“Cotter and Son,” a dry voice called. Howard Randolf beckoned them in with a hand as slow and as lacking in inward energy as a weed waving under water. They entered the ward and came, pushed by the nightmare’s end at the end of the hall, pulled by a welcome respite in that journey, to Howard’s bed. “This is where you eventually see everyone you know, isn’t it, John?” Howard said. His lined, gullied face looked terribly clean, as if the hospital had washed and sterilized half the life out of it.
“How are you, Howard?” John asked.
“Why, I’m fine and dying, of course, like all the rest.”
“They said you had heat prostration and some broken ribs.”
“Yes, and a slight dying of the heart, they tell me.”
William Cotter seemed not to hear. He cast quick, apprehensive glances at the sick men down the line, and John wondered if he looked for his own face, washed and faded, on one of the hospital pillows.
His father leaned toward him and said in an apologetic voice, “I’ve got to go to the bathroom,” then turned and walked out, tall and springy, the picture of handsome health. Panic lent him strength this time.
“Well, aren’t you a little frightened too?” Howard asked. “All you healthy bastards feel guilty in here.” He chuckled painfully and tapped his ribs through the faded hospital pajamas. Only the eyes, deep yet unsurrounded, moved as if on stalks and showed fire. “You haven’t been to see Bruce yet, have you?” he said, looking shrewd. “Well, he’s had his visitors all right, and I’ve had the same, grim and vulturine both. Listen, John, don’t write and you won’t get ileitis of the semicolon. Don’t ever make your peace with God, either. Bruce knew better and so don’t I. I’ve had the same buzzards measuring me with their twitchy beaks, and I’d prefer to be Bruce. He can’t hear them! Every time he breathes they know the words that wind would carry if it could!”
“Howard…”
“What?”
“I thought you were a sanguine sort of guy.”
“Man, that sang ain’t gwine so good no more, don’t you know? I’ve got a dead spot big as a walnut in my heart. Look at Bruce now. That’s what you’re going to do and you don’t like it, do you? You’ll be looking at an optimist! He always thought that someday he might get away with his own sins. Can you imagine that? He couldn’t keep a sin or a secret or a secret sin from himself, but the poor bastard thought someday he could! If you can’t keep a secret from yourself, who the hell can you keep it from?” His eyes twitched on the optic nerves, his chest heaved and hesitated in pain.
“He made no treaties, did he,” John said.
“He was not only brave, Johnny; he was fierce. ‘Why should men love a wolf more than a lamb or dove?’ asked Henry Vaughan, and I might add that women find wolves attractive, too. Oh, well, goodbye, John! Goodbye, goodbye! You want to know something? You may be as fierce as Bruce.” Howard put out a weak hand and shook John’s. “If you weren’t such a shit you’d be a good man. Goodbye!”
And so, John thought as he entered the hall again, the descent into the nightmare progresses: first one confronts the milder beasts, the mammals, who are not too distant relatives and haven’t the force of terror; then the reptilian bird, the essence of ferocity. That’s at the end of the hall, in the dark, feathery place where the talons wait and you deserve it.
The angles of the hall’s perspective grew acute, and although he walked slowly, the distance to the door grew small at the rate of the dream in which he was pulled. His mouth dried, his hands sweat, the clean clothes he had put on for the hospital seemed insubstantial and full of windy gaps. The door approached; painted steel, it was too small, gummy at the edges and partly open. He passed right on through, eyes shy and staring, to meet the half-man dying on the white bed.
In the cold light the closed face could have been, for purposes of cruel identification, Bruce’s. The forehead was a band of dead white; the shut eyes beneath it were deeply sunken, the dark lids red as fresh bruises. The cheekbones, above the blue swath of shaven beard, were as pearly and ovoid as eggs in waterglass. The expected thin tube entered the left nostril, where it was taped in place, and led the mind down to an inspirated, cruel hook, as would a taut line in the mouth of a fish, no hookeye visible. The wasted face and neck were somehow fungus-like and ripe, as if pale life burgeoned underneath in place of bone, and might split through. The nose was sharp and lean, the untaped nostril black and deep—as deep as the end of the tube’s push into Bruce. His mouth was slightly open, and a noisy suck of air, a windy, whistled parody of surprise, repeated and repeated upon the sleeping lips. Through the bristly new hair, a youthful, unmeant crewcut, John followed on the pale scalp the deep red crosshatchings of the stitched-down flaps. Through there the burr holes had been augered and the saw inserted: See-saw, and the bonemeal had come shedding out.
John’s own scalp crawled as if in response to glittering tools, and his hair, in a design identical to the design trenched upon his brother’s head, seemed to stand on end. If he did not love his brother, still the connection had been made in raped bone; in the violation of the most private part of a private man, his brain, brother perceived the shadow of brother’s wounds.
The chair beside the bed was empty, as was the low chair in the corner of the room. Beneath the half-pulled green windowshade the golden light of dusk shone weakly, whitened and sterilized at the sill by the fluorescent bar above the bed. Upon the metal bedtable a glass ash tray, centered upon a doily that was itself perfectly centered, remained and would remain innocent of Bruce’s nervously stubbed long butts and scattered ash. The time for bad habits—the property of anxious brain—had passed. This thing he had become, lax-armed upon a bed, fingers in the slight bend of coma, was the vegetable of whispers, the fascinating horror all men whispered of.
John stood beside the bed, his hand close to Bruce’s white one. Black hairs curled in crisp design upon the backs of the tapering fingers, and the white hand on its narrow wrist emerged as if from a sleeve of soft, woven black. The hand that he had always feared for its unthinking strength in rage, the hand he had found disturbingly weak when he helped Bruce into his last conscious bath, had now in absolute immobility regained its steel. It lay as if waiting for a trump of action—as if, instead of the machine it was, severed forever from its source of power, it saved and bided.
He moved a few inches away, to a point beyond the radius from the elbow to the arc of potent fingers, and only then recognized the distance for what it exactly was. If there had only been a time, if he could only conjure up a time to soften the fear that had grown into reflex! Bruce’s touch was as much to be avoided, had always been, as the kiss of red-hot iron; his flesh leaped back from it as if that separation were ruled by the spinal cord itself.
“I want a memory,” he said out loud, and the wind on Bruce’s lips answered surprise, repeated, lost the strength of that suggestion and repeated itself out of meaning into air.
No one could add a thousand little things committed in the course of life, nor, adding just a few, gain the comfort of reason; there had to have been a choice, a point where lines diverged like rays from the sunburst of love killed or born, and if he could find that point in time he might at least create a brother in his mind—make Bruce the actor in a play of dignity and worth.
Thunder: above Leah blue-black thunderheads climb in gigantic billows to the height of the Universe, stretch the sky upward beyond a ten-year-old boy’s conception of the depth of deep blue. The sound is so loud it is a vacuum in all sound, and shuts the eyes as well as the ears. CRACK in the electric air, and the houses are miraculously standing, the misty hills more or less where they were—or maybe not. Tame bushes in the yard roll white in maniac gusts; the arching maples lash thick branches with willowy irresponsibility, as if, in panic, they have lost their comforting strength. On the back porch two boys, one ten and one seventeen, scream back at the storm how brave they are and face the sting of rain that flings itself through the screen. They are alone
in the house, and have run upstairs and down closing windows. They have battened the hatches of the ship their home and now face the storm that is a typhoon; that has transformed Leah into a foreign sea. The lawn and driveway are suddenly water, pebbled by moving sheets of rain. The air is suddenly cold. Stunning thunder crumps dents in the blue-black sky, and lightning spits chimes, a jagged crack, then crackle and BLAM! the hills rock in the violent mist. The boys scream back, their screams lost and joyful in the higher clamor of weather. Along the sill below the billowing screen a row of pint cream bottles rock and tinkle. Seeing that they are about to fall the younger boy runs to save them, slips on the wet porch boards, skids into bottles, sill and screen and falls among the glass. Then he sits to watch his right arm gush, watches the rain mix with the red, wash blood and rain together to the boards and out the scuppers of the porch. The slice in his arm is like a crack in a dam, and he sees himself pouring out. He is the fluid clear or red that is flowing out into the storm. Boy overboard! In a terror of dilution he sees himself for the first time dying, and believes, as he will always believe, that death is precisely such a random flow. As he begins to faint he hears his voice cry HELP, and sees, as if through a dark lens, the white face of his brother. “All right, I’ve got you,” he hears. Like an iron valve a strong hand closes the hole. He knows then that some of him, at least, is left, and that it is his brother’s hand saving him, holding his life inside. Thunder would prepare, lightning split, rain wash him into the swallowing ground—but for the one strong hand that holds him inside of himself.
Bruce’s tapered hand lay slightly curled against the sheet. Blood pulsed, yet the pale hand never moved. There was a memory of rain and brotherhood! Alone, brother saved brother’s life. Headline in the Leah Free Press: Boy Saves Brother’s Life.
I will give him that memory, John thought, give him the memory and take the scar. And with cold surmise he reached for Bruce’s hand. He gathered the fingers that were as random as tassels into his own live ones, lifted the hand and turned the hairy arm. There ran the white ridge of the scar, from dark border of hair to dark border of hair—livid across the white as white as a toad’s belly.
If Bruce hated the objects of his cruelty, as he had the mangled toads, might he also hate those who helped him? Gratitude was the most unstable of emotions, and there was no plan, no angle of incidence, no physics in that dark mirror. He held the warm hand, and could not let it go. The memory was as inverted as the brain could wishfully make it; the scar could neither be transferred nor erased.
“Bruce,” he called to the body of his brother. In the hand a slight pulse ticked—perhaps it was his own. The wind of breath sucked on; the plasm idled. His hand, in the limp one, seemed to separate from his body altogether, and he stared down upon it and upon the one that was held, or held his. A hawk’s talon cruelly hidden in a mouse’s back: even to witness such a sight meant connection, as if the line of vision itself were palpable as flesh. Held by the long-nailed fingers, their moons covered by untended cuticle, he waited for a sign. “All right,” he said, “I give you my hand in payment. Cut it off.”
And then cried in terror, for the hand closed upon his.
—Gently, with the hesitation, almost the tenderness, of consciousness. Would he look up along the scarred arm, up the body to the face, his eyes darting closer to the horror he might find there? If the eyes now opened—were now open—charged with the sudden power of sense, signaling the glee of vegetable turned animal…Perhaps they smiled at him! He snatched his hand away. No, the face was still and closed; the thin tube still proclaimed Bruce lump. But the hand still moved upon the sheet, slowly clenching and unclenching with the idiot disconnectedness of the claw of a dying bird.
He made himself take the hand again, and suffered the weak clenchings of it. It hadn’t hurt him. It hadn’t had the strength. Moved by some stray circuit of the infinite, now disorganized, geometry of sense, the hand in spasm merely flexed. If he could forgive, or be forgiven, the same two hands must do their meeting sent by mind, strong in circuit, aimed by eyes. He could remember when he ran from a Bruce who may not have chased to hurt him. Younger, weaker, he had learned to run and disappear as a mouse evades a hawk. Older, no longer mouse, the pattern was still in force: to break it he must willfully give himself.
No sunburst of love born or hate ended, but in his hand the hand of his brother grew familiar. There was no past time, as there never is, no memory of tentative, shared possibilities. So he must be crying out of pity for the death of pride, out of sadness for love unborn.
He had never heard his father cry before, but now he recognized that tortured noise as the expected progression of his father’s deep and virile voice. As he turned to add the strength of his arms to the weakness of his father in sorrow, he heard his own smooth, involuntary moans. Smooth in the resolution of indifference, in the loss of hate, this music seemed to become the pure and simple mourning of love that heals and cleans like rain.
CHAPTER 27
Jane waited beside the little graveyard, where he had mysteriously told her to wait. The order had been calm and stern—she hadn’t thought to question it. Now she waited with a quiet confidence she could not, although she tried, disturb. God knew there were reasons for anxiety. What had been settled, except that she had admitted need beyond reason or restriction? He had found her in the hospital, and with an inner certainty she could not question said that now he was fit. He’d been to see his brother, and said: “I saw Bruce. He’s sick and dying, but there’s nothing I can do.”
Darkness was coming up Pike Hill, moving up from the valley where Cascom and Connecticut joined as if Leah, as her lights went on, pushed night up into the wild, higher places. In the west the sun had gone out of an orange sky. No wind at all moved the great black pines behind the graveyard, and no animals moved in the new darkness; that shade of night had come when even the red squirrels left talking for fear of silent owls.
Leah smoldered in the east, burned without flame. Only the thin smoke hovered and stayed for warning.
She heard him coming through the trees, his steps soft and precise even in the dry brush. Then he stood quietly beside her. “I didn’t want to tell you sooner,” he said with difficulty. “It wasn’t my move. I didn’t mean to let you worry longer than you had to.” He lit a match and held it over a piece of paper so that she could read:
DEAR JOHN,
I know you was going to turn me in. I do not blame you John. A man never ought to be punised for what he never done even Junior Stevens. I figured out you would come told me first so I figured you would get this. I have got to close now as I am going out to the woods and I will never be comeing back alive. I hereby deed you my farm and truck approx. 100 acres all there on the deed. Do not let them gip you John G.I. $1000 exempton covers all the taxs. Rember all those good times we have had. You was my only friend John.
Sincerely yours,
WILLIAM HUCKINS MULDROW
P.S. They will not ever find me, W. H. M.
“He’s gone, of course,” John said. “He means it, I can tell you that. You can call Junior when we get back to the house. I don’t want to show this to the police until tomorrow. Give Billy a chance to get himself set. He likes privacy.”
“I’m sorry, John,” she said.
“I knew it before. I went to see him, and he told me not to worry. His rifle’s gone, too. That’s how he’s going to do it.”
She put her arms around his waist, her head under his chin. Above her head his eyes would be fiercely blue, staring, as she had seen them stare, with the power to burn lines in the air; as if they were electrodes aimed—this time back into the deep, absorbent woods.
After a while he turned her toward Leah, and they looked down upon the busy constellation of windows, signs and lights winked by rising heat, masked gently by Leah’s pillaring trees. “We’ve got to go down,” he said, and as if in warning answer a parched wind moved like dust against their faces. A dull, continuing fear surged
against her and was stopped by his strong arm. Burning and the threat of it constantly hovered, sometimes hardly felt: the deaths of friends and husbands, hills black and dead, rooms ashes of wood or of love…
“Will it ever rain?” she asked.
“I suppose it will, Janie, but that’s no excuse for waiting.” He turned her around again and stared into her eyes. She looked straight into his and received a nearly blinding charge of that fierce energy.
“I forgot,” he said, and whirled around. “My father’s guilty bourbon!” He went to a thin gravestone, his hand running gently over the edge of it, then bent and pulled up a bottle. “O bourbon,” he said, “I know a stronger medicine than you!” With that he threw the bottle through the trees, where it was silently received.
“Wasn’t much in it, anyway,” he said.
As they walked down again, toward Leah and the things of life, she knew herself to be, again, a part of that purposeful, complicated moil. As they descended into the neighborhood of lights, into the wide tunnel of maples, it seemed to her that the craggy, fertile arms of Leah—threatening or threatened—arched and touched over their heads.
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