2. Isaac
It was long after dark and he’d walked all day from Little Washington to Speers, nearly twenty miles. From Speers it was only eight miles to Buell.
He stood on the I-70 bridge looking out over the Mon River for a few minutes before making his way down to the train tracks. He passed a group of teenagers sitting under the highway and one of them started to say something. But then Isaac must have given them a look because they all got quiet and when he was past them he realized they had seen his hunting knife.
When he was out of sight he undid the knife from his belt and tossed it into the river without ceremony. The kid renounces the old ways. If he doesn’t choose it gets chosen for him. Look at him—walking—he decides to put one foot in front of the other; it happens. Think about that. The way Lee’s cat used to knock pencils off your desk. Why? To remind itself that it could. Because some part of it—oldest part—knew that one day it wouldn’t be able to. Take a lesson, he thought. Wake up ignorant every morning. Remind yourself you’re in the land of the living.
He continued heading south. The tracks passed through a wide meadow and the night was clear and black and the stars stretched down to the horizon. Billions of them out there, all around us, an ocean of them, you’re right in the middle. There’s your God—star particles. Come from and go back. Star becomes earth becomes man becomes God. Your mother becomes river becomes ocean. Becomes rain. You can forgive someone who is dead. He had a sense of something draining out of him, down his head and neck and the rest of his body like stepping out of a skin.
South of Naomi he decided to stop for the night. A few miles left for morning. He went to a flat place by the river and sat to think. Can’t go home—they’ll just talk you out of it. As you would do for them. Better to wait.
The old man, he tried. He did try. You can say that for him. Tomorrow you will go and tell Harris what you did. That is the right thing.
As he sat there on the ground he could feel the stiffness easing out of him, as if his bruises were healing. The Swede might have sat in this same camp two weeks ago. Old fire rings. Nice to have one now. No matches, though. He looked out at the river, flowing slowly through the trees. Bedtime, he thought. Your last night of freedom, sleep it off.
3. Henry English
They drove to Pittsburgh to talk to the lawyer that day a big firm at the top of the old Koppers Building near Grant Street. He could tell as Lee wheeled him into the elevator that it was going to be expensive. He couldn’t stand the thought of her new husband helping the family with money but no other arrangement was possible.
The lawyer had a corner office, he was a man nearly Henry’s age but tall, thin, and fit with a full head of gray hair, the type that probably played tennis. Most women after a certain age would have found him attractive. Henry took an immediate dislike to him but when he glanced at Lee he could tell she felt comfortable. These were her people now. It gave Henry a sick, jittery feeling, or maybe it was just being in this office, or maybe it was knowing why they were here, or maybe it was all three. He shifted himself in his wheelchair.
“Are you comfortable enough, Mr. English?”
“I’m fine. Used to this by now.”
They sat and the man went over the fees and rates and a client’s bill of rights, the most important feature of which seemed to be that they could expect their phone calls to be returned promptly. Lee nodded and took out the checkbook. Henry saw her name was on the top along with Simon’s. Only it was still Henry’s last name. That was a comfort, anyway. All these things he’d never asked her about.
Peter Brown, the lawyer, quizzed them amicably about Isaac’s background, where they lived, what Henry had done, even how his accident had occurred. He asked about Isaac’s mother and Henry would have protested but Lee told the man everything. She told him too much. Then Lee told the man what Billy Poe said about Isaac having killed the man in the factory. Peter Brown set down his pen for a moment and brought out a small digital recorder from his desk.
“Maybe we shouldn’t make a tape of this,” said Henry.
“Those are good instincts, Mr. English, but this is for our purposes and not the state’s. They’d have to break in here and steal it from us.” The man had a quiet voice and you had to sit still to listen to him. Henry looked at Lee again.
“Do you remember exactly what he said?” asked Peter Brown.
“I can try,” said Lee.
“My son didn’t kill that man. There’s no point in making a tape recording.”
“Dad.”
“Your son was there when this man died. If we don’t face up to this now, they’ll make us face up to it in court. That’s the only reason we’re doing it.”
“Except that Billy Poe hasn’t said a word about this. If he had, they would have already charged my son.”
“Billy Poe hasn’t even seen his lawyer yet and once he does, things will start changing pretty quickly. The fact that Isaac hasn’t been charged yet is more a technicality than anything else.” He looked down at his notepad. “I’m sorry,” he said.
It was ten o’clock and Henry was sitting in his bedroom in the wheelchair, looking at his desk, going through his papers. He heard the shower running upstairs for a long time and then Lee knocked on the door and asked if he needed help getting in bed but he said no. She waited for a minute outside the door.
“Anything else?”
“No. Get some sleep.”
He heard her moving around the house and then she went upstairs and settled into her room and then it was quiet except for the creaking of the house, cooling. He dozed off in his chair, he dreamed he was still working at Penn Steel, he looked forward to waking up, he was tired at the end of the days and dirty and happy to be home to his wife but in the mornings he was always ready to go to work. Something creaked and he woke up hungry for air.
He was still in his bedroom. With effort he took deep breaths, sometimes when he slept he didn’t get enough oxygen. How small your life feels—that was what you couldn’t explain to people. If I could have known how it would turn out I would have known what to do. Slow slip down.
Mary had left him alone, he knew that, she had given up. It shouldn’t have been her to do that, it made no sense. If they had talked about it they could have come to an arrangement that made sense, she could have taken the kids and gone somewhere else, but she had gone and done it without telling him a thing. His arms were trembling, how many times had he wanted to do that, he should have, but she had gone first. She was weak, that was the truth of her, the truth of all women, it was why he’d laid his bets on Lee. He had to get her out, he couldn’t have her ending up like her mother.
Maybe you were the one who was weak, he thought. Maybe her doing that makes her stronger. You know the reason she went to the river and you know the reason your son ended up like this. Still, he didn’t see what he could have done. The three years he’d commuted from Indiana, home once a month, that had not been easy for them but it had not been easy for him, either, living in boardinghouses and month- to- month hotels. But Steelcor paid plenty well. They just worked you hard and it was not safe. You looked at the stats, they had more accidents. But you didn’t have to look at the stats. They were there to make money. They were trying to squeeze every dollar out of that mill before they’d ironed all the kinks out. What would you give to have called in sick that day.
At first he hadn’t minded being nonunion, like Reagan said, the labor costs were out of control, it was a problem with the unions, you voted for him. Except it was not just that. Penn Steel hadn’t spent a dime in their factories in fifteen years, most of the other big American mills were the same, the places were all falling apart, plenty of them were single-process right up to the day they closed, whereas the Germans and Japs had all been
