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“Sir!” he shouted.
“Do me a favor,” I said.
“Anything!” he shouted.
“Take this extra money,” I said, “and buy the biggest bottle of Irish moss you can find. And just before you pick me up tomorrow night, Nick, drink it down, drink it all. Will you do that, Nick? Will you promise me, cross your heart and hope to die, to do that?”
He thought on it, and the very thought damped down the ruinous blaze in his face.
“Ya make it terrible hard on me,” he said.
I forced his fingers shut on the money. At last he put it in his pocket and faced silently ahead.
“Good night, Nick,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”
“God willing,” said Nick.
And he drove away.
The Time of Going Away
The thought was three days and three nights growing. During the days he carried it like a ripening peach in his head. During the nights he let it take flesh and sustenance, hung out on the silent air, colored by country moon and country stars. He walked around and around the thought in the silence before dawn. On the fourth morning he reached up an invisible hand, picked it, and swallowed it whole.
He arose as swiftly as possible and burned all his old letters, packed a few clothes in a very small case, and put on his midnight suit and a tie the shiny color of ravens’ feathers, as if he were in mourning. He sensed his wife in the door behind him watching his little play with the eyes of a critic who may leap on stage any moment and stop the show. When he brushed past her, he murmured, “Excuse me.”
“Excuse me!” she cried. “Is that all you say? Creeping around here, planning a trip!”
“I didn’t plan it; it happened,” he said. “Three days ago I got this premonition. I knew I was going to die.”
“Stop that kind of talk,” she said. “It makes me nervous.”
The horizon was mirrored softly in his eyes. “I hear my blood running slow. Listening to my bones is like standing in an attic hearing the beams shift and the dust settle.”
“You’re only seventy-five,” said his wife. “You stand on your own two legs, see, hear, eat, and sleep good, don’t you? What’s all this talk?”
“It’s the natural tongue of existence speaking to me,” said the old man. “Civilization’s got us too far away from our natural selves. Now you take the pagan islanders—”
“I won’t!”
“Everyone knows the pagan islanders got a feel for when it’s time to die. They walk around shaking hands with friends and give away all their earthly goods—”
“Don’t their wives have a say?”
“They give some of their earthly goods to their wives.”
“I should think so!”
“And some to their friends—”
“I’ll argue that!”
“And some to their friends. Then they paddle their canoes off into the sunset and never return.”
His wife looked high up along him as if he were timber ripe for cutting. “Desertion!” she said.
“No, no, Mildred; death, pure and simple. The Time of Going Away, they call it.”
“Did anyone ever charter a canoe and follow to see what those fools were up to?”
