Fast Lanes

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  “Let me get the rosewater,” I whisper.

  Inside the tent he sits up to make room. Hold the bowl and the cloth, crawl in and it’s like sitting low in high fields hidden away, except there isn’t even sky, no opening at all.

  “It’s like a coffin, that’s what,” he’d said when he could talk.

  “A coffin is long and thin,” I told him, “with a lid.”

  “Mine has a ceiling,” Warwick said.

  Inside everything is clean and white and dry; every day we change the white bottom sheet and he isn’t allowed any covers. He’s sitting up—I still can’t see him in the dark; even the netting looks black, so I find him, hand forehead nose throat.

  “Can’t you see me? There’s a moon, I see you fine.”

  “Then you’ve turned into a bat. I’ll see in a moment, it was light in the kitchen.”

  “Mam?”

  “Mam and three lamps. She’s rolling bandages this hour of the night. She doesn’t sleep when you don’t.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “I know.”

  He only sleeps in daytime when he can hear people making noise. At night he wakes up in silence, in the narrow black room, in bandages in the tent. For a while when the doctor bled him he was too weak to yell for someone.

  “I won’t need bandages much longer,” he says.

  “A little longer,” I tell him.

  “I should be up walking. I wonder if I can walk; like before I wondered if I could see.”

  “Of course you can walk, you’ve only been in bed two weeks, and a few days before upstairs—”

  “I don’t remember when they moved me here, so don’t it seem like always I been here?”

  Pa and Dennis and Claude and Mam moved him, all wearing gloves and their forearms wrapped in gauze I took off them later and burned in the woodstove.

  “Isn’t always. You had deep sleeps in the fever, you remember wrong.”

  I start at his feet which are nearly healed, with the sponge and the cool water. Water we took from the rain barrel and scented with torn roses, the petals pounded with a pestle and strained, since the doctor said not to use soap.

  The worst week I bathed him at night so he wouldn’t get terrified alone. He was delirious and didn’t know when he slept or woke. When I touched him with the cloth he made such whispers, such inside sounds; they weren’t even words but had a cadence like sentences. When he whispered them to me it was all right; I wasn’t scared, but that one noon his fever was highest and the room itself like an oven—he shouted, on and on—Mam made everyone pray, even the men called in from work in the fields. Satan was inside Warwick. That is not God’s language, she said, Satan is trying to take him. She yelled louder than Warwick as though he might hear if she shouted the devil down: He delighteth not in the strength, He taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man, the Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear Him.… Fear him! hope in His Mercy, He casteth forth His ice like morsels—

  I was rubbing Warwick with alcohol to take the sweat, he was wet and smelled of poison, his legs arms eyes all bandaged and hands and legs tied down so he wouldn’t thrash and make his raw skin bleed—I was terrified there in the hot narrow room, sun in the windows horribly bright. Voices in the kitchen, the other side of the wall. Thou hast made him lower than angels … he did fly up, Mam shouted, and Warwick in the darkness in his secret place, all round about him like black water boiling in the dark. I could see him vanishing like something sucked down a hole, like fire ducked into a slit. If he could hear them praying, if he could feel this heat and the heat of his fever, blind as he was then in bandages, and tied, if he could still think, he’d think he was in hell. I poured the alcohol over him, and the water from the basin, I was bent close his face just when he stopped raving and I thought he had died. He said a word.

  “Bessie,” he said.

  Bless me, I heard. I knelt with my mouth at his ear, in the sweat, in the horrible smell of the poison. “Warwick,” I said. He was there, tentative and weak, a boy waking up after sleeping in the blackness three days. “Stay here, Warwick. Warwick.”

  I heard him say the word again, and it was my name, clearly.

  “Bessie,” he said.

  So I answered him. “Yes, I’m here. Stay here.”

  Later he told me he slept a hundred years, swallowed in a vast black belly like Jonah, no time anymore, no sense but strange dreams without pictures. He thought he was dead, he said, and the moment he came back he spoke the only word he’d remembered in the dark.

  Sixteen years later, when he did die, in the mine—did he say a word again, did he say that word? Trying to come back. The second time, I think he went like a streak. I had the color silver in my mind. A man from Coalton told us about the cave-in. The man rode out on a horse, a bay mare, and he galloped the mare straight across the fields to the porch instead of taking the road. I was sitting on the porch and saw him coming from a ways off. I stood up as he came closer. I knew the news was Warwick, and that whatever had happened was over. I had no words in my mind, just the color silver, everywhere. The fields looked silver too just then, the way the sun slanted. The grass was tall and the mare moved through it up to her chest, like a powerful swimmer. I did not call anyone else until the man arrived and told me, breathless, that Warwick and two others were trapped, probably suffocated, given up for dead. The man, a Mr. Forbes, was surprised at my composure. I simply nodded; the news came to me like an echo. I had not thought of that moment in years—the moment Warwick’s fever broke and I heard him speak—but it returned in an instant. Having once felt that disappearance, even so long before, I was prepared. Memory does not work according to time. I was twelve years old, perceptive, impressionable, in love with Warwick as a brother and sister can be in love. I loved him then as one might love one’s twin, without a thought. After that summer I understood too much. I don’t mean I was ashamed; I was not. But no love is innocent once it has recognized its own existence.

  At eighteen, I went away to a finishing school in Lynchburg. The summer I came back, foolishly, I ran away west. I eloped partially because Warwick found fault with anyone who courted me, and made a case against him to Mam. The name of the man I left with is unimportant. I do not really remember his face. He was blond but otherwise he did resemble Warwick—in his movements, his walk, his way of speaking. All told, I was in his company eight weeks. We were traveling, staying in hotels. He’d told me he was in textiles but it seemed actually he gambled at cards and roulette. He had a sickness for the roulette wheel, and other sicknesses. I could not bear to stand beside him in the gambling parlors; I hated the noise and the smoke, the perfumes mingling, the clackings of the wheels like speeded-up clocks and everyone’s eyes following numbers. Often I sat in a hotel room with a blur of noise coming through the floor, and imagined the vast space of the barn around me: dark air filling a gold oval, the tall beams, the bird sounds ghostly, like echoes. The hay, ragged heaps that spilled from the mow in pieces and fell apart.

  The man who was briefly my husband left me in St. Louis. Warwick came for me; he made a long journey in order to take me home. A baby boy was born the following September. It was decided to keep my elopement and divorce, and the pregnancy itself, secret. Our doctor, a country man and friend of the family, helped us forge a birth certificate stating that Warwick was the baby’s father. We invented a name for his mother, a name unknown in those parts, and told that she’d abandoned the baby to us. People lived so far from one another, in isolation, that such deceit was possible. My boy grew up believing I was his aunt and Warwick his father, but Warwick could not abide him. To him, the child was living reminder of my abasement, my betrayal in ever leaving the farm.

  Lately I have a dream. As is true in fact, I am the last one left. The farmhouse is deserted but still standing; I walk away from it. There is mist from the creek and the moist smell of day lilies, mustard bitters of their furred sepals broken in the black ivy. Thick beds of the dark-veined leaves are a tangle i
n the undergrowth. There, in the thicket where I fought with Warwick, I find the yellow rope, bleached pale as rain in those leaves. The frayed fibers are a white fuzz along the ground. I kneel down to touch the leaves, and the dirt beneath is cool as cellar air, pliable as sand. I dig a hole, as though a grave is there, a grave I will discover. Cards I find, and a knife. And the voice of a preacher, wet and charred: One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found.

  The funeral was held at the house. Men from the mine saw to it Warwick was laid out in Coalton, then they brought the box to the farm on a lumber wagon. The lid was kept shut. That was the practice then; if a man died in the mines his coffin was closed for services, nailed shut, even if the man was unmarked.

  The day after Warwick’s funeral, all the family was leaving back to their homesteads, having seen each other in a confused picnic of food and talk and sorrowful conjecture. Half the sorrow was Warwick alive and half was Warwick dead. His dying would make an end of the farm. I would leave now for Bellington, where, in a year, I would meet another man. Mam and Pa would go to live with Claude and his wife. But it was more than losing the farm that puzzled and saddened everyone; no one knew who Warwick was, really. They said it was hard to believe he was inside the coffin, with the lid nailed shut that way. Touch the box, anywhere, with the flat of your hand, I told them. They did, and stopped that talk.

  The box was thick pine boards, pale white wood; I felt I could fairly look through it like water into his face, like he was lying in a piece of water on top of the parlor table. Touching the nailed lid you felt first the cool slide of new wood on your palm, and a second later, the depth—a heaviness, the box was so deep it went clear to the center of the earth, his body contained there like a big caged wind. Something inside, palpable as the different air before flash rains, with clouds blown and air clicking before the crack of downpour.

  I treated the box as though it were living: it had to accustom itself to the strange air of the house, of the parlor, a room kept for weddings and death. The box was simply there on the table, long and pure like some deeply asleep, dangerous animal. The stiff damask draperies at the parlor windows looked as though they were about to move, gold tassels at the hems suspended and still.

  The morning before the service most of the family had been in Coalton, seeing to what is done at a death. I had been alone in the house with the coffin churning what air there was to breathe. I had dressed in best clothes as though for a serious, bleak suitor. The room was just lighted with sunrise, window shades pulled halfway, their cracked sepia lit from behind. One locust began to shrill as I took a first step across the floor; somehow one had gotten into the room. The piercing, fast vibration was very loud in the still morning: suddenly I felt myself smaller, cramped as I bent over Warwick inside his white tent of netting, his whole body afloat below me on the narrow bed, his white shape in the loose bandages seeming to glow in dusk light while beyond the row of open windows hundreds of locusts sang a ferocious pattering. I could scarcely see the parlor anymore. My vision went black for a moment, not black but dark green, like the color of the dusk those July weeks years before.

  Author’s Note

  I wish to thank my editor at Vintage, LuAnn Walther, for suggesting the addition of three previously uncollected stories to this edition of Fast Lanes. “Counting,” written in appreciation of the Japanese poet Akutagawa, was first published as a limited edition letterpress book by Annabel Lee’s Vehicle Editions. “Callie” is a memory saved from disappearance, a real-life counterpart to Audrey’s entirely invented voice in “Alma.” That story, first published in Esquire, was written as I began work on a novel called Shelter. Two of the characters, Lenny and Alma, are sisters, and “Alma” was my first inkling of who they were before they arrived (in the company of numerous other characters) at the isolated rural setting of the novel. As Shelter progressed, “Alma” was taken apart, arranged differently throughout a particular section of the book, changed into third person. Numerous readers have asked me to preserve it in its original first-person form.

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