Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  “What’s this?” she said, pulling on his bathrobe and peering farther under the table. “Tommy! You’ve been there all this time!” Tommy’s father had come into the dining room, and Mrs. Steer said, “Mac, one of your guests is under the table. I don’t think he was invited.” She laughed and made Tommy come out. He was afraid, but he did, and he stood there in his hideous blue bathrobe with the frayed cord and looked at the carpet.

  “Emma,” his father said, “I think we’ve got a visitor here who needs to be put to bed. And he’s sober as a judge, too. He must have been drinking Scotch,” his father added. Everyone laughed, and Tommy tried to. His mother came into the room and saw him.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, astonished.

  “He’s been hiding under the table,” Mrs. Steer said.

  “I thought I saw you go to bed,” his mother said.

  “I didn’t,” said Tommy. Everyone was making a fuss over him now, his parents’ friends and his brothers and their friends, and all of them thought it was hilarious. They were all happy because of the parties and nobody seemed to mind very much what he’d done, but Tommy was very tired and he asked his mother to take him to bed. He asked her how her leg was, and she said it was fine. “But you burned it,” Tommy said. “I saw it happen.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t hurt a bit,” and his mother extended her leg, clad in its dark stocking, the silk slipper on her foot. “It’s just a little burn,” she said, patting the leg with her hand. “Nothing to worry about at all. You go ahead upstairs now. I have to speak to Rose, but I’ll be with you in a minute.” Tommy waited by the stairway. He refused to go up alone. He wished he had never come down.

  When his mother finally took him up to bed, Tommy was crying. He was overtired, his mother said. He had had too much excitement. But she was not so annoyed as she might have been. All she did was close his curtains and pull his shades. She insisted that the lights would bother him.

  There were tears in her eyes, too, Tommy thought, when she bent to kiss him and tuck the blankets around him so he’d be snug and warm in the frozen middle of the first night of the New Year. The cold heavy clips she wore in the neck of her dress brushed against him as her soft lips touched his own soft cheek. Tommy hugged his mother tightly to him. “Mommy, Mommy,” he cried, “why did you burn your leg?”

  “There, there,” she said. She sat on the edge of his bed and began to sing her familiar lullaby: “Bye baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting, Gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap my baby bunting in,” but the lullaby did not assure him. The pale light from the half-open door to the hallway radiated from behind her. It caught in the stones in her ears, in the jeweled arrow in her hair, in the two clips she wore like tiny shields on her dress, and flared in the prism of his tears like a shower of cold, infinitesimal, brilliant darts. He could not see her shadowed face.

  His mother kissed him again, and patted his chest. She sat there for a time, her hand resting lightly on him, trying to soothe him as the tears turned into sobs and were now subsiding slowly and without hope into a soft, almost silent crying, impersonal and relentless as the encroaching frost that glazed his bedroom window. Finally his mother said good night. “Sweet dreams, my dearest, my darling boy,” and left him, shutting the door tight so he wouldn’t be disturbed by the sounds from downstairs, though the dark, to Tommy, seemed more disturbing.

  When she had gone, Tommy lay awake for a long time, listening to the voices and laughter float up beneath him, feeling his tears run from the corners of his eyes, wetting his face, his pillow. Tommy didn’t know why he was crying; he just felt very sad, as sad as he had ever felt in his entire life. He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt true sadness before, but he was sure that this was it. It was a feeling so empty and alone, as though something were lost, lost forever and for all time, never to be regained. The tears welled up within him from an endless spring, and he imagined his tears filling his bed, overflowing onto the floor, washing down the stairway into the floor below, filling the living rooms, the cellar, the house, the street; and he imagined his house and all its inhabitants floating away in the flood of his tears, like Noah and his ark. The thought made him smile a little, as he drifted slowly into sleep, abandoned to his dream, which was not sweet as his mother had ordered.

  In the dream a man appeared in white shirt sleeves, his arms near his sides, his face wreathed in a luminous plume of thick white smoke that rose slowly from the cigarette he held in his beckoning hand and curled about his face, ghostlike, before it trailed off into the darkness above his head. The man stood beside Tommy’s bed, his dark eyes burning into him as Tommy lay there helpless, unable to move. The man motioned again with his hand. As if in thrall, Tommy passed through the open cellar doorway and down the steep steps, the man directly behind him, shutting the door. The cellar was dark, very dark. Its darkness absorbed like cotton wool the dull light from the bulb that hung above the great scarred block of wood where they sometimes split logs for the fireplace. Flames from the coal fire flared out from the open furnace door. There were other men in the room, shadowy figures, in the background. Tommy could see them silhouetted on the wall from the light of the flames that flashed and flickered, their shadows suddenly looming and dissolving and looming again, dancing against the blackness. The tools stood beside the furnace, ancient iron rods as tall or taller than Tommy’s father: the grappling tongs for the cinders, long pokers hooked at the end and pokers that were straight and pointed, the big axe for the firewood and the iron wedge that split it. Tommy, terror frozen in his throat, lay immobile on the block, the back of his head to the furnace door, arms tight to his chest, hands clenched beside his face, waiting for what terrible thing to happen he did not know, at the hands of a man he sometimes seemed to recognize but could not. He was choked with terror, his eyes trembling, paralyzed with fear and helpless to resist. He was going to die. If he were not to die, he had to kill, and he could not kill. He did not have the power to kill. Oh, God, why did he have to die? What had he done to deserve to die? The man, his shirt sleeves rolled up near his elbows, moved closer. Tommy could feel the light burning from his eyes, the light flashing from the furnace, bursting the shadows that flickered and vanished and appeared again. He moaned—ah, ahh—and struggled to emerge from the dream, too terrified to scream, moaning louder—ahhh, ahhhh—and opened his eyes to the blackness of his room; and then he screamed.

  In an instant Tommy’s father was standing over him. “Oh, God! Oh, God,” Tommy sobbed, his face to the wall, hands clasping his head. “Oh, God, help, help!” And his body heaved with sobs in the black night. Heaved and heaved and heaved. His father put out his hand to touch Tommy and Tommy shrank back. He did not want to be touched; he wanted to be touched. He wanted his father to hold him, to make everything all right, but he was afraid, still caught in his dream, a dream more vivid than his father’s shadowy robed presence looming above his bed.

  His father sat down on Tommy’s bed, rubbed his legs in the blanket, and tucked it tight around him. “There, there,” he said. “There, there.” His father sat with his hand on Tommy’s shoulder for a long time and told Tommy that he’d been dreaming, that it was only a dream, a bad dream but still only a dream. Everybody had bad dreams once in a while, he said. He didn’t ask what the dream was, nor could Tommy have told him or anyone else. He didn’t know. All he wanted to do was forget it. It was the first time he had dreamed it. Tommy asked his father to raise his blinds, and he did. His father returned to the bed and stroked Tommy’s legs and back—Tommy was still facing the wall, not wanting to look his father in the face—until at last and again he dozed off into a fitful sleep, and then sank into a very deep, deep sleep.

  When he awoke, the sun was shining through the east window into his room, and shining on the thick snow that coated the pines and the bare branches of the maples, weighed down the thornapple and chokecherry thicket, and transformed the contours of his familiar, visible world. It was New Year’s Day.

  That
afternoon Tommy went with his parents to Mr. Treverton’s open house. It was held every New Year’s Day, and almost everyone Tommy knew—everyone who had been at his parents’ breakfast the night before, probably everyone who had gone to the dance as well—was there along with their children. Fires blazed in Mr. Treverton’s two fireplaces, the dining-room table was filled with platters of ham and turkey and cheese, the Christmas tree lighted the big hallway, and the children drank hot chocolate and eggnogs. The adults drank hot buttered rum; it was Mr. Treverton’s custom. The smell of hot buttered rum made Tommy feel sick, but everything else was delicious.

  Mr. Treverton—all the grown-ups called him Trev—had a skating rink next to his house. Many of the adults, wrapped in their furs and overcoats, hats and gloves and scarves—Tommy’s mother, for instance, who loved to skate, and Mrs. Steer who loved it even more and was very good at it—glided around the ice in a brisk but stately rhythm, mufflers streaming behind them, under the small white lights that were strung from a pole in the center of the rink to the edges, bordering it and making a kind of pavilion of lights above the ice, against the sky. Mr. Treverton had an old sleigh with a seat, which could be pushed by two handles. The children took turns going around the rink in it, pushed by one or another of the men or by Mrs. Steer, the whole company coalescing in a kind of procession behind the child in the sleigh, the very young children carried by their parents, the children Tommy’s age skating along, ankles wobbling, supported by the hands of one or two adults, his brothers and their friends occasionally darting in and out of the line. It was, Tommy thought, beautiful to watch, as if the procession of all those lives had taken on a single life of its own.