Bright's Passage: A Novel (19 page)

Again it was as if she couldn’t move.

“Step. Forward.” The barrel of the gun was only inches from her. “If you do not step forward, I will kill my grandson.”

She came forward an inch.

“Good, good,” the Colonel said approvingly. He beckoned. “Forward still. Forward, forward, turn your head just a bit, my dear … and … good.”

When she stopped, the barrel was pressed flatly against the birthmark at her temple. The baby cried. It hurt her to hear it, but she did not move.

“Now,” he said. “I have come a long way and I am going to take a drink of this rare old cognac.”

He took three long swallows and then held the bottle out to her. “Take a sip yourself, child. You look as though you need it.”

The rifle stock appeared to sigh against her skull as she obeyed.

She took the bottle, put it to her lips and sipped.

Abruptly, he switched the lights off again, and the room was submerged once more in blackness.

“The old man made up his mind that he would kill the rogue and bring his daughter back home where she belonged. It was right that the rogue should die. It was strange, though—each time the old man and his sons crossed the ridge with the intention of killing him, something always thwarted them. Once the old man was about to shoot, when the rogue’s horse came and stood in the path of the shot. Another time, the old man’s sons
got into a nest of bees and were stung frightfully. He actually managed to pull the trigger once, only to find that the rifle contained no bullets. The old man would not be deterred, however. He would have his revenge. Then, one day, as he watched his daughter from the woods, he saw that she was with child and a thought came to him.”

There was silence. The rifle barrel lifted from her temple in the dark, and the man’s voice drew much closer. “He thought to himself, ‘As the rogue has stolen my child, so, too, will I steal a child from the rogue.’ He decided that he would not kill the rogue until the baby was born. Then, when the child was delivered, he would swoop down and exact his vengeance. The old man made a vow to himself that he would stand victoriously above the rogue, holding the rogue’s child in his arms.

“The bottle, please,” he sighed. She felt his hand grope down her arm to the bottle. He took it, gulping loudly in the dark.

The pantry could not have been darker had she closed her eyes. She tried to listen through the thick, velvet blackness, through the pantry’s stone walls and metal door, for the sounds of someone who might come to her aid. She knew it was useless; the kitchen staff, the coffee and cocoa girl, the dishwashers, the stewards and waiters, had been dismissed to see to their own families, and anyone else who was still here had been set to work out on the lawn. Her thoughts flashed to Dennis, but he was probably gone to the barn to fetch the animals. “Please,” she began to whisper. “Please. Please.”

“Shush,” the Colonel said, his grammar slipping as he drank. “Shush. A little more and then we’ll both go, I reckon.” He giggled. “Yeah, we’ll both get going, I reckon. Anyway, the girl grew and grew with the child in her belly, and then one day she felt the pains.”

His breath was at her ear now, the liquor misting on her
cheek. She backed up and he moved with her, crowding against her until her shoulder blades were pressed against the shelving on the far side of the room.

“The old man knew it,” he said. “When his daughter started feeling the birth pains, he knew. He waited, and the birds of the forest stopped singing and waited with him.” His throat clicked drily in her ear. “But he was never to be reunited with his daughter. She died in the early morning, delivering a son. Henry Bright set fire to the cabin and escaped to the east on his horse, carrying the baby boy that is now in your arms.”

The bottle shattered against the wall where he threw it among the jars of preserves. “Where is he?” She bolted in the darkness for the door, but the Colonel caught her by her hair, looping it around his fist like reins, forcing her to her knees on the tiled floor.

“I don’t know!”

He twisted her hair tightly, as if winding a spring.

“Well,” he said. He was breathing hard through his mouth when he put his lips to her ear again. “I found his horse.” His grip on her hair loosened for an instant. “And I found his boy.” He brought the rifle butt down hard against the back of her head. She slumped, but he held her kneeling body upright by the hair so that she would not fall forward on top of the baby. “I suppose I will find him, too, soon enough.” He eased her down against a shelf before switching on the light. He knelt by her, peering closely for the first time at his daughter’s child. Its eyes were tightly closed, but it was giving full throat to its displeasure. He lifted the cooking girl’s arm so that he could pull the infant in its sling from around her neck and hang it round his own. Then he stood and opened the pantry door to the brightness of the kitchen.

The ridiculous young woman he had met at breakfast was
sloshing whiskey into a silver flask over the sink. “Well, hello,” she said brightly. “We meet again. I was just finding Lawrence and me a drink to take with us for the road.”

Without a word, the Colonel carried the screaming infant past her. He threw open the door of the servants’ entrance, and the child’s howls folded into the howling of the wind as it whipped around the hotel eaves and into the room, setting the hanging pots and pans to rattling and banging against one another. He stood looking out at the lawn, with its great crowd of people and cars, dogs and horses. In the space above his head, the doorway framed the fire crowning in the treetops. Flames lashed at the trees, tearing branches away, hurling them skyward in great updrafts. The barn stood nestled in their midst, glowing like an in got of white-hot metal. He looked steadily at the far-off building, watching it closely even as a cinder the size of a man’s leg fell out of the sky at his feet in the doorway. All at once he seemed to come to a decision, and clamping an arm around the crying child on his chest, he pulled the rifle tightly against his back and started out across the lawn.

Pots were falling off the wall now, and somehow a sack of flour had been knocked to the floor and exploded open. The fine white powder was swept up into the currents of air and swirled angrily around the room like a trapped ghost. Amelia dropped the whiskey bottle and the flask in the sink and grabbed the nearest pot, throwing it under the tap and filling it with water. She ran to the burning branch that had landed in the doorway and doused it. The door itself was blown back on its hinges by the steep wind, and she pushed her shoulder hard against it until it closed and the room fell silent. She rested her forehead upon the wood a moment, then turned to survey the wreckage of the kitchen. Standing unsteadily on the far side of the room was the kitchen girl, Brigid.

That night, after retrieving the she-goat from the girl and the Colonel’s sons, he made a supper of a few eggs he had brought home with him from Fells Corner. The chickens were clucking their way toward consensus in their hutch, while nearby the billy and she-goat were tucked cozily into a patch of bracken fern. Bright stood in the doorway of the cabin, looking off toward the ridge as if he could tunnel through it with his eyes and see Rachel once more. His fork scraped against the dish as he ate. When he was done, he walked across his little farmyard and stooped to wash his dish in the stream.

“Henry Bright.”

He didn’t move.

“Henry Bright,” the angel said again. “Henry Bright, I found you. Fear not.”

He felt the sigh on the back of his neck and the heat of the angel’s nearness, but he gave no answer and continued the washing up as if he were completely alone. When at last it seemed he might rinse the plate forever, he twisted his neck around and looked up into the deep pool of breathing black that was his new horse. “Yeah,” he said. “You found me, all right.” Then he stood up and, turning his back on the animal, walked across the yard to tether the goats.

“Your time has come, Henry Bright,” the horse said behind him. “A great work is demanded of you.”

“I don’t know you,” he said. “You’d better git on out of that horse. That’s my horse. If you want a horse, there’s a auction over in Fells Corner.”

“You know me, Henry Bright. The angel from the church ceiling.”

“No, I do not know you. And I don’t want to know you either.” He walked to the cabin and went in and sat there on the edge of the bed. As evening began to deepen, he came back to the door and stood looking out. “Everybody wants my animals,” he said, and threw the flap shut again. A little while later, a metallic clatter arose in the yard. It continued for several minutes and Bright, exasperated, finally threw open the cabin flap to investigate the noise. The horse stood in the middle of the farmyard, looking at him expectantly, one of its back feet standing in the bucket Bright had left at the creek side. He went to the horse and lifted its hoof out of the bucket. “Anyway,” he said, “how am I supposed to know it’s you?”

“You know it’s me.”

“How’d you find me?”

“Never mind that. Your great work awaits you.”

Bright walked to the doorway of the cabin once more. “I don’t want any of your great-work talk. I’m going to work in the coal mines.”

“You are not going to work in the coal mines. You are going to marry the girl Rachel and have a son.”

“I can’t believe you,” Bright said.

“You have been chosen, Henry Bright. You will marry her and she will bear your child. She has been chosen to be the mother of the Future King of Heaven.”

“You’re crazy, angel. You talk like you never heard there was a Jesus Christ before.”

“Why do you say that, Henry Bright?”

“Because that’s what Jesus Christ is, right? He’s the King of Heaven.”

“Is he?”

“That’s what they say, yeah.”

“Yes, they do,” the horse said, chewing on the thought. “They do say that, don’t they?” There was silence. Then, “What about the barbed wire? Is he King of that? And the mustard gas?”

“How do I know?” Bright stood facing the horse head-on. “You’re the angel who was always saying he knew everything.”

“Or the shells? The trench mortars? The Spanish flu? Do you remember the flu, Henry Bright? The men drowning of it in the trenches? Is Jesus Christ, the King of Heaven, the King of the Spanish Flu? Of the smells? Of the shit and piss? Is Jesus Christ, the King of Heaven, King of all that misery as well?”

“So what if he is?” Bright said. “I don’t care anymore.”

“You don’t mean that, Henry Bright. Please come to one side so that I might look at you when you address me.”

Bright stared deep into one of the horse’s eyes, as if he were looking through a hole in the world. “You left me when I got shot. We’re finished, you and me.”

“Answer me, Henry Bright: Is Jesus Christ the King of everything that you’ve seen?”

“Maybe he is.”

“Why do you suppose a good King would let all those things happen? Doesn’t a King have the power to stop them?”

“Why are you making me say all these things? I don’t know why he does what he does—”

“Nor do I,” the horse said. “Nor do I. The cruelty I’ve seen is beyond my understanding. So I’ve decided we need a new King of Heaven.”

Bright stood a long moment in the darkness, the empty
bucket dangling in his hand. A valedictory stream of urine shot from the horse, drumming hollowly against the ground, as if there were only a thin crust of earth between its hooves and the underworld. Bright peered about him and into the woods, but there was nothing out there. “I don’t want to be talking to you anymore,” he said finally. “Do you hear me, angel? I didn’t ask for you to come around here. You left me out there all shot up and I didn’t hear from you for months. Now you’re here, just fresh as a strawberry and won’t get out of my horse, and talking like you always talked, like nothing ever happened.”

“You were never abandoned, Henry Bright. I saved you many times. Remember the graveyard, when the shell landed in front of you and did not explode? And what about in the village? How was it that you kept living while so many others did not? I saved you from drinking the poisoned water and from being discovered as you lay in the ditch. I kept you from being buried along with Sergeant Matthews, and I saved you from being shot in the head on the last day of the War. Who was it but me that grabbed your leg and pulled you to the ground where you would be safe? I saved your life hundreds of times, thousands of times. The bullets that came for you were legion. Tell me truthfully: If not for me, would you have lived?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Well, anyway, I didn’t ask you for any of that.”

“Of course you did. From the very first moment you heard my voice, you called out to me without ceasing.”

“What about all them others? Why was it me you saved and not any of them?”

“Because I chose you, Henry Bright. That day in the church, when you looked up at me, I knew that you alone were the one to help me bring the Future King of Heaven into the world. He is the son you will have with the girl, and, come that great day
when the boy takes his throne, men will no longer be forced to kill other men. They will farm, work a trade, marry. They will die in their beds. War will be a thing of the past.”

He walked to the creek, dipped the bucket in the water, and set it near the horse for the animal to drink. At the cabin door he lifted the flap, then stood there in the triangle of light for a long moment.

It was four nights later that he saddled the horse and set out toward the Colonel’s house to bring back his bride.

After Amelia was gone, he held the comb up to the dim light of the window once more. A hairline crack ran grayly up one of the fine white tines. The woman carved into the comb’s base looked accusingly at him for this. He held her face up nearer to the window, but the fire had turned the sky the color of engraver’s ink, and the only real illumination came from the treetops pluming brightly at the lawn’s edge. He pulled her tiny face very close to his own, trying to read her expression, and in doing so the tines seemed to catch a figure running jerkily between them toward the barn. The figure was as thin as a scarecrow, his hat pulled down hard over his pate, his face slanted down against the wind. He wore an outmoded military jacket, and across his back, pulled tight with its tiny burden, hung the sling that Bright had made from Rachel’s dress.