

### Three Novellas:

### The Last Long Walk of Noah Brown

### The King and the Clockmaker

### The Vast Darkness

by

Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

SMASHWORDS EDITION

******

PUBLISHED BY:

The Wessex Collective on Smashwords

Three Novellas

copyright 2007 by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowlegements:

"The Vast Darkness" originally appeared in _The Long Story_

###

Table of Contents

The Last Long Walk of Noah Brown

The King and the Clockmaker

The Vast Darkness

a note about the writer

##

### The Last Long Walk of Noah Brown

1965 -1975

Noah Brown's first really long walk started in 1965 from his hometown of Annapolis to a commune in western Maryland on the Pennsylvania border. This journey occurred at a leisurely pace and took the better part of a year. The commune was called "The Free University for Life Skills" and Noah was proud to be accepted as he had always been told, sometimes taunted, that he was a retard.

Noah Brown was a walker, even as a child wandering off and exploring the town where he was born. He was not the youngest of his parents' six children but he was the last to leave home. A sister, a year younger than Noah, married at sixteen a much older man whom she did not love, but she told Noah the man was a good provider and she ate well. The oldest sister had left early as well. She made good money cutting hair in town. Sometimes she tracked Noah down and tried to slip him a few bucks, telling him to buy something for himself, not to give the money to the folks because she said they would just drink it up. He would give them the money anyway because he couldn't lie and sure enough they drank it up. His three older brothers had joined the navy and each time one of them went to a new place in the world Noah would get a postcard always with the same message written in large letters easy for him to read: CAN'T COMPLAIN, FOOD IS GOOD AND PLENTY OF IT. Noah could read the words food and good and got the general idea.

Nothing ever came for the folks and the folks did not seem to care. Noah himself could not get into the navy, couldn't pass the tests. He'd heard it whispered now and then that his mother must have been so drunk so often while she carried him that his brain was doomed before he was born. But what he lacked in conventional intelligence he made up for with a generous and cheerful personality. He would have stayed with the folks tolerating their rude behavior and drunken ways forever but his mother told him one day he had to leave and make his own way because they couldn't afford to feed him any longer. In point of fact they had stopped feeding him years before and he had been doing odd jobs for people in the town in exchange for meals, hand-me-down clothes and a little civil conversation. He was well liked and trusted in the town. Nonetheless when his mother told him he had to leave he did not seek accommodations with any of the townspeople but began to walk inland. He had some cash his sister had given him. He'd had brains enough to find her and ask for it and she had given him a hug and a wad of $10 bills. She'd explained change to him years before and now told him what shoes should cost and a bus ticket to this town and that one while Noah pretended to listen. She also wrote down her address on a piece of yellow lined notebook paper and told him to send her a postcard when he settled somewhere, told him to ask for help if he needed it though she had long ago taught him to print some.

As it happened, Noah was uncomfortable in shoes and on the Greyhound bus, confinement of any kind making him feel just a bit faint, so he walked barefoot along the side roads through the countryside and made a lot of friends because he had so little to say and could listen indefinitely, not knowing the difference between wisdom and nonsense and having no schedule to keep.

His first day out a fog rolled in and Noah could see only a few steps ahead so he walked slowly, reverently. He enjoyed the blanketed feeling, more secure in wild nature than he'd ever felt in the house with his family. The sun did eventually emerge in time to set in the west casting sideways glances through the trees, causing the green-gold and orangey red of the autumn leaves to lift up and float with a vivid iridescent glow in the dusk.

Before it was completely dark, Noah stopped and found a comfortable place among the trees that lined the highway. He gathered armloads of fallen leaves to make a soft nest and curled up in the embrace of the large sheltering roots of an oak tree. Sometimes in the night he opened his eyes and saw the sky full of stars so he knew it had cleared.

Noah woke with the sun which burned off the morning fog and warmed him. He'd been soaked to the bone by the early evening fog and the early morning dew. Not far away a cow with an overburdened udder was mooing to be milked and the rooster called to the rising sun, the geese that took to arrowed flight, the crows and the magpies who joined in. A child stood in a field looking around at the world and saw Noah and called to him. The child was not afraid of Noah. He marched right up to Noah, asked if he wanted a job and within minutes Noah was hired on to help get the hay in from the field. The child's mother drove an old tractor pulling a flat bed trailer and Noah helped the small boy and his older sister pitch and haul the rectangular bales up onto the trailer. The boy's father worked in a factory during the days and with the weather growing ever more damp, his wife and children were rushed to get that precious second cutting into the barn before it got moldy.

"Moldy hay'll kill the horses" the boy told Noah so Noah would fit his hand in between the sheaves of hay to be sure it had stayed dry inside and felt around the outside to be sure the morning sun had dried up the moisture from the evening fog. Some bales, he told the woman, needed to stay longer in the sun before they were stacked in the dark barn.

"You'd be a good hand" she told Noah and asked if he would like to stay on and help. The family could not afford to pay him but he'd eat well and have a roof over his head.

Noah stayed with the family through the winter and observed and learned many things, some fearsome, some wonderful. He learned how to milk the cows and especially enjoyed that. He chopped wood and shoveled snow, carried groceries and washed dishes. He learned to play some rudimentary tunes on the blues harp. He comforted the little boy when a truck ran over his dog, That was the hardest thing that winter. The most unforgettable was when two cows calved early in the season. A heifer died with her first calf. The vet might have been able to save her but the roads were slick with black ice under the snow and he arrived too late to save the heifer. He saved the calf and they were discussing what other cow might let the orphan suck. Bottle fed calves did not fare well in the damp winters. As fortune would have it, another cow gave birth prematurely to a dead calf that same evening. The vet remarked with some enthusiasm that the odds of that happening in such a small herd were pretty low.

Noah thought it sad to see the cow licking the dead calf as sorrowful as any human mother could be. Then he watched with horrified fascination while the farmer and the vet, after putting the cow up in the barn where she continued to cry out, skinned her dead calf and put the skin over the orphan calf in order to fool the cow into letting it suck as if it were her own. The ruse worked and Noah never forgot the bloody sight of it. He was comforted by the sight of the cow contented at last and relieved when the orphan calf was accepted and could be removed from the bloody skin. Noah began to understand then that life could be both brutal and sweet.

When spring was well established, Noah decided it was time to keep moving and rather than explain his strange aversion to buses, he allowed himself to be driven to the greyhound station in the nearest town. The farmer's wife wanted to wait with Noah until he was safely on board the bus but her husband said "he's a grown man, he'll be OK," and after they drove away, Noah got a refund for his ticket and walked out on the highway to hitch a ride.

As it was back then in the sixties, the whole country seemed to be on the move, young people hitch-hiking or driving vans or buses converted into homes on wheels. Noah didn't mind riding in a colorfully painted bus equipped with comfortable old armchairs and beds and hot plates. He could stretch out, eat, sleep, not at all like riding the dog. Having nowhere else he needed to be and rather liking the company of the young couple who had stopped to give him a ride, Noah decided to accept their invite to check out the Free University. He told them he had not graduated any high school and they told him that would not matter because this University was free in more ways than one.

A couple of life changing events took place within the first few days of Noah's stay at the communal University. He learned about his namesake in the bible, a story he vaguely remembered his older sister had told him a long time ago, and he experienced the joy of sexual relations with a lovely young red haired woman who gave him a peacock feather the next morning before she headed on down the road. Noah kept that peacock feather, along with the memory, for the next forty years, packing it carefully in secret places among his sparse belongings each time he took to the road. But it would be another two years before he seriously took to the road again.

During those two years, while all around him people were building shelters of varying types: yurts and tipis and solar heated domes, Noah built an ark. The project started with a dream inspired by a picture in a child's book of bible stories. There were children at the Free University who were being home schooled by a group of adults who's responsibility was child care and schooling. When the woman who directed this effort discovered that Noah could only read a few words, she endeavored to teach him this skill using the books that had been donated to the small makeshift school. It had not been her intention to teach him bible stories, rather to help him learn to read but of course he was intrigued by the story of Noah and the Ark.

His teacher had begun with this story so that Noah would be inspired by recognizing one of the words that he could read: his own name. She asked him some questions then about his parents, were they religious? "No" he told her, a bit irritated that she spoke to him as though he were five years old. He told her he thought he might have been named for a boat that used to dock near where his family lived. He knew his brother Will was named for a boat with the words "Sweet William" stenciled on its end. He remembered some boys teasing his brother about being called "sweet" and how his brother had felt compelled to beat them bloody. Will had been sweet to Noah, though, and remembering that made Noah sad. The teacher stopped asking him questions about his family that day, but from time to time she would ask again. He always answered her until he overheard her one night talking about his family to some other people and they all seemed to feel sad for Noah. He did not want anyone to feel sad on his account so after that evening he never again told her anything about his family and for the most part he stopped thinking about them himself.

It was several months before he remembered that he was supposed to write to his sister and then he asked the woman's help. She seemed so happy that he had a sister he wanted to contact that she took a photograph of him in front of the large log building that served as the community kitchen and dining hall with a few bedrooms in the back for the permanent residents. It had a big porch and she had posed Noah on the porch which looked very grand. They waited to send his letter until they could include this photograph and Noah knew his sister would be happy for him. She sent him a simple printed letter in return and they wrote back and forth every month the entire time Noah lived there.

The dream Noah had about the ark was in vivid color just like the picture in the child's book. The crested waves from the picture tore loose in his dream with such force that he could hear and smell and feel the roaring salt water and woke up struggling to breath. He realized then that the story could happen again and that he, being Noah after all, should begin immediately to build an ark. He wanted it to be as like the picture as possible and had no idea how he would construct it alone. At first he was afraid if he asked for help he would be laughed at but finally he confided his dream to the oldest man he could find, someone who looked a bit like the biblical Noah himself. His name was Bob, and Bob did not laugh. Bob told Noah he would help him build his ark as well as a nifty little wheeled trailer by which it could be towed to the water someday. Noah kept to himself the thought that the water would be coming to the ark soon enough. For his part, Bob kept to himself that, in point of fact, the boat he would help Noah build would be a canoe.

The building of the canoe that they called Noah's Ark took two years. This was because Bob guided Noah through a process that began with choosing trees in the woods to cut for the wood and waiting for the wood to cure. Together they wandered the woods and Bob told Noah stories and they talked about the different kinds of trees, the quality of the wood, how to recognize the different kinds of trees by their bark in the winter when they were bare of leaves. Bob made Noah learn to recognize the kinds of trees they would cut for the boat: ash and white oak and walnut, and hemlock for the oars because Bob told Noah, he should have hemlock oars. He spoke lovingly of grains and colors, how beautiful the ark would be, and light. It had to be light enough for Noah to drag behind him even on the wheeled contraption that Bob designed for it.

Sometimes they cut a tree, sometimes not, sometimes two, never more than that. It was a process that took into consideration two objectives, one getting the wood for the ark, the other thinning the forest without cutting too much in any one area. Noah learned respect for the forest, the trees and the animals in it. As they cut the trees they peeled the bark from them with a special tool and this too was a process that involved a lot of patience. Noah and Bob both took much sensual pleasure from the scent of the fresh wood beneath the bark. They kept the long strips of bark and a woman at the school dried those and used them to weave baskets. They took the cut and peeled trees to a man who had a small sawmill on his farm. He made extra money that way, the saw-mill, the hay, the canned goods and selling ginseng to health food coops in Baltimore and Washington. Bob and the sawyer used hand-tools to cut strips of wood, ranging from 16 feet long to a couple inches long, less than an inch wide and, miracle of miracles, only a quarter inch thick to make what they called a strip canoe until Noah trained them to use the proper word for his project: he wanted to build an "ark". It did not bother him in the least that this sixteen foot long canoe would only carry a couple of adults, perhaps a small child, or maybe a dog. Noah was not crystal clear yet on who would be the occupants of his ark once the great flood hit.

Noah was not as adept as Bob at stapling the long narrow strips to the skeleton that Bob built under a canvas canopy and sometimes, despite the amazing suppleness of the wood strips, he broke one. No matter Bob told him, they would use those pieces lower down on the underbelly of the boat. He wasted nothing and for this Noah was thankful for the thought of wasting the lovely trees made him cry. When Noah learned his task well enough that Bob felt confident leaving him to work alone, Noah came to love the rhythm of the work, slowly smoothing the strips around the bones of the boat, stapling them carefully, then running his hand over the lovely wood again and again. He examined his creation carefully with his eyes and his hands together, like a lover memorizing the body of his beloved, pairing the visual image with the touch of hands as if storing memories for some eventual blindness.

Later Bob and Noah drove all the way back to Annapolis. It was a much shorter trip in Bob's truck than it had been for Noah, coming from that city, meandering as he had about the countryside on foot, hitching rides that sometimes took him out of the way or even backwards. The visit back to his hometown felt like a trip back in time. Bob asked him if he had family he would like to see and Noah said he'd like to see his sister so they went by the place she used to work but the owner said she had gone to West Virginia to visit her aunt and was not expected back for a week. Noah was reluctant to go back to the house he had been raised in, embarrassed perhaps to have Bob see what a shabby shack it really was, or even more embarrassing to have Bob see his mother and father passed out drunk or wide awake and mean with drink. So Noah felt like a ghost of sorts come back to haunt his old home, to look around but remain unseen.

In Annapolis they visited a chandlery where Bob purchased what he called the boat's "skin" a gossamer fine cloth that would be used to wrap the boat and the resin they would need to coat it with to protect the beautiful woods that striped his ark with their different shadings and grains. Noah wanted to wait a while to put this skin over his boat, he wanted to run his hands along the naked wood a few more times but Bob warned him they needed to cover the boat with this protective skin before the damp and the blowing rains that had already started began to erode the exquisite wood. In the spirit of protecting his beloved boat, Noah, slowly, reverently stretched the skin over the wood and slowly, reverently stroked on the resin and then he let it sit in the work shed and was not in a rush to take it out for trial run on a nearby river. Noah was content to simply admire his accomplishment that had spanned two of each season. The very last touch made to the boat was the painting of its name. On Bob's advice, Noah sought the help of one of the residents who was very gifted at painting and this woman carefully painted the words NOAH'S ARK straddling the center of the canoe at each end. She painted it in the color of Noah's choice: a rust red color like earth and each letter highlighted in green, the same shade as the spiky needles of the hemlock tree that Noah had planed and smoothed into oars while Bob made other items from the wood of that particular tree, lovely carved toys that he would sell at crafts fairs to raise money for their winter supplies.

During the time that Noah worked on his ark many of the residents of the communal University left to go find land of their own. They went to Maine and West Virginia and New Mexico where people were poor and land was cheap and they wrote back from time to time to report on how things were going. One couple went as far as British Columbia in Canada. A group of them went back to Washington D.C to join the protestors who blocked the highway to the Pentagon and demanded that their government get out of Viet Nam. People came from the cities to stay a few nights or a few weeks, no one stayed as long as Bob and the woman who taught Noah to read. Noah learned that these two had at one time been married. They had no children but acted like the parents of all the young people who came through and Noah enjoyed being part of their little core family. Nonetheless, about a month after the ark was finished, Noah felt his wanderlust return and he determined to take another long walk, to see more of the world.

Noah was rightfully proud of his ark and the entire community participated in a special celebration to "launch" it on a lake to which they pulled it behind a pick-up truck with a hitch intended to pull a kind of covered wagon contraption that the owner had built for his family, the family still a dream at that point. The event doubled as Noah's going away party although, had he changed his mind and decided to stay that would have been fine too.

There was homemade dandelion wine and a beautiful woman in a colorful billowing dress opened a bottle and splashed a little token wine over the craft, cut a ribbon that had been tied across the front and proposed a toast to Noah and his next great adventure. Everyone took turns paddling the ark out on the lake and drinking the dandelion wine and once it got dark they built a fire and sat around talking about where Noah should go next on what was by then being called The Great Exploration. Turns out people had come to The Free University of Life Skills from all over the country and there were a lot of suggestions from Key West, Florida to Taos, New Mexico. The man from New Orleans told the best stories however and he told them so well that, before long, Noah thought that man's memories were his own and he was longing to get back to a home he had yet to see.

The same woman who had painted Noah's name on his ark, painted him a beautiful sign with the words New Orleans and lots of flowers on it and Noah set off the next morning, the only person not hung over from too much dandelion wine. He did not know it at the time but it would take Noah several years to get to New Orleans as his journey would be a winding twisting road throughout the southeastern countryside.

1975 -1985

"You've come a long way" the card reader told Noah who was suitably impressed. The old woman always started with that announcement. It could be understood so many different ways. "A long way" could be measured in physical miles or by emotional growth or financial ups and downs and it could mean a long way forward or a long way backward. Most people who felt the need to consult a Tarot card reader felt that they had come a long way in some direction so it never failed to impress. Then she asked her customers if they had any questions. Most wanted to know if a lover was in the cards and poor Noah was no different in that regard. He'd traveled, more or less, fourteen hundred miles, much of it on foot over a period of more than five years, all that time pulling the ark and often sleeping in it, was still sleeping in it where he'd been allowed to park it behind a church and he'd endured extreme heat and driving rains and oft-times went without very much that was good to eat and the only question he wanted the old woman to answer was if there was going to be a woman in his life. The woman laid out the cards with a slow solemnity and smiled at Noah.

"Yes" she said, "A woman will be coming soon to be with you." She paused a bit then went on:

"But she is not one you were expecting."

"Not expecting? I'm not expecting anyone. That's why I came here to ask you."

"This woman is your mother. See this card, this card represents your mother so you will be seeing your mother soon." Actually the card was The Empress and could have represented any number of things about to happen in Noah's life but the old woman considered that he appeared to be in need of some mothering. He however could not believe it and told the woman as much, told her he didn't even know if his mother was still alive and if she was still alive she certainly would not be coming to visit him, she'd kicked him out of the house ten years ago.

"Suit yourself," said the old woman "It is what I see in the cards. Do you want to know what else I see?"

"Sure" said Noah hoping perhaps she'd see another woman, younger like the one who had given him the peacock feather he still carried with him wherever he went."

"The Emperor" the old woman said in a deep and ominous voice with an exaggerated expression of fear on her face.

"What does that mean?"

"It means that someday you will meet a man with lots of wealth and power who rules a lot of people, can do whatever he wants with them, send them off to war to die or kill if he wants to, tax the fruits of their labor until they are starving, rape their daughters...." ...the old woman's voice had reached a scream and she continued to rant and yell so that Noah did not stay to hear anymore or pay the $2 he owed her. He could hear her ranting all down the street and a passerby said to Noah and anyone else who might be listening, "That woman is crazy, don't let her fool you, she is just plain crazy, crazy as the day is long, crazy as the night is dark, crazy as the stars are a multitude..."

"Who are you?" asked Noah of the man.

"Me? I'm crazy too, crazy two, double crazy, that's me, we're all crazy on this street. Welcome to the neighborhood."

Later Noah thought that perhaps he was crazy himself when he found exactly the place he'd been told to look for and it appeared to have disappeared. The man at the Free University for Life Skills who had first ignited Noah's passion to come to New Orleans had described a beautiful park like place lined with hundreds of old oak trees. Noah loved oak trees. He told Noah that the black residents of the city had their own Mardi Gras parade down this street. Noah had carefully written down the name in large block letters on the same piece of paper that his sister had written her address. It said: CLAIBORNE. And the sign on the street where Noah now found himself said CLAIBORNE. He compared it letter by letter. But there was no park. Instead of oak trees there were massive concrete columns holding up a noisy freeway that roared overhead, the same freeway that he had ridden in on. Instead of grass there was litter and broken glass and it all seemed terribly depressing to Noah. He had gotten himself fairly well lost by this time and had to ask directions to the church where he'd been let off and had parked the ark.

The truck driver who had picked Noah up thought Noah would need some help in the big city so brought him to the church because she knew the priest would look after him. Since that day less than a week earlier, Noah had been sleeping in the ark where he could look up and see a few stars at night and returning to the comfort of his strange home, he forgot about the crazy old card reader and the lost park on Claiborne Ave. Nonetheless, the next day he took from his pocket the much folded piece of yellow lined paper and went to find the priest to get some help writing a post card to his sister. He thought he should ask her about their mother.

The priest said why not write a real letter and Noah agreed but could not think of that much to say once he was put on the spot to say it. He asked how their mother was and if she had plans to visit him and dictated that he was now in the great city of New Orleans. The priest took it upon himself to add the address and phone number of the church and added his name and a brief note to the end.

Not more than two weeks later Noah's sister arrived on the church steps looking for him.

"Mother is dead but I'm here" was all she said at first and then she began to cry and hugged Noah, gasping a bit about the long bus trip while the priest directed an altar boy to bring her suitcase inside. He was eager to explain to this woman that he'd gladly have helped Noah find a more suitable place to live but Noah refused to leave the ark even though the priest had promised it would not be stolen or damaged behind the church.

"I understand," the woman said and finally smiled. "He's a tad stubborn," she said whereafter she and the priest conferred for a good hour about possible accommodations and job openings for a hair dresser. Noah was a bit put out, he knew he was thirty years old and had lived on his own for the past ten years and here his sister still treated him like a child.

"I can read now," he broke in.

"That's wonderful" his sister exclaimed, then continued her conversation with the priest.

"I had sex with a woman," he broke in again even louder. This time both his sister and the priest were silent for quite a while but Noah looked so proud of himself and innocent at the same time that they both let it pass, though each resolved to question Noah further in private.

That very afternoon they were settled in rooms they rented from a woman who knew the priest. Noah's sister paid the deposit of $200 with a wad of ten dollar bills she accumulated from various hiding places on her person and in her luggage, for she had traveled very carefully. Noah's sister introduced herself to their landlady as Glory, not Gloria as the woman first thought she heard, but Glory Brown. This came as an interesting surprise to Noah who had always called his sister "Sister" just like his parents had. He liked that her real name was Glory. The landlady, a woman not much older than Glory said "you can call me Corrine" and so they did. Noah and Glory shared a bed-sitting room with an alcove screened off for Glory, and a small balcony with a toilet and sink in a closet at the end. There was a large claw footed bath tub in another closet down the hall that they could use in turn with other tenants of the house. Some tenants were there for years and years and others only weeks but Noah and Glory lived there together for the next ten years and helped Corrine clean the other rooms and ate their meals with her in the large old fashioned kitchen.

Glory worked evenings and weekends cutting and curling the hair of women who worked nine to five Mondays through Fridays and did not have much money for tips but she said they were more generous than the wealthy ladies she'd beautified back in Annapolis. She seemed happy with their simple life and Noah often heard his sister and Corrine talking and laughing late into the soft velvet nights. Noah himself liked to go to bed early looking forward to his dreams and he was always up to see the sunrise which was his greatest delight in life. He would walk miles before the two women even stirred and arrive back in time for breakfast.

Sometimes he'd walk up Camp Street to the quarter and peer into windows, chat with folks just waking up on their stoops where they'd fallen asleep after an evening smoking, sipping wine, singing harmonies. Or he'd walk the other direction to an old cemetery and daydream about the lives of the people whose names appeared on the tombstones, think about how some had lived so many years and some only weeks or even days. He'd wander down streets that were run down and ragged and talk to the people picking through the trash who told him fantastic stories.

"See that green house there," one told him. "They keep alligators behind the gate to keep burglars away. You can't poison a gator. I seen live chickens thrown from the top windows to feed the gators."

It was a big event to the old guy but Noah felt bad for the chickens.

Sometimes he'd wander into streets of mansions where the yards and gardens were well kept. He'd look into the windows of the beautiful homes hoping to see well dressed people going about their exotic lives and wondered about what they ate and if they played the piano brilliantly but he never saw any rich people and he was relieved that they never saw him either. Servants, sometimes he saw women on their knees scrubbing floors or men trimming flowers and trees, dogs and cats sleeping on the wide verandahs but never any of the wealthy folks. He liked to talk to the working men in the yards and they would stop to talk to him, tell him stories, point out the flowers and the trees the owners had brought from foreign places, taking pride in these gardens as if these gardens belonged to them. Noah loved learning the names of the exotic plants, names like Bird of Paradise, Blue Daze with a Z, and Star Jasmine or Night Blooming Jasmine. Noah loved the idea of a flower that hid from the sun and came out for the stars. He struggled to pronounce names like Bromeliad and Bougainvillea and laughed at the sound of Bambusa, savored the feel of Plumbago on his lips. He rarely remembered what flower went with what name but he didn't care. They made a single picture in his mind and their names repeated over and over made a song that accompanied his walk through this dreamscape.

Sometimes Corrine and Glory walked with Noah in the evenings and Corrine explained the street names to them, named for the muses she said and explained the long ago civilization of the Greeks. Calliope was the name of the muse of epic poetry and Clio the muse of history. Erato was the muse of love and erotic poetry and Corrine had to promise to explain later what erotic poetry was so Noah would let her continue her explanation of the streets in their neighborhood. Euterpe was the muse of flute playing and about this Noah did not particularly care. Melpomene was the muse of tragedy and Thalia of comedy, Polyhymnia the muse of heroic hymns and Terpsichore the muse of dance and lyric poetry. Urania was the muse of astronomy and Noah was excited to learn that astronomy was the study of the stars. Calliope, Noah practiced on his tongue, Calliope, Terpsichore, he whispered as he walked, Plumbago, Jasmine. Noah learned to love the sounds of words and wrote poems which he recited to the old men on Claiborne Ave. who seemed impressed.

Noah spent many mornings having a cup of chicory coffee with those old men on that same Claiborne Avenue that so confused him his first week there. They told him about the old days when the place was indeed a beautiful park and how in the mid sixties the trees had been removed and a highway built right there over their very heads. It was no longer beautiful but it was still a gathering place for the folks in the neighborhood who had not been consulted about the highway. Sometimes Noah watched while an artist painted pictures around the columns, sometimes pictures of the oak trees that had grown old and magnificent there in that spot before being destroyed. One of the columns was used as a kind of bulletin board with obituaries stuck all over it. "Well," one old man said, "people got to know about who died, don't they?" Noah thought that was pretty depressing until he saw his first funeral parade and then he figured that people in New Orleans thought differently about death than they did in other parts of the country. The best music Noah ever heard was at funerals. He became a regular at funeral parades. Sometimes Corrine went with him but Glory never could get used to the idea.

Corrine herself relished the eccentric customs of her home town. Come Thanksgiving she called a friend with a car to drive them along the river road and pointed out to them a number of tall wooden structures in a variety of shapes and sizes, explaining that at Christmas they would all be set ablaze, a holiday tradition. Glory was worried that it might upset Noah, but in fact come Christmas when that same friend with a car drove them out to the levee to watch, Noah enjoyed the spectacle as much as any of the multitude of children that Glory also thought might be disturbed by the sight of santas and large teddy bears being thrown into the flames. What did apparently disturb Noah was the sight of all those happy children running around setting off fire crackers and the families all so joyous. Mothers and fathers and children, enjoying themselves together. Glory could see his face become thoughtful by the wavering light of the flames in the night.

It was shortly after Christmas that Noah asked about their mother. What had she died of? Had she suffered much? Had she ever asked about him, her son, Noah? He was hurt that she had never written him so much as a single postcard. He had not written her either but when he studied on it a bit he realized that she would have known how to reach him through Glory. He always called her Glory now, relishing the name. What his sister then told him stunned him and kept him pondering for days, sitting absolutely still under a tree in the backyard. Not easy to find out after so many years that their mother was his grandmother and his sister Glory was in fact his real mother, thirteen years old when he was born.

Noah tried to imagine the little girls who came to church as young mothers, and he blushed to himself because he knew how babies are made. He did not really like to think about this but he loved his sister/mother and wondered why he did not live with her when he was a child. He had begun to feel angry that he did not stay with this favorite sister but realized he should understand the reasons for things before reacting to them. And Glory understood that this news was a shock to him so did not try to tell him more, thinking she would just wait until he asked, thinking he would ask when he was ready.

When he did ask her she started with the circumstances of his birth, leaving the circumstances of his conception for later, if ever, for that would be hard for her to tell and him to hear.

"Oh honey" (said lightly so as not to cry) "what would you say if I told you that you were born in a chicken house?" and she laughed so Noah thought it was a joke and laughed as well but no, no joke she told him.

"When my mother realized I was pregnant she bought us some bus tickets to Charleston and her sister picked me up and drove deep into the dark woods where she lived. My mother did not even come to visit. Said the place gave her the creeps and she turned right around and went back to Annapolis. Did not even give me a hug but then our mother never did hug us, I guess you remember that. Always angry that woman was, but I guess she had her reasons. Well my auntie was pretty jolly and I liked being with her so I was ready to accept whatever living arrangements she had to offer.

"Her house was kind of ramshackle, a room added here and there and all of them filled with little kids and stuff, she had more stuff than a person could shake a stick at. And she had this real nice chicken house, built new when she decided to make some extra money selling organic eggs. But that didn't work out for her. Half the chicks she ordered were roosters, did you know they can't tell a hen from a rooster until they are grown? There are some people who claim they can tell but that is just hocus pocus I think like those guys that go around looking for underground water with a forked stick. Anyway, she had to make soup out of those roosters and she froze all that soup because she had this big chest freezer on her porch and the hens, well they just didn't take to confinement, laid their eggs all over the place, in the hay in the barn, in the trees, we even found some in the doghouse.

"That big beautiful new chicken house just sat there empty so auntie and me, we whitewashed it and put in this antique iron bed with a comfortable feather mattress on it and that was my home that summer before you were born. Auntie's husband was a truck driver and hardly ever home but when he did come by he was polite to me and didn't stare and I learned not to be afraid of him as I was afraid of men in those days but not him and not the young man who came with the midwife when it was time for you to come out. He was a paramedic he said and drove an ambulance and when he wasn't driving the ambulance he helped the midwife who turned out to be his auntie and they delivered you nice and clean and when you were old enough to travel we took the bus back to Annapolis. But you know I'd've been happy to stay out there in West Virginia forever. It was a happy time for me and holding you in my arms that very first time, was the most joy I'd ever known or have ever known since."

This announcement made Noah happy for a moment before he worried that he had not given his mother more joy as he grew up. But he didn't ask about that. He asked instead what happened when they got back to Annapolis.

It was not a good time for Glory when Noah asked that question. She knew she needed more time and was supposed to be getting ready to go to work but after giving it some thought she decided to call in sick and settle in to talk a while. After all, Noah was a grown man finding out important things for the first time, things perhaps he thought he should have been told years earlier and she knew she owed him this.

"Lets walk" she said, "Walking relaxes me and it will be easier to remember everything, there is a lot to tell, honey, some of it hard, best if we be walking while I talk." And of course Noah enjoyed walking himself. He didn't realize until he wanted to look at his mother's face that walking protected her from eye contact while she told her story, and by then he realized it was better that she not see his eyes either because he did not want her to feel bad if he cried or appeared angry or shocked.

"First I got to tell you that I never told anyone about this before you so even though I should have told you earlier I guess, you are the first to know." Noah smiled, proud, then settled his face into a more serious demeanor for what he was about to hear.

"I never told my mother either but I sometimes wonder if she knew. Well let me cut to the chase honey, my father. My father . . . . "

They walked in silence while the truth that Glory could not utter revealed itself to Noah.

"My father was my grandfather?" he asked then and she nodded, not speaking, not crying but feeling that if she did speak she would cry. They walked a good half hour in silence, hearing the crows that cawed with a hysteria that sounded like anger and it seemed the wind whipped up then rather suddenly as if all of nature were angered by her news. After a while they came to a bench and Glory sat down, exhausted, and Noah sat with her and there they sat another half hour or so before heading back home. Noah knew she'd tell him more another day. As it happened, Glory could have made it to work on time that day but she did indeed feel sick and went straight to bed. Corrine brought her some tea to help her sleep. Glory slept for the next fifteen hours and woke up relieved the following dawn in time to walk again with her son and continue her story.

"My mother used to yell at me all the time, call me a little slut when she was drunk, hit me although she lacked the strength to hurt me physically and I did not care enough for her to have my feelings hurt. I despised her and feared my father. He stopped bothering me and I don't know if he ever bothered my sister or not. I talked to her, warned her to steer clear of him and she spent most nights at a friend's house, a friend with a real family, lucky for her. I think my having you scared him. He used to tell me that if I ever told anyone he'd make my life a living hell and I never said a word back because I was afraid but one day I yelled back, said my life was already a living hell and I ran away and I am so sorry, my child, I left you with them. But I was still only fourteen years old and it was hard enough to find a new home for myself let alone for both of us. I guess I've never really forgiven myself for that.

"But they didn't treat you too badly did they? I mean they didn't hit you or anything? You were such a sweet child and even mom seemed to have a soft spot for you once I was gone. I still lived in town and I visited you and talked to the boys, asked them to protect you. Our brother Kenny was as big as Dad by the time he was twelve and he told me how he stood up to him, threatened to knock him into tomorrow if he ever took the belt to him again and he said Dad just backed down, meek as you please. He put your crib in the room all the boys shared and when you cried it was the boys saw to you.

"Thank god they've all survived wherever the government has sent them. I thank god for my brothers. You know..." and here Glory laughed almost as if the memory were a sweet one... "Kenny used to call me when the folks were passed out cold from whiskey and I'd come over and step right over them sometimes and hold you in my arms and sing a bit and stroke your sweet little head, stay most the night while they snored and groaned in their drunken stupors, who knows they might even have been awake and seen me and not even known they were awake, thinking maybe they were hallucinating. Funny eh?"

Noah thought it was heartbreaking but he gave a little laugh himself and said yes it was funny. He did not want this woman who felt more like his sister at this moment, a younger sister at that, to stop talking.

The rest of the story was not really sad at all. Glory had a teacher at school who helped her find a job with a wealthy family in the town. They took her in to help with a new baby and help with the cleaning. She had her own bedroom and bathroom over the garage and she ate in the kitchen with the cook who liked to be called Cookie, saving her more elegant real name, Ophelia, for Sunday meeting. Cookie was good to Glory who she always called "baby girl" and Glory loved being called "baby girl" hearing the love in the phrase. She studied in her room at night and took a test and got her GED and went to cosmetology school so by the time she would have graduated from high school she was all ready to go out in the world and earn a better living than her father ever had.

She got herself a little apartment for cheap in one of the old row houses on Prince St. near St. John's College and for a while she even had a boyfriend although he dumped her when he graduated. He had been from a rich family and she figured he would go home and marry the daughter of one of his father's rich friends. She knew how it worked. Cookie had warned her. Nonetheless she nursed a broken heart through the spring feeling left out of the tenderness of the season and fell into a summer lethargy that could as easily have been the heat as a temporary depression.

By the next October she was inexplicably joyful, invigorated by the crisper air, clear blue skies and the brilliant colors of dying leaves. Once a week, Cookie would come to visit after church and they would fix a special Sunday dinner together and in this way the years passed and Glory collected better memories. Once she was working and making money her parents were happy to have her visit because there were things they wanted that they couldn't afford and she gave them money so she could have quiet visits with her brother/son Noah and after a while, her story became his story also and they shared those memories again on their long dawn walks.

Before they knew it Mardi Gras was in the air, everyone getting ready. Glory recalled that in his youth, Noah was much agitated by large crowds but based on how well he responded to the Xmas Eve celebration at the levee, she decided to go with him to watch a Mardi Gras parade. The crowd was larger, more unruly and Noah felt caged in and threatened by the noise and crush of bodies scrambling for strings of beads thrown out to them by the costumed people in the parade. He became so upset that Glory and Corrine had a hard time calming him down and getting him home. Corrine gave him a cup of tea with honey and a few drops of tincture of skullcap and he slept until midday the next day. The next year the three of them watched the Mardi Gras festivities on the television and the year after that Corrine went with some other tenants and promised to find someone with a television camera and wave to them if they watched for her.

One day Corrine came running home all excited and just minutes ahead of two muscular young men who carried between them a player piano while Corrine herself had lugged up a box of rolls for it filled with music by guys with names like: Jelly Roll Morton, Memphis Slim, Montana Taylor, Piano Red, Black Boy Shine, Barrelhouse Buck, Cow Cow Davenport, Cripple Clarence Lofton and Kid Stormy Weather. That night they had the time of their lives playing the old timey piano music, making faces and making up silly lines like silent movie stars. The piano keyboard could be played without the rolls as well and Corrine sometimes liked to play some church music and get Glory and Noah to sing and so it was the women discovered that Noah had the gift of perfect pitch. The two women had known that Noah liked to sing and his voice was not spectacular, but the fact that he could accurately reproduce any tone or series of tones Corrine tapped out on the piano impressed them so much Glory decided that Noah should join a choir, maybe she would as well. Corrine said she'd stick to the piano because her vocal range spanned two notes, both of them middle C.

Glory went to see the priest who continued to look out for the ark behind his church but he said he could not organize a choir as his shifting congregation consisted mainly of homeless and transient individuals more interested in soup and shelter than music. He did write her a letter of introduction however and sent her to another part of town where a friend of his led a first rate choir called upon for all kinds of celebrations both religious and secular. Glory came to find out as she heard him challenged that her son could not only accurately reproduce any tone played for him but he could do that as high or as low as any singer in the choir having command of a full four octaves. Everyone was suitably impressed and made jokes about Noah making it big on Broadway and knowing him "when" and Noah would forever cherish the appreciation of those seasoned singers like he still cherished his peacock feather. Glory's own range was limited but she discovered that inserting one perfect low tone beneath the soloist's soaring soprano enriched the timbre and thrilled her soul with its perfection. She felt the harmonies they made as a complete physical sensation that made her weep with something she thought must surely be pure joy. It was a vibrating, shimmering feeling and she felt wholly loved and protected for the first time ever in her life. "So this," she thought, "is what it feels like to be 'saved,' lifted up above fear and sorrow and loneliness, engulfed in harmony."

1985 - 1995

Glory could feel her body winding down, her life energy draining out of her. It was not the same feeling as plain exhaustion. Her employer got her on a group insurance plan and she went to see a Doctor for the first time in her life, just in time to discover that it was cancer draining her life away and too late to save her. She didn't need to hear the "if only...we could have....you should have..." It did her no good to know they could have done something had they caught it earlier, that she should and could have been getting annual mammograms. Now she needed to consider how best to use the time she had remaining to her and how best to prepare her son for his impending loss. He was a forty year old man with the innocence of a six-year-old child.

About this time a new tenant came to live at Corrine's, a man with an interesting demeanor and a wonderful job. The man's name was Alexander Graham named for the inventor of the telephone and he liked to say his father who had the last name of Graham decided to name him Alexander because he could tell even then that his son would have the gift of gab. Some people called him AG or even Alexander Graham, nobody ever called him Alex. Alexander loved horses and took tourists on horse and buggy rides through the French Quarter and the Garden District. He was a busy man most of the time but when business was slow he would invite Glory and Corrine and Noah for a ride around the neighborhood. Lulled by the steady clip clop of the horses' hooves, Glory would doze hearing only bits and pieces of Alexander's stories but Noah would hang on every word. Sometimes Noah practiced repeating Alexander's stories; sometimes he practiced telling a few of his own. After all, he had seen a bit of the world himself.

Alexander Graham knew lots of stories about the rich and famous people of New Orleans, whether they lived there in the present or the past or had just passed through although Alexander once said nobody "just passed through" because each person who spent time in the city of New Orleans had its mark on them just as if they had lived there and then he'd said that really everyone was just passing through this life anyway and Corrine had given him a quick shushing look but Glory said "that's OK, we all know that I'm dying, do we all know that we are all dying?" and Noah wanting to change the subject asked Alexander if knew any stories about "ordinary" people:

"You know what I mean? poor people." To which Alexander said that poor people were not ordinary but be that as it may, yes he did know stories about poor people but most tourists who paid him for a buggy ride did not want to hear about poor people unless they had once been rich people. Alexander said tourists were always curious about rich people, rich and famous was better and the rich and famous who had lost all their wealth and died in poverty were the most interesting: "yes," he said, "death trumps them all for pure fascination," and Corrine gave him another look, but Glory was really not bothered by such references to the inevitable and she even became quite animated and contributed her own story about a woman in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia who was the young and beautiful second wife of a much older wealthy man who built her a castle. Then he lost all his money and died soon thereafter leaving her to live out the rest of her very long life in the chicken house where the new owners kindly let her stay. Glory said she wasn't sure if the story was true but when visitors paid to see the castle, their tour always ended out in the back where they could see the contrast in accommodations and be properly awed by the vicissitudes of time and fate.

Passing a beautiful mansion painted bright yellow and trimmed in gleaming white, Alexander said the home was given to an order of nuns who cared for grown children, people who could not care for themselves, one of them, the daughter of the family who had owned the mansion. Alexander tactfully said the young woman was "slow" and her parents had cared for her quite lovingly but after the mother died and then the housekeeper and the gardener, her father knew that before long his daughter would be alone and helpless so he deeded the house to the nuns to turn into a home for developmentally disabled adults and thus assured that his daughter would be well cared for. Then he died a peaceful death in the upstairs bedroom he had reserved for his remaining days and had a beautiful funeral procession up the street to the famous cemetery where all the movies scenes were filmed.

Noah asked what "developmentally disabled" meant and before Corrine or Glory could interject, Alexander told them something they would each cherish. He said they were people who were too innocent for a guilty world.

"Even the best intentioned among us have to learn a few tricks to make it in this world but some folks are too honest, too gentle and just can't so they need some help getting by."

Noah thought about this a lot. He knew he was considered "slow" but was wondering if he would be considered innocent.

One afternoon when Glory was feeling very low and even Alexander could not cheer her up Noah decided to share a story of his own.

"Did I tell you the story about the college professor and the one eyed calf?" Noah asked Glory.

"No," she smiled, happy to see him look so cheerful, for his anxiety over her was palpable.

"Well this was on one of them organic farms in West Virginia, maybe near where I was born but I didn't know it then of course"

"Of course," his mother echoed still smiling.

"I'd stopped there for a few months, helping out; I liked working on farms you know."

"Oh I know," she said, responding just enough to keep him going and not taxing her waning strength.

"Well, they had a lot of visitors from the city who wanted to see what this whole back to the land thing was all about and sometimes they would write articles about the farmers and one woman was writing a paper about the way they taught their children at home, stuff like that. So, this one professor came from some college in Virginia and he hung around kind of longer than anyone really wanted. He said he wanted to help but whenever anyone really needed him to do anything it was too early in the morning or he was out exploring. The only time anyone could rely on this guy to be around was at mealtimes and then he didn't even help clean up afterwards, said to one of the guys that cleaning up was women's work even though the women did all the men's jobs too."

"I hear that," said Corrine.

"Well, one day the professor told the farmer that he would go out and check the cattle, probably thinking that would be a good excuse for a walk in the woods. The cows were grazing all over the place. The farmer asked him if he would know what to look for and the professor said sure, how hard could it be, checking cattle. So the farmer invited him into the corral where he had this one calf and the farmer asked the professor what was wrong with the little guy. That professor he walked all around the calf, looked him over from one end to the other and up and down and found all kinds of things wrong with it that were, actually, just fine. After a while the farmer got tired of waiting on the right answer and pointed out that the calf had lost an eye. Well you can imagine there were a lot of jokes about the professor's own eyes after that. Folks said he was blinder than a one eyed calf and the women told him not to be afraid he'd be asked to do women's work because you needed eyes in the back of your head to do women's work which included keeping an eye out for the kids. Just when it looked like maybe he was tolerating all that teasing pretty well and might finally be accepted, someone got the idea to give him a nickname. I guess he did not know that being given a nickname was a good thing because when they started calling him Cyclops, he said he'd had enough and went back to the university and he never wrote nothing about the farm."

At first Glory laughed to please her sweet son and then she laughed harder because it just felt so good to be laughing and then she just could not stop laughing at all. All that laughing was contagious and Alexander began to laugh too and when Corrine joined in they were all laughing so hard they could barely draw breath for laughing. Then Noah told a lot of jokes he had heard from fellow travelers, some he was not even sure he understood, most of them he'd learned from an old guy who was hitchhiking back to New Mexico after having been gone most of his life. Glory wondered why anyone would leave such a beautiful place. She'd seen pictures in magazines of New Mexico and told Noah she had always wanted to go there and how she'd been trying to save some money to take Corrine and Noah both on a vacation to New Mexico. "Promise me," she asked him, "promise me, that someday you will go to New Mexico," so Noah, having no idea where New Mexico even was, said he would do that, he would surely do that.

Once, in the privacy of their room, Noah asked his mother if Corrine knew he was her son and Glory said yes that after telling Noah himself she told her story to Corrine and was glad because she learned then that her experience was not as unusual as she always thought it was and that comforted her somehow even though she felt bad for all the other young girls who had gone through the same betrayal.

Thinking about it made Noah remember a story he heard when he was traveling down through Alabama but he decided not to tell his mother for it seemed too horrible to repeat and when he remembered the story he did his best to forget it: listened to music or began singing to himself to drown out the image of it. It had been more than a decade since he'd heard about the terrible things but he still remembered it like it was just days ago. Noah had hidden the ark among some trees along a back road, a shortcut someone had recommended to him although to where he was not sure. The woods were softly beautiful in the dusk and enticing and wandering too far into them, he'd lost his sense of direction. He was not really bothered by this and began to look for a good place to make his bed for the night when he was startled by an old woman who appeared out of nowhere. She told him to be careful, that there were people hanging from the trees. Then she disappeared so quickly Noah wondered if he had imagined her. He never actually saw any people hanging from the trees but he dreamed of them, a multitude of bodies swinging from a multitude of branches, some by their broken necks, some upside down. All night long he heard the screech owls in the woods.

The next morning he headed back to the road to find the ark and resume the long walk toward New Orleans. But he walked in circles in the woods, unable to find the road and came instead to a large stone house on the side of a hill, a grand house really, with pillars out front. A family of women lived there, all beautiful, a mother and her five daughters. Noah knocked on the door to ask directions and discovered that he did not know the name of the road he was looking for and he stood there speechless and truly afraid for the first time because he did not want to lose the ark he had so carefully crafted and which contained his few possessions. The oldest daughter who answered the door assumed he was hungry and invited him inside to the kitchen. The mother fixed him some breakfast and asked him his business, realizing he was lost and afraid. They put him to work chopping firewood for the cook stove and he stayed several days with them, his harmlessness being apparent. At night he heard the screech owls. They sounded like women screaming in the night. He covered his head with a blanket even though the night was hot but still he heard the screaming.

It was the youngest daughter who told him about the people hanging from the trees and about the women screaming in the night in the woods behind the house. She told him that yes indeed there had been many hangings in the woods not that many years earlier and people would be afraid when they saw the victims and not report it.

"Lynchings" she called it, mostly men, mostly black men, but some white men who loved other men, sometimes a woman was hung after other tortures for transgressions that Noah could not understand. And, carried away with the horrors of the history of these woods in her own backyard, she then told him about the screaming in the woods behind the house, how every time she heard a screech owl she thought it was a woman screaming, how some years before, abortions were done in the backseats of cars in the woods with nothing to kill the pain and now it was just screech owls back there but sometimes, sometimes she thought maybe it was the ghosts of those women.

"I just know some of those girls went home and died, bled to death or died of infections, I just know it," she said and Noah sat quietly while she shook her head.

"If a woman wants to have one, she is going to have one so they may as well make it legal and safe and clean," she told Noah without batting an eyelash. When Noah asked what an abortion was, she became embarrassed trying to explain. She changed the subject, began talking about something else but Noah wasn't really listening, thinking hard about the women, about the screech owls, about the people hanging in the trees.

When a week had gone by, a man came to the door to deliver some groceries and he told the women about the strange thing parked up among some trees alongside the road, a beautiful canoe, utterly abandoned on a nifty set of big rubber wheels, with the name Noah's Ark painted on it. Noah cried out with joy and said it was his ark and that he had been trying to get to New Orleans. The man, Henry his name was, might have thought Noah was crazy but he believed him and certainly he'd seen crazier in his day. Henry drove Noah back in his pickup truck to the place where the ark was parked and they pitched it up into the bed of his truck, wheels and all. Henry drove Noah to the highway that would take him into New Orleans, where Noah forgot the nightmares of the Alabama woods until his sister-mother's sad story reminded him and then it would haunt him sometimes at night just as he'd been haunted in those woods.

Thinking about those poor women having babies cut out of them in the backseats of cars, afraid and bleeding, perhaps to death, Noah did not want to disturb his mother, herself dying, and so once again he buried the image in his mind by suddenly singing one of their choir songs. This delighted her and they sang together a while as if they were the two happiest people on earth. It was in that moment that Noah learned that happiness was not always a gift but the result of hard work and effort and that indeed he had been innocent.

Glory lived long enough to see the Christmas Eve fires on the levee. She had come to enjoy the haunting sight of it and it comforted her now that she knew her own material existence was coming to an end. Noah watched her face lit up by the flames in the night then lost again in shadow and he tried to comprehend it. Glory watched Noah watching her, trying to decide if he was ready yet then realizing it was not her decision. Glory let go then and trusted to something, maybe god, maybe nature, maybe something else she had no name for, that Noah would figure out a way to live with this loss. That is, after all what everyone must do sooner or later and usually often. Glory got ready to die that night in the wavering illuminations and shadows cast by celebratory fire.

The next day Corinne prepared a special breakfast but Glory only pretended to eat. Preparing herself to die, she wanted no food and very little water. She asked Noah questions about his travels, for it seemed his memories about his journey down from Maryland through West Virginia and Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama, were endless and he rarely repeated a story. Sometimes he just talked about sights and birdsongs and smells. Sometimes he got quiet as he remembered. That morning, he remembered sleeping on a beach in Biloxi and opening his eyes to see the shrimping boats in the distance. On each boat a huddled figure steered while a slender graceful boy stood at the prow, poised to cast the nets and when they cast them, the nets billowed out gossamer white, a dreamlike tracery against the sky that was gone in the space of a breath, and, remembering this, Noah caught his own breath and tried to find the words to make her see it, but Glory was gone.

Corrine took care of the cremation and the service and she tried to comfort Noah but she could not comfort Noah. He found that just looking at Corrine made him sad for she was a remnant of something torn asunder, a piece of something broken and useless: the family that had been himself and his mother and Corrine and was now just two lonely people who had lost what had connected them. That was how it felt to Noah though he did not have the words to tell her this and he could not bear to look at her much less attempt a conversation with her. At first Noah walked to Claiborne Ave. to find comfort among his old friends there. But they greeted him with the news that one among them had died and they had missed Noah at the funeral. He did not even have time to explain where he'd been and that his own mother had died. He listened to them talk about the fine funeral and he thought about his mother's quiet little service at that church that was his first home in the city, just the priest and Noah and Corrine, Alexander and a few ladies from the hair salon. Quiet it was, sad. He was still sad. He would always be sad. He could not imagine being anything but sad. Finally, when the others finished telling him all they could remember about the funeral he had missed, he tried to tell them his own story but he cried instead and ran off.

Noah started walking to the water, watching its oily darkness, the soft sound of it lapping up against the sides of boats. The moon glimmered on the water, a mother watching him, and he stared at it for hours mesmerized and soothed. Eventually he had to leave, go back home, he couldn't stay here forever watching the moon's reflection on the water...unless...he did nothing that first night by the water. He returned every night and stared at the moon until it had grown from a silver crescent to a large full round moon and it was simply too lovely to leave so he looked for a way into the water and finally jumped, shocked by the coldness of it, the breath knocked out of him and he let himself sink, stopped breathing even before he was completely under and passed out. He never heard the commotion of the old woman who had first seen him or saw Alexander who had been looking everywhere for him.

Noah awoke to the strong smell of ammonia and a large hospital building where he was wheeled around on a hospital bed for what seemed like hours and when he told one nurse after another that he had to get up and pee they ignored him or told him to hold on, no one seemed to know what to do with him until he got up and tried to find the bathroom on his own and about four of them came running. Noah actually laughed before he got dizzy and was glad to sink back down into a wheelchair. The hospital was a blur of days and nights and bright white lights until Corrine and Alexander came for him and took him home and he was embarrassed and ashamed and refused to speak.

For several weeks, Noah hardly spoke, barely ate, did not go outside at all and Corrine and Alexander were quite beside themselves with worry and frustration. No one knew how old Corrine was and to the little family of tenants who had gathered at her house she seemed ageless, eternal, but she was in fact quite an old woman by the time Glory died her own untimely death and feeling helpless to care properly for Glory's son and after due deliberation with Alexander, she decided that Noah himself might be better off living at the yellow house. Noah went meekly enough, followed the nuns to his own room which was actually quite nice with a lovely view of the neighbor's garden, learned where to find the bathroom and the dining room and turned off his light when told. Corrine and Alexander came often to visit and Noah tried to be polite and respond to their conversation but in truth he wished he could just fade away. After a while Corrine stopped coming to see him and Noah felt guilty that he had disappointed her. Alexander came a few times alone and for the first time in his life seemed to be at a total loss for words. The priest, who had befriended Noah when he first came to town, came a few times and then at last to say goodbye as he was leaving for Guatemala. He told Noah that he would be sure to tell the new priest to take care of Noah's ark for him in case he ever needed it. Then years passed when no one came to see him and Noah did not care.

1995 - 2005

It was a day of magpies. They were everywhere, several dozen of them at least, each choosing his own treetop on which to settle and then without a sound (unusual for magpies) they would swoop down from their respective treetops to convene somewhere on the ground beyond the scope of Noah's window. He would see them in the sky or their shadows on his wall flying through the air one at a time or in groups of three or four and then gone and then back all day, teasing Noah with their freedom. He noticed the puppy in the fenced garden below also watching the birds and Noah decided he had to figure out a plan, a way to escape and walk to the ocean, run on the beach and watch gulls. Sometime gulls flew with the magpies or fought with them in raucous cries and shrieks, each laying claim to endless sky as high and as far and as wide as Noah's eye could see.

He needed to get out and he'd get the puppy out as well to be his companion for Noah was tired of loneliness and silence. Together they would go find the ark. It had been blessed and protected by the priest, it could not have been destroyed or stolen, of this he felt certain. Calm now he had the beginning of a plan, the resolve was his beginning and he slept and rested and stored up his strength, dormant for a decade.

The puppy had been a Christmas present to a little boy who had lived next door, at least that is what Noah guessed because the child brought the puppy into the yard adjacent to the home's yard on Christmas morning to play with him and Noah, watching, saw that there was a bright red ribbon around the puppy's neck. Noah watched for a while from his window feeling lonely and sad and missing his mother and Corrine's beignets until someone came to get him. He walked silently to the dining room to share a Christmas noon meal with the other residents who had no relatives to take them home on a day pass.

Sometimes staff members offered to take him to their homes but he had refused to go just as he refused to speak or eat food that did not interest him or play ballgames in the yard. What Noah did was watch. He watched the moon rise at night and fade in the morning. He watched lonely people walk down the street and listened to their footsteps feeling the rhythm of walking. Sometimes he whispered words to himself: Terpsichore, Plumbago, the sound and the feel of the words bringing back images to his mind, memories so vivid they seemed to be happening all over again. He watched the puppy grow bigger and the boy go away with his young single mother and the grandmother tie the playful puppy in the yard, bring him food, bring him water, but never play with him or talk to him or walk him out in the wide world of wonderful smells and sights and sounds.

Noah watched the poor dog pull at his rope and bark hopefully and finally wind down to a whine and a whimper when he realized the tired old grandmother didn't hear him or didn't care. All day and half the night, day after day and night after night, Noah's heart broke for the dog's loneliness and for his own and then Noah would speak, whispering words of sympathy to the dog and after a while the dog began to watch back, staring at the light in Noah's window the way Noah stared at the moon, until Noah was told to turn out his light and go to sleep. It seemed then that the dog slept as well and he stopped barking and whining and just watched the window and seemed to hear the whispered words. On the day of the magpies, the dog was ready.

It was easier than Noah thought it would be and a good thing for him that it was, for the story he had concocted in case he ran into any of the nuns on his way out, was not at all credible and he knew it. As it happened he simply walked out the door when the front desk receptionist had taken a brief bathroom break and no one noticed. Later when the floor night nurse had called lights out and Noah's light was already out, no one noticed that he was missing so used were they to his staying inside his room. He was not discovered to be missing until breakfast and by then Noah and the puppy were both long gone.

Noah took the rope used to tie the puppy to use as a leash but he never really needed it as the puppy whom he now named Cory after the woman he was seeking, stuck close to his heels as they walked all over town. They went first to locate the ark which they found miraculously unmoved from the church lot and even protected from the elements by a large tarp that had been tied down over and around it with great care. The plan was then to go to Corrine's place but Noah was a middle aged man now unused to the long walks of his youth. He counted on his fingers the birthdays that had passed in the home and realized with astonishment that he was an old man. He was fifty years old now but he didn't feel it because he had lost a full decade of life experience, all his memories of the home blended into one memory of the monotonous routine. He hoped that his legs would feel better after a good night's sleep in the open and that he could soon begin once more to explore his world.

Noah untied the ropes that bound the tarp that protected his ark and Cory pulled the ends of the ropes away, helping and endearing himself even more to the man. Inside the ark were posts like tent posts that fit into little pockets sewn into the corners of the tarp. Noah thought that the priest had left this convenient tent for him and was grateful and set it all up with a patience that was partly the sheer joy of making something with his hands again, simple though the task was. He shared the bread he had taken from the home with Cory and they snuggled up together to sleep.

The moon was at its zenith when the old street woman returned to her home and found it invaded by a sleeping man and a dog. Cory was the first to wake and barked protectively over Noah who then woke up fuzzy and not sure where he was or when or who. Confused as he was, Noah recognized the tarot reader who had already been so old when he had first encountered her twenty years earlier it did not seem possible she could have aged even more. She was skin and bone and leathery, a walking artifact of her own history. "I know you" said Noah and "you'd damn well better" she said back and then she asked what he was doing in her shelter.

Noah heard a squawking sound behind her, a string of curses and questions so fast his ears could not keep up with them. Turned out to be Pedro, Cassandra's parrot, her companion of several decades, and once she recognized the young man who had asked if there was going to be a woman in his life, the same one who's life she saved although he did not know it and she would not tell him as it would have been impolite to make him feel obligated, she relaxed and told him her story and the parrot told his, the two interrupting each other so often that Noah was confused about who was who. The woman had some food and shared it with Noah and his puppy who were both hungry again and they made a party of it in the tent, talking until dawn.

The next day, Cassandra and Pedro took Noah into the church to meet the new priest who took seriously his instructions from his predecessor to be a friend to the down and out and homeless of the city. Father Francis did not interfere too much with the lives of his transient parishioners but stood ready to be their safety net. Then Cassandra and Pedro followed Noah and Cory to the old boarding house he'd called home years earlier. He thought about what he would say to Corrine, how to explain this long absence, feeling ashamed now for having left her. But when they arrived at the correct address the place looked different, all spruced up with an open entry hall and a reception desk. And it had a colorful sign advertising itself as a Bed & Breakfast in fancy Victorian calligraphy. The man behind the desk was quite charming and asked what he could do for the little group. Since Noah was speechless, Pedro spoke up to the amusement of the man who called his partner to come and see the brilliant parrot. The two men were from New York, refugees from the world of publishing, who decided they wanted to change their lives and had bought the place from the bank. They knew nothing of Corrine or Alexander and so could not tell Noah that she had died in peace and comfort surrounded by a ragtag crew of tenants who looked to her as to a mother, forming a strange but affectionate little family around her. By the time the bank foreclosed and sold the property to the men from New York, all the tenants had dispersed about the city to seek odd jobs and random companionship where best they could.

Sometimes when no one came by to have their future foretold in the cards, Cassandra would entertain Pedro and Noah by making up stories about the people who passed by. She was very good at this, having a seemingly endless supply of plots in which to cast these unwitting characters. One day a little boy, about five, came over to Cassandra and it was apparent he had been eavesdropping for he said quite simply:

"Hello lady, my name is Steven and I wish you would make up a story about me." It was dusk and midsummer so rather late already. Cassandra told him she didn't need to make up a story about him because she was a seer and could tell him his real story. Then she asked him if his mother always sent him out in the evenings about this time and he said yes she did and that the last time he had not gone back home because the new man his mother was with was drunk and nasty and he was afraid of him. "Happens a lot," Cassandra said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone of voice and then she did not tell him he had to go back home and she did not call social services or the police. She invited little Steven to live with them in their tent where they had a nifty bed in a canoe as well as the more usual mattresses. Steven was quite excited to sleep in a canoe and he went with them. No one ever came looking for him.

Cassandra often talked in her sleep. It seemed she heard the voices of children and she was trying to get to them, to help them, her babies she called them. This happened before they found Steven but more often afterwards. Steven would wake up then and go to her and stroke her head and call her mama until she fell into a deeper more peaceful sleep, sometimes reaching for and holding the little hand that stroked her hair. And that boy, sweet child that he was, he would sit up half the night to let her hold his hand.

"She wasn't always nutty as a fruitcake you know," Pedro whispered one night in Noah's ear. Cassandra was snoring loudly. The child had slipped his hand from her grasp and slept as though dead. Sometimes when he slept that soundly, they checked to see if he was breathing. Noah had been half asleep himself but he grunted a little in response to Pedro's invitation to gossip. Once started of course Pedro could handle both sides of any conversation.

"When she first came to town, she was broke and found a job cleaning rooms in a hotel in the Quarter, where I was kept caged in the lobby as a kind of tourist attraction. The managers gave her a little room in the basement and at night when neither one of us could sleep, she would come upstairs and read to me. On her day off she would go to the library and check out as many books as she could carry and she read every word of every page of every book to me. Said she used to read to her children and she missed them. She was just waiting for me to ask so she could talk about it, the sadness of leaving them. I guess her old man was some kind of rich and powerful person in Washington D.C and he didn't treat her well at all, no, not at all. She didn't say much about it but you gotta figure it must have been awful for a woman to leave her children behind. You know he was bad because she told me once that she was afraid he would kill them all if she tried to leave with the kids, two daughters turns out, I saw their photos. She still has them hidden away somewhere but doesn't remember or won't remember. She tried to call them but he wouldn't let them come to the phone and once she tried to write to them without letting on where she was. She took a bus all day so she could post those letters from a faraway town. Then the letters came back unopened and stuck in a larger envelope with a note that said they didn't need her anymore and a photo of the man with a woman looked to be a little older than he was and the two girls, beautiful girls, but eyes so sad it made me cry just to look at that photo, and I'm a bird, so you can imagine what it did to her. The envelope was addressed to the hotel so obviously he knew where she had ended up. That broke her, poor thing, and she started talking crazy soon afterwards. She still read to me, those were the only times she sounded sane, reading words on a page, but just let her try to converse about her own thoughts and the craziness was evident. She started going out a lot too, roaming the streets and sometimes she'd get all dressed up in some fancy clothes she found left in the hotel rooms. Amazing how many people forget things. That was what got her fired actually, accused of stealing an evening dress. Maybe she did, maybe she lied to me about the guests forgetting their clothes because she was ashamed. Anyway, they fired her and she left with her pitiful little bag of salvaged stuff and she thought to open my cage and set me free so I followed my poor crazy lady. The fortune telling was my idea and I think she's done pretty well with it, all things considered. We've lived mostly on the street since then but sometimes someone comes back all excited because some good thing she predicted came true and we get a little bonus, sometimes we even stay in a hotel ourselves, as guests, with room service. If I've told her once, I've told her a hundred times, we've got to make the most of the moment whenever we can."

Noah tried to listen politely to all this but he was so tired and his eyes finally closed. He didn't wake up until the sun was high and Cassandra and Pedro had gone to Jackson Square to find lonely tourists who wanted to know when love would find them. When they returned Pedro had hustled up a job for Noah at a bar that looked to be boarded up and closed but actually catered to a few neighborhood drunks and the owner said she could use a dishwasher. He didn't have to come in until noon so he had time to watch the sunrise, go visit the old men on Claiborne Ave. and explore the city.

As winter approached Father Francis invited them all into the church basement where they had responsibilities and made themselves useful. When Steven grew too big to be wandering around the streets on school days it was Father Francis who made arrangements so Steven could go to school while continuing to live at the church with his friends. Once again, Noah had found a safe haven and he embarked upon his new life with contentment and even some joy. His period of loneliness and despair was over and for that he was daily thankful to god in case god really existed, and certainly to that servant of god, Father Francis, but mostly to Cory and Cassandra and Pedro and Steven for being his family. The years went by as they should, punctuated with the predictable variety of seasons and celebrations, and the occasional surprise of unforeseen events sometimes frightening, sometimes marvelous.

As so often happens in life, no sooner had Noah stopped looking for or even thinking about his old friends than Alexander Graham found Noah. He was taking his horse and carriage home for the night after a day of entertaining tourists when he saw a strange little group that caused him to look twice. He recognized Cassandra who had long ago been reading palms in the same parts of town that Alexander told his stories and drove his carriage. He thought he recognized Noah but seeing him out on the street and together with Cassandra, a growing boy and a dog, took him by surprise. When he realized they were not merely a vision he called out to them and offered them a ride which they accepted with excitement. Alexander, with some embarrassment and many apologies, explained to Noah that after Corrine died ("oh you didn't know? I'm sorry I should have come by to tell you, I'm sorry for that") he had returned to his birthplace in Kentucky, thinking that he and his old horse were ready for retirement. He had intended to come to the home to say goodbye to Noah but the rodeo cowboy who was going to give him a ride and trailer the horse behind them decided to leave rather suddenly (to avoid some trouble brewing Alexander guessed) and Alexander found himself in a bit of a rush if he wanted the ride. He'd only been back in town, plying his old trade with a new horse for a couple of years and thought often of Noah but, well, one knows how it is, life happens while you are making other plans, time flies when you are having fun and even when you aren't and so on and so forth. Noah didn't mind, he was just happy to see Alexander after all these years, what was it? Eight? Nine? Surely not ten? And asked him if he had any new stories of the rich and famous or poor and infamous as he remembered Alexander had often liked to quip. Alexander laughed but did not in fact entertain his friends with new stories. Instead he launched into a series of gloomy speculations about the future of civilization to be brought about by the current obsession with computers and what he called with an unmistakable sneer "virtual reality" whereafter he surmised that our lives were nothing more than a game in some super sized computer . . . . "or perhaps not so super sized but it just seemed so to us because we are really microscopic." Noah and Cassandra just looked at each other with some disappointment and Steven appeared to be dozing. Alexander's talk ended as they entered the stable and they parted ways saying perhaps they should meet again for coffee but it seemed to Noah that would not likely happen and his premonition that he'd seen the last of his old friend turned out to be true.

Alexander Graham had enjoyed recreating a part of New Orleans history with his old fashioned horse and carriage but now he felt like he was the anachronism with no place in a new world. This depressing thought was bad for his mood and bad for business and it would not be long before he retired once again, and this time permanently, to that small town in Kentucky, the name he had forgotten to mention. Or maybe he had just made it up and had really just moved (and would again) to another part of town. Noah felt the last vestige of an old life blowing away in the evening breeze and it made him a little sad but he had learned to move on and to cherish his memories more than he regretted his losses.

There had been a rhythm to Noah's life and he could feel that yet another era had ended and a new one was about to begin. Thinking back on all the places he'd been and what he'd done, he realized he'd never used the ark for its intended purpose and he began to dream again of water rising. Steven was surprised when Noah took his bed out from under him and began to inspect it carefully, checking for leaks, checking its skin and sturdiness, even removing the oars from their storage places on the insides of the canoe and taking it for a few test rides in the river. Steven went with him. Cassandra finally did as well. When the flood did come as Noah always knew it would, he was ready.

2005-2007

An Old New Mexico Widow

"The wind made sounds like footsteps in the house, not random like wind but purposeful like death. At first I thought it was mine, I think about death a lot in the night. I play solitaire by the fire to stay away from the cold in the back bedroom and the constant sense I have of that presence that I know is death. I used to read cards, the tarot, but always they came up death so I got one of the decks my husband used to play poker with and now I play solitaire, sometimes I cheat. I've been doing this for twenty years now, twenty years a widow and twenty years waiting. And then a few nights ago, or maybe weeks, ah hell, maybe months, I've lost track, he knocked, the strange man with the old woman and the little boy and the dog and this parrot who seems to have taken a shine to me. The house is crowded with these travelers, the back bedroom is hot now with the body heat of the boy and the man and the dog and the old woman is sitting across the card table from me, like me she sleeps sitting up, afraid to suffocate if she lies down. The parrot, well that parrot never sleeps at all that I can tell.

They walked all the way from New Orleans, saw that flood coming and he, that man who's name is Noah as it happens, funny thing that is, well he had this canoe that he called an ark he'd been trailing around after him for forty years to hear him tell it and I believe him, why not? All the time I was watching the news about the flood on the television set, he was paddling up this street and down another rescuing folks with their beloved dogs and cats and caged birds who'd forgotten how to fly. They had some stories to tell about the flood and then later the hard times in the city: swarms of mosquitoes and rats coming out from everywhere, gangs of boys with machetes, a man watching them walk down the street with a shotgun and a large dog, just watching. He was afraid of course and so were they, the strange little crew. Why they decided to come out here, I'm not sure but decide they did. They marched along the roads still dragging that canoe and now it's out front in the yard all decked out for Christmas, boughs and wreaths and candelarias, and those little carved statues my husband bought me in Santa Fe back in the days you could still buy things in Santa Fe. All the Mexicans around here come by on Sunday after church to look at it like its some kind of shrine. They'd rigged it up so the man and the boy each carried an end of it with some tarps over top to make a kind of movable tent to protect the old woman from the rain and the hot sun and she sat on a seat they'd contrived to attach to the wheels meant for the canoe. She held onto some belts that were attached to Noah's waist so he was dragging the woman on her seat and carrying the canoe like a tent overtop with the boy bringing up the rear and the dog prancing on ahead and that parrot flying around in circles to report back whatever news he thought they needed to know about the road ahead of them. They looked like a circus menagerie coming up the road and I heard about them long before they knocked on my door.

I heard the story from her, the boy, the parrot, only the man, Noah, was quiet. They were all excited, traumatized really after seeing a man shot in Texas or thinking they saw a man shot in Texas. To hear them tell it, they hightailed it straight for the border as soon as they could. He had a thing about New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, everyone comes here with illusions, it's just a place, full of people who are just people. I'll never forget the commotion of that night, the boy and the woman and the parrot all telling different parts of the same story.

"Pedro!" (that would be the kid yelling at him, telling him to shut up, which he sometimes does when he just can't stand it anymore) "Hey Pedro pendejo, you birdbrain" (the kid calls him that all the time, but of course between friends it's a term of endearment) . . . . ." Pedro we are fast approaching a remote farmhouse in Texas and we have no idea what kind of folks are in there or what they might be up to: starving maybe and dreaming about parrot soup, you never know, so SHUT UP!"

That would have been when the shot rang out. They'd have been pretty alarmed by that unless they thought it was a truck backfiring. Truth is, I can't tell the difference myself and both those events occur with a fair amount of frequency in these parts. Well, I can just see them, everyone all of a sudden real quiet and trying to turn slowly and quietly back in their tracks when they hear the big beefy guy yelling "HEY YOU" and them pretending they didn't hear and trying to be invisible and walk away and the voice yelling again "Hey you folks with the canoe and the parrot" and there was just no mistaking who he was yelling at then, their game was up, their cat was out of the bag, their goose was cooked, they were beyond the point of no return and they were up shit creek without a paddle. That voice was a cop who wanted to see their identification cards and of course they had none. Over there in Texas those people just go crazy thinking swarms of Mexicans are coming over the border illegally. Legally, schmegally, who cares? Didn't useta matter but now the poor bastards got more than river water wetting their backs, blood, its blood, no joke, they're killing people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and having no papers. Every time the government has something to hide, they make people afraid of the Mexicans, always blame the Mexican. I was married to one so I know, lived with it for years. Well of course my guests had no papers, homeless folk that they were, but heroic too. That quiet man with his crazy little boat out rescuing those poor souls caught in the flood in New Orleans. I still can't get over it, while I was watching it all on television, he was out there, a wonder I missed him. The boy told the cop about it, that boy is a sweet talker; no doubt about it and the cop must have figured he'd do himself no good gunning down a retarded man, a crazy old woman with a talking parrot and a boy with a dog. Must a ruined his day. They wanted to ask about the shot, the parrot saw the body and the dog had actually run into the bushes and was sniffing around it. But Steven said he had more sense than to let on they knew anything and he only heard later from Pedro that the man was lying face down with a bullet in the back of his head and bullet holes going through both hands as though he'd been holding them behind his head. They were just glad the man with the badge let them leave. When they were all talked out and I could get a word in edgewise I just said "welcome to the west" and they've been here ever since."

Cassandra

"Everything happened like a dream or some vision I sometimes have of the future but now I remember it is the past. The waters rising, you keep thinking there must be some end to it, it cannot keep rising like that but it did and we ran for the canoe and It's a good thing Steven is so small and Noah so thin because that little slip of a canoe was not meant to carry so many of us, call it what you like, its no ark, not really. But it was miraculous that day how it held us all and we paddled until Noah could put us someplace for safe keeping while he paddled back into the midst of it and Pedro flew overhead calling him here and there to rescue people he could see sitting on their roof tops or struggling in the water and Noah always brought them back to where we were waiting and I would be amazed sometimes at how many folks he did fit into that canoe. One time he came back with a woman must have been three hundred pounds but the canoe held her, it was a miracle. Noah did this rescue thing until it got dark and then someone found him a lantern and he set it up at one end of the canoe and it was magical how he slipped smooth as silk through that dark night, the lantern sending a shimmer of light out onto the water like a sign. Pedro went on finding folks who needed rescuing and we all wandered around talking to those folks he let off about their plans and people were saying Noah was an angel sent by god and that they would never forget him.

And then it was over, for us anyway. All kinds of people starting arriving: volunteers to help, journalists to report the news, insurance adjusters to assess the damage. No one needed us, we didn't want to be interviewed, we were just in the way. And then the street gangs went wild looking for easy pickings and easy prey. We walked around our old neighborhood but it didn't feel like a home anymore: some people were barricaded behind gates with guns and everywhere you looked you could see eyes peaking out of windows from behind curtains or shutters. Where the flood hadn't caused damage the winds had and the rubble in the streets made it look like a bombed out neighborhood in one of those countries you see on television news shows at the local bars. Noah told us he'd promised his mother when she was dying that he would see New Mexico one day although he didn't explain why that was important and we didn't have any other better ideas so we set off on what turned out to be an extremely long walk, Noah's last and longest but the first really long walk for the rest of us. I had this thought then that god really did want to destroy mankind because of all the evil, just like in the biblical flood and that our own Noah Brown was a biblical character, good enough to be saved and strong enough to save us. Of course in the end it won't be god that destroys mankind but mankind that destroys its own sources of essential nurturance: just like Midas who wished that everything he touched would turn to gold and then starved to death (or should have, now I can't remember how that story ends, maybe he repented and got to touch food and eat again).

Crossing Texas was as surreal a trip as any journey through the tarot, through dream, or memory could ever be. We met the priestess who ran a truck stop café and took us in and warned us about all kinds of strange goings on in the land, and gave us each a talisman for our safe passage: to me she gave a charm from a child's bracelet, interestingly a little golden boat, to Noah a red plastic chili pepper on a green string and to Steven a rabbit foot on a key chain that made him sad thinking about the poor rabbit but she told him it would bring him luck, luck indeed, that child was his own luck. Then she fed us in the front and took us back to a little apartment and locked us in which freaked us out but we decided to trust her and in the morning she let us back out and fed us huevos rancheros and chorizo and we ate ourselves sick.

Most of the knights in this land drove beat up old trucks but there was a small band of cowboys on horseback, one of them for each of us and they hoisted each of us: Noah, Steven, and me behind their saddles, put Cory in front of one of them and pulled the canoe on its inflatable rubber wheels across the land, galloping to beat the wind and I thought I was young again. They took us to a ranch where an old man sat on his porch and watched his sons and grandsons drive old cars around the mud yard packed as dry and hard as concrete, putting parts from one into another. From this collection of wrecks they were building a chariot while the old grandpa planned a journey, going to town to carouse and get drunk most likely.

They carried us far away and then let us down in the middle of nowhere and said "this is as far as we go" and they pointed us down a road that looked like it had no end and all we had was that canoe to give us shelter from the sun if we turned it upside down and wriggled under it but Pedro thought he saw a homestead in the distance and urged us on, yakkety yakking all the way.

As we got closer I saw a man walking in front of another man who had a gun aimed at him. The man in front had his hands held up and behind his head but I was hot and tired and not at all sure that I wasn't dreaming. Later Steven told me he'd seen the same thing. Noah never did say anything about it, but became so sad for so long that I am sure he must have. Then we all heard the shot and decided we were headed in the wrong direction. The land was flat, not a single vertical thing on that vast horizontal horizon, no way could we suddenly become invisible, no matter what direction we moved in or even if we stood as still as we could and closed our eyes and pretended that whoever we couldn't see couldn't see us, no, that was just not going to work. The shooter saw us and called out to us and we had to wait while he approached and introduced himself as a man of the law. I didn't mock him, not while he had that gun hanging down so loose and casual by his side, like it just sort of grew out of his arm.

He was downright friendly, as if he hadn't just killed a man, maybe two, maybe more than that before we happened on the scene. We couldn't actually see the body although Cory seemed very interested in something in the brush. Steven called Cory back who obeyed rather reluctantly and also responded to the man who requested to see some kind of picture ID: he could tell we had no need of drivers' licenses and I'm sure we didn't look like the kind of people who take their birth certificates with them whenever they go out. Hell, we must have looked like what we were: homeless people for whom "out" is home. So Steven started in to talking, telling the fellow about the flood which of course he knew all about, the caravans of trucks with aid still passing us on the endless roads. And my smart boy pointed out that the weird tent thing over my head was in fact an upside down canoe and when he talked about Noah saving all those people back in New Orleans, the guy just laughed his head off and told us to go on, just go on. He didn't even have to tell us not to say anything about what we'd seen; he realized no one would listen to such as us.

After that we got a lot of rides in semis. Those truck drivers wanted the company and didn't mind Pedro running off at the mouth. I 'd warned him not to mention anything about what we'd seen on the farm and he stuck to parrot talk to amuse the truckers, Steven slept like the dead and Noah just watched everything as if he was in shock.. They all wanted to get their futures told of course and I told them all romantic nonsense to keep them happy. Some things never change. The married men wanted to know if their wives were cheating and I always told them hell no, their wives loved them more than they let on and the single guys wanted to know if they would find a beautiful woman who would love them more than life itself as if they deserved this sort of devotion. Of course I always said they certainly would, probably somewhere in New Mexico and sure enough one fellow was fool enough to go out of his way to take us to New Mexico just on the off chance he would meet the love of his life over there. We ended up in a little town just off the interstate called Maxwell named for some thief who was a governor of New Mexico territory and used his authority to steal a lot of land from the Mexicans.

The land is truly beautiful. We just walked around and considered what door to knock on and I, being the seer, chose one. There were exquisite roses growing by the front door so I took that as a sign. It was a good one. The woman who lived there had been a widow for too long and was glad for our company. Ironic that she was playing with a deck of cards when we knocked on her door and when she heard where we'd come from, she invited us to stay with her right then and there. She fed us and put us to bed and we all slept like the dead until the sun woke us up and we watched the mountains on the horizon emerge in the dawn.

I'd never seen mountains like those, in the morning they were so shrouded in mist and cloud I thought I only imagined their contours in the sky but later they would emerge as if marching from a great distance. Some mornings I'd see stars everywhere and knew we'd have clear skies but those mountains made their own weather creating their own cloud cover. On windy days when the trees down here blew about drawing a dance of black lines against a blue background, those mountains wore a halo of blowing snow and if you watched carefully sometimes you'd catch a whirlwind of bright snow lift up from a dark mountain crater and linger in the sky before being absorbed into those permanent clouds. It all moved, the trees, the clouds, the mountains. I lost my interest in the future. I made one last prediction at the request of our hostess because of course I could not turn her down. She wanted to know when she would die and I could tell she had been obsessed with this question for a long time. The first card to come up was the Hanged Man and the first person to speak was Noah. "Oh my" he said "I remember now the people hanging in the trees" and he looked frightened. I knew then, just a gut thing, a true premonition that had nothing to do with the cards, that Noah would be the next to die and soon.

He was too gentle for this world and the world continued to play out its cruel plan all around us. Sheltered though we were in that kind woman's house, we were more aware of wars and disasters and tragedies than we had been on the street or the shelter of the church basement. The television, it brought all that bad news into our house and our hearts. That is when I remembered what it was drove me to the street in the first place. I'd forgotten the big house and the fancy quiet car like a hearse and how I felt like a corpse myself riding it in it with my cruel husband at the wheel. He had run over a cat, someone's beloved pet no doubt. I'd seen it and said nothing knowing he wouldn't stop, wouldn't care, would only say vicious things to me.

I left the next day, left that car in traffic and walked to the ATM and got out what cash I could and took the first bus out of Washington D.C. and ended up in New Orleans. I remembered all that before my mind closed the curtain on other memories that would hurt too much. I remember his name still because sometimes it would rise to my lips like a curse whenever something bad happened. It took my breath away all that remembering and when I looked up the woman was watching me, waiting for her answer. "You will live to be a hundred" I told her wanting her to forget about death for a while. Then Noah walked outside and I told her about him. "Don't try to protect him" I told her because I knew the poor man was ready and that he had always walked to his destiny with a willing and innocent heart like Isaac with Abraham to the mountain. I knew he would die in those mountains and be carried with them on their march through time."

Noah

"I used to like to tell my mother stories about my travels but after she died I stopped talking. I don't remember much anymore. I got old in an old house all by myself but surrounded by people who didn't talk to me and I didn't talk to them either. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe I should have talked first. Then I left with my dog and Cassandra found us. She had the parrot. He talks constantly but sometimes I think Cassandra is one of those people who can talk without moving their lips and they go on television with a doll on their lap and have conversations with it but they are really doing all the talking; that is what I sometimes think. They were my friends, so was Father Francis, and then Steven came and joined us. We have been like a family, all these years, as long as I lived with my mother in New Orleans I lived alone in that house and then again that is how long I lived with this new family. Time is a strange thing. I do not understand it at all. I cannot believe I am so old. Maybe 60 years is not so old but it seems old to me. I feel like I am still a child and wonder how I got to be this old. Cassandra is even older and I think she always was old and will live forever although I know everyone must die sooner or later. I still like to sing songs quietly when no one can hear, like in a whisper and I still like to make up poems that I say to myself. Now I remember that I had friends on a street under a highway and those men seemed so old to me then but I know they were only as old as I am now. They treated me nicely, I remember that. But something happened I don't remember what. I only remember my mother died, and she was never old, she was always young, and then I was alone in that house and Corrine was gone and Alexander. I saw Alexander not that long ago but then he disappeared again and I am thinking he must have died, he must have been older than I realized. When I remember those people, I feel like I am seeing someone else, not me. I remember another old man named Bob and he helped me build my ark. I remember him like yesterday. I have a peacock feather and I remember the girl who gave it to me and why and I remember that I was once a very young man but I can't feel the connection: it is more like seeing a movie on television than remembering my own life. Childhood, I don't remember it much at all, just that I walked a lot. I loved walking. I was always happy walking. Sometimes people in the town would stop and ask me where I was going and if I wanted a ride but wherever I was going, it was just an excuse to be walking. I walked all over the town and sometimes in the woods around the town and then one day I walked into the woods and along the highway and away from the town and it felt like I could walk forever and I did walk for a long time, for years, and then I got to the city on the sea and stayed there a very long time. I would have walked again after my mother died but I was in the big yellow house and they wouldn't let me leave. They trapped me with kindness, those nuns, even though I refused to speak to them. I don't know why I didn't walk out sooner but that is what I finally did, I walked out and I had a life in the city but a completely different life than the one I'd had before. There were adventures, like saving all those people in my ark when the flood finally came. I'd been waiting for that flood for years and I was glad it didn't come while I was still trapped in that house with the nuns. I was glad I was out and could use the ark to save a lot of people. They all thanked me; some of them cried and hugged me. Of course I saved them. That was what I was supposed to do when the flood came. But then we all took a very long walk to get here and on the way we saw a man kill another man and I was not able to do anything and had nothing to say. It was too late. The man was dead. I felt sad for him. I knew about killing. You can't live very long and not know about killing but I'd never seen a man killed right in front of me, even though it was far away, I knew what I saw. That was terrible. That was part of this life I am in now. I feel like I've had so many different lives and sometimes I remember them and sometimes they don't seem like my own. Sometimes it seems like I have too many memories and I have to let some of them go and now, here is what I am thinking: I am thinking that it is time to go, to be done with these lives. I have one more walk I want to take, a walk into the mountains. The mountains here are so beautiful and I have been walking in them all this past year, in the snow, in the rain, even when there is thunder and lightening and everyone warns me that it is dangerous to be up there but still I walk in them and even in the hot sun which is closer to the earth here and hotter than other places. I love to walk in the mountains and when I am down here in the house I look out the window and watch them move in and out of the clouds and mists like magic. People talk to me but I don't talk anymore, I am thinking about the mountains and how much I want to be in them, not just for a few hours but forever. I know that Cassandra will understand, she is a seer and understands everything even the future. And Steven is grown up now and can take of himself and everyone else. He talks all the time about school and going to college, someone at the school is going to help him to get to college. He reads and writes all the time. And Cory is so old, I know Cory can't live much longer and I remember, this I do remember like it really was me and was just yesterday, I remember how I felt when my mother died and I don't want to feel that again when Cory dies. I'll leave Cory with Steven and Cassandra and walk into the mountains. I've been so many places and the only place I want to be now is in those mountains, right near the sky, the snow, the thunder and lightening and the hot sun."

The Widow

"Christmas 2006 was beautiful. There was more snow than had been seen in years. Storms, power outages, roads closed, and people complained, but I loved it. Wind was blowing the snow about in the mountains so the peaks disappeared into the mist of the blowing snow, melted into the clouds, the clouds looked like mountains, mountains as high as the eye could see, all white and soft gray shadow and endlessness as though there were no such thing as death at all. I felt exhilarated and everyone was happy, happy to be warm and dry with wood on the fire and food warm in the oven. We all ate all day long and had company. People came by and talked and left and others came, all my neighbors, my husband's nieces and nephews and I didn't care that they all spoke Spanish among themselves, serves me right I guess for never learning it but I didn't care, the house was full and when at last all the visitors had gone home and it was dark I still had my houseguests, my family now, our second Christmas together. I could hear the boy, growing up so fast, but still a child, trying to coax some food into the dog in the yard, poor old dog, and Noah snoring on the sofa with the television on, the parrot repeating jokes in Spanish, a new challenge I guess and old Cassandra and I played cards, gin rummy like my grandmother taught me. I'm a tough gin rummy player, she didn't have a chance, won three games to my thirteen "like life" she said "you win some, you lose a lot" and we both laughed. I let her tell my future then with my beautiful tarot deck that I'd put away so long ago. It came up death again but not for us. She said she and I would live to be a hundred and since our birthdays are within a couple weeks of each other that makes it convenient: as only one of us will have to be left alone and then not for long. Yes I believed her, why not?

And I believed her about Noah, that he would find his rest before the year was out and not to mind because he was ready. Sure enough, he went out walking one last time a couple days later into the snow covered mountains. The boy wanted to take the dog and go look for him but Cassandra said only if the Sheriff went too. We gave him his time, time to find his resting place and then when enough time passed and he had not returned and we knew we were right, we called the Sheriff and the volunteer medics went also, searching, but in the snow they could not find his body and probably won't until spring, if even then. But I, I dreamed they found his body peaceful like he'd just fallen asleep in a spot we knew he'd chosen carefully, a hollow place in a rock outcropping where he had walked in the fall to see the view, a beautiful spot, a spot to feel worshipful, a good place to die. I've had this dream many times this past week and it gives me comfort. Only a few days have past since we last saw Noah, but it seems a lifetime ago. Time is like that."

#

### The King and the Clockmaker

Part One

Prologue

The workings of the clock had filled its maker's visions so fully and exclusively that when he closed his eyes to rest from his labors its workings filled the darkness and his dreams. And good for him that it did, for when it was done the King, jealous of its unique magnificence and the glory he believed it reflected upon him, ordered the clockmaker's eyes put out with hot pokers to prevent its duplication in some other realm.

Those were eyes of genius and eyes that could penetrate the secrets of a sick soul as well as the secrets of time. They were dangerous eyes and the King had been mesmerized by them, had loved them, felt compelled to destroy them and had waited only until the masterpiece was complete to act upon that compulsion. Now he was the proud possessor of the finest, most magnificent and advanced time telling machine in the known world and thought that he had no more use for those eyes he had loved and feared, the eyes that dominated his dreams whether tender or violent. He would order them put out, expecting to put an end to the dreams, get some sleep finally, some respite, some blessed rest. The guard, so ordered, hesitated and the King grabbed the wooden handle of the molten-tipped iron rod and put out the eyes themselves, forever imprinting upon his own mind's eye the image of their last look.

One

December

A bell rang somewhere nearby like a cowbell although the clockmaker knew that no cattle were allowed in the town. The sound must have been borne on the wind from the outskirts in that time of morning when sounds carry long distances, in their solitary clarity. The wind was warm, a prophecy of spring on that mid December morning when the clockmaker woke up blind. It smelled somewhat of a distant sea and carried a balm to comfort the injured soul with lost memories and bring visions to the wounded eyes: wounded unto death of course and forever that death, but in the earliest light of dawn, the clockmaker dreamed he saw the sun rising in the waves of warmth born on the wind. He imagined a healing that included sight.

He began to believe in God, having nowhere else to turn. He thought he should talk to the rabbis and began to plan his journey home in that moment of quiet between the distant bell and the morning calls of the crows and the geese. By the time the birds had heralded the day and roused the workers in the town and the people began to move about and call out to one another, the noise of it, the moment of magic submerged in it, the clockmaker succumbed again to sleep, to hide a little longer from the pain he felt returning.

It seemed only the day before yesterday he'd been whole because the days and nights since the attack had all blended into one long delirium of pain and strange sighted nightmares. A doctor had attended him at the King's command and had drugged him to let him sleep, let him heal. When he awoke screaming loudly or moaning softly, the doctor was there in the selfsame moment with the strange sweet liquor and soothing words and the clockmaker fell back into his world of dreams and visions, dreams being the only life where vision survived and therefore the more real life for him now.

He saw the moon as well at night, knowing night by its sound. The moon was vivid and huge and bright before him with dark shadings where eyes could be, blind eyes, the moon was blind like the clock blindly counting the minutes, hours and days. If he could envision the moon so clearly perhaps it had only ever been a vision of his mind and he had always been blind and if he had always been blind then all men were blind seeing only dreams in the darkness of their minds. And if all men were blind, counting out the minutes of the hours of the days of their lives which they only imagined before they died, what then? Who imagined the ones who had imagined life? So ran the thoughts of the clockmaker.

Sometimes he dreamed of hooded and cloaked men stepping around a sphere until they fell outward into space and became stars. Sunrises and moonrises and rising stars, all imagined.

There came a time the Doctor said he could get up and be about. He stumbled around his room with the help of a nurse sent by the King to help him. Could it be the King was remorseful? Or could it be that the King truly loved him now he was stripped of his power, that power to create with his hands the visions of his mind, his eyes being the intermediary. He would get his power back and then see how much the King loved him.

Although he had often walked through the dark nighttime town to the clock tower to work, the clockmaker had never experienced such a total, such an unremitting darkness, not a shadow hinted at open space or solid structure. He stepped slowly feeling the ground with his feet and sliding his hand along the stone of walls until there was no stone to touch or feel and he fell into open space as if he were one of the cloaked and hooded men of his recurring dream and then he realized this too was a dream and he was still delirious not with pain but with helplessness.

When the clockmaker awoke from a deep sleep and remembered not a single dream he felt disappointed for his dreams were the only visual stimulation he'd ever have. Sometimes they were no more than fields of color as if he viewed the world and its forms so closely their outside contours disappeared. Over time his dreams restored other memories to his conscious mind. One night he dreamed of working on the clock in the dark seeing nothing but feeling everything with every part of his hands and this was a different kind of seeing that he realized with a bounding joy he could bring with him from the world of his dreams to the reality of his waking days.

Later he would have his nurse walk him through the town to the clock-tower and silently he counted the steps: thirty nine steps to open space, thirty nine steps to cross it, one hundred steps along a wall of one texture, a doorway of wood: five steps, then another one hundred steps of stone differently textured and then confusion. He couldn't remember the entire formula of textures, of solidity and open space and numbers so he had to practice once more, twice more with the nurse who would chatter as he silently counted out his secret scheme. Finally he was ready to make the dark journey alone when silence differentiated late night from early evening and he knew he'd recognize the dawn by the cry of the crows and the distant bellowing of the cattle in the country wafted in on the clear and empty morning air.

He came to love the soothing sorrow of that early quiet with the distant country sounds as if they came from his home which he had left when such a young man. He had left his home to see the world, he laughed to himself, to see the world. He would return but not until he had destroyed the clock. He planned to do this on New Year's Eve and he began to ask the nurse to help him keep track of the days.

He strode though the city, even ran, so confident was he of his steps and then he realized he must have passed the clock tower and he looked back to seek it on the skyline and saw other spires and towers he had never seen before. He realized he was lost in a city he had never been in before and then his panic woke him and he was back in the darkness lit only by imagination.

The clockmaker, master of time, calmed and measured his too fast beating heart, breathing slowly, deeply and he tried to imagine the village of his youth, the place he had once longed to escape so he could see the larger world. He laughed out loud at himself startling the nurse who inquired but he said simply it was a dream and went on with his thoughts. He was constantly struck by the irony of that desire to see more and he had indeed seen more but most of it not worth seeing. The pomp and gaudy ostentation of the rich and powerful he had despised, even as he was seduced by it, thinking to earn through his skill enough currency to buy for himself the solitary enjoyment of beautiful woods in beautiful mountains, far away from both the silly pageantry of the city and the petty intrigue of the village. He realized then that he could tolerate human beings only one at a time for only one at a time were human beings set free of envy and competitiveness and the need to impress or control or be impressed or controlled. This had made him laugh, not mirthfully but ironically, so that the nurse, her curiosity still unsatisfied, gave him a strange and searching look but to no avail of course because his eyes that might have given her a hint could not see out and were therefore no longer a window into his troubled soul. Nonetheless he could sense her looking at him and to ensure his privacy he sought sleep again, for that reason, and also because he ached to get up and walk in long strides across the city and he could only do that in his dreams.

This time in his dream world he swam through fields of tall growing grasses feeling pursued and frightened. Soon he was flying above them, moving his arms as though he swam through the air. Currents of wind lifted and warmed him and he landed gently on the top of a steep mountain. There were little stone huts in rows on top of the straight-up sided mountains and monks came out of them to greet him and they pointed out to him a man below trying desperately to climb up after him but they assured him he would fail. With the telescopic vision of dreams he could see the man, tiny as an ant from that distance, was the king. After being so much afraid, the clockmaker now felt only a pity for the poor struggling king. When he awoke this second time he could feel and hear and sense the darkness that had descended on the room and knew it was night and he alone was still awake. The realization that night and day would forever be the same to him made him feel lonelier than being alone ever had.

Someone walked quietly into the room and must have awakened the sleeping nurse and the two people whispered a bit before the nurse left and the second person, a man, sat in her place. He couldn't make out everything they said but he could tell the second voice belonged to the king's companion and personal guard, Samson. He knew Samson was as kind as the king was cruel and had often wondered what this strong but gentle man saw in the weak but tyrannical king to make him love him as he so obviously did. Samson sensed the clockmaker only pretended to sleep and spoke softly to him.

"The King sent me to watch over you and see that you have all the assistance and comfort you need to recover." This much was true for the king had given his instructions but Samson, assuming goodness existed where it had never been able to thrive and grow, added his own wish:

"The King seeks your forgiveness."

The clockmaker lay silent pretending to sleep, thinking that this strong man was also a fool.

Eventually the clockmaker relaxed and slipped again into his dream world but this time he went nowhere outside his little room but lay where he was and watched Samson as he paced quietly looking out from time to time at the moon which was larger than the clockmaker had ever seen it. Slowly it was eclipsed and slowly came back to light the room that had grown spacious in the dark and the clockmaker saw many of the courtiers sitting in a semi-circle around him and among them the Queen, dead before the clockmaker had even come to the city, and they were discussing what to do about the then child king and asking his advice but he pretended to be asleep even as he dreamed.

He slept through the morning birds and awoke in the midst of the busy part of the morning, people shouting or just speaking normally but the sheer numbers of voices made it seem a terrible noise to the clockmaker. Samson had gone and in his place there was a creature with a voice that could be male or female but she had a woman's touch, competent and tender all at once. She put a cloth soaked in hot soapy water in his hand and instructed him it was time to bathe himself. She led him to a cupboard and guided his hand to open it and let him feel around inside it for the various articles of clothing he would need to go out. She let him feel all around each piece, to find the neck, the sleeves. She let him put his trousers on backwards and have to start over again. He was grateful to her for allowing him time to learn these simple acts. Her name was Lydia and she became his friend.

Lydia took the clockmaker out walking in the town and she herself helped him to count the steps to the places he would need to go and she gave him a carved and smoothed walking stick to feel out the steps and cobbles along the way. At first he walked slowly but in a few days he was striding along just like in his dream. The night after his first outing with Lydia he dreamt he was in a different part of the dream city and searching desperately for a street with a woman's name, something like Edith or Elizabeth, he couldn't remember when he woke and the desire to remember nagged at him all day. In this dream he had ridden about on a long closed cart filled with people that was not drawn by horses or oxen but simply ran on its own and very fast, fast enough to take his breath away and the city was so large, so large, he was afraid he would never get back to where he had started.

Two

January

From the night he blinded the clockmaker, the King was unable to sleep. He was driven to wander through his palace in an agony of restlessness that would not let him sit or lie down until he would be so overcome with exhaustion he would sleep while he walked, unable to still his body long enough to rest. He revisited every room of the vast palace in increasingly frantic circles expecting to find something different somewhere, expecting and hoping and fearing to find that single thing or person that would give him a new direction in his wandering, perhaps allow him to stop. He talked to himself incessantly, whispering in his sleepwalking, shouting sometimes to the ghosts that haunted him, shouting often to the clockmaker or sometimes to god and seemed to confuse the two in his weakening mind.

He counted everything, every step, every second, every heartbeat, worried that his heartbeats came too rapidly or too slowly, never regularly, worried he would be stopped in his tracks, wishing he could stop and rest. And then one night suddenly he collapsed and slept twenty four hours right where he fell behind a large carved chest in an otherwise empty room.

A search continued the entire time but he was not found until he awoke and presented himself, devastated that the searchers had not been more diligent. What they told him then was that the great astronomical clock had been destroyed from within, stood still and silent in its tower and he knew then it had to have been the clockmaker who had done that. He ordered the clockmaker brought to him and waited, excited and anxious to face him and decide whether to let him live and repair the clock or to order his death.

He considered how he might have the clockmaker killed: having him thrown from the top of the clock tower seemed the most appropriate punishment but of course it was not really a punishment, death. Death was the end of everything including punishment. He shuddered to think that it would be over, forever, he would never again discourse on philosophy or astronomy with that mysterious man.

He made up his mind and reminded himself over and over that he would allow the clockmaker to live as long as the man agreed to repair the clock. He could not imagine how a blind man could repair such a complex mechanism but he would let him try and they could talk while the clockmaker worked. He began to look forward to it. The thought assuaged his restlessness. He felt as though he'd been forgiven, for that was of course what he had craved.

In the beginning, the King's life was sung, a continuing lullaby of the kind that nurses sing to infants to get to them to sleep or to stop crying, although the little king never cried. And there were other songs as well for his nurse never spoke but she sang and everything that happened in the traveling encampment was described in her songs. The birth of the little king, so long promised to his people, was also, according to one song, the cause and occasion of the deaths of two queens. The one who died giving birth to the little man-child, the other executed for adultery when she gave birth to a girl, useless to her father in his struggle for power among the various tribes who warred over the land at that time.

Soon enough they would all be massacred but for the nurse and the little king whom she hid and carried with her into another land. She stopped her singing then, became very quiet and sometimes the child thought he was abandoned but then he would hum to himself, remembering the songs, the measured rhythms of them and their melodies commanded his emotions and their meter his very breathing. He could make the nurse come back to him with his humming even when she might have thought her own journey would be easier without him and so they made their way through mountains and woods into lands ruled by more peaceful people.

Samson also wandered about those same mountains, a man so strong but so mild who had been exiled because the leader of his tribe perceived in him a threat that simply was not there. It was not his nature to be long angry or sorrowful and he reveled in the beauty of the land and survived on the plants he found there, unable, because of an overly kind heart, to kill animals for food. He found the woman and the infant and took care of them in the woods and the three of them soon entered into a city governed by a town council.

The council members were arguing about how best to defend themselves from the barbarous nomads who themselves fled before a great force from the east. When Samson walked into the town, easily the largest man any of them had ever seen, they took this as a sign and made him their leader. Samson would have preferred to decline the honor but the nurse with the infant boy encouraged him and it was she who negotiated with the nomadic tribes, of whom she had considerable knowledge, to ensure the continued safety of the town. At first she spoke through Samson but soon it became apparent that he could not remember all the intricacies of the clever plans she devised to protect the town and so she ruled outright and was accepted gratefully by the people.

The child was frightened by the people who daily crowded around the woman he took to be his mother and angered to feel so excluded from her company. More and more she left Samson to attend to the child's needs while she attended to the needs of the city. Lonely and bored, the boy quickly learned his numbers and his letters. He seemed an unusually intelligent child although, when nervous, he still wet and befouled himself and to cover his profound shame at this would go into a rage. Sometimes the Queen would interrupt her meetings to go sing the raging child into a more peaceful frame of mind and he thus learned how best to claim her attentions. At night when all was quiet and the Queen herself snored in her deep exhausted sleep, the boy would calm himself by counting his own heartbeats.

One evening when the child could not sleep he went outside and walked about the gardens surrounding the palace. He counted his steps in each direction, and noticed each tree and flower in the moonlight for he had a terror of getting lost. Beneath one tree, silvered with moonbeams that shone through the lacey branches, he spotted a bird trembling on the ground with an obviously broken wing. The boy wanted to help the bird and tried to fix his wing. He was clumsy and did not know what he was doing, so instead of repairing the bird's broken wing, he caused the bird great pain and anguish. The bird struggled to free itself and in the struggle expired completely. The child felt angry at the bird for struggling against him, certain that he could have repaired the broken wing. He picked up the dead bird and threw it as hard as he could into the bushes that marked the boundary of the garden. He cried then and ran back inside and around the palace toward his room, automatically, forgetting to count his steps or even watch where he was going. For a moment, he even thought himself lost until he saw his own familiar room and stopped to catch his breath before confining himself to the boredom and safety of his own bed where he lay awake until dawn.

Later that day he went out to find the bird, feeling bad that he had flung it away in his rage. He found it under a bush with ants crawling all over it and he took a stick to try to pick it up and carry it to a small grave that he had dug under the tree where he had first seen it. He tried to insert the stick gently beneath the unbroken wing to lift the bird but it kept falling sideways and off the stick, and finally, in order to bury the bird, he had to impale it completely on the stick. For the second time in two days, he frightened himself with the intensity of his own anger. But he buried the bird and said some prayers over it for he still toyed with the idea that there might be a powerful god in the heavens.

Thereafter he cried often and for long periods of time and the Queen and Samson could not comfort him nor could they get him to explain his grief. After a few weeks of this the boy told Samson he wanted a little bird in a cage to keep him company in his room and sing to him at night. The Queen was so delighted that there was something to cheer her son that she sent out the palace hunters to trap and bring back a beautiful bird of the woods for him. But the bird would not sing in the child's room at night and the child killed the bird and buried it beside the other one and told his mother and Samson that he had set it free for indeed he had.

So did the child keep his secrets and he grew up with the one face he presented to them and the other face he turned inward to himself, talking about himself to himself as if he were three people and sometimes he felt truly crowded in his soul, suffocating and angry and afraid.

The Queen always intended that her son should succeed her and rule the city but she expected to live a long life and have plenty of time to train this child in the ways of governing. Instead she was stricken with a disease that no one could identify but she knew it would kill her. She could feel her body deteriorating inside of her skin. She could feel the blood congealing in her veins, her bones turning to dust, her muscles disintegrating. As she grew weaker and weaker during the last months of her life, she decided that the child must be installed as King before her impending death, despite his youth. She hung on longer than she thought she could, planning every detail of the grand event. She even commissioned an artist from a city far away to come and memorialize the event in a large painting.

The painter traveled a long distance from the west and there was great excitement in the city and competition among the council members to entertain him. But the man went straight to work grinding and mixing his paints and there were rumors about the precious gemstones that he requested as necessary to his endeavors. Of course there would be a large amount of gold leaf on the painting as the Queen had specified. Soon the painter was ready to assemble the people who would appear in the portrait of the installation of the young King and day after day, before the actual event, they sat, stiff and uncomfortable, posing for the painting.

The event itself was almost anticlimactic after the unveiling of the painting. It was resplendent with the excited faces of many courtiers dressed in robes of lapis, emerald and ruby silk, trimmed in fur rendered as if real, each hair of fox or rabbit highlighted. There was a long side table covered with gorgeous and intricately patterned brocades, each fold painted perfectly and over this, platters of exquisitely ripened and rounded and highlighted fruits and nuts were laid out. Small hidden details abounded to delight the careful eye: a squirrel stood on hind legs amidst the feast, a dog slept partially beneath the folds of a woman's train.

The child who was the reason for all this effort could not sit still long enough for these sessions and his likeness was painted on top of a miniature adult male body in glorious raiment. The boy often sat mesmerized in front of the painting examining every detail, counting out the buttons on his jacket, the number of pearls on his mother's bodice. And he examined the faces, looking for the models from among the adults at court, comparing the painted faces with the real ones, fascinated with how accurately the painter had rendered them, showing personalities as well as features. It was indeed a marvel, this painting. His eyes could not get enough of it.

After so much anticipation, the actual event was over quickly. Although they had been the center of the coronation, neither the child King nor the Queen stayed to attend the festivities that followed. They were both tired and needing sleep. A Guard was sent to help the new King to bed. The Queen, barely able to stand a moment longer, asked Samson to escort her back to her chambers. She lay herself down in all her finery and precious jewels and she told Samson that she would have loved him as he had wanted but she was old enough to be his mother and was, in fact, the young king's grandmother and that had been her secret told to no one but him. He told her it would not have mattered and then she drifted off to sleep and he found her cold and quite suddenly ancient the next morning. Samson told himself the boy showed no grief because he was so shocked by the sudden and unexpected abandonment.

Three

February

It is February, the last day, the 29th; there will not be another 29th day of February for another four years. A train is going by in the distance and I hear its whistle and think "Once upon a time" and I think "what is time?" Last night the newsman on television talked for two minutes about "time" saying that it baffled Einstein (who was not good at mathematics in school and thereafter changed it completely) saying "time" does not exist and that it is an arbitrary measurement. I wonder, if time does not exist, what is it that is killing us minute by minute from the very first minute we are born, stretching and kneading and torturing our every particle of mind and body in a ritual that we call life until every particle is worn out and the last working particles give it up and we die and then of course and only then ("then" being a word invented to designate an element of time which we are told does not exist and yet we can contemplate somehow) only then do we understand where we've been in relation to where we will be (after we die that "will be" becoming where we "are", "are" being a word to denote being-ness which might be completely unrelated to time once we've broken free of the finite particles to merge with infinity, a word, which also has nothing to do with "time" other than in being unbounded by its arbitrariness).

I woke up thinking that everything I wrote about the King in a story I began years ago and let lie in a drawer for what seems like a very long time, is poorly done or just not right or relevant and does not explain with any sufficiency why he would have put out the eyes of the Clockmaker. Neither the King nor the Clockmaker have made themselves sufficiently known to me yet. But I trust that in time each will. After all, these two characters from the past which only exists apparently in some collective imagination, jumped out at me and clung to my imagination like drowning men cling to a raft in a sea of anecdotes in the thousands of books of fact and fiction and various combinations and permutations thereof that I have read, at the time, over the last half century, whatever that is. So they jumped out of the sea of words and recollections and declared themselves in whispers and riddles begging me to understand and illuminate the dark places of their souls, I almost wrote wounds, a Freudian slip, do I really consider our souls to be our wounds? . . . . .well . . . . . however, to illuminate the dark places, to them, to me and to some others neither they nor I could name but who, they assured me and I knew, would know them and recognize them once I'd written their stories in something more than the cryptic, skeletal manner of old tales. They pleaded with me in the night in my sleep and the mornings when I awoke distracted by their rambling conversations and shadowy memories. They told me to just begin writing and then the words would come to me and I would understand and be enlightened and see the next step and the next clear and brightly lit in this tunnel they had dragged me into.

How long would the tunnel be I wondered and no one could or would tell me. I simply had to trust that eventually I would see the light at the end of it. Would it be straight like other tales I've wandered into and written down? No, already, I've learned that the tunnel through the minds and lives, the whys and wherefores of these two characters has many side tunnels that dead-end forcing me back to the beginning. Their story is a maze in a tunnel like my own life has been. Haste makes waste. I cannot stride forward humming tunes and executing little dance steps from time to time. No, I must step carefully like the blind Clockmaker himself feeling his way through the mythical city of this story, mythical because I've never been to Prague, unless Prague is that dream city where I am always lost.

It is like those psychics who shake your hand and see your future, or fondle a piece of lost clothing to find the loved one, dead or alive, but for me there is no known, named person on the other ends of the endless connections that are made every step I take. Every bit of sedge and stone, every sound I hear of stream or bird or rain, every smell that wafts by, fleeting, vague, assails me through every perceptive organ, and even the pores of my skin, with vague memories, and odd details like extremely specific and minute pieces of puzzles. The constant whisper of their pain, their sudden sick survival humor, all that pours into my heart, floods my blood, permeates, inundates my brain. It makes me crazy for I am each and every one and all of them at once. And they themselves, who were they in earlier incarnations and where? I walk in hills and forests here and witness scenes from faraway places, memories of memories, back and back into time, that thing that does not exist.

In the beginning was the word, or so universal rumor has it, the word of a Judeo-Christian God, the song lines of Australian Aboriginal people, naming things to give them life distinct from other things, light from dark, night from day and thence to cycles of time, seasons, years, lives, epochs. Feelings too, all contained in that world of darkness within, how can we know we are happy until we have a word for it? Or know that we are depressed until we have known happiness and its lack, if not in our hearts, then at least by name? We need words to determine cause and effect and we need cause and effect and some concept of linear time to create stories and we need stories to pass it all along from one life to another, from one generation to the next, "le dor ve dor" as we, the people who are known as the "people of the book", say over and over in our books, "le dor ve dor" . . . . . with words we can imagine time and things we cannot bind, time and telepathy, incarnation and reincarnation, memory, dream and vision, reality and surreality, meta-physical and paranormal and psychic and therefrom we create the stories we love more than reality even when the stories are sad, even when they are brutal.

So I walk and listen to music and am transported to places I've never seen to times before I lived and live in those places and times and speak words through the mouths of phantom strangers who I may once have been, who think they are me now. And it doesn't matter that the stories, theirs and mine, are rejected, neglected, disrespected because for me it is not a poor choice but a pure compulsion to give voice to the voices that won't let me rest, won't allow me to die until their stories are told, this way and that, again and again.

Perhaps that answers my own question about why I feel compelled to explore the motivations of a man who would blind another man in a cruel and brutal way. I heard on the news on television not too long ago a story about a man in Germany who is a cannibal and advertised on the internet for someone to consent to being killed, cut up and eaten. The story made the news because he did indeed kill, cut up and eat someone and in his own defense claimed the victim was willing and that in fact he had received hundreds of responses to his online request for willing victims. What's up with that? A vestige perhaps of some weird religion with rituals of human sacrifice? Sounds like one of those cult films starring Vincent Price. There has been no follow up on that story nor has either one of those strange and scary individuals visited me. For this I can only be grateful.

Four

March

Some people thought the clockmaker a forgiving man to be so willing to repair the clock at the King's request. How foolish, he wondered, could some people be? He was well aware that to refuse this request would mean death or something worse, some long tortured imprisonment. He also was well aware that once the clock repairs had been finished, he himself might be finished as well, so the Clockmaker, like Scheherazade, devised a scheme by which to prolong his life. Every day he worked slowly feeling everything out with his hands, repairing the damage he'd done to the clock and then at night he snuck back and undid most of what he had done during the day or, sometimes, lest it become obvious what he was doing, he would leave the day's repairs alone and do some other damage to some other part of the complex mechanism.

Most days, while the clockmaker worked, he listened to the King who came to visit and to tell him stories, lewd stories about his prowess with young women. The king was already nineteen years old and still in fact a virgin. He would not admit to this of course but it was well known. Some of the council members and other land owners were pressing him to marry and each one who pressed had a daughter to recommend. Perceiving the King to be a weakling who had inherited none of this mother's intelligence, each of them entertained fantasies of ruling the land through the influence of a beautiful daughter wed to a puppet King. So can and does the greed for power and wealth sometimes blind otherwise intelligent men.

The King was not interested in any of their daughters and instead had palace guards bring him strong peasant girls to play with. He imagined them with the eyes of the clockmaker when he attempted to make love to them but he proved unable to respond to any of the ministrations of the girls. Most of them pretended to be quite taken with him and cried inconsolably when removed from his august presence. These clever girls were comforted and given money to take home to their families. One girl, however, was more proud than clever and refused to play this game. She actually laughed at the young King as if he were not all powerful.

This so enraged him that he instructed Samson to take the girl out into the woods and kill her. He further instructed Samson to bring back her head as proof that the terrible deed was done. The King by now delighted in tormenting his protector and, knowing Samson's kind heart, could think of no better joke than this with which to amuse himself and teach the laughing girl a lesson. Nonetheless, the girl had the last laugh, albeit a quieter one, when she told Samson something he could say to convince the King that her heart (not so different from the heart of some forest animal), would be the better trophy. Samson pointed out to the King, that if he had the head preserved he would have to look upon her laughing expression for eternity but her heart could not express laughter or contempt or fear or anything at all but silence and was that not what the King wanted to do, silence her?

Samson pretended to drag the bound girl into the woods but as soon as the sight of them was obscured by trees and the lowering dusk, he undid her bindings and they walked quickly into the depths of the forest until they came upon a deer. It was a magnificent buck with antlers in velvet and stood still and silent staring at the man and the girl. Samson stood frozen in awe and fear because he dreaded what he knew he must do. "It will be alright" he heard a voice say and assumed it was the girl by his side speaking and that her voice sounded far away because he was in such distress. "It will be alright. You can kill a deer quickly without inflicting pain." Samson followed the instructions that seemed to come from inside his own mind.

When the deer lay dead before him with open eyes, Samson reverently closed the lids and stroked the deer's body, speaking slow, soft prayerful words that flooded his heart. He gave thanks to the deer for giving its life so that the girl could live and prayed that the deer would visit his dreams for never had Samson seen such a perfect and beautiful woodland creature. The girl had already disappeared as Samson knew she must and Samson then slit the deer's chest just enough to remove the heart. He then found a small cave, a cleft in a large boulder upon which an ancient oak tree leaned, caught in mid-fall by the boulder hundreds of years earlier and then spreading its roots and branches around the boulder. It was the perfect burial spot for the magnificent animal. Samson was a strong man but he wondered at the lightness of the dead deer and the ease with which he was able to maneuver it into the small cave, almost as if the buck moved himself into the cave. Then with a huge effort Samson rolled a smaller boulder into place to cover the cave entrance to protect the body from scavengers. He prayed again for forgiveness . . . . forgiveness. . . . . forgiveness. It was the wind in the trees that whispered absolution and wind that lifted the weakened man and blew him home. Wind a gift from the sky and in his hands he held the bloody heart of the buck, a gift from the earth.

Thus did Samson kill his first deer and it pained him greatly but he knew he had to do this to save the life of the young woman. The King commanded that the heart be preserved in a glass jar by the palace alchemist. He kept it in his room and the first month dreamed nightly of a deer hunt in the forest where the animals turned into women and the women back into animals. Because of these dreams he suspected Samson of deceiving him and began to pay closer attention to his personal companion and body guard.

The King even asked the Clockmaker what he thought, hoping as usual to shock the man. Of course the Clockmaker's blind eyes never betrayed what horror he felt at the King's casual disclosures of his own cruelty. In a voice as mechanical as the clock he worked on, he told the King that he was quite certain that Samson was incapable of disobeying the King in any way. In fact, he knew from Lydia that the girl remained hidden in the forest, disguised as a boy, a woodcutter by trade, and sometimes ventured into the town to sell firewood, safe in her disguise of rags and soot.

At night the Clockmaker dreamed the textures of the mechanisms of the clock, the cold smoothness of the metals, the rough edges of carefully scored wheels, and he dreamed the sounds of his work, the grinding sounds, the musical sounds. He dreamed, as well, the odors of the day's work, the sharp acrid odor of the metallic shavings, the smell of the oils he used and the odor of the King, heavy perfume that mingled with but did not disguise the man's sweat whenever he discussed his imagined sexual exploits. Sometimes the Clockmaker could barely draw breath in the atmosphere the King made heavy and offensive with his presence, his voice, his breath. The Clockmaker longed for different dreams, dreams that would be different from his days. He longed for the days of working on the clock to end but he didn't know how to end them without the risk of ending his own life. He smelled then his own sweat, sudden in the chilly nights, the sweat that came from fear. And once he smelled his own fear, he couldn't get it out of his nostrils, not for hours, not for days. He worried that the King could smell it also.

So it went until the Clockmaker became accustomed to the routine and then the King came with a new story, an even more terrible story. In this new story, the King admitted to the Clockmaker that he imagined him when he made love to the woman, a confession that the Clockmaker had sensed coming but had tried to avert not knowing how he could possibly respond. When the inevitable disclosure finally came it was part of such a rush of words that the Clockmaker had no time or need to respond.

The King told the Clockmaker in grim detail how he had murdered the woman with his own hands, how the sight of her blood had aroused him, dwelling on that word "sight" with a sneer and a pause, causing the Clockmaker to hesitate in his work and then resume in haste as he smelled his own fear wafting up to him. He was sure the King noticed because the King laughed before he excused himself: "I must go find Samson. He will have to bury her in the forest. It will serve him right for deceiving me about the other one." And the Clockmaker wondered if the King thought he also had deliberately deceived him and what punishment the King would think would serve him right. He sat immobile on his workbench all through the day, frozen by shock, thirsty and hungry, but afraid to call out or even move.

When it was quite late and long dark, Lydia came for the Clockmaker. She knew something was wrong. She told him that Samson awaited him at his apartment. Samson told the Clockmaker that he had buried the girl in the forest and planted a rose bush over her. He cried and said he could not describe the terrible tortured condition of her body. Then he told the Clockmaker about something he knew that the King did not. This girl was not a peasant girl brought to the King by the palace guards but the daughter of a powerful landowner who had come at her father's behest in disguise. The greedy and power hungry man had thought to trick the King into an alliance with his family and thereby to achieve special favor and rule the city. He couldn't have known the King's secret, sick propensities and now, of course, there would be repercussions. The Clockmaker was astonished and appalled that Samson could still worry about the cruel King's fate, but Samson could not help himself. All night, in the seclusion of the Clockmaker's chamber, Samson grieved. By morning, he had resolved that he himself would smother the King in his sleep to save him from the more vengeful fate he knew the noblemen had planned for him and perhaps as well to save the young King from his own headlong rush to hell.

The Clockmaker did not fall asleep until Samson left in the morning determined to end the mad King's secret terrors and still protect him from the full vengeance of the nobles. The Clockmaker slept throughout the day, waking now and then when he thought he heard screams, then falling back into a fitful doze and then further into a hellish dreamscape from which he struggled to emerge. He awoke at night exhausted and Lydia came and gave him something sweet tasting to drink that made him sleep throughout the night. It was forty eight hours almost to the minute after the King had left him at his workbench when he returned to the clock-tower. Again Lydia walked with him and he noticed a strange silence and a heavy humid quality to the air he hadn't noticed before.

"It is trying to rain" was all she said.

As they approached the tower, Lydia stopped and whispered to someone who must have given her bad news for she cried softly. The Clockmaker asked her what was wrong and she said only that Samson was dead. When he climbed the tower steps to the room that housed the inner workings of the great clock, the King was waiting for him. He spoke as though asking a question and surely he wanted to see what reaction the Clockmaker would have when he told him that Samson had tried to kill him in his sleep. The King told the Clockmaker how he had tricked that huge, strong man, pretending to be asleep until Samson was almost upon him with the pillow he intended to smother him with, and then, just at the last moment, the crafty King thrust a long sharp knife into Samson's heart killing him instantly.

He told this story as though it were a child's adventure tale. Then he described for the Clockmaker what it felt like to lie beneath the dead weight of the man and to be drenched in his blood. He must have lain there a long time before he called for help. When he did, two servants could not lift Samson off of him. They called for a third and the three men struggled to lift the huge dead man from the King and set him free. Then the King described with a particular relish how he had required three bronze tubs full of fresh water to cleanse himself of all the blood.

Five

April

The Clockmaker could smell the springtime fragrance and imagine the pink and white and pale green buds spreading out like a graceful, lacey net over the trees. Then it snowed, one of those late spring snows, wet and heavy. The trees caught the wet, sticky, snow in wide nets of buds and young leaves and the branches broke beneath the weight of it. Every where lay the large, broken branches, the leaves dripping icicles. The tender sappy innards of the trees, exposed to the cold, hardened, darkened and died. The Clockmaker, feeling the cold on his skin and hearing the cracking of dying branches and the groan of dying trees, thought about the quiet cruelty of nature, wondered at it, the incongruity of breathtaking beauty and life-threatening catastrophe, of boundless creativity and careless destruction.

In the fields around the town, animals that had come out to forage in the warm abundance of spring, ran for cover from the cold and snow. Houses at the edge of town were overrun with mice and rats, squirrels and snakes. A baby was bitten and died. People were afraid. There was talk of plague. Men roamed the town with long swords cutting snakes and small animals in half and piling their bloody bodies onto wheelbarrows to dump in the fields outside the boundaries of the town. The joyful mood of spring had turned into panic and blood thirst. In the palace the King ran out with the servants laughing as they chased and slashed the snakes that chased and ate the mice.

They had cornered one very large rat and everyone stood frozen, afraid to approach close enough to reach and slash at it when the King decided he wanted to make a pet of it and ordered one of the guards to get a cage and trap it. It seemed the whole group stood a very long time, cutting off the rat's escape, while the guard went to find a hunter who would have a cage tight enough to trap the rat. It felt like hours and then the entrapment happened quickly, suddenly in fact and everyone collapsed just a little in relief.

The King had the caged rat brought to his private chamber where he fed it himself with bits of the carcasses of snakes, talking to it as if to a friend. "My only friend" he sometimes addressed it, or when he spoke about it, for he told the Clockmaker about his new friend, the caged pet rat.

"When we were all standing there surrounding that poor animal I suddenly remembered an experience I'd had as a boy." The King told the Clockmaker and the Clockmaker realized he still considered the King a boy, a terrible, spoiled, out of control sick boy who would never become a man. It was not that the Clockmaker thought grown men lost their capacity for cruelty but that the cruelty of grown men was motivated by greed and lust for power whereas the cruelty of the King was random and without purpose. Then it occurred to the Clockmaker that to ascribe purpose to cruelty was hypocrisy, an excuse, the grown man's acknowledgement that his basic instinct to inflict pain was simply not acceptable without some redemptive "purpose" and the Clockmaker felt less appalled by the naïve King as he felt more appalled by humankind generally. He began to perceive the King as innocent in the same way the rat was innocent. He began to listen with a kinder, more forgiving heart while the King described the incident that occurred years earlier when he had run away from Samson and gotten lost in the woods outside the town.

The King reckoned he would have been about eight years old when he ran away. He had not been able to sleep, had counted his heartbeats for what seemed like hours. As soon as the stars began to disappear into the pre-dawn mist, the child had gotten up and dressed himself and crept quietly out of the palace and up the road right out of town into the woods from whence he had come as a babe in arms. Years and years he had looked longingly on the dark green secluded spots he remembered still as places of warmth and security where his nurse and Samson together had embraced and protected him. He could not possibly remember the pains they had taken to hide from the malice of strangers. Nor could he understand the very existence of strangers who would not revere him, so accustomed had he become to the respect of one and all toward his mother, the Queen, Samson, her companion and he himself, her son.

He had frequently asked Samson to take him into the woods and Samson always obliged but never went far enough from the town to satisfy the young King's curiosity to explore their depths. By the time the sun had burned off the morning mist, the child had gone farther than he ever had under Samson's protective supervision. He had gotten damp and cold on his walk through wet ferns and saplings and when he saw smoke from a wood fire he thought he would seek out the source and warm and dry himself. He remembered the sweet smell of the smoke and the gladness he felt when he found three woodcutters cooking a rabbit on a stick over the crackling pine fire.

He approached them innocently . . . . . "innocently" was the word the King used to describe this to the Clockmaker and the Clockmaker's heart beat faster as he wondered if the King had read his mind and was perhaps baiting him. He'd come to know that the King was good at this little trick of instilling fear in subtle ways. But not this time. This time the King was remembering the subtle ways of the malicious woodcutters and how his own terror enlarged his child's heart, how the beats quickened until he thought he might faint, how he had been unable to keep his count of those pounding heartbeats.

"Well look at this, comrades. Something meatier and sweeter than rabbit meat has come our way."

"Oh look! You've frightened the little fellow. He really thinks we would cook and eat him."

"That right little man? Do you think we're cannibals then?"

The man looked insulted, then broke into laughter but it was a nasty laughter.

"What's the matter with you boy? Are you to good to talk to the likes of us? Look at him will you? Look at the clothes, clean and new and dear, you'd think he was a prince. Are you a prince little man?"

"No prince would be wandering out here alone."

"Then again, maybe he would be, lost of course, maybe someone with a lot of gold to spare is looking for the little fellow right now."

"If that's the case they'd more likely use all that gold to buy our heads on pikes than hand it over with a thank you and good day for the safe return of the little one."

"Better just kill him and then eat the evidence. They'll never find us. They haven't found us yet."

By this time the Prince had messed himself much to the amusement of the men.

"You two are fools. We've never taken a boy so well dressed as this one. You know he's important. You leave him alone and let me clean him up and take him back to the edge of town."

Then turning to the gasping, choking child, the man asked him "If I take you to the edge of town you can find your way back home right? And say nothing to no one because I can turn myself into a ghost and go anywhere I want and never be seen or taken. You believe me don't you?" The King did believe him for years after and even now telling the Clockmaker the story he half believed that all three men were ghosts.

The kind man, the man who protected him from the other two who laughed and continued to say nasty things, took the boy to a little hut near a spring and removed all his clothes, the soiled and the clean. He washed the shivering child and wrapped him in fur pelts and laid him by a fire to dry off and warm up and urged the child to sleep a while. Then the man washed the clothes in the spring and laid them out on rocks in a small sunlit space to dry. In his sleep, the boy dreamed that the man returned and got inside the fur pelts behind him and poked something inside him that hurt terribly but when he tried to scream with pain, no sound came and he couldn't breath and then the man pushed something into his mouth and he gagged and nearly suffocated but then he woke up and the man was sitting up next to him and told him he had had a bad dream, had been screaming in his sleep. He had the dry clothes over his arm and told the boy to get up and get dressed but the child remained wrapped in the fur pelts until the man put the clothes on the ground and left the hut.

"OK, I'll go outside while you dress." He said and then laughed in a lewd manner making the eight year old boy wonder if his dream had been a reality.

The man carried the boy on his back through the dusky woods to the edge of town and set him down. The boy stood there a few seconds and when he turned to see the man, there was no one behind him, only the ferns and the saplings strangely lit by the lowering autumn sun and he ran into the town and toward the Palace where he was met by Samson who told a guard to the tell the others the search was off, the boy had been found.

It was not until the King had finished his story that the Clockmaker realized he had been referring to himself as "he" and "the boy" never daring to say "I" and the Clockmaker cried for him then.

"You are a good man" the King told the Clockmaker, "like Samson was once. Do not turn on me like he did. I cannot help what I do." The Clockmaker's heart expanded with sorrow for the King and contracted with fear of him. Not knowing how to respond, the Clockmaker offered to show the King how the great clock worked and thereafter the King talked of nothing but time and counting it and became like an apprentice to the Clockmaker.

As time went by the King shared strange ideas with the Clockmaker including the thought that human beings with their ticking hearts were God's timepieces. He went on to suggest that a man when creating the ticking clock to count time imitated God. He thought he would like to be able to create a clock in the image of a man with arms and legs that could gesture and walk and even a brain that could respond to spoken commands. The Clockmaker thought this frightening but said nothing, merely showed the King how and where to fit two parts together. The King laughed, knowing he had shocked the Clockmaker.

"But why not?" Local legends are full of such fantasies. I just believe the concept is more practical than fabulous. If you can produce this amazing piece of machinery why not produce a machine in your own likeness? Is that not what God did in creating mankind? Is it not written that God created man in his own image? And if we are indeed Godlike, why not create machines in our own likenesses?"

The Clockmaker ventured a question: "Are you thinking that these machines would do the bidding of the men who created them?"

"Of course."

"But is it not clear that men do not do God's bidding?"

"Who knows what God's bidding is anymore? What men hear God speak? Or understand when they do? All I ever hear when I listen most carefully is the beating of my own heart, the ticking, the ticking, the counting and I do not know what it means. I wait for clues, for understanding, but it never comes."

Six

May

I was late and hordes of children were running out the doors, blocking my way back inside. I imagined Dougie waiting for me and probably crying when I did not appear. I worried about that, the way he would cry just like that, not worrying who saw him, not understanding how crying could provoke the school bullies.

I was on the verge of crying myself. I had put my coat on outside my fourth grade room before walking around the playground to the kindergarten entrance on the other side of the building and while I worked against the crowd in the wide hallway I began to sweat. When I finally got inside the room it was empty and quiet. A teacher putting away pots of paint asked me if I needed something.

"My brother" I said, "I came to take him home." She told me that all the children had left already ten minutes ago.

I started home looking for Dougie everywhere as I walked past the rows of closed and shuttered houses and across the streets no longer patrolled by the eight grade "safeties" and the sound of leaves skittering across the sidewalk made me sadder and frightened.

The street was deserted now, all the children safe at home, the fathers not yet returning from work, the mothers hidden behind the heavy drapes that covered every window. No light, no vision, no essence escaped the tightly locked houses on our block. I was afraid for my brother in this early dusk. I felt outside of time, outside of my entire world as if that entire world had moved somewhere else and I had missed it. I had mislaid my world in the space of ten minutes that seemed a recurring eternity. Then I was at our house and the door was open and my mother was home, standing there in the doorway watching me run up the walk.

"I lost Dougie" I cried. "He's right here" she said and smiled and there he was beaming, proud of himself because he'd found his own way home and our mother was proud of him, smiling, home to let him in. I stood outside the door looking at them, relieved, then angry, thinking then, that if he would only wait for me, listen to me, follow me, we could somehow forestall the inevitable. Even then I dreamed of losing him, got up in the night to check him in his bed, to make sure he breathed. In my dreams the chronology of our lives reversed itself.

In the dictionary, there is more space devoted to definitions of the word "time" and phrases containing the word "time" than any other word. I do not take this to mean that the word "time" is the most exhaustively (and definitively) defined word in the language but rather that it is the most difficult to define, perhaps even impossible, given the definition of the word "define" (to state or set forth the meaning of a word, to explain the nature or essential qualities of; to determine or fix the boundaries or extent of). The dictionary distinguishes between "stating the meaning of a word" and "fixing the boundaries of" by its examples, but in fact, to define anything, a word, a quality, as well as a territory, is to set boundaries around it, to limit its meaning. With each successive attempt at definition on the two and half pages of definitions in the dictionary, the boundaries of the meaning of the word time are expanded until we lose sight of them altogether. I could say that "time" _is_ "infinite" (another word that, by definition, defies definition). But the writers of the dictionary have an easier time dealing with the word "infinite" because they merely need to point out that infinite is the opposite of finite. They merely need to point out that whatever is "infinite" has no boundaries. For some reason, although "time" is "infinite" the word "time" took hold in a far more pervasive way in the language than "infinite" and we have come to use it in all sorts of odd little ways as I just did when I wrote that the writers of the dictionary had an easier "time" dealing with the word "infinite" and so on and so forth.

One of the over sixty definitions of the word "time" (before moving on to the phrases containing the word such as time bomb, time capsule, time card, time exposure, time honored, time immemorial, etc. all the way to time zone) is that it is the system of sequential relations that any event has to any other as in past, present, future; another is: _indefinite_ continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another. Yet another definition is: " _finite_ duration as contrasted with eternity" which would mean that, sometimes, "time" is considered the opposite of "eternity" even though we all know that time _is_ eternal. Other definitions refer to measurement: a system or method of measuring time such as "Greenwich time"; a particular period as distinct from other periods (of time); a prescribed or allotted period, and the examples are, in an interesting juxtaposition, "as _one's life_ or for payment of a debt" and that last followed by another definition: " _the end_ of a prescribed or allotted period . . . . . . . . is this perhaps a conscious acknowledgement of our mortality? Another good word, that one, "mortality", derived completely from the concept that time does go on even after we, each of us individually dies and will go on (or will it? and what does that mean to "go on"?) even after every last one of us dies. We all know this (or do we?) and yet the dictionary defines the word "eternal" as existing outside all the relations of time. Is time then the thing that imposes boundaries on everything else but itself? Even eternity is defined in terms of time, i.e. to be eternal a thing must exist _outside_ of time. (But if time is infinite and itself eternal, how can it have outside boundaries?)

What awes me completely is that we have words to ask these questions and to ponder these incomprehensible concepts. How did all this language evolve? It does seem that with the advent of writing, language itself became more self conscious and thinkers developed more and more language in order to examine the intangible. This is even more interesting when one considers that written language began primarily as a means for counting things, keeping accounts as it were, as trade among societies developed. Stories were passed down verbally, chanted to enable the memory to maintain everything, keeping rhythmic time being a memory enhancer. But keeping track of numbers of things, like those little snail shells used to make the royal purple dye or small flat pieces of precious metal, those would be hard to chant and remember. Once written language began it grew so rapidly, compared to what had happened before, unless of course it is all happening all at once or over and over again. I wonder sometimes: all those intriguing theories about the lost continent of Atlantis, cryptic biblical stories that seem symbolic of things to come, the Tower of Babel comes to mind: such a clear symbol for present civilization with its amazing, almost magical, technological feats and the fact that a nuclear holocaust could end it all, force the few survivors (if any) to start all over again. Makes you wonder how many times that has happened already.

But if human beings were to kill themselves off completely, the computers would still be here, immune to nuclear threat although having viruses of their own. I think about all those futuristic movies about computerized robot-people. Do those directors know something I don't? Is that in fact the plan for the future? Are we already in it? I sometimes feel like I am dealing with robots when I try to correct a mistake on a bill or see a doctor. Nice enough, the people I talk to, but with a finite list of responses, regardless of the question, like a computer. If I were a robot, would I even know it? I don't think I'm a robot, but sometimes I am not completely certain of that or anything else either.

Well May is the month to consider all the possibilities because May is the month of my birth and my annual reckoning of the years, the official marking of my lessening time left in this life and the irresistible urge to look back and measure against the increasing years behind me, the decreasing opportunities to make it all matter. May is when I ponder, daily upon waking, where all those years went, what I did with them (not much) and what I would do if I could do them over again. . . . . . "If I knew then what I know now" . . . . . "Youth is wasted on the young" . . . . that sort of depressing morning mental peregrination. . . . . . . .That, plus my allergies, could be the reason I prefer fall and winter to spring and summer.

Seven

June

The King spent most of the spring in bed with a cold and suffering a depression that left him without the energy even for cruelty. He asked for the pet rat to be let loose on his bed. The rat sat there, confused and quiet on the mound of quilts while the King spoke to it, but when he moved to stroke it, the rat ran off. The King felt too tired and ill to be angry. He let it go. The entire city felt relief while the King hibernated.

The Clockmaker worked steadily on making, not only repairs to the clock, but embellishments, figurines, one representing death, that would come out at certain times, brandishing a scythe. He had satisfied himself that he could continue embellishing the clock indefinitely and, like Scheherazade with her endless tales, entrance the King sufficiently that he could expect to live out the full number of his days.

While the king remained in his sick bed, the noble landowners, who had once made up the governing town council, did in fact govern the town and, feeling emboldened, finally united around a common purpose. They plotted revenge, their vision of the King's final demise becoming more gruesome with each warm spring day. Believing the Clockmaker to be the most badly used by the king, some of councilmen came to visit him, ostensibly to watch him work but in truth to feel out his sentiments. They knew the King, that fool (or so they reasoned) seemed to idolize the man he had victimized and they thought perhaps they could enlist the Clockmaker's help in trapping and assassinating the King. Not a one of them came right out with these thoughts as not a one could discern the Clockmaker's state of mind. The Clockmaker had learned to betray no hint of his thoughts and these visitors left him puzzled and relieved not to have said more of what they planned. Nonetheless, the Clockmaker guessed from the questions they asked what they were up to and he wondered if he had a moral obligation to warn the King of his danger of if he should merely let human history run its course which it probably would in any case regardless of his part in it. Then again, the King, as twisted in his mind as he was, might mistake the Clockmaker's warning and turn on him. In the end, the Clockmaker decided to mind his own business.

When the King finally felt well enough to venture from the warmth of his bed and fire, he went first and predictably to the Clock tower to see what progress the Clockmaker had made and he was delighted with the new toys the Clockmaker had created for him. He was so inspired by the little parade of figurines that he resolved to go on a walking tour of the countryside with his own parade of guards and advisors and perhaps pick up some children along the way. The King decided that he would not worry about finding a wife and having a son. He would adopt a son from among the children of the countryside. He couldn't have been more pleased with himself and with the Clockmaker for giving him the idea. He began to feel as though he himself were the clock that ticked at the Clockmaker's whim and he realized he must never again hurt the Clockmaker who instilled in him ideas, spirit, heart. It was as close as the King would ever come to feeling love. The Clockmaker for his part was relieved that the King would be gone away from the imminent danger and that he now did not have to grapple with his own conscience on the matter. He decided he himself would be gone when the King returned.

The King began to plan his excursion into the countryside, collecting the youngest and hardiest of his usual retinue. The King knew he must take plenty of armed guards for his protection. Even before there was a plot against his life, he always feared one. He didn't know but would not have been surprised to learn that one of his own guards had been bribed by the council members and that one man was feeling out the loyalties of other guards, planning to win enough of them over to be able to assassinate the King without repercussions.

The King for his part had already been bribing the loyalty of his guards, poor peasant boys all, to whom he gave pieces of land once part of the council members' large estates. He merely followed the example of his mother who had requested and been given large areas of land in exchange for her negotiating peace with the marauders from the east. She then divided more than half of what she received into small farms which she gifted to guards recruited from poor tenant farming families so the heads of these families could vote (land ownership being a prerequisite of voting) as well as produce their own surplus food to store and to sell. The guards were grateful for their small farms and the chance to cast votes on those matters upon which votes were cast. The King, again following the example of his mother, often requested the vote of the people on many decisions, albeit nothing that impacted his own power.

The King consulted the painting of his coronation for ideas about costumes to wear on the parade he decided should begin the day of the summer solstice. He put one of his guards to work on planning their route and ordering luxurious tents made for their overnight accommodations as the King expected to be out on the road for many days, making a leisurely tour of the lands that surrounded and supplied the city. He instructed the guard to tell no one the route beforehand and he trusted no innkeepers. He cleverly put his safety entirely into the hands of this young guard who swelled up with pride at his sudden promotion to the King's special confidante and entertained himself with dreams of glory.

The palace chefs were expected to come along and to carry with them their implements, spices and condiments with which to prepare the wild game they would hunt and eat along the way. Chefs and hunters, guards, musicians with pipes and drums and lutes, jugglers and magicians with their tricks all were needed to accompany the King on this celebration of the summer solstice and, as it happened, the seventh anniversary of the King's coronation. He had decided seven years was a good time to mark with appropriate festivities. Astronomers were ordered to come along to watch and interpret the night skies from wherever they stopped each night. Alchemists and philosophers were expected to drop what they were doing in the city and join the mimes and jokers and follow the King on his long and well protected walk into the woods and out into the lands. The excitement was palpable and the preparations required all the weeks leading up to the solstice and even then, there was a feeling, a sense that something more was needed, something had been forgotten or left undone but then they began their walk, lighthearted and joyous, one and all, for how could anyone resist the music, the colors, the warmth of that day?

They left the same way the King had gone as a child when he'd been nabbed by the three ghostly woodcutters and he half hoped they might find those men, unchanged around their fire, cooking a rabbit and the King imagined what he would do to them if he found them. The image of the men spitted and roasting over their own fire amused him but it was not to be, the men were never found. They did find children, playing in the woods, against the wishes of parents no doubt, and these they invited to come with them and the children were happier than they had ever been to do so. A young woodcutter with a girlish face and no beard joined them also, toward the end of the long retinue, blending in with the crowd, singing and dancing when they sang and danced, but never taking his eyes off the King, waiting for him to wander off, waiting for dark, waiting for some opportunity to accost the King alone, having all the time in the world.

In another time and place a parade of soldiers marches through the streets of a small dream town: the dreamer sits upon a stoop watching it. The soldiers are marching in the early 1940s, and the dreamer, dreaming twenty years later, knows this, understands it is a dream; thank god it is a dream. The soldiers wear the uniforms of the German SS troops and Hitler is at their head and they all salute him. The townspeople are expected to salute Hitler as well. The dreamer is still a child, but knows. The dreamer goes inside the house to avoid saluting Hitler and to investigate opportunities for hiding because the dreamer understands there is no escape, not that day. Also there is a baby in the house who must be protected. For herself nothing matters that very much, but the baby must be protected. Inside, between her and the baby, there is a very large, very fat soldier standing in the middle of the main room of the house. The dreamer finds in her hand the fork from her mother's fancy carving set from Toledo Spain. The dreamer, enveloped by the fat arms and chest of the soldier, begins to stab the soldier in the chest with the fork, over and over and over again but the soldier does not die, does not even bleed, and the two wrestle until the dreamer prays to wake up and be delivered from the struggle. First the dreamer wakes up enough to be delivered from the struggle but not from the house in the town. The dreamer falls back asleep and hides there in that house with the baby, hardly daring to breath, until the morning birds wake her up into the 1960s in a ranch style home in Denver, Colorado, out of breath from fear, her baby brother in the next room, grown larger than she is, already growing a beard.

I read _The Painted Bird,_ by Jerzy Kosinski and could not rid my mind of the most awful images. They were beautiful and terrible at the same time. The painted bird: painted beautifully and dreadfully and cruelly in order to create such a terrible spectacle of the bird being torn to shreds by its own kind, birds who did not recognize it after the painter had decorated it. Did God decorate human beings differently to ensure that they would destroy each other? Why is violence as instinctive as love? Why? Where did Bosch find his images? I saw the paintings done by patients in a mental hospital, imprisoned for life by and because of their madness, and the paintings were wonderful but terrible like the paintings of Bosch. Where do they come from these images? Does God find our blood more beautiful when spilled? Is the sanity we claim nothing more than denial of our nature?

The Clockmaker, left alone now, begins to live outside the Clock Tower. He takes his own walks outside the town with Lydia, touches the grasses and trees, listens to birds, the sounds of streams, rejoicing in his senses, in his freedom from the tyranny of the great clock and his terror of the small King. He remembers in his imagination faces and forms and colors more vivid in his mind's eye than in reality. He sleeps in the daytime, lying on the warm grass, feeling the light tread of lady bugs across his chest. He dreams in the day. He imagines the parade, hears them singing from the distance or is that the buzzing of flies? He hears a quiet grunt and feels faint from loss of blood when the young woodcutter, finally revealed to be a girl, stabs the King and the King does not even fight back but offers his breast like a sacrifice, relieved it is finally happening and his fears can be ended and neither the King nor the Clockmaker can know if the distant sobs they both hear are for relief or sorrow at this murder. The King wants to pardon her, forgive her, for he is finally free of his own burdens and sorrows and had he known how relieved he would feel, he would have done this himself years ago.

The Clockmaker wakes, wondering if his dream could have been real. He says nothing to Lydia who has been gathering wild flowers. They walk back into the town where it is very quiet as if nothing special has happened and he begins to doubt what he thought he knew about dreams, about prophecy and premonition, about the myth of time and space and stars, about life and death and God.

### Part Two:

### The Clockmaker's Journey

Eight

July

News of the King's death barely preceded the return of his body and his body alone for no other blood was shed. The soldier who had been entrusted with the King's safety was asleep when the King was stabbed to death and because the King never cried out, the soldier slept until awakened by the sun and found the King already hours dead. This young soldier was so filled with shame and remorse over his own negligence that he would have taken his own life but for the thought that he owed it to the King to find the murderer and avenge his death.

After stabbing the silent King, the woodcutter had gone back into the woods and started a fire inside a stone hut where she lived alone. She had stripped off her bloody clothes and burned them and put on newer cleaner clothes that were nonetheless stained with soot by the time the evidence of her crime had been consumed by the fire.

She was back with the King's caravan by dawn and pretended then to be just awakening with all the others. No one suspected the woodcutter and soon the young woman could discard her disguise and dress again like a young woman and blend in with the other young women of the town and have her own life back. But for the meantime, dressed still as a woodcutter, she volunteered to lead soldiers into the woods in search of bandits because the soldiers were certain it was bandits who had done the murder. She led them around and around in circles in the woods for days while others carried the King's body back to town for a stately burial. Eventually three wizened old men were discovered, completely insane all of them, and these were brought back to the town tied and led by a rope like cattle, where they would stand trial and be executed. The young woodcutter felt no guilt about this because she knew that each of them had committed other crimes worse than the one for which they would finally be punished.

The King was given his stately burial which appeased those of his citizens who still felt loyalty to him but while there was a public display of grief, there was also much secret rejoicing. The town council members reconvened and took up the governance of the town as they had before, out of fear, they had given their power to the family of strangers who had emerged from the woods as if divinely sent. Now they surmised it had been the devil who sent those three and they forgot the good the Queen had done for them, forgot the kindness of Samson, and remembered only the cruelty of the demented King.

The father of the girl who had been brutally slain by the King was allowed to visit the dead King's casket before the burial and there performed an act of mutilation that failed to comfort him as he had thought it would. There would be no comfort for him, there never is. Time healed nothing, but time made things different. Eventually he would speak to his dead daughter and about her and cherish his memories as well as his anguish. He was elected the head of the town council for he had acquired wisdom the hard way.

The Clockmaker stayed another month to finish not only the repairs but the decorations on the clock and the council rewarded him with a sum of money that would last him for several years. He was offered a comfortable home in the town but he had made up his mind that he wanted to return to the village he had left as a young man. He felt like such an old man now, that agedness being the result of the quality, not the quantity of his years. By mid-summer he embarked on his last journey. Lydia accompanied him a couple of days until they came to a village where she was satisfied he would be cared for and given another guide to accompany him on the next phase of his long walk home.

He had intended to make his way back home in as direct a route as possible, walking through the cool nights (for what is daylight to a blind man?) and sleeping in the warm afternoon sun. He expected to be home before the first snowfall. But the Clockmaker did not realize that he had become a legend until he was so warmly welcomed in the first village. Lydia stayed a while too and then left him with tears and kisses and admonitions to let the villagers care for him. He was wined and dined so jovially that he gave in to the villagers' entreaties to stay even longer with them and before he could get away, the first snow fell.

The Clockmaker stayed that winter and then another, being the guest of first one family and then another, as they all vied for the privilege of hosting him. In the end he could not leave until he had spent time under the roof of each and every family in the village. He spent the days working on a gift to repay their hospitality and when he left them two summers later, almost to the day, they had an exquisite clock for which the local carpenters were proudly building a tower. In this way, the clockmaker traveled very slowly from village to village in circles or zigzagging across the countryside like a meandering brook and leaving the magical work of his hands wherever he tarried. He also listened to the stories of the people in the towns and these he pondered on his travels, feeling sad or happy for the people who confided their sorrow to him in the cryptic manner of myth since of joy they always spoke openly. From that first village he visited he always remembered the woman who told him the story of the stonecutter's wife before herself disappearing into the snow one mid winter night.

The stonecutter and his wife lived alone in the forest outside of the town. In their youth the stonecutter and his wife had made a handsome couple and everyone remarked upon it whenever they traveled into the village for supplies or to dance at a wedding. They seemed happy as well and had much to talk about but as the years went by they got tired and quiet and stopped talking to one another. They still danced at the weddings of their nieces and nephews, having no children of their own, but never for the sheer joy of it as once they had and for the stonecutter at least it seemed the joys of life were over and he was waiting for death to come and relieve him from its daily burdens. His wife however still liked to remark on the spring flowers, the birds, the sunshine and the rain and the fairy tale whiteness of the winter snows. She still loved the world and she began to venture out in it by herself talking to herself as if to a friend and sometimes crying in her loneliness for she missed the companionship of her husband and did not understand his growing bitterness.

One evening the stonecutter's wife realized she did not wish to return to the dark house and the silent man. She wanted to remain in the forest beneath the sky, neither joyful nor sad for those feelings no longer mattered and she did not even trust the earth to see to her needs as her only need was to be part of it. "Do with me what you will" she whispered and curled up within the rough embrace of a large tree root. In the dusk a mountain lion appeared seeking food for her cub and she stared at the woman in the tree and the woman stared back without fear and whispered again to the earth "Do with me what you will" and the earth turned the woman into a stone. The mountain lion could not eat her and wandered off. The rain fell on the stone and the sun shone upon it and lichens and moss grew on the stone and inside the beautiful stone the woman's heart still beat with blood and was content.

At first the stonecutter did not miss his wife but felt angry that she was not home to prepare his meals. He thought she had stayed away to spite him and decided not to reward her with the slightest attention, but when a few days passed and then a week and then another, he became worried that a bear or a mountain lion had gotten her. He was so sure of this that he became even angrier for had he not told her over and over again not to go alone into the forest? When a niece came to visit with her husband they insisted on going out to look for the woman and scolded the old stonecutter so that he felt he must go with them and grudgingly admitted he had been wrong to be angry and stubborn.

After they walked a long way, the niece felt tired and sat down on a large rock and as soon as she caught her breath she thought she heard the thudding steps of a large animal and jumped up to run. But as soon as she stood up the thudding sound stopped and she sat down again thinking it had been her own heart she heard. But as soon as she sat down she heard the sound again and was sure it was something outside of herself and was again frightened and again jumped up to run and again the sound stopped. Finally after jumping up and sitting back down a few times the niece was certain the sound came from inside the stone and the stonecutter who had brought his ax for protection split the stone in two and they found inside a large heart shaped seed, as red as blood. A voice in the stonecutter's head told him that this was what was left of his wife. He cried then and his tears fell on the heart shaped seed and it throbbed as if about to burst into flower. He took the seed home and planted it in a pot on a sill in the sun and watered it carefully every day and spoke to it as if this were indeed his wife and the seed sprouted into a lovely flower and every morning and every evening the stone cutter greeted the flower and talked about the weather and the beauty of the world. When he died the next year his niece and her husband buried him and planted the flower upon his grave for the niece said he loved that flower more than any other person or thing on earth.

There were many tales of transformation. His favorite involved a young woman who could whistle in the woods and summon a magical buck whom she had once saved from hunters when they were both quite young. The buck promised her in a voice she alone could hear in her own mind that one day he would save her life and anytime she was in trouble to whistle. She grew to be a thoughtful young woman, often lonely because people thought she was too serious, talked to much, asked too many questions they could not answer and so she often whistled for the buck for simple companionship, they would walk and she would talk and thought that indeed the buck did answer her. But one evening she came with a very serious request.

"I need your heart" said the girl, "for now it is I who am hunted by an evil king who will not rest until he has my heart in his hand."

The deer then consented to allow a large man who had accompanied her to kill him in order to cut out his heart to take back to the bloodthirsty king. It pained the man to do this but he was comforted by the deer who spoke to him and told him how to go about the task so as to inflict the least pain and also how to bury and pray over his body so that the deer could live in a dream forest all eternity where his friend, the young woman could visit him every night.

"And did she?" the Clockmaker asked the old one who told him this story.

"Do you believe the story?" asked the old one.

"I want to" said the Clockmaker and indeed he did for he knew the characters well. "Well then, I will tell you more, for this is a favorite story in these parts and every one who tells it adds a little more before sending it along on its way to the next story teller and to future generations. This is the way we heal, growing new skin over old wounds."

So the Clockmaker listened to the tale of the magnificent buck who died to save the young woman and was buried in special cave, a large cleft in a huge boulder that supported and was embraced by an ancient oak tree. Some robbers had been by the spot before the deer was buried there and had hidden their stolen loot. When they came back for it more than a year later, they found the spot blocked by a large stone and they wondered at this, wondered if someone had discovered their cache. They worked to move the stone and were knocked down by an enormous buck that flew past them and into the moonlit sky. The men were so stunned they passed out and slept soundly until morning. Then they went inside the cave to look for their treasure. They found among the gemstones and jewelry and pieces of gold the bones of a large deer and these they burned to keep warm while they camped that night. The ashes had a sweet smell to them and attracted a large number of birds who sang like no birds they had ever heard. When they slept that second night with the sweet smell in their nostrils and the sweet birdsong in their ears, they had visions that spoke to them of goodness and they awoke changed men. They used all their stolen wealth to help poor peasants in the surrounding villages and did more good with it than the original owners would ever have done.

"This, however, is another story. The story of the magical deer is over, at least for now," said the old one to the Clockmaker, sending him on his way.

Nine

August

Every August 12th the earth passes through the field of an old meteor and the sky is filled with what appear to be falling stars but are really bits of debris left from that long ago meteor. Every night for several nights leading up to August 12th I lay outside on my back in a sleeping bag in the mountains waiting to see the fiery lights streaming here and there across the sky. On the night of the 11th the activity was amazing; there was a streak of light somewhere in the sky all the time. I couldn't move my eyes fast enough to catch them all. I could not imagine the brilliance of what would take place on the following night, the 12th of August but when I went out on the 12th of August and waited and scanned the sky and almost nothing happened, three tired flashes at long intervals, I realized it was leap year and indeed I had been lucky to catch the event the night before earlier than I had expected it. Amazing really that we even understand what we are seeing, how can we know about this universe of which we are a part? How do we learn these things? How do we know that what we have learned is really true? I think sometimes that the world of my dreams is more real than the waking world I experience so intensely but with such frustrating limitations. In my dream world I can fly, I can mix up the past and the future, I think I understand what is happening in my dreams but as soon as I awake into this world, I am mystified again.

Waiting for a bus, an organ grinder out of place and out of time, here, now, and the first few autumn leaves at my feet, all this familiar but strange. The commercial part of the city, noisy, chilly, storm dark at noon, people pass as if I were invisible and not crying for help and I am crying on the other side of the rain. I am lost and I am part of the strange mid-day twilight. The twilight is draining my life. Nobody will help me. If I could get home I would stop dying, but I cannot find my home. The darkness brings down a new world and my home is not in it at all. The doorways are old and people stare cruelly and I cannot stay here. The streets are changed. What city is this? Number 10,003, a street name like Edith, a woman's name and it begins with an E, yes Edith, odd. Arches and tunnels, a residential area after the businesses, and all the doors are locked and the blinds are down.

No grass, nowhere to lie down, a military installation, fences. I shall never get out. I should never have left my home and I'll never find it again. I feared for my life. There was violence. I hid in closets, in basements, a wired porch, no, 'screened' is the word, but I was aware of the wires. Mountains, a well, a waterfall near by. I must have run away and gotten lost. So many died and so much violence, veiled and imminent, I sensed it, the violence and the anguish. So much fear and I had forgotten something: a baby or a dog, and I had to get back. This nightmare comes back and back and back again until I am afraid to sleep.

Little things frighten me: cows getting into a hostile neighbor's garden or getting lost in the city. I keep taking buses into this city, different parts of it each time, and getting lost and then I can't find a bus back to the country where the dark is soft and comforting, not terrifying like it is in the city with the neon and the noise and the strange shadows. Getting lost in cities frightens me the most, not knowing where I am or where I'm going to in a physical sense. That is what it would be in the end: lost on a street maybe even a familiar street made strange by my own homelessness and destitution. I relate very strongly to those sodden bodies on the streets. I remember something, some physical reflexive haze, a protection against the infinite moral despair. Somehow I feel it myself whenever I see them as if remembering my own future. It is confusing, this total simultaneity of time.

I believe now that I was dreaming over and over the last hours of my brother's life. He was lost, of this I am sure, and perhaps the rumors about drugs, LSD it would have been then, perhaps that was a truth I did not want to admit because I had warned him, the genetic propensity for schizophrenia, the danger of adding LSD to that volatile mix. That street, Edith Street, it does exist but how could I have known that then? Years later, decades later, I found it by accident, toiling up a spiraling path to the Coit Tower in San Francisco and there it was all of a sudden a small side street, not even a through street, just a short block that dead-ended, Edith Street. And the addresses were prefaced with triple zeros just like in my dream. How could I have known that?

He was sending me a message but when I found the place I had no idea its significance. There were people there, a small theatre company, something about my brother in a play: it was a dream that I had only once but I was so horrified by it, I never forgot it. I had gone to that city to see him perform in a play and he was cast as Jonah and was eaten by a whale and the special effects were very artful. Then when I went backstage to find him no one admitted knowing him, it was as if he'd been spirited away and I knew they had killed him but I did not know why, wondered if it had happened accidentally during the play or if it had been done intentionally during the play. I could discover nothing.

The boy who was with him when he died, wouldn't talk to anyone, the only witness and everyone suspected he was lying, some people suspected he had done it, an accident? Surely not intentionally? No motive. Drugs the rumor was, somehow drugs were to blame. I wondered if they had been approached and the other boy ran and hid, didn't come to my brother's aid and watched him killed. Accidentally or intentionally? What is intention? How does it differ from compulsion and how do we know? Does it make a difference? What would he want? What would my brother want me to do if I were to discover the truth? That boy he was with, he had a bad time I heard, drugs, definitely drugs and then rehab and then some kind of job in a hospital, getting his life together. He still wouldn't talk about it, wouldn't tell anyone anything and I thought he felt so guilty he couldn't talk about it, not that he had done something violent but that he had done nothing to prevent violence. I have no facts to base this on, can only try it out and see how it feels.

My brother no longer visits me in dreams. Maybe his connection with us in this world became less important over time. Time, how does he experience time? To us, he is eternally young, nineteen.

It was after he died and after I fully realized I would never hear his voice again, never see his face alive again, that I began to wonder about time, how fast it flies, how slow it can feel. I thought that trees danced but so slowly we could not catch sight of their dancing and that rocks grew like plants but so slowly we couldn't detect it and of course that is true. Our lives go by in a flash, like those bits of meteor debris in the sky, fast and perceived by us after the event, how long after we cannot even conceive. No wonder humankind has this compulsive need to measure time, to make clocks and calendars and historic records in order, by accretion of words and memories, accumulation of stories, to give weight and substance to our little flashes of life. Some people say it was necessary to make calendars to know when to plant food but once food became predictable and plentiful and hierarchy came in the wake of surplus, and with it vanity and ego and a need to control all of nature, well of course, it all had to be justified somehow, had to be given some special permanency in the overall scheme of things.

In my dream of being lost in the city, I often find myself riding on a bus and I don't know where the bus is going or where to get off to catch a different bus that is supposed to take me home. On the dream bus there is always a blind person. Last year I was in San Francisco (I am drawn there periodically) and I did ride the bus and there was a blind woman and she was dressed in an odd collection of clothes that I'm sure she had obtained from the Salvation Army and everything was green, different shades of green, a ruffled, child-like, summer weight, flowered skirt on a light green ground, a white blouse with an emerald green ribbon running through a bit of lace across the chest, solid green socks worn with dirty tennis shoes, a green cardigan sweater with a parade of red animals knitted into it under a dark green aviator's style jacket, too many layers for the warm day but it can get suddenly cold in San Francisco. I wondered how she had done that, if she was really blind, or if some poor soul had collected the clothing for her and for some reason of her own had tried to color coordinate the otherwise oddly mismatched items. I became curious about what it meant to this exceedingly poor, possibly homeless, blind woman to go out all dressed in the color green and if she even knew about it. No wonder I am barely functional in this world, wondering about such inconsequential things when time is rushing by and civilization is destroying itself and we are bits of its debris flashing through a vast emptiness.

Ten

September

A light rain had begun to fall when the Clockmaker arrived at the Village of K. The feel of it and the heightened scent of the pine trees helped him see the beauty of the scene in his mind, although oft-times the beauty he imagined exceeded the reality. This time he had wandered into a place so beautiful that all the sighted travelers who passed through it ached with a longing to become a part of it. Some of them did, staying longer than intended and even marrying and having families here, sometimes forsaking a first family elsewhere to start a second family in the exquisite spot.

This, in fact, was how the village had grown since it had been started by the grandmothers. A small group of women, six precisely, had escaped the oppression of their husbands, leaving sons behind and wandered in the mountains from the east, living off the fish from streams and rivers and cress and the occasional bird one of them was able to hit with a stone. They wandered a long time in circles until they found the perfect spot to settle down in hidden serenity. Three clear rushing mountain streams pooled in a hidden valley and then meandered in wide curves through a meadow filled with wild flowers, before falling from this exquisite ledge down through a rocky canyon and on into the world beyond. The women, wily and wary, did not build their creek-stone shelter in the meadow where the structures could be seen from below and above but nestled it instead inside the sloping crevasse down which the largest of the three streams rushed and sang its way to the river and thence to a far off sea.

First they built a large covered bridge over the stream. It was built of long thin poles that had been felled by beavers because the women had no iron tools to cut and plane the wood. All they had among them was a very small ax one of them had grabbed quickly when they had run away from their old village. This small ax was sufficient to cut up already dead wood for a cooking fire but would not have lasted long had they put it to use felling trees for building. So they took what the beavers left and built their rustic structure that served both as a bridge and a place to get in out of the rain and snow after the pole roof had been covered with mats woven from the meadow grasses.

This bridge was wide enough for the women to cross six abreast with arms stretched out to their sides and clasping hands. This was the way they measured its width. Later the village meeting house would take up three quarters of the walkway and the bridge portion would be narrowed so that only two people could walk abreast or single file if one of them was fat.

By the time the bridge was finished the leaves had begun to turn bright yellow and deep red and the women started immediately collecting stones from the stream to build a shelter in which they could have a fire and warm themselves through the winter. This first stone house was built against a large granite outcropping that formed a back wall. The ground sloped away from it down toward the creek so the women had to first build up a rock retaining wall to hold in the soil they dug and carried to make a level floor. They set the front wall back a bit with the pole and grass roof overhanging enough so that one could sit in front of the house and dangle her feet over the ledge protected from rain and snow and dream to the music of the stream. The house itself was large enough for all six to stretch full length and sleep. One of the side walls was built with a hollowed out place in which to build a fire to warm them through the nights. They still did all their cooking outside. The women had selected and fit the stones of the house together so carefully and cleverly that they needed no mortar but to prevent the wind from finding a way in on winter nights, they hung woven grass mats down two of the walls. The granite boulder which was solid and the wall that contained the fire space they left exposed.

For several years they lived the wild life, the oldest among them remembered and these old grannies passed on the stories of what had happened to their people before the youngest among them had even been born. The old women had wandered with their tribe herding animals they kept for milk and living here and there in tents they could easily set up and take down. They stayed nowhere long enough to grow food but gathered what grew wild and hunted small animals for meat. Weather and other tribes drove them westward and the lands available for their periodic use began to disappear as more and more villages established themselves and people took land for crops and drove away the wanderers. The nomads became raiders in desperation and for a while violence was a way of life. Then their leader negotiated peace and was given land where his tribe could stay put and grow crops like their neighbors. In exchange they promised to fight for these neighbors against other raiding tribes.

The women were glad for the peace but then worse things happened. Even though everyone had the same size field, food did not grow with equal abundance on each and some families had more food than they could eat while nearby others starved. For the women the solution was simple: those who had too much would share with those who had too little. The men, however, had other ideas. If a man gave another man grain to feed his family he wanted something more than a promise of future reciprocity. He wanted a goat or a cow, or, if the poor man did not have a goat or a cow, he wanted one of the man's daughters and thus the women began to be traded as goods and against their wills and inclinations. Two of the older women, recalling better times, took their grown daughters and a granddaughter old enough to travel fast and hunt and escaped the village of their husbands and fathers who had betrayed them.

It would be two full cycles of the seasons before any men discovered them and these men were so taken with the daughters and granddaughter they wanted to stay with them. The grandmothers had to give in to the wishes of the daughters who believed they could keep these men under control and maintain their communal life style but of course the very first thing they all did was build two more stone houses to separately shelter each man with the bride of his choice.

By the time the Clockmaker happened upon them, the first two old grannies had long since died and the granddaughter was herself a great grandmother and the oldest woman in the village. As the oldest she was well respected and under her guidance the village still maintained certain rules. The crops now grown in the meadow were planted, cultivated and harvested by everyone and each family given its share according to the number of mouths that needed feeding. No one family had more than any other and women had an equal vote with the men when decisions were to be made. When a new house needed building the village voted on it. When it was necessary to send someone outside to trade for tools and other supplies, the village voted on it. Marriages and births and birthdays were celebrated by the entire village and deaths were mourned by all.

The Clockmaker spent a dozen years in this village where he was asked not for a clock but to carve the face of each and every villager into the wood walls of the covered bridge meeting house, in order that their history might be recorded thus. He was able to do this because he could feel the form of each face with his hands and recreate it in wood and eventually in stone with an accuracy that seemed like pure magic to the villagers. As he did this work, he also collected all their stories, the secret ones they told about themselves as well as the ones they told about each other.

The old men told cautionary tales and tales about animals who behaved like human beings but with more wisdom. The young men told tales about the young women they thought they loved and who they feared would betray them, but the women, young and old told tales of wandering. The clockmaker remembered the stone cutter's wife and listened for her in these tales of wandering women.

The one that haunted him most was the tale of the woman who fled to the stream. After many years of marriage and after her children were grown with families of their own, this woman had begun to wander off alone causing her husband to worry. Once he found her laughing out loud as the stream seemed to carry her away. He rescued her from drowning in the torrent of river water swelled by melted snow and spring rains and she was angry with him. She said she would not have died. She said she wanted the river to take her . . .

"If that is not dying I don't know what is" he had said to her sister who was a healer and knew all the secrets of the herbs that grew in the hidden places. He asked his sister-in-law for something he could give his wife to bring her to her senses but the sister-in-law told him there was no such plant. She told him she could give him something that would make his wife sleep long and deep at night so he could also sleep, knowing she would not run off as soon as he closed his eyes. Just to be sure, the man tied one end of a piece of cotton string to his wife's ankle when she finally fell into her deep, herb induced sleep. Then, when he himself went to bed, he tied the other end of the string to his own ankle so he would be awakened when she stirred. In this way the man was able to watch his wife's every waking move and still get his rest at night.

When he ran out of the sleeping inducing herb he visited his sister-in-law to get more and she told him she wanted to visit her sister first and try to talk some sense into her and he said "go ahead and try. I'm sure it won't make any difference. She has become incapable of rational thought and conversation." But the herbalist found her sister to be very capable of rational thought and conversation and they spoke of many things throughout the afternoon while the husband went about his business. The healing woman did not think it was craziness that her younger sister wanted to live the wild life in nature and let nature take her when it was time. She might have liked to live such a life herself were she not responsible for curing the ills of the villagers in both body and spirit. She was, after all, the oldest daughter of the oldest woman in the community and as such had inherited her power, knowledge and responsibility.

When she next met her brother-in-law she gave him a weakened version of the herbal infusion for his wife and something to help him regain his strength which she had observed was waning. He trusted her completely and gave his wife the infusion meant for her and drank the one meant for him. That night he slept so soundly that he never felt his wife untie the string from her ankle and escape quickly and quietly into the night. When he awoke to find her gone he was distraught and angry at his sister-in-law but she comforted and soothed him as she had promised her sister she would and before a year had passed they were married.

When the healing woman came to have her face felt all over by the blind artist who then magically carved her likeness into the wall, her husband had recently died and no one knew what had become of his first wandering wife. Her body had never been found. The healer told the Clockmaker this story because she had never told anyone the truth of her part in her sister's escape and she wanted to tell someone before she herself passed on. Feeling herself close to death, she had asked to have her face and her story immortalized by the Clockmaker and then she too disappeared into the mountains, perhaps to seek her sister.

"It was not right" she had told the Clockmaker, "not right for a man to tie his wife to him with string, not right for him to try to keep her from the mountain or the river when her soul ached to burrow into the mountain, longed to rush over rocks with the fresh clear water from its deepest springs. He had to understand her need to become part of her world even if it meant abandoning her body." She trusted the Clockmaker to understand this and indeed he did.

The healer was not the only villager to tell the story of this wandering woman but hers was the version he believed. One woman who told him the story said she thought the herbalist herself had murdered her own sister with poison and hidden her body so she could marry her sister's husband. She made it clear she had wanted him herself, him or someone, she was a lonely woman given to weaving bizarre fantasies. She told everyone her theory and no one believed her so why should he? Nonetheless he was kinder about it than her neighbors. Many of the villagers told him the spiteful woman's story that was really no story for she had no story that was her own so made up stories about others.

But really they all did. Even some villagers who held the herbalist in high regard, because of some cure she had wrought for them, blamed her for her sister's escape. They all thought the wandering woman had died in the wilderness, must have died, they could not imagine her surviving what they preferred not to risk. The Clockmaker thought that she had survived for he had happened upon her before coming to the village. At the time he had thought she was the stone cutter's wife and later he thought perhaps the world was filled with these women who fled the banality or the cruelty, the pain or the sheer silence of their lives with men to live freely in the forest. He never mentioned these thoughts to anyone. The Clockmaker simply wrought his magic in the wood and stone and listened. He would store up the stories for when they were requested.

Eleven

October

What primitive poet philosopher gave us this trilogy of words: earth, heart, hearth? Is not fire at the heart of the earth and is it not symbolic of returning to origins? Some tribal peoples we call "primitive" build their simple homes around the hearth or fire pit and give that center proper awe and respect and some take care to face their doorways to the rising sun or the setting sun, depending on how they express their respect for that first fire.

The dictionary defines "primitive" as 1. being the first or earliest of the kind or in existence, 2. early in the history of the world or of humankind, 3.characteristic of early ages or an early state of human development, 4. In anthropology pertaining to preliterate or tribal people having cultural or physical similarities with their early ancestors no longer in technical use, 5. unaffected or little affected by civilizing influences; uncivilized; _savage_ primitive passions and so on, the definitions thereafter becoming more specific to linguistics, art or biology, categories created by civilized scholars. "Primal" on the other hand is afforded this secondary definition: "of first importance; fundamental."

What happens to a civilized society that seeks to leave its fundamentals behind? Can it even be done? In his own language, the Clockmaker thought about this, I know it. I know that he pondered as I do the questions about what is fundamental, what is the primary, the most important aspect of human nature.

When the clockmaker had completed the portrait of the youngest child in the village, only then did he rest from his daily routine of work for he had worked with a passion that would not let him rest, had worked through the Sabbath each week and through the festivals celebrated by the villagers, stopping reluctantly when they begged him to partake of their feasts, to listen to the music their musicians played while the villagers danced and to hold the hands of friends on either side and dance in circles with them. He enjoyed these breaks but never lost the feel of the all consuming work in his fingers until the task he had set himself was done.

And then the passion was gone and he left thoughts of carving in wood or in stone behind in the village. The passion to carve had died in his heart and his hands and he craved instead some other healing thing, for after the distraction of his hands was finished, his pain was still there waiting for him. He realized he needed to get back to his home and to hear voices familiar from the long distant past.

He had lived in the village more years than he had lived in the city as a Clockmaker, first as an apprentice, then a master, then the creator of the world's finest, most magnificent clock and finally, the blind prisoner of a lunatic King. But his days in the village had been so ordered and his purpose there limited and temporary so he never allowed himself to feel attached to that place as he had to the city. When he left to continue his journey home, it was if he had sojourned there but a few weeks, to wait out the winter weather and to render a small service to the people. The stories they told him all ended on the day their faces were finished and they went about their business, grew up, married, had children, grew old and died. All those things happened to someone each year and he was an honored guest at all the weddings and funerals but he did not participate in their lives. He had recorded their existence for the centuries in wood and in stone and when he left them, he concentrated on recalling the stories they told him.

As he continued his odyssey across the land, retelling the stories in his mind, refining them, waiting for an audience of strangers, the villagers became for him not some three hundred souls but a single man, a single woman, a single child, experiencing all the life, the pain of it and the joy of it, that had been distributed among the many and he began to create myths to explain what being human was like. It was an explanation first to himself for he had missed so much of it and an explanation for some imagined companion that walked with him in the nights for he had resumed his habit of walking at night and sleeping in the daytime sun, an explanation perhaps to God for he wondered sometimes if God could possibly imagine what he had unleashed in the minds and hearts of humankind. This was a question he would ask the rabbis when he finally found his home again.

In order to remember the stories that folded so many lives into one, he recited them to himself in words that were rhythmic like music, and in this way, he composed long songs, epic poems, and he began to think about teaching these stories to someone else who could pass them on to yet another and down through the years for he wanted them to be a lasting gift, like the carved portraits, like the clocks had been though he tried not to think of the clocks in these waning years.

In the midst of these thoughts, he had another revelation about the nature of art and it was that art was like the clocks in an attempt to usurp some of God's power. The making of clocks was an attempt to measure the infinity of time and the making of art was an attempt to create something that would survive the passage of time as human life never could. So were religions and the teachings of the rabbis, the talk of the soul and its return to this recognizable world: an attempt to deny or even overcome the inability of humankind to participate in the infinity of time. But why then, he would ask himself, create human beings, if only to let them die and disappear, never to return? Perhaps the infinity of the soul simply made sense. He tried to believe that God had indeed spoken to the authors of the Torah and that the authors of the Talmud knew this and understood what they spoke of, but too often he had doubted it and he was afraid to vanquish the doubts of his youth that had seemed so practical and inescapable. He was afraid to become a crazy old man wandering in fields he could not see, feeling his way to the rivers he could hear and waiting helplessly to hear voices he hoped he would recognize. He had left his home to see the world, to learn something from it and now he was blind and felt more confused than before he had left. He longed to hear the voice of God and was afraid to receive what he prayed for.

Yom Kippur comes sometimes toward the end of the month of September, sometimes as late as mid October, the Jewish lunar calendar being incongruent with the Christian solar calendar. The Clockmaker made efforts in the city to keep track of the annual Day of Atonement and to observe the day in some fashion even though he did not join with other Jews to pray and request God's forgiveness for the inevitable sins of the community as well as his own. He had learned as a child that the world was a broken thing and that the Jewish people were intended by God and exhorted by the prophets to make what repairs they could here and there, day by day, with small acts of kindness and mercy, and larger acts of justice when that was possible, but always to make their own lives an example. As a child of course he expected that once done, such deeds, such mitzvot, would accomplish a permanent, lasting improvement in the world, but he had learned, as a blind man, that repairs done today could be undone tonight and he understood now the dance of back and forth and up and down that life really was.

Avinu, Malkeinu, our Father our King, he prayed to himself from memory, gently beating his breast with the rhythmic confession of each sin, forgive, forgive, forgive. Give forward, give first, and wait for the promises to be kept and forgive those promises when they prove too much or impossible to keep. For what are human beings after all if not incomplete and imperfect? Perhaps the King had merely done what God required when he blinded the Clockmaker for the Clockmaker had created something greater than a man, more lasting, more perfect and for that surely there must be retribution. The Clockmaker had finally repaired the great clock, repaired it so that it would continue to work for centuries, but he had hidden small flaws in the workings and decorations, hidden obeisances to the God he had forgotten for so many of the days of so many of his years.

Now he was done with creation, with clocks and sculptures and thought about the stories, for God, it was said among his own people, loved a good story, and so he talked to God, telling the stories, looking forward to finding the rabbis in his village and hearing their stories for surely much had happened in his absence. While he walked in the direction of the morning sun, he gave thanks for the beauty of the world, broken as it was, for the fragrance of the dew dampened leaves that he breathed in with deep pleasure, the sounds of the birds that he heard with delight, the fresh coolness of the stream water that he found by its song that beckoned and guided him, and for his memories of the colors of dying leaves so vivid in the slanted light just after dawn, just before dusk. Surely the pleasure he had derived from his body, from his senses was equal or greater even than the pain it had given him, and he marveled at it, gave thanks for it, remembered the prayers he had learned as a boy and recited them all like a song that flowed as naturally as blood flowed through his veins.

Around him the wind blew golden leaves from the trees and the ground glittered and crunched with them. Sometimes the wind was icy on his skin and he remembered and imagined the sky dark in the afternoon and the golden leaves gleaming as though all the light lost from the sky were stored in them and the world was lit by them as if by a multitude of candles. He would bend to gather up handfuls of leaves, touch them to his eyelids and remember Red; remember Yellow and a myriad of colors in between. He would reach out to find the trees and caress their bark and remember Ash and Locust, Birch and Oak, Elm and Poplar and sweet Maple.

At night, listening to the wind in the trees, the Clockmaker dreamed, as his creator dreamed, as the earth itself dreamed, of the joy of energy and rhythm, the bursting forth of fire from a volcano, the back and forth dance of the tides, the tenderness of new trees growing up from the ashes of the old, the tension and release and beauty of compressing rough substances like wood and coal into gemstones hidden in the body of the earth, bursting into brilliance in the atmosphere, and oh the pain, the pain of those extractions, the painful friction of earthquakes, the dull enervating drain of parasites living in and upon the earth, in its fluids and hard and soft substances, filling its arteries with what cannot thrive therein, sickening it, the earth, sickening it, so that it could no longer sustain its own life and that of the parasites, the human beings who sucked more from the earth than the earth gave freely, killing it slowly until it had to fight back, rid itself of these greedy parasites. That was the dream, dreamed in unbounded time, a gift, this glimpse into the sensations of the earth itself. In time, this species like other species in other times would be sucked back into the earth and become something else, something the earth could live with and sustain, at least for a time.

The Clockmaker prayed to God the Father for forgiveness before he lay himself down upon the ground to sleep, but realized in dreams that came to him from deep inside the earth that formed his bed, that Earth the Mother gives and takes and subsumes and transforms with no thought for sin or atonement. When the heat of the sun became unbearable and he awoke and sought the coolness of a stream, he had already forgotten his dream but it would come again when he slept and became someone, something, entirely different.

In his sleep, the Clockmaker embraced the earth as a caterpillar might, as a snake conforms its body perfectly to the contours of smooth rocks and loam, of scratchy, grassy mounds and valleys. Sometimes in his sleep he dreamed that he soared like birds rising on shafts of earth warmed air and touched down lightly on sand or skimmed along the glassy surface of crested ocean waves. Never had he experienced such thrills and joy as he experienced in these vivid dreams. To the traditional prayers of thanks for the body and its physical sensations he added his own to give thanks for the gift of imagination and for whatever it was in his mind that allowed him to connect to the world outside the boundaries of his body.

Twelve

November

The fall air was so crisp and clear that every sound was born a long distance with all its clarity intact. The Clockmaker was guided onward by the sound of music from a distant house, it was the music of a harp and a human voice and it was sad and lovely and he hurried onward, following his ears and his nose as well for as he came closer he could smell the sweet scent of burning pine. Even so, it took him a full day to find the source of the music and the sweet scented air. He stayed the night with the solitary singer, a young woman who had recently buried her husband. She sang to give herself company and hope, for the winter would be hard alone in the woods in these hills.

That night the young woman told the clockmaker a story that at first confused him. She talked about events that he did not remember hearing of and yet they were events that everyone should have heard about. She told him how she had grown up in a world across the ocean where she did not feel she belonged and how she had come to this place which had been the place her father's family had lived until they were all rounded up and killed. She described how the people were rounded up from all over the countryside and from the cities and put on trains and shipped to large ovens for extermination. She talked about vast numbers of people, more people than even existed in the Clockmaker's world and finally as the night wore on and he listened to the horrific history he thought he must have walked out of his own time or perhaps the young woman had come back in time, but either way, he realized her past was his future and he hoped he dreamed but when he eventually fell asleep and awoke again, she was still there, still singing and he knew this was more real than his memories of the King and the town. It was as if those other realities had fallen off the edge of the earth into a great void and he was trapped in a future that multiplied the cruelties of the King in numbers that could be comprehended only by comparing them to the stars in the sky or the blades of grass in the meadows. And yet the men who had engineered the torture and extermination of so many human beings had tried. They had tried to count them, making lists, endless lists. The young woman had told him this still amazed herself at the nature of such record keeping and the Clockmaker had remembered the king counting his own heartbeats as if to measure the infinite gave him some power over it.

Why had the young woman come back, he wondered, if her parents had escaped across the ocean? This she could not explain but thought a while and said she had wanted to see the place where her father's childhood memories had happened. Then she had fallen in love and married a man here but he had died of some disease and now she did not know where to go next. She said all her life she had thought of herself as completely free, a citizen of the world, free to go anywhere and live anywhere for as long as she wished and no longer.

The young woman invited the Clockmaker to stay and the music she made was tempting, but he had become anxious that if he did not make his way quickly death would overtake him before he reached his home, his proper place and time. His nightly dreams had been invaded by a new sensation. Now he dreamed that something slow and sluggish filled his veins and was quietly shutting down the workings of his body. He dreamed that his body, asleep, was already decomposing and turning into earth, to the ash from whence it had come, nourishing the saplings and mushrooms, the very rocks that surrounded him. It was not a frightening feeling nor painful, rather peaceful, a relief even, but when he woke he wanted more time to find the meaning of what his life had been. He was almost but not quite ready to let it go. ...

...It is that time of year of rotting apples and early doom. I hear wind in the trees and it sounds different than it did in the summer. The last of the brilliant autumn colors have blown away like so much debris in the city streets and I remember the days we used to rake them into piles and burn them in the gutters. I liked that time of year even then, even as a child, even though I understood it was a time of death and the coming of a long cold silence. It was peaceful.

I found another story in the paper, not about a cannibal this time, but about another voluntary victim. A homeless man who usually begged for change on the same street corner until a resident of the neighborhood invited him to fix up a shed in his yard and there the homeless man made a home for himself and his dog. The owner of the property said the man had fixed it up nicely, had food and water and candles. The owner had been interviewing him in order to write about him and had taken photographs. There was a photograph of the man with his dog in front of the little backyard shack in the newspaper. He was forty eight years old and had been homeless for five years before moving into the shack. The owner said the man had told him he'd been devastated by a divorce, his whole life had fallen apart then, but the newspaper story did not go into details, did not give the reasons for the divorce that was the reason for his circumstances. The man had lost most of his toes to frostbite and got around in a wheelchair, but he was able to stand without it.

Another man, a broken hearted man in great despair, perhaps a friend, the story did not address how they knew each other, got him to take part in a drama he wanted to stage for the woman who had just broken up with him, broken his heart and his hope and his reason. It is possible he offered to pay the homeless man. Homeless people end up having to sell anything and everything in order to survive. That is what the news article said. In any case, what happened was the two men went together to the street in front of the ex-girlfriend's house and the broken hearted man cried her name and told her loudly that what she was about to see was happening because she wouldn't listen to him. The article did not say what it was she didn't listen to, presumably that the man couldn't live without her, something like that. Then he began to beat the other man who had risen from his wheelchair and was knocked back down into it. The woman who talked to the press and the police said she thought that much of the scenario had been planned but not what happened next.

The broken hearted man simply could not stop his rage once it was unleashed and he continued to brutally beat the other man who said "hey man, that's enough" as the woman who was watching reported it. Another woman who lived down the street had come out and she hollered to the man in the wheelchair to come to her and he wheeled himself to her so she was right there when the heart-broken man stabbed him in the throat and she promised the man as he was dying that she would take care of his dog.

The woman for whose benefit this drama had been planned told the police there were many victims that day including her ex lover who she said had "put up" with a lot, what exactly she didn't say, that he had "gone through" a lot, again not too specific. Perhaps there will be a follow-up story. The strange thing is I do not take the paper anymore. I found just the one page when it blew into my yard with a swirl of dead leaves.

It struck me, this story, because of my dream that my brother had been murdered when he took part in a stage play. I've been obsessed with it, the news, the stories of violent deaths, twisted vestiges of ancient rituals of human sacrifice still happening without the ritual, the awe, the intent. My dreams are haunted by past lives filled with violence. I was born and reborn so many times in the land of ballads where words were sung not spoken and the tale was always the same. I killed someone or someone killed me but always I was a victim. I came finally to the city where I was alien but safe in my invisibility and yet I longed to find the places that were the scenes of my pain. I longed to tell the story of my life like it used to be, should be, would be if it could be, to tell it like it mattered. My head is full of characters and they are all me or knew me or killed me or were killed by me or saved by me or saved me. I yearn to find again the one who saved me. Telling their stories, my story, is like breathing. Who was I the other day when grief and deprivation exploded into spontaneous human sacrificial rites and the only kindness was the hurried promise to care for an orphaned dog? What caused that poor man, what causes anyone, to do such terrible things? Where is God? When does this business of repairing the world ever get finished?

I had a grandfather, a man I actually feel close to although he jumped from a tenth story window years before I was born, when my father was himself only a child. He could not bear to witness the violence. He jumped before having to witness the Holocaust of Nazi Germany but the only thing new about that particular incident of genocide was the systematic and efficient way in which the Nazis sought to exterminate every last Jew the same way scientists would go about exterminating some strain of bacteria. They merely perfected, with scientific precision and on a horrific scale, what human beings had been randomly doing to each other for as long as recorded history and continue to do as I write this. My grandfather had other images to haunt him, the same ones I'd heard about and envisioned since earliest childhood: the women dragged by the hair on their scalp behind the galloping horses of Cossacks until they were dead bundles of torn clothing, ripped skin and broken bones, the babies stuck on the ends of bayonets, the buildings burned after the occupants had been bolted inside, the screams of pain, the cries of grief and loss and that endless question "why?" and after all this time, all these centuries of the recorded violence of human history, we are left with that single question "why?" and no answer coming any time soon. For a while I thought I might find an answer, some revelation in San Francisco. I would go and stand on this street or that, at an intersection, waiting for the answer to come to me in one of those voices like the voices of my characters, those people I don't even know and never really recognize, just take down their various dictations. But my brother's voice, or some other voice that identifies itself as my own grandfather, I never hear them. Whatever they know, they aren't telling. Perhaps it will come in a story, the last one, the one that tells itself to me as I myself lay dying. But there is this one thing that I have discovered writing these tales. I have discovered that it does not matter who killed my brother or how or why, whether by accident, neglect or intention. What drove my innocent and gentle brother from this world is the same thing that drove my scholarly and probably gentle grandfather away. It was the accumulation of violence that is everywhere around us. However vast the expanse of time and space that surround us, every soul confined to a human body is trapped in a cell with the poisonous snake of violence coiled in a corner ready to strike. I think I was born knowing this and forgot. I remember now, when the call came, the two words: "Dougie's dead". . . . in that millisecond before the stages of grief set in, my first reaction was relief. I was relieved that he was finally safe.

EPILOGUE

The Clockmaker knew he was home when he heard familiar voices in the midst of the same conversation he had overheard on the day he had left so many years before. The Rabbis were discussing the day's Torah portion, the same portion for the same day of the Jewish calendar year, every year. Whatever the words of that day's allotment of instruction and guidance, the Rabbis would extrapolate, analogize, dig for deep meaning, seek elusive meaning, and perhaps even make up their own meaning to suit the issues of the day. This was the ongoing work of the Rabbis and it was never done because they were seeking the ultimate repair of a broken world, to cure the grief of the earth's own soul.

When a strange old man approached them, they did not recognize the face of the Clockmaker but, when he spoke, they recognized him as the young man who had left long ago or perhaps not that long ago after all, to see the world. Unseeing, he had become unseen, but he was heard and known by his voice. He was welcomed as if he'd been gone only a few days. And certainly it seemed as though it were only a few days since he had last overheard the rabbis telling their stories because the stories were the same, and always would be. He knew this from his sojourn with the young woman in the woods, had it been only a night or a century?

Someone helped him to wash and gave him wine and bread and a place was found for him to rest and live out his days which numbered slightly more than a month by the calendar. He died on the Christian New Year's eve while a distant clock tolled the hour and the year and he dreamed he heard the sound of passing trains and the almost, but not quite silent sob of a woman mourning.

#

### The Vast Darkness

I

Sara

Sara assumed she would continue in the field of psychology as that was her undergraduate background and it had always fascinated her. She took a road trip to visit the universities she thought she would apply to. The University of West Virginia was too close to the location of the now abandoned commune. She considered it briefly but walking around the campus disturbed her. She remembered that first summer when they had come once or twice a week to sneak into the dorms and use the showers. Not "sneak" exactly; the trick was to dress like the students, which was easy because in those days the students adopted the hippie style, and walk in boldly like you belonged there and knew where you were going. The women with kids pretended to be visiting cousins. One of them actually had a cousin who was enrolled but lived off campus. It was that cousin who gave them the idea for the shower "raids" as they jokingly called them, "stealing clean" they called it. (Abbie Hoffman had made stealing an intellectually respectable political action.)

Eventually they built their own shower, gravity fed from a strong year-round spring up the hill and warmed by the sun until they acquired a rusty old propane powered water heater and a propane tank of industrial size in trade for a healthy pregnant holstein heifer. They built a shed big enough for four or five adults from which they could enjoy the sunrise while showering. Those mixed communal showers gave rise to an entire season of gossip in the small town nearest them, another obstacle to their longevity on the land. But they all worked hard from first light to last and were far too tired in the evenings for the wild orgies the neighbors imagined, even had they been so inclined. Those neighbors would have been surprised to discover that the couples were monogamous and the singles chaste (until and unless they became part of monogamous couples). Nor did anyone use any drug more serious than the marijuana they grew in modest amounts in a well-hidden field. What bound this group was a belief in socialist principles, a good work ethic, respect for the land and a desire to remain aloof from the more irresponsible elements of the sixties "back to the land" movement. They were earnest young people seeking a moral utopia in the midst of the holocaust of industrialized civilization.

Thinking back on it, Sara realized it had been the building of the main house that had finally and irrevocably splintered them. They all got too involved with their own visions of what it should be, and it defeated them. But there were other things, many things along the way, that had already weakened the little community: a mother with small children insisted on making concessions to the capitalist telephone company that ate at their philosophical foundations, and not everyone wanted to sue (and thereby antagonize) the local electric coop that had used chemical spray on their right of way one morning before dawn ("Did they really think they could go undetected? Did they really think they could get away with it?" "Haven't you noticed? They CAN get away with it.) There were increasingly heated discussions about the morality of raising beef. One mother accused another of starving her infant because of too many politically motivated food taboos. There was even talk of calling Social Services in the nearest city. One man insisted that his pregnant wife go to a hospital for her delivery, and she lost respect by acquiescing ("If you are too chicken to let Melinda help you, at least have the integrity to speak for yourself"). Their meetings turned into vituperative debates over every aspect of their communal lives. Sooner or later, everyone scattered, to single-family homesteads, to other communes, even "back to civilization" with downcast eyes.

Sara stayed on even when she realized that it was not a simple love of the land but a list of shared prohibitions that had brought them all together, and this made her unutterably sad. She stayed on until she was the last one, all alone, abandoned with the shack, the sheds, the huge excavation where the new main house was to have been. They had indeed built and roofed a shell but scavengers came and took the lumber and the piled-up building materials inside. In the night, Sara thought she could hear them tearing the skeleton of the house and she knew there was nothing that she, all by herself, could do. She thought about taking the rusty old rifle with her and running them off and then thought again and went back to sleep, her heart broken. It was the very next day that she left. It had begun to snow, the last big snowstorm of her last spring there. It had been three years but would be more significant than the next three decades in her life. For the warm earth spawns ghosts and those ghosts accompanied Sara everywhere ever after.

Lying on a bed beneath an open window on a dark summer afternoon, the darkness of storm, the rain coming in on my legs, I look up at the trees through a window and hear rock and roll music from the distance mingle with the thunder and the swoosh of cars on the wet asphalt and all these things remind me of London, a lifetime ago, sitting in the room, looking up at the curtains blowing into the room, hearing Miriam Mekeba and the city rain bouncing with a light sound off the pavement and there I was remembering New York and when I went back to New York I remembered London, back and forth in time, my memories round in circles: riding my bike in a Maryland suburb near the University at dawn remembering the mornings I rode my bike around the Bronx remembering Rome. Where haven't I been? briefly passing through? I don't remember what I was looking for in all those cities, with all those people. I remember a lot of lonely, misplaced women too old or too young to belong anywhere.

Riding the 6th Avenue bus, the organ grinder, a hunchback. This I must have dreamed before I dreamed I was lost on the bus and before I dreamed the truck's headlights coming at me, running me over. I remember that dream very clearly and then the day that the leaves swirled around my ankles as if just before a storm and I saw the woman, the hunchbacked woman in a torn dress, very drunk, and all this remin'd me of the nightmare. The woman is homeless and she rides back and forth on the bus. She lives on that bus for as long as she can and the driver jokes with her. Actually, he is making fun of her because she is retarded but she doesn't realize that he is making fun of her so she doesn't care. That would have been Denver.

In New York there was the subway and all those drunks: the man who told me about owning a horse once with a girl on it, and a big dog. He'd had all these things and now he wanted a dime. Striding down 2nd Avenue to the wine store I see an old beggar woman rummaging in a wire trash can and I offer her the half of my sandwich I was saving for dinner. "What is it? Ham? Roast beef? Pastrami? No, I don't like pastrami." She disdains to speak to me, foul eater of pastrami that I am.

Standing on Howard Street at night by the bus station, thousands of birds crying. It was obscene those birds making that noise in downtown Baltimore at night, as though the forest were still there. A bus station in Alabama, the ladies' room smells terrible and a young girl, maybe fifteen, she talks to me. It's three in the morning. She just got a divorce she tells me. Good thing there were no kids she tells me. I ask how old she is. "Fifteen" she tells me, proudly.

In Florida a woman with half her nose missing tells me about her rose bush and how she waited twenty-one years for it, the husband promised it to her and forgot, time and time again and the boy was born, grew up, went to war and was killed, and the husband died and then she up and went to town and bought herself the rosebush but it wouldn't bloom, not for years and then one September it put forth one white rose: the September rose she called it and I wondered why she was telling me this story and what I was doing there: buying honey I think. I think I stopped to buy honey because she had a sign out front. A busload of kids came then and she had to tell them how the bees made the honey and their teacher kept shushing them. I don't remember what I was doing in Florida or how I got there or if I was with someone else or alone. Too many places.

Sometimes early in the morning while I drink coffee and wait for the dawn and listen to the sound of the geese flying over to the Park I indulge myself in memories of West Virginia. I felt so nurtured there. I lived in the dry rotted remains of a two-room shack held up by inertia and I had never felt so at home anywhere. Outside every window were scenes of a thousand greens and a deep peace.

Nestled and hidden in the nooks and crannies of rock formations and forest I could see the tops of tipis, to the east, the fading colors of an India-print bedspread flapping in the entry to the hayloft of the leaning old barn: Tom lived up there with his ex-biker wife and they fixed it up prettier than the house. I lived in the house because I was the cook, needed to be close to the kitchen. Why me? How had they known that I would be the best cook? Never cook anymore: frozen dinners when I have the time, fast food from machines when I don't. I was so thin in those days, of course: eating only what we grew and walking up and down hills, miles every day, no level ground in West Virginia: they said if it was ironed out flat it would be bigger than Texas and Alaska put together.

They said a lot of things. Tall tales were an art form, the thing to do on long winter nights by the fire. I don't remember anyone clearly, just oblique shadowy profiles or faces partly hidden by beards, long hair. I remember earrings and eyelashes on cheeks, habits of flipping long hair back over the shoulder, ways of walking, expressions of speech, everyone in pieces. I didn't really know anyone that well. They didn't really know me at all.

One by one they left, or two by two, or couples with children, sometimes sending friends back in their places but over time, fewer and fewer people living there in the woods. Finally just me.

I was an exile in time and only there could I be at home or at least create the illusion of it. It was so still there. I missed the animals though they were trouble in the winter. The geese could take care of themselves and the first few summers they were there living in the old barn and on the generous creek. But one summer they were gone: a few bones in the barn, foxes I supposed. I missed the geese and that summer I was sad, but later I got used to it and concentrated on the garden. Sometimes a man from up the road left his horses there to pasture when there wasn't much rain and the grass on his place wasn't sufficient. I took nothing for the pasturage. I was glad to see the horses there.

The man who actually owned the land decided to hang onto it, a good "investment" he said, unashamed at discarding his socialist principles so easily. He justified it by saying the community had let him down by not remaining committed to that hard life, more cold days than warm, more work than reward, so it seemed to them and to him, the man who had learned his lesson, had put youthful ideals aside and "grown up"...but not me. I loved it: the poetry of the creek and the beauty of the life on the land: I lived inside a landscape painting and heard music everywhere. I loved it. And yet, not enough it seems. Left on my own, I couldn't stay either: more cold days than warm, more work than reward, more work than I could manage all alone. I tried to finish the house we had started together. He said I could live there...but I couldn't.

Sara didn't belong and she knew it. No matter how long she stayed or how hard she worked, she was a stranger. Neighbors offered to help her but never asked her to reciprocate and this hurt her deeply. They were as kind or as cold to her, depending on their respective personalities, as they would be kind or cold to anyone among their own who was lacking something vital: sense perhaps. What Sara lacked was a history. They asked her enough questions for sure but couldn't relate to the answers. She was guarded and brief and her last name was simply too exotic to be real. She had given herself the name of Brindisi after the town in Italy from which she and her youthful husband had once embarked for Greece, one of the too many places she hadn't stayed.

How could she tell them that she had been on the run from her mother's third husband since the age of fourteen? Sara had hitched rides all across America, had worked odd jobs and flown off across the Atlantic without any clear plan, had married briefly when she was only eighteen, had come back and gone to a small alternative college on a scholarship because the college admissions officer had been so enthralled with a vagabond who had read so much and knew several languages: they let her take a test in lieu of requesting a high school transcript.

She discouraged his other interest in her with a ready wit and he responded gracefully (perhaps with relief, being married with grown children) and continued as her mentor. She graduated in three years with a degree in Behavioral Science. When anyone expressed amazement that she had finished so quickly, she just told them she had nothing else to do those three years and that always brought a laugh and put an end to questions about how she had spent her summers and winter and spring breaks. The college library had been her home. After graduation, feeling once again dislocated, she joined a commune made up of people she barely knew because she craved the beauty and moods of mountains. But to the mountain people, Sara would be strange twenty years hence. In the end that was what really drove her away, not the hard work or the cold winters.

"All science is an attempt to cover with explanatory devices—and thereby to obscure— the vast darkness of the subject. It is a game in which the scientist uses his explanatory principles according to certain rules to see if these principles can be stretched to cover the vast darkness. But the rules of the stretching are rigorous and the purpose of the whole operation is really to discover what parts of the darkness still remain uncovered by explanation." Naven, 2nd ed. Gregory Bateson. Stanford University Press, 1958, pp. 280-281.

Professor Cormack was delighted that Sara was interested in his idea of a particular kind of ethnographic study of an isolated mountain community in Appalachia and she was excited about the excuse to return. Of course there was a mountain of paperwork that had to be taken care of in order to be accepted by the university but, as head of a department, he was able to make sure the red tape moved smoothly and by the time she had completed the first half of her first semester she was an official, bona fide graduate student.

She spent that first semester doing background reading, culminating in a careful and fascinating reading of _Naven_ by Gregory Bateson for an understanding of his concept of the ethos and eidos of an entire society. It was this unusual and interesting approach that Professor Cormack wanted her to take in her study of her old neighbors.

II

Henry and Mary

Mary never did learn to talk, just kind of grunted or cried or screamed for things and pointed. And she had this embarrassing habit of touching her private parts in public. Old Henry beat her when she did that but after a while it became clear to him that she wasn't about to learn anything, not talking, not restraint, nothing. So he just kept her home and never went out himself either.

His wife had passed when Mary was born, a young girl herself when he married her, maybe thirteen, fourteen, maybe too young for childbearing. Mary's mother had been the daughter of a miner dying of black lung and a mother who lived in another world and them with eight children, Mary's mother being the youngest. Henry married her as a favor, taking her in, feeding her, was fifty himself at the time. Her name was Elvira but no one called her that. He himself just called her "girl" because that was what she was. And he called Mary "girl" too, but she didn't know the difference. When Elvira was dying she had asked him to call her by her name because no one ever had. It seemed important to her also that her child be named Mary for the blessed virgin, Elvira being Catholic, and she didn't even know then if it would be a boy or a girl.

Henry was hoping for a boy to help out with chores but he got a girl and he took care of her as best he could. After Elvira passed, that's all he did. He just took care of the girl and read his Bible and took care of the stock, what there was left of it. He kept a small kitchen garden but gardening was woman's work and he never cottoned to it. Just some corn and beans and potatoes and he hunted and fished and they ate fine. Neighbors were in the food stamp and restaurant business: they'd get the food stamps and then fix meals for cavers who came from the cities: Pittsburgh and Detroit and D.C., even New York City...but Henry wouldn't do that and anyway, cavers came on Sundays and he wouldn't even wash his face on a Sunday. He knew folks thought him too religious and they made fun of his girl.

He always talked politely to her even though she didn't respond, even when he beat her, when he used to beat her, but he stopped that long ago. She didn't understand and couldn't talk. She only made noises when she wanted something to eat or had to use the toilet. When she got sleepy she would fetch a blanket and curl up wherever she felt most comfortable, on the floor by the stove in winter, out on the porch in summer. He bathed her and helped her with the most private functions as if she were an infant and when she was twelve and began to bleed, he cried every month with her, both of them horrified by the sight of her blood. But then he would hold her and rock her and calm her down and he would sing in a sad tuneless voice the hymns that he knew. This was their life, Henry's and Mary's.

III

Robert

_The mountain people were loyally united against outsiders: folks from the cities who came looking for cheap land, folks from the towns who had gone out into the world and come back with education as doctors, lawyers, bankers, politicians; bottomland farmers with indoor plumbing and barns all painted white and green. It was as though the mountains and trees had whispered secrets to these people. The secret whisperings might be sheer gibberish or might be some wisdom they failed to comprehend, but in any case they felt chosen and were proud of these secrets, whatever they might perceive them to be, and they looked down upon the city folks, the rich folks, the uninitiated ones, and treated them at best with unsubtle but confusing mockery or, worse, with intent and ingenious malice_ ... Sara's journal

Robert Awkman was strange. He had grown up in Monroe County as had his mother and her mother before her. He had always been a bookish boy with fantasies that involved faraway places and important people he read about in the magazines at the laundromat in town. Other young people made fun of him and called him "Awkward Awkman" behind his back. To his face, very few of them said anything at all. He kept all the covers of _Time_ magazine and talked about the faces on those covers as if he knew the folks personally. Those fantasies were his company.

Robert was slightly taller than average and very thin, didn't look to be as strong as he was, but he could lift heavy boulders by himself, and some people said they wouldn't want to run into Robert on the road after dark. During the last war Robert had walked all the way into Charleston to sign up but was rejected and walked all the way back again not stopping for night, not stopping for anything. He bragged on this accomplishment when other men told war stories.

Robert walked everywhere, ignoring rain, the heat, just plodding along and he worked for $2 an hour for anyone who needed some help putting up fences, building a barn, doing the work of two men. Robert never left home but took care of his old mother,who had been senile forever. It was said that Robert was hit by lightning when he was young while he was out cutting wood and it made him crazy, but others said he was always crazy. He told long involved stories about South American "powers" meeting in Jerry Smithson's cabin to plot the takeover of the United States of America or how the cigarette company that took an advertising photo of the waterfall in Back Valley then dynamited the waterfall, causing it to disappear so their picture couldn't be duplicated. He also talked about the young woman who sat up top the waterfall on the rocks smoking her cigarette ("You can take the girl out of the country but you can't take the country out of the girl").

Robert got real strange when talking about women, especially good-looking city women. And he really liked getting that look of shock on some woman's face when she walked into a conversation among the men and he would suddenly break out into obscenities. Robert liked to think that he could control people, tell them things that would make them angry at each other, start feuds, and then watch what happened. He snuck around a lot too. No one could hear Robert if he didn't want to be heard. He observed everyone in the county at some time or other, watching to see what intrigues he could uncover, or those hippy types making love out of doors or Henry counting his money. And he liked to walk long distances and sleep out on the ground so that he might be in Monroe County one day and Greenbriar the next and go all the way to Hinton, maybe hitch a ride to Huntington, before he'd head back, on foot, to Gap Mills. He liked the feeling that the whole state was his territory. Robert was a man to be reckoned with and to think otherwise was foolish.

The first time Sara met Robert was shortly after she had set up her camp for her summer of study: a sleeping tent under a shelter of hemlock trees and trenched around to keep rainwater from flowing beneath it, a desk she had made of rough boards across tree stumps she had rolled into place and evened out with wedges of flat stones from the river, a dining table that was nothing more than a telephone cable spool and a couple of folding canvas chairs that sat low to the ground designed for the beach. Over the work area she had hung a waterproof tarp tied taut at the four corners by twine to four tall trees and peaked in the middle by a post she dug into the ground and pushed up under the tarp to form a kind of roof from which rainwater would drip instead of pooling in the middle. She kept her food and cooking supplies and her books in the cab of the truck until she required them and she did all her writing on a yellow pad with yellow pencils. She had found a spot for the campground near the river. It was private land and she had permission from the owner who had once been a student of her advisor in the anthropology department. It was close to the holler where she'd once lived.

Sara had been hiking in the woods on the other side of the creek away from the road and came back to find a skinny, funny-looking guy paging through the book she had left on the desk: the Bateson book. Her first impulse was to laugh: he looked like the figure of Ichabod Crane she'd once seen in an animated version of the tale of the Headless Horseman. But she didn't laugh and as she came closer she felt wary as if Robert exuded some scent of malice.

"Hello. I'm Sara Brindisi, a guest of the Weavers?" As the stranger continued to ignore her presence, her statement took on the uplifted ending of a question, and she reproached herself for what she considered a sign of weakness. She should simply have asked this person who the hell he was and what was he doing there among her things.

"Robert Awkman at your service," he mumbled without looking up. He didn't look up at her until she had stationed herself right across the narrow "desk" from him. Then he looked up and offered her the book at the same time.

"Interesting book you have here. I'd like to borrow it sometime."

"Well, perhaps the local library will order it for you. I'm working on a project and I need to consult it from time to time and then return it to the professor who lent it to me. If it were my own, I'd be happy to let you borrow it, but it isn't mine. You understand?" Once again Sara started asking questions when it was the stranger who should have been explaining himself. After a while he did, with far more detail than Sara would have liked.

"You the lady anthropologist come to study us hillbillies? I know most everyone around these parts and you got any questions about anyone I can tell you more than you'd want to know probably, more than they would tell you about themselves, I'm sure. Most people around these parts have more secrets than stories if you know what I mean. I can help you get to the bottom of things."

"Well, I'm not here to snoop on anyone. I'm writing a paper, maybe eventually a book, about Appalachian culture. I figure people are writing books about cultures in India and Africa and Russia and Greece, all over the world, you know, and here we have a very interesting culture right here in our own mountains and I wanted to write about it. So I probably will want to interview you, Mr. Awkman, but it wouldn't be about other people's secrets. It would be about your own ancestors and family traditions first, then later about community matters, not personal secrets. I think we have to respect those, don't you?" She was being condescending and she knew it, but she wasn't sure how to react to this sneaky, scary man.

"Why you want to write about us? Most folks think we're stupid and dull. Leastways that's what I think most people think."

"Not at all, Mr. Awkman. Rural ways of life are dying out as more people go to the cities and the cities grow and build over land that was once rural. I think there are truths about being human that people who live old-fashioned lives in rural areas can teach the rest of us that are very important, about survival for instance."

"Well, if our way of life is dying out, we can't be such hotshot experts at survival can we? No, I think you'd have a more interesting book if you just let me tell you the secrets: kind of a 'rural' Peyton Place, know what I mean? More money in it anyway, make you a movie maybe. I could be your 'consultant'...well, I see I am wasting your time. You have work to do. Maybe you could write down the name of that book for me with the publisher and all and I'll get the librarian in Alderson to order it for me. I know she hasn't got it but she can order it. They'll order books from all over the 48 continental United States for you if you ask. They're so happy to know anyone wants to read cuz most people in these parts don't."

Since he had already half turned to go, Sara didn't encourage him. She had already introduced herself to the local postmistress who understood what she was doing here and she thought maybe she'd ask that lady about this guy. She would have been curious and even intrigued but for the tone of sarcasm that permeated his every word, even the announcement of his name, as if even his name was some kind of obscene joke. Sara looked down after Robert was gone from view and noticed he had left the book open to where he'd been reading:

In the business of head-hunting, the masculine ethos no doubt reached its most complete expression; and though at the present time the ethos of head-hunting cannot be satisfactorily observed, there is enough left of the old system to give the investigator some impression of what that system implied. Lacking observations of actual behavior my description must however be based on native accounts. The emphasis here was not on courage; no better coup was scored for a kill which had entailed special hardship or bravery. It was as good to kill a woman as a man and as good to kill by stealth as in open fight. An example will serve to illustrate this set of attitudes: In a raid on one of the neighboring bush villages a woman was killed and her daughter was taken by the killer (Malikindjin) and brought back to Kankanamun. He took her to his house, where, for a while he hid her, thinking of adopting her into his household. But she did not remain there. He took her to the ceremonial house and a discussion arose as to her fate. She pleaded that she should be pitied: "you are not my enemies; you should pity me; later I will marry in this village." One of the young men, Avuran-mali, son of her captor, cut into this discussion, and in a friendly way invited her to come down to the gardens to get some sugarcane. Accordingly he and the girl went down to the gardens together with one or two of the younger boys, among them my informant, Tshava, who was then a small boy. On arriving there, Avuran-mali speared her. (The duty of cleaning the skull fell to Tshava. An enemy skull must never be touched, and Tshava had some difficulty in detaching a ligament. He therefore discarded the tongs, seized the end of the ligament in his teeth and pulled at it. His father saw him and was very shocked; but Tshava said to me: "that silly old man! How was I to know?" an attitude towards taboos which is not uncommon among the Iatmul.) supra pp. 138-139

#

"Hell will freeze over before that girl loses her precious virginity. First of all, she wouldn't know how to do it and second of all, what boy would want her? and third of all, Henry would never permit it."

Robert hadn't been sure what to make of Mary until Mary developed into a woman and then he knew what to make of her, casting her in his lewd fantasies. He talked about his fantasies sometimes to Houston because Houston seemed to enjoy it.

Sometimes when Robert was in the neighborhood he would stop by Henry's place and say things to Mary and laugh because she didn't understand and he would talk about her to the Baker boys who were the only young folks who ever really listened to Robert. The Baker boys laughed, knowing Mary was retarded and couldn't even talk and not thinking of her that way at all. But Robert was nothing if not patient and proud of it. He could walk and watch and talk endlessly, waiting for something to happen, something he knew all along would happen.

Robert had never had a sexual encounter with a woman. He'd thought about going to a prostitute in Charleston but he was afraid he'd get a disease and then his mother would find out. But he'd seen plenty. He liked to watch. He sure did like to watch. Houston seemed to know this because he teased Robert about being a virgin himself even though Robert would describe all kinds of encounters based on his observations, but then Houston would always want to know who with and if Robert said he couldn't say, Houston would say it was because it was no one, that's why he couldn't say, and if Robert named someone he'd seen, Houston would laugh and say no way would that good-looking woman have let Robert near her with a ten-foot pole and then Houston would make a big sorry ass fool of himself laughing about the ten-foot pun he'd made at Robert's expense.

So Robert stopped talking to Houston for a while and visited instead with the Baker boys who were too stupid to make fun of Robert. And they didn't care if the old fart was a virgin or not: who cared about the sex lives of old farts?

IV

Sara

It rained and Sara heard the rain in her sleep. She dreamed that winter had come upon her. Deep in her cocoon of sweaters and jackets and blankets, she grew colder and colder. She realized her body was stiff and beginning to shudder. The wind had begun again blowing and snow, fine fine snow came through the cracks in the house, little flakes of snow, like the finest dust, were melting, not even melting, on her blanket. She remembered being told once that when people freeze to death they get warm before they die, warm and sleepy. First warmth, then sleep, sounded good to her. She thought of stories she'd heard of people frozen in their homes, the clapboard shacks that weathered and dried so that wide cracks opened between the boards and let in the wind like sieves and they just built the fires up higher and higher and often the shacks burned down: there were so many leaning brick chimneys in the valley. But she was free: she had a truck with an engine that worked and money for gas when she got to town. She could leave and she even had somewhere to go, if she could find it. She would leave now and come back in the summer, if summer ever came back to the valley. She could guess but didn't want to know that the cold had hit the cities as hard as the forest...

She dreamed she was a child in her mother's house and she wandered from room to room in her mother's house, making a circle through the archways and swinging doors. She knew it was desperate to think that anything might change in any of the rooms but still she made her rounds, looking for something she knew but didn't want to admit was there. She loved to dance to music on the phonograph but if she heard someone coming she would stop as if guilty, sit down and appear to be listening quietly to the music that her mother played incessantly on the phonograph, incessantly bombarding her with a painful beauty she wanted to be part of. She was an exile from the beginning.

She dreamed she played in a vacant lot and was still and again a child. Other children came to the lot where she played and she could see that they were rough and mocking and cruel and she was frightened. She ran through the lot filled with laundry on lines blowing in the wind like flags, pale and old, poor and torn. She ran into an eight-sided house of dream memory, where there were many doors and she had to race to each door to lock it against the rioting children and there were always more, always open, to her terror and amazement. She was frightened and tired. She could see them watching her and sometimes they were right outside or sometimes far away but sometimes they came all the way into the house and she had to force her dream to force them out and she was getting tired in her sleep. She couldn't get out anymore but they could get in and one of them was coming to judge her and the others were telling outrageous lies about her. She saw the sheets on the lines again and knew that each one was a deception and nothing could protect her from the mocking, the cruel eyes hidden behind them. She began to feel sleepy but was afraid to sleep and sometimes she would start up suddenly, realizing she had dozed and then she would have to search the house to see if anyone had gotten in and was waiting to attack her, or if someone had come and gone, taking something of value from her. But the house was empty. She only imagined that she kept important things in the house. Only dreams were in it and her fears and thoughts...

Sara's pile of notes grew. She'd interviewed Houston for an entire day: had trouble breaking away after dark. He talked about everyone in the county but himself or his own family. She found out more about Houston from the postmistress, who seemed to stick to the facts while Houston was a natural-born gossip. She found out about some guy named Cecil who lived in cities all winter and then came back to the holler in an old bread van with a jar full of cash money and hunted sang in the woods to sell in the cities. Cecil was the best source for what was going on in the cities because he paid attention and didn't drink. Lots of folks made forays into the cities, to investigate careers in factory work, save up some money, maybe find a girlfriend after being rejected at home, but they all came back sooner or later, them that was really a part of the place anyway, wouldn't exactly call it a community but OK that was a good enough word, Houston guessed, for what he was trying to get at: the people who left for good were never part of it anyway, kept to themselves, they noses in books more'n likely, dreaming all the time of leaving, never really here. Houston couldn't tell her about the town folks, never went to town. The nearest "town" consisted of about 300 people, give or take a birth now, a death then.

Sara always began her day rushing up to the highest point of the road to watch the morning sun burn the mist from the mountainsides, working down to the valley where little houses and barns and plowed fields would emerge as if by magic, and then she would leave the road and follow the deer paths through the forest back to her camp, sometimes taking hours as she stopped to examine lichens growing on rocks and dead wood passing through various phases of sculptural beauty on its way back to the earth. She'd get back to camp when the sun was high in the sky, have some coffee, usually nothing to eat knowing she'd have to sample some food wherever she went in the afternoon or risk seeming rude. On drizzly days she was torn between a reluctance to leave the sweet-smelling misty forest and a desire to warm and dry herself at the fragrant wood fires she knew would be burning in the homes of the folks she had yet to visit and interview.

But the summer was drawing to an end and she couldn't leave anyone out, except of course those that had made it clear to her they weren't talking. Seems everywhere she went, someone gave her the names of someone else she should talk to and if she didn't show up to talk to those folks they would track her down, offended she hadn't been by to visit immediately. So she had her growing list of names and her schedule made up for her by the "informants" who were, for the most part thrilled and filled with self-importance to think that their gossip would end up in a bona fide book to be read at the University. This was their chance to get messages out to a world that generally paid them no mind. Everyone had some funny story and then some homespun-sounding wisdom that they figured would sound good on the outside. Sara finally figured out that much of what they told her was what they figured she expected and wanted to hear about the good ole country folks they were supposed to be.

Sara found herself thinking in the mountain dialect and cadences, more so than when she had lived with the city kids on the commune and not had much commerce with the local people. She found out about old Pat who clear-cut the timber on his land to sell and made everyone so angry at him that he had to move to North Carolina. She found out about some killings and noticed nobody was much shocked. Some woman pushed her husband down the stairs when he was drunk and he died there of a broken neck, but everyone said he just fell even though everyone knew she done it: he beat her, had it coming. Sara found out about who bought themselves some bottomland and a nice new trailer home with insurance money from the old shack burned down, these stories told with winks and laughter.

Sara observed that most of the folks she interviewed didn't say much about themselves but were full of stories about their neighbors. She learned that John Adkins and Annie Smith had finally married after a thirty-year courtship when John's old mommy died finally at age of ninety-nine because John's mother hadn't much liked Annie anyways, maybe because Annie was so damn independent, driving her rural postal delivery route and living practically inside the city limits of Covington, even bin to court there to speak on her own behalf once. And Sara learned that when old Ruby Adkins finally died just short of a century, seven of her eight children wanted to sell the family farm, all 600 acres of good timber and cropland and take their share of the money to places like Roanoke, Virginia or Baltimore, even as far as Rhode Island, leaving their eldest brother, Robbie, homeless, not even knowing what to do with his share of the cash. Past times he'd a used extra cash to purchase a breeding heifer at the livestock auction he attended every Saturday, which was his whole social life, but with no land, what would he do with another cow? So Robbie bought him a trailer home over in Greenbriar County near a town was familiar but, being used to 600 acres, Robbie couldn't take it and died of a broken spirit before the year was out. Sara shook her head in sadness with the rest of them and, out of respect for the dead, refrained from taking notes until she got back to camp. She had so many notes and she would wait to put them together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, trying to find some explanation for the vast darkness of this place, when she got back to the University. Meantime she listened to the voices of the forest to give her ideas whose worth she couldn't rightly know.

V

Henry and Mary

Henry's house was two rooms up and two rooms down and each of the downstairs rooms had its own door to the sagging front porch. There was a shed kitchen in back. In the corner formed by the main house and the kitchen was a small storage room where chopped wood was stacked and rats ran rampant among the sacks of beans, rice and feed corn. To the north the cow regularly pushed through a split rail fence in disrepair, meandered up the road over the culvert and to the barn where she made an insistent noise to be let back in through the fence to the barnyard. She could just as well have waded the wide but shallow part of the creek that ran through the culvert under the road and divided the small sparse pasture from the barnyard, but she never learned that simple convenience.

The barnyard itself was something of a shrine to the broken and bedraggled character of the owner. Scattered about were rusted-out wood cookstoves, bits and pieces of old horse-drawn farm equipment and a collection of beehives, half-used rolls of tar paper and odds and ends of lumber. The hay bales inside were not rotated, and fresh hay was stacked atop old and moldy bales. To the south of the house was the garden. To the west, a mountain stood steep and straight behind an unused stone root cellar that was home to a nest of copperheads and a wood toolshed filled with a variety of old lawn mowers, empty bottles and cans, some handsaws and scythes. A steep path up the hillside led to the outhouse, and Henry had attempted to ease the climb by laying a twisted lane of rock steps.

The mountain was in many ways a barrier, blocking the rising sun early in the day, cutting off the most direct route to the nearest town and separating Henry from the neighboring homestead. It could change in moments from a warm and sunlit friendly landscape buzzing with bees and birds to an ominous wall of coldness and dark, funneling strong winds and imposing its shadow on the little house. Henry ignored the mountain. Mary stared at it incessantly. Sometimes she saw Robert walking miraculously down its steep flank and then she would run indoors.

Every morning Henry went out at dawn while it was still gray and misty and milked the one cow he had kept after Elvira died. Mary went with him and this was the nicest part of their days together. She was peaceful and opened her mouth to let him squirt the milk straight from the cow's teat into her mouth. She loved the warm milk. He had tried of course to teach her to milk, but she was never able to master the quick movements that first allowed the milk to drop into the teat and then stopped it from squeezing back up into the udder. As time went on Henry was content to see her pleasure in the milk.

Robert did the milking for Henry on Sundays because Henry would do no work on the Sabbath. He knew their usual routine. He had seen Henry hide his money in a pill container in the flour crock in the kitchen and he had even seen Henry sing hymns to Mary. He had seen many things about their lives they thought were private. On one of his visits to the lady anthropologist, he suggested she go out to see Henry and Mary and write about them.

VI

Robert

Lilting...it was lilting, a Celtic ballad, a waltz, distant, too distant to discern if it was a woman's voice or a man's sweet high tenor or no human voice at all but some eerie ancient stringed instrument still played in these hills...plaintive and lilting and distant and then gone. Sara waited to hear the music again, someone's car radio maybe? or someone singing? the wind and the creak of trees bending away from the wind, a stream closer than she remembered? All these sounds mingled in an exquisite conspiracy to hide the voice. Then she fell deeply asleep and dreamed the music loud and clear and danced in the woods in her dream, whirling, slowly waltzing among the trees until Robert came to watch and she stopped, her blood still whirling through her body to the unbearable music but her limbs still as stone. She dreamed that Robert came intending to kill her, he said so, and she cried out to a shadow passing through the woods she thought she recognized, but the man simply waved and walked away. Robert waved back at him but Sara could not move. Finally, dying of terror, she realized she could save her own life if she woke up, and in her dream she did wake up and realized she was only dreaming and went back to sleep again, all in her dream.

She awoke for real at dawn and decided to walk awhile, shake the lingering terror of the vivid dream, but she fell back asleep needing to calm her pounding heart and didn't actually get up to start her day until the sun was already high in the sky, 8 o'clock she guessed.

Sara started a small fire to brew her coffee and heat wash water and then Robert was there sniffing the coffee and nodding Sara a good morning. She was standing and bent at the knees to reach the coffeepot and rose easily to pour him some in a blue tin cup and handed it to him and walked around the fire to move away from the smoke and bent her knees again to carefully replace the pot on a flat rock on the rim of the fire pit. She moved slowly and remembered the waltz of her dream and felt her heart pounding again when Robert followed her around the fire as the smoke spiraled and twisted around him and it was a kind of graceful waltz they performed there in the forest, each listening intently to the birds, waiting for the other to speak. Sara felt intimacy growing in that lilting silence and knew only words could break it, so she spoke first.

"Did the Alderson Library have my book?"

"No but Agatha's ordered it for me. She loves tracking down stuff when I ask her."

"I'm sure. She loves her job."

"That she do."

"I'd bet she could recommend other books about anthropology...if you're interested."

"That fellow wrote about them headhunters like it was no big deal, them killing folks for the hell of it."

"He was trying to be objective, writing about another culture, a culture very different from our own."

"You and me don't have ourselves a culture. Culture here in these hills is different from yours. Why else you be here to study on it? My guess is that guy figured people got to be educated to be evil. Some folks got this idea that primitive types are naturally innocent. Like they never heard of Adam and Eve. Its OK to kill folks for the hell of it if you hain't had no schooling. That's what he thinks."

"What do you think, Mr. Awk..."

"Call me Robert, everyone else do."

"OK, Robert, what do you think?"

"I think god made us in his image and god has a mean streak a mile wide is what I think."

Sara smiled, thinking it made sense but who would admit to such a belief?

"That is certainly an original idea, Mr. ...Robert, certainly original."

"No, it hain't. It is just modern namby-pamby folks want to see 'good' in everything and especially in god: don't want to have be afraid ever day. Now those old guys wrote the bible knew god could be cruel. They didn't worship and bend they knees to god because they thought god was 'good,' no sir. Hell, they knew they'd damn well better honor god or they'd get they asses whupped good. Now that's a good one: god's goodness being in how good a whupping he could give a man." Robert laughed at his strange pun and went on talking: "Yeh, god be the one with the power, the smart ones are gonna worship god all right."

"Do you honor god, Robert?"

"Aw, that was then. Now is different. Humankind got so out of hand, even god can't keep up with it: too damn many of us."

"So you figure you won't get your ass whipped because god won't notice you in the crowd?"

"Well the way I look at it, god gets rid of as many of us as he can with the floods and hurricanes and forest fires and whatnot, and they be all kinds of other bad luck gets folks one at a time: life be a regular minefield and some of us will just make it through and die quietly in our beds, unless of course you count bad dreams, and others are gonna step on some of them mines and have a rougher time of it and it's all just a matter of luck. Do you see any rhyme or reason to the way life is?"

"No, I guess I don't."

"Bet you thought you'd find out something more satisfying in them books, or maybe even from these people in these hills, but you should know, it's all just stories, just stories, some good, some sad, some funny but just stories, no sense to any of 'em."

"The Jews say god created human beings because he loves a good story."

"Them Jews be pretty smart I hear. Yeh, as good a reason as any I guess."

"So...what do you think?"

"I done tole you what I think."

"Yes I guess you did."

"Guess that means I'm done and should be getting on my way."

But Robert didn't move, and Sara did not want to appear inhospitable so she offered him another cup of coffee before he went, and he said no thanks but if it was OK with her he'd set a spell and smoke, pretty spot there in the woods. He slowly rolled his cigarette with tobacco from a small leather pouch. After a few thoughtful drags, he asked her about her work.

"You gonna put what I tole you in your book?"

"I might. Do you mind?"

"Not at all, young lady, not at all. I hope you will. Not many folks pay me much mind, laugh at me mostly, them that aren't afraid."

"Afraid?"

Robert didn't answer, just gave her a look like she was supposed to understand why the primitive innocents of that back Appalachian holler should be afraid of Robert Awkman. Sara didn't understand at all but she accepted it on faith and was suitably afraid.

VII

Sara

The Appalachians are ancient mountains, battered down by the eons and hollowed out by underground rivers, easier to climb up on the outside than down on their insides. Sara had always been intrigued by the caves but had sensibly only gone down inside them with groups of individuals each of whom she trusted with her very life, both their intentions and their skills. She herself relied on the skill of others to instruct her in the bodily contortions and subtle shifts of weight often required to get back out of the cave when the exit was tight, steep and, naturally, slippery. Once she had despaired of getting out at all when she had worn tennis shoes with no grip. That day she learned to hold herself from slipping by wedging a shoulder between two small rocky outcroppings and then to free herself upward by arching her back and turning sideways, this way, then that, slowly and gently and no weight whatsoever on those slip-slidey canvas shoes, until she could carefully reach an arm upward through the hole and be pulled up by the big burly hand attached to the soft, patient voice that had guided her. That day, that voice was the voice of god to Sara.

Always looking for analogies between nature and human psychology, Sara wrote at length about the craft of caving as a physical counterpoint to the craft of survival in the isolated mountain communities: subtle, slippery, contortionate. Other students were writing about the impact of language on thought and culture; Sara wrote about the impact of landscape on language, thought and culture. No word was without multi layers of meaning in this land atop a complex system of caves. This was a landscape that inspired myth, kept the mind tightly leashed to an increasingly ancient history and emphasized shadow and speculation, secrecy and intuition over clarity. Mountain people of few words might be perceived by outsiders as direct and forthright but that was only part of the deception intended to keep outsiders where they belonged: in the light where they could best be watched. Mountain people were part of the mountains themselves, the forests, streams and springs, the caves, all endangered by civilization and its shriveling glare. And like the very earth, mountain people were, above all, wary, keeping a part of themselves resolutely "primitive"...those that stayed, those whose survival depended on staying.

VIII

Henry and Mary

The morning of the rape, the two Baker brothers waited for Henry and Mary to come back from the barn and one of them jumped Henry while the other held the girl. It didn't matter; she wouldn't have left Henry even though there was nothing she could do to help him. When the boy realized Mary wasn't going to run but would just stand there screaming to the lonely mountain, he helped his brother bind Henry's feet and his hands behind him with pieces of baling twine that hung behind the kitchen door and they gagged his mouth with a rag from the kitchen sink.

Some glimmer of humanity made them turn the bound man's face to the wall so he could not see what was happening to his girl. She had never stopped screaming and it made them nervous. They each took a turn holding her down while the other raped her, and she never stopped screaming and it didn't take long because she made them nervous. She had no idea what they were doing to her. She only knew they wouldn't let her move and they hurt her with a surprising pain she'd never felt before and they made her bleed again. They left her on the floor and found the money in the flour crock, took that and ran. When they had reached the safety of their truck they broke into nervous laughter. Mary's screaming hadn't stopped.

Mary couldn't untie the twine that held her father prisoner, and he struggled as he had during the rape to get free but he couldn't loosen the sharp cutting twine. He struggled in silence while Mary screamed and tried to get into his lap.

It was Robert who finally appeared and saved them. He untied the twine and Henry told him about the two Baker boys who had done this to him and raped his girl and stolen his money. Robert didn't say much but he did tell Henry where the Baker boys had a secret spot where they went to hunt deer with bows and arrows off season: a large rock that had caught the fall of an old maple so many paces north of the cave by the side of the spring that had once been a waterfall. He had often seen the Baker boys in that spot, quiet, not smoking or talking, nor even daring to pee in the vicinity because the odor would scare off the deer and they'd have to make do with greasy possum or bits of squirrel meat on all them tiny bones. That's what Robert told Henry.

Henry took his shotgun and moved quietly and quickly upon them. First he shot toward their privates and then their faces. He figured that was right for what they had done to his girl. He had parked on a logging road not far from the spot and he dragged each body in turn to the truck. He had to hurry because the cow would be mooing soon as its burden of milk got heavy in the morning and Mary would wake up. He took the bodies to the overlook on top of Little Mountain where it was steep and there was a small stone retaining wall and a trash can for the picnicking tourists who stopped for a view of the valley. There was one of them half-car, half-truck things parked there but no one appeared to be in it...must be broke down...not so unusual. He rolled each body in turn over the top of the retaining wall and watched it roll down the steep rocky incline into the thick brush not too far below and heard it fall even farther through the brush. Then he had to start up his truck, which had died on him while he worked, and drove back home to milk the cow and comfort his Mary. She had only stopped screaming the night before when she fell asleep by the stove and she woke up this morning as Henry came into the kitchen wanting her milk, as if nothing had happened. Only her eyes were different.

* * *

When Sara packed her few belongings, she found she had forgotten to pack her bound journal. She didn't need her handwritten notes anymore: she had typed them up on the manual typewriter and organized them under tentative categories, the better to share them with Professor Cormack. The notes were intermingled with too much personal stuff. She decided to burn all that shit. Reflections on the past took up too much time anyway, and she wanted to find a more satisfying future: some stability, some belonging somewhere: maybe teaching. She began by ritualistically burning it page by page but got impatient and finally she just put the thick bound bundle of paper in the fire pit to smolder slowly while she left to begin yet another era of her life. She thought she might come back someday but had no idea how soon and what the circumstances would be.

It was already late in the day by the time she got started, and by the time she reached Gap Mills she needed a nap. She pulled over into a rest stop for what she figured would be half an hour, but she slept through what was left of the night.

She woke up to the noise of a truck starting. It seemed like another noise from her dream, but she lifted her head and glimpsed a license plate with the word JESUS on it as the truck drove away in the morning mist. It didn't ring a bell with her. She crawled out of the car, peed in the bushes and then started back down the mountain road to the next town. She needed a wash and some breakfast and planned to make D.C. later that day.

Less than an hour after Sara had started out from the overlook, a farmer's wife found the bodies of the two dead boys and called the local game warden, who was the woman's cousin. He came out with the sheriff and was able to identify the boys by their shoes. The Baker boys had been famous for the size of their feet. By the time Sara stopped for biscuits and gravy everyone was talking about the murder. In fact a state trooper was having coffee in the same truck stop where Sara had her breakfast, and without giving it her usual careful ethical and philosophical consideration, Sara told him about the singular license plate she'd seen that morning right about where the bodies were found.

It was Sara's circumstantial evidence that led to Henry's arrest, but the prosecutor didn't need to make a case: Henry wouldn't lie and didn't even ask for a lawyer although one was assigned to him anyway. Henry himself had no use for her apology. That was the long and the short of it.

"Thou shalt not kill" ... "vengeance is mine sayeth the lord" ... and it sounds easy, but Henry had the ringing in his ears for the rest of his life: the sound of Mary's screaming never left him. In the hospital they punished her when she screamed, doused her with water until she finally learned something. Mary learned to whimper quietly and to point to what she needed. Generations of mental health workers came full of pity for Mary, determined to teach her a few words, to help her clean up. They hugged her and cut and curled her hair and showed her her own face in a mirror. But Mary defeated them all.

Henry's fall from righteousness, though appalling (those mangled, bloody faces), earned him some sympathy in the community. His sentence was four years for voluntary manslaughter, and he understood he would only serve two if he behaved himself in prison. He was regularly escorted across the valley and over another mountain to the hospital to visit his daughter. The hospital was surrounded by farms, small family farms, and after he asked if he could do the milking for a neighbor, the ritual milking happened every Sunday. It was his penance, a humiliation he embraced with pride, to work on Sunday, the one day he was allowed to visit his child.

They took her from him in orderly steps. He was brought by the sheriff to the hearing with handcuffs on and wearing the uniform of a prisoner. She was brought to the hearing by a lady who worked at the local hospital and wore a suit no matter how warm the weather. A lawyer had been appointed to represent Henry, a different lawyer than the one appointed to represent him in the criminal matter. He only met this lawyer once before the hearing, and the young man suggested he stipulate to the necessity of relinquishing custody to the Department of Social Services. He didn't know what "custody" meant (confusing it with his own imprisonment) and he didn't know what "stipulate" meant and he was too numb to listen when the judge asked him if he understood what he was doing and he just nodded yes and then mumbled his assent when the judge instructed him to speak up for the reporter.

There was another hearing after Henry pled guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter and again the sheriff brought him in his uniform and cuffs and he didn't pay attention while the lawyers and social workers all agreed the best place for Mary was the state's facility for the developmentally disabled and that she be continued a ward of the state in order for the payment to be covered. Henry was asked for his agreement and again he nodded and mumbled his assent, having no idea what it all meant.

The hospital was a rambling complex of buildings that housed the very old and senile, the psychotic and the developmentally disabled. Adolescents had separate quarters. It was set in a pleasant green valley surrounded by small farms on three sides and the red brick gas station/grocery store/post office on the highway on the fourth. The farmers' children either worked for the PO or the hospital. Sometimes there was a beating but mostly the farmers' children were kindly, sympathetic young people who were truly frightened at the sight of so much freedom curtailed. At home they had fights that sometimes spilled over into violence. At the hospital patients were not allowed to vent their tempers and they would be whisked off to the "time out" room and held down if necessary at the first sign of outraged feelings. At home, mothers would often cry for days for no apparent reason and maybe their husbands would joke and say they were going to take them to the loony bin and sometimes the women shouted that they'd as soon live there as home where they worked so hard for no thanks, but in the real loony bin people who cried for days were given pills and watched while they swallowed them and then they would just sleep instead.

In accordance with the law there were periodic reviews of Mary's status, but she never changed. Various lawyers were appointed to represent her, but they never came to the hospital and knew her only as a thickening file. Henry was duly notified but he didn't understand any of it and had had enough of courtrooms. Mary's fate was routinely reaffirmed by a small group of people in business suits who'd forgotten what she looked like if they'd ever seen her.

Shortly before Henry's release, early for good behavior, he received a letter saying that the hospital was being closed down and all the patients were being moved to another, new facility in the eastern part of the state, closer to Virginia, in Greenbriar County. It was in a pretty location and the walls were fresh painted in pastel colors.

As soon as he got out he wanted to visit Mary. First he had to get home to check out his old truck. Miraculously all the parts were on it but most of them didn't work. The tires were dry-rotted and flat. There was rust of course and the battery was dead. Henry had to go to Houston's house, that lazy old liar he had never liked, and wait around while Houston finished his dinner of beans and onions and garden greens, and then he had to pace himself to follow old Houston who moved slower than any man Henry had ever seen, around his yard full of trucks in various stages of decay and fossilization, and find the parts he needed, laboriously written out in large lopsided letters on a list. Houston picked up an alternator that crumbled in his hand and started out to look for another. He had all day, he had a lifetime. Henry stifled his rage.

"So, what's it like in the pen?"

"I'm out now. I don't want to talk about it."

"Old Cecil's nephew was up there seven years for a killing. Was drunk but of course he was always drunk, whole family's always drunk. In the genes. He's back now for somethin' else I hear. You see him when you was there?"

"I don't know Cecil's nephew. Wouldn't recognize him if I did see him."

"Well, you 'member him? Sure. He used to come 'round here to hunt sang and sell it in the towns. Tall, skinny blond fella, hair so blond it almost white. You'd 'member him if you saw him all right."

"I don't mess with the young fellas; don't care for this younger generation, not one bit, no sir. I never messed with 'em."

"Well, you messed with a couple of 'em pretty good."

Henry just kept on walking, pretending to be looking for a battery, until his head cleared, and Houston had no choice but to shut up in the face of such indifference. They walked among a veritable forest of old trucks, with grass growing up between the rotted-out boards of flatbeds, even the all-metal bodies of pickups rusting and feeding the life of lichens and mushrooms. Old logging trucks used to grunt under the loads of thick pine trees carried to the paper mills, trucks that carried stock to the auction or the slaughterhouse, clean-looking trucks scratched by all the antique junk that brought such high prices in Charleston and Huntington. Got so a man couldn't just demolish a house anymore but had to take it apart carefully because he got more money for the colored-glass windows and cast-iron bath tubs, carved oak doors and fireplace mantels than he got paid to tear the thing down. Houston laughed thinking about it. Sometimes there were winos in those houses in the cities; couldn't sell them, though.

Now he wasn't demolishing houses no more, he traded in old truck parts, picking up all the abandoned and wrecked trucks in the county seemed like. Somewhere in the midst of all the colorful and fantastic wreckage there was a white clapboard house with a tin roof where Houston ate and slept but it was hard to find. Everything here, the trucks, the house, even Houston himself, especially Houston in fact, seemed partially obliterated by the green and gray and brown forest; the forest could obliterate faster than Houston could clear. Henry thought that Houston moved about as sprightly as an old tree.

Fixing his truck was a frustrating business involving two more trips to Houston's junkyard. But he got it running and the sound of the engine and the feel of the truck moving like an ox up the muddy hill road gave him a young feeling of energy and joy. He wasn't a man given to shouting but he kind of gasped and clung hard to the wheel and felt his chest expand with too much air and too much pleasure and then he had to cry, couldn't help it, just cried. He had traded some old tack for the truck parts and gotten a little cash besides; Houston sold all that stuff along with the bathtubs and windows to people who hung it on the walls of their libraries. And he found a butter churn and corn shucker that still had some of the red paint on it in the barn that he could get some cash for. He cleaned up as best he could and put on the clothes he had washed in the creek and dried on a rock in the sun. Then he set out for the hospital to visit his daughter. He picked some laurel flowers and wrapped the woody stems in a wet rag and lay the bundle on the seat beside him. He wanted to bring his daughter a gift now he was free.

The trip took longer than he expected. The truck could still pull like an ox but an old one—not much speed. Everyone passed him on the highway. Then he had a blowout and was thankful that it was while going through a town. He used up most of his small amount of cash buying yet another reconditioned tire and getting Houston's old tire repaired for a spare. He had to wait for the young fellas at the gas station to get some other things done; no one ever seemed to be in a hurry, and the whole thing took a couple of hours.

Then he was back on the road feeling anxious because the sun was setting and he couldn't push the truck any faster. It was 9:00 p.m. when he finally arrived at the hospital and visiting hours were over at 8:00. They told him to come back the next day and he resigned himself to sleeping in his truck. He had to pee in the bushes before the sun came up and had only coffee for breakfast to make sure he kept some money on him for emergencies. Then he had to wait until 10:00 a.m. to see his daughter, so he pretended to be working on his truck in the parking lot to avoid questions. People kept asking him questions and whatever it was, he didn't want to talk about it.

At 10:00 a.m. he saw his daughter and brought her the laurel flowers he had kept alive if not quite fresh with frequent soakings of the rag they were wrapped in. She looked at them briefly and an attendant found a vase for them, made much over them and put them on an unused formica-topped table by the bed. Henry was allowed to take Mary for a walk but there were no cows to milk and she seemed disappointed. He wanted to give her a kiss good-bye but didn't like to do that in front of folks, so he just left when their time was up. The nurse did let him share lunch with Mary.

Having accomplished the purpose of his trip, he felt aimless. He started driving back home but after 30 minutes realized there was nothing there for him anymore and he didn't feel like going back. He began to turn up the back roads that interested him, exploring this new territory. He slept in the truck again that night and in the morning began to knock on the doors of farmhouses, did they need something fixed? Some help in the garden? He could do most anything (but of course so could the people in the houses). Nobody turned him down though. Everyone found a little job he could do for a little money or at least invited him to share dinner.

Henry moved around, working, sometimes visiting his daughter when he was close, other times thinking about her, thinking sometimes about the city woman who had seen him when he dropped the boys over the cliff, studying on his past and not noticing the present much. Sometimes he saw Robert and Robert always wanted to speak to him and he didn't want to speak to Robert, but Robert was the kind of man made you stop and listen and Robert told him that woman was back, told him she even visited Mary once. Henry made no response like Robert was hoping for, but Henry studied on it.

IX

Sara

Sara was back to visit, camping on the old place. Two summers had come and gone before she could get free for a few weeks to come back. She had finished her thesis and gotten her degree, but she wanted to return and see what had happened to the human beings she had been studying, and even more compelling: she wanted to find out what had happened to Henry and Mary. She found out that the regional hospital where Mary had been taken had closed down and Mary had been moved with the other patients to another facility closer to Sara's own territory. She also heard that Henry was out of prison and wandering around, didn't go back to his home. She found this out from Robert when she stopped at the same truck stop coming in where she'd met the trooper going out all those years earlier. Sara asked the waitress about Mary and was directed to where Robert was working and he told her more than she really needed to know.

"I know you feel bad about your part in what happened to Henry and Mary, but I thought you should know that it was all for the best. Henry couldn't take care of that girl by himself and she is better off in the hospital."

Sara wanted to say that nobody was better off in an institution but she thought she should be careful about what she said.

"I wouldn't know. I didn't know them."

"Thought you might of interviewed Henry for your book."

"No, Henry didn't want to be interviewed. He was actually kind of hostile, but I'm sure he had his reasons. It wasn't my way to intrude."

"But sometimes you can't help it, intruding I mean, interfering in other people's lives. Most folks be better off if they just realized that fact and didn't fight it so much."

"Well I certainly did not intend to."

"The question is: did you intend NOT to? That's what I mean."

Sara was shocked at how Robert read her. She had regretted so much her part in what happened to those two folks. Because of her, Henry and Mary had both been caught in systems. Henry was out now but Mary would never get out and Henry couldn't save her; he didn't have a clue how to start. Even though she knew she should cut their conversation short, she told Robert she was staying little more than an hour away from the new regional hospital and would go see if Mary was OK, if they were treating her well, and then she was afraid she shouldn't have told even that much to Robert. He asked her a lot of questions where she was staying and she answered vaguely, but she knew if he wanted to find her he could ask in Paint Bank or Sweet Springs or even Gap Mills; they all knew her.

Of course Mary didn't respond to Sara's strange visit, but she was quiet and stared calmly at Sara as Sara sat looking at her. Sara talked a little first until she realized it was useless and then she just sat resting in Mary's peaceful sad stare; eyes looking into eyes yearning for woods. She knew that Mary missed the damp matted leaves laced with the occasional fragrance of laurel or hemlock borne on the breeze, the sound of the stream rushing over rocks and the sun making bright patterns on the trees. Both women felt these things in the deepest parts of their souls, buried in Sara, silenced in Mary. Sara knew from Robert how Henry used to squirt the milk warm from the cow into Mary's mouth and Mary made those sounds of pleasure she'd forgotten in the hospital and Sara couldn't smell the lactating herds of dairy cattle without feeling bad about Mary and thus, she felt what Henry felt even though she'd long forgotten his face.

X

Henry

"That woman nailed you for the murder of the Baker boys...?"

"You mean the lady who noticed my license plate?"

"Well, yeh, same thing. I mean everyone in the county knows your truck, Henry."

"I thought she was a stranger, not from the county."

"Well, yeh, but she bin interviewing a lot of people for a book she was writing. She ever interview you?"

"No, she come 'round but I run her off...maybe she saw the plate then now I think on it."

"Maybe you made her mad, not talking to her then. Wonder what other folks said about you."

"You think she was askin' 'bout me?"

"Asked me, but I didn't tell her nothing."

* * *

Water is a fugitive force in West Virginia, hard to trap and tame. There is only one natural lake in the whole state and it ain't much. Lots of springs and running mountain streams green the land and fall beneath the bedrock, carving out the myriad caves that attract tourists and spelunkers from as far as New York City and D.C. The low worn hills conceal intricate sculptures of devastating beauty and dangerous enticement. Thermal springs and fast-running streams resist freezing and if you've got those you can water stock and if you build near one you can have running water in the house year round. But not many folks want to build in the damp dark spots where the streams want to run. Sometimes you got to build higher than the water source to catch the sun's warmth and that means pumping your water and that means the electric co-op for a generator and probably frozen pipes at least part of the winter. Some folks just make do with a cistern.

Sara had gone back to the site of the old commune to camp for the summer. There was a cistern by the old house, what they had used for water before piping it in from a spring up the hillside. But she didn't go there now. She set up her campsite in the dark woods by the stream. She avoided the old house all covered with overgrown grasses, wild roses and elderberry trees and probably crawling with copperheads. But she had to pass close by it to go down Ewings Run or the other way to the big cave and the waterfall. Towards the end of the summer a powerful smell came from the cistern always overflowing with rusty rainwater and she found a dead chicken in it and she knew someone had put it there as a sign. She'd gotten the sense that Robert or maybe Henry himself was stalking her when she went into the store at Paint Bank and there was one old man too many and no one introduced her, they just all got quiet and later she thought she heard someone ask after Mary, but she couldn't be sure, the voice was so quiet and distant, she could have imagined it. Robert had been there but hadn't spoken to her like he usually did, had just looked at her while he continued whispering to the old man she didn't recognize but sensed was Henry.

It was August and the locust trees seemed already to be turning or maybe Sara imagined it. It had been so long since she had felt herself consumed in the electric color of the West Virginia autumn. She hoped Robert wouldn't do anything before she left at the end of the month. She even thought about going back early. Something else told her it wouldn't matter. He had nowhere in particular to go and he could follow her anywhere and just might. It didn't occur to her that he might back off just shy of a really big city. She hadn't gone back to see Mary after seeing the man in the store.

Robert showed up not unexpectedly, but still giving her the creeps. She always wondered how long he'd been watching her before he'd emerge from the woods to tell her his fantastic stories. But even though she asked him outright, he wouldn't say anything at all about Henry's whereabouts. It was just the look that he got and the way he changed the subject like he was speaking in some special code just for her that made her think Henry was watching her and Robert was watching them both. She stayed on but packed her things, was ready to drive away on a moment's notice if she decided to.

She began to carry a rifle that had leaned against a wall in a corner of her old cabin, now abandoned, for years. She cleaned it and bought shells and practiced with it, like everyone did, shooting at cans atop fence posts and the letters on state road signs. She wasn't very good but she got better every day and if anyone was watching her, it wouldn't hurt to be seen shooting that thing. It was a preventative measure. Had it not been for her isolation in the woods she might not have felt so frightened, but she would have been wrong not to feel frightened. Hadn't she herself made a point of how these isolated communities didn't trust institutions like the police and the courts and so felt themselves free to carry out justice as they saw fit. Although it was Robert who turned up in her face periodically, her own guilt made her fear Henry as well. He'd shot the boys for what they had done to his daughter, might he not want to shoot her for what she had done to him? Even though he'd confessed, he'd confessed only because he was caught and he was caught because of her big mouth.

The last time she encountered Robert it was right there where she had set up her camp. And he was snooping again, unabashedly, just laughed when he was caught and told her he was looking for books. She decided she would leave the very next day and spent the afternoon loading her truck. The empty tent would be easy to dismantle and most of her food and cooking supplies were already boxed and ready to go. But she waited until she thought Robert had completely left the area before she began. With him walking, not driving everywhere, it was hard to know when and where he stopped. She walked a ways up the road after him and saw him crest the next hill and disappear over it.

She lay down trembling in her sleeping bag, leaving her shoes on and holding the rifle. Several times she thought she heard steps coming up from the county road, but she waited to be sure and realized it was only some small animal from the forest seeking food at her campsite. Once she awoke in a panic from the realization that she had fallen asleep and been dreaming that Robert was stalking her along a street in some European city. She caught her breath and waited, wanting rest and daylight to make her long drive, and she waited until it was almost too late.

It was in the middle of that clear, starry night when Henry came around meaning business. It was the full moon and the road wound clear and light through the night. She woke up when she heard a truck with no headlights sliding, brakes grinding, down the road above. This time not a dream, no mistake. A truck with the engine turned off and no headlights could mean only one thing and she was almost relieved, she'd been expecting it so long.

Sara had slept fully dressed with the rifle next to her. She sat up slowly, quietly and put on her shoes. She knew she was watched. She did not know if he knew she had the rifle but chances were he did. She knew where she was going. Away from the road the woods hadn't changed, not for years, whole generations. Before she moved away Sara had walked all over the mountainsides finding sinkholes and cave openings, places where the boulders formed shelter and the trees that, once dead, had been hollowed slowly and took years to fall, forming still more hiding places. Even years later, she knew this place literally like the back of her hand, like another body it had been to her, and she had dreamed of wandering in this place so many times it felt like she still lived half her life there.

She would follow the creek, blending the sound of her steps with the sound of the water and where she hit the marshy land where the spring branched five different ways she'd go straight west up the ridge to an old logging road edged in stones so scattered now as not to be recognizable as a road at all. She had been an archaeologist studying the very recent past, fast swallowed by the forest, the loggers, the farmers, the moonshiners, all leaving their peculiar traces, like those stones weathered by water before being carried uphill to line the sides of a raggedy road now maintained solely by the shade of the trees overhead.

She crossed the road lit by the moon and kept it in sight as she traveled south again until it too reached the crotch of a fork, joining it with a deer path going west. She recited the directions to herself. Walking softly on a straight southwest diagonal she found the sinkhole. She didn't know it, but she had lost her pursuer in the creek. He hadn't expected to find himself sinking in the marshy area around the springs that fed several creeks and he lost track of Sara there. While Sara climbed down into the sinkhole and found the small opening to the cave system that underlay her land, Henry made his way back down another creek to the county road and had to walk a mile or so back to his truck. He slept through the day waiting for night to try again. Sara spent the night trying to keep warm in the sinkhole, afraid to venture out in the moonlight.

The next morning Sara came back and lay down for a brief nap that lasted longer than she would have dared. Then she took her tent down and packed it into the truck and started driving away from this place, sad because she knew it would have to be forever. She didn't notice that her spare tire, exposed in the back of the truck, had been punctured. She discovered it when a front tire blew barely a hundred yards from her campsite. She knew someone was playing with her but she had no choice: she had to walk to the nearest neighbor, rolling the tire in front of her and request a ride into town to get it repaired or maybe trade it for a newer used tire, and a spare. This task took most of the day and it was already dark by the time Sara was ready to go. But tired as she was, she would leave immediately. She had had enough of this game. She was putting the rifle in last when the shots came.

This time when she crept to the creek, he shot at her and shot several times before she got to the marsh. Then she waited while he reloaded and followed the same precise path she had taken to the sinkhole the night before. Sara was barely able to scramble down into the sinkhole and wedge herself into the narrow opening to the cave below, before he appeared on the road above. He was clearly lit by the moon and very still as he looked for her, listening for her step. She moved the rifle quickly to her shoulder, took careful aim at his hand on his gun and fired. The first shot went wide of him but gave him pause. He was raising his gun and taking aim at the source of it when the second shot killed him.

In the dark, Sara wasn't sure she'd seen him fall, maybe it was an illusion or a deliberate trick. She wedged herself further into the cave opening and barely drew breath as she waited for the dawn. In the silence, she thought she heard soft animal steps running swiftly from the scene.

Then with the speed and magic of a dream Sara was sitting awkwardly in the fork of a large tree. Down below wild dogs and birds of prey pecked and tore at Henry's body while she watched, terrified and freezing. There was no way for her to count the hours but she could count the dawns and it took the wild animals seven days and nights to complete this ritual of nature while Sara stood guard in the tree. Before the carrion birds and dogs had done there was a drenching rain that cleaned the bones and battered the killer in the tree and then a hot dry day that bleached the bones and warmed the woman who waited one more day because it wasn't the kind of thing to be rushed. "Fire or water?" she was asking herself when the stench of death awakened her.

Sara unfolded herself and all her aching joints from the cave opening and for a few minutes forgot what part of her life she was in and why she was here in the forest in the misty dawn. She could barely make out the body that lay dead in the gray morning light. The odor that had awakened her was not Henry but a dead possum on the logging road that ran above the highest rim of the sinkhole. She walked back slowly to her campsite and sat awhile thinking before returning to her truck. She had carried the rifle with her quite automatically, not even noticing it, and she dropped it behind the seat of her truck and threw the sleeping bag over top.

At midmorning the sky relaxed its tense grayness and let fall the snow. Quiet, large wet flakes filled the air and covered the ground, inches in minutes. Briefly the sun shone faint through the grayness, looking dirty and old and worn-out. It flickered like fire...briefly, dying out.

Expecting to kill a second time for vengeance, Henry had covered his tracks. Robert had told everyone days ago that Henry had gone to Boone County. By the time Sara stopped for breakfast in New Castle, Henry's body was buried deeply, softly, reverently in the first snow of autumn.

XI

Sara

"The road home keeps getting longer and longer..." was playing in her head, over and over. Travis Tritt was a nineties singer. A few years earlier it was Eric Clapton singing about not being able to find the way back home. Everyone understood those songs once they'd killed something inside themselves. Why was music so painful? Why were the red leaves dancing in the wind, so beautiful, so like the lilting waltz, such an overwhelming hurting vision?

It wasn't so long ago that Sara stood watching the older kids, the school-age kids, coming toward her in her yard. The snow was perfect, unscarred, but then the kids came and walked right through it making a slushy path and it infuriated her, that small helpless child who had been awed by the quiet, perfect beauty of the glistening snow, the smooth coldness on her skin.

_In the autumns I walked, shuffling scented dead leaves ahead of me into piles. Everywhere I smelled the smoke of burning leaves, in my hair and woolen clothes. The leaves blew at my ankles in that whirlwind that always precedes a storm and I remembered the falls, so many falls year after year and the child's fall, the early days, the frightening frosted days of rotting apples and early doom_ ... Sara's journal

The leafy vines that grew up the chimneys of old Tudor houses wafted gently in the early October breezes. Sara walked looking into yards through the branches of huge fir trees and longed for even that limited approximation of forest that enclosed the large old homes. She imagined wood fires behind the leaded glass and richness of wood floors and oriental carpets. But of course the residents of these mansions were just people, like her, like Henry, riddled with pain, tormented by an ignorance that always seemed just on the verge of lifting but never did. She stood still, mesmerized by the movement of yards and yards of vines lifting and settling again over the front of a house exposing briefly the image of an old man and a little girl looking out the window. "Fire," she thought.

A lethargy always overwhelmed Sara in the fall. She knew it was depression but Prozac didn't work for her, sleep was better. In the fall, Sara slept from early dark to late dawn and dreamt many dreams, establishing another world, another home in those dreams, the ongoing saga of another life. Often her dreams turned dark and violent but even so, Sara was always happiest entering them and hearing again the sounds of her beloved forest.

There was no place to park. The snow had been cleared and cleared into growing mounds by the edges of roads and the mounds grew into the road until it was barely wide enough for her truck. Some cars parked on the edge of the road were covered with snow and others had been dug out but there was no place for any of them to go. She left the truck in the middle of the road and walked stiffly up the house of her friends who had left the forest a year earlier than she had. She hesitated at the door and then rang the bell even though it was midnight. No one answered: she hadn't heard the bell ring so figured it probably didn't work anymore. Finally she got too cold to stand there and went back to her truck, never even thinking of just breaking into the house. It wouldn't have done her any good to do so: the house had been deserted for over a month and there was no heat. She crawled back into the truck and wrapped herself in the plaid car blanket she kept there for emergencies and turned on the heater and the tape player and fell asleep, warm and cheerful to the accompaniment of the easy, slightly ironic ragtime of Scott Joplin. In a last, very real dream, she got out of the cab and entered Mrs. Bradley's house back in West Virginia and the woman started to hug her and asked her to sit awhile. They talked a bit about the weather and their gardens and then, without warning, Mabel Bradley got the memory book from her husband's funeral. She had to read it all, all the names and hear about who sent flowers and she felt bad, she hadn't sent any. There were fifty wreaths Mabel told her, too many she seemed to think, and if it had been up to Mabel she would have put some of those flowers on Dewey's grave. He'd lost his mind at the end. He'd see people coming up the road and run out and ask the drivers to take him to sinking creek or some place from his childhood. He scared a lot of people and Mabel would yell down to them to wait and she'd go down there and drag him out of the car, because they would let him get in, not understanding he wasn't himself, and he would fight with her and call her names and never really know who she was, his wife of fifty years. It was smoking did it, Mabel told her, not the alcohol. Mabel said she never drank or smoked and so they sat and visited and then the visit was over and she had to leave and Mabel told her to come again, but she knew she wouldn't. She got back into the truck, still in her dream, and slept even more deeply, dreaming some other dream and knowing this time that it was a dream: voices coming through the thick snow like whispers, and little tinkly noises like breaking glass:

" _Wait, I hear something. Hey man there's music in that truck, you see that truck on the road?"_

" _I'll check it out. Don't worry about it, just another stiff, another one froze in the car."_

Rounds of tinny ragtime and Mozart and glass breaking magically as if it could go on breaking forever.

" _Look at these candleholders, I think they're solid gold! they're heavy as hell."_

" _No, they ain't gold...I can just tell, that's all. Forget the heavy brass stuff. Go for the electronics. The guy said electronics. OK you go back in and hand it out to me and don't worry, no one is coming in this cold."_

All the people gone somewhere to get warm, gone to the country maybe to burn wood because there was no more fuel coming into the cities. The beggars dying in the streets same as usual and the affluent dying too, asleep in their cars with the carbon monoxide in the parking lots of airports where the planes couldn't take off and the roads they had come in on blocked with snow, frozen in busloads downtown on their way home from offices, burned in their apartments with the gas ranges and electric heaters substituting for the empty oil furnaces. And slowly everything closing. But somewhere there was a frenzy of life, of people waiting out the cold spell and getting things cheap in the meantime and maybe getting something for nothing, that was always good for a thrill, and maybe a little revenge in these last moments, maybe some justice now it didn't matter anymore.

The scavengers ran off with their stuff for all the good it would do them in a few days time when the earth would be packed even more firmly beneath the ceaselessly falling snow and they were themselves "stiffs" in the backs of deserted buildings. No one expected it to end like that. It always seemed more satisfying to imagine the whole thing going up in a big, glorious cloud of radiation, sudden and crazy and marvelously violent. Some froze, some starved, some died of loneliness, all was preserved under the quiet, stifling snow, kind of inconclusive, definitely anticlimactic.

Dancers coming on through the fog of smoke, of snowy mist, knees bent, soft stepping, elbows bent, slowly flapping, clipped-winglike, circling slowly circling, wide stepping, soft stepping. The men in bowler hats and vests and tight-fitting pants, colorful, the women like cheap gimcrack figurines in their high high-heeled shoes standing on one hip in their feathers and satins and arch looks, eyes turning as the men dance around them, strutting, leaning, turning slow like to the raggedy slow-motion waltz. Colors here and there forcing out of the soft gray mist of smoke (of snow) colder and slower and colder and slower the piano player smoking his cigar, spinning out the music slower and slower and they spin like mechanical dolls to a stop, frozen in time. Horned beasts, beasts with smiles, grotesque animals with parts borrowed from other animals, fanciful, colorful, plastic gargoyles spinning around slower and slower on the merry-go-round. Empty carriages spinning and lifting into heels in the air spinning slower and slower and leaving them there. Trains climbing slowly to summits and crashing down in breathtaking bursts of speed. Dwarves spinning slowly around the black and white princess of the woods, plastic faces grinning eyes sparkling eternally to the music, carnival music and the slower crashing of the ocean's waves. Somewhere the boy who turned it all on lies frozen warm by the side of the sea, the waves slowing into glaciers and the music cutting sharp into snowy mists, hitting hard on the frozen air. Dance of death, dance of death. All the clocks chiming, all the dolls dancing out the time, the time, time stopped in snow, sound stopped in snow. Stopped.

The end of the world was a comforting dream. In the fall, Sara always thought that god had made too many mistakes and needed to throw out the whole complicated story and start over again, fresh. Another comforting dream was the burning of Henry's bones, a ceremony of respect, a task left waiting for her.

The bones were brittle and bleached, but they were scattered around the sinkhole and mixed up with the bones of deer, rabbits, squirrels, animals the dogs had killed and eaten along with Henry's remains. She collected them all in bundles of rags she had brought all the way from D.C. She had driven straight through like she used to and gone through Paint Bank while it was still dark, before the school bus was started, stopping for nothing.

It took her three trips to carry the bones and her old rifle back to the shack where once she had lived, walking along the old deer path that passed the larger cave opening and the spring. As always, Sara was afraid that Robert might emerge from the forest to confront her with his strange stare full of meanings only he could fathom, but she met no one. With the knowledge that dreams confer, she had a sense that there was no one to meet, anywhere.

She went into the toolshed looking for old cans of kerosene but they were mostly empty and she had to siphon off the gasoline still left in an old power mower. She piled the last evidence of Henry's existence in the middle of the floor of the front room of the shack and soaked the pile with gasoline. All the windows and doors were open and it was a dry breezy day. She lit the fire and ran out the door, up the road to her truck.

Usually Sara woke up at this point. But this last time she dreamed on. This time she was not the last person on earth and she felt relief when she found familiar faces at the Paint Bank volunteer Fire Department.

Everyone was there and they had just begun a dance. She stood awhile watching fat, smiling women in colorful dresses whirl past on the arms of stiff old men with stoic expressions. "We are all in an old painting" she said to someone who didn't see her. She looked for the postmistress who would recognize Sara and tell her husband to get the fire truck out.

By the time they arrived, the toolshed, woodshed, wood roof of the root cellar and the outhouse were all burning and they were concerned about the fire spreading across the dry grassy field to the forest up the hill. She told them to never mind the house and just be sure to contain the fire and protect the woods. That's what they did, trenching around the field and the garden plot and diverting springwater to protect the trees. Sara worked with them and it felt so real. Soon, the buildings, all but the stone walls of the root cellar, were a pile of rubble, stones, charred metal tools and old stoves, canning jars, some tarred boards and tin roofing and asphalt shingles and somewhere in that rubble the metal parts of a rifle and a man's teeth.

That was the last time Sara dreamed about Henry's bones. Though she wanted to, she never went back to camp at her old home. She knew that Robert was patiently waiting for her, and sometimes she wrote to the postmistress saying she might come out but she never did. Henry's truck had long ago been reported abandoned and towed off by the state road crew. Henry himself had been forgotten by all but Robert, who never forgot anything or anyone but twisted all number of memories into his fantastic braid of implausible stories that no one paid any attention to, and by Sara, who never really got that good a look at him but remembered him when the autumn leaves rustled or the snow fell.

XII

Mary

At the state hospital, Mary learned to dance. She loved to listen to music and twirl round and round in circles and, amazingly, never got dizzy: it was her special gift. Staffers would play her favorite songs and she would begin to twirl and they would watch and yell "go Mary" and she would smile and hum the music and twirl and twirl.

XIII

Robert

Robert was working on writing a novel about the people in his county. He had found some notes about them written on some charred pieces of paper left in the fire hole at that woman's campground after she left. He was amazed at the things folks had told her and didn't believe the half of it, but he thought it might make a good movie for TV. Trouble is, he kept rewriting it and rewriting it. Then he couldn't figure out how to end it. Every time he thought he had it worked out he would get a new idea that didn't work with the old one so he would throw away the whole thing and start over. He'd been working on it for years. He told Houston about it, which was, of course, a big mistake. No one took Robert seriously but he worked diligently nevertheless.

As he worked, Robert felt a growing bond with that city woman. He found himself wishing she would come back so he could tell her about how he'd saved her life that night Henry went stalking her. She'd been so frightened she'd never even gone close enough to examine Henry's body, to see the wound that killed him. Just like a city woman to think she'd done it herself with that little twenty-two so far away and in the dark. Maybe she thought god was looking after her and directed her paltry bullet straight to Henry's heart. Well, in a way, god was looking after her. God had sent Robert with his skill at stealth, who could sneak right up behind Henry without being heard and push his small handgun right into Henry's back and shoot and run away without being seen. Robert liked the idea that he was sent by god. And then he thought he ought to put Sara into the novel, thinking he had finally found the ending. He began to work himself into Sara's story. He began to wonder where she'd gone to. Maybe the postmistress would know.

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a note about the writer

Sandra Shwayder Sanchez earned a BA in Behavioral Sciences at University of Maryland and a Juris Doctor degree fromvDenver University Law School. Her law practice involved the representation of indigent clients in the Denver criminal, family and mental health courts. In the early seventies she built a house and farmed in rural West Virginia. She now lives in a small mountain town in Colorado with her husband Ed Sanchez. The short stories and novellas of Sandra Shwayder Sanchez have appeared in _The Long Story, Zone 3, The Healing Muse, Storyglossia, The Dublin Quarterly_ , and _Cantaraville_. Her first novel, _The Nun_ , was published in 1992 by Plain ViewPress, and a new novel, _The Road Home_ will be forthcoming this year.

