Dzhon Makdonald - That Strangest Month of All [story]

Now the earth had turned a little bit past summer, and the elms stood tall and proudly aflame. On the orchard slope behind the house the apple trees had lost half their leaves. It was a day of incomparable stillness and clarity, with the morning sun climbing toward noon.

After the school bus had picked up the children and after Paul had left for the office, she had hurried through her housework, changed to the treasured and threadbare yellow sun suit, and with stubborn effort wrestled the old drop-leaf table out of the cellar and into the middle of the backyard. Paul had removed the paint and a lot of the varnish. She sanded it, the sun hot on her back, taking pleasure in the texture, the rough whispering sound.

She was a wife named Susan, a slim tanned woman with a soft cap of black hair, a lovely face, but with a brooding inward look, an air of containment. She was called Susan. Not Sue. Not Suzy.

Autumn had always been for her a time of haunting nostalgia, a longing for something she could not even identify. A time for what Paul called her gypsy mood. It left the children uncertain and Paul troubled. They seemed to sense she was off in some place where they could not reach her.

She straightened in the sunlight to rest her back and looked around at her world, at the white gracious farmhouse, at the small red barn, at the country road and the wood lot to the left of the house and the pasture to the right. Beyond the pasture she could see the dark blue patch of the roof of the Carter house through the bright trees. When she looked to the northwest, she could see the smog that tainted the blue sky over the industrial city 14 miles away, and she visualized Paul there, with the gray steel desk and the dark green rug and the discreet buzz of the intercom.

She folded a piece of sandpaper into a thin strip and sat on her heels and began to work on one of the table legs. She heard a truck and glanced toward the road and saw the pink-and-blue diaper-service truck heading back toward the crossroads. A little while later the mail came, and she walked down to the roadside box after the carrier had driven away.

Just as she put the mail on the back porch to take in later, she became aware of a curious pulsation in the air. And a helicopter, flying low, came over the tops of the pines at the crest of the hill beyond the orchard. It passed directly over the house. She saw two men in the gleaming bubble, men in maroon helmets. Beyond the house the helicopter made a tilting turn and headed toward the crossroads... Last winter they had used helicopters when those children had been lost in the woods beyond Hingham Creek.

A half hour later, just a few minutes before noon, she heard the sirens. There seemed to be several of them in a far forlorn chorus, quite out of place in the autumn countryside.

She searched the horizons for smoke and saw none. For a time she thought they were coming down the country road, but when the sound began to fade, she realized they were over on the Chamberland Road that paralleled the country road one mile to the south.

She decided she could finish the table before fixing herself some lunch.

As she worked, she became aware of a curious feeling of restlessness, a tiny threshold of irritation. She turned suddenly and looked behind her and found herself staring into the eyes of a man who stood a dozen feet behind her. She looked at him and knew the meaning then of the helicopter and the sirens.

He was big, as big and hard and solid as the trunk of one of the old oaks. He wore gray denim coveralls that seemed to be some sort of uniform. They were muddy, and the mud was drying.

She looked into the mans face and saw an animal emptiness that stopped her breath. The shaved head and the hard high cheekbones and the flattened cartilage of the nose gave him almost a cartoonists version of brutality. But what horrified her was the slackness of the lower part of his face and the pale uncomprehending opacity of his eyes.

He held his right hand out from his side awkwardly. It was puffed, with blood on the swollen fingers. He held a stout length of broken branch in his left hand. He wore crude heavy shoes caked with mud. He stood there, not stolidly but with a look of mad nimbleness, as if the body could pounce a blind destructive organism that carried with it, as an unwilling passenger, the numbed mind.

She remembered a long-ago time when she had been cornered by a vicious dog. She had stood very still then, a small and frightened girl, sensing that any attempt to run would be the necessary trigger.

She stood up slowly, turning to face him squarely as she did so, and held her hands in such a way that he could see they were empty. And she stretched her tense mouth into what she hoped was a smile of reassurance. And she thought she saw a faint flickering of awareness behind the deadness of the pale eyes.

He turned his head and stared at the house and then looked back at her. The heavy lips worked silently for a few moments, and then he pointed toward the house with the stick he held and said in a rusty rumble: Who? Who?

I am alone, she said. Alone.

Alone. He mouthed the word with heavy difficulty.

And once again the distant keening of the sirens became audible above the sounds of the birds. He raised his head sharply, the flattened nostrils widening. He quickly put the club under his right arm and closed his left hand around her upper arm and hurried her toward the house. His palm was as rough and hard as the bark of a tree.

He pushed her into the kitchen and went in after her. He made little sound with his heavy shoes, but the old boards creaked under his weight. He stood and seemed to be listening. She heard the sirens fade away. And even as she stood there in her terror, one part of her mind thought quite calmly, saying: This is the way it happens.

He took two quick strides to the sink and turned the water on and stared at her for a moment; then he bent toward the faucet to gulp the water that ran into his cupped hand. When he heard her open the cupboard, he whirled around.

She took the glass out and held it toward him, trying to keep it steady. She took two slow steps toward him. And then he took the glass from her and filled it and drank and filled it again and drank and put it on the drainboard.

He stood for a moment with his eyes shut, and her sudden pity was as keen and unexpected as a knife. He was exhausted. His hurt hand was horrid. Dumb creature in pain. And what of all the tales of the thorn in the pad of the lion? Were they true?

Your hand, she said, forming the words distinctly. You need something done for it. Your hand.

He lifted his hand and looked at it. Hand, he said. Gun. And she saw that it must indeed have been a bullet through the middle of the hand.

She moved tentatively toward the doorway and stopped abruptly when he said No! and half-raised the club.

Medicine, she said. For your hand. Its bleeding.

He stared at his hand again. He looked at her.

She moved toward the doorway again, backed toward it. He followed her to the medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom.

She found gauze and the tube of antiseptic salve. He thrust his injured hand out and held it before her. She used the salve liberally, risked taking his wrist and turning his hand over, and did not look up into his face knowing that if she looked into his face, she could not touch his wrist; telling herself that it was just a hand, a hurt thing. She wound it in gauze and taped the gauze in place.

He followed her back into the kitchen.

She pointed to a chair. Sit down. Please sit down.

With less hesitation he sat in the chair.

In the chair where Paul ate his eggs and drank his coffee and read his paper. Competent, efficient, mannerly, adjusted Paul man so suited to his environment. She thought: And for you there is no place. No place in this world.