False Entry by Hortense Calisher

the receding observation car of his first train. It had become mine enough to leave.
    We had come almost to the brow of the hill, climbing with heads bent to the steepness, our backs to the east. It was still black-dark, the darkest hour, but beneath us the trains now began their low, predawn stammering to one another. A piece of hanging moss brushed my hair, and it occurred to me that I knew almost none of the words for the plants and trees here. From far away across that sea over which I could not remember coming, I remembered children who had charted the sedge and the scabious with Elizabethan exactness, making dim poetry of a hundred trefoiled names, mapping their heritage in a botany of love. Here, where we were taught that each place was only a chip upon the vastness, the land-language of possession must be a different one, I thought; perhaps it was the language of trains.
    “Johnny,” I said. “What’s the name of the next big town north?”
    He never answered me, for we had come to the top of the hill.
    We rounded a ledge, raised our heads, and the whole of the east struck our eyes, a black horizon with a penumbra that burned.
    Before us, the great crater line of the dam site crested its silent tidal wave in an arc that took in half the world. Its four peaks rose like pediments. Each one bore a cross. Each one bore a fiery cross whose roaring current streamed backward although little wind blew—four wooden images of a man breasting the wind with his arms stretched wide, his flesh a yellow mane behind him, a running man who burned.
    I watched them for a long time. In the end I held out my arms to their Biblical glory. The apocalypse reaches the eyes long before it hits the heart. Beauty bombards us from wherever it can. I watched them until they fell.
    Johnny lay at my feet in the myrtle, looking down on the lights in the houses below, as they went out one by one. He looked at them steadily, chin on his folded arms. Finally only one was left, an orange lamp on a street we knew. Then it went out, the last one.
    “Nellis’s light,” I said softly.
    He did not answer.
    I thought of the Night Hawk coming home, the last one, walking up the path where the bulbs were beginning, seeing his own long head, his long chin, in the brass name plate on his door.
    “The man up at your mother’s!” I said. “That was Nellis!”
    He turned his face and looked up at me. No, that is the way I remember his face best. That way.
    “Go down,” he said. “ You go down. ” Then he put his head on his folded arms.
    Before I left, I stood over him, remembering how he had lifted my face from the ground and had wiped the just filth away. I was of no use to him now; I had spoken; I had his paring. He would never of himself call for me now. I could never say “Call for me” again.
    That same day, the dam moved forward, over the hill. Fire had crept to the wooden forms for the concrete; water and fire had cracked the heart-wall, and one whole side of the earthworks had given way. Charlotte disappeared under water, and Denoyeville, and two feet of water crawled in the streets of Tuscana, but not a man could be found who remembered a fiery cross.
    And that same day, Johnny left town. At least, he was not seen there again. Some might think that he never left the hill at all, that the dam came over him with its dynamite thunder and still holds him, skeletal, inside. But I do not believe that. I think that he went on, as most of us go on in this life, as I, that night, went back down the hill, and so home.
    Time does not need to murder the innocents with bloodshed. It lets them find one another.

PART II
Compromise
    S O ENDS MY CHILDHOOD.
    We are streaked with childhood all our days, and when death finishes us with its perfect stroke we must lie like those bottles of swirled glass in the museums, whose shapes flow from the initial angle of the layers—a gadrooned column, a spread fan. Surely we do not need those latest epigraphers of the