The Moonlight Man (7 page)

She said nothing. He looked at her questioningly. The silence between them grew dense with words not said. Catherine stared at the open bottle.

“Don't ride me, Catherine,” he muttered. “I won't be told what to do”—his voice rose suddenly—“especially not by young females!”

She turned on her heel and went out of the kitchen, out of the house, and got into the car. Two fishing rods lay on the back seat. A bluebottle fly buzzed against the windshield. She realized she was afraid. How violently he had thrown the whiskey down his throat! How he shuddered as though it hurt him! Oh, the fly was so stupid! “Here!” she cried, trying to steer it with her hand toward the open window. “Can't you speak English?” It swerved out, then flew back into the car. “There's no saving you,” she said to it.

She had driven those drunken men home in the dramatic middle of the night. She had thought it was all over the next morning. At least, she had hoped it was. Finding her father in the kitchen just now, the sunlight falling on the counter, her breakfast plates draining in the small dish rack, she had felt the depth of her ignorance. She only knew that there was danger.

He was coming toward the car from the house, walking briskly, rubbing his hands as though he were chilled. He got into the car and bent forward to start it, saying, “Ah …” when the motor turned over.
“Va t'en,”
he said, brushing at the fly, which flew away for good this time. A French-speaking fly, she thought.

Her father did so many things easily, but he drove as though he were pursued by devils—jaw clenched, eyes peering ahead as if a thick fog had formed, a permanent one, in front of the windshield. Had he taken a second drink, or a third?

She felt him glance over at her.

“It'll be a good day,” he promised. “You'll see.”

She thought of how she and the other Dalraida students tried to outdo each other describing the monstrous amounts of liquor Madame LeSueur was supposed to consume, how they imitated her walking up the stairs with her mad, precarious dignity. She recollected how sick she and Cornelia had been on that mountain wine. How could anyone want to feel so horrible?

“Do you like your new stepfather?” Mr. Ames asked.

His question took her by surprise. With an emphasis that startled her, she answered, “Yes. Very much.” Did she? She was about to say that Carter was nice. She didn't want her father to ask her what
that
meant.

“A steady sort of chap?” he asked lightly.

“Steady? I don't know about that,” Catherine replied. “He's kind.”

“Kind. Kind to kittens and tots? And steady, I'm sure. And certain. Oh, to be certain,” he said.

They didn't speak again until he had parked in front of Reverend Ross's parsonage.

“It's doubt that makes one think,” he said then. “Certainty answers everything.”

She wanted to argue with him, but before she could speak, she saw an elderly man walking down a path toward them. She didn't, in any case, know what she would have said.

“How do you do,” the Reverend said to her with a nod as he got into the car. He had a weatherbeaten face and a large jaw. She had started to give him her seat in the front. He shook his head vigorously. “No, no,” he said in a deep, baying voice. While they drove the narrow country road to the trout stream—the Reverend's secret place—he told them what Catherine suspected was the entire history, with footnotes, of the Maritime Provinces.

Mr. Ames parked the car in a field. The three of them climbed a low stone wall and walked through a meadow, where the grass grew as high as their waists, down the slope to a line of willow trees. The secret place was a wide, shallow stream strewn with boulders, sonorous with the sound of rushing water.

The Reverend held a finger to his lips. “Not a word,” he whispered, “or they'll hear us.” He waded out into the stream in his high rubber boots. Like an important conductor about to lead an important symphony orchestra, he raised high his fishing rod.

“Do you think he'll stop for our picnic?” Catherine asked her father.

“Patience, child,” he replied in a low voice. “Eat a few leaves, a twig or two. Be dignified. Don't howl for your dinner. Here. Stand here … I want you to learn how to use this thing.”

But she couldn't get the hang of casting. Her line caught in the branches of a willow. It flew everywhere except behind the rock her father pointed to. She glimpsed a brown fish lurking a few yards away just beneath the surface of the water. “Why don't I just pick it up?” she asked.

Her father snorted with laughter, looking somewhat nervously to where the minister stood casting effortlessly. “You just try! They're cunning creatures. I fear you're no match for them.”

She was relieved when he went off by himself, as the Reverend had done. It was agreeable to sit on the bank and watch the two men, so still except for the graceful motions of their arms as they cast, reeled in, cast again and again. The water flashed where sunlight touched it. She heard the delicate buzzing of the reels as the lines flew out, arced, rested lightly, briefly, on the surface of the stream.

Her father appeared to be as absorbed as the Reverend. Was it because he glanced over at her from time to time that she felt he was giving a performance of a man fishing? Not only for her but for himself? She dozed a while, read
A Child's Christmas in Wales,
which she nearly knew by heart, then went for a walk through the meadow back to the stone wall, following it for half a mile or so until it dwindled to a few moss-covered rocks near the lip of a small pit. In the pit, she saw the skeleton of what had been a little animal. She squatted down and stared at it. She could have touched the clean, bleached bones that formed the rib cage. The heat of the sunlight on her back had weight like a full pack. The sudden drumming of a woodpecker was loud, a door rapped with a cane. She stood abruptly and turned away from the pit. With long strides, she followed the wall back to the point where she had begun to follow it. She was frightened, though she could not think why she should be. When she reached the willow trees and saw the two men standing beneath them on the stream's bank, she felt comforted, as she did when she awoke from a bad dream and knew it to be only that.

Mr. Ames was admiring the Reverend's four trout. He had had no luck himself.

“You must take three of them,” the Reverend said, adding that he and his wife ate only light, modest suppers.

Mr. Ames said crankily to Catherine, “Look. You've left your Dylan Thomas on the ground. That's no way to treat a book.”

She took it from his hand and put it in a back pocket of her jeans. She supposed he was cross because he hadn't caught anything. She quickly spread out the picnic on a blanket she had taken from her bed. She noticed how suspiciously the Reverend was regarding the food, the deviled eggs and ham and tomato sandwiches, the thick wedge of cheddar, a box of cupcakes, this last which Catherine had asked for despite her father's scornful remark about mass-produced food.

Reverend Ross picked up a deviled egg and stared at it closely. A modest supper made you rest easy at night, he declared. And a modest lunch left your mind clear for reflection. He had several theories about the way people ate, he said. There were those who snapped at their food like foxes. Others mooned over their dinners and made designs with their forks in mashed potatoes. In church, he had observed that the snappers threw down communion wine as though it were rum, but the mooners and dreamers sipped it like fine wine. Each type, he said, consumed the Lord in his own way.

Mr. Ames looked very patient. He was holding a sandwich and staring at the egg the Reverend continued to hold on his outstretched palm. “I think, after all, I'll have a bit of that cheese,” Ross said at last.

“I admire your restraint,” Mr. Ames said.

“It is not restraint. It's fear of indigestion,” the Reverend answered coolly.

Her father stuffed the sandwich in his mouth. The Reverend continued his sermon on feeding habits, taking bits of cheese from time to time. When Mr. Ames offered him coffee from a Thermos, he observed, “Coffee is not good for us.” Mr. Ames then lit a cigarette. Reverend Ross shook his head and rolled his eyes at the heavens, then walked to the edge of the stream, turning his back on Catherine and her father. But Mr. Ames followed him and clumsily, Catherine observed, intruded himself between the minister and the water. In a rush of words, Catherine heard him praising Ross for his casting technique. He was stammering. Why was he grinning so doggishly?

“Time we were, going back, Mr. Ames, don't you think?” the Reverend asked.

Humbly, it seemed to Catherine, her father helped her gather up the picnic things and load the car. He even slid humbly into the driver's seat. It must have been the Reverend who had managed to bring about all this meekness in her father, but Catherine couldn't figure out how he'd done it—unless it was by his apparent disapproval of everything. He hadn't spoken to her at all. Perhaps he thought of her as a divorced child and not worthy of conversation. Yet when they dropped him off at his parsonage, carrying his one fish for his modest supper, he said rather sternly that he had had a splendid time. They must do it again. “Perhaps the girl will learn to cast—if she's given proper instruction.”

“That was pretty funny,” Mr. Ames remarked, as they drove on toward home. “I don't think the old horse even knew you were there—or me, either, for that matter. He certainly doesn't exude the warmth of Christian love, does he? Heavens! I couldn't get his attention for one minute.”

That was it, Catherine realized. It was what had made her father so uneasy. The Reverend had been indifferent to him, had treated him as if he were just anybody. But who was
anybody?
Why should
anybody
be treated with indifference? She hadn't liked the Reverend; he seemed a tight, rough man. Yet she felt faintly shamed by Mr. Ames's efforts to charm him. Why on earth did he want to charm him?

“Even parsons have secret thoughts,” he remarked to her later that evening, as they sat in the swing on the edge of the cliff. “Even they divide the world into opposing groups. I must say I prefer good and bad to Ross's division between gulpers and sippers. What a vision of human character!”

“You divide the world in half. My mother on one side, you on the other.”

He looked perplexed.

“You called her a daylight person,” she reminded him. “Are you a moonlight person?”

“You store away everything, don't you? If I said that, it was foolish. After all, there are only men and women. As for being a moonlight person, the truth is I've lived most of my life in a dense fog.”

“Why didn't you ever have me to visit you and Emma?” she asked abruptly.

Mr. Ames put his foot on the ground to stop the slight motion of the swing. They hung there, motionless, for what seemed a very long time, as darkness deepened around them. At last he spoke quietly, sadly.

“I didn't think it would be good for you. I didn't think
I
was good for you. It was Emma who persuaded me—to try. She said—if you never got a close look at me, you'd be wondering about me all your life. I suppose you will be, anyway.”

Catherine didn't care for the idea that Emma was responsible for this visit. Her father had a rather silly look on his face—thinking of Emma's wonderfulness, no doubt.

“What about what I thought?” she asked.

“That's what Emma was concerned about.”

“I mean—what did
you
think about my thoughts?”

“Do I hear self-righteousness? Are you feeling badly treated? Don't—for God's sake—be a victim. It rots out the brain. You'll never have a moment of pleasure because of thinking of all the wrongs you've suffered.”

She quailed at the anger she thought she heard in his voice. As though to confirm it, he got out of the swing and strode off to the house. How could he be so unfair? She followed him and at once tripped on some root or hummock. She knew it wasn't because it had grown dark. Her body had gone out of control because she'd lost inner balance.

She found him in the kitchen pouring himself a drink of whiskey.

“What about that?” she cried, a tremor in her voice. “Does that stuff keep your brain from rotting?” She remembered how his features had slackened that night of drinking, how his body had slumped. Her dismay was so great, she held out both her hands toward the bottle as though to snatch it from him. He looked at her as though she were a stranger. Her hands dropped to her sides. She felt exhausted. She felt she could go to sleep standing there next to the kitchen table.

“Don't be a prig,” he said harshly. “You're old enough to know damn near everything—though not, I must add, to have any judgment. And don't tell me your sainted mother hasn't nailed me to the cross about my drinking habits.”

“Mom didn't have to tell me,” she said flatly. “Do you think I can't see on my own? How I hated it when you were passed out cold in the back of that horrible car!”

“Not at all,” he protested. “I wasn't passed out. I was thinking.”

“Do you snore and snort when you think?”

He started to laugh. He took two steps and grabbed her arms and shook her. “Cath, I won't do it again. I swear it! As for the car—if you like, we can go out and throw rocks at it!”

She didn't want him to swear to anything, to what he would or wouldn't do. “Try to understand,” he urged her. She had begun to learn his face. She knew he was trying to show her how earnest and simple—and truthful—he was being. But being simple was the last thing he wanted to be. She knew that, too.

“Try to understand,” he began in a conciliating voice. “I was so damned nervous about living with you. Don't you see that it's strange for both of us? Not only for you? I'm used to seeing you on the run—as though we were fugitives.”