Little Sister Death

  The laughter died away. The old man grew still. Sewell saw his eyes were wide with fear and incomprehension, tears forming there and welling over the sockets. Son, the old man awkwardly began, his voice breaking off. Son, she. There seemed to be little of his father left in this pathetic old man.

  There were tears in his own eyes now, and Sewell wiped them away with the rough sleeve of the coat. He didn’t say anything. It was far too quiet. There was only the cold wind in the distance, the frozen trees keening over the bare winter fields. He helped Beale up, put his shoes on and tied them. This time they stayed tied. Come on, he said. The old man stood stubborn and disoriented, looking toward the single light flaring in the house, looking out across the fogbound fields as if all places were the same to him.

  Come on, Sewell said again, tugging at his arm. The old man came reluctantly, his left foot dragging audibly over the whorled earth.

  Where?

  The barn. We’re hitching up a team and leaving. I’m taking you and Mama over to Jacob Junior’s.

  It won’t do any good.

  How do you know what’ll do good?

  I just know

  Sudden anger flared in Sewell, fierce and violent. Anger at the old man for his stoic acceptance, anger at the horror that had consumed his father and sister, that might in his turn consume him until he lay in his grave. All right, by God, he said. Then we won’t go to Jacob’s. We’ll go to Virginia, or Carolina, or Kentucky. Sell the hellhole or give it away, if you could find a taker like you could have done four years ago, if you hadn’t been too damn stingy to take a penny’s loss.

  Halfway to the barn he turned at a sound. A figure had stepped from the darkness pooled in the orchard and strolled silently along, pacing them through the stalks of winter weeds on the other side of the fencerow, gliding toward convergence at the end of the pasture. He hurried the old man, not even hearing the mumbling complaint, his stomach icy with dread. He’d thought his belief was suspended, that he could accept anything without fear, but each manifestation had the quality of being marvelously new yet the same at the core, old wine in new bottles he thought, so that each time his reason was assaulted anew.

  He looked back. The figure was climbing the wooden stockgate, a figure in a long gray or black dress. The woman was in motion, climbing down then jumping the last two or three feet to land soundlessly in the roadbed, silhouetted for a moment, inkblack against the paler heavens: its face was long and cowshaped, he could see the hooked horns curving out from the sides of the head.

  Come on, he said, panic running through him. He pulled the old man’s wrist, Beale halfrunning in a sort of lurching shuffle. He could hear the cattle then, smell them, the clean summersmelling hay.

  He looked back. There was nothing, the wooden stockgate silhouetted against the sky, stark and austere. The road lay brimming with moonlight, cold and white and empty.

  The girl moaned softly, stirred in the willow chair. The black woman had a hand to her forehead. Virginia opened her eyes, which were for a moment depthless and blue and profoundly devoid of expression, then in an instant congested with bewilderment, confusion. She clasped the black woman’s arm and her face seemed to calm, as if she drew comfort from the old slave through some acute sensation of touch.

  What did she say, Chloe? she asked. Did I miss her talking tonight?

  Beale Station, Summer 1982

  The weekends were the worst, Corrie thought. The weekdays were not so bad—David had been used to working at some job during the weekday, writing in the evenings. That was the way it had been in Chicago, and he still seemed locked into this pattern, unable to write until the afternoon drew on. So he would wander amiably about the place, talk to her, help around the house, assist her time in its arduous flight, always seeming restless, waiting, ill at ease, but still there, anyhow, not like weekends.

  Saturday morning he would begin as if freed from a forty-hour workweek and continue through the day and night until exhaustion forced him to cease, giving up the notebook or typewriter with visible reluctance.

  Even then he was still working. He would be wound too tight, distant and vague, his mind numb, she thought, as he glanced occasionally at her in a curious, speculative manner that disturbed her, as if wondering who she was, how she fitted into the scheme of things. If she spoke to him he would answer her cordially enough, but he didn’t volunteer anything. He’d just sit on the end of the sofa, legs crossed, a cigarette burning unattended in his fingers, his eyes heavylidded, inwardlooking. His mind, she guessed, still filled with the people that were realer to him than she could ever be. Even though she always read his work, the simple reading of it did not carry her where he had been.

  And the worst part of it was that she had thought this book was to be different; in the writing of his other two novels he had been dealing with real people in life-and-death situations, concerned with tying together the disparate threads of his characters’ lives, almost unable to let them go. Now he was supposed to be knocking off a ghost story for the money and forgetting it, taking a little time off then getting on to more serious things. Secretly she had thought that was the idea that he just let be, she thought he had the ability that this would squander. They should have just tightened their belts and made do, they could have made it until the second book was made publishable, been more thrifty with the little money they got and not spent what they had on a ruined backwoods mansion.

  Sunday afternoon was more of the same, hot and clear and a mile long. The steady clack clack clack of the typewriter ceasing only when he paused to light a cigarette, make coffee, go to the bathroom. She was counting the days till Labor Day.

  She wished she had brought gardening tools. The yard was flanked with tall brick flowerbeds, she guessed all that was left of the sisters Abernathy. There were peonies, bloodred cannas, others she didn’t even recognize, all of them strangling in weeds and crabgrass.

  She began to pull weeds, turning their roots to die in the sun, planning on next Saturday already and it only being Sunday: fertilizer and small hoe, a trowel to loosen the earth about the flowers. Maybe he’d go before Saturday. Maybe they’d run out of something.

  The earth was parched and hard, solid as clay baked in the sun. The stick she prodded it with broke and she pitched it aside and arose, wiping her hands on her shorts.

  She turned. The toolshed. There would be something, even if it was only a sharp piece of steel. She could loosen the soil and water the cannas; it was better than Sunday evening TV.

  Serried gloom within, slats of white sunlight where the shakes were missing from the roof. She stood for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the shadows. Oddments of unidentifiable junk, scrapiron, old broken purposeless tools took shape out of the plasmic shade.

  It was hot in the shed, the air still and lifeless, freighted with nearinvisible motes of dust turning like spinning points of light. The smell of hot wood baking in the sun, the dank odor of moldy earth. Slow sleepy drone of insect wings. She looked up. Above the door wasps were flying about an enormous gray paper nest, arriving, departing, involved in some commerce known only to themselves, ugly red wasps thick as her little finger. She looked away, glanced about for anything that looked as if it would serve her purpose.

  A wooden platform covered half the earth floor, as if, she thought, the toolshed had once been floored and then part of it had been ripped up. The wooden bins, she figured, had held foodstuffs, perhaps potatoes, bags of dried beans. Against the wall, amidst a motley of thrownaway clothes, stood a hoe.

  She took up the hoehandle as she stepped on what a cursory glance had told her was a string of gaudy rag. It erupted to life, a copperhead flowing smooth as oil past her feet, across the worn floorboards, vanishing somewhere beneath them onto the blackgreen loam.

  She screamed and whirled about with the hoe, running blindly for the door, for daylight, the hoehandle striking the back sides of the doorjamb, momentarily stopping her, and the wasps were instantly upon her. She droppe
d the hoe, stood in the doorway slapping wildly at her face.

  She was still screaming. They were in her hair, down the neck of her blouse, she could feel them crawling over her breasts, stinging her face. She ran blindly into the yard.

  She could hear running footsteps. He grabbed her, slapping at the wasps. Goddamn it to hell, he said. He grasped her skull roughly with both hands hard, moving them over her hair, she could feel his hands crushing the wasps on her scalp. He jerked her blouse off, beat at her breasts and shoulders, caught her in his arms, turned her wildeyed face up momentarily toward his own.

  Where’d they sting you?

  All over, she said, crying brokenly. My face, my breasts. Is that all of them?

  I think so.

  Then get the hell in the house.

  She washed with cold water and coated her face with calamine lotion. She had taken most of the stings on her face and she could already feel it swelling. Her eyes seemed to be disappearing, her vision diminishing as if she peered through slits, knifeholes stabbed in the bloated flesh of her face.

  Where were you?

  Where was I? I was typing. Where did you think I was?

  You could have come when I screamed. A damned copperhead practically ran over my foot and you were typing. I could have been bitten. I could be dead by now, and you would be typing.

  I came when I heard you.

  Sure. When you finished the paragraph. Or the page.

  Goddamn it, Corrie, I came when I heard you. How did I know where you were? You know better than to be in that hot toolshed. What were you doing in there anyway? I thought you were on the porch.

  You’re never around when I need you. She began to cry.

  You know that’s not fair, Corrie.

  It’s the truth. I don’t give a damn anymore what’s fair and what’s not.

  She lay in the darkness, her eyes swathed in artificial darkness of cold wet bandages, listening to him typing. She wondered what time it was, if he would cook her supper or insist on her doing it. Or more likely, just do without.

  After a while the typing ceased. The door opened.

  Corrie, you want some tomato soup?

  No.

  What do you want?

  Nothing. I want to be let alone. I don’t want you looking at me.

  Before her eyes swelled closed, she had looked with horror at herself: a bloated nightmare in the bathroom mirror, tiny dark eyes like bits of coal sinking in the softwhite suet of her face, tiny nose and curious kewpie mouth stuck onto an enormous balloon being inflated as she watched.

  You want to go to the doctor?

  I don’t know. Do you think it could hurt the baby?

  No.

  After a while he went out. The door closed. The typing resumed. She lay listening to the whir of the air conditioner.

  When she awoke, her eyes were not as swollen. She could see a little. Night had fallen beyond the window.

  She wasn’t sure what woke her until she heard it again. A knock on the other side of the wall.

  David?

  No answer. She waited. It came again, a hard preemptory knock such as something hard striking the paneled wall. A knock again, a sound of something falling against the wall and slithering down it.

  Oh, Jesus. A walking stick, she thought, sick at heart, thinking about her father. She got up, opened the door. David? she called. The typing had ceased. It must be late. David? She went through the foyer, her vision still impaired, everything dark and blurry. She went onto the porch. Cool night air on her hot swollen face—she could smell cigarette smoke, hear the creek running.

  David?

  What is it? He was sitting on the porch steps, his head leant against a column. Staring off toward the toolshed.

  What are you doing?

  Resting. What are you doing?

  There was something beating on the walls.

  He didn’t say anything.

  I thought it might be you.

  No, he said. It wasn’t me.

  It was beating on the bedroom wall.

  It was?

  What are you doing?

  Thinking about those wasps. We’ll have to get some spray and a sprayer and wipe them out. I don’t know what to do about the snake. I don’t relish ripping up that old floor.

  Just stick a match to the whole thing. That’s what I’m going to do.

  No, he said gently. We can’t do that. But I’ll kill the snake, Corrie, I promise you.

  Somebody’s going to get bitten if you don’t. I said I would.

  When are you coming to bed?

  Not now. I just need to unwind. In a few minutes.

  I wish you would. I’m afraid in there.

  I will in a minute.

  She went back inside. Her head ached, and when she lay back down the bed seemed to turn drunkenly, to tilt, so instinctively she clutched the covers. She wondered if there was any way the baby could have been affected.

  She thought about her father. For a moment his face was frozen in her mind with the clarity of a photograph. His image would not recede: the pale almost protuberant eyes, the bony ridge across his forehead, the pale scalp through the receding reddishgray hair.

  They had been living in Chicago when Ruthie called. They had flown to Knoxville that same night to find the old man seemingly better; Ruthie, prone to exaggeration, had him near death of a heart attack, the flowers already ordered likely as not, but the old man himself said he was tough as the butt cut of a whiteoak log.

  Ruthie and Vern flew back to Florida. Vern ran a hotel there, and it wasn’t often he could get away. Corrie said, well, as long as they were there they’d stay a few days with her father. Her father had never really liked David, and she was thinking that a few days might bring them, if not closer, at least to some understanding of each other. Her father was a merchant, and David was so far outside the normal range of his realm of acquaintances they might have been from different planets.

  They had been making love for what must have been hours that night when the first knock came on the wall, David thrusting deep inside her, nearing orgasm, continuing despite the knocks and her attempt to get up, his arms tightening about her, his weight pinning her to the bed.

  I have to see about him.

  In a minute.

  It may be time for his heart medicine.

  He did not reply nor alter the rhythm of his thrusting. She was suddenly devoid of sensation, pushing at him, not playing anymore. The knock came again, and she was fighting him, trying to unwrap his arms, to stop the metronomic piston stroke inside her. She felt cold there between her legs, dead. His arms felt strong as steel bands, his stomach slapping hers. She could feel his hot breath on her throat.

  She heard him fall against the wall, slide down it. David, please, she was crying, feeling him thrusting faster, beginning to come just as she shoved with all her might against him, forcing him off the side of the bed onto the floor, his penis sliding out of her.

  Goddamn, David said.

  She had a momentary vision of him leaping up, standing there naked and outraged, pendulous cock swinging. For a long time, that was the way she saw him: an enormous engorged penis swinging from a diminutive insignificant little man so far behind it you could barely make him out.

  Her father was dead when she ran into the room, his face slack, eyes bulging and dull.

  The will was read. There was twelve thousand dollars. Corrie had been his favorite.

  Yet no one knew about that knock except she and David, and they had never spoken of it. The closest to an apology he had come was the gentle way he treated her the next week or so.

  No one knew, so she must have dreamed it. Or, she had half a thought she wouldn’t let herself pursue: the house knew.

  Late in the afternoon he would walk back across the fields and watch dark fall over the homeplace. Dusk gathered first in the dell where lay the ruins of the old houseplace, and it seemed to Binder that dusk dwelt there always, crept out when the shadows lengt
hened like ink seeping into blotting paper. He knelt against a great beech and smoked his third cigarette of the day, watched the mosaic of trees go dimensionless and depthless, jagged brushstrokes rendering black trees against the paler heavens. A solitary whippoorwill called. Night birds took up the cry. A moon of palest rose cradled up out of the hollow, cypresses darkened to red as the day waned. Dusk drew on and the moon turned the color of blood, fierce and malign, enormous, he felt he could rise and stretch his arms and touch it. A foreign moon out of another age and another world, it should have risen over Stonehenge a thousand years ago. The skeletal pear tree turned to a twisted hieroglyphic of blackened bone, a clue left him by a prior race could he but decipher it.

  David, he could hear her calling, and for a moment he had forgotten who and where he was and the voice seemed to have drifted across a hundred years of ruined landscape.

  He crushed the cigarette carefully against the heel of his shoe and arose. He went through the old cemetery, mostly given now to scrub sassafras and sumac, marble tombs, graven angels and crumbling spires recumbent in poison oak rising out of the honeysuckle. The lettering so worn you could hardly tell the tale. Old musty yellowed yesterdays, a bloody deranged tale carried to the grave. He thought of the bones beneath this quiet hillside, of the secrets he would never know, the words he would never hear, that had never even been spoken, and he felt an almost tangible sense of loss. JACOB BEALE, the oblong block of granite read, NOW AT REST. Somehow Binder doubted it.

  He loved the solitude, the dreamy sameness of the days. Time folded in on itself, one century the same as the next. Time was really only a concept, he thought, a way to get a handle on things, and he had discovered that he didn’t need it: the house must have looked the same a hundred years ago. And the same dark enigma dwelt here then.