Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  * * * *

  The abbey where Pierce read and thought was a recent foundation; its church was a great strong Romanesque one, as simple and lasting as the hill it stood on, but not old. It reminded Pierce of the welcoming and comforting structures of stone and timbers built in the wild places by the government just a few decades before, when labor was cheap and hopes were high, the lodges and the nature centers of state parks, the riparian works and dams, places Pierce had loved to come upon as boy when his cousins and he went on travels in summer to other, more American places than the one they lived in. Like those rough but thoughtfully crafted places too were the oak pews of the abbey church, the pale flagged floors, the ironwork hinges and candle stands. In high plain niches were statues, but only the required few, the family figures of Mary and Joseph on either side of the stage where their Son's passion and transformation were daily enacted. They and all the other pictures and devotional objects were on this evening blind and obscure, wrapped for the last weeks of Lent in their purple shrouds.

  It was Compline, nine o'clock at night. In the bell tower, the bells swung and their carriages rocked, sometimes carrying the bells around in a complete circle, the circle children think they might make if they push their swings out far enough. At this hour Christ prayed in the garden, on the Mount of Olives. Around him his apostles slept and dreamed of what? If this cup may not pass away from Me except I drink it, then not My will but Thine be done. A problematic scene for trinitarians, Pierce thought. Jesus seemed to grow less sure of himself the nearer the agony came. Just a frightened human after all. What have I done.

  Pierce was not, at this night hour, in the dim blank-windowed church at prayers with the brothers. He was seated again in the confessional-like telephone cubby. When the bells ceased he lifted the handset and after a moment's pause dialed a number, not Rosalind Rasmussen's this time. He told the operator that he wanted to reverse the charges. And when the phone was lifted and answered there, he heard the operator ask, Will you accept the charges?

  "Yes. I'll accept the charges."

  "Hi,” Pierce said then.

  "Hey. It's you."

  "It's me."

  "I thought you wouldn't call. That you couldn't. Except emergencies."

  "Well."

  "It's not an emergency?"

  "No. No emergency."

  Silence. She had a way—always had—of leaving phone conversations, going silent, having nothing to say it might be, or pondering or distracted. Unafraid that her interlocutor might think she'd gone, or was mum from hostility or impatience.

  "So I had a little breakthrough,” he said at last. She didn't respond, and after a while he said, “I was wrong about it. The book. I had, well, an insight. I think. Today."

  "Good. How is it there?"

  "It's okay."

  "Just okay?"

  "I don't know if I can make it. The whole two weeks."

  "What."

  "Prayer. Bells, every three hours. At every meal we listen to tapes, about meditation. This murmuring."

  "Doesn't sound so bad."

  "I kind of dread it. I shrink from it. I may be having an allergic reaction to Catholicism. After all."

  She laughed. Pierce could hear cries and hilarity in the deep far-off, where she was.

  "Like hives,” he said. “I didn't expect it. How are the girls?"

  "Jeez, Pierce, they're great. They're so great. You know I went to the doctor yesterday..."

  "Yes and what..."

  "And he remembered back when they were toddlers and I went to him for a physical and he asked was I getting any exercise. You remember? And I said well gee no not really, and then I said well actually I do. I lift weights. Yeah. Their names are Vita and Mary."

  As though cued, Pierce heard the two children racing by, Doppler effect of their cries approaching and receding.

  "They're still up?” Pierce said. “It's like nine o'clock."

  "Courtney got them in bed but they wouldn't sleep. When I got back from work they'd just nodded off and the car woke them up. Courtney says."

  More distant happy shrieking from her world. She wasn't going to tell him more about that visit to the doctor. “How's Axel?” he asked.

  "He's okay. He misses you. When you're gone he walks around as though he's trying not to make noise, you know? And he's got this face. The Ghost Butler. Trying to help and not be there at the same time."

  "Oh gee."

  "He scares the girls. He tries so hard."

  "I'll be back soon."

  "No,” she said firmly. “You stick. No running home. You do this job. It's what we agreed. Peace and quiet for free. A ... what do they call it? Recourse? Defeat?"

  "Retreat.” A room in the Retreat House, plain meals, counseling (optional) and silence. Give whatever you feel you can. A mountaintop in the wooded hills. Perfect, he'd thought, for the job he had to do, the last hard push on Kraft's book, get it to its ending, his house a little loud and crowded, his office at school too. “I don't know. I just don't know."

  "Well."

  "Can I speak to the girls?” Condemned man asks for a little pity.

  "Um sure,” she said. “If they will."

  He heard her call out: Kids, it's Daddy. And his heart filled. He heard a confused thunder, thump of feet, and one was shouting in his ear, Vita, joke-chiding him not very intelligibly even as her sister took the phone from her and spoke carefully.

  "Daddy?"

  He could see clearly the big instrument held to her ear, her hand around it, the missing teeth in her smile.

  "Hi, girls. Yes it's me."

  "What are the monks doing, Daddy? Are they making jam?"

  "Maybe, hon, but it's kind of late. Do you want me to bring you some jam?"

  "Are they scary?"

  "Nah.” The one pictured on the labels of their proprietary jam jars sort of was, cowled and faceless, stirring his witch's brew: Pierce had showed the girls before he left. The name of their order could be a little unsettling too, it just occurred to him.

  "You said you couldn't talk."

  "I can. They can't."

  "I hope you have a nice time, Daddy."

  "Thanks, Mary."

  Vita yelling her encouragement too, from too far away.

  "Yeah, thanks to you, Vita, too. I love you both."

  Pierce's wife, whose name was called Roo, took back the phone.

  "That was nice,” he said.

  "Yeah. Now get back to work,” she said. “You wuss."

  III

  CARCER

  1

  When Pierce returned from Europe to the Faraway Hills it was March, almost a year's trip around the sun since he had first moved there from New York City. He had no home here now, though, as he had had then; no job, no car, no reason to be here instead of elsewhere. He came by bus, of course, all the way to Blackbury Jambs, where the two rivers—the Blackbury and the Shadow—meet in a Y: a fertile valley one way, a rocky tumbled woodland the other.

  Leaving his bags where he had unshipped them, at the little store where the bus stopped, he walked out River Street to the bridge over the Shadow. He passed the Blackbury Jambs Free Library, and the Donut Hole. He remembered many things. He thought that wherever he went, for however long, the places of this town and its outlying regions and its rivers would be for him a Memory Palace, or maybe a Stations of the Cross (Jesus Falls for the Third Time). But actually that wouldn't be so, it only seemed so then.

  Across the bridge, he turned down the river road toward Bluto's Automotive, as Rosie Rasmussen had instructed him to do, for Gene the manager kept a few old cars for rent cheap, Gene's Rent-a-Ride. Then in a large old and smelly but not necessarily unsafe sedan (a Firebird) he went back the way he had come and out along the roads to Littleville. All along the road forsythia was springing from what had seemed to be anonymous shaggy hedges, twiggy and snow covered when last he had seen them. No one passed him, no one came up behind. He found himself driving even more slowly than he was
wont to do, as though in a funeral procession of one. He looked around himself to see what was changed, and what was still the same; but it was (we all know it) the observer who had changed, and stayed the same.

  He reached the Winterhalter gateposts, and turned in there. Up on the rise was the big custard-colored house with its chimneys and gables, and here the road to go downward to the small model of it, servants’ quarters or guesthouse, where he had lived. His poor old car, already sunken like a beached boat in new grass. Astonishing: the green fuses of what must be a hundred, a thousand daffodils had come out before the house and over the lawn, whose existence he hadn't suspected. Never suspected. He felt he would weep. More astonishing: the door stood ajar.

  In the first hard freeze of the winter, the gimcrack jury-rigged water system that had supplied the bungalow from a well on the hill had frozen up, and Pierce had abandoned the house, draining the pipes and mopping out the toilet as best he could, carrying away what counted with him as valuables and leaving the rest; both banished and in flight. He wrote a letter to the Winterhalters in Florida, to tell them he wouldn't be watching over their house as he had promised to do, failing them as they had failed him (Pierce, it's not your damn fault, Rosie Rasmussen said).

  He pushed open the door with his fingertips, and it swung inward gently, accommodatingly. He remembered that he had dreamed of doing this once, but not what had happened next. In actuality this door had often not latched properly when he shut it behind him, and apparently hadn't even when he had shut it behind him for good. It had stood open, then, for months perhaps. He stepped within cautiously, prepared to meet a new tenant, squatter or beast.

  No one. The place smelled of cold, dust, mildew, his sadness. How could he have thought to live here, then or now.

  You remember how it was laid out: the front door opening right into a little living room; the kitchen on one side and, through an arch on the other side, a dining room that he had made into an office. A flagged and screened porch in back, yes. A bathroom, and beyond it the bedroom, the bedroom Rose Ryder had called Invisible. You went into the Invisible Bedroom through that closed door, the door that he could see from the office where he stood.

  None of the books had changed their places or disappeared, though they looked weary and bored. Piles of his papers. For a moment he couldn't think what they contained, only that he feared them. His typewriter slept on the desk, a sheet of paper still rolled within it, and he went and tapped the key that rolled it forward, just to see. And the machine, still connected, awoke and responded: the paper chucked forward two steps. There were only three words on it.

  I am going

  What had he meant to say? I am going mad. I am going to sleep. I am going to awaken. I am going home. Back. Farther. To learn better. To be brave. To lose. To die.

  No way now to know what a man of that kind, in that kind of trouble, might have been about to say or think. Unless the sentence was in fact complete.

  He tugged open a file drawer, and drew back with a shudder: in a shredded mass of his notes and facts a mouse family was living, pink infants wriggling blindly, four five six.

  He sat down on the daybed there, its clothes still disordered from the last night he had spent in this house, when he had been forbidden the wide bed in the far room. He put his hands to his face and at last wept for real.

  Love, Charis had said to him. That's just love, Pierce, real love.

  His rag-and-bone shop. What if there was nowhere for him to go from here, nothing to do but lie down with what he had done here, to her and to himself. Yeats, or his angel visitant, said that after death there comes a long time—long for some—called the Siftings, when the soul sorts through its last life on earth, sits unpicking the garment, undoing what was done in hope and error and desire.

  Ah well. He said Ah well, ah well. And he grew conscious of the approach of a car outside, and stood.

  No, she was in Indiana, or in Peru, she had said, at the work of converting Peruvians or Hoosiers to her crabbed little faith. Or she'd given it all up, gone on her way, her way dividing eternally from his.

  When he dared look out the window he saw a long gold-colored Cadillac that he recognized, just coming to a stop before his door. From it after a moment there came with some little effort a man he also knew: his landlord, Mr. Winterhalter.

  Almost before Pierce could assemble himself and select an attitude, the man was in the house, rapping his knuckles in a merely symbolic way on the open door and calling out Hello hello. Then he was standing in the office archway.

  "Well,” he said. “The return of the native."

  It was impossible: the last time Pierce had seen this man he was a shrunken wreck, hardly able to breathe, on his way south evidently for the last time. Now in a fur-collared coat and gleaming dentures he was hale, thrusting a mitt toward Pierce in a gesture that was at once conciliatory and hostile.

  Pierce took the hand, unable not to, tried to crush back as he was crushed.

  "We're just back this week,” Mr. Winterhalter said.

  "I just came to look in and,” Pierce said at the same time.

  "Yes, yes,” said Mr. Winterhalter. “So you couldn't manage here."

  "It couldn't be managed,” Pierce said, and clasped his hands behind him.

  "Now now,” said Mr. Winterhalter. “Anyway our place didn't burn down without you. All is well.” He clasped his own hands behind his back, but lifted and pointed with a grizzled chin. “We've decided not to ask you for the rent for those two months."

  "I'm leaving,” Pierce said. “I've just come in to look around, start to pack."

  "You've got a lease. It runs till next year."

  "It's impossible to live here,” Pierce said. He was afraid for a moment that he might weep again. “Impossible."

  "Now now,” Mr. Winterhalter said again, and clapped Pierce on the shoulder in a buck-up gesture he could not have made in the fall; he seemed to have added inches to his stature. He was again the man from whom Pierce had rented the place in the summer, hale then too, stumpy and barrel chested, a pistol-shaped hose nozzle in his hand.

  Rose Ryder with him then. Coming in the day to rent the house they had broken into in the night one year before, though they didn't know at that instant that it was the same house; not at that instant.

  "Impossible,” he said. “Really."

  Mr. Winterhalter had turned away and was examining the room. “You're quite the reader,” he said. “Lots of quiet here for reflection."

  "Listen,” Pierce said.

  "My brother's something of a woodworker. Maybe we can knock up some bookshelves for you."

  "No, listen.” He buttoned his coat, and picked up his bookbag, thrust some papers into it that he didn't want as though he wanted them very much, had come only for them and was now gone, out of here.

  "I'll go over the water system with you again. It was some little thing you did. Or didn't do.” What operation had he had, what pills had been given him? His burnished face glowed like a cartoon sun. “Anyway it's a long time till then. It's nice now. Days are getting longer, you notice? Warmer. Pretty soon you'll be wanting these windows open.” He unzipped his own coat. “I'm back. The winter's over."

  "I've got to go,” said Pierce.

  "Tell me you'll think about it,” Mr. Winterhalter said. “We don't want to be hasty. A lease is, as you know, a legal document.” He had stepped into the bathroom, and Pierce thought he meant to throw open the bedroom door, but instead he turned the porcelain handles of the hot and cold faucets at the sink. Water came out of them, stopped; they coughed and gagged, their tracheae trembling noisily; then more water, brownish, then clear. Mr. Winterhalter held out a hand to them and one to Pierce, grinning as though to say, Come, drink and wash, it's all right.

  * * * *

  Not thinking where he would go, wanting only to leave Littleville behind and not turn yet toward Stonykill and Arcady—where he imagined Rosie ensconced amid Boney's books and papers, awaiting him a
nd his tale—Pierce turned off and up Hopeful Hill toward the other side of the Faraways. He found himself then at the Shadowland crossroads, with nowhere to turn but back toward the Jambs or up the Shadow River road and Mount Whirligig. As though he played snakes and ladders here, or some such game without exits, only returns.

  Halfway toward the turn to The Woods he came upon the driveway of the little cabin Rose had lived in the summer before. The windows (he glimpsed as he went by; not for anything would he stop, he might have to do it all again if he did) were still covered in gray plywood, sheets he had himself put up.

  But not much farther was the road down to the Faraway Lodge. There, he thought, he could visit. And just as he came within sight of it, and of Brent Spofford's Ram parked in the lot, the car he drove expired.

  * * * *

  "So how are they doing, those two?” Val the bartender and owner asked when he'd told her of his run-in with his landlord. They stood in the sun on the Lodge's porch. Brent Spofford was examining the ancient and probably dry-rotted beams that supported the sagging roof, with an eye to giving Val a price for repairs. “I hear one's been sick."

  "The man or the wife?” Pierce asked.

  Val looked at him as though either he knew something astonishing, something that it was inconceivable she didn't know herself, or he was a complete idiot. “There's no wife,” she said. “Just the two of them."

  "The two,” Pierce said.

  "Mort, and. Mort. I forget the other brother's name.” She chucked the Kent she had smoked to the filter. “He used to be a chef, one of the big fancy places around here. I think he's the one who's not doing well."

  "No, it's the other brother,” Spofford said. “The one that's not sick is not the chef."