Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (37 page)

She shifts her position, crossing her ankles and crossing her wrists. “For what?” She has a hundred answers to that question; Ian offers none. He raps at the door with his knuckles, so hard the mirror on the inside shakes; she sees herself framed in it, shaking. “Why are you sorry?” she asks him again, but Ian beats a jaunty closing tattoo on the door-frame, says, “Sleep well, anyhow,” and leaves.

Hattie arranges herself on the bed. She folds her brown wrap precisely and wonders how she otherwise might pass the time—how to beguile the hours, days, and weeks till her heart cracks. There are books to read and serving silver to polish, and Betsy Ferguson’s niece will not stop having babies, so there’s receiving blankets to make up. She sits alone with her mirrored second self for company, and talking to keep up her courage. “
I’m
not the one who’s pregnant,” Hattie says. “
I
haven’t brought dishonor on the house.”

Her digestion has been troublesome. There’s only so much wormwood you can swallow before your stomach hurts. It’s like a hardened artery or a sclerotic vein—although she has neither, thank goodness. But the bitterness and gall accumulate; they pinch in your lower intestine; they lie there like a self-accreting ball of bile. She wishes she could hawk it up and spit it at Maggie just once. But she is a mannerly person and therefore must swallow her knowledge and answers; she has to bite her tongue. She has done so before every meal. She speaks with honeyed sweetness, saying please and thank you and might I have another maraschino cherry, if you please.

Maggie has been companionable with her in the months since Judah’s death; Harriet acknowledges that. They’d shored each other up in isolation like a doorway frame you find somewhere standing in the woods, with everything around it burned or rotten and torn down. They’d formed a kind of arch, she thinks, standing upright and separate and at a certain point starting to lean. They leaned together, falling, and were each other’s support. Then you looked inside and saw the forest, looked outside and saw the forest, looked below you and saw only the lintel, then weeds.

Still, some magic is at work; it’s a wonder she’s having a child. Stranger things have happened, but none so strange since Hattie could remember hearing, or ever in the Big House. There’s bravery in it, she has to admit. There’s bravery and recklessness mixed in so close together it’s not like the sides of a doorframe, but more like cream and milk. And now she knows the ghost she fears is just the vanquished past and Maggie’s way of saying what’s important is anticipation, not remembrance, is every tomorrow to come. Hattie can admire this, but cannot accept it as true. She has to give credit where credit is due, and her sister-in-law can take credit for this: nothing in eighty-two previous years had made Hattie take to her bed. Her parents and brother and nephew have died; she never had married, and has outlasted all her suitors anyhow; the most part of her friends are dead, or in hospitals and on the way. But nothing—not two wars and one Great Depression and Lord knows how many setbacks, recessions, the flu—you could knock her down with a feather, Hattie thinks, you could blow her over and just leave her, she’s never in all her born days . . .

She wears cleanly night things, since they should not be embarrassed when they come to lay her out. It is a tester bed, handed down from her grandmother’s aunt. Her eyes are bothersome. If her eyes had been better, she thinks, she would have spotted this coming, could have seen it a mile down the road. She still could sue. She is not litigious—not like Judah anyhow, who’d jump into a lawsuit like a boy into a swimming hole, feet first and whistling, shutting his eyes, delighting in the thump and splash and wetting everyone who watched. Then he’d come up grinning, dripping, saying what the hey, that worked or didn’t work and let’s just try again.

Yet Samson Finney himself, she knows, would counsel against such a suit. It would cost the family whichever way, and the only ones to benefit would be the newspaper people. You wouldn’t want a fuss like that, not in this town at this time. She supposes the lawyer is Judah’s watchdog still; Miles Fisk would take an item like that and run a two-column lead.

So Hattie determines to go. She folds her hands, interlacing her fingers on the lace bodice that’s laundered and pressed. Jacob’s ladder ascended to clouds. In the picture book she’d used, and then the one she gave to Ian, heavenly ladders got lost at the top of the page in a sunburst that could dazzle you—so bright the rungs seemed silver. She will forgive them their trespasses, though Lord knows they’ve trespassed enough. She wishes them joy in the house.

“Hattie.”

This is the next visitation—foreseen.

“Hattie. Are you asleep?”

She presses her lips shut.

“Can you hear me?”

She twiddles her thumbs.

“She’s sleeping,” Maggie says. So Hattie knows there’s two of them outside, not only her sister-in-law. She reverses the direction of her thumbs, twiddling toward her own neck.

“Hattie?”

She holds her breath.

“I meant no harm,” says Maggie to the door. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I do apologize.”

She stops her thumbs’ rotation.

“I should have told you earlier. You had a right to know.”

The walls require paint; their rose tint has faded to pink.

“I just wasn’t certain, is all. It might have been Judah’s, I thought.”

There are cracks in the plaster besides; she’s watched the house disintegrate. The shape on the ceiling above her is like a spring-tooth harrow, and she imagines it dragged the whole length of the room. It’s as if the plaster were an ice-smooth field to plow.

“I could use your help,” Maggie says.

She has trouble restraining herself; she presses her palms to her ears. If she wanted, she could tell them both a thing or two.

“We all could.”

She hears Ian withdraw; his steps have Judah’s pace to them, although not the weight. Hattie cups her palms harder; she wishes that she had her conch shell handy, where you listen to the sea. If she started to talk she would burn off their ears.

“Well,” Maggie says.

She lies back and listens. Her pillow is horsehair, flat.

“Good night then.”

The mattress too is horsehair, and long-lasting, though it ought to be repacked. She imagines the horses that shed her mattress to be a matched, picked team. The stable hands would curry them for profit, selling off their coat.

“Sweet dreams,” Maggie offers. “I’m grateful for your attention.”

They would bear her away in the coach. She tries not to laugh out loud.

“It’s been such a pleasant chat.”

They would carry her out of this dark place, through the gates. Maggie and Ian could taunt her forever, but she would be upright in the carriage, trotting smartly, not able to hear.

“I know you’re in there listening,” she finishes, “so hear me out and then I’ll go. I’m in pain tonight and wish you’d be willing to help me.”

It is as if the oak has no protective density, no deadening resistance to her voice; it is as if the keyhole where she whispers is a trumpet. “Good night,” Maggie says. “Wish me luck.”

Now she arises like smoke. Hattie has no fear of cold or heights or what the neighbors would say if they chanced to see her on the ladder, no fear of falling when she swings out over the ledge. She has decided to escape and is not indecisive and has no regrets. They conspire in the corners, thinking that they’ve locked her in, but she has a trick or two left. She finds herself giggling, delighted, as she lets herself down rung by rung. She sneezes twice, and sways. The ladder takes her weight as if she were a schoolgirl or lover eloping; it lets her down springily, resilient, and she noses past the dark bay window of the dining room.

The house is warm. The clapboard’s slats retain, it seems, the sun’s heat from that afternoon, and the ivy rustles so as to cover her clinking descent. Her hands are cold, however, and she does fear cramp; she counts five rungs, then rests. For an instant, dangling there, halfway from the window, she yearns to climb back up and clamber into bed. But she does not have the strength to rise; she tries one rung, and it’s all she can manage to lift her first foot. There are lights above her, but the downstairs floor is dark.

“Hot night,” says Judah.

“Yes.”

“We’re not supposed to feel it, but we do. Sometimes I sweat like a horse. The weather’s changing hereabouts.”

“State your purpose.” Hattie confronts him. “Tell me what you’re after and I’ll let you know what’s what.”

“Still the same old girl,” he chuckles. “No monkey business.”

“That’s right.”

“In some things anyhow.”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s going on in this house?” Judah asks. “What’s happening beneath my roof?”

Those had been his final words—the last time that she spoke to him before he fell asleep, or seemed to, and Maggie took over the watch. He had been suspicious, but she, Hattie, was without suspicion and tiptoed out, never dreaming he would die that day or have nothing else to say, with unanswered questions.

She continues her descent. She cannot see. She drops her shawl. Her left foot misses, and she flails out for a further rung but misses, toes the ground. She stands in the shadow of the head-high yew trees, safe.

Next Hattie gathers up her nightgown like an evening dress. She holds the pleats so that they will not rustle, and she steps forward alone. Seth is a bat; Judah a fading, fire-rimmed presence; and her tester bed is not a carriage but a sleigh. She summons all her hardiness and plunges through the stream with Jamie Pearson once again (his red hair flaming in front of her; his drunken cackle making mock of her bared breasts) and shivers while Widower Powers warms his ring-bespangled hands in front of the coal grate.

Hattie advances. She follows the flagstone path. The moon has sunk behind the house, and it takes her several steps to come out from its shadow. She skirts the Toy House, then the sugarhouse and carriage barn and, keeping those buildings at her back, sets out for the pump house and pond. She raises her left hand as if there were partners and does a box-step fox-trot. She hums to keep up her courage, and does not retreat.

And all her great-hearted elders—Tommy Sherbrooke lost at sea; Peacock fording the isthmus, though in the death grip of pneumonia, to return to his imagined mansion made actual for his children, and his children’s children till time out of mind; her mother in a wheelchair and father asking permission to light a cigar—ride on every side of her, escorting. They are without fear. There is an inland sea she’s heard of, coming around the mountain: it is where they’re going to, her father says. They have donned bathing gear and brought umbrellas and picnic hampers; they’ve all prepared for such immersion. There is balm and sense-soothing liniment about; there are birds in abundance.

“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” cries Judah, and she wants to warn him that his wife has been unfaithful, that she’s spawning Sherbrookes who have no true Sherbrooke blood. But he is happy, oblivious; he does his flutter kick. He splashes and whoops and, in the water, stands on his head. The horses graze contentedly; there’s been no damage, Judah says, emerging again to dry off. He shakes the water off him like a dog. The horses shift and stamp. He blows and sputters and wheezes hugely, saying, “Do you hear me? There’s no damage, sister. Nothing. None.”

Therefore, at the pond’s near edge, she does not slow her pace. She rucks up her gown a tuck higher and tiptoes through the cattails. The marsh grass is springy; it gives. She is dancing splendidly; she whirls and twirls and floats. Wild ducks flee from her and fly off south; she hears their wings. And now the water welcomes her; it is a bevy of partners, and she embraces each in turn. They yield and sing and sink.

XVI

“When in the cool of the evening we walk by the arroyo here—for such they call the stream bed that is dust and gravel now which once must needs have been mighty indeed to hollow these hills—Willard discourses to me on the workings of the Covenants, and how the Doctrine pertains. Let me impress upon you, brother, that the only begotten Son of God in the flesh is nonetheless part of a purposed and principled unity, one in three. Scarce half a century ago, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was organized at Fayette, and see what progress we make: heathen by the hundreds flocking to our fold! As if the Melchizedek priesthood—which as you know was directly bestowed by these resurrected apostles, Peter, James, and John, upon the prophet Joseph Smith and also Oliver Cowdery—as if this priesthood, I say, and also the lower Aaronic orders, were herdsmen watching over the lambs and the large-bellied goats. We run around the pen. We follow the leader in circles, close to. But just about and outside of the gate, remaining there for our protection against the importunate scavenging Wolves, is the whole of which the Shepherd seems but part: godhead and good appetite, an ignorance dispersed.”

The dawn is late, with that irresolute lingering dark that means the end of October. Ian walks out by the barn, where Hal is stacking wood. He labors in the shadows—bent-backed, stooping, and chomping on his unlit pipe; Ian remembers, embarrassed, how yesterday he’d promised help but had forgotten.

“Changed your mind, did you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Had better things to do this morning?”

“Mm-mn.”

“Well.” Boudreau blows his nose. He checks the wind’s direction. “It’s not getting any warmer.”

They work together in silence, stacking and facing off cords. Hal has backed up a wagon, with split maple wood and ash. “You can tell me anytime, shut up. Just mind my own business,” he says. “But what’s it like, I wonder.”

“What?”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-six. Why?”

“No reason.” Boudreau studies the alignment of the wood, then says, “We’ll keep this section clear. Back the wagon on in later.”

“All right.”

“I just thought I’d ask you, is all.”

Ian knows there’s no use rushing: that impatience in him will slow Boudreau down. This is the spring’s dead wood, ready to burn. So he signifies his willingness to answer, saying nothing, sneezing in the barn’s thick outer air.

“Because maybe,” Boudreau says—he ties twine together, slides the barn door shut again, and drapes his loop on a nail—“maybe you been to the Alagash?”

“No.”

“God’s country, that is.”

Ian has chaff in his throat. He hawks and spits.

“You know what my boy told me? He learned this in biology, he says; you know how your body cells die. Well, every seven years exactly every one of them is changed; you’re not the same person you was. There’s not a single cell alive in you that was living here seven years back.” Boudreau marvels at this; he thumps his chest. “This heart of mine even; it’s been eight different hearts. You figure fifty-six is eight times seven, right? You figure every time you change it takes you seven years; you’ve got to figure I been eight different people, seems like. Seven, anyways.”

There are pigeons in the barn. They settle on the flashing, unalarmed.

“You’re an educated person,” says Boudreau. “I want your opinion on that.” He holds his right hand up and ticks the fingers off, working backward to the thumb. He folds each finger down in the service of arithmetic, intent. “So what I want to know is, are you figuring to stay?”

“How long? For seven years?”

Boudreau nods. He studies Ian closely now, eyes large in the dim light. “And what sort of partner do you think you’re like to be?”

“Partner?”

Hal nods again. He plays with the brim of his cap. “I figure I got the know-how and you got the money and land.”

“For what?” Ian asks. He can hear the pigeons flutter and ruffle, settling.

“For anything you’ve got a mind to,” Boudreau says. He looks like a cardplayer now—cagey, holding his cap to his chest.

“Development?”

“Maybe.”

“A shopping center?”

“Why not?”

“A bowling alley,” Ian says. “I’ve always been partial to them. We could use the bottom land.”

“If you’ve got a mind to . . .”

“Parking lots,” he continues. “We’re in need of parking lots around here.”

Boudreau seems less certain now.

“Shit,” Ian says. “Stock racing. That’s what we could do with it. Build us a track!”

“If you want to . . .”

“The answer is no.”

Maggie runs to meet him. Her strides are panic-lengthened, and she wheels her arms. She appears to find no rhythm, swerving, jostled, jerked along and not quite falling; she has not run in months.

“Where’s Hattie?” she cries out to Ian. “Where’ve you been?”

He sees her terror, takes her arm.

“Where
is
she?”

“Wait,” he says. “First catch your breath.”

She stands beside him, panting, flushed, sweat starting on her face; she leans on him and shuts her eyes. “I’m certain she’s gone. I was so sure you had left me.”

“No.”

“But
she
has. There’s no answer there, no matter what I say to her. It’s not the same sort of silence, Ian, not like last night when we knew she was listening.”

“Let’s look at her window,” he says.

Maggie is calmer now; her breathing subsides. But as they walk around the house, Ian supporting her, she says, “There’s no one alive in that room. I tell you I can feel it; she’s gone. She’s killed herself.”

“Take it easy. We don’t . . .” They round the corner and see the fire ladder and the open window and her shawl on the yew bush beneath. Maggie stops. She starts to laugh. Her laugh is high-pitched and irregular, on hysteria’s edge. “I told you so,” she says.

The ladder hugs the clapboard as if pasted on. There is no wind.

“Well, anyhow, it’s one way in.”

“It’s one way
out
, you mean.”

“No,” Ian says. “I mean I’ll climb on up and take a look. It’s easier than knocking the door down. You meet me back inside.”

“I’m staying here.”

“Please. You were racing up that path to meet me; you’re shivering now. I’ll climb up and unlock the door. That way . . .”

But Maggie takes the brown shawl from the branch it dangles on, and swaddles herself and says, “No.” He cannot argue with her; he has come to share her dread. So for something to do he tests the ladder, puts his weight on it and pulls. It holds; it seems securely hooked across the sill. He starts to climb.

“It’s useless,” Maggie says. “She isn’t there, I know it. She’s gone—can’t you understand anything? Why can’t you understand that?”

Ian continues to climb. As he clears the yew bush it comes to him that his mother’s right, that he’s some playacting suitor making his way up to vacancy. The window gapes above him, open, and she would not leave the window open were she still inside. He thinks perhaps he’ll find her corpse, and that she’s let the cold air in so as not to stink. This is absurd, he tells himself; this is as silly as believing she eloped. But he cannot keep from shaking as he clears the final rung; the ladder clanks beneath him and he hears Maggie talking, but not what she says. He puts his head above the ledge and, eyes shut, tumbles in. The room is unlit, rectangular, cold; there is nothing in the room.

Maggie looks about her. Whenever she attempts to rest, the baby within her is restless; it’s used to motion, she assumes, and prefers being rocked when she walks. She holds her side and tries to keep the panic in, staring up at the ladder and wall. Her son has disappeared. There is some sort of order, apparently, in what she sees as order’s absence; it is like those number series she’d been tested on in grade school, to test her gift for patterning. It’s the sort of game that Judah liked, according with his sense of how things fit. The simplest questions showed a simple sequence; if the list ran two-four-six-eight, you could answer ten. If it ran four, fourteen, twenty-four, thirty-four, you could answer forty-four comes next. She says these numbers aloud.

Her child will deal with all of this. Her child will bring vivacity into the dead surrounding space—bringing frogs and teddy bears and friends, wearing so rapid a sequence of clothes that Maggie cannot quite determine if it is male or female, young or old. It wears pajamas, nightgowns, jump suits, snowsuits, pants, skirts, blouses, sweaters, and has an assortment of hats. It is an infant, little girl, stripling, youth and debutante at once. It cries, wails, drinks from her breast, then from a bottle of gin without interval and is married, then both a mother and father. Her child eats Easter bunnies’ ears, then jelly beans and pizza, then selects a lemon tart from the dessert cart at Périgord Park. She tries to watch such fantasy unreeling like a series of home movies with the focus not quite right. Whatever it is, it is soon.

For Jude the future’s guises had been threatful, indistinct. He saw plots behind each tax hike, and inroads every time they tarred a road. She has begun to understand how all his self-taught caginess about the law was meant to throw a smoke screen up—not against her own behavior but government authority—not to save the money but to thwart the I.R.S. Had he died intestate, Maggie as his lawful wife would anyhow have gotten what his maneuvering offered: the house and the land for life. And the trust funds were an ill-named joke: they signaled lack of trust.

Yet Finney, with his chitchat about provisos six and nine, was heralding the future’s toll and telling her to watch out. She has a vision, suddenly, of their impoverished children’s children squabbling over resale rights, and who would get to keep what piece of tract land after the developers were done. They would have to sell the place in order to pay inheritance taxes; they would divide and subdivide and end up with the Toy House only, staring through a picket fence at the mansion-turned-museum that had been their family home.

“How might we best live after those who go before? What remedy or comfort can we discover—with our great fathers dead, against this Present Age? It is my dream of waking that we follow their Example and survive. When Father died it was as if the ligh
t
of the world went out for me, and all delight was snuffed. Things used to seem so
organized
. . .”

Ian reappears. His head is framed by the window’s white frame. The wood requires painting. “I’m coming down,” he calls. “She’s not here.”

“I know that.”

“Yes.” In the silence she can hear doors opening and closing; Maggie knows it is too late to follow Hattie’s tracks. Her sister-in-law is light-footed, and she’d have gone off alone. Like those aged Eskimos that Judah said got up and left the fire’s circle, heading out to freeze, she must have headed for the hills, not town. It’s just exactly like her, Maggie thinks, her way of having the last bitter laugh.

Ian comes out from the house. “Should we call the police?” he asks. “When did you notice this? When do you think it happened; how long has she been gone?”

“Last night sometime. I thought maybe you’d run off together.”

“We do have to notify
someone
; we’ll need help.”

“I can’t have them ogling me, Ian. Not this morning, I can’t face them now.”

He studies her. She is floating, inward, arms on her stomach as if it were buoyant. It may be a fool’s errand but he’ll make it anyhow, and spend the day hunting his aunt. There are flashlights in the car. Maggie nods at him and, trailing the brown shawl, walks past. She enters the house like a hospital hall; irresolute, he follows.

“Well, go if you’re going,” she says. “I’ll wait.” So once again he gathers up equipment for the car—keys and blankets, a bottle of rye. He drives the land’s perimeter as he had done six months before, arriving. The stone walls of the property are bare. He has half expected, somehow, she’d be sitting by some gate. Or that he’d meet a car whose passenger seat she occupied, turning in the entry drive—sure she’d told them of her plan to spend a night after bridge with Doris, or that she’d gone to Arlington to visit Laura McKechnie who’d been begging her to come since Lord knows when. She’d feign innocence in any case, pretending not to know she’d been in any way missed or remiss; she’d scold him for his fretful search and say she knew the reason. “Just because
you
want to leave doesn’t mean I’m leaving, mister. Don’t call a kettle black until you’ve cleaned the pot.”

But the few cars he encounters do not slow down; the village beneath him is quiet. He drives through Main Street twice, in case, where the houses yield no secrets to him, and the bar would not contain her, and the post office and grocery are empty. Nor does he think it likely that Hattie—who called departure “trespassing”—would leave. Still, there is the ladder and the evidence of escape. So she’d let herself down and gone for a walk and not returned for twelve hours at least, he calculates how far she could get in that time.

She might have gone in circles. She would have stopped to rest. She might set out on what she took to be the path of least resistance, and find it was a marsh. There are paper streamers dangling from the trees, festooning them for Mischief Night; tomorrow will be Hallowe’en. There are exploded pumpkins on the southerly approach road, dropped from trucks. Ian parks and finds himself where first he’d parked, returning. He vaults the fence and is again at the shed field’s far edge. He stands beneath the oak, hears what he swears is the same hoot owl calling, and studies the Big House a half mile below. He paces the field’s width, then length, and, hunting his aunt’s traces, crosses the field and continues.