Bright's Passage: A Novel (9 page)

“I told you, no fire.”

“Fuck it, Bright. Fuck you.” The match flared and Bert began to smoke his last cigarette. When he was half through, he turned toward Bright and said, “You know—” and was shot in the head from somewhere in the dark. Bright rolled over and flattened himself in the ditch, pulling Bert down on top of him. “Whew!” said Bert. “Jee-roosh!” he sighed. Finally he said, “Well,” and that was the last he said of anything.

The car carrying Margaret and her children moved down Main Street, past the coal-company office and a church to where the trees took over and the large houses lulled in the shade of the overhanging elms. Bright watched it until it was gone, then he sagged in the heat. He recognized the kind of smile the girl Margaret had given him. It was the kind of smile that people give to children, and he surely knew what it meant when she gave it to him. Rising up from the sling on his chest now came the smell of his son dirtying his new diaper. He yanked a fresh rag from the sack hanging off the saddle pommel.

“You are a coward, Henry Bright.”

“Goddamn it! Why you always got to talk to me when I’m covered in shit? You know I ain’t a coward! And, anyways, why didn’t you jump in and give me something to say when she was smiling at me like that?”

“Coward,” the angel said again.

Bright spit on the ground. “You’re a big one to talk,” he said. “If you’re so brave, why didn’t you stay in France? You didn’t go and find another church to go be an angel in because you were afraid of getting bombed again, weren’t you? That’s it, isn’t it? You were scared just like everyone else.”

“The Future King of Heaven needs his swaddling changed.”

“I’m getting to that, so be quiet, ’cause I’m talking now.” Bright whipped the white rag in the air before the horse’s face. “What about when I needed you on the field after I got shot? Where were you then? You were hiding is what. Scared is what you were! You’re the coward, not me.” He shook his head as he knelt and spread his jacket on the hot pavement, then laid the new diaper on the jacket.

“Henry Bright, you are so blinded with fear that you refuse to see that I am trying to help you now, just as I helped you then.”

“How are you trying to help me?” Bright took his son from the sling and rested him gently on the jacket. As he waited for an answer, he began hesitatingly to tie the new diaper as the auntly woman had taught him to do in the store. “Exactly how you’re helping is what I don’t know,” he said again, looking up once from where he knelt near the horse’s hooves.

“I am trying, despite all your best efforts to the contrary, to find you a mother for your son, the Future King of Heaven. As I was telling you before you allowed the girl Margaret to escape, the boy needs a woman who will claim him as her own. You cannot care for him by yourself. Now we must follow her. She must take the boy or all is surely lost.”

“What do you care if he’s safe anyhow, angel? You weren’t so careful with me when I got shot in the War. I lay there for hours and called for you, but you didn’t come. And you didn’t care any when Rachel was dying either, did you? She was screaming—
screaming!
—and you didn’t care. You just stood out there under that chestnut tree like you were asleep.”

“You survived. I knew that you would. And Rachel lived long enough to fulfill her destiny as the mother of Jee-roosh. I never assured you of her well-being past that point.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What’s what supposed to mean?”

“Jee-roosh?” Bright replaced his son in the sling. The baby cooed up at him. “What are you saying ‘Jee-roosh’ for?”

“The time has come to name the child. He shall be named Jee-roosh.”

“No, it ain’t!” Bright said. “Oh, no, it ain’t, angel.” He climbed into the saddle. “He’s my son and his name is going to be Henry, like me.” The angel said nothing, as the horse’s big jaws worked a cud. “And Henry’s a good name too, angel,” Bright continued. “You have a problem with a name like that?” Its ears twitched and it lifted its tail, allowing several large balls of dung to fall to the pavement.

Bright sat up in the saddle. “That’s real polite,” he said. He gave the horse a sharp kick with his heels to get it moving.

“Very well,” the horse said. It swished the argument away with its tail and began to clomp along in the direction that Margaret’s car had gone. They passed a group of men loitering around the coal-company office. “For now the Future King of Heaven’s name is Henry, but it will be Jee-roosh as the boy grows older, and men will speak the name with awe as the centuries unfold. Your own name will be recalled from time to time.”

They went by the church and the spreading elms and through the smell of green onions and pecan pie, roasting chicken, and garden laughter, through the dark mahogany sound of someone playing hymns on a piano and the far-off thrumming of a train. The breeze had dropped as they walked up the street, but now it picked up again, the leaves above beginning to clap against one another as the air blew warmer. The goat, normally so quick to dart this way and that on her tether, now stayed close to the horse and lifted her white nose again to snuff at the black scrolls of smoke garlanding the air.

“Smoke’s getting a lot stronger,” Bright said.

“Yes.”

“Fire’s gonna burn this place down.”

“It would seem so.”

The road passed the last of the big white homes and swished through a series of lazy bends as the smell of smoke grew first stronger, then weaker, and then stronger again in the uncertain breeze. Bright let the reins hang loosely in his hand, allowing the horse to slouch unhurriedly down the middle of the road until at last they pulled to a halt before a gigantic gate, its ornate wings swung wide. The road continued on, bisecting a rolling ocean of tight green grass, threading its way between several nickel-colored ponds and curling itself finally around a gushing fountain. Behind the fountain, like a series of new white molars, rose a huge and beautiful palace. Margaret’s auto was parked there at the foot of a set of creamy steps that led up to the gleaming golden front door.

“The girl Margaret waits within. Go to her quickly.”

“That place ain’t hers,” Bright said, shaking his head.

“Think again, Henry Bright.”

“Even if it was hers, if you think I’m impressed by a palace you can forget it,” Bright said. “I seen a hundred palaces in France, all of them just like this one here.” His eyes drifted across the expanse of green to the building a long moment.

The wind buffeted again at their backs, as if to push him forward, but before he took a step the driver of Margaret’s car emerged from the palace, carrying the bags for a finely dressed couple and a young child. He ushered them into the auto, then arranged their luggage on the car’s roof before getting in behind the wheel and circling around the fountain and back down the road, toward the gate where Bright now stood. His path once more blocked by Bright and his animals, the driver slowed to a crawl and stopped until Bright pulled the livestock to the side of the road and let the car pass. As it did, Bright recognized
the child within as one from the clutch that had surrounded Margaret earlier. She was a little girl with a wine-colored cap, and she now sat happily on the lap of a woman who was clearly her mother.

“Well,” Bright said, turning to face the horse.

“Go to Margaret, Henry Bright.”

“She ain’t no mother of five children, you idiot! She probably ain’t even a mother at all.” He swung his arm behind in the direction of the palace. “And that palace over there? That’s a hotel! I seen those in France too. I even stayed in one once. Either you’re trying to trick me or you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I am only trying to help you.”

“Some help you are. That girl Margaret minds children for rich folks.” He threw a caustic laugh in the horse’s face. A touch of spittle landed on the its dark nose, startling the beast. “
You know everything!
I just bet you do!”

The angel was silent.

Bright tied the horse’s lead tightly around a tree. Then he went to fill a pail with water from one of the small ponds on the lawn. He came back into the trees and plunked the bucket down in front of the horse. “Everything you told me so far has been wrong,” he said, as it lowered its head to drink. “I come back from the War and you show up all of a sudden, tell me I gotta go steal Rachel from her own house, and I listen to you and go on over there and get her in the middle of the night and the old man comes out yelling he’s gonna kill me. Then she’s having a baby and you don’t help us and she dies. Rachel! Now the Colonel and his boys are gonna kill me and take my son—”

“The old man and the half-wits are not chasing you,” the angel interrupted.

“You say that, but you been wrong about everything else!”

“They are not chasing you.”

“I loved Rachel, angel! I loved her! Maybe you don’t know about that kind of thing.”

“You are being a coward, Henry Bright. Go and—”

“She was my wife!” he screamed. His eyes were red-rimmed and welled with tears. His lower lip trembled. There was a twitch in the skin over his cheekbone and he tried to smooth it out by rasping a hand over his face and looking up into the hazy sky until he had composed himself. “And
now,
” he said, once he was able to continue, “you want me to give my boy to that girl Margaret in there because you say she’s a mother, and now I find out that she’s not even a mother at all.”

The goat began to pull on its tether, straining toward a bush. Bright bent and untied it to forage. The horse rumbled deep in its throat.

“You’ll get your food when I say you do,” he snapped. “And I’ll tell you another thing: Everything you tell me is wrong and makes me look like a fool. So why am I supposed to believe you? And don’t say something like, ‘It’s because I know,’ ’cause we both know that ain’t gonna wash with me no more.” He took the baby out of its sling and laid it on his jacket on the ground.

“Go.”

“No, no, no! I ain’t going. This is a wild-goose chase. Only thing we got to do is stay away from the Colonel, and that’s just what we’re gonna do. We’ll stop here tonight and head out in the morning. We’ll ride another piece tomorrow and another piece the next day.”

“The boy will die.”

“He ain’t gonna die. I ain’t gonna let him die, but I ain’t gonna do everything you say anymore just ’cause you tell me to.” He threw himself on the ground next to his son and cast one arm over his eyes. “If you want that girl so much, then
you
should go and ask her to be
your
mother. We’ll just leave you behind
in the morning, see if we don’t.” He rolled over. “Go to hell.”

He lay there for a while, and the horse held its peace. Eventually Bright got up, emptied the bucket of water, and went to pick the goat up and carry it out of the dark-green leaves where it was munching contentedly. He milked it for a bit, then set up camp and ate the crackers and wedge of cheese that the woman had given him at the general-merchandise store. After a little while, the big black auto came back, empty of its passengers and their bags. The birds began to sing and then they stopped, and the sky began to darken as night fell. Finally the moon rose, nearly full, but its light seemed to be shining down through a trough of smoke-slicked water, and across the lawn the white hotel fell into dark shadow beneath stars that were fainter than they should have been.

Henry’s mother taught him how to take care of the rabbits and chickens that they kept in a hutch near the chestnut tree. In the late summer the two of them would eat apples and then push the cores through the fencing and sit watching as the two species shared the remainders decorously with one another. In the mornings the hens liked to lay their eggs in the warmth where the rabbits had been sleeping, and they would squabble and squawk the rabbits out of their beds. This always made his mother laugh, no matter how many times she saw it, and when he heard her laugh it would make Henry laugh too.

The garden patch would be thick with vegetables, and when she gave him haircuts she would keep his hair and show him how to tie it up into little bundles which they would hang on the fence posts around the garden to keep the deer away from the vegetables. He would pick runner beans and bring them to her, and she would put them in jars and boil the jars and then put them on the shelf for winter. When they could get to the tomatoes before the birds did, they would preserve those too, but not before they ate some with eggs and bread.

They had summer squash and acorn squash and some stalks of corn. She would make the corn silk into a beard and hold it to her face like a monster and chase him around with it while he
screamed in terrified delight and the chickens and rabbits clacked and scampered in their pen.

When he was seven and it was time for him to start going to school in Fells Corner, she got a job cooking for an old couple in town. Each morning, after the chickens and rabbits had been fed, they would head out. Whatever else she took with her, his mother always carried her rifle slung across her shoulders, and he knew to be quiet and not talk while they passed the turnoff to the Colonel’s house. She would grip his hand hard then, pulling him along, so that he could never see past the first bend in the drive. He knew somehow that she had used to live there, until something bad had happened.

When the Colonel’s little boys, Corwin and Duncan, started to come to school too, sometimes they would all be on the road together at the same time. He knew his mother didn’t like them, was maybe even afraid of them the way she was always sure to place herself between them and Henry as they walked.

Sometimes it was the Colonel’s little girl, Rachel, who would be standing at the end of the drive of his mother’s old house, waiting for them to walk by so that she could join them. His mother liked Rachel. She was a funny one, his mother said. She would tell funny stories about big green monsters and beautiful ladies and knights that lived in castles and chased wild pigs. And she was pretty, his mother said. Her clothes were very bad, though. Her skirts were muddy at the hems, and even the parts that weren’t muddy were dirty, like they had never been washed. She never had any food with her and she smelled bad. Her hair was all knotted, and she had a single green ribbon that she always untied from her hair and tied round her wrist because she liked to see it and was afraid to lose it. Even the ribbon was dirty, though.