The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  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 ai
r 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.

  The garden in front of the Fitzgeralds’ house was badly overgrown. Weedy saplings with leaves like big flapping hands waved over the picket fence. Alice and Theo stopped on the sidewalk and looked over into the yard, where the browning heads of peonies and the heavy canes of old rosebushes had fallen over into the tall grass. The MacCauleys’ car was parked on the street, and from the direction of the garage, Alice heard the sound of a motor—a lawn mower, or maybe it was a chain saw—catching and then dying. Eli must have decided there was more serious work to be done than weeding.

  The house was high and square, painted white with black shutters, although both house and shutters needed painting, Alice noticed. The Fitzgeralds’ was among the more formal of Grange's residences; most of the houses on the street, with their narrow front gardens and sheer curtains at the front windows, were what Alice thought of as town houses, with additions that led back away from the street toward the woods and the river, not country houses like her own. The piano lessons, Alice remembered, had been held in a room at the back of the house, reached through a separate entrance by a slate path that ran downhill along the side of the house between overgrown boxwood bushes. Archie had not sent Alice to Miss Fitzgerald when it had been her turn to begin music lessons, and Alice didn't think Miss Fitzgerald knew that Alice played. She hoped that Miss Fitzgerald would not find out somehow, because Alice felt sure that Miss Fitzgerald would see it as another disloyalty on Archie's part. She didn't know if anyone took piano from Miss Fitzgerald anymore.

  Alice knew that she and Theo had lingered too long in the woods—most of the morning, in fact—despite James's injunction not to be late. They had longed to stay there and play, and it had not been easy to leave. On their way up to the road, Theo had consoled himself with grand plans for the afternoon. He wanted to build a shelter on the island highest in the stream, the one with the best vantage upriver. All the way to the Fitzgeralds’ he had described how they would set out fishing lines and string a hammock in the trees (making a hammock was easy, he'd said; all things seemed easy to Theo). He wanted to plant a flag, like the explorers of Everest. He wanted to tame a deer and went on at length about how they might accomplish this; he seemed to know all about it. He wanted to raise a baby raccoon, too—he said he'd seen a nature show on television about this, and to Alice he made it sound inevitable that they would stumble across an orphaned baby raccoon in need of nursing. He wanted to fix up the twins’ raft and moor it near the island, too.

  Beneath his eyes he had painted dirty pairs of black stripes like Indian paint, and he had taken off his shirt to tie it around his head. After he'd finished painting his own stripes, he had turned Alice to him, both hands on her shoulders, and looked critically at her face. Then he knelt down and mixed a little spit with the dirt at his feet and with his thumb planted a muddy print on each of her cheekbones, leaning back to examine the effect. Blinking back at him, Alice had noticed that his eyes were golden, like a lion's, and that his eyelashes curled up tightly. For a moment, she thought of Helen, and her happiness was crossed by a shadow. It seemed wrong that Helen's accident, or illness, or whatever it was, was the cause of Alice's happiness at this moment.

  As she and Theo stood on the step at the Fitzgeralds’ front door, Alice realized that her hands had gone clammy. She could feel the telltale prickle of heat on her neck, where she flushed when she was shy or worried. She wasn't sure how long they'd stayed in the woods, but she knew it had been too long. She wiped her hands on her T-shirt and then saw that she had left rusty streaks down her front. She glanced at Theo; he was no cleaner. His hands and knees were filthy and his face still bore the streaks of his war paint. He'd put his shirt back on, though.

  Alice reached up and lifted the knocker.

  Suddenly, beside her, Theo said, “I've got to pee.” He began to hop up and down in agitation.

  Alice glanced around. “Go back there, over by the garage,” she said, trying to keep her voice low. “Hurry up.”

  Just as he raced away around the corner, the front door opened.

  Miss Fitzgerald stood inside behind the screen, her outline dark and indistinct, like a giant puff of black smoke. Alice stared up at her. Miss Fitzgerald seemed to be about to take a step back and close the door again; it was as if she didn't see Alice standing there on the doormat, though there she was, plain as day. The hallway behind her was dark.

  “It's Alice,” Alice said, for suddenly it occurred to her that maybe Miss Fitzgerald might not know who she was, might not remember her. Miss Fitzgerald had never actually spoken to Alice directly. When she came by to see Archie, her eyes would graze over you, even if Archie politely introduced you to her. And yet Alice felt sure somehow, as she stood there separated from Miss Fitzgerald by the insubstantial and distorting surface of the screen door, that Miss Fitzgerald did know who Alice was; that she knew her, and she knew Alice knew her in turn, despite the fact that they never spoke, and that she could not bear something about that mutually reluctant acknowledgment that passed between them.

  Miss Fitzgerald's form approached the screen from inside the hallway, as if she were trying to get a better look at whatever had addressed her from the doormat. Behind the mesh of the screen, her face looked like a terrorist's with a stocking pulled over it, featureless and flat and vaguely frightening. Alice felt her heart begin to pound inside her chest.

  “Go around to the side. Your feet are terribly dirty,” Miss Fitzgerald said and closed the door.

  Alice's cheeks burned, but she backed off the front step obediently. She was not used to being spoken to like this. Elizabeth was dictatorial about baths and clothes and manners at the table, but Alice understood that this was Elizabeth's job; she was supposed to be severe about such things, and she was not mean, anyway, just no-nonsense: give me none of that yakking, Elizabeth said, or hurry up, time's up. She was never rude.

  Alice glanced around for Theo. She called his name in a loud whisper but he didn't answer.

  She jumped when the front door was abruptly opened again. From inside, Wally pushed open the screen door. He had a small, rolled-up carpet over his shoulder.

  “Where have you been?” he said. He resettled the rug on his shoulder. “Wh
ere's Theo?”

  “He had to pee,” Alice said. “He went by the garage.”

  Wally craned out the front door to look in that direction, but there was no sign of Theo. “Well, you'd better come in,” Wally said. “I'll leave the door open for him.”

  Alice hesitated. “She told me to go around to the side. She said my feet were dirty.”

  Wally's eyes widened. “She's worried about your dirty feet?” He gave a snort. “Come on,” he said. “It doesn't matter. You'll see.”

  Inside, there was hardly enough room for Alice and Wally to stand side by side. The dark hallway was lined with stacks of boxes and paper, some as tall as Alice herself. Alice followed Wally down a little path between them. A carpeted staircase rose up to their left. It, too, was crowded with piles of things. Alice could see cobwebs like garlands looping from place to place across the flocked wallpaper.

  “See what I mean?” Wally said quietly over his shoulder.

  At first Alice thought that all the boxes and bags and piles of loose papers were Kenneth Fitzgerald's belongings, that he had moved in and been too sick or weak to arrange anything. But soon she saw that the teetering stacks were made up mostly of old newspapers and broken-down boxes, crates heaped with clothing and dishes and bits and pieces of things: she saw doorknobs, drawer pulls, casters, lampshades, hangers. She followed Wally carefully along the narrow passageway, her mouth hanging open.

  “Pretty much the whole house is like this,” Wally said from in front of her, his voice still low. “He's got the addition at the back of the house, where she used to do the piano lessons. It wasn't as bad back there, and we got it pretty much cleared out already. Tad and Harry took a load of stuff to the dump in the truck. He said not to even look at any of it. Just to get rid of it.” Wally hoisted the rug higher on his shoulder. “She says she's collecting for the poor.”