Affair of Honor

Years afterwards when an aging Charles Alexander held his newborn granddaughter in his arms and looked through the window of the hospital room towards distant trees along the Charles, he thought, If Hope Kirby had not spared my life, this child would never have been born. He remembered the pistol pressed to his forehead, the resounding metallic click of the hammer cocked in the dark, the oddly compassionate words: "I'm sorry, boy. I've got to kill you, too." Charles held his granddaughter--a bundle asleep, tiny and helpless and soft. His son put her in his arms. She breathed in a great sigh. Life. Her fingers and toes delicately sculpted by light. Charles almost cried, but he laughed instead. They all laughed while she slept. "What is to be will be," the Primitive Baptists said. And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. That was the belief of the Apostle Paul and of Eugenia Alexander, and until he met W. T. Stace and then Hope Kirby it was the gospel of Charles Alexander. Then something else replaced it. When he grew older he could remember himself, the passionate religious person he had been. But he couldn't understand it. All those foolish things piled together in his head! None of it made sense to the later Charles. But there it was in 1953. All things are as they are for no reason at all, and if they were different, there would be no reason for that either. That was W. T. Stace and Charles Alexander. What was life? One damned thing after another, and if you had a lucky break or two you did something you liked, and so it passed. Charles's might have passed much more quickly than it did had he not had the mercy of Hope Kirby. Saturday night, August 8, 1953. It had been miserably hot. The temperature broke slightly when the sun sank in the west, turning off the fire that baked the world. The round thermometer with the needle and the dial over the door of Kelly Parmalee's clothing store on the square showed ninety-four degrees at two-thirty in the afternoon. Bourbonvillians noted it. Kelly Parmalee stood outside, looking up, making conversation about his thermometer, laughing, clapping friends on the back. Everybody was Kelly Parmalee's friend. Pencil mustache like Errol Flynn's. Today he wore a canary-yellow blazer and a dark purple necktie and a pin-striped shirt with a button-down collar. Classy dresser, Kelly Parmalee--a walking model for the men's clothes he sold off the rack for the better classes in Bourbonville. You couldn't dislike him. He had a gift for believable flattery. People wanted the temperature to go to a hundred. A hundred was something to brag about, something to recall proudly later on when anybody complained about the heat of this or that day. You didn't get a hundred every summer in East Tennessee. Lacking a hundred, people talked about hot days, hot places. "Hell, you don't know nothing about heat till you're in the Solomon Islands and the Japs are shooting at you. That's heat, boy." When six o'clock came, the farmers headed home to milk, and the townspeople went home to eat supper, and sit on their porches afterwards and fan themselves, speaking in murmuring platitudes about this and that. Some of them sat inside and watched television now. Television was new in East Tennessee. Fuzzy, black-and-white, but free once you had put money down on a television set and started making the payments on the installment plan. People were proud of the big aluminum antennas on their roofs. Red Eason, editor of the Bourbon County News, went home early after he wrote a little story about how hot it had been and what people said about the heat. He quoted six people. Names sold news. Put as many names in the paper as you could. Lloyd's wisdom, left behind when Lloyd died. Lloyd drowned in the lake last summer with that girl. She pulled hiMarius, Richard is the author of 'Affair of Honor' with ISBN 9780375412394 and ISBN 0375412395.