The Hour

The thing that comes after that is a name I had seen once before, at the bottom of a page in a lawyer's office in Pittsburgh, in a column of names in a hand that was not his.

Bess.

"Her name was Bess," he said, and then he told it standing up, because he would not sit down again. She had been young when it happened, and the man she was living with had turned up dead.

The county built a case out of her temper, her fists, and the fact that she had been seen. It looked like a life sentence until the lawyer the family kept — the family, the mine, the family up the ridge — got her off with a witness nobody could shake and a piece of evidence nobody could produce.

The child was born in the middle of the trial. The child was Rudd's. The child was given away to a woman at the top of the hill who had a house and no children and one hour she would not leave.

The arrangement was made by the lawyer, and the lawyer was Harlan Voss; the woman who carried the tray of paper into his office that day in Pittsburgh is the mother, and she has a scar through her lip, and I had never asked her name, and neither, so far as I could tell, had anybody else.

I understood all of it standing up, which I want to record, because I have never since understood anything standing up.

"She did it," said Rudd, before I could ask him. "I'll not dress it up for you. The man was a dog to her and she did it, and I paid the lawyer, and I would pay him again tomorrow."

"That woman," said Rudd, "took the child because she wanted a weapon. She wasn't hiding it. It was the deal."

"Then why not go to her?"

"Because I'm not fit to." He said it without self-pity, as a man states the tonnage of a load. Then he stopped, and he looked at me for a while, and I understood that something of mine had just become the price of the rest of it.

"You've been up that hill more than I have," he said. "Tell me one thing she said to you."

I had never told anybody. I had carried it in a coat pocket for eight years, the way you carry a stone.

"She told me I would never have her," I said. "She said it the way a doctor reads out a date."

Rudd nodded slowly, the way he had nodded at me in the ditch.

"Look at me," he said. "I'm a man with a cuff-mark on my ankle and a name the county says twice a year. You think that girl walks into a room and says my father is that? What she'd get out of knowing me is nothing. What she'd get out of the money is what she already has, and she's had it, and I paid for that too, because the woman up the hill made a bargain with me before you were born and I kept it, and the bargain was: she raises the girl, I pay for the girl, and I stay where I am, and the paper on my ankle says where I am allowed to stand."

"Does Vera know?"

"She knows nothing. That's the entire point of her." He looked at the radiator. "And she's going to marry that Sutter man, and I can't stop it, and neither can you, because the woman up the hill has been building that all along."

I asked him where he was staying. He said he had a room out past the yards and a car that was not in his name, and that he had gone up the ridge the week before and stood at the bottom of the drive at Stillhour for an hour with his hands in his pockets, and had not gone in, and would go in. I did not ask him what he meant by it. I have wished since that I had.

At the door he said one more thing, with his back to me.

"He said, 'You should have drowned in that ditch.' That's what I wouldn't say to you in the room. He said that to me the night you brought me the pie, and I have carried it, and now you've got it, and I'd thank you not to want any more."

Then he told me what he had come in from the street to tell me, and he told it flat, the way a man reads out a docket.

"Lyle Deakin is alive. He has been a clerk in a state office for nine years under a name that is not quite his own. He is in this city. He has stood in your doorway twice this month, and he has not come up the stairs because he has not yet decided whether what he wants from me is money or the ending of me."

I did not ask him how he knew. I have thought since that he knew because the man had told him so himself, on the telephone, in a voice I never heard.

I went up the ridge the next morning and stood in the room with the clocks and said everything to Mrs. Ashby.

She heard me out. That was the terrible part; she heard out every word, sitting with her one shoe on, and when I was finished she looked at me with something that was almost affection.

"So you have found it out," she said. "I have been waiting most of my life for somebody in this hollow to find something out."

"The boy before me," I said. "What happened to him."

"He was my sister's grandson, and he cried on the third visit." She said it the way she said everything, as a fact about the weather. "I sent him down the hill in his uncle's car and that branch of the family has not been in this house since, and I have not missed them."

"You made a weapon out of a child."

"I made a lady out of a child. There was no other way to make one. You have to have been started wrong to be finished like that. She is the only thing I have ever finished." She touched the silver watch pinned to her breast — the one ticking object in the house. "I was going to be married at half past nine in the morning on a Tuesday in April, and at nine o'clock the night before I was given a note, and I have never in my life read anything else. Do you know what I have done since? I have sat here and I have kept the hour. Every clock in this house. That is not madness, boy, that is housekeeping."

"Then you can stop keeping it."

"Nobody stops," said Mrs. Ashby. "Not me and not you. You will go on standing in halls with your hands in your pockets for the rest of your life waiting to be chosen by somebody who has already chosen."

And then she stood up out of the chair, which she had not done in front of me in fifteen years, and the veil went back off her shoulder into the fire.

I have had twenty years to think about whether she did it on purpose and I have decided that the honest answer is that it does not matter, and that the two answers are the same answer. The white went up like paper. She did not make a sound. I got my arms around her and got her down onto the boards and I beat at the cloth with my hands, both hands, and Emmet's glove was not there, and the smell in that room was something I will not describe. On the way out I took the little brass clock off the bracket by the window. I do not know why, except that it was the only thing in that room small enough to be saved by one pair of hands.

The clocks did not care. Every hour in that house went on saying twenty past nine while a woman burned in front of them.