Mohawk

then, he has always been there to touch. Now, as then, she has refrained.
    Outside, the lazy snow forms a halo around the street lamp. There is a stirring sound below, and Anne wonders if her father is awake. He has begged off helping with the packing, probably because it meant something like goodbye. Anne turns out the light and, after undressing, pulls a quilt over her on the sofa. Two-thirty. Mid-December. Very nearly the longest night of the year.
    Downstairs, Mrs. Grouse rolls over in bed and opens her eyes. The bedside clock says two-thirty. She sees that Mather Grouse’s bed is empty, the covers thrown back. No doubt he has gone to the bathroom. Mrs. Grouse resolves to remain awake until the toilet flushes, a comforting sound. She doesn’t get up to check on her husband, because it angers him to be checked on, especially at night, on the toilet, where he claims any man ought have a little peace. Sometimes he just sits there in the dark, behavior which frightens Mrs. Grouse, though she doesn’t know precisely why. “What do I need a light for?” he complains when questioned. “I know what I’m doing. It’s not a complicated process.” He can be a thoroughly hateful man.
    But Mather Grouse is not in the bathroom. He isin the living room in his favorite chair, his head slumped forward. When a car goes by, its headlights send patterns around the room, waving over his face and torso, though he doesn’t react. Mather Grouse is not thinking about what has troubled him so deeply of late. Nor is he thinking about the afternoon over fifteen years ago when something inside him snapped. Sitting in that very chair, from which he could see the street outside. Young Billy Gaffney was there, just as he had been there for nearly a month, watching patiently, just as Mather Grouse watched him, though the boy had no idea. And as he sat there, Mather Grouse heard afresh the hooting and jeering, and saw again the men dangling out of windows. The boy was not to blame, of course. No longer even an issue, really, since his daughter was seeing another boy now. No reason, but the Gaffney boy weighed on Mather Grouse. That way he had of just standing there, utterly relentless, as if he knew that time was on his side, as if his private oracle had counseled patience. It was not a moonstruck boy that Mather Grouse saw standing there, but rather the personification of his own straight-jacketed existence. Mohawk was waiting there for her, confident that sooner or later she would come out and offer her embrace. And sometimes Mather Grouse imagined that it wasn’t Bill Gaffney at all, but his father, a goatlike presence, come to claim her. And so something inside Mather Grouse snapped and he went crazy, if only for the time it took to make a phone call. Almost before he set the receiver down, Rory Gaffney pulled up in his ramshackle old car and shoved the boy roughly inside. Twice more the boy appeared, and twice more Mather Grouse had used the telephone, each time making the threat more explicit. Then the boy missed the last weekof school before summer vacation, and for a month no one saw any of the family. Gaffney’s wife had disappeared, and some said he’d gone after her. Then he walked back into the shop, and everyone began to say he was the most unfortunate man who’d ever lived. Not only had his wife managed to stay missing, but his son had been in an accident and, well, damaged. There was a brief flap, because some people wanted to know more. Rory Gaffney himself appeared shaken for a while, but before long he was his old self again. One day he had the opportunity to say a word to Mather Grouse, privately. “You don’t have to worry,” he whispered. “Not about my poor boy.” There was complicity and friendship in his manner as well as a distilled hatred that took Mather Grouse’s breath away.
    But Mather Grouse is not thinking of these things, as he has been, increasingly, since his afternoon at Greenie’s. Rory Gaffney’s whispered confidences and innuendos do not turn like a knife in his heart as they have for the last fifteen years. Nor is he thinking any more about the possibility of redemption, of getting one good, long, cleansing breath, deep into his lungs, burning away with its icy purity the yellow bile that has collected there. He is having no trouble breathing. His chest neither rises nor falls.
    The car going by awakens Mrs. Grouse again, and seeing that her husband has not returned to bed, she sits up