‘That’s tomorrow night,’ said Casey. ‘And anyways, it’s not you that’s going, it’s Them is coming back.’
‘Them? Your friends?’
‘No, yours.’ And Casey beckoned.
The old man let himself be led through the hall to look out the front door into a deep well of night.
There, like Napoleon’s numbed dog-army of foot-weary, undecided, and demoralized men, stood the shadowy but familiar mob, their hands full of pictures—pictures leaned against their legs, pictures on their backs, pictures stood upright and held by trembling, panic-whitened hands in the drifted snow. A terrible silence lay over and among the men. They seemed stranded, as if one enemy had gone off to fight far better wars while yet another enemy, as yet unnamed, nipped silent and trackless at their behinds. They kept glancing over their shoulders at the hills and the town as if at any moment Chaos herself might unleash her dogs from there. They alone, in the infiltering night, heard the far-off baying of dismays and despairs that cast a spell.
‘Is that you, Riordan?’ called Casey, nervously.
‘Ah, who the hell would it be!’ cried a voice out beyond.
‘What do they want?’ asked the old party.
‘It’s not so much what we want as what you might now want from us,’ called a voice.
‘You see,’ said another, advancing until all could see it was Hannahan in the light, ‘considered in all its aspects, your Honor, we’ve decided, you’re such a fine gent, we—’
‘We will not burn your house!’ cried Blinky Watts.
‘Shut up and let the man talk!’ said several voices.
Hannahan nodded. ‘That’s it. We will not burn your house.’
‘But see here,’ said the Lord. ‘I’m quite prepared. Everything can easily be moved out.’
‘You’re taking the whole thing too lightly, begging your pardon, your Honor,’ said Kelly. ‘Easy for you is not easy for us.’
‘I see,’ said the old man, not seeing at all.
‘It seems,’ said Tuohy, ‘we have all of us, in just the last few hours, developed problems. Some to do with the home and some to do with transport and cartage, if you get my drift. Who’ll explain first? Kelly? No? Casey? Riordan?’
Nobody spoke.
At last, with a sigh, Flannery edged forward. ‘It’s this way—’ he said.
‘Yes?’ said the old man, gently.
‘Well,’ said Flannery, ‘me and Tuohy here got half through the woods, like damn fools, and was across two thirds of the bog with the large picture of the Twilight of the Gods when we began to sink.’
‘Your strength failed?’ inquired the Lord kindly.
‘Sink, your Honor, just plain sink, into the ground,’ Tuohy put in.
‘Dear me,’ said the Lord.
‘You can say that again, your Lordship,’ said Tuohy. ‘Why together, me and Flannery and the demon gods must have weighed close on to six hundred pounds, and that bog out there is infirm if it’s anything, and the more we walk the deeper we sink, and a cry strangled in me throat, for I’m thinking of those scenes in the old story where the Hound of the Baskervilles or some such fiend chases the heroine out in the moor and down she goes, in a watery pit, wishing she had kept at that diet, but it’s too late, and bubbles rise to pop on the surface. All of this a-throttling in me mind, your Honor.’
‘And so?’ the Lord put in, seeing he was expected to ask.
‘And so,’ said Flannery, ‘we just walked off and left the damn gods there in their twilight.’
‘In the middle of the bog?’ asked the elderly man, just a trifle upset.
‘Ah, we covered them up, I mean we put our mufflers over the scene. The gods will not die twice, your Honor. Say, did you hear that, boys? The gods—’
‘Ah, shut up,’ cried Kelly. ‘Ya dimwits. Why didn’t you bring the damn portrait in off the bog?’
‘We thought we would come get two more boys to help—’
‘Two more!’ cried Nolan. ‘That’s four men, plus a parcel of gods, you’d all sink twice as fast, and the bubbles rising, ya nitwit!’
‘Ah!’ said Tuohy. ‘I never thought of that.’
‘It has been thought of now,’ said the old man. ‘And perhaps several of you will form a rescue team—’
‘It’s done, your Honor,’ said Casey. ‘Bob, you and Tim dash off and save the pagan deities.’
‘You won’t tell Father Leary?’
‘Father Leary my behind. Get!’ And Tim and Bob panted off.
His Lordship turned now to Nolan and Kelly.
‘I see that you, too, have brought your rather large picture back.’
‘At least we made it within a hundred yards of the door, sir,’ said Kelly. ‘I suppose you’re wondering why we have returned it, your Honor?’
‘With the gathering in of coincidence upon coincidence,’ said the old man, going back in to get his overcoat and putting on his tweed cap so he could stand out in the cold and finish what looked to be a long converse, ‘yes, I was given to speculate.’
‘It’s me back,’ said Kelly. ‘It gave out not five hundred yards down the main road. The back has been springing out and in for five years now, and me suffering the agonies of Christ. I sneeze and fall to my knees, your Honor.’
‘I have suffered the selfsame delinquency,’ said the old man. ‘It is as if someone had driven a spike into one’s spine.’ The old man touched his back, carefully, remembering, which brought a gasp from all, nodding.
‘The agonies of Christ, as I said,’ said Kelly.
‘Most understandable then that you could not finish your journey with that heavy frame,’ said the old man, ‘and most commendable that you were able to struggle back this far with the dreadful weight.’
Kelly stood taller immediately, as he heard his plight described. He beamed. ‘It was nothing. And I’d do it again, save for the string of bones above me ass. Begging pardon, your Honor.’
But already his Lordship had passed his kind if tremulous gray-blue, unfocused gaze toward Blinky Watts who had, under either arm, like a dartful prancer, the two Renoir peach ladies.
‘Ah, God, there was no trouble with sinking into bogs or knocking my spine out of shape,’ said Watts, treading the earth to demonstrate his passage home. ‘I made it back to the house in ten minutes flat, dashed into the wee cot, and began hanging the pictures on the wall, when my wife came up behind me. Have ya ever had your wife come up behind ya, your Honor, and just stand there mum’s the word?’
‘I seem to recall a similar circumstance,’ said the old man, trying to remember if he did, then nodding as indeed several memories flashed over his fitful baby mind.
‘Well, your Lordship, there is no silence like a woman’s silence, do you agree? And no standing there like a woman’s standing there like a monument out of Stonehenge. The mean temperature dropped in the room so quick I suffered from the polar concussions, as we call it in our house. I did not dare turn to confront the Beast, or the daughter of the Beast, as I call her in deference to her mom. But finally I heard her suck in a great breath and let it out very cool and calm like a Prussian general. “That woman is naked as a jay bird,” and “That other woman is raw as the inside of a clam at low tide.”
‘“But,” said I, “these are studies of natural physique by a famous French artist.”
‘“Jesus-come-after-me-French,” she cried: “the-skirts-half-up-to-your-bum-French. The-dress-half-down-to-your-navel-French. And the-gulping-and-smothering-they-do-with-their-mouths-in-their-dirty-novels-French, and now you come home and nail ‘French’ on the walls, why don’t you while you’re at it, pull the crucifix down and nail one fat naked lady there?’
‘Well, your Honor, I just shut up my eyes and wished my ears would fall off. “Is this what you want our boys to look at last thing at night as they go to sleep?” she says. Next thing I know, I’m on the path and here I am and here’s the raw-oyster nudes, your Honor, beg your pardon, thanks, and much obliged.’
> ‘They do seem to be unclothed,’ said the old man, looking at the two pictures, one in either hand, as if he wished to find all that this man’s wife said was in them. ‘I had always thought of summer, looking at them.’
‘From your seventieth birthday on, your Lordship, perhaps. But before that?’
‘Uh, yes, yes,’ said the old man, watching a speck of half-remembered lechery drift across one eye.
When his eye stopped drifting it found Bannock and Toolery on the edge of the far rim of the uneasy sheepfold crowd. Behind each, dwarfing them, stood a giant painting.
Bannock had got his picture home only to find he could not get the damn thing through the door, nor any window.
Toolery had actually got his picture in the door when his wife said what a laughingstock they’d be, the only family in the village with a Rubens worth half a million pounds and not even a cow to milk!
So that was the sum, total, and substance of this long night. Each man had a similar chill, dread, and awful tale to tell, and all were told at last, and as they finished a cold snow began to fall among these brave members of the local, hard-fighting IRA.
The old man said nothing, for there was nothing really to say that wouldn’t be obvious as their pale breaths ghosting the wind. Then, very quietly, the old man opened wide the front door and had the decency not even to nod or point.
Slowly and silently they began to file by, as past a familiar teacher in an old school, and then faster they moved. So in flowed the river returned, the Ark emptied out before, not after, the Flood, and the tide of animals and angels, nudes that flamed and smoked in the hands, and noble gods that pranced on wings and hoofs, went by, and the old man’s eyes shifted gently, and his mouth silently named each, the Renoirs, the Van Dycks, the Lautrec, and so on until Kelly, in passing, felt a touch at his arm.
Surprised, Kelly looked over.
And saw the old man was staring at the small painting beneath his arm.
‘My wife’s portrait of me?’
‘None other,’ said Kelly.
The old man stared at Kelly and at the painting beneath his arm and then out toward the snowing night.
Kelly smiled softly.
Walking soft as a burglar, he vanished out into the wilderness, carrying the picture. A moment later, you heard him laughing as he ran back, hands empty.
The old man shook his hand, once, tremblingly, and shut the door.
Then he turned away as if the event was already lost to his wandering child mind and toddled down the hall with his scarf like a gentle weariness over his thin shoulders, and the mob followed him in where they found drinks in their great paws and saw that Lord Kilgotten was blinking at the picture over the fireplace as if trying to remember, was the Sack of Rome there in the years past? or was it the Fall of Troy? Then he felt their gaze and looked full on the encircled army and said:
‘Well now, what shall we drink to?’
The men shuffled their feet.
Then Flannery cried, ‘Why, to his Lordship, of course!’
‘His Lordship!’ cried all, eagerly, and drank, and coughed and choked and sneezed, while the old man felt a peculiar glistering about his eyes, and did not drink at all till the commotion stilled, and then said, ‘To Our Ireland,’ and drank, and all said Ah God and Amen to that, and the old man looked at the picture over the hearth and then at last shyly observed. ‘I do hate to mention it—that picture—’
‘Sir?’
‘It seems to me,’ said the old man, apologetically, ‘to be a trifle off-centered, on the tilt, I wonder if you might—’
‘Mightn’t we, boys!’ cried Casey.
And fourteen men rushed to put it right.
Night Call, Collect
What made the old poem run in his mind he could not guess, but run it did:
Suppose and then suppose and then suppose
That wires on the far-slung telephone black poles
Sopped up the billion-flooded words they heard
Each night all night and saved the sense
And meaning of it all.
He stopped. What next? Ah, yes…
Then, jigsaw in the night,
Put all together and
In philosophic phase
Tried words like moron child.
Again he paused. How did the thing end? Wait—
Thus mindless beast
All treasuring of vowels and consonants
Saves up a miracle of bad advice
And lets it filter whisper, heartbeat out
One lisping murmur at a time.
So one night soon someone sits up
Hears sharp bell ring, lifts phone
And hears a Voice like Holy Ghost
Gone far in nebulae
That Beast upon the wire,
Which with sibilance and savorings
Down continental madnesses of time
Says Hell and O
And then Hell-o.
He took a breath and finished:
To such Creation
Such dumb brute lost Electric Beast,
What is your wise reply?
He sat silently.
He sat, a man eighty years old. He sat in an empty room in an empty house on an empty street in an empty town on the empty planet Mars.
He sat as he had sat now for fifty years, waiting.
On the table in front of him lay a telephone that had not rung for a long, long time.
It trembled now with some secret preparation. Perhaps that trembling had summoned forth the poem…
His nostrils twitched. His eyes flared wide.
The phone shivered ever so softly.
He leaned forward, staring at it.
The phone…rang.
He leapt up and back, the chair fell to the floor. He cried out:
‘No!’
The phone rang again.
‘No!’
He wanted to reach out, he did reach out and knock the thing off the table. It fell out of the cradle at the exact moment of its third ring.
‘No…oh, no, no,’ he said softly, hands covering his chest, head wagging, the telephone at his feet. ‘It can’t be…can’t be…’
For after all, he was alone in a room in an empty house in an empty town on the planet Mars where no one was alive, only he lived, he was King of the Barren Hill…
And yet…
‘…Barton…’
Someone called his name.
No. Some thing buzzed and made a noise of crickets and cicadas in far desertlands.
Barton? he thought. Why…why that’s me!
He hadn’t heard anyone say his name in so long he had quite forgot. He was not one for ambling about calling himself by name. He had never—
‘Barton,’ said the phone. ‘Barton. Barton. Barton.’
‘Shut up!!’ he cried.
And kicked the receiver and bent sweating, panting, to put the phone back on its cradle.
No sooner did he do this than the damned thing rang again.
This time he made a fist around it, squeezed it, as if to throttle the sound, but at last, seeing his knuckles burn color away to whiteness, let go and picked up the receiver.
‘Barton,’ said a far voice, a billion miles away.
He waited until his heart had beat another three times and then said:
‘Barton here,’ he said.
‘Well, well,’ said the voice, only a million miles away now. ‘Do you know who this is?’
‘Christ,’ said the old man. ‘The first call I’ve had in half a lifetime, and we play games.’
‘Sorry. How stupid of me. Of course you wouldn’t recognize your own voice on the telephone. No one ever does. We are accustomed, all of us, to hearing our voice conducted through the bones of our head. Barton, this is Barton.’
‘What?’
‘Who did you think it was?’ said the voice. ‘A rocket captain? Did you think someone had come to rescue you?’
‘No.’
‘What’s
the date?’
‘July 20, 2097.’
‘Good Lord. Fifty years! Have you been sitting there that long waiting for a rocket to come from Earth?’
The old man nodded.
‘Now, old man, do you know who I am?’
‘Yes.’ He trembled. ‘I remember. We are one. I am Emil Barton and you are Emil Barton.’
‘With one difference. You’re eighty, I’m only twenty. All of life before me!’
The old man began to laugh and then to cry. He sat holding the phone like a lost and silly child in his fingers. The conversation was impossible, and should not be continued, yet he went on with it. When he got hold of himself he held the phone close and said. ‘You there! Listen, oh God, if I could warn you! How can I? You’re only a voice. If I could show you how lonely the years are. End it, kill yourself! Don’t wait! If you knew what it is to change from the thing you are to the thing that is me, today, here, now, at this end.’
‘Impossible!’ The voice of the young Barton laughed, far away. ‘I’ve no way to tell if you ever get this call. This is all mechanical. You’re talking to a transcription, no more. This is 2037. Sixty years in your past. Today, the atom war started on Earth. All colonials were called home from Mars, by rocket. I got left behind!’
‘I remember,’ whispered the old man.
‘Alone on Mars,’ laughed the young voice. ‘A month, a year, who cares? There are foods and books. In my spare time I’ve made transcription libraries of ten thousand words, responses, my voice, connected to phone relays. In later months I’ll call, have someone to talk with.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sixty years from now my own tapes will ring me up. I don’t really think I’ll be here on Mars that long, it’s just a beautifully ironic idea of mine, something to pass the time. Is that really you, Barton? Is that really me?’
Tears fell from the old man’s eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘I’ve made a thousand Bartons, tapes, sensitive to all questions, in one thousand Martian towns. An army of Bartons over Mars, while I wait for the rockets to return.’
‘Fool.’ The old man shook his head, wearily. ‘You waited sixty years. You grew old waiting, always alone. And now you’ve become me and you’re still alone in the empty cities.’