Signals from a Lampless Beacon
:Beasts of Burden
by
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Thomas continued: "I know that the child was adopted at birth, that you know who the adoptive parents are, who the natural father is. I know that the father himself does not know he has this child, and I do not propose to tell him. But I do intend to find out for myself." "You won't learn any of that from me." "I will, because there is no other living person who knows all of it." Thomas showed the revolver to Bunny, broke it open, let him see that every chamber in the cylinder was charged. 'Is this an auto da fe?' he wondered. 'It has a definite inquisitorial air about it.' He placed the muzzle in the declivity beneath Bunny's right ear, just behind the angle of the mandible. He was filled with pity when he realized how abnormally deep this depression in the flesh had become with the progression of sickness and its wasting. "Now you will tell me." But Thomas knew less about his adversary than he had believed. Hanging chained from the neck of the oxygen cylinder was a wrench. Thomas took it and closed the valve. Bunny lurched forward, to the extent he could, but Thomas quickly moved the tank to beyond his reach. 'Can I really have grown so despicable?' "You will tell me the name of the child's father and the names of the adoptive parents, then I shall turn the oxygen on again." "I can't! For God's sake, turn it on! I gave my word as a gentleman that I would never reveal...." And there ensued a spectacle of coughing, gasping and choking, with wheezing...as empty as the man himself. "Look! My fingernail-beds are turning blue." Thomas looked, and they were blue, the same blue as they had been while the oxygen had flowed. Thomas somehow sensed that he was being shown a third and certain means of extorting confession. He said: "I know perfectly well, Bunny, why you are so reluctant to tell me what I want to know; it is clear to me that the child was fathered by someone of not quite the right background and given up to people of--not to mince words--social unsuitability." It worked like magic. Bunny told Thomas the names and where the bearers of them had lived a quarter-century before. And, as Thomas had more-or-less expected, none of it meant anything to him at all. "I'm sorry," he said, after he had got the oxygen to bubbling merrily again through the water in the humidification-jar, "to have added this distress to all else you have to bear." Bunny had lapsed into some unspecified state other than waking. Thomas sat beside him for a time. Bunny roused himself. "Thomas, will you shoot me? Please, shoot me." "No, Bunny." "Then, will you bless me?"
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About the Book
A long-dark lamp is rekindled.
The South is unshrouded from the Gothic cloth woven by so many poets, dramatists, and novelists of stature. Characters share their obsessive lunacies and tragic error with the rest of humankind; their heritage of cultivation, moral strength, and compassion is allowed to stand forth in a chronicle of two races, of three families, of four generations, beginning in Wartime of 1941-1945.
Abduction aboard a U-boat; violation, suicide, and intimations of redemption; global amnesia, its complications, its release; extortion by a priest prepared–he supposes–to commit murder in the process; falling in love; losing one’s love; near-drowning at the climax of an idiosyncratic deer-shoot–these are elements of a story punctuated by homilies from a clergyman wandering quietly away from Christian orthodoxy toward heresy...or toward Apollonian light.
If the story ends, its symbols and themes need not; no more than ends Mr. Benny Ormond, veteran of the Great War who has escaped so many threats to life to which those around him have succumbed that he comes to suspect, against his better judgement, that he is destined not to see death.
Throughout, the reader is directed away from the sense of man’s possession of God to a beginning grasp of God as Self-transcendent...leaving an apparent emptiness, into which, however, for the watchful, signals pour, saying, “Lift up your Hearts.”
About the Author
Paul Traywick was born and brought up in the small-town South. Later, he earned degrees from Princeton (A.B.), Harvard (A.M., Ph.D.), and Johns Hopkins (M.D.) Universities. He has published in professional and learned journals, but he offers now his first published fiction. He has lived either through or alongside events, and among people, equivalent to the ones the reader will see and hear in his pages. He and his wife of forty years live in the mountains of Western North Carolina in summer, in the Carolina Lowcountry in winter.