The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  “No, no, Ed,” said Margaret. “I can understand him, often. And you know his mind hasn’t been much affected. Please, dear. Go to see him. Your mother isn’t hysterical; she said your father distinctly asked for you and named you.”

  He folded his big arms across his chest, and his eyes narrowed. “Funny,” he said with an unpleasant smile. “I’ve never been away from here. I’ve seen Pa hundreds of times since he was taken sick. And he never seemed to recognize me even when I spoke to him. He never even grunted at me as he does at others. And now, suddenly, all at once, he not only thinks of me but asks for me by name! Burns said he must be quiet.” The unpleasant smile broadened. “And quiet is what Pa is going to get. From me.”

  Oh, God, thought Margaret, distractedly. What is it, what is it? I know his father exploited him for the others, but surely he can forgive now. Or is it something deeper? “Please, please,” she implored Edward. He took up his paper again. “Let him sleep,” he said in a tone that frightened his wife.

  Margaret almost ran from the room, and up the stairway, stumbling once or twice on her long robe. She went into the elder Engers’ suite. Maria was sitting by her husband’s bed, holding his shriveled hand, and the nurse was taking the pulse in the other hand. Margaret approached the bed, and winced with pity at the sight of the old ashen face on the pillows. Heinrich’s eyes, so gentle and so childlike, fastened on her eagerly with full consciousness and knowledge. “Eddie?” he said, and his voice was clear and loud.

  “Yes, yes, dear,” said Margaret, and bent and kissed his forehead. She was horrified at its damp coldness. “He’s coming. In just a minute.”

  Heinrich gave her his painful and twisted smile. He said again, “Eddie.”

  Margaret exchanged a desperate glance with Maria, whose face became expressionless. A question had been asked, an answer given. Maria sighed. The nurse said in a low voice, “His pulse is very weak. I think we should call Dr. Burns again.” She went off to make the call, and the two women sat side by side at Heinrich’s bed in hopeless silence. Margaret swallowed her tears. Her arm touched Maria’s comfortingly, but Maria appeared not to know. She saw only her dying husband. A fire fluttered on the hearth, and the bright chintz at the windows and on the chairs gleamed vividly in the winter sunlight.

  “Eddie,” said Heinrich again. His face seemed to dwindle visibly.

  “Yes, yes,” said Margaret. “He—he was away a few minutes. He will be here, dear Papa Enger.” But Heinrich was looking at the doorway, and his whole simple soul was in his eyes, pleadingly. Margaret could not bear to see this, and so she stared dryly at the foot of the bed.

  The nurse returned with an anxious report that Dr. Burns was away for Christmas dinner and could not be reached for an hour. She felt Heinrich’s pulse again. “Why,” she said in a more cheerful voice, “it’s stronger. Now isn’t that nice?”

  Margaret smoothed her short hair with her trembling hands. She prayed that Edward would come. She listened for footsteps in the corridor outside. It was unendurable to see that fixed bright stare of Heinrich’s directed at the door. Maria said nothing; she had begun to rock massively in her chair in the ancient movement of sorrow. The quiet was so complete that the ticking of the old clock downstairs could be heard above the crackle of the fire. Once or twice Margaret caught the excited shout of a child in the distant living room. A light wind lifted a veil of sunlit snow against the windows and left diamonds of it on the glass.

  “He’s sleeping. That’s good,” said the nurse. The fixed eyes had closed, and Heinrich’s breath came unevenly. After a few moments Margaret stood up. She said in a shaken voice, “I’m going to my room. To lie down. And then I’ll dress. Call me, Mother Enger—if there’s any—change.”

  Maria nodded, without looking at Margaret, and continued to sway in her chair.

  Margaret went to her room and lay down, and suddenly she was crying. How was it possible for Edward not to go to his dying father? It was incredible that even years of bitterness and resentment could induce him to refuse that last call. It isn’t like Ed! thought Margaret. Oh, no, it isn’t like Ed, who is so good and gentle and tender. It isn’t like Ed, who gives everything and receives nothing. It’s just that he didn’t believe his father wanted or needed him or asked for him. After all, we’ve had a lot of alarms since Papa Enger took sick. Ed thinks it’s just another one of them.

  But she could not convince herself of this. There had been something final and bitter and inexorable on Edward’s face, something cold and malign, as if he knew only too well. Margaret moved her head denyingly on the pillows. “No, no,” she whispered. “Ed isn’t like that.”

  She shrank from the thought of the family dinner; she was tired, and her throat was sore. She fell asleep with tears on her cheeks.

  She dreamed that she and Edward were alone in the mansion, and there was no one else there at all, not even the children. She was stitting beside Edward, who was asleep. She was conscious of some agony in herself which devoured her like a beast. It was night; no, it was dawn. There was a grayness at the windows, and a magenta slash in the grayness, like a wound. She called to Edward, but he did not awaken; her voice was an echo. And then Edward turned in the bed and his eyes were glazed and without life, and as she watched him with increasing terror and agony he rose out of the bed slowly, not seeing her. She called to him, and he did not hear. Slowly, slowly, moving like one in a trance, he left the bed and flitted like a ghost across the floor. He reached the doorway and went through it. Margaret tried to get up and follow, but she was paralyzed. She called, and her voice was snatched away in a sudden wind. The agony became a death in her, and she thought, I am dying.

  “Wake up, wake up, darling,” said a strong voice, and she woke up to find Edward standing beside her bed. “What on earth’s wrong?” he said and bent to kiss her. “You were moaning. Bad dream?”

  She stared at him incredulously, the dream with her, and then a frantic joy engulfed her and she knelt up in bed and threw herself into Edward’s arms and burst into wild sobbing. “I thought, I thought!” she cried.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and held her. “What?” he asked indulgently.

  But she could only sob. She could not tell him, for the very words were too terrible. The sunlight strode into the room and it was only Christmas Day, after all, and Edward was here, holding her, and her frenzied heart was slowing. She dropped her head on his shoulder and clutched the rough cloth of his coat in wet hands.

  “It’s time,” Edward began, smoothing her pretty hair. But he did not finish his sentence. Maria had entered the room, and she stood near them like the figure of an aging Viking goddess, very calm, very still. She looked only at her son.

  “Your father is dead,” she said, with no change in her voice.

  “Oh, no,” Margaret cried, dropping her arms from Edward, who stood up and faced his mother.

  “He asked for you, Edward,” said Maria, as if Margaret were not there at all. “You would not come.”

  Edward said nothing. His face was a face carved from gray stone.

  “No,” said Maria, beginning to turn away. “You would not come, though he asked for you, though it was the last thing he asked.” She stopped in her turning and gazed at her son with majestic condemnation.

  “There is much that you have endured,” she said. “But there is even more that you do not understand. I wish only to say this: I shall never forgive you, no, not even to the day I die. Or you die.”

  Heinrich’s will was very strange to all but Violette, and pleasing to none but herself and Ralph, and, though no one knew it, to Maria also. The old man had left his money, some four hundred thousand dollars, divided between his wife and André, his grandson.

  “It is very good,” said Violette to André. “And very sensible. We must now invest it carefully. It is in what they call the blue chips and bonds. We must have consultations with very wise men who do not have the too eager spark in the eyes.”

  CHAPTER VIr />
  When I was a child, thought Margaret, listlessly, there was not all this excitement about weather, as if it were a new calamity every year, to be shrilled about in little indignant voices, by little shrill people—who perhaps should never have been born in the first place. Everybody clamored that “the government” should do something about everything, including the natural phenomena of nature. What a tiny little generation we are becoming!

  Huddled in her fur coat, which could not keep her from shivering from some inner cold, she paced along the walks which circled the house. One blizzard had succeeded another since Heinrich’s death and final burial in the black and marble desolation of the cemetery. (She would never forget the stiff dark earth, the flailing snow and the bitter howl of the wind, the day of the funeral, and how, in some way terrible, the heaped flowers looked, in their dying color on the lifeless ground.) So high was the snow along the sides of the walks that it seemed to Margaret that she was walking through a white tunnel, a white hell of a tunnel. The grounds undulated away from her in their buried starkness, the spruces bearing on their branches broad white plumes of snow, which dissolved even while she looked at them into flying clouds of frozen spray. The house, at a little distance, appeared to have sunken into a vast mound of whiteness, a bog of whiteness, with chimneys futilely smoking, and the eaves drifting in mist, and the snow crushing down its great roof. Waterford had never known such snows, and it in what was called “the snow belt.” The papers clamored about the weather, the monstrous cold, the clogged roads, the zero temperatures, the isolation of the city. And in the clamor there was a mean petulance as though something or someone were responsible and should be punished.

  A tiny little generation of tiny little people with shrill voices, thought Margaret in an effort to distract her sorrowful thoughts. They want everything soft and what they call “cozy” and protected; they look at weather with dismay, and shiver when the natural turbulence of this planet threatens their ugly little comforts or their trivial little ways of living. Sometimes I agree with Ed: men are less loyal than dogs, less innocent than wolves, less courageous than mice, less kind than tigers. Less worthy to be alive.

  She was sick with the sickness of living. She could not bear to turn her thoughts to the stricken and blank faced family. With the exception of Maria, the family wore an air of outrage and bewilderment that one who had lived so long on the edge of the grave had finally toppled into it, with no sound, no voice, no protest, and no dramatics. What have we done that death should enter this house? they appeared to be saying. Even Edward. Even Ed, thought Margaret, with an acrid taste in her mouth. No one spoke of Heinrich. He had lived in that house for many, many years, and none had noticed him much except his wife. There was no room where any of them could say, “Here Pa stood, and this is what he said—and how he laughed. Or here he gave us this, or that. Or I remember there was one day, and he was sitting there at the head of the table, and he said something … Do you remember the time he trimmed the tree—or walked over there—it was the funniest remark.…”

  No, there was not a room, and not even his deserted bed now, that spoke of Heinrich. There was not an ornament which he had bought. There was not a picture anyone could remember that he had admired. There was not a footprint of his, or a fingerprint, which marked his former presence. He had left the world as unostentatiously as he had been born and had lived. Yet the muffled indignation remained in the family, the silly, voiceless indignation, that death had dared to walk into that house and had, for a moment, brushed them with his dark and noiseless wings. There was a hideous selfishness in their bewilderment. And a furtive uneasiness. Was each remembering, vaguely and reluctantly, or at least trying to remember, the sound of that meek voice, the murmur of that ineffectual laughter, or recalling, or trying to recall, the father of their youth? Were they indignant and dimly ashamed that they could remember so little of him who had given them life?

  The children were worse, in their way, than the adults. They had been briefly awed at the thought of death and its presence. Margaret—and she was embarrassed now at her juvenility—had hastily removed the children to upper rooms, and had prevented them from seeing their grandfather in his coffin. “Children should be happy,” she had said defensively to Violette, who had stared at her with open amusement. “Why?” Violette, the realist, had answered. “Who told you, ma petite, that anyone should be happy? Who informed you, chérie, that man was born for happiness? You do not want the children to have ‘nightmares’? That is what you have said: ‘nightmares.’ It is absurd. Life is a nightmare which we disperse with laughter, when we can laugh. We must not,” and Violette shook her wise head, “protect our children from life or give them the evil drug of happiness. They are not tender, these little ones. They are as hard as stone. It is perhaps because you have forgotten what children are, but I, I have not forgotten children, who are monsters. Everything is an occasion for them, these barbarians, no matter if it is death or birth or weeping or quarreling or hate. They revel—yes, it is revel—in drama and struggle. And you would deprive them of drama and their delight in tragedy!” She shook her head again. “You have deprived your Gertrude and your Robert of joy in terror and mystery.”

  Violette was quite right, of course, Margaret thought dolefully as she paced her lonely way along the walks. Gertrude and Robert had protested, avidly, at her fluttering insistence that they not see their dead grandfather, that they not attend his funeral. Was that actually disappointment she had seen in their smooth young faces? Yes, it had been disappointment! Not grief, not subdued awareness—only disappointment and resentfulness that they had been robbed of excitement and the hungry satisfaction that all primitives feel at the calamity of others.

  Young André had been conducted at once by his mother into the presence of his dead grandfather, and Violette had serenely answered his questions. “He is dead. What is dead?” “Mon petit, you have seen a dead bird, or a dead flower, or a dead insect. So is Grandpère dead, and he is no more now than these.” “And we all die, Maman?” “Surely, we all die, child, and this way shall we lie for a little time, and then the earth will cover us.”

  André had peered up at his mother, at her slightly smiling face, so amber-colored, so pert, and from her calmness and casual manner he had derived considerable understanding. “But Tante Margaret has said we live again,” he had remarked, with an academic thoughtfulness. Violette had shrugged. “So it is taught, and who shall answer, my child? It is enough that for this while we live, that we can laugh, that we can love, that we can know.”

  “Robert says Grandpère is in heaven,” André said. “Where do you think he is, Maman?”

  Violette had replied, and her smile had disappeared, “That, mon petit, is a question for God to answer, and we are not God.” She had then taken his hand and had led him to her own room, where they had contentedly sipped hot chocolate and had eaten some eclairs, and had talked of life while Heinrich lay dead below them.

  I am a fool, thought Margaret. Her children were discontented. They questioned André with that ugly avidity of children, and he had looked at them with the amused contempt which his mother reserved for the jejune. He had teased Gertrude and had called her “a baby,” and Gertrude, in return, had reproached her mother, who had no words to explain now. We protect our children when they only want to learn and live, she told herself miserably. Violette is quite right; we Americans are juveniles, not adults, and we treat our children as precious toys and not living creatures who just go about the business of life very soon.

  She stopped and stood on tiptoe to look over the tunnels surrounding the walks. Then, as if in expurgation, she lifted her skirts and her coat and deliberately plunged into the snow and struggled against it as she had struggled as a child. It was exhilarating; it was wonderful to defy and oppose the elements, to live as a human being and not as a protected fish in a warm bowl. The snow bore heavily against her legs and her flesh, and she exulted, with fresh pleasure and strength, as she pl
owed against its resistance. Her heart felt strong and fearless; when she brushed against a spruce and it poured its shower of weighted snow on her head and shoulders, she laughed a little and was glad, as a child is glad. Now she was no longer cold, and she could forget that house, forget Edward’s dark closed face, his silence, the withdrawal of Maria, the sullen indignation against death which showed in the eyes of Edward’s brothers and sister.

  When she emerged from the snow onto another cleared walk, the color glowed in her cheeks and lips and her eyes were washed clean of the wretchedness of the thoughts which had imprisoned her since Heinrich’s death ten days ago. She shook the dry snow from her coat and legs. She stamped her feet. She was alive! A person had only to realize that he was alive, to live again. Except …

  She looked up to see David standing near her, looming dark and thin and silent against the bitter azure of the winter sky. She blushed, and now the old sickness and animosity against all of Edward’s family returned to her.

  He smiled faintly. “I’d like to do that, too—walk in the snow,” he said.

  “Well, why don’t you?” she asked, and half turned away from him. Her expanded heart contracted again into chill and tiredness. She began to walk away, but he caught up with her. The sun, colorless as glass and as bright, shone on the snow, and the skeletons of the trees etched themselves on the whiteness.

  David said, “I know you don’t like us, Margaret, and I don’t blame you. You think we’re childish, and we are. You think we’re parasites, and we are. You think we’re worthless, and we are. All of us. But we’re also something else.”

  “What else?” she said in a clear loud voice, stopping on the walk and looking at him with the merciless blue of her eyes.

  “How can I tell you, Margaret?” His voice was gentle. “How can any man tell another what he really is? He himself doesn’t know.” They paced along together, Margaret reluctantly, David absorbed in his thoughts. He began to speak again. “You think we don’t care about Pa. We do. But we’ve thought so long about ourselves that it’s a shock when we’re called upon to think of somebody else, and we can’t escape thinking.”