by T E. D Klein
'Oh, he's not one to show it, but he's pleased, all right. He likes it when strangers come and look the place over. Reminds him that he really belongs here – that he's back where his roots are.'
'Roots?' Freirs laughed. 'You know, he mentioned something about that the first time he was showing me around. I thought he was kidding.'
Deborah shook her head. 'My husband doesn't jest. This farm's real special to him.'
'But I thought you bought the place just last winter.'
'We did – but Sarr's family owned it a long time before. They were the first to settle here.'
'You mean the Poroths built this place?'
'No, it was on his mother's side. The Troets. They're another one of Gilead's old families.'
'Yes, I remember. A group of them died in a fire.'
'And this is where they lived.'
'You mean the fire was right here? On this site?'
She nodded. 'It was a long time ago – a hundred years or more. Sarr told me about it. He says the house we're in now is the second on this spot, built on the old foundation. The first burned right down to the ground, with naught left but the chimney and this old thing.' She gestured toward the squat cast-iron stove. 'I forget how many people died. Six or seven, I think. Mother, father, babies – the whole family.'
'Except for one,' said Freirs. 'The young boy that people think set it. Matt Geisel told me about him.'
'Well, whatever the cause, it was a tragedy.' She turned back to the dishes.
Freirs nodded, then reached for the pudding bowl. 'Must have happened at night, while they were asleep. Otherwise you'd think they could've gotten out.'
'Yes… Yes, it must have been at night.' Deborah stood at the window, gazing absently into the sunshine. It was barely noon. Freirs sat contented over dessert. Outside lay her garden, the cornfields, the barn, distant hills – familiar things, all of them, the constants of her life; yet it seemed, at the moment, that they hinted at a terrible impermanence. She turned away, busying herself with the washing, but her thoughts were on something else entirely, something madly out of place on so bright and fair a day: the image of a cold black sky and, beneath it, reddening the night for miles around, a pyramid of flame.
She heard a spoon scrape against the bowl. 'Come on, Jeremy,' she said, rousing herself. 'I want to see you finish up that pudding.'
'A real smart choice,' the man is saying. In the sunlight flooding through the open doorway, the smile lines around his mouth show as lines of fatigue. 'It's always a pleasure to deal with someone who knows what he wants.' He marks several spaces with an X and slides the forms across the battered desk. 'Now all I need from you is your John Hancock, there at the bottom of the page… Uh-huh, and there too. .. That's right, very good. Thanks a lot.' Gathering up the papers, he pushes back his chair and stands. 'Now if you'll just wait here a minute, Mr – uh, Rosebottom, I'll get these things taken care of for you right away.'
'You're very kind.'
Outside, in the lot, sunlight gleams from the silent rows of cars. A line of red plastic pennants flutters overhead. Seated by the doorway of the office, the old man hums a tuneless little song and watches the afternoon traffic speed obliviously past. He feels the building vibrate to the rumbling of the trucks and smells the gasoline fumes and the smoke from the exhausts. Here, on the outskirts of the city, the world lies locked in concrete, but bis thoughts are far away, where tiny shafts of green push through the soil and small houses sleep in the shadow of the woods.
Out there, among the farming people, the visitor will now be settled in: reading, or dozing, or engaged in some half-hearted exploration of his new surroundings. Perhaps he has already had his first discouraging taste of loneliness or boredom, unwilling as he might be to admit it. Another day should bring him around – just in time for his birthday and the delivery of the book. When the moment comes, he will be ready.
And as for the woman…
'She's all yours now, mister. Here's the ownership. Your keys are in the car.' The salesman has returned; together they start across the lot, past grill and chrome and windshields bearing scrawled white prices. On one of them the price has been erased. 'Well, here she is. You can drive her right out of here.' He pats the polished metal of the hood. 'She'll give you years of service.'
'Years?' The old man blinks distractedly.
'No question about it! G.M. built these things to last. You can't go wrong buying American.' The hood reverberates hollowly beneath his fist. 'Registration's in the glove compartment, along with your warranty. Like I said, any problems, you got all the coverage you need. It's good up to one year or ten thousand miles, whichever comes first.'
And what if neither comes? the old man wonders, but he is barely listening.
He is thinking of the farm, and of the woman who will visit it this weekend. Her position is much clearer than the man's, her motives quite transparent; her behavior can already be predicted – and provoked. Once a few small tasks are successfully behind her, her education can begin in earnest. She will make a willing pupil.
But there is still another visitor to come – though nobody will think of it as one. At least not till it stands revealed…
'And don't forget,' the salesman is saying, 'there's a free tank of gas waiting for you, right over there at the pump.' He holds open the door. 'Take it from me, mister, you got yourself a lot of car for your money. She'd make it clear around the world.'
The Old One smiles. 'Oh, she won't be going quite that far. Just to New Jersey and back.'
Book Three: The Call
12. CALLING IN THE DHOL.
Only the player holding the Book may call in the Dhol, and only at the designated time.
Instructions to the Dynnod
July Second
The heat in the little Chevy had grown oppressive, but rolling down the window meant she couldn't listen to the radio. No matter, she'd had her fill of Honda ads and reports of what a great weekend it was going to be. Silly to get your hopes up… But maybe it would be great. Carol turned her head from side to side as she let the gusts of wind from off the highway cool her scalp; once again she found herself thanking God she'd had her hair cut short. Did men feel this cleansed, this free, all the time? The Voorhis Library back there in the city seemed like a prison on the other side of the world.
She had lost track of the time, and with it her sense of direction. She knew only that she was extremely late. Despite her intentions of starting out at ten, she had put in too many hours last night over the week's work for Rosie – papers on a certain Ozark nursery rhyme, a fertility ritual in North Africa, and something called the Mao Game, though it wasn't Chinese but Welsh – and she'd overslept this morning despite the sunlight streaming through her blinds. Rochelle, who'd been supposed to wake her, had gone out – shopping for shoes, she'd said, returning just as Carol left – and obtaining the car from the uptown lot where Rosie kept it had taken the better part of an hour. It had been almost one by the time she'd left the city, and the last news report she'd heard had said one forty-five. Now the radio was drowned out by the wind.
On the seat beside her the reassuring bulk of Rochelle's red canvas tote bag, borrowed for the weekend, bobbed up and down with the motion of the car. Inside, pressed against her nightgown and a sweatshirt she probably wouldn't need, lay the wine Rosie had brought her – a home brew, white, in an unlabeled bottle – and a slim little package wrapped in white paper that he'd given her for Jeremy. It was a pack of cards, he'd said, 'an amusing variation on the old tarot deck.' Leave it to Rosie to think of everyone. Alongside them were the three books she was taking to the farm. Two were for herself, just in case she found the time: a dog-eared paperback of The Bell Jar and an early Teilhard de Chardin, copiously underlined by the fellow novitiate from whom she'd borrowed it long ago. The third book – the Machen – was for Jeremy, and bore special instructions from Rosie. 'Now for heaven's sake don't just hand it to him when you get there,' he had told her, old eyes twin
kling. 'Save it for Saturday night. It's the sort of tale you've got to read at bedtime; otherwise it simply doesn't workV
One thing about Rosie, he sure took his literature seriously.
Freirs sat in a deck chair on the lawn outside his building, squinting in the glimmering sunlight and heat, attempting to concentrate on his book while brushing away two small flies that kept buzzing around his head. He would have been glad to move back inside to the cool shadows of his room, but he was hoping to work up a last-minute sun tan before Carol arrived. He wished that despite Deborah's good cooking he'd made more of an effort to diet during the past week, but at least he'd forced himself to take a few minutes' jog along the road this morning (followed by a long soak in the tub) and afterward had made a real attempt to brighten up his room; there were clean sheets on the bed, a poster of Resnais's Providence tacked to the wall, and a vase of fresh-cut roses from the bushes beside the house. His books and papers were in order. He had even trimmed the ivy vines that surrounded his windows.
The day was at its hottest now, the heat soporific, and, despite the persistence of the flies, it took some effort of will simply to remain awake. He was beginning to feel slightly guilty, sitting there reading, daydreaming, drowsing, shifting position only to unstick his perspiring skin from the back of the chair, all in plain sight of Sarr and Deborah laboring in the nearby field to the beat of some monotonous little chant. It was clearly hard work – a lot harder than turning the pages of a novel, and a hell of a lot more boring. But he made no move to help them, nor did he retreat inside. Whatever they may think of me, he told himself, I'm paying good money for this reading time and I'm damned well entitled to enjoy it.
He was, in fact, enjoying it. The Monk, the Gothic he was immersed in, was proving far more lively than the others he'd read -and, as he'd been pleased to discover, unrelievedly dirty-minded, even by modern standards. He could imagine the sensation it must have caused back in the eighteenth century.
But he was growing impatient and uneasy. Where was Carol? What could be keeping her? She had told him she'd be there by noon, and it was already a quarter past two. Maybe something had come up and she'd had to bow out of the weekend. For once he wished the Poroths had a phone; it was frustrating to have to rely on the mail. He had left a forwarding address with the post office back in New York, but so far he'd received nothing except Carol's letter, addressed directly to the farm, and a few birthday cards, hollowly cheerful things congratulating him on entering his fourth decade, a doom which in fact would befall him tomorrow. He had carefully hidden the cards away in the top drawer of the bureau, deep among his notebooks and his stationery, so as not to be reminded of the day. He wondered if tomorrow's mail would bring a card"from Laura or his ex-wife. He rather hoped it would not.
God, could it really be tomorrow? How had it come so soon? He felt like Doctor Faustus, with his one bare hour to live. Of course, turning twenty had been even worse; it had seemed so tragic, somehow, to kiss his teenage years goodbye, with all their arrogance and special privileges, that sense of glorious future possibilities…
He felt the book fall shut. His head was growing heavy; his mind was slowing down. He was dozing off again, drifting back into a purple world where dreams and half-dreams mingled, heated by the sunlight that flamed against his eyelids. Carol sat nearby, stretching her arms in the warmth. With a languorous movement she rolled toward him, mashing her hips against the back of bis hand, and instantly he knew that she was naked beneath her skirt; he could almost feel a wisp of hair against his fingertips. But the hair, he saw now, was not Carol's, it was Deborah's, thick and dark as fur, and at his touch she rose and stood before him with Deborah's full hips, Deborah's full breasts. He saw her glaring down at him, saw her mouth fall open as if she were about to speak, and suddenly the place his fingers touched was wet.
He awoke with a gasp. The Poroths' old charcoal cat, Rebekah, was pacing back and forth in the grass beside his chair, butting her head softly against his outstretched hand and looking up at him. As he watched, her pink tongue darted out to lick his fingertips.
Backs aching from the hours spent stooped over the furrowed ground beneath the burning sky, Sarr and Deborah were planting pumpkin seed between the bare rows where soon tiny corn sprouts would dot the field. Less than fifty yards away their visitor sat nodding over his reading, brushing sporadically at some invisible flying insect. From time to time Deborah would look toward him and smile, but her husband only shook his head and kept his gaze upon the ground.
Whenever the mood struck them, they would sing one of their planting songs – a different song this time, simpler, more in keeping with the present task:
'One for the blackbird,
One for the crow,
One for the cutworm,
And three to grow.'
Suddenly Deborah paused in the singing and poked her husband in the ribs. 'Look,' she said, lowering her voice and grinning. 'Look at him.'
Over by the outbuilding Freirs had dozed off again. The book lay open on his lap, the pages turning slowly backward.
Sarr frowned and looked away. He could usually convince himself he loved this labor – hellfire, he really did! – but it was harder with Freirs so near and so disconcertingly idle. In truth, he would much rather have been asleep right now himself, or at least lying up in the little bedroom on the cool sheets, while Deborah, in the kitchen, made him something cold to drink. Then she would come upstairs to him with two tall glasses on a tray, the ice cubes clinking as she walked, the long dress swishing softly around her legs… He shook his head to clear it of this vision and stomped some dirt over a clump of seeds with the heel of his boot.
'Wouldn't be surprised if he got twenty hours of sleep a day!'
Deborah smiled. 'Now, honey, that's not fair. You know how late he stays up every night, and I've seen him up real early in the morning, doing his exercises. He didn't see me looking.'
Sarr snorted derisively. 'Exercises! That's a laugh! And then he spends all morning soaking in the tub – as if he's even worked up a sweat! Let me tell you, if he really wanted to build some strength he'd be out here helping us. Lord knows there's plenty of work to be done.' Laying a line of seeds along the furrow and pressing each into the earth, he straightened up and rubbed his back. 'I'll give him all the muscles he wants. I'll bet he's never done a day's work in his life. Not real work, like this.'
He noticed that his wife was making a face at him. 'What's so funny?' he demanded.
'You are,' she said, nudging him with her hip. 'You act like you've been doing this ever since you were a little boy. You forget who you're talking to! I've seen where you grew up, and the nearest you ever got to a field was that playground out behind the school. I remember you at college, only a few years ago. You didn't have a callus on your hand! In fact, I remember now, that's just what I liked about you. You had the softest hands I'd ever seen.'
He had to laugh. She really took him out of himself, this woman. She was good for him. 'Lord's my witness,' he said, 'any hands would seem soft to you after some of the clodhoppers you took up with. I was probably the first man you ever saw who didn't have dirt all over his face and manure on his shoes!'
Playfully she tossed a lump of dirt at him. 'Well, you sure do now, mister!'
He reached for her and would have thrown her down beneath him, as he knew she expected him to, but at that moment a small cloud drifted across the sun and shadows darkened the field. His smile faded abruptly; he drew away his hand. 'There'll be time for this later,' he said. 'Right now we've work to do.' He bent back to the rows.
Responding to his mood, she pulled away. She was used to these changes in him. 'And not even much time for that,' she said. She wiped a sleeve across her sweating forehead. 'If that girl of his is coming today, I've got to get back inside soon and start dinner.'
Sarr nodded silently, busy grappling with the earth. Deborah's mention of the girl had reminded him of something that had been troubling him. He felt lik
e a fool, now, for having carried on so with her. There was something more important on his mind.
It really was a shame, Carol decided, that she wasn't going to sleep with Jeremy.
She would have liked to. And under different circumstances she might actually have done it. Surely God would have understood (though the farmer and his wife might be shocked). She'd never pretended to be a saint, she told herself; if Rochelle could sleep with all those men, it wouldn't hurt for her to sleep with one. High time she got it over with, in fact; this maidenhood of hers, this blessed virginity, was fast becoming a burden and a bore. While once it had seemed worth preserving, setting her a cut above the rest of the world, now it seemed little more than a souvenir of the convent, separating her from her friends, her own sisters, most of all from Rochelle. She was sick of being different.
But now was not the time to change. After twenty-two years of holding onto something, you didn't just give it away to the first halfway acceptable man who came along. Especially not tonight, on what amounted to their second date, in a glorified henhouse with stern, religious, disapproving strangers all around. She hoped Jeremy didn't expect anything more, and assumed he'd had enough sense to make provisions for her to spend the night inside the farmhouse.
Not that there was anything wrong with Jeremy; as soon him as anyone else. It was all very well to remind herself that, considered critically, he was not the first man she would have chosen and that her interest in him derived, in part, from that most humbling of predicaments, his being, at least for now, the only game in town. Still, the choice was more than just pragmatic. He genuinely appealed to her. He made her smile.
All this past week he'd been much on her mind. She had found herself pausing in her homeward walk down Eighth Avenue to stare expectantly at the western horizon, as if to catch a glimpse of distant marvels – in Jersey, of all places! She'd even found herself inventing entire conversations with him, conversations which, however playful or earnest, invariably ended with a mutual declaration of love. / must be crazy, she told herself for the dozenth time. Was her life really so empty that she'd fall for the first man who showed an interest in her? And did it really take so little – a drink, a cheap Italian meal, a walk home in the dark? Surely there was more to her life than that.