Billy nodded.
"I don't know what Ellen saw, if indeed she saw anything at all, but we both had to shoulder a lot of pain. I think . . . seeing Kenneth's ghost was a way for Ellen to deal with his death, but instead of laying him to rest she tried to resurrect him. He was a very good boy. You would've liked him. Is there ... is there nothing of him left?"
"Oh yes." Billy rose to his feet. "You bring him back to life when you remember him. Remembering doesn't have to be sad; it's a good thing, because you can keep your son with you all the time, in your heart and your memory. I think he's resting easy now, and he's gone on to whatever's waiting, but he's still alive inside you."
Dr. Mirakle smiled wistfully. "Yes. And I guess that's good enough, isn't it? Kenneth always remains a young man in my memories; he's always handsome in his uniform, and he's always the best son any man could ask for." He lowered his head and Billy heard him sigh deeply. Then he said, "I'd better check the soup. I've been known to burn it," and returned to the kitchen.
Billy stood at the top of the stairs for a while longer, his hand on the railing. But there was nothing there. Nothing stirred the air around him, nothing tried to make desperate contact, nothing yearned to shrug off its earthly pains and pass on. The house was silent and at peace. Billy descended the stairs and returned to the piano room. He ran his hands over the heat-cracked wood of the piano, tracing fingers over the battered and worn keyboard. He sat down on the bench and hit a single note that reverberated sharply in the air. Then another note, down in the bass register, that moaned like a low wind on a winter's night. He hit three notes at the same time, and winced at their discordant wail. The next try, though, the sound was sweet and harmonious, like a cooling balm against the fever that churned within him. Looking at the keyboard, trying to figure it out, was a mystery in itself: why were some keys black and others white? How could anybody make music out of it? What did those pedals down there do?
And suddenly he brought both fists crashing down onto the keyboard. Notes shrieked and shrilled, and Billy could feel the vibration thrumming up his wrists, up his forearms, his shoulders, his neck, and right to the top of his skull. The sound was awful, but somehow the energy he'd expended had cracked the hot cauldron of emotions in him, a tiny crack allowing a trickle to escape. Billy hammered again, with his left fist. Then with his right. Then both fists were coming down like pistons, and the house was pounding with a rough, jarring noise that perhaps harmonized with the music of terror and confusion. The old piano seemed about to burst with explosive noise; under Billy's relentless pounding several pieces of ivory flew off like rotten teeth. But when he stopped and he listened to the last echoes dying away there did seem to be a music in them: an eerie harmony of ignorantly struck chords, fading away now, fading into the very walls of the house. And Billy felt as if that cauldron had split down the middle, all the terrors and pains streaming out and flooding through him into this instrument that stood before him. He felt lightened, cleansed, and exhilarated.
And he remembered his grandmother saying, a long time ago, that it would be up to him to find a way to release the emotions he absorbed through contact with the revenants. She had her pottery, just as his mother had her needlepoint, and now . . . what was closer to human emotion than music? But how to bring out real music from this assembly of wood and metal wires? How to caress it instead of beating it half to death? How to let it soothe away the pain instead of ripping it out?
"Well," Dr Mirakle said from behind him, holding a tray with two bowls of soup, "I'm glad to see my house is still standing. I'm sure the police are on their way by now, but we'll ask them to join in the jamboree."
"Is this yours? Do you know how to play it?"
"Me? No, I couldn't play a kazoo. My wife is . . . was a piano teacher for a while. Can I venture to say that you're no Liberace?"
"Who?"
"Never mind. Then again, neither is Liberace a Billy Creekmore. Come on, we'll eat in the front room, it's too dark in here." He paused, because Billy wasn't rising from the bench. Instead, the boy was fingering the keyboard again, picking at various notes as if he'd stumbled upon Captain Kidd's treasure. "It's probably not too hard to learn," Mirakle said. "I never had the inclination, but there are a stack of old instruction books down in the basement. Are you interested?"
He struck a high note and listened to it sing. "Yes sir."
"I'll get them for you, then. They're probably so mildewed you can't read them, but ..." Mirakle came over and set the tray down atop the piano. He saw the look of excitement in Billy's eyes, and noticed also that his coloring had improved. It had been a great relief, in a way, to hear that Kenneth was resting far from the confines of this house. "You've been a great help to me," Dr. Mirakle said. "I appreciate all the work you've done. I . don't know what's ahead for you, but I think I'll be hearing frorm you again. At the very least, I hope you'll write to let me know how you're doing."
"Yes sir, I will."
"I have an idea you're the kind of young man who means what he says. That's rare enough in itself, in this day and age. In the morning I'll take you to the bus station; I would offer you a sizeable increase in pay to join me on the carnival circuit next season, but . . . you've got better things to do, I think." He smiled. The thought streaked through him that somehow he was losing a second son, and he touched Billy's shoulder. "The soup's getting cold. Come on, let's eat."
Mirakle took the tray into the front room; Billy paused at the keyboard a moment longer, then joined him. Young man, Mirakle thought, I wish you much luck. That is the very least of what you'll need on your journey.
And it was possible—no, probable, Mirakle told himself—that sometime before winter's cold set in he might drive the truck back up to Hawthorne, back to that little shack off from the road, and deliver a piano that might yet learn to sing again.
NINE
Revelations
42
"He went to sleep," Ramona said, long gray strands of her hair blowing from around her scarf. There were deep lines under her eyes and on each side of her nose, yet she refused to bend to the will of the years; she carried herself strong and straight, her chin uplifted. "I read the Bible to him that night, and we ate a good dinner of vegetables. He talked a lot about you, as he had for the few days before that, and he said he was trying very hard to understand . . . what we're like. He said he knew you were going to be a great man, and he'd be proud of you. Then he said he was going to take a nap, and I washed the dishes. When I went in later to see about him, he . . . was as peaceful as a child. I pulled the covers over him, and then I went to get the doctor."
Billy touched the granite marker A chill breeze was sweeping down into their faces from the hills, and already winter was knocking at the door though it was hardly the middle of October. He'd come walking up the road yesterday, lugging his suitcase from the Greyhound bus stop at Coy Granger's, and had seen his mother out in the field, gathering pecans in a bowl. His father wasn't sitting on the front porch. The Oldsmobile was gone—sold for scrap, he'd later learned, to pay for his father's casket. The house was the same, fixed up and painted with the money he'd sent home; but things had changed. He could see the passage of time in his mother's face, and from what she'd told him his father had died near the time Billy had dreamed of him and his dad walking along the road to Hawthorne. Billy said, "You had to know. The aura. Didn't you see it?"
"Yes, I did," Ramona replied quietly. "I knew, and so did he. Your father had made his peace with the world . . . and especially with himself. He raised you with a good, strong hand and he worked very hard for us. He didn't always agree with us or understand us, but that was never the point: at the end, he loved us just as much as he always had. He was ready."