The Toynbee Convector

He need only touch her hand, her cheek, and he would wither in a few hours, a week at the latest. He would change color and fell in folds of ink and turn to ash, black fragments of leaf that would break and fly away in the wind.

One touch and...Death.

But a further thought came. She lives alone, away from the others of her race. She must like her own thoughts, to be so much apart. Are we not the same, then? And, because she is separate from the towns, perhaps the Death is not in her...? Yes! Perhaps!

How fine to be with her for a day, a week, a month, to swim with her in the canals, to walk in the hills and have her sing that strange song and he, in turn, would touch the old harp books and let them sing back to her! Wouldn’t that be worth anything, everything? A man died when he was alone, did he not? So, consider the yellow lights in the house below. A month of real understanding and being and living with beauty and a maker of ghosts, the souls that came from the mouth, wouldn’t it be a chance worth taking? And if death came...how fine and original it would be!

He stood up. He moved. He lit a candle in a niche of the cave where the images of his parents trembled in the light. Outside, the dark flowers waited for the dawn when they would quiver and open and she would be here to see them and tend them and walk with him in the hills. The moons were gone now. He had to fix his special sight to see the way.

He listened. Below in the night, the music played. Below in the dark, her voice spoke wonders across time. Below in the shadows, her white flesh burned, and the ghosts danced about her head.

He moved swiftly now.

At precisely nine forty-five that night, she heard the soft tapping at her front door.

One for His Lordship, and One for the Road!

Someone’s born, and it may take the best part of a day for the news to ferment, percolate, or otherwise circumnavigate across the Irish meadows to the nearest town, and the dearest pub, which is Heeber Finn

’s.

But let someone die, and a whole symphonic band lifts in the fields and hills. The grand ta-ta slams across country to ricochet off the pub slates and shake the drinkers to calamitous cries for: more!

So it was this hot summer day. The pub was no sooner opened, aired, and mobbed than Finn, at the door, saw a dust flurry up the road.

That’s Doone,” muttered Finn.

Doone was the local anthem sprinter, fast at getting out of cinemas ahead of the damned national tune, and swift at bringing news.

“And the news is bad,” murmured Finn. “It’s that fast he’s running!”

“Hal” cried Doone, as he leaped across the sill. “It’s done, and he’s dead!”

The mob at the bar turned.

Doone enjoyed his moment of triumph, making them wait. ‘Ah, God, here’s a drink. Maybe that’ll make you talk!” Finn shoved a glass in Doone’s waiting paw. Doone

wet his whistle and arranged the facts.

“Himself,” he gasped, at last. “Lord Kilgotten. Dead. And not an hour past!”

“Ah, God,” said one and all, quietly. “Bless the old man. A sweet nature. A dear chap.”

For Lord Kilgotten had wandered their fields, pastures, barns, and this bar all the years of their lives. His departure was like the Normans rowing back to France or the damned Brits pulling out of Bombay.

“A fine man,” said Finn, drinking to the memory, “even though he did spend two weeks a year in London.”

“How old was he?” asked Brannigan. “Eighty-five? Eighty-eight? We thought we might have buried him long since.”

“Men like that,” said Doone, “God has to hit with an axe to scare them off the place. Paris, now, we thought that might have slain him, years past, but no. Drink, that should have drowned him, but he swam for the shore, no, no. It was that teeny bolt of lightning in the field’s midst, an hour ago, and him under the tree picking strawberries with his nineteen-year-old secretary lady.”

“Jesus,” said Finn. “There’s no strawberries this time of year. It was her hit him with a bolt of fever. Burned to a crisp!”

That fired off a twenty-one-gun salute of laughs that hushed itself down when they considered the subject and more townsfolk arrived to breathe the air and bless himself.

“I wonder,” mused Heeber Finn, at last, in a voice that would make the Valhalla gods sit still at table, and not scratch, “I wonder. What’s to become of all that wine? The wine, that is, which Lord Kilgotten has stashed in barrels and bins, by the quarts and the tons, by the scores and precious thousands in his cellars and attics, and, who knows, under his bed?”

“Aye,” said everyone, stunned, suddenly remembering. “Aye. Sure. What?”