Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  I carried my brother – with all his bulked-up muscles, so much heavier than lifting my two fathers had been – into the bathroom, that still smelled to me of my mother’s powders and perfumes. Now, my lover and I lived and worked in both houses. It was appropriate enough. Two families were becoming combined, as they were meant to be. It was like tearing down the fence that separated the two yards, and letting the grass grow rampant to blur where the division had been...the apples from the Silvestris’ gnarled little tree falling, scattering, to sprout new trees in the one merged yard. Incongruous orange trees would sprout as well, from the seeds of my mother’s tossed offering of fertility. A whole orchard of both kinds of trees...how wonderful that would be...

  The knife sculpted smoothly, working its way between the joints of bone with an ease that was mystical. I disassembled poor Tommy, released from his torments, with as much ease as I had opened the glyph-like wound in my own abdomen. It was as though the blade had worked its way around the nerves in my body without even nicking them, because I felt not a hint of pain as I inched one of Tommy’s severed limbs slowly into my interior in a strange sort of digestion, or intercourse...fitting that part of him into me in a space that shouldn’t be large enough to accept it.

  This process I had begun was not surgery, per se. I did no stitching or assembling in a mechanical sense. I did cut, yes, but it was more art than it was science. And while I worked, first over Tommy’s fresh young body and then, next door, over the blackened body of Mr. Silvestri, I found myself muttering strange words in a kind of chant, words that came to my tongue directly from some bequeathed gene, skipping past my brain altogether.

  Now, our anguished and fractured family – families – would be all united again. More so than ever before. Tommy and I would be close at last. My father reunited with my mother...my mother with my true father...and me with Mrs. Silvestri. And Phoebe. When I took the flap of wine stained flesh out of the plastic container, and smoothed it across my lover’s brow, it adhered there again. By the next day, its edges had blended with the skin that was not wine stained.

  The discoloration and the odors of rot vanished from her. She was able to rise from her wheelchair again, at last, like a cripple cured by a faith healer...and totter toward me stiffly, grinning, her arms lifted, outspread like wings to engulf me in her embrace. And I embraced her with the new, muscular arms that had replaced my own former, too-skinny limbs. I gazed down into Theda Bara’s glowing black eyes with my new crystalline blue eyes. And my hands, which ran up and down her smooth back, were the hands of a true artist...the patchwork hands of my biological father.

  This was what my lover, my mother, these goddesses had needed, in order to restore her...restore them. She drew me by the hand, into the other room, and down onto the mattress, still stained with Tommy’s blood...

  And we joined our two bodies together there, in a sense...in our final and most profound act of unification. The act of love.

  The End

  Praying That You Feel Better Soon

  When I half-fainted in the close, carpeted aisle of Taylor’s Cards and Gifts, I fell heavily backwards against a display of ceramic knickknacks and brought a row of them shattering down in little glittering fragments like the bones of faeries.

  The proprietor, more concerned about my health or a lawsuit than the knickknacks, called an ambulance, no doubt thinking this old lady had suffered a heart attack on the premises. I assured her and the few customers who gathered around that I was fine, if shaken. But I offered no explanation except to mumble that I hadn’t eaten enough that morning. I did not tell them about the card I had just picked up. It still lay on the floor where I had dropped it, and I saw the proprietor half-consciously stoop for it and return it to its place in the wall of GET WELL cards. For a moment I again saw the front of the card, before I looked sharply away.

  There was no type on the front, which was simply a gray, soft-focus black and white photograph of a statue in front of a vague background of trees. The statue was of a little girl, with the prepubescent wings of a child angel. Her hands were pressed together under her chin in an attitude of prayer, her lids lowered and the subtlest smile on her tiny lips. The flowing lines of her light soft gown were remarkably rendered in the unwavering stone, as if you might expect to see the material begin to float and ripple. The lines of her hair and feathers of her small spread wings were also realistic if a bit more stylized.

  These days, a lot can be done to alter photographs. Another person picking up that card might think that the dark stains on the angel child’s cheeks had been added in by a computer program. It looked as though heavy black mascara had run down from both eyes as a result of tears the child had shed. It put one in mind of pictures of the Madonna in which tears of blood are said to have flowed.

  But I knew those stains were not an embellishment. I had had this angel statue meticulously described to me, some twenty odd years before.

  The ambulance arrived. I balked at going with them, but a policeman who came wouldn’t let me drive until I had been checked out. At last I gave in...but before I left Taylor’s Cards and Gifts – as loathe as I was to touch it again – I bought that card of the angel child, though I had no intention of sending the thing to my ailing cousin in Minnesota.

  While seated in the back of the ambulance (no, I told the officer, I had no children to drive me to the hospital -- and my husband had died years ago) I took the card from my bag with trembling hands and heart, and opened it at last to read its inside sentiment. There was a closer shot of just the statue’s prim folded hands, screened to look lighter, and the scrolling words:

  Praying That You Feel Better Soon.

  * * *

  It was my husband William who described the angel child to me.

  Will had been an employee of the town Department of Public Works, and it often fell to him not only to plow snow from the roads of Eastborough during the winter, but from the roads and pathways of the several town cemeteries as well. After the blizzard of ‘78, Eastborough was like Pompeii after all the ash fell, and for a week it seemed that I didn’t see Will at all, as if those two feet of bright heavy snow had buried him as well.

  The town’s four cemeteries took little precedence when some people couldn’t even get to work for a week, but when at last the DPW could take the time, it fell to Will to plow out the Pine Grove Cemetery, which borders on Eastborough Swamp.

  Will told me later that evening that although the sky was a blazing blue that afternoon, a biting wind had been whipping up mists of sparkling snow dust like wraiths that billowed between the ranks of stones. Well, Will didn’t say it like that – Will wasn’t one for embellishments, or for much talk at all. But I could visualize the scene as he related it to me that evening. And Will’s emotion made the visualization all the more vivid, because he was shaken that evening – and Will wasn’t one to be shaken, either.

  The snow lay in as yet unbroken dunes and drifts, and he could only tell where the paths lay because there were spaces winding between the rows of granite markers. He lowered his plow and began what would prove to be a long afternoon’s work, Pine Grove being the largest of Eastborough’s graveyards.

  Up front when one enters into Pine Grove, the plots tend to be newer, the rows neater, the markers more polished and modern in their outlines. The cemetery began at the periphery of the swamp, and grew out from there. There are no old willow-and-urn 18th century slates, as there are in the Midtown Cemetery just down the street from my house...the oldest stones in Pine Grove date back to the mid 19th century. At the back of Pine Grove, Will must have seen those pitted, slanting white markers with their raised or indented words nearly erased by rains and many previous blizzards and biting winds. There is a section along one side path that is entirely devoted to children...many of them stillborn, or dead in their infancy. It’s a sad little spot, a tragic reminder of a time when such deaths were more common than now.

  But that isn’t where Will struck the stone a
ngel.

  He was turning down a fresh pathway when his blade caught against something buried in an especially deep drift. He said he heard a screeching as the metal ground against stone. Hissing a curse under his breath – he never swore outright, and certainly not at me – Will stopped his truck and got out with a shovel in hand. A less conscientious worker wouldn’t have thought twice about the accident, and kept going on despite whatever damage he might have caused. I sometimes wish Will hadn’t stopped, and dug out the thing he had struck so as to inspect it. But then, he wouldn’t have been my Will if he hadn’t...

  The first thing he laid bare was the top of a head. As he dug further, he uncovered a child’s head with dreamily lowered lids, streaked stains down both cheeks, and a smile so subtle the Mona Lisa might seem like a grinning fool. He dug further like a less than enthusiastic archeologist, and he didn’t stop until he had found the spot where he had struck the little statue. There was only a scrape across one of her stylized miniature wings, a white scratch against the age-stained gray of the rest of her. Will was relieved. The statue leaned a bit to one side, but he didn’t know if he had caused that or if it had been a natural occurrence. There was nothing he could do about that either way, and so he got back into his truck, poured a fresh coffee from his large plaid thermos, had a few sips, and resumed his work.

  He circled about the cemetery, and the winds picked up in speed, like waves breaking across his windshield. He told me that as he turned into yet another pathway – though nearly finished now, as the sun began to lower and the snow began to turn a dark violet color – he saw an odd thing through a cloud of this whipped-up dust.

  Distantly, through the glittering veil and the naked branches of intervening trees, Will saw a child that seemed to be having a violent seizure. The figure was vague, but it seemed to be tightly bound, so that it couldn’t move its arms or legs...could only whip its body madly from side to side. It was as if a child were being terribly electrocuted, as Will described it (his deep, low voice in a raspy whisper, tinged with shame at the tinge of fear I heard in it). Violent, jerking spasms. The child’s clothing seemed to be snapping and blowing behind it in a blur. He heard no cries, but he said he could see the steamy exhalations of the child billowing around its head, obscuring its face.

  Needless to say, Will turned his truck around as quickly as he could manage and headed back that way. But as he rounded a bend and neared the spot, he realized what he had really seen...

  It was the angel statue he had struck. It was not moving, its face as placid as when he had uncovered it. What he had taken to be clothing blowing behind it were only its marble wings, incapable of any blurred, frenetic movement. Will shuddered, and told himself he had gone without enough sleep and with too much coffee over the past week.

  Still, he couldn’t account for the steamy clouds that were still dispersing in the air around the head of the angel child.

  * * *

  Will was not the fanciful type. He wasn’t superstitious, wasn’t even religious (much to the disapproval of my parents early on, though they came to accept him for the kind man he was). So I didn’t feel he was lying about or imagining what came later. If he told me he hadn’t been dreaming that night, then I had to accept that. It didn’t mean I believed what he saw was fact. It only meant that I didn’t disbelieve him...

  It was nearly a week after Will had plowed out the cemetery that I awoke to an awful cry in the middle of the night. I had never heard my husband utter such a sound before – for it was him I had heard. As I sat up in bed, my heart galloping, I saw his large body silhouetted at one of the room’s windows.

  When I asked him what was wrong he spun around startled and frightened me as much as I had frightened him. I clawed a lamp on, and saw a face so transfigured that for a wild moment I wondered if I hadn’t surprised a burglar in the bedroom, a stranger with crazed eyes. But it was Will, and he cast one more look – a timid look of dread – out the window before he came to the bed to tell me what he’d seen.

  He told me that a scraping sound had awakened him, a sound against the clapboards outside as if a tree branch were blowing against them. But there was no tree outside that window close enough to rake across the boards. So Will stole out of bed, and went to peek around the shade to see what it might be.

  It had been dark, but the street lamps had given off enough illumination to glow white on the figure he saw climbing up the side of the house toward our second floor bedroom window.

  It was a child, all white from her skin to her hair to her gown...poised on the side of our house like a fly...a fly with stone wings...and he said when he parted the shade, the child lifted her head to look up at him. Her eyes were open and had black pupils and rolled like the eyes of a panicking horse. But she was grinning, grinning in such a way that her lips were pulled far back from white gums like the lips of a snarling dog, revealing little clenched marble teeth.

  But when he cried out, he said, he saw the child drop from the house to her feet and scamper off madly across the yard, disappearing into a line of trees that separated our yard from the next. She had thrown one look back at him over her shoulder, he told me in a shaky voice. She had still been grinning.

  We slept with the bedside light on that night. I admit, the light made me feel better, too.

  In the morning, I saw Will out that same window. He was examining the yard for footprints in the snow...but if any had been there, a light snow that had fallen in the early morning hours and a gusty wind had obliterated them. What was left could have been made by a dog. But I thought there was something suggestive to them, at least. Because when Will had left for work, I snuck out to look at them myself.

  He had been afraid to leave me alone in the house...but promised me he would be home before dark. And again, I’ll admit that I was grateful for his promise.

  The snows of the early morning returned the next night with more vigor. By the next day, Will was out plowing again. I filled his big plaid thermos for him, kissed his cheek before he left. It was unshaven. That wasn’t like Will.

  Those who examined him later decided it was a massive heart attack that killed my husband sometime that afternoon.

  When he didn’t answer his radio calls, his friends Donny McNeil and John Thompson drove out to Pine Grove Cemetery, where they knew Will was supposed to be plowing.

  They found his yellow truck there. The plow was down, and he had begun his job. But inside the cold tomb of its cab, Will sat dead behind the wheel. I’m told his eyes were tightly squinted shut, as if to block out intense pain...or as if to block out something terrible he had seen.

  Through my tears, I asked Donny and John later if they had seen any odd footprints in the snow. If they had seen any children about in the graveyard. Both of them wagged their heads, but when Donny began to ask me why, I waved for him not to.

  Well, John said as if in an afterthought, he had heard something funny when he opened the door of Will’s cab -- something he had dismissed or hadn’t really taken in at the time, considering the shock of the discovery of his friend. He remembered now that he had heard a child giggling behind a tree, not too far away. He hadn’t seen anyone when he glanced that way, but he believed he saw a little white mist of breath curling out from around the trunk...and maybe...just maybe...tiny white fingers peeking out from behind, clutching the bark.

  * * *

  I discovered one thing about the statue of the angel child just several weeks after Will’s funeral. And more than twenty years later – after my trip to Taylor’s Cards and Gifts -- I have now uncovered another fact.

  The first discovery came with the aid of the DPW, the Eastborough Antiquarian Society, and through my own investigation of Pine Grove Cemetery, once the snows had receded enough for me to explore it.

  Try as I might, and filled with dread though I was, I could not locate within all of Pine Grove any statue of an angel, let alone that of a child angel. And when I asked Will’s boss at the DPW, he told me that desp
ite Will’s having struck the statue, it had not been removed – at least, not by any of his crew. He began to suggest that Will himself had removed it, if he had been feeling guilty about the thing, so as to set it straight in the earth come spring...but he dropped his theory when he noticed my glare.

  It was Jo Torrey at the Antiquarian Society who was the most helpful, the most informed, and whose information stunned me the most. Jo was into gravestone rubbing. She would have known these things...

  She told me there had never been any angel statues in Pine Grove Cemetery.

  And that was where it ended, for twenty years. And though Will and I had plots already purchased in Pine Grove, I had Will cremated and scattered his ashes along a path in Acadia National Park where he had kissed me on our honeymoon. I did not want him left helpless in that cold ground, under future snows...

  The get well card with the angel was printed by a large corporation that was not immediately receptive to my letters, but I persisted with more letters and several phone calls and my niece contacted them over the internet, until finally I was given the address of the photographer who had taken the photograph of the angel with her dark-stained cheeks, and her little hands pressed together demurely under her chin.

  The photographer, a Richard Bedard, has since told me that he chanced upon the statue in a small, back road cemetery in Oakton, Virginia.

  Which is a long way away from Eastborough, Massachusetts.

  I do not want to visualize a small white figure scampering along dark roads in the dead of night, in its mysterious migration. Or perhaps, even, flying...

  I try to tell myself, some nights as I lie awake in the same bedroom where my Will stood in terror at that window, that it couldn’t be the same statue. Couldn’t be...

  But it’s clear in the photo, you see. White against the gray of the stone.

  There is a long shallow scratch across one of the angel’s wings.

  The End