“We’ll go,” his mother said. “We’ll go home now.”
They drove home at once; for all those hours he lay on the back seat and cried silent pain tears, shielded by the dark.
He stayed in bed for the next few days. She did not try to coax him, or rouse him. When he felt well enough, he got up; she kissed him at breakfast without the least sign of surprise—as if he had been there every morning. He went to the same shady porch corner. She went back to her gardening. She did not mention the doctor; he did not ask. It was as if it had never happened.
He seemed to doze with his eyes open, to rest himself against the moisture-filled air. Everything was soft and vague and far away.
Once he wrote a letter to his father, a short letter because writing hurt. “I am sick,” he wrote; “can you get a leave? I would feel better if you came home.”
Bit by bit the pain in his wrists subsided, the September days turned sharp blue, and he woke from his doze and looked around. He saw changes.
His mother had gotten more religious. Much more. She went to Mass every morning—a forty-mile drive—and the house was full of saints and flickering candles and the funny smell of incense. One day as she sat reading the newspaper, her skirt slipped aside and Anthony saw that her knees were covered with calluses and lacerations. As he watched, a trickle of blood ran down the front of her leg, bright red blood twisting among the little black hairs. She felt it, thought it a mosquito, slapped at it. The blood splattered, wet and oily; she jumped up and hurried away. And Anthony remembered a sound he heard whenever he wakened at night, the jingle of rosary beads. … He sometimes sneaked up to her door at night, but it was always firmly closed with the key in the lock. There was only the dry rattle of the heavy Ursuline nun’s rosary.
He noticed that now his mother often seemed to have a fever, her eyes glittered, the skin across her cheeks was dry and crinkly like paper. Now too she wore only loose dresses that hung straight from the shoulders, and she walked as if she were in pain. Routinely rummaging through her room, he found the bottle of red ants. And peering through her half-closed bathroom door, he saw that her breasts and stomach were covered by the large suppurating blotches of their bites.
“SCHOOL’S STARTING,” Anthony said, “I’ve got to go back.”
“I thought you would stay here,” she said. “It won’t hurt you to lose a term. After all, you’re a year ahead of your age.”
That was true. “I wish you’d told me, Mother.”
“You didn’t seem interested, Anthony.”
And that also was true. He’d hardly spoken to her for the last month.
“Grandfather doesn’t come at all.”
“I asked him to wait until you felt better. You didn’t seem to care.”
“Maybe I would have cared if he’d come.” He was furious at her total devotion, her selfless care.
“Anthony, you have to tell me those things if you want me to know them.”
“Well, I want him.”
“Anthony,” his mother said levelly, “you’re forgetting. Your grandfather had a heart attack, and now your aunt is having a terrible divorce. They are both busy.”
That was true too. His mother had a lot of single truths but when they were all put together they were no longer true. “I wrote my father a letter, asking him to come home. Why didn’t he answer me?”
“Your father writes whenever he has time, Anthony.”
“But he never has said anything about coming. Not even about not being able to get a leave. He would have, if he got the letter.”
“I threw that letter away,” his mother said quietly. “It was foolish and it would have worried him very much.”
“You didn’t mail it.” His anger disappeared in the face of such simplicity. He went back to his shady porch and stared out at the Gulf, a rain-freshened blue stretch where no ship ever sailed, no boat ever moved. Only a sea gull now and then.
Later when she sat beside him, pulling off her gardening gloves and brushing her hands against her dress, he asked: “Why are you always praying?”
She too stared out at the Gulf. “Because God is the author of our life and the hope of our salvation.”
And then Anthony stopped asking questions.
NOW EACH morning when he stepped from the blackout shrouded house into the bright September day, he saw how horribly empty the Gulf was, how bare and still. He would not look at it any more, he would move to the other side of the house. There were the gardens, and beyond the gardens were the fields and pastures, where cattle fattened on the soft thick grass, where wild birds came to feed on specially planted fields of buckwheat. Beyond the fields were the woods, the soft yellow-green pinewoods, their smooth sand covered by dry needles, clear of brush except for an occasional clump of palmettos. He’d never gone exploring in there; his mother was afraid of snakes. He had seen the big rattlers men killed; they brought them to the kitchen door and the maids and the cooks gathered to stare at them, and giggle. They skinned the biggest ones and tacked them to the side of the tool house, to cure in the sun. He’d never seen a live rattler. So many things he hadn’t done. …
“You’ve moved your seat,” his mother said.
“I like the trees,” he said.
They didn’t seem quite so empty, as they shimmered in the clear air.
A couple of days later he telephoned his grandfather—his mother was in the garden. “Are you coming this weekend?”
His grandfather answered: “Your mother doesn’t seem to want company just now.”
“I want you to come.”
His grandfather hesitated but only for a moment. “When your mother says she wants to be left alone, Anthony, I can’t do anything about it.”
“Then I want to come to New Orleans.”
“Your mother says you have an infection to get over.”
“Is that what the doctor said?”
“That’s what she told me.” His voice was mildly annoyed.
“I think I’m sick,” Anthony said slowly. “I think I’m very sick and I want to leave here.”
“I’ll speak to your mother.”
Anthony hung up.
She said: “Your grandfather called me.”
“Can I go?”
“When you are stronger, Anthony.”
“What have I got?” he asked.
“You’re tired from growing so fast.”
“You won’t let me out. You won’t let me go.”
“Anthony, don’t be silly.”
“You won’t even tell my father.”
That night he wrote a letter to his father, and starting just before daylight, he began walking to the post office at Port Bella. He thought he could make it before his mother came after him. He almost did. Some Negro children crawfishing on the outskirts of town found him by the road in a ditch, buried to his waist in slime and water. He had fallen there when he fainted.
AFTERWARD, WHEN he was quite sure where he was—back in his own room with his mother sitting at his bed—when he was quite sure that he had failed, he did not feel angry any more, or trapped.
“Mama,” he said, “what did the doctor say is wrong with me?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Mama,” he said, “you are lying.”
“Anthony, really,” she touched his forehead, “you have a fever and you’re overtired.”
“He said I was going to die.”
He watched while the color drained from her suntanned skin. It turns yellow, he thought, not white but yellow. Now isn’t that funny?
He went on staring at her, at the frozen set of her face, at the blotchy movement of color under her skin, and he wasn’t afraid, he wasn’t even upset. He was simply rather pleased at having guessed. And he was very pleased at having hurt her.
“Anthony, you mustn’t say that.”
He began to laugh. Way down inside himself. It started as a little tickle behind his spine and it spread over his body until he was shaking all over. But there w
asn’t a sound on the surface, not a single sound to disturb the silent air. He just went on laughing and laughing all by himself.
HE FELT lighter now, and happier. There seemed always to be laughter bubbling inside him. “You prayed a lot last night,” he said, smiling, to his mother, “maybe you should pray harder.” She was standing between him and the light, just a tall thin shape against the dazzle; he couldn’t see her face. She turned away without answering.
Again he spoke: “Where are the priests, Mama?”
“Anthony, you’re getting better.”
“No, I’m not,” he said.
ANTHONY STOPPED eating; he drank pitcher after pitcher of iced tea. “Anthony, you’ve got to eat,” his mother said.
“I want to go back to New Orleans. I want my father to know.”
“There is nothing for us in town, Anthony; you know that.”
He nodded, smiling his secret little smile. “You know the name but you won’t tell me. And I know how it feels but I don’t know the name.”
“The Lord is the source of many miracles,” his mother said abruptly. “He does what he wills.”
“He does,” Anthony said, and that time his hidden laughter broke to the surface.
BUT THEN the nights became a burden to him. After a couple of hours, he had had enough sleep. He would turn on his light and sit up and try to find an all-night station on his radio. His mother—she didn’t seem to sleep any more either—would come in to see why he was awake, and he would deliberately not talk to her, would lie with his back toward her until she went away.
(You would think she would cry; he wondered why she did not cry. Her eyes, even in the middle of the night, were round and dry. Only, there was a certain light to them. Another light, wherever it came from, whatever it was. They were the brightest eyes he had ever seen. Like a car’s headlights. Artificial beams shining to light the road. She could see at night with them. … She could make a miracle happen with them. …)
He learned to creep down the back stairs—they were farthest from his mother’s room—and out the kitchen door. Sometimes he sat on the porch, listening to the raccoons and skunks rattle the garbage cans. Sometimes he walked in the gardens, studying the shapes and patterns of leaves. And sometimes he went to the beach, to the end of the long wooden pier, and pretended he was crabbing by moonlight and that the crabs he caught were gold and covered with rubies, with pearls for their eyes.
It got more and more difficult for him to walk that far, even when he stopped to rest two or three times. Pretty soon, he thought, I won’t be able to get out, my mother will have caught me inside that house forever.
He thought about that, sitting on the rough wooden edge of the pier. The moon hung upside down and low on the horizon, reflecting shiny bright in the motionless mirror water. He stared out at a star-spotted gulf, endlessly empty, flawlessly still. He glanced down, saw the pirogue; it was moored under the pier, suspended on the glassy surface, gleaming with moonlight. The gardener’s boys had forgotten to return it to the boat house.
Tipping his head, he watched the moon with his right eye and the pirogue with his left. Moon’s cup turned over, water spills out. … but there wasn’t a sign of rain in the night sky. The rough half-finished wood (it was an old-fashioned pirogue cut from a single log) looked smooth and velvety against the moon-polished water.
Soft, he thought, how very soft. Like an upholstered chair. So comfortable.
He knew it wasn’t. He’d been in too many pirogues—they were rough uncomfortable little shells that danced on the surface of the water.
All the money my grandfather’s made—he squinted straight up at the moon, as if expecting an answer—and we only have a pirogue, like any dirt-poor Cajun. War took the other boats, gone to the Coast Guard. At least we should have a new pirogue, or a skiff. With all that money …
And what was money like? When he was little, he’d thought of it as piles and piles of dollar bills locked in a closet somewhere. My father married my mother to get the key to the closet, and my grandfather likes my father better than my mother. … I wonder what he thinks of me. Not much. Not enough to come see.
A school of minnows broke water directly beneath him, flashing silver specks that fled the invisible pursuer, and vanished with hardly a shadow of ripples left behind.
He counted stars: four, five, and three more over there, where the Dipper was so low—it must be late. Light comes slow this time of year. Past the middle of October. Now comes Thanksgiving and Christmas and days that are shorter still. I haven’t seen dawn once, not this summer. I’ll wait for it this morning. …
He looked back at the house. Wide and tall and gray against a blue night sky. His mother’s light was on. And the one in the hall. She’d missed him already.
He let himself down the ladder and into the pirogue. It shuddered and bounced on the water, but he steadied it, sat down carefully in the proper spot, and released the mooring line.
His mother would look for him in the gardens first, then along the road to town. She wouldn’t think about the beach until the very last. He had plenty of time.
He dug the paddle in the water, uncertainly. After a few tries he remembered how to do it, remembered all the things he had been taught.
He paddled straight out on the smooth windless Gulf. He rested frequently, the pain in his wrists was beginning again, but he kept on, he had a plan. When he had gone far enough to be safe, when he could no longer be seen easily from shore, then he would turn toward the west: the current, he remembered, went that way, and he would drift to that little town—what was it called? Longport, or some such name—and when he got there he would see what to do.
But his wrists hurt too much. He had to stop. He dropped his paddle into the bottom, into the pool of water there. He rested his aching wrists on both gunwales as he lowered himself to the bottom of the pirogue. The water that sloshed along his back felt warm and comfortable. He floated secure, contained in his shallow cradle. When, lifting his head unsteadily, he peered over the side, there was still no sign of lightening in the sky. The moon had set, leaving only star-flecked black overhead. On all sides the Gulf gleamed dully, turning back the starlight in an even glowing sheen. He lay back, carrying with him the image of what he had seen. A smooth clean satin expanse, soft and white and inviting. Like a bed, like an endless bed. He tried to lift his head again to look but found he lacked the strength for that. Without thinking, he turned on his side and spreading his pain-torn arms he rolled softly and gently into the endless spread.
AT THE MEMORIAL SERVICE in Metairie Cemetery there were three priests and the Archbishop and a dozen altar boys. Incense hung like fog at the new red marble tomb, wrapped its white fingers around the crouching grieving angels at each of the four corners. But only Anthony’s name was there, chiseled in foot-high letters. For, in spite of their searching, in spite of the rewards his grandfather offered, Anthony eluded them all. He stayed in the bed he had chosen.
ANTHONY WAS GONE, HE’D walked away. He’d slipped from his room, he’d crept down the stairs, he’d fled across the gardens to the barrier ocean. His highway.
He’d even kept the pirogue hidden from them, those hundreds of searchers who prodded among the marsh grasses, who searched the Gulf from low-flying planes and fishing boats. Why did Anthony keep the boat; where was he going that he would need an old pirogue? Where was he going?
She’d run screaming all over the house, up and down the hills and gardens, across the pastures. She’d sent her servants in every car to look along all the roads. While she herself stood on the porch, huddled in the shadow, hands clasping her face as if it would shatter, and watched the sun rise. …
She’d never thought to look at the beach. … She’d known him that little. She’d been that wrong.
Time and process were reversed. Anthony dwindled, curling into a fetus, slipped back into her womb; retreated into initial parts of ovum and sperm; and still further, into the nothing that he was before the
ir mating. His ultimate concealment.
He was gone.
She accepted that hurt with the dumb stoicism of exhaustion. She did not pray for the recovery of his body. Her father did, her sister did: they set whole convents of nuns praying for Anthony’s return.
Anna saw only a poster tacked on the gates of heaven: “Wanted, Dead or Alive.”
Endless prayers, prayers rolling out like an enormous carpet, to lead Anthony to heaven.
And where was he? Slipped away.
The prayers would find him, the prayers would bring him back. Like filings to a magnet. He would be drawn from his hiding place, to the bosom of his family, to the right hand of God. …
Only Anthony was even trickier, more devious, more cunning in his concealment.
WITH THE infected ant bites, her fever shot to dizzy heights. She plastered herself with wet soda, and then poultices made of seven greens, the way Negroes did.
Anthony, come back.
Now, even now, a week later, walk out of the Gulf, walk on the water, hair shining blue black, my face surrounding your eyes, my skin across your bones. …
Anthony, come out of hiding, back in the reeds, among the white underwater stems, bubbles and drift and bright fish eyes, all the soft shell-less things like you. Hide-and-seek, catch me if you can. But the game’s over. It’s time to come in now; it’s time to come home.
SHE SAW masses of candles, banks of candles, rising like hills in thin air, where she knew no candles were. Triangles of lights, floating. She shook her head to dispel the sight, to shake it to pieces, to send it away. Secure in their own unhurried order, one by one, relentlessly, the candles went out, leaving behind the blank black-red glass cups that had held them.
She heard a bell where no bell could possibly be. Four or five times a day, sunlight and dark, she saw it outside the window, swaying back and forth, suspended by nothing, swinging free in the air. Not the peal of a wedding. Not the ordered threes of the Angelus. Not the flat funeral clang. A rhythm all its own, broken, hesitant, sometimes a single stroke as if the clapper Were hitting one side of the bell only. …
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