The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  The Vesper bells died into a vibrant silence, and mauve shadows in the street melted into gold. Mr. Enger, according to the laws of the state, was permitted to open his shop for public service from six to eight on Sundays. Women always forgot that bottle of milk, or some dill pickles, or a package of crackers or a loaf of bread, or there was unexpected company needing ham or cooked corned beef. “I’ve got to go, Betsy,” said Edward, scratching the bird’s wings. “Pa can’t keep things going all by himself on Sunday nights.”

  He stood up, a tall and robust boy, wide of shoulder, straight of back, long of sturdy limb. Holding his hen, he pushed his feet into his shoes. He winced, for his feet had swollen and the blisters hurt. He tossed his dark brown hair, shaggy and damp with sweat, off his forehead, so that the new breeze could cool him. Never, in anybody’s memory, had there been such a hot August like this. Everybody said so. But it had been hot last year, too, and the year before. It kept a fellow dodging under trees, out of the sun, on the way to work or school. School. He had had to leave school in June, after he had finished the ninth grade. He decided not to think of school; it hurt too bad. Well, school wasn’t for his kind, so that ended it.

  He turned toward his home, a tall, lean clapboarded house painted light gray with dark gray trimming, its attic window a slash of scarlet in the sunset. The narrow porch was small and cramped, but filled with neat chairs, each with a white cotton pad where a head could rest. Clipped bushes surrounded it, but no climbing vines. The house had a prim apperance, respectable and colorless. Edward loved color; there was practically no color in any room, just old browns and dark reds and navy blues and dark, polished woods. “I sure would like to see some scarlets and golds and greens somewhere,” Edward said to Betsy as he started for the house. Just then David, in the parlor, began on the piece he had been endlessly practicing. Edward knew it was a part of the “Moonlight Sonata.” Beethoven. His father had told him.

  He stopped, Betsy held to his chest, and listened, and his gray eyes, fringed with thick black lashes, opened wide and filled with light. Why, he knew what that music sounded like! Like great white angels moving slowly down golden stairs, with golden shadows on their half-extended wings, their faces grave and majestic, their lips carved like marble, their garments flecked with radiance which shifted and fell like rain. He must have dreamt it sometime. Even Betsy was motionless, listening. “God,” he whispered prayerfully, “I can just see it; they’ve been talking to You, haven’t they?”

  Then he shuddered, for David had spitefully broken into the very heart of the music with a tinny, syncopated sound, “Meet me at the fair!… St. Louis, Louie … Meet me at the fair!” It was the derisive laughter of devils beneath the golden stairs.

  “Shut up, shut up,” Edward muttered. “That’s what I’m paying four dollars a week for? Why can’t you play the thing through when you start it? Just because Pa isn’t there? You know he hates that St. Louis thing.”

  The street, so calm, so silent, so without humanity, suddenly became clamorous with ugly and discordant voices, though not a creature, except the birds, tenanted it as yet. The beauty was gone, the hallowed splendor of the sunset, the quiet meditation of the trees, the warmth, the color, the shine of light against wood and brick. Edward, bending his head, went up the rear wood-planked walk to the yard. Here there was nothing except carefully cropped grass. No tree, no flower, no border. Just grass. Edward had built Betsy a little shelter against the wood garage shed with its sloping cover. He tenderly placed the protesting bird inside, checked her water and seed, ruffled her feathers. He was feeling slightly sick and was afraid that the hen felt his mood. “I’m all right,” he said. “Time for birds to be asleep, hear?”

  The hen whimpered through the wire netting. “Don’t be afraid,” he murmured. “I’m coming home soon. Half past eight. See?”

  He went away, turned his back on the house, and began to trudge the four streets to his father’s delicatessen. His big brown neck, his square brown chin, were drawn in, and he had pushed his hands into the pockets of his old trousers. No use feeling gloomy about that damn David. David was a genius. He, Edward, supposed geniuses must sometimes get tired of their own gifts and break loose. He forgave David almost at once. Why, hadn’t Pa often told him that no one could understand a person who had a gift? They lived in a world of their own, beyond criticism, beyond the knowing of other men. There was Wagner, with the bad temper and the screams, and the way he hit other musicians over the shoulder with his cane, and the swearing and everything. Why, even the Kaiser had been afraid of him, and all the grand ladies at the court. “In Germany we understand these things, these geniuses,” Mr. Enger had often told Edward dolefully. “But not in America. America has no soul.”

  The little sick nagging in him would not go away, though he began to whistle softly. He was not even aware that he was whistling the first few bars of the “Moonlight Sonata”; he was only, after a time, aware of a kind of mysterious comforting, as though a hidden voice had spoken. He met no one on his way to the store. He might have been moving in a landscape of narrow streets and cobbled roads and planked sidewalks and empty porches, completely drained of human life. He passed the drugstore, and, as always, he stopped a moment to admire the big green and yellow jars in the window. The sunset was mirrored in them, in exquisite detail, and the piercing silver secret of the evening star. That would be Jupiter, far down in the lake of crimson, hardly seen. Edward wished that Ralph, his brother, eight years old, could see this miniature sunset and the flickering steadfast speck of the planet. He had just the deep scarlet for it, in the paintbox Edward had bought him at his father’s suggestion. A scarlet deeper than blood, more depthless than blood, more living than blood. There could be no blue in it at all; that would spoil it. There must be a way to give life and movement to paint, thought Edward. Well, little Ralph would find that out someday. His father took him to the small art gallery every Wednesday afternoon while Edward kept store alone. Ralph would come back, jumping and excited, black eyes distended, his mouth babbling incoherently. Yes, he was a genius.

  Edward went on. His whistling became hardly audible. Then he hummed richly. “All the days of my life, all the days, all the days of my life.” He had invented the music for the splendor of this phrase; it was noble, like the words. He did not know where he had heard the words, but they had affected him deeply. “All the days, the days, the days of my life!” His voice soared out, pure and strong and masculine, like an angel’s voice, and the words he sang were a reverent chant. He lifted his chin, and the last light of the sun illuminated his dark, broad face, with the square nose, the patient, humorous young mouth, the broad brown forehead, the dimpled chin, the indomitable curve of youthful cheek, and the full gray eyes. His step quickened, as if to a marching song of soldiers bent on a holy war. He was tall and full of vitality, and he threw back his shoulders and was joyful. He forgot he was only fourteen years old and that he had worked since six that morning and that he was tired. He forgot that he was only Edward Enger and had no right to dreams. He was free, under the silent sky, under the last crimson burning of the sun. “My life, my life!” he sang as he bounded up the three wooden steps of his father’s delicatessen.

  The shop was small but almost incredibly neat, the two little windows polished to a blazing crystal, the wooden floor whitely scrubbed, the wooden counters without a stain. It was a Lilliputian delicatessen, but very compact, shining, and complete. Here hung no twisted lengths of sticky flypaper from the white ceiling, and no dishes filled with fly poison on the counters, and no clots of flies hovering over exposed food. Mr. Enger believed in screens; Ralph, his youngest child, had painted a sign on the outer door: “Please Close!” This so startled customers, drawn as it was in the brightest red, that they hastily obeyed. Even the two barrels of pickles, one dill, one sweet, had been covered with fabric fly screens over a clean white towel. One could be sure, said the approving housewives, that the cloves one saw in the pungent liquid were really
cloves. But the towels, renewed every day, and the screens did not inhibit the luscious fragrance of the barrels, which mingled with the saliva-evoking scents of smoked ham and corned beef. It was Edward’s duty, at six in the morning, to scrub out the little shop, to shine up the meat slicers, to apply suds to the counters, to polish the windows, to align the bottles and tins on the shelves and dust them, to replenish the ice under the counters where galvanized cans held their treasures of vanilla and strawberry and chocolate ice cream and bottles of milk. It was his duty to clear away every crumb from the glass case which held doughnuts and loaves of crusty bread, and to polish the glass. The firm cheese, round and resolute as a wheel, had its own glass container, with its own sparkling knife.

  “You can eat off the floors,” said the local housewives, who were not so careful of their own floors. “You wouldn’t believe Mr. Enger was a foreigner, would you? So neat.”

  Edward was proud of the shop. It would be his one day, his father had promised him. He took pleasure in the polishing and the scrubbing, whistling between his teeth under the lighted gas lamp flickering away in the dark mornings. He hated dirt of any kind. Until last June his mother had done most of the work in this shop before it opened, but now she was too old and too tired. After all, she was thirty-six and her husband was thirty-four, and people of that age could not work like a boy. On Fridays at five o’clock, when the city of Waterford still slept, Edward would accompany his father to the wholesale market three miles away, pulling a large cart behind him. He loved the market with its bustle, its brawny men, its comings and its goings, its teams of horses and big wagons, its clamor under yellow gas jets. He was already a shrewd bargainer and buyer. Mr. Enger, who was timid and gentle, permitted his son to attend to the business of purchase, but it was he who at the end laid the gold-and-green dollar bills on the counters. Then they would return in the darkness of predawn, Edward hauling the heaped wagon as if it contained nothing. The bread, wrapped in Mrs. Enger’s white towels, was still hot from the bakery, the shrouded hams steamed under their wrappings, the barrels of pickles were sweeter than the morning air. The stacked tins would rattle merrily; the cold butter leaned against them, the sacks of roasted but unground coffee would emit wafts of divine perfume. They were sweetest of all, in their mingled fragrance, in the winter, but at any time of the year they inspired the spirit.

  Once last spring Mr. Heinrich Enger had said to his stalwart son in his gutteral Bavarian accent: “It is good, Edward, that the mother does not need to accompany me any longer in these mornings. It is her delicacy. After all, one needs to remember that she was a Von. But I have told you. A Von! From the big Schloss on the mountain! To condescend to a miserable little burgher like Heinrich Enger, the Gnädige Frau. What a mystery is life. Ah, my parents, God be with them, would not have believed it. A Von.”

  Edward would murmur appreciatively, but one of his black eyebrows had taken on a skeptical lift lately, in spite of his respect for his parents. His mother was a huge and massive woman, with a shapeless, down-turned mouth fixed in severity, with light blue eyes and a fleshy nose and an amorphous figure, great of breast and hip. Her one claim to comeliness was a mass of hair so pale of color that it was almost silvery, and the sun brought out dim golden crests on its waves. She spent the evening hours, between mending, combing out that mass for the admiration of her children. She was not Edward’s favorite parent, for she domineered over her little fat husband, a head shorter than herself, and told endless tales of the grandeur of her family, the Von Brunners. “The blond Von Brunners,” she would say, looking disparagingly at the bald and glittering head of her small and rotund husband, who had only a fringe of black Bavarian hair to embellish his sphere of a skull. Edward hated to see his father bow his head meekly, until he finally understood, only a month ago, that Maria’s affectionate contempt for Heinrich in some way mysteriously enhanced his stature. Edward, growing to maturity, daily marveled at the revelations displayed to him of the complexities of human nature.

  On these journeys to the market, Edward with new curiosity, had discreetly questioned his innocent father. It seemed that Heinrich had played the flute in a tiny cluster of musicians at a Gasthaus, in the village of Dorfinger, in the shadow of the amethyst Bavarian Alps. The Schloss, it finally emerged, was an old but revered ruin on a foothill, and the Von Brunners had lost most of their money during the Franco-Prussian War. For the last three generations they had made beer, good beer, but not so good as that made in Munich, which the discriminating had preferred. Maria Von Brunner had been only a very poor relation, an orphan of distant connection, and she had come to the Schloss to teach the family’s children. Before that she had been a “Fräulein” for some Englishers. “So educated, so dainty,” Heinrich had sighed, unaware that his son was drawing some very sharp conclusions from the narrative. One day she had graciously accompanied the family to the Gasthaus and had admired Heinrich and his flute. “Ah, that day, that day!” Heinrich had said, closing his eyes as if before a dazzling light. “I can see her still, with her hair like silver under her big plumed hat, and her noble smile! And I, but a flutist, with but twelve marks a week! An angel, to bow her head in my direction, a Von Brunner! I could not look at her; it would have been a desecration.”

  “But she married you, Pa,” Edward had said, trying to keep his voice dispassionate. “You must not have been so bad.” His German was very correct; the family spoke it under the stern tutelage of the mother.

  Heinrich shook his head in wonder. “Ach, it was a miracle. The family was unkind to your mother. She had no money, though they had little more. Her father had been a Herr Professor in Munich and one knows that Herr Professors make no fortunes. The family paid her very little. I was then a man of twenty.” He paused. “And she was almost twenty-three,” Edward added somewhat grimly to himself. “I dared to speak to her one day.” Heinrich went on. “I had saved my money. I was going to America, where the streets were paved with gold and where even musicians could become rich.”

  Heinrich laughed with gentle bitterness. He shook his head again. “It was a miracle. Ach, yes. I dared to speak to the Fraulein Von Brunner and tell her my dream, and she smiled at me like the moon itself and said it was her dream also. And so, and so, we were married.” He paused. At this point he would invariably become confused. It appeared that the Von Brunners had not been too averse to their Maria’s marrying the little fat flutist at the Gasthaus. “They were very kind, for such unkind people,” Heinrich would murmur. “They gave Maria, your mother, a fine trousseau, as the French say. They also gave her five hundred marks. They gave us their blessing. And so we came to America.”

  Two months ago Edward, the always kind, had said ironically, “And the five hundred marks helped with the passage money.”

  “I have told you that their kindness was also a miracle,” Heinrich had answered crossly. He had changed the subject. “There is no room in America for a flutist. I have the flute. I had hoped that David would like it, but he prefers the piano. I knew the business of a Gasthaus, for often I assisted when ours was very crowded. I saw there were no things like a Gasthaus in this country, though I have heard there is in Milwaukee where the Indians reside. But we had no money, I worked for some years in a delicatessen, and your mother was saving and careful, and so we came to this very misbegotten place and opened a delicatessen of our own. Your mother’s sensitive soul has never recovered from the shattering of her dreams. However, I make an excellent living. I have five children and a house with only one thousand dollars mortgage, and four of my children are the geniuses. It is the Von Brunner blood. But my children are dark like the Engers and this is a cross; your mother hardly forgives me.”

  Edward had suddenly pressed his father’s small but bulky arm, and Heinrich had smiled that sweet, shy smile of his in gratitude. “It was in March, 1887, when we came to America, and your brother David was born eight months later in Albany. Your mother was determined to be American, so you have the American names. It
is so sad that she must always try to forget her family, who were so unkind. I should have preferred German names, in remembrance. For are we not Germans?”

  “We’re Americans,” Edward had said, stoutly.

  He loved his father, so small, so fat, so innocent and so gentle, with a fierce protectiveness. He stood between his father and his mother, with inexorable partisanship.

  Edward was always glad to see his father, to see the smile on the round and chubby features, so flushed and beaming, so kind, so self-deprecating, so eager to please. He had the sweetest temper; he was rarely vexed or impatient. The housewives, sometimes forgetting he was a “foreigner,” had a deep affection for him. He never shortchanged; he was invariably anxious to oblige. The cookie box was usually open for a child; he had a special cylindrical glass jar filled with striped peppermint drops for the poorer of the children who entered the shop. Sometimes when things were going very well he would give a few of these children a one-cent ice-cream cone, generously filled. At Christmas he had a box of peppermint canes for all children, poor or middle-class, wrapped in tinsel paper, or pink suckers in holiday wrappers. At Easter there were tiny chocolate rabbits. Mrs. Enger did not approve of this waste, but on this her husband, usually so meek and docile and humble, stood firm.

  Once he had said: “I remember the Christmas in Dorfinger, the Christmas my father died. We had boots on Christmas, and sometimes an orange and nuts, but this Christmas we had nothing. Nor on the following Christmases. I remember I looked in the shop windows.” But he had said this but once and had then quailed under the pale eyes of his wife, the former Fraulein Von Brunner, who had never known a starving Christmas or the yearning unhappiness in a child’s heart. One did not speak of near-starvation to a Gnädige Frau.