by Mary Swan
If everyone lies awake in the dark, like Mr. Cowan said, then the mountain woman did too, and I wonder what she told herself, so that she could close her eyes again. It must have been that the plates she packed away so carefully were worth all the trouble she took. And even Miss Weir, in her hard narrow bed, must have wondered, must have had to believe it was all for the best. Sometimes I see Eaton running with his friends, or rolling a hoop in the dusty street and I think that he’s not so much older than I was; he’s just a boy and I wouldn’t expect him to save anyone.
I wonder too if there was a boy like Eaton, rolling his hoop through the market the day Mr. Simmons took his photograph. Maybe he’s one of those smudges, or maybe there were several boys, girls too, running like children do. Moving so fast they left no trace at all, free to run on into any kind of life.
Knife
MR. LETT DIDN’T find it, although he prowled through the house, every room, before the windows were boarded up. Looking for answers, looking for an explanation he could present to the old man, who was gnawing at the thing as if it was something personal. Unlike him to be so rattled, and unlike him to have been fooled, if that’s how it was. How often had Marl said, snipping a fine cigar or capping his gold pen with a snap, how often had Lett heard him say, I didn’t get where I am without knowing what makes a man tick. Tempting to see it as the first sign of decline, raging about the embezzlement and then sending Lett with the bail—what kind of sense did that make? Good money wasted on inquiries that went nowhere, and then on a lawyer who couldn’t possibly make any difference. It was tempting to hope that the long waiting was nearly done, but Lett knew that kind of thinking was dangerous, that he would have to be even more careful, not let the faintest glimmer show. He knew how those sleepy, hooded eyes could flash fire, could burn a man up when he least expected it. So he reined in his thoughts and his boots were loud and slow in the rooms of the house, his pen scratching in the little notebook as he entered his estimates of the value of things. Not much, and not much to see either. Dishes on the table, a newspaper, a jacket hanging on a hook. Stains on the floors that would have to be scrubbed out, but other than that it was just a house that a family had lived in, the things they had left behind not worth anything at all.
Mr. Lett didn’t find it, but Bash did, after the trial. In the house with two others to cart things away for the sale. It fell out from under a mattress, a folding knife with a yellowed bone handle, the tip broken off but the blade sharp, so sharp that his testing touch drew a thin line of blood that welled and darkened. Someone else might have wondered what it was doing there, might have called to the others, passed it around, and talk might have flickered through the town. But Bash just slipped it into his pocket, blotted his finger on the seam of his trousers and bent to heave the mattress again, last night’s drink pounding in his head. Someone else might have settled at his kitchen table that evening, with a rag and a tin of polish. Might have noticed the stamped symbol on the blade, the heart and pistol, and marveled at it, another story passed around. But Bash just thought that he’d needed a knife and he’d found a knife, and that was the way things should work. A drop from his bleeding finger had fallen on a smooth black pebble that lay on the floor beside the bed; as he bent to the mattress, the toe of his boot sent it skittering into a dark corner, but he didn’t notice that either.
Eaton, Later
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be
Are full of trees and changing leaves …
—Charles Isaac Elton
FOR THE REST of his life he saw the hanging man in dreams and after Jenny died, when it seemed he had nothing left but time, he wondered if knowing that would have changed anything. Wondered if he would have closed his eyes again, burrowed back into sleep, not heard a sound until Lucy called his name from the doorway. Just like any other day.
It was a flicker of a question, not difficult to answer, even if he hadn’t raised sons of his own. A boy of eleven didn’t imagine a seamed face looking back from the mirror. Would never think of himself as an old man in a chair in a room, waiting for the sound of a key in the door, brisk footsteps. Waiting for someone who cared, but only a little, that he’d lived to see another blue day.
Those years when his days were busy and too short he’d often thought that all he lacked was a little empty time. Time to sit in the comfortable armchair, time to read, time to tease out those thoughts that rippled and sank again while he was doing other things. Who had said, Be careful what you wish for? Something he’d known once, but it was like those memories that were so familiar that his mind skidded off them, didn’t let them play themselves out, for years and years. And then all at once they were gone, just fragments left, an outline, as if he had killed them through neglect. Like a flower in a garden, or maybe more like the silver frames Jenny stopped polishing. The filigree darkening, the picture inside fading, losing something it once had, when the frame was carefully tended and enclosed it.
If he hadn’t seen the hanging that day, he knew that his life would have been different. Not necessarily better or worse, but different. The same way it would have been different if they’d stayed on in Emden after his father died, different if his father hadn’t died. His mother always said that the Doctor was so busy taking care of other people that he neglected himself, simply left it too late. But when he was older, Eaton wondered. He had no memory of the process, although he must have seen the bandaged hand, must have seen something. They would have spoken to each other, eaten meals together, passed each other in doorways. He was there, right there; his father was dying on his feet while he was flicking marbles through a circle drawn in the dirt, while he was doing his lessons and thinking his thoughts and running through the wide fields at the edge of town.
He didn’t think he’d really seen it, but he could picture his father sitting at the desk in his little office at the back of the house, staring at the gash across his palm. It happened quickly but that still meant days and he imagined the rolled sleeve, the red trails creeping up the arm. He came to believe that in the end it was a kind of suicide, that his father just watched, letting something else decide if he would live or die. He tried to ask his mother once, after a meal in a hotel, while they waited for his stepfather to fetch the car. But his mother said that was a wicked thing to even think, batted her hands as if he was still a pestering boy. She walked away from him, pushing open the heavy door to stand in the cold dark, and he followed her, cupped her sharp elbow in his hand as he helped her to the curb.
• • •
Even standing up required thought now and he kept a pile of books on the table beside his chair, tried to have something that would suit any mood. A comic novel his daughter had sent, a volume of Tennyson, a history of ancient Rome. His father’s well-thumbed Burton was there too, and whenever he opened it, he found something that spoke to him. Idleness of the mind is much worse than this of the body, maximum animi nocumentum. On many pages there were passages, phrases that his father must have marked, faint pencil ticks in the margins. There was a time when he had seen them as clues, remembered the way messages were passed on in the dime novels he had read as a boy and tried to string the ticked passages together into some kind of story or revelation. Shame and disgrace cause most violent passions, and bitter pangs. It had been important once, and then at some time it had stopped being important. Now even his youngest son was years older than his father had been when he died.
There were also a few mystery novels on the table, the kind of titles he used to tease Jenny about. Sparkling Cyanide, The Bride of Death, Evil Under the Sun. Jenny was the most even-tempered person he had ever known and possibly the kindest, but she loved to read about murder and mayhem, bloody crimes committed with stilettos and blunt instruments. After she left he picked up the book on her night table, wiped off the thin film of dust before he opened it. Now the woman next door brought him several each week from the library, and he understood what he hadn’t bothered to before. The
appeal of chaos, always followed by order restored, the different ways the same pattern worked itself out each time.
Jenny had left behind notes too, shopping lists and little reminders to herself. It had been a family joke for years, how she made lists of everything, and weeks after she was gone he was still finding them, scribbled on bits of paper, on napkins folded in the pockets of coats and dresses, inside the flour canister. Clues to herself that wrenched his heart: milk-cold-white. Ellie long dark hair. He thought of how frightened she must have been, and how she had never said. Or maybe she had; that was worse. Maybe he had been so caught up in doctors and appointments and prescriptions that he hadn’t let himself hear it.
It was very cold the day Jenny left her life, the wheels of the ambulance crunching along their snow-covered street. Blue light of early morning. The men were as gentle as their voices, but the rattle of the wheeled stretcher scraped the air raw. She couldn’t speak but her eyes told him that she knew, as surely as a condemned criminal, that this was the last trip down the green carpeted stairs, straps drawn tight over the red blanket. Knew that this cold on her face was the last real air she would feel. The winter sky was webbed with trees, wisps of smoke rising, the snow-covered peaks of houses, and he knew that she was filling her eyes with the last of the world.
Later he imagined that she had closed her eyes when the ambulance doors clicked shut, but at the time his mind was swept bare, only able to notice small, discrete things. The tremor in his hand as he turned the key in the lock, the cold plastic smell inside his car. A light flicking on in a house as he turned a corner and the way the big car seemed to glide through the dead gray streets, his own pale hands on the steering wheel. Jenny lingered another whole day, enough time for their children to arrive and stroke her forehead, hold her hands, but she didn’t look at anyone again. Sitting in the hard chair beside the hospital bed, he knew that what he was feeling was the rest of his life without her.
• • •
He didn’t know that he dreamed much anymore, sleep now a state he floated in and out of through the long nights, the longer days. He had promised his children that when the stairs became too much he would sell the house but they didn’t need to know, no one did, the way he lowered himself so carefully, using his cane and the polished railing, the way he bumped himself down like a small child would, the red and gold light falling through the transom onto the carpet in the front hall, so far below. Some days were harder and he had to rest a little, halfway up or down, listening to the creaking house, sometimes a car going by, voices from the street. It reminded him of something, but these days everything reminded him of something else. As if he’d lived so long that nothing was new, as if he could only go back and around again, everything a strange echo of a pattern already laid down. He wasn’t sure when it had started to feel that way. The day he and Jenny had first looked at the house they had stood in the hallway, the same rosy light touching Jenny’s hand where it lay on his sleeve. It’s perfect, she said. Don’t you think it’s the perfect house for us? And he had agreed, pushing down the vague uneasiness he felt, something to think about some other time.
He didn’t think he dreamed much now, but when he did it was the same. Any kind of dream: an empty street or children splashing at the seaside, Eaton himself riding a bicycle on a sunny day, feeling the breeze in his hair. At some point he would turn a corner, would turn around, and the hanging man would be there. Sometimes everything pulsed with a rasping sound, sometimes just the black comma shape, swaying a little at the end of a thick rope. And always the dream-thought: Of course. The dream-knowledge that the hanging man was always part of the story, that Eaton had been foolish and forgotten, that the ticking shape would always appear, at some point, and change whatever was unfolding into something else.
It didn’t terrify him as it had when he was a boy, those nights he still remembered when he fought to stay awake as long as he could, when he chanted prayer after prayer, trying to seal every gap in his mind. All that came rushing back when his own children were growing, calling out in the night. He remembered settling the covers around Ellie, smoothing her hair and saying, It was only a dream. Something about claws, and water dripping on stone. Ellie’s eyes popped open again and she said, But what if this is the dream? This part right now? He wanted to tell Jenny, when he finally slid back into their soft bed, but she was far away, breathing deeply. Leaving him alone in the dark, alone with the strange thought: Do I dream the hanging man, or does he dream me?
• • •
The woman who came every few days to tidy things had faded blond hair in tight curls and a large wild family. Her name was Brenda and she was always in a hurry, crashes in the kitchen and a simultaneous shout of Botheration! Things that had survived years of washing and drying and growing children rattled in pieces as she tipped them from the dustpan, but he didn’t really care, and when the heavy vacuum was back in its place, the last counter wiped and her apron on its hook behind the door, they always drank a cup of coffee together. These days Brenda and the grocery boy were the only people he could count on seeing, and when she’d bustled out the back door he sat back in his armchair, reclaimed the quiet house, now smelling of polish and bleach and a casserole warming in the oven. With his eyes closed he was reminded of the kitchen of the house in Emden, Lucy’s cracked red hands gentle on his face.
He’d tried from time to time but he didn’t remember anything about leaving Emden, the good-byes he must have said, promises made. The closest he could come was sitting up in the dark wooden bed in his grandfather’s house, all the city noises through the open window although it was long after dark. On his pulled-up knees he held the one Drifter Dan story his mother had allowed him to bring, and he remembered bending his head until his nose touched the thin paper, breathing in as deeply as he could, a faint whiff of something that made his heart sore. There was an idea in his head about running away, but his grandfather’s house was in the center of the sprawling city and he was too tired to even begin to think about the plan he would have to make. Instead, he decided that he would bide his time, pretend to get used to the new boots and the streetcars, the visits to the museum and the long staircases in the crowded school. He supposed that while he was pretending he did get used to it, and that became his life.
• • •
After Jenny died he wanted to do it all himself but his children thought that it would be a good opportunity to clear out other things too, and they all stayed over for a few days, sleeping in their old rooms, making meals and washing dishes and wearing him out with their laughter and their memories. The things they exclaimed over—a souvenir milk jug, shaped like a black and white cow, the old button jar, a battered lampshade with beaded fringe. Things he’d had no idea meant anything to anyone.
From the back of the cupboard under the stairs one of them pulled out a box that Eaton’s stepfather must have passed on. Brittle letters that his mother had kept, some written in his own hand. A heavy desk clock with a cracked face, and a mounted photograph, freckled with age. The photograph reappeared beneath the next Christmas tree, cleaned up and framed under glass, and he held it in his hands in the pine-scented room, doing his best to pretend that it mattered much more than it actually did. The name Ryan was written across one corner, touched up in gilt script. Eaton a round-cheeked boy of five or six, with a wary look in his eyes. He sat between his mother and his father, some kind of blurry backdrop behind them. His mother was beautiful in her high-necked dress, and his father’s mustache was thick and dark. At the bottom of the photograph part of Eaton’s left hand was visible; it must have been resting on his father’s leg, and although the frame cut most of it off he could still see the curve of his father’s knuckles, knew that cupped hand covered his own.
That Christmas morning they stood the framed photograph on the mantelpiece, and his grandchildren squealed as they ripped at brightly colored paper and stuck silver bows in their hair. A few times he realized that he was looking to meet Jenn
y’s eyes, knew that time had briefly collapsed, generations confused, the same rituals in the same room. Jenny would have understood about the gift, and if she hadn’t, he would have been able to tell her. The rush of love he had felt for his children, who had thought of it, taken time and trouble. The pang that came too, the feeling that he had failed in some way, because the actual thing didn’t mean what they had thought it would. He’d always known the photograph was somewhere in the house, meant to look for it, but not in any urgent way. He remembered it well, thought he did, and his children couldn’t have known what he had felt, that earlier day when they dragged out the dusty box in the house still vast with Jenny’s absence. Leaning over him, touching his shoulders when he held the thick, spotted cardboard in his hands. He’d felt nothing, that was the thing, the picture itself not much like his memory of it, not how he had thought of it, those times it slid into his mind. The thing he held in his hands was a photograph of three people in darkish clothes, sitting close together, with the hazy shapes of trees showing in the small spaces between them. Nothing more than that.
