he morning sky was dark and heavy with clouds, but as the day wore on, the clouds retreated before a hot noon wind. The sky grew desolate. There was no sound but the rustling of leaves and the tick-tick-tick of her father’s pocket watch. Tick-tick-tick. The tick-tick-tick was loud, obdurately loud, attacking her ear, echoing in her head as it pounded at her temples. Melissa Archer could feel the closeness of the desert and all of its harshness. Buzzards might be circling overhead. She could almost hear them calling to one another, gleefully.
“A death! A death!”
The second hand on the watch spiraled ever downward, moving toward the pit of hell, the pit of her stomach, the pit of fear. She could feel the moment coming nearer.
She concentrated on the second hand, its damned steady movement. I can stop time, reverse it, with the power of my mind.
She imagined it going slower, slower, stopping.
But no. It marched on with the dignity and determination of a soldier marching again to battle.
In only a few more moments, she would need to go inside and face a moment of truth.
Melissa was older now, just past the cusp of womanhood.
Her father lay inside the house, in his bed. He was a man of the outdoors, a man of action. He was a farmer, and every day found him out among the animals and the crops.
This day he was in his bed, his face pale and drawn. He looked small and shriveled as he lay there, much different from the powerful, towering man that she knew. He looked, for the first time, old.
Paul Archer was a man of few words. He left the running of the household and the raising of the children to his wife. He was a man. He did a man’s work. He filled a man’s role. He knew the secret of life: everything was perfectly simple and straightforward. Everyone went around and tried to make things complicated. This was a mistake. Complications were nothing but problems, and problems were something you wanted to avoid.
You obeyed your parents. You went to school, even though you didn’t like it. You grew up. You worked on your father’s farm and learned your father’s business. You picked a girl. You got married. You got your own farm. You had children. You worked the farm every day. You ate your meals, and gladly, even if your wife wasn’t much of a cook. The weather and the crops and the animals were enough of a problem all by themselves. You dealt with them as best you could. When you came home at night, you sat in a chair, quietly, and relaxed. You enjoyed the feeling of exerting your muscles and strength. That’s all a man needed. That’s all there was to life, just living every day.
In a house full of women, he saw problems being made. The children fought. His wife cried and had hysterics and wanted fancy clothes from catalogues. This was all extraneous to life. His wife didn’t understand what needed to be done, that life was complicated enough with just cooking and cleaning and dressing the children. They made problems in him, as well, this woman and these daughters—no, this daughter. That’s what women were. That’s what girls were. They stirred you up, unsettled you, unbalanced life, caught you up in these things, these ideas, these feelings, this world of the female. More trouble than it was worth. Paul Archer bore this burden with occasional outbursts of anger. He was not a violent man, but he was a man of his body instead of his mind. If a child needed to be disciplined, a beating held more force than the spoken word. If his wife was irrational, his hand could quiet her sooner than his voice. These outbursts were not frequent, but regular. They were not excessive, but definite. He saw them as just and necessary discipline. His wife endured them as a matter of course, seeing her husband as a man and all of his actions as the natural actions of a man.
His daughter responded to a whooping as most children. She cried. She accepted punishment. She altered her behavior to avoid it. Paul Archer believed that the punishment was effective and that his daughter was a better person for it.
After a beating in her young girlhood, Melissa Archer would often escape the house, after dark, when her parents were asleep. She would let herself out through a bedroom window and walk calmly through the fields in the coolness of the night.
She would picture herself, a vibrant blue image, walking coolly and emotionlessly through a tunnel of flame. This was the rage, the pain inside of her. It burned her, but still she walked—coolly, calmly, emotionlessly.
On these ramblings, Melissa was hypersensitive to the world around her. The worms in the ground were chewing on the dirt, and she could feel this underneath her feet. The new leaves on the orange trees were growing, and she could feel them reaching upward in the darkness with their light greenness, searching vainly for the coming sunlight. Water from a distant stream gushed and clattered over the ground and then was lost at the bottom of the pool where her sister had drowned. A leaf fluttered to the ground. Far away, there was the sound of wheels turning, a steady grating noise, like the sound of a passageway, long closed, sliding open.
She would walk until near-dawn, when she could hear the squabbling of birds rising and falling as they woke, as a quarrel or the awareness of a predator traveled through the ranks of their flock. When she heard the birds rising, she knew that her father would soon be in the fields, and she took herself back to her room.
On one of these rambles, longer and farther than usual, Melissa came across the tower. All of the sounds of the nighttime seemed silent there, and the rage inside of her came to a kind of peace. She walked through the rubble and explored the emptiness of the stone building. She climbed the steps that led upward, and at the top room, she climbed out of the window and pulled herself up into the empty bell tower.
Sitting there, above the ground, she had an urgent temptation to throw herself off the tower, simply because no one would know why. They would search for her all day, and when they finally found her, her mother would go into hysterics. Her father would look at her limp body with the dumb, mouth-open expression that he had on the day that Wisteria died. What had happened? No one would ever know. Everyone would talk. Was it an accident? Had she slipped? Had she been playing? How had she gotten out here in the middle of the night?
The only flaw in this irrational inspiration was that she would not be around to hear their chattering wonder. She sat in the bell tower for hours before crawling down again and returning to her bed.
This was the first point of tangency, the first moment that my life was bound to Melissa’s. Before this moment, she could have been a thousand miles away. We were bound by the tower. We were both drawn to it. We are both in and of the tower. Its phallic, babylonian stone edifice raises us up. Melissa, my sister, I’m sorry.
When Paul Archer began to fall ill, there was no explanation for it.
The doctor looked at him with a concerned expression and asked after what he had eaten.
“He has never had any stomach troubles before,” said his wife.
“I’ve always eaten what I’m given, and no trouble about it,” said Paul.
“He sleepwalks, sometimes,” said his wife.
Paul looked at her, frowning. “I do not sleepwalk.”
“Well, I never liked to tell you about it,” she said. “You wake me up when you bump into things.”
“I never sleepwalked before,” he said.
“How would you know? You don’t wake up, just bumble around the house. I turn you around, and you come back to bed.”
“Well,” said the doctor, “sleepwalking wouldn’t have anything to do with this.” He gave them a bottle of some medicine to calm the man’s stomach. “It’s a gastric fever,” he said. “Don’t give him any fancy food. Plain potatoes and bread and milk with his meals. Bed rest, and he should get better. Give me a call if he takes a turn.”
Paul Archer did get better, with his wife and daughter waiting on his bedside. Running the farm was difficult, and money was tight. Magdalene Archer took pains to hide these problems from her daughter.
Melissa Archer sat by her father’s bed daily and gazed at her father with wide, amazed eyes. Paul found her devotion touching.
In a week he was back in the fields.
Paul Archer had three more attacks of gastric distress over the next six months. His doctor told him that he was growing older and more sensitive to foods and that we all had difficult crosses to bear. Paul Archer was no stranger to bearing crosses, and so he bore this one. His sleepwalking became more severe, though, and one night he found himself out on the front porch of his house, banging on the unlocked door, begging to be let in.
Tick-tick-tick. Melissa’s father’s pocket watch ticked away in her hand, pulsing with time as it seeped away, drop by drop.
Tick-tick-tick.
This was Paul Archer’s fifth attack of gastric fever, and Melissa had to face the facts.
Each time he lay ill, she felt the pangs of guilt.
Each time, she sat at his bedside, wondering at actions, how effects followed causes with eerie regularity and ease.
Each time, she no longer wished that he would die.
Each time, she felt power. She felt her own presence, stronger and larger than her father’s presence.
Each time, this same cycle happened. She would nurse him at his bedside, and he would recover.
Once he recovered, his presence would again grow strong and overpowering. She would shrink down in importance. Her existence was threatened by his strength.
If her father recovered, he would grow strong and large, and she would exist only in his shadow.
It was a matter of learning from the past. Here, in the present, she did not wish that he would die. The present would not be true forever. The present flows into the future, and she had seen that future.
She had to make a decision: whether to continue on with this never-ending cycle, or whether to hold fast to her determination and break away from the cycle today.
Listening to the tick-tick-tick of the pocket watch, Melissa felt clear in her mind. Each time her father got sick, work got behind on the farm. Money stretched tighter and tighter. Her father’s sicknesses were a downward spiral. If he died, though, there was the life insurance. The watch moved in cycles, ever forward, never stopping. The sun moved across the sky, in cycles, ever forward, never stopping. The orange grew round on the tree, and the ant crawled across it eternally, never ceasing. This was the fabric of the universe, this continuation. She was imbued with the power to break the cycle. This was her gift.
She walked to the kitchen to get her father a bowl of bread in milk, with something special added. This dose would surely be enough, now that he was already ill in bed. She thought that she must look her best for his funeral.
There were trees outside Melissa’s window. Not orange trees, though those grew close to the house. These were tall oak trees, and in the winter they shed their leaves. The branches threw shadows on her ceiling, shadows with jagged edges and disconcerting, impossible patterns. The stark, moonlit patterns moved with the wind outside. Watching them, lying in bed, Melissa saw shapes hidden by the trees, moving steadily forward, toward the window.
The more she watched, the more hypnotized she became by the changing patterns, an eerie kaleidoscope. She did not dare to rise from the bed, to walk to the window, to gaze out and see that there was, in fact, nothing there.
Lying in bed, chills began to walk up the back of her neck, on tip toe. Her head lay against the pillow, her body firm against the mattress. But she could feel something behind her, defying the solidity of the bed. She could swear it was in the room with her.
Patterns on the ceiling continued to move methodically. If she closed her eyes, she could still see them. It was late at night. Her mother was asleep in her room. There was only the constant light from the moon coming in through the window, plastering the shadows on the ceiling. Other than the motion of the wind in the trees, she was alone.
Everything was still, except the motion of the trees.
A doll sat on the dresser across from her, staring at her, laughing at her. The chills continued to creep down her spine.
She lay in bed, desperate for another human figure, another human voice. She got up from her bed, and walked through the room, finding nothing. She searched the closet, finding nothing. She turned all of the corners of her room with the fear that there was someone there, always behind her, always hovering over her ears. She expected at each second to feel the ghost of a breath on her neck.
She closed the curtains and was engulfed in the mist of darkness, instead of the concrete motion of shadows. Looking at the curtain, she became convinced that behind it was a face, staring in at her, hovering in her window, and that any moment the curtains would be forced forward—that she would see the outline of a figure moving toward her underneath the curtain.
She yanked the curtains open.
There was nothing there.
Minutes ticked away. The night ticked away. She could not bring herself to go wander through the darkness. She could not bring herself to lie in her bed. She could not stand still. She could not move.
So the night passed with an agony.
She consented to marry John Peacock to escape the agony of ever spending a night alone again.
Maybe I should tell you a little bit about myself, about who I am. It’s easier to talk about Melissa. I understand her. At least, I understand who I believe Melissa to be. I understand that Melissa relates to me, at least on some underlying, fundamental level. I, too, feel the burning of the tower, its quiet agony.
I am so many things that I lose track of myself.
My own father was not a simple man. He was a complicated man, a man who was never satisfied with what was given to him. He was a man who did not accept the common views of the world around him. He was a man who believed in things that were higher and better than our world. He was a man who searched for ever more complicated answers to ever more complicated questions.
Yet, he was fundamentally a man who was ruled by his passions. Aren’t we all ruled by passion? Passion is inherently human. It is the causer of action, the causer of motion.
I can feel Melissa’s passion, and Paul’s passion, and my father’s passion. I can feel my own passion, but I cannot forgive it.
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