Now and Forever, Page 3

  “If I came back in late June would I meet the kids coming home for the summer?”

  Culpepper held still, much like Claude.

  “I said—”

  “I heard.” Culpepper knocked the sparking ash from his pipe. “If I said yes, would you believe me?”

  Cardiff shook his head.

  “You implying I’m a mile off from the truth?”

  “I’m only implying,” Cardiff said, “that we are at a taffy pull. I’m waiting to see how far you pull it.”

  Culpepper smiled.

  “The children aren’t coming home. They have chosen summer school in Amherst, Providence, and Sag Harbor. One is even in Mystic Seaport. Ain’t that a fine sound? Mystic. I sat there once in a thunderstorm reading every other chapter of Moby-Dick.”

  “The children are not coming home,” said Cardiff. “Can I guess why?”

  The older man nodded, pipe in mouth, unlit.

  Cardiff took out his notepad and stared at it.

  “The children of this town,” he said at last, “won’t come home. Not one. None. Never.”

  He closed the notepad and continued: “The reason why the children are never coming home is,” he swallowed hard, “there are no children. Something happened a long time ago, God knows what, but it happened. And this town is a town of no family homecomings. The last child left long ago, or the last child finally grew up. And you’re one of them.”

  “Is that a question?”

  “No,” said Cardiff. “An answer.”

  Culpepper leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. “You,” he said, the smoke long gone from his pipe, “are an A-1 Four Star Headline News Reporter.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “I…,” said Cardiff.

  “Enough,” Culpepper interrupted. “For tonight.”

  He held out another glass of bright amber wine. Cardiff drank. When he looked up, the front screen door of the Egyptian View Arms tapped shut. Someone went upstairs. His ambiance stayed.

  Cardiff refilled his glass.

  “Never coming home. Never ever,” he whispered.

  And went up to bed.

  Sleep well, someone said somewhere in the house. But he could not sleep. He lay, fully dressed, doing philosophical sums on the ceiling, erasing, adding, erasing again until he sat up abruptly and looked out across the meadow town of thousands of flowers in the midst of which houses rose and sank only to rise again, ships on a summer sea.

  I will arise and go now, thought Cardiff, but not to a bee-loud glade. Rather, to a place of earthen silence and the sounds of death’s-head moths on powdery wings.

  He slipped down the front hall stairs barefoot and once outside, let the screen door tap shut silently and, sitting on the lawn, put on his shoes as the moon rose.

  Good, he thought, I won’t need a flashlight.

  In the middle of the street he looked back. Was there someone at the screen door, a shadow, watching? He walked and then began to jog.

  Imagine that you are Claude, he thought, his breath coming in quick pants. Turn here, now there, now another right and—

  The graveyard.

  All that cold marble crushed his heart and stopped his breathing. There was no iron fence around the burial park.

  He entered silently and bent to touch the first gravestone. His fingers brushed the name: BIANCA SHERMAN BATES

  And the date: BORN, JULY 3, 1882

  And below that: R.I.P.

  But no date of death.

  The clouds covered the moon. He moved on to the next stone.

  WILLIAM HENRY CLAY

  1885–

  R.I.P.

  And again, no mortal date.

  He brushed a third gravestone and found:

  HENRIETTA PARKS

  August 13, 1881

  Gone to God

  But, Cardiff knew, she had not as yet gone to God.

  The moon darkened and then took strength from itself. It shone upon a small Grecian tomb not fifty feet away, a lodge of exquisite architecture, a miniature Acropolis upheld by four vestal virgins, or goddesses, beautiful maidens, wondrous women. His heart pulsed. All four marble women seemed suddenly alive, as if the pale light had awakened them, and they might step forth, unclad, into the tableau of named and dateless stones.

  He sucked in his breath. His heart pulsed again.

  For as he watched, one of the goddesses, one of the forever-beautiful maidens, trembled with the night chill and shifted out into the moonlight.

  He could not tell if he was terrified or delighted. After all, it was late at night in this yard of the dead. But she? She was naked to the weather, or almost; a mist of silk covered her breasts and plumed around her waist as she drifted away from the other pale statues.

  She moved among the stones, silent as the marble she had been but now was not, until she stood before him with her dark hair tousled about her small ears and her great eyes the color of lilacs. She raised her hand tenderly and smiled.

  “You,” he whispered. “What are you doing here?”

  She replied quietly, “Where else should I be?”

  She held out her hand and led him in silence out of the graveyard.

  Looking back he saw the abandoned puzzle of names and enigma of dates.

  Everyone born, he thought, but none has died. The stones are blank, waiting for someone to date their ghosts bound for Eternity.

  “Yes?” someone said. But her lips had not moved.

  And you followed me, he thought, to stop me from reading the gravestones and asking questions. And what about the absent children, never coming home?

  And as if they glided on ice, on a vast sea of moonlight, they arrived where a crowd of sunflowers hardly stirred as they passed and their feet were soundless, moving up the path to the porch and across the porch, and up the stairs, one, two, three floors until they reached a tower room where the door stood wide to reveal a bed as bright as a glacier, its covers thrown back, all snow on a hot summer night.

  Yes, she said.

  He sleepwalked the rest of the way. Behind him, he saw his clothes, like the discards of a careless child, strewn on the parquetry. He stood by the snowbank bed and thought, One last question. The graveyard. Are there bodies beneath the stones? Is anyone there?

  But it was too late. Even as he opened his mouth to question, he tumbled into the snow.

  And he was drowning in whiteness, crying out as he inhaled the light and then out of the rushing storm, a warmness came; he was touched and held, but could not see what or who held him, and he relaxed, drowned.

  When next he woke, he was not swimming but floating. Somehow he had leaped from a cliff, and someone with him, unseen, as he soared up until lightning struck, tore at him in half terror, half joy, to fall and strike the bed with his entire body and his soul.

  When he awoke again, the storm over, and the flying gone, he found a small hand in his, and without opening his eyes he knew that she lay beside him, her breath keeping time with his. It was not yet dawn.

  She spoke.

  “Was there something you wanted to ask?”

  “Tomorrow,” he whispered. “I’ll ask you then.”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Then.”

  Then, for the first time, it seemed, her mouth touched his.

  CHAPTER 13

  He awoke to the sun pouring in through the high attic window. Questions gathered behind his tongue.

  Beside him, the bed was empty.

  Gone.

  Afraid of the truth? he wondered.

  No, he thought, she will have left a note on the icebox door. Somehow he knew. Go look.

  The note was there.

  Mr. Cardiff:

  Many tourists arriving. I must welcome them.

  Questions at breakfast.

  Nef.

  Far off, wasn’t there the merest wail of a locomotive whistle, the softest churn of some great engine?

  On the front porch, Cardiff listened, and again the faint locomotive cry st
irred beyond the horizon.

  He glanced up at the top floor. Had she fled toward that sound? Had the boarders heard, too?

  He ran down to the rail station and stood in the middle of the blazing hot iron tracks, daring the whistle to sound again. But this time, silence.

  Separate trains bringing what? he wondered.

  I arrived first, he thought, the one who tries to be good.

  And what comes next?

  He waited, but the air remained silent and the horizon line serene, so he walked back to the Egyptian View Arms.

  There were boarders in every window, waiting. “It’s all right,” he called. “It was nothing.”

  Someone called down from above, quietly, “Are you sure?”

  CHAPTER 14

  Nef was not at breakfast, or lunch, or dinner.

  He went to bed hungry.

  CHAPTER 15

  At midnight the wind blew softly in the window, whispering the curtains, shadowing the moonlight.

  There, far across town, lay the cemetery, immense white teeth scattered on a meadow of fresh moon-silvered grass.

  Four dozen stones dead, but not dead.

  All lies, he thought.

  And found himself halfway down the boarding house stairs, surrounded by the exhalations of sleeping people. There was no sound save the drip of the ice pan under the icebox in the moonlit kitchen. The house brimmed with lemon and lilac illumination from the candied windows over the front entrance.

  He found himself on the dusty road, alone with his shadow.

  He found himself at the cemetery gate.

  In the middle of the graveyard, he found a shovel in his hands.

  He dug until…

  There was a hollow thud under the dust.

  He worked swiftly, clearing away the earth, and bent to tug at the edge of the coffin, at which moment he heard a single sound.

  A footstep.

  Yes! he thought wildly, happily.

  She’s here again. She had to come find me, and take me home. She…

  His heartbeat hammered and then slowed.

  Slowly, Cardiff rose by the open grave.

  Elias Culpepper stood by the iron gate, trying to figure out just what to say to Cardiff, who was digging where no one should dig.

  Cardiff let the spade fall. “Mr. Culpepper?”

  Elias Culpepper responded. “Oh God, God, go on. Lift the lid. Do it!” And when Cardiff hesitated, said, “Now!”

  Cardiff bent and pulled at the coffin lid. It was neither nailed nor locked. He swung back the lid and stared down into the coffin.

  Elias Culpepper came to stand beside him.

  They both stared down at…

  An empty coffin.

  “I suspect,” said Elias Culpepper, “you are in need of a drink.”

  “Two,” said Cardiff, “would be fine.”

  CHAPTER 16

  They were smoking fine cigars and drinking nameless wine in the middle of the night. Cardiff leaned back in his wicker chair, eyes tight shut.

  “You been noticing things?” inquired Elias Culpepper.

  “A baker’s dozen. When Claude took me on the bread and muffin tour I couldn’t help but notice there are no signs—anywhere—for doctors. Not one funeral parlor that I could see.”

  “Must be somewhere,” said Culpepper.

  “How come not in the phone book yellow pages? No doctors, no surgeons, no mortuary offices.”

  “An oversight.”

  Cardiff studied his notes.

  “Lord, you don’t even have a hospital in this almost ghost town!”

  “We got one small one.”

  Cardiff underlined an entry on his list. “An outpatient clinic thirty feet square? Is that all that ever happens, so you don’t need a big facility?”

  “That,” said Culpepper, “would about describe it.”

  “All you ever have is cut fingers, bee-stings, and the occasional sprained ankle?”

  “You’ve whittled it down fine,” said the other, “but that’s the sum. Continue.”

  “That,” said Cardiff, gazing down on the town from the high verandah, “that tells why all the gravestones are unfinished and all the coffins empty!”

  “You only dug one up.”

  “I don’t need to open more. Do I?”

  Quietly, Culpepper shook his head.

  “Hell, Mr. Culpepper,” said Cardiff. “I’m speechless!”

  “To tell the truth,” said Culpepper, “so am I. This is the first time anyone has ever asked what you’ve been asking. We folks have been so busy just living, we never figured anyone would come, gather his spit, grab a spade, and dig!”

  “I apologize.”

  “Now you’ll want a practical history. I’ll give it to you. Write it down, Mr. Cardiff, write it down. Over the years, when visitors arrived, they got bored quick, and left even quicker. We tried to look like every other town. We put on nice false-front funerals, hearse and all, real flowers, live organ music, but empty coffins with shut lids, just to impress. We were going to hold a pretend funeral tomorrow, show off, so you’d be assured we sometimes die—”

  “Sometimes?!” cried Cardiff.

  “Well, it has been a while. Cars occasionally run over us. Someone might fall from a ladder.”

  “No diseases, whooping cough, pneumonia?”

  “We don’t whoop and we don’t cough. We wear out…slow.”

  “How slow?”

  “Oh, at last count, just about—”

  “How slow?!”

  “One hundred, two hundred years.”

  “Which?”

  “We figure about two hundred. It’s still too early to tell. We’ve only been at this since 1864, ’65, Lincoln’s time.”

  “All of you?”

  “All.”

  “Nef, too?”

  “Wouldn’t lie.”

  “But she’s younger than I am!”

  “Your grandma, maybe.”

  “My God!”

  “God put us up to it. But it’s the weather, mostly. And, well now, the wine.”

  Cardiff stared at his empty glass.

  “The wine makes you live to two hundred?!”

  “Unless it kills you before breakfast. Finish your glass, Mr. Cardiff, finish your glass.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Elias Culpepper leaned forward to scan Cardiff’s notepad.

  “You got any more doubts, indecisions, or opinions?”

  Cardiff mused over his notes. “There don’t seem to be any roaring businesses in Summerton.”

  “A few mice but no buffalo.”

  “No travel agencies, just a train station about to sink in the dust. Main road is mostly potholes. No one seems to leave, and very few arrive. How in Hades do you all survive?”

  “Think.” Culpepper sucked on his pipe.

  “I am, dammit!”

  “You heard about the lilies of the field. We toil not, neither do we spin. Just like you. You don’t have to move, do you? On occasion, maybe, like tonight. But mostly you travel back and forth between your ears. Yes?”

  “My God!” Cardiff cried, clutching his notepad. “Hideaways. Loners. Recluses. By the scores of dozens. You’re writers!”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Writers!”

  “In every room, attic, broom-closet, or basement, both sides of the street right out to the edge of town.”

  “The whole town, everybody?”

  “All but a few lazy illiterates.”

  “That’s unheard of.”

  “You heard it now.”

  “Salzburg, a town full of musicians, composers, conductors. Geneva, chock-full of bankers, clockmakers, walking wounded ski dropouts. Nantucket, once anyway, ships, sailors, and whale-widow wives. But this, this!”

  Cardiff jumped up and stared wildly toward the midnight town.

  “Don’t listen for typewriters,” advised Culpepper. “Just quiet things.”

  Pens, pencils, pads, paper, thought
Cardiff. Whispers of lead or ink. Summer quiet thoughts on summer quiet noons.

  “Writers,” murmured Cardiff, spying this house or that, across the street, “never have to get up and go. And no one knows what color you are, by mail, or what sex, or how tall or how short. Could be a company of midgets, a sideshow of giants. Writers. Godfrey Daniel!”

  “Watch your language.”

  Cardiff turned to stare down at his companion. “But they can’t all be successful?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Would I know any of their names?”

  “If I told you, but I won’t.”

  “A beehive of talent.” Cardiff exhaled. “But how did they all wind up here?”

  “Genes, chromosomes, need. You’ve heard of those little writers’ colonies? Well, this one’s big. We’re soul mates. Similar people. Nobody laughing at what someone else writes. No alcoholics, however, no bats out of hell, or wild parties.”

  “F. Scott Fitzgerald can’t get in?”

  “Better not try.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “Only if you lose your pad and pencil.”

  “You one of them?”

  “In my own quiet way.”

  “A poet!”

  “Not so loud. Someone might hear.”

  “A poet,” Cardiff whispered.

  “Mostly haiku. At midnight when I put on my specs and reach for my pen. Semi-haiku, too many beats.”

  “Example?”

  Culpepper recited:

  Oh, cat that I truly love,

  Oh, hummingbird that I madly love.

  What are you doing in the cat’s mouth?

  Cardiff whooped with delight. “I never could write that!”

  “Don’t try. Just do.”

  “I’ll be damned. More!”

  A pillow of snow by my warm face.

  A snowdrift at my touch;

  You are gone.

  Culpepper quietly reloaded his pipe to cover his embarrassment.

  “I don’t recite that one often. Sad.”

  To break the quiet, Cardiff said: “How do you writers stay in touch with the outside world?”