A Thousand Bottles

Vera counted the bottles in the second week because the second week was when she stopped being able to sleep, and counting was the only thing she had ever found that stopped her mind from running on.

She did it honestly, which is to say she did not force the door. She waited for the afternoon, when Otis was at the co-op and the bandaged man was out on one of his walks, and she went up with the spare key on the ring in her apron and she stood in the doorway with the door open behind her and counted what she could see, the way a person reads a room from the hall.

The crates had been opened and flattened and stacked against the window. The paper was in the stove. The bottles were on the floor in rows, and she counted a hundred and forty on the visible side of the bed and stopped counting because there were more rows behind the bed and more under it and more along the wall by the closet, and the whole of it sat in straw and smelled of a smell that was not one smell. It was kerosene. It was the swimming pool building in September. It was the dentist. It was the inside of the mill's paint shop, and Vera had grown up in the mill's paint shop and she had not smelled it in sixteen years, and she stood in that doorway and was, for about four seconds, twelve years old.

Small bottles, mostly. Brown glass with black screw caps. Green glass with ground stoppers. A few tall white plastic jugs. Three big carboys — five-gallon glass, in straw jackets, the kind they used to sell spring water in — and one of them was standing in the middle of the floor with a glass tube down into it and a rubber bulb on the tube, and beside it on a folded towel sat a small steel pan and a thermometer and a neat row of six glass syringes, and there was no needle in any of them, which was the detail Vera would mention to the deputy and which he would write down without knowing what it meant.

On the dresser, in the place where most men keep a photograph, there were three notebooks. Black and white marbled composition books, the kind every school in the county buys by the case, and each of them had a rubber band around it and each of them had a strip of masking tape on the front with handwriting on it, small and level and in a hand that made Vera think of the labels on the fuse box in her father's cellar.

Under the notebooks, flat, there was an envelope. Vera could see the corner of it and it had a stamp on it and no address — a state parks stamp, and she would know the envelope again by that stamp — and she looked at it for a while because she had decided on the walk up the stairs that she would look at what was in the open, and she would not touch anything, and she would not lie about having been in the room.

She did not touch anything. On her way out she stopped, because the lamp by the bed was on and the room was bright enough that she could see under the bed, and what was under the bed was a nest of paper: the bandage wrapping. That is what it was. A pile of used gauze, six or seven inches deep, gray-white and stiff, all of it cut or torn rather than unwound, cut along one side as though the man cut it off himself each day with scissors held the wrong way round, and on the floor beside the bed the boards had been wiped and wiped and wiped, and the varnish had gone.

She went out and locked the door behind her with the spare key and put the spare key back on the ring, and then she went down to the kitchen and got the scrub bucket and went back up and stood in the hall for a while and did not go in again. There was a smell in that room that her whole house now had, and she had spent a week telling herself it was the bleaches.

At supper she said, "He's got acid in there."

Otis said, "What kind of acid."

"I don't know what kind of acid, Otis. There's a crate with ACID written on it in four-inch letters and it's in my upstairs room over my dining room."

"We could ask him."

"We are not going to ask him," Vera said, "we are going to find out what happens to a floor when you spill acid on it," and she got the vinegar out of the cupboard and went up to the second-floor hall and, while Otis watched from the bottom of the stairs with the expression of a man watching weather, she poured four inches of vinegar onto the floorboards in the hall outside the bandaged man's door and they all watched it do nothing whatsoever.

"He's not using vinegar," Otis said.

"No," Vera agreed, "he is not using vinegar."

Pastor Ellery Gibbs came on Wednesday, which was the day he came to everyone, because Wednesday was the day he made his visits and because Ruth Gibbs was at the church with the altar guild and Ellery had found, in the fifteen years since he had come to Bellhaven, that a visiting minister is a man with a job and a husband is a man with an errand, and he was much better at the job.

Vera told him at the door. She told him the short version, the version with no trays and no tracks in the yard and no vinegar, and Ellery Gibbs listened with his hat in both hands the way he had listened to her for fifteen years, and when she was done he said, "May I," and Vera said, "Try," and he went up.

He was up there eleven minutes. When he came down, his mouth was set in a line Vera had never seen, and the professional calm was gone from his eyes, and he stood at the bottom of the stairs and did not speak for a moment, and that was the first time in fifteen years Vera had ever seen the man take a breath before he talked.

"He says he's been ill," Ellery said.

"He says he's been ill."

"He says it isn't anything that a doctor of souls can do anything about, and he said it pleasantly enough, and he said it while he was standing at the top of the stairs with his hand on the door, and Vera, there was no hand on the door."

"He wears gloves."

"There was no door," Ellery said, and then he stood in the hall and looked at his hat and put it on his head and took it off again.

"That's the kind of thing a person says," Vera said.

"Yes."

"Ellery."

"I'd have sworn the man was six feet to my left," Ellery Gibbs said, "and he was on my right and he was talking with his mouth an inch from my ear, and the whole time he was doing it I was looking at the top of the stairs where nobody was standing and there was a coat on the newel post that was standing up by itself, and I have prayed the whole way down this staircase and I would like to go home now."

And he went home, and he did not tell Ruth, and the next night his house was robbed, which is a thing that Bellhaven remembered as one thing and that Ellery Gibbs remembered as two: the money, and the fact that whoever had been in his study had known exactly which drawer, and had read the parish registers and left them open to the page with the building fund.

The money stopped being enough on the Thursday.

Vera was doing the register, which was a ledger now, because the machine had stopped working and nobody in Bellhaven could be found to care, and the bandaged man came down into the office and stood in the doorway and said, "I want to order some things."

"From where?"

"From whoever. Corliss's. Trask's. I'll write it down."

"Corliss closes at six."

"He doesn't have to open," the bandaged man said. "He has to leave it on the step and take the money off the step and that is all he has to do."

Vera looked at him — at the wrapping, at the dark glasses, at the bulge where the nose was — and asked, because it had been building in her for eleven days and nobody in the house was going to ask it: "What is all this?"

There was a pause. She had learned the pause by then. It was not a thinking pause. It was the pause of a man who has a stack of answers and is choosing the one that will end the conversation fastest.

"I'm working," he said.

"On what?"

"On getting out of this."

He wrote the list at her desk, sitting down, leaning over the paper with his left shoulder high so that she could not see the tip of the pen, which she noticed; and the list was in that small level hand, and it was four things long, and Vera read it upside down and did not understand three of the words on it, and the fourth was the word for the kind of battery they sell for a boat.

"I'll want it delivered here. In the afternoon. Left on the porch."

"They'll want to see who's paying."

"They'll be paid in cash," he said, "before they see anybody," and he paid her, and it was a hundred dollars, and it was a hundred dollars she had already spent on the previous week's list, and when he had gone back up the stairs Vera sat in the office and did the arithmetic three times and got the same answer three times, which was that the man in her upstairs room was now paying for his groceries, his crates and his batteries out of cash that he had brought into town in the same stack it was still coming out of, and that the stack had not gone down, and that in her experience there was exactly one kind of money in the world that behaves like that, and she had never in her life expected to have it in her house.