Katrine was thrown against the front seat. The cabbie said, “You all right?” She speechlessly nodded yes, but was obviously shaken. “The fellow possibly ain’t dead, miss.” But he could not know either way. He issued instructions to Katrine: “You stay and give a statement. Not my fault, see. The gentleman stepped right out in front of me.” Which was not exactly the case, as William was already in the street, though only for a split second. And it was an intersection. The cabbie turned off the ignition, pocketed the keys, got out of his taxi and walked to where William lay in the street. David shoved him. The cabbie said, “Hey, what? I was just—” and backed up a few steps. Katrine needed some air; she got out and leaned against the cab. “Ciggie,” she advised herself, reaching into her handbag for a cigarette. She smoked, staring at the people gathered on the sidewalk.
David had in fact thought William was dead; there was blood at his mouth, his eyes stared up vacantly. Yet when David got on his knees and leaned close, William suddenly focused and grotesquely croaked, “Tell Mr. Aston I’ll be late.”
The ambulance arrived in less than ten minutes. Three paramedics spilled out, attended to William. One asked William a question, said to the others, “He can’t get out the words, mates.” The youngest paramedic reported this and more to a doctor on standby over a kind of walkie-talkie, listened, then said, “Got it, got it, got it. Right.” He placed the walkie-talkie in its holster on his belt. The paramedics conferred a moment, then fit a plastic collar around William’s neck.
“Here we go, then,” one said, and all scrupulously lifted William sideways onto a stretcher, carried the stretcher to the ambulance. One paramedic got in behind the wheel, a second sat in front on the passenger’s side, the last climbed in back. David said, “I’m his son-in-law.” The paramedic in back said, “Right, then,” so David boosted himself up and sat next to William. Siren. Faces blurred past. On the sprint to the hospital the paramedic said, “Don’t try to talk, sir,” and hooked up an IV just as William blacked out.
Skywritten
THE FIRST WEEK of October 1986, a letter accepting David’s book proposal, Light and Dark: The Photographs of Josef Sudek, arrived from Harrison Macomb. In fact, it was the second letter Macomb had sent. The first, back in June 1985, was forwarded to the Tate Gallery by David’s landlord. The Tate had no recourse but to send it back to Macomb. David had pretty much cut off all of his old contacts. “I thought perhaps you’d become a bellman at Durrants Hotel and given up writing altogether!” Macomb wrote. “You seemed so at home in their lobby. But I’m told I’ve now found the proper address. At any rate, Mr. Kozol, I trust you still wish to write your book. You must ring me up and we’ll discuss terms. Please know that I can offer a decent advance, but cannot make you a fortune unless the book makes me one. That said, your proposal was quite brilliant. I read closely and admired your other writings on Sudek. My staff thought highly of them as well.”
David telephoned Macomb the next morning at 5 A.M., Nova Scotia time. Full of apologies, he said he’d gotten married and was now living in Canada, and added the lie that in between he’d been doing research. “My wife’s expecting our first child in November,” David said. “But I can certainly begin organizing my notes and get to work on the writing in, say, December.”
“I don’t tell my authors how to schedule their time, Mr. Kozol, but let’s try to settle on a reasonable deadline, shall we? I prefer not editing until a first draft is completed. I’ve worked different ways with different writers, but that’s my preference. Might that suit you?”
“This is my first book, but it sounds fine.”
“Tecosky Estate, Parrsboro, Nova Scotia — still your address?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Well, busy day here, Mr. Kozol, busy day in progress. Congratulations, finally. Glad to have caught up with you. A contract will be sent within a month. Look it over.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Macomb.”
“Lunch again at Durrants when you’re next in town?”
“Of course.”
That afternoon near the pond, David showed Macomb’s letter to William. “I take it you’d like me to report this to Margaret?” he said. “But good for you. Some form of employment, at least, when you most need it, whatever your and my daughter’s living arrangements. Maybe write to Isador and Stefania. Thank them for letting me keep you on. I think once the child’s born, a modest raise in salary might be forthcoming. Considering their devotion to Margaret.”
All over Nova Scotia, the heat wave continued without reprieve through October. Some days were tolerable, others stifling, the nights on average fifteen to twenty degrees warmer than what was typical of the season. On the health front, William now walked up and down the stairs for exercise; he’d extended his daily constitutional, half a mile from the mailbox along Route 2 and back. His voice therapy had ended; he was reading articles from National Geographic, and sea and island tales by Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad, aloud in a moderate voice at night in bed. “Nothing like being read to,” he’d joked to Maggie. His primary anodyne was aspirin (also a glass of whiskey before sleep).
As for David, his bruises — brought about by what William referred to as the “Edinburgh-Parrsboro Express,” as if he’d been waiting since childhood to throw a punch with such resolve behind it — lingered in lighter hues, and his jaw was still a bit numb. William had a folder of suggested recipes, provided by the hospital, and during the first few weeks of his son-in-law’s recovery, he had used an electric blender to prepare concoctions of meat, vegetables and vitamins in liquid form, which David ate mostly through a straw. On October 21 David had his jaw unwired, an arduous procedure that required an anesthetic. William took him home from the hospital at 3 P.M. in the truck, a sudden deep rut in the road jolting David’s skull like a relapse. Once in the guesthouse, David immediately took to his bed, and slept until four the next morning. He woke hearing static from the radio.
A few days later, William sat with David at the guesthouse’s kitchen table, eating a dinner of egg salad sandwiches, soft pear slices and ice water. They said little during the meal. David cleared the dishes and they repaired to the porch, where David pressed an ice pack to the side of his face. They sat in opposite porch swings, feet planted on the slat floor. “Both these swings need oiling,” William said.
“I’ll get to it,” David said.
They sat not talking for a good fifteen minutes, looking out toward the pond. Then William said, “Children’s zoo keeps asking for our swans, but I told them as long as this heat keeps up, I prefer they stay here with us.”
William had got the swans in the pen before dinner; he’d seen a fox crossing to the estate side of Route 2. At about seven o’clock there was the slightest of breezes. Veering in from the north, all at once there arrived a flock of wild swans. In successive groups of six, eight and ten, they settled in the pond with scarcely a splash, spreading out with impressive equanimity over its breadth. From his vantage point William saw their initial approach; David turned in time to see them light. “Those are whistling swans. Cygnus columbianus. Naomi said they got here late August last year,” William said. “Let’s go down and have a look.”
They walked past the pen. The Tecoskys’ swans were worked up, a number of them with bills pressed to the fence. Their abbreviated wings and confinement seemed cruel. The whistlings continued to converge. The wild swans were on high alert; they formed a loose-knit gather, the biggest ones in a kind of half circle, facing outward.