Archangel (46 page)

The screen door creaked open and banged shut on its spring hinge. Clara was back in the farmyard. “Will you stop this?” she yelled up. “I am tired of you making war on that poor bear!”

“I don’t even know anymore if he is a bear,” Coltrane shouted down. He scanned the field. A breeze tousled the corn tops and the whole field seemed to be moving. He reached into his pockets and grabbed a handful of loose ammunition. The brass cartridges rattled together.

“You’re crazy! You know that? You’re obsessed!”

“I got him this time. I swear I did.” Coltrane was talking to himself.

Then the corn exploded at the edge of the field. Coltrane saw the huge bear loping toward the trees.

“Goddamnit!” screamed Coltrane. “Ain’t we even yet? How much more do you want from me? Didn’t I do enough to put things right?” Coltrane grabbed for his rifle. He jammed a round into the breech, half-aimed and pulled the trigger. He slid back the bolt and the empty cartridge flew up into his face. It was hot and still smoking and he cried out as the brass hit his cheek. By the time he realized he was losing his balance, it was gone. He slid backward down the roof, without even time to cry out. Then he hit the rain gutter and flipped. The rifle flew out of his hands. He heard Clara scream. The back of his barn swung up and past, and now he was falling although he had no sense of falling. It was everything else rising up to meet him. He saw the mountain of his hayrick and the cornfield, right-side up now and from the other side of the barn Clara was hollering. Then he vanished into the hay, a great rustling crunching sound all around him. Yellow dust kicked up. The sun-warmed stalks caught him softly and held him and suddenly he was not moving anymore. His brain sent out its cautious messengers down the long paths of his bones to see if they were broken. Slowly, he opened his eyes. He studied the tangled threads of straw close to his face.

Coltrane knew he had almost been killed. The knowledge reached him in a strange, tingling warmth through his body. For a moment longer, he sat there breathing, enjoying the smooth rustle of air into
his lungs. Then Clara climbed up the hayrick to find him. She was crying as she dug through the hay, and when she did, he looked up grinning, the way he had not grinned since he was a child. “Will you give it up at last?” She reached down to embrace him. “Some fights you aren’t supposed to win. That bear is just being a bear, and killing it won’t give you what you need.”

Coltrane still sat where he had fallen, listening to the heavy-boot plod of his heart. At first, he did not understand what Clara meant. The bear just being a bear. The animal had been wrapped up in all his ideas of what he had done in keeping silent about Mackenzie’s spiking of the tree and the payment he had to make to live with himself again. Only the spilling of blood had allowed him to see what was real and what existed in the shadowy parallel world of his imagination. But now it was clear to him. The rage that had stockpiled itself inside him began to diffuse, and suddenly it made no sense to him. For Coltrane, it was like waking from a dream in which he did not recognize himself.

Victor and Clara Coltrane thought back to the times just after their marriage when they had come here to lie in the hay, and how much had changed since then beyond the quiet valley of their farm. The quality of light had altered in their memories, and their surroundings seemed to fade, as if into the watery brown of an old sepia print. They saw themselves fading as well, and held on tightly to each other as they vanished into the past.

Jonah Mackenzie lay in a coma under the clear plastic hood of an oxygen tent, looking like a man entombed in ice. The green line of his heart-rate monitor drew shark fins in the black. Where the color had been on his face, there was now only a slick and waxy sheen. In the cellophane clinging of flesh to his bones, the places that were once light had turned to gray. Mackenzie had become like a photographic negative of his old self. He was not dying with the fireball swiftness that he once imagined. Instead, death wandered slowly and patiently through his veins. It took his strength fragment by fragment, until at last nothing remained.

Now he was moving away. The room and the hospital and the tiny
bunched-together houses of the city faded quickly from his view. He forgot he had ever been born.

Jonah Mackenzie set out into the ancient forests of an undiscovered land. He was filled with fear and wonder. Distant voices called to him, speaking the words of his prayers. They reached him in the depths of stillness, where even his heart made no sound.

Night Over Day Over Night

Calm at Dawn, Calm at Sunset

In the Blue Light of African Dreams

The Promise of Light

Stand Before Your God

P
AUL
W
ATKINS
is thirty-one years old. In addition to being one of the best-reviewed new writers on the American literary scene, he is also one of the most colorful. The California-born son of Welsh parents, Watkins grew up on the shores of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, and was educated at Eton and Yale. His most recent book,
Stand Before Your God
, is a memoir about an American’s coming-of-age at a British boarding school. His widely praised first novel,
Night Over Day Over Night
, the story of a young SS soldier during the Battle of the Bulge, was published when its author was twenty-three, and was nominated for the Booker Prize. To research the book, Watkins hiked through the Ardennes forest, where the battle took place, and interviewed veterans of both sides.
Calm at Sunset, Calm at Dawn
, which was awarded Britain’s Encore Prize for best second novel, reflects several seasons Watkins spent working on trawlers off the New England coast. For his third novel,
In the Blue Light of African Dreams
, Watkins learned to fly a biplane and spent months in the Moroccan Sahara. And before he wrote
The Promise of Light
, he lived in the Irish towns of Lahinch and Ennistymon and drew upon a vast body of historical literature in order to study the Irish independence movement from all angles.

Watkins lived and worked in the woods of northern Maine while researching
Archangel
, his sixth book. He makes his home near Princeton, New Jersey.