In the spring I began walking out onto the moors every week to see the old American. What with Anne gone, someone needed to take him his groceries, which the town contributed: some bread and a couple of meat pies, some potatoes. He did a little gardening out in front of the stone house. Feeble as he was he did all right for himself. He’d barely speak to me when I first arrived, but if I stayed long enough he’d finally talk. It became pleasant in the spring when we sat in front of the house until nine or ten in the evening without feeling the chill, in little chairs that seemed made for children, rocking back and forth. Across the moors could be seen the lights of church steeples, churches not even there in the silver sheen of the moor days, as though they were beneath the earth and their lights shone up through the ground after dark. He watched the lights very intently, counting them in his head. Twenty-eight, he reported, I got twenty-eight. What do you get? I counted. Twenty-eight, I told him. He nodded in disappointment.
I couldn’t vouch for it that he wasn’t a little out of his mind. He was certainly confused about things: time and dates and places. I told myself I should become more careful about time and dates or I would be confused too when I was older. One night he asked me the year and I actually had to think a moment. Nineteen fifty-two, I said; he shook his head peculiarly. It was as though he didn’t understand the very number itself: No, no, he said, that can’t be it. He understood the numbers of churches but not the numbers of years. I could never get a straight answer out of him; I asked if he’d been to Chicago. Again he looked peculiar and shook his head, as if Chicago were Asia or the Antarctic. I asked if he’d been in New York and that seemed to ring a faint bell. Once I think, he said, nodding. Very long ago, before I went to prison. Prison? I said, startled; and he answered, Out in the annexes. Montana. Saskatchewan. And then I went to a city, he said, where there were a hundred canals, and storefronts that wept in the distance, and whores that slept in the lagoons. His whole little white face struggled with the memory of it. He said, A terrible music came from the earth. He said, A boat circled day after day, and she was on it. He said, In this city I died, over and over.
Music came from the earth? I said.
It’s you, isn’t it, he said. He said it in my presence but he didn’t say it to me. It’s you I hear calling over the songs of a zombie city. I cast myself in flight for the decapitation of my own guilt, to live where I once died, to resurrect my passion, my integrity, my courage from out of my own grave. Those things that I once thought dead. By the plain form of my delirium I’ll blast the obstruction of every form around me—Mr. Cale, I said to him—into something barely called shadow. I sail. Mr. Cale? I swim to you. I reached over and shook him roughly by the shoulder. I know the water. Mr. Cale, I said again, shaking him.
He turned to look at me, and I pulled my hand away. I saw her there waiting for me as I came out of the water, he said. It was dark there on the peninsula, nothing else around; but I’d been wrong about one thing, and that was the light. The light that had called me across the bay. I thought it was the thing she hid beneath the folds of her skirt (as though at this point she could actually deceive me). But it wasn’t that at all, it was her eyes, they were the fire that had warned a hundred sailors.
Perhaps they were meant to warn me. I stumbled onto the beach, falling down on one knee but then getting up, and she walked up to me in the same dress, her feet bare as I’d always seen her, and her black hair and bloody mouth. She still held her hands behind her skirt. We stood inches from each other and she gasped slightly when I wouldn’t take my eyes from hers, when I held her stare with my own; I knew if I looked away, if I turned away, she would have done it to me, as she believed she had done it before, in other places, on other beaches.
Done it?
On other beaches, in other places. But I looked at her and she finally said in her bad funny English, “It is
