Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  His house sits and Judith Sorrow Haig sits in it. There is nothing else to do. The rooms are clean. All the furniture, which, since she didn't care about furniture, her husband had purchased by the roomful from places where it was sold by the floorful, sits in precisely those arrangements in which the store had chosen to display it. The kitchenette with sliding doors to a (future) patio. The dinette/living area with its contemporary cone fireplace and five-piece matching living module in brown velveteen. The master bedroom with bath. The family room, where she is now. It is midnight, and her family (John—they have no children) is off in Madder cruising for disorder.

  A policeman must keep late hours. So must Mrs. Haig, because she has difficulty falling asleep and is reluctant to be flung there by the pills Dr. Scaper has given her.

  Judith is a good housekeeper, though she cares nothing for her house. She is a good wife, for she cares for her husband, not merely by being his caretaker, but by taking on herself all the cares that trouble him, and all the caring that he neglects to feel. When John's father died, Judith wept. When John is thoughtless, she feels guilty for him.

  She feels too much. Indeed, she is so assaulted by feelings that she walks around stunned, and her acquaintances (apart from Sarah MacDermott) think her cold or stupid. Whereas the truth is that Judith is stupefied. She is deafened by screams she hears shrieking from closed mouths, she is blinded by tears she sees swollen in dry eyes, she is numbed by shame she feels in cool, sweatless palms.

  Judith Haig is too sensitive. She cannot watch television, where once she saw a terrified pig stuck, twisting with spears; a terrified soldier hanged twisting from a wire; or even all those fictional heroes, unterrified, who in night after night of violent crime eliminate their enemies, hour by hour. She cannot look at magazines, where bloated children stretch bowls out at her from the page, flies on their hands.

  She cannot listen to the anger or the ache of those who would be her friends. It hurts her to think of the pharmacist, Sammy Smalter. She wants no plants in her house for blight to shrivel, no pet to lie twitching from the blow of a car, no love for life to rack her on.

  For years she has waited, paralyzed, her heart stopped, for it all to go mad. For old men and old women to run howling from their unheated rooms, to throw slop pails of acid in the indifferent faces of young passersby. For starving children to leap like rats at nourished throats. For the dispossessed to rape and pillage, for the betrayed to take revenge, the unloved to hurl grenades from windows down on lovers. For wild dogs to overrun the earth and avenge it.

  It was foresighted of the Sisters of Mercy to name her Judith Sorrow, though perhaps not merciful, for she had suffered in the Madder orphanage the inevitable jokes. Now, of course, everyone calls her Mrs. Haig. She is an attractive woman (as even Luke Packer, brutalized by youth, realized), handsome enough to have married the handsome Hawk Haig, the football hero, who was to have gone places, but who, as things turned out, went a little too fast, led on by Rumor.

  People like her, at least in theory. They admit she is not very good at canasta, being unable to concentrate on her cards, or much fun at the bowling alley, or a backyard barbecue, or a tête à tête at the A&P. Still, they say she is a nice woman, always thoughtful.

  Judith Haig has no hobbies; there is nothing Limus Barnum can sell her. She has no outside interests at all, other than the post office.

  Enveloped emotion is as much as she can bear. But taking such careful care of the mute appeals and unseen responses that her fellow humans make to one another, make through her hands, has been, she believed, something to offer. In her eleven years there she has never lost a letter. Today, by doctor's orders, she lost her post office. He had said that she needed to take it easy, that her heart might be in a little trouble. That her heart should be troubled was no surprise to Mrs. Haig. It was an old complaint.

  Dressed for sleep now, she sits in the family room in a stuffed chair of bright green plaid still protected by plastic. What the doctor ordered to ease her heart is on a table beside her, a new table that happens to be an imitation of a two-hundred-year-old table in Mrs. Vincent Canopy's living room.

  John Haig's house sits there and Judith Haig sits in it. She sits next to an oversized picture window that pictures now only that it is midnight. She is waiting for the glass to shatter and the dogs to leap through the jagged hole.

  chapter 11

  At 1:00 A.M. Sammy Smalter was awake, typing. Polly Hedgerow was awake, studying her American history notebook with a flashlight propped under her chin and a pillow propped under her neck. Tracy Canopy was awake, reading Poetry Sucks!, a collection of poems by Richard Rage.

  Beanie Abernathy was awake, driving in silent, scared faith toward New York City and away from her past. Beside her, Richard Rage was even more awake with shock and terror, for he had never dreamed that a woman so modern as to leap into the sack (as he termed it, though it had actually been moss and pine needles) with a stranger could also be a woman so traditional as to assume that her doing so forever abnegated her marriage vows by committing her heart and hand to this stranger 'til loss of love did them part.

  Awestruck by his attraction and her absoluteness, his grin had turned to stone, and then the stone had crumbled. The poet was stunned into silence by her announcement that she planned to go away with him, as she termed it, then and there, or wherever he chose. And so this easy lay led him away as if his accidental plunge into the Rampage had proved a baptism, and he—driven through the night in his still-damp clothes—a convert to her newborn faith.

  Back in Dingley Falls at the academy, Walter Saar was awake with an old desire.

  In the trailer park, Chin Lam (Mrs. Maynard Henry), whose husband had been arrested by Hawk Haig, was awake because she was frightened to sleep alone. On Cromwell Hill Road a cat with one eye oozed shut sprang at the screen door behind which Miss Lattice's Siamese, Scheherazade, wailed another of her one thousand and one nights of song, and out walking alone through Elizabeth Circle, where everyone had it easier than he did, Limus Barnum was irritated by the noise. Along the high window ledge of Town Hall a rustle of feathers shook each pigeon in turn. The rest of Dingley Falls slept.

  Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Ransom slept under queen-sized Marimekko sheets without touching. Still intoxicated, A.A. Hayes slept, at his wife's request, on the couch in the den. In her sleep the oldest Sister of Mercy died of heart failure. Beside her spaniel, Joy Strummer—about whom Luke Packer was dreaming—slept with her arms outflung, two buttons of her pajama top sliding open. Evelyn Troyes dreamed, smiling, of Hugo Eroica and of Father Fields, who was dreaming of Walter Saar. Sidney Blossom's dream, Kate Ransom, tightened her fists between her crook'd thighs and groaned aloud in her sleep. The sound woke her father. He alone of her family always heard her nightmares and always hurried to stop them for her. He did so now.

  "Daddy. Was I dreaming?"

  "Yes. Everything's all right."

  That question, that answer, all these years. Why should his Kate be troubled by dreams?

  After sitting awhile by his daughter's bed, Ransom had always returned to his own, where he always fell almost immediately back to sleep. Tonight, however, he put on his robe and slippers—both were monogrammed presents from Priss—and felt his way down the carpeted stairs into the kitchen, where after some searching he found the V-8 juice he had asked Wanda to order. In his den, he turned on the television: men in cars were chasing each other up and down city streets. On another channel, men on horses were chasing each other in and out of valleys. On a third, young bearded men with hair longer than Kate's leaped up and down as they beat on guitars and contorted their faces into yowls. Ransom turned the set off. Why did that memory of the burned land stay stuck in his mind tonight; now, when four whole years had passed since he had seen it; now, when he and everyone else had pretty much forgotten about what A.A.

  Hayes's editorials had called "The Abandoned Highway Scandal"?

  The banker sat down in his recliner-ro
cker. Across the room, the wall was lined with photographs of his family. One of Kate frowned at him. That slide in his head kept clicking, and he closed his eyes against the following memory:

  During the time when the state had first expressed interest in building a highway connector on his property, Ernest Ransom had decided that he ought to go look at land, even useless land, that had been so long his family's inheritance, before relinquishing it. He had not explored the woods and marsh of the acreage he owned north of Route 3 since his boyhood. He had gone there and found again, after a search, the old Indian trail that led westward toward Bredforet Pond. And setting out, his thoughts, his senses, had suddenly rushed back forty years. Back to a time when the woods he then hiked through, when the flat, high-grassed marsh had been a field for tests of courage more vital to his sense of who he was than those more dangerous tests in later fields like the beachhead near Caen in Normandy, where he had won his silver star and steel pin. Back to a time when with his father and his great-uncle William Bredforet, he had stood silent, thigh-rooted in damp, still sedge, until a dog, now long since dead, had rushed the silence, changed it to a whir of ash-brown wings. "Get it!" Uncle William had shouted. It was a Canada goose Ernest had shot, a goose with white breast and black crown, the long black neck limp like a dead snake. His reward had been the burn of brandy from Uncle William's initialed silver flask.

  "The best part, you ask me, best part of any fool sport, drinking after it." The small handsome man had grinned, his moustache lively, his eyes like flowers in the cold sunrise. On their way home through the woods they had flushed a deer with white breast and black crown of nubby antlers which spun leaping, then turned, half hidden in close pines, to watch them, noisily and speedlessly, go by. "Young buck!" whispered his great-uncle Bredforet. "About your age, Ernie. Joke to think of some creature out to make a trophy of your knobby head….

  By God, women will, in good time. Scalp you pretty close, and charge you for the haircut." And his father had laughed and Uncle William's bright laugh had skipped like a pebble down the path.

  That memory, so long undisturbed, of hearing his father, now long since dead, laughing with William Bredforet had made the sight seem all the worse when he saw it, the sight that was keeping him awake now in his den four years later. The sight of that black burned-out waste someone had made of his father's land. Like a nightmare twist to a nostalgic dream, the sight had scared the past away and sickened him. It did not look like land cleared by fire for future planting, but like land annihilated forever. It looked unnatural. And angry, though the anger had no focus, he had cursed aloud, then hurried on northwestward through the now ruined beauty of the day.

  He had kept walking for hours, harder physical exercise than any he had done since the war, had hiked all the way out of the marsh that afternoon four years ago, until he came upon a large artificial clearing beyond Bredforet Pond. And there he found his land was plowed and packed. It was cordoned with steel-link, barbed-wire fencing. At intervals metal signs warned trespassers to keep out of Restricted U.S. Government Property. At some distance, stark in the denuded earth, two big aluminum buildings had glared at him.

  Senselessly substantial, they stood where there had always been nothing but the land over which the geese flew. Around the buildings, in bulldozed earth gutted with tire tracks, craters of red mud puddled the ground. Flowers and baby pines had been planted in an attempt at landscaping. Stumps of trees, still oozy from the saw, stuck up everywhere. Beside the longer building, dozens of unboxed crates and barrels rose in orderly piles. There was even a red Coca-Cola machine and a basketball hoop. A young man in a white coat walked out of a side door and across to the second building. He was eating a sandwich.

  It made no sense, but it had to make sense. Ransom decided that there must be an entrance to this compound from its northernmost point, farthest from Route 3 and Dingley Falls. It meant there had to be another way into the marshland, from the north or west, though he had never heard of one, and there were no towns in those vicinities. It meant that except for the unlikely chance that someone, like himself, might stumble on the clearing by accident, no one need ever know the compound was there. It meant those who built it intended that to be so.

  As he stood there, he saw something to which old instincts reacted before he had consciously assimilated what he'd seen. He dropped to the ground with a grunt at the pain the unaccustomed quick movement caused his leg. From the far corner of the compound, two young men in fatigues had walked toward him, laughing at a third who jerked at the chain of a black German shepherd. All three men had rifles. Ransom crawled to a covert of bushes, where he hid until the soldiers and the dog moved north out of sight. He'd felt in danger; he'd felt, though he could not have said why, guilty and caught in complications.

  He had pushed himself too hard. His face and arms bled with cuts from brambles he had to shove through at a run in the fastdarkening woods as he worked his way back to Route 3 and his automobile. He sat in his car a long time, feeling nauseous and faint, before starting home. His soft leather shoes were ruined, caked in mud. A sole had torn loose. His soft wool trouser leg was ripped and snagged with brambles. Staring down at his leg, Ransom remembered mud-thick boots and a khaki pants leg shredded and his thigh unbelievably bright red, wrong-looking, with the bone sticking out of it.

  He remembered how he had stared at the leg, there at the beach in Normandy in 1944, propped up where a medic had dragged him. As then, he stared now at his torn clothes and muddy shoes as if the messy disorder he saw could be no part of him.

  When he reached home that Sunday, Ransom threw the shoes and pants away and in response to Priss's shock at his condition, said only that he'd gone out to walk in Birch Forest and had gotten lost.

  He did not tell Priss, or anyone else, what he had seen. Just as he had never told anyone that in 1969 (three years before negotiations with the state about the highway began) he had leased that northwesternmost part of his land to the federal government, whose purposes, of course, were none of his business—if they chose to restrict them.

  In his recliner-rocker tonight, Ernest Ransom had not retraced much more of this memory than his setting out on that autumn walk.

  It was late, and he was an early riser who tried to be in bed by eleven and invariably got out of it by six. He had fallen asleep almost as soon as he had leaned back in the chair, had waked up disoriented half an hour later, and returned to the queen-sized Marimekko sheets.

  In her aviary of a bedroom on the fourth floor of the tallest house in Dingley Falls, old Miss Ramona Dingley abruptly sat up. It annoyed her to find herself awake. More and more each night, sleep escaped her an hour or so after it was seized, as if, in anticipation of imminent endless rest, her body could not be bothered with nightly naps. Her brain was too anxious to learn its ultimate destiny (if any) to want the reprieve of dreams. Young Father Fields, who had spent that evening offering her Pascal and Paul Tillich, had not come up with any answers that satisfied. A sweet boy, but a fool like most men; men, who can't give birth, giving birth to gods in order to have gods to love them.

  Miss Dingley's collapsible cane flicked open like a switchblade.

  She poked at the darkness with it. One floor below, her relative Sammy Smalter had finally turned out his light and gone to sleep.

  Slowly, down the hall, the old woman walked, angered by her turtle pace. Wasted by time, she couldn't afford to waste time. Then, out on her widow's walk—though, in fact, she had never wed—she stared at the star closest to her. The star stared back. But not at a fat, stooped lady in a white nightgown leaning on the balcony rail of a Victorian house. No, the star had no idea, yet, that Miss Ramona Dingley was ever born. It saw backwards in time, saw a forest in which an Indian hid and spied on Elijah Dingley, who sat exhausted in a little clearing and remarked to a bonneted woman in a cart words he later preserved in a diary: "Here is as farr as I ride, dear Yokefellow. That the Lord is no longer perswaded we should continue in this t
oilsome Journie, I judge from the bloodie Blistering of my great Toe. Some ale from the Hogshead, good Agatha, here be our Home!" The star saw three hundred years ago the founding by the Rampage of Dingley Falls. And farther stars saw flood across America, and farther still saw ice.

  "What do You care?" asked Ramona, looking up at the star-bright sky. "You or Your Son either?"

  Much closer, off beyond the marshlands, a quick flick of light spiraled down to Bredforet Pond. Falling stars are much more haphazard, thought the old woman. It had to be methodical man. But why, she wondered, should flying saucers be so persistently fascinated with a Connecticut marsh? Maybe the idea of UFOs was nonsense after all. Her eyes were still as good as a hawk's. If only she had her legs and her wind back. She would find out. Perhaps it was smugglers.

  From Canada. Perhaps somebody was smuggling something to America. Through her town. Well, she would send a spy whom life had not yet crippled. She would borrow young legs. With that plan in mind, Miss Ramona Dingley returned slowly to bed.

  And now all Dingley Falls slept, on a Founder's Day that the closest star would finally see three hundred years from now.

  CONCERNING PLOTS

  We are all premeditators, plotting one thing or another. Hawk Haig is plotting to be rich, Chin Lam Henry is plotting to free her husband, Limus Barnum is plotting to be accepted or avenged. No one can return to spontaneity. Language will not let us go, but bars with its sword our return to that wordless, thoughtless Eden. Beanie Abernathy wishes there were no words, yet even she must write a letter. Even Sloan Highwick must have some plot in mind, if only how to persuade his host to offer him a martini.

  There are those, like Walter Saar, who actively plot against themselves, and those, like Ernest Ransom, whose indifference becomes a plot against others. There are those whose plots are mysteries to themselves. Judith Haig is such a person; so is Richard Rage.