‘Look!’ said Joey, squeezing her hand. ‘Mr MacHenry’s pick-up!’
As if in a dream she saw Mr MacHenry’s old blue Chevy pick-up sliding through their yard. There was nobody driving it, and it was sliding sideways, its tires digging deep furrows in the dirt. It was followed by a slowly tumbling junkpile of wheelbarrows and shovels and farming equipment, even a rusty engine-block turning over and over. Wanda could hear the sound of it over the shrieking of the wind. Ajangly, bumping, knocking, dragged-along sound, like some strange ritual funeral-procession. It gave her a feeling of fear like nothing she had ever experienced before — a slow-burning chill that ran through every nerve-fibre in her body.
I was standing by my window
On a cold and cloudy day
When I saw those hearse wheels rolling
They was taking my mother away …
What had made her think of that song? Why did that jangling, tumbling junk sound so much like a burial? She thought of ashes to ashes and dust to dust, and black sashes and black veils, and grim white faces gliding through the bloody half-darkness.
It was then that something collided with the corner of the house. Something huge and heavy, that splintered the verandah and cracked the frame around the kitchen door. They heard furniture falling all through the house. Upstairs, their mother’s huge mahogany wardrobe slammed flat on its face. Windows broke, china smashed, rows of books softly thundered onto the floor. Both Wanda and Joey were knocked off balance, and toppled onto the rug. All around them, chairs and tables and china came sliding across the room, to heap themselves up against the wall.
‘Wanda!’ screamed Joey, climbing to his feet, and balancing himself like a slack-wire walker. ‘The house is falling down! The house is falling down!’
Wanda managed to get herself up onto all fours, and then unsteadily stand upright.
‘We’d better get out!’ she shouted at Joey. ‘Try and get to the door!’
They struggled towards the living room door. Wanda couldn’t believe how difficult it was, Just to walk. The floor was perfectly level, but it felt as if it were tilting uphill at forty-five degrees. All of the furniture in the house wanted to slide towards the western wall. The living room door was already clogged with kitchen chairs and stools and pulled-open drawers from the kitchen hutch; and up above her head Wanda could hear the beds rumbling across the polished board floors.
Joey tried to clear the tangle of chairs in the doorway, but as soon as he pulled one chair aside, it slid back to where it had been before.
Wanda shouted, ‘We’ll have to climb over! Quick!’
Awkwardly, they managed to scale the chairs and climb down the other side, into the hallway. The front door was open, and outside they could see the yard and the highway beyond. They should have been able to see Mr MacHenry’s house, but that seemed to have vanished altogether.
By pulling themselves along the walls, they managed to reach the doorway. The force of the storm seemed to grow every second so that by the time they had reached the doorway, and were clinging onto the frame, they felt as if they were hanging by their fingertips from the top of a building. The floor stayed as level as ever, but Wanda knew that if she lost her grip on the doorframe, she would literally fall.
Peering through the doorway, their eyes narrowed against the wind and the flying grit, they could see why Mr MacHenry’s house seemed to have disappeared. The whole building had been wrenched free from its brick foundations, and had slid right across their yard and collided with theirs. The two houses were now crushed together like a monstrous traffic-accident; with stove-in boarding and broken windows and collapsed rooftops.
And all around them they could feel their own house shuddering against its supports; its whole frame tense, its mitres and dovetails strained to the limit; its nails being gradually dragged out like wisdom-teeth.
‘Wanda, we’re not going to die, are we?’ asked Joey. All the hysteria had gone out of his voice. His words sounded like clear water.
Wanda swallowed and clung on tight to the door frame, and didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t a storm at all. This was hell on earth.
The noise was enormous and overwhelming, but quite unlike any noise that the children had heard before. Apart from the funereal jangling and clanking, and the keening and whistling of the wind, there was a deep arythmic crashing. It was the sound of cars and trucks rolling over and over — not fast, as they would have rolled over in an accident, but slowly — roof, fender, trunk, wheels — jouncing on ruined suspension — as if they were being heaved over and over by a mob of protestors. Except that there were no protestors. There was nothing but the wind and the grit and the bloodily-swirling sky. These cars and trucks were rolling on their own.
The cars and trucks were accompanied by a tumbling, dancing tide of rubbish. Wanda saw a half-crushed telephone booth; and a bashed-up Coca-Cola machine, its cans brashly sliding around inside it; a jumble of newspaper-racks performing clattering handstands. She saw iceboxes and display counters and shelving and magazines and bright red packs of frozen food and shoes and sunglasses and broken bicycles and sacks of dog-food.
She began to see people, too. One dark-blue Ford wagon slid eerily past with its tires screaming an off-key Hallelujah chorus, its windows totally blanked out with blood. A few moments later, Mrs Hemming from the Hemming General Store appeared. She was sliding along the highway on her back, dead or nearly dead, her eyes open as if she were staring up at the sky. Her auburn wig was clotted with blood and a big whitish bulge of brain-tissue, as if she had pinned a cauliflower to her hair. Her pink floral dress was torn to tatters, so that Wanda could see her blood-soaked corset and her bruised and bulging thigh.
Soon after, a tall thin man in Oshkosh dungarees slid past, face down. He looked as if he had been broken, like a marionette. Nobody could lie with their arms and legs angled like that, not unless their arms and legs were all dislocated, torn out of their sockets, shoulders and hips. Wanda thought she recognized him as one of Mrs Hardesty’s farmhands from the Grasslands spread. He left a wide glistening trail of blood on the road surface; but the blood was soon covered over by newspapers and gum-wrappers and Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes.
Wanda glimpsed children amongst the rubbish — children who must have been dead. She saw broken baby-buggies and dead dogs. She saw Leroy Williams, the janitor from Pritchard Elementary School, lying on his side with his face like a bright red Hallowe’en mask.
Joey started to scream. Piercing, high, in utter panic.
‘Joey!’ Wanda reached across the doorway and snatched at his wrist. ‘Joey, it’s all right, just hold on!’
‘But it’s Mommy! Look, it’s Mommy!’
‘Mommy’s in Springfield, I told you!’
‘She’s not, she’s not! It’s Mommy!’
Wanda stared at Joey, wide-eyed. ‘Look,’ he said. But she didn’t want to look. All this wind and noise and blood and deafening chaos were enough for her to cope with.
She couldn’t face the idea that she might have lost her mother, too.
‘It’s not Mommy,’ she whispered. ‘Mommy’s in Springfield,’
But then that capillary-fine lightning crackled from the clouds; crackled like cellophane; crackled like blazing hair.
Its charge was so strong that Wanda could feel her blouse sticking to her skin. Her fingertips snapped with tiny sparks of static. The lightning crackled again, and rubbish whirled and shopping carts bucked and bounced and tumbled. Stray sheets of newspaper suddenly caught fire.
In the sudden darkness that followed the lightning, Wanda turned toward the highway. There — slowly borne along on a river of garbage and paper and broken vegetables — her mother lay, white-faced, dead, like Ophelia.
Her mother’s hair was spread out all around her, blonde and fine. Her eyes were wide open, her fists possessively clenched around bunches of paper and plastic bags. What can you take, when you go? When you go to Heaven even the humblest of plastic bags is too m
uch of an earthly self-indulgence.
Wanda watched her mother pass with a terrible feeling of loneliness and desperation. What was she going to do now? She would have to bring up Joey; she would have to fend for herself. How were they going to eat? How were they going to get to school? Who was going to buy their clothes? What about the rent? She couldn’t bear it, couldn’t believe it.
She called, ‘Mommy! Mommy! It’s Wanda!’
But her mother was gradually being dragged away, one arm lolling, one cheek lacerated by asphalt. Her jeans were torn at the knee and her yellow-checkered shirt was splattered with brown dried blood.
She can’t be dead. She can’t be. She’s my mother.
Wanda shouted to Joey, ‘Wait here! Cling on tight!’
‘Where are you going?’ Joey screamed at her. ‘You can’t leave me! You can’t leave me!’
‘Wait here!’ Wanda insisted.
She pulled herself out of the doorway and took three staggering steps across the verandah. It was only then that she realized how strongly everything in Pritchard was being dragged towards the west. She managed to catch the verandah-rail, but all the same she could hardly stay upright. Lightning spat all around her; garbage and newspapers blew in the wind. She turned back to Joey and shouted, ‘Stay there! Stay there! I’m going to rescue Mommy!’
‘You can’t!’ screamed Joey. ‘You can’t save her, you can’t!’
‘Just stay where you are!’ Wanda yelled at him.
She stood up as tall as she dared. Her mother’s body was moving slowly but unceasingly away from her. If Wanda allowed herself to be dragged away too, then perhaps she could catch up with her; and find a place for them both to cling on to; a house or a shed or even just a fence; at least until this storm had blown itself out.
‘Mom!’ she shouted. ‘Mom, it’s Wanda! I’m coming to save you!’
Her mother’s body rose and dipped in the tide of garbage. For a moment, Wanda lost sight of her. But then another crackle of lightning caught the yellow plaid of her bloodied shirt; and Wanda could see that she had already been carried away as far as Waldo’s Food Mart, on Main and Comanche.
Joey screamed at her, ‘Don’t! Don’t leave me alone!’
Wanda turned. ‘Joey, I have to! Somebody has to!’
‘Don’t leave me alone! Don’t leave me alone!’
‘Joey—’
‘Noooo!’
At that instant, with a sharp ripping noise, the nails were tugged out of the verandah rail, and flew towards the west. The rail collapsed, with a barking, planklike echo, and Wanda was thrown head-over-heels into the dusty yard. She rolled over, rolled over again, thought: this isn’t so bad. But then she found herself rolling over and over again, and again, and hitting a fence-post, and tumbling over grit and shingle, and tumbling again, and hitting a hitching-rail, and — winded — colliding with boxes and reels of cable and bedding-pots and cans of paint.
She caught hold of the hitching-rail and pulled herself onto her feet. She took a deep breath, and then tried to walk towards her mother.
She managed three or four tottering steps, but then she couldn’t stop herself. The ground was level but she had to run. She felt as if she were bounding down a steep hill, faster and faster, until her legs were whirling so fast that she couldn’t keep up with the pull of gravity. She tripped, stumbled and fell — only fifty or sixty feet away from her mother. She was showered in cans and papers and garbage and broken bottles. She scraped both knees, and they stung like fire. She was almost drowned in rubbish. A cat jumped past her, end over end, an acrobat cat, even though its eyes were yellow and staring, and its legs were rigid with rigor mortis. She screamed, helpless, scrabbling against the tarmac with lacerated hands, trying anything to prevent herself from falling any further.
‘Mommy! Mommy!’ she cried. ‘Mommy!’
She got up on her knees; fell; got up again; fell. Lightning snapped and exploded all around her, cans and papers pirouetted with static. She opened her mouth to scream but her lips crackled with living electricity.
She fell, waded, fell again. But she had nearly reached her mother. ‘Mommy!’ she shouted, but stumbled. Trash poured over her like a surging tide. A supermarket trolley struck her on the side of the head. ‘Mommy, it’s me! Please, Mommy, it’s me!’
She was dragged at last into her mother’s arms. But her mother’s arms were lifeless; lolling and loose.
Through a blizzard of styrofoam cups and ripped-up Time magazines, Wanda could see without doubt that her mother was dead; smiling but dead; nothing but a heavy jiggling body in a yellow-checked shirt, grinning, sightless, and blissfully ignorant of Wanda’s fear. She wasn’t Mommy any more; she was a lifesize imitation made of dead meat; horribly flawed; horribly carefree. Wanda screamed and pummelled at her mother’s arm. Her mother vanished under showers of torn-up plastic bags and rubbish; then reappeared ten or fifteen feet further away, still smiling, a woman happily swimming in the sea of oblivion, all responsibilities forgotten.
Wanda screamed, ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ But she knew that her Mommy had already left her. The smiling woman in the yellow-checked shirt was nothing but a mockery of Mommy. Her real Mommy was in heaven; or someplace else, where Wanda could never find her; and Wanda had been left to survive on her own.
She climbed to her feet again, stumbled, and toppled. All around her houses were moving like ships that had dragged their anchors. Chimneys dipping; balconies swaying. Even the Exxon gas station had collapsed, and its roof was being pulled westward like the black triangular fin of a killer whale. She looked up, and saw that the sky to the west of Pritchard was black as night; black as sin; and that even the clouds seemed to be drawn towards it
She saw a house grinding past her; a mustard-painted house; and recognized the Allisons’ place from almost a half-a-mile east. She struggled upright, ran and fell; but ran again; and managed to clamber up onto the Allisons’ porch. The house was moving beneath her feet, and slowly turning as it moved, but at least she wasn’t being pulled along the highway.
She circled the Allison house, clinging tightly to the verandah posts to keep herself from being pulled off. It was two-storey, clapboard, a typical Pritchard house. Some of the folks who moved away from Pritchard took their houses along with them, on the back of a flatbed trailer. Almost all of the downstairs windows were broken and the door was hanging off its hinges. Wanda struggled into the hallway, snagging her hand on a broken hinge. She sucked blood, and wrapped her handkerchief around it. Then bracing herself against the wall, she shouted out, ‘Hallo! Is anybody home? Hallo!’
There was no reply. The house whistled with wind and echoed with banging doors. The wallpaper in the hall was yellow and brown, like French and American mustard all mixed up; but most of the pictures had dropped off the wall and all of the furniture had slid right through to the drawing room, so that the hall was oddly bare for a town where people habitually over-furnished. In Pritchard, furniture meant affluence, the same as it had when the town was first established, back in 1865. Big colour TVs and coffee-tables and couches and display cabinets crowded with crystal and china, they all stood for solidity, and community pride, and success.
Wanda’s feet crunched on broken picture-glass. ‘Hallo?’ she called again. ‘Is anybody there?’
She was just about to make her way through to the kitchen when she heard a thin, distorted cry from upstairs. She froze, her hand on the banister post, and swallowed hard. She heard the cry again. Aaaoooooohhhhhh, with a chilling echo to it. She couldn’t make up her mind if it were an animal or a human.
‘Is anyone there?’ she shouted; her voice tight and piping. ‘Hallo? Is there anyone up there?’
She heard the cry once again, and this time it sounded distinctly like ‘Help me.’
She hesitated for a moment, listening to the wind and the dreadful banging of trucks and automobiles, and then she mounted the stairs. She had to grasp each banister rail tightly to prevent herself from being dragged away. I
t was more like scaling a steeply-tilted ladder than climbing upstairs. She whimpered as she went, partly out of grief, partly out of fear. But she was desperate to find somebody alive, somebody who could help her, somebody who could tell her what to do.
‘Aaaaaoooohhhhhhh,’ came the cry; lower this time, and somehow more frightening than it had been before.
Wanda pushed open a bedroom door. The four-poster bed had slid across to one side of the room, along with the nightstand and the dressing-table and tangled heaps ofclothes. A dressmaking dummy lay tilted against the wall, stiff and dowdy and headless. It was wearing a half-finished summer frock with bright splashy poppies on it — a frock which now would never be finished.
‘Aaaaoooohhhhhh,’ the voice wailed again.
Wanda called, ‘I’m here, I’m coming! Where are you?’
‘Aaathrroom,’ the voice called back.
‘What?’ asked Wanda.
‘Baaatthhhrooommm. I’m in the baaatthhrooommm.’
Shaking with delayed shock Wanda made her way along the landing until she reached the very last door, which was the only door which was closed. There was a clutter of broken pictures up against it, as well as a bentwood chair and a small semi-circular table and a shattered glass lamp. One of the pictures was an amateurish oil-painting of Pritchard in pioneer days, when it had been nothing much more than a general store and a post office and a haphazard collection of farms.
‘Oh, God, please help me,’ the voice begged, from beyond the door.
Wanda turned the handle, and the door opened. Immediately, all of the debris that had been piled up against it tumbled eagerly into the bathroom, and collided with the bathtub.
The bathroom window had fallen inwards, and the wind was blowing the flowery curtains into rags. Even though the glass was gone, however, the sky had grown so bloody and dark that it was difficult for Wanda to see what had happened. She could make out a big white bathtub, and a cork-topped seat lying on its side, and heaps of shattered glass. But at first sight of the bathroom appeared to be empty.
Burial Page 11
