The Man Who Walked Away A Novel

by Maud Casey

  “Sammy, you are fine. You are fine.”

  “It is too much.” Samuel’s voice is a whisper through the trees. It is the rustle of the wind. “I can’t.”

  Only the giant coat quiets him. “Here.” Henri pulls it closer around Samuel, holding him with it.

  “We should go back,” Rachel says. She is the youngest and prone to weeping. When she begins to cry, Elizabeth moves away. Her own tears are a divine miracle. Rachel’s tears are contagious and disgusting.

  “Shoes and socks, everyone,” the Director says.

  “Samuel is too small for his emotions,” Elizabeth says, her wet skirts dragging heavily behind her until she is back on the bank where a magpie picks at the laces of her boot. “Look, a ’pie!” she shouts as it flicks its long pointed tail at her and flies off chattering.

  “Only one of those is bad luck,” Marian says. “Two? A divine miracle.”

  “How do you know there wasn’t another?” Elizabeth asks. “How do you know? Perhaps he had a more subtle companion.”

  “Don’t worry about the dirt,” the Director says to Rachel, who is reluctant to sit on the ground because the frog disapproves. The frog would like to return to the asylum immediately and this makes putting her shoes back on difficult; its desire is an ache in her muscles.

  “How kind, Elizabeth,” the Director says when she allows Rachel with her contagious tears to put a hand on her shoulder for balance. She is willing to risk infection if it means being touched.

  “I, myself, am enlivened by a joyful spirit of hope,” Walter says, popping a blackberry into his mouth.

  “Well, good, Walter, good,” the Director says, sounding relieved. “Very good.”

  “Will you take my arm?” Marian asks, straightening her veil. She misses him when he is not at her side pestering her.

  “Of course, my dear,” he says, and they follow the Director, who walks ahead of Henri and Samuel, safe again inside his giant coat.

  “Sammy’s fine,” Henri says, fixing Samuel’s coat more securely around his shoulders. “You’re tired is all. We’re all tired.”

  Through the woods they go and back up the slope. Back along the birch-lined path, and then they are trooping into the common room in their wet and muddied clothes, clumps of creek clay on their shoes. “I see you’ve brought nature back with you,” says Nurse Anne. “I suppose it might get lonely out there on its own.” She eyes Samuel trembling in his coat and Rachel’s freshly tear-streaked face.

  “Wait,” and she wipes the mud off Rachel’s skirt before Rachel sits down at the piano.

  These trips always end this way, in tears or something like tears, even when there is a curious fox or the beautiful wing of a bird. But for that fleeting moment of quiet contemplation, the Director will return to the creek again and again and again. He salutes Nurse Anne with his trowel; despite her scowl, he knows she believes it is worth it too.

  “Who knew there was so much mud in the world?” she says. But she does trust him, this man who treats patients as children rather than animals, who prefers walks in nature to bloodletting, chains, and manacles, who has faith that patients may be restored through self-discipline in a place that is more a household than an institution, who knows he does not have all of the answers but believes he is doing his best. Rachel begins to play a Beethoven sonata; its bright key of E major suggests a desire to return to serenity, but first it wanders through improvisational wilderness. Marian curls into the armchair by the fire and Walter settles by her feet to continue talking about the voluptuousness he feels in the midst of nature. “Yes, yes,” Marian says. “A furry, furry rabbit.” Elizabeth has returned to the puzzle she undid this morning in order to start over again, and Samuel hovers in a corner whispering to Henri. Nurse Anne truly believes the Director is doing his best. It is why she is here. It is why she stays.

  “You look very well,” she says to Marian. “You too,” she says to Walter. On her way past, Nurse Anne touches Samuel’s shoulder, hidden somewhere in that giant coat. Order, the comfort of structure—this is what she has to offer. It’s what keeps her own occasional desire to flee these people from creeping into her voice. She calms herself by thinking of that time on her way to and from the asylum, not there yet, not yet home, the time she has to herself when she thinks only of her body moving through the cool spring air—this, this, this. “Tomorrow will bring a new day,” she says when Elizabeth, distressed over a missing puzzle piece, the piece that’s always been missing, begins to twitch. Nurse Anne imagines tomorrow as a shadowy figure delivering a tiny wrapped gift and she almost laughs at the idea of unwrapping the new day: Fresh terror! But she doesn’t laugh. She bends down, knees cracking, and tries to catch Elizabeth’s shifting eye, which hovers around the blank space where the puzzle piece should go. “Tomorrow will bring a new day,” Nurse Anne says again in her gentle, persuasive tone, and who could argue with that?

  Chapter 5

  What was the question?

  The only problem with oblivion is it doesn’t last. Over and over, Albert has woken not knowing where he is—here, then there—not knowing how he got there. The sky filling with those charcoal clouds darkening the whole world and him too, and then he’s fading again with that terrible thirst, sweating and trembling, his body ringing with the ache of it until finally the ringing becomes a song. Oh, Albert. He is beautiful in the song, walking, astonished, but the song keeps ending and the sky keeps filling with those charcoal clouds and he is so tired.

  He walks through time as if it were as transparent as the bright spring air. But it is not. Tomorrow he will appear in the courtyard of the asylum across from the small stone church, but first there is Albert walking through time as if it had nothing to do with him.

  Fascinating? Magnificent? Yet another escapade?

  He discovers himself lying naked in the dark, not knowing where he is, not knowing how he got there. A fleeting illumination along the pitch-dark trail of his mind: there had been a shimmer on the verge of taking shape, and something unfolded deep inside of him, a pocket of space that opened and opened and opened until it was a hole through which he was falling. He fell through himself, and now he is here. “But you told me to wake you. Last night you told me,” a woman is saying, her heart-shaped face losing its heart in her anger. “You said wake me. You said I need to get the train in the direction of Lectoure. It is not my fault you are angry.” She slams the door behind her, and Albert lights the gas lamp to study the situation, first throwing back the covers to see what is left of him. All of it; it’s all there. He touches his velvety cock, rising to meet his hand, ready for a crescendo that will lift him out of himself, save him from this terror of not knowing, of never knowing. The woman with the heart-shaped face was pretty even as her face lost its heart. A fleeting illumination: a woman lay down beside him once in a field where he slept, sent over by people standing around a fire. “They’ll pay me if they can watch,” the woman said, putting her hand on his beautiful instrument, but she wanted money, and besides, it is safer and easier for him to take care of his own pleasure, which he does while thinking of that woman and her quick hand, its smoky smell, and the swing of her large hips, her supple ass as she walked back to join the fire people. When he is done, when he is not fortunate enough to be lifted into the oblivion that obliterates the problem of now, what can he do but wash and dress in this hotel room he doesn’t remember checking himself into? Reaching into his jacket pocket, he discovers a train ticket he doesn’t remember purchasing. He wishes he could leave himself behind in the tangled sheets he doesn’t remember sleeping in. Stay here. Don’t follow me. But there he is, still himself, insisting.

  “Do you know when is the train in the direction of Arcachon?” a man in the lobby asks the clerk. Hearing the word, Albert is suddenly very thirsty. Arcachon Arcachon Arcachon. The tremor moves through his toes into the arch of his right foot and when he tries to jiggle it loose, the urge leaps into the other foot. Arcachon Arcachon Arcachon. The ringing in hi
s ears has become a song and off he goes until he is falling through the pocket of space that opens without warning inside of him into another unfamiliar place.

  There are moments when he thinks he might be dreaming, that it has all been a dream from which he might awake. This is what he wishes when he discovers himself behind the horse and its rider on a muddy road with a rut six feet deep. Without warning they begin to sink. Albert’s heart lifts at first. Surely this must be a dream. The rider kicks the horse, beats it with a stick, but the mud holds the horse fast, sucking it down. Kicking and beating are of no use and the rider is forced to leap off, to watch helplessly as the horse sinks up to its chest, its neck thrashing. Albert watches with the rider, who weeps as the horse thrashes and squeals until mud fills its nostrils and its mouth, until it is too tired to squeal. The horse’s eyes stop rolling back in its head; they go still with hopelessness. It is better not to thrash, the eyes say.

  Several men happen by in a carriage; with a rope they help the weeping rider drag the enormous body of the horse out of the sucking mud. After everyone has gone, Albert watches the still surface as though something might rise up out of it. It is better not to thrash. He is thick and deaf with sludge. He doesn’t care anymore if the urge to walk comes or not. He is a shrouded version of a man who will leave behind only his simple, heavy body to be carried away. If he doesn’t thrash, will someone carry him away, out of this life?

  But when he finds himself in a shambles of a public square—not even a monument to such-and-such general—he has not been carried away, not at all. He is still himself, though he seems to be disappearing with greater frequency. How could he ever be sure, but it seems as if he is himself less and less. It is a town so poor the people wear vests with old coins for buttons and hats of worn black felt. Some people have no shoes at all. A large greatcoat covers their misery.

  “Would you like something to eat?” a child with a dirt-streaked face asks Albert, holding out a fat-fried potato in his pudgy hand. Nearby, his mother hangs clothes on a line. “He’ll come back,” she says through the clothespin between her teeth. She is speaking to her friend whose husband has gone on another bender.

  “Or maybe he won’t,” the other woman says, “I should be so lucky.” The way she laughs, Albert knows she doesn’t mean it. There may be misery here, but every morning these women wake up into a family of the sort he will never have. To have a family requires being in one place. You cannot be the sort of man who ends up in Verdun with the echo of sheep bells in your head when you were meant to meet a woman who said she wanted to marry you at four o’clock somewhere else entirely.

  “Would you like a potato?” the boy says, his hand still outstretched.

  The boy’s kindness is more than Albert can bear. Better that the woman hanging clothes should run him off or have him thrown in jail. Better to tell him he is not fulfilling his duties as a citizen, to accuse him of causing the nation’s downfall.

  What about love? It is somewhere else. Not for him. Never for him.

  He wiggles his toe through the rustling leaves in his shoes. He hopes the child will understand.

  Understand what? What day? What gift?

  What was the question?

  There is no explaining, so he does the only thing he knows how to do. Though his legs ache, though all he wants is to stop, he walks away.

  “Wait!” the child calls after him. “Come back! I can make it smaller. I will cut it in half.” The boy hurls the fat-fried potato after him in frustration. He was being kind the way his mother always told him to be. Why wouldn’t this man receive his kindness? A bird, startled out of a holm oak, swoops down to where the potato lies in the dirt, spears it with its beak, and flies away.

  “Come back!” cries the boy, a tug in his stomach. He is filled with a powerful longing he doesn’t understand. He wants the man who is walking away to turn around more fiercely than he has wanted anything in his short life, but the man only becomes smaller and smaller and smaller.

  “Stop your shouting,” his mother shouts, and though the boy will eventually stop his shouting, though he will return to playing games—stealing his father’s worn felt hat and dropping it down the well, for example—for days he will think about the man disappearing over the horizon. The boy’s heart will be heavy with that image, and though it will fade eventually, it will return to him when he is a man and feeling melancholy. What was that? He won’t be able to place it. It must have been a dream he had once long ago when he was a boy capable of conjuring such things.

  “Don’t go!” Albert hears the boy calling out to him, but it is too late. The bird with the potato in its beak flies past his ear. He hears the boy calling him even after he has walked so far away he couldn’t possibly hear him. Don’t go! As if there were a life for Albert there.

  There is no life for him there. There is no life for him anywhere.

  This is no life at all.

  He discovers himself fading with the light, trembling with cold amid the rubble of a cemetery wall half pulled down to make room for more victims of cholera. Though he doesn’t know it, he is not far from home. He is not thinking of home. He wants only to sink into the mud. It is better not to thrash. Let him die right there in the cemetery. No one will have to drag him from a muddy rut; no one will have to shoulder his dead body out of town. Just dig a hole.

  When he sees the lamplighter, grizzled and trembling with age, Albert believes he has gotten his wish: the man must be coming to bury him here where he lies.

  “Is that you, boy?” the lamplighter says, pulling him up from the cold flattened gravestone where he has been lying. “I thought I saw a shape from the path that looked like a man. I wasn’t sure if . . . it’s been so long. Is that you, Albert?”

  “Tell me you’re not a dream.”

  “Stand up,” the old man says. Albert is tired, so tired, too tired; he leans into the warmth of the lamplighter’s body, the arm around his shoulder. “There is no need to cry. Come, now,” the lamplighter says, pulling Albert to his feet.

  He is so cold and stiff he can barely walk even with the old man’s help, but he allows the lamplighter to guide him into the city, the home he is forever leaving, through the winding streets reeking of horse piss. He leans into the warmth of him as he escorts him past the public gardens with the Spanish chestnut trees under which the rats scurry, through the Cathedral Square where the men who live inside the tick-tock of regular days gather at the end of the work day, never worrying about wandering away. “Where has the time gone?” Albert imagines them saying to one another as he’s heard other men say so breezily. They don’t mean “Where is yesterday?” or “Where is the month of March?” Time has not really gone anywhere; it has not abandoned them, for example, in a cemetery to die.

  “Look,” a man Albert doesn’t recognize says, though the laughing and pointing are familiar. “The man with the . . . Oh! Oh! My beautiful instrument!”

  “What is wrong with you?” barks the lamplighter. “Go home. Leave him be.”

  Once more, kindness is so much worse than ridicule. Albert wants only to return to the cemetery. He wants to lie down and sink into the earth. Cover him with dirt; he will become the dirt. But the lamplighter won’t let him go and then they are passing the little church of St. Eulalie, where during the day men and women, so appealingly clean, whisper up and down the aisles, bowing their heads, kneeling and praying.

  And then, tsk-tsk, out of the cold darkness of the church a cloaked figure appears into the shadows of dusk, clucking its tongue.

  “I have seen you,” hisses a familiar voice, throwing back a cloak to reveal her sharp eyes and clucking tongue. It is the witchy-looking woman who stands guard each day to harangue anyone who will listen and those who won’t on the subjects of good and evil.

  “Be quiet,” the lamplighter says, though he knows as everyone does: She sees everything.

  “Behind the cathedral, abusing himself.” Her loose neck jiggles as she speaks. “God curses you.
”

  “God would not even bother to curse you,” the lamplighter says.

  “This man!” the woman shrieks at a group of men passing by. “He has committed unspeakable acts.”

  “It sounds as though you’d like him to commit them again,” one of the men says, laughing.

  The witchy woman grabs a bucket and hurls the filthy water. The lamplighter shouts and tries to pull Albert clear, but his clothes are drenched, the clothes he has taken such care to keep clean in spite of the dust and the mud of the road. He has walked great distances in search of rivers, in search of ponds.

  It is better not to thrash. He will not thrash. He goes limp in the lamplighter’s arms.

  “You know nothing,” the lamplighter shouts at the witchy woman. “Nothing.” The filthy water has splashed him too, but it doesn’t matter. All those years ago, when everyone else turned their backs, the lamplighter remained friends with Albert and his father. He had done what he could, but it wasn’t enough. Once—it had been some time now, a year at least—he tied him to the bed, as Albert’s father surely would have done had he been there, to keep him from walking but it hadn’t worked. After that, from time to time, he would see the boy around town but recently he had not and he had come to believe Albert was gone forever. Disappeared was as much as he allowed himself to imagine, vanished over the horizon. To imagine the terrible end the boy might have met on the road, it was too much. Now the lamplighter has the chance to make it right as much as it is possible to make it right. He pulls Albert, heavy in his wet clothes, dripping with the filthy water, toward the large iron gates across the street from the small stone church.