Read Online Resurrection Man by Sean Stewart - Free Book Online
Authors: Sean Stewart
Tags: Contemporary Fantasty
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they clicked and rustled, murmuring in long, slow conversation with the twisting willow leaves, the running river.
It took six weeks to build that fort, six weeks of building through the long summer afternoons while the sun tanned the willow green, listening to the sap well and beat beneath its bark.
Six weeks of feeling the willow's long, slow grief.
Dante tried to ignore it, but even I could tell it was a tree that had known too much remorse. Even at summer's heart, its leaves never lost a certain gray pallor. Even on the calmest day, a sad breeze sighed through its trailing fronds. The river had eaten away at the island's southern tip, exposing the willow's great black roots, and I used to find myself wondering what lay trapped in the shadows beneath the river's surface there. What did the black roots pierce, and piercing, draw into themselves?
Then too there were the scars on its trunk and on many a broad limb where strips of bark two fingers wide and a handspan long had been carefully peeled away, seventy or eighty of them. Never clustered too closely together, never anything that might ring the tree or kill one of its boughs. Sap gummed these wounds like scabbing blood.
At first I thought those welts must be the cause of the willow's restless grief, but Dante told me once the opposite was true. He didn't know the story, he said; didn't want to. But he knew something lingered, some tincture of remorse for events now unremembered, that made gifts of these scars; each one a chance for penance. (For long after guilty memories fade, the urge for penance lingers: strong and blind as the will to drink rain and grope for sunlight.)
Maybe in the end it was the willow's melancholy that drove him away. Dante was never one to suffer clouds in his endless sky.
In this picture Dante is perched on the fort's west rail, one leg stretched out, the other dangling down. It is late afternoon. The sunlight is low, coming right down the river valley; it burns like silver along the line of his leg. Willow shadows knot and tangle on the bamboo walls.
In life what you notice about Dante is the curly red-gold hair, the pale complexion, the freckles, the smile. But here in black and white you see the restlessness in his limbs, the hunch of his shoulders and the line of a flaring eyebrow as he squints upstream into a dazzle of sun. We had just spent weeks building this fort; poured countless hours into planning and constructing it, argued every detail of materials and tools and cost, ridden into the City on the bus and plunged into Chinatown looking for blinds and red lacquer and a set of glass chimes in the shape of dragonflies. But looking at the picture, you can tell Dante is already leaving this place, putting it behind him, gazing restlessly into the future, as if like Lot or Orpheus the world would be lost if he dared look back.
Dante—gregarious, charming, facile—thinks we could hardly be more different: day and night, sun and moon. He's wrong, of course: we just carry our aloneness differently. Mine is no secret. I stand always apart from the center of things, observing. Dante, on the other hand, carries his isolation into every crowd. He laughs and jokes and seizes conversation, satanic eyebrows flaring... but he only lends himself: he never gives. He never stays, he never puts down roots. He floats through time, too cagey to dock or let an anchor down; and life drifts by him on the bank.
It is a picture I return to: the two of us, in the place we built together. Dante, already eager to be gone; and me, behind the camera, absent from the picture, as if I wasn't even there.
* * *
It was the dark gray before dawn, clammy and cold, as Dante and Jet lowered the boat into the river with the corpse propped awkwardly across the thwarts. Jet sat in the stern, his pale hand resting on the tiller of the little Evinrude engine, just above the cadaver's head. Dante sat in the prow. When the boat rocked, his own dead feet
It took six weeks to build that fort, six weeks of building through the long summer afternoons while the sun tanned the willow green, listening to the sap well and beat beneath its bark.
Six weeks of feeling the willow's long, slow grief.
Dante tried to ignore it, but even I could tell it was a tree that had known too much remorse. Even at summer's heart, its leaves never lost a certain gray pallor. Even on the calmest day, a sad breeze sighed through its trailing fronds. The river had eaten away at the island's southern tip, exposing the willow's great black roots, and I used to find myself wondering what lay trapped in the shadows beneath the river's surface there. What did the black roots pierce, and piercing, draw into themselves?
Then too there were the scars on its trunk and on many a broad limb where strips of bark two fingers wide and a handspan long had been carefully peeled away, seventy or eighty of them. Never clustered too closely together, never anything that might ring the tree or kill one of its boughs. Sap gummed these wounds like scabbing blood.
At first I thought those welts must be the cause of the willow's restless grief, but Dante told me once the opposite was true. He didn't know the story, he said; didn't want to. But he knew something lingered, some tincture of remorse for events now unremembered, that made gifts of these scars; each one a chance for penance. (For long after guilty memories fade, the urge for penance lingers: strong and blind as the will to drink rain and grope for sunlight.)
Maybe in the end it was the willow's melancholy that drove him away. Dante was never one to suffer clouds in his endless sky.
In this picture Dante is perched on the fort's west rail, one leg stretched out, the other dangling down. It is late afternoon. The sunlight is low, coming right down the river valley; it burns like silver along the line of his leg. Willow shadows knot and tangle on the bamboo walls.
In life what you notice about Dante is the curly red-gold hair, the pale complexion, the freckles, the smile. But here in black and white you see the restlessness in his limbs, the hunch of his shoulders and the line of a flaring eyebrow as he squints upstream into a dazzle of sun. We had just spent weeks building this fort; poured countless hours into planning and constructing it, argued every detail of materials and tools and cost, ridden into the City on the bus and plunged into Chinatown looking for blinds and red lacquer and a set of glass chimes in the shape of dragonflies. But looking at the picture, you can tell Dante is already leaving this place, putting it behind him, gazing restlessly into the future, as if like Lot or Orpheus the world would be lost if he dared look back.
Dante—gregarious, charming, facile—thinks we could hardly be more different: day and night, sun and moon. He's wrong, of course: we just carry our aloneness differently. Mine is no secret. I stand always apart from the center of things, observing. Dante, on the other hand, carries his isolation into every crowd. He laughs and jokes and seizes conversation, satanic eyebrows flaring... but he only lends himself: he never gives. He never stays, he never puts down roots. He floats through time, too cagey to dock or let an anchor down; and life drifts by him on the bank.
It is a picture I return to: the two of us, in the place we built together. Dante, already eager to be gone; and me, behind the camera, absent from the picture, as if I wasn't even there.
* * *
It was the dark gray before dawn, clammy and cold, as Dante and Jet lowered the boat into the river with the corpse propped awkwardly across the thwarts. Jet sat in the stern, his pale hand resting on the tiller of the little Evinrude engine, just above the cadaver's head. Dante sat in the prow. When the boat rocked, his own dead feet
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