Forgetful of the hours while I work, I do not begin the long walk home until late, at dusk. The day has been warm, but now in my shirt I am cold, and a half mile along I am caught in a sudden shower, forced to leave the gravel road for the shelter of a tree, its leaves already brown and yellow. The rain becomes a storm, streaking at me sideways, drenching me. I cinch the neck of my canvas bag to protect my painting and equipment and decide to run. My socks are spongy in my shoes, repulsive, when at last I reach the lane down to the house and barn.
The house and barn. They and my mother alone have changed, as if as one, warping, weathering, their joints twisted and strained, their gray so unlike the brightness I recall as a boy. The place is weakening her. She is in tune with it. She matches its decay. That is why we have come here to live. To revive. Once I thought I could convince her to move away. But of her sixty-five years she has spent forty here, and she insists that she will spend the rest, what is left to her.
The rain falls stronger as I hurry past the side of the house, the light on in the kitchen, suppertime and I am late. The house is connected to the barn the way the small base of an L is connected to its stem. The entrance I have always used is directly at the joining, and when I enter, out of breath, my clothes cling to me cold and wet. The door to the barn is to my left, the door to the kitchen straight ahead, I hear the dripping in the basement down the stairs to my right.
"Meg. Sorry I'm late," I call to my wife, setting down my water-beaded canvas sack, opening the kitchen door. There is no one. No settings on the table. Nothing on the stove. Only the yellow light from the sixty-watt bulb in the ceiling, the kind my mother prefers to the brightness of a one-hundred watt. It reminds her of candlelight, she says.
"Meg," I call again, and still no one answers. They're asleep, I think. With dusk coming on, the dark clouds of the storm have lulled them, and they have lain down for a nap, expecting to wake before I return.
Still the dripping. Although the house is very old, the barn long disused, the roofs crumbling, I have not thought it all so ill-maintained, the storm so strong that water can be seeping past the cellar windows, trickling, pattering on the old, stone floor. I switch on the light to the basement, descend the wooden stairs to the right, worn and squeaking, reach where the stairs turn to the left the rest of the way down to the floor, and see not water dripping, but milk. Milk everywhere. On the rafters, on the walls, dripping on the film of milk on the stones, gathering speckled with dirt in the channels between them. From side to side and everywhere.
Sarah, my child, has done this, I think. She has been fascinated by the big, wooden dollhouse that my father made for me when I was young, its blue paint chipped and peeling now. She has pulled it from the far corner to the middle of the basement. There are games and toy soldiers and blocks that have been taken from the wicker storage chest and played with on the floor, all covered with milk, the dollhouse, the chest, the scattered toys, milk dripping on them from the rafters, milk trickling on them.
Why has she done this? I think. Where can she have gotten so much milk? What was in her mind to do this thing?
"Sarah," I call. "Meg." Angry now, I mount the stairs to the quiet kitchen. "Sarah," I shout. She will clean the mess and stay indoors the remainder of the week.
I cross the kitchen, turn through the sitting room past the padded, flower-patterned chairs and sofa that have faded since I knew them as a boy, past several of my paintings that my mother has hung on the wall, brightly colored old ones of pastures and woods from when I was in grade school, brown-shaded new ones of the town, tinted as if old photographs. Two stairs at a time up to the bedrooms, my wet shoes on the soft, worn carpet on the stairs, my hand streaking on the smooth, polished, maple banister.
At the top, I swing down the hall. The door to Sarah's room is open. It is dark in there. I switch on the light. She is not on the bed, nor has she been. The satin spread is unrumpled, the rain pelting in through the open window, the wind fresh and cool. I have a bad feeling then and go uneasily into our bedroom. It is dark as well, empty. My stomach has become hollow. Where are they? All in my mother's room?
No. As I stand at the open door to my mother's room, I see from the yellow light that I turned on in the hall that only she is in there, her small torso stretched across the bed.
"Mother," I say, intending to add "Where are Meg and Sarah?" But I stop before I do. One of my mother's shoes is off, the other askew on her foot. There is mud on her shoes. There is blood on her cotton dress. It is torn, her brittle hair disrupted, blood on her face. Her bruised lips are swollen.
For several moments, I am silent with shock. "My God, Mother," I finally manage to say, and as if the words are a spring releasing me to action, I touch her to wake her. But I see that her eyes are open, staring toward the ceiling, unseeing although alive, and each breath is a sudden full gasp, then a slow exhalation.
"Mother, what has happened? Who did this to you? Where are Meg and Sarah?"
But she does not look at me, only toward the ceiling.
"For God's sake, Mother, answer me! Look at me! What has happened?"
Nothing. Her eyes are sightless. Between gasps she is like a statue.
***
What I think is hysterical. Disjointed, contradictory. I must find Meg and Sarah. They must be somewhere, beaten like my mother.
Or worse. Find them. Where? But I cannot leave my mother. When she becomes alert again, she too will be hysterical, frightened, in great pain. How did she end up on the bed?
In her room, there is no sign of the struggle she must have put up against her attacker. It must have happened somewhere else. She crawled from there to here. Then I see the blood on the floor, the swath of blood down the hall from the stairs. Who did this? Where is he? Who would beat a gray, wrinkled, arthritic old woman? Why in God's name would he do it? I imagine the pain of the arthritis as she struggled with him.
Perhaps he is still in the house, waiting for me.
To the hollow sickness in my stomach now comes fear, hot, pulsing, and I am frantic before I realize what I am doing, grabbing the spare cane that my mother always keeps by her bed, flicking on the light in her room, throwing open the closet door and striking in with the cane. Viciously, sounds coming from my throat, I flail the cane among faded dresses.
No one. Under the bed. No one. Behind the door. No one.
I search all the upstairs rooms that way, terrified, constantly checking behind me, clutching the cane and whacking into closets, under beds, behind doors with a force that would certainly crack a skull. No one.
"Meg! Sarah!"
No answer, not even an echo in this sound-absorbing house.
There is no attic, just an overhead entry to a crawl space under the eaves, and that has long been sealed. No sign of tampering. No one has gone up.
I rush down the stairs, seeing the trail of blood my mother has left on the carpet, imagining her pain as she crawled. I search the rooms downstairs with the same desperate thoroughness. In the front closet. Behind the sofa and chairs. Behind the drapes.
No one.
I lock the front door, lest he be outside in the storm waiting to come in behind me. I remember to draw every blind, close every drape, lest he be out there peering at me. The rain pelts insistently against the windows.
I cry out again and again for Meg and Sarah. The police. My mother. A doctor. I grab for the old phone on the wall by the front stairs, fearful to listen to it, afraid he has cut the line outside. But it is droning. Droning. I ring for the police, working the handle at the side around and around and around.
***
They are coming, they say. A doctor with them. Stay where I am, they say. But I cannot. Meg and Sarah. I must find them. I know they are not in the basement where the milk is dripping — all the basement is open to view. Except for my childhood things, we have cleared out all the boxes and barrels and shelves of jars the Saturday before.
But under the stairs. I have forgotten about under the s
tairs, and now I race down and stand dreading in the milk, but there are only cobwebs there, already reformed from Saturday when we cleared them. I look up at the side door I first came through, and as if I am seeing through a telescope, I focus on the handle. It seems to fidget. I have a panicked vision of the intruder bursting through, and I charge up to lock it, and the door to the barn.
And then I think: if Meg and Sarah are not in the house, they are likely in the barn. But I cannot bring myself to unlock the barn door and go through. He must be there as well. Not in the rain outside but in the shelter of the barn, and there are no lights to turn on there.
And why the milk? Did he do it, and where did he get it? And why? Or did Sarah do it before? No, the milk is too fresh. It has been thrown there too recently. By him. But why? And who is he? A tramp? An escapee from some prison? Or asylum? No, the nearest institution is far away, at least a hundred miles. From the town then. Or a nearby farm.
I know my questions are a delaying tactic, to keep me from entering the barn. But I must. I take the flashlight from the kitchen drawer and unlock the door to the barn, forcing myself to go in quickly, cane ready, flashing my light. The stalls are still there, listing — and some of the equipment: churners, separators, dull and rusted, cobwebbed and dirty. The must of decaying wood and crumbled hay, the fresh wet smell of the rain gusting through cracks in the walls.
Flicking my light toward the corners, edging toward the stalls, hearing boards creak, I try to control my fright. I remember when I was a boy how the cattle waited in the stalls for my father to milk them, how the barn was once board-tight and solid, warm to be in, how there was no connecting door from the barn to the house because my father did not want my mother to smell the animals when she was cooking.
I scan my light along the walls, sweep it in arcs through the darkness before me as I draw nearer to the stalls, and in spite of myself, I recall that other autumn when the snow came early, four-foot drifts by morning and still storming thickly, how my father went out to the barn to do the milking and never returned for lunch, or supper. The phone lines were down, no way to get help, and my mother and I waited all night, unable to make our way through the storm, listening to the slowly dying wind. The next morning was clear and bright and blinding as we waded out, finding the cows in agony in their stalls from not having been milked and my father dead, frozen rock-solid in the snow in the middle of the next field where he must have wandered when he lost his bearings in the storm.
There was a fox nosing at him under the snow, and my father's face was so mutilated that he had to be sealed in his coffin before he could lie in state. Days after, the snow was melted, gone, the barnyard a sea of mud, and it was autumn again and my mother had the connecting door put in. My father should have tied a rope from the house to his waist to guide him back in case he lost his way. Certainly he knew enough. But then he was like that, always in a rush. When I was ten.
Thus I think as I aim my flashlight toward the shadowy stalls, terrified of what I may find in any one of them, Meg and Sarah, or him, thinking of how my mother and I searched for my father and how I now search for my wife and child, trying to think of how it was once warm and pleasant in here, chatting with my father, helping him to milk, the sweet smell of new hay and grain, the different sweet smell of fresh droppings, something I always liked although neither my father nor my mother could understand why. I know that if I do not think of these good times I will surely go insane, dreading what I might find. I pray to God that they have not been killed.
What can he have done to them? To rape a five-year-old girl. Split her. The hemorrhaging alone can have killed her.
Then, even in the barn, I hear my mother cry out for me. The relief I feel to leave and go to her unnerves me. I do want to find Meg and Sarah, to try to save them. Yet I am eager to leave the barn. I think my mother will tell me what has happened, tell me where to find them. That is how I justify my leaving as I wave the light in circles around me, guarding my back, retreating through the door and locking it.
***
Upstairs, my mother sits stiffly on her bed. I want to make her answer my questions, to shake her, to force her to help, but I know that will only frighten her more, push her mind down to where I can never reach it.
"Mother," I say to her softly, touching her gently. "What has happened?" My impatience can barely be contained. "Who did this? Where are Meg and Sarah?"
She smiles at me, reassured by the safety of my presence. Still she cannot answer.
"Mother. Please," I say. "I know how bad it must have been. But you must try to help. I must know where they are so I can find them."
She says, "Dolls."
It chills me. "What dolls, Mother? Did a man come here with dolls? What did he want? You mean he looked like a doll? Wearing a mask like one?"
Too many questions. All she can do is blink.
"Please, Mother. You must try your best to tell me. Where are Meg and Sarah?"
"Dolls," she says.
As I first had the foreboding of disaster at the sight of Sarah's unrumpled satin bedspread, now I begin to understand, rejecting it, fighting it.
"Yes, Mother, the dolls," I say, refusing to admit what I suspect. "Please, Mother. Where are Meg and Sarah?"
"You are a grown boy now. You must stop playing as a child. Your father. Without him you will have to be the man in the house. You must be brave."
"No, Mother." My chest aches.
"There will be a great deal of work now, more than any child should know. But we have no choice. You must accept that God has chosen to take him from us, that you are all the man I have to help me."
"No, Mother."
"Now you are a man and you must put away the things of a child."
Eyes streaming, I am barely able to straighten, leaning wearily against the doorjamb, tears rippling from my face down to my shirt, wetting it cold where it had just begun to dry. I wipe my eyes and see my mother reaching for me, smiling, and I recoil along the hall, then stumble down the stairs, down through the sitting room, the kitchen, down, down to the milk, splashing through it to the dollhouse, and in there, crammed and doubled, Sarah. And in the wicker chest, Meg. The toys not on the floor for Sarah to play with, but taken out so Meg could be put in. And both of them, their stomachs slashed open, stuffed with sawdust, their eyes rolled up like dolls' eyes.
The police are knocking at the side door, pounding, calling out who they are, but I am powerless to let them in. They crash through the door, their rubber raincoats dripping as they stare down at me.
"The milk," I say.
They do not understand. I wait, standing in the milk, listening to the rain pelting on the windows while they come to see what is in the dollhouse and in the wicker chest, while they go upstairs to my mother and then return so I can tell them again, "The milk." But they still do not understand.
"She killed them, of course," one man says. "But I don't see why the milk."
Only when they speak to the neighbors down the road and learn how she came to them, needing the cans of milk, insisting that she carry them herself to the car, the agony she was in as she carried them, only when they find the empty cans and the knife in a stall in the barn, can I say, "The milk. The blood. There was so much blood, you know. She needed to deny it, so she washed it away with milk, purified it, started the dairy again. You see, there was so much blood."
That autumn we lived in a house in the country, my mother's house, the house I was raised in. I have been to the village, struck even more by how nothing in it has changed, yet everything has, because I am older now, seeing it differently. It is as though I am both here now and back then, at once with the mind of a boy and a man.
For the next ten years, I worked exclusively on book-length fiction. After finishing First Blood in 1971, I wrote several different types of novels, including a pursuit novel, Testament, a non-supernatural horror novel, The Totem, and a historical western, Last Reveille. Simultaneously, I continued to commit myself
to teaching. There wasn't time for short fiction. Or energy — whenever I did sit down to attempt a short story, I found the effort frustratingly difficult. My block was finally broken in 1981 with "The Partnership." My inspiration for the story was a graduating senior who was worried about his job prospects. He did well, as it turned out, but I got to thinking about the lengths that some graduates might go to land a job.
The Partnership
« ^ »
Sure, it was cold-blooded, but there didn't seem another way. MacKenzie had spent months considering alternatives. He'd tried to buy his partner out, but Dolan had refused. Well, not exactly. Dolan's first response had been to laugh and say, "I wouldn't let you have the satisfaction." When MacKenzie kept insisting, Dolan's next response was, "Sure, I'll let you buy me out. All it takes is a million dollars." Dolan might as well have wanted ten. MacKenzie couldn't raise a million, even half a million or a quarter, and he knew that Dolan knew that.
It was typical. MacKenzie couldn't say "Good morning" without Dolan's disagreeing. If MacKenzie bought a car, Dolan bought a bigger, more expensive one, and just to rub the salt in, Dolan bragged about the deal he got. And if MacKenzie took his wife and children on vacation to Bermuda, Dolan told him that Bermuda wasn't anything compared to Mazatlan where Dolan took his wife and kids.