The Toynbee Convector Part 17

"G.o.d, Janice, but how soon? What about the other girls? What about the other towns?"

The telephone burred like an insect.

"All of them closed down? On the whole d.a.m.n planet? There must be one place one place! If you don't find a place for me soon, I'll ... !"

Everything was strange about it. It was like seeing a woman for the first time. The way she held her head back, the way she moved her red-fingernailed hands, all new and different She crossed her white legs, leaning forward, her elbow on a bare knee, summoning and exhaling spir its, talking, squinting at the window where he, yes, he stood in shadow; she looked right through him, oh, if she knew, what would she do?

"Who, me, afraid of living out here alone?"

She laughed, Sio laughed in cadence, in the moonlit darkness. Oh the beauty of her alien laughter, her head thrown back, the mystic clouds jetting and shaping from her nostrils.

He had to turn away from the window, gasping.

"Yeah! Sure!"

What fine rare words of living, music, poetry was she speaking now?

"Well, Janice, who's afraid of any Martian? How many are left, a dozen, two dozen. line 'em up, bring 'em on, right? Right!"

Her laughter followed as he stumbled blindly around the corner of her house, his feet thras.h.i.+ng a Utter of bottles. Eyes shut, he saw the print of her phosphorous skin, the phantoms leaping from her mouth in sorceries and evocations of cloud, rain and wind. Oh, to translate! Oh, G.o.ds, to know. Listen! What's that word, and that, and yes then, that!? Did she call out after him. No. Was that his name?

At the cave he ate but was not hungry.

He sat in the mouth of the cave for an hour, as the moons rose and hurtled across the cold sky and he saw his breath on the air, like the spirits, the fiery silences that breathed about her face, and she was talking, talking, he heard or did not hear her voice moving up the hill, among the rocks, and he could smell her breath, that breath of smoking promise, of warm words heated in her mouth.

And at last he thought, I will go down and speak to her very quietly, and speak to her every night until she understands what I say and I know her words and she then comes with me back into the hills where we will be content I will tell her of my people and my being alone and how I have watched her and listened to her for so many nights....

But...she is Death.

He s.h.i.+vered The thought, the words would not go away.

How could he have forgotten?

He need only touch her hand, her cheek, and he would wither in a few hours, a week at the latest. He would change color and fell in folds of ink and turn to ash, black fragments of leaf that would break and fly away in the wind.

One touch and...Death.

But a further thought came. She lives alone, away from the others of her race. She must like her own thoughts, to be so much apart. Are we not the same, then? And, because she is separate from the towns, perhaps the Death is not in her...? Yes! Perhaps!

How fine to be with her for a day, a week, a month, to swim with her in the ca.n.a.ls, to walk in the hills and have her sing that strange song and he, in turn, would touch the old harp books and let them sing back to her! Wouldn't that be worth anything, everything? A man died when he was alone, did he not? So, consider the yellow lights in the house below. A month of real understanding and being and living with beauty and a maker of ghosts, the souls that came from the mouth, wouldn't it be a chance worth taking? And if death came...how fine and original it would be!

He stood up. He moved. He lit a candle in a niche of the cave where the images of his parents trembled in the light. Outside, the dark flowers waited for the dawn when they would quiver and open and she would be here to see them and tend them and walk with him in the hills. The moons were gone now. He had to fix his special sight to see the way.

He listened. Below in the night, the music played. Below in the dark, her voice spoke wonders across time. Below in the shadows, her white flesh burned, and the ghosts danced about her head.

He moved swiftly now.

At precisely nine forty-five that night, she heard the soft tapping at her front door.

One for His Lords.h.i.+p, and One for the Road!

Someone's born, and it may take the best part of a day for the news to ferment, percolate, or otherwise circ.u.mnavigate across the Irish meadows to the nearest town, and the dearest pub, which is Heeber Finn's.

But let someone die, and a whole symphonic band lifts in the fields and hills. The grand ta-ta slams across country to ricochet off the pub slates and shake the drinkers to calamitous cries for: more!

So it was this hot summer day. The pub was no sooner opened, aired, and mobbed than Finn, at the door, saw a dust flurry up the road.

That's Doone," muttered Finn.

Doone was the local anthem sprinter, fast at getting out of cinemas ahead of the d.a.m.ned national tune, and swift at bringing news.

"And the news is bad," murmured Finn. "It's that that fast he's running!" fast he's running!"

"Hal" cried Doone, as he leaped across the sill. "It's done, and he's dead!"

The mob at the bar turned.

Doone enjoyed his moment of triumph, making them wait. 'Ah, G.o.d, here's a drink. Maybe that'll make you talk!" Finn shoved a gla.s.s in Doone's waiting paw. Doone wet his whistle and arranged the facts.

"Himself," he gasped, at last. "Lord Kilgotten. Dead. And not an hour past!"

"Ah, G.o.d," said one and all, quietly. "Bless the old man. A sweet nature. A dear chap."

For Lord Kilgotten had wandered their fields, pastures, barns, and this bar all the years of their lives. His departure was like the Normans rowing back to France or the d.a.m.ned Brits pulling out of Bombay.

"A fine man," said Finn, drinking to the memory, "even though he did spend two weeks a year in London."

"How old was he?" asked Brannigan. "Eighty-five? Eighty-eight? We thought we might have buried him long since."

"Men like that," said Doone, "G.o.d has to hit with an axe to scare them off the place. Paris, now, we thought that might have slain him, years past, but no. Drink, that should have drowned him, but he swam for the sh.o.r.e, no, no. It was that teeny bolt of lightning in the field's midst, an hour ago, and him under the tree picking strawberries with his nineteen-year-old secretary lady."

"Jesus," said Finn. "There's no strawberries this time of year. It was her hit him with a bolt of fever. Burned to a crisp!"

That fired off a twenty-one-gun salute of laughs that hushed itself down when they considered the subject and more townsfolk arrived to breathe the air and bless himself.

"I wonder," mused Heeber Finn, at last, in a voice that would make the Valhalla G.o.ds sit still at table, and not scratch, "I wonder. What's to become of all that wine? The wine, that is, which Lord Kilgotten has stashed in barrels and bins, by the quarts and the tons, by the scores and precious thousands in his cellars and attics, and, who knows, under his bed?"

"Aye," said everyone, stunned, suddenly remembering. "Aye. Sure. What What?"

"It has been left, no doubt, to some d.a.m.n lank drift-about cousin or nephew, corrupted by Borne, driven mad by Paris, who'll jet in tomorrow, who'll seize and drink, grab and run, and Kilc.o.c.k and us left beggared and b.u.g.g.e.red on the road behind!" said Doone, all in one breath.

"Aye." Their voices, like m.u.f.fled dark velvet drums, marched toward the night. "Aye."

"There are no relatives!" said Finn. "No dumb Yank nephews or dimwit nieces felling out of gondolas in Venice, but swimming this way. I have made it my business to know."

Finn waited. It was his moment now. All stared. All leaned to hear his mighty proclamation.

"Why not, I been thinking, if Kilgotten, by G.o.d, left all ten thousand bottles of Burgundy and Bordeaux to the citizens of the loveliest town in Eire? To us us!"

There was an antic uproar of comment on this, cut across when the front doorflaps burst wide and Finn's wife, who rarely visited the sty, stepped in, glared around and snapped: "Funeral's in an hour!"

"An hour?" cried Finn. "Why, he's only just cold-"

"Noon's the time," said the wife, growing taller the more she looked at this dreadful tribe. "The doc and the priest have just come from the Place. Quick funerals was his lords.h.i.+p's will. 'Uncivilized,' said Father Kelly, 'and no hole dug.' 'But there is is!' said the Doc. 'Hanrahan was supposed to the yesterday but took on a fit of mean and survived the night I treated and treated him, but the man persists! Meanwhile, there's his hole, unfilled. Kilgotten can have it, dirt and headstone.' All's invited. Move your b.u.ms!"

The double-wing doors whiffled shut. The mystic woman was gone.

"A funeral!" cried Doone, prepared to sprint.

"No!" Finn beamed. "Get out. Pub's closed. A wake wake!"'

"Even Christ," gasped Doone, mopping the sweat from his brow, "wouldn't climb down off the cross to walk on a day like this."

"The heat," said Mulligan, "is intolerable."

Coats off, they trudged up the hill, past the Kilgotten gatehouse, to encounter the town priest, Father Padraic Kelly, doing the same. He had all but his collar off, and was beet faced in the bargain.

"It's h.e.l.l's own day," he agreed, "none of us will keep!"

"Why all the rush?" said Finn, matching fiery stride for stride with the holy man. "I smell a rat. What's up?"

"Aye," said the priest. "There was a secret codicil in the will-"

"I knew it!" said Finn.

"What?" asked the crowd, fermenting close behind in sun.

"It would have caused a riot if it got out," was all Father Kelly would say, his eyes on the graveyard gates. "You'll find out at the penultimate moment."

"Is that the moment before or the moment after the end, Father?" asked Doone, innocently. "Ah, you're so dumb you're pitiful," sighed the priest "Get your a.s.s through that gate. Don't fell in the hole!"

Doone did just that. The others followed, their faces a.s.suming a darker tone as they pa.s.sed through. The sun, as if to observe this, moved behind a cloud, and a sweet breeze came up for some moment of relief.

"There's the hole." The priest nodded. "Line up on both sides of the path, for G.o.d's sake, and fix your ties, if you have some, and check your flies, above all. Let's run a nice show for Kilgotten, and here he comes comes!"

And here, indeed, came Lord Kilgotten, in a box carried on the planks of one of his farm wagons, a simple good soul to be sure, and behind that wagon, a procession of other vehicles, cars, trucks that stretched half down the hill in the now once more piercing light.

"What a procession!" cried Finn.

"I never seen the like!" cried Doone.

"Shut up," said the priest, politely.

"My G.o.d," said Finn. "Do you see the coffin coffin?"

"We see see, Finn, we see see!" gasped all.

For the coffin, trundling by, was beautifully wrought, finely nailed together with silver and gold nails, but the special strange wood of it?

Plankings from wine-crates, staves from boxes that had sailed from France only to collide and sink in Lord Kilgotten's cellars!

A storm of exhalations swept the men from Finn's pub. They toppled on their heels. They seized each other's elbows.

"You know the words, Finn," whispered Doone. "Tell us the names names!"

Finn eyes the coffin made of vintage s.h.i.+pping crates, and at last exhaled: "Pull out my tongue and jump on it. Look! There's Chateau Lafite Rothschild, nineteen seventy. Chateauneuf-du-Pape, 'sixty-eight! Upside down, that label, Le Corton! Downside up: La Lagune! What style, my G.o.d, what cla.s.s! I wouldn't so much mind being buried in burned-stamp-labeled wood like that, myself!"

"I wonder," mused Doone, "can he read the labels from inside?"

"Put a sock in it," muttered the priest. "Here comes the rest rest!"

If the body in the box was not enough to pull clouds over the sun, this second arrival caused an even greater ripple of uneasiness to oil the sweating men.

"It was as if," Doone recalled, later, "someone had slipped, fallen in the grave, broken an ankle, and spoiled spoiled the whole afternoon!" the whole afternoon!"

For the last part of the procession was a series of cars and trucks ramshackle-loaded with French vineyard crates, and finally a great old brewery wagon from early Guinness days, drawn by a team of proud white horses, draped in black, and sweating with the surprise they drew behind.

"I will be d.a.m.ned," said Finn. "Lord Kilgotten's brought his own wake with with him!" him!"

"Hurrah!" was the cry. "What a dear soul."

"He must've known the days would ignite a nun, or kindle a priest, and our tongues on our chests!"

"Gangway! Let it pa.s.s!" The men stood aside as all the wagons, carrying strange labels from southern France and northern Italy, making tidal sounds of bulked liquids, lumbered into the churchyard.

"Someday," whispered Doone, "we must raise a statue to Kilgotten, a philosopher of friends!"

"Pull up your socks," said the priest. "It's too soon to tell. For here comes something worse than an undertaker!"

"What could be worse?"

With the last of the wine wagons drawn up about the grave, a single man strode up the road, hat on, coat b.u.t.toned, cuffs properly shot, shoes polished against all reason, mustache waxed and cool, unmelted, a prim case like a lady's purse tucked under his clenched arm, and about him an air of the ice houses, a thing fresh born from a snowy vault, tongue like an icicle, stare like a frozen pond.