Nobody's Fool

“You and I have known each other for more years than I care to add up. Might I offer a personal observation?”
    â€œYou always do, Mrs. Peoples,” Sully said. In fact, he’d been wondering when she’d get around to chastising him for his latest round ofmisdeeds. Doubtless his punching a policeman and getting thrown in jail for the holidays struck Miss Beryl as conduct unbecoming a man of his years, a man with a son and a grandson and a handful, at least, of adult responsibilities he’d not succeeded in dodging. When was he going to grow up? Since Miss Beryl was the only person he allowed to lecture him, he took a deep breath and prepared to take his medicine.
    â€œIt’d give me great pleasure to overlook the matter,” she began ominously enough, fixing him with her stern gaze, “but I cannot. Try as I might to ignore your shortcomings, I feel compelled to mention that you are not wearing hose this morning and that you look positively ridiculous as a result.”
    Sully looked down at his shoes and bare ankles. “It’s our next stop,” he promised.
    â€œWell, I should think so,” she said. “I’ll thank you to remember that when you leave this house, you reflect upon me as well as yourself. There are times, I suspect,” she added significantly, “when you forget this.”
    This, Sully realized, was his lecture. “I’m sorry if I do, Mrs. Peoples,” he said, because he genuinely was sorry. “I never mean to shame you.”
    â€œIt’s true,” Wirf put in. “Most of the time he’s content to shame himself.”
    â€œWell, no man is an island,” Miss Beryl reminded them both. “Do you recall who said that?”
    Sully nodded. “You did,” he said, his standard response when his landlady began lobbing quotations at him. “All through eighth grade.”
    Miss Beryl turned to Wirf. “It frightens me to think, Abraham, that I helped to shape this life. What will God say?”
    â€œBe just like Him to blame you,” Sully agreed. In his experience, people usually got blamed for the very things they were most innocent of. It happened to himself so frequently that he’d come to think of the phenomenon as a facet of divine Providence. Its corollary was that the things a person really was guilty of were mostly ignored. His father, for instance. Big Jim had never even been charged in the matter of the boy who’d been impaled on the spike. The lifelong drunken cruelty he’d inflicted on his family had gone unpunished. He’d died well fed, untroubled by conscience, happily playing grab-ass with nurses who considered him full of spunk. As near as Sully could figure it, there was something in human nature that sought to ignore or absolve obvious guilt on the one hand even as it sought to establish connections and therefore responsibility in the most unrelated things.
    Of course, these principles applied to himself as well as others. He’d made his share of mistakes, and there was plenty of legitimate blame that might be laid on his doorstep, but his sense of things was that other people mistook what they were. He had not been the best husband to Vera, who had legitimate gripes. But she had been uncanny in her ability to select, as the focus of her fury, something he hadn’t done. Ruth was the same way, trying to make him feel responsible for Janey. For his worst blunders, on the other hand, he’d been consistently rewarded. After burning down Kenny Roebuck’s house, he’d been thanked profusely. The result of ignoring his son was that Vera and Ralph had managed to make an educated man out of him. He was beginning to sense in all of this perversity the way his current situation would eventually shake down. Somehow, although he’d assaulted a police officer in front of witnesses, he was going to walk. He could feel it. In return for which it would generally be conceded that he was responsible for Hattie’s death.
    No, the world, in Sully’s view, did little to inspire belief in justice. The conventional Christian wisdom seemed to be that all of this world’s inequities would be rectified in the next, but Sully had his doubts. Wasn’t the perversity of the world he knew more likely a true reflection of its source? What if Big Jim Sullivan was grinning down at him from heaven, seated comfortably at the right hand of the Father? That would