Chapter Seven

The atavistic avatar dropped from space:

“I did it only to see the look on our face.”

1

On his way across the short overpass that unofficially connects Corson Street to Torqwamni Hill, Holly glances down at a small house below. It’s an ugly little fist-like rental that had gone up during the Second World War—as had countless others of its kind in Charleston. Like the caw of a crow or a bit of dandelion fluff getting stuck to your cheek, this house exists only in the moment you share with it. Yet nearly thirty years gone by, the same house had once unclenched and gave Holly a touch of honesty; thus it had it had earned in his mind its own small history.

Although subsequent tenants never draw the sun-yellowed Venetian blind that covers the house’s only large window, Holly knows that the living-room lies behind it. And he recalls a long gone summer night when, half drunk, he had crossed the overpass and saw three obese people (two women, one man) watching TV. All three were sitting in worn-out easy chairs too small for their rotund shapes, and each one had an immense Corning ware bowl of popcorn balanced on his and her lap. There had also been an equally portly little Chihuahua-mix that made successful rounds from bowl to bowl. It was obvious from the strong family resemblance that the oldest woman was the mother and that the other two were brother and sister. All had that flickering dimness of eye-light you see in the faces of people whose intellects hover between that of the “slow” and the mentally disabled (or “retarded,” which, as a proper pronoun, has gone the way of “Negro.”).

Even though Holly had been well-oiled by Happy Hour schooners sucked down at one of the nearby local shitholes, something poignant and everlasting accompanied him from there on. Although these were the type of people he’d lay silent scorn upon while watching them power-waddle toward the bus, this catching a glimpse of how it goes behind their veil had caused him pain. There was nothing sentimental or phony about what he had felt; yet every attempt at putting words to it failed to recreate the emotion. In time he realized that you cannot effectively describe an emotion until the emotion has ceased. It’s a good life lesson; invaluable to a poet.

Holly stops on the sidewalk, re-adjusts his heavy backpack and gazes into the west. Although the pewter clouds are thick and look pregnant with snow, the timer he always carries in his pocket has alerted him to the coming sunset. He always observes sunset even when it’s not visible. Down on Corson Street, the steady hum of Christmas Eve traffic speaks of a world in which the relative motion of the sun is irrelevant. An endless stream of headlights form halos in the frigid gloaming. Gloaming, now there’s a chestnut for you, Holly thinks. Yet within his insolence he knows that all things have souls in spite of their own indifference. This too is a good life lesson; it makes a poetry matter. He turns and moves east. Onward to Bethlehem.

2

Bethlehem Shelby hates Christmas. When the topic comes up, normally well-spoke Beth (who only curses here and there for a little spice) instantly falls into a coarse verbal assault on the subject; for her it is “Fucking-Christmas,” and she is seldom heard to refer to it as anything else—save for “Freaking-, Frigging- or Effing-Christmas” on the rare occasion when the sensitive type is present. No, no one hates Christmas more than Beth; and that goes for you and you and you and the Grinch and Scrooge, as well.

Christmas also happens to be Beth’s birthday. This year she turns fifty-eight. Although she is candid about her age throughout the year, and is not considered particularly vain by those few who know her, she refers to this circumstance as “That Goddam-Fucking-Christmas-Birthday.” Here, no euphemisms are substituted for the profanities; and if you happen to be the sensitive type, well, that’s just how it goes.

Although crass commercialization and the way goddam “Black Friday” won’t stop getting bigger until it is held on December, 26th annoy the holy hell out of Beth, it’s the memory of her widowed, working-class mother, Harry, skipping lunches and in all ways scrimping on herself from September on to make sure Beth got presents under the tree and something “special” for her birthday that had begun this hate. She also remembers crying into her pillow for only God knows for how long when, at thirteen, she had been informed of this situation by Harry’s best friend Fran, after Beth had launched into Harry the way thirteen-year-old girls will do—even those who have an IQ of 160 and are already working on their Masters in Mathematics. Although Beth is considered a decent human being, the only two things she hates more than Christmas are crying and feeling guilty. And not at all helping matters is the way her Holly knows about this serious business, yet continues to find her attitude toward the holidays as funny as the actions of that fierce and murderous little bunny in Python’s Search for the Holy Grail. Never a year passes without this little joke going up like a fucking-Christmas stocking.

Currently more peeved with Holly for again being late for their trip to the hospice than she is with the Season, Beth stands at the window and gazes out. The sun has just gone down and she knows that Holly is observing the event as though he were a goddam Inca priest. The silver sky has taken on a pinkish hue, which is indicative of snow. Beth lights a cigarette. Snow for fucking-Christmas, she thinks. Doesn’t God know He’s dead?

3

There are few clocks and calendars to be found in the rooms at the Catholic Hospice of Charleston. Nor is there a division of day and night that isn’t controlled by a switch. This matters little to the residents, for the mindless exist in a state of absolute now that requires no measurement, and the thinking dead live almost entirely in the past.

Fran is as exceptionally strong as a hospice patient can get. She is also a favorite of the nuns and the staff because she had once been an ER nurse who had later worked in geriatrics. She still thinks and speaks coherently and has yet to degrade to the point where soiling the bed doesn’t bother her. Of all the things she has lost or is losing the ability to do, Fran has steadfastly held onto using the toilet. Every time this goes her way, she prays extra hard for death to come, as to let her go out with this much dignity intact.

Fran should be dead by now. She has outlasted her original “expiration date” by two years since her original cancer diagnosis, yet nothing about this survival has had anything to do with advances in medicine. God’s will, she thinks without irony. She had insisted on leaving Beth’s house for the hospice on the Monday after Thanksgiving; she had figured that it would “be a short drive to Heaven from there”; but nearly a month has gone by, in which time Fran has heard the bell toll in the courtyard seven times. Donne was right: you must hear the chimes as your own, as others must accept yours as theirs.

A lifelong, progressive Catholic, Fran often sends God ironic prayers, but no matter what horrors befall her and the world, she has kept her faith as diligently as she has held her toilet. Perhaps a bit slack with the Sunday attendance during baseball season, Fran has never missed Christmas Mass, and this year has been no different. Although it is only Christmas Eve, time is a precious commodity at the hospice. Mass is held in the chapel on the hour every hour, and will be through tomorrow. It’s brought to the beds of those too fragile to be moved.

There are few private rooms that have windows in the hospice. But, in life (and, yes, in death and the church), if you’ve got the money you can die in a private room that has a window. Fran is seated in the expensive rocking chair that wealthy Beth (who had also “bought” the room) had given her as an early Christmas present (nearly all Christmas presents are of the “early” variety at the hospice). She is fully dressed and is wearing shoes for what she knows will be the last time in her life. She doesn’t want Bethlehem or Holly to find her lying in bed when they come by tonight, even though she’d very much would like to lie down. She looks out the window, which faces west. She spies a snow flurry spiraling down from the aluminum sky in the weak light of the winter sunset. Snow for Christmas.

4

Christmas 1958

Behold Harriet Shelby lying in her hospital bed. Harry’s a big-eyed pretty little thing who looks remarkably fresh for someone who had given birth to a daughter just two hours ago. She’s gazing out the window as the first flakes of snow drift down from the oddly back-lit salmon-colored sky. Snow for Christmas, she thinks. God lives.

Harry loves Christmas and snow, and this time both are a thousand times better than ever because she is seeing things through the recently discovered filter of morphine. At twenty, Harry has never had anything stronger than an aspirin. Just a little splash in a needle changes things so.

An equally young, extremely tall and wholesome young woman wearing a candy striper uniform appears in the doorway. She is carrying an almost comically large black purse, and she makes a great show of looking left, right, down and up before entering the room.

“Jesus H.,” Harry says. “Who the hell are you looking for, Frances—Santa?”

“You know goddam well who,” Fran says on her way over to the bed. “If Bull Nurse catches me giving you this stuff, I’ll be on bedpan duty till Valentine’s Day.”

“I didn’t know that nurses and stripers did that sort of thing,” Harry says with a highly affected shudder as she snatches her purse from Fran.

“Who do you think does it, Harriet, the Bed Pan Fairy?”

“Why yes,” Harry says, “I do think that—Oh, did you see Dan and the horde on their way out?”

“Hardly anyone else in this part of the joint—you’re the only mother in the entire ward,” Fran replies. “Your folks look elated, Dan seems sort of dazed…I suppose it won’t matter if I tell you there’s no smoking in bed?”

“Nope,” Harry says as she fetches her Winstons and a box of Red Devil matches out of her purse. Fran pulls the ashtray out of the bottom drawer of the nightstand. Harry brings a match off the stand’s top and takes a heavy drag off her cigarette. Fran suddenly breaks out a first magnitude smile.

“What’s the gag, Frannie?”

“Oh nothing,” Fran says as she motions Harry to lean forward. Fran sits down on the bed behind her closest friend and she begins to weave Harry’s long dark hair into a French braid. “I was just thinking about you having to change loaded diapers for the next eighteen months or so. It makes me feel good inside to think that Harry, real good—Holy shit! When did it start snowing?”

“Just now,” Harry says. “I really oughtn’t be giving you this,” she adds as she fishes a small gift-wrapped box from out of her purse. “Not with that wisecrack and all this volunteering at the hospital and reading to old people and all the other selfless Christly stuff you do. You make me look real bad, Saint Frances, when you do that sort of thing. We both know I was selfish, but really, was there a reason to put it out there in neon?”

Fran opens the package. It’s a charm bracelet. Somewhere deep inside, Fran knew that this was coming. Upon the passing of their mutual friend, Elsbeth Allison, that spring, only days after Harry’s death, Ellie’s granddaughter had told the tale of how her grandmother had been visited by Harry’s ghost in her final dreams and that there had been a charm bracelet involved.

Current day Fran stirs in her rocker. Her faith allows her to believe in such visions. She lets the happy dream go on without question.

5

Neither Beth nor Holly drive. Beth has never learned how, and Holly gave it up after he no longer could convince himself not to get behind the wheel while drunk (oddly, he never had an accident nor had he ever been cited for anything other than driving on expired license tabs). Beth’s inability is a longer story; boiled down it involves some kind of hitch in her powerful mind that doesn’t allow a “by the seat of the pants” sort of thinking to usurp what should be a mechanical process only. She does better in the abstract than she’d ever do merging on the highway.

They rely on cabs. Beth is such a fine and well-paying customer of Burl’s Taxi that she never has to wait longer than fifteen minutes for a hack, even on Christmas Eve in what is becoming a driving snow storm.

For a while they ride together in the backseat, in silence. The cabbies know Beth to be friendly, but not overly conversational. The only sounds are that of the car’s wipers and fucking-Christmas music on the radio.

“How was the sunset?” Beth asks, finally ending the Silent Treatment she had laid on Holly after he had arrived nearly forty-five minutes late. “Do we need to stop for a sack of goat blood, Inca priest?”

“They don’t keep time at the hospice, Bethlehem,” he replies. “As Harry would have said, ‘that’s awfully barn door after the cows.’” Holly winces. He usually doesn’t regret flipping Beth shit; it’s what they do—give and take. But regardless of Beth’s disdain for the holidays, this is the first Christmas she has spent without Harry and Fran and sometimes Ellie coming over to the house and getting squishy on wine while watching It’s a Wonderful Life. He almost apologizes, but he squeezes her hand instead.

“Will it be tonight?” Beth says with the purr she speaks in only when talking to herself or Holly.

Holly doesn’t answer the question directly, but Beth knows he soon will. She never looks too hard at it, but under certain circumstances had during the better than the fifty years they have known each other, Holly often sees the future.

“Ellie Allison once told me that ‘A life is the gift you get after the dream has died,’” Beth purrs. “I never knew what she meant by that until this year. You know how she’d get all philosophical around her third loganberry flip. I just thought it was another bit of drunken horseshit; but I know better now. “

“You’ve always known,” Holly says. “I recall that flick in which Marlene Dietrich told Orson Welles that he had no future—‘it’s all used up.’ But that doesn’t go for us just yet, Bethlehem. Come spring we’ve got a tree to plant and a grave to rob.”

She smiles and asks the cabbie if she may light a cigarette. It’s against the law, but he doesn’t mind.

“And the question remains,” Beth says as she brings a match off her thumbnail.

“Yes,” Holly says with a sigh. “It will happen tonight.”

Chapter Six

Sighs, echoing laughter, and half-remembered faces that belong to all-forgotten names gather in the pooling shadows of Corson Street; the ghosts gaze at Holly More as he walks alone in search of a hundred-year-old man. No matter how much money Charleston pours into the “revitalization” of the Corson district, its ghosts remain stubborn and continue to luxuriate in the riches of the poverty into which they had been born, thus lived, and brought home from their graves.

An ageless weeping-willow—gnarled and endowed with a sleepy wisdom by the salty winds that constantly assail it off Philo Bay—has changed little since Holly was a boy. Although Holly knows nothing of its origin, he is certain that the willow is an unplanned tree, whose critical seed blew in from the bay and took hold in the soil—so determined to live, that not even two nearby house fires or three major earthquakes could dissuade its fractal-reach into the sky. Nowadays the willow’s neighbors include a dealer in silk flowers and a tidy, albeit anal-retentive, mortician.

A verse takes shape in Holly’s mind:

From not weepy willow contrive my wreath;

Lay plastic greens and berries on thine door.

Show your sentimental, shallow-most grief;

Never display love extant beyond before.

“Eleven notes on the last,” Holly whispers. Eleven is an unlucky number. It seldom carries its own weight.

A young couple exits a retro-clothing shop. They are wholesome and attractive and move easily in the light gravity of youth. Their radiance is bulletproof, and is even enhanced by the raw October weather.

As brown is to orange, fresh faces are to cable-knit. Holly sighs. There might have been something in that line, but it’s already gone.

“I still hate the way that debate went last night,” the man said to the woman. “All that yelling. And we’re supposed to give one of them Lincoln’s old job?”

The young woman smiles sweetly, too briefly, at Holly, when the couple passes him by. “Right?” he hears her say. “It was all ‘You’re the antichrist!’ and ‘Oh yeah? Well, you’re the bigger, scarier antichrist!’”

They can take turns being the antichrist, Holly thinks. If you’ve seen one candidate debate, pretty lady, you’ve seen them all. Maybe what we need is a good old fashioned dictator, like Stalin—that way everyone will know who the antichrist is without guesswork.

The mournful, ululate warning bell of an unseen shipyard tram interrupts his thoughts. Holly pauses on the sidewalk and absently draws his jacket collar up to his chin. He has heard this sound all his life, and he always associates it with Beth, Harry and Saint Frances; three faces too near to his heart to ever be seen as ghosts.

Charleston wouldn’t exist without the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. “Green” peace-and-love-types often spy irony in a hand of the American killing machine causing life to flourish; but that sort of thing doesn’t hold up well when you consider what Darwin had to say on the subject.

Alas, big items such as war and peace do not interest Holly. He’d rather have the latter, but he thinks that a serious alteration in the natural ways of humankind will have to happen before the former becomes unnecessary.

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Holly likes this, except for the twenty-five notes. Twenty-five is unlucky. It stacks like money.

As a poet, Holly More is constantly on the lookout for an honest hundred-year -old man. He must be honest unto himself only. He must be clear and complete and yet neither relate nor compare to no other being or memory, even in paradox.

Holly’s lifelong friend, Bethlehem, knows about this quest. When they were children on Corson Street during the sixties and seventies, the hundred-year-old man was their by-word for interesting situations and objects one or the other had discovered in the alley that ran between Corson and Wycoff Avenue. On the Wycoff side of the alley stood a row of large turn-of-the-century houses that had been divided into apartments for the poor and working-class. Holly and his troubled mother had lived on the top floor of one of the tenements, while Beth and her fun-loving, widowed mother, “Harry,” had rented rooms in the basement. With Harry, you always got Saint Frances.

The alley still runs along between Corson and Wycoff—and although the old houses had succumbed to the wrecking ball twenty years back, the unreachable poor and those who live from paycheck to paycheck still inhabit the Wycoff side. But nowadays they do so in a monotonous row of low-income duplexes. It’s the same old story: plastic sheathed windows, shoes flung up over the lines, ignorant wanna-bee gangstas on the make, and unplanned kids everywhere.

Although Corson Street begins near the foot of Torqwamni Hill, follows the curve of Philo Bay, and eventually merges with the highway that leads out of Charleston, for Holly and Beth it actually began at The Temple of the Dow Lady Emporium and ended at the White Pig Tavern. In between lay Elmo’s Adult Books; Clarke’s Drugs; various dives; two or three Mom and Pop’s; possibly the only Masonic Temple on earth made entirely out of wood; a busy pawnbroker, and the A&P—at which Holly’s mother often got her cigarettes on the strength of a note she’d send along with her son. Not surprisingly to Holly, the Dow, Pig, Charleston Loans, and Elmo’s continue to do business to this day. These places, along with the alley, are the heaviest with ghosts.

Holly cuts through a vacant lot choked with grabby, feral blackberry brambles and hibernating Scotch broom to access the alley. He recalls how the hundred-year-old man got started in 1967:

“Wanna see a hunnert-year-old man?” Holly says.

Beth rolls her incredibly large kewpie-doll eyes and says, “Don’t talk like PWT.” At eight, Beth is a year older than Holly, and she’s already doing high school course work because her IQ shook out close to that of Tesla. She considers it her duty to keep her “boyfriend” from speaking like a poor white trash brush picker.

“Awright, then say ‘Mother may I’ and spell cup.” Holly has recently learned this witticism in second grade. He uses it plenty.

Beth shakes her head. Some things are just plain hopeless.

According to Beth, the only trouble with the hundred-year-old man was that there was one. Almost certainly in his eighties, he was knowingly referred to as “the Jew” by the landlady, Mrs. Wells: “Come Monday they squeeze every dime ‘til Liberty screams—it’s their christless way of doin’ business.”

Unlike everyone else, Holly found the hundred-year-old man interesting to observe. The fellow had a huge hook-nose, a corona of wispy white hair that splayed out from beneath a red beret, and was as hunched over as a fairy tale wizard. He’d beat about a cane with one hand and carried a perfectly filthy shopping bag in the other—and no matter how warm the day, he was never seen in any less than three sweaters. Looking back, the unlucky sneer that Mrs. Wells had laid in Jew depresses Holly. Although she could be quick with “Jew,” “colored” or “dago,” she had also been a kind woman who had never turned anyone out on account of what they were—except for hippies—Mrs. Wells had hell’s own fury toward hippies; she had lost a brother on Omaha Beach.

Although Beth had been unimpressed by Holly’s discovery, the phrase “hundred-year-old man” (in reference to an interesting discovery) somehow stuck to the kids’ private idiom and has remained active for half a century. During the sixties, hundred-year-old men would turn up everywhere in the alley. Once, it was a dead cat that the kids did their best to bury in the stony, switch-grass root-infested soil of the lot behind Elmo’s. At the “funeral,” Holly read something from the Bible that he had gotten from the lady who ran Good News—for quoting Holy Scripture seemed like the thing to do. Another time they stood in the shadows mystified by the sight of an obviously drunken young woman dancing with an imaginary partner at her window. Her blouse and bra had been equally imaginary. For months afterward Holly’s eyes would suddenly glaze over with memory, and Beth would goddam well know that he was thinking about “boobies.”

She seldom steps her best,

‘til she’s got it off her chest.

“That’s not good enough to be dirty,” Holly mutters. Then he spies a lost ghost wandering from shadow to shadow. It’s bad luck to be afraid of a ghost. Nor is it polite to stare. The thing to do is jump the first solid, unrelated thought that seeing the ghost summons in your mind—the one that comes right after, “Jesus, Christ, I think I see a ghost,” that is. It’s what lost ghosts do best; they resurrect misplaced hundred-year-old men.

Holly tags along with the ghost (yet he keeps a respectful distance) on its way up the alley toward the White Pig Tavern. Who are you? A junkie who nodded -off one time too many behind the Pig? A raincoat boy oozing his way out Elmo’s backdoor before heading home to be the man of the house—a bed-stain your wife didn’t understand? Did you catch the free peep-show the dancing lady starred in? Holly doesn’t worry about offending the ghost with his thoughts, for even lost ghosts know only the truth.

It doesn’t matter to Holly that the ghost is his own moving reflection passing across broken windows and over the surfaces of mud puddles. Nor is this to be considered madness. If anything, Holly is too well tuned to reality; to the degree that he must constantly escape it to protect his soul. Alcohol used to provide a safe haven, but it had turned on him as any self-respecting demon must. It had become evident within the bleak passages that had lain between debaucheries that he had stopped pulling his own weight, and thus had become unlucky. Even though Beth is wealthy and has yet to wholly drop the fantasy of a patron/artist relationship, Holly knew that he was a kept man mostly owing to Beth’s loyalty and inability to turn her back on a loved one. Holly quit drinking a couple of years back, and he now has a job—well, sort of. He’s the night custodian at the Temple of the Dow Lady, which is about the best a fifty-six-year-old notorious town drunk, womanizer, ex-actor, and fifty-cent poet—who does things such as not speaking on Thursdays because he’s got it in his head that Thursday is the day of the week in which people who talk too much talk most—can hope for.

The lost ghost sees both home and a hundred-year-old man. It follows a trail of shattered glass to a rise of cracked stone steps that lead to an elevated, weedy vacant lot. Holly climbs the steps and stops on the third. Three is a hit or miss number; you can never tell what it is up to.

Peter prayed to Jesus:

“Lord, I meant no harm;

For I got it straight from Judas,

‘Third time’s the charm.’”

Beth has a stunning memory. Although genius cannot be taught, she believes that there are certain doorways in the mind that anybody may enter and recover the past with clarity. “It all exists as it had been,” she has said time after time. “The brain’s like cloud storage. And I’m willing to wager that even your pickled egg of a temporal lobe still contains something—although I’m fairly certain that your overall brain is now as smooth and hard and small as a shoehorn. You shouldn’t have drunk away your crinkles, Sir Hollyhock—they’re what cause us to think.”

Whatever.

Although Holly knows that he is as likely to recreate the past the way Beth sees it as he is to begin thinking in logarithms, he does have his own genius for the recollection of emotional memory. Beth can take him back to a long gone afternoon and describe details down to the tilt of a miss-pulled window shade, and he believes her. (That’s the thing about dear Bethlehem—she cannot tell a lie because she has never needed to learn how to do so.) But he has a knack for sniffing his way back through time, following the long trail left behind by a certain feeling all the way back to that feeling’s lucky moment. He had awoken this afternoon with a quality that is best described as earned trust nibbling at his thoughts. Instinctively, he went to Corson Street and the alley to find the moment when the feeling had been pure. And in his jumping from here-to-there, then-back-here-after-another-there thinking process, he examines this hundred-year-old man.

This is an important third step. Mom died on this step—not on the sofa where I had found her; she finally passed in my mind and heart when Beth, Harry and Saint Frances spoke the truth to me until it stuck for keeps. It’s a hell of a thing to look into a face that knows that nobody gives a damn anymore. You see it in stray cats, mostly. And in the eyes of mothers who’d rather be dead than hear the voices any longer. Do demons still have plenty to say after the host has died? Maybe they linger and hoot on the lawn in the predawn darkness like party-goers who can’t quite get it through their heads that the host is dead.

Then the hundred-year-old man comes to Holly, as he knew it would. It’s a dirty trick to play on a memory, this pretending to be lost in unfocused dreams, all the while casting a line along the periphery for what is actually being sought. If you want to attract a squirrel, feed a crow.

Although his mother’s death when he was sixteen is something Holly thinks about at least ten times a day, it, as it goes with his thoughts on war and peace, is too vast to be made sense of. It’s the little things that live large, they build up unto themselves and, in time, compare to nothing, not even in the context of paradox. And when the timid yet persistent small image comes to his head, his deeply furrowed brow smoothens and he turns to face Holman House even though all there really is to see is an apathetic, slouchy cottonwood, which clings to the last of its leaves like that tree outside the sick window in the O. Henry story. Even though the image is clear in meaning, Holly’s imagination fills in the details:

“You’re old enough to do this for a lady without being told how,” Fran says holding out a delicate gold chain that holds a crucifix. Fran and Harry are busy getting ready to go out for the evening. The process is a religious rite of sorts, and takes no less than two hours to perform.

Harry glances up from a small mirror, which she only uses to add mascara to her already long lashes and gazes at Holly, a playful grin darts along her lips. “How old are you, kid?” she asks.

“Seven.”

“A year younger than me,” Beth chimes in. “Just like Pooh-bear and Christopher Robin.”

“I dunno, Frannie,” Harry says, still grinning. ”That boy looks like a born boob-snoop if I’ve ever seen one.”

Holly and Beth exchange knowing glances.

“Just because you date goose-necked guys doesn’t mean that I suffer from the same weakness, Harriet,” Fran says. “Come here, my little gentleman. Once you’ve mastered this skill, the ladies will crumble at your feet.”

“They’ll do it faster if you drop a twenty dollar bill,” says Harry.

“Never mind her,” Fran says. She hands Holly the necklace and sits in a kitchen chair. Then she holds her long blond hair up and aside to expose the back of her neck to him. “Loop it under my chin and fasten the clasp; don’t let your eyes wander over and down.”

“’Over and down,’” Holly says. Even at seven, he had known what that had meant. He has sympathy for men who had grown up in histories written by men. Holly met his father just once. It had been at a bar, and the only thing he took from that meeting was the desire not to repeat it. That set up had been awkward as hell; it was as much a hundred-year old man as ordering a pizza. Not surprisingly, the women in his life had no hand in arranging that terrible little comedy.

The mournful ululate wail of the still unseen shipyard tram reaches his thoughts once more. And the spell is broken, and the lot and the stairs become what they have been for decades, ruins given over to bramble and broom and neglect.

No verse comes from the memory; nothing will do, and any attempt would be unlucky. Holly almost pushes for such anyway, for he thinks that a posy ought to be tossed at this grave. But he finally thinks better of it. It would be the same as sneaking a peek over and down.