Carnival of Shadows (35 page)

Greene dropped the half-smoked cigarette and extinguished it. He rose from the chair and walked to the edge of the low stage. He raised his right hand and held it with his palm facing the crowd. He closed his eyes, and then he started to breathe more heavily.

The crowd fell quiet.

“Sometimes people decide to die,” Greene said. “And it doesn’t matter what you say or do; they are going to die. This is not fate or destiny. This is the power of the mind over the body.”

Greene leaned forward. “Do you know that there are certain Native American Indians who possess the capability of stopping their own hearts? They can do that, you know? When they get old and they believe it is time to move on to the happy hunting ground, they can simply sit down, lean against a tree, close their eyes, and stop their own heart. Someone will come by later and find them, and there is such an air of peace and tranquillity about them. Remarkable, you might think, but all of us possess such capabilities. There is nothing one human being can do that another can’t. All that we were once capable of doing, we can do again. All that we have forgotten, we can once again remember. We can see the past, the present, the future. We can learn from history but remain unaffected by it. There are answers there, the answers to every question you might ever have asked, and yet we are afraid to open our eyes and ears to those answers.” Greene paused. He scanned the crowd, and then he seemed to identify someone in the shadows to the right.

“The truth, my dear, is that there was nothing you could have done. That is what I am saying. Some people make a decision to die. Some people have grown tired of the game, and they want a new game, a better game, and the unknown future presents a possibility so much more appealing than the present. And when it comes to suicide… well, this person has simply reached a point where even they themselves believe that the world would be better off without them. That is the truth they see. A sad truth, granted, but nevertheless a truth they believe. And it is all too easy to ask yourself what you could have done or said that would have made it different. The fact of the matter is that there was nothing you could have done or said that would have made the slightest bit of difference. He decided it was time, and that was that.”

Travis looked closely, and—just as before—the people around Greene’s
target
seemed to step away.

A woman came forward, perhaps late thirties or early forties, and yet Travis suspected she might have been younger. She carried age before her time, it seemed. Why he felt this to be the case, he did not know. It was just something he sensed.

“Your brother was a good man,” Greene said.

The woman looked visibly shaken. She took a handkerchief from her skirt pocket and clutched it as if it were a lifeline somehow capable of rescuing her from the emotional tidal wave there on the horizon of her thoughts.

“He was a good man, but he carried his ghosts well, Miss Petersen.”

The woman gasped audibly.

“Ron Petersen carried his ghosts through childhood, through his teenage years, all the way into adulthood, you see, and there was no one who could have alleviated him of that burden. Sometimes we are born with ghosts, bringing them into our current life from some past existence perhaps. Sometimes those ghosts are just waiting for us when we arrive, and they attach themselves to us, they become part of us, and unless you learn where they come from, they will always haunt you. This is why the truth of life is so important. This is why we have to look in order to see, to listen in order to hear. This is why we have to ask questions, and we have to keep on asking those questions until we find an answer that makes us feel better. The truth might hurt, but the truth will always heal. It is not time that will heal, but the truth over time. That is the difference, friends and neighbors.”

Miss Petersen stepped forward. She was now just a few feet from the edge of the stage.

“I—I lo-loved him,” she said, her voice frail but clearly audible.

“I know you loved him, Miss Petersen,” Greene said, “and he knows that you loved him, and he also knows that you would have done anything for him. However, the truth is that there really was nothing you could have done. Your brother had a rendezvous with death, and there was nothing that was going to prevent him from meeting it.”

Miss Petersen started crying, but it was not some overwhelming display of grief. There was a sense of unburdening about her, as if some weight was being lifted from her shoulders.

“And so,” Greene continued, “it is time for you to forgive yourself, my dear. It is time for you to stop the endless questions about whether you could have done this or that or the other. He has been dead for six years, and you have been dead as well. At least some part of you went with him, and it is time to take it back. There is a man who loves you, and he needs you to be well and happy. He wants to spend his whole life with you, but he does not want to live with your dead brother as well. Your brother has gone, and yet you keep trying to get him back. Let him go. The past is the past. Do not hide from it, of course. It will always be right where it is. You can see it, but you do not need to keep pulling it up into the present, and it certainly has no place in the future.”

Miss Petersen took a further step forward, and she held out her hand toward Chester Greene.

What was this? Travis wondered. Was this
now
where she led the field, the first to hand over money, and the crowd would follow? But there was no money. There was just Miss Petersen’s hand reaching out toward Chester Greene, and Chester came forward himself and took her hand, and she held on to him for just a second. Their eyes were level, for Chester was standing on the stage, and for a moment it seemed as if there were no one else in the tent.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice all but a whisper, but it was heard by everyone in that tent.

“Live,” Greene said. “Stop dying, my dear. It’s not your time, and it won’t be your time for a great many years to come.”

Miss Petersen gripped Chester Greene’s hand once more, and then she turned and disappeared into the crowd.

“And now… now it is perhaps time for a little housecleaning, eh?” Greene said. He returned to the chair and sat down. He leaned back and crossed his legs. The audience seemed to edge closer, as if he was going to share something of a more personal nature with them.

“The mind,” Greene said, “is like an attic. It is up here…” He tapped his forehead with his index finger. “It is up here, and we know it’s there, but we sort of ignore it. It goes about its business on a day-to-day basis, and while we take the time to tidy up and clean every other room in our lives, we often forget this one altogether.” Greene smiled knowingly. “But this, dear friends and neighbors, is where we find the past. Of course, there are good times and bad times. That is life. That is what being human is all about. And I’m not talking about the good things, people, I am talking about the stuff that hurts. The good stuff we keep, you see? The good stuff doesn’t go in the attic. That’s what we put on display. That’s what we carry around with us that we want our friends and family to see. However…” Greene uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. The audience seemed to lean right on back at him. “And this is a big
however
… the things we don’t want, the things we hide away from the world, well, this is where we find the trouble. These things are like little weights, like little anchors, and we find ourselves slowing down. Every day we get older, and every day we add a little more weight, a little more unnecessary baggage, and life becomes harder, and we become more bitter, and after a while we find ourselves resenting the youth and happiness of others. We don’t like to admit it, but it’s true. We are alone, and we see a young couple so in love, and we hate them just a little bit. We have no job, we are struggling, and we see someone heading off to work, and we hate them just a little bit. Of course, we don’t hate them really, but we hate the idea of how they make us feel. Because we should know better, and we know we’re not bad people, but then why do we react in such a way?”

The crowd murmured.

Even Travis felt that there was little of what Greene was saying with which he could find disagreement. How many times had he seen couples together and thought of times he’d spent with Esther? Hadn’t that even happened, albeit subconsciously, when he’d first met Edgar Doyle and Valeria Mironescu? Hadn’t that happened when he’d taken time to comment—even if only to himself—regarding how attractive Laura McCaffrey was?

“But the past is a different country,” Greene continued. “The past is a different country, and sometimes we forget that in this country they speak a different language. We forget that tongue, and we forget part of our own life, and though it may not seem to be the case, that part of our life is vitally, vitally important. Why? Because that’s the attic, my friends. Because that’s where you find all those damp and dusty boxes. Because within those boxes are the memories you don’t want to remember, and sometimes you just have to steel yourself, you have to roll up your sleeves, you have to climb that ladder into the roof of your house and start opening those boxes once more.”

Greene placed his hands together palm to palm and smiled with great sincerity.

“Now, I am not a preacher,” Greene went on. “I am not a man of the Lord. Heaven knows, I have done enough in my life to earn myself a special hot place down there…”

Greene nodded at the ground. There was a ripple of uncomfortable laughter from the audience, due perhaps more to the self-same recognition in the congregation than anything else. Weren’t we all our own worst judges? Didn’t we deem our own crimes, however small, worthy of a far more severe sentence than that which would be granted by others? Of course we did. That, once again, was simply human nature.

“But perhaps I won’t find myself there, folks. And I’ll tell you why. Because we always tell ourselves it was worse than it was.”

Travis looked at Greene. Hadn’t Travis just considered that same exact thought?

“We always tell ourselves that what we did was far more serious than it really was, you know? We do that. We all do that. That’s just part of human nature.”

Again, a murmur of consent from the audience.

“So, if we learn nothing, we have to learn how to forgive ourselves. We have to remember that others will never be as harsh as we are with ourselves—”

“I want to speak!”

The crowd turned in unison.

Sheriff Rourke stood forward. The people around him stepped away. There was no mistaking who he was. He was standing right there in front of everyone, and irrespective of the fact that he was out of uniform, there would have been few people who didn’t know who he was, even among the out-of-towners.

Rourke stood for a moment in silence, and then he held out his hands at his sides, palms forward, as if saying,
Here I am. This is me, and I am ready for everyone to hear what I have to say.

“You want to say something?” Greene asked.

“I just want to say something, Mr. Greene.”

Travis was impressed with Rourke. He was the local representative for law and order, and now he was going to impress his authority on these proceedings. Despite asking everyone to call him Chas, despite his easygoing and avuncular manner, he was going to tell Chester Greene and the rest of these people exactly what he thought of them.

Rourke cleared his throat. “Well, in truth,” he said, “I want to tender an apology, actually. I spoke badly of you and your people when you came here. I really did. I said some harsh things. I used words that it was not right to use, and I wanted to say I was sorry.”

Travis was stunned. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

There was a small ripple of applause, and before it had a chance to grow, Greene raised his hand and silenced it.

“We were received no better or worse here than anywhere else, Sheriff Rourke. I am sure what you said was not so bad, and certainly no worse than the things that are routinely said to my face, but I appreciate the sentiment, and I acknowledge your apology. However, I do not believe that this was really what you wanted to say, was it?”

Travis wondered whether now was the time to speak up, to elbow his way to the front of the crowd and demand that they stop this charade immediately. Something within himself prevented him, yet had he been asked he would not have known how to describe it. Fear? Surely not. Perhaps some concern that the crowd would turn on him, that their belief in whatever it was that Greene was doing was far greater than their belief in Travis’s right to uphold the law?

Greene stood up and walked to the front of the stage.

Rourke took a single step back, but it was so clear that he was withdrawing from whatever it was that he was confronting.

“I know it was a long time ago, Sheriff Rourke, but sometimes those things that happened in childhood are the most dangerous. The mind is impressionable. Everything seems so much more important to a child. Everything seems so much more significant. And those memories, the distant ones, are the ones that have had the longest time to fester and grow more bitter. And remember what I said… we judge ourselves ever more severely than others will judge us. It was an accident, perhaps?”

Rourke’s eyes widened. He looked at Greene, and then he turned and looked at the faces around him.

The sense of anticipation was almost physical. Travis could sense that the air itself had changed. It seemed harder to breathe. There was a constrictive sensation in his chest. His hands were sweating, and he found himself willing Rourke to speak. He wanted to know what had happened. He
needed
to know what had happened.

“W-we were just ch-children, you understand?” Rourke said. “We were just little kids, and we didn’t think…” He lowered his head for a moment. His chest rose and fell as if he was suppressing some huge wave of emotion. “We didn’t think,” he said. “That was the problem right there, wasn’t it? We just didn’t think about what we were doing, what we were saying, and this has haunted me all of my life. I try so hard to forget, and weeks, sometimes months will go by, and I won’t even think of it, but it’s always there…”