Alice McDermott - After This

“There are trees down all over,” the man added. He raised his chin and in the darkness his eyes seemed as black and wet as his coat. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or thirty. “Take care of your family,” he said, and turned, using his flashlight to get himself down the three steps that led to the door. Squinting against the rain, John Keane watched him cross the path to the sidewalk, the circle of white light leading him, first to the right and then across the street where he might have disappeared altogether, leaving only the pale beam of his flashlight and a flashing reflection of two streaks of silver on his back, and then, as he apparently rounded the opposite corner, not even that.

The wind was howling in long gusts, driving the rain straight across his face, against his slippers and pants legs. He listened for some sound of an idling motor, strained his eyes against the wind and the rain to see some indication-a stain of red light or blue light, perhaps-of the truck or car that must be waiting for the fireman on the next block. But there was nothing he could see, or hear above the sound of the wind and the rain and the shaking leaves. Across the street the blue storm light briefly caught the blind windows of his neighbors’ homes.

He stepped back and closed the door. His fingers, too, where they had gripped it, were wet. He dried them on his pajamas, then groped for the closet door and found the flashlight he kept on the shelf there. The living room was as it had been. He turned to the stairs, aware, now, of the sound of the willow branches brushing the opposite wall of the house. It would indeed fall straight, from the front yard to the back, parallel to the house, and for the next few days his children, all the neighborhood children, would crawl over its trunk and up into its branches, like Lilliputians over a longhaired Gulliver, until Mr. Persichetti down the street arrived with a newly purchased chain saw and a borrowed truck, offering his services. Mr. Persichetti was a night nurse at the state hospital, inspired by the storm’s destruction (he would say) to make better use of his days. The loss of the tree, then-the lovely willow that had made them, ten years ago, choose this house above any of the others-was all of the inalterable change that the long day had portended.

In their room, the boys, who had been awoken by the pounding at the door, watched silently as the beam of their father’s light moved slowly up the stairs. For Jacob, the slow pace of the rising beam was a comfort; there could be no immediate danger if his father walked so steadily up the stairs. Michael felt only disappointment at his father’s quiet return. But then their father stood in the doorway, the light pooled at his feet, and told them, whispering, that they’d better get up and come downstairs. He whispered the same to their mother, who was already standing beside her bed, tying her robe at the narrowest place left to her, high up on her belly and just under her breasts. He lifted their sister from her bed and carried her downstairs over his shoulder. Even in the peripheral light (Michael had asked to carry the flashlight but his mother had taken it instead, and Jacob’s hand), it was clear that she was only pretending to still be asleep-her eyelids fluttered, there was the smallest shape of a smile. Herding them all toward the basement, their father paused at the dining-room window, pulled back the curtain and shone the beam through the window and out into the darkness until it caught the yawning base of the doomed tree.

After only a quick glimpse, a glimpse that was like a gulp of foul air, Jacob pulled at his mother’s hand to draw her to safety. But Michael lingered, and even Annie squirmed out of her father’s arms to stand by the window, her two hands on the painted sill. The roots reared out of the black ground, the trunk leaned and then straightened, the long branches swung this way and that. Their mother patted Jacob’s hand to soothe him. On their way through the kitchen she took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and the remaining paper cups from their picnic. They followed their father’s flashlight down the wooden steps. It was a tunnel of light and it seemed to draw all the surrounding shadows to its edge. Only Michael walked alone although, at one point, as they made their way down the stairs, he touched his fingers to the back of Jacob’s neck and made him jump. They sat together on the old couch that was just the other side of the toy-train table. Their mother between the two boys to avoid trouble, Annie on her father’s lap. The washing machine and the sink and the long string of the clothesline where she hung clothes in bad weather were just behind them, each illuminated, however dimly, by the blue light of the storm at the narrow windows. Around their own circle of light, their mother said, “Let’s say an Angel of God,” the bodies of her two boys pressed against her. “Angel of God,” they said, following her voice. “My guardian dear, to whom God’s love, commits me here, ever this night, be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.”

And then the thrashing of the wind against the house and then what might have been a volley of pistol shots, and then a sound like something slowly spilling from a great height. Jacob pulled his knees up into his arms and whimpered. Annie, dramatically, put her arms around her father’s neck. “There went the tree,” he said.

In the small circle of the flashlight, their mother poured milk into the paper cups and carefully handed them to the children.

When john and mary keane said “during the war,” their children imagined the world gone black and white, imagined a hand passing like a dark cloud over the earth, blotting out the sun for what might only have been the duration of a single night, or the length of a storm. Long before any of them was born, after all, their parents, the world itself, had emerged from that shadow.

During the war, their father said, we sometimes slept in people’s cellars. France, Belgium, into Germany. (The milk in the paper cups smelled like candles, like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower.

Once, three or four of them had taken shelter for the night, in the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse-it was maybe late ’44 or early ’45-and when the sun came up (not a sun, really, as he recalled it, only darkness turning to pale gray) they realized a new guy, a replacement, had joined them during the night. He just appeared among them, as if he had sprung from the dirt floor while they slept. No more than nineteen or twenty. Anxious and poorly trained, the way all the replacements were at that stage of the war. “Who the fuck are you?” one of the guys said. (Although telling the tale to his children-around the single flashlight-John Keane said, “Who the blankety-blank…”) “Jacob,” the boy said. “Jake. From Philadelphia.” Then he shook everybody’s hand, like he was joining a poker game. Another Jacob.

Michael turned to his brother whose eyes were large and dark at the edge of the light. He had hoped until now that his father’s story pertained to him.

The two of them walked out of the cellar together, into the cold. Jake seemed to think that John Keane, perhaps because of his age, was of some superior rank, and it was possible that the kid was looking for some advantage, sticking with him. Or it may have been only that the other men, superstitious about replacements, had given him a wide berth. It was a gray dawn, an overcast day, only the beginning of the worst of it. There would have been the sound of boots breaking frost-tramp, tramp, tramp. A smell of diesel fuel, which was pervasive. Creak of army boots and canvas cartridge belts. Maybe wood smoke somewhere. Jacob was dark-eyed and pale. He had a young man’s beard, only potential, the hint of black whiskers along his jaw looking like something black pressed under a thick pane of smoked glass. At one point he pulled off a glove with his teeth and left it dangling from his mouth as he, what?-opened a K ration? lit a cigarette? The condemned man’s last. His bare hand was as white as bone, as small as a child’s.