Evangelista's Fan

by Rose Tremain

  ‘Herman,’ said Willa, ‘the world is endin’, honey. Someone go out an’ take a look!’

  Lester and Amy Pickering were at supper when they first heard the wind. Then the room got dark and Amy said: ‘My! Whatever is happening, Lester?’

  Lester had a mouthful of corn bread. Chewing, he went to the window and saw what Willa had seen – the slab of darkness moving over the sky.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he said.

  ‘What is it, dear?’

  ‘Boy-o-boy . . .’

  ‘Lester?’

  ‘Take a look, Amy.’

  Amy came and stood beside her husband and looked out. Then she took hold of his hand. ‘God Almighty, Lester! What the heavens is it?’

  ‘Low pressure. Big low front moving in.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! Looks like a building falling down on us!’

  ‘Severe low. Knock out the power, maybe. Better get us some candles and a flashlight.’

  ‘Shoot! I never seen such a thing!’

  ‘We got any candles?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Get ’em, then, Amy.’

  ‘God! I never in my life saw that.’

  ‘’S only weather.’

  ‘Don’t look like weather, do it? Look like Apocalypse Now.’

  ‘Get the candles, OK?’

  ‘Come with me, Lester.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m scared, that’s why.’

  ‘Told you, Amy, it’s only weather.’

  ‘OK, so it is. That don’t mean I don’t have to be afraid.’

  ‘. . . afraid?’ said Willa. ‘That ain’t the word for what I felt that night. If I live to be sixty – which I won’t, now my heart’s got broke – I’ll never be that terrorised. Bad enough it was, I guess, for folk in houses. But for us in the trailer park, well, you couldn’t imagine how it was, because that wind, it came and lifted up our homes. It lifted them plumb off the earth, and one of ’em, the trailer of my neighbour, Mr Zwebner, it lifted so high, it came down on the Interstate and how Mr Zwebner didn’t die was only because he wasn’t in his trailer; he was in mine, tryin’ to stop me screamin’ . . .’

  The worst thing was, Vee didn’t come home.

  If Vee had come, Willa could have clung to him and maybe they would have sung songs or something to keep their fear from getting the better of them. But the hours passed and full night came on, and there wasn’t a sign of him. No car arriving. No Vee in his cowboy boots, holding his guitar. Nothing. Just darkness and the screaming, tearing wind and the trailer creaking and moving and the sirens going and all the thin poplars that screened the park from the Interstate snapping in half, like matchwood.

  What could Willa do but start screaming?

  ‘Vee!’ she screamed. ‘Help me, Vee! Vee! Come help me! Vee! Where are ya? Vee! VEE! VEE!’

  And some time after all that hollering for Vee, there’d been a thumping on her door and she thought, Sweet Jesus, he’s home, and she undid the latch and the chain and went to pull him in, to take him in her arms and not let go of him till she died or the wind ceased, whichever came soonest. But it wasn’t Vee. It was Mr Zwebner in his thick night clothes that smelled of onion or something, and he began hollering back at her not to scream. ‘You make yourself sick with this screaming, Willa, I swear!’ he shouted. And he put his smelly hand over her mouth and gripped her arm and shook her like you would shake a chicken, to wring its neck.

  And after a moment of this shaking, she came out of her screaming and broke down and sobbed with her head on Mr Zwebner’s chest, through which she could hear his old heart still just about beating.

  ‘Mr Zwebner,’ sobbed Willa, ‘where’s Vee? Don’t tell me he’s gone?’

  And then the gust came that pitched Mr Zwebner’s trailer onto its end and sent it spinning down onto the freeway.

  ‘Woulda killed him dead,’ said Willa, ‘’cept he was with me, helpin’ me in my hour a’ need.’

  Though Amy had found some candles, she and Lester didn’t need them, because, by some kind of miracle, the power lines in Green Hills stayed standing.

  What came flying off were the roofs. On almost every house on every bit of the green hills, the wind tore in under the shingles and sent them hurtling down.

  Lester heard this happen and saw it in his mind’s eye – all the roofs just being blown away. And he stayed up all night, sitting in a chair, not afraid of the wind, but just thinking about it.

  Near two o’clock, Amy said: ‘Maybe we should go to bed. Or at least lie down for a while?’

  But Lester shook his head. ‘Can’t lie down, Amy,’ he said. ‘Too much on my brain.’

  So they sat on in the living room. Amy picked up photos of their grown-up children and looked at them and thought back to how, when they were little, and they had their rickety old house in East Nashville, they used to be afraid of it in a high wind, as if it planned to do them harm.

  But Lester wasn’t thinking about his children, or about the past. He was thinking about Belle Meade and the future. He was thinking about money.

  ‘Amy,’ he said, after some hours, ‘know what?’

  ‘What, Lester?’

  ‘This storm ain’t gonna hurt us none.’

  ‘I sure hope not,’ said Amy.

  And then they were silent again. But Lester smiled as he sat there, because he saw what was coming. In a few months – if he stayed cool and cunning and didn’t let the pressure get to him – he could make more money than he’d seen in years. Enough to get beyond this halfway point. Enough for the house with the fruit garden and the colonnades.

  Only thing was, he wouldn’t be able to do the Baptist church. There just wouldn’t be any time for that. ‘I sure am sorry, John,’ he’d say to the Minister, ‘but that night of the storm, it changed a lotta things.’

  It got light.

  The wind mellowed down, and the people of the trailer park stood about, looking at the ruin all around them.

  Half the roof was gone from Willa’s home, but it was still standing, so she said to Mr Zwebner: ‘You have a nice rest, till the police an’ all come, Mr Zwebner. You lie down right here, on Vee’s bunk, OK, and cover yourself with the counterpane.’

  ‘What will you do, Willa?’

  ‘Ain’t nothin’ for me to do, really, ‘cept go to work. Take my mind offa things. Always supposin’ Mr Pie’s ain’t blown away to Kansas.’

  So Willa washed her face and hands, wiped all the blotched shadow from her eyelids and put on fresh, and went to wait for the 5.30 a.m. bus, which didn’t arrive.

  She began to walk. The sky was a kind of dead white colour and there were no shadows anywhere on anything.

  As she walked, she thought, I dunno, I jes’ dunno what coulda happened that Vee never got home. It’s like God said: ‘I’m gonna take one on them, Willa. Vee, or the trailer. I’m gonna puff one on them away.’ ’Cos what life is, it’s never all the way you want it. More like half. Like you can have Vee, or you can have your home be one of the lucky ones not destroyed by the wind. But you can’t have both.

  Soon after Willa arrived at Mr Pie’s, while she and Ileene were still setting up the relishes and sauces, Lester Pickering came in and sat down at the counter and ordered an Early Breakfast.

  He knew Willa by name, for it was a thing he loved to do, to get up early, while Amy was still sleeping, and treat himself to sausage, biscuit, grits, hash browns and egg before he went to work.

  ‘How yo’re, Willa?’ he asked, with a grin. ‘Survive the storm, did ya?’

  ‘Just about, Mr Pickering. Trailer next to mine blew down. You want coffee, sir?’

  ‘Sure. Lotsa coffee. Sat in a damn chair all night.’

  ‘Me, my neighbour done come in to quieten me. I was screamin’ so hard, I couldn’t hear m’self.’

  ‘Where was Vee, then?’ asked Ileene. ‘He didn’t come back after his big success, then?’

  ‘What “big success”?’

  ‘You didn’t listen to the
Opry, Willa?’

  ‘Sure. Bits of it.’

  ‘You didn’t hear Herman Berry?’

  ‘Yeh. I heard him.’

  ‘Singin’ Vee’s song?’

  ‘He weren’t singin’ no songa Vee’s. He was singin’ a Johnny Cash number.’

  ‘Before that, he sang Vee’s song.’

  ‘You was hearin’ things, Ileene.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t. Tell you the title of the song, if you want: Do Not Disturb. Told the audience, “I learned this just today, in one afternoon, ’cos I liked it so much I wanted to sing for y’all tonight. An’ it’s written by a new songwriter, resident here in Nashville, name of Vee La Rivière.”’

  Willa put the coffee back on its burner. She rested her elbow on the chrome counter and gave Ileene one of the long, hard stares she was famous for in her childhood.

  ‘You lyin’ to me, Ileene?’

  ‘No. I ain’t lyin’. Do Not Disturb. He ain’t written a song called that?’

  ‘Yeh. That’s his new one.’

  ‘Well then. There y’are. He’s famous now. Vee La Rivière.’

  Willa said nothing more to Ileene. She went into the kitchen and waited there while Fat Pete cocked Lester Pickering’s breakfast. Then she took the plate of sausage and grits and the side order of donuts and set them up on the counter.

  ‘Everything OK for you here, Mr Pickering?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Willa.’

  ‘You gonna be busy, I guess, with all them roofs flyin’ off?’

  ‘Yeh. Busier than I ever been.’

  ‘What happens, then, to folk as lost their roof? Insurance pays, do they?’

  ‘Yeh. Most everyone’s got coverage.’

  ‘That’s lucky.’ Then she smiled at Lester Pickering, whose mouth was stuffed with sausage. ‘Shame I couldn’t of had somethin’ like that on Vee,’ she said. ‘Some insurance, like. Know what I mean? So that when his good luck blew in, I was covered. Know what I’m sayin’, Mr Pickering?’

  Over

  Waking is the hardest thing they ask of him.

  The nurse always wakes him with the word ‘morning’, and the word ‘morning’ brings a hurting into his head which he cannot control or ameliorate or do anything about. Very often, the word ‘morning’ interrupts his dreams. In these dreams there is a stoat somewhere. This is all he can say about them.

  The nurse opens his mouth, which tastes of seed, and fills it with teeth. ‘These teeth have got too big for me,’ he sometimes remarks, but neither the nurse nor his wife replies to this just as neither the nurse nor his wife laughs when from some part of his ancient self he brings out a joke he did not know he could still remember. He isn’t even certain they smile at his jokes because he can’t see faces any longer unless they are no more and no less than two feet from his eyes. ‘Aren’t you even smiling?’ he sometimes shouts.

  ‘I’m smiling, sir,’ says the nurse.

  ‘Naturally, I’m smiling,’ says his wife.

  He’s being nursed at home in his own small room that was once a dressing room. His curtains are drawn back and light floods in. To him, light is time. Until nightfall, it lies on his skin, seeping just a little into the pores yet never penetrating inside him, neither into his brain nor into his heart nor into any crevice or crease of him. Light and time, time and light, lie on him as weightless as the sheet. He is somewhere else. He is in the place where the jokes come from, where the dreams of stoats lie. He refuses ever to leave it except upon one condition.

  That condition is seldom satisfied, yet every morning, after his teeth are in, he asks the nurse: ‘Is my son coming today?’

  ‘Not that I know of, sir,’ she replies.

  So then he takes no notice of the things he does. He eats his boiled egg. He pisses into ajar. He puts a kiss as thin as air on his wife’s cheek. He tells the nurse the joke about the Talking Dog. He folds his arms across his chest. He dreams of being asleep.

  But once in a while – once a fortnight perhaps, or once a month? – the nurse will say as she lifts him up onto his pillows: ‘Your son’s arrived, sir.’

  Then he’ll reach up and try to neaten the silk scarf he wears at his throat. He will ask for his window to be opened wider. He will sniff the room and wonder whether it doesn’t smell peculiarly of waterweed.

  The son is a big man, balding, with kind eyes. Always and without fail he arrives in the room with a bottle of champagne and two glasses held upside down between his first and second fingers.

  ‘How are you?’ he asks.

  ‘That’s a stupid question,’ says the father.

  The son sits by the bed and the father looks and looks for him with his faded eyes and they sip the drink. Neither the nurse nor the wife disturbs them.

  ‘Stay a bit,’ says the father, ‘won’t you?’

  ‘I can’t stay long,’ says the son.

  Sometimes the father weeps without knowing it. All he knows is that with his son there, time is no longer a thing that covers him, but an element in which he floats and which fills his head and his heart until he is both brimming with it and buoyant on the current of it.

  When the champagne has all been drunk, the son and the nurse carry the father downstairs and put him into the son’s Jaguar and cover his knees with a rug. The father and the son drive off down the Hampshire lanes. Light falls in dapples on the old man’s temples and on his folded hands.

  There was a period of years that arrived as the father was beginning to get old when the son went to work in the Middle East and came home only once or twice a year, bringing presents made in Japan which the father did not trust.

  It was then that the old man began his hatred of time. He couldn’t bear to see anything endure. What he longed for was for things to be over. He did the Times crossword only to fill up the waiting spaces. He read the newspaper only to finish it and fold it and place it in the wastepaper basket. He snipped off from the rose bushes not only the dead heads but the blooms that were still living. At mealtimes, he cleared the cutlery from the table before the meal was finished. He drove out with his wife to visit friends to find that he longed, upon arrival, for the moment of departure. When he made his bed in the morning, he would put on the bedcover then turn it down again, ready for the night.

  His wife watched and suffered. She felt he was robbing her of life. She was his second wife, less beautiful and less loved than the first (the mother of his son) who had been a dancer and who had liked to spring into his arms from a sequence of three cartwheels. He sometimes dismayed the second wife by telling her about the day when the first wife did a cartwheel in the revolving doors of the Ritz. ‘I’ve heard that story, darling,’ she’d say politely, ashamed for him that he could tell it so proudly. And to her bridge friends she’d confide: ‘It’s as if he believes that by rushing through the now he’ll get back to the then.’

  He began a practice of adding things up. He would try to put a finite number on the oysters he had eaten since the war. He counted the cigarettes his wife smoked in a day and the number of times she mislaid her lighter. He tried to make a sum of the remembered cartwheels. Then when he had done these additions, he would draw a neat line through them, like the line a captive draws through each recorded clutch of days, and fold the paper in half and then in quarters and so on until it could not be folded any smaller and then place it carefully in the wastepaper basket next to the finished Times.

  ‘Now we know,’ his wife once heard him mutter. ‘Now we know all about it.’

  When the war ended he was still married to the dancer. His son was five years old. They lived in a manor house with an ancient tennis court and an east-facing croquet lawn. Though his head was still full of the war, he had a touching faith in the future and he usually knew, as each night descended, that he was looking forward to the day.

  Very often, in the summer of 1946, he would wake when the sun came up and, leaving the dancer sleeping, would go out onto the croquet lawn wearing his dressing gown and slippers from Simp
son’s of Piccadilly and stare at the dew on the grass, at the shine on the croquet hoops and at the sky, turning. He had the feeling that he and the world made a handsome pair.

  One morning, he saw a stoat on the lawn. The stoat was running round the croquet hoops and then in and out of them in a strange repeated pattern, as if it were taking part in a stoat gymkhana. The man did not move, but stood and watched. Then he backed off into the house and ran up the stairs to the room where his son was sleeping.

  ‘Wake up!’ he said to the little boy. ‘I’ve got something to show you!’

  He took his son’s hand and led him barefoot down the stairs and out into the garden. The stoat was still running round and through the croquet hoops and now, as the man and the boy stood watching, it decided to leap over the hoops, jumping twice its height into the air and rolling over in a somersault as it landed, then flicking its tail as it turned and ran in for another leap.

  The boy, still dizzy with sleep, opened his mouth and opened wide his blue eyes. He knew he must not move so he did not even look round when his father left his side and went back into the house. He shivered a little in the dewy air. He wanted to creep forward so that he could be in the sun. He tiptoed out across the gravel that hurt his feet and onto the soft, wet lawn. The stoat saw him and whipped its body to a halt, head up, tail flat, regarding the boy. The boy could see its eyes. He thought how sleek and slippery it looked and how he would like to stroke its head with his finger.

  The father returned. ‘Don’t move!’ he whispered to his son, so the boy did not turn.

  The father took aim with his shotgun and fired. He hit the stoat right in the head and its body flew up into the air before it fell without a sound. The man laughed with joy at the cleanness and beauty of the shot. He laughed a loud, happy laugh and then he looked down at his son for approval. But the boy was not there. The boy had walked back inside the house, leaving his father alone in the bright morning.