The Last Believer

The sample case was genuine cowhide, and Earl Prentiss kept it oiled.

Inside, arranged in the velvet-lined trays he'd had fitted in Davenport, were fourteen sample units: four of the Tonic in the amber glass, three of the Rub in the flat tins, the cream in the little pots with the gold foil seal, and the two specialty items he reserved for audiences that showed promise. He had been working the downstate Illinois route for eleven years. He knew which rooms needed the specialty items and which rooms needed the amber glass, and he was rarely wrong.

It was November. He had forty-two tins of Rub left and eleven cases of Tonic, and he intended to move them before the roads went bad.

He called Meredith from the lodge in Decatur on a Sunday, the way he always did.

The children were fine. The furnace had been making a sound but her brother had come to look at it. Earl said good, tell him I said thank you.

Then she said: "Earl, I need to tell you something and I need you to actually hear it."

He said: "Go ahead."

"Agnes came for supper on Friday. She was looking at the photograph on the mantle — the one from the Elks banquet — and she got very quiet. And then she asked me if it had always looked that way."

Earl waited.

"She said you were glowing, Earl. In the photograph. She asked if you were well."

"Agnes has always had an imagination."

"I told her that. And then she looked at me — you know the way Agnes looks at you when she thinks you're not being honest with yourself — and I couldn't say anything because the truth is I've noticed it too. The last few mornings before you left. In the kitchen, when the light was a certain way. There's something, Earl. There's something about the way you look."

"Meredith."

"I'm not being dramatic."

"I know you're not being dramatic. You're never dramatic. But I have been applying this product consistently for four years and what you and Agnes are seeing is the result of that. That is the product working. I am the best advertisement this line has ever had and I intend to keep being that advertisement until every tin in this trunk is sold."

The line was quiet for a moment.

"Just come home healthy," she said.

"I'll be home by the twentieth."

He hung up. Sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees. Then he opened the sample case, measured two careful teaspoons of Tonic into the lodge glass, drank it, and noted in the route book that he felt restored.

He went to bed.

The call from Hargrove came on a Tuesday, patched through the switchboard in Centralia with the particular crackling formality of long distance.

"Earl," Hargrove said, "I'll get right to it. The company is making adjustments to the product line. Effective the first of the year."

"I've seen the newspapers, Gerald."

"Then you know the situation. The board's made a decision. The current line is being phased out. Now — and I want to be clear about this — for salesmen carrying existing inventory, the company is prepared to make arrangements. Buy back the stock. Make you whole, or close to it. It's the right thing to do. These men bought in good faith."

Earl was quiet for a moment.

"Gerald," he said, "I have forty-two tins of Rub and eleven cases of Tonic in the back of my Packard. I bought that inventory in July. Out of my own pocket, the way I have always bought my inventory, because that is the arrangement and I understood it when I entered into it."

"I know that, Earl—"

"I have four stops left on this route. I intend to complete those stops. I intend to move that product. That is what I do."

"The company is trying to do right by you here."

"The company is making a business decision and I respect that. But my inventory is my inventory. You want to talk about the new year, we'll talk about the new year in the new year." He paused. "How's your family, Gerald?"

"They're fine, Earl. They're just fine."

"Good. I'll be in touch."

He hung up. Sat looking at the wall for a long while afterward.

Outside, the Packard started on the third attempt in the cold. Earl let it idle while he loaded the sample case into the trunk. The latch stuck once before catching properly. He made a note to oil it when he got home.

The road south of Decatur had gone soft from rain earlier in the week. Mud climbed the fenders in ribbons. By noon the car smelled faintly of wet wool, gasoline, and the medicinal sweetness that had settled permanently into the lining of the trunk sometime during the summer.

Earl no longer noticed it unless he had been away from the car for several hours.

The newspapers were still at it.

He had developed a reliable method for handling newspapers: he did not read them past the front page, and if the front page contained something disagreeable he folded it and used it to level the sample case in the trunk. He had leveled the sample case eleven times since August. He was not distressed by this. People had said the same things about electrical current, about the motorcar, about processed foods. Progress made enemies in the press. That was the nature of progress.

At a diner outside Pana, a waitress refilled his coffee three times without once looking directly at him. Earl noticed this only because she had the efficient movements of someone ordinarily very good at her work.

When he thanked her, she startled slightly.

"You need anything else, sir?"

"No ma'am. Just the check."

She nodded too quickly and moved away.

Earl watched her speak quietly to the cook through the service window. The cook glanced once in Earl's direction and then immediately pretended to busy himself with something beneath the counter.

Earl finished his coffee.

People had become strange lately. Nervous. Newspapers did that to a country.

That evening in Champaign, a pharmacist named Gerald Schutte attempted the litigation conversation and Earl handled it the way he always handled it. Let Gerald finish. Smiled. Said: "Gerald, I have been putting this product on my face and in my body every day for four years. Does this look like a man being harmed?"

Spread his arms the way he did.

Gerald looked at him with an expression Earl could not quite place — not a sales expression, not a hostile one, something more like a man watching a horse about to step in a hole — and then changed the subject.

Earl moved four units to Gerald's cousin before dessert.

As Earl fastened the straps on the sample case, Gerald said almost absently: "Awful business with those girls up north."

Earl looked up.

"The watch factory girls," Gerald said. "The ones painting the dials."

He shrugged.

"Newspapers say half of them are sick. Jaw trouble. Bone trouble. Lord knows what's true anymore."

Earl gave a short laugh and settled his hat onto his head.

"People said the same things about electric lights."

"Maybe," Gerald said.

Outside, crossing the hotel lobby toward the door, Earl found himself pressing his tongue once against the left side of his mouth before realizing he was doing it.

He removed his hand from his face almost immediately afterward and adjusted his tie instead.

The rain had stopped an hour earlier but the city still held it everywhere. In the gutters. In the seams of the brick. In the black shining streetcar rails cutting down Jefferson.

A young couple approached from the opposite direction speaking quietly to each other. The man wore a college scarf beneath his coat. The woman was laughing softly at something he had said.

Earl stepped beneath a streetlamp and nodded courteously as they neared.

Then he passed beyond it.

The woman's laughter stopped.

Not abruptly. The sound simply failed to continue.

Earl became aware of them slowing behind him. He assumed at first they were deciding whether to cross before the next intersection. Then he heard the woman say quietly:

"George."

A pause.

"Do you see that?"

Earl kept walking.

"See what," the man answered too quickly.

She did not reply.

At the next storefront Earl caught his reflection faintly in the dark glass.

For just a moment, in the absence of the streetlamp, there did appear to be some unusual quality about the skin around his face and hands. Not brightness exactly. More the impression of brightness. Like the lingering effect left behind after looking too long at a bulb.

Then a passing automobile swept light across the window and the effect disappeared entirely.

Earl straightened his tie.

Tomorrow was Springfield. Then Gallatin County. Then home.

The Rotary Club of Gallatin County met on Thursdays in the back hall of the Merchants' Hotel, and on the third Thursday of November Earl Prentiss stood at the lectern with his case open on the table beside him and forty-one people in the room.

They were a good crowd. Mixed — men in work coats and women in good wool, a few young couples, a table of older ladies near the window who had come together. The chandelier was lit. Someone had put out coffee service. Earl felt the familiar settling feeling he always felt when a room came together properly, the way a hand of cards can look like a hand before you've played it.

He began the way he always began, with the history. Discovered in the soil of the earth. Identified by scientists of the highest caliber. Properties not yet fully understood — which was not a weakness but an opportunity, as the properties of electricity had once not been fully understood and look where that had gotten everyone.

He was twelve minutes in when he felt it.

Not pain — or not only pain. A loosening. A catastrophic shift in the architecture of the left side of his face, something moving that had no business moving, the hinge giving in a way silent to him and apparently not silent to the woman in the front row, whose eyes widened in a manner he registered and chose not to interpret.

He had forty-one tins of Rub on that table. Eleven cases of Tonic in the Packard. A laminated route map in his breast pocket with the rest of the winter marked out in pencil.

He was not going to stop.

What came out of him then was not nothing. That was the thing. It had shape and force and the desperate forward momentum of a man who knows he is losing ground and is throwing everything he has at the problem.

The sounds originated somewhere in the chest, in the place where conviction lives, and traveled upward through a throat doing everything it was supposed to do before emerging through a mouth no longer able to do its part — and what resulted was something the room would carry with them for the rest of their lives.

It was not speech.

But it was trying to be speech with everything it had.

There was a frequency to it that suggested urgency, pressure rising where a close would rise, a grasping forward motion in what had once been consonants but were now something remembering consonants the way a dream remembers a face — close enough to recognize, wrong enough to be wrong.

Beneath it, audible only to Earl, was what he was actually saying:

the product works, I am the proof, I have the figures right here, let me show you the figures

—and the distance between what he believed he was saying and what emerged from him was the full distance between a man and his own body when the body has stopped waiting for permission.

The jaw had not come free entirely. That was perhaps the worst part for the people watching. It hung at an angle the human face is not designed to accommodate, the left side dropped and forward, held by what remained of its mooring, and the effect was of a man whose face had made a unilateral decision.

The drool came not as rupture but as steady, indifferent loss — the kind that has stopped asking permission — falling from the corner of what had once been his mouth onto the lapel of his good coat, onto the lectern, onto the notes he was no longer reading but had not moved away from.

And still he gestured.

That was the thing that broke the woman in the front row.

His left hand was still moving in the loose rotational motion he used when building toward a close, the motion he used when he wanted a room to feel the size of an idea. The hand did not know. Or the hand knew and had decided its job was its job.

The room had gone the way rooms go when they witness something they have no category for.

The men in work coats looked at the floor or table, giving Earl the dignity the situation did not technically allow for. The young couple near the back had turned toward each other and confirmed it and had not looked back. The older women near the window had gone collective and still, a table of women who had seen most of what life produces and were now in the presence of something outside that catalogue.

Earl's eyes remained on the room.

That would be the detail surviving in every retelling over the years that followed — not the jaw, not the sounds, but the eyes.

They were not vacant. They were not confused.

They were the eyes of a man fully present, watching the room fail to come around, refusing to accept it as a final answer.

There was something in them that looked like will.

That looked like effort.

That looked, if you could bear to look directly at it, like the specific desperation of a man who had been told by everyone around him — by his wife on a Sunday phone call, by his regional manager on a crackling long-distance line, by folded newspapers in the trunk of a Packard — that it was time to stop, and who had looked at all of that and chosen the route instead.

The sounds kept coming. Urgent. Effortful. Shaped by a will that had outlasted the machinery it required.

The chandelier swung faintly in a draft from somewhere, and in its swinging light the room could see what Agnes had seen in the photograph and what Meredith had seen in the kitchen on those last mornings before Earl had loaded the Packard and driven south — a quality difficult to name and impossible now to look away from.

It was not the light of the chandelier.

It lived in him.

Faint and steady and indifferent.

The sample case remained open on the table. The amber glass caught the light. The little pots with the gold foil seals sat in their velvet trays exactly where he had placed them that morning.

He had forty-one tins.

He was going to close this room.