“Indeed, the Beautiful One is here,” said Cecy in Timothy’s throat and mouth.
“Nonsense! Would you hear another reason why the weather will change and the floods come?” said the ancient.
“Indeed.” Timothy felt the soft presence of his sister press against his windowed eyes. “Tell us, Nef.”
“They hate me because I am the accumulation of the knowledge of Death. That knowledge is a curse to them instead of a useful burden.”
“Can,” started Timothy, and Cecy finished, “can death be remembered?”
“Oh, yes. But only by the dead. ‘You the living are blind. But we who have bathed in Time, and been reborn as children of the earth and inheritors of Eternity, drift gently in rivers of sand and streams of darkness, knowing the bombardment from the stars whose emanations have taken millions of years to rain upon the land and seek us out in our plantations of eternally wrapped souls like great seeds beneath the marbled layers and the bas-relief skeletons of reptile birds that fly on sandstone, with wingspreads a mil-lion years wide and as deep as a single breath. We are die keepers of Time.
You who walk the earth know only die moment, which is whisked away with your next exhalation. Because you move and live, you cannot keep. We are the granaries of dark remembrance. Our funerary jars keep not only our lights and silent hearts, but our wells, deeper than you can imagine, where in the subterranean lost hours, all the deaths that ever were, the deaths on which mankind has built new tenements of flesh and ramparts of stone moving ever upward even as we sink down and down, doused in twilights, bandaged by midnights. We accumulate. We are wise with farewells. Would you not admit, child, that forty billion deaths are a great wisdom, and those forty billion who shelve under the earth are a great gift to the living so that they might live?”
“I guess.”
“Do not guess, child. Know. I will teach, and that knowledge, important to living because only death can set the world free to be born again that is your sweet burden. And tonight is the night when your task begins. Now!”
At which moment, the bright medal in the center of her golden breast flared. The light blazed up to swarm the ceiling like a thousand summer bees threatening, by their very flash and friction, to fire the dry beams. The attic seemed to spin with the rush-around light and heat. Every slat, shingle, crossbeam groaned and expanded, while Timothy raised his arms and hands to ward off the swarms, staring at the kindled bosom of Nef.
“Fire!” he cried. “Torches!”
“Yes,” hissed the old, old woman. “Torches and fire. Nothing stays. All burns.”
And with this, the architecture of the long-before-Gettysburg-and-Appomattox House smoked on her breastplate.
“Nothing stays!” cried Cecy, everywhere at once, like the fireflies and summer bees bumping to char the beams. “All goes!”
And Timothy blinked and bent to watch the winged man, and the sleeping Cecy, and the Unseen Uncle (invisible save for his passing like the wind through clouds or snow-storms, or wolves running in fields of black wheat, or bats in wounded zigzag flights devouring the moon), and a double dozen of other aunts and uncles and cousins striding the road away from town. Or soaring, to lodge in trees a mile off and safe, as the mob, the torchlit madness, flowed up old Nef-Mum’s chest. Off out the window Timothy could see the real mob coming with torches, heading toward the House like a backward flow of lava, on foot, bike, and car, a storm of cries choking their throats.
Even as Timothy felt the floorboards shift, like a scale from which weights are dropped, with seventy times a hundred pounds in flight they jumped overboard from porches. The House skeleton, shaken free, grew tall as winds vacuumed the now-empty rooms and flapped the ghost curtains and sucked the front door wide to welcome the torches and fire and the crazed mob.
“All goes,” cried Cecy, a final time.
And she abandoned their eyes and ears and bodies and minds and, restored to her body below, ran so lightly, quickly, her feet left no tread in the grass.
There was a storm of activity. All around the House things were happening. Air was rushing up the flue of the chimneys. Ninety-nine or one hundred chimneys were all sighing or moaning and mourning at the same time. Shingles seemed to be flying off the roof. There was a great fluttering of wings. There was a sound of much weeping. All the rooms were being emptied. In the middle of all this excitement, all this activity, all this flurry, Timothy heard Great Grandmere say:
“What now, Timothy?”
“What?”
She said, “In another hour the House will be empty. You will be here alone and getting ready to make a long journey. I want to go with you on your travels. Maybe we won’t be able to speak much along the way, but before we go, in the midst of all this, I want to ask you, do you still want to be like us?”
Timothy thought for a long moment and then said, “Well”
“Speak up. I know your thoughts, but you must speak them.”
“No, I don’t want to be like you,” said Timothy.
“Is this the beginning of wisdom?” Grandmere said.
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking. I’ve been watching all of you and I decided that maybe I want to have a life just like people have always had. I want to know that I was born and I guess that I have to accept the fact that I must die. But watching you, seeing all of you, I see that all these long years haven’t made any difference.”
“What do you mean?” said Great Grandmere.
A great wind rushed by, sparks flew, singeing her dried wrappings.
“Well, are you all happy? I wonder about that. I feel very sad. Some nights I wake up and cry because I realize that you have all this time, all these years, but there doesn’t seem to be much that’s very happy that came of it all.”
“Ah, yes, Time is a burden. We know too much, we remember too much. We have indeed lived too long. The best thing to do, Timothy, in your new wisdom is to live your life to the fullest, enjoy every moment, and lay yourself down, many years from now, happily realizing that you’ve filled every moment, every hour, every year of your life and that you are much loved by the Family. Now, let us get ready to leave.
“And now,” wheezed old Nef, “you be my savior, child. Lift and carry.”
“Can’t!” cried Timothy.
“I am dandelion seed and thistledown. Your breath will drift, your heartbeat, sustain me. Now!”
And it was so. With one exhalation, a touch of his hands, the wrapped gift from long before Saviors and the parted Red Sea arose on the air. And seeing he could carry this parcel of dream and bones, Timothy wept and ran.
In the upheaval of wings and scarves of spirit illumination the swift passage of lightless clouds over the valleys in tumult caused such an upthrust suction that all of the chimneys, ninety-nine or one hundred, exhaled, shrieked, and let gasp a great outburst of soot and wind from the Hebrides, and air from the far Tortugas, and cyclone layabouts from nowhere Kansas. This erupted volcano of tropic and then arctic air struck and cracked the clouds to pummel them into a shower and then a downpour and then a Johnstown flood of drenching rain that quenched the fire and blackened the House in half ruin.
And while the House was being battered and drowned the downpour so smothered the rage in the mob that it pulled back in sudden clots, slogged about, trailing water, and dispersed on home, leaving the storm to rinse the facade of the empty shell, while there remained one great hearth and chimney which sounded its throat up to where a miraculous residue hung almost upon looms of nothing, sustained by no more than a few timbers and a sleeping breath.
There lay Cecy, quietly smiling at tumults, signaling the thousand Family members to fly here, amble there, let wind lift you, let earth gravitate you down, be leaf, be web, be hoofless print, be lipless smile, be mouthless fang, be boneless pelt, be shroud of mist at dawn, be souls invisible from chimney throats, all list and listen, go, you east, you west, nest trees, bed meadow grass, hitch ride of larks, dog-track with dogs, make cats to care, find bucket wells to lurk, dent farmland beds and pillows with no shape of heads, wake dawns with hummingbirds, hive snug with sunset bees, list, list, all!
And the last of the rain gave the charred shell of House a final rinse and ceased and there were only dying smokes and half a House with half a heart and half a lung and Cecy there, a compass to their dreams, forever signaling their rampant destinations.
There went all and everyone in a flow of dreams to far-away hamlets and forests and farms, and Mother and Father with them in a blizzard of whispers and prayers, calling farewell, promising returns in some future year, so to seek and hold once again their abandoned son. Goodbye, good-bye, oh yea, goodbye, their fading voices cried. Then all was silence save for Cecy beckoning more melancholy farewells.
And all this, Timothy perceived and tearfully knew.
From a mile beyond the House, which now glowed with sparks and plumes to darken the sky, to storm-cloud the moon, Timothy
