Totentanz (15 page)

He tried not to think about it too much.
There were a lot of things he tried not to think about too
much.

He rose and cracked his bones. That couldn't
be helped. In the Union Army he had bunked with a fellow for a time
who had jumped out of bed each morning and cracked, it seemed, each
bone in his body, relishing the task. He started with the knuckles
in his hands and toes and then worked his way through every joint
in his arms and legs, finishing with his neck. Jeff had begged him
not to do it, but he had just laughed. It got so bad that Jeff
thought he would have to kill him to make him stop, but a rebel
soldier had done the job for him in Fredericksburg. What his own
body did to him now was something like that; no matter how gently
he rose, each bone in his body cried out at the same time, begging
not to be stood up. It sometimes took ten minutes for all his bones
to settle into place. The first time it had happened, it had
scared the hell out of him, but now he looked on it as his old army
bunkmate's revenge.

With a groan he pushed himself over to the
small mirror on the wall of his trailer. He did this each time he
got up, and the shock was always the same. In the glass he saw his
face but not his face. The features were all there, the weak jaw,
the strong, straight nose, the high cheekbones that almost made his
face gaunt, the curly mass of boyish red-brown hair thicker on top
than on the sides. But the eyes he could not see. However hard he
stared at himself, he could not look into his own eyes. They were
there, and they were the right shade of light blue, but he just
couldn't look into himself. He'd always faced himself this way in
the morning, taking stock and getting the day's duties straight in
his mind; it had always been his way of waking up. And now he was
awake, or something like it, and it was impossible to do this
thing. He had once asked Ash about it, and Ash had only laughed,
and he hadn't asked again.

The bones in his neck creaking painfully, he
surveyed the rest of the room. It was little better than the army
tent he had lived in for three years during the war. But that was
fine with him. A small wooden table next to his bunk, a couple of
books—mostly picked up secondhand or at library sales—on a
makeshift shelf over the tidy dresser. On top of the dresser, just
one thing. In the old days, a couple of pictures would have been
there: a sepia print of his mother and a black-and-white photograph
that Matthew Brady himself had taken of him and his buddies in the
14th Infantry, looking in the crackly print like old men around a
dead campfire. A hairbrush, bone-handled, that his father had given
him on his twelfth birthday. The Bible that Lucius had given him on
that same day, when the two of them, his father and Lucius, decided
for some reason that he was a man.

The only thing there now was a Bible; not the
same one, but another that originally had belonged to a fourth
grader at St. Catherine's school in a suburb of Chicago. He'd
picked it up for fifty cents. When he had put his hand on it at the
rummage sale, he had expected something momentous to happen, like
lightning whipping out of the sky, or at least that the old leather
cover would burn his hand, making him let go (after all, I'm
dead!). But nothing of the kind had happened. That was another
reason he liked to think of himself as Frankenstein, because the
monster would have been a reader had he had the chance. There was a
scene in the movie where Frankenstein came across a blind man who
recited scripture to him over tea. It was probably the most
touching part of the movie. The monster, even with his cursed
deviate's brain, was obviously moved. No taint of evil lurked in
him, only around him, in that situation.

Each day he read from the Bible, just as he
had in the army. He'd started at the beginning, with Genesis, but
had soon given that up. There was much more that interested him in
the New Testament than in the Old. He found himself going over
Revelation again and again, looking for some hint of comfort, and
had discovered that whatever comfort he did gain from the book
centered on Matthew's gospel. Matthew could write; he was not a
blind lunatic like the other three gospel writers. He had a keen
eye for detail and seemed to cut to the bone of the matter without
embellishing it. And in that there was a stark poetry that made his
account all the more believable. Jeff wanted very much now, much
more than, well, before, to believe in all of it, the Resurrection
and especially what came after it. The Second Coming was something
he wanted desperately to believe in because, he thought, might it
not hold out hope for himself? He was a changed man, much more
cynical than he had been before, but also different in other ways.
He thought things through now, and he wanted to understand his
situation. He thought he had come to understand revenge, and he
wanted no part of it.

But he also felt more powerless than he ever
had before.

After all, sixty years ago I was dead.

He gave a harsh, grunting laugh at the
thought, flipping the Bible open with one hand to choose a random
passage.

The door behind him opened, then closed,
slamming shut like a screen door. Jeff felt the peculiar mix of
revulsion, fear and renewal that he always did when Ash was
nearby.

"Let me pick a verse for you," Ash said. "How
about this? `Fear not, for I am with thee.' Genesis. Like it?"

"Go away, Ash."

"But why? I've come to summon you, dear boy.
For as the Bard says, to quote from another and much finer work
than the one you hold there. We must take the current when it
serves, or lose our venture.' "

Jeff could barely move. A cold spot started
way down in his stomach and blossomed to till his body. He felt
drained, frozen.

"Amusement time," Ash said. "Actually, you
won't be needed much for a while, except to calm Lucius. I really
do regret having him around. He makes everyone nervous. Continually
wringing his hands and moaning, uttering cries to heaven, all that.
Do something about him before I do."

Jeff Scott turned, trying to control the
roiling within him.

"I want no part of this."

Ash smiled, making his face look like a sack
of flour with a deep red gash in it. He produced one of his
cigarettes and took his time in lighting it, carelessly dropping
the still-lit match on the rough wooden floor of the trailer. "This
is all for you. Jeff."

"Tell me exactly who you are, Ash."

Jeff felt as he never had before, both
feverish and elated. The chill in him dispersed; he felt lighter,
less sluggish, than he had in months.

"You were saying?" Ash replied, ignoring the
change that had come over Jeff Scott.

"Tell me all about yourself," Jeff said,
laughing. He felt almost powerful. His nostrils flared, as if he
were a famished animal smelling meat. "What are you afraid of, Ash?
Deep down, I know, I can sense, that there's something, or someone,
you're terrified of. Is it me?"

Ash threw down his
cigarette. For a moment Jeff thought he would storm out, short coat
snapping theatrically behind him. But he only stared at Jeff. In an
instant Jeff felt his elation evaporate. "I'm extremely frightened
of you,
boy
," Ash
said. Jeff felt as if someone were scooping out his insides with a
trowel. He gagged, collapsing to his knees and holding his
stomach—he was afraid that if he let go, everything in it would
spill out.

“Do you really think this is all only for
you?" Ash spat. "Did you really believe me when I said that? Did
you believe me whenever I spoke?" A look Jeff had never seen before
possessed Ash's non-face.

Now Jeff felt as though he had been doused
with gasoline and lit. He looked up and saw nothing but blackness.
Ash had disappeared; so had his room, the trailer, everything.
There was only the horrible burning of his skin, both outside and
inside. He could not even work his mouth to scream. He felt for the
floor, thinking that perhaps he would find coolness there, but
there was no floor. He was in empty space. Then the fire abated and
a curtain was drawn aside, and he had a vision, a remembrance of
the kind he had when he "dreamed."

He was back on his daddy's farm. It was a
glaring, bright day; the sky was so full of daylight it hurt his
eyes. He looked down and saw that the brightness was reflected off
the ground, which was covered deep in virgin snow. The sky was the
kind of deep sapphire it was after a good strong snow storm. There
was a sheen of thin, icy crust on the snow, as though it had
partially melted at the height of day and now was freezing again.
It was late afternoon, by the sun.

The oak in the front yard,
ponderously tall even when denuded of leaves, held a thin white
frosting along the top of its gray branches. For a moment it was
like a perfect color snapshot, the kind they printed in the issues
of
Life
magazine
that he had picked up a couple of times—and then, as if someone had
thrown a switch, things began to move. The top limbs of the tree
soughed gently in the near-still breeze; some of the powder drifted
off and fell lazily, like the snow in one of those snow globes
imported from Europe that you shook upside down. Off behind the
barn, a cow mooed sleepily. The door to the house slammed open and
then shut. It seemed to spit a hooting figure out onto the porch,
bearing something nearly too heavy for it to carry.

"Jeff! Jeff!" the figure whooped, and as it
came closer, Jeff saw that its burden was a long wooden toboggan.
The figure was his brother Tom. He was dressed in heavy boots and a
bright-colored knitted muffler and a buff-colored coat that was too
big for him. There was a smile a mile wide on his face. He suddenly
threw the sled down and grabbed Jeff.

There were tears in Jeff's eyes. He looked at
him- self and discovered he was dressed in heavy mittens and
hand-me-down boots, and, his brother, who had not been alive to him
since 1861—his brother, who was a hundred and twenty years dead,
speared through the heart by a Confederate bayonet—was standing
before him, shouting into his face and grinning as if it were
yesterday. He knew this day; he knew something momentous had
happened on this day, but he did not remember what. And as he
remembered these things, he found that he was more six years old
than long-dead, and that he was grinning back at twelve-year-old
Tom and nodding at everything he said, worshiping him as
always.

"I can't
believe
Pa let us outa
the rest of our chores," Tom said. "What are you standing there
for? If we don't go now, he'll change his mind!"

Tom picked up the toboggan, grunting, and
heaved it onto his back; and then Jeff was trotting along, half
beside and half behind him, holding an edge and at least pretending
that he was helping. They passed the white-coated carousel, dead
for the winter, its horses wearing snow caps, and in a few minutes
they had left the farm behind and were making the long, slow climb
up the shallow hill, way off at the far edge of their land, that
led to the real hill where sledding was done. Before long they were
both puffing heavily, and they stopped, dropping the toboggan on
the ground, where it made fine cracks in the crusty top layer of
snow. They looked back at their father's house and, before them,
the town of Montvale. Then they looked at their own breath-and the
smoke that it made in the air.

"Pa said I could order those stamps from New
York next month," Tom said. Jeff smiled, not really knowing what
stamps were except that they were little square things that Tom
pasted, using little tongs, in a book. He wanted some himself and
knew that he would have them when he started getting an allowance
too. Right now he got a penny every now and then from Tom,
sometimes two pennies from Pa when they went into town to the
general store with its candy jars. He never had such fine days as
those. Except maybe for this one.

Tom said, "Can't wait for those stamps," and
there was a dreamy look to him, and then they hauled the sled up
again and continued on their way.

It wasn't long before they reached the
sledding hill, high and curved like a C around the churchyard.
There was a rickety fence separating the sledding track from the
cemetery. The same fence failed to separate the boys from the
cemetery in October around Halloween or sometimes when the older
boys drank in the summer and made dares on one another. Now the old
chipped fence posts stood up like long teeth, crooked and sharp at
the end, and you had to be careful you didn't bash into them
because one of the teeth might come down on you, or even give way
and send you right into a headstone.

There was a group already making use of the
track, taking turns one after another like a neat, segmented snake,
and Jeff saw a couple of tar torches already lit at the top and
bottom of the hill so that the sledding could go on after dark.
Laughter, swirling and then borne away by the strengthening wind,
reached them, and suddenly they were at the top.

" 'Lo, Tom, Jeff," said Petey Graham, who was
making a bench of his sled off to the side of the starting patch.
It looked like he was carving something; as far as Jeff could
remember, he had never seen Petey Graham go down the sled track
once the whole winter.

"Hi, Pete," Tom answered for both of them.
Jeff knew that Petey was someone they were not supposed to spend
much time with; he was said to be slow-witted. They passed him,
lugging the sled another twenty feet to where a small group of
five or six sat huddled around a pile of sticks. In the darkening
afternoon Jeff recognized one or two of the faces turned his way:
the parson's boy; John Major and his brother Henry; the mayor's
daughter Melissa. As they drew closer, the others turned as well.
William Gantry, Tom's best friend, was there, as were the Becker
sisters and the blacksmith's apprentice, Pod Williamson.