The arrangements were now complete. In the morning they would come and move her things across the street into the cottage they had built for her. Sunny had asked her to come and have a gander at it before the trauma of moving day, but she had refused. I’ll see it when I get there, she thought. At my age I may not wake up in the morning, and then I won’t get there anyway, so what’s the point of seeing something first and getting all stirred up for nothing? I fussed about the future many times, in the nine lives I’ve had before this one, and where did it get me? All the way to Grief Street, that’s where. For Sunny’s sake she had feigned some interest in choosing wallpaper from the assorted bundles he lugged over, though none of the ghostly roses, dumpling flags or haplessly cheerful urchins he unrolled for her held any appeal. In the end she selected the plainest and least offensive. What did it matter? She was not really interested in a house which she herself had been tempted to help confect. Houses ought to grow, she had always thought. They should express the lives lived there. They should be surprised, dreamed, mercurial, beautiful to the beholder. I guess that’s why I loved the Lane, and why I never could explain it, certainly not to Cap and not even to Arthur, who tried very hard and whose own handiwork was, despite his good-natured disclaimers, done in the same spirit. ‘Only the temptations of the church saved you from bein’ a Laner,’ she used to tease him. ‘And only you saved me from the church,’ he’d laugh back.
I’ll ask them to move your trunk last, Arthur, she promised. I’ll walk beside it. That way we’ll keep the ghosties inside. You realize they aren’t going to be too happy with the sudden transfer. Being theatrical ghosts, though, they ought to be used to being on the move. They told me you were almost fifty before you settled in one pew. She wished now that she could have seen Arthur in his prime, treading the boards of the great stages of the West, warbling away like his own favourite – the bluebird – with not a touch of winter in his song, with no thought of wings wearied with migration or the unalterable swing of the seasons.
It was May now and unseasonably warm. Her crocuses had bloomed in their usual profusion. The tulips along the house bulged in the trapped sunlight. The vegetable beds lay spaded and expectant. “We’ll leave the border flowers an’ shrubs, for a while,” Sunny had assured her. “But the garden’ll be turned into grass. Eventually, the whole area will be landscaped in some manner suited to a cenotaph. It’ll be a kind of special ground. There’s a bit of land behind your new place. We may have to clear some trees, though, to get enough sun in there.”
Granny felt the need to get out for a while, out of Arthur’s house, out of the gardens they had planted together, out of the vegetable patch she would never tend again. As far as she could recall, she had not been off her own property since the terrible autumn of 1918. It was high time. I’m going out there and have a look at this town, all of it, one more time before I settle in somewhere to die. If these wobbly old legs will carry me. And if I happen to topple into the River, well, I’ll save the council the price of a ceremony.
She felt surprisingly sturdy. She walked north along her own street towards Michigan Ave. She recognized every house she passed, found perfectly familiar every gable, stoop, gate, half-finished dormer, or coppery window with one blank eye unpatched since the War. Each house sent its voices wafting out to her – shredded, grown faint with the years but still unappeased, still desperate for attention, the need for a story to be told in full, an ending to be got right at long last, and a hidden side to be revealed and understood. Too late, too late, she whispered as she hurried slowly past, too late for all that, now.
She passed the houses of the respectable, some fallen since to disrepute, and heard no apologies for the treatment received there by Cora the cleaning woman, or before that, ‘that washerwoman Lily from the Lane’; houses where she had been good enough to wash clothes, scrub floors, cook a meal, wipe up the children’s snot and shit but not to share a meal, carry a confidence, love them without premeditation. ‘But did you ever try to talk to them? See life from their point of view?’ Cap had asked her many times. ‘You kept yourself aloof. You expected the world to come to you. You were a loner by choice. It was your chosen philosophy.’ Perhaps there was more to Cap’s accusations than she had ever acknowledged during their long hours of reciprocal interrogation. But what did it matter now? They were all dead. Several of them she had walked with to the very edge, helping them across when the props of their respectability cracked asunder, when death dared them to enter his chamber unattended, and they couldn’t. ‘But you’ll be glad to know,’ she said to Cap now, ‘I felt no satisfaction.’
Some, of course, like Eliza Sanders, had been furtively kind, slipping her an extra dollar when a husband wasn’t looking, giving hand-me-downs she was too proud to take home to her boys but others along the Lane were happy to receive.
She passed Redmond’s Grocery, the Post Office, the new hotel, the Pool Room – feeling heads turn in shop windows – and crossed the street to the Lane where The Queen’s had stood for fifty years. It was a rooming house now, she had heard, but the spirits that poured out of its bowers, anterooms, closets, pantries and wine-cellars stopped her in her tracks, overwhelmed her with their babble. She felt dizzy. Don’t faint, you stupid old fool, she thought, not right here on the main street with the sun shining.
She didn’t, thought she couldn’t be certain because when she opened her eyes she was not in front of The Queen’s or any other building, nor was she on any of the village sidewalks. She was in some sort of field. In the summer it would be covered with sawgrass and sandburs, but at the moment it was soft and fern-like, and her legs were carrying her, not willy-nilly through it, but along a wide path that was, for a short time in this young half of spring, plainly visible. This had been a road once, a winding, sauntering one. On either side of her, she noticed clumps of concrete or the shell of what had been a porch or chicken-run, some of its wire rusted as thin as fish-nets in the drying sun. to her left a window, all of its glass intact, stood rooted to the ground where it had slumped and stuck while all else around it had inexplicably rotted away. She almost tripped over the frail skeleton of a child’s sled. An icy breeze from the Lake reminded her of more than she was prepared to remember.
The Alley. The Lane. She looked unbelieving to the north-east. She saw the back-yards, sheds, coops and rambling pitches of the houses built along the ‘official’ Lane, straightened by statute. I helped to do this, she thought, long ago, in another name. Now the air was filled with human sounds, voices skewed and thinned by the breeze. Her body was propelling itself towards them. She saw the crazed outline of chicken-wire, caught the thick stink of swine too long in their styes, heard the domestic sing-song of women’s conversation as they laboured. Her eyes strained ahead to see them, to know who these inheritors were, whether they knew what ground, what tradition, what spritely demons they had foolishly promised to possess. No one was in sight. She stumbled. The voices arrived, loud and clear: a foreign tongue. She listened, ignoring the burn in her knees: it was no language she knew, or had ever heard. Suddenly the syllables stabbed at her eyes, raced unconnected through her head like bat’s echoes in a belfry, spinning her around, deafening, she couldn’t hear the last beats of her heart nor the bounce of her kneecaps on the stiff earth.
When the sounds stopped ringing in her head, miraculously she was still walking. It was getting dark or misty, or both. She was in a sort of hollow, for though she could hear the lake-breeze high in the distant trees, she felt no wind at all on her face. The ground beneath her walking was resilient, kindly, sown with the tender grass found only on the graves of children. She was lost, her legs had gone numb, but she was not in the least afraid. She felt serenely at ease. At any moment of her choosing, she could lie down on one of those sandy mounds, close her eyes and sleep the longest, deepest, sunniest sleep of her life. The air around her trembled with invitation. There were voices in it but they spoke directly to the weariness of her bones; they carried the news of consolation. It’s time to lie down, she thought.
A shadow flicked, off to her right. A bird, returned from its journey? A mourning dove? Something bright and shifting caught the last of the daylight and transformed it. It’s alive, she thought. Am I?
Then a sound, the last quarter of a whimper. She forced her legs towards it, gritting with the pain. Don’t worry, she cried, I’m coming.
The voice reassembled. The sun froze in the entanglement of a child’s hair: glinting and going out as it twisted in the grip of something perilous. It was a cry. A child’s cry. A little girl’s cry. The sun went blood-red. It jerked the blond tresses of the little, lost girl upward into a scarlet, lungless scream.
“Mom-mee! Mom-mee! Mom-mee!”
The child’s face caught fire. The features blurred and congealed. The hair flared like a halo and cindered. The lips alone remained to surround their one word, emptying it again and again into the empty air.
Granny felt her heart burst. Her knees hit the sidewalk, then her elbows, then her chin. She was looking up. The sun grinned down at her. She read the faded letters of the Queen’s Hotel on a yellow brick wall. This is not Heaven, she thought, just before the pain blinded her.