An Annie Dillard Reader (11 page)

He looked at his own chipped plate. He had eaten his breakfast and was not dead yet. A month ago he had decided not to think any further about being poisoned at home. Obenchain had talked about killing Clare specifically, as though pinpointing him alone in the mobs of the living demanded a precision that attracted him. He would not want to risk killing June, or Ada, or Mabel, by mistake. Or would he? Would he take them all by some neighbor's doctored pie? Obenchain would do anything. But of thinking of poison there was no end. Everything tasted good.

He felt under his jacket for his sidearm, a new double-action Colt Lightning. June saw the movement, and caught his eye. He touched her, covering her hand with his, but she rose then and slipped away to the kitchen. Was he too sentimental for her? He carried his plate to the sink, following her, and laid his hand over the waist of her basque. She turned to him, confused, and took his plate. He saw her embarrassed frown.

There was a wagging patch of light on the wall above the sink; the lilac bushes outside the dining room wagged too. The
planet wagged on; the man who planted those lilacs was dead. And time, for Clare, had sprung a leak.

For he was on his way, it seemed; he was a man already exited. To these familiar people in the kitchen, time was a secure globe in which they rode protected from one end of things to the other. June stacked the clean dishes and hung the towel by the stove. Old Ada fetched a tray from the pantry and headed out back toward the cellar. Mabel, now four, sat on the kitchen floor in the peculiar way she liked to sit, with her back straight and her legs pointing every which way, as though they were broken or popped at the hip. Her red braid hung limp on her neck. She was wearing an undershirt and sateen bloomers. She was scratching the cat with a fork. The cat cringed and made no move to leave.

“Quit your fooling,” Mabel said to the cat. “You make my tail ache.”

Clare could see the dark at the edge of the plain. He felt a hole in the wall behind him; things rushed out of that hole. He was running low on air. Yesterday he had imagined and seen the long horizon of water and islands begin to tilt and upend. On the low side a gap appeared, and water and islands and houses and all the world's contents slid into the gap and blew away.

Possibly everyone now dead considered his own death as a freak accident, a mistake. Some bad luck caused it. Every enterprising man jack of them, and every sunlit vigorous woman and child, too, who had seemed so alive and pleased, was cold as a meat hook, and new chattering people trampled their bones unregarding, and rubbed their hands together and got to work improving their prospects till their own feet slipped and they went under themselves, protesting. Clare no longer felt any flat and bounded horizon encircling him at a distance. Every place was a tilting edge. “And I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it, and turning it upside down.” Time was a hook in his mouth. Time was reeling him in jawfirst; it was reeling him in, headlong and breathless, to a shore he had not known was there.

 

Now something crashed. Clare saw Mabel fly out of the pantry, crying. She had dropped something. June and Mabel
had been carrying armloads of jars past him, he realized. Mabel had just dropped a loaded tray of plum preserves. He saw every glass jar smashed on the pantry floor. Now she had run away. This alarmingly bright and self-sure little Mabel, of whom Clare usually lived in some awe, was crying too hard to help clean up her mess. June and Ada passed Clare and crowded into the pantry carrying rags and a bucket. Clare ordinarily considered Mabel a human marvel, and her accomplishments miraculous. She hung out over the stairs to make an entrance, wagging her stockinged legs like a pendulum. She lettered her name, opened umbrellas, and erupted forth to give precisely articulated opinions on household matters, which startled Clare as much as if the cat had spoken. She possessed a queer, manly chuckle, which arose from her smooth depths at apparent random. If anyone asked her, “How are you?” she replied, looking away, in a stolid, thrillingly low voice, “Good.”

He found her crying on the parlor sofa, twisted up and half dressed. She was too old and too big to pick up. Clare picked her up.

He picked her up and bore her from station to station around the parlor. Its dark wallpaper repeated a ribboned bouquet of pale flowers, over and over. Absurdly he pointed Mabel's face toward each window in turn, as though she were an infant still and might see some bright sight over his shoulder to distract her. He pointed her at the organ, its lacy carved front, its many ivory-ringed plugs. She cried wetly on his neck; he smelled her familiar, sour hair. What had he done with his life? He had been arranging things and putting things to rights, so he could get started.

Beyond the window's lace curtain the lilac bush in the yard seemed real enough, and the sky's gray light seemed handmade for the moment's heat like any fire. This was, however, a year among years, and him dying early. The whole illumined, moving scene would play on in his absence, would continue to tumble into the future, extending the swath of the lighted and known, moving as a planet moves with its clouds attached, its waves all breaking at once on its thousand shores, and its people walking willfully to market or to home, followed by dogs. He had thought he had more time.

Clare carried Mabel outside to the porch and toted her around as he did formerly, when the porch was new and so was Mabel. When had she grown so big and heavy? She kept slipping inside her sateen bloomers; he hoisted her up. She hushed her crying. Now, Clare knew, she held herself still so Clare would not notice her and set her down. He noticed her, but he wanted to carry her on the porch a while longer. How had he got to be forty-two? What had he meant to do with those years?

He would be one ancestor of Mabel's grandchildren, at best three strangers away. They would be careless, wretched, ignorant great-grandchildren, badly behaved, who would swing on swings in the bright sunlight of those future days without a care in their cruel, cussed hearts, and who would never have heard mentioned one Clare Fishburn of Whatcom, Washington, who was once a prominent figure in a local way and considered, by some, to have possessed promise, vigor, and enterprise, who might even have attained high office…or who, he concluded to himself, at any rate loved his life and his urgent times with all his strength. He looked down the hill across the vacant lot where Obenchain had stood. The wind blew from the southwest. Loops of Mabel's hair wrapped against his face. She hid her bare arms in his coat. Cloud parts were leaving the sky. Sea ducks were leaving the water. The morning high tides of winter were gone. Night after night, Orion dived unseen to the west behind the clouds and died young. The wood stems of lilac bush by the door were banging together. Those blunt stems would be gone soon, broken into lilacs. How does a man learn to die when the experts are mum?

It seemed to Clare this morning that he had consumed his life. He had played false and, perfectly pleased, fell for a sham. He followed the news; he floated like a sea duck with the crowd. The momentum of activity and accumulation lulled him. The Whatcom
Bugle Call
and the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer
endorsed it as real, this sheer witless motion and change. The minister, the biggest men in town, the most pious women, and everyone he knew except his mother endorsed it as real; they followed the news. He had gone along. He had burrowed into the whirling scheme of things; he had hitched himself to the
high school men, to the growing town and the mighty nation and its sensations, events, and shared opinions. He had lost the fight with vainglory, and the fight with ignorance, for what he now guessed must be the usual reason: he had not known there was a fight on.

Clare set Mabel down; she idled into the house to dress for church. He felt the blood returning deep in his arms. He paced by the porch rail, looking out. The sea was yellow and swollen. White clouds blew and stretched under the leaden cloud cover. The cottonwood in the front yard looked dried out. He could feel the planet spinning ever faster, and bearing him into the darkness with it, flung. These were the only days. “The harvest is past,” Clare thought, “the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

There was not time enough to honor all he wanted to honor; it was difficult even to see it. The seasons pitched and heaved a man from rail to rail, from weather side to lee side and back, and a lunatic hogged the helm. Shall these bones remember?

 

It had been three months since Obenchain told Clare he was going to kill him. During January, February, and most of March, Clare had watched his own increasing detachment. Throughout his life before Obenchain's threat, he awakened some mornings and perceived that things were easy and pleasant, and some mornings, by contrast, he fancied that things were fixed and dreary, and these moods reversed from hour to hour, wherever they started. Now things seemed, for the first time, simply big, all day. He had begun to view his own Lambert Street—the scraped hillside before him, its elaborate houses, its few poplars and cottonwoods—altered into an abstraction and revealed as a piffling accident, as a certain street in a certain town. Whatcom was a town among thousands of towns—the town in which most of his haphazard life had elapsed. His own time was a time among times. This bright year, this new 1893 with its shifting winds and great, specific clouds, this raw-edged winter with its stiff mud and gray seas—this was one year.

Clare leaned against the cold porch rail. He saw beneath him the lower hill with its houses; he saw the growing business
district, and the dull sea spreading beyond it under thick skies. The railroad trestle curved across the bay in a pencil line from south to north. This was his town, and in his way Clare had helped build it, as he had helped break its wilderness as a boy.

Mabel came out to the porch and twirled dully, like a hanged man, in her new Easter dress—something white and ruffled, with red braid. She had a stiff straw hat pinned flat on her head; someone had blacked her shoes—and she did look an angel. Clare told her she was “the ant's ankles.” Pleased, she perked up, plucked at her bloomers, and said she was going down the street to display her glory to her cousin Nesta. Clare watched her flit down the steps, her black-stockinged legs apparently boneless.

He had begun to wonder where, in this series of accidents, the accidental part left off. Could he as readily have been an actor, or a lawyer, as a high school teacher, when he had felt himself so profoundly and for so long to be a high school teacher? Would he do just as well as some other sort of fellow altogether? Was June only one of many women he might have married? Might he just as readily be living on some other street, in some grievous town in Wisconsin he had never heard of, with some other woman—a woman he did not know? This was a grim thought. He disliked strange women.

A fresh, stiffening wind blew up through the lot below. A sheet of water gleamed behind the plunging precipice of the town. The colorless sea and the colorless sky were batting the dead light back and forth. What Clare really wanted to know was this: Would he ever see June again?

It was a novel, uncomfortable question, linked in his mind with the shed church he attended as a boy, and with his mother's floppy Bible, whose assigned chapters he had memorized perforce. He knew that forty years ago in the west they used to say, “Ain't no law west of Saint Louis, and no God west of Fort Smith.” But now God had been planted in the west for two generations—God, women, and railroad trains. Towns welcomed churches for their civilizing influence and noble architecture. One of Clare's favorite stories was about Chief Seattle. Chief Seattle had heard much about a common heavenly father who
had come down to earth to live among people and save them. Chief Seattle remarked, “We never saw him,” and Clare repeated this to general hilarity in the hotel bar and in the Lone Joe Saloon. Chief Seattle said, “We never saw him.” Would there be something he and his friends could do together, like old times?

Clare moved inside. His father had died many years ago in what people called a freak accident; he had not seen a hair of him since. From time to time he dreamed of him standing mute in his overalls in a family-filled log cabin. Everyone welcomed him, saying, “Rooney! We all thought you were dead.” Clare himself looked at his father, overcome with affection and shyness. Gradually he always understood that, in fact, the man was dead. He had no will, no love, and no way to express his embarrassment for the overexcited living. He was an apparition the family's hopes could not sustain; his form faded as their faith failed, and where he had stood was only the sooty log wall. Now, as winter left the coast that year and spring wore on, Clare dreamed this dream again, and others like it.

 

Everywhere he went he saw Obenchain. Friday it was Obenchain brooding at the new post office, his lower lip hanging. Last week he became aware of Obenchain at the grocer's when, from the corner of his eye, he saw one pale forehead as high as his own above the other heads, as if the two men were lighthouses. From a high school window he saw Obenchain pacing the center of the street below, agitated, wearing his hat over one ear. Twice from parlor windows he saw him looming tense in the vacant lot below the house, cast in silhouette against the bay.

One January Saturday he and June were replenishing the woodpile, and Clare had glanced up to see Obenchain just disappearing down the back alley. The alley ran through a tangle of blackberry bushes. Clare had leaned on his maul and peered hard through the thorns to learn if the ungainly, wrinkled form that was Obenchain had kept moving or stopped. He could not tell; he could not decide if he had seen a dark piece of a man moving, or if he was now seeing a man holding still, or a patch
of gloom and no man at all. He had stood and studied and pondered, until he began to see not Obenchain, but his own self, as a man with a revolver behind blackberry thorns might see him: a target as isolated and still as some poor stiff before a firing squad. Would he then fall handily in his own yard on Lambert Street, with his wife at his side?