Twilight (5 page)

He wandered aimlessly about the farm, his mind reconstructing old lives. Old long-silent voices told him tales. Beseeched him to remember them and carry them back to the world they’d lost. Folks were born here, grew old here. Died here, for he found tilting tablets of stone and sunken oblong declivities in the earth beneath the sawbriars and orange bells of cowitch. Old rooms papered with newsprint and flour paste, and he’d wander the house reading this surreal mural of old news as if it had something to tell him.

He felt remote, utterly alone. With the cool earth against his back he awoke sometime in his second night and he could feel the earth wheeling on its mitred course through eternity. Here the sky was clear and so strewn with stars there seemed no darkness between them but simply a vast phantasmagoria of light. Weak with hunger he watched loom out of the night strange gaudy constellations like great wheels rolling toward him and turning endless in the void as if here in the Harrikin even the heavens were ancient and strange. They seemed to alter night to night as if the universe itself was still in flux. Once a shower of falling stars that seemed to have fallen prey to some celestial epidemic but instead of them showering around him he felt the pull of the earth fall away from his back and he became weightless, rising toward their streaking light like ofttold tales of souls raptured upward.

On the third day he came upon an apple orchard reverting to wildness. Most of the trees were dead, black twisted trees like the skeletons of profoundly deformed beasts. Yet one was thick
with fistsize summer apples. The earth beneath strewn with them and the drone of bees and the musk of apples everywhere. They were sweetly tart and full of winy juice and he wanted nothing better. He seemed to have reached some curious point where he wanted nothing at all save the fall of night and the configurations of the stars to study as if he’d decipher some message there. Some sign.

On the third or fourth night in a dream or vision an old man came to him who would lead him out of this blighted waste. He’d been sent, he said, he couldn’t say by whom. The old man’s flesh had wasted away on his bones and beneath the faded chambray shirt he wore his arms were thin and fragile as sticks. In times past he’d been shackled in irons, hands and feet. He wore them yet but the chains had been sawn away, they were just heavy bracelets at the ankles and wrists with the sawn links appended like fey adornments.

Tyler had a fire going he kept feeding sticks and balls of grass. He on one side of the fire and the old man at the otherlike ancients at council. Somewhere in the night foxhounds bayed then passed in a hollow below them and the wind brought voices or ghostvoices of men. He shook his head and told the old man he guessed he’d find his own way out. He couldn’t be beholden to another. In order to survive in this world and then make a life in it he had to do this on his own. At last he lay back and slept with his head pillowed on an arm. He awoke once in the night and raised up and looked through the smoke of the dying fire and he was alone.

The next day his sister and a schoolteacher named Phelan and a hunter they’d hired as guide named Tippydo found him and took him home. It didn’t seem to matter. All things and
all places had come to seem transitory at best and he seemed to have arrived at some idea of where he fit or did not fit into the scheme of things.

The old man was contrite. He grasped Tippydo’s hand and pressed into it a twenty-dollar bill. Twin tears crept down his pouched cheeks, etching paths of cleanness out of the grime. He’d never do it again. Wouldn’t have done it then but for bad whiskey. There seemed little whiskey that was good that year for soon he was at it again. He seemed in a constant state of anger which Tyler seemed to bring into focus.

By the time he died Tyler could have whipped him instead, but he never did it. He never hit him, never cursed him, just did his best to stay out of his way. Honoring some biblical restraint of parental honor.

Already he was groping for a way to live, to accommodate himself to the world or it to him. He felt that if he fell upon his father with murder in his heart that he had proven irrevocably that he and the old man had the selfsame cankered blood in both their hearts and if this was so all was lost. The day the old man died he was standing on the stairs to the attic. He’d stopped a minute to rest and catch his breath, and then he’d come on and batter at the door. Tyler imagined the door charring beneath his ceaseless tirade of invective. Against Tyler, against the uncaring God who’d let such twisted fruit of his loins thrive.

The way Tyler always imagined it God had been sitting before the fireplace with his feet propped up on the hearth. Or maybe just on midair—God could do that. He was reading an old hymnbook or maybe a seed catalog. Listening with one ear and trying to concentrate on his reading. Finally after years and
years of this just getting totally fed up and throwing his book against the wall of Heaven and turning and fixing the old man with his fierce eye. God’s eyes flickered with electric blue light and the old man’s heart exploded in a torrent of black blood and corruption and he just dropped like a stone, dead before his body touched the stairs, and God went back to his seed catalog.

For the first week after the briefcase disappeared from the trunk of his Lincoln, Fenton Breece lived on tenterhooks, waiting for the other shoe to fall. Dark visions haunted him waking and sleeping. The faceless burglar in an alley or a stone culvert hurriedly slashing open the briefcase and dumping out its spare contents, expecting money or who knew what but certainly not expecting the neat stack of photographs. Riffling through them an act of sacrilege. A greasy thumbprint perhaps on the pale bloom of a breast. A thin fingernail of ice traced the nape of Breece’s neck and down hispine.

I’ve just got to do something, he thought in his brisk businesslike manner. But there wasn’t anything to do.

Then in a few days a measure of reason returned. No one had called him. Nothing sinister in the mail, the sky had not fallen. At length he began to see the faceless thief glancing at the rubberbanded photographs in disgust and tossing them away in a ditch. Mud, debris, shards of broken glass, and clotted leaves hid them modestly from prying eyes. Yellow water opaque with mud sent them turning dreamily, pale washedout ghosts of themselves, toward the muddy sanctity of the Tennessee River.

The woman behind the desk had an officious manner and carefully coiffed bluelooking hair. She seemed to have appraised the girl by some abstract standard she kept in her head and found her wanting.

Mr. Breece is not in right now, she said.

I reckon I’ll just wait then, the girl said.

It may be a good while, the woman said.

Then I reckon I’ve got a good while to wait, the girl said. She crossed the narrow office and seated herself in a contoured yellow chair. She took up a magazine and sat staring at it though she could have told you no word that it said. She could hear the woman shuffling papers importantly about. After a while the woman cleared her throat.

What was it about?

It was about me seeing Fenton Breece, she said. She went back to her magazine.

He may not be in for a while. Perhaps I could help you. You couldn’t unless you’re Fenton Breece, and I don’t believe you are.

After a while the outer door opened and Breece himself came in. He was wet and coldlooking and beyond him rain fell slantwise in the wind. She hadn’t known it had begun to rain. Breece folded his umbrella and stood it in the wastebasket to drain. Messy out, he said brightly. A pale hand to the smooth bird’s wing of his hair.

A lady to see you, the woman said grudgingly.

Breece turned, and for an instant recognition and something other flickered in his eyes. Then nothing. He glanced back at the woman behind the desk. He looked at his watch.

You can go any time, Mrs. Cothron, he said. My office is
back here, he told the girl. He pointed down a narrow hall. She got up and followed him.

She sat primly on the edge of an armchair. Worn purse clutched bothhanded in her lap. Her eyes on Breece’s face were fierce and intent and unwavering, and they made him nervous.

You buried my father, she began.

He nodded unctuously. He couldn’t wonder what this was about. He remembered the girl, and he remembered the old man, but he couldn’t fathom what she wanted unless someone else was dead. He kept glancing at the purse, and he couldn’t remember if it had all been paid or not. Maybe she owed him money.

Mann Tyler, she said. He had an insurance. We paid for an eight-hundred-dollar steel vault to go over his casket, and it’s not there anymore.

The room was very quiet. She could hear rain at the window. Breece got up and crossed the room. He peereddown the hall and closed the door. He went back and sat down. His hands placed together atop the desk formed an arch. He was watching her and she could see sick fear rise up in his eyes.

Just not there, she went on. And that’s not all. He’s buried without all the clothes we bought for him, and he’s been…mutilated.

She just watched him. A tic pulsed at the corner of one bulging eye like something monstrous stirring beneath a thin veneer of flesh.

Absurd on the face of it. I’m a reputable businessman; no one has ever questioned my professional ethics. My work is exemplary, a matter of pride to me, and you are treading on dangerous legal ground if you intend to accuse me of
misconduct.

Misconduct, she said. Her mouth twisted with the taste of the word. She had leant forward, elbows on knees. She smiled slightly. From the street the faint sound of a car door closing, an engine starting up. The bluehaired lady drove away. Breece was staring past the girl’s shoulder through the window to the street.

Dangerous ground indeed, he murmured. A matter to be taken up with my counsel. But for the sake of discussion, just speaking hypothetically, suppose that such things were true. How would you come to know of it?

We dug him up, she said.

You what?

We dug him up. We had reason to suspect something was wrong about his burial, and we were proved right. Then just to be sure we dug up several more. I forget how many. I don’t even want to think about the things we found. No one wouldexpect to find the things we did, not in a thousand years.

Graverobbers. Vandals digging up graves and committing atrocities. Desecrating the corpses. I’ve often heard of such things but I never expected to find it in the town I live in.

I’ve heard of them myself. But none where these vandals took pictures of you and a bunch of naked dead women and then hid them in the trunk of your car. Why do you reckon they did that?

His eyes darted away. They were a hard glassy blue, slick as wet marbles. The open-shut eyes of a doll. The hands were pale, fleshy spiders, the fingers meshing endlessly. One hand trembled violently, and he stayed it with the other. She thought he might weep.

My car was vandalized. So it was you that did that.

I bet you ran straight to the law, too. I bet there’s an all-points bulletin out about those pictures.

What do you want?

You’re finished. You don’t begin to suspect how finished you are. When all these people hear about what you’ve done to their folks, they’re just going to mob you. They’d hang you, but you won’t last that long. They’ll tear you apart like a pack of dogs.

What do you want?

I want the things you done to my daddy made right. I want him buried with the decency you expect your folks to be put away with. I want that waterproof vault we paid for around his casket.

Breece was nodding. Head bobbing metronomically. Of course, he said. If you aren’t satisfied, I’ll do anything I can to satisfy you.

I’m a hell of a way from satisfied. Of course, I’ll refund your money. No question about that. I could even give you a liberal sum for what they call, ah, punitive damages.

And what would you expect in return for that?

He was silent for a long moment. The pictures, of course, he finally said. I’d have to have them back. They’re subject to misunderstanding, a delicate subject, part of an experiment you wouldn’t understand.

I expect you’re right about that. I was wondering about the panties. Are they part of the experiment, too?