The Good and Respectable James T Crawley

The Good and Respectable James T. Crawley

         The year was 1941.
         The town had never seen many tourists. Its streets were bleak and barren, crispy on the morn and dreary on the eve, but there was a faint breeze that night. It blew across the plains surrounding the town, forcing the grass gently down and into the street. They flew quickly and quietly onto a small lawn off the side of Main Street. The wind knocked on the door and invited itself in, gently blowing the hearth still.
         Mrs. Crawley ran to the ash and soot, throwing wood on the funeral procession while praying softly for the Promethean soul. In the end, her prayers kindled and burst into a soft and gentle flame. It may have been her imagination, but she seemed warmer whilst praying than kneeling before a newborn ember.
         But there are few moments for a mother to either kneel or pray. At the sound of a cry, she rushed upstairs, through the dark hallways, through her dark bedchamber, into the kindly lit room of her dearest son, Paul Crawley. She picked him up as softly as a feather, holding her close to her chest and rocking him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. By the time the moon retired, Mrs. Crawley was asleep, in her chair, with that gentle ember nuzzled against her dreams.
         When she woke, she put young Paul in his crib and went downstairs. The sun was shining through the lone window in her sitting room, illuminating the tree adorned with gold and silver lining, little baubles and trinkets, and the brightest star ever made by man as its crown. There were a few boxes beneath the christened abode, all gleaming in red and blue and white, safely tucked away for Paul three weeks hence. As she passed the tree, Mrs. Crawley stumbled over one of the blessed packages to mark another day off the calendar. It was now December 4th, 1941. A box beneath that was circled, December 11th, and Mrs. Crawley proudly cut down December 3rd as another fallen tree.
         Knowing little Paul wouldn't wake up for another hour or two, and wholly secure in her certainty, Mrs. Crawley, after readying herself for the journey, headed out for the local A&P. As she went, she couldn't help but notice the bustle unusual for the little town of Plainview. Everyone was walking here and there in suits alien to her, grey and black against the sky, as she darted between the cars that seemed to spring out of and recede into the scathing fog that is ever home to urban life. When she finally reached her destination, she picked up a few groceries (a loaf of bread, two jars of preserves, and a tub of butter) and quickly hurried home.
         When she reached the door, she could hear her neighbor and despised friend, Miss Amouri, calling her name. She strode across her lawn in perfect comfort, full of luster in life, with sunlight in her hair and Fitzgerald in her voice.
"Anne! Anne Crawley!"
Mrs. Crawley turned around, not too excited, and greeted Miss Amouri as kindly as you could want, with a kiss on each cheek, as was her fashion, and asked politely how she did.
"Oh, you know me! Always the same here in old Plainview. Lawyers, lovers, and everything in between! Speaking of which, when is our dear James Crawley coming home? Isn't he stationed over in Hawaii?"
Mrs. Crawley always hated how everything her neighbor said was brought back to her husband by one road or another. "Not for a few days yet, but I know Paul will be ever so glad to see him. We miss him so, that damnable man."
There was a short bit of laughter in Miss Amouri's eyes as she replied, "I'd wager so, what with him being gone every other month! I say, by our Lord in Heaven, you'd think men would spend a little less time serving Uncle Sam and little more with their wives, wouldn't you say, Anne?"
It was at this point that young Paul marks his return, screaming with all the power of a young man's lungs. Mrs. Crawley rushed inside, leaving her neighbor, husband, and Uncle Sam behind her, and climbed up the stairway and into his room.
It was empty, cold, but more. The paint was peeling where before it was pristine, the wood scratched and smeared with dust, and the crib was cracked and dead where Paul had just sounded so full of life. No words might express Mrs. Crawley's terror, the sheer wall of ice that doused her right then and there and made her scream with the force of Paul a thousandfold. She rushed through the room, screaming his name, checking under and behind everything for her dearest boy. She did the same throughout the house, sparing no expense with her search, before finally leaving the house.
The moon was overhead, or it would be, if Mrs. Crawley could see through the sea of clouds that now marched triumphantly overhead. There was naught around her, houses ruined, lawns given free reign over their property, and Mrs. Crawley was all alone on that street. Miss Amouri was gone, the suits gone, the cars gone, and everything was cold and empty in Plainview.
Oddly enough, the fear dissipated in Mrs. Crawley's eyes. She calmly walked back inside the house, past the blackened corpse of a tree, over presents opened and crushed, past a calendar painted all over in red ink, over newspapers calling for justice for the attack on Pearl Harbor, over letters written in the begging hand of none other than Paul Crawley, past the mirrors that would have reflected her silver wisps of hair and tattered nightgown had she but cared to look, to the hearth at the end of her sitting room.
She knelt on both knees before that tomb, whispering over and over again a certain line of scripture in the hopes that she might forget. There was a singular flame that rose and fell before her, slowly sinking back into the grey waters of a dusty afterlife. She would have wept if she could, but her eyes had been spent twenty years ago. Mrs. Crawley knew where everyone was, where Paul lived, where her husband had gone, where Miss Amouri and all the others had left, but she alone had stayed. She watched the flame struggle and sputter, grasping for every breath, and she recalled all the long years she had lived alone, how every day seemed a new war she waged on life and God eternal. She remembered all this, and more. She remembered the days she had spent with her husband and her son in peace and love, and she remembered the days she spent with her son in infinite mourning. She remembered the day her dearest Paul had announced his retirement and headed off for "a better life." She remembered how she alone had remembered her husband and everything he had done for her, all the years he spent away from his family, the countless nights she suspected he had abandoned her. She remembered the night she had gone over and caught him in the act, pushing him out of the house and towards Hawaii. She remembered the endless suspicion with which she regarded every woman thereafter, the pain she felt when she knew she denied him the right to see his son, to redeem himself, and so he went to do the most heroic thing he could: to serve his country.
She remembered all this, the life she had lived and the lives she had killed, and then she bent over and blew out the flame, just as the Japanese had blown out the life of the good and respectable James T. Crawley.