When I asked his advice about how to become a successful innkeeper, he told me:
Into this universe, and why not knowing, nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing: and out of it, as wind along the waste, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing, which wasn’t really helpful.
A year after their arrival, I had to ask them to leave. I hated to see them go. But their fights had reached a pitch where Mrs. Hennessy, across the way, was calling the sheriff several times a week, and my aversion to the police was greater than my liking for Leon and Norma.
On the day they left, Leon drew me aside. “I don’t have no money to pay you, Darcy,” he told me regretfully, “and I’m the sorrier for it. But there are three things I am gonna leave you that are better than money. One is the truck.”
Leon had patiently taught me how to drive the rusted-out heap that he and Norma had arrived in. Grateful, I nonetheless wondered if his leaving it had anything to do with the fact that he’d been unable to get it started for the past month.
“The other thing I’m leaving you is this.” He picked up his shotgun, the one I’d always been afraid he’d one day use on Norma.
“What’re you leaving that for?” I asked dubiously.
“Oh, you’ll understand what to do with it when the time comes.”
“How will I understand?”
He spread his arms wide and looked up at the sky and I knew I was in for another recitation.
Then to the rolling heaven itself I cried, asking, ‘What lamp had destiny to guide her little children stumbling in the dark? ‘A blind understanding!’ heaven replied.
“ Here,” he added, handing me a leatherbound tome. “Everyone should have a book of Persian poetry.”
RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM was etched in gild leaf across the tattered cover.
“Who’s Omar Khayyam?”
“Some smart old Persian guy.”
After a while, he turned back to me and said, “You know, when I was a young man living in New York City, I used to love to go to the theater. And it seems to me when you think about it long enough, we’re all just actors in one another’s plays. We each have our part to perform, whether we want to or not. Maybe your part in my play was to help me and Norma out while we was down on our luck. And maybe my part in your play is to give you this gun. I got a feeling someday you’ll have a use for it.”
2.
A Checkerboard of Nights and Days
In those days, my only ambition, modest as it may seem, was to avert disaster, and being in the hospitality profession made this pretty hard. Inviting strangers into your house is a surefire way to leave yourself wide open to the ever-present dangers that lurk all around just out of sight. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t convinced that one of those strangers who mysteriously divined their way to our door would be our undoing, and for years, I waited, without realizing I waited, looking down the road that led up to the Inn, waiting for the one to come who would change things forever. Yet strange enough, when he came that summer, the fourteenth summer of my life, he passed unrecognized.
I never liked Jesse James, but I certainly never feared him. He seemed too ridiculous a person to fear. Take his name. I didn’t need anybody to tell me that Jesse James wasn’t his real name. (Later, I would discover that his real name was Wistar Paist.) He roared into our lives on a motorcycle, disturbing the dust in the road, wearing a black helmet and a black leather coat. To me, he was comical. Younger than Jewel, with dirty blond hair and opaque gray eyes, he stood not more than five and a half feet tall, with a build so slight and wiry, and a chest so slender and narrow it was almost concave. And he called himself Jesse James! I couldn’t waittill Jewel heard that one. She always laughed at people who put on airs, and I was betting she’d wet her pants when she got a look at Mr. James, so it came as a real surprise when she didn’t think he was funny at all. Looking back, I suppose it was their shared adventures in nomenclature that kept her from appreciating the humor of such a skinny little guy taking the name of a famous outlaw. I guess Margaret Mary Willickers wasn’t about to call the kettle black.
Anyhow, they hit it off right away, and so discreet was Jewel that it took a full week for me to realize they were sleeping together. Oh, they were subtle all right. Going to bed at different times. Stretching and yawning dramatically and then retiring to separate rooms. But I knew. The girls, not being as watchful as me, never suspected anything. But I saw the way he looked at her and the way she looked back.
Jesse never talked about himself much. He told us that somebody he’d met in a bar on the turnpike had told him about our establishment. His only luggage was a duffel bag that bore some kind of navy insignia. I searched it while he was sleeping one night but found nothing interesting, except identification that revealed his real name. One night while Jewel was cooking dinner—she’d overcome her fear of ovens and taken to cooking since Jesse had arrived, no doubt wanting to impress him with her domestic skills—I asked him about his bag.
“Oh, that?” he said, pointing to his duffel. “That’s left over from my Navy days.”
“What’d you do in the Navy?”
“Why? You writin’ a book or something, Darcy?” he asked, amused.
“No. But I make it a point of finding out about anybody who’s sleeping under my roof and in my mother’s bed.”
“I get the feeling you
