Bright's Passage: A Novel (21 page)

He looked around wildly. “Where’s he at? My father?”

“He died,” Bright said. “I’m sorry,” he added.

“I’m not.”

They passed a group of men going in the opposite direction, shepherding the big pumper toward the pond. Some were already wearing gas masks. Farther on, others were just setting out for the fire, most still dressed raggedly in the clothes that they had been wearing when they were driven from their homes. Among them were some of the hotel guests in shirtsleeves, their faces blanching in the temperature. Near the gate, people worked furiously to dig firebreaks with whatever they had. Some used shovels, but others turned the ground with hoes, knives, even spoons. The auntly woman from the general merchandise store was there, ripping great, green chunks of soil and grass from the ground with a pickax. A line of children waited with buckets at a water pump by the kitchen entrance. A hose now ran out of the fountain and was being used to wet the lawn.

“Kill him, Henry Bright.”

Bright heard the voice but did not stop walking.

“Henry Bright, you must kill Duncan. Then we will find a mother for the child.” Bright glanced toward the goat hanging exhausted in Duncan’s arms. Even its ears dangled listlessly. Suddenly it looked up at him, its pupils golden keyholes, its voice serene and confident. “He must die, Henry Bright. The safety of the Future King of Heaven demands it.”

Bright looked away and didn’t speak. They rejoined Brigid
and his boy in the milling crowd near the fountain. The girl held the child closely and smiled as Bright approached. He reached out and touched his son’s hair. “I have to do something,” he told her. “I’ll be back directly.”

He turned to Duncan. “I was in the War. I went to France and I saw some things there.” He paused. “No, I saw a lot of things that I wish I’d never seen. Awful things. Sometimes I still see them.” Bright’s hands clenched tightly at his sides, and he ground his teeth as he fought with some inner thought. Then, suddenly, “Were you there?”

“Where?” Duncan asked.

“Did you go to the War? Did you come out of the farmhouse that night?”

For once, the black stones of Duncan’s eyes seemed to register surprise. “Me?” he said. “I never been this far from home.”

Bright searched those eyes for any traces of the farmhouse that might be hidden in them. Then his face relaxed and the tautness went out of his shoulders. He reached out to pet the goat in Duncan’s arms. “I guess you were right about one thing after all,” he said to it.

“What?” Duncan asked.

“I have to take my goat now,” Bright said to him. “Don’t you worry, she’ll be safe. Maybe you and I will find a new goat when this is all over,” he added.

Duncan gave the goat to Bright and sat down on the edge of the fountain.

“You must kill him, Henry Bright. If you do, I will help you find a mother for your son.”

At his feet, the hotel steps rippled upward like the train of a wedding dress. He ascended them, the she-goat tucked under his arm, and passed through the revolving doors into the silence of the now-deserted lobby. Once inside, man and goat looked
up into that domed sweep of beneficent blue sky, so different from the apocalyptic orange world without.

At the center of the great, round room, beneath the eternal early-fall clarity of the painted dome, stood the batholithic piano, impenetrably dark. He carried the creature across the room toward the glossy black slab, turning a slow full circle and checking that the sky above them was as empty as it had appeared earlier. When he was sure that it was, he placed the she-goat atop the piano. Her hooves clicked soundingly against the ebony, causing faint vibrations in the strings. Somehow the sounds were magnified beneath the high ceiling, as if, high above, a discordant orchestra had begun to tune.

“Jee-roosh needs a mother, Henry Bright. The Future King of Heaven needs someone to care for him until he can take the throne.”

“Enough of that,” Bright said. “Keep it. I’ve heard enough.”

“Do as I say!”

“We’ve had our differences, you and me, but everyone should have a home, and it weren’t a trouble to bring you here. You kept me safe when I was in the War, and maybe I wouldn’t have married Rachel if it wasn’t for you, and maybe we wouldn’t a had a son.” He paused to consider the thought. “Maybe that’s all true. I don’t have any idea one way or the other. But I do know that without you, I wouldn’t have burned down our cabin and the whole forest and all those people’s homes and let my horse get shot. And,” he said, “I wouldn’t have let anybody make me believe I couldn’t raise my own boy.”

He looked at the goat. “I hope that this place will make you happy. If the fire don’t reach the hotel I guess you’ll be safe enough. There’s no one else around you in that sky to bother you, so just get out of that goat and go on up there now. Git.”

“Don’t leave me here, Henry Bright,” the angel commanded.

“Maybe if you’re happy here,” Bright continued, “you’ll just let me go on about my life with my boy.” He looked up into the blue and closed his eyes a moment. He was very tired.

“I know you’re angry with me,” he said, opening them again after a while. The goat was staring at him ponderously, her little teeth sliding back and forth against one another. He smiled at this. “I guess that’s all a load of junk you told me about the King of Heaven and everything, but if any of it is the truth, if my son Henry really is the future King of Heaven, then I figure when he gets old enough, if you’re still mad at me for leaving you here, maybe he can straighten things out between the two of us.”

He leaned over the piano’s edge and kissed the goat on her nose. The animal snuffled at the collar of his uniform, and the two of them stayed there a long moment. Then, without looking back, Bright spun on his heels and strode out from beneath the cool light of the dome and through the revolving doors.

At the edge of the lawn, the tumult of flames and smoke was smearing the sky into the ground. Toward the fire’s sway marched lines of men and women, holding tiny buckets of water with which to soak the grass. At times throughout the night, they seemed to turn from real, living people into mere photographs of people, and then from photographs into memories, which are like photographs, and finally, as the ground blurred beneath them, whatever parts of them that could be seen from afar seemed to float like ghosts in the rippling air as they went about their work.

He descended the steps and wove his way back through the crowd of refugees. Amelia and Lawrence, arm in arm, were being fretted over by a knot of well-dressed people. Duncan stood near them, looking about him at the world through red-rimmed eyes as if for the first time. Bright found Brigid where he had left her, holding his son in her arms. He smiled at her and
she returned the smile. He looked into his son’s blue eyes and laughed. It was a strange sound to hear coming from his mouth. He leaned forward to kiss the boy’s forehead. With her free hand, Brigid reached out and brushed stiff, white goat hairs from the shoulders of his jacket and then gently pulled him forward by a lapel and kissed his own smoke-stained forehead. He looked at the mother and child together for a long time and then made to join some men heading to fight the fire. Abruptly, though, he turned to face her once more and, drawing from his pocket a small and ancient ivory comb, he pressed it into her hand for safekeeping.