Adam Haslett - Union Atlantic

He had just handed the prince an outline of the arrangement he envisioned and that he would soon lay out for the men gathered at the far end of the hall, when he heard the phone ringing on Helen’s desk. A moment later, she knocked on the door.

All color had left her face. “You have to take this,” she said. “It’s about Charlotte.”

You been misled , Wilkie’s stentorian voice proclaimed. You been had. You been took. And now you’re trapped. You’re double-trapped. You’re triple-trapped. And what are you gonna do? You gonna sit-in? You gonna picket? You gonna march on Washington? Or are you gonna stand up and make some justice happen?

Light from beneath the shade illuminated his dull black coat; it was morning and he was hungry.

For years, the two of them had slept in the living room. But no longer. They did as they pleased now, climbing on furniture, the bed even, waking her at all hours, there whenever she opened her eyes.

See it’s like when you go to the dentist and the man is going to take your tooth. You’re gonna fight him when he starts pullin’. So they squirt some stuff in your jaw called Novocain to make you think they’re not doing anything to you. So you sit there, and ’cause you got all that Novocain in your jaw you suffer peacefully. Blood running all down your jaw and you don’t know what’s happening. ’Cause someone has taught you to suffer peacefully, law-abidingly — their rules, their game — and you’re surprised they win every time? Is your mind that weak, that soft? What you need is a do-it-yourself philosophy, a do-it-right-now philosophy, an it’s-already-too-late philosophy .

He approached the bed and as he stretched his jaw open Charlotte could see down the minister’s pink gullet.

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue .

“Quiet,” she pled. “There’s no need to convince me.”

For days she’d meant to get to the store to buy herself and the dogs some food, but having no appetite herself she’d forgotten, there being no room left in her mind anymore, it seemed, for anything but her single purpose.

Stepping out of bed, she crossed the room, the dogs following her to the closet. A dress didn’t seem appropriate for this day. Something more practical was in order. She chose a pair of gardening corduroys and a pullover she’d patched at the elbows.

Sam started in where he’d left off the night before, shaking his head with that self-satisfied disappointment of his. I see that the devils are swarming about you this morning, like the Frogs of Egypt, here in the most retired of your chambers. And yet, like the sinner you are, you welcome them .

Slave owner! Wilkie shouted. White devil! Get your filthy paws off the woman’s conscience. She’s seeing at last that it’s time for action. Time to swing up on some justice .

The Blood of the Soul of this poor Negro here lies upon you , Sam said, not deigning to speak directly to his dark companion, and the guilt of his Barbarous Impieties, and superstitions, and his neglect of God, if you are willing to have nothing done toward the salvation of his soul. Despite what you think, to convert one Soul unto God is more than to pour out Ten Thousand Talents into the Baskets of the Poor .

You listen to me, you cracker spook , Wilkie said, I’m not going to be taken in by your love-thy-servant nonsense. If a man speaks the language of brute force, you can’t come to him with peace. Why good night, he’ll break you in two, as he has been doing all along. You have to learn how to speak his language and then he’ll get the point. Then there’ll be some dialogue. There’ll be some communication. There’ll be some understanding .

Oh, who can tell , Sam called out, his indignation rising, but that this Poor Creature may belong to the Election of God! Who can tell, but that God may have sent this Poor Creature into your hands, Charlotte, that so One of the Elect may by your means be Called and by your Instruction be made Wise unto Salvation! The Blackest Instances of Blindness and Baseness are admirable Candidates of Eternal Blessedness. Though it be caviled, by some, that it is questionable Whether the Negroes have Rational Souls, or no, let that Brutish insinuation be never Whispered any more. They are men not beasts. Withhold knowledge of the Almighty from them and they will be destroyed .

At her heels they raged, traipsing after her down the hallway, down the back stairs, and into the kitchen, to the window above the sink full now of dishes.

Over the grass a morning mist hung. Its tendrils stretched under the maples and down the hill. Ten minutes or more she stood there waiting, until at last she saw Fanning come out of his front door, dressed not in a suit today, as he usually was, but in jeans and a sweatshirt. She watched with relief as he got in his car and drove up to the road. She was not, after all, in the business of killing.

Yesterday, after saying her goodbyes to Henry, she had seen in her mind’s eye the mansion burning, and felt, in anticipation, its heat on her skin, the heat she remembered from the bonfires they used to have in the back field when they came up for Thanksgiving and dragged the fallen branches out of the woods and burned all the raked leaves, only how much greater would the heat be when it was an entire house consumed, wood and nails and glass and a thousand substances besides? Again now, she saw the fire, and then the charred frame and then that, too, crumbling, and from the blackened earth saplings rising, drinking sun and rain, thickening in nature’s time to the testaments of endurance that trees became, shading again the river and the trout, the cardinals and the blue jays and the orange-winged butterflies flitting through a summer dusk, when she and Henry had played by the riverbank before being packed in the car and driven back to Rye, only years later to discover, at night in her dorm room, Milton’s pentameter describing what the two of them had lost: … whereat

In either hand the hastning Angel caught

Our lingering Parents, and to th’ Eastern Gate

Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast

To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer’d .

She let the tap water run until it chilled the bones of her fingers and then she filled a glass for herself and the dogs’ bowls. They lapped them quickly dry and were back at her side in no time.

They say overcome your enemies with your capacity to love. What kind of an idea is that? Wilkie asked. He’s not going to be overcome by your love. I’ve never called on anybody to be violent without a cause .

There is a court somewhere kept, where your pride shall be judged , Sam warned. And it is not here in the False Church of this earth .

“I have not for one day believed in your God.”

No, sure. And so in Great Folly you shall one day wander down to the Congregation of the Dead .

She took a box of matches from the ledge of the stove and beneath the sink found a canvas bag.

Sam and Wilkie followed her into the breezeway.

To concentrate just once more, she thought. That’s all that it would take. And indeed, as she stepped down the ramp onto the floor of the barn, she began to feel as she’d imagined she would, reading those stories in the papers over the years of the environmentalists and the anti — free traders who broke the law in the name of some greater justice, the anticipation of the act clarifying experience, rescuing it from the prison of language, the inward purpose blessing the otherwise desultory with meaning. And yet, for that very reason, she’d always considered such extremism adolescent. Too simple. Willful in its ignorance of the world’s complexity. And so deadly earnest. And yet how judgmental she had been. What, after all, was wrong with earnestness? Weren’t Fanning and his kind earnest? Weren’t all the polluters earnest, the physical and the cultural? And did anyone ever impugn or mock them for it? No one ever thought to. Avarice was never shackled by a concern for authenticity. It didn’t care about image or interpretation.