Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “Of course you do,” Charlie said nervously. “I used to hunt arrowheads every summer around your place. Drug my grandson Bobby along quite a few times—he loved this valley when he was little. Your husband …”

  “My husband … passed away three years ago,” she said.

  Embarrassed, he slipped off his hat; it hung limply from his hand. “Ma’am, I’m real sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  Agnes Williams looked at him sternly. “Don’t be foolish,” she said gruffly. “Come inside.” Then just as he was stepping past her, “I’m still quite capable of being a little hospitable, I believe.”

  “Yes’m …” Charlie murmured, feeling like a boy. The interior of the Williams house seemed to be quite a bit better maintained than the exterior. The rooms were crowded with a variety of antiques which apparently Agnes Williams had been unable to part with, for in many cases two pieces of furniture of identical function were placed side-by-side: in the dining-room two golden oak sideboards whose legs differed but slightly, two dressers in the parlor which were virtually identical, and in the living-room a veritable collection of small, seemingly useless side-tables, and, incongruously placed in one corner, a single mahogany canopy bed. All were well kept, and the rooms were free of dust. Charlie thought the house resembled some antique showrooms he had seen, but there had been no signs that Mrs. Williams was now in the antiques business.

  Mrs. Williams had apparently noticed his interest, for before they sat down on the living-room couch she said, “My husband appreciated fine furniture. He’d have a fit if I sold any of it.” Almost as a bitter afterthought, she added, “Even though I certainly could use the money.”

  After an uncomfortable pause, Charlie asked, “I take it you no longer farm the place?”

  “No. No tenant, you see, not since just before my husband died.” She looked out the room’s large window, and Charlie followed her gaze. There was a clear view of the old tenant’s cabin up on the hill.

  Charlie turned back to her. “There was a family, wasn’t there? A Parker family, I believe.”

  “Parkey,” she said. “James Parkey, his wife, and two children. The wife and the remaining child moved away after James Parkey died.”

  Charlie felt awkward. “The husband, and a child?” He shook his head.

  “Elizabeth. She was always a sickly one, never could build up her strength. But a lovely child. The parents, they used to give her the food off their plates. I saw them …” She stopped. Charlie had watched her hard face growing softer, her eyes pooling moisture, but when she stopped it was as if she had suddenly remembered herself. Her face grew hard again. “The husband died a year after Elizabeth,” she said. “Heart attack. He was a hard worker. And stubborn. He worked until he was ready to drop. He worked even after he fell out of a tree in the apple orchard and broke his arm, the fool. It never did heal right. After a couple of years it hung useless down his side, like a dead limb. He broke his leg when the tractor ran over it. Then later, working with the bulls … I swear, near the end he was hobbling around here like some old scarecrow with sticks shoved through his sleeves and pant legs. He could hardly bend at all. But still my Delbert would watch him every day from down here at the house. He wanted to make sure old Parkey still gave him a good day’s work.” She gestured towards the bed with an almost mocking half-smile. “That was his bed, my husband’s. He had it out in the center of the room here, so he could watch them, make sure that poor family worked hard enough.”

  Charlie couldn’t help looking back up at the tenant cabin. A wind was building up on the ridge: the dark twisted limbs of the trees writhed, raking at the sky. “There’s a clear view,” he said, as if he were making an excuse for her late husband.

  “Oh, he made sure of that,” she said. “You will be staying for lunch, of course.”

  Charlie didn’t think it sounded like an invitation. “If you insist.”

  Mrs. Williams made a small sound somewhere between a cough and a laugh.

  Charlie waited at the dining-room table while she prepared the food. He’d offered to help, but she’d looked at him as if he were crazy.

  From his place at the head of the table he was able to gaze out the window, and again at the tenant’s cabin up on the hill with its brightly rusted roof. In his line of sight were eight or nine large stumps, as if the trees there had been cut down just to make such a view possible. Up on the hill the smaller, bent trees shook as if in protest.

  “My husband made Parkey cut down those trees himself,” she said behind him. She put lunch on the table: a platter of sliced roast beef, a thick milky soup, and chunks of dark homemade bread. “It looks delicious,” he said.

  “It’s what we always ate around here.”

  The silverware she’d arranged by his plate was exquisite: a finely detailed floral pattern, the curve of the knife, the tines of the fork, the bowl of the spoon all beautifully proportioned. To his surprise, her own place-setting was ordinary, dime-store cutlery. His gaze shifted to her face: she’d obviously been watching him the entire time.

  “My husband loved that silverware,” she said quietly, as if that were explanation enough.

  Charlie jabbed a serving fork into a slice of roast beef and transferred it to his plate. He loved good beef. The knife slipped into the brown flesh easily, with very little resistance. No gristle at all, as far as he could tell. Brown juice welled up, with just a trace of red. The rich flavor of the meat filled his mouth. A small groan of pleasure escaped his lips.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I’m usually not so ill-mannered. But this is good beef, best I’ve had in a long time. Man could get pretty fat on beef like this.”

  “I know. My husband grew quite fat and satisfied on that beef: three times a week, all his life.”

  “He knew quality—I could tell that about him.”

  “Oh, he knew it, certainly. And he liked to keep it for himself. The Parkey family would have killed for meat like that, just once, just for Christmas, or Easter Sunday maybe. And my Delbert had it three times a week. I don’t believe little Elizabeth even tasted beef once in her whole life.”

  Charlie looked down at his plate, the finely worked knife and fork poised over the oozing slab of beef. He thought about the wonderful taste of it, and yet couldn’t bring himself to slice off another piece. “Children going hungry,” he said haltingly, “it’s always a terrible thing.”

  “I know you’re a good man, Charlie Goode. You would have given that family a little beef, now wouldn’t you? Even with their being a colored family?”

  “Yes … yes I would have.” It made him embarrassed, it seemed terribly self-congratulatory, but he didn’t know what else to say. While gazing at Mrs. Williams, he had unconsciously lowered his knife back into the meat. He stared at his plate. He had been sawing the blade without thinking, cutting into the brown meat. He lifted the knife abruptly. Reddish-brown juice dripped from the blade. He caught the reflection of his eye in the high shine of the metal. The single eye stared at him. His eye, too red for comfort.

  He looked back at Mrs. Williams, past her, up the hill to the cabin with the bright red, rusted roof. A tall brown figure stood beside the cabin, leaning on the ragged fence, staring downhill into the dining-room window of the Williams home. Slowly it moved across the ridge, towards the trees, walking lopsided, one shoulder higher than the other, one limb dangling at its side, the body twisting as it continued its tortured locomotion, pausing now and then to raise its arms to the sky like some penitent scarecrow.

  “Good beef, you say?” Mrs. Williams’s voice was soft and distant.

  Charlie looked back at his knife, dripping brown and red juices onto Mrs. Williams’s clean white china plate. The reflection of the single eye appeared again beneath the evaporating juice. The huge bright eye that was not his, Charlie suddenly realized. The white of the eye veined heavily with blood, the swollen, sick eye of an old man dying of heart disease. Delbert Williams’s eye. “It’s very good beef
, ma’am,” Charlie said politely. He stared past her bland, smiling face, at the crooked figure on the hill, now ambling into the copse of distorted trees and joining them, its limbs waving in the air.

  “I’ve still got a whole freezer full of that beef,” Agnes Williams said. “Never could eat any of it, myself.”

  Absences

  Charlie propped himself up on his elbows and took the Mason jar full of pink milk from Bobby. His grandson’s hand seemed so warm that Charlie looked up at him quickly, searching for sickness in his face. But all he found was a ragged, worried frown. Bobby’s hand seemed so warm because Charlie’s had grown cold. He could feel them trembling. “I should be warm, burning up with fever,” he thought. He imagined that his hands were cold for some of the same reasons a dead man’s hands are cold. All the life drains away. The systems shut down. Foolish hypochondriac, he thought. Such grim self-pity wasn’t like him. He’d caught some sort of bug, that was all.

  He sipped at the jar and looked around at his bedroom, so familiar with its collections of arrowheads, Civil War memorabilia, small antique shelf decorations, and anything else he’d been able to steal from the grave the world sometimes became for him. Here and there his gaze rested on something somewhat unfamiliar, a forgotten piece from his summer wanderings. He wondered briefly from what old country house, forlorn church, or ill-kept graveyard it might have come, picked up while he was taking his photographs or making his seemingly purposeless examinations. Why were some objects recalled so vividly, and others so vague they might as well have belonged to a stranger? He had no idea. He supposed it might have something to do with those locales he favored—places where nothing happened anymore, at least in the conventional meaning of the term.

  “I don’t know how you can swallow this stuff, Granddad.” Bobby sniffed his distaste, eyeing the pinkish milk with something very like fear and trembling.

  “It was your grandmom’s recipe. Ground berries in milk for a cold. She swore by it. Don’t know if it helps the sickness, but it helps my attitude.” Charlie upended the smooth jar filled with Alice’s medicine—sweet Alice’s love, he called it—and let it fill his empty throat, his empty belly. Not for the first time it occurred to him that the drink was very near the color of Alice herself: milky white, with pink highlights where the blood ran close to the surface, where she had once blushed with embarrassment, sadness, or anger. He stared at the empty jar, the inner cloud of pink draining rapidly in the fire-warmed room, Alice’s flesh grown absent, her presence an empty, transparent jar. A form to fill up again with his own grief and memory.

  Bobby stepped up behind the jar, and suddenly Charlie was seeing Alice in Bobby—her eyes and mouth—through the lens of Alice’s absence. “I can’t believe you’re actually going out in this rain, especially as sick as you’ve been.” His voice seemed muffled by the glass.

  “Jane is an old friend.” He thought lady friend, but was too shy to use the term in front of his grandson. And still holding the empty jar with its vanished reminders of his long dead wife, these new thoughts of Jane, the one he’d almost married, made him feel traitorous, even though he’d known Jane first. “She needs me,” he said. “She’s been in a great deal of distress of late.”

  “People say she’s gone a little crazy, Granddad. People say she’s dying up in that old house. They sound like they’re surprised she’s even still around for you to be visiting.”

  “Well now, you thank them all for their concern, Bobby.” He could see his grandson’s face go pinker than the milk. “Let you in on a little secret.” He leaned forward and coughed dramatically. “We’re all dying. And we all go a little crazy from time to time. I’ve never met a soul who has earned the right to feel any superiority where sanity is concerned.”

  Bobby laughed. “You don’t think too highly of the human animal, do you, Granddad?”

  “On the contrary, as long as people realize just how close to the animal they still are.”

  It didn’t require a great effort to convince his grandson to drive him to Jane Elder’s house. Bobby knew he’d walk if the offer of a ride wasn’t forthcoming. Charlie felt some guilt over such manipulation, but it quickly passed, and he told the boy to pick him up in four hours. He gauged that to be the maximum amount of energy he had left for the day.

  The Elder house—or “the Elder sprawl” as he used to call it—had always been the most impressive, the most clearly magnificent, house in town, even after years of inadequate upkeep. It possessed four three-story round towers, an enormous porch, and a broad second-story balcony, magnificent gingerbread worked into every right angle—much of this developed around a central animal motif—tall windows framed in brass and fine wood carvings, gargoyles cleverly disguising rain spouts and exhaust vents, and dozens of variously designed lightning rods covering the rooftop like a city of fairyland towers.

  Despite their great wealth the Elders had left no other monument in the community to mark their long existence there: no long tradition of service in the form of doctors or lawyers, no parks or community facilities bearing the family name, not even the token of an “Elder Street” or an old building with the Elder name emblazoned along its roof line. All of the family’s energies had gone into the making of money—real estate and stocks were the usual vehicles—and the acquisition of things. And the periodic remodeling and refurnishing of the Elder dwelling.

  The family had been largely reclusive—Charlie could remember that towards the end of their lives Jane’s father and uncles had chosen to conduct most of their business through lawyers. And despite Charlie’s having visited that house nearly every day during his early college years, he could count on the fingers of one hand the times he had actually seen the older members of the family.

  No small wonder that Jane had never quite matured, had grown more shy and more insecure over the years. A lasting relationship would have been impossible with her. From the time that he’d first met Alice there had never been any question. But still, he supposed, Jane had held a special lease on some isolated region of his affections—that part men reserved for first sweethearts, impossible loves, romantic curiosities, and child brides.

  But what Jane lacked in maturity she made up for, somewhat, in her talents: an encyclopedic knowledge of southern folklore and ancient trivia, a familiarity with antiques which rivalled his own, and a detective’s knack for finding long sought after pieces. In the year following Alice’s death, Jane was a frequent companion of his on hunting expeditions, an invaluable aide when it came to finding unique curiosities at bargain prices. Her own researches had been more specific. With the beginnings of the Elder family’s decline during the mid-twenties, her older relatives had begun a slow dismantling of their vast store of possessions, selling them off when living expenses were needed, or giving them away—outside the family—when their deaths were imminent. Jane’s father had never participated in this activity, had in fact thought it insanity at best, at worst a variety of patricide. The task Jane had set herself over the past twenty years had been to reacquire all these scattered treasures. It was obviously quite important to her—Charlie had been with her several times at the event of a key discovery. She acted as if a long-lost child had been found. Although he had not gone out with her on these trips in several years, had not seen her at all for at least three—as she grew frailer her intense excitement at these finds had begun to smack uncomfortably of a kind of necrophilia—he understood her to be very close to the completion of her goal.

  Looking at the house from the outside, with its vague indications of sagging siding and stresses awkwardly accommodated, Charlie could almost imagine that it was bulging out from the pressure of all the reclaimed mementoes accumulated inside. The rain had slackened to a mist, intensifying the already grey finish of the boards, and casting such a vagueness over the house that some angles and features and even whole walls of it disappeared from time to time, so that at first Charlie thought his eyes must be failing him. As a young man he had loved the
fresh, rain-washed look of things after a storm. Now that he was old he found the effect annoying, a reminder of how much things changed, how the work of a day, even a year could so easily be washed away. Rain stained the house in broad ovals and emphatic gestures, indicative of poor drainage and decades of damage, he supposed. But the grey shadows appeared pressed back into the wood as if appalled, mouths dropped open and hands thrown in surrender. In darker areas the wood dripped with agonizing slowness. In the periodic push of damp winds, the Elder house creaked with movement.

  Charlie could almost hear his own creaking as he made his way across the broad porch to the cut-glass door. Before he could press the bell the glass rippled with an image of vaguely disordered flesh. He recognized Jane’s hair and eyes. As if reassembling herself, she waited before pulling open the door.

  “Charlie … Charlie Goode,” she said, as if she knew him by reputation only. Charlie stared at the woman under the ornate lintel—two birds tearing at a strip of meat, it seemed, but the paint was badly chipped—and thought it was Jane’s mother from fifty years ago. Certainly it was the mother’s dress, from the portrait over the parlor mantel. Plum-colored, silver brocade flowing over the chest. “I know you must recognize the dress.” She laughed, and the young laugh cracked and became old. “I’ve had it restored.” The fire in the high cheeks faded and his Jane was suddenly there, or at least her form, her container. What filled her space was far paler, far older than he’d ever seen her. Only the eyes still glistened, as if with fever.

  “You haven’t changed,” he lied. “I’d recognize you anywhere.”

  Her face flushed so vigorously that the rest of her appeared to fade altogether. “I’ve almost done it!” she said excitedly. “There are just the lions, and they’re to be delivered at any moment.”

  Charlie turned and stared back out the open door. He’d forgotten the lions had ever existed. Two recently cleared areas at either side of the front walk reminded him. Such rare, fine, valuable work, and yet so impractical—they’d been among the first pieces to go, when Jane had still been a girl, really. As a boy he’d watched them for hours—with such detail he’d fully expected them to move at any moment. Huge and golden, they’d immediately established for him the image of the ideal lion. How could he have ever forgotten them?