Clay Hand (15 page)

“I can tell you that in a moment. Martin Shaw was here from Zanesville that day for his pagoda.” As he went to the desk he explained that the pagoda was a magic illusion. He had made it on order for a practicing magician. Its sale would be entered in the account book. “February 13,” he said. “Five weeks ago. It seems as though we knew him all of our lives. That is the way sometimes.”

Phil took a notebook and pencil from his pocket and wrote down the date. “How did he introduce himself? Dick could make friends in a minute where I need a formal introduction.”

Clauson smiled at his self-deprecation. “I remember the first words he said to me: ‘I am finding it hard to make friends in Winston. Perhaps you will loan me a little magic.’ I told him that all my magic had not brought me friends in the town. ‘But it brought you to the town?’ he said. And very shortly I was telling him how I had come to Winston.”

“So soon, and he had you telling him all about yourself.”

“You are quite right. He had that faculty. I can see you, too, are curious about that.”

“I am.”

“This house belonged to Rebecca’s mother—to her grandparents, really. Her grandfather was one of the first doctors in this part of the country—that is, the first to set up private practice. In those days Winston was a company town, and the company provided whatever medical care was given. Private practice was very private.”

“But you’ve been treated as a stranger here, Mr. Clauson.”

“Quite so. The doctor abandoned Winston. He intended to come back. But it was not to be. He passed away before he could accomplish it, and his wife shortly after him. My wife’s inheritance was this house. It was fortunate, as things turned out. My career as a practicing magician was over with the end of vaudeville. Besides, I was never a very good magician, always a bit slow and thoughtful. I enjoyed seeing the illusion develop, and that of course is fatal. A good magician believes only in his own skill. He is contemptuous of his tools. Nevertheless, he buys them constantly, but only to prove his conquest of them. Look. I will show you one that a master will take a week to manipulate. But having mastered it, he will have something unusual.”

He took Phil to the table in the bay window, and pulled a ceiling light on. Taking a cloth from over its top, he displayed a miniature stage with dancing figures on it. “Those will vanish, and the practicer will be able to have his audience examine the box, and not find them. Yet they will be there. I have a gentleman coming from Baltimore in a few days who will pay handsomely for the secret.” He threw the cloth over the device and pulled off the ceiling light. “You see how easily I can be engaged in the discussion of my trade?”

“Yes, I can see it,” Phil said.

Rebecca had put on the smock that hung in the dining room and had gone to work there.

“My daughter paints my pieces for me,” Clauson said. “I am more interested in illusion than in gadgets for sleight of hand. She has a wonderful feeling for transparency, for silken, weblike work.”

Phil looked at the painting over the mantle. Clauson nodded that it was hers. It was a woman wrapped in the woof of her dreams, Phil decided, a veritable tumbleweed. The old man drew a match from his pocket, struck it on the fireplace and held it to one of the candles.

Before he touched the other, his daughter had swung around from her work. “Please don’t, Papa. Please put it out.”

Phil caught a brief glimpse of the lucid coloring in the painting before the old man blew the candle out. The reds were blood, he thought, the blues and greens tearlike.

“As you wish, my dear.” He returned to his chair. Date by date, they put together Dick’s visits to the house.

Finally, Phil turned to the daughter. “Miss…” he started. He had almost said Miss Clauson. And there was reason. In this house, he had seen no trace of Glasgow and no place for the kind of man he seemed to be. “Mrs. Glasgow,” he corrected himself, “when you and Dick were together, and you talked to Laughlin, did Dick lead him to talk of himself, also?”

She laid down the brush with which she was working and came to the door. “Yes. He told us of knowing the mines like the back of his hand. He told us of the first time his father had taken him for work in them when he was twelve.”

“Do you remember the first time you saw him?”

“Laughlin? I had seen him many times. The first time Dick saw him—I can’t be sure, of course, but I think it was only two or three days before Laughlin died.”

“Did Dick speak of him to you at all?”

“No. The second time we saw him, Laughlin told us about that entry being his special job. I think that was what made Dick curious about him—that no one else approached the entry. It was that day I went with him to the mouth of it, and waited while he went down there. It is not true that I went in with him, Mr. McGovern.”

“And when he came out?” Phil prompted, ignoring the last remark.

“He said only that he suspected there was gas down there.”

“But nothing about Laughlin?”

“Only that he intended to warn him.”

Phil nodded. “You know Laughlin’s story, don’t you? That his wife was killed in that area?”

“Dick told me after he was found.”

“Mrs. Glasgow, what did Dick tell you of his own wife? I know Margaret pretty well.”

“Do you? He told me no more than what I said at the inquest.”

“Without being impertinent, may I ask how it came about that he should tell you that?”

She looked at him. “We were speaking of my husband, and how I came to marry him.”

The old man shook his head. “Dick was very, very fond of Rebecca. If only they had…”

His daughter whirled on him and cut off his words. “Stop that, Papa! For the love of heaven will you get it out of your mind? He loved his wife. You could see why, looking at her today, couldn’t you?”

“No, my dear,” he said painfully. “When I look at you, I cannot see it at all.”

A great, strained weariness came over the woman. She sat down, slumped in the chair as though she would hide in it. “When the blind describe their visions,” she said bitterly, “God help those of us with eyes.”

The old man roused himself then. “Will you have a cup of tea, Mr. McGovern?”

He had tried, Phil thought, but his heart was not in the invitation. “Thank you, but maybe I may come for it another time. Dick is to be buried in Winston now—tomorrow morning at nine-thirty from the funeral parlor.”

Something very near to joy came into Rebecca’s face when she heard the words. To hide it, she got up and returned to her work in the other room.

Phil took a last look at the painting, and put on the coat the old man was holding for him.

B
EFORE HE WAS INSIDE THE
iron gate at Mrs. O’Grady’s he could hear the sound of laughter and an occasional flute of off-pitch music. The lights were on upstairs in the regular boarder’s rooms, and Whelan’s taxi was in the driveway. As Phil rounded the house and mounted the back steps the anger rose in him. Among the lights in the town below were those burned by strangers at the coffin.

He stood on the porch a moment, breathing deeply of the raw air. Anger would blind him. It would hang like a veil between his perception and his understanding. The laughter inside was real, and Margaret’s among it—the beloved wife…the town was real, and the hard board railing he clung to on the porch was solid beneath his hands…the stale taste of tobacco in his mouth and the wind sluicing the sweat that had broken out on his face…. The inquest was unreal—the hundred gaping faces, the crowing and the crooning of the old lady inside, the smirking face of Whelan, the contemptuous Glasgow, the hard steel eyes of McNamara, the sound of the hammer on the coffin, the two-fingered reveille of Billy Riordon on the piano, the swirling, whorled color in the Clauson home…the blind describing their vision…

“Dear Lord in heaven,” he whispered, loosening his hands from the railing and digging his nails into the palms to feel the reality of pain. He went through the two doors then as though they were one, and the revelry stopped abruptly, the smiles stiffening on the flushed faces at the sight of him.

Margaret had taken off the demure black suit and wore a rose red housecoat. She sat proudly at the kitchen table like an imprisoned queen, the widow across from her, and Whelan nodding foolishly between them. Phil forced himself to smile.

“There,” Whelan said, “the man’s human. For a minute I thought he was a ghostie.”

“Were you expecting one?” Phil said, taking off his coat and flinging it over the kindling box. “May I bring a glass?”

“Bring a bucket if you like,” the widow said, “as long as you bring a smile with it.”

“It’s good to see you without the scowl, Phil,” Margaret said.

He pulled out the chair beside her and sat down, pouring himself a glass of beer from the gallon bottle. “It’s good to see you without the mourning traps.” He touched the lapel of the housecoat.

“A scowling man and a roaring bull,” Whelan said, “they’re two of the most disturbing things in the world. While you’re at it, put a head on mine here for me. I must go down soon to my loving family.”

“You’ve been saying that for an hour, Jerry,” the widow said, “and the only move you make is the hand to your face with a glass in it. Do you sing, Philip?”

“I was a choirboy.”

“Give us a sacred tune then,” Whelan said. “I always say there’s no music like the old hymns.”

“Hymns be damned,” said the widow. “Give us a fighting tune. Did you ever hear him sing ‘The Minstrel Boy’? Ah, he had the voice of John McCormack.”

“I thought he was a baritone,” Phil said.

“What’s the odds, he could carry a tune.”

“I fell in love with his voice first,” Margaret said.

“Where?” Phil asked.

“A restaurant in Paris where the newspaper people used to hang out.”

“Were you with a newspaper, Margaret?”

“Just with a newspaper man,” she said mildly.

Phil emptied his glass, and Whelan slopped the beer in refilling it, his sleeve trailing in the mess. “I thought you met on a park bench,” Phil said.

“We did. Many times.”

“Ask a foolish question, you’ll get a foolish answer,” the widow said. “I hear there’s a whole Irish settlement in Paris.”

“Och,” said Whelan, “we’re the kind of people never have the sense to go home.”

“How long are you in this country, Jerry?” Phil asked.

“I came over steerage in 1919. There was more Irish in the hold of the ship than cattle, and a bloody Scotsman steward or whatever. My poor old mother fortified me with a bottle of whiskey at the dock, and me too sick to reach my hand under the pillow after it. Do you know the little Scots runt never had his hand free of it? I swear to God he didn’t sleep a wink on the passage for fear of missing a drop.”

“My only regret in living as long as I have,” the widow said, “is the number of times I’ve had to listen to that story. Where were you tonight, Philip?”

“I went to visit the Clausons.”

He was aware of the eyes of all of them on him.

“Well,” said Whelan, “there’s nothing much gay over there tonight, I’ll wager. My Anna had the word for them now, didn’t she?”

“Close your gab, Jerry,” Mrs. O’Grady said.

“Don’t be all the time shutting me. I’m not your slavey, woman.”

“Shut, I said, or get out of the house.” She turned on Phil. “So they’re wheedling round you already, are they? After taking him over…”

“And leaving him dead,” Whelan finished.

“You like the thought of that,” Phil said. “You all like it. Why? What have you got against them? You, Whelan, what have you got against them?”

“They’re bloody heathens…”

“That’s not enough, Jerry. You wouldn’t know a heathen from a saint if he was sitting next to you in church.”

Whelan got to his feet, jarring the table. “I’ll not stay here and be insulted by an outsider, a bloody smart foreigner. You can fetch your beer for yourself, old woman, as long as they’re in the house. You’re seeing his true colors now, are you? Or are you color-blind, as well as deaf to a word of warning? You like your chances, do you? Well, you’re taking one now.”

“If you made as much sense as noise, Jerry, they’d compile an almanac of your sayings. Go, if you’re going.”

She watched him out of the house. “Peh! He hasn’t the guts to match his brain, and there’s little enough of that. Is there candles burning down there for him?” She poked Phil with her stick.

He flung the cane away from him. “He has no need of candles where there isn’t a person to look at his face the last blessed time.”

The tears came to Margaret’s face.

He turned on her fiercely. “And no need for tears. Pour yourself another drink there, and you’ll sing a song for us in a minute.”

She stifled back the tears and got up from the table. “I won’t forget this, Phil. Believe me, I won’t forget it. You think flailing your fists in the air makes you a hero. You think crying in public makes you a mourner. Don’t be so goddamn righteous.”

She left him then, and the widow prodded him again with her cane. “Bring a rag there from the sink and clean up the mess on the table.”

T
HE MORNING OF THE
funeral was murky and cold, and two of the Winston collieries were working. A few women followed the hearse through the town, and came to stand in shivering huddles within the cemetery. Phil drove Margaret and Mrs. O’Grady, and Father Joyce permitted him to drive over the frozen ground where there were no headstones until he was within a few feet of the open grave. In that way the widow might participate in the service without leaving the car.

Those present never missed a funeral, Phil thought. They were the town’s keeners, and they would weep for a dog as well as a friend—women all, upon which the burden of death fell so heavily they were inclined to pick it up whether or not it belonged to them. They moved closer with the tolling of the church bell, thirty-five in summary for the years in the life of the departed.

Randy Nichols and McNamara had joined the two deputy sheriffs as pall bearers. They stood bareheaded, waiting for Father Joyce. At the close of the bell’s tolling, the priest came from the church in his cassock. His rich voice intoning the Latin rubric was muffled in the wind, and his cassock billowed out as though he would be lifted from the ground.