Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  The morning after Christmas, it snowed. A light dust, rising and swirling in the wind. They stayed in the house, and kept to separate rooms most of the day. No one knew what to do for anyone else. Rosa wasn’t there, having gone to New Orleans to spend time with a cousin. Lily wrote in her journal, and then began to prepare something for them all to eat.

  In the waning light of that afternoon, there was a knock at the front door, and she heard Tyler say he would get it. She entered the living room in time to see Roger Gault standing in the square of fading light, with a checked jacket on and his cap in his hands, nodding slightly and smiling at Tyler and past Tyler, at her, and at Sheri, who had come in from the kitchen. He had a package under his arm. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  Tyler repeated the phrase tonelessly, and moved aside for him to enter. Gault offered the package, a box of Godiva chocolate truffles, which Tyler took and then handed to Millicent when she came down the hall from the family room.

  “We’re a mess,” said Mrs. Galatierre. “Why don’t you call a person.”

  Lily watched her face, and was seized by a strong desire to get out of the suffocating closeness of the rooms of the house. Millicent held the box of truffles and thanked him, running one hand through her hair, tears streaming down her cheeks. Gault hadn’t seen the tears, standing half turned from her, talking to Tyler about the snow, and the almost white Christmas they’d had—clumsy talk about weather, utterly without a single trace of anyone’s true thoughts or feelings. At last, he saw that Millicent was weeping, and put one hand, quite gingerly, on her shoulder. “I’m so very sorry,” he said, his face betraying his frustration with the hollow sound of the words. He was a man needlessly repeating himself, who knew it, and still could do nothing to stop it. Millicent excused herself and went up the stairs to her room. Sheri followed her.

  “Well,” said Gault, almost as if to himself. “I can’t stay.”

  “It was kind of you to stop by,” said Tyler.

  Lily felt a stirring of deep affection for Tyler in that moment, watching him guide the other man to the door and shake his hand—Tyler seemed the one person who knew what was expected, what to do next in the circumstances.

  When the door closed on Gault, Nick, who had entered the room from the kitchen, muttered, “Oh, God.”

  Lily turned to him, but there was nothing in his face. He had apparently spoken out of sheer exhaustion at the prospect of contending with the world out there, in the new situation.

  The days leading up to New Year’s Eve were perhaps the hardest of all. No one would let her help with anything, so Lily spent a lot of time alone, writing in the journal, or trying to read, anything to take her mind away from her grief. The house was too quiet, and when Tyler put music on—a CD of Christmas songs from various artists, and then an anthology of torch songs by Ella Fitzgerald—it seemed depressingly pointless and unsatisfactory. But no one said anything, and twice they all sat down to the same table for a meal while Chopin’s Nocturnes played—Millicent’s choice. Neighbors brought food and gifts, and so there was the need to maintain some sociability. Lily worked to relieve Rosa and Millicent of the weight of entertaining these guests, who spoke in confident, soft tones of the better place Buddy had gone to. They all meant well, and their kindness was part of the nightmare, and Lily was as certain of this as she was of the baby’s insistent movements.

  New Year’s Eve, they watched television, and saw the bright ball descend, the sudden brilliant lights: 1990. Millicent had wanted to see the year turn; and her soft look of disheartened acceptance when the others had excused themselves to go to bed made them all relent.

  So they were all awake for it. They watched the television in silence.

  There were the thousands of people in Times Square, celebrating amid the falling streamers and fake snow, the honking horns and the cacophony of music, the shouts and the laughter and the general hysteria. It seemed to Lily that the crowds were all exhibiting the kind of frenzied cheerfulness people assumed in the unspoken, even unimagined, presence of the inevitable, and the terrible.

  Millicent decided to let Nick run the dealership; he had been doing a lot of it anyway, because Buddy had planned to retire early. Nick went off to work, as Buddy had, in his own demonstrator, and he usually stayed later than Tyler did. Tyler had gotten some time off, to help Lily find their own place at last.

  They chose an old sharecropper’s house out near Yellow Leaf Creek, the remnant of a farm that had been sold piecemeal to developers. An apartment complex was being built within sight of it—they wouldn’t have found it if they hadn’t gone to the complex in search of a place there. But they saw it and on impulse they stopped. There was a lockbox, and a sign with a telephone number. They drove to the nearby 7-Eleven and called the number. Tyler spoke to the agent while Lily waited in the car, her coat wrapped tightly around herself. He came back and got in, frowning.

  “It’s already taken,” Lily said.

  “Son of a bitch asked me if I was black. He said it was just for his information.”

  She sighed. “What did you tell him?”

  This made him smile. “You know what Buddy said to me once—the first hunting trip? He said in the South, whites’ll get close to a black man, but won’t let him rise; and in the North, they’ll let him rise, but not get close.”

  Lily said the name. “Buddy.”

  “You miss him, too, don’t you?” Tyler said.

  She nodded, but he wasn’t looking at her now. He stared out at the brown field before them, eyes filling with tears, absorbed in his own thoughts.

  SEVENTEEN

  1

  IT IS SOMEHOW CONSOLING to think of you now, still tending to your mother, still going on in the new silence that is more than silence. It’s like that here, in this house, where Tyler’s mother and sister go about their daily tasks in the aftermath of everything, and the whole world is an increment quieter, with a quiet that follows you, a ghostlike, awful, reminding silence, the not-voice of the one who is gone. I sit here and scribble in this notebook, and the scratching sound of the pencil calms me, and I feel guilty for the consolation of it. It is, after all, only the consolation of any action in such terrible hours. I have been cooking for everyone—I just took it over when Rosa left, and nobody said anything. That first time I could feel them all trying not to hurt my feelings about the mess I made. I’m still making a mess, each time, though it’s not as bad as the first—at least it’s closer to being edible. I never learned how to do any of this, and am depending on the recipe books that, I’ve discovered, Buddy liked to collect. His presence is still so strong, in every room.

  I wonder how it must have been for you, bearing your grief and the grief of your mother, and Charley, caring for him and his frailties, seeing him off to school, finding a way to supervise and help him in his studies, going through your father’s library as the proprietor of it, really, since Charley’s interest never really matched your own, and you must’ve sensed that. You took on new duties every day as a matter of course, and you never seemed to fail at anything. I am coming to see that the only thing I can do well is this scribbling. I can’t even do relationships well—am such a clutch of hurts and sore places and worries about the future.

  Mrs. Gainseville spends most of her time in the kitchen, or the parlor, and Mary has the disturbed sense that she is being avoided. Any day now, she will have to discharge the woman, and the woman doesn’t wish to be discharged. Lucy Toulmin-Smith visits, and other friends, Violet Roy, and Molly Brown, and friends from the London Geographical Society whom Mary knows through her father. Lucy bothers her about her failure to let Mrs. Gainseville go.

  —You won’t be able to keep paying her and have any freedom of your own, Mary.

  She never thinks of it. Or hasn’t. She has found a way to go on, and her mother’s needs have kept her busy enough.

  Guillemard is a frequent caller these days. She’s come to think of him as a dotty old character, absentminded and easily
disturbed, almost skittish. But he is kind, he has been a true friend; he has wide knowledge, and his fondness for her is evident. When her mother calls from the upstairs room, he interrupts himself, and waits quietly for Mary to tend to the older woman, and when Mary returns, sometimes nearly an hour later, he acts as if there’s been no interruption at all. He busies himself with her father’s library. She finds him with an open book on his lap, and he behaves precisely as though this is a welcome interruption of an already settled afternoon of study.

  Mary is grateful for all her father’s friends, most of whom are her friends, too, now, and they all call on her. She’s finding herself with more to do socially than she ever had to do when her father was alive. Yet there is a curious form of apathy seeping into her soul, even as to others she seems full of bravery, still managing to be humorous and charming, self-deprecatingly sardonic. Inside, something awful is moving toward the center, toward the heart of her. She feels it like a sifting downward, a nothingness that no sight or sound or pleasure quite reaches. There is for her now only the pure sensation of the moment.

  Washing her mother’s pale skin, with its pitiable lack of resilience—it is like dead flesh; it is even cold to the touch—she observes the phenomena of dissolution and cannot call up a single element of feeling beyond this very minute, and her in it. The rest of the world’s a blank.

  One morning as she opens the curtains of the room, letting in gray afternoon light, her mother speaks from the bed.

  —Don’t stand there like that.

  Mary turns, and says:

  —What?

  Her mother stares from the bed, not quite seeing her:

  —Get your father.

  —Mother?

  The older woman’s face seems to have sunk around her eyes, which shine with a scary, glistening something, as if an intelligence other than her own had entered her body:

  —I ’ave to tell your father something.

  —Mother, don’t.

  —Quickly, child.

  The sternness of the voice, its surprising strength, startles Mary, who moves quickly to her mother’s side and takes the thin, cold hands into her own.

  —Mother, it’s me, she says. Father’s gone.

  —Where ’as he gone to this time?

  Mary cannot lie to her; it would be somehow to admit what is happening right here, before her eyes. And in the act of denying this, she insists on the truth of that.

  —Father died in February, Mother. Remember?

  But the other woman is silent now, has lapsed into a strange, open-eyed state of suspension. She’s breathing, but it’s clear that she cannot speak. She’s trying to make a word come, or words, and nothing comes but the smallest puffs of air, and the breathing that goes on, and Mary holds her hands, wanting to run out of the room to send for Guillemard, and fearing at the same time to let go, because the look on her mother’s face says “Don’t leave me” even as the poor woman seems to be growing angry at her inability to speak. Mary stays at her side until she grows quieter, though the eyes never close, and the small breathing goes on. She starts downstairs, is on the landing in the darkened hallway, when the thought comes to her that the end is near. Something rises in her mind, a terrible stirring, and she sends for Guillemard, and then moves through the rooms of the house putting things in order, or changing the order that already exists. She can’t allow herself to think.

  Guillemard arrives an hour later, riding up in his surrey, and getting down with some difficulty. He strides up the walk and in past Mary, who holds the door for him and cannot quite find the words to answer him when he speaks. He looks at her and then turns to the stairs, looks back at her, hesitates, and then starts up. She moves from room to room downstairs, unable to concentrate on anything. Then she ascends the stairs, slowly, and stands waiting in the tenebrous silence of the hall. She has no concept of how much time has passed. It passes. Ten minutes; fifty years. At last the door opens and Guillemard emerges. He sees her, and beckons. She rushes to him, and he murmurs:

  —I’m afraid you must prepare yourself, Mary.

  —Yes, she tells him. She almost goes on to say, Did you think I didn’t know it?

  —I do not believe she will last this night, Guillemard says.

  After he’s gone, the phrase becomes fixed in her mind: this night. She sits in the library among her father’s books and tries not to allow it in her thoughts, and it asserts itself, growing in power with her resistance to it. This night.

  Charley arrives from being out among members of the family, and the two of them keep the vigil. Sometime near midnight their mother stirs and mumbles something neither of them can make out. She seems in pain for a few moments, and they rise to stand close, believing this to be the last struggle, but she subsides, and appears to let down, as if whatever has disturbed her has dissipated, dissolved back into the recesses of her body, her dreams, all she had seen of dreams in the long years of ailing. She sleeps peacefully, though the sides of her mouth are pulled down, and Mary and Charley wait together. After a time, the needs of her body take over, and they have to disrobe her, wash and dress her again, and put her back to bed. Charley helps do this, with a grimace of horror on his face, but without complaint and without having to be asked or prompted. They are in it, now; they are all that will be left of this strange household. They do not speak. Mary bears her inward struggle not to think, not to allow words, not to see words, and the quiet of this old house begins to expand with the syllables, the language riding through her mind anyway—terrible, muffled, but still all utterance: this night. Her mother’s breathing slows, and slows again, becomes labored. Yet her features betray no pain or anguish. The sides of the mouth have even relaxed, so that it is as if gravity has settled her here, sunk in this bed, asleep. Mary retreats to her own room, and buries her face in the blankets, crying, a dry, painful sobbing. This night. The two words are only a beginning, and some secret part of her knows it, and knows, too, what follows, what awful words follow. She gets up, and frantically occupies herself. She’s in a kind of interior retreat. She goes down into the kitchen and makes tea, and then she rushes to the cellar and works the coal into the furnace, though the cold outside is that of early April, the late cool vestiges of the month of March. Finally she hurries out of the house and away from it in the fresh chill. She is aware that this is something she is repeating, that these small forays out away from the structure are a form of escape, a way of seeking breathable air, even though the air may be heavy with the acrid, stinging odor of coal smoke. She stands in the dampness, the dark, where it has rained, a thundershower that she hasn’t even noticed. She can’t bear her own mind. She turns and looks at the tall house and the lighted window of the room, the one room, and she’s caught, she feels the inevitability of it, in spite of all her fright and all her attempts to escape the thinking of it, the thing comes anyway, seizes possession of her—complete, terrifying, the whole thought: this night, at last I shall be free. Somewhere in her soul, she accedes to it, welcomes it.

  —No, she says, and realizes she has spoken aloud. She falls to her knees on the wet ground, in the darkness, the moonless quiet, and begins to weep.

  2

  SHE AND CHARLEY are both there for the very last, perhaps three hours after her flight out of the house. Her mother never regains consciousness. Her breathing simply continues to slow, and finally becomes so labored that they believe each in-suck of air must surely be the last. But it goes on that way for a long time, and when the last gasp does come, a deep breathing in that doesn’t expel itself, they sit quite frozen in attitudes of expectation, as the quiet stretches and grows too long for any human pause, and then the death rattle begins.

  —Well, Charley says. He sobs.

  —It’s over, says Mary. Will I call on everybody?

  —No, Charley says. I’ll do it. He stands, but then seems to falter. Mary reaches over and places her hand on his forehead.

  —You’re feverish, she tells him.

&nb
sp; —I feel awful.

  She washes her mother’s body and prepares it for the undertaker, tying the jaw shut with a long scarf her father gave her when she turned sixteen. Charley has taken to his own bed. There is no one else to perform the task. Her mother’s body, so light when she was alive and wasting in the bed, is heavier in death, unwieldy, eerily demanding. Mary looks at the hands, the long fingers, the folds of the neck, the hair, which never lost its sheen, even through the years of bedridden existence—the hair is still beautiful, like that of a young woman. Mary dresses her in one of the gowns she wore when she was indeed a young woman, and first in love with George Kingsley. It’s a fine sky-blue garment, something her mother kept in a special box in the closet, and on occasion brought out to show Mary. She sometimes talked about putting it on to go to a dance with Mary’s father, one last dance under the lights of Islington Hall, where they met. Where the handsome, dashing young adventurer first had the acquaintance of a servant girl, a cook, Mary Bailey, whose charms he found so alluring. In her mother’s things there’s an old daguerreotype of the two of them, George Kingsley standing behind the chair in which his young wife sits, with a baby that Mary knows must be herself. The gown her mother wears in the daguerreotype is the one she will wear into her grave. Mary fights back tears, thinking of it. But this is not her mother now, this inanimate thing whose arms she works into the sleeves of the dress.

  When Mary Bailey Kingsley is laid out in her coffin, looking too deeply asleep, Mary kisses the cold cheek. It is the first of her actions with this body, this inanimate thing, that isn’t designed to manage it in some way.

  Members of her father’s family come to call, to express their condolences, but they seem anxious to be gone. Mary and Charley and a few of their father’s friends, and some aunts and uncles from the Bailey side of the family, are the only ones at the funeral. The bells toll, and they accompany their mother to the site of George Kingsley’s grave. It’s a chilly, cloudy day, with the threat of rain in the air, except that it feels, finally, too cold for rain. The clouds look bruised, swollen. The wind bites at their faces, and blows the coat and shirtfronts back.