Chaneysville Incident (24 page)

I do not know how I thought those answers would come. Perhaps in a blaze of light, or of heat. I don’t know. I only know that gradually something had occurred to me that had never occurred to me before: the attic was cold.

At first I had not minded too much, but as the nights had worn on and each attempt to fit the facts together had failed, the attic had grown, it seemed, ever more drafty. At last I had had to risk building a fire in Moses Washington’s fireplace. But that had not seemed to help. I had used the fires I built to heat water and mix toddies with the cheap liquor Old Jack was only too happy to supply—that had helped. But only for a while.

Because there had come a night when the snow had fallen heavy and deep and the air was so cold it burned the lungs, when the wind was coming from west, ripping clouds of snow from the mountaintops and singing its ineffable eerie song, when the fire had died in the grate and I knew it would do no good to rekindle it. Because I had sat there at that table, with the flame from the lamp flickering over the pages of notes that I had made, and had known that I had failed. Not just taken a wrong path, or run into a dead end in research. Failed. Completely. I had put the facts together, all of them, everything I could cull from those books and his notebooks and my notebooks: everything. I had put it together and I had studied it until I could command every fact, and then I had stepped back and looked at the whole and seen…nothing. Not a thing. Oh, I had seen the facts, there was no shortage of facts; but I could not discern the shape that they filled in. There were, it seemed, too many gaps. But what I had feared was that there were not too many gaps; only too many for me, my mind. For I simply could not imagine what I should see. Could not imagine what it was I was looking at part of. I had everything I needed, knowledge and time and even, by then, a measure of skill—I could follow a fact through shifts and twists of history, do it and love it. But I could not imagine. And if you cannot imagine, you can discover only cold facts, and more cold facts; you will never know the truth. I had seen the future stretching out before me, my life an endless round of fact-gathering and reference-searching, my only discoveries silly little deductions, full of cold, incontrovertible logic, never any of the burning inductive leaps that take you from here to there and let you really
understand
anything. I had known that was how it would be, had known that if I could not look at the things Moses Washington was looking at and, at least, discover what it was he had been working on, then I could not do anything important at all. And so I had risen from the table and had set the room to rights, putting my notebook on the shelf next to all the other notebooks—his, mine—and extinguishing the lamp, and, leaving the matches in their keeping place, I crept down from there, going to lie in my bed, to shiver between icy sheets. I had not slept. I had lain in that half-sleep, half-trance state in which reality provides the impetus for bizarre driftings of mind, in which it is possible both to dream and to know you are dreaming, and to rest secure in the knowledge that all you have to do if the dreams get a bit too threatening is to decide to wake up. And so, when I had felt the dreams beginning, I had not tried to stop them, I had welcomed them, in fact, as a relief from the failure. But they were no relief. For in the first one I saw myself lying sick with fever, felt the burning of my own skin, hot as the fires of hell. And then my mother had come, as she often had when I was a child and feverish, with a chipped enameled basin of ice water and cloths. She bathed me with the cold water, and the burning went away. But she kept on bathing me, and the fever turned to chills. I had asked her to stop but she had kept on bathing me, and I realized that she was trying to kill me. I leaped up from the bed and evaded her grasping hands and ran out through the window. It was winter outside and the snow was deep, and my naked feet froze as soon as they touched it, but I ran on, the only idea in my mind being to get to the far side, to have a toddy and build a fire and get rid of that awful cold. I ran through the snow and I heard her running after me, heard her panting as she ran, and knew, because she was breathing so hard, that I could easily outdistance her, that I was safe. But when I reached the crest of the Hill I found that there was no path, but a giant gorge a hundred feet deep, with a stream of frothing white water echoing and booming at the bottom of it. I stopped and shivered, hearing the wind singing in the trees, hearing the panting and then the footsteps as she came up behind me….

But when I turned it was not her, it was Old Jack. He asked me if I knew where I was and I started to say no, but then I realized I did know, and I started to say the Hill, but then I realized that was wrong, and then I knew where I was and I told him: the stream was Laurel Branch, and it ran south along the upper ridges of Tussey Mountain, a few miles north of the Line. He smiled, pleased, and said I deserved some comfort. I was wearing clothes and shoes now, and I did not feel as cold, and I felt even better when he built a fire and made us toddies. But before I could drink mine he looked at me and said, “He’s down there,” and waved his hand downslope, to the east. I saw tracks then, the spoor of a big buck, bigger than any I had ever seen, and so I picked up the shotgun and set off, tracking through the snow. At first the prints were clear, but then there began to be breaks in them, and I would have to stop and sight off into the distance to pick them up again. Then the prints vanished altogether, but I tracked on anyway, following the vague impression of what might have been a trail, the subliminal lingerings of scent, the almost invisible bendings of leaves. I felt good then; I was tracking better than I had ever tracked in my life. And suddenly I knew I had found him. I could not see him, but I could hear a hollow silent space in the woods, a little dead spot. I knew what caused it—all the other creatures, in his presence, were keeping quiet. And so I brought the shotgun to my shoulder and fired into the dead spot, and heard a sudden, dreadfully human cry of anguish and anger. I turned to look for Old Jack but I did not see him anywhere, and I ran forward and found the buck lying on the ground, blood dripping into the snow, and a set of prints leading away again into the snow.

I followed the prints, moving quickly because they were clear. In a few minutes I came to the edge of a clearing and saw a man in the center of it, naked to the waist, despite the driving snow and horrible cold, building a cairn of giant triangular boulders. I knew that it was Moses Washington. I watched him from cover, seeing the rippling of muscle as he lifted the massive rocks, hearing him grunt as he clumsied them into place. When he finished he stepped back and admired his handiwork, and then he brought up his foot and proceeded to kick the cairn apart, sending the rocks avalanching down in disarray. I said nothing, made no sound, gave no hint of my presence, but nevertheless, when the destruction was complete, he turned and looked at me and laughed, and then he vanished into the woods.

I went forward then, and put the gun down, and tried to lift one of the rocks. I found that it was not at all heavy. And so I began to rebuild the cairn. It was amazingly easy; all the stones fit together in a sensible and logical way, and in only a moment I had finished. But it did not look quite right. And then I realized that since the stones were all triangular, they would all fit together logically and easily, and so I took them down and put them up another way, and when done I took them down and put them up again….

Then I had seen that it would go on like that. Then I had tried to wake. But I could not. Something had shackled me in the dreaming state, and I could not open my eyes. The escape for me had not been up into wakefulness but down into deeper slumber; not out of the dreams but into them. There, at the bottom of it all, there was only one dream. Not even a dream; just an all-encompassing sensation of icy coldness, and a visual image of total white. No sound. No smell. No feeling really; just the cold. That was the dream, the coldness and the whiteness growing to envelop me, like an avalanche of snow, deceptive in slow motion, covering me, smothering me. And I could not stop it. I could not free myself. I could not wake up. Not on that night. And not on any of the nights that followed. Of course, I would awaken, sooner or later. But never spontaneously, never of my own accord. Someone—or something—had to wake me. For years it had been Bill, coming across the room and touching me lightly and waiting until the cries had stopped, until my eyes were open, and then wordlessly going back to his bed. Then for years there had been no one, and I had acquired a reputation for brilliance simply because I would rather sit up late into the night studying than take the risk of going to sleep. When I had slept, when I had had to sleep, I had religiously set my alarm clock to awaken me at half-hour intervals, and had always found my lodgings near sources of sound—trolley car tracks, truck routes, anything that might provide occasional rescue. And then there had been Judith, who had said nothing when I had explained to her about the alarm clock and the dreams, but who had turned the clock off and slept with her hand on me, to feel the first shivering, and then, even though she was never fully awake herself, waking me and holding me and watching with a hurt, rejected look in her eyes when I would leave the bed and go and mix a toddy too strong and too hot and large enough to sedate a horse, saying nothing, but not understanding that even though I knew she was there to awaken me, even though I had faith in her, I could never really trust her. Because some night she might not feel the shivering, and there would be nothing to wake me, and I would freeze.

That day nothing woke me. Not for long hours, not until I heard the sound of my mother returning. Then I came up out of sleep shivering, the springs beneath me squeaking with each spasm of my body. Eventually I got up and got into the shower, under water as hot as I could make it. Eventually I stopped shivering, and I got out and dried myself. Then I went back into the bedroom and dressed in clothes out of the dresser and the closet, some Bill’s, some mine. And then I went down the back stairs into the kitchen.

“I made the calls,” she said.

She did not look up from the counter, from the salad she was preparing. I didn’t say anything, simply stood on the lowest step, looking at the condiments arrayed on the thin veneer of Formica she had had cemented over Moses Washington’s maple countertop, noting them carefully, trying to figure out what kind of strange offensive she was mounting.

“John…”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Reverend Williams said we can use the church.”

“Thank him.”

She looked up then, annoyed, a strand of hair falling free from the bun rolled at the nape of her neck. “Don’t you want to know about the arrangements?”

I kept my eyes on the countertop, although I could feel hers on me. “Friends will be received at the E. F. Cohen Funeral Home from seven to nine tomorrow evening. Services will be held at two-thirty Wednesday at Mount Pisgah Methodist Church, with interment following at Mount Ross Cemetery. I leave anything out? Get anything wrong?”

She turned back to the salad. “Just the time,” she said. “Funeral’s at ten. Reverend Williams works the afternoon shift.”

“Good,” I said. “I can catch the afternoon bus.”

She looked at me again then, and I met her eyes. “You can’t stand to be around me a minute longer than you have to, can you?”

“I can’t stand to be here
while
I have to,” I said.

She looked back at the salad, went on a moment. Then she said, “Well, then, I guess your mongrely friend oughta be mighty grateful to you for coming all this way for his funeral.”

“I didn’t come for his funeral,” I said. “I came because he asked for me. I came because he was dying.”

She didn’t look up; she just moved her hands along in a cupping motion, gathering the salad together. “John,” she said, “would you come if I asked for you?”

“Why?” I said. “Are you dying?”

She said nothing while she scooped the cut-up vegetables into a large wooden bowl. The bowl had been a birthday gift to her from Bill. It had been a project for a Boy Scout merit badge. He had spent hours on it, selecting the log, burning out the inside of it as the African natives had done to make canoes—although he had been taught it was a practice of the local Indians. I watched her use it and wondered what in the name of God she was playing at. She finished scooping and set the bowl aside, wiped her hands on the towel below the sink. Then suddenly she stopped, hands still on the towel, and looked out the window, down over the nearly dark hillside to the softly glowing lights of the town. “We’re all dying,” she said. “I was thinking that today. I remember we used to have a chain. Just like an old bucket brigade, only it was for news. Every woman would have two others to get word to, and each one of them would have two more. That was the old way. When I moved here it had been going on as long as Negroes had been living here. The thing that changed it was the telephone; folks started listening in on the party lines. You’d hear your ring, and soon as you picked up you’d hear the other phones, click, click, click, all down the line. When all the Negroes had telephones, or most did, well, the system just died. And then they brought in the dial phones, and you didn’t know when your neighbor’s phone was ringing anymore, and we needed that old way again. But it was too late then, we’d forgotten how to do it, and we had to get our news like everybody else, over the radio, or in the paper. Just like everybody else.”

“Just like the white folks,” I said. “I’d have thought that would please you.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it did please me, while it was happening. Your father used to go down and watch them digging the holes for the poles to bring those phone lines up on the Hill here, and he’d get so mad. He’d come home mad. I’d say to him, ‘Moses, that’s progress.’ And he’d say, ‘Vette, that’s white man’s progress. It’s colored man’s death.’ And I never knew what he meant, because when he passed, the phones weren’t in yet, and everybody heard, and when your brother died, the whole County heard, but today, they said they couldn’t run the announcement in the paper until day after tomorrow, and so I tried to get through to folks on the phone, and I thought to myself, there was a time you could have told everybody you needed to tell by talking to two people, but now you have to make twenty phone calls, and you have to look up the numbers in a book, and those poles marching up the Hill weren’t progress, they were death. Just like Moses said.”