Chapter 8 The Second Supper
He asked her again on the eighth day, which she had not entirely expected.
Not because she thought he wouldn't — she had been fairly certain from the quality of the first supper that it would be repeated, the way a sentence that has found its rhythm tends to continue.
But she had not expected the asking to happen the way it did, which was on the street at eight in the morning, before either of them had begun the day's work, in the direct and unpremeditated way that things happened with him when he had made a decision.
"Tonight," he said. "If you're available."
"I'm available," she said.
"Seven," he said.
"Seven," she said.
He walked north. She walked south. The mountains observed.
This second supper was different from the first in a way she could feel but not immediately describe.
The first supper had been the establishing of something — the fact that they could talk, the shape of what talking looked like between them, the discovery that the silence between the talking was as inhabited as the talking itself.
The second supper was the something already established, and the question was what they were going to do with it.
"Tell me about the war," she said, midway through the meal.
He looked at her. "Most people don't ask," he said.
"I know," she said. "I'm asking."
He was quiet for a moment. She waited. She was good at waiting for the true version of things rather than accepting the managed version, and she had learned with him that the waiting was almost always worth it.
"I was at Gettysburg," he said. "Both days, as I told you.
After the second day I had six men left in my company.
I'd gone in with forty-one." He looked at the table.
"Six men. The others were dead or in the hospital or — one man simply disappeared.
Walked into the trees after the second day and was never found.
I always thought that was the most honest response.
The rest of us stayed and called it duty. "
"You don't think it was duty?" she said.
"I think it was inertia," he said. "I think most of what people call duty at that point was the inability to conceive of doing anything else."
She looked at him. "And the praying?" she said.
He looked up. The sharpness of the look — the quality of a man who has been seen in a place he did not know he was visible — settled into something else after a moment. "You're direct," he said.
"Yes," she agreed.
He looked at the lamp on the table between them.
"I prayed on the morning of the second day," he said.
"Before the charge. I believed then. I believed entirely, the way you believe things at twenty-two when you have not yet been given sufficient evidence to revise.
" He paused. "The afternoon was sufficient evidence. "
"Evidence against what?" she asked.
"Against God caring," he said. Not bitterly — she noticed this. Flatly. The way a man stated something he had concluded and examined from multiple angles and arrived at and was no longer inflamed by. Simply the conclusion.
"Or evidence of something else," she said.
He looked at her.
"Evidence of the cost of free will," she said.
"Evidence of what happens when several thousand men with firearms make several thousand decisions about what to do with them.
Evidence that God does not prevent consequences.
" She paused. "I don't say this to argue.
I say it because it's how I've thought about grief.
My mother died when I was twenty-three. My father when I was twenty-seven.
I prayed through both, and neither answered the way I wanted, and I concluded something different from what you concluded. "
"What did you conclude?" he said.
"That the absence of rescue is not the absence of presence," she said.
"That being there without preventing is different from not being there at all.
" She looked at her hands. "That is not a comfortable theology.
I don't recommend it for people who want comfort.
But it's what I concluded, and it held up under scrutiny, and I've been running on it for seven years. "
He was quiet for a long time. The dining room was warm around them, the other tables occupied with people whose conversations were inaudible, the world doing its December evening thing outside the windows.
"You make it sound simple," he said.
"It isn't," she said. "It's the hardest thing I know.
Being present with people who are suffering without preventing the suffering.
I watch God do it and I find it — " She stopped.
"I find it the most difficult thing to believe in and also the thing I am most certain of.
Because the presence is real. I have felt it.
Not during the grief — after. When the grief was done being the loudest thing. "
He looked at her with the full-eyes expression that Nora had described and that Mercy had been watching since the road on the first day.
"I stopped feeling it," he said. "After Gettysburg."
"I know," she said. "The question is whether the feeling stopped or whether you closed the door on the room it was in."
He said nothing to this. She did not expect him to — it was not a question that required an immediate answer, or perhaps any verbal answer at all.
It was a question that required time and honesty and the particular courage of a man who had been managing for twenty years reconsidering whether managing was the same as living.
They finished the meal. He walked her to Mrs. Connelly's. They stood on the step in the cold.
"The question," he said. "The one about the door."
"Yes," she said.
"I don't know the answer."
"I know," she said. "I didn't ask it for an answer. I asked it for the sitting with."
He looked at her. Something in his face shifted — a very small thing, but specific, the shift of a man who has encountered an approach to a problem he had not previously considered.
"Good night, Miss Alcott," he said.
"Good night, Sheriff," she said, and went in.