Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [56]
“Nothing,” I said. “I don’t even try. Leave him alone.”
So Linus blew a speck of sawdust away, and wiped his forehead with one veiny brown arm and fell silent. He was used to my protecting him, not Saul. He didn’t guess how often I had asked myself the same question: What do you make of Saul?
Saul had become a man of blacks and whites. In the pulpit, looming black robe with a wide white neckband; the rest of the time, cheap black suit and white shirt. Often, while buying groceries or walking with the children, I would catch sight of him striding through the town on some wild mission—larger than life, with his unbuttoned suit coat billowing out behind him, trouser cuffs flapping, tie fluttering, strings of neglected hair feathering over his collar. He carried a Bible, always, and wore a dark, intense expression, as if narrowing in on something. Most of the time, he didn’t even see us.
Was he just a fanatical preacher, bent on converting the world?
But sometimes when giving his sermons he stumbled and halted, and appeared to be considering the words he had just spoken. Then I would have to consider them myself, trying to discover what truth might lie within them. Sometimes, while lashing out against the same old evils, he would stop in midsentence and sag and shake his head and walk away, forgetting to say the benediction. Then his bewildered, ever smaller flock would rustle in their pews, and I would sit gripping my gloves. Should I run after him? Should I let him be? I pictured some great substructure shifting and creaking inside him. I felt my own jagged edges grinding together as they settled into new positions. At night, I often woke with a start and pressed my face against his damp, matted chest. Even his heartbeat seemed muffled and secret. I never was able to imagine what he dreamed.
I was moving around the kitchen one day in the spring of 1974, serving up breakfast to a man from the mourners’ bench. Dr. Sisk. I was trying to hurry Jiggs along because it was nearly time for kindergarten and he was just sitting there with one sock on and nothing else. I was tripping over the dog, this terrible dog that Selinda had brought home from Girl Scouts. It wasn’t one of my quieter times, in other words. So it took me a minute to notice what I assumed to be Saul from another age, leaning in the doorway—the Saul I married, with a calmer face and no lines around his mouth, a little more hair on top, easier and looser and less preoccupied. He wore faded, tattered jeans and carried an Army surplus knapsack. He watched me with a kind of wry amusement that Saul had long ago lost. Well, I wasn’t so very surprised. In fact I’d already thought of an explanation for it (some simple time warp, nothing to get alarmed about) when he spoke. “I knocked but nobody answered,” he said.
It wasn’t Saul’s voice at all, and never had been; didn’t have that echo behind it. I said, “Amos!”
“How you doing, Charlotte?”
He straightened up and came to offer me his hand. By now I was so used to various people wandering in it didn’t occur to me to ask why he was here. (I’d been expecting him for years, to tell the truth. Wondered what was keeping him.) But Amos seemed to think he had to tell me. “Hear Clarion High School is looking for a music teacher,” he said. “I thought I might apply. I guess I should’ve dropped a line ahead of time but I’m not too much of a letter writer.”
He had sent us fifteen letters in all the time we’d been married—if you count a Hallmark wedding card and about fourteen of those printed change-of-address notices that you pick up free from the post office. But that’s the way the Emorys did things. I said, “Never mind, have some breakfast. Meet Jiggs and Dr. Sisk.”
Jiggs stood up in his one striped sock and shook hands. He was always a dignified child, even naked, and looked like a kindly little old man in his stodgy glasses. I was proud to show him off. But Amos gave him a puzzled stare and said, “Jiggs?”
Then Dr. Sisk rose too, jarring the table, and leaned across the scrambled