Childgrave

by Ken Greenhall

  “Can you walk?” Sara asked me. She helped me to my feet, and I took a few steps without doing any damage to myself. “Come home with me,” Sara said.

  By the time we reached the doorway of the Meeting Hall, I was moving more or less normally. We walked quickly out into the night, and I looked toward the cemetery. The vigil seemed to be still in progress. “They’ll be there until dawn,” Sara said. When we were in the house, I went first to the fireplace and put a couple of logs on the embers. Sara helped me out of my jacket, and she put her arms around me. As we stood in front of the fireplace, two or three kinds of warmth began to invade me. I would have been absolutely comfortable, but the image of the people who were standing at the cemetery kept returning to me. If those people were experiencing any kind of warmth, I couldn’t imagine what it might be.

  I kissed Sara more elaborately and sincerely than I had ever kissed anyone before. But that didn’t take my mind off the things I had seen earlier in the evening, either. I was sure that even if Sara were to take her clothes off, I would be thinking not entirely of her body, but wondering why she had been wearing that black cape and that black wool floor-length dress. (Fortunately, she had got rid of her bonnet before she joined me in the Meeting Hall.) I decided that, at least for the present, there was more need for us to talk than to make love.

  I backed away from Sara and said, “Let’s talk.”

  “Let’s go to bed and talk,” she said.

  I wondered for a moment whether Sara was joking. But her suggestion was serious and helpful. She took a candle and led me upstairs to her bedroom. In the corner, her harp glinted in the flickering light. She put the candle on a bedside table. We took our shoes off, Sara put aside her silly cape, and we got into bed. It was a perfect arrangement: soft light, warmth, and relaxation. It was intimate, but—thanks to our heavy clothes—not quite intimate enough to be distracting. We lay on our sides, facing each other. I wrapped my arms around Sara and put my cheek against hers. Mouth to ear, we talked.

  Sara said: “Ask me questions. Ask the most important thing first.”

  I thought for a moment, and asked: “Do you love me?”

  “Yes, Jonathan, I love you. Yes. That’s the most important thing.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been here, of course.”

  “Why hide from me if you love me?”

  “Because Childgrave will always come first in my life. If we were to live together, we would have to live here. You—and Joanne—would have to accept the rules of the village. I wasn’t sure you could do that, or that I had the right to ask you to do that. You were more persistent and serious than I thought, though. I still don’t think it would be wise for you to live here, but I think you can be trusted to know what your choice would mean—and to be discreet about it.”

  “And that choice would mean getting involved with human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism?”

  “An anthropologist might put it that way. A person who lived in Childgrave would say it means demonstrating that your love of God transcends your love of your own life.”

  “But if I’ve got it right, it’s not your own life you’re risking, but the life of an innocent child.”

  “Yes. That makes it more difficult.”

  “Especially on the child.”

  “I’m not sure about that, Jonathan. We’re the ones who have to live with the memory of what we have done.”

  “But wouldn’t it be more civilized to do these things symbolically?”

  “Perhaps. But civilized people seem to end up playing bingo or having rummage sales. They’re more interested in frivolous pleasures and in possessions than they are in God. Maybe God is not civilized.”

  I wasn’t ready to deal with that kind of theoretical question, so I asked Sara to tell me about practice and not theory. The practices turned out to be pretty much what I had read in Josiah Golightly’s book. That is, each Easter, the names of all the girls in Childgrave below the age of six were written on separate slips of paper, and one of the names was chosen at random. The girl whose name was chosen was allowed to do pretty much anything she wanted to do until the following Christmas Eve, when she would—as I had just seen—enter the mausoleum with the chief of police and a knife. A week later, on New Year’s Day, the Child-graveans broke their fast in a way that Sara didn’t seem too eager to describe in any detail.

  “We have communion,” she said.

  “What you mean is, you drink a little girl’s blood and eat her flesh.”

  “It doesn’t seem like that, Jonathan. It’s not unpleasant.”

  “Was that Gwendolyn Hopkins who went to the cemetery tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the next meal you will have—”

  Sara interrupted, apparently not wanting it described in my words. “It’s not a meal,” she said. “It’s a simple communion.”

  I took my arms away from Sara and moved to the edge of the bed. “And if Joanne and I were to move here, Joanne’s name would go into the hat next Easter?”

  “Yes. And, Jonathan . . . if you want to live in Childgrave . . . I think you must move here before next Easter.”

  Sara had anticipated my thoughts: Joanne would reach her sixth birthday next November. If I married Sara after Easter, Joanne would never be subject to the lottery. “Why is that necessary?” I asked.

  “Because to be a Childgravean means that you are willing to make that sacrifice. You would never be accepted here unless you demonstrated that willingness.”

  “But it’s not my sacrifice. I mean, if it were my name going into the hat, okay. But it’s Joanne’s name.”

  “Joanne is willing. She told Gwendolyn she is.”

  “Joanne is just a little kid. She’s not responsible. I’m responsible.”

  Sara didn’t argue the point. I was desperate and angry. I’m not very good at debate, but I was determined to try to find a weak point in her logic. “What about the people who don’t have female children? They don’t have to make the sacrifice. What about your ex-husband Martin? I gather he’s not likely to have any children.”

  “He tried to have children, Jonathan.”

  It occurred to me that he might have tried in the same bed I was lying in. I got out from the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, facing away from Sara. We were silent for a while. Finally, I said: “It’s unreasonable.”

  “Yes,” Sara said.

  I didn’t want to think about that part of it anymore. “How did you know I was here tonight?”

  “Chief Rudd knew. He had you watched.”

  “Good old Delbert.”

  “He’s come to trust you. He’s willing to have you become one of us. Although he doubts whether you have the . . . grace that’s necessary. But he trusts you not to make trouble for us. You understand, don’t you, that we could be in trouble if the wrong people knew about our customs?”

  I didn’t think it was necessary to answer. Instead, I said, “I suppose the other Childgraveans have been passing judgment on me, too. Verity Palmer, for example. Did I earn points for resisting her saintly advances?”

  “That was her own idea. I told her that that sort of thing wasn’t called for. We weren’t testing you, Jonathan. We just thought some of the people here should get to know you—and that you should get to know us.”

  I gathered I hadn’t met the most important citizen of all, though. So I asked, “Who was the man who was with Chief Rudd tonight?”

  “He’s our benefactor; the only one of us who lives outside the village. You must have noticed that we have no basis for an economy here. Our benefactor conducts our business for us. He supplies us with all our everyday needs. He lives in New York City.”

  As I was thinking that over I felt Sara tap my shoulder. I turned to find that so
mehow she had managed to get out of her dress while my back was turned to her. She was smiling. “Let’s please each other now, my love,” she said. “Then you go back to the city and make your decision.”

  Although there weren’t many times in my life that I had been so preoccupied, the sight of Sara removed everything else from my consciousness. Her Puritan aspect had vanished. The candlelight reflected softly from her white flesh and from the few pieces of black nylon she was wearing. I ran my fingertips over her whiteness; I removed the black nylon, touching with my mouth the places where it had been. Then I put my mouth against hers, and I welcomed that strange state of consciousness that results from absolute pleasure. I don’t know whether it was a consciousness of myself or of Sara or of the two of us becoming one, but it was unlike anything I had known before. The only thing I was aware of apart from us was a sound—a sound that at the time I thought was some sort of hallucination. It wasn’t until we lay quiet and apart that I realized that I had been hearing the strings of the harp vibrating delicately in reaction to our movements.

  As Sara and I dressed we did a lot of smiling at each other, but no talking. When we left the house, Sara turned toward the cemetery. I hesitated. “I have to get back to Joanne,” I said.

  “Yes,” Sara said. “Write to me, my love.”

  I watched her walk away, and then I started up the hill toward my car. Before I reached the car, I heard from far behind me the cry of despair I had heard earlier when the woman left the crowd and ran toward the mausoleum. It was probably Gwendolyn Hopkins’s mother, Beth.

  Santa is supposed to be tired but happy after he finishes his annual rounds. By the time I got to the apartment, transferred gifts from the closet to the floor around the Christmas tree, and got into bed, I qualified for the role. The problem was that I also qualified for the role of a hysterical insomniac. I was wide-eyed with anxiety over the decision that Sara had presented me with and my recollections of the night’s festivities in Childgrave. I got out of bed and looked out my window. The dawn hadn’t come yet. They would still be standing there in the freezing darkness; Sara would still be there. And I was standing, too. There wasn’t any point in my getting back into bed and trying to sleep. What I wanted to do was to take a hot bath. But how could I allow myself to do that when I knew those people were out there?

  I stood at the window, shivering and letting my mind show and reshow images from earlier in the night. The sequence changed, but the images stayed the same. I felt as though I were a film editor putting together the trailer for a new movie. I was trying to keep it from looking like a horror movie, but I wasn’t having much success. The images recurred: the muscled white flanks of the horses; the two figures in the sleigh; the crashing doors of the Meeting Hall; the white-dressed girl moving between the rows of black-robed figures; the candles flickering in the night wind, the knife in the raised hand; the scrawled words on the antique paper; Sara’s hand on my shoulder; Sara’s body under mine; the harp strings trembling.

  I tried to hold the image of Sara, but it moved past and cross-faded with the others. The shot that appeared more and more frequently, from changing angles, was the one that showed Chief Rudd’s upraised arm; his tense hand; the knife blade glittering faintly in the candlelight.

  That was the image that was with me when Joanne came into my room. I felt her hand in mine. I was still standing at the window, my body trembling like a recently plucked harp string. It was dawn.

  “Merry Christmas, Daddy.”

  “Merry” isn’t the word that best describes my state of mind that Christmas Day, although I tried hard to be cheerful. I sought out some physical warmth first, in the form of hot bacon, eggs, and coffee, and a hotter bath. It wasn’t long before my body was as feverish as my mind. Nanny Joy and I watched Joanne open presents. My daughter is of the school that believes in prolonging pleasure. First she had to admire the wrappings. Then she had to remove the paper and ribbon without doing any damage to them. Fold the paper and roll the ribbon. Do a little guessing. Then, slowly, open the box. Her patience gave me a lesson in inherited traits.

  My big present for Joanne was a lot of little presents: more furniture for her dollhouse. I had been noticing the dollhouse lately, because it reminded me of Mrs. Coleridge’s place. The tiny pieces of furniture I bought were supposedly precise scale models of museum items dating from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. I suspected the museums had paid less for the originals than I had paid for the shrunken versions.

  Joanne immediately retired into her imagination and—in every respect except the physical—became about an inch tall, wandering through the rooms of the dollhouse, and arranging and rearranging chairs, mirrors, rugs, and dozens of other objects that someone had found interesting enough to save from the scrap heap of design. When she put a bed in the upstairs bedroom, I watched with more than casual interest. There was also a bedside table with a minuscule candlestick on it, and my most fortunate purchase: a harp. Joanne looked up at me and smiled as she placed it in the bedroom.

  Nanny Joy seemed to be enjoying herself, although her patience finally gave out and she began to speed up the furnishing process, tearing off wrappings and making a lot of the decisions about how the furniture should be arranged.

  After the little harp was in place, I let my anxiety re-emerge. I looked at Joanne; she was beautiful and happy. And she was as innocent and safe as anyone can be in Manhattan. Someone might try to harm her, but it wouldn’t be with the consensus of the whole neighborhood.

  I thought back to how perceptive and receptive Joanne had been concerning Childgrave and its customs. From the moment she had met Sara and had begun to see Colony Golightly’s (all right, I’ll say it) ghost, she had somehow known everything. I remembered her sudden interest in raw meat—the pink veal on the plate. (I’ve read somewhere that human flesh tastes like veal, although I don’t remember who found himself or herself in a position to be able to supply that little culinary sidelight.) As usual, I had been a bit dense. There had also been a lot of interest on the part of Joanne and Sara in blood. I should have put two and two together. But who ever expects two and two to equal cannibalism?

  I wondered what Sara and her neighbors were doing now. No bacon and eggs; no presents under the tree. But despite it all, I wanted to be in Childgrave at that moment. I was aware that Joanne and Nanny Joy and I didn’t constitute the perfect family unit. Joy had announced that she would be going out to church in the afternoon. Joanne would probably want to take a nap. And Jonathan would be alone. I hadn’t thought much about Harry Bordeaux lately, and I knew that he was more a business acquaintance than a friend. But I realized that my life had become more restricted than ever, and he was more like a friend than anyone I knew in the city. Even though it was ridiculous, I began to think of the people I had met in Childgrave as though they were members of my family: Mother Coleridge; brother and sister Hopkins; cousin Verity; and of course, old uncle Rudd.

  I was lonely.

  After Nanny Joy left for church, Joanne made the peculiar announcement that she thought we ought to go to church too. I didn’t ask her what her reasons might be, but since it was Christmas Day, I supposed it was an unarguable suggestion. My problem was that I didn’t know any churches. I had been in a few more or less as a tourist, but I had always been uncomfortable in them, feeling that they really weren’t meant for tourists—not even St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which probably was meant for tourists.

  I tried to remember the last time I had been in a church. I decided it must have been when I got married. That made me think of Elliott Mason, the man who performed the wedding ceremony and who took my wife away—away from me and from life. In a drawer somewhere I had the letter he sent me after the accident and my wife’s death. He said he was available if I ever needed him. Well, I wasn’t sure if he was the person I needed, but I was certain that after my experiences of the previou
s night few people had more reason than I to try to find out a little about certain points of Christian morality.

  I found the letter. It didn’t have a return address on it, but there was a phone number. It wasn’t the best day or time to call, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say, but I wanted to talk to him. He answered on the first ring.

  “Elliott Mason,” he said.

  I’ve never quite known what to make of people who answer the phone by saying their names. It seems to have an odd combination of efficiency and egotism. In any case, I’ve never progressed beyond a tentative “hello.”

  “This is Jonathan Brewster.”

  I expected his reply to be “Who?” But instead he said, without any surprise or hesitation, “It’s good to hear from you, Jonathan. And on Christmas Day. How good of you to call.”

  “I suppose you’re busy.”

  “Not until five o’clock.”

  “My daughter wanted to go to church, and I thought of you. I wasn’t sure where you were stationed now.”

  Elliott gave me an address on the Lower East Side. It wasn’t far from my apartment—but it was very far indeed from the Upper East Side address he used to be connected with. He said he would meet us in his church in about half an hour.

  As Joanne and I left the apartment, it started to rain. We jogged through deserted side streets, and in a few minutes we were standing in front of the shabby brownstone facade of what turned out to be All Seraphim Church. There was an announcement board in front with messages spelled out in English and Spanish with unmatched plastic letters. There was no mention of any denomination. The interior of the church wasn’t exactly the sort of thing to inspire most people to have faith in either God or the profession of architecture. The nave was dark and damp, and I had seen higher ceilings in duplex apartments. Behind the altar there was a mural that showed what I supposed was God on a throne, surrounded by swarms of angels. The angels didn’t look very airworthy. But despite my initial cynical response to the building, I soon realized that I felt more comfortable there than I would have in most other churches. Obviously, the people who worshiped in All Seraphim were not out to enjoy minor esthetic pleasures or to demonstrate their tastefulness.