Drink for the Thirst to Come (11 page)

He watched the earth, nights, homing from the Plow. After leaving Stanley at the fork, he climbed the gentle rise. He’d start across the fields near home and watch the earth ripple in the still, still air.

“When’d I die?” he said. “Who took me?”

Nothing.

“You think I’m the only one left walking in the air?” he asked Welly.

Welly, drowned and gone in the chops of the Channel, never said a thing. Nothing at all.

“You went and drownded yourself because! Ain’t that right?” Bill said. “Because why? Because you din’t want ter go unnerground no more, ain’t that it? You were dead, too, and knew it and wanted no more crawling in the mud, ever after. Right, am I, Welly?”

And nothing spoke to him, but the questions seemed complete. The air winkled in the field and shadows rolled in the starlit grass.

“Down there, Welly? Well there’s dead below the waters, too, old son!” Bill shouted to the night. “You dancing in the deep are you, Welly?”

Maybe it was the beer but the next day Bill put a fiver in his pocket and took the train to Dover.

Messines Ridge blocked the eastern sky. Dawn was a way away and the moon long gone. The ripples in the earth raised, became flesh, flesh and bone and urges. The urges grew fingers and the hands from the earth stroked Bill’s feet. They reached upward. The emerging arms shed earth and flesh as they gripped and climbed his legs. The weight of their bodies, unbuoyed by the dirt they displaced, staggered him. They didn’t hurt. They meant no harm, Bill knew. What harm could they do? He didn’t know them, not by name, not yet, but they knew him. Heads and shoulders lifted from the dark that rolled beneath. They only wanted him.

“I’m watching you, you horrid little man,” one said, his voice, a whisper at Bill’s ear. Others spoke. Whispered French twittered at his nose, German rolled around his face, other words and ways, Bill knew, but didn’t know what.

“Wanner come down and ’ave a swim wiv us, Old Bill?” another said. Munger. “You’re one o’ us, there, Ol’ Bill, right enough!”

“Am I?” Bill said to the face that had climbed his chest and stared up his nose. “I’m one o’ you lot?”

“Wait for it!” called a familiar voice. “Wait for IT…” another. So many familiar parts and places swam and rose in the field around him. Bodies by the hundreds lifted from the dirt and from the holes in the holes around the Messines Ridge. Bodies broke the surface in the starlight, their world glinting from the bone between the flesh and serge and wool and rusted steel. They hugged him and the scent of earth filled his nostrils, the scent of old explosions, of shit and piss, of gunpowder and dead horse, of blood and garbage, of old gas attacks and the eternal smell of men and sweat and breath and fear and life near the edge of the great hole.

Their bodies were not heavy, light as dust, in fact. Just so many of them. He waited, though. Waited for it.

“Now lads,” Sarge shouted, “over the top!” His whistle blew across the morning and Bill went forward, falling, swimming, digging, crawling; crawling down to glory.

IN A DAINTY PLACE

I was a magician when the old hallway returned. Just
a phase
, Mother said. Still, the doomed deer, the flying dog and weeping women, the whole world I’d imagined, returned to the upstairs hall. Magic? Not mine. I’d paged through
The Big Book of Malini
. I’d memorized a few stories to distract the audience—patter, we called it. I knew gags that could confuse my kid brother. “Alikazam,” a quarter drops out of his nose and he grabs for it or “Shazam,” his rubber duck vanishes and he starts squalling. That was it. The hallway? No. The hallway was beyond me. Way beyond.

We lived in Grandfather’s house. Grandfather was “Pop-pop.” In Pop-pop’s house there was a hallway on the second floor. The hall ran between Mother’s room and mine. The floor was splintery wood, a worn maroon carpet, from one end to the other. Nothing hung on the walls. They were wallpapered. The paper felt like thick fabric, fabric with pictures,
a
picture, same on both sides of the hall. The thing that almost caught your eye first was the dog, flying. That wasn’t the first thing because just below the flying dog was a dying deer, a stag, taller than my father had been. The stag’s antlers were huge, thirty-two points to be precise. Magicians need precision. The stag was surrounded by hunters, men on horseback, on foot, with pikes, bows and arrows, dogs. The dogs’ fangs and claws had raked cruel stripes across the animal’s flanks and he bristled with arrows. One of the mounted hunter’s pikes had pierced its shoulder. The horse had reared. If the light was right and you watched for a time, the hooves seemed to move, but only if the light was right. The hooves mixed with the stag’s tossing antlers so the deer’s head seemed to move too.

The hunters were not cowboys or Indians. “They’re of a different age,” Pop-pop said, from long-ago and far-away. Not Americans, they came from where Pop-pop’s stories had come.

Seven women stood on the outskirts of the clearing, eyes and faces turned away from the killing. They wore tall pointed hats; veils streamed from them. Two clutched their hearts.

The deer’s eyes, the eyes of the pikeman’s horse were wide and wild. Terror, I guessed, both of them, maybe anger or other things I didn’t understand, the sight and smell of bleeding dogs, the whinnies of a downed horse. And there was that flying dog. His howls. He must be howling. I could hear. Terror. Wide terror. Terror of being tossed by those antlers, of flight. Dogs aren’t used to flying. The kid always looked there first, always laughed at that flying dog. Not at everything, but at that.

I don’t remember the whole of the picture, not exactly, not anymore. Whenever I spent a rainy day sitting on the floor, watching it, I continued the story, on my own. I heard the animals, the shouts of the hunters, the women’s sobs; all of that became part of the little world. I felt the heat of that day on my face. I smelled the blood, the green richness of the forest, smelled smoke from campfires beyond the picture. I don’t remember the whole picture because so much of my memory of it is conjured, the story I made up that began, went into the broader world, and ended in that clearing. I heard voices. The men, the women, then others, close by, then distant ones. Voices meant lives lived. Lives lived in there. It was me, of course it must have been. And so I made stories of what had come before, what happened after, what was happening in the trees or through them, in the castle that must be beyond the woods, in the town around the castle. Where else are those hunters from? Details. I made details I knew weren’t there but which had to be somewhere.

I’d never hunted, never even been to the woods. My father was a hunter. He was going to take me. Always said when I grew this-tall he would. But he went away before. And other than at the butcher shop, I’d never smelled blood. I’d squeezed a few drops from the kid’s poked finger once, tasted it before putting on the Band-Aid, but that was it. Yet in Pop-pop’s hallway, I heard the forest murmur, what I know to be cicadae, wind in the trees, small brooks, the rustle of animals.

I remember the feel of the wallpaper, like narrow cords on stiff cloth. Like tapestry, Pop-pop said. Close, the smell was of the old, of wheat paste, dried and cracked. Like the inside of a scrapbook, maybe.

The only light in the hallway was from a lamp Mother kept on a small table with a marble top. The table legs were claws that clutched clear glass balls. Dragon feet, the kid called them. “Yeah,” I told him, “the feet of a dragon Dad killed.”

He said no, but I think he believed part of it.

The upstairs phone also sat on the table. A heavy black affair, the thing smelled of Pop-pop’s pipe and kisses. The lamp was lit day and night. A yellow cone of light spread upward across the picture, washed the deer’s face, his wounds and blood and, at its limit, kept the flying dog from tumbling upward into the dark.

At Mother’s room and mine, the picture disappeared into forest—a world wooded. Beyond those woods? Again, I made so many nearly good stories that they became real to me.

Rising from Mom’s room, the morning sun lit the edge of the picture, the ladies clutching, weeping. The sunset, from my end of the hall, sometimes glowed the dark trees and washed the women in red.

On the other side of the hall was the same picture, reversed. There were interruptions, the bathroom door, the stairway to the living room, the side hall leading to the attic steps, Pop-pop’s room. Pop-pop’s room was at the center. His door cut the deer’s head and shoulders from the picture so, no wound, no blood, no wild eyes there. The horse reared, the huntsman’s pike disappeared into the frame, half the flying dog emerged.

When the war came, Dad went. He died and my kid brother was born. Dad was killed on the day Raymond was born. My guess. That made it kind of perfect anyway. We got the letter in the middle of winter just after Mom came home from the hospital with Raymie and I came home from Aunt Erby and Uncle Mac’s, where I’d been stashed until Mom could cope. Her word. Pop-pop was not to be trusted with the entirety of me, I guess. I was five when the kid showed up. It was Raymie’s fault the wallpaper went away. Here’s the story:

Picture Mom standing in the hallway early one morning. The kid could walk, but she’s holding him anyway and he’s screaming. Here’s why: the phone rang at 6:30. I was up and in the bathroom but I never answered the phone, not mornings or late at night. Mother’s rule. Raymie ran out of Mom’s room and to the phone. He always did. Then he stood and stared at it like a pointer until someone came and answered it. I guess Raymie caught his foot in one of holes in the carpet and fell. Mom came, picked him up, like always, and held him in the crook of her arm, bouncing him quiet as she answered the phone. Simple. He always stopped crying when she held him. Now he didn’t. He didn’t so much that I came out of the bathroom, toothpaste slobbering out of my mouth, to see what was going on.

Dull morning light poured out of Mom’s room. Deer, dogs, spear, blood, women, everything blue or green or yellow or any color was soaked in deep red.

Mom was on the line bouncing him but the kid would not shut up. I didn’t know why. Then I did. Raymie was nose-to-nose with the bleeding deer, its wild wide eye, maybe six inches from his, flying dog above him, sticking spears, arrows, rearing horses. He twisted one way, the other, another; everywhere was blood pain.

Mom didn’t notice at first. She kept bouncing the kid on her hip and trying to talk. I was laughing my head off—quietly, so not to disturb. Raymie looked at me, saw toothpaste foam on my mouth I guess and upped the screams to where Mom finally realized the kid wasn’t going to shut up.

“Excuse me a second, okay?” she said. Then, “Raymond. Raymond? Ramie, what? What?” She looked at me. “Is it your brother?” I wiped the paste off my lips and shrugged. I didn’t know. The kid kept it up. “Is it what? What, honey? What?”

The kid pointed at the wall and screamed.

“What? The paper? Is it this, the wallpaper?” She looked at me. “You think the wall is scaring him?”

It seemed stupid.

“I think. Are you? You afraid of this?” Mom laid her hand on the deer’s face.

Raymie doubled the volume and buried his eyes in her hair.

“He is. He’s afraid of the wallpaper! Huh! Listen,” she said to the phone, “have to go.”

Pop-pop had been born in the house. The wallpaper was there when he was a kid. Never bothered him, so far as he said. Mom had been born in the house. She didn’t say so, but it probably didn’t scare her. I was a baby there and it never made me cry. Then on, Raymond went through the hall, eyes shut. He fell at least once a week, with consequent screaming and flailing, right under the stag’s head, the horse’s hooves.

Finally, Pop-pop started taking estimates for redoing the hallway. One guy wandered, looking. He wanted to scrape and re-plaster, said that paper was on there darn good; even with the steam she was gonna rip out a lot of that old plaster. “That there’s horse-hair binder, that there’s holding it to them lathe strips under there,” he said. “Gonna be rough, that job, and gonna lose some them lathes, too. Then there’s the wire’s gotta go over them voids and the new plaster.” When all that was done, he could put on some pretty new paper over it. “Something ain’t scary, you know, something, say, with flowers, nice flowers,” he said, smiling down at the kid. “Or them puppy dogs and bunny bears. Something’ll come off easy when the kid’s growed, you know?”

The kid stared. This was in the living room where there were no horses, stags, and hounds.

Another guy figured the same, wrote it on a piece of butcher paper with a stubby pencil he kept licking, then sat down alone and did some quiet arithmetic. He finally said the walls would probably have to come down and go back up. Then he could hang some paper. Or not. Her choice. He gave mom a big book with lots of samples. She could choose, choose anything she wanted. Most of them had flowers, stripes, or both. He left the paper with it written in wet pencil lines and numbers.

Another wanted to just scrape, plaster and paint. Some nice paint, he thought. White would be good, people are doing that now, paint. “Wallpaper? That’s horse and buggy days.”

The kid whimpered about the horse and buggy stuff.

Everyone wanted to scrape and plaster first.

“That costs what?” Pop-pop asked. Three times he asked.

Each man said. They said different figures, but numbers so high Pop-pop’s eyebrows went up each time. Each time he made blow-face noises.

Pop-pop died early one Sunday morning. He dropped down in the hall on his way to the bathroom and lay there until Raymie tripped over him. There was screaming.

Then it was up to Mom. Six months later she painted. Over the wallpaper. She’d had it. She had a guy in, none of the ones from before, a guy she found in the phone book. He started pretty much the same as the others and Mom shut him up! If the damn stuff is on there so good, it can just stay there and he could paint over it.

The guy didn’t like that and he left. Said it wasn’t worth his time.