Two rows behind Edith he saw without pleasure the angular haunted features of James Doherty, and the opaque calm of the black-clad man on Doherty's left. It would be Father Bland's habit, Warner supposed, to show at all times that careful benignity smooth as quartz. Without pleasure, without much interest, he wondered in passing how it felt to be certain of one's own serene rightness.
Hunter's noise—oh, geography. Giving them the lie of the land.
"Those properties are on the outskirts of Shanesville proper. You go out Walton Road about three miles beyond the city line. There's a fork, and the right branch, Summer Avenue, reaches the village limits of Shanesville in a mile; Walton Road runs on south to Emmetville, Pritchett, other towns at the south end of the county. The Doherty place is near that right-angle fork of Summer and Walton, back from the road, its drive opening north on Summer Avenue. The house itself stands about a hundred yards west of the fork. The Chalmers house is south of Dohertys'—entrance on Walton Road about the same distance from the fork. Except for not very heavy traffic, the region's isolated. Peaceful. Closest neighbor is about a quarter-mile down Summer Avenue from Dohertys', a Mrs. Phelps Jason, who manages her twenty-acre place as a wild-life sanctuary. The back land behind it is unused pasture and woods belonging to the Chalmers property, which used to be operated as a farm.
"The Chalmers and Doherty houses are separated by a grove of trees that reaches all the way to Walton Road. On the west side of Dohertys' the woods are continuous, except for Mrs. Jason's place, to Shanesville. You can think of the Doherty place as a pocket cut out of woodland. The two families used a winding footpath through the grove for visiting back and forth. And you must imagine the region as it is in summer, leafed out so that the two houses are quite hidden from each other. Maple, pine, hemlock, oak—some very big pines at the edge of Walton Road.... In the grove near the property line there's a natural pond, fed by a brook from the Chalmers back land. Its outlet runs through the grove, into a culvert near the fork of the highway. The pond is small, oval, fifteen feet across at the widest, less than five feet deep last August because of several weeks of drouth.
"From the spur path or the pond, you can't see either house in summer. On the night Ann Doherty died there, it might have been possible to catch a glint of light from the Chalmers house, through the leaves. A hazy night, hot, a nearly full moon shining through the overcast. A still and oppressive night."
And that night, Warner remembered, the night of Ann Doherty's death and of Callista's longer and stranger ordeal, he had been at Mrs. Willoughby's discreet establishment on River Street, sharing a well-perfumed sheet with one of her young professionals. The memory remained clear because there had been no more such nights since August; the many other nights of hired love stretching back across thirty-odd years tended to blur and run together—here and there a face remembered, a word, a special instant of intensity, annoyance, amusement. The night in August had been delightful; relaxed, no attempt to achieve a counterfeit of youth, and no wish for it. Leisure of a sort was possible—it ought to be, at Mrs. Willoughby's rates!—and the girl, small, brown-eyed, pert, had been convincingly friendly; more so, once she understood that the Old Man, in spite of being sixty-eight and too fat, didn't care for elaborate variations but wanted only the bread-and-butter-steak-and-potatoes of natural intercourse. They had talked a while, he recalled, she comfortably smoking, braced up prettily naked on a thin elbow and chattering—perceptive enough, by the way, not to call him Daddy.... There might be no more such nights: a final recession of the need, or perhaps a suddenly yielding blood-vessel, a cancer taking over, a tumble in a slippery bathtub—never mind.... He could almost remember walking home from River Street (thinking very likely of Callista), but it must have been after the moon was down. A hazy night—"Out of the cradle endlessly rocking—"
T. J. Hunter was still pausing over a drink of water. Warner remembered—old things mainly, their intensity dissolved by distance in time; remembered, under the illusion of detachment that can make existence appear truly like a river, yourself able to look back upstream at nearly forgotten vistas: trees, meadow and town, eddies, dubious shoreline, floating trash. Warner shielded his face with his hand, closing away even Callista, as he had found he must sometimes do.
Boyhood was the sound of ocean, medicinal reek of kelp washed in on the night tide to wait for bare feet and a poking stick. It was the breakers, green ridges advancing out of the ever-distressed Atlantic and growing a snowy froth, never pausing yet seeming to pause when the froth spilled over the crest. Then a toppling, crash, inward flow. A receding; a mysterious acceptance of an end, soft hiss and sigh and aftermath, swirl of light water become thin and harmless on the sand.
Boyhood was fishing boats and Montauk Light, gravely busy clam-diggers, Manuelo whom Cecil wasn't supposed to play with. It was the unseen journey of hollow-voiced titans in the fog; pressure and majestic riot of storm. It was an afternoon of watching the disappearance of an unknown sail over the southern curve of the earth. School, too. Helpless rage at long division; Papa's dry-goods store that was always going to do a little better next year; Manuelo in the empty boathouse showing off how many times he could do it in half an hour; Great-aunt Harriet who turned up every Thanksgiving, who liked to announce abruptly out of her world of deafness that she'd been in Ford's Theatre when Lincoln was shot—then she would read lips a minute while the company hollered how wonderful that was, and then, eating loudly and cheerfully, she would slip back contented into the mist of ancient times. Boyhood was windy nights, and surf hammering the muffled drums of sand a quarter-mile away; stillness also in the dark, and moonlight pouring into another midnight of black water. Tide inexorably rising to clean away the dead jellyfish and driftwood, blotting out barefoot stories written on the low-tide beach; clear sunshine over the whitecaps; and long gray days.