John Connolly - The Wrath of Angels

‘No, I don’t believe we are.’

‘I thought not,’ said Ray. ‘When do we start?’

‘Soon, Ray. Real soon.’

V

Tread lightly, she is near

Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear

The daisies grow.

‘Requiescat’, Oscar Wilde

(1856–1900)

43

When I was a boy, I thought everyone over thirty was old: my parents were old, my grandparents were real old, and after that there were just people who were dead. Now my view of aging was more nuanced: there were people in my immediate circle of acquaintances who were younger than I, and people who were older. In time there would be far more of the former than the latter, until eventually I might look around and find that I was the oldest person in the room, which would probably be a bad sign. I recalled Phineas Arbogast as being almost ancient, but he had probably not been more than sixty when I first met him, and possibly even younger than that, although he had lived a hard life, and every year of it was written on his face.

Phineas Arbogast was a friend of my grandfather and, boy, could he talk. There were people who crossed the street when they saw Phineas coming, or dived into stores to avoid him, even if it meant buying an item that they didn’t need, just so they wouldn’t get drawn into a conversation with him. He was a lovely man, but every incident in his day, however minor, could be transformed into an adventure on the scale of the Odyssey . Even my grandfather, a man of seemingly infinite tolerance, had been known to pretend that he wasn’t home when Phineas dropped by unexpectedly, my grandfather having been given some warning of his approach by the belchings of Phineas’s old truck. On one such occasion, my grandfather had been forced to hide beneath his own bed as Phineas went from window to window, peering inside with his hands cupped against the glass, convinced that my grandfather must be in there somewhere, either sleeping or, God forbid, lying unconscious and requiring rescue, which would have provided Phineas with another tale to add to his ever-expanding collection of stories.

More often than not, though, my grandfather would sit and listen to Phineas. In part he did so because, buried somewhere in every one of Phineas’s tales, was a nugget of something useful: a piece of information about a person (my grandfather was a retired sheriff’s deputy, and he never quite set aside his policeman’s love of secrets), or a little shard of history or forest lore. But my grandfather also listened because he understood that Phineas was lonely: Phineas had never married, and it was said that he had long held a flame for a woman named Abigail Ann Morrison, who owned a bakery in Rangeley that Phineas was known to frequent when he went up to his cabin in the area. She was a single woman of indeterminate age, and he was a single man of indeterminate age, and somehow they managed to circle each other for twenty years until Abigail Ann Morrison was sideswiped by a car while delivering a box of cupcakes to a church social, and so their dance was ended.

So Phineas spun his stories, and sometimes people listened and sometimes they did not. I had forgotten most of those that I heard; most, but not all. There was one in particular that had stayed with me: the story of a missing dog and a lost girl in the Great North Woods.

The Cronin Rehabilitation and Senior Living Center was situated a few miles north of Houlton. It wasn’t much to look at from the outside – a series of blankly modern buildings built in the seventies, decorated in the eighties, and allowed to remain in stasis ever since, the paintwork and furnishings restored and repaired when required, but never altered. Its lawns were well tended, but there was little color. Cronin’s was nothing more or less than a neutral corner of God’s waiting room.

Whatever the subtleties of defining the aging process, there was no doubt that Phineas Arbogast was now very old indeed. He lay sleeping on an armchair in the room that he shared with another, marginally younger, man who was reading a newspaper in bed when I arrived, his eyes magnified enormously by thick spectacles. Those owl eyes focused on me with alarm as I approached Phineas.

‘You’re not going to wake him, are you?’ he asked. ‘The only peace I get is when that man is asleep.’

I apologized, and said it was important that I spoke with Phineas.

‘Well, on your head be it,’ he said. ‘Just permit me to get my gown on before you go rousing David Copperfield over there.’

I waited while he got out of bed, put on his gown and slippers, and prepared to find somewhere to read undisturbed. I said that I was sorry for a second time, and the old man replied, ‘I swear, when that man dies God Himself will move out of heaven and join the devil in hell to get a break from his yammering.’ He paused at the door. ‘Don’t tell him I said that, will you? God knows, I’m fond of the old coot.’

And away he went.

I remembered Phineas as a big man with a gray-brown beard, but the years had picked the meat from his bones just as the fall wind will denude a tree of its leaves before the coming of winter, and Phineas’s eternal winter could not be far off. His mouth had collapsed in on itself with the loss of his teeth, and his head was entirely bald, although a little of his beard remained. His skin was transparent, so that I could count the veins and capillaries beneath it, and I thought I could discern not just the shape of his skull, but the skull itself. According to the nursing assistant who had shown me to his room, there was nothing wrong with Phineas: he had no major illnesses beyond an assortment of the various ailments that beset so many at the end of their lives, and his mind was still clear. He was simply dying because it was his time to die. He was dying because he was old.

I pulled up a chair and tapped him lightly on the arm. He woke suddenly, squinted at me, then found his spectacles on his lap and held them to the bridge of his nose without putting them on, like a dowager duchess examining a suspect piece of china.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘You look familiar.’

‘My name is Charlie Parker. You and my grandfather were friends.’

His face unclouded, and his smile shone. His hand reached out and shook mine, and his grip was still strong.

‘It’s good to see you, boy,’ he said. ‘You’re looking well.’

His left hand came out and joined the right, like a man being saved from drowning.

‘You too, Phineas.’

‘You’re a damned liar. Give me a scythe and a hood, and I could play Death himself. If I stumble by a mirror when I’m up to take a piss at night, I think that’s the grim old bastard come for me at last.’

He took a brief coughing fit then, and sipped from a can of soda that stood by his chair.

‘I was sorry to hear about your wife and your little girl,’ he said, when he had recovered. ‘I know you maybe don’t like folk reminding you about it, but it has to be said.’

He took my hand in his again, there was a final tightening, and the hands withdrew.

I had a box of candy under my arm. He looked at it bemusedly.

‘I got no teeth left,’ he explained, ‘and candy plays hell with my dentures.’

‘That’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t bring you any candy.’

I opened the box. Inside were five Cohiba Churchill cigars. Cigars had always been his vice, I knew. My grandfather would share one with him at Christmas, then complain about the smell for weeks after.

‘If you can’t have Cuban, I figure the best Dominicans will have to do,’ I said.

Phineas took one from the box, held it beneath his nose, and sniffed it. I thought he might be about to cry.