Little Sister Death

  Below him the lights came on. The door opened and a rectangle of yellow spilled onto the yard. He could see Corrie, doll-size, approaching the steps, peering into the gathering night. He could imagine her face sweetly becoming slightly apprehensive as night drew on. Afraid of the dark, he thought derisively, who would have welcomed anything the night might choose to favor him with.

  David, David.

  He could hear her calling, the voice belllike yet faint with distance. He arose and took up his notebook, went stumbling blindly downhill toward the lighted house.

  You were out a long time, Corrie said.

  She thought you were snakebit, Stephanie told David.

  My name is Mommy, Corrie said. Not she.

  Binder laid aside his silverware, took up his coffee cup. I finally found the old Beale homeplace, he said. Greaves said it would be easy, and maybe in the wintertime it would, but this place is so grown up you can’t find anything. I fought blackberry briars all afternoon and finally just stumbled upon it. The two chimneys are there, just like Greaves said, but he neglected to mention there are trees growing right up beside them, taller than they are. Right up through where the floor of the house was, poplars forty or fifty feet tall. I keep forgetting this was all a hundred and forty years ago.

  What else was there?

  The pear tree old Jacob Beale set out in his yard. Dead, I’ll admit, but a pear tree nonetheless. The graveyard where the Beales are buried. The old orchard. You can see the configuration of the land, the lay of it, where the fields were, the old grape arbor. The spring is still there, of course, and the wreckage of the old stone springhouse.

  A regular scenic tour, she said, smiling wryly.

  What amazes me is that we got here while there was anything at all left…I expected to find everything razed, the ground bulldozed, house trailers setting everywhere.

  He waited for her to echo his enthusiasm but she did not. She arose and began to clear the table. Binder lit a cigarette, glancing outside. The windows had gone opaque, dark stolen over the land. He could see his reflected image at the head of the table, the shadow of a beard he was beginning to grow blurring the edges of his face. Lit bright orange by the flare of the match, his reflection was oblique and conspiratorial.

  How long do you think it will take you to block out the book? Do you think you can get the feel of it here—begin it, maybe— and then we could go back to Chicago to finish it?

  I don’t know, Corrie. It’ll just come when it comes. Why? I don’t recall you being that fond of Chicago.

  I wasn’t, but I’m not that fond of the Beale farm, either. This place, especially this old house, just drives me up the wall. Besides, there’s school to think about.

  This is only July. There’s plenty of time to think about that. It’ll all be worth it, Corrie. I promise you.

  Well. I hope it’s a good book.

  I don’t know how good it’ll be but it’ll be commercial. And that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?

  I suppose so. I know you can write. You don’t have to prove anything to me, David.

  When the house had been modernized, a bathroom had been added in the largest downstairs bedroom, a partition erected so there was a narrow hall that ended in two doors, one to the bathroom, the other interconnecting with a smaller bedroom. They had bought Stephie bunk beds in Beale Station. Corrie had set them up in the smaller room and done what she could to brighten it up, but the walls were a drab dirty brown and the room still had the austere appearance of a dormitory or military barracks.

  Or prison, she thought.

  Binder read to Stephie until he thought she slept, then ceased. She lay with her eyes closed for a time, but when he softly closed the book and arose to leave she opened them. When she spoke her voice was blurred with sleep.

  Daddy?

  What?

  I forgot to tell you about the lady I saw.

  Lady? Where did you see a lady, babe?

  Stephie had arisen on her elbows. Her face was animated now, no longer sleepy. Binder thought she looked like a tiny clone of her mother.

  On the hill above the toolshed. She had something. A rabbit, I think. It kept trying to get away but she held it real tight and it didn’t.

  A rabbit? Binder thought. Aloud he said, What did the lady look like, Stephie? Did she look like anybody we know?

  No, she was real old. Sort of fat and mean-looking. Grouchy.

  Where did she go?

  I don’t know. Just away. The way you went. She…she shook her hand at me.

  You mean she waved? Or what?

  Sort of…she waved her hand but it wasn’t fingers. Her fingers didn’t wave.

  Shook her fist? he wondered. At a child?

  Her eyelids fluttered. He could see sleep rising up in her blue eyes like a soft mist. It was a brown rabbit, she said drowsily. Then she fell silent.

  He sat beside the bed, waiting until she was sound asleep. Sometimes she pretended, letting him get all the way to the door, then calling, Daddy.

  He was thinking about rabbits. Something about rabbits. Then he remembered the man the real estate agent had sent to clear the place of weeds and brush. He and Stephie had been watching the red tractor moving through the lawless growth of pigweed and sassafras and all at once there was a hellacious noise beneath the blade of the bush hog. The driver got off swearing, kicking through the weeds to find the stump he had hit. But there was no stump. He approached Binder with a curious look on his face.

  Hope that wadn’t you or your little girl’s rabbit box, he said.

  Go in the house, he told Stephie.

  I want to see the rabbits, she said stubbornly.

  I said go in the house. Tell Mommy I said to give you some ice cream.

  Binder went to see. The operator had raised the mower. Beneath it, shattered, they saw dowels and lashes of wood, a near-unidentifiable wreckage of splinters.

  You can’t prove to me that ever was a rabbit box, he said. But the weeds were showered with bright drops of blood, sticky bits of hair and flesh and white shards of bone, as if some furry creature had exploded all over the lawn.

  I’ll keep this to myself, Binder thought. It wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted Corrie to know, high-strung as she was, and with her father dying.if Stephie hadn’t told her already.

  Did you tell Mommy about seeing the lady? he asked. But this time she really was asleep.

  Corrie sat in silence for a time, a prolonged silence that Binder had come to recognize. It meant that Corrie was going to ask him something she knew he’d rather not be asked.

  David?

  What? Binder was holding his notebook but he wasn’t working. He was waiting.

  You think it would bother you if Ruthie and Vern came up for a few days sometime this summer?

  I guess not, he said reluctantly, mildly annoyed but at the same time realizing that he couldn’t deny her so simple a request. He planned to be deep in the book all summer and to have little time for small talk. Vern was very big on small talk.

  Vern was successful. He had once been a construction worker, a few years ago, and had fallen from a rigging of scaffold. Binder had once maintained, not entirely facetiously, that Vern had jumped in order to sue the company. He had won an enormous lawsuit, had even been rolled into the courtroom in a wheelchair. The money was no more than in his hands than Vern was healed by a traveling evangelist in a miracle bright and incandescent that Binder figured was probably the peak of the faith healer’s career. Vern and Ruthie had immediately moved to Florida and gone into the motel business.

  Vern didn’t like Binder. In fact he probably didn’t like Binder almost as much as Binder didn’t like him. Vern didn’t trust anyone who didn’t have a job or wasn’t rich; he felt if you weren’t filthy rich you ought to be punching a timeclock somewhere. He had never really understood what it was that Binder did. The idea that a grown man would spend his time writing made-up stories in a notebook amazed him, and the idea that there w
ere folks in New York who would pay Binder for this was simply beyond his comprehension.

  I don’t care if they come, it’ll be company for you and Stephie and God knows there’s enough room. But Vern’ll have to find his own games to play. I’ll be busy then and he needn’t look to me for entertainment.

  I told them you’d be working. I’ll be glad to see Ruthie again, though. It seems we never see each other anymore except when there’s trouble in the family. Ruthie worries about me. You know how big sisters are.

  No, I don’t. When did this plan come about, anyway?

  After Daddy’s.when Daddy died.

  She had crossed the room, came up behind him where he sat. He felt her hands alighting on his shoulders, saw in the mirrored windows their reflections merge. She leant her face to the top of his head, her hair so fair against his own. He could smell her hair.

  Poor, lonely David. You were an only child when I found you.

  He smiled at her reflection. I was an only child before that. You want something else, I can tell. What?

  Fix the TV so it works tomorrow?

  All right.

  It’ll liven up the place some.

  He was silent a time. Look, he finally said. I don’t want you thinking I’ve dragged you into something against your will. I’m only here to write the book. And I’ve always wanted to see this place, and this seemed like a good chance to do it. You could have stayed in Chicago. Or Orlando.

  No. I wanted to be with you.

  We could stay nights in a motel, then. If the house upsets you that much, I mean.

  No. That would be crazy, even if we could afford it. It’ll be all right, David. Really. You’re committed to do the book, and that’s the important thing right now.

  His silence bespoke assent but he already knew better, had known from his first night here, from before that. From the day he had come here with Greaves, the night he had read the book in Chicago. The book he was writing was important to him, but it was becoming secondary to the mystery. All the things that were supposed to have gone on down here: had they or hadn’t they? Had all those people lied? It was over a century ago, layered with myth and folklore, but what was the basis of it? He felt he had the pieces to an enormously complex puzzle, needed only time to figure out where they went.

  Night. She slept, or perhaps she feigned sleep. Lately he thought that she sometimes did. He could feel her regular breathing against his back. He couldn’t hear the sounds outside the bedroom window, only the mesmeric whirring of the fan. The fan negated the heat, the whippoorwills, created an artificial environment of no sound no climate no time that Corrie needed to induce sleep.

  The first day in the house it hadn’t occurred to them the place wasn’t air conditioned, and that night they had lain sleepless and sweaty in the dark. The next day he went to Beale Station and bought a fan to use until the air conditioner was installed.

  Binder had told himself that he could sleep anywhere, but he couldn’t tonight. His mind seemed wired on adrenaline, his eyes kept opening to stare upward at the unseen ceiling, and when he tried to clear his mind, to be completely blank, scenes from the book he was beginning flickered across it bright and chaotic as snippets of colored film.

  It had to work. Too much riding on it, too many things. Lying there in the dark, he itemized them in his mind like a man going over things he had bought on credit and wondering how he was going to pay for them.

  The money. All his money—Corrie’s money, really, but what’s mine is yours—thrown into the pot for a single quixotic toss of the dice. All right. Six-month lease, eighteen hundred dollars. Twenty-four hundred for a used pickup truck. Four hundred to an obstetrician, and more to come there. Utility bills. Food for twenty-four weeks at…seventy-five? Ninety-five hundred dollars to start with.

  He thought of Stephie. Of the nameless and faceless child in Corrie’s womb. How could Corrie have let him do this? How could she have stood by and calmly watched him put all her hard-won eggs in one basket?

  Well, to start with, she didn’t know about the location of all the eggs. He expected she believed that a great many of them still resided at the Blount County bank.

  Her sleeping body stirred against him and he felt a rush of love for her. He needed her. He needed her practicality, her intense concern for the mundane minutiae of the world he wouldn’t or couldn’t cope with. He even needed her faint ridicule; it sharpened him, kept him moving, let him know when he was drifting too close to the edge that had always fascinated him. Yet a part of his mind stood apart, detached and uninvolved, and asked him how much he would love her if there ever came a time when he didn’t need her.

  The book had thrown her off balance. She hadn’t expected the money, the good reviews, the award it received. He could imagine her drawing back, regrouping, confused, thinking, Well, maybe he knows what he’s doing after all. Maybe I ought to give him more rope. Maybe he won’t hang himself.

  Her hips moved against his thigh and he wondered what she was dreaming. He smiled wryly into the darkness. Your mind is as cold as a cat’s heart, but your body didn’t get the news.

  How much could he realistically expect? Fifteen thousand? Twenty? If the book went over there might be a film sale…

  He got up furtively and pulled on his pants. He took up his lighter and cigarettes and went out of the dark bedroom through the high-ceilinged foyer to the porch. The door was open save a screen and a cool breeze blew off the creek. He opened the screen and went out into the sounds of the summer night. He sat on the top step smoking and listening to the crying of the crickets and the lonesome call of an owl from somewhere out there in the far-off darkness.

  Here in the moonlight the world seemed drained of color. The outlines of objects took on an added clarity, as if their edges had been sketched in charcoal. For no reason he could name he found himself watching the old toolshed, a leaning structure of gray planking set against the base of the hill. Above it the hill undulated eastward, cold and silverlooking in the moonlight, broken only by the dark stains of cedars. He found himself waiting, staring intently at the doorway of the toolshed, a rectangle of Cimmerian darkness that seemed beyond darkness, darkness multiplied by itself, and he was thinking, Something is going to happen. He sensed a change in the air. It had grown denser yet, so that even the crying of the nightbirds could not pierce it. He seemed locked in a void of silence. The crickets had ceased or the roaring in his ears diminished them. He had fallen into a helpless, volitionless state, no longer a participant but an observer, a person things happen to, straining to see he knew not what but watching with rapt fascination an oblong abscission into warm, mustysmelling darkness.

  He became conscious of a painful constriction of his chest and realized suddenly that he had been holding his breath. The cigarette burned his fingers. He looked down when he put out the cigarette and when he looked up he could hear the nightbirds again and the toolshed had lost its air of dark menace. It was only a shakeroofed outbuilding collapsing infinitesimally slowly under its own weight.

  He felt chilled and shaky. All right, he told the house. We both know you can do it. You don’t have to prove anything to me.

  The roof was already hot to the touch at eight a.m. and by nine he could feel slick trails of sweat across his ribcage and down his back. The white shirt was plastered across his shoulder blades, and after a while he took it off and balled it in his fist and tossed it off the edge of the roof.

  He moved carefully toward the ridge of the house, balancing the antenna and pole and watching his tennis-shoed feet, careful of their placement. Some of the slates were loose, earlier one had skittered beneath a foot and fallen to the concrete patio below, a dizzying distance from the apex of the roof.

  There was no way to secure anything on the slate roof, and eventually he settled for leaning the antenna pole against one of the chimneys and securing it with wire. When he released it the pole skewed sideways with the antenna pointed toward the earth. No signal there, Binder k
new, and he stood for a moment gazing up the sheer plumb side of the brick flue. No purchase for hands or feet. No thought when it was built one hundred and twenty years ago of handholds for Binder to climb, nothing to lash an antenna to. He squatted and went crablike down the roof to the edge and down the ladder to the kitchen roof, another ladder to the ground. In a few minutes he returned with a stepladder and a length of clothesline wire.

  He balanced the ladder and climbed it with painstaking care, fingertips almost prehensile against the brick, a dizzy fear of heights knotted in the pit of his stomach, freshets of nervous perspiration starting from seemingly every pore.

  The top. His breath whistling in his throat, he locked his hands over the lip of the chimney, feeling a heady rush of relief in a world of intangibles. Here was something a man could cling to. A rock in all this tumult. He shifted his weight, leant out over space, reaching with his right hand for the antenna, his left clinging to the top of the chimney. Then the century-old mortar gave and the brick came away in his hand, the ladder kicking out beneath him, Binder hitting the roof hard and fighting to keep consciousness, everything a dervish of movement washed in red haze. Hitting the slate on his back then and rolling, fingers clawing for purchase at the very air, grasping the antenna wire desperately and feeling it tauten momentarily and come away from the antenna with a rush of relief in his hands and his descent accelerate, heard the antenna crash to the roof somewhere above him, the elements skirting against the roof. He was grasping at the slate, tearing at it with his nails, after what seemed like hours slowing his descent and ending near the eave, every muscle of his body taut and the fingers of both hands hooked over the rough edges of a tier of slate. His head and his fingertips hurt. The world looked filtered through a red miasma of fear and anger at his own stupidity. He could feel blood soaking through the hair on his right temple, see it trickle down the index and second finger on his left hand.