To Be Cold, Like Trees

During the #coronavirus pandemic, I will be regularly posting stories and selections from my published collections and novels. Read for free! Reading is the best at this time!

This short story, the second free offering, is also from the collection "Since the Sky Blew Off: The Essential G. Wayne Miller Fiction, Vol. 1" It was first published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in 1987 -- one of my first big sales -- but I daresay it has stood the test of time. Nuclear holocaust was the fear then; today, a viral equivalent...

TO BE COLD, LIKE TREES

I look at the trees outside my window and I think how many centuries they have survived, how many summers they have blossomed with life, how many Septembers they have worn fire, how many winters, like this winter, they have been skeletal and cold and perfectly . . .

... content.

I look across the empty street at the factory and I remember back so long to when it was alive, to when there were workers on all three shifts, and the parking lot was full, and chimneys spewed smoke, and lunch sirens blew, and the trucks and boxcars ringed it like a fortress under siege.

Now the factory is cold, like the trees, and shadowy, like the hills beyond, and black at night except for a single light some fool leaves on in an attempt to keep the vandals away. Down the street is an antique shop, and there are desks and chairs and rusting bed frames still piled on the front porch, but it is closed, too. The win­dows are boarded with plywood, and the weeds are wild and thick where once there was impeccable lawn.

Only the grocery still opens for business, weekdays nine to six, Saturdays nine to noon, as it has for over a century. Of course, they're going to close that, too. Hank McArthur, whose family's run it from the start, said so himself. Told me he's keeping his stock up only through the end of black-powder season and then he's putting the for-sale sign up and moving over the mountains past the reservoir to Amherst, where, he assures me, times are better.

Why don't you come along? he said.

You could stay with me at my sister's until you find something of your own. She's got a mean tongue, Sis has, and she don't tolerate drinking, but you're no drinker anyways, so why not? You've got your Social Security and that's good anywhere a body chooses to be, so can you just tell me, why not?

And I nodded my head, and said as how I would consider it, but I won't. There are still some things to do in this town. Still some whisperings I must pay attention to.

I stare at the trees tonight, and I look at the factory, and I remember something I read once in one of those glossy magazines before my eyes went bad. It was a story about how many H-bombs there are in the world today, and how many times over they could turn this planet into a radioactive graveyard, and how many people would die, and how many animals would be incinerated, and how many of God's lovely trees would be vaporized, and how long the sky would remain the color and temperature of frozen charcoal. I saw one of those bombs once.

It was lashed to an army flatbed and it was rolling through the Nevada desert in the middle of an armed convoy one Sunday evening late in 1947. I was a staff sergeant, and I was one of only a dozen guards with the necessary clearance to be out there on that range, and I had been sworn to secrecy, and I have kept that secret to this day. We hauled that thing off into the setting sun and the next morning at the crack of dawn, there was a tremendous flash followed by a mushroom cloud and a sound like the devil himself announcing the end of the earth. Five or more miles away, the sagebrush and pine were reduced to ash. Three hours ' later, we could see traces of the cloud, still faintly shaped like a mushroom from an opium-eater's dream.

And I wanted to scream, but I didn't. Not out loud.

Today is Christmas Eve.

It's almost midnight now, almost the Savior's Day, and I sit here as I have nightly since summer, when the trees were so green.

Outside, it is spitting snow. The wind is right, blowing, as it is, toward the reservoir that services two million people in a metro­politan area a hundred miles to the southeast. I suppose somewhere, probably over the hills there in Amherst, young children are dreaming their sugarplum dreams. The wind is not blowing their way, no, but toward the scientists and politicians and generals and industrialists whose existence is nourished, by nightmares.

They call me, these Vermont trees.

I sit here in my bedroom, the window open, the factory fading in and out of the snow, and they call me. I cough blood again, and my whole body shakes, and my head feels deliciously light, my stomach painfully heavy, and I wonder once more if this disease that consumes my insides began that Monday morning in 1947, or if it started later, in the bowels of that factory, where we manu­factured clothing out of asbestos.

Like all the others, this is an academic issue now.

I take another sip of codeine and I feel ready.

Soon, I am going to the cellar to remove from a wall safe the lead canister that has been hidden there so long. I will put on my winter coat then and step out into the night, loading the canister onto a child's rusted wagon I happened upon near the antique shop. Pulling that wagon, I will cross the street to the factory and go inside through a back door, the one closest to the hills and the trees. After forty years, I know that door well. I will carry a flash­light and I will find my way down deep into the basement, a stuffy and fume-filled place where my little fire can get its best running start. I shall laugh at the absentee owner and his silly light, and I shall disarm the sprinklers by closing a valve the size of a grown man's skull. I will hum a nameless tune and I will pour kerosene everywhere through that rat-infested cellar and when I am ready to leave, I will drop a match. Kerosene burns slower than gas, and I will be in no rush, no rush at all.

I shall climb.

I will use the back stairway, the one where I first kissed the young mill girl who became my wife and mother of my children, both of whom were stillborn. I will probably struggle with that canister, but I will make it to the top, I am sure. I will go to the middle of the roof, the place I expect the fire to be most fierce, the smoke most thick, and I will pry the top off that canister. For the first time since 1947, I shall see plutonium dust. There is almost a pound of it, and I am not ashamed to say it was stolen by me and a long-dead man of rank who had vague hopes of someday becoming rich or famous with it.

Then I will go to the edge, six granite and iron-beam stories high, and I shall check the wind one final time to be sure it is still blowing strongly toward the reservoir.

Then I shall breathe. Deep, long breaths, hale and hearty with the raw power of the new season. At last I shall sit, staring off into trees, and I shall wait, listening to the whispers:

To be cold, like trees.

To be hot, like bombs.

(Should you wish to purchase any of my collections and books, fiction or non-fiction, visit www.gwaynemiller.com/books.htm)

LANDING PAGE for all the Free Reads during #coronavirus

NEXT UP: An excerpt from my auto-racing book, "Men and Speed: A Wild Ride Through NASCAR's Breakout Season."