Manly House - Part #3
Gerald Beckman
Issue #3 (May 2008)
Manly has discouraged all contact with the outside world. His unintentionally neglect of the passes up the mountain to Manly House Inn has discouraged all guests. The mansion on the mountain side has become a legend, almost a myth.
Manly is able to care for all of his personal needs and the needs of his farm animals, but time is beginning to become a blur. Only an encounter with a lost climber reminds Manly of his wish to be left alone.
He went outside to do his chores. He didn’t recognize the animals. Their colors, shapes, their numbers, all were very different from what he remembered from – what – the day before? But they knew him. They grunted and bleated for their feed, and he fed them from stone bins filled with roughage of a kind he had no recollection of storing.
And the lots and pens – they were old, so very, very old. The fences were made of stones piled on one another just as the house was, with less attention to detail perhaps, but built to last as long as the stones themselves. Soil had all but buried the bottom two layers, and the interiors of the pens had worn concave, like the bottom of a shallow bowl. The wooden roofs of the sheds had not only collapsed, but there were no signs they had ever had roofs.
And his house – great god, the house had the same look! Carefully he crossed the yard back to his house, and the very lay of the ground, its contour, had changed subtly. The pattern of the grass, the way it grew, its color and texture had also changed in a way he could not identify.
He examined the front door. It was not the one he had so carefully designed, then had fashioned from hard mountain ironwood by a craftsman in the village below, expecting it to last longer than his own life. This door was obviously handmade, of mountain oak, and of great age. Its frame was as old as the door, and like the door, oxidized almost beyond use. And there was no lock on it.
The windowsills too had been replaced and were now aged by who knew how many decades – centuries perhaps. The front steps were worn round and smooth, as were the stone floors inside.
The valley was still there, but the villages were gone, and in their place was an endless city partially hidden – whether by smog, clouds, or some combination, he couldn’t tell. Contrails crisscrossed the sky. Planes by the score, noiseless, with fantastic shapes and sizes were landing and taking off below, moving at impossible speeds.
He wondered why he wasn’t overly disturbed by it all, and was conscious of being glad he wasn’t. Fear, apprehension, worry, it took too much energy to engage such emotions. It was so much easier to start to work and not waste time trying to sort it all out.
He started with the animal shelters.
Once he started rebuilding the sheds, stacking rock upon rock with the milk cows nuzzling his bare back, his brain seemed to disengage. He continued working but was conscious only occasionally, and then barely. The project was a long and difficult one, yet suddenly it was over and he had no idea how long it took. It might have been a week, it might have been a year. He neither knew nor cared. All he knew was, the sheds had been rebuilt, a cold wind was blowing, and he was tired. He went inside for supper and bed, but finding neither, curled up in a corner by the fireplace.
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