The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(55)

His grandmother told him that the first time she ever saw his father she knew that nothing would ever be the same again. The first time that she brought him to the house. I didnt know what was goin to happen. I tried to pray about it but I didnt know what it was I was prayin about. I shouldnt have told you that.

You didnt say anything bad.

No. But I thought it.

He slept. He woke again. You shouldnt have come, he said.

He got up and got his jacket and put it on over his T-shirt and stood looking out the window. His breath fogged the glass. The light from the vapor lamp cast the falling shapes of house and tree across the field toward the road. He turned and went out and down the hall. The lights were still on and he went down the stairs in his socks and shorts and jacket. Royal was asleep in the livingroom in his armchair. The gray screen of the television had numbers across the bottom and it gave off a low steady hum. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and stood there. In the basket at the bottom were some carrots and he took one and closed the refrigerator door. He stood at the sink looking out the window and eating the carrot. It tasted earthy. Something was crossing the field beyond the barn. Possibly a fox. Or a cat. A few more years and his grandmother would be gone and the property would be sold and he would never come here again. The time would come when all memory of this place and these people would be stricken from the register of the world.

The night was cold. So still. He’d eaten the carrot save for the stalk. Then he ate that. Earthy and bitter. So bitter. He went upstairs and went to bed.

He went for long walks in the woods. He saw no one. A man walking in the woods in the fall of the year in that part of the world was an object of suspicion if he’d no gun with him and he’d have taken a gun but that the thieves who broke into the house two years earlier had taken them all. They’d taken his Gibson mandolin. His grandmother’s costume jewelry. They’d also emptied all the papers out of the old Jackson press in the livingroom and carried them off and when he asked his grandmother about that she only shook her head.

He went through the things in his closet. Mementoes of his youth. Fossils, shells, arrowheads in a jar. A sharpshinned hawk he’d mounted, much motheaten. He supposed he should have understood the nature of the robbery when he first learned of it but he did not.

Royal was every bit as strange as his grandmother had said. He’d rear up in his chair and demand the opinions of those long dead. He looked out the window at Granellen’s green Dodge and asked her when she’d traded cars although she’d had the Dodge for eleven years.

He drove into Knoxville. A gray and rainy day. It was hard to keep the glass clear inside the car and he’d taken with him a small towel to wipe the windshield. The Maserati was a strange car, full of French hydraulics. The brake pedal had zero travel and that took getting used to. He drove down Gay Street and out Cumberland Avenue. He knew almost no one in this town. Everything had a gray and abandoned look to it. He drove out the Alcoa Highway and pushed the car to a hundred and fifty trailing a thin roostertail of watervapor in his wake.

In the morning he left the house at dawn and walked up the road to the bridge and crossed the fields to the old quarry, following the faint ruts of the quarry road into the woods. Some crows dropped down out of the trees on the ridge above him and flew away in silence. Great square blocks of stone stood in the woods beyond. The stone was the same color as the treetrunks and the quarry formed an amphitheatre in the woods. A flat stone floor and two stepped levels and a reflecting pool still and deep and black. The walls rose up on three sides, the blocks ribbed with flutings where featherdrills had been used to bore them for the dynamite.

He crossed along a low wall of sawn blocks opposite the pool and sat as he had sat that summer evening years ago and watched his sister perform the role of Medea alone on the quarry floor. She was dressed in a gown she’d made from sheeting and she wore a crown of woodbine in her hair. The footlights were fruitcans packed with rags and filled with kerosene. The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals. She was thirteen. He was in his second year of graduate school at Caltech and watching her that summer evening he knew that he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.

When it was over he stood and clapped. The flat dead echo halting off the quarry walls. She curtseyed twice and then she was gone, striding off into the dark, the shadows of the trees bowing to her in the light from her lantern where it swung by the bail. He sat on the cold stones with his face in his hands. I’m sorry, Baby. I’m sorry. It’s all just darkness. I’m sorry.



* * *



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The last night of his visit they sat at dinner and ate quietly. His grandmother had fixed fried chicken and biscuits with white gravy. Royal sat poking at his food and then he put down his fork and looked up at the wall, his napkin at his throat. It’s one void after another is what it is, he said. It aint just the one. Like it says in the good book. You think the void is just the void but it aint. It goes on.

Eat somethin, Royal, his grandmother said. You need to eat. Instead of secondsaying the Bible.

They ate. Western looked at his grandmother.

Do you think there might be any of her papers here?

Bobby, to the best of my knowledge there is not.

I just wondered if you’d come across anything.