Sometimes between midnight and daybreak, the old man began to dream, and the dream was so vivid that every smell and sound and detail was so real that his life became a blurred, half-forgotten dream. It was late June or early July, and he was in Alabama. It was early morning, the dew was still on and he was on his way to the new ground to grub bushes. The dream was so real he could feel the sun through his work shirt and the weight of the mattock on his shoulder and although he was walking ground he had not trod in sixty-odd years, he knew exactly where he was and he knew that if he turned in the red dust of the road he would be facing the house he had been born in. He turned and there beyond the fencerow was the log house, weathered gray, two sides with a dogtrot between. A thin wraith of smoke from the cook stove rose and dissipated in the surreal blue sky. As he watched it, he heard the back screen door creak and slam shut and saw his mother carry out a basket of wet clothes and begin to hang them on the line. She threw a sheet across the wire and spread it and it hung slack and straight in the breezeless air. He could hear her singing some old church song and he turned back the way that he was headed.
The winding clay road was bound on either side by a fence of split rails and thick with vines and briars. He began to follow it. He crested an undulating rise and in the distance he could see the field where his father plowed and disked behind the mules. The distance was a soft tapestry in muted greens and browns. He curved past the barn, angled steeply down toward the bottoms flanking Deerlick Creek, and then through trees that made a shady bower for his passage. He was aware of the calling of birds he had not heard since his childhood and of a distant tranquil murmuring from the creek that sounded as no creek had murmured to him since.
He came onto the new ground where the sassafras bushes were and as he passed the last elm he saw his brother Isaac sitting on the bank in the shade of a gnarled apple tree and watching his passage as if it afforded him some secret amusement. Isaac was bare to his waist and his skinny shoulders brown from the sun. He sat calmly, his elbows resting across his knees, as if he had sat so forever and would continue into infinity.
He stopped in the road. There was a roaring in his ears that diminished the birds, the creek, all the myriad sounds of the summer day. He swung the mattock from his shoulder and leaned on it, the head of it settled in the dust beside his bare feet. Then he dropped the mattock and began to climb the bank.
Isaac watched his approach without interest as if there was nothing extraordinary in the fact that he had come back to the field where they had grubbed together so many days.
He dreamed that he put his arms around Isaac’s neck, felt the heat of him, smelled the clean scent of his hair, then Isaac shoved him roughly away.
What’s the matter with you?
You’re supposed to be dead.
What’s the matter with you? he asked again. Are you sunstruck? Has the old man worked what little sense you had out of you?
Them lines, he said. You was tangled in the lines and the horses drug you to death. You was twelve years old.
Isaac laughed and looked away, toward the creek. Beyond it, limestone bluffs climbed steep and sheer and above its dizzy precipice hawks or buzzards circled against the immeasurable blue.
I seen you laid out, he said in wonder, and felt how inadequate that was in the face of what he beheld: Isaac in the flesh, the pale eyes so long forgotten, the freckles dusting his thin arms, the calm irrefutable corporeality of the flesh. Love so strong it ached like pain rose in his chest, his throat constricted with emotion so that he felt he might asphyxiate. They lied, he thought. They had all lied, then.
Then the dream altered subtly, took on another dimension as if a curious muted light had come on somewhere. He saw that he was in the early part of the summer Isaac died in, that all the horror was yet to come, that Isaac sat before him doomed as surely as there was a God Almighty. That he was powerless to alter what lie ahead, and that he was double cursed by its foreknowledge. He saw that he had curiously gone two directions in time, backward to the time preceding Isaac’s death and yet possessing knowledge of what was to come. He felt weary and impatient with helpless anger.
Then Isaac arose and started down the bank toward the creek. Come on, Isaac said. He followed down the bank, picked up the mattock from the road. Isaac had started into the deep cool shade near the creek’s edge, then turned impatiently back toward him. Come on. What are you waiting on?
Some inexplicable fear had touched him, chilled the sweat running down his ribs. I don’t want to, he said.
What’s the matter? Isaac asked. Are you afraid? He gestured toward the viney undergrowth and its cool humming stillness, motioning for him to come on. It’s cooler in here, and quieter.
No, he said. Wait. Let me just sit here and rest a minute.
He came awake. It was near day and the moon on the snow created an illusion of a spurious dawn outside his window. He lay for a time, half wanting to recapture the dream and half dreading what lay ahead. But it was lost to him. A feeling of sorrow touched him, for Isaac or perhaps for himself. There was an unpleasant taste in his mouth, a metallic taste of canker.
__________________________________
From Stories from the Attic by William Gay. Used with permission of the publisher, Dzanc Books. Copyright © 2024 by William Gay.
