Homeplace (42 page)

The knocking ripped her awake so suddenly she was on her feet in the middle of the room before she even came to herself. It seemed to have been going on forever, insistent, frantic. Mike went suddenly and mindlessly cold with fear.

“Who is it?” she called, through stiff, prickling lips.

“It’s J.W., Mike.” His voice came as distinctly through the heavy, locked door as if he stood in the room. “Open up. I got to talk to you.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bayard Sewell hissed from behind her, leaping out of the bed. “Keep him out of here! Don’t open that door!”

He scrambled for his clothes, swept them up from the floor beside his bed, and bolted into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. Mike heard the scrape of the big, ornate iron key in the lock.

“What’s the matter, J.W.?” she called, wanting with all her heart not to hear.

“It’s Mr. John,” he called back. “He’s not in the house. He gone!”

“Gone,” Mike repeated mindlessly. “Gone? Where could he go?”

J.W. knocked again, furiously.

“Mike, befo’ God, you come out of there or I’m gon’ knock this do’ down! I think you daddy’s foun’ out about the house, and got hisse’f down there somehow. The car gone from the garage, and his wheelchair layin’ beside it.”

“Oh, dear Jesus in heaven,” Mike breathed, leaden and motionless with the cold fear. “Oh, dearest God! I’ll be right there, J.W.!”

She skinned into her crumpled blue jeans and a T-shirt and jerked the door open so hard that it banged back against the wall. She was halfway down the stairs, J.W. sprinting before her, before she realized that she had put on no shoes, and that Bayard Sewell was calling to her from behind the locked bathroom door, over and over: “Mike! Mike! Come back here! Mike!” Disregarding both, she plunged down the foyer. From the look of the sun, it must be around six; nothing stirred either inside the house or outside it. Mike ran first, stupidly, to her father’s room. It was as J.W. Cromie had said. The bed was empty, the sheets and thin summer blanket drawn neatly up. The two pills lay on the bedside table, alongside the untouched chocolate milk. Mike moaned in her throat without knowing that she did. Whirling, she ran back into the hall, and J.W. came to meet her, gasping for breath. He was actually ashen.

“Sam,” Mike said, her voice queer and small and whistling. “Get Sam, J.W. Call Sam.” She did not think of Bay Sewell, still upstairs in his locked fastness, though his nimble little BMW stood just around the
corner on the next street. Sam, if she could just reach Sam …

“He on his way,” J.W. said. “I called him first thing. Did you hear anything, Mike? Mr. John stirrin’ aroun’, or anything?”

“No,” she whispered. “I’ve … I was asleep. I left pills for him; I thought he’d be dead to the world …”

“He ain’t take the pills,” J.W. said.

“I know,” she said. Her breath still would not come. “Oh, God, Sam, where
are
you!”

He wheeled into the driveway of the Pomeroy Street house then, brakes squealing, and was out of the car almost before it stopped rolling. The motor still ran.

“Get in,” he said, and his face and voice were very calm and even, but his words were bitten off short. “Why in God’s name weren’t you with him, Mike? I thought you said you were going to give him an extra dose of medication …”

“I left it for him,” she breathed. “He didn’t take it. He said he would, but he didn’t. I … I went to sleep …”

“I hope you had a good nap,” he said. “J.W., you’ve got no idea how long he’s been gone?”

“Naw,” J.W. said. “I seen the wheelchair turned over in the garage and the car gone when I come in ‘bout ten minutes ago. I called you right off.” He got into the backseat of the Toyota. Mike sagged bonelessly against the fender. She could not seem to move her arms and legs.

“Get in the car, Mike!”
Sam Canaday shouted, and she did, stumbling. He slammed it into gear and spun it out into the street and headed it south, toward the highway.

“I guess you didn’t hear anything while you were … napping,” he said, his eyes slits against the westering sun. “He must have made quite a racket, getting that wheelchair out of the house. Not to mention
crawling into the car and starting it. It must have taken him hours.”

“No,” she said. “The air conditioner was on high. I had no idea he could … how could he possibly
do
that? For that matter, how could he have known it was today? I don’t see how …”

“Don’t you?” Sam said. “I see how. God knows what it must have cost him to get to that car, but he did it. He did it.”

“You’re sure that’s where he is …”

“Oh, God, Mike, where in hell else would he be? Of course that’s where he is! God damn us all!”

Time was playing tricks on her. One moment it telescoped upon itself and rushed backward, so that it seemed only a breath’s time since she had held out her arms to Bayard Sewell in the bedroom, clad in white silk charmeuse. The next, it spun itself out into infinity, so that the distance between Lytton’s two stoplights, in the center of town, seemed frozen and enormous. The light was strange, too; the town seemed to lie in a flood of impossibly bright, shadowless radiance. And sound had stopped: the normal 6:00
P.M
. street life of a small town went on as if on a movie screen with the sound off; Mike felt that no one could see the car, or her and Sam and J.W. inside it. The interior of the car was very hot. A fly buzzed and bumbled frantically at the windows, seeking escape. Mike watched it.

“Did you know that a fly flying around inside an airplane going six hundred miles an hour is a perfect example of Einstein’s theory of relativity?” she said.

Sam shot a look at her, and then reached over and laid a scar-webbed hand over hers, clenched and icy in her lap.

“I want you to stay in the car when we get there,” he said.

“You go to hell,” she said back, and he did not speak again.

They saw the wreckage from the road. Where the familiar bulk of the house had stood against sunsets for the entirety of Mike’s life and long before, now a maimed and alien silhouette crouched. It was almost exactly half a house; the front two rooms and roof still stood as they had, under the great pecan and walnut trees, and the central chimney still clawed skyward, but the back half of the house, the back porch and kitchen and bedrooms and the well house, were gone. The empty air seemed to shimmer where they had stood. A mound of forlorn and perfunctory rubble lay where the back rooms had been; brick and plaster and mortar and wood and shingles spilled out like entrails into the swept yard that had been Daisy Winship’s day-to-day task and pride. White dust and denser, rusted red effluvia lay in the still air in planes, like geological strata. A small knot of men in overalls and billed caps stood watching as another man maneuvered a great bucking, orange-jawed backhoe into position alongside the remaining walls and chimney. It seemed to paw and butt and nose at the mass of whitened rubble like a great, mutated beast from a terrible, younger age, crouching over the corpse of its prey. There was no sound except the strangely trivial buzzing and snarling of the backhoe. The old Cadillac was nowhere in sight.

“Oh, Christ, maybe he’s
not
here …” Sam’s voice, like hers, had no force behind it.

“Go down to where the cedars start,” Mike said. The dread in her chest was so cold and heavy that she could not even feel her heart beating under it. She knew with a crystalline prescience that the car would be there, hidden from the sight of the men with the backhoe and passersby on the highway beyond.

It was. The door on the driver’s side sagged open, and a dreadful snail’s track scored the dust in the alleyway between the cedars, running like an open wound all the way from the car to the house. There were not
footprints, just the track in the pink dust. He must have dragged himself with his hands and forearms. No one who did not know about the cedar alley would have seen him or known that he was there.

Mike was out of the car before Sam stopped it, running in her bare feet toward the wreckage of the house. She seemed to be running in slow motion and silence, as in a nightmare. She heard a man’s voice crying, “Lady, you can’t go in there; it ain’t safe!” and Sam Canaday’s voice shouting, “Stop that goddamned thing! Mike, come back here! Back it up, you motherfuckers, there’s a man in there!”

“The shit you say!” shouted the man on the back-hoe, but the noise of its great jaws stopped, and utter silence fell. In it, Mike could hear the slide and scuffle of her bare feet in the rubble, but she felt nothing. Everything was white and thick with plaster dust, and the nearest edge of rubble, where the well house had stood, was overspread with a tangle of mutilated red roses, like blood, or a pall on a coffin. Mike ripped them aside, not feeling the thorns tearing her hands and legs and feet, and waded into the body of the rubble. She could not see for the planes of dust, but she seemed to know what she sought. Her hands and feet took her of themselves.

She found him lying under a great fallen beam, the central ridge beam of the homeplace, where his boyhood bedroom cubicle had been. He could not have been seen from the road or from where the men and their machine had positioned themselves. A partially collapsed wall shielded him, and she knelt beside him, behind it. He was totally white with dust, and still, and lay as formally posed as an effigy on a crusader’s tomb, on his back, his hands folded almost primly over the beam that had crushed his chest. Mike thought that he was dead, but then she saw the faint rise and fall of his chest, and he opened his eyes. They were clear and free
of pain, the lucent gray of rain, fully focused and spilling a kind of opalescent light. Incredibly, he smiled. A thin red line of blood crept from the down-drawn corner of his mouth, cutting like a scarlet thread through the thick whiteness. His white lips moved almost imperceptibly. Mike leaned down over him to hear. The air around her face vibrated with shock and stillness; plaster dust gritted in her eyes and mouth, and choked in her throat.

“Lift … up,” John Winship whispered. His voice was barely audible and high, like that of a very sleepy young child. Mike plunged her hands into the rubble under his head to lift it, and felt a stinging in her palm. A murderously bright strip of sheared tin had bitten deep into it; she looked incuriously at the blood that flowed over her wrist onto her father’s face and down onto the rubble under it, to soak finally into the earth beneath. She felt, after the first sting, no pain. But her blood on her father’s cheek, making a dark red paste of the dust there, bothered her, and she tried to wipe it off with the edge of her other hand.

“Cut … yourself,” he
whee2ed
. “Sorry.” The blood bubbled in the corner of his mouth.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Mike said. “It’s nothing.”

“You … wrong,” he said, very faintly. “It’s everything.”

She looked down at her blood, soaking through the plaster and into the earth of the homeplace, and she felt again the great salt swelling of the tears that had lodged in her chest earlier in this interminable day. But still they did not fall. Mike felt a kind of remoteness, as if she were watching herself through the wrong end of a telescope, and the peace of distance. She watched his chest rise and fall, rise and fall. She was aware of someone standing behind her, and she heard, dimly, running feet and a voice calling for an ambulance, but they did not seem to penetrate the stillness that enclosed her and
John Winship. He was quiet for a time, and she did not move, kneeling there beside him. Then he spoke again, his voice a little stronger.

“Who does she look like? Your dau … this Rachel of yours?”

“Your granddaughter, you mean?” Mike said. “She looks like me. And like you, Daddy. She looks just like you.”

He closed his eyes, and then they opened again, and lifted to the sky where the roof of the homeplace had stood for 135 years, and then moved to Mike’s face. Then they closed once more. Mike was motionless, scarcely breathing.

“I feel sorry for her, then,” John Winship said, and the breath went out of his throat in a long sigh, and his chest did not rise again.

Behind her, Mike heard the shrunken, painful man’s sobs of J.W. Cromie, and felt hands on her shoulders, and knew they were Sam Canaday’s. He knelt beside her in the white rubble, saying nothing, only kneeling there with his hands touching her. Mike crouched in what was left of John Winship’s homeplace and finally she cried. She dropped her head into her bloody hands and cried for all the lost things in the world, and for that first and last long love.

L
ATER IN HER LIFE, WHEN
M
IKE DEALT WITH OTHER DEATHS IN
other places, she would reflect on the sheer effortlessness of her father’s. Not his dying, but all that
came
after. In small towns such as Lytton, especially in the South, the machinery of death goes into operation silently and swiftly, as if oiled. It is like an intricate insect ballet, in a way; some ancient and immutable ritual of ants or beetles. From the moment that John Winship’s life rode out on his last breath, Lytton swung into action. Not a foot was put wrong; not a beat missed. Mike was awed and grateful for the clockwork pageantry, for it could, and did, operate totally without her. For the first six hours that her father was gone from the world, she could not stop crying.

Downstairs, the telephone rang and was answered, the screened door twanged open and shut again, soft, grave footsteps came and went, florists’ vans and cars and bicycles appeared in the driveway and idled quietly out again, the death certificate and coffin were dealt with, preachers and undertakers and casseroles and cakes flowed into the house on Pomeroy Street.

All the while, in her darkened bedroom upstairs, Mike cried.

Sam Canaday had brought her home in the Toyota, leaving J.W. to wait for the ambulance and the police, driving away from the silent knot of workmen and the foreman, who was even then explaining his blamelessness to his chief. She had sobbed quietly and steadily all the way home, and he had not attempted to comfort her or stop her tears, except to keep one hand on her shoulder as he drove. He led her through the dim, still house and upstairs into the bathroom, where he sat her down on the edge of the old clawfooted tub and washed the white plaster from her hands and feet and face. Some of the scratches and cuts were deep, and the cut in her palm gaped with white lips, but she did not flinch at the hot water, or when he poured peroxide into her hands and bound it with brittle yellow gauze that he found in the medicine cabinet. She said nothing, only sobbed monotonously, and he did not speak, either. He walked her back into her bedroom and sat her down on the bed and brushed the plaster dust from her tangled hair as best he could, with the brush he found on her dresser. Then he said, “Hold up your arms, Mike,” and she did, obediently, and he pulled the filthy T-shirt over her head, and gently and slowly drew the blue jeans down over her hips. Mike wore no underwear. The tepid breath of the still-laboring air conditioner washed over her naked body, and she looked up at Sam Canaday, as if seeing him for the first time that afternoon. She stared at him for a long time, seeing the white dust in his light hair and eyebrows, and the streaks on his cheeks, where his own tears had coursed and dried. There were no tears now in the light green eyes. He stared back at her.