She came closer, looking hardly sixteen, more like thirteen, and his sanity hung on a bombsight thread, for, judging from the questioning innocence swimming about her, the girl remembered not a thing.
“What ya doin’, Austin?” she said, removing her hat, stuffing it into a pocket and freeing her hair, which she shook like a filly.
“Oh—straightenin’ about.”
“Can’t tell whether ya diggin’ in or diggin’ out.”
“Little of both.”
“Sure doin’ some funny things.”
“You been watchin’?”
“A-yuh. Me and Froom.”
“What’d you find out?”
“That ya left ya backhouse door open.”
“You been watchin’ there too?”
“Well—if ya leave it open…” She smiled, again that unfathomable smile. “Free show.” And she laughed, a child’s laugh, and it threw him further because he didn’t want her to be a child.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked.
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Of course you. Who else could I be talkin’ to?”
“Don’t know. Ya can be a strange man, from time to time.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. I find ya strange. Froom finds ya nuts. Oh, well.” She bent down, scooped up some snow, made it into a snowball, tossed it underhanded into the air and allowed it to descend upon her head, a puff of white on her jet-black hair, marshmallow topping for a chocolate sundae. “Direct hit.” She smiled. “Pow!”
She was twelve years old, Austin thought. Maybe ten. They could not possibly have made love. “Do you do that a lot?”
“What?”
“What you just did.”
“What’d I just did?”
“Hit yourself with a snowball.”
“Oh, that? I do it whenever I feel like it. If I want to be real dangerous, I make it bigger and throw it higher. If I throw it too high, I can’t always get under it. Then it’s just wasted. Froom can throw it up a mile and get under it every time. Once almost busted his nose. Another time almost choked. But he keeps on doin’ it. Says he’s an expert.” She did it again, sending up another snowball, allowing it to land upon her head. “Pow!”
“I asked you where you’ve been.”
“I know.”
“You goin’ to answer?”
“Sure.”
“When?”
“How’s about now?”
“Fine.”
“Been in school.”
“Four days?”
“That what it’s been?”
“Four days.”
“Felt like four hundred. Ya’d been proud of me, Austin. I think my grades are gainin’ ground. Even geometry, if ya can believe it. Even isosceles triangles, which I’m gettin’ to know ’most everythin’ about. ’Specially their sides, which are equidistant from somewhere as well as equally lateral—from somewhere else.”
“I missed you.”
“I wanted ya to.” She did the snowball thing again, playing it like a child but looking at him with a woman’s eyes, eyes that came at him from left field—gray, unavoidable, sidelong and promising. “Wanted ya to get used to not havin’ me around, which will be the case when ya leave.”
“Ara, why would I want to leave now?”
She rolled another snowball. “’Cause ya said ya were leavin’.” And she tossed it into the air over his head, and he made no move to avoid it. She laughed as it crowned him. “Pow!”
“But how could I leave you after…” He allowed the question to hang in the air, just as he allowed the snow to remain on his head.
“Ya look pretty funny, Austin. Ya look hit by an eagle.” She brushed away the snow, her little mittens flying. “Goin’ to freeze there. Freeze ya brains.”
“You don’t want to talk about it, is that it?”
“We already talked about it.”
“About what?”
“About ya leavin’.”
“That’s not what I’m talkin’ about!”
“Well, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
He felt it come over him again, dusting him as the snowball had dusted him—the fleeting suspicion of his own fading sanity, fitting over his head like a hat, and just the right size. “Okay—let’s start over, okay?”
“Okay. Start over what?”
“Ara—the last day I saw you, I said I loved you.”
“A-yuh. I heard ya.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Fat chance.’”
“And what did you mean by that?”
“That I was angry.”
“At what?”
“At ya leavin’.”
“Ara—you came back that night.”
She looked at him squarely, surprised at what he had just said. “No I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“Didn’t.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus Christ might’ve, but I didn’t.”
“Hey—I can understand your not wantin’ to talk about it.”
“Ya can?”
“Yes. Of course. And I’m sorry you feel that way, because I don’t. Because I think it was…the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”
“Ya do?”
“Yes.”
“What was?”
“Ara! You came back that night and we made love!”
Her face blanched, all color and expression flying, even the pink from her cheeks taking flight. Only her eyes, gray and searing, continued to function, fixing unblinkingly on his, accusingly, as if to say, “How dare you!” then looking away, as if to say, “True, it happened, it truly happened,” and then back into his, and then once more away. “Guilty. Not guilty. Maybe. Perhaps.” A whole range of reactions played in her eyes, from clarity to confusion, to anger, to bliss. And Austin could see, his own eyes not stupid, that the issue was unsettled, the truth, elusive, the girl close to panic, the tears soon to come.
He pulled her to him and she allowed it, pressing herself against him as if to fuse herself there, her hair rife with winter, pine and balsam—clean, fresh drifts of it, blowing the thought into his head, hammering the words home as with chisel to marble: I love this girl, this Minnawickie, this sprite. God forgive me, but I love her and all that comes with it, all the jumble and all the pain—and, yes, death too, if it must. But I love her, Lord, and what the hell do I do about it?
“Look, Ara—tell me you hated it. Or that you’re sorry we did it. Or that your father’s coming to shoot me. But don’t tell me you don’t remember it.”
She said nothing, choosing to stay as she was, clinging to him hard, like a marsupial in a pocket or a child in a quandary, snuggling for protection or buying time to frame an answer. With her head down as it was he couldn’t see her face and couldn’t guess which.
“Ara—I wasn’t sure myself, that it happened. I went outside, looking for your bootprints. They weren’t there, but that could’ve been because the snow covered ’em over.”
She stirred in his arms, pushing herself from him lightly, unraveling from him as it were, but not with coquetry or anger—with sublime gentleness. She looked up at him, and the eyes had indeed been crying, and could have cried more but for the fact that she would not allow it, running her irresistible mittens across them, stopping the tears dead in their ducts. “Maybe it didn’t happen, Austin.”
“It happened.”
“Maybe it didn’t.” She dropped back a short distance and picked up a few years, no longer the girl with a snowball on her head, more the woman with a problem on her mind. “I wanted to come back. That very night. I wanted to. And almost did. Almost ready to walk the whole way.”
“Maybe you did.”
“Didn’t. Later, after some dreamin’, I thought maybe I did—because it was so strong in me. But I didn’t. I didn’t, Austin. I didn’t.”
“What kind of dreamin’?”
“Nice dreamin’.”<
br />
“No. Specifically. What kind of dreamin’? Ara?”
“Nice dreamin’…Naughty dreamin’.”
“Strong dreamin’?”
“A-yuh. It was strong.”
“You and me?”
“A-yuh.”
“Ara—”
“And that’s all I got to say on it. That’s all the answer ya goin’ to get.”
He would be inductive, working toward a solution rather than from a hypothesis. “That day, Ara, the last day we saw each other, you didn’t want me to leave, right?”
“A-yuh.”
“So you came back. To my house. To make certain I wouldn’t leave.”
“No.”
“Ara, there’s no shame in that. There’s a naturalness in it.”
“I don’t care what ya say, Austin. I didn’t come back. Not until now.”
“Okay. Then how come, if I said I’d be leaving the next morning, and you believed me, how come you come back today, four days later, and you’re not the littlest bit surprised to see that I’m still here?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“No. I just knew ya wouldn’t be gone.”
“How could you know?”
“I don’t know. I just knew. Austin, ya goin’ to make me cry.”
He hugged her tightly. “No, we don’t want to do that.” And he took her mittened hand, all roly-poly and babyish. “Come on, it’s gettin’ cold. Let’s go back to the house and I’ll perk us up some coffee.”
She balked, looking at him disapprovingly.
“Ara, you don’t have to be afraid. I’ll behave. You can ask Nutsy to come along. He’ll protect you.”
And still she didn’t move. She just stood there, all of her pretty weight on one foot, her chin jutted out, her eyes narrowed, her hands on her hips like a schoolmarm who had just been crossed.
“Ara? What’s the problem?”
“Problem is, it’s Penobscots what like coffee. Not Minnawickies.”
“Oh—I forget. I’m sorry.”
“Minnawickies prefer tea.”
“Right. Right. I should’ve realized.”
“Passamaquoddies like cocoa. Wabanaki like milk. Abanaki’ll drink anything. But Minnawickies like tea.”
“Right. Well, then, I’ll make us some tea.”
“Best ya do.”
They walked back to the house and she was young again, making him walk ahead while she hung back, lobbing snowballs into the air in hopes of their coming down upon his head. Once or twice they did and she’d shout, “Pow!” and would laugh, while he wondered how the girl could change the direction of his emotions so quickly and so easily, giving him a distinct lift where, but a moment ago, he was half out of his mind with depression. Make that full.
It pleased him to be having tea with her, it was like old times. Though they had not known each other two weeks, Maine winter and Maine isolation had a way of moving things along, accelerating such natural phenomena as late-migrating birds, underground streams, hungry rabbits, and human relationships. Even the cloud-struck sky outside was beginning to whip by as in time-lapse cinematography.
He saw how she held her tea mug, not as a woman with pinky extended—but as a child, both hands wrapped about the mug, all ten fingers clutching as if to plug a leak. Her eyes peeked out at him from over the rim—and the high part of her nose, and the forehead, and the fine black hair—and the rest was steam, encircling her face like a halo, and it was as though he were looking at her in a morning mist when no girl looks prettier and no forest creature more fantastic.
He had calmed down by then, his lunatic war preparations retreating once the girl arrived to make of the battlefield a meadow, and of his heart a sponge that absorbed the sight of her, storing it for that future time when he might wish to drink of her again. “You know I love you, don’t you?”
“A-yuh. That’s what ya said.”
“I still do. Always will.”
“Whatever turns ya on.”
“And you love me.”
“Ya got no proof.”
“I know. I knew you couldn’t have walked across the night like you did.”
“It’d be eight miles.”
“I think I knew it then, but I didn’t care. Real or imagined, I wanted you. Anyway I could get you—it didn’t matter.”
“Still of been a long walk.”
“You were in your house and I was in mine, yet something made us both believe we’d made love. Why?”
“Maybe ’cause it’d of been wrong for us to actually do it.”
“You’re talkin’ conscience, and I’m talkin’ something else.”
“You’re always talkin’ somethin’ else, Austin. I’d have to take a whole extra course in school to understand ya.”
Austin was arriving at something. Slowly. But he was getting there. “Ara—something either sent you here, which is what we both felt—or made me believe you came here to…keep me here, waitin’ for you, for these four days.”
She had nothing to say on his last point, no pithy rejoinder, no off-center observation. She simply looked at him, silently, not even pretending to sip at the tea which, but a moment before, she had been consuming so happily. But in saying nothing she said it all, and Austin was quick to see that she was as confused and troubled by the event as he was, and that no amount of hiding behind her little-girl veneer could disguise that fact.
“There’s something about this house, isn’t there?”
Her voice was small, her words, aimed down into her mug, hollow and distant. “I don’t know.”
“I felt it the first night. I figured it was the power of suggestion—all those things Jack Meeker was fillin’ my head with, plus all the things Maynard’d told me.” For the first time he noticed the sky, the clouds seeming to rush over it like sheep to a barn; cold-colored streaks of it threading across the heavens at such a pace as to appear like all the colors of death, gathered upon one enormous brush before being hurriedly slapdashed across the world’s last canvas.
Ara noticed it, too, though her reaction was more passive, her eyes simply taking their cue from his, turning to the window and looking out, almost casually, at the strangely motivated sky. She didn’t blink. She didn’t speak. She just looked.
“Ara, what is it? What’s going on?”
“Don’t know.”
“A blizzard?”
“No call for it.”
“It’s beginning, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Whatever’s goin’ to happen—it’s beginnin’.”
“No wind. No cold. No snow. It’ll pass.”
“No.”
“It’ll pass, Austin.”
“Yeah, and me with it.” He grabbed her jacket. “Well, whatever the hell it is, you don’t want to get caught in it.” He helped her into her jacket as if she were an infant, handing her her mittens and her muffler. “Eight miles to your house. Better get movin’.”
“A-yuh.”
Through the window he could see Froom signaling wildly, throwing snowballs at the house like a baseball-pitching machine. “Your brother’s gettin’ nervous.”
“Looks that way.” She allowed him to hold her mittens as she thrust her fingers into them, like a surgeon about to operate. Then she put on her muffler, twirling it with such a practiced quickness that it went twice around her neck and once across her wan smile. Next came her hat, and she looked like a little woolen teddy bear, her hair redolent as she tucked it under. Never in his life had he been exposed to such simple beauty, to such a fine winter creature, to such innocent sensuality. And he wondered if he would ever see her again, and he panicked at that disquieting thought though he struggled not to show it.
“I don’t suppose you’d care to stay,” he said, “and wait it out with me.”
“Can’t.”
“Froom could stay, too. I’ve got a good fire, lots of wood, lots of food.”
“Can’t, Austin.”<
br />
“I know. Just thought I’d ask.”
“Ya shouldn’t of.”
“I know. Think you’ll make it?”
“A-yuh.”
“It’s eight miles. Whatever’s comin’ out of that sky, it’s eight miles, Ara.”
“We can travel fast.”
“It’s a hundred hills.”
“Half of ’ems down.”
“No. It’s a hundred up and a hundred down.”
“Right. Guess I’m still not all that good at mathematics.”
“Will you come back tomorrow?”
She cocked her head, giving the matter thought. “Tomorrow? What day is tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know what today is.”
“Well…” She smiled, figuring it out rather philosophically. “Tomorrow, today’ll be yesterday, and the rest’ll kind of just follow.” She went to him, stood on her toes, and gave him a kiss. A little-girl kiss, dry and pure and soft, but on the lips all the same, and he drew her closer, looking into her eyes, into the deep gray depths of them.
“I love you, Ara.”
“I guess I know.”
“Do you love me?”
“A-yuh.”
“Will you come back?”
She thought about it, again for too long, and it shook him. “I will if you will, Austin.” And she pulled free from him, turned away, and went out.
He held the door open and watched as she walked out to where Froom was twitching like a live wire, anxiously motioning her on. Their sled was waiting. Soon they’d be gone—over the hill to Grandmother’s house, laughing all the way. He was only twenty-three. Still he wondered if he had ever been as young as she. Endearingly young. Eternally young. Peter Pan young. Would she ever grow old?
The door flew from his hand, as if it were alive and had gotten away from him. It slammed shut with a finality that surprised him, and he couldn’t get it open. That too he accepted as a signal that it was all beginning and that he’d better get ready.
He went to his window to watch as Ara and Froom pulled their sled to the top of the hill and mounted it. Ara turned and waved and he waved back. And then they were gone, the sled nosing over the hill and tailing out of sight, the last thing he saw of her being the fringe of her bright muffler, flapping gaily—farewell and goodbye, sweet girl, till we meet again.
Maynard’s House Page 21