Free The Man Who Walked Away A Novel by Maud Casey Page B

will be heavy with that image, and though it will fade eventually, it will return to him when he is a man and feeling melancholy. What was that ? He won’t be able to place it. It must have been a dream he had once long ago when he was a boy capable of conjuring such things.
    “Don’t go!” Albert hears the boy calling out to him, but it is too late. The bird with the potato in its beak flies past his ear. He hears the boy calling him even after he has walked so far away he couldn’t possibly hear him. Don’t go! As if there were a life for Albert there.
    There is no life for him there. There is no life for him anywhere.
    This is no life at all.
    He discovers himself fading with the light, trembling with cold amid the rubble of a cemetery wall half pulled down to make room for more victims of cholera. Though he doesn’t know it, he is not far from home. He is not thinking of home. He wants only to sink into the mud. It is better not to thrash . Let him die right there in the cemetery. No one will have to drag him from a muddy rut; no one will have to shoulder his dead body out of town. Just dig a hole.
    When he sees the lamplighter, grizzled and trembling with age, Albert believes he has gotten his wish: the man must be coming to bury him here where he lies.
    “Is that you, boy?” the lamplighter says, pulling him up from the cold flattened gravestone where he has been lying. “I thought I saw a shape from the path that looked like a man. I wasn’t sure if . . . it’s been so long. Is that you, Albert?”
    “Tell me you’re not a dream.”
    “Stand up,” the old man says. Albert is tired, so tired, too tired; he leans into the warmth of the lamplighter’s body, the arm around his shoulder. “There is no need to cry. Come, now,” the lamplighter says, pulling Albert to his feet.
    He is so cold and stiff he can barely walk even with the old man’s help, but he allows the lamplighter to guide him into the city, the home he is forever leaving, through the winding streets reeking of horse piss. He leans into the warmth of him as he escorts him past the public gardens with the Spanish chestnut trees under which the rats scurry, through the Cathedral Square where the men who live inside the tick-tock of regular days gather at the end of the work day, never worrying about wandering away. “Where has the time gone?” Albert imagines them saying to one another as he’s heard other men say so breezily. They don’t mean “Where is yesterday?” or “Where is the month of March?” Time has not really gone anywhere; it has not abandoned them, for example, in a cemetery to die.
    “Look,” a man Albert doesn’t recognize says, though the laughing and pointing are familiar. “The man with the . . . Oh! Oh! My beautiful instrument!”
    “What is wrong with you?” barks the lamplighter. “Go home. Leave him be.”
    Once more, kindness is so much worse than ridicule. Albert wants only to return to the cemetery. He wants to lie down and sink into the earth. Cover him with dirt; he will become the dirt. But the lamplighter won’t let him go and then they are passing the little church of St. Eulalie, where during the day men and women, so appealingly clean, whisper up and down the aisles, bowing their heads, kneeling and praying.
    And then, tsk-tsk , out of the cold darkness of the church a cloaked figure appears into the shadows of dusk, clucking its tongue.
    “I have seen you,” hisses a familiar voice, throwing back a cloak to reveal her sharp eyes and clucking tongue. It is the witchy-looking woman who stands guard each day to harangue anyone who will listen and those who won’t on the subjects of good and evil.
    “Be quiet,” the lamplighter says, though he knows as everyone does: She sees everything.
    “Behind the cathedral, abusing himself.” Her loose neck jiggles as she speaks. “God curses you.”
    “God would not even bother to curse you,” the lamplighter says.
    “This man!” the woman