From the Dust Returned

“Cecy!” Grandpère raged. “Stash Jack in a dog, a tree! Anywhere but my damn fool head!”

“Out, Jack!” commanded Cecy.

And Jack was out.

Left in a robin on a pole flashing by.

Grandmère stood withered in darkness. Grandpère’s inward gaze touched to reclothe her younger flesh. New color filled her eyes, cheeks, and hair. He put her safely away in an orchard of trees in Alexandria when time was new.

Grandpère opened his eyes.

Sunlight blinded the remaining cousins.

The maiden still sat across the aisle.

The cousins jumped behind his gaze.

“Fools!” they said. “Why bother with old? New is now!”

“Yes,” whispered Cecy. “Now! I’ll tuck Grandpère’s mind in her body and bring her dreams to hide in his head. He will sit ramrod straight. Inside him we’ll all be acrobats, gymnasts, fiends! The conductor will pass, not guessing. Grandpère’s head will fill with wild laughter, unclothed mobs, while his true mind will be trapped in that fine girl’s brow. What fun on a train on a hot afternoon!”

“Yes!” everyone shouted.

“No.” And Grandpère pulled forth two white tablets and swallowed.

“Stop!”

“Drat!” said Cecy. “It was such a fine, wicked plan.”

“Goodnight, sleep well,” said Grandpère. “And you—” He gazed with gentle sleepiness at the maiden across the aisle. “You have just been saved from a fate, young lady, worse than four male cousins’ deaths.”

“Pardon?”

“Innocence, continue in thy innocence,” murmured Grandpère, and fell asleep.

The train pulled into Sojourn, Missouri, at six. Only then was Jack allowed back from his exile in the head of that robin of a faraway tree.

There were absolutely no relatives in Sojourn willing to put up with the rampant cousins, so Grandpère rode the train back to Illinois, the cousins ripe in him, like peach stones.

And there they stayed, each in a different territory of Grandpère’s sun- or moonlit attic keep.

Peter took up residence in a remembrance of 1840 in Vienna with a crazed actress; William lived in the Lake Country with a flaxen-haired Swede of some indefinite years; while Jack shuttled from fleshpot to fleshpot—Frisco, Berlin, Paris—appearing, on occasion, as a wicked glitter in Grandpère’s eyes. And Philip, all wise, locked himself deep in a library cell to con all the books that Grandpère loved.

But on some nights Grandpère edges over through the attic toward Grandmère, no four thousand, now fourteen, years old.

“You! At your age!” she shrieks.

And she flails and flails him until, laughing in five voices, Grandpère gives up, falls back, and pretends to sleep, alert with five kinds of alertness, ready for another try.

Perhaps in four thousand years.

CHAPTER 11

Many Returns

Incredibly, what went up had to come down.

In a blizzard of darkness all over the world, the winds blew backward, and what stormed up hesitated on the verge of the horizon and then fell back upon the continent of America.