the tremendous provender of his food and meat, bringing to them all the deathless security of his strength and power and passion, bringing to them all again the roaring message of his fires that shook the fire-full chimney-throat with their terrific blast, giving to them all again the exultant knowledge that the good days, the magic days, the golden weather of their lives would come again, and that this dreamlike and phantasmal world in which they found themselves would waken instantly, as it had once, to all the palpable warmth and glory of the earth, if only his father would come back to make it live, to give them life, again.
Therefore, he could not think that he was dead, and yet it was October, and that year he had come home again. And at night, in his mother’s house, he would lie in his bed in the dark, hearing the wind that rattled dry leaves along the empty pavement, hearing, far-off across the wind, the barking of a dog, feeling dark time, strange time, dark secret time, as it flowed on around him, remembering his life, this house, and all the million strange and secret visages of time, dark time, thinking, feeling, thinking:
“October has come again, has come again…. I have come home again and found my father dead… and that was time… time… time…. Where shall I go now? What shall I do? For October has come again, but there has gone some richness from the life we knew, and we are lost.”
Storm shook the house at night—the old house, his mother’s house—where he had seen his brother die. The old doors swung and creaked in darkness, darkness pressed against the house, the darkness filled them, filled the house at night, it moved about them soft and secret, palpable, filled with a thousand secret presences of sorrowful time and memory, moving about him as he lay below his brother’s room in darkness, while storm shook the house in late October, and something creaked and rattled in the wind’s strong blast. It was October, and he had come home again: he could not believe that his father was dead.
Wind beat at them with burly shoulders in the night. The darkness moved there in the house like something silent, palpable—a spirit breathing in his mother’s house, a demon and a friend—speaking to him its silent and intolerable prophecy of flight, of darkness and the storm, moving about him constantly, prowling about the edges of his life, ever beside him, with him, in him, whispering:
“Child, child—come with me—come with me to your brother’s grave tonight.
