Manly Conclusions
His wife, Valjean, admitted that Carpenter Petty had a tree-topping temper, but he was slow to lose it; that was in his favor. Still, he had a long memory, and that way of saving things up, until by process of accumulation he had enough evidence to convict. “I don't get mad, I get even,” his bumper sticker vaunted. Fair warning. When he was angry he burned like frost, not flame.
Now Valjean stood on the trodden path in the year's first growth of grass, her tablecloth in her arms, and acknowledged an undercurrent in her husband, spoke of it to the greening forsythia with its yellow flowers rain-fallen beneath it, confided it to God and nature. Let God and nature judge. A crow passed between her and the sun, dragging its slow shadow. She glanced up. On Carpenter's behalf she said, “He's always been intense. It wasn't just the war. If you're born a certain way, where's the mending?”
She shook the tablecloth free of the breakfast crumbs and pinned it to the line. Carpenter liked her biscuits—praised them to all their acquaintances—as well as her old-fashioned willingness to rise before good day and bake for him. Sometimes he woke early too; then he would join her in the kitchen. They would visit as she worked the shortening into the flour, left-handed (as was her mother, whose recipe it was), and pinch off the rounds, laying them as gently in the blackened pan as though she were laying a baby down for its nap. The dough was very quick, very tender. It took a light hand. Valjean knew the value of a light hand.
This morning Carpenter had slept late, beyond his time, and catching up he ate in a rush, his hair damp from the shower, his shirt unbuttoned. He raised neither his eyes nor his voice to praise or complain.
“You'll be better at telling Dennis than I would,” he said, finally, leaving it to her.
She had known a long time that there was more to loving a man than marrying him, and more to marriage than love. When they were newly wed, there had been that sudden quarrel, quick and furious as a summer squall, between Carpenter and a neighbor over the property line. A vivid memory and a lesson—the two men silhouetted against the setting sun, defending the territory and honor of rental property. Valjean stood by his side, silent, sensing even then that to speak out, to beg, to order, to quake would be to shame him. Nor would it avail. Better to shout Stay! to Niagara. Prayer and prevention was the course she decided on, learning how to laugh things off, to make jokes and diversions. If a car cut ahead of them in the parking lot and took the space he had been headed for, before Carpenter could get his window down to berate women drivers, Valjean would say, “I can see why she's in a hurry, just look at her!” as the offender trotted determinedly up the sidewalk and into a beauty salon.
She was subtle enough most times, but maybe he caught on after a while. At any rate, his emotional weather began to moderate. Folks said he had changed, and not for the worse. They gave proper credit to his wife, but the war had a hand in it too. When he got back, most of what he thought and felt had gone underground, and it was his quietness and shrewd good nature that you noticed now. Valjean kept on praying and preventing.
But there are some things you can't prevent, and he had left it to Valjean to break the news to Dennis. Dennis so much like Carpenter that the two of them turned heads in town, father and son, spirit and image. People seemed proud of them from afar as though their striking resemblance reflected credit on all mankind, affirming faith in the continuity of generations. He was like his mama, too, the best of both of them, and try as she might, she couldn't find the words to tell him that his dog was dead, to send him off to school with a broken heart. The school bus came early, and in the last-minute flurry of gathering books and lunch money, his poster on medieval armor and his windbreaker, she chose to let the news wait.
She had the whole day then, after he was gone, to find the best words. Musing, she sat on the top step and began cleaning Carpenter's boots—not that he had left them for her to do; he had just left them. She scrubbed and gouged and sluiced away the sticky mud, dipping her rag in a rain puddle. After a moment's deliberation she rinsed the cloth in Lady's water dish. Lady would not mind now; she was beyond thirst. It was burying her that had got Carpenter's boots so muddy.
“Dead,” Valjean murmured. For a moment she was overcome, disoriented as one is the instant after cataclysm, while there is yet room for disbelief, before the eyes admit the evidence into the heart. The rag dripped muddy water dark as blood onto the grass.
They had found Lady halfway between the toolshed and the back porch, as near home as she had been able to drag herself. The fine old collie lay dying in their torchlight, bewildered, astonished, trusting them to heal her, to cancel whatever evil this was that had befallen.
Carpenter knelt to investigate. “She's been shot.” The meaning of the words and their reverberations brought Valjean to her knees. No way to laugh this off.
“It would have been an accident,” she reasoned.
Carpenter gave the road a despairing glance. “If it could have stayed the way it was when we first bought out here .... You don't keep a dog like this on a chain!”
It had been wonderful those early years, before the developers came with their transits and plat-books and plans for summer cottages in the uplands. The deer had lingered a year or so longer, then had fled across the lake with the moon on their backs. The fields of wild blueberries were fenced off now; what the roadscrapers missed, wildfire got. Lawn crept from acre to acre like a plague. What trees were spared sprouted POSTED and KEEP and TRESPASSERS WILL BE signs. Gone were the tangles of briar and drifted meadow beauty, seedbox and primrose. The ferns retreated yearly deeper into the ravines.
“Goddamn weekenders,” Carpenter said.
They had lodged official complaint the day three bikers roared through the back lot, scattering the hens, tearing down five lines of wash, and leaving a gap through the grape arbor. The Law came out and made bootless inquiry, stirring things up a little more. The next morning Valjean found their garbage cans overturned. Toilet tissue wrapped every tree in the orchard, a dead rat floated in the well, and their mailbox was battered to earth—that sort of mischief. Wild kids. “Let the Law handle it,” Valjean suggested, white-lipped.
“They can do their job and I'll do mine,” Carpenter told her. So that time Valjean prayed the Law would be fast and Carpenter slow, and that was how it went. A deputy came out the next day with a carload of joyriders he had run to earth. “Now I think the worst thing that could happen,” the deputy drawled, “is to call their folks, wha' d’ya say?” So it had been resolved that way, with reparations paid and handshakes. That had been several years back; things had settled down some now. Of late there were only the litter and loudness associated with careless vacationers. No lingering hard feelings. In the market, when Valjean met a neighbor's wife, they found pleasant things to speak about; the awkwardness was past. In time they might be friends.
“An accident,” Valjean had asserted, her voice odd to her own ears, as though she were surfacing from a deep dive. Around them night was closing in. She shivered. It took her entire will to keep from glancing over her shoulder into the tanglewood through which Lady had plunged, wounded, to reach home.
“Bleeding like this she must have laid a plain track.” Carpenter paced across the yard, probing at spots with the dimming light of the lantern. He tapped it against his thigh to encourage the weak batteries.
“She's been gone all afternoon,” Valjean said. “She could have come miles.”
“Not hurt this bad,” Carpenter said.
“What are you saying? No. No!” She forced confidence into her voice. ”No one around here would do something like this.”
Fear for him stung her hands and feet like frost. She stood for peace. She stood too suddenly; dizzy, she put out her hand to steady herself. He could feel her trembling.
“It could have been an accident, yeah, like you say.” He spoke quietly for her sake. He had learned to do that.
“You see?” she said, her heart lifting a little.
“Yeah.” Kneeling again, he shook his head over the dog's labored breathing. “Too bad, old girl; they've done for you.”
When the amber light failed from Lady's eyes, Valjean said, breathless, “She was probably trespassing,” thinking of all those signs, neonvivid, warning. He always teased her that she could make excuses for the devil.
“Dogs can't read,” he pointed out. “She lived all her life here, eleven, twelve years. . . . And she knew this place by heart, every rabbit run, toad hole, and squirrel knot. She was better at weather than the almanac, and there was never a thing she feared except losing us. She kept watch on Dennis like he was her own pup.”
“I know . . .” She struggled to choke back the grief. It stuck like a pine cone in her throat. But she wouldn't let it be her tears that watered the ground and made the seed of vengeance sprout. For all their sakes she kept her nerve . . .
“And whoever shot her,” Carpenter was saying, “can't tell the difference in broad daybetween ragweed and rainbow. Goddamn weekenders!”
They wrapped the dog in Dennis' cradle quilt and set about making a grave. Twilight seeped away into night. The shovel struck fire from the rocks as Carpenter dug. Dennis was at scout meeting; they wanted to be done before he got home. “There's nothing deader than a dead dog,” Carpenter reasoned. “The boy doesn't need to remember her that way.”
In their haste, in their weariness, Carpenter shed his boots on the back stoop and left the shovel leaning against the wall. The wind rose in the night and blew the shovel handle along the shingles with a dry-bones rattle. Waking, alarmed, Valjean put out her hand: Carpenter was there.
Now Valjean resumed work on the boots, concentrating on the task at hand. She cleaned carefully, as though diligence would perfect not only the leather but Carpenter also, cleaning away the mire, anything that might make him lose his balance. From habit, she set the shoe atop the well-house to dry, out of reach of the dog. Then she realized, Lady was gone. All her held-back tears came now; she mourned as for a child.
She told Dennis that afternoon. He walked all around the grave, disbelieving. No tears, too old for that; silent, like his father. He gathered straw to lay on the raw earth to keep it from washing. Finally he buried his head in Valjean's shoulder and groaned, “Why?” Hearing that, Valjean thanked God, for hadn't Carpenter asked Who? and not Why ?—as though he had some plan, eye for eye, and needed only to discover upon whom to visit it? Dennis must not learn those ways, Valjean prayed; let my son be in some ways like me.
At supper Carpenter waited till she brought dessert before he asked, “Did you tell him?”
Dennis laid his fork down to speak for himself. “I know.”
Carpenter beheld his son. “She was shot twice. Once point-blank. Once as she tried to get away.”
Valjean's cup wrecked against her saucer. He hadn't told her that! He had held that back, steeping the bitter truth from it all day to serve to the boy. There was no possible
antidote. It sank in, like slow poison.
“It's going to be all right,” she murmured automatically, her peace of mind spinning away like a chip in strong current. Her eyes sightlessly explored the sampler on the opposite wall whose motto she had worked during the long winter she sat at her mother's deathbed: Perfect Love Casts Out Fear.
“You mean Lady knew them? Trusted them? Then they shot her?” Dennis spoke eagerly, proud of his ability to draw manly conclusions. Valjean watched as the boy realized what he was saying. “It's someone we know,” Dennis whispered, the color rising from his throat to his face, his hands slowly closing into tender fists. “What—what are we going to do about it?” He pushed back his chair, ready.
“No,” Valjean said, drawing a firm line, then smudging it a little with a laugh and a headshake. “Not you.” She gathered their plates and carried them into the kitchen. She could hear Carpenter telling Dennis, ”Someone saw Gannett's boys on the logging road yesterday afternoon. I'll step on down that way and see what they know.”
“But Carpenter—“ She returned with sudsy hands to prevent.
He pulled Valjean to him, muting all outcry with his brandied breath. He pleased himself with a kiss, taking his time, winking a galvanized-gray eye at Dennis. “I'm just going to talk to them. About time they knew me better.”
She looked so miserable standing there that he caught her to him again, boyish, lean; the years had rolled off of him, leaving him uncreased, and no scars that showed. He had always been lucky, folks said. Wild lucky.
“Listen here now,” he warned. “Trust me?”
What answer would serve but yes? She spoke it after a moment, for his sake, with all
her heart, like a charm to cast out fear. “Of course.”
Dennis, wheeling his bike out to head down to Mrs. Cobb's for his music lesson, knelt to make some minor adjustment on the chain.
“I won't be long,” Carpenter said. “Take care of yourselves.”
“You too,” Dennis called, and pedaled off.
Carpenter crouched and pulled on his stiff, cleaned boots, then hefted one foot gaily into a shaft of sunset, admiring the shine. “Good work, ma'am.” He tipped an imaginary hat and strode off into the shadows of the tall pines.
A whippoorwill startled awake and shouted once, then sleepily subsided. Overhead the little brown bats tottered and strove through the first starlight, their high twittering falling like tiny blown kisses onto the wind-scoured woods. It was very peaceful there in the deep heart of the April evening, and it had to be a vagrant, unworthy, warning impulse that sent Valjean prowling to the cabinet in the den where they kept their tax records, warranties, brandy, and sidearms. Trembling, she reached again and again, but couldn't find the pistol. Carpenter's pistol was not there.
Not there.
For a moment she would not believe it, just rested her head against the cool shelf; then she turned and ran, leaving lights on and doors open behind her, tables and rugs askew in her wake. She ran sock-footed toward trouble as straight as she could, praying Carpenter! Carpenter! with every step. And then, like answered prayer, he was there, sudden as something conjured up from the dark. He caught her by the shoulders and shook her into sense.
“What's happened? Babe? What is it?”
But she could not answer for laughing and crying both at once, to see him there safe, to meet him halfway. When she caught her breath she said, “I was afraid something awful—I thought—I didn't know if I'd ever—”
“I told you I was just going to talk with them,” he chided, amused. She gave a skip to get in step beside him. He caught her hand up and pointed her own finger at her. “I thought you said you trusted me.”
“But I didn't know you were taking the gun with you . . .”
Angry, he drew away. Outcast, she felt the night chill raise the hair on the back of her neck.
“I didn't take the damn gun! What makes you say things like that? You think I'm some kind of nut?”
“But it's gone,” she protested. “I looked.”
And then a new specter rose between them, unspeakable, contagious. For a moment they neither moved nor spoke, then Carpenter started for home, fast, outdistancing her in a few strides. Over his shoulder he called back, edgy, unconvinced, “You missed it, that's all. It's there.” He would make sure.
She ran but could not quite catch up. “Dennis has it,” she accused Carpenter's back.
“Nah,” he shouted. “Don't borrow trouble. It's home.”
When he loped across the lawn and up the kitchen steps three at a time he was a full minute ahead of her. And when she got there, Carpenter was standing in the doorway of the den empty-handed, with the rapt, calculating, baffled expression of a baby left holding a suddenly limp string when the balloon has burst and vanished. The phone was ringing, ringing.
“Answer it,” he said into the dark, avoiding her eyes.