A Good High Place

Chapter 3

c H A P T e R T H R e e Ken offered to take care of the yard in Birmingham until i could tie up loose ends and get the house sold. A steady, apologetic sort of man, the kind who looks at you long. older than me by five years or so. Thing is, the only men who interested me after duke died happened to be younger. Henry, for instance. Good dancer. Great hands—the most telling feature about a person. How coordinated they are, how clean, how creative, how used to hard work, how vain, how relaxed, how generous. How gentle, too. i remember seeing pictures once, paintedintheMiddleAges,ofthesoulleavingthebody:Thepaintings depicted which parts of the body the soul was thought to inhabit while the person was alive. i’m not sure about that, but i’ve studied more than my share of dead people over the years, and this is what i think: a man with fleshless palms invariably has a soul to match them. Henry’s hands, strong but well shaped, gave me involuntary muscle spasms in my right leg. Got it shaking uncontrollably, something that hadn’t happened before and hasn’t happened since. He teased me that it was like a dog thumping its foot whenever you found the right spot, a comparison i didn’t appreciate. i couldn’t make up my mind whether i found his affect on me annoying or wildly erotic. He was thirty at the time to my thirty-eight, and i told myself then i didn’t have the nerve, but that wasn’t the reason. 22 L.E. Kimball The truth is it was too damned hard to slide over the first time. Some days i wished i could say my husband had been an odious sort of man, a reprobate, that he swilled whiskey and took to beating me on occasion. But duke was nothing like that. He laughed a lot, wiggled his ears for the kids in the neighborhood. He was a hard worker. i don’t remember who started calling him duke, but it seemed a dubious improvement over dewey, his given name. We were married seven years. Most of that time he was oakland county coroner, which was interesting if you could overlook the corpses in the back parlor and the recurrent nightmares he had that he was lying in the back room of his own house, cold, rotting, and devoid of character, one more body he needed to “get to.” But nothing like that happened. They took him straight to White chapel cemetery instead. only thirty-five, he died of Hodgkin’s disease before we’d gotten to the core of anything—other than having our son, dick, of course. So my marriage, like everything else about my life, has an arrested quality, like another truly fine but partly digested meal. cAP AlWAYS SAYS GraSSHoPPeRS are best gathered before sunup and put in old cigar boxes. And jars within jars are best for attracting bloodsuckers, baited with great oozing slabs of liver. Minnows and grubs are easy to come by, most anytime, too, though minnows prove to be trouble because the water needs constant changing. And hellgrammites are things i don’t even like to think about. Night is best for night crawlers, of course, unless it’s raining, as it’s doing now—then anytime is good. Wesellbait.Whichisfine.exceptthatiamaflyfisherandiconsider a bait fisher the lowest life-form on the planet. lower than the worms. Tonight cap and Uncle George are going at it. i remember the fast staccato jabs Uncle George delivers under the influence of what appears a justified fervor and too much alcohol and the subdued, legato replies of cap who has, even then, assumed a defensive posture, head turned slightly away and held low. i can’t see him from A GOOD HIGH PLACE 23 upstairs, but i know how his body looks. The words they say to each other float up to me as if they are lighter than air instead of words with crippling weight to them. Words like sin and responsibility are spoken often on either side of the fracas. Goddamn it, ira, you live in your own damn world, you do, i hear Uncle George say. You do what suits you with no regard for anyone, not even your girls. Always some reference to cap’s being a lousy father. cap...