The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [122]
Emerald itself didn’t change much, except on the outskirts where the malls spread. On River Street, Now Voyager and Nickerson Jewelers still bowed with their bay windows, side by side, leaning out to customers as if planning to snatch them off the sidewalk. And down the block the sweet tang of Dina Destin’s Barbecue, run by her nieces, floated onto the street. In St. Mary’s spongy green graveyard, the ivy and moss took their time climbing up the tilting stones.
John Ingersoll Peregrine
1946–1948
Taken From Me
In time the stone markers were joined by other stones with other names and none of them was going anywhere.
On the other hand, thanks to the Navy, Annie had traveled both far and fast, faster than the speed of sound. In her love of speed, she knew, she was more like the father who’d left her than the one who’d taken her in, Clark, who was like the level lighted path of a runway on which she could land, who was like the arresting hook that caught her jet on the aircraft carrier. He was home safe.
***
On the Pilgrim’s Rest porch, slowly Annie’s uncle rocked to his feet. He walked inside, dropping the pink cap on the hall table. In the pagoda, Teddy was snoring. In the kitchen, Sam was listening to the news. He could hear her retorts. “Lies! Tell the truth!” Why the woman kept believing network television would tell the truth, he couldn’t imagine. But he loved her stubborn faith.
He predicted that Sam, caught up in her battle with CNN, wouldn’t notice him. Often in the old days, he would pass by Sam and Annie on the couch watching television together—sometimes Annie would have her Walkman headphones on as well—and he would speak to them, even wave his arms at them, but they wouldn’t or couldn’t see him. He’d say, “Ladies, there’s a real live human being passing through your field of vision…Okay, last chance. Okay, I’ll say good night.”
Sometimes they’d notice him and derisively wave. Sometimes they wouldn’t even do that. Sometimes he’d blink the overhead lights at them until they told him to stop it. Sometimes he’d just kiss the air loudly and then proceed with his nightly ritual of locking up the house, turning the old iron keylocks in the doors, turning off the lights, turning down the thermostats, and heading upstairs.
Pilgrim’s Rest was so familiar that he didn’t have to switch on the hall light to make his way to the kitchen. He reminded Sam that they were supposed to meet friends at a local restaurant soon. Sam waved him off, riveted to a news graph showing the recently elected President Bush’s abysmal poll numbers for the first week of July. “Five minutes,” she promised.
Back in the front hall, he ran his hand softly around the crown of Annie’s pink baseball hat. It seemed to him quite improbable that these glass beads were anything other than glass, much less priceless jewels.
After a while he opened the porch door again and looked up at stars as crowded as lights on Sam’s Christmas trees.
For years, starting when Annie was seven, together they studied the stars through a telescope. Annie had written Santa Claus asking for this instrument, not believing in Santa Claus but wanting a way to stay in touch with the stars that her father had pointed out to her on the road. Buying a good telescope had been one of many successful Christmas choices made by Sam and Clark, who always avoided mistakes by scrupulously following the child’s wish lists. She was thrilled when they set up the telescope in the yard. Together they made a monthly chart of the reliable, recurring pattern of the constellations. It proved a great pleasure to Annie to chart the order of the sky, every star in its predictive place.
Now Clark looked east to west at the sky. She was somewhere up in that black starry space much of the time, in jets faster than sound. He turned to look south where, far less sure than stars, her inconstant