Death Bell
THEY
SAY ONCE THE CLAPPER STRIKES inside your skull, there’s
no way you can bargain with death. Someone you love will
die; you can’t stop it, and there’s no way to
know who it will be but to wait.
So she leaned against the kitchen counter and waited, her skull clanging away all sense from her thoughts, stunning all natural feeling from her extremities.
She stood looking down at the dustpan she’d dropped, her fingers clinging now to the edges of the counter top, afraid she’d be spun around yet again, as if her body were the bell-rope that might stir the clapper back to life. But the echoes subsided, so slowly she hardly believed they were leaving her still alive, still standing. She moved her head to the right, and there was the shelf with her blue willow plates stacked the way they’d been stacked before death rang her skull.
She turned to the left; there the late afternoon sun laid its passage on her dinner table like a scrappy coverlet. The clock ticked. The dog whined to come in.
She bent to the dustpan still full of crumbs from her lunch sandwich and the wet leaves she had tracked inside from picking the first creasy greens on the hillside. There they lay on a sheaf of newspaper, ready to be washed. She could smell their green flesh in her nostrils, so strong she wondered if her brain had been overwrought by the tolling, making every sense twice as strong. Her eyes hurt, as if the sight of her kitchen was too much to bear. Her skull itself felt too full of sound to be borne aloft. Her ears hummed like a chorus of yellow jackets.
Let the debris in her dustpan lie for a while longer. She would come back for it later.
Spreading her hands in front of her as if she might hold onto the air for ballast, she walked out the door into the fading spring afternoon and sat on the porch steps, her heart beating as though trapped inside her rib cage, wanting out of this story she had never feared she would find herself inside. Her whole body seemed now like a cage, holding nothing but fear spiraling through her entrails. To think she had heard it, what her grandmother had told her might come to a woman at any time, though God forbid it should ever come to her. Then you begin to seek out every face you love, asking this one? Or this one? Whose death spun me round in the midst of life? Whose leave-taking yet to be borne?
Everywhere dark was gathering, tendrils of cold air unfurling. She raised an arm and swung at them, as if she could gather them up like skeins of loose yarn. Little switches of mares’ tails floated above Stony Man, the sky looking as if it might shatter at any moment like blue milk glass from some high-pitched scream she could not hear. If it fell it would slash the budding trees to ribbons. The chickens would all lie bloody, feathers flying.
The chickens pecked as always at the feed she had tossed to them before she had entered the house. She called to the dog, but he kept his distance from her, not daring to push his head under her arm for attention. Her freshly washed curtains on the clothesline did not ripple, not once. The wind was still, still, still. It too was waiting.
High above her a jet plane passed, but its sound lay far back of it. She envied the people inside it, sitting upright in their seats, carried through the air toward some place she had never been. Could they see her world down here? See her tiny piece of farmland? Or did everything below blend into nothing when seen from such distance, blessedly removed from their journey through the clouds?
She hugged her knees, feeling her breath hot on her bare arm. The breath of life. With it she could warn them all! She could phone Willa Mae, urge her to stay away from that man of hers with his heavy fist. One fall the right way, and the baby’s cord could pull free. She could tell her sister not to drive anymore at night from her Bible study, the road full of tanker trucks barreling downhill, aimed at the women chattering in their cars, oblivious to the horror almost upon them. At least she had already lost Ben, no death bell announcing that loss, just a slip of paper, a lab report relayed in the doctor’s quiet office.
Yes, she could warn all of them, but then what? How long could they all hide out? How long can death be put off? How long could they live always looking over their shoulders for a shadow stalking them? A stray bullet? A drunk driver? A meteorite?
And they took such risks, all of them. Birdie walking home by herself after dark from the bus stop, her babies left alone sometimes when she had to study for her classes. Susie determined to marry that crazy boy with the white teeth she loved. There was something about him that she never wanted to name that gave her cold chills. And her Lucas, signed up for the Marines as soon as he graduated from high school. Any day now he could be sent to some country she had never even known existed on the planet.
That her own skull should serve as Death’s calling card, ripping her calm open like that plane’s white trail, made her body shake. She stood up and stared hard at the sun going down. She could take Ben’s old shotgun and stand guard at her own front door, at least, not let anyone or anything come calling. Not Death, with his noisy clangings. She’d shoot her own self in the head before she’d submit ever again to his entry.
And yet, in the midst of her fury, the thought of hoisting Ben’s gun made her laugh at herself. She had been quick to reach for a shotgun when she was a girl, the oldest of three fatherless daughters, their mother a midwife who stayed away too much of the time. She had stood with her dead father’s shotgun that night Ben came walking up the trail to their house. The two of them had lain together down by the river only days before, the afternoon fine as any in April, all her chores done and her little sisters sent to their grandmother’s to help work a quilt. She and Ben had flirted with each other for months, on the sly and on the run--a few minutes after church, or walking home from a dance, but when he appeared at her door that afternoon, saying he wanted to show her the trillium just poking out of the shadows like little birds, she followed him. The whole world seemed to want them to come together, to merge their bodies with the wind and the earth beneath them. Her skirt smelled of green when she set off home; she breathed deeply of it when she took it off. She had ever since loved the smell of crushed green, but in those first days after, the scent of it shamed her.
So there she stood pointing her shotgun at Ben, saying, as best she could remember, “You are a no-account man, and I will have no more of your shameful intentions.”
“Not even this?” he asked, holding out his palm.
In it was something wrapped in white paper. She knew at once that it was a ring.
“A small ring,” he said. He had borrowed money to buy it in Gatlinburg.
She lowered the gun and asked, “Well, when do you plan to put it on my finger?”
“As soon as you put that blamed gun down.”
And she had, trying not to smile, her face burning in the twilight.
She looked up at the sky again. The plane glittered with the setting sun, trailing its fraying shroud behind it. Remembering was like that, she realized, seeming so real at first but finally insubstantial as mist or witch water.
But she could not let go of it, the way it pulled her into another time when she had stood again with shotgun in hand, on another spring twilight, not much different from this. Her mind had been heavy then, too, with her husband’s absence, her body tired with carrying another baby.
He had come back home, begging forgiveness. He had strayed, he said, and as he stood there staring down at his boots, she could think of nothing but an old tomcat with its tail between its legs, come back home for supper.
“And I am supposed to forgive you then? Open the door and say sit right down, here’s fresh cornbread baking and meat on the table? What did that young girl feed you when you roared off together in your truck, her laughing like a slattern all the way to the county line?”
“She didn’t feed me anything but potato chips,” he said.
His answer was so honest, his whole appearance so hungry and sad looking, that she had to struggle to keep herself from laughing, though she hoped he hadn’t noticed that in the dark.
“This here gun’s loaded,” she warned.
“I know it is,” he said softly. “I made sure it was before I left.”
“So I could shoot you through the heart when you came back?”
“I’d rather you shoot me through the heart than any other woman I know.” And he opened his shirt. “There,” he said. “Fire away.”
She squinted down the muzzle. Let him wonder for a few minutes what she was going to do.
Had she really done such a thing, stood here on this very porch, aiming a gun at his chest? The memory glimmered, then began to recede, like that plane she had been watching moving ever closer to the edge of her vision.
Then it disappeared into what she called the faraway, that blueness the mountains became after they disappeared from view, and slowly the sound of its passing was swallowed up into the larger sounds of the valley ongoing around her. The creek pushing its way over the rocks, the little frogs singing like crazy down in the low pasture.
She wanted that memory back again, so that she could see the two of them wavering in the coming dark, the man stepping onto the porch, the woman who was once herself letting him inside the house that he had left in a hurry just days before. She wanted the scent of him as he passed her, wood smoke and sweat, and she shut her eyes as if to will the memory back again, but it would not come. It was as gone as the golden trail the plane had left behind in the sky.
Now she heard the wind breathing through the pines like her own breath as she let it out, after having held it in for so long that she felt dizzy. She lingered in that empty space before she had to breathe again, that darkness that pulled her down and down into something she knew she could never understand. Maybe nobody could. An emptiness that waited like water at the bottom of a well.
Finally when she could bear it no longer, she took another breath and walked back inside the house.
So she leaned against the kitchen counter and waited, her skull clanging away all sense from her thoughts, stunning all natural feeling from her extremities.
She stood looking down at the dustpan she’d dropped, her fingers clinging now to the edges of the counter top, afraid she’d be spun around yet again, as if her body were the bell-rope that might stir the clapper back to life. But the echoes subsided, so slowly she hardly believed they were leaving her still alive, still standing. She moved her head to the right, and there was the shelf with her blue willow plates stacked the way they’d been stacked before death rang her skull.
She turned to the left; there the late afternoon sun laid its passage on her dinner table like a scrappy coverlet. The clock ticked. The dog whined to come in.
She bent to the dustpan still full of crumbs from her lunch sandwich and the wet leaves she had tracked inside from picking the first creasy greens on the hillside. There they lay on a sheaf of newspaper, ready to be washed. She could smell their green flesh in her nostrils, so strong she wondered if her brain had been overwrought by the tolling, making every sense twice as strong. Her eyes hurt, as if the sight of her kitchen was too much to bear. Her skull itself felt too full of sound to be borne aloft. Her ears hummed like a chorus of yellow jackets.
Let the debris in her dustpan lie for a while longer. She would come back for it later.
Spreading her hands in front of her as if she might hold onto the air for ballast, she walked out the door into the fading spring afternoon and sat on the porch steps, her heart beating as though trapped inside her rib cage, wanting out of this story she had never feared she would find herself inside. Her whole body seemed now like a cage, holding nothing but fear spiraling through her entrails. To think she had heard it, what her grandmother had told her might come to a woman at any time, though God forbid it should ever come to her. Then you begin to seek out every face you love, asking this one? Or this one? Whose death spun me round in the midst of life? Whose leave-taking yet to be borne?
Everywhere dark was gathering, tendrils of cold air unfurling. She raised an arm and swung at them, as if she could gather them up like skeins of loose yarn. Little switches of mares’ tails floated above Stony Man, the sky looking as if it might shatter at any moment like blue milk glass from some high-pitched scream she could not hear. If it fell it would slash the budding trees to ribbons. The chickens would all lie bloody, feathers flying.
The chickens pecked as always at the feed she had tossed to them before she had entered the house. She called to the dog, but he kept his distance from her, not daring to push his head under her arm for attention. Her freshly washed curtains on the clothesline did not ripple, not once. The wind was still, still, still. It too was waiting.
High above her a jet plane passed, but its sound lay far back of it. She envied the people inside it, sitting upright in their seats, carried through the air toward some place she had never been. Could they see her world down here? See her tiny piece of farmland? Or did everything below blend into nothing when seen from such distance, blessedly removed from their journey through the clouds?
She hugged her knees, feeling her breath hot on her bare arm. The breath of life. With it she could warn them all! She could phone Willa Mae, urge her to stay away from that man of hers with his heavy fist. One fall the right way, and the baby’s cord could pull free. She could tell her sister not to drive anymore at night from her Bible study, the road full of tanker trucks barreling downhill, aimed at the women chattering in their cars, oblivious to the horror almost upon them. At least she had already lost Ben, no death bell announcing that loss, just a slip of paper, a lab report relayed in the doctor’s quiet office.
Yes, she could warn all of them, but then what? How long could they all hide out? How long can death be put off? How long could they live always looking over their shoulders for a shadow stalking them? A stray bullet? A drunk driver? A meteorite?
And they took such risks, all of them. Birdie walking home by herself after dark from the bus stop, her babies left alone sometimes when she had to study for her classes. Susie determined to marry that crazy boy with the white teeth she loved. There was something about him that she never wanted to name that gave her cold chills. And her Lucas, signed up for the Marines as soon as he graduated from high school. Any day now he could be sent to some country she had never even known existed on the planet.
That her own skull should serve as Death’s calling card, ripping her calm open like that plane’s white trail, made her body shake. She stood up and stared hard at the sun going down. She could take Ben’s old shotgun and stand guard at her own front door, at least, not let anyone or anything come calling. Not Death, with his noisy clangings. She’d shoot her own self in the head before she’d submit ever again to his entry.
And yet, in the midst of her fury, the thought of hoisting Ben’s gun made her laugh at herself. She had been quick to reach for a shotgun when she was a girl, the oldest of three fatherless daughters, their mother a midwife who stayed away too much of the time. She had stood with her dead father’s shotgun that night Ben came walking up the trail to their house. The two of them had lain together down by the river only days before, the afternoon fine as any in April, all her chores done and her little sisters sent to their grandmother’s to help work a quilt. She and Ben had flirted with each other for months, on the sly and on the run--a few minutes after church, or walking home from a dance, but when he appeared at her door that afternoon, saying he wanted to show her the trillium just poking out of the shadows like little birds, she followed him. The whole world seemed to want them to come together, to merge their bodies with the wind and the earth beneath them. Her skirt smelled of green when she set off home; she breathed deeply of it when she took it off. She had ever since loved the smell of crushed green, but in those first days after, the scent of it shamed her.
So there she stood pointing her shotgun at Ben, saying, as best she could remember, “You are a no-account man, and I will have no more of your shameful intentions.”
“Not even this?” he asked, holding out his palm.
In it was something wrapped in white paper. She knew at once that it was a ring.
“A small ring,” he said. He had borrowed money to buy it in Gatlinburg.
She lowered the gun and asked, “Well, when do you plan to put it on my finger?”
“As soon as you put that blamed gun down.”
And she had, trying not to smile, her face burning in the twilight.
She looked up at the sky again. The plane glittered with the setting sun, trailing its fraying shroud behind it. Remembering was like that, she realized, seeming so real at first but finally insubstantial as mist or witch water.
But she could not let go of it, the way it pulled her into another time when she had stood again with shotgun in hand, on another spring twilight, not much different from this. Her mind had been heavy then, too, with her husband’s absence, her body tired with carrying another baby.
He had come back home, begging forgiveness. He had strayed, he said, and as he stood there staring down at his boots, she could think of nothing but an old tomcat with its tail between its legs, come back home for supper.
“And I am supposed to forgive you then? Open the door and say sit right down, here’s fresh cornbread baking and meat on the table? What did that young girl feed you when you roared off together in your truck, her laughing like a slattern all the way to the county line?”
“She didn’t feed me anything but potato chips,” he said.
His answer was so honest, his whole appearance so hungry and sad looking, that she had to struggle to keep herself from laughing, though she hoped he hadn’t noticed that in the dark.
“This here gun’s loaded,” she warned.
“I know it is,” he said softly. “I made sure it was before I left.”
“So I could shoot you through the heart when you came back?”
“I’d rather you shoot me through the heart than any other woman I know.” And he opened his shirt. “There,” he said. “Fire away.”
She squinted down the muzzle. Let him wonder for a few minutes what she was going to do.
Had she really done such a thing, stood here on this very porch, aiming a gun at his chest? The memory glimmered, then began to recede, like that plane she had been watching moving ever closer to the edge of her vision.
Then it disappeared into what she called the faraway, that blueness the mountains became after they disappeared from view, and slowly the sound of its passing was swallowed up into the larger sounds of the valley ongoing around her. The creek pushing its way over the rocks, the little frogs singing like crazy down in the low pasture.
She wanted that memory back again, so that she could see the two of them wavering in the coming dark, the man stepping onto the porch, the woman who was once herself letting him inside the house that he had left in a hurry just days before. She wanted the scent of him as he passed her, wood smoke and sweat, and she shut her eyes as if to will the memory back again, but it would not come. It was as gone as the golden trail the plane had left behind in the sky.
Now she heard the wind breathing through the pines like her own breath as she let it out, after having held it in for so long that she felt dizzy. She lingered in that empty space before she had to breathe again, that darkness that pulled her down and down into something she knew she could never understand. Maybe nobody could. An emptiness that waited like water at the bottom of a well.
Finally when she could bear it no longer, she took another breath and walked back inside the house.