Apocalypse Read Free Page B

“Mark’s wife.”
    She rode past two junked cars and thought, I graduated with honors in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, and now my mind is becoming like this woods, full of people’s garbage, their junk, their leavings, and I am seeing their ghosts. She rode past an inscrutable, yawning structure of concrete built into the hill, its gape full of coffee-black water. On clumps of mountain laurel the new leaves looked succulent, substantial, meaty to her, like little green steaks. She rode past a pile of twisted sheet metal, a slag heap, a springhouse buried in poison ivy, a ruinous stone farmhouse, all pierced by reaching trees.
    She had seen an apparition, and all she remembered clearly was its sexual equipment. Very well. No one had to know.
    Her back and thighs relaxed, surrendered to the rhythm of Dove’s walk. This was why Cally rode horseback: this pleasant lassitude, this sense of letting go. Self lost in journey, even though journey circled and came back where it began, going nowhere—it didn’t matter. Very little mattered. Cally began to hum as if a small mine worked in her innards, and after a while she began to whisper words remembered from the Yeats unit of Modern Poetry 201:
    â€œTurning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer.…”
    Elspeth lay amid the grazing horses, sketching a picture and not unconscious of the picture she herself made, lounging there in the pasture in her vivid dashiki, her bare legs taking on umber shadows from the spring-green grass. After a month’s sun her tea-colored body would darken to raisin brown, but her face always stayed ecru and exotic. It pleased Elspeth that she looked like an artist, that people turned their heads when they saw her. She had her sense of individual style and her mixed blood to thank for that. Her mother was native American and Black, her father Chinese, Irish and Hispanic. Out of this mulligan stew Elspeth had somehow emerged with a dainty, graceful body, lustrous dark hair and eyes, a strikingly beautiful, full-lipped face, a confused mind and a blazing temper.
    She sketched, not the grazing horses or the Pennsylvania hillsides or anything so pretty—a pejorative word—but scenes from her mind. Often scenes of warfare, primal warfare, hard, bloody and honorable, with the sword.
    Overhead the Hoadley sky spread mottled with vague, inchoate clouds. Yellow ochre, Elspeth thought (her thoughts hazy as the sky), a watercolor wash of yellow ochre overlaid with a mottling of Payne’s gray. Nearby, a butterfly bright as her dashiki alighted on a pile of fresh horse dung and clung there, sipping sustenance. Elspeth gazed, pleased not by the beauty but by the irony, the conceit. She was the butterfly, she considered, and everyone knew what Hoadley was. But to Hoadley she clung, and in Hoadley she somehow found what she needed to nourish her, because Shirley had brought her there.
    Shirley had repaired the farmhouse, put up the fences and the prefab stable. Shirley had torn down the sagging old barn but built a castle: to the glazed-brick silo she had added flat roof and floors and spiral stairs and small, slotlike windows, crenellating the top, all because Elspeth wanted it that way. It was Elspeth’s own tower keep now. It was her private retreat, her recompense for being brought to this place of horse dung, and sometimes, with Shirley, her love nest.
    Elspeth signed her sketch with a flourish copied from the signature of Queen Elizabeth I, the powerful and pseudovirginal virago who had influenced her choice of a name. Elspeth used no surname. As it had taken her practice and artistry—if not artifice—to settle on the signature, so it had taken her some thought to settle on the name itself. Trying to belong in a WASP world, perhaps—though her motives were mostly hidden even from herself—she had discarded the name her parents had given her and