Dinner Along the Amazon (17 page)

Moving east, then, from the old man and the church, you came to the Jewell place, Kings’, and Feltons’. Past Feltons’ there was a breach of wilderness which was cut by the river. On the west bank of the river were the Cormans, and beyond them, on the other side of the road, was Barney Lambert. By Lambert’s the road turned and was gone. It disappeared town-ward into the trees.

Monday at noon, the childless Jewells got into their station wagon and went away, leaving their farm to the whisper of mice—and there remained then only the Feltons, Cormans (by the river), and Barney Lambert—plus old Turvey.

At 2:00 p.m., Monday, the second airplane flew over. It cut a few high white lines into the sky and departed without making its presence more than obliquely obvious. It was there; it was gone. Its meaning remained a question.

Harvey Felton phoned Joe Corman and said, “Well, are you staying?” and Joe Corman said, “Yes, until we’re absolutely certain.”

But Felton was feeling more than mere apprehension now because his neighbours, the Kings, had already left. Through binoculars there was something very unnerving about their barn door standing wide open like that, and the horses gone and the cows gone and only the cat wandering lost and sitting silently magnified at the back door of the King house, which did not and would never again open for it.

So, at four o’clock, Harvey Felton, his wife and two sons got into their truck and drove down the road to the Cormans’. One boy sat between them and Mrs Felton held the other on her lap. As they went along, Kate Felton stared quietly at the annual tragedy of the falling leaves and thought: this is so natural. It’s natural. Why can’t they just leave us alone with what’s natural like this?

Joe Corman’s house was particularly small, so the two families, replete with babies and dogs, held their meeting on the bridge, while the children threw stones into the water.

Felton had long, rustic bones and gray skin—except on his face, where the bones were feminine small and the skin remarkably pink. He had great thick fingers whose dried, cracked skin had not been flesh-coloured since he’d ceased, at twelve, to be a schoolchild—and standing on the bridge, he kept trying to jam these fingers down the closed collar of his denim shirt, or into the belt loops of his pants, or, fisted together, into his armpits. To no avail.

It couldn’t ever be right to leave, Felton’s erratic posture seemed to say. It was wrong. No matter what the Government said, or how many licences they issued or denied, these people had always been here—always—all of them—for generations impossible to tell—and it didn’t matter that they should leave or that they must, according to law—it was just wrong, and he simply could not get over that. He could not reason any more and his wife became afraid.

Mrs Corman, so large that she was semi-invalid, was not afraid but she was curious. She stacked her bulk against the stone abutment of the bridge and watched the laconic animation of the men and the stilled, waiting face of the only other woman—Kate Felton. Mrs Corman cleaned her fingernails with an old guitar pick of her son’s, but Mrs Felton was pale and catatonic, with a blanket thrown over her emotions.

Mrs Corman felt so sorry for Kate Felton that it was difficult to watch her and to stand so close to her. Stay or go. She herself was relatively relaxed in the knowledge that her own husband could make up his mind to act on a set decision. But poor Kate was caught in a terrific panic of wanting to go now—of having to get out clean without the delay of debate—even without the delay of thought—but her husband, Harvey, just stared with a reminiscent eye into the sliding water, not knowing what to do. Afraid to stay, fearful of going, Harvey Felton was beyond being able to save his wife and children—and Mrs Corman knew it. She wanted to say so, but it was not her place to speak. A family was a family; you simply didn’t interfere.

She could not quite hear the voices of the men and she could no longer bear to look at Kate, so she turned away and looked back at her own beloved house—semi-lost among the trees by the river. We’ve lived here all our lives, she thought. Joe laid that shingle only last May, and I planted the bulbs on Thursday. Why, they renewed our licence in July! So why won’t they let us stay here now? And what’ll we do with the dog?

At five, the E.R.A. Forestry Siren began to wail on the outskirts of town and the meeting on the bridge broke up. If another plane came that night, it was decided, or if there was even a hint of tanker trucks on the highway, then the Cormans would leave. But if there were no plane and no activity on the road, then they would be satisfied that it was not happening yet and they would stay. For a while. Until it did.

Still, Harvey Felton went home from their meeting not knowing.

And it happened.

At 3:10 a.m. a helicopter stuttered through the night and was above the road for at least fifteen minutes before it finally departed. The Cormans had lain awake and now they began to rise and dress, knowing exactly what to do. They started in to fill the back of their truck and both the men, father and son, went down to set the livestock loose.

Up at the Feltons’, Harvey heard the helicopter and sighed and got out of bed and went into the bathroom and locked the door. He was thinking that if he could be alone, with just the light bulb and the mirrors and the mesmeric glitter of being bathed and warmed and steamed in memory—if he could just sink into this roomful of pleasures, womb-like, with the comfort of water—if he could only stay there a moment—an hour—he would be safe. Perhaps he could even gain admission to his courage, if he could be alone with the sanity of the past.

But Kate got up and hadn’t slept either and went down the hall to the door and stood there scratching at it lightly so as not to wake the children. And she wanted to get in, through to him, but he would not let her and so she stood there (leaning, really), whispering through the door but thinking that she was shouting, until at last she lost her voice. And when all she got was a stammered protraction of Harvey’s indecision of the afternoon (in fact, she thought, of all his life), she wandered from the door so quietly that he was not aware she’d left.

The Arthur Kings being gone, there were no immediate neighbours to hear her when she fired a gun, point-blank, into the temples of each of her sleeping sons. Or when she prayed and turned the thing into her own mouth without amen because she didn’t want time to think about conclusions or how you came to them. She simply pulled the trigger and the whole thing was over.

For her.

So, at about five o’clock, when Harvey Felton rode away on the back of Joe Corman’s pick-up truck, his feet dangled bare from his long-boned legs, and one hand was over his face. He hadn’t even dressed, and as if to fortify his reason, he’d gone over to Kings’ in just his pajamas, and had brought along the abandoned cat when he’d walked down the road to the bridge.

Neither Joe nor Joe Junior, spoke of the blood that covered him, and because of it, no one asked after his wife and his sons. In her mind, little Nella Corman was certain that Harvey had committed murder, but Mrs Corman, having taken her private look at Kate on the bridge the previous afternoon, merely sighed and tried to remember whether they had brought with them their own guns. And saw that yes, they had.

Barney Lambert’s wife was many years dead and his daughter had some time ago been accepted for Government-approved marriage in the City. So he lived alone.

Barney had set the expression on his face the day his wife died and no one had seen it alter since. It was not a dour expression, or even sad. It was just set and there was never animation.

But he was liked. His eyes showed you his whole life and sometimes yours, too, as you stood talking to him. Through his silence he could make the wisdom or the foolishness of what you said apparent. For a man who did so much listening, he had remarkably small ears, and when he was in his twenties and thirties, people had regarded him as the best-looking, the most athletic, and the kindest young man in the district. He had married Ethel Felton, a cousin of Harvey’s. But that was all a long time ago, before you had to have a licence to live, and Barney was fifty-two years old now, living on remembrance.

When his daughter met and married her man and was given her clearance to live in the City and was gone, Barney closed the gates down by the road and without ill will of any kind, just removed himself from the people around him and became inaccessible. But he remained all that he had been—kindly, intelligent, friendly if met—and silent. He took to cultivating cabbages (a difficult crop) and to raising a menagerie of animals culled from their world without any apparent thought for their usefulness to him. Only of his usefulness to them. He had three burros, a mule, two goats, a cow, three Canada geese, and a dog. In the house he kept a cat and another dog who was too old to get around.

He lived a plain life within a certain discipline that was neither rigid nor lax. He was aware of Time but never ran to do anything. He was not a paragon of tidiness, but he never threw a paper or a pillow on the floor.

Barney had heard all that was going on—the aircraft, the various leave-takings, and the E.R.A. Forestry Siren. When the Cormans drove by from the river on the Tuesday morning, Barney was watching from the upstairs windows of his house, moving from room to room to see them out of sight. He noted the posture of Harvey Felton as he slumped there, holding the cat and his own face, and he remembered his own grief and he knew, more or less, what had happened to Kate Felton, and maybe to the boys, too. Barney had ceased at about the same time as everyone else to be aware that there was a God, and so he did not pray, even mentally, for these would-be survivors. A few women could tolerate prayers, but men could not, and children were alarmed by the ridiculous posture of prayer and by the closed eyes and the silent, moving lips. Still, Barney had respect and awe for something and that something was Nature and so, when he saw his neighbours depart and one of them was in grief, he slapped his thighs with the palms of his hands and gave the Universal sigh.

Then he went down to the kitchen where the old dog was asleep under the stove, and he lit the fire to make coffee.

Five-thirty, and a pale, high light beyond the windows.

Barney went outside and remembered where the wheelbarrow was and brought it round to the back door. It was a sizeable barrow of the kind used for carrying manure—not one of those small, neat, garden types, but large and serviceable. He piled blankets and two pillows into it and then went back.

He got out a cardboard carton and a can opener and filled the carton with tinned and bottled food and put the can opener in his pocket. He filled two five-gallon tins with water. Then he stuck toilet paper and a First Aid Kit under his elbows and lifted the carton and carried it outside. He came back for the water and out again, and then back again.

At last, about 6:00 a.m., he sat down to smoke a cigarette and to drink coffee and he tried most of all not to look around the room he was in, and not to want to get up and go through the house, memory by memory. He wanted everything to be as it was now in his mind, even if he remembered it wrong, without the pain of refreshment. So he sat still and squinted at the cup and at his hands and at the cigarette. He did not even look at the table top. He just thought about right now and he saw only what was right there.

There was, however, one very bad moment when the sun made it absolutely all the way over the horizon and had ceased being red or orange or any other colour and was just light—and Barney felt a terrific urge to put his head down and hide. He did then, for one faltered second, give his glance to the rifle in the corner and his mind to the box of bullets in the drawer. But he got out of it by standing up. His pride reminded him that his child had been accepted into Civic Society, that one of them at least had made it and that he could make it, too, if he tried.

He took a spoonful of honey and ate it and another spoonful which he carried over carefully to the old dog.

“Come on,” he said, “it’s time to wake up now. And go.”

And he got to his knees and the old dog, still lying down, licked the spoon clean, and then Barney put the spoon down on the floor and left it there forever—and pulled the dog’s box out from under the stove and soothed the old dog with a litany of hums and haws and lifted him up so that the old dog’s head could rest against his neck and he walked out of the house and laid the old dog very carefully in the barrow on the blankets and pillows and surrounded him with the tinned water and the boxed food and the toilet paper and the First Aid Kit and, at the very last, the cat—and they set off toward the barn.

And all the while the E.R.A. Siren screamed at the edge of the town: This is the End. This is the End. This is the End.

In some instances there were spectators, but this depended on the season and on the direction of the wind. It also depended upon the availability of masks and on whether the event took place on a weekday or on a weekend.

Civic people, rich in safety, could afford to watch from the privacy of the air, and there were usually a few groups of trainees who went up, too, in University helicopters, but as with all such things, Time creates tolerance and even boredom and on this particular day the only people who were by were there to work.

You may wonder what the townspeople made of all this, and probably question the morality of their silence, because they were so close to these events and even neighbours of the victims. But they were neighbours only in the tactical sense. In fact, they formed a bulwark—a wall of protective innocence—between the City-dwellers and the Rural Expendables. The townspeople smiled among themselves and nodded at the sounding of the E.R.A. Forestry Siren and said things like “Goodness, another fire” or “When will it ever end?” and they went inside on these days and closed and locked their doors and pretended through the following weeks that they did not smell or see or hear what patently they did—what certainly they had to. They were particularly adept at going blind.

Barney went down the lane unnoticed and got to the barn and opened the doors.