Russell Banks - Outer Banks

But that night, as she sat on the edge of the double bed that she and her new husband had purchased a few days before, she looked around her, and all she saw was hopelessness and dark retreat. It was not the kind of hopelessness that was characterized by disorder or sloth, but the kind that makes itself known first by the ruthless paring down of the elements of a life to its essential, molecular units, then by a compulsive ordering of those units, a deliberate placement of remnants in self-referring relations that were abstract, geometric, intellectually pure, controlled. The house and its contents seemed suddenly, hopelessly, cold to her, like an arctic wind, and she began to think with fond nostalgia of her small, crowded apartment in Concord, its warm disarray and thoughtless clutter. (She did not dare to think of the house she had lived in before that, the house she had shared for twenty-three years with Harry Franklin.) She snapped off the light next to the bed, got slowly undressed in the dark, and slipped into the bed. She began to think that she had made a terrible mistake. It might not be too late. Harry was a good man, though flawed, cruelly flawed … and he had cried when she left him, cried like a baby…

Hamilton did not come to bed that night. Or at least not to their bed. Possibly he had slept in one of the upstairs rooms and had made the bed when he got up, but when she came into the kitchen at six-thirty, the ceiling light above the table was burning and his coffee cup and breakfast dishes, as usual, were soaking in the sink, and his car, as usual, was gone.

She heard the furnace kick over and start its low hum, and she checked the thermometer posted outside the kitchen window. Fourteen above zero. She hoped it wouldn’t snow for the funeral. Oh, God — the funeral. What should she do about the funeral? As the gray cold day wore on, she worried more and more fixedly about it. How was she supposed to act? What was expected of her? She could not understand how such a thing could have become problematic, but it had. She was surprised that she actually did not know what was the proper and appropriate thing to do. Funerals and weddings and birthdays — these were events in a life that were such integrated parts of its overall texture that one almost never questioned what was expected of one as a participant in those events. One simply knew. They were rituals of the culture, and she was one of the people who lived inside and sustained that culture. Why, then, was she so unsure of herself, so incapable of deciding what was expected of her by her husband, her sisters-in-law, the townspeople they lived among? She felt as if she had accidentally wandered into an alien land, where the rituals were obscure and exotic, where a wrong guess could be disastrous for her because outrageous to everyone else.

Around four in that afternoon, as it grew dark and the temperature began to fall again, she called the only florist in Barnstead, Herb Cotton, and ordered a large arrangement of white chrysanthemums to be sent to the church the next day in time for the funeral. She knew that she should have sent the flowers to the funeral home, but Sarah hadn’t said anything about which funeral home her mother’s body was lying in or whether there was to be a service there, and she didn’t dare call Sarah now and ask her.

“ What should the card say? ” the florist, presumably Herb Cotton, asked in a high, thin voice.

“What?”

“ The card. What should we put on the card? ”

“Oh… Well, I suppose … the usual, I guess.”

“ The usual? ”

“Yes … you know, ‘From Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton Stark,’” she said with hope in her voice.

“ This Mrs. Stark speaking? ”

“Yes.”

“ I see. ” He paused. “ Ham’s wife, eh? ”

“Yes.”

“ Yep. Wal, don’t you an’ ol’ Ham worry yourself. We’ll get these over to the Heywoods’ Funeral Home tonight. They’ll still look good at the church tomorrow. ”

“Oh… Well, thank you.”

“ Good woman, y’know. That Alma Stark. That’s Ham’s mother, y’know. ”

“Yes, I know. I… I never knew her.”

“ Yep. Bye, now, ” he said sharply.

“Good-bye,” she said, and she hung up the phone.

That evening, Hamilton arrived home three hours later than usual, only slightly drunk, but dark and glowering and filled with smoldering silence. She bobbed around him, gave him food, and stayed in the bedroom for the remainder of the evening, listening to him as he tramped heavily in and out of the house from the barn. Every now and then she could hear sounds that told her he was sorting out the tools, equipment, materials—“a place for everything and a thing for every place.” One minute she imagined him doing something that was wholly intentional, deliberate, no matter how bizarre-seeming. She imagined him, for instance, building a coffin for his mother, a hearse from his car, a graveside marker. But a minute later she could only imagine him doing something that was determined wholly by forces outside his conscious will, compulsive acts, no matter how ordinary or normal-seeming — and she imagined him sorting out jars of nuts and bolts, inventorying pipe and fittings, stacking kindling endlessly.

That night she slept alone again, and again she didn’t know where her new husband slept if he had slept at all, for when at seven-thirty she went out to the kitchen, even though it was Saturday and not a workday, once again the light was burning and his breakfast dishes were in the sink and his car was gone. Around nine he returned, with the newspaper and the week’s groceries, ale, and Canadian Club. He had begun his regular weekend routine. Dora, of course, did not know this yet, but by eleven, when she had watched him several times perform some menial or trivial task in the yard or house and then pull a pen and small black notebook from his shirt pocket and make a mark in the book, she realized that he was indeed performing a weekly ritual. That’s when it occurred to her that the man had no intention of attending his mother’s funeral. She could not say with confidence, however, that it was his intention, actually, not to go, for she also believed that he was unable to go, that forces beyond and stronger than any of his intentions were keeping him at home on this day, notebook and pen in hand, checking off his chores, one by one, as he did them.

She decided it was safe to tell him, simply and straightforwardly, that she would be going to the funeral. Whatever ritual he was going through, she knew that it did not include her, at present, in any way, and that she was free to attend the funeral or not. So, as he strolled whistling through the door with an armload of split wood for the kitchen woodbox, his face red and dry from the cold, she told him that she wanted to go to the funeral but had no way to get there.

“I’ll get you there,” he said cheerfully, clattering the wood into the box next to the large black stove. “What time’s the service?”

“One.”

“Well, you’d better hurry. I’ll drop you off on my way to Pittsfield,” he said, as if he were agreeing to drop her off at the library. “I forgot to stop at Maxfield’s this morning for some eightpenny nails and friction tape. By the time I get back from Maxfield’s, you ought to be ready for a ride home, so wait outside the church and I’ll pick you up as I come by,” he instructed her, and then he made another mark in his notebook and walked out to the barn.

Grateful, though somewhat perplexed, she quickly put on a dark gray, simply cut wool dress, hat and coat. By then it was a quarter to one, so she went out to the barn and presented herself. “I’m ready,” she announced.