Agnes Mallory (36 page)

Anyway, my reaction to this discovery was almost comically stupid. Well, it was pure resistance at this stage. I had all the facts, I knew everything; it was pure denial that kept me from putting it together. Instead, I went positively radiant with hope and determination. Ho, ho, thought I, a small, rapt smile creasing my idiot features; ho, ho, if I could bring
this
down! If I could help bring her down with
this
from the mountaintop, guide her through our love to a happier life creating such things as
this
, well then, young Harry, my son, my pal, well then, even your scandal, even your selfishness, your unkindness, your very corruption would become mere footnotes in the Book of Art, mere quibbles beside your magnificent contribution – nay lad, next to your salvation, after all!

This called for a sandwich. Back I tread to the formerly hated door with a last fond glance at the Child – and a quick check to make sure I hadn't left footprints in any stray sawdust – and touching the lightswitch, I gently shut up the studio, and gently locked it.

I went to the kitchen and slapped some goat cheese on wheat, and stood at the window chomping away and chuckling in what must have been an hysteria of impossible aspirations. I watched the rainwater streaking the pane, and listened to it spanking the slates of the roof and, hey, it was letting up a little, I fancied. Yes, it was. Oh, how symbolical, I thought, and how right it would be – how perfect, I thought, popping the last of my sandwich in the old gob – how perfect if tomorrow should dawn bright and clear.

The day dawned bright and clear, all right, the storm finally abating in the last dark hours, the big clouds just blowing over and away as the clang of the woodstove door in the next room woke me. I lay there gathering my thoughts a moment, memories surfacing. I had awakened at one point in the dead of night, I recalled, and found Agnes lying also awake beside me. She'd been staring quietly up at the ceiling, a small, unpleasant smile on her lips; a sneer almost. And I had shuffled close to her and nuzzled against her neck and murmured I loved her as I fell back to sleep. Some hours after, as dawn was coming, I woke again – or became aware, at least, that the rain was stopping. The raucous thwacking at the roof had become a scattered drip-dripping from the eaves and from the trees … What else did I remember? Oh yes: nightmares – I had had nightmares – those came back to me last. Ominous, importunate dreams, full of eager faces staring through inky murk. I suppose my subconscious had been working things out, assembling what I knew. The valley, the routine, the disconnected phone, I
have to work
, the one statue. They had come back to me in my dreams as whispers, messages, urgent, distant, muffled as if through fog. I closed my eyes, straining to hear them again.
If I could make a child …
The little clay figures in the stream back home, the baby she had almost drowned,
a child of glory …
I guess, in my sleep, defences down, I had finally let the whole picture come together because now, as I lay there, casting for my dreams, the facts began to arrange themselves. Agnes's evening depressions – it occurred to me, as if out of nowhere, that these were glimmers of her better self – her happier, saner self, I mean. Signs that the weight of the love she still could feel, the beauty she still could make had been resurrected, were threatening to overwhelm her grand ambitions and intentions. I ran my two hands up into my hair. Yes. That was right. I understood. And in the morning, she was cheerful – cheerful because she had triumphed again, her intentions, her artistic mission had triumphed again, was marching on. I mean: nuts. What if she was nuts, in other words! Caught in one of those ritual treadmills of insanity like some guy on a street corner arranging buttons in a gutter. Christ! It could have been going on for months. Long before I came: days, weeks, months literally, before I showed up to disturb her. Doing the same thing day after day after day, again and again going into her locked room, chiseling out the same face, the same child, over and over and over until her heart sickened with love, at what she saw as this trial of mere love against her revelation, and then every morning, every fucking morning …

‘Jesus Christ!' I said aloud.

The clang of the woodstove door.

I got tangled in the covers as I hurled myself from the bed. Cursing, I ripped them off me, and hurtled, naked, over the bedroom threshold. The peaceful susurration of the stove was deep and chesty. The orange glow around the door sent out blinding spokes of glare. I grabbed the door handle, searing my fingers. Threw the door open and stuck my hand into the blaze.

‘Damn it!' I shouted. ‘God damn it!'

For a single instant, I had hold of it, even drew it to the edge of the fire. Saw, as through a dancing red glass, the face already shrinking into flaking char. And then I fell back, hissing in pain, gripping my hand to my chest and gritting my teeth as the red flesh blistered. And the thick log shifted back into its bed of ashes and was hidden completely by the unbroken shroud of fire.

‘Oh … bah!' I said. Furious, I stalked back into the bedroom. I yanked my pants off the bed's footboard, yanked them on, up over my nakedness, barely remembering to push my penis down clear as I yanked the zipper up with another curse.

I stomped back through the central room with a convulsive sneer at the jolly stove. I kicked the screen door open and stepped out, barefoot, into a muddy puddle up to my cuffs.

I sloshed to the edge of the Swimhole trail. There was no sign of her.

‘Agnes!' I shouted, clenching both my fists. ‘Agnes!'

And then, with another harsh expulsion of breath, I threw my hands to my sides in disgust. I shook my head. And then – standing quiet like that – I heard the river.

Well, I was a city boy. It hadn't occurred to me – what happens to a river, I mean, after two nights and a day of torrential rains. I suppose I knew in the back of my mind; I suppose I could have answered if someone had asked. But I was a city boy. I just hadn't thought about it. Not until I stood there, not until I heard that sound.

I started running. Down the trail – all mud now, mud and puddles and swift rivulets of brown water. I had, I guess, some crazy hope that it was just some sort of aural glitch – that steady bellow rising through the forest to my left – that it was magnified between the banks or something, that it sounded worse than it was. But there was no mistaking the fact of it as I splashed, mudspattered, nearer to its source. The thing was roaring – roaring – like a giant trapped in a pit, that sort of echoing, hollow, interminable roar. I rushed past the turn off to the meadow – I was wheezing for breath – and saw the other turn off up ahead, and the steep forested hill to the river's edge, now sliding with mud. I saw the river then too, through the trees. Unrecognizable as the river I knew. Half again as wide and twice as high, whipped by tornadoes of frothing white, and the driving current scored atop its surface in long, moving sinews of implacable force.

I left the trail – before the turn off, I just cut off it and raced into the trees. Immediately, my feet were swept down and out from under me. I dropped hard onto my ass, sliding in the mud, rolling in the mud to find my feet again. Grabbing hold of tree trunks, I got a few more steps – let go and charged and fell again, forward this time, thudding to the wet earth on my shoulder as the filth sprayed up over my mouth and eyes. Again, I rolled. I grabbed at a tree, and dragged myself up. I worked myself, sliding, to the next tree and the next …

And already, I was at the edge of the water. It had risen that high, that far into the woods. The sandspit, of course, was gone, was buried under the rushing current. Even the diving rock was wholly covered, and where its extension had been was now a lashing serpent's tail of green-white spume.

Agnes stood naked there, on the far side of the rock, with the foam thrown up around her. She stood at the very brink of the forest, at the brink of the water, between two trees. Her green robe was lying in the mud behind her. She was poised to dive and I, braced against a tree twenty yards away, had no chance of reaching her. I suppose I could have shouted – assuming she could have heard me over the river's roar – but I knew there was no point to it. This was part of the ritual too – this she did after the burning in remembrance and communion – and for all I know the secret motive of the whole business had always lain in the fact that the river would one day rise. If I'd ever had a chance to break the spell, it was probably when she'd taken me along with her to swim here, when she'd allowed me to come that close to the mystery. Maybe I should have ravished her on the beach that day and just hoped like hell she'd love me. I sort of doubt it would have worked like that. Then, after all, she'd been in her pride – and even last night, when the terror struck her, me and my precious dick and my cut-rate humanity had just been things to mourn over and sneer at in the dark; I had nothing near the power of her compulsion.

So, leaning on the tree, I closed my eyes and said, ‘Aw, Agnes.' And when I looked again, she dove.

Maybe she had a moment of comprehension then – because she buckled as she fell, as if to stop herself mid-air, and she plunged into the water sloppily. The current slammed her into the diving rock and the serpentine waves grabbed hold of her and tossed her over. Her body was pulled down beneath the water, her limbs splayed, as if she had no power at all, as if she were a doll or a puppet. But she was still conscious, I think, because she surfaced once in the next second or so, and I saw her chin tilt up and her mouth open as she fought for air. She was facing upriver. The next whirlpool was just behind her. That dragged her under finally, and she was drowned.

This I remembered, but hadn't told. Still hadn't told, though the fire was snickering down now, and the wind and the hail were rising. And the girl was at the cottage door – the model, the beneficiary. Lena. She stood soggy and forlorn in her wet earmuffs, still hesitating with her hand upon the knob, composing some savage or penetrating or triumphant exit speech to clobber me with because she thought she wanted to hear about how her crazy mother fashioned her likeness every day and then used it every morning to cut down on her heating bills. What ode of inspirational joy would she make of that, I wondered. What would she console herself with
–
it would be kind of interesting to know. Well, Agnes probably did save her life back then by refusing to let Roland bring her home to the cabin. And the great sculptress did get a little glum of an evening because she still felt enough mother-love to intrude on her madness – almost. For myself, I know – because none of us lives without consolation – for myself, when I get tired of rehearsing it in my lonesome bed, and the stars have revolved toward sunrise in the unseen sky – not by way of mitigation for my crimes, incidentally, but just to get some sleep, dear God, to get a little sleep – I remember that I did jump into the river after her, I did try to pull her from the water in the end. As I say, I'm no hero; I was plenty scared and almost certain I'd get myself killed. And it was ridiculous, of course: she was a much better swimmer than I was. I even knew it was ridiculous at the time, which is part of what helps me sleep. Because I certainly wasn't suicidal or anything. I just loved her and was pissed off and had to do something, even if it was useless, even if it killed me. So I jumped in
.

Hilarious how the river dragged me off and sucked me under. Hilarious, I mean, because I'd had some idea of swimming after her on the current. I don't think a person's imagination contains any image of his own helplessness. Complete helplessness like that. Even in retrospect, you always wonder if you could have fought harder or thought smarter or done
something
to gain the upper hand. Even when it was happening, come to think of it, I struggled and thrashed as if it made any difference – which it didn't; I could've floated limp and the river would have carried me off the same way, wherever it went. I can still feel the inanimate fact of it, the insentient, irresistible strength big with its guiding laws. I might have been one of the broken branches spinning and shooting past me. I might have been a twig off one of those branches, just part of the river now
.

And the fact that I was stronger at heart than Agnes, that I was saner, that I had a better grasp of the minimum daily requirements of life; these things, like whether she was smarter or kinder or better or more creative than I, had nothing to do with the fact that I survived and she didn't. There just happened to be this rock, this boulder, out in the middle of the river around the bend, submerged but still visible in the rising shelf of waves that curled above it where the river struck. The current at that point carried you out smack toward it, and the water seemed to flow in equal measure around either side. If I'd hit that thing – and there was no chance of missing it – and spun around it to the right – and there were good odds of that, being positioned as I was – I would have died for certain because there was nothing beyond it on that side but a thrashing stretch of white rapids to the brink of a thunderous falls. But, tumbling helplessly about as I was, I was tossed up to the surface with my legs in front of me. My thigh smashed against the rock, sending my whole leg numb, but my upper body, most of my weight, was on the left side of it, so I was carried off, by this chance, to the left, where a tree had been brought down on the bank by the storm. The tree – a maple, I think – was still anchored firmly to the earth by its roots and its branches reached out several yards into the water, much of it above the current. I went crashing into the branches backward – else probably I'd have lost an eye – and, half-conscious, I held onto them, and the tree bore the pressure, and so I dragged myself to shore
.

‘
You're just afraid – really,' said Lena at the door. This was her valedictory now. Spoken to my back because I was still sitting in the Windsor, facing away from her. Hands between my legs, shoulders slumped a little. Ready for the speech to wash over me with whatever force it had. ‘You' re just afraid that no one'll, like, give a damn about you anymore. I mean, it's like: you think the only thing that matters about you now are your secrets. All these people, these reporters, my mother's biographers, me – we all come around here, like, begging you to tell us what you know. And then, like, what if you tell us, right? What if you tell everybody what happened? I mean, it's not like it'd make you famous or anything. It's not like Agnes was a movie star or anything. She just made art. So no one would care, right? No one would come here. They'd just write about what you said and they'd pretend they knew more about it than you did, and what you thought wouldn't even matter. And you wouldn't matter. And that's what you're afraid of, right? They'll go away and I'll go away, and then you'll just be here with yourself and no one'll care. You're just a coward, that's all. You're just afraid to be alone
.'