«I have no idea.»
«They operate the undertaking establishment in town.»
«What!» A gasp.
«Yes!» Shrill laughter. «Isn't that priceless!»
Timothy stood very still.
A pause in the laughter. «They bring home sustenance for Mama, Papa and all of us,» said Laura. «Except, of course, Timothy….»
An uneasy silence. Uncle Jason's voice demanded. «Well? come now. What about Timothy?»
«Oh, Laura, your tongue,» said mother.
Laura went on with it. Timothy shut his eyes. «Timothy doesn't―well―doesn't like blood. He's delicate.»
«He'll learn,» said mother. «He'll learn,» she said very firmly. «He's my son, and he'll learn. He's only fourteen.»
«But I was raised on the stuff,» said Uncle Jason, his voice passing from one room on into another. The wind played the trees outside like harps. A little rain spatted on the windows «raised on the stuff,» passing away into faintness.
Timothy bit his lips and opened his eyes.
«Well, it was all my fault.» Mother was showing them into the kitchen now. «I tried forcing him. You can't force children, you only make them sick, and then they never get a taste for things. Look at Bion, now, he was thirteen before he….»
«I understand,» murmured Uncle Jason. «Timothy will come around.»
«I'm sure he will,» said mother, defiantly.
Candle flames quivered as shadows crossed and recrossed the dozen musty rooms. Timothy was cold. He smelled the hot tallow in his nostrils and instinctively he grabbed at a candle and walked with it around and about the house, pretending to straighten the crape.
«Timothy,» someone whisped behind a patterned wall, hissing and sizzling and sighing the words, «Timothy is afraid of the dark.»
Leonard's voice. Hateful Leonard!
«I like the candle, that's all,» said Timothy in a reproachful whisper.
More lightning, more thunder. Cascades of roaring laughter. Bangings and clickings and shouts and rustles of clothing. Clammy fog swept through the front door. Out of the fog, settling his wings, stalked a tall man.
«Uncle Einar!»
Timothy propelled himself on his thin legs, straight through the fog, under the green webbing shadows. He threw himself across Einar's arms. Einar lifted him.
«You've wings, Timothy!» He tossed the boy light as thistles. «Wings, Timothy: fly!» Faces wheeled under. Darkness rotated. The house blew away. Timothy felt breezelike. He flapped his arms. Einar's fingers caught and threw him once more to the ceiling. The ceiling rushed down like a charred wall. «Fly, Timothy!» shouted Einar, loud and deep. «Fly with wings! Wings!»
He felt an exquisite ecstasy in his shoulder blades, as if roots grew, burst to explode and blossom into new, moist membrane. He babbled wild stuff; again Einar hurled him high.
The autumn wind broke in a tide on the house, rain crashed down, shaking the beams, causing chandeliers to tilt their enraged candle lights. And the one hundred relatives peered out from every black, enchanted room, circling inward, all shapes and sizes, to where Einar balanced the child like a baton in the roaring spaces.
«Enough!» shouted Einar, at last.
Timothy, deposited on the floor timbers, exaltedly, exhaustedly fell against Uncle Einar, sobbing happily. «Uncle, uncle, uncle!»
«Was it good, flying? Eh, Timothy?» said Uncle Einar, bending down, patting Timothy's head. «Good, good.»
It was coming toward dawn. Most had arrived and were ready to bed down for the daylight, sleep motionlessly with no sound until the following sunset, when they would shout out of their mahogany boxes for the revelry.
Uncle Einar, followed by dozens of others, moved toward the cellar. Mother directed them downward to the crowded row on row of highly polished boxes. Einar, his wings like sea-green tarpaulins tented behind him, moved with a curious whistling down the passageway, where his wings touched they made a sound of drumheads gently beaten.
Upstairs, Timothy lay wearily thinking, trying to like the darkness. There was so much you could do in darkness that people couldn't criticize you for, because they never saw you. He did like the night, but it was a qualified liking: sometimes there was so much night he cried out in rebellion.
In the cellar, mahogany doors sealed downward, drawn in by pale hands. In corners, certain relatives circled three times to lie, heads on paws, eyelids shut. The sun rose. There was a sleeping.
Sunset. The revel exploded like a bat nest struck full, shrieking out, fluttering, spreading. Box doors banged wide. Steps rushed up from cellar damp. More late guests, kicking on front and back portals, were admitted.
It rained, and sodden visitors laid their capes, their waterpelleted hats, their sprinkled veils upon Timothy who bore them to a closet. The rooms were crowd-packed. The laughter of one cousin, shot from one room, angled off the wall of another, ricocheted, banked and returned to Timothy's ears from a fourth room, accurate and cynical.
A mouse ran across the floor.
«I know you, Niece Liebersrouter!» exclaimed father around him but not to him. The dozens of towering people pressed in against him, elbowed him, ignored him.
Finally, he turned and slipped away up the stairs.
He called softly. «Cecy. Where are you now, Cecy?»
She waited a long while before answering. «In the Imperial Valley,» she murmured faintly. «Beside the Salton Sea, near the mud pots and the steam and the quiet. I'm inside a farmer's wife. I'm sitting on a front porch. I can make her move if I want, or do anything or think anything. The sun's going down.»
«What's it like, Cecy?»
«You can hear the mud pots hissing,» she said, slowly, as if speaking in a church. «Little gray heads of steam push up the mud like bald men rising in the thick syrup, head first, out in the broiling channels. The gray heads rip like rubber fabric, collapse with noises like wet lips moving. And feathery plumes of steam escape from the ripped tissue. And there is a smell of deep sulphurous burning and old time. The dinosaur has been abroiling here ten million years.»
«Is he done yet, Cecy?»
The mouse spiraled three women's feet and vanished into a corner. Moments later a beautiful woman rose up out of nothing and stood in the corner, smiling her white smile at them all.
Something huddled against the flooded pane of the kitchen window. It sighed and wept and tapped continually, pressed against the glass, but Timothy could make nothing of it, he saw nothing. In imagination he was outside staring in. The rain was on him, the wind at him, and the taper-dotted darkness inside was inviting. Waltzes were being danced; tall thin figures pirouetted to outlandish music. Stars of light flickered off lifted bottles; small clods of earth crumbled from casques, and a spider fell and went silently legging over the floor.
Timothy shivered. He was inside the house again. Mother was calling him to run here, run there, help, serve, out to the kitchen now, fetch this, retch that, bring the plates, heap the food — on and on — the party happened.
«Yes, he's done. Quite done.» Cecy's calm sleeper's lips turned up. The languid words fell slowly from her shaping mouth. «Inside this woman's skull I am, looking out, watching the sea that does not move, and is so quiet it makes you afraid. I sit on the porch and wait for my husband to come home. Occasionally, a fish leaps, falls back, starlight edging it. The valley, the sea, the few cars, the wooden porch, my rocking chair, myself, the silence.»
«What now, Cecy?»
«I'm getting up from my rocking chair,» she said.
«Yes?»