Travellers May Still Return Read online

  Harry came looking for you.

  Your dad was here.

  The unspoken words hung like straw dust in needles of sun.

  “You are such a beautiful girl,” he said. “You look seasonless.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Not young, not old. Out of this world.”

  “Why did Tortoise die?”

  “Want of breath.”

  She glared at him. “I’m serious.”

  He nodded slowly. “Something in her gut.”

  “She was old.”

  “No she wasn’t.”

  They had nothing to talk about except horses and the sea. Tell me again the story of the ponies. Why did you catch them? Which horse what year? What is it like to be at sea? What is it like in a storm? Never: When will you die? Who is the father?

  9.

  “Red’s a big horse,” Danny said to Tom, but your girl’s capable.

  We were all gathered at Tom and Lucy’s house for Christmas Eve. I looked round the table as Tom uncorked the wine, poured out seven glasses. For Jane and Abi, the eldest of their five daughters, for Peter the son in law, for Danny, for my wife, myself, himself. Lucy held her hand over her glass.

  “Subtle, Tom,” Emma said after a sip. “Hint of peach?”

  “Happy Christmas,” said Tom, raising his glass.

  “To James’s family,” said Lucy. “We are avoiding that. That is what we’re avoiding.”

  Out the window snow swarmed around the single yard light. The conversation had been about motherhood and children, then horses, riding, the wine, and now turned to the dead boy. The giggling twins would not heed their mother’s call for silence. I could see what we were avoiding. James was in the room, the too-hot room, and Lucy was staring at Abi. Abi was looking at Danny. And Danny had looked too much at Abi. That circuit was the problem. Then it was quiet and we were all waiting, poised.

  What was barely felt: a thickening of blood in the thighs, expanding time and puzzlement, faint roiling in the gut.

  Lucy, the ever-pregnant mother, was avoiding her husband’s eyes, while he, stubbly and wide, gulped his wine, and the twins continued their private game that involved glances and giggles and blushing. Danny had stopped eating.

  “Are you all right, Danny?” Lucy said. “Your hands are all red. Your eyes are bloodshot.”

  Danny held up his bright hands. He was ruddy as a fall leaf. To see him was a shock. He wore a dark leather jacket and a white shirt and a thick gold chain, but his face was beetroot and tears were rolling down his cheeks. He lifted his head and stared at us, then held up his rough spotted red hands. It looked as if he might faint, might vomit.

  “It’s true,” Tom said. “Your face is red, Dan.”

  Danny said, “I have to move to the city to see to a tumour.”

  Above the table drifted a haze of heat. The shadows stirred, furring the edges of things. He held up his hands. Emma was bent forward in concern. Lucy and Tom were giving Danny all their attention, but no one could help him. I could see that. No one could give him what he wanted.

  “What tumour?” said Emma.

  “Bowel.”

  “Your eyes,” Abi said. “Your eyes are so bloodshot.”

  “Ah,” he said. “It’s too hot in here. The room is too hot.”

  “Is it bad?” said Tom.

  “Is there a good cancer?”

  “You should lie down before mass,” said Lucy.

  “I’ll be all right. I don’t think I’ll go to mass.”

  “Red,” the children repeated. “Red. Red. Red. Red.”

  Each moment. The next moment. She should not draw attention to herself; if she says nothing this will lead to no attention; although she likes his attention, she doesn’t want this attention; he’s staring and staring. Her mother is staring, too. Her dad and sisters and Peter and Emma and Charles go on with their stew, why couldn’t Danny and her mother?

  Her dad says, “You’re getting surgery, then?”

  “Don’t know. Radiation first, then back here for a while, I guess.”

  Then Peter, mouth full of meat, is talking about the snow, the frozen earth, the vine roots. Her dad tells the story again of cutting James down and carrying him home and how he looked lying on the couch. Poor James. Poor family. Poor Gee.

  And that’s the end of conversation.

  Everything’s quiet except for spoons in bowls and her niece sucking her sister’s nipple in plain view of everyone and Uncle Danny red as a devil. She feels hot herself, a red heat rising from the middle of her chest. The plague has jumped from the tiny castle right into her own house, and she can feel it flooding her neck and face. James hanged himself in the woods because he had the red death and even though the members of her family are not lords and ladies painted and dressed up, they will contract the red death. Her sisters and father will get it; Peter and Charles sipping from their wine and giving her the evil eye already have it: she can smell death on them, see it in their faces. Tortoise died of it. Uncle Danny’s so red she can’t take her eyes off him. Her mother is catching it right now. Perhaps only Emma is immune — she looks cool, calm.

  “Are you all right, Abi?” her father asks.

  She tries to rise, her chair legs moaning on the wood floor, but before she can escape, Uncle Danny takes a long look into her eyes, pushes up from the table, and totters to the ottoman. “Go on with your dinner,” he says. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

  All of them know or will soon know.

  Dinner continues around the table as if all is hunky dory, James gone without a trace after hanging from a tree, Uncle Danny helping her dad cut him down. But nothing is hunky dory. A baby stirs in her belly. A baby stirs in her mother’s belly. Her niece is drinking red wine from her sister’s nipple. Red death stalks the house.

  The girl poised, spoon aloft, her slight neck bent, face turned toward her mother. The pale mother receiving the look. The living man shivering on the brocade ottoman next to the standard lamp. The girl getting up from the table, crossing the room to kneel at his side.

  Uncle Danny smiles. “I’m so sorry.”

  She nods. This is death. Cold and red-handed. This man she knows. She touches his red fingers. They are cold.

  A pass high in the northern hills. A single tree. Her scalp cooled by a drip falling from a new leaf, burst of red behind her eyes. Young men and women of distant cities filing through her, through the pass: new families to replace the boring people at the dining table.

  Baby Sophie leans back and gurgles, then hunts and catches Jane’s nipple. An invisible stream passes from Jane’s body into Sophie’s mouth. Something tangible passed from men’s bodies into hers last summer. Something visible will pass from her body into her family. They don’t know what she is capable of, what she has done. She’s trapped in this house at Christmas watching Sophie’s lips tug at the fat nipple while a cousin baby sleeps in her belly. Uncle Danny showed her the cabin; she showed James. She looks down at the gaunt shape on the ottoman, his face like a pomegranate, purple rings under his closed eyes, his sticky lips moving and dim thoughts, not flesh at all, surface: horses from the sea, boys from men; the baby in her belly, hardly flesh at all, has thoughts that already double her life. Pregnant mares accompany her the way the water in the ditch creeps round the house, and she wants to flow too, in the company of wild ponies, past the houses, through the village, over the vineyards to the open land, through mountains to the sea. They are all she can attend to, these ponies. And while she attends, she looks down at her worn slippers. Her toes are in there, small, straight, white toes, and if she stood they’d take root or give her purchase and traction. There is the choice to stay or go. She regards the men. They are so simple. Uncle Danny really gave her Red and has promised her all his horses. What can a girl do with a barn full of horses? Gee asked. James said he’s not worth studying, that old man. She feels the slow return of the present as the dishes are cleared from the table and tries to imagine the young g
uy Danny was, but she’s just mixing him up with James who has hanged himself in the woods.

  Danny limps with Abi’s help over the icy silver planks to his truck. With his arm around her, he feels ancient, or alien. Tom’s house looks just plain alien. What the hell. He sits behind the wheel with the engine running, while she crosses back and turns at the gate to wave. A tide of nausea. Has he touched her? Has he leaned on her? He lights a joint. She has promised to come tomorrow. She will tend the horses while he’s away. Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer. If he says it enough times will it feel his gaze and retreat? He will need to confess but what more can he do? They need company, the horses, need grooming and moving out to pasture on warm days, in for the night, food and water, for as long as they live. She loves them but is too young, and she has a wild streak. She reminds them of freedom. He rolls down the window and leans out. “You can manage the horses?”

  She says yes. She knows what to do when it freezes.

  He says he’ll pay her in advance. “Can you come tomorrow?”

  She says sure.

  “Come early. Want to go to the cabin one last time?”

  She stands at the open gate and shrugs, then closes it behind her and walks toward the house. He winks his lights. He sits in the truck and floats with his ghost parents off to Florida — there they are, highballs in hand, two blurred, epic, flapping unravelled stories, bowels married in Celtic knots. That he should face this now. Radiation, surgery. Knots in his own twisted tale. Six weeks to burn the sucker down to size. But at least. At least what? He sits in his truck and flicks away the roach, checks the rear-view — grey puffing smoke, exhaust — and is transported to the alpine pass high in the northern hills, his forehead cooled by a drip falling from a leaf, burst pollen on his fingers. He doesn’t want to die, nor does he want to be surrounded by strangers in a city hospital. Above all he wants to avoid being summoned by Tom and Lucy. He would rather ride into the mountains and have Abi attend to his passing, Abi and the horses. If he knew for sure he was dying, he’d take the horses up there and start a new landrace, make camp and let her witness what he really was.

  10.

  “Has to be we’re travelling, not the mountains,” said Danny, “but I like to think they are moving on us.”

  “Yeah,” said Abi.

  “Noticed it the first time I ever rode out here and I always look for it. It’s striking when there’s fresh snow on the slopes. I figure it must affect the horses when they run, but I guess they’re at home with such confusions. Figure and ground. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah. We studied it in Art.”

  “Did you?”

  “Where’s the pass?”

  He pointed. “See the reserve?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s right there, between those two cliffs. That dark slash?”

  They were walking out into the plain on Christmas day, Danny on Solomon and Abi on Red, and bells were ringing from the village behind them. Time sticks. Ahead were the mountains, too young to know they were once molten. To each side the lowering sky. Light was flat, grey. They’d left at dawn, galloped to warm up as soon as they could make out the strewn rocks. Now the sun was rising, hooves and breath were the only sounds and every time Red snorted, Solomon snorted. And when Red shook his head, Solomon did the same.

  “Solomon’s just a copycat,” said Abi.

  Danny laughed.

  “Where’d you get that name? Paraclete.”

  “It’s Greek, Abigail. Close helper. When there’s misery in human affairs Paraclete will advance you a notch toward spring.”

  “He loved Tortoise.”

  “Yes he did.”

  “Is he mourning?”

  Abi looked where Danny was pointing, at the two pony-and-rider shadows made long by the early sun. The mountains did seem close; they were nearer than she’d ever seen them. They looked completely wild. Unrelated to her in any way. Advance me, she whispered, and squinted at the black slash above the distant hills, trying to understand this package of shadows and sky and mountains inside her. Something was building; it was how much Danny loved her; how much he loved the horses, how close she was to figuring everything out. What was going on inside her could find meaning in Danny’s words, the way it already had in his speaking; ever since he’d told her of the ocean and the waves, she’d felt them in her; she was a kind of wild horse. She was sure that was it. And he was what an adult could be near the end of words.

  “Desire was the foal of Paraclete. Paraclete was the foal of Mimesis. Mimesis was the foal of Longing.”

  She didn’t know how the names had bubbled up through Danny, the ordinary and the magical. While he dismounted to pee, she asked Red what she should do, her voice a skinny knife in the sparkling air, then turned to the village behind her, river lost in its channel carved by an oldness she could feel in her bones, and waited for the answer. Red shivered, then shook his head, mane spinning out a rainbow, and they completed a circle, the horse dancing as if to prepare a direction, new possibilities appearing and disappearing in the muscles flexing beneath his hide, in the complications his legs spun him through, joints performing copies of fellow joints, hoof echoing hoof, fetlock answer to fetlock question.

  “Danny, are you going to die?” she called.

  “Yes.” He climbed back into his saddle.

  “Why didn’t you leave them wild?”

  “They were going to fade out. There were fewer births every year. Each spring they came back from the mountains thinner and fewer. This is what we do with our lives.”

  They rode to the foothills, then it got stormy and Danny said they’d have to spend the night in the cabin. The day was dark when they got there. They settled the horses in a lean-to full of hay, then went into the single webby room. He still wore the gold chain under his leather jacket that flashed in the gloom as he gathered kindling from cardboard boxes ranged along the walls.

  “I’ll have to stay up to keep the fire going,” he said.

  She blew into the hot chocolate and listened to him talk, drifting in and out of sleep, her body still swaying with the motion of the horse, until the blanket fell from her shoulders and he was lifting her into a cot in a recess beside the stove.

  All night, Danny was up in the loft talking.

  He’d discovered the pass thirty-five years ago during an early spring camping trip to the basin-land north of the reserve where he’d watched the wild herd for a week and one day just before sunset, after a day of exploration and rain showers, he’d isolated his first pony in a meadow between two hills — a small filly, restive, nervous, regal — surprisingly easy to cut from her sisters. She’d stood in the scrub and watched his approach, nickering, let him lay his hand on her flank. He’d kneeled at her side and stroked her, finding a wound, once deep but almost closed now, on the inner thigh of her back right leg. When he rode off again she followed, and the others kept pace at a distance. A rainbow spanned the valley and they flew under its arc toward the mountains and reached the pass just ahead of the first stars.

  Then Abi was talking, everything flowing out of her, everything she’d said and not said to her family, to the villagers; when she slept she dreamed of them all gathered on a grassy slope by the sea.

  She watched the gold flash in the first light as Danny descended the ladder from the loft and got the stove roaring and put the heel of whisky (his indulgence, he called it) away in a high cupboard, and took from an adjacent cupboard a tin of coffee and filled a pot with water, set the pot on the stove. She sat up and tucked her feet under her and pulled the red blanket closed in front. She felt like an old woman, tired and scraggly, her face greasy, new pimples starting. Everything seemed lurid as day came on and all she wanted to do was lie down again and sleep. Just shut her eyes and disappear.

  “Every day for a few hours, give or take,” Danny said. “Course, you don’t have to. I don’t expect it from a girl with your troubles.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said.
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br />   “You might later.”

  “Are you scared of dying?” she said.

  “What I’m scared of is hospitals,” he said. “And I don’t want to leave here. Whatever comes back won’t be me.”

  “If you don’t come back, I can’t keep looking after them.”

  “I know. There’s your dad or Charles, and what about Harry? They would help out.”

  “I can’t wait to leave,” she said. “I can’t wait to get out. It’s like the longer I stay, the more there is to lose. I keep having this dream of a white ship as big as a mountain, and it can sail on land and just wipes out everything, the whole village, just when I have something to say and everybody’s listening, and I can never get the words out. I always wake up crying.”

  On their way home he rode ahead. Abi stared at his white hat with its black band, his hair a grey bush under the brim. His thin sunburned grimy neck, the frayed white shirt collar. She watched him gallop a ways, then stop. He stood in the stirrups, gazing back at her, or at the way they’d come. In the familiar landscape, he seemed like a prince disappointed in his father’s kingdom. The flatland was like the sea that had once covered it and the vine hills where they lived were like islands, still a long way off. This was their last ride. Soon she’d be alone with the horses. She closed her eyes and let Red walk on and willed the white ship to appear, now, on the horizon, like a hundred-mile wall; and she and Danny would marvel and look at each other. The towering steel would wipe them out in a flurry of tumbling rocks and vines and bricks and debris, and she would see the world for a second as it was, wide and conscious and beautiful. She would feel no guilt. Her family at the breakfast table, councillors at the council table, birds on the ground — all swept away.

  When she opened her eyes, Danny was regarding her.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “Is there ever a time when nothing is happening and nothing’s about to happen?”