I jogged after her. We climbed through a section of collapsed wall and moved through the rooms downstairs, through burned-out doorways like cave mouths. Water was puddled on the floor. Somber smears of smoke streaked the walls. The fire started on the second floor, according to the fireman who woke me, and Mrs. Cunningham died in bed. We didn’t go upstairs. Portions of the house were strangely undamaged, small surviving corners, where a lamp stood untouched, as if Mrs. Cunningham had just stepped out and might at any minute return and require a little light for reading. Being in the house felt wrong, like trespassing on something sacred.
Shiloh was around there somewhere. He didn’t try to prevent us from entering, wouldn’t even come near us, as if he understood that something dire had happened. Every now and then, we would see him slip past a doorway, wraithlike. It amazed me that something that big could move so silently.
“It’s beautiful,” Charlotte said. “In an awful way. It’s more beautiful now than it was before, I think. It’s less perfect, you know what I mean? It’s like looking at someone’s X-ray.”
She stopped to examine a rosewood dining table, running her fingers along its dusty surface. Faint blue moonlight slanted in through window frames—the heat had caused the glass to explode outward—and through holes in the ceiling, where the second floor had burned. The light caught in the clean streaks left on the table by Charlotte’s fingers.
“Someone died here tonight, Charlotte,” I said. “We shouldn’t be here.”
“She lived here, too, Parson, for a long time. That’s what’s so amazing. Think of everything that happened here before you came along.” Charlotte pressed her palm flat against the dining room wall. “Put your hand here,” she said. “It’s still warm.”
“One of the guys from the fire department told me they think she started the fire herself. On purpose,” I said.
Charlotte jerked her hand away from the wall.
“She wanted to kill herself?”
I told her what the fireman had told me. That the bedroom door was closed and locked but all the doors downstairs were open to whatever sort of intruder might want to help himself. The theory was that she wanted to bar Shiloh from the bedroom and be certain he had a way out of the fire. While I was talking, I watched Charlotte for a reaction. She walked over to the window, her steps crunching on the cooled embers that had rained down from upstairs. She stood there, perfectly still, and looked out at the night. A breeze moved past her and I could smell her perfume mixed in with the scent of ash. The moonlight was gauzy on her cheeks.
“You told me they had to carry Shiloh out of the fire,” she said, turning toward me, her face now shadowed.
“Maybe he’s too stupid to know that fire is a bad thing,” I said.
“Maybe he didn’t want to leave her.” She faced the window again and cocked her head as if listening intently. I tried to hear what she was hearing. Cicadas ringing in the darkness. A train rumbling along the tracks that divided Mrs. Cunningham’s property, just barely shaking the ground. Nothing much but those strange country sounds that only make you more aware of the silence behind them. Charlotte said, “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,” and I didn’t know whether she meant the plaintive night sounds or what I had just finished telling her.
I was a quiet tenant and, until Charlotte, had never brought a woman to the farm, so most of the complaints between Mrs. Cunningham and me tended to be mine, regarding Shiloh. I drink too much and would occasionally wander the fields at night. I don’t know if Mrs. Cunningham was ever aware of my roving, though I have heard that old people tend to be light sleepers. She anyways never mentioned it, and I had lived on her farm for two years before she died. I would wander down to the railroad tracks or to watch the bats swarming over the pond, skimming for insects that lit on the surface. You could throw a stone out over the water and the bats would dive-bomb it, kamikaze runs, plunging themselves into the pond, blind by nature, stupid from hunger, after what they thought was food. It was a mistake, the first time I fooled the bats. I was just skipping rocks. The second stone was a test case to make sure the first wasn’t a fluke or a figment of my imagination. After that, I tell myself that I was drunk, that I wouldn’t have gone on tricking the bats with stones, if I had been sober. But I remember the buzz of power that came with killing without laying a hand, that came at the moment of impact, when a bat flashed through the night haze and smacked the surface, a sound like surprise, and didn’t come up.
When we first started seeing each other, Charlotte asked me to tell her the worst thing I had ever done. She wanted to know how low I could go. She wanted to prepare herself for the worst. I thought about it for a while, then took her down to the pond and told her about the bats. She didn’t say anything for a long moment, just looked at me, considering. I shifted awkwardly in her gaze, worried that telling her had been a mistake, that I had let her look into my thoughts and she had seen something too awful to stay. The bats slapped the air above us with their wings. Charlotte turned away from me to watch them. Her hands were in the pockets of her jeans and the wind was blowing, making her cheeks red, whipping her hair around her face, causing strands of it to stick to her lips. Softly, she said, “They’re just bats.” Then, turning back to me, smiling a little, gathering momentum, “They’re blood suckers. Wait till deer season and look around for the blaze orange caps. Those are the nut jobs. Don’t turn your back on those fuckers.” I didn’t know if she meant what she said, but I had never been more grateful.
There had been other women in my life during my time at Mrs. Cunningham’s farm but only short-term, a weekend or two, and none of them had been invited to visit. The cottage was mine alone before Charlotte came along. She told me that she had been by herself a while, too, hadn’t really felt at home with a man, until she stayed at my house. I can’t speak for Charlotte, but I should say that I have always had trouble getting involved. In anything. I tried newspaper reporting after graduate school but couldn’t get over the feeling that my work, even when writing the most innocent of stories, birth or wedding announcements, was an invasion of privacy. I wasn’t long with the newspaper. I returned to history, for which I was originally trained. The stories of history had already been written.
The first night Charlotte spent with me was an accident of sorts. I had asked my students out to the farm for a get-acquainted picnic. Both of us were drunk, inspired, I think, by the rest of the students, most of whom were underage. Charlotte stayed late to help me clean. Just before we went to bed, she said to me, “You think too much. You’re educated to within an inch of your life, aren’t you?”
Maybe so. Charlotte believed I was laughably careful about hiding our relationship from the administration. I passed her in the hall without speaking, called her by her last name in class. Probably, she was right, nothing would have happened if we were discovered. But I hated the “probably,” hated its lack of guarantee. So she smiled indulgently to ease my apprehensions and promised again that she had told no one, that she would not ever tell.
We had the farm to ourselves for almost a month after the fire. Charlotte came out on the nights when she didn’t draw the late shift at the Italian restaurant where she worked. Shiloh still frightened Charlotte, but she had softened toward him since hearing of his loyalty to Mrs. Cunningham. We took to leaving bowls of food for him, raw eggs cracked over white bread, leftover grits, on what used to be the patio of the main house. Charlotte believed we could win him over. I told her that I had tried bribing him before without success, but she thought that maybe Mrs. Cunningham’s death had changed the dynamic between us.
Shiloh’s enthusiasm for harassing me was beginning to flag and we felt sorry for him. At Charlotte’s request, I made myself an easy target. We thought it might cheer him up. I would walk slowly around the main house, wear a groove back and forth to my car, but he didn’t take advantage of my vulnerability. My path took me down to the pond, where a family of geese would scatter at my approach, and the still
ness of the water was broken occasionally by a jumping bass. I even stood too close to the edge with my back to Shiloh, which I thought would be irresistible. He would keep me in sight but never come close, breeze through the high grass on my flank or stretch out on the hilltop above the pond, looking down on me, scrunch-eyed and serious like I was an algebra problem to be solved. I have to admit that there was something lovely about the way he moved, something elemental, long and low to the ground. Once, when I had lost hope of an attack, he hit me hard from behind. I sprawled on the grass trying to catch my breath, and he curled up a few yards away. I had the feeling that he knocked me down for old times’ sake.
When the sun was almost all the way gone, Charlotte and I would drag my rocking chairs with the cane bottoms out onto the grass beneath the maples. It was warm for that early in the spring, but it was cooler on the lawn than it was in my cottage. We played at being rich on Mrs. Cunningham’s farm. It was easy with the main house so close, even a charred shell of it, easier now that Mrs. Cunningham was gone. We could be her secret heirs. We debated putting in a swimming pool.
“It’ll be a godsend in summer,” Charlotte said. “We could put it right here under the trees and the branches would catch the pool lights at night.”
“But, Charlotte, this isn’t Las Vegas,” I said. “A pool just wouldn’t sit right.”
We sat quietly a moment, considering the options. Charlotte said, “We’ll never come to an agreement, my love. Ask Montague to break the tie.” Montague was our imaginary butler. We laughed at our silliness. We called each other “my love” and felt very English and, when Charlotte asked for another glass of Dom Perignon, I knew that she was referring to our bottle of grocery store wine. It seemed those nights, my thoughts pretty with wine, that everything, the house, the pond, the grand evening shadows that lingered on the lawn, that all of this belonged to me.
Mornings, before my afternoons courting Shiloh and evenings with Charlotte, belonged, however, to the college. Each spring, the college cooked up some historical anniversary and served it to the students in a section called “Topical History,” taught by the low man on the tenure ladder and monitored closely by the promotion committee. The class that fell to me was the fiftieth anniversary of both VE and VJ day. I told my students about the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the cruiser that delivered the atomic bombs to Okinawa so that they could be dropped more conveniently elsewhere in Japan. On its return voyage, the Indianapolis was torpedoed and its crew set adrift on life rafts.
The class was interested that day, a detail I hoped wasn’t lost on the committee observer. They are always interested when the subject is sex or death. I told them that the crew watched 80 percent of their shipmates be devoured by sharks, that many of them committed suicide, shot themselves, or gave themselves up to drowning, slipping their life jackets over their heads and letting the weight of their clothes drag them under. It was in their power to kill themselves. The sharks were beyond their control. One of the young men in class, a punk kid who always wore a black leather jacket embroidered with delicate chains and had f-u-c-k tattooed on the knuckles of his left hand and t-h-i-s on his right, and who was not at all impressed with me, asked, “What are we supposed to understand from that story?” This kid didn’t like the grades I’d been giving him and had a knack for flustering me.
That night, Charlotte and I walked down to the pond and she said, “Every action has a consequence, my love.”
The bats darted above us, their motion spastic and somehow too quick. I wouldn’t have tricked them, but I looked for stones anyway. I liked the cold feel of them in my palm.
“That’s what you should have told that student today,” she said. “That’s what he should have understood from the story of the Indianapolis”
“That’s a rather occult revisionist take,” I said. “I’m not qualified to teach karmic retribution. You might try Eastern Religions.”
I played the moment over in my head, the question, my embarrassed stuttering and note shuffling, like I had the answer written down right there if I could only find it, the committee observer watching all of this. What I came up with in class, after considerable flailing, was, “There’s nothing to understand per se. It’s just a story. Something interesting and terrible that happened once. Something that bears remembering.”
* * *
We had several visitors to the farm after the fire. An insurance agent taking Polaroids, then an artist who wanted to paint the ruined house. Shiloh greeted each visitor ferociously, chasing them back to their cars and pressing his muzzle to the window, foaming on the glass. I would leave whatever I was doing and cross the lawn from my cottage, a toothless dog, to inspect the stranger, to bestow or withhold my approval like the lord of the manor. One evening, about a month after Mrs. Cunningham’s death, we heard Shiloh barking, then a woman’s voice dismissing him, “Quiet, dog. Lay one paw on me and you’re history,” and before I could leave my chair to reconnoiter, she rapped once on the door and let herself in without waiting for an invitation. “You’re Parson Banks,” she said. “I’m Brady Cunningham. Your landlady’s daughter.”
I hadn’t even realized that Mrs. Cunningham had children. I had imagined for her a spinster’s existence with maybe a lover lost at sea or leaving her at the altar. But here was this woman, small and wiry like Mrs. Cunningham, with Mrs. Cunningham’s red hair, standing in my cottage, one hand still loosely on the doorknob, claiming to be her child and informing me that they were putting the property on the market. “Don’t get up. I just thought you should know,” she said. “As eldest daughter, I’m serving as executrix for the estate. I’ve got a sister who isn’t altogether happy with me in charge, but the one thing we can agree on is to get rid of this old place. It’s a financial sinkhole.”
Two children, daughters. Charlotte was in the kitchen cracking raw eggs into a bowl for Shiloh, when Brady came in, and she stayed there, silent, her hands poised over the bowl, fingers dripping yolk. This daughter was all business, telling me that the cottage was still mine, until they found a buyer. I would pay my rent to an estate account. She wasn’t interested in my sympathy. When I said, “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said, “Don’t be. I haven’t spoken to that woman in almost ten years. Mother was the meanest woman I ever knew.”
She stepped backward out of the house, closed the door behind her, opened it again, and leaned inside. She said, “Oh, and if you see my sister around here trying to take anything out of the house, call the police. She looks like me only blonder and taller.” Before I could tell her that I didn’t want to get involved, didn’t want to be in the middle of an inheritance dispute, she was gone, the door shut firmly between us. I heard Shiloh barking again, then her car heading off, tires crunching on the gravel driveway. I hadn’t left my chair. Wind rustled in the chimney. I turned to face Charlotte and raised my eyebrows in a question. She said, “Don’t ask me what that was all about. Who does she think she is barging in here? You tell me that. Her mother’s dead a month before she decides to show her face. And then only to sell the house. Her mother’s house, Parson.” We looked at each other a moment longer before Charlotte went back to cracking eggs.
Brady Cunningham didn’t bother to do anything about Shiloh. A For Sale sign appeared at the end of the driveway a few days after she left, but I pulled it out of the ground and tossed it into the rain gully beside the road so it would look like it had been knocked over accidentally. A realtor began stopping by to show the house. Because of the fire, it was a bargain basement deal. Most of the potential buyers were nice enough, assuring me that if they decided to purchase the place I would be able to stay on as a tenant. They were wealthy people from out of state, looking for a lifestyle change. I hated that word, lifestyle. There was an oilman from Texas, a computer genius, close to my age but worth about a million times as much, even a movie actress whose stardom was beginning to fade. Each of them asked me how I liked living on Mrs. Cunningham’s farm. I didn’t tell them that I would buy it in
an instant, if that were within my means. When the realtor wasn’t listening, I would invent reasons for them not to buy and offer them grudgingly as if I were just giving a little friendly advice. A fictitious article I had read about how expensive and ultimately impossible it was to restore fire-damaged houses to their original condition. The biblical swarms of biting insects that descended on the house at dusk or the plague of rats that infested the basement in winter. I found that the most effective technique was simply to rehash the details of Mrs. Cunningham’s suicide. Often the realtor hadn’t apprised them and I found that telling the story that way, adding my own specifics—Mrs. Cunningham soaking the bed and carpet in gasoline, before crawling under the covers with a match—her suicide began to seem like just another invention to prevent the house from being sold.
Brady Cunningham began coming out to the farm more often once the house was on the market. We’d see her from my porch in her bib overalls and work gloves, her hair tied back with a bandanna, Aunt Jemima-style. She would emerge from the house sooty and disheveled, carrying a cardboard box of salvageable goods. Every now and then, she gave us a smile or a tentative wave, which we vehemently ignored. Charlotte had an idea that Brady was somehow connected to her mother’s death or, at least, that she knew something that she wasn’t telling, and that in the boxes that she took away was the evidence. When she was gone, we would slip into the house and try to discern what was missing, but neither of us was familiar enough with the place to recognize an absence. We found gaps in the charred bookcase but couldn’t remember what, if anything, had been there before. End tables with blank surfaces, empty drawers in which we could not find a clue. The only thing missing, that we could tell, was Mrs. Cunningham.
Shiloh stayed clear when Brady was around. Charlotte wondered why he didn’t attack, why he didn’t drive her screaming from the grounds. She worried that Brady Cunningham’s appearance had somehow robbed him of his spirit. I said, “He’s a dog, Charlotte. What you’re saying implies that he understands what’s happening around here.” But I worried, too. Sometimes, when we went down to the main house to collect the bowls that we had left for him, we discovered the food eaten, sometimes not. I worried that Shiloh wasn’t getting any of it, that a raccoon or something was reaping the rewards of my generosity. I decided to become a spy.
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