It was a day of holocausts, cataclysms, tornadoes, earth-quakes, blackouts, mass murders, eruptions, and miscellaneous dooms, at the peak of which the sun swallowed the earth and the stars vanished.
But to put it simply, the most respected member of the Bentley family up and died.
Dog was his name, and dog he was.
The Bentleys, arising late Saturday morning, found Dog stretched on the kitchen floor, his head toward Mecca, his paws neatly folded, his tail not a-thump but silent for the first time in twenty years.
Twenty years! My God, everyone thought, could it really have been that long? And now, without permission, Dog was cold and gone.
Susan, the younger daughter, woke everyone yelling:
“Something’s wrong with Dog. Quick!”
Without bothering to don his bathrobe, Roger Bentley, in his underwear, hurried out to look at that quiet beast on the kitchen tiles. His wife, Ruth, followed, and then their son Skip, twelve. The rest of the family, married and flown, Rodney and Sal, would arrive later. Each in turn would say the same thing:
“No! Dog was forever.”
Dog said nothing, but lay there like World War II, freshly finished, and a devastation.
Tears poured down Susan’s cheeks, then down Ruth Bentley’s, followed in good order by tears from Father and, at last, when it had sunk in, Skip.
Instinctively, they made a ring around Dog, kneeling to the floor to touch him, as if this might suddenly make him sit up, smile as he always did at his food, bark, and beat them to the door. But their touching did nothing but increase their tears.
But at last they rose, hugged each other, and went blindly in search of breakfast, in the midst of which Ruth Bentley said, stunned, “We can’t just leave him there.”
Roger Bentley picked Dog up, gently, and moved him out on the patio, in the shade, by the pool.
“What do we do next?”
“I don’t know,” said Roger Bentley. “This is the first death in the family in years and-“ He stopped, snorted, and shook his head. “I mean-“
“You meant exactly what you said,” said Ruth Bentley. “If Dog wasn’t family, he was nothing. God, I loved him.”
A fresh burst of tears ensued, during which Roger Bentley brought a blanket to put over Dog, but Susan stopped him.
“No, no.1 want to see him. I won’t be able to see him ever again. He’s so beautiful. He’s so - old.”
They all carried their breakfasts out on the patio to sit around Dog, somehow feeling they couldn’t ignore him by eating inside.
Roger Bentley telephoned his other children, whose response, after the first tears, was the same: they’d be right over. Wait.
When the other children arrived, first Rodney, twenty-one, and then the older daughter, Sal, twenty-four, a fresh storm of grief shook everyone and then they sat silently for a moment, watching Dog for a miracle.
“What are your plans?” asked Rodney at last.
“I know this is silly,” said Roger Bentley after an embarrassed pause. “After all, he’s only a dog-“
“Only!?” cried everyone instantly.
Roger had to back off. “Look, he deserves the Taj Mahal. What he’ll get is the Orion Pet Cemetery over in Burbank.”
“Pet Cemetery!?” cried everyone, but each in a different way.
“My God,” said Rodney, “that’s silly!”
“What’s so silly about it?” Skip’s face reddened and his lip trembled. “Dog, why, Dog was a pearl of... rare price.
“Yeah!” added Susan.
“Well, pardon me.” Roger Bentley turned away to look at the pool, the bushes, the sky. “I suppose I could call those trash people who pick up dead bodies-“
“Trash people?” exclaimed Ruth Bentley.
“Dead bodies?” said Susan. “Dog isn’t a dead body!”
“What is he, then?” asked Skip bleakly.
They all stared at Dog lying quietly there by the pool. “He’s,” blurted Susan at last, “he’s ... he’s my love!” Before the crying could start again, Roger Bentley picked up the patio telephone, dialed the Pet Cemetery, talked, and put the phone down.
“Two hundred dollars,” he informed everyone. “Not bad.”
“For Dog?” said Skip. “Not enough!”
“Are you really serious about this?” asked Ruth Bentley.
“Yeah,” said Roger. “I’ve made fun of those places all my life. But, now, seeing as how we’ll never be able to visit Dog again-“ He let a moment pass. “They’ll come take Dog at noon. Services tomorrow.”
“Services!” Snorting, Rodney stalked to the rim of the pool and waved his arms. “You won’t get me to that!”
Everyone stared. Rodney turned at last and let his shoulders slump. “Hell, I’ll be there.”
“Dog would never forgive you if you didn’t.” Susan snuffed and wiped her nose.
But Roger Bentley had heard none of this. Staring at Dog, then his family, and up to the sky, he shut his eyes and exhaled a great whisper:
“Oh, my God!” he said, eyes shut. “Do you realize that this is the first terrible thing that’s happened to our family? Have we ever been sick, gone to the hospital? Been in an accident?”
He waited.
“No,” said everyone.
“Gosh,” said Skip.
“Gosh, indeed! You sure as hell notice accidents, sickness, hospitals.”
“Maybe,” said Susan, and had to stop and wait because her voice broke. “Maybe Dog died just to make us notice how lucky we are.”
“Lucky?!” Roger Bentley opened his eyes and turned. “Yes! You know what we are-“
“The science fiction generation,” offered Rodney, lighting a cigarette casually.
“What?”
“You rave on about that, your school lectures, or during dinner. Can openers? Science fiction. Automobiles. Radio, TV, films. Everything! So science fiction!”
“Well, dammit, they are!” cried Roger Bentley and went to stare at Dog, as if the answers were there amongst the last departing fleas. “Hell, not so long ago there were no cars, can openers, TV. Someone had to dream them. Start of lecture. Someone had to build them. Mid-lecture. So science fiction dreams became finished science fact. Lecture finis!”
“I bet!” Rodney applauded politely.
Roger Bentley could only sink under the weight of his son’s irony to stroke the dear dead beast.
“Sorry. Dog bit me. Can’t help myself. Thousands of years, all we did is die. Now, that time’s over. In sum: science fiction.”
“Bull.” Rodney laughed. “Stop reading that junk, Dad.”
“Junk?” Roger touched Dog’s muzzle. “Sure. But how about Lister, Pasteur, Salk? Hated death. Jumped to stop it. That’s all science fiction was ever about. Hating the way things are, wanting to make things different. Junk?!”
“Ancient history, Pop.”
“Ancient?” Roger Bentley fixed his son with a terrible eye. “Christ. When I was born in 1920, if you wanted to visit your family on Sundays you-“
“Went to the graveyard?” said Rodney.
“Yes. My brother and sister died when I was seven. Half of my family gone! Tell me, dear children, how many of your friends died while you were growing up. In grammar school? High school?”
He included the family in his gaze, and waited.
“None,” said Rodney at last.
“None! You hear that? None! Christ. Six of my best friends died by the time I was ten! Wait! I just remembered!”
Roger Bentley hurried to rummage in a hall closet and brought out an old 78-rpm record into the sunlight, blowing off the dust. He squinted at the label:
“No News, Or What Killed The Dog?”
Everyone came to look at the ancient disc.
“Hey, how old is that?”
“Heard it a hundred times when I was a kid in the twenties,” said Roger.
“No News, Or What Killed The Dog?” Sal glanced at her father’s face.
“This gets played at Dog’s funeral,” he said.
“You’re not serious?” said Ruth Bentley.
Just then the doorbell rang.
“That can’t be the Pet Cemetery people come to take Dog-?”
“No!” cried Susan. “Not so soon!”
Instinctively, the family formed a wall between Dog and the doorbell sound, holding off eternity.
Then they cried, one more time.
The strange and wonderful thing about the funeral was how many people came.
“I didn’t know Dog had so many friends,” Susan blubbered.
“He freeloaded all around town,” said Rodney.
“Speak kindly of the dead.”
“Well, he did, dammit., Otherwise why is Bill Johnson here, or Gert Skall, or Jim across the street?”
“Dog,” said Roger Bentley, “I sure wish you could see this.”
“He does.” Susan’s eyes welled over. “Wherever he is.”
“Good old Sue,” whispered Rodney, “who cries at telephone books-“
“Shut up!” cried Susan.
“Hush, both of you.”
And Roger Bentley moved, eyes down, toward the front of the small funeral parlor where Dog was laid out, head on paws, in a box that was neither too rich nor too simple but just right.
Roger Bentley placed a steel needle down on the black record which turned on top of a flake-painted portable phonograph. The needle scratched and hissed. All the neighbors leaned forward.
“No funeral oration,” said Roger quickly. “Just this . . And a voice spoke on a day long ago and told a story about a man who returned from vacation to ask friends what had happened while he was gone.
It seemed that nothing whatsoever had happened. Oh, just one thing. Everyone wondered what had killed the dog.
The dog? asked the vacationer. My dog died? Yes, and maybe it was the burned horseflesh did it. Burned horseflesh!? cried the vacationer. Well, said his informant, when the barn burned, the horseflesh caught fire, so the dog ate the burned horseflesh, died.
The barn!? cried the vacationer. How did it catch fire? Well, sparks from the house blew over, torched the barn, burned the horseflesh, dog ate them, died.
Sparks from the house!? shouted the vacationer. How-?
It was the curtains in the house, caught fire.
Curtains? Burned!?
From the candles around the coffin.
Coffin!?
Your aunt’s funeral coffin, candles there caught the curtains, house burned, sparks from the house flew over, burned down the barn, dog ate the burned horseflesh-In sum: no news, or what killed the dog!
The record hissed and stopped.
In the silence, there was a little quiet laughter, even though the record had been about dogs and people dying.
“Now, do we get the lecture?” said Rodney.
“No, a sermon.”
Roger Bentley put his hands on the pulpit to stare for long moments at notes he hadn’t made.
“I don’t know if we’re here for Dog or ourselves. Both, I suppose. We’re the nothing-ever-happened-to-us people. Today is a first. Not that I want a rush of doom or disease. God forbid. Death, come slowly, please.”
He turned the phonograph record round and round in his hands, trying to read the words under the grooves.
“No news. Except the aunt’s funeral candles catch the curtains, sparks fly, and the dog goes west. In our lives, just the opposite. No news for years. Good livers, healthy hearts, good times. So-what’s it all about?”
Roger Bentley glanced at Rodney, who was checking his wristwatch.
“Someday we must die, also.” Roger Bentley hurried on. “Hard to believe. We’re spoiled. But Susan was right. Dog died to tell us this, gently, and we must believe. And at the same time celebrate. What? The fact that we’re the start of an amazing, dumbfounding history of survival that will only get better as the centuries pass. You may argue that the next war will take us all. Maybe.
“I can only say I think you will grow to be old, very old people. Ninety years from now, most people will have cured hearts, stopped cancers, and jumped life cycles. A lot of sadness will have gone out of the world, thank God. Will this be easy to do? No. Will we do it? Yes. Not in all countries, right off. But, finally, in most.
“As I said yesterday, fifty years ago, if you wanted to visit your aunts, uncles, grandparents, brothers, sisters, the graveyard was it. Death was all the talk. You had to talk it. Time’s up, Rodney?”
Rodney signaled his father he had one last minute.
Roger Bentley wound it down:
“Sure, kids still die. But not millions. Old folks? Wind up in Sun City instead of marble Orchard.”
The father surveyed his family, bright-eyed, in the pews.
“God, look at you! Then look back. A thousand centuries of absolute terror, absolute grief. How parents stayed sane to raise their kids when half of them died, damned if I know. Yet with broken hearts, they did. While millions died of flu or the Plague.
“So here we are in a new time that we can’t see because we stand in the eye of the hurricane, where everything’s calm.
“I’ll shut up now, with a last word for Dog. Because we loved him, we’ve done this almost silly thing, this service, but now suddenly we’re not ashamed or sorry we bought him a plot or had me speak. We may never come visit him, who can say? But he has a place. Dog, old boy, bless you. Now, everyone, blow your nose.”
Everyone blew his nose.
“Dad,” said Rodney suddenly, “could-we hear the record again?”
Everyone looked at Rodney, surprised.
“Just,” said Roger Bentley, “what I was going to suggest.”
He put the needle on the record. It hissed.
About a minute in, when the sparks from the house flew over to burn the barn and torch the horseflesh and kill the dog, there was a sound at the back doorway to the small parlor.
Everyone turned.
A strange man stood in the door holding a small wicker basket from which came familiar, small yapping sounds.
And even as the flames from the candles around the coffin caught the curtains and the last sparks blew on the wind
The whole family, drawn out into the sunlight, gathered around the stranger with the wicker basket, waiting for Father to arrive to throw back the coverlet on the small carrier so they could all dip their hands in.
That moment, as Susan said later, was like reading the telephone book one more time.
It was a pounding on a door, a furious, frantic, insistent pounding, born of hysteria and fear and a great desire to be heard, to be freed, to be let loose, to escape. It was a wrenching at hidden paneling, it was a hollow knocking, a rapping, a testing, a clawing! It was a scratching at hollow boards, a ripping at bedded nails; it was a muffled closet shouting and demanding, far away, and a call to be noticed, followed by a silence.
The silence was the most empty and terrible of all. Robert and Martha Webb sat up in bed.
“Did you hear it?”
“Yes, again.”
“Downstairs.”
Now whoever it was who had pounded and rapped and made his fingers raw, drawn blood with his fever and quest to be free, had drawn into silence, listening himself to see if his terror and drumming had summoned any help.
The winter night lay through the house with a falling-snow silence, silence snowing into every room, drifting over tables and floors, and banking up the stairwell.
Then the pounding started again. And then:
A sound of soft crying.
“Downstairs.”
“Someone in the house.”
“Lotte, do you think? The front door’s unlocked.”
“She’d have knocked. Can’t be Lotte.”
“She’s the only one it could be. She phoned.”
They both glanced at the phone. If you lifted the receiver, you heard a winter stillness. The phones were dead. They had died days ago with the riots in the nearest towns and cities. Now, in the receiver, you heard only your own heart-beat. “Can you put me up?” Lone had cried from six hundred miles away. “Just overnight?”
But before they could answer her, the phone had filled itself with long miles of silence.
“Lotte is coming. She sounded hysterical. That might be her,” said Martha Webb.
“No,” said Robert. “I heard that crying other nights, too. Dear God.”
They lay in the cold room in this farmhouse back in the Massachusetts wilderness, back from the main roads, away from the towns, near a bleak river and a black forest. It was the frozen middle of December. The white smell of snow cut the air.
They arose. With an oil lamp lit, they sat on the edge of the bed as if dangling their legs over a precipice.
“There’s no one downstairs, there can’t be.”
“Whoever it is sounds frightened.”
“We’re all frightened, damn it. That’s why we came out here, to be away from cities, riots, all that damned foolishness. No more wiretaps, arrests, taxes, neurotics. Now when we find it at last, people call and upset us. And tonight this, Christ!” He glanced at his wife. “You afraid?”
“I don’t know. I don’t believe in ghosts. This is 1999; I’m sane. Or like to think I am. Where’s your gun?”
“We won’t need it. Don’t ask me why, but we won’t.” They picked up their oil lamps. In another month the small power plant would be finished in the white barns behind the house and there’d be power to spare, but now they haunted the farm, coming and going with dim lamps or candles.
They stood at the stairwell, both thirty-three, both immensely practical.
The crying, the sadness, and the plea came from below in the winter rooms.
“She sounds so damned sad,” said Robert. “God, I’m sorry for her, but don’t even know who it is. Come on.”
They went downstairs.
As if hearing their footsteps, the crying grew louder. There was a dull thudding against a hidden panel somewhere.
“The Witch Door!” said Martha Webb at last.
“Can’t be.”
“Is.”
They stood in the long hall looking at that place under the stairs, where the panels trembled faintly. But now the cries faded, as if the crier was exhausted, or something had diverted her, or perhaps their voices had startled her and she was listening for them to speak again. Now the winter-night house was silent and the man and wife waited with the oil lamps quietly fuming in their hands.
Robert Webb stepped to the Witch Door and touched it, probing for the hidden button, the secret spring. “There can’t be anyone in there,” he said. “My God, we’ve been here six months, and that’s just a cubby. Isn’t that what the Realtor said when he sold the place? No one could hide in there and us not know it. We-“
“Listen!”
They listened.
Nothing.
“She’s gone, it’s gone, whatever it was, hell, that door hasn’t been opened in our lifetime. Everyone’s forgotten where the spring is that unlocks it. I don’t think there is a door, only a loose panel, and rats’ nests, that’s all. The walls, scratching. Why not?” He turned to look at his wife, who was staring at the hidden place.
“Silly,” she said. “Good Lord, rats don’t cry. That was a voice, asking to be saved. Lotte, I thought. But now I know it wasn’t she, but someone else in as much trouble.”
Martha Webb reached out and trembled her fingertips along the beveled edge of ancient maple. “Can’t we open it?”
“With a crowbar and hammer, tomorrow.”
“Oh, Robert!”
“Don’t ‘Oh, Robert’ me. I’m tired.”
“You can’t leave her in there to-“
“She’s quiet now. Christ, I’m exhausted. I’ll come down at the crack of dawn and knock the damned thing apart, okay?”
“All right,” she said, and tears came to her eyes.
“Women,” said Robert Webb. “Oh, my God, you and Lotte, Lotte and you. If she is coming here, if she makes it, I’ll have a houseful of lunatics!”
“Lotte’s fine!”
“Sure, but she should keep her mouth shut. It doesn’t pay now to say you’re Socialist, Democrat, Libertarian, Pro-Life Abortionist, Sinn Fein Fascist, Commie, any damn thing. The towns are bombed out. People are looking for scapegoats and Lotte has to shoot from the hip, get herself smeared and now, hell, on the run.”
“They’ll jail her if they catch her. Or kill her, yes, kill her. We’re lucky to be here with our own food. Thank God we planned ahead, we saw it coming, the starvation, the massacres. We helped ourselves. Now we help Lone if she makes it through.”
Without answering, he turned to the stairs. “I’m dead on my feet. I’m tired of saving anyone. Even Lotte. But hell, if she comes through the front door, she’s saved.”
They went up the stairs taking the lamps, advancing in an ever-moving aura of trembling white glow. The house was as silent as snow falling. “God,” he whispered. “Damn, I don’t like women crying like that.”
It sounded like the whole world crying, he thought. The whole world dying and needing help and lonely, but what can you do? Live in a farm like this? Far off the main highway where people don’t pass, away from all the stupidity and death? What can you do?
They left one of the lamps lit and drew the covers over their bodies and lay, listening to the wind hit the house and creak the beams and parquetry.
A moment later there was a cry from downstairs, a splintering crash, the sound of a door flung wide, a bursting out of air, footsteps rapping all the rooms, a sobbing, almost an exultation, then the front door banged open, the winter wind blowing wildly in, footsteps across the front porch and gone.
“There!” cried Martha. “Yes!”
With the lamp they were down the stairs swiftly. Wind smothered their faces as they turned now toward the Witch Door, opened wide, still on its hinges, then toward the front door where they cast their light out upon a snowing winter darkness and saw nothing but white and hills, no moon, and in the lamplight the soft drift and moth-flicker of snowflakes falling from the sky to the mattressed yard.
“Gone,” she whispered.
“Who?”
“We’ll never know, unless she comes back.”
“She won’t. Look.”
They moved the lamplight toward the white earth and the tiny footprints going off, across the softness, toward the dark forest.
“It was a woman, then. But ... why?”
“God knows. Why anything, now in this crazy world?” They stood looking at the footprints a long while until, shivering, they moved back through the hall to the open Witch Door. They poked the lamp into this hollow under the stairs.
“Lord, it’s just a cell, hardly a closet, and look...”
Inside stood a small rocking chair, a braided rug, a used candle in a copper holder, and an old, worn Bible. The place smelled of must and moss and dead flowers.
“Is this where they used to hide people?”
“Yes. A long time back they hid people called witches. Trials, witch trials. They hung or burned some.”
“Yes, yes,” they both murmured, staring into the incredibly small cell.
“And the witches hid here while the hunters searched the house and gave up and left?”
“Yes, oh, my God, yes,” he whispered.
“Rob
“Yes?”
She bent forward. Her face was pale and she could not look away from the small, worn rocking chair and the faded Bible.
“Rob. How old? This house, how old?”
“Maybe three hundred years.
“That old?”
“Why?”
“Crazy. Stupid ...
“Crazy?”
“Houses, old like this. All the years. And more years and more after that. God, feel! If you put your hand in, yes? Would you feel it change, silly, and what if I sat in that rocking chair and shut the door, what? That woman . .. how long was she in there? How’d she get there? From way, way back. Wouldn’t it be strange?”
“Bull!”
“But if you wanted to run away badly enough, wished for it, prayed for it, and people ran after you, and someone hid you in a place like this, a witch behind a door, and heard the searchers run through the house, closer and closer, wouldn’t you want to get away? Anywhere? To another place? Why not another time? And then, in a house like this, a house so old nobody knows, if you wanted and asked for it enough, couldn’t you run to another year! Maybe”-she paused-“here ... ?”
“No, no,” he muttered. “Really stupid!”
But still, some quiet motion within the closeted space caused both, at almost the same instant, to hold their hands out on the air, curious, like people testing invisible waters. The air seemed to move one way and then another, now warm, now cold, with a pulsation of light and a sudden turning toward dark. All this they thought but could not say. There was weather here, now a quick touch of summer and then a winter cold, which could not be, of course, but there it was. Passing along their fingertips, but unseen by their eyes, a stream of shadows and sun ran as invisible as time itself, clear as crystal, but clouded by a shifting dark. Both felt if they thrust their hands deep, they might be drawn in to drown in a mighty storm of seasons within an incredibly small space. All this, too, they thought or almost felt but could not say.
They seized their frozen but sunburned hands back, to stare down and hold them against the panic in their breasts.
“Damn,” whispered Robert Webb. “Oh, damn!” He backed off and went to open the front door again and look at the snowing night where the footprints had almost vanished.
“No” he said. “No, no.”
Just then the yellow flash of headlights on the road braked in front of the house.
“Lotte!” cried Martha Webb. “It must be! Lotte!” The car lights went out. They ran to meet the running woman half up the front yard.
“Lotte!”
The woman, wild-eyed, hair windblown, threw herself at them.
“Martha, Bob! God, I thought I’d never find you! Lost! I’m being followed, let’s get inside. Oh, I didn’t mean to get you up in the middle of the night, it’s good to see you! Jesus! Hide the car! Here are the keys!”
Robert Webb ran to drive the car behind the house. When he came back around he saw that the heavy snowfall was already covering the tracks.
Then the three of them were inside the house, talking, holding onto each other. Robert Webb kept glancing at the front door.
“I can’t thank you,” cried Lotte, huddled in a chair. “You’re at risk! I won’t stay long, a few hours until it’s safe. Then ..
“Stay as long as you want.”
“No. They’ll follow! In the cities, the fires, the murders, everyone starving, I stole gas. Do you have more? Enough to get me to Phil Merdith’s in Greenborough? I-“
“Lotte,” said Robert Webb.
“Yes?” Lotte stopped, breathless.
“Did you see anyone on your way up here? A woman? Running on the road?”
“What? I drove so fast! A woman? Yes! I almost hit her. Then she was gone! Why?”
“Well . .
“She’s not dangerous?”
“No, no.”
“It is all right, my being here?”
“Yes, fine, fine. Sit back. We’ll fix some coffee-“
“Wait! I’ll check!” And before they could stop her, Lotte ran to the front door, opened it a crack, and peered out. They stood with her and saw distant headlights flourished over a low hill and gone into a valley. “They’re coming,” whispered Lotte. “They might search here. God, where can I hide?”
Martha and Robert glanced at each other.
No, no, thought Robert Webb. God, no! Preposterous, unimaginable, fantastic, so damned coincidental the mind raves at it, crows, hoots, guffaws! No, none of this! Get oft’ circumstance! Get away with your goings and comings on not neat, or too neat, schedules. Come back, Lotte, in ten years, five years, maybe a year, a month, a week, and ask to hide. Even tomorrow show up! But don’t come with coincidence in each hand like idiot children and ask, only half an hour after one terror, one miracle, to test our disbelief! I’m not, after all, Charles Dickens, to blink and let this pass.
“What’s wrong?” said Lotte.
“I-“ said Robert.
“No place to hide me?”
“Yes,” he said. “We’ve a place.”
“Well?”
“Here.” He turned slowly away, stunned.
They walked down the hall to the half-open paneling.
“This?” Lotte said. “Secret? Did you-7”
“No’ it’s been here since the house was built long ago.” Lotte touched and moved the door on its hinges. “Does it work? Will they know where to look and find it?”
“No. It’s beautifully made. Shut, you can’t tell it’s there.” Outside in the winter night, cars rushed, their beams flashing up the road, across the house windows.
Lotte peered into the Witch Door as one peers down a deep, lonely well.
A filtering of dust moved about her. The small rocking chair trembled.
Moving in silently, Lotte touched the half-burned candle.
“Why, it’s still warm!”
Martha and Robert said nothing. They held to the Witch Door, smelling the odor of warm tallow.
Lotte stood rigidly in the little space, bowing her head beneath the beamed ceiling.
A horn blew in the snowing night. Lotte took a deep breath and said, “Shut the door.”
They shut the Witch Door. There was no way to tell that a door was there.
They blew out the lamp and stood in the cold, dark house, waiting.
The cars rushed down the road, their noise loud, and their yellow headlights bright in the falling snow. The wind stirred the footprints in the yard, one pair going out, another coming in, and the tracks of Lotte’s car fast vanishing, and at last gone.
“Thank God,” whispered Martha.
The cars, honking, whipped around the last bend and down the hill and stopped, waiting, looking in at the dark house. Then, at last, they started up away into the snow and the hills.
Soon their lights were gone and their sound gone with them.
“We were lucky,” said Robert Webb.
“But she’s not.”
“She?”
“That woman, whoever she was, ran out of here. They’ll find here. Somebody’ll find her.”
“Christ, that’s right.”
“And she has no I.D., no proof of herself. And she doesn’t know what’s happened to her. And when she tells them who she is and where she came from!”
“Yes, yes.”
“God help her.”
They looked into the snowing night but saw nothing. Everything was still. “You can’t escape,” she said. “No matter what you do, no one can escape.”
They moved away from the window and down the hall to the Witch Door and touched it.
“Lotte,” they called.
The Witch Door did not tremble or move. “Lotte, you can come out now.” There was no answer; not a breath or a whisper. Robert tapped the door. “Hey in there.”
“Lotte!”
He knocked at the paneling, his mouth agitated. “Lotte!”
“Open it!”
“I’m trying, damn it!”
“Lotte, we’ll get you out, wait! Everything’s all right!”
He beat with both fists, cursing. Then he said, “Watch out!” took a step back, raised his leg, kicked once, twice, three times; vicious kicks at the paneling that crunched holes and crumbled wood into kindling. He reached in and yanked the entire paneling free. “Lotte!”
They leaned together into the small place under the stairs. The candle flickered on the small table. The Bible was gone. The small rocking chair moved quietly back and forth, in little arcs, and then stood still.
“Lotte!”
They stared at the empty room. The candle flickered.
“Lotte,” they said.
“You don’t believe .
“I don’t know. Old houses are old... old . .
“You think Lotte ... she ... ?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.”
“Then she’s safe at least, safe! Thank God!”
“Safe? Where’s she gone? You really think that? A woman in new clothes, red lipstick, high heels, short skirt, perfume, plucked brows, diamond rings, silk stockings, safe? Safe!” he said, staring deep into the open frame of the Witch Door.
“Yes, safe. Why not?”
He drew a deep breath.
“A woman of that description, lost in a town called Salem in the year 1680?”
He reached over and shut the Witch Door.
They sat waiting by it for the rest of the long, cold night.
The talk in the village in the year 1853 was, of course, about the madman above, in his sod-and-brick hut, with an untended garden and a wife who had fled, silent about his madness, never to return.
The people of the village had never drunk enough courage to go see what the special madness was or why the wife had vanished, tear-stained, leaving a vacuum into which atmospheres had rushed to thunder-clap.
And yet ...
On a sweltering hot day with no cloud to offer shadow comfort and no threat of rain to cool man or beast, the Searcher arrived. Which is to say, Dr. Mortimer Goff, a man of many parts, most of them curious and self-serving, but also traveling the world for some baroque event, or miraculous revelation.
The good doctor came tramping up the hill, stumbling over cobbles that were more stone than paving, having abandoned his coach-and-horses, fearful of crippling them with such a climb.
Dr. Goff it turned out, had come from London, inhaling fogs, bombarded by storms, and now, stunned by too much light and heat, this good if curious physician stopped, exhausted, to lean against a fence, sight further up the hill, and ask:
“Is this the way to the lunatic?”
A farmer who was more scarecrow than human raised his eyebrows and snorted, “That would be Elijah Wetherby.”
“If lunatics have names, yes.”
“We call him crazed or mad, but lunatic will do. It sounds like book learning. Are you one of those?”
“I own books, yes, and chemical retorts and a skeleton that was once a man, and a permanent pass to the London Historical and Scientific Museum-“
“All well and good,” the farmer interrupted, “but of no use for failed crops and a dead wife. Follow your nose. And when you find the fool or whatever you name him, take him with you. We’re tired of his shouts and commotions late nights in his iron foundry and anvil menagerie. Rumor says he will soon finish some monster that will run to kill us all.”
“Is that true?” asked Dr. Goff.
“No, it lies easy on my tongue. Good day, Doctor, and God deliver you from the lightning bolts that wait for you above.”
With this the farmer spaded the earth to bury the conversation.
So the curious doctor, threatened, climbed on, under a dark cloud which did not stop the sun.
And at last arrived at a hut that seemed more tomb than home, surrounded by land more graveyard than garden.
Outside the ramshackle sod-and-brick dwelling a shadow stepped forth, as if waiting, and became an old, very old, man.
“Well, there you are at last!” it cried.
Dr. Goff reared back at this. “You sound, sir, as if you expected me!”
“I did,” said the old man, “some years ago! What took you so long?”
“You are not exactly cheek by jowl with London, sir.”
“I am not,” the old man agreed and added, “The name is Wetherby. The Inventor”
“Mr. Wetherby, the Inventor. I am Dr. Goff, the so-called Searcher, for I move in behalf of our good Queen, turning rocks, digging truffles, curious for stuffs that might delight her Majesty or fill her museums, shops, and streets in the greatest city in the world. Have I reached the right place?”
“And just in time, for I am now in my eightieth year and of inconsequential vigor. If you had arrived next year, you might have found me in the churchyard. Do come in!”
At this moment, Dr. Goff heard a gathering of people behind him, all with a most unpleasant muttering, so at Mr. Wetherby’s beckoning, he was glad to enter, sit, and watch an almost rare whiskey being poured without invitation. When he had quaffed the glass, Dr. Goff swiveled his gaze about the room.
“Well, where is it?”
“Where is what, sir?”
“The lunatic device, the insane machine that goes nowhere but in going might run down a child, a lamb, a priest, a nun, or an old blind dog, where?”
“So I am that famous, am I?” The old man let a few crumbs of laughter fall from his toothless mouth. “Well, sir. I keep it locked in the goats’ shed behind: the outhouse of machines. Finish that to strengthen your sanity when you at last behold the delight and grievance of my long inventive life. So!”
The doctor drank, was replenished and soon out the door, across a small, smooth circle of turf, and to a shed whose door was triple-kept with numerous padlocks and keys. Old Wetherby entered, lit many candles, and beckoned the good doctor in.
He pointed as to a manger. The medical Searcher looked, expecting a mother, crib, and holy babe by the way Wetherby gestured and cried:
“There she be!”
“Is it female, then?”
“Come to think, she is!”
And there in the candlelight was Wetherby’s mechanical pride.
Dr. Goff coughed, to hide his chagrin.
“That, sir, is but a metal frame!”
“But what a frame to hold velocities! Ha!”
And the old man, young with fevers, rushed to seize a largish wheel which he transported to fit to the front part of the frame. Then he fetched yet another circular object to fit into the frame’s rear.
“Well?” he cried.
“I see two wheels, half a cart, and no horse!”
“We will shoot all horses!” exclaimed Wetherby. “My invention, by the tens of thousands, will shy off all horses and banish manures. Do you know, each day in London a thousand tons of horse clods must be cleared, fertilizer wasted, not spread on neighbor fields but dumped as sludge down-Thames. God, how I talk!”
“But, sir, continue. Those look to be spinning wheels, borrowed from nearby farms?”
“They are, but spliced and strengthened with metal to sustain” - Wetherby touched himself - “one hundred twenty pounds. And here’s the saddle for that weight.” Whereupon he fitted a saddle mid-frame. “And here the stirrups and ribbon to run the back wheel.” So saying, he affixed a longish leather ribbon to one stirrup’s rotary and tightened it on a spool at the rear.
“Do you begin to perceive, Doctor?”
“I am stranded in ignorance, sir.
“Well, then, be alert, for I now enthrone myself.”
And the old man, light as a chimpanzee, slung himself in place on a leather seat mid-frame between the silent spinning wheels.
“I still see no horse, sir.”
“I am the horse, Doctor. I am the horse a-gallop!”
And the old man thrust his feet in the stirrups to chum them up, around, and down; up, around, and down; as the rear wheels, provoked, did likewise, up, down, around, with a lovely hum, fastened in place on the platform planks.
“Aha.” The doctor’s face brightened. “This is a device to manufacture electrical power? Something from Benjamin Franklin’s storm-lightning notebooks?!”
“Gods, no. It could make lightnings, yes! But this, sir, not seeming one, is a horse, and I its night rider! So!”
And Wetherby pumped and wheezed, wheezed and pumped, and the rear wheels, locked in place, spun faster, faster, with a siren whine.
“All very well,” snorted the good doctor, “but the horse, if it is, and the rider, if you are, seem to be going nowhere! What will you call your machine?”
“I have had many nights and years to think.” Wetherby pumped and wheezed. “The Velocitor, perhaps.” Pumpwheeze. “Or the Precipitor, but no, that sounds as if I might be thrown from my ‘horse.’ The Galvanizer, yes? Or why not-“ Wheeze-pump. “The Landstride or Diminisher, for-“ Wheeze-pump. “It does diminish time and distance. Doctor, you know Latin, eh? So, feet to wheel, wheel run by feet name it!”
“The Elijah, your given name, sir, the Elijah.”
“But he saw a wheel way in the middle of the air and it was a wheel in a wheel, is that not so?”
“When last I was in church, yes. And you are grounded, that is plain to see. Why not Velocipede, then? Having to do with speed and the applied toe and ankle?”
“Close-on, Dr. Goff, close-on. Why do you stare so fixedly?”
“It comes to mind that great times call forth great inventions. The inventor is child to his year and day. This is not a great time for such as you and yours. Did this century call you forth as its mightiest of all men of genius?”
Old Wetherby let his machine coast for a moment and smiled.
“No, I and my Tilda here, I call her Tilda, will instead be the gravity that calls forth the century. We will influence the year, the decade, and the millennium!”
“It is hard for me to believe,” said the medical gentleman, “that you will build a road from your sill to the city on which to glide your not-inconsiderable dream.”
“Nay, Doctor, the reverse is true. The city, and the world when they know me1 and this will run a concourse here to deliver me to fame.”
“Your head knocks heaven, Mr. Wetherby,” said the doctor dryly. “But your roots ache for sustenance, water, minerals, air. You stroke and pump wildly, but go nowhere. Once off that rack, will you not fall on your side, destroyed?”
“Nay, nay.” Wetherby, in gusts, pumped again. “For I have discovered some physics, as yet nameless. The faster you propel this bodily device, the less tendency to fall left or right but continue straight, if no obstacles prevent!”
“With only two wheels beneath? Prove it. Release your invention, set it free in flight, let us see you sustain your forward motion without breaking your bum!”
“Oh, God, shut up!” cried Wetherby as his kindling legs thrashed the pedals, racketing round as he leaned into a phantom wind, eyes clenched against an invisible storm, and churned the wheels to a frenzy. “Don’t you hear? Listen. That whine, that cry, that whisper. The ghost in the machine, which promises things most new, unseen, unrealized, only a dream now but tomorrow - Great God, don’t you see?! If I were on a real path this would be swifter than gazelles, a panic of deer! All pedestrians vanquished. All coach-and-horses in dust! Not twenty miles a day, but thirty, forty miles in a single glorious hour! Stand off, Time. Beware, meadow-beasts! Here glides, in full plummet, Wetherby with nothing to stop him!”
“Aye,” said the Searcher dryly, “you pump up a storm on that stand. But, set free, how would you balance on only two wheels!?”
“Like this!” cried Wetherby, and with a thrust of his hands and an uplift of frame, seized the Traveler, the Motion Machine, the Pathfinder, up free of its stand and in an instant plunged through the room and out the door, with Dr. Goff, in full pursuit, yelling:
“Stop! You’ll kill yourself!”
“No, exhilarate my heart, oxygenate my blood!” cried Wetherby, and there he was in a chicken-yard he had trampled flat, paths some sixty feet around on which he now flailed his metal machine with scythings of ankle, toe, heel, and leg, sucking air, gusting out great laughs. “See? I do not fall! Two legs, two wheels, and: presto!”
“My God!” cried Dr. Goff, eyes thrust forth like hardboiled eggs. “God’s truth! How so?!”
“I fly forward faster than I fall downward, an unguessed law of physics. But lo! I almost fly. Fly! Good-bye horses, doomed and dead!”
And with “dead” he was overcome with such a delirium of pant and pump, perspiration raining off him in showers, that with a great cry, he wobbled and was flung, a meteor of flesh, over and down on a coop where the chickens, in dumb feather-duster alarms, exploded in shrieks as Wetherby slid in one direction while his vehicle, self-motivated, wheels a-spin, mounted Dr. Goff, who jumped aside, fearful of being spliced.
Wetherby, helped to his feet, protested his trajectory:
“Ignore that! Do you at last understand?”
“Fractures, wounds, broken skulls, yes!”
“No, a future brave with motion, ‘tween my legs. You have come a long way, Doctor. Will you adopt and further my machine?”
“Well,” said the doctor, already out of the yard, into the house, and to the front door, his face confused, his wits a patch of nettles. “Ah,” he said.
“Say you will, Doctor. Or my device dies, and I with it!”
“But.. .” said the doctor and opened the outer door, only to draw back, alarmed. “What have I done!” he cried.
Peering over his shoulder, Wetherby expressed further alarm. “Your presence is known, Doctor; the word has spread. A lunatic has come to visit a lunatic.”
And it was true. On the road and in the front garden yard were some twelve or twenty farmers and villagers, some with rocks, some with clubs, and with looks of malice or outright hostility caught in their eyes and mouths.
“There they are!” someone cried.
“Have you come to take him away?” someone else shouted.
“Yah” echoed the struggling crowd, moving forward.
Thinking quickly, Dr. Goff replied, “Yes. I will take him away!” And turned back to the old man.
“Take me where, Doctor?” whispered Wetherby, clutching his elbow.
“One moment!” cried the doctor to the crowd, which then subsided in murmurs. “Let me think.”
Standing back, cudgeling his bald spot, and then massaging his brow for rampant inspiration, Dr. Goff at last exhaled in triumph.
“I have it, by George. A genius of an idea, which will please both villagers, to be rid of you, and you, to be rid of them.”
“What, what, Doctor?”
“Why, sir, you are to come down to London under cover of night and I will let you through the side door of my museum with your blasphemous toy of Satan .
“To what purpose?”
“Purpose? Why, sir, I have found the path, the smooth surface, the road you spoke of at some future time!”
“The road, the path, the surface?”
“The museum floors, marble, smooth, lovely, wondrous, ohmigod, for all your needs!”
“Needs?”
“Don’t be thick. Each night, as many nights as you wish, to your heart’s content, you can ride that wheeled demon round and round, past the Rembrandts and Turners and Fra Angelicos, through the Grecian statues and Roman busts, careful of porcelains, minding the crystals, but pumping away like Lucifer all night till dawn!”
“Oh, dear God,” murmured Wetherby, “why didn’t I think?”
“If you had you would’ve been too shy to ask!”
“The only place in the world with roads like future roads, paths like tomorrow’s paths, boulevards without cobbles, pure as Aphrodite’s cheeks! Smooth as Apollo’s rump!”
And here Wetherby unlocked his eyes to let fall tears, pent up for months and long hilltop years.
“Don’t cry,” said Dr. Goff.
“I must, with joy, or burst. Do you mean it?”
“My good man, here’s my hand!”
They shook and the shaking let free at least one drop of rain from the good doctor’s cheek, also.
“The excitement will kill me,” said Wetherby, wiping the backs of his fists across his eyes.
“No better way to die! Tomorrow night?”
“But what will people say as I lead my machine through the streets to your museum?”
“If anyone sees, say you’re a gypsy who’s stolen treasure from a distant year. Well, well, Elijah Wetherby, I’m off.”
“Be careful downhill.”
“Careful.”
Half out the door, Dr. Goff tripped on a cobble and almost fell as a farmer said:
“Did you see the lunatic?”
“I did.”
“Will you take him to a madhouse?”
“Yes. Asylum.” Dr. Goff adjusted his cuffs. “Crazed. Worthless. You will see him no more!”
“Good!” said all as he passed.
“Grand,” said Goff and picked his way down the stone path, listening.
And uphill was there not a final, joyful, wheel-circling cry from that distant yard?
Dr. Goff snorted.
“Think on it,” he said, half aloud, “no more horses, no more manure! Think!”
And, thinking, fell on the cobbles, lurching toward London and the future.
“Well,” said Sheila, chewing on her breakfast toast and examining her complexion, distorted in the side of the coffee urn, “here it is the last day of the last month of the ninth year.”
Her husband, Thomas, glanced over the rampart of The Wall Street Journa4 saw nothing to fasten his regard, and sank back in place. “What?”
“I said,” said Sheila, “the ninth year’s finished and you have a completely new wife. Or, to put it properly, the old wife’s gone. So I don’t think we’re married anymore.”
Thomas floored the Journal on his as-yet-untouched scrambled eggs, tilted his head this way and that, and said:
“Not married?”
“No, that was another time, another body, another me.” She buttered more toast and munched on it philosophically.
“Hold on!” He took a stiff jolt of coffee. “Explain.”
“Well, dear Thomas, don’t you remember reading as children and later, that every nine years, I think it was nine, the body, churning like a gene-chromosome factory, did your entire person over, fingernails, spleen, ankles to elbows, belly, bum, and earlobes, molecule by molecule-“
“Oh, get to it,” he grumbled. “The point, wife, the point!”
“The point, dear Tom,” she replied, finishing her toast, “is that with this breakfast I have replenished my soul and psyche, completed the reworking of my entire flesh, blood, and bones. This person seated across from you is not the woman you married-“
“I have often said that!”
“Be serious.”
“Are you?” he said.
“Let me finish. If the medical research is true, then at the end of nine years there is not an eyebrow, eyelash, pore, dimple, or skin follicle in this creature here at this celebratory breakfast that in any way is related to that old Sheila Tompkins married at eleven a.m. of a Saturday nine years ago this very hour. Two different women. One in bondage to a nice male creature whose jaw jumps out like a cash register when he scans the Journal. The other, now that it is one minute after the deadline hour, Born Free. So!”
She rose swiftly and prepared to flee.
“Wait!” He gave himself another jolt of coffee. “Where are you going?”
Hallway to the door, she said, “Out. Perhaps away. And who knows: forever!”
“Born free? Hogwash. Come here! Sit down!”
She hesitated as he assumed his lion-tamer’s voice. “Dammit. You owe me an explanation. Sit!”
She turned slowly. “For only as long as it takes to draw a picture.”
“Draw it, then. Sit!”
She came to stare at her plate. “I seem to have eaten everything in sight.”
He jumped up, ran over to the side table, rummaged more omelet, and banged it in front of her.
“There.! Speak with your mouth full.”
She forked in the eggs. “You do see what I’m driving at, don’t you, Tomasino?”
“Damnation! I thought you were happy!”
“Yes, but not incredibly happy.”
“That’s for maniacs on their honeymoons!”
“Yes, wasn’t it?” she remembered.
“That was then, this is now. Well?”
“I could feel it happening all year. Lying in bed, I felt my skin prickle, my pores open like ten thousand tiny mouths, my perspiration run like faucets, my heart race, my pulse sound in the oddest places, under my chin, my wrists, the backs of my knees, my ankles. I felt like a huge wax statue, melting. After midnight I was afraid to turn on the bathroom light and find a stranger gone mad in the mirror.”
“All right, all right!” He stirred four sugars in his coffee and drank the slops from the saucer. “Sum it up!”
“Every hour of every night and then all day, I could feel it as if I were out in a storm being struck by hot August rain that washed away the old to find a brand-new me. Every drop of serum, every red and white corpuscle, every hot flash of nerve ending, rewired and restrung, new marrow, new hair for combing, new fingerprints even. Don’t look at me that way. Perhaps no new fingerprints. But all the rest. See? Am I not a fresh-sculpted, fresh-painted work of God’s creation?”
He searched her up and down with a razor glare.
“I hear Mad Carlotta maundering,” he said. “I see a woman hyperventilated by a midlife frenzy. Why don’t you just say it? Do you want a divorce?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Not necessarily?” he shouted.
“I’ll just simply ... go away.”
“Where will you go?”
“There must be some place,” she said vaguely, stirring her omelet to make paths.
“Is there another man?” he said at last, holding his utensils with fists.
“Not quite yet.
“Thank God for small favors.” He let a great breath gust out. “Now go to your room.”
“Beg pardon?” She blinked.
“You’ll not be allowed out for the rest of this week. Go to your room. No phone calls. No TV. No-“
She was on her feet. “You sound like my father in high school!”
“I’ll be damned.” He laughed quietly. “Yes! Upstairs now! No lunch for you, my girl. I’ll put a plate by your door at suppertime. When you behave I’ll give you your car keys. Meanwhile, march! Pull out your telephone plugs and hand over your CD player!”
“This is outrageous,” she cried. “I’m a grown woman.”
“Ingrown. No progress. Re-gress. If that damn theory’s true, you didn’t add on, just sank back nine years! Out you go! Up!”
She ran, pale-faced, to the entry stairs, wiping tears from her eyes.
As she was hallway up, he, putting his foot on the first step, pulled the napkin from his shirt and called quietly, “Wait ...”
She froze in place but did not look back down at him, waiting.
“Sheila,” he said at last, tears running down his cheeks now.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I love you,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “But it doesn’t help.”
“Yes, it does. Listen.”
She waited, hallway up to her room.
He rubbed his hand over his face as if trying to massage some truth out of it. His hand was almost frantic, searching for something hidden around his mouth or near his eyes.
Then it almost burst from him. “Sheila!”
“I’m supposed to go to my room,” she said.
“Don’t!”
“What, then?”
His face began to relax, his eyes to fix on a solution, as his hand rested on the banister leading up to where she stood with her back turned.
“If what you say is true-“
“It is,” she murmured. “Every cell, every pore, every eyelash. Nine years-“
“Yes, yes, I know, yes. But listen.”
He swallowed hard and that helped him digest the solution which he now spoke very weakly, then quietly, and then with a kind of growing certainty.
“If what you say happened-“
“It did,” she murmured, head down.
“Well, then,” he said slowly, and then, “It happened to me, too.”
“What?” Her head lifted a trifle.
“It doesn’t just happen to one person, right? It happens to all people, everyone in the world. And if that’s true, well, my body has been changing along with yours during all the last nine years. Every follicle, every fingernail, all the dermis and epidermis or whatever. I never noticed. But it must have.”
Her head was up now and her back was not slumped. He hurried on.
“And if that’s true, good Lord, then I’m new, too. The old Tom, Thomas, Tommy, Tomasino is left behind back there with the shed snakeskin.”
Her eyes opened and she listened and he finished. “So we’re both brand-new. You’re the new, beautiful woman I’ve been thinking about finding and loving in the last year. And I’m that man you were heading out to search for. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that true?”
There was the merest hesitation and then she gave the smallest, almost imperceptible nod.
“Mercy,” he called gently.
“That’s not my name,” she said.
“It is now. New woman, new body, new name. So I picked one for you. Mercy?”
After a moment she said, “What does that make you?”
“Let me think.” He chewed his lip and smiled. “How about Frank? Frankly, my dear, I do give a damn.”
“Frank,” she murmured. “Frank and Mercy. Mercy and Frank.”
“It doesn’t exactly ring, but it’ll do. Mercy?”
“Yes?”
“Will you marry me?”
“What?”
“I said, will you marry me. Today. An hour from now. Noon?”
She turned at last to look down at him with a face all freshly tanned and washed.
“Oh, yes,” she said.
“And we’ll run away and be maniacs again, for a little while
“No,” she said, “here is fine. Here is wonderful.”
“Come down, then,” he said, holding his hand up to her. “We have another nine years before another change. Come down and finish your wedding breakfast. Mercy?”
She came down the steps and took his hand and smiled.
“Where’s the champagne?” she said.
Looking back now, I can’t remember a time when Bug wasn’t dancing. Bug is short for jitterbug and, of course, those were the days in the late thirties, our final days in high school and our first days out in the vast world looking for work that didn’t exist when jitterbugging was all the rage. And I can remember Bug (his real name was Bert Bagley, which shortens to Bug nicely), during a jazz-band blast at our final aud-call for our high school senior class, suddenly leaping up to dance with an invisible partner in the middle of the front aisle of the auditorium. That brought the house down. You never heard such a roar or such applause. The bandleader, stricken with Bug’s oblivious joy, gave an encore and Bug did the same and we all exploded. After that the band played “Thanks for the Memory” and we all sang it, with tears pouring down our cheeks. Nobody in all the years after could forget: Bug dancing in the aisle, eyes shut, hands out to grasp his invisible girlfriend, his legs not connected to his body, just his heart, all over the place. When it was over, nobody, not even the band, wanted to leave. We just stood there in the world Bug had made, hating to go out into that other world that was waiting for us.
It was about a year later when Bug saw me on the street and stopped his roadster and said come on along to my place for a hot dog and a Coke, and I jumped in and we drove over with the top down and the wind really hitting us and Bug talking and talking at the top of his lungs, about life and the times and what he wanted to show me in his front parlor-front parlor, hell, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom.
What was it he wanted me to see?
Trophies. Big ones, little ones, solid gold and silver and brass trophies with his name on them. Dance trophies. I mean they were everywhere, on the floor by his bed, on the kitchen sink, in the bathroom, but in the parlor, especially, they had settled like a locust plague. There were so many of them on the mantel, and in bookcases instead of books, and on the floor, you had to wade through, kicking some over as you went. They totaled, he said, tilting his head back and counting inside his eyelids, to about three hundred and twenty prizes, which means grabbing onto a trophy almost every night in the past year.
“All this,” I gasped, “just since we left high school?”
“Ain’t I the cat’s pajamas?” Bug cried.
“You’re the whole darned department store! Who was your partner, all those nights?”
“Not partner, partners,” Bug corrected. “Three hundred, give or take a dozen, different women on three hundred different nights.”
“Where do you find three hundred women, all talented, all good enough, to win prizes?”
“They weren’t talented or all good,” said Bug, glancing around at his collection. “They were just ordinary, good, every-night dancers. I won the prizes. I made them good. And when we got Out there dancing, we cleared the floor.
Everyone else stopped, to watch us there out in the middle of nowhere, and we never stopped.”
He paused, blushed, and shook his head. “Sorry about that. Didn’t mean to brag.”
But he wasn’t bragging. I could see. He was just telling the truth.
“You want to know how this all started?” said Bug, handing over a hot dog and a Coke.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “I know.”
“How could you?” said Bug, looking me over.
“The last aud-call at L.A. High, I think they played ‘Thanks for the Memory,’ but just before that-“
“ ‘Roll Out the Barrel’-“
“-‘the Barrel,’ yes, and there you were in front of God and everyone, jumping.”
“I never stopped,” said Bug, eyes shut, back in those years. “Never,” he said, “stopped.”
“You got your life all made,” I said.
“Unless,” said Bug, “something happens.”
What happened was, of course, the war.
Looking back, I remember that in that last year in school, sap that I was, I made up a list of my one hundred and sixty-five best friends. Can you imagine that? One hundred and sixty-five, count ‘em, best friends! It’s a good thing I never showed that list to anyone. I would have been hooted out of school.
Anyway, the war came and went and took with it a couple dozen of those listed friends and the rest just disappeared into holes in the ground or went east or wound up in Malibu or Fort Lauderdale. Bug was on that list, but I didn’t figure out I didn’t really know him until half a lifetime later. By that time I was down to half a dozen pals or women I might turn to if I needed, and it was then, walking down Hollywood Boulevard one Saturday afternoon, I heard someone call:
“How about a hot dog and a Coke?”
Bug, I thought without turning. And that’s who it was, standing on the Walk of Stars with his feet planted on Mary Pickford and Ricardo Cortez just behind and Jimmy Stewart just ahead. Bug had taken off some hair and put on some weight, but it was Bug and I was overjoyed, perhaps too much, and showed it, for he seemed embarrassed at my enthusiasm. I saw then that his suit was not half new enough and his shirt frayed, but his tie was neatly tied and he shook my hand off and we popped into a place where we stood and had that hot dog and that Coke.
“Still going to be the world’s greatest writer?” said Bug.
“Working at it,” I said.
“You’ll get there,” said Bug and smiled, meaning it. “You were always good.”
“So were you,” I said.
That seemed to pain him slightly, for he stopped chewing for a moment and took a swig of Coke. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I surely was.”
“God,” I said, “I can still remember the day I saw all those trophies for the first time. What a family! Whatever-?”
Before I could finish asking, he gave the answer.
“Put ‘em in storage, some. Some wound up with my first wife. Goodwill got the rest.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and truly was.
Bug looked at me steadily. “How come you’re sorry?”
“Hell, I dunno,” I said. “It’s just, they seemed such a part of you. I haven’t thought of you often the last few years or so, to be honest, but when I do, there you are knee-deep in all those cups and mugs in your front room, out in the kitchen, hell, in your garage!”
“I’ll be damned,” said Bug. “What a memory you got.”
We finished our Cokes and it was almost time to go. I couldn’t help myself, even seeing that Bug had fleshed himself out over the years.
“When-“ I started to say, and stopped.
“When what?” said Bug.
“When,” I said with difficulty, “when was the last time you danced?”
“Years,” said Bug.
“But how long ago?”
“Ten years. Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Yeah, twenty. I don’t dance anymore.”
“I don’t believe that. Bug not dance? Nuts.”
“Truth. Gave my fancy night-out shoes to the Goodwill, too. Can’t dance in your socks.”
“Can, and barefoot, too!”
Bug had to laugh at that. “You’re really something. Well, it’s been nice.” He started edging toward the door. “Take care, genius-“
“Not so fast.” I walked him out into the light and he was looking both ways as if there were heavy traffic. “You know one thing I never saw and wanted to see? You bragged about it, said you took three hundred ordinary girls out on the dance floor and turned them into Ginger Rogers inside three minutes. But I only saw you once at that aud-call in ‘38, so I don’t believe you.”
“What?” said Bug. “You saw the trophies!”
“You could have had those made up,” I pursued, looking at his wrinkled suit and frayed shirt cuffs. “Anyone can go in a trophy shop and buy a cup and have his name put on it!”
“You think I did that?” cried Bug.
“I think that, yes!”
Bug glanced out in the street and back at me and back in the street and back to me, trying to decide which way to run or push or shout.
“What’s got into you?” said Bug. “Why’re you talking like that?”
“God, I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s just, we might not meet again and I’ll never have the chance, or you to prove it. I’d like, after all this time, to see what you talked about. I’d love to see you dance again, Bug.”
“Naw,” said Bug. “I’ve forgotten how.”
“Don’t hand me that. You may have forgotten, but the rest of you knows how. Bet you could go down to the Ambassador Hotel this afternoon, they still have tea dances there, and clear the floor, just like you said. After you’re out there nobody else dances, they all stop and look at you and her just like thirty years ago.”
“No,” said Bug, backing away but coming back. “No, no.”
“Pick a stranger, any girl, any woman, out of the crowd, lead her out, hold her in your arms and just skim her around as if you were on ice and dream her to Paradise.”
“If you write like that, you’ll never sell,” said Bug.
“Bet you, Bug.”
“I don’t bet.”
“All right, then. Bet you you can’t. Bet you, By God, that you’ve lost your stuff!”
“Now, hold on,” said Bug.
“I mean it. Lost your stuff forever, for good. Bet you. Wanna bet?”
Bug’s eyes took on a peculiar shine and his face was flushed. “How much?”
“Fifty bucks!”
“I don’t have-“
“Thirty bucks, then. Twenty! You can afford to lose that, can’t you?”
“Who says I’d lose, dammit?”
“I say. Twenty. Is it a deal?”
“You’re throwing your money away.”
“No, I’m a sure winner, because you can’t dance worth shoats and shinola!”
“Where’s your money?” cried Bug, incensed now.
“Here!”
“Where’s your car!?”
“I don’t own a car. Never learned to drive. Where’s yours?”
“Sold it! Jesus, no cars. How do we get to the tea dance!?” We got. We grabbed a cab and I paid and, before Bug could relent, dragged him through the hotel lobby and into the ballroom. It was a nice summer afternoon, so nice that the room was filled with mostly middle-aged men and their wives, a few younger ones with their girlfriends, and some kids out of college who looked out of place, embarrassed by the mostly old-folks music out of another time. We got the last table and when Bug opened his mouth for one last protest, I put a straw in it and helped him nurse a marguerita.
“Why are you doing this?” he protested again.
“Because you were just one of one hundred sixty-five close friends!” I said.
“We were never friends,” said Bug.
“Well, today, anyway. There’s ‘Moonlight Serenade.’ Always liked that, never danced myself, clumsy fool. On your feet, Bug!”
He was on his feet, swaying.
“Who do you pick?” I said. “You cut in on a couple? Or there’s a few wallflowers over there, a tableful of women. I dare you to pick the least likely and give her lessons, yes?”
That did it. Casting me a glance of the purest scorn, he charged off half into the pretty teatime dresses and immaculate men, searching around until his eyes lit on a table where a woman of indeterminate age sat, hands folded, face thin and sickly pale, half hidden under a wide-brimmed hat, looking as if she were waiting for someone who never came.
That one, I thought.
Bug glanced from her to me. I nodded. And in a moment he was bowing at her table and a conversation ensued. It seemed she didn’t dance, didn’t know how to dance, didn’t want to dance. Ah, yes, he seemed to be saying. Ah, no, she seemed to reply. Bug turned, holding her hand, and gave me a long stare and a wink. Then, without looking at her, he raised her by her hand and arm and out, with a seamless glide, onto the floor.
What can I say, how can I tell? Bug, long ago, had never bragged, but only told the truth. Once he got hold of a girl, she was weightless. By the time he had whisked and whirled and glided her once around the floor, she almost took off, it seemed he had to hold her down, she was pure gossamer, the closest thing to a hummingbird held in the hand so you cannot feel its weight but only sense its heartbeat sounding to your touch, and there she went out and around and back, with Bug guiding and moving, enticing and retreating, and not fifty anymore, no, but eighteen, his body remembering what his mind thought it had long forgotten, for his body was free of the earth now, too. He carried himself, as he carried her, with that careless insouciance of a lover who knows what will happen in the next hour and the night soon following.
And it happened, just like he said. Within a minute, a minute and a half at most, the dance floor cleared. As Bug and his stranger lady whirled by with a glance, every couple on the floor stood still. The bandleader almost forgot to keep time with his baton, and the members of the orchestra, in a similar trance, leaned forward over their instruments to see Bug and his new love whirl and turn without touching the floor.
When the “Serenade” ended, there was a moment of stillness and then an explosion of applause. Bug pretended it was all for the lady, and helped her curtsy and took her to her table, where she sat, eyes shut, not believing what had happened. By that time Bug was on the floor again, with one of the wives he borrowed from the nearest table. This time, no one even went out on the floor. Bug and the borrowed wife filled it around and around, and this time even Bug’s eyes were shut.
I got up and put twenty dollars on the table where he might find it. After all, he had won the bet, hadn’t he?
Why had I done it? Well, I couldn’t very well have left him out in the middle of the high school auditorium aisle dancing alone, could I?
On my way out I looked back. Bug saw me and waved, his eyes as brimmed full as mine. Someone passing whispered, “Hey, come on, lookit this guy!”
God, I thought, he’ll be dancing all night.
Me, I could only walk.
And I went out and walked until I was fifty again and the sun was going down and the low June fog was coming in early over old Los Angeles.
That night, just before going to sleep, I wished that in the morning when Bug woke up he would find the floor around his bed covered with trophies.
Or at the very least he would turn and find a quiet and understanding trophy with her head on his pillow, near enough to touch.
Fentriss sat up in his chair in the garden in the middle of a fine autumn and listened. The drink in his hand remained unsipped, his friend Black unspoken to, the fine house unnoticed, the very weather itself neglected, for there was a veritable fountain of sound in the air above them.
“My God,” he mid. “Do you ‘hear?”
“What, the birds?” asked his friend Black, doing just the opposite, sipping his drink, noticing the weather, admiring the rich house, and neglecting the birds entirely until this moment.
“Great God in heaven, listen to them!” cried Fentriss.
Black listened. “Rather nice.”
“Clean out your ears!”
Black made a halfhearted gesture, symbolizing the cleaning out of ears. “Well?”
“Damn it, don’t be funny. I mean really listen! They’re singing a tune!”
“Birds usually do.”
“No, they don’t; birds paste together bits and pieces maybe, five or six notes, eight at the most. Mockingbirds have repertoires that change, but not entire melodies. These birds are different. Now shut up and give over!”
Both men sat, enchanted. Black’s expression melted.
“I’ll be damned,” he said at last. “They do go on.” He leaned forward and listened intently.
“Yes ...” murmured Fentriss, eyes shut, nodding to the rhythms that sprang like fresh rain from the tree just above their heads. “... ohmigod ... indeed.”
Black rose as if to move under the tree and peer up. Fentriss protested with a fierce whisper:
“Don’t spoil it. Sit. Be very still. Where’s my pencil? Ah...”
Half peering around, he found a pencil and notepad, shut his eyes, and began to scribble blindly.
The birds sang.
“You’re not actually writing down their song?” said Black.
“What does it look like? Quiet.”
And with eyes now open, now shut, Fentriss drew scales and jammed in the notes.
“I didn’t know you read music,” said Black, astonished.
“I played the violin until my father broke it. Please! There. There. Yes!”
“Slower,” he whispered. “Wait for me.”
As if hearing, the birds adjusted their lilt, moving toward piano instead of bravado.
A breeze stirred the leaves, like an invisible conductor, and the singing died.
Fentriss, perspiration beading his forehead, stopped scribbling and fell back.
“I’ll be damned.” Black gulped his drink. “What was that all about?”
“Writing a song.” Fentriss stared at the scales he had dashed on paper. “Or a tone poem.”
“Let me see that!”
“Wait.” The tree shook itself gently, but produced no further notes. “I want to be sure they’re done.”
Silence.
Black seized the pages and let his eyes drift over the scales. “Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” he said, aghast. “It works.” He glanced up at the thick green of the tree, where no throat warbled, no wing stirred. “What kind of birds are those?”
“The birds of forever, the small beasts of an Immaculate Musical Conception. Something,” said Fentriss, “has made them with child and its name is song-“
“Hogwash!”
“Is it?! Something in the air, in the seeds they ate at dawn, some whim of climate and weather, God! But now they’re mine, it’s mine. A fine tune.”
“It is’” said Black. “But can’t be!”
“Never question the miraculous when it happens. Good grief, maybe those damned wonderful creatures have been throwing up incredible songs for months, years, but no one listened. Today, for the first time, someone did. Me! Now, what to do with the gift?”
“You don’t seriously mean-?”
“I’ve been out of work for a year. I quit my computers, retired early, I’m only forty-nine, and have been threatening to knit macrame’ to give friends to spoil their walls, day after day. Which shall it be, friend, macrame’ or Mozart?”
“Are you Mozart?”
“Just his bastard son.”
“Nonsense,” cried Black, pointing his face like a blunderbuss at the trees as if he might blast the choir. “That tree, those birds, are a Rorschach test. Your subconscious is picking and choosing notes from pure chaos. There’s no discernible tune, no special rhythm. You had me fooled, but I see and hear it now: you’ve had a repressed desire since childhood to compose. And you’ve let a clutch of idiot birds grab you by the ears. Put down that pen!”
“Nonsense right back at you.” Fentriss laughed. “You’re jealous that after twelve layabout years, thunderstruck with boredom, one of us has found an occupation. I shall follow it. Listen and write, write and listen. Sit down, you’re obstructing the acoustics!”
“I’ll sit,” Black exclaimed, “but-“ He clapped his hands over his ears.
“Fair enough,” said Fentriss. “Escape fantastic reality while I change a few notes and finish out this unexpected birth.”
Glancing up at the tree, he whispered:
“Wait for me.”
The tree rustled its leaves and fell quiet.
“Crazy,” muttered Black.
One, two, three hours later, entering the library quietly and then loudly, Black cried out:
“What are you doing?”
Bent over his desk, his hand moving furiously, Fentriss said:
“Finishing a symphony!”
“The same one you began in the garden?”
“No, the birds began, the birds!”
“The birds, then.” Black edged closer to study the mad inscriptions. “How do you know what to do with that stuff?”
“They did most. I’ve added variations!”
“An arrogance the ornithologists will resent and attack. Have you composed before?”
“Not” -Fentriss let his fingers roam, loop, and scratch-“until today!”
“You realize, of course, you’re plagiarizing those songbirds?”
“Borrowing, Black, borrowing. If a milkmaid, singing at dawn, can have her hum borrowed by Berlioz, well! Or if Dvorak, hearing a Dixie banjo plucker pluck ‘Goin’ Home,’ steals the banjo to eke out his New World, why can’t I weave a net to catch a tune? There! Finito. Done! Give us a title, Black!”
“I? Who sings off-key?”
“What about ‘The Emperor’s Nightingale’?”
“Stravinsky.”
“’The Birds’?”
“Hitchcock.”
“Damn. How’s this: ‘It’s Only John Cage in a Gilded Bird’?”
“Brilliant. But no one knows who John Cage was.”
“Well, then, I’ve got it!” And he wrote:
“’Forty-seven Magpies Baked in a Pie.’
“Blackbirds, you mean; go back to John Cage.”
“Bosh!” Fentriss stabbed the phone. “Hello, Willie? Could you come over? Yes, a small job. Symphonic arrangement for a friend, or friends. What’s your usual Philharmonic fee? Eh? Good enough. Tonight!”
Fentriss disconnected and turned to gaze at the tree with wonder in it.
“What next?” he murmured.
“Forty-seven Magpies,” with title shortened, premiered at the Glendale Chamber Symphony a month later with standing ovations, incredible reviews.
Fentriss, outside his skin with joy, prepared to launch himself atop large, small, symphonic, operatic, whatever fell on his ears. He had listened to the strange choirs each day for weeks, but bad noted nothing, waiting to see if the “Magpie” experiment was to be repeated. When the applause rose in storms and the critics hopped when they weren’t skipping, he knew he must strike again before the epilepsy ceased.
There followed: “Wings,”
“Flight,”
“Night Chorus,”
“The Fledgling Madrigals,” and “Dawn Patrol,” each greeted by new thunderstorms of acclamation and critics angry at excellence but forced to praise.
“By now,” said Fentriss, “I should be unbearable to live with, but the birds caution modesty.”
“Also,” said Black, seated under the tree, waiting for a sprig of benison and the merest touch of symphonic manna, “shut up! If all those sly dimwit composers, who will soon be lurking in the bushes, cop your secret, you’re a gone poacher.”
“Poacher! By God, yes!” Fentriss laughed. “Poacher.”
And damn if the first poacher didn’t arrive!
Glancing out at tree in the morning, Fentriss witnessed a runty shadow stretching up, handheld tape recorder poised, warbling and whistling softly at the tree. when this failed, the half-seen poacher tried dove-coos and then orioles and roosters, half dancing in a circle.
“Damn it to hell!” Fentriss leaped out with a shotgun cry: “Is that Wolfgang Prouty poaching my garden? Out, Wolfgang! Go!”
Dropping his recorder, Prouty vaulted a bush, impaled himself on thorns, and vanished.
Fentriss, cursing, picked up an abandoned notepad.
“Nightsong,” it read. On the tape recorder he found a lovely Satie-like bird-choir.
After that, more poachers arrived mid-night to depart at dawn. Their spawn, Fentriss realized, would soon throttle his creativity and still his voice. He loitered full-time in the garden now, not knowing what seed to give his beauties, and heavily watered the lawn to fetch up worms. Wearily he stood guard through sleepless nights, nodding off only to find Wolfgang Prouty’s evil minions astride the wall, prompting arias, and one night, by God, perched in the tree itself, humming in hopes of sing-alongs.
A shotgun was the final answer. After its first fiery roar, the garden was empty for a week. That is, until- Someone came very late indeed and committed mayhem.
As quietly as possible, he cut the branches and sawed the limbs.
“Oh, envious composers, dreadful murderers!” cried Fentriss.
And the birds were gone.
And the career of Amadeus Two with it.
“Black!” cried Fentriss.
“Yes, dear friend?” said Black, looking at the bleak sky where once green was.
“Is your car outside?”
“When last I looked.”
“Drive!”
But driving in search didn’t do it. It wasn’t like calling in lost dogs or telephone-poled cats. They must find and cage an entire Mormon tabernacle team of soprano springtime-in-the-Rockies birdseed lovers to prove one in the hand is worth two in the bush.
But still they hastened from block to block, garden to garden, lurking and listening. Now their spirits soared with an echo of “Hallelujah Chorus” oriole warbling, only to sink in a drab sparrow twilight of despair.
Only when they had crossed and recrossed interminable mazes of asphalt and greens did one of them finally (Black) light his pipe and emit a theory.
“Did you ever think to wonder,” he mused behind a smoke-cloud, “what season of the year this is?”
“Season of the year?” said Fentriss, exasperated.
“Well, coincidentally, wasn’t the night the tree fell and the wee songsters blew town, was not that the first fall night of autumn?”
Fentriss clenched a fist and struck his brow.
“You mean?”
“Your friends have flown the coop. Their migration must be above San Miguel Allende just now.”
“If they are migratory birds!”
“Do you doubt it?”
Another pained silence, another blow to the head.
“Shit!”
“Precisely,” said Black.
“Friend,” said Fentriss.
“Sir?”
“Drive home.”
It was a long year, it was a short year, it was a year of anticipation, it was the burgeoning of despair, it was the revival of inspiration, but at its heart, Fentriss knew, just another Tale of Two Cities, but he did not know what the other city was!
How stupid of me, he thought, not to have guessed or imagined that my songsters we’re wanderers who each autumn fled south and each springtime swarmed north in A Cappella choirs of sound.
“The waiting,” he told Black, “is madness. The phone never stops-“
The phone rang. He picked it up and addressed it like a child. “Yes. Yes. Of course. Soon. When? Very soon.” And put the phone down. “You see? That was Philadelphia. They want another Cantata as good as the first. At dawn today it was Boston. Yesterday the Vienna Philharmonic. Soon, I say. When? God knows. Lunacy! Where are those angels that once sang me to my rest?”
He threw down maps and weather charts of Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and the Argentines.
“How far south? Do I scour Buenos Aires or Rio, Mazatlan or Cuernavaca? And then? Wander about with a tin ear, standing under trees waiting for bird-drops like a spotted owl? Will the Argentine critics trot by scoffing to see me leaning on trees, eyes shut, waiting for the quasi-melody, the lost chord? I’d let no one know the cause of my journey, my search, otherwise pandemoniums of laughter. But in what city, under what kind of tree would I wander to stand? A tree like mine? Do they seek the same roosts? or will anything do in Ecuador or Peru? God, I could waste months guessing and come back with birdseed in my hair and bird bombs on my lapels. What to do, Black? Speak!”
“Well, for one thing”-Black stuffed and lit his pipe and exhaled his aromatic concepts-‘ ‘you might clear off this stump and plant a new tree.”
They had been circling the stump and kicking it for inspiration. Fentriss froze with one foot raised. “Say that again?!”
“I said-“
“Good grief, you genius! Let me kiss you!”
“Rather not. Hugs, maybe.”
Fentriss hugged him, wildly. “Friend!”
“Always was.”
“Let’s get a shovel and spade.”
“You get. I’ll watch.”
Fentriss ran back a minute later with a spade and pickax.
“Sure you won’t join me?”
Black sucked his pipe, blew smoke. “Later.”
“How much would a full-grown tree cost?”
“Too much.”
“Yes, but if it were here and the birds did return?” Black let out more smoke. “Might be worth it. Opus Number Two: ‘In the Beginning’ by Charles Fentriss, stuff like that.”
‘In the Beginning,’ or maybe ‘The Return.””
“One of those.”
“Or-“ Fentriss struck the stump with the pickax. “ ‘Rebirth.’ “ He struck again. “’Ode to Joy.’ “ Another strike.
‘Spring Harvest.’ “ Another. “’Let the Heavens Resound.’ How’s that, Black?”
“I prefer the other,” said Black.
The stump was pulled and the new tree bought.
“Don’t show me the bill,” Fentriss told his accountant. “Pay it.”
And the tallest tree they could find, of the same family as the one dead and gone, was planted.
“What if it dies before my choir returns?” said Fentriss. “What if it lives,” said Black, “and your choir goes elsewhere?”
The tree, planted, seemed in no immediate need to die. Neither did it look particularly vital and ready to welcome small singers from some far southern places.
Meanwhile, the sky, like the tree, was empty. “Don’t they know I’m waiting?” said Fentriss. “Not unless,” offered Black, “you majored in cross-continental telepathy.”
“I’ve checked with Audubon. They say that while the swallows do come back to Capistrano on a special day, give or take a white lie, other migrating species are often one or two weeks late.”
“If I were you,” said Black, “I would plunge into an intense love affair to distract you while you wait.”
“I am fresh out of love affairs.”
“Well, then,” said Black, “suffer.”
The hours passed slower than the minutes, the days passed slower than the hours, the weeks passed slower than the days. Black called. “No birds?”
“No birds.”
“Pity. I can’t stand watching you lose weight.” And Black disconnected.
On a final night, when Fentriss had almost yanked the phone out of the wall, fearful of another call from the Boston Symphony, he leaned an ax against the trunk of the new tree and addressed it and the empty sky.
“Last chance,” he said. “If the dawn patrol doesn’t show by seven a.m., it’s quits.”
And he touched ax-blade against the tree-bole, took two shots of vodka so swiftly that the spirits squirted out both eyes, and went to bed.
He awoke twice during the night to hear nothing but a soft breeze outside his window, stirring the leaves, with not a ghost of song.
And awoke at dawn with tear-filled eyes, having dreamed that the birds had returned, but knew, in waking, it was only a dream.
And yet...?
Hark, someone might have said in an old novel. List! as in an old play.
Eyes shut, he fine-tuned his ears .
The tree outside, as he arose, looked fatter, as if it had taken on invisible ballasts in the night. There were stirrings there, not of simple breeze or probing winds, but of something in the very leaves that knitted and purled them in rhythms. He dared not look but lay back down to ache his senses and try to know.
A single chirp hovered in the window.
He waited.
Silence.
Go on, he thought.
Another chirp.
Don’t breathe, he thought; don’t let them know you’re listening.
Hush.
A fourth sound, then a fifth note, then a sixth and seventh. My God, he thought, is this a substitute orchestra, a replacement choir come to scare off my loves?
Another five notes.
Perhaps, he prayed, they’re only tuning up!
Another twelve notes, of no special timbre or pace, and as he was about to explode like a lunatic conductor and fire the bunch-It happened. Note after note, line after line, fluid melody following spring freshet melody, the whole choir exhaled to blossom the tree with joyous proclamations of return and welcome in chorus.
And as they sang, Fentriss sneaked his hand to find a pad and pen to hide under the covers so that its scratching might not disturb the choir that soared and dipped to soar again, firing the bright air that flowed from the tree to tune his soul with delight and move his hand to remember.
The phone rang. He picked it up swiftly to hear Black ask if the waiting was over. Without speaking, he held the receiver in the window.
“I’ll be damned,” said Black’s voice.
“No, anointed,” whispered the composer, scribbling Cantata No.2. Laughing, he called softly to the sky.
“Please. More slowly. Legato, not agitato.”
And the tree and the creatures within the tree obeyed.
Agitato ceased.
Legato prevailed.
There were too many cards in the file, too many books on the shelves, too many children laughing in the children’s room, too many newspapers to fold and stash on the racks ...
All in all, too much. Miss Adams pushed her gray hair back over her lined brow, adjusted her gold-rimmed pince-nez, and rang the small silver bell on the library desk, at the same time switching off and on all the lights. The exodus of adults and children was exhausting. Miss Ingraham, the assistant librarian, had gone home early because her father was sick, so it left the burden of stamping, filing, and checking books squarely on Miss Adams’ shoulders.
Finally the last book was stamped, the last child fed through the great brass doors, the doors locked, and with immense weariness, Miss Adams moved back up through a silence of forty years of books and being keeper of the books, stood for a long moment by the main desk.
She laid her glasses down on the green blotter, and pressed the bridge of her small-boned nose between thumb and forefinger and held it, eyes shut. What a racket! Children who finger-painted or cartooned frontispieces or rattled their roller skates. High school students arriving with laughters, departing with mindless songs!
Taking up her rubber stamp, she probed the files, weeding out errors, her fingers whispering between Dante and Darwin.
A moment later she heard the rapping on the front-door glass and saw a man’s shadow outside, wanting in. She shook her head. The figure pleaded silently, making gestures.
Sighing, Miss Adams opened the door, saw a young man in uniform, and said, “It’s late. We’re closed.” She glanced at his insignia and added, “Captain.”
“Hold on!” said the captain. “Remember me?”
And repeated it, as she hesitated.
“Remember?”
She studied his face, trying to bring light out of shadow. “Yes, I think I do,” she said at last. “You once borrowed books here.”
“Right.”
“Many years ago,” she added. “Now I almost have you placed.”
As he stood waiting she tried to see him in those other years, but his younger face did not come clear, or a name with it, and his hand reached out now to take hers.
“May I come in?”
“Well.” She hesitated. “Yes.”
She led the way up the steps into the immense twilight of books. The young officer looked around and let his breath out slowly, then reached to take a book and hold it to his nose, inhaling, then almost laughing.
“Don’t mind me, Miss Adams. You ever smell new books? Binding, pages, print. Like fresh bread when you’re hungry.” He glanced around. “I’m hungry now, but don’t even know what for.”
There was a moment of silence, so she asked him how long he might stay.
“Just a few hours. I’m on the train from New York to L.A., so I came up from Chicago to see old places, old friends.” His eyes were troubled and he fretted his cap, turning it in his long, slender fingers.
She said gently, “Is anything wrong? Anything I can help you with?”
He glanced out the window at the dark town, with just a few lights in the windows of the small houses across the way.
“I was surprised,” he said.
“By what?”
“I don’t know what I expected. Pretty damn dumb,” he said, looking from her to the windows, “to expect that when I went away, everyone froze in place waiting for me to come home. That when I stepped off the train, all my old pals would unfreeze, run down, meet me at the station. Silly.”
“No,” she said, more easily now. “I think we all imagine that. I visited Paris as a young girl, went back to France when I was forty, and was outraged that no one had waited, buildings had vanished, and all the hotel staff where I had once lived had died, retired, or traveled.”
He nodded at this, but could not seem to go on.
“Did anyone know you were coming?” she asked.
“I wrote a few, but no answers. I figured, hell, they’re busy, but they’ll be there. They weren’t.”
She felt the next words come off her lips and was faintly surprised. “I’m still here,” she said.
“You are,” he said with a quick smile. “And I can’t tell you how glad I am.”
He was gazing at her now with such intensity that she had to look away. “You know,” she said, “I must confess you look familiar, but I don’t quite fit your face with the boy who came here-“
“Twenty years ago! And as for what he looked like, that other one, me, well-“
He brought out a smallish wallet which held a dozen pictures and handed over a photograph of a boy perhaps twelve years old, with an impish smile and wild blond hair, looking as if he might catapult out of the frame.
“Ah, yes.” Miss Adams adjusted her pince-nez and closed her eyes to remember. “That one. Spaulding. William Henry Spaulding?”
He nodded and peered at the picture in her hands anxiously.
“Was I a lot of trouble?”
“Yes.” She nodded and held the picture closer and glanced up at him. “A fiend.” She handed the picture back. “But I loved you.”
“Did you?” he said and smiled more broadly.
“In spite of you, yes.”
He waited a moment and then said, “Do you still love me?”
She looked to left and right as if the dark stacks held the answer.
“It’s a little early to know, isn’t it?”
“Forgive.”
“No, no, a good question. Time will tell. Let’s not stand like your frozen friends who didn’t move. Come along. I’ve just had some late-night coffee. There may be some left. Give me your cap. Take off that coat. The file index is there. Go look up your old library cards for the hell-heck-of it.”
“Are they still there?” In amaze.
“Librarians save everything. You never know who’s coming in on the next train. Go.”
When she came back with the coffee, he stood staring down into the index file like a bird fixing its gaze on a half-empty nest. He handed her one of the old purple-stamped cards.
“Migawd,” he said, “I took out a lot of books.”
“Ten at a time. I said no, but you took them. And,” she added, “read them! Here.” She put his cup on top of the file and waited while he drew out canceled card after card and laughed quietly.
“I can’t believe. I must not have lived anywhere else but here. May I take this with me, to sit?” He showed the cards. She nodded. “Can you show me around? I mean, maybe I’ve forgotten something.”
She shook her head and took his elbow. “I doubt that. Come on. Over here, of course, is the adult section.”
“I begged you to let me cross over when I was thirteen. ‘You’re not ready,’ you said. But-“
“I let you cross over anyway?”
“You did. And much thanks.”
Another thought came to him as he looked down at her.
“You used to be taller than me,” he said.
She looked up at him, amused.
“I’ve noticed that happens quite often in my life, but I can still do this.”
Before he could move, she grabbed his chin in her thumb and forefinger and held tight. His eyes rolled.
He said:
“I remember. When I was really bad you’d hold on and put your face down close and scowl. The scowl did it. After ten seconds of your holding my chin very tight, I behaved for days.”
She nodded, released his chin. He rubbed it and as they moved on he ducked his head, not looking at her.
“Forgive, I hope you won’t be upset, but when I was a boy I used to look up and see you behind your desk, so near but far away, and, how can I say this, I used to think that you were Mrs. God, and that the library was a whole world, and that no matter what part of the world or what people or thing I wanted to see and read, you’d find and give it to me.” He stopped, his face coloring. “You did, too. You had the world ready for me every time I asked. There was always a place I hadn’t seen, a country I hadn’t visited where you took me. I’ve never forgotten.”
She looked around, slowly, at the thousands of books. She felt her heart move quietly. “Did you really call me what you just said?”
“Mrs. God? Oh, yes. Often. Always.”
“Come along,” she said at last.
They walked around the rooms together and then downstairs to the newspaper files, and coming back up, he suddenly leaned against the banister, holding tight.
“Miss Adams,” he said.
“What is it, Captain?”
He exhaled. “I’m scared. I don’t want to leave. I’m afraid.”
Her hand, all by itself, took his arm and she finally said, there in the shadows, “Sometimes-I’m afraid, too. What frightens you?”
“I don’t want to go away without saying good-bye. If I never return, I want to see all my friends, shake hands, slap them on the back, I don’t know, make jokes.” He stopped and waited, then went on. “But I walk around town and nobody knows me. Everyone’s gone.”
The pendulum on the wall clock slid back and forth, shining, with the merest of sounds.
Hardly knowing where she was going, Miss Adams took his arm and guided him up the last steps, away from the marble vaults below, to a final, brightly decorated room, where he glanced around and shook his head.
“There’s no one here, either.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Well, where are they? Do any of my old pals ever come visit, borrow books, bring them back late?”
“Not often,” she said. “But listen. Do you realize Thomas Wolfe was wrong?”
“Wolfe? The great literary beast? Wrong?”
“The title of one of his books.”
“You Can’t Go Home Again?” he guessed.
“That’s it. He was wrong. This is home. Your friends are still here. This was your summer place.”
“Yes. Myths. Legends. Mummies. Aztec kings. Wicked sisters who spat toads. Where I really lived. But I don’t see my people.”
“Well.”
And before he could speak, she switched on a green-shaded lamp that shed a private light on a small table.
“Isn’t this nice?” she said. “Most libraries today, too much light. There should be shadows, don’t you think? Some mystery, yes? So that late nights the beasts can prowl out of the stacks and crouch by this jungle light to turn the pages with their breath. Am I crazy?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“Good. Sit. Now that I know who you are, it all comes back.”
“It couldn’t possibly.”
“No? You’ll see.”
She vanished into the stacks and came out with ten books that she placed upright, their pages a trifle spread so they could stand and he could read the titles.
“The summer of 1930, when you were, what? ten, you read all of these in one week.”
“Oz? Dorothy? The Wizard? Oh, yes.”
She placed still others nearby. “Alice in Wonderland. Through the Looking-Glass. A month later you reborrowed both. ‘But,’ I said, ‘you’ve already read them!’ ‘But,’ you said, ‘not enough so I can speak. I want to be able to tell them out loud.’
“My God,” he said quietly, “did I say that?”
“You did. Here’s more you read a dozen times. Greek myths, Roman, Egyptian. Norse myths, Chinese. You were ravenous.”
“King Tut arrived from the tomb when I was three. His picture in the Rotogravure started me. What else have you there?”
“Tarzan of the Apes. You borrowed it . .
“Three dozen times! John Carter, Warlord of Mars, four dozen. My God, dear lady, how come you remember all this?”
“You never left. Summertimes you were here when I unlocked the doors. You went home for lunch but sometimes brought sandwiches and sat out by the stone lion at noon. Your father pulled you home by your ear some nights when you stayed late. How could I forget a boy like that?”
“But still-“
“You never played, never ran out in baseball weather, or football, I imagine. Why?”
He glanced toward the front door. “They were waiting for me.”
“They?”
“You know. The ones who never borrowed books, never read. They. Them. Those.”
She looked and remembered. “Ah, yes. The bullies. Why did they chase you?”
“Because they knew I loved books and didn’t much care for them.”
“It’s a wonder you survived. I used to watch you getting, reading hunchbacked, late afternoons. You looked so lonely.”
“No. I had these. Company.”
“Here’s more.”
She put down Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, and Treasure Island.
“Oh,” he said, “and dear and strange Mr. Poe. How I loved his Red Death.”
“You took it so often I told you to keep it on permanent loan unless someone else asked. Someone did, six months later, and when you brought it in I could see it was a terrible blow. A few days later I let you have Poe for another year. I don’t recall, did you ever-?”
“It’s out in California. Shall I-“
“No, no. Please. Well, here are your books. Let me bring others.”
She came out not carrying many books but one at a time, as if each one were, indeed, special.
She began to make a circle inside the other Stonehenge circle and as she placed the books, in lonely splendor, he said their names and then the names of the authors who had written them and then the names of those who had sat across from him so many years ago and read the books quietly or sometimes whispered the finest parts aloud, so beautifully that no one said Quiet or Silence or even Shh!
She placed the first book and there was a wild field of broom and a wind blowing a young woman across that field as it began to snow and someone, far away, called “Kathy” and as the snows fell he saw a girl he had walked to school in the sixth grade seated across the table, her eyes fixed to the windblown field and the snow and the lost woman in another time of winter.
A second book was set in place and a black and beauteous horse raced across a summer field of green and on that horse was another girl, who hid behind the book and dared to pass him notes when he was twelve.
And then there was the far ghost with a snow-maiden face whose hair was a long golden harp played by the summer airs; she who was always sailing to Byzantium where Emperors were drowsed by golden birds that sang in clockwork cages at sunset and dawn. She who always skirted the outer rim of school and went to swim in the deep lake ten thousand afternoons ago and never came out, so was never found, but suddenly now she made landfall here in the green-shaded light and opened Yeats to at last sail home from Byzantium.
And on her right: John Huff, whose name came clearer than the rest, who claimed to have climbed every tree in town and fallen from none, who had raced through watermelon patches treading melons, never touching earth, to knock down rainfalls of chestnuts with one blow, who yodeled at your sun-up window and wrote the same Mark Twain book report in four different grades before the teachers caught on, at which he said, vanishing, “Just call me Huck.”
And to his right, the pale son of the town hotel owner who looked as if he had gone sleepless forever, who swore every empty house was haunted and took you there to prove it, with a juicy tongue, compressed nose, and throat gargling that sounded the long October demise, the terrible and unutterable fall of the House of Usher.
And next to him was yet another girl.
And next to her ...
And just beyond ...
Miss Adams placed a final book and he recalled the fair creature, long ago, when such things were left unsaid, glancing up at him one day when he was an unknowing twelve and she was a wise thirteen to quietly say: “I am Beauty. And you, are you the Beast?”
Now, late in time, he wanted to answer that small and wondrous ghost: “No. He hides in the stacks and when the clock strikes three, will prowl forth to drink.”
And it was finished, all the books were placed, the outer ring of his selves and the inner ring of remembered faces, deathless, with summer and autumn names.
He sat for a long moment and then another long moment and then, one by one, reached for and took all of the books that had been his, and still were, and opened them and read and shut them and took another until he reached the end of the outer circle and then went to touch and turn and find the raft on the river, the field of broom where the storms lived, and the pasture with the black and beauteous horse and its lovely rider. Behind him, he heard the lady librarian quietly back away to leave him with words .
A long while later he sat back, rubbed his yes, and looked around at the fortress, the encirclement, the Roman encampment of books, and nodded, his eyes wet.
“Yes.”
He heard her move behind him.
“Yes, what?”
“What you said, Thomas Wolfe, the title of that book of his. Wrong. Everything’s here. Nothing’s changed.”
“Nothing will as long as I can help it.” she said.
“Don’t ever go away.”
“I won’t if you’ll come back more often.”
Just then, from below the town, not so very far off, a train whistle blew. She said:
“Is that yours?”
“No, but the one soon after,” he said and got up and moved around the small monuments that stood very tall and one by one, shut the covers, his lips moving to sound the old titles and the old, dear names.
“Do we have to put them back on the shelves?” he said. She looked at him and at the double circle and after a long moment said, “Tomorrow will do. Why?”
“Maybe,” he said, “during the night, because of the color of those lamps, green, the jungle, maybe those creatures you mentioned will come out and turn the pages with their breath. And maybe-“
“What else?”
“Maybe my friends, who’ve hid in the stacks all these years, will come out, too.’,
“They’re already here,” she said quietly.
“Yes.” He nodded. “They are.”
And still he could not move.
She backed off across the room without making any sound, and when she reached her desk she called back, the last call of the night.
“Closing time. Closing time, children.”
And turned the lights quickly off and then on and then halfway between; a library twilight.
He moved from the table with the double circle of books and came to her and said, “I Can go now.”
“Yes,” she said. “William Henry Spaulding. You can.” They walked together as she turned out the lights, turned out the lights, one by one. She helped him into his coat and then, hardly thinking to do so, he took her hand and kissed her fingers.
It was so abrupt, she almost laughed, but then she said, “Remember what Edith Whanon said when Henry James did what you just did?”
“What?”
‘The flavor starts at the elbow.’
They broke into laughter together and he turned and went down the marble steps toward the stained-glass entry. At the bottom of the stairs he looked up at her and said:
“Tonight, when you’re going to sleep, remember what I called you when I was twelve, and say it out loud.”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“Yes, you do.”
Below the town, a train whistle blew again.
He opened the front door, stepped out, and he was gone. Her hand on the last light switch, looking in at the double circle of books on the far table, she thought: What was it he called me?
“Oh, yes,” she said a moment later.
And switched off the light.
The cemetery was in the center of the city. On four sides it was bounded by gliding streetcars on glistening blue tracks and cars with exhaust fumes and sound. But, once inside the wall, the world was lost. For half a mile in four directions the cemetery raised midnight trees and headstones that grew from the earth, like pale mushrooms, moist and cold. A gravel path led back into darkness and within the gate stood a Gothic Victorian house with six gables and a cupola. The front-porch light showed an old man there alone, not smoking, not reading, not moving, silent. If you took a deep breath he smelled of the sea, of urine, of papyrus, of kindling, of ivory, and of teak. His false teeth moved his mouth automatically when it wanted to talk. His tiny yellow seed eyes twitched and his poke-hole nostrils thinned as a stranger crunched up the gravel path and set foot on the porch step.
“Good evening!” said the stranger, a young man, perhaps twenty.
The old man nodded, but his hands lay quietly on his knees “I saw that sign out front,” the stranger went on. “FREE DIRT, it said.”
The old man almost nodded.
The stranger tried a smile. “Crazy, but that sign caught my eye.
There was a glass fan over the front door. A light shone through this glass fan, colored blue, red, yellow, and touched the old man’s face. It seemed not to bother him.
“I wondered, free dirt? Never struck me you’d have much left over. When you dig a hole and put the coffin in and refill the hole, you haven’t much dirt left, have you? I should think...”
The old man leaned forward. It was so unexpected that the stranger pulled his foot off the bottom step.
“You want some?” said the old man.
“Why, no, no, I was just curious. Signs like that make you curious.”
“Set down,” said the old man.
“Thanks.” The young man sat uneasily on the steps. “You know how it is, you walk around and never think how it is to own a graveyard.”
“And?” said the old man.
“I mean, like how much time it takes to dig graves.”
The old man leaned back in his chair. “On a cool day: two hours. Hot day, four. Very hot day, six. Very cold day, not cold so it freezes, but real cold, a man can dig a grave in one hour so he can head in for hot chocolate, brandy in the chocolate. Then again, you get a good man on a hot day, he’s no better than a bad man in the cold. Might take eight hours to open up, but here’s easy-digging soil here. All loam, no rocks.”
“I’m curious about winter.”
“In blizzards we got a icebox mausoleum to stash the dead, undelivered mail, until spring and a whole month of shovels and spades.”
“Seeding and planting time, eh?” The stranger laughed.
“You might say that.”
“Don’t you dig in winter anyhow? For special funerals? Special dead?”
“Some yards got a hose-shovel contraption. Pump hot water through the blade; shape a grave quick, like placer mining, even with the ground an ice-pond. We don’t cotton to that. Use picks and shovels.”
The young man hesitated. “Does it bother you?”
“You mean, I get scared ever?”
“Well ... yes.”
The old man at last took out and stuffed his pipe with tobacco, tamped it with a callused thumb, lit it, let out a small stream of smoke.
“No,” he said at last.
The young man’s shoulders sank. “Disappointed?” said the old man. “I thought maybe once .
“Oh, when you’re young, maybe. One time ...”
“Then there was a time!” The young man shifted up a step. The old man glanced at him sharply, then resumed smoking. “One time.” He stared at the marbled hills and the dark trees. “My grandpa owned this yard. I was born here. A gravedigger’ 5 son learns to ignore things.”
The old man took a number of deep puffs and said:
“I was just eighteen, folks off on vacation, me left to tend things, alone, mow the lawn, dig holes and such. Alone, four graves to dig in October and a cold came hard off the lake, frost on the graves, tombstones like snow, ground froze solid.
“One night I walked out. No moon. Hard grass underfoot, could see my breath, hands in my pockets, walking, listening.”
The old man exhaled frail ghosts from his thin nostrils. “Then I heard this sound, deep under. I froze. It was a voice, screaming. Someone woke up buried, heard me walk by, cried out. I just stood. They screamed and screamed. Earth banged. On a cold night, ground’s like porcelain, rings, you see?
“Well-“ The old man shut his eyes to remember. “I stood like the wind off the lake stopped my blood. A joke? I searched around and thought, Imagination! No, it was underfoot, sharp, clear. A woman’s voice. I knew all the gravestones.” The old man’s eyelids trembled. “Could recite them alphabetical, year, month, day. Name any year, and I’ll tell. How about 1899? Jake Smith departed. And 1923? Betty Dallman lost. And 1933? P. H. Moran! Name a month. August? August last year, buried Henrietta Wells. August 1918? Grandma Hanlon, whole family! Influenza! Name a day, August fourth? Smith, Burke, Shelby carried off. Williamson? He’s on that hill, pink marble. Douglas? By the creek ...”
“The story,” the young man urged.
“Eh?”
“The story you were telling.”
“Oh, the voice below? Well, I knew all the stones. Standing there, I guessed that voice out of the ground was Henrietta Fremwell, fine girl, twenty-four years, played piano at the Elite Theatre. Tall, graceful, blond. How did I know her voice? I stood where there was only men’s graves. Hers was the only woman’s. I ran to put my ear on her stone. Yes! Her voice, way down, screaming!
“’Miss Fremwell!’ I shouted.
“’Miss Fremwell,’ I yelled again.
“Deep down I heard her, only weeping now. Maybe she heard me, maybe not. She just cried. I ran downhill so fast I tripped and split my head on a stone, got up, screamed myself! Got to the tool shed, all blood, dragged out the tools, and just stood there in the moonlight with one shovel. The ground was ice solid, solid. I fell back against a tree. It would take three minutes to get back to her grave, and eight hours of cold night to dig to her box. The ground was like glass. A coffin is a coffin; only so much space for air. Henrietta Fremwell had been buried two days before the freeze, been asleep all that time, using up air, and it rained just before the cold spell and the earth over her, soaked with rainwater now, froze. I’d have to dig maybe eight hours. And the way she cried, there wasn’t another hour of air left.”
The old man’s pipe had gone out. He rocked in his chair, back and forth, back and forth, silently.
“But,” said the young man, “what did you do?”
“Nothing,” said the old man.
“Nothing!?”
“Nothing I could do. That ground was solid. Six men couldn’t have dug that grave. No hot water near. And she might’ve been screaming hours before I heard, so . .
“You did-nothing?”
“Something Put the shovel and pick back in the tool shed, locked it and went back to the house and built a fire and drank some hot chocolate, shivering and shivering. Would you have done different?”
“I-“
“Would you have dug for eight hours in hard ice rock so’s to reach her when she was truly dead of exhaustion, cold, smothered, and have to bury her all over again? Then call her folks and tell them?”
The young man was silent. On the porch, the mosquitoes hummed about the naked light bulb.
“I see,” said the young man.
The old man sucked his pipe. “I think I cried all night because there was nothing I could do.” He opened his eyes and stared about, surprised, as if he had been listening to someone else.
“That’s quite a story,” said the young man.
“No,” said the old man, “God’s truth. Want to hear more? See that big stone with the ugly angel? That was Adam Crispin’s. Relatives fought, got a writ from a judge, dug him up hoping for poison. Found nothing. Put him back, but by that time the dirt from his grave mixed with other dirts. We shoveled in stuff from all around. Next plot, the angel with broken wings? Mary-Lou Phipps. Dug her up to lug her off to Elgin, Illinois. More relatives. Where she’d been, the pit stayed open, oh, three weeks. No funerals. Meanwhile, her dirt got cross-shoveled with others. Six stones over, one stone north, that was Henry Douglas Jones. Became famous sixty years after no one paid attention. Now he’s planted under the Civil War monument. His grave lay wide two months, nobody wanted to utilize the hole of a Southerner, all of us leaning North with Grant. So his dirt got scattered. That give you some notion of what that FREE DIRT sign means?”
The young man eyed the cemetery landscape. “Well,” he said, “where is that dirt you’re handing out?”
The old man pointed with his pipe and the stranger looked and indeed, by a nearby wall was a sizable hillock some ten feet long by about three feet high, loam and grass tufts of many shades of tan, brown, and burnt umber.
“Go look,” said the old man.
The young man walked slowly over to stand by the mound.
“Kick it,” said the old man. “See if it’s real.”
The young man kicked and his face paled.
“Did you hear that?” he said.
“What?” said the old man, looking somewhere else.
The stranger listened and shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Well, now,” said the old man, knocking out the ashes from his pipe. “How much free dirt you need?”
“I hadn’t thought.”
“Yes, you have,” said the old man, “or you wouldn’t have driven your lightweight delivery truck up by the cemetery gate. I got cat’s ears. Heard your motor just when you stopped. How much?”
“Oh,” said the young man uneasily. “My backyard’s eighty feet by forty. I could use a good inch of topsoil. So ...?”
“I’d say,” said the old man, “half of that mound there. Hell, take it all. Nobody wants it.”
“You mean-“
“I mean, that mound has been growing and diminishing, diminishing and growing, mixtures up and down, since Grant took Richmond and Sherman reached the sea. There’s Civil dirt there, coffin splinters, satin casket shreds from when Lafayette met the Honor Guard’s Edgar Allan Poe. There’s funeral flowers, blossoms from ten hundred obsequies. Condolence-card confetti for Hessian troopers, Parisian gunners who never shipped home. That soil is so laced with bone meal and casket corsages, I should charge you to buy the lot. Grab a spade before I do.”
“Stay right there.” The young man raised one hand.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said the old man. “Nor is anyone else nearby.”
The half-truck was pulled up by the dirt mound and the young man was reaching in for a spade when the old man said:
“No, I think not.”
The old man went on:
“Graveyard spade’s best. Familiar metal, familiar soil. Easy digging when like takes to like. So.”
The old man’s head indicated a spade half stuck in the dark mound. The young man shrugged and moved.
The cemetery spade came free with a soft whispering. Pellets of ancient mound fell with similar whispers.
He began to dig and shift and fill the back of his half-truck as the old man from the corners of his eyes observed:
“It’s more than dirt, as I said. War of 1812, San Juan Hill, Manassas, Gettysburg, October flu epidemic 1918, all strewn from graves filled and evicted to be refilled. Various occupants leavened out to dust, various glories melted to mixtures, rust from metal caskets, coffin handles, shoelaces but no shoes, hairs long and short. Ever see wreaths made of hair saved to weave crowns to fix on mortal pictures? All that’s left of a smile or that funny look in the eyes of someone who knows she’s not alive anymore, ever. Hair, epaulettes, not whole ones, but one strand of epaulette, all there along with blood that’s gone to silt.”
The young man finished, sweating, and started to thrust the spade back in the earth when the old man said:
“Take it. Cemetery dirt, cemetery spade, like takes to like.”
“I’ll bring it back tomorrow.” The young man tossed the spade into the mounded truck.
“No. You got the dirt, so keep the spade. Just don’t bring the free dirt back.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Just don’t,” said the old man, but did not move as the young man climbed in his truck to start the engine.
He sat listening to the dirt mound tremble and whisper in the flatbed.
“What’re you waiting for?” asked the old man.
The flimsy half-truck ran toward the last of the twilight, pursued by the ever-encroaching dark. Clouds raced overhead, perturbed by the invisible. Back on the horizon, thunder sounded. A few drops of rain fell on the windshield, causing the young man to ram his foot on the gas and swerve into his home street even as the sun truly died, the wind rose, and the trees around his cottage bent and beckoned.
Climbing out, he stared at the sky and then his house and then the empty garden. A few drops of cold rain on his cheeks decided him; he drove the rattling half-truck into the empty garden, unlatched the metal back-flap, opened it just an inch so as to allow a proper flow, and then began motoring back and forth across the garden, letting the dark stuffs whisper down, letting the strange midnight earth sift and murmur, until at last the truck was empty and he stood in the blowing night, watching the wind stir the black soil.
Then he locked the truck in the garage and went to stand on the back porch, thinking, I won’t need water. The storm will soak the ground.
He stood for a long while simply staring at the graveyard mulch, waiting for rain, until he thought, what am I waiting for? Jesus! And went in.
At ten o’clock a light rain tapped on the windows and sifted over the dark garden. At eleven it rained so steadily that the gutter drains swallowed and rattled.
At midnight the rain grew heavy. He looked to see if it was eroding the new dark earth but saw only the black muck drinking the downpour like a great black sponge, lit by distant flares of lightning.
Then, at one in the morning, the greatest Niagara of all shuddered the house, rinsed the windows to blindness, and shook the lights.
And then, abruptly, the downpour, the immense Niagara ceased, followed by one great downfell blow of lightning which plowed and pinioned the dark earth close by, near, outside, with explosions of light as if ten thousand flashbulbs had been fired off. Then darkness fell in curtains of thunder, cracking, breaking the bones.
In bed, wishing for the merest dog to hold for lack of human company, hugging the sheets, burying his head, then rising full to the silent air, the dark air, the storm gone, the rain shut, and a silence that spread in whispers as the last drench melted into the trembling soil.
He shuddered and then shivered and then hugged himself to stop the shivering of his cold flesh, and he was thirsty but could not make himself move to find the kitchen and drink water, milk, leftover wine, anything. He lay back, dry-mouthed, with unreasonable tears filling his eyes.
Free dirt, he thought. My God, what a damn-fool night. Free dirt!
At two o’clock he heard his wristwatch ticking softly.
At two-thirty he felt his pulse in his wrists and ankles and neck and then in his temples and inside his head.
The entire house leaned into the wind, listening.
Outside in the still night, the wind failed and the yard lay soaked and waiting.
And at last ... yes. He opened his eyes and turned his head toward the shaded window.
He held his breath. what? Yes? Yes? What?
Beyond the window, beyond the wall, beyond the house, outside somewhere, a whisper, a murmur, growing louder and louder. Grass growing? Blossoms opening? Soil shifting, crumbling?
A great whisper, a mix of shadows and shades. Something rising. Something moving.
Ice froze beneath his skin. His heart ceased.
Outside in the dark, in the yard.
Autumn had arrived.
October was there.
His garden gave him ...
A harvest
Harrison Cooper was not that old, only thirty-nine, touching at the warm rim of forty rather than the cold rim of thirty, which makes a great difference in temperature and attitude. He was a genius verging on the brilliant, unmarried, unengaged, with no children that he could honestly claim, so having nothing much else to do, woke one morning in the summer of 1999, weeping.
“Why!?”
Out of bed, he faced his mirror to watch the tears, examine his sadness, trace the woe. Like a child, curious after emotion, he charted his own map, found no capital city of despair, but only a vast and empty expanse of sorrow, and went to shave.
Which didn’t help, for Harrison Cooper had stumbled on some secret supply of melancholy that, even as he shaved, spilled in rivulets down his soaped cheeks.
“Great God,” he cried. “I’m at a funeral, but who’s dead?!”
He ate his breakfast toast somewhat soggier than usual and plunged off to his laboratory to see if gazing at his Time Traveler would solve the mystery of eyes that shed rain while the rest of him stood fair.
Time Traveler? All, yes.
For Harrison Cooper had spent the better part of his third decade wiring circuitries of impossible pasts and as yet untouchable futures. Most men philosophize in their as-beautiful-as-women cars. Harrison Cooper chose to dream and knock together from pure air and electric thunderclaps what he called his Mobius Machine.
He had told his friends, with wine-colored nonchalance, that he was taking a future strip and a past strip, giving them a now half twist, so they looped on a single plane. Like those figure-eight ribbons, cut and pasted by that dear mathematician A. F. Mobius in the nineteenth century.
“Ah, yes, Mobius,” friends murmured.
What they really meant was, “Ah, no. Good night.”
Harrison Cooper was not a mad scientist, but he was irretrievably boring. Knowing this, he had retreated to finish the Mobius Machine. Now, this strange morning, with cold rain streaming from his eyes, he stood staring at the damned contraption, bewildered that he was not dancing about with Creation’s joy.
He was interrupted by the ringing of the laboratory doorbell and opened the door to find one of those rare people, a real Western Union delivery boy on a real bike. He signed for the telegram and was about to shut the door when he saw the lad staring fixedly at the Mobius Machine.
“What,” exclaimed the boy, eyes wide, “is that?”
Harrison Cooper stood aside and let the boy wander in a great circle around his Machine, his eyes dancing up, over, and around the immense circling figure eight of shining copper, brass, and silver.
“Sure!” cried the boy at last, beaming. “A Time Machine!”
“Bull’s-eye!”
“When do you leave?” said the boy. “Where will you go to meet which person where? Alexander? Caesar? Napoleon! Hitler?!”
“No, no!”
The boy exploded his list. “Lincoln-“
“More like it.”
“General Grant! Roosevelt! Benjamin Franklin?”
“Franklin, yes!”
“Aren’t you lucky?”
“Am I?” Stunned, Harrison Cooper found himself nodding. “Yes, by God, and suddenly-“
Suddenly he knew why he had wept at dawn. He grabbed the young lad’s hand. “Much thanks. You’re a catalyst-“
“Cat-?”
“A Rorschach test-making me draw my own list-now gently, swiftly-out! No offense.”
The door slammed. He ran for his library phone, punched numbers, waited, scanning the thousand books on the shelves.
“Yes, yes, he murmured, his eyes flicking over the gorgeous sun-bright titles. “Some of you. Two, three, maybe four. Hello! Sam? Samuel! Can you get here in five minutes, make it three? Dire emergency. Come!”
He slammed the phone, swiveled to reach out and touch.
“Shakespeare,” he murmured. “Willy-William, will it be-you?”
The laboratory door opened and Sam/Samuel stuck his head in and froze.
For there, seated in the midst of his great Mobius figure eight, leather jacket and boots shined, picnic lunch packed, was Harrison Cooper, arms flexed, elbows out, fingers alert to the computer controls.
“Where’s your Lindbergh cap and goggles?” asked Samuel.
Harrison Cooper dug them out, put them on, smirking. “Raise the Titanic; then sink it!” Samuel strode to the lovely machine to confront its rather outre’ occupant. “Well, Cooper, what?” he cried.
“I woke this morning in tears.”
“Sure. I read the phone book aloud last night. That did it!”
“No. You read me these!”
Cooper handed the books over.
“Sure! We gabbed till three, drunk as owls on English Lit!”
“To give me tears for answers!”
“To what?”
“To their loss. To the fact that they died unknown, unrecognized; to the grim fact that some were only truly recognized, republished, raved over from 1920 on!”
“Cut the cackle and move the buns,” said Samuel. “Did you call to sermonize or ask advice?”
Harrison Cooper leaped from his machine and elbowed Samuel into the library.
“You must map my trip for me!”
“Trip? Trip!”
“I go a-journeying, far-traveling, the Grand Literary Tour. A Salvation Army of one!”
“To save lives?”
“No, souls! What good is life if the soul’s dead? Sit! Tell me all the authors we raved on by night to weep me at dawn. Here’s brandy. Drink! Remember?”
“I do!”
“List them, then! The New England Melancholic first. Sad, recluse from land, should have drowned at sea, a lost soul of sixty! Now, what other sad geniuses did we maunder over-“
“God!” Samuel cried. “You’re going to tour them? Oh, Harrison, Harry, I love you!”
“Shut up! Remember how you write jokes? Laugh and think backwards! So let us cry and leap up our tear ducts to the source. Weep for Whales to find minnows!”
“Last night I think I quoted-“
“Yes?”
“And then we spoke-“
“Go on-“
“Well.”
Samuel gulped his brandy. Fire burned his eyes.
“Write this down!”
They wrote and ran.
“What will you do when you get there, Librarian Doctor?”
Harrison Cooper, seated back in the shadow of the great hovering Mobius ribbon, laughed and nodded. “Yes! Harrison Cooper, L.M.D. Literary Meadow Doctor. Curer of fine old lions off their feed, in dire need of tender love, small applause, the wine of words, all in my heart, all on my tongue. Say ‘Ah!’ So long. Good-bye!”
“God bless!”
He slammed a lever, whirled a knob, and the machine, in a spiral of metal, a whisk of butterfly ribbon, very simply-vanished.
A moment later, the Mobius Machine gave a twist of its atoms and-returned.
“Voila!” cried Harrison Cooper, pink-faced and wild-eyed. ‘It’s done!”
“So soon?” exclaimed his friend Samuel “A minute here, but hours there!”
“Did you succeed?”
“Look! Proof positive.”
For tears dripped off his chin.
“What happened? what?!”
“This, and this ... and ...this!”
A gyroscope spun, a celebratory ribbon spiraled endlessly on itself, and the ghost of a massive window curtain haunted the air, exhaled, and then ceased.
As if fallen from a delivery-chute, the books arrived almost before the footfalls and then the half-seen feet and then the fog-wrapped legs and body and at last the head of a man who, as the ribbon spiraled itself back into emptiness, crouched over the volumes as if warming himself at a hearth.
He touched the books and listened to the air in the dim hallway where dinnertime voices drifted up from below and a door stood wide near his elbow, from which the faint scent of illness came and went, arrived and departed, with the stilted breathing of some patient within the room. Plates and silverware sounded from the world of evening and quiet good health downstairs. The hall and the sickroom were for a time deserted. In a moment, someone might ascend with a tray for the half-sleeping man in the intemperate room.
Harrison Cooper rose with stealth, checking the stairwell, and then, carrying a sweet burden of books, moved into the room, where candles lit both sides of a bed on which the dying man lay supine, arms straight at his sides, head weighting the pillow, eyes grimaced shut, mouth set as if daring the ceiling, mortality itself, to sink and extinguish him.
At the first touch of the books, now on one side, now on the other, of his bed, the old man’s eyelids fluttered, his dry lips cracked; the air whistled from his nostrils:
“Who’s there?” he whispered. “what time is it?”
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can,” replied the traveler at the foot of the bed, quietly.
“What, what?” the old man in the bed whispered swiftly. “It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation,” quoted the visitor, who now moved to place a book under each of the dying man’s hands where his tremoring fingers could scratch, pull away, then touch, Braille-like, again.
One by one, the stranger held up book after book, to show the covers, then a page, and yet another title page where printed dates of this novel surfed up, adrift, but to stay forever on some far future shore.
The sick man’s eyes lingered over the covers, the tides, the dates, and then fixed to his visitor’s bright face. He exhaled, stunned. “My God, you have the look of a traveler. From where?”
“Do the years show?” Harrison Cooper leaned forward. “Well, then-I bring you an Annunciation.”
“Such things come to pass only with virgins,” whispered the old man. “No virgin lies here buried under his unread books.”
“I come to unbury you. I bring tidings from a far place.” The sick man’s eyes moved to the books beneath his trembling hands.
“Mine?” he whispered.
The traveler nodded solemnly, but began to smile when the color in the old man’s face grew warmer arid the expression in his eyes and on his mouth was suddenly eager.
“Is there hope. then?”
“There is!”
“I believe you.” The old man took a breath and then wondered, “Why?”
“Because,” said the stranger at the foot of the bed, “I love you.”
“I do not know you, sir!”
“But I know you fore and aft, port to starboard, main topgallants to gunnels, every day in your long life to here!”
“Oh, the sweet sound!” cried the old man. “Every word that you say, every light from your eyes, is foundation-of-the-world true! How can it be?” Tears winked from the old man’s lids. “Why?”
“Because I am the truth,” said the traveler. “I have come a long way to find and say: you are not lost. Your great Beast has only drowned some little while. In another year, lost ahead, great and glorious, plain and simple men will gather at your grave and shout: he breeches, he rises, he breeches, he rises! and the white shape will surface to the light, the great terror lift into the storm and thunderous St. Elmo’s fire and you with him, each bound to each, and no way to tell where he stops and you start or where you stop and he goes off around the world lifting a fleet of libraries in his and your wake through nameless seas of sub-sub-librarians and readers mobbing the docks to chart your far journeyings, alert for your lost cries at three of a wild morn.”
“Christ’s wounds!” said the man in his winding-sheet bedclothes. “To the point, man, the point! Do you speak truth!?”
“I give you my hand on it, and pledge my soul and my heart’s blood.” The visitor moved to do just this, and the two men’s fists fused as one. “Take these gifts to the grave. Count these pages like a rosary in your last hours. Tell no one where they came from. Scoffers would knock the ritual beads from your fingers. So tell this rosary in the dark before dawn, and the rosary is this: you will live forever. You are immortal.”
“No more of this, no more! Be still.”
“I can not. Hear me. Where you have passed a fire path will burn, miraculous in the Bengal Bay, the Indian Seas, Hope’s Cape, and around the Horn, past perdition’s landfall, as far as living eyes can see.”
He gripped the old man’s fist ever more tightly.
“I swear. In the years ahead, a million millions will crowd your grave to sleep you well and warm your bones. Do you hear?”
“Great God, you are a proper priest to sound my Last Rites. And will I enjoy my own funeral? I will.”
His hands, freed, clung to the books at each side, as the ardent visitor raised yet other books and intoned the dates:
“Nineteen twenty-two ... 1930 ... 1935 ... 1940 . 1955... 1970. Can you read and know what it means?”
He held the last volume close to the old man’s face. The fiery eyes moved. The old mouth creaked.
“Nineteen ninety?”
“Yours. One hundred years from tonight.”
“Dear God!”
“I must go, but I would hear. Chapter One. Speak.”
The old man’s eyes slid and burned. He licked his lips, traced the words, and at last whispered, beginning to weep:
“’Call me Ishmael.’”
There was snow and more snow and more snow after that. In the dissolving whiteness, the silver ribbon twirled in a massive whisper to let forth in an exhalation of Time the journeying librarian and his book bag. As if slicing white bread rinsed by snow, the ribbon, as the traveler ghosted himself to flesh, sifted him through the hospital wall into a room as white as December. There, abandoned, lay a man as pale as the snow and the wind. Almost young, he slept with his mustaches oiled to his lip by fever. He seemed not to know nor care that a messenger had invaded the air near his bed. His eyes did not stir, nor did his mouth increase the passage of breath. His hands at his sides did not open to receive. He seemed already lost in a bomb and only his unexpected visitor’s voice caused his eyes to roll behind their shut lids.
“Are you forgotten?” a voice asked.
“Unborn,” the pale man replied.
“Never remembered?”
“Only. Only in. France.”
“Wrote nothing at all?”
“Not worthy.”
“Feel the weight of what I place on your bed. No, don’t look. Feel.”
“Tombstones.”
“With names, yes, but not tombstones. Not marble but paper. Dates, yes, but the day after tomorrow and tomorrow and ten thousand after that. And your name on each.”
“It will not be.”
“Is. Let me speak the names. Listen. Masque?”
“Red Death.”
“The Fall of-“ -
“Usher!”
“Pit?”
“Pendulum!”
“Tell-tale?”
“Heart! My heart. Heart!”
“Repeat: for the love of God, Montresor.”
“Silly.”
“Repeat: Montresor, for the love of God.”
“For the love of God, Montresor’.”
“Do you see this label?”
“I see!”
“Read the date.”
“Nineteen ninety-four. No such date.”
“Again, and the name of the wine.”
“Nineteen ninety-four. Amontillado. And my name!”
“Yes! Now shake your head. Make the fool’s-cap bells ring. Here’s mortar for the last brick. Quickly. I’m here to bury you alive with books. When death comes, how will you greet him? With a shout and-?”
“Requiescat in pace?”
“Say it again.”
“Requiescat in pace!”
The Time Wind roared, the room emptied. Nurses ran in, summoned by laughter, and tried to seize the books that weighed down his joy.
“What’s he saying?” someone cried.
In Paris, an hour, a day, a year, a minute later, there was a run of St. Elmo’s fire along a church steeple, a blue glow in a dark alley, a soft tread at a street corner, a turnabout of wind like an invisible carousel, and then footfalls up a stair to a door which opened on a bedroom where a window looked out upon cafes filled with people and far music, and in a bed by the window, a tall man lying, his pale face immobile, until he heard alien breath in his room.
The shadow of a man stood over him and now leaned down so that the light from the window revealed a face and a mouth as it inhaled and then spoke. The single word that the mouth said was:
“Oscar?”
They drove into green Sunday-morning country, away from the hot aluminum city, and watched as the sky was set free and moved over them like a lake they had never known was there, amazingly blue and with white breakers above them as they traveled.
Clarence Travers slowed the car and felt the cool wind move over his face with the smell of cut grass. He reached over to grasp his wife’s hand and glanced at his son and daughter in the backseat, not fighting, at least for this moment, as the car moved through one quiet beauty after another in what might be a Sunday so lush and green it would never end.
“Thank God we’re doing this,” said Cecelia Travers. “It’s been a million years since we got away.” He felt her hand hug his and then relax completely. “when I think of all those ladies dropping dead from the heat at the cocktail parry this afternoon, welt”
“Well, indeed,” said Clarence Travers. “Onward!”
He pressed the gas pedal and they moved faster. Their progress out of the city had been mildly hysterical, with cars shrieking and shoving them toward islands of wilderness praying for picnics that might not be found. Seeing that he had put the car in the fast lane, he slowed to gradually move himself and his family through the banshee traffic until they were idling along at an almost reasonable fifty miles an hour. The scents of flowers and trees that blew in the window made his move worthwhile. He laughed at nothing at all and said:
“Sometimes, when I get this far out, I think let’s just keep driving, never go back to the damned city.”
“Let’s drive a hundred miles,” shouted his son.
“A thousand!” cried his daughter.
“A thousand!” said Clarence Travers. “But one slow mile at a time.” And then said, softly, “Hey!”
And as suddenly as if they had dreamed it up, the lost highway came into view. “Wonderful!” said Mr. Clarence Travers.
“What?” asked the children.
“Look!” said Clarence Travers, leaning over his wife, pointing. “That’s the Old road. The one they used a long time ago.”
“That?” said his wife.
“It’s awfully small,” said his son.
“Well, there weren’t many cars then, they didn’t need much.”
“It looks like a big snake,” said his daughter.
“Yeah, the old roads used to twist and turn, all right. Remember?”
Cecelia Travers nodded. The car had slowed and they gazed over at that narrow concrete strip with the green grass buckling it gently here or there and sprays of wildflowers nestling up close to either side and the morning sunlight coming down through the high elms and maples and oaks that led the way toward the forest.
“I know it like the nose on my face,” said Clarence Travers. “How would you like to ride on it?”
“Oh, Clarence, now
“I mean it.”
“Oh, Daddy, could we?”
“All right, we’ll do it,” he said decisively.
“We can’t!” said Cecelia Travers. “It’s probably against the law. It can’t be safe.”
But before his wife could finish, he turned off the freeway and let all the swift cars rush on while he drove, smiling at each bump, down over a small ditch, toward the old road.
“Clarence, please! we’ll be arrested!”
“For going ten miles an hour on a highway nobody uses anymore? Let’s not kick over any beehives, it’s too nice a day. I’ll buy you all soda pops if you behave.”
They reached the old road.
“See how simple? Now which way, kids?”
“That way, that way!”
“Easy as pie!”
And he let the car take them away on the old highway, the great white-gray boa constrictor that lashed now slowly this way in green moss-velvet meadows, looped over gentle hills, and lowered itself majestically into caves of moist-smelling trees, through the odor of cricks and spring mud and crystal water that rustled like sheets of cellophane over small stone falls. They drove slow enough to see the waterspiders’ enigmatic etchings on quiet pools behind dams of last October’s leaves.
“Daddy, what are those?”
“What, the water-skaters? No one has ever caught one. You wait and wait and put your hand out and bang! The spider’s gone. They’re the first things in life you can’t grab onto. The list gets bigger as you grow old, so start small. Don’t believe in them. They’re not really there.”
“It’s fun thinking they are.”
“You have just stated a deep philosophical truth. Now, drive on, Mr. Travers.” And obeying his own command with good humor, he drove on.
And they came to a forest that had been like November all through the winter and now, reluctantly, was putting out green flags to welcome the season. Butterflies in great tosses of confetti leaped from the deeps of the forest to ramble drunkenly on the air, their thousand torn shadows following over grass and water.
“Let’s go back now,” said Cecelia Travers.
“Aw, Mom,” said the son and daughter.
“Why?” said Clarence Travers. “My God, how many kids back in that damned hot town can say they drove on a road nobody else has used in years? Not one! Not one with a father brave enough to cross a little grass to take the old way. Right?”
Mrs. Travers lapsed into silence.
“Right there,” said Clarence Travers, “over that hill, the highway turns left, then right, then left again, an S curve, and another S. Wait and see.”
“Left.”
“Right.”
“Left.”
“An S curve.”
The car purred.
“Another S!”
“Just like you said!”
“Look.” Clarence Travers pointed. A hundred yards across the way from them, the freeway suddenly appeared for a few yards before it vanished, screaming behind stacks of playing-card billboards. Clarence Travers stared fixedly at it and the grass between it and this shadowed path, this silent place like the bottom of an old stream where tides used to come but came no more, where the wind ran through nights making the old sound of far traffic.
“You know something,” said the wife. “That freeway over there scares me.”
“Can we drive home on this old road instead, Dad?” said the son.
“I wish we could.”
“I’ve always been scared,” said the wife, watching that other traffic roaring by, gone before it arrived.
“We’re all afraid,” said Clarence Travers. “But you pay your money and take your chance. Well?”
His wife sighed. “Damn, get back on that dreadful thing.”
“Not quite yet,” said Clarence Travers and drove to reach a small, very small village, all quite unexpected, a settlement no more than a dozen white clapboard houses mossed under giant trees, dreaming in a green tide of water and leaf-shadow, with wind shaking the rocking chairs on weathered porches and dogs sleeping in the cool nap of grass-carpeting at noon, and a small general store with a dirty red gas pump out front.
They drew up there and got out and stood, unreal in the sudden lack of motion, not quite accepting these houses lost in the wilderness.
The door to the general store squealed open and an old man stepped out, blinked at them, and said, “Say, did you folks just come down that old road?”
Clarence Travers avoided his wife’s accusing eyes. “Yes, sir.
“No one on that road in twenty years.”
“We were out for a lark,” said Mr. Travers. “And found a peacock,” he added.
“A sparrow,” said his wife.
“The freeway passed us by, a mile over there, if you want it,” said the old man. “When the new road opened, this town just died on the vine. We got nothing here now but people like me. That is: old.”
“Looks like there’d be places here to rent.”
“Mister, just walk in, knock out the bats, stomp the spiders, and any place is yours for thirty bucks a month. I own the whole town.”
“Oh, we’re not really interested,” said Cecelia Travers.
“Didn’t think you would be,” said the old man. “Too far out from the city, too far off the freeway. And that dirt road there slops over when it rains, all muck and mud. And, heck, it’s against the law to use that path. Not that they ever patrol it.” The old man snorted, shaking his head. “And not that I’ll turn you in. But it gave me a nice start just now to see you coming down that rut. I had to give a quick look at my calendar, by God, and make sure it wasn’t 1929!”
Lord, I remember, thought Clarence Travers. This is Fox Hill. A thousand people lived here. I was a kid, we passed through on summer nights. We used to stop here late late, and me sleeping in the backseat in the moonlight. My grandmother and grandfather in back with me. It’s nice to sleep in a car driving late and the road all white, watching the stars turn as you take the curves, listening to the grown-ups’ voices underwater, remote, talking, talking, laughing, murmuring, whispering. My father driving, so stolid. Just to be driving in the summer dark, up along the lake to the Dunes, where the poison ivy grew out on the lonely beach and the wind stayed all the time and never went away. And us driving by that lonely graveyard place of sand and moonlight and poison ivy and the waves tumbling in like dusty ash on the shore, the lake pounding like a locomotive on the sand, coming and going. And me crumpled down and smelling Grandmother’s wind-cooled coat and the voices comforting and blanketing me with their solidity and their always-will-be-here sounds that would go on forever, myself always young and us always riding on a summer night in our old Kissel with the side flaps down. And stopping here at nine or ten for Pistachio and Tutti-frutti ice cream that tasted, faintly, beautifully, of gasoline. All of us licking and biting the cones and smelling the gasoline and driving on, sleepy and snug, toward home, Green Town, thirty years ago.
He caught himself and said:
“About these houses, would it be much trouble fixing them up?” He squinted at the old man.
“Well, yes and no, most of ‘em over fifty years old, lots of dust. You could buy one off me for ten thousand, a real bargain now, you’ll admit. If you were an artist, now, a painter, or something like that.”
“I write copy in an advertising firm.”
“Write stories, too, no doubt? Well, now, you get a writer out here, quiet, no neighbors, you’d do lots of writing.”
Cecelia Travers stood silently between the old man and her husband. Clarence Travers did not look at her, but looked at the cinders around the porch of the general store. “I imagine I could work here.”
“Sure,” said the old man.
“I’ve often thought,” said Mr. Travers, “it’s time we got away from the city and took it a little easy.”
“Sure,” said the old man.
Mrs. Travers said nothing but searched in her purse and took out a minor.
“Would you like some drinks?” asked Clarence Travers with exaggerated concern. “Three Orange Crushes, make it four,” he told the old man. The old man moved inside the store, which smelled of nails and crackers and dust.
When the old man was gone, Mr. Travers turned to his wife, and his eyes were shining. “We’ve always wanted to do it! Let’s!”
“Do what?” she said.
“Move out here, snap decision, why not? Why? We’ve promised ourselves every year: get away from the noise, the confusion, so the kids’d have a place to play. And . .
“Good grief” the wife cried.
The old man moved inside the store, coughing. “Ridiculous.” She lowered her voice. “We’ve got the apartment paid up, you’ve got a fine job, the kids have school with friends, I belong to some fine clubs. And we’ve just spent a bundle redecorating. We-“
“Listen,” he said, as if she were really listening. “ None of that’s important. Out here, we can breathe. Back in town, hell, you complain ...”
“Just to have something to complain about.”
“Your clubs can’t be that important.”
“It’s not clubs, it’s friends!”
“How many would care if we dropped dead tomorrow?” he said. “If I got hit in that traffic, how many thousand cars would run over me before one stopped to see if I was a man or dog left in the road?”
“Your job ...” she started to say.
“My God, ten years ago we said, in two more years we’ll have enough money to quit and write my novel! But each year we’ve said next year! and next year and next year!”
“We’ve had fun, haven’t we?”
“Sure! Subways are fun, buses are fun, martinis and drunken friends are fun. Advertising? Yeah! But I’ve used all the fun there is! I want to write about what I’ve seen now, and there’s no better place than this. Look at that house over there! Can’t you just see me in the front window banging the hell out of my typewriter?”
“Stop hyperventilating!”
“Hyperventilate? God, I’d jump for joy to quit. I’ve gone as far as I can go. Come on, Cecelia, let’s get back some of the spunk in our marriage, take a chance!”
“The children
“We’d love it here!” said the son.
“I think,” said the daughter.
“I’m not getting any younger,” said Clarence Travers.
“Nor am I,” she said, touching his arm. “But we can’t play hopscotch now. When the children leave, yes, we’ll think about it.”
“Children, hopscotch, my God, I’ll take my typewriter to the grave!”
“It won’t be long. We-“
The shop door squealed open again and whether the old man had been standing in the screen shadow for the last minute, there was no telling. It did not show in his face. He stepped out with four lukewarm bottles of Orange Crush in his rust-spotted hands.
“Here you are,” he said.
Clarence and Cecelia Travers turned to stare at him as if he were a stranger come out to bring them drinks. They smiled and took the bottles.
The four of them stood drinking the soda pop in the warm sunlight. The summer wind blew through the grottoes of trees in the old, shady town. It was like being in a great green church, a cathedral, the trees so high that the people and cottages were lost far down below. All night long you would imagine those trees rustling Their leaves like an ocean on an unending shore. God, thought Clarence Travers, you could really sleep here, the sleep of the dead and the peace-fill-of-heart.
He finished his drink and his wife half finished hers and gave it to the children to argue over, inch by compared inch. The old man stood silent, embarrassed by the thing he may have stirred up among them.
“Well, if you’re ever out this way, drop in,” he said. Clarence Travers reached for his wallet.
“No, no!” said the old man. “It’s on the house.”
“Thank you, thank you very much.”
“A pleasure.”
They climbed back into their car.
“If you want to get to the freeway,” said the old man, peering through the front window into the cooked-upholstery smell of the car, “just take your old dirt road back. Don’t rush, or you’ll break an axle.”
Clarence Travers looked straight ahead at the radiator fixture on the car front and started the motor.
“Good-bye,” said the old man.
“Good-bye,” the children yelled, and waved. The car moved away through the town.
“Did you hear what the old man said?” asked the wife.
“What?”
“Did you hear him say which way to the freeway?”
“I heard.”
He drove through the cool, shady town, staring at the porches and the windows with the colored glass fringing them. If you looked from the inside of those windows out, people had different-colored faces for each pane you looked through. They were Chinese if you looked through one, Indian through another, pink, green, violet, burgundy, wine, chartreuse, the candy colors, the lemon-lime cool colors, the water colors of the windows looking out on lawns and trees and this car slowly driving past.
“Yes, I heard him,” said Clarence Travers.
They left the town behind and took the dirt road to the freeway. They waited their chance, saw an interval between floods of cars hurtling by, swerved out into the stream, and, at fifty miles an hour, were soon hurtling toward the city.
“That’s better,” said Cecelia Travers brightly. She did not look over at her husband. “Now I know where we are.”
Billboards flashed by; a mortuary, a pie crust, a cereal, a garage, a hotel. A hotel in the tar pits of the city, where one day is the pitiless glare of the noon sun, thought Mr. Travers, all of the great Erector-set buildings, like prehistoric dinosaurs, will sink down into the bubbling tar-lava and be encased, bone by bone, for future civilizations. And in the stomachs of the electric lizards, inside the iron dinosaurs, the probing scientists of A.D. One Million will find the little ivory bones, the thinly articulated skeletons of advertising executives and clubwomen and children. Mr. Travers felt his eyes flinch, watering. And the scientists will say, so this is what the iron cities fed on, is it? and give the bones a kick. So this is what kept the iron stomachs full, eh? Poor things, they never had a chance. Probably kept by the iron monsters who needed them in order to survive, who needed them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Aphids, in a way, aphids, kept in a great metal cage.
“Look, Daddy, look, look, before it’s too late!”
The children pointed, yelling. Cecelia Travers did not look. Only the children saw it.
The old highway, two hundred yards away, at their left, sprang back into sight for an instant, wandered aimlessly through field, meadow, and stream, gentle and cool and quiet.
Mr. Travers swung his head sharply to see, but in that instant it was gone. Billboards, trees, hills rushed it away. A thousand cars, honking, shrieking, shouldered them, and bore Clarence and Cecelia Travers and their captive children stunned and silent down the concourse, onward ever onward into a city that had not seen them leave and did not look to see them return
“Let’s see if this car will do sixty or sixty-five,” said Clarence Travers.
It could and did.
When I was eight years old, in 1928, an incredible event occurred on the back wall outside the Academy motion picture theater in Waukegan, Illinois. An advertising broadside, some thirty feet long and twenty feet high, dramatized Black-stone the Magician in half a dozen miraculous poses: sawing a lady in half; tied to an Arabian cannon that exploded, taking him with it; dancing a live handkerchief in midair; causing a birdcage with a live canary to vanish between his fingers; causing an elephant to ... well, you get the idea. I must have stood there for hours, frozen with awe. I knew then that someday I must become a magician.
That’s what happened, didn’t it? I’m not a science fiction, fantasy, magic-realism writer of fairy tales and surrealist poems. Quicker Than the Eye may well be the best title I have ever conjured for a new collection. I pretend to do one thing, cause you to blink, and in the instant seize twenty bright silks out of a bottomless hat.
How does he do that? may well be asked. I really can’t say. I don’t write these stories, they write me. Which causes me to live with a boundless enthusiasm for writing and life that some misinterpret as optimism.
Nonsense. I am merely a practitioner of optimal behavior, which means behave yourself; listen to your Muses, get your work done, and enjoy the sense that you just might live forever.
I don’t have to wait for inspiration. It jolts me every morning. Just before dawn, when I would prefer to sleep in, the damned stuff speaks between my ears with my Theater of Morning voices. Yes, yes, I know, that sounds awfully artsy, and no, no, I am not preaching some sort of Psychic Summons. The voices exist because I stashed them there every day for a lifetime by reading, writing, and living. They accumulated and began to speak soon after high school.
In other words, I do not greet each day with a glad cry but am forced out of bed by these whispering nags, drag myself to the typewriter, and am soon awake and alive as the notion/fancy/concept quits my ears, runs down my elbows and out my fingers. Two hours later, a new story is done that, all night, hid asleep behind my medulla oblongata.
That, don’t you agree, is not optimism. It’s behavior. Optimal.
I dare not oppose these morning voices. If I did, they would ransack my conscience all day. Besides, I am as out of control as a car off a cliff. What began as a numbed frenzy before breakfast, ends with elation at noon lunch.
How did I find these metaphors? Let me count the ways:
You discover your wife is pregnant with your first child soon to be born, so you name the embryonic presence “Sascha” and converse with this increasingly bright fetus that evolves into a story that you love but no one wants. So here it is.
You wonder whatever happened to Dorian Gray’s portrait. Your second thoughts grow to an outsize horror by nightfall. You upchuck this hairball into your typewriter.
Some of these stories “happened” to me. “Quicker Than the Eye” was part of a magic show I attended where, with dismay, I saw someone much like myself being made a fool of onstage.
“No News, or What Killed the Dog?” was a Victrola record I played all day every day when I was five, until the neighbors offered to break me or the record, choose.
“That Woman on the Lawn” was first a poem that then turned into a story about my mother as a young and needful woman; a topic we care to discuss only with euphemisms.
“Another Fine Mess” resulted from my writing “The Laurel and Hardy Love Affair.” There had to be a sequel, because when I arrived in Ireland forty years ago, the Irish Times announced LAUREL AND HARDY, ONE TIME ONLY, IN PERSON! FOR THE IRISH ORPHANS. OLYMPIA THEATER, DUBLIN. I rushed to the theater and bought the last ticket, front row center!
The curtain rose and there they were, Stan and Ollie, doing all their old, sweet, wondrous routines. I sat with happy tears streaming down my face. Later I went backstage and stood by their dressing room door watching them greet friends. I didn’t introduce myself. I just wanted to warm my hands and heart. After twenty minutes of ambience bathing, I slipped away. Thus “Another Fine Mess.”
“Unterderseaboat Doktor” is an example of people not hearing themselves talk. A writer friend at lunch some years back described his psychiatrist, a former submarine captain in Hitler’s undersea fleet. “Holy God,” I cried, “give me a pencil!” I scribbled a title and finished the tale that night. My writer friend hated me for weeks.
“Last Rites” wrote itself because I am the greatest lover of other writers, old or new, who ever lived. I have never been jealous of any writer, I only wanted to write and dream like them. That makes for an enormous list, some of them first-class ladies as well as writers first class: Willa Cather, Jessamyn West, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Weelty, and, long before her current fame, Edith Wharton. “Last Rites” shuttles in Time to pay my respects to three of my heroes, Poe, Melville, and a third writer, nameless until the finale. It crazed me to perceive that these giants died thinking they were to be buried unknown and unread. I had to invent a Time Machine to celebrate them on their deathbeds.
Some of the stories are self-evident. “At the End of the Ninth Year” is the sort of quasi-scientific factoid we all discuss a dozen times, but neglect to write.
“The Other Highway” lies beside the main route heading north from Los Angeles. It has all but vanished under grass, bushes, trees, and avalanched soil. Here and there you can still bike it for some few hundred yards before it melts into the earth.
“Once More, Legato” spontaneously combusted one afternoon when I heard a treeful of birds orchestrating Berlioz and then Albeniz.
If you know the history of Paris during the 1870s’ Commune and Haussmann, who tore it down and built it back to the wonder it is now, and if you have experienced some Los Angeles earthquakes, you’ could guess the genesis of “Zaharoff/Richter Mark V.” During the last High Shake, two years ago, I thought: My God, the damn fools built the city on the San Andreas Fault! My next thought: what if they built it that way on purpose?!
Two hours later, the story was cooling on the windowsill.
That’s not all, but it should do.
My final advice to myself; the boy magician grown old, and you?
When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses: don’t delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align your wits.
Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life rampant and death most real.
Make haste to live.
Oh, God, yes.
Live. And write. With great haste.