A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories Read online

  “Some men trapshoot or hunt ducks,” I said. “Some men box or wrestle.”

  “And some don’t. I’m talkin’ about them that don’t. Me. All my life I’ve been saltin’ down those bodies, puttin’ ’em away on ice in my head. Sometimes you get mad at a town and the people in it for makin’ you put things aside like that. You like the old cave men who just gave a hell of a yell and whanged someone on the head with a club.”

  “Which all leads up to …?”

  “Which all leads up to: everybody’d like to do one killin’ in his life, to sort of work off that big load of stuff, all those killin’s in his mind he never did have the guts to do. And once in a while a man has a chance. Someone runs in front of his car and he forgets the brakes and keeps goin’. Nobody can prove nothin’ with that sort of thing. The man don’t even tell himself he did it. He just didn’t get his foot on the brake in time. But you know and I know what really happened, don’t we?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  The town was far away now. We moved over a small stream on a wooden bridge, just near the railway embankment.

  “Now,” said the old man, looking at the water, “the only kind of killin’ worth doin’ is the one where nobody can guess who did it or why they did it or who they did it to, right? Well, I got this idea maybe twenty years ago. I don’t think about it every day or every week. Sometimes months go by, but the idea’s this: only one train stops here each day, sometimes not even that. Now, if you wanted to kill someone you’d have to wait, wouldn’t you, for years and years, until a complete and actual stranger came to your town, a stranger who got off the train for no reason, a man nobody knows and who don’t know nobody in the town. Then, and only then, I thought, sittin’ there on the station chair, you could just go up and when nobody’s around, kill him and throw him in the river. He’d be found miles downstream. Maybe he’d never be found. Nobody would ever think to come to Rampart Junction to find him. He wasn’t goin’ there. He was on his way someplace else. There, that’s my whole idea. And I’d know that man the minute he got off the train. Know him, just as clear …”

  I had stopped walking. It was dark. The moon would not be up for an hour.

  “Would you?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. I saw the motion of his head looking at the stars. “Well, I’ve talked enough.” He sidled close and touched my elbow. His hand was feverish, as if he had held it to a stove before touching me. His other hand, his right hand, was hidden, tight and bunched, in his pocket. “I’ve talked enough.”

  Something screamed.

  I jerked my head.

  Above, a fast flying night express razored along the unseen tracks, flourished light on hill, forest, farm, town dwellings, field, ditch, meadow, plowed earth and water, then, raving high, cut off away, shrieking, gone. The rails trembled for a little while after that. Then, silence.

  The old man and I stood looking at each other in the dark. His left hand was still holding my elbow. His other hand was still hidden.

  “May I say something?” I said at last.

  The old man nodded.

  “About myself,” I said. I had to stop. I could hardly breathe. I forced myself to go on. “It’s funny. I’ve often thought the same way as you. Sure, just today, going cross-country, I thought, How perfect, how perfect, how really perfect it could be. Business has been bad for me, lately. Wife sick. Good friend died last week. War in the world. Full of boils, myself. It would do me a world of good—”

  “What?” the old man said, his hand on my arm.

  “To get off this train in a small town,” I said, “where nobody knows me, with this gun under my arm, and find someone and kill them and bury them and go back down to the station and get on and go home and nobody the wiser and nobody ever to know who did it, ever. Perfect, I thought, a perfect crime. And I got off the train.”

  We stood there in the dark for another minute, staring at each other. Perhaps we were listening to each other’s hearts beating very fast, very fast indeed.

  The world turned under me. I clenched my fists. I wanted to fall. I wanted to scream like the train.

  For suddenly I saw that all the things I had just said were not lies put forth to save my life.

  All the things I had just said to this man were true.

  And now I knew why I had stepped from the train and walked up through this town. I knew what I had been looking for.

  I heard the old man breathing hard and fast. His hand was tight on my arm as if he might fall. His teeth were clenched. He leaned toward me as I leaned toward him. There was a terrible silent moment of immense strain as before an explosion.

  He forced himself to speak at last. It was the voice of a man crushed by a monstrous burden.

  “How do I know you got a gun under your arm?”

  “You don’t know.” My voice was blurred. “You can’t be sure.”

  He waited. I thought he was going to faint.

  “That’s how it is?” he said.

  “That’s how it is,” I said.

  He shut his eyes tight. He shut his mouth tight.

  After another five seconds, very slowly, heavily, he managed to take his hand away from my own immensely heavy arm. He looked down at his right hand then, and took it, empty, out of his pocket.

  Slowly, with great weight, we turned away from each other and started walking blind, completely blind, in the dark.

  The midnight Passenger-to-be-picked-up flare sputtered on the tracks. Only when the train was pulling out of the station did I lean from the open Pullman door and look back.

  The old man was seated there with his chair tilted against the station wall, with his faded blue pants and shirt and his sun-baked face and his sun-bleached eyes. He did not glance at me as the train slid past. He was gazing east along the empty rails where tomorrow or the next day or the day after the day after that, a train, some train, any train, might fly by here, might slow, might stop. His face was fixed, his eyes were blindly frozen, toward the east. He looked a hundred years old.

  The train wailed.

  Suddenly old myself, I leaned out, squinting.

  Now the darkness that had brought us together stood between. The old man, the station, the town, the forest, were lost in the night.

  For an hour I stood in the roaring blast staring back at all that darkness.

  A Scent of Sarsaparilla

  Mr. William Finch stood quietly in the dark and blowing attic all morning and afternoon for three days. For three days in late November, he stood alone, feeling the soft white flakes of Time falling out of the infinite cold steel sky, silently, softly, feathering the roof and powdering the eaves. He stood, eyes shut. The attic, wallowed in seas of wind in the long sunless days, creaked every bone and shook down ancient dusts from its beams and warped timbers and lathings. It was a mass of sighs and torments that ached all about him where he stood sniffing its elegant dry perfumes and feeling of its ancient heritages. Ah. Ah.

  Listening, downstairs, his wife, Cora, could not hear him walk or shift or twitch. She imagined she could only hear him breathe, slowly out and in, like a dusty bellows, alone up there in the attic, high in the windy house.

  “Ridiculous,” she muttered.

  When he hurried down for lunch the third afternoon, he smiled at the bleak walls, the chipped plates, the scratched silverware, and even at his wife!

  “What’s all the excitement?” she demanded.

  “Good spirits is all. Wonderful spirits!” he laughed. He seemed almost hysterical with joy. He was seething in a great warm ferment which, obviously, he had trouble concealing. His wife frowned.

  “What’s that smell?”

  “Smell, smell, smell?”

  “Sarsaparilla.” She sniffed suspiciously. “That’s what it is!”

  “Oh, it couldn’t be!” His hysterical happiness stopped as quickly as if she’d switched him off. He seemed stunned, ill at ease, and suddenly very careful.

  “Where did you go this morning?”
she asked.

  “You know I was cleaning the attic.”

  “Mooning over a lot of trash. I didn’t hear a sound. Thought maybe you weren’t in the attic at all. What’s that?” She pointed.

  “Well, now how did those get there?” he asked the world.

  He peered down at the pair of black spring-metal bicycle clips that bound his thin pants cuffs to his bony ankles.

  “Found them in the attic,” he answered himself. “Remember when we got out on the gravel road in the early morning on our tandem bike, Cora, forty years ago, everything fresh and new?”

  “If you don’t finish that attic today, I’ll come up and toss everything out myself.”

  “Oh, no,” he cried. “I have everything the way I want it!” She looked at him coldly.

  “Cora,” he said, eating his lunch, relaxing, beginning to enthuse again, “you know what attics are? They’re Time Machines, in which old, dim-witted men like me can travel back forty years to a time when it was summer all year round and children raided ice wagons. Remember how it tasted? You held the ice in your handkerchief. It was like sucking the flavor of linen and snow at the same time.”

  Cora fidgeted.

  It’s not impossible, he thought, half closing his eyes, trying to see it and build it. Consider an attic. Its very atmosphere is Time. It deals in other years, the cocoons and chrysalises of another age. All the bureau drawers are little coffins where a thousand yesterdays lie in state. Oh, the attic’s a dark, friendly place, full of Time, and if you stand in the very center of it, straight and tall, squinting your eyes, and thinking and thinking, and smelling the Past, and putting out your hands to feel of Long Ago, why, it …

  He stopped, realizing he had spoken some of this aloud. Cora was eating rapidly.

  “Well, wouldn’t it be interesting,” he asked the part in her hair, “if Time Travel could occur? And what more logical, proper place for it to happen than in an attic like ours, eh?”

  “It’s not always summer back in the old days,” she said. “It’s just your crazy memory. You remember all the good things and forget the bad. It wasn’t always summer.”

  “Figuratively speaking, Cora, it was.”

  “Wasn’t.”

  “What I mean is this,” he said, whispering excitedly, bending forward to see the image he was tracing on the blank dining-room wall. “If you rode your unicycle carefully between the years, balancing, hands out, careful, careful, if you rode from year to year, spent a week in 1909, a day in 1900, a month or a fortnight somewhere else, 1905, 1898, you could stay with summer the rest of your life.”

  “Unicycle?”

  “You know, one of those tall chromium one-wheeled bikes, single-seater, the performers ride in vaudeville shows, juggling. Balance, true balance, it takes, not to fall off, to keep the bright objects flying in the air, beautiful, up and up, a light, a flash, a sparkle, a bomb of brilliant colors, red, yellow, blue, green, white, gold; all the Junes and Julys and Augusts that ever were, in the air, about you, at once, hardly touching your hands, flying, suspended, and you, smiling, among them. Balance, Cora, balance.”

  “Blah,” she said, “blah, blah.” And added, “blah!”

  He climbed the long cold stairs to the attic, shivering.

  There were nights in winter when he woke with porcelain in his bones, with cool chimes blowing in his ears, with frost piercing his nerves in a raw illumination like white-cold fireworks exploding and showering down in flaming snows upon a silent land deep in his subconscious. He was cold, cold, cold, and it would take a score of endless summers, with their green torches and bronze suns to thaw him free of his wintry sheath. He was a great tasteless chunk of brittle ice, a snowman put to bed each night, full of confetti dreams, tumbles of crystal and flurry. And there lay winter outside forever, a great leaden wine press smashing down its colorless lid of sky, squashing them all like so many grapes, mashing color and sense and being from everyone, save the children who fled on skis and toboggans down mirrored hills which reflected the crushing iron shield that hung lower above town each day and every eternal night.

  Mr. Finch lifted the attic trap door. But here, here. A dust of summer sprang up about him. The attic dust simmered with heat left over from other seasons. Quietly, he shut the trap door down.

  He began to smile.

  The attic was quiet as a thundercloud before a storm. On occasion, Cora Finch heard her husband murmuring, murmuring, high up there.

  At five in the afternoon, singing My Isle of Golden Dreams, Mr. Finch flipped a crisp new straw hat in the kitchen door. “Boo!”

  “Did you sleep all afternoon?” snapped his wife. “I called up at you four times and no answer.”

  “Sleep?” He considered this and laughed, then put his hand quickly over his mouth. “Well, I guess I did.”

  Suddenly she saw him. “My God!” she cried, “where’d you get that coat?”

  He wore a red candy-striped coat, a high white, choking collar and ice cream pants. You could smell the straw hat like a handful of fresh hay fanned in the air.

  “Found ’em in an old trunk.”

  She sniffed. “Don’t smell of moth balls. Looks brand-new.”

  “Oh, no!” he said hastily. He looked stiff and uncomfortable as she eyed his costume.

  “This isn’t a summer-stock company,” she said.

  “Can’t a fellow have a little fun?”

  “That’s all you’ve ever had,” she slammed the oven door. “While I’ve stayed home and knitted, lord knows, you’ve been down at the store helping ladies’ elbows in and out doors.”

  He refused to be bothered. “Cora.” He looked deep into the crackling straw hat. “Wouldn’t it be nice to take a Sunday walk the way we used to do, with your silk parasol and your long dress whishing along, and sit on those wire-legged chairs at the soda parlor and smell the drugstore the way they used to smell? Why don’t drugstores smell that way any more? And order two sarsaparillas for us, Cora, and then ride out in our 1910 Ford to Hannahan’s Pier for a box supper and listen to the brass band. How about it?”

  “Supper’s ready. Take that dreadful uniform off.”

  “If you could make a wish and take a ride on those oak-laned country roads like they had before cars started rushing, would you do it?” he insisted, watching her.

  “Those old roads were dirty. We came home looking like Africans. Anyway,” she picked up a sugar jar and shook it, “this morning I had forty dollars here. Now it’s gone! Don’t tell me you ordered those clothes from a costume house. They’re brand-new; they didn’t come from any trunk!”

  “I’m—” he said.

  She raved for half an hour, but he could not bring himself to say anything. The November wind shook the house and as she talked, the snows of winter began to fall again in the cold steel sky.

  “Answer me!” she cried. “Are you crazy, spending our money that way, on clothes you can’t wear?”

  “The attic,” he started to say.

  She walked off and sat in the living room.

  The snow was falling fast now and it was a cold dark November evening. She heard him climb up the stepladder, slowly, into the attic, into that dusty place of other years, into that black place of costumes and props and Time, into a world separate from this world below.

  He closed the trap door down. The flashlight, snapped on, was company enough. Yes, here was all of Time compressed in a Japanese paper flower. At the touch of memory, everything would unfold into the clear water of the mind, in beautiful blooms, in spring breezes, larger than life. Each of the bureau drawers slid forth, might contain aunts and cousins and grandmamas, ermined in dust. Yes, Time was here. You could feel it breathing, an atmospheric instead of a mechanical clock.

  Now the house below was as remote as another day in the past. He half shut his eyes and looked and looked on every side of the waiting attic.

  Here, in prismed chandelier, were rainbows and mornings and noons as bright as new rivers flowing endlessl
y back through time. His flashlight caught and flickered them alive, the rainbows leapt up to curve the shadows back with colors, with colors like plums and strawberries and Concord grapes, with colors like cut lemons and the sky where the clouds drew off after storming and the blue was there. And the dust of the attic was incense burning and all of Time burning, and all you need do was peer into the flames. It was indeed a great machine of Time, this attic, he knew, he felt, he was sure, and if you touched prisms here, doorknobs there, plucked tassels, chimed crystals, swirled dust, punched trunk hasps and gusted the vox humana of the old hearth bellows until it puffed the soot of a thousand ancient fires into your eyes, if, indeed, you played this instrument, this warm machine of parts, if you fondled all of its bits and pieces, its levers and changers and movers, then, then, then!

  He thrust out his hands to orchestrate, to conduct, to flourish. There was music in his head, in his mouth shut tight, and he played the great machine, the thunderously silent organ, bass, tenor, soprano, low, high, and at last, at last, a chord that shuddered him so that he had to shut his eyes.

  About nine o’clock that night she heard him calling, “Cora!” She went upstairs. His head peered down at her from above, smiling at her. He waved his hat. “Good-by, Cora.”

  “What do you mean?” she cried.

  “I’ve thought it over for three days and I’m saying good-by.”

  “Come down out of there, you fool!”

  “I drew five hundred dollars from the bank yesterday. I’ve been thinking about this. And then when it happened, well … Cora …” He shoved his eager hand down. “For the last time, will you come along with me?”

  “In the attic? Hand down that stepladder, William Finch. I’ll climb up there and run you out of that filthy place!”

  “I’m going to Hannahan’s Pier for a bowl of clam chowder,” he said. “And I’m requesting the brass band to play ‘Moonlight Bay.’ Oh, come on, Cora …” He motioned his extended hand.

  She simply stared at his gentle, questioning face.