Northern Lights (24 page)

Amazing. Science was confounded, for the moon was its own source of light. Reflecting and illuminating nothing, an internally fired, softly silver globe. Indecently low, below the clouds, below the tips of the trees and below the storm. Even without his glasses, Perry saw it clearly. He tried to wake Harvey to show him, but Harvey was sick and sleeping and lost.

Perry remembered.

“I want a bomb shelter built,” the old man said from his bed. “About standard size, serviceable and square and nothing very fancy. I want it for you and Harvey as much as for me. People will talk but they’ve talked on and on anyway, and more talk will just keep them lubricated, don’t worry about it. Put it right on the lawn, right in front if you want.” The old man’s eyes had that blank red glow of prophecy. Failed prophecies mostly. Perry himself, a failed prophecy. He remembered.

“We’ve got to do it,” Harvey said.

“Not me.”

“The old man’s dying and you won’t help build a crummy bomb shelter?”

“No.”

Harvey paled.

“It’s gone too far,” Perry tried to say. “He’s … okay, he’s not crazy. I’m not saying that, Harv. But just
look
at it. He’s dying and he wants us to build him a bomb shelter. Now is that
right
? Does that make
sense
?”

Harvey was just a kid. He looked away. “The old man’s dying.”

“I know.”

In the morning Harvey started digging. October, and the earth was already tight. Perry watched from inside. The death-watch was on. He watched from the kitchen window, watching through gauzed curtains that had hung for years. Some rotten luck. Harvey used a spade and wheelbarrow, just a kid, patiently digging as the day got late and the old man lay upstairs ringing a spoon in his spit bucket. An old signal. The chiming rattled down the stairs to the kitchen, persisting until Perry left the window and reluctantly pursued the chime to its source. Crazy and sad. The old man did not look as if he were dying.

“Goddamn Russians!” he hollered.

“You all right?”

“Goddamn Russians. I was saying it years ago.” He dropped his spoon into the spit bucket and waited for the final shrill chord to ring to its end, inspecting Perry top to bottom.

It was October, and the radio was playing.

Perry shrugged and grinned. The old man did not look as if he were dying. Burnt outdoor health covered him like a cosmetic. “You hear that?” He pushed up in bed. His hair was full and bushy and still speckled partly black. “It’s coming,” he said loudly, “and I been saying it for years. The world’s going in the big Russian blowout, you
hear
that?” He reached down for his silver spoon and pointed it at Perry. “You think I’m crazy now?”

“I never said that, never.”

“You believe me now?”

Perry shrugged and grinned. The old man did not look like death. Clean shaven and strong in his undershorts and bare chest, lying with the window wide open and no blanket.

“You think I’m mean and crazy?” Oddly, the old man smiled.

Perry grinned again and shrugged. It was hard to believe the old man was dying. He straightened a pillow and partly closed the window. Harvey’s digging sounds came through clearly.

The old man lay back. “Well. Guess this’ll show them.”

“What?”

“This,” and the old man gestured towards the radio.

“Oh.”

The old man inspected him gravely. Then he shook his head. “You aren’t out there digging, are you?” he said.

“No.” Perry couldn’t stop from grinning.

“You think … No.”

“Comfortable enough?”

“Did I ever teach you anything?”

“Yes,” Perry said.

“I tried to teach you about things.”

“I know it. I know.”

“I tried to teach you everything I know.”

“I know.”

The old man shook his head. “And you aren’t helping with my bomb shelter.”

Perry grinned. He could not shed the ghastly mistaken grin. Tragic and distorted and unmeant.

He wanted to hear the old man’s thoughts, but the old man was talking about the world blowing up. A bomb shelter.

Perry remembered.

“I’ll bring up some supper soon.”

He went to the living room, turned on television and let it blare out afternoon quiz gaming and spot bulletins. He turned the volume high to dull the old man’s chime. Beat the bucket, old man. Perry grinned sadly. Kick it, old man.

Harvey came in at dusk. Perry made sandwiches and they
ate without speaking. The house was cold and womanless with its dark-stained pine timbers and hardwood floors and yellow-gauzed curtains without origin, no origin except what was locked in the old man’s brain, unspoken origins and locked-up secrets and thermostats kept to sixty on January mornings.

“How’s it going?” Perry said.

“You want to help?”

Perry grinned. He didn’t mean it and he couldn’t help it.

Harvey went upstairs to look in on the old man. Silently, Perry listened. There were those secrets between them. He wanted to hear, listening and cleaning the sandwich plates. The kitchen was lighted white. It was empty. The floor tiles glistened. The refrigerator was white. There were murmurs up the stairs, Harvey was moving around in the old man’s sickroom, the timbers creaked. He imagined they were talking about fishing. An apt subject for them. Not really talking, he grinned. No one ever talked, not in the rugged house. Fishing. The time they saw the wolves, a whole pack of them together, all caught in the deep snows behind Pliney’s Pond. Smiling in their knowing ways for many years. Perry started on the dishes. Comfortable work. At last Harvey came down the stairs and took out two extension cords without a word, thereby accusing, and Perry suffered with his head bent fixed over the dishpan.

Perry remembered, one of those lasting nightlong images.

Cold October, and Harvey’s hole was shadowed by four bare electric lights dangling from birch trees. The forest all around him, such a cold night, and the already grieving boy digging a monumental bomb shelter.

Clucking, Perry wandered the house. He stayed awake and away from the old man’s sickroom, kept the television loud, wondered if the old man could hear, thinking: another distortion, for he cared. Harvey out digging the old man’s bomb
shelter and instead they should be together, reading at the foot of the sleeping man’s bed, whispering over him and talking with him whenever he awoke, tying up conversational ribbons that had been fraying for years, finishing thoughts while there was time, learning titbits of the old man’s life that hadn’t before come out, plumbing the old man’s last reservoirs for whatever was left, tertiary recovery, learning about the stack of photographs in the attic, learning who the bright-pictured faces were, learning about the old man’s photographed gray navy battleship, learning about the pictured woman’s face, listening in on the man’s last dreams and forging brotherly communion out of the deathwatch. Instead of a bomb shelter.

Simultaneously, Harvey’s spade struck a rock and the old man’s bucket chimed. The chord carried Perry outside. Harvey steadfastly dug into the yard.

“How’s it going?” Perry asked.

The spade struck and lifted and deposited hard soil into the wheelbarrow.

“How’s it going there?” Perry asked again, and again the spade thumped into the yard.

“I can bring out hot chocolate. How would you like that?” The spade hit a rock. Sparks in the hole, a fire in the hole. The four dangling electric lights swung with leaf-empty branch shadows, the forest all around them, how long had it been going on? Blanched, grieving Harvey struck and lifted and struck again. “Hot chocolate. I’ll go get it then. You just stay here, all right? I’ll get it and bring it out.”

Perry hunched over the stove, blending sweet milk with syrup, clucking at his warm work. Fall was always a nice season. The Arrowhead forests and the clean air. He carefully poured the hot chocolate from pan to mug, put a napkin on a saucer, put the mug on the napkin, put cookies on the saucer, put everything
on a tray, carried it out to Harvey’s night dig. “Some hot chocolate for you. I’ll just put it here till you’re ready for it.” Perry put it down far enough from the hole to be free of dust and dirt. “All right?” he said. He watched the spade rise and fall, then he turned and took a few steps, then turned again. “Don’t forget and let it go cold.” He turned again, stopped again. “We can talk when you come inside. How will that be, then?” He turned once again, seeing them imagining the rise of the spade, its downwards electric arc, sparks of the breaking splintering shattering mug, the full-expected explosion of hot chocolate and glass and tray and saucer. And he turned and saw Harvey’s aggrieved spade wet with sweet milk. “Yes,” Perry said, “then we’ll just talk when you come in. It’s all right.”

It went on that way while the old man died. Perry remembered.

Jets scrambling over Miami Beach, trawlers in the Caribbean, an address by the President that began:
Good evening, my fellow citizens
and the old man rang with his spoon in the spit bucket, as though celebrating his insight.
This Government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba
chiming in doom like a vindicated and vilified prophet while Harvey’s spade thumped in the October soil.
Within the past week unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purposes of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere
although the old man insisted it was the whole world coming to ruin as he banged his silver spoon in the spit bucket, calling out.

The bomb shelter arose from its hole. The walls were standard two feet thick. The great body of the shelter hulked underground and only its flat top actually emerged, the roof coming just to Harvey’s breast. A stainless-steel air filter climbed like a chimney
from the center of the roof. In the sunlight, the shelter was bright white and in the shade it turned gray. It was a center of gravity in the yard, with the grass sloping towards it from all directions.

“I see Harvey’s got it done,” the old man said sternly.

Perry shrugged and grinned. “Pretty much. Has to cement seams or something. And put in the door bars and steps.”

“Just in time,” said the old man. He was propped against three firm pillows. Bare-chested, covered to the knees with a sheet, he spoke harshly: “You think it’s crazy, don’t you? You never listened.”

“I listened,” Perry said. The old man did not look as if he would die.

“Harvey knows.”

“I guess so.”

“Why are you grinning?”

“I can’t help it,” Perry said.

“Happy about something?”

“No,” Perry said.

The old man became silent. It was as if they hadn’t spoken at all.

“Get some rest,” Perry said softly. He closed the door.

“Love you,” he whispered.

The old man didn’t really look like death.

Grinning so that his eyes watered and his glasses steamed and his nose hurt dreadfully, Perry moved down the stairs.

He turned on the television. Another bulletin, which was unreal and hapless as anything spouted from the old man’s pulpit.

It was impossible, of course.

The old man was ringing again in the spit bucket but Perry stayed away. And Harvey’s spade was clanging outside.

The house was very cold.

It was impossible, of course.

“Love you,” he whispered, grateful that the old man couldn’t hear.

On the television, a reporter was reading the text of a White House statement, smiling slightly as though both disbelieving and reassuring, and Perry had sympathy for the fellow. Nobody believed but they imagined, and Harvey’s spade clanked against the concrete bomb shelter as the reporter said,
In summary, there is no evidence to date indicating that there is any intention to dismantle or discontinue work on these missile sites. On the contrary, the Soviets are rapidly continuing their construction of missile support and launch facilities
 … the language of the old man’s religion: facilities and missile support systems. Perry listened with a grin and without watching, listened as another reporter interviewed nailbiting breathholding flushfaced citizen prophets. Incredible. Disbelieved. Incredible that the old man’s craziest prophecy was not crazy at all, therefore perfectly crazy, completing a grand cycle. Perry sat and listened, primogeniture in a Finnish man-family of October doom and swamps at sea, while the truly sad thing was that the old man was dying, and nobody cared, least of all the old man, while ships moved to sea, alerts and re-alerts and civil defense, and the craziest thing of all was that the old man’s craziest prophecy was not really crazy. Nobody believed. It drove the old man crazy.

The old house was cold.

It got late and the old man slept for a while, but Harvey continued his work.

Perry wandered the house. Once he looked in on the old man. His chest was fuzzed with black hair and the window was wide open.

Around midnight the old man woke up and began clanging for attention.

Perry remembered:

The echo in the house.

The banging of Harvey’s hammer at midnight in the mostly finished bomb shelter.

Then the ringing in the bucket. The chiming, clattering demonic ringing of the old man’s spoon in the bucket.

The thermostats turned to freezing for the old man’s dying comfort.

The chill in the house.

The persistent hammering and bucket ringing, while the radio went berserk with midnight Action Line call-in oracles: “And no one ever listened and now it’s too late, because I was warning of this twenty years ago when I lived in Mankato, twenty years ago. I warned about the Chinese slinking on the sidelines while we fought it out with the Russians, and who’ll be left? You guessed it. Just lucky we caught them, that’s all. Quemoy-Matsu. It’s the Chinese that’s behind it. When we had the chance, then we should’ve let them have it with both barrels at Quemoy-Matsu. Now all we can do is pray. Pray we win, that’s all. But, anyhow …”

The house was cold.