He put the book back on the display and went to find the salesclerk to ask about a book on gardening. “I might have just the thing, we just got this in,” and the girl—who was not a girl, really, except they all seemed like girls to Tommy these days—brought him a book with hyacinths on the cover, and he said, “Oh, that’s perfect.” The girl asked if he wanted it wrapped, and he said Yes, that would be great, and he watched while she spread the silver paper around it, with her fingernails that were painted blue, and with her tongue sticking slightly out, between her teeth, as she concentrated; she put the Scotch tape on, then gave him a big smile when it was done. “That’s perfect,” he repeated, and she said, “You have a nice day now,” and he told her the same. He left the store and walked across the street in the bright sunshine; he would tell Shirley about Lucy’s book; she had loved Lucy because he had. Then he started the car and pulled out of the parking space, started back down the road toward home.
The Johnson boy came to Tommy’s mind, how he couldn’t get off drugs, and then Tommy thought of Marilyn Macauley and her husband, Charlie, and then his mind went to his older brother, who had died a few years back, and he thought how his brother—who had been in World War II, who had been at the camps when they were being emptied—he thought how his brother had returned from the war a different man; his marriage ended, his children disliked him. Not long before his brother died, he told Tommy about what he had seen in the camps, and how he and the others had the job of taking the townspeople through them. They had somehow taken a group of women from the town through the camps to show them what had been right there, and Tommy’s brother said that although some of the women wept, some of them put their chins up, and looked angry, as if they refused to be made to feel bad. This image had always stayed with Tommy, and he wondered why it came to him now. He unrolled the window all the way down. It seemed the older he grew—and he had grown old—the more he understood that he could not understand this confusing contest between good and evil, and that maybe people were not meant to understand things here on earth.
But as he approached the sign that declared SEWING AND ALTERATIONS, he slowed his car and turned down the long road that led to the Barton house. Tommy had made a practice of checking in on Pete Barton, who of course was not a kid now but an older man, ever since Ken—Pete’s father—had died. Pete had stayed living in the house alone, and Tommy had not seen him for a couple of months.
Down the long road he drove, it was isolated out here, a thing he and Shirley had discussed over the years, isolation not being a good thing for the kids. There were cornfields on one side and soybean fields on the other. The single tree—huge—that had been in the middle of the cornfields had been struck by lightning a few years back, and it lay now on its side, the long branches bare and broken and poking up toward the sky.
The truck was there next to the small house, which had not been painted in so many years it looked washed out, the shingles pale, some missing. The blinds were drawn, as they always were, and Tommy got out of his car and went and knocked on the door. Standing in the sunshine, he thought again of Lucy Barton, how she had been a skinny child, painfully so, and her hair was long and blond, and almost never did she look him in the eye. Once, when she was still so young, he had walked into a classroom after school and found her sitting there reading, and she had jumped—he saw her really jump with fear—when the door opened. He had said to her quickly, “No, no, you’re fine.” But it was that day, seeing the way she jumped, seeing the terror that crossed her face, when he guessed that she must have been beaten at home. She would have to have been, in order to be so scared at the opening of a door. After he realized this, he took more notice of her, and there were days he saw what seemed to be a bruise, yellow or bluish, on her neck or her arms. He told his wife about it, and Shirley said, “What should we do, Tommy?” And he thought about it, and she thought about it, and they decided they would do nothing. But the day they discussed this was the day Tommy told his wife what he had seen Ken Barton, Lucy’s father, do, years before when Tommy had his dairy farm and Ken worked on the machinery at times. Tommy had walked out behind one of the barns and seen Ken Barton with his pants down by his ankles, pulling on himself, swearing—what a thing to have come upon! Tommy said, “None of that out here, Ken,” and the man turned around and got into his truck and drove off, and he did not return to work for a week.
“Tommy, why didn’t you tell me this?” Shirley’s blue eyes looked up at him with horror.
And Tommy said it seemed too awful to repeat.
“Tommy, we need to do something,” his wife said that day. And they talked about it more, and decided once again there was nothing they could do.
—
The blind moved slightly, and then the door opened, and Pete Barton stood there. “Hello, Tommy,” he said. Pete stepped outside into the sunshine, closing the door behind him, and stood next to Tommy, and Tommy understood that Pete didn’t want him inside the house; already a rank odor came to Tommy, maybe coming off Pete himself.
“Just driving by, and I thought I’d see how you were doing.” Tommy said this casually.
“Thanks, I’m okay. Thank you.” In the bright sun Pete’s face looked pale, and his hair was almost all gray now, but it was a pale gray, and it seemed to match the pale shingles of the house he stood in front of.
“You’re working over at the Darr place?” Tommy asked.
Pete said he was, though that job was almost done, but he had another lined up in Hanston.
“Good.” Tommy squinted toward the horizon, all soybean fields in front of him, the bright green of them showing in the brown soil. Right on the horizon was the barn of the Pederson place.
They spoke of different machines then, and also of the wind turbines that had been put up recently between Carlisle and Hanston. “We’ve just got to get used to them, I guess,” said Tommy. And Pete said he guessed Tommy was right about that. The one tree that stood next to the driveway had its little leaves out, and the branches dipped for a moment in the wind.
Pete leaned against Tommy’s car, his arms folded across his chest. He was a tall man, but his chest seemed almost concave, he was that thin. “Were you in the war, Tommy?”
Tommy was surprised at the question. “No,” he said. “No, I was too young, just missed it. My older brother was, though.” Up and down quickly, once, went the branches of the tree, as though it had felt a breeze that Tommy had not.
“Where was he?”
Tommy hesitated. Then he said, “He was assigned to the camps, at the end of the war, he was in the corps that went to the camps in Buchenwald.” Tommy looked up at the sky, reached into his pocket, pulled out his sunglasses and slipped them onto his face. “He was changed after that. I can’t say how, but he was changed.” He walked over and leaned against his car, next to Pete.
After a moment, Pete Barton turned toward Tommy. In a voice without belligerence, even with a touch of apology to it, he said, “Look, Tommy. I’d like it if you didn’t keep coming over here.” Pete’s lips were pale and cracked, and he wet them with his tongue, looking at the ground. For a moment Tommy was not sure he heard right, but as he started to say “I only—” Pete looked at him fleetingly and said, “You do it to torture me, and I think enough time has gone by now.”
Tommy pushed himself away from the car and stood straight, looking through his sunglasses at Pete. “Torture you?” Tommy asked. “Pete, I’m not here to torture you.”
A sudden small gust of wind blew up the road then, and the dirt they stood on swirled a tiny bit. Tommy took his sunglasses off so that Pete could see his eyes; he looked at him with great concern.
“Forget I said that, I’m sorry.” Pete’s head ducked down.
“I just like to check on you every so often,” Tommy said. “You know, neighbor to neighbor. You live here all alone. Seems to me a neighbor should check in once in a while.”
Pete looked at Tommy with a wry smile and said, “Well, you’re the only man who ever does that. Or woman.” Pete laughed; it was an uncomfortable sound.
They stood, the two of them, Tommy’s arms unfolded now; he slipped his hands into his pockets, and Pete slipped his hands into his pockets as well. Pete kicked at a stone, then turned to look out over the field. “The Pedersons should take that tree away, I don’t know why they don’t. It was one thing to plow around it when it was standing up straight, but now, sheesh.”