He shut and opened his eyes, now witnessed a woman who quivered in a faint, personal glamour that shouldn’t have been visible, really, not even in such a weak light, a woman in a dark gray dress. Others behind her. The pig-men coming through the shadows. No, not the pig-men, but two presences.
Fairchild thought she was downcast, her head perhaps bent forward and hidden against her chest, but when she turned and this was definitely the front of her, the upper fasts on her gray dress torn open, it was the same. She was headless.
He heard the singing and knew it to be hers, but it came from elsewhere, as if she hid in a tree and only remembered this tableau, singing, while the body, or embodiment, drifted like a lantern in its own light. She sensed her pursuers and took a sprout over the apple boughs. The dim light from her was real, it liquefied the branches below her in its passing and spooked a shadow from under a campsite picnic table. The two presences darkened his view of her briefly, and the dimness of her drifted out toward the water. It sashayed out past the shore; over the water its to-and-fro accelerated, until it wobbled like a drop on a hot ember and suffocated in the dark.
Fairchild had only a little way to go—this probably green but currently indiscernibly colored State Forest Service picnic table. He sat down, facing out, sitting straight, his heart kicking in his throat.
Fairchild leaned his back carefully against the table, thinking that if he’d been going to stop anywhere at all before his feet shuffled into the waves, it could just as easily have been sooner. He’d thought he was being harried out past the shore to drown, but it was only the hill, only gravity, that had driven him.
He felt other presences, fleeting and distant, mostly, except for his father with his ferocious, unabating eyes. He’d been aware of his father’s presence for some time now, as clearly and sensorily aware as if he’d heard his father bushwhacking down the draw behind him.
Out on a hunt, boy?
More or less perhaps.
Out catching bullets. You’ll end up trephined like a slice of Swiss cheese.
They’re working on it.
If only you could’ve sassed the world like you sass me.
His maculation altered when he spoke. The old man looked patched together out of areas of light and dark, sitting on the other bench across the table and watching things, while Fairchild watched his father.
You’re not the only ghost around here.
I never claimed to be.
There’s a woman out there.
Her? That’s the schoolmarm.
What about her head?
Gone.
Man, me too. I gotta go, I gotta groove.
Whatever for?
The dogs.
The dead dogs. The ghost dogs. We’re all ghosts in these parts.
What about me?
Oh yeah. You, me, them. The old schoolmarm and her two buddies. Look who else is here.
Winona? Winona?
Oh yeah. Ever since her boyfriend choked her dead…That’s the old Winona. The new one’s somebody else.
I knew it, Fairchild said.
We don’t speak.
They turned to watch Winona suffer past in a mist of confusion, touching the fingers of both hands to her neck.
Father, did you know I was coming?
Hell yes. You were here when I got here. Always have been.
Fairchild thought about this remark but steered around any understanding of it.
Hell, Fairchild said, that sure was a storm.
His father just stared at him.
Hell, Fairchild repeated, that was a storm on loco-weed.
Father went on staring.
Was there a storm perhaps you saw?
Never was any storm but you.
Other demons loitered here in their nakedness and neediness and strangerness, other wraiths, including Indians crucified on the trees and cowboys with their scalped, decorticated craniums. All seemed the sources of little illuminations. Including himself: a man of dreams and failure.
Don’t talk to him. When the time comes you’ll know everything he has to say anyhow.
Fairchild watched his own ghost wander far down the beach, carrying an air that didn’t seem particularly unhappy.
All appeared very much alive. When his father yawned he produced a mistral breath.
What say we all get a little sleep?
I can’t.
Why not?
The dogs. The dogs.
The dogs are sleeping, his father said.
His preparation for sleep was like that of the animals. He found a place away from light and noises, where his body wouldn’t be threatened by predators or thieves and he could relax without moving or falling. He lay still under the table and yielded, for once, to no ambush of embarrassing moments—old moments that beset you just before sleep, moments that rise up on their hind legs and walk like dinosaurs. His eyelids fluttered. The little pond between waking and sleeping is bewitched…no one floats across with open eyes. He renounced control over his train of thought, he said farewell to concerns, to any capacity at all for concern, he let his will fall into a bottomless pit of passivity and nihilism…Then there began to appear to him those first messages of a new world—hypnagogic phenomena. He was shaken by truths, electrified, soothed.
On the day of his death Nelson Fairchild received numerous grants of peace and grief, proofs of the beauty of the world, clarifications, deep consolations, and happiness. Descending from clear dark spaces, he came first into a kind of translucence. He woke with a warm easy feeling and didn’t hurry into the state of waking. Faint, unfriendly messages arrived from that territory, regions of discomfort, aches. Now he was on the shores of awareness, rolled up onto the sands in his own body, sleep a particular to be grasped at, an outer garment he tried to stay wrapped in. But something about the darkness under its baggy folds…It seemed bigger than any darkness he’d ever visited, and scared him further awake.
Dreamed I was real.
Lying on his right side with a bump of sand-grown switchgrass under his cheek, his rucksack cuddled against his belly, he watched what appeared to be the shores of an ocean from his near-sleep. He caught himself caressing his groin with his good hand; realized he didn’t want to stop; understood that he took comfort from it. The other hand had evidently been taken away, erased, and the arm and shoulder too, expunged from his experience and all mirrors and all old photographs of himself. A generalized suffering stole over but didn’t entirely smother his sense of the rightness of things—the shadow of his situation, a little distant, troubling but accepted. He smelled something like the faint rancid signature of a tomcat—eucalyptus. Heard the fustigating breakers—he would write that down.
Oh well. Why not?
He got up and sat at the table he’d slept under. He considered, for a while, how that might have been accomplished, went over the operations he must have performed on the physical plane, the crawling, standing, balancing, lowering, and gathered that he’d just now been heroic. This crazy immense nausea. From now on he promised to be a coward.
It was morning, but with an evening light. The shadow of the mountains worked far out onto the sea and stopped there: here was the gray-green water, there were the clouds, and between them a cupreous molten interlude ate its way toward California. Way back in the highlands the buzzards walked precariously on nothing. The seals calling, the gulls calling, but he couldn’t see them. He worked one-handed at the buckles on his rucksack—his papers, his pen.
Although entirely alone he was embarrassed at the literalness with which he’d taken it all lately, allowed almost a whole afternoon and evening to swim through him uninterpreted. His was not a mind to permit such things. No unsupervised swimming. His soul never took its clothes off—Melissa said it ruined him in bed. Winona might have said it too if she’d been granted the sensitivity ever to have figured it out.
Then he heard the schoolmarm, the humming of almost intelligible words. A song and a voice reminiscent, decidedly s
o, of an Indian flute. And now the low strangled death moan of a man, these sounds more frightening, for their being daylit, than they’d seemed last night.
He moved again, jolted along by his alarm but swiftly powerless, and sat down right beside the sea. The Ocean, the source of life, the place of death, he intended to write, the Ocean behaving like a deity, but he forgot. Sitting in the wet sand he apprenticed himself to the sea’s infinite pitiable preoccupation with the shoreline.
As I write this this morning in a camp in coastal Humboldt County, the sun touches the canyon and absolutely ignites the path leading out of here. But I doubt very much I’ll be walking that path.
I feel in fact as if I live here, on the main thoroughfare of ghosts, in a traffic of nonentities. I hear their shuffling steps in the grass—
And the moans of the man. He could make out a couple of animals, seals—maybe some kind of bird—or otter perhaps—rummaging after gull eggs—scrambling over the rocks with oologic obsessiveness. Ah, here were the seals offshore, balneating with their snouts up like French intellectuals.
The shuffling feet went past. Fairchild kept his eyes down and saw only the man’s waterlogged shoes and the laces’ aglets licking at the sand. But had to look up. The rapist priest of Schoolmarm Cove—clutching his rat-gnawed Holy Bible.
He’d written, he saw, nothing at all. He wrote:
I am dying in Wheeler, California, a village by the Pacific around forty miles straight up the coast from Fort Bragg. I’m the only person in town. In fact, to call it a town or a village, or anything like that, is misleading. There are three or four walls standing around here in a little dell the old maps call “School Marm’s Cove,” and two or three big rusty pieces of last century’s logging machinery turned out lopsided under the oaks; otherwise this place is just a place—a creek, a grove, a meadow. The thing is, it’s still called Wheeler. There are two or three campsites in the grove maintained by the Forest Service. I’m the only person within miles. Except for the pig-men.
I’m here to decide whether to let my life go, or fight to stay inside it. To face the music, or stay dead.
Or—I’ve come here to be alone for the rest of my life with the tension, the beautiful tension, between those two alternatives. I may decide nothing. May stay here forever with my alternatives. May take them both out of here with me.
I just want to let myself be guided, in this solitude, by my truth.
He wrote some lines, trying to remember the whole paragraph, but failing, lines from Hermann Hesse’s Demian—”…because of my evil and misfortune I stood higher than my father and the pious, the righteous…”
I almost wrote “eveil”—I wrote “eveil” and crossed it out—as if evil veils something that is not evil as we understand it—a gift—live—evil—veil—
He rested, looking out at the flotsam and haughty seal-snouts in the water. Looked down at the page. He could find only three words: I am dying
Though he sat in a shadow, a darker shadow fell across him, and he leapt up. The schoolmarm in her pale torn dress with its empty neckline. She left no footprints, but the priest’s shoes dragged shallow troughs in the sand as he followed. The Moor followed the priest.
Fairchild came last with his pen behind his ear, clutching his papers. The four kept to the water’s edge with a good distance between each of them, paralleling the brazen horizon, the populous cloudscape. Offshore the gulls dove upward against sudden atmospheric walls, the wind sawing and gusting, the sea jagged but unflecked. His hair felt greasy, and the skin of his face. He tasted salt on his lips.
They drifted into the creek’s wide flat mouth and he followed. His strength gave out as the water narrowed. He sat down beside it at a second campsite table scattered with leaves and watched the water’s movement. A sense of passing and staying.
I want to die like this river. I want to drift away and I want to be clear and cold. And underneath my passing I want a cruel bed of stones.
Where was Father?
He called “Father?” but his throat let out only a breath shaped like Father.
The Old Man wouldn’t show. No phantasms visited him other than the schoolmarm passing headless by. She was surprised by smugglers or, some said, Pomo Indian renegades, but Fairchild liked the version in which she was surprised by the priest, a Spaniard ruined by mescal or syphilis. The priest and his Moorish boatman had escorted her here from San Francisco to take up her duties, and when they discovered nobody around, the three had hiked four miles north to pick blackberries, known to them as roundberries, beside Bear Harbor, where the priest and the Moorish boatman fell upon and raped her, then chased her all the way back to this town of Wheeler. She was young and frail, it was said of her she looked hardly strong enough to carry her auburn hair’s beautiful abundance, but she fought back against them, disemboweling the Moor with a scythe, which the priest wrestled away and used to behead her, and then he hung himself. And now the two rapers live here as ghosts, in earshot of her singing in heaven.
I can’t remember, he wrote, if I’m remembering this or learning it just now.
He looked up because he heard the dogs, the dogs.
Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.
He examined the page. Still only three words had appeared.
The wonderful fountain pen. The pen had run out of ink. To get its halves uncoupled one-handed, he took its butt end in his teeth. He filled it from the dark red puddle of himself he was sitting in on the bench.
Up in the forest, the dogs bayed. The wind in and out of boughs like the suspiration of organs, I am no longer passionate for Melissa who lit up my bones, but for solitude, more and more in love with solitude. His left arm laid his blood all over the margin of the pages.
Oh, but he understood now: I am the schoolmarm of School Marm’s Cove.
The demons roiled in her belly and exited through her heart as sobs and sighs. Worst were the slow stirrings of frozen emotions waking up, astonishingly delayed responses, the putrid dregs of childhood traumas, old griefs clawing their way up out of her, bursting from her throat, nothing connected with any memories at all, only the feelings themselves.
The dogs. The dogs. She heard them baying. Saw them come like leaves blown down the hill among the trees. Then again, lower down the hill. Their music was the song of dogs, full of joy, tamped down and flowing over. And offshore the seals, some yipping like pups and others saying, Heart? Heart heart? Heart? When she saw the men she felt explosive incommunicable gratitude.
I’ll probably never leave, the schoolmarm wrote in her own blood. Is this strange? Yes, wonderful and strange. The blades of the pasture stopped in the sun have had all the life cooked out of them by the drought—all the hope, the strength to grow, to suffer—and now
and now they are God. I’m standing barefoot on the grass, writing these words. And I must keep it a secret. I can show this only to the people I’ve failed, and to those I’ve had the privilege of betraying.
Clarence Meadows entered the Gualala Hotel and walked sharply left, into the bar, where the drinkers of the forenoon listened to the jukebox. Meadows took a table quite near the large-screen TV and faced the window onto the highway. Out there across the road in his church minivan the Reverend Connor would be pausing for a minute, long enough to be recognized, before he travelled on to the rendezvous. The Scout, parked just there, did not look conspicuous. He’d transferred the plants to three silvery space-age trash bags and jammed them in back with the bunched tarpaulin; it all looked like so much what-all, the usual stuff. But it reeked like baking spinach.
Meadows shook his head at the barmaid before she’d made the crossing, and she leaned herself on the bar again and put her face close to another woman’s and went on with the conversation. The TV played, but not its sound; only the jukebox’s furry music.
The blue Lutheran minivan pulled up across the empty highway, idled there for sixty
seconds, and departed.
The image of the man on the big screen, in his weariness and his handcuffs, with his fingers working continually for circulation, was as large as Meadows himself, sitting beside it. It was old footage. Then the videotape of yet another bad day in the history of Joe Hopeless: Jose Esperanza murdered, face down in a galaxy of multicolored golf balls with his shirt up and his big tattoo bleeding. They’d been showing this stuff all week. The station was infatuated with this amateur video taken minutes, even seconds, after the shooting.
Meadows went to the bar and out of a big glass bowl gathered a whole lot of stale pretzels in his hands. He took them back to his seat and spread them out on the tabletop and started eating them.
Meadows had no training in civilian murder, but he gathered keeping the weapon afterward was no good. Yet he’d wrapped the Winchester in a ratty blanket and rested it at a haphazard angle in the scout’s camper, and had driven off still in possession of this evidence against him. It was down on the floorboards under the dope even this minute.
He’d broken his fast and kept down his meal of vengeance. The two had been dressed for death just as they’d been at birth. The mystery of their nakedness he took as a signal of his justification.
Inside of an hour he’d come back here with a lot of money. Rent a room and take a very long, very hot shower, get under the sheets with his hair still wet and resign the office. Leave it to the younger wolves. Sleep for twelve hours absolutely without moving. He intended then to get married, at least informally, to the mother of his future child.
He’d opened the camper door and rousted the pair of dogs, and they’d made like bullets for the creek and sunk their tongues in it. The plants had been wrapped still in Meadows’s own blue tarpaulin, and covered with a blanket. The dogs had been sleeping on them.
It had occurred to him as he reached the culvert, and then the road, that he probably should have shut the camper door after the dogs had exited, lest they shelter inside it and the wind blow it to, and trap them.