Free The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up by Jacob M. Appel Page B

attitude might mellow. He had made meaningful sacrifices
for her
in the past Like placing his mother in that hyper-sterile nursing home when he’d have preferred that Mama come to live with them. Yet now she couldn’t accept that his apologizing didn’t matter as much to her as his not-apologizing mattered to him. Judith wouldn’t even give him the opportunity to argue his case. After he’d disowned Gilbert’s statement, she refused to speak to him at all. When Arnold entered a room, she left it quickly. If he tried to touch her, she swatted his hand away. One afternoon, shetook Ray to the aquarium. Arnold suggested they leave by ladder. Instead, Judith walked straight through the front door and down the block, past the hooting demonstrators, without turning her head. Otherwise, she didn’t leave the house. She phoned in sick at St. Gregory’s. Her painting materials collected dust on the dining room table. Arnold’s wife spent her evenings ensconced in front of the television, watching their private lives being dissected for public outrage and amusement. A conservative cable network was running “24-hour Tongue Traitor” coverage that included interviews with a disgruntled former student whom Arnold had failed for cheating, although the news broadcast didn’t mention the cheating episode, as well as with the father of the nine children from the baseball game. “My daughter was scared,” the man said. “She’s had nightmares.” The media also burrowed deeper into Arnold’s past: his draft deferment during the Vietnam War, his summons for being in a public park after hours as a teenager. (Nobody explained that he’d been in the park hunting for moonflowers, which blossom only at night.) A digital counter at the corner of the television screen calculated exactly how much time Arnold had gone without apologizing. The counter was shaped like an alarm clock, but with horns and a forked orange tail. Judith called out the number of hours periodically. “I thought we were on the same side,” Arnold pleaded with her. “Can’t you try to see things my way?” In response, she shut off thetelevision and locked herself in the upstairs bathroom. At night, she slept in her studio. She could have kept this silent treatment going for weeks or months. Judith was capable of just such intransigence. But even a siege does not relieve a household of its minor crises, such as the daily crush of domestic challenges. It was one such episode, on the third morning of the protests, that finally forced them to speak.
    Arnold had just come inside from the garden, where he’d been slicing a fallen sycamore with a chainsaw. He’d earlier put off this task for several months. Truthfully, the saw blades always scared him. But that morning he’d been in the mood to hew something—or someone—limb from limb. Chopping up the tree trunk presented fewer negative consequences than dismembering the Reverend Spitford. Besides which, the whir of the implement had helped drown out the chanting from the street. Arnold had thrown himself into the sawing with full force, working up a sweat, and when the task was done, he actually found himself disappointed that there was nothing else left to cut. On the way to the tool shed, he snipped at a few stray wisteria vines, gumming up the blades. Back in the townhouse, he ran the tap in the ground-floor bathroom and splashed his face in the sink. Then he took a swig of cool water from a paper cup. What he really wanted was a tall glass of orange juice, but Judith was preparing the kid’s breakfast in the kitchen, and Arnold didn’t wantto drive her out of the room. Even though
she
was being unreasonable, “forcing” her to relocate made
him
feel guilty. So he sprawled out on the living room sofa to kill time.
    Arnold had been resting only a few minutes, his eyes closed, when he was startled by pounding at the door. Like a watchman’s nightstick or the back of a flashlight. At first, Arnold feared