No Book but the World: A Novel

by Cohen, Leah Hager

  In general Neel did not intervene. In general he was against intervention. But now, in the most dulcet, encouraging tones, he leaned across the table and said, “What had you been making there, Freddy?”

  June flashed him a look, which he declined to notice. Then I saw her turn and gaze apologetically, or in a kind of appeal, toward the waitress, but the waitress, too, would not catch her eye; she only dragged out her order pad and jabbed at the end of her retractable pen.

  “What was your drawing of, hm?” coaxed Neel.

  For a long moment we waited then, all of us growing increasingly uncomfortable except for Neel, who seemed wholly untroubled.

  “What’s that?” he urged, as if to say, “Beg pardon?” although Freddy had not made a sound.

  “Ah . . .” Freddy let his thumb slide wetly from his mouth. Still with his face looking down at the spot where the syrup had been, he said, “Ah, ah-cow.”

  That this was false must have been transparent even to the waitress, although she could not have known what to the rest of us was obvious: the fib’s inspiration. Just before turning off the highway for lunch, Neel had pulled the Dasher over onto the shoulder so that we could all get out and have a good look at a herd of grazing cows.

  “What do cows say, Freddy?” June had prompted. She’d picked him up, heavy as he was, the better for him to see, and they stood close to the fence, with its five rows of wire strung between wooden posts like a musical staff. June had been teaching me to read music so we could play recorder duets.

  “Moo.”

  “That’s right.”

  I stood a little away, pleased with my discovery of how the fence resembled the empty staves in my music notebook. “Look at the fence,” I began, tugging June’s skirt, but saw I did not have her attention. Never mind. I would practice alone, practice the mnemonic she had taught me for the lines of the treble staff, trying to hear the notes in my head as I touched my finger to each row of wire in turn: “Every . . . Good . . . Boy . . .”—going from a crouch onto my tiptoes as I reached for the highest two rows—“. . . Does . . . Fine.” Fine delivered a nasty jolt, weirdly fizzy and spiked. I thought at first I’d been stung by a bee. I studied my finger; it bore no mark. The tears that sprang to my eyes were due more to surprise than pain. I squeezed the finger in my other hand and looked around; no one had seen.

  Neel, squinting across the pasture, his hands deep in the pockets of his rumpled canvas pants, said in his mild way, pleasant yet corrective: “Cows do not say moo.”

  And they had not. We stood there smelling the sweetish, prickling mixture of grass and manure, and took them in: they were massive and brown, magisterially placid except for their switching tails. Their eyes big as plums, the bones of their haunches sharp as coat hangers from which their pendulous bodies hung.

  We’d stood in a row before the fence, our various heights, it occurred to me, like notation, like the notes missing from the bare staff. No one but I knew the top wire was electrified. I began to hope someone else would touch it. I began to hope Neel would. He was always saying we should learn through experience. A secret, greedy pressure built up in me as I concentrated on the back of his curly head, stared hard at his tanned, creased neck, willing him to rest a hand on the fence’s uppermost wire.

  He removed his hands from his pockets. I held my breath. “Well,” he exclaimed, giving a clap as he turned around. He rubbed his hands vigorously together and seemed to look shrewdly in my direction. “Who’s hungry?”

  I blushed, and bit my sleeve.

  • • •

  UNDER THE SASSAFRAS Kitty and I stood, a minute or two into our relationship, tenuously united for the first time in the joint act of regarding my little brother, whose own eyes flitted back and forth between us and then away—Freddy whose gaze was forever unmoored, forever listing. Watching him was like watching a ship take on water: under our collective appraisal something seemed to mount within him. Kitty couldn’t have known it then, but I recognized the signs of his growing tension, and could guess where it might lead.

  Neel and June were nowhere in sight. The bulkhead doors leading to the cellar had been flung open and they had both gone belowground to store the tents and poles in that dank space I loathed, with its low ceiling jiggly with cobwebs and its curious, sour clay smell. We were not entirely beyond the purview of grown-ups; from the corner of my eye I saw the wide woman in blue ambling across the grass toward us.

  But I never took my gaze off Freddy while Kitty and I stood and stared at him, because to do so would have been to sever something, this little game we’d begun when we turned, in concert, to look at him, or which perhaps we’d begun earlier when she first tumbled out of the tree, or earlier still when the first shoe fell, when she was still half-cat and I was enchanted by the idea, and now that I had entered this game with her I had to stay. We looked at Freddy. His sloe-eyes went glassy. They fixed on something invisible between us. We had him trapped. We were all very quiet and still under the canopy of mitten-shaped leaves, but the power we held over him was vibratingly real. Visibly he took on more and more of whatever it was we were transferring to him: nothing else but our attention, yet such a deliberate, substantial sort of attention that it seemed to swell him with actual mass. And I had the impression that Kitty, innocent as she then was of Freddy, nevertheless had an inkling of what was happening, what kind of effect we were having on him, so that when the inevitable happened, it seemed to me I wasn’t the only one who bore responsibility. Kitty, no matter how genuinely surprised she sounded when she cried out, no matter how true the pain—and it must have been painful, from the pale blue egg that rose up almost instantly on the crescent ledge of bone beneath her eye—was implicated, too.

  Moments before Mrs. Manseau reached our little enclave under the sassafras tree, Freddy raised the long wooden spoon he’d been trailing in the dust all this time, arced it up over his head and brought it down in front of him, displacing the air with all his might but not a trace of anger—acting on pure impulse and nothing else—until it met with an audible crack Kitty’s heart-shaped available face.

  Four

  COLD AND HUNGER finally impel me from Mrs. Tremblay’s mauve-and-blue guest room around noon.

  In an effort to remedy the first, earlier this morning I’d pulled the coverlet off the bed and wrapped it around me as I sat at the rattan desk, writing in the marble-covered book. Kitty had been prescient. Or not prescient, smart. At any rate, writing does seem to help. And once I began, the words came fast. Really I should say they came fast and slow, because the act of writing plunged me so wantonly down slippery avenues of thought that frequently I found myself not writing at all, but having come to an unbidden halt and gazing into the middle distance between the page and the rainy windowpane, my mouth open on a half-formed word with which my hand had been unable to keep pace and from which my mind had careened many seconds or even whole minutes earlier like a horse having thrown its rider. Until, coming to, I would begin to write again, transcribing the raw, unruly stuff of memory and imagination as best I could into letters, sentences, paragraphs. I kept up this spasmodic progress long enough to fill a dozen pages before dropping the pen, queasy with the realization that I was doing again what I’d sworn against: molding the fluid stuff of life into form.

  I sat rigid then in judgment upon myself, with the stiff bedspread wrapped around me and my arms folded across my chest, until I realized I resembled one of the pair of Indian dolls that had been passed down through generations in June’s family. June said her paternal grandmother had always claimed Oneida lineage, but we had no documentation and June herself seemed somewhat skeptical. Still, I took pleasure in believing it, fervently, all throughout my childhood. (Why? Out of simple-minded romanticism? Or because the story seemed to explain my own persistent and inarticulable feeling of otherness?)

  The dolls—a man and a woman, each about a foot tall—were not for p
laying with. They stood on a shelf in the living room in their doe suede moccasins and heavy woven blankets and long, coarse hair that June said probably came from a real horse’s tail. Their faces were molded of glue and sawdust and what I loved most was the unalloyed sobriety of their expressions. They looked as though nothing you told them could possibly make them blink or turn away.

  On occasion June would let me take them down, though never when Fred was around. I could be trusted to handle the dolls gently, to inspect how their cotton print shirts had real tiny buttons and tiny pointed collars; to confirm that the beaded necklace the man wore went all the way around his neck; to stick my finger up under the woman’s skirt and feel that her legs ended in a block of wood; to press—lightly—their middles and hear and feel the straw stuffing give. She knew I would never force off the stitched-on blankets to see whether they really had arms. I would never break their legs, trying to make them walk or sit. I would never take them into the woods and leave them there to have their faces washed off in the rain, their bodies twisted, their hair plucked out by birds.

  But oh, help: I am telling a story. I am telling a story and I must not. What do I know of what happened? What do I know of Fred, my brother, my little brother, now at six-feet-two and nearly two hundred pounds my big-little brother, from whom I have not heard in almost two years? What do I know of his relationship to James Ferebee, twelve years old, enrolled in the sixth grade at Arthur L. Humphrey Middle School right here in Perdu, who, according to the papers, had played youth basketball and numbered among his hobbies fishing and rock collecting; who, last Saturday, at Criterion Regional Medical Center, was pronounced dead?

  Nothing. Next to nothing. Little more, perhaps, than Mrs. Tremblay down in the kitchen, monitoring her old cathode-ray TV, which sits fatly on the counter beside the breadbox, emitting its endless newsfeed. She had the local news on at breakfast (fried egg, slice of toast, grapefruit half), and though nothing came on about Fred, I was on edge the whole time, listening for the coanchors’ jovial banter to break up and resolve itself into a suddenly grim “And now, following up on last week’s story about young James Ferebee . . .”

  What did I fear they might divulge? I know what conclusion the public has already drawn. What the television reporters are insinuating every time they direct their somber looks at the camera, looks I imagine they rehearsed in broadcasting school, so uniform are they, so perfectly pitched at virtuous condemnation. I know what it means when they say, “In the absence of any request for ransom, authorities can only speculate on possible motives for abducting the child,” and, “A spokesperson for the boy’s family describes the suspect as a loner who kept odd hours and preferred the company of children to adults.”

  A man drives a boy into the woods, disappears with him there for days, until one is found alive and one is found dead, and where no story is proffered people rush in to make one. It’s unavoidable, inexorable, water swirling into a ditch. We are at the mercy of our own narrative impulses. We must have story at all costs.

  My story is this: Fred is no predator.

  Which does not mean he is incapable of doing harm.

  I look at my watch: not even one. More than three hours before I’m due at the law offices of Bayard Charles.

  I cannot stay in this room until then. If nothing else, I will need lunch. I stand and the bedspread slips from my shoulders.

  The stairs, with their flimsy iron banister that moves beneath my hand like a loose tooth, lead directly into the living room, where Mrs. Tremblay looks up from the plaid recliner on which she sits with an object in her lap. Not a cross-stitch, not coupons, not even Reader’s Digest, but a heavy, serious-looking book, a library book, from the crackle and glint of its acetate jacket. The story I have been telling myself about her needs adjusting. She says nothing, merely looks at me, neither friendly nor unfriendly. I want to ask what she’s reading but instead wipe my palms on my pants and say, “I . . . I’ll be heading out now,” then remain stupidly on the bottom step like a child waiting to be dismissed.

  She gives a nod, her lower lip tightly molded around that phantom lemon drop, her finger marking her place in the book. It is so quiet in here, so small. The house with its neat and orderly furnishings shrinks tighter around me. Mrs. Tremblay does not return to her reading but continues to regard me. From somewhere in the very still room comes the sound of a clock I do not see. Each tick a tiny tsk.

  Until, shaking free of my paralysis, I stumble down the last step into the little foyer where my coat hangs. While I am shoving my arms into the sleeves, Mrs. Tremblay calls out, “Know where you’re going?”

  Close to a panic—if I answer I will expose the reason I am here, expose once and for all my dreadful link—I thrust my feet hurriedly into my boots, yank open the door and call back, “All set, thanks!” before stepping gratefully into the cold rain.

  • • •

  THE ROAD FROM MRS. TREMBLAY’S into Perdu undulates darkly in a crevice between forested hills. The wind has dropped but rain still falls steadily and in the lowest places my tires send up pearly plumage. I keep my speed low, wipers high. Yellow road signs show silhouettes of swerving cars and zigzag arrows, of trucks pointing down steep grades and of leaping deer. Once when we were small, June paid a tall man at the Freyburg street fair to cut our silhouettes, Freddy’s and mine, from black paper. The man wore suspenders and worked with tiny, long-handled scissors, and snipped out our likenesses unbelievably fast. I remember he had a waxed mustache, too, so wide it stuck out past his face like the whiskers on a mouse. My silhouette came out just like me, all the little protrusions and recessions of my profile faithfully noted, including the eyeglasses I still wore then and the slimmest outcropping of paper for my eyelashes. The artist complimented me on sitting so well.

  Freddy’s was a vaguer likeness. He would not stay put on the little canvas camp stool, but wiggled back and forth until it collapsed; when it was set up again, first he straddled it, then hunched, then, briefly submitting to the artist’s entreaties, did sit up straight—only to keep pulling at his lower lip and rubbing his eyes. Then he had a sneezing fit which made him “fall” off the stool. When he got to his feet, he had ropes of snot hanging from both nostrils. June rummaged for tissues in her bag; by the time she found one, he’d wandered off to another booth, whose wares—delicate stained-glass objects displayed on a table—he immediately began to handle, and June had to pay the silhouette cutter in a hurry so we could run after Freddy before he broke any.

  For many years they hung, our silhouettes in oval frames, side by side in the upstairs hall: my features neat and tidy, Freddy’s softer, slightly lumpy; his hair a strange, clownish nimbus, mine molded neatly to the contours of my head before diverging in a braid down my back. Facing each other, our silhouettes did what Freddy and I could never have done in real life: held each other’s unbroken gaze, the very emblem of interconnectedness. But when turned back to back they gave off an embittered aura, an air of excommunication. I am the one who used to switch them around on their picture hooks, depending on whether I loved my brother or hated him on any given day. June must have noticed but never commented on the inconstancy of their orientation.

  I wish it were Fred I was driving toward now, instead of this Bayard Charles, his “assigned counsel,” whose law offices are in another town. He hadn’t even met Fred yet when he finally returned my calls late Monday afternoon. He spoke slowly; I had the sense he was groping between words for the thread of his own thoughts. “Frederick Robbins . . .” he repeated when I reminded him why I had called, “. . . Robbins . . . Oh, yes. Ugly business. So you’re the sister?” I could hear papers being shuffled. His breathing made me picture a heavy man, and his voice had the same squashed quality as Mrs. Tremblay’s, his vowels flat as the pennies Kitty and I once laid on the Freyburg railroad tracks in anticipation of the commuter train.

  We’d been ten that afternoon, at the beginning, and
in some important way the height, of our power. Holding hands, we’d backed slowly from the tracks, never letting our vision stray from the five copper coins glinting in the autumn sun, even as the engine approached, mounting in volume and also in something else, a kind of invisible charge, bearing down on us, louder and louder with an accompanying thrust of wind, making us shriek wild crackling ribbons of laughter, and then it was there, directly in front of us, a rushing, and we yelled as it stormed by.

  In the wake of the train—a kind of elastic lucidity that marbled the air as the whipped-up red and brown leaves settled slowly back upon their beds—we went looking for our pennies. We scoured the rails and ties and the leafy gravel and everything seemed to glint like copper, fooling us, until at last, running our fingers through the clumps of weeds, we did find one, elongated and effaced of any markings.

  Freddy had wanted to come and we wouldn’t let him. “You’re not old enough.” In the end we staved off a tantrum only by promising to bring him back one of the flattened pennies, but we never did turn up any of the others. Years later I read that pennies can shoot out like bullets when struck by the wheels of a train, and imagined a disc of copper lodging in a shinbone or eye. I realized what a lucky thing it was neither of us got hit, and how stupid we’d been to stand so close. Back at Batter Hollow, when Freddy demanded his due, we told him we couldn’t give him the penny. “We don’t even have one apiece,” I reasoned.