A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories Read online

  “Heber Finn’s pub?” I’d shout, once connected. “Is Nick there? Could you send him along here, please?”

  My mind’s eye saw them, the local boys, lined up, peering over the barricade at that freckled mirror so like a frozen winter pond and themselves discovered all drowned and deep under that lovely ice. Amid all their jostlings and their now-here’s-a-secret-in-a-stage-whisper-commotion stood Nick, my village driver, his quietness abounding. I heard Heber Finn sing out from the phone. I heard Nick start up and reply:

  “Just look at me, headin’ for the door!”

  Early on, I learned that “headin’ for the door” was no nerve-shattering process that might affront dignity or destroy the fine filigree of any argument being woven with great and breathless beauty at Heber Finn’s. It was, rather, a gradual disengagement, a leaning of the bulk so one’s gravity was diplomatically shifted toward that far empty side of the public room where the door, shunned by all, stood neglected. Meantime, a dozen conversational warps and woofs must be ticked, tied, and labeled so next morn, with hoarse cries of recognition, patterns might be seized and the shuttle thrown with no pause for breath or thought.

  Timing it, I figured the long part of Nick’s midnight journey—the length of Heber Finn’s—took half an hour. The short part—from Finn’s to the house where I waited—took but five minutes.

  So it was on the night before the first night of Lent. I called. I waited.

  And at last, down through the night forest, thrashed the 1931 Chevrolet, peat-turf colored on top like Nick. Car and driver gasped, sighed, wheezed softly, easily, gently as they nudged into the courtyard and I groped down the front steps under a moonless but brightly starred sky.

  I peered through the car window at unstirred dark; the dashboard had been dead these many years.

  “Nick …?”

  “None other,” he whispered secretly. “And ain’t it a fine warm evenin’?”

  The temperature was fifty. But, Nick’d been no nearer Rome than the Tipperary shore line; so weather was relative.

  “A fine warm evening.” I climbed up front and gave the squealing door its absolutely compulsory, rust-splintering slam. “Nick, how’ve you been since?”

  “Ah.” He let the car bulk and grind itself down the forest path. “I got me health. Ain’t that all-and-everything with Lent comin’ on tomorra?”

  “Lent,” I mused. “What will you give up for Lent, Nick?”

  “I been turnin’ it over.” Nick sucked his cigarette suddenly; the pink, lined mask of his face blinked off the smoke. “And why not these terrible things ya see in me mouth? Dear as gold-fillin’s, and a dread congestor of the lungs they be. Put it all down, add ’em up, and ya got a sick loss by the year’s turnin’, ya know. So ya’ll not find these filthy creatures in me face again the whole time of Lent, and, who knows, after!”

  “Bravo!” said I, a non-smoker.

  “Bravo, says I to meself,” wheezed Nick, one eye flinched with smoke.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “I’ll need it,” whispered Nick, “with the Sin’s own habit to be broke.”

  And we moved with firm control, with thoughtful shift of weight, down and around a turfy hollow and through a mist and into Dublin at thirty-one easy miles an hour.

  Bear with me while I stress it: Nick was the most careful driver in all God’s world, including any sane, small, quiet, butter-and-milk producing country you name.

  Above all, Nick stands innocent and sainted when compared to those motorists who key that small switch marked paranoia each time they fuse themselves to their bucket seats in Los Angeles, Mexico City, or Paris. Also, to those blind men who, forsaking tin cups and canes, but still wearing their Hollywood dark-glasses, laugh insanely down the Via Veneto, shaking brake-drum lining like carnival serpentine out their race-car windows. Consider the Roman ruins; surely they are the wreckage strewn and left by those motor-biking otters who, all night beneath your hotel window, shriek down dark Roman alleys, Christians hell-bent for the Colosseum lion pits.

  Nick, now. See his easy hands loving the wheel in a slow clock-like turning as soft and silent as winter constellations snow down the sky. Listen to his mist-breathing voice all night-quiet as he charms the road, his foot a tenderly benevolent pat on the whispering accelerator, never a mile under thirty, never two miles over. Nick, Nick, and his steady boat gentling a mild sweet lake where all Time slumbers. Look, compare. And bind such a man to you with summer grasses, gift him with silver, shake his hand warmly at each journey’s end.

  “Good night, Nick,” I said at the hotel. “See you tomorrow.”

  “God willing,” whispered Nick.

  And he drove softly away.

  Let twenty-three hours of sleep, breakfast, lunch, supper, late night-cap pass. Let hours of writing bad script into fair script fade to peat mist and rain, and there I come again, another midnight, out of that Georgian mansion, its door throwing a warm hearth of color before me as I tread down the steps to feel Braille-wise in fog for the car I know hulks there; I hear its enlarged and asthmatic heart gasping in the blind air, and Nick coughing his “gold by the ounce is not more precious” cough.

  “Ah, there you are, sir!” said Nick.

  And I climbed in the sociable front seat and gave the door its slam. “Nick,” I said, smiling.

  And then the impossible happened. The car jerked as if shot from the blazing mouth of a cannon, roared, took off, bounced, skidded, then cast itself in full, stoning ricochet down the path among shattered bushes and writhing shadows. I snatched my knees as my head hit the car top four times.

  Nick! I almost shouted. Nick!

  Visions of Los Angeles, Mexico City, Paris, jumped through my mind. I gazed in frank dismay at the speedometer. Eighty, ninety, one hundred kilometers; we shot out a great blast of gravel behind and hit the main road, rocked over a bridge and slid down in the midnight streets of Kilcock. No sooner in than out of town at one hundred ten kilometers, I felt all Ireland’s grass put down its ears when we, with a yell, jumped over a rise.

  Nick! I thought, and turned, and there he sat, only one thing the same. On his lips a cigarette burned, blinding first one eye, then the other.

  But the rest of Nick, behind the cigarette, was changed as if the Adversary himself had squeezed and molded and fired him with a dark hand. There he was, whirling the wheel round-about, over-around; here we frenzied under trestles, out of tunnels, here knocked crossroad signs spinning like weathercocks in whirlwinds.

  Nick’s face; the wisdom was drained from it, the eyes neither gentle nor philosophical, the mouth neither tolerant, nor at peace. It was a face washed raw, a scalded, peeled potato, a face more like a blinding searchlight raking its steady and meaningless glare ahead while his quick hands snaked and bit and bit the wheel again to lean us round curves and jump us off cliff after cliff of night.

  It’s not Nick, I thought, it’s his brother. Or a dire thing’s come in his life, some destroying affliction or blow, a family sorrow or sickness, yes, that’s the answer.

  And then Nick spoke, and his voice, it was changed too. Gone was the mellow peat bog, the moist sod, the warm fire in out of the cold rain, gone the gentle grass. Now the voice fairly cracked at me, a clarion, a trumpet, all iron and tin.

  “Well, how ya been since!” Nick shouted. “How is it with ya!” he cried.

  And the car, it too had suffered violence. It protested the change, yes, for it was an old and much-beaten thing that had done its time and now only wished to stroll along, like a crusty beggar toward sea and sky, careful of its breath and bones. But Nick would have none of that, and cadged the wreck on as if thundering toward Hell, there to warm his cold hands at some special blaze. Nick leaned, the car leaned; great livid gases blew out in fireworks from the exhaust. Nick’s frame, my frame, the car’s frame, all together, were wracked and shuddered and ticked wildly.

  My sanity was saved from being torn clean off the bone by a simple act. My eyes, seeking
the cause of our plaguing flight, ran over the man blazing here like a sheet of ignited vapor from the Abyss, and laid hands to the answering clue.

  “Nick,” I gasped, “it’s the first night of Lent!”

  “So?” Nick said, surprised.

  “So,” I said, “remembering your Lenten promise, why’s that cigarette in your mouth?”

  Nick did not know what I meant for a moment. Then he cast his eyes down, saw the jiggling smoke, and shrugged.

  “Ah,” he said, “I give up the other.”

  And suddenly it all came clear.

  The other one hundred forty odd nights, at the door of the old Georgian house I had accepted from my employer a fiery douse of scotch or bourbon or some-such drink “against the chill.” Then, breathing summer wheat or barley or oats or whatever from my scorched and charcoaled mouth, I had walked out to a cab where sat a man who, during all the long evenings’ wait for me to phone for his services, had lived in Heber Finn’s pub.

  Fool! I thought, how could you have forgotten this!

  And there in Heber Finn’s, during the long hours of lacy talk that was like planting and bringing to crop a garden among busy men, each contributing his seed or flower, and wielding the implements, their tongues, and the raised, foam-hived glasses, their own hands softly curled about the dear drinks, there Nick had taken into himself a mellowness.

  And that mellowness had distilled itself down in a slow rain that damped his smoldering nerves and put the wilderness fires in every limb of him out. Those same showers laved his face to leave the tidal marks of wisdom, the lines of Plato and Aeschylus there. The harvest mellowness colored his cheeks, warmed his eyes soft, lowered his voice to a husking mist, and spread in his chest to slow his heart to a gentle jog trot. It rained out his arms to loosen his hard-mouthed hands on the shuddering wheel and sit him with grace and ease in his horse-hair saddle as he gentled us through the fogs that kept us and Dublin apart.

  And with the malt on my own tongue, fluming up my sinus with burning vapors, I had never detected the scent of any spirits on my old friend here.

  “Ah,” said Nick again. “Yes; I give up the other.”

  The last bit of jigsaw fell in place.

  Tonight, the first night of Lent.

  Tonight, for the first time in all the nights I had driven with him, Nick was sober.

  All those other one hundred and forty-odd nights, Nick hadn’t been driving careful and easy just for my safety, no, but because of the gentle weight of mellowness sloping now on this side, now on that side of him as we took the long, scything curves.

  Oh, who really knows the Irish, say I, and which half of them is which? Nick?—who is Nick?—and what in the world is he? Which Nick’s the real Nick, the one that everyone knows?

  I will not think on it!

  There is only one Nick for me. The one that Ireland shaped herself with her weathers and waters, her seedings and harvestings, her brans and mashes, her brews, bottlings, and ladlings-out, her summer-grain-colored pubs astir and advance with the wind in the wheat and barley by night, you may hear the good whisper way out in forest, on bog, as you roll by. That’s Nick to the teeth, eye, and heart, to his easygoing hands. If you ask what makes the Irish what they are, I’d point on down the road and tell where you turn to Heber Finn’s.

  The first night of Lent, and before you count nine, we’re in Dublin! I’m out of the cab and it’s puttering there at the curb and I lean in to put my money in the hands of my driver. Earnestly, pleadingly, warmly, with all the friendly urging in the world, I look into that fine man’s raw, strange, torchlike face.

  “Nick,” I said.

  “Sir!” he shouted.

  “Do me a favor,” I said.

  “Anything!” he shouted.

  “Take this extra money,” I said, “and buy the biggest bottle of Irish moss you can find. And just before you pick me up tomorrow night, Nick, drink it down, drink it all. Will you do that, Nick? Will you promise me, cross your heart and hope to die, to do that?”

  He thought on it, and the very thought damped down the ruinous blaze in his face.

  “Ya make it terrible hard on me,” he said.

  I forced his fingers shut on the money. At last he put it in his pocket and faced silently ahead.

  “Good night, Nick,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

  “God willing,” said Nick.

  And he drove away.

  The Time of Going Away

  The thought was three days and three nights growing. During the days he carried it like a ripening peach in his head. During the nights he let it take flesh and sustenance, hung out on the silent air, colored by country moon and country stars. He walked around and around the thought in the silence before dawn. On the fourth morning he reached up an invisible hand, picked it, and swallowed it whole.

  He arose as swiftly as possible and burned all his old letters, packed a few clothes in a very small case, and put on his midnight suit and a tie the shiny color of ravens’ feathers, as if he were in mourning. He sensed his wife in the door behind him watching his little play with the eyes of a critic who may leap on stage any moment and stop the show. When he brushed past her, he murmured, “Excuse me.”

  “Excuse me!” she cried. “Is that all you say? Creeping around here, planning a trip!”

  “I didn’t plan it; it happened,” he said. “Three days ago I got this premonition. I knew I was going to die.”

  “Stop that kind of talk,” she said. “It makes me nervous.”

  The horizon was mirrored softly in his eyes. “I hear my blood running slow. Listening to my bones is like standing in an attic hearing the beams shift and the dust settle.”

  “You’re only seventy-five,” said his wife. “You stand on your own two legs, see, hear, eat, and sleep good, don’t you? What’s all this talk?”

  “It’s the natural tongue of existence speaking to me,” said the old man. “Civilization’s got us too far away from our natural selves. Now you take the pagan islanders—”

  “I won’t!”

  “Everyone knows the pagan islanders got a feel for when it’s time to die. They walk around shaking hands with friends and give away all their earthly goods—”

  “Don’t their wives have a say?”

  “They give some of their earthly goods to their wives.”

  “I should think so!”

  “And some to their friends—”

  “I’ll argue that!”

  “And some to their friends. Then they paddle their canoes off into the sunset and never return.”

  His wife looked high up along him as if he were timber ripe for cutting. “Desertion!” she said.

  “No, no, Mildred; death, pure and simple. The Time of Going Away, they call it.”

  “Did anyone ever charter a canoe and follow to see what those fools were up to?”

  “Of course not,” said the old man, mildly irritated. “That would spoil everything.”

  “You mean they had other wives and pretty friends off on another island?”

  “No, no, it’s just a man needs aloneness, serenity, when his juices turn cold.”

  “If you could prove those fools really died, I’d shut up.” His wife squinted one eye. “Anyone ever find their bones on those far islands?”

  “The fact is that they just sail on into the sunset, like animals who sense the Great Time at hand. Beyond that, I don’t wish to know.”

  “Well, I know,” said the old woman. “You been reading more articles in the National Geographic about the Elephants’ Boneyard.”

  “Graveyard, not Boneyard!” he shouted.

  “Graveyard, Boneyard. I thought I burned those magazines; you got some hid?”

  “Look here, Mildred,” he said severely, seizing the suitcase again. “My mind points north; nothing you say can head me south. I’m tuned to the infinite secret well springs of the primitive soul.”

  “You’re tuned to whatever you read last in that bog trotters’
gazette!” She pointed a finger at him. “You think I got no memory?”

  His shoulders fell. “Let’s not go through the list again, please.”

  “What about the hairy mammoth episode?” she asked. “When they found that frozen elephant in the Russian tundra thirty years back? You and Sam Hertz, that old fool, with your fine idea of running off to Siberia to corner the world market in canned edible hairy mammoth. You think I don’t still hear you saying, ‘Imagine the prices members of the National Geographic Society will pay to have the tender meat of the Siberian hairy mammoth, ten thousand years old, ten thousand years extinct right in their homes!’ You think my scars have healed from that?”

  “I see them clearly,” he said.

  “Yoy think I’ve forgotten the time you went out to find the Lost Tribe of the Osseos, or whatever, in Wisconsin some place where you could dogtrot to town Saturday nights and tank up, and fell in that quarry and broke your leg and laid there three nights?”

  “Your recall,” he said, “is total.”

  “Then what’s this about pagan natives and the Time of Going Away? I’ll tell you what it is—It’s the Time of Staying at Home! It’s the time when fruit don’t fall off the trees into your hand, you got to walk to the store for it. And why do we walk to the store for it? Someone in this house, I’ll name no names, took the car apart like a clock some years back and left it strewn all down the yard. I’ve raised auto parts in my garden ten years come Thursday. Ten more years and all that’s left of our car is little heaps of rust. Look out that window! It’s leaf-raking-and-burning time. It’s chopping-trees-and-sawing-wood-for-the-fire time. It’s clean-out-stoves-and-hang-storm-doors-and-windows time. It’s shingle-the-roof-time, that’s what it is, and if you think you’re out to escape it, think again!”

  He placed his hand to his chest. “It pains me you have so little trust in my natural sensitivity to oncoming Doom.”