“The time is now,” Miss Addie said. Miss Lillian held fast to Felix, whose small heart began to pound. He tried to squirm but was too woozy to do much.
“It’ll all be over soon, kitty,” Miss Lillian assured him. She closed her eyes and spoke in long tangles of words, old as time, as Miss Addie plunged the knife into the cat’s belly, making the necessary incision. The cat stilled. She reached into the stomach cavity and pulled out its intestines, plopping them into a bowl. Some got on her apron and she was glad she’d changed first. She stared into the bowl, frowning. Miss Lillian left the cat’s bloodied corpse and joined her.
“What is it, sister?”
“They’re coming,” Miss Addie said. “Oh, dear sister, they are coming.”
In the quiet museum, Will sat at his desk, the green glow of the banker’s lamp the only light. Earlier, he’d noticed the plain sedan parked across the street and the two men in dark suits sitting inside, watching. One of them ate nuts from a paper bag, dropping the shells out the window. Will had locked up and, whistling a carefree tune, strolled to a nearby Automat with a view of the museum for a sandwich and coffee, which he barely touched. Only when he’d seen the sedan drive away did he return to the museum, frowning at the break in the piece of cellophane he’d left across the doorjamb. He took a long, slow walk through the building, examining each room. After a careful inventory, he saw that nothing was missing. It had just been a look-around. For now.
Will craned his neck to gaze at the room’s mural, the angels and devils hanging above the hills, plains, and rivers, above the patriots, pioneers, Indians, and immigrants of the new world. Then, in the hushed green glow of the old library, he walked the stacks until he came to a large leather-bound edition of the Declaration of Independence. From inside its pages, he retrieved a worn envelope. The envelope had been stamped on the upper-right-hand corner: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF PARANORMAL, 1917. He opened the file to the first page.
Memorandum. To: William Fitzgerald, Jacob Marlowe, Rotke Wasserman, Margaret Walker
Top Secret.
Project Buffalo.
Will sat at the desk, rereading the file. When he had finished, he sat staring into the shadows.
He sat for a very long time.
THE MAN IN THE STOVEPIPE HAT
The land was a pledge, and the land was an idea of freedom, born from the collective yearning of a restless nation built on dreams. Every rock, every creek, every sunrise and sunset seemed a bargain well-struck, a guarantee of more. The land was robust. Rivers ran swiftly by on currents of desire. Purple mountains crowned sweet-grassed plains. A rejoicing of elms and oaks, mighty redwoods and sheltering pines sang across hillsides that sloped gently toward valleys grateful for their song. Telephone poles jutted up beside roads, their lonely wires stretched across the open fields, thin promises of connection. Ramshackle hickory fences of the kind that made good neighbors bordered rustic farmhouses, curved around red barns and stoic windmills. Corn rustled lightly in warm breezes.
In the towns, there were Main Streets of the sort that lined the halls of hazy, fond memory. A church steeple. Barbershop. Ice-cream parlor. Town square and a public green perfect for picnicking. Butcher. Baker. Candlestick maker. On the far side of the fabled towns, covered bridges made beautiful in the reflected glory of fall foliage hovered atop streams rich with fish fit for a wounded king. In the courthouse under a wheezing ceiling fan, the women’s fingers busied themselves with needlepoint—HOME SWEET HOME, GOD BLESS AMERICA—and their husbands fanned themselves with folded newspapers as an argument droned on about whether man had been fashioned in the image of a master craftsman, wound with a key at the back and set into motion to play his part in a mysterious destiny, preordained, or had crawled from the mud and trees of the jungles, cousin to the beasts, an evolutionary experiment of free will let loose in a world of choice and chance. No verdict was reached.
The roads needed room. They stretched. They roamed and conquered. Past the open ranges. The deer and the antelope. The buffalo. Past the tribes pushed to the sides under the watch of the cross, for this nation has its reservations. They kept pace beside the railroad, that great steel spine of progress, backbone of industry. The cicadas’ song joined the song of the steam-train whistle, the shrill signal of the redbrick factories as they released the sweat-stained workers at five, then took them in again at seven. The coal miners hacked and hauled their load deep underground, one eye ever on the canary. Out west, oil spewed from hard earth, staining everything in money. In the cotton fields, the weeping left their harps upon the trees.
The roads reached the cities. The gleaming cities frantic with ambition, rich in the commerce of longing, a golden paradise of businessmen prophets, billboards advertising the abundance augured on Wall Street, promised by Madison Avenue: “Physicians say Lucky Strikes—they’re toasted for your pleasure!” “Move with the times! Imperial Airways.” “Of course you want Colgate’s Ribbon Dental Cream!” “Studebaker—the automobile with a reputation behind it!” The people sculpted monuments to great men, men who had built the nation, led the armies, their beliefs safely ensconced in marble and granite. The people made idols and tore them down again, baptizing them in ticker tape parades, blessing them in long tears of profit and loss, throwaway tributes tossed with abandon from tall windows, a celebration of the good times that seem as if they will never stop, the land a fatted calf.
The wheel of sky turned toward dusk; the stars were not yet lit. An anxious wind worried the tops of trees into a fretful sway. From back doors, mothers called children in from games of hide-and-seek and kick-the-can to wash up and say grace before supper. The children complained mightily, but the mothers remained firm and the games were left with promises of tomorrow. Street lamps flickered on. The factories, the schools, the halls of justice, the churches fell quiet. A soft evening fog rolled in like a balm of forgetting.
In the graveyards, the dead lay sleeping with eyes open.
The gray man in the stovepipe hat stepped from the mist and surveyed the land. He had not stood there for some time, and much had changed in his absence. Much always changed. His skin was the mottled gray of a moth’s wing. His eyes were narrow and black, his nose sharp, and his lips thin as a new thought. His raggedy coat lay upon him like an undone winding sheet. He shook the dust from its many folds. Crows flew out and up, cawing, into the sky now tinged with the ominous clouds of a coming storm. He spoke to the crows in a whisper. Then he spoke to the trees and the rocks, the rivers and the hills. He spoke in many tongues and in a language beyond words.
In their graves, the dead listened.
The gray man strode into the honey-brown field, letting the stalks tickle the leathery cracks of his palms. The worn shine of his hat reflected a hazy miniature of the land. A rabbit leaped from spot to spot, sniffing for sustenance. Curious, it trundled close to the pointed tip of the gray man’s boot, and the man lifted the startled hare by the scruff of its neck. The rabbit twitched and kicked violently. Quick as a magician’s sleight of hand, the gray man reached through the rabbit’s fur and skin with his long fingers and withdrew its tiny heart, still feverish in its pulsations. The rabbit kicked exactly twice more, a reflex, and then stilled. The man in the stovepipe hat squeezed the heart in his brittle fist. The blood seeped into the fertile ground drop by drop.
The dead heard.
The man in the stovepipe hat closed his eyes and inhaled the sweetness of the air. In his palm, the rabbit’s heart beat faintly.