Childgrave

by Ken Greenhall

  “And a gambler?”

  “When the stakes are right.” I almost said “odds” rather than “stakes,” but I suppose I had known all along that love doesn’t play the odds. To say that you’ll marry if the odds are right means you’re marrying for some reason other than love.

  Sara stepped away from me. “You can’t really know whether the stakes are right, though, can you? I’m practically a stranger to you, Jonathan. I’ve spent most of my time hiding from you—hiding my personality as well as my body.”

  Sara blushed, probably remembering, as I was, that she hadn’t been too successful in hiding her body. And that told me a fair amount about her personality. Then it occurred to me that what was to be gained through my gamble was not so much Sara as it was love itself. I would be getting not just a wife and a new home but a new way of seeing.

  What I was seeing at that moment seemed worth a lot of sacrifice. Sara stood between the bed and her harp. On the wall behind her was a large, spottily silvered mirror in which I could dimly see my own reflection. I began to feel unsettled. The hairs on the back of my neck moved. It was as if I were a third person in the room. I thought of a painting I had often seen reproduced: a wedding portrait by an early Renaissance Flemish painter—one of the van Eycks, I think. A couple stands in a bedroom. There is a canopied bed at one side, and a round mirror hangs on the wall in back of them. I think the artist’s reflection shows in the mirror. One of the odd things about the painting is that the woman depicted—the bride—is extremely pregnant. As I remembered this, my ears pulled back. Could Sara be pregnant? Of course she could. I could vouch for that. And was Sara pregnant? Yes. I was sure of it. She probably didn’t know it, but I knew it. Was I going to become clairvoyant? I wasn’t exactly sure what that involved, but I decided that if it didn’t involve seeing ghosts, I wouldn’t mind it.

  But what was more important was that Sara and I were going to have a new child. For some reason, I had never thought of that possibility before. It made a difference. I wasn’t sure, on the whole, whether it was a good difference or a bad one. But it excited me.

  I wanted to do something silly and dramatic, like putting my head against Sara’s belly. But instead, I simply kissed her forehead and left her.

  The wedding ceremony was unremarkable. At about two-thirty in the afternoon, a tall gentleman named Button Golightly came to escort us to the Meeting Hall. (The name might have been—and somehow I hoped it was—Burton, but everyone made it sound like Button.) Sara and I signed what Mr. Golightly assured us was a valid wedding license, and then our little party walked to the hall. The plan was that Mrs. Coleridge, Joanne, Sara, and I would stand at the back of the hall while the old gentleman walked up the aisle to the other end of the building. When he turned to face us, we would follow.

  There was a full house—full of attractive people dressed in tasteful, only slightly out-of-fashion clothes. While we were waiting for Mr. Golightly to make his way unsteadily up the aisle, I couldn’t resist the temptation to take a quick census of the congregation. There were about two hundred and fifty people, sitting in family groups. The bit of information I wanted most was not too easy to come by from my vantage point: the number of girls under the age of six. Most of the young children were hidden by the backs of chairs or the backs of adults. I felt Sara squeeze my arm. It was time for the procession to begin. I blushed, ashamed to have been thinking of anything other than Sara.

  I had expected to hear some music at that point—a choir, or at least a harp solo by Beth Hopkins. But the only sounds were our footsteps and, somewhere in the congregation, the gentle whining of a bored child. As Sara and I moved along the aisle I tried to concentrate on her and the significance of the ceremony we were about to go through, but the child’s voice distracted me and made me think of another ceremony: the one Joanne would be involved in at Easter. And even though I tried to look straight ahead at Mr. Golightly, I found myself glancing from side to side. By the time I got to the front of the Meeting Hall, I had concluded that there were about fifteen girls in Childgrave below the age of six. I tried desperately to avoid thinking in terms of Joanne’s odds as I heard Mr. Golightly say, “Dearly beloved . . .”

  I concentrated on the words of the ceremony and on the exciting, singular woman who stood next to me. A few minutes later we were wife and husband. We kissed, and all thoughts vanished except those concerned with present and future delights. We went quickly back up the aisle. My delight eased quite a bit when we reached the foyer and for a moment I saw Joanne standing against the wall directly beneath the display case that held Josiah Golightly’s knife.

  But there was no time for me to brood. A storm of activity broke out. People moved chairs into corners, and several large folding tables were set up. A peculiar little orchestra consisting of a harp, a lute, a tambourine, and a sort of hurdy-gurdy began to play music that might have been written in the thirteenth century. Cases of wine and platters of food were produced, and Sara pulled me back into the center of the hall and managed the little miracle of getting me to follow her in an improvised dance.

  As Nanny Joy would have said, we let the good times roll.

  Even in Childgrave.

  And much later, Sara and I lay side by side in our curtained bed—our musky tent of pleasure. I drew aside one of the curtains. On the bedside table, a candle—which had been tall and new when I had drawn the curtain—had become a glittering puddle that was about to drown its remaining bit of flame. In the semidarkness I could see Sara’s glistening belly rising and falling. Her muscles contracted as the room’s cool air touched her skin.

  We hadn’t spoken since we entered the bed. We hadn’t felt the need of metaphor.

  Sara’s breathing became slower and more shallow. I pulled the bedclothes slowly up over her neat-rowed toes and the long curves of her legs. I paused and made the gesture I hadn’t made earlier in the day: I put my head against her belly. My cheek was bristly, and there was a scraping sound as I moved my face across her skin. Sara didn’t seem to be awake, but as I moved the covers up to her chin I noticed that her breasts were showing signs of appreciating my gesture.

  I was comfortable in my new life, but I didn’t know what its meaning was. I know that Sara’s warm, agile body lay next to me, and that Joanne rested in the darkness nearby. I knew that the candlelight had dimmed and was flickering. The candle went out, and its smoke drifted through the room. I was aware of the silence that surrounded the house. I knew that in the darkness of the Meeting Hall, a leather-bound journal lay in a drawer, and a knife was displayed in a glass case.

  And I knew that at the end of Golightly Street there were rows of small graves and that a stone angel looked out over us all.

  I knew those things, but I didn’t know what to think of them or why they should make me happier than I had ever been before.

  Epilogue

  It is Easter Sunday, and the people of Childgrave are assembled in the Meeting Hall. There are two hundred and forty-four of us. I’m acquainted with all of the other two hundred and forty-three. I’ve sat here with them on other Sundays, and I’ve been in their homes. I’ve photographed them, and I’ve taken their photographs to New York City to show to my old friend Harry Bordeaux, whose wife Lee is pregnant—a condition that pleases her, and with which she has no plans to interfere. I also visited Nanny Joy, who wasn’t pregnant, but who said she damn well would have been if she had been a few years younger.

  The noise and abrasiveness of the city frightened me, although there were a few moments when my emotions got caught up in the alluring traps with which the city diverts its people from the grime and seaminess—moments when I wondered whether my love for Sara might not find greater depths of expression if we were to live away from Childgrave.

  I recall that on one of my visits to the city, I passed Carnegie Hall. I found myself imagining that I was sitting in the auditorium
listening to a performance of a Mahler symphony. I imagined Sara at her harp behind the second violins, tense with concentration, her hair glinting in the stage lights. I also imagined Joanne being back in the city, asleep in our studio home, her future containing nothing more suspenseful than whether or not she would be accepted by the right school.

  But there have not been many such moments of doubt for me. I am content with my new life: Childgrave pleases me.

  And most of all, my wife Sara pleases me. Life holds no serious difficulties for me as long as I am able to be in her presence. Even in the moments when she is remote from me—the moments around the fire in the evening when she and Joanne see things I can’t see and would rather not see—even then, I am consoled as I examine the play of the firelight on her features. As in the beginning, I need not touch Sara to be excited by her. She dresses modestly, even primly, in full-length skirts and long-sleeved blouses. Yet, when the soft, reddish firelight plays over her clothing, subtly revealing the contours of the pale, firm body that I know so intimately now, my excitement can become complete if I don’t find a distraction.

  Today, as we sit in the Meeting Hall there are at least seventeen distractions. Joanne and sixteen other young girls, all of them wearing white dresses, are seated in a row before us. Three of the girls are not much more than infants, being held by their mothers. I am ferociously pretending that Joanne is not one of the seventeen girls.

  To one side of the girls stands a man whom I once met in the back seat of a black limousine. The man has interesting hands. Everyone is looking at his right hand now. He lowers it into a leather box and lifts out a folded piece of paper. The hall is quiet enough for us to be able to hear the crinkle of the paper as the man unfolds it. He looks at the paper for a moment and places it on the table next to the box. Then he walks slowly to the area behind the girls. He will stand in back of one of the children and place his hand on her head.

  The man is approaching the girls. His right hand is raised. I look at Joanne. She is smiling at me. I feel that unless I move, my vascular system will do something fatal. I look at my own right hand. I place it on Sara’s belly. She places her hand on mine. Her belly is rounded with the growing child that I knew was there before Sara knew it.

  And now the longest moment of my life begins. The man stops. He is not standing directly behind Joanne, but he is close enough to her so that he could place his hand on her head. I feel the panic increasing in me. How could I ever have let myself get into this situation? How can I allow my daughter, whom I love, to face arbitrary death—and worse than death?

  Unpleasant emotions sweep through me. I need reassurance and comfort. My hand, which has been resting lightly on Sara’s belly, moves lower. Sara’s legs part quickly beneath the pressure of my hand. I realize, with shame, that one of the emotions I am feeling is strong sexual excitement.

  My eyes, unblinking, stare desperately at the man who stands behind the young girls. His raised hand has begun its descent. In my deranged state, the hand seems to me to be moving no faster than the minute hand of a clock. However, my mind is moving with incredible speed. A new certainty grips me—a certainty I have been foolishly denying for months: I have sacrificed Joanne’s welfare to my love for Sara. I lift my hand from Sara’s body.

  Now I have a brief impulse toward prayer. I want to ask God to keep Joanne from being chosen. But that is impossible, for it is supposedly in God’s name that the ceremony is being conducted. There are probably parents sitting near me who are asking God to permit their daughter to be chosen. I know now that I can never have such an attitude. I know I am not a believer.

  After the realization sweeps over me, my mind goes blank, leaving all its functions and pathways clear for the message my eyes are about to bring it.

  I stare straight ahead at Joanne. She is still smiling, but her attention is directed at the man who stands behind her. She, like most of the other girls, has begun to squirm with excitement. She turns to face the man who stands behind her, and as she does his hand touches the head of the girl to her right.

  My stomach contracts in a combination of relief and disgust. The chosen girl, Jean Mackie, is a neighbor of ours who is less than two years old. She is seated on her mother’s lap, oblivious to the meaning of what has just taken place. The child raises her face to the man who has touched her. She smiles at him and murmurs in uncomprehending pleasure. The man returns her gaze blankly after what might have been a barely perceptible wince. The child’s mother is in tears—tears that I imagine she would claim are tears of joy but that I am certain must reflect some terror. I hear Sara gasp. I turn to her and realize that the gasp is not a reaction to what she has just seen but to something she has felt frequently in recent days: the kicking of the child within her. She takes my hand and places it on her belly once more. The vague movement I feel beneath my hand does not please me.

  I look across at Joanne. She has never seemed more beautiful or valuable to me. She has been spared and will never again have to take part in the lottery. I find that I am whispering: “Forgive me, Joanne.” And I know I will never be able to let another child of mine take such a chance.

  Joanne looks at me in bewilderment for a moment. Then, realizing she has not been chosen, she jumps off her chair and runs up the aisle into my arms. “I didn’t win, Daddy,” she says in one of her rare self-pitying moods. “And I can’t play this game anymore, can I?”

  “That’s all right, dear,” I tell her. “I’ll teach you some better games.”

  I look again at Mrs. Mackie, the young woman whose child has been chosen. People have begun to approach her. They say a few words and then leave the hall. I look at her eyes and decide that if I were to speak to her, I wouldn’t know whether to offer congratulations or consolation.

  I feel Sara’s hand on my arm. I turn to her and see an expression she has not used with me since early in our friendship: an expression of doubt and mistrust. I had hoped she would never look at me that way again, and I want to reassure her. I shift Joanne awkwardly and lean over to kiss Sara’s cheek.

  I realize that despite the change that has taken place in me during the lottery, I still belong to Sara. But I am certain that I do not belong to Childgrave and that I never will.

  I know now that I must try to do something that no one else has been able to do in more than three hundred years: end Childgrave’s lottery.

  I lead Sara and Joanne out of the hall without stopping to speak to Mrs. Mackie, who definitely looks as if her faith has been a little too sorely tested. Maybe now she realizes what I, as an outsider, have always realized: that not every parent would say yes as Abraham did when God asked him to sacrifice his child.

  As we reach the street I turn to face the graveyard. I had come to think of the towering angel and the symmetrical rows of tiny gravestones as things of beauty—a beauty symbolizing a faith that contained a remarkable, perhaps supernatural, strength.

  But now the cemetery looks only grotesque to me. I will place my faith not in symbols of past sacrifices but in the children who live now or who are about to live.

  Sara, Joanne, and I turn away from the cemetery. For the first time in my life I am about to become more than an observer. Tomorrow I will have a talk with Mr. and Mrs. Mackie.

  We start for home, and as we do, Sara and Joanne hold out their hands to me.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ken Greenhall was born in Detroit in 1928, the son of immigrants from England. He graduated from high school at age 15, worked at a record store for a time, and was drafted into the military, serving in Germany. He earned his degree from Wayne State University and moved to New York, where he worked as an editor of reference books, first on the staff of the Encyclopedia Americana and later for the New Columbia Encyclopedia. Greenhall had a longtime interest in the supernatural and took leave from his job to write his first novel, Elizabeth (1976), a tale o
f witchcraft published under his mother’s maiden name, Jessica Hamilton. Several more novels followed, including Hell Hound (1977), which was published abroad as Baxter and adapted for a critically acclaimed 1989 French film under that title. Greenhall died in 2014.