‘Blah,’ she said, ‘blah, blah.’ And added, ‘blah!’
He climbed the long cold stairs to the attic, shivering.
There were nights in winter when he woke with porcelain in his bones, with cool chimes blowing in his ears, with frost piercing his nerves in a raw illumination like white cold fireworks exploding and showering down in flaming snows upon a silent land deep in his subconscious. He was cold, cold, cold, and it would take a score of endless summers, with their green torches and bronze suns to thaw him free of his wintry sheath.
He was a great tasteless chunk of brittle ice, a snowman put to bed each night, full of confetti dreams, tumbles of crystal and flurry. And there lay winter outside for ever, a great leaden winepress smashing down its colourless lid of sky, squashing them all like so many grapes, mashing colour and sense and being from everyone, save the children who fled on skis and toboggans down mirrored hills which reflected the crushing iron shield that hung lower above town each day and every eternal night.
Mr Finch lifted the attic trapdoor. But here, here. A dust of summer sprang up about him. The attic dust simmered with heat left over from other seasons. Quietly, he shut the trapdoor down.
He began to smile.
The attic was quiet as a thundercloud before a storm. On occasion, Cora Finch heard her husband murmuring, murmuring, high up there.
At five in the afternoon, singing My Isle of Golden Dreams, Mr Finch flipped a crisp new straw hat in the kitchen door. ‘Boo!’
‘Did you sleep all afternoon?’ snapped his wife. ‘I called up at you four times and no answer.’
‘Sleep?’ He considered this and laughed, then put his hand quickly over his mouth. ‘Well, I guess I did.’
Suddenly she saw him. ‘My God!’ she cried, ‘where’d you get that coat?’
He wore a red candy-striped coat, a high white, choking collar, and ice-cream pants. You could smell the straw hat like a handful of fresh hay fanned in the air.
‘Found ’em in an old trunk.’
She sniffed. ‘Don’t smell of mothballs. Look brand-new.’
‘Oh, no!’ he said hastily. He looked stiff and uncomfortable as she eyed his costume.
‘This isn’t a summer stock company,’ she said.
‘Can’t a fellow have a little fun?’
‘That’s all you’ve ever had,’ she slammed the oven door. ‘While I’ve stayed home and knitted, Lord knows, you’ve been down at the store helping ladies’ elbows in and out doors.’
He refused to be bothered. ‘Cora.’ He looked deep into the crackling straw hat. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to take a Sunday walk the way we used to do, with your silk parasol and your long dress whishing along, and sit on those wire-legged chairs at the soda parlour and smell the drug store the way they used to smell?
Why don’t drug stores smell that way any more? And order two sarsaparillas for us, Cora, and then ride out in our 1910 Ford to Hannahan’s Pier for a box-supper and listen to the brass band. How about it?’
‘Supper’s ready. Take that dreadful uniform off.’
‘If you could make a wish and take a ride on those oak-laned country roads like they had before cars started rushing, would you do it?’ he insisted, watching her.
‘Those old roads were dirty. We came home looking like Africans. Anyway,’ she picked up a sugar-jar and shook it, ‘this morning I had forty dollars here. Now it’s gone! Don’t tell me you ordered those clothes from a costume house. They’re brand-new, they didn’t come from any trunk!’
‘I’m –’ he said.
She raved for half an hour, but he could not bring himself to say anything. The November wind shook the house and as she talked, the snows of winter began to fall again in the cold steel sky.
‘Answer me!’ she cried. ‘Are you crazy, spending our money that way, on clothes you can’t wear?’
‘The attic,’ he started to say.
She walked off and sat in the living-room.
The snow was falling fast now and it was a cold dark November evening. She heard him climb up the step ladder, slowly, into the attic, into that dusty place of other years, into that black place of costumes and props and Time, into a world separate from this world below.
He closed the trap door down. The flashlight, snapped on, was company enough. Yes, here was all of Time compressed in a Japanese paper flower. At the touch of memory, everything would unfold into the clear water of the mind, in beautiful blooms, in spring breezes, larger than life. Each of the bureau drawers, slid forth, might contain aunts and cousins and grand-mamas, ermined in dust. Yes, Time was here. You could feel it breathing, an atmospheric instead of a mechanical clock.
Now the house below was as remote as another day in the past. He half-shut his eyes and looked and looked on every side of the waiting attic.
Here, in prismed chandelier, were rainbows and mornings and noons as bright as new rivers flowing endlessly back through time. His flashlight caught and flickered them alive, the rainbows leapt up to curve the shadows back with colours, with colours like plums and raspberries and concord grapes, with colours like cut lemons and the sky where the clouds drew off after storming and the blue was there.
And the dust of the attic was incense burning and all of time burning, and all you need do was peer into the flames. It was indeed a great machine of Time, this attic, he knew, he felt, he was sure, and if you touched prisms here, doorknobs there, plucked tassels, chimed crystals, swirled dust, punched trunk-hasps, and gusted the vox-humana of the old hearth-bellows until it puffed the soot of a thousand ancient fires into your eyes, if, indeed, you played this instrument, this warm machine of parts, if you fondled all of its bits and pieces, its levers and changers and movers, then, then, then!
He thrust out his hands to orchestrate, to conduct, to flourish. There was music in his head, in his mouth shut tight, and he played the great machine, the thunderously silent organ, bass, tenor, soprano, low, high, and at last, at last, a chord that shuddered him so that he had to shut his eyes.
About nine o’clock that night she heard him calling, ‘Cora!’ She went upstairs. His head peered down at her from above, smiling at her. He waved his hat. ‘Good-bye, Cora.’
‘What do you mean?’ she cried.
‘I’ve thought it over for three days and I’m saying good-bye.’
‘Come down out of there, you fool!’
‘I drew five hundred dollars from the bank yesterday. I’ve been thinking about this. And then when it happened, well … Cora …’ He shoved his eager hand down. ‘For the last time, will you come along with me?’
‘In the attic? Hand down that step-ladder, William Finch. I’ll climb up there and run you out of that filthy place!’
‘I’m going to Hannahan’s Pier for a bowl of Clam Chowder,’ he said. ‘And I’m requesting the brass band to play Moonlight Bay. Oh, come on, Cora….’ He motioned his extended hand.
She simply stared at his gentle, questioning face.
‘Good-bye,’ he said.
He waved gently, gently. Then his face was gone, the straw hat was gone.
‘William!’ she screamed.
The attic was dark and silent.
Shrieking, she ran and got a chair and used it to groan her way up into the musty darkness. She flourished a flashlight. ‘William! William!’
The dark spaces were empty. A winter wind shook the house.
Then she saw the far west attic window, ajar.
She fumbled over to it. She hesitated, held her breath. Then, slowly, she opened it. The ladder was placed outside the window, leading down on to a porch roof.
She pulled back from the window.
Outside the opened frame the apple trees were lush green, it was twilight of a summer day in July. Faintly, she heard explosions, firecrackers going off. She heard laughter and distant voices. Rockets burst in the warm air, softly, red, white, and blue, fading.
She slammed the window and stood reeling. ‘William!’
Wintry November light glowed up through the trap in the attic floor behind her. Bent to it, she saw the snow whispering against the cold clear panes down in that November world where she would spend the next thirty years.
She did not go near the window again. She sat alone in the black attic, smelling the one smell that did not seem to fade. It lingered like a gentle sigh of satisfaction, on the air. She took a deep, long breath.
The old, the familiar, the unforgettable scent of drug-store sarsaparilla.
And the Rock Cried Out
THE raw carcasses, hung in the sunlight, rushed at them, vibrated with heat and red colour in the green jungle air, and were gone. The stench of rotting flesh gushed through the car windows, and Leonora Webb quickly pressed the button that whispered her door window up.
‘Good Lord,’ she said, ‘those open-air butcher’s shops.’
The smell was still in the car, a smell of war and horror.
‘Did you see the flies?’ she asked.
‘When you buy any kind of meat in those markets,’ John Webb said, ‘you slap the beef with your hand. The flies lift from the meat so you can get a look at it.’
He turned the car around a lush bend in the green rain-jungle road.
‘Do you think they’ll let us into Juatala when we get there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Watch out!’
He saw the bright things in
