“I can’t imagine why anyone would object.”
He nodded. “I wanted to be sure.” When he was done with his cigarette he began breaking up the ground.
He used to live here, and he knew how things were done. It had somehow never seemed to her that the place had his attention, or it seemed he was attentive to strategies of evasion and places of concealment, never to the skills of the ordinary, dutiful choring that made up most of every life, and was so much the worth and the pride of that life, by local reckoning. But he spaded between the rows of irises and he was businesslike about it, too. He had rolled up his sleeves.
SHE HEARD HER FATHER CALL OUT, “SUPPER, JACK!” WHICH WAS an opinion he had formed on his own, since it was 4:15 and she had not begun to prepare anything. But Jack stood the spade in the ground and paused for a minute, looking at his hand. He walked to the porch, looking at it, and she heard her father say, “Let’s see! Oh yes, yes! Glory will take care of that! Glory? He has a splinter here. From that old spade handle! I don’t know how long we’ve had that spade! I should have said something! Glory?”
Jack said, “If I can borrow a needle, I can take care of it, I think.”
“No, no. That’s pretty deep, Jack!”
Her father’s face was animated with concern. He held to the wrist of Jack’s upturned hand and almost hurried along beside him. “We’ll put some iodine on that!”
Glory said, “You can wash up and I’ll disinfect a needle.”
“I’ll get the iodine!” the old man said, and launched a determined assault on the staircase.
Jack looked at her. “It’s just a splinter.”
She said, “Not much happens around here,” and he laughed.
She had made him laugh twice. She took a certain satisfaction in the joke about the towel, but in order to laugh at this little remark he must be feeling pretty kindly toward her, she thought. He was never one to laugh when you hoped he would, when other people would. In those old days, that is. He was a restless, distant, difficult boy, then twenty years passed with hardly a word from him, and now here he was in her kitchen, offering her his wounded hand, still damp with washing, smelling like lavender and lye. They sat at the table and she took his hand to steady it. A slender hand, still unsteady, with a few blisters rising on it from the work he had done that morning. Cigarette stains.
He noticed her scrutiny. “Do you read palms?” he asked.
“No. But if I did, I would say that you have a splinter through your lifeline.”
He laughed. “I believe you may have found your calling.”
She put the needle down. “I’m afraid to do this. It might actually hurt. And your hand is trembling.”
“Well, if that one is, so is the other one. I could do myself harm if I tried it, I suppose.”
“All right. Stay as still as you can.” She thought, If he really were a stranger, this would not seem so odd to me. She could hear his breathing. She could see the blue traces of blood under the white skin of his wrist. “Just a second — there.” She extracted the splinter easily enough.
“Thank you,” he said.
The cane and the creaky railing and the hard, slippery shoes, and their father hurried into the kitchen with a bottle of iodine and a spool of gauze.
“Yes, you’ll want to wash it and dry it again,” he said. Then he daubed iodine here and there, finally where it should have been.
Jack said, “Ow,” for old times’ sake, by the sound of it.
“Yes, but it is very effective!” Her father was afire with solicitude. He went to the refrigerator and opened the door and stood there, purposive. “Supper!” he said. “I believe the pies are missing!”
Glory said, “They were so old I put them over the fence for the Dahlbergs’ dogs.”
“You did? The way things go around here, it might be time to invest in a dog of our own!”
Jack laughed, and his father smiled at him and patted his arm and said, “Well, that’s wonderful! That’s what I like to hear!”
Someone had left sliced ham and a macaroni salad in the porch the day before, one of those kindly reminders that nothing passed in their household unnoticed. The grace was exuberant—“Our hearts are much too full!” the old man said, and sank into that reverie prayer had become for him.
Through supper Jack was patiently restless, hearing out his father’s attempts at conversation—“Yes, this was a very different town at one time, when we were still on the main road! There were people passing through. You wouldn’t remember the old hotel. We thought it was very fine. It had a big veranda and a ballroom—” He grew ruefully excited, pondering the Gilead that was, and Jack watched him with the expression of mild impassivity he wore now that the embarrassments of his arrival were more or less behind him. She felt sorry for her father, happy as he was. It was hard work talking to Jack. So little in his childhood and youth could be
