He was sagging with fatigue, and he wondered that he was able to hold his head up; and then he realized that Cody Plumtree was sitting on the sand behind him and cradling his head in her lap. Kootie was kneeling white-faced behind Plumtree, with his arms around the black dog’s neck. Blood was trickling down Kootie’s own neck from a long, shallow cut below his ear, where a stray shot-pellet had evidently nicked him.
Cochran rolled his eyes to look back out at the water of the bay, but it was still empty—the blobby black figure had certainly gone.
The Green Knight gave the boy just a token cut, Cochran thought; and he settled his head more firmly against Cody’s warm, solid legs. The retribution-aspect of Dionysus was merciful, this morning.
Pete was behind the wheel of the truck, and now started up the rackety old engine; and just because of the new noise Cochran became aware that at some point violin-pure voices had begun singing out of the pipes that stood up from the masonry, a high solemn wordless chorus that now coaxed Cochran’s sluggish pulse to meet the vibrant cadences implicit in the new dawn.
“Get up, Sid,” said Plumtree, and Angelica added, “On this morning you can go to a hospital, with no fear of ghosts.”
Cochran got dizzily to his feet, leaning heavily on the two women as he shambled up the slope toward the shaking truck.
White seagulls, luminous in the new daylight, were circling high overhead against the blue of the clean sky, whistling and piping in the open, unechoing air as if calling out the news of the soon-returning spring.
EPILOGUE: IN THE MIDSUMMER OF THIS YEAR …
All, all is yours,
The love I owed my father, who is dead,
The love I might have given to my mother,
And my poor sister, cruelly doomed to die.
All yours now, only yours.
—Aeschylus,
The Libation Bearers
CUPPED at the very top of the steep green hill, above the lake that encircled the island and above the fenced-in reservoir that fed the waterfall, was a little lake surrounded by cherry laurel trees and standing green and orange stones. The lake water was so still that every tree branch against the blue sky was reflected motionless in the water.
Cody Plumtree had run up the steps of half-buried railway ties ahead of the others, and now she carefully lifted the hem of her white linen skirt and stepped up onto the altar-like rock at the east end of the little lake. This rock looked as if it were once a source for a waterfall into this lake, and it also looked as it it had been the site of fires in remote times. She remembered Sid saying that these moss-green stones were druid stones, magically counterweighted by the monastery stones around the lake below. Sid might not remember that now, but he would know it if she told him about it and then made sure to tell him about it again a few times.
It was a topic that was connected to his memories of his dead wife, and all those memories really had disappeared. He knew these days that he had been married, and he could even recognize photographs of the Nina woman, but he was like an amnesia victim—except that an amnesia victim would probably want to learn about the lost past. Along with the memories, Sid had lost any interest in what they had been of.
Cody didn’t mind, and she would probably not remind him of the history of the stones.
The two of them had been living in Sid’s South Daly City house for five months now, but somehow—like, she thought helplessly, the Solville piece of string that couldn’t ever quite be cut—it had consistently been a celibate relationship. That would change after this ceremony today, she was certain.
Cody had not lost any memories at all, and she still dreamed of the other girls that had occupied her head with her. On some nights she even dreamed of the day the sun fell on her, the day—twenty-six years ago now to the day, perhaps to the hour—when her father was thrown off the building in Soma; it was a harrowing dream, but she was glad to experience it, especially since she saw it in color—it indicated that she had absorbed, taken as her own, those earliest memories that had been in the sole custody of dead Valorie.
And last night she had dreamed of driving the bus, speeding up and jumping across the wide empty gap in the freeway to land safe on the other side, and the man standing beside her had been Sid Cochran.
Two miles away to the southeast she could see the tall X-shaped TV tower on Mount Sutro; and when she shifted around, she could see the two distant piers of the Golden Gate Bridge, appearing in foreshortening to be standing next to each other on the horizon.
The other people were scuffing up the steps now—and she saw Scott Crane come striding lightly across the grass first, tall and brown and smiling through his lustrous coppery beard; he was fifty-two years old now, but hardly looked thirty-five, and on this midsummer’s day his wound didn’t make him limp at all. He wasn’t dressed as any kind of priest, though that was the function he would be serving here today; he wore a navy blue suit with a white shirt, and his long hair was tied back in a ponytail secured, she had noticed on the walk over the bridge, with a gold Merovingian bee.
The others from the Leucadia compound were right behind him, led by lithe Nardie Dinh and Diana with her three-inch thatch of radiant blond hair. Arky’s widow, Wendy, was leading their two teenage daughters; Plumtree had been afraid to meet them at first, and then had been surprised by their unaffected friendliness and their eagerness to hear stories about Arky’s last month. Diana’s boys Scat and Oliver appeared next, herding the children up into the clearing. Behind them she could hear a barking dog, which meant that the Solville contingent was coming right up.
With the Valorie-memories which were now her own, Cody called across the hilltop glade to Crane, “Standing in happy sunlight on the hill in the lake!”
Crane laughed quietly, and the sound seemed to shake the green leaves and send ripples across the little lake.
Through the green branches overhead, the sky was a cloudless, deep blue. It was a good day for a wedding.
SID COCHRAN was glad now that he hadn’t acceded to the advice of the other sales representatives at Pace and worn some kind of tuxedo. His suit was formal enough, and in these wooded sunlit groves the affected pretension of a tuxedo would have been ludicrous. In the same spirit, he had left his prosthetic hand in the car’s glove compartment, and was just wearing a white sock over the stump of his right wrist.
Behind him Fred was bounding along the cinder path on a leash, for Angelica hadn’t wanted him jumping up on people’s nice clothes, and Kootie was kept as busy as a fishing boat trying to stay over a powerful marlin, with the dog wanting to sniff at the mossy stones along the path and go loping and barking across the grass. Kootie had left his sport coat in the Solville van, and Cochran could see that there was no bandage anymore under the boy’s white shirt. Angelica had told him that Kootie’s two-year-old wound had finally healed up within a week of their return to Long Beach.
“And the cement Eleggua figure was back in its cabinet, when we got back home,” said Angelica now, striding along between Cochran and Pete Sullivan.
“With a bunch of snapshots in the cabinet with him,” added Pete. “Pictures of the Eleggua statue in front of Stonehenge, and at the Great Pyramid, and at Notre Dame cathedral …”
Cochran glanced sharply at him, but Pete’s face was resolutely deadpan and Cochran couldn’t quite decide if he was kidding or not.