The package arrived five years ago. And looking at the contents had become part of her annual birthday ritual. She kept his cameras, bracelet, and the chain with the medallion in a special chest in the closet. A local carpenter had made the box to her design, out of walnut, with dust seals and padded interior sections. “Pretty fancy box,” he had said. Francesca had only smiled.
The last part of the ritual was the manuscript. She always read it by candlelight, at the end of the day. She brought it from the living room and laid it carefully on the yellow Formica, near a candle, lit her one cigarette of the year, a Camel, took a sip of brandy, and began to read.
There are old winds I still do not understand, though I have been riding, forever it seems, along the curl of their spines. I move in Dimension Z; the world goes by somewhere else in another slice of things, parallel to me. As if, hands in my pockets and bending a little forward, I see it through a department store window, looking inward.
In Dimension Z, there are strange moments. Coming around a long, rainy, New Mexico curve west of Magdalena, the highway turns to a footpath and the path to an animal trail. A pass of my wiper blades, and the trail becomes a forest place where nothing has ever gone. Again the wiper blades and, again, something further back. Great ice, this time. I am moving through short grass, in furs, with matted hair and spear, thin and hard as the ice itself, all muscle and implacable cunning. Past the ice, still farther back along the measure of things, deep salt water in which I swim, gilled and scaled. I cannot see more than that, except beyond plankton is the digit zero.
Euclid was not always right. He assumed parallelness, in constancy, right to the end of things; but a non- Euclidean way of being is also possible, where the lines come together, far out there. A vanishing point. The illusion of convergence.
Yet I know it’s more than illusion. Sometimes a coming together is possible, a spilling of one reality into another. A kind of soft enlacing. Not prim intersections loomed in a world of precision, no sound of the shuttle. Just… well… breathing. Yes, that’s the sound of it, maybe the feel of it, too. Breathing.
And I move slowly over this other reality, and beside it and underneath and around it, always with strength, always with power, yet always with a giving of myself to it. And the other senses this, coming forward with its own power, giving itself to me, in turn.
Somewhere, inside of the breathing, music sounds, and the curious spiral dance begins then, with a meter all its own that tempers the ice-man with spear and matted hair. And slowly—rolling and turning in adagio, in adagio always—ice-man falls… from Dimension Z… and into her.
At the end of her sixty-seventh birthday, when the rain had stopped, Francesca put the manila envelope in the bottom drawer of the rolltop desk. She had decided to keep it in her safe deposit box at the bank after Richard died but brought it home for a few days each year at this time. The lid on the walnut chest was shut on the cameras, and the chest was placed on the closet shelf in her bedroom.
Earlier in the afternoon, she had visited Roseman Bridge. Now she walked out on the porch, dried off the swing with a towel, and sat down. It was cold, but she would stay for a few minutes, as she always did. Then she walked to the yard gate and stood. Then to the head of the lane. Twenty-two years later, she could see him stepping from his truck in the late afternoon, trying to find his way; she could see Harry bouncing toward the county road, then stopping, and Robert Kincaid standing on the running board, looking back up the lane.
A LETTER FROM FRANCESCA
Francesca Johnson died in January of 1989. She was sixty-nine years old at the time of her death. Robert Kincaid would have been seventy-six that year. The cause of death was listed as “natural.” “She just died,” the doctor told Michael and Carolyn. “Actually, we’re a little perplexed. We can find no specific cause for her death. A neighbor found her slumped over the kitchen table.”
In a 1982 letter to her attorney, she had requested that her remains be cremated and her ashes scattered at Roseman Bridge. Cremation was an uncommon practice in Madison County—viewed as slightly radical in some undefined way—and her wish generated considerable discussion at the cafe, the Texaco station, and the implement dealership. The disposition of her ashes was not made public.
Following the memorial service, Michael and Carolyn drove slowly to Roseman Bridge and carried out Francesca’s instructions. Though it was nearby, the bridge had never been special to the Johnson family, and they wondered, and wondered again, why their rather sensible mother would behave in such an enigmatic way and why she had not asked to be buried by their father, as was customary.
Following that, Michael and Carolyn began the long process of sorting through the house and brought home the materials from the safe deposit box after they were examined by the local attorney for estate purposes and released.
They divided the materials from the box and began looking through them. The manila envelope was in Carolyn’s stack, about a third of the way down. She was puzzled when she opened it and removed the contents. She read Robert Kincaid’s 1965 letter to Francesca. After that she read his 1978 letter, then the 1982 letter from the Seattle attorney. Finally she studied the magazine clippings.
“Michael.”
He caught the mixture of surprise and pensiveness in her voice and looked up immediately. “What is it?”
Carolyn had tears in her eyes, and her voice became unsteady. “Mother was in love with a man named Robert Kincaid. He was a photographer. Remember when we all had to see the copy of
Michael sat across from her, his tie loosened, collar open. “Say that again, slowly. I can’t believe I heard you correctly.”
After reading the letters, Michael searched the downstairs closet, then went upstairs to Francesca’s bedroom. He had never noticed the walnut box before and opened it. He carried it down to the kitchen table. “Carolyn, here are his cameras.”
Tucked in one end of the box was a sealed envelope with “Carolyn or Michael” written on it in Francesca’s script, and lying between the cameras were three leather-bound notebooks.
“I’m not sure I’m capable of reading what’s in that envelope,” said Michael. “Read it out loud to me, if you can handle it.”
She opened the envelope and read aloud.
January 7, 1987
Dear Carolyn and Michael,
Though I’m feeling just fine, I think it’s time for me to get my affairs in order (as they say). There is something, something very important, you need to know about. That’s why I’m writing this.
After looking through the safe deposit box and finding the large manila envelope addressed to me with a 1965 postmark, I’m sure you’ll eventually come to this letter. If possible, please sit at the old kitchen table to read it. You’ll understand that request shortly.
It’s hard for me to write this to my own children, but I must. There’s something here that’s too strong, too beautiful, to die with me. And if you are to know who your mother was, all the goods and bads, you need to know what I’m about to say. Brace yourself.
As you’ve already discovered, his name was Robert Kincaid. His middle initial was “L,” but I never knew what the L represented. He was a photographer, and he was here in 1965 photographing the covered bridges.
