“You’ll have to do it early. It’s too hot for her in the afternoon.”
“Six o’clock.”
“You want to get up that early?” Kasiak smiled at his gibe at the Hollis family and their disorderly habits. Lightning tipped the woods, so close to them that they could smell the galvanic discharge, and a second later there was an explosion of thunder that sounded as if it had destroyed the county. The front of the storm passed then, the wind died down, and the shower fell around them with the dogged gloom of an autumn rain.
“Have you heard from your family recently, Kasiak?” Paul asked.
“For two years?not for two years.”
“Would you like to go back?”
“Yes, Yes.” There was an intent light in his face. “On my father’s farm, there are some big fields. My brothers are still there. I would like to go there in an airplane. I would land the airplane in these big fields, and they would all come running to see who it was and they would see it was me.”
“You don’t like it here, do you?”
“It’s a capitalist country.”
“Why did you come, then?”
“I don’t know. I think over there they made me work too hard. Over there, we cut the rye at night, when there is some moisture in the air. They put me to work in the fields when I was twelve years old. We get up at three in the morning to cut the rye. My hands are all bleeding, and swollen so I can’t sleep. My father beat me like a convict. In Russia, they used to beat convicts. He beat me with a whip for horses until my back was bleeding.” Kasiak felt his back, as if the welts still bled, “After that, I decided to go away. I waited six years. That’s why I came, I guess?they set me to work in the fields too soon.”
“When are you going to have your revolution, Kasiak?”
“When the capitalists make another war.”
“What’s going to happen to me, Kasiak? What’s going to happen to people like me?”
“It depends. If you work on a farm or in a factory, I guess it will be all right. They’ll only get rid of useless people.”
“All right, Kasiak,” Paul said heartily, “I’ll work for you,” and he slapped the farmer on the back. He frowned at the rain. “I guess I’ll go down and get some lunch,” he said. “We won’t be able to scythe any more today, will we?” He ran down the wet field to the barn. Kasiak followed him a few minutes later, but he did not run. He entered the barn and began to repair a cold frame, as if the thunderstorm fitted precisely into his scheme of things.
Before dinner that night, Paul’s sister Ellen drank too much. She was late coming to the table, and when Paul went into the pantry for a spoon, he found her there, drinking out of the silver cocktail shaker. Seated at the table, high in her firmament of gin, she looked critically at her brother and his wife, remembering some real or imagined injustice of her youth, for with any proximity the constellations of some families generate among themselves an asperity that nothing can sweeten. Ellen was a heavy-featured woman who held her strong blue eyes at a squint. She had had her second divorce that spring. She had wrapped a bright scarf around her head for dinner that night and put on an old dress she had found in one of the attic trunks, and, reminded by her faded clothes of a simpler time of life, she talked uninterruptedly about the past and, particularly, about Father?Father this and Father that. The shabby dress and her reminiscent mood made Paul impatient, and it seemed to him that a vast crack had appeared magically in Ellen’s heart the night Father died.
A northwest wind had driven the thundershower out of the county and left in the air a poignant chill, and when they went out on the piazza after dinner to watch the sun go down, there were a hundred clouds in the west?clouds of gold, clouds of silver, clouds like bone and tinder and filth under the bed. “It’s so good for me to be up here,” Ellen said. “It does so much for me.” She sat on the rail against the light, and Paul couldn’t see her face. “I can’t find Father’s binoculars,” she went on, “and his golf clubs have disappeared.” From the open window of the children’s room, Paul heard his daughter singing, “How many miles is it to Babylon? Three score miles and ten. Can we get there by candlelight?…” Immense tenderness and contentment fell to him with her voice from the open window.
It was so good for them all, as Ellen said; it did so much for them. It was a phrase Paul had heard spoken on that piazza since his memory had become retentive. Ellen was the mote on that perfect evening. There was something wrong, some half-known evil in her worship of the bucolic scene?some measure of her inadequacy and, he supposed, of his.
“Let’s have a brandy,” Ellen said. They went into the house to drink. In the living room, there was a lot of talk about what they would have?brandy, mint, Cointreau, Scotch. Paul went into the kitchen and put glasses and bottles on a tray. The screen door was shaken by something?the wind, he guessed, until the thumping was repeated and he saw Kasiak standing in the dark. He would offer him a drink. He would settle him in the wing chair
