Camilla had chosen the wallpaper. It was pink, with beaded bands of light blue running to the ceiling and rows of roses between them. Her father had papered the room, and behaved very professionally about it though his pleasure showed through at the privilege of doing it for them: showed through so well that he had got the paper on upside down. And only now, as he lay on his back and followed its lines up the wall, did Wyatt realize that the roses were roses, not the pink dogs' faces with green hats he had taken them for as a child, and never questioned since. When she stepped into the room that first time, Camilla could not see what had gone wrong. Then she did; but there stood her father with a smile of pride beside her, and she threw her arms over his crooked shoulders and thanked him, and never told him. It was the way things had of working out for her from the start.
— It looks fine, it still looks fine, the Town Carpenter said now, backing into a chair stacked with paintings and sketches and knocking the whole thing over, which immediately put him at his ease by giving him something to do. He admired each piece separately as he picked them up. — The detail! The detail! he said over and over, of these souvenirs of Wyatt's illness by now become permanent fixtures in his life. Of these fragments of intricate work most were copies. Only those which were copies were finished. The original works left off at that moment where the pattern is conceived but not executed, the forms known to the author but their place daunted, still unfound in the dignity of the design.
— Look! said the Town Carpenter, waving a book from the floor. — Balloons!. Then he added, — Damn them, the French. Someone's written it in the French language. He stood turning the pages, muttering, — They do that to confuse people, of course. The French covet a truth when they come upon it, you know. He stayed an hour or so, talking himself most of the time, a proclivity he'd developed since he started to become hard of hearing and people tired of the effort of talking to him. Now, he gave a rough precis of the Odyssey (Gwyon had sent him off one day with Chapman's translation), and as though the voyage had suddenly grown too short, had just introduced Odysseus to Prester John at Ogygia, when Janet came in with Wyatt's supper. The Town Carpenter behaved with all the courtly grumbling of a shy hero, retiring before her, waving from the door to the boy on the bed'and calling out, as though across a chasm, — And they've made me the sexton at the church, you know. The Reverend your father made me the sexton, over their dead bodies if you follow me. And he escaped with both volumes of Tissandier's Histoire des ballons.
Thus the bells ringing in the morning hours were usually right on time; but after eleven in the morning they commenced to fall off a bit, for it was a good fifteen-minute walk from the Depot Tavern to the church.
Waking in this room of roses upside-down was a new experience, the dawn red from the roses of Eden (as one of those books at his bedside had it from the Talmud), after the days' ends in his own room red from the fires of Hell. Here, after the throbbing flow of the night was broken by the first particles of light in the sky, he often pulled a blanket from the bed and crept to the window, to sit there unmoving for the full time it took until the sun itself rose, the unmeasured hours of darkness slowly shattered, rendered into a succession of particles passing separately, even as the landscape separated into tangible identities each appraising itself in a static withdrawal until everything stood out separate from the silent appraisals around it.
He passed the months of convalescence painting, and with increasing frequency broke his gaze at the window to get to work. He was most clear-headed, least feverish, in these early hours when, as unsympathetically as the daylight, his own hand could delineate the reasonable crowded conceits of separation.
Only once, going to the window before it was light, he was stopped in his tracks by the horned hulk of the old moon hung alone in the sky, and this seemed to upset him a good deal, for he shivered and tried to leave it but could not, tried to see the time on the clock but could not, listened, and heard nothing, finally there was nothing for it but to sit bound in this intimacy which refused him, waiting, until the light came at last and obliterated it.
Then, mornings just before sunrise he could hear his father's steps on the east porch below. And though he heard the voice speaking sometimes, he never made out a word.
Wyatt missed the sound of sleighbells. On his first attempt at a long walk outside, he went down to the carriage barn and found it locked and silent.
— Yes, his… his time came, Gwyon said, clearing his throat and pulling at one hand with the other behind him. — But you… no one told me.
— Well, we… you were sick, while you were sick I didn't want to upset you.
— But, then what did you do?
— Yes, I… I buried him, down there, down behind the barn there.
— How did it happen, did he just. It's funny, some of the things I… sometimes I think I remember things that are. that couldn't. like. He looked up earnestly, pausing now as though he expected to be prompted, to see his father watching him with eyes which, had he known it, blazed with the same wild intensity as his own in fever. — It's. sometimes it's bewildering., he faltered, looking down as Gwyon looked away, turned his back and showed his twisting hands behind him. But only for a moment. Gwyon swung round, looking very different, reassured, and tried to smile with,
— You're well? You're well now, almost well? Yes, it's bewildering, bewildering. He changed the subject clumsily. — Like the bulls. Yes, people say they're kept in a dark cell before they're let into the arena, into the bright sun, to confuse them, but that. that. you should see their confidence, their grandeur when they come in, a great moment, that, when they come in, they. their heads up, tossing their heads when they come in… He paused to look up and see if he'd relaxed Wyatt's attention, then went on enthusiastically, — It's after that, after they stick those. the banderillas in the shoulders, you can hear them rattling in the bull's shoulders, a regular dance of fury, it's after that their legs start to cave outward, after that they just stand, bewildered, looking around. before the sword, the. they say you don't kill with the sword but with the cape, the art of the cape. He relaxed himself as he spoke, moving about the room until he got near the door, talking as though in a hurry to be gone, but he paused there to finish with, — The sword, when the sword is in and the bull won't drop, why, they use the cape then, to spin him around in a tight circle so the sword will cut him to pieces inside and drop him. His legs stiffen right out when they stab him in the brain. Do you want anything? But you're up, you're up now. Do you want anything? I'll send Janet up, Gwyon finished and got out to the stairs.
When Janet arrived, Wyatt had her help him out and down the stairs, but he left her in the house when he went down the lawn with his cane. A large stone had been pushed into place against the hole in the hillside, among thorn bushes now bearing early blackberries. The place had been the kitchen midden for as long as he could remember. In his weakness he could not move the stone from its place, for it was very great; and when he started back for the house he tripped against a row of small stakes, driven into the ground there without evident purpose. He climbed unsteadily to his feet from the blemished earth and stones and walked as quickly as he could manage back up the open lawn. There was something defiled about that place which frightened him.