A Common Life (9 page)

He remembered stealing a pork loin from the grocery store and getting it home and not knowing how to cook it. He had dropped it in a pot of boiling water with oatmeal and let it cook ’til the water boiled out on the stove, then he carved the meat in five chunks and they tried to eat it and got so sick, he thought they’d all die in the night. Once he’d stolen five cans of creamed corn, so they could all have exactly the same thing and not fight over who got what and how much, and the store manager had caught him and jumped on him really bad, but he’d let him have the corn, saying if he ever did it again he’d be sent to the penitentiary. A woman who overheard the commotion had gone and gotten a can of Harvard beets, a loaf of Wonder bread, a pound of M&Ms, and a quart of buttermilk and gave the items to him in a plastic bag. He remembered that he couldn’t stomach buttermilk and the kids wouldn’t drink it, either, but they couldn’t bear to throw it out and it sat in the refrigerator for maybe a year.

He didn’t like to think about these things, he wanted to forget everything that had ever happened before he came here, but sometimes he couldn’t. He especially wanted to forget about his little sister, Jessie, because thinking of her being gone and nobody knowing where made him want to cry, and he tried to keep his face as hard and tight and straight as possible so nobody would ever be able to tell what he was thinking.

Sometimes, at night especially, he remembered trying to help his mama when she was drunk, and would suddenly feel a great love for her welling up in him. Then he’d be angry with himself for being stupid, and feel the old and shameful desire for her to die.

Things were just fine for him and Father Tim; he felt safe, finally, like things would be all right. But now he didn’t know what would happen. He liked Cynthia, but what if she didn’t like him, what if she tried to get him to leave or go back to his mother, if anybody could even find his mother? Or what if Cynthia tried to be his mother? His heart felt cold at such a thought. He wanted his own mother, even if he did hate her and wish he would never see her again as long as he lived.

He was glad that Barnabas came to his room and jumped on the foot of his bed, because it felt good to have a friend. Besides, Barnabas would never tell anyone that he was crying and couldn’t stop.

H
is heart was nearly bursting with a kind of longing, though he had no idea why. After all, he was blessed with everything this life could afford, everything and more.

He sat at his desk in the study and looked out the window into the gloaming as it settled over Baxter Park. Cynthia was working on an illustration that had to go out tomorrow by FedEx, or he would have been at her side, as magnetized to her living presence as his grocery list to the refrigerator.

He drummed his fingers on the desktop.

He didn’t want to work on his sermon. He didn’t want to take a shower and crawl into bed with a wellloved book from his well-stocked shelves, and he most certainly did not want to turn on the TV and have the clamor pour into this quiet place like some foul Niagara. He was unable to think of anything he wanted to do; there was no seduction in any of the usual pursuits.

Aha. His fingers grew still upon the desktop.

There it was, plain as day:

He wanted to record, somehow, the joy of this breathless thing that had swept him up and overpowered and mesmerized him. Perhaps for most people, people who had been in love again and again, it would not be such a beauteous experience, but it was new to him and dazzling. Yet even in its newness, he felt it slipping away, becoming part of a personal history in which the nuances, the shading, would be lost forever; buried within the consciousness, yes, but paled by time, and then, he feared, vanished altogether.

He opened the desk drawer and took out a writing pad and one of the commercial pens he’d grown to prefer. Though the ink had a noxious odor, he liked the way it flowed onto the page—black, bold, and able.

He knew now what his soul was driving him to. He knew, and he liked the idea immensely.

He would write a poem.

In it, he would tell her everything, he would confess the all of his love, which, by its great and monumental force, had heretofore rendered him dumb as a mackerel.

With her, he experienced a galaxy . . . no, an entire universe of feelings, yet they continually displayed themselves as the western portion of the state of Rhode Island:

YouarebeautifultomeIshallloveyoueternallywillyou marrymeandmakemethehappiestmanwhoeverdrewbreath,
period, end of declaration.

He was amazed at how far he’d gotten with this extraordinary woman by the utterance of the most rudimentary expressions of love, all of them sincere beyond measure, and yet, they were words too simple and words too few; not once had they been equal to the character, the beauty, or the spirit of the one to whom they were addressed.

He knew, now, why people wanted to shout from rooftops, yet he couldn’t imagine it to have great effect, in the end. One would clamber onto the roof and, teetering on some gable or chimney pot, bellow until one was hoarse as a bullfrog, “I love! I love!”

And what would people on the street do? They would look up, they would shrug, they would roll their eyes, they would say:

He bounded happily from the chair and went to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Clearly, shouting from the rooftops had been a fleeting thing in the history of the lovestruck, not long enjoyed as a certified expression of ardor. Indeed, what had done the trick each and every time? Poetry! And history had proved it!

“ ‘I love thee,’ ” he recited as he filled the kettle, “ ‘. . . to the level of every day’s Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight . . . I love thee freely, as men strive for Right . . .’ ”

There! That was getting down to it. The only problem was that E. B. Browning had already written it.

He stood musing by the stove in a kind of fog that made him forget momentarily where he was and what he was up to, until the kettle whistled and he awoke and found himself oddly joyful to be dropping the bags into the teapot and pouring the steaming water therein.

He clamped the lid on the pot and, leaving it to the business of steeping, returned to the study and visited his bookshelves. He couldn’t readily put his hand on a volume of love poetry, but surely he’d find something here to spark a thought, to get his blood up. He chose a small blue volume that he’d used a time or two in marital counseling, and opened it at random.

“ ‘I feel sad when I don’t see you,’ ” he read aloud from a letter by a nineteenth-century American suitor. “‘Be married, why won’t you? And come to live with me. I will make you as happy as I can. You shall not be obliged to work hard, and when you are tired, you may lie in my lap and I will sing you to rest . . .’ ”

There’s a good fellow! he thought.

“ ‘. . . because I love you so well, I will not make you bring in wood and water, or feed the pig, or milk the cow, or go to the neighbors to borrow milk. Will you be married? ’ ”

He shoved the book upon the shelf, took down another, and thumbed through the section on all things marital.

“ ‘I love you no longer; on the contrary, I detest you . . .’ ” Napoleon Bonaparte to Josephine, wrong section.

Ah, well, here was one for the books, something Evelyn Waugh had trotted out in a letter of proposal. “ ‘I can’t advise you in my favour because I think it would be beastly for you, but think how nice it would be for me!’ ”

Would it be beastly for Cynthia? Living with him, an old stick in the mud? He shook the thought away and licked his right forefinger and turned to another page.

“ ‘You have set a crown of roses on my youth and fortified me against the disaster of our days. Your courageous gaiety has inspired me with joy. Your tender faithfulness has been a rock of security and comfort. I have felt for you all kinds of love at once. I have asked much of you and you have never failed me. You have intensified all colours, heightened all beauty, deepened all delight. . . .’” Duff Cooper, writing to his future wife in the war-dark year of 1918, had known how to get down to brass tacks, all right. Maybe he could do something with the idea of courageous gaiety; he had always thought Cynthia courageous.

He sighed deeply. In truth, this was going nowhere. It was a waste of precious time to try and glean from another man’s brain. There’d be no more lollygagging.

He dashed again to the kitchen and poured a mug of tea, then added a little milk and stirred it well, and returned to his desk and sat, gazing at the mug, the pad, and the pen, and the nightfall dark against his window.

He considered that he had written hymns to God, several in his time, but he’d never done anything like this, never! He knew that God was familiar with his very innards and that He perceived the passion of his heart full well; thus he had not sweated greatly over lines that were awkward here or a tad sophomoric there, but this . . .

“Write!”
he bellowed aloud.

Barnabas bolted from the rug by the sofa and trotted to his master and stood by the desk. The rector turned his head slowly, and for a moment each looked soulfully into the other’s eyes.

Dearest love
. . . , he wrote at last,
tender one . . . my heart’s joy . . .

He drew a line through the feeble words and began again:

What about something from the Song of Solomon? On second thought, scratch that. The Song still made him blush. Whoever drummed up the notion that it was about Christ and the church . . .

He nibbled his right forefinger and mused upon lines from Shakespeare; he chewed his lower lip and called to mind Keats; he sank his head onto his arms on the desktop and contemplated Robert Browning’s fervent avowal, “All my soul follows you, love . . . and I live in being yours.”

Blast and double blast. The good stuff had already been written.

He talked to himself with some animation as he trotted up Main Street from Lord’s Chapel. What if Shakespeare had never put pen to paper because the good stuff had already been written? In truth, what if he refused one morning to preach because all the good sermons had already been preached?

On the other side of the Irish Shop’s display window, Minnie Lomax examined the bent head and hunched shoulders of the village priest as he blew past, his mouth moving in what she supposed was prayer.

He didn’t look at all like a man besotted with love, not in her view.

Why was he staring at the sidewalk when he might be looking into the heavens, or whistling, or waving to her through the window as he usually did? He was scared of what he’d let himself in for, that’s what! Sixty-something and getting married for the
first time
? The very thought gave her the shivers.

She had never married, and never wanted to. Well, not never, exactly. She had wanted to once, and look what happened. She sniffed and smoothed her cardigan over her thin hips and took a Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose, then turned around to the empty store, wondering what she might do to lure traffic through the door today. Boiled wool had a terrible go of it during the summer; next year she would advise the owner to put in more cotton and linen, for heaven’s sake, and get shed of the entire lot of those hideous crocheted caps.