I tried but could not suppress a gasp at my idiocy. “Mrs. Hale,” I said.
“Do not speak, Mr. Crosby,” she said. “I know who you are and why you are here. You will find none of what you came for in this house. I am sorry for your loss, but it is time you stopped this carrying on. It is disgraceful.”
Tears brimmed in my eyes and ran down my cheeks. I was humiliated and in awe of the woman. She possessed the majesty of plain speech.
“Mrs. Hale,” I said. It would have been foolish of me to tell her I had not come for drugs. That was somehow immaterial to her.
“I know what you are doing out there at night, Mr. Crosby,” she said. “It is not a mystery. With all your crawling, you’ll soon be going on your belly. You’ll spend your days swallowing dirt and hoping for bare heels to bite.”
“Mrs. Hale,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Crosby.”
“I am sorry.”
“Well and fine, Mr. Crosby, but your sorrows are selfish.
You are a maker of dismal days. You burn your daughter in strange fires when I should think you would be grateful for the blessing of having had a lovely child. Enough is enough.”
I understood as she spoke that Mrs. Hale was not going to call the police. She was not going to report the break-in, or call the offices of The Daily Bread, or speak any more sternly than she already had, or, as a matter of fact, speak any more at all. I had been dismissed.
She sat still and erect on the settle, looking at a point high on the opposite wall, toward whatever it was that moored her to her convictions, clearly finished with the affair, clearly weakened and frail and, worst, frightened, another victim of my violence. The hardness of her consideration toward me was so nearly unbearable that I almost offered to help her lie on her bed or to make her tea or to care for her lawn for free for the rest of her life, gestures that themselves would have been violent, would have demonstrated that I had missed her point precisely, that I rejected precisely the straightforward responsibility she had extended to me, enacted for me.
For an instant I thought of murdering Mrs. Hale. She seemed so impossibly decent. But her dignity provoked me into humility and silence. After bowing my head and standing mute before her for a moment, I turned from the door and walked back down the hall, the wide pine floorboards creaking. I descended the dark, narrow staircase. The grandfather’s clock on the bottom landing read one-thirty. I paused in front of it for several seconds. The silence of the house was so deep that each tick of the clock seemed to enfigure in sound the brass works rotating behind the dial. The clock seemed a device for preserving and telegraphing the heartbeats of my grandfather and my grandmother and my mother and Kate, and a coffin, and a reliquary, and finally just a plain old beautiful clock. Somewhere I could not remember the orrery sat in its room, still, latent, potent in the darkness. I descended from the landing and followed the hallway back to the front door. I stepped outside into the dark night and closed the door behind me.
I WALKED ACROSS THE meadow and into the woods, into the Enon River sanctuary near where my grandfather and I and Kate and I had fed the birds from our hands so many times. I imagined the birds dropping dead from the trees until the ground was covered in a tangled mass of corpses, the beak and broken wings and soiled feathers and needle-thin bones of one animal interlaced and looped with those of the next and all the bodies knitted together. And I imagined that the plaited bodies might be lifted in a single pane and draped over my shoulders and clasped together at my throat with claws and worn like a cape or robe. It would be very light, made as it was from feathers and hollow bones. It would be very long and I would wander from the tame boundaries of the sanctuary out into a real wilderness with a great train following me that would comb up insects and grass and bark and snag on stumps, and that would constantly force me to stop and turn to gather or yank free or untangle, only to have it catch again a moment later on another barb. Bones would snap and wings unscrew from their sockets and I would leave a trail of looping feathers and scattered limbs. My thrashings would knot the garment as much as they rent it. The garment would attract living, wild birds as I passed below their nests and they would alight on it and become entangled. Over time, the garment would be transformed, expelling those first, tame birds and accumulating dark pheasants and crows and elusive little songbirds. After many years, the cape would no longer contain any of the birds from which it had been originally formed. It would become more and more gruesome as it metamorphosed from entirely dead birds to a mixture of the dead and the living. It would writhe and twist with black and brown and flutter scarlet and yellow and purple. The snared birds would peck one another bare and pick out one another’s eyes and preen themselves and eat one another and defecate upon one another and couple, all while they screeched and sang and made nests and brooded over eggs that were not theirs but had boiled up beneath them through the thickets of bones and plumage, even as their own eggs had sifted away to hatch somewhere else or fallen from the cloak onto the ground or in cold puddles, where their quickening yolks would cool and cloud to mere jelly. Sparrows would raise waxwings and crows beget finches and there would be generations of birds that were born, lived, sang, struggled, and died wholly ensnared in that monstrous cloak.
When I came to the creek that ran from Enon Swamp to the lake, I stopped and filled the backpack I had brought with me with as many stones as I could shoulder. I walked through the woods to Cedar Street, crossed the street, and marched through more woods to Enon Lake.
The night was moonless and lidded with clouds so thick that they were invisible within the darkness they made. The clouds seemed low enough that I had to hunch down not to crack my head on them. My mind blazed with ravishing lies. I thought, I cannot accept this gift of myself, myself as a gift, of my person, of having this mind that does not stop burning, that deceives itself and consumes itself and immolates itself and believes its own lies and chokes on plain fact. Mrs. Hale is right, but I cannot stomach it. My grandfather always told me that whether or not I believed in religion or God or any kind of meaning or purpose to our lives, I should always think of my life as a gift. Or that’s what he told me his father had told him and that his father had told him, in a tone of voice that suggested that such a way of thinking had seemed to him as remote and as equally magnificent and impossible as it did to me, even as he passed it along as practical advice. But it’s a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating.