Later, he was sick. Later, it burst out of both ends of him and he knew they’d be coming for him with their dogs and the noose braided for lynching and if he ran out into the fields he’d have no say in the matter because he would just be their bait. How he got down into the cellar beneath the inferno of the house he couldn’t have said. And he couldn’t have said either why he didn’t just stand there and let the burning joists fall to crush him and the flames to devour him, because he was done now, all the rage purged out of him as if it had never been there at all. He gave a thought for Gertrude — they’d make her pay and she didn’t deserve any part in it — but it was a thought that flitted by and vanished in the instant her sorrowful face materialized in his brain. A flame was as light as air, and yet the frame of that architect’s house couldn’t withstand the weight. Brands fell round him. Everything shrieked and groaned, unholy noise, the structure rattling and striking out against the death that had come to embrace it. He opened the door of the furnace that had boiled the water for the dead of the house. It was cool inside. Or cooler, anyway. He got in there with the thick glass bottle he’d saved for last, the caustic to kill him before they did, muriatic acid and the triple X and the skull and crossbones to warn them off. He pulled the steel door closed against the roar and the chaos. It was black, purely black, not the thinnest tracery of light to be seen in any direction. They would never find him here.
CHAPTER 8: ALL FALL DOWN
Lunch. A sandwich from the restaurant, a moment to relax with the newspaper — umbrage in the Balkans and the guns thundering across the Continent, and what next, the Archduke rising up out of his coffin on angel’s wings? — before he went back to wrangling with Waller over money and Iannelli over the sprites, because the Italian, understandably but maddeningly, was balking at delivering the rest of the statuary without payment in hand or at least guaranteed. The sandwich was good, first-rate — Volgelsang really knew his business, give him credit there — and the newspaper was sufficiently lurid and bloody for even the most jaded reader, but Frank couldn’t help keeping one eye on John,176 who was at the far end of the room, up on the scaffolding, applying a wet brush to the polychromatic mural behind the bar. A pretty picture that, and John as precise and unerring a worker as his father himself. Details, details. This room, the tavern, was Waller’s number one priority and never mind the glories of opening night with Max Bendix and his hundred-piece orchestra sawing gloriously away and Pavlova pirouetting across the stage and all the rest, he was bleeding money through his pores till the beer started flowing right here, out of these dry and thirsty taps. (“I don’t give a damn about murals or sprites or anything else,” Waller kept telling him. “I just want the place finished and the tables full. Beer. I just want beer.”)
Of course, it was an insult, and he was determined to see the design realized in its every last particular if he was going to draw another breath on this earth, but he could hardly be blamed for the delays at this point. He took another bite of the sandwich. Lifted the glass of ice water to his lips. It was hot. Damnably hot. He thought of Taliesin then, of the lake, and how he’d give anything to throw off his shirt, trousers and shoes and plunge into the cool opaque depths of it and maybe give the fish a run for the money. He was thinking of that, of the fish and how Billy Weston’s son had pulled a catfish as long as his arm out of there just a week ago — an amazing thing, really, with its big yellow mouth gaping wide as if to suck in all the air in the valley and the barbels twitching and the tiny dots of its blue-black eyes that hardly seemed sufficient to take in the incandescent world that had loomed up on it so precipitately — when the stenographer from the main office suddenly burst through the door, looking as if she’d had all the blood drained out of her in a scientific experiment. He was going to comment on that, make a joke of it, a quip about the heat and how it was a leading cause of anemia in women under thirty, but her face warned him off. “Mr. Wright,” she said, out of breath, running sweat, paler than the stack of paper she kept to hand beside her typewriter, “you’re wanted on the telephone. Long distance. From Spring Green.”
Once, when he was young, younger than John was now, he’d seen a building collapse. It was a massive brick structure still under construction, men aloft, hod carriers rushing to and fro, the workmen all separately focused on their tasks but communicating as if by some extrasensory intelligence, the whole thing — men, materials and machines alike — a kind of living organism. He’d stopped to watch as he often had over the course of the weeks past, fascinated by the frenzy of activity and the way the building rose in discernable increments — different each day and yet the same too — and he was there watching when all that changed in an instant. More than anything he remembered the sound of it, the explosive snap of the beams buckling and the cannonade of one floor tearing through another, a roar of the inanimate animated, withering, unforgiving. And the screams. The screams that rose up out of a clenched fist of silence and the harsh soughing of the dust. He’d stood there for hours, the dread rising in him with a bitter metallic taste that constricted his throat — one man had been crushed till he was little more than extruded pulp; another had to be sawed, living, from the wreckage, two raw stumps palpitating there in place of his legs — and he’d wanted only to put it all right again, to build it back up so it would never fall. But Taliesin had fallen, was falling now, and it was worse, far worse, because this was fire and fire not only crushed you, it consumed you too.
The roar was in his ears as John pushed him into the cab and the cab hurtled through the streets, and it was there still as they pulled up to the curb and John jerked open the door and led him out of the cramped automotive interior and into the marble vault of Union Station. He held to his son’s arm through the crush of people and across the floor to the ticket window, his throat dry, his legs stripped of muscle and bone alike so that he could barely stand upright. And here were the reporters, their faces rabid and their mouths working—“Mr. Wright! Mr. Wright!”—and John shouldering past them and through the door and onto the platform where the local would haul them over the rails for five agonizing hours before the station in Spring Green rose up like a gravestone beyond the windows. And couldn’t they hurry? Couldn’t they call it an emergency and cancel all the other stops? Rush on through, red flags flapping and whistle shrieking as if the president himself were on board?
He shut his eyes and heard the roar. And it was a merciful thing because the roar drowned out the shouts of the newsboys who were there now and who would change faces and jackets and hats and mob every station stop along the way to hawk the very latest up-to-date special edition: Murder at Taliesin, read all about it!; Taliesin Burning to the Ground, Seven Slain, Seven Slain, Seven Slain! It was John who kept them off and John who took the conductor aside and arranged for a private compartment, John who spotted poor Edwin Cheney standing there stricken in a circle of reporters and spirited him into the compartment before they could work their beaks in him and their talons too. Five hours. Five hours on that train staring at Ed Cheney’s shoes while Ed Cheney stared at his. Five hours. Seven slain.
He didn’t pray. He hadn’t prayed since he was a boy. But each minute of that journey was a slow crawl to Calvary and the moment when they’d stretch him on the Christ tree and drive the nails in, and all the while he imagined the worst and hoped for the best, and maybe this was prayer, maybe this was what prayer was after all. What he didn’t know was that Mamah was dead, her corpse so incinerated as to be unrecognizable. What he didn’t know was that John Cheney was dead too and that Martha, with her graceful limbs and her mother’s ready smile, was writhing under the wet towels they’d laid over her, her hair and eyebrows gone and her skin fried like sidemeat in a pan, or that she would die by the time he got there. He didn’t know that Brunker was dead, didn’t know that Lindblom would soon follow him or that Brodelle was already gone. And he didn’t know that Billy Weston, concussed, burned and bleeding from the scalp, had grappled with the Barbadian and chased him off before running to Reider for help and then come back to unfurl the garden hose and play it on the fire while the victims lay there stretched out on the paving stones of the courtyard like so many sacks of grain. Burned-up grain. Rotten grain. Grain fit only to turn into the earth. Or that Ernest, the very make and model of his father, lay there among them, unconscious and dying from his wounds while one of the neighbor women tended him and Billy struggled with the hose, numb to everything but the infernal scorching heat on his face.