Burnt Mountain

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  From the stage Nick’s microphoned voice said, “When I was a kid, I thought everybody used to live in trees. I was convinced that Adam and Eve started it in the Garden of Eden, and that we only gave it up about the time we started wearing suits and ties. I still think the best place to live is in trees, and so I designed the housing for our Olympic competitors so that everyone would live under and sometimes even up in trees. And because Atlanta is basically a city of trees, I’ve very graciously been given permission by the city to locate this housing in the woods and around the lake in Piedmont Park. Like this.”

  On the screen behind him flashed a module about the size of a freight car. It was made of a soft-weathered copper shimmering material, with one entire wall of very slightly tinted glass or plastic. Inside, at one end, a lower, curved wall of a dark gold metallic tile enclosed a sleeping space and a compact brushed-steel bathroom. Outside, in the open living area, deep burnished built-in leather couches and a small kitchenette fitted jewel-like. The floor was a thick deep shag rug in mixed-metallic colors that I thought was made of leather, and on the opposite end of the room was a wall of shelving with books, a TV set, and a pull-down movie screen. Soft ivory shading could be pulled down to cover the larger window wall, and the top was skylit so that sun-or starlight could flood in. The module was simple and beautiful. Nick clicked a button on the lectern and a deep curve of forest around the lake in Piedmont Park, in the city’s heart, bloomed on the screen. It was a night shot, and the glowing modules hung in the trees, were stacked three and four deep in the open glades, and ran like lanterns along the paths that circled the lake. Above them the woods were a chiaroscuro of flickering light.

  There was a concerted soft gasp, and then applause broke out. It was a fantastic forestscape hung with magic lanterns. My eyes filled with tears. I would have loved to live in that forest-set city of light even if it had not been Nick’s. It was magic made entirely from the earth. Practical magic. Around me people began to stand. I stood, too. On the stage Nick grinned even more widely and bowed from the waist.

  “I like ‘em, too,” he said. “The city has agreed to give us a spur rail line that will connect to Peachtree Road and the rapid transit system there. No competitor will be more than five miles away from every bar, restaurant, and theater from Buckhead to the airport. When the Olympics are over they can be transported wherever they’re wanted. I know one family that’s putting one in the backyard for the in-laws. I think another few will make a small apartment complex up in the foothills. I’m putting one in the country outside Manhattan for my kids. At any rate, they’re all spoken for. Which is not to say I wouldn’t whomp any of y’all up a few more if you ask.”

  He smiled again and walked offstage. The applause went on for another few minutes. It was hard to say whether it was for Nick or his luminous housing.

  “My goodness,” the mayor’s wife said. “That was lovely. Isn’t your husband doing something to represent the camps? He’ll have to go some to beat that. Big Jim says it’s bound to be spectacular, though. Something to do with mythology, I think?”

  “Probably,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “But I have no idea what it is. He says the boys will have the last say in it.”

  “Sweet of him,” Mrs. Mayor murmured. “I believe he’s next after the one about the transit system, isn’t he?”

  I looked down at my program. The last line read “Mythologist and Folklorist Professor Aengus O’Neill, representing Camp Forever.”

  “Looks like it,” I said.

  I was suddenly afraid. I could not have said of what. I wished with all my heart that I could slip out of my seat and run to my car and go home. I wished that Carol was sitting beside me, ready to pat my hand or puncture the night with her reassuring laughter, whichever was called for. But the sainted Walter was in town, and she had gone to dinner with him to strike another blow in the long custody battle. I had seen her before she left; she looked cool and chic and altogether respectable in dark blue linen with her hair pulled back smoothly and high-heeled spectator pumps.

  “You’d get custody of any child in Atlanta tonight,” I’d told her. “Why don’t you bring him to see that thing the mayor’s doing out at Cantwell Park for the Olympics? Aengus has got some of the camp kids in his presentation for Camp Forever; I should think even Walter would like that.”

  “Are you kidding?” she’d snorted. “Aengus probably has them playing trolls or something. We’re going up Saturday to see the boys… if Walter’s still speaking to me, that is. You can tell me about it tomorrow.”

  I laughed and agreed. But I wasn’t laughing now, waiting as the perfunctory applause for the dust-dry show of street routes and city vehicles sputtered to a halt.

  “Oh, Aengus,” I whispered to myself, “keep it in this world, please. Keep it as real as Nick’s.”

  And shocked myself even thinking it.

  Instead of Aengus, Big Jim Mabry walked out onstage, smiling and nodding to the scattered applause.

  “Before Dr. O’Neill’s presentation, I’d like to tell you all about Camp Forever. I had the honor of purchasing the land, from a fine gentleman named Nog Tierney…. Nog, come on out here.”

  The thin, sandy-haired, snub-faced bus driver I had seen ambled onto the stage, a Camp Forever cap in his hands, wearing blue jeans and a tee shirt and work boots. He nodded but kept his eyes on his boots. He was a picture of humility, but something about him was—false. This man was not humble.

  “Anyway, to make a long story short, this is his son, and he ‘bout runs that camp for me. He and Dr. O’Neill, who is going to show us how Camp Forever got its name. Take it away, Aengus!”

  The two men left and the stage lights dimmed until it was totally dark. There was no light at all except the cold, pouring light of the full moon and the faint, glowing bubble that was Atlanta. There was no sound except for the monotonous non-noise of faraway traffic and a muffled kind of thumping that sounded as if it was coming from behind the stage. There was hardly any whispering in the crowd. We simply sat in the dark and waited for Aengus.

  One spot came on over the lectern. A dense ray of light in which dust motes danced. It looked solid enough so that one might climb it. No one stood in it. And then, from offstage far right, a great drum began to beat. Long beats, thundering, echoing. Very slow beats. To me, up in mid-audience, they sounded muffled and unreal, but they filled the amphitheater and the woods and sky around it. A march, I thought, my neck hair prickling.

  A death march.

  Oh, Aengus, no. No, please.

  As though it had manifested itself out of the sound, a figure came onto the stage, slowly, walking in time to the drumbeat. It was tall and oddly luminous, a very faint presence walking through darkness on the echoing vibrato of a drum.

  He stepped into the light and there was a great exhalation from the crowd. It was not wonder and perhaps not quite shock; it was something older: a tribe catching sight for the first time of a being that might or might not be one of its gods. All I could think was that it was a waiting sound. I could hardly hear it over the slow throat hammering of my heart.

  He wore nothing but a sort of one-shouldered singlet that looked as if it might be made from the hide of some pale animal. Where on earth would Aengus get such a thing? It came to the tops of his knees, and the shoulder that it left bare was gilded with some sort of thin wash… ink? Paint? His legs were gilded, too, and he wore short, soft boots that folded over, of the same skin. Around his neck was, what I knew now, a gold Celtic torque; this one did not look to be my necklace. His hair was pale and stood up in thick spikes, and he had a pale gold mustache. Aengus? Who was this gilt man? He was a wild thing, a wild man; he had no ken with my world or this place or even this or any other century that might easily be recalled. If I could have articulated it, I think I would have said that my husband gave off such a huge and potent spoor of pure otherness that there was nothing to do but regard him with silence and fright. He must have known this. H
ow could he not? What would he have us do, this audience of his friends and fellow Atlantans and travelers from so many countries of the modern world? Aengus on this night called to no other world that could have been named. We all felt it. I know that as surely as I have ever known anything.

  The last coherent thought I had was, Not even Carol could laugh at this.

  Aengus’s Irish brogue was never stronger: “Here,” he almost sang, “at the foot of Ben Bulben lies the Stone Age cemetery of Carrowmore. Here the ancient Celtic hero Oisin met Saint Patrick, to lament the loss of lusty pagan Ireland, and here, under a great cairn, lay Maeve, the Celtic warrior queen of Connaught. And here, on these heights whipped bare by wild Sidhe, the wind off the ocean, also dwelt Niamh, the pale nymph who rode away with Oisin to Tir Na Nog, the Land of Forever Young, beyond the sea.”

  He paused for a moment; the great drum continued. Then he threw back his head and closed his eyes, lifted his arms to the sky, and chanted in a queer, trilling, flutelike voice:

  The host is riding from Knocknarea

  And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;

  Caoilte tosses his burning hair,

  And Niamh calling Away. Come away:

  Empty your heart of its mortal dream.

  The wind awakens, the leaves whirl round,

  Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,

  Our chests are heaving, our eyes are agleam,

  Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;

  And if any gaze on our rushing band,

  We come between him and the deed of his hand,

  We come between him and the hope of his heart.

  The host is rushing ‘twixt night and day.

  And where is there hope or deed as fair?

  Caoilte tossing his burning hair,

  And Niamh calling, Away, come away.

  As he chanted, the drum quickened, and from the wings, one by one, four crude chariots with round wooden wheels came, drawn by what I supposed to be the camp’s ponies, hung with tinkling trinkets and tossing their heads, on which appeared to be crows’ feathers fastened in their forelocks. In the small painted wooden chariots, two boys stood back to back. They were all gilded and torqued like Aengus, and as the front one handled the reins the one behind raised a great shield painted with golden runes and shook a long lance. By the time Aengus had finished his chant and dropped his head, all four chariots had stopped in a line onstage and the boys stepped out to face the audience. They, too, wore tunics, and torques, but unlike Aengus, they were barefoot. They stood in a perfect line before their chariots while the bored ponies stamped and flicked their tails, looking off into the distance above the audience. The drum stopped. No one spoke. I did not hear a single person in the audience even draw a breath. No one moved.

  Then the drum gave one last tremendous, echoing boom and the boys all drew from their chariots and held up to the audience four dripping, severed heads.

  Even in the last row, you could have told they were papier-mache. No human had ever walked the earth wearing heads like these. Nevertheless, they were… horrendous. The boys held them by long strands of blood-gummed black hair. Empty, hollow eyes stared. Open mouths screamed silently; half-severed tongues lolled out of them. Blood or ketchup or whatever—it did not matter—spattered the floor of the stage and pooled there. Still the boys and Aengus did not move or speak. My eyes registered that the two boys in the last chariot were Chris and Ben Partridge, even though my mind did not until the next day.

  High up above me a woman took a deep, rattling breath and screamed, a long, terrible scream. Several others followed. A great general noise like a gust of wind started up in the crowd.

  I jumped up out of my seat, nearly tripping over several people, and ran as hard as I could to my car out in the parking lot. There under the cold, clean, high-riding moon I vomited until I almost fell to my knees. I heard no more sound from the audience far behind me. When I stopped the car in our driveway all I could hear was the monotonous, heat-thickened sound of the cicadas and my own breath, sobbing in my chest.

  CHAPTER 18

  I let myself into the house with fingers that shook so badly that I dropped my keys twice. I did not turn on any lights. I stopped in the kitchen, trying to think where to go. My mind took a frantic, scrambling tour of the house, but I could think of no place in it as sanctuary, no place that was mine alone, nowhere that I could not see Aengus also. Aengus with his false yellow hair and lilting, inhuman voice, Aengus and his warrior children with the dripping heads…

  I walked through the dark kitchen, my heels clicking on the beautiful river stone floor, and up the stairs and into our bedroom on the third floor, with the silver-blooming stars and the cold moon pouring their radiance down through the skylight onto the wide bed. Its pale bronze comforter was rumpled; I remembered I had sat there to pull on my unaccustomed heels. I stepped out of the shoes, slumped down onto the bed, and drew myself into a tight ball. This way, I thought, nothing could pierce me through my heart or stomach.

  I thought that I would cry, sob, wail aloud, scream out my grief and sheer disbelief, but I did not. I lay still and contorted, my face pressed into a pillow. I could only manage small, quick breaths, and I could not move except to shake my head very slightly back and forth, my lips rubbing the silky fabric, whispering, “No… no… no… no….”

  The phone rang and I let it ring itself out. When it rang again I reached over and took it out of its cradle. Its insistent buzzing intermingled with the night-drowned throbbing of the cicadas outside the open windows, and after a while both faded into a kind of rhythmic, primal undersound, like the beating of a heart in a body deep in coma. The sound of life. The only sound of life.

  I didn’t fall asleep, but gradually my clenched-shut mind opened just enough to let the memory of the night seep behind my eyes. I found that I could not banish the images. I thought that I would have them forever, perpetually bobbing over and above anything else that came into my mind.

  I will have to die, I thought, because I cannot tolerate that. That cannot be what I see when I think, Aengus. Of course I would think of Aengus; I would see Aengus every day; how could I not think of him? I would see him tomorrow night or the next; we would go about our lives; we would go to the beach, he had said we would do that…. We simply had to get past this night first, and then we could go back to being us, Thayer and Aengus….

  The tears came then, wild torrents of them. I knew that I did not think we could get past this night. Not and still be us. I did not know who I would be when I got up off this bed again, and I had no idea on the living earth who Aengus would be. Had I ever known?

  “I want my mother!” I cried aloud, in the sort of extremis of grief of a devastated child. It is an old cry, as old as the world, a cry of utter loss, of howling helplessness: “I want my mother!…”

  I knew that I did not want my mother, that my mother was the indirect architect of this anguish. I even knew that under any other circumstances I might have laughed at the sheer incongruity of it. But now it was not funny, only terrible, a cry for surcease where there was none.

  I curled back into my ball. Over my ragged sobbing I heard Carol’s voice, as clear as if she stood there: For God’s sake, Thayer, it was only a skit. It was only one of Aengus’s damned Celtic myths. Granted, it was pretty ugly to see, but…

  Is that all it was? Can it be that that’s all people thought it was? I begged her silently, desperately.

  No, Carol said, her voice darkening. That’s not all it was. It was… beyond human. It was an obscenity.

  I began to cry again. A lassitude deeper than any fatigue I had ever felt weighted my body. I wanted to get up, to run out of the house, to run, run like the wind, down the street and to the river, to the cold, swift-running river under the bridge. I wanted to plunge in and be cleansed…. But I could scarcely move. I could only cry.

  A weight sank down on the bed beside me and two arms came around me, lifting me up, pulling me in. I tried to te
ar myself away; how could he even think of touching me after what he had shown me?

  “Thayer,” Nick Abrams’s voice said into my hair. “Thayer. Come here, baby. Come here to me.”

  I began to cry, sobs torn from deep in my belly, a weeping like vomiting. It was past midnight when I finally lifted my face from his shoulder. The salt weight behind my eyes began to lessen. I knew the time because, somewhere in the storm of my grief, I had heard the midnight whistle at the paper mill far downriver. It was faint, but you could hear it on still summer nights like this, with only the cicadas for competition.

  The last time I heard it I had been lying in other arms. Except for inarticulate murmurings of comfort, Nick had not spoken to me again. Now he brushed my wild, damp hair back from my wet face and said, “Is he coming here tonight?”

  “No,” I said thickly. “He’ll be at the camp tonight and probably tomorrow night, too. We… we were going to drive down to the beach on Saturday….”

  “Not on my watch, you’re not,” he said, drawing me back into his arms and resting the side of his face against mine. He kissed me softly on my forehead and cheek and rocked me gently, as you would rock a child.

  “We need to talk about this, Thay,” he said into my wet hair. “I don’t want you to be around him right now. I’m not really sure he’s sane. I’m not quite sure what to do about it, but if you’ll let me I want to—”

  “Nick, no,” I said feebly. “He’s not… That simply wasn’t him. I don’t know what’s happened to him. That business tonight wasn’t the Aengus I married. It was… I don’t know… his interpretation of one of his Celtic things. He’s always said the boys love them; I think he just… lost sight of where he was and who he was performing for—”

  “I think he’s nuttier than a fruitcake and bloodthirsty as a tick. You left; I saw you go… you don’t know what went on afterwards. The crowd just went crazy. Women were crying, and you could hear the booing to Peachtree Road, and Big Jim and the mayor both stood up and tried to smooth it over, and then your sainted Aengus came running out on the stage and let out this… I don’t know, war cry or something… and shook his javelin at the crowd, and drew that dirk thing out of its sheath and you could hear the boys crying offstage, and one of the ponies got loose and took off up the hill toward the highway, and that chanting of his got higher and higher…. Security came and led him offstage, but by that time the audience was pouring out of the exits…. They didn’t take him to jail, I heard later, but there are some pretty pissed parents around here, I can tell you. I thought you’d be here, and I didn’t want him coming home to you, so I… well, anyway, I let myself in. Your back door wasn’t locked.”