Lightfall

by Paul Monette

  He trotted across the meadow, through a grove of knee-high ferns. Ahead, the edge of the woods was alive with pacing beasts. They cooed and whirred excitedly, and when he reached the trees, they fell into place beside him as he ran. They didn’t presume to choose the path or beg to be taken along. They went as a kind of escort, mostly. Somehow he didn’t mind them, the way he did the villagers. Perhaps because they were different kinds, and men were all the same.

  He came to a field of bright blue flowers, waving above an undergrowth of clover. The air was abuzz with honeybees, with moths the size of his fist. He was restless, angry, sick of power. He threw himself down and rolled about, as if to make a burrow deep in the woodland green. He tried to think if they’d ever spoken love to each other. Of course he couldn’t recall. Beyond her face, he remembered nothing. He writhed in the thick-grown grass, mad to be something else besides a man. He felt, with a searing pain in his loins, how alien he was next to all this life that rooted in the ground. He floated free as a severed child, dying of the world.

  He was fast asleep before he knew how perfectly they watched him. The big cats sat like sentinels, in a circle around his huddled form. A fox walked back and forth, peering anxiously into the trees. An owl came down and landed by his shoulder, asking nothing. All of them were waiting: bucks and does, bulls and cows; they couldn’t break free of the forest till the day had gone to night. Though their coats and spotted skins brushed against one another with a rustle like silk, they scarcely connected, beast to beast. They didn’t cry out. Didn’t even growl.

  At the clearing’s edge, a giraffe had buried his head to feed in a bush. A kangaroo stood under him for shade. All the old forms—the hunters, the hunted, the staking of ground—had vanished. The fish were tanked by the millions in the tide below the cliffs. The air was clouded just to the north with a whole encyclopedia of creatures of the air. They only knew this naked man was master of the revels. If he could wait, then so could they. They had all the time in the world.

  A lone clarinet was wailing on the veranda, beneath an arc of jasmine that had just gone blooming, four months early. Everything was slightly out of synch this Sunday morning. The radio said they were due for a blow, eight weeks after the hurricane season had given in. It was very, very hot on the mossy lawns of Esplanade. The man with the horn hadn’t played in years. He was ninety-three. In his one locked drawer in the St. Charles Home, he kept a sepia picture of himself, with a band he founded back in 1910. All the others were dead. He’d sold his horn for a song maybe fifteen years ago.

  But New Orleans wasn’t the only place where things were turning queer in the upper air. Deep in the South Bronx there was an area six blocks square, mostly uninhabited, where the temperature dropped at night to ten below. In a town in the coal slags west of Scranton, the hail fell black for two nights straight. Out on the high Dakotas, little tornadoes took a house here, a school bus there, in a dozen random incidents. But New Orleans was the biggest place—the one most on the map. Since late the previous afternoon, the city had gone haywire. Crimes of passion. Virus. Fires.

  For the most part everyone simply drank a little more, by way of compensation. Those who didn’t stayed in bed, complaining of the weather. The French Quarter took in stride the lower forms of hallucination. Saturday nights were always bad, and Sundays had always started slow, since before the Civil War. The general level of hangover covered a multitude of sins.

  The old man had been playing for an hour when the others began to emerge from the firetrap mansion just behind him. Most were black like he was. Most carried instruments. It took them a little while to get it right, since everyone had to have a solo—the banjo player alone was hot for fifteen minutes. Eventually, they were satisfied they had themselves a sound. They headed off the porch and up the street, one in a wheelchair, two on canes, the wizened man with the tambourine trailing tubes from both his arms. There were perhaps ten of them playing jazz, with half a dozen more singing along and clapping. They had gone four blocks—weaving through the Quarter, bringing the town to its windows—before there was any stir at the St. Charles Home.

  The third-floor nurse on the women’s ward went down to get a cigarette, to the second floor where the county kept the old and penniless jazz bums. This group was easy to handle. They ate like birds, they slept all day, and they moaned in pain if they were moved, so nobody ever bothered. The most that ever happened was that they died from time to time. It didn’t seem especially quiet. It was always like a tomb. Still, as she went from door to door, calling out for Marsha who split the eleven-to-seven with her, she was startled to find the beds were empty.

  Where the hell did they go? She started to laugh, at the thought that perhaps they hadn’t been there at all for weeks and weeks. Who would have noticed? She felt wonderfully young for a couple of seconds. Who needed them, after all? Get rid of the ladies, too. It was all just pouring money down the drain.

  She reached the nurses’ station, and there lay Marsha, throat slit ear-to-ear.

  As the band went tottering through the tourist crowd on Bourbon Street, children and blue-haired grandmothers turned as if at a pistol shot. One by one, they broke away and followed. Middle-aged mothers and fathers, wed as they were to guided tours, stamped their feet and shouted, but to no avail.

  Only the young and the old heard it in their bones. Toddlers two and three years old, still a bit shaky on their feet, who wouldn’t let go of their mothers’ hands for anything at all. Wheezing, bedridden invalids, who whined if anyone came in the room and otherwise stared at the ceiling. The weakest of the breed were suddenly seized with purpose. Some had to fight to get away. Some used tricks and slipped out windows. It was as if they’d been saving their strength, their whole lives long. By the time the jazzmen reached the Quarter’s northern end, heading up to the lake, they must have had two or three hundred in their train.

  Nobody chased the old ones very far, and the young were far too cunning to let themselves be trailed. Shrieking women ran out in the street to say they had been robbed, but the city police were much too busy gathering at the levee, where they stared in helpless wonderment at the rising of the river. The rain came down in shattering gusts. The palm trees out by the lake bent nearly double. It wasn’t exactly a hurricane, but they had no other word.

  Still the jazzmen played. Though some were blown to the earth and broken like reeds, they passed their instruments on. The line wound through the neighborhoods, flooding the narrow streets like a revolution. They seemed to be sniffing out orphanages, convalescent hospitals, and centers for lonely pensioners. Even as they passed, the Little Flower Nursery School, in an orchard on upper Dumaine Street, turned en masse on the smiling teacher. In a few short minutes, they’d buried her up to her neck in sand and pelted her dead with stones.

  A few blocks further on a circle of sullen kids waiting at the dentist’s heard the throb of blues filtering in off the street. They rushed the doctor and zapped him, boring the drill right into his brain, then fled away to join the band as if jazz were some kind of candy. Mothers-in-law and maiden aunts, useless drooling neighbors, bald arthritic men who lived on cat food—all of them fired as if by spring. They put on the last of their fancy clothes, saved at the back of the closet as if they meant to be buried in them. The high wind only made them laugh as they broke out their final wigs and boas.

  They trailed around the rim of the lake to the cypress swamp on the other side. By now they were near a thousand. The jazzmen had long slumped over and tumbled into the bayous. The dented trumpet had been passed so many times, the mute who had it now thought it was some kind of scepter—some queer holy vessel for the ceremony up ahead. Others played who’d never played before, so the blasts were hard as battle cries, without human shading. They were a tribe whose only reason lay in motion. They had no home nor sought one. The whirlwind let them know there wasn’t any point to staying put. Roofs were coming off buildings. Floodwater rose an inch on the quarter hour. Nobody owned a th
ing.

  Their casualties were awesome in the swamp. Snakes and crocodiles tried to flee, but the band came trampling through at such a swath that they could only turn and fight. The copperheads coiled and jumped for the pulses. Mosquitoes fogged all over them and drank in blood till they fell like hail. The turtles snapped off toes. The crocs ate the little ones whole. For miles there was only jungle, and they drew no new recruits. The children couldn’t slog through the muck, so the elders tried to carry them. It was like a doomed migration, lost in a blizzard or a burning desert. These were the last of their kind.

  And yet they struggled on. Ten miles in, the bodies reached a crescendo, piled three deep, with those not dead now raving, rolling in the slime. The thousand had shrunk to a handful, ten or twelve, each one clutching an instrument. They stumbled forward—delirious, frightened, vomiting blood—getting as far as they could from the cries and clutching fingers of the dying. The swampland yielded at last to woods. The birds stopped hovering blackly.

  Far behind them, the storm that had covered their flight from the city had now drawn back to the humid Gulf. The National Guard was parachuting in, as if what had come to pass were the regular sort of disaster, demanding only a cleanup. Survivors perched on the pitched slate roofs of the Garden District. Down in the Quarter, they clung to the iron grilles of the upper balconies. The swollen Mississippi swirled in the tree-lined streets below. Nobody understood. They thought the thing was over.

  Meanwhile, deep in the woods, three old women and two old men led a pack of swooning children to higher ground. Their trumpets and banjos and slide trombones glinted in the noonday Sabbath sun. They belonged to an ancient people high on the spine of Chile. Their chiefs had sacrificed milk-white cows to keep them safe from the wrath of mountain gods. They believed they would reach a clearing soon and be home once more in a windswept plaza, with a zigzag temple just beyond. They began to chant their plainsong, older than all the ruined cities lost in the sands of Africa.

  The children knelt in the sift of leaves at the foot of massive live oaks. Tiny mushrooms peeped from the folds of moss, so small they were hardly there. The children pinched them up and popped them into their mouths. The whimpering elders stooped beside them, begging for a taste. They ought to have known their time was up, but thought they were meant to settle down and start a whole new world. It took the extra generation to winnow out the last shred of the civilizing urge. The children sneered and shoved the elders from the feast. They laughed with bitter scorn as they turned to complete the harvest.

  Four hundred years had brought them to the bases of these trees. In half an hour, when the spores were gone, they would start to fight with one another. Only the very strongest would finish out the day. In the end, a last strange child would wander the woods alone. He was doomed to wait till his king emerged from the chrysalis of the sun. Till then he was just another newborn creature, shy of the haunts of men and still in a kind of dream.

  Every city had woods like these within half a day’s walk of the nodes of power. A hurricane wasn’t necessary in every case. Each had a different way of feeding a tribe from the iron-dark streets, back to the wilds that ringed them. By tonight, parties of misfits and powerless types would set out in secret from dozens of places. By tomorrow, a hundred more. Still, for a little longer, life was more or less intact. The savage babies roamed the woods with an idle smile, picking up blossoms and swimming in streams. The larger possessing would have to wait. When the king was free, in a day or two, they would own the earth forever.

  All day long the sound of building rang from the cliffs—hammering, sawing, breaking stones. The barking of orders filled the air as men in teams went hauling. They sweated profusely, and the youngest sons carted them water from the deep town well. The women were busy inside, stripping the woodwork off the walls, knocking out plaster, then axing the joists. It was not building at all, but unbuilding. There was something in it now about men and women as well—as to who was doing the tearing down and who the hollowing out—but they hadn’t the inclination to put it into words. They talked to no one, not even themselves.

  It took about three or four hours to pull a house flat to the ground. Then there was all the debris to get rid of. They loaded the cars and drove to the rim of the cliff, half a mile north of the harbor. There was a full crew stationed along the edge—weathermen, mostly, with here and there a ranger. They did nothing all afternoon but hurl down wood on the tidal rocks. After a while it looked as if an entire fleet of ships had wrecked against a shoals.

  The cellars beneath the houses took up a lot of the rubble, but they had to be careful to leave some room. For the retirees, in a band of twenty, were out in the woods slowly filling a truck with humus. This they were going to bed on the bare foundations and plant over with grass seed. Then they would transplant bushes and weeds from the upland meadows. Then slips from the towering firs. They leaned on their shovels panting, to pace themselves so their hearts wouldn’t stop. They were sure they could make a perfect mock of nature at every site where a house came down. No shard of the old life would remain. In a couple of months no one would ever know.

  It went like clockwork. Maybe they feared that if they didn’t move fast the master would abandon them. Yet they had a fervor all their own, possessed of the vision he’d left them with, of turning everything wild again. The horror would all go away once they restored the old world. It filled them with pride to think they would leave the place more perfect than they found it.

  They didn’t touch the houses of the others. By noon, the two-room cottages up and down Polly’s lane were leveled, leaving only hers. It stood like a freak at the end of a bad tornado. The boardinghouse was spared, though they took apart the barn behind. Maybeth had never bought it outright. The deed was still in the hands of Sam Delaney, the village lawyer. She only owed a couple of hundred dollars.

  Emery’s house was fine. Also Dr. Upton’s. Both had a little more land than most, so perhaps it was some buried wish for a ruling class that kept their places safe. Standing at dawn in either one of their gardens, as they themselves did—each in his pajamas, having the last of the early tea—one could almost believe the village had never changed in a thousand years. The sea was the clearest blue. So was the sky. The world had done nothing wrong.

  As to how it would go for Felix Quinn, it wasn’t certain till after eleven, when his maddened wife set fire to the bungalow with the privet hedge. She feared the crowd would leave it up, as belonging more to him than her. It burned to the ground without incident. The villagers mostly looked the other way. They knew they were not permitted any powers beyond their own. They hadn’t a right to a thing like fire.

  Naturally, they shunned the doctor’s wife from that point on. Judith took no part in the disassembling of their lives. She knew she wasn’t wanted—right away. Still, she walked distracted in her yellow dress up and down the street, as if it were just another morning, nodding hello to her naked neighbors.

  “Why doesn’t she come with us?” asked Roy, as they watched from the top of the rise.

  “Why should she?” retorted Iris, in her most didactic tone. “She gets to be the scapegoat. It makes her different.”

  They had come out of the trees where the timbered lodge the rangers lived in stood on a hidden bluff. Untouched so far, but they knew it was only a matter of time. They had gone in to pick up Roy’s things so he could move in at the boarding-house. He wore a green nylon rucksack, mostly full of survival books in case he had to run. Iris carried his heavy-weather gear slung across one arm. It gave off a kind of shipboard odor. She realized with a shock how much she loved the feel of packing in—as if for a winter siege, as if they were going to be here for months.

  They came downhill to the village proper, passing the naked carpenters left and right. The loads of wood and shingles were like slag from some kind of tunneling inward. Nobody paid them any mind. It was like walking among the mad—only they were vastly outnumbered, and had no control at all
. Strangely, though, Iris found she was getting used to it. This business with the houses didn’t surprise her a bit. She’d started to see how his mind worked.

  Or perhaps she understood the contrast more. Michael’s people stripped themselves of everything that smacked of structure. For all their looking blank, they had a certain purity about them, with their shoulders stooped and their arms dangling. She had no fear of them; they seemed too innocent.

  Her own small group was doing its best to hold to the manners of a highborn age. Flowers were still put into vases, the vases arranged just so on certain parlor tables. Sometime in the early dawn Emery had left them neatly lettered invitations, each at his separate doorstep, asking them yet again to lunch at one in the cliffside park. Then Maybeth had called her aside at breakfast to ask her help deciding on a dress. She tried to press on Iris a straw hat, a parasol, and a long pale linen skirt. Iris laughed it off and ran to be with Roy, but she started to feel vaguely threatened.

  “Roy?” she said as they passed the leering mayor, “where do you think we should go?”

  “When?”

  “When it starts to happen.” She didn’t know why she shrank from calling it by its name.

  “Doesn’t matter, does it?” he answered with a shrug. “As long as we don’t go out on the cliffs.” And then, since she seemed to be brooding, he made it more concrete: “I thought we’d all get together at Emery’s.”

  She nodded. “I think we ought to talk about it,” she said. “Maybe this afternoon.”

  “It’s more or less understood, isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t understand it.”

  They picked their way through the rubble of the barn to the back porch. The barn swallows wheeled above their heads, groping for a perch. Maybeth hummed at the kitchen table. She packed her basket with deviled eggs, an applesauce cake and a mason jar of piccalilli. Helping her tuck in forks and knives and a sweating hunk of cheese, Iris wondered how she’d managed to stock so much beforehand. Had she had some kind of premonition? Or were they always the hoarding type, even before they came here?