If I wrote “Pony”—and I must surely have — the rest of my confession is there, in that story, however turned around backwards and veiled it might be, however fictionalized and prettied up with metaphor. What Amanda wanted, I couldn’t give.
The bridle chafed, I suppose.
That day, just before Amanda left, I told her I loved her, and she laughed and said, “Just because you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.”
I’m finally running out of ribbon, I think, and I don’t have another to replace this one with. Maybe I should conserve whatever is left. Isn’t that a little like the miner trapped after a cave-in, waiting for rescue and trying to make his oxygen or flashlight batteries last as long as possible? Only, I know that no one is coming for me. No one is left who might bother.
I’m going to wait a while longer for Constance. The car keys are here on the dressing table next to the typewriter. I’m only going to wait until morning.
I will add this.
Because this is true also. And because you go so far, and it hardly seems to matter whether or not you let yourself go just a little farther.
I was falling-down drunk the night Amanda died (that is not meant as a caveat). I was drunk, and fell asleep on the sofa, because I could not stand to look at our bed, even though it had once been only my bed. Something woke me, very late, and I’d fallen asleep with the television on. Old black-and-white movies on TCM, and for a while I lay there, half awake at best, blinking and staring at the screen, bathed in that comforting silvery wash of light.
On the TV, a young woman stared out a window. She was watching another woman who seemed about the same age as herself and who was sitting in a tire swing hung from a very large tree. It was almost exactly like the swing my grandfather put up for me and my sister when I was a kid. Just an old tire and a length of rope suspended from a low, sturdy branch. From the angle of the shot, it was clear that the window looking out on the tree was also looking down. I mean, that it must have been a second-story window. Or an attic window. The woman in the tire wasn’t swinging. She was just sitting there. There was no dialog, and no musical score, either. There was nothing but the sound of wind blowing. The woman watching from the window leaned forward, resting her forehead against the glass. With an index finger, she traced the shape of a heart on the windowpane. And then I realized that there was something approaching the tree. It came very slowly, and by turns I thought I was seeing a bear, a wolf, a dog, and a man crawling forward on his hands and knees. Whatever it was, the woman in the swing didn’t see it, but I had the distinct impression that the woman watching from the window did. After a bit, she turned away, stepping out of frame, so that there was only the window, the tree, the woman in the swing, and the whatever it might have been slowly coming up behind her.
And I must have fallen back to sleep then, because that’s all I can recall of the film. My cell woke me sometime after dawn, and there was a Buster Keaton movie playing on the television. I answered my phone, and the call was from the hospital, from a mutual friend who’d gotten the news before me. Amanda had been dead about two hours.
I have no idea what the film was, and possibly it was nothing but a dream. The night my grandfather died, my grandmother told us she was awakened by a very small bird, like a sparrow, beating its wings against the window. She’d been at the hospital for days, but she’d been convinced to go home and get some rest, because everyone thought my granddad was out of the woods. It was the dead of winter, and my grandmother knew the bird must be freezing, but she couldn’t remember how to open the window and let it in out of the cold. She swore she wasn’t dreaming, though my mother suspected that she was. A few hours later, the phone woke her with the news that Granddad had died in the night.
Grandmamma said that the little bird was a psycho-pomp, and that she should have understood.
I’ve been awake maybe an hour. I woke to find a very large dog standing at the foot of my bed, watching me. But when I sat up, startled, it was gone. I saw it very clearly. Its eyes were the same reddish brown as Constance’s eyes, and it had a mottled tongue, gray and pink. Its fur was dark, but not quite black. Not quite.
It could have been the same dog that John Potter shot that summer day in 1724, shortly before both his daughters died. Charles Harvey described the dog very clearly, quoting from Potter’s journal. I don’t remember all of the story now, but it was broad daylight, and Potter had been sitting alone near a window, reading the Bible. He heard a noise and looked up to find this dog staring in the window at him. He said that it was standing on its hind legs, its forepaws propped against the sill. He called for his wife, and it ran. The dog ran. He said it had eyes the color of chestnuts. He said a lot of things, John Potter did, and I don’t know if any of the stuff that Harvey put in that manuscript is true.
I never learned the name of the film, or the year that it was made, or who the actresses playing the woman at the window and the woman in the swing might have been. But then I never tried very hard. I’ve never mentioned it to anyone. My grandmother once told me she wished she’d never told anyone about seeing the sparrow.
I have to leave this place today. I can’t stay any longer. She’s not coming back.
“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, “It was a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to your tea; it’s getting late.” So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.
I went up to the attic again, to get the paintings, Bettina Hirsch’s paintings, and to bring them down. I meant to burn them all, because I could not bear the thought of them, of leaving them there to be discovered by someone else. So, I went up the stairs, and the door was still unlocked.
There are no oak leaves carpeting the floor, and there are not seven paintings arranged on seven easels. Everything that Constance brought here with her is gone.
No. Just this once, stop lying. It’s worse than that.
The attic is the same as it was the first time I set eyes on it, that day I went looking for a yardstick. There are boxes and a few pieces of furniture, and everything is covered with a thick coating of cobwebs and dust. My hand-prints are still clearly visible on the lid of the old steamer trunk in which I found the yardstick. Otherwise, there’s no sign whatsoever that the dust has been disturbed for a very long time. No one’s been in the attic since I was up there in June. I stood there for almost half an hour, waiting to see through the illusion, desperate to find that it was an illusion. Like the blank canvases had been, before they became paintings. But no matter how hard I stared, or how many times I looked away, or shut my eyes, nothing changed. If I were to call Blanchard and ask him about his attic lodger, I think I know what he’d tell me.
I’m very tired, Amanda, and I need to rest.
I shouldn’t be this tired when I try to find my way back to the tree. I’ll rest for a while, and I’ll drift back down to the orchard, and the stone wall. I’ll lie in my bed and wait. Someone has turned the ponies out again.
Excerpt from A Long Way To Morning(Sarah Crowe; HarperCollins, 1994):