“But they’re inscribed,” George said.
“To strangers. To Whom It May Concern.’ “
“What for?”
Claunch shrugged. “She was nuts.”
Mills wasn’t interested. Not in Claunch’s money and power nor in his abrupt, summary ways. There was nothing for him here. He did not need to know anything or have anything. It was astonishing to him that he had ever gone to Mexico, that he had supervised deathbeds so unreluctantly. That his passions had been up. He was tired of all of them — of Breel, the Claunches, the Meals-on-Wheelers, Messenger, the Glazer girls, himself. Amazed he’d consented to be a pallbearer or given a moment’s thought to the character of his suit. Dumbstruck he’d taken any part at all. He had let everyone bully him, everyone. Father Merchant, all his lockstep, aspic’d ancestors. Now he would turn to go and Claunch Sr. would embrace him with one more confidence, one last devastating request. He knew what it might be, knew he would decline. That whatever the disparity in their wealth or power, it was Claunch who was subject to temptation, snarled in gravity and desire, Mills who was free.
So he turned to go. Disengaged as the dead, indifferent as wood.
“What did she tell you?”
“Nothing,” Mills said.
“She wasn’t a quiet woman. She wasn’t shy, she wasn’t modest. Anything on her mind burned holes in her pockets. She spent confidence like a drunken sailor.”
“Nothing was on her mind.”
“You were with her for weeks. You saw her die, you watched her dress size come down.”
“Yes.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Your unpublished numbers.”
“Don’t tangle with me, Mills. What did she tell you?”
“Everything.”
“Horseshit.”
(And thought of Greatest Grandfather Mills.)
“Wait,” Claunch said, “don’t go. Please, Mills. Please, George.”
“Tell me what you want,” George Mills said. (Thinking: You can’t have it, there’s nothing left.) And didn’t wait for Claunch to reply, telling him instead what any of them — his forebears — would have told him, mollycoddling grief and concern, handling his anxiety like something armed, primed, talking him in off all his rich man’s window ledges — because much had been lost in the retelling, blurred in the father-to-son translations, distinction smudged as a ruin — seeing a thousand pairs of boots radiant in the hall, hearing even as he spoke them the rote and passionless lies, his ancient tribe’s ancient there-theres and now-nows, the primitive consolations — for bread, a nickel for a cup of coffee, a coin for a candy, a place to hide from the wind — worn-out as a witchdoctor’s gibberish. (And seeing for perhaps the first time in a thousand years something even more radiant and splendid than the cumulative shine on the cumulative boots. Glittering spectra beyond trust. Bright as belief. And thinking: Why, we could have destroyed them!)
“Was the pain ever more than she could handle?”
“Sometimes she’d take an extra aspirin.”
“Aspirin? Only aspirin?”
“Her belief comforted her.”
“Yes,” Claunch said, “there was that. She believed.”
(And Cornell to be mollified. Was something between them? Not his business. Nothing his business.)
“Tell me,” Claunch said softly, “did she curse me?”
“There was a kind of message.”
“Oh?” he said. “A message?”
“She didn’t want there to be hard feelings.”
“She told you she forgave me?” Claunch asked hopefully.
“No,” Mills said, and looked directly at the ambassadorlike man. “She told me she apologized.”
He passed a row of garages with their antique and classic automobiles. (He had noticed one or two at the church, three more at the cemetery. In the narrow roadway it had looked more like a rally than a burial.) And crossed past a middle-aged couple examining a restored 1933 Plymouth which Mills recognized as being exactly like Wickland’s old car in Florida, the one his father had driven to De Land on his errands. The man smiled and waved, and George nodded at him.
He did not have to be told where to go. Not instinct this time either, and certainly not grace and down from déjà vu and history. Not even imagination so much as a blueprint knowledge of its location, certain, sure as a housekeeper where things went. Knowing there’d be a toy station, population, elevation signs, a town’s given name high on the station nostalgic as a stand of trees or the iron horse itself. (It would bear the name of wood or game: Elmville. Deerfield.) Flowers would be planted around its platform, along its borders.
And started to climb a low knoll. And heard the train before he saw it. Not its comical whistle — certain of this, too: the outsize locomotive wail that would be hung about its neck like some apocalyptic joke — but its tinny chuff chuff as it pulled them along the banks and straightaways of its miniature routes. (Imagining Mrs. Glazer as a child, laughing hysterically, pissing her drawers, unable to help herself, seduced, ravished by motion.) Seeing it before he actually saw it (because despite reservation, protestation, all his low-grade weariness of their complicated, graceless lives, he had his Mills-given gift for the inventory of the rich, as intimate a knowledge of their safes, attics and basements as he had of his own clothes closet — precious treasure’s second sight).
At the top of the rise he spotted them in their luscious, bulldozed valley. Grant — who forebore to wear the engineer’s cap Mills saw stuffed in his pocket — sat behind a long locomotive on a sloping tender which served as a seat, his hands on controls which poked out of the rear of the engine like levers in a tavern game. Four topless passenger cars the dimensions of desks were pulled along at about fifteen miles an hour. The coaches’ only slightly scaled-down seats were plush, reversible, wide as rumble seat. George saw the heavy brass handles, tickets fluttering from them like bright feathers. Frames had been painted onto the wide safety glass that wrapped each car to give the illusion of windows. Milly sat primly alone in the last coach, his wife and Cornell facing each other in the second, their knees touching in the crowded quarters. Louise was the one who rode backward. Mary sat on a bench outside the station and glanced impatiently at her wrist watch and then up the line just as if she were waiting for a real train.
He started down the slope, his eyes on the single and sometimes double set of tracks which merged and seemed to cover each other like stripes on a barber pole. When he was halfway down the hill Louise spotted him and waved. She called to the engineer and Grant sounded the whistle, bass as a boat’s, and rang the bell, his face obscured in the plume of steam which feathered back from the stack.
George came to a siding next to some signals and switches and waited for the train to pass. He smiled — instinct again, or reflex — at Milly. Messenger grinned and shouted something to him which he couldn’t make out, and when the train had gone by he crossed the tracks and passed through the thin verisimilitude of tiny trees which masked the passengers’ vision from their toy environment, and walked directly across the carefully landscaped oval to the station.
He sat next to Mary, who seemed subdued now, all interest lost, if she’d ever had any, in the elaborate rig.
“That train ain’t going in your direction?”
“I never ride the day my mother is buried.”
“Oh,” Mills said.
“I bet they don’t stop,” she said. “Your wife and that Cornell character have been going round and round just forever. Not a thought for poor old Grant who has to catch all that steam in his face.”