The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  Meanwhile, she could not make herself do many of the things that had once felt like requisites of the life she had led before, indeed, that had been among its pleasures. The only dependable happiness was to be outdoors; she found the river's rushing colloquy comforting. She did not think that the river had tried to drown Kenneth, any more than she believed that the rope walk had killed him. He had used the rope walk, as he had used the falls and the river.

  Archie was persuaded that if Kenneth had intended to kill himself, he would have left a letter; that none had been found was evidence that whatever had happened at the edge of the falls, it had not been premeditated. Archie acknowledged that, perhaps, finding himself poised there, Kenneth had simply … taken the opportunity. But if that opportunity had not presented itself? Archie had let the question hang. And in the silence that grew between them as Alice had stood before her father, Alice felt the ground pull away from beneath her.

  “I blame myself,” Archie said, not looking at her. But she knew he blamed her.

  Alice did not ask herself to imagine what had happened, Kenneth moving shakily hand over hand through the dark, still woods that evening when everyone else in Grange, including his sister, was at the dance, sweating under the lights; Alice and Theo had seen her there, working alongside some of the other women serving punch and cake. Kenneth's death was too much to think about, too much to consider, the details too shocking; she was sensible about protecting herself in this way and would not make herself picture it. But she could not believe that he had simply fallen to his death; he had known exactly where he was going, she thought. What she could not understand was how he could have ended his life without giving Alice and Theo—especially Alice and Theo—some kind of explanation. Without saying goodbye.

  As they crouched in the dirt under the porch the morning after Kenneth's death, Theo had said, “He had AIDS. He knew he was dying. Everybody who gets AIDS dies eventually. Maybe everyone in the whole world will get AIDS. Ijust don't think he wanted to be alive like that anymore, and with her.”

  Alice hadn't said anything.

  “He was sick,” Theo said. “He was in pain.” After a minute, he added, “Maybe it was kind of a brave thing to do. He just… you know. Whoosh. Flew.”

  “Maybe,” Alice had said. She had felt grateful to Theo for this version of events, for the way it calmed the sick sensation in her stomach, the hideous rise of guilt.

  Theo had been quiet for a time, and they had crouched there together, staring out through the bars of the lattice. “It was meant to be nice,” he had said finally, and Alice had been glad to hear the anger in his voice, because she felt angry, too.

  Alice stared out her bedroom window now into the swirling blur of the snow falling through the evening air. Her head throbbed and her neck and back ached. Once she had wanted to take on a hundred enemies at once, sword flashing, cape flying. Now she felt both surrounded and curiously alone; she did not know which way to turn.

  For days after Theo had been sent home, Alice had wandered around outside or lay on her bed. From time to time Wally had come in and pulled up a chair, sitting quietly near her and smoking cigarettes as if in open, angry defiance of Archie.

  “Kenneth must have been suffering, Alice,” Wally said the day after Theo had been taken away “I don't think he meant to hurt you. I don't think he was even thinking about you. Maybe he just had a flair for the dramatic. Or maybe he couldn't think of any other way.”

  “I want Theo,” Alice had said. She rolled over away from Wally. The wallpaper was coming loose at its seam; she reached out and picked at it.

  “Listen,” Wally said. “You tried to do something wonderful, right? You just have to remember that.”

  Alice sat up on her bed and turned to face him. “Why did Archie make Theo leave?”

  “Archie just wants the whole thing to go away,” Wally said. “This is exactly the kind of thing Archie hates. People talking about him.”

  “He hates me,” Alice said.

  Wally had shaken his head. “No, he doesn't. He's just … he feels like it's his fault. Like he should have known what you guys were doing.”

  “We didn't want anyone to know. It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “Yeah, well…” Wally put out his cigarette in the coffee cup he'd brought upstairs. “How long did it take you guys to build that, anyway?”

  “All summer.”

  “I don't think I could have done that at your age. It's impressive, really.” Wally leaned forward, looking at her bedside table. “Why do you have all those dead bugs in that jar?”

  Alice looked at the jar. The last valiant earthquake detectors had fallen on their backs to the bottom of the glass amid the dead leaves and broken twigs. It was awful, she thought, as sad and terrible as a battlefield. She flopped back down on her bed and closed her eyes.

  “It's Theo's earthquake-warning device,” she said. “Why isn't Archie mad at Kenneth?”

  “Well, he is. But Kenneth's… you know.”

  “Dead,” said Alice, eyes still closed. “You can say it.”

  Being separated from Theo was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She knew that her mother's death had been more important in terms of terrible things to happen to a person, but because she had not felt that loss, she could not compare it to this. She had tried calling directory assistance in Manhattan and in Brooklyn and the Bronx, but she didn't know where exactly Theo lived, nor his father's first name—there was no listing in his mother's name—and there were dozens of Swanns in the directories. Every day she saw something or thought something that she knew Theo would have liked. At night in bed she crept her fingers together over her breastbone and clasped her hands there over her heart, but it was not the same, holding your own hand.

  When Elizabeth came upstairs with a glass of water and an Advil, Alice got into bed.

  Elizabeth tugged the sheets and blankets into place around her while Alice swallowed the pill. Then, sighing, she sat down on the chair where Alice had been sitting by the window. “That's some snow!” Elizabeth said.

  Her head with its neat cap of hair was silhouetted against the silvery light of the snowstorm outside the window. Her voice sounded to Alice very far away. “Maybe I should stay here tonight,” she said. “Roads might get bad.”

  “Don't leave,” Alice said groggily from bed. “Elizabeth?”

  “What? Wow. Look at that snow, Alice!”

  “Don't leave, okay?”

  “Okay. Shhh. Go to sleep.”

  Alice woke up the next morning feeling light-headed but otherwise well. She stood at the window for a moment, looking out at the landscape. Against the snow that lay over the ground, the firs were a deep, velvet green, iced in silver. Recovering from illness often gave her a fragile sense of euphoria, especially if she woke, as she did this morning, to clear weather, the skies an achingly brilliant blue. As she went downstairs, her head felt pleasantly separated from her body, as if her legs and torso were a ship that moved beneath her, cumbersome and heavy, sensitive to currents that her mind, skimming along in the thin air above, could not detect.

  “Lucky day for you,” Elizabeth said cheerfully, when Alice found her in the dining room surrounded by an armada of the silver and her polishing rags and a blaze of winter sunlight. “Big water pipe broken at school. You get free vacation. No homework, even. Right?”

  “Really?” Alice sat down on a chair in the sunshine. When she reached out to touch the tarnished garland of roses on the coffee pot, Elizabeth made a noise of caution.

  “Sorry.” Alice withdrew her hand.

  “You feel better?” Elizabeth said.

  “Much,” Alice stretched. She stood up and wandered into the kitchen to make herself a piece of toast, which she ate standing at the back door, looking out into the brightness of the morning and over the pure, unbroken whiteness, the slow crystalline dripping of water from an icicle hanging from the gutter of the garage. There were interesting patterns of purple sha
dows over the snow, the blurred mauve silhouette of a squirrel running along a power line, the immense shadow of the house itself. The world had been simplified, laid out in blocks of color: white, green, blue, gray.

  From the dining room, Elizabeth called, “You want scrambled eggs?”

  Alice turned away from the window and went back to the dining room. “No, thank you,” she said. She squatted down in front of her map on the floor. She had been working lately on North America, drawing in the rivers in the west, the Missouri and the Snake and the Columbia. She had drawn in the outlines of Montana and Wyoming and Idaho, sketched the tumult of the Rocky Mountains, where Lewis and Clark and their party had been shocked to discover not the fabled Northwest Passage and a gentle slope down to the Pacific, but only the endless rugged heaves of Clark's “Shineing Mountains” stretching far away into the distance, the snow-covered ranges of the Bitter-roots that would nearly destroy the Corps of Discovery and its brave leaders.

  Alice lay down on her stomach at the edge of her map and traced her finger along the Missouri to the Great Falls, where the company had portaged the canoes. The journal entries from those weeks, and the ones over the next two months, when the explorers crossed the Continental Divide, had been the most harrowing in Lewis and Clark's accounts of their voyage west. Theo had stopped falling asleep in the afternoons when she read, as caught up as she was in the story. From time to time, Lewis and Clark had been forced to part company and consider alternate routes, leaving each other handwritten notes pegged to trees, articles of faith in the midst of such a vast wilderness the dimensions of which Alice found astonishing. How had the two friends found the courage to believe they would see each other again? How had they possibly expected to find each other's valiant messages fluttering against the brown bark of one tree in a million? Every time she read about days when Lewis and Clark had to separate, or send a man off to look for a packhorse gone astray, or then more men to look for that man when he failed to return, Alice's anxiety had risen. She had been alone in the woods enough times herself, halted suddenly by a prickling at the nape of her neck, an alarm that rippled through her like the wind in the trees, to imagine the explorers beyond the grip of danger or even their own fear. She wanted them all to stay together, but time and time again they bravely had bid each other farewell and set off, sometimes one man utterly alone. Had they never succumbed to fear, Alice wondered? They had written in their journals. They had gathered specimens of roots and moss and plants. They had met Indians and bartered for horses and information and dogs and beaver skins. They had taken their bearings, made their careful drawings and their maps. Somehow, miraculously, they had survived.

  The sheet was warm now in a patch of sunlight falling through the window where the curtains were drawn back. Alice could smell the acid fumes of the silver polish, hear behind her at the table Elizabeth's vigorous efforts with the cloth. Alice rested her chin on her folded arms and let her gaze wander over her map. Here the men of the Corps of Discovery, stranded by hail and snow in the steep passes of the Bitterroots, had slaughtered their horses to eat and to stay alive, here they had killed a coyote, here in desperation they had melted down and eaten some of their tallow candles.

  And yet, it probably wasn't exactly right here, she thought. She rested her chin in her hands, looking at the lines she had drawn. Then she consulted the atlas spread open on the floor beside her. She couldn't tell exactly, looking at the modern atlas, where Lewis and Clark's trail had gone. In the edition from which she'd been reading to Kenneth and Theo, there had been a map on the flyleaf of the book much like the map in her copy of The Hobbit, with its drawing of the Misty Mountains and Mirk-wood and the Desolation of Smaug. In James and Wally's room there was an edition of The Wind in the Willows with its absorbing map of the Wild Wood and Surrounding Country. The map on the flyleaf of the Lewis and Clark journals had shown the explorers’ trek westward with little black symbols like a chain of arrowheads or tiny footprints crisscrossing the plains, and though she knew that the voyage had been a real one across a real continent, the landscape in the black-and-white drawing had seemed as mythical and exciting as an imaginary place. The little track had veered north toward Canada and then descended in a crooked dip through the mountains, a scooped path like the bowl of the Big Dipper, before stretching out on the runaway lap down the Columbia toward the Pacific Ocean. She looked at her own map and then back at the atlas. She would like to draw Lewis and Clark's route on her map, she thought.

  She looked up, startled, as the bough of a fir tree just outside the window released its burden of snow, the drift sliding heavily down the slippery needles and crashing into the shrubs beneath the window. Dry snow rose like a smoke signal into the still, cold air outside. In the silence of the house she could hear the faint, raspy ticking of the clock in the hall, the vigorous rubbing sound Elizabeth made with her cloth. And then another load of snow slipped free, following the first. A second puff of dry snow exploded and hung suspended, sparkling in midair. Alice blinked. A third branch dipped, strained; snow slid hissing toward the ground. A fourth went. A fifth. Each time, Alice blinked as though a gun had been fired beside her ear, a signal going off to bring her to her feet, like Lewis and Clark's men bolting from sleep as a buffalo bull charged into their camp.

  She sat up abruptly. What had happened to the edition of Lewis and Clark's journals she had taken to Kenneth's? What had happened to all the books she and Theo had brought with them on that first day they'd gone to visit Kenneth? Were they still there on the table in Kenneth's room?

  On one of the last days she had read aloud to Kenneth and Theo, when she came to Clark's triumphant journal entry at the explorers’ first view of the ocean, Alice had had difficulty controlling the emotion in her voice. “Great joy in camp we are in view of the Ocian,” he had written, “this, great Pacific Octean which we been so long anxious to See. and the roreing or noise made by the waves brakeing on the rockey Shores (as I suppose) may be heard disti[n]ctly.”

  “Whew,” Theo had said from the floor. “I thought they'd never get there.”

  That evening, Archie came in the back door while Alice was eating her supper. Elizabeth had made her tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich and had pulled up the rickety little bamboo side table to one of the armchairs before the fireplace in the kitchen. The house was cold, and Alice was wearing her pajamas and a pair of heavy socks and one of Wally's hats with the fake fur earflaps.

  “Feeling better?” Archie said, putting a hand on Alice's head briefly as he stood by the fire and unwound his scarf. He sat down in the chair across from her. “It's snowing hard again,” he said to Elizabeth. “You should go on home before it gets worse.”

  Elizabeth leaned down and gave Alice a hug on her way out the back door. “Dinner's in the oven,” she said to Archie, pulling on her mittens. “You eat it, okay? Don't forget. I don't want to come back tomorrow and find it in there again, hard like a old rock.”

  “No. Of course not.” Archie stood up, his scarf in his hand. “Thank you.” He looked embarrassed, Alice thought, glancing up at him. Maybe he often forgot about his supper.

  He came back a few moments later with a glass of wine and the mail. Alice swiveled in her chair, her back to the fire so she could watch the snow through the window. The snowflakes seemed to be engaged in a battle, colliding and whirling like people running wildly in all directions.

  In the chair on the other side of the fireplace, Archie unfolded the newspaper and held it up before his face.

  Alice looked at the gray front page of the newspaper. There was a picture of a crowd of people, their expressions violent.

  Archie reached out from behind the paper and picked up his wineglass.

  Alice watched the newspaper for a minute, but Archie stayed hidden behind it. She picked up her soup cup and looked into it. She stuck her tongue down into the cup and licked. Everybody in the whole world seemed to be angry, she thought.

  “Don't forget about your dinner,
” she said at last.

  “What?” Archie didn't lower the paper.

  “In the oven,” Alice said.

  “Oh. No, I won't.” He lowered the paper at last. He folded it on his lap and tilted back his head, closing his eyes. He looked old and tired, Alice thought. Once Archie had played Prospero in one of the plays in Grange, and she'd been frightened of him in his cape and stage makeup, with long black lines painted on his face and his hair wild.

  She looked down into her cup again and with her tongue reached for the last of the soup at the bottom. It was very quiet in the room, just the fire hissing and crackling gently at their feet, but Alice's thoughts were whirling. She looked over at Archie, trying to reach him with her mind. Could she communicate with him that way, tell him what she was thinking without actually saying the words? She tried, concentrating fiercely, but her efforts did not seem to be successful. He didn't even open his eyes. She tried saying it very distinctly inside her head—I'm going to go lookfor the Lewis and Clark—but Archiejust sat there, his eyes closed. It gave Alice a sad sense of freedom. There were all sorts of things she could hide from her father. There were continents that separated them now.

  It was neither as cold as she had expected it to be at midnight, nor as dark. The moon was nearly full, and even though snow was falling lightly, she could see the moon behind the clouds, a blurred lamp high in the sky. The snow-covered fields around the house gave off an unearthly light.