The Rope Walk (11 page)

When Archie came back into the kitchen, his hand lingered on Alice's head. “That was Miss Fitzgerald,” he said.

“Oh, no.” Harry hunched over his coffee cup, a pantomime of misery.

Archie sat down at the table again and began gathering up the newspaper. He ignored Harry. “Your help has been requested,” he said. “All of you. I've said you'll be over after breakfast.”

James came into the kitchen, a towel around his neck, his hair wet. “Where are we going?”

Archie pushed his glasses onto his head. “I gather there's some furniture—” he began.

A chorus of groans came from the boys. Archie held up his hand. “And some weeding.”

James poured himself a cup of coffee from the stove. “At the Fitzgeralds’? When do we have to do this?
Now?”

Archie stood up. “Fortify yourselves appropriately,” he said. “But don't keep Miss Fitzgerald waiting.” He picked up the newspaper. “I'm going over to the hospital, and I trust you to behave like gentlemen. Mr. Fitzgerald would like some things rearranged in the house to accommodate his possessions. I don't suppose it will take you very long, big strapping boys like yourselves.” Then he looked down at Alice. “And you have been especially requested, Alice,” he said.

Alice looked up at him in surprise. What would Kenneth Fitzgerald want with her? And yet, as she looked up at Archie, she felt herself blushing.

“I gather that Mr. Fitzgerald requires your services in particular,” Archie said. He was looking at her oddly. Then he glanced over at Theo, waiting at the stove for his eggs. “And you, too,” he said.

Theo's jaw dropped.

“You're to choose something to read aloud to him,” Archie said, returning his attention to Alice. “It can be anything you like, apparently. His eyesight has deteriorated, and he …” Archie hesitated. “It will be a kindness, Alice.” He hesitated again, as if there was something else he wanted to say. But after a moment it seemed he had thought better of it, for he only took his glasses off his head and put them in his shirt pocket.

After Archie had left the room, Wally lit a cigarette.

Tad stood up, his plate in hand. “Someone said he's got AIDS,” he announced.

Wally looked up at him sharply. “Shut up, you asshole,” he said. “Can't you see there are children in the room?”

“Fuck you, Wally,” Tad said, surprised. But he looked embarrassed.

“I know what AIDS is,” Theo said.

“Yeah, me too,” Alice said, defensively.

Wally took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled. Then he smashed it out on his plate. He didn't look at Alice and Theo, but his words were clearly directed at them. “You can't get it from him. You can't get AIDS from him. You know that, right?” he said, finally looking up at Alice. “It's not contagious like that.”

She nodded.

“You can't get it just from reading to someone, or even from shaking their hand.”

“We can only get it if we shoot drugs with them or have sex,” Theo said.

James began to laugh.

Wally stood up. “I just didn't want there to be any confusion,” he said loudly over James's hooting, but only Eli and Alice and Theo were watching him. Tad had taken his plate to the sink and stalked out of the room. Harry was bent over the newspaper, ignoring them all. For a moment Wally stood beside the table.
Alice, stricken silent, was appalled at his expression, at the way his voice had shaken, with anger or with something else, she couldn't tell. “They just shouldn't be afraid of him,” he said finally, and he looked around the room at his brothers, and at Alice and Theo, as if in challenge. Finally he pushed back his chair violently and walked out.

James was still laughing as Wally left the room.

James decided that Alice and Theo could walk over to the Fitzgeralds’. “Don't dawdle,” he said to Alice. She gave him a resentful look. She was usually on time; it was the rest of them who were dawdlers, slowpokes who never seemed ready to go anywhere when the time came, causing Archie to stand outside by the idling car and bellow for them in impatience.

Upstairs, Theo had to look for his shoes. “Do you have a haversack?” he asked Alice. “We need a haversack.”

“What for?” Alice got down on her knees to retrieve one of his sneakers from under the bed.

“Provisions,” Theo said. “Maps.”

“We're only going to the Fitzgeralds’,” Alice said, handing him his shoe and looking around the room for the other one. For a boy with only one suitcase, he seemed to have brought a lot of possessions; clothes were strewn everywhere, all over the floor. She had peeked into his suitcase. There weren't many clothes in it, but he had brought a lot of Legos.

Theo looked at her pityingly. “Never go anywhere without a map, Alice,” he said. “You might get lost. Do you have a compass?”

They decided to bring the rest of the blueberry muffins from breakfast, a map of the state of Vermont, two screwdrivers from Theo's toolbox, a coil of rope from the barn, a box of matches,
and some Christmas tree ornament hooks Theo discovered while rifling through a drawer in the pantry.

Alice was uncertain about what books to bring. What did you bring to a man who had AIDS? She didn't know quite as much about AIDS as her comment at the breakfast table had suggested. She did not understand fully about the issue of sex that Theo had raised, though she did understand that one should not poke a needle that had been used by an infected drug user into one's arm, an admonition that seemed so far from Alice's frame of reference that she had not really even bothered to think about it. She knew that a lot of people were dying from AIDS, and she knew that many of them were black people in Africa, or people called “gays.” But she was not sure exactly what “gay” meant, though she knew it had something to do with sex—boys liking boys instead of girls—and she was not sure exactly what
that
entailed, either. Nicholas Papaver, who lived in Grange and was a few years older than her, a fawning, greasy-haired acolyte to Harry and Tad, who did not really like him, had once pulled down his pants behind the MacCauleys’ barn and invited her to look at his willy. Alice, who had seen a few of these before, living with five brothers, had stared at it dispassionately. But when it started to twitch like a rusty garden hose and then rise, her eyes had flown up, shocked, to meet Nicholas's gaze, and he had blushed bright red and turned away hurriedly to zip himself up. She knew that willies had something to do with sex, but not exactly what their role might be.

Regardless, it did not seem that someone like Kenneth Fitzgerald, AIDS or not, would appreciate the books most beloved by her—the Harry Potter books, C. S. Lewis's Narnia chronicles,
A Story Like the Wind
by Laurens van der Post, Kipling's
Just So Stories, The Once and Future King, The Wind in the Willows
—and she felt in any case that these stories, her pleasure
in them, was private. She did not want to read aloud from them to Kenneth Fitzgerald, even if he was sick and suffering and deserved her attention. He seemed, in a way, to know too much about her already, and these stories that she loved, she felt irrationally, would give him a strange access to her and her feelings. The way he had looked at her and spoken to her, the things he had seemed to know about her … he was not like other adults, and Alice was uncomfortably aware of being flattered by his attention, almost as much as she was disconcerted by it. Most grown-ups barely seemed to notice her.

Alice and Theo stood in front of the bookshelves in Archie's study. Finally, thinking of Archie, Alice took a volume of Shakespeare's sonnets, a collection of short stories by a writer named Chekhov that Archie always said were an inspiration to him, and, at Theo's urging, a book about Meriwether Lewis and his expedition with William Clark across the American territories. Theo had taken the book down from the shelf and opened it at random. “ ‘Every man on his Guard and ready for any thing,’ “ he read aloud. “I know about them. They walked across the whole country or something. This sounds good.”

They set out into the bright morning, following a track down from the MacCauleys’ driveway into the lower field. At the margins of the meadow, the white bark of the birch trees stood out against the shadowy darkness of the woods beyond. Both the MacCauleys’ property and the Fitzgeralds’ bordered the river, and Alice knew she and Theo would be able to walk the whole way through the woods near the water until they came to the falls, where they would have to climb up to the road.

The stretch of river below the falls and through the MacCauleys’ land was broad and shallow, easily flooded during storms and heavy snowfalls. Over time, the river had branched across the low ground into winding streams, bowered invitingly
by branches and full of musical tinkling, that looped through the woods, creating chains of tiny, private islands easily reached across the rocks. The boys had played their wildest games here, defending the islands from enemies, setting up camp, and building forts. Even though she was conscripted in these games for boring duties such as wood gathering or cooking, when she would be given a battered pot and a stick for stirring and left at “camp” to prepare a soup of berries and moss and river water, Alice had not minded the domestic nature of these roles. She had squatted alone over a campfire—sometimes a real one, though Archie had expressly forbidden them—shivering with happiness as the boys’ war whoops or floating whistles sounded through the trees. Through the smoke she caught flashes of them running fast through the greenery and heard their feet splashing through water, the sound of their hard breathing.

The boys gradually grew too old for these games and Alice was left to play by herself, but she had never been afraid to go down into the woods alone, out of sight or even earshot of the house. Sometimes she was gone for hours. She could not have accounted for her time there, nor was she ever asked to. She would have been speechless if she had been called on to describe what she did when she went out to play. She was aware of a change that came over her, though, when she left the bright sunlight of the fields and made her way into the shade of the trees: a boundary between her own body and the world seemed to vanish then. She was attentive to the way things felt and smelled; she could identify her brothers by smell alone. It was a game they played sometimes, Alice blindfolded on the telephone bench in the front hall, the brothers coming silently one by one to stand before her and let her sniff the air; she could even name some of their friends this way, and she was rarely wrong. Over the years she had come to associate the smell of the woods with her own smell, and she
felt at home there. For a long time, she had played that she was a fairy flying through the trees or a gnome child hunched on a moss-covered log. She sprang from stone to stone along the edge of the river, or hid in the grass and watched the insects darting over the water, the birds in the undergrowth. She did not feel alone during these games, or lonely; she sensed the hidden gaze of the world, unseen companions who watched her, their eyes blinking among the grasses.

Though the MacCauleys’ land was friendly territory, perfectly proportioned for children's play, the Fitzgeralds’ property bordered a more dangerous mile of water, where the river narrowed toward the falls and its high chasm. Sheared-off straggly junipers and cedars dug roots into the rocks and leaned out over the water, and the steep hillsides were covered with aspens and ash and maple and red oaks. Canoeists and kayakers had to portage here, carrying their boats through the woods and down the perilously rocky paths. The deep pool below the falls was known as Indian Love Call, for the melancholy way the air, full of mist and spray, held an echo and for the rumors of the ghostly voice of a young Indian squaw who could be heard weeping for her lover. Occasionally swimmers made their way through the woods from the road to swim in the pool below the falls; for many years, a rope had been tied to the branch of a tree that clung to the edge, and Alice knew from her brothers that boys dared one another to swing out over the water and drop. You had to know just where to let go, they said, when to drop the rope and let your body plunge straight as a needle into the black water, your arms at your sides, or you could be dashed to bits on the rocks. Alice knew that Archie had forbidden the boys to swim there, even in the pool where the river widened out past the falls and where the water was deep and wide and smooth, full of a mysterious cold blackness. There were too many temptations
there, Archie had said, too many risks; the whole place wore what he called
“the cunning livery of hell.”
But Alice knew that all the boys had disobeyed him; Tad and Harry had even swung out over the water on the rope, probably more than once.

She herself was wary of that stretch of the river. The stories about the ghost, who was said to have lost her life going over the falls, were troubling, even if Alice didn't exactly believe them. And the strength and power of the water felt hypnotic to her, tempting in a way she found frightening. When you drew close to the falls, the air had a deep, concussive ringing, and you felt compelled to try to creep closer to the tumult of water, inching along on the tumbled wreckage of rocks. One winter afternoon, walking with Wally in the woods, they had come across a deer, its neck caught in the fork of a tree that had fallen over the river a hundred yards below the falls. The poor creature, slipping on the rocks, had fallen in and been swept downstream until it was trapped by the forked branch, held there in the water while it froze to death. The deer's body had been encased in a cataract of ice like a gruesome sculpture, tiny hooves protruding helplessly through the frozen waterfall. Alice had never forgotten the sight of it; it stayed there in her mind like a talisman against the place, and sometimes she thought of it at odd moments. That day, Wally had taken her hand and helped her back over the rocks away from the water, into the woods silent in their winter white and gray, silent in a way that made Alice think of their cold, speechless witness to the deer's terrible death. She had wanted to cry at the thought of the creature's suffering, its slow dying in the freezing water, its desperate velvet mouth turned upward through the icy spray to catch at the air. Sometimes when she lay in bed at night, especially when she was aware of the pleasure of her own sleepy warmth and cleanliness after a bath, and of the cheerful sound of the radio being played quietly downstairs,
the comforting glow of the yellow lamp on the Chinese chest in the upstairs hallway … then she thought of the deer, and she froze inside at the proximity of such suffering alongside her own comfort. It was guilt that she felt, and pity, but also something more complicated; she would turn then and look for a long time at the photograph of her mother holding the infant Alice, and when sleep slowly took her away in its black-sleeved arms, she went as an orphan, a wide-eyed survivor, all alone on the deck of a boat sailing into the darkness.