Strange Wine (14 page)

The precise moment of the opening of the doorway to Hell occurred on a Friday the 13th, apparently ten days earlier than usual for the autumnal equinox to manifest itself. This discrepancy was only superficial, however. To those familiar with the changeover from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian in 1582, the ten-day prematurity was utterly harmonious. As the smoldering sun passed the celestial equator going north to south, numberless portents revealed themselves: a two-headed calf was born in Dorset near the little town of Blandford; wrecked ships rose from the depths of the Marianas Trench; everywhere, children’s eyes grew old and very wise; over the Indian state of Maharashtra clouds assumed the shapes of warring armies; leprous moss quickly grew on the south side of Celtic megaliths and then died away in minutes; in Greece the pretty little gillyflowers began to bleed and the earth around their clusters gave off a putrescent smell; all sixteen of the ominous
dirae
designated by Julius Caesar in the First Century B.C., including the spilling of salt and wine, stumbling, sneezing, and the creaking of chairs, made themselves apparent; the aurora australis appeared to the Maori; a horned horse was seen by Basques as it ran through the streets of Vizcaya. Numberless other auguries.

And the doorway to Hell opened.

For just a moment. The macrocosmic maze of the universe proffered exits, and escapes were effected.

Jack the Ripper fled. Caligula slipped away. Charlotte Corday, her hands still reeking with Marat’s blood, seized the moment to get away. Edward Teach, beard still bristling but with the ribbons therein charred and colorless, decamped, laughing hideously. Burke and Hare and Crippen (who had become friends in The Foul Place) ran off together. Cain’s release was realized. Cesare and Lucretia Borgia elbowed one another in their attempts to break loose, and the sister won her poisonous freedom, leaving the impotent brother behind. George Armstrong Custer galloped up and off on a flaming ghost stallion, his long blond hair trailing fire, hounds baying at his heels. Others.

Hitler found himself directly beside the portal, and could have escaped. But did not. He had found a home; his eternity had been spent painting roses on the walls of Hell; and he could not leave his masterpiece behind.

The doorway closed, and all was as it had been before.

As it closed, a paradoxical whirlpool was created in the megaflow, sucking back all the doomed souls but one.

Margaret Thrushwood escaped undetected. Impossibly, for the very best records were always kept up to date in Hell, no notice was taken of her absence; and all was as it had been.

But Margaret Thrushwood, recently quartered in Hell, was back in the world.

There had been a multiple slaying in Downieville in 1935.

There had been a house in Downieville that the residents called the Octagon House, because of the shape in which it had been built. Ramsdell had been the name of the family that had built and had lived in the Octagon House. The Ramsdells had been in mining and when the mine had played out they had gone into cattle and farming. Wealthy, friendly, interested in their community, giving and sharing during the Great Depression, they had been both loved and respected in Downieville.

The slaughter at the Ramsdell Octagon House had shocked and infuriated the god-fearing townsfolk.

Margaret Thrushwood, the housekeeper, thirty-one years old, had been the only person left alive in that abbatoir. Covered with blood and crying piteously, she had been found crouched down, half naked, in the dining room clogged with the bodies of the six Ramsdells, three of whom had been children. The townsfolk had dragged her from the house and drowned her in a nearby well. Lynching was commonplace in 1935.

On Friday the 13th, on a day of chill winds and rivers that tried for a moment to run upstream, the burned and ruined shade of Margaret Thrushwood returned to Downieville.

Henry “Doc” Thomas no longer lived there.

He had died in 1961.

The still-smoldering cinder that was the shade of Margaret Thrushwood did not linger long in Downieville; as Midgard, it had not long held the waiting shadow of Henry “Doc” Thomas. She continued searching; and when she realized he was not there, she gave a pitiful wail that made babies cry throughout the town; and she continued searching. He had not gone to Hell…she would have met him there and settled accounts between them. Again impossibly, defying all logic, refuting the commonly held belief that the universe balances itself in crystalline purity between good and evil, justice and injustice, Henry Thomas had been taken to Heaven.

Freed from The Foul Place, Margaret Thrushwood crawled to Heaven to find the man who had taken her virginity.

It was near twilight when she reached Heaven. The blessed host moved in slow and stately patterns. Heaven was a great pastel city, suffering from overcrowding. The faces of the residents seemed strained, but the sound of muted laughter was everywhere. It was considerably cooler than Hell had been. There were no birds in the sky. Crickets nattered.

Margaret Thrushwood asked directions and was led by stages to a common square where a pool of pale golden water whispered gently against the coming of evening. And there, at the edge of the pool, she found Henry Thomas with his bare legs dangling in the water.

She came up behind him and her hands clenched into fists without her knowledge. The clenching was painful: her hands were terribly burned. She wanted to
hit
him.

She tried to speak, and found she could not. Was it too much emotion, or that she had not spoken in Hell (save to scream) for so very long? She tried again and managed to speak his name. “Doc.”

A tremor passed through him, and he stared straight ahead. She said his name again. He turned his head slowly and looked up at her. As their eyes met, he began to cry.

Hidden in the moment, was the memory of that evening.

She sank to her knees beside him and looked at his face. It was twenty-six years older than the face that had compelled her love in 1935. Torment lay like a patina of dust across the fine features. He had not shaved. Perhaps he was not required to shave here. Perhaps he had been unshaved at the moment of his death. She wondered
how
he had died, but the thought was a vagrant breeze. She wanted to take his face in her blackened hands and feel once again the heat that came from him. But it was not possible. Too much time, too many moments in Hell, lay between them, as that evening lay between them.

And he cried.

Helplessly, he stared at her. He was totally and wholly at her command now. He whispered her name, then again. And the hearing of it, twice, so quickly like that, melted all the hatred in her. She leaned forward and put her sooty face against his shoulder. Black marks were left on his white flesh. She made gentle, baby-soothing sounds, even as her own body trembled. She had never seen him like this. The last time she had seen him had been that night as he…

Heaven began to run at the edges
.

Margaret looked over Doc’s shoulder. The sky of Heaven was beginning to smear and drip. She had seen a house run that way once, just the year before, in 1934. Ultraviolet rays and moisture worked rapidly on the linseed-oil binder in paints of the time. Rain would get at the fascia and trim and produce what house painters called “chalking.” The colors would run. That was common in 1934, 1935.

There was a trembling in the ground beneath them. The pale golden water of the pool gently swelled to the left, then to the right. It sloshed back and forth, overflowing first at one side, then the other.

It grew much warmer. Margaret thought she heard the cry of a bird, but there were still no birds, no birds in the sky, nowhere in that smeared drizzle of heavenly sky-color running down.

She held onto Doc as tightly as she could.

The silvery light that had no source, that illuminated Heaven, dimmed; and disturbing cancers of darkness appeared here and there in the empty spaces around the square.

Margaret pressed herself more tightly into Doc’s body, as she had that night. There in her servant’s room at the rear of the Octagon House. Oh. The room. She could see it now in her mind, just as fresh and sharp as it was…when? Was it that many years ago, just yesterday, back in 1935, just one real day ago when they dragged her out of the house and tied the wellrope around her ankles, and one of the men doubled his fist and hit her in the side of the head, and another man bounced her face off the bricks of the well, and they hoisted her up, dazed and squirming and crying and now completely naked, so embarrassed at her nakedness, and tipped her head down and threw her over the lip into darkness, way down there, all the way down there to The Foul Place–was it just a day ago in real time, or forty, fifty, a hundred years ago burning always burning? She could see the room, that sweet little room the Ramsdells had given her when she came to work for them, from Dr. Pulney’s in Oxnard. Through the big kitchen with the butcher’s-block table in the middle and the matched copper-bottom pans hanging from their hooks and the slick sweet smell of freshly-washed-down oilcloth on the breakfast nook table and the wood-burning stove the Ramsdells continued to use even though there was piped-in gas. Through the main pantry, the huge walk-in pantry with the circular staircase at the back wall, the staircase that led up to the second and third floors where the family had their bedrooms, where Mr. Ramsdell slept and could get up quietly in the middle of the night and come downstairs for a snack of some kind or other. And the door to her room, her servant’s room, she being the full-time paid-well just twenty-eight years old when she came to them housekeeper. Under the circular staircase that led up to Mr. Ramsdell who came down very late in the night for snacks, the door to her sweet and clean and neat as a pin room.

The sky ran, the ground trembled, darkness swirled through Heaven and the blessed host ran in random directions trying to escape the increasing warmth; as Margaret Thrushwood clung to the weeping body of Doc Thomas, as she had that evening.

“Don’t you want to know where my dream comes from?”

He looked down at her and the smile came to his face even though he fought to contain it. “Why should I want to know where it comes from?”

“Because it’s necessary to know that dreams come from someplace close. From someplace dear. Otherwise, they would be no better than wishes for money or great runs of land or all the caviar you could eat.”

“So tell me where the dream comes from.”

She sat up on the bed in the small room at the rear of the huge pantry. She wore only a slip and her silk stockings. They had been making love on the bed, and her skin was pink from having been pressed; small marks on her breasts and upper arms testified to the intensity of her love; intense enough for her to give herself up to his need to nibble, even when it was risky, that someone might see the signs of passion.

“My dream comes from seeing my mother. She was from Birmingham, in England. I told you that, didn’t I?”

He smiled, as he had smiled at a child who had brought him a hummingbird with a broken wing just that morning. “Yes, you told me that.”

“I knew I had. Come hold me and I’ll tell you more.”

He slid back onto the bed and they lay side by side. He held her, with her chestnut hair which she had let down till it reached the back of her knees, all her beautiful hair, blanketing his naked body. Her head was pressed into the secret hollow under his chin, and he heard her speaking from far away. “My mother always worked; I cannot remember a time when she wasn’t working. My father died when I was very young. My mother told me that.”

“But you didn’t believe her,” he said, softly.

She sat up and stared at him. “Good lord, Doc, how did you know that?”

He motioned her to resume the position. At that moment he coughed. He had been sick, a minor summer cold; but the cough was very loud. She grew alarmed, fell back upon him and put her hand over his mouth. “Shhhh. They’re eating dinner. They think I’m meditating. They mustn’t know you’re here…oh, Doc, why did you come here so early…?”

“I couldn’t wait to see you.” His words were muffled by her hand. He kissed the palm against his lips.

“Oh, you mustn’t. Not ever again. Late is the only time. Very very late, Doc.” Then she paused, as if considering something, and added, “But sometimes not
too
late at night.”

He didn’t get a chance to ask her what that meant.

“My father really ran off. Then my mother saved her money and followed him to New York. She got tired of waiting for him to send her the fare. He was a furniture refinisher. So she worked and saved it herself and came without telling him, because I think she
wanted
to catch him living with that girl, and he was, of course, and then he just ran off and left the both of them. My mother became friends with her; that was my Aunt Sally.”

He slid her slip up her legs. She tried to push it back down, but his hand was there. “Oh,” she said, as if it were the first time, and again, when he had moved over her, “Oh.”

The door opened.

She heard the soft sound of the empty cardboard box she had placed against the door, moving across the floor. She had come to place the cardboard box there as a matter of course. Every night. So she would know, when she was asleep, if she was to be visited. Very,
very
late at night, some nights, Mr. Ramsdell came downstairs for a snack. Of some kind or other.

She looked over Doc’s shoulder and
he
was watching them.

He did not stop them.

He watched until Doc was finished, muffling his sounds against the pillow; and then when Doc rose up slightly to look at her, to see if he was ahead or behind, and Doc saw she was staring past him, and he strained around to see what she was looking at,
then
he spoke to them: “I’ll have no whores under my roof. Be packed and gone before we’re done eating.”

He turned, leaving the door open, and walked away, stooping from his six-foot height to pass under the circular staircase that led up to the bedrooms.