Autumn Street

  "You can try it once," I said anxiously. "But then give it back."

  One of the other boys leaned down suddenly, collected a mitten full of dirty snow, and lunged forward to smear it in Charles' face.

  "Don't!" I cried. But Charles still was voiceless, standing stiffly as if he were frozen there at the top of the Autumn Park Hill. The snow was sliding on his face, down into the collar of his coat.

  "Do something, Charles!" I said to him fiercely. But he was stricken, silent, and helpless. The big boys had turned from us and taken my sled with them to the starting-off place. Johnny McKittrick looked back and called, "We'll give it back when we're finished with it. But get him off this hill."

  They piled, three of them, in layers, onto my new sled and sailed, whooping, down the packed snow, smaller and smaller, as I watched helplessly. When I turned back to Charles, he was gone; I saw him with his back to me, trudging through the snow, not toward Grandfather's house, but heading toward the upper end of the park, toward the end of Autumn Street.

  When I caught up with him, I could see that he was crying, and I had never seen Charles cry before.

  "Is your face okay? Did they hurt you?"

  "Shut up."

  "They'll give the sled back."

  "I don't care about your ole sled."

  I plodded beside him through the deep, untrammeled snow. It worked its way into the tops of my boots and down inside my socks so that my feet began to feel as wounded as my raw throat. My whole body ached with cold. And inside me somewhere I ached with something else, something that had nothing to do with my sled, but was connected with Charles' tears. I searched for redemptive things to say to him.

  "If you cry outside in winter, maybe you'll get icicles on your face."

  He turned on me furiously and pushed me down. I fell into the thick, stinging snow, and it coated my neck and wrists. I lost a mitten. Charles stopped and stood over me, angry, as I floundered, trying to get up. Finally he gave me his hand. I took it, and tried to find a way to cheer him.

  "Charles," I said when I was upright, shivering, "do you want to go into the woods?"

  "I'm goin' into the woods and I'm goin' to find me a cave, and you ain't comin'," he said.

  "Let me come."

  "You jest a baby."

  "No, I'm not. I won't be scared."

  "You scared of them turtles."

  "Not with you, I won't be."

  "Promise?"

  "I promise."

  It was a lie, and I knew that it was. But I took his hand, trying to warm my bare one against his wet red mitten, and went with him to the woods at the end of Autumn Street. Far behind us, the shouts of the boys who had my sled grew fainter until we heard nothing at all as we entered the dark woods by the path on which only a few footprints showed. It began to snow again, silently covering those, and our own.

  There had been no sun all day; and now, with the new snow, the grayness of the morning's sky blurred so that the whole world was a gray-white mass, bitter cold, and darkened by the heavy overhanging pines that bordered the narrow path. It was absolutely soundless: none of the chattering squirrels and noisy birds of summer, and even our own steps were as mute as the tread of ghosts, through the new powder of the freshly falling snow.

  "Where them caves?" demanded Charles. We were barely into the woods. I could still see, even through the snowfall, the outline of Autumn Street.

  "I don't know." My voice was raspy and my throat so filled with pain that it was almost unbearable to speak.

  "Well, where them turtles, then?"

  "Charles, I don't feel good." My head was suddenly spinning inside, as if the knives in my throat had cut loose whatever held my thoughts in place.

  "WHERE THEM TURTLES?"

  And I knew, despite the lurching emptiness in my head, what I had probably always known. I sank to my knees on the snowy path, unable to hold myself up anymore. I started to cry.

  "Charles, there aren't any turtles."

  "Liar."

  Did he mean that I was a liar for having told him, long ago, that there were? Or for saying, now, that there were not? I didn't know. It didn't matter. There was something wrong with our being in the woods at all, something far more frightening than turtles or caves, and the certainty of that fluttered in my head like a bat, clawing at me, but I couldn't keep it still to think about it, to exorcise it, or to explain.

  "Charles," I whimpered. "I'm sick. Something's the matter with me. Take me home."

  "Go home yourself. I'm stayin'."

  "Please come with me."

  I looked up at him and saw him shake his head firmly. He wouldn't come. I stood up, swaying with dizziness, and pulled at his arm, partly to support myself, partly as a plea. But he turned his back. Finally I willed my numb feet to move, back along the path, coward the street, through the place where our footprints had been layered over and lost.

  ***

  I left him there. I left him there alone, because he wouldn't come, and because my head swam with fever and the terrifying knowledge that one can, after all, save only oneself.

  It was true, what I told him, that there were no turtles in the woods, and I knew it then. But there was some other danger there, and we both knew that; we could feel it in the snow and the silence, as small as we were. With the hot knives in my throat and the buzzing pain that had begun to be a sharp-toothed creature in my head, I had none of the strength or courage to stay and face the danger with him, and none left of the anger that made him stay there alone.

  He was taller than I was, it was true. The angels that we had made together in Grandfather's yard had shown it. But he was so little. I looked back at him, standing there resolutely on the curving, overhung path, his dark face proud and defiant, his red Christmas mittens bright through the swirling snow, and I knew how little we both were. But my head was spinning and hot, and my vision was beginning to blur from sickness, the relentless snow, and my own tears.

  "Please come," I said once more, and perhaps he heard me; but he had already turned away to go farther, deeper, into the woods. I stumbled, crying, all the way home; and the street, changed by the snowfall and the distortions of beginning delirium, was endless and unfamiliar.

  When I reached Grandfather's kitchen, Tatie's soup was still simmering on the stove, the same soup she had been starting when we left. So no more than an hour or two had passed. But time had stopped for me. It could have been days, or years, or a lifetime, since I had trudged away with Charles and the sled.

  "I don't feel good," I cried, and Tatie stripped my sodden, ice-filled clothes from me as I stood shaking on the kitchen floor. "And Charles wouldn't come back. He's in the woods at the end of Autumn Street."

  "That Charles." Tatie peeled me down to my underwear and rubbed my arms and legs briskly with her warm hands. "Don't you worry none about him. You're catching a cold, child. Your voice sound like bullfrogs. You run up and get yourself in a nice hot bath. Charles, he be back when he's ready. He gets stubborn, sometimes."

  But the bath didn't help. I lay in the hot water shivering, and finally, half-dry and naked, I climbed into my bed, something I had never voluntarily done in the mid-afternoon.

  My mother came in. "You've missed lunch, Liz. Tatie says you're catching a cold. Do you want her to bring some soup up to you?"

  I shook my head, the covers drawn up tight around my neck. "I just want to sleep. I'm so tired, Mama. It was so cold out."

  She touched my forehead, and her hand felt cool.

  "You have a fever. If you're not better later this afternoon I'll call the doctor."

  "Mama?" I was already half-asleep, my thoughts dissolving into the heat inside my head.

  "What, sweetie?"

  "Charles is up in the woods. He wouldn't come back with me."

  "Did you tell Tatie?"

  "I think so." I couldn't remember.

  "Well, don't worry. Charles can find his way home, and he'll come back when he gets cold."

  She went a
way, and I let the heat melt all my thoughts, and I slept.

  It was almost dark, the early dark of winter, when I woke, coughing and confused, and remembered Charles again. I climbed from the bed, pulled on my flannel nightgown, and walked groggily into the upstairs hall, touching the wallpaper to keep my balance. Mama was coming up the stairs. I wanted to tell her that my throat felt like hot splinters.

  "Elizabeth, it's getting dark, and Charles hasn't come back. Tatie's very worried. We all are. Tell us exactly where you left him."

  I sat on the top step, pulled my nightgown around me for warmth, and told her.

  "We went into the woods at the end of Autumn Street. And I got scared, and didn't feel good, so I wanted to come home. But Charles wouldn't come. When I left him he was on the path that goes into the woods, near the place where you can see the big rock from the road."

  She nodded and left me there. I sat, shivering, swallowing again and again, testing the pain in my throat, and listened to people talking downstairs, in low voices. The voices swam into my head, back and forth, in slow motion, and through my fever I couldn't sort them out. Mama's voice. Tatie's. The clock striking. And soon, men's voices in the front hall. The sounds of boots stamping off snow, doing it right on the front hall rug, something Grandmother never permitted. I sat still, my head against the wall, and half-slept, half-listened. Full darkness came; lights were turned on, downstairs, but I huddled in shadows at the top of the stairs, shaking and drifting in and out of sleep and the beginnings of interrupted dreams.

  Police came. I thought that was a dream. But I startled myself awake and listened. There were police downstairs, stamping snow off, and Mama's voice. Tatie's, saying Charles' name. There was fear. Worried sounds. And outside, there was darkness. Darkness and snow.

  The dreams began coming again, in bright colors that carved pain in my head, and I was not sure if I was awake or asleep. I forgot Charles, forgot the police and the snow, remembered only the way to my bed, and felt my way there where it would be warmer, safer. I slept again.

  There were nightmares, which seemed to go on forever, from which I woke again and again in the dark with a feeling of fear that transferred itself on waking into the pain that now lodged deep in my chest. Again and again I sat up suddenly in my bed, to find night still there, to hear voices still downstairs, and to slide back into sleep.

  Then the real nightmare came, as light came back with the beginning of morning, and the real nightmare was not part of my sleep. It was the men's voices again, the stamping of snow again, so much noise that I once more climbed from bed and felt my way to the top of the stairs, and heard that Charles was dead.

  In the woods. In the woods. I heard them say that, and I heard Tatie's low cry. I had known that the danger was in the woods. Charles had known. We hadn't understood the form of the danger, had imagined it to be turtles, caves, or even the red-headed boy who licked lustily at the dripping from his own nose. But it was none of those. I staggered down the stairs to the place where the lights were on; they didn't hear me come in my bare, cold, quiet feet. Perhaps if they had seen me they would not have said in my presence, for I was still only six, that Charles had been killed by the half-mad derelict who wandered through the streets of Grandfather's town. Charles had been killed when he had come upon Ferdie Gossett in the woods at the end of Autumn Street.

  I stood at the foot of the stairs, unseen, and heard them speak of it, the most unspeakable of things, in my grandfather's house, while upstairs my grandfather slept with his speechless dreams, his powers of protection gone. In my own anguished delirium I could see Charles, so small; and I could see the man into whose furtive-eyed face I had sometimes glanced with timid curiosity as he stood alone, a victim himself. With their different angers, their different terms of innocence, the two had met in the woods that I had always feared for the wrong reasons. And the man had carried with him a knife. He had cut Charles' throat from one side to the other. When I heard the policeman say that, I heard the clean whisper of a sled runner slice through packed snow, and I cried out and fell.

  It was Tatie who picked me up and held me close in her massive, inviolate arms. I remember that. I remember that her low moans filled the high-ceilinged hallway, that she clasped me against her, nearly crushing me as if to crush my pain and hers, as if to ward off more. She murmured unintelligible words to me, rocking me against her; and the words became wails, high-pitched chants, almost songs, almost magic: they were wails I had never heard before, wails not part of my own heritage or understanding. But they blurred and softened the edges of my terror.

  The others stood motionless, silent, and watched. Her sounds were a litany for which, in the dim early morning winter light of the high-ceilinged hallway, there was no response.

  Finally she lifted her head. Her body was shuddering, still, but her voice, when she spoke, was very firm.

  "Call a doctor," she said. "This child's on fire. Let's not lose this one, too."

  My mother, her face pale and stricken, moved quickly to the telephone.

  17

  FOR DAYS THERE was a haze in the room, so that everything was veiled; but the haze seemed to be behind my own eyes, deep in the hot part of my head, where something ached and throbbed with the same rhythm as my pulse.

  My whole body was burning. I thrashed and kicked the blankets aside and then shook uncontrollably with chills. Through the haze, someone replaced the blankets again and again, and wiped my face with a damp cloth. From time to time a cool spoon was placed against my mouth; someone held a firm, supporting arm to my back, lifting me, and liquids I couldn't taste were given to me from the spoon. I turned my head from side to side, trying to refuse; it took all my energy to breathe, and I couldn't summon the strength to swallow. Phantoms pressed against my chest. Each breath was pain. I couldn't dislodge the heaviness that gripped my ribs; through the darkness and the haze, I planned each breath, trying to find a way around the weight. Finally, desperate, I would take the breath, gasping, but the weight and pain were always there; and I cried, fighting it, fighting the breathing itself, unable not to breathe, frantic to escape the pain, the heat, and the monstrous things that screamed and raked their claws inside my head.

  Sometimes there were bright lights. There was a man who came, who spoke to me, who said, "Elizabeth, Elizabeth," in a deep, demanding voice from which I turned away, and who raised my nightgown gently and then stabbed my shaking bottom with needles.

  But mostly there were shadows and darkness and dreams. I could see Charles in the dreams, and I could see him again when my eyes were open, looking at me through the haze; I could see his dark face with the mouth molded into a scream. His mouth was like Grandfather's, open and black; but the eyes were Charles' eyes, little-boy eyes, wide and frightened, not at all like the tired, puzzled stare of an old man.

  I could see his neck, red and open as a grin.

  I shrieked into the dark room, into the night, into my own dreams, shrieked even through the pain that pulled tighter around my chest. And they came again, people whose names I no longer knew; lights went on, and the cool hands sponged my face one more time, and one more time, and one more time.

  Through the haze I could hear my mother cry. It may have been a dream; there was a time when the dreams were as real as the other, when night and day were the same, and when no one's tears mattered but my own.

  Then the weight and pain began to lift. Breathing began to happen without thought. I was able, now and then, to focus on things through the lifted haze: my mother's face, swimming into my sight and disappearing again; a glass of water on the table; a picture hanging, as it always had, on my bedroom wall. Everything I had known was the same, and yet it was all different. It all seemed new and flat, without interest. And I was more tired than I had ever been. Too tired to keep my eyes open, but too frightened of my dreams to sleep. I lay stunned and mute, awake, silent, waiting. I let them lift me, wash me, feed me; but my eyes stayed closed while I waited for the next unspeakable
thing, not knowing what it would be, or how it would come, but certain that it would happen and that I would not be able to keep it away.

  One morning it was my mother's voice that I heard through the secret darkness of my closed eyes. "Elizabeth," she said to me, "it's the first day of spring."

  I let her words float, pulsing, through my head, searching for the unwounded place where they would have meaning.

  "It's your birthday," she said gently. "You're seven years old today."

  And the meaning pierced my consciousness, inside where the sounds had subsided. February was gone. March had come and was almost past. Charles had been seven. Now I was. I turned my head away from Mama's words.

  But she touched my shoulders and shook me softly. "I have a surprise for you," she said. "Will you open your eyes to see it?"

  I kept my eyes tightly closed and said nothing.

  "Your daddy's back," she told me. "Open your eyes now, Elizabeth."

  So I did, at last; and the first thing I saw on my seventh birthday was my father. He stood in the doorway, wearing the uniform that I remembered, smiling at me; and I remembered his smile, I remembered his face, I remembered in a rush all the things about my father that I had thought gone forever.

  When he walked toward my bed, it was slowly, and I saw that he was leaning on a cane. The sight made me curiously happy; it linked him to my grandfather, redeeming the dignity of the old man who now sat slumped and helpless in the house he had always commanded. Somehow the cane, and my father's slow, uneven steps, gave a continuity to the world and made it seem firm enough to hold me once again.

  He sat on my bed and put his arms around me, nuzzling my neck with his nose the way he always had. I held tightly to him.

  "Daddy, bad things have happened to me," I whispered, my hands knotted together behind his shoulders so that he could never leave again.

  "I know," he whispered back. "But they're all over now. Bad things won't happen any more."

  I believed him, when he told me that. I think that he believed it, too.

  Bad things had happened to my father, so I knew that he understood. Part of his leg was gone. He had a new lower leg, made of wood and metal in fascinating, complicated combinations. After the first, startling sight of the place where his real leg ended and the new one began, it didn't seem terrible any more. He taught me, while I was still in bed, recovering, to say "prosthesis," and it was only then, when I tried to say it and failed in a wonderful mixture of spit and giggles, that I realized my two front teeth were gone. Sometime during the time of nightmares and pneumonia they had fallen out; so I had continued to grow, and it was true, what my father had said, that the bad things were all over. I was seven and safe.