Bright's Passage: A Novel (11 page)

Standing at the foot of the table, she took her sister’s ankles in her blistered hands and made ready to lift them. The
Colonel went to the head and stood looking down into his wife’s face. He removed his broad-brimmed hat and ran his hand through the plastered strands of his hair. “Well, that is that,” he said. He reset his hat firmly on his head and strode from the room without a second glance, leaving her still holding the dead woman’s ankles at the foot of the table.

She set the legs down and came to kneel next to Henry. “I’m going to need your help one more time. This will be hard, but we’ll go slowly. Will that be all right?”

Henry looked out the doorway where the Colonel had gone and nodded yes.

“Now, I want you to go to where I was standing and I want you to try to hold those legs up while I pull her off the table. Can you do that?”

He nodded again and went to where she had been standing.

His mother took the body by the armpits and began to pull it slowly down the length of the table. Henry followed the dead woman’s feet as they slid down the long plane of wood, and he tried to catch them as his mother finally pulled the last length of the woman’s body off the table, but the legs were too heavy and the little black boots passed through his hands and thumped to the floor. His mother caught her breath and considered her sister’s body. She looked at the doorway warily before taking the rifle from around her back and nestling it in her sister’s arms. They half carried, half dragged the deadweight a few feet at a time until, as they passed into the hallway and neared the front door, his mother gave up trying to carry the body at all. Instead, she grabbed whole ripping handfuls of the woman’s gown and heaved her over the threshold and down the porch stairs each step punctuated by the dragging
rat-tat
thump of the boots. At last the body rested in the dirt at the Colonel’s feet. She bent and pulled the rifle from her sister’s embrace.

“You haven’t got a box, have you?”

The Colonel stood erect and did not reply, so she cocked the rifle and handed it back to Henry, who pointed it at the man while she climbed into the shallow grave and pulled the body in after her.

She took a long time arranging her sister in the narrow hole, brushing the dust as best she could off the gown, combing her hair once more with the ivory comb. The arms, which had twisted in their joints from being dragged, did not look right. She tucked them behind the body, so that the dead woman appeared to be clasping her hands behind her as she walked through a doorway from one world into the next.

Finally, she closed her sister’s eyes, climbed out of the grave, and, after taking the rifle back from Henry, allowed her gaze to rove the house and the overgrown craze of bramble and crab-grass that lived in its shadow. She put a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “We’re going now,” she said to the Colonel. “She was my sister but she was your wife, and I’ll not be the one to bury her. That’s for you to do, and I know you know how to do that at least,” she said. “It didn’t take you long to get my father in the ground. If he’d known what kind of a man you really were, he’d have shot you down like a sick horse. He might not have been a colonel, like you claimed to be, but he fought in a war too, and when he came home he held his head high.” She spat on the ground. “Look at you,” she said to the uniformed figure, “
Colonel
Morse.” She said the name as if it were a bad taste. “They were all so proud of you. She was so proud of you. A colonel. The last man to know my brother.” She snorted once with derisive finality. “To think anyone was ever worried about the family name because I married a coal miner.”

The Colonel’s eyes raked across her face, but he said nothing.

“Rachel,” she said to the small girl in the doorway. “I want
you to come live with Henry and me now. Just leave your things and come along. This isn’t the place for you to live anymore.”

“Leave her be,” the Colonel said quietly. “That is my daughter.”

The girl in the threshold curled her neck around the door frame like a little swan, her body still subsumed by the interior shadows behind her.

Henry’s mother raised the rifle with one hand until it was pointing at the Colonel. With the other hand she beckoned to the girl. “Rachel? Just come along now, all right? You’re going to come and live with us.”

The girl wavered, looking in confusion between the face of Henry’s mother and the Colonel. The man did not turn to his daughter but continued to regard Henry’s mother.

“It’s all right, girl,” his mother said. “He isn’t gonna hurt you. He knows this is no place for little girls. You know that too, don’t you? Come along now.”

The girl’s dirty face flickered. She unfolded herself from the door frame and came walking slowly down off the porch. The Colonel lunged and grabbed her as she was about to pass. He pulled her close to him, and the girl did not resist, appeared in fact to relax into the surety of her father’s grip.

“She is my daughter,” the Colonel said. “You dare insult a grieving man.”

“Rachel,” Henry’s mother said. “Little girl, if you ever need anything, if anything ever happens to you, I want you to come find me, do you hear? You know where we live.”

All the way back to the cabin, his mother walked facing backward, the rifle gripped so hard in her hands that her knuckles looked as if they might pop out from beneath her skin. Once they were home, she put it up in the rafters where she always kept it and sat down on the footstool by the empty fireplace a long, long time, rubbing her shins beneath her skirt and
staring into the charred rocks at the bottom of the flue. Henry went outside and played with the rabbits and chickens through the fencing. As the sun was going down, he went and threw rocks on the road. Only when the sky was as black as the fireplace itself did his mother emerge from the cabin and fetch some wood for a cook fire.

The night passed with agonizing slowness as Bright lay in the ditch beneath Bert’s body. He thought for a long time about the girl in the church, about her beautiful face and the way that she had looked down from the ceiling at him in the very instant he had put his head through the doorway. It had been as if, in that moment, the girl had wished to go with him but knew that she never could, that her fate was elsewhere. He knew that look well. He’d seen it on Rachel’s face the last time she had come to their house.

It had been almost two weeks since the death of his aunt Rebecca, and his own mother had been in the house working to mend a hole in the bed quilt. Henry had been in the yard when he glanced up and saw the girl standing there in the road. He knew immediately that everything was different now. She was not the same girl that he had been walking to school with every morning for two years, not the same one who had told him that he and she would one day be married or who had laughingly piled the peeping golden chicks on his chest. This girl looked as if some giant from one of her own stories had stooped down and whispered the world’s largest, worst secrets in her ear. She was barefoot. He could have gone to her, but something, some new kind of law, prevented it. Instead, he had raised his hand to
her and she, after a moment, returned the gesture. The golden ribbon was tied around her wrist. She had looked at Henry with the same expression on her face as the girl on the church ceiling. It was a look of farewell, he realized now, lying there in the ditch. She had come to tell him goodbye. She never went to school or came back to the cabin again after that day. Perhaps she didn’t even remember who he was anymore.

“She does.”

The world once again got very still, very small at the sound of the voice.

“You hear me, Henry Bright.” The voice was very close to his ear in the blackness.

“Yes,” he said finally. Then, “Who are you?”

“I am an angel, Henry Bright, be not afraid.”

“I am.” His throat was tight with fear and the words came out with a cracked, whistling sound. “I am afraid.”

“Be not,” the voice said again.

“Where are you?”

“Henry Bright, be quiet. Look.”

He was quiet and he looked. The sky was getting infinitesimally lighter now, and in the farmhouse down the road, through the gaping holes of one of the window frames, he saw something move. It was slight, a kind of rustle upon the eyes that carried no sound, but it was there nonetheless. “Who is it?”

“I am an angel. Be not afraid.”

“No,” he whispered. “Who is that down there, moving around down there?”

“You must lie very still.”

The squat figure of a stoop-shouldered man emerged from the house. He stood there in the door frame and looked up into the blue moonlit sky before walking into the middle of the road and stretching, as if just having risen from a heavy meal. The doorway disgorged another figure, this one much thinner than
his companion. The two stood in confab a moment, the silver splinters of rifle barrels glinting down their backs in the moonlight. It was too dark to tell what uniforms they wore, but as the duo began to walk down the road in his direction, their movements were animated with a kind of easy contentment, as if whichever side they belonged to, they felt quite safe in their surroundings.

He tried to pull Bert’s body even farther on top of him.

“Lie still, Henry Bright.”

He lay still as they passed him by, but they could not have gone twenty feet when Bert’s empty canteen shifted somehow in the dark and fell against the stone wall, making a clinking sound. Bright caught his breath and, as he did, Bert’s corpse shifted above him once again, the dead man’s head lolling to release a stream of cold, thick fluid onto his face. He coughed quietly once against the wetness.

“Lie still, Henry Bright.”

The footsteps pulled up short and stood there in silence. Then the boots came back, mulching and sucking against the mud of the road.

“Close your eyes. Do it now.”

He closed his eyes and pretended to be dead. The boots stood there in the darkness a long time. Then there came a cracking of joints and the crunkle of leather as one of the figures stooped to a squat for a closer look. A hand came down softly on Bert’s back, resting there like the kind of close friend that it was likely Bert had never had. The hand whispered up and down the fabric of the dead man’s back two or three times and then a palm was running along the scalp of Bert’s head, and more cold fluid dripped and slid onto Bright’s face. The fingers trailed down past Bert’s ear and then down the nape of the dead man’s neck until they came to rest on the crest of Bright’s eyebrow. He held his breath in agony as the hand made its way across the
wet, sticky surface of his eyelids, down his cheek, and then slowly pried his lips apart and slid into his mouth. The fingers worked between Bright’s teeth and under his tongue as he struggled to hold his breath. Just when he felt that he might explode from lack of air, the fingers pulled away and the figure stood. A metallic sound was followed by a quick punch of pressure from above, and a harsh, sulfurous rip of air escaped Bert’s bloating body through the puncture made by a bayonet. The blade came down hard three more times, but due to Bert’s girth Bright was untouched. What followed was the kind of long, steady silence that accompanies surveyal, and Bright waited behind closed eyes for the bayonet to come for him, but the awful silence went on for so long that he began to wonder whether the figures had somehow slipped away. When the agony of waiting was too much for him, he found himself, almost against his own volition, opening his eyes a fraction in the moonlight, catching the men’s familiar faces in the instant before they turned and continued walking away from him down the road. He did not need an angel to tell him who it was he had seen.

Bright couldn’t sleep, and so he lay looking at the bilious sky and the hotel, which sat in its pool of electric light there in the middle of the darkened lawn. On occasion the breeze scooped up a few jostling strains of music being played on a piano, and once or twice voices broke out in singing. The infuriating horse shifted lazily on its feet but then slept. It lay down once to dream, but then it got up again. When the baby cried he fed it from the goat’s milk and rocked it slowly until it fell asleep again. Later, he woke to find the hotel silent, and he changed the boy’s diaper in the darkness. When this was done, he fed it once more. Rachel’s nipples had been small, thimbly things, much tinier than his big index finger. On impulse, he dipped his little finger in the milk and offered it to his son. The boy took it in his mouth and suckled greedily.

She had been out milking the goat when her water broke. As usual in warm summer weather, she was naked, the skin stretched tightly across her enormous belly. She stood there in the yard and called to him. The goat was standing near the puddle of fluid, neck craned up at her. Together the goat and the girl looked at Bright. He had tried to pick her up to take her inside, but she had waved him away and finished milking the goat first.

He stood above her, unsure of whether to touch her or not,
and then after a while he went to stand with the horse under the chestnut tree. “Well,” he said, “I guess that it’s happening now. This is what we talked about, ain’t it?” He watched the girl milk. The horse was not watching, but its nostrils flared, pulling in drafts of the new scent and chuffing them out again. “And she’s happy, ain’t she? I mean, we’re going to have a baby. What I mean to say is, thank you for making me go over there and steal her away.”

The horse said nothing in reply.

“Angel?” he said, but if the angel was there it gave no answer.

His wife stood then, the bucket in her hand. “Maybe it’s time we went in to the bed and see what happens,” she said, and held an arm out for him to slip his shoulder under.

He went to her then, the angel forgotten, and carried her feetfirst through the cabin flap, one arm holding the bucket, one arm slung around his neck.

That was the last time she ever put her arm around him. After that had come a feverish nightmare that he could remember only pieces of. The baby’s head was large, and he had twisted around sideways. Bright had been forced to reach in, as he’d seen a man do once with a cow, and pull the infant out by its heels. At some point during this time Rachel had died. He wasn’t sure quite when. Maybe she had looked at him and tried to say something. Maybe she had said something. She could have been screaming something; he might have been screaming too, but suddenly there was only a single sound in the cabin, and that was the crying of their son, the boy who now lay in a clean diaper against his chest.