by Janny Wurts
But her job, as well as the tacked together appointments she called a social life, had been wrenched to a halt by Sandy's relapse. The event had impelled her to acts of insanity: to cash in her unused vacation time and leave the office in a hair-pulling rush.
Her boss's shouting troubled her yet. 'There might not be any job here for you, whenever the hell you get back!'
And her reply, as filled with female bitchiness as any chauvinist could wish, to find fault for firing her later: 'My nephew is ill, and I'm driving to New Hampshire to help my sister. If you've got a problem with that, then take my resignation in writing, sideways, down the first orifice you can reach.'
She'd slammed the office door upon a thunderstruck, stupefied silence; and although she'd stayed absent for a month and sent no word, nobody from the firm so much as phoned.
Presently on her knees in the silvery pile of Annie's living room carpet, Lynn smothered a halfway hysterical laugh. Just now the convolutions of high-pressure employment seemed a picnic, beside the daily management of young boys, and keeping tabs on one alley-bred mutt. She scrounged under the coffee table, careful not to upset the empty pizza box with its cache of stale crumbs, and stretched to rescue her sneakers. These had somehow been kicked so far underneath the sofa they were wedged against the back strut. Grunting other inexpressible frustrations in epithets over the dog, she sauntered across waxed wooden floors and expensive orientals to the doorway, still open and decorated with a wreath that had Easter eggs wired in withered sprigs of hemlock.
The decoration had stayed up, forgotten, in the crush of concerns that followed Sandy's sudden onset of infections and the ugly, inescapable diagnosis that every agonizing scientific remedy had bought little more time, and no cure.
Lynn crossed the white and green painted New England porch, squinted through light that hurt, and dissected the muddle of shade cast by a privet hedge whose wild growth reflected the absence of a husband. Though the fence wasn't torn, and the wire gate on its sagging hinges was still wrapped shut with chain, the dog's pen stood deserted. The infamous Grail had departed on another of his happy gallivants.
She sighed. Grail. What a stupid name for an ungainly mutt that loped like a roll of discarded shag carpet, propped askew on four legs. A creature nobody would have wanted, in right mind or not; but as a shambling stray towed home on a length of twine that showed signs of its salvage from the gutter, he had not been easily refused. Not when his plight had been championed by Sandy, who had sneaked outside unseen, still shaky and pale from the effects of his chemotherapy treatments. The huge eyes and gaunt face of leukemia in remission had overturned practicality, which would have been fine if the idiot dog had been content to enjoy his good fortune.
But the mongrel was friendly and brainless, and possessed by a penchant for wandering. He chewed through ropes, dug under wire fences, then progressed to other escape methods as unfathomable in their art as Houdini's. It had been grandfather Thomas who had called the creature Grail; the name stuck because of his young owner's obsession for Arthurian legend, and for the hours the whole family spent in Godforsaken searches that seemed as regular and futile as crusades.
'Do us all a service and charge in front of a delivery truck,' Lynn grumbled to the creature's absent spirit. She kicked a stone and hiked after its savage ricochet down the drive. Over the grit and sparkle of gravel left mounded by the melt of last season's snowdrifts, she rounded the hedge toward the neighbor's yard.
Charlie Mitchell still wore his bathrobe, sash and hem flapping as he ill-temperedly chased down a bread wrapper caught by the wind. The trash can stood righted amid a chewed litter of The Colonel's colored packaging. Obviously Grail had feasted and departed. Poised to beat a quick retreat, Lynn moved too late.
White hair askew and pajama cuffs grayed from the dew, Charlie pounced on the plastic. He gave a crow of triumph, swiveled around, and realized in embarrassment that his antics had been observed. Flustered by his unaccustomed burst of exercise, he called in carping irritation, 'Damned dog lit off for the woods an hour ago! Get wise and buy him a chain, can't you? It's illegal to shoot dogs out of hand in this state. Or by God, I'd have loaded my shotgun and blown the mutt to the devil.'
Lynn choked back excuses that a chain had failed already. Grail's brainless skull was narrow like a snake's, and collars slid off him like so many layers of shed skin. The chain, hacked off a foot from its swivel clip, now fastened an equally useless gate. She produced a polite apology for her sister's sake, and returned in resignation toward the house.
Inside, cut off from the gusty freshness of bursting azaleas and tulips, the rooms were sun-washed and silent. The waxed antiques and stylish hardwoods seemed too warm with life, their expensive comforts disjointed by a wider setting of tragedy. Lynn gritted her teeth unconsciously as she passed by Sandy's room, with its counterpane bedspread and clutterless floors, all too painfully neat. Unlike Tony, who slept like a hot dog in a bun, Sandy tended to rip his bedclothes off wholesale and leave them tousled in heaps. Photos of medieval castles lined the walls, as well as an old poster, lovingly framed, from a stage production of Camelot. The books and toy knights were not scattered across the rugs, nor arrayed for a charge against Saxons. They sat ranked in rows on the shelf, helms and ribboned trappings dulled by a layer of soft dust. As if Sandy's boisterous presence had been subdued, reduced already to a shadow that diminished the vibrance of his memory. Lynn pressed a hand to her mouth and hurried the length of the hallway, her track automatically bending to avoid the clutter of the younger boys' toys.
But the desk in the corner of the master bedroom offered no haven at all.
Lynn sat, elbows crackling in stacks of envelopes that showed not a curlicue of Annie's idle doodles. The mail lay as it had come, unopened, or else torn apart in fierce bursts, contents rifled for information. North sky through the casement blued the oblong, windowed cellophane; the return addresses of medical labs and oncologists, printed starkly in thermographed typefaces only preferred anymore by doctors, lawyers, and funeral homes.
Off to one side, bent-cornered and half buried, lay the unsent application for the charity that granted the wishes of terminally ill children. Only the blanks that related to Sandy's condition were filled out; the doctors' signatures meticulously collected in heavy-handed, near illegible scrawls. The last sentences, in defiant schoolboy printing, requested a visit to the Round Table of King Arthur. After that, unfilled lines stretched in rows. The memory still cut, of the aftermath, with Ann driven to the edge. 'My God, Lypn. Sandy's old enough to know that a trip to the past is impossible!'
At this desk, in this chair, Ann had sat white-faced over the pens and the papers gathered up from the kitchen table. She wept in despairing exasperation that the one wish her boy chose to long for was beyond human resource to fulfill.
Later, around the rubber-soled tread of busy nurses and the unending interruptions of hospital routine, they tried to coax Sandy to reconsider. Donated funds could send kids to Disney World, let them play with circus clowns, allow them to meet famous rock stars, or tour the set of a movie. But sending a boy back to King Arthur's court was just not a practical aspiration.
Too thin, too pale, his scrawny hand clenched on the wrist that had bruised red and purple from too close acquaintance with needles, Sandy stayed adamant. He would see Camelot, or go nowhere at all.
Lynn swore and blinked back tears. It wasn't as if they couldn't have sent the kid to a Renaissance fair, or a summertime re-creation staged by the Society for Creative Anachronism. Yet Sandy scorned the idea of a staged joust. He wanted real chivalry, and swords that drew blood, as if the savage bright danger of a legendary past could negate the horrors he endured through his illness.
'You know,' he confided to his mother, 'men got hurt in Arthur's time, and suffered wounds, and it was for a cause. Knights died for other people, Mom. I hurt, and I'll die too, but nobody will be better or get saved.'
A boy's view: more than just desire, t
hat leapt reason's restraint and became dreaming obsession. The tissue of tears and salvation for him; agony to the family he'd leave behind. Ann had pulled a tissue from her purse, blown her nose, and put the subject behind as best she could. She gave Sandy a hug and insisted it probably didn't matter anyway, as grants to bring joy to terminally ill children usually were awarded to cystic fibrosis cases. Leukemia, these days, was considered the less devastating disease.
Not Sandy's aggressive form, this was true.
Battered by platitudes that even the child could sense were meaningless, Sandy never complained. Colorless as the pillows he lay on, his features made over into an eerie, premature old age by the hair loss caused by his treatments, he had comforted his mother by pretending most diligently to forget.
Now, stung to useless fury by this fortitude, Lynn plowed aside the paper clutter that mapped a child's last month of life. She grabbed the phone and jabbed numbers fiercely.
The line rang once. Ann answered. She sounded beat to her socks.
Lynn made a failed attempt to sound cheerful. 'Still there?'
A wrung out sigh came back. 'Still there. At least he still shows breathing and a heartbeat.' A pause, as Annie roused enough to take worried notice of the time. 'Did Brian miss the bus?'
Lynn blinked faster, and felt tears trace hot lines down her cheeks. She could not, so easily, brush away the vision in her mind, of Sandy lying lost in a sea of adult-sized sheets, his wasted form diminished by the monitors and the tubes, overhanging his bed like modern-time carrion vultures awaiting his moment of death. 'Brian and Tony are at school, and fine. I called because Grail's got out.'
An interval of shared exasperation. 'That dog. He's probably picking the chicken bones out of Charlie Mitchell's trash. You'd think the old coot would spend a few bucks and buy cans with lids that fit. The ones he hangs onto are a lunch invitation to coons and every other passing animal.'
'Grail ate the trash already. Now he's run off to the woods.' The unspoken question dangled - should Lynn abandon the mutt and drive to the hospital, or embark on a cross-country bushwhack?
'You'd better find him, I suppose.' In the background, over the faintly heard tones of a nurse and a doctor conversing, Ann said, 'Just a minute.' A muffled roar as her hand smothered the receiver. She came back, tiredly resigned. 'There's little enough to do here, anyway.'
'Hang on,' said Lynn. 'I'll join you soon as I can.' She dropped the receiver in its cradle, swearing like a sailor, because at that moment she hated life. She ached from sad certainty that Ann wanted her off to find the dog because even now she held out for a miracle. Outraged motherhood would not accept that Sandy's final hour must happen soon. He would not wake up, recover, and come home; but as long as life still lingered, it was unthinkable to Ann not to have a dog waiting, to bark and lick Sandy's hands in greeting.
'Damn, damn, damn,' said Lynn, her eyes now dry to her fury, and her insides clenched in misery. 'There ought to be a law against mothers outliving their children.'
But there was no law, beyond the one outside the window, in cycles eternally unaffected. Nature wove all of spring's fabric of rebirth, in the flight of nesting barn swallows, and in the sunlight falling immutably gold over maples crowned with unfolded leaves.
Lynn shoved up from the desk, returned to the kitchen, and dug through the clutter of children's drawings and coupons for the spare ring of keys. She locked up a house made cozy for living, but that echoed empty as a tomb. She slammed the door, set the dead bolt, and crossed the back yard to the woods in a blaze of targetless anger.
For Ann, and for Sandy's memory, she'd find the blasted dog.
Grail was the sort who tore up great grouts of earth with his hind feet just after he defecated. Assuredly no tracker, Lynn nonetheless could not miss the divots chopped out of the grass and raked in showers across the patio as evidence of Grail's blithe passage. A smeared print or two remained in the mud by the swing-set; these pointed unerringly into the shade, and should have been companioned by the sneaker treads of a young boy, were it Saturday, and Sandy not mortally ill.
Lynn crossed the dried weeds that edged the sandbox. Dandelions pushed yellow heads through the stalks of last year's burdock. The woods lay beyond, and through them, well trodden by young boys, was the path that led to the fort they had built out of sticks. The birches threw out new leaves, pale lit in sunlight as doubloons. The path was strewn with the drying wings of fallen maple seeds, and snarled mats of rotted twigs. If a dog had passed, nose to ground on the scent of a possum or hot after the tails of running squirrels, no sign remained. The path dipped toward the stream, the soft, moss-grown banks speared by unfurling shoots of skunk cabbage, and ranked on drier soil, the half-spread umbrellas of May apples. Across the narrow current lay the fort. Lynn paused. Naturally the water was high at this season, last summer's stepping stones washed out or submerged.
A fallen log offered the only crossing and an exercise in balance not attempted since childhood. Hesitation over a patch of wet bark cost her a slip. Lynn splashed knee-deep in a sink-hole. One leg of her jeans, one sock, and one expensive designer sneaker became as icily sodden as her mood.
Hating Grail with fresh energy, she sat, and skinned the rest of the way across on her fanny. The far bank was reached without mishap beyond a torn pocket and sadly tattered dignity.
Longingly she mused upon clothing that was pastel and fluffy. The smell of the oil-stained anorak made her feel off, and if the staff in the office were to see her, their worship of her unflappable grooming would suffer a shock beyond salvage. Well, they could all perish of missed deadlines,
Lynn thought venomously, and she smiled as she arose and dusted off particles of bark.
Winter had not been kind to the lean-to that comprised the boys' fort. Snow load had caved in the roof. One wall sagged inward, and the wooden shield on which Sandy had sketched his make-believe coat of arms rested on the ground, weathered bare of poster paint. The unicorn lay dulled to shabby gray. A rusty can contained water, black leaves, and assorted bent nails. Beyond a snarl of moldered string and a burst cushion, a trash bin still held whittled sticks, imaginatively fleshed out as lances. Sad pennons decked the ends, cut from old pillow slips that dampness had freckled with mildew.
Nowhere, anywhere, was there sign or sound of Grail.
Lynn sighed and sat down on a boulder. She listened to the chuckle of the stream, wiggled toes that squelched in the wet sneaker, and finally undid the laces. Her hands got chilled as she wrung out her cuff and her sock. The gravel and mud ingrained in the knit she could do little about; too depressed for annoyance, she hoped the stores still carried laces to coordinate with last year's fashion colors. She shoved her wet calf to warm in a patch of sunlight, and cupped her chin in her palms.
A catbird in its plain gray squalled outrage from a maple. Lynn watched its discontent, abstracted.
How foolish to feel sloppy in jeans and no makeup on a weekday. Now adorned in mud, bits of bark, and dead leaves, her own problems seemed dwindled to insignificance. The man she'd hoped would become serious, who'd never phoned through to Ann's to inquire; the silly stresses abandoned at the office; her boss's tantrum at her leaving; all these seemed reduced, re-framed in the triteness of a sitcom.
By contrast, Ann's efforts at handling the pending loss of her boy seemed unapproachable; as pitiless and futile as a modern-day search to define the true Chalice of Christ. Everywhere one turned lay Sandy's memory; and where recollection had not trodden, new things cut the heart no less fiercely. The awareness never ceased, that this sight, or that fresh experience, could have stirred the boy to delight.
For two years, he'd had so little, between the doctors and the treatments, and the jail-like isolation necessary to shelter him from infection.
Lynn slapped her wet pants leg. Days like this, under spring sunshine with the hope ripped out from under all of them, she felt like suing Almighty God, that He would allow a little boy to be born, solely to suffer a
nguish and die. New age philosophies and spiritual metaphors simply ceased to have meaning, when Sandy had sat straight with pencil clenched in hand, demanding impossible wishes.
His own way of asking, perhaps, for something the healthy otherwise took for granted. A fit of rebellion, that life, for him, was as unreachable a dream as a quest in historical legend.
That moment, the rusty, deep-throated bay that was Grail's split the woodland stillness. Jolted to recovery of her purpose, Lynn jammed on her shoe and stood up. The sound came again, from upstream. She jogged, her wet sneaker squishing, and hoped the mutt hadn't flushed a deer. Grail might run dead crooked, his hind legs flailing crabwise a foot offset from his forepaws, but he could go on tireless for miles. As the damp sock wadded up on her heel and began instantly to chafe a new blister, Lynn determined she was not going to chase that dog one step further than her breath lasted.
That promise she broke in sixty seconds.
In the ten minutes it took to track Grail down, she raked one arm on a briar, and ruined her other sneaker in a slithering step across a pit of black mud between swamp hummocks.
The sight of Grail gave no cheer.
He was wet, had been rolling in something nameless and noisome, and his coat was screwed into wiry ringlets like an Airedale's. His butt was raised, burr-coated tail waving like a whip, and his snout was jammed to the eyeballs in the cleft of a half-rotted stump.
Lynn flagged back to a walk. 'Grail!'
The dog yiped, inhaled mold, and loosed a forceful sneeze into the stump. The beat of his tail increased tempo; beyond that, her summons was ignored.