Look Back All the Green Valley: A Novel (The Kirkman Family Cycle, 4, Band 4) - Softcover

Chappell, Fred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312243103 ISBN 13: 9780312243104

Verlag: Picador, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

The last in the Kirkman family trilogy by one of our most treasured writers

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Fred Chappell

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Look Back All the Green Valley

By Fred Chappell

Picador USA

Copyright ©2000 Fred Chappell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312243104

Chapter One

TRAPPED!

Time has no secrets. You can match a clock all day and never learn a thing. ?Fugio

    My mother possessed a bristling armory of useful talents,but a gift for dying was not among them. I recalled the dutiesshe had undertaken over the years, the offices she had fulfilledin regard to the jester's motley of business enterprises my fatherinitiated. She had served as handmaid and general manager,as field laborer and nurse, as accountant and secretary,as critic and counselor, as gofer and governess, and their livesand happiness throve. Sometimes she had complained of herburdens, for they were weighty, but mostly she had performedthose multifarious tasks cheerfully. My parents adored eachother, even though the expression of that adoration was shadowedby a dark mordancy of temperament on her side and bya vigilant teasing playfulness on his.

    He was Joe Robert Kirkman and she was his beloved Cora,his mainstay and counterpart but not his mirror image. Wherehis nature gleamed with streaks of fantasy and sparkled withuninhibited impulse, hers was rooted in the clinging clay ofpragmatism and patched here and there with fatalistic gloomings.My mother was rather less gay than my father, maybe alittle less generous, but she was equally brimful of life; it wasonly a quieter kind of life than his. Yet her fullness of life ebbedquickly from the brim when my father died, hammered to thefloor of their living room by a massive heart attack. He hadbeen watching the great spectacle on the television set hecalled, in one of his futuristic waggeries, his "visiscreen." Itwas an almost brand-new twenty-one-inch-screen Zenith. Thedate was July 20, 1969, only hours before one man ventureda small step and mankind made a giant leap. All during the1950s, my father had predicted that Americans?men andwomen together?would rocket to the moon. His predictionwas dismissed by our neighbors and even by his admiring croniesas being only another example of his plentiful eccentricities.But I believed him. When I was a teenager, I sometimesimagined that he might be the first man to fly to the moon.

    Maybe he was.

    My mother never recovered from the loss of her husband.Oh, she made it through the necessary rituals well enough;her usual valiant courage was equal to those ordeals. She managedto complete some of the most urgent of the business demands:tax forms, will probate, debt arrangements, deedsearches, and so forth. But then her body began to weaken asher spirit crumbled and her strength of will deserted her littleby little, like a cone of sand leaking away to the bottom of anhourglass. She claimed in these days that she could wish fornothing more ardently than to lie in the earth alongside JoeRobert Kirkman, her Ariel, her Puck, and her Prospero all inone.

    This wish is a common, an honorable, and an ancient desire.I remembered how Roman Ovid had given it warm incarnationin his Metamorphoses with the story of Baucis and Philemon.They were an elderly couple who had loved each other always,who had lived in peace and amity since their first hours together.When benevolent deities in human disguise made itpossible for their secret hopes to be granted, the husbandbegged only that neither of them would have to experiencethe loss of the other. The wish was granted; Zeus changed Baucis,the woman, into a linden tree and her husband into anoak. Their branches intertwined and together they formed aneverduring arch. When my mother voiced her wish to join myfather, a few scraps of Ovid's verses murmured in my head.

    And yet when death did approach, when my mother's heartfluttered and threatened to cease its pumping, she drew backby force of an undesired strength. The spirit was willing, butthe flesh was yet too powerful. She suffered from congestiveheart failure, a disease that filled her lungs with fluid and hermind with terror. Extinction drew nigh upon her, but then aglimpse into the unresonant abyss would send her soul scurrying,like a terrified lapdog, back to the warmth of the world,back to the treachery of living. After a while, she made a kindof peace, accepting the necessity of having to die in the goodLord's own good time and not according to a schedule of herown devising. But she bowed to it with an air of deep regret,as if she was disappointed in herself.

    Then there came periods when she was bedridden. Now shewould study her worldly affairs and think of duties undone,tasks that my sister, Mitzi, and I were to carry out. Some ofthese were merely trivial, but she would brook no argument,and we, ever mindful of her failing health, could offer none.When Mitzi and I conferred about some of these minor concerns,we would complain in good-humored mock-gloomyterms. "Trapped!" we would exclaim. "She's got us exactlywhere she wants us. We're caught like mice in a trap!"

    Some of the things she wanted were of middling importance.The first of these was the burial arrangement. If she could notjoin my father immediately, as she so expressly prayed to do,she wanted to make certain that when she did die, she wouldbe supine by his side. The second item of urgency was myfather's last remaining hideaway workshop; it had been leftuntouched since his demise, and she wanted it cleaned out,sorted out, and set in order. There were other chores, too, butthey were of less moment.

    How could we deny her? There she lay in the bed she detestedin the new-smelling infirmary she abhorred in the retirementcommunity she was not reconciled to, and she issuedMitzi and me our orders in no uncertain terms. When shespoke to me, she tried to straighten herself, scooting backagainst two propped pillows at the headboard. She may havethought this taller posture lent her commands more authority.

    It twisted my heart to look at her. Her face was gray andpeeled-looking, her eyes watery. Painful arthritis had wrenchedher hands into bony knots. Her hair had always been thin andwas now so sparse that she had gathered it into a wispy topknotand secured it with a pink ribbon tied in a bow; this styleresulted in a Kewpie-doll look that made her crushing sadnessappear a little ridiculous. I couldn't help remembering howbright she used to look, her pert intelligence animating her features.That was the way she was supposed to look, I thought,and the way she looked now was like an ill-chosen frock; itsimply was not her.

    This room was too small for me to sit beside her. I had toheave a ponderous armchair, upholstered in squeaky limegreen plastic, to the foot of the bed and lean forward towardthe footboard bars as she laid out her plans. I expected toagree to her every demand, even to the ones that made nosense to me.

    "You want to make sure Jeff Halsted finishes paying off hisloan," she said, "and you need to send a gift for his daughter'shigh school graduation."

    "All right," I said.

    "What will you send?"

    "I don't know. What do you suggest?"

    She flapped a hand in listless impatience. "I'm all finishedwith those kinds of concerns now. You'll have to decide thingslike this from now on for...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Picador
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312243103
• ISBN 13: 9780312243104
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland