In his dream he was a child being led down a winding country road. It was early morning and he could feel the dew on his bare feet and the grasses and weeds were damp. They went by grazing cows and deep woods that still held night at their center, he could see slashes of it through the trees. The hand clasping his own child’s hand was gentle, the way was long but he did not tire. A hawk flew from the roadside with a flurry of wings and he glanced to the side and saw that there was no one beside him. A hand bewenned (not a word) and agespotted still clutched his own and he could feel the delicate tubelike bones beneath the slack skin, feel a wedding band on the ring finger and glancing up he saw that the disembodied arm tended upward, and upward, a thin wasted arm in lavender brocade that stretched to infinity, to high thin clouds that ultimately obscured it.
The ringing phone woke him. Beth? he thought, but the voice in his ear was harsh and preemptory, curiously mechanical, like something electronic imitating a voice. It said, I’ve got to have some help over here.
He felt numb, cold as ice. Who is this? he asked. Is this your idea of a joke? Yet in some curious cobwebbed corner of his mind there was a part of him that was waiting for just such a phone call, had been for days. He exhaled, he’d breathed deeper than he meant to, the sudden pain made him gasp. But some release had been negotiated, some delicate border had been broached, he was already feeling about for his shoes.
He drove through the cool summer night, everyone asleep, the highway his alone. At home with the night now, at peace. When he left the blacktop the lowering trees beckoned him into the tunnel of darkness like a vaguely erotic promise. And it was like a road that wound down through time.
Beyond the blurred cedars the farmhouse sat foursquare in the moonlight, its tin roof gleaming wetly with dew, its windows enigmatic and dark. Steeply gabled, its high eaves rose in black and silver shadows, its ornate oldfashioned tin cornicing somehow stately and dignified. A bisected tin sun was set high in the eaves, tin rays fanning upward, you hardly ever saw Victorian trim like this anymore.
He went up the brick walk to the wraparound porch, the silence was enormous, the house seemed to be listening to some sound that hadn’t reached him yet. He felt for his keys. When the door was unlocked it opened silently inward on oiled hinges and he stepped into the darkness. Hot stifling darkness with compounded smells, jasmine, Vick’s Vaporub, time itself. From the kitchen the refrigerator hummed, somewhere a clock ticked with a firm strong heartbeat. He turned on the light and the first thing he looked for was the telephone. It was cradled and when he took it up all there was to hear was a dialtone.
He sat in the bentwood rocker. He lit a cigarette. She had been lying on her left side before the rocker, about where his feet were now. Beside the rocker was a table where he’d restacked the copies of National Geographic, the goldrimmed bifocals. Even after all that time she had still been breathing shallowly and he had squatted there with the phone in his hand watching her. Her breath was a thin panting, like a dying kitten he remembered from childhood. Finally she had exhaled and just never took another breath.
The ramifications of what he’d done or not done were dizzying, he’d made a lifetime out of living on the edge but this time he’d slipped and fallen further than he’d ever meant to go. It ain’t everybody can fall five scaffolds and not break nothing, Rojo had said. What had she thought when everything began to shut down? Whole banks of memory rendered into oblivion, had she seen the little night watchman going from room to room throwing breakers, clicking his flashlight down the dark corridors, will the last one out turn out the light?
She seemed to hover the room yet, dusting the bric-a-brac, straightening the giltframed photograph of some ancestor whose bones had gone to dust. Most of the photographs were of Wildman though and they charted his growth from infancy to adulthood like graphs showing the evolution of a species. One of a toddler sitting in a childsize rocker, a disembodied grandmother’s hand on his shoulder and all there was of the young Wildman left was the dark and haunted eyes that studied this likeness.
He went into the kitchen and turned on the light. He made a cup of instant Nescafe from the hot water tap and went with the cup in his hand through the kitchen door into what had been the living room and he saw with a stricken wonder that everything had changed forever.
The rosewood coffin on its catafalque set against the west wall where the sofa had always been. The casket and its occupant seemed to dwarf the room and were twinned by the opaque window behind it. He approached it, stared down at the stern old woman with irongrey hair and pincenez. Every detail was stored in his mind with a clinical detachment. The prim pursed mouth was slacker now, a stitch had given and left a small bloodless incision, he could see the wadded cotton or whatever her mouth was packed with. Studying her so intently he saw with a dull loathing a faint blue pulse beating in her throat.
He stumbled numbly backward over a folding chair. He saw with no surprise that the room had been set about with such chairs all alike stamped McFarland Funeral Home. He righted the one he’d stumbled over and seated himself like a patient spectator awaiting the commencement of some arcane show.
He sat waiting for time to draw on. In truth time had ceased to exist, neither past nor future, all motion had slowed finally to a drugged halt and all there was at the end of the world was an old woman in a casket and a man watching with heavylidded eyes from a folding chair. Then there was a faint rustle of funeral silk, the smell of lemon verbena, and the old woman raised her head. Cocked slightly sidewise in an attitude of listening. Then a scarcely audible sigh, and she pillowed her head again on the quilted satin. The clock in the corner began to toll, one, two, three, twelve times in all and she raised herself again, pulling herself upright with a clawed hand on the edge of the casket, tendons pulled taut as wires with exertion. She turned toward the window, listening intently. He knew intuitively that she was listening for him, or for what he had once been, an eighteen year old Wildman that always had to be home by midnight.
He heard the sound of an automobile approaching, headlights slid whitely across the wall, ceased and vanished. The engine died. The old woman sank back to rest with an expression of satisfaction. The clock began to strike again, tolled on and on, turning to see he watched its hands ratcheting madly backward, he could hear the protesting grind of metal on metal, gears and pins and springs being sheared off and broken. When the hands ceased at six o’clock the old woman began to rise again and the room was saturated with the smell of brewing coffee, he could hear it singing in the glasstopped percolator, he could smell bacon sizzling in hot grease. In the kitchen pots and pans rattled, cutlery was being laid out. Outside a car door slammed, a dog dead these twenty years scrabbled up from the porch and went running to meet its master. The smells of coffee and bacon intensified, became overpowering, a corrupt stench of charred meat.
The air was tinged with greasy smoke, somewhere flames were crackling like something feeding. He turned toward the kitchen. Beyond the door was a strobic flickering like summer lightning and thick black smoke rolled along the floor. There was a step on the porch. Someone was approaching the door, he could hear the dog leaping and whining to be petted. Flames were darting up and down the wallpaper playfully and the rug beneath his feet buckled and began to smoke, ceramic cats warped and ran like melting glass, the very air was aflame.