Read Online Hero by Paul Butler - Free Book Online Page A

inside me as I pulled the bell cord. I had no idea what I would do or say. A muffled ring sounded.
    My previous self, he who had stood here so many times before the war, leaned upon my shoulder siphoning into me emotions I had assumed to have long ago withered and dried to powder. The door rattled, then opened, and like an intruder upon my own past, I was admitted into the house.
    And then the silent fury, the wordless accusations, and finally the sentences spilled like burning coals from an overfilled grate. What was the purpose of the tears, accusations, and jealousy?
    I was like a Vandal entering Rome, besmirching the beauty I could not create, burning the buildings I could no longer inhabit. Truth was the only tool forbidden to me in this act of destruction. I latched onto anything else. She was unfaithful.
    She was cruel. The energy of bitterness was real, but the target was false.
    What a pitiful barbarian! Sarah’s sympathy, as fresh as it had been in her letters, as warm as I remembered it, reunited me briefly with myself. Despite all the humiliation this seemed like a good thing. I had come through the war.
    Now, as I lie awake listening to the shed door slam, creak open, and slam once more, I realize my mistake. It would be better for me to keep on living as the floating ether of damnation, attempting nothing, expecting nothing. Murder heals over and accepts itself. It is beauty and love that churn up the soul. In trying to return to Sarah, I let an inappropriate hope intrude upon darkness. Before tonight I was a creature of guilt and unreality. Now I am a riot of irreconcilable forces. Like a poorly made garment, with hems exposed and limbs sewn inside out, I make my wearer clownish and bizarre, unable to move at all without pain.
    The door slams louder than before and grit or sand scatters on the windowpane. I think of Charles’s grave out there beyond the hedgerows, inland from the ruined churchyard. It seems odd that he should have beaten me here—that in returning home the dead have precedent to the living.
    Tomorrow Sarah intends to show me Charles’s grave. Like a blind man uncomprehending a clear and approaching danger, I agreed, remembering how Charles, Sarah, and I used to run along the stretch of Dunwich beach below the old graveyard, pointing out to one another ridges of collarbones or domes of skulls peeping through the cliff-face alongside ancient pebbles and shells. Never quite irreverent enough to poke and excavate, we would nevertheless construct lives and personalities for the former owners. Last night the idea of visiting Charles’s grave, safely half a mile from the shore, promised to realign the present to the past. I could feel the mournful whimsy with which Sarah and I would remember former times. The arrangement felt almost wholesome; it was as though being so close to the source of my guilt, talking freely about it, might somehow weave a tapestry of fiction, obscuring the true nature of his death even to myself. Truth is merely a series of associations that seem real, I thought. In visiting Charles’s grave, in giving voice to soft regretful words, I would be creating a direct bridge between now and our days before the war. The experience would muffle and bury those other images—Charles’s eyes after the bayonet penetrated, whites enlarged like those of a hard-boiled egg; Smith’s forefinger hovering, pointing in my direction. These would be versions only, open to dilution with multiple alternatives.
    Now the plan to visit the grave seems obscene—Charles’s murderer picking at his bones, making sympathetic noises to his sister while leering like a stage villain at an audience she cannot see.
    The wind circles and makes a low moan against the window. Everything built on this coast crumbles to the sea. One day, our house, and Sarah’s too, will edge towards the clifftop, splinter at the foundations, list, and fall brick by brick into the