The Burning
has never seen such magnificent shades of gray as the clouds during these weeks, pewter and silver, dawn and afternoon and dusk, nor does he recall the last time he thought the sky was beautiful. He melts the snow at night with his heat and sweat, packs it into his mouth and around his scrotum, beneath the fabric of his night, shirt and robe. Eileen loves the snow. She makes the cook prepare a dish with sugar and cream. William can't eat enough of this dessert. Snow cream and eggs are making him fat. All day he looks forward to his bed of snow. Even that doesn't cool him enough. Fresh snow falling at night brings him a relief that borders on joy. It covers him, but it doesn't last. If there is moonlight and if he looks up toward the multitude of windows in the house, he might glimpse a gleaming candle and, above it, his wife's face gazing down on him. During the day, his dogs sniff the hollows where he lay, spaces where he melted through the snowdrifts all the way to the grass. All his life, he has had a horror of illness, of weakness. He has scorned those who are frail, the lame and the infirm. When he was younger, he could throw off sickness. "You're getting old," his cousin Robert says. "You're nearly as old," William answers. To look at the two of them, William has to admit, you would no longer know they were separated by only four years. Yet these are mooern rimes. Men live longer than they once did. William's thoughts are too disordered for him to determine how to regain youth and health. He was a young man once, courting Martha, who became his wife. Hide and seek in the garden that is now covered with mounds of snow. William's fever burns hotter than any heat of summer. Even in summer, down in the garden, there were cool spaces, shadows, dew under the boxwoods even in afternoon, and a trellis covered with blue ivy where Martha used to wait for him, stifling her laughter, jump, ing out to surprise him, even frighten him. Martha: a scurrying sound in her room, at her papers and letters all day. He is married to a sound. The ivy in the garden smelled like an old, lost world, she used to say, a sweet old place, the smell of memory. She would pluck an ivy leaf and twirl it beneath his nose. One night he awakes outside in panic, convinced all of his stock are dead. He bolts from his bed of snow and rushes into his house, calling out for his wife, but it's Eileen who appears on the steps with a candle in her hands, her hair carefully arranged, a velvet dressing gown belted at her waist. "The animals," he gasps. ''Are they dead?" He can't remember when he has last seen a sheep or a hog, a horse or a cow. The snow must have killed them weeks ago. Wimer 2004-05
J7