The Day of the Week

photograph by les roberts

He would come home, if he came home, on a laundry day.  She knew that he would want to first see her from a distance before he'd come closer, so she wore her best skirt and shoes to hang out the shirts and underwear and linen.  Every week, every season, every year. 

And it really was years by now.  Almost five years since that night when she had heard the cars, and then the shouting, and then the soft groan of the iron gate on its home made pipe-hinges.  And then he’d been there in the doorway, wearing a long dark coat she had never seen before.  It was unbuttoned down the front and she saw something dark on his lovely white shirt, the shirt in which he had just a few months earlier walked to the front at the old school house and received his certificate.  The National Senior Certificate.  It was an almost unbelievable accomplishment about which she was at once both proud and a little  bewildered.  Where had he ever found his way to that?  How had he managed all the work required, here alone on all the nights she’d had to work?  How had he held true to his course, when boys she didn’t trust, and even girls she didn’t trust, came calling for him?

Now the shirt moved into a patch of light as he stepped toward her.  It was some black and glistening mess on the front his good shirt, and she reached out to touch it.  Wet.  And sticky.  She looked down and her hand wasn’t black; it was red.  She began to lift her fingers to her face but he quickly knelt before her, his own fingers gripping her wrist and drawing her soiled, defiled hand back down into the darkness between them.

She looked at him in confusion, seeking some explanation of this vile thing, and she saw that his dark eyes were filled with tears.  She could not speak.  Not even move.  So even his tears fell free and untended, her fresh white handkerchief remaining untouched in the pocket of her apron. 

Another shout, answered from somewhere across the road, and nearby.  He stood, shrugged out of the strange long overcoat and quickly undid the shirt buttons and stripped it off, twisting it into itself, wrapping the awful stuff on it well inside before thrusting the tight bundle into her hands.  Then he reached for the long coat again and stepped back to put it on.  She saw his body, his chest and stomach, in the light from the street lamp (the only street lamp for a hundred yards in either direction, her guide home sometimes after long days and nights at work … many times she’d have sleepwalked into a ditch without that light).  His clean young torso was unmarked, undamaged: this lifeblood was not his.  She was relieved for a full two seconds before the obvious truth hit her; it was someone else’s blood.  He’d held someone to his chest as they … bled.  Died?  Yes, she knew it: he had held a dying head to his chest.  Somewhere nearby, tonight, just minutes ago.

He reached for her hand, hanging limp and useless at her side, lifted it and took it and gently opened the calloused fingers.  He touched her palm and she felt herself almost pull away, and he felt it too, and his grip insisted, surprised her with its demand.  His fingers touched her palm again, and then something else, and he wrapped her fingers tight around it.  She knew at once,  A thick wad of banknotes, tightly rolled and held with rubber bands.  She felt as if it may begin dripping yet more blood from between her trembling fingers, though it did not.  It was death, this thing.  She would bury it, dig it deep and forget where.  He nodded, bowed his head to her one time, eyes down and not lifting back to meet hers.

Then he was gone, into his old room and, she knew, straight out of the hinged window into the tiny space between their shack and the next; an alley narrower than the shoulders of the man he had become.  And the window softly swung shut and his room was an empty room.  Five years ago.

And so she knew that when he came home, if he came home, it would be by way of that secret alley.  She was out here not to meet him, but to show him, from wherever he would watch her first, that it was safe.  And on every laundry day, every season, every year, she dressed in her best to show him she was still proud of his National Senior Certificate.  And every time, every laundry day, the very last thing that she pegged onto the line was his white shirt, now forever perfectly white and pure again, as it ever was in her mind.