Bag of Bones (54 page)

“Mike? Are you still there?”

“I'm here, Frank. But I'll be goddamned if I know what could have scared her so.”

“She mentioned one other name I remember: Royce Merrill. She said he was the one who remembered the most, because he was so old. And she said, ‘I don't want Mike to talk to him. I'm afraid that old man might let the cat out of the bag and tell him more than he should know.' Any idea what she meant?”

“Well . . . it's been suggested that a splinter from the old family tree wound up here, but my mother's people are from Memphis. The Noonans are from Maine, but not from this part.” Yet I no longer entirely believed this.

“Mike, you sound almost sick.”

“I'm okay. Better than I was, actually.”

“And you understand why I didn't tell you any of this until now? I mean, if I'd known the ideas you were getting . . . if I'd had any
clue
 . . .”

“I think I understand. The ideas didn't belong in my head to begin with, but once that shit starts to creep in . . .”

“When I got back to Sanford that night and it was over, I guess I thought it was just more of Jo's ‘Oh fuck, there's a shadow on the moon, nobody go out until tomorrow.' She was always the superstitious one, you know—knocking on wood, tossing a pinch of salt over her shoulder if she spilled some, those four-leaf-clover earrings she used to have . . .”

“Or the way she wouldn't wear a pullover if she put it on backward by mistake,” I said. “She claimed doing that would turn around your whole day.”

“Well? Doesn't it?” Frank asked, and I could hear a little smile in his voice.

All at once I remembered Jo completely, right down to the small gold flecks in her left eye, and wanted nobody else. Nobody else would do.

“She thought there was something bad about the house,” Frank said. “That much I
do
know.”

I drew a piece of paper to me and jotted
Kia
on it. “Yes. And by then she may have suspected she was pregnant. She might have been afraid of . . . influences.” There were influences here, all right. “You think she got most of this from Royce Merrill?”

“No, that was just a name she mentioned. She probably talked to dozens of people. Do you know a guy named Kloster? Gloster? Something like that?”

“Auster,” I said. Below
Kia
my pencil was making a series of fat loops that might have been cursive letter
l
's or hair ribbons. “Kenny Auster. Was that it?”

“It sounds right. In any case, you know how she was once she really got going on a thing.”

Yes. Like a terrier after rats.

“Mike? Should I come up there?”

No. Now I was sure. Not Harold Oblowski, not Frank, either. There was a process going on in Sara, something as delicate and as organic as rising bread in a warm room. Frank might interrupt that process . . . or be hurt by it.

“No, I just wanted to get it cleared up. Besides, I'm writing. It's hard for me to have people around when I'm writing.”

“Will you call if I can help?”

“You bet,” I said.

I hung up the telephone, thumbed through the book, and found a listing for
R. MERRILL
on the Deep Bay Road. I called the number, listened to it ring a dozen times, then hung up. No newfangled answering machine for Royce. I wondered idly where he was. Ninety-five seemed a little too old to go dancing at the Country Barn in Harrison, especially on a close night like this one.

I looked at the paper with
Kia
written on it. Below the fat
l
-shapes I wrote
Kyra,
and remembered how, the first time I'd heard Ki say her name, I'd thought it was “Kia” she was saying. Below
Kyra
I wrote
Kito,
hesitated, then wrote
Carla.
I put these names in a box. Beside them I jotted
Johanna, Bridget,
and
Jared.
The fridgeafator people. Folks who wanted me to go down nineteen and go down ninety-two.

“Go down, Moses, you bound for the Promised Land,” I told the empty house. I looked around. Just me and Bunter and the waggy clock . . . except it wasn't.

When it wanted you, it called you.

I got up to get another beer. The fruits and vegetables were in a circle again. In the middle, the letters now spelled:

lye stille

As on some old tombstones—
God grant she lye stille.
I looked at these letters for a long time. Then I remembered the IBM was still out on the deck. I brought it in, plonked it on the dining-room table,
and began to work on my current stupid little book. Fifteen minutes and I was lost, only faintly aware of thunder someplace over the lake, only faintly aware of Bunter's bell shivering from time to time. When I went back to the fridge an hour or so later for another beer and saw that the words in the circle now said

ony lye stille

I hardly noticed. At that moment I didn't care if they lay stille or danced the hucklebuck by the light of the silvery moon. John Shackleford had begun to remember his past, and the child whose only friend he, John, had been. Little neglected Ray Garraty.

I wrote until midnight came. By then the thunder had faded away but the heat held on, as oppressive as a blanket. I turned off the IBM and went to bed . . . thinking, so far as I can remember, nothing at all—not even about Mattie, lying in her own bed not so many miles away. The writing had burned off all thoughts of the real world, at least temporarily. I think that, in the end, that's what it's for. Good or bad, it passes the time.

I
was walking north along The Street. Japanese lanterns lined it, but they were all dark because it was daylight—
bright
daylight. The muggy, smutchy look of mid-July was gone; the sky was that deep sapphire shade which is the sole property of October. The lake was deepest indigo beneath it, sparkling with sun-points. The trees were just past the peak of their autumn colors, burning like torches. A wind out of the south blew the fallen leaves past me and between my legs in rattly, fragrant gusts. The Japanese lanterns nodded as if in approval of the season. Up ahead, faintly, I could hear music. Sara and the Red-Tops. Sara was belting it out, laughing her way through the lyric as she always had . . . only, how could laughter sound so much like a snarl?

“White boy, I'd never kill a child of mine. That you'd even think it!”

I whirled, expecting to see her right behind me, but there was no one there. Well . . .

The Green Lady was there, only she had changed her dress of leaves for autumn and become the Yellow Lady. The bare pine-branch behind her still pointed the way: go north, young man, go north. Not much farther down the path was another birch, the one I'd held onto when that terrible drowning sensation had come over me again.

I waited for it to come again now—for my mouth and throat to fill up with the iron taste of the lake—but it didn't happen. I looked back at the Yellow Lady, then beyond her to Sara Laughs. The house was there, but much reduced: no north wing, no south wing, no second story. No sign of Jo's studio off to the side, either. None of those things had been built yet. The ladybirch had travelled back with me from 1998; so had the one hanging over the lake. Otherwise—

“Where am I?” I asked the Yellow Lady and the nodding Japanese lanterns. Then a better question occurred to me. “
When
am I?” No answer. “It's a dream, isn't it? I'm in bed and dreaming.”

Somewhere out in the brilliant, gold-sparkling net of the lake, a loon called. Twice.
Hoot once for yes, twice for no,
I thought.
Not a dream, Michael. I don't know exactly what it is—spiritual time-travel, maybe—but it's not a dream.

“Is this really happening?” I asked the day, and from somewhere back in the trees, where a track which would eventually come to be known as Lane Forty-two ran toward a dirt road which would eventually come to be known as Route 68, a crow cawed. Just once.

I went to the birch hanging over the lake, slipped
an arm around it (doing it lit a trace memory of slipping my hands around Mattie's waist, feeling her dress slide over her skin), and peered into the water, half-wanting to see the drowned boy, half-fearing to see him. There was no boy there, but something lay on the bottom where he had been, among the rocks and roots and waterweed. I squinted and just then the wind died a little, stilling the glints on the water. It was a cane, one with a gold head. A
Boston Post
cane. Wrapped around it in a rising spiral, their ends waving lazily, were what appeared to be a pair of ribbons—white ones with bright red edges. Seeing Royce's cane wrapped that way made me think of high-school graduations, and the baton the class marshal waves as he or she leads the gowned seniors to their seats. Now I understood why the old crock hadn't answered the phone. Royce Merrill's phone-answering days were all done. I knew that; I also knew I had come to a time before Royce had even been born. Sara Tidwell was here, I could hear her singing, and when Royce had been born in 1903, Sara had already been gone for two years, she and her whole Red-Top family.

“Go down, Moses,” I told the ribbon-wrapped cane in the water. “You bound for the Promised Land.”

I walked on toward the sound of the music, invigorated by the cool air and rushing wind. Now I could hear voices as well, lots of them, talking and shouting and laughing. Rising above them and pumping like a piston was the hoarse cry of a sideshow barker: “Come on in, folks,
hurr
-ay,
hurr
-ay,
hurr
-ay! It's all on the inside but you've got to
hurr
-ay, next show
starts in ten minutes! See Angelina the Snake-Woman, she shimmies, she shakes, she'll bewitch your eye and steal your heart, but don't get too close for her bite is
poy
-son! See Hando the Dog-Faced Boy, terror of the South Seas! See the Human Skeleton! See the Human Gila Monster, relic of a time God forgot! See the Bearded Lady and all the Killer Martians! It's on the inside, yessirree, so
hurr
-ay,
hurr
-ay,
hurr
-ay!”

I could hear the steam-driven calliope of a merry-go-round and the bang of the bell at the top of the post as some lumberjack won a stuffed toy for his sweetie. You could tell from the delighted feminine screams that he'd hit it almost hard enough to pop it off the post. There was the snap of .22s from the shooting gallery, the snoring moo of someone's prize cow . . . and now I began to smell the aromas I have associated with county fairs since I was a boy: sweet fried dough, grilled onions and peppers, cotton candy, manure, hay. I began to walk faster as the strum of guitars and thud of double basses grew louder. My heart kicked into a higher gear. I was going to see them perform, actually see Sara Laughs and the Red-Tops live and onstage. This was no crazy three-part fever-dream, either. This was happening right now, so hurr-ay, hurr-ay, hurr-ay.

The Washburn place (the one that would always be the Bricker place to Mrs. M.) was gone. Beyond where it would eventually be, rising up the steep slope on the eastern side of The Street, was a flight of broad wooden stairs. They reminded me of the ones which lead down from the amusement park to the beach at Old Orchard. Here the Japanese lanterns
were lit in spite of the brightness of the day, and the music was louder than ever. Sara was singing “Jimmy Crack Corn.”

I climbed the stairs toward the laughter and shouts, the sounds of the Red-Tops and the calliope, the smells of fried food and farm animals. Above the stairhead was a wooden arch with

WELCOME TO FRYEBURG FAIR
WELCOME TO THE 20TH CENTURY

printed on it. As I watched, a little boy in short pants and a woman wearing a shirtwaist and an ankle-length linen skirt walked under the arch and toward me. They shimmered, grew gauzy. For a moment I could see their skeletons and the bone grins which lurked beneath their laughing faces. A moment later and they were gone.

Two farmers—one wearing a straw hat, the other gesturing expansively with a corncob pipe—appeared on the Fair side of the arch in exactly the same fashion. In this way I understood that there was a barrier between The Street and the Fair. Yet I did not think it was a barrier which would affect me. I was an exception.

“Is that right?” I asked. “Can I go in?”

The bell at the top of the Test Your Strength pole banged loud and clear. Bong once for yes, twice for no. I continued on up the stairs.

Now I could see the Ferris wheel turning against the brilliant sky, the wheel that had been in the background of the band photo in Osteen's
Dark Score Days.
The framework was metal, but the brightly
painted gondolas were made of wood. Leading up to it like an aisle leading up to an altar was a broad, sawdust-strewn midway. The sawdust was there for a purpose; almost every man I saw was chewing tobacco.

I paused for a few seconds at the top of the stairs, still on the lake side of the arch. I was afraid of what might happen to me if I passed under. Afraid of dying or disappearing, yes, but mostly of never being able to return the way I had come, of being condemned to spend eternity as a visitor to the turn-of-the-century Fryeburg Fair. That was also like a Ray Bradbury story, now that I thought of it.

In the end what drew me into that other world was Sara Tidwell. I had to see her with my own eyes. I had to watch her sing.
Had
to.

I felt a tingling as I stepped beneath the arch, and there was a sighing in my ears, as of a million voices, very far away. Sighing in relief? Dismay? I couldn't tell. All I knew for sure was that being on the other side was different—the difference between looking at a thing through a window and actually being there; the difference between observing and participating.