Bright's Passage: A Novel (6 page)

The boys fetched the goat off the rock in the stream and, shortly after, the baby slung securely around his chest and his livestock in tow, Henry Bright climbed the incline of shale and slate tailings to the road and struck out toward the town to buy a new box of matches. He’d been riding only a few minutes when he heard the growl of an automobile coming around the curve of the mountainside. It swerved to avoid them and then was gone around the next bend, a buff-colored, open-topped blur, its tires spraying his face with bits of gravel, the chemical fumes of its engine exhaust settling in his nose a moment before being picked up by the wind and blown behind him, out across the gorge, through the slats of the railroad trestle and into the sky where it would eventually join with the great veil of smoke that was rising from the forest at his back.

A while later the road changed from gravel to macadam, and the smell of roast chicken and chives, of mint and fresh-baked bread, threaded the air as he and his son rode through drowsing afternoon heat into the town. It seemed a tidy place of dappled white houses and American flags, and he found it almost impossible to keep the greedy animals back from the banquet of flowers spilling down to the street from arbor after shady arbor. Children could be heard, as could the lovely low hum of
leisurely work being done: painting of fences, canning of tomatoes and runner beans, gossip over cooling pies. Even the trees here seemed to have a kind of deep green and prepossessing prosperity that the trees of the forest could have no share in.

He found Main Street and tethered the horse and goat under the sign of the general-merchandise store. Inside was long and narrow, and he stood with the baby on his chest in the doorway a moment, allowing his eyes to adjust to the cool darkness of the aisles. The boards under his feet had been worn to a honey luster by workboots and linseed oil. To his left, a long counter supported an ornate brass register, behind which bolts of colored fabric stood row on row. In front of the till, amid a dawdling, noisy clutch of hip-high children, a young woman with a round milky-white face listened to an older woman address the little ones from behind the counter with an auntly air.

Bright walked down the far aisle, listening to their talk, his son sleeping warm against his chest. As he approached with his new box of matches, the two women broke off their conversation and the younger began to arrange her children about her. He laid the matches down on the counter alongside a dime.

The girl turned toward him. “Oh! What a beautiful baby!”

Bright made no reply but tilted his chin down against his chest to peer in acknowledgment at the infant who was just now waking and thrusting tiny fists aimlessly at the air. She pulled back the edge of the sling on his chest to peek in at the boy. “Hello … hello,” she cooed.

“I believe he needs a diaper,” the auntly one said, crinkling her nose. A bleached and sparkling rag appeared off the shelf from somewhere behind her and the woman laid it on the counter, pulling its edges taut and trim with the expert grace of long service. Next, she reached across and lifted the boy from Bright’s chest. After undoing the esoteric knots of his own efforts, she laid the child flat on the pristine square of fabric and
looked the baby over, pinching a foot, pulling its arms to full extension, clucking first to the right and left of the boy’s ears, and finally looking straight down into its tightly closed face. The boy twisted on his back like an overturned turtle. “Few mosquito bites,” she said, nuzzling its belly. All at once she tilted her head and looked up at Bright, her eyes gone flinty. “Where’s his mother?”

“She passed.”

The auntly woman looked at Bright for a long moment and then back down at the boy. The younger one leaned in for a closer look at the baby. The children sucked on candies near the door or else fussed around an old tomcat suffering them from a patch of sun by the front window. “Margaret,” the older woman asked, “will it be you or I that shows this poor man how to change a diaper?”

“You do it,” the girl named Margaret said. “You’re so much better at it than me.”

The old woman shook her head in disapproval. “Well, if you haven’t learned yet I just don’t know …”

“Oh, I don’t have to do any of
that
kind of thing,” Margaret said. “They have their own nannies for
that
kind of thing.”

The auntly woman shook her head again at this. She looked back up at Bright. “Are you coming from the fire?” It was the first time that Bright had heard someone besides the angel or himself speak of it.

“I saw it yesterday morning,” he said finally.

They looked at him expectantly, waiting for more.

“After he was born and”—he paused—“and …” He looked at the box of matches there on the counter. “Yes, Ma’am, I saw it,” he said.

“Mmm.” The auntly woman’s mouth set grimly, her eyes roaming over the naked baby. Then, drawing in her breath and pulling herself straight, she said, “Well, it’ll be here by tomorrow
or the day after if the weather doesn’t change.” She looked around the store. “We had a fire here when I was a girl,” she said. “Well, not here, but next town over. Anyhow, my father took the register out of the store with the help of three men, and they pulled it down the road on slats and buried it in our front yard. My father was a good man, always fair. Half the people in town saw him bury it there, but he knew it would be safe. The fire burned down the whole town, but he came back and dug up the cash register—this very cash register—and we started new right here.”

“When did your wife die?” Margaret asked, interrupting the older woman.

“Margaret!” the older woman barked. “Keep your mouth shut, if you don’t have any sense at all.” She wiped the child’s little legs clean with a rag.

“Day before yesterday,” Bright said.

“Oh.” Margaret looked down at the floorboards. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What’s your baby’s name?”

“Margaret! Tell me I didn’t just tell you to keep your mouth shut?”

“He doesn’t have a name,” Henry mumbled. He watched the auntly lady twist the ends of the diaper so that the whole assemblage seemed to wrap itself around his boy like magic. The spell of white fabric was held by two pins that materialized from the same nowhere that the diaper itself had.

“Well, you need a name for him,” the auntly one said. “Have you thought maybe about naming him after yourself?”

“He don’t need any kind of name like mine.”

“What’s that?” Margaret asked.

“Henry Bright.”

“Well, what’s wrong with a name like that?” Margaret asked. She turned to the auntly lady. “What’s wrong with the name Henry, after all?”

“Not a thing,” the auntly one replied. “What boy wouldn’t be proud to carry his father’s name? And a man like you who went to war and fought for his country?” She clucked her tongue and reached beneath the counter, pulling out a horsehair brush that she passed to the girl. “Margaret, reach up there and brush all that dust off his nice uniform. The shoulders there,” she said, “and his back,” she said, directing as the girl ran the soft brush over his uniform as she might dust a mantelpiece. “There.” Margaret passed the brush back to her. “I’m giving you a drop of cinnamon oil here … and here.” She put a dab of the warm-smelling stuff on either side of the sling hanging on his chest, then gave him back the boy. “Keeps the mosquitoes away,” she winked. She stood back from the counter and looked at Bright. “And for you, I have some cheese and crackers. I don’t like the looks of how thin you are in that uniform.” She placed a large wedge of hard white cheese in a square of brown paper and laid a package of crackers alongside it.

There arose the sound of an automobile outside, and the girl Margaret looked back toward the door, where her brood was trying to teach the tomcat how to lick a stick of candy. “That’s our car. I have to go now,” she said. “Mr. Bright, I’m very sorry for your loss. Everyone!” She clapped her hands for their attention and the children piled out of the store.

“Learn to tie a diaper!” the auntly one yelled after her as the door closed.

The men spread out as they approached the church, their eyes roving over the village square for any danger that might lurk in the debris. Bright reached the immense doors first, and at a signal from the sergeant, the others spread to either side. The wood was stained almost to ebony by age, and the weighty brass rings that served as handles were polished yellow at their base from centuries of use.

They waited on Sergeant Carlson for the signal to open the heavy doors, and, when he gave it, they grabbed the rings and pulled hard until a small crack afforded Bright a look inside. The sanctuary was narrow, the floor a diamond-checkerboard pattern of slate and marble. The walls had been painted an austere white but were stippled here and there with muted flecks of color as daylight shone through the few remaining stained-glass windows, as through the prism of an icicle. An altar hunkered squatly on a dais at the far end of the room, one corner chipped away, a candlestick fallen to the floor.

Bright signaled that the room was empty, and at another sign from Carlson, he slipped inside. In the single, brief moment before the others crowded in around him, he let his eyes rise to the painted ceiling and, unprepared for what he saw there, found
himself falling headlong into the crowded heaven that spiraled into infinity above him.

It was the blue of the sky that caught him first: a rapturous, painfully pure spike of color that hooked his eyes like fish and reeled them upward into the heights. Gone in that instant was the viscous puddle of October light that had dribbled in behind him through the crack in the doorway. Beneath the gracious blue vault of the church it was a fresh and dazzling spring morning at the beginning of the world.

His hand shot out, gripping the brass door handle hard, as if to keep himself from falling upward. He had believed the church to be empty, but, hanging there, Henry Bright realized he was in fact surrounded on all sides by a great gesticulating host of fellow beings. There were thousands of them in the sky around him—men, women, and children, in every conceivable pose and color. Some had the muscular builds of river-boat men and stood proudly astride their cake-white clouds. Others, a species of fat-faced-baby things, seemed to have leavened their way into the clouds themselves and popped their tousled heads at random from out of the billows, wearing expressions of frantic mirth and mischief. Many figures in the assemblage thrummed musical instruments, while others placidly displayed brutal and mysterious wounds. A finely featured woman held a pair of eyeballs on a platter, next to a nearly naked man who was calmly watching his own body being rendered into fat by flames.

Above this crowd and higher still, a circle of bearded and wild men looked down from their perches with electric severity at Henry Bright, though he barely noticed them. His eyes now had come to rest on the figure of a young girl kneeling in prayer there in the highest heavens at the dome’s apogee.

She was almost impossibly beautiful, her eyes filled with such
reserves of comfort that to Bright it seemed as if, had he come into the church only an instant earlier, she would have been happy to give him all the love and understanding he might have ever needed or desired. Sadly, though, this was not to be, for her face was even now caught in the act of turning toward the other figure who was interrupting her prayers.

This other interloper was an angel, its hair like twists of fire, its wings bejeweled with eyes in all states of opening and closing, its white robes trailing just behind it in this, its moment of arrival. It was impossible to tell what the angel was saying to the girl, but so beautiful was she, so composed and fatalistic was the poetry of her face against the urgency of the angel’s, that Henry Bright fell in love with her in that moment and stood staring up at her as if stricken.

“Bright!”

“Bright?”

Bathing in the radiant pool of the girl’s beauty, he was deaf to the men behind him and returned blinkingly to himself only to discover that he had been jostled forward by the others as they pushed past him into the church.

“Jesus! Would ya look at that!”

“Jesus my foot! Chaplain was right. Catholics. Nothing here but a bunch of dirty pictures. We oughta—”

The pealing bells above came back to him now and, turning, he found that he was standing before a small stone archway past which a staircase led upward into the bell tower. As the others argued with one another or else stood silently looking up into the blue, Bright stepped through the archway and began to climb the stairs.

Without his mother’s rifle, and with little money left to buy provisions, the winter was very hard. The wind shrieked and the stream froze solid. He melted snow for water in which to boil the dwindling reserves of dried corn and bitter carrots. Rachel had terrible pains and sickness for a while. Her tongue turned a bright red and she ran a fever, but she didn’t miscarry.

When the temperature dropped so low that the chickens stopped laying eggs, he brought them inside and they lived with the clucking all hours. The goats dug for forage some, but as the snow got deeper all the animals got thinner. He killed the first kid and they ate the thing down to nothing. Rachel’s health made an improvement. He killed another and made a stew with a few potatoes and the last of the carrots. She ate this for a week, and gradually the fever broke and her tongue returned to its normal shade. Now that they were inside the cabin, the hens began laying again. In the mornings there would be eggs in the folds of their blanket, in the bottom of the bucket, in the heel of a boot. She got up often now and would peek out at the horse through the freezing crack between the cabin flap and the door frame.

The horse was enduring the winter only slightly better than the goats. Its thick coat hung loosely over ribs, which showed as
plainly as the bars on an empty prison. Except for the times when Bright would rouse it for his rare trips to town, its breaths came slow and deep, as if it was waiting to be revived by a kiss of spring breeze or the chirp of returning birds. Rachel often asked to bring it into the house, something that Bright forbade explicitly. He returned from Fells Corner once to find that she had led the animal inside their cabin anyhow, throwing their quilt over it and stoking the fire. It had been hell getting the stubborn thing out again, but he relented somewhat after this episode and tied the animal to the leeward side of the cabin, where it would be most out of the wind.