From the Dust Returned Read Online Free PDF Page B

we'll soon stop it!"
    And to roars of laughter the chilly hand and the cold moon face lurched away in the roundabout dance.
    "That," said Mother, suddenly near, "was your Uncle Jason."
    "I don't like him," whispered Timothy.
    "You're not supposed to like, son, not supposed to like anyone. It's not in the cards, as they say. He directs funerals."
    "Why," said Timothy, "does he have to direct them when there's only one place to go ?"
    "Well said! He needs an apprentice!"
    "Not me," said Timothy.
    "Not you," said Mother instantly. "Now light more candles. Pass the wine." She handed him a salver on which stood six goblets, brimmed.
    "It's not wine, Mother."
    "Better than wine. Do you or do you not want to be like us, Timothy?"
    "Yes. No. Yes. No."
    Crying out, he let the stuff fall to the floor and fled to the front door to fall out in the night.
    Where a thunderous avalanche of wings fell down to clout his face, his arms, his hands. A vast confusion brushed his ears, banged his eyes, chopped his upraised fists as, in the terrible roar of this downfell burial he saw a dreadfully smiling face and cried, "Einar! Uncle!"
    "Or even Uncle Einar!" shouted the face, and seizing him, threw him high in the night air where, suspended and shrieking, he was caught again as the man with wings leaped up to catch and whirl him, laughing.
    "How did you know who I was?" cried the man.
    "There's only one uncle with wings," Timothy gasped as they shot above the rooftops, rushed the iron gargoyles, skimmed the shingles and veered up for views of farmlands east and west, north and south.
    "Fly, Timothy, fly!" shouted the great bat-winged uncle.
    "I am, I am!" gasped Timothy. "No, really??!"
    And laughing, the good uncle tossed and Timothy fell, flapping his arms, and still fell, shrieking, to be caught again.
    "Well, well, in time!" said Uncle Einar. "Think. Wish. And with the wishing: make !"
    Timothy shut his eyes, floating amidst the great flutter of pinions that filled the sky and blinded the stars. He felt small buds of fire in his shoulder blades and wished more and felt bumps grow and push to burst! Hell and damn. Damn and hell!
    "In time," said Uncle Einar, guessing his thought. "One day, or you're not my nephew! Quick!"
    They skimmed the roof, peered into attic dunes where Cecy dreamed, seized an October wind that soared them to the clouds, and plummeted down, gently, to land upon the porch where two dozen shadows with mist for eyes welcomed them with a proper tumult and rainfall applause.
    "Good flying, aye, Timothy?" the uncle shouted, he never murmured, everything was an outrageous explosion, an opera bombardment. "Enough?"
    "Enough!" Timothy wept with delight. "Oh, Uncle, thanks."
    "His first lesson," Uncle Einar announced. "Soon the air, the sky, the clouds, will be his as well as mine!"
    More rainfall applause as Einar carried Timothy in to the dancing phantoms at the tables and the almost-skeletons at the feast. Smokes exhaled from the chimneys shapeless to assume shapes of remembered nephews and cousins, then ceased being smolders and took on flesh to be crushed in the orchestra of dancers and crowd the banquet spreads. Until a cock crowed on some distant farm. All stiffened as if struck. The wildness stilled. The smokes and mists and rain-shapes melted along the cellar steps to stash, lounge, and occupy the bins and boxes with brass-labeled lids. Uncle Einar, last of all, kettledrummed the air as he descended, laughing at some half-remembered death, perhaps his own, until he lay in the longest box of all and let his wings simmer to be tucked on each side of his laughs and with the last bat-web pinion safely appliqued to his chest, shut his eyes, gave a nod, and the lid, so summoned, shut down on his laughs as if he were still in flight and the cellar was all silence and dark.

    Timothy, in the cold dawn, was abandoned. For all were gone, all slept fearful of light. He was alone, and loving the day and the sun, but wishing somehow to