Jan Karon - In the Company of Others

‘Now you’re being tiresome.’

A pale ferocity in her eyes. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Speaking always of your torments, your griefs, your many persecutions. The fact is, God visited you, he sought out your company, and you refuse to believe it.’

‘How can I possibly believe such an absurd notion?’

‘You make a decision to believe it. Unlike what you say of me, you have nothing to lose but everything to gain.’

‘Do you know what happened to my mother and sisters?’

‘I do.’

‘I opened the door,’ she said, weeping.

‘You opened the door because you were going back to ask forgiveness, and to offer it. That’s reason enough to open any door, anytime.’

‘I banked the fire, I pulled the chairs to the hearth, I hung the laundry over the chairs. There was the spark to the dry cloth.’

‘You were going back to ask forgiveness and to offer it. Please remember that.’

The draperies sucking in. A thin keening rising from her.

He bent toward her, praying, silent.

‘I was the survivor. Not dead like them, but alive and alone, and yes, beautiful-it was a curse, something my sisters hated me for. I was left to recall every day and night of my life the horror I had seen and the suffering I had caused.

‘My God,’ she said, panting. ‘My God.’

He had an intense desire to touch her, to lay his hand on her forehead, but he held back.

‘Tell me something,’ he said.

‘I have told you everything of consequence.’

‘Tell me whether William is Liam’s father.’

He said it gently, yet his heart pounded. He’d been in such territory before-the territory of the hot spot, the truth that people reserve until last or until never.

She turned her head on the pillow and faced him, ravaged now, beyond defenses. ‘Why are you such a hard man?’

‘I’m actually a pathetically soft man.’

‘Is it important that you know this?’ There was no bitterness, merely a question forwardly put.

‘It is. Things have gotten tangled up; they’ve gotten people tangled up.’

‘A web,’ she said, panting. ‘A snare. If you must know, William was the love of my life.’

He thought of the old man sitting in the reception hall, the inscription engraved on the window pane.

‘I learned to hate him to the same degree I loved him. He was cruel and self-serving. He came home at last when Paddy was six, he thought he might have me again for his own. Nothing mattered to him-not my husband, not my son, not my fine house for which I had surrendered everything, not even my mother and two sisters whom I had lost for all time.

‘I toyed with William then, as he had toyed with me. I led him on, let him think he might take me to himself, that I had no care for my husband or child or anything but his unspeakable ways, the big boxer who’d been to Scotland and had his face bashed in, the man of the hour, the bloody self-serving gamecock of the world.

‘Aye, and he thought he had me, that I was all but done in the oven of his heathen lust. And then I took my husband’s pheasant gun from the cabinet; ’twas a twelve-bore Purdey side-by-side from the twenties. The stock was carved Turkish walnut and Riley was very proud of it. I was the only person allowed to shoot it other than himself, and I was an exceedingly fine shot.’

He watched a certain color return to her face, noted something like a grimace that might be amusement.

‘I took it to the beech wood where I was to meet William for the offering of my body, my flesh-the one prize he had not yet won. I was standing behind a bench Riley had put there, and I see William coming out of the wood, gawping at me like a bloody savage.

‘I raise the gun, then, and fire off a shot, for I intend to kill him and let the vultures take care of the rest. Oh, if you could have seen…’ She was suddenly laughing, a raw, hoarse, half-hindered laugh, as if it were wrenched from her like an infant when it won’t be naturally born. On and on, her shoulders heaving, and then the coughing.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘No more.’ He put his hand on her head, felt the heat of her scalp with its coarse silk of hair.

‘I would have killed him,’ she said, plucking at the coverlet, ‘but he ducked as I fired, then did what the spineless do. He ran.’ She looked up at him. ‘I despised him all the more for that. For all his taking it like a man in the ring, for all his standing up to whatever black torment the public demanded, he ran before the fury of a woman. What do you say, Reverend? ’

‘I say I would have run, too. Oh, yes.’

They both laughed now. Hard and long; it hurt his sides.

‘Water,’ she said, and he offered the straw, and she drank a little, and he opened the manila envelope and removed the portrait.

‘I’ve been asked to show you this.’

She lay still against the pillows and examined it with a solemn gaze.

‘The oul’ gallute,’ she said.

He laid it on the table.

‘Who did that portrait?’ she demanded.

‘My wife.’

‘Your wife?’

‘She’s an author and illustrator of children’s books. She has a newfound gift for portraiture.’

‘Show it to me again.’

He held it before her, feeling the odd beggar of pride in Cynthia’s achievement.

‘Your wife is very competent. Where is she?’

‘At Broughadoon.’

‘I would like her to paint me in exchange for a pearl ring.’

‘I’ll tell her of your offer.’

‘The setting is white gold. I wish to be painted while I’m at my worst.’

‘A very unusual request.’

‘I wish to see what life has written on my face. It will be for my own amusement. Perhaps there will be something left of the young bride in the portrait after Sargent. Riley loved my beauty, Reverend, all the while looking away from my misery, refusing to see it because it was not lovely, but deformed and carrying me away like someone caught in an undertow.

‘Suffering was all I had and he wanted to deprive me of it, as anyone in his right mind would. He wanted my beauty to be everything, to be all, to be enough.

‘But William would have let me have the sorrow; he was unafraid of it, for he had sorrow himself. Beauty would not have been enough for William; he would have wanted all that I had, all the pain, all that I was, and if we had married, perhaps I could have been healed, relieved in some way I can’t know.’

The draperies stirring, afternoon light shimmering on the walls.

‘What is your wife’s name?’

‘Cynthia. She’s nursing a fractured ankle, but has wanted to see Catharmore.’

‘Show it to me again,’ she said.

She looked at it, expressionless.

‘He’s waiting in your front hall.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just to be near, he says, not wanting to trouble you.’

She tried to rise, felt a scalding pain, lay back. ‘Tell him to get off my property at once or we shall call the Gards.’

In the kitchen, Seamus gave him a fervent back-slapping.

‘Joseph and Mary! I’ve never heard the like. When has the woman laughed? I can’t recall th’ time, though I remember bein’ much younger.’

Something was shaken off them; they were laughing-cracking up, as Dooley would say.

‘I could kiss y’r bloody hand.’

‘Don’t be doing that,’ he said, bursting into another fit of laughter. Both of them at it again, bending over, carrying on like two pagans.

‘Great God!’ said Seamus, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

‘Yes, Seamus, yes. He is a great God.’

Sober now, the two of them, looking at each other. Tears in their eyes.

‘Walk out with me, if you will,’ he said to Liam.