George Mills Part 10

" 'Don't say son of a b.i.t.c.h,' his father said without turning.

"The astonished farmer barely had time to step aside. Oliver was already into his downstroke when he stumbled, the momentum of his tremendous blow pulling him forward and causing his head to fall upon the center of the anvil just as his calm, phlegmatic father, that masterful pipe smoker of a man who did not join their gossip but only counseled and advised, was delivering the last packed smash that would put the arch of the horseshoe exactly right.

"They hadn't even been talking about him. It was a joke about a necrophile. Farmers always lowered their voices when they told smoking car stories, even when women weren't around. His father supposed it was the way decent men cheated on their wives.

"The burly farmer, who had stepped aside instinctively, tried to apologize, his eyes still wet with laughter from the good story he'd told, but Joe already understood.

" 'He wasn't quite twenty-one yet,' he said. 'Ayuh. Kids go off half-c.o.c.ked sometimes.'

"Over the last casket he would ever have to build, the blacksmith said the psalms one last time. He didn't change the eulogy because it was a father's duty to treat his children equally, but he added a final statement for the cronies and customers who had turned out to hear him.

" 'Being a pa's a terrible burden,' he said. 'Now maybe I can get some peace. I've learned from all this. Maybe I ain't so good a blacksmith as I thought I was. I couldn't do the delicate work good as my boy, though no one's better with livestock than I am, I think. A man should stick to what he does best. If it's small motor control, as it was with my Oliver, then he should stick a jeweler's loupe in his eye, keep it there, and leave the heavy lifting to others. My son would be alive today if he hadn't gone for the fences with that last big bulldozer cavalry charge.

" 'I'll continue to honor your custom and do the best I can with your horses and tack, though after what's happened I think I'd prefer to work by myself for a bit.'

"It was better than an ad. Indeed, it was was an ad, almost a decree, nothing barker or ballyhoo about it or undifferentiated as the handbill stuck under your winds.h.i.+eld wiper or circular shoved through the letter slot with your mail, but touching, sort of, and tremendously official and solemn and even final, like banns or the little notice of bankruptcy in the public press that the bankrupt has to pay for himself, something understated, even unspoken, but there anyway, like those sad little admissions of guilt and responsibility in the cla.s.sifieds when there's a divorce and the husband publicly disavows liability for his wife's debts. You know the lawyer made him put it there, that it wouldn't have occurred to him otherwise. an ad, almost a decree, nothing barker or ballyhoo about it or undifferentiated as the handbill stuck under your winds.h.i.+eld wiper or circular shoved through the letter slot with your mail, but touching, sort of, and tremendously official and solemn and even final, like banns or the little notice of bankruptcy in the public press that the bankrupt has to pay for himself, something understated, even unspoken, but there anyway, like those sad little admissions of guilt and responsibility in the cla.s.sifieds when there's a divorce and the husband publicly disavows liability for his wife's debts. You know the lawyer made him put it there, that it wouldn't have occurred to him otherwise.

"So Joe's announcement that he was best with livestock was no boast, the reverse rather, a kind of confession that he was good with little else, the Swiss movements of agricultural machinery or children either.

"Whatever, it had its effect, even if it was an effect my uncle could not have antic.i.p.ated.

"Have you ever seen a barn raising or any of those episodes of country charity where the feelings of the partic.i.p.ants are not those of obligation or even duty so much as the sheer amplitude of the heart, its cheerful, generous, almost maritime displacements buoying cause and mission like stalled s.h.i.+pping? Or have you ever been to a surprise party, Dr. Kinsley? Or anniversary, or testimonial dinner? Have you risen to your feet with the others in the hall to give someone who doesn't expect it a standing ovation? Then you will recognize the inclusive, almost religious good will of such moments. There's something in it for you, too, though it may not be what you think. It isn't the sense of a paid-up debt or the satisfaction that is said to come from good behavior. It isn't anything peripheral or serendipitous or spin-off or sidebar or fallout at all. That barn you helped raise is forever after your barn too, just as the surprise is your surprise-'Were you really surprised? Did you suspect anything? What did you think when you saw all those cars in the driveway? We'd have parked on the street but all the spots were taken'-and the ovation not just a declaration of your grat.i.tude and love but an affirmation of your taste.

"What Uncle Joe said was repeated all over the state, given motion and impetus by word-of-mouth, some relayed, pa.s.sed baton or aloft torch quality of marathon unimpedance. And not just Vermont but New Hamps.h.i.+re too, parts of Ma.s.sachusetts and Maine and New York State and corners of Connecticut.

"It was how I heard-I don't recall who told me, some friend of a friend who'd been traveling in New England that summer-all that far away in Michigan. It wasn't astral projection. Joe hadn't written. His last letter had been when Elizabeth died. She was my mother's sister, my aunt. I suppose he believed that as a nephew I had a stake in that loss. But he never wrote about Susan or his sons. Perhaps he felt cousins aren't relatives at all, only friends. Or maybe there's just something too sour in the death of children. Tragedy, but tragedy spoiled, gone off like meat. It wasn't anything one would want to write letters about.

"Anyway, the response of the farmers and sportsmen was incredible. It was as if no one in Vermont could mend tack or shoe a horse except my uncle. They brought him their hobbled animals as if they were making a pilgrimage, some long, lame march to a Green Mountain Lourdes. They went out of their way to come to him and, since my uncle had expressed the wish to work alone and no longer be for them that cracker-barrel or wood or potbelly stove or general store philosopher that had gotten him into trouble in the first place, they simply turned their beasts over to him, disengaging the animals from the wagons they pulled as if they not only had come to a sort of hospital but were brought there in a sort of ambulance which they, the lame horses, had had to pull themselves, and then went off to drink or actually register for the night at the local inn. So it cost them money and time too, though possibly they didn't see it that way, still riding the wave of that conjoined magnanimity and effluent partic.i.p.atory chivalry which is not only the inspiration for surprise parties but the only reason you can get people to come to them in the first place.

"They had to knock now. Then my uncle would come out to them, take their animals and damaged tack, give them a receipt (which they did not always want later to surrender, the slip of paper being the stub, the souvenir of their attendance), and lead their property back into the blacksmith shop.

"I wrote Joe when I heard what had happened and, when he didn't answer, I wrote again. I wrote a third time, a stolid, solemn letter of patient unput-out condolence. I asked if he wanted to come to Michigan for a while. He didn't answer.

"I would have gone to him in Vermont. In my last letter I had suggested as much, proposing it as an alternative should he not wish to make the trip to Michigan. So you see, Dr. Kinsley, there was no astral trigger finger, no metempsychotic quick-draw pyrotechnics. I have, as I've said, been an adept for more than five years. But I gave up joy-riding long ago. The occult airs are too chill, its weathers too tempestuous. I was forced, you see. I loved my uncle, my dead cousins. To have lost almost all of them at once, as I had casually learned I had, was simply too much. Uncle Joe wouldn't answer his mail. Perhaps he was holed up in his grief. Perhaps he needed me. Perhaps I needed him.

"I tried to enter his dreams. He had no dreams. He slept like someone napping. I don't mean fitfully; I don't mean lightly; maybe I don't even mean uncomfortably, but with just that hibernant, abeyant doze one sees on the faces of sleepers in railway carriages or in the awry angled heads of pa.s.sed-out drunks. My uncle could have been an uncle in parlors after family feasts, or paralyzed, all his features-eyes, mouth, nose, forehead, cheeks, chin-in some leaden, unresisting mandragoran acedia, even his bones in coma, not piled so much as stashed unarchitecturally as firewood. Quite simply there was no one home, and his face had about it some lifeless, awful quality of nonuse, like clothes, say, in the closets of the dead.

"I entered his head through his nostrils, thinking my rubbery pa.s.sage there might act like some chemical reagent, but I know dreamless sleep when I see it. He was as nerveless there as toenail, his body lulled as hair.

"I became bolder, even naughty. I entered his head through his a.n.u.s, his ears, the littorals of his s.e.x--all the watched pa.s.ses and zebra-gated, checkpoint vulnerables of his ticklish borders. I would have done as well to have entered his head through his hat.

"Once inside I moved about as freely as a man in his own rooms, but with as little sense of voyage, journey. I probed his brain like a caver, but the cave was featureless, dead, the bland limestones and indigenous geologies ordinary as cellar. There was neither grief nor joy, his unconscious recessive as his hunger.

"I slipped outside again with the intention of reconnoitering his room, more cop than nephew, more scientist than mourner. I looked for--what? A Bible perhaps, open at some telling pa.s.sage of consolation or bleak denunciation, or perhaps at one of those two psalms in my uncle's repertoire that might indicate the words meant more to him than just a formula for the disposition of bodies.

"There was no Bible.

"I looked for framed photographs of my cousins, posed, frozen, idealized Sunday bested, their young lives solemnized and potentiated by their severe clothes and managed expressions, neither openly smiling nor hardened in some scam seriousness but posed nevertheless, genuinely posed, posed, to give off their own real considered sense of who they were, all they intended to be. Or loose snapshots, deceptive candids, my cousins tricked out in life as they worked by the forge or were snapped in repose, horseplay, seated at table or dancing the jig. to give off their own real considered sense of who they were, all they intended to be. Or loose snapshots, deceptive candids, my cousins tricked out in life as they worked by the forge or were snapped in repose, horseplay, seated at table or dancing the jig.

"There were no framed photographs, there were no loose candids.

"I looked for memento. Not locks of hair or the stuffed toys of their childhood-I knew there wouldn't be any-but their heights sketched with a pencil mark on the doorways and walls, or a window hairline cracked by one of them in roughhouse. For diary, journal, a note pa.s.sed at school. For their lucky coins and stamp collections. For anything beside the way which had once engaged them and which now, in death, might be allowed to stand for the obscure talismanics of their father's engagement.

"There was nothing.

"Ah, thought the astral detective, then doesn't the persistent absence of such stuff suggest their willful repudiation? Wouldn't Joe have gone the other way altogether, sweep away, get rid of, jettison forever all trace, spoor, vestige and relic of his all-gone family, doing the conscientious spring cleaning of death?

"No evidence warranted the a.s.sumption. In their rooms, their furniture and lives, if not just as they had left them, seemed to have been put in a more logical order, arranged, even enhanced. I had last visited three years earlier. Aunt Elizabeth was still alive. I remember Susan had remarked that she had no place to store her things. There was a chiffonier in Redford's room. Redford himself volunteered to let Susan have the piece. Elizabeth seconded, adding that she had always thought the bureau too feminine for her eldest son anyway. Joe, however, had objected to its removal, pointing out that the blond finish matched the color of the bed he had built. Susan's furniture was dark. He said that when he had time he would build her a chest of drawers of her own, one that would go with what she already had. She didn't want to wait, she said, and, since Redford didn't mind giving up the chiffonier, her father soon agreed. It was a heavy piece to move and I recall being drafted to help in the rearrangement of the furniture.

"Now the big chest of drawers was back in Redford's room again, no new piece having replaced it in Susan's.

"Such arrangements seemed universal throughout. Spreads and curtains which had been distributed with no thought to decor now complemented the beds they lay across, were a.s.similate with the windows from which they hung. This was not the grieved archeologist's loving reconstruction nor even the sensitive curator's historical placements. This--this was show business!

"But nothing in the house gave any clue to my uncle's state of mind. Nothing about his look in sleep did. (I was with him until just before dawn. He didn't even turn over.) Even his body-which lay on top of the sheets-seemed neutral, gently in idle like a good car at a stoplight. He could have been his own easy effigy lying on his bed like a dead pope on a sarcophagus.

"And what was was his sleeping body like? What secret language did it speak? None. It was mute. (He didn't snore, his breath was regular, even, neither shallow nor deep.) He looked like a man floating in heavily salted water. And, undressed-he was a blacksmith, a man who may even have conducted heat-naked, oddly unfit, powerful of course but with the power off plumb, like a klansman's or bear's or vaudeville deputy's. His body saddened me-even his beard did, its poor dumb brush cut, the misguided bristles of rect.i.tude and economy like primary growth on some elemental sea thing-but told me nothing. his sleeping body like? What secret language did it speak? None. It was mute. (He didn't snore, his breath was regular, even, neither shallow nor deep.) He looked like a man floating in heavily salted water. And, undressed-he was a blacksmith, a man who may even have conducted heat-naked, oddly unfit, powerful of course but with the power off plumb, like a klansman's or bear's or vaudeville deputy's. His body saddened me-even his beard did, its poor dumb brush cut, the misguided bristles of rect.i.tude and economy like primary growth on some elemental sea thing-but told me nothing.

"In a week I returned. Nothing had changed. If he hadn't been wearing pajamas I wouldn't have known he'd ever awakened. He was dreamless as ever. I made three more visitations. He was always dreamless, his sleep undramatic as a doll's.

"Because it was love which brought me back, some recidivist exercise of honor and homage to an uncle blacksmith whose two women and three boys had once represented a kind of full house, anyway luck, anyway moral force, the view from the rocker, the view from the hearth, some sung song of engagement and dignity and pride, my opinion of the man not unlike my cousins', not unlike those country peers and cronies whose spit sizzled like some tempering principle on all his blacksmith's machinery of heat. Because only love could have made me do it, my appet.i.te for the parlor tricks of magic and sorcery having long since been brought down, leveled and flattened, of no more interest to me, now that I could do them, than the charms of money, say, to a tired sheik. (Because I don't know how G.o.d does it, don't understand what's in it for Him, why his limitless power and the limitless demands on it don't bore Him to death.) And if you're not G.o.d it drains you, really takes it out of you, runs down your health, grinds your teeth, there really being such a thing as beginner's luck, those lively gushers of commencement like the hefty, undepleted reserves of sperm in a fifteen-year-old boy. I had no such energy, and each trip, each paranormal, theurgic transport told heavily on my-well, what have you?-blood, bone, skin, bowel, urine and saliva. I would return each time after my nocturnal sojourns to a body whose blood seemed to have thickened and cooled. I cut my hand, bled. Fat bubbled in globules there like oil slicks in soup. My bones burned. My skin rashed. My bowels loosened. My urine hardened, painfully sc.r.a.ped the walls of my urethra. My saliva congealed. I had to pick it from between my teeth with floss. What if I caught a draft? Exposed, sloped as a flier gone down on a glacier, my lungs would have s.h.i.+pped the pneumonic poisons like locks filling. (I shut the windows before I went to sleep, pulled the shades-this was high summer-closed the doors, arranged myself between quilts and comforters.) What if I became overheated? I would have expired of all the miasmas and malarials of Michigan concentrated in the bedroom. (And without even delirium to comfort me, my mind fled with my spirit.) "And it has never been easy for me. Maybe I haven't the stomach for it. Even in the beginning, when I was younger, stronger, it wasn't easy, all that steep, uphill, roller coaster and ferris wheel verticality, all that roil and flux and vertigo, spiral roll, reel, twirl and turn giving me the staggers, shakes, totters and spastics, giving me the flutters, flops, snaps and palpitations.

"Also, frankly, it bored me. I mean the astral projection itself, if one can even think of boredom in connection with an enterprise filled with such dread and such terror, immaculate as the edge of a knife. I am afraid I am afraid of the dark.

"The trip from Michigan to Vermont is almost a thousand miles and is accomplished in time. No dimension is finessed, and even if my body is incorporeal, the Great Lakes are wet and deep, the cold night air piled with isobar, pressure, front, moisture and electrical charge. There are birds that could snap up my soul in one peck. There is gravity and the hard, wide black landscape beneath it like a net. There are rough trees and treacherous limbs and sharp-edged leaves like a dangerous vegetable cutlery. There are small animals in the gra.s.ses with their honed, predatory temperaments. There are vicious puddles of oil on the highways, noxious, cloying as quicksand. There are tile and slate roofs like strips of sulfur below my astral friction. There is the air mail. There is everywhere beneath me and all along the route of my medium impediment like land-mined s.p.a.ce or badly laid track. There are the poisoned, awful molecules of the supernatural, and the blinded atoms of the dark.

"And once, streaming through s.p.a.ce, I felt the presence of some ignus fatuus ignus fatuus and could just make it out, a phosph.o.r.escent, not point, and could just make it out, a phosph.o.r.escent, not point, grease grease of light that maneuvered with me, kept pace with me, swerving to the left when I did, soaring when I soared, swooping when I swooped. I thought it might be a bird but no bird could fly at such speeds. I tried to evade it, losing my course but not my companion. I did barrel rolls, loop-the-loops, plunges, spins, stalls, slips and slides, all the dives and glides of Chagall acrobacy, but it kept up with me, I couldn't shake it. Terrified, I climbed-I could have made it over the Rockies then-higher than I had ever climbed and, at the apogee of my endurance, suddenly leveled off, thinking to outrun it. I could still hear it, its pierce through s.p.a.ce, but behind me now and not so loud as before. of light that maneuvered with me, kept pace with me, swerving to the left when I did, soaring when I soared, swooping when I swooped. I thought it might be a bird but no bird could fly at such speeds. I tried to evade it, losing my course but not my companion. I did barrel rolls, loop-the-loops, plunges, spins, stalls, slips and slides, all the dives and glides of Chagall acrobacy, but it kept up with me, I couldn't shake it. Terrified, I climbed-I could have made it over the Rockies then-higher than I had ever climbed and, at the apogee of my endurance, suddenly leveled off, thinking to outrun it. I could still hear it, its pierce through s.p.a.ce, but behind me now and not so loud as before.

"At the last it called out. 'Please. Please,' it called, 'I'm lost. Please. Let me come with you! Please,' it cried. 'Something's wrong. I can't get back. Won't you help me? Please,' it wailed, 'please!'

"It was another astral projectionist. If it hadn't been exhausted, if it hadn't been on its return trip, it would have caught me. It would have followed me back. It would have burrowed into the vacant body on my bed like a worm hiding in fruit.

"So of course course it was love which took me there, not curiosity. If I needed to know what my uncle was feeling it was so I could console him. But he would not dream, he was dreamless. I would have to make the trip in daylight. it was love which took me there, not curiosity. If I needed to know what my uncle was feeling it was so I could console him. But he would not dream, he was dreamless. I would have to make the trip in daylight.

"Forget that I would have to face in light the thousand terrors I had merely glossed in dark, that each stone would now not only be palpable but visible, and all rough terrain writ large, the confused blur of geography, the rooftops, kids, dogs and all sharp spikes of the world present to me as temperature. Or maybe it was that height, height itself (and distance too) would become a landmark, a physical, ponderable corporeity solid as the calculable per second per second acceleration of falling bodies. Forget all all my misgivings. There was still left the physics of the thing, the fixed givens of technique like the const.i.tutional stipulations governing a presidency. The spirit may separate itself from the material plane only when the physical body is sleeping. There is that same guard-prisoner relations.h.i.+p one runs across in melodrama--jealousy, suspicion and the followed heart. my misgivings. There was still left the physics of the thing, the fixed givens of technique like the const.i.tutional stipulations governing a presidency. The spirit may separate itself from the material plane only when the physical body is sleeping. There is that same guard-prisoner relations.h.i.+p one runs across in melodrama--jealousy, suspicion and the followed heart.

"I am not one of those fortunates who can nod off anywhere. I haven't the gift of napping. Sleep is a ceremony with me. There must be weariness, yes, but also beds, night, pajamas and turned-down blankets. The clocks must be wound, the house locked and the cat put out. There must be bedtime. Even when I'm ill, I've noticed, I find it hard to doze in the daytime. Healthy, the task is almost impossible.

"But I made the effort. I undressed as I would at night, carefully folding my s.h.i.+rt, still fresh-I'd put it on that morning-and hanging my suit neatly in the closet. I lined up my shoes, the toes just sticking out from beneath the bed but hiding the part where the laces begin. I put my bathrobe on over my pajamas and brought my socks, handkerchief and underwear to the laundry hamper. I emptied my bladder and brushed my teeth. I got into bed. I sighed and yawned, attempting to trick myself with the noises of ease. I was quite wakeful of course. I knew I would be. I decided to read for a bit, selecting for my reading matter not only the dullest book I could find but one I had already read. I turned on the reading lamp beside the bed, though there was light enough to read even with the shades drawn and the curtains pulled tight across the window. Wakeful as ever, it seemed to me that I was becoming hungry. I nibbled fruit, drank warm milk, grazed cold chicken. At three that afternoon I dressed, went to my office and put in three hours' work before starting home. I repeated my efforts the next day and the next after that, and though I slept soundly at night, my insomnia disappearing at my normal hour for retiring, I was unable to sleep at all during the day.

"On the fourth day it occurred to me to try to lull myself with the habits of my childhood. I had no toys now of course, but I brought the cat into the room and encouraged it to stay beside me on the bed, a privilege it is at all other times refused. The cat was terrified and I let it go. I said my prayers. I prayed for sleep. I counted sheep. What didn't didn't I do? I even obtained a rather powerful sleeping draught from a pharmacist friend and took it late one morning with a cup of warm honey. The potion worked and I was soon asleep, but I had not realized that inside my drugged physical body my astral one would be narcotized too. We are a curious mix of curious psychology, Doctor, a patchwork of whim and fixed idea. I don't know if you will understand this, or if the boy you show this letter to will, but I was more bitter about the seven wasted hours of drug-induced sleep than I was about all thirty of the wakeful, working, tossing and turning ones I had put in trying to lose consciousness. I do? I even obtained a rather powerful sleeping draught from a pharmacist friend and took it late one morning with a cup of warm honey. The potion worked and I was soon asleep, but I had not realized that inside my drugged physical body my astral one would be narcotized too. We are a curious mix of curious psychology, Doctor, a patchwork of whim and fixed idea. I don't know if you will understand this, or if the boy you show this letter to will, but I was more bitter about the seven wasted hours of drug-induced sleep than I was about all thirty of the wakeful, working, tossing and turning ones I had put in trying to lose consciousness.

"The solution to the problem when it came in the middle of the second week-the seventh week after I had first learned of my uncle's difficulties-was absurdly simple. Or perhaps not simple, merely correct, merely honorable. It was never just family feeling that had drawn me on those night flights to Vermont. It was never, though it should have been, that avalanche loss of prized cousins, that c.u.mulative, rolled-snow cataract of exacerbate, b.u.mped-up death. It wasn't even my sense of my uncle's awful losses, the terrible casualties he was taking that year. It was my uncle himself, his being, legend, whatever it was in the man that had captured first the imaginations of Susan and Oliver, Redford and Ben, and then their souls, whatever it was that had made them do actual physical violence to each other, even delayed murder, just for the right not to live with him since they already had that right but to stay in the same room with him while he worked, even, for appearances, decorum, taking on that work themselves, the watchmaker, the woodsman, the young man with tenure in love, the young woman who lifted anvils not just to see if a girl who weighed perhaps one hundred thirty pounds could raise and hold off the ground an object two and a half times her own weight but just to be ready to do so if the time ever came when she might be required to. It was Joe, it was my uncle, whatever he had been-was, is-that had caused his children to repudiate whatever potential they may have had for individual distinction-none even wished wished to attend the state university at Burlington-and collectively subsume all future, even after the pattern was established and they saw it was certain to be a doomed one, under his. Not apprenticed to the blacksmith, apostled. to attend the state university at Burlington-and collectively subsume all future, even after the pattern was established and they saw it was certain to be a doomed one, under his. Not apprenticed to the blacksmith, apostled.

"So it was simply a matter of putting things into perspective. If my cousins could lay down their lives for my uncle, surely I could lay down and sleep for a few hours.

"I rose on a Thursday morning in the second week of my efforts to sleep during the day. I showered, dressed, made my bed, breakfasted and returned to my bedroom, where I undressed, got into the pajamas I had taken off less than an hour earlier, removed the spread from the bed I had just made, got into bed and was asleep almost as soon as my head touched the pillow.

"Separation came quickly, my astral integument peeling off from my body like rind. The trip to Vermont was uneventful.

"I am, perhaps, too sentimental, but it was a place I'd summered when I was a child, where I'd spent all those sharp, bright weeks of un-Michigan youth, where I was a visitor, privileged, glamorous even to myself, cargo'd by all that distant geography of the Midwest, the kid who'd seen Chicago, who'd lived for a time in Detroit, where the automobiles came from, where dozens of factories employed thousands of men simply to tighten a bolt, or just to patrol, take down the names of men talking, where there were machines, a.s.sembly lines longer than the main street of my cousins' New England town, where somehow-I knew it, my aunt did, my cousins-the scale was different, not just the buildings that were bigger and taller, but the people, too, who would have had to be if only to manage those immense planes and perpendicularities. (They asked if there were mountains in Michigan. I told them no. Of course, they said. Meaning, I think, that there wouldn't have been room for them, that something would have to give way in the fierce moil of all that activity and that of course it would be Nature.) So, welcome as I was, I was looked on by my cousins with something like awe, and if they took me on trails in their mountains or patiently taught me to fish in their streams, or sidestepped with me, hugging the loose timbers for handhold, along the outside ledges of their covered bridges or sneaked me into their granges and meeting halls where we hid in the back or crouched beneath the stage while the grownups argued, or invited me to church on Sunday mornings or quickly hustled me inside their one-room schoolhouse after they had picked the lock or read aloud the strange motto-'Live Free or Die'-on the New Hamps.h.i.+re license plates on the occasional car parked near the green, or Vergil'd me through the small, ancient graveyard, waiting while I read each tombstone, the dates and names and epitaphs, it was not so much to show off as to brief me, actually lobbying I think, pressing me with information, facts, their ident.i.ties subsumed even then, if only I'd known it, their decisions already made, goners to the twentieth century and asking only that their mottos, names and epitaphs be taken back with me to what even they thought of as the real world.

"So if I hesitated outside my uncle's smithy it was not grief, though it may sound like it, not a moment of silent prayer, though it may sound like that too. It was not even tribute. It was nostalgia. Not for my cousins, for myself. For those good old days when they had imbued me with the mystery of distance. (Who had it now, who could hopscotch s.p.a.ce like a token on a Monopoly board, negotiate the round trip of half a continent in a piece of a night or day--the astral leapfrogger, the astral miler.) I did not re-attend those old haunts, the greens and streams and trails and halls, graves and grange, schoolhouse and covered bridge, merely taking them in at a glance, no more, the lovely street of the lovely town-it was daylight, not yet noon-and guessing at the weather like a sailor-in repose the astral essence, the astral gist is insensate as coin-gauging the temperature of the late August Vermont morning by the hard edges of the s.h.i.+ning clouds against the high sky, blue and crisp as a fresh works.h.i.+rt, putting it in the mid-sixties, say, from the legible, razor-sharp shadows of the leaves. It could have been twenty years earlier, I could have been that proud, privileged visitor who'd seen Chicago, who'd lived for a time in Detroit. I tell you all this to prepare you.

"The street outside my uncle's shop was practically deserted. No farmers with wagons were lined up outside waiting. There was nowhere to be seen those cronies I'd heard about or seen myself when I'd made my visits as a child. A single wagon stood unhitched and pulled up against the great, shut, almost barnlike doors at the side of the shop. I could see smoke rising from one of my uncle's special chimneys but in no great quant.i.ty and with no special force. I couldn't hear anything, neither the ringing slam of the blacksmith's hammer nor the great low huff of his fire. I went inside. I shan't set the scene.

"My uncle was alone in the locked shop. Perhaps I had misread the weather signs, I thought, or maybe heat was c.u.mulative, like sweets or starches, and if you stayed around it long enough you began at last to store it, like a fever thermometer that has not been shaken down. Except for his leather blacksmith's ap.r.o.n he was naked.

"There was a mare with him, a Morgan, I think, a little darker than most Morgans, but maybe less full in the flank and croup. I'm not really expert in these matters, only what I picked up-overheard-from my uncle when I was a kid, but something off about her proportions. Her front, from chest to withers and elbow to shoulder, was full as a gelding's but she tapered at mid-rib to an attenuated hind quarters and she gave one the sense-listen to this, I refer to the astral pith as 'one'; you get used to anything-of prow, some foreshortened, figurehead horse.

"Pay attention, listen to me. What do I I know about a horse's proportions? Perhaps something know about a horse's proportions? Perhaps something was was a little off, but I dance around like this because I don't know how to say it. I've come this far, those two weeks of insomniac days, those four deaths, those five round trips from Michigan to Vermont, and I don't know how to tell it. a little off, but I dance around like this because I don't know how to say it. I've come this far, those two weeks of insomniac days, those four deaths, those five round trips from Michigan to Vermont, and I don't know how to tell it.

"My uncle was directing the horse like a ringmaster. I don't mean that the horse moved around him in circles but that my uncle constantly repositioned himself within her arcs and windings, ducked inside her torsions--more sheepdog, really, than ringmaster.

" 'How's that shoe?' he asked in a low voice. 'Go ahead, put your weight on it.'

"Then he spoke to it more gently still, his open palms moving in and away from his body, doing the pa.s.ses of perspective and appraisal, his low voice choked with implication. 'Sets the hoof off nice.'

"The words were strange. He spoke of her walls and white lines, of her bars and b.u.t.tresses and frogs. 'Your elastic was almost threadbare,' he said. 'I could feel horn. In places it showed through the pulp like new tooth. Well, your frog's so big. I never seen such frogs on a mare. I had to hold it with both hands. I had to hold it with both hands, didn't I? No, no,' he said soothingly, 'you got the bulbs for it, sister. It ain't as if you didn't have the bulbs for it. Bet you could kick a man to Kingdom Mountain with those bulbs.'

"He might have been a shoe salesman, with all such a salesman's oblique, evasive flattery. He was almost flirting with the animal, talking in tongues of the equivocal, the shy acrostics of obsession, his words almost matching the s.h.i.+fting position of his hands.

"He never touched it. All he did was look, encouraging its aimless parade around his smithy and constantly adjusting his own relation to it like a man changing seats in a movie.

" 'Well,' my uncle said finally, 'your owner will be calling for you. What do you say we get into our tack?'

"He turned to some harness hanging from pegs on the wall of the shop, pacing back and forth beside the gear before choosing.

" 'Let's get a look at you in the bellyband,' he said, and took down the thick girth, angling it from just behind her withers and along the forward line of her belly. He buckled it slowly, stepping back when he'd finished, drawing deep breaths. 'Don't you you look provocative?' he said. 'Too tight?' he said. 'You don't want it loose and it'd take more than look provocative?' he said. 'Too tight?' he said. 'You don't want it loose and it'd take more than I've I've got to do a wench like you a bruise. Nice you're so dark. I like a dark mare. It brings out the power. I'm a bit of a dark horse myself. Well,' he said, 'a girl has to breathe. I'll take that off for a bit.' He unbuckled the bellyband, let it lie where it dropped, fallen as garter on the floor of the shop. Then he selected a bridle, setting the headstall loosely, the thin, unfastened straps vaguely wreathing her face like the struts of some extraordinary veil. He attached the bit and curb and added a set of blinders which he took from the pouch of his leather ap.r.o.n. 'Eye shadow,' he said, then removed one of the blinders. 'Don't got to do a wench like you a bruise. Nice you're so dark. I like a dark mare. It brings out the power. I'm a bit of a dark horse myself. Well,' he said, 'a girl has to breathe. I'll take that off for a bit.' He unbuckled the bellyband, let it lie where it dropped, fallen as garter on the floor of the shop. Then he selected a bridle, setting the headstall loosely, the thin, unfastened straps vaguely wreathing her face like the struts of some extraordinary veil. He attached the bit and curb and added a set of blinders which he took from the pouch of his leather ap.r.o.n. 'Eye shadow,' he said, then removed one of the blinders. 'Don't you you look haughty. Like some old, one-eyed wh.o.r.e. Let's take that off, missy.' look haughty. Like some old, one-eyed wh.o.r.e. Let's take that off, missy.'

"The bridle's reins and checkreins he allowed to hang loose, then, studying them, proceeded to wind them like sandal straps about the horse's chest and belly and flanks. He watched silently as the mare, reaching behind her with her long head, began to undo the great, loose package of itself that my uncle had made. 'Oh,' he said, 'aren't we shameless, aren't we bold?' He scooped off the bridle and reins and, opening her jaws, pulled the bit from her mouth, transferring it, before I realized what was happening, into his own mouth, impossibly, greedily shoving all of it inside his distended cheeks. He started to gag. He stood over the looping reins of his retching. 'No, no,' he said breathlessly, 'it ain't you. Your breath's just as fresh, as fresh--' He vomited again, hitting the side of her muzzle. Stooping quickly, he raised a corner of his ap.r.o.n and wiped his mouth on the leather. The startled horse s.h.i.+ed obliquely, prancing back and sideways away from my uncle. I thought she was going to back into the forge. So, apparently, did my uncle, who, recovering immediately, sprang forward while she was still off balance and, shoving against her haunch, managed to knock her over.

"You'd think he'd have stopped. He was a Vermonter, a canny New Englander. The owner might already be on his way back. He was still naked, the mare was too. You'd think he'd have stopped. He cradled her head for a moment in his great arms, then allowed her to rise, studying her now from underneath. You'd think he'd have stopped.

"Then maybe he did. He stood and put the bellyband on again. Working quickly, he attached the breast collar to it, tightening it across the mare's shoulders and holding it in place with the straps that went over her back. He stepped back.

" 'Lewd jade,' he said. 'Hussy horsy, minxy mare. Piece, baggage, chippy, drab! Floozie, doxy, harlot, tart! Racy, ain't we, in our horse bra.s.sieres? Racy, ain't we, in our horse bra.s.sieres?'

"He set the breeching between her loins and croup and around her b.u.t.tocks. He looped a thong through both bra.s.s breeching links and tied it off tightly under her belly. Her rump suddenly jumped into place, set off like something mounted. My uncle walked around behind her.

"He's going to cover her! My G.o.d, I thought, he's going to cover her!

"He raised his ap.r.o.n. He was wearing her crupper, my uncle's p.e.n.i.s in the leather loop. He'd been wearing it all along, big enough all along to to wear it. 'The smith,' he said huskily, 'a mighty man is he,' and loosened the loop, rolling it down the length of his c.o.c.k. Then, raising the mare's tail, he pa.s.sed the loop quickly under it, buckling it to the harness so that the tail, arched now, perked in some counterfeit of sw.a.n.k and hauteur and pride, the beast, arranged in leather, seeming as abandoned and wanton and vainglorious as anything my uncle had yet called it, its own leathery being made for harness, for all the dressings, gauzes, slings and splints, all the bandages, swabs and tourniquets, all that Sam Browne belt kink of girdled loin, and the intricate s.e.xual square knots of leverage, actually prosthetic perhaps, the bandoleer and bunting arrangements, the flashy, fleshy piping of possibility. wear it. 'The smith,' he said huskily, 'a mighty man is he,' and loosened the loop, rolling it down the length of his c.o.c.k. Then, raising the mare's tail, he pa.s.sed the loop quickly under it, buckling it to the harness so that the tail, arched now, perked in some counterfeit of sw.a.n.k and hauteur and pride, the beast, arranged in leather, seeming as abandoned and wanton and vainglorious as anything my uncle had yet called it, its own leathery being made for harness, for all the dressings, gauzes, slings and splints, all the bandages, swabs and tourniquets, all that Sam Browne belt kink of girdled loin, and the intricate s.e.xual square knots of leverage, actually prosthetic perhaps, the bandoleer and bunting arrangements, the flashy, fleshy piping of possibility.

"He's going to cover her. He's not even going to remove his ap.r.o.n. He's going to cover her.

"But he didn't. All he did was squat behind her on his bare feet, his long t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es grazing the floor. All he did was watch.

"Then, suddenly, the mare stiffened, locked her legs and s.h.i.+t a steaming mound of manure bright as tobacco. And so did my uncle.

"Yes. I wondered about that part, too. It had been a good projection, I mean an easy one. The trip to Vermont was uneventful. I wasn't even winded. What had happened to the astral telegraph? Where was the soul semaph.o.r.e, the point-to-point red alert of the heart? At first I was going to 'speak.' I had meant to. I had my objections and chastis.e.m.e.nts and pleas all ready. I had meant to speak out.

"First I didn't. Then I couldn't.

"The smith, a mighty man is he. Who denied the claims of biology and brooked no precedence in love. Who would not vary a psalm or alter an iota of eulogy and who built his coffins not to custom but to paradigm. He didn't want his children to die, he couldn't have known that they would. I can only presume that he knew the preferences of his glands, that he had identified them from the beginning, from the time he first went into blacksmithing-he could as easily have tapped the maple trees or farmed cider or made a crop of hay-before, perhaps, perhaps from the moment he had first seen a horse saddled. Not only permitting the old-timers and cronies but actually hosting them, wearing the scratchy checkered s.h.i.+rts (who wanted hide next to his skin or nothing) out of some native patience and politeness, some I'll-come-as-you-are deference and courtesy, like a man who manages to get down some food he can't stand simply because his hostess has taken the trouble to prepare it for him. And then permitting the children as he had permitted the cronies, not a host this time but a father, and evidently a good one, possibly a great one. Not forbidding their attendance on him even after their mother had died, only-love makes no precedence, no distinction-asking of them that they settle the pecking order themselves. The glands in abeyance, their rampage not tamed but checked, whip-and-chair'd up onto the heavy platforms of decorum, and his back never once turned.

"As I say, astral projection can take you so far and no further. As I say, it can't even get me past the Rockies. As I say, it is often a cold comfort, well intentioned but of as much real use as the ca.s.serole of a condolence caller. It can clear the air though. Sometimes. A little, a little it can. That blazing sprint of the soul can clear the air, and perhaps may even explain the good weather, the briskness of the day, its sharp shadows, focused as ink on a bright page.

"Faithfully, LEWIS P PRESS R RINGLINGER"

Kinsley was across the room watching him read, knowing, the boy believed, just where George was in the letter at any given time, not only which page but which paragraph, which sentence.

"Well?" the man said as George looked at the signature. "What do you think?"

"What did he mean 'the boy you show this letter to'?"

"Ah," the big man said.

"What did he mean?"

Kinsley smiled. "Perhaps only that we're being watched."

"Watched," George said.

"It's the West he can't get to, not Florida." George looked in the corners of the room, on the lookout for the telltale point of greasy light Ringlinger had spoken of. "I'll tell you what I I think," Kinsley said. "I think it's the p.o.r.nography business we're in. Death and the supernatural are merely the covers it takes. I think we're in the p.o.r.nography business, that the religion we practice, the hoodoo consolation we give away, is s.e.xual. I'd like you to work the seances with me. I want you to be my contact, my messenger boy from Death. You're not twelve yet. I want you to work nude. No pasties, no Indian loincloth or oversized dressing gown with its planets and crescents and five-points-to-the-star astronomy. Naked. Nude. No one would touch you. You won't have to touch anyone. It will be dark. No one will even be able to make out your face. think," Kinsley said. "I think it's the p.o.r.nography business we're in. Death and the supernatural are merely the covers it takes. I think we're in the p.o.r.nography business, that the religion we practice, the hoodoo consolation we give away, is s.e.xual. I'd like you to work the seances with me. I want you to be my contact, my messenger boy from Death. You're not twelve yet. I want you to work nude. No pasties, no Indian loincloth or oversized dressing gown with its planets and crescents and five-points-to-the-star astronomy. Naked. Nude. No one would touch you. You won't have to touch anyone. It will be dark. No one will even be able to make out your face.

"It's a good idea, you know. We'd make a lot of money. There's so much l.u.s.t. The st.i.tching of s.e.x everywhere, common as knot, pandemic as signature. More l.u.s.t and combination than the ingredients in recipes. Ask your parents. It's a gimcrack idea.

"You know," Kinsley said, "it's a shame finally. It's all real, you know. The supernatural plane is real as a breadboard. Astral projection is real. All of it is. I'm certain of my facts. (I get past past the Rockies.) Last night I visited my dead. It's just you can't always reproduce it for them. It's just you have to be alone. Isn't that right, Mr. Ringlinger? Isn't that right, sir? Am I lying to this boy?" the Rockies.) Last night I visited my dead. It's just you can't always reproduce it for them. It's just you have to be alone. Isn't that right, Mr. Ringlinger? Isn't that right, sir? Am I lying to this boy?"

George held his breath. It seemed to him that just for a moment, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the dark stain where greased, oiled heads had rested against the back of a wing chair glisten and flare.

"So," Kinsley said, "what do you think?"

What he thought was that it wasn't the first time. It seemed that someone he knew of was always talking to horses. Perhaps only what they said was different. Or maybe not. Maybe they said the same things finally, choosing language good as any to talk to horses in, trying to get through, past, like Ringlinger, like Kinsley, like all the others in Ca.s.sadaga, telling them in words even people would have trouble with what they wanted, who they were.

He had known the secrets of seances for almost a year, had attended, diligent as someone learning a card trick, as almost every spiritualist in Ca.s.sadaga had explained his particular techniques, unburdening, trusting him with their mysteries, dragging him into their conspiracies. It was not the way grownups normally behaved with children. Even his parents had said "when you're older," putting him off with their "not yets" and "not nows" (filling him in only on this: family history), but the Ca.s.sadagans had fixed on him as if he were some kid confidant, inundating him with some need they had to provide the plausible, satisfy logic, purge belief, lapse faith.

If he was taken in by some particularly striking effect, they could become almost shrill in their contempt.

"My G.o.d! Didn't you even feel feel it?" Reverend Bone demanded. it?" Reverend Bone demanded.