To Make Death Love Us (23 page)

The Colonel and
Pepino ran out onto the grass of the backyard, already dressed, as if expecting or dreading such
an incident. There they found Evalina in her night­dress and robe, standing with her back against
a tree, her hand at the throat of her torn garment. Will was wiping a laugh, nervous and unfunny,
from his mouth with a sud­denly nervous hand. He whipped his head around at their
approach.

"What the hell have
you done, Will?" cried the Colonel.

"Why, nothing.
Nothing at all. We were just standing under the tree, Evelina and me, talking. It's a hot night
and . . . and . . ."

"What have you
done, you damn fool?" Paulette called from the summer porch, in her soft but carrying
voice.

He turned around as
if to answer to the new accusation and went on with what he was trying to say.

"We were just
talking and a spider fell out of the leaves onto her hair. I brushed it off and she
screamed."

"At your hand on
her?" Pepino asked.

"No, at the damned
spider. I was brushing it off. She was afraid of the spider."

Mr. Demming was
there all at once. He was in his night­shirt. He had a shotgun in his hands as though he were
prepared to shoot a fox after his chickens. Indeed, the chickens in the coop were kicking up one
hell of a fuss.

Will looked at the
farmer standing there and went on talking faster. "She jerked away and my hand must have caught
the neck of her nightdress. Now, that's all that happened and that's the truth."

Mrs. Demming wasn't
with her husband. Will seemed to know that she had stayed with Paulette on the summer
porch.

"I swear on my
mother's grave that that's the truth," he said.

"Shall we ask
Evalina?" Mr. Demming asked softly.

Will's eyes
flickered. "Ask her. Ask her," he shouted.

"She'd say you
spoke the truth."

"Then you believe
me?"

"No. Evalina
wouldn't want you hurt or punished."

"Now, wait. Who's
talking about punishment? Who's threatening to do me an injury. I'm innocent, I tell
you."

Mr. Demming raised
the barrel of the gun a bit. Will felt sweat breaking out on his forehead.

"Evalina is a good
and gentle girl," said Mr. Demming, "who would never bear witness against someone, even if that
someone did her harm."

"It happened just
the way I said it. It was just a spider! Just a spider, I tell you!" Will was beginning to
panic.

"But I know that
Evalina would never scream at a spi­der's touch. You couldn't know that. She's not the least
afraid of any living creature."

"Well, now . . . ,"
Will started to say.

"Come along behind
the shed, Mr. Carney," the farmer said, motioning with the gun.

Will wanted to
refuse, to turn and run, but he looked at the shotgun, which never wavered, and went
along.

Mr. Demming looked
at the Colonel and Pepino. "The two of you can come along. We don't believe in secret
justice."

They went behind
the shed. There was a machine set upon the stumps of two trees. It was a makeshift chain saw
fashioned from the guts and gears of an old Chevy. It was, judging from the sawdust round it, the
place where logs were sawed to size for winter wood.

Mr. Demming got it
started by touching an open lead to the poles of an old battery. The machine coughed, kicked
over, and then roared into life, the gears meshing and clanging one on the other as the saw
started spinning. Will stared at it with wide-eyed horror.

"Come here," the
farmer said.

Will started to
tremble, backing away. Fast as a striking rattler, the farmer reached out a long arm and caught
Will's left wrist in his own big hand. He exerted pressure and quickly brought Will to his knees
with his great strength. Will gasped in pain.

Mr. Demming changed
his grip, catching Will's arm high above the forearm, near the elbow. His hand was so big it
nearly circled Will's arm.

Grim-faced, he drew
Will's hand toward the saw.

"No/No!
Don't cut my hand
off!" Will screamed.

It was all
happening so quickly. Pepino and the Colonel just stood there. They wanted to stop it but the old
farmer was a force of nature, an avenging prophet, and the fear that justice was on his side
paralyzed them.

He pulled Will
closer, dragging his whole body that last few feet, and, without apparent anger, forced his hand
into the gears of the machine.

Will let out a
scream loud enough to wake the moun­tains from their ancient rest. The gears meshed, ground,
tearing muscle and bone, then the engine stalled. Mr. Demming let go of Will's arm, freeing it
from the stopped machine.

Will fell to the
sawdust, fainting dead away, his arm flung out and the hand at the end of it a bloody
mess.

Afterwards, Mrs.
Demming nursed the hand, bathing and bandaging it. They fed the entire troupe for two weeks while
Will recovered, until he was no longer in danger, his slight fever and small infection gone. All
the
while, there seemed no hate against
any of them for what Will had done.

Will said nothing
during that period of healing. Once they were on the road again, he told them all, over and over
again, that what he'd said was the truth. He'd never made a move to touch that girl except to
brush a spider from her hair. "It's the truth. The truth, I tell you!"

No one believed him
though they nodded their heads, and that seemed to make him first terribly angry, then sad, and,
finally, bitter as alum.

For a long time
after, particularly when he was fuzzy with drink, he would suddenly murmur, "I didn't do
any­thing," and cup his mangled hand with his good one. And sometimes he hid his eyes to hide the
sight of tears.

In any case, he'd
worn the wolf's clothing too long, and, perhaps, that one time he was wrongly hanged for
it.

The four in the van
knew they were in a race with a force that would destroy them. They knew it from the trem­bling
of the mountainside. They knew it from the sound of small earth slides that echoed up from the
valley below. They knew it in the large sense.

But in the
moment-to-moment assessment of their peril, they were gratefully unaware. Because they did not
know, they were able to labor on, pulling out this box and that bale, clearing the space to
freedom. Were they to know how closely death ran upon their heels, they may
well have lost their courage and lain down and let death
take them. But they had a dream that made them over, that lied just a tiny bit to them, just
enough to give them the power of disguise. And each, sensing his or her own inner greatness,
labored on, lives rising up strongly in the shadow of death.

As they moved the
weight about, shifting goods and clearing the way, the balance of the truck upon the moun­tain
was kept even. The forces at work were many and subtle.

Water still
percolated through the body of the earth, stones moved and pebbles slid away to form new dams and
pressures, vegetation gave up its hold upon the earth, the weight of accumulated sand and mud
moved down against the wheels of the truck.

The light from the
worklamp had been growing dim­mer. Now it became a subtle thing. The battery was giv­ing up the
last of its charge.

It was dark
again.

Paulette gave a
little gasp.

"I think the
tunnel's big enough for all of us," the Colo­nel said. "Never mind the light. First, we must take
Se­rena out."

"Take Paulette
first. She's been very good and she's afraid," Serena said.

"No, no," Paulette
began, but before she could protest further the Colonel cut her off. "There's no question of
first or favor here," he said. "Paulette has to stay where she is to hold the balance of the
truck. We can't risk her moving from that spot first."

His words were met
with silence. They had grown weary and numbed with their terror, until it had become almost a
comfortable and sleepy thing. They had lost the means to react to it. Thus, fresh knowledge of
the deadly hazard started up the entire process of fear once again.

"Help me,
Pepino."

The Colonel and the
Rubber Man lifted Serena be­tween them in their arms as they had done so often during the night.
Pepino, crouched double, moved backward through the tunnel, taking great care not to bump into
the sides of the tunnel. In the dark, they did collide once, and a stack of crates threatened to
topple over on them. Serena, sensing the disaster, cried out softly, like a mouse.

But they made it to
the end of the truck.

"Oh, God, how clean
the air smells," Pepino said.

They set Serena
down. Pepino scrambled off the tail­gate and turned to lift her in his arms. The truck
shud­dered, shifted an inch. They all gasped but the truck moved no farther. Pepino held Serena
in his arms. His eyes met the Colonel's in the dim light of the moon. They laughed silently into
each other's face as though laughing at death.

They wanted to
shout and leap about in their gladness. They just might make it after all.

The Colonel turned
around and faced the mouth of the tunnel again. "Come along, now, Paulette. Carefully. Carefully
and slowly."

After a long while
her voice came back. "I can't. I'm afraid."

"There's nothing to
be afraid of except staying where you are. You must come out."

There was another
wait that seemed too long before she spoke again. "I think I'm going to faint," Paulette called
out weakly.

From somewhere high
up on the mountain, the moun­tain gave up another piece of itself. Out here, in the clear air,
the sound of it seemed far louder than it had from inside the van, though, strangely, far less
threatening.

"Damn it. You come
right on out of there," the Colonel cried out.

They could hear
Paulette's soft sobs as she began to cry. She reacted swiftly to her own hurt
feelings.

Pepino stood
holding Serena and looking about as though looking for a place to set her down. There was nothing
but mud and slick puddles of water.

"Take Serena from
me," he said to the Colonel, "and I'll go back inside for Paulette."

"No." The Colonel
straightened himself and then shiv­ered, not from the cold but for the courage he was about to
ask of himself. "I'll go get her. It's for me to do."

The midget went
back into the belly of the truck that loomed as dark as that of Jonah's whale. The journey back
through the tunnel of boxes seemed to go on forever. He despaired of ever coming to the end of
it. When he did, he walked toward the sounds of soft weeping.

"I didn't mean for
you to come back," Paulette said when he touched her hand.

"Did you ever doubt
that I would? For don't we love you? Now, take my hand, my sweet one, and I will lead you down
the garden path."

Their hands touched
and they began to move.

"You in there.
What's going on in there?" Will suddenly called out. "Where's the light? What have you done to
the light?"

"Don't answer him,"
the Colonel whispered.

"You'd better say
something, goddamit, or I'll rock this goddamn truck over the side with everybody in
it."

The Colonel entered
the tunnel, leading Paulette be­hind him. She moved with a certain ponderous delicacy, shuffling
her feet so that the weight of her should not move heavily from side to side. The truck groaned
and shifted beneath their feet.

"You hear me? You
hear me? Where the hell are you? Have you gone off and left me? Answer me, damn you?"

Will cried,
begging, cursing, shouting, pleading softly for someone to answer him.

Paulette and the
Colonel moved toward the back of the truck and freedom. They listened in all their blood and
bones for the protesting heaves of the truck. It groaned, it shifted like a dragon coming awake.
There were screams of metal and the gratings of stone. Will's cries became louder.

They reached the
tailgate. The truck trembled. The Colonel leaped down into the mud.

"Sit down on the
edge of the tailgate, Paulette, then ease yourself down carefully."

Ponderously,
slowly, the Fat Lady seated herself, no mean feat in itself. Her legs hung down off the tailgate.
She heaved forward, sliding off, to land with a great splat in the soft, wet earth. It was a
comical tumble, as her legs held her for a second, then betrayed her and she fell headlong, like
a dying dinosaur. She looked up unhurt, with a smile on her face.

Suddenly, they all
began to laugh, happily, crazily.

"We did it, didn't
we, Colonel? We rescued our own selves." Pepino grinned like no philosopher of Romany inclination
had ever grinned.

Serena laid her
head against Pepino's chest. There was a smile in her heart but she was tired past belief. She
seemed like a flower crushed between the pages of a book, dried and containing only a memory of
life. She was a dream that had found the end of the rainbow and had no other place to
go.