Love and Sleep (4 page)
Georgie Porgie ran away.
Still Pierce wasn't offered membership in the Retrievers; perhaps Joe Boyd sensed in him some remaining reluctance about fellowship, or the work it entailed, that might be a source of disaffection. “I don't care anyway,” Pierce said to Bird and Hildy in their bungalow at night. “I already have a club. Sort of."
The three of them were gathered at the brown gas heater, big as a chest of drawers, that stood in Pierce's room and heated the whole of the little house. It took all three of them to light it: Hildy to direct operations, and turn on the gas; Pierce to light the match; Bird, afraid of lighting matches but not afraid of the heater as Pierce was, to thrust the lit match into the hole in the heater's side.
"What's your club?"
"Well, it's secret.” He readied himself with match and box next to Bird at the touch-hole. Hildy crouched at the gas cock. “It's a secret club of my father's."
"They let little kids in?"
"Some."
"What's the name of it?"
"I can't tell you. It's secret.” He saw his father's face, binding him in an imaginary but suddenly vivid past to secrecy.
"Ready?” said Hildy impatiently, whose skinny legs trembled with cold.
"Okay."
"Okay."
Pierce, after a few misfires, got the match to flame, turning it in his fingers. Hildy had opened the cock already, too soon; Bird fumbled for the match in Pierce's fingers, each of them trying to keep farthest from the flame. She half-thrust half-threw the match within the hole and turned away. Gas built up within the chamber ignited with an impatient
whump
, not as loud as on some nights when the process took even longer.
"Who all are members?” Hildy asked. “Can we be?"
"Maybe,” Pierce said.
"Can Warren be?"
Pierce shrugged.
"Can Joe Boyd be?"
There was no reason to exclude him. There was also no reason, and Pierce felt no compulsion, to inform him that he was eligible for membership; or that his membership had been considered. And accepted. The taste of triumph, like the taste of the burned gas, was in the back of Pierce's throat. “Sure,” he said. “Sure he can."
Later, in bed, his two cousins tried to guess the name of Pierce's secret lodge, or wheedle it from him. They guessed birds and beasts noble and ridiculous ("The Lizards Club! The Bugs Club!") until they got the giggles; they asked Pierce for the initials, the number of letters, the sounds-like. Pierce wasn't telling, though; he didn't yet know himself. He only knew that he was a member, inducted long ago (he with so little long-ago, that had recently come to seem so much to him), the brothers robed and smiling to welcome him, rank on rank. His heart was full of a wicked glee, that he wasn't alone here as they had all thought him to be, but one of a company, invisible for now but coming clearer to him all the time.
The Retrievers soon passed out of existence, its clubhouse still uncleaned, as Joe Boyd turned his hungry heart elsewhere. Pierce couldn't later remember if he was ever formally sworn in, but Bird said sure he had been, didn't he remember, there were outings and official business that included him, and dues exacted. It would later surprise Pierce how much more his younger cousin could remember, of things they had both experienced, than he could himself. That first year he came to Bondieu must, he thought, have been so full of shifting challenges and things hard to understand that like the successive crises of a long dream they couldn't be retained in memory afterwards: only the umbrageous colors, and the sense of a struggle.
"I can't even really tell you how we
got
there,” Winnie in Florida said to him, “with all our things, our trunks and clothes and the beds and things."
"The marble-topped dresser,” Pierce said—locating it suddenly, vividly, just as it was on the point of departing, got
you
at least. “The spool bed."
"Did Axel send them on?” Winnie wondered. “I guess he must have, because they were all there later on, weren't they? Sure they were. Well, I was in a state, I know it."
Pierce never blamed Winnie for his exile. Of Axel his father he had been deeply, inarticulately ashamed; on those nights when Axel called to talk to him, he would listen almost without speaking to Axel's anyway unbreakable stream of sentiments (always a sound in the background of these calls, a tinkle and sea-murmur of voices and music) which inevitably grew maudlin, sorry, filled with moist pauses, while the Oliphants watched and Pierce's cheeks grew hot. But he didn't blame Axel for what had become of him either, because Winnie didn't or didn't seem to. She never complained of Axel; she seemed to bear him no grudge; she rarely spoke of him at all. Maybe it was because Winnie was able not to notice things, because she sought so diligently for a space of rest for herself untouched by the consequences of things, maybe because she loved Pierce so much and never questioned him either, that Pierce had always found in her room not the reasons for his exile but a respite from it.
Take care of your mother,
Axel had commissioned him, his words drowned in tears, that last morning in Brooklyn before Pierce set out with Winnie, in a cab filled with their swollen suitcases, toward the bus station.
Be a good knight,
he had said.
Be a good knight. Axel, quixotic lover of romances, chivalry, and vows of service, had also suffered a quixotic harm to the brain from them. Pierce in Kentucky remembered his injunction, but he didn't feel burdened by it, not then anyway. Axel grew dim to Pierce in Kentucky, insubstantial, which judging from Winnie's behavior he was supposed to do, evaporate, melt into nothing like a snowman in the advancing of Pierce's seasons. But Pierce
was
his mother's knight, and would remain; she had rescued him from the dark wood of the Brooklyn apartment where his father was lost (Why dark? Why lost?) and now she was his alone, installed over in the upper story of the main house, in the bedroom next to Sam's. There he served her, there he waited on her, laughed with her, capered before her; he poured himself endlessly into the vacancy that was her, teasing her with questions that would last forever because they had no answers: What if everything suddenly got twice as big as it is? Could you tell? What if the stars are really small and close overhead, just a little ways, a thousand miles, and only seem to be far away? What if seeming-to-be-far-away is just the way they are, and you could really reach them easily in a jet? Why is everything the way it is, and not some different way instead? Why is there space? Why is there anything, anything at all, and not just nothing?
Autumn rains slaked the ash of the hillside and the holler; for a long time the smell of things burned and then wetted reached the nose on every wind, but more cold rain washed the air. In spring the burnt-over land would only be the more fertile because of the rich ash the children had laid on it; burning and then planting, after all, was how Cumberland crops had long been grown. Pierce turned a leaf of
Collier's
magazine and saw an ad for the Plywood Association: an emerald sprout of fir, sheltered like a flame by rough caring hands, first growth of a new forest in the colorless blasted land all around.
The school year hadn't yet started for the Oliphants. Every autumn since they had come school had started late, and this year Father Midnight's sister, who had been the children's tutor, went away to a distant hospital just as the process of setting up school in the kitchen and sitting room of the little bungalow was to begin. What sort of hospital she went away to, and for what reason, wasn't described to the children, which left them free to imagine reasons and outcomes more drastic than any the real case warranted. They hadn't loved Miss Martha, Father Midnight's sister, but she was vague and easily fooled, and they hadn't feared her.
(It was Hildy who had first seen that their parish priest was a replica of the unheroic hero on TV, who, whatever deeds he might once have done in some other medium somewhere else, on their Saturdays now merely introduced ancient cowboy movies from behind a desk, and in the intervals sold a hot drink the children had never drunk and could not imagine. The priest was he exactly, but in phony eyeglasses and liturgical gear: Father Midnight. Warren had to be strictly schooled never to call him that.)
It wasn't conceivable that the children should attend the local grammar school. There was one, a square brick building not in the town of Bondieu but in the town of Good Luck, a mile or so distant. Like the square brick hospital, like the rows of gritty cabins along the railroad track, the school was a beneficence of the Good Luck Coal and Coke Company in the early years of the century. Now it was the property of the state, and all the children of Bondieu who went to school went there, just as almost all the fathers who worked had once worked for Good Luck Coal and Coke. Dr. Hazelton himself had dispensed pills to miners and miners’ wives at the Good Luck hospital, which had just closed its doors for good. “Good luck for the patients,” Sam said.
Sam's arrangement with his hospital had from the beginning included provision of a tutor for his children; Opal Boyd had seen too many schools like the Good Luck school, and had known their teachers. So Miss Martha, who had trained as a teacher though she had only briefly been one, had been hired, and Opal had done the rest, until her headaches got too bad; and now Miss Martha too was gone. September ran into October. The children lived within an unwonted freedom that could end any day; they got used to it. Summer's games continued. They were like the mountain children they knew of but rarely encountered, shoeless wraiths invisible to teacher or to principal.
They did read, though. There wasn't one of them, not even Joe Boyd, who didn't. They read through meals and chores and car-trips; they hogged the bathroom, unwilling to leave the pot where they sat reading. Hildy could read and listen to the radio at the same time, and miss nothing either of Nancy Drew or of Sky King. Sam read the novels that Winnie finished, as he had read Opal's.
They got their books by writing to the State Library in Lexington and asking for them; there was no public library for mountain miles in any direction from Bondieu. Once a month a big box of them arrived in a sort of laundry case with canvas belts that could be done up when the books had been read (or not read) and were to be sent back. What books were received depended on what was asked for, who received the order, and what the library had, which wasn't Everything though it seemed bottomless from Bondieu. If Bird asked for a book about horses, she was as likely to get dense volumes on equine anatomy or ranch management as she was to get another book like
Black Beauty,
which was what she wanted. Joe Boyd knew what he wanted, but not how to describe it: he wanted books full of facts, strange but true, things which he could ask others if they knew and be certain they would not: the number of peepers that could sit side by side on a single pencil, the number of pencils that could be made from a single cedar tree. If the facts were disgusting as well as obscure, that was all the better.
It was Joe Boyd's description of this category, however he had phrased it, that had once brought him a big book whose end-papers showed a mass of ruins, and whose double-columned pages were filled with tenebrous illustration. Or maybe it had been put in just to fill up the box, as the best and worst books the family got often were. Anyway Joe Boyd claimed it, and looked through it for a while, enjoying the images of monstrous gods, witches at their sabbats, and heretics aflame. Then Pierce took it up:
A Dictionary of Deities, Devils and DAEmons of Mankind,
by Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle, a name that Sam would have had fun with if Pierce had ever shown him the book, which he never did. Whenever it arrived (and Pierce ordered it again and again after the first time) it would immediately be removed to Pierce's room, to the shelf where he kept things important to him: the missal his father had given him, his photo album, his crystal of quartz and his souvenir sheath-knife from Bear Mountain, his bookends in the form of two hemispheres of the world, beneath which on either side little sculpted boys and girls read books of unimaginable facts.
"This one again?” Winnie asked him when she opened the case that October. Pierce only took it from her, without apology: he knew how much there was in it yet to read, or to reread. Winnie distributed the other books. Hildy's allotment of Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames (Hildy played it safe, and ordered her books in named series: the only danger then was getting the same one twice, which after the passage of a little time she didn't notice). Winnie's own novels, dense and pictureless. Bird's horses and Warren's, his surmounted by cowboys. They all went their separate ways then with their piles, like starvelings, to consume them in private.
Abraxas. Adocentyn. Apollyon. Ariel. Ars Notoria. Azael. In the Angelic Conversations of Doctor DEE (
q.v.), Azael
is the Interpreter of God. What did “q.v.” mean? The first thing to do after staring again long into the vast ruins pictured on the end-papers front and back—broken antique torsos, huge headstones covered in clearly cut but unintelligible words, toppled pillars sunken in tufts of grass, arches, urns, capitals, obelisks—was to turn to the page whereon he had found the name of his secret lodge or club, the one Joe Boyd was now President of (though he didn't know it). It wasn't far from the front, in an entry on Alchemy (the dictionary was broader than its name suggested, almost any odd name or notion could get an entry); the book almost fell open there, so stared at was the page.
There was the row of small dark etchings, the creatures brought forth from base matter by alchemical processes, but how: the Red Man and the White Woman, the Green Lion, the Child of the Philosopher, the Androgyne (one breast, one half a beard, convolute privates too ill-drawn to study). Below them, a picture of the Alchemist, in bathrobe and complex hat, the smoke of his cauldron and the flames of his fire drawn with the same harshly cut black lines as the pleats of his robe. Too absorbed in his mysteries to notice a crowd of long-nailed curly-tusked bat-winged devils swarming through his window, glad to see him at the work that would damn him. Below him, another picture: a miniature castle, its drawbridge drawn up, the inhabitants within at work on tasks of transformation or studying big books or firing guns or arrows out the windows.