I did not feel like looking anymore. I was shivering with cold. You can get ice out of fire, Father had said. Now I believed him. That fire froze my guts.
I kept my head down and my mouth shut, even though I was muddy and wet and bitten by bugs. I had felt the heat and smelled the torches — that was how close they were. Then they were gone. I looked up slowly and saw their torches flickering in the ship-shaped woods I had cut through myself. The tree branches jumped in the firelight, and this leaping line of hot stripes and shadows crossed to the far side where it settled and glowed.
I crawled out of the ditch and chucked the vines aside and emptied my boots. Then, keeping to the ditch, I sloshed as far as I could, and duck-walked across the asparagus and into the woods. By now the procession was beyond the trees. All that remained here was the smell of gasoline-soaked rags and burned leaves. I was well hidden here. In fact, I could see everything from behind a heap of rocks.
Two of the men were hunched over. They must have been fastening the dead man to the cross, because soon after, in the fiery light of the circle of torches, I saw the cross raised up with a man on it, his wrists bent and his toes sticking down and his head tipped like a jug.
It looked wicked, and I expected the men to be screaming blue murder. But no, it was all quiet, even jolly, and that was worse, like the nightmare you watch happening to you and cannot explain. In all that zigzagging across the fields, I was so afraid of giving myself away and being burned alive that I had forgotten why I was there. But just as I saw the raised cross I remembered that I was looking for my father. The recollection and the sight came at the same instant, and I thought: That dead twisted person is my old man.
I sat there and put my hands over my eyes and tried to stop crying, but I kept blubbering until my head felt very small and very wet. I thought, without knowing why, that I would be blamed for it.
All I could do was watch and listen. I had gotten used to this murky sight, and the longer I looked the more I felt responsible for it, as if it was something I had imagined, an evil thought that had sprung out of my head. Watching it made me part of it.
There was no time to worry. All at once, the men doused their lights. After the fires and the shadows and the lighted cross, there were only shirts and hats — bone-white skeleton rags moving without bodies — and silence, as the men, these rags, foamed toward me.
I picked myself up and ran for my life.
***
I'm the last man! That had been Father's frequent yell.
It was painful, back in my bed, in the dark unlocked house, not dreaming but thinking. I felt small and shrunken. Father, who believed there was going to be a war in America, had prepared me for his death. All winter, he had been saying, "It's coming — something terrible is going to happen here." He was restless and talkative. He said the signs were everywhere. In the high prices, the bad tempers, the gut worry. In the stupidity and greed of people, and in the hoggish fatness of them. Bloody crimes were being committed in cities, and criminals went unpunished. It was not going to be an ordinary war, he said, but rather a war in which no side was entirely innocent.
"Fat fools will be fighting skinny criminals," he said. "You'll hate one and be scared of the other. It'll be national brain damage. Who's left to trust?"
He sounded disgusted, and in the depths of that white winter he was sometimes very gloomy. One day, Tiny Polski's pipes froze solid and Father was called on to unblock them. We stood in the snow, at the edge of a freshly dug pit, wiring the pipes to Father's "Thunderbox" to thaw them. (This device was his own invention, and he was proud of it — patent pending — though the first time he used it he almost killed Ma Polski, her hand being on an electrified faucet when he turned on the juice.) He watched the pipes heat and throw off vapor. Ice cracked inside, and jostled, and rattled like gravel. He listened with pleasure to the clunking thaw in the pipes, and then faced me at the edge of the snow-crusted pit.
"When it comes, I'll be the first one they kill. They always kill the smart ones first — the ones they're afraid will outwit them. Then, with no one to stop them, they'll tear each other to pieces. Turn this fine country into a hole."
There was no despair in his words, only matter-of-factness. The war was a certainty, but he was still hopeful. He said he believed in himself and in us. "I'll take you away — we'll pack up and go. And we'll shut the door on all this."
He liked the idea of setting out, moving away, starting off in an empty place with nothing but his brains and his toolbox.
"They'll get me first."
"No."
"They always get the smart ones first."
I could not deny this. He was the smartest man I knew. He had to be the first one to die.
Until I saw that marching procession at midnight, and the dead body on the cross, I could not imagine how anyone would be able to kill him. But that night was enough. I was convinced now, and I was alone. The strongest man I knew had been strung up on two poles and left in a cornfield. It was the end of the world.
"I'm the last man, Charlie!"
The dark hours were passing. Soon it would be morning and I would have to face everyone and tell them that Father had predicted it. So I lay in my bed and thought how Father had said that the country was doomed. He had promised to save us and get us away before it was too late. But he was gone, I was too weak to save the others, and in the dream I finally had in the coldest part of the night I was leading Mother and the twins and Jerry through burning fields under a wounded sun and a sky the color of blood, all our clothes in rags and the smoke, and nothing to eat They were depending on me and only I knew, but was afraid to tell them because it was too late that I was taking them the wrong way.
In the bruised red-black sky was the mocking face of Father, after we had walked and walked, saying, "Where have you been, sonny?"
I covered my eyes. I was still in the dream and aching, Mother and the kids behind me, disaster ahead and no escape.
"Where have you—?"
I woke and saw his face, sunburned and angry, and sat up because I expected him to hit me — afraid he was dead, then afraid because he was standing over me. His cigar told me I was not dreaming. I was too shocked to cry.
"I had a bad dream."
And I thought: It has all been a dream — the men with the torches, the corpse on the cross, the laughing savages, the wounded sun and sky. I was very happy. The sunlight bleached my bedroom curtains, birds screeched at me.
"You must have been dreaming about poison ivy," Father said. "You've got the worst case I've ever seen."
As he said it, I began to ache. My face felt pebbly and raw, and my arms too.
"Don't touch it. You'll make it spread. Get out of the sack and put something on it." He started out of the room, and as I pulled on my clothes he said, "You've been fooling in the bushes — that's where you've been."
The loose board on the threshold told me everything was normal. I smelled coffee and bacon and heard the twins screaming and was gladder than I had ever been. I went to the bathroom. My face looked like a pomegranate in the mirror, and my arms and shoulders were inflamed with the poison-ivy rash. I wiped calamine lotion on it and hurried to the kitchen.
"It's a ghost," Jerry said, seeing my whitewashed face.
"You poor thing," Mother said. She set a plate of eggs in front of me and kissed the top of my head.
Father said, "It's his own fault."
But it was nothing. After what I had seen, a case of poison ivy seemed like salvation.
"Eat up," Father said. "We've got work to do."
I wanted to work, to carry the toolbox and hand him the oil can and be his slave and do anything he asked. I deserved to be punished. I wanted to forget those torches and those men. I was thirteen years old again. I had felt forty.