Текст книги "Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys"
Автор книги: Gary A. Braunbeck
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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 31 страниц)
“I guarded the gate at the south end of the camp. It was a pretty big camp, kind of triangle-shaped, with watchtowers and searchlights and barbed wire, the whole shebang. There was this old Jap tailor being held there with his family and this guy, he started talking to me during my watch every night. This guy was working on a quilt, you see, and since a needle was considered a weapon he could only work on the thing while a guard watched him, and when he was done for the night he’d have to give the needle back. Well, I was the guy who pulled ‘Needle Patrol.’
“The old guy told me that this thing he was working on was a ‘memory quilt’ that he was making from all the pieces of his family’s history. I guess he’d been working on the thing section by section for most of his life. It’d been started by his great-great-great-great-grandfather. The tailor, he had part of the blanket his own mother had used to wrap him in when he was born, plus he had his son’s first sleeping gown, the tea-dress his daughter had worn when she was four, a piece of a velvet slipper worn by his wife the night she gave birth to their son....
“What he’d do, see, is he’d cut the material into a certain shape and then use stuff like paint or other pieces of cloth stuffed with cotton in order to make pictures or symbols on each of the patches. He’d start at one corner of the quilt with the first patch and tell me who it had belonged to, what they’d done for a living, where they’d lived, what they’d looked like, how many kids they’d had, the names of their kids and their kids’ kids, describe the house they had lived in, the countryside where the house’d been...it was really something. Made me feel good, listening to this old guy’s stories, ‘cause the guy trusted me enough to tell me these things, you see? Even though he was a prisoner of war and I was his guard, he told me these things.
“It also made me feel kind of sad, ‘cause I’d get to thinking about how most people don’t even know their great-grandma’s maiden name, let alone the story of her whole life. But this old Jap– ‘scuse me, I guess I really oughtn’t use that word, should I? Don’t show the proper respect for the man or his culture– but you gotta understand, back then, the Japs were the enemy, what with bombing Pearl Harbor and all....
“Where was I? Oh yeah—this old tailor, he knew the history of every last member of his family. He’d finish talking about the first patch, then he’d keep going, talking on about what all the paintings and symbols and shapes meant, and by the time he came round to the last completed patch in the quilt, he’d covered something like six hundred years of his family’s history. ‘Every patch have hundred-hundred stories.’ That’s what the old guy said.
“The idea was that the quilt represented all the memories of your life—not just your own, but them ones that was passed down to you from your ancestors, too. The deal was, at the end of your life, you were supposed to give the quilt to a younger member of your family and it’d be up to them to keeping adding to it; that way, the spirit never really died because there’d always be someone and something to remember that you’d existed, that your life’d meant something. This old tailor was really concerned about that. He said that a person died twice when others forget that they’d lived.
“‘Bout six months after I started Needle Patrol the old tailor came down with a bad case of hepatitis and had to be isolated from everyone else. While this guy was in the infirmary the camp got orders to transfer a hundred or so prisoners, and the old guy’s family was in the transfer group. I tried to stop it but nobody’d lift a finger to help—one sergeant even threatened to have me brought up on charges if I didn’t let it drop. In the meantime, the tailor developed a whole damn slew of secondary infections and kept getting worse, feverish and hallucinating, trying to get out of bed and babbling in his sleep. He lingered for about a week, then he died. As much as I disliked Japs at that time, I damn near cried when I heard the news.
“The day after the tailor died I was typing up all the guards’ weekly reports—you know, them hour-by-hour, night-by-night deals. Turned out that the three watchtower guards—and mind you, these towers was quite a distance from each other—but all three of them reported seeing this old tailor at the same time, at exactly 3:47 in the morning. And all three of them said he was carrying his quilt. I read that and got cold all over, so I called the infirmary to check on what time the tailor had died. He died at 3:47 in the morning, all right, but he died the night after the guards reported seeing him—up till then, he’d been in a coma for most of the week.
“I tried to track down his family but didn’t have any luck. It wouldn’t have mattered much, anyway, ‘cause the quilt come up missing.
“After the war ended and I was discharged, I decided to take your Grandma to New York. See, we’d gotten married about two weeks before I shipped out and we never got the chance to have a real honeymoon. So we went there and saw a couple of Broadway shows and went shopping and had a pretty good time. On our last day there, though, we started wandering around Manhattan, stopping at all these little shops. We came across this one antique store that had all this ‘Early Pioneer’ stuff displayed in its window. Your Grandma stopped to take a look at this big ol’ ottoman in the window and asked me if I thought there were people fool enough to pay six-hundred dollars for a footstool. I didn’t answer her. I let go of her hand and went running into that store, climbed over some tables and such to get in the window, and I tore this dusty old blanket off the back of a rocking chair.
“It was the quilt that Japanese tailor’d been working on in the camp. They only wanted forty dollars for it so you bet your butt I slapped down the cash. We took it back to our hotel room and spread it out on the bed—oh, it was such a beautiful thing. All the colors and pictures, the craftsmanship...I got teary-eyed all over again. But the thing that really got me was that, down in the right-hand corner of the quilt, there was this one patch that had these figures stitched into them. Four figures. Three of them was positioned way up high above the fourth one, and they formed a triangle. The fourth figure was down below, walking kind of all stooped over and carrying what you’d think was a bunch of clothes. I took one look and knew what it was—it was a picture of that tailor’s spirit carrying his quilt, walking around the camp for the last time, looking around for someone to pass his memories on to because he couldn’t find his family.”
By now he’d slipped the stone bottle back under the blankets. He lay on his side, looking at them, his bone-thin hands kneading the pillow. “That’s sort of what I’m trying to do here, you understand? I know that if I was to die real soon I wouldn’t have no finished tapestry to show...mine’s got all these holes in them. I wanna have a whole one, a finished one. I don’t much fancy wandering’ around all-blessed Night because God don’t like what I show Him. I want to fill in the holes I made.” He smiled. “I love you two kids. I truly do. And I love your mom and your Grandma and your dad, too. They’re all real fine people. I just want you all to ...I just wanted to tell you about that.”
“Grampa,” said Alan, softly. “Whatever happened to that man’s quilt?”
Grampa pointed to his top blanket. Marian and Alan looked at one another and shrugged, then Grampa started to pull down the blanket but didn’t have the energy to finish, so they did it for him.
Underneath the top blanket lay the quilt. Even though they could see only very little of it, both Alan and Marian knew it was probably the most beautiful thing they’d ever see.
“I wanna...I wanna be buried with this,” said Grampa. “I already told your dad that.” He
gestured for Marian to lean down close so her could kiss her good-night. “Hon, I need to be alone with your brother for a few minutes, okay?”
“... ‘kay.”
“Good girl. You run along to bed and I’ll see you in the morning.
Marian decided to sleep downstairs that night in case he woke up and needed something, so she went into the living room and laid down on the sofa.
She watched as Grampa gave Alan the stone bottle and explained something to him. Her brother looked so serious as he listened, more like an adult than a nine-year-old. Then she lifted her head and overheard Grampa say, “...wait here with me until your dad gets home...” but then she was too tired to keep her head up.
She woke up around two-thirty in the morning. Lifting her head, she saw her Dad’s work boots setting next to the door. She wondered if he’d had a good night at work. Maybe he could quit soon, like he wanted, and start his own building business. She hoped so. It bothered her that Dad was never home nights.
She heard Grampa tapping against the railing of his bed with something. She went to him.
“You got good ears, little girl. You’ll go far.” He tried to raise himself up but couldn’t.
“I gotta pee,” he said. Marian wanted to go wake Alan or Dad but Grampa wouldn’t hear of it. He finally laid down and pointed to his drinking glass. “Why don’t you empty that damn thing out and I’ll ...I’ll use it.” She did as he asked, carrying the glass into the kitchen and pouring its contents down the sink. When she came back in Grampa had his hands at his sides and was staring at the ceiling.
“Marian, I hate like hell to ask this, hon, but…well...I can’t seem to move my hands. Would you mind, uh...?” Marian already had him out and in the cup, so there was no need for him to finish. “You’re a good girl,” he said. “You make your mom rind dad real proud, you hear?” “Yes sir,” she said. His eyes then lit up, but only for a few moments. “How’s about puttin’...puttin’ my record on real low so’s we don’t wake the whole house? I’d kinda like to hear it.” Again Marian did as she was asked.
When she came back Grampa was desperately trying to empty his bladder but couldn’t get anything to come out. She wiped his forehead, then put her hand on Grampa’s abdomen, pushing down gently. After a few moments the pained expression on his face relaxed as the urine started to fill the cup. He soon finished and nodded his thanks. Marian took the cup into the bathroom to empty it. It was full of blood. She washed her hands afterward and then asked him if there was anything else he needed. “Could you maybe fix it so my record would play over a few times?”
She did, then kissed him good-night again, and went back to the darkness of the living room, where she sat on the sofa and listened for a while before falling asleep again, hoping that Grampa would feel better on the morningside.
When she woke up there was Mom, holding Grampa’s head in her lap, rocking back and forth, stroking his hair and crying. “Yes, that’s it...go to sleep, shh, that’s it, you rest now. You rest....”
Alan came over and hugged Marian. They stayed like that until Mom looked up and saw them and told them to come over and say good-bye to Grampa. Marian was suddenly afraid of the thing that mom was holding in her arms. It wasn’t Grampa. It didn’t even look like a human being.
She pulled away from her brother and saw that some of Grampa’s blood was still on her fingers.
It took her forever to get that hand clean.
5
Press seam allowances toward the darker fabric. Cut apart in pairs. The squares are in their proper color placement and ready for sewing. Place the first pairs right sides together and sew into four patches.
* * *
Alan pressed the top of his baseball cap to make sure it was still in place, then reached into one of his pants pockets and removed the stone bottle. “When Dad came home that night Grampa had both of us cut our thumbs and put some of our blood into this bottle, along with his. Then he gave it to Dad to keep until it would be time to pass it on to me.” He shrugged. “Guess it was some kind of Irish thing, some legend that our great-great-grandfather brought with him when he came to the States.”
“What are you supposed to do with it?”
Alan shook his head. “I can’t tell you yet.” He lifted the bottle into the light, slowly turning it from side to side, admiring it. “There’s something like twelve generations’ worth of Quinlan-men’s blood in here.” He looked straight at her.
“You’re now the only Quinlan woman left who can willingly carry on the family’s bloodline, so it’s your time now.”
Of all the things that raced through her mind at that moment, Marian found herself focusing on one word: willingly.
Alan took hold of her arms and pulled her to her feet. Jack reached up and—like something out of a cartoon or a Washington Irving story—removed his head from his shoulders and held it in front of him, his twig-fingers grasping the stem and removing it from the top of his head.
“Not yet,” said Alan to Jack as he took hold of Marian’s injured wrist, removed the dressing, and pushed on her wound until it burst open, dripping blood into the stone bottle.
Jack guided his head under the flow, trying to ignite his flame with Marian’s blood.
“Stop it,” she said through clenched teeth, wriggling against her brother’s grip but he was stronger than she remembered. He increased the pressure on her arm, pulling it toward the pumpkin while Jack loomed closer, his glow dimming, his form somehow larger and more powerful.
“We need to do it this way,” said Alan. “Just a little more blood, please.”
“Jack Pumpkinhead’s lonely, hon,” said the thing holding its own pumpkin head. “I want our family together again.”
Marian took a deep breath, twisting her wrist as some of her blood slopped into the jack-o’-lantern, then kicked back, the heel of her shoe connecting solidly with Alan’s shin. He howled and released her and Marian made a beeline for the back door because there was no way in hell she’d make it past both of them to the front door. Ignoring Alan’s calling her name, she
made her way into the kitchen and toward the back porch when she was struck in the face by a tree limb and fell backward against the sink counter.
Jack Pumpkinhead help to right her, then stroked her hair. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you like that, but you just have to understand.”
Alan was next to her now. “Look, Sis, I don’t mean to go all Sleepy Hollow on you or anything, but you need to understand that...I’m sick. Just like Dad and Grampa and every other man in the Quinlan line going back for...I don’t know how long.” Her face was throbbing and it hurt too much to move. “Wh-what’s wrong?” “Colon cancer. It runs in the men in the family.” “Have you seen a doctor?” “No need to.”
“Then h-how do you know?”
“The man I killed last night came here and told me.”
Marian felt her shoulders tense.
“It’ll all make sense soon,” he said, and kissed her cheek. For some reason Marian then remembered that both Grandma, Grampa, Mom, and Dad had all died in this house, and all were buried in the Quinlan area of Cedar Hill Cemetery, along with their direct and distant ancestors.
Alan looked at the blood on his fingertips—whether it was his blood, Marian’s, or some of that from the bottle, there was no way to tell. He turned toward one of the upper cupboards and began drawing faces on them. “I know,” he said, “that there’s nothing we can do about the dying, you’re right there. But there is something we can do about the part that comes after the dying, I found that out last night.” He finished the first face– it looked a lot like Grampa’s– then started another. “I suspected for a long while that there might be ways to do it, I even tried a few– but I imagine Laura or Boots told you all about that.”
Marian offered no response. There was no need.
“Okay,” he said. “The first thing you’ve got to ask yourself is this: what kind of tapestry, quilt, whatever, are you supposed to offer up to the Divine Art Critic when you reach the great Gates? Answer: a beautiful one. Because if it’s not beautiful, that means it’s not finished.” He stopped drawing Mom’s face and leaned toward Marian. “But what happens if– regardless of how much you try to make it otherwise– your tapestry doesn’t turn out to be so beautiful? What happens when you offer it up after death and the big Somebody shakes Its omnipotent head. ‘But it’s the best I can do!’ you cry. ‘I really tried, but I just didn’t have all that much nice stuff to work with!’ What happens then? Easy; you and your tapestry are thrown out to wander around all-blessed Night.” “I love you, Alan, but you’re not making sense.” “Stay with me, Sis, you always were the best listener in this house.” Marian stared. “Please let me go, Alan.”
He wasn’t listening. “Families talk about ‘the ties that bind’ a lot, you ever notice that? You know how that phrase originated? From Story-Quilt makers. I kid you not. See, there’s a method of quilting called ‘tessellation,’ which means ‘to form into or adorn with mosaic, a careful juxtaposition of elements into a final, coherent pattern.’ Since the quilt-makers had to employ endless tessellations in order to join the various patches together in order to form the story of their family, the threads they used were referred to as the ‘ties that bind.’ Don’t say I never taught you anything.
“Well, care to guess what those ‘ties’ are in our family, Sis? Love? Loyalty? Personal integrity? Think about. What is it, above all else, that ties you to your family?”
Marian looked down at her legs; they were shaking. She looked at the bloody faces on the cupboards; they were drying. She looked in her brother’s eyes; they told her nothing.
“I don’t know,” she finally said.
“Guilt,” replied Alan. “Guilt is what ties us all together, whether we admit it or not. Oh, sure, it’s easy to dismiss that idea. ‘I do it because I love you.’ ‘I do it because she’s been so good to me.’ ‘ I don’t care how sick or senile he is, I’m going to see him because I love him.’”
Alan laughed; it was breaking glass. “What a fucking bill of goods! You don’t do it because you love someone, you do it because your conscience won’t leave you alone if you don’t. It’s not so much that you love that senile, oatmeal-drooling caricature of a human being in the nursing home bed, you do it so you can clear your conscience. ‘Well, at least I came to see him. At least I did that.’ It’s all such shit. I’m not saying that love doesn’t have a small part in there, it’s just that we tend to ennoble our actions by saying they’re done out of love, when in reality they’re done because we’re scared to death of never being able to forgive ourselves if we don’t at least make the gesture!”
“God, Alan, that’s a horrible way to think.” Marian was so terrified she was on the verge tears, and the last thing she wanted to do now was give into it.
“Is it?” replied her brother. “Think about it. It’s what drove Grampa to us, isn’t it? His last-ditch attempt to clear the slate, to beautify his tapestry. There’s so much that gets buried under the weight of compiling years, so many memories that can find a dark, dusty little corner to hide in, so much unresolved guilt that builds up unnoticed that we can never be sure if we have really made our tapestries whole, beautiful, acceptable, cha-cha-cha. What if Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grampa, all of them, what if when they got to wherever it is we go they pulled out their tapestries and– voila!– right smack in the middle of it was all this shit they’d forgotten about, all these disfiguring little unremembered guilts that crept into to the artwork, huh? Easy—they get banished to ever-blessed Night. But what if there was a way to fix those tapestries? What if there was a way to remove the ugliness from them? They’d have to be accepted then, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t they?” He was almost right in her face now, and Marian, for the first time she could remember, was very much in fear of her brother.
“G-Given what you’ve s-s-said,” she whispered, “I s-s-suppose they would almost h-have to be. Yes.”
Alan’s body suddenly released all its tension. His eyes grew less intense, his shaking stopped, and he smiled his crooked grin. “Good,” he said, taking her hand. His touch was almost too gentle, and Marian noticed with a numb horror that the moist blood squishing between the flesh of their hands was not...was not at all that unpleasant. She closed her eyes and swallowed. “Marian?” “Yes?” “I’m going to tell you how we can do it. I’m going to tell you how we can make their tapestries beautiful once again.” “...all right.”
He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She stared at the faces he’d sketched on the wall, wondering why none of them were dripping because his blood was so fresh.
“Last night, around six or six-thirty– I wasn’t paying that much attention– I was sitting in the front room, just...just sitting, I guess. I kept thinking about all that had gone wrong between Laura and me, and try as I did I couldn’t find the reason for us breaking up like we did.
“You have to understand that the nights were terrible for me, have been for the last eight months since she left, and I...I can’t stand sleeping alone. The fact that everything in our house had her smell on it didn’t help matters any. The chairs, the curtains, our bed– God, especially our bed! She took everything with her when she left, except her smell. It’s the sweetest smell I ever knew. Everything about her was the sweetest I’d ever known.
“Anyhoo, I started going through the closet one day and I found her old black robe and a bra and panty set she’d left behind. They were covered with her scent. It was incredible. I’d hold them next to me and lie on the bed and just...just breathe it in.
“It was so overpowering that I could almost feel her there with me. So I tried laying all the things out like she’d be wearing them if she were still there, and I’d lay there and close my eyes and smell here, so near, so full and ready, and I could sense her body, every part of her body, there in the bed next to me. So one night I didn’t open my eyes, I let her scent carry me as far as it could, and when I reached out to touch her I could feel her skin, and it was so warm, so near, so ready...it was like we’d never been apart. I made love to her that night like I’d never done it before.
“Afterward, I closed my eyes and let the scent cover me. And then I sensed him in the room with me. I looked up and he was just standing there, shaking his head at me.” Marian shuddered. “Wh-who?” “He said his name was Joseph-Something-or-Other, I don’t quite remember.” Marian swallowed. Once. Very loudly. “Comstock?” “What?” “Comstock. Was his last name ‘Comstock’?”
“How’d you know that?” Alan didn’t wait for an answer. “So Joseph says to me, ‘You should turn the gas off.’ So I did. I even opened all the doors and windows so nothing would go wrong. Then he told me what he’d come for, and asked me if I’d lead him to where he needed to go.
“I led him to the spot in the front room, under that hanging of The Last Supper, the spot where Grampa died. He stood there a long time, like he was searching for something, then he turned around and said there’d been a lot Grampa had forgotten about.
“I took him upstairs next, to the guest room where Grandma died. The first thing he did was ask me how she died, and I told him about how Grandma moved in with us after Grampa’s funeral because she felt so bad about things, and I told him about how I’d bring her an orange soda every night so she could read and take her pills, then about that last night when I brought her the soda and she hugged me so hard and kissed me and told me I didn’t have to sit with her if I didn’t want to, she’d understand. I told him about how I left her and how, the next morning, we found her dead because she’d taken all her pills. He just nodded at me and then sat on the bed and then found the things she’d forgotten about, as well. Then I brought him down here and he went right to the spot Dad died—I didn’t even have to show him where. He stumbled a little bit because of all the guilt and regret Dad had inside him when he died.
“The hardest part was finding Mom. I knew she had her stroke at the market and that she DOA at the hospital, but the hard part was going to be finding the exact spot where she died. We wandered through the store for a while– they’re open all night now, isn’t that nice?– until we hit the ‘Miscellaneous’ aisle. She’d gone into that aisle to get some more thread to use on her story quilt because she was almost finished with it. Joseph turned around and told me it started there, the first waves of dizziness and pain and breathing problems.
“Mom always checked-out through lane 7 because it was closest to the payphone so she could call a cab. And she had to call a cab– I’m sure we all know– because all my life I’ve been too chickenshit to drive. If I did drive then maybe– “—but that’s nothing. We walked outside and he found the spot where it really hit her. “Then he looked at me. “Took three steps. “And found her.
“Those fuckers at the hospital lied to us when they said she died on the way! She was dead before they even got there. He even told me what it was she whispered to some woman who was near.
“She was worried that no one would remember to feed the dog, Midnight. Our dog that’s been dead for six goddamn years!
“By then Joseph had everything that he came for, so we went back to the house and down to the basement. He found Dad’s old tool box and took out the hammer.
“‘It’s the only way you can find out,’” he said to me. I knew he was right. I took the hammer from him and turned it around so the claw was facing out. He turned and knelt down in front of me like he was praying. I put my free hand on the back of his head to steady myself because I was so scared, but he said, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ and I wasn’t. It was all there waiting for me, all the ugly little guilts that had found their way into the tapestries.
“I took a breath, pulled back with the hammer, started crying, and swung down at the back of his skull. I remember thinking his head made an interesting sound when it split open. You know the sound a watermelon makes after you cut it down the center and then pry the halves apart? It’s not really a pop or a crunch, but something wet in between the two? That’s what it sounded like when I opened his skull. Then I had to put the hammer down and pry the halves apart with my hands.
“God, it was a mess, but it was worth it. They all spread out before me; all their tapestries with all that unremembered, disfiguring guilt. And I fixed them, Marian, I did it. I wallowed in the ugliness, then took it away, removed it from all of their tapestries until all that was left were the whole, finished, beautiful tessellations of love and memory and happiness. And the things I found out! Did you know Mom once had an affair she never told anyone about? It was with some old friend from her days in the Childrens’ Home. It lasted three weeks and then the guy moved away. Afterward she had these little fantasies about him, which is why she and Dad seemed to have such a new marriage after their twenty-fifth anniversary. Dad never suspected, and wherever he is now, he’ll never know because I’ve got that memory, that guilt, right up here in my mind and in my heart. It’s part of my tapestry now and can’t touch them where they are.
“Oh, and Dad. You know why he always had a problem with his mother? Bitch used to beat him with her shoes when he was a little boy. High heeled shoes. Just take them off and pound at his back until it looked like Swiss cheese. Poor Aunt Boots used to stick him back together afterward and then they’d hug each other and hide in their room, scared to death she’d bust in with a ball bat and kill them both. And everyone wondered why he didn’t cry at her funeral. But the thing is, he never blamed her– he always felt guilty because he was such a bad boy and got his mother mad enough to do that to him! Well, he doesn’t have that anymore, I’ve got it! And I hope his mother is burning in Hell right now, I really do.
“I can’t tell you what it felt like, taking it away like that. It feels awful now– the worst thing I’ve ever felt– but at that moment, up to my eyes in it, it was the greatest sensation I’ve ever known. But when it was over, Joseph’s body flopped over onto its back and spoke to me. The two halves of his face kind of squirmed like worms, but I could understand him just fine, and he told me about you, about how it had to be like this. Then he fell back down and stopped moving.
“I wanted to call someone and tell them all about, how miraculous the whole thing was, but I knew if I called Aunt Boots or Laura they’d have the Twinkie Mobile over here in no time flat, so I did the next best thing; ;I walked over to the Western Union office and sent you a telegram. I knew where your show was so it was easy. It was always great of you to send us your schedule, really it was.
“And here you are. It’s great to see you, Marian. I knew this would just bring us closer together. I just knew it.”
Marian stared the man standing across from her. Closer together? She’d never felt so distanced from anyone or anything in her life. Or afraid. So afraid.
“So,” Alan said in calm, conversational tone. “How’s the show going?”
Marian blinked. Small talk? How-are-you?-chit-chat? Now? Hey, Sis, there’s a mangled body in the basement and by the way how are things with your career?
“Okay,” said Alan, “since you don’t feel like playing catch-up, what say you go find out for yourself.” He nodded at Jack, who began moving Marian toward the basement door.
“Turn on the light, and go down there. What do you say, Sis? If you really want to know if I’ve gone the Permanent Bye-Bye, that’s all you have to do.”
There was no threat in his eyes.
“I love you, Alan.”
“You keep saying that. Look, no one’s going to hurt you, I swear. You’ll walk out that front door as alive as you came in. I’d never let anything happen to you. Never.”
