by Hugh Hood
“Her mother killed herself.”
“So she did, so she did. He knows it and he can’t get out; the house owns him.” It is complete triumph for her. “When your father and I lived there, we owned the house, we had tenants in the smaller side and we mailed their rent to Ellie. But we had the house, it didn’t have us. Now the only people he can find to live in the smaller side are the Hungarians, because everybody in town who can speak English is afraid to go near the place. So the house has him. Oh, I’ll go and see him,” she concludes.
But Maura is ahead of her, already at the door. “You and he can do the gardening together,” she observes. “You can preserve Daddy’s arbor. Grover loves the trees.”
“You don’t have to go down there tonight. You’re under no obligation and you’ve got a train to catch.”
“It’s been a long weekend,” says Maura, “but I told him I’d drop in.”
“Well, don’t you get caught!”
It was a promise fairly made, though one which she repents of as she walks along the shore towards the three tamaracks which guide her into the leafy paths. The river is flat calm, an end-of-autumn calm, with here and there faint smudges on the surface moved by the slight breeze. Maura pauses for a moment before she pushes through the hole in the fence to study the river and wish it altered. What we need here, she decides, are docks and cranes, smoke, drydocks, slipways, a hundred factories; the river has strangled Stoverville. Straining her eyes she looks across to the desolate New York banks behind which, she remembers from the motor trips of childhood, there is nothing. Daddy promised me bears on the New York side but there weren’t any, not a bear. Oh God, she allows herself for one second to reflect, oh God, I want children. I want two children.
She pushes through the hole in the fence, remembering the afternoon she caught her party frock on a nail in this same board, sneaking home late from a birthday party by her secret route. She looks for the hole in her frock and the red splash of the rust but there isn’t anything there at all, and up she goes along the path to where Grover stands in the twilight on the sagging steps, anxiously looking out for her, with his hands outstretched to help her through the leaves.
“The husband,” he begins shakily as soon as he can see all of her, “is not really a blood relation of the wife, is he? That is, he isn’t related to her. After all I come from another part of the province and I’m not a Phillips. Am I?” He insists on it. “I’m not a blood relation to my wife, am I? Because this place should be transmitted according to the blood strain and should naturally come to you, all to you. I tell you, Maura, and I’d tell your father too, if I could, that I never wanted this place for myself. We have no children and you’re part Phillips. You should get it, and I’m going to see that you do. Because I don’t want it. I never did, not for myself. Never. For two whole days Ellie has been going over and over the matter, threatening to leave the place to me, but I told her that I’m not a blood relation. I’m related to her by marriage only.”
“That’s a closer relation.”
“No, it isn’t,” he shouts, leaping like a trout in a still pool. “This place belongs to you through your father and I’ve insisted to Ellie for thirty-six hours that she leave it to you. I’ve torn up her will. I’ll make her write another before she gets worse.” He shudders. “I’m afraid she’s going to die soon.” It has gone from twilight to dark through his speech.
“Where is she now?”
“She made me move her bed. She’s lying down in your room at the top of the house. She’s exhausted. I tell you, Maura, when she isn’t herself she says things you wouldn’t believe. I don’t mean to complain or bear tales but I’ve never seen her like this and I can’t bear it.” His throat dries up and closes convulsively and then miraculously opens for his final words as they pace up and down hand in hand on the creaking porch.
“You’ll take it, won’t you? Look at me, Maura, please! It’s so dark I can’t see you.” He turns to face her and throws his arms stiffly wide apart. “It’s yours. It’s yours! I don’t want it. You will take it, won’t you? Take it, take it, please!”
Her little bedroom is dark like a virginal cell in a cloister and Ellie lies on her bed with arms folded on her chest like an effigy on a tomb, her mind whirling with the effort to concentrate and control her thoughts. At regular intervals of maybe thirty seconds her body arches rigidly, projecting her torso and thighs forward and upward into the air, drawing her lower back up off the sheets, the cramped writhings of a woman in childbirth forcing her thighs apart and racking her abdomen, and all to no purpose. But her consciousness doesn’t record these convulsions as the stream of her ideas grows fuller and stronger, swollen by many tributaries, sliding faster and faster. Ppaaaarrrrpp. I am going to starboard. Mmeeeeuuuuuhhhh. I am going to port. SS Renvoyle upbound with package freight for Toronto. MV Prins Willem Oranje downbound for the locks and the Atlantic, half-laden, looking for a full hull at Quebec City. The horns grow louder and merge with the full downward current of her thoughts. They were never like this before, never so loud, never right in my room like this. The ships are swimming over me and the river through me and the horns are inside my head muddling my ideas all together with the family downstairs in the living-room with the captain from Oslo, seven stars and seven coronets and the three trees on the point for Christ and the two thieves hanging so straight and dark in the twilight on the darkening water I am going to starboard under the stars on the current down the river down east past the Plains of Abraham, farther, to where the river yawns its mouth eleven miles wide, invisibly wide, bearing me away at last to the darkness, the sleety impassible impassable Gulf.
After the Sirens
They heard the sirens first about four forty-five in the morning. It was still dark and cold outside and they were sound asleep. They heard the noise first in their dreams and, waking, understood it to be real.
“What is it?” she asked him sleepily, rolling over in their warm bed. “Is there a fire?”
“I don’t know,” he said. The sirens were very loud. “I’ve never heard anything like that before.”
“It’s some kind of siren,” she said, “downtown. It woke me up.”
“Go back to sleep!” he said. “It can’t be anything.”
“No,” she said, “I’m frightened. I wonder what it is. I wonder if the baby has enough covers.” The wailing was still going on. “It couldn’t be an air-raid warning, could it?”
“Of course not,” he said reassuringly, but she could hear the indecision in his voice.
“Why don’t you turn on the radio,” she said, “just to see? Just to make sure. I’ll go and see if the baby’s covered up.” They walked down the hall in their pajamas. He went into the kitchen, turned on the radio and waited for it to warm up. There was nothing but static and hum.
“What’s that station?” he called to her. “Conrad, or something like that.”
“That’s 640 on the dial,” she said, from the baby’s room. He twisted the dial and suddenly the radio screamed at him, frightening him badly.
“This is not an exercise. This is not an exercise. This is not an exercise,” the radio blared. “This is an air-raid warning. This is an air-raid warning. We will be attacked in fifteen minutes. We will be attacked in fifteen minutes. This is not an exercise.” He recognized the voice of a local announcer who did an hour of breakfast music daily. He had never heard the man talk like that before. He ran into the baby’s room while the radio shrieked behind him: “We will be attacked in fifteen minutes. Correction. Correction. In fourteen minutes. In fourteen minutes. We will be attacked in fourteen minutes. This is not an exercise.”
“Look,” he said, “don’t ask me any questions, please, just do exactly what I tell you and don’t waste any time.” She stared at him with her mouth open. “Listen,” he said, “and do exactly as I say. They say this is an air-raid and we’d better believe them.” She looked fr
ightened nearly out of her wits. “I’ll look after you,” he said; “just get dressed as fast as you can. Put on as many layers of wool as you can. Got that?”
She nodded speechlessly.
“Put on your woollen topcoat and your fur coat over that. Get as many scarves as you can find. We’ll wrap our faces and hands. When you’re dressed, dress the baby the same way. We have a chance, if you do as I say without wasting time.” She ran off up the hall to the coat closet and he could hear her pulling things about.
“This will be an attack with nuclear weapons. You have thirteen minutes to take cover,” screamed the radio. He looked at his watch and hurried to the kitchen and pulled a cardboard carton from under the sink. He threw two can openers into it and all the canned goods he could see. There were three loaves of bread in the breadbox and he crammed them into the carton. He took everything that was wrapped and solid in the refrigerator and crushed it in. When the carton was full he took a bucket which usually held a garbage bag, rinsed it hastily, and filled it with water. There was a plastic bottle in the refrigerator. He poured the tomato juice out of it and rinsed it and filled it with water.
“This will be a nuclear attack.” The disc jockey’s voice was cracking with hysteria. “You have nine minutes, nine minutes, to take cover. Nine minutes.” He ran into the dark hall and bumped into his wife who was swaddled like a bear.
“Go and dress the baby,” he said. “We’re going to make it, we’ve just got time. I’ll go and get dressed.” She was crying, but there was no time for comfort. In the bedroom he forced himself into his trousers, a second pair of trousers, two shirts and two sweaters. He put on the heaviest, loosest jacket he owned, a topcoat, and finally his overcoat. This took him just under five minutes. When he rejoined his wife in the living room, she had the baby swaddled in her arms, still asleep.
“Go to the back room in the cellar, where your steamer trunk is,” he said, “and take this.” He gave her a flashlight which they kept in their bedroom. When she hesitated he said roughly, “Go on, get going.”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Of course I’m coming,” he said. He turned the radio up as far as it would go and noted carefully what the man said. “This will be a nuclear attack. The target will probably be the aircraft company. You have three minutes to take cover.” He picked up the carton and balanced the bottle of water on it. With the other hand he carried the bucket. Leaving the kitchen door wide open, he went to the cellar, passed through the dark furnace room, and joined his wife.
“Put out the flashlight,” he said. “We’ll have to save it. We have a minute or two, so listen to me.” They could hear the radio upstairs. “Two minutes,” it screamed.
“Lie down in the corner of the west and north walls,” he said quickly. “The blast should come from the north if they hit the target, and the house will blow down and fall to the south. Lie on top of the baby and I’ll lie on top of you!”
She cuddled the sleeping infant in her arms. “We’re going to die right now,” she said, as she held the baby closer to her.
“No, we aren’t,” he said, “we have a chance. Wrap the scarves around your face and the baby’s, and lie down.” She handed him a plaid woollen scarf and he tied it around his face so that only his eyes showed. He placed the water, and food in a corner and then lay down on top of his wife, spreading his arms and legs as much as possible, to cover and protect her.
“Twenty seconds,” shrieked the radio. “Eighteen seconds. Fifteen.”
He looked at his watch as he fell. “Ten seconds,” he said aloud. “It’s five o’clock. They won’t waste a megaton bomb on us. They’ll save it for New York.” They heard the radio crackle into silence and they hung onto each other, keeping their eyes closed tightly.
Instantaneously the cellar room lit up with a kind of glow they had never seen before, the earthen floor began to rock and heave, and the absolutely unearthly sound began. There was no way of telling how far off it was, the explosion. The sound seemed to be inside them, in their bowels; the very air itself was shattered and blown away in the dreadful sound that went on and on and on.
They held their heads down, hers pushed into the dirt, shielding the baby’s scalp, his face crushed into her hair, nothing of their skin exposed to the glow, and the sound went on and on, pulsing curiously, louder than anything they had ever imagined, louder than deafening, quaking in their eardrums, louder and louder until it seemed that what had exploded was there in the room on top of them in a blend of smashed, torn air, cries of the instantly dead, fall of steel, timber, and brick, crash of masonry and glass — they couldn’t sort any of it out — all were there, all imaginable noises of destruction synthesized. It was like absolutely nothing they had ever heard before and it so filled their skulls, pushing outward from the brainpan, that they could not divide it into its parts. All that they could understand, if they understood anything, was that this was the ultimate catastrophe, and that they were still recording it, expecting any second to be crushed into blackness, but as long as they were recording it they were still living. They felt, but did not think, this. They only understood it instinctively and held on tighter to each other, waiting for the smash, the crush, the black.
But it became lighter and lighter, the glow in the cellar room, waxing and intensifying itself. It had no colour that they recognized through their tightly-shut eyelids. It might have been called green, but it was not green, nor any neighbour of green. Like the noise, it was a dreadful compound of ultimately destructive fire, blast, terrible energy released from a bursting sun, like the birth of the solar system. Incandescence beyond an infinite number of lights swirled around them.
The worst was the nauseous rocking to and fro of the very earth beneath them, worse than an earthquake, which might have seemed reducible to human dimensions, those of some disaster witnessed in the movies or on television But this was no gaping, opening seam in the earth, but a threatened total destruction of the earth itself, right to its core, a pulverization of the world. They tried like animals to scrabble closer and closer in under the north cellar wall even as they expected it to fall on them. They kept their heads down, waiting for death to take them as it had taken their friends, neighbours, fellow workers, policemen, firemen, soldiers; and the dreadful time passed and still they did not die in the catastrophe. And they began to sense obscurely that the longer they were left uncrushed, the better grew their chances of survival. And pitifully slowly their feelings began to resume their customary segmented play amongst themselves, while the event was still unfolding. They could not help doing the characteristic, the human thing, the beginning to think and struggle to live.
Through their shut eyelids the light began to seem less incandescent, more recognizably a colour familiar to human beings and less terrifying because it might be called a hue of green instead of no-colour-at-all. It became green, still glowing and illuminating the cellar like daylight, but anyway green, nameable as such and therefore familiar and less dreadful. The light grew more and more darkly green in an insane harmony with the rocking and the sound.
As the rocking slowed, as they huddled closer and closer in under the north foundation, a split in the cellar wall showed itself almost in front of their hidden faces, and yet the wall stood and did not come in on top of them. It held and, holding, gave them more chance for survival although they didn’t know it. The earth’s upheaval slowed and sank back and no gaps appeared in the earth under them, no crevasse to swallow them up under the alteration of the earth’s crust. And in time the rocking stopped and the floor of their world was still, but they would not move, afraid to move a limb for fear of being caught in the earth’s mouth.
The noise continued, but began to distinguish itself in parts, and the worst basic element attenuated itself; that terrible crash apart of the atmosphere under the bomb had stopped by now, the atmosphere had parted to admit the ball of radioactivity, had been blown hund
reds of miles in every direction and had rushed back to regain its place, disputing that place with the ball of radioactivity, so that there grew up a thousand-mile vortex of cyclonic winds around the hub of the displacement. The cyclone was almost comforting, sounding, whistling, in whatever stood upright, not trees certainly, but tangled steel beams and odd bits of masonry. The sound of these winds came to them in the cellar. Soon they were able to name sounds, and distinguish them from others which they heard, mainly sounds of fire — no sounds of the dying, no human cries at all, no sounds of life. Only the fires and cyclonic winds.
Now they could feel, and hear enough to shout to each other over the fire and wind.
The man tried to stir, to ease his wife’s position. He could move his torso so far as the waist or perhaps the hips. Below that, although he was in no pain and not paralyzed, he was immobilized by a heavy weight. He could feel his legs and feet; they were sound and unhurt, but he could not move them. He waited, lying there trying to sort things out, until some sort of ordered thought and some communication was possible, when the noise should lessen sufficiently. He could hear his wife shouting something into the dirt in front of her face and he tried to make it out.
“She slept through it,” he heard, “she slept through it,” and he couldn’t believe it, although it was true. The baby lived and recollected none of the horror.
“She slept through it,” screamed the wife idiotically, “she’s still asleep.” It couldn’t be true, he thought, it was impossible, but there was no way to check her statement until they could move about. The baby must have been three feet below the blast and the glow, shielded by a two-and-a-half-foot wall of flesh, his and his wife’s, and the additional thickness of layers of woollen clothing. She should certainly have survived, if they had, but how could she have slept through the noise, the awful light, and the rocking? He listened and waited, keeping his head down and his face covered.
