by Joan Chase
“When have I ever?” he asks her in a bold and mocking pretense of disbelief. Already we are thrilling with excitement, fascinated by the blue again burning in his eyes. There is no stopping us either. But Aunt Grace is by now distracted, sorting through laundry on the floor, laundry for ten people that must be bleached and blued, starched, washed and dried, sprinkled and ironed; she scarcely notices when we leave, singing under her breath, quite content. She seems well, like her old self again.
Linked in the force of our expectancy, we go to the back of the barn and sit there to wait for Neil where the cedar log is so dried and whitened with lime and calcium dust it appears to have drifted over the surging sea to rest finally on this desolate shore. Soon we are sweating under the full impact of the sun; the few locust trees scatter a skimpy shade into the quivering heat. Neil takes so long to come to us that we forget almost why we have waited here. But we wait on because he told us to, and then Celia cries out because a hickory burr has struck her head and we glance up just in time to catch Neil’s head drawing back out of the eaves window of the hayloft.
“We see you. We see you.” We are shrill in relief.
Neil sticks his head out again. From upside down under the brimmed hat, his face appears cloven at the chin, in shadow under the shiny petal yellow of the bleached straw and the surrounding fall of yellow hair. “If you’re ready for the spelling bee,” he says, talking down the hay sprig dangling from his mouth, “get yourselves lined up.”
We arrange ourselves into formation after finding for Neil the stout stick that he always holds. It is an old-fashioned school, like the one he went to as a boy when, he has told us, the teacher was as mean as Silas Marner, as severe as God and as relentless as the devil. Neil commands his class with the absolute authority of his own justice. During the session we will call him Master Higgenbottom. He knows the name will make us laugh, but only for an instant. Uncannily, his abrupt transformation into the dreaded master completes for us the entire setting of his boyhood —the raised platform where the teacher’s desk presides, the central wood stove which must be fed continually although everyone is always either cold or sweltering, and the actual whip, long, of a narrow braided leather, which is hung up in plain sight. He has told us how fortunate we are that he as master does not insist on the complete historical accuracy of employing the strap; although he looks quite capable of resorting to it, should it become necessary. We tremble, waiting in line.
We have entered the school. It is a hundred years ago and we are trapped there, by fate, by our own intention. Before us stands the demoniac Master Higgenbottom; we even conjure for him a tailored rusty black waistcoat. There is now no humor in his name, none in his always unsettling yet once familiar eyes, which now stare from the distance of an incomprehensible lost world. We stagger, almost faint in the glare of high noon. Again, we have not recognized him until it is too late.
“And now, my dears,” he says, and addresses us especially, his two daughters. “I have appraised the fact, made known to me through the word of several of your more infatuated and silly admirers, who shall remain nameless, that you, although the erratic disarray of your clothing, your disheveled appearance in general, would deny it”—and here he takes the tip of his stick to flick the dragging hems of our cotton dresses—“that you,” he repeats, and curls up his top lip, “have recently entertained aspirations that would forever sever you from the taint of this miserable pig wallow and thrust you into a broader, and presumably receptive, world.”
None of us responds, in part because we have to struggle with the words he uses. He has heard that we have been listening to the country radio broadcasts, coming out of West Virginia, that we have in turn sung in harmony like those pairs of sisters we have listened to, that we have talked of singing on the radio and being famous. Good singers like good actors, he has always told us, are a dime a dozen. If only he had a nickel for every mother’s son who wanted to be a star. It seems entirely shameful and ludicrous to us now, this ambition which is against all that Neil has taught us, about vanity and self-denial, humility, against all that he truly admires and has wanted us to be. We have been seduced, spoiled for him. We deserve punishment. We cannot meet his eyes.
“Therefore,” the master continues, “duty impels me to uncover this betrayal or else to discover if there is a single shred of evidence that such clandestine hope should reside in the breasts of common farm girls, should be given an iota of encouragement.
“Sing,” he commands us.
Our mouths hang open, like mouth-breathers’, but we have no power to move them. There is a prolonged silence. “I thought as much,” he says finally, himself for an instant, laughing at us. Then he slaps the stick against his open hand, causing it to resound smartly. The master again, he speaks: “I won’t flog you this time. But should such vain conceit appear in the future, it would be clearly incumbent upon me to expunge this detestable and affected foolishness which would persuade you from your plain and rightful course. Unless, of course, you should ever wish to perform.”
We are humiliated. He has shown again that we are his stupid, flighty, undisciplined daughters, certain to end our days in the laundry or as bar wenches. He has told us so.
“Attention,” he begins. We straighten ourselves involuntarily, caught in the flow of his power.
“Was.” He gives the first word to Jenny.
“W-a-s,” she responds. Nobody smirks although she is by far the most able student among us—only ten months younger than Celia, she seems the older of the two, perhaps because Celia was so sick as a baby. We all know Neil asks Jenny the easiest words, always does, because he admires her sensible ways. She is safe in her role as the prize student, the role he gives her.
To Celia: “Give.” Again, what we expect, a simple word which, although she is always pressed to her limits at school, struggling mightily just to pass the grades, he knows she will spell easily;
But for his daughters, the next pause is extended into an unreeling suspense. It could be anything. “Shame”: he delivers the word, and we are flooded with the joy of being able to spell it out. After this the game moves easily, and with a skill we seldom manage, we spell all the words he gives us, even multisyllabic ones. Increasingly our voices reflect our assurance and confidence; our disregard of what, underneath, we know is only a temporary respite.
“Symbol,” he calls to Celia.
“S-i-m-b-l-e,” she tries.
“Come forward.” It is very hot in the locust clump, which holds heat and casts a shallow pool of shadow into its own roots with the sun high overhead. Above Celia’s pink trembling mouth we see the dewy salt. Master Higgenbottom renders her the punishment—one blow with the stick across her bare calves. Celia’s tongue licks over her lips but she does not cry out. The actual blow does not hurt very much; he strikes his own hand harder.
We begin our plunge into the final predictable though unavoidable moments of the session; for in surefire and rapid order we miss each of our next words and suffer the noisy blows. Once. Then again. As we become more flustered we miss even the simple words. And with our mute failure to even attempt “conscience” and “uranium,” as though we had been commanded to sing, we have received the ten strikes which end the game. The last are the hardest and we at last break down. He regards us with contempt. “You wanted to play. Nobody forced you. And now you blubber and bawl. Can’t take it, can you?” He hurls the stick against the barn siding, turns his back and walks away. He kicks through the bone piles as though he is thrashing willful stupidity.
We four climb up into the haymow, up to the rafter window. We vow we will never forgive him. We swear to avenge ourselves, even if we have to pay with our lives. We tell each other how he’d feel if we died. Dry-eyed, exhausted at last, we lie in the sun-shot darkness of the barn, and the soft cries of the doves seem to be the sound of Neil’s grief when he knows that he has lost us, when he views us, innocent girls, cold and still in death.
We are releas
ed then, forget again, and begin to descend the levels of the barn, down through the shafts of sunlight, and then we run off down the pasture lane into the woods, walking by the stony shallow stream until it is deeper and runs clean. We slide into the water; our dresses fill and float about us as though we have been altered into water lilies. After our dip, cool, absolved, we lie upon the bank, brushed dry by the coarse grasses, which hold a mosaic of daisies and Queen Anne’s lace.
When we hear the rock chuck into the water beside us, we sit up. We don’t see anything but we know he is here. Feel him. Somewhere, hiding. When the next throw comes, we are ready and pop up our heads to see a streak of bright blue among the trees, a blue bluer than the sky painted behind the trees, his shirt, and we are up, shrieking, “We see you, we see you,” leaping away over the brook with our wet clinging dresses slapping against our legs, going on into the denser woods, where immediately the silence takes hold. We feel lost, stop, strain into the winding tangles of brush and vine. Has he been there? Then from nearly on top of us, from behind, comes a menacing growl. We wheel round. There it is, the leaping blue, and we race after his retreating form. And then he trips or falls somehow and we are upon him. We jump on top of him, seizing a wonderful victory. We have hold of his yellow hair. We tickle under his arms and pinch the loose skin by his belt. He puts his arms around us and rolls over the ground, going downhill toward the creek, and laughs so that we can feel his body shaking, with his hard legs wrapped around us. “Did my little girlies get mad at their daddy?” he whispers. “Did the little girlies think they would never love him again?” Sky and trees dissolve behind his enclosing shoulders.
At the bottom of the hill we lie, surrounded and quiet. We can smell his tobacco and the wild parsley and clear water. We are at peace, enthralled. Sometime in there he becomes restless and leaves. When we realize he has gone we search and call into the solemnity of the woods. Then we forget again, dreaming.
The sound of the trampling feet rouses us, provokes in us the fear which flickers always just beyond the edge of our senses and which, triggered, drives us crazy. We see them as horned, creatures with foaming mouths breaking through the branches. We dash in circles, scream, laugh and push into each other until we are able to pull ourselves up into an oak tree, to safety, twisting ourselves right out from between the teeth of the beasts that mill about on the ground near the base of the tree right beneath us. But then, laboring painfully, spent, they simply stand there, calming. Grandad would be furious if he knew someone had run his cows. All the same, we want to see them scared and running again, want them to pay. We wonder when we will ever get away—as if, shipwrecked, we’re stranded in a swaying oak tree island.
Then Neil is coming down the path swinging his stick, whistling as though he has just happened along. We know better. He walks right into the midst of the cows, pushing at them, poking. With a start they amble on down the curving path along the stream-bed. Neil is singing about Frankie and Johnny. “Frankie drew back her kimono,” he sings. His voice inclines toward us, mellow and insinuating. A certain inflection tells us he knows we are there, although he doesn’t look up. It’s in the way he lingers over “kimono.” Then he says, “Reckon you gals are safe now. Now that I’m here. Whatever do you suspicion commenced them critters to skedaddle like that?” He’s mocking Gram now, the way he does sometimes, so we’ll join him in laughing at her, even though it makes us feel disloyal, bewildered. Also he wants us to know exactly what he’s been doing. Although he’ll say we’re lying if we tell. We don’t know what to think of him, but it doesn’t matter and we sail out of the tree and seem nearly to waft to earth. Then with him we follow the path winding along the stream, skipping rocks, jumping the wider banks, naming aloud the meadow flowers for him, to show we remember what he has taught us. And we sing through to the end the long droning ballads of forsaken love, to which he learned all the words when he was a boy. In the shallows where the stream is divided by a sandbar, we take hands and for a while make a bridge the width of the stream, Neil in the middle. It all affects us, the deep of the woods and the songs, as though we are legendary maidens drowned in the deep salt sea.
It is only when we are going up the wooden back stairs onto the porch and then into the house that we know we have been gone longer than long. We smell onions frying. Aunt Grace is preoccupied, moving over the length of the two joined kitchen rooms, for the stove is in the larger room with the table, and the sink and refrigerator are in the smaller pantry room, the countertops here and there. Everybody is at the table. Waiting. When Neil comes in and sits down, still wearing the straw hat, it’s as though they relax and tense simultaneously, preparing for him. When he passes Aunt Grace, going for a drink, he slides an ice cube down her dress front and she yelps and squirms around to dislodge it, then leaves the room to remove it. We all laugh like crazy.
Rossie calls from the yard for the four of us to come out. “Hey, I got a new shiner. I want to show you.” He sounds friendly and we let him talk us in closer to him, the way we draw Queenie toward us with grain when we want to ride her. He wants us to admire the new marble he has won in a game. We don’t understand his moods.
“Honest,” he says. He stands across from us, holding out his hand. We stand like draft horses, shifting nervously, unwinking, even afraid of a shadow. Then he empties the whole sack of marbles and we are caught. They roll and spin, are beautiful, some clear as jewels, and in others shattered crystals resemble sugar or milky spills. We are impressed that he has so many, and the shiner is mammoth. He impresses us further by giving each of us one—he lets us pick. We love him again and want to take care of him, this neglected and fatherless boy.
He wants to show us a new trick. He lies on the grass and raises his knees. His plan is for us to balance on the bottoms of his feet, full length, while he gives us rides up and down, back and forth. He wants Jenny to go first because she is his favorite because she is sensible. We all take turns then and we like doing it a lot so that when he offers one of us an honest-to-God flip we all want one. Celia goes first—she asks him to be careful and gives him her hands. The next thing we know, she is off on the ground some distance away, as if she has flown there. Now she is still.
“You killed her,” we say, and go to her. She opens her eyes when we lean over her. “What happened?” Her voice is hollow-sounding. We think she is pretending, trying to get attention. “What do you mean, what happened? You were doing the trick.” We want to hit her.
Her face is very white and she doesn’t answer. “Don’t be dumb,” we tell her, and lie down beside her on the grass, watching the first coming of evening, lavender among the dark branches. Rossie has gone away and we wonder about him, how he can be this way and the other way we know him too, the way he is sometimes in bed at night with one of us. Those nights, it seems to us in our attic beds as though we are together and forgotten in an isolated tower. The cars out on the highway that sometimes splash the walls with their lights proceed like our thoughts, solitary and dreamlike, at a great distance. Sometimes there is a mashed and wrecked car brought into the garage down the highway, late at night, and if we wake up we get out of bed to watch the crane drop the car, watch the spinning red light. In the morning we will go across to see the car; sometimes there is blood on the seat or mixed in with the windshield glass. After the night is quiet, we feel lonely and shivery, and if Rossie is there he gets into one of the beds and waits until only one of us is awake beside him. We are so far away from the rest of the world, up in the branches of the trees, it is as if the curving stairway is a fragile mooring line on the end of which we bob and drift. Soft and warm and secret, we touch each other and in that way we are able to fall asleep. In the mornings afterwards we fight. We are ashamed because of what we can mean to each other. We want everyone to believe that we despise Rossie, that he despises us. Everybody is fooled. Except Neil maybe. He knows about boys; his lip curls up at the very mention. He says he wishes Rossie were his own boy—for about five minutes.<
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Now we get up and walk toward the house and Celia stumbles a little and wants to know what happened. We ignore her, looking at the lights which appear in various rooms of the house, lights that have been left on, for days maybe, a negligence that drives Gram wild with the waste and her bills. As we go in we still hear everybody laughing. We have forgotten for a moment that Neil is here.
“I don’t know how Grace does it,” Aunt Elinor says. “Do you know that when I’m by myself in the city I don’t even boil water.” That seems natural enough to us, her New York affairs far removed from the minor concerns of food and drink. We are sitting on the dining room floor, beginning to play gin rummy, but we watch Aunt Grace move back and forth and we listen to their talk.
Neil begins, says, “That never was a favorite of mine anyway,” meaning Elinor’s boiled water.
Aunt Libby says, “You know, it’s the truth—what Momma says: If I used a barrel of butter and cream in everything I make, you’d rave over my cooking too. But I think Grace is the best cook.” She says this with the impartiality of someone definitely not in the running.
“Well, I never will understand what all the fuss is about anyway,” Aunt Rachel says. “Seems to me anybody that can read can cook.”
“Hear, hear,” Neil says. This is it, what he’s wanted. “That explains it, Ellie. You can’t read. And all this time you’ve hidden it. By golly, I wish one of you barmaids”—he turns away from the table so he can see us watching and listening to him—“would take off a little time and teach your auntie to read. She’d probably be a good study. Although, considering your spelling, I don’t know. Maybe none of you can read.” He gets the disgusted look that we see sometimes when he says privately to us, “I don’t know how I ever got tied up with such a bunch of stupes.” Still they all are laughing; it comes out of their love for each other and the keenness of its trance. Aunt Elinor laughs too, expansively and musically, the way she does everything.