Bright's Passage: A Novel (20 page)

He threw the door open and stood disoriented in the hallway. It was white plaster and stretched away forever in both directions, the distances measured in potted ferns and musty prints of hunting dogs and prize thoroughbreds. He chose a direction and ran past the numberless doors and flocked wallpaper until he arrived at the brass portals of two elevators. He stood wavering before these, then saw the stairwell beckoning to him through an inconspicuous doorway only a few yards farther on. He threw himself down the steps three and four at a time, holding on to the banisters so that his momentum wouldn’t carry him crashing into the plaster busts and knickknacks that crammed the landings. The stairway became more and more crowded with people the closer he got to the ground floor. By the time he rounded the second-floor landing, it felt as if he was wading in a living river of animals, children, nannies, and noise. He pushed his way down into the midst of the confusion and caught a glimpse of the girl Margaret, still directing her brood. He squeezed by her into the domed lobby. Everywhere, trunks and bags were being loaded on large pallets, and porters rushed about, writing on tags and directing one another. Well-dressed men and women stood on the fringes of the activity putting on and taking off gloves, fanning themselves with summer
hats, worrying buttons. Children chased one another gleefully through the maze of legs and luggage beneath the dome, climbing on sofas, on hand trolleys, even up on the stately black piano, which stood like a river rock in the middle of the floor.

He wove and jostled his way through the frantic cauldron to the revolving doors and, passing through them, ran down the wide white hotel steps to the drive. Automobiles were backed up fender to fender, adding their own smoke to the air as they vied for space and their drivers shouted at one another. Through the human and mechanical commotion came, at intervals, the velveteen drip of wildlife careening onto the grass from through the gaps in the burning curtains beyond. In the midst of all this, no one seemed to notice Henry Bright as he ran in desperation toward the fire and the barn that it was about to devour.

It looked like the outskirts of the War: carts and horses, huffing engines of all kinds, women and children without homes, and men digging into the dirt to save a piece of ground that only seemed like theirs in that single, desperate moment. The wildfire was a living angry thing in front of him. He could feel the ground itself getting hotter through the soles of his boots, and he was tossed about by gusts of grit-streaked wind. Above its rushing in his ears, he heard another sound and realized that he was screaming, just as he always had when the order came and he fixed his bayonet and climbed up over the sandbags to cross the fields. Then suddenly he was at the lawn’s edge, and the world had gotten so atrociously loud and leaden with heat that even the noises coming from his own throat were lost.

Each step toward the incandescent whiteness of the barn became a step into the forge. He skirted a row of rattling cornstalks, moving along the barn’s broad side until he came around to the front of the building and could see where its doors hung open. A man’s body lay there in the doorway amid a blizzard of white chicken feathers. His neck was a lattice of cuts and
scrapes, his dead eyes filled with the same look of insult and terror that crosses an animal’s face as it is dragged into the underbrush.

In the midst of the heat, a cold yellow wave of fear sloshed up in Bright’s chest. He spun, certain that Corwin and Duncan were behind him, but no one was there. His eyes roved the long row of cornstalks, searching them for faces, but the husks only clapped against each other merrily and gave nothing away. He turned back toward the body lying in the barn doorway and found himself face-to-face with his horse. The animal stood before him, lock-kneed and rigid, its mouth flecked with spittle, its flanks quivering. The black eyes rolled and the big nose snuffed hard against the thick air. The Colonel sat high astride the animal, the baby in the sling upon his chest, the gaping muzzle of the gun pointed down at Bright’s head. The horse canted nervously to the left but the Colonel pulled it back to true, hauling viciously on the reins, cutting the bit deep beneath its lolling tongue.

Bright looked up into the black length of the barrel. “That’s my mother’s rifle.”

The old man’s eyes glinted. He kicked the horse hard and the animal lunged forward, knocking Bright back against the side of the barn wall with its shoulder. “All your running away,” he said, “and you run right to me. A coward always ends up running toward what he wishes to escape. There is no irony in it.” He glanced to either side, looking for something. “My goddamn boys are off somewhere,” he said. “My useless goddamn boys are off somewhere, but”—he pushed the muzzle of the rifle forward into Bright’s face—“it makes no difference to you and me.”

Bright looked past the gun into the horse’s eyes. “You’re gonna let him kill me now?”

“Fear not, Henry Bright.” The angel’s voice was calm.

“But I did everything you told me to!”

“All is well.”

Forgetting the rifle pointed down at him, he stepped toward the horse. The Colonel kicked him in the teeth, knocking him painfully back against the barn wall again. His eyes had begun to water hard from the smoke, burning so that it was a struggle to keep them open.

“My daughter.” The Colonel, too, was weeping as he ran a sleeve across his mouth. “She was my beautiful girl. You stole her away from me.” The tears streamed freely down his face and dropped onto his grandchild as he looked down at the infant. For a moment the old man on the horse seemed to forget that Bright was even there, then his head snapped up once more. “You stole her away from me just like your mother tried to do,” he said. “I should have killed you both. I should have shot you down when you were small and buried you where you fell.” A thick cloud of smoke enveloped them. The Colonel doubled over, coughing in the saddle. The rifle barrel dipped as he struggled for breath.

“Stay very still, Henry Bright,” the angel commanded serenely. “Stay very still and close your eyes.”

Another rolling barrage of heat washed over them as the bales of hay inside the barn caught fire. The wind whipped the Colonel’s hat off and sucked it behind him into the whirling vortex. He didn’t seem to notice. He pulled the rifle hammer back.

Henry Bright looked up into the Colonel’s eyes briefly, but the fear was gone, and neither the old man or the waiting infinity of the rifle were of interest anymore. He found that all he wanted to do in the remaining moments of his life was to look at his son. The baby seemed strangely at peace in the conflagration. His coppery hair blew out in all directions. Bright realized that he, too, felt a kind of peace.

If he had lived, it occurred to him, he might have eventually felt that same kind of peacefulness at home, watching his boy grow up. He would have tended to his chickens and rabbits and goats and taught his son the things that his own mother had taught him. And, should he ever again smell the scent of lemons, he might one day have been able to think of sweet tea or lemonade instead of a pile of bodies on the edge of a ragged November tree line.

Maybe, he thought. If he had lived.

He thought about Rachel, whom he had loved since they were small. He felt happy to have held, even for a short while, the son whom she had delivered into his arms. He wondered if his own father had felt such a moment of grace as the earth collapsed around him.

He took one last look at his son and closed his eyes.

The last thing he felt before he heard the gunshot was the breath of the angel on his cheek. After that there was nothing but the heat and the drifting sensation of time continuing to pass in the world beyond his eyelids. He was in hell, he thought. In hell or the War.

He opened his burning eyes to find out which it was.

Above him the Colonel sat erect in the saddle, so still that he could have been posing for his portrait. A purple flower had blossomed beneath his right eye. It bloomed, then wilted and ran down over his cheekbone and into his collar. The old man’s face sagged, and then his head drooped and he looked down at his chest as if someone were in the process of pinning a medal there.

The Colonel slumped forward in the saddle. Behind him, a pistol in his outstretched arm, was a man Bright had never seen before. Next to him, faces white and slick with sweat, stood Amelia and Brigid. The Colonel listed in the saddle, his deadweight pulling the horse off balance. Bright pushed away from
the barn wall, lunging to catch the old man’s body before it toppled off the horse and crushed his son.

The horse began to stamp, but Bright grabbed a stirrup and held the animal where it was as Brigid rushed forward and took the reins. He couldn’t reach high enough to pull the sling over the Colonel’s head, so he began to ease the body gently down out of the saddle. The buttons of the old man’s jacket were hot to the touch.

He saw his mother’s rifle only as it slipped from the Colonel’s hands. It fell to the ground, firing its single charge. Angel or no angel, the sound of the shot was finally too much for the horse. It went wild, pulling away from Brigid and charging toward Amelia and the man with the pistol as Bright fought hard to hold on. The child bounced crazily in the sling around the dead man’s drooping neck.

A second shot sounded, and the rampaging animal, seeming to remember something all of a sudden, went instantly still. It hung there frozen a moment, then collapsed on Henry Bright, pinning him to the ground by his legs. Lawrence reached down and fired a final, merciful shot into its head.

Brigid knelt. “Are you all right?” He answered something, but she was already intent on pulling the infant from the sling.

“You’re cracked, H.!” Amelia bent over and yelled down at him. “I tell you to stay put and order room service and this happens?” She watched as Lawrence jammed the Colonel’s rifle stock between the horse’s hindquarters and the ground. He and Amelia began to lever the deadweight slowly off Bright’s legs.

Bright pushed and scraped against the hot ground with his hands and elbows until he’d pulled his feet free and he could stand. They ran from the barn, doubled over, through throes of corrosive soot, washed forward by the percussive
whoosh
of exploding trees, surfacing finally on the great lawn like castaways.

The air was still brutally hot and he struggled to catch his
breath as he looked over at Brigid holding his son. She looked back at him, her eyes widening, and yelled something that he couldn’t make out. Only when he felt his hair catch fire did he realize that his jacket was burning. He ran to the nearest of the small ponds and threw himself in.

Brigid came to the water too, and he sloshed to the girl’s side. She was looking down at the ashen-faced child with deep concern. The boy lay totally still, his expression a mask. Bright reached for the bundle in disbelief, but Brigid slapped his hands away. She bent and dunked the child in the water and, as if reborn, the boy came up howling.

Amelia and Lawrence stood at the pond’s edge looking back at the fire. The barn gave way to the flames all at once, as if it had suddenly been transformed into a great swarm of black bees, which at some signal went buzzing heavenward together. Amelia slipped her arm around Lawrence, whom she would marry in the fall, when the weather cooled and the humidity died down. Bright and Brigid looked down at Henry. As she had lifted the infant from the water, the boy had opened his eyes for the first time. They were beautiful and blue, just like Rachel’s had been.

They were coming up the bank when the figure of a man staggered out of the fire and stood encased in the dirty-yellow no-man’s-land between the trees and the pond as if trapped in amber. Although he made no sound, a serrated cry of alarm came cutting through the roar of the fire from the animal he carried on his back.

By the time Bright reached him, Duncan had sunk to his knees. He tried to pull the goat from his shoulders, but Duncan held the creature’s hooves tightly in his fists, unwilling or unable to let go. Bright knocked Duncan to the ground and climbed on top of him, as if he meant to choke him. Duncan made no move either to resist or to let go of the goat, and after a long,
tangled moment, Bright grabbed the Colonel’s son by his hair and shirtfront and pulled him to his feet. He shoved him, the goat still on his back, to the pond’s edge and pushed Duncan in. As he hit the water, the goat finally kicked herself free of Duncan’s grip and stood shakily sneezing in the mud.

“I found her,” Duncan said, sitting up in the water. “She was running around in the fire and I caught her.” He leaned forward and took a drink of water. “Do you have the baby?” Soaked, Duncan looked more like a child than a man. “He’s my sister’s baby.”

“Yes,” Bright said. “Come on.” The goat was looking at him across the water, as if trying to remember something. A dream came back to him then. In it he was kicking Duncan in the head.

Duncan woozily reached around in the pond for the goat. It made no struggle as he scooped it into his arms again. “I think I need help walking,” he said.

“Where did you come from?” He helped the Colonel’s son up the bank.

“Corwin and me weren’t allowed to stay inside the hotel with the other folks ’cause of some of the things he used to do. They all blamed me too. One of them knocked me down and he was beating me, but a man from the hotel stopped him. We still had to leave, though, so we went to the barn.” Duncan coughed. His ribs seemed about to poke through his skin. “And at the barn there was all these chickens. I looked at Corwin. I saw what was in his mind.”

Bright looked in those deep-set eyes. “Where’s Corwin?”

“That hotel man came across the field just when Corwin was starting in on the chickens. He tried to stop Corwin but it wasn’t no use. He didn’t know about my brother. Corwin knocked him down and then … He wouldn’t stop. Finally I took a shovel and I hit Corwin over the head with it real hard and it killed
him. That didn’t make no difference to the hotel man, though. He was already gone. I saw my father coming across the field, so I dragged my brother over behind the barn. Your goat was standing there. She took one little look at me and just lit out. I said to myself, ‘She’s gonna run right into the fire.’ So I chased after her until I caught her.”