I woke up when I realized my wife was not in her bed. I ran a hand over the plain of warmth her body had left and I rolled over and smelled her scent on the pillow. Her new scent, alive with beeswax and trees. I lay diagonally across the bed, stomach-down, feeling the beginnings of an erection and meaning to ambush her with it when she returned from what I presumed to be a trip to the outhouse. I began to drowse again and then sprang awake when I realized it had been a very long time and she was not back. I rolled over.
“Dora?”
I sat up in bed and unraveled my feet from the top sheet. A glance at the clock told me it was three in the morning.
I swung my legs over and stood up nude in the cool room, trying to feel rather than hear her.
She was not upstairs.
“Eudora?”
I had a premonition that I was rehearsing for something unpleasant, that I would find her this time but that eventually I would be left alone in this or some other house. I went out of the room and stood at the top of the stairwell, reminded of the view from behind the cannon. It was then that I saw her, standing where I had first seen the monster, at that hairpin angle where the common room led to the kitchen. The light from stars and a crescent moon outside were so weak I had to strain to make her out. She just stood there, naked like me.
I walked down the stairs, squinting at her.
“Honey, what are you doing?”
I got close to her and saw that she was not awake. Her eyes looked through me and she swayed as if she were trying to find her land-legs. Her lips moved gently. A hand twitched.
Was it bad to wake a sleepwalker?
I seemed to remember hearing that. So I sat on the overstuffed sofa watching her. Until she moved again. Into the kitchen. She put water in the teapot and set it on the stove even though there was no fire. Stood swaying in the kitchen. Then she went to the back door and tried to open it but could not figure out the latch. She walked back to the spot I found her in, and I was tempted to speak to her but did not interfere with her until I saw her go to the front door and unlatch it successfully. It swung open, letting a chilly breeze in, and she walked slowly onto the porch.
I called her name and went to her then, putting an arm around her. She responded by moving her face towards me, but did not wake up. I steered her around and directed her back inside, latching the door. I guided her back up the stairs one by one and when I put her in bed I tucked the top sheet around her so tightly I would feel it if she got up.
By and by I slept.
Just before dawn she made love to me drunkenly, the strength in her legs pressing at my hips while she rode me. I thought she might break the bed again. I was not sure she knew who I was.
After, I watched her sleep while daylight bled into the sky.
For the first time I was afraid of her.
IN THE MORNING I wanted to hear music, so I went to where I had moved the gramophone for easy loading into the moving van, not far from the front door. I ran my fingers over the walnut casing to see if it had been nicked or gouged by the shrapnel that had coned down from the stairwell when the cannon went off. The wood was cool and smooth to my touch. The old Aeolian Vocalion. My father’s last birthday present to me. I imagined my father’s spirit as a falcon mantling over the gramophone to protect it from the shrapnel. A sleepy, slurring falcon with reading glasses on. I chuckled and opened the hood. Touched the brass arm holding the needle. The little brass arrow of the volunome. The guts of the thing.
I thought of France and all its smashed houses, the litter inside them. Everything made to be enjoyed for a little while and then broken. One day this, too, fractured like pot shards under a city.
I put a record on the turntable and then fitted the brass crank into its port and turned it. I was rewarded with the slow, sweet jazz a colleague had sent me from Berlin. A woman chided her faithless lover in German, sending goose bumps up my left side. This song always moved me. German usually sounded like a chisel to me, but this woman turned it into a paintbrush.
Dora walked barefoot down the stairs.
“I’m sorry. It’s loud, isn’t it?” I said.
“I’m glad it woke me. It’s nearly noon. Honestly, I seem to be sleeping my life away.”
“It’s this place. You’ll come back to yourself in Chicago.”
“Have you eaten, Frankie?”
“No. Nibbled.”
“I’m starving.”
“There’s still some of that smoked ham in the icebox. How do you feel otherwise?”
“No, I finished the ham while you were sleeping. I don’t feel half bad. Foot’s a real pill and my head’s not clear, like we went to bed tight. But we didn’t touch a drop, did we?”
I shook my head.
She came and draped her arms around my neck.
She spoke into my ear.
“Music’s nice. I remember this one. What’s she saying now?”
“That he will learn about sorrow. Someone else will take him to school the way he did her.”
She moved against me so our embrace became a dance. I took her hips in my hands and swayed with her, bending my head down to her.
“You with your shoes on,” she said. “I feel so short.”
“It’s about to end.”
“Start it over.”
I did.
We danced without speaking the second time through. Her strange smell in my nose. I held her tightly, but not as tightly as I wanted to.
The next several days passed as that day did, full of dreams and whiskey and sleep, the sleepwalking of my wife, her hungry lovemaking, her greedy belly.
And then I went back into the woods.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
IT WAS THE last day of October.
Halloween, but nobody celebrated it here.
Although Dora and I had never joined the people of town in their Sunday devotions at the church (covering ourselves with the tattered rags of my Catholicism), I could almost hear Pastor Lyndon intoning, “If God wanted you to have a false face, He’d have given you one.”
Funny that flower-bedecked sacrificial pigs struck him as Christian, but only heathens made jack-o’-lanterns.
We met at the cemetery just before dawn.
Buster Simms handed bullets of silver out to each man in the requested caliber. The gunsmith in the mill town had gouged Buster terribly for the work because the metal was so much harder to melt and fashion than lead, with the result that most men could afford only a few rounds—although Saul had paid for twelve with his daddy’s money, enough to fill his rifle twice. He had insisted on fitting the bullets into the casings himself and had stayed up all night measuring and re-measuring the propellant, seeing to his father’s and brother’s .30-30 shells as well. They took five each.
I requested seven, enough to fill the clip with one in the chamber. These slugs were solid silver; the ones I had gotten from the silversmith were lead with filings in the nose, capped with wax. I had no way of knowing if they would do more than hurt. I thought so, but I was glad to have the solid rounds. The four weaker slugs went last into the clip and in the chamber; the more potent ones, four of them loose in my jacket, would be the last rounds I shot. In case the first ones didn’t do it.
I would have liked to have heard the conversation between Buster and the gunsmith; the silversmith had asked me if I was shooting at haints. Once he explained to me what a haint was, I said he wasn’t too far off.
Buster looked at us, the men he had gathered. He had stood himself near the freshly turned earth beneath which Ursula Noble’s ashes rested in her mother’s jewelry box. This box sat atop the coffin containing what remained of her mother. Buster wasn’t good at talking to groups of men so he let that mound of black dirt do the talking for him. It would say the right things to make of us the vengeful men he wanted, men who would have the strength to go into the country of our enemy and act. Ursula’s father was the first one to speak. His eyes were dry and hard. He snugged his .38 into his waistband and said, “We goin?”