Pegasus

PEGASUS

         Dust was everywhere. It lay like a patina on everything in the room, dulling colors, changing the scene the way time had changed his memory of it, dimming, blurring.

         Miles had remembered the objects in this room from a different eye level. He had remembered them as a great deal bigger. But then he was only a nine-year-old child the last time he was in here.

         That was when they told him his grandmother was dead and he couldn't live here any more. He remembered that; it was etched in his mind. The next events were confused and jumbled; memory became unreliable after that.

         His uncle Kenneth had inherited the property. Kenneth was his father's brother. Step brother to be precise. When Miles' grandmother died that made Kenneth the sole heir, except for a modest trust fund that had been set up for Miles. Uncle Kenneth had a young wife who didn't want any nine-year-old boy around to cramp her style. They had no legal obligation toward Miles of course so he had to leave. As it turned out before long she didn't want Kenneth either.

         After the divorce Kenneth lived here like a hermit, angry with the world around him, amassing a hoard of money and little else. He never remarried and he never had a child.

         So now it had come full circle and it all belonged to Miles. He lifted the cover from the yellowed ivory keys of the piano and touched them. It was terribly out of tune, like fingernails on a blackboard. He had spent many hours on that bench, listening to the ticking of a metronome. It was in tune then! This piano was his grandmother's prize possession. She regarded it almost as a living thing. She had started him on lessons when he was six and his little hands could span only half an octave.He made a mental note to have a tuner in at once. He could probably find one in the Yellow pages. He went through the dining room and into the kitchen.

         His cell phone began to play Barcarole. He detached it from his belt and pressed the button. "Hello ~ yes I'm there now. No I haven't looked around very much yet. Place is a mess! I have to get out of here; I'm starting to wheeze. I'll have to get somebody in to clean it up."

         He walked to the back door and stepped out into the yard where he had played as a child. Once by the fence, he built a fort from the wood in the woodpile,but Uncle Kenneth had made him take it down. He said it would kill the grass. Now the grass was dead anyway, and so was Uncle Kenneth.

         The funeral had been nothing much. Kenneth was not a man who made friends, and since he had no family of his own, Miles, Sarah and their son were the only attenders and they could not have been called mourners by any stretch of the imagination. The funeral director asked Miles if he wanted to say a few words. There was nothing truthful he could say and no point in saying anything now. At that point in time he hadn't even known he was Kenneth's heir. If he had at least known that he could have thanked the dead man, for having made him rich.

         What could he say? He remembered thinking about it. He asked Sarah what to say and she suggested saying Uncle Kenneth had been a warm human being. That much was true, while he lived he was warm. Ninety eight and six tenths degrees of warm. More or less. And he was a human being, sort of. Yes he could say that.

         But then Sarah had failed to keep a straight face and he started to laugh too. He thought, Stop it! You do not laugh during a wake. Or do you? Nobody was crying. The funeral director certainly wasn't crying. This casket was built like the vault at Fort Knox, it must have cost plenty and he knew the little man in the black morning coat and striped trousers had made money for his work this day.

         When undertakers go to school to become undertakers is there a class where they are taught to talk in that muted monotone? Or was it something a man took on after years of attending the dead?

         The little man in the striped trousers asked Miles if he would care to have the lid lifted so he could view the body. He answered hastily, "No!" He would have paid good money not to have to look at Uncle Kenneth's dead face!

         Looking at Sarah he knew she was fighting the impulse to laugh. She did that when she was nervous. "Do we have to stay here?" she asked at length.

{indent]"I don't think so. Nobody else is coming, that's for sure."

         "Then let's go; this place gives me the creeps."

         So the old man was buried without mourners because that was the life he had chosen for himself. When we choose our lives we also choose our deaths, thought Miles.

         It was a week later he discovered that he had suddenly become, if not rich, closer to it than he had ever expected to be. Along with the inheritance came the old house that was his childhood home after his father was killed in Korea.

         He was still talking on the phone as he walked around the back yard. "Yes, it looks as if everything's here. It's been so long, how would I know? Yes, I'll be going back to the hotel soon. I need to get away from all this dust. I'll be home tomorrow. Love you," and he turned off the phone. He went back into the house.

         He locked the kitchen door behind him and went upstairs.

         The room that had been his was by the top of the stairs. He opened the door and looked in. Dust was on everything in there, too. To his surprise the bed was the same one he had slept in and the chest at the foot of the bed was his old toy chest.

         He blew the dust off, and opened the chest, expecting to find it empty. It wasn't empty. He sat on the floor, handling his old belongings, a kaleidoscope of memory slowly turning in his mind.

         Why hadn't the old man gotten rid of this stuff? Was it possible nobody had been in this room in ~ in forty four years? He pulled aside the dust cover on the bed, hoping to see his old counterpane with the trains embroidered on it. It was just the old mattress covered with striped ticking. There were a couple of circular stains in the middle, attesting to the fact that he was a very small boy, when he began to occupy this room.

         Well it was all his again, as it had been his long ago. He reached into the chest and took out a little toy horse, made of some kind of cast metal. He remembered that horse. He remembered pretending he had a real one like it, with an arched neck like that, a flowing mane and tail, pretending he could ride far and wide, leap fences, go anywhere. He had named the toy horse Pegasus after the one his grandmother read to him about from a book called Tanglewood Tales.

         It was time to go. He was choking on dust. He had seen enough. It was time to go. He put Pegasus in his jacket pocket.