Bright's Passage: A Novel

by Josh Ritter

  “Mmm.” The auntly woman’s mouth set grimly, her eyes roaming over the naked baby. Then, drawing in her breath and pulling herself straight, she said, “Well, it’ll be here by tomorrow or the day after if the weather doesn’t change.” She looked around the store. “We had a fire here when I was a girl,” she said. “Well, not here, but next town over. Anyhow, my father took the register out of the store with the help of three men, and they pulled it down the road on slats and buried it in our front yard. My father was a good man, always fair. Half the people in town saw him bury it there, but he knew it would be safe. The fire burned down the whole town, but he came back and dug up the cash register—this very cash register—and we started new right here.”

  “When did your wife die?” Margaret asked, interrupting the older woman.

  “Margaret!” the older woman barked. “Keep your mouth shut, if you don’t have any sense at all.” She wiped the child’s little legs clean with a rag.

  “Day before yesterday,” Bright said.

  “Oh.” Margaret looked down at the floorboards. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What’s your baby’s name?”

  “Margaret! Tell me I didn’t just tell you to keep your mouth shut?”

  “He doesn’t have a name,” Henry mumbled. He watched the auntly lady twist the ends of the diaper so that the whole assemblage seemed to wrap itself around his boy like magic. The spell of white fabric was held by two pins that materialized from the same nowhere that the diaper itself had.

  “Well, you need a name for him,” the auntly one said. “Have you thought maybe about naming him after yourself?”

  “He don’t need any kind of name like mine.”

  “What’s that?” Margaret asked.

  “Henry Bright.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with a name like that?” Margaret asked. She turned to the auntly lady. “What’s wrong with the name Henry, after all?”

  “Not a thing,” the auntly one replied. “What boy wouldn’t be proud to carry his father’s name? And a man like you who went to war and fought for his country?” She clucked her tongue and reached beneath the counter, pulling out a horsehair brush that she passed to the girl. “Margaret, reach up there and brush all that dust off his nice uniform. The shoulders there,” she said, “and his back,” she said, directing as the girl ran the soft brush over his uniform as she might dust a mantelpiece. “There.” Margaret passed the brush back to her. “I’m giving you a drop of cinnamon oil here … and here.” She put a dab of the warm-smelling stuff on either side of the sling hanging on his chest, then gave him back the boy. “Keeps the mosquitoes away,” she winked. She stood back from the counter and looked at Bright. “And for you, I have some cheese and crackers. I don’t like the looks of how thin you are in that uniform.” She placed a large wedge of hard white cheese in a square of brown paper and laid a package of crackers alongside it.

  There arose the sound of an automobile outside, and the girl Margaret looked back toward the door, where her brood was trying to teach the tomcat how to lick a stick of candy. “That’s our car. I have to go now,” she said. “Mr. Bright, I’m very sorry for your loss. Everyone!” She clapped her hands for their attention and the children piled out of the store.

  “Learn to tie a diaper!” the auntly one yelled after her as the door closed.

  12

  The men spread out as they approached the church, their eyes roving over the village square for any danger that might lurk in the debris. Bright reached the immense doors first, and at a signal from the sergeant, the others spread to either side. The wood was stained almost to ebony by age, and the weighty brass rings that served as handles were polished yellow at their base from centuries of use.

  They waited on Sergeant Carlson for the signal to open the heavy doors, and, when he gave it, they grabbed the rings and pulled hard until a small crack afforded Bright a look inside. The sanctuary was narrow, the floor a diamond-checkerboard pattern of slate and marble. The walls had been painted an austere white but were stippled here and there with muted flecks of color as daylight shone through the few remaining stained-glass windows, as through the prism of an icicle. An altar hunkered squatly on a dais at the far end of the room, one corner chipped away, a candlestick fallen to the floor.

  Bright signaled that the room was empty, and at another sign from Carlson, he slipped inside. In the single, brief moment before the others crowded in around him, he let his eyes rise to the painted ceiling and, unprepared for what he saw there, found himself falling headlong into the crowded heaven that spiraled into infinity above him.

  It was the blue of the sky that caught him first: a rapturous, painfully pure spike of color that hooked his eyes like fish and reeled them upward into the heights. Gone in that instant was the viscous puddle of October light that had dribbled in behind him through the crack in the doorway. Beneath the gracious blue vault of the church it was a fresh and dazzling spring morning at the beginning of the world.

  His hand shot out, gripping the brass door handle hard, as if to keep himself from falling upward. He had believed the church to be empty, but, hanging there, Henry Bright realized he was in fact surrounded on all sides by a great gesticulating host of fellow beings. There were thousands of them in the sky around him—men, women, and children, in every conceivable pose and color. Some had the muscular builds of river-boat men and stood proudly astride their cake-white clouds. Others, a species of fat-faced-baby things, seemed to have leavened their way into the clouds themselves and popped their tousled heads at random from out of the billows, wearing expressions of frantic mirth and mischief. Many figures in the assemblage thrummed musical instruments, while others placidly displayed brutal and mysterious wounds. A finely featured woman held a pair of eyeballs on a platter, next to a nearly naked man who was calmly watching his own body being rendered into fat by flames.

  Above this crowd and higher still, a circle of bearded and wild men looked down from their perches with electric severity at Henry Bright, though he barely noticed them. His eyes now had come to rest on the figure of a young girl kneeling in prayer there in the highest heavens at the dome’s apogee.

  She was almost impossibly beautiful, her eyes filled with such reserves of comfort that to Bright it seemed as if, had he come into the church only an instant earlier, she would have been happy to give him all the love and understanding he might have ever needed or desired. Sadly, though, this was not to be, for her face was even now caught in the act of turning toward the other figure who was interrupting her prayers.

  This other interloper was an angel, its hair like twists of fire, its wings bejeweled with eyes in all states of opening and closing, its white robes trailing just behind it in this, its moment of arrival. It was impossible to tell what the angel was saying to the girl, but so beautiful was she, so composed and fatalistic was the poetry of her face against the urgency of the angel’s, that Henry Bright fell in love with her in that moment and stood staring up at her as if stricken.

  “Bright!”

  “Bright?”

  Bathing in the radiant pool of the girl’s beauty, he was deaf to the men behind him and returned blinkingly to himself only to discover that he had been jostled forward by the others as they pushed past him into the church.

  “Jesus! Would ya look at that!”

  “Jesus my foot! Chaplain was right. Catholics. Nothing here but a bunch of dirty pictures. We oughta—”

  The pealing bells above came back to him now and, turning, he found that he was standing before a small stone archway past which a staircase led upward into the bell tower. As the others argued with one another or else stood silently looking up into the blue, Bright stepped through the archway and began to climb the stairs.

  13

  Without his mother’s rifle, and with little money left to buy provisions, the winter was very hard. The wind shrieked and the stream froze solid. He melted snow for water in which to boil the dwindling reserves of dried corn and bitter carrots.
Rachel had terrible pains and sickness for a while. Her tongue turned a bright red and she ran a fever, but she didn’t miscarry.

  When the temperature dropped so low that the chickens stopped laying eggs, he brought them inside and they lived with the clucking all hours. The goats dug for forage some, but as the snow got deeper all the animals got thinner. He killed the first kid and they ate the thing down to nothing. Rachel’s health made an improvement. He killed another and made a stew with a few potatoes and the last of the carrots. She ate this for a week, and gradually the fever broke and her tongue returned to its normal shade. Now that they were inside the cabin, the hens began laying again. In the mornings there would be eggs in the folds of their blanket, in the bottom of the bucket, in the heel of a boot. She got up often now and would peek out at the horse through the freezing crack between the cabin flap and the door frame.

  The horse was enduring the winter only slightly better than the goats. Its thick coat hung loosely over ribs, which showed as plainly as the bars on an empty prison. Except for the times when Bright would rouse it for his rare trips to town, its breaths came slow and deep, as if it was waiting to be revived by a kiss of spring breeze or the chirp of returning birds. Rachel often asked to bring it into the house, something that Bright forbade explicitly. He returned from Fells Corner once to find that she had led the animal inside their cabin anyhow, throwing their quilt over it and stoking the fire. It had been hell getting the stubborn thing out again, but he relented somewhat after this episode and tied the animal to the leeward side of the cabin, where it would be most out of the wind.

  They ate the last kid in late February, when the world was at its coldest, and by early March he had butchered the billy. By then they had both developed a rank distaste for goat meat, and this last sacrifice to their hunger and the hunger of the unborn child was the worst. When he cooked it, the room had filled with gamy, clinging steam.

  She milked the she-goat every day, though, and somehow, slowly, the world began to get warmer and the slant of the sun began to find their faces when they would leave the cabin and tramp through the melting snow to the hutch where he had resettled the chickens. The horse was moved back from the side of the cabin to its customary spot under the chestnut tree. The she-goat began to get fat again, and Bright suspected that she came down off her perch on top of the hen hutch in the night and foraged, when she could be sure that he would not come out and slaughter her as he had the rest of her family.

  By May, his wife’s belly was big and they were happy. At night he would hold her close and she would tell him wild stories that came from her own mind. She never talked about her father and brothers. It was as if since her rescue they had ceased to exist for her, and if that was so he saw no need to remind her of them or of the awful threats the old man had made as they turned their backs on him and rode away together. Sometimes he would tell her about the War, but when he did it was always about little things: the finding, once, of a lemon, or the unlikely discovery of a bottle of clear liquor standing untouched in an exploded bar, the thick white towels at the hotel where he had stayed in Paris during his leave from the front. He never told her about the church or the angel or Bert, and if he ever got too close to those things, he would stop mid-sentence. She, sensing something in him, would help him to steer his stories until the tension in his voice was gone and the pounding in his chest had slowed.

  “And where were you then?”

  “In Saint-Mihiel.”

  “That’s a pretty name. San Maheel.”

  “Yeah. In a graveyard.”

  “In a graveyard? You were in a graveyard?”

  “Yeah. And we were all on our hands and knees, and the one guy next to me, Ezra, he froze because he saw a gravestone with his last name on it.”

  “Really? What was his last name?” Her fingertips stroked at the thin hair on his chest.

  “I don’t remember what it was. Ezra Something-or-Other. He saw it and he just froze there, and all the rest of us, we crawled on and didn’t see him. Then someone noticed he was gone so I went back to find him and he was still there, down on all fours, staring at that gravestone like it was telling him something he didn’t want to forget.” Bright looked up into the ceiling rafters. “I said ‘Hey, Ezra, hey, hey,’ but he wasn’t listening to me, he was listening to the stone, so I reached over and I grabbed him and hauled him around in front of me so that I could get him going. After a bit I got him moving again. He was real young, younger than me. So we were crawling around the stones to join the others when a shell landed right next to me. It shattered another gravestone and there was rock everywhere. I got some in my eyes and I was coughing on dust and for a second I thought that I was dead, but the shell didn’t explode.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it was—” He broke off and she waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she helped him finish the story.

  “It was because God saw you helping that man and he said, ‘Hmm! I like that boy Henry! I’m gonna keep him safe.’ ” She laughed quietly and held him and kept laughing to herself until she fell asleep. It was a playful laugh that bubbled up around them like a spring of freshwater. Sometimes he thought it was actually the child laughing inside her. He would fall asleep to that music, and some nights he would escape his dreams.

  14

  He saw the horse caroming wildly about the small chamber as he rounded the final curve of the steeple staircase. Whoever had led the animal up these perilous spiral steps had finished cruelly by tying its tail to one of the ropes that rang the bells above. He stood still in the entrance of the room and allowed the horse to see him. More boots were coming up the stairs behind him. He waved a hand behind his back and the footsteps halted. The whites of the horse’s eyes sliced at the air fearfully, its mouth was specked with foam at the corners. Bright stayed at the edge of the room and did not move, and eventually the animal began to quiet. It stamped uncertainly in a pile of dung, but its huffing slowed and it focused on him, watching for what he was going to do.

  Bright moved slowly across the room toward it until he was close enough to reach out and rest his palm on the animal’s twitching flank. The bells above had fallen silent as it had stopped moving and the rope tied to its tail slackened. The horse whinnied a few times, but Bright kept his hand where it was, and when he judged it finally calm enough, he ran his palm down the length of the shivering body until he was holding the slack of the belfry rope in his hand. He slipped the rifle off his shoulder and, holding it by the stock, sawed through the rope.

  Above them in the belfry, the bells jangled loudly at their sudden release from the horse’s tail. Hearing the dreaded things unexpectedly once more, the animal spooked clattering across the stone floor and hurtling in headlong panic past the men pressed against the staircase walls. From below them came a frantic whinny followed by a single shot as the horse reached the sanctuary.

  Bert stood at the bottom of the stairs, the officer’s pistol dangling loosely in his hand. The horse lay a few feet away, nearly dead, its tongue tasting the dusty marble of the floor, its eyes watching the heavens painted above them.

  They all stood around it dumbly until Sergeant Carlson stepped forward and shot the horse in the head. The animal lay still. He looked down at it, rasping a hand across his face. “Well,” he said, raising his eyes and looking around him at the others, “we’re not leaving a dead horse in a church.” He removed his helmet and ran a hand through his hair. There were the beginnings of a smile at the edges of his mouth. “Anyone see anyplace to get a drink in this town?” he asked. Then the smile disappeared and he stepped back to survey the problem of the dead horse. “I’m buying for anybody who’s ever moved a dead horse before.” Bert was still standing by the door, the gun swinging slightly back and forth like a pendulum.

  “Bert,” he said, but Bert’s eyes were far off beneath his yellow hair, as if he were looking at reflections in the pooling blood there on the checkered slabs.

&n
bsp; “Bert!” Carlson stepped between the boy and the dead horse. “If I ever see that Kraut gun of yours again, I’m going to kick your teeth in.”

  It took ten of them to push and drag the horse by its legs and neck across the blood-slicked marble floor. Finally they got it down the nave and from there pulled it bruisingly down the steps and out under the full ominous weight of the afternoon sky. Then there was nowhere else to drag it, and so they all straightened and looked around at one another and then around at the shattered village, unsure of what to do next.

  Bright took off his helmet and walked back up the steps and into the church for a last look at the girl on the ceiling, but the light through the transept windows had begun to fade and he had to squint now to read her features. Then, hearing the sergeant call his name, he turned and walked out past the immense wooden doors to rejoin the company. He had just replaced his helmet when the air above them screamed and the church exploded.

  15

  Back in the sunlight, a sack of rag diapers in his arms, a new box of matches in his pocket, and his son clean and dry in the sling on his chest, Bright watched the girl named Margaret as she glided down the street above her throng of children.

  “The Future King of Heaven needs that woman, Henry Bright.”

  Bright said nothing, tying the bundle of diapers to the saddle pommel, where they would hang next to the bucket of goat’s milk.

  “The Future King of Heaven needs a mother,” the angel said again.

  He untied the goat and then swung the animals around in the direction from which they’d come into town.

  “She will suckle your child. Your son needs a mother or he will die. He will starve.”

  “He ain’t gonna starve. I been feeding him, haven’t I?”

  “Your child cannot live long on goat milk. See how skinny he is. How slight.”