Now And Forever Part 3

Cardiff rattled the front doors. Locked tight.

"It's only May," Cardiff said to himself. "School's not out yet."

Claude whinnied irritably, and perhaps out of pique, began a slow glide away from the school.

"Claude!" Cardiff put iron in it. "Stay!"

Claude stayed, drumming the bricks with both forefeet.

Cardiff turned back to the building. Carved in the lintel, above the main door were the words: SUMMERTON GRAMMAR SCHOOL, DEDICATED JANUARY 1st, 1888.

"Eighteen eighty-eight," Cardiff muttered. "Well, now."

He gave one last look at the dust-caked windows and the rusted swing chains and said, "One last go-round, Claude."

Claude did not move.

"We're all out of bread and names, is that it? You only take bakery orders, nothing else?"

Even Claude's shadow did not move.

"Well, we'll just stand here until you do me a favor. Your new star boarder wants to cross-section the whole blasted town. What's it to be? No water, no oats, without a full trot."

Water and oats did it.

Full trot.

They sailed down Clover Avenue and up Hibiscus Way and over on to Rosewood Place and right on Juneglade and left again on Sandalwood then Ravine, which ran off the edge of a shallow ravine cut by ancient rains. He stared at lawn after lawn after lawn, all of them lush, green, perfect. No baseball bats. No baseb.a.l.l.s. No basketball hoops. No basketb.a.l.l.s. No tennis rackets. No croquet mallets. No hopscotch chalk marks on sidewalks. No tire swings on trees.

Claude trotted him back to the Egyptian View Arms, where Elias Culpepper was waiting.

Cardiff climbed down from the bread wagon.

"Well?"

Cardiff looked back at the summer drift of green lawns and green hedges and golden sunflowers and said, "Where are the children?"

CHAPTER 11.

Mr. Culpepper did not immediately respond.

For dead ahead there was afternoon high tea, with apricot and peach tarts and strawberry delight and coffee instead of tea and then port instead of coffee and then there was dinner, a real humdinger, that lasted until well after nine and then the inhabitants of the Egyptian View Arms headed up, one by one, to their most welcome cool summer night beds, and Cardiff sat out on the croquetless and hoopless lawn, watching Mr. Culpepper on the porch, smoking several small bonfire pipes, waiting.

At last Cardiff, in full brooding pace, arrived at the bottom of the porch rail and waited.

"You were asking about no children?" said Elias Culpepper.

Cardiff nodded.

"A good reporter wouldn't allow so much time to pa.s.s after asking such an important question."

"More time is pa.s.sing right now," said Cardiff, gently, climbing the porch steps.

"So it is. Here."

A bottle of wine and two small snifters sat on the railing.

Cardiff drained his at a jolt, and went to sit next to Elias Culpepper.

Culpepper puffed smoke. "We have," he said, seeming to consider his words with care, "sent all the children away to school."

Cardiff stared. "The whole town? Every child?"

"That's the sum. It's a hundred miles to Phoenix in one direction. Two hundred to Tucson. Nothing but sand and petrified forest in between. The children need schools with proper trees. We got proper trees here, yes, but we can't hire teachers to teach here. We did, at one time, but they got too lonesome. They wouldn't come, so our children had to go."

"If I came back in late June would I meet the kids coming home for the summer?"

Culpepper held still, much like Claude.

"I said-"

"I heard." Culpepper knocked the sparking ash from his pipe. "If I said yes, would you believe me?"

Cardiff shook his head.

"You implying I'm a mile off from the truth?"

"I'm only implying," Cardiff said, "that we are at a taffy pull. I'm waiting to see how far you pull it."

Culpepper smiled.

"The children aren't coming home. They have chosen summer school in Amherst, Providence, and Sag Harbor. One is even in Mystic Seaport. Ain't that a fine sound? Mystic. I sat there once in a thunderstorm reading every other chapter of Moby-d.i.c.k."

"The children are not coming home," said Cardiff. "Can I guess why?"

The older man nodded, pipe in mouth, unlit.

Cardiff took out his notepad and stared at it.

"The children of this town," he said at last, "won't come home. Not one. None. Never."

He closed the notepad and continued: "The reason why the children are never coming home is," he swallowed hard, "there are no children. Something happened a long time ago, G.o.d knows what, but it happened. And this town is a town of no family homecomings. The last child left long ago, or the last child finally grew up. And you're one of them."

"Is that a question?"

"No," said Cardiff. "An answer."

Culpepper leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. "You," he said, the smoke long gone from his pipe, "are an A-1 Four Star Headline News Reporter."

CHAPTER 12.

"I...," said Cardiff.

"Enough," Culpepper interrupted. "For tonight."

He held out another gla.s.s of bright amber wine. Cardiff drank. When he looked up, the front screen door of the Egyptian View Arms tapped shut. Someone went upstairs. His ambiance stayed.

Cardiff refilled his gla.s.s.

"Never coming home. Never ever," he whispered.

And went up to bed.

Sleep well, someone said somewhere in the house. But he could not sleep. He lay, fully dressed, doing philosophical sums on the ceiling, erasing, adding, erasing again until he sat up abruptly and looked out across the meadow town of thousands of flowers in the midst of which houses rose and sank only to rise again, s.h.i.+ps on a summer sea.

I will arise and go now, thought Cardiff, but not to a bee-loud glade. Rather, to a place of earthen silence and the sounds of death's-head moths on powdery wings.

He slipped down the front hall stairs barefoot and once outside, let the screen door tap shut silently and, sitting on the lawn, put on his shoes as the moon rose.

Good, he thought, I won't need a flashlight.

In the middle of the street he looked back. Was there someone at the screen door, a shadow, watching? He walked and then began to jog.

Imagine that you are Claude, he thought, his breath coming in quick pants. Turn here, now there, now another right and- The graveyard.

All that cold marble crushed his heart and stopped his breathing. There was no iron fence around the burial park.

He entered silently and bent to touch the first gravestone. His fingers brushed the name: BIANCA SHERMAN BATES And the date: BORN, JULY 3, 1882 And below that: R.I.P.

But no date of death.

The clouds covered the moon. He moved on to the next stone.

WILLIAM HENRY CLAY.

1885a R.I.P.

And again, no mortal date.

He brushed a third gravestone and found: HENRIETTA PARKS.

August 13, 1881 Gone to G.o.d But, Cardiff knew, she had not as yet gone to G.o.d.

The moon darkened and then took strength from itself. It shone upon a small Grecian tomb not fifty feet away, a lodge of exquisite architecture, a miniature Acropolis upheld by four vestal virgins, or G.o.ddesses, beautiful maidens, wondrous women. His heart pulsed. All four marble women seemed suddenly alive, as if the pale light had awakened them, and they might step forth, unclad, into the tableau of named and dateless stones.

He sucked in his breath. His heart pulsed again.

For as he watched, one of the G.o.ddesses, one of the forever-beautiful maidens, trembled with the night chill and s.h.i.+fted out into the moonlight.

He could not tell if he was terrified or delighted. After all, it was late at night in this yard of the dead. But she? She was naked to the weather, or almost; a mist of silk covered her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and plumed around her waist as she drifted away from the other pale statues.

She moved among the stones, silent as the marble she had been but now was not, until she stood before him with her dark hair tousled about her small ears and her great eyes the color of lilacs. She raised her hand tenderly and smiled.

"You," he whispered. "What are you doing here?"

She replied quietly, "Where else should I be?"

She held out her hand and led him in silence out of the graveyard.

Looking back he saw the abandoned puzzle of names and enigma of dates.

Everyone born, he thought, but none has died. The stones are blank, waiting for someone to date their ghosts bound for Eternity.

"Yes?" someone said. But her lips had not moved.

And you followed me, he thought, to stop me from reading the gravestones and asking questions. And what about the absent children, never coming home?

And as if they glided on ice, on a vast sea of moonlight, they arrived where a crowd of sunflowers hardly stirred as they pa.s.sed and their feet were soundless, moving up the path to the porch and across the porch, and up the stairs, one, two, three floors until they reached a tower room where the door stood wide to reveal a bed as bright as a glacier, its covers thrown back, all snow on a hot summer night.

Yes, she said.

He sleepwalked the rest of the way. Behind him, he saw his clothes, like the discards of a careless child, strewn on the parquetry. He stood by the s...o...b..nk bed and thought, One last question. The graveyard. Are there bodies beneath the stones? Is anyone there?

But it was too late. Even as he opened his mouth to question, he tumbled into the snow.

And he was drowning in whiteness, crying out as he inhaled the light and then out of the rus.h.i.+ng storm, a warmness came; he was touched and held, but could not see what or who held him, and he relaxed, drowned.

When next he woke, he was not swimming but floating. Somehow he had leaped from a cliff, and someone with him, unseen, as he soared up until lightning struck, tore at him in half terror, half joy, to fall and strike the bed with his entire body and his soul.

When he awoke again, the storm over, and the flying gone, he found a small hand in his, and without opening his eyes he knew that she lay beside him, her breath keeping time with his. It was not yet dawn.

She spoke.

"Was there something you wanted to ask?"

"Tomorrow," he whispered. "I'll ask you then."