The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Cal looked away to gaze at the line of mountains, and the layer after layer of buzzards high overhead, circling, dipping, seeing something down on the ground and shifting position, circling once again.

  MAR. 16

  1968: the My Lai Massacre takes place. As many as five hundred men, women, and children are murdered.

  They didn’t make it all the way to the county line– the sheriff was called off onto a sideroad to investigate some cattle mutilations, the sixth such incident that month. He worked on that until two in the morning, walking back and forth between the pasture and the surrounding wood. Cal held a flashlight for him.

  They spent the night in a motel and headed out early the next morning. The sheriff was offered a breakfast steak but couldn’t eat it. Cal asked him who might have done such a thing.

  “Some say it’s army intelligence. A lot of others say it’s aliens. Hell, if you ask me we don’t have to go to the military or outer space for an explanation. Lot of ordinary folks might be inclined to do something like that just for the fun of it.”

  They’d stopped for lunch. When Cal got back to the car the sheriff had a worried look on his face. “I hate to do this to you,” he said, “but we’re gonna have to make us a little detour. Then I’ll have to turn back.”

  They were several minutes down the road, lights flashing and sirens blaring, before the sheriff said anything more. “Men killing their families, it’s something I’m never gonna understand. Guess it’s gone on forever, but that don’t help it make any more sense. Guess some men look at their families as personal property, without lives of their own.”

  The coroner and the state troopers were there already, but it was the sheriff’s county so he pretty much took charge of the thing. A wife and four kids and the man’s older brother murdered in their beds. Some of the troopers were crying.

  The murderer– the sheriff kept calling him the suspect– was a man of about Cal’s age. A husband. A father. An ex-husband. An ex-father. An ordinary-looking man. The sheriff put him behind the heavy wire mesh in the back seat, his arms handcuffed behind him. Cal sat in front, but kept stealing glimpses of the prisoner. The man talked almost non-stop. The sheriff maintained a grim silence. Cal wondered if the sheriff was listening as closely as he was to the man’s monologue.

  “Your wife. Your kids. Flesh of your flesh. So much of your very skin gets out there in the world you have troubles finding home. Because there is no real home anymore when you get spread so thin. There’s only the worry. The left hand worrying about what the right hand is doing. The father worried about what the son is doing, going to do, thinking. Because children flesh they have minds of their own, separate from yours, and in those minds secrets take seed and flower. Flesh of your flesh. They hurt you but they know not what they do. They’re ignorant of the pain you feel when their smaller bodies are hurt. They’re oblivious to the anguish of knowing your children may not outlive you. They know not the sorrow of birth and separation, the terror of the womb, the woman’s womb what hides your children from you for nine months and then even years later has a hold on your children you can never have.

  “Flesh of my flesh, what is the sense of living when your children are growing up and leaving you a little each day? Where’s the joy in it when they can take your flesh away and abuse it and kill it if they like and there is nothing you can do because your flesh is their bodies?

  “What profit a man to have children when their hearts of your flesh grow indifferent to your wisdom and whatever you do you know they must resent and hate you in the end?

  “What reason should flesh dwell outside your body if it is incapable of being a comfort to you?

  “Why not kill the flesh that walks away and abandons you and is never there? It is your flesh and you must stake your claim to it. Sometimes to kill the flesh that abandons you cleanses the body of extraneous concerns. And the father who can concentrate full attention to himself is the best father indeed.

  “I pondered these questions for years until the answers were revealed unto me.”

  The sheriff dropped Cal off at a bus station in a nearby small town. He grasped Cal’s hand firmly, warmly, and wished him godspeed. This was not an insincere man.

  The murderous father was still talking as the sheriff’s patrol car pulled away.

  MAR. 17

  461: according to tradition, St. Patrick– the patron saint of Ireland– dies in Saul.

  During Cal’s first full day on the bus he had seen a rapid turnover in passengers: a troop of Brownie Scouts with their harried leader in tow, two drunks with their hands in each others’ pockets, two old women caressing and kissing the same old man, several kids with Walkmans beating time with their heads for miles, a little girl with a coathanger-shaped bruise across her forehead, several men and women with red and distant eyes, two young girls who could not let go of each others’ hands, a woman with three grocery bags full of cat food, a woman who kept picking invisible creatures off her sweater and scolding them, a man having a long and loving conversation with his dead wife, a man describing his five-year-old son to anyone who might listen as stupid and worthless while the little boy sat silently and watched, a man singing lullabyes to his triplet babies spread across his lap, a man whispering jokes to his teenaged son who laughed until he cried, a man weeping as he sat staring at children’s pictures in his wallet, and on and on until Cal grew dizzy with it and forced himself to sleep.

  When he woke up they were at a stop and an army of leprechauns dressed in bright shades of green was climbing aboard. Several had beards. They were all on the smallish side. They were all quite drunk. Finally a barrel of a leprechaun over six feet tall came aboard. As he passed Cal on his way to the back of the bus, telling his fellow leprechauns that they needed to behave themselves or they were all going to be kicked off this bus as well, Cal saw the button on his chest: Sons of Ireland, it said.

  An hour later most of the other passengers had asked to be let off in disgust. Two of the leprechauns were naked and painting themselves green. Several seats were awash in vomit. They’d gotten the bus driver so drunk he was lying in the back explaining how he wasn’t really Irish but he sure as hell felt like it today. One of the naked leprechauns swore up and down he used to drive a garbage truck so he was the current designated driver. Cal thought he was doing a pretty decent job. He just wished the man weren’t so hairy.

  A few hours later most of the leprechauns were asleep. The driver was humming sweet melodies. Cal could now see that, besides himself, there was another non-leprechaun passenger: a figure in a baggy dark coat and hood sitting across the aisle and one row back.

  Cal kept staring at the figure which did not move, which might have been asleep or dead. Then he saw the eyes burning within the darkness of the hood. The head raised– apparently the figure had noticed Cal staring– and a face began to emerge, all scarred and gnarled and hooked and awful, a forked tongue slipping between driftwood lips, and up high on the forehead, horns.

  The demon looked at Cal and spoke. Damn Irish, Damn Saint Patrick. Drove me out of the only place I ever fit in. I hate ’em! And then he laughed. Say hello to your children for me. It’s a lovely world out there. He laughed even louder. Then his face became a shadow again.

  MAR. 18

  1931: Schick Inc. markets the first electric razor.

  1937: more than 400 people, mostly children, are killed in a school gas explosion in Texas.

  1965: Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov executes the first spacewalk.

  On the bus, a young boy was shaving the beard from his father’s face with a rechargeable shaver. He did this with evident gentleness and care, touching newly bare parts of his father’s face as the shaving progressed.

  Cal thought it might bother Linda and their children that he hadn’t changed his physical appearance more. Maybe, Cal thought, he should have a beard, or some new scars, perhaps even some fingers missing to mark his time away from home. Significant departures, and certainly s
ignificant betrayals, demanded some sort of correlating physical transformation. For a brief, crazy moment, he actually imagined ramming his face through the bus window in order to effect some last minute change in appearance.

  The bus passed a small building on fire. Some sort of day-care center. Crying children were being carried out by firefighters and police officers to their hysterical parents. Cal felt his spine go soft. It was because of just such possibilities in the world that he had left his children in the first place, unable to bear the imagining of such things. And that fear certainly wasn’t gone. But he had imagined so many things since he’d left his children, so many stories, perhaps he might still bear a few more elaborate, imagined tragedies. Even if they involved his children as principle players. And of course there would still be the very real tragedies his children might, perhaps even should, experience.

  The boy shaving his father’s face was giggling now. He had created a second mouth of hair below his father’s real mouth. The father joined his son in laughter, from both his real mouth and his hair mouth.

  Cal closed his eyes, hoping sleep would bring his family closer. He imagined his children in a fire, and as he fell asleep this imagining became a dream of him leaping into the flames to join them. He grasps their hands in his and the three of them float up with the flames, float away from the earth and into a sky filled with other dreaming parents and their kids. By the time they reach the moon there are so many families they can all join hands and encircle the moon, walk back and forth hand in hand until it is a dance they are doing, waltzing in and out of one another’s dreams of danger, and safety, and the love they share in spite of it all.

  MAR. 19

  The date the swallows traditionally return to the San Juan Capistrano Mission in California.

  Somewhere on the edge of what he had known, the birds appeared near the bus, travelling with it, surrounding it, picking up speed as the bus picked up speed, beaks open and songs lost to the wind.

  It was a wonderful thing. The drowsy passengers opened their eyes, stretched, and smiled. Small children pointed and tapped the windows.

  Eventually the birds moved on, passing ahead of the bus, the dense flock a shadow that raced and preceded the passengers into each new destination.

  Finally Cal was the only one left on the bus. The driver was whistling a tune taught him by the birds. Cal rolled down his window a few inches, permitting the wake of the birds to enter and charge his every breath with anticipation.

  MAR. 20

  The Vernal Equinox. The first day of Spring.

  1727: Sir Isaac Newton dies in London.

  Once he got into the city Cal took a city bus to within a few blocks of their home. People waved to him from their yards as he passed, people he knew, smiles on their faces, as if he had never been gone. He wondered if they knew he had been gone. Maybe Linda had kept it a dirty family secret. He imagined other people watching him from behind closed curtains. He imagined phones being dialed. He imagined details being shared. The weight of all their anticipated conversations increased the gravity of the neighborhood. He noticed how some of the trees sagged with the additional pull. Here and there grass or a bed full of flowers was flattened. His shoes were like lead, his shoulder muscles tightening under the strain of the air.

  The day seemed brighter than it should, but that often happens when a long winter has just ended. The neighborhood’s colors were Kodacolor, Technicolor, primary cartoon yellows, greens, blues, and reds. The people staring at him out the windows had bright red faces, blue and yellow shirts. His head drooped with gravity.

  Jenny and Parker were standing on the bright green front lawn. They bounced a bright red ball. Jenny didn’t look like herself. She looked far too old. Behind them the house had been repainted, reroofed. A bright blue roof. Green walls. Yellow curtains. Parker and Jenny’s clothes were bright reds, greens, and blues. On the porch were stacks of boxes: all the stuff he had shipped. They appeared to be unopened. The dull brown of the boxes looked far too real for this neighborhood. He didn’t want anyone to touch those boxes. He didn’t want his children to open those boxes and let the contents escape.

  Now he saw that Parker and Jenny were looking at him. Staring. Jenny began to cry. Parker looked the angriest Cal had ever seen him as he held onto his little sister. Cal hadn’t known he was capable of such rage. Apparently he’d grown into it.

  His children said nothing. Jenny cried. Parker seethed. They both stared. The boxes waited on the porch, silent and full of danger.

  Linda came out of the house. She was so beautiful he could not breathe. She did not smile. She looked cold. He should have thought more about her. She was the most understanding, the most generous person he’d ever known. He’d almost assumed … but surely even Linda would have her limits.

  She hugged his children. She kissed his children. “Daddy’s home,” she said so softly Cal almost didn’t hear her. She did not smile.

  All the gravity in him leaked out. He felt his feet begin to leave the ground.

  MAR. 21

  1685: Johann Sebastian Bach is born in Germany.

  1871: Stanley begins his expedition to Africa to locate Livingstone.

  In the darkness after midnight, Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 played so softly in the background he could barely hear it, but he could feel it, and it was so beautiful, in this house, his home, his eyes filled with tears.

  Linda had been distant with him, but what did he expect? He was lucky she’d let him through the door. Every few minutes she’d been checking on him, and it didn’t feel like she was necessarily making sure he was still there– although that might have been part of it– but it was more like he was an invalid who couldn’t be left alone for any length of time. Maybe she thought he was a suicide risk. Maybe she wasn’t sure he was really her husband after all.

  He could hear her footsteps outside the door, coming to check up on him once again.

  “Cal, are you okay?” Linda appeared in the doorway, a soft gray shadow that would be easy to dismiss, easy to imagine as nothing. “I just want to know if you’re okay. That’s all. The way you fainted … we wanted to go help you, you know, but I didn’t know what we should do.”

  “Apparently I’m a lot better off than my kids are,” he said.

  “They’re okay. Really. You hurt them, you hurt … all of us. And you have a lot to make up for. But if you do the right things they’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  “You do it one step at a time. One word, one sentence, strings of them, reassurances every day. Touches and hugs, when they’re ready for them. I’m not saying there’s no lasting damage here. There’s always lasting damage. But we’ll manage. We’ll survive.”

  Bach filled the silence.

  “Are we going to be okay?” he asked.

  The gray shadow shifted, faded, and Cal fought down panic. He knew she was there– he’d been speaking to her– but he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t be sure, and she was so quiet.

  “I … think so. I know you.” She laughed briefly. “Well, I thought I knew you. But we have a lot to talk about.”

  “I was afraid. I was afraid of what might happen to them.”

  “You think I never noticed? I know that’s why you left. I also know you weren’t thinking much about me, were you? There wasn’t any room. I had a private detective out looking for you– I think you know that– I wanted him to bring you back. Then I changed my mind, pulled him back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you had to come back on your own. We have a lot to talk about. A lot.” She lapsed into silence. Cal thought of her listening to the same music he was listening to, how much he had missed that. “It’s okay to be scared. Even scared half to death– in fact I think that may be normal behavior for parents. But, sweetheart, it’s not okay to run away. And it’s damn hard to forgive. It’s going to take some time, for all of us, to deal with that.”

  She walked over to the stereo and tu
rned up the volume only slightly, but Cal felt himself shaking under the force of it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “How do I begin?”

  She slipped into the chair beside him. “You could start by telling them stories. They both said that’s what they’ve missed the most. The stories you told them every night, in the dark, when sleep wanted to grab them. You still have stories for them, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah.” He closed his eyes as she touched his head. “For every night. For a lifetime.” She kissed his hair and now he wept openly in relief. “Stories and stories and stories.”

  THE END