Grim Tales (3 page)

The drowned do not stay put. They circulate among the seas and oceans, rivers and bays, watching through the swaying window the sun and moon trade places in the sky, while they, too, move relentlessly on – impatient to find for themselves a grave, but pleased in spite of themselves with effortless swimming and the suave beauties of their world.

He drowned in a pool – at night, swimming alone – and was found the next morning by fishermen trolling off the coast for mackerel. How does one explain this except by saying that between a swimming pool and an ocean lies that which no man can contemplate without profound revulsion? A kind of drain or sluice through which the body will, on rarest occasions, be drawn from a small to a larger place, in accord with a law of physics yet to be discovered.

They had lived for generations in their village on the river. Lived entirely without violence or neurosis – “big city troubles.” They liked their sedate houses and businesses, set back from the quiet streets, behind green hairpin fences. They liked the fields that swept down to the river – mobbed with wild flowers and Timothy in summer and, in winter, burnished gold by stiff winter wheat sticking up above the snow. They especially liked their river – the swans, the rustling music as the water swayed among the reeds, how the sky seemed to sink down in it some days and on other days how the water blackened and ran before the wind. The morning after the ribbon-cutting ceremony opened their new bridge to traffic (a thing they did not want), the first “jumper” leaped from the rail and drowned.

Sit still! she shouted; but the boy would not sit still. So she changed him into a chair.

Until that morning, furniture had never betrayed the slightest wish to move – ostensibly content with a luxurious, if sedentary existence, out of the weather, attended daily by vacuum and duster, caressed lovingly with fragrant oils. No one sharing the house with tables and chairs suspected that in their resinous or upholstered hearts they burned for a change of scenery: to face a different wall or window. That morning, while the man and his wife wielded pruning hooks among the trees, a table took its first diffident steps across the living room, with the woman's prized Limoges vase on its back – poised to fall and break. By nature smugly self-assured, an armchair threw its arms around the child's neck, who was at that moment eating barley sugar and daydreaming of lions, and strangled him. This was the first reported instance in what has come to be known as the Revenge of Objects.

She was frightened now that she had murdered him, seeing in his eyes as they closed on her the image of her own face, which – she knew – he would take with him even to the worms.

The steamer appeared in the harbor at dusk, black smoke from its stacks losing itself in the coming darkness. As the boat drew closer to the wharf, men leaning against the bollards to smoke heard band music on the water: “The Mountains of the Moon,” a tune none had heard until then, which seemed to dissolve in the suddenly chill air. Night fell; the ship's lights trembled against the black river. Here and there, passengers could be seen standing in the light that splashed down onto the decks. The men on the pier had never seen such a ship. It came to rest, gangplanks were let down and now the passengers began their slow disembarkation. They wore clothes the men thought peculiar – clothes that had been fashionable in 1912 when the
Titanic
is believed to have gone down. But the name of this ship was
H.M.S. Titanic
. Later, when the passengers were questioned, they laughed at the idea their ship had sunk! Didn't we know it is “unsinkable”? There had been ice in the sea lanes and thick fog – they remembered the fog; but they had slept soundly that night and long – dreaming, in first class or steerage, of ballrooms or barrooms, polo or bocce. The best sleep of our lives! they said while they waited with letters in their hands for those who had promised to meet them.

Forbidden to look at the sun, he did and ever after saw unimaginable sights.

The children stopped their play and looked at the ground from which – they said – a music was coming like “ants singing.” But the mothers and fathers who had gone outside to see why the children had grown so silent heard nothing, though they strained to hear and went so far, some of them, as to kneel and put their ears to the ground. They could hear nothing like a music anywhere underneath the grass – all except the simple-minded one who mowed lawns in summer. He said shyly, “Like ants singing a nasty song that makes me want to run and hide.” That evening as the sun fell swiftly behind the hill, the children hid themselves down the wells, in storm drains, culverts, and other places inside the earth and were never seen again, although afterwards the simple-minded man said he heard them, from time to time – heard them sing a terrible song.