Энн Тайлер - Searching for Caleb

Justine felt stabbed in the chest. “Dear Mama,” she wrote, “I miss you very much. I want to come home for a visit. Duncan says we will just as soon as we can, although of course goats are not something you can just walk off and leave. They have to be milked twice a day and watered, and Duncan has to stay pretty close by anyway because he has to put an ad in the paper and soon customers will be coming . . . ”

“Dear Ma,” Duncan said on a postcard. “High! We’re doing fine. Say hello to everybody. Sincerely, Duncan.”

The family’s ink was black, their envelopes cream. Nearly every morning a cream-colored accordion lay waiting in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. Once Duncan got there before Justine and he scooped the letters out of the box and flung them over his head. “Hoo!” he said, and tipped back his face like a child in a snowstorm while the envelopes tumbled all around him. Justine came running, and bent at the edge of the gravel to gather them up. “Oh, Duncan, I wish you wouldn’t do things like this,” she told him. “How will I know I’ve got them all?”

“What does it matter? Each one is just like the next.”

It was true. Still she read them closely, often stirring or starting to speak, while Duncan watched her face. Each envelope let out a little gust of Ivory soap, the smell of home. She could imagine the leafy shadows endlessly rearranging themselves outside her bedroom window, and her grandfather’s slow, fond smile when he met her at the start of a day. She missed her grandfather very much.

“If you like,” Duncan said, “I’ll take you this Sunday for dinner. Is that what you want?”

“Yes, it is,” she told him.

But somehow they didn’t go. Duncan became involved in cleaning the barn, or wiring the new electric fence. Or they simply overslept, waking too slowly with their legs tangled together and their blue eyes opening simultaneously to stare at each other across the pillow, and then the unmilked goats were bleating and there were always so many chores to do. “Maybe next Sunday,” Justine would write. When the new sheaf of envelopes arrived she felt chastened and sorry even before she had opened them. But when she took the letters to Duncan out in the barn he only laughed. Like a teacher with a pointer, he would poke a stalk of timothy at stray sentences here and there — reproaches, transparent braveries, phrases with double and triple and quadruple meanings. “ ‘Of course we’re sorry you didn’t make it but we understand perfectly, as I had already told your aunts that perhaps we shouldn’t expect you.’ Ha!” he said.

Justine’s face, then, would slowly ease, but she reclaimed the letters and stacked them carefully before she went back to the house.

Then one day a truck rattled up their driveway and a man climbed out, carrying a telephone on the palm of his hand. “Phone,” he said, as if Justine should lift the receiver to answer it. But he swung on by her and up the porch steps, with a beltful of tools clanking around his hips. Duncan met him in the doorway. “ We didn’t order that,” he said.

“Somebody did.”

“Not us.”

The man pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and shook it open. “Peck and Sons,” he said.

“That’s someone else.”

“Your name Duncan Peck?”

“Yes.”

“This phone is for you, then. Don’t complain. Bill goes to Peck and Sons. Wished I got presents like that.”

“If we had wanted a telephone we would have ordered it on our own,” Duncan said.

But Justine said, “Oh, Duncan, it’s a gift! We can’t hurt their feelings.”

Duncan studied her a minute. Then he said, “All right.”

Now the phone rang once, twice, three times a day even, and Justine would come running in from the fields or the barn to answer it. “Justine,” her mother said, “I am upstairs. I’m standing in the hall here looking into your room and your shelf of dolls along the wall, the Spanish lady with her real lace mantilla that your grandfather gave you in Philadelphia when you were only four, remember? She has the sweetest, saddest face.”

“Mama, I’m helping Duncan dehorn a goat.”

“Do you remember when Grandfather gave you the Spanish lady? You insisted on taking her to bed with you, though she wasn’t a cuddly kind of doll. Your daddy and I came into your room every night after you were asleep and put her up on the bureau again. Oh, you looked so innocent and peaceful! We would stand there a while just watching you. Your daddy didn’t have to travel so often then and it seemed we had so much more time together.”

“Oh, Mama,” Justine would say, “I wish I could be there with you. Don’t take on so, please don’t cry.”

Aunt Sarah called, with Aunt Laura May on the upstairs extension. “She’s started staying in bed, Justine, she never gets out of her bathrobe. She has these awful headaches. I called your daddy but I believe that man is possessed. He said he wouldn’t come, she should come stay in his house and of course that is just not possible, he only has a weekly cleaning lady. Of course she would need more than that, it’s all we can do to see to her wants even with Sulie helping out. We’re running our feet off.”

“We bring all her meals on a tray,” Aunt Laura May said.

“We’ve moved the television up to her bedroom.”

“The radio for daytime. Stella Dallas .”

Justine said, “We’ll come on Sunday.”

“Do my ears deceive me?”

“We’ll be there around noon,” said Justine. “But we can’t stay the night, you know, the goats are—”

“The goats, yes.”

“Goodbye till then.”

She went back out to the field. “Duncan,” she said, “I think we’d better go for dinner this Sunday.”

“You do, do you.”

“It’s been six weeks, you know. And they say that Mama is—”

“You don’t have to keep harping on it, we’ll go.”

But in bed that night, when he had just stretched out alongside her and taken her head in his hands, the phone rang again and he said, “Bulls-eye.”

“I’ll get it,” she said.

“Oh, your mother and her X-ray vision. She’s worked on this, she’s got it timed. She couldn’t call when you were just reading Woman’s Day , no—”

“Let me up, I’ll answer,” said Justine.

“No, don’t. We’ll ignore it.” But then he said, “How can we ignore a thing like that? Nine rings. Ten.”

“I’ll only be a minute.”

“Eleven,” Duncan said. He had laid one arm across her to hold her down but he kept his head raised and his eyes on the black shine of the telephone. “We’ll go out and sleep in the field,” he told her.

“The field , Duncan!”

“Where else? If we answer, she wins. If we lie here and listen she wins. Hear that? Four-letter rings. Come on, Justine.”

“Well, just let me get a blanket.”

“Here’s a blanket.”

“I’ll need a bathrobe.”

“What for?”

“Do you want your pillow?”

“ No I don’t want my pillow.”

“And insect repellent.”

“Oh, for—”

Then he was off the bed and out of the room. “Duncan?” she said. “Duncan, have you changed your mind?” But before she could follow him he was back, waving the huge iron clippers he used for trimming the goats’ hooves. Justine heard a single click. The phone gave a whimper and died.

“Oh, Duncan,” Justine said, but she was laughing when she lay back down.

All the next morning the telephone sat silent on the bureau with its comical stub of a tail sticking out. In the afternoon, when they were leaving to do some shopping in town, Duncan locked the front door so that no repairman could come while they were gone. “You know the family is going to let them hear about this,” he said. “They’ll be sending undercover men with their little bags of tools.” And sure enough, when they got back there was a card hanging from the doorknob. “What a pity, our telephone representative has been and gone,” he said. Still, Justine only laughed.