And who’s to say that Jeptha Arrison had it wrong? If Doctor Sprague had had one wish in the world, what would it have been? To die, not quietly, but in a way that let everyone know: I loved a woman so and grieved a woman so that I burst into flames. All anyone ever wants is evidence. She had not written him a single love letter and she had not saved his. By god the woman hated words.
There he is at his table. The bowlers think he has given up. They think he isn’t doing a damned thing except drinking and scrawling notes on jagged scraps of paper. (The man can afford more than scraps. Why must he be so perverse?) The women bowlers think he might at any moment turn the boat of his grief back to shore. Right now he’s drifting; soon he’ll find some purpose; he’ll remember his daughter, or the memory of his wife will be one he wishes to honor with good deeds and happiness and responsible fatherhood. But the men think otherwise: a certain dead-eyed look in a drunkard means he’s done for good, and no legislation or temperance Mary will save him. Both men and women think: there’s a clock wound down. They only disagree over whether his gears are jammed for good.
But we know: grief looks like nothing from the outside, it looks like surrender, but in fact it is the most terrible struggle. It is friction. It is a spiritual grinding, and who’s to say it cannot produce a spark and heat that, given fuel, could burn a good man to the ground?
Almost Done
Ads were taken out in newspapers all over New England—Orono, Maine; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Mystic, Connecticut; Boston, Worcester, Providence. Nahum Truitt was not flushed from any of these places. Joe Wear ran the alleys. He oversaw the rebuilding of the first lane, though it did not take much: new bench, new floor beneath, new table. Time and smoke and the greasy clothing of bowlers would take a while to shellac the new wood: there was a halo there. Joe Wear thought about what he might do, if the alley were his: rip out the bar, which had buckled and which since Prohibition they did not really use, add two more lanes. Meanwhile he hired pinboys, paid their salaries, paid his own, took the profits to the bank, and awaited the appearance of Bertha Truitt’s son. No will existed for Bertha Truitt, but Leviticus Sprague had been more thorough. All he owned to Minna, except the alley, which he left to any close relatives of Bertha Truitt who weren’t Minna Sprague. From the bowling alley she was disowned. It was Jeptha Arrison who offered up the name Nahum.
What had happened to the leg? Buried by itself in a coffin, cremated to match the rest, filed as evidence at the police station.
“You reckon he’s haunting us?” said Jeptha, as though he were a girl wanting to be asked to dance. “I always wanted to meet a ghost. I mean, of a fellow I knew already.”
“No such thing,” said Joe. “No such person.” Though he wondered. Objects in the alley had found their voices: the toilets sang in the middle of the night, the radiators shook their chains and hissed. Since the fire he felt widowed, or married. The only way two men could marry, thought Joe Wear, is if one were a ghost.
Jeptha closed his eyes. He said, “I been waiting for a ghost all my life. I’ll be one, if I’m allowed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was born here, and I’ll die here,” said Jeptha Arrison. “That’s what I mean.”
But he had his own parents, a pair of doting old Yankees who liked to watch their Jeptha set pins. Mother Arrison, stout and sharp nosed, stood by the front door, holding her pocketbook up near her face to ward off the smoke.
“Mrs. Arrison!” said Joe Wear. “It’s a pleasure. Tell me—” He tried to come up with a question. He landed on, “Where was Jeptha born?”
“We live in Attleboro,” said Mrs. Arrison coldly. “We have always lived in Attleboro.”
Joe tried to decide if that was an answer.
“Oh, look at him,” said Mrs. Arrison. Her voice had been ice but now it was edged with melt. She would have been in her sixties then, and Jep a man of forty. There he was at the end of lane eight, as though on a stage, setting the pins. The smoke and distance made him black and white; the noise of the alley made him silent. He stood on one leg, Buster Keaton among the pins, humming his own accompaniment. Pure grace doing a dumb job. Pure love, too. He set the pins down as though they were sleeping children. He looked at them as though they were works of art.
“We almost died, Mr. Wear,” said Mrs. Arrison. “Both of us. When he was born. Now there he is. He loves it here. We thought she might leave him something in her will. Not the whole alley, but mention it, mention he should be here always, no matter.” Mrs. Arrison’s eyes were damp as oysters, as salty gray. Then, as though she trusted Joe: “Whatever happens, you must keep him here. I believe he’d die if he had to go.”
“All right.”
“I mean it,” said Mrs. Arrison.
“Mothers always mean it,” said Joe Wear, who had little experience of mothers.
Across the city of Salford, like the drifting ash he might have turned to, the particulate Dr. Sprague entered dreams. He ran up walls. He alphabetized canned goods. He cured two headaches. Twenty different people heard him warble “Somewhere a Voice Is Calling,” though in real life nobody had ever heard him sing a note. He kept Jeptha Arrison company and he came to Joe Wear and said, Thank you for staying, Mr. Wear, I know you’ll regret it. You mean I won’t regret it. Did you not hear me the first time.
Hazel Forest dreamt that he appeared and parted his shirt and then his stomach to show a weeping wound, and parted the wound to show a dripping cauldron. He said, You’re a nurse, you should have known. But you’re a doctor! she told him. Yes, he said.
Mary Gearhart came down to breakfast to find him there, explaining that he was actually a wax figure from the museum: why he went up in flames like that.
LuEtta Mood dreamt that Dr. Sprague met her at the public library, in front of the dioramas (Salford in the Time of the Pilgrims; Shakespeare’s Globe; Salford, Like Rome, Is Built on Seven Hills; Salford in the Time of the Revolution). He said to her, You’re pregnant. She could hear her mother’s voice calling down a dream hallway, Where’s Edith, where is she? though in real life she never said Edith’s name aloud. I’m not, LuEtta said to the dream doctor, and then, when she woke up, she did the addition in her head—weeks, symptoms—and it seemed a bewitchment. She was old to have another child, in her late thirties, though younger than Truitt had been.
Not sorcery. Not a miracle. As with most unbelievable things, it was mere and shocking biology.
Why not be Nahum Truitt? The ads had been placed. The lawyers were waiting. He was the right age.
“I am Nahum Truitt,” said Joe Wear. He was alone in the rooms above the alley. But if he owned them! Not such a grim place. The windows were big and showed the blue of the sky over the grocery store roof. The rough brick walls reminded Joe of beloved lost roughness. “Mother was ashamed,” he said, and that he couldn’t believe. “Ma Truitt.”
So what if Bertha Truitt had never shown him any motherkindness while she fussed over Jeptha? That was her, he practiced saying, that was mother: not one to spoil.
He had never really owned anything. He knew he still did not. He looked at the hissing stove upon which he heated canned soup, the tiny icebox he never stocked with ice. The furniture had been bought by Bertha, and there you could see some affection very much like Bertha herself: horsehair heart and velvet skin. Well-made furniture. Through the closet behind the toilet was a ladder that led to the roof, where Joe Wear liked to smoke. He went there now.
He sat down on the tar of the roof. “I am Nahum Truitt,” he said again. He tried through the seat of his pants to feel in possession of all that was beneath him. “I once was Nahum Truitt. Nahum Truitt is my name by birth.”