Джон Макдональд - The End of the Night

“I called him an hour ago,” Sheriff Kurby said mildly. “He seemed to like it. I had to go through maybe nine people to get to him, but I finally did, and I kept getting that fifteen-second beep, so I know they got a good record of it. And I got one too, Mase. I strictly don’t know the law about using such a thing, but while I was talking to Dunnigan I was thinking that if it does work out, it might make a nice tape Peterson could play for the people, so I was careful, the things I said. I put in a part about how wonderful it is to live in a society where the world’s greatest police department will listen to a plain county sheriff.”

“Have you ever thought of being governor, Gus?”

“Only late at night when I can’t get back to sleep. A man’ll think of a lot of foolish things in the small hours.”

On Route 30, between York and Lancaster, and not far from the Susquehanna River, on the north side of the road, on a wide curve, in rather pleasant rolling country, is the Shadyside Motor Hotel. Steam Heat, Tile Baths, Innerspring Mattresses, Home Cooking. The units are separate, small brick buildings, square and rather ugly. There are only six of them. They are set well back from the highway at the foot of an apple orchard hill. The highway sign is in front of a large white farmhouse set much closer to the road.

The brick cabins were constructed over twenty years ago by Ralph Weaver, then fifty-five, who had farmed those eighty acres all his life, as had his father and grandfather before him. When he became crippled by arthritis he put his savings into the construction of the six cabins, despite the continuous opposition of his wife, Pearl. He died of a stroke two years after he completed the final cabin. Neighbors expected her to sell out. There was nothing to hold her there. Pearl had had four children. Accident, disease and a war had taken all four of them before any of them had married. She could have lived on a tiny income, with great care, and that’s what the neighborhood expected her to do.

But she sold off all but five acres, and she ran the small business. Had Ralph Weaver built less solidly, maintenance would have eaten up the marginal income. At seventy-two, Pearl Weaver was a tall, erect woman with a square powerful figure, and an alarmingly loud, shrill voice. A half-wit woman from over the hill came in once a week to help with the heavier cleaning. A neighbor boy helped with the big lawn. Once a week Pearl Weaver drove her ancient Dodge truck to York and did her marketing. Each year she planted a large kitchen garden, and canned what she could not use. For those who wanted it, she would provide a gargantuan country breakfast for sixty cents. The cabins rented for five dollars a couple, four dollars for a single, during the summer. In the last few years it had become a great rarity for them to be all filled — unlike the early days when sometimes all the cabins were filled and so were all the spare bedrooms in the main house. It had been three years since she had had anyone in the main house, but she kept the whole house just as spotless as the cabins.

Summer was the best time. In the winter a whole month might go by without a single customer. The summer money had to last out the winter, and each summer she took in a little less. She was realist enough to hope that she could survive in this fashion until she died. She did not want to give up the house. Her life was in that house, all the remembered voices and gestures of love. Her only concession to her loneliness was a six-year-old television set, and she felt guilty every time she sat and watched it.

Two cabins were occupied on Sunday night. She had hoped for more. The single said he would leave too early for breakfast. The young couple said they’d like breakfast at eight. And that was another dollar twenty.

Though she had great need of every bit of income, she was careful about the tourists to whom she rented her cabins. Each night before going to bed she would go out and turn on the floodlight that shone directly on her sign, and take down the board that masked the legend, “Ring Night Bell for Service.” A fat, red arrow pointed at the bell button set into the sign itself.

Her bedroom was in the front, overlooking the sign. The night bell rang in her room. Whenever it would ring, she was up and out of bed in an instant, and she would look out the window at them. They would be illuminated by the floodlight. She would watch them carefully for the look of drink, the staggering and the loud voices. And she would be wary of the too-young giggling couples. When she did not like what she saw, she would fling open the window and yell down in that terrible voice that cut the night like a sword, “Closed. Go away. Go away.” No one argued with a decision delivered with such finality.

On Monday morning, not long before dawn, the night bell awakened her. She stood at the window in her nightgown and looked down through the copper screening and saw a good-looking automobile parked near her sign, and a man standing quietly beside it. He turned and said something to someone in the car and she heard him answer, but could not hear what was said. He seemed respectably dressed, and she could read fatigue in his posture.

“Come to the front door of the house,” she called. “I’ll be down in one minute.”

She put on her robe and went down. She turned on the bright overhead porch light and looked at him again before she unlatched the door. He was a big young man, quite nice-looking.

She talked to him in the hall and he told her what he wanted and she named the price, and she took him into the parlor and had him sit at the old breakfront desk and write the names in the book. He did not want to look at the cabins first. She assured him they were clean and equipped. She told him to take the last two on the right as you stood facing the row of them, and please be careful about noise because folks were sleeping. She asked him when they’d be leaving, and he said he didn’t know, but somewhere around the end of the day.

After she had walked him to the door and waited until the car drove out to the cabins, the lights touching the trunks of the big elms in the yard, she walked back into the parlor with the ten-dollar bill in her hand and looked at the names he had signed in the book. Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Smith. Mr. W. J. Thompson. Mr. H. Johnson. All of Pittsburgh.

She stood with her lips compressed, sensing a wrongness that she could not identify. The young man had been very tired. And yet he had seemed to feel the need to force himself to be quite jolly. He had laughed a few times at nothing at all, an empty, social laugh. She remembered that it was exactly the way Ralph used to laugh when his conscience bothered him. The young man’s hands had been quite dirty, and that did not fit the rest of his appearance, or the cultivated sound of his voice. And his hands had trembled as he had written in the book. The writing was shaky. And they were such terribly ordinary names. But lots of people had ordinary names. That’s what made them ordinary, of course. And people with ordinary names could travel together. And it was a nice-looking car.

She shrugged away her feeling that something was wrong, and went back to her bed. She was up an hour later, and she was hanging the board that masked the night bell when the single drove out, a salesman who had stayed with her before. He waved and she waved back. The young couple appeared for breakfast at eight-thirty. She insisted they eat until they begged for mercy. She felt great satisfaction in sending them on their way with what was probably the first decent breakfast they’d eaten in a year.

All the time she did her housework she was conscious of the car out there, the four people sleeping. They had parked the car between the two cabins, heading out. It was a brown-and-tan car, with double headlights, and the big front grill was a shiny frozen grin.