Silas Timberman (28 page)

“I couldn't sleep anyway.”

It was surprising how slowly warmth came back to Silas, how long it took to get the chill out of his bones. Not that it was very cold outside, and he could remember many a colder night during the war; but that was better than five years ago, and he was forty years old now. And he was a skinny man; he had always chilled easily.

“Funny about coffee,” Leslie said. “It seems that every struggle I ever been in, there's always some time when you sit with a cup of coffee in your hand. It's always the taste of black coffee that brings it back. I was in the Bulge, and even there, they got some hot coffee up to us once. Black. I drink it there, and it reminds me of a picket line. Then I drink it on a picket line, and it reminds me of the Bulge.”

“It reminds me of trying to stay awake when I was a student,” Myra said.

“Funny, when I have it for breakfast, I use milk and sugar. The kind of habits we get into!”

Silas was recalling his reactions as he had paced around the house with Alec Brady. He had wondered then what he would do if they met anyone, and he recalled his amusement at the stick he carried in his hand. Brady was a strange man, a typical scholar, indeed in some ways a great scholar, yet with an incredible diversity of experience and knowledge. His prediction about the police had been absolutely correct. They came and they went. Had it occurred to Silas, Brady wanted to know, how modern the entire concept of police was? That until society reached a certain point of organization, there were no police anywhere? That until then, men as individuals and little groups organized for the protection of their property? Property—it was not his, Silas thought, for when he stopped paying the quarterly installments, it would go to the bank. And where would the Timbermans go, he wondered? Strange how little thought he had given to his own future—or perhaps it was not so strange when one considered how indeterminate his future was. He had no idea of what he was going to do. The only thing he knew how to do was to teach. Was it possible that there was a college somewhere that would not be swayed by this insanity? They would have to leave Clemington sooner or later—so why all these heroics tonight about remaining in a house which soon would not be theirs at all?

“I guess I will have a sandwich,” Mike Leslie said, “if you twist my arm, Mrs. Timberman.”

“Ham and cheese?”

“Ham and cheese is fine. You know, I like those college kids out there. They're good kids,” he said with an air of discovery.

“Ever go to college, Mike?”

“Nope. I would have liked it, I guess, but I would have been something else. You got one life, and you don't live it, it lives you—”

“We discovered that,” Myra nodded.

Silas thought about Myra. Look at Myra. Why did she always adapt to something so much better than he did? How could she be so much more at ease among people? If something troubled her for a while, she worked it into herself, and then it stopped troubling her; but with him it was different. Things went on troubling him, and he chewed a thing over endlessly. Myra's people had money; his own people were dead; they had lived and died in poverty—and their only dream and their only pride had been to educate a son. He recalled Anthony Cabot's amazing chatter about names. Timberman. Now the house of Timberman Was beleaguered. The thought made him smile. Myra's people had money and Myra wasn't afraid of poverty, and he was afraid and the whole future mixed itself up with fear.

He finished his coffee, and Myra asked him, “Where are you going, Si?”

“I thought I'd look at the kids,” he said.

“But you just looked at them.”

“I know—well—you know the way I am.”

He went upstairs, wondering whether Myra felt what he felt when he looked at them asleep, and wondering whether the complexity of people was not also a terrible simplicity? The two girls slept in one room, Brian in a little cubbyhole of his own. Their rooms were lit with enough reflected moonlight for him to see them. As usual, Brian had kicked off his blankets, and Silas covered him.

Susan opened her eyes, smiled at him, and went back to sleep.

It was good to be a child at a time like this, Silas thought.

* * *

At a half-hour past one, Spencer and Talbot and half a dozen of the students discovered four or five people climbing the slope in back of the house. Whoever these were, they broke and ran at the sight of the students; and a handful of others also ran for cover when found across the road from the front of the house. For the next hour, it was quiet and no one else appeared. The men from Indianapolis spread out and beat through the heavy brush on the slope and through the empty lots on each side of the Timberman place, but there was nothing to be found.

At a quarter to three in the morning, Brady came into the house and said, “I sent the Clemington kids home to get some sleep. That leaves Hart and myself and Leslie and the men he brought with him—and you, of course. I think it's over, and that our brave knights of righteousness changed their plans when they discovered that we were up and waiting. But you can't tell. We'll spend the night here and leave some lights on. You and Myra get some sleep.”

“We're all right. I just wish we had beds.”

“It doesn't matter. We'll use the couch and put the pillows on the floor—and see what kind of blankets you can spare?”

Myra found two camp cots and a rubber bolster, and dragged out every pillow and blanket they had in the house. It wasn't comfortable but it would be better than sitting up, and when she and Silas finally crawled into bed, it was well past three o'clock.

“This has been a day—a day and a night,” Myra sighed. “I'm not for this kind of a life. I always used to tell myself how much I'd enjoy danger—like those women you read about, shooting lions and climbing mountains. I don't enjoy it, Silas. Not at all.”

“No—I guess not,” he mumbled. He had begun to fall asleep the moment he got into bed, his head burrowed into her arm, his long body jack-knifed.

“Damned, bony man—Silas. You hear me? Funny, I. never knew you until now—sleeping? I'm not sleepy, Si—” She went on talking as he drifted into sleep, and then it seemed that he had only closed his eyes when he sat up, wide awake. “Myra?” She was asleep next to him. The moon must have set, for the room was very dark, and he sat in bed trying to recall what had awakened him. Then he heard shouts. He fell over himself dragging pants on over his pajamas, and then he thrust his bare feet into his shoes and ran to the window. Myra was awake and crying.

“What is it? What is it, Si?”

The sudden flare from the window lit the room, and Silas snapped up the shade to reveal a lop-sided cross, burning with the quick, violent flare of kerosene-soaked waste, standing in the center of the lawn, thrust into the soft dirt of Myra's tulip bed. He felt Myra pressing behind him, her gasping breath in his ear, and then there were more shouts, and three men ran across the lawn.

Silas ran to the head of the stairs and called Brady. “It's all right, Silas!” Brady shouted back. “They're running. Just the cross, and they're running—”

There was a sudden crash against the wall of the house, and then another, and then the crash of glass being shattered, and then the screaming of children, and Myra calling, in a voice wild with agony.

“Silas! Silas!”

He ran through his bedroom and into the girls' room. Susan stood at the doorway, half-hysterical and sobbing, “No—no, no, no!”

“Are you all right?”

The terrible screams came from Brian's room. He ran in there. The lights were on, and Geraldine was standing at one side, stiff, like a piece of stone, her face contorted with horror. Brian lay in Myfa's arms, screaming with pain, screaming through the pain, “I can't see—I can't see!” his face covered with blood and blood all over his pajamas and Myra's nightgown, and Myra trying to comfort him and wipe the blood from his face, but gently, because the face was so cut and broken.

“My God, my God! What happened?”

Through her own tears, Myra tried to tell him that Brian must have had his face pressed against the window pane, which was shattered, when the rock hit it. Silas ran to the bathroom and wet a towel with hot water. When he came back, Geraldine was sobbing, “Daddy, daddy, he's dead.” Myra's face was white with horror, and Brian lay limp and quiet in her arms. His hand shaking, Silas found the child's pulse—and said almost angrily, “He's not dead! Stop that damned nonsense! We've got to get him to a doctor! He must have fainted from the shock.” Then Spencer pushed past Silas into the little room and said.

“On the bed, here, Myra. I'll help you.”

They laid the child on the bed, and Spencer wrapped him in blankets while Silas wiped the blood from his face and stanched the flow with towels. He was badly cut, especially around the eyes and forehead.

“Cotton on his face,” Spencer said gently. “Have you got absorbent cotton? We must leave him space to breathe.”

Silas returned with the cotton, and pulled off wads to hand to Spencer, who packed it gently on Brian's face. It served to stop the flow of blood, and then he bound it loosely on with bandage.

“Fit to drive?” he asked Silas, and when Silas nodded, “Good. We'll take him to the hospital in town immediately. Myra, call Doc Burnside and tell him to meet us there. I'll carry the boy.”

They did as he said without questioning him. Out in the corridor Silas saw Brady and Leslie standing silently, Brady's arms around the two girls.

“You'll stay here?” Silas whispered.

Brady nodded. Spencer bore the blanket-wrapped child gently and tenderly. He was in his shirtsleeves, and Silas threw a coat over Spencer's shoulders and then led him to the car and helped him to lay Brian on the seat.

“Get a coat for yourself,” Spencer said.

Silas threw on a coat, his own or not, he didn't know, and when he got into the car, Myra was already there.

“You reached Burnside?”

Myra nodded. Then he drove into Clemington to the hospital, pressing all thoughts from his mind in the concentration of driving quickly and carefully and smoothly.

* * *

The dawn was breaking, gray milk flowing into the dark corners of the dimly-lit vestibule that served as waiting room for Clemington's little hospital, when Dr. Burnside finished his work and came to where Myra, Silas and Hartman Spencer were waiting. Myra and Silas sat on a bench, her head resting against his shoulder, her silence for the past hour no measure of what went on inside of her. Spencer idly turned the pages of a medical manual for the fourth time, staring blindly at the advertisements for stretchers, bedpans and iron lungs. They all looked up when Burnside entered; they sat and waited for him to speak, like a traditional tableau, and he observed the scene with the tired recognition of used-up middle age. He toyed nervously with his glasses, which hung from his neck by a black ribbon, and the two white spots left alongside his nose gave him a forlorn, unreal elegance.

“The boy will be all right,” he said immediately. “Yes, the boy will be all right—that's the first thing you want to know. He lost a good deal of blood and he went through a profound shock, but he'll be all right. I don't think there's any fracture, certainly no brain injury, and that's what you want to know, isn't it?”

Myra began to cry, and Silas spoke slowly and hoarsely, so that he would not burst into tears himself and that way make it worse for Myra and everyone else concerned.

“Can we see him?”

“Yes—yes, of course. Why not? But there isn't much to see, you know—his face is pretty well bandaged up.” Burnside smiled, uncertain as to whether it was a witticism or not. “Bandages can be pretty frightening, remember, but they don't mean scars. He'll have scars—you couldn't expect anything else with all those cuts—but they'll be thin ones mostly, and in time they'll fade away. Young flesh has a tremendous vitality for healing, verve, you might say—you and me, we'd be bad, worse. But he won't be disfigured. I got all the glass out, I think—yes, I think I could say so, all the glass, nasty stuff—dreadful thing, glass—” He was rambling in his own agony, unable to say what they were equally unable to ask. They couldn't ask, and it was Spencer who said.

“What about his eyes, Dr. Burnside?”

“His eyes were hurt,” the doctor answered miserably.

“Badly?”

“The trouble is, I don't know. I did all I could do and I saw what I could see. I don't want to hold anything back from you, but I also don't want to give you any fears that aren't based on facts, I told you that his eyes were hurt—that's so. The cornea is damaged, but I don't know how badly. This is something for a very skilled ophthalmologist to decide, a surgeon, and that's not the kind of surgery I can do or would dare to do. I thought of calling Cohen in, but he's an oculist, and he wouldn't be able to say much more than I could. He's the only one in Clemington. I think we have to get someone to look at him quickly—maybe Sapperman, from Indianapolis.”

“But,” Silas said, measuring each word, “will he be blind?”

“That's just it. I don't know. I wish I could say that his eyesight won't be affected, but I can't say that. All I can say is that he will recover from the effect of the cuts and the concussion and the shock.”

“But you must have some opinion?” Silas pleaded.

“What good is an opinion if it isn't based on knowledge? Just a few hours, and someone will be here who can tell you. Please don't press me, Silas.”

“We understand, doctor,” Myra whispered.

“Now, why don't you go in and see the child, and then get home and get some rest?”

“Can't I stay with him?”

“You have to rest a little, Mrs. Timberman, or we'll have two sick people. And you have to get some fresh clothes on—” Myra looked down, and realized that she was wearing a flannel nightgown, already caked with dry blood. “Yes, now go look at him, and in a few hours you can come back and stay with him. I've got a nurse with him. He'll be all right. Now come with me.” He led them down the corridor, Myra whispering to Silas, “I don't need sleep, Silas. I'll put on a dress and come back. Please.”