Nathan Hill - The Nix

The answer being, in fact, Yes.

On her desk back home is a letter from Circle — so official-looking with its logo and heavy paper — informing her of her scholarship. The first girl from her high school to win a college scholarship. The first girl ever. How could she not feel better than everyone else? Being better than everyone else was the whole point !

Faye knows it is wrong to think this, for these thoughts are not humble; they are arrogant and vain and choked with pride, that most hazy of sins. Everyone proud of heart is an abomination, the pastor said one Sunday, and Faye in the pew nearly crying because she did not know how to be good. It seemed so hard to be good, and yet the punishments were so vast. “If you’re a sinner,” the pastor said, “not only will you be punished but your kids will be punished, and their kids will be punished, to the third and fourth generation.”

She hopes the pastor doesn’t find out she visited Henry without permission.

Or that she was so sneaky about it. That she drove without headlights while approaching his family’s farm. That she parked the car at a distance and walked the rest of the way. That she crouched on the gravel road, let her eyes adjust to the dark, watched for the dogs, spied on the house. That there was some sly maneuver to get his attention without stirring his parents: tossing pebbles at his window. Teenagers have their ways.

The town knows about them, of course. The town knows about everyone. And they approve. They wink at Faye and ask her questions about weddings. “Won’t be long now,” they say. It seems obvious they would prefer she marry than go to college.

Henry is kind, quiet, well-mannered. His family’s farm is large and well-run, respectable. A good Lutheran, a hard worker, his body is built like cement. She feels his muscles tense when she touches him, that nervous boy voltage that gathers up and breaks him. She doesn’t love him, or rather she doesn’t know if she loves him, or maybe she loves him but she’s not in love with him. She hates these distinctions, these tiny matters of vocabulary that, unfortunately, matter so much. “Let’s go for a walk,” Henry says. His farm is bordered on one side by the nitrogen plant, on the other by the Mississippi River. They walk in that direction, to the riverbank. He does not seem surprised to see her. He takes her hand.

“Have you been watching the news?” he says.

“Yes.”

His hand is rough and calloused, especially on the palm, above each knuckle, where Henry’s body connects with the various implements important to farm labor: shovel, spade, hoe, broom, the long and finicky stick shift of the John Deere tractor. Even a baseball bat would cause such marks, if it were used as he uses it, to kill the abundant sparrows that nest in the corn crib. It’s too small in there for buckshot, he explained to her once. It could ricochet. You could lose an eye. So you have to go in with a baseball bat and take the birds out of the air. She asked him never to tell that story again.

“Are you still going to Chicago?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says.

The ground grows spongier the closer they are to the river. She can hear the whoosh of each small wave. Behind them the lighthouse burns a bright azure blue, like a splinter of daytime that got stuck here through the night.

“I don’t want you to go,” Henry says.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

When they’re holding hands, he’ll often rub his fingers on the soft skin between her thumb and index finger, or on the even softer skin of her wrist. Faye wonders if he does it because otherwise he can’t feel anything. Not beneath so many layers of thick, dead skin. It’s the friction that tells him his fingers are where he thinks they are, and Faye worries what will happen when he begins reaching for other things, for new things. She’s waiting for it — it’s inescapable — waiting for him to make a move beneath her clothes. Will they hurt, those hard, impenetrable hands of his?

“If you go to Chicago,” Henry says, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“I won’t,” he says, and he squeezes her hand hard and stops walking and turns to her, theatrically — seriously and profoundly — like there’s something of great weight he must tell her. Henry always has had a bit of the melodramatic in him. Teenage boys are like that sometimes, the emotions they feel blown so tremendously out of proportion.

“Faye,” he says, “I’ve made a decision.”

“Okay.”

“I have decided”—and here he pauses, makes sure she’s listening with appropriate attentiveness, feels assured that she is and so continues—“if you go to Chicago, I’m joining the army.”

And here she laughs — a little bark she tries to hold back but cannot.

“I’m serious!” he says.

“Henry, please.”

“I’ve decided.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“The army is honorable,” he says. “That’s an honorable thing.”

“But why on earth would you do that?”

“I’ll be lonely if I don’t. It’s the only way I could forget you.”

“Forget me? Henry, it’s college. I’m not dying. I’ll come back.”

“You’ll be so far away.”

“You could visit.”

“And you’ll meet other boys.”

“Other boys. Is that what this is about?”

“If you go to Chicago, I’m joining the army.”

“But I don’t want you to join the army.”

“And I don’t want you to go to Chicago.” He crosses his arms. “My mind is made up.”

“They could send you to Vietnam.”

“Yeah.”

“Henry, you could die.”

“If I did, I guess it’d be your fault.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Stay here and be with me,” he says.

“That is not fair.”

“Stay here where it’s safe.”

She feels the injustice of this, and she’s angry about it, but she also feels, strangely, relief. The riots, the looting, all the horrible things on television tonight, and her mother, and the town: If she stays here with Henry, they need no longer terrorize her. Things would be so much easier if she stayed, so much cleaner.

Why did she come here? She regrets it now. She regrets summoning Henry under the pale blue flame of the lighthouse. She hasn’t told him, but there’s another reason she calls that thing a lighthouse. It’s because a lighthouse is two-faced, and this is how she feels each time she visits. A lighthouse is both an invitation and a warning. A lighthouse says Welcome home. But next to that, right after that, it also says Danger.

IT’S A SATURDAY NIGHT late in April 1968—the night of Faye’s senior prom. Henry picks her up at six o’clock with a rose and a corsage. His hands fumble as he pins the flowers to her gown. He pulls on the fabric near her chest as if he were pantomiming, right there before her parents, all the awkward gestures of teenage groping. Yet her mother takes photographs, says Smile. And Faye guesses this corsage business was invented by parents — very protective parents wanting to ensure that their daughters’ suitors were not too familiar with the garments and breasts of women. Clumsiness is probably the best thing here — it signals little danger of bastard children. And Henry is a man inept with flowers. He cannot get the corsage pinned correctly. He grazes the needle across her skin and leaves a thin red line on her breastbone. It reminds her of the horizontal bar in the letter A.

“It’s my scarlet letter!” she says, laughing.

“What?” Henry says.