Charlie had slumped down into a chair after she’d left the room and looked wearily at Bobby. He was breathing heavily. “I’m getting a little mean in my old age, Bobby. I’m afraid you’re going to have to learn when to stop me.”
Bobby tried to formulate a reply, trying to think of something that would make his grandfather feel better, and yet wondering if perhaps he was right—maybe he had pushed a little too hard. But a crash from the front hall interrupted him. They both leapt to their feet and raced to the front door, where they found Mrs. Irma Bledsoe sprawled on the floor, the opened letter in her hand, her pale face frozen with—what had the doctor said?—that scared look.
Bobby knelt beside her and picked up the letter. It was a Valentine, a perfect white square of fine linen paper. At the exact center was affixed a dark blotch of a heart that in the dim light of the hall seemed to change shape even as he watched, grow warped and distorted, a hateful thing, like fungus, or disease.
He dropped it as soon as he realized what it was, but it left his fingers warm and sticky. Even with his grandfather’s help and his own frantic scrubbing, it took him hours to wash away the bright color, and the smell.
Bouquet
For years Charlie Goode spent a brief period during July—two or three days at most—camped out on a particular grassy slope in the Minnimaw valley. He had no set date for this event; some vague notion that the time had arrived would simply make itself known, something about the way his skin felt in the morning, or the way the sunlight looked in late afternoon, or something peculiar about how distant voices rested in his ears. But it always took place during some part of July’s wet, heat blasted days. His grandson Bobby told Charlie he was too old for that kind of heat, and refused to go with him on these trips. Charlie never bothered to point out that his grandson had never been invited. In a way even Charlie did not understand, the occasion was a private one.
Charlie had not taken the trip the past three summers. Bouts of poor health and scholarly endeavors which simply would not wait had required too much of his time. Much to his surprise, he hadn’t even missed the annual trips. He came to believe that during those three years the need had simply not been there.
But this year he had felt compelled to go. He had lost three old friends in the preceding six months. Three old friends had died, he reminded himself. There was no point being overly polite about it at his age. Certainly death had no manners, to speak of. But still, in some ways the word “lost” was strangely appropriate. He hadn’t been by each of their bedsides at the time, although he had wanted to be. A long time ago he’d promised himself he’d be there when it happened. But Willie had died in the hospital while Charlie’s old pick-up was stalled in the driveway. Tom fell out of his boat fishing, and was dead by the time Charlie got to the emergency room. Matthew dropped down during mid-sentence, standing behind the counter at his hardware store. He hadn’t even seen their bodies until John Abrams, the local funeral director, was done with them. By that time he wasn’t sure he even recognized them: their faces looked like bad color photographs of themselves. So it was as if his old friends had just vanished. He’d lost them somewhere along the trail.
It had been the same with his sister Ellen that Christmas morning. He’d grabbed her hand and leaned over the bed to stare into her eyes, but the life had already fled, was wandering some darkened field somewhere. Lost.
Only his wife had looked herself. Years ago. But he had been with her. Alice had awakened once again with the pain. She had pulled him to her in the bed, and he had seen the life leaving her smile. He had held her a very long time, then, and still it amazed him how long the spring smell of her hair had stayed with him, the sweet fragrance of her flesh, the lilac smell of her cheeks and breasts. But years of southern winds and hot wet summers had dissipated the smells, rubbed her bouquet out of the fibers of those old clothes of hers he’d kept, out of the furniture and walls of the house they’d shared so many years. Her flesh became a thin paper memory, dry and without scent.
He had never cried over the deaths of his sister and his wife, nor had he cried over the recent deaths of his friends. He wouldn’t have thought it possible if he’d heard it of someone else, to feel so much pain and yet not to weep. To be torn so badly and yet not to bleed. For years it seemed his emotions had suffered from a terrible aridity. It was not that he had been brought up not to cry; it was simply that the tears had made themselves inaccessible when he needed them. They had hidden like deep moisture in the grain of the stone, pressured into invisibility. His thin old body had long seemed too dry for tears, as desperate as he was for them.
After the recent deaths of his friends, and the sharp return of those dreams of Ellen’s death, his wife’s death, those dreams of all the deaths to come, he began to awaken more and more often with the touch of dust in his mouth, the morning sounding odd, his clothes like sandpaper against his skin, breakfast and dinner tasting like metal and ash on his tongue. He knew that all this had something to do with his need again to perch himself on the upper slope of that valley, but he could not even venture a guess as to why.
He’d carried one of the lawn chairs up from the basement, wiped it off, and it was on that suburban throne he was perched now, his small army surplus tent pitched behind him. He could smell the old canvas cooking under the sun. From his chair he could survey this landscape where three towns had died.
He examined this land, not as an amateur archaeologist, nor as an antiquarian, although he could not deny old habits from guiding his eyes. He could not help but notice the vague traces of walls beneath the grassy mounds, the scattered areas discolored, betraying the presence of foreign debris. There were sections of the distant slopes where the land had fallen in, to fill up the cavity of some house whose roof and floors were gone. Up close these vague depressions were almost undetectable—you could climb right over them without even noticing—but from his seat a mile across the valley the signs were unmistakable.
As the sun rose higher towards noon, occasional bits of metal—battered coffee pot lids, stove-pipe shrapnel, buckles and cutlery and old tin toys—made their presence known with a momentary stab of white light, intermittent signals from those lost so long ago. He’d been offered the job of excavating those buried towns several times over the years: by family members, landowners, or just curious folk who should have known better. Such diggings could have been easily done, and certainly there was a wealth of objects to be found. But the very idea had appalled him: this was no ancient tomb they’d be robbing, but twenty-year-old graves of neighbors, relatives, and friends. The monument erected at the mouth of the valley said as much: The Towns of Jenson, Reynolds, and White Snake Lost To Earthquake, Flood, and Fire. Only Two Dozen Souls Survived. Below these words were chiseled the tiny names of the dead.
Charlie sat up in his lawn chair long after the sun had dropped behind the distant ridges. He began to feel the first fingers of cold creeping under his arms, brushing away the warmth in his skin. He could feel the night air pooling in his ears, swirling into his head, dragging with it the echoing roar of earth suddenly giving way, cook stoves tilting, whining, and spewing fire out onto tinder-dry plank walls and floorboards, a gigantic wall of water rushing out of a broken creek bed to grind and mix and erase.
Later they said those towns should never have been built on such unsteady ground. After the fact, everyone else had known something terrible was going to happen someday. No one made the mistake of building there again; even if they’d wanted to, the locals would never have permitted it.
For a moment Charlie tried to recapture the aromas, the myriad lost smells of three lost towns: aftershaves and perfumes and hot cooking oil and old congealed greases and lavender and pipe smokes and glues, leathers, soaps. The sour smell of old breath and the bright smell of children’s sun-warmed hair. Beer and sugars and cleansers and floor wax and rising dough. For just a moment he thought he could actually smell the rich bouquet—a mix that included the lilac smell of his lo
ng dead wife—seeping out of the pores of the mountain’s flanks.
Before the earth in his memory came crashing down again, filling all these sweet living smells with dust.
The moon fell into the clouds and a thicker darkness gradually crept up the slope and enveloped him. And still he sat up.
Very little had grown on these slopes since the calamity. People around the valley ascribed this to all manner of curses but Charlie knew it could easily be explained by the terrible disruption of native soils. Although he personally would never choose to attribute such a cause. Banal facts seemed to have no place here. Still, here and there plants clung stubbornly to the rough contours of scree, tall and scrawny blue-green things with hard buds but no flowers. Some sort of weed with travelling roots, he supposed. A few small trees, warped and bent fantastically. Malnourished patches of thin grass. Irregular blotches of some nameless green vegetation timid and low against the debris.
Charlie Goode had spent years contemplating the fragility, the transience, the mysterious nature of human flesh. It appalled him that the fate of such wonderful and startling personalities as he had met over the years depended so much on the vitality of this stuff he could never quite believe was completely solid. Although he’d never cared much for accounts of “scientific” ghost chasing—they seemed to miss the emotional, human side of our anxiety over death—the idea of ectoplasm fascinated him. This ectoplasm matched his perceptions exactly as to the true essence of flesh: something always on the verge of losing its shape, of transforming into dream, of discorporating into memory. Human flesh could be a truly awful thing. At its worst it was decay and foul gases and an emptiness that drained part of the life from those who were forced to look upon it. It was the living death that trapped brilliant and caring souls.
But at its best it was soft, unfolding tissues, eyes and lips budding, blossoming, a form for those same brilliant and caring souls to embrace.
He’d been obsessed with memory so long, those brilliant souls lost to us and the ancient, decaying objects they’d left behind. And still he did not know where his wife had gone. He did not know what place to go to tell her once again how much he still loved her.
In the vague night breezes there were no smells, not even green ones.
Charlie Goode leaned forward in his ridiculous lawn chair, his hands rubbing the grief out of his face. For a moment his skin tightened under his fingertips as if in protective retreat, then softened so quickly he imagined it was melting. His fingers grew wet. The damp spread to his wrists; he leaned forward and released his sobs into the night. He could feel his too solid flesh begin to soften, the form of him held so tightly for so long—in fear that if he did weep, he might lose that form completely. Muscles lost their grip. His jaw lost its clench. Below him, his tears moistened the pale dry ground.
Charlie closed his eyes and heard the wind pick up around him. Dry weeds and the skinny odd plants with their hard, closed buds beat against his ankles and knees, but still he kept his eyes closed, his breathing still. A soft hiss in the wind. A new sensation along his nose.
And suddenly there were smells issuing from ground and air, a bouquet of lavender and lilacs, sun-perfumed hair, soaps and leathers and bacon frying in the morning. Charlie opened his eyes, and then it was as if his eyes themselves were taking in the scents, apprehending the grand bouquet directly.
The hard buds had burst open, and even in the dark their blooms were of a soft and brilliant flesh. Colorful skin thin as tissue paper unfolded into a collage of myriad-shaped flowers. And although they vaguely resembled the hibiscus, peony, and roses that had once made his wife’s flower garden so wonderful, Charlie knew there was nothing like these flowers in the natural world.
Some of the blooms reminded him of bright garments: dark velvet coats and pink, lacy lingerie. Others made him think uncomfortably of bruised flesh, the damage triggering a blossoming of fluid and fiber, bright colors expressing the grim determination to repair themselves, to heal. Orange and blue and yellow injuries painted the torn and scattered petals, pale pink highlights where the life but barely hung on.
He gazed into something like a petunia, the white tissue spreading like the skin of a face stretched out almost to the point of rupture, the translucent skin beginning to scallop at the edges, pistil and stamen stretching like narrow, pale, green-edged fingers.
He gasped as the white flesh stretched out even more towards him and tore, the sound of its disintegration into dying strips almost undetectable, but strangely revolting in that it was detectable at all.
A bloom like but unlike that of a poppy began to spin and open, its center vaguely like a tiny mophead, or maybe a tiny head covered with soft, golden hair. The head exploded and its miniature blond locks disappeared into the rising night wind.
A mock-rose leaned over as if to sniff Charlie’s breath, then, as if suddenly thrilled, curled up on its stalk, lacerating itself on its own barbs.
A hard green pod of vegetable matter near his hand trembled, then was still. Clusters of plants so like bromeliads, and yet so unlike, crawled out of the stunted trees like green babies with broken backs, their heads suddenly exploding into garish color.
A clump of bright blue phlox, although he knew it was not quite phlox, raised and lowered its separate flowers as if in some nameless state of need.
Several groupings of tiny white flowers, hard and dry on tiny stalks, trembled as if electrified.
Long and slender multicolored bells bled their colors and drooped to the ground.
Large iris-like blooms undressed themselves with sudden agony, their petals tearing in the haste of their unfurling.
Painted daisy heads suddenly became so thick with color they turned completely black, absorbing the night into stems and petals.
Purse-shaped masses of color swayed and dropped as if attempting to give birth.
Charlie sat in the midst of a garden where three towns had died, transfixed where hundreds of souls had been ripped from torn and battered flesh. Souls which had sought flesh and nurturing living tears ever since. He sat and wept, rocked and wept, for his wife and sister and friends and himself, for the unfairness of it all, until he had no more tears to spend.
Then, as quickly as they had burst into activity, the myriad pseudo-blooms and impossible blossoms died, moisture escaping their bodies into invisible, foul gases, the flowers drying rapidly, shriveling into stains, ancient paint splashes, discarded threads and rags.
Again there were no smells in the vague night breeze. Charlie Goode quickly took down his tent, and in a few minutes had all his gear back into his truck. If he drove carefully enough to survive the journey down the twisting valley road, he’d be at his daughter’s house by morning, in time for breakfast, and the fulsome bouquet of sausage, bacon, and eggs. With a solid belly he’d have the energy to recount his experience to grandson Bobby, and to praise the brilliance of so many impermanent things.
The Snow People
Charlie Goode was a great believer in synchronicity. How else could he explain the fact that again and again he just happened to be where the everyday world and the spirit world rubbed up against each other, the edges flaking off and mingling there, however briefly? It wasn’t as if he actively sought out the contacts, although he was too much the gentleman to turn down someone who really wanted him to intervene. He was no scientist, despite his status of knowledgeable amateur in the field of archaeology. He was no trained parapsychologist, either, and certainly no solver of puzzles (much of the time he was unable to guess the identity of the killer even after the author had practically spelled out the name in capital letters).
He did have a curiosity about such matters, though; he cared far more about antiques, yellowed documents, or buried artefacts than anything a new and freshly packaged world had to offer. And what was a spirit but a memory unmoored from the past, now somehow travelling and acting under its own steam? But more than a curiosity, Charlie possessed an affinity for matters of the spirit. And
although he did not solve the puzzle, he had come to believe that questions of the spirit did somehow resolve themselves because of his presence there.
It was perhaps because of such synchronous forces at the end of a snow-bound week during which Charlie had brooded over the loss of nearly every friend he had ever had, and during which the irony that his obsessive concern over the past had effectively prevented him from making many new friends had become especially painful, that Jimmy Ballentine chose to return to town.
The pale and angular face with the nervous mouth was unmistakable, even when partially obscured by a faded, low-slung baseball cap. “Hi … Charlie,” the mouth twitched out.
“Jimmy Ballentine, you old heathen!” Charlie leaned forward to embrace his old friend, then knew he had said the wrong thing. The nervous mouth had pursed suddenly, as if it had bitten into something sour. Jimmy’s grandfather had been Preacher Ballentine, who had used the word “heathen” often and viciously, from what Charlie could remember. The reasons Jimmy had left town in the first place were flooding back to him. “Jimmy … I’m sorry …” But then Jimmy was hugging him, patting his back with short, nervous strokes.
Charlie’s grandson Bobby brought still another pot of tea. As he set this tray down he raised an eyebrow in Charlie’s direction. Charlie was confused at first, then realized he’d asked the boy to remind him to watch his bladder.
Charlie looked up into his grandson’s eyes and downed another cup. “I think Jimmy here could use more sugar.”
Bobby glanced over at Charlie’s old friend. “I can see that.”
Charlie looked at Jimmy and frowned. Jimmy had spilt most of his last cup on his pants leg but didn’t seem to notice. “Better bring another towel, Bobby.” Bobby sighed audibly and left the room. Charlie leaned forward. “Why’d you come back after all these years, Jimmy? If it was just to see your old friend it doesn’t seem to have done your nerves much good.”
Absent Company Page 35