Bright's Passage: A Novel (17 page)

“They’re both fine as well. We’ve kept them at the barn, but
if the fire gets closer, Dennis will make sure they’re moved. Now, don’t worry. I’ll bring your boy up to say hello in just a little bit.”

She let the door hang open a crack when she left the room. Amelia crossed the floor and pushed it firmly closed.

“I like her,” she said, rapping her ring on the doorknob. “Now, tell me, H.” She walked across the room and stood at the foot of his bed. “What was it like?”

“What was what like?”

“Oh, don’t be like that. What was
it
like? The War? Come, now, no one gets to be my war hero unless they tell me what it was that they did in the War.”

“The War?”

“All right,” she laughed. “I’m too proud to wheedle it out of you, H. My things are being packed while Lawrence is out shooting at quails or ducks or geese or whatever, but I’ll be back to say goodbye when he’s ready to go. When I get back, I expect at least one ripping good yarn. And see if you can work in that Patton fellow,” she added. “I think he is absolutely a man.”

She put her hand on the knob, but she stood still and did not turn it. “My first husband went, you know,” she said, not looking at him. “He wasn’t actually my husband, not yet, but we were going to be married. He died. I was there with his family when the man came. He said that Henry—yes, that was his name, H.,
Henry
: horrible, isn’t it?—had perished a hero. ‘Perished?’ I asked the man. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Perished.’ I asked him how and the man said that that was all he could tell me. He told me that he was loved by his men and that he had perished a hero. I said, ‘Well, of course he was loved by his men. Of course he perished a hero. How else could he have perished?’ ”

She toed the plush silver carpet, her face impassive. “Lawrence
didn’t go,” she said. “He has a trick shoulder, but keeping him out of the War is the only trick I’ve seen it do.” She opened the door. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m spilling my guts all over you.”

Henry Bright had had guts spilled on him before, and he said nothing.

The fire pushed them all before it, eastward, through the hardwoods to the coal-company town. They carried everything they could with them: heirlooms and axes, tin washbasins and butter churns. Whatever couldn’t be carried by hand was lashed to livestock. There were a few spluttering automobiles, but mostly it was mules and doze-eyed oxen dragging wagons, horses carrying the infirm.

Upon arriving in the coal-company town, the refugees found a prosperous place coming apart at its seams. The pale, frightened faces of children peeked out from the shadows behind screen doors. Men soaked their lawns and roofs with water in the hopes that the fire might not be able to catch hold. Women piled precious belongings in the street, torn between what could be taken and what would be left to burn.

Rumors that had been gusting about on the dry wind could now be confirmed by the new arrivals. Fells Corner was gone. Its inhabitants had tried briefly to save it, but what had initially been a small blaze had quickly grown monstrous on great drafts of air and the summer heat. There had followed a chaotic period of making ready to leave, and by the time that they finally abandoned town, the fire was crowning and there was scarcely time for a last look back.

After that it had come down to simply trying to stay ahead of the blaze. They traveled along the train tracks through cold-mouthed railroad tunnels and across the perilous high trestles that seemed to creak and sway with vertigo beneath them. Even as they crossed the final one, the stragglers had seen the flames licking at its stanchions, the rising odor of boiling pitch and creosote like burnt black licorice in their noses.

The coal-company town, racked by a panic of its own, could offer no help or shelter to this smoke-stained group except to point them down the road toward the wide open lawn of the hotel. So they came through the hotel gates in ragged, stumbling clumps of humans, animals, and housewares, casting themselves upon the safety of the great green field, milling about like people awaking from a single shared nightmare.

In the midst of this strange scene, no one took much notice of the three bedraggled men, hands and faces deeply stained with soot, who shambled out of the woods and onto the lawn toward the gushing fountain at the front of the hotel. Once there, the three did not get in line to wash their faces in the water but instead hung closely together. When at last the eldest, a graying man with a rifle slung over his back, did peel away from the other two, it was in order to address a young woman who wore the uniform of a cook. The young woman carried an infant hugged securely against her inside a white sling. She nodded at what the soot-covered man said before motioning him along toward a sandy-haired man who was directing another group of refugees into the hotel. A smile played itself across the old man’s blackened face as he bowed low to her, but the girl had already turned away and was now talking with someone else, her hand brushing absently at the birthmark on her temple.

When the auctioneer held up Bert’s stolen German pistol, the auction hall gasped. The bidding was higher than expected, but in the end a man from Lewisburg, a doctor, purchased it. With the money he made, Bright bought a black horse, about twenty years old with decent teeth, freshly shod hooves, and a back only slightly bowed considering the size of the farmer putting it up for sale. He slept soundly that night in the barn of the hardware-store man, with a full belly, four chickens, two goats, and the horse.

It was raining the next morning as he and his band of animals began the trip homeward. He tied the chicken crates to the horse’s back and strung the goats in a caravan behind the horse. The goats were meddlesome creatures and the horse, bored, stupid, or both, didn’t resist them when they chose to go their own way. As a result, the big animal’s plodding hindquarters would gradually drift sideways toward whatever leafy green the little white goats had a taste for. A passerby would have wondered at the group: a skinny, uniformed young man leading a horse that seemed to be learning the difficult art of walking sideways in a steady downpour. Eventually Bright untied them from the horse and briefly tried pulling them down the road separately, holding their tethers in his free hand. In the
end, though, he let them off their leads entirely and left them to follow him as he and his horse continued trudging down the muddy road.

They stayed close at first, but as he passed the overgrown wagon-wheel tracks that were the turnoff to the Colonel’s house, the she-goat hung back to munch and nose the tall grass and nettles of the drive. After a hundred yards she had made no signs of rejoining the group. He pulled the horse to a halt and waited for her to emerge. When she did not, he retethered the billy goat and led his remaining animals down the road to stand once more at the turnoff. It was all very quiet, save for the quizzical clucking of the chickens and the raindrops against the leaves. He thought of how his mother always had her rifle with her when they passed the drive. He remembered how they used to meet Rachel here each morning before school and how Duncan had stood in this very spot on that terrible day of the rabbits and chickens. He wished briefly to have Bert’s gun back. When he could no longer help it, he let his mind linger on the French farmhouse and the things he had seen inside it.

He began walking up the drive, pulling the animals behind him and clicking his tongue softly for the she-goat as he peered through the dripping foliage. There was nothing around the first bend but the rain and yet another bend. Around this second corner, the road softened into a wet marsh of cattails and devil’s walking stick and the house hove into view. The lawn was mangy gray, the brittle needles of grass grown high and spiky. A rust-colored stream ran along the far southern edge of the plot, and what few trees remained between the stream and the house seemed like overgrown twins of the grass. Their branches were hacked crudely away up to forty feet, past which point they spindled outward like finger bones. The wrought-iron balcony listed dangerously out of plumb, the ivy vines hanging thickly from it pulling it to the ground like some waxen
green lion. It was here, beneath the balcony, that he saw Rachel. She was standing so motionless in the shadows that at first glance he had taken her for an off-white warping in the moldering clapboard. She was watching something that was happening in the mud-packed wasteland out of view on the other side of the house. He moved farther out onto the drive, hoping for a better angle in which to see the girl, and caught his breath on what he saw instead.

Corwin had scooped up the she-goat in his cumbersome arms, and reedy, underfed Duncan stood close by, holding a clump of yellow grass under her nose. Her tail flicked and looped in the air like a distress flag.

Rachel had noticed him now. He stared back at her, forgetting his goat and the Colonel’s sons. She was far too skinny. Around her waist the white dress hung loosely, and her shoulders were scarcely wide enough to keep it from slipping off. Her collarbones were almost avian, painful to behold. When at last the moment passed and he looked over at the two men holding his goat, he thought of them standing above him in the darkness as he lay beneath Bert’s body in the ditch during the War.

Together, the group formed a haphazard nativity scene in the rain-soaked yard.

“That’s my goat,” he said. “I bought her in Fells Corner. At the auction there. There’s more like her if you want your own.”

The goat began to squirm and kick its stony hooves against Corwin’s chest. “I want my goat back,” he said again. “Please.”

Rachel looked once behind her into the recesses of the house and then at her brothers. “Give it back,” she said quietly. “Give it back. That’s Henry’s goat so don’t you be fiddling with it anymore.”

Corwin gave his sister a cloying smile and set the goat on the ground with exaggerated care, as if it were a china dish. He backed away from the animal, extending his arms in invitation
to Bright. Bright came forward to pick it up, but his eyes never left the two men. “Thank you,” he said. He held the goat tightly so that they would not see his hands shaking.

“Henry?” Rachel tilted her head with the question. “Henry, where have you been?”

He didn’t know what to say. Her face was so beautiful to him that she made her surroundings look all the more deplorable. “I went to the War,” he stammered. “I was in the War.” He stole a glance at Corwin and Duncan as he said it.

“Did you get married there, Henry?” she asked. “I bet you did. I bet you got married there.”

He swallowed drily. After a pause he said, “No. No, I just stayed there and that’s all I did.” He nodded to Corwin and Duncan. Neither returned the nod. He nodded at Rachel, then turned and pulled his animals out of the yard, down the drive, and back through the rain to the main road and his cabin.

The angel gave him no peace after that.

The Colonel and his sons, another old man, two elderly women, four or five young couples, and an indiscriminate number of children and dogs followed the hotel man named Dennis down a long basement hallway and into a large concrete room. A metallic click came as Dennis flipped a switch, and the few electric bulbs cast their light dimly on rows of mattresses lined up on the stone floor. One of the old women had breathed in too much smoke from the fire, and every time she began to cough, one of the dogs would bark. As soon as Dennis left, Duncan went immediately to a bed in the far corner of the room and lay down, putting the thin pillow over his head to keep out the noise. The Colonel sank down against the wall and pulled his hat over his eyes to think.

He had expected that his army uniform would have more of an effect on the cook he had talked to by the fountain and that, in return for the service he had given to his country, she would have sent him upstairs to rest in one of the resplendent rooms on the top floor, as Henry Bright had been. The young woman had a birthmark on her temple and had been carrying a newborn. He had congratulated her on her beautiful child and had not missed the brief look of confusion there in her eyes. Now he sat on the floor in the basement with the loaded rifle across his
knees, pondering how best to find Henry Bright now that he had located both the rogue’s horse and his child.

The man who owned the hardware store in Fells Corner stood across the room staring at the Colonel, then walked over and nudged the sitting figure with his boot. The Colonel shifted his hat toward the back of his head and lifted his eyes to return the store owner’s glare.

“You don’t remember me,” the Fells Corner man said. There was spite in his voice.

“Of course I do,” the Colonel replied with equal spite.

“We ain’t gonna have any trouble with you or them boys. Not today.” His voice was flat. “Git.”

The Colonel sighed. “Sir, I am a colonel and expect to be addressed with the courtesy due me.” He pulled the hat back over his eyes. “As befits my rank,” he added.

“If you’re a colonel, I’m George Washington,” the hardware man said to the brim of the Colonel’s hat. An old woman cackled loudly, then began to cough. A dog started barking. “We ain’t gonna have your boys in the same room as the children or the women. We all got enough trouble already. Git.” He toed the Colonel once again, harder this time.

By the time Dennis returned to the basement room, leading more refugees, three men had ahold of Corwin and another held Duncan’s arms behind his back. The hardware-store man was leaning forward on the balls of his feet, jabbing a peglike finger into the Colonel’s chest while the Colonel looked derisively at his tormentor over coal-smeared cheekbones.

Dennis stopped in the doorway. “What’s this?” The people he was leading went on tiptoe behind him trying to catch a glimpse.

At the sound of Dennis’s voice, the Colonel pivoted slowly to face him, showing his back to the Fells Corner hardware
man. “There are peasants in my lodgings,” he said. “Fleas and the croup are rampant. Children and dogs have overrun the place.”