The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  I didn’t speak.

  “She said—” Jerry’s voice was low and wondering—“she said, ‘This is the thing my people do not know.’ ”

  “Jesus!” I said before I could stop myself. I had expected anything but that puzzling remark; it did not fit in with the things Parsons and I had discussed; it made no sense for Luella Jamison to have made that remark.

  Jerry took careful aim and kicked a bit of rock out into the hard sunshine on the other side of the ravine. “That’s the only reference she’s ever made. Oh, I’ve asked her, but she never tells me. Sometimes she just laughs and says I’ve got to forget she had any past at all. Several times I’ve tried to press her into telling me.”

  “What happened then?”

  “It sounds silly to say it, but she got so angry I was afraid to go on.”

  “Do you think she has a guilty conscience or anything?”

  “God,” he said impatiently, “I don’t know. I’d swear she had nothing in her whole mind that she was ashamed of. But it’s the not-knowing that torments me. It’s the noticing that she never goes back of that time in Collegeville. It’s the feeling that there’s something she won’t share with me, some part of her that she won’t give. And it’s begun to scare me. Suppose it is something pretty horrible—that wouldn’t make any difference to me, and she knows it. Suppose this damned thing—this reason she has for not telling me who she is— comes out sometime and I’m not ready for it. It got so that I was afraid to have her meet strangers for fear they were a part of that past of hers, whatever it was. That’s one of the reasons we came out here.”

  I could think of nothing to say to him.

  “ ‘This is the thing my people do not know,’ ” he quoted slowly and half to himself. Then he turned to me and said, “Bark, I have a hunch that you know something about Selena that I don’t. You’ve got to tell me what it is.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said quickly. “How could I? You’ve been with me practically every time I’ve seen her, and all through the LeNormand business.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re not being honest with me. I know you pretty well, Bark, and I’ve been thinking back over everything. After that time you came back from Collegeville, you were different, in lots of ways. You drank more. You avoided being with us. There was something on your mind, something that you knew. And it’s either something you found out by yourself when you went back there, or it’s something Parsons told you. And it’s something that I’ve got to know. Maybe you think I’m hysterical or foolish or completely nuts, but I tell you I’ve got to know what it is.” He looked at me steadily and with an eagerness that made me feel almost sick.

  Yet, there was my promise to Parsons. I could break that and tell him the story of Luella Jamison, but there was no way in which I could see that doing so would help him. Instead, it would simply add another uncertain horror to revolve in his mind. After living with the story of that incredible disappearance and the possibilities it contained, I knew what it could do to a mind that fastened upon it. No, certainly I would never tell him anything about that.

  “Parsons,” I answered carefully, “was stuck. He told me we were being followed; he knew all about what we had been doing. Knowing that, got me sort of nervous. That was why I was funny about things then.”

  He disregarded my words. “So you won’t tell me.”

  “Listen,” I said. “The only thing I know that you don’t has nothing to do with you or Selena, except indirectly. It’s nothing that will help you in the least, and I gave my word to Parsons that I wouldn’t tell anyone about it. He told me because he wanted me to tell him whether it had any connection with the LeNormand case, and it didn’t and I told him so. That’s all there is to that.”

  He shook his head. “All right. You’re a stubborn guy when you make up your mind. But I want you to promise me one thing.”

  “What is it?”

  “After you’ve been out here awhile, I want you to think whether you’ll tell me what that thing was, and whether you notice anything else that could help me.”

  I nodded. “All right,” I said, “but I’d have told you long ago if I’d thought it was a good idea.”

  We climbed into the car again without saying anything more. As he put the car in gear, Jerry said, “And Parsons never found out who killed LeNormand.”

  “No,” I said. And then I wondered if somehow he had the idea that Selena had anything to do with it. “Anyway, he told me he was positive that Selena and you and I didn’t do it. He said he could prove that much.”

  Jerry said nothing for a moment as he swung the car back into the miserable road. “Parsons is a smart man. I thought he would solve it.”

  “Well,” I said, “he didn’t have anything to go on. No clues, and no motive, and no witnesses.”

  Jerry drove intently and without looking away from the road. “There were those equations. . . . Remember the sheets of old notepaper on the table?”

  “Yes.” But I couldn’t see what they proved. “After all, figures don’t lie, let alone murder.”

  Jerry smiled fleetingly. “I’ve been playing around with those equations. Selena came in the other day and found me at it. Like a fool I told her what I was doing. She didn’t like it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Why not?”

  “I dunno, exactly. I suppose it’s a piece with the rest—not wanting to have anything to do with the past.”

  “Well,” I observed, “I remember she was interested in those Arabian books of Dad’s.”

  “Yes,” he said, frowning a little, “she knows a lot of math. I can’t figure out where she picked it up. From LeNormand maybe.”

  After that it grew too hot to talk. The car rolled steadily along, about west by south, on the long road to Cloud Mesa. Just before eleven o’clock we reached it.

  13. CLOUD MESA

  AROUND and above us the night was growing old. The stars were points of smaller light, the shadow masses of the trees had denser, less distinguishable shape against the sky, and the water of the Sound glinted seldom and faintly . . . “The darkest hour” . . . That hackneyed tag of speech went through my mind as I turned to Dr. Lister.

  “It will be dawn soon,” I said. “But this is the part of the story that matters most.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Are you too tired to go on?”

  “I’m too tired to stop.”

  “You mustn’t be afraid to call a halt if you wish.”

  He did not seem weary at all. Erect as ever, quiet, with his eyes fixed upon me steadily, it gave me strength to look at him.

  “We could never go back to this,” I said. “It is better to finish now.”

  “Yes.” His voice was calm, but I noticed that one of his fingers was tapping against the edge of the table.

  The last few miles of our ride, the road went uphill steadily. We must have climbed nearly a thousand feet. Then we swung round a shoulder of the mountains and saw Cloud Mesa.

  It was something of a geological puzzle to me. In shape it resembled the ordinary mesa of the Southwest, with the usual steeply sloping sides, covered with rocky detritus and ending toward the top in sharp cliffs of naked rock. The level expanse of its summit was as sharply marked as the edge of a table, and on the valley side it rose sheer from the floor of the desert. But its western edge seemed only partly separate from the wall of mountains behind and the northern, narrower end slid down to the floor of a mountain ravine into which our car began to dip. Sharp and clear I could see the cube of the house about halfway up the mesa’s northern slope and shining white in the sun.

  The place had been built by an artist named Eberhardt whom Dad had once befriended. He had come out to the West to paint and to recover from the effects of a dose of gas in Belleau Wood. Before he died he did some strange, harsh-colored pictures of the desert country which I never liked because there was a brutality in them that you couldn’t ignore. He left most of them and the house as well to Dr. Lister—out of gratitu
de, I suppose. It had remained empty until Jerry and Selena came there, and my heart sank a little as I looked across the ravine. If there was ever a lonelier place, or one more dwarfed by its setting, I never saw it.

  Jerry pulled the car up in front of the weather-beaten sort of shack that was apparently used for a garage, and we got out stiffly. He hauled forth my bags and we went toward the house. Seen at close hand, it was not quite so forbidding; the walls were a whitewashed cream in color, and there were the conventional blue shutters. It was larger than it had looked from where I had first seen it. Apparently there was a spring just behind the house; at any rate, there was a patch of green which must have meant water in this thirsty country.

  Selena was standing in the doorway to greet us; she was wearing a yellow linen dress and sandals. Her beauty was unchanged, so far as I could see; the sun did not appear to have tanned her bare legs and arms, and her face and hair were as I had remembered them, sculptural and perfect. Later, when she moved, I saw that she was walking once again with the same long, swift stride that she had when we first knew her and before she began to imitate Grace.

  “Hello, Bark,” she said, and held out her hand.

  I took it and told her I was glad to see her, which was a lie. I think she knew it.

  “Well, Bark,” said Jerry. “Welcome to our humble home.” His voice didn’t sound quite natural to me.

  I told them both I was glad to be there, and we went into the house. Inside it was dark and cool; the floor was tiled, and the heavy adobe walls seemed to hold the freshness of the night all through the heat of the day. The room we entered was clearly the living room, with a big fireplace to the left, at the eastern end. It did not have much furniture aside from several Navajo rugs on the floor. A long settle in front of the fireplace. A large table of unpainted wood, and three straight chairs.

  Jerry opened the door on the far side of the room. “This is your place,” he said, and carried my bags in. The room was scarcely more than a cubicle, with a bed, a washstand, and a single window opening to the east. “I think you’ll find everything you want.”

  “Sure,” I said, “this is palatial.” But actually I found myself thinking of it with an obscure sense of relief as a sort of refuge.

  After I’d washed and got into some old clothes, Jerry showed me the rest of the house. Next to my room was a sort of small study, well lined with books, which he told me was where he worked. Behind the study was a large bedroom where Jerry and Selena slept, with a door opening out of its west wall. The kitchen was in a lean-to shed at the southwest corner of the house.

  I wondered what there was about the place that bothered me. It was pleasant enough inside, and done with a simplicity and directness that were agreeable. Even the half dozen or so of Eberhardt’s pictures on the walls could not explain why I felt uneasy. But as soon as I stepped out of doors again I saw the reason. The great bulk of the mesa loomed towering and imminent above the house; incalculable tons of rock and earth seemed almost suspended above its roof; the very scale of that slope above you made you feel like an ant. I don’t know how better to give the effect than to say that I felt always as if a giant were about to step on the house and all of us in it.

  Jerry showed me over the place with much pride, and I began to feel that I had been a fool about my first reaction to it. But behind his enthusiasm and the steady flow of talk which he kept up I felt his relief at my coming. How long had the silences been when just the two of them were there alone? And later, in the afternoon, when the blue shadow of the mesa poured down and over the house and left us in a sort of twilight my uneasiness returned to me. We watched that shadow swoop down the slope above us, and after it had swept over the house I turned to go indoors.

  “Wait a minute, Bark,” said Jerry. “I want to show you something else.”

  He led me a few yards up the slope and pointed to what looked like the remains of an uneven rock stairway that began behind the spring and clambered up the wall of the mesa above us.

  “Cliff dwellers. God knows how long ago, but you can still climb their stairs. Want to go up?”

  I saw that he did, so I agreed. It was not a really hard or dangerous ascent; the stairs were steep but in pretty good shape. Although we stopped to breathe and look back and down several times, it was only a quarter of an hour or less until we were at the top.

  Below us spread the gigantic sweep of the desert, tarnished gold where the sun still lay, and purple blue where the shadows from the western mountains were racing across it as the sun sank behind us. Watching that great tidal wave of darkness pouring across the valley, I suddenly realized how truly the earth was a ball, hung in gulfs of space and spinning around its axis with majestic precision and power. I almost thought I could feel the eastward surge of the mesa under my feet.

  After a moment we turned and walked across the level top. It was very bare, with a few bushes, and here and there a low mound that Jerry said he suspected was the remains of ancient houses. Ahead of us was a slight rise in the ground; as we drew near it I saw that on it stood an oblong of rock.

  We halted and looked at that single piece of weathered stone, massive, rough-hewed by the chisels of men who were dust a thousand years ago. Unmistakably it was an altar.

  “ ‘To the unknown God,’ ” I said.

  Jerry stared down at it a long time. “Yes,” he said finally. “ ‘To the unknown God,’ only I suppose they had a name for him. The people who lived up here.”

  Certainly this was one of the “high places” that men of the very ancient world had felt to be holy, whether in Palestine or in the American desert. Even when houses had stood on the mesa top, this must have been a still place, aloof and plainly not a part of the business of human living at all. So they had hewed a stone and put it where it could lie for century upon century, here on this height, under the sky and swept clean forever by the great winds. An altar, yes, and in a place where they had felt that the immensity of the universe touched the immediacies of the earth on which they lived. This stone was their ebenezer; it marked their recognition of the something more than they could put a name to. A memorial to the tremendous force or will that had created the earth and the stars.

  I turned away from it reluctantly, and yet eager to leave the height and the wind that blew by us. Such vastnesses lay around us that I was suddenly hungry for a roof and a fire and four close walls. Jerry seemed more than willing to go at once; we scrambled down the shadowy stairs with cautious haste, and as we went we saw that Selena must have lighted a fire, for flickers of orange radiance spilled out of the windows below us.

  Jerry and I got the supper ready. Selena sat in the living room and read; I remembered that Jerry had said she did not cook, but I felt a little annoyed at her just the same. When we finally got it assembled, it was a workingman’s supper; the climb and the air had given me a tremendous appetite. The two of us ate heartily, but I noticed that Selena moved the food around on her plate but swallowed hardly more than one or two bites. It was a quiet meal, perhaps because we—Jerry and I—were wolfing our food, yet as I ate I thought how seldom they spoke to each other. But the food was good, and I didn’t much mind the silence.

  After it was finished, we pushed back our chairs and I lit a pipe. A feeling almost of peace came over me; for the first time I felt at home, not strange in any way. I smiled at Selena and said, “This is very pleasant, Selena. I’m glad I came.”

  She smiled back at me almost automatically. “It is a beautiful place, isn’t it?”

  Jerry seemed determined to keep the conversation going; he began to explain that the life grew on you, and that you never got tired of watching the desert and the mountains, and that we should have to take some tramps as soon as I got used to the climate.

  After a while Selena asked me if I thought I had everything I needed in my room.

  I said I thought I had.

  She told me, “You’ll be sleepy early tonight, I think. The desert makes you sleepy, and the
air at night.”

  Jerry added quickly that, while I could turn in any time I wanted to, he hoped I’d sit up and talk for a while. He began to stack the dishes and carry them out to the kitchen, firmly declining my efforts to help him. Selena went back to the settle in front of the fire and picked up her book again. Once, as Jerry was cleaning the crumbs from the table, she turned and looked over her shoulder at him.

  “Are you going to work tonight, Jerry?”

  “Well,” he said, and there was a faint flavor of apology in his tone, “I’m almost through, you know, and I thought I’d do a bit more. I think I’m getting somewhere.”

  “Darling, it’s no use, you know. I wish you would give up the whole idea.”

  His face set a trifle stubbornly. “Ah, you must allow for an old man’s crotchets. I get a kick out of it.” And then, turning to me, he said swiftly, “I’m doing a bit of mathematical research for my thesis. It’s really based on that dope of LeNormand’s, but I think I see a way to present it so the boys will swallow it. If I do, it’ll be worth publishing.”

  So that was what he was working at. I wondered why Selena did not like it. Plainly it annoyed her very much, but she contented herself with saying, “You are wasting your time.”

  Jerry laughed. “Don’t worry your handsome head over my math, my sweet. It’s harmless.”

  She made no answer, but I thought in the uncertain light of the fire that an expression had gone over her face of a sort I could not quite define. Still her face was shaded by the lamp behind her, and I was not sure.

  We could hear Jerry, back in the kitchen, whistling to himself and splashing the water in the dishpan, but she read on in her book without lifting her head, and I sat smoking my pipe and watching her. Suddenly I saw a curious thing. She was crying. There weren’t any tears, and she didn’t make a sound, but her face was contorted with grief and the hand lying beside her on the settle was clenched till the knuckles were white.