Little Sister Death

by William Gay

  I don’t know if I could do that or not.

  Are you saving yourself for posterity or what?

  I guess I don’t know if I can do it.

  Well, Pauline said, a shrug in her voice, you’re a writer. It’s your decision to make.

  I’ll write you in a day or two and let you know.

  By the time he got back to his beer and the ballgame, his mind was already busy thinking of a ghost story. He couldn’t focus on the ballgame. He always enjoyed reading M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House was one of his favorite novels. Binder, in his youth, had always been interested in the supernatural, had felt some deep and nameless affinity for the questions that did not have any answers.

  Halfdazed from the heat and from the beer he’d drunk Binder went into a used bookstore on Clark and began to browse. He bought a halfdozen books from a shelf marked OCCULT ARTS AND SCIENCES, selecting volumes with no criteria save their titles, choosing those with ghost or haunting or poltergeist, passing over those on astrology and spiritualism and out-of-body contact. With the paper bag of books under his arm he turned into the first bar he saw and ordered a Hamm’s, took it and the books to a back booth under the air conditioner, and studied them critically.

  Not much here. Ghosts in American Houses. Fifty Great Ghost Stories. He hesitated on an oversized paperback, for the title stirred some memory he had lost. The book was covered with thick red paper, typescript in black, no illustration. It had been published by some house he had never heard of, one he guessed was out of business long ago, or perhaps the book had even been privately printed by a vanity press.

  The Beale Haunting by J. R. Lipscomb. J. R. Lipscomb was not given to modesty, Binder figured, for the book was subtitled: The Authentic History of Tennessee’s Mysterious Talking Goblin, the Greatest Wonder of the Nineteenth Century.

  He opened the book and with a shock of recognition saw an ink drawing of a girl, buxom and distraught, the words beneath: VIRGINIA BEALE, FAERY QUEEN OF THE HAUNTED DELL.

  He suddenly remembered the Beale haunting, saw immediately that fate, coincidence, and synchronicity had played into his hands. This had happened in Tennessee, two hundred miles and a hundred years from his home. He remembered an old issue of Life magazine from his childhood, a Halloween number with an article called “The Seven Greatest American Ghost Stories” or something of that nature. There had been two pages on the Beale haunting.

  That night he read the book cover to cover, then lay sleepless thinking about it, his brain striving to postulate a solution. It grew in his mind, tolled there some evocation of familiarity until he found himself obscurely homesick for a place he had never been.

  The book was amateurish and extravagantly overwritten and mawkishly sentimental in its treatment of the Beale family and their travails, but Binder was fascinated. It was a clear case of material transcending style. On the surface it was a story of a family’s relocation from North Carolina to Tennessee in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was a piece of history of the Tennessee wilderness, a story of pretty, teenaged Virginia Beale, whose wellordered life was shortly to be shattered. The tale deepened and darkened with the advent of the haunting and the ultimate descent into madness and bloody violence. Beneath the surface it seemed to Binder saturated with erotic Freudian symbolism, and he wondered if anyone had ever read the book in quite that way before.

  He had to write a book about it; it seemed an unmined wealth of material. He wanted to let his mind play with the facts, rearrange them to his whims, find answers to the questions of rationality the book raised. A plan had already begun forming in his mind. He was burnt out on Chicago, had no desire to be here when the hot brassy summer changed to wind and snow.

  The next day he bought an atlas of road maps. There it was. Beale Station, Tennessee, population 2,842. He could hardly believe it. The story had read like a dark fairy tale. It was like looking on a map and finding Magonia, leafing through a telephone book and finding a listing for Borley Rectory.

  Beale Station, 1982

  The real estate agent was named Greaves. He was a heavyset man in hornrimmed glasses and he had the professional gladhanding air of the successful businessman about him. He sat behind a desk littered with deeds and plats and advertising brochures, chainsmoking Lucky Strikes and drinking tepid coffee out of Styrofoam cups.

  Yes, sir, he said. If banker Qualls told you that then he told you right. I have the only section of the Beale farm that’s available at any price.

  The banker said the place had been split up quite a bit.

  Oh my, yes. Originally it was over sixteen hundred acres, but that was way back in the eighteen hundreds. The only remaining section that could be called the Beale farm runs only sixty-two acres, but the house has been continually maintained and I guess you could call it the old homeplace.

  The house? You mean old Jacob Beale’s house? I understood that was torn down years ago.

  No, no. Well, the original log house was torn down, but Beale had another house built, a better one. He lived there until his death and then his son lived there. Of course the house has been renovated, wired and plumbed and that sort of thing. Are you interested enough to drive out and take a look at it?

  That’s why I’m here.

  Greaves arose. And that’s why I’m here, he said.

  Outside it was blinding hot, the sun searing white off the decks of parked cars. The sky was a bright cloudless blue. Binder paused to put on sunglasses, Greaves clipping dark lenses over his spectacles.

  We’ll go in the Jeep, Greaves said. The road’s not real good going in.

  On the way Binder tried to find out all Greaves knew about the Beales, but the real estate agent professed to know very little at all. Or any Beales either, there being none remaining in the town that had been named for them. Greaves was handling the property for a descendant in Memphis, a great-great-granddaughter who was not even named Beale anymore.

  Binder rode in silence then, watching the country slip past, the ends of cornrows clocking past like spokes in a neverending wheel, fields of heat-blighted corn segueing into dusty fencerows of sumac and honeysuckle and elderberry, all talcumed alike with thick accretions of dust from the slipstreams of passing automobiles. Here and there a tidy white farmhouse tucked well back from the road in the shade of a grove of trees, a distant tractor slowmoving and noiseless, towing a great wake of white dust.

  He guessed whatever had afflicted the Beales had driven them apart and ultimately scattered them like a handful of thrown stones. He didn’t know what he had expected, or even what he had hoped for. A descendant, perhaps, who would tell him old stories heard at Daddy’s knees. Hearthside memories you couldn’t buy with gold. Old foxed papers in spidery penscrawls, journals from a pastoral corner of dementia.

  The road kept branching off, steadily deteriorating until the Jeep seemed to be leaping from one raincut gully to the next, steadily ascending, the red road winding through a field promiscuous with wildflowers and goldenrod, leveling out when the cedar row began. He smelled the cedars, faintly nostalgic, the road straightening and moving between their trunks, and then in the distance he could see the house.

  A great graywhite bulk looming against the greenblack of the riotous summer hills, tall and slateroofed and stately and, he thought instantly, profoundly malefic. He was suddenly of two minds about it: he wanted to flee back to Chicago and he wanted the peace he intuitively felt he could find within its walls. There was a timeless quality about it that seemed to diminish any problems he might have. In this bright moment of revelation he knew that it was less than he had expected, and incalculably more. Part log, part woodframe, part stone, it seemed to have grown at all angles like something organic turned malignant and perverse before ultimately dying, for Binder saw death in its eyes, last year’s leaves in driven windrows on the front porch, two of the second-story windows stoned blind or blown out by hunters’ guns. The house seemed mantled with an al
most indefinable sense of dissolution, profoundly abandoned, unwanted, shunned.

  Great God, Binder said.

  Greaves glanced at him sharply. Been added on to a time or two, hasn’t it?

  Once or twice, Binder agreed. Or else they kept changing their minds while it was under construction.

  Greaves stopped the Jeep. Water’s down there, he said, pointing southward where beyond gray and weathered cornstalks a stream moved bright as quicksilver in the sun. That comes down from the wellhouse. Good water, he added professionally, going into his pitch. Cold as ice, it’ll ache your teeth. The spring flows out of a cave on yonder hill.

  Beale Cave, Binder said automatically.

  That’s right, Beale Cave. But if you buy it you can call it Binder Cave or whatever you want.

  It surprises me that a house in that good a shape sat empty so long.

  Say it does? Hell. I could show you a halfdozen others in a ten-minute drive. They ain’t no work around here. And the big farmers have choked the little man right out of a livin. Folks is leavin here as they get old enough to have to work, cause there damn near ain’t nothin for em to do here. Starve or git on the welfare. Get them foodstamps. And the folks that’s stayin couldn’t keep up no such place as that.

  I guess that’s right.

  What do you work at?

  Right now I am sort of looking for work.

  Greaves produced a ring of keys large as a grapefruit, selected one, unlocked the deadbolted double doors, opened them onto a foyer the size of Binder’s Chicago living room. Walls rose plumb and sheer to a dizzying height. A staircase climbed into near-dark shadows. Arched doors opened left and right, shadowy furniture crouched shapeless in shroudlike draping.

  It’s furnished, Binder said in surprise.

  Oh yes. The furniture goes with it. It was rented as is until two years ago. Then Mrs. Lindsay decided to sell it.

  You mean people lived here as recently as two years ago?

  Certainly they did. Two old ladies, sisters they was. The Misses Abernathy. What did you expect? The house is a little rundown, couple of panes of glass out, but it’s certainly sound as a dollar, and it’s been kept up. Why does it surprise you that folks lived here?

  I don’t know, Binder said lamely. I thought the Beales were farmers. This doesn’t look like the sort of house a farmer would build.

  The Beales were wealthy, for those times anyway. And Drewry seemed to wind up with all of it; he lived here until his death. Greaves lit a cigarette, stood for a moment cupping the dead match. Mr. Binder, you look around all you want to. I’m gonna sort of inspect the outside. See what needs painting.

  All right.

  Greaves turned in the doorway. You get lost just holler right loud. I’ll be where I can hear you.

  Cold smell of long burntout fires, hot smell of wood baking in the sun. The dry nearmetallic drone of dirtdaubers plying their craft in the hot still air. A startled bird whirring to instantaneous life at the opening of a bedroom door, flying with blind desperation into the broken glass of a window, a tinkle of glass striking stone two stories below. He looked down. Greaves in his khakis leaning against the Jeep, his round, bored face peering bemusedly up.

  He saw nothing out of the ordinary, heard nothing he could not account for. He went back downstairs into the shady yard.

  He told Greaves he wanted a six-month lease. Greaves shook his head. He didn’t know about that.

  My client wants a quick sale, he said. She hasn’t said a word to me about leasing.

  Well, give me an option to buy, then. If she’s been wanting a quick sale for two years and you haven’t gotten it yet then I don’t see what six months would hurt. I’d think she’d be glad to lease.

  Greaves looked pained, as if Binder had maligned his ability to sell real estate. Well, it’s not that I couldn’t have moved the place, Mr. Binder. It’s the times. There’s a recession on, money’s tight, and the interest rate is higher than a cat’s back.

  Binder was watching him. To say nothing of the place’s unsavory reputation, he said.

  Greaves took off his glasses, wiped them gently with tissue he took out of his shirt pocket. Without the glasses his blue eyes looked vulnerable and defenseless. When he put them on he looked at Binder with an expression almost of amusement. Now where did you hear that, Mr. Binder? Surely not from banker Qualls?

  No. Not from Mr. Qualls the banker. I read a book about this place.

  Say you did? Oh, I got your number now. The famous Beale haunting. All that stuff in the eighteen hundreds. Do you mean to stand here in the cold light of day and tell me man to man that you believe any of that bullshit?

  Binder just watched him, enjoying himself, imagining Greaves trying to figure out just how much he knew, amused too at the thought that the tales Greaves wanted to shield him from were the very tales that had brought him six hundred and fifty miles from Chicago, a hundred and thirty-five years too late.

  You only got half my number, Binder said. I heard about the other stuff, too. He was shooting blind and in the dark here, but knew with a blood-quickening certainty that he had been right.

  Greaves bit. You mean that Swaw business in the thirties? Mr. Binder, he said, looking away across the fields toward where the horizon ran, lush green folding into an austere blue of distance. You take a piece of land, any piece of land, and if a man had the longevity and the inclination to just sit and watch it for a hundred and fifty years, no telling what he’d see. You’d be surprised. People ain’t never been anything else besides people and ever now and then they’re going to slip up and do the same sickening things folks’ve been known to slip up and do before. And that don’t affect the land, neither. It don’t haunt it or cheapen it or wear it out. It’s still the same piece of ground it was in the beginning.

  I’ve just heard folks’ve seen things here. Lights and such.

  There’s certain folks that’ll see things most anywhere. Those Abernathy women lived here from…1966 to 1978, and never seen a light or heard a rat in the walls for all I know. Anyway, the rent money come the first of ever month regular as a clock ticking.

  Can you show me where the old houseplace was?

  I can’t today, he said, glancing at a wristwatch. I’ve got to show another place on Sinking Creek. But I can tell you good enough so’s you can find it.

  All right. Will you ask her about the lease?

  I sure will, Mr. Binder. I’ll do what I can. You sure you want it, ghosts and all?

  He called the motel the next afternoon. The place was Binder’s for six months. A bird in the hand, he figured.

  Jesus, a mall, Binder said, still not quite believing it. Beale Station with a Walmart and a McDonald’s and JCPenneys, a mall, everything.

  Cheer up, Corrie told him, laughing, opening the car door. It’s probably haunted too.

  Fairy Queen of the Haunted Mall, Binder said crossing the parking lot, Stephie skipping along before them, Corrie swinging on his arm.

  There was a brief magic to the day. They bought living-room drapes and kitchen curtains and a bedspread and curtains for Stephie’s room. Stephie begged for not one but two videocassettes of Disney’s Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Binder splurged on a pair of aviator sunglasses.

  To Corrie time seemed to accelerate, to move at a different pace than the time the homeplace ran on. They ate at McDonald’s and saw a movie at the multiplex and suddenly the day was gone and it was time to go home.

  They fell silent on the road ascending through the cedars. The house rose before them somber and still silent and imbued with the quality of patient waiting.

  Everybody out, Binder said. Home sweet home.

  Corrie gave him a swift callid look, as if to see was he serious or not.

  Corrie had been fighting nervousness all day by staying busy. Unpacking, replacing the faded curtains with her own, trying to force her mind blank, free of anything that would make her think of her father. Alone in the house, the afternoon seemed endless. S
he caught herself listening for footsteps. Once she thought she heard voices that led her from room to room, listening, but ultimately there was only the moribund silence of the July day.

  What could David be doing out there? she wondered. All there is is woods, how long does it take to look at a tree? She had a sudden image of David dying of snakebite. Hadn’t the real estate agent specifically warned them about snakes? Copperheads always been bad on Sinking Creek, he’d said. I wouldn’t feel right about my job if I didn’t warn you. Specially with this little blondheaded gal here.

  I could finish unpacking, she thought, seeing the cardboard boxes still stacked in the hall. But she hated the thought of it; anyway, what would she do with it? And it would just have to be repacked when they left.

  David had said he would help her, and she guessed he figured he had. He had unpacked his books and put them on shelves, cleaned his typewriter and changed the ribbon and arranged it on a makeshift desk he’d constructed of two filing cabinets and an old door he found in the toolshed. With his books shelved and his workspace prepared, David felt at home anywhere.

  The remaining boxes were all David’s as well, except for one or two belonging to their daughter, Stephanie. Magazines. David had a peculiar reverence for the printed word that apparently forbade him throwing away anything it was printed on, so that during their marriage they had moved from apartment to apartment an ever-increasing number of boxes filled with old Esquire, Playboy, Harper’s, battered old copies of Ramparts and Rolling Stone.

  She smiled wryly at one box marked STEPHANIE.

  He had apparently communicated this trait to his daughter; she was five years old and she already had her own twinebound box containing back numbers of Children’s Digest and Humpty Dumpty.

  The thought of Stephanie drew Corrie to the screen door. She heard the slow creak of the swing chains, saw Stephanie rocking listlessly. Stephie, as she was called, had her mother’s fair skin and hair, but temperamentally she seemed closer to David: she already showed signs of being as imaginative as he was. Corrie might have said over-imaginative. Sometimes David and Stephie seemed attuned to a wider spectrum of sensory impulses than Corrie knew existed.