A human nine-eleven.
Or a woman becomes a country, and you see her leaving herself. Like the winters of old in the Eastern Bloc, the threats came on more quickly: The boils, they rose like battlegrounds.
They blitzkrieged over her back.
The drugs wreaked havoc with her thermostat; they scorched her, then froze, then paralyzed, and when she walked from bed she collapsed—her hair like a nest on the pillow, or feathers on the lawn, from the cat.
For Penny you could see it was betrayal. It was there in the green-gone eyes; and the worst was the sheer disappointment. How could she be let down like this, by the world and by her body?
Again, like The Odyssey and The Iliad, where gods would intervene—till something spiraled to catastrophe—so it was with here. She tried to reassemble herself, to resemble herself, and sometimes she even believed it. At best we soon were jaded: The stupid light of hospital wards.
The souls of lovely nurses.
How I hated the way they walked:
The stockinged legs of matrons!
But some, you had to admire them—how we hated to love the special ones. Even now, as I punch what happened out, I’m grateful to all those nurses; how they lifted her in the pillows, like the breakable thing she was. How they held her hand and spoke to her, in the face of all our hatred. They warmed her up, put fires out, and like us, they lived and waited.
* * *
—
One morning, when the toll hit close to breaking point, Rory stole a stethoscope—taking something back, I guess—as our mother became an impostor. By then she was the color of jaundice, and never again the color she was. We’d come to know the difference by then, between yellowness and blond.
She held on to us by our forearms, or the flesh of our palms and our wrists. Again, the education—so easy to count the knuckles, and the bones in both of her hands. She looked out through the window, at the world so bright and careless.
* * *
—
It’s also a thing to see, when you see your father change.
You watch him fold in different places.
You see him sleep another way:
He leans forward onto the ward bed.
He takes air but doesn’t breathe it.
Such pressure all held within.
It’s something fatigued and trodden-looking, and clothes that sigh at the seams. Like Penny would never be blond again, our dad would lose his physique. They were the dying of color and shape. It’s not just the death of them you see when you watch a person dying.
* * *
—
But then—she’d make it out.
Somehow, she’d climb from all of it, and traverse the hospital doors. She’d go straight back to work, of course, though death was at her shoulder.
No more hanging from the power lines for that old guy.
Or draping round the fridge.
But he was always out there somewhere:
On a train or a bus, or footpath.
On the way back home to here.
* * *
—
By November she was miraculous.
Eight months and she’d managed to live.
There was another two-week hospital stint, and the doctors were noncommittal, but sometimes they’d stop and tell us: “I don’t know how she’s done it. I’ve never seen anything so—”
“If you say aggressive,” said our dad, and he’d pointed, calmly, at Rory, “I’m going to— See that kid?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m going to tell him to beat you up.”
“Sorry—what?”
The doctor was quite alarmed, and Rory suddenly awoke—that sentence was better than smelling salts.
“Really?” He was almost rubbing his hands together. “Can I?”
“Of course not, I’m joking.”
But Rory tried to sell it. “Come on, Doc, after a while you won’t even feel it.”
“You people,” said that particular specialist, “are totally out of your minds.”
To his left there was Penny’s laughter.
She laughed, then quelled the pain.
“Maybe that,” she said to the doctor, “is how I’ve been able to do it.”
She was a happy-sad creature in blankets.
* * *
—
On that occasion, when she came home, we’d decked out the entire house: Streamers, balloons, Tommy made a sign.
“You spelt welcome wrong,” said Henry.
“What?”
“It’s only one L.”
Penelope didn’t mind.
Our father carried her from the car, and for the first time, she actually let him—and next morning we all heard it, before first light had hit the house: Penny was playing the piano.
She played through the sunrise, she played through our fights. She played through breakfast, and then long past it, and none of us knew the music. Maybe it was a misspent rationale, that when she was playing she wasn’t dying—for we knew it would soon be back again, having swung from wire to wire.
There was no point closing the curtains, or locking any of the doors.
It was in there, out there, waiting.
It lived on our front porch.
When Clay ran back from McAndrew, our father was standing with Achilles.
He asked if Clay was okay.
He told him he’d really missed him.
“You didn’t build while I was away?”
“No.” He patted the mule, but cautiously. “There could be thousands of people working on this bridge, and the world could come to see it…but they’d all know who it belonged to.” He handed him the lead of the animal. “You’re the only one who can finish it.”
* * *
—
For a long time, Clay stood outside.
He watched Achilles eating.
Evening would soon be upon them.
There was one thought overpowering him, and at first he didn’t know why.
I think he just wanted to talk to him.
It was the legend of Pont du Gard:
Once, in France, which wasn’t even France then—it was the ancient world—there was a river that proved unbeatable. That river, today, is the Gardon.
For centuries, the people who lived there could never quite finish a bridge, or if they did, the river destroyed it.
Then one day the devil strolled into town, and made an offer to the villagers. He said, “I can build that bridge for you easily! I can build it in a single night!”
And the villagers, they almost cried.
“But!” The devil was quite beside himself. “The first one who crosses the bridge next day is mine to do with what I please.”
So a meeting was held in the village.
It was discussed and finally agreed.
They took up the devil’s offer, and watched in total rapture, in the night, as he tore stones from up on the mountaintops, and anything else he came by. He threw and juggled the pieces, and made arches in twos and threes. He made that bridge and aqueduct, and in the morning, he awaited his payment.
He’d made his bargain; he’d lived up to it.
But the villagers, for once, had outsmarted him—and set a hare free over the top of it, as the first one to cross the river—and the devil was infuriated: He picked up the hare and smashed it.
He flung it epically against an arch, and the outline is still there today.
* * *
—
While Clay and Michael Dunbar stood, in the field by Achilles and the river, he watched and spoke across to him.
“Dad?”
The insects were mostly silent.
There were always these bloodied sunsets here, and this was the first for Achilles. The mule, of course, ignored it, though, and went on with what he was born for; this field was made for the eating.
But Michael stepped closer and waited.
He wasn’t sure how to approach Clay just yet, for the boy had seen so much—and then came something strange: “Remember you asked if I knew it? The legend of Pont du Gard?”
Michael was caught, midanswer.
“Of course, but—”
“Well, I wouldn’t.”
“You wouldn’t—what?”
Achilles was listening, too, now; he’d looked up from the grass.
“I wouldn’t make a deal—for the bridge to be built in a night.”