The Time Traveler's Almanac (160 page)

“I don’t know,” the welfare lady said. “Maybe this time he’ll have to go to Murdock.” Murdock is a state mental hospital. I know it well.

“It was the dog gettin’ kilt done it,” one of the children said. Maybe if he had another dog—”

“Another dog,” the welfare lady said. “Aid to Dependent Dogs.” She spoke to Dolores: “Do you have any idea – No. Of course you don’t. I’ll talk to the doctor. I’m afraid it will have to be Murdock.” But she came back later in the day with a toy dog, a stylized stuffed Airdale covered in plush. “Let’s try it, anyhow,” she said. “You never know.”

Loob stared at the toy as emptily as he stared at the rest of the world. After a while the welfare lady said, “Well, I’m not surprised. It was worth trying, though.” She turned to go. Loob reached out and took the toy. His face did not change, but he raised the dog and squeezed it to his chest with both hands, and that evening he devoured his usual enormous meal. For the next five years of his life he was never seen without the toy in his hand.

He did not play with it or show it any sign of affection, or indeed seem to be aware that he held it, but even in his sleep his grip did not wholly relax. In time the plastic stuffing hardened and crumbled and sifted out through rips in the seams of the plush, so that at last Loob carried only a filthy rag; but to all appearances the rag had the same value to him that the new toy had had. It may have been that the sticky wad of cloth provided the only continuity in his life, the only thing of permanence in his inconstant world. Or perhaps he was after all capable of some murky analogue of emotion and felt something akin to affection for the ruined toy. It is even possible that he had never perceived it as a representation of a dog, but simply as an object tendered in kindness, and hence not to be relinquished. Whatever the reason, it was unique in the world, a thing that appeared to matter to Loob.

Dolores took it from him one day, took it and burned it and so created her own beginnings and condemned a town. She took Loob’s rag out of simple malice, out of a heartfelt desire to cause him pain; but she never knew whether or not the confiscation had really hurt him, any more than in the past she had been able to tell if he had heard her voice when she railed at him or felt the blows when she struck him. This time, though, she had achieved her purpose.

It was a bad morning for her, a morning when the thrum and jangle of her nerves had begun before she awoke, so that she came to consciousness depressed and apprehensive, with a yellow taste in her mouth and an incipient tremor in her limbs. She was well aware of the cause, which was a lack of alcohol in her system; and she remembered clearly and with despair that before going to sleep she had drunk the last drop in the house, having debated leaving a pick-me-up in the vodka bottle and deciding against it. She had had this experience before, and she knew precisely the course it would take. It was absolutely necessary that she have a bottle within the next hour, or the shaking and nausea would utterly incapacitate her.

The car would not start. She sat behind the wheel and cursed, a stringy woman with bad teeth and lank hair, musty and disheveled and becoming frantic. Without pause in her swearing she left the car and, sweating, returned to the house to use the telephone. The taxicab company told her the town’s only taxi would not be available until the afternoon.

She stood clutching the telephone, frozen by panic. She did not see how she could walk the mile to the liquor store, but no matter how desperately she tried, she could think of no alternative. She was quite unable to cope with the problem. Until her brain had received its wonted portion of alcohol, it scarcely functioned at all, and getting the alcohol to make thinking possible was itself her problem. Frustration squeezed her in a clawed vice and became anger, a red extremity of rage that she thought might burst her head with its intensity.

Through the door to the kitchen she caught sight of Loob, sitting dumbly in his corner staring at nothing. “You bastard!” she shouted. “You goddam crazy dummy, you old goddam crazy dummy! Sit and hold your goddam crazy rag all day, you goddam crazy dummy! Why can’t you
do
something?”

Loob did not move, did not blink. She rushed into the kitchen and struck him on the cheek with her fist. He gave no sign of feeling it. “Goddam you!” she shouted. “Goddam, oh, goddam!” Loob sat and stared emptily. “You bastard,” she said, panting now. “Oh, you big dummy bastard.” Her eye fell upon the rag. “Oh, you big dummy bastard with your rag.”

She snatched suddenly, and the rag was in her hand. Without hesitation she pulled a lid off the stove and dropped the rag inside, where coals still glowed. “There, you crazy dummy!” she said. “There’s your crazy rag.” There was a crackle of flame inside the stove.

Still Loob made no sign. She gave a wordless shriek, a yelp of pure, helpless rage, and struck him again, to no effect whatever. She stood trembling for a moment and then ran from the room and from the house and stood sobbing beside the road. A car came, and she held up her hand. The car stopped and picked her up.

In the kitchen Loob sat without movement for some time. Then his hand opened, lay so for a moment, and clenched again. He repeated the movement two or three times. He rose ponderously, lurched out through the kitchen door, and made his way through the litter of the back yard to a gap in the fence, and thence through a vacant lot to Dappling Road. He proceeded erratically down the road, as he had a thousand times before, and turned in at the derelict slag lane that led down to the old house. When he reached the house he climbed the discolored stone steps, entered, and took his seat in the window. His hand was slowly clenching and unclenching.

Something new had happened – was happening – to him: he was, improbably, in the grip of an emotion. Somewhere in the ruinous labyrinth of his mind there was adumbrated a feeling of loss, something nameless that was forever gone. There was no way for him to weigh the matter, to reflect upon the strangeness of this phenomenon; he could only react instinctively:
Danger. Strike.
He struck.

It was toward the end of a long August afternoon in 1905, and Sam Dappling was opening a door, entering the room where Olivia was playing Chopin. A house-guest, a cousin from Philadelphia, stood beside the piano and turned the pages of the music, and two other visitors, another cousin and his wife, listened from seats on a divan. As he crossed the threshold, placid, genial Sam Dappling went mad; the black discharge of Loob’s strange ordnance smashed into his brain, instantly exploding a million subtle connections, and in the moment of passing through the doorway Sam Dappling ceased to exist. In his stead was something monstrous, a thing bulging with insensate ferocity, that ran suddenly into the room and tore from the wall the Civil War saber that hung under a portrait of old General Dappling. It whirled with the saber in its hand and without the slightest pause accelerated into frenzied motion, filling the room with a demented fury of destruction and dismemberment; and when the butchery at last was done, it again did not pause, but rushed dripping out of that place of blood and stink and twitching scraps into the outdoors, onto the lawn where a child and a dog played in the sunshine.

It left unspeakable things scattered there on the grass and plunged, howling, into the barn, where it found only a mare and her foal, upon whom it fell in undiminished frenzy. When there was no more movement in the stall, it paused for a fraction of a moment. In the loft pigeons were fluttering; it heard the sound and went swarming up the ladder, in no way slowed by the saber. The pigeons were out of reach, swooping just under the roof, far above. At the end of the loft was another ladder, leading up to the great opening under the ridge pole through which the hay was hauled into the mow. It scuttled up with the agility of a great feral monkey. A startled pigeon flapped in confusion and then flew hastily through the opening, and the thing that had been Sam Dappling leaped for it, wildly cutting with its sword. The pigeon rose gracefully and curved back to alight on the roof. The thing sailed outward and dropped, still slicing and hacking at the air through which it fell. It struck the hard-packed earth and bounced slightly and was still. In the house the screaming had just begun.

For Henry Dappling it never stopped. He lived for the seven years that remained of his life with a never-ending scream in his ears. It was not the screaming from the house that he heard; it was the demented noise that came from Mrs. McVay, who was standing on the lawn with her face to the sky as he rode the gray out of the woods that evening. He had emerged from the sun-shot cool gloom and silence of the forest into the full evening sunlight and pulled up as usual. He heard it then, a mindless howl of terror and loss and unutterable grief, ripping through the bright clear air with ugly insistence, smirching the evening. He put the gray into a dead run, down the meadow and the drive and over the lawn to where she stood screaming and screaming. He saw what she held in her hands.

That was the real end of Henry Dappling’s life. His remaining seven years were something worse than death. He would have made a quick end of it almost immediately, except that he did not see how he could die without knowing
why.
Even a vindictive maniac God must have had a reason for so gross an affront to decency, so loathsome and abominable a cruelty as permitting him to see the bulging small blue eyes and yellow curls of what was frozen in Mrs. McVay’s clawed hands. The question became almost the sole tenant of his mind, a consuming obsession that was never absent for a second of his years as a mad hermit in his mansion. He did not find his answer, of course, and he died at last with the screaming still in his ears, alone in the great house where mildew and dry rot were crumbling the interior and weeds and branches besieged the walls. Long before his death the house had come to look desolate and abandoned, and it was known as a haunted house while its master still lived within its walls.

He had attended the funeral; indeed, he had taken charge from the very first, from the moment he had pried Mrs. McVay’s hands away from their awful burden. He had shouted at her in so loud and peremptory a voice that her hysteria was punctured, and she took hold of herself and obeyed his instructions to gather together the men whom he named and to have the sheriff sent for. He himself told the men what to do, evincing no emotion at the sight of the shambles in the house or the pitiful thing that had been his son lying broken on the ramp of the barn. He went about for the three days, with an expressionless face, speaking, when speech was needful, in a precise cold voice, glassy-hard and without apparent grief or rage. He was watched warily: at any moment full realization might strike him, and he could be expected to do something strange – to become violent and murderous or perhaps lose his mind entirely and gibber and drool.

In fact he did none of those things. After the funeral he took the superintendent of the mill aside. “Pay off everybody,” he said. “Yourself, too. Lock it up.”

“What?” said the superintendent. “Pay—? Lock—? What?”

“Do it,” Dappling said. The superintendent did. The town stopped. The big houses lost their people first, as the men who had run the mill betook themselves to Pittsburgh and Gary. Then some of the row houses emptied; venturesome or ambitious men severed their roots and went to Wheeling or Youngstown, while others, in whom the old highland blood ran strong, satisfied a perennial urge and returned to the cabins. A majority stayed. They stayed and watched the town decay around them, a passive indolent community bereft of leadership and energy, doomed now to a long sleep and then extinction.

It stirred to life, briefly, during the First World War; money and importunities from Washington effected a partial resolution of the chaos into which Dappling’s estate had fallen and the mill was put into operation for a year, although the already archaic equipment was hopelessly inefficient. After the Armistice the ponderous machinery of the law again clanked into operation; the gates were re-locked, the new railroad sidings left to rust. The tedious succession of suit and countersuit, stay and deferral, lien and attachment and injunction was resumed and dragged its dusty way through courtrooms and sheriff’s offices and lawyers’ chambers. If Dappling had died with his family, there would have been no problem; his affairs would have been carried on without even a pause by an existing establishment. But he lived on for seven years, and there was no way to appoint an executor or administrator for a living man. They might have had him certified incompetent, but no one dared. And so no taxes were paid or rents collected; no one voted shares of stock or gave proxies for them; no one guarded or was responsible for property and accounts. Sheriff’s deputies nailed notices to doors; servers of process came and went; various bank accounts stagnated or were looted. Numbers of small suppliers went bankrupt; certain bankers and lawyers prospered greatly.

And all the while the town shrank and rotted and waited for the better times that had to come, and Henry Dappling, grown hairy and filthy and emaciated, crept through the dark haunted rooms of his mansion and endlessly asked his unanswerable question. One day in the seventh summer, McVay, who each week left a supply of food for the hermit at the kitchen door, found the previous week’s provisions still on the step. He called the sheriff, who came with a fat deputy, broke into the shuttered house, and found Dappling’s body. The screaming had stopped at last.

Lawful administration of the estate began at once, but it was too late. Except for the federal cutting of the Gordian Knot for wartime purposes, there had never been a hope of bringing enough order out of the chaos to make the mill a going enterprise again. Vultures and then beetles picked the carcass clean and left the town to its own devices.

It could devise nothing but stagnation. When the Great Depression came, the event would have passed unnoticed by the people had it not been for the fact that money began to arrive from the government. They were at first too proud to accept it, and then they accepted it and were ashamed, and in due course they were not ashamed but came to think of it as rightfully theirs. The relief checks became the way of life of the town, an assurance of a livelihood for even the most indolent and feckless. When times at last improved, there was a leaching away of the brighter and abler young, who went to seek a future elsewhere; and by the time “relief” became “welfare,” no one there worked at all except for a few torpid merchants, whose customers paid with government checks. The town would not die, but it lived – or half-lived – as a parasite.