And and … and and. Where had that come in before? He could picture the wink, the “etcetera, etcetera.”
What he found last, before drawing the curtains shut again to allow the room to settle back into its former reddish darkness, was a letter, its hand spindly and wiry, with great crests and flourishes, its lines as errant as Krieger-Corless’s (or whoever’s):
Dere mister Owen,
This heres a kinda tempt to let you no me & Maddy are ok & how she sometimes miss you & the family something bad. We come here where I got work working for a nice gal still pore but we are doan ok. I spose theres awways goan be some bad blood over what happen afore but someday I hope things can be better for Maddy sake. Pleese rite if you want. (Maddy dont know I sent this)
Henry Work
And may God Bless
There was no stamp on the envelope, marked Postage Due, and the letter was dated the year before. The return address was in New York.
It was as if the tantalus had taken on lungs, a throat and voice, the way it called him …
4.
THE FAMILY PLOT was not contiguous with what remained of the land that surrounded Berkeley house. Until the end of the last century one made one’s way from the house to the little walled cemetery by any number of paths or the carriage road that ran to the northernmost end of the property. When at last the acreage that surrounded this plot was sold it was agreed in the terms of sale the Berkeleys would retain ownership of this piece of land and have an easement to it by the bridle path that ran along the river until it veered inland and up past the cemetery’s gate.
Since then, in the 1920s, the land that separated the plot from Berkeley house had been sold, resold, and resold. Roads began to cross the subdivided hills in a pattern like a trestlework bridge fallen into a gorge. What had once been Berkeley farm, and after, O’Donnell farm, was reduced to a stitchwork of houses, streets and a small, already run-down shopping mall. One of these streets, Case Hill Road, soon enough ran within a dozen yards of where the remains of Theophilus and Susanna Berkeley rested undisturbed for nearly two hundred years. From time to time the developers who owned the parcel of land along Case Hill Road—and who had been able to build and sell houses across the street but not adjacent to the ivy-covered walls of the graveyard—approached the Berkeleys with offers to buy. Hats in hands they appeared at the front porch, a real estate broker anxious to pay double its appraised value, a licensed gravedigger prepared to disinter generations of bones at the former’s expense (“—after about thirty years? Well with all respect, in a climate like ours? frankly speaking? all gone to dust down there anyways, box, the whole kit and caboodle”), the minister who would clear his throat in discomfort, invoke in a raw whisper words like deconsecration service, municipal cemetery, right and proper. None of them would have expected what came from grandma’s lips: “All dust? Well, the earth is greedy but not so greedy as the men that walk it.” Once, the city council attempted to sue the Berkeleys to give up the small gore, but as it turned out there was no legal way to make them sell. The law provided that all surviving heirs of those buried within the precincts of the plot sign a release allowing for their ancestors to be reburied. This no Berkeley would ever do.
When Jonathan and Alma emerged from the shadowy bridle path there were no neighbors stirring. A Saturday morning. The grinding drone of a leaf blower somewhere, unseen behind brick and glass, picket and chain-link fence, shrubbery, blocks of the neighborhood street. At the edges of Case Hill Road, viewed from the primitive tangle of trees and weeds, Jonathan felt he was standing at the brink of an alien world. The two-story, clapboard houses in a tidy, close-set row each with its porch, each with its glimmering storm windows put up more or less simultaneously—and all this year prematurely—differentiated ostensibly by shades of paint (white, peach, pale green, forest green) and modest landscaping: trellises, there a sickly stick of maple held firmly in place by a metal brace and three cords tied about its trunk and staked. In the driveway of one house were five cars, two tireless and up on cinder blocks, one a shell of rust covered in melting dew.
“God,” he said. “When did they build all this?”
Alma walked around to the length of wall facing away from the street. She pushed open the iron gate that gave into the yard.
Jonathan followed her into the enclosure. It was darker here, owing to the overhanging branches of the willows. He tried to imagine his mother’s body there, under the brown clay; he wondered which way her head was pointed. His brother William’s place was buried under the rubbery black of a trash bag, formless heap itself covered in the leaves which rain had transformed into a mucky rug. “Poor Red—”
Alma came up behind him, wedged her hands between his arms at his sides and embraced him. She mumbled into his back, into his shirt, between his shoulder blades.
“Look at this fucking mess.”
Headstones lay akimbo in the high pale grass. Some had tottered over forward or backward, several seemed to have sunk to the side. The stone chapel, built into an angle where the walls joined, was in ruins. Its slate roof had caved in, the wooden crossbeams having rotted through. Broken bottles (beer, sour gherkins, juice, tomato catsup), paper sacks with garbage spilling like a cornucopia’s fruit from top and torn sides, cans, a tattered kite were scattered. Jetsam? wondered Jonathan, from vandals or the anonymous neighbor, his sense of decorum slackened after a multitude of pink squirrels, daiquiris, grasshoppers, white-wine spritzers at a cocktail party, moved not to foxtrot with his hostess on an autumn night but to demonstrate his offended sense of dignity at having to live with a burial ground within view of his kitchen window. “Look at all this. Like it’s the city dump, the bastards.”
Jonathan came back that afternoon and in (modest) defiance parked the car on the street across from the plot. Dill, who came with him, helped set the gravestones right again, collect garbage into a burlap sack, scythe and rake away the knee-high grass. The slate shingles of the chapel they stacked at the end of the yard, and when they finished looped a heavy chain through the wrought-iron grillwork of the gate and around the supporting bar at the frame in the wall and joined ends together with a padlock bought at the hardware store in the (“stinking disgusting wasteland of a”) mall. In a lane off the main road there was a tavern, a beat-down, friendly affair which Jonathan took to be a remnant of the pre-mall, predevelopment days with truck drivers and locals in bib overalls sitting along the varnished bar on tall stools, and Jonathan stood Dill a drink. They would be late for dinner.
“What kind of name is Dill?” he asked, and listened to a story of the anise seeds stolen from his mother’s spice rack and sucked on like candy, handfuls of dill seed—“stimulant and carminative,” his mother once said, exotically, from the rolling universe of her rocking chair—under shade trees, until he became sick with hiccuping and crazy as tensely strung wires in an electric storm. After a second drink Jonathan was drawn enough to Alma’s fiancé’s good temper that he almost broached the topic of Owen’s insanity, but held back in deference to a lingering propriety—that, and a cloud called “family” which his brother Red had appreciated, had honored, as had his grandfather, and those that lay in the cemetery, but which to Jonathan seemed always thinner, wispier, insubstantial. What bothered him the most was that he began to see that this trait had come from Owen, if anyone—Owen, whom Jonathan wished to resemble less than he did any other man on earth. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mottled mirror that ran the length of the bar and listened to Dill.
Tell me about Red, was what Dill was asking. Hadn’t Alma filled him in about any of them?
Red happened to be born in Virginia, Charlottesville, when his mother, Sophie, away from her young husband for the first time and for all purposes the last, had gone there to visit her father. He was premature, a seven-monther, and mother and child returned to Berkeley house in the great, round Plymouth which Owen had driven down to get them. William Hurley Manfred Theophilus Berkeley—names culled from the
family tree as if against the prospect no other child would ever come to redeem and embody them. A masculation, a paying the piper in advance. Jonathan bestowed on William the nickname Red not for carrot-colored hair or an Irish complexion, neither of which he had, but for the only syllable in his hyperbolical name he could as a child pronounce.
“William Hurley Manfred Theophilus Berkeley, but even more, add to that Private 1st Class, didn’t you notice back there? Born August 7th 1948 Died December 6th 1967 In Valor Pro Patria?”
“Vietnam?”
“Bien Hoa,” he answered more emphatic, coming awake. “Bien Hoa Province in the south, Company A, 4th Battalion, 12th Infantry, 199th Light Infantry Brigade, they ran into a battalion-sized force and, I don’t know what happened really, he was shot. Died in the field. This priest sent Alma his helmet.”
That evening they deliberately got drunk, outside in the draft that stirred from the river uphill. The Milky Way shone like an erased cloud. Jonathan said he wished he could remember names of the constellations. He and Red as children had carried their father’s telescope out to the edge of broom-sage fields behind their house on summer nights and picked out Orion and Canis Major with its bright dog star. Air so weighted with honeysuckle it made them dizzy, they watched for shooting stars, counted aloud in unison “one one thousand! two one thousand!” or on a particularly clear night they spotted satellites, Russian or American, as the race to space was underway, cutting slowly across the sky. How their mother approved. She didn’t know about Red bringing the stolen cigarettes. Nor how britches down they would masturbate together. Once Red beat off Jonathan, who listened to his brother panting behind him, listened half in horror half disdainful, with what wits he had left to him as his brother’s hand coaxed “Mr. Cucumber” and Red’s own penis filled, stood insistent and awkward along the small of his back. It was everything Jonathan could manage not to pull free, pivot, slap at his brother’s mouth. That business he would never let happen again; dutiful, he came in Red’s tightening fingers. But the stars, the stars … they hacked on dried-out cigarettes and stargazed. Now it was all he could do to pick out the Dippers (which he recalled his father called “Chas’ Wain”) and the North Star at the end of the Little Dipper’s extravagant handle.
“How easy everything’s just forgotten, just like that. Alma, do you still have Red’s helmet?”
“You didn’t see when you were over at the gore?”
“See what?”
“The helmet, I put it there, a long time ago, it’s on a ledge there. I planted flowers in it, some perennials.”
“What the fuck did you do that for?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Well, it’s not my fault, so don’t blame me, but it was rusted through. It looked like an old chamber pot.”
“What are you saying?”
“I chucked it, I thought it was garbage, so I threw it out. You couldn’t even tell what it was.”
“You threw it away?”
Jonathan hadn’t intended to raise his voice so much; what Alma cried back at him he could have predicted was coming: “Since when do you care about it so much? You act like I did it on purpose, but you never cared about it one way or the other.”
“Alma.”
“Leave me alone.” Alma ran inside, she stood in the foyer holding her tears back, not breathing, listening for sounds upstairs that might tell whether or not her father had heard them argue. It was silent. Out of Dill’s view she composed herself by staring into the hall mirror. She went upstairs. She would change sheets. The light bulb in the bedroom was burnt out. Because she knew the room by heart she was able to strip the bed and remake it with fresh linen. The room she could dust and sweep in the morning. Pulling the case over the heavy pillow, at the smell of the fresh linen she began to weep. She walked to the window; she could hear Dill’s footsteps coming up the stairs after her. Something was stirring below. It was her brother, bottle clutched at his side; he was walking down toward the field at the foot of the long terrace. He was humming to himself. He was hunched over, and seemed like a man crippled by age struggling to make his way forward with each step. Once he reached the dark field, far out of Alma’s sight, he fell forward unceremoniously to his knees on the soft dry ground and rolled over onto his hip. “Whasza news up there Red-boy,” he made a puttering sound, faintly, took a drink of bourbon, coughed, set the bottle at his side, burying its bottom slightly in the soil. He lay back flat and gazed at the sky of stars. They jumped, jerky; smoothly skated all with luminescent tails like a coliseum of candle-bearers turned upside down. For a moment the whole flat dome of sky was white. Jupiter burned like an irregular point pricked by a pin or by the tip of a pen in black construction paper.
Owen heard none of this. He busied himself in the offices. There was a letter which he wanted to draft. It was too late to prevent them from coming, and anyway he wanted them to come. Nevertheless he would write them about several details in the first history of It that continued to bother him, if only for his own peace of mind. For one, he had found a book in the library here which gave a much modified portrayal of the surrender of Gil González Dávila who had marched against the gentleman in question from the Olancho valley. He had checked out another book and actually read Cortés’s Fifth Letter to King Charles of Spain where he found evidence of horses swimming, horses drowning, hamstrung horses—but nothing of horses being eaten. Dogs, yes. Dogs were apparently bred and fattened and eaten. Pigs, yes. But no horses.
Cortés’s account of Francisco de Las Casas’s escape from prison in Naco, and his capturing Olid, differed also from what Owen read in the epistle from Honduras. Seems that both Las Casas and Gil González were sitting in a room in Naco one night, arguing with Olid, when Las Casas who had been trimming his fingernails with a penknife simply seized Olid by the beard and stabbed him, crying out, “We can suffer this tyrant no longer,” or something of the sort. Guards rushed about, inflicting blows, ensigns shouted, and Olid escaped amid all the confusion, only to be found a few hours later and placed under heavy guard. True to the epistle: the following morning he was sentenced to death, though a source for the events after decapitation Corless would have to provide, still.
All in all, the history of It was, it seemed, completely full of holes. Naturally, he thought to add as a postscript, any of the discrepancies these alternate histories might point up ought to have no effect on their original intentions and negotiations.
The third and final epistle reached the post office in Danlí soon after Krieger had responded to his others. Whatever might have stood behind the indiscrete sense of urgency in the timing of his communiqués (the fat man was reminded of a time when sent to an auction in New York as personal representative of His Excellency Tacho Somoza, with “buy bids” for several oils, French Impressionist, he raised his hand at the opening bid and did not lower it until the lot had been declared his own; there combined then the inebriate of power with a strange shame—abetted by silence that emanated from the small, bitter audience around him—of somehow recognizing he had poorly played the game)—whatever lay behind Berkeley’s nervousness intrigued Krieger nearly as much as it delighted the fat man.
In essence, he waived caution in favor of expediency. The esteemed Corless was instructed that the photographs and what documentation he planned to send ahead for approval need not come before—or independent of—the product in question. Having given the kaleidoscope a great deal more thought than he had when he had written his second letter, Berkeley now reasoned that no body of supporting evidence could possibly be substituted by anyone interested in empirical proofs (as was he) for genuine firsthand acquaintance with the “subject/object” in question. There was no way, in other words, to go about expediting their transaction other than to import It directly into the country. While it was understood that the buyer had to be satisfied with what he had purchased, and that if there were an invoice (there wasn’t) it would be marked On Approval, the fat man understood Berkeley
’s latest (and last) epistle to show every sign of weakening will.
Come Sunday Page 33