Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [180]
I blinked my eyes and brought the book closer. I wanted to read more. I wanted to read the entire page, but now I could no longer see those words. The page was back in darkness. I turned it toward the window that sliver of light must have come from, but there was no light.
I closed the book and lay back down and held it to my chest. Was this a possible reprieve? If I worked harder at loving the other, would I live?
WHEN I woke the next morning Fontaine was downstairs with Helena. I could smell toast and brewing tea. On the other side of the windowpane, through thin leafy branches, was a shock of blue sky and I stared at it like a man with a noose around his neck; the black preacher’s face was as clearly behind my eyes as if he’d always been there, his words too. Since when does a night dream not fade with the morning but grow stronger? Was this my last morning? Or would I get one or two more? I had other questions like this, and I began to feel my family back home like some warm planet I would soon fall away from.
Sweat broke out along my hairline, my mouth was old paper. Love one another. Of all the words in the New Testament, why was I only able to see those three? Was there some invisible presence guiding us? And if there was, why was I finding it only now, just before it would all end?
Downstairs Helena laughed. I dressed quickly and hurried barefoot down the dark wooden stairwell to the sunlit kitchen and the comforting voices of my wife and her cousin.
I TOLD Fontaine and Helena my dream. Fontaine listened as if I had just read to her from a passage of fiction and she was interested to read more on her own. Helena looked concerned, not about the content of the dream but that I had taken it so literally. She made me some tea from herbs she said were calming. She talked to me about symbolic death versus literal death, how the dream was suggesting an old part of me was giving way to something new, that’s all.
I sipped my tea with two hands and listened. This was a logical and more sophisticated reaction than mine had been. But she hadn’t seen the preacher’s face when he looked at me. She hadn’t seen the urgency in his eyes. She hadn’t heard his voice.
No, she was wrong. I was going to die soon. It was just a matter of hours now, or days.
DAYS PASSED and I didn’t die, but sometimes dreams come back like fevers, and you deny that first pricking along the skin just before your eyes ache and your flesh burns once more and you sink back into a malevolence you thought you’d put behind you.
We were on an overnight ferry crossing the Irish Sea, a ferry of loud, drunk men on their way home from beating a British team in one of those games with a ball in it. The boat smelled like beer and vomit, and there was no place to sit that was not in a crowd of them, laughing and yelling and raising paper cups of ale and calling the Brits a bunch of focking conts. We were on the main deck, an enclosed space with the chairs and tables bolted to the floor, the tops of them strewn with empty cups and cans, sweaters and caps, a spilled pack of cigarettes left behind in a pool of wine.
It was after two in the morning and Fontaine and I sat up against the wall in a corner. She was one of the only women on the ferry, and every now and then one of the Irish fans would glance over at her, then at me, and I’d stare at him and try to leave enough on my face he would look away without thinking he’d been challenged. There were so many of them and they did not remind me of my dream, they were the dream, and so this is where it would happen, late at night on the black Irish Sea.
Fontaine’s friend Audrey lived in a farmhouse on twenty acres of land on the west coast of Ireland. Once we got to Dublin, we were