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CHAPTER TWENTY
I followed Max’s blue Cadillac north down Main Street where we turned left up Gardner Canyon Road. It was dark. There were a few streetlights every other block, pools of light between estuaries of trackless black. Snowplows had not even bothered with the side streets. The snow would be compacted by traffic, and that would be good enough. I caught a glimpse of a large, two story wood frame house and remembered it was the old Armitage place. I had dated Mary once. Up the road, in Gardner Canyon, we used to spend hours scrabbling around on slate cliffs that contained an astonishing amount of fossils, delicate ferns and similarly fragile skeletons of creatures lithographed into the rocks by time’s heavy press.
Clayton Bostwick’s house, I discovered, was indeed the old Armitage place. A four-wheel drive truck was parked at the head of a driveway that had been shoveled. Behind it two other cars were parked, the last nearly in the road. Max pulled the Cadillac gingerly off to the side and I pulled up behind him and turned off the lights. I looked at up and down the streets. I felt a sudden pang of . . . nostalgia? Loss? I imagined in the soft squares of light from house windows along the block families in warm kitchens eating hot suppers. More often though, I saw the winking color of the blind eye of television tubes in living rooms where catatonic husbands, wives, and children were staring passively, inanimately, at images from another planet. I wanted, at that moment, to be at sea on the bridge of a ship. It was end of the second dog watch, and I could go down to my cabin and get in my pitching bunk and read while the sea lulled me to sleep.
A square of light fell down the cleared sidewalk as the front door opened, and I followed Max up to a set of three cement steps. A pair of long icicles flanked the steps from the porch roof eaves, stalactites to be driven into the heart. I recognized Clayton’s wife now. It was Cheryl Valentine! I had no idea. I was stunned into a present, awkward silence as she extended a plump hand, and gave me what she must have thought was a warm smile. It was a smile as empty as her eyes.
“You remember Cheryl,” Max said, shrugging out of his coat.
“Of course,” I said.
“It’s good to see you again,” she said, with some semblance of animation. I wondered at that moment, with terror, if Clayton had told her our secret. Max never mentioned it, so she must be innocent of the reason for our visit beyond the apparent kindness her husband’s old friends were showing to him in his hour of need. “Clayton said he is terribly glad that you’ve come to see him. It means a lot,” she said, and then paused, looking directly into my eyes. “To both of us.”
“Yes, well, I had some leave,” I mumbled.
She led us to the stairs that were just across the little foyer and we ascended–her first– then Max, then myself. I looked up and saw the rhythm of her hips as she climbed, and remembered her as I whirled her about on the hardwood dance floor under a ceiling festooned with colorful crepe paper, the orchestra struggling with Marty Robbins’ “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation.”
At the top of the stairs, newly carpeted I noticed, was a hallway with two doors on the right hand side, and one left near the head of the stairs. The door immediately to my left was open, and appeared to be a sewing room. She walked past the first door on the right, and I thought I could hear a radio playing something modern, something MTV, but it was muted. The next door was slightly ajar, an inch wide bar of light crossing the carpet. She swung it open, poked her head inside for a moment, and then stepped aside gesturing for us to enter. I braced myself. I thanked her as I passed. I caught just a breath of something like a perfume from her hair and clothing and when I looked down at her face I could see a prescient terror behind her streaming eyes. I entered the sick room.
Biff and Willy were sitting in two straight-backed chairs on the far side of the bed. They had their hands folded in their laps. Both of them were in dark suits and ties. Biff held a worn leather bound bible in his hands. Willy’s hands were twisting as if he were kneading arthritic finger joints. Then the odors assailed my senses and I felt my late lunch rising in a storm of bile. It was the unmistakable smell of sickness, each one separate to a nose with experience. There were the odors of medicine and human waste. A small television set was on, with the sound mute. Behind the hospital bed were two large cylinders of oxygen. Some kind of a medical device with clear tubing seemed to be connected to him somehow. I saw a colostomy bag, and a bag of dark yellow urine on the floor under the bed.
The center of the room was filled with the bed where Clayton Bostwick was laying. The bed was shallowly raised at the head. Upon two pillows was a man whom I would not have recognized as a man. Thin strands of hair splayed in disarray over an oily scalp, bright and wet with perspiration. Within a face gray as a north sea were two myopic eyes, yellow with a jaundice, rheumy, and weak without glasses. I looked within and saw, however, an alertness, an intelligence—a man.
“Clay, how are you feeling,” I said, approaching him as he extended a fleshless hand from the bed covers. I shook it without flinching, and saw a flicker of a smile.
“I'm wishing, right now, for a glass of that ole Waste Oil Wine, Andy,” Clayton said. His voice and smile were firm. “I’ll never forgive you guys for not taking me with you the night before . . .” He tried to summon a grin which, I thought, under the circumstances, was a good sign. Perhaps he’d live to be a hundred. There was a life force within him that belied the husk from which it issued.
“Now that would make you really sick,” I said, and smiled, remembering with fondness the young Clayton whose good cheer and timidity were a constant. Clayton was the one among us with no real pretensions to be any thing other than he was. He had the soul of a green grocer from the day he was born. I glanced across the bed and saw the solemn faces of Biff and Willy staring at us. Max stood at the end of the bed, his hands gripping the rail, and said nothing.
“I want to thank you, Max,” Clayton said, “For all your help these past few months.” I didn’t know to what he was referring.
“The thing for you to do is get better, Clay,” Max said, and I seconded that with some conviction. Looking at Clay more closely, I didn’t see how the doctors could have given him much longer than minutes to live, but the voice seemed to deny the evidence before my eyes.
“It was awfully good of you to come,” Clayton said, looking back at me. I saw him try to rise, and sit a little straighter, which he did. Biff leaned over from his chair and adjusted a pillow behind the sick man’s head. Then Clay reached for a button hung on the bed rail and an electric motor cranked his head higher until he was sitting nearly straight up.
“That’s better,” he said. He reached up and fiddled with the twin oxygen tubes that ran around his neck and into his nostrils. “Shall I have Cheryl bring up another two chairs?” he asked. I saw him reach for another button.
“No, I’m fine,” I said.
“Well, we’ll leave her alone then. She is tireless. Up and down those stairs a hundred times a day.” There was just a beat of silence, and then he said, “Willy, will you give the prayer? And then Biff can give the blessing.” This confused me, having forgotten the rituals.
Biff stayed in his chair. Max let his hands drop from the railing and he clasped them together and bowed his head. Willy stood awkwardly, looking completely uncomfortable in the suit and tie. I stepped back, not sure of what to do with head and hands.
“Dear Heavenly Father,” Willy began, his voice rumbling over gravel, “we have come together to, ah, seek, ah, thy counsel with our good brother Clayton. InthenameofJesusChristamen.” That, I thought, had the brevity of old brother Henry Edwin when he preempted Viola Sleight at Sacrament meetings.
The atmosphere in the room seemed to close in on us, and with the “amen” we drew closer to the bed. Biff produced a bottle of cheap olive oil from his jacket pocket as he stood and took a step toward the bed. He nodded to Max and Willy. Max stepped next to Willy, and the three of them clasped their hands around the bottle.
“Heavenly father, we ask Thee to bless this oil with thy healing power. We pray that it will aid our brother Clayton to recover his health as we anoint his head with Thy blessed strength.” With that Biff uncapped the bottle, poured a small amount into the palm of his big hand, and placed it on Clayton’s forehead. Then the three men lay their hands on the sick man’s scalp, and bowed their heads and closed their eyes. I stepped back further.
“Heavenly Father, we lay our hands upon our brother’s head and pray for Thy blessing upon our Brother Clayton Bostwick and Thy blessing upon his family. We beseech Thee for his recovery, and we thank Thee for Thy great works. Pour down Thy power, Lord, that he may be healed. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, amen.”
“Amen,” was murmured. Biff sat down, and then Willy. Max went to the end of the bed, and I stepped closer, back into the light. I looked to Biff. He glanced at me, dipped his head, and took a deep breath. The tension had grown with the blessing. One could tell by our postures the tightening of muscles beneath our clothing, the stiffening of the gut, the trickles of sweat down the back and under the arms in the stale, sickening cloister of the room. The silence was pressing more heavily when Biff finally spoke.
“I have taken the liberty of telling Max and Willy and Andrew what you feel you must do before you . . .” Biff began.
“Die. Yes,” Clayton said. I was horrified at the resolve in his voice.
“We are here to ask you one more time to reconsider. To think further of the ramifications,” Max said softly.
“I haven’t much time,” Clayton said vaguely. “I don’t think so.” I was horrified to hear the strength, the confidence in his voice. We were sunk, and I knew it then.
“Clay,” Willy said, standing again, agitated, with sparks of anger shooting from his eyes, “There just ain’t no point to it!”
“The point is,” Clayton said softly, looking around at the three of us, “I cannot go to my death without confessing my sins to Jesus Christ, aloud, and in front of witnesses. That is what the church instructs.”
“Since when?” I asked, coldly. “I thought that was a Catholic–I wanted to say ‘failing’– tradition? And whoever hears this so-called confession is not bound by any priestly confidentiality, are they?”
“No, they are not bound. I’m sorry. It is a Christian tradition and necessity, Andrew. Confessed sins will be forgiven. Unconfessed sins condemn you straight to Hell. You’ve been away from the church too long.” I wanted to reach over and strike the man with my fist. They never let it go, they were relentless in saving other souls. “Biff, and the Stake President will confirm that truth.”
“Yes,” Biff whispered, “That is the truth.”
“Bullshit,” I said. The reaction was instantaneous. Biff moved around the bed swiftly, athletically, and before I knew it he had gripped me by both arms, and I thought for certain he was going to strike me.
“Watch your language,” he hissed.
“Hey,” Willy said.
“Stop it,” Max ordered.
“Please,” Clayton said, extending his hand. He looked as if he wanted to rise, but fell back.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, furious. Biff retreated. Max stepped forward next to me.
“We have something we wish you to hear, Clayton. For the good of your family.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you could find a way to keep your peace, your silence, we are prepared to see to the security of your wife and children.”
“How?” Clayton asked.
“We are prepared to give Cheryl a lump sum of one hundred thousand dollars. We will see to it that Bob and Jenny have the means for a college education. And we will see that you leave them with no outstanding medical bills.”
This was followed by such an incredulous look I knew instantly that it would be rejected out of hand. I was right.
“You would do that?” he asked, lapsing into wonderment. He looked to Biff for a denial. It was not forthcoming. Biff looked away. “A bribe? You are trying to bribe me? I don’t believe this. Biff, this is, is, monstrous. It’s evil!”
“No, no, Clay,” Biff stammered.
“You are trying to buy the truth,” Clayton said. I could see his skin take on a more ruddy color than I thought possible. He was outraged. I looked at the other men in the room, and for the first time I felt the tension becoming metallic, transmutable from the softness of copper to the brittleness of cast iron. Willy’s face was working, the muscles on his clean face jumping. Max was grinding his perfectly capped teeth. He took off his glasses, and made to polish them on his tie, an odd reaction.
“What is the sense of it?” I asked. “Why can’t you hold your peace? It is past, forgotten, futile,” I almost shouted, although my voice was soft, strangled.
“The Stake President and his counselors are coming to see me later this evening,” Clayton finally said. “I apologize to you, and I beg your forgiveness, and I forgive you for your attempt to . . . buy my soul.”
“There is no chance, then,” I finally said. “You will destroy us?”
“I’m sorry,” Clayton said. His head fell back on the pillow, his eyes pinned on me. “I will not die with a lie,” he finally said, and closed his eyes. There was the susurration of the oxygen as it trickled into his nostrils. And then there was a movement. Willy, with a look in his eyes of infinite sadness, quietly slid behind Biff. I saw his hand go to the oxygen cylinder, and he grasped the valve. He looked at Max, who shook his head negatively. Biff, head bowed, remained still. I was disbelieving. In the corner of the room behind Max, in an old armchair, was a pillow that I remembered clearly from our childhood days. It was a souvenir pillow from Hawaii. It was a garish red satin; a rich crimson neon, with yellow lettering, and had a long green fringe around the perimeter. It was hideous. It looked new, but I knew it was fifty years old. Upon the pillow, which was about eighteen inches square, was written “Remember Pearl Harbor.”
Max looked at me steadily, quietly. I knew. I nodded, briefly. He turned around and went to the chair and picked up the pillow. He took a few more steps, and was next to me. The four of us, two on each side of the bed, drew close. Clayton opened his eyes. It was a brief second before I saw some small recognition come into him. There was a silence, a shallow catch in our breathing. There was no sound coming from below. The world had swallowed the light.
Max extended the pillow, and each one of us reached over and grasped a corner.
“No,” Clayton said.
“May God forgive us,” Max said.
And then we lay on our hands.
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted.
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