Presbyterian minister said he would stay as long as they wanted him there.
Mrs. Callan grasped my mother’s hand, and asked her not to go just yet. So we
waited in that room with the stark white walls as the mist turned to rain, the
rain stopped, fog drifted across the windows, and mist returned.
Past midnight, Mr. Callan went to get a cup of coffee from a machine down
the hall. He returned a few minutes later with the gray-haired doctor.
“Diane!” he said excitedly. “Diane, he’s come to!”
They rushed out, their hands linked.
Ten minutes passed. Then, after what seemed an eternity, Mr. Callan
walked back into the waiting room. I have seen cigarette burns with more life
than his eyes possessed. “Cory?” he said softly. “Davy Ray wants to see you.”
I was afraid.
“Go on, Cory,” my father urged. “It’s all right.”
I stood up, and I followed Mr. Callan.
The doctor was standing outside Davy Ray’s room, talking to their
minister. They made a grim picture. Mr. Callan opened the door, and I walked
in. Mrs. Callan was in there, sitting in a chair beside a bed enveloped by a
filmy oxygen tent. Plastic tubing snaked up from the figure that lay under a
pale blue sheet and connected with bags full of blood and clear liquid. A
machine showed a green dot, blipping slowly on a round black screen. Mrs.
Callan saw me and leaned over toward the head under that tent. “Davy Ray? He’s
here.”
I heard the sound of labored breathing, and I smelled Clorox and Pine
Sol. Rain began to tap against the window. Mrs. Callan said, “Cory, sit here,”
and she stood up. I went to her. Mrs. Callan picked up one of Davy Ray’s
hands; it was as white as Italian marble. “I’ll be right here, Davy Ray.” She
summoned up a smile with a mighty effort, and then she lowered his hand to the
bed once more and moved away.
I stood next to the bed, looking through the oxygen tent at my friend’s
face.
He was very pale, with dark purplish hollows under his eyes. Somebody had
combed his hair, though. The comb had been wet. He was all covered up, so I
saw no indication of the wound that had brought him here. Tubes came out of
his nostrils, and his lips were gray. His face looked waxen, and his eyes were
staring right at me.
“It’s me,” I said. “Cory.”
He swallowed thickly. Maybe the green blip had picked up a little, or
maybe it was my imagination.
“You took a fall,” I said, and instantly thought that was the stupidest
thing ever uttered.
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t speak, I thought. “Ben and Johnny were
here,” I offered.
Davy Ray breathed. The breath became a word: “Ben.” One side of his mouth
hitched up. “Numb nuts.”
“Yeah,” I said, and I tried to smile. I wasn’t as strong as Mrs. Callan.
“Do you remember much about what happened?”
He nodded. His eyes were feverishly bright. “Tell you,” he said, his
voice crushed. “Have to tell you.”
“All right,” I said, and I sat down.
He smiled. “Saw him.”
“You did?” I leaned forward conspiratorially. I caught a whiff of
something that smelled bloody, but I didn’t show it. “You saw the thing from
the lost world?”
“No. Better.” His smile went away as he swallowed painfully, then came
back. “Saw Snowdown,” he said.
“Snowdown,” I whispered. The great white stag with antlers like oak
trees. Yes, I decided. If anyone deserved to see Snowdown, it would be Davy
Ray.
“Saw him. That’s why I fell down. Wasn’t watchin’. Oh, Cory,” he said.
“He’s so pretty.”
“I’ll bet he is,” I said.
“He’s bigger than they say! And he’s a whole lot whiter, too!”
“I’ll bet,” I said, “he’s the most beautiful stag there ever was.”
“Right there,” Davy Ray whispered. “He was right there in front of me.
And when I started to tell my dad, Snowdown leaped. He just leaped, and he was
gone. Then I fell down, ’cause I wasn’t watchin’. But it wasn’t Snowdown’s
fault I fell, Cory. Wasn’t anybody’s fault. Just happened.”
“You’re gonna be fine,” I said. I watched a bloody bubble of saliva grow
at the corner of his mouth.
“I sure am glad I saw Snowdown,” Davy Ray said. “I wouldn’t have missed
it. For nothin’.”
He was silent, but for the soft wet rattling of his breath. The machine
blip… blip… blipped. “I guess I’d better go,” I said, and I started to stand
up.
His marble-white hand grasped my own.
“Tell me a story,” he whispered.
I paused. Davy Ray watched me, his eyes needful. I settled back down
again. He kept hold of my hand, and I didn’t try to pull loose. He felt cold.
“All right,” I said. I would have to put this together as I went, like
the tale of Chief Five Thunders. “There was a boy.”
“Yeah,” Davy Ray agreed, “gotta be a boy.”
“This boy could just think of it, and he could go to other planets. This
boy could get the red sand of Mars on his sneakers, or he could skate on
Pluto. He could ride his bike on Saturn’s rings, and he could fight dinosaurs
on Venus.”
“Could he go to the sun, Cory?”
“Oh, sure he could. He could go to the sun every day, if he wanted to.
That’s where he went when he needed a good suntan. He just put on his
sunglasses and went there, then he came back brown as a berry.”
“Must’ve gotten awful hot, though,” Davy Ray said.
“He took a fan with him,” I said. “And this boy was friends with all the
kings and queens of the planets, and he visited all their castles. He visited
the red sand castle of King Ludwig of Mars, and the cloud castle of King
Nicholas of Jupiter. He helped stop King Zanthas of Saturn and King Damon of
Neptune from fightin’, when they got into a war over who owned a comet. He
went to the fire castle of King Burl of Mercury, and on Venus he helped King
Swane build a castle in the tall blue trees. On Uranus King Farron asked him
to stay all year, and be an admiral in the ice fleet navy. Oh, all the royalty
knew about this boy. They knew there’d never be another boy just exactly like
him, even if all the stars and planets burned out and were struck to light
again a million times. Because he was the only one on the whole earth who
could walk on the planets, and he was the only one whose name was written in
their invitation books.”
“Hey, Cory?”
“Yes?”
His voice was getting drowsy. “I’d kinda like to see a cloud castle,
wouldn’t you?”
“I sure would,” I said.
“Gosh.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore. He was looking somewhere else,
like a solitary traveler about to wish himself to a fabled land. “I never was
afraid of flyin’, was I?”
“Not a bit.”
“I’m awful tired, Cory.” He frowned, the red saliva beginning to thread
down his chin. “I don’t like bein’ so tired.”
“You oughta rest, then,” I said. “I’ll come see you tomorrow.”
His frown vanished. A smile sneaked across his mouth. “Not if I go to the
sun tonight. Then I’ll have me a suntan and you’ll be stuck here shiverin’.”
“Cory?” It was Mrs. Callan. “Cory, the doctor needs to get in here with
him.”
“Yes ma’am.” I stood up. Davy Ray’s cold hand clung to mine for a few
seconds, and then it fell away. “I’ll see you,” I said through the oxygen
tent. “Okay?”
“Good-bye, Cory,” Davy Ray said.
“Good—” I stopped myself. I was thinking of Mrs. Neville, on the first
day of summer. “I’ll see you,” I told him, and I walked past his mother to the
door. A sob welled up in my throat before I got out, but I clenched it down.
As Chile Willow’s mother had said, I could take it.
There was nothing more we could do. We drove home, along misty Route
Sixteen, where Midnight Mona arrowed in search of love. We didn’t say much; at
a time like this, words were empty vessels. At home, the green feather lay on
the floor where it had drifted; it went back to its cigar box.
On Sunday morning I awakened with a start. Tears were in my eyes, the
sunlight lying in stripes across the floor. My father was standing in the
doorway, wearing the same clothes he’d had on all day yesterday.
“Cory?” he said.
Traveling, traveling: to see Kings Ludwig, Nicholas, Zanthas, Damon,
Farron, Burl, and Swane. Traveling, traveling: to castles of red sand, hewn of
blue trees, formed of fire, shaped of sculpted clouds. Traveling, traveling,
with planets and stars beyond and invitation books open to a single name. The
solitary traveler has left this world. He will not pass this way again.
2
Faith
I THOUGHT I HAD KNOWN DEATH.
I had walked with it, ever since I could remember sitting in front of the
television set, or hunkered down with a box of buttered popcorn before the
Lyric’s silver screen. How many hundreds of cowboys and Indians had I
witnessed fall, arrow-pierced or gut-shot, into the swirling wagon train dust?
How many dozens of detectives and policemen, laid low by the criminal bullet
and coughing out their minutes? How many armies, mangled by shells and burp
guns, and how many monster victims screaming as they’re chewed?
I thought I had known Death, in Rebel’s flat, blank stare. In the last
good-bye of Mrs. Neville. In the rush and gurgle of air as a car with a man at
the wheel sank into cold depths.
I was wrong.
Because Death cannot be known. It cannot be befriended. If Death were a
boy, he would be a lonely figure, standing at the playground’s edge while the
air rippled with other children’s laughter. If Death were a boy, he would walk
alone. He would speak in a whisper and his eyes would be haunted by knowledge
no human can bear.
This was what tore at me in the quiet hours: We come from darkness, and
to darkness we must return.
I remembered Dr. Lezander saying that as I’d sat on his porch with him
facing the golden hills. I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want to think
that Davy Ray was in a place where he could see no light, not even the candle
that burned for him at the Presbyterian church. I didn’t want to think of Davy
Ray confined, closed away from the sun, unable to somehow breathe and laugh
even if doing so was only shadow play. In the days that followed the death of
Davy Ray, I realized what fiction I had been a witness to. The cowboys and
Indians, the detectives and policemen, the armies and the monster victims,
would all rise again, at the dimming of the stage lights. They would go home,
to wait for a casting call. But Davy Ray was dead forever, and I could not
stand the thought of him in darkness.
It got to where I couldn’t sleep. My room was too dark. It got to where I
wasn’t sure what I’d seen, the night a blurred figure spoke to Rebel. Because
if Davy Ray was in darkness, so, too, was Carl Bellwood. Rebel was. And all
the sleepers on Poulter Hill and all the generations whose bones lay beneath
the twisted roots of Zephyr’s trees: they, too, had returned to darkness.
I remembered Davy Ray’s funeral. How thick the red earth was, on the
edges of the grave. How thick, how heavy. There was no door down there when
the minister was finished and the people gone and the dirt shoveled in by
Bruton men. There was only dark, and its weight made something crack inside
me.
I didn’t know where heaven was anymore. I wasn’t sure if God had any
sense, or plan or reason, or if maybe He, too, was in the dark. I wasn’t sure
of anything anymore: not life, not afterlife, not God, not goodness. And I
anguished over these things as the Christmas decorations went up on Merchants
Street.
Christmas was still two weeks away, but Zephyr struggled for a festive
air. The death of Davy Ray had drowned everybody’s joy. It was talked about at
Mr. Dollar’s, at the Bright Star Cafe, at the courthouse, and everywhere in
between. He was so young, they said. Such a tragic accident, they said. But
that’s life, they said; whether we like it or not, that’s life.
Hearing these things didn’t help me. Of course my folks tried to talk to
me about it, saying that Davy Ray’s suffering was over and that he’d gone to a
better place.
But I just couldn’t believe them. What place would ever be better than
Zephyr?
“Heaven,” Mom told me as we sat together before the crackling fire. “Davy
Ray’s gone to heaven, and you have to believe that.”
“Because why?” I asked her, and she looked as if I’d just slapped her
face.
I waited for an answer. I hoped for one, but it came in a word that left
me unsatisfied, and that word was “faith.”
They took me to see Reverend Lovoy. We sat in his office at church, and
he gave me a lemon candy from a bowl on his desk. “Cory,” he said, “you
believe in Jesus, don’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“And you believe that Jesus was sent from God to die for the sins of
man?”
“Yes sir.”
“Then you also believe Jesus was crucified, dead and buried, and on the
third day He arose from the grave?”
“Yes sir.” Here I frowned. “But Jesus was Jesus. Davy Ray was just a
regular boy.”
“I know that, Cory, but Jesus came to earth to show us that there’s more
to this existence than we understand. He showed us that if we believe in Him,
and follow His will and way, we, too, have a place with God in heaven. You
see?”
I thought about this for a minute as Reverend Lovoy sat back in his chair
and watched me. “Is heaven better than Zephyr?” I asked him.
“A million times better,” he said.
“Do they have comic books there?”
“Well…” He smiled. “We don’t really know what heaven will be. We just
know it’ll be wonderful.”
“Because why?” I asked.
“Because,” he answered, “we must have faith.” He offered the bowl to me.
“Would you like another candy?”
I couldn’t picture heaven. How could a place be any good at all if it
didn’t have the things there you enjoyed doing? If there were no comic books,
no monster movies, no bikes, and no country roads to ride them on? No swimming
pools, no ice cream, no summer, or barbecue on the Fourth of July? No
thunderstorms, and front porches on which to sit and watch them coming? Heaven
sounded to me like a library that only held books about one certain subject,
