they came.
Outside, in the violet rage, bells tolled and a multitude of voices sang dirges from empty cisterns. Somewhere close by, perhaps from under Bremen’s bed, a rooster crowed, and then the sound died off to the rattle of bones in a dry cup.
The bats with baby faces crawled head downward until they tumbled onto Bremen’s bed like so many wriggling rats with leathery wings and sharp infant smiles.
Bremen screamed as the lightning stirred and the thunder dragged ahead of the rain like a heavy curtain scraping across old boards.
The next day Bremen did not eat, as if fasting would cure a feverish mind. There was no phone call from Miz Morgan, no morning note tacked to the bulletin board outside.
Bremen went south to the edge of the ranch, as far from the hacienda as he could get, and dug postholes for the new stretch of fence that would run between the woods and the pond. White noise roared around him.
On the eleventh hole, almost three feet down, his postholer bit into a face.
Bremen dropped to his knees. The dirt in the jaws of the postholer was soft, red clay. There was a bit of brown flesh and white bone there, too. Bremen took his spade and spread the hole wider, opening it out into a cone-shaped pit.
The face and skull were arched backward, almost separated from the white-wedged bones of neck and collar, as if the buried man had been trying to swim up through the soil toward air. Bremen dug out the grave as carefully as any archaeologist who had ever widened an excavation. There were tatters of brown cloth across the crushed rib cage. Bremen found bits and pieces of the left hand where the swimmer had raised it; the right hand was missing.
Bremen set the skull in the back of the Jeep and drove back toward the ranch, changing his mind just before coming into sight of the hacienda and heading up and around the hogback ridge to sit awhile and listen to the wind through the chapel windows.
When he got back to his bunkhouse at sunset, the phone was ringing.
Bremen crawled into bed, turned his face to the rough wall, and let it ring. After several minutes the noise stopped.
Bremen covered his ears with the palms of his hands, but the mindnoise continued like a great, white wind from nowhere. After it grew dark and the insect sounds from down by the stream and up by the cold house began in earnest, Bremen rolled over, half expecting the phone to ring again.
It was silent. Next to it, oddly luminescent in a sliver of moonlight through the shutters, the skull watched him from its place on the plank table. Bremen did not remember carrying it in.
It was somewhere closer to midnight than dawn when the phone did ring. Bremen studied it a moment, only half-awake, thinking for a confused second that it was the skull that was calling him.
He padded across rough boards in bare feet. “Hello?”
“Come up to the house,” whispered Miz Morgan. In the background Bremen could hear a muffled stereo sounding like voices singing in dry cisterns. “Come up to the house now,” she said.
Bremen put down the phone and went out the door and up through the moonlight toward the sound of baying hounds.
EYES
Jeremy and Gail love each other with a passion that sometimes frightens them both.
Jeremy once suggests to her that their relationship is like one of the plutonium pellets imploded out at Lawrence Livermore Labs by a hundred lasers on a spherical shell firing inward simultaneously, driving the plutonium molecules closer and closer together until there is no more room between discrete atoms and the pellet first implodes and then explodes in hydrogen fusion. In theory, he says. Sustained fusion hasn’t actually been achieved, he says.
Gail suggests that he might find a more romantic metaphor.
But later, when thinking about it, she sees the accuracy of the comparison. Their love might have been a volatile, unstable thing without their ability, dying after a short half-life, but the ultimate sharing of mindtouch and the “driving inward” of a thousand experiences shared daily has imploded their passion into a fiery intensity rarely found outside the cores of stars.
There are countless challenges to that closeness: the human urge for privacy that each of them must compromise to such a great extent, the balance of Gail’s emotional, artistic, intuitive personality with Jeremy’s stable, sometimes plodding outlook on things, and the friction of knowing too much about the person one loves.
Jeremy sees a beautiful young woman on the campus one spring day—she is bending over to lift some books when a breeze tugs and lifts her skirt—and that single, sharp erotic instant is as tangible to Gail four hours later as the lingering smell of perfume or a smudge of lipstick on a collar would have been to another wife.
They joke about it. But they do not joke when Gail forms a brief but obsessive attraction to a poet named Timothy the following winter. She tries to exorcise the feelings, or at least block them behind the small remnants of mindshield still left between her and Jeremy, but her emotional indiscretion might as well be a neon sign in a dark room. Jeremy senses it immediately and cannot hide his own feelings—hurt mostly, a certain morbid fascination secondly. For over a month the brief and rapidly fading attraction Gail has for the poet lies between her husband and her like a cold sword blade in the night.
Gail’s freedom with her emotions may well have saved Jeremy’s sanity—he says as much sometimes—but at other times the surges of feeling distract him from his teaching, his thinking, his work. Gail apologizes, but Jeremy still feels like he is a small boat on the turbulent sea of Gail’s strong emotions.
Not able to retrieve poetry from his own memory, Jeremy searches Gail’s thoughts for images to describe her. He finds them frequently.
When she dies, it is one of those borrowed images that he shares silently as he spreads her ashes in the orchard by the stream. It is from a poem by Theodore Roethke:
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
