Mystery Walk

He felt lightened, cleansed, and exhilarated.

And he remembered his grandmother saying, a long time ago, that it would be up to him to find a way to release the emotions he absorbed through contact with the revenants. She had her pottery, just as his mother had her needlepoint, and now . . . what was closer to human emotion than music? But how to bring out real music from this assembly of wood and metal wires? How to caress it instead of beating it half to death? How to let it soothe away the pain instead of ripping it out?

'Well,' Dr Mirakle said from behind him, holding a tray with two bowls of soup, 'I'm glad to see my house is still standing. I'm sure the police are on their way by now, but we'll ask them to join in the jamboree.'

'Is this yours? Do you know how to play it?'

'Me? No, I couldn't play a kazoo. My wife is . . . was a piano teacher for a while. Can I venture to say that you're no Liberace?'

'Who?'

'Never mind. Then again, neither is Liberace a Billy Creekmore. Come on, we'll eat in the front room, it's too dark in here.' He paused, because Billy wasn't rising from the bench. Instead, the boy was fingering the keyboard again, picking at various notes as if he'd stumbled upon Captain Kidd's treasure. 'It's probably not too hard to learn,' Mirakle said. 'I never had the inclination, but there are a stack of old instruction books down in the basement. Are you interested?'

He struck a high note and listened to it sing. 'Yes sir.'

'I'll get them for you, then. They're probably so mildewed you can't read them, but ...' Mirakle came over and set the tray down atop the piano. He saw the look of excitement in Billy's eyes, and noticed also that his coloring had improved. It had been a great relief, in a way, to hear that Kenneth was resting far from the confines of this house. 'You've been a great help to me,' Dr. Mirakle said. 'I appreciate all the work you've done. I . don't know what's ahead for you, but I think I'll be hearing frorm you again. At the very least, I hope you'll write to let me know how you're doing.'

'Yes sir, I will.'

'I have an idea you're the kind of young man who means what he says. That's rare enough in itself, in this day and age. In the morning I'll take you to the bus station; I would offer you a sizeable increase in pay to join me on the carnival circuit next season, but . . . you've got better things to do, I think.' He smiled. The thought streaked through him that somehow he was losing a second son, and he touched Billy's shoulder. 'The soup's getting cold. Come on, let's eat.'

Mirakle took the tray into the front room; Billy paused at the keyboard a moment longer, then joined him. Young man, Mirakle thought, I wish you much luck. That is the very least of what you'll need on your journey.

And it was possible—no, probable, Mirakle told himself—that sometime before winter's cold set in he might drive the truck back up to Hawthorne, back to that little shack off from the road, and deliver a piano that might yet learn to sing again.

NINE

Revelations

42

'He went to sleep,' Ramona said, long gray strands of her hair blowing from around her scarf. There were deep lines under her eyes and on each side of her nose, yet she refused to bend to the will of the years; she carried herself strong and straight, her chin uplifted. 'I read the Bible to him that night, and we ate a good dinner of vegetables. He talked a lot about you, as he had for the few days before that, and he said he was trying very hard to understand . . . what we're like. He said he knew you were going to be a great man, and he'd be proud of you. Then he said he was going to take a nap, and I washed the dishes. When I went in later to see about him, he . . . was as peaceful as a child. I pulled the covers over him, and then I went to get the doctor.'

Billy touched the granite marker A chill breeze was sweeping down into their faces from the hills, and already winter was knocking at the door though it was hardly the middle of October. He'd come walking up the road yesterday, lugging his suitcase from the Greyhound bus stop at Coy Granger's, and had seen his mother out in the field, gathering pecans in a bowl. His father wasn't sitting on the front porch. The Oldsmobile was gone—sold for scrap, he'd later learned, to pay for his father's casket. The house was the same, fixed up and painted with the money he'd sent home; but things had changed. He could see the passage of time in his mother's face, and from what she'd told him his father had died near the time Billy had dreamed of him and his dad walking along the road to Hawthorne. Billy said, 'You had to know. The aura. Didn't you see it?'

'Yes, I did,' Ramona replied quietly. 'I knew, and so did he. Your father had made his peace with the world . . . and especially with himself. He raised you with a good, strong hand and he worked very hard for us. He didn't always agree with us or understand us, but that was never the point: at the end, he loved us just as much as he always had. He was ready.'

'Ready?' Billy shook his head disbelievingly. 'Do you mean he just . . . wanted to die? No, I don't believe that!'

She looked at him with a cool, level gaze. 'He didn't fight it. He didn't want to. At the end he had the mind of a child, and as all children have faith, so did he.'

'But . . . I . . . should've been here! You should've written me! I . . . didn't ... get to say good-bye! . . .'

'What would that have changed?' She shook her head and put a hand on his arm. A tear streaked down his cheek, and he let it fall. 'You're here now,' she said. 'And though he is not, you'll always be John Creekmore's son, and he'll be in your child's blood as well. So is he really gone?'

Billy felt the restless wind pulling at him, heard it whispering around the pungent pines. It was true that his father lived within him, he knew, but still . . . separation was so hard to take. It was so hard not to miss someone, not to cry for him and mourn him; easy to look at death from a distance, more difficult to stare into its face. He already felt a world away from the carnival with its riotous noises and flashing lights; here on this bluff, framed by hills covered with woodland and overshadowed by gray sky, he seemed to stand at the center of a great silence. He ran his hands over the rough gravestone and remembered how his father's unshaven jaw had felt against his cheek. The world was spinning too fast! he thought; there were too many changes in the wind, and the summer of his childhood seemed lost in the past. For one thing he could be happy: before leaving Mobile yesterday morning, he'd called the hospital in Birmingham and had been told that Santha Tully was going to be all right.

'Winter's on the way,' Ramona said. 'It's going to be a cold one, too, from the way these pines have grown thick.'

'I know.' He looked at his mother. 'I don't want to be like I am, Mom. I never asked for this. I don't want to see ghosts and the black aura, I want to be like everybody else. It's too hard this way; it's too . . . strange.'

'Just as your father's in your blood,' she replied, 'so am I. No one ever said it would be easy. . . .'

'But no one ever gave me a choice, either.'

'That's true. Because there can be no choice. Oh, you can live as a hermit and shut out the world, as I tried to do after you were born, but sooner or later there comes a knock at your door.'

He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and hunched over as a cold wind blew around him. Ramona put her arm around him. Her crying was done, but it almost broke her heart to see so much pain in her son. Still, she knew that pain sculpts the soul, molds the will, and would leave him standing stronger when he'd finally straightened up.

After another moment he wiped his eyes on his sleeve and said, 'I'm all right. I didn't mean to . . . act like a baby.'

'Let's walk,' she told him, and together they went down the hill among the tombstones, heading toward the road. It was over two miles back to the house, but they were in no hurry.

'What do I do now?' Billy asked.

'I don't know. We'll see.' She was silent for a few minutes as they walked, and Billy knew that something