Immediately after this was what was billed in the program as “A Reading from A Memory of Light “, and the panelists listed were Harriet—and Robert Jordan. I may have been the last person to clue into what this meant. I had assumed that Harriet was going to read something from the book that Jordan had written.
What I got was quite different.
Wilson was there, too, and got up and told us how, a few weeks before Mr. Rigney died, Wilson was sitting with him when Mr. Rigney suddenly began to talk. He was describing a scene, and as soon as Wilson realized what he was hearing he jumped up and ran into the next room and got Harriet and Maria, so they could take notes, and dashed to Wal-Mart to buy audio recording equipment. Because Robert Jordan was telling them the end of the story.
I don’t mind telling you, when I realized they were going to play some of the audio recording for us, I got chills.
Wilson told us that what we were about to hear was recorded twenty days before Mr. Rigney passed, and is a description of a scene in the Prologue of A Memory of Light . I’m not sure, but it may be the very first scene in the book. You could have heard a pin drop in the room when he sat down next to Harriet and started the recording.
I can’t claim that I specifically remember what Mr. Rigney’s voice sounded like when I met him five years ago, but I would have remembered if it had sounded any different from what a big, self-assured man generally sounds like, so hearing what he had sounded like near the end was something of a shock. The voice on the tape was hoarse and cracked and exhausted and determined, and altogether… I hesitate to use the word “eerie”, for fear it seems disrespectful, but, well, I can’t think of another way to describe it. Combined with the scene he was actually describing, which was entirely for the purpose of creating a sense of ominous foreboding, the effect was… I don’t know what it was.
The scene was simple, with largely nameless characters who are unlikely to appear in the larger narrative, starting with a farmer sitting on his porch, watching a cloud bank in the distance, one which is behaving in a manner unlike any clouds the farmer had ever seen before. I won’t go into more detail (though it may be that others will), because we were asked beforehand not to employ recording devices, and though a written summary is certainly not breaking that rule, I feel that I should adhere to the spirit of the request. And besides, a written summary wouldn’t do it justice.
The thing I remember most was the repeated phrase: “The storm is coming. The storm is coming.” He said that over and over again.
I had choked up the moment the recording started, and by the time it was over, I was unabashedly in tears. This may seem like a rather strong reaction, but perhaps it is a little explained when I tell you that by entirely random coincidence, Mr. Rigney had died barely a month before my own father did; my father was only a year older than Mr. Rigney, too.
Meaningless coincidence this may be, but grief doesn’t truck much with logic, and… and I don’t have much more to say on that topic. Let’s just say it struck a raw place, and leave it at that.
All other considerations aside, whatever else I felt at that moment, I also feel privileged to have been there for it.
Fortunately for this con-goer, there was a ball later that evening. With a bar.
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