Nathaniel (3 page)

“On a farm, you keep the hay in bales up in a loft. Then, when you want to feed the animals in the barn, you pitch some of the hay down from the loft into the haybin.”

“But how far is it?”

“Maybe ten feet.”

Michael’s frown deepened. “I fell that far once, and all that happened was that I twisted my ankle.”

Amos hesitated, then spoke again. “But you didn’t fall onto a pitchfork, did you?”

Michael’s eyes widened. “A pitchfork?”

Amos nodded. “It’s a big fork, with four tines. It’s what you use to move hay around with. It was lying in the bin, and your dad fell onto it.”

Suddenly Michael was on his feet, his face contorted with fury. “No! That’s not what happened!” His voice rose as his angry eyes riveted his grandfather. “My dad didn’t fall—he wouldn’t have! Somebody must have pushed him. Somebody killed him, didn’t they? Somebody killed my father!”

Michael’s fists came up, ready to begin pummeling at his grandfather, but Amos reached out, putting one large hand on each of Michael’s forearms. As his strong fingers closed, Michael found himself held immobile.

“Now you listen to me, young man,” he heard his grandfather say. “What happened to your father was an accident. Nobody pushed him, and nobody killed him. It was an accident, and it’s over with. Do you understand?”

Michael stared at his grandfather, then started to speak, but something in the old man’s eyes made him remain silent. He swallowed hard, then nodded his head. His grandfather’s iron grip eased, and his arms dropped to his side.

“And another thing,” Amos added, his voice softer now, but no less commanding. “If I tell you something, you can count on it being the truth. So I don’t ever again want to hear you arguing with me. Is that clear?”

“But—”

His grandfather interrupted, “You’re not a baby anymore, and you mustn’t act like one. You asked me what happened, and I told you.” He was silent for a moment, then: “If you don’t want an answer, don’t ask a question. And don’t ever argue with me. I’m older than you, and I’m wiser than you, and I don’t hold with children not respecting their elders. All right?”

For several seconds Michael said nothing, but then, from the depths of his subconscious, the right words rose to the surface. “Yes, sir,” he said softly. His grandfather smiled.

“Good. We’re going to get along just fine, you and I. Now, you get settled in here, and when you’re ready, come on downstairs, and I’ll show you around the place. And I bet your grandma will have something good in the oven. You like apple pie?”

Michael nodded, but said nothing.

“Well, I’ll bet you’ve never tasted anything like your grandmother’s apple pie.” He started out of the room, but stopped when Michael suddenly spoke again.

“Grandpa, how come Grandma can’t walk?”

Slowly, Amos Hall turned back to face the boy. “I was wrong a couple of minutes ago,” he said after a long silence. “I won’t answer all your questions, because some questions just don’t have answers. And that’s one of them. I don’t know why your grandma can’t walk, Michael. It’s just something that happened a long time ago.” He turned, and left Michael alone in the room that was filled with all the things that had belonged to his father.

Anna Hall looked up from the kitchen table where she sat in her wheelchair, shelling peas for that evening’s dinner. “Well? Are they getting settled in?”

Amos lowered himself into the chair opposite her. “If you can call it that. The girl’s taking it hard, I think.”

Anna stopped working for a moment, but still avoided her husband’s eyes. “We can’t expect her not to, can we? For us, it’s a little different. We hadn’t even seen him for twenty years. It was almost as if he was already dead—”

“He
was,”
Amos replied, his voice bitter. “As far as I’m concerned, he was as good as dead the day he walked out of here.”

“Don’t say that, Amos,” Anna pleaded. “Please don’t say that, not anymore. What if Janet hears you? What would she think?”

“What does she think anyway? What do you suppose Mark told her about us? You don’t think he didn’t talk about us, do you?” When Anna remained silent, his voice rose. “Do you? Do you really think he wouldn’t have told her all about that night, and what he thought he saw?”

Anna’s eyes narrowed. “If he did, then why is she here? Why didn’t she tell us to ship Mark’s body back to New York? I don’t think he told her anything. Nothing at all.”

Amos sighed and stood up. “Well, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that she came back and brought the child with her.”

“But that doesn’t mean she’ll stay, Amos.”

“She’ll stay,” Amos replied grimly. “She needs us right now, and we’ll be here for her. She’ll stay. I’ll see to it.”

As Amos strode through the back door, Anna regarded her husband’s erect spine with bitterness. It was true, she realized. If Amos wanted Janet and Michael to stay in Prairie Bend, they would. And she, who had never been able to defy her husband in all the years of their marriage, would not defy him now.

Janet Hall awoke from a restless sleep. The nightmare had come back, the one she hadn’t had since she’d married Mark. Now, as she came out of the dream, she felt disoriented, and the acrid smell of smoke lingered in her memory. For a moment she listened for the familiar sounds of the city at night, but heard only the silence of the prairie. And then, in the silence, there was something else: a whimpering sound, mixed with soft moanings.

Michael, in the grip of his own nightmare.

Shaking off the last vestiges of sleep, she got out of bed, slipped into the flannel robe Anna had given her, and made her way through the darkness to the room next door, where Michael slept. She found him tangled in the sheets, his arms moving spasmodically, his hands bunched into tight fists.

“Michael—Michael, wake up. You’re having a nightmare.”

Michael’s eyes flew open. He stared at his mother without speaking, then his arms went around her neck, and he buried his face in her breast. She drew his quivering body close, cradling him. “He’s not here,” he sobbed. “He’s gone, Mommy. I saw someone push him, and then he fell off the edge. He fell, and he fell, and then there was a—a pitchfork. I saw it, Mom. I tried to warn him, but I couldn’t. And then—and then—”

“Hush,” Janet soothed. “It was only a dream, sweetheart. You just had a bad dream.” The shaking subsided, and Michael relaxed his grip on her, but Janet hugged him closer. “Would you like to come and sleep with me tonight?”

Now Michael wriggled out of her arms and drew slightly away from her, shaking his head. “I’m too old for that,” he said.

“I know,” Janet agreed. “But sometimes people get lonely, or frightened, and they need to be close to someone. I just thought maybe tonight you might want—”

“I’m okay,” Michael interrupted. He sat up in bed and began straightening out the sheets, and Janet rose uncertainly to her feet.

“If you’re sure you’re all right—”

Michael nodded vigorously. “I’m fine, Mom.” He lay back down, pulling the sheet up to his chin.

Janet leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. “All right. Sleep tight. If you need me, I’m right next door. Okay?”

Michael nodded, turning away from her to curl himself up into a tight ball. Janet watched him for a moment; then, reluctantly, she left him alone and started back to her own room. In the hall, standing at the head of the stairs, she found Amos. Startled, she tripped over the hem of her robe. Instantly, Amos put out a hand to steady her.

“Are you all right?”

“A nightmare. Michael just had a nightmare.”

Amos nodded. “I heard something. I was coming up to see what was wrong.”

Janet nodded. “I guess I wasn’t sleeping very well anyway. I—I just feel all confused. It’s as if everything’s a dream, and I keep thinking I’ll wake up, but then I know I won’t.”

Wordlessly, Amos led her into her room and guided her back into bed. “It’ll take time,” he finally said. “You have to give yourself time to get used to it. But you’ll be all right, Janet. You and Michael will both be all right. We’re here, and we love you, and we’ll take care of you for as long as you need us. All right?”

In the dim moonlight that filtered into the darkened room, Janet looked up at her father-in-law. There was so much of Mark in his face, so much of Mark’s strength in his eyes. “I—I just feel so helpless—”

“And that’s all right, too,” Amos assured her. “Just try to go back to sleep, and try not to worry.”

He stayed with her, sitting in the chair near her bed, until once more she drifted into sleep.

Michael lay still in bed, listening first to the soft mutterings of his grandfather and his mother talking, then shifting his attention to the sounds of the night. Crickets chirped softly, and the lowing of cattle drifted through the darkness. His eyes searched out the model airplanes, and he began thinking once more about his father.

He couldn’t
feel
his father.

That, he decided, was what was strange about this room. Even though it was filled with his father’s things, he couldn’t feel his father.

That was something he’d never experienced before. Always, for as long as he could remember, he’d been able to sense his father’s presence near him, even when Mark wasn’t at home. It was as if any place his father had been, he’d left something of himself behind, something for Michael to hold on to. It was something special between himself and his father, and even though they’d never talked about it, Michael was sure his father had felt it too.

And yet, in this room, with all his father’s things around him, Michael couldn’t feel him.

He’d felt him in the dream, though.

In the dream, he’d seen his father standing in the hayloft, and he’d seen someone else, someone he couldn’t quite make out, near his father.

And then there’d been a flash of movement, and suddenly his father was over the edge, falling.

It was as if Michael himself was falling, but even as he felt himself tumbling endlessly toward the haybin, he’d also watched as his father’s body plummeted toward the darkness below.

He’d seen the pitchfork, its handle buried in the hay, its four gleaming tines pointed straight upward, waiting for him, waiting for his father.

He’d tried to cry out, tried to scream, but no sound would come from his throat.

And then he could feel the cold, knife-edged steel plunging into his flesh, but even as the pitchfork pierced him, he could see that it wasn’t himself falling onto the dangerous tines, but his father. Yet even knowing it was not he who was dying, Michael could still feel the pain, feel the agony shooting through his father’s body, feel the death that had come for his father.

And above, watching, there was someone else.…

It was only a dream, and yet deep within himself, Michael knew it was more than his mind’s imaginings.

It was real.

No matter how hard she tried, Janet Hall couldn’t focus her mind on the reality of what was happening. There was a sense of wrongness to everything, and she found herself grasping at inconsequentials. Suddenly, in the warmth of the spring morning, she saw herself as she should have been right now, striding down Madison Avenue, past the Carlyle Hotel toward American Expression, the boutique that was the usual focus of her Wednesday morning shopping expeditions.

And Michael should have been sitting in his classroom at the Manhattan Academy, pretending to be paying attention to his teacher. He wouldn’t be, of course. Instead, Michael would be gazing out on the bright and sunny morning and dreaming of spending the weekend camping with Mark in the Berkshires.

And Mark. Mark should be facing his eleven o’clock class, polishing his glasses and filling his pipe while he glanced over his notes on The Effects of the War in Viet Nam on the Middle-class Family.

That was the way it should be. A typical family—if not the almost laughably stereotypical family Mark had once called them—going through the routines of their normal, stereotypical lives. But things were rarely as they should be, and today
nothing
was as it should be.

Everything was wrong; everything was unreal.

Mark was
dead
.

That was the thing she had to accept; when she could understand that, then everything else would fît, and she would be able to orient herself to her surroundings.

She forced herself into reality, yanked herself out of New York and back into Prairie Bend, and fixed her eyes on the coffin that stood next to the open grave. That’s Mark, she told herself. That’s all that’s left of him, and in a few minutes, they are going to put him in the ground, and cover him up, and then he will be gone.
Gone
. She repeated the word to herself, but it still had no real meaning for her. Mark couldn’t be gone, not forever. It wasn’t fair. And that, she realized in a moment of sudden clarity, was the key to it all.
It wasn’t fair
. There hadn’t been anything wrong with Mark, except perhaps that odd daredevil streak in him that had never fit with his professorial personality, those sudden, inexplicable urges to thrust himself into danger that had, apparently, finally killed him.

It hadn’t always been that way. When they’d first gotten married, he’d been what she’d always dreamed of: a quiet man living a quiet life. And then, a year into the marriage—eleven years ago—two things had happened: Michael had been born, and Mark had bought a motorcycle. Though Mark had denied it, Janet had always been sure there was a connection between the two events. It was as if Mark wanted to prove to his son that he was more than a milquetoast professor, that he was some kind of he-man, or at least his own image of a he-man. The motorcycle had been just the beginning.

Finally, there had been the skydiving. He’d taken that up two years ago, after a year of dragging his family out to the Jersey meadows every weekend to “watch.” From the beginning, Janet had been sure that her husband would not be content to stay on the ground, and she had been right. Six months after he started watching, he started jumping. Of course, he’d been careful, as he was careful about everything.

And there, she realized, was the irony. Two years of skydiving, two years of risking his life from thousands of feet in the air, only to die in what couldn’t have been more than a ten-foot fall.