Comfort and Joy (12 page)

Danrose and headed to the bathroom. Ford leaned up onone curled armand watched, amazed, the naked body walking in his house. Dan came back with towels. He cleaned Ford's thigh and his ownand sipped lukewarmchampagne.

"I don't have to take youhome tonight, do I?"
"I think I'mallright where I am."

In the morning, soon after dawn, Ford woke with his limbs twined round Dan, the thick taste of champagne in his mouth. They had stumbled here toward morning, drunk and exhausted, leavingclothes and ashinthe library.

Now Ford studied Dan's feline sleep. Not only had he made love to Dan Crell but now they rested together in Ford's bed. When Ford stood to find the bathroom, he was careful to be quiet. He returned to the bedside and stood there, watchingDan, curled like a geisha in the folds of sheets and blankets, a flower inFord's bed. Someone witha heartbeat, waitingfor Ford.

Familiar pines alerted Dan to the fact that Ford and he were approaching Forrester County. Gaunt, stunted branches swayed atop shaggy trunks, ragged against a pale sky. Silent, he fought apprehension, as across the front seat Ford waited and watched.

Whenever Dan returned to this country, he carried with him the conviction that the land would swallow him. Through the early part of the ride, from the Raleigh-Durham airport to the wastelands surrounding Smithfield, Princeton, and Goldsboro, his dread manifested itself as a tautness across his chest. He watched the procession of devastated landscape, ruined farms, and collapsing shanties, wrecks of unpainted carpentry from which, nevertheless, smoke rose through chimneys into a cloudless sky. Pastel mobile homes perched on cinderblock feet in bleak squares of grass. Red-cheeked plastic Santas waved gaily from the bland roofs of ranch-style bungalows. Wrecked automobiles clustered as if in herds, overgrown with ropes of automobiles clustered as if in herds, overgrown with ropes of kudzu vine. The images, the courses of the roads, struck him as familiar but oddlychanged. Scoured inwhite light.

For a while he would forget Ford, then glimpse him. The landscape absorbed Dan, and he studied the line ofragged trees, the swoop and rise of the high-tension wire, the slant of an untended road sign; and suddenly, turning his head, he would find Ford drivingthe car.

Highway 70 gave way to the less-traveled Highway 58 beyond Kinston. The roads forked at a clapboard service station over which soared a sign bearing a blue neon bird, wings flapping at the same electronic interval as when Dan first remembered seeing it, years ago, Dan small and quiet, peering over the backseat ofhis father's car.

Soon the car crossed into Forrester County, and he read the first road signs for Somersville and Potter's Lake.
Along these roads stretched a chain of houses in which Dan had lived during his childhood. The thought of the houses, and of Ford seeing the houses, filled him with quiet apprehension. The first appeared beyond Potter's Lake, a white, tiled cottage nestled on a low rise, impossibly tiny, porch fallen to ruins. Dan had intended to point out the house to Ford but at the last moment his arm collapsed to his side and no words emerged fromanywhere. The house seemed so smalland shabby, evenhe could hardlybelieve he had once lived there.
The next was worse, a heap ofboards sitting neglected in high grass behind a broad fig bush. Empty windows. Barns tumbling to wreckage behind. The yard had dwindled to a small tangle of weeds surrounded byold farmequipment.
I lived here once.
He turned to Ford and imagined the words. Impossible.
Silence soon began to choke him, and he stared fixedly at the road. Ford must have felt the change, because he asked, "Did youlive around here?"
Roads, houses, eventrees, alive inhis memory, passed byhim ina dullstream.
"I have something to show you," Dan said, as the car crossed
"I have something to show you," Dan said, as the car crossed the bridge over the Eleanor River.
Wooden frame buildings formed something called the Harvey Crossroads. Ford eyed Dancautiously. "Where?"
"Turnright onthis road. Not far."
The woods had been larger when he was a boy. But farther down the road little had changed; the same barns stood in the same fields he remembered, the same farmhouses hanging back half-hidden in the shade of sweet-gum trees. Beneath another bridge, the Eleanor River twisted back on herself, clotted water overhung with shadows; downriver from the bridge was the railroad trestle, and beyond opened the broad field of his memory, once littered with cornstalks but planted now with clover. Inthe center ofthe bleak field stood the house, sentinelin its plowed ground, guarded by huge old trees. When his family had lived there, the children named the place the Circle House. The yard consumed the house in weeds and grass, and the structure itselfsagged, empty.
Ford studied the tiny house in perfect silence. He slowed the car and parked onthe shoulder.
Dan stepped into December wind. The smell of the air entranced him, he studied the horizon in amazement. The line of pines encircled the flat plate of earth, ragged and gaunt. Hardly different at all. Beyond the broad ditch and yard, knee-deep in weed, stretched the flatness of the field. Beyond those trees ran the river, drifting within her shadowed banks, flowing silkily, darklythroughthe pilings ofthe bridge.
Ford appeared at his side and studied him. "Here?"
Dan nodded. He studied the weathered clapboard of the front, the sagging tin roof, the concrete porch with cracked steps, ivy covering one wall. The front door hung inward on its hinges. Paint flaked from gray wood. Whitewashed boards covered some of the windows. The house stared blindly forward.
Do you recognize me? Did you think I would ever come back?
His body rebelled when he reached the front porch steps.
back?
His body rebelled when he reached the front porch steps. He took a deep breath, watching his feet, which refused to move until he reminded himself the house was empty and a foot lifted. Found the next step. Ford hungat his elbow, as ifafraid he might fall.
He climbed to the concrete porch. Stepping with squared shoulders to the opendoor, he peered inside.
No image of the past remained, not the least flicker. The empty front room echoed with the sound of his breath. Dry leaves clacked on the floor when the wind slid through the crack in the door; Dan pushed the door open as the wind gusted, and the roomshook witha rattlinglike bones.
Ford's expression changed when he saw the shabby interior. Part of the floor had rotted away, in the corner where the longago couch had rested. An old tin chimney flue lay collapsed in one corner, fallen fromthe wreck ofan oilfurnace, installed after the Crells abandoned the place. The sight of the machine eased Dan, giving evidence of other inhabitants. He had pictured the house as eternally empty, abandoned since the last stick of Crell furniture rolled awayinPapa's truck.
Both men crept forward, careful of the weak floor. The kitchenoffered hardlyenoughroomfor them, narrower thanDan recalled. Ford had to stoop in one place where the ceiling sagged. Yellow grocery flyers littered the empty gap where Mama's stove had nested. The sink tumbled brown with dead spiders and insect wings, a slight breeze stirring from the partly open window. Dry linoleum curled across the floor, cracking underfoot. The back door, incongruously locked, yielded to force and swunginward.
Outside, a porch had run the length of the house, but now it plunged downward into weeds. Wooden steps hung at a precarious angle. Behind the house, the old block shed stood firmly behind the tangle of an overgrown quince. At the center of the yard the headlights of an old car reflected the swaying grass. Rust ate its metalskinand its clothinterior hunginrags.
The door that had once led to the children's bedroomswayed wildly as wind rushed across the field. "That was our bedroom." wildly as wind rushed across the field. "That was our bedroom." Danpointed.
"You're not goingto tryto get out there."
"No."Laughingsoftly. "This place is a mess."
Turning abruptly.Sliding past Ford, who crowded him against the door. They looked at each other. Ford said, "This place has beenemptyfor years."
"I know. I think I'm glad." Speaking matter-of-factly. "I'm almost readyto go. There's just one more roomI want to see."
In the living room he hesitated. Ford waited behind him. On the far wall, between the high bookshelves (which had made his mother proud, when she first saw the house), the closed doorway, perfectly preserved, stilled him. His parents' bedroom. He reached for the loose enameled doorknob and turned it. The door opened silently. The room, dappled with midday light, welcomed him.
Cobwebbed windows admitted a landscape of the side yard, the field, the line of trees along the river. Part of this room had survived, but in the place where his parents bed had stood a great split had opened, as if lightning had slashed the wall like an ax. The room lay open to sky, the roof collapsed above it. Dan stared stupidly through the broken floor to the ground under the house. A plastic doll's foot layhalfburied inthe soft earth.
"That floor's not goingto hold youup, Danny."
"I know. I'm not going any further." Searching the room, as if he might have left something here, those many years ago. Glancing at what remained ofthe bathroom, the steady drip, drip of water now silenced, the sink tumbled onto the floor, staining the floorboards with a streamofrust. Turning, Dan almost began the short walk to Ford, who waited inthe doorway.
But for a moment, as if beyond the window another time existed, he glimpsed his mother, young and slim, as real as if she were actually there, stepping across that snow-covered field, wearing the red dress Dan had loved. Arms wrapped in a thin sweater, she moved deliberately across the furrows, at last sweater, she moved deliberately across the furrows, at last raisingher head to scanthe house....
He moved to the window, heedless of the groaning floorboards; Ford said, "Danny, I swear, I'mcoming in after you ifyoudon't come out."But Danhad reached the window and lay his hand against the sill. Vision suddenly blurred and he could hardly see the field or the line of trees beyond. "I should have gone to the river,"he said.
"The river?"
"Past those trees."He studied the ragged gray line beyond the field. "I used to walk out there."
He forgot whenand where he was, he became that right-yearold again, staring across the field at the pale walls of this house, low under the trees, stubby and nondescript on its cinderblock pilings. He could almost smell the river through the glass; and suddenly he was there, stepping along the bank tangled with honeysuckle, withhusks ofcattail, withthick beds offern.
"I would go to the river whenever I could. Unless it was dark, then I had to stay in the house. When I was at the river, I couldn't hear Mom and Dad anymore. It was peaceful."
And I used to lie in the dead honeysuckle and dream of a cave beneath the river, a man like you in the cave, and one day a
lionin
a golden field.
Anarmcircled Danfrombehind.
One day a lion in a gold field gashed my thigh, and I slept for a hundred days in your arms,
and the two stood silently watching the distant line ofthe river throughthe trees.
"I used to dreamabout you at the river,"Dan said. "You lived under the water, and youtook care ofme."
"Me?"
"I didn't know it was youat the time. But it was."
He turned to where Ford stood behind him. The shock on Ford's face confirmed for Dan that he himselfwas crying, though he could not feel his tears. Head resting against the now familiar roundness of Ford's shoulder, Dan found he could see the field again. Bare of any habitant. Clean of snow. The present reasserted itself. Today was Christmas Eve, and Dan had grown reasserted itself. Today was Christmas Eve, and Dan had grown far past the eight-year-old who once wandered by that river. Now Mama lived an hour down the road, and she no longer owned the red dress. But as he and Ford traced their way across the weakened floor, he again felt his own ghost in the house, the small boy who still wandered in these rooms, searchingfor what he had lost.