Lie Down in Darkness
Page 45
Oh most Powerful
Oh must
It was as if all the air had become an ocean. It was not rain, but solid water, which came down over the cemetery and Carey’s last glimpse of the place before he darted back into the doorway was of flooded tombstones, grass plastered down by the torrent, and finally, in the limousine, of Dolly, sealed with round, frightened eyes behind the streaming windows like a guppy in a fish bowl. There was a crackle of thunder; lightning struck nearby in the woods. Carey thought he heard the crash of a falling tree. He turned. There was a short corridor here, smelling of damp concrete, a depressing place, ill-lit and lined with empty niches. At the end of the corridor Mr. Casper and Barclay had taken refuge, along with Ella Swan, who stood against the door leading into the chapel proper, and wept desperately and audibly into her handkerchief. A chill had arisen with the rain, and Mr. Casper turned up the collar of his coat; now and then he rubbed his hands together and looked up piously toward the thunder.
Loftis had dragged Helen into a little anteroom nearby. This had happened when the storm broke. Carey had seen it all: the compliant look on her face, her smile. She had even put an arm around Loftis’ waist as he drew her along with him. But when, closing the door, he had gazed back at Carey for one confused moment, his face wore the same look of agony. A minute had passed, certainly not much more. Carey heard Loftis’ voice, high, hysterical, tormented, muffled by the walls. He couldn’t hear Helen’s at all. Then the door broke open, and Helen came out, followed by Loftis with outstretched arms and bright, glazed eyes.
“Why have I wanted you?” he shouted. “Because you’re the only thing left! That’s why! My God, don’t you see? We’re both sick, we need to make each other——”
She rustled up and took Carey’s arm. “Can’t we go now, Carey? Milton,” she said over her shoulder, “don’t make a scene. Please don’t make a scene.”
Loftis approached them wildly, his hair flying, and clutched her by the arm. Carey felt his bowels give way somewhat, in fear and in horror: the place seemed touched with a violence greater, even, than the storm. A spray of water swept beneath the door.
“Scene! Scene!” Loftis shouted. “Why, God damn you, don’t you see what you’re doing! With nothing left! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!”
“Would she want it that way?”
“She?”
“Yes,” Helen said.
“She? Who? She?” he cried.
She removed his hand from her arm. “Yes,” she said softly, “I imagine she would.”
“She would?” he yelled.
“Milton, I’ve told you that anything you need or want from me you can have. Except—” she paused, still smiling—“except—— Well, we’ve been through it all, haven’t we? One has pride——”
Then Carey saw something take place which he could never have predicted—much less, he later said to Adrienne, thought ever could happen at all, among civilized people of a certain maturity. Whenever he told Adrienne, usually with a pipe, usually with something to drink, sherry perhaps, or a drop of bourbon, he told it with sorrow, slowly and thoughtfully, and with a sort of grave wonder. Yet secure in the rectory, though he tried, he could never retrieve—in a vicarious, not really too worthy attempt at excitement—the same horror, which had made his guts moist and his limbs paralyzed and futile, and which had caused something in his brain to say, at the moment it happened, “Oh, my Lord, You shall never reveal Yourself!”
Loftis pulled Helen about so that she faced him and began to choke her. “God damn you!” he yelled, “If I can’t have … then you … nothing!”
“People!” Carey cried. “People! People!” He couldn’t move.
“Die, damn you, die!”
It was over as quickly as it had begun, one red flash of violence spread out like momentary lightning against the storm. Loftis relaxed his grip on her neck, stood trembling and weeping in the hallway with its fading, ugly light, its smell of dampness and rain and death. Helen slumped against Carey, heavily, without a sound, and distantly within the chapel, where Peyton’s body lay, something stirred, moved, a piece of falling slate perhaps, a rain-blown gutter pipe—who knows? Carey said later, with his pipe and bourbon, except that the noise seemed ghostly then, somehow fatal, and altogether quite shattering to his mind, fevered as it was with such hot wild winds of ruin and godlessness. But it was over. Loftis lifted his hands to his face—a sudden, angry, almost childish gesture, as if he were striking himself in the eyes with his fists. Then he turned and ran out into the rain. He didn’t pause at the limousine. He did give Dolly, it seemed to Carey, a brief glance as he hurried past the car—but here Carey might have been mistaken. The last he saw of him was his retreating back, amid all the wind and rain, as he hustled on, bounding past wreaths and boxwood and over tombstones, toward the highway.
Then Helen steadied herself against Carey, and she pressed her head next to the wall. “Peyton,” she said, “oh, God, Peyton. My child. Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!”
Toward the end of the day, when it was nearly dusk, Ella, La Ruth and Stonewall stood on a corner in North Port Warwick, waiting for the bus. The sky had cleared, the storm had passed, rumbling far off eastward; near them the trees dripped water, roses on a trellis bore round white pearls of dew. It was cool and quiet on the highway. The evening star had risen in the west, one ornament in a blue, cloudless sky—this and the pale rind of a tilted new moon. Ella and La Ruth both had on their white baptismal robes, and white turbans wrapped around their hair. Stonewall was dressed identically, and in miniature, except for the turban: he wore none, which allowed him, from time to time, to reach up and scratch his sparse, kinky hair. There were no tears now, no grief or lamentation, at least outwardly exposed; Ella’s face wore the passive look of one who has seen all, borne all, known all and expects little more, of either joy or suffering: she was too old, and if occasionally the wrinkled serenity of her face became a touch grim, it was because her outlook on life was basically tragic, and not because of any passing anger or bitterness. La Ruth’s face was formed in one huge pout: she had missed out on Peyton’s funeral, and this had left her with a vague, empty feeling, of a grief that had been stifled, that had not—since no one had let her go to the ceremony—reached a proper climax in her heart; and there were a number of other lacks and disappointments stirring about inside her, none of which she could define or very well understand. Now and then she began to moan, to press Stonewall against her belly, and to rock backward and forward in a lumpy expression of anonymous, uncomprehending woe, but Ella would always touch her on the arm and tell her to stop. Stonewall was lost in dreams. “Mama,” he said, “Christine say she want to frig wid me. Do dat mean——”