Little Sister Death

by William Gay

  David taught her to read early. Her kindergarten teacher in Chicago had suspected she was gifted, and a series of tests administered to her bore this out. David reacted to the news as if he had been personally and entirely responsible. I told you so, he kept telling Corrie, as if she had maintained that the child was a congenital idiot. Or as if his genes had been transmuted to Stephie pristine and untainted by Corrie’s. Though she guessed that wasn’t fair; after all, it had been David who had read to her from the time he had gotten the child’s attention, and at a period in his life when time had been at a premium.

  She opened the door and went out onto the porch. Stephie sat idly turning the pages of a book about gnomes, but she was no longer looking at them with any semblance of interest.

  She looked up at Corrie. Can we watch TV?

  No, we can’t. Sorry.

  Why not?

  Daddy didn’t hook it up to the antenna yet.

  David had said that he would, but Corrie had turned it on a little past noon and there was only the blank white screen, the white noise of static emanating from the speaker. The lead wire wasn’t even hooked to the little screws on the back of the set, and when she finally found a screwdriver and leant over the set to fix it she had seen through the window the antenna itself leaned against the back porch wall, still in its cardboard carton. Maybe he would tomorrow. Or tonight, if he came in in time.

  Corrie had left the sound on anyway, turned all the way up. At least it was something out of this century. Nothing else in the house seemed to be.

  Don’t you want to play in the playhouse Daddy fixed you?

  She closed the book. I suppose so, she said. She arose and went somewhat grudgingly down the flagstone steps toward the playhouse under the elm. She played as if it were work she was forced to do, Corrie thought, thinking of herself. Today she had felt like a child forced to play grownup in a cavernous nineteenth-century house with someone else’s furniture, someone else’s past.

  Though not forced, she thought hastily. David had been scrupulously fair about that. It had been a joint decision. Except that David had thought of it, David had been the one enthused about it, and David had a way of leading you along on the ragged edge of his enthusiasm until you were someplace you hadn’t planned to be, wondering how you got there. She could have gone to Orlando and stayed with her older sister Ruthie and her husband Vern; she could have stayed in Chicago. But she knew that David would have done it anyway. He would have come alone, and that would have been worse.

  David had been a drifter when he married her, and though he had made an enormous effort to change or at least convince her he had changed, there was still a lot of drifter in him: a refusal to put down roots, to think of any one place as home, a disinclination to do for very long anything he didn’t want to do. He just wouldn’t be bored. There was no pretense of politeness about him. She had heard him kill a hundred boring conversations just by shutting up.

  A goddamned hippie, her father (her father: the word fell through her mind like a stone settling slowly through deep water) had called him contemptuously. Among other things, a lot worse. Those had been hard times, when she and her father had both said ugly unforgivable things to each other, things that still rang in her ears. She had always been her father’s favorite, and suddenly a gulf had opened between them she couldn’t close. She hadn’t had an excuse for the things she had said, though her father had the best one in the world: he was dying of an undiagnosed brain tumor, was already dying the moment she accused him of just going crazy and mean.

  Even as she tried to think of David, another level of her mind twisted in guilty pain and she realized how much she missed her father. Grief cut her clean and deep as a surgeon’s scalpel, and in that moment she would have clawed the dirt from his casket to see his face.

  She forced herself to quit thinking about that, to make her mind gray and blank as the television screen she was watching. But it wouldn’t completely go away, and a part of it wondered detachedly how much would he have decayed, would I know him, could I stand to touch him.

  She forced her mind, by a sheer exertion of will, to forsake her father’s face, to think of David. She seemed to have known him forever. He was five years older than Corrie, but in certain respects a generation apart. In 1968, when he had been listening to Bob Dylan, she had been thirteen. There were fundamental differences that showed even in so insignificant a thing as the music they liked: he still played Dylan and the Stones, she liked middle-of-the-road and country, neither of which David could tolerate. He said it was junk, Muzak, throwaway plastic. He said Dylan was a poet, that if he hadn’t grown up in an electronic society Dylan would have been writing his apocalyptic visions for the little magazines, and he heard dark and sinister undercurrents in the music of the Rolling Stones that she just didn’t hear.

  She was like her father: fiscally responsible, possessed of a healthy respect for the dollar. David simply didn’t care, though she guessed that was changing. Ever since they’d learned she was pregnant again, David seemed to think about nothing but ways to make money. He had been just as happy broke as he was when he had money. When he came back from Vietnam, he was discharged in California and blew his mustering outpay on a typewriter and a Suzuki motorcycle, which she had never even seen. He had wrecked it in Tempe, Arizona, only one state out of California, and had just walked off and left it.

  The word Vietnam had dark connotations for Corrie, like a spectre watching over their shoulders. She blamed it for the changes in David. She had been thirteen when he left for his tour of duty, and up until then he had never spoken a dozen words to her in her life. She barely knew him. He was cleancut, a little reserved maybe, but the image of the boy next door. When she saw him four years later he looked.not exactly grubby, but not exactly the boy next door anymore. His hair was long, not shoulderlength or anything, but long, and he had a beard. But the worst thing was his eyes. They had changed, looked at you cold and impassively out of the dark beard-shadowed face, as if nothing much mattered to them one way or another.

  There was a strong air of single-minded purpose about him, too much intensity: you couldn’t call him laid back. She really believed he could do anything he wanted to do. Even for a while when he had long hair and a beard and had gone about in old Army fatigues he had always known who he was, what he was, what to do about it.

  He was a writer. Even then he had been writing stories and sending them away and getting them back along with the little impersonal rejection slips. But Corrie saw that David had known he was a writer; he was just waiting for the world to catch up, which it finally had, in Chicago.

  He’s not much fun, is he? Ruthie had said before they were married. Ruthie had tried to seduce him, she guessed. David never said so, but Ruthie always tried to seduce everybody at some time or other, especially Corrie’s boyfriends. And the occasional man who didn’t succumb she dismissed as being no fun anyway.

  Actually he had been quite a bit of fun. He could be charming when he wanted to, and he had wanted to quite frequently then, when they were going together, getting engaged, when things weren’t pushing at him so.

  He could be persuasive, too. He had made love to her the first night she had gone out with him. She had been a virgin, couldn’t quite figure how it happened, and the next day she was assailed with guilt, not at the loss of some intangible something she had never been aware of possessing but at the idea that she had been so easy and at the thought that David would think her cheap. She was angry at herself, and a little puzzled. Why had she let him when she wouldn’t let anyone else?

  It took her a while to see that she had done it simply because he had wanted her too. He had wanted her with the focused intensity he applied to all the things he wanted. No one else had wanted her that intensely. He had just assumed she was going to let him, and she had.

  The descending twilight was hot and still. A blood sun of eventide. Silence save the sleeping droning of insects, the spill of water over the shelf of
limestone. The rabbit came up out of the thick ferment of wild peppermint by the springhouse and leapt nimbly stone to stone across the damp dark loam. The air here was cool and it smelled richly of mint.

  The rabbit went up the path that bordered the creek. It paused crossing a sandbar where a water moccasin lay curled. The snake stirred, somnolent eyes becoming alert, its entire attention focused on the rabbit. The rabbit gave no indication of fear. It watched the snake levelly with its black shoebutton eyes. The snake seemed to sense something amiss: it abruptly slithered up the branch, dropped with a splash into the creek, fled across the water in a series of S-shaped undulations.

  The rabbit turned. She was a young rabbit, halfgrown perhaps, lean and stringybodied. She went up the embankment, feet scuttling in the sand, came out into a field of red clover. The clover was in bloom and the air was filled with droning bees and the red clover perfume but the rabbit did not pause to feed. She skirted the darker side of the field and went through a thick hedgerow grown up over a splitrail fence. She came up through the garden spot, watching the house. Her nose crinkled delicately as she scented the air.

  She was watching the girl. The girl was playing under the dark of a beech tree.

  Stephie came slowly up the steps, stopped and sat down on the porch. She looked out toward the toolshed at the lower edge of the yard, upward and beyond it to the green and umber sedgefield rising to meet the dark line of trees. Corrie knew she was looking for David. He had been ascending the ridge when Stephie had seen him last.

  When is Daddy coming in? I’m hungry.

  I don’t know. When he comes.

  What does that mean, when he comes?

  It just means your father does things the way he wants to and when he wants to.

  Is that a good way to be?

  Corrie paused. The child was watching her with calm, level eyes. Impersonal as a tape recorder, Corrie thought against her will. But this sounded like one of Stephie’s loaded questions: she seemed almost hypersensitive to any criticism that David might receive.

  I suppose it is if you can do it. Some people can’t. I can’t, and sometimes when people do that kind of thing it makes it hard on other people.

  Why is he hunting for a place an old house used to be?

  Your daddy is writing a book. Sometimes he acts peculiar when he’s busy doing that. He…he gets involved with what he’s writing about.

  I’m going to be a writer.

  Corrie knew that Stephanie was sometimes disquieting to other people, especially when they listened to their conversations. They didn’t quite know how to talk to her, never knew what she knew and what she didn’t. Sometimes her friends had treated Stephanie as if she were afflicted with a disease with a high mortality rate instead of merely being precocious; Corrie herself thought of them as a family comprised of three adults, two regular-sized and one trial-sized.

  And one on the way, she thought, a twinge of unfocused worry flickering through her.

  He came onto the place with an air of discovery, an archeologist seeking the chaos of an older time. He hunkered in the windy sedge at the rim of the hill and examined it. He could see how the old homeplace and yard below him were set in the epicenter of a saucerlike depression in the earth perhaps a half mile in diameter, the house set at the end of a dual lane of cedars that flanked the drive, down which ran droves of curiosity-seekers to hear spectral voices and obscene babbling, watch phantom figures and lights drift about the fields. According to contemporary accounts, few came away disappointed. Binder didn’t plan on being disappointed either. He felt a growing obsession to unstring the secrets the house held, to unravel the Gordian knot time and myth had only tightened.

  Where the house had stood was a tangle of riotous weeds and brush, the twin chimneys rising starkly out of the undergrowth. It was caught in the slow sweep of failing light, the sky beyond it redorange and metallic, flooded with garish colors as if all the light in the world had pooled there, congesting momentarily at the horizon and then draining off the rim of the world. Struck by the gradations of light and shadow Binder watched in an almost rapt stillness the subtle changes the shifting light brought, objects altering slowly as if undergoing some metamorphosis at their core, their very cells being rearranged. Though he was not an artist he studied the scene with the intensity of a painter, eyes marking color and shading, the tilt of the sedge, the darkening and accruing shadows seemingly drawn out of the earth itself.

  He was watching the homeplace and he was pondering the nature of its evil, not wondering if there was evil indeed there but knowing it with an absolute certainty that he applied to very few things. What triggered it? he wondered. How did it work? And how did it ever come to be there? Something old and evil had happened here, so evil that everything that had come after was just echoes, just spreading ripples in the water so intense that Beale and his family had ultimately abandoned the house and rebuilt in the place he was now moving into. Though that didn’t help, did it, Old Jake? Binder thought. Whatever it was just walked across the ridge and knocked at your door.

  Binder had seen old pictures where the house itself looked ungainly and out of proportion, the original log structure added to with seemingly with no eye for symmetry or even common sense, so that ultimately the house took on an air of inherent arrogance or just the unmindful disconcern of the very old, serene, and timeless.

  There was, he saw again, juxtaposition of lineament that jarred him. No angle seemed to be true to the eye’s expectation. The horizontal seemed slightly out of level, the vertical just a fraction out of plumb. Perhaps this very imbalance lay at the root of things; an eye perpetually beguiled and a brain constantly reevaluating these images might draw insanity to it like a comforter. Yet he knew the evil predated the house, and he looked farther to the land itself, the sedgefield running stonily down the hill to the outbuildings, to what must have been the carriage house, and far beyond that, the ruins of the slave cabins.

  It was an evil perhaps indigenous to the slope and rise of the land, to the stark austerity of the woods surrounding the ruined plantation. For whatever course, it was a verifiable fact that evil had happened here. He had the book, the old newspapers. Such word-of-mouth stories as he had been able to collect. Arcs had fallen here, and fallen again. Blood had run like the proverbial water. And before that, in the nineteenth century, the homeplace had been the setting for a sort of pastoral haunting so bizarre and irrefutable that word of mouth and finally an article in so prestigious a source as the Saturday Evening Post had drawn the curious hordes to listen for voices in the night whispers, to see Casper candles flit about the fields.

  He had come equipped to unravel it all, to line the yellow sheets of foolscap with the place’s true history. It was a book he was compelled to write. By what? His interest, the writer’s interest, by some misalignment of his consciousness. What was his fault, how had it picked him?

  Or had he picked it?

  On the way back he passed through the old graveyard. Abandoned by the living, only the dead kept their watch. He sat down on one of the headstones. After a while he arose and started back, stopping for a moment at Jacob Beale’s headstone. It seemed imbued with lost knowledge, secrets carried to the grave, deadbolts he could open could he just find the right sequence of numbers.

  JACOB WILLIAM BEALE 1785 ∼ 1844

  TORTURED BY A SPIRIT, NOW AT REST

  ORIGINAL STONE STOLEN IN 1937, THIS ROCK PLACED IN 1941

  He didn’t linger here. He had seen it before and it held nothing new for him.

  It was a scant two hundred yards over the sedgefield and down the ridge to the house. Here he stopped again, studying the place. There was a look of great age about it. Save the anomolaic four-wheel-drive truck parked in the yard, he could have stepped backward into the middle of the previous century.

  Behind Binder the field sloped continually upward in a stony tapestry of sedge and faded into a blue wood. That was where the old woman watched him from blueberry eyes in
the warm, quilted leather of her face. Her hair was black without a streak of gray and frizzed out from beneath the man’s felt hat jammed on her head. She wore walking shoes and a shapeless pair of men’s corduroy pants and a gray sweater whose buttons were split away and she had clasped the front with safety pins. She was old, but she looked wiry and tough, as if her bones had been strung on rawhide thongs and her skin tanned to leather. Her hands were big-knuckled and large as a man’s.

  One of these hands clasped the wadded mouth of a gunny sack. Something stirred in it. She lowered the weight to the ground to rest her arm, still watching the distant figure of the man, thinking, Well there you are, sure enough. Reckon how long you’ll be here? She released her grip on the sack momentarily. As if sensing this tentative freedom, whatever was in the bag leapt spasmodically against the restraining burlap, but she stayed it with a foot and went back to watching him. The bag stilled.

  Just like a man, she thought. Look for an hour when there’s nothing in the world to see. You needn’t go lookin for it anyway, she told Binder’s angular figure. When it gits ready for you it’ll come huntin you up.

  Her shadow had lengthened, she felt the lessening of the sun’s weight. She took up the bag and slung it across a shoulder. She would have liked to have watched the man longer but she did not want to be on the Beale farm after dark, and besides, the woods were full of dead treetops where logs had been cut and hauled away and they lay like deadfalls awaiting tripping. So at length she turned toward deeper woods, came out in a clearing above which a hawk wheeled, fleeing the raucous tormenting of a flock of crows. She stopped to watch. The hawk ascended into a darkening void, vanished. A whippoorwill called from the shadowed wood and she went on.