Bright's Passage: A Novel (10 page)

One time, while he and Rachel were walking ahead of his mother, Rachel made him hold her hand and told him that they
were going to get married. He didn’t say anything. It was like she had cast a special spell for him, like the women in the stories she told. He didn’t want to ruin her spell. Even after the teacher told Corwin and Duncan that they couldn’t come to school anymore, for the way they were with the other children, Rachel still came each morning, walking alongside Henry and his mother. His mother put more food in Henry’s lunch bucket. She began to bring the beautiful ivory comb with her, and with it she would work the knots out of the girl’s hair before they came in view of the schoolhouse.

For the Christmas program, Henry was to be a donkey and Rachel was to be an angel. His mother made him funny brown ears from the fabric of a flour sack and they practiced making donkey sounds for weeks. On the night of the program, they crunched through the snow and met Rachel in the darkness at the end of her drive, and then they all walked together. When they got to the schoolhouse, it was brightly lit and whole sleighloads of people were arriving in their best clothes. Before they went in, Henry’s mother tied a new piece of ribbon—bright and glossy gold—around the girl’s head.

“There, you beautiful girl,” she had said. “Now you look like a real angel with your own halo.”

Even from the vantage point of a donkey, Rachel had looked glorious.

Henry was eight years old before he saw the Colonel. He came to their cabin on the very day that the first green blades of corn began knifing through the slush of the farmyard. He had gray hair cut close. His beard was trim and the same color of gray as the hair at his temples. His eyes were flat and spoon-colored, set within an angular face that seemed carved out of a large block of salt. His back, beneath a military uniform much frayed from use, was so straight and sharp of shoulder, and his
legs in their black riding boots so thin and knobble-kneed, that the man seemed almost to have been fashioned in a workshop rather than a womb. To Henry, he looked like the monster his mother pretended to be sometimes when she would hold the corn silk to her face and chase him around the yard. Henry knew then that the man was the Colonel, and that the Colonel was a monster too. He waited for Henry to fetch his mother.

When she came, she stood at the cabin flap and looked at the Colonel for a long moment. She put her hands on Henry’s shoulders and pulled the boy closer to her. “What can we help you with today, sir?” she said. “Maybe you’ll want some tomatoes or some beans and then you’ll go on your way.” She did not ask the man inside.

“She is dying,” the Colonel said. “She has been calling for you.”

His mother’s tongue caught in her throat with a click until she forcibly cleared it. She let go of Henry’s shoulders and wiped her hands on her apron at the words. “All right.” She disappeared into the blackness of the cabin, and when she reappeared her hair was tied back and she was no longer wearing the apron. Her knuckles knotted and unknotted themselves around the stock of the rifle that she held between her breasts. “This is loaded,” she told the Colonel. Then, to Henry, “Henry, wash your face and fetch a clean shirt. Quick, now, we’re going to meet your aunt Rebecca.”

Henry did as he was told and came to stand by his mother and the Colonel.

“Good man.” The Colonel smiled faintly down at him. “Rum rations doubled.” He bowed and swept a courtly arm up the road.

“Don’t speak to my son,” his mother said. “And we’ll walk behind you, not the other way around.”

“Chivalry is—”

“Keep it,” she said.

As they came up the drive, Henry was happy to see Rachel standing on the porch, but when they got closer he could see that she had been crying. His mother saw the girl too, and she slung the rifle by its strap over her back. It rattled against her shoulder blades as she ran up the steps and pulled the girl close. Only when she saw the Colonel’s two boys standing silently in the open door did she become wary once more and release Rachel, pulling the gun back around into her hands so that the barrel pointed at the space of porch between her own feet and the boys’. Corwin, thick-lipped, his eyes cast downward and his fingers kneading themselves into fat fists, refused to acknowledge Henry or Henry’s mother. Duncan, yowl-eyed and willowy, regarded them both with the steadiness of an underfed barn cat. Henry’s mother turned to the Colonel. “Where is she?”

Henry followed her through the front door and into the gloom of the Colonel’s house. In front of them a staircase led to the second floor, but his mother did not ascend it, instead veering left and into a large sitting room festooned with portraits. Here the air was heavy and the light pierced through the gap-toothed slats of the shutters like hot knitting needles. A woman dressed in an old gown lay on her back upon a table in the middle of the room. Henry’s mother went to the head of the table and gazed down. That the women were sisters was unmistakable, and yet, while Henry’s mother was healthy and strong, her sister’s face was sunken, her arms at her sides like sticks, her tiny feet laced tightly within ankle-high black boots. She did not seem able to move save for her eyes, which blinked at a crack in the ceiling plaster above her.

“Colonel,” his mother said, as she turned and fixed the man with a look of hatred, “I’ll ask you for a few minutes alone with
my sister please.” The Colonel backed out of the archway, through the front door and down to the yard. When he was gone, she turned and leaned over the woman. “Rebecca?” She said the name very quietly. “Rebecca? Can you hear me?” She laid her hand on the table and then rested it on her sister’s hand. “He came and told me you were asking for me.” She beckoned Henry to her side. “Henry, come here and say hello to your aunt Rebecca.”

Henry had been standing in the center of the room, afraid of the woman on the table in front of him, and afraid of Corwin and Duncan standing with Rachel in the archway behind. He approached slowly. The woman tore her eyes off the ceiling crack and looked at Henry blisteringly. Her pupils were very large in the dimness and they jittered back and forth like birds in shaken cages. He had to look away, and when he looked back her eyes were once more fastened on the ceiling above.

“Last time you saw him was when he was born,” his mother said. “He’s growing up into a big strong man like our own brother Henry was.” The woman’s hands were small and seemed covered over with the kind of thin, beautiful skin that frogs have. “It’s all right about everything,” his mother said to the woman. “I know it didn’t turn out like you thought it would. It didn’t turn out that way for me either. We both know where things went wrong, but it’s no good worrying about any of it now. The world got us all at once. First with our Henry dying in the Philippines, then Mother and Father”—here she turned and looked out the window at the Colonel on the lawn—“then my own husband buried in the coal mine before he could lay eyes on his son.” She raised Rebecca’s hands a little and then lowered them again as she leaned over her. “Too much,” she said quietly. “Too much all at once.” She let go of the woman’s hands in order to fasten a stray button at the top of the woman’s neckline. “We can’t blame each other for all the things we said
to each other that we didn’t mean, but I know we can’t say we’re sorry either. So I’ll just say that I love you. I love you so much. Looks like you have some really fine children here, and I’m gonna pray for them. I’m gonna pray really hard for them and I’m gonna pray hard for you and that we meet again in a better world than this one we’ve been given.” She bent and kissed her sister on each of her cheeks and then, taking the ivory comb from the folds of her skirt, she began to comb the woman’s hair. “I’m not gonna leave you here like this,” she said, her voice turning as thin and jagged as the crack in the ceiling.

“Children,” she said. “If you stay, you need to bow your heads and close your eyes and don’t open them again, no matter what you do, until I tell you that you can. Henry, go on over there with Rachel and the boys and bow your head too.” They did as they were told and she began, her back to them and standing over her sister. “Heavenly Father, if it is true that you give us sorrow and joy in equal measure according to the strength of our backs to bear the load, have mercy on your daughter Rebecca and give her now the joy in her new life that you withheld from her in this one.” Henry opened his eyes to peek at his mother, but he couldn’t see her face. “We pray that as she enters your kingdom …”

Her voice left off suddenly and her body hunched with some strange effort, her head bowed from sight beneath the line of her shoulders. The rifle slung over his mother’s shoulder shifted this way and that as if it was aiming at some high-flying, far-off bird. Rebecca’s tiny boots kicked against the table three or four times, then lay still.

In the silence that followed, Henry looked over at Rachel and her brothers. Corwin and Rachel’s heads were bowed, but Duncan’s eyes were wide open and he was watching Henry’s mother as well. After a long while a sigh escaped her lips and
she continued, “We pray, Heavenly Father, that as she enters your kingdom you will offer her some explanation for the sorrows that you, in your infinite wisdom, saw fit to visit upon her.” His mother’s hands dropped to her sides all at once. She turned, the rifle butt clanking hard against the parquet as she sank to the floor. She pulled the gun around and laid it across her lap, leaning back against one of the table legs for support. She closed her eyes. “Amen.”

She opened them again. Her hair was mussed, her face as waxen as her dead sister’s. Corwin and Rachel still had their eyes closed and their heads bowed. She glanced at Henry and then at Duncan. The boy looked back at her steadily. She looked more exhausted than Henry had ever seen her. She reached behind with one hand and used the lip of the table to pull herself to standing. “Corwin, Rachel, you can open your eyes now. Henry,” she said, “come along with me.”

She walked through the upper rooms, standing in doorways, trailing her hands absentmindedly behind her along the walls as if her fingertips were collecting old memories. Here and there a few strips of dirty wallpaper had once been printed with lilac bunches and roses. One room had been a nursery, and where there had been a water closet, part of the wall had fallen away, the room dropping off abruptly into open air and the dusty lawn below. The tub and washbasin were filled with old charcoal.

There was a sharp, mildewed odor to the rooms. Plaster pieces lay fallen and cracked everywhere. One room was bare save for a pair of boots lined up against a wall, a broomstick planted stick-down in the hole of one as if awaiting the firing squad. “It didn’t used to look like this, Henry,” she blurted all at once, standing framed in the crumbling hallway. “It was a beautiful house once. Do you believe me?”

He went to take her hand, but she brushed by him now and ran down the stairs. He went to a window and looked down to the yard where she had joined the Colonel. She was leaning forward and speaking to the man’s unmoving profile, strands of her hair escaping the knot she had tied it in and puffing into cirri around her face. Henry crept down the stairs to the porch and stood half hidden in the doorway, next to Rachel. The Colonel seemed oblivious to his mother’s ferocious presence. He stared off into nothing as she spat words so quietly at him that Henry couldn’t make them out.

Just when it seemed he had turned into some Civil War statue the Colonel collapsed from his reverie and walked to the squash patch and pulled a rusty shovel from where it was stuck into the ground. “Boys!” he yelled toward the house, and looked off into the far distance as he waited for an answer. When none came, he did not call again, instead holding the shovel handle toward the open doorway where Henry was standing.

Henry’s mother snatched it away from the Colonel and stepped back, the shovel in one tightly clenched hand, the rifle in the other. “What in God’s name
are
you?” she hissed. “Henry!”

He was down off the porch and at her side in a moment. She did not look away from the Colonel as she held the rifle down for him to hold. “You remember how to use this, don’t you?”

Henry nodded, taking the gun in his hands.

“Yes, you do. And you remember how I taught you to pull the hammer back so the gun is cocked and ready to fire?”

He nodded his head once more.

“Good,” she said. “Now, I want you to cock the gun carefully, all right? Pull it back with your thumb like I showed you.” There was a click as the hammer locked. “Good, Henry.” She seemed to exhale forever. “Now I want you to point it at him,
and if you see him move from where he’s standing, I want you to shoot him dead.” Her eyes flitted quickly down to see if he’d comprehended. “Do you understand me? If he moves while I’m digging this hole, I want you to shoot him dead in the face. You don’t even ask me if you should; you just pull the trigger. I need you to protect me, Henry. Can you do that?”

He clenched the rifle so tightly in his hands that his fingers began to tingle and whiten. In answer, he pointed the gun up at the Colonel’s head. The Colonel stared hard at Henry, and those spoon-colored eyes frightened him, but he hid the man’s face behind the eclipse of the rifle barrel and kept it there as his mother dug the grave.

The early-spring ground was still frozen solid beneath the slush, and digging was nearly impossible. She chiseled away at it nevertheless, steam rising first from her mouth and then from her entire body before she broke down and sat in the middle of the shallow gash she had cut in the yard. When she caught her breath she got up and began again. Henry’s arms began to tire and his fingers to feel numb from holding the heavy rifle trained on the Colonel. By the time his mother had dug a trench two and a half feet deep he was nearly weeping from the weight of the thing. She stood back and let the shovel fall on the frozen pile of chipped dirt by the side of the hole. She came and knelt next to Henry. He tried to give the rifle to her but after an hour his fingers seemed locked around it. Her eyes shone as she eased the hammer back down and helped each of his fingers to uncurl from the gun. “That was just fine, Henry. Your father would be proud of you.” She kissed his cheek and then heaved herself up with the rifle and walked up the steps into the house. The Colonel followed close behind her.