“Ah, Brendan, what have we given you—life or death? What’s to become of you?”
CHAPTER 2
The Black Horseman
There was a black-clad rider and he rode a black horse and he came a great distance. Long before Brendan could see him, he heard the horse’s hooves: clippity clip, clippity clip.
Brendan was four and he had a fever and that day he didn’t go to nursery school. And all day and into the evening he heard the horse’s hooves and he told no one. He pressed his hot forehead against the cool windowpane of his bedroom and listened to the clippity clip. At eight that evening there was talk of taking him to the hospital because his fever was so high and because the teddy bear had an even higher temperature and it was nice and cool in the hospital—and they could put him in a bathtub packed with ice there. Lovely cool ice.
Brendan fell into the deep sleep, and the hoofbeats grew, louder and louder, and the earth shook from them. The rider arrived. He was all in black with a black hood over his head and black lusterless eyes looking at Brendan through the two holes in the hood. And the horse had a mask over his eyes too, and a black plume standing on his forehead. Clippity clip.
And on the horse behind the rider was Grandfather Davitt in his banker’s suit and his angry glasses. He looked very severe. And when Brendan woke, his fever had broken, and he and the teddy bear and bed were all wet with his perspiration. And his mother hugged him and cried and said he didn’t have to go to the hospital.
But his mother looked very anxious when he told her about Grandfather Davitt on the black horse and she made him promise not to tell anyone; it was a family secret. In the morning his mother told him that Grandfather Davitt had died the evening before in his sleep.
Somehow the story got out and the rest of the family looked askance at Brendan. He had the second sight from his mother, the family said.
When he was nine, he was eating cornflakes at breakfast, he remembered clearly, and he heard hoofbeats very far away. At lunchtime he told his mother. At dinnertime she began to prepare his memory for the black horseman. And gradually he remembered the fever and the rider and his grandfather mounted on back and looking very angry.
At two o’clock in the morning he roused the family with his shouts. The horseman was terrifying, mounted on an enormous stallion with a black plume who made the earth shake with his stamping hooves, and the horse pranced and kicked his legs in the air, then rode off with Grandmother Davitt on his back behind the rider with the terrifying, dead black eyes.
Twice when he was thirteen the terrible rider visited him and carried off Grandfather Davitt’s twin sisters. They died within three weeks of each other, and his mother inherited a houseful of Waterford glassware, Belleek china and other household impedimenta.
His mother then sat with him and carefully explained about his second sight. He didn’t like it; he didn’t want it. The horseman terrified him. She counseled acceptance: God had given him the gift for a reason and he had to accept it without complaint. He talked earnestly with her after that and sought her consolation and reassurance. She told him she too had the second sight, only it appeared much later in her life and it was not nearly as strong as his. He confessed that he often could tell things about people—secret things, just by touching something of theirs.
The next time he heard the hoofbeats, Brendan was fifteen. He was down at the Jersey shore for Labor Day week and he had just fallen in love.
Her name was Annie O’Casey. She was a cousin to his cousins, the Larkins, but no relation to him. He’d hardly paid any attention to her in past summers. But this year was different. She was fifteen too, with a merry laugh he’d never noticed before. Nor had he noticed in past summers her gift of mimicking people; she made Brendan laugh even when she imitated him. She had long legs, and a way of talking with her hands, and long slim fingers that fascinated him. Her hands were mimes that acted out her words. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Best of all, she would look sidewise at him and see him staring and she’d smile and make a face.
He dreamed it would be a wonderful week but on Friday he woke and thought he heard hoofbeats. He lay in his cot in the attic of the seashore house, hearing the surf spilling on the beach, but during the silence between waves he heard a very faint clippity clip, clippity clip.
He rolled over on his cot and wanted to shout, “Go away! Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know!” But he looked around at the four sleeping boys who shared the attic with him and he kept his angry shouts to himself.
He decided this time to fight the rider—to refuse to hear him or see him. He got up and looked down from the attic balcony. An early-autumn fog had rolled in. It was so thick it hid the beach and it muffled the sound of the invisible surf that was calling to him a few hundred feet away. The waves said, Brennnndannnn. Brennnndannnn. The eaves of the house dripped.
It was late August and eleven cousins had gathered at Uncle Matty Larkin’s beach house in Loveladies on Long Beach Island, off the Jersey shore. Every year for the past six years, during the week before Labor Day, Matty had opened up his house to his two children and all their cousins of the same approximate age; eleven cousins in all—Davitts and Larkins and Sharkeys and O’Caseys.
Brendan pulled on his clothes and slipped down the attic stairs, then past the bedrooms where the girls and his aunt and uncle slept, and down the main stairs cluttered with piles of books.
Uncle Matty Larkin was a free-lance writer, book reviewer, literary critic, editor and teacher of writing in the night school of City University in New York. It was said he never slept: He wrote all day, taught all evening and read all night. He attracted books like banks attract money. Indeed the beach house, like Matty’s house in Brooklyn, was stuffed with books. They were stacked on the floor, on tables, on chairs, on stairs, stuffed beyond capacity into bookshelves that lined the walls of every room. The garage here and in Brooklyn both contained bulging cartons piled to the crossbeams. Matty’s wife, Gloria, said the only exercise he ever got was making more bookshelves. Brendan stepped past the low piles that surrounded Uncle Matty’s favorite reading chair and went out on the beach.
The loud voice of the surf helped muffle the sound of the hoofbeats. He walked into the fog along the beach toward Barnegat Lighthouse. To see if he was being followed, he turned once and looked at the beach house. It was an old Victorian frame structure, a noted veteran of the beach that had survived storms and floods for almost a century. The fog easily swallowed it.
Clippity clip: He’d never be able to outrun the rider. Sometimes he believed he was actually mental. But his mother told him second sight wasn’t madness. He wished she were here to talk to.
He began to trot to get away from the sound.
He’d always hated it, hated being different, hated not having the normal human blessing of not knowing the future. And he resented the attitude of his relatives, especially the older ones who avoided him for fear he would tell them something terrible about their futures. They made him feel like a freak.
But it was true. He sometimes looked at people and knew things about them, sometimes from their pasts, sometimes from their futures. His second sight seemed not to distinguish between “was” and “will be.” Time seemed all one.
Ahead of him, hidden in the fog, he could hear the cree cree cree of the shorebirds running and feeding along the surfs edge. Like the future, they were just beyond his vision, sending him signals and clues.
He tried to think about Annie O’Casey.
This summer Jackie Sharkey had arrived with a totebag bulging with Playboy magazines. When they all went to bed at night, the boys would lock the attic door and stare at the nudes by flashlight. Jackie called them anatomy lessons with a suggestive giggle. Then they would all try to outdo each other with filthy remarks. Brendan invented a slobbery sigh that made the others giggle until their cots shook.
Brendan’s favorite was Miss February. He was very conscious of how much her face resembled Annie’s. It sham
ed him a little but he gazed at Miss February nonetheless.
He decided to turn back in the fog. He knew he couldn’t outrun the rider. He wanted to protest; it wasn’t fair.
Clippity clip.
All the talk at breakfast was about the Sixth Annual World’s Worst Sideshow. Crazy Day, the cousins called it. This year there were the Flying Fumblers (A Terrible Tumbling Act), America’s Tallest Midget, The Only 87-Pound Circus Fat Lady in Captivity, Jo Jo the Boy-faced Dog, The Clown Clones, Magic by Brian the Incompetent and much more.
In the kitchen everyone was trying to make the waffles. Someone was wiping up some spilled batter. Someone else poured orange juice into paper cups. Cousin Jackie was passing out the butter, and by his side Annie O’Casey filled the syrup jars from a large bottle. Brenda’s prissy cousin, Brian, sat at the end of the long kitchen table, forking large pieces of waffle into his mouth. Syrup ran down his chin.
When Annie saw Brendan she smiled at him. “Did you get it yet?” she called.
“No,” Brendan answered. Someone pushed a paper plate into his hands.
“Where’d you go?” Jackie demanded.
“For a walk. I was thinking about the play.”
The play was for Annie O’Casey’s Puppet Theater. Hers was the only talented act in the whole show and she had asked Brendan to write the script. It would be about a fallen angel who wants to go back to heaven. But God will not hear the fallen angel’s prayers. To make the situation worse, the devil prevents the angel from leaving. The plot was based on one of Brendan’s dreams. It had been astonishingly vivid. He could actually picture the angel: red-haired, with a half smile sometimes and a dimple in his chin. The only problem was, Brendan had no last act. Did the angel get back to heaven or not? Brendan didn’t know.
After breakfast Brendan sat on the porch steps with Annie. She was sewing the angel’s gown. Unthinkingly, Brendan stared at her so fixedly she became self-conscious. Miss February.
“Boo,” she said softly. Brendan drew back. The devil she held up was ferocious-looking—blood-red eyes in lighter-red skin and a red goatee.
Annie pulled out the gown for the angel and waited to see his reaction to the material, a remnant of silk she had been saving for two years. When he reached out his hand to touch it, she drew back.
“Your hands are dirty, Brendan.”
“I like dirt,” he said. “It’s very democratic.”
“You read that somewhere.”
“James Joyce didn’t like to wash and look how famous he is.”
“Who’s James Joyce?”
“See how famous he is?” They both laughed. Then Brendan said, “He was an Irish writer and someone asked him one day if he was going to wash himself. And he said, ‘All of Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream.’”
She giggled. He could say things that weren’t funny in such a funny way it made her laugh. And he told funny stories that made her stomach hurt with the laughter.
He could also tell fabulous ghost stories he invented himself. He could hold groups of people in the palm of his hand. Wednesday night they’d had a big bonfire on the beach, and they got Brendan to tell them a ghost story by the firelight. It was all about this phantom looking for its head, which was being carried by this man in a bowling-ball bag. Brendan changed his voice for each character and made sound effects for the dragging of the ghost’s lame foot, and he imitated its mad giggle, and he knew just when to make dramatic pauses and when to whisper so everyone would lean close and when to shout and clap his hands.
All the cousins pretended to be too sophisticated to take the story seriously but none of them left the beach while he was telling it, and one cousin actually got so frightened she wet her panties and slept all night on a narrow cot hugging her older sister. Even the adults applauded when Brendan finished his story and patted him on his back, and Annie felt secretly proud of him.
She envied him that imagination. Her puppet scripts were pale beside his tales.
But there was also another side to Brendan. He could be telling a funny story—everyone loved his funny stories, they were always about himself and the silly things that happened to him—when he would suddenly stop and scowl. Then he would smile and finish up with a joke as though nothing had happened.
Annie pushed him with her finger. “Hello. Brendan. Are you in there?”
He turned his face to her uncomprehendingly for a moment, then smiled that gentle smile of his.
“What do you see when you stare away like that, Brendan? Where were you?”
He grinned self-consciously at her. “Oh, nowhere.”
“Tell me.”
“I was thinking about a horse, that’s all.” His smile closed that subject. His eyes, one gray, one blue, watched her sewing fingers.
“Have you decided what you’re going to be, Brendan?”
“Oh—a lawyer, I guess. Did you ever go to a courtroom?”
“No.”
“I go all the time. I’ve seen murder trials, rape trials, damage suits, felony cases, lots of things. I even know a gambler who has a rap sheet as thick as a telephone book.”
“What’s a rap sheet?” Annie asked.
“Arrest record.”
When he tried again to touch the gown she was sewing, she drew back again. “Your hands are still dirty.”
He stood up, “I can cure that. I’ll prune them.” And he ran into the surf. He listened underwater to the muffled thunder of the breakers. And beyond that the other sound. Clippity clip. Clippity clip.
After supper Brendan still had not written the end of the script. He and Jackie and their prissy cousin Brian walked down to the store to get ice cream cones. That is, Brian wanted an ice cream cone. Jackie shot pool with Brendan.
Brendan was a good pool player. He often went to a place in downtown Brooklyn that had three or four top-rated pool shooters who won tournaments all over New York, and Brendan learned a great deal from them.
The poolroom proprietor was a pain in the ass; sometimes he let Jackie play and sometimes he wouldn’t. “State law, kid. You’re too young.” But he let Brendan shoot. And Tuesday night Brendan had beaten two men at pool, making one run of thirty-six balls, and that was probably the reason that the proprietor let them both play. Brian sat on a stool, hogging a triple ice cream cone.
“Tonight,” Jackie said, “I’m going to shoot the lights out.”
Much to the delight of Brian, Jackie was losing to Brendan when in came a loudmouth in crummy jeans, dirty T-shirt and a super-big can of Coors beer. All of the six pool tables were in use and the guy stood there watching Jackie shoot. He had carbuncular acne and small eyes and body odor.
“Hey, kid,” he said at last. “Haul ass.”
“We’re not finished,” Brendan said.
“You are now.” And the man took the cue from Brendan’s hand.
“No good!” Jackie shouted. “It’s my turn!”
“Screw, kid, before I break something.”
“No dice!” Jackie shouted. He gripped the cue stick like a cudgel and dared the man to come closer. Brendan stepped in front of Jackie and pushed him gently.
“Let’s go, Jackie.”
“Bullshit! I stay!” He tried to step past Brendan and swing the cue stick. Brendan blocked him and firmly moved him to the back door. Jackie was so angry he almost jumped up and down.
“Why’d you stop me! I can handle assholes like that. I’ve thrown better men than him out of my uncle’s saloon. Any night. Any night! Why’d you stop me!”
“You hit him with that cue stick and you’ll kill him. You have an Irish temper, Jackie.”
“He’s an animal!” Jackie punched his palm with his fist.
“Didn’t you feel sorry for him?” Brendan asked.
“Sorry! Why—for the love of God?”
Brendan shrugged. “Because that’s the best he can do. Push a fifteen-year-old kid out of a poolroom. That’s the high-water mark for him. Rotten teeth. Smell like a goat. Red sores all
over his face. And one pair of jeans to his name. Life screwed him.”
“Jesus. You know, Brendan, you could go around feeling sorry for rattlesnakes. How about feeling sorry for me? I was making a hot run on that table. Eleven balls I had.”
“You don’t need anyone to feel sorry for you, Jackie. You’re going to be king of the hill.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You’re going to be a famous actor.”
“Here comes the bullshit again.”
“It’s no lie, Jackie. You’re going to go all the way.”
Jackie put his arm on Brendan’s shoulder. “Brendan—you should keep that future stuff to yourself. Some of the people in the family are calling you a weirdo. They say a banshee howled when you were born.”
“I know.” Brendan shrugged at him. Acceptance, his mother said.
Jackie punched his arm. “Hey, Brendan? Do you see me making out with Annie O’Casey?”
They were walking down the beach toward the house. Jackie seemed to have forgotten about the poolroom incident. The Irish temper: a grass fire of great heat, quickly burned out.
Jackie turned to Brian. “You finished with that ice cream cone, Lump-lump? You’re wearing most of it all over your face. Come on, I’ll spot you a hundred yards and I’ll race you back to the house. Deal?”
The sunset over the bay was a rich red, like the puppet devil’s face. From the sea, darkness was reaching out to smother the whole island. And Brendan felt desperately alone. He wished for his mother, wanted badly to have her advice. He walked alone with his hands over his ears. Clippity clip. Clippity clip.
All up and down the beach, people were having the last bonfires of the season. And everyone looked strangely red and merry.
He pulled his hat farther down over his eyes. It was Uncle Matty’s yellow fishing hat and the brim could be brought down to hide his eyes. He’d worn it all day so that others wouldn’t see the doubt and fear in his eyes.
The Monk Page 5