From the Dust Returned

“No!” “Lies!” “We did nothing!” cried the voices from one side, then the other, of his mouth. “Cease!”

“Silence!” Father seized the ancient chin and focused the inner bones with a shake. “West of October is Sojourn, Missouri, not a long trip. We have kin there. Uncles, aunts, some with, some without children. Since Cecy’s mind can only travel a few miles, you must cargo-transit these obstreperous cousins yet farther and stash them with Family flesh and minds.”

“But if you can’t distribute the fools,” he added, “bring them back alive.”

“Goodbye!” said four voices from the ancient harvest bundle.

“Goodbye Grandpère, Peter, William, Philip, Jack!”

“Forget me not!” a young woman’s voice cried.

“Cecy!” all shouted. “Farewell!”

The train chanted away, west of October.

The train rounded a long curve. The Nile ancestor leaned and creaked.

“Well,” whispered Peter, “here we are.”

“Yes.” William went on: “Here we are.”

The train whistled.

“Tired,” said Jack.

“You’re tired!” the ancient one rasped.

“Stuffy in here,” said Philip.

“Expect that! The ancient one is four thousand years old, right, old one? Your skull is a tomb.”

“Cease!” The old one gave his own brow a thump. A panic of birds knocked in his head. “Cease!”

“There,” whispered Cecy, quieting the panic. “I’ve slept well and I’ll come for part of the trip, Grandpère, to teach you how to hold, stay, and keep the resident crows and vultures in your cage.”

“Crows! Vultures!” the cousins protested.

“Silence,” said Cecy, tamping the cousins like to

bacco in an ancient uncleaned pipe. Far away, her body lay on her Egyptian sands, but her mind circled, touched, pushed, enchanted, kept. “Enjoy. Look!”

The cousins looked.

And indeed, wandering in the upper keeps of the ancient tomb was like surviving in a dim sarcophagus in which memories, transparent wings folded, lay piled in ribboned bundles, in files, packets, shrouded figures, strewn shadows. Here and there, a special bright memory, like a single ray of amber light, struck in upon and shaped a golden hour, a summer day. There was a smell of worn leather and burnt horsehair and the faintest scent of uric acid from the jaundiced stones that ached about them as they jostled half-seen elbows.

“Look,” murmured the cousins. “Oh, yes! Yes!”

For now, quietly indeed, they were peering through the dusty panes of the ancient’s eyes, viewing the great hellfire train that bore them and the green-turning-to-brown autumn world streaming, passing as before a house with cobwebbed windows. When they worked the old one’s mouth it was like ringing a lead clapper in a rusted bell. The sounds of the world wandered in through his hollow ears, static on a badly tuned radio.

“Still,” Peter said, “it’s better than having no body at all.”

The train banged across a bridge in thunders.

“Think I’ll look around,” said Peter.

The ancient felt his limbs stir.

“Stay! Lie back! Sit!”