The Feet are at the Door

Albert Parkman spent two nights walking around in the house. His wife, Ruby, said nothing about it and that alone was a problem. In the dark downstairs he'd wandered from chair to chair, looked out windows, checked door locks, stood at the edges of rooms to watch vacant furniture, stood in the middle of rooms to look out windows from farther back. The Palances - a family he knew only from photographs and hateful stories - were on their way, three of them coming this morning, ending their drive from Mississippi to Maine, a full-length coffin riding in their one-ton box bed truck.


The biggest stone in Hartland Cemetery belonged to Frederick Palance. Many pictures of the man and his family hung in town, positioned and preserved by lovers of historical fact. These photographs decorated the general store's long counter and the grange mudroom walls, and they leaned on the mantle of the big, rock fireplace at the fish-and-game. The pictures showed husband and wife, sons and daughters each smiling smiles that looked like bearing teeth and little more; women and men all standing at important corners of business. But the family was gone, cut out of the little town clean, forty years ago. Albert owned the Palance estate now; third generation living on that land.


No one knew, and Albert had no idea until a telephone conversation gave up a secret: there were no bones beneath Frederick's tall stone, only a coffin stuffed with cloth and field rocks. The bones themselves lay in another box, down the logging road, buried in the old farm woods. The man on the telephone, David Palance, a grandson of Frederick, had told how the family swaddled the coffin rocks in used up blankets and clothing to guard against one knocking on another in the carrying and the burying. A little stone man went into the ground. This was the grandmother's design; Elizabeth Palance wanted it known only by family where her husband would be. David described the true site in the woods and Albert saw it: the low tumbled wall, the central stone a hip-high spine erect out of black leaves, the top a tall point too sharp even for a cat to stand on. He could walk to the place through straight woods, no trail, the same as anywhere on his land. Forever he'd thought the stone there to mark property. His father told him this: it merely stood as the meeting point for two lines of some forgotten plot. But he'd gotten it wrong; it was a grave, and this changed the woods. They seemed in a moment to intensify, to gain a mind; the shadows and the wind sounds. Albert told his sons, and their faces slackened; they looked far away. The new idea settled in and opened doors for them.


On the telephone, David was a friendly and funny man. Albert could rarely act the way he wanted with someone new. Trying to sound like himself, he'd sweat and never get out what he hoped to say, but with David he'd achieved a tone right away that satisfied; he'd drifted through lulls without worry and felt a peace that held to where he didn't need to know the conversation was going anywhere. Ruby came to the kitchen, sat and marveled at his ease.


David asked about Albert's life and work. He seemed interested, asked many questions. After Albert got over feeling that he had to be boring this man, he went along freely, describing people and situations with clarity and recall he had no idea he could manage.


Eventually he said what he was thinking: his father and grandfather would have hated him talking to a Palance. David laughed and said the same thing. He knew all about the old war, mentioned it like it was funny, and Albert in the moment saw it that way too. He felt odd seeing this, but good. They talked two hours. Albert held the receiver in one hand instead of two, a great sign of his comfort. As the conversation got down to its ending, David explained that his grandmother was not well. He'd said this a couple times, but now he wanted to talk about it. She'd been stuck on the idea of dying and said her husband needed to be near her now. They couldn't shake her from it. She wanted him brought off the old land and taken south so she could lie beside him when the time came, and she swore to God it was coming. David asked permission. In the traveling party it would be he and his brother, and they'd have the Grandmother along too since she would allow nothing else. They could come in a month if this was at all acceptable to Albert. Before thinking too long, he opened his home and welcomed them warmly. He felt very gracious and accommodating. Ruby said he seemed powerful talking on the telephone.


For a time, Albert experienced a fair amount of peace and pride. His invitation had come off comfortably and he liked to think of it and say to himself how he'd said it. When he felt especially good he wished he'd asked them to stay a night, though he wouldn't call back; a second conversation might spoil the first.


The peace lasted a day or two, and it would have gone longer, but there were regulators in Albert's head. They could lie quiet, but they never went away. The flesh that wrapped the bones of these things (he called them his spirituality and his church) was knit of habits of his thinking. Their inspiration to move came of discomforts in the flesh. Albert's decision got the old group talking. Now they ascended, gathered round to look at what he'd done, studied it for a day, and when Albert received their work he understood how complex the situation was. Were his father alive to witness the Palances welcomed he would have degenerated deeper into a man of impulses, and this was surprising only in that it affected Albert. It was his memory. Something let it go. The gate door holding it swung wide and he saw the old face stiffen, watched the head cock back, the hands shake, animated in rage. He watched his father with the attention a miracle-healed blind man might use for looking at a tree, trying to figure out what it is.


It only took him a little while feeling like this before, half knowing what he did - the known half, regretful, the other curious - he had his father popped out of the ground, carried over roads and standing up on the property. For years he hadn't cared to see him, forced himself never to, though now he looked until it was normal. And they hadn't talked; it had been memory-talk, of course, but still. Very soon he tried a little talking, just said: "Hello," when he felt he should, and he saw him every day: the towering head and leaned in teeth, his wet blue eyes and long ears and long nose. He hadn't felt the old dread in thirty years (watching the work truck turn in the drive; a child waiting for footfalls on the porch stairs; for the lock to turn; the sound of him in the house; the sound of his silence in the house). He hadn't missed it. But he didn't hate it now; decades past that childhood he could examine his father in safety. In a day or so the old man left his post, went inside and sat in every chair, and the house changed, got crowded. He looked out all windows, nosed the panes not steaming one even a dime's width. It was nice to see him, and it was awful. He stood in the rooms and listened to conversations. He knew something had been done and was looking for it; a hunched man, tracking a hint of smoke to fire. Even so, the thought of the Palances' arrival continued to please Albert. He was sure it did. He'd gone along with his father's thinking so long without question that when the time had come to test it out, he'd completely forgotten it. This made him feel irreverent, though not guilty at first, for the old hate had lounged unchallenged and slept so silently it may well have been a feature of the landscape, some upjutting ledgework of no mind, and he'd stepped right over it not really knowing. So he walked about in the house with welcome in his heart for them all. Now this was easy toward the men; they were close to his age and so had played no part in any of his father's stories, but the woman, she had played a part. Still, he welcomed her. Elizabeth Palance was a dying woman who wanted to be buried with her husband. Albert could see the innocence in it. And he felt proud to go forward with something no one of his family could have done.


He stood at a front window, watching the road.


Joseph looked from the drapes upstairs.


If anyone wanted to see if a Palance had ever lived in Hartland, they'd find proof enough. In the graveyard, the name trailed back out of memory, the older headstones looking like natural rock. Frederick had stationed his grown children in a row of seven houses on the main road through town - before RT. 12 cut the outskirts in a straight line - a road named Palance Lane by an old document or two. Three of the houses still had the iron name tacked to the molding. At the edge of Ann's Lake lay the foundation of their old motel, knocked in now, burned, now gone to rows of granite in the grass where cats sunned and the ground glittered with broken glass. The church's corroding bell carried the name on the sounding ring. Fredrick's son, Harman, the minister in those days, sketched a design for the ringer that no one could convince him to drop, and in three days the blacksmith gave him what he wanted: a large man's head cast in bronze. Harman hung it upside-down in the bell. Children climbed to see and rejoiced. Men and women who needed a pastor they could understand, hypothesized this was the head of the devil; they comforted themselves saying the Sunday bell expressed Christ's mastery, and the pastor had planned it all. Albert had seen the head and sent his sons. The bell wall crushed the bronze nose flat, and the mouth and chin, though it never marked the open eyes. Despite the purer reasoning forced on the bell, many said more tempting things: something was wrong in the ringing, a voice mixed up in it, singing at the best, wailing even worse and better, and for a little while some named the Sunday bell "The Devil's Din", which became "The Devil's Tim" then "Old Tim". They invented this Timothy, had him inhabit the steeple, and many in town learned to make good use of him. Tim Palance, a derelict son, walled up in the bell spire for his perversions, a justly dead boy there for making the best of his trial by turning himself on his head to converse with the devil. For years, whenever something strange happened in Hartland - a window inexplicably smashed, a flying flag cut apart or a tire gashed, a cat come home with whiskers burnt to curling chaff, the tale nipped to a bob, they said Tim's come from the bell. "Down from the bell to work his hell."


When Frederick Palance died, his family shook down to dust. He came inside to show his wife places on his face that he could not feel. She touched him along his jaw, under his nose, around the rims of bone beneath his eyes. He left her and pushed in sewing pins and found blood but felt nothing. Water ran over the surface of the bones of his head, he told her, like warm water running between sheets of ice. In two nights he couldn't hold a pen; in three he no longer opened his eyes - the children declared him dead ten times before he did die; one of them would say it and they'd all come in, but see his chest still rising and falling, and they'd leave as though having clumped around a circus cage, uncloaked it, found the lion missing. When he did die, they stood in the room, all at the foot of the bed, Elizabeth the only one to touch him or cry. Andrew, the eldest son, sat on the porch through the morning, his father's boots on - having taken them - and laced to the tops.


Stopping to see and sign off officially on the death, the doctor blamed a buildup in the head, a fleck of rust shaken free to land on a critical place; a flu shutting over fire; a dropped flower petal stopping a tank was what it was.


For several months the Palance sons and daughters wore new clothes. They left their mother in the house alone; returned only to have her walk them to their father's vault. They had their flash in the fire. In half a year they had nothing but the house and land. Albert's grandfather, Joseph, came quickly as a pastor might to the side of a man fading away. He made his offer, just a formality strung up in the name of decency, and they sold their estate for a terrible price. Joseph said how weakness must dominate a family that can decide to die by losing the head instead of putting up a new one. He despised them for this, for not cursing him at all through the whole process of the moving out. He stood by as they carried furniture and crates; "Stumping like they all died too. No one said a thing to me. Kids the only ones looking over; none of the older ones, and not a word. It just shows me more what they are. Without him, they'll do well at searing that family line shut. I thank God."


Those children, with their mother, emptied the house of what they could afford to take then left Hartland. A few people said they saw one or two of them the next town over, in Jackman, but other than that, nothing, and it was generally decided they were gone.


On a morning a month or so after Joseph and his wife Norma moved into the house and felt comfortable there, which is to say his wife had scrubbed and scalded the smell of the people out, he went to the yard and found a large stone buried in the windshield of his truck. The crimes after this came steadily and varied in creativity and severity. Another morning he discovered the side door of the house removed, the hinge bolts like little fingers pointing at the open space. Next he found a hole cut in the roof of the barn. Birds sat around it. One morning the truck was tipped on its side. Then it went into the pond, sunken to the rooftop. The day they woke to the scarecrow in their bedroom chair beside Norma's head, wearing one of Norma's dresses, she began talking about travel. They woke on another morning to fumes. Stepping in the hall they found each bedroom door painted black and done very well; the hallways and walls upstairs and down were covered by streaks and large blotches, some that Norma stood back from and identified as silhouettes of beings; she believed demons were involving themselves now, had come to lean on walls, to mark doors for who knows what. She refused to figure out what, refused comfort and additionally did not do a thing about the markings though Joseph did make his voice loving when he suggested it. She attended church the next Sunday and did not come home. Hatefully he predicted to his son, Albert's father, that she never would. She never did. Norma could not take any more suspense, could not adapt to her husband's practice of inaction which had grown tyrannical. He brought not one offense to an authority. "They'll wear themselves out," he said. "They're looking for us to strike and give them reasons for new ideas. You can see that's what they're doing. They're getting tired. It's desperation now. That's the wildness in it."


Albert watched the road. Ruby rushed around in the kitchen getting ready. The boys would wake up because of her noise, but she was not concerned. Albert closed his eyes. A headache swelled in the place of sleep. At first it had kept to his head, but now it pumped through his eyes. When he blinked the lids felt shrunken; they belonged on a child's head; closing, they synched and he felt it like something curling fingers behind each eye. He touched his forehead to the cool glass then pinched the bridge of his nose lightly as he would a chrysalis, lifting one from a leaf. Ruby stacked cups and plates, humming while she did. Albert did not share her pleasure, though two weeks ago he had. The real problem was he'd done something horrible. He admitted that it was. Saturday of the previous week, alone on the farm, he'd ignored the feeling God put in him and walked into the woods with a shovel and a bag on an errand he'd loved but hated right now. He had felt fear like this before but not in years. It rolled in his stomach like a freezing child. When the Palances got into the woods today and knew everything, they'd come back, and whether or not they'd be dangerous, he just didn't know.

Ekleksographia:
Wave 4.1c

August, 2010

Fiction