Endless Things Read Free

vines to an empty beach; it took you a while to see, perched at the end of a twisted limb, a small brilliant bird.
    Empty. Before humans. Winnie after the months of fear—months of thinking about those soldiers and their fear when they had to go ashore on such beaches against the Jap machine guns and then pour fire into their holes to burn them out—was tempted to wish men or Man had never gone to those places, never found them and put them at risk so thoughtlessly. For there were no birds there now, she bet, no blossoms. Which led to the thought that it would be better if men hadn't come to be at all, the peace and endlessness without them: and she drew away from that thought in a little awe.
    * * * *
    Sam returned unhurt. Coming down whole and hale (a little fatter, even) from the great brown plane almost before its props stopped turning, one of so many in their billed or cloth caps, brown leather jackets, brown ties tucked into their shirts. A major: they had told him that if he stayed in he'd be made a colonel in two years. Winnie and Axel and their son Pierce on the tarmac behind the fence, with Opal and Sam's son and daughter, and all the other wives and children.
    Winnie thought later that it must be Pierce's first memory, and he came to believe that it might be, that the little brown pictures Opal took—of Sam holding his son Joe aloft, Sam grinning cheek to cheek with his sister—were things he had seen and stored away. The small flag he was given to wave. How he cried when Sam bent to dandle him, cried and cried till Sam took off the scary phallic cap.
    It was in any case the first time he ever saw the man under whose roof and rule he would live for ten years.
    You remember the reason for that: how Winnie learned what kind of man Axel was, not the marrying kind (it was Axel himself who told her, in tears, late in the night or early in the morning of a day in Pierce's tenth year, Pierce asleep in the far room); what things he had done before his marriage, maybe even after it, the felony arrest long ago that had made him undraftable, she stopped her ears at that point. The way I'm made , he said.
    When she packed her bags and took her son to live in Kentucky with her newly widowed brother (for it was Opal, beautiful, wise Opal, who didn't live long, and Sam who was left to mourn), it was as though her own life bent backward just at that awful juncture, returned to take instead a way that she had projected for herself when she was a child; as though Axel's sin or sickness had been the necessary condition by which she took her rightful place beside her brother, in his kitchen and on the distaff side of his fireplace, in her chair just smaller than his. It seemed—not in the first flush of horror and amazement, but not very long after—so clear a case of benevolent or at least right-thinking Destiny in action that she really held nothing against Axel, and even let Pierce spend days with him now and then in Brooklyn when the family came north.
    She never could bring herself to touch him again, though.
    The way Pierce pleased his father when they were together (and he did want to please him, mostly) was to listen to him talk, as Winnie had done, and which Pierce did then and ever after. Axel was one of those people who seem to have been born without a filter between brain-thought and tongue-thought: to be with him was to be set afloat or submerged in his tumbling stream of consciousness, where floated odd learning, famous names, the movie version of his own life and adventures, fragments of verse and song, injunctions, dreads, self-pity, antique piety, the catchphrases of a thousand years. With how sad steps O Moon thou climb'st the skies , he would say; rum, sodomy, and the lash ; inter fæces et urinam nascimur, plangently in altar-boy pronunciation; Count Alucard? Why I don't believe that's a Transylvanian name.... He could often seem like other people when in public, but alone with you he overflowed those banks,