Rabbit, Run (34 page)

A familiar old Plymouth slows against the curb outside and Rabbit’s mother gets out and looks up and down the sidewalk angrily. His heart leaps and trips his tongue: “Here come my parents.” As if giving a warning. And they do all come to attention, as if to withstand an attack. Mrs. Springer gets up and Harry places himself between her and Janice. Standing in formation with the Springers like this, he can at least show his mother that he’s reformed, that he’s accepted and been accepted. The undertaker’s man goes out to bring them in; Harry can see them standing on the bright sidewalk, arguing which door to go into; Mim a little to one side. Dressed in a quiet suit and with no make-up, she reminds him of the little sister he once had. The sight of his parents makes him wonder why he was afraid of them.

His mother comes through the door first; her eyes sweep the line of them and she steps toward him with reaching curved arms. “Hassy, what have they done to you?” She asks this out loud and wraps him in a hug as if she would carry him back to the sky from which they have fallen.

This quick it opens, and seals shut again. In a boyish reflex of embarrassment he pushes her away and stands to his full height. As if unaware of what she has said, his mother turns and embraces Janice. He is relieved to see her act courteously, normally. Pop, murmuring, shakes Springer’s hand. Mini comes and touches Harry on the shoulder and then squats and whispers to Nelson, these two the youngest. All under him Harry feels these humans knit together. His wife and mother cling together. His mother began the embrace automatically but has breathed a great life of grief into it. Her face creases in pain; Janice, rumpled and smothered, yet responds; her weak black arms try to encircle the great frame yearning against her. Mrs. Angstrom yields up two words to her. The others are puzzled; only Harry from his tall cool height sees. His mother had been propelled by the instinct that makes us embrace those we wound, and then she had felt this girl in her arms as a member with her of an ancient abused slave race, and then she had realized that, having restored her son to herself, she too must be deserted.

He had felt in himself these stages of grief unfold in her as her arms tightened. Now she releases Janice, and speaks, sadly and properly, to the Springers. They have let her first outcry pass as madness, they of course have done nothing to Harry, what has been done he has done to them. His liberation is unseen by them. They become remote beside him. The words his mother spoke to Janice, “My daughter,” recede. Mim rises from squatting; his father takes Nelson into his arms. Their motions softly jostle him.

And meanwhile his heart completes its turn and turns again, a wider turn in a thinning medium to which the outer world bears a decreasing relevance.

Eccles comes, panting from some drugstore or tormented home, and the seven of them file with Nelson into the room of flowers and take their seats on the front row. Black Eccles reads before the white casket. It annoys Rabbit that Eccles should stand between him and his daughter. It occurs to him, with a strange deep soft probe of guilt, what no one has mentioned, the child was never baptized. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”

The angular words walk in Harry’s head like clumsy blackbirds; he feels their possibility. Eccles doesn’t; his face is humorless and taut. His voice is false. All these people are false: except his dead daughter, the white box with gold trim.

“He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arms, and carry them in his bosom.”

Shepherd, lamb, arms: Harry’s eyes fill with tears. It is as if at first the tears are everywhere about him, a sea, and that at last the saltwater gets into his eyes. His daughter is dead; June gone from him; his heart swims in grief, that had skimmed over it before, dives deeper and deeper into the limitless volume of loss. Never hear her cry again, never see her marbled skin again, never balance her faint weight in his arms again and watch for the blue knives of her eyes to widen at his words. Never, the word never stops, there is never a gap in its thickness.

They go to the cemetery. He and his father and Janice’s father and the undertaker’s man carry the white box to the hearse. There is weight to it but the weight is all wood. The cemetery is beautiful at four o’clock. Its nurtured green nap slopes down somewhat parallel to the rays of the sun. Tombstones cast long slate shadows. Up a crunching blue gravel lane moves the careful procession; their destination a meek green canopy smelling of earth and ferns. Beyond them at a distance a crescent sweep of black woods; the cemetery is high on the hill, between the town and the forest. Below their feet chimneys smoke. Harry can see across the valley but from here it looks different, more blue. A man on a power lawnmower rides between the worn teeth of tombstones far off. Swallows in a wide ball dip and toss themselves above a stone cottage, a crypt. The white coffin is artfully rolled on casters from the hearse’s deep body onto crimson straps that hold it above the small nearly square-mouthed but deep-dug grave. The small creaks and breaths of effort scratch on a pane of silence. Silence. A cough. The flowers have followed them; here they are under the tent. Behind Harry’s feet a neat mound of dirt topped with squares of sod waits to be replaced and meanwhile breathes a deep word of earth. The undertaking men look pleased, fold their pink hands in front of their flies. Silence.

“The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing.”

Eccles’ voice made fragile by the outdoors; the distant buzz of the power mower halts respectfully. Rabbit’s chest vibrates with excitement and strength; he is sure his girl has ascended to Heaven. This feeling fills Eccles’ recited words like a living body a skin. “O God, whose most dear Son did take little children into his arms and bless them; Give us Grace, we beseech thee, to entrust the soul of this child to thy never-failing care and love, and bring us all to the heavenly kingdom; through the same thy Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.”

“Amen,” Mrs. Springer whispers.

Yes. That is how it is. He feels them all, the heads as still around him as tombstones, he feels them all one, all one with the grass, with the hothouse flowers, all, the undertaker’s men, the unseen caretaker who has halted his mower, all gathered into one here to give his unbaptized baby force to leap to Heaven.

An electric switch is turned, the straps begin to lower the casket into the grave and stop. Eccles makes a cross of sand on the lid; stray grains roll one by one down the curved lid into the hole. A pink hand throws crumpled petals. “Deal graciously, we pray thee, with all those who mourn, that, casting every care on thee …” The straps whine again. Janice at his side staggers. He holds her arm and even through the cloth it feels hot. A small breath of wind makes the canopy fill and flap like a sail. The smell of flowers rises toward them. “… and the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, now and for evermore. Amen.”

Eccles closes his book. Harry’s father and Janice’s, standing side by side, look up and blink. The undertaker’s men begin to be busy with their equipment, retrieving the straps from the hole. Mourners move into the sunshine. “Casting every care on thee.” He has done that; he feels full of strength. The sky greets him. It is as if he has been crawling in a cave and now at last beyond the dark recession of crowding rocks he has seen a patch of light; he turns, and Janice’s face, dumb with grief, blocks the light. “Don’t look at
me
,” he says. “I didn’t kill her.”

This comes out of his mouth clearly, in tune with the simplicity he feels now in everything. Heads talking softly snap around at a voice so sudden and cruel.

They misunderstand. He just wants this straight. He explains to the heads, “You all keep acting as if
I
did it. I wasn’t anywhere near.
She’s
the one.” He turns to her, and in her face, slack as if slapped, sees that she too is a victim, that everyone is; the baby is gone, is all he’s saying, he had a baby and his wife drowned it. “Hey it’s O.K.,” he tells her. “You didn’t mean to.” He tries to take her hand but she snatches it back like from a trap and looks toward her parents, who step toward her.

His face burns; forgiveness had been big in his heart and now it’s hate. He hates her dumb face. She doesn’t
see
. She had a chance to join him in truth, just the simplest factual truth, and turned away in horror. He sees that among the heads even his own mother’s is horrified, blank with shock, a wall against him; she asks him what have they done to him and then she does it too. A suffocating sense of injustice blinds him. He turns and runs.

Uphill with broad strength. He dodges among gravestones exultantly. Dandelions grow bright as butter among the graves. Behind him his name is called in Eccles’ voice “Harry! Harry!” He feels Eccles chasing him but does not turn to look. He cuts diagonally through the stones across the grass toward the woods. The distance to the dark crescent of trees is greater than it seemed from beside the grave. The romping of his body turns heavy; the slope of land grows steeper. Yet there is a softness in the burial ground that sustains his flight, a gentle settled bumpiness that buoys him up with its reminiscence of the dodging spurting runs down a crowded court. He arrives between the arms of the woods and aims for the center of the crescent. Once inside, he is less sheltered than he expected; turning, he can see through the leaves back down the graveyard to where, beside the small green tent, the human beings he has left cluster. Eccles is halfway between them and him. His black chest heaves. His wide-set eyes concentrate into the woods. The others, thick stalks in dark clothes, jiggle: maneuvering, planning, testing each other’s strengths, holding each other up. Their pale faces flash mute signals toward the woods and turn away, in disgust or despair, and then flash again full in the declining sun, fascinated. Only Eccles’ gaze is steady. He may be gathering energy to renew the chase.

Rabbit crouches and runs raggedly. His hands and face are scratched from plowing through the bushes and saplings that rim the woods. Deeper inside there is more space. The pine trees smother all other growth. Their brown needles muffle the rough earth with a slippery blanket; sunshine falls in narrow slots on this dead floor. It is dim but hot in here, like an attic; the unseen afternoon sun bakes the dark shingles of green above his head. Dead lower branches thrust at the level of his eyes. His hands and face feel hot where they were scratched. He turns to see if he has left the people behind. No one is following. Far off, through a tiny patch at the end of the aisle of pines he is in, a green glows which is perhaps the green of the cemetery; but it seems as far off as the patches of sky he can glimpse above the treetops. In turning he loses some sense of direction. But the tree-trunks are at first in neat rows that carry him along between them, and he walks always against the slope of the land. If he walks far enough uphill he will in time reach the scenic drive that runs along the ridge. Only by going downhill can he be returned to the others.

The trees cease to march in rows and grow together more thickly. These are older trees. The darkness under them is denser and the ground is steeper. Rocks jut up through the blanket of needles, scabby with lichen; collapsed trunks hold intricate claws across his path. At places where a hole has been opened up in the roof of evergreen, berrying bushes and yellow grass grow in a hasty sweet-smelling tumble. These patches, some of them broad enough to catch a bit of sun slanting down the mountainside, make the surrounding darkness darker, and in pausing in them he becomes conscious, by its cessation, of a whisper that fills the brown tunnels all around him. Midges circle thickly in the sunshine above these holes. The surrounding trees are too tall for him to see any sign, even a remote cleared landscape, of civilization. Islanded in light he becomes frightened. He is conspicuous; the bears and nameless menaces that whisper through the forest can see him clearly. Rather than hang vulnerable in these wells of visibility he rushes toward the menaces across the rocks and rotting trunks and slithering needles. Insects follow him out of the sun; his sweat is a strong perfume. His chest binds and his shins hurt from jarring uphill into pits and flat rocks that the needles conceal. He takes off his coat and carries it in a twisted bundle. He struggles against his impulse to keep turning his head, to see what is behind him; there is never anything, just the hushed, deathly life of the woods, but his fear fills the winding space between the tree-trunks with agile threats, that just dodge out of the corner of his eye each time he whips his head around. He must hold his head rigid. He’s terrorizing himself. As a kid he often went up through the woods. But maybe as a kid he walked under a magic protection that has now been lifted; he can’t believe the woods were this dark then. They too have grown. Such an unnatural darkness, clogged with spider-fine twigs that finger his face incessantly, a darkness in defiance of the broad daylight whose sky leaps in jagged patches from treetop to treetop above him like a blue monkey.

The small of his back aches from crouching. He begins to doubt his method. As a kid he never entered from the cemetery. Perhaps walking against the steepest slope is stupid, carrying him along below the ridge of the mountain when a few yards to his left the road is running. He bears to his left, trying to keep himself in a straight path; the whisper of woods seems to swell louder and his heart lifts with hope: he was right, he is near a road. He hurries on, scrambling ruthlessly, expecting the road to appear with every step, its white posts and speeding metal to gleam. The slope of the ground dies unnoticed under his feet. He stops, stunned, on the edge of a precipitate hollow whose near bank is strewn with the hairy bodies of dead trees locked against trunks that have managed to cling erect to the steep soil and that cast into the hollow a shadow as deep as the last stage of twilight. Something rectangular troubles this gloom; it dawns on him that on the floor of the hollow lie the cellarhole and the crumbled sandstone walls of a forgotten house. To his shrill annoyance at having lost his way and headed himself downhill again is added a clangorous horror, as if this ruined evidence of a human intrusion into a world of blind life tolls bells that ring to the edges of the universe. The thought that this place was once self-conscious, that its land was tramped and cleared and known, blackens the air with ghosts that climb the ferny bank toward him like children clambering up from a grave. Perhaps there were children, fat girls in calico fetching water from a nearby spring, taming the trees, scarring them with marks of play, growing old on boards stretched above the cellarhole, dying with a last look out the window at the bank where Harry stands. He feels more conspicuous and vulnerable than in the little clearings of sunshine; he obscurely feels lit by a great spark, the spark whereby the blind tumble of matter recognized itself, a spark struck in the collision of two opposed realms, an encounter a terrible God willed. His stomach slides; his ears seem suddenly open to the sound of a voice. He scrambles back uphill, thrashing noisily in the deepening darkness to drown out the voice that wants to cry out to him from a source that flits from tree to tree in the shadows. He runs always against the rise of land, chasing it in treacherous light, the steep solid land like some fleeing, twisting thing.