Jimmy settled the cup on the coffee table with both hands. “I came back to close down the old house. I need your help with that, separating the junk from the stuff I can sell, that kind of thing.” He was obviously trying to smile at Charlie but his lips weren’t working right.
“How do your aunts feel about that? I heard they were still alive …”
Jimmy interrupted with a bray of laughter. It made Charlie put his own cup down. “Of course! They’re all the family I got left, Charlie.” He gazed at the kitchen door where Bobby had just passed. “Family’s an important thing, you know.”
“And they approve?”
“They don’t have any say. The house is in my name, always has been.”
Charlie thought to ask about what was going to happen to those three elderly women, but didn’t want to insult his friend. Jimmy had always been a good man; he would do right by his elderly aunts. Elderly, hell! he thought. How old are they? Seems like they’ve been around since I was a boy. “You didn’t have to come back just for that, you know. I would have been glad to do it all for you and just send you the money, and make the arrangements for your aunts. I mean, it’s really good to see you, but I remember how you felt when you left here, how your grandfather …”
“… was the devil himself? I still believe that, Charlie. Even now that he’s dead—I could feel him the minute I drove into this valley. But I have to make sure the house gets closed proper—I have to be there to make sure it happens. I owe that much to the family.”
Jimmy’s family. Charlie remembered how it had been. All of them dead in two years’ time, except for Jimmy and the aunts. Preacher Ballentine had been first: that hatchet-nosed, slash-mouthed face staring up out of the coffin looking no more peaceful dead than it had alive. He’d always ranted about there being a better place beyond, for you, for me, and all our family! Charlie hoped he had been right, at least for the rest of the Ballentines. Jimmy’s mother and father died the next month. Then the three sisters and two brothers. Heart failure, respiratory arrest, a few other general causes, but old Doc Willard never found a good reason for any of it, or at least that was the story told. Aunts and uncles and cousins and extended family members dropping one at a time weeks, sometimes days, apart. Jimmy finally had had enough and ran. The three oldest aunts stayed behind, as if waiting for the turns that never came.
Jimmy didn’t want it, but Charlie insisted that he take a few days with the aunts to pack before Bobby and Charlie brought the truck out and began the long process of sorting through everything. It was the right thing to do, and Jimmy’s reluctance to give those elderly women even that much time to leave the only home they’d ever known struck Charlie as uncharacteristically cruel.
When they first arrived with the truck Charlie thought that Jimmy had made three tall piles of old clothes out in the snow-packed yard. It would have been a foolish thing to do, but at this point it wouldn’t have been surprising. Jimmy was still insisting that they complete the job in one day, not enough time for a fair appraisal. He wanted the better pieces of furniture segregated from the rest, but then he said he didn’t really care what price Charlie got for them, said there wasn’t time to find the best price, said he just wanted the pieces sold and gone. And finally, he told Charlie that he didn’t want his aunts consulted about any of it. He didn’t even want Charlie and Bobby talking to the three old sisters. That order had come in an almost hysterical phone call the night before, more a monologue than a conversation, more—in fact—like one of Preacher Ballentine’s sermons than Jimmy’s usual deferential mumble.
Well, that was one order Charlie fully intended to disobey, even for his friend. It was shameful.
Charlie had started to tell Bobby that he’d better get those old clothes out of the snow and into the truck before they were damaged, when one of the bulky, multicolored piles moved. Bobby jumped back. Charlie pushed his way through a snow drift that curled around the three figures, reached up to the top of the pile, and peeled a strip of bright red cloth away from the mass.
A withered chestnut-brown face peered up at him out of the wrappings. The eyelids were open; two marble-sized black orbs appeared to stare at nothing. Charlie could barely detect a mouth among the wrinkles and wattles that ran down from the beak nose and across the tiny, ancient throat.
“She can’t see,” Jimmy said from the porch. Charlie looked over at his old friend, who looked skinnier and more agitated than ever in an old suit much too big for him, whose cuffs were now soaking up the brown snow sludge from the dung-colored boards. “None of them can. Can’t hear either. They can speak, I guess, but so far they haven’t had much to say to me.”
Charlie carefully put the red swatch of cloth back in place. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said, even though apparently she couldn’t hear him. Then back to Jimmy, “Don’t you think these poor women should be inside? They’ll freeze out here!”
“You can’t get them inside if they want to be out there! God knows I’ve tried. But once they decide it’s time to play you just can’t budge them. They always bundle up enough, I guess. At least they seem healthy as far as I can tell.”
“Play?” Charlie looked around at the three women, still as poles wrapped in rags.
Jimmy frowned. “They like the snow. One of them—damned if I know which—tells me they always have. We’ve got lots of work, Charlie.” Then, as if he suddenly heard the commanding, bossy tone in his voice, Jimmy dropped his gaze. “Charlie, please …” He turned and went inside the shack.
“Bobby, go inside. I’ll be right there.” Charlie turned and watched the women, waiting for them to show some sign of life. He felt profoundly uncomfortable just leaving them there, but didn’t know what else he could do. After a few minutes they began gradually raising their wrapped arms. Slowly, pale fingers appeared from the ends of the tattered rags, weaving back and forth, bending and extending as if playing the snowflakes like some complex musical instrument. Two of the aunts bent over and began pushing mounds of snow together.
Inside, Charlie found Bobby helping Jimmy dump several boxes of old books and knick-knacks into a large crate labelled TRASH. Bobby turned and frowned. “Mr. Ballentine wants to finish earlier than we planned. He says he wants most of this stuff junked now.”
Charlie examined the crate. “There are valuable antiques in here, Jimmy. You don’t want to do this.”
“I know what I want to do, Charlie. Don’t worry about it.” Charlie could feel Bobby stirring uneasily beside him. Jimmy looked down at the floor, scratching his head as if he’d forgotten something. “My aunts … you left them out in the yard?”
“Yes. They were … playing, as you put it.”
“How?”
Charlie found himself smiling. “Well, I think they were building a snow man.”
Jimmy shoved past Charlie and out the door. Charlie ran after him and was shocked to see his friend demolishing the three blind sisters’ partially completed snowman with a series of furious kicks. Bobby yelled and started off the porch, but Charlie held him back. “Too late, anyway,” he mumbled. They both watched helplessly as Jimmy Ballentine stomped around in the drift, tearing up the snow. His sudden fit spent, he staggered back to the porch and went inside, coughing and shaking the snow out of his old suit like an agitated little dog.
The three women stood motionless, like colorful mummies propped up in the blowing snow. Then, as if some fail-safe mechanism had been tripped in their antique mechanical brains, the two bent to gather snow again, while the third blind sister stretched her hands into the dark to delicately play the tiny flakes.
Charlie pushed Bobby back inside the shack. Jimmy sat propped up in a straight-back chair, a whisky bottle in his hand, a pool of melted snow gently spreading around him. “This isn’t like you, Jimmy. I can’t be a part of something like this.”
Jimmy waved a half-hearted dismissal. “Suit yourself. I’ll just burn it all, the shack included. I don’t care.”
Charlie strode over and jerked the bottle away.
“This is wrong! Please, Jimmy. Don’t make me call the sheriff.”
Ballentine buried his face in his hands. “Call whoever you like. Nothing I ever do is going to rid me of this place, and those …” He gestured towards the open door, the muffled shuffling sounds beyond.
“A shack and three old ladies?” Bobby laughed.
“It’s not just the three grim sisters out there,” Jimmy said. “It’s my whole family, all of them. They stayed out here—away from everything—until they died, every last one of them. Like it was some kind of damn vacation they were all taking together!”
Charlie went over and rested a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “People die, Jimmy. It’s not up to any of us to choose the time or place. It’s taken me quite a spell to accept those rather unfair conditions.”
Jimmy looked up at him, his old eyes burning. “My grandfather used to say he could choose. For all of us. He claimed it was his right as head of the family.”
“Jimmy. How could he? Did your family actually believe him?”
“Not at first. But he’d give us these sermons, not like the ones in front of his congregation, but special sermons, just for the family. About how fine a place heaven was, and how he was praying so hard to get us all there as a family.”
“Your grandfather was a forceful man. I remember him in church. It was hard not to listen to him,” Charlie said. “I remember when I was a young boy. We were all scared to death of Preacher Ballentine.”
“The young ones in the family, we were terrified just to have him in the house. And the adults weren’t much better. They let Grandad tell them what they should think and feel about everything. There was just no stopping him.”
“A better life in heaven. There’s been many who haven’t fully lived because of a too strong belief in that idea.” Charlie gazed out the open door. The snow was blowing much harder now. He could barely make out the figures of the three women. His vision blurred; he thought he’d seen a fourth, a fifth, maybe a sixth white bundled form out in the snow. He turned back to Jimmy. “But then he was the first of the family to die, wasn’t he? So he couldn’t choose the time, after all. And obviously he couldn’t make it happen for the rest of you.”
“But they did die, Charlie, all of the rest of them. You remember how fast it happened. You sat with me here through more than a few of those wakes and funerals.”
Charlie watched the snow through the doorway as it thickened, eddied, spiraled down. “I remember. I remember how the rest of your family talked. “He went on over’, or ‘Last night she just went on over’, like they were talking about taking a trip or something.”
“That’s the way it was, all right. Like taking a trip. No heart attack, no disease, no accident to mar the body. They just went on over, one at a time to join Granddad until only the three blind sisters were left. They’d always been special to him.”
“The three blind sisters, and you,” Charlie looked at him steadily.
“That’s why I ran away towards the last, hid out in the woods for a while, then in some of the small towns south of here. I came back that winter during the first snowfall. See, I thought if there was anyone left they might freeze to death. I thought maybe I could take them back to town, save something of the family.”
“And there were just the three sisters left.”
“Making snow people,” Jimmy said almost in a whisper. “The two working on the bodies, and the older one—older by five minutes, they say—working on the faces, weaving her blind fingers through the falling snow and pulling the faces out of the cold black air.”
The wind brought scattered snow flakes through the open door, and the last words of a whisper Charlie could hear in only the vaguest way … Jimmy … Jimmy … He crept closer to the open door, waiting to hear more.
Jimmy Ballentine stared out the door. Then he looked at Charlie. “Ever since I got back to the house, Charlie. They keep making them, and I keep tearing them apart. And it just keeps snowing more and more, giving them what they need to work with. They want me back in the family. He wants me back. That’s why he left the blind sisters behind. To bring me across. They keep building snow people, but I keep tearing the snow people down. But I’ve got very tired, Charlie. You wouldn’t believe how tired I’ve got running all this time, and now to have them still be building those damn snow things.”
Charlie could only nod. While Jimmy talked he watched what was happening outside. He could see the tall snow figures, the blind sisters massaging the snow into detailed legs, arms, hands.
It barely registered when Jimmy got out of his chair and headed towards the door.
“Jimmy …” Charlie managed feebly, then ran after him.
Outside, the two blind sisters stood away from the near-completed figures while the third passed slowly before each one, weaving her fingers into the black air in front of the blank snow faces, plucking individual flakes out of the air, placing them gently onto the waiting snow, pulling dark and wind and more snow out of the air, pulling out the long-gone faces of teenagers and children, Ballentine men, Ballentine women, whose faces remained cold, white, and stiff, but whose dark eyes turned to stare at their lost child up on the porch.
It wasn’t until the last face that Jimmy screamed. The last face placed on the tall, heavy snow figure at the center of the grouping. Broad cheekbones and a black slash for a mouth, a gnarled white lump for a nose, and the darkest winter night eyes of them all. Eyes that seemed to turn and look directly at Jimmy, and behind them a wind that brought the word grandson right out of the night and the woods and the fury of the snow. You should have stayed …
Jimmy screamed again and dived into the midst of the figures, flailing legs and arms with all his might, obviously desperate to destroy as many of them as he could. Clouds of powdered snow rose in silent explosion, obscuring Jimmy and the snow people, obscuring even the three sisters for all their brightly-colored mummy wrappings.
Charlie and Bobby raced to help him, but they could see nothing. They reached out their hands frantically to touch him, but all they touched was cold.
When the clouds of snow finally settled, the thick white powder was decorated with dozens of multicolored rags. For a moment Charlie thought he could see a thin face pictured on the flat surface of the snow, a pale worried face so like that of Jimmy Ballentine, with deep black holes for eyes as if two tiny snow mice had burrowed there. But the wind quickly swept the surface, leaving the snow clean and without feature.
Cutlery
Charlie Goode had spent most of the morning of that blazing summer’s day running his old pick-up up and down narrow Tennessee highways, exploring dirt and gravel back roads so narrow he’d had no idea what he’d do if another vehicle approached. He had been looking for likely plots of farmland to search for arrowheads, flint pieces, stone mortars, Indian clay pipes. Now and then he would pull off the side of the road and wander around on foot, imagining he was seeing the land the way the Cherokees must have viewed it, conveniently ignoring—for the moment—the road and the grey-board farmhouses and the rows of tobacco barns, the encroachments of modern civilization, however poor and rural they might be.
There was good bottom land here by the river, ideal for farming, for those who still attempted it. And yet every year he came back to this valley he saw fewer recently ploughed fields. It saddened him—for selfish reasons in part, since he needed the fresh ploughing to uncover a new stratum of Indian relics each year—but also because the world was changing even faster than he’d ever anticipated. With each passing year his failure to connect with the present world became painfully evident—it was the world of his parents and grandparents which enthralled him. He’d always hoped that somehow the land would become unrecognizable after he’d died, but already long-familiar landmarks were becoming subtly strange, features of someone else’s interior landscape, not his.
On a distant newly ploughed slope he could read the large spot where the earth darkened: the Cherokees had had campfires there over
the years. He’d make sure he talked to that particular farmer before sundown.
The road dropped towards the river, followed it for several twisting turns, then swung away sharply where the Delbert Williams farm began. The main house was about a mile away, across a wide expanse of ground bearing nothing but tall weeds. Far up on the ridge was a copse of twisted black trees and the rusted tin roof of the Williams’s tenant house, gleaming redly like a fresh knee scrape in the sun. The fields up there hadn’t been ploughed either. Charlie could remember a time when coming around that bend in the road you could see nothing but tobacco and corn fields for miles, all a part of the Williams crop. It had been a good farm for finding relics—there had always been fresh ground turned over. Charlie had visited the farm every spring and summer for twenty years or more.
He wondered if old man Williams had finally given it up. Halfway around the long curve in the highway, a rutted dirt road led off to the main house. On impulse, Charlie took it.
Approaching the front yard, Charlie was surprised to see that Agnes Williams’s annual beds hadn’t been planted this year: the half-dozen small gardens, bordered with whitewashed brick, were choked with weeds and the occasional volunteer marigold. A black Buick was parked in front of the house, weeds growing around the dusty tires. Charlie pulled in beside it.
The porch needed paint. The porch swing had a broken chain on one side, and looked as if it had for some time. Charlie knocked on the door frame; paint chips disintegrated under his knuckles. He brushed paint off his hands and waited.
After a minute or so he knocked again. Just as he was getting ready to leave, the door creaked open.
The old woman stared at him as if sightless, a few wisps of unbrushed white hair hanging over her left eye. Then her eyes moved up and down his body. “I know you,” she said softly.
“The name’s Goode, ma’am. Charlie Goode? I just wanted to ask if …” He stopped. My God, it’s Agnes! he thought.
“Yes …” She moved her mouth slowly, wetting her lips with a small, pale tongue. “I know you. I … remember you.”
Absent Company Page 36