The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [120]
“Pilgrim’s Rest and I, we just sit here,” Clark told the child as they rocked with Sam and Teddy on the porch, looking west at a sunset reddening the river. He lit a cigarette with the lighter he carried always in his loose khaki pants.
“One of these days,” Sam predicted to Annie, “it’ll be your kids running in and out of Pilgrim’s Rest and then this house will laugh all the time.”
“Houses can’t laugh,” Annie informed her aunt. Laughter had been her father’s gift to her. Laughter was betrayal.
“Sure they can,” Clark said.
“Then can houses cry?”
Sam nodded. “This house used to cry. But not since you got here.”
“I’ll never sell it,” Annie vowed to Sam, who had bequeathed her Pilgrim’s Rest. “But I don’t want you and Clark to die.”
“Me either,” Clark said, slowly rocking.
Although Annie had in her teens criticized Clark to Sam, had once even called him “a stupid slug” in an argument, she had counted on, even in those angry years, the steadiness of her adopted uncle. In fact, Clark’s promise that the world could be relied on, his advice “to look on the bright side,” did not come without effort, for privately he believed in flukes and horrors and knew that chaos could only be absorbed, not defeated. Two years in a POW camp as a teenager had shown him the malignity of man and the indifference of nature. Twenty years of performing emergency surgery on children had taught him how thin the shell of life, how easily cracked. It was hard to reassure Sam that nothing like the drowning of her baby brother would happen to Annie, when deep down he worried too. Like Sam, he wanted the equivalent of dunking both of Annie’s feet in the River Styx for safety’s sake. What could that goddess of a mother of Achilles been thinking, to miss wetting one of her baby’s heels?
Clark’s concerns about Annie’s safety focused on speed and Sam’s on water. Sam held up the school bus to lecture the driver on the dangers of hydroplaning. On Annie’s first try at a bicycle, she ran beside her on River Hill Road, ready to fling herself between the child and the rocky river below. She showed up with a life jacket for a camp boat trip that was (as Annie hissed at her) only a three-minute ferry ride across the lake.
But with Clark it was always, “Slow down.” He’d call it after her as she sped away on the bike, in the car, in the plane.
Clark was right to sense that their fretting oddly comforted Annie. She could count on him, on Sam, not to want to let her go. And slowly that counting-on gave her back an instinct for trust. Each evening, the little girl would wait for the measured three hoots of Clark’s horn as he chugged slowly up the hill in his Volvo. Every Friday, she would drag out of the backseat the large brown paper bag of takeout Chinese food, under whose weight she would stagger across the lawn like a small drunk. The takeout never varied. Sitting in the family room, watching movies, Annie, Clark and Sam ate the dishes from the House of Joy cartons, week after week as years went by. First with Teddy, then joined by Malpy, they watched every classic film owned by Now Voyager so often that they knew them by heart. They didn’t always like each other’s favorites—Clark thought speed movies like Top Gun had about as much appeal as a demolition derby—but they took pleasure in watching together. Simultaneously breaking apart their wooden chopsticks, they ate the fried dumplings, shrimp lo mein, and moo shu pork that were always in the bags, just as Clark’s suitcase always contained a “good luck” present for Annie on his return from pediatric conferences. He took no chances and bought her talismans of all faiths, amulets as varied as a Celtic cross, a wooden Buddha, a Peruvian woven purse, and an Abyssinian wishing bell. He filled her room with charms and crystals.
From the porch swing in the evenings, Clark would wait for her to appear at the end of her five-mile jog, looking for the orange glow of the reflector vest to come over the crest of River Hill Road and in through the gates to Pilgrim