James stops. It’s ridiculous to dig anywhere but in a sandbox with your bare hands, but in a New Waterford back yard it’s even more ridiculous, because there’s coal not far under the ground, even coal right at the surface in places. And rock. James is crying. He covers his face with his hands, streaking it with mud and soot and blood. He has never cried like this before, not counting early childhood. He’s in the war. Not that he is hallucinating himself back to the Front or hearing shells explode in his head or seeing chopped-up men, it’s not that conscious. It’s just that if you asked the layer of his self that’s in charge of assumptions, “Where are we now?” it would reply, “In the war, of course.” There is a water-filled trench. There is an unhappy man with bleeding hands. There is the body of a boy. Of course.
“Daddy.”
“No-o-o-o-o-o. No-o-o-o-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho.” Like Santa Claus, only sad.
“Daddy, I’m sorry.”
James quiets down a bit and rocks on his heels for a while, making only very small sounds, with his hands still covering his face.
“The baby’s cold, Daddy.”
James gets up, gasping, swaying a bit, every breath touching off a little moan. But they’re just the aftershocks of grief. He can function now, the chest-heaving will run its course like a case of hiccups. He looks across at Frances. He splashes through the creek and takes the live baby from her. Her elbow joints unsquinge like damp springs, and her arms levitate in giving up the child’s weight, while retaining its warm impression — a phantom baby she will feel in her arms for days to come. James gives her a light shove towards the house.
“Go to bed now, go on.”
“Don’t hurt her.”
“I won’t hurt the baby, go.”
Frances goes.
“Wait. Take off your nightgown.”
She peels it from her body and James takes it from her. She watches Daddy return to the garden, where he swaddles the infant boy in her nightgown and tucks him into the shallow earth.
Frances walks across the yard back to the house, savouring the novelty of the night air on her bare chest. Boys are the only ones who ever get to feel this. There’s a bright moon, her underpants glow white and she pretends to herself that she’s really a boy stripped down for a swim at Lingan. She skips across the back yard feeling light and free, and it’s not until she steps out of her damp underpants and snuggles down in bed next to toasty-warm Mercedes that Frances starts to feel cold and to shiver.
Down in the cellar, Materia is curled asleep on a pillow of ashes behind the coal furnace. She dreams of an expanse of quiet earth embroidered by drought, then a calm sea of sand. In her dream she is aware that kings and queens are buried in the sand. A wide blue river blinks in the distance. In the river there is something she needs. But the sand makes her sleepy. Sleepy like Arctic snow. It’s not the cold that makes you sleep yourself to death in the Arctic, it’s the smooth pallor of the landscape, and the desert has that same smooth pallor, though Arabic. It’s the whiteness, the sameness of everything, that makes you fall asleep out of life, parched or frozen and so so comfortable when you finally let it roll over your mind, like a rolling-pin over dough.
The latch on the cellar door thwacks open and the airborne part of Materia slams back into her body, her eyes opening on impact; she has fallen awake. His shoes squish heavily down the steep wooden stair slats. He stumbles a bit at the bottom because there’s no light down here and he hasn’t brought a lantern. Materia doesn’t move a muscle. She is a pair of eyes now, that’s all she is. A desert with eyes.
James has either forgotten she’s there or doesn’t consider it of any importance. He yanks open the door of the cold furnace and tosses in a load of bloody sheets, douses it with kerosene and lights it. The sudden glow across his face startles even Materia and tears spring to her eyes, there is nothing sadder than the Devil. Tears spring to her eyes because in this light, in fire-light as in candlelight, the essential beauty of a person is evident. Candle-light is kind and caressing and therefore a natural companion to romance. The essential James is what the flames illuminate and it’s splintering what’s left of her heart, the sight of him as he was so long ago, the two of them alone in the hunting cabin out of season with his gift of his mother’s tartan blanket and the song and his bliss at the sound of her mother tongue, he loved her but she didn’t know she was supposed to save him, she didn’t know, she didn’t know, he must have fallen down and hurt himself just now because his face is dirty, he’s been crying and his cheeks are striped with blood.
He sprinkles a little more fuel onto the flames. Materia can’t stay by the furnace much longer what with it heating up like this. If he doesn’t leave soon she will have to move and betray her presence. But he shuts the pot-belly door and the glow dies down, his sweet agony disappears and is replaced by the shadows of the face she has come to know and Materia ceases to feel the lump in her throat.
As he heaves and shifts the weight of himself from one foot to another up the steps, Materia wipes the tears from her face with her sooty hands. She unwedges her body and drags it along the cinder floor behind her until she can stand up in it again, and goes back to being nothing but a pair of travelling eyes.
Before dawn, with Mercedes still sound asleep beside her, Frances opens her eyes and sees a black woman staring down at her. The woman reaches out and lightly strokes Frances’s forehead. She does the same to Mercedes, and then leaves. Frances falls back asleep. Candy. She dreams of candy.
The night is bright with the moon. Look down over Water Street. On the lonely stretch between where the houses end and where the sea bites into the land, a tree casts a network of shadow that stirs and bloats in one spot, as though putting forth dark fruit that droops, then drops from the bough. It’s a figure come out from under the branches and onto the street. It stops, drifting in place like a plant on the ocean floor. Then it travels again all the way down the street to the graveyard. It passes among the headstones that have flourished with the town, but it does not linger at the freshest mound. It continues to the edge of the cliff. There, it lies down on its stomach and places its neck upon the lip of the precipice, as though the earth were a giant guillotine. It looks straight out to the sea that stretches four thousand miles due east, and sings.
Is it possible that the Atlantic conducts the song across its waters until, thirsty and ragged, the song reaches the Strait of Gibraltar, revives a little with the refreshment of its own echo off the rock of ages and continues its journey, turning on its tattered axis all the way to Lebanon, where it finally loses momentum and rests in air for a moment before descending in soft arcs to the sandy shore below, to sleep there in peace and for ever, at last?
When Mrs Luvovitz opens her back door at three that morning she gets a fright. There’s someone in her garden. Just standing there at a slight tilt, as though blown that way by a wind that’s since died down.