Chapter 19
The town burned itself down to a sullen red glow away in the south while the night came on full and the stars climbed out thick and indifferent overhead, and Abe sat the whole of it out in the chair at the end of the porch, the bad leg stretched stiff and straight in front of him on the boards, his face turned toward the dying light with nothing moving in it at all.
Marielle let him have a long while of that.
There were things a man had to be let sit with alone for a stretch before another person could be any use to him, and she’d learned the shape of that waiting across two years of bad nights with her mother, learned not to rush at a grief before it had settled enough to be approached.
So she saw to the horses first, rubbing the tired one down and getting grain and water into all of them, the work of her hands going on while the work of her mind circled the thing on the porch.
She got water into Samson where he sat roped at the post, holding the cup to his cracked mouth because his hands shook too badly to be trusted with it, and he drank it down and muttered something that might have been thanks and shut his eyes again.
She stood a time at the rail looking south the way Abe looked south. And then she went inside and got the second chair and brought it out and set it down beside his and sat in it.
For a good while she said nothing either.
There was a kind of company that asked no talk of either party and only wanted the other body near, and she’d learned that too, sitting in the dark with a woman who’d drunk herself past speaking, and she gave Abe that kind now, the two of them side by side in the dark watching a town die.
“You can’t keep it all in your face like that,” she said finally. “It’ll set there if you let it sit long enough. I’ve watched it set in men, and once it’s set you don’t get it back out again. There’s a look certain men carry that started as one bad night they wouldn’t put down.”
He didn’t answer right off. The glow in the south pulsed and dimmed and pulsed as something over there gave way and fell in on itself, a roof or a wall, sending up a brief brighter flare that died back.
“It’s mine,” he said at last. His voice came out low and level and even, and the levelness of it was worse than if it had cracked, the sound of a man stating a fact he’d already finished arguing himself out of any way around.
“What happened in that town tonight. It’s mine to carry and I want you to understand that plain, and I want you not to set about talking me out of it, because I’ll know that’s what you’re doing while you do it, and it won’t take, and you’ll only have spent the words for nothing.”
He turned the next of it over slow, the way a man counts coins he already knows the sum of and counts anyway.
“I burned their stable. I broke open the store of them and ran their crossing dark and stood on Nash’s front step with a name that wasn’t mine the same morning the smoke was still going up off it.
I pushed, and I pushed hard, and I pushed fast. And a man who’d already killed your father to keep one secret was always going to come round to deciding that a whole town that had seen too much was cheaper to silence than it was to trust.
“I knew the kind of men these were. I’d stood over a dead one of them in the Arkansas woods and read the brand on his arm, and I’d sat across a table from a Ranger named Deerfield and heard him lay out plain, the things they’d already done to people who got in their road. I knew it.
And I pushed anyway, because I wanted the thing moving after a year of it sitting still, and now Tom and Mae Henderson are dead on their own kitchen floor and David’s tied across a horse in your yard and the town’s gone to coals, and the whole of it is because I wanted the thing to move and didn’t stop to count who’d be standing where it moved. ”
“You couldn’t have known they’d do this,” she said. “Not this. Burn a whole town full of people, shoot old women dead on their own floors. Nobody could have stood and looked at a stable full of rifles and said,
‘This ends with the main street on fire and children dead in the road.’ That’s not a thing a sane man’s mind even reaches for, because a sane man can’t believe in it until he’s seen it.
You weighed them the way you’d weigh men with some bottom of sense left in them, and you were wrong about how far past sense they’d gone.
That’s a misjudgment. It isn’t the same animal as fault. ”
“I could have known.” He said it flat, and a wet shine had come up in his eyes by the red light, and he didn’t move to wipe it or hide it and didn’t acknowledge it either, only let it stand there and finally spill over, two slow tracks of it cutting down through the soot and the dust caked on his face.
“I should have known. And I want to tell you why I should have, since you keep on saying I couldn’t have, and you’re saying it to be kind to me, and I find tonight I’d rather you had the truth of me than the kindness.
This isn’t the first town I’ve done this to.
It’s not the first time I reached for a thing I wanted, hard, because I’d decided my own clean conscience weighed more than the lives of the people standing near me, and got those people killed for the reaching.
I did it once before, the first time, before I’d ever set my foot on the soil of this whole country. ”
She turned in the chair to face him, and she waited, and let him find his own way down into it.
“My family were Jews,” he said. “In Russia. You’ll know a little of what that means. You’ll not know the half of what it meant there, in that town, in those years.” He looked south at the coals while he spoke, not at her, the way a man tells a thing he can only get out by telling it to the dark.
“My people had lived in that town a long while. Longer than most of the families that hated us had lived in it, which is a bitter thing to know and no use to a man knowing it. And the way we lived in it, the only way there was to live in it, was by being careful. By being quiet. By being small.
“There were whole years it was a dangerous thing simply to be known for what you were, and in those years my father made our family into a family that was very good at not being known.
He had a gift for it. A gift for being whatever the room in front of him wanted him to be.
He’d stand in the market and nod along while men talked filth about us, about Jews, as though he weren’t one himself, as though he were just another man agreeing it was a shame what the Jews were doing to the country.
He kept the faith of his fathers behind a shut door and a drawn curtain and a low voice, and he taught the rest of us to keep it the same way, and he was good at the teaching, and it kept us alive straight through things that did not keep other families on our street alive.”
His jaw worked once. “And I hated him for it. I want you to hear that, because it’s the center of the thing.
I hated my own father for it. I was young, and I had all the certainty a young man comes equipped with and not one ounce of the sense that’s meant to come with it later, and I’d look at my father bowing and scraping and nodding along and lying with his whole life about who he was, just to be left be, and I thought it was weakness.
I thought it was cowardice, plain and simple.
I thought a man ought not have to hide his own faith in his own town where his own grandfather was buried.
I thought, in that clean stupid way a young man thinks, that if we’d only stop being afraid, only stop hiding, then the fear would have no place left to land and would have to go elsewhere.
I was sure of it the way only a fool is ever sure of anything, all the way down, with nothing in me to argue the other side. ”
The coals shifted and settled in the south. Samson, roped at the post below them, had gone very still and was listening, and Abe paid him no mind at all, talking past him to the dark and to her.
“There came a Passover, one spring,” he said.
“The seder of it, the dinner, held at the synagogue, which we none of us ever went to, because going to it was exactly the kind of being-known my father had spent his whole life and ours teaching us to never do.
And I decided that year that I was going to go to it.
I told myself it wasn’t to spite him, though I’m an honest enough man now to know it was that too, was a good deal that.
I told myself it was for the dignity of the thing.
That I was sick to the back teeth of being afraid in my own skin, and that I was going to walk in and sit down at that table like a man with nothing in this world to hide, because I had nothing to hide, because the hiding was the weakness and I was finished with being weak. ”
He drew a slow breath and let it go. “And I went. And I’ll tell you a thing, and I need you to hear it true, because it’s the part that’s damned me twelve years.
It was good. It was good, Marielle. I sat at that long table among my own people, in the open, unafraid, for the first time in the whole of my life, and I felt like a man instead of a thing crouched behind a curtain waiting on the knock at the door, and I sat there thinking, I was right.
I was right all along. Look how good this is. Look what my father’s fear cost us all these years. Look what was on the other side of it the whole time, if we’d only had the courage to walk through.”
“Abe.” She said it low, not to stop him, only so he’d know she was still there beside him in the dark.
“There was a man saw me leave it,” Abe said.
“A neighbor. A man who’d nodded back at my father in the market all those years and known the whole time exactly what we were, the way they always knew.
And now he had his proof. He’d watched me come out the synagogue door with the others, on Passover, in the light.
And he carried that to the men who were always glad to be brought a thing like that. ”