The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  “A funeral parlor,” said Gregory hopelessly.

  Edward looked at them all with a darkling smile. “I had no time to play,” he said. “I had no time to study, to dance. I never learned to play the piano or paint or read books. I didn’t have the money to go to the nickelodeon. Why, we had a ball team on this street and I could run better, hit better, and throw better than anybody else! But there wasn’t time, after I was ten. There was the store. And all of you.”

  David gazed at him, and his slender face became moved and tremulous. “Edward has justice on his side,” said Maria. “If he works so hard, then it must be appreciated. But I do not like his tone. He will never join—”

  “Merry Christmas!” said Edward ironically. And he went to the door and for the first time a passage was made for him. He could feel the disturbed eyes of his brothers and sister on his back, and he straightened his shoulders and he was no longer tired.

  “Merry Christmas, my son!” said Heinrich imploringly, but Edward did not answer.

  Maria watched him go. She thought, My son has removed himself from us. He removed himself a long time ago, though doubtless he believes we have rejected him. Is it possible that the rejected have, in reality, rejected others first? Who is, in reality, the destroyer, Cain or Abel? Was Cain goaded beyond his strength by his brother? Were their mother and father truly the guilty ones? Who can tell, in this terrible and most confusing life? I know only one thing with surety: Edward is the reflection of myself, and I know my weaknesses, and he shall not suffer from his own, if I can prevent it. He is too strong to expire into nothing, as I expired.

  She moved ponderously toward the kitchen, and her expression was remote and determined. Edward’s lonely door, in the attic, banged behind him, and Maria winced. It is the eve of his birthday, she thought as she removed her coat. He thinks we have forgotten—that I, his mother, have forgotten. He does not know that each man must travel a lonely way to himself, and that the journey is frightful, but at the end is God. This, he will learn, and no one can help him but the Father. The road is more terrible, but more rewarding at the last, for the strong than the sheltered way of the weak.

  Edward lit his one oil lamp, which was unshaded but whose chimney he himself had brightly polished. It stood on an old round oak table, discarded from the parlor, and it was scarred by the years, having been second-hand in the first place. Neatly arranged about the lamp were a number of Edward’s books on physics and three copies of the Retail Merchant. After lighting the lamp, Edward lit his meager second-hand oil stove, a round small affair like a cylinder. It gave little heat; he stood over it and tried to warm hands which remained cold and stiff and trembling.

  He looked about his attic room. He alone occupied it. He could have shared a room with David, but would not, and had given no explanation. “He is so obstinate,” Maria would say, after she had urged her second son to move in with his brother in the larger, warmer, and more comfortable room on the middle floor. “A recluse. If he were an artist, one would understand.”

  The room was very narrow but ran the full length of the house. Only the part occupied by Edward’s old iron bed was walled and papered in a sleazy fashion. It had been so prepared four years ago when he had demanded the attic for himself. There was no ceiling, however, except the steep and slanting roof, all its rafters bare, all its nails revealed. Accordingly, the attic was fearfully hot in summer, paralyzingly cold in winter. Against one beaverboard wall with its paper of leprous purple flowers and venomous green leaves stood an ancient and lopsided dresser with a marble top and a blurred mirror. Against another wall had been hung a horizontal rod, concealed by a chintz curtain, which held Edward’s few clothes. There was one discarded kitchen chair near the table, and there were no other furnishings. The sagging bed was covered by an old patchwork quilt, thriftily bought by Maria in a church rummage sale. Beyond the uncertainly improvised walls lay the shadowy body of the attic, where baggage was stored, and abandoned furniture and numerous crates containing the family’s castoff apparel and books. Edward cared for his attic himself, and a broom stood in a distant corner.

  Once, three years ago, when Edward had had bronchitis and a doctor had had to be called after long family consultation, the doctor had glanced indignantly about the “room” and the rest of the attic. But young Edward had smiled and had said, “I could have a room downstairs with my brother, a nice room. But I like this. I made them give it to me.”

  Here he could be alone; here he could think; here no one could intrude. Here he could dream and read and study. Here was silence. Until a few months ago the attic had been filled with peace and tranquillity for him. Now there was no peace. The horrible purple and green wallpaper had a way, lately, of seeming to crawl before his eyes, and so he avoided looking at it as much as possible. The shapes of his furniture, once friendly and homely, had taken on firm and inimical outlines, as if withdrawing from him. The distant mounds of baggage and crates lurked and lost compactness, as if denying him their reality. There was grit on his books now, though once they had been tenderly dusted by him every day. Only the Retail Merchant, well read and constantly reread, showed evidence of being part of him. Passages were marked with pencil, and he referred to them often. The golden-lit dreams of his near past had gone, with all their entrancement and bemusement and happiness. They had been replaced by a hard sureness, like a blueprint.

  Well, Edward would say to himself with some misery, I guess it’s because I’m a man now, and not a kid, and I know what I want. I’m on my way. I suppose you have to pay something for that.

  Where had he heard that Spanish proverb? “Take what you want, says God. But pay for it!” He could not remember. However, he repeated it to himself several times a day, and it gave him a bitter courage. He was ready to pay. He was certain that he knew what it was that required so awesome a price from God.

  The attic seemed particularly cold and dingy and repellent tonight. It was the sleeping place of a stranger whom he did not know, though once he had known very well. The coldness of his hands was in his body, too; even his bones felt cold and tremulous, and the pit of his stomach. His face was dark and as fixed as granite, and there was an arctic grimness in his mind and a feeling of triumph which gave him no pleasure. He was too young, as yet, to know the source of all this. He only knew that where there had once been a softness and sweetness in him, in spite of all his work and strength and worry, a gentle yet powerfully urgent love for life and bright excitement, there was this as yet nameless rigidity and glacial induration, this icy objectivity. He did not regret the loss of what once had been his. He did not regret it until he was nearly fifty. On this Christmas Eve he could almost rejoice that he had lost what now seemed his “babyishness and silly ideas.” He did not know that what he was feeling was largely mixed with hatred, for hatred heretofore had been unknown to him and only a perplexing word.

  No sound came to him from downstairs; the family was still in the kitchen lingering over their coffee and cake. Edward lifted his head stiffly, and the frail lamplight fell on his clenched face. Mr. Enreich had told him to take a long look at his family. Well, he had taken that look tonight. Weaklings! David, Sylvia, Gregory, Ralph—all of them! Having been given gifts, they trifled with them. There was no dedication in their spirits, no determination, no drive. Well, thought Edward, I’m the boy who can drive them! They’ll toe the mark and make all the days of my life count, They’d better! I’m not giving up my life for nothing.

  These were new thoughts for Edward Enger, and some chill uneasiness came to him a moment later, some mysterious warning, some stern if voiceless admonition. He shook his head, as if denying. He did not understand. His whole body became like one co-ordinated muscle, bent like a bow for one target. For one instant his startled and alarmed soul sent him a message from an old Greek story which he had once read. “I shot my arrow at random, yet perhaps it was not at random, and I discovered it later in the dead heart of my brother.” Again Edward shook his head and t
his time as if shaking off the unearthly wing of a butterfly which had flown to him from an unknown place, once familiar to him but now lost forever.

  He walked up and down the uncarpeted and rough boards of the floor, and his footsteps were a slow and heavy drumming. He could control his thoughts now. Until last August he would let his thoughts, sometimes gilded and odd and secret and sweet, rove at their will, filling him with delight. He was over that “weakness,” since August. He could concentrate his thoughts and force them where he willed. He thought of George Enreich and his peculiar and reflective staring. He would be “tutored” by this successful man, he said to himself firmly and pushed that long staring out of his mind. He put his hand in his pocket and withdrew the velvet box which contained the golden pen. He looked at the pen. Gold. It was a wonderful color, Gold. Gold was all that mattered; you could see that on Pa’s face. You could see it in his reverence. For one instant Edward’s hand involuntarily lifted as if to throw the pen furiously from him. The next instant he had controlled himself and he rubbed the pen lovingly in his fingers. Nevertheless, he took box and pen to his dresser and put them away, far under his small supply of underwear. Something of that night remained in him. He never used the pen. For the Stalwart. Years later he understood why the pen remained locked away by him, by his own will.

  Suddenly his thoughts, escaping from him like lighted and determined birds, blew away from his control. Billy. Oh, he thought impatiently, I’ll make it up to him! But Billy had betrayed him in a way; he had revealed a frivolous and very worthless facet of his character to his friend, who had believed in his genius. He had stood up for David. He had played with David. He had acted like—like—an ape. Jumping up and down as he played the harmonica in that ragtime. My harmonica, thought Edward bitterly. He used to play beautiful music on it. Billy’s cheap, too. Well, Billy’s only a … Now the stern and voiceless admonition resounded in Edward’s inner ear, and he quelled his thought. But the poisonous residue remained, like a drop of vitriol in the cells of his spirit.

  (He forgot the battered New Testament Billy had given him. Maria, discovering it in its newspaper wrappings, believed it of no value and later stored it in the attic with all the other discarded things.)

  Billy fluttered in his mind, a ghost which would not be laid. Edward’s heart lurched, and the granite fixity left his face. I ought to be ashamed, he said to himself, even if Billy’s cheap now. But still, he shouldn’t have encouraged Dave. Oh, I’ll make it up to him! I shouldn’t have hit him. He’s my friend.

  Edward went to the one tiny oval window in the attic and leaned his forehead against the frost-encrusted glass. He rolled his head against it with a masochistic pleasure in his own penitential discomfort. Goddamn it, he suddenly thought, why don’t You speak to me any more? Well, I’ll go on loving You anyway. Remember me? I share Your birthday. All at once there were tears in his young eyes, and he sobbed dryly a few times. Look, he said silently in himself, they’re all down there celebrating and they never invited me. I’ve never sung Christmas carols with them since I was ten years old. I was always too tired. Me? Oh, I’m the one who isn’t interested in religion! Just a workhorse. I wouldn’t understand! Maybe You blame me for that, too, like the rest of them. Maybe You’re on their side and You don’t like me for trying to help them develop what You gave them.

  Like a soft and tender strain of music, little Margaret, almost forgotten Margaret, crept into the boy’s agonized thoughts. What was her last name? He could not remember. Something beginning with P or perhaps it was B. Never mind. She was only a kid.

  A cold wind blew in through the thin rafters, and the light of the lamp wavered and Edward shivered involuntarily. His thoughts ran away from him again. Where had he read something else? “Died at fifteen, buried at seventy-five.” Stupid thought. He wasn’t dead. He was alive for perhaps the first time in his life. He shook his head once more as if in denial. It was only because he would be fifteen tomorrow, fifteen in half an hour. That’s why he’d thought that silly thing.

  The snow was falling heavily outside; the little oval window blurred with fluffy whiteness, like shining moths in the lamplight. Now the harsh voice of the rising winter gale sounded against the rafters and thundered in the bricks of the chimney which rose through the attic. Loneliness, like a gaunt presence, haunted the long shadows, blew in Edward’s face, moved over his flesh. I should be in bed, Christmas Eve or not, thought Edward, glancing at the roundness of the feather bed under the quilt. But still he could not get undressed. It was as if he were waiting.

  The family came out of the kitchen, replete and warm. It was time for the Christmas carols, in German, and David sat down at the piano and the family settled in the light of the oil lamps on the unforgiving settees and carved chairs. They began to sing. It is too bad, thought Heinrich, that we do not have a tree, but the mother considers it plebeian. He remembered the gay little trees of his youth, sighed, sang louder to conceal his sigh. He was very tired, in all his short, plump limbs. The church party had seemed drearier than usual, with the children reciting in their shrill and precise voices, and the Christmas play had been disappointing for all Sylvia’s skill, Ralph’s brilliant painting, and David’s music. I do not understand this American way, said Heinrich to himself. It was not so in Germany. We had carolers on the snowy streets, and there were cakes and hot spiced wine in one’s home beside one’s fire or near the porcelain stove. And there were visitors to the home, carrying parcels tied with colored ribbon and much kissing and cold rosy cheeks presented to one’s lips, and the tinkling of bells in the clear white night. This was after church, of course, during which the minister spoke simply and joyously and the people’s eyes filled with happy and grateful tears. Now, it seemed, one had church parties during which everyone was bored except the parents of the particular child who was reciting at a given moment. Heinrich sighed again. It was so very barren here.

  There was so much talk in the newspapers and at patriotic celebrations of America’s “youth.” But America was not really young. She had no gaiety, no solidity, no laughter of friends, no love that extended beyond the house to strangers. The American “dream”? There was no dream if the dream concerned itself only with money and materialism. Yet, thought Heinrich sadly, it is such a wonderful country if only it would sing the old songs and laugh and kiss and greet even strangers courteously and wish them Godspeed when encountered in a beer garden or a crowded place or in a shop. Heinrich thought of the men of the Tyrol in their short leather trousers and the feathers in their hats and their gentle, polite manners and their eyes that danced. He thought of the girls in their bright skirts and their white lace-edged petticoats, and their full pink cheeks, and the children who did not look like sharp and wizened old men and women with wary eyes as flat as buttons:

  David had suddenly stopped playing, and Maria and her children sang the balance of “Stille Nacht” without his music. David, to Maria’s umbrage, was rising restlessly and was walking about as if uncertain, his lean head bent. Then he went to the short uncarpeted stairway at the side of the room which led upstairs. He looked upward, and his mouth drew together in a thin line that was not hard but only thoughtful. As if he had decided something, he returned to the piano and began to play something he always practiced when alone: Bach-Gounod’s “Ave Maria.”

  “What is this pagan song, this Popish song?” demanded Heinrich in consternation. But David played on, and the glorious and solemn music soared in the triumphant and reverent salutation to a Queen. Maria turned in her chair, smiling. What if it was not a Lutheran song and only a “Roman” song? It was a salutation, an angelic salutation, to a young girl who bore God under her childish breast. Ah, thought Maria, there is so little beauty on this earth, among men! Where and when it comes, it should be saluted, should be cherished, should be adored.

  Edward heard the song, for David played it with the sound of quiet thunder and passion, and he knew it, for he had, known to David, heard the practicing. He ran to hi
s door and flung it open, and then as the great “Ave Maria!” rose like the voice of an archangel, he sat down abruptly on his narrow stairway and bent his head on his knees. He did not know that David was playing it for him, that his brother, the arrogant, impatient, and contemptuous David, was offering it to him in simple penance, a penance David did not quite understand himself.

  The other children were suddenly and strangely moved, without their own comprehension. Tears rolled down Sylvia’s stark and colorless face, Gregory was frankly weeping, and little Ralph cried silently. Maria glanced at them, and her mouth shook. She stared at David piercingly with her large pale eyes, and understood what he did not understand.

  David’s face lifted, his eyes closed in still rapture. He had a clear strong tenor and he sang the angelic salutation each time it occurred in the song. There are times when I do not know my children, thought Maria, and was sternly touched. Edward was too easily forgotten, but then he always seemed to wish to stand apart from the family, and especially so for the last few months. He should have been invited to sing and eat and drink with us, she told herself, though it is probable that he is already asleep. But last year, and the year before, he refused, saying he was tired.

  Edward’s head remained on his knees, and tears seeped down a face no longer embittered. His tears were the last tears of his childhood. But even he did not know that David was playing for him, was lifting his voice to his brother. He felt himself an outcast, thrown beyond close hearing, close companionship, permitted only to sit here in the darkness and listen, unknown, unseen.