When We Were Saints (2 page)

Archie knew Clyde was waiting for him to speak. He crossed his arms and tucked his hands under his pits, the way Armory always did. "We wanted to do something big, you know?" he said to Clyde. "He was moving all the way to Washington, so we wanted one last hurrah before he left. That's what we called it—the still, that is. The Last Hurrah, we called it."

Clyde raised his eyebrows and nodded. "The still. I heard about that, and I'm surprised at you, Archibald. Making your own alcohol's illegal in this state, even today."

"Armory got the instructions off the Internet. He said it was easy. He said it couldn't be illegal if you could get the directions off the Internet."

Clyde wagged his head. "Son, why you always had to follow after that boy I'll never know. He's gotten you into more trouble with your granddaddy. Maybe it's good he's moved away."

Archie rubbed his left arm, moving his hand over the area where Armory had tried to tattoo the words
Live Fast, Live Dangerously
with a razor blade and colored Sharpies. His arm still felt sore and swollen from the infection he had gotten from the dirty blade. His grandfather had been furious with him for that, too, but it was nothing like the anger and fury he had when he discovered the still.

"It's my own choice what I do," Archie said. "I can't be blaming Armory for everything. It's not his fault me and Granddaddy don't get along. It's me. It's my fault." Archie stared off into the woods on his right. "Granddaddy has never liked me." Archie's voice was a whisper. "Not in the way he liked my father."

Clyde cleared his throat and said, "I suspect your granddaddy got awful sore over that still, but he loves you every bit as much as he did your father. It's not your fault he's dying, son. No matter how much you and him goaded each other, that didn't cause his liver problems."

Archie raised his brows and looked back at Clyde. "'Liver'? It's not his heart? He didn't have a heart attack? That day he found us in his basement with the still—he was so mad." Archie shook his head. "He's never been that mad. His whole body shook. And then—he just keeled oven" Archie felt tears stinging his eyes, and he blinked them away. "He hasn't talked to me since, except when he got home and wanted his bed brought down to the living room. He didn't say one word to me when I went to see him in the hospital. He blames me, all right, and so does Grandmama."

Clyde stepped closer to Archie, his muddy work boots shuffling through the blanket of pine needles. "That doesn't sound like your grandmama. Did she tell you she blames you, or are you just imagining that's how she feels?"

Archie shrugged. "Grandmama never tells me anything. Why didn't she tell me it was his liver?" Archie answered his own question. "She hates talking about painful things. But still, she blames me. She has this look, you know? You ever seen her look when she's disappointed in you? She doesn't have to say anything; her look says it all. You ever seen it?"

Clyde shook his head.

Archie pushed himself off the tree, then fell back against it. "Yeah, well, it makes you want to just curl up and die, and she's been looking at me that way ever since Granddaddy took sick. And Granddaddy, if he looks at me at all, gives me his mean, squinty-eyed look, like he's plotting out seventy-five ways to get even with me."

Clyde set a calloused hand on Archie's shoulder. "I'm not saying they aren't upset about the still; maybe they are, but they aren't blaming you for that bad liver. Your granddaddy's been suffering with liver trouble for a long time now. Maybe what your grandmama wants is for you and your granddaddy to talk things out. Son, you don't want to let him die before you two have had a chance to say what needs to be said to each other. You understand?"

Archie looked into Clyde's gentle eyes and nodded. "Yes, sir."

"Once he dies those things can't be said. Now, maybe it's up to you to be the bigger man this time and speak up first. You think you can do that?"

Archie had told Clyde that he thought he could. He knew he had to say something to break the ice and come to some kind of understanding with his grandfather before the old man died, but Archie never did muster up the courage—and so there he sat, with his grandmother and all the elderly people in the town, watching his grandfather breathe his final breaths. Instead of speaking up, he waited for his grandfather to say something first. He just wanted to hear one word, one word of encouragement.

The neighbors waited, too. They hoped for one last word from the old prophet. Silas Benjamin Caswell had been the town prophet long before the small southern village hidden in the mountains had become an artists' colony where people from all over the country came to buy handmade pottery, landscape paintings, dulcimers, and finely crafted pieces of furniture. In the early years people took his predictions of famine and locusts and tornadoes seriously, but as he grew older and times and the population in the mountain village changed, his predictions became quaint, and the summer people, sitting out on their decks and balconies, would point as Silas passed by calling out to them and shaking his finger and say to their guests with a chuckle, "There goes the prophet, warning of hellfire and damnation." The people gathered at his bedside now were his old friends, the ones who remembered how it used to be.

The day grew grayer the room darker. The friends waited and hummed. Then Archie stood up.
It is now or never,
he decided. He had to say something. He knew he would regret it for the rest of his life if he didn't. In spite of what Clyde had said, he felt he was responsible for his grandfather taking ill when he did. All he had to say were two words:
I'm sorry.
Heads turned toward Archie when he stood up, but the humming continued. The heads turned back to the dying man. Then, just as Archie opened his mouth to speak, his grandfather, Silas Benjamin Caswell, opened his eyes. The humming stopped. He lifted his right hand and pointed. One thick yellow fingernail pressed into Archie's stomach. Silas Benjamin looked at his grandson, and Archie looked at him.

"Young man, you are a saint!" his grandfather said.

His raised arm flopped back down by his side, his eyes closed, and with the release of one last dry breath, he died.

A
RCHIE THOUGHT IT
was fitting that it was pouring rain on the day of his grandfather's funeral. He believed it was the old man's way of raining hellfire and damnation down on his head one more time. He let the rain soak his good wool suit as he walked alone from the church to the graveyard and waited for everyone else to arrive. His grandmother and friends rode in cars following the hearse the half mile to the graveyard. The rain and the need for umbrellas and the waiting for people to get to their cars and line up had slowed everyone down, so Archie had a good twenty minutes to stand alone at the empty grave site.

His grandmother had given him an umbrella to hold and the site had a canopy over it, but Archie didn't take advantage of either of those things. He felt he deserved the punishment of the cold rain. He looked out past the deep pit with the fake-grass rug pulled over it to the gravestones just beyond the Caswell plot and discovered three stones standing side by side, one with the word
BACK
written in block letters, the next with the word
STREET
, and the third with
THRASHER
written on it. Before he knew what he was doing, Archie had invented a new character for the comic strip that he had been working on: the Back Street Thrasher a daredevil mountain biker with a penchant for murdering people and archenemy of Mountain Mike the Mountain Biken When Archie realized what he was doing—and how angry his grandfather would have been to know that at his very funeral he was working on the comic strip his grandfather had forbidden him to do—he felt ashamed of himself and kicked the mud at his feet.

"Look at you, Archibald, all soaking wet," his grandmother said when she caught up with him. "I gave you that umbrella to put over your head, not to use as a walking cane. Now come on, you're standing up front with me, and take this camellia." She handed him one of the two white flowers she held in her hand. "I want you to lay it on his casket after Brother Will's words."

Archie took the flower and stood with his grandmother beneath the canopy. The rain beat down hard, so that Brother Will had to yell to be heard over the noise. It slanted in and pelted Archie's legs. He stepped in closer to his grandmother hoping to protect her legs from the cold water. His grandmother patted his arm in thanks. While the pastor spoke, gesturing toward the casket, Archie looked out to the three strange gravestones that stood in the fog that rose up from the leaves covering the ground around them.

He noticed someone standing beneath the oak tree just beyond the stones, directly across from him. It was a woman or a girl; Archie wasn't sure which. She was tall and slender; that much he could tell, but she held her umbrella so low,
Archie could not see her face. She was dressed all in black, from her boots and tights to the dress that came down to just above her knees. Two slender young-looking hands gripped the umbrella. Archie wondered who she was and why she wasn't standing with everyone else. It looked almost as if she was deliberately standing in front of him, watching him from beneath her umbrella. He stared out at her and felt for a moment that he was seeing some kind of ghost rising out of the fog, and he determined that when the service was over he would go and find out who she was. He knew that if Armory were there he would call out to her and probably even would have done so in the middle of the service.

Remembering Armory made Archie's heart sink. He missed his old friend. He turned his attention back to the service, but when it was time to bow his head for one last prayer Archie kept his head lifted and his eyes fixed on the figure still standing beneath the tree.

After the service Archie followed his grandmother's example and kissed his flower and placed it on top of the casket. Tears welled up in his eyes, taking him by surprise. He had yet to cry for the loss of his grandfather: He thought to say something, anything to make up for not speaking before the man had died, to make up for all the ways that he had hurt his grandfather over the years, and all the fights they had had with each other. He thought again to apologize for the still and for vomiting on him, but what was the use? His grandfather was dead, and anyway, an apology wasn't enough—but what was? Becoming a saint? Was that what his grandfather's final words meant? Was he saying, "It'll take your being a saint the rest of your life to make it up to me now, boy"?

His grandmother's friends had their own ideas about what the words had meant, and after the service, when Archie was trying to get away and catch up with the stranger beneath the tree, they held him back and gave him their take on Silas Benjamin Caswell's final words.

Miss Nattie Lynn Cooper shook her finger at him and said, "You listen to me, child, your granddaddy's last words were a warning. Take care, Archibald, and sin no more—that's what the old prophet was saying!"

Mrs. Wally Hoover said, "Nonsense, Nattie Lynn, don't you go scaring the boy half to death. Old Silas was just having a heraldic vision. It had nothing to do with Archibald at all."

Archie looked out past the women and saw the figure still standing in the same place, as though she was waiting for something. He wondered if maybe she was waiting for him. The thought made chills rim down his spine. He still considered the idea that she was some dark spirit a real possibility.

Then Miss Callie Butcher stepped forward and argued with the others, taking hold of Archie's hand. "With old Silas so close to death, he was not of sound mind. The fool was just speaking gibberish," she said. She shook Archie's hand in hers and added, "Don't you think another thing about it, Archibald."

Archie couldn't help noticing that nobody, not even him, believed his grandfather's words meant just what he had said—that Archie was a saint.

At last the women moved on, and Archie hurried out toward the oak tree before any more of his grandparents' friends could catch hold of him. As he jogged he saw that the dark figure was moving. Then he realized she was coming toward him, and he thought of the Back Street Thrasher wondering if he had conjured up some kind of evil spirit. Archie slowed down, then stopped. The figure kept walking. The rain and wind whipped her dress about her knees and beat upon her umbrella. She held the umbrella so low over her head that Archie wondered how she could see where she was going. As she approached him, Archie began to back away. Then he heard her speak in a soft voice.

"This is for you, Archibald Lee Caswell," she said. She placed a small laminated card in the palm of his hand.

Archie looked down and read the words on the card:

Who are you, Almighty God of goodness and wisdom,
that you should visit me and judge me worthy,
I who am lower than the worms in the soil,
and most despicable?

"What's this supposed to mean?" Archie looked up and saw the figure retreating.

"Hey!" he called. He started after her but then he heard Clyde yelling to him. He turned and saw Clyde and his grandmother gesturing for him to come on, it was time to leave. He looked back for the girl—he was certain she was a girl and not a woman—and saw her already across the cemetery, heading toward town.

Archie looked down at the card in his hand, squeezed it, and then set out across the graveyard to join Clyde and his grandmother:

A
RCHIE LOOKED FOR
the strange girl as he rode through town on his way home from the funeral, but he didn't see her. Then for several days afterward, he rode his bike the nine miles into town, or on days when his grandmother who didn't see well, needed to run some errands and Clyde couldn't drive her he drove her in his grandfather's truck, even though at fourteen he had no license, and searched for the girl while his grandmother went about her business. He didn't have much to go on, no face and no name, but still he wandered in and out of the shops and boutiques that lined Main Street searching for her wanting to find out who she was and how she knew his name, and why she had given him that card. What had those words to do with him?