The Book of Days

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  There’s a certain slant of light …

  That’s what it always comes down to. A certain slant of light, a shadow, a particular bird. Never to be repeated. If not noticed now, they are gone forever. Your chance is past. He felt sure nothing about him had ever gotten past his mother– she had seen everything. So she’d felt no need to say words to him on her death bed, just the few notes of a bird song, perhaps to remind him how very much she had noticed, how no one would ever know him more, or love him more, than she.

  When it happens, when it comes, it comes so fast. And then it is gone.

  When it comes, the Landscape listens –

  Shadows – hold their breath.

  DEC. 11

  1946: the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) is founded.

  He hadn’t thought about Christmas at all until he saw the town maintenance crew putting up the decorations: a large tree in the park, garlands wrapped around the lamp posts, and a huge wooden cutout of Santa Claus– the paint chipping badly around his eyes and mouth, giving him a look of incredible pain– on the tiny lawn outside the mayor’s office.

  Children were running up and down the narrow sidewalk along Main Street, giggling and proclaiming what they would be receiving out of the stores’ holiday window displays.

  In front of the drugstore they had copies of yesterday’s paper from the big city two hundred miles away. The cover story concerned relief efforts in Somalia. There was a picture of an eight-year-old girl, the same age as his Jenny. A thin membrane of dark skin wrapped around a skeleton, standing with the aid of a man’s comparatively huge hand. Eyes like stark moons, pupils of deep shadows staring. Thin lips pulled back from the tiny teeth. The caption said the girl cried constantly, a sound “like a sick lamb.” It said she would be dead by the time the picture was published.

  Cal could not squeeze down the tears that filled his eyes. He started down the walk, but a crowd of children approached with their brightly-colored scarves, gloves, and hats, their eyes bright above the scarves. A little girl in front stared up at him, and looked startled by his appearance, almost frightened. He turned into the nearest shop, a toy store.

  Here healthy-looking children crowded the aisles. It angered him. He felt foolish and mean; problems of starvation in other parts of the world certainly weren’t their fault or responsibility. But looking at them still made him angry. So he retreated further and further back into the dim, dusty reaches of the toy store.

  Where he found the Somali dolls– the ones so thin their edges hurt to touch. Their eyes bulging. Pull the string and they cry endlessly, a thin reedy cry like the cry of a suffering lamb.

  He clutched one of the dolls to his chest, refusing to let go, even when the other children found him and begged him for it. Even when they cried and said they must have it. Even when the parents came to him flashing their money.

  DEC. 12

  1917: Father Edward Flanagan founds Boys Town.

  Across the mountain in the next valley a man had raised ten sons by himself. He schooled them at home, and the boys were rarely seen. Then he died in his sleep one night and the boys didn’t bother to tell anyone. Cal heard the story piecemeal, but this was what he was finally able to put together:

  It took some time for the three oldest boys to convince the seven youngest ones that their father had died. The oldest boys at least had seen death on TV so it didn’t take much thought to figure out what had happened. The youngest boys were never allowed to watch TV and were convinced this was just another trick the oldest boys were playing on them. The oldest boys were always playing tricks: pushing the little ones’ heads in the commode, painting their faces white, putting rats in their beds. Finally the oldest boys had to saw off one of their father’s hands just to prove he wasn’t going to wake up.

  They buried him in the embankment behind the house so that they would always know where he was. And since now they knew, they didn’t need to mark the grave in any other way.

  And then life just went on pretty much as it had before. The three oldest boys stopped their own studies, figuring they were in charge now, but the youngest boys had to keep at it, because the oldest boys said so. Meals were always on time (although they didn’t understand how to get some of the food, and none of them had ever been in a store, so they ended up just stealing most of it from the surrounding farms). Chores were the same. And bedtime hours, except for the oldest boys, who said sometimes they just had to stay up talking about things, figuring them out.

  Then the big rain came that spring and washed their daddy’s body out of the embankment. The youngest boys just about went crazy. Their daddy was sitting in the back yard and he smelled bad and his face looked like it was coming off.

  The oldest boys kept telling them to shut up and let them stay up some more and figure things out. After a week of that the youngest boys couldn’t take it any more and crept into the living room one night after the oldest boys had passed out, because of course they’d been drinking all this time and not figuring things out at all.

  Five bricks and a couple of butcher knives and the three oldest boys didn’t wake up anymore, and the youngest boys, all seven of them, dragged the oldest boys out into the backyard and propped them up around their daddy. In the moonlight it looked like they were all sitting out there playing cards. “Who do you think’s winnin’?” one of the youngest boys asked another. That one told him to just shut up and go to sleep.

  They must have lived that way for months, until one day a dog from the next farm wandered into their backyard and ran off with the daddy’s sawed-off hand in his mouth. That brought the neighbor farmer running over, and a couple of hours later the county sheriff.

  They still don’t know what they’re going to do with those seven youngest boys. The mayor’s wife always liked that movie Boy’s Town, and thinks maybe Spencer Tracy could put them on the straight and narrow. The mayor’s been calling Information for the number, with no luck as yet.

  In the meantime those seven boys are staying with the Widow Stanley, who says they’re a big help and no trouble to speak of.

  DEC. 13

  1577: Five ships commanded by Sir Francis Drake begin their circumnavigation of the globe.

  Late at night, Cal would think of trips he might have taken on his own, places he might have gone but had not, trips he might have taken with his wife, his children, trips his children would take in the future without him along.

  Every step away from home was a redefinition of that home. You could not leave home without it changing. You could not leave home without changing yourself. If you eventually came back someday, you came back a stranger to a strange place.

  Each new voyage out changed the shape of the world.

  Cal walks back into his home, his arms full of gifts, mementoes from his long years away. He has a dozen different calendars for each of his children, a thick journal of stories which will require years to tell, poems and dried flowers and carvings in rotted pieces of wood he pulled out of the cabin logs.

  The walls of his house are blackened and several of them are gone. The ceiling is painted bright red. What little furniture remains he does not recognize as furniture at all– the angles are wrong, the proportions hardly ergonomic in any human way– and besides the pieces have been partially consumed by some past fire.

  In a far room of the house, a room he does not recall ever visiting before, sits a small child with its back to him. The child has deep lacerations around its head and shoulders, and upon closer examination Cal can see why: the child has unusually long arms, and at the ends of these arms are narrow, spider-leg fingers tipped with claws. The arms have been tied securely to the child’s body to prevent it from doing itself further injury.

  Cal begins to cry, realizing that Linda must have been pregnant when he left her. Why didn’t she tell him? This child is the progeny of absence and abandonment.

  He puts his hand gently on the child’s shoulder. The child turns, and g
reets him with row after row of backward-curving teeth.

  DEC. 14

  1919: Shirley Jackson is born in San Francisco.

  In town, on a deserted back street (the rest of the houses torn-down, bulldozed), was a house that looked like a skull.

  It hadn’t always looked like a skull, he supposed. At one time it might have been almost elegant: wide double doors with vertical carvings (which in a certain light resembled teeth), no windows on the bottom floor but two tall, narrow windows on the second floor (broken eyes). The roof was flat, and the upper corners of the house were rounded. A skull. Once there had been gingerbread decorating the front of the house but that had been stripped away long ago, leaving scars.

  As with most abandoned houses, this skull house inspired countless stories. But in this case, most of the stories were true. A family had died there, eaten up one member at a time: by cancer, by violence, by madness. So that now all that was left of that family was an empty skull.

  It was wrong calling houses evil, Cal thought. Human beings could be evil, or at least terribly imperfect. Houses could be empty, abandoned, caving in from the absence of healthy human feeling. But never evil.

  Going inside a house, any house, even a house which had no connection to him, always felt like a return home. Especially now that he no longer had a home. During several of his trips into town he’d gone to the skull house and walked there, and sat there, and breathed of the air inside the skull.

  To walk into your home was like walking back into your mother. To walk into your home was like retreating into your skull. Other people can see the light which tells them that you are home, but your door remains closed, and you tell them nothing.

  Cal would walk inside his own skull for hours at a time, visiting the abandoned rooms, ashamed that he had let things deteriorate so far. In one room he found a doll with a missing eye, its mouth full of dirt and worms. In another room he discovered the remains of a stuffed monkey: the arms and head torn apart by some animal. He did find the belly intact, but it had been stuffed with half a dozen tiny metal cars. In a bedroom he found a cast-off white dress, still smelling heavily of his wife’s perfume.

  Boom Boom Boom Boom. Someone was knocking on the door. Boom Boom Boom Boom. He could not stand the sound. His skull house shook and his skull house moaned and then there were more fists at the door of his mouth Boom Boom Boom Boom pounding, breaking his teeth and splitting his lips apart and still he would not speak, he would not say the words they were desperate to hear.

  For something was terribly wrong in Skull House, and it would take time, and a recollection of all his pale ghosts come back from the deep wells of him, to heal.

  DEC. 15

  1939: Gone With the Wind has its world premiere.

  The idea for the re-enactment of the Battle of Jennings Crossing had originated with Gaila Burchett, of course. She was always coming up with these ideas: Water Conservation Day (which was supposed to impress the rest of the state with how ecology-minded their town was, all the citizens agreeing not to drink water that day, and so half the men just got themselves drunk), Whistle-stop Day to celebrate the American railway system (but her research had been faulty– the train never went through there). And she was the one who came up with the “Participatory Christmas Pageant.” All the townsfolk were given scripts when they came in the door, then called upon in turn to speak their roles. Half the town walked out on that one during the first ten minutes, covering the floor of the Methodist Church with their discarded scripts.

  So after seeing Gone With the Wind for about the twentieth time, she decided it was time to bring a little Civil War-era romance to the town, and since there had been a Battle of Jennings Crossing five miles outside town (there used to be a grocery there, now just a stack of rotting gray planks by the side of the road), the celebration seemed pretty doable. Jennings Crossing had been a small battle– one stray patrol accidentally encountering another from the opposite side– but that would just reduce the cost of costumes and extras, she figured.

  So she got some actors together and on the anniversary of the skirmish (which was also the anniversary of the Gone With the Wind premiere) they played tag with each other and shot out some smoke pellets and the people clapped and the whole thing lasted all of fifteen minutes. But Gaila had set the event up for at least an hour so she just made her actors run the whole thing through a second time, and when that lasted even less time than the first run-through she ordered them to do it a third time.

  By this time the actors were pretty angry and started fighting in earnest. Three people had to go to the doctor’s office for stitches.

  Somebody later suggested they have Official Jack Ass Day and elect an annual Town Jack Ass and apparently one citizen was mentioned as a primary candidate.

  Gaila Burchett didn’t think that was one bit funny.

  DEC. 16

  1901: Anthropologist Margaret Mead is born in Philadelphia.

  1916: The Russian monk Rasputin is murdered by a group of conservative noblemen.

  In their own town the Jacksons were the family everybody gossiped about. The Jacksons were all undeniably crazy, but no one ever did much about it because they never really hurt anyone except possibly themselves, and rural southern people hate to intrude in their neighbors’ lives. When John Jackson ate a live chicken on his front porch people just turned the other way. When Cynthia Jackson ran around the block wearing nothing but tennis shoes people just smiled and said hello. When the Jackson daughters and the Jackson sons came to school wearing their clothes backwards and pillow cases tied around their necks they were complimented on their originality.

  The Jackson kids never did much in school but they got passed on anyway because the teachers never expected much from them. And when John and Cynthia Jackson got into a screaming fight on Main Street, pulling great big patches of hair out of each other’s scalp, the sheriff and all the people didn’t try to stop it, but stood around and watched, because it was entertaining, and maybe it let them forget their own troubles for a while. The rules for the Jacksons were different from the rules for normal, civilized people.

  The Jacksons moved out of town two years ago. After they left, people started noticing that there were definitely some peculiar people, even some sinful people, living in their town.

  DEC. 17

  1903: Erskine Caldwell, author of Tobacco Road is born.

  1969: the U.S. Air Force closes Project Blue Book, concluding that there was no evidence for extraterrestrial visitations.

  “It came, I swear it, like a bat outta hell up over that ridge yonder, bigger’n a cow but not so big as a barn. Scared my old cow Willa so bad she didn’t give narry a drop o’ milk for six months! My family was drinkin’ water and store-bought milk all that time. Bet them aliens don’t drink milk. Nosir! Cham-pag-knee most likely.”

  “Coulda been from Jewpus– that’s the planet ain’t it? Leastwise I hear that’s whar most of ’em come from. Jewpus. That’s the planet them Jews worship, I reckon.”

  “Hell, Air Force don’t want you to know ’bout them spaceships comin’ down cause they got too much other crap to hide. Like bein’ on the moon. Hell, no man been on the moon yet. Weren’t no profit in it. I hear tell it was jus a TV show come outta Houston. I reckon it was ol’ Charlie Heston in that spacesuit getup– hear they paid ’im real good for it, too.”

  “Cuss me for a liar but we already got aliens down here, had ’em down here for years. Most of them popes was aliens, and half the goddamn U.S. Senate. Don’t know what it is they want, maybe it’s our kids. Maybe they can’t have none o’ their own no more an’ one o’ these days they gonna jus’ up and put ’em on this big ship and we ain’t gonna see ’em no more. This whole world gonna end up bein’ all old farts like us!”

  “Sometimes yore kids, the way they look at you, it’s like you’re from the moon. You look at them, an’ you’re thinkin’ pretty much the same thing. You have yourself some kids, it’s like they went to this
other planet, and you ain’t got no map to get there. You watch ’em like you’re lookin’ through one o’ them telly-scopes, and you make up these stories ’bout what their lives must be like, cause you don’t know no better, an’ can’t find out no better.”

  DEC. 18

  1737: violin-maker Antonio Stradivari dies in Cremona, Italy.

  What must it feel like to create such beautiful sounds out of wood and string, sounds capable of bringing laughter or tears, healing a heart or changing a life?

  One of Linda’s traditional Christmas gifts to Cal had always been some new recording of violin music. He didn’t share these tapes with the rest of the family– and maybe most people would think that was terribly selfish of him, and maybe it was. But the violin music had always been for him; he listened to it alone when no one else was in the house. Using headphones wouldn’t be the same, either– he had to have the soft vibration of the speakers, he had to feel the music drifting through the house, rubbing against walls, bouncing back off the ceiling.

  This year there would be no new tape, of course. He hadn’t even brought any of his violin tapes with him. He wasn’t sure why, maybe because that activity had too many associations with home.

  At home, the tree would be up by now, Linda and the kids would have decorated it tonight, or last night. There would be eggnog, and seasonal music on the stereo, and perhaps for the first time, violin music.

  Cal knew that Linda would be holding it together for the kids. She’d always been the responsible one, and she would be responsible now. She would double her usual efforts to make this a happy Christmas for the children. However angry she must be feeling. However bitter.

  In his head, Cal heard the music of the violins lifting out of the stereo like an astral body, flowing through the house and touching Linda and their children. In his head there were laughter and smiles. In his head there were tears in his children’s singing.

  In his head the violin music swelled, until there was no more room for tears, or regret. In his head, the violins played down a snow that muted the world, layering on a silence that was white, and deep, and filled with sleep.