Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

He was growing smaller day by day, Elizabeth thought. He reminded her of a fear she used to have: that once grown, free to do what she chose, she might dwindle back into childhood again. Life might be a triangle, with adulthood as its apex; or worse yet, a cycle of seasons, with childhood recurring over and over like that cold rainy period in February. Mr. Cunningham’s hands were as small and curled as a four-year-old’s. His formless smile, directed at the ceiling, had no more purpose than a baby’s. He was in bed nearly all the time now. He lay propped on his back exactly as she had placed him, his arms resting passively at his sides. “I do like westerns,” he said. His S’s whistled; his teeth were gnashed helplessly in a glass on his nightstand.

“Chapter one, then,” Elizabeth said.

“Couldn’t you just tell it to me?”

“It’s better if we read it.”

“I’m not up to that.”

She flattened the book open and frowned at him, considering. They were doing battle together against old age, which he saw as a distinct individual out to get him. They read books or played checkers, pinning his thoughts to the present moment, hoping to dig a groove too deep for his mind to escape from. His attention span grew shorter every day, but Elizabeth pretended not to notice. “Isn’t it depressing?” people asked when they heard of her job. They were thinking of physical details — the toothlessness, the constant, faltering trips to the bathroom. But all that depressed Elizabeth was that he knew what he was coming to. He could feel the skipped rhythms of his brain. He raged over memory lapses, even the small ones other people might take for granted. “The man who built this house was named Beacham,” he would say. “Joe Beacham. Was it Joe? Was it John? Oh, a common name, I have it right here. Was it John? Don’t help me. What’s the matter with me? What’s happening here?” When he awoke in a wet bed, he suffered silent, fierce embarrassment and turned his face to the wall while she changed his sheets. He viewed his body as an acquaintance who had gone over to the enemy. Why had she supposed that people’s interiors aged with the rest of them? She had often wished, when things went wrong, that she were old and wise and settled, preferably in some nice nursing home. Well, not any longer. She sighed and creased the book’s binding with her fingernail.

“We can read tomorrow,” Mr. Cunningham said. “Today, just sum things up.”

“If that’s what you want,” said Elizabeth.

She turned to the first page and scanned it. “It seems to be about someone named Bartlett. He starts out getting chased by a posse. He’s riding through this gulch.”

“What’s he wanted for?” Mr. Cunningham asked.

“Well, let’s see. They say, ‘In the course of his career as a gunman.…’ Probably one of those guys that hires out. Now he’s coming to a shanty, there’s a woman hanging out the wash. Her hair is the color of a sunset.”

“Red, they mean,” Mr. Cunningham said dreamily.

“Who knows? Maybe purple.” Elizabeth snorted, and then caught herself. All these westerns were getting on her nerves. “He asks her for a dipper of water from the well. Then when the posse comes up she hides him away, she tells them she hasn’t seen a soul. She brings him beef stew and a canteen, and he sits there eating and admiring her.”

“This talk about water is making me thirsty,” Mr. Cunningham said.

She laid the book on its face and poured him water from an earthenware pitcher. “Can you sit up?” she asked him. “I just don’t know.”

She helped him, raising his head in the crook of her arm while he took small, noisy gulps. His head was strangely light, like a gourd that was drying out. When he had finished he slid down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Even that much movement had been an effort for him. Resettling himself among the sheets, he gasped out the beginnings of defeated protests. “I can’t get—” “It don’t seem—” Elizabeth smoothed her denim skirt and sat back down. She was conscious of the easy way her joints bent and the straightness of her back fitting into the chair. Wouldn’t he think of it as a mockery — even such a simple act as her sitting down in a Boston rocker? But it didn’t seem to occur to him. He stared at the ceiling, flicking his eyes rapidly across it like a man checking faces in a crowd. Sometimes it seemed to her there was a crowd, packing the room until she felt out of place — dead people, living people, long ago stages of living people, all gathered at once into a single moment. She waited for him to call out some name she had never heard of, but he was still with her. “Go on,” he told her. “Get to the good part.”

“Okay.” She turned pages, several at a time. “He’s boarding with this woman, taking care of her livestock and such. He goes into town for provisions. Now he’s—” she skimmed the paragraphs. “He’s in the saloon, getting challenged by a tough guy.”

“What about?”

“They don’t make it clear.”

“People in those days were so cranky,” Mr. Cunningham said.

“They have this fistfight.” “Where, out in the street?” “Right in the saloon.”

“Oh, good.”

“Bottles smashing,” said Elizabeth. “Mirrors breaking. Chairs going through the windows.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, in the end he knocks the other guy out,” Elizabeth said. “Then he has about a page and a half of bad mood, wondering why people will never allow him to go straight and lead a peaceful life. Let’s see. But they don’t know he’s thinking that, they offer him a sheriff’s badge.”

“I don’t want the responsibility,” said Mr. Cunningham.

Elizabeth glanced over at him and turned another page. “He has to be argued into it, there’s quite a stretch of arguing. Then—”

“I couldn’t be expected to take on that kind of burden,” Mr. Cunningham said.

“Well, it would be quite a job. But this is only a story. We’re reading a story now.”

“Oh yes. I knew that.”

“Where was I? They want him to be sheriff.”

“It’s too much. It’s too much. It’s too much.”

“I’ll just lower the shades,” said Elizabeth. She set the book down and went over to the window. Mr. Cunningham rolled his head from side to side. “It’s time to sleep,” Elizabeth told him.

“I’m too little.”

Elizabeth stayed at the window, looking down into the front yard. Heat waves shimmered up from the pavement, and the grass had an ashy, flat, washed-out look. She was glad to be here in the dimness. She pulled the paper shade, darkening the room even more, and then looked back at Mr. Cunningham. His eyes were blinking shut. He kept his face set toward her. In the night, Mrs. Stimson said, he sometimes woke and called her name—“Elizabeth? Where’d you get to?”—turning her into another ghost, one more among the crowd whose old-fashioned faces and summer dresses filled this room. “He just dotes on you,” Mrs. Stimson said, and Elizabeth had smiled, but underneath she was worried: Wasn’t he sinking awfully fast? Just since she had come here? Maybe, having found her to lean on, he had stopped making an effort. Maybe she was the worst thing in the world for him. When she read aloud so patiently, and pulled his mind back to the checkers, and fought so hard against his invisible, grinning, white-haired enemy in the corner, it was all because of that worry. She was fighting for herself as well — for her picture of herself as someone who was being of use, and who would never cause an old man harm.

She watched him drop off like this a dozen times a day, maybe more. He swam in again and out again. Mrs. Stimson would say, “Oh, bless his heart, he’s sound asleep,” but there was nothing sound about that sleep. He seemed to have gone somewhere else, but always with a backward glance; returning, he glanced backward too, and mentioned recent experiences that he had never had.