The Second Coming (12 page)

Down stone steps and into root-smelling dark: perhaps the cellar had been sealed off from vandals, like King Tut's tomb. Yes, some few treasures had fallen down the steps and been covered by creeper: an iron stove, two books, and a grimy transom-size window. The books were
Captain Blood
by Rafael Sabatini and
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
by John Fox, Jr., both books rain-soaked, sun-dried, and swollen to fat loaves. She opened
Captain Blood,
sat on the steps, and read:

Picking his way daintily through that shambles in the waist came a tall man with a deeply tanned face that was shaded by a Spanish headpiece. He was armed in back-and-breast of black steel beautifully damascened with golden arabesques. Over this, like a stole, he wore a sling of scarlet silk, from each end of which hung a silver-mounted pistol. Up the broad companion to the quarterdeck, moving with easy assurance, until he stood before the Spanish Admiral.

The words were still clear on the thick yellow page but the paper crumbled like bread and a bakery smell rose in her nostrils. Words surely have meanings, she thought, and there is my trouble. Something happens to words coming to me from other people. Something happens to my words. They do not seem worth uttering.

People don't mean what they say. Words often mean their opposites.

If a person says to you:
I hate to tell you this, but—
she doesn't hate to tell you. She likes to tell you. This is a good place to make a new start with words. A man wrote these words over fifty years ago and here they've been ever since, lying in a dark cellar. She read the phrase aloud:
a tall man with a deeply tanned face.
It sounded strange in the dead silence and the warm Carolina sunlight.

A large brindled dog came down from the trail, straight across the ruins, sat down and looked at her, not panting and not wagging his tail. He did not have a collar. His head was as wide and flat as an anvil. No doubt he belonged to a hiker but he did not leave. His clear hazel eyes looked from her to the book and back to her. An orange tuft above his eye moved like a man cocking an eyebrow. When she met his gaze, he cocked the other eyebrow and looked at a chipmunk. Can a dog be embarrassed?

She opened
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine—it
smelled more of school library than bakery—and read:

Knowing nothing of the ethics of courtship in the mountains—how, when two men meet at the same girl's house, “they makes the gal say which one she likes best and t'other gits”—Hale little dreamed that the first time Dave stalked out of the room, he threw his hat in the grass behind the big chimney and executed a war dance on it, cursing the blankety-blank “furriner” within from Dan to Beersheba.

Yes, that's it, she thought, forgetting about the dog. Ordinarily people have ways of doing things—like the people who lived in this house long ago and read this book. It was up to the “furriner” to catch on. As for her: either she had not caught on to the way people do things, or people did not know what they were doing and there was no use trying to catch on. In either case, this seemed as good a place as any to make a start.

Make a start at what? For one thing, she could read these books for more clues, go to town, visit the public library, obtain a library card, take out more books, speak to the librarian, sit on the bench, observe people, speak to them, and either catch on to their ways or, if they didn't have any ways, make up one's own.

She examined the window. It must have been a glass transom for a double door, for it had a big brass latch and it was almost too heavy to wrestle up the steps and through the vines. Panting, she propped it against a chimney and knelt for a look. It was not broken. Cellar rootlets stuck to the glass. No, not rootlets, they were lead cames. When she leaned over to see if the lead went through, the sun made dull colors through the dust. The panes were stained glass.

Dragging the transom to the foot of the path, she leaned it under the dripping rock and went to get soap, rag, and moss. The dog followed, his serious hazel eyes attentive but unable to meet her gaze.

It gave pleasure to make a soft soaped Brillo pad of moss and scrub every inch of glass, frame, lead, and brass, doing one camed section at a time and rinsing it under the trickle. The water was not cold and had a mineral reek.

Downhill and easy going to the greenhouse, but her arms trembled as she pushed the transom up the wall until it rested on the concrete ledge. Now the trick was to stand on the ledge and slide the transom up the first slope of glass without falling off. It couldn't be done. There was no getting a purchase on it. But it was possible to stand on the ground and push it up with a forked stick of dogwood until the transom was balanced on the gambrel. Then, half propping, half holding stick on ledge, she climbed up beside it. Now the angle was right. She could lean forward against the lower slope, ah safe! both hands free to push transom past the gambrel angle and let it down carefully on the upper slope—but there was no sliding it laterally now, it must be lined up carefully.

Hope rose in her, then a confidence, that the random fit of transom to hole would somehow work out better than if she had measured hole and designed window to fit. It did. It was better than a fit. The frame of the transom overlapped the steel sash of the greenhouse, the scuffed wood engaging rusty metal all around, and weighted down in a friction bond so strong she couldn't even budge the transom toward her down the slope.

A fit by chance is romance, she said to herself.

Climbing down, she was already thinking how to fasten it more securely. A strong wind could blow it off. Perhaps a few nails in the frame, the nails above wired to the iron fleurs-de-lis and below to the mechanism of the window vents.

Tired now, she stretched out on her bunk. The afternoon sun shone directly on the upper slope of stained glass. The light broke into colors which filled the little room. Perhaps she had stirred up a suspension from the potsherds and the moss. The gold was like dust in the air and the violet made a vapor.

She gazed up at the transom. A cornucopia dumped out its fruit and flowers, purple grapes, yellow corn, scarlet strawberries, golden pumpkins, boxy pink rhododendron, the harvest tumbling down a blue sky to a green earth where fascicles of pine needles spelled out Autumn. Rhododendron! Then the stained glass had been designed for this place, my place. What had happened to her Winter, Spring, and Summer? Carted off by Tut tomb robbers. But perhaps they and many other treasures are hidden in the cellar. Kegs of nails, books, such as the Swiss family of Robinson found on their wrecked ship.

Something bumped the potting table. She leaned out. The dog was turning round and round in the moss to make a bed.

She took a nap.

When she woke, violet vapor swarmed in her eyelashes. She took out her Scripto pencil and notebook and wrote:

I am here.

I need from town: milk, matches, dog food, saw. There is plenty of stove wood, dead chestnut I think. When did all the chestnuts die? What about bathing? How to get the stove up from the basement? What kind of stove is it? How does a stove work? Does it burn wood or coal? Does it heat water?

I need to make a living. I do not have a house but I have a greenhouse. I can live here and either get a job in town or make a living from the greenhouse. How do you make a living in a greenhouse? With greens.

I need to remember what I knew when I wrote to myself in this notebook, for example, that this is my place. Because now I can only remember things after I see them (somewhere I must have worked with stained glass, knew about cames).

In order to make a living I must remember what I can do.

Remember. Start at the beginning. My name is Allison. I was born in nineteen-fifty-something, sixty-something?

Try.

The first thing I remember is my embarrassment with strangers. No, embarrassment
for
strangers. They seemed so vulnerable. What if one should hurt their feelings? Once as a child when I was walking home from school I stopped to talk to a colored maid hanging out wash. She seemed very nice. But I began to worry how to break off the conversation and leave. I could not think of a way that might not hurt her feelings. So I had to wait until she finished hanging out the wash and went inside.

Very well, start at the other end. Yesterday. Last week.

After you make a living, then what do you do? How do you live?

When she leaned back on the knapsack pillow wedged into a corner of glass, a ruby swatch of light fell across her face. The down on her cheek turned fiery.

Yes, now I remember something. It was because she had sat so in the closed ward in the same lookout position, head wedged in an angle of the wingback chair. From here too she could see the two places people come from, the highway which ran past the main gate and the door to the hall.

Using the binoculars her father had given her for birdwatching, she was watching out not for the birds but for the bread truck. A car came over the hill, its top appearing first as a swelling in the hot asphalt. In the binoculars it seemed not to approach but to swell and rise until it was a few inches clear of the highway and riding on thick shimmering air. The car, a yellow Continental, was foreshortened and set off at an angle so that the four women passengers, two in front and two in back, appeared to be seated in a row. They were dressed as if they were going to a party, hair done neatly, but at this hour they could only be visiting antique shops or views of valleys and mountains of red leaves. Yes, they were leafers. The car had a Florida license.

Dr. Duk came in. He knocked on the door after opening it and coming in.

Knock knock, he said, hiding in the little foyer.

Who's there, she said.

Ivan.

Ivan who?

Ivan to be alone.

This was a bad sign. When Dr. Duk felt obliged to be funny, she was in for it. By enlisting her in his joke, he was trying, one, to be funny, and, two, to give her a “language structure” so that she, who had stopped talking because there was nothing to say, would have a couple of easy lines, straight man to his comic.

When he said
Knock knock,
it was not hard to say
Who's there?
Or
Ivan who?
Perhaps he was right. She could never lead off with a
Knock knock.
So she had lost most of her speech except for short questions such as
Who's there?
and
Ivan who?

Where did he get these knock-knock jokes? Not even her father had told a knock-knock joke for years. Dr. Duk was English. Had knock-knocks just got to England? But Dr. Duk was not quite English. He sounded English and his first name was Alistair, but a faint sootiness underlay his white skin. It reminded her of her mother stirring carbon black into her Williamsburg white paint. Kelso said his real name was Dr. Dukhipoor. Had he got his knock-knock jokes from old Milton Berle reruns in Pakistan? The patients called him Dr. Duck.

Her eyes were asking him something and he knew what it was, but he felt obliged to talk first about his hobbies, birdwatching and gardening. Maybe he was English. There is an advantage to being a small insular people, he said. We make a virtue of our limitations—ah, but you Americans and the Russians with your great continental soul-searching—heavy, man!—all very well indeed I'm sure but it's not a bad thing to do a bit of gardening and take a good look at a pine warbler. D'you know the first thing I do when I go to a convention to read a scientific paper? Register in the motel, then take a turn around the block with my glasses. Have a look-see. Nobody walks in your suburbs. Children look at me with absolute astonishment. Parents suspect me of being a molester. Dogs try to bite me. Last year in Phoenix I took a turn with my glasses, stopped at a vacant lot filled with the usual rubbish and weeds, spotted a bit of a commotion, put my glasses on it, and what d'you suppose it was? A canyon wren! Can you imagine? A canyon wren in a vacant city lot!

Maybe he's right, she was thinking at the edge of her mind but really watching his face for a sign, a pudding face framed by black hair combed low across his forehead and straight down the sides like Robert Newton. Maybe the Englishman can keep sane in a mad world by watching wrens and puttering about his garden—ah, she thought in her greenhouse, I can have my garden now, yes, more “grandiose” than his, he would say, because it's a crystal palace and I'm going to live in it and make a living from it. With greens. A greenhouse is for growing greens. But maybe he's right, and it's one way to keep from going nutty, but maybe there's something nutty too about an Englishman puttering about his mums while the sceptered isle slowly sinks into the sea.

No, he wasn't quite kosher with his too black hair and his puddingish Robert Newton face, and his sooty white skin. Anyhow, the English don't go around talking about “the English” and “your suburbs” and saying “heavy, man.”

Her eyes kept asking him the question, so he answered her, coming smoothly off the knock-knocks and the bird-watching and swinging round to her but offhandedly as if the birds were the important tiling and her illness a detail to be polished off on his way out. Yet it was his very off handedness which caused the familiar sweet doomstroke in her throat. What is this sweetness at the horrid core of bad news?

No—ah—I just thought praps you might do with a light massage of your neurones. Not even a major ECT series. A small refresher course. To get you ready for the big world out there.

You're going to buzz me again. (Her unfamiliar voice sounded loud and crackly like the intercom.)

Only a refresher course. I would imagine it to be your last.

Why?

Why what?

The asking in this case is like the answering, she said. I mean—she stopped.

Yes?

She had trouble talking. It was like walking out on a stage. She could answer questions, play straight man to his knock-knock routine, even ask questions. But to make a statement on your own, surely you had to know what you were talking about.