There weren't many words between the men that morning, and sometimes still less in the following days. At other intervals, they talked together quite contentedly, though briefly. For, reunited across the divide of Bill's sickbed, they had instantly found an intimacy. Bryce had known they would; it was why he had flown to Mississippi with an open return, and why he had put the ticket away, for the present, on his closet shelf.
Beyond the lowered blind and the eight glass panes of the window, a mild wind fluttered in the green, light branches of two plum trees. The hovering smell of disease had seeped in the walls, but no matter; Bill was alert and willing, at least in August, to enter into a green dream of the past with his nephew. It was a fiercer current than nostalgia that attracted each to the other, for there was an enemy, an evil entity, in the room with them, though neither spoke of it.
The days were to pass their light and dark faces and absorb him in Bill. He saw the rest of his family and other people he had lost track of and didn't particularly care to know now but was polite enough to give the time of day to. And because his reclusive habits were not conducive to company, there were occasions in September and October when he just went off by himself.
He made himself agreeable to errands; he let down his guard and told himself it was character improvement. In the important ways, he protected his privacy. There were two sides to his daily trips to Bill's house: it was precisely when he wasn't next to Bill that he mentally conjured what the man had once been, at least for him. Like a ritual act, this gave him courage. These recollections were vividly engendered, a lining of light behind a dark cloud.
Bryce remembered a man with a boy behind him on horseback ambling among nodding grasses and waving leaves, the spring air fresh enough for only a flannel shirt. He vowed that these moments in the past would remain fixed permanently in the inner eye, unharmed by what had already damaged so much.
Access to the sickroom, as Bill's condition worsened, was gradually limited, yet Bryce was always let inside. Given the timetable that was to assert itself as the leaves changed their color and furled, Bryce had come soon enough for a long-held love to reaffirm itself.
This was a fact of greater fervor in the shortening days, in those hours when Bill scarcely seemed to notice anyone, in the entire week when he left the blind drawn all day and didn't want to look out anymore on the lawn and the sky and the trees hung with their last fruit, already pitted and spoiled by marauding birds. After a while Bill's doctor withdrew the injections of poisonous chemicals. He gave pills for pain and little else. The protracted death prolonged Bryce's visit to Mississippi, a tame death in the old style that would happen at home.
But in the meantime, in the still summertime September when the frosts seemed as far off as stars, there was an afternoon when Bill felt well enough to sit on the porch with a blanket over his knees and Bryce beside him, when he asked for a chunk of wood from the pile in the shed, even requested "white pine."
"Got your knife on you, boy?" Bill asked Bryce after he had come back with a handsome piece, but the "boy" couldn't even find a penknife on his person. The blade that Bill brought out from his bathrobe pocket was dangerously sharp, set in a handle of inlaid bone; and so it was that Bill took to whittling all by himself, his empty-handed nephew looking on.
Bryce found this sight of his uncle in quiet absorption soothing, as he watched the thin shavings curl and pile at his uncle's feet, blonder than straw. There was a patience in the sick man's hands, even if they shook just perceptibly where they had been steady, slipped once and took off a good-sized chip, pointed jaggedly at one end and rounded at the other, which Bryce picked up and held in his palm.
Though he sat a yard away, Bryce didn't pull his chair any closer, nor did he break the silence to ask his uncle what he was making. Bill was to abandon the whittling whimsically begun this autumn afternoon, leaving unfinished a disk in the shape of an oyster shell. With the first strokes of his knife that day, he might have been sculpting the wood into any number of things. Between the shadows cast by the porch's columns, elongated stripes of sunlight were a cautionary clock. "Tell me when you're tired, Uncle Bill," Bryce had planned to say but didn't, too moved to speak by the beauty of the delicate, exposed face downslanting away from him, intent on the task, despite a throbbing pulse at the base of the left eye. Like the involuntary tremor of the hand, it was a motion Bill hadn't willed and couldn't control.
Each day spent with Bill has turned out to be different from what preceded or is bound to follow, mused Bryce. As he watched his uncle's hand still confidently wield the knife, he slipped the wood chip he had salvaged into his pocket, feeling, despite their desultory conversation, the rareness of the moment. When his fingers trembled, Bill halted until the shaking passed, and when he had had enough, he closed the knife blade and stood up by himself while Bryce held open the back door. Bryce kept the chip of wood. He liked to lay it in his palm and turn it over, press the tip into his forefinger, run his thumb with the smoothness of the grain along the sides.
* * *
On a cloudy Sunday morning in mid-October, Bryce drove to a state forest in the adjoining county and selected a trail which he had hiked in his boyhood and which wasn't too steep.
He parked his parents' second car and locked it, put on a parka, and, wielding a stick, entered the woods where the heads of the trails converged. They fanned out at the onset and then continued in parallel tracks down and along valleys and ridges before meeting again at a waterfall. Bryce wouldn't tackle that trip today but would instead take a shortcut that crossed to the valley trail from the one on the ridge.
So, he'd have to climb first and get it over with. He stumbled on a tree root, but caught himself with the stick and made the climb rather easily, breathing lightly. Not until he reached the top did he realize that a soft mist of rain clung to the pine needles and the changing leaves. The ground was damp, but not wet. By a trick of the light the woods appeared to recede before Bryce just as he approached them, upright and evergreen, with patches of hardwood, darkening hickory, and bare rocks as lookout points and open weedy places where the day looked in, as dim as a summer twilight though it was close to noon.
Stretched in a single plane across the trail where Bryce was to pass was an immense cobweb as tall as a man. Its numerous long guy lines were anchored in three dimensions, attached to nodding reeds and small-leafed bushes, to the coarse white edges of grassblades, to snags in the peeling bark of a pine tree, and to dead twigs on living trees and fallen logs. He didn't spot the web until almost upon it, and then only because its threads were fretted with moisture.
At once he started back; he saw the spider, large and spotted, and the several trapped and tied insects whose death had preserved their delicate structures. He wouldn't have wanted to tangle with those sticky threads himself, but before he made a detour, he inspected the web more closely. Hanging liquid from the lines, rain droplets expanded to translucent globes that distorted what they reflected. Standing thus in sight of the web's static symmetry, Bryce experienced the curious disorientation that either it was revolving or he was.
It chilled him, seeing a web like that strung across the trail as if it were meant for a person. He had almost been snared, but now he looked at the loveliness, the long looping lines and the radii that extended their design. That was what he recognized first, the pattern, and then the empty spaces it spanned: a stretched framework that suggested, by obverse, the absence it bridged in that its lines met around holes.
Thus, a void opened for Bryce in the taut breathing mesh his life made with the mortal world. He felt himself in a dream landscape, green, moist, and muted, with something nightmarish in the way that the light was muffled. Besides the threat to himself, he sensed a space, an absence like a sudden chilly breath of air that settled from the open sky on his bare head.
The web was something he'd seen through, but hadn't penetrated. He bypassed it and the other, smaller webs he came across later by leaving the path and wal
king around them. Just as he left the woods, he caught himself listening for the slip of his step on fallen pine needles. It was the slightness of that sound that accentuated the stillness he had found himself travelling past.
The rain never fell in full force that day and, driving back to his parents' house, Bryce kept flicking on and off the windshield wipers. Though the day was still gloomy, he felt gladder after his walk, and the glow stayed with him, calm and cool in the pit of his being, like phosphorescent gleams in water.
* * *
In October Bill no longer left his bed. The major care fell to Margaret or the nurses—by this time there were two, one during the day and another all night. Sometimes Bryce helped by feeding Bill his simple meals of semi-liquid food or by rearranging his body that now seemed as light as balsa wood. When he concerned himself with his uncle's comfort, his dread was somewhat eased.
Four days after his October woodland walk, Bryce saw Bill lift his hand from the sheet. It soon began to tremble and he let it fall back. Was it a signal? Bryce was holding the piece of wood Bill had begun to carve, that someone had left on the bureau among the antique photographs. Bryce found the other piece, the wood chip, in his pocket, but he couldn't make them join exactly. He played with the chip on the plush of his palm.
"What does it look like to you?" he asked Bill, holding it in his uncle's view.
Bill's stare back was a blue astonishment, as though from another world. Bryce had partially opened the blind; a slatted light fell across the room's furnishings. He ought to have felt perfectly at home here, but, before the look of serene puzzlement in Bill's eyes, the familiar room, with its books and pictures, receded. Grief smarted Bryce’s eyes with tears, his jaw was stiff, his cheeks puffed and achy.
"It might look like a shoe," he said in reply to himself, "but it's not. Guess again… .No, it's not a cradle either," he continued. "Do you give up yet? One more? No? Well, all right. When you stand it up like this, it's nothing substantial, but it ends in a regular shape.
"That's why it's a point of reflection." Bryce threw his thought up in the air, caught it, and repocketed it. A found sculpture was a token consolation in a grievous time.
Several days later Bill no longer spoke; he refused to eat. Bryce watched his aunt sitting before her husband, spoon in hand, gently persuading. Her Irish countenance turned to her nephew- tilted nose, low forehead, wide mouth. Even neglected, she was still a pretty woman. She hadn't gotten down a single mouthful. The spoon clattered against Bill's closed teeth, a brown broth spilled on the sheet. She took back the utensil, shrugged her shoulders, and turned away from Bryce to the blinded window, but not before he sensed as much as saw a tear slide in a satin line down her cheek.
Such recoveries of composure were necessary in the last days. Bill's presence in his own house had been growing increasingly more shadowlike. Conversely, it was the things in the room which seemed to gain in substance for Bryce, as though an intimacy had developed between them and him, fellow witnesses. One afternoon, when he was sitting alone with his uncle, he got up from his chair by the bed and wandered around the room. Idly he opened the top bureau drawer and found a forgotten collection of Bill's: pebbles picked up in Bill's western travels mounted on little wooden stands turned out identically on a lathe, a typed label neatly affixed to the side of the base, each specimen placed protectively under a wine glass. The first row was red sandstone, river shale, a glittery tuft of pyrite, and glassy smooth obsidian from the Yellowstone cliffs. The interests of the man now dwelled outside him. They would outlast him, made by his absence into evidence.
Bryce was also a testimony to the dying man. He saw the cycle of generations, saw himself old, wondered whom he'd pass himself onto. He'd have no children. His throat melted, his eyes stung. Bill's company felt like a privacy so remote as to not exist. But it wasn't death. Not yet. Signs of life were there, but they were almost invisible.
Bryce was not present at the actual demise. He was told about it by his mother who monitored incoming phone calls to the house. "It was a very peaceful death. He went into a coma and never woke up." Bryce's mother leaned towards him convincingly; he sensed that she was straining to sound sincere.
As elder brother, Bryce's father made the funeral arrangements. The ceremony was to be two days hence, the principal service at the church and a smaller one at the cemetery.
Bryce came with the others to the funeral parlor. They stood in a semi-circle across from the bier which, one by one, they approached. Bryce peered into the open coffin and saw a mask with his uncle's features. The body was so small that it had been wrapped in a shroud.
After they got home, Bryce's mother took him aside and asked him if he would mind spending the night after the funeral with his aunt. "We're putting up the Memphis cousins here," she said, "and we need your room. I don't think it's good for Margaret to be alone that night, but she can't possibly take in a lot of people."
It turned out well that relatives and friends came and filled Bryce's father's house, people his aunt was willing to see, if not to receive in her own home. Margaret was at first startled yet essentially gratified by how many showed up. It wasn't so much that her grief was bared to the public, as it was reflected in it.
The hubbub came to a hush the next day at the funeral. The minister's sonorous voice intoned the solemn prayerbook service. The coffin was kept closed by request of the family; and after the eulogy and hymn were over, the mourners filed out in small groups, still silent or whispering among themselves.
Only the family gathered at the graveside. It was another misty day, like Bryce's noon on the mountain ridge. The sky was both menacing and mild, the air almost balmy. Most in the huddled group carried umbrellas, but in the end there was no rain. Bryce watched the coffin being lowered, then turned his back and left with the others before the caretakers began to raise their shovels.
He was feeling more blue after the funeral and began to drink whisky before dinner. He had already packed an overnight bag so as not to disturb his visiting relatives, but he postponed going. It was after ten-thirty when he finally took his leave. The road that led to the highway from his parents' to his uncle's house was a dark tunnel of dissolving mist. The yellow reflectors that warned of curves seemed to disintegrate like lit dust in his headlights. Bryce kept rehearsing his uncle's face in his mind, as if he were already accusing himself of forgetfulness.
Bryce's sister's maid was there to open the door. "Where were you?" she asked. "We've been waiting."
He shrugged. "It was hard to get away." He almost missed Margaret sitting in the living room without a light on, staring into the empty fireplace. She motioned to a bottle of Cointreau on a silver tray on a sidetable and asked him if he would have a glass with her. Her eyes were downcast, her lips dumb. She kissed him on his forehead when he left the room. Her hands on his brow were uncomfortably clammy, and he found himself ducking to avoid her touch.
A bittersweet savor of oranges lingered on his tongue. He had to pass his uncle's room on the second floor to reach the staircase that led to the spare room on the third floor. He couldn't prevent himself from peeking his head into what he would always call "Bill's room."
He noticed a difference at once. The blind was pulled up. Rectangles of light from the outdoor lamp came in the window and lay down on the floor, holding the quivering shadows of the plum trees. The acrid odors of medicines, pungent sniffs of rubbing alcohol and disinfectant, the benign smells of lotion and body powder, and, underlying all these other smells, the sour smell of the dying—they were gone. He hadn't thought they would disappear as easily as did the rented hospital bed, but now, save for a trace scent in a sensitive nostril, they had yielded to the richer aromas of floor wax and furniture polish.
Bryce caught his breath. He might have been expecting his uncle's ghost, rummaging among his things, shiftless and genial. That was another Bill to conjure, but when Bryce tried, he could only remember the weary invalid or the fixed features of the face inside
the coffin. He continued down the hall, switched on the light in the stairwell, and laboriously climbed the steps.
Bryce hadn't ventured up here once in all his visits with Bill, and he couldn't remember what else besides the spare room and its bath was located up here. When he reached the top of the stairs, he was out of breath. He could feel the liquor in his head. He opened the door of the bedroom, turned on the light, and put his bag on the floor. The ceiling sloped; he was under the eaves. There was a coverlet on the bed, a chest of drawers, a wooden table and chair, a lamp. The bathroom had an old-fashioned tub on claw feet, no shower, and a blue stain around the drain. He looked at himself in the mirror. His eyes were bleary and bloodshot, but his face was still handsome, perhaps more handsome now that it was a little worn. Bryce didn't feel like sleep. He didn't know what he wanted.
In the hallway were two other doors, both closed. He tried the first. It wasn't locked. Bryce knew immediately from the musty smell and the obvious outlines of objects in storage that he was in the attic. He found the light. Before a box full to the brim with pictures and papers, he knelt and dipped in his hand as one might trowel in a trough of sand, lifting up the fine and coarse, the beige and black grains without differentiation, dropping them back. So he picked up and let fall sheets of paper, envelopes, photographs, frayed leaves from scrapbook albums, not reading anything, scarcely looking. Dreamily he passed his fingers through the rustling documents, as unconcerned as a sleepwalker in a rote motion. Then he noticed, at first with only a flitting attention, that the glare of the light bulb had shrunk and he was kneeling in shadow.
Then the shadow shifted. Bryce heard his name spoken furiously, a hiss. His head jerked; he stood up. Margaret's face was hanging just over his. He had always thought of her as a large woman; now he saw she was merely taller than he. Myopically near, her enraged features were distorted in his vision to two equally rigid faces, one a blur of the other, like a reflection and its light.
Fall Love Page 11