The Sound of Thunder

by Taylor Caldwell

  The hall swam in soft light and was very silent. He could feel it like a friendly presence. He went down the stairs. There were lights in the hall, and a fire on the hearth, and lights beyond in the living room. He could hear voices, far and muted voices, the voices of tiny creatures. He hesitated; then the man’s voice called to him again, and he said, in surprise, “Yes, Padraig. Where are you?”

  “Here,” said Padraig. And there was Padraig, young and smiling, at the big hall doors. He had opened them. He stood in the aperture, and beyond him the world was all summer and moonlight, a world wide and illuminated and filled with the sweetest of perfumes. Padraig held out his hand and Edward went at once to him, and again he wanted to laugh with pleasure and delight. “I dreamt you were dead,” he said to Padraig, and Padraig laughed. “I was never dead,” he replied. “You were dreaming.”

  But when Edward reached out to take his hand, Padraig said gently, “Not yet. Just follow me.” And he stepped into the sweet and luminous world of summer and moonlight and Edward followed. Everything had a luminosity of its own, as if shining softly from within. The leaves on the summer trees were pale jewels; each blade of grass was burnished. The stars were great spheres, burning in sapphire and ruby and emerald; they were so close that it was possible to see their majestic turning and to observe the flash of their ordered passage. The moon stood in the dark sky, an immense moon, giving out her own light and not the light of any sun. Edward saw flowers along his path that he could not remember. Roses and lilies so fair and so tall and so fragrant that he knew at once that they were not insensate plants but individuals who knew him and loved him, and stood proudly in their colored radiance. He saw the animals of the fields near them, not afraid but clothed in their shy and simple innocence. Their eyes glowed and regarded him with kindness.

  Then he remembered that it was winter. He turned his head and looked back, and the winter was there, cold and stark and dead, the moon diminished, the patches of snow eroded and leprous. An icy wind struck his face. He saw the house, and it was indeed a doll’s house, shrunken, huddled close to the unliving earth.

  “Do not look back,” said Padraig. “It is always winter when you look back.”

  Full of wonder, Edward followed him. Padraig was so close, yet when Edward quickened his step he could not shorten the gap between them. Padraig was leading the way across the garden, which blossomed before them in that pure silver light. The fountain splashed in drops of mercurial brilliance, and the boy who stood in the midst of the bowl nodded his head at Edward in greeting. “I thought you were stone,” said Edward in surprise. The boy replied, “But nothing is stone. Everything lives.” His face was no longer depraved; it was the face of a blissful child.

  Now Padraig was standing and waiting under the shadow of the grove of trees, and the trees were in full summer, their leaves plated with light and ever-turning in a soft wind. “Let us sit here and talk,” said Padraig in the deep and quiet voice Edward remembered. They sat on the bench together, but Padraig sat at a distance, and his face was smiling and peaceful. “They sent me for you,” he said. “And then you must decide whether to go with me or return.”

  “Return to winter?” asked Edward, and it seemed to him that he diminished and became cold and frozen.

  “You have forgotten,” said Padraig. “Love is there, in the winter.”

  “We must go back for Margaret,” said Edward.

  Padraig shook his head. “Not yet. It is not her time. It may not be yours.”

  They looked at each other, and Padraig smiled with affection and serenity. “I have only a little time,” he said. “God has been good. He let me come to you. There is so much you do not know, Ed. I am permitted to show you.” He lifted his hand and pointed. “See, and then you must understand.”

  Edward turned his head. It was still night. But a small and unlovely night now. He was looking at a street, lonely, narrow, the houses dark and mean. A summer night, with hammocks creaking on silent little porches. People were alive in the dusty darkness and heat. A boy was walking down the concrete sidewalk, and it was he himself. He could hear his own thoughts: “I wonder what people live for? What, for instance, am I living for?” There was an arc light spitting and sparkling on the corner, all starkness, all without merciful shadows. Clouds of blinded insects blew about the light, hurling themselves to a burning death, trying to extinguish themselves. “Why, they’re like those people on the porches and in the houses,” the young Edward said, and he was filled with pity. “Why were they born? Why was I born?”

  “See,” said Padraig, and the street swirled, became mist, and was gone, and only the gemmed and moonlit summer darkness was there once more. “It was never real at all,” said Edward with relief. But something else was forming, and it became a small and narrow room, and Edward recognized it as the parlor of the house on School Street. There was David’s piano, and the oak settees with their poisonous green plush and the stiff lace curtains at the windows, and the smell of dust stifling in the hot close heat of the room. Kerosene lamps stood on a table near the wall, with its pattern of red roses crawling over green lattices. Edward’s breath stifled in his throat. And there he sat, in the oak rocking chair, and his father, young and anxious and very serious, was sitting near him. They were alone. “We sold over twenty dollars’ worth of stuff today,” Edward said, and his voice was like a memory, and it was tired.

  “It is good,” said Heinrich, absently. Edward was very sorry for him. He said, “I didn’t believe you were dying. I thought you were just awake, and I was punishing you. Forgive me.”

  But Heinrich did not appear to have heard him. He was gazing at Edward with the utmost earnestness. “You must listen to me, my son, for you are fourteen years old and it is time that you knew many things, for you are no longer a child but almost a man.” He spoke in German, and his voice, too, was an echo.

  “Yes, Pa,” said Edward, wanting to soothe and placate him, for Heinrich was very serious. In a few moments Ma would come downstairs to ask why they were sitting there, at ten o’clock at night, and market day tomorrow.

  “You have been saying, my son, that you were asking yourself what meaning there is to life. There is no meaning at all; the best philosophers have said so, and though we go to church, it is to listen politely. Certainly there is a God, but who shall ever know Him? It is not our concern. Our concern is men, and what all of us must do to change the world, to make it easier and more pleasant, to make days of work shorter, to make more luxuries available for the people, to give to the people their rights, which is the control of the means of production. There must be no profits, no rewards, no millionaires.”

  Edward became uneasy. He wanted to say with bluntness, “What about me? I do nothing but work for the kids.” But his father looked so earnest, like an enthusiastic child.

  He said to his father, “But I do think there’s some meaning to living. There’s got to be. What’ve people got to look forward to if there’s no meaning? They have kids and the kids grow up and get married, and then they have kids, too, and it’s all repeated, like a nightmare, and there’s nothing, no meaning. Just breeding, just working, just dying.”

  He told his father, then, about the moths blowing themselves to a witless and unlamented death against the spluttering arc light, and Heinrich listened, looking somewhat confused and impatient. Then he said, “But, my son, we are not moths. They are not men.”

  “But our life and our end seem the same,” said young Edward. He was very rebellious. He could not understand why his father’s expression was so blank. Heinrich began to blink his eyes, trying to form an answer.

  He said at last, “But, Eddie, there is a meaning in your life and mine. The geniuses.”

  A grim glow lighted the young Edward’s face. Yes, the geniuses. It was worthwhile to live and work to bring something bright and vivid to the drabness of life! Something greater, nobler, more passionate, than mere existence. And in that work, itself a satisfying answer, there was a
promise of a larger answer. Man was no thoughtless mechanism, breeding more mechanisms for endless generations, for no heroic end greater than materialistic benefits which meant nothing in the face of expanding life, which meant nothing in the face of death. Man, indeed, was no moth. He had a reason for being born; his destiny was not in this world but in eternity. Not in his small animal gratifications but in God. God gave significance to life; God gave transfiguration to mere physical existence. That was the answer, the promise!

  In working, and in hoping, and in labor and deprivation, the young Edward thought, I am contributing to that glory. I am developing something great in my brothers and sister, their genius, which comes from God. And so he nodded his head joyfully at his father and said, “Of course, the kids! It’s kind of—kind of—like offering yourself on an altar.” He smiled shyly. “Helping them to help God make the world more beautiful. When you do that, you show the power of God.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Heinrich, without understanding. And then to Edward’s astonishment, Heinrich continued, “They will receive honors from men. They will become rich and famous. You and I will stand humbly in the background, unseen, unheard. You and I are nothing. We can only work.”

  “You began to hate your father then,” said Padraig. “You began to remember that he was exploiting you, for all his conversation about the brotherhood of man. He was depriving you of your own dignity as a human being; he had relegated you to an inferior plane, where you had no importance of your own. Equality, the idealism of your father, did not apply to Edward Enger.”

  Edward looked at the scene of himself and his father. Heinrich was slowly becoming flat and without color; the parlor was dissolving, the heat was blowing away. Then it was all gone, and the wide and jeweled summer night was all about Edward, and Padraig’s face was smiling sadly, and was so young and thoughtful and kind.

  “Yes,” said Edward. “Now I know. But I know a number of other things, too. How Pa must have suffered. At the end, with all he had worked and dreamed for, he had nothing. He felt useless and without purpose and unneeded.”

  “He knows, now, that you have forgiven him,” said Padraig. “He is very sorry; he could not be at peace until you forgave him.”

  Edward said, “I am glad. I ought to have understood before. Our childhoods are like a library behind us; we have only to open the old books and read.”

  Padraig continued, “And then, slowly but implacably, you began to hate your brothers and sister. You had many gifts and intuition. You knew, in your heart, as the slow years passed, that their own gifts were meager. So all your work and sacrifice and planning were coming to nothing. Your brothers and sister were depriving you of the significance of living. And as the meaning of life, the spirituality of existence, escaped you because of your brothers and sister, you lost the source of life and turned from Him, losing your own reason for existence.”

  Padraig’s eyes shone on him with compassion. “You were desperate. Without your conscious knowledge you looked for revenge. They had called themselves geniuses; your parents had declared they were. You knew it was not so, though you still tried to believe it, for life would be intolerable without that belief. You would make them live up to their assumption of genius, not for their sake, no longer for the sake of God, but for your own sake. They would never escape you. They would have to justify your own being. It was not really power you wanted, though you deceived many that it was. You were in mortal error. You had built your meaning of life on men. Deprived at last, you took your vengeance not only for your spiritual damage but because your family had compelled you to dominate them.”

  Edward was silent. He looked about him at the radiant trees and grass, at the incandescent light of the moon, at the splendor of the mysteriously looming stars.

  Padraig spoke again. “One day a promise was made to you when you were a child. Your hatred and vengeance darkened the vision of it, though it was closer to you than breathing.

  “You know now that the things of the world, desirable though they seem, are the things of the earth and its meaningless materialism. Life is nothing if it does not have a meaning. And its only meaning is God. Life has no verity outside the context of Our Lord. If men live without Him, they will eat the dust of the earth and it will give them no sustenance, though they have all else. Man must equate his being with God; without that equation his life is a sum that cannot be added, for the numbers of the sum are meaningless. We were born to know Him and love Him, to work with Him on earth, to join Him after the dissolution of our bodies. His is the truth and the life and the light. His is the illumination of our days. He is the answer you sought, and which you never found. Your father, in his terrible ignorance, kept you from the finding.”

  Edward bent his head. He was silent and he was brokenhearted. He had lost the promise and the vision forever. Then he looked at Padraig and said, “It is too late now.”

  Padraig smiled. “No, it is not too late. God is merciful. Your life has been bitter and full of pain and striving. You have had less joy in it than most men. You have done what you could in your chaos of living; you have been kind to the friendless; you have been just to all save your family. You have given of yourself and your money. You have been compassionate. Above all things, you have been compassionate. Has not Our Lord said that charity is greater than faith and hope? You may choose even now, for no soul is bound. You are not dead. Your spirit is still in your flesh. You have only to choose. Listen!”

  Margaret’s wailing and agonized voice filled the warm and scented air. “Ed! Come back, come back! Dear Ed, you are all I have. Please, dear God, don’t let him leave me!”

  He started to his feet. “I’m coming!” he called to her. “My darling, I’m coming! Wait for me.”

  He turned his back to Padraig. The winter lay all about him, bleak and cold and lifeless. The snow glistened under a fainting moon, a small and frozen moon. The trees stood over him, stark and black and coated with ice. He took a step, then glanced back at Padraig. But Padraig was gone.

  Edward ran over the snow and the wet and broken earth. Then the darkness was all about him, and he could see nothing. He opened his eyes.

  He was in his bedroom, warm but with pain. A nurse hovered in the background; he was only just aware of her presence. He remembered everything. His dear Margaret was kneeling beside him, her face drawn and white and anguished. She was murmuring something like a litany.

  It was an enormous effort even to whisper. He said, “Margaret? Darling?”

  Her head lay like a stone on his pillow. He had her hand, which was as cold as death, and put it against his cheek.

  “It’s all right,” he said in the faintest of voices. He smiled at her. “It’ll be all right—all the days of my life.”

  She was crying and kissing his hand. “You’ve forgotten the rest of it,” she said, and she was trembling with her joy; he could see ripples of returning light on her poor face. He waited, and she faltered,

  “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life—and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.”

  “Goodness and mercy,” he said. “Goodness and mercy.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  “I think, perhaps,” said Edward, “that in a way it all clarified when my hen, Betsy, was killed. I suppose that sounds ridiculous, but I think it is true.”

  He could see the sky beyond his bedroom window; it shone with a patina like pale blue metal. An elm bough, faintly brown, stretched its arm across the window and the buds on it had become gold with returning life. The spring wind howled softly along the eaves, and the elm bough trembled. The fire on the hearth fluttered in hot tongues among the heaped-up logs. The room was very quiet. Maria sat near Edward, knitting as always, and she listened. She had listened a great deal during these long days. She looked at her son, high on his pillows, at his quiet gray face and his peaceful eyes and his thin hands crossed on the crimson quilt.

  “It is said that a pebble can throw a giant,”
she said.

  Edward moved restlessly. “I don’t think I was ever a giant. In fact, I think that in many ways I was a pigmy. A strong spirit shouldn’t be thrown by a pebble.”

  “But many pebbles heaped up become a wall, an obstacle,” said Maria. She put the knitting in her lap. “I have been guilty of many things, but the worst was that I never told you, my son, that I loved you. I also knew my strength, which was in you. My other children were weak; I wished to use your strength to shelter and guide them. Now I know that no man should be exploited for another. It is a crime against humanity and God. If the strong condescend to charity, out of greatness of heart and by an act of the will, then that is acceptable and most gracious to God. But force used against the strong for the benefit of the weak, who are often greedy, should not be accepted by the strong.”

  Edward turned his head to her with an effort. “I injured my brothers and sister,” he said. “I ruined their lives.”

  Maria nodded gravely. “It is always so. You narrowed their hearts and their souls by giving them what they demanded.”

  Edward was silent. He looked at the bough against the window, and he thought how strong the tree was, because it had to battle the elements for its life and had to thrust its mighty roots into the earth, striking through stone and clay, in order to wear a crown in the sun. Then Edward said, “I’m not reproaching you, Ma,” and he smiled. “But Pa wasn’t the only one to blame, when I was a kid.”

  “Have I not admitted it?” said Maria, calmly. A streak of sun moved across her thick white hair. “Do you think I was, and am, very wise, that I have not committed almost unpardonable crimes? I told you I would never forgive you when your father died and you would not go to him. I beg your forgiveness as I have begged it before. I do not think what you have told me was a dream.”