He enlisted the Invisibles, recklessly, in the secret struggles he recounted to himself; they were themselves losers, from a no longer existent time, and could be imagined to be takers of the wrong, the doomed side, the side History would leave behind. Anyway (he thought) he couldn’t ever really alter the outcomes by taking the sides he took, for the right side always had to win—according to all the histories Pierce had read or been made to study it always had, in the end—and so Pierce’s secret allegiances were moot: but still, into these adventures the others were not invited.
And the battle of the angels: which side then?
That afternoon, as they did every Saturday, Joe Boyd and Pierce went together with Warren to the Bondieu theater to see the cowboy movie always shown: walking each with his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket, each corduroy collar turned up, Warren alone of them wearing guns. On the stretch of sidewalk before the theater the boys of the town milled, waiting to be let in, eyeing the Oliphant boys and Pierce. One or two no older than Pierce smoked cigarettes with casual assurance. Sam said smoking stunted your growth; it certainly seemed to have stunted these guys’.
The picture was ten years old, but they neither knew that nor cared; and after it came a cartoon, or a comedy as the Kentuckians called it, rapid rituals of destruction and revival; and then the familiar urgent music of the serial. The announcer’s doomladen voice hurried through the events of ten weeks to the present moment while snatches of scenes flew by carried on the runaway music. How Gene found the deserted mineshaft leading to the underground empire; how he had gone down to struggle with the powerful subterraneans and their plans of conquest. He was left at the end of every episode in mortal danger, as good as dead in fact, only to be seen at the beginning of the next episode to have survived: the cliff over which he had been shoved had a projecting ledge to cling to that had not been there last week, the careening truck had missed him, he had leapt out of its path though it was clearly impossible that he could have: as though the drastic and the final softened, between one Saturday and the next, into something less final.
Not this time though. The X-ray bomb that Gene had deflected from the upper regions and his own innocent ranch had, going haywire, blown up Gene himself. “They can’t get out of that one,” Joe Boyd last Saturday had said, with a certain satisfaction too: and they had not. Gene was still dead. The empress of the underworld looks down on him lifeless and still, the toes of his pointed boots turned up. But she is secretly his ally. She convinces her dark Vizier (Father Midnight, now in high-collared cape and cuffed gloves) that the secrets Gene knows must not be lost. Very well, Majesty: there are ways. By techniques of science which the upper regions will not learn for centuries, or have for as long forgotten, Gene is brought to life.
—Hurry, oh hurry.
—Have patience, Majesty. Death is strong.
He stirs on the shimmering operating table, beneath the reviving lamps. From his mouth comes a gout of language in a voice not his.
—What does he say?
—It is the language of the dead, Majesty. They often speak it on returning; but they soon forget.
“Oh good grief,” said Joe Boyd. “Oh lordy.”
After they left the movie, Joe Boyd insisted they stop at the dark and odorous variety store where magazines and comics were sold; while Joe Boyd, jaws working over a wad of Bazooka, looked through the new issue of Guns and Ammo, Warren and Pierce mooched among the comics, never holding any one too long, the embittered and watchful storekeeper whom Joe Boyd alone of them did not fear could decide suddenly that it was soiled and thus sold.
The vengeful dead, rising from the rotten plush beds of their coffins, dragging their decaying cerements after them. You could tell the girl skeletons because their hair, white and fine, still clung to their yellow skulls. Did it really? Warren would not touch or even approach the horror ones, looking at the covers only with one eye shut and his face turned away.
Outside the store they parted. Pierce was to serve an early Mass next day, and ought (he thought) to take Communion too; when he served a later Mass he could be excused, a growing boy who needed his breakfast. And if he went to Communion, then he needed to go now to confession. Joe Boyd saluted him, grinning around his gum, and Warren followed his big brother toward home.
Blessed Sacrament was like no church Pierce had known in Brooklyn, not like smoky-black St. Simon Cyrenean, nor like St. Basil’s where Axel had used to go to hear the music, all pink and blue paint within. It looked like a house: small and dirty white, clapboarded and square-windowed, with a little porch. It even had a picket fence running in front of its square of grass and up its cement front walk. There was a miniature steeple, though, and an electric bell inside it.
The story was that the first priest (Father Midnight’s predecessor) had built it himself, with the men of the parish, collar off and sleeves rolled up. Pierce thought of this often as he sat in it, noting small details of its construction, wondering if it had been the priest who had failed to make the moldings meet squarely at that corner, the priest who had made the dollhouse altar of white-painted wood. IHS. In hoc signo. Beneath the stone let into the altar’s surface were the relics of a saint, Pierce knew, for every altar had to have some. Relics: bits and pieces, unrecognizable. Not a skull with floating hair.
He knelt, hands still in his jacket pockets, guessing which among the six or eight old women and the single man in line were there to be absolved, and which were already scrolling through their penances. The man knelt with his hands over his eyes, hands like great worn-out tools, as though he had clawed rock all his life or broken trees with them. What had he done, what had he unburdened himself of here?
Pierce’s own conscience, when he regarded it, was dingy but not really marked, like his underwear; the problem was finding enough nameable faults to make it worth bending Father Midnight’s ear. Pierce knew that to conceal a sin you knew about would make the sacrament inefficacious, would be a sin in itself actually, and Pierce was not tempted to conceal sins; he was tempted to make them up. Envy. Anger. Pride. Lust.
His turn. In the dark of the booth he waited, hearing the delicate murmur of the priest’s voice speaking to the sinner on his other side. Then the window slid shut on that side, and the window on Pierce’s side slid open. Father Midnight dim behind the violet screen. Father forgive me for I have sinned. Decades later Pierce would read about the invention of the double confession booth, by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, and would see it then as others must who had not grown up with it: a construction weird as a bathing-machine, as fraught as a guillotine.
“Father, I started a fire.”
A silence in the violet dimness. Pierce fully believed himself to be anonymous here, unrecognizable voice of an unknown sinner; later he would grow less certain.
“Did you start the fire on purpose, son?”
“No, Father. It was an accident.”
“Well. In order for something to be a sin, there has to be an intention. You can’t commit a sin by accident.”
Pierce said nothing.
“Can you try to make restitution for the damage you caused?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ask and see. But you shouldn’t think it was a sin. Now for any carelessness you may have been guilty of, make a good act of contrition.”
Pierce bent his head to the padded lip of the prie-dieu and whispered through the prayer with mnemonic haste, feeling strangely privileged: to have been the cause of wide destruction, and at the same time to be officially innocent.
Why (he wondered, making his miniature penance) do we ever do anything but pray? If we know life is short, not even an eye-blink compared to All Eternity, then why do we take the chance of living a life? Obviously it was best just to kneel, hands clasped, wrapped in adoration until the (quick) end. Then bang right into your endless happiness. That he was not tempted to do this himself, that he found the argument self-evident but not somehow convincing, suggested a flaw som
ewhere, a flaw maybe inside himself; and maybe not.
It was evening when he came out, the year heading toward its darkness, old age of the Sun. When he came in sight of the big square house atop the rise at the end of town, lamplight was already shining in the windows, in the kitchen and in Joe Boyd’s room upstairs: yellow lamplight that warned him away. He turned from the road and climbed the gullied bank at a place he knew of. And on silent feet up through the scrubby trees into the brown field above. Night was falling, and the mild beings of the day hid themselves away.
He felt the black melancholy burden of his nature, turned outside in now and warming him for his task. He was as he was and not different: and that was all right. The harvest was cut and in the barns; the flocks—sensing him pass, perhaps—hurried quick into their byres. With the wind on his cheek he entered the pines at the top of the hill where it was night already (night, and the moon full, and the world aghast) and climbed along the ridge above the house and its outbuildings.
Which was harder, he wondered: to make your home in a strange far place, or to be a stranger in your own home place?
Superb in his loneliness he looked down on the human habitations. Let them eat and drink in peace: they need not know of his passage near them, on his way somewhere they could not imagine. It’s all right.
He turned his steps away, toward the far side of the ridge and the path downward, toward the battle. He would be there; his kind would know him: he would not be alone.
SIX
On Christmas night that year there was a sudden drop in the temperature, and beneath the bungalow the pipes running unprotected through the crawlspace froze, as they did once almost every winter. Most of Christmas morning Sam and Joe Boyd poured hot water on them from kettles and wrapped them in hot rags, Sam in his overcoat and fedora. “They think they live in the South around here,” Sam muttered. “The sunny South.”
That was the Christmas that Bird learned there was no Santa Claus, or was anyway officially informed of it, which left Warren alone in the dark, or the light. Bird got a camera from Santa anyway, which she loved and quickly mastered. Hawkeye. One of the first pictures she took was of the drive that led down to the highway from their house, a picture that ended up much later among Pierce’s possessions, and seemed to him to distill an entire Cumberland winter in a single shiny square: the black undergrown trees slick with rain; the winter-exposed trash caught in the claws of the bushes; a scrawny chicken; broken barbed wire. Down at the end of the drive, across the highway, the little store could be seen, propped on posts over the clay banks of the Little No Name River, or the crick as everybody called it. A turtleback Chevy and a Hudson parked outside; no folks. In that store, besides numberless Nehis and Sky Bars, Pierce bought the first tobacco he ever smoked.
That happened in February of the new year, when Sam and Winnie were in Florida. They decided to go—Sam decided—in the sudden and exasperated way he tended to make up his mind to indulge himself in something, a new car, a vacation. He stunned Winnie somewhat with the news, and she stunned the children. Two weeks. They would be taken care of in that time by a housekeeper (couldn’t say babysitter in Joe Boyd’s hearing) who would see to their every need. And Sister Mary Philomel would come extra-long, to help.
What housekeeper? Sam asked around at the hospital and among his patients, and Winnie asked at the store, and they came up with a name or two, and Winnie interviewed them a little awkwardly.
“You have children of your own?”
“Yes, ma’am. Three.”
“Won’t they be needing you?”
“Jes Baby Henry, ma’am. T’other’s growed. She’s married now.”
“Oh. How old is she?”
“Sixteen. And t’other’s in heaven.”
“Oh.”
“Phthisic.”
“Oh.”
Mousie (not a nickname, but all the name she had been given) was a big soft woman with big soft arms freckled orange, the same orange as her hair and her pale lashes. The children were to call her Mrs. Calton, not Mousie, and she let them do so even though it was evident in her milk-white face that she found it funny, funnier than being called Mousie.
“Why did they name you Mousie?” Bird asked her at last.
“Cause when I was born? My momma thought I looked just like a little mouse. That’s what Momma says.”
After the horror of being left in this woman’s care had worn off, of seeing Sam and Winnie drive off South alone in the Nash, the children came to appreciate Mousie, and never stopped marveling at her. She turned on the television first thing in the morning, when there was nothing to see but a man with a picture of a farm behind him, who talked about tobacco and beans, and she let it run unceasing through Ding Dong School and A World Elsewhere to the capering puppets and varnished-haired newscasters, not closing its eye even at dinnertime, when a man at a church organ played mild favorites for half an hour without interruption, only occasionally gazing sweetly into the room where the Oliphants and Mousie and Baby Henry ate their dinner.
Winnie had done her best making lists of bedtime hours, house rules, and bad habits, but she forgot a lot, and what she did remember was cast in language so odd to a Bondieu ear that much of it didn’t catch. “Caint make out her meaning,” said Mousie, pondering Winnie’s dashing blue-black hand when Winnie was far away. When Winnie’s menus and the frozen store of Winnie’s bread ran out, Mousie began giving them the same meals she ate herself, sandwiches of white bread (“like Kleenex,” Hildy said) filled with pale cold Spam, lettuce and margarine; these accompanied by unchilled strawberry pop and blocks of ice cream striped pink, white and brown.
She did give them each their spoonful of vitamins every morning, as Sam directed, a viscous yellow-green stuff that could still be tasted hours later, years later too in memory. But she also gave them Alka-Seltzer if they complained of stomach-aches (which Hildy often did because she liked the acrid foaming stuff, liked especially to watch the tablets dissolving as though in ecstasy, leaping and spinning and bumping into each other). She gave Baby Henry something for his teething that kept him mild and placid (or maybe he inherited these qualities from Mousie) and fun for Bird to dress, put to sleep, take for trips, bury.
They were used to being left alone and paid little attention to, but Mousie (probably assuming rightly that there were realms of trouble it wouldn’t occur to these children to get into) hardly gave them an order during the whole of her stay, unless it was one she was relaying from Winnie’s instructions. “Your momma says warsh your har Saturday night, so git now.” To Joe Boyd she was particularly deferential, and together they settled into an easy joky relationship that seemed to come automatically to both. She simply treated Joe Boyd as a grown man, as all the boys his age whom she knew were treated; his right to his indolence and his occupations understood. Man of the family. Joe Boyd would not forget.
The Oliphant children had rarely ventured beyond the limits of the Hazelton place on its hillside, except inside the Nash. Hildy sometimes visited the daughters of the people who kept the store at the bottom of the hill, or they came up and solemnly played cards or Parcheesi now and then; there was a little boy down the hill who would tag after the Invisibles sometimes, ignoring the cries of his mother calling Johnnie Ray-ee? Johnnie Ray-ee? with endless patience. Mousie now brought into their ken not only Baby Henry but her married daughter as well, and her husband and baby too (Mousie’s own husband was in Deetroit gettn rich makn cars, and would be back with the money soon). The daughter was on Well Far, and her husband never came into the house; instead, while his wife visited with her mother, he opened the hood of his Ford or crawled under it to tinker. Inevitably Joe Boyd drew near.
“Reach me that wrench, will you, son?”
“That one?”
“Nope. The littly. Next over but one.”
Joe Boyd knelt to choose among the tools that lay on an oily rag on the ground beside the Ford. Mousie’s daughter’s husband smoked as he worked, cigaret
te stuck to his lip and his eye squinted against the rising smoke. If there were Kentucky kinds of destinies, then Joe Boyd had just then met one, and found it his.
Nor was that the sum of Mousie’s family.
“Mrs. Calton, there’s a little girl on the porch who won’t come in and won’t go away.”
Hildy watched from the hall as Mousie went out. The girl whom Hildy had found there backed away a cautious step from Mousie but didn’t flee.
“Now what are you doin here?” Mousie demanded, and then the two of them began talking at once, both with arms indignantly akimbo, each trying to overtop the other, spooling out their complaints and commands too quickly for Hildy to follow. Then they stopped. Mousie fanned a hand at the child. “Gwan. Git. Go home to your daddy.”
“Ain’t my daddy.” She was about Bird’s age, Hildy thought, skinny and cold-looking, with a round doll’s face and thick untidy ringlets. She wore an overcoat with a matted collar, pretend fur; the buttons were buttoned wrong.
“He’s your daddy now.”
“Ain’t.”
“Gwan home.”
“Won’t.”
Mousie crossed her plump arms across her breast, stumped. “How’d you get here, anyways?”
“Walked.”
“Well, you can walk back then.”
“My feet hurt.” Her shoes were cracked patent leather; her anklets were walked down in back beneath her heels in a way painful to look at.
“More’n that’ll hurt when you get home.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed. “You big fat,” she said.
This made Mousie’s mind up, and she went and took the girl by her fur collar. She walked her down the length of the porch, down the steps, out onto the drive leading down. Now Pierce and Bird (carrying out trash for Sister Mary Philomel from the bungalow) saw the encounter, and watched too. Mousie set the girl on the drive, and gave her a small push. The girl, head down, took a few small steps down the hill, but as soon as Mousie turned to go back to the house, the girl spun around and started back.