Sarah Jane Read online

  For days a neighbor had witnessed no activity, no coming or going, no sequence of lights, drapes or blinds, decidedly uncommon as Mr. Patch had always been regular as clockwork. When she went over to check on him (which is what neighbors do, right?) the mailbox was full, a FedEx package wedged between screen and front door. No answer when she rang the bell.

  Nor was there any response when I rang, knocked, and called out, “Sheriff’s Office.” I tried the door. Locked, but the frame was old wood that gave when pushed against hard. The lock tore through. From deeper within came music, lightly festive, almost bubbly, strings and a horn or two.

  I went toward the music, through the front room, down a hall hung with blue-green seascapes and sepia photos of people in clothing and hair styles from the forties, to the bathroom.

  What struck me upon entry was the stillness, the repose. The peacefulness of it all. Clawfoot tub full to within inches of the top, water long gone cold, radio on a shelf to the side by neatly stacked towels and washcloths. The open Pabst Blue Ribbon beer on the shelf had not been drunk from. The tub’s ancient enamel was chipped away on the rim, paint of much the same color peeling from the wall behind. Mr. Patch leaning back as though he’d only fallen asleep there.

  Something about the wash of light from the window above and to the left of the tub, the spill of shadow, stirred memories of . . . what? Took me a moment to pull it up: Intro to Art History, elements of classical painting. Mannerist structure, the distribution of light and shadow across the canvas, hand pointing up to the heavens, hand pointing down to earth—that sort of thing. How the central figure (as Dr. Warren in baggy khakis and bright Hawaiian shirt explained) becomes at once individual man and manifestation of some larger meaning.

  Not that I could find some larger meaning here, or any meaning at all.

  Certain images from our life stay with us, the lopsided crane we built from an erector set when we were ten, the dried husk of a pet chameleon, scenes from Rashomon or Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman, and we don’t know why. Do these, like dreams, derive from random firings of synapses? Or is there something about them freighted with meaning—veiled messages from universes within ourselves?

  Often at night, after this, I’d put on baroque music. Horns and strings, Telemann maybe, or Steinmetz. Didn’t matter. It’s the pulse I was looking for, the way the music’s so alive, so continuous.

  That first sight of the room remains with me today, indelible. I imagine Mr. Patch preparing his bath, choosing his music, opening the beer. Then leaning back and, in absolute repose, in absolute peace, dying. As though the world in that moment, for that moment, held its breath.

  Very few lives end in such grace.

  Nine months in the saddle, almost ten, when I caught the call, by which time I’d been through my fair share of bar fights, domestic disturbances, runaway kids—the standard small-town B-list. Plus a handful of assaults, a shotgun suicide, a fatal hunting accident. But this was one that stayed with me.

  When I began asking about, nobody knew much of Mr. Patch’s life. He’d shown up maybe thirty years ago, paid cash for the home he died in. Kept to himself, no sign of family or friends, near as anyone could recall. One name did come up: Riley or Raleigh Robinson, living as a squatter in the ruins of an old mansion in what was once rich farmland between Farr and Johnstown. With help from an ageless attendant at the filling station where I stopped for a coke so cold there was ice in its throat, and from a kid I came across walking abandoned railroad tracks, I found my way.

  In its glory days the place could have put up three families and they’d have no need to mingle. Now walls, floors and doorframes skewed off at cockeyed angles every which way and the skirt of the wraparound porch sagged around the home’s ankles, dragging ground. The first couple times I went out there, stood on the porch and knocked, nothing came of it, though I could hear movement inside. No way one could walk those wood floors silently. Shift weight and parts of the house shift with you. Third time, the door opened. I could smell frying meat inside. Not very good meat.

  His skin was mottled, patches of it black, others milk-chocolate, the palms of his hands pink-white and deeply creased. Both hands shook.

  “You just don’t give up, do you, Miss?”

  “Not much anymore, no sir, I don’t.”

  “Whatever you’re looking for ain’t here.”

  “It’s about Willis Patch.”

  “He ain’t here either.”

  “I came to tell you he died.”

  No pause. “The hell you did.” Nothing showed on his face or in his eyes. “Ain’t nobody drives all the way out here, on what precious little’s left of them damn roads, without she wants something. And she sure don’t do that three times. But you might as well come on inside.”

  Motioning me to a saddlebroke couch of a shade of green not seen in nature, he went out to shut off the stove then sank into a chair so low that his knees stuck up level with his head. I told him who I was, about the call and my breaking into Mr. Patch’s home. When I was done we sat there, spine and joints of the house creaking around us.

  “Peaceful, you say.” He shifted in the chair. One front leg of it was an inch shorter than the others. “That’s good. Man survives almost ninety years, he’s deserving of some peace.”

  “He didn’t look to be close to that old.”

  “Willis was from hardy stock, tough people made tougher by the lives they lived.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “This in regard to tidying up your paperwork?”

  “No sir.” I tried to explain how Mr. Patch’s death had made me feel. Sad. Calm. How little I understood of other lives. My sense of loss. I didn’t do a very good job with my explanation. I haven’t done much better since. Words just won’t hold it all. But whatever I said, it prompted Raleigh or Riley (he’d said his name, I still couldn’t be sure) to go on.

  “Willis, he was a private man. Figured his business was his, just like others’ business should stay theirs. Guess that don’t matter so much now.”

  Willis Patch’s father, he told me, hailed from St. Louis. He’d been a doctor there, Niggertown they called it back then, and did his best to take care of all he could. Went from house to house when need be, ran a clinic out of one-half of the family’s living room. People used to say Dr. Patch had delivered half Niggertown’s babies, then delivered their babies. There was talk of the riots, too—people remembered—with over a hundred injured put up in the basement at Holy Methodist, and Dr. Patch the only doctor to see after them.

  Man died, maybe eighty years old, still going about his business. Dropped dead in the street late one night on his way to the colored hospital they had by then. And that’s when they found out he hadn’t been a doctor at all. Never had a license, never had one blessed day of schooling. Wife said he told her when he was just coming up he looked around and saw how bad the community needed doctors, so he decided right then and there to make one of himself. From books, he said. Read everything in the library, everything he could find, till he was half blind. Learned everything he knew from reading those books.

  Which must have been in his blood, cause Willis was the same way. Whatever you brought up, whatever you asked about, Willis knew of it, or if he didn’t he soon would. By his mid-twenties he was living in D.C. When he found out in Virginia you didn’t have to go to law school to be admitted to the bar, he talked a local lawyer into letting him read law with him for a year, that’s what they call it, reading law. Studied his black ass off, he used to say, then took the big test.

  He lawyered a long time, out of an office above a general store first, then out of one tucked away at the back of a beauty shop in another town a little closer, he said, to civil-eye-zation. Helped out a lot of folks. You had to wonder like I did how he scratched out any living at all for himself.

  Back then’s when we met up. Some woman’
s purse got snatched out front of the Safeway. Me being black and easy to find, they came and got me. I was cooking at Sally Ray’s Homestyle Café, sleeping in the storeroom. Still don’t know how he did it, but Willis got me right up before a judge. Hour later, they turned me loose. Ever so often after that, Willis’d come find me to see how I was doing.

  Me, I never had much of anything by way of ambition, always been good with who and where I was, but Willis, he might have had too much of it. Like he was carrying ’round this load—all this and that that needed doing, and him coming to see how little of it gets done. One night he stopped in at the tire store where I was working to say good-bye. He’d brought sodas and sandwich fixings. The sack had smears on the side where grease from the meats soaked through. We sat out back eating. Plenty of grease back there too. You think you’ve got hold of it, he said, car’s running smooth, not much noise under the hood, lights are good out there ahead of you. But the damn thing keeps breaking down. A mile outside town, a hundred, don’t matter, it just keeps breaking down.

  Lot of water under the bridge after that, can’t begin to tell you how surprised I was to run into old Willis again. Told him now I had me a house too, and when he saw it he said my house like to had more potential than any he’d ever seen.

  Years dragged by, way they will. We’d meet up time to time. Never asked him why it was he came to living up here, same as he never asked me. But Willis’d say things, you know. Like how some people seem put together different. Him living the way he did, keeping to himself, that had to do with something inside him he’d come to know. Told me one night he set out to change things but instead, things had changed him. I figure something must of happened, something to do with the law, but Willis never spoke on it.

  “I appreciate this, Mr. Robinson,” I said, standing.

  “Don’t know what you looked to find here, young lady.”

  Nor did I. The shorter chair leg tapped at the floor as my host also stood.

  Mr. Robinson’s stories rode home with me in the car. I made it back for my shift, got home around midnight, then lay awake till dawn.

  It turned into one of those nights when the temperature dropped five or six degrees and refused to budge further, so humid that lights went blurry and sheets got soaked. After a while I pulled mine off and put on clean ones; within the hour the new ones were as soggy as the old. A storm brewed far off—rumbles of thunder, flares of lightning at the edge of my vision—but it never came closer.

  7.

  All stories are ghost stories, about things lost, people, memories, home, passion, youth, about things struggling to be seen, to be accepted, by the living.

  One morning I woke staring at the faded bamboo shoots on the wallpaper, went out to the kitchen to look for coffee, and found that I was acting sheriff.

  By this time I’d moved to a small house outside town. Like Mr. Robinson’s it had potential. Three rooms the size of flatbed trailers, fixtures replaced so carelessly that insects came and went around them as they wished, yawning gaps between doors and frames, kitchen cabinets hung such that one walked softly nearby. I didn’t own a TV or radio, stayed away from the Internet, hadn’t seen a newspaper in years. Now and again I’d overhear people talking about current events—bad guys and good guys implicit in what they were saying—and wonder anew that people could live in such uncomplicated worlds.

  The beeper went as I was dumping coffee into the French press. KC, who had recently graduated from the local high school where he was star football player and who should have been off shift, answered when I called in.

  “Sarah? It’s about Cal.”

  Which could mean many things, but my mind filled in the blank with the worst.

  “Ceci couldn’t get him on the phone last night. This morning she went over there.”

  His daughter, one of those women who looked like a teenager well into her thirties, which she was, worked three towns over at some charity for kids, trolling the well-to-do for contributions. Well-to-do being distinctly relative hereabouts.

  “He’s missing,” KC said.

  No way missing sounded good, but it was on the list below, say, getting shot dead during a routine traffic stop. “Out of here last night at six, six-thirty, Bruno says. Never showed at The Elite.” Where he had dinner, the daily special, something like 300 days out of 365.

  “I’ll be right in.”

  Clad and shod in record time, I’d backed out of the drive before realizing I had failed to pick up my Glock and was wearing two different boots, so I left the motor running and went back. The phone was ringing as I relocked the door but I let it go. I carried a cell as backup but as often as not forgot to turn it on. That’s what I claimed, anyway. So everybody used the landline.

  The drive into town was quietly reassuring. Bobbie Ferguson, feet barely able to reach the pedals, waved from the vintage Schwinn that had belonged to her granddad. The ancient tree by the town square, given up for dead most every year before it pushed out delinquent sprigs of green, was filling with leaves. Farr had limped from rural to urban long after much of the rest of the country, carrying history on its back with its brick and clapboard homes, narrow streets and town square. Years before, the town hall had been taken over by a Lutheran church. The gazebo in the square housed generations of feral cats.

  KC came out the back as I pulled into the parking lot. Opened the passenger door and got in.

  “Judge Polick says consider yourself sworn in.”

  “I’ve already been sworn in.”

  “As acting sheriff.”

  “I’ve been on the job a year, KC.”

  “Don’t matter.” He pointed ahead. “Left at Cypress.”

  KC’s directions took us north to an imposing home that, plantation-like, stood on a hill as though southwest winds might have carried spores from it to spawn the town.

  “This is where Cal lived?”

  “So I’m told,” KC said.

  Ceci had given him a key and, crossing a covered porch that must once have held older folk seated on swings and gliders swapping stories as they watched youngsters play, we entered. The porch floor’s hardwood tongue and groove continued into the entryway.

  “Ceci says turn left off the hall.”

  And so we did, into what had no doubt been a dining room. The rest of the house, we soon found, was closed off.

  “You’ve never been here before?” KC asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Doesn’t look much like anyone has,” he said.

  A narrow bed, impeccably made, stood against heavy oak sliding doors. The doors were latched, their recessed handles, presumably the hidden clockwork as well, heavy brass. By one casement window a formica-topped table held a vertical file with half a dozen slots, and a letter tray. Between tray and file, flanked by a coffee mug bearing pens, scissors and stapler, Cal’s phone and beeper charger were aligned. Gauzy curtains at each tall window.

  “Place looks like a board game,” KC said.

  He was right. Table and bed holding the room in place, loveseat and Morris chair at complementary angles near its center, shoes squarely beneath the chair. More at work here than simple orderliness: move a single piece, the whole tangible world could tilt off plumb.

  KC went to look through the house while I poked around there in the cockpit. A radio on the end table by the Morris chair played a local oldies station when clicked on. The chair’s cushion was lumpy and faded to purple from who knows what original color. The battered loafers under the chair had been recommissioned as house slippers, heels permanently mashed in.

  I shuffled through the folders. Bills paid early in batches, regular deposits to a savings account. Polaroids and photos of Ceci as a child, at school age, as gowned college grad. Medical records for the VA, private physicians, lab work, pharmacies. Tax forms. Sixteen personal letters, none of them over two brief paragraphs. Birt
h certificate, marriage license, Social Security card, Living Will.

  At one point KC came back to tell me there was a boxed set of Story of Civilization in there, eleven books. I was surprised he knew what they were. “And a whole set of Encyclopedia Brittanica, when’s the last time you saw one of those?”

  “He had a kid, remember?” I said. “That’s what people did.”

  On the drive back to town, I got a full report of the house’s contents. Long-outdated food on kitchen shelves, unplugged refrigerator, clothing still in bags from the drycleaner, Ceci’s room just as it must have been when she lived there as a teen, one toilet out of three, in the utility room by the kitchen, that remained functional, nest of wasps inside a broken window.

  “Man lived in that one room, didn’t he? With a whole house right there.”

  “Looks like,” I said.

  “Why would he do that, Sarah?”

  I shook my head. Why people do most things is a mystery. Trying to keep it simple, maybe. Keep it on the surface. What you see is what’s there.

  “Will he come back?”

  “We don’t know that he’s gone.”

  We didn’t know jack.

  How was it that the Cal we spent our days with and the Cal who lived in that room were the same person? And where were both of them, besides missing? I’d spent time myself doing my best to stay close to the wall, avoid taking on weight. Slipping away, keeping on the move. Private lives, public lives. We all have them. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life, any examined life at all, is for damn sure going to surprise, confound and disturb you. Still, here I am, writing this all down, just as I did in the spiral-bound notebook when I was seven.