Three Novellas
Page 6
“I used to like to tell my mother stories about my travels but after she died I stopped talking. I don’t remember much anymore. I got old in an old house all by myself but surrounded by people who didn’t talk to me and I didn’t talk to them either. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I should have talked first. Then I left with my dog and Cassandra found us. She had the parrot. He talks constantly but sometimes I think Cassandra is one of those people who can talk without moving their lips and they go on television with a doll on their lap and have conversations with it but they are really doing all the talking; that is what I sometimes think. They were my friends, so was Father Francis, and then Steven came and joined us. We have been like a family, all these years, as long as I lived with my mother in New Orleans I lived alone in that house and then again that is how long I lived with this new family. Time is a strange thing. I do not understand it at all. I cannot believe I am so old. Maybe 60 years is not so old but it seems old to me. I feel like I am still a child and wonder how I got to be this old. Cassandra is even older and I think she always was old and will live forever although I know everyone must die sooner or later. I still like to sing songs quietly when no one can hear, like in a whisper and I still like to make up poems that I say to myself. Now I remember that I had friends on a street under a highway and those men seemed so old to me then but I know they were only as old as I am now. They treated me nicely, I remember that. But something happened I don’t remember what. I only remember my mother died, and she was never old, she was always young, and then I was alone in that house and Corrine was gone and Alexander. I saw Alexander not that long ago but then he disappeared again and I am thinking he must have died, he must have been older than I realized. When I remember those people, I feel like I am seeing someone else, not me. I remember another old man named Bob and he helped me build my ark. I remember him like yesterday. I have a peacock feather and I remember the girl who gave it to me and why and I remember that I was once a very young man but I can’t feel the connection: it is more like seeing a movie on television than remembering my own life. Childhood, I don’t remember it much at all, just that I walked a lot. I loved walking. I was always happy walking. Sometimes people in the town would stop and ask me where I was going and if I wanted a ride but wherever I was going, it was just an excuse to be walking. I walked all over the town and sometimes in the woods around the town and then one day I walked into the woods and along the highway and away from the town and it felt like I could walk forever and I did walk for a long time, for years, and then I got to the city on the sea and stayed there a very long time. I would have walked again after my mother died but I was in the big yellow house and they wouldn’t let me leave. They trapped me with kindness, those nuns, even though I refused to speak to them. I don’t know why I didn’t walk out sooner but that is what I finally did, I walked out and I had a life in the city but a completely different life than the one I’d had before. There were adventures, like saving all those people in my ark when the flood finally came. I’d been waiting for that flood for years and I was glad it didn’t come while I was still trapped in that house with the nuns. I was glad I was out and could use the ark to save a lot of people. They all thanked me; some of them cried and hugged me. Of course I saved them. That was what I was supposed to do when the flood came. But then we all took a very long walk to get here and on the way we saw a man kill another man and I was not able to do anything and had nothing to say. It was too late. The man was dead. I felt sad for him. I knew about killing. You can’t live very long and not know about killing but I’d never seen a man killed right in front of me, even though it was far away, I knew what I saw. That was terrible. That was part of this life I am in now. I feel like I’ve had so many different lives and sometimes I remember them and sometimes they don’t seem like my own. Sometimes it seems like I have too many memories and I have to let some of them go and now, here is what I am thinking: I am thinking that it is time to go, to be done with these lives. I have one more walk I want to take, a walk into the mountains. The mountains here are so beautiful and I have been walking in them all this past year, in the snow, in the rain, even when there is thunder and lightening and everyone warns me that it is dangerous to be up there but still I walk in them and even in the hot sun which is closer to the earth here and hotter than other places. I love to walk in the mountains and when I am down here in the house I look out the window and watch them move in and out of the clouds and mists like magic. People talk to me but I don’t talk anymore, I am thinking about the mountains and how much I want to be in them, not just for a few hours but forever. I know that Cassandra will understand, she is a seer and understands everything even the future. And Steven is grown up now and can take of himself and everyone else. He talks all the time about school and going to college, someone at the school is going to help him to get to college. He reads and writes all the time. And Cory is so old, I know Cory can’t live much longer and I remember, this I do remember like it really was me and was just yesterday, I remember how I felt when my mother died and I don’t want to feel that again when Cory dies. I’ll leave Cory with Steven and Cassandra and walk into the mountains. I’ve been so many places and the only place I want to be now is in those mountains, right near the sky, the snow, the thunder and lightening and the hot sun.”
The Widow