She wanted him to stop gambling, but he couldn’t. It was how he thought about the world. Gambling was a series of questions: Am I lucky? Am I favored? Am I unlike other men? Will I die alone? Am I loved? Am I respected? The answers to these questions came at once, and with great certainty. Then the certainty evanesced. That was the good news. You got to ask again. Only the wilderness could cure him, where there was no other man to wager against.
In Salford’s Plocker Park—they’d arranged to meet by the frog pond; it was spring and the water boiled with spawn—Margaret walked right past him, despite the black suit she knew very well. What percentage of him had that beard been? For a moment he felt that peculiar combustion of uncertainty and nerve that is the engine of a fraud. He could keep on walking. Either he’d leave for Maine immediate, or he’d stick around Salford, incognito, peering through windows at his family from time to time. But no. There was her dear back. She was looking for him. He would not leave alone. It was possible after all to tell her things.
“Meg,” he called.
April in Salford is a tossed deck of cards, every day like the others and unlike them, too. Yesterday it had been sixty-five degrees; today it was brighter but twenty degrees colder. Nahum Truitt’s face felt interrogated by both the chill and the sun and now by his wife, who stared at him then seemed slapped.
“Your beard!” she said. “Your beautiful beard! Nim!” Then, ominously: “You lost a bet.”
He could never tell whether Nim was a nickname or a persistent misunderstanding. “I did not, missus, for heaven’s sake, how would I gamble my beard away?”
She had set her basket down and doffed a glove to investigate his face, as though it still might be an optical illusion. “I don’t know. But you could do it. Did you keep it?”
He caught up her hand. “It’s gone to the barber’s furnace,” he said, though he did not know if there was such a thing. What happened to shorn beards? Were they ghosts or corpses? “He were welcome to it.”
“You lost a bet to the barber,” she said.
“The barber is rich in beards, the barber can have any beard he likes. No,” he said. “This morning I awoke and I remembered what I once said to Joe Wear and I thought I wanted a good clean chin for a good clean start.”
“Are you married to Joe Wear?” she asked.
It were a marriage of sorts, thought Nahum. “Listen,” he said to her, but kindly. He had been surprised by many things in his life—the bodily cold of his baptism, seasickness when he’d planned to be a sailor, a poison-eyed demon ransacking his camp that turned out instead to be a particularly bumptious raccoon, a naked lady upon a beach who oscillated between beauty and rapaciousness—“Sir,” she’d said to him, “have you seen my Larry,” and he could not tell whether Larry was a child or a husband or some sort of terrible slang for something she was offering up, something he did not want but might should have accepted. He’d been surprised by hunger often, and by fatherhood, and by the invention of the motorcar and by seeing the name NAHUM TRUITT in the Orono Messenger—but nothing surprised him more than his particular love for his odd little second wife. He loved her more than she loved him. Opalescent: that gets to the heart. Her thoughts were beautiful, but really only ever for show. Maybe that would help, eventually.
“What I said, Meg, to Joe Wear, all these years ago: let us see if the Commonwealth of Massachusetts needs me. I do believe the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has rendered its verdict in the negative. It does not. I were born in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and it sput me out once and I believe it is getting ready to duplicate the effort. Let’s away to the State of Maine, Meg. Can we? To the ocean. Build a house of rock. Our own house. As many sides as would please my darling. A duodecagon. Boys’ll hunt and fish. We’ll be ourselves. State of Maine,” he said, and he clasped her chilly hands.
“No,” she said.
“But why?”
“Our business is bowling.” She handed him a sandwich wrapped in wax paper.
“It is not,” he said, filing the sandwich in his jacket pocket. “That were an accident we both ran into and now it is bankrupting us. Let’s walk away from the wreckage of it. Give it to Jeptha. Leave it to the cats. I were never meant for the world of men. I say, Meg, you must choose.”
“Choose what?”
“Choose me,” he said. “Over the alleys. Let me tell you who I am, Margaret, let me deliver you the truth—I have good news! I have—”
She shook her head in disbelief. “I’ve written to Minna,” she said. “She’ll help us.”
“Who?” he asked, but he knew who.
“Your sister. I’ll write again. I’ll ask for help. Give us the Octagon, at least. Let us live there.”
“But how did you? Wherever did you locate her?”
She hesitated. “I wrote to her through her uncle Mr. Sprague, who is a friend of mine.”
Nahum was glad to see her cheeks flush at the lie of friend. Margaret had no friends. “No,” he said. “I am done with all Spragues.”
“Nim—”
“No,” he said. “From Spragues I seek nothing, from Spragues I expect nothing. Bertha Truitt renounced her own people for them.”
“She was an orphan before she met Dr. Sprague,” said Margaret.
“Ah,” said Nahum. “But not alone in the world, is my meaning. My meaning is me. She gave up me. I made her the offer, I said, Mother if you marry him, that’s the last you’ll see of me, I will walk away, here I go, here I am off walking, Mother, say the word, and she did not, and it were. The last, I mean. Till she died. She hasn’t writ back, the girl?”
“Not yet,” said Margaret. Then, “Your beard.”
“My beard is not the topic,” said Nahum.
“Your beard,” she repeated. “I can’t think of anything else till it’s come back.”
By then, she’d been through so many abandonments and deaths. Everything in her life had fallen through. She was an orphan, too, of course—you’d think orphanhood was both hereditary and contagious! Well, it is, most people pass it along to their children.
“She’s your sister,” said Margaret to Nahum. “She loves you no matter what. Shall we sit?”
There was no term for the issue of your first wife’s second marriage. He took the sandwich out of his pocket, regarded it, replaced it. He had not had so much as a bite and he was choking on it. To Maine, then, alone, or else he would deliver himself to his debtors, he would sink into them and expire. But if he went, he owed nothing. “My appetite has gone to Maine,” he said. “I will see you anon.”
He kissed her. Without the beard it felt to both of them at once distant and overwhelming, like jumping off a cliff. Margaret had expected his bare face would be cold but it was as warm as any other part of him, and she almost suggested that since Jeptha wasn’t expecting them and the boys were at school, they should go home to bed. But that wasn’t her way, and instead she said, “Anon. Is that soon?”
“Soon enough,” he said.
I was never made for a world of men. By men Nahum had meant human beings, as people always did in those days. A world of women would have killed him outright. He had a ham salad sandwich warming in his pocket for supper. It hadn’t occurred to him that Meg would say no to Maine. She had only ever denied him things if they cost too much money. He would not get on the train at the Salford Station, where somebody might see him, though who would recognize him without his beard? His face hurt. Heart, too. To Boston, then, to disappear into a crowd. Would he see his sons again? Did they suspect he was a fraud? Roy would, soon enough, and Roy would tell Arch, Roy liked to ruin things. If Nahum had had daughters instead of sons he wouldn’t have fooled them so long but he might have been forgiven. Sons didn’t forgive. He knew that much. Well, he’d die anyhow. Might as well give them more room at home: they wouldn’t have to recoil from him, shrink themselves so as to make space for their unwieldy father. He didn’t understand that his absence would be as large as his presence, the exact same dimensions, cast from his body like a bronze sculpture. Durable as bronze, too.
The Noise of Ordinary Thunder
It’s time to train the boys,” Margaret Truitt told Jeptha Arrison.
“The boys,” said Jeptha.