Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “Here’s the part that’ll be a tough sell for our neighbors, I’m sure,” Dr. Knowles interrupted our debate. “They have rules to this procession. No one can look at them. We have to draw curtains, close shutters. Not a single person in town — man, woman, child or dog — can be on the street. It’s that sacred.”

  We all took this in.

  “How long’s this shindig going to last?” I asked.

  “It’ll start right at sundown and run until dawn I think. He told me it’s involved. It’ll be noisy, too.”

  “Primitives,” Paul Lockwood said. “Wailing, caterwauling, no doubt chanting.”

  “It’s a cult,” Josh Cooper said. “I don’t mind them, but I don’t really like the idea of this.” He leaned in to me. “I mean, do you? Why do they even need to come through our village? Can’t they stay out on their own land?”

  The table went silent.

  May Peters brought the coffee pot over and refilled our cups. She apologized for eavesdropping, “but whenever I hear about the Smiths, I just can’t help it.”

  “May?” I asked.

  “I’ve never liked them,” she said.

  “You ain’t alone, sister,” Willie said.

  “They’re not so bad,” Ruby said. “If you give them a chance.”

  Truth was, they weren’t bad at all; and yet, in my deepest self, I had to admit that I’d never been quite comfortable around the Smiths. They’d kept themselves so separate over the years that it was as if our own culture had been rejected by them as not worthy. I wasn’t smart enough to explore why this bothered me, but it did bother me. This seemed at the root of all our unease.

  They had never quite accepted us.

  As if we hadn’t heard her the first time, May repeated, “I’ve just never liked them and I’m not afraid to say it out loud.”

  Dr. Knowles looked up at her. “It’s not a matter of ‘like’. They’re part of our town. They’ve hurt no one. They deserve our respect — and compassion — in this situation.”

  “They smell different,” May said. “They cook strange stuff, too.”

  “My wife cooks strange stuff,” I said, and Ruby reached over to swat the air in front of my face in mock anger.

  “Close our curtains? That’s ridiculous. I won’t do it,” May said as she receded into the coffee shop while her voice grew louder. “What are we supposed to do? Not go outside, not even look at the stars? Skip any kind of night out we might have planned? Who does that? Is everything supposed to shut down at nine o’clock for them? For those people?”

  After May mumbled away, Dr. Knowles lowered his voice. “A lot of people are going to feel like that. Look, we must convince everyone to do this. The Smiths believe that if even one outsider sees the funeral parade, terrible things will happen. World-changing things, he said. For all of us.”

  “Like what?” Willie asked, a kind of backwoods challenge in his voice.

  Dr. Knowles shrugged. “We really want to find out?”

  “Maybe they’ll set us on fire,” Paul muttered. “They like their fires, those heathens.”

  “This is their Queen. And frankly,” Dr. Knowles tilted his head slightly as if convincing himself, “they outnumber us.”

  There, someone had finally said it. More than three hundred Smiths occupied farmland and woodland, and our little village didn’t quite hit that number. If you needed any kind of factory job, you probably worked with or for at least one of the Smith clan. If you worked over in Hazelford, where the great jobs tended to be, you had to drive twenty miles across Smith land to get there.

  Dr. Knowles had said the one thing that none of the rest of us wanted to examine:

  We didn’t really run things in quite the same way as we once had. Oh, we ran the village, no doubt, and we were like the villages in all directions, but in terms of population, the Smiths had us beat.

  At the table, we chewed the subject a bit more, but agreed with Dr. Knowles in the final minutes before heading home.

  We’d call an emergency town meeting to make this happen.

  Then, after a night of shouting matches in the old meeting hall that went late into the night, we exhausted opponents of this proposal into offering just this one summer night to the Smith family and to no one else.

  It was in the town’s best interest.

  One night we heard the sound of a strange horn — deep and sonorous — and knew that the funeral had begun.

  5. The Funeral Parade

  Sunset brushed the trees with a rusty haze. Within an hour or two, we all should’ve been heading to bed anyway but…well, who could sleep once they thought of the entire Smith clan and some strange priest of their cult walking down Main Street?

  We anticipated some unavoidable indecency in the request to close our eyes to their dark celebration. It gave a little thrill to the quiet summer night.

  Before drawing the final curtain in the front hall, I glanced out into the shadowed street and saw that all the neighboring homes were shuttered.

  The village — from what I could see —shut down tight as a clam.

  I closed the curtain.

  The inside of our home became toasty to the point where we’d all stripped down to shorts and undershirts and my wife wore only a slip once we’d sent Caleb up to his room.

  Josh Cooper kept calling me: had they come ‘round yet? Did anyone see them?

  And I kept telling him to forget it and just go to bed.

  I sat in the living room watching Ruby pace back and forth as if expecting a guest at the door. Now and then, she’d look over and say, “I don’t know why I’m so keyed up,” or “you’d think I’d just read a book and go to bed, but I’m almost afraid.”

  “It’s the heat,” I said. “Look, if you’d just sit. Drink some lemonade. You’ll cool down.”

  “It’s not the heat,” she said, “although my god, these fans do nothing without the windows open.”

  I pointed out the three windows that were in fact open, particularly the ones facing the garden. “And we have six fans going. It’s not that bad.”

  “And the noise. Someone should invent a quiet fan. It’s like living inside a beehive,” she said. “I’m hoping they come through fast. I can maybe take an hour of this. Maybe not even an hour.”

  “Take a cool shower,” I said.

  “It is not the heat,” Ruby said. “And I don’t need a shower.”

  Caleb, expressly forbidden to look out his shuttered window, had gone to bed — reluctantly — early, with a book he’d been supposed to read all summer, although my wife and I heard his radio on upstairs playing rock n roll over the hum of fans.

  “Any other night, I’d yell for him to turn it down,” I said.

  Ruby ignored my comment.

  “You think anyone will look?” Ruby asked. “I mean, how will they not? You’re told not to do something, you do it. It’s human nature.”

  “God, I hope not.”

  “It’s not as if the Smiths’ll notice,” she said. “Jeanne Marie told me she was going to peek. But only a little. There’s that dormer window with a little bit of the shutter missing and she said she and Bill would sit up just for a look.”

  “They shouldn’t risk it,” I said. Then I swore. “Everybody promised they wouldn’t look. I hope Jeanne Marie was just pulling your leg.”

  “Well it’s not as if the Smiths’ll see them. And that’s all we need to do. Make sure they don’t see us looking.”

  “Is it so hard to just not look outside for one night? How often do we come home, have supper and then not even glance out the open window?”

  “This is different.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s like being in prison,” she said. “Or a coffin.”

  Ruby stopped pacing. She went and sat on the rug by the coffee table. She picked up a copy of Reader’s Digest and read off all the article titles in a droning voice and then put it down again. She drew her knees to her chin, reminding me of a girl I once knew.
Her long tan legs, the silky slip, the way her shoulders shrugged and her hair swept across half her face. She had never looked more appealing to me. Where was that girl with the Coke bottle in one hand, the cigarette in the other, the glasses and old-fashioned dress that I’d first met? Replaced now by this siren, a dream of slip and girl and desperation.

  “Come here, you,” she said.

  “Honey?”

  “Come here.” She held her arms out. I went over and crouched down in front of her.

  She drew me into the cradle of her body. We were sweaty and there was something filthy about her wanting me like that. I felt as if I were taking advantage of her.

  I pulled back, and we sat there staring at each other.

  “I know, I know,” she moaned. “I just wanted to get away from all this. Can’t we get away?”

  I felt confused by this state she was in.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We can go upstairs if you want.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s like I want a pill or a drink.”

  “What a compliment.”

  “You know what I mean. I just want to block it out.”

  I returned to the chair and she stood up and began pacing again.

  “I didn’t think I’d feel like this,” she said. “All jittery. It’s like the world’s going to end or something.”

  “I promise you the world won’t end.”

  “I mean, they could’ve picked Hazelford. They’ve got that farm by the river. Why us? It’s strange. It’s just too strange.”

  She stomped her feet, just a little, a spoiled girl instead of a woman in her thirties.

  “What’s gotten into you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know. But all I think is, you go along in life the way you’re supposed to, you do all the right things, all the things that make a good life. You marry, start a family, raise your kid, work a job, go to church, honor your father, be nice to everybody, and then one night you’re in a closed up house with every door locked up and you can’t even look outside because you’re somehow not good enough. It’s how I feel right now, and I know it sounds crazy, but when I think of my brother Caleb dying on some foreign island and my mother dying in her bed and thinking I’d lost you until you came back and then how things changed so quickly here and how I’ve been afraid to…”

  I had to catch my breath as she went on and on. I’d never heard my wife talk like this. She dug up tales from her childhood, from our own past, some argument we had, the miscarriage after Caleb, the fact that I hadn’t fought in the war but pushed papers while her brother had given the ultimate sacrifice, the idea of wifedom and what it meant, and sisterdom and daughterdom and motherhood and how fathers expected so much and how she’d given up chances because of the stupid war and all these women in town who made comments about your house and wallpaper and how much your husband made and how you dressed and all the stupid things she’d had to do because it was like following a rule book.

  Her nose ran and spit flew in the middle of this rough waterfall of words and she stood over me flailing her arms around. I felt somehow responsible. She didn’t shout, she just let this stream flow from her. She grew all teary-eyed. Sweat burst along her forehead. She went off on me and the world and everything she’d never mentioned before in her life.

  I honestly wondered if she might be having a nervous breakdown.

  Only then did I notice that our son’s radio had gone silent upstairs.

  My wife and I stared at each other in the buzz of many fans. I patted my lap. Calming, perhaps exhausted, she sat down and we cuddled, but I could tell that this wasn’t enough. We were sweaty, uncomfortable, dissatisfied.

  Just get through this one night, I thought. She feels boxed in. It’s the heat. It’s the idea that we’re not as free as we thought we were. That’s all. She’ll be fine in the morning.

  “You do everything right,” she whispered as if in a confessional. “But it doesn’t matter. You give up dreams. You do things so other people will think you’re fine. You don’t take risks because if you risk things, you lose. People you love might die. The world might fall apart. But nothing you do adds up. None of it makes sense.”

  I thought about how maybe we should’ve taken those trips we’d planned — to the Grand Canyon or to St. Augustine or even just to Manhattan to see the museums.

  We’d let life get in the way.

  The phone rang. She got out of my lap.

  “Where you headed?”

  Ruby glanced back at me and for a second I thought she wouldn’t answer.

  “Honey?” I said.

  “I think I’ll take that shower.”

  I reached for the phone.

  “That you?” it was Josh.

  “Who else?”

  “Hear the music yet?”

  “No.”

  “It’ll get louder when it gets to your side. Believe me.”

  A pause on the line.

  “You better not be looking,” I said.

  “I just snuck a peek out the attic window. Over the rooftops to where the road veers into town. And you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it. Just shut the curtains, go to bed, or go work in your basement or something.”

  “Hell with that. You should see it. Torches lighting everything up like it’s the middle of the day practically. And Elephants! Camels! A wagon — no, more like a golden chariot, drawn by tigers! It’s like the circus — or Cleopatra — coming to town. There must be a hundred or more of them — not all of them Smiths, either — waving incense around, twirling sabers and dancing. The men in robe, the women wrapped up like mummies but some of them — hold on to your hat — don’t got nothin’ on from the waist up.”

  “Quit looking,” I said.

  “All of ‘em moving this way and that, a big guy blowing this bull’s horn and a bunch of women playing some kind of flute. Bunch of little boys running around smashing cymbals together. Two guys wearing big antlers, some of them painted all in gold and silver. And then there’s Mr. and Mr. Smith…”

  “Wait, you’re still watching?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Look, you’ve got to see this — they have crowns on. Golden crowns with glittering jewels. Like it’s the sultan and his queen or something. And that oldest boy of theirs? He’s got this big pole and at its top it looks like a golden snake all wrapped around it. He has flowers all over him, head to toe, and maybe a dozen half-naked girls following after him like he’s the catch of the day.”

  “Shut it,” I said.

  “You’ve just got to look out a window. Wait, they’re going around, over near your place,” he said. “I’m telling you, you have never in all your days seen something like this and I’m guessing you never will again. You miss this, you miss everything.”

  I hung up the phone.

  I argued with my better nature: we promised, this is their ritual, this is their custom, honor them, they’re good neighbors, Josh exaggerated anyway, how could camels and elephants and tigers be all together here? They weren’t even from a country of camels and elephants and tigers after all, why would they have them? Had they raided a zoo? Rented from Ringling Brothers?

  But it drove me a bit crazy.

  I went over to the living room window. I might just move the curtain slightly. Just a quarter inch. Just enough to see out.

  I began to hear the music. The cymbals, the flutes, the beat of the drums, the strange string instruments that whined and screeched. If I stepped away from the curtains, our fans drowned out the sounds. But right up next to the window…

  The Smith noise grew louder in my head.

  My fingers brushed the curtain’s edge.

  Don’t do it, I thought. What if they see you?

  Josh Cooper already had risked a possible skirmish by spying from his attic. How many more in town would break their promise?

  “You’re lying. Or joking,” I said wh
en I called Josh back.

  “No,” he said. “You need to look out there. They’ll never see you. They’re too involved in their…well, their spectacle. I saw three little girls riding some kind of large wild pig. I’ve never seen anything like it. And all these banners. And colored paper. And blankets with spirals and things all over them. And lights, these amazing lights.”

  “What about the coffin?”

  “Coffin? What? Oh, no, it’s not like that. They must not believe in that. Ancient Smith. The Queen. You should see. It’s as if she’s still alive. They have her raised up in this silver chair of some kind and she’s dressed like she’s going to a wedding, all bright scarves and bracelets. It really is something to see, you should just look, just for a second.”

  I went silent. I’d heard a noise from upstairs.

  “Got to go.” I hung up. I bounded up the stairs, thinking I’d check on Ruby in the shower. Halfway up, I saw Caleb crouched in the hall by the narrow window, his head beneath the shade.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  He bumped his head on the glass. The paper shade slapped him as he ducked back from under it.

  When Caleb turned around he couldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Sorry, dad.”

  “Go to your room.”

  “But dad, you got to see it. There’s this…”

  “Stop right there, young man.” I pointed at him as if throwing a lightning bolt. “You know the rules tonight.”

  “They’ll never see me,” he said. “And there’s this bird — I think it’s a bird — it’s huge and clomping around. And one of the Smith kids is riding it just like a horse.”

  “Really?” I asked, losing my fatherly power for a moment.

  “Just look for a second,” my boy said.

  “We promised we wouldn’t.”

  “They’ll never know.”

  “It’s honor, Caleb,” I said and then shooed him to his room at the back of the house.

  I wanted to peer under the shade, but resisted.

  Instead, I went to check on Ruby. I knocked on the bathroom door and heard her say, “just a minute,” so I waited on the landing. I kept glancing over at the shade, wondering if my sense of duty was getting in the way of seeing something truly remarkable.