Love Sleep

  “Now gwan!”

  Mousie bent to the dirt and made as if to pick up a stone: just the gesture Sam had taught the children to use in scaring off strange dogs. It worked as well, too: the girl turned on her heel, and deliberately but without haste walked away. Maybe, like the dogs, she was used to having stones thrown at her.

  Mousie looked around herself then, and saw that she was being stared at in wonder by the three children. “Oughten never to have come so far,” she said. “Wild child.” And nothing more.

  Through that day, Pierce or Hildy glimpsed the girl, far off, who had not really left after all. Once they saw her through the tangle of trees along the road at the bottom of the hill; she seemed to be looking for thrown-away bottles along the shoulder, as the Oliphants did too sometimes, to return for the deposit. Then later on Bird saw her away up the hill beyond the chicken house, eating something, maybe a candy bar bought with the bottle money.

  Without agreeing among themselves to do so, they said nothing to Mousie about what they’d seen.

  At bedtime Pierce in his pajamas went into the bathroom, to open the faucets a little as Sam had told them to do if it might freeze. The trick was to get them to run in a standing stream as thin as possible, a thread of water, which would not break up into sleep-destroying ticktock drops. He was making the necessary fine adjustments when his eye, then his mind, caught a face in the bathroom window: half a face, from the nose up. When he had yelped in surprise and truly looked, the face was gone.

  He knew who it had been.

  “What should we do?” he asked the girls.

  “What if she freezes?” Hildy asked. They were sitting on Bird’s bed, talking for some reason in whispers.

  “Mousie won’t let her in,” Bird said.

  “Maybe if we asked.”

  “No,” said Hildy.

  They looked up then, as one, because the girl they talked about was at the bedroom window, looking in.

  Hildy went to the window and called softly through the glass: “Go down to the back door.” She pointed several times toward the far end of the bungalow. Then, with Pierce and Bird following, she went down the hall and through the dark school-room to the sun-porch door and opened it.

  The girl was larger in the house than she had seemed to them outside; as soon as she had come in, they knew they had done something extraordinary in bringing her in, something anarchic almost, as though they had brought in one of the half-wild bristle-back dogs that lived around the holler, to have for a pet. They stood for a long moment just looking, inhaling the odor of her cold wool and her person. Then Bird remembered her manners, and asked the proper first question of a kids’ colloquy.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Bobby.”

  Hildy in her nightgown had begun to shiver, and Bobby did too, as though she could release herself enough now in the warmth of the bungalow to allow tremors to wrack her thinness; her knees vibrated and her chin began to tremble. “Come on,” Hildy said, and they guided the girl, with small touches as though she were blind, back through the schoolroom and the hall into Pierce’s room where the heater was.

  “Is this y’all’s house?”

  “This is our part.”

  “What’s that Mousie’s livn in?”

  “That’s the rest of it.”

  She had ceased shivering, and looked warily around herself, arms hugged tightly and protectively across her middle. “Huh,” she said.

  “We must have the same name,” Bird said. “Roberta. My name’s Roberta, they just call me Bird.”

  “Nope. Jes Bobby.”

  This was nearly as bad as Mousie. “Well you can’t just be baptized Bobby,” Bird said mildly. “It’s not a real name.”

  “Ain’t baptized,” said Bobby. “What’s his name?”

  “Pierce,” said Bird.

  She smiled at him. “That’s a nice name,” she said. “Sounds like Pee-ears.”

  Pierce blushed hotly, and Bobby watched him do so with interest. “Do you want to see Mrs. Calton?” Hildy asked.

  Bobby shook her head.

  “Is she your relative?”

  “Nope. She’s jes kin.”

  “Why did she make you go away?”

  Bobby shrugged, a quick lift of one shoulder. “ ’Cause she’s a pismire.”

  “Why don’t you want to go home?”

  “Got no home.”

  “Mousie—Mrs. Calton—told you to go home to your daddy.”

  “Ain’t my daddy.”

  “Why did she say that?”

  “Ain’t my daddy. He’s my grandpap.”

  “Oh.”

  “He adopted me. So he says now he’s my daddy, and I’m spose to call him daddy, but I don’t.”

  She pushed the dark ringlets of untended hair from her face and folded her small plump hands in her lap, unconscious that she had said something so odd that the others didn’t even know what question to ask next.

  “She’ll let you stay here,” Pierce said, magnanimous. “We’ll tell her to.”

  “No!” said Bird.

  “She has to!” Pierce said. “She works for us, doesn’t she?”

  No one could dispute that, but no one really knew how to act on it either. Bobby gave them no help, neither asking to stay nor making any motion to go. She only sat by the heater, gradually ceasing to shiver, looking from one to another of them as frankly as a cat.

  What they decided, then, by default, was that she would stay in the bungalow with them, and Mousie wouldn’t be told. She would sleep on the couch in the windowed sitting room. Pierce volunteered to go for food, which they decided (Bobby listening unoffended to them discussing her) she must need.

  “Milk,” Hildy said.

  “No milk,” Bobby said. “Milk’s like a pizen to me.”

  Pierce tied his bathrobe tightly around himself and found his slippers. Through the glass of the bungalow’s front door he could see that lights were still on in the big house.

  Pee-ears. A nun at Saint Simon Cyrenean had once told him that Pierce wasn’t a saint’s name, and that every Catholic child should have a saint’s name. Not long after he had come to Kentucky he told this fact solemnly at dinner, and Hildy said it was okay, he could pick a new name for Confirmation, and Sam said Sure and went to the shelf for his Book of Saints to look for a good one. The kids made some suggestions, the general favorites—Francis, Joseph, Anthony—but Sam scoffed, too tame. He leafed through the book. Waldo, how about Waldo. No? My god, look at some of these. St. Pancras, a great railroad station. St. Quodvultdeus, what on earth. Now they were all laughing. “Blessed Dodo,” cried Sam, tears of laughter in his eyes. “Locally famous for practicing astonishing austerities. Oh Lord.” And Pierce had laughed too.

  Night wind blew across the breezeway between the houses, cold and odorous.

  The first room of the big house he entered was the summer kitchen, winter mudroom, where an old refrigerator stood, and piles of boots. Then the kitchen. Beyond, the TV murmured, programs he had never seen. If he was caught he would Come To, act astonished, and claim to have been sleepwalking. He opened the refrigerator, got out the box of Velveeta and some of the Kleenex bread kept there, a carrot and a Nehi orange soda. And got back across the breezeway undetected.

  Bobby had taken off her coat but hadn’t moved from her place by the heater. Her dress was thin figured cotton, a summer dress; the sweater she wore over it was gray and far too small. “But why did he adopt you?” Hildy was asking. “Are your parents dead?” The books she read were full of girls whose mothers were dead, who had been adopted by kindly aunts or rich uncles.

  Bobby looked shocked. “No! They’re in Deetroit.”

  “Then why are you adopted?”

  “I was base-born,” Bobby said. “My daddy wronged my ma, in Deetroit. Then she come back and we lived in Clay County where I growed up, and my grandpap adopted me, ’cause of gettn benefitted. Now my ma’s went back to Deetroit to look for my daddy and my grandpap says
he’s my daddy now but he ain’t.”

  Pierce and his cousins had listened intently, but for all they understood it might as well have been glossolalia.

  “Anyways I ain’t gone live with him. Gone find my ma.”

  They had no knife to cut the cheese, so they used a thin wire coat hanger. Bobby ate slice after slice with bread, watching the orange block even as she ate, as though it might disappear before she’d had her fill. The soda they opened on the opener that was screwed into the bathroom doorjamb, as in a motel, but why. They shut the lights off in Hildy and Bird’s room and talked in whispers though Mousie was far away: the consequences of Mousie finding Bobby among them eating cheese were incalculable. Then they took an extra blanket from the closet in the hall (Indian stripes, diamonds and triangles) and Hildy’s long dress coat too.

  They guided Bobby back to the cheerless sitting room, Hildy with blanket and coat. The heater seemed far away. But Hildy insisted (sticking to the convention by which these things happened in books, orphans taken in and put to bed on sofas), and so Bobby lay down on the couch in her clothes, hands crossed over her breast like a corpse, and they put the bed-clothes on her.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “You okay?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Okay.”

  Later though, long after they were asleep in their own beds, she got up, and passing through Pierce’s room and maybe through his dream as well, she went into the front room, slipped off her shoes but not the summer dress and baby’s sweater, crawled into Bird’s bed without waking her, and slept there till morning almost without moving.

  SEVEN

  Pierce awoke with the conviction that something altogether new, something both dangerous and valuable, lay in the bungalow with them, but couldn’t at first remember what it was. When he did remember he also remembered that Winnie no Mousie would in a moment come in to see if they were up, and call them to breakfast, and that not long after that Sister Mary Philomel would be arriving, who could not, must not see Bobby.

  “Pierce! She’s in here!”

  He got out of bed, too late, the front door had opened and Mousie was talking. Come on now git y’all’s grits. Fore they’s cold. And the door closed as she left.

  He looked into Bird and Hildy’s room just as Bobby uncovered herself, having made herself small amid an artful tumble of bedclothes on Bird’s bed. She climbed out, refreshed, unapologetic, pulling at her tangled locks with both hands: their charge now, and satisfied to be so it seemed, though still wary in the depths of her closed face.

  While they dressed and washed, they tried to lay plans, but Pierce’s were so outrageous—involving disguises, illusions, huge lies rapidly changed—that Hildy said she wouldn’t be part of it, and Bobby got nervous and cried out over their altercation Y’all don’t tell don’t tell don’t TELL, which they had no intention of doing: she was amid expert secret-keepers, and safe.

  At breakfast they filled their pockets with bread and fruit as Hildy told them to do, which Mousie did notice but didn’t ponder; there was no time for Bobby to eat it, though, for Sister was on her way.

  “Whose sister?”

  “Sister. From the hospital.”

  “But whose?”

  They got her into her coat and filled her pockets from theirs, and Pierce tugged her by the hand out through the schoolroom and out the back door. Just in time, for as they crept along the far side of the bungalow ducking under the windows (Gene and Smiley did it that away, duck beneath the windows, peek up to see the badguys unaware within), they heard Sister Mary Philomel arriving, and Mousie delivering Warren to be schooled.

  A dash across the open space of the breezeway and around the backside of the house, Pierce afraid to let go of her hot hand for fear she’d bolt, and to the bulkhead doors leading to the cellar.

  “Ain’t gone go down there.”

  “It’s just for a second,” Pierce said. “We’ll go up inside.”

  She looked around her, up the hillside, cold smoke coming from her mouth. She had nowhere to go. She went down the bulkhead stairs into darkness with Pierce.

  Base-born, born in a basement? At St. Simon Cyrenean the toilets had been in the basement, and a request to go to the basement elicited giggles. Sister may I go to the Basement, thighs shut tight together.

  His daddy too had wronged his ma, somehow; Pierce didn’t know how or why, but somehow.

  The light switch was near the interior stairs, so they crossed the cellar in the dark, she willingly holding his hand now and silent. She froze when the automatic stoker spilled coal into the furnace—the automatic stoker which it was Joe Boyd’s job to fill daily with coal, he’d be coming down here any minute.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Somebody shoveled.”

  “No, it’s nothing. Come on.”

  They climbed the narrow stair pressed close together, Pierce half aware of Bobby’s strange strong odor, rough as her speech. What Axel called a hum. Pierce opened the door an inch.

  The house was silent. Mousie might have gone back to bed, or gone out, or into the bathroom with Baby Henry. Pierce pulled Bobby unwilling out the door and around to the stairs upward. Once in the house, though, Bobby wanted to linger and see things, and Pierce had to whisper urgently to her; even more than in the bungalow, Bobby seemed uncontrollable, a source of catastrophe here, in Sam’s house. Sam, though, was gone.

  Gone.

  He pushed her up the stairs, his ears huge to hear Mousie with Henry. Nothing. He urged Bobby over against the hallway wall, showing her where to step along the outermost floorboards that didn’t creak.

  “Go on. Go on.”

  At length she pushed back, having had enough, and turned to look at him in defiant contempt, arms akimbo. Pierce made urgent hand signals: that door, that one. Bobby walked to it with deliberate steps, on her own, a guest here.

  Sam’s bedroom was more silent than the silent house. Pierce’s heart beat hard, conscious of the outrage he was committing. “Stay here,” he said to Bobby, who was looking around the room from the threshold, her eyes alone moving, almost unwilling to step up on the carpet. “Just stay here.” He pointed to the little clock on the bedside table, next to the phone that now and then woke Sam in the middle of the night. “When it says twelve, I’ll come back. Twelve.”

  For a long time after he closed the door on her (she watched the knob turned carefully so as to make no noise) she only stood hugging herself; but she grew braver. She took wadded bread from her pocket and ate it as she looked over Sam’s furnishings. There were two beds, or really one bed split into two, joined behind by shelves of gray grained wood, she ran her hand over its glassy unwoodlike surface. She looked into the broad mirror over a dresser made of the same wood, burned by a cigarette here, a little wound that would never heal: she put her finger into it.

  When she had lost her fear of the room she dared open the door and peek out. She heard voices, Mousie’s and a male voice she didn’t know (it was Joe Boyd), and closed the door again. She tried a chair—it had a wooden coat hanger affixed to the top of it, with a coat draped over it, and big shoes on a rack below: a chair wearing clothes. She went to the bed and lay down on one side of it, listening to the hum of the clock (which she couldn’t read) and smelling the familiar male smell of the pillow, like her grandpap’s. When she got up, she noted that an impression of herself remained on the bed and the pillow.

  She opened Sam’s drawers, and marveled at the black eggs of his rolled socks; she looked at huge glossy issues of Esquire magazine that Sam prudishly stashed there, at pictures of cars and bottles of amber whiskey and elongated women the color of biscuits. She found the furry humpbacked box that held Opal’s wedding and engagement rings: she opened it, and watched the tiny stone color the light that entered it, her thighs tight together and her hand pressed between her legs.

  She had seen the commode in the little house where the children lived and thought there might be another
one in here too, but where. She bent to look under the bed for the pot, one side, the other side, wetting her pants. No pot. At length she lifted a ginger jar off the headboard of the bed, and used that as well as she could, watering the flocked rug too. She rolled up her damp pants and tossed them deep under the bed where no one could ever find them; she capped the jar and put it back. Later she could ask where to empty it.

  She forgot it, though, when she saw the knob of the door turn, and Pierce’s anxious white face looked in: and though Winnie eventually found the pants, still for a long time Sam would smell in his room the tang of stale urine, and not know why.

  “Come on,” Pierce whispered.

  “There’s a diamond ring there,” she said.

  “Come on.” He had sat all day in Sister Mary Philomel’s classroom burdened with his knowledge that she was in the house, knowledge that at once filled and shrank his heart; now when he opened the door and saw her, she seemed to be a different person than the one he had been thinking of, denser, more problematic, renewing his fear and wonder.

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  Could it really have been (Pierce wondered, having cause to ponder these things again) that they had kept Bobby to themselves for many days, a week at least, without Mousie knowing? Maybe there were enough children in the house that Mousie hadn’t detected an extra pair of feet clattering on the back stairs; maybe Sister Mary Philomel couldn’t distinguish a Cumberland whisper amid the urgent whispers in the garden plot below her schoolroom window (Bobby refusing to stay in the hideaway under the house they had found for her). Anyway no one caught her. She slept with Bird, and the one time her shape under the covers was discerned by Mousie, Hildy had been in the bathroom, and Mousie thought it was she in Bird’s bed.