The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  David, her oldest brother, stood near her, his slender hand on the back of her chair. He was elegant and distinguished as always, and dressed in black as always, and though more than a year older than his brother, Edward, he had a patrician agelessness. His lean head was bent, his aquiline profile brooding and still. “There’s just the nurse,” he said to his sister comfortingly. “And you could hardly expect Margaret to leave him just now. I’ve been up to the door a dozen times, but it’s shut and there’s no sound behind it. We’ve just got to wait, I’m afraid.”

  Ralph, the youngest, said in his robust voice, “Dr. Bullitt told me it wouldn’t necessarily be fatal. Why, millions of people have coronaries every day, and over fifty per cent, now, recover well from such accidents. I don’t see why Bullitt wouldn’t let us call an ambulance and take him to the Clinic—Alone here, with a nurse, and a tank of oxygen, and nothing else—If he dies—” He was a big and ruddy man with a mass of auburn hair and a round face so vigorous in expression that at times he resembled a strong child.

  Margo, Gregory Enger’s wife, had been crying strenuously, and her bold face had a crumpled look. Streaks of straight blonde hair were strewn over her wide forehead, and she kept pushing them automatically out of her small blue eyes which were so swollen now. Her air of animal power and simplicity had dwindled; her broad and usually laughing mouth was pinched and gray. “Jesus!” she exclaimed. “How’d anyone know that he had a bad heart, anyway? You’d never think a man like Ed would drop down—like that.” She shivered, and her eyes strayed guiltily around the room.

  Gregory, sitting apart from them all, said savagely, “Shut up! For God’s sake, shut up! Haven’t you done enough, damn you?”

  Margo sat upright, in outrage. “Me! I did it?” Now she flushed violently. “It was you! I’ve been thinking, sitting here. I’ve been thinking of Dad and Mom, and how they won’t even talk to me any more—because of you and what you taught me. Damn you yourself! You can bet I’ve been doing some thinking, old Greg!”

  She stared at him furiously, seeing her husband now as a whole, this forty-three-year-old man who was a feebler copy of Edward, this sophisticated man with light gray eyes that were always dancing maliciously. They were not dancing now. They had a haunted expression, and his big mouth was jerking, and he was deadly pale under the darkness of his complexion. He was leaning forward in his chair, his tightly clasped hands between his knees, and he had not spoken all this night until now for all his customary loquaciousness and witty banter.

  “You and Margo were with him, and Margaret, when it happened,” said Sylvia. Her voice rose sharply, and she turned in her chair to study him the better. “You never did tell us what happened, or why. Tell us now.”

  “Nothing,” he said, sullenly, and again his mouth jerked as if in torment. “He’d just come home from—” He stopped and colored. “I think it was from New York. Margo and I just happened to pass the library, and he was in there with Margaret, and we talked a little, and then he collapsed.”

  “I think you’re lying,” said Sylvia, in a slow and bitter voice. “You were always a liar, Greg. And you won’t tell us the truth now.”

  “Yes,” said Margaret, in the arched doorway. “He’s a liar. You all are.”

  They started, then gazed at her with fear and withdrawal, except for David, who took a step or two toward her. But she halted him with a fierce motion of her hand. She came into the room, walking silently and gracefully, tall and straight and poised in her severe suit. Her deep blue eyes, sunken and deadened with grief, moved from one face to another. Ralph rose heavily, but Gregory dropped his head lower and his jawbone struck out against the taut flesh, like a white ridge.

  “Why do you stay here?” cried Margaret, passionately. She had begun to shiver, and she tried to make her body rigid so that they would not see. “You don’t care for Ed. Ed, to you, was always the peasant, the stupid one of the family, the treasury of the family, the dolt, whose only reason for being alive was to serve and support you. And did you permit him to serve you, and did you take his life from him!”

  “Now look here,” said Ralph, “you don’t know what you’re saying, Margaret. I know this is awful for you, but you won’t let anybody come near you, not even my own wife, Violette, and you always liked her, didn’t you? You haven’t any right to insult us. Ed’s our brother; you’ve only known him about twenty-two years; we’ve known him all our lives. He’s our flesh and blood—”

  “How kind of you to remember that all at once,” said Margaret, the passion in her voice rising. “Have you just remembered because you’re wondering what Ed has left you in his will?”

  “I resent that,” said Sylvia, and the slash of her lips stood out in the bony pallor of her face. David, who had returned to her, put his hand firmly on her shoulder. He looked at Margaret with sadness. “I know how you hate us,” he said, “and I’m not going to deny you have reason, more reason than you know. But there are things you don’t know, too, and this isn’t the time or place to tell you. However, please, Margaret, I want you to understand, just a little, without exaggeration or too much hate—”

  “I understand everything!” exclaimed Margaret, twisting her hands together. Now the haggard eyes sparkled with desperate loathing. “Do you think I’d believe anyone but my husband?”

  “Oh, God,” said Margo, in her loud voice, and she glared at Gregory. “A wife’s an idiot to believe her husband, and don’t I know it now!”

  “Our own brother,” said Ralph, “and you won’t let any of us go near him.”

  “No,” said Margaret. “Not your brother. Not ever again your brother. Just my husband.”

  “Margaret,” David pleaded. But she turned and left them then, and silence followed her. The stairs rose before her endlessly; she climbed forever into the darkness of the upper hall. She had to lean against the balustrade for a moment, for there was such a constriction in her throat and chest, such a rage of pain. Perhaps I’m going to die, too, she thought, and the pain relaxed, as if she had heard a promise of deliverance.

  The cold and pearl-colored light of the early morning stood at the window of the bedroom now, like a hovering presence. Mary turned to Margaret with a smile. “We’re doing fine, just fine,” she said, and wiped her moist red face, and then her glittering glasses, with a man’s big white handkerchief. “Just look at his color. Practically normal. And his heart’s beating steadily. I just listened.”

  For the first time Margaret came to the bed, no sensation in her feet or legs. She stood beside her husband and looked down at him. His face was faintly colored, as if with fever, against the white pillows. His eyes were closed and his breath was ragged. Margaret could feel nothing; something in her breast, as enormous and heavy as a stone, was dragging her down. She leaned against the bed, and her head dropped weightily.

  Then she heard a tired whisper. “Margaret?”

  She turned her head with a powerful effort. Edward’s gray eyes, still filmed with suffering, were smiling up at her. She slipped to her knees because she could no longer stand. She let her head fall beside Edward’s head. He moved his hand feebly and took her fingers and pressed them against his cheek. “Darling,” he murmured. “You’re cold.”

  “Ed,” she said. “Oh, Ed.” Oh, my darling, my life, my blood, my hope, my God.

  “It’s all right,” he replied. “Don’t worry, dear. It’ll be all right.” He moved in his fearful distress and pain. “All the days of my life.”

  She lifted her head and she thought clearly, Yes, he is dying. “You’ve forgotten the rest of it, sweetheart,” she said. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

  For a long moment or two he regarded her with the strangest expression, but it was as if he were remembering something, looking far back into the recesses of his spirit. His light eyes darkened and withdrew, pondering, and no longer seemed to see his wife. Even when she took his hand and held
it tightly, he still did not see.

  She kissed him then on his lips, which were so hushed and cold, and there was a great quietness in her now, as if a silent abyss had opened in her and her heart had fallen into it.

  “Forever,” she whispered. “Forever.” Forever, my dear, for always. To the end of time.

  His darkened eyes closed in soundless peace, and the nurse’s compassionate hand touched Margaret’s head. “‘Surely goodness and mercy—’” a voice said, but Margaret did not hear it.

  Her whole life seemed centered in Ed’s hand, to which she clung, and all her consciousness was in that hand. Was it becoming a little warmer, or was it that her own hand was turning to ice? She began a groaning litany.

  “Father, don’t take him. Almighty God, don’t take him. Christ, Our Lord, spare him for me. Father, have mercy. Christ, have mercy—”

  CHAPTER I

  In a few minutes he would have to go to help his father. Far off, in the hot Sunday quiet of early evening he could hear the Vesper bells ringing, sweet and unearthly against the gold and fiery rose of the western sky. A dusty breeze sang dryly in the trees; the houses, the street, lay entranced in stupefied silence, the cobblestones gray with grime, splattered here and there with the brown of horse manure. It was so still that Edward Enger, fourteen years old, heard distinctly the distant and languid clop-clop of a horse going home, and the serene rattle of some buggy or carriage filled with a happy family replete from a picnic, a drive along the river, or a visit to relatives. He had never ridden in a buggy or, better, a carriage. But it was good, sitting this way on the curb, with no one around and only the sky and the bells for company. It was awfully good, even if a person was tired out after a long day’s work. Across the narrow and cobbled streets he could see the quiet porches trailing wistaria, purple in the mauve shadows that filled the air, the Chinese prisms voiceless, the comfortable chairs cushioned and waiting, the tenantless hammocks. The upper windows of the houses opposite reflected the sky and seemed to burn with an inner fire. A dog barked, surfeited and content, out of sight, resting after the heat.

  Edward thought School Road, where he lived, about the nicest street in the city of Waterford, though it was lower middle class and no home contained any luxuries such as he had seen elsewhere. On this block, only his own home, behind him on a narrow green lawn, and the Witlocks’, boasted a piano. Well, it was something to have a piano! Edward lifted his head proudly. He pressed his big brown hand against his shirt pocket. Five dollars there! Four of them, tomorrow, would go for David’s piano. (It was always “David’s piano,” when the family spoke of it, though Edward was paying on time for that glorious instrument. Four dollars a week. Fifteen more weeks. Then it would truly be “David’s piano.”) Edward sighed, frowned a little. He hated buying on time. So did his parents. But David had to have that piano. “I suppose he did have to have it,” said Edward aloud. He had taken off his hot and aching shoes, and his large feet, brown as his hands, refreshed themselves in the cooling dust of the gutter. “He couldn’t have waited until I’d paid off the whole thing. The teacher said he had to have it, for practice.”

  He leaned his throbbing back against the trunk of the great old elm behind him, and felt the comfort of companionship. Sylvia said it made the house dark and gloomy, and Mr. and Mrs. Enger, who loved the tree, had yet been eager to sacrifice it for the sake of Sylvia’s “nerves.” She hated shadows and the quiet of serene old branches. Sylvia was all quickness and impatience. But for once Edward had raised his voice, in a house where his voice was seldom permitted to be heard or heeded. (“That dolt!” Sylvia would say.) He, Edward, had said, “If you cut down that tree, David don’t get more payments on his piano. Hear?” Sylvia had replied with contempt, “The word is ‘doesn’t,’ stupid. But what can you expect of an uneducated person?”

  Edward shook his head, remembering. He had wanted to remind Sylvia, thirteen years old and in first-year high, that he had had to leave school at the age of fourteen because he was needed. But a quarrel with Sylvia inevitably brought pain to his father’s face, and annoyance into his mother’s eyes, and cutting remarks from the other children. Edward’s parents were sorry that he had had to leave school. When the decision had been made for him, he had expressed his awkwardly spoken wish to be a physicist. “What!” David had cried with mirth. “You? Why, you’re no good at anything but mathematics!” David, the pianist, had not, of course, understood that mathematics was the most important requisite. But Mrs. Enger had begun to frown, and Edward had said no more. His room was crowded with old second-hand books on physics, and he read them and hid them whenever anyone entered. Maybe he was a fool, at that, thinking of being a scientist when there was so much genius in the family: David the pianist, Sylvia who produced the school plays, Gregory who would probably be a famous writer, and Ralph who would be an artist. “Yeah,” said Edward aloud, rubbing his blistered feet in the dust. “Cost me a dollar last week for that box of water colors.”

  But still, after he had spoken in a loud, firm voice, no one had dared to suggest that the tree be cut down. “I like her,” he had said. “I’ve got a name for her. Margaret. She looks like a Margaret.” After he had warned them, no one had dared to jeer as usual.

  Edward, who hated the very scent of power, and who instinctively suspected power and the users of power, had been ashamed when he had silenced his family. He had been a bully. He despised bullies. He had wanted to apologize. But an apology would bring death, he knew, for “Margaret.” He had often yielded in the past and catastrophe had followed for himself or something he had loved. He looked up at the mighty tree now and smiled. “If I’d said I was sorry about Sylvia’s nerves, you wouldn’t be up there today, Margaret. You’d be firewood for the kitchen stove.” The tree, as if in response, bent her lovely green crest, and it glittered with the sunset light, and a bird rose from it, singing. Edward listened. Now birds were something! You’d think that David, at least, the pianist who would be famous, would listen to birds, especially at dawn and at sunset. But David hated the out-of-doors. “So crude.” David was fifteen. For an instant, and only for an instant, Edward addressed David in his heart: “You’re daffy.” Then he hurriedly turned away from the revealing truth, remembering that his father, who had actually shaken Wagner’s hand in Germany, and who played the flute, had declared, with an ecstatic clapping of his little fat hands, that David was a genius, with the soul of a musician. Pa ought to know! Besides, Pa had a bad heart and loved serenity and affection in a family. Nothing disturbed him so much as quarreling and angry voices. “Seems as if it’s me that’s always got to keep peace, for Pa’s sake,” said Edward, smiling up at Margaret, who suddenly showed him a high branch covered with the golden light of the falling sun. “And Ma’s temper,” he added. Margaret drew her boughs together in the rising wind and stood like a goddess, crowned with fire. There was a small, sharp catch of joy in Edward’s chest. He was glad that no one else on the street saw this illuminated glory. There was not a single footfall on the sidewalks. “I’ve just got to be alone with you, Margaret,” said Edward. “If there’s anybody else around, you just go far back into yourself and you don’t even speak to me.” There was love in his rough and youthful voice. Margaret smiled down at him, like a celestial mother. She promised him something, mysteriously, and there was a lilting, a joy, in his heart. Gosh, he was only fourteen! There was a whole life ahead. He wished he did not have to work all day Sunday. He’d like to go to Sunday school with the other kids and learn about … About what? Why, God, he supposed.

  He looked at the sunset. God was only for people who did things, who had missions. “You and me,” Mr. Enger had said to Edward in his native German, “we were born to serve.”

  “I suppose Pa’s right,” Edward grunted, looking up at his beloved tree.

  “Margaret” clamored in a sudden gust, distressfully. Edward could not interpret, for this was a new voice. He was pondering on the strange and urgent message to him when he heard th
e brisk flutter of wings and a scrabbling in the dust. A young brown hen flew determinedly on his knee, and he laughed and took her in his hands and cuddled her under his chin. “How’d you get out, Betsy?” he asked with severity. “Thought I’d penned you in good.” The hen pecked feverishly at his lips and cheeks, in her frantic affection. He had bought her at Easter in the local five-and-ten; five cents. “You ain’t worth even five cents,” he told her lovingly as she pecked at his ear. “Not five cents, you rascal. Gee, you were cute when you were a kid, just a yellow ball of cotton batting. Never mind, you’re cute now, too.” He ruffled the brown feathers on her neck with his mouth and she squirmed with delight. “Why, you’re just a kid, anyways. But you got to get back in your pen. Never can tell what’ll happen to you out here.”

  Betsy pushed her head against his neck, then inside his sweat-heavy shirt. She clucked her love. He stroked her gently, eased his back against the tree. Hell of a thing, working all day Sunday, mowing lawns, cleaning out cellars, brushing out furnaces, getting ready for the winter, washing windows, cranking ice-cream freezers, scrubbing down porches, mopping over buggies and carriages, piling up manure in barns, currying horses. Seemed like everybody left their chores to be done on a Sunday while they went to church or out to dinner somewhere. But he couldn’t complain; he made more on a Sunday than on weekdays, when he helped his father full time in the store. His father paid him five dollars a week, which was his own. But there was always a call on it before he could buy what he wished for himself. He could keep one dollar of his Sunday earnings. He scratched Betsy’s stomach and she held up one claw to give him more room, rolling her eyes in ecstasy. “I’m going to make you a real pen, not just that crate,” he told her.