Little Sister Death

by William Gay

  He didn’t watch TV anymore except videocassettes with Stephie. He particularly didn’t watch the news anymore. It had come to seem absurd, the curious doings of folk he wanted no truck with, folks fighting and dying in obscure countries for no reason he could fathom, Mercedes-driving good-old-boy evangelists with the clayest of feet, caught in seedy motel rooms playing doctor with whores.

  It wasn’t real, none of them were and he wanted no part of any of it. The IRS wasn’t real, nor the CIA or the FBI or IRA or IBM or NBC. It was a game, a complex invention of boys playing grownup, a way to while away the time until the dark fell.

  What was real was the slow timeless heart of midday, the sleepy drone of insects, the almost imperceptible murmur of the creek, and the hypnotic way the greengold pillars of light fell shifting through the trees into the haunted dell. The endless-looking fields that undulated away toward vague blue-looking woods, fireflies bobbing random as spirit lights. These are things that matter, he thought, and wondered about the wasted years when he hadn’t known, with a kind of resigned regret. These are things with an aura of permanence about them.

  That and the intangible mystery he could not put his finger on, which changed and teased like a will-o’-the-wisp, achingly nostalgic, faintly erotic, a musky heady taste in the back of his mouth, like a lost fragment of a dream or a life he ought to be able to retrieve could he just put his mind to it.

  At some clockless hour he arose stiffly from the typewriter and placed what finished manuscript he had in a manila envelope and fastened the thumbclasp and stored it in a desk drawer. Corrie had always read his work and let him know in subtle ways if she thought he was getting a little flamboyant but he was going to sit on this. He wasn’t sure if it was good or bad or indifferent but he did know it was the stuff of nightmares.

  He also knew it would be useless to try sleeping for another two or three hours: he slept now when the house slept, as if in some curious way their cycles had become synchronous, catching catnaps in the daytime, dozing in the hot still honeysuckle afternoons. He knew the house was awake now, he could stand in its center and feel its heart beating around him, synced with his own breathing when he breathed, feel its attention on him, alert and focused as a cat watching a broken-winged bird.

  He went out. The night was hot and still, holding its breath, not a leaf in motion. The creek murmurous across the polished stone. A whippoorwill called from some vague hollow far away and lost in the dark.

  The toolshed was burnished silver in the moonlight, the rusted roof draining off what light there was, the canted door showing a wedged-shaped section of darkness. It was like no darkness that ever was, at once forbidding and achingly evocative and utterly foreign. His feet were damp with dew soaking through his sneakers before he even knew he was approaching it.

  He went in the door, the rusted hinge protesting, a darkness here moonlight would not defray. At first he could see nothing, stood swaying in the hot still dark like a man unbalanced by wind or coalesced out of the darkness as if he were consciously creating them, and coincident with his dim vision felt the heat just leave, suddenly just not there anymore, trickles of perspiration down his ribcage gone icecold, the still fetid air, the cold charnel smell of the grave, and the hair prickled on his forearms and at the back of his neck.

  There was a manlike bulk crouched in the corner of the toolshed. Heavyset hunkered the way a country man might sit, whittling, and very still, just something manlike and undistinguished moving the old singletrees and tracechains, smell that seemed to take him down bowered dusty roads to a long time ago, a smell compounded of sweat and tobacco and the smell of the warm earth and horses and the springtime smell of time itself, distillate and aphrodisiac.

  Then the dark bulk stirred and a slurred voice said out of the darkness: Get you a little drink good buddy.

  In a space between the boxing over the door lintel of the toolshed he found a half pint of whiskey three-quarters full: somebody’s hidey-hole, he guessed. He had long become obsessive about searching for artifacts of the place’s past, old bottles, broken tools, nameless chunks of rusted metal, an old one-bitted ax head he found beneath the rotted floorboards. Anything with threads of the past stringing off it, if you didn’t know what the lock looked like, who knew what the key might be?

  He unscrewed the cap and drank. Sweet Jesus that’s awful, he said, and a low chuckle came from the corner of the toolshed. In the oblique moonlight he was someone else and he was somewhere he had never been before. He slid the bottle backhanded into a hippocket he hadn’t known he had and the dried-out brogan workshoes he was wearing chafed his ankles. He was walking through luxuriant thick wild oats that came up to his thighs, the path trending through them gleamed like quicksilver, vanished. The world was the same yet different.

  The house still sat on its knoll against the hillside but there was no light now, nothing but the brooding bulk of wood and stone and the moonlight on the windows and even the trees looked different, lusher, more opulent, and when he turned, there was a cornfield where no cornfield should be, the rows clocking away into nothingness, the stalks blueblack and gleaming.

  A dog brushed the calf of his leg and wended away, toward the creek, without noticing him. Somewhere along the creekbank lost to him in the shadows beneath the sycamores came a young girl’s laughter, achingly sweet and pure and nostalgic as the tinkling sound of some long-lost childhood carnival carillon. He was seized with longing so intense it ached in his chest, he wanted it always to keep, to drag out secretly and study it like a yellowed photograph, and he thought I am home, this is me, this is where I have been rambling down to all these years.

  The moon rode above him, cold and still as a world locked in ice. When he raised his head to study it, it was no moon he knew, a moon of other seasons comfortless and uncaring and utterly remote.

  A part of him stood aside and thought this is a dream, but I have got to remember this, there is something here I can use. Some lines from W. H. Auden drifted through his mind.

  The stars are not wanted now: put out every one:

  Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

  Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

  For nothing now can ever come to any good.

  The creaking of the toolshed hinges drew him slowly around; his body felt foreign to him, awkward, an older man’s body, ill-used and heavy. The canted door swung slowly outward on its one good hinge, and a tide of black blood erupted soundlessly onto the silver grass. The blood pooled in the lowbank near the creek, rising incrementally, foaming in the thick wild oats, eddying onto the worn footpath, staining the moonwhitened road that wound to the bridge. He could feel it lapping about his ankles.

  Then in an eyesblink it was gone and he could smell the dew and the wild oats again and three men were clambering over the wooden gate and dropping into the barn lot, dusting themselves off and crossing the yard toward the house, an old frockcoated man with muttonchop whiskers and a heavyset prosperous-looking man in a broad-brimmed hat and a felt-hatted black who walked with a stifflegged shambling gait. They seemed to be talking animatedly among themselves although he could hear no sound. One by one they vanished, as if they filed off the edge of the earth. Then a voice in Binder’s ear said, almost conversationally, Slit the little roundheeled whore’s throat, is what I’d do. A voice sourceless and genderless and somehow mechanical and Binder didn’t even wonder if it was talking to him or not.

  A weight of morning light on his eyelids, featureless yellow world, reality seeping in, he awoke by degrees, like a drunk remembering the places he was and the things he did. The toolshed, he thought. Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with me. He felt strange and dislocated, half afraid to open his eyes, caught in the strand of the dream he half wanted to hang onto. Come on, he said, you’re a tough guy. You can do it. He became aware of white ceilings, walls of deep rose, the comforting whir of the air conditioner. He remembered Corrie saying: You had too much to drink last night, and another par
t of his mind said, Hell yes, the electric pruner, that’s what the damn manlike bulk was.

  Corrie slept beside him, her dark hair tousled, a careless arm thrown across her face, and a wave of love and gratitude hit him with such force it left him dizzy. Then he saw the butcher knife. It had been inserted between Corrie’s pillow and the mattress, perhaps eight or ten inches. Beyond her tanned face he could see an inch or so of serrated blade and the fingergrip rosewood handle.

  He got up incrementally careful not to jar the bed, noticing without surprise that he was naked, his bare feet clotted with wild oat seeds, soundless across the carpet. She stirred as he eased the knife from beneath the pillow, her eyes opened beneath his face, startled and blue, so close. Lefthanded he slid the knife out of sight under the bed, stroked her cheek with his right. Her eyes were depthless and guileless, so close to his own, eyes you could drown in. Abruptly tears stung his eyes and he hid his face in the soft hollow of her throat. Why, baby, she said, and raised a tender hand to stroke his hair.

  It could work the TV now. Stephie had seen it do it with Pooh and Piglet twice. But intuitively she knew that it did not work the electronic things inside the back of the TV but with the things inside her mind or her head. Daddy said the brain was electronic too, just a very complex computer that ran on tiny bits of electricity, but she didn’t believe it and Mommy didn’t either. Mommy said God made it and no man could make anything approaching the mind because the mind was sacred. It had a soul, you unplug it and all it was was a bunch of junk.

  She had watched Pooh four or five times before and already knew it word for word, scene for scene. It was the one about the blustery day, when it was raining all over the Hundred Acre Wood.

  Daddy was taking a break from writing, and she was sitting on his lap in the recliner, the chair tilted back and Daddy’s socked feet bookending each side of the TV set, Mommy on the couch hemming a pair of curtains, a homey scene out of lxave It to Beaver.

  The soundtrack was singing, The rain, rain, rain came down, down, down. Pooh and Piglet and Tigger were rambling through the Hundred Acre Wood looking for a house for Owl, Tigger bounding on ahead. They came through a spinney of larch onto a stony field stumbling downhill in the sun, and at the bottom of the field stood the old toolshed, angular and oblique, in the midday heat, the sides encroached with poison oak, greenblack, and simultaneously with the sight of the toolshed Daddy jumped and she could feel the harsh intake of his breath in her hair. The image flickered, muted, as if some light tremor had jarred the Hundred Acre Wood, rumbled way beneath the earth. Daddy had relaxed against the cushions and she knew intuitively that he wasn’t seeing what she was anymore.

  Mommy was watching the set blandly, a half smile on her face, and Stephie knew that she hadn’t seen anything at all except Milne’s cartoon world.

  Pooh and Piglet and Tigger were clustered before the canted cedar door, gesturing and talking. Piglet seemed to be trying to convince them to go inside the toolshed, Pooh hanging back, he looked confused and frightened, Piglet tugging at his arm, impatient, at length dragging him into the darkness.

  Stephie leant forward, straining to see, Daddy said something murmurously and interrogatory, she couldn’t tell what. They were in now. She had seen with detached amazement that it was the same toolshed, the rotted floorboards rendered in Disney animation, the motley of tools strewn about the cartoon walls. Piglet had taken up an ax.

  Something sinister here, the soundtrack had altered, there was a hypnotic buzz in her ears. Above it Daddy said, What the hell, not in shock or disbelief. She was feeling a mild hint of irritation, as if the picture was messed up.

  Mommy looked up. What is it, David? she asked, precisely as Beaver Cleaver’s mother might have said it. David mumbled something she couldn’t hear.

  What?

  Hell of a thing to put in a cartoon for kids, he said, and looking up, Stephie saw that he looked confused, as if he was himself not quite certain what he had seen. She turned back to the TV

  I think you left your mind in gear and it rolled away, Corrie said.

  Piglet drove the ax into Pooh’s forehead, rocked it back and forth to dislodge it from the bone that anchored it, swung it savagely again and Pooh went down, his face pumping blood, not cotton or Styrofoam or other synthetic fiber, but a thick gout of foaming scarlet, Pooh trying to crawl toward the door and the ax falling metronomically, bisecting a cartoon rendering of flesh and muscle and splintered bone, Tigger making a mad scramble toward the door that the ax suddenly blocked, and before she knew what happened, she was vomiting, her stomach recoiling and spewing out a steaming barrage of hot acidic liquid onto David’s lap, David clutching her up, saying, Jesus, what’s the matter, Stephie simultaneously vomiting and crying, at last choking out, Turn it off, to Corrie who had jumped up startled, the curtains fallen and forgotten.

  Later, she was sick off and on all night, Corrie up with her, up and down to the bathroom. Coming through the living room sometime in the small hours of the morning, Stephie was startled to find the TV on, David stretched out on the couch watching it.

  Jesus, David. Pooh at three o’clock in the morning? Corrie said disgustedly.

  Daddy, Stephie said, and when he didn’t reply she thought he was asleep: but when she approached him she saw he wasn’t, his eyes were open but did not seem to remark her, instead watched with a kind of bemused confusion the frolicking of cartoon animals on the particolored screen.

  At night there were dreams of old plagues that the morning would not quite erase. From the first, the house just did not feel right to Corrie. It just did not feel right, like any house where a family would live and raise children. She could not quite put her finger on the word she wanted, and suddenly the word unclean drifted into her mind. That’s what it is, she thought, the place is filthy: though not in a literal sense, for the people Greaves hired had certainly done an adequate job. The place was spotless, as spotless as you would expect a hundred-year-old house to be. The trim was newly painted, the hardwood floors stripped and sanded and revarnished, the brightly colored drapes she had chosen should have brought life and freshness into the rooms, but they did not. The house seemed to absorb everything into itself, to darken everything a shade, to suck the very life out of it and leave a dry husk.

  For no reason she could discover, the house made her think of the grandfather who had died when she was a child. Diseased, she thought, that is precisely the word I meant. There is something very wrong with the house, it has a cancerous growth in the insides that keeps ticking away like a time bomb. There seemed to be a dark malignancy in the bowels of the house. And after this, she became aware of its smell. Beneath the smell of paint and varnish and the crisp smell of new fabric, there was an undercurrent of malevolence, a smell no amount of cleaning would erase, the persistent seeping yellowbrown odor of the sickroom where someone is dying a slow death from cancer.

  Diseased. And the house, something in the light or lack of it, played tricks on you. It caught you when you weren’t paying attention and brought you back. You thought you saw things out of the corners of your eyes. She didn’t believe in ghosts, thought the whole thing absurd, but there was no way around admitting that once she thought she glimpsed a woman in a green dress pass the window. She turned and it was gone. The ground floor of the house was flanked by a covered porch on the front and both sides and that was another thing she hated, the way the house looked and the sickening smell of flowers, not living flowers but the drying withering smell of banked funeral flowers. The ground-floor porches were too wide and they gave the house a disproportionate aspect, absurdly like a humped old woman with full skirts. The woman had been walking up the west side of the porch toward the front of the house, but of course there had been no one there and Stephie was playing quietly in the front yard and she felt like a fool for looking.

  It just became one of the things she didn’t think about much lately, the things she filed away to be looked into later. Like the way David was ab
sorbed in what he was writing, so much more so than with the first book. He didn’t even want to go into town anymore and put it off as long as possible. And the way Stephie did little except sit in front of the TV or reread books she had read dozens of times. Every day was waiting, every day was like life lived in airline terminals, bus stations, the waiting rooms of expensive specialists in terminal diseases.

  But mostly the way one day segued into the next, each the deadly same, the hot sun baking everything, the white dusty road empty as a broken promise, not even a Bible salesman or a lost tourist to break the monotony. Days came and they went and she forced the inevitable frustration out of her mind, almost physically pushing them away, thinking, It’s only for the summer, one summer out of all the summers of our lives, it seemed a minimal price to pay: for she knew the book was working. She had read the letter from David’s agent, but she had known already. If the book worked the way David wanted and everybody believed in it and promoted it and it was a bestseller, she could quit worrying about the money. The money and Stephie’s school and all this morbid, sickening bullshit about ax murderers and hundred-year-old poltergeists and just get on with it, with their lives, go somewhere bright and cheerful, Florida maybe, swim in the sun and the salty sea with the diseased smell completely out of her nostrils, this monstrous, diseased homeplace no more than a bad memory, a day gone with no more to show than a number on the calendar, what I did on my summer vacation.

  The snakes, the wasps, and then the sounds through the wall were all Corrie could stand, especially when she thought of Stephie. They agreed to let Stephie go stay with friends of the family for a few weeks, until school started or they moved back to Chicago for the winter.