A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories (11 page)

T
he thought was three days and three nights growing. During the days he carried it like a ripening peach in his head. During the nights he let it take flesh and sustenance, hung out on the silent air, colored by country moon and country stars. He walked around and around the thought in the silence before dawn. On the fourth morning he reached up an invisible hand, picked it, and swallowed it whole.

He arose as swiftly as possible and burned all his old letters, packed a few clothes in a very small case, and put on his midnight suit and a tie the shiny color of ravens' feathers, as if he were in mourning. He sensed his wife in the door behind him watching his little play with the eyes of a critic who may leap on stage any moment and stop the show. When he brushed past her, he murmured, “Excuse me.”

“Excuse me!” she cried. “Is that all you say? Creeping around here, planning a trip!”

“I didn't plan it; it happened,” he said. “Three days ago I got this premonition. I knew I was going to die.”

“Stop that kind of talk,” she said. “It makes me nervous.”

The horizon was mirrored softly in his eyes. “I hear my blood running slow. Listening to my bones is like standing in an attic hearing the beams shift and the dust settle.”

“You're only seventy-five,” said his wife. “You stand on your own two legs, see, hear, eat, and sleep good, don't you? What's all this talk?”

“It's the natural tongue of existence speaking to me,” said the
old man. “Civilization's got us too far away from our natural selves. Now you take the pagan islanders—”

“I won't!”

“Everyone knows the pagan islanders got a feel for when it's time to die. They walk around shaking hands with friends and give away all their earthly goods—”

“Don't their wives have a say?”

“They give some of their earthly goods to their wives.”

“I should think so!”

“And some to their friends—”

“I'll argue that!”

“And some to their friends. Then they paddle their canoes off into the sunset and never return.”

His wife looked high up along him as if he were timber ripe for cutting. “Desertion!” she said.

“No, no, Mildred; death, pure and simple. The Time of Going Away, they call it.”

“Did anyone ever charter a canoe and follow to see what those fools were up to?”

“Of course not,” said the old man, mildly irritated. “That would spoil everything.”

“You mean they had other wives and pretty friends off on another island?”

“No, no, it's just a man needs aloneness, serenity, when his juices turn cold.”

“If you could prove those fools really died, I'd shut up.” His wife squinted one eye. “Anyone ever
find
their bones on those far islands?”

“The fact is that they just sail on into the sunset, like animals who sense the Great Time at hand. Beyond that, I don't wish to know.”

“Well,
I
know,” said the old woman. “You been reading more articles in the
National Geographic
about the Elephants' Boneyard.”

“Graveyard, not Boneyard!” he shouted.

“Graveyard, Boneyard. I thought I burned those magazines; you got some hid?”

“Look here, Mildred,” he said severely, seizing the suitcase again. “My mind points north; nothing you say can head me south. I'm tuned to the infinite secret well springs of the primitive soul.”

“You're tuned to whatever you read last in that bog trotters' gazette!” She pointed a finger at him. “You think I got no memory?”

His shoulders fell. “Let's not go through the list again, please.”

“What about the hairy mammoth episode?” she asked. “When they found that frozen elephant in the Russian tundra thirty years back? You and Sam Hertz, that old fool, with your fine idea of running off to Siberia to corner the world market in canned edible hairy mammoth. You think I don't still hear you saying, ‘Imagine the prices members of the National Geographic Society will pay to have the tender meat of the Siberian hairy mammoth, ten thousand years old, ten thousand years extinct right in their homes!' You think my scars have healed from that?”

“I see them clearly,” he said.

“Yoy think I've forgotten the time you went out to find the Lost Tribe of the Osseos, or whatever, in Wisconsin some place where you could dogtrot to town Saturday nights and tank up, and fell in that quarry and broke your leg and laid there three nights?”

“Your recall,” he said, “is total.”

“Then what's this about pagan natives and the Time of Going Away? I'll tell you what it is—It's the Time of Staying at Home! It's the time when fruit don't fall off the trees into your hand, you got to walk to the store for it. And why do we
walk
to the store for it? Someone in this house, I'll name no names, took the car apart like a clock some years back and left it strewn all down the yard. I've raised auto parts in my garden ten years come Thursday. Ten more years and all that's left of our car is little heaps of rust. Look out that window! It's leaf-raking-and-burning time. It's chopping-trees-and-sawing-wood-for-the-fire time. It's clean-out-stoves-and-hang-storm-doors-and-windows time. It's shingle-the-roof-time,
that's
what it is, and if you think you're out to escape it, think again!”

He placed his hand to his chest. “It pains me you have so little trust in my natural sensitivity to oncoming Doom.”

“It pains
me
that
National Geographics
fall in the hands of crazy old men. I see you read those pages then fall into those dreams I always have to sweep up after. Those
Geographic
and
Popular Mechanics
publishers should be forced to see all the half-finished rowboats, helicopters, and one-man batwing gliders in our attic, garage, and cellar. Not only
see
, but cart them home!”

“Chatter on,” he said. “I stand before you, a white stone sinking in the tides of Oblivion. For God's sake, woman, can't I drag myself off to die in peace?”

“Plenty of time for Oblivion when I find you stone cold across the kindling pile.”

“Jesting Pilate!” he said. “Is recognition of one's own mortality nothing but vanity?”

“You're chewing it like a plug of tobacco.”

“Enough!” he said. “My earthly goods are stacked on the back porch. Give them to the Salvation Army.”

“The
Geographics
too?”

“Yes, damn it, the
Geographics!
Now stand aside!”

“If you're going to die, you won't need that suitcase full of clothing,” she said.

“Hands off, woman! It may take some few hours. Am I to be stripped of my last creature comforts? This should be a tender scene of parting. Instead—bitter recriminations, sarcasm, doubt strew to every wind.”

“All right,” she said. “Go spend a cold night in the woods.”

“I'm not necessarily going to the woods.”

“Where else is there for a man in Illinois to go to die?”

“Well,” he said and paused. “Well, there's always the open highway.”

“And be run down, of course; I'd forgotten that.”

“No, no!” He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. “The empty side roads leading nowhere, everywhere, through night forests, wilderness, to distant lakes....”

“Now, you're not going to go rent a canoe, are you, and paddle off? Remember the time you tipped over and almost drowned at Fireman's Pier?”

“Who said anything about canoes?”

“You did! Pagan islanders, you said, paddling off into the great unknown.”

That's the South Seas! Here a man has to strike off on foot to find his natural source, seek his natural end. I might walk north along the Lake Michigan shore, the dunes, the wind, the big breakers there.”

“Willie, Willie,” she said softly, shaking her head. “Oh, Willie, Willie, what will I do with you?”

He lowered his voice. “Just let me have my head,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, quietly. “Yes.” And tears came to her eyes.

“Now, now,” he said.

“Oh, Willie …” She looked a long while at him. “Do you really think with all your heart you're not going to live?”

He saw himself reflected, small but perfect, in her eye, and looked away uneasily. “I thought all night about the universal tide that brings man in and takes him out. Now it's morning and good-by.”

“Good-by?” She looked as if she'd never heard the word before.

His voice was unsteady. “Of course, if you absolutely insist I stay, Mildred—”

“No!” She braced herself and blew her nose. “You feel what you feel; I can't fight that!”

“You
sure?
” he said.

“You're the one that's sure, Willie,” she said. “Get on along now. Take your heavy coat; the nights are cold.”

“But—” he said.

She ran and brought his coat and kissed his cheek and drew back quickly before he could enclose her in his bear hug. He stood there working his mouth, gazing at the big armchair by the fire. She threw open the front door. “You got food?”

“I won't need …” He paused. “I got a boiled ham sandwich and some pickles in my case. Just one. That's all I figured I'd …”

And then he was out the door and down the steps and along the path toward the woods. He turned and was going to say something but thought better of it, waved, and went on.

“Now, Will,” she called. “Don't overdo. Don't make too much distance the first hour! You get tired, sit down! You get hungry, eat! And …”

But here she had to stop and turn away and get out her handkerchief.

A moment later she looked up the path and it looked as though nobody has passed there in the last ten thousand years. It was so empty she had to go in and shut the door.

 

Nighttime, nine o'clock, nine-fifteen, stars out, moon round, house lights strawberry-colored through the curtains, the chimney blowing long comet tails of fireworks, sighing warm. Down the chimney, sounds of pots and pans and cutlery, fire on the hearth,
like a great orange cat. In the kitchen, the big iron cookstove full of jumping flames, pans boiling, bubbling, frying, vapors and steams in the air. From time to time the old woman turned and her eyes listened and her mouth listened, wide, to the world outside this house, this fire, and this food.

Nine-thirty and, from a great distance away from the house, a solid whacking, chunking sound.

The old woman straightened up and laid down a spoon.

Outside, the dull solid blows came again and again in the moonlight. The sound went on for three or four minutes, during which she hardly moved except to tighten her mouth or her fists with each solid chunking blow. When the sounds stopped, she threw herself at the stove, the table, stirring, pouring, lifting, carrying, setting down.

She finished just as new sounds came from the dark land outside the windows. Footsteps came slowly up the path, heavy shoes weighed the front porch.

She went to the door and waited for a knock.

None came.

She waited a full minute.

Outside on the porch a great bulk stirred and shifted from side to side uneasily.

Finally she sighed and called sharply at the door. “Will, is that you breathing out there?”

No answer. Only a kind of sheepish silence behind the door.

She snatched the door wide.

The old man stood there, an incredible stack of cordwood in his arm. His voice came from behind the stack.

“Saw smoke in the chimney; figured you might need wood,” he said.

She stood aside. He came in and placed the wood carefully by the hearth, not looking at her.

She looked out on the porch and picked up the suitcase and brought it in and shut the door.

She saw him sitting at the dinner table.

She stirred the soup on the stove to a great boiling whirl.

“Roast beef in the oven?” he asked quietly.

She opened the oven door. The steam breathed across the room to wrap him up. He closed his eyes, seated there, bathed.

“What's that other smell, the burning?” he asked a moment later.

She waited, back turned, and finally said, “
National Geographics
.”

He nodded slowly, saying nothing.

Then the food was on the table, warm and tremulous, and there was a moment of silence after she sat down and looked at him. She shook her head. She looked at him. Then she shook her head again silently.

“Do you want to ask the blessing?” she said.

“
You
,” he said.

They sat there in the warm room by the bright fire and bowed their heads and closed their eyes. She smiled and began.

“Thank you, Lord …”

“R
eady?”

“Ready.”

“Now?”

“Soon.”

“Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?”

“Look, look; see for yourself!”

The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.

It rained.

It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.

“It's stopping, it's stopping!”

“Yes, yes!”

Margot stood apart from them, from these children who could never remember a time when there wasn't rain and rain and rain. They were all nine years old, and if there had been a day, seven years ago, when the sun came out for an hour and showed its face to the stunned world, they could not recall. Sometimes, at night, she heard them stir, in remembrance, and she knew they were
dreaming and remembering gold or a yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy the world with. She knew they thought they remembered a warmness, like a blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands. But then they always awoke to the tatting drum, the endless shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forests, and their dreams were gone.

All day yesterday they had read in class about the sun. About how like a lemon it was, and how hot. And they had written small stories or essays or poems about it:

I think the sun is a flower
,

That blooms for just one hour
.

That was Margot's poem, read in a quiet voice in the still classroom while the rain was falling outside.

“Aw, you didn't write that!” protested one of the boys.

“I did,” said Margot. “I did.”

“William!” said the teacher.

But that was yesterday. Now the rain was slackening, and the children were crushed in the great thick windows.

“Where's teacher?”

“She'll be back.”

“She'd better hurry, we'll miss it!”

They turned on themselves, like a feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes.

Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.

“What're
you
looking at?” said William.

Margot said nothing.

“Speak when you're spoken to.” He gave her a shove. But she did not move; rather she let herself be moved only by him and nothing else.

They edged away from her, they would not look at her. She felt them go away. And this was because she would play no games
with them in the echoing tunnels of the underground city. If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and did not follow. When the class sang songs about happiness and life and games her lips barely moved. Only when they sang about the sun and the summer did her lips move as she watched the drenched windows.

And then, of course, the biggest crime of all was that she had come here only five years ago from Earth, and she remembered the sun and the way the sun was and the sky was when she was four in Ohio. And they, they had been on Venus all their lives, and they had been only two years old when last the sun came out and had long since forgotten the color and heat of it and the way it really was. But Margot remembered.

“It's like a penny,” she said once, eyes closed.

“No it's not!” the children cried.

“It's like a fire,” she said, “in the stove.”

“You're lying, you don't remember!” cried the children.

But she remembered and stood quietly apart from all of them and watched the patterning windows. And once, a month ago, she had refused to shower in the school shower rooms, had clutched her hands to her ears and over her head, screaming the water mustn't touch her head. So after that, dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was different and they knew her difference and kept away.

There was talk that her father and mother were taking her back to Earth next year; it seemed vital to her that they do so, though it would mean the loss of thousands of dollars to her family. And so, the children hated her for all these reasons of big and little consequence. They hated her pale snow face, her waiting silence, her thinness, and her possible future.

“Get away!” The boy gave her another push. “What're you waiting for?”

Then, for the first time, she turned and looked at him. And what she was waiting for was in her eyes.

“Well, don't wait around here!” cried the boy savagely. “You won't see nothing!”

Her lips moved.

“Nothing!” he cried. “It was all a joke, wasn't it?” He turned to the other children. “Nothing's happening today.
Is
it?”

They all blinked at him and then, understanding, laughed and shook their heads. “Nothing, nothing!”

“Oh, but,” Margot whispered, her eyes helpless. “But this is the day, the scientists predict, they say, they
know
, the sun …”

“All a joke!” said the boy, and seized her roughly. “Hey, everyone, let's put her in a closet before teacher comes!”

“No,” said Margot, falling back.

They surged about her, caught her up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and then crying, back into a tunnel, a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the door. They stood looking at the door and saw it tremble from her beating and throwing herself against it. They heard her muffled cries. Then, smiling, they turned and went out and back down the tunnel, just as the teacher arrived.

“Ready, children?” She glanced at her watch.

“Yes!” said everyone.

“Are we all here?”

“Yes!”

The rain slackened still more.

They crowded to the huge door.

The rain stopped.

It was as if, in the midst of a film concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, something had, first, gone wrong with the sound apparatus, thus muffling and finally cutting off all noise, all of the blasts and repercussions and thunders, and then, second, ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a peaceful tropical slide which did not move or tremor. The world ground to a standstill. The silence was so immense and unbelievable that you felt your ears had been stuffed or you had lost your hearing altogether. The children put their hands to their ears. They stood apart. The door slid back and the smell of the silent, waiting world came in to them.

The sun came out.

It was the color of flaming bronze and it was very large. And the sky around it was a blazing blue tile color. And the jungle burned with sunlight as the children, released from their spell, rushed out, yelling, into the springtime.

“Now, don't go too far,” called the teacher after them. “You've only two hours, you know. You wouldn't want to get caught out!”

But they were running and turning their faces up to the sky and
feeling the sun on their cheeks like a warm iron; they were taking off their jackets and letting the sun burn their arms.

“Oh, it's better than the sun lamps, isn't it?”

“Much, much better!”

They stopped running and stood in the great jungle that covered Venus, that grew and never stopped growing, tumultuously, even as you watched it. It was a nest of octopi, clustering up great arms of fleshlike weed, wavering, flowering in this brief spring. It was the color of rubber and ash, this jungle, from the many years without sun. It was the color of stones and white cheeses and ink, and it was the color of the moon.

The children lay out, laughing, on the jungle mattress, and heard it sigh and squeak under them, resilient and alive. They ran among the trees, they slipped and fell, they pushed each other, they played hide-and-seek and tag, but most of all they squinted at the sun until tears ran down their faces, they put their hands up to that yellowness and that amazing blueness and they breathed of the fresh, fresh air and listened and listened to the silence which suspended them in a blessed sea of no sound and no motion. They looked at everything and savored everything. Then, wildly, like animals escaped from their caves, they ran and ran in shouting circles. They ran for an hour and did not stop running.

And then—

In the midst of their running one of the girls wailed.

Everyone stopped.

The girl, standing in the open, held out her hand.

“Oh, look, look,” she said, trembling.

They came slowly to look at her opened palm.

In the center of it, cupped and huge, was a single raindrop.

She began to cry, looking at it.

They glanced quietly at the sky.

“Oh. Oh.”

A few cold drops fell on their noses and their cheeks and their mouths. The sun faded behind a stir of mist. A wind blew cool around them. They turned and started to walk back toward the underground house, their hands at their sides, their smiles vanishing away.

A boom of thunder startled them and like leaves before a new hurricane, they tumbled upon each other and ran. Lightning struck
ten miles away, five miles away, a mile, a half mile. The sky darkened into midnight in a flash.

They stood in the doorway of the underground for a moment until it was raining hard. Then they closed the door and heard the gigantic sound of the rain falling in tons and avalanches, everywhere and forever.

“Will it be seven more years?”

“Yes. Seven.”

Then one of them gave a little cry.

“Margot!”

“What?”

“She's still in the closet where we locked her.”

“Margot.”

They stood as if someone had driven them, like so many stakes, into the floor. They looked at each other and then looked away. They glanced out at the world that was raining now and raining and raining steadily. They could not meet each other's glances. Their faces were solemn and pale. They looked at their hands and feet, their faces down.

“Margot.”

One of the girls said, “Well …?”

No one moved.

“Go on,” whispered the girl.

They walked slowly down the hall in the sound of cold rain. They turned through the doorway to the room in the sound of the storm and thunder, lightning on their faces, blue and terrible. They walked over to the closet door slowly and stood by it.

Behind the closet door was only silence.

They unlocked the door, even more slowly, and let Margot out.