John D. MacDonald

That Strangest Month of All

Now the earth had turned a little bit past summer, and the elms stood tall and proudly aflame. On the orchard slope behind the house the apple trees had lost half their leaves. It was a day of incomparable stillness and clarity, with the morning sun climbing toward noon.

After the school bus had picked up the children and after Paul had left for the office, she had hurried through her housework, changed to the treasured and threadbare yellow sun suit, and with stubborn effort wrestled the old drop-leaf table out of the cellar and into the middle of the backyard. Paul had removed the paint and a lot of the varnish. She sanded it, the sun hot on her back, taking pleasure in the texture, the rough whispering sound.

She was a wife named Susan, a slim tanned woman with a soft cap of black hair, a lovely face, but with a brooding inward look, an air of containment. She was called Susan. Not Sue. Not Suzy.

Autumn had always been for her a time of haunting nostalgia, a longing for something she could not even identify. A time for what Paul called her “gypsy” mood. It left the children uncertain and Paul troubled. They seemed to sense she was off in some place where they could not reach her.

She straightened in the sunlight to rest her back and looked around at her world, at the white gracious farmhouse, at the small red barn, at the country road and the wood lot to the left of the house and the pasture to the right. Beyond the pasture she could see the dark blue patch of the roof of the Carter house through the bright trees. When she looked to the northwest, she could see the smog that tainted the blue sky over the industrial city 14 miles away, and she visualized Paul there, with the gray steel desk and the dark green rug and the discreet buzz of the intercom.

She folded a piece of sandpaper into a thin strip and sat on her heels and began to work on one of the table legs. She heard a truck and glanced toward the road and saw the pink-and-blue diaper-service truck heading back toward the crossroads. A little while later the mail came, and she walked down to the roadside box after the carrier had driven away.

Just as she put the mail on the back porch to take in later, she became aware of a curious pulsation in the air. And a helicopter, flying low, came over the tops of the pines at the crest of the hill beyond the orchard. It passed directly over the house. She saw two men in the gleaming bubble, men in maroon helmets. Beyond the house the helicopter made a tilting turn and headed toward the crossroads... Last winter they had used helicopters when those children had been lost in the woods beyond Hingham Creek.

A half hour later, just a few minutes before noon, she heard the sirens. There seemed to be several of them in a far forlorn chorus, quite out of place in the autumn countryside.

She searched the horizons for smoke and saw none. For a time she thought they were coming down the country road, but when the sound began to fade, she realized they were over on the Chamberland Road that paralleled the country road one mile to the south.

She decided she could finish the table before fixing herself some lunch.

As she worked, she became aware of a curious feeling of restlessness, a tiny threshold of irritation. She turned suddenly and looked behind her and found herself staring into the eyes of a man who stood a dozen feet behind her. She looked at him and knew the meaning then of the helicopter and the sirens.

He was big, as big and hard and solid as the trunk of one of the old oaks. He wore gray denim coveralls that seemed to be some sort of uniform. They were muddy, and the mud was drying.

She looked into the man’s face and saw an animal emptiness that stopped her breath. The shaved head and the hard high cheekbones and the flattened cartilage of the nose gave him almost a cartoonist’s version of brutality. But what horrified her was the slackness of the lower part of his face and the pale uncomprehending opacity of his eyes.

He held his right hand out from his side awkwardly. It was puffed, with blood on the swollen fingers. He held a stout length of broken branch in his left hand. He wore crude heavy shoes caked with mud. He stood there, not stolidly but with a look of mad nimbleness, as if the body could pounce — a blind destructive organism that carried with it, as an unwilling passenger, the numbed mind.

She remembered a long-ago time when she had been cornered by a vicious dog. She had stood very still then, a small and frightened girl, sensing that any attempt to run would be the necessary trigger.

She stood up slowly, turning to face him squarely as she did so, and held her hands in such a way that he could see they were empty. And she stretched her tense mouth into what she hoped was a smile of reassurance. And she thought she saw a faint flickering of awareness behind the deadness of the pale eyes.

He turned his head and stared at the house and then looked back at her. The heavy lips worked silently for a few moments, and then he pointed toward the house with the stick he held and said in a rusty rumble: “Who? Who?”

“I am alone,” she said. “Alone.”

“Alone.” He mouthed the word with heavy difficulty.

And once again the distant keening of the sirens became audible above the sounds of the birds. He raised his head sharply, the flattened nostrils widening. He quickly put the club under his right arm and closed his left hand around her upper arm and hurried her toward the house. His palm was as rough and hard as the bark of a tree.

He pushed her into the kitchen and went in after her. He made little sound with his heavy shoes, but the old boards creaked under his weight. He stood and seemed to be listening. She heard the sirens fade away. And even as she stood there in her terror, one part of her mind thought quite calmly, saying: “This is the way it happens.”

He took two quick strides to the sink and turned the water on and stared at her for a moment; then he bent toward the faucet to gulp the water that ran into his cupped hand. When he heard her open the cupboard, he whirled around.

She took the glass out and held it toward him, trying to keep it steady. She took two slow steps toward him. And then he took the glass from her and filled it and drank and filled it again and drank and put it on the drainboard.

He stood for a moment with his eyes shut, and her sudden pity was as keen and unexpected as a knife. He was exhausted. His hurt hand was horrid. Dumb creature in pain. And what of all the tales of the thorn in the pad of the lion? Were they true?

“Your hand,” she said, forming the words distinctly. “You need something done for it. Your hand.”

He lifted his hand and looked at it. “Hand,” he said. “Gun.” And she saw that it must indeed have been a bullet through the middle of the hand.

She moved tentatively toward the doorway and stopped abruptly when he said “No!” and half-raised the club.

“Medicine,” she said. “For your hand. It’s bleeding.”

He stared at his hand again. He looked at her.

She moved toward the doorway again, backed toward it. He followed her to the medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom.

She found gauze and the tube of antiseptic salve. He thrust his injured hand out and held it before her. She used the salve liberally, risked taking his wrist and turning his hand over, and did not look up into his face — knowing that if she looked into his face, she could not touch his wrist; telling herself that it was just a hand, a hurt thing. She wound it in gauze and taped the gauze in place.

He followed her back into the kitchen.

She pointed to a chair. “Sit down. Please sit down.”

With less hesitation he sat in the chair.

In the chair where Paul ate his eggs and drank his coffee and read his paper. Competent, efficient, mannerly, adjusted Paul — man so suited to his environment. She thought: “And for you there is no place. No place in this world.”

She saw his mouth begin to work, to test the shape of the words he wanted to say: “Thank you.”

“You are welcome.” So perhaps it was all true about lions and thorns. Now that his eyes were a little more alive, she saw that it was a good face, had once been a good face when the mind behind it had been alive.

“Who... comes... here?”

She looked then at the kitchen clock and saw that it was after one. The school bus would drop the children off at five of three. And they’d come racing in, hungry and hooting. And at any disturbance like that he would kill.

With small cold fingers tight around her heart she despised herself. A great game of thorns and lions!

Suddenly the extension phone in the kitchen started to ring. He was up and in the middle of the room, club in hand, in one explosion of effort.

She started to move toward the phone.

“No!” he said.

“Maybe it is my husband. Do you understand? If he doesn’t get an answer, he’ll come home right away.” She put her hand on the wall phone. “I won’t tell anybody about you.”

When she saw the hesitancy, she picked up the phone and said hello. He moved close behind her. He circled the back of her neck with thumb and fingers and leaned close to the phone, his head beside hers. His touch made her shudder.

“What took you so long to answer, honey?” Paul asked.

“I was out in the yard, sanding the table.”

“Oh. I heard the news about the man hunt. Have you heard about it?”

“I’ve heard helicopters and sirens, but I didn’t turn on the news.”

“That’s just like you, baby. I want you to stay in the house and keep the doors shut. And locked. You hear? Don’t even bother to get the table in. They think they’ve got him cornered down by Hingham Creek, and they’re moving in on him, but you never can tell.”

“Who is it they’re after?” she asked and felt a sudden increase in the pressure of the hand on her neck.

“Oh, it’s some madman from the state farm. They thought he was harmless, but he wasn’t. He killed three of them — two patients and an attendant. The police got one shot at him early this morning, but they lost him in the woods. Keep the doors locked, honey, and keep the kids in the house when they get home. ’By.” He hung up.

Susan hung up and stood there, unmoving, the powerful hand on the back of her neck. After a few moments it was removed.

She stood near the table. “What will you do if they come here?”

The big brown hand closed on the club, and he said, “Hit!”

You must think, she told herself. This is an almost mindless thing. You can’t run from him, even when the school bus stops. You can’t save everything. So it comes to a choice. At any cost to you. Susan, you must warn them. Before the school bus comes.

She said, “I know where you can hide.”

There was no comprehension in his heavy stare.

“Come with me. I can hide you where they won’t find you.” She backed toward the doorway. “Come with me.”

He followed her. She felt him, heavy on the stairs behind her. She touched her cigarettes and matches in the pocket of the sun suit. She walked by her bedroom and the children’s rooms to the narrow stairway to the attic. He followed her up the second flight of stairs.

The carton was where she expected it to be, with the cans of paint, the bottle of turpentine. She walked close to the box, to the dormer window, and forced a smile and said, “It’s hot up here. I will open a window.” She waited and saw no protest and turned and opened the small window, propping up the bottom sash with the stick on the sill. There was no screen.

It was her plan to snatch the bottle of turpentine and smash it on the floor between them and drop a match into it and then climb quickly through the small window. The flames would keep him from following her. She would cross the roof and drop to the sun-porch roof and from there to the ground. She would be running down the road to the Carter house before he could run through the house and out to stop her. With the rubber soles on her sandals she should have enough traction on the steep roof.

“Dear house!” she thought. Soon the bus would be leaving the school. Yes, in this cause she could burn this dear place.

“You can sleep there,” she said and pointed into a far corner and stood for endless seconds before his big head turned slowly.

She snatched the bottle and smashed it on the floor, and the fumes were pungent. She had the matches out, and she ripped one out and tried to strike it, and it would not light. And she tried again and failed and knew there would be no third chance. She turned and thrust herself recklessly through the small opening out onto the hot sunlit slant of the shingled roof, scraping her thigh against the window frame — slid in panic toward the steep drop, trying to stop herself with hands and heels.

She saw a standpipe to her right and caught it in her hand; then she turned onto her knees and, holding the standpipe, looked back at the window in time to see him kick both sashes out of the frame. They slid and clattered down the roof and fell below.

The man and woman looked at each other. Gone was the chance to tame the lion. Their eyes were 10 feet apart.

He ducked out of sight, and a moment later a heavy can of paint struck the standpipe inches from her face. The force of the impact stung her hands. The can burst, and a great splash of orange paint spread across the roof.

“Paul used that to paint the boat trailer,” she thought. And she ducked as the next can whistled by her head, scrambled her way diagonally across the roof, then upward till she reached the peak, where the window was below, and he could not see her. She held tightly to the television aerial.

She saw a car coming, a woman driving. She waved frantically. She shouted, “Help me!” The woman, a stranger, saw her and waved back in a neighborly way and drove on down the empty road.

He came slowly and carefully out the window. He looked up at her. But the heavy shoes slipped on the shingles. He climbed back through the window.

“Now,” she thought, “he’ll take off his shoes and come after me. And maybe autumn has been the sad time for me always because, by some strange prevision, I knew that it would end in autumn. And it ends without dignity, ludicrously, on a roof.”

He began to back out the window again, feet bare and grimy. And she heard the faint high fluttering and looked up and saw the helicopter; and the tears ran down her face. She had the feeling she would wave in desperation, and they would wave back, and one of them would say to the other, “See the woman on the roof fixing her television aerial, Joe?”

So, holding with one hand, she sprawled on the roof and hoped she looked hurt or dead. The helicopter made one swing around the house and came back and hovered over her, 15 feet above her, and she was made breathless by the wind of its big protective pinions. She pulled herself up to the ridge and looked down the opposite side of the roof. He was gone.

As she wondered about that, the helicopter suddenly veered and tilted away and swooped like a great slow hawk. She saw him then, running barefoot across the back yard, past the sanded table, and up through the orchard while the helicopter kept behind and above him without effort. By the time it had reached the pines beyond the orchard, the sound of it had faded enough for her to hear the sirens, louder each moment.

She inched her way down the roof and climbed back in through the window. In the back of her mind was the image of him — running, running, running, the big pulsating bird above him, as inescapable as destiny.

She knelt in the attic and mopped up the turpentine. She went down to the kitchen. The children would be home in 10 minutes. She sat at the kitchen table and realized with mild wonder that the tears were still running down her face.

When the school bus arrived, they were marching him through the pasture to the official cars parked at the edge of the road. The children wanted to watch. She sent them, frightened, into the house, using a tone of voice they had never heard.

She watched him stumbling wearily along with bowed head, hands chained behind him. A car drove away with him. The helicopter landed in the pasture. Only when she saw a large group of men start walking toward her house, and saw that some of them had cameras, did she realize the ugly rawness of her scraped thigh, the spots of paint on the ancient sun suit.

She told them just what had happened. They said the helicopter wouldn’t have come in for a closer look had it not been for the orange patch on the roof, a patch that had not been there the last time they had been over. They told her she was a brave woman. The man was dangerous — homicidal.

“What is his name?”

“Brindon. James Brindon. He’s 50 — but he doesn’t look it. He was an engineer and got a head injury in a construction accident more than 20 years ago. Lots of brain damage. Nobody thought he was dangerous. But some wise kid at the farm was picking on him all the time lately.”

“What will become of him?”

“Don’t worry, lady. They aren’t about to let him get out again. Not ever.”

She hadn’t meant it that way, but she saw little point in trying to tell them what she had meant.

Paul had been telephoned, and he arrived, very upset, just as the officers and reporters left. He made her tell him all about it.

“You bandaged his hand? You touched him!”

“He was hurt.”

The kids were out in the yard, giving a shrill imaginative account of the whole thing to the Carter children. “...chased her all over the roof!” she heard Buddy exclaim.

A poor witless thing, trapped, hidden away in some back corridor of the damaged brain. Remnants of a fineness in the brutalized face. There had been some communication. A little. “Thank you,” he said. For kindness.

Paul beamed at her. “Well, sweety, you’re quite the heroine! Escape from a monster!”

“Could you be quiet!”

He stared at her, his smile fading. And she resented all the neatness and orderliness and gentleness of him. She resented his lack of revolt, his freedom from any kind of desperation. Something in that damaged and dangerous man had called out to her own autumn madness. For a little while there had been another dimension to the world, and it would disappear so quickly.

“Susan, I didn’t mean to...”

She saw his concern, then, and his goodness and the quiet quality of his love, and she went quickly to him, and he held her in his arms.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and she told herself that this was really all she wanted and needed. His arms, and the dear house around them, and the child voices in the dusk.

She knew then that the autumn disease of the heart was gone for this season. Susan was home again, free of all the half-heard voices that seemed to come from just beyond the hill. Content once more. Maybe forever. Or maybe just till October would come again — that strangest month of all.

Content

John D. MacDonald
That Strangest Month of All