Beneath Ceaseless Skies #156

by Alex Dally MacFarlane

  I puffed up my chest, swelling it nice and big. But, in their wide eyes staring back at me, I saw the great abyss opening up—and heard the silence in our tomb, and in the town outside.

  * * *

  When the vault opened, Protection was gone.

  Milky sunlight gleamed through the dust-colored cloud cover, and suddenly the world was completely flat again. Most of the buildings had been reduced to blackened cinders or blown-apart shells lying in sad little heaps. A few had survived; maroon skeletons with their windows blown out. Dead animals, rubbish, pieces of someone’s wardrobe, and a broken wheel were lying strewn about the thoroughfare. I saw human legs poking out from under an overturned cart, and my jaw ached something fierce.

  “Frank!” someone cried.

  A horse approached.

  “Mr. Gibson, I found a doc!”

  The young man, Frank, advanced; Leonidas Lazarus Suttner bouncing in the saddle behind him. Suttner saw me and gave me a look.

  Then he addressed the bank man, Gibson, standing behind me. “Doctor Leo Suttner.”

  “Thank the Lord Almighty you’re here, Doc. I’m W.P. Gibson, chief officer of Protection Town Company and Bank. Our regular physician’s out doing the rounds in the rest of the county, so it is a blessing indeed to have found you.”

  Suttner clambered off the horse, landing on unsteady feet. He had his bag with him; a medical kit. Just like Augustus. I meditated on this comparison while tonguing my loose tooth.

  “Point me in the direction where my services are needed.”

  And so we spent the rest of the day, accounting for the destruction. I shied away from the townsfolk, sitting on an uprooted plank of wood, waiting my turn. Or waiting for what, I don’t know. I just watched Suttner work, listened to the things he told people.

  “Don’t move it or try to raise it. I’ll check it again in a day or two, but, so long as the bone knits properly, it’ll be just fine.”

  A family was standing over the body of a young boy. The mother cried into her handkerchief. The father tugged at Suttner’s elbow.

  “Doc?” the man said. “Doc.”

  “His name?” Suttner kneeled.

  “Romulus.”

  “Hi, Romulus. How are you doing?” Suttner kept speaking to the child, as if he could hear him. But I didn’t see no movement. “Mind if I check this, son? Don’t worry about nothing, you’ll be fine. Just fine.”

  “Doc, I don’t think—” the father began.

  “Can you hold this for me?” Suttner asked, shifting his bag over. He sat back on his heels, heavily. “Oh, Romulus. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ....”

  “What is it?” the father asked. “What’s wrong? You reckon we should take him to Greensburg?”

  Suttner looked up. “Can I speak to you, sir?” He glanced at the mother. “Private?”

  “Tell us both, Doc,” the mother said.

  “All right. His back’s broken.”

  “Romulus! Oh Lord, no, no—please!”

  “Martha, please....” The father looked at Suttner, all shaky and pale. “Does that mean he’s—?”

  “It won’t be long.” Suttner shook his head. “Jesus, I’m sorry. You should sit with him. Sit with him while he’s still around. I’m so sorry.”

  The woman crumpled downwards, sinking into her hoop skirt like a deflating balloon. Her husband tumbled with her, knees giving out. They knelt over the boy, sobbing.

  Suttner stood back up. I watched him. Our eyes met.

  Others were running up to the family now, coming to console, or ask questions, or I don’t know what. Curious, sympathetic, goddamned vultures.

  The final tally: three people dead. Fifteen wounded.

  Suttner came to crouch in front of me, eyes red, hands wavering like leaves. Gently, he reached out and touched the bruise on my cheek. I tried not to fidget under his examination. He laid a knuckle against my swollen jaw. I hissed.

  From this close, I could see the gray stubble, the grease in his hair, each oily smudge on his spectacles. He looked drab and sorrowful, like the rest of Protection.

  I started breathing fast. “I didn’t mean for none of this to happen.”

  “I know you didn’t,” he murmured. “No one’s saying you did.”

  “That’s not true. They’re all saying I did. Why’d you think I got my face near broken for? They’re gonna try to tell you this was all my fault. I bet they’ve already told you, haven’t they? But I didn’t bring no tornado to this town. I didn’t mean for no one to die.”

  He stopped working and looked me in the eye. “Carrie, it ain’t your fault. And what those men did to you was wrong.”

  “I did burn down the saloon though,” I kept blabbering. “But it was something of an accident. And all I said was that this was just the karma, coming back around. That ain’t so cruel, is it? It’s just the Teachings, is all!”

  Suttner worked quietly. Without looking at me, he dug around in his bag, muttering under his breath. My scalp was still sore from when that old Jeremiah had pulled at my hair, jerking my head around.

  Suttner pulled a bottle out and poured something into a handkerchief. “Well, you won’t be losing any teeth.” He dabbed at my lip. “Sorry if it stings.”

  I snorted, sucking up snot, embarrassed that my nose was running all over my lip and mouth. Embarrassed that I was suddenly falling apart, like the Protection houses, or that mother over there. I hadn’t lost anyone, so what did I care? And it was all law of the Lord, so what was I getting so tender for?

  My tears burned hot, cutting into the scrapes on my cheeks.

  “It’s all right, dear. Shh. It’s all right.” Suttner stared at my chin, saying it to me, or himself.

  I grabbed the handkerchief from him and pressed it against my trembling lips, wanting to hide my whole face.

  “Should we find someone to help that boy with his bardo?” I asked.

  “No. No. We can leave them to it.”

  “Suttner. Look at me.”

  He did.

  “You think I did wrong, don’t you? Say it. Say that you do.”

  “I don’t, Carrie. I really don’t.”

  I was shaking now with the sobs. “Why you got to lie like that? Why can’t you be straight? I’m always straight with you! No one’s straighter than I am!”

  “I don’t disagree with that. Come on, hush now. It’ll be fine.”

  A third voice: “What’s that elephant blubbering about?”

  It was the old man from the bank vault: Jeremiah. My enemy. My Devadatta. He stood away from us, glaring, hands on hips.

  “Ain’t this all what we should be ‘happy’ for?” he said. “Ain’t that what you said in there? That we ‘deserve’ it and all?”

  “Oh, leave it alone, Mister Huxley,” a young woman said.

  “Yeah, come on, Jeremiah.”

  Jeremiah started gearing up for another insult, walking forward with mouth open, when Suttner spoke abruptly, turning around. “You leave off now.”

  “What?”

  “You are being foolishly provocative. If you keep goading her and she hits you, I will not provide you with my services. And she just might, given it’s one-on-one now. So go away, and good riddance to you.”

  “Who the hell—? You ain’t even from around here!”

  “Mister Huxley,” Gibson called from further off. “Would you just shut the hell up for a moment? And Doc, we need you over here, please.”

  I cowered down into myself, searching for the Lord’s holy light, for His voice, wanting to get from Him some meaning, some explanation or, at least, some powerfully offensive rebuke to use against that old goat, Jeremiah. Instead, I found nothing: I found the abyss, a gaping maw, a mouth like a Hungry Ghost, begging me into it. I squeezed my eyes shut and chanted the Lord’s Prayer: Om mani padme hum, om mani padme hum, oh om shanti shanti....

  * * *

  I didn’t sleep that night, and I didn’t hear no voices.

  The Lord was quiet, maybe
ashamed about what we had done. I laid awake in bed, still in my tornado clothes, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Augustus. Augustus who had been ten years older than me and grimy and sour-faced and had smelled like rancid butter. Augustus with his judgments and opinions and never-good-enough-ness. I had been too poor to re-do my entire wardrobe according to the proper full-, heavy-, and half-mourning periods, but I had tied the white armband every day for the past six months.

  I had used to think that had been real grief, but now I felt different.

  Sounds from outside: the peaceful buzz of a sleeping countryside. Still air. Kansas. Damned void-of-the-cosmos Kansas!

  Every time I shut my eyes, I saw burnt buildings and broken-backed boys, and so I kept them open, and thought about how badly Augustus had smelled. And how strangely he had looked after his bardo: his Adam’s apple shrinking inward, his neck elongating and his gut expanding like a newspaper cartoon about overly fat politicians.

  What a shame it had been, to have Augustus turn Hungry Ghost on me like that. And in front of the Reverend, even.

  I wondered when dawn would come.

  Lord. Oh, Lord.

  Outside, the sounds of a horse clopping, snorts, men’s voices. I sat up and saw the shadow of Suttner pass.

  “Suttner!” I whispered.

  He heard me and stopped, glancing in the window. I motioned for him to enter.

  He looked dizzy when he came in, and he leaned hard against the door when closing it. I saw him press his forehead against the wall, to rest or to push something into his brains, I don’t know, and I heard his heavy breathing.

  “Everyone,” he slurred, “seen to. At least until tomorrow.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “How’s your jaw?”

  “Not as sore as earlier,” I lied.

  “Well, keep something cold on it. And don’t lean back too much.”

  “I won’t. I’m not tired anyway.”

  “You’ll have a rainbow of colors to go through before it heals.”

  “I don’t care none about how I look. Never have.”

  “Good mentality.” He sat heavily in the chair, burrowing his head in his arms. “Missus Nation, do you mind if I sleep inside tonight? Your cow tends to urinate on me.”

  I didn’t mean to, but I laughed. Suttner smiled.

  “Everyone’s all right then?” I asked.

  “With some rest and some prayers against infection, they should be.”

  “The Lord is merciful.”

  Suttner just exhaled onto the table.

  I stood. “I’ll make coffee.”

  With the lamp and stove going, and the smell of coffee grounds bubbling murkily in the water, and another warm body in the room with me, the soddy felt almost home-like.

  Suttner sat obediently and cradled the tin cup in both hands. I sipped my coffee, leaning against the counter, feeling massive and completely unwomanly. I wondered why I had been born so big, as if the Earth wasn’t made to my size. Then I speculated as to what damned fool decided what size women should be anyway.

  Suttner indicated a picture on the wall. “You pray to the Saint Christ too?”

  The saint had rosy cheeks and rosy lips; his head was cocked to one side. He looked gentle, healer-ish, clean and foreign.

  “No. That’s Mister Nation’s. My faith don’t include the saints. I don’t reckon even Mister Nation cared for him, but it was supposed to bring luck to physicians, so we kept it in the house.”

  “And did it bring him that? Luck?”

  I sipped. “None.”

  Suttner rolled the cup around in his hands, drawing his fingers over the rim. “The Finches asked me to see their son through his bardo,” he said.

  “The Finches?”

  “Romulus.”

  “Oh.”

  “I said no, initially. That’s preacher work, after all. Not my specialty. Not my work at all, to be blunt. I wouldn’t know what....”—he rolled the cup, his voice falling—”wouldn’t know what to do, really.”

  “Ain’t they got a preacher in town?”

  “Don’t look like it.”

  I sat in the other chair. “So are you gonna do it anyways?”

  “I suppose I have to. I mean, I did some during the war. It was never very pleasant. The things... men turn into, what when they’ve seen what they’ve seen. Done what they’ve done....” He snapped his fingers. “Sometimes it’d happen like that. Fast as lightning. One second, alive. Then, dead. Then—like that!—into the bardo. And it was never a pleasant experience. Good bardos were rare there, as you can imagine. And those fast bardos. Well.” He was blinking fast; all agitated tics. “I suppose—I mean, I suppose a child like Romulus Finch would never bardo like that, of course. He’d—pass peaceably from this life to the next. Isn’t that what the Teachings say we should expect?”

  I nodded mutely.

  “‘State of mind in the final moments’ and all that bull.” He laughed humorlessly. “Though how in the hell am I to know what state of mind Romulus Finch found himself in when—when he passed on? He was probably shitting his pants with fright, for all I know. Pardon me. Or he probably had no idea what the hell was going on, if he was lucky.”

  “Well, it ain’t just the last moments. It’s all the moments of the whole life. That, and some prayers from the family. So if Romulus was a good boy, and his parents....”

  Suttner was staring at me witheringly, so I stopped.

  “So are you gonna do it or not?” I asked again.

  “Yes,” he said. “I did eventually say I would. I’ll need your help, though.”

  “Me? What? No—I mean, why would—? That wouldn’t be right.”

  “You’ve got to. You know the prayers and all. I don’t. Ain’t you always going on about religion?”

  I shook my head. “No, no. Half the town hates me. I ain’t going there to hold their hands now.”

  “Do not,” Suttner suddenly raised his voice, “let ignorant old fools like Jeremiah Huxley prevent you from doing a good deed!”

  I stared. Suttner was red in the face. He was breathing hard out of his nose, like a starved, scrawny wolf, spooked and in the corner. Fast air, tornado gusts.

  “You are coming with me! You are helping me with this!”

  I opened my mouth to say something—and said nothing.

  * * *

  The Finches were Orthodox, but we didn’t have no white clothes.

  Suttner found a strip of old gauze in his medical kit, and he tied that around his jacket sleeve a few times, making an armband. I found an off-white lace tea cozy and folded it into my dress’s pocket.

  “That’s as white as we gonna get.”

  I grabbed a copy of the Canon and we set off for the Finch farm.

  They had laid Romulus Finch in a patch of grass under an apple tree. The Finches had a tiny orchard that they tended to, and they told us that Romulus had always played in that orchard, inventing games about cowboys and Indians, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, magicians from the Orient. The tree had his initials carved into the bark.

  “We want him to wake up here. We want this to be the first thing he sees.”

  I didn’t mention that even I knew Orthodox law said you should never bardo a body so close to its original home. That the whole point was that this life was over, and a new one was beginning, stripped of all its previous entanglements. I didn’t mention that when I had held Augustus’ bardo on the farm, he had plagued me with his ravenous Hungry Ghosting—eating up the crop, puking out cow shit, draining the stream—and I had been too embarrassed to call for a proper exorcizing, having instead to do it all myself.

  Suttner knelt by the boy—who was porcelain pale now, looking cold and peaceful in the dappled sunlight—and placed a finger under the boy’s nose. I cracked open my Canon and started to read.

  “‘Hark ye, all the winds do dissolve in the seventh cycle of mind dissolution, and, when this is observed, prepare ye for the clear light of death.’”


  We sang a couple verses of ‘Follow the Deer Into the King’s Arrow’ followed by ‘Another Turn of the Wheel’, droning and off-key, and then began the wait.

  Now, professional preachers and holy men can pinpoint a bardo’s proper commencement down to the minute, but Suttner and myself only had a vague idea that Romulus Finch, since he had been young and generally a good boy, would probably start transfiguring about a day or two after his death.

  But it was real embarrassing waiting there, waiting for any change in the boy, while his parents snorted and sniffled and cried fresh tears. Suttner eventually stopped kneeling, and sat back in the grass, keeping his hand on the boy’s forehead and pushing the hair back, rhythmic. As if he could comfort him alive. I cleared my throat. The day got hot.

  Romulus Finch didn’t start changing until well into the afternoon.

  In the golden sunlight, we heard movement. Shifting in the grass. Suttner looked up. I opened up the Canon again.

  “And the Lord Buddha said, ‘Hark, for the journey of life is long, and faith is your best companion. It is your best refreshment,’” I read, exchanging a look with Suttner, “‘and it is your best property.’”

  “Amen.”

  “And the Lord Buddha said, ‘Neither fire nor death....’”

  Romulus Finch was shivering all over now; his body jolted like someone was feeding it lightning.

  “...’nor birth nor death can erase our good deeds.’”

  “Amen,” Suttner and the family muttered in unison.

  Romulus was making noise now too: yelps, little whimpers, ungodly gasps. I prayed hard he wouldn’t turn into something from the Hell Realm.

  “Now, it’s customary for the preacher to talk about the particular transfiguration currently occurring,” I said. “But I ain’t no preacher, and I can’t really tell what’s going on, to be honest. Do you wanna say something instead?”

  The mother was crying into her handkerchief too hard to answer, and the father, holding her shoulder, was staring transfixed as Romulus flopped around in the dirt. Suttner kept both his hands on the boy’s shoulders, trying to stop him from jumping away from us altogether.