The small man stared at them. The soldier with his arms crossed looked off.
She came over to them and the men stepped back as she leaned over the body. A girl in a floral dress, in white socks crushed at her ankles. Her skin was greenish and oddly lumped. The small man had laid his thin sweater across her face for modesty. The grass under her was stiff and burnt and she stared at it a moment and said without raising her eyes: Who was she?
My niece.
She looked at the small man and then at the soldiers.
I'll help you, she said. I'll take the legs. Her voice was hoarse. He doesn't want to leave her like this, she said to the soldiers. She was surprised to find she did not feel angry. Why don't you bring a coffin over here for us.
The two soldiers looked at each other.
Our orders are to stay here, ma'am, the one said. I'm sorry. They got volunteers.
She said nothing.
After a few moments the first soldier looped his rifle over his shoulder and shook his head and went off towards the coffins. A tall stooped man in a grey sweatshirt passed them and he checked his wallet then tucked it back into his pocket with two fingers. A flock lifted from the telephone lines and wheeled overhead. When the soldier returned he bore the footed end of a coffin and an old volunteer was with him. Its unfinished planks were rough and splintered and the small man stepped into it and bent down the heads of the nails with his boot.
The volunteer slid a fold of tarp under the girl's body and straightened and the small man gripped the tarp in his fists and she stood opposite the volunteer and all three lifted and conducted the girl's decomposing flesh to its casket. The body's hips sagging low over the grass. The head thunked the lip of the coffin bonelessly but the small man's concentrated expression did not alter. She looked down. The girl pale and lovely in her resting. Thinking of her daughter asleep with her hair dark and liquid at her face, her savage brown eyelids. She was not well. There was the smell of fresh lumber and of cooled iron. She rose. Bent by grief perhaps. Her lips moved wordlessly as if arguing with some unseen judge. Against some law greater than the flesh. Be merciful.
The two soldiers slipped away as the volunteer and the small man bore the coffin slouching towards the stadium wall and then the man set off for the tables of typists.
You okay? the volunteer asked.
She did not reply for a long while.
At last she said, I don't think I am.
She stood to one side. He collected the sheets of lumber and stacked them against the iron rails along the wall and he watched her as he worked.
All at once she knew she could not bear another cadaver and she took the mask from her face. She unzipped her jacket and went up the steps and sat high in the bleachers. Grooved steel seats. Chewed gum flattened underfoot. Far below the dark figures stood among the corpses. She peeled off her glove with difficulty and dropped it under the slats and she sat for a long time staring at her hand. It looked very wrong.
She looked off.
Finally she rose.
At the end of the third row she found her. Her clear face was dark and softly furrowed as if she dreamed. She did not dream. Anna Mercia breathed. Child of darkness, child of glass. Laid out on her back, her dark hair in storm upon the grass. Her white shirt was rumpled and streaked with dirt and her school tie hung aslant her flattened breasts. Anna Mercia lowered her head and stood a moment but it did not help. She made her way crinkling between the tarpaulin mounds and sat in the grass beside her daughter and after she had watched her for a few minutes she began to cry. She was still so much a child. Anna Mercia cried harder and harder but made no sound, her dark mouth hanging open. She turned her head and looked out past the fence at the low clouds. The sky a dense black shroud of vapour and ice, water and swirled dust. It did not fall. A shadow slipped across the earth and she groomed her daughter in her waxen sleep her fingers tracing the eyelids and then her hand hung and lifted over her unmoving as if to ensure her safe passage. She sat like that and looked about at the figures wending slowly along the aisles of the dead and the soft crinkling of the corpses and her eyes grew very clear. It did not end. Her wrist was limp in the cold grass, her palm was empty and very dark. It did not end.
In the dream I'm a young man again and walking out to my car at the
airport. I don't have any luggage. It's a vast parkade in the dream. I
don't know that it ever seemed that big in life. I go up and down the rows
in the cold working my way up through the levels until I reach the roof.
A grey rain clatters off the parked fenders there, punches off the dahlias
and rhododendrons planted around the lampposts. I blink the water from
my eyes. There's no one around. When I turn back, my wet shoes have left
prints across the darkening asphalt.
Then I see the car. It's always like that. I turn slightly, see my shoe
prints, see the silver Volvo parked under the open sky. There's a silhouette
in the passenger's seat. It's Callie. I knock on her window but she doesn't
hear me and I can see water beading coldly on the glass and coursing in
slow rivulets over the door. I climb into the back seat, shut the door with
a bang. I wipe my face with my open hands. I stare at the back of her
head.
I know that it's her though I can't see her clearly. I understand she
shouldn't be here and I'm afraid to disturb her, afraid she'll realize her
mistake. The rain daps loudly on the roof, it flecks the windshield. Then
the world outside in its darkness darkens yet further and I peer sadly
through the dappled glass. Shadows of raindrops mottling Callie's hands.
Her skin looking spotted and old. Below us I see the black airport outbuildings
warp and bend through the rivering pane and the black trees
and parked cars beyond also go strange and the world seems to stretch and
distend. I lay my head back upon the cold seat and then the keys in my
hand darken and Callie's skin in the front seat seems to darken and then
the very air itself. Beyond the airport over the fields the sky is white and
blinding and I cradle my eyes thinking the leeched sun must set but it
doesn't set. The darkness comes on.
Callie? I say quietly.
But she is gone in the darkness. I think at that moment I will wake
up but I don't wake up. The darkness comes on. It comes on overtaking
car and parkade and airport and I shift in my seat, stare back through
the rear window at the blackening world. Until it too has passed, as all
things pass, into that darkness.
The old man's tea had gone cold. He held the gold-rimmed cup in both hands and stared hard into it as if to divine some meaning there. Turning the cup slow on its china base in his thick fingers, the tea whorling the more slow within. The little girl coughed. A spoon clinked. He looked up. The heatstove ticked softly and the custodian rose and took up the poker and hefted back the hinged lid to stir the smouldering logs. A wall of heat rising through the basement. His wrinkled face cast in a red glow of corded wood and ash like some inchoate demon at its forge and his features cast in stark lines of shadow, lines of light. He shut the lid with a clang. Stood wiping his hands on his shirtfront.
If that teacher saw her then I expect she'll turn up, he said.
The organist was staring into the stove. She'll find her, she said. Maybe his mother's found her already.
Of course she'll find her. I can feel it. He bent then to hang the iron poker over the bricks and it swung creaking on its nail.
The old man weighed them both in his dark eyes. The cloistered air smelled faintly of things burning and he pushed his teacup away in its saucer and stood.
I think I will take those aspirin, he said. They're in your car?
The organist lifted her head slowly. Sal?
The custodian rose from his chair but the old man waved him down.
No. No, he said. I'll go.
They're in the glovebox, she said and held out the keys. It's a blue Prius.
He studied the boy sleeping in the corner, his hollowed eyes.
He came up the water-stained stairs and crossed the chancel in the grey light, his heels echoing up the empty aisles. The church felt sad and hugely vacant. The thick doors stood open to the street and the old man grimaced there at the threshold to see the blue world beyond. He began combing his hair with his fingers and clapping the dust from his sleeves. Sat on the nearest pew and bent over and retied his laces then straightened and studied the overcast sky. His face was tanned with grime and his hair still bent up in white tufts from the crown of his head and he looked like a man confounded by grief.
A car drove slowly past. The old man walked out into the dusk and down the peeling wood steps. The handrail rattled and jounced under his weight like a gangplank. A wind was up from the east and the side of his face went cold with it. He thought of the woman bowed with grief on the dark sofa, her stillness. He went slow and his heart felt sore and he was crossing the lawn towards the drainage ditch when his feet went out from under him and he fell. He fell hard onto his side and the breath went out of him. The street was dead and the shuttered houses dark and where the old man lay it seemed suddenly that the light had dimmed and the noise of the world been shut off and he lay listening for the sound of his blood but he heard nothing. A slight wind still coming down cold upon him, ripping at the grasses without sound. He shut his eyes.
After a time he got to his feet. It was starting to rain. His trouser leg was grimed with clay and there was grass in his fingers and he could see his skin through the thin shirt. He wiped his hands in the grass. He could just see in the rising dusk the boarded-up fence of Henderson Field, the grey figures ghosting past. A shadow came to the open doors of the church and stood staring out at him but he could not make out the face. Thin and enshrouded and cadaverous. After a time the figure went back in and the old man shivered and turned away.
Across the road an old chestnut tree stood impassively on a rise of grass and all through his childhood he knew that tree must have stood as it stood now. All of the dark yards surrounding had been forest then and he remembered prowling the trees with sticks and pine cones after church, his good grey slacks greased with mud. He ran a wet hand across his eyes. He heard the faint laughter of fathers drifting out of the sunlight, the cries of children in the trees. He turned his face to the darkening sky. At the edge of the cold light he could almost see them, blurred and fading. Shadows of mothers, shielding their eyes. Calling their loved ones in.