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.That made him glad for each of nine or ten paintings he skimmed through dealt from individualized perspectives with a train of child-figures moving in a column across a plain toward a cavern in a mountainside.The plain was marked by a scatter of henges and megaliths.A muddy inscription near the bottom of one canvas read, Fathers and mothers come as slaves and depart as kin.The children slake Old Leech.They entertain him with their screams.The name Old Leech struck a chord in his subconscious.He covered the pile with a drop-cloth, determined to burn the whole mess later.“Oh, hey, don’t touch those,” he said as Kurt rummaged in the cabinet of the dolls.Kurt turned a rag doll over in his hands; a horrid thing of matted yarn, floppy, segmented limbs and coveralls wrinkled with age and mildew.Its eyes had fallen out.“Eh? This thing is heavier than it looks.Swear to Christ it’s full of wet sand.”“Would you—? Your mother’s got her mind set.She’ll cook my goose for sure if we mess with them.We’ll come back to it later.”“I doubt it,” Kurt said.He laughed and tossed the doll aside.He looked around.“We’ve been at this for three hours.No end in sight.This must be what Purgatory is like.”“Sisyphus and son.”Kurt moved to the Westinghouse projector and the film canisters.“Ever watch any of these?” He picked up a couple of the canisters and gestured.“I mean, wow.Some of these babies are old as the hills.” He began stacking them inside a box, pausing to name the titles of those that bore one.Most of the labels had faded to white.There were several dozen canisters, approximately a quarter of which contained Michelle’s personal collection from various travels abroad.“There’s not much to them,” Don said after a period of cataloging the boxes, labeling with a magic marker, and stacking them.In truth, he’d only glanced at a few of the films, and those at metaphorical gunpoint, usually in the company of Michelle’s anthropologist friends following one of her trips; a gaggle of bluff academics in Hawaiian flower print shirts and Bermuda shorts, or in the case of the more staid variety (like Don himself), cheap suits they wore to every occasion, including the grocery store for cigarettes; everybody sipping gin and tonic and laughing uproariously at the in-jokes while Michelle put on her dry-as-bones dead-pan narration and Don melted into the background, content to weather the tedium by passing among them with the drink tray.“What?”“Bird watching, picnics, travelogue rubbish.Nothing interesting.” Don winced at the paucity of creativity in his fabrication.He couldn’t fathom his embarrassment.Michelle wasn’t particularly enamored of his rock collection or his treatises on glaciations, was she?“Bird watching?” Kurt frowned.“This must be from one of Mom’s trips.Yeah, right here—Papua, New Guinea.Crng (Lynn.V) 10/83.What’s on it?”“You’ve seen your mother’s slides.This is probably the same, but longer.”“Ugh.The bloody slideshows; how soon we forget.” Kurt chucked the canister in with its mates.A couple minutes later, he whistled to Don.“Hey, Pop.Check this out.” He waved an envelope of photographs he’d discovered in one of Michelle’s waterproof belt pouches; the kind she carried when afoot in jungles and deserts.The pouch had been mixed up with the film canisters.“I was doing a wee bit of snooping when we were over last week.Win is so taken by Mom’s adventurous ways and I showed her some of the stuff she’d left here.Anyway, I came across these.See, these were taken in the ’30s or ’40s judging by the car there, and the house…”Don accepted the photos; less than a dozen low quality black and white shots of the house with a Model T parked in the yard, and the barn a gray rectangle in the background.Other photographs featured pastorals: the field; the hill and stream; one from atop an elevated vantage in the valley [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]