Bright's Passage: A Novel (16 page)

The woman began again, “So then Amelia—”

“I’ll
tell it, Evelyn, if you don’t mind, since he did propose
to me,”
Amelia laughed.

“She’s jealous,” the truculent man said into his crumpet.

“I am jealous,” Evelyn said. She turned, smiling, to the man with a fine mustache at the end of the table, who had first greeted the Colonel. “Lawrence”—she laid her hand on his arm and batted her eyelashes—“if you’d asked me to marry you, I would have said yes in a second!”

“I recall that I did ask you to marry me once, Evie,” he said.

“But that was ages ago. Years. And just moments before, you’d fallen off the railing and into the garden. I chalked it up to a head injury. But if you asked me now—”

“Oh, hush,” Amelia said. “He’s asked me to marry him and I’m not letting him take it back, am I, Lawrence?”

“What a pleasant day for a walk,” the Colonel interjected from over at his small table.

The group paused their conversation and looked at him blankly.

“Yes, it is,” Amelia said after a moment, “and you look as if you’ve already been out walking this morning.”

“About a thousand miles,” the ill-natured man said with a snort.

“Now, Russell … manners … How far have you come, sir? Have you had to escape the fire too?” She twisted her hair and leaned toward him as she asked the question.

“Oh, I live just down the road, a mile back in town,” the Colonel said.

“Pleasant place,” Lawrence remarked. “I’ve been coming here since I was a boy. I’ve always loved it.” He had on a hunting jacket with a leather patch on the shoulder for the rifle butt.

“It is an extremely pleasant place,” the Colonel agreed. He motioned at the extra place setting. “I am meeting my son here for breakfast. He has just had a child.” The waiting girl arrived.
“Coffee, black,” he barked. “And steel-cut oats with canned peaches.” She left. “My son is a soldier,” the Colonel said, and watched their faces.

“Well, that’s wonderful,” Evelyn said. “Soldiers everywhere.”

“Was he in France?” Amelia asked.

“Yes he was. Fighting the Boche. Am I to take by your comment that there are other veterans here besides myself and my son?”

“Were you in France too?”

“The Philippines,” he said, his eyes never leaving Amelia’s face. “And you said there were other veterans staying here?”

Not to be ignored, Evelyn leaned in closer. “Early this morning, a veteran in his uniform came in from the direction of the fire. He was out of his senses.”

“Shouldn’t have let him in,” sullen Russell opined. He sat back in his chair and looked in the opposite direction from the Colonel. “He’ll get the whole place sick with the mumps. That on top of the fire, on top of them letting the whole pikey hillbilly world come and stay for free until it passes? I won’t be coming back here. I don’t pay good money to get the mumps and eat possum stew.”

“I swear, Russell, you’re such a pussy willow sometimes.” Amelia cocked her thumb back at her new fiancé. “You’re as bad as Lawrence. After all, it was only poison ivy.” She turned back to the Colonel. “Lawrence thinks I was crazy to have the man moved up out of the basement and into the hotel, but I had a nice room and he is a veteran after all, so I wanted him moved to a place where he could be absolutely comfortable. It was the very least I could do. We’re leaving today anyway.”

“What was the room number?” the Colonel asked. “Perhaps I will visit him before I leave. Veteran to veteran, you know.”

“Oh, dear, I don’t have any idea. There are no room numbers on the top floor, are there, Lawrence?”

“I haven’t got the foggiest,” Lawrence said, grown bored.

The group drifted back into their own conversation, and the room filled with the boisterous laughter of men about to go out for a last round of golf or shooting before they all got in their cars to drive away and escape the fire. As he ate and drank his coffee, the Colonel listened for further word of Henry Bright, but he heard nothing.

Before the bill could be brought, he stood and bowed to his neighbors. “Have a blessed day,” he said sweetly. Holding his paper-white palms out toward Amelia, he took her hands in his and bent low across the breakfast table to kiss them. “May your impending union be as fruitful as my son’s has been.” He nodded once more at Lawrence, who returned the nod sternly. Then, with great and gathered dignity, he walked across the breakfast-room floor and out into the smoke-filled morning to go find his sons and fetch his rifle.

For the next few days after he arrived home, Bright worked steadily at making more repairs. He cleared the garden patch, beating back the intruding tendrils of the wilderness and in the process exhuming nearly a bushel of homuncular carrots. He climbed up on the roof and repapered with the tar paper he had bought at the hardware store, then he chipped some new shingles from the pitchy remnants of the fence posts he had set around the garden. He removed the contents of the cabin and placed them in the yard: the enameled washbasin, the trunk for his mother’s clothes, the mahogany credenza, the moldering Bible, and the bed. He swept out the cabin’s lantern-blacked interior, then filled the bucket with water and used a rag to work the deep dirt out of the floorboards. When he was done, he stripped off his clothes and washed in the stream. Then he shaved, climbed into his uniform, and set off to Fells Corner for the auction. Though he’d dumped the bullets on the ground back in the War, he held Bert’s beautiful stolen gun in his hand, visible to anyone who might be watching him from the woods as he passed the house where the Colonel and his sons lived. Once he was down the road a ways, he tucked the gun back into his haversack.

He was unprepared for the stir he would make at the auction
Since he’d returned from France, he’d spoken to no one but the conductor on the train and the man at the hardware store. After such long silence, the little town at auction time was a nightmare of back slaps, hand-wringing, tears, and canned fruit. A fat little man with a straw hat and a blueberry stain on his shirt turned out to be the mayor. He stood on a crate, clasped Bright’s hand above his head, and made a speech. Everywhere Bright went, small boys followed him around, patrolling left and right and using the same kind of talk that Bert had before he was shot in the head. Old men saluted him and young men watched him from the corners of their eyes.

The auctioneer referred to him as “our very own” each time Bright raised his hand to place a bid. He bought the hens first, then the two white goats. He went outside and ate some fried chicken that was given to him and drank a mug of beer and a cup of buttermilk. He ate a piece of pie that had been brought to him by a detachment of flat-chested girls. When he was done, he got up from the picnic table and went back into the sweat and tobacco of the auction hall to examine the horses.

The Colonel arrived back at the train tracks near the coal depot where they had spent the night to find his sons squatted around a desultory fire, tearing at an unplucked chicken carcass. He eyed the two boys closely. Corwin glanced up dully, then returned to his meal. Duncan received his father’s gaze in his bottomless black eyes. After a moment the old man looked away, then turned to Corwin. “Report,” he commanded.

“We found a chicken,” Corwin said, his mouth around a bone.

“I can see that. Where?”

Corwin ducked his head in the direction. “The barn. They got a bunch of them there if you want to go get one.”

The Colonel sniffed at this. “I am not asking because I wish to pilfer a chicken. I have already taken my breakfast. I had steel-cut oats with peaches and cream.”

Corwin’s fingers were sticky with down and chicken blood. “Peaches?” he asked. He wiped his index finger and thumb on his pant leg, but none of the grime came away.

“Peaches in syrup, yes.”

“I’ve never had a peach.”

“It would be wasted on you.”

“No, it wouldn’t!”

“In any case, you will never have the chance. The two of you could never behave yourselves in such fine company as take their breakfast yonder. Now report,” he said again.

Duncan watched his brother throw a chicken bone off into the weeds by the train track. “A man was there. We watched him through the trees. He had Henry Bright’s horse and he was brushing it and then he took it into the barn.”

“How do you know for sure that it was the rogue’s horse?”

“Because he also had his goat there on a rope. I know it was his goat. Corwin and I seen it once.”

Corwin nodded at the memory, breathing through his mouth.

The Colonel sighed in contentment over the peaches in his belly, no longer listening to the story. He looked for a while through the trees in the direction of the hotel. Then, as if a great notion had come into his mind, he turned back to his sons. “Would you like some peaches after all, Corwin?”

“You know I do!” Corwin said.

“Of course you do.” The Colonel smiled. He stooped to pick up the rifle and began walking down the tracks in the direction of the coal depot. Corwin jumped up and followed his father, leaving what was left of the wretched chicken body to blow forlornly in the morning breeze between the rails.

Duncan looked at the fire gathering strength behind the trees. Then he stood and followed, rubbing the small of his back where it was sore from his relations and other kinds of people kicking him and throwing rocks at him.

When Bright woke again, the curtains were drawn wide and muted morning light suffused the room. A kind of woman entirely unknown to him sat slung across a burgundy divan.

“
You
have been talking in your sleep,” she said. Her dark-yellow hair hung heavily about her face as if freshly forged. She looked at him amusedly.

“What did I say?” he asked, his eyes roving about the room for the cook, Brigid. The carpets were thick and beige colored. At either end, body-length mirrors in japanned frames reflected back and forth upon each other.

“Oh, all of your secrets are safe with me, H. Bright,” the woman said. She vaulted to her feet and came to stand at the head of his bed, shooting a hand toward him. “Amelia,” she said. “My last name is Choate, A. Choate. And you are H. Bright.”

The bed squeaked as he took her hand.

“There,” she said. “Formalities laid to rest. Now, just lie back and let me talk.” She leaned over him, peering closely at the rash on his face. “Cripes. They say the water here is healthful, so maybe you’ve come to the right place. I see you’ve noticed my ring. Ha. It’s black pearl. Not at all so rare as Lawrence
would have me believe, but I don’t tell him this, of course, because all that kind of talk is so dull. Anyway, if he really is serious about marrying me this time, which I can’t help but think he is, then he’ll have to cough up for something much flashier soon enough. I’m talking diamonds, H. Not that I care. I don’t wear much jewelry. I’m wearing this at the moment only because he’s just given it to me. Now he’s out shooting birds with his ‘pals.’ ”

She ran a hand through her hair. “I was invited to join them too, of course. I’m actually quite a good shot, but that would mean me spending more time with his ‘pals,’ and so I told him that I was going to head back upstairs to make the acquaintance of my war hero, H. Bright.” She regarded him with a cocked eyebrow. “Dear H., can’t you see that I’m trying to get it through your head that you haven’t introduced yourself to me yet? Your last name was easy, it’s written on your uniform. I was in school with an Alexandra Bright. We called her Flexy.”

“My name is Henry,” he said. “Where is my boy at?”

Amelia looked hard at him, as if he’d said something unexpectedly cruel. Then her face changed and she let out a small sigh. “Ah. Henry. I see. Then I hope that you won’t mind me calling you H. It’s not your fault, it’s just that a certain other Henry was the author of a disastrous chapter in my life, and the memory is a bit … fresh … yet.” She gave a short laugh and looked down at the bedspread.

“Isn’t it funny, don’t you think, how at times one can’t escape a name? There was a year when it seemed that every new man that I met was named Albert, or Bertie, or Bert. Large-footed, husky dolts, to a one, but I couldn’t escape that name. There’s a riddle in it somehow, or perhaps it was my subconscious telling me that I needed to be with a strong, simple-minded, Teutonic sort.”

“I knew a Bert,” he said. “In the War. Where’s my boy?” he asked her again.

“Oh, H.! I’m sorry. I’m going on and on, and all the while the forest fire really is coming close. Well, I’m getting out,” she said. “Still, there’s a part of me wishes I could stay here and help fight it. Your boy. Yes. Your boy is being cared for by one of the cooks. He’ll break hearts for sure.” She tapped her ring finger on the wooden headboard and winked down at him. “Like you, H., like you.”

“He’s all right?”

“Of course he’s all right! He’s in the pink! The doctor has been in checking on you both. He’s from Baltimore. They say he’s the best there is in nem- … pom- … I don’t know, something-something-ology. Anyway, he said it was poison ivy.”

There came a knock at the door. Amelia peered through the peephole and then swung the door open for Brigid to enter. “Ah! The soup! Just put it over there to cool, and you can come in and feed Mr. Bright when I’m through with him.”

Brigid set the steaming bowl on a side table and stopped to readjust the covers at the bottom of the bed. Again Bright noticed the rough redness of her hands.

“Thank you, thank you,” Amelia said, holding the door open for the departing girl.

“Is my boy all right?” he asked loudly. The exhaustion and anxiety welled up plainly in his voice.

Brigid turned back and nodded. “He’s fine.” There was a long pause as she stole a glance at Amelia and then back at Bright. “Try to rest now.” She turned again to leave. The smoke outside waved across the room at itself in the facing reflections of the japanned mirrors.

“My horse and my goat?” he asked after her.