accidentally butting Albert on the bridge of the nose, sending a gush of blood down his lips. Then they were separated.
By the time Edith had run across the grass, ungainly on her heels, Bob was leading Albert to the house. Albert was holding his nose with his fingers, trying to stanch the blood which dripped on his cuffs and saying, “Son of a bitch, they’re going to have to cauterize this. Once my nose starts bleeding…”
A few women and children were standing some distance off, mute, staring. Jack was trying to button his suit jacket with trembling fingers. “That’ll hold him for a while, loudmouthed -” he began to say when he saw his wife approaching.
“Shut up,” she said in a level voice. “Shut your mouth. Your son is listening to you, for God’s sake.” She was right. The boy was listening and looking, face white and curdled with fright. “And if you hadn’t noticed, the others are politely standing over there, gawking at the wild colonial boy. You’re drunk and you’re disgusting.”
“I’m not drunk.”
She slapped him hard enough to make his eyes water, his ears ring. “Christ,” he said, stunned. She had never hit him before.
“You’re a drunken, stupid pig,” she said. “I’m sick of the sight of you.”
“Don’t you ever hit me again, you bitch.” He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“Don’t you ever give me reason to again. Stop ruining my life.”
“You don’t want to hear my side. You never do.”
“I’ve heard it for nine years.”
“He was yapping about that hundred dollars you borrowed. I said it wasn’t any of my affair. I want you to tell him I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Nothing at all. No, you didn’t have anything to do with it. You just ate the groceries it bought.”
“I didn’t ask him for anything. I wouldn’t ask him for sweet fuck all.”
“Don’t fool yourself. You don’t like being hungry any better than I do. Don’t pretend you didn’t want me to ask him for the money. Don’t fool yourself. You needed my brother Albert because you couldn’t take care of your family. Could you?”
Cosgrave straightened himself and touched the knot of his tie. “We’re going,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her last words, “get the boy ready.”
“The hell we are! I want you to apologize to Albert. Families don’t forgive things like this.”
“It’ll be a frosty fucking Friday in hell the day I apologize to Albert Stiles. We’re leaving.”
“No we aren’t. Brian and I are staying. This is my day and I’m having it.”
“All right, it’s your day. Welcome to it. But it sure isn’t mine. If you don’t come now, don’t expect me back.”
His wife said nothing.
It was only when he turned up the street and headed for the beer parlour, his shoulders twisted in his black suit, feet savage on the gravel, that Brian trotted after him, uncertainly, like a dog. The short legs stumbled; the face was pale, afflicted.
His father stopped in the road. “Go back!” he shouted, made furious by his son’s helplessness, his abjectness. “Get back there with your mother! Where you both belong!” And then, without thinking, Cosgrave stooped, picked up a tiny pebble and flung it lightly in the direction of his son, who stood in the street in his starched white shirt and prickly wool pants, face working.
By nine o’clock that night the last dirty cup had been washed and the last Stiles had departed. Edith, Brian, Bob and his wife went out to sit in the screened verandah.
It was one of those nights in early summer when the light bleeds drowsily out of the sky, and the sounds of dogs and children falter and die suddenly in the streets when darkness comes. In the peace of such evenings, talk slumbers in the blood, and sentences grow laconic.
Edith mentioned him first. “He may not be back, you know,” she said. “You may be stuck with us, Bob.”
“His car’s still in the street.”
“What I mean is, he won’t come to the house. And if he sits in the car I won’t go to him.”
“It’s your business, Edith. You know you’re welcome.”
“He’s always lied to himself, you know?” she said calmly. “It’s that I get tired of mostly. Big ideas, big schemes. He won’t be what he is. I don’t complain about the other. He doesn’t drink as much as people think. You’re mostly wrong about him, all of you, on that count.”
Brian sat, his legs thrust stiffly out in front of him, eyes fixed on the street where the dark ran thickest and swiftest under the elms.
“You should cry,” suggested her sister-in-law. “Nobody would mind.”
“I would. I did all my crying the first year we were married. One thing about him, he’s obvious. I saw it all the first year. Forewarned is forearmed. But if he blows that horn he can go to hell.
They sat for a time, silent, listening to the moths batter their fat, soft bodies against the naked bulb over the door. It was Brian who saw him first, making his way up the street. “Mum,” he said, pointing.
They watched him walk up the street with that precarious precision a drunk adopts to disguise his drunkenness.
“He won’t set foot on this place. He’s too proud,” said Edith. “And if he sits in the car I won’t go to him. I’ve had it up to here.”
Cosgrave walked to the front of the property and faced the house. For the people on the verandah it was difficult to make him out beneath the trees, but he saw his wife and son sitting in a cage of light, faces white and burning under the glare of the lightbulb, their features slightly out of focus behind the fine screen mesh. He stood without moving for a minute, then he began to sing in a clear, light tenor. The words rang across the lawn, incongruous, sad.
“Jesus Christ,” said Bob, “the man’s not only drunk, he’s crazy.”
Edith leaned forward in her chair and placed her hand against the screen. The vague figure whose face she could not see continued to sing to her across the intervening reaches of night. He sang without a trace of his habitual irony. Where she would have expected a joke there was none. The voice she heard was not the voice of a man in a cheap black suit, a man full of beer and lies. She had, for a fleeting moment, a lover serenading her under the elms. It was as close as he would ever come to an apology or an invitation. Jack Cosgrave was not capable of doing any more and she knew it.
Edith Cosgrave was not deluded. Not really. She was a Stiles, had been born a Stiles rather. She got to her feet and took Brian by the hand. “Well,” she said to her brother, “I guess I can take a hint as well as the next person. I think the bastard is saying he wants to go home.”
How the Story Ends
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“Christ, Lydia,” said Big Paul, “don’t you think they keep them clean in that T.B. sanatorium? They don’t have no choice about bathing in a place like that. They make them. Sure he looks clean.
