Toward The End Of Time Part 7

Manolete's arm darted toward me like a sword. "Young, we show them young them young. We got the guns, and we don't give no f.u.c.king d.a.m.n no how!"

"Well said," I said. "But what you need, to convince people like me, is something written. I know people your age hardly even bother to learn how to read, but that's how the people you want to convince deal with one another. With something in writing. Suppose I were to give you an endors.e.m.e.nt. It would go something like, 'I, Benjamin Turn-bull, of this address et cetera, hereby declare that these young entrepreneurs and enforcers of order have supplied their services to me in a thoroughly satisfactory manner. What they promise, they deliver, so help me G.o.d. These fine young men can be trusted.' How does that sound?"

"It sounds like real old-time bulls.h.i.+t," Manolete said, but with a smile, here underwater.

Doreen asked, "Why would you do that for us?"

Her torn jeans and loose T-s.h.i.+rt and rough short haircut did not conceal that at thirteen going on fourteen she had the beginnings of a figure. Slender pliant waist, budding b.r.e.a.s.t.s. At one end of the fertile continuum Beatrice was at the other of. "I like you," I said. "You've brought some fresh faces into my lonely life. And you're repelling trespa.s.sers for me, right?"

"'Pay or go away,' we tell the ones on the way to the beach," Manolete said, with one of his pent-up gestures.

"Exactly," I said. "Also, it seems to me, if I gave you such a written endors.e.m.e.nt to establish your credibility in the neighborhood I might be ent.i.tled to a discount."

"Discount?" Doreen asked. "How much?"

"Oh ... what would be fair? Let's say ten-no, fifteen- percent. Fifteen percent off the monthly charge. Don't answer me now. Take it up with the other two. But point out to Ray and Jose that it's the only way to get their racket on a respectable footing. I would write the endors.e.m.e.nt in blue ink on my engraved stationery, that would show everybody it was authentic."

Mosquitoes, as the long June afternoon slipped into damp shadow here on the eastern side of the hill, were finding their way through gaps in the netting. I slapped several as they approached my ear. Odd, that I who cannot bear to kill a spider, and used to hate it when one would suicidally crawl into the wet paint of some home repair, am heartless about mosquitoes, though they are all prospective mothers seeking a drop of blood to nurture their progeny. That telltale whine of theirs-I wonder why evolution has failed to silence it, through the survival of the unsinging. But evolution has its curious perversities and warps and failures to deliver the obvious. "You need bug repellent," I said, standing but taking care not to hit my head on the translucent corrugated roof.

"We got it," Doreen said, less friendly as the light clammily ebbed from this fragile s.p.a.ce of shelter. "But it doesn't work worth squat on those ticking things."

"I squash 'em," Manolete boasted again.

Gloria must be back from Boston or wherever she has been. I could hear through the trees the surging motors of cars, but whether on our driveway or elsewhere I couldn't tell. The acoustics of this hill have always been deceptive. Conversations at the gas station downtown sound as if they were just outside the kitchen window, whereas in my study upstairs-my journal-keeping room-I fail to hear the FedEx truck come up the driveway. By the time its roar strikes my ear the heedless truck is around the curve by the daylily bed and out of sight, having knocked one more low-hanging branch off the hemlock.

"And you have a cooler for drinks, I see," I said, spotting the white of Styrofoam glowing in a corner of the other room. "For a modest fee, I might let you string up electricity from a plug in my garage. It would take a lot of extension cords, but you could have a fan, and a lamp, and even a little refrigerator. Not free, of course."

"Hey, Big Guy," the boy said. "We like it the way it is. The way it is, it's our own thing."

That "Big Guy" had been worth the slippery trip into the woods to hear.

The longest day of the year 2020 A.D. happened to be rainy and misty, its early dawn and extended dusk hidden in a white wet ma.s.s of droplets. The day was a long pallid worm arching up out of darkness and back again. The paper as I write curls limply and rejects the abrasion of the graphite.

In Gloria's garden, the peonies are already rather blown and by, though a few buds, their tightly packed silks stained as if tie-dyed, still wait to unfold. The huge white ones have scattered edges and spots of vermillion like b.l.o.o.d.y clues. The two-toned lupines are by, but the towering foxgloves are at their peak, as are yellow columbines, delicate dancing minikins that seem to disavow any connection with their stems. Bouncing Bet has escaped from the borders to mingle with the weeds out by the old hotbeds, which have been reduced by time to a rubble of broken gla.s.s and dried putty.

She cut some roses from the rounded bed toward the sea and won a number of second-place ribbons at the June Garden Club compet.i.tion. I think she would have won first if she had waited a few more hours to cut her entries, which had opened too wide by the time of the evening judging. The contest is not so much for growing as for cutting. Now the contestants sit about the kitchen in water gla.s.ses, as opulent as old actresses, and the ribbons dangle in the library, their strings pinched between the six volumes of Winston Churchill's history of the last great war but one.

I made an obligatory, multipurposed excursion to Boston. There was a plethora of bare flesh in the train and in North Station and even the streets of the financial district, along its seam with the tourist traps and juvenilia of Quincy Market. Some tans were already ripe and hardened; young female b.u.t.tocks, poking their hemispheres below the fringed hems of their radically abbreviated denim cut-offs, exposed here and there a pastel rim, shaped like a new moon, of bikini underpants. I thought of Deirdre.

And yet, by and large, how hideous people are! In Ma.s.s. General Ambulatory Care Center, where my dermatologist made his semi-annual harvest of my keratoses, sizzling them away with painful squirts of liquid nitrogen, none but the obese, the cankered, the demented, and the crippled crowded into the elevator with me. In the corner of my vision, faces scrambled, so that I had the distinct impression of a much-grafted and patched-together burn victim standing beside me, his face a chaos of ridges and blotches. But when I sneaked a glance in focus, his face was unscarred, and twenty years younger than my sun-damaged own. I practiced my new trick: by focusing mentally on a face in the side of my vision, I was able to generate an impression of swarming deformity on all sides of me, as if I were ascending in an elevator crammed with mutants or ghastly damaged survivors of the recent great war, their raw surfaces radioactive, their mutilation beyond plastic surgery.

In fact, except for the empty office blocks and the apathetic, sometimes deformed male beggars in olive-green fatigues, there is oddly little in contemporary America to recall the global holocaust of less than a decade ago. The national style has always been to move on. Business as usual is the pretense and the ideal, though the President and the legislators down in Was.h.i.+ngton have as little control over our lives as the Roman emperors in the fifth Christian century did over the populations of Iberia or Thrace. Even before the war, the bureaucracy had metastasized to the point of performing no function but its own growth. The post-war world dreads all centralized power. Our commonwealth scrip is printed not in Boston or centrally located Worcester but by six or seven independent small-town presses; the design varies widely. Still, electronic connections with other regions of the country are reviving, and commerce is imposing its need for an extended infrastructure. There is even talk of air service from New York to California, hit hardest by the Chinese bombers and further reduced-to near-Stone Age conditions, it was said-by earthquakes, brushfires, and mud slides. Reuniting the coasts is a dream demagogues make much of, on talk radio.

The first prize I ever won, awakening me to the possibility that there were prizes to be had, was a freckle contest at a church picnic; we belonged, half-heartedly, to the Ches.h.i.+re United Congregational, with its skimpily equipped bas.e.m.e.nt Sunday school and its tall plain-gla.s.s windows and its paint-poor pillared Greek-temple front. Puritanism lost its salt and savor as it moved west through Ma.s.sachusetts; it seemed to me that the white light fell cruelly through the clear gla.s.s on our faces and Sunday duds, like the remorseless clarity under a microscope. What comfort did the watery Congregational creed bring, I wonder now, to my mother and father as they struggled with poverty, toothaches, chronic unemployment, and constant dissatisfaction? Never mind: as a child I used to win freckle contests, and, though the freckles have faded, the susceptible fair skin has remained, its squamous and basal cells seething with DNA damage. During the long wait in my dermatologist's office, I studied my fellow-patients with loathing. They all seemed much older than I, doddering and drooling onto the handles of their canes, when in fact they were probably my age. I still peer out of the windows of my eyes with the unforgiving spirit of a young man on the make. My heart spurned all alliance with these disgusting relics of the last, unmourned century; I sought, instead, collusive flirtation with the noticeably nubile nurse who at last ushered me into an examination cell and, handing me a folded robe of blue paper, indicated that I should strip. Why don't you strip with me, darling?

My dermatologist, himself a relic, gave me an abstracted going over and found nothing that needed the services of a surgeon. I rather enjoy excision, the decisiveness of it-one less set of diseased cells to lug around. He painfully squirted liquid nitrogen onto a few spots of actinic damage on my face and the back of my right hand. The doctor, whose own skin is soft as rose petals but a wilted brown, said that yet another vitamin-A derivative had been found to reverse, somewhat, the deterioration of dermal cells. I waved it away: "At my age-"

He tut-tutted. He was ten years older than I. "Don't underestimate skin," he told me. "It's the last thing to go. People die of a failed heart or a failed liver but never of a failed skin. In Irish bogs, you know, these corpses preserved by the chemicals in the clay, the skin holds up as well as the bones. We see five-thousand-year-old tattoos, clear and blue as the day they were stippled in." Yet, in his encroaching senility, he forgot to write me the presciption he promised, for the vitamin-A ointment.

Mrs. Fessenden, whose senility has advanced a notch, has developed the fixed fear that all her funds have disappeared in the electronic maze of computerized finance. It is a reasonable fear: data banks blank out, governments fade away, inflation makes a mockery of currency. But the genius of capitalism dictates that wealth, once established, endure, to lure others to labor for it. Wealth survives wars, idiocy, and high personal unworthiness. So from MGH I trudged through the acres of brick-and-concrete rubble (Government Center, they used to call it) where the John E Kennedy Building and City Hall used to stand (both blown up by American sympathizers with the Chinese cause during the war, though all the inhabitants of Chinatown had been interned on the harbor islands) to State Street and my old offices at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise. Here I had been happy; here I had been, in a small way, mighty. I often dream I am riding the elevator up, and finding everything beyond the receptionist's desk nightmarishly changed. It was necessary today to secure tangible proof for Mrs. Fessenden that she was still a wealthy woman, however the world wagged. Yet what could I get for her but more suspect computer printouts? They all looked alike and could mean anything, she said. With the grudging help of Ned Partridge, who now has a wispy a.s.sistant with the economical name of Gary Gray, I found in a back room of old-fas.h.i.+oned "hard" files some engraved Chicago Munic.i.p.al Water Authority Board from the 1920s that had been left to her in her father's estate. They were beautifully ornamented with crosshatched fountains, overflowing urns, nude Nereids, and bearded heads of a jubilant Neptune. Along the bottom edge, above the lacily etched border, ran a tableau of a French fur trader, in company with two buckskinned Indians, surveying the horizon of Lake Michigan from the marshy mouth of the Chicago River. Another of Ned's a.s.sistants, a compactly built girl in a jade-green sheath that clung tightly to her honey-colored skin-Africa had recently b.u.mped into Asia somewhere in her gene map-helped me take state-of-the-art color Xeroxes of these antiquated proofs of financial substance, and collusively agreed to FedEx them, at the expense of the firm, to Mrs. Fessenden in Chestnut Hill.

The air-conditioned offices in their shades of ecru fluorescence formed a kind of paradise and I was tempted to linger. Once I had been welcome here, and it was not the least unkind trick of time that I had become an alien body, a germ to be neutralized and expelled. The comely underlings understood this less well than the higher-ups. One of the disagreeable things about Ned Partridge's face, besides its papery indoor pallor, is the way in which his long l.u.s.treless nose somehow appears in profile even when he is looking at you head-on. In the Pica.s.soesque scramble his fishy eyes seem to intersect, also. "The place isn't the same without you, Ben," he told me, with such evident insincerity that the mixed-blood beauty darted an eyelash-begemmed glance in his direction.

"You all seem to be managing," I said.

"Yeah, but there's no give-and-take any more. No fun."

"Was I fun?" I asked incredulously.

"There's no graciousness," he went on, avoiding my question. The Afro-Asian a.s.sistant demurely lowered her lids on the moist treasure, in its s.h.i.+ning lashed vessels, of her gaze.

As if I, a poor boy from outer Hammond Falls, had been the standard-bearer for fading gentility. "You still have Firman Frothingham," I pointed out. "He's fun."

"Yaah, he's still around, but between us"-his face jumped closer, out of focus-"Frothy's lost a lot of his fire, his esprit esprit. It's all cut-throat now," Ned said, settling back into his chair with a shuffling of lips and nostrils. "Savages," he snorted. "Everybody carving out their little turf and pulling up the drawbridge. Bingo, and f.u.c.k you, Mac. Let Pat show you out, Ben-we have a new floor plan since you left."

Pat, indeed. Pat pat. As we threaded through the vanilla lambency of the offices, I observed how her green sheath, with its split exposing a golden-brown sliver of thigh, fit her discreetly but undeniably steatopygous b.u.t.tocks with enough snugness to declare their cleavage. Even her face, as it smiled goodbye forever, had its muscular bulges. She was a choice cut of meat and I hoped she held out for a fair price.

Then, expelled, I descended to the steamy squalid streets, with their throngs of ghastly hoi polloi. It was as if the world's population had never been halved. All the sickly marbled tints of Occidental skin spilled and milled about on Congress Street as I bucked through the tumbling flesh toward North Station. Within, the stench of the cheese and pulped tomatoes of Italian fast food nearly made me gag. Overweight girls in their random search for stimulation were staring right through me. The commuter train in summer becomes a cargo carrier to the North Sh.o.r.e beaches, and the vinyl seats take on an aroma of salt water and suntan lotion and of wet towels and sleepy sunburned young bodies dying to take a p.i.s.s. As we age and appet.i.te dwindles, I notice, we become fussier about our food-we smell unsavory ingredients that youth greedily gobbles up, and also resent the secretive fumes of breeding, from the sour fermented beverages that loosen our inhibitions to the post-coital puddles. Odorous rumors of all those necessary secretions and excessively clever gametes make us queasy.

I write this while doubting its truth. There is a rapacious splendor in the way our ugly, multi-digited species, with its absurd patches of hair and oversized skull, slaughter by slaughter covered the world in waves of anthropic fat, wiping out the mammoth and aurochs and dodo and rhino and pressing the tiger and cheetah and Sus scrofa Sus scrofa into unsanitary zoos, where they smell nothing on the night air but people-an ocean of human scent and excrement and s.e.m.e.n. I am part of it, still; in the same shameful nook of me that craves perpetuation I am as carnal as ever. into unsanitary zoos, where they smell nothing on the night air but people-an ocean of human scent and excrement and s.e.m.e.n. I am part of it, still; in the same shameful nook of me that craves perpetuation I am as carnal as ever.

I can remember that first, rapt taste, chalky and exalted like a primal malt ball, of childhood p.o.r.nography. Grubby pages were pa.s.sed around, from hand to hand, in that Dark Age of text duplication, in tattered mimeograph and even blurred carbon copy. There was an inspiriting prose tale of a sixth-grade boy whose teacher has him stay late at school; she mounts a ladder to affix a Christmas decoration and lets him look up her legs to see that she is wearing no underpants. Later in the saga she makes him taste her copious fluids and extracts from his fly his silver virgin rod. Amazing! We schoolboys wondered, Did such things truly happen? In some universe, perhaps, but certainly not this. I, a businessman in bud, asked myself who were the adults who showered such delicious fantasies upon us starving juveniles, and how such a business reaped its profit. Another item of s.e.xual samizdat samizdat took the female point of view, in rhyme: took the female point of view, in rhyme: I took out my t.i.ts, shyly proud of their size, And blushed as Ted's finger explored 'tween my thighs.

I gulped when his member was thrust into view, But he bid me caress it, and lick at it, too.

How often I have wished I recalled more than this one stanza, and cursed myself for having an indifferent memory. But other boys were leaning on me, stabbing with smudged fingers at the fragile, often-folded hectographed copy, threatening to tear the revelatory text into fragments. One detail was unforgettable in its technical interest: as Ted prepared the heroine for her deflowering, he knowingly placed a pillow under her hips. Pillowy a.s.s upon a.s.s-kissing pillow: a sacred secret here, the v.a.g.i.n.al ca.n.a.l lifted skyward at the proper tilt, like an ack-ack gun, to bring down ecstasy from on high. I hugged this rakish bit of s.e.xual insiderism to my heart's foul underside but in the next fifty-five years have found less use for the tip than I would have thought. Education is so wasteful, so hit-or-miss.

In the first narrative, did the student then get up on the ladder, and the teacher, from below, rub her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s against the boy's feet, in a sort of Biblical laving?

Or have I made all this quite up, in a suspect surge of recovered memory?

Beside the driveway, the laurel bush, whose pentagonal blossoms seemed each a dainty marvel of biological design, has spread around itself a white-and-pink circle of such blossoms, shed, like a young woman who has slipped, while standing, out of her wide petticoats.

How much of summer is over before it begins! Its beginning marks its end, as our birth entails our death. Urzeit gleich Endzeit Urzeit gleich Endzeit, somebody once said in the course of my hit-or-miss education. The lawn is dry and tan in spots; a minute or two is snipped from the ends of each successive day; the hard white sails against the bay's midsummer blue seem as unsubtle as the stencilled border of a pampered child's nursery. The leaves of the little English oak along the driveway show, I notice on my way to the mailbox, constellations of holes eaten by insects or their fuzzy-headed larvae. The gra.s.s and weeds have hastened to go to seed, knowing their time is short. The year is like a life-it is later than you think, the main business is over and done with before you fully begin. There is a kind of tidal r.e.t.a.r.d in our perception of forward motion.

As I tried to explain to my proteges, an explanation for the puzzling fact-puzzling to physicists more than to ordinary men, who can imagine it no other way-that time's arrow moves in only one direction is that the initial singularity, the universe at the moment of the Big Bang, was utterly or almost utterly smooth, with the consistency of an orange pop-side, whereas the terminal singularity toward which all the billions of galaxies may raggedly collapse will be less smooth, or downright rough, like b.u.t.ter brickle ice cream.

It makes sense: all those blazing suns, red and swollen or white and shrunken or yellow like our moderate own, blue and new or black and collapsed, madly spinning neutron stars or else all-swallowing black holes denser yet, not to mention planets and cinderlike planetoids and picturesque clouds of glowing gas and dark matter hypothetical or real and t.i.tanic streaming soups of neutrinos, could scarcely be expected to converge exactly upon a singularity smaller, by many orders of magnitude, than a pinhead. The Weyl curvature, in other words, was very very very very near zero at the Big Bang, but will be much larger at the Big Crunch. But, I ignorantly wonder, how does time's arrow know this, in our trifling immediate vicinity? What keeps it from spinning about like the arrow of a compa.s.s, jumping broken cups back on the table intact and restoring me, if not to a childhood self, to the suburban buck I was when still married to Perdita. On one busy summer day, as things worked out on everybody's schedule, it fell to me to f.u.c.k three women- Perdita in the morning, since I was going off on a business trip and we liked to leave each other "topped up"; another, a pretty but futureless interne bond a.n.a.lyst, at lunch hour, in the Parker House, after room service had delivered some club sandwiches and iced tea; and the third in my hotel room in Houston, an overweight gum-chewing wh.o.r.e I picked up in the saddle-brown bar over whiskey and frijoles. Because she was a professional, I explained the situation frankly, and the sheer cra.s.sness of the explanation got me so excited that I wound up, to her drawled, grudgingly impressed compliments, coming twice. In all cases, my s.e.m.e.n arrowed outward, into darkness, like the minutes of my manhood ticking away. near zero at the Big Bang, but will be much larger at the Big Crunch. But, I ignorantly wonder, how does time's arrow know this, in our trifling immediate vicinity? What keeps it from spinning about like the arrow of a compa.s.s, jumping broken cups back on the table intact and restoring me, if not to a childhood self, to the suburban buck I was when still married to Perdita. On one busy summer day, as things worked out on everybody's schedule, it fell to me to f.u.c.k three women- Perdita in the morning, since I was going off on a business trip and we liked to leave each other "topped up"; another, a pretty but futureless interne bond a.n.a.lyst, at lunch hour, in the Parker House, after room service had delivered some club sandwiches and iced tea; and the third in my hotel room in Houston, an overweight gum-chewing wh.o.r.e I picked up in the saddle-brown bar over whiskey and frijoles. Because she was a professional, I explained the situation frankly, and the sheer cra.s.sness of the explanation got me so excited that I wound up, to her drawled, grudgingly impressed compliments, coming twice. In all cases, my s.e.m.e.n arrowed outward, into darkness, like the minutes of my manhood ticking away.

This morning I alarmed myself. While shaving, without thinking, I began to shave my chin and the area below my lower lip before I did my upper lip. It was as if I had forgotten for a second how to be me. My shaving procedure is invaluable: soften whiskers with hot washcloth, lather bar in soap dish, shave right cheek and jaw first, then left, then upper lip, and lastly the tricky, k.n.o.bby region of the chin, with its need to hold fast the lower lip with the upper teeth. I have cut myself more often in this region than any other, and save it for last. Suddenly I was tackling it out of sequence. My ident.i.ty had been usurped by an alien who had not been briefed upon just this trifling detail; another hand than mine had taken over. It was as when a measurement is taken in the quantum realm of an electron's position or momentum, and the wave function collapses and another universe floridly sprouts on the spot.

All praise be to the holy Lord on this glorious day at the end of June. The sea is speckled with white crests-the manes of white stallions, the superst.i.tious folk say, but for those of us sequestered in prayerful peacefulness on our island hill a divine sign of safety, as the scudding aftermath of a night blow strong enough to hold in their harbors the dragon-headed, square-sailed galley s.h.i.+ps of the fair-faced demons from far Lothland. Rumors have arrived from across the narrow water between our fastness and the Munster mainland concerning attacks ever nearer. The seafaring fiends have no end of appet.i.te and cruelty, to which Providence in its miraculous patience lends scope so as to acc.u.mulate un-gainsayable proofs toward the eternal d.a.m.nation of their souls. The saintly monks of Lindisfarne, the makers and inscribes of magically beautiful codices, were stripped and tortured in June of the year 793 after our Lord's birth of a meek virgin, and the raiders came again in 801 to set the buildings afire, and in 806 to kill scores more of helpless monks. St. Columcille's fair lona has fallen with much ma.s.sacre, and Inis Murray was quite destroyed, never to rise, in the second year of this our terrible ninth century. Glen-dalough, Clonfert, Clonmacnoise, and Kildare where none less than St. Brigit rules as high abbess above a holy gathering of both s.e.xes-none could withstand the evil from the sea. The pirates with golden beards have penetrated even to Patraic is beloved Armagh and burned the blessed buildings to the ground. The horrors that G.o.d in His mercy permits! All to test the faithful, our learned abbot explains-to polish up the devoted to be sparkling angels in the ranks depleted by Satan and his defiant and banished legions.

And still, he says, to ease the fear from the unshaven faces of the young among us, unlikely in the extreme it would be for the Lothlanders to seek out our remote and rocky island, poor as we are, thirty brothers and twice as many of sheep, nine goats and a single dutiful ram, two pair of oxen to drag the plow through our patch of low soil, and a pen of pigs for the bacon to trade (we eat no meat) and for the squealing when the rare strangers come up the lone flint path from the s.h.i.+ngle beach. A man like me, unable to read a sign save that of the cross and the great dancing "X" which begins Christ's name-Brother Guaire has shown me pages he has labored on in the scriptorium, glowing designs that dizzied me endeavoring to follow them down to the end of the knot, all in inks the everlasting colors of jewels-a man like me, thrust by a hard-hearted wh.o.r.e of a mother, before I had the makings of a memory, upon the bosom of the church, and raised by it within the charity of G.o.d to serve my betters, gifted though I was with naught but an encouraging way with dumb beasts and the herbs of the garden, such a man, his chief joy the simple smile of creation and one meatless meal a day, bran soaked in goat's milk or sea ba.s.s with bread and uncooked beans, and the gratification of lying stretched cruciform on the dirt floor of his stone hut offering up his hunger and pain to the crucified G.o.d, such would not likely attract the fury of the marauding Antichrists from the lands to the north, where all is ice and bewhiskered sea-creatures with soulful eyes like those of men eternally condemned.

The highest pasture on our stony island consists of gra.s.s tufts nibbled by the goats; below the upmost ledges in the growing season sheep graze broad-sloped shoulders of green, the winter lambs near the size of their mothers now and all still as gray boulders in the golden morning sun, heads lowered to feed. The occasional bleat of a lamb imagining himself lost drifts down. A pair of hawks whistle one to the other as they hang watchful in the wind. The herbs and medicinal flowers in their frothy rows nod about my knees-the yellows of the cowslips and feverfew, the purples of hyssop and lavender, the dainty useful greens of mint and cabbage. Brother Vergil before he wasted away of flying venom and the weakness of age explained his arrangement by the humors: here thyme and hyssop, warm and drying herbs, to clear phlegm; there burdock and figwort, cool and dry, to cleanse the sanguine system of gout and diarrhea; here senna and h.e.l.lebore to purge with their heat the clogging of black bile that induces constipation and melancholy; and there rhubarb and dandelion to counteract with their cool moisture the hot and dry tempers inflicted by an excess of yellow bile. Garlic and basil, coriander and goldenseal-the mute plants do hold in their roots and stems and calyxes and corollas a thousand responses to the mult.i.tudinous gaps and imbalances the body in its turmoil poses. G.o.d through His vast kindness knots into all the crevices of His flowering creation the essential juices of His peace and love, according to the code declared by the wondrously variegated patterns of the flowers and leaves. Dried aerial parts yield decoctions and poultices no malady can resist. For headache, lavender and feverfew; for boils, a poultice from feverfew; for sore throats, infusions of coneflower roots or loosestrife blooms, added to tincture of astringent, phlegm-reducing herbs like silverweed; for hemorrhoids, ointment of pilewort-there is nothing amiss in our workings without cure in G.o.d's garden. Even warrior's wounds slowly vanish under applications of self-heal and purple-flowered comfrey, called knitbone by the simple folk. Before the birth of Christ, so gracious is G.o.d, He was busy revealing these secrets to the pagan Greeks, the king of whose wisdom was named Aristotle. As I bend my back to the weeding of the aisles of my living church of silent adorers, I beg forgiveness for these many deaths by uprooting, for even weeds too humble to have a name no doubt contain properties that, knowingly extracted and combined, would join them to the chorus of cures. G.o.d created nothing to no purpose, though many purposes are yet hidden from us, to be revealed no doubt on the day when the living and the dead alike are summoned in their risen bodies to judgment, and all this finespun intricacy singing about us is revealed as but a filigreed shadow of the glorious true world prepared for His faithful. This day cannot be far off, the abbot says. Indeed, that eight centuries have been allowed to pa.s.s since our Lord gave Himself to torture and despair on the Cross would cause Paul and those other early saints to marvel at the fullness of time allowed obdurate Mankind for its own salvation. Those who study the mind of Heaven agree that the world must surely end before the year 1000, since a year of more digits than the Trinity would be a certain blasphemy.

The pigs have started a sudden squealing in their pen of wattles and alder stakes. Looking toward the west, where our humped island like a sundial casts its shrinking morning shadow into the flickering silver of the endless western sea, a flock of sails in the fatal square shape has silently appeared. Slender, they sit on the bright sea with the symmetry of letters, the same dragonish upturn before the mast as after. Perhaps I have been the last to read them, rapt here among the rustle of the herbs, tending and gathering. Now my ears take in shouting from the direction of the abbot's house and the round tower. I run to the cliffs edge and see fair-bearded men with sun flas.h.i.+ng from their close-fitting helmets wading in squat armor onto the s.h.i.+ngle despite the roughness of the waves. Some have already arrived in our midst. Shouting and pitiful cries rise to disturb the sheep on their high shoulders of meadow. Their bleating and the slow heartbeat of surf on the beach below all but drown the overheard thuds of struggle. Monks in their sackcloth make no more resistance to broadswords and battle-axes than slugs to the gardener's knife. The careless growth at the cliffs edge clings with its cold dew and milkweed spittle as I hasten bare-legged away, casting aside my basket half full of fennel plucked for a meal that will now never be served. My stone hut's beehive shape came into my mind but this sanctum for sleep and for prayer would offer no exit with a roaring demon crouching at the entrance. Beyond the lower walled edge, the cliff breaks away into crevices and shallow trickling caves where a man might outwait a storm. Gulls above circle and dip, curious over the stir but safely aloof. The chapel bell, costly iron that nigh sank the raft that brought it a week's journey around Dingle, begins to ring madly as if to shatter its own Christian voice, jerked into clamor not by the pull of pious hands but by the mocking strength of a Norseman inflamed by mead and b.l.o.o.d.y plunder.

I catch my breath behind the shoulder of the stone milking house. Through the c.h.i.n.ks of its sloping wall, which release to my nostrils like a final scent of earth that of dung-spattered fresh hay, I spy smoke curling from beyond the oak chapel, the dairthech dairthech where so many times I saw the gleaming chalice lifted up amid the intertwining chanting of the brothers. I see that what is afire is the wide reed roof of the where so many times I saw the gleaming chalice lifted up amid the intertwining chanting of the brothers. I see that what is afire is the wide reed roof of the tech mor tech mor, where we were accustomed to eat and talk, not always without natural men's gaiety, and those who could read would read at the tables, the leaves of parchment turning stiff as wind-filled sails. Now from the chapel's entrance streams in gesticulating gobbets a parade of the longhaired fiends in their furs and leather breastplates. One holds aloft our precious chalice, its rim of silver filigree picked out with enamels the bright colors of sheep's blood and noontime sky: the pattern would swirl beneath my eyes in the moment when Christ's blood, sweet and strong as dark queen's honey, was tilted into my lips by the abbot's white hands. My gullet would feel the thick warmth of G.o.d's inmost being.

The Lothlander holding the chalice aloft now lowers it so that his comrades in pagan brutishness can spit into the pristine vessel and, as with a maiden helpless in their midst, perform worse desecrations from the low parts of their bodies. The great altar candlesticks and fine holy cloths and the cedarwood reliquary inlaid with precious metals and containing the bones of the hand of St. Finnian all flow forth on the stream of booty. The illuminated Gospels stored in a locked chest beneath the chapel lectern have been torn apart for the jewels in the covers, and the bright pages are scattered and trampled. It is a devilish sight that makes my innards sicken for more than myself. Brother Guaire! His knots undone! The thatch of the tech mor tech mor shows flags of orange flame, and the smoke from this and other fires dyes the scene like the dipping close of a cloud livid with thunder. In the murky tangle of horrors I see the abbot's small head, pale and benign, being brandished on the end of a bearded fiend's pike. The bodies of my brothers, naked and dismembered, are tumbled into the sacred well whose miraculous fresh waters, drawn from beneath the salt sea, had sustained our settlement here. G.o.d has forsaken us, to test our faith. The animals as they are led away, roped and hauled or driven with staves, bellow as if on the way to slaughter, but it is not the animals being slaughtered. They will live for yet a while. In this universe turned upside down the chickens ascend in a sprawling of feathers as if to join the gulls indifferently soaring above the havoc. shows flags of orange flame, and the smoke from this and other fires dyes the scene like the dipping close of a cloud livid with thunder. In the murky tangle of horrors I see the abbot's small head, pale and benign, being brandished on the end of a bearded fiend's pike. The bodies of my brothers, naked and dismembered, are tumbled into the sacred well whose miraculous fresh waters, drawn from beneath the salt sea, had sustained our settlement here. G.o.d has forsaken us, to test our faith. The animals as they are led away, roped and hauled or driven with staves, bellow as if on the way to slaughter, but it is not the animals being slaughtered. They will live for yet a while. In this universe turned upside down the chickens ascend in a sprawling of feathers as if to join the gulls indifferently soaring above the havoc.

And now a step sounds behind me. My enemy is come. He is young, though tall and s.h.a.ggy in his armor. Fine-meshed iron mail covers a long-sleeved tunic of green wool heavy with salt spray. He seems newly minted in the foundry of battle; perhaps I will be the first man he has slain. I drive my eyes to seek his face. His helmet is a pointed brazen dome that extends to a flared nose guard. Golden hair flows to his red-caped shoulders from underneath his helmet. When he lifts his cinder-black battle-ax high in both arms, the curly fleece of his beard lifts to reveal the clasp of his cape-an iron face incised with round staring eyes, snakelike horns, and fangs: his G.o.d, the enemy and ant.i.thesis of my G.o.d. He utters some words in his musical heathen tongue. I crouch beneath him, lowering myself to make his ax travel a hand's breadth farther to reach me. I hurry my thought through one last prayer to Christ; like my doom now will He tower above my resurrected flesh in judgment, in the blinding light of the life to come. Though I sleep a thousand thousand years, I tell myself, it will be to me as an instant. But there are still things of this life to see. The infidel's dog-white teeth are bared. Terrors swarm out of his deep-socketed eyes like bees bringing home honey from the freckled pits of a tall blue foxglove. I see that the boy is as frightened as I. This instant of time toward which our lives have converged has two sides of terrible brightness. Killer and martyr partic.i.p.ate equally in the sacrifice our Lord commands. Poison and medicine are the same extract. Darkness and light are one.

Summer asks that we co-exist with too many other living creatures. The vegetable efflorescence depletes one's morale. The sky loses color in the humid heat; the sea becomes a parking lot for sailboats. Orange daylilies lord it over the blowsy yards in the village; Queen Anne's lace and Bouncing Bet brighten the meadows; daisies and chicory dot the ragged roadsides. A dead eviscerated frog appeared on our driveway: dropped by a crow, clumsy or sated? The mysteries of overplenteous life. I ventured into the buggy woods and found the full delegation, minus Doreen, in the hut, smoking cigarettes. "It keeps the mosquitoes down," the biggest told me. He was Jose, I reminded myself.

"How's it going, gentlemen?" I asked the three.

"A lot of kids goin' to be tryin' to come through here tomorrow," the lawyer told me. He was Ray. Tomorrow was Independence Day. Haskells Crossing puts on a fireworks display that attracts ma.s.ses from the village and beyond. Bare-chested Vikings, already drunk, lug coolers full of beer. No matter how repulsive and futureless these young males are, they always have girls with them, going along: it says something about our species. No man too bad not to attract a woman. If women were fastidious, the species would go extinct. Thug boyfriends pleasantly remind them of their thug fathers.

"And what are you going to do about it?" I asked.

The question was embarra.s.sing. "Keep 'em in line," Ray finally offered.

"That's all? You should charge the people to get by," I told them.

"You want that?"

"What's the point of being here if you don't? Not so much they can't pay; keep it within reason. Say, three welders a head, five for a couple. Children in arms can get in free," I suggested.

Ray, the little lawyer, asked, "This with your permission?"

"Absolutely," I said. "For a cut, of course."

"A cut? How much cut?"

I hadn't thought it through but proposed, "Twenty percent. One welder out of five. That's not so much. How else are the people going to get to the fireworks?"

"Supposin' they say they won't pay?" Jose asked. In his plump, seamless face his opaque black irises had a b.u.t.toned-on look, an extra protuberance that may have been an illusion produced by their brightness, their luxurious lacquer.

I laughed. A laugh sounds sinister in the woods, dampered by the greenery. "You're asking me that? A big tough guy like you? Maybe I should find some new protection."

"You're sayin' kill 'em if they don't pay?"

"That seems extreme. And probably counterproductive. What you want is a happy line of paying customers. But, listen, this is your party. I didn't ask you to camp here, on my land. Let them pa.s.s if you want. You have bigger fish to fry, remember? How are you doing with my neighbors?"

Each waited for the other to speak.

"Not so good, huh?" I said at last.

"They comin' around," the lawyer lied.

Manolete gestured suddenly. "They be sorry when we burn their houses down. Pfoom!" Pfoom!"

"We have a saying in business," I told them. "Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs."

Manolete, perhaps the brightest as well as the youngest, said in his abrupt, small-boy, explosive way, "Only eggs they layin' is tellin' us to get the h.e.l.l off they f.u.c.kin' property."

"Mr. and Mrs. Kelly," Ray interposed, "were reasonable. We show them your letter. They say O.K., they'd contribute something, but only a part of what you paid, since they only have three acres to your eleven."

He was learning the language, I thought. "Tell them," I said, "that that may be so but there are six of them and only two Turnbulls. Maybe mention casually that you would hate to see any of their children kidnapped; ransom costs a lot more than protection."

They took this in, the three brown faces in the sun-slit gloom of their fragile little shelter. Jose volunteered, "Those Dunhams, they didn't come up with nothin'. They treated us like dirt. He has his own own guns, the c.o.c.ksucker said." guns, the c.o.c.ksucker said."

The Dunhams were a perfect couple, unless one considered childlessness a flaw. Their impeccable mock-colonial house, visible in winter, lay hidden in the leafy woods not two hundred yards from Gloria's back garden. Athletic into their fifties, they matched like salt and pepper shakers. Both lithe, both forever smiling though faintly formal even in jogging outfits, their skins glowing with the same shade of suntan, their hair tinged with exactly the same becoming amount of gray, they came from old New England families with about the same amount of money and cachet. The world's woes, and the woes that parenthood brings, had pa.s.sed them by; there was a polished, impervious beauty about them that one itched to mar. Their only point of vulnerability was their animals. They had two prize Persian cats, a perfectly trimmed miniature poodle, and a piebald pony who grazed in summer in a little meadow carved from their section of the woods.

"You might think about killing one of their cats," I told the boys. "They let them out in the morning for exercise and to do their business in the shrubs. Just kill one, leave the body on the porch, and show up for collection the next day. You don't have to admit to anything, just don't deny it either. If they don't pay up then, do the dog, that d.a.m.ned yappy poodle. The horse-before you kill him, get some spray paint and paint his side. If he holds still for it, paint in numbers your monthly charge. Like an invoice on legs."

In our box of artificial twilight, with its smells of tobacco smoke and sweaty mattress and pine needles masked by plywood, the boys broke into laughter at my wealth of malice.

"Any ideas how we should handle Mrs. Lubbetts?" Ray asked.

I was enjoying this. I loved these willing boys, so superior, in their readiness and accessibility, to my own grandsons.

Pearl Lubbetts was a Jewish widow-Earl Lubbetts had made his pile in potato chips and packaged popcorn-who had taken on over the years the imperious, lockjawed, rough-and-ready manner of a Wasp matriarch. She was usually dressed in Wellingtons and muddy-kneed dungarees, directing teams of local workers on one or another project of excavation, forestry, resodding, or masonry. She had built a private sea-wall to protect her front lawn from the tides, and at a far corner of her property had constructed a modernist beach house which was, as it happened, the only structure in my seaward view, summer and winter. She had cleared the surrounding trees, so nothing impeded my sight line; with its bleached redwood siding and flat white Florida-style roof and its sundeck bal.u.s.trade like a bone comb, it was an unignorable blot on my view. Metal and gla.s.s elements on the roof and walls-flas.h.i.+ng, skylights, twirling vents, and complicated tin chimney guards- beamed irritating glints into my visual field, unanswerable emergency signals from the edge of the sea; no matter what the hour between sunrise and sunset, some reflective angle boldly bounced photons right through my windows into my retinas.

"You could burn down her little beach house," I suggested. "That should give her the idea that you are serious individuals. When you go to collect," it occurred to me to add, "you might want to wear suits, or at least a jacket and tie. It makes a world of difference, credibilitywise."

The boys consulted with one another in silent glances. Triangles of white flickered beside their s.h.i.+fting irises.

"Hey, how come you tellin' us all this stuff?" Ray asked me.

"I like you young fellas. I want you to succeed."

"What's in it for you?"

I let a beat of silence go by. "How about twenty percent?" I said.

"Ten plenty," Jose said.

Ray's eyes flicked sideways in surprise at being supplanted as negotiator.

"Ten on the protection, twenty on the admission fees tomorrow," I offered.

Ray took back the role of spokesman. "How you know we not be cheatin' you?" he asked.

"The sad way things are in the world now, we all have to work through trust. I trust you, it's that simple," I told them.

Jose, the biggest, was the one to rise, extend his broad but soft hand, and say, "It's a deal."

iv.The Deaths