Rose's Garden (20 page)

But Nolan demurred. “I don't know what to write,” he said. “What do I write? I'm writing to myself?”

“Well, it's only for proof,” Conrad said. “Just so you can see. Write your name or something.” He waved his hand. “Just put your mark there.”

And then he stopped, thought of the archangel, his lost bird, his last, lost letter to Rose. He turned, looked Nolan full in the face.

“I used to write to my wife,” he said. “If I'd taken the birds for a long flight, I'd send her a message. She'd always be here when they got back, you see, clocking them for me.” He paused. “It was something I could count on,” he said.

Nolan stared in at the birds. “I don't have anybody to write to,” he said at last.

And Conrad saw that he was embarrassed, that he was going over in his head all the people he knew, anyone to whom he might say something, something that mattered.

“Well, I'll tell you something,” Conrad said, sitting down slowly on the top step. He thought of everything he knew about pigeons, all the evidence of faith lodged there, the stories he realized he'd always depended on for a confirmation of the value of hope. How was someone swayed toward belief, toward happiness?

“During the First World War,” he said at last, “frontline troops used to carry pigeons with them. It was how they communicated with headquarters if it was too dangerous to spare a runner to send back. They'd send word by pigeon instead, giving their position, describing what was going on, that sort of thing.” He stopped, thought a minute. “Ships took them to sea, too. And in World War II, the Royal Air Force outfitted the birds with tiny cameras rigged so that the shutter would snap a picture at timed intervals. The birds would be dropped from planes, and they'd fly home having shot aerial photos the whole way back. Men parachuted from planes, too, with pigeons strapped to their chests. Sometimes they even sent pigeons ahead, hoping a friendly patriot would recover them and send back word about enemy positions and so on.”

He waited a minute, glanced up at Nolan, who was staring impassively at the birds.

“Eventually, of course,” Conrad went on, “the Germans figured out what was going on and started shooting at them.” He picked a feather from the cuff of his trousers, fluttered it away with his fingers. “Nobody understood exactly how the pigeons always knew how to get home again. But they trusted that whatever they had to say would find the person it was intended for.”

He craned around again to find Nolan with his eyes. He offered the pencil to him. “You just have to trust it,” he said. “It's a mystery, and you just have to trust it.”

Nolan stared back at him and then after a moment took the pencil. He leaned over with the paper on his knee and, after a few seconds of apparently deep thought, wrote for a minute or two. “Here,” he said finally, handing over the paper. He cleared his throat. “I have written to Miss Barteleme. I have told her—to come back. To get well soon.”

Conrad smiled up at him. “That's fine,” he said. “I believe Miss Barteleme will be looking for this bird.”

TOGETHER THEY LOADED
one of Conrad's pigeons into a crate. Conrad selected a roller, capable of impressing Nolan with its high-diving antics, its acrobatics, how it could fall fearlessly from a great height. Conrad picked up the crate, and they headed up the hill through the garden.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked Nolan finally. But the wind had picked up even more, and his words were carried away.

“What?” Nolan leaned over the bed of Conrad's truck, cupped his hand to his ear.

Well, we're a fine pair, Conrad thought. He can't hear and I'm losing an eye. He motioned to Nolan to get in the truck.

Once they were inside with the doors shut, he asked him again, “Where do you want to go? To let the bird out?”

Nolan thought. “What about the reservoir? Lake Arthur?” He leaned forward and looked out the windshield. “You know,” he said suddenly, “I've got a bad feeling about that sky. I think we're going to get hit hard.”

Conrad leaned forward as well and looked up. The sky had been threatening for days, but a terrible struggle was taking place overhead
now, the mountains a bulwark against the clouds, trying to contain an ocean behind them.

“I was up there yesterday,” Nolan went on, still staring through the windshield. “At the reservoir. Walked along the dam for a ways, doing some bird-watching. Fall migration's started. I like to go up and see what's around this time of year. But I'll tell you—” He stopped a minute. “That dam doesn't look good. They made a big show of shoring it up after the hurricane in '42, you know. Havelock Eddison, that old lunatic, donated a Cadillac, drove it right into the lake in front of the dam. And the Army Corps were up there, fooling with it. But it's been a wet summer. The water's high. And I wouldn't bet anything on that dam.” He set his mouth grimly. “Wouldn't bet a damn thing.”

Conrad backed the truck out of his driveway.

“I haven't been up there in years,” he said to Nolan. “My wife used to like to picnic up there, near the falls. She was always finding things to dig up and bring back.” He steered them down the hill, toward town and the road that led in snakelike curves up the far mountain. “She used to call it the Lost Lake.”

Nolan didn't say anything, just craned his head and looked up at the sky again. “I don't take any bets,” he said. “Not with a sky like that.”

ROSE HAD BEEN
right about the lake, Conrad thought, when they walked in through the silent woods to the water's edge, black ripples lapping lightly with a small sound at the top of the old stone-and-earth dam. It did seem like a lost place, a place where something had happened once, though so long ago that no one could remember exactly what.

You might lose your memory here, Conrad thought. You might kneel down to find your face reflected in the watery mirror and forget who you were, the eyes looking back into your own a stranger's. He stopped, stared across the water ribbed with silky silver ripples. He shivered slightly and hurried to catch up to Nolan.

The trees here were pruned high, an upper-story canopy of oaks and hickory. Their leaves muffled the sound of the wind. Conrad carried the crate with his pigeon through the unnatural darkness, following Nolan, who nosed along like a scout, stopping briefly every now and then to cock his head and listen. Finally Nolan stopped near the water's edge, turned to face the trees, and stared up into them for a moment. He pulled a pair of binoculars from his coat pocket. Lifting them to his eyes, he panned slowly through the treetops. After a minute, he removed the glasses, wiped at the lenses with his handkerchief, and then raised them again.

Conrad shifted the cage to his other arm.

“Well, look at that,” Nolan said quietly, not moving the binoculars from his eyes.

“What?”

“Here.” Nolan handed him the glasses. “Up there. In the trees. Just look. Wait.”

Conrad set down the crate and took the glasses from Nolan. He realized again how bad his eye had become, for he couldn't see anything at all for a minute as his good eye struggled for focus. But at last the branches became clear, though something darker, like spreading paint, moved within the brace of leaves and twigs.

And then he saw that it was birds, the bodies of hundreds or even thousands of birds come to rest in the tops of the branches, a thick darkness that shifted like ink, huddled sections rolling gently in the branches as one group of birds parted to make way for another, the flock settling and resettling, a watery sluice opening
and closing. He swung the glasses slightly to the right and then the left, then backed up a step and moved the binoculars in a wider arc. He realized that all the trees as far as he could see were dense with closely feathered wings pumping smoothly, a communal heartbeat high overhead. And yet they made no sound at all. No complaint, no warning.

He dropped the glasses to his chest, turned to look at Nolan, who was squinting, staring up into the leaves.

He opened his mouth, but before he could say anything Nolan stepped forward and clapped his hands.

At the sudden noise a piece of the sky above them lifted and swerved away. The air was full of the sound of beating wings, a buffeting sensation, confused and alarming. Conrad drew back instinctively as if to protect himself. A chorus of screeching cries filled the wood.

But in an instant it was over. The sky above them sealed again; like a rock rolled before a cave's mouth, the birds resettled in the branches, blocking the light. They made an unfamiliar ticking sound.

Conrad stood there, his breath held, and thought he had turned to stone, here in this lost place where the wild creatures of the air had come to roost on the mountain, gathering in the treetops, a rain of stinking hickory nuts and acorns jarred from the branches, falling soundlessly to the soft earth. These were the last uneasy motions of the world, its pointless final adjustments. And he saw Rose's body on the bed, the shape of her discomfort. He had tried to adjust her head on the pillow, tilting her chin away from where it wanted to fall on her breast. But she had resisted him, had opened her eyes, opened her mouth, and he had thought that she would come back then, that she would hear him, that he could say everything that then rose to his lips, the miraculous sentences
ready at last, the thoughts so clear and bright—it would all come to him. He wanted to tell her. And there was something she, too, wanted to say, as if after a lifetime together there was one word that had evaded them, which was now rising like the sun appearing at the window, light flooding into the darkness, breaking over the sill and coming across the floor, rising up the bedclothes and the folded sheet, touching her hands and wrists and arms, the small curve of her listening ear, one word that would be made manifest. He had hovered over her. She had spoken, but he had missed it in the roar of white light that overcame them, his back rounded over her, his hands denting the mattress by her shoulders. It had passed right through him, an interval of illumination, and taken her with it, leaving him behind.

NOLAN HAD WALKED
off, a small figure twenty yards away, advancing slowly, balancing along the thin line of the dam.

Conrad watched him bend down, retrieve a long branch, and drive it in toward the water. Conrad hoisted the pigeon crate again, picked his way over the tangled tree roots along the edge of the lake, and stood at the shoreline.

Nolan turned around carefully and came back along the dam toward Conrad.

“Never seen anything like that before, have you,” he said, though it wasn't a question.

“What's happening?”

Nolan shrugged, looked up. “They're waiting,” he said. “Migration's started, but I guess they know bad weather's coming, and they're just staying put until it blows past. Sort of a voluntary detention.” He grimaced and shoved the stick he was still holding into the water again. “I'll tell you something else.” He fished around with the stick, turned up a dripping tangle, a rib cage of
black, sodden leaves and broken branches. “These spillways are all choked up. Four or five inches of rain and it'll be over the top. This dam's never going to hold all that water. It's going to blow.”

Conrad was queasy. He looked up into the trees, the birds waiting there, shoulder to shoulder. He felt impatient and annoyed. Nolan's grim manner was alarming him.

“Well, surely someone's been up here before this,” Conrad said. “Looked it over.”

“Oh, I don't know,” Nolan said airily. “There's dams like this all over the state, all over the country, in just about every little town you can think of on the East Coast. Wherever there's water. They were built a century ago, or more. It's like bridges. There's bridges ready to fall down all over the place, too. They don't get fixed until they break. And then it's too late.” He turned around and looked out over the water, its restless cargo.

“It'll be just like before,” he said. “Helen, that was the hurricane in ‘42. They put in some discharge pipes after that, but nobody comes around to check on them. And they're all blocked up now. Even the spillway's full.” He turned around to face Conrad.

“See, this is where Laurel lies,” he said, spreading his hands flat, palm down, in the air. “This is the lay of the land,” he continued, and he tilted his hands, swooped them downward, imitating the driving flight of a seabird. “Water will go this way, down the channel in the mountain.” He swayed slightly as if floating above the land itself, feeling its contours, shafts of warm air, cool air, the view beneath him. “Just like last time. It will come down the mountain, come through town, and go right out the other side, following the river.”

Conrad stared at his drifting hands, the tilting table of the landscape.

Nolan wagged his right hand. “Most of Laurel is up on the high
shoulder, here, to the east. That was smart of them. I guess it was obvious that you don't build too much right next to a river that's mostly fed by the wash running down the mountains. Water can go up and down too fast, because when it rains you don't get just the two or three inches falling on your own head. You get it from over the whole area. Every little stream picks it up and channels it right into the river.”

Conrad frowned. He knew enough from his days as an engineer to know that Nolan was right. Heavy rains near mountains were the worst, for exactly the reasons Nolan cited. And all that igneous rock—there was no place for the water to go but right along the surface of the land. He looked down at the lake, the tree roots looping like coarse stitches along the shore.

Nolan stepped off the dam, passed around Conrad. “Coming?” he asked, turning around.

Conrad stared at the water for a moment. He sniffed, taking in the sour scent.

“Coming?” Nolan repeated.