Kent Haruf - Benediction

The flowers he had brought her that afternoon were still there on the mirrored buffet. Their fragrance was in the room. She waited as he locked the door and then he turned to her and she kissed him, she was full of joy and happiness. Then he undressed her. The bed was cold and they clung to each other until they were warm and the sheets were warm.

The room had been rich once, beautiful, with wallpaper that had dark red roses aligned up and down, and with an elaborate brass light fixture in the ceiling and a tall mirror on the wall and a narrow door letting into the bathroom, you took a step up to enter, and inside were the claw-footed bathtub and the free-standing sink with the two porcelain faucet handles, and an oval mirror with tiny silver cracks around the edges.

She rose above him in the bed and kissed him and looked down into his face. He had a good face. And brown eyes, looking at her. Oh God, she said.

I know. Don’t think about it.

I’m not thinking. I just was going to say—

I know.

She reached under the sheet and found him and made the adjustment, shifting a little.

Afterward lying in the bed in the old beautiful room, feeling warm and happy, she said, Don’t go yet.

I have to. You know I do. I still have to drive home. It’ll be late as it is. And I can’t tell what the roads will be.

Stay here. Stay overnight. Please.

How can I?

Call her. Say you’re snowed in, you can’t leave. You got delayed at the meeting and didn’t get started when you thought you would.

The meeting was over this afternoon.

Make something up.

I can’t.

Of course you can. You do already. We both do.

I can’t tonight.

When will you? When is it going to be any different? Will it ever be?

Yes.

When?

I don’t know. I can’t say that.

Go on then. Leave if you’re going to. She turned away from him.

Don’t be like this.

You don’t know what it’s like, she said. You have no idea.

She lay in the bed and turned toward him again and watched him dressing in the dim room, in the winter light from the street coming in at the window, his long legs, his bare chest and back and arms before he covered them, dressing, and watched how he stood while he tucked in his shirt, and then he came across the room and sat on the bed and bent and kissed her and reached under the cover and touched her breast again.

Are you going to say anything?

No, she said.

He kissed her cheek and went out of the room and she got up quickly and wrapped herself in the bedcover and stood at the window and saw him far below picking his way across the street in the darkening car-packed snow and then she watched him walk down the block in the snow that was still falling and go around the corner out of sight to his car, to drive home on the icy roads to his wife and children in the town where he was principal in the high school.

She imagined his arrival at home, his wife’s worry and complaint, and his consoling her, joking a little, making his excuses and explanations, and she could see them then in the familiar pretty picture walking arm in arm, looking in at the sleeping children, and entering their own bedroom, lying in bed with her head resting on his shoulder and her hair spread out like a fan, and then she saw him kissing her and doing what he had just done with her, and she realized she was crying again and after a while she got up and went into the old tiled bathroom to rinse her face.

AFTER IT WAS announced at Annual Conference where they would be sent, Lyle drove his family the two and a half hours from Denver out onto the high plains to look at the town. Main Street with one traffic light blinking on and off at the corner of Second Street, the business section of three blocks, the old brick buildings with high false fronts, the post office with its faded flag, the houses on either side of Main Street, the streets on the west side named for trees, those to the east named for American cities, and Highway 34 intersecting Main and running out both directions to the flat country, the wheat fields and the corn and the native pastures, and beyond the highway the high school where John Wesley would be going, and far away the blue sandhills in the hazy distance.

After they had moved to Holt, John Wesley spent the first week up in his room at his computer writing long letters to his friends in Denver. Then on Sunday he was forced to attend the morning service since it was the entire family who made up the preacher’s presence in town and the church expected them all to attend. On the third Sunday he got a surprise.

There was a girl who attended church who was tall and thin and strange, dressed in black with bright red lipstick, and with very pale skin. She always sat in the back pew. She caught up to him after the Sunday service when he was walking away from the church.

Wait, she said. Are you trying to escape from me?

He stopped and turned toward her.

They told me about you. You’re going to be a sophomore in high school. It’s too bad you’re not still a freshman, I could initiate you. Well I can anyway.

She had her own car and they went out at night driving all over the town and out into the country on the gravel roads as far south as Highway 36 and as far north as Interstate 76, John Wesley in the seat beside her, the windows open, the cassette player playing her music, the two of them talking, and then they would pull off the road onto a farm track or an unused side road and she would move him into the backseat and unbutton him and teach him what she knew, and afterward sweaty and red-faced they would get back in the front to drive some more. The air would be coming in cool and fresh and the dust boiling up behind them on the county roads, with rabbits and coyotes and red foxes and raccoons all out at night on the road, and once suddenly the great white shape of a Charolais cow broadside in the headlights together with its pale calf, and occasionally they’d stop again for another time in the backseat. She was on birth-control pills. Are you stupid? she said. I thought you city boys knew something. I’m not going to get pregnant and fuck everything up. Don’t worry about it. Come on, preacher’s boy. Don’t you want to go again.

Then he’d return home. She’d drop him off in front of the parsonage and drive away and he’d walk up onto the porch and enter the dark quiet house. His father and his mother would be asleep in their bedroom upstairs, and he’d go back to the kitchen and make something to eat, and take the food up to his room, and enter the bathroom and lower his trousers and inspect himself and soothe his soreness with hand salve and return to his bedroom and turn on the computer and eat the food he’d brought upstairs and read his messages.

It went on for most of a month this way. He and this older girl, Genevieve Larsen, out in the country in the dark in Holt County driving and stopping and climbing into the backseat. And then starting the car again and turning back out onto the gravel roads and always the dust swirling and rising up behind them.

You should have known me in Denver, he said. It was different in Denver. I had friends there. I was known there.

What’d you do? Sit around and play with your computer?

No. We had fun. It was interesting.

Doing what?

It was different. There’s so much to do. We went out at night and talked and saw people. Ate in the cafés. We laughed and laughed. We hung out at the malls.

We’re out at night. We’re talking. Don’t you like this?

Yes. Of course.

You didn’t have somebody like me there, did you?

No.

Well.

I don’t know, it was just different there. That’s all I’m saying. You’d have liked it.