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FIFTY-TWO

At one o’clock that morning, Jud Crandall’s telephone rang, shrilling in the empty house, starting him awake. In his doze he was dreaming, and in the dream he was twenty-three again, sitting on a bench in the B&A coupling shed with George Chapin and Rene Michaud, the three of them passing around a bottle of Georgia Charger whiskey – jumped-up moonshine with a revenue stamp on it – while outside a nor’easter blew its randy shriek over the world, silencing all that moved, including the rolling stock of the B&A railroad. So they sat and drank around the potbellied Defiant, watching the red glow of the coals shift and change behind the cloudy isinglass, casting diamond-shaped flame-shadows across the floor, telling the stories which men hold inside for years like the junk treasures boys store under their beds, the stories they store up for nights such as this. Like the glow of the Defiant, they were dark stories with a glow of red at the center of each, and the wind to wrap them round. He was twenty-three, and Norma was very much alive (although in bed alone now, he had no doubt; she would not expect him home this wild night), and Rene Michaud was telling a story about a Jew peddler in Bucksport who— That was when the phone began to ring and he jerked up in his chair, wincing at the stiffness in his neck, feeling a sour heaviness drop into him like a stone – it was, he thought, all those years between twenty-three and eighty, all fifty-seven of them, dropping into him at once. And on the heels of that thought: You been sleepin’, boyo. That’s no way to run this railroad … not tonight.

He got up, holding himself straight against the stiffness that had also settled into his back, and crossed to the phone.

It was Rachel.

‘Hello?’

‘Jud? Has he come home?’

‘No,’ Jud said. ‘Rachel, where are you? You sound closer.’

‘I am closer,’ Rachel said. And although she did sound closer somehow, there was a distant humming on the wire. It was the sound of the wind, somewhere between here and wherever she was. The wind was high tonight. That sound that always made Jud think of dead voices, sighing in chorus, maybe singing something just a little too far away to be made out. ‘I’m at the rest area at Biddeford on the Maine Turnpike.’ ‘Biddeford!’

‘I couldn’t stay in Chicago. It was getting to me, too … whatever it was that got Ellie, it was getting me, too. And you feel it. It’s in your voice.’ ‘Ayuh.’ He picked a Chesterfield out of his pack and slipped it into the corner of his mouth. He popped a wooden match alight and watched it flicker as his hand trembled. His hands hadn’t trembled; not before this nightmare had commenced, anyway. Outside, he heard that dark wind gust. It took the house in its hand and shook it.

Power’s growing. I can feel it.

Dim horror in his old bones. It was like spun glass, fine and fragile.

‘Jud, please tell me what’s going on!’

He supposed she had a right to know – a need to know. And he supposed he would tell her. Eventually he would tell her the whole story. He would show her the chain that had been forged link by link. Norma’s heart attack, the death of the cat, Louis’s question – has anyone ever buried a person up there? – Gage’s death … and God alone knew what further link Louis might be forging right now. Eventually he would tell her. But not over the phone.

‘Rachel, how come you to be on the turnpike instead of in a plane?’

She explained how she had missed her connecting flight at Boston. ‘I got an Avis car, but I’m not making the time I thought I would. I got a little bit lost coming from Logan to the turnpike, and I’ve only got into Maine. I don’t think I can get there until dawn. But Jud … please. Please tell me what’s happening. I’m so scared, and I don’t even know why.’ ‘Rachel, listen to me,’ Jud said. ‘You drive on up to Portland and lay over, do you hear me? Check into a motel there and get some—’ ‘Jud I can’t do th—’

‘—and get some sleep. Feel no fret, Rachel. Something may be happening here tonight, or something may not. If something is – if it’s what I think – then you wouldn’t want to be here anyway. I can take care of it, I think. I better be able to take care of it, because what’s happening is my fault. If nothing’s happening, then you get here this afternoon, and that will be fine. I imagine Louis will be real glad to see you.’ ‘I couldn’t sleep tonight, Jud.’

‘Yes,’ he said, reflecting that he had believed the same thing – hell, Peter had probably believed the same thing on the night Jesus had been taken into custody. Sleeping on sentry duty. ‘Yes, you can. Rachel, if you doze off behind the wheel of that damn rent-a-car and go off the road and get yourself killed, what’s going to happen to Louis then? And Ellie?’ ‘Tell me what’s going on! If you tell me that, Jud, maybe I’ll take your advice. But I have to know!’ ‘When you get to Ludlow, I want you to come here,’ Jud said. ‘Not over to your house. Come here first. I’ll tell you everything I know, Rachel. And I am watching for Louis.’ ‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘No, ma’am. Not over the phone. I won’t. Rachel, I can’t. You go on, now. Drive up to Portland and lay over.’ There was a long, considering pause.

‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘I have had some trouble keeping my eyes open. Maybe you’re right. Jud, tell me one thing. Tell me how bad it is.’ ‘I can handle it,’ Jud said calmly. ‘Things have got as bad as they’re going to get.’ Outside the headlights of a car appeared, moving slowly. Jud half-stood, watching it, and then sat down again when it accelerated past the Creed house and out of sight.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘I guess. The rest of this drive has seemed like a stone on my head.’ ‘Let the stone roll off, my dear,’ Jud said. ‘Please. Save yourself for tomorrow. Things here will be all right.’ ‘You promise you’ll tell me the whole story?’

‘Yes. We’ll have us a beer and I’ll tell you the whole thing.’

‘Goodbye, then,’ Rachel said. ‘For now.’

‘For now,’ Jud agreed. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Rachel.’

Before she could say anything else, Jud hung up the telephone.

He thought there were caffeine pills in the medicine cabinet, but he could not find them. He put the rest of the beer back in the refrigerator – not without regret – and settled for a cup of black coffee. He took it back to the bay window and sat down again, sipping and watching.

The coffee – and the conversation with Rachel – kept him awake and alert for three quarters of an hour, but then he began to nod once more.

No sleeping on sentry duty, old man. You let it get hold of you; you bought something and now you have to pay for it. So no sleeping on sentry duty.

He lit a fresh cigarette, drew deep, and coughed an old man’s rasping cough. He put the cigarette on the groove of the ashtray and rubbed his eyes with both hands. Outside a ten-wheeler blasted by, running lights glaring, cutting through the windy, uneasy night.

He caught himself dozing off again, snapped awake, and abruptly slapped himself across the face, forehand and backhand, causing his ears to ring. Now terror awakened in his heart, a stealthy visitor who had broken into that secret place.

It’s puttin’ me to sleep … hypnotizin’ me … somethin’. It doesn’t want me awake. Because he’ll be comin’ back pretty soon. Yeah, I feel that. And it wants me out of the play.

‘No,’ he said grimly. ‘No way at all. You hear me? I’m puttin’ a stop to this. This has gone far enough.’ The wind whined around the eaves, and the trees on the other side of the road shook their leaves in hypnotic patterns. His mind went back to that night around the Defiant stove in the coupling shed, which had stood right where the Evarts Furniture Mart stood in Brewer now. They had talked the night away, he and George and Rene Michaud, and now he was the only one left; Rene crushed between two boxcars on a stormy night in March of 1939, George Chapin dead of a heart attack just last year. Of so many, he was the only one left, and the old get stupid. Sometimes the stupidity masquerades as kindness, and sometimes it masquerades as pride – a need to tell old secrets, to pass things on, to pour from the old glass to the new one, to … So dis Jew peddler comes in and he says I got something you never seen before. These pos’cards, dey jus look like wimmin in bathin’ suits until you rub dem wit a wet cloth, and den— Jud’s head nodded. His chin settled slowly, gently, against his chest.

—dey’s as nakid as the day dey was born! But when dey dry, the clo’es, dey come back on! And dat ain’t all! I got— Rene telling this story in the coupling shed, leaning forward, smiling, and Jud holds the bottle – he feels the bottle and his hand closes around it on thin air.

In the ashtray, the cigarette-ash on the end of the old man’s cigarette grew longer. At last the cigarette tipped forward into the ashtray and burned out, its shape recalled in the neat roll of ash like a rune.

Jud slept.

And when the tail lights flashed outside and Louis turned the Honda Civic into his driveway some forty minutes later and drove it into the garage, Jud did not hear, nor stir, or awaken, any more than Peter awoke when the Roman soldiers came to take a tramp named Jesus into their custody.