Sister Wolf (8 page)

“You are not logical, Colly. She is Marian de Neufville’s granddaughter.”

“That does not alter their plans for my house!” the Bishop shouted.

Luba pulled the crucifix out of his grasp. She saw that his knuckles had started to bleed.

“Lie back, Colly.” She took his hands. “Remember you are not helpless in this matter.”

The Bishop’s head sank deep into the goose-down pillows. His eyes were closed, but he was frowning like an angry vole. Luba massaged his hands and began to conspire out loud. As she spoke, the Bishop stopped frowning and opened his eyes. Then he asked to have his head propped up a little higher. Spite acted like iron in his blood. He took over the plot.

“So, now.” He was summing up. “We will have blind children, not beggars. You and Vlado and the appalling Enos will be trustees. What a howling joke on a philanthropist. Hugo loses to charity.”

Later that day the Bishop died, in much the same manner that he had lived. The World and the Faith stood flanking his bed, in the shape of a lawyer and a priest. In his right hand he held the crucifix, while Father Zachary read the office of extreme unction; with his left hand he initialed the clauses that changed his will.

On June 30th, unless it fell on a Sunday, the Meyerling Community held its Children’s Fair. The fair marked the end of the spring term, and commemorated Bishop Meyer-ling’s birthday. After the fair, the children were sent home to their families for two weeks. When they came back, Meyerling turned into a summer camp, which ran through Labor Day. The fair had opened at ten o’clock with a grand march. It was nearly noon.

Marit had been in the sanctuary all morning, walking the western edge of the enclosure, which bordered on Marco Jullian’s pasturelands. Through the fence she could see his herd of fawn-colored Jerseys, which did not sense that a lynx could also watch them grazing. Marit had spotted the lynx stretched out on a low-hanging branch. He opened one eye, as if to measure the space between them. He could have felled her in one bound, but he rubbed his chin on the bark and went back to sleep. He preferred to nap by day and hunt at night, and, in any case, girls and cows were much too large—a red lynx likes to crunch on smaller prey. For an instant, when she had locked eyes with the lynx, Marit wondered if she was wise to go unarmed, but she hated guns and she felt that the animals knew who had one. A gun on her person would lend an extra vigilance, which would make the animals restless and defensive. Wearing a weapon implied that the beasts were not friends but enemies. She wanted to be their equal and their kinsman, and a gun was the badge of a jailer or a tyrant.

Jullian’s pastures lay opposite—on a map of Marit’s land—to the Meyerling blind school. It was here, on her side of the fence, that Marit had last caught sight of the two black bears, standing waist-deep in the pond and fishing for trout. Marit was tracking the bears by their spoor in order to find out what territory they had established. If there were no good hibernating spots in the black bears’ territory, Herb Frechter, the local treeman, had promised to find some hollow tree trunks and deliver them to her. She had left a basket of currants by the edge of the pond, but the fruit was still uneaten. The bears had moved on. She could tell by the sun overhead that she had no time left today to go on searching.

With the sun climbing higher and higher, Marit dawdled back through the woods toward the sanctuary gate. She wanted to stay alone in her fenced-in wilderness, the only place in a peopled world where she was not afraid. The animals were equipped with killing claws and teeth; they could see at night and stalk her by her scent. They were larger or swifter than she was; a lynx could climb higher, and a bear could crush her with its weight. But four-footed creatures wanted nothing from her, except that she should not harm them. Her two-legged kind had hidden needs, which they expected her to understand.

Marit’s senses shut down outside this fence, and her reflexes played her false. Her instinct about any animal was sure and generous. She could tell the growl of pleasure from the growl of warning. She knew when a bite was playful, or a signal that her hands had touched a sore place under the fur. Several times she had felt the power that belongs to healers, and had seen a black ring or aura encircling the bodies of creatures who had shown no prior signs of illness. Her special sight had helped to halt the infection before it grew.

What power she had to help her animals came from love untrammeled by suspicion, the kind of love that does not seek its own advantage, or negotiate for favorable terms. With human beings her insight foundered in mistrust. When animals bared their fangs, they were enraged; in humans a show of teeth was called a smile. A freak of weather could make an animal erratic, or a tumor pressing in upon the brain; but human actions were always uncertain and perplexing, especially the actions of the people whom she wished to love. Marit had come to expect injustice and whim in all relations, and only Lola had ever loved her without reserve. She had learned early to be on guard against her mother, before she was old enough to go to school.

A baby brother, who was not named, had died at birth. Luba stayed in her room and did not call for Marit. She may have asked for Vlado, but Vlado had disappeared. Marit sat on the stairs where she could watch Luba’s bedroom door, and the train of maids and nurses moving in and out, bearing trays of food and other trays covered with cloths. The nurses never closed the door without shaking their heads, or lifting a finger to their lips to keep Marit from speaking. Sometimes they sent her away and she would visit the nursery, which had been painted light blue and refurnished for a new baby boy.

After several weeks Luba had come down to take her meals, but Marit was kept in the playroom until her mother had retired. Twice she tried to sneak into the dining room, but her governess caught her in time and dragged her upstairs. Marit had seen the shadows under Luba’s eyes and her pale, thin mouth, and she knew, without being told, that her mother was mourning.

Marit knew what dying meant, because her own star-nosed mole had just died, the mole who lived in a shoe box under her bed. Now the mole could not eat or move or play with a string. Its eyes were closed and its coat was matted and dull. Marit wished to share her sadness with her mother, but she was not allowed to talk to her or go near her. The best she could do, for their mutual comfort, was to put the mole in one of her socks with its head sticking out, and carry it into the nursery. She lay the creature in her brother’s cradle and pulled the embroidered sheet up to its head. She never heard Luba enter, nor could she remember whether Luba had hit her first and thrown the mole out of the window afterward, or the other way around. She did remember lying on the nursery rug until it was dark, with one hand cupping her swollen cheek, and her knees drawn under her chin. Her tears washed the blood off the corners of her mouth, ran down her neck, and stained her white collar brown. When her governess saw the collar, she was very angry.

Marit stood at the edge of the woods where the land had been cleared. She could see the gate in the distance across the field. The sun was hot and the ground was stubbly with new growth. She stopped to tie her shoes and roll up her sleeves. On her way to the gate she stopped for one thing and another: to uproot a sapling that had grown too high; to pick some chicory that would not reach the house alive; to build a pile of rocks next to a patch of poison ivy, so that she could find it when she came back later to burn it out. The Children’s Fair had started by now; still she dragged her feet. Gabriel would be at the fair, and she did not know how he would treat her.

Gabriel had come to her house twice in the last six days, with the lapse of a day between each visit. The first time he came around nine at night, without calling beforehand. He did not use the bell or the door knocker, either; he tapped on a windowpane. He asked if she had found his Swiss Army knife, and stayed quite briefly. One of his pupils had frequent nightmares, and he did not like to be out too long. He inquired about her wolves politely, as if they were parents or relatives. There was some conversation about raising animals, and whether it was easier or harder than teaching children, but Marit was so bewildered that her answers were curt. He had discovered that she was a Meyerling trustee, and asked her if the board would consider endowing a fund for blind black children. While he held forth on the democracy of blindness, she watched his strong, square hands and well-shaped forearms. His dark hair had auburn lights and his nose was curved like a hawk’s. When he left, after a cordial handshake, she was numb with shame. He was a grown-up man, with a storehouse of ideals and goals, while she had showed herself for a rampant, lustful primitive, sitting mute, with parted lips, eyeing the shape of his penis in his trousers, transmitting greedy thought-waves which had offended him and driven him away.

The second time he did not call, ring, knock, or tap. He threw a shower of gravel at the window, a noise which startled her, then roused her anger. When she opened the door, she did not take stock of his perfect teeth or his cleft chin; she noticed that he was shorter than she was by at least three inches. She blocked the doorway, waiting for him to speak, but she had not counted on this new, commanding Gabriel, who took hold of her and kissed her deeply, bending her backward to correct the difference in their heights, holding her with one arm and closing the door with the other hand. As he guided her across the floor toward the velvet sofa, his mouth never left her mouth, except to murmur that he should not be there, that he thought he loved her. Marit yielded to his heat and haste and closed her eyes. For once she had nothing to do; he did all the work. He had the silken touch of a craftsman; in his hands zippers slid open, elastic did not snap, and buttons melted out of their holes. Marit was opening and melting, too; there was a buzzing sound in her head, the sound the television makes when a station goes off the air. Once in a while her mind formed a thought, in spite of itself, like the awareness that her navel was as sensitive as her breasts. She felt her shirt slipping off her shoulders, and waited for Gabriel to take her arms out of the sleeves.

Instead the scene began playing backward, as if someone had flipped the reverse switch on a projector: her shirt was pulled up, and her trousers, which had been piled on the floor around her feet, were drawn back over her legs and belted at the waist. Her heart fluttered in alarm. What had she done to make him change his mind? Her underwear was plain and mended, but she kept herself clean. Or perhaps she had been too passive; she had heard that some men want a woman to move like a mink. Gabriel’s hands were still working, smoothing, buttoning, and tucking, making her shipshape before he lifted her to her feet. She did not open her eyes until his arms released her, in time to see him turn and run out the front door.

Marit made her way up the meadow toward the house, walking as if she were wearing lead shoes. Any moment Lola would arrive to take her to the fair, and start to scold her for being late and dirty. Her mind was simmering like a witch’s kettle, full of eyeless dreads. She did not want to deal with Gabriel in the light of day; she did not even know which Gabriel would confront her, the skittish one or the suave one. He had been tossing her in a blanket, and she was not sure if she had landed on her feet or on her head. She was too proud to hover around him, and too muddled to ask herself why she should be frightened of a man whom she had known for less than a week. She felt like a convalescent, and the sight of him might hasten her cure or bring on a relapse. When she got to the fair, she would stake him out and keep her distance.

She could not keep her distance from the blind children, however, as much as she might want to. They knew their way through the terraces and the lemon arbors. They strayed in groups on the reachless lawns below, like the sheep that the Bishop had kept to mow the grass. Marit thought of deer when she thought of the Meyerling children, the fallow deer in the Dangerfield Zoo. The herd of five had been beaten with chains by an unknown vandal. Marit had driven to the zoo the day the newspaper story had appeared. Only two deer were left. Three were critically wounded in the sick bay. They were like fairy deer, quite defenseless in their pen, which had low sides and gave them no protection from their attacker. Perhaps their small size and helplessness had provoked his cruelty. They had fleet legs and light frames for outrunning predators, but they had nowhere to run in that tight, low pen. She had sat for hours on a bench across from their pen: their frailty made her feel tentative; they would have to be handled gently, for fear of bruising them. A person unbalanced or mad, watching them as she did, might experience that tentativeness as an itch crawling on his skin. His confusion might become frustration and turn into rage.

The fallow deer were like the blind. But the pity the blind inspired in Marit made her hesitant and clumsy, so that she mistimed her instructions when she was guiding them. She would tell them to step up on the curb just too soon or too late. They would miss their footing, and turn on her when they stumbled.

Marit pitied blind people, but she was also frightened of them. The deaf became fierce; they resisted their handicap. The blind had no choice but to surrender to their condition; they had to learn to live by a new set of rules entirely. Their submissiveness lent them an aspect of humility that she did not trust. The blind were set apart, like saints, but their saintliness was an accident, not a choice. Marit suspected that the blind had invented a secret code and language, that they met by themselves and laid plans for the undoing of the sighted world. She did not know where their meeting places might be, but she felt that if there were such places they should be found and rooted out with the same purpose that inspires those horticultural zealots who pour kerosene down into mole holes. If the blind were to gather in large numbers, their hidden rage would become their collective resource. Because they could not see, they had an edge on clairvoyance and telepathy. They would gather, focus their rage, and beam out its killing rays.