This image rang through my suspended mind. Everything was a part of this surge of feeling, my ripped hand, the unimportant discomfort in my neck, even Zack’s prattle about reality being thinnest in the Midwest, even my theft and destruction of Maccabee’s terrible book. The proof would occur on the twenty-first of July. There were no impossibilities. I slept. (I passed out.)
And woke full of purpose. When I had said to Duane, don’t be surprised by anything you hear, I’d had a plan which I now saw to be absolutely necessary. I had to begin the preparations. I had to be ready for the day. I had about three weeks. It was more than enough time.
I began by tearing a photograph out of the nearest frame that looked the right size and sliding the picture of Alison and myself inside it. Idly, I tore the other photograph in half, and doubled the pieces and tore it again Dropping the torn bits of glossy paper and letting them flutter to the littered floor, I took the photograph into the living room and hung it where the first photograph of Alison had been.
Then I looked around at the room. Most of it was going to have to go. I was going to make an Alison-environment: I was going to recreate, as nearly as possible and with a few added embellishments, the room of twenty years before. Duane’s office furniture could go down into the root cellar where my grandmothers old furniture now sat. I wasn’t sure that I could singlehandedly manage some of the heavier pieces down the rough steps of the root cellar, but there was no other choice It was what I was going to do.
The doors to the root cellar were set into the ground at a slightly elevated angle just at the end of the porch. You swung them up and let them drop open to the sides — it was the most oldfashioned and rural of arrangements and I suspected that Duane’s dark cellar, though modernized by the introduction of a staircase leading down from the body of the house, was originally of similar construction. With some effort I pulled one of the doors up and open, nearly straining my back; time had cemented the two doors together.
The earthen stairs looked treacherous, half-crumbled away and very steep. Some of the damage was old, but Duane had shredded some of the steps when he had taken the old furniture down. I put one foot on the first of the stairs and tested my weight. The earth was reassuringly resilient and firm. After trying a few more steps I became careless and put my foot down without looking, and the earth gave way beneath it, sending me sliding three or four feet down across a terrace of crumbling dirt. When I was steady again I put my feet solidly on a thick step and braced my shoulder under the other door and pushed with my body and legs. The door strained and flew open on complaining hinges. Now light entered nearly the whole of the root cellar. That wonderful old furniture lay in heaps and piles like stew bones. Like the garage, the cellar smelled like a grave. I began to pull my grandmother’s furniture out of the dark hole of the root cellar and up into the sunlight.
I worked at this task of reclamation until my shoulders and legs ached and my clothes were covered with dirt. There was more furniture in the cellar than I had thought, all of it essential. I needed every footstool and end table, every lamp and bookcase. Too exhausted to continue, I went inside and made sandwiches from Saturday’s groceries. When I had pushed down the food, I went back out with a pail of soapy warm water and washed off what was on the lawn; that completed, I went back down the crumbled steps and began to wrestle out more things. I could remember where every stick of it had been placed, I could see the room as it had been twenty years before and would be again. She had touched every bit of this furniture.
By the time the light had begun to fail, I had it all out on the lawn and washed. The fabrics were worn, but the wood was clean and shining. Even on the lawn beside the white house in the fading light, it all looked magically appropriate — that is to say no more than that it had the tightness of all things made and used with care. That beautiful worn old stuff could make you weep. The past was enshrined in it. Just sitting out there on the lawn in the dusk, it evoked the entire history of my family in America. Like them, it was solid, it was right.
Unlike Duane’s office furniture, which merely looked naked and stunned and stupid when dragged outside. There was less of it than there had seemed. It had a negative relation to spirit.
I made the mistake of taking the lighter pieces, the dreadful pictures and lamps and chairs, down into the root cellar first. Under one of the lamps I found two neatly folded dollar bills. Under different circumstances, I might have admired the gesture, but it was proof of how badly I had acted. I finished with the light things in a disproportionately bad temper. That left me with the job of handling the heavy couches and the two heavier chairs when I was almost too tired to move them further, and in the dark. I had only the light from the porch and pale early moonlight, and the battered earthen steps, in many places now worn to a continuous pitted incline were visible only at their top. The first chair went down easily; I carried it in my trembling arms and felt my way slowly along the ruined steps. But when I tried it with the second chair, I lost my footing on an incline of dirt and fell all the way to the bottom.
To complete that Buster Keatonish stunt I should have landed on the dirt floor seated comfortably in the embrace of the chair; but I landed sprawled half-over, half-under it, with pain radiating out from all of my left leg ankle to thigh. It did not feel broken, but one of the chairs legs was, dangling from ripped fabric like a dead tooth. Cursing, I ripped it off and threw it into a corner. I disposed of the chair in much the same way.
After that, I had no patience with the couches. I was not going to baby them down the slope. I shoved the first up to the lip of the cellar, nudged it over until it was set. and let go of the arm. It crashed down to the bottom. I grunted with satisfaction and was turning to the second when I became aware of a flashlight bobbing toward me.
“Goddam you, Miles,” Duane said. The flashlight was held on my face. In a moment he had moved into the area of light from the porch.
“You don’t need a flashlight to see it’s me.”
“No, even on a dark night I’d know it was you.” He flicked off the flashlight and stepped closer to me. His face was savage. “Goddam you. I wish you’d never come back here. What the hell were you thinking of anyhow? You fucking bastard.”
“Look,” I said, “I know it looks funny, but—” I realized that as far as anger was concerned I was an amateur. Duane’s face seemed to be inflating.
“Is that what you think? You think it looks funny? Now you look. If you had to go and talk about that goddam house, why did you have to talk about it with my daughter?”
I was too stunned to reply.
He glared at me for another long moment, and then whirled to the side and banged his hand against one of the porch supports.
That was when I should have started to worry — when I was given special dispensation.