I took a long walk. Without a lantern or flashlight. It was an extremely clear night sky, and the stars themselves provided nearly enough light to see by, although once I stumbled upon a family of resting deer and gave them a fright as bad as the one they gave me, leaping up and crashing off into the brush, a buck and two does and four or five fawns. I called out to them to come back, and was very sorry I had scared them.
I kept walking, my boots sometimes sinking ankle-deep in the new snow. Although I stopped now and then to study the spectacular star patterns, I seemed to be walking in a definite direction, I seemed to have some destination in mind. I’ve studied the stars quite a lot, and never failed to be impressed with the stupendous infinity of space and the thought of all the infinitude of possible galaxies and constellations and suns and worlds, but never until this night had the sky-spectacle had such an overwhelming effect on me, not necessarily obliterating my own problems but making me think of how unlimited are the problems of the universe, whole stars dying and exploding and worlds taking billions of years to reach perfection before being snuff ed out like candles. I resolved that night to take up a closer study of astronomy; although I could recognize all the stars in the Pegasus constellation, the Andromeda constellation, and Cassiopeia, Pisces, Aries, Aquarius, and many others, I had a very vague notion of just how large and how far away each star was. But I knew that in the time it took for the light from any one of those stars to reach the earth, all the towns and cities of America had been born and would vanish. In all that empty space out there was more than enough room to harbor the transient souls of every creature who had ever lived in all the habitable worlds of the universe.
My walk took me, near midnight, to the fallen ruin of Gold Brook Chateau. Until I got there I had not been fully conscious that this was my destination. But as soon as I got there I knew it was. And I began yelling at once, “Henry! Henry! Henry??” My voice may have frightened night creatures. “Henry Fox!” I yelled. “Henry, where are you? I need you!” I waited and yelled louder, “Henry, I’ve got to talk to you!” There was never any answer. I felt no “presences.” For all I knew, Henry Fox had been just an ignorant and even illiterate gold miner whose name I had read about in that article on the Five Corners gold mines, but I did not feel the least bit silly, yelling for him. I needed him, as much as Daniel Lyam Montross ever needed him. Sometimes I used to try to talk with God, but I’ve outgrown that. Being nineteen years old now, I could much more easily believe in Henry Fox than I could believe in God.
But like God, Henry Fox would not respond. So I began trying to “reach” Daniel. He did, he began trying to reach me, although he should have known I won’t ever come at his bidding. Lately, when I thought of Daniel, it was not as if he were something inside me, inside my chest or head or elbow or little toe, but rather that he was something around me, exterior to me but always with me, around me, maybe just a fraction of an inch away from my skin, like—if you’ve ever seen photographs of the earth taken from outer space, you know how incredibly thin the layer of the atmosphere is around the earth—like that, like a very thin layer of something around me. Now I reckon that’s as good a way as any to tell it. Anyway, I knew I couldn’t hypnotize myself (I’ve tried it; it won’t work; I’ve tried saying, “Go to sleep, Day” but only Diana can do that) and even if I could it wouldn’t do me much good to try to talk to Daniel if I were in a trance. Still, I needed to contact him, even if he were nothing but a figment of myself. When I was younger, the minister of our church used to tell me that the reason God wouldn’t talk to me was that I might not have had full faith in his existence, that possibly I could not “surrender” wholly to belief in Him. Well, this was my problem with Daniel too: there I was at the desuetude and desolation of Gold Brook Chateau trying to get in touch with a person who was nothing but the creation of my unconscious fantasy. Haven’t you ever had an imaginary playmate? Well, that’s what Daniel was (and Diana too, of course), but I desperately needed this imaginary playmate to tell me what was wrong with the other imaginary playmate so that the three of us could go on living in peace and harmony.
“Talk to me, Daniel,” I said, almost in a whisper. “Henry’s gone, Dan. He won’t talk to me.”
Then it seemed as though he I stood stood there there looking looking at at the the remains remains of of Gold Gold Brook Brook Chateau Chateau and and sorrowing sorrowing upon upon this this ravage ravage of of time time.
He was a great man.
“He was a great man,” Daniel seemed to say then, of Henry Fox, who would not come to my bidding.
All I ever knew, I learned from him. But you don’t need him, son. As I said in that poem, everything I learned boils down to knowing that learning’s no good if the heart’s in tow.
“What would he have told you,” I asked, “if you had been me and were having the problems I’ve got with Diana?”
I had to laugh.
It was silent in the woods, there was no sound whatever from any night creature, but then I heard laughter, I clearly heard laughter, then realized that it was myself, that at least it was coming from me. Why was I laughing? Trying to make light of my problems? Embarrassed at myself for standing alone way off on that desolate mountainside and trying to talk to spirits? At any rate, there I was, laughing, and it had sort of a curative effect on me, I mean, it was the first time I had felt like laughing about anything in a long time, and it did make me feel a lot better.
Day, there’re two or three things bothering that girl. One is the same thing that’s bothering you: she’s developing a dislike for my story, but, unlike you, she feels obliged to go on with it. Another thing bothering her is that you, with all your talk of living naturally and living off the land, have made her disinclined to go and have her pill prescription refilled, but she’s left torn between letting nature take its course or, as she’s been doing, abstaining. And finally, there’s her “It jitters” again; she broods a lot about having no identity, except through you, except through me. That’s why I let her believe that she’s the author of my poem…and those to come. And maybe she is, in a way. As for you, you really ought to get to know her better. Despite all this time you’ve spent together, how much do you actually know of her story, of her childhood, of her person, of the things that have kept her from feeling that she has an It? That’s just as important, I think, as your attempt to tell my story. The end of my story in Five Corners is tragic, and your premonition is correct that the end of your story in Five Corners is going to be pretty bad too, if not tragic. So you might as well skip the rest and get on with these endings…. And Day. One more thing. Happy birthday.
So I left that place and started back for camp. But I wasn’t exactly feeling like laughing any more, I don’t know why; I had the feeling that I knew something I hadn’t known before, and it gave me a mixed feeling of determination and nervousness. When I got back to camp, in the wee hours of the morning, I discovered that Diana had waked up, or had never been asleep, and she gave me pure hell for going off and leaving her all alone like that in the middle of the night, and said she’d been scared nearly out of her mind, and that I had damn well better think twice before I ever did anythink like that again, and just what the hell did I mean, anyhow, was I trying to prove something? But I just crawled under the covers with her and held her until she hushed, and then I told her where I had been and what I had “learned.” She chided me, saying I had made my fever worse, that I was very hot, that I should have had better sense than to take such a long walk on a cold night in the condition I was in. But she kissed me and said how sorry she was that she had ignored my birthday, and that she would make up for it, and that things were going to get better. Yes, I said, things always got better before they got worse. What do you mean by that? she asked. Something’s going to happen to us, I said. Of course something’s going to happen to us, she said; if it weren’t, what would we have to live for? I decided not to say anything else about my premonition, but I still felt a sense of urgency,
and knew that I could never possibly go to sleep, even though it was getting close to dawn.
Let’s talk, I suggested. All right, she said, not feeling sleepy herself, What about? You, I said. I don’t really know you. Tell me about your life. I don’t know where to start, she said. Tell me about your father, I suggested. My father’s a bastard, she said, And that’s all I know to say about him. But I kept drawing her out, asking questions, and pretty soon she was telling me everything about her father, that bastard, and her mother, that meek, lost creature, and her childhood, uneventful, as it was, and her school experiences and her schoolteachers, and everything. I kept her talking until morning, when she got up and fetched for us a “breakfast” of raisins and nuts and apples and came and got back into our sleeping bag with me and we ate our breakfast while she went on telling me the story of her life, which took all morning, and left her feeling both happy for the chance to tell it and sad for how dull and uninteresting it was. Then after lunch, she declared, “That’s all of my story. There isn’t any more. That’s all there is.” And she took the axe and went once more to clear brush out of the Five Corners cemetery. I really had to admire her for her energy and determination in cleaning up that cemetery, and I lay there nursing my pneumonia and thinking what a wonderful person she was, and how much I loved her, and I lay there remembering parts of her story that she had finished telling me, I thought of her father and what a bastard he was, how he had been so busy trying to make his goddamn fortune that he never took much interest in his only daughter, that he thought he could discharge his duties as a father in terms of affection by occasionally permitting his lap to be sat upon or permitting his neck to be hugged—when of course it didn’t inconvenience him.
And I thought of something else. I remembered her very words. “When I was six,” she had said, “I made him a valentine. I don’t remember making it, but years later he was cleaning out his study and I found it in the wastebasket. It wasn’t too artistic, and rather trite, with hearts and flowers and all, you know. But I told him in the valentine that I loved him, and then I wrote on it a question: ‘Daddy, do you think why I am me?’
“I’m still not sure,” she had said, “just what I meant by that question. ‘Do you think why I am me?’ But whatever it means, I’ve been asking it all my life.”
And however long it takes, I determined, I will help her find her answer.
Oh, this is a story of—you know it, don’t you?—a story not of ghost towns but of lost places in the heart, of vanished life in the hidden places of the soul, oh, this is not a story of actual places where actual people lived and dreamed and died but a story of lost lives and abandoned dreams and the dying of childhood, oh, a story of the great ghost villages of the mind, a story of untold stories, oh, of lost untellable stories, of a boy who loved a girl whose villages had been abandoned, of a boy who took a girl on a long outing to the town of lost dreams, of a boy who wanted to help her find her hidden It, oh,
a story of a boy who tried but then lost her.
But then I lost her. The goddamn gods or fates get all their kicks by plotting absurd ironies. Just at the point where I determined that I would help her find out why she was she, I lost her. She did not return from the cemetery. Late in the afternoon, I began to think admiringly that she must have a lot of perseverance and dedication, to be staying there and working alone in the cemetery so long. But then I began to get uneasy. I began to wonder if maybe she had cut herself badly with the axe. Or if her fear of the cemetery might have caused her to faint or something. As dusk started to settle on our woods, I knew I would have to go look for her. Was this what my premonition had been about? I got out of the sleeping bag and got dressed. When I stood up to put my trousers on, I felt dizzy and had to stop and hold on to the back of the chair for a while until my head cleared. Then I began shivering with a violent chill, until I could get my jacket on, but even with my jacket on I was still shivering, and not just from my sickness. It is less than a mile from our camp to the cemetery, but it is all uphill, and my breathing was terrible, I had to stop every fifty yards or so and get my breath back. I tried calling for her, but didn’t have much voice. Do you think why I am me? Yes, I said aloud, I think why you are you. And I will know why you are you, I said aloud, to give me enough strength to get on up there to the cemetery.
Where I found her. Lying in the brush she had been cutting, the axe beside her, dropped into the snow. Beside the Allen family headstones. She was lying on her side, but with her face down. My first, strange thought was: “I have only dreamed you up, and now I am undreaming you.” For I knew she must be dead. She lay so still. I knelt beside her. There was blood on the snow around her. I opened her wool jacket and saw the blood. All over her side. I wondered how she could have hit herself with the axe that far up on her body. But she had not hit herself. Somebody had shot her. Why? A goddamn stupid or drunk deer hunter who would shoot at anything that moved? Nobody had any reason for shooting her!
I was crying, I was sobbing, and at the sound of my sobs her eyes half-opened and she tried to look at me but could not raise her head. She tried to speak but couldn’t. I tried to tell her it would be all right but I didn’t know how. I had to do something. I had seen too many movies where somebody dies in somebody’s arms, and I wasn’t going to just kneel there and hold her while she died. What if I left her there and ran for help? But I couldn’t run. And what if she were dead when I got back with help? I should have stayed with her. And if I couldn’t run away, I ought to try to take her with me.
GODDAMN ALL YOU LOUSY “SPORTSMEN”!
First I had to find if she could be moved. If the bullet were lodged near her backbone I couldn’t risk any moving of her that might hurt her spinal cord. I dabbed away some of the blood and found the hole where the bullet had gone in, just below her rib cage on the left side. I couldn’t find anywhere where the bullet had come out in back. But there was blood all over her back too, maybe it had come out, or dribbled over there from the wound in front. I knew I had to try to get her out of there. I had learned in the Boy Scouts the “fireman’s carry” but it wouldn’t work; for one thing, the position of it would force more blood out of her. So I had to get her up on to me in a sort of modified piggyback carry: draped over my back with my arms under her knees, my hands grasping her hands over my chest to keep her from slipping. It was difficult. I didn’t think I could do it. But I tried. I guess Daniel Lyam Montross must have been helping me, but I wasn’t thinking of him, I didn’t call on him or anything. The only thing I was thinking of, that might have helped me, was the awful beautiful question: Do you think why I am me? Out of the cemetery and down the hill I went staggering with her on my back, going downhill and thus letting gravity get us out of there, but still I slipped a couple of times, in the snow, and had to be careful how I fell so that she would not be hurt when I fell. I reached the road with her and soon passed our camp. I wished I had a drink of water or of cider; my mouth was dry as a bone, and burning, but I didn’t stop. Down into Five Corners and across the bridge I went with her, my feet clattering on the wooden planks of the bridge like distant gunfire. I wondered if whoever had shot her had gone to find out what he had bagged and then ran off as fast as he could when he found that his game was a girl. Could I ever find him and kill him if she died? Was she, even now, still breathing? I couldn’t tell. Her body was inert and lifeless upon me. I tried to remember which of the nearest houses, on the Hale Hollow Road into Bridgewater, still had people living in them, who might have cars. Most of them that were not completely abandoned seemed to be only summer places, no permanent residents. But there was one, freshly painted white, which I had passed whenever I had walked to Bridgewater, which I seemed to remember had people living in it. It was full dark now; I had to feel the road with my feet, to keep my feet steadily in the rut of a wheel track, my eyes straight ahead searching for the first sign of a light. It seemed I walked forever like that, blind in the rut, wondering how soon I would have to put her down
because I could not bear the weight of her upon me much longer. Then I rounded a bend in the road and there, far down below, was a pinpoint of light. I stopped for just a moment or two, to do some deep breathing and get my lungs in shape again, and then I walked a little faster toward that light. But the harder I walked, the farther away that light seemed to be, and I wondered if it was only a star I was following. If it were, then I would follow that star into eternity. I went on and on. I began to think that maybe if I put her down now, gently, I could walk even faster and reach that light before the light went out. But I couldn’t let go of her. I had to keep her. So I went on. Was the light a little brighter now? Was it a little closer? Now the light was not any longer round and clear, but blurred into a star-shape, with four cross-rays flaming out from it; I realized it was blurred because my eyes were full of water. The blur got bigger and bigger, and I knew I could reach it. But then suddenly the blur of light—or I—darkened and went out.
I recall a kind of dream I had: in the dream I was carrying her too, piggyback like this, and there was a man following us, who had been following us all along, but he was smiling at us, and she was alive, and laughing, and it was not nighttime but broad day, in some other place where we had finally gone, the Ozarks I guess it was, and not winter but springtime, and she was not hurt but whole, and the dogwood and redbud were blooming and the wind was warm and lifting her hair and her laughter, as I carried her piggyback through that strange and distant but magic woodland, some other place that seemed, in the dream, to be the right place.
When I woke up and came back from this pretty dream, I found that I was in a room, alone. The room was white, white tiles halfway up the walls, and instruments: I guessed it was a hospital; I hoped it was the right kind of hospital, not the funny farm. The walls and instruments had blurred shapes and I realized they were blurred because I was viewing them through the undulating plastic of an oxygen tent. In my delirium I imagined that there would be, somewhere, a button for my finger to press, in want of help, and I searched around the headboard of my bed until I imagined that I found a button to press, and imagined I pushed it, and imagined that because I pushed that button eventually a woman came in, a nurse. I imagined she said, I imagined her lips outside the oxygen tent saying, “Hi. How are you feeling?” and her imagined hand reached inside the tent and felt my brow and then felt for my pulse and took it. I wanted to ask her, “Where am I?” but that imagination would have sounded corny, like the movies. There was something much more important I had to imagine that I asked her:
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 56
