From the Dust Returned (13 page)

"Bread and onions." Timothy joined the smiles. "Onions and bread!"

The onions had been put aside with the bread sheaved near them to reveal a gossamer veil laid over the face in the box.

Mother gestured. "Timothy?"

Timothy fell back.

"No!"

"She's not afraid to be
seen.
You must not be afraid to
see.
Now."

He took hold and pulled.

The veil plumed on the air like a puff of white smoke and blew away.

And Angelina Marguerite lay there with her face upturned to the candlelight, her eyes shut, her mouth enclosing the faintest smile.

And she was a joy and a delight and a lovely toy crated and shipped from another time.

The candlelight trembled at the sight. The Family knew an earthquake of response. Their exclamations flooded the dark air. Not knowing what to do, they applauded the golden hair, the fine high cheekbones, the arched eyebrows, the small and perfect ears, the satisfied but not self-satisfied mouth, fresh from a thousand years' sleep, her bosom a slender hillock, her hands like ivory pendants, the feet tiny and asking to be kissed, there seemed no need for shoes. Good Lord, they would
carry
her
anywhere
!

Anywhere! thought Timothy.

"I don't understand," he said. "How can this
be
?"

"This
is
," someone whispered.

And the whisper had come from the breathing mouth of this creature come alive.

"But—" said Timothy.

"Death is mysterious." Mother brushed Timothy's cheek. "Life even more so. Choose. And whether you blow away in dust at life's end or arrive at youngness and go back to birth and within birth, that is
stranger
than strange, yes?"

"Yes, but—"

"Accept." Father lifted his wineglass. "Celebrate this miracle."

And Timothy indeed saw the miracle, this daughter of time, with a face of youngness which became younger, yes, and even younger as he stared. It was as if she lay beneath a smoothly flowing, slowly passing stream of clear water which washed her cheeks with shadows and light and trembled her eyelids and purified her flesh.

Angelina Marguerite at this moment opened her eyes. They were the soft blue of the delicate veins in her temples.

"Well," she whispered. "Is this birth, or rebirth?"

Quiet laughter from all.

"One or the other. Other or none." Timothy's mother reached out. "Welcome. Stay. Soon enough you will leave for your sublime destiny."

"But," Timothy protested yet again.

"Never doubt. Simply
be
."

An hour younger than a minute ago, Angelina Marguerite took Mother's hand.

"Is there a cake with candles? Is this my first birthday or my nine hundred and ninety-ninth?"

Seeking the answer, more wine was poured.

Sunsets are loved because they vanish.

Flowers are loved because they go.

The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart.

These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.

So it was with Angelina Marguerite and the Family, but most of all with Timothy.

Make haste to live
was the motto embroidered on a great hall carpet over which they walked or ran each minute of each hour of the day that the lovely maid occupied their lives. For she was diminishing from nineteen to eighteen-and-one-half to eighteen-and-one-quarter, even as they stared and put out their hands to quell this endless yet beautiful retrogression.

"Wait for me!" Timothy cried one day, seeing her face and body melt from beauty to beauty, like a candle lit and never ceasing.

"Catch me if you can!" And Angelina Marguerite ran down across a meadow with Timothy weeping in pursuit.

Exhausted, with a great laugh, she fell and waited for him to drop near.

"Caught," he cried. "Trapped!"

"No," she said, gently, and took his hand. "Never, dear cousin. Listen."

Then she explained:

"I shall be this, eighteen, for a little while, and then seventeen and sixteen a small while, and oh, Timothy, while I am this and then that age, I must find me a quick love, a swift romance, in the town below, and not let them know I come down from this hill or this House, and release myself to joy for a little while before I am fifteen and fourteen and thirteen and then the innocence of twelve before the pulses start and the blood manifests, and then eleven and ignorant but happy, and ten—even happier. And then again, Timothy, if only somewhere along the way backward, you and I could conjoin, clasp hands in friendship, clasp bodies in joy, how fine, yes?"

"I don't know what you're
talking
about!"

"How old are you, Timothy?"

"Ten, I guess."

"Ah, yes. So you
don't
know what I say."

She leaned forward suddenly and gave him such a kiss on his mouth that his eardrums fractured and the soft spot on his skull ached.

"Does that give you a small idea of what you'll miss by not loving me?" she said.

Timothy blushed all over. His soul leaped out from his body and rushed back in in a storm.

"Almost," he whispered.

"Eventually," she said, "I must leave."

"That's terrible," he cried. "Why?"

"I must, dear cousin, for if I stay too long in any one place they will notice, as the months pass, that in October I was eighteen, and in November seventeen and then sixteen, and by Christmas ten, and with spring two, and then one, and then search and seek to find some flesh to mother me as I hide back in her womb to visit that Forever from whence we all came to visit Time and vanish in Eternity. So Shakespeare said."

"
Did
he?"

"Life is a visit, bounded by sleeps. I, being different, came from the sleep of Death. I run to hide in the sleep of Life. Next spring I will be a seed stored in the honeycomb of some maiden/wife, eager for collisions, ripe for life."

"You
are
strange," said Timothy.

"Very."

"Have there been many like you since the world began?"

"Few that we know. But aren't I fortunate, to be born from the grave, then buried in some child bride's pomegranate maze?"

"No
wonder
they were celebrating. All that laughter!" said Timothy, "and the
wine
!"

"No wonder," said Angelina Marguerite, and leaned for another kiss.

"Wait!"

Too late. Her mouth touched his. A furious blush fired his ears, burnt his neck, broke and rebuilt his legs, banged his heart and rose to crimson his entire face. A vast motor started in his loins and died nameless.

"Oh, Timothy," she said, "what a shame that we could not truly meet, you moving on to your grave, and I to a sweet oblivion of flesh and procreation."

"Yes," said Timothy, "a shame."

"Do you know what goodbye means? It means God be with you. Goodbye, Timothy."

"What?!"

"Goodbye!"

And before he could stagger to his feet she had fled up in the House to vanish forever.

Some said that she was seen later in the village, almost seventeen, and the week after that in a town across country, reaching and then leaving sixteen, then in Boston. The sum? Fifteen! And later on a ship bound for France, a girl of twelve.

From there her history fell into mist. Soon a letter arrived that described a child of five who stayed some few days in Provence. A traveler from Marseilles said a two-year-old, passing in a woman's arms, crowed and laughed some inarticulate message about some country, some town, a tree, and a House. But that, others said, was bumbershoot and poppycock.

The sum that set the seal on Angelina Marguerite was an Italian count passing through Illinois who, savoring the victuals and vintages at a mid-state hostel, told of a remarkable encounter with a Roman countess, pregnant and full ripe with child, whose eye had the eye of Angelina and the mouth of Marguerite and the shining of the soul of both. But, again, nonsense!

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust?

Timothy, at dinner one night surrounded by his Family, and napkinning his tears, said:

"Angelina means like an angel, yes? And Marguerite is a flower?"

"Yes," someone said.

"Well then," murmured Timothy. "Flowers and angels. Not ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Angels and flowers."

"Let's drink to that," said all.

And they did.

But they were more than that.

They hollowed, they lingered, they roared down and wafted up, but they did not actually sweep the chimney vents and flues.

They occupied them. They came from far places to live there. And whether they were ethereal, sussurance of spirit, reminiscence of ghost, ambience of light, shadow, and slept or wakened soul, none could say.

They traveled in clouds, the high cirrus clouds of summer, and fell in thunderous frights of lightning when storms prevailed. Or often without benefit of cirrus or alto stratus they came upon the open sky meadows and could be seen brushing the acres of wheat or lifting die veils of falling snow as if to peer at their final destination: the House and the ninety-nine or some said one hundred chimneys.

Ninety-nine or one hundred chimneys, which gasped at the skies asking to be filled, to be fed, and this hollow utterance pulled from the atmosphere each passing breeze, each moving weather, from all directions.

So the shapeless and invisible winds arrived one by one, carrying the semblance of their old weathers with them. And if they had names at all it was monsoon or sirocco or santana. And the ninety-nine or one hundred chimneys let them sift, wander, fall to lodge their summer solstice tempers and wintry blasts in the sooted bricks there to resummon themselves on August noons as crooning breeze or sound late nights with sounds like dying souls or then again reverberant of that melancholy suffering of sound, the foghorn, far out on the peninsulas of life, stranded on ship-wreck crags, a thousand funerals in one, a lament of burial seas.

The arrivals had occurred long before, then during, and long after the Homecoming with no commingling of essences beyond the hearth or up the flue. They were as composed and sedate as cats, great feline things in no need of company or sustenance, for they fed upon them-selves and were well sated sure.

Catwise indeed were they, with starts from the outer Hebrides or arousals in the China Seas, or much-hurried hurricanes flung hopeless from the Cape, or flurried south with freezing breaths to meet the breaths of fire that moved intemperately across the Gulf.

And thus it was the chimney flues in all the House were full-inhabited, with winds of memory that knew the oldest storms and told their frights if you but lit the logs below.

Or if the voice of Timothy shot up this flue or that, the Mystic Seaport winter would weep a tale, or London's fog in transit on a westerly would whisper, murmur, hiss lipless its unlit days and sightless nights.

All told there were then some ninety-nine, perhaps one hundred kindred spells of weather on the move, a tribe of temperatures, the ancient airs, the recent blows of hot and cold that, seeking, found good lodging where thus hidden they waited for a rain-soaked wind to cork them out to join carousals of fresh storm. The House then was a great vintage bin of muttered yelling, heard but not seen, opinions of pure air.

Sometimes when Timothy could not sleep he lay down on this hearth or that and called on up the flue to summon midnight company and speak the traveling of winds across the world. Then he knew company as down the brick-walled flues the spirit tales would drift in lightless snow to touch his ears, excite Arach's hysterias, palpitate the Mouse, and cause Anuba to sit up in feline recognition of strange friends.

And so it was the House was home to seen or most unseen, the rooms of Family walled in by comforters of breeze and wind and climates from all time and every place.

Invisibles in flues.

Rememberers of noons.

Tellers of sunsets lost in air.

The ninety-nine or one hundred chimneys, nothing in each.

Except
them.

Father looked into Cecy's attic-space just before dawn. She lay upon the riverbed sands, quietly. He shook his head and waved at her.

"Now, if you can tell me what good she does, lying there," he said, "I'll devour the crepe on our porch windows. Sleeping all night, eating breakfast, and then sleeping again all day."

"Oh, but she's helpful!" explained Mother, leading him downstairs away from Cecy's slumbering pale figure. "Why, she's one of the busiest members of the Family. What good are your brothers who sleep all day and do nothing?"

They glided down through the scent of black candles, the black crepe on the banister whispering as they passed.

"Well, we work nights," Father said. "Can we help it if we're—as you put it—old-fashioned?"

"Of course not. Everyone in the Family can't be of the age." She opened the cellar door and they stepped down in darkness. "It's really very lucky I don't have to sleep
at all.
If you were married to a night-sleeper, what a marriage! Each of us to our own. All wild. That's how the Family goes. Sometimes like Cecy, all mind; and then there's Uncle Einar, all wing; and then again there's Timothy, all calm and worldly normal. You, sleeping days. And me, awake all and all of my life. So Cecy shouldn't be too much to understand. She helps in a million ways. She sails her mind to the greengrocer's for me! Or occupies the butcher's head to see if he's fresh out of good cuts. She warns me when gossips threaten to visit and spoil the afternoon. She's a travel pomegranate full of flights!"