The ugly, the sickening word came back to her, spoken in Miss Tyler’s small voice: fat. Harriet looked down at herself under the bedclothes; she was gross, a revolting series of huge mountains, a fat fat fat girl.
She turned her head from side to side on the pillow, her eyes shut so as not to see herself. You’ll always be fat, she thought, never pretty, never charming, never dainty. In an ecstasy of shame she searched for every pretty word she knew; she would never be any of them.
Finally she sat up in bed, tears on her cheeks, and looked out of the window. Outside were the eucalyptus trees, like lace against the sky. If it were only possible to lie against them, light and bodiless, sink into their softness, deeper and deeper, lost in them, buried, never come back again. . . .
• • •
“Sure I saw it,” Pat said. He closed his eyes. “It was awful,” he said.
Marilyn smiled involuntarily, and said urgently, “Well, what was it like?”
“Awful,” Pat said vividly. “All blood, and dirty. It was awful.”
“Was the rock there?” Jamie Roberts asked with respect.
“Sure. I nearly touched it,” Pat said, and the children sighed, all together. “It was all covered with blood,” he said.
“Golly,” Jamie said. He folded his arms and stared wistfully. “I wish I’d been there,” he said.
“Yeah,” Pat said scornfully, “you wouldn’t have liked it much, I can tell you. Boy,” he said reminiscently, “it was sure awful.”
“Listen, Pat,” Mary said, “listen, was she awful? I mean, all bloody?”
Pat made an expressive face. “There was blood all over everything,” he said. “I nearly got some on my shoe.”
“Oooh,” Marilyn said, her face all screwed up, “Pat, you’re terrible!”
• • •
Mr. Merriam, walking slowly by the creek in the first dusk, met and recognized Mr. Perlman by the fallen log. They smiled embarrassedly at one another and then stood together, looking out beyond the creek over the golf course.
“I was just looking around,” Mr. Merriam said. “I just had an idea I’d kind of like to look around.” He laughed uncomfortably. “Suppose the police have covered everything pretty thoroughly,” he said.
“I suppose so,” Mr. Perlman said. “Doesn’t seem quite right, does it?”
“That’s what I thought,” Mr. Merriam said. “It just doesn’t seem quite right.”
“He was too small, for one thing,” Mr. Perlman said eagerly. “You can’t tell me a boy that small could heft a rock that big. Stands to reason.”
“No,” Mr. Merriam said quietly. “No, I thought of that.”
“Just isn’t possible,” Mr. Perlman said. “And another thing, he came home. Wouldn’t have done that.”
“You know,” Mr. Merriam confided, “Desmond’s been saying the kid had blood all over his clothes. Well, now, I was one of the people saw Tod when he came home.” Mr. Merriam paused for effect, and then said, “There was not one spot of blood on him. Not a spot.”
“Well, then, that’s another thing,” Mr. Perlman said. “He’d have gotten some blood on him, wouldn’t he?”
“You know what I think?” Mr. Merriam said, “I think it was a tramp. Some Godforsaken old bum just hanging around down here. Never did like the kids playing up here, it’s a natural place for tramps to hang out.”
“Something in that,” Mr. Perlman said. “Marilyn’s been playing up here; I don’t like to think what might have happened.”
“My kid too,” Mr. Merriam said.
They were both quiet for a minute, looking at the silent trees and the deserted golf course. Then Mr. Perlman said, “At any rate, the whole thing was too hasty. Far too hasty. Everyone jumping to conclusions.”
“Take my word for it, it was some tramp,” Mr. Merriam said.
• • •
“I think they’re not telling all they know,” Mrs. Merriam said. She nodded emphatically, and Mrs. Byrne said in her comfortable voice, “I don’t blame the poor people for not wanting any more fuss, after all.”
“I think,” Mrs. Merriam said, leaning forward to emphasize her point, “that when you get a young boy like Tod, who’s obviously, well, not right, somehow, taking a little girl like that off into a deserted spot. . . . Well.” She nodded again and leaned back.
“Really,” Mrs. Byrne said. She stirred uneasily, and Mrs. Merriam said, “More tea, Mrs. Byrne?” Mrs. Byrne held up a hand in refusal. Mrs. Merriam gave a muffled little laugh, and said, “You’d think I invited you just to talk about this dreadful affair, Mrs. Byrne, but really I can’t help thinking about it all the time. It’s so fresh in all our minds, I suppose, and then it makes you so mad to think of him getting off so easy.”
“Easy?” Mrs. Byrne said, startled.
“Well,” Mrs. Merriam said, flustered, “you know what I mean. Of course, the way he . . . did it, without telling anything first, is as good as a confession. But they should have gotten the facts first.”
“He was such a quiet little thing all the time,” Mrs. Byrne said. “Seems funny to think about him having gumption enough to go and get the rope, and—”
“Don’t,” Mrs. Merriam said with a shiver. “I can’t even think about it.”
“Well, now, Pat, my son, he was there,” Mrs. Byrne said. “He went with the policemen that found the . . . that found her. Not that I think he should have been along.” She looked at Mrs. Merriam, and Mrs. Merriam rolled her eyes in horrified agreement. “Well,” Mrs. Byrne continued, “Pat seemed to think it was like an accident. Like she fell against this rock and hit her head, and Tod saw he couldn’t help her and got frightened, and no wonder.”
Mrs. Merriam said, “No, indeed, that could not have happened, Mrs. Byrne. Think about that boy, think about how he acted all the time. He was always strange, I remember myself, noticing how strange he always was. And then think about the facts they’re not giving out. Mark my words,” Mrs. Merriam said, “even if that killing was an accident, there were other things about it that were not accidental.” She tightened her lips and looked triumphant.
• • •
“‘Woe to him,’” Mrs. Mack read, her voice rising slightly as the dog watched her patiently. “‘Woe to him that coveteth an evil covetousness to his house, that he may set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the power of evil! Thou hast consulted shame to thy house by cutting off many people, and hast sinned against thy soul. For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber shall answer it. Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and stablisheth a city by iniquity!’”
• • •
“I am so damn sick of all this business I could scream,” Mrs. Roberts said. She sat up in bed and looked angrily down on her husband, barely visible in the darkness. “What the hell do you know about it anyway?” she demanded viciously. “You were too drunk to do anything except fall over your own feet.”
“Good night,” Mr. Roberts said into his pillow.
“And the way you talked to Mr. Desmond,” Mrs. Roberts went on inflexibly, “right there where everyone could hear.” She raised her voice to a high mimicry. “‘Desmond, I’m so sorry about your little girl getting kidnapped.’”
Indignant, Mr. Roberts rolled over on his back. “What I said—” he began in a voice of cold logic.
“I could have died,” Mrs. Roberts said. “And his little girl lying there dead.”
“Oh, God,” Mr. Roberts said. He rolled over onto his stomach again.
“I was so ashamed,” Mrs. Roberts continued, her voice dropping almost an octave. “Seems like I always have to be ashamed, when everyone else is out there helping and my husband has to be lying there dead drunk, the only one on the block who had to go to a nice party and get dead—”
“Good night,” Mr. Roberts said again.
br /> “And dancing with Virginia Donald like a college boy,” Mrs. Roberts said. “And the children right there all the time.” Sitting up in bed in the darkness she began to cry.
• • •
“So.” Frederica leaned back and regarded her sister across the round table. Beverley was listening open-mouthed, her hands on the table and her eyes wide. “You see?” Frederica said. “All that I told you is true, every word. You see what happens to bad girls that run away all the time?”
“Tell it again,” Beverley begged, scarcely breathing with excitement, “Frederica, tell it again.”
• • •
The new road was finished on schedule, the following spring, and the first person across it was Hallie Martin. No one ever heard from the Donalds again after they moved out to Idaho where her family lived, but Miss Fielding died very suddenly about a year later and the Merriams went to the funeral, which was badly attended. Mr. Perlman eventually bought the house he lived in on Pepper Street, and put in some improvements, particularly an addition to the garage for the car he gave Marilyn on her eighteenth birthday. The Terrels moved out very suddenly one day and left no forwarding address; no one saw them go.
The Ransom-Jones’s cat, Angel, died, and was buried in the garden alongside her three predecessors. After debating for some time, the Ransom-Joneses took another cat, a brown Siamese. The Byrne family finally moved to a home in a fashionable part of San Francisco because Mr. Byrne disliked commuting by train. The Robertses had a third child, another boy, named Francis.
Although the pavement in the new street was fresher and shinier than the pavement on the old Pepper Street block, it was always less satisfactory for roller-skating, being made of some material slightly more slippery. A wide break appeared in the sidewalk the first winter, near the spot where Jamie Roberts had left the print of his hand in the fresh cement.
Mrs. Mack’s house remained, a pastoral eyesore, while the neighborhood changed around it. The new boy who moved into the Donald house once ventured in through the apple trees to see the old lady, and she drove him out with a stick.
Harriet Merriam kept house for her father after her mother’s death; she never married. The Desmond house was vacant for nearly a year before it was bought by some people from Oklahoma.
The old lady who had owned the wall and the property it enclosed passed away very quietly one night in her sleep. No one was at her bedside when she died.
Shirley Jackson, The Road Through the Wall
(Series: # )
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