‘What do they say, tell me what they say?’
She stood on the ancient wooden steps, holding to herself, and could not tell him.
He waved his hand. ‘Front porch here, living-room there, dining-room, kitchen, three bedrooms. Part we’ll build new, part we’ll bring. Of course all we got here now is the front porch, some parlour furniture and the old bed.’
‘All that money, Will!’
He turned, smiling. ‘You’re not mad, now, look at me! You’re not mad. We’ll bring it all up, next month, next year. The cut-glass vases, that Armenian carpet your mother gave us in 1961! Just let the sun explode!’
They looked at the other crates, numbered and lettered: Front-porch swing, front-porch wicker rocker, hanging Chinese crystals …
‘I’ll blow them myself to make them ring.’
They set the front door on the top of the stairs, with its little panes of coloured glass, and Carrie looked through the strawberry window.
‘What do you see?’
But he knew what she saw, for he gazed through the coloured glass, too. And there was Mars, with its cold sky warmed and its dead seas fired with colour, with its hills like mounds of strawberry ice, and its sand like burning charcoals sifted
by wind. The strawberry window, the strawberry window, breathed soft rose colours on the land and filled the mind and the eye with the light of a never-ending dawn. Bent there, looking through, he heard himself say:
‘The town’ll be out this way in a year. This’ll be a shade street, you’ll have your porch, and you’ll have friends. You won’t need all this much, then. But starting right here, with this little bit that’s familiar, watch it spread, watch Mars change so you’ll know it as if you’d known it all your life.’
He ran down the steps to the last and as-yet unopened canvas-covered crate. With his pocket knife he cut a hole in the canvas. ‘Guess!’ he said.
‘My kitchen stove? My furnace?’
‘Not in a million years.’ He smiled very gently. ‘Sing me a song,’ he said.
‘Will, you’re clean off your head.’
‘Sing me a song worth all the money we had in the bank and now don’t have, but who gives a blast in hell,’ he said.
‘I don’t know anything but "Genevieve, Sweet Genevieve"!’
‘Sing that,’ he said.
But she could not open her mouth and start the song. He saw her lips move and try, but there was no sound.
He ripped the canvas wider and shoved his hand into the crate and touched around for a quiet moment, and started to sing the words himself until he moved his hand a last time and then a single clear piano chord sprang out on the morning air.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Let’s take it right on to the end. Everyone! Here’s the harmony.’