Chapter 4: The Long Table

He woke at 11:14.

The clock sat on the table between the bed and the window with its face turned toward the pillow, so he didn’t have to lift his head to read it. He read it, shut his eyes, and read it again at 11:16.

The door to the hall was shut.

The other half of the bed was flat. The sheet had been pulled up over it and smoothed, and the pillow laid on top with no dent in it. Nathaniel’s patch was on the nightstand, stuck to the face of his phone. The fan in the bathroom was off, and he could hear it anyway.

His own pillow still smelled of him, faint, worked into the case. He lay still and breathed it in until he could breathe normally again.

Above his elbow there was a sore place the width of four fingers. The backs of his thighs were sore. His lower back had been sore for a week already.

What he had of the night was the water. Hot at the start, cold by the end of it, a hand flat between his shoulder blades the whole way through, and then the bed and the lamp off.

He got up.

Two glasses of water at the bathroom sink, and he drank the second one looking at himself in the mirror. Nothing had changed except the place on his arm. He pressed it with his thumb. It was no worse than it looked. His hair stood up on one side and he wet it down with his hand and it came up again.

The drawers had been restocked. Three shirts, folded the way things got folded in that house, and the jeans underneath them. He put on a shirt and the jeans and went back for the boots.

Down the back stairs with one hand on the rail.

The dining room had the table in it and not much else. The table had all three leaves in it, and sixteen chairs, and one place set at the end nearest the kitchen.

Mrs. Alcott stood at the sideboard with a napkin over her arm and her hands folded on the napkin. She brought the plate around and set it down in front of him. A slice of ham. Three potatoes cut in half. Green beans with the ends snapped off. She poured the water last, from a pitcher beaded cold, and set the glass by his right hand.

He ate a piece of potato.

The salt and the pepper were in the middle of the table. He looked at them for a while. Then he walked down past eight chairs and brought the salt back with him, and sat down, and salted the potatoes and the beans and the ham. Mrs. Alcott’s hands stayed on the napkin. Her eyes stayed on him.

He cut the ham into nine pieces and ate seven of them.

He laid the fork across the plate and left it there.

“Will Mr. Voss be home for dinner?”

She looked up.

Most nights the car came up the drive at 7:35.

She didn’t answer.

“Has anyone been by? In the last couple of days. From Mr. Voss’s father’s side.”

She looked at him a moment longer. Then she came around the end of the table and took his plate and carried it to the sideboard. Two pieces of ham on it yet, and a potato and a half.

He put his hands flat on the cloth.

She came back for the salt and the pepper and took them both and left the water. At the kitchen door she turned her head.

“The kitchen closes at four,” she said.

“Thank you.”

The door swung in and out and was still.

He drank the water. The clock over the sideboard said 12:08.

Nathaniel’s car came up the drive at 7:35 on the nights he came straight from the city. It came later on the nights he didn’t. That left seven hours and change, minus the quarter mile down to the gate and the quarter mile back.

He did not get up. The clock said 12:26. It said 12:33. Then he carried the glass to the sideboard and went out through the hall.

In the hall the long clock said 12:36. His watch said 12:35. It had been doing that for a week. He stood there a second and then went on through to the side door.

There were four sets of keys on the board by the door, on four hooks, and none of them had ever been handed to him. His coat was on the third hook, the thin one. He put it on and went out.

Gravel for a quarter mile, and the gravel had been raked that morning and still had the lines in it, and the light came off it so that he squinted even with the hedge between him and the sun. Halfway down he took the coat off and carried it over his arm.

The gatehouse had its window up. Doyle was inside with the radio down low and the book open on the sill.

“Afternoon,” Doyle said.

Doyle turned the book around on the sill and held out the pen without looking up. Ellis checked his watch — 12:41 — and wrote Ellis Ward, 12:41 in the book, and gave the pen back.

Doyle read it, the way he read it every time. Then he capped his pen.

“Not taking a car?”

“Walking.”

“It’s two and a half miles into town.”

“I know.”

Doyle put the pen down and left his hand on it. “They’re saying the old man’s still got his hand on the last of it,” he said. “That’s what I hear. Not from me.”

“I heard that too,” Ellis said.

“Long as the checks clear.” Doyle hit the button and the gate rolled back along its track.

Ellis went out through it and down the last of the drive.

The drive met the county road on a curve where you couldn’t see either way until you were standing in it. Past the hedge the light came down flat and white, and it was eighty-six if it was anything, in the middle of May, and the air smelled of cut grass and hot tar. The coat was over his arm. He turned left, downhill, toward town, and the tar gave under his boots at the edge of the road.