Taltos

“Yes, thank you, Jacob,” he said. He stopped. The snow was falling all over his dark coat. He could feel it melting in his hair. Nevertheless, he reached into his pocket, felt for the small toy, the rocking horse, yes, it was there.

“This is for your son, Jacob,” he said. “I promised him.”

“Mr. Ash, for you to remember something like that on a night like this.”

“Nonsense, Jacob. I’ll bet your son remembers.”

It was embarrassingly insignificant, this little toy of wood; he wished now that it were something infinitely better. He would make a note-something better for Jacob’s son.

Taking big steps, he walked too fast for the driver to follow. He was too tall for the umbrella anyway. It was just a gesture, the man rushing beside him, umbrella in hand, for him to take it if he wanted it, which he never did.

He boarded the warm, close, and always frightening jet plane.

“I have your music, Mr. Ash.”

He knew this young woman, but he couldn’t remember her name. She was one of the best of the night secretaries. She’d been with him on the last trip to Brazil. He had meant to remember her. Shameful not to have her name on the very tip of his tongue.

“Evie, isn’t it?” he asked, smiling, begging forgiveness with a little bit of a frown.

“No, sir, Leslie,” she said, forgiving him instantly.

If she’d been a doll, she would have been bisque, no doubt of it, face underpainted with a soft rose blush to cheeks and lips, eyes deliberately small, but dark and deeply focused. Timidly she waited.

As he took his seat, the great leather chair made especially for him, longer than the others, she put the engraved program in his hand.

There were the usual selections-Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich. Ah, here was the composition he had requested-the Verdi Requiem. But he couldn’t listen to it now. If he slipped himself into those dark chords and dark voices, the memories would close in.

He put his head back, ignoring the winter spectacle outside the little window. “Sleep, you fool,” he said without moving his lips.

But he knew he wouldn’t. He would think about Samuel and the things Samuel had said, over and over, until they saw one another again. He would remember the smell of the Talamasca house, and how much the scholars had looked like clerics, and a human hand with a quill pen, writing in great curled letters. “Anonymous. Legends of the lost land. Of Stonehenge.”

“Just want to be quiet, sir?” asked the young Leslie.

“No, Shostakovich, the Fifth Symphony. It will make me cry, but you must ignore me. I’m hungry. I want cheese and milk.”

“Yes, sir, everything’s ready.” She began to speak the names of the cheeses, those fancy triple creams that they ordered for him from France and Italy and God only knows where else. He nodded, accepting, waiting for the rush of the music, the divinely piercing quality of this engulfing electronic system, which would make him forget the snow outside, and the fact that they would soon be over the great ocean, pushing steadily towards England, towards the plain, towards Donnelaith, and towards heartbreak.

Two

AFTER THE FIRST day, Rowan didn’t talk. She spent her time out under the oak, in a white wicker chair, her feet propped on a pillow, or sometimes merely resting on the grass. She stared at the sky, eyes moving as if there were a procession of clouds above, and not the clear spring blue, and the bits of white fleece that blew silently across it.

She looked at the wall, or the flowers, or the yew trees. She never looked down at the ground.

Perhaps she’d forgotten that the double grave was right beneath her feet. The grass was growing over it, quick and wild, as it always does in spring in Louisiana. There had been rain aplenty to help it, and sometimes the glory of the sun and rain at the same time.

She ate her meals-approximately a fourth to one-half of what they gave her. Or so Michael said. She didn’t look hungry. But she was pale, still, and her hands, when she did move them, would shake.

All the family came to see her. Groups came across the lawn, standing back as if they might hurt her. They said their hellos, they asked about her health. They told her she looked beautiful. That was true. Then they gave up and they went away.

Mona watched all this.

At night Rowan slept, Michael said, as if she were exhausted, as if she’d been hard at work. She bathed alone, though this scared him. But she always locked the bathroom door, and if he tried to stay inside with her, she merely sat there on the chair, looking off, doing nothing. He had to leave before she’d get up. Then he’d hear the lock turn.

She listened when people spoke, at least in the beginning. And now and then when Michael pleaded with her to speak, she clasped his hand warmly as if comforting him, or pleading with him to be patient. This was sad to watch.

Michael was the only one she touched, or acknowledged, though often this little gesture was made without a change in her remote expression or even a movement of her gray eyes.

Her hair was growing full again. It was even a little yellow from her sitting in the sun. When she’d been in the coma, it had been the color of driftwood, the kind you can see on the muddy riverbanks. Now it looked alive, though if memory served Mona correctly, hair was dead, wasn’t it? Already dead by the time you brushed it, curled it, did stuff to it.

Every morning Rowan rose of her own accord. She would walk slowly down the stairs, holding the railing to the left, and leaning on her cane with the right hand, placing it firmly on each tread. She didn’t seem to care if Michael helped her. If Mona took her arm, it didn’t matter.

Now and then Rowan stopped at her dresser before she went down, and put on a bit of lipstick.

Mona always noticed. Sometimes Mona was waiting for Rowan in the hallway, and she saw Rowan do this. Very significant.

Michael always remarked on it too. Rowan wore nightgowns and negligees, depending upon the weather. Aunt Bea kept buying them and Michael would wash them, because Rowan only wore new clothes after they had been washed, or so he had remembered, and he laid them out for her on the bed.

No, this was no catatonic stupor, Mona figured. And the doctors had confirmed it, though they could not say what was wrong with her. The one time one of them, an idiot Michael had said, stuck a pin in her hand, Rowan quietly withdrew the hand and covered it with her other one. And Michael went into a rage. But Rowan didn’t look at the guy or say a word.

“I wish I’d been here for that,” said Mona.

Of course Mona had known he was telling the truth. Let the doctors speculate and stick pins in people. Maybe when they went back to the hospital, they stuck pins in a doll of Rowan-voodoo acupuncture. Mona wouldn’t have been surprised.

What did Rowan feel? What did she remember? Nobody was sure anymore. They had only Michael’s word that she had awakened from the coma fully aware, that she had spoken with him for hours after, that she knew everything that had happened, that in the coma she had heard and understood. Something terrible on the day of her awakening, another one. And the two buried together beneath the oak.

“I never should have let her do it,” Michael had said to Mona a hundred times. “The smell that came out of that hole, the sight of what was left … I should have taken care of things.”

And what had the other one looked like, and who had carried it down, and tell me all the things that Rowan said-Mona had asked him these questions too often.

“I washed the mud from her hands,” Michael had told Aaron and Mona. “She kept looking at it. I guess a