Bright's Passage: A Novel (15 page)

The Colonel took the sugar and turned toward the window, popping it in his mouth and winking for the benefit of his sons. Corwin pressed his face against the pane of glass with a beseeching look in his eyes. The Colonel turned back to the lady, his face gone somber and gray.

“I am seeking that man for something.” He fixed the woman with a cold stare. He pointed at the sugar bowl again. “Might I have another lump of sugar?”

Before she could answer, there came a thud against the windowpane and sounds of a scuffle from outside. Corwin and Duncan were surrounded by six men.

The woman looked out the window and then back at the Colonel. “They’re from the coal company,” she said. “Making sure we don’t have the wrong kinds of people staying in town too long. Are you relations?”

The Colonel glanced over his shoulder without interest at the faces of his sons. “With them? No. I have never laid eyes on them in my life,” he said.

“I didn’t mean with them,” the woman said, frustrated. “I meant with the soldier—Henry Bright—and his boy. Are you related to the soldier and his boy?” She asked the question slowly, as if the old man was softheaded.

They both looked at the bullets there on the counter.

“Ah, yes. Henry. The man is my …” He chuckled to himself, then smiled thinly at the snooping old thing. “You see, the man murdered my daughter.”

She threw a hand over her mouth and stared at the Colonel wide-eyed.

From outside the store rose the quick, scuffling sounds of a nascent mêlée. He listened with quiet satisfaction, but his gaze did not wander from the woman’s face.

“That man?” she asked in disbelief. “The war hero?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “The man stole my daughter from me in the black of night, and less than a year later left her for dead after she delivered his child.”

The woman looked vaguely off toward the door. “That nice soldier?” she asked.

“Indeed so,” he said. “Will you tell me where he went?”

Her eyes watched the fighting outside vacantly.

“Please, will you tell me where Henry Bright went?” the
Colonel insisted. She didn’t hear him, so absorbed was she with watching the fight outside her store and weighing the awful claims that the old man had made. The Colonel saw her distraction and snuck another lump of sugar into his mouth and leaned in closer across the counter. “I fear for the infant’s life as well. The man is a murderer.” He reached out suddenly, grabbing the woman high up on her arm. She looked away from the window and down at the hand clutching her, then up into his face. “I need to find Henry Bright,” he said. “Tell me where he—”

The woman yanked back from his grasp. “Get the hell out of here!” Her face had gone purple with rage all at once, and she started around the counter toward him. She took a rake from a milk crate where a number of them were standing and knocked a stack of enameled pie plates to the floor. She swung the thing in a wide arc, missing him but sending a stuffed pheasant flying down the aisle. “I’ll give you a beating for talking like that about a war hero!” She pounded the rake’s handle on the floor and glared at him as two of the coal-company men entered the store. “Ralph,” she said. “Edgar.”

“I can see that you are a fine woman and ever the help of those in need,” the Colonel said, with the last reserves of his courtly composure. Strong arms pulled him toward the shop door. “If you see that rogue again, tell him that I am going to find and kill him.”

The woman followed the men to the doorway and out onto the street as they dragged the old man and his sons down toward the coal-company offices. “Make sure I don’t ever see them again or I’m gonna cut them from their ears to their assholes!” She huffed in disbelief at the kinds of people there were in the world, then she dusted herself off and disappeared into the store. In another moment she came back out again and
hollered up the street to the roughs. “And when you’re done with them, get on back and help me bury my cash register.”

The coal-company roughs tied the trio and carried them like spitted heifers out of town, dumping them finally by the train tracks running past a coal depot. They pulled out the men’s pockets but found nothing of any interest. One of the roughs drew a long knife from his own belt and held it under the Colonel’s nose. “You ain’t coming back here again, are you?” The Colonel shifted in his ropes and turned his face away. The rough watched him a beat longer, then laughed and cut the old man’s ropes, spun him around, and kicked him hard on the backside, sending him sprawling down the tracks. He threw the unloaded and useless rifle after him. “We don’t want your types around here,” he said.

The roughs walked, joking among themselves, back down the road the way they had come. The Colonel sat gingerly on the railroad track and watched them go, then looked at his sons where they lay, bloody and straining against the ropes that still bound them.

When he was sure the men were gone, he pulled the long brass bullet out from between his cheek and his teeth. “I thought,” he said, holding it up and examining it with a jeweler’s eye, “that you would both be better behaved if I left you outside of the store.”

He rubbed the bullet on his sleeve and, after inspecting its gleam, he chambered the round in the rifle with a satisfying mechanical clack. Then he laid the rifle aside and looked placidly at his sons.

“Henry Bright is nearby, and I have procured the means with which to kill him.” He nodded at the rifle lying by his side. “Since it is growing late and there is nothing more that can be done at present, I feel we are all in possession of a blessed space
of leisure time in which I might pass on to you both a few bits of instruction concerning proper manners when residing in town.” This he proceeded to do, talking at length as night fell, his lecture interrupted only once when he saw the light of a train coming and he paused so that he could drag his boys one by bundled one from the tracks, lest they be cleaved in two.

He lay there on the battlefield with a hole in his shoulder, until eventually he was found and moved boozily to a Red Cross tent. A racket of haphazard marching bands moved up and down the gruel-colored stretch of camp road at all hours. The walls of canvas were stiff and dreary as the sky, still as paint. The nurse came and retreated. He was woken at times by the screams of others. When this happened, the nurse would be there, and sometimes the doctor too. He would be given something for his pain and would go back to sleep, wake, and eat the cool soup that was spooned to him. There were voices outside and commotion at times. Then everything would get dark again and he would lie there and call out to the vanished angel.

He was in the Red Cross tent for so long that it began to seem that he might be the last one to leave the War. He got up but was made to lie back down again. He got up again, and this time he was put on a truck that took him to a train. The train took him to the coast, and at the coast he was placed aboard a steam liner. After four days of sitting in port, the steam liner left. He never saw any of the men he had known in the trenches again. He kept a careful watch for the Colonel’s sons, but they weren’t on his boat. He found whatever solitude he could on board. He tried closing his eyes or watching the waves as they
frothed behind the ship. He took Bert’s stolen gun from his haversack and sat staring at the lettering, letting his eyes unfocus and the talk of others blur around him. None of it was any use. The angel seemed gone for good. His shoulder throbbed in the damp air. The boat landed in Virginia. He was given a ticket and got on a train that, after many stops, dropped him at the same empty station he had departed from just over a year previous.

The neglected cabin was in much need of work, but Bright began at the edges. He went into the woods and cut six trees, then spent the next two days fashioning fence posts that he placed around the small garden that his mother had made. Although it was still early in the spring and frost painted the ground each morning, he slept in his army kit in the timothy grass within sight of the cabin. He did not go in. He wasn’t quite ready to resume his former life. He ate whatever he had left from his trip. He walked a half day to Fells Corner for a bar of soap, a pound of nails, and tar paper with which to patch the roof of the hen hutch. At first the old man in the hardware store didn’t recognize the gaunt, uniformed young man who stood before him. When at last he did, the man came out from behind the counter and put his arms around him, and this time he gave him two full pounds of nails for free before making Bright promise to come to the auction the following week.

He returned home and hacked away the tall grass that had grown up around his mother’s grave. Something—the winter snow, wild animals—had pushed inward most of the boards he had nailed over the cabin door to protect the inside from weather. He pried and yanked away whatever splinters remained nailed to the door frame, then he turned in the doorway and looked a while at the homestead he had reclaimed. When he was finally ready, he stepped inside the cabin and sat
there on the bed for a very long time, as if waiting to feel something, while the hours passed and the slant of the daylight changed around him. At last he stood on the lumpy straw mattress and felt around in the shadows of the rafters for his mother’s rifle. The gun was missing.

Come morning, his boys were a travesty to look upon. Swollen lips, black eyes, cheekbones bruised, foreheads and noses bloody and dirty. After untying them, the Colonel made his way a little farther into the forest and then up a small rise. To his left and right the trees went on to the horizon, deep blue-green and gently breathing. Directly in front of him, about a quarter mile distant, the forest of hickory and oak gave way to an enormous rectangle of lawn with several small man-made ponds strewn carelessly about. They reflected a sky that was one part daybreak and two parts smoke. The Colonel paid the impending fire no mind. His eyes were roving over the spectacular white hotel. The building was at least four hundred feet long, with drowsy, darkened windows just beginning to garner the sunlight, as if the morning was one more servant to be admitted into the room along with the coffee and the big-city papers. Tennis courts and a swimming pool were appended to the right side of the hotel, and to the extreme left, on the far side of the great lawn and set slightly back into the trees, stood a large white barn trimmed in green.

“I am going to the hotel to ask for Henry Bright,” he announced to his sons when he got back to the train tracks. “I gleaned from the lady in the store that he was very close. I will
see what further information I can come by there.” Corwin was sitting on one of the rails, throwing small rocks at his brother’s back. The struggle had gone out of Duncan, who sat staring fixedly at the sunlight glancing off one of the rails.

“From the rise there you can see a large white barn,” the Colonel said, pointing. “While I am away, I want the two of you to scout it for Henry Bright’s horse. If by luck you do find the animal stabled there, do not harm it.” He looked hard at both of his sons to make sure that they were listening. “Allow me to emphasize. Do not harm the horse! … I want nothing to alert the rogue that we are nearby.” The Colonel removed his uniform jacket and shook it, releasing clouds of dust into the air. “And you would both do well to otherwise keep to the woods, as you look less than presentable.”

He made his way through the woods and down to the road leading through the gates to the hotel. At the foot of the hotel steps, he met a crisply dressed porter who brought him up the wide marble stairs, through an ornate revolving door, and into a large lobby with a sky-blue dome and a beautiful grand piano. Here the ragged old man was passed from the porter to an equally well-pressed bellboy, of whom the Colonel inquired where a proud grandfather might breakfast with his son and new grandson, who happened to be guests of the hotel. The bellboy smiled at him and led the way to the breakfast room. A few reverberant murmurs of conversation met the Colonel’s ears from a group of departing guests as he walked by the reception desk.

“… and so we decided to get out now while the getting out was good …”

“… but I don’t believe it …”

“… if it is worse than ’09, which they say maybe it will be …”

“… never happen …”

The bellboy spoke over his shoulder to the Colonel. “Everything you’ve heard about the breakfast here is true,” he said, as they passed beneath an oaken Tudor arch and into a glassed-in conservatory. The light streaming through the windows gleamed off the polished silver service and scattered brilliantly in all directions, as if the whole room were contained within a bubble in some sunlit brook. “Eggs Benedict, eggs
Florentine
”—the bellboy stretched the word out like he was describing the Grand Canyon—“eggs Benedict
with trout
? Believe me, sir, it’s the best there is, and there’s plenty of it.” With a nod to a passing girl, he returned to the lobby and the girl led the Colonel to a setting for two near the far end of the long glass room. Nearby, a group of four young people—two men and two women—was arrayed around a table. They had stopped their talking as he approached and were now looking at him as if he was some acquaintance of theirs who had dressed in costume. The smiles of the two women were already forming as they turned back around to face the men. A chair was pulled out for the Colonel, and he brushed the seat cushion once with the napkin.

“So then …” he heard one of the women say, as she tried to retrieve the strand of the conversation, “so then Amelia went …”

“Good morning to you all,” the Colonel said brightly.

“Ah, good morning,” one of the men said. The other, looking directly down at his crumpet and spearing it absentmindedly with a knife, turned his head and gave the barest, most obligatory of nods before returning his attentions to the pastry.

The Colonel, after nodding respectfully at the women, turned his attentions fully upon his napkin, taking it by the corners and flipping it as if he were taunting a bull before tucking half its length into his collar.