Cages and Those Who Hold the Keys

11

We don’t talk about that night. Oh, every once in a while, when the four of get together to play cards, Grant McCullers will call us “The Wild Bunch” and everyone will get this look on their faces, but that’s as close as we come to discussing it.

One night Ted Jackson told us a story about something he’d seen after a recent labor riot that made me cringe, and Grant told us what had really happened at the Hangman.

We listened, and we all believed, but we don’t talk about it.

Like the Reverend says, this is Cedar Hill. Weird shit happens here.

Grant gave Beth and her kids five hundred dollars and put them on the bus to Indiana himself. Lump even got a seat, but he had to ride in a carrier, which didn’t please him too much from all reports. Beth and the kids promised to write and call Grant as much as they could, but if they’ve ever been in touch with him, he hasn’t said.

The basement was finally repaired after the Reverend got really pushy with a couple of local contractors. So far, it’s holding up fine.

Linus is touring with another carnival, once again as Thalidomide Man. He sends us postcards all the time.

I’d almost managed to learn how to live with what I saw, until one afternoon a couple of weeks ago when I was waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change. A bird chirped. A car backfired. A child laughed somewhere. The wind whistled.

And those four notes, in succession, in the right tempo, began that tune, and I remembered Knight’s words: The notes, they’re out there. They’re everywhere. A bird, the sound of the wind, a car backfiring…the notes are all over the place. And every so often, enough of them come together in the same place, at the same, and in the right tempo, that the doorway opens and he comes shambling in. And there’s not a goddamn thing you can do to stop it.

I can’t listen to music anymore. Oh, I hear it, but I’ve trained myself to think of it as background noise, nothing to pay attention to.

It has to be this way, because I have been made aware of the sequence of notes that, if heard, recognized, and acknowledged, will bring something terrible into the world.

Of all the things I have lost in this life, it is music that I miss the most.

Ethel, God love her, has noticed that I don’t seem as “chipper” as I used to be. I smile, shrug, and tell her not to worry, that I’m fine, still seeing the doctor, still taking my medications. “You need to stay cheerful, Sam,” she says. “It’s a sad world, and you got to fight it or else it’ll eat you alive.” She has no idea. She tells me that I ought to be like the Seven Dwarves when I work, that I should whistle a happy tune. A happy tune. But I can’t remember any.