XI
Sara
“The road home keeps getting longer and longer…” was playing in her head, over and over. Travis Tritt was a nineties singer. A few years earlier it was Eric Clapton singing about not being able to find the way back home. Everyone understood those songs once they’d killed something inside themselves. Why was music so painful? Why were the red leaves dancing in the wind, so beautiful, so like the lilting waltz, such an overwhelming hurting vision?
It wasn’t so long ago that Sara stood watching the older kids, the school-age kids, coming toward her in her yard. The snow was perfect, unscarred, but then the kids came and walked right through it making a slushy path and it infuriated her, that small helpless child who had been awed by the quiet, perfect beauty of the glistening snow, the smooth coldness on her skin.
In the autumns I walked, shuffling scented dead leaves ahead of me into piles. Everywhere I smelled the smoke of burning leaves, in my hair and woolen clothes. The leaves blew at my ankles in that whirlwind that always precedes a storm and I remembered the falls, so many falls year after year and the child’s fall, the early days, the frightening frosted days of rotting apples and early doom… Sara’s journal
The leafy vines that grew up the chimneys of old Tudor houses wafted gently in the early October breezes. Sara walked looking into yards through the branches of huge fir trees and longed for even that limited approximation of forest that enclosed the large old homes. She imagined wood fires behind the leaded glass and richness of wood floors and oriental carpets. But of course the residents of these mansions were just people, like her, like Henry, riddled with pain, tormented by an ignorance that always seemed just on the verge of lifting but never did. She stood still, mesmerized by the movement of yards and yards of vines lifting and settling again over the front of a house exposing briefly the image of an old man and a little girl looking out the window. “Fire,” she thought.
A lethargy always overwhelmed Sara in the fall. She knew it was depression but Prozac didn’t work for her, sleep was better. In the fall, Sara slept from early dark to late dawn and dreamt many dreams, establishing another world, another home in those dreams, the ongoing saga of another life. Often her dreams turned dark and violent but even so, Sara was always happiest entering them and hearing again the sounds of her beloved forest.
There was no place to park. The snow had been cleared and cleared into growing mounds by the edges of roads and the mounds grew into the road until it was barely wide enough for her truck. Some cars parked on the edge of the road were covered with snow and others had been dug out but there was no place for any of them to go. She left the truck in the middle of the road and walked stiffly up the house of her friends who had left the forest a year earlier than she had. She hesitated at the door and then rang the bell even though it was midnight. No one answered: she hadn’t heard the bell ring so figured it probably didn’t work anymore. Finally she got too cold to stand there and went back to her truck, never even thinking of just breaking into the house. It wouldn’t have done her any good to do so: the house had been deserted for over a month and there was no heat. She crawled back into the truck and wrapped herself in the plaid car blanket she kept there for emergencies and turned on the heater and the tape player and fell asleep, warm and cheerful to the accompaniment of the easy, slightly ironic ragtime of Scott Joplin. In a last, very real dream, she got out of the cab and entered Mrs. Bradley’s house back in West Virginia and the woman started to hug her and asked her to sit awhile. They talked a bit about the weather and their gardens and then, without warning, Mabel Bradley got the memory book from her husband’s funeral. She had to read it all, all the names and hear about who sent flowers and she felt bad, she hadn’t sent any. There were fifty wreaths Mabel told her, too many she seemed to think, and if it had been up to Mabel she would have put some of those flowers on Dewey’s grave. He’d lost his mind at the end. He’d see people coming up the road and run out and ask the drivers to take him to sinking creek or some place from his childhood. He scared a lot of people and Mabel would yell down to them to wait and she’d go down there and drag him out of the car, because they would let him get in, not understanding he wasn’t himself, and he would fight with her and call her names and never really know who she was, his wife of fifty years. It was smoking did it, Mabel told her, not the alcohol. Mabel said she never drank or smoked and so they sat and visited and then the visit was over and she had to leave and Mabel told her to come again, but she knew she wouldn’t. She got back into the truck, still in her dream, and slept even more deeply, dreaming some other dream and knowing this time that it was a dream: voices coming through the thick snow like whispers, and little tinkly noises like breaking glass:
“Wait, I hear something. Hey man there’s music in that truck, you see that truck on the road?”
“I’ll check it out. Don’t worry about it, just another stiff, another one froze in the car.”
Rounds of tinny ragtime and Mozart and glass breaking magically as if it could go on breaking forever.
“Look at these candleholders, I think they’re solid gold! they’re heavy as hell.”
“No, they ain’t gold…I can just tell, that’s all. Forget the heavy brass stuff. Go for the electronics. The guy said electronics. OK you go back in and hand it out to me and don’t worry, no one is coming in this cold.”
All the people gone somewhere to get warm, gone to the country maybe to burn wood because there was no more fuel coming into the cities. The beggars dying in the streets same as usual and the affluent dying too, asleep in their cars with the carbon monoxide in the parking lots of airports where the planes couldn’t take off and the roads they had come in on blocked with snow, frozen in busloads downtown on their way home from offices, burned in their apartments with the gas ranges and electric heaters substituting for the empty oil furnaces. And slowly everything closing. But somewhere there was a frenzy of life, of people waiting out the cold spell and getting things cheap in the meantime and maybe getting something for nothing, that was always good for a thrill, and maybe a little revenge in these last moments, maybe some justice now it didn’t matter anymore.
The scavengers ran off with their stuff for all the good it would do them in a few days time when the earth would be packed even more firmly beneath the ceaselessly falling snow and they were themselves “stiffs” in the backs of deserted buildings. No one expected it to end like that. It always seemed more satisfying to imagine the whole thing going up in a big, glorious cloud of radiation, sudden and crazy and marvelously violent. Some froze, some starved, some died of loneliness, all was preserved under the quiet, stifling snow, kind of inconclusive, definitely anticlimactic.
Dancers coming on through the fog of smoke, of snowy mist, knees bent, soft stepping, elbows bent, slowly flapping, clipped-winglike, circling slowly circling, wide stepping, soft stepping. The men in bowler hats and vests and tight-fitting pants, colorful, the women like cheap gimcrack figurines in their high high-heeled shoes standing on one hip in their feathers and satins and arch looks, eyes turning as the men dance around them, strutting, leaning, turning slow like to the raggedy slow-motion waltz. Colors here and there forcing out of the soft gray mist of smoke (of snow) colder and slower and colder and slower the piano player smoking his cigar, spinning out the music slower and slower and they spin like mechanical dolls to a stop, frozen in time. Horned beasts, beasts with smiles, grotesque animals with parts borrowed from other animals, fanciful, colorful, plastic gargoyles spinning around slower and slower on the merry-go-round. Empty carriages spinning and lifting into heels in the air spinning slower and slower and leaving them there. Trains climbing slowly to summits and crashing down in breathtaking bursts of speed. Dwarves spinning slowly around the black and white princess of the woods, plastic faces grinning eyes sparkling eternally to the music, carnival music and the slower crashing of the ocean’s waves. Somewhere the boy who turned it all on lies frozen warm by the side of the sea,
the waves slowing into glaciers and the music cutting sharp into snowy mists, hitting hard on the frozen air. Dance of death, dance of death. All the clocks chiming, all the dolls dancing out the time, the time, time stopped in snow, sound stopped in snow. Stopped.
The end of the world was a comforting dream. In the fall, Sara always thought that god had made too many mistakes and needed to throw out the whole complicated story and start over again, fresh. Another comforting dream was the burning of Henry’s bones, a ceremony of respect, a task left waiting for her.
The bones were brittle and bleached, but they were scattered around the sinkhole and mixed up with the bones of deer, rabbits, squirrels, animals the dogs had killed and eaten along with Henry’s remains. She collected them all in bundles of rags she had brought all the way from D.C. She had driven straight through like she used to and gone through Paint Bank while it was still dark, before the school bus was started, stopping for nothing.
It took her three trips to carry the bones and her old rifle back to the shack where once she had lived, walking along the old deer path that passed the larger cave opening and the spring. As always, Sara was afraid that Robert might emerge from the forest to confront her with his strange stare full of meanings only he could fathom, but she met no one. With the knowledge that dreams confer, she had a sense that there was no one to meet, anywhere.
She went into the toolshed looking for old cans of kerosene but they were mostly empty and she had to siphon off the gasoline still left in an old power mower. She piled the last evidence of Henry’s existence in the middle of the floor of the front room of the shack and soaked the pile with gasoline. All the windows and doors were open and it was a dry breezy day. She lit the fire and ran out the door, up the road to her truck.
Usually Sara woke up at this point. But this last time she dreamed on. This time she was not the last person on earth and she felt relief when she found familiar faces at the Paint Bank volunteer Fire Department.
Everyone was there and they had just begun a dance. She stood awhile watching fat, smiling women in colorful dresses whirl past on the arms of stiff old men with stoic expressions. “We are all in an old painting” she said to someone who didn’t see her. She looked for the postmistress who would recognize Sara and tell her husband to get the fire truck out.
By the time they arrived, the toolshed, woodshed, wood roof of the root cellar and the outhouse were all burning and they were concerned about the fire spreading across the dry grassy field to the forest up the hill. She told them to never mind the house and just be sure to contain the fire and protect the woods. That’s what they did, trenching around the field and the garden plot and diverting springwater to protect the trees. Sara worked with them and it felt so real. Soon, the buildings, all but the stone walls of the root cellar, were a pile of rubble, stones, charred metal tools and old stoves, canning jars, some tarred boards and tin roofing and asphalt shingles and somewhere in that rubble the metal parts of a rifle and a man’s teeth.
That was the last time Sara dreamed about Henry’s bones. Though she wanted to, she never went back to camp at her old home. She knew that Robert was patiently waiting for her, and sometimes she wrote to the postmistress saying she might come out but she never did. Henry’s truck had long ago been reported abandoned and towed off by the state road crew. Henry himself had been forgotten by all but Robert, who never forgot anything or anyone but twisted all number of memories into his fantastic braid of implausible stories that no one paid any attention to, and by Sara, who never really got that good a look at him but remembered him when the autumn leaves rustled or the snow fell.
XII
Mary
At the state hospital, Mary learned to dance. She loved to listen to music and twirl round and round in circles and, amazingly, never got dizzy: it was her special gift. Staffers would play her favorite songs and she would begin to twirl and they would watch and yell “go Mary” and she would smile and hum the music and twirl and twirl.
XIII
Robert
Robert was working on writing a novel about the people in his county. He had found some notes about them written on some charred pieces of paper left in the fire hole at that woman’s campground after she left. He was amazed at the things folks had told her and didn’t believe the half of it, but he thought it might make a good movie for TV. Trouble is, he kept rewriting it and rewriting it. Then he couldn’t figure out how to end it. Every time he thought he had it worked out he would get a new idea that didn’t work with the old one so he would throw away the whole thing and start over. He’d been working on it for years. He told Houston about it, which was, of course, a big mistake. No one took Robert seriously but he worked diligently nevertheless.
As he worked, Robert felt a growing bond with that city woman. He found himself wishing she would come back so he could tell her about how he’d saved her life that night Henry went stalking her. She’d been so frightened she’d never even gone close enough to examine Henry’s body, to see the wound that killed him. Just like a city woman to think she’d done it herself with that little twenty-two so far away and in the dark. Maybe she thought god was looking after her and directed her paltry bullet straight to Henry’s heart. Well, in a way, god was looking after her. God had sent Robert with his skill at stealth, who could sneak right up behind Henry without being heard and push his small handgun right into Henry’s back and shoot and run away without being seen. Robert liked the idea that he was sent by god. And then he thought he ought to put Sara into the novel, thinking he had finally found the ending. He began to work himself into Sara’s story. He began to wonder where she’d gone to. Maybe the postmistress would know.
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a note about the writer
Sandra Shwayder Sanchez earned a BA in Behavioral Sciences at University of Maryland and a Juris Doctor degree fromvDenver University Law School. Her law practice involved the representation of indigent clients in the Denver criminal, family and mental health courts. In the early seventies she built a house and farmed in rural West Virginia. She now lives in a small mountain town in Colorado with her husband Ed Sanchez. The short stories and novellas of Sandra Shwayder Sanchez have appeared in The Long Story, Zone 3, The Healing Muse, Storyglossia, The Dublin Quarterly, and Cantaraville. Her first novel, The Nun, was published in 1992 by Plain ViewPress, and a new novel, The Road Home will be forthcoming this year.
Three Novellas Page 23