The Curfew (3 page)

On then to the next appointment. This was a row house where houses were all slate-roofed. Every window in the street had bars across it. At that moment the sky was tremendously blue. For the first time in a long while, William looked down and saw his hands. If you have had this experience, you’ll know just what I mean.

He knocked on the door.

After a minute, he could hear footsteps. The door opened. A man and woman were standing there. They appeared to be husband and wife.

—I’m from the mason.

—Yes, we’ve been expecting you. Won’t you come in?

They brought him through the dark low-slung house to the back, where a long narrow window with many clear square panes afforded some measure of light. It was a room of three chairs.

—This is where we thought we’d talk, said the woman.

—We thought it would be all right in here, added the man.

—That’s fine, said William.

He sat in one of the chairs and took his notebook out. This he set on one knee. From his pocket he took an unsharpened pencil.

Then, out with the knife, and he began his sharpening.

He looked at the couple.

—The stone is for your daughter, I believe?

—Yes.

—She was, nine years old?

—Just nine.

—I’m sorry to hear it.

The couple looked then the one at the other.

William continued,

—You see, I have a daughter who is nine.

The woman flinched as if hit.

—Be careful with her, she said. Our Lisa seemed indestructible, fearless, invincible. But all it takes, all it takes is …

Her voice was drowned out by her own crying. Her husband put his arms around her.

—It was a roof slate that did it. Right here in the street. The wind blew it. She had gone out to play and an hour passed, two hours, three. We just thought she was with a friend, or, well, I don’t know what we thought. Anyway, Joan went out front to see if Lisa was coming, and …

The room was empty except for the three chairs. There weren’t any pictures, there wasn’t a table, just bare walls and this long narrow window of exactly square panes. Each of the panes was square, William observed for the third time. He looked at them in turn, yes, all square, leaded glass.

The man was trying to continue, but it took him a little while.

—You see, she was just there, right in front of the house, on the ground. The rest of her was fine, it was her head that, well, it had sailed down, the slate, and, the wind must have really sent it. I guess it didn’t make any noise as it came.

—I’m sorry, said William. It is a terrible thing.

—We want it to mean something, said the woman. We thought about it, and this is a place where it can be made to mean something, don’t you think?

—I’m sure of it.

—We thought it would begin with the name, that’s how they go, and then,

—So … Lisa Epstein. Did you want the name in capital letters?

—Yes, clear large lettering.

The man broke in,

—Perhaps, perhaps, She was walking in the street by our house, and it was almost evening.

—We thought of it, you know, several different ways. What do you think?

They looked at him then, very intently.

—I think, perhaps, well, let’s look at it. How old, exactly?

—Nine years, twenty-four days.

He leaned over his little book.

Lisa Epstein.

She was walking in the street by our house,
and it was almost evening.

He took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair. He closed his eyes, opened them, looked at it again. He looked up and around the room, avoiding the eyes of the couple. Wherever he tried to look, his eyes were drawn to this narrow ledge of light, this eighteen-paned window. It was the room’s nature, and the three chairs were the expression of that nature. That wasn’t right, though, not exactly. There weren’t three chairs. There were two chairs, and then one that wouldn’t be used. He wondered if he was sitting in the chair that the girl used to sit in. It could even be that the room had changed completely, that the girl had never entered the room under these conditions.

—Do you sit here often?

—We sit here in the evening.

He looked again at his book. Lisa Epstein. Lisa Epstein.

He went to a new page.

LISA EPSTEIN
9 years, 24 days.

In the street by our house, it was almost evening.

He showed it to them.

A thing that develops in a child—that which must occur particularly, precisely, if great success is to be had in some field—is not the prefiguring of that excellence, no! It is not the ability to produce great things of a lesser sort leading upwards like a ladder. It is rather a vague listlessness that infects other matters, leaving the single matter clear.

But then, of course, there is the matter of RIDDLES which must be learned by hand or with great violence of tutelage. Why, I shouldn’t mind being beaten with a stick if it meant I could solve all riddles without exception. Yes, William had been whipped until he had the whole Exeter book by heart. No wonder then, the rise of this second profession, epitaphorist.

There is a theory that the sun is made up of thousands of suns arranged in a war each against the others. It is a discredited theory, but it has never been disproven.

He took an oblique route to the next place, and passed through several alleys, which were themselves connected to other alleys. Here, the backs of things could be seen, unrepaired, unconstructed, unrepentant. Still, one was not unwatched. Faces could be seen beneath ruined stairwells and from the mouths of makeshift tents.

Down the first side-alley he saw a man running, and several men in pursuit. The man who was running ran in an odd way, the way one runs only if one’s hands are tied. Of those who chased him, one had a catch pole with a wire on the end. It ducked towards the first man’s head again and again, but he kept ahead and shot around a corner. The others raced on, relentlessly, and all were gone from sight.

How could the government’s people know one another? The simple answer, and the truth of it, as far as William could tell, is they did not. Government men were often caught by other government men and taken into the huge death cell rumored to be in the city center (no one had ever seen it). Once captured, the truth or falsehood of their claims could be decided. It was a small difficulty that permitted them to go at large without uniforms, operating with impunity.

The next place was a business. It was a butcher’s shop, a huge one. As he entered, he emerged into a place for standing before a long counter, perhaps ninety feet in length. Behind it stood ten or fifteen men dressed in long white aprons. The counter was wood on top with glass, and William had never in his life seen so much meat in one place.

As it is described it seems very still, but in fact, there were dozens of customers in line, and the men behind the counter were strenuously engaged in great business of cutting, slicing, wrapping, tying. They dodged past one another, and past innumerable blades and cleavers with acrobatic motions.

William bypassed the line, and a young man, also in an apron, approached him immediately.

—You’ll need to wait there.

—I’m not here to buy anything.

—In that case, you certainly need to stand over there. If you just want to look around, come by at some hour when we’re less busy.

—No, no, I’m here on business. Mr. Denton asked me to come.

—Denton? Well, why didn’t you say so? Come with me.

The boy gave the line a stern look before turning away, to make sure everyone stayed exactly where they were.

—Over here.

He walked William down to the end of the shop, where a small stair led to a door.

—I go no farther, said the boy. It had better have been true what you said. Denton doesn’t like soliciting.

He hurried away back down the stairs.

William then opened the door and went into one of the tidiest, most comfortable rooms he had ever been lucky enough to encounter.

There was one very fine leather chair directly in front of a large window that overlooked the shop. All around were bookshelves, full of books of every kind, although he could see that many pertained to butchery and to animal anatomy. A drafting table was against one wall. The whole room was lit by candles, perhaps sixty of them. Before the drafting table, which was meant to be used standing, stood a large man of formidable characteristic.

—Mr. Denton?

—You are from the mason, I assume.

—I am that.

—Sit over there, please. I will fetch a stool.

Denton opened a closet and removed a three-legged stool. He placed it beside the sumptuous leather chair.

—Sit down, he said again.

He was about fifty, with a weathered face and deeply brown, almost black eyes. He wore the same aproned outfit as the men below, but his was the definitive version.

William sat. Out of his pocket, the notebook. He began to sharpen a new pencil.

—That’s a fine little knife, said Denton. Marzol?

—It is, said William.

—I knew it. Those take quite an edge, quite an edge. I won’t lie to you, I have more than a few of them myself, although substantially larger. The only meat you’ll cut with a knife like that is a man’s throat.

William blinked, and tried not to flinch as the man sat on the stool and rested one burly arm on the armrest of the leather chair.

—So, this is how it is. My father’s dead. He started this business. Made it what it is now. People will always need someone to do their butchering, that’s what he used to say. Do you know he could butcher a cow in any of thirteen different ways? How do you write an epitaph for a man like that?

—Robert Denton, that’s how we’ll start, said William matter-of-factly.

—Robert Denton, that’s right.

—So, any thoughts? Some people like to put something simple, in remembrance, others like to really make the person’s presence felt. Sometimes the epitaph is an inside joke—something only the deceased would understand.

—I do have something like that, said Denton.

The door opened, and a man nearly as big as Denton stepped into the room.

—Wilson fell under an ox, and his leg’s bent.

—Well, call over Hal Sanderson. He’ll put it right. As for the ox, is it dead?

—It was dead. He pulled it off a beam and it dropped on him.

—I see. Well, that’s how it is.

—Right.

The door shut.

—I’ve got something, said Denton. He often said he could skin a pig with the lights off. He even said he did it once, although I never saw it.

—That’s good, said William. That’s really good.

He wrote:

ROBERT DENTON

who could skin a pig
in the dark
.

—I like it, said Denton.

William went to the door.

The two shook hands.

—They made me think, down there, you might be a hard man to deal with, said William.

—Don’t fool yourself, said Denton. I’m a mean bastard. You just caught me at a tender moment.

—Well, I’ll get to work on this.

Denton nodded.