Strange Seed (16 page)

He closed his eyes briefly, as if that temporary loss of sight would make his other senses more acute.
 
He heard nothing.
 
Felt nothing.
 
Only stillness.

And it struck him that the stillness was not the ordinary stillness of mid-afternoon—that there was no busy undertone of foraging honeybees, birds involved in mating and food-gathering, small animals slipping through the underbrush.
 
Sounds he had grown so accustomed to they had become a part of silence.
 
The stillness he sensed was complete, as if all that existed around him were only some vast, circular and wonderfully executed painting of what had once existed, an exhibit:
 
This has passed.
 
This is history.
 
Turn the page.

He thought of cupping his hands to his mouth and shouting, “Hello, hello!” but felt, strangely, that it would be an oafish thing to do, a cowardly thing to do.
 
He couldn’t admit that it would also be proof of the sudden strong fear that had settled over him.
 
That, if the land and all that existed on it had gone into a sleep, his shouts would awaken it.
 
And awaken the ghosts.
 
Give them notice of his presence and apprehension.

*****

From the doorway, Rachel quietly watched the boy for a long moment.
 
His back was to her, his face pressed hard against the boarded-up window.
 
She could dimly see the contours of his tensed muscles beneath the green corduroy suit.
 
Amazingly, the first time she’d dressed him in it, several days ago, he’d made no attempt to get out of it.

“Care to tell me,” she said, realizing and relishing her facetiousness, “what it is you see out there?”
 
She paused.
 
The boy gave no indication that he knew she was in the room.
 
“Is it freedom?” she continued.
 
“Is it freedom you see?”
 
She found that her tone had become vaguely pitying.
 
“We all lose our freedom,” she went on.
 
“We have to.
 
I lost mine to Paul.
 
He lost his to this house.
 
And you lost yours to us.
 
That’s the way it has to be.
 
I’m sorry, but that’s the way it has to be.”

The boy did not move.

Rachel took a few steps into the room.
 
“It’s the sunlight you want, isn’t it?” she said.
 
“And I’ll admit that we’re being terribly unfair—keeping you cooped up in this dreary room.
 
But it’s the prerogative of parents to be unfair, isn’t it?”
 
She took another step toward him.
 
Still he gave no hint that he knew she was in the room.
 
“It’s for your own good.
 
I want you to know that.
 
If we were to let you outside, as if you were a normal child, you might go back.
 
And we don’t want that.”

She heard the sound of cloth being torn, seams giving way.
 
The sounds stopped abruptly.

She stepped forward and studied the boy more closely.
 
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
 
He was in precisely the same position he’d been in when she’d entered the room.
 
“Don’t do that,” she ordered, unsure of what it was she didn’t want him to do.
 
“What are you doing?” she repeated, because she heard again the sound of cloth being ripped, seams giving way.

Then, impossibly, the boy’s flesh—from his waist to under his right arm—appeared beneath the torn corduroy suit.

Rachel gasped.
 
“What are you doing?” she screamed.

She ran to him, bent over and spun him around viciously.
 
He faced her eye to eye, expressionlessly, for a second, then closed his eyes, as if in meditation, and tensed his muscles powerfully.

The left hand seam burst.

Before realizing what she was doing, Rachel’s open hand swept hard across his face.

The seams on the legs of the corduroy suit burst simultaneously.

“My God!” Rachel whispered, and raised her hand to strike him again.
 
But hesitated.
 
For the first time, she saw, an emotion was clear on his face.
 
An emotion that, like his laughter, was a contradiction, an abomination.
 
And, she realized in the next moment—as the shreds of the corduroy suit fell to the floor around him—that she was the source and the target of his emotion.

*****

This is how the deaf must experience the world,
Paul told himself.
 
The thought was inaccurate, he knew.
 
The world of the deaf was the same world he normally inhabited, and that world was filled with motion.
 
This world was not.

The thought—off-handed, desperate, inaccurate—had been designed to give him comfort, to make him an observer, not a participant, he realized.

“Bullshit!” he whispered.
 
He was both observer and participant here.
 
But of what?

Was this only some sacred pause in the progress of things?

“Hello!” he shouted.
 
He shuddered.
 
The word had been absorbed by the land in much the way it would have been absorbed by a small and cluttered room.
 
As if the vastness around him were only an illusion.

Then the word came back to him from the forest—a quarter miles distant—and he smiled, relieved.

“Hello,” he shouted again.

“Hello,” he heard a second later.

His smiled broadened.
 
Far to his right, a hawk circled expectantly.
 
Ahead, near the forest, a woodchuck waddled across the path.
 
From a shallow weed-choked ditch behind him, he heard a flurry of activity; a moment later, a pheasant, several of its feathers trailing to earth behind it, took flight.

And, abruptly, all the nearly subliminal noises of the land returned.

In the same instant, Paul’s face went blank.
 
He brought his rifle to a ready position--diagonally across his chest, right hand on its stock, left hand on its barrel.

You there!
he wanted to yell.
 
But the words went unuttered.

Fear stopped them.

And confusion.

And knowledge.

“The land, Paul…The land…creates.
 
The earth creates.”

He understood, now, what Lumas meant.

Rachel thought the boy had died in his sleep, during the night, at any rate, while she and Paul slept.

She wanted to step into the room.
 
IT seemed so ludicrous that she couldn’t she had, after all, been with him most of the night.
 
But now, less than a minute after summoning Paul—“It’s the boy.
 
I don’t know—there’s something wrong.
 
I don’t think he’s breathing.”—she could only wait in the doorway, arms at her sides, body erect, face blank in anticipation.

Is he dead, Paul?
she wanted to ask, to have the final word said.
 
Paul was taking so long, and this death was so grotesquely obvious.
 
So without question.

Paul took his finger from the boy’s jugular but did not straighten: he had his left knee on the floor, was resting his right arm on the other knee.
 
“He’s gone, Rachel.”

“He’s dead?” she managed, as if asking if he were asleep, or whether he’d eaten his dinner or if he was feeling better after a minor illness.

“Yes.
 
He’s dead.”

“How do you think he died, Paul?”
 
How do you change a tire, clip a cat’s nails, use an axe?

Paul stood very slowly, his gaze on the boy all the while.
 
“He’s dead, Rachel—that’s all I can say.
 
If you want to know how, you’ll have to ask someone more qualified.”
 
He aid it matter-of-factly, as if commenting on a not-quite-up-to-par meal:
 
it gave his words a grim, cold finality.

“Was it me, Paul?”

He looked confusedly at her.
 
“You?”

“Was it this room?” she said, face still blank, body still erect.
 
“Did we kill him by putting him in here?”

Paul turned back to the boy.
 
“He died.”
 
Again matter-of-factly.
 
“He’s dead.
 
That’s all I can say, and any speculation as to how he died is going to be self-defeating.”

‘Jesus, Paul!”

“It’s true, and you should realize it.”

She said nothing.

Moments later—when he turned away from the boy—she was gone.
 
He listened heard her go down the stairs, hesitate, then cross through the living room and kitchen, where she hesitated again, then he heard first the back door then the screen door being opened.
 
Both doors shut seconds later.

Some things—weddings, for instance, and bad lovemaking—Rachel mused, are permanently fixed in the memory, and they’re unalterable.
 
All the pathetic futile attempts made to stop a death are unalterable, too.
 
A person might wish, afterward, that those attempts had been more in earnest, had put the death off a few hours or a few days.
 
But the result would be exactly the same, wouldn’t it?

She descended the back steps slowly, almost instinctively with caution.
 
My God, it was a gorgeous day, brisk and clear and it had a good clean smell to it—the smell of autumn.

Permanently fixed:
 
covering that exquisite brown body with several blankets (warmth always put death off), even though she knew that, within minutes, he’d throw them to the floor.
 
Smearing first-aid cream over those ugly dark splotches on his arms and legs.
 
Forcing bouillon and mushroom soup and mashed peas into his mouth (hunger was a friend to death).
 
Staying in that awful room with him for hours and hours, as if death couldn’t happen unless she looked away.
 
But it had, although the exact moment had escaped her notice.
 
She might, she knew, have been watching him a long, long time…

Permanently fixed—all that she should have done to save him.
 
She could have taken him into town, for Christ’s sake, where there would have been better help him, although not as much caring.
 
And, during the first stages of his illness, letting him out of the house and into the healing sunlight.
 
But she hadn’t done those things and never would—not even in memory.
 
Instead, she had done the things which had killed him.

Goddammit!
 
Did Paul listen, really listen, to some of the stuff that came spilling from his mouth?
 
“He’s dead, that’s all I can say, Rachel.
 
And any speculation as to how he died, or why, is going to be self-defeating.”
 
Oh, that was very nice, very
rational
.
 
And inhuman.
 
You could expect some killing machine to feel nothing for what it did, but as for the person who operated that machine…

She stopped on the last step, her hand lightly touching the new railing.

She was, she realized, thinking objectively, logically.
 
As Paul apparently had been.
 
But it was impossible.
 
Death precluded it.
 
Especially this kind of death.

It was, she thought, as if something had been misplaced.
 
It wasn’t a sense of emptiness she felt, but merely that she had expected something and it had not arrived.

She grasped the railing tightly.

That something, she knew at last, was grief.
 
Guilt, yes.
 
She had that in abundance—though it was not the self-defeating, self-destructive guilt Paul supposed it to be.
 
It was far weaker, far more rational—dammit—than that.
 
But no grief.
 
Not for the boy.
 
And not even for herself that she was now without him.
 
It was as if a visitor had come and stayed and interrupted their lives.
 
And now was gone.

She sat on the third step, hand still on the railing.

Was she…grateful?
 
But that was impossible, too.
 
She had been, for all intents and purposes, the child’s
mother
these past few months.
 
And now she and Paul would have to bury him, would have to dig a deep hole and put him in it and cover him because those arms, those legs, that chest, all of what just yesterday had been so wonderfully animated, would never again…