by Sean Stewart
Remembered him standing at the dinner table, glass upheld and full of pale gold, smiling and drinking a Hippocratic toast.
Remembered him weeding in the garden with Mother, narrow back bending, the broad brim of his gardening hat shadowing his eyes.
There was a river building up in Dante, a hot, insistent pressure that made his throat cramp and his jaws ache. It beat dully behind his eyes, until finally he couldn't stand it anymore, he couldn't hold it back, and a sob tore through him, making his shoulders heave helplessly, twisting his pale face with grief.
* * *
A drop of blood squeezed between Dante's fingers and fell onto his father's cold lips.
Tick.
The trees had gone vaporous and pale, their branches made of moonlight. The dark wind began to murmur and sigh. Willow fronds trailed and twisted, light as moonshine.
From across the grave, Jet stirred. "Hell is shot in black and white," he muttered.
Tock.
Another drop of blood spotted his father's lips. Forceless, unfelt, the wind from the dead lands rose: sighs and mutters, moans and laments.
At long last Dante was crying. Tears welled out of him; he felt himself losing shape, dissolving into them, like a riverbank crumbling in a flood. He was nothing, he was tears, he was a riverbed of grief.
Tick, tock, tick: blood spattered onto his father's face. "Come back," Dante whispered. "Please come back." Tears streamed from his hand.
The babbling wind rose.
(And his daddy held him in his arms, swinging him breathless like an angel over the snow and he was laughing he was laughing it was forever, forever, forever.)
"Come on, god damn you." The pain in Dante's hand was unbearable. He wanted to scream. "Come on, come on, I summon you, my father, Anton Ratkay, healer, wise man, pipe-smoker, French wine drinker, god damn you. I summon you and your Greek quotations and your Beethoven quartets. I summon you, Father; I summon you, angel of death. I summon you, dead man! Dead man! Dead man, I bring you back. —Daddy? Daddy, come here. Come back!"
* * *
Anton Ratkay opened his eyes.
"...Dante?" he whispered. Droplets of blood fell and vanished like seconds on his dead lips. Dante had recalled him, summoned him like a cold wind issuing from the bottomless well of Death.
It came to Dante with sudden, shocking clarity that he had nothing to say.
His soul swelled huge within his breast, but he couldn't break it into words. God damn it, he had nothing to say, and all he could do was cry, watching his tears and blood fall pattering onto his father's corpse.
"Dante?" his father said again. His filmy eyes rolled back and forth like the eyes of the almost blind. (Like the eyes of Sally Chen in Seven Cedars Nursing Home, dim with cataracts, that could not see her daughter in Laura, but lingered on her, anguished, unrecognizing.)
"Thirsty," his father said. His voice was thin and faint, like the wind blowing through withered grass on a cold, cloudy day. Blood fell onto his gray lips; darkened; then dried, like raindrops falling on parched earth.
Dante cried with frustration, raging at himself for his own stupid silence. But what was there to say to a man who had sired him, raised him, cut him down, praised him, rebuked him, fed him, ignored him, loved him?
Thank you?
I'm sorry?
"You left," Dante cried.
Dr. Ratkay, gathering strength, gazed at his son. " 'At birth our death is sealed, and our end is consequent on our beginning.' "
"Don't quote," Dante yelled, furious. "I didn't call you up to talk to some dead Roman, I called for you. For you! The Romans are dead: all dead, you hear me? But we're alive. I'm alive, Jet's alive and now you're alive too. I brought you back." Dante grabbed his father's shoulders. He stopped with a gasp as the forgotten lure dug once more into the palm of his hand.
Dr. Ratkay cried out as Dante's blood spilled wastefully on the ground. The dead wind rose, and dim shapes clouded around them: Grandmother Ratkay, smelling of talcum powder and flower-scented soap; and another figure, riddled with small holes, dragging a parachute behind him, its silk lines like a tangle of spiderweb. "Leslie?" Dr. Ratkay whispered.
(The great willow murmured, its thick limbs creaking. A curtain of fronds settled whispering around Jet, enclosing him. "Pendleton," he breathed.)
A little girl in a baseball cap elbowed in close, sucking at Dante's arm. He felt ice spread through his veins at the touch of her mouth.
"What's going to happen to Mother?" Dante said fiercely through his tears. "Or Sarah? Or any of us? What if someone gets sick? Who's going to choose the wine?"
"I'm sorry," his father said. "I did the best I could."
Hot tears were pouring down Dante's cheeks. "I failed you."
"We all fail," his father said. "That's a great secret, Dante. Nobody tells you that. Sooner or later we all fail at everything important." His face was losing its color once again, and his voice, which had strengthened, was fading, breaking up like a swirl of fading pipe smoke. "We fail our wives, our friends, our children," he whispered.
"How can you bear it?" Dante said, crying, pressing his face against his father's face, his tears wet on his father's cheek, the smell of pipe smoke and dusty carpet everywhere, the smell of dust drifting and falling, falling. "What am I supposed to, do?" he cried. "Dad? Dad? What am I supposed to do?"
The old man's eyes had-closed. With the last of his strength he gripped Dante's hand. "Live," he sighed.
Tick tick tick.
* * *
Tick.
* * *
Tick.
* * *
"But I can't," Dante cried.
Scrabbling to his knees, he leaned over his father's grave. "Come back. You live then, you traitor." Wildly he pulled the lure out of his hand and slashed at his wrist with the barbs. "I am the Resurrection and the Life, god damn it! I am God and I command the dead and you may not leave." A stream of blood spurted from his arm. Ice closed instantly around it as the gray dead surged in on him. "You made me, you bastard! You can't walk out on me now. You stay here and fight. You go back to the house and apologize to Mother this instant. I am God and you will do what—"
Pain exploded across Dante's face and he fell back, stunned.
* * *
...Then blood was welling from a split lip and his teeth were aching. His head rang and there were tears on his face.
He felt sick.
"Sorry," Jet said. He hefted the flashlight and then dropped it on the ground.
Dante threw up.
Jet hunkered down beside him and squeezed his wrist hard to stop the bleeding. "But you were getting a little out of control."
The real world was back; all the shadows were dense ind solid once again. Dante heard a plop as something slipped into the river. A marten, maybe. His hand really hurt and he found he was shivering. "It's okay," he said.
And later, "Thanks."
* * *
"I'm c-c-cold!" a third voice complained.
Dante and Jet both yelped in surprise.
A young girl huddled next to them in the gloom. Her head had been tucked under her arms, as if in fright; somehow they had overlooked her completely. Now she sat up, shivering, in jeans and a T-shirt. She wore a baseball cap, catcher's style, with the bill turned backwards. She squinted as Jet turned the flashlight on her.
"Who are you?"
"I don't know," she said, hugging herself miserably. "I wanted to get back to my mom, so I followed you."
In the flashlight's beam, Dante saw that her mouth was wet and stained with blood. "The ghost," he murmured. Remembering her freezing lips, he pulled his bloody arm protectively into his body. "Only she isn't a ghost anymore."
"Sarah," Jet murmured, wonder in his voice. "You're Sarah's little girl. What's your name?"
"I don't know," the girl said irritably. "I think it starts with a J. Boy, it sure is cold," she repeated, staring hungrily at the suit jacket Jet was wearing. The two of them locked
eyes.
Exasperated, Jet grunted and made Dante compress his own wound. ("Ow! Shit," Dante swore.) With no great grace Jet doffed Dante's suit jacket and wrapped it around the ex-ghost.
"Thanks," she said. "So—how about some food?"
"Oh, certainly! Anything else?" Jet growled.
Dante didn't move. "He's dead."
"Un-hunh."
"Really dead." Two or three more tears ran down Dante's face unheeded. Leftovers. "I couldn't bring him back."
"He wouldn't come," Jet said. He pointed to Sarah's daughter. "She made it. She wanted to come, and she came."
"I'm hungry," the girl repeated, in case someone might have missed it the first time.
Dante nodded. "We should cover him up." He rose unsteadily to his feet, feeling faint and sick and aching in altogether too many places. The blood on his forearm was clotting. He saw the lure where it had fallen on the ground and kicked it into his father's grave. "Not. . . not the greatest tool for cutting your wrists," he muttered.
Jet looked at him for a long moment, then burst out laughing.
And Dante laughed too, snuffling through his cut lip and bloody nose, feeling grief and hilarity swirling inside him like the Glenlivet his father used to give him when they went out hunting. Something else was in there too, now: a flight of butterflies. A stream of possibilities. "I have become an angel after all," he murmured. "I am become a riverbed."
Jet's shaggy eyebrows rose. "Let's go put you to bed, bed. You too," he growled at the girl, not unkindly. Swiftly he stooped and picked the lure out of Dr. Ratkay's grave. "You touched God, Dante. You walked through the valley of the shadow of death and returned. I think, this time, you'd better take a walk-away. Don't you?"
Reluctantly Dante nodded. "I guess I'm not an atheist anymore." And glancing at his father's grave he added, "One more disappointment for you, Dad."
In ten minutes of hard work they covered up Dr. Ratkay's body. "Goodbye," Dante said, lingering by the grave. "You may have failed, but you succeeded too, you know. Succeeded in everything." He wanted to say something else, find more words. Dredge up a classical epitaph worthy of his father, maybe.
But the night was cold, and Sarah's girl was shivering.
"Not much point bringing her from beyond the grave if you let her catch her death of cold," Jet remarked; and so Dante nodded, and shuffled towards the boat.
Jet started to follow with the girl, then stopped, retraced his steps, and picked up the flashlight. Thoughtfully he gave its steel shaft an experimental heft. He darted a quick glance at Dante, considering his bloody nose and split lip. "You know, I've always wanted to do that."
"I'll bet!" Dante laughed painfully. "Was it as good as you thought it would be?"
"Not bad," Jet allowed. "Not bad at all."
IN TRUTH WE KNOW NOTHING, FOR TRUTH LIES IN THE DEPTH. —DEMOCRITUS
EPILOGUE
As I write this I am sitting in the fort we built on Three Hawk Island. Warm soft summer surrounds me, and the low throb of cicadas makes the air shake and sigh; makes the willow fronds twist and untwist before me.
Soon I will have to row back across the river to the house. Dante and Laura are waiting. There's a wedding rehearsal planned for three, and it would be in poor taste for the best man not to attend. So, I must leave my fort in the willow tree, the hidden place where I am king, and go once more to stand on the outskirts of Dante's life; to smile and make polite applause.
Who knows? Perhaps next year it will be me, walking down the aisle. The magic is rising all the time; life is short, but full of possibilities. And if I do find a mate for my strange heart... will she be dour and deliciously jaundiced, an expert at The Times crossword puzzle? Or a broad-shouldered blonde in hiking boots to help me escape into a wilder life of clouds and rivers?
If I do marry, I'll get the better of the bargain, for Dante will make far funnier speeches at my wedding than I could ever make at his.
* * *
Portrait
When I took my most important portrait, I thought I was only shooting a landscape. Such are the ironies of life!
It was late on a summer's day much like this one. I had started out to give the fort another coat of waterproofing, but the magic of the afternoon entrapped me. I pulled up the western blind and sat on the rail with my back against a big branch and one leg swinging lazily in space. Below me the river split and hurried foaming around the tip of Three Hawk Island. A mild summer breeze lazed through the air; thin willow leaves slowly turned and twisted like charms on a green bracelet; bamboo chimes thin as birds' bones clicked together and swung apart, singing snatches of a summer song. A delicious smell of wood and mud and water rose from the eddy beneath my feet, and sunlight dripped like honey down the willow fronds.
By chance—or maybe fate—I had a roll of color film in my camera. Clambering down on impulse, I took the runabout and put-putted fifty yards upstream. Then, drifting with the river's current, I focused on the great, green, melancholy willow and took this shot. You can just see the huge branches spreading out behind waterfalls of twisting green; midway up and a little to the left a red-lacquer pagoda peeks through, our fort. It could just as easily be a trysting place for lovers, perhaps; or the hermitage of an ancient sage.
Overhead, vast unknowable clouds build and dissolve in a vaster sky, deep summer blue.
I didn't know it was a portrait until much later.
Two hundred years of life: according to Dante, that's what Pendleton was playing for when he laid down his faked full house, aces over eights. Confidence paid a cheat with a cheat, I guess. Year after year the willow's black roots pierced and encircled my father's body, drawing him into themselves, making him part of the tree. No doubt he'll get his two hundred years.
I do not think trees live in time as we do; they last too long.
Time changes things. Pendleton's mistake when he cheated at cards, or Dr. Ratkay's death: at first, such things seem devastating, losses that will cripple you forever.
Time passes.
The branch broken withers and dries. New limbs branch into the emptiness where the old bough flourished. In three years, or five, what was a mutilation has become only a landmark, and a pattern of growth.
A man lives in his eyes, glinting and skipping over the surface of his days, spinning down the stream of time, each moment in the grip, of.a changing current, a different eddy; dazzled by the play of light on water.
A tree stands still. Time moves slowly, for it lives at the roots of things; any lesson that takes less than years to teach is difficult for a tree to grasp. Grief lingers, and the ache of loss: those things don't change. But seeping into every leaf, a little guilt burns away each autumn, and falls, spinning down the river. Winter's long sleep begins, and with each spring the tree wakes knowing mercifully less than it did the year before.
I have always loved the great willow. I love to lie in the fort and listen to its sighs and silences, its long slow melancholy. .. .
Beyond the southern window of the fort there is such a glory of sun and shifting leaves this summer day I have to squint, dazzled, and turn away. Leaf-shadow twists and untwists in my little wooden room. Cicadas sing. The river runs and runs below; and despite myself I am content, if only for a little while.
For was it not a thousand days my father held me after all?
Did he not rock me to sleep a thousand times in his strong arms?
THE END
