“No, Wilson. Come on, let’s go. She’d never let you.” They stepped off the porch.
“Wait,” said Wilson.
“No, come on,” said Dave, his voice almost inaudible.
“OK, I’m coming,” called Wilson, and followed them outside. The three walked down below the barn into the trees, Wilson’s dogs running around them. “You know, I think you’re right, Sam,” he said, shaking his rod and looking at it. “I think they’ll be biting—I’ve just got that feeling.”
Della woke up at three and saw the empty bed. She threw on her bathrobe, stuffed her tiny feet into slippers and went down the hall, downstairs and into the kitchen. A blast of cold air met her. Holding her robe closely about her neck, she went to the door and closed it. She stood there looking out into the lit barnyard, shadows roundly filling the two tracks out into the darkness of the barn. The awful snow, thought Della, and the words came running back again and again like shaking someone falling between consciousness and unconsciousness, calling his name over and over—the awful snow, the awful snow—until she regained herself.
She went to the closet where Wilson’s winter coat still hung, and put on her own. Then the fur-lined boots and scarf. She took down Wilson’s coat and hurried to the door—then stopped again, looking outside. Dropping the coat, she ran into the dining room, and with a key from behind the teacups she opened their utility closet. From a little case between Wilson’s tackle boxes she took the pistol and put it in her pocket. She took up the coat again on her way out, and the flashlight for the porch. She called his name and followed the tracks, noticing how closely Cindy had kept to Wilson, never wandering as much as several feet away. Though she did not think it now, she did later. Those tracks . . . they were much like soldiers’.
She followed them below the barn, halfway down the hill toward the river, to a place where there were rocks jutting up from the snow, crowned with ice. Her flashlight caught Cindy’s green eyes. She went over. Leaning against the rock was Wilson, his eyes nearly closed. She took her hand out of her mitten and touched his face. It was cold and hard.
Della dropped the mitten. She stood back and closed her eyes, opened them wide, lifted her head up above the white, howling wilderness, watched the stars of Orion reel over her, his belt like a dagger in her heart. Then she felt the gentle pressure, Wilson’s gentle pressure—his comforting net settle over her soul and bring it back around her.
“Come on,” said Della to Cindy. “There’s nothing here.” The old dog whined and lay down at Wilson’s feet, watching for his eyes to open, for him to get up and go back to the warmth of the house. Della took out the pistol and shot her, then went back home, the sharp, tearing, inhuman blast running a needle through her sorrow, bleeding into the insatiable pores of her body.
John was out of the Army in 1947.
From the dawning of his conscious thought July had been told that Daddy was coming home, though he had no idea of who this was or what he would be like. He did know that this Daddy, however, was likely to be an object of his mother’s attentions, which all his life had belonged almost entirely to himself, and which he felt were vital to his very existence. She told him he would have to try hard not to be jealous, because Daddy loved him too, and Daddy’s attentions were going to be just as good as, or better than, her own. And not knowing anything else, July could do nothing but wait and see. Then later she came to talk about the exact date he would be coming, and every day after that she exclaimed how, praise be to God, it was one day less. The closer it got, the more she neglected July and abandoned herself to her own expectations, filling him with dread.
John rode on a bus jammed with servicemen from New York City to Toledo. Many got off along the way, and there was a layover of six hours. On the bus to Chicago there were only eight men in uniform besides himself, trained from their duties to live with boredom and motion. Another layover in Chicago, a dinner of fried chicken and coleslaw in a diner on the Loop, and he was the only GI on the bus for Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, a seven or eight-hour ride.
He tried to sleep and couldn’t. For the rest of his life he would remember this ride. Outside the tinted windows everything smelled of the disgust and nightmare of war. January thaw, he thought. My father’s dead, he remembered again. My mother: they might not have wanted to tell me about my mother. He resolved then, passing over the Mississippi and into Iowa, that if he could salvage his broken and splintered religion, if he could become a part, in a small way—any way—of those things he had so many nights feared were never true, if he could lie against Sarah’s body and be only a little happy—he would never breathe a word of the last five years. He would deny them. The bus went on farther into his state and he began seeing familiar landmarks, familiar towns. His sleeplessness since getting into the States had honed his nerves to an edge, and by the time they pulled into Iowa City, fear was soaking him in cold sweat. Beyond the window Sarah stood against the brick wall. Tears wanted to be let out of his eyes. Men were staring at her. Her face looked anxious. His desire to touch her frightened him. Maybe, he thought, she won’t want to. Maybe she’ll say when we get home, “John, I’ve got to tell you something, while you’ve been gone away—” God help me, please help me, I am a wreck of a man.
It was in this condition July would have first seen his father, had John come out of the bus at that time. But a large woman getting baggage from the overhead rack forced him back into his seat. Angry and frantic, he looked out the window again. This time he saw his son standing behind her against the wall, and it was as though he had not known before and had just been told: Did you know, you have a boy, old enough to talk and understand, with a complete personality of his own. Here he is. He’s yours.
He’s a pretty good-looking boy, he thought, staring out of the besmudged window. He stands well, making no trouble . . . no idea what a man would think in a bunker—what he would do to save his own miserable life, the extent to which he would go . . . The woman with her bags bumped on down the aisle, and John slid out of his seat. At the door he stopped and gathered as well as he could all the loose ends and stepped down, reminding himself over and over: Be careful. Nothing can be taken for granted. Make no assumptions.
July felt his mother’s hand tighten and tremble as the uniformed man stepped down from the huge metal bus onto the ground. “John,” she called, and he came slowly over, carrying a cloth bag, holding his hat in his hand. Dark moons like blue wounds under his eyes, ugly hairs on his face, smelling clothes. The man held out his hand and at first July was afraid to touch it, even though pressed to by his mother. The knuckles and joints and veins were so awful. July touched it and wanted to cry: it was so hard. Then the hand squeezed and he felt the power, the child-crushing strength that lay dormant like a crouching panther, controlled only by the sallow face’s intention. Red lines in his eyes.
They went over to the car, and his mother wanted “Daddy” to drive. No, he said, he didn’t want to. He sat next to July’s window, July next to his mother behind the wheel. They left the station and headed home. The stranger looked suspiciously at the telephone poles and houses, at the dashboard and at July’s mother’s feet. His smell overpowered July’s mother’s. He spoke once on the ride home, asking about Grandma, only he called her Mom. The rest of the time he was silent.
Once home, he remained standing in the driveway, looking suspiciously at everything outside as though it might grow wings and flap away into outer space. The bird feeder (which his mother had carefully filled before they drove to the bus station) seemed to hold him mesmerized. His mother waited silently for him inside the opened door to the house. Finally, he came toward them with his cloth bag. July rushed to the door, slammed it and locked him outside so that he could never come in. He looked back to his mother, whose face was a betrayal of her erupting emotions: fear, hatred, sorrow and despair. She sank to the sofa.
The
