When Darkness Loves Us

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  They continued through tunnels barely large enough for Michael’s muscular body, up and down shafts, eating when hungry, resting when tired. They finally reached the lake, and the underwater doorway to Home Cavern.

  At the large lake, they camped. Michael didn’t know that his children and grandchildren were so close, just on the other side of the wall. No sounds escaped the underwater entrance. Suddenly she didn’t want Michael to see them. She wanted to keep him under her control. She realized that he might want to take her babies back with him, and that was out of the question. She prayed Clint or Mary or one of the boys wouldn’t come out this way while they were there.

  “Tell me, Michael. Does Maggie know you’re with me?”

  “Oh, yes. She didn’t like it, but then she doesn’t like much anymore. I didn’t tell her about Clinton. I told her you were taking me to see Mary.”

  “I see.” Sally Ann grinned in the darkness. A plan was taking form in her mind.

  3

  After sleeping three or four times, Michael was anxious to get under way. Sally Ann delayed their departure as long as she dared, then led him down a tunnel, far away from the Home Cavern where the children played. She remembered from long ago another cavern, much like the one Michael expected, and she took him there. It took them a long time. She doubled back down different tunnels, and frequently he would ask, “Didn’t we come this way?,” and she would laugh at him and call him foolish. She enjoyed the power she held over him. It was time he learned something.

  Finally, they stopped just outside the cavern. Sally Ann talked to Michael in a low voice, as if the others could hear. “Michael. They’re not used to anybody else, you know. Clinton doesn’t even believe in you, so he won’t let the boys believe in you, either. Mary has been here a long time, and she’s not sure who to believe, so don’t expect a major welcome. This is their territory, you know, and you’re an intruder. They may even ignore you, or tell you to go away. But they’re flexible. They’ll get used to you.”

  How well he knew what an intruder he was. She had made him feel very uncomfortable since the beginning of this damned journey, and he was now sorry he had ever agreed to come. He was totally at her mercy, and he didn’t like that at all. She seemed a little crazed. “I’ll be all right. Let’s go.”

  They turned the corner and Sally Ann went dancing into the cavern. “Clinton! We’re home! Mary? Boys? Come see the surprise I’ve brought.” Silence reverberated in the huge room.

  “There’s no one here, Sally.”

  “Oh, they’re probably just busy. Or maybe they’re hiding. They’ll come back soon.”

  They sat down to wait. Sally fidgeted, as her mind raced. They didn’t wait long. “Here they are, Michael.” She got up and ran to the back of the cavern. “Hello, Clint. And Mary. How are you? I told you I wouldn’t be gone long. Come say hello to your daddy.” Michael was silent at the entrance to the cavern.

  “There’s nobody here, Sally.”

  “Nonsense, Michael. Here they are, right here. Clint, Shake hands with your Dad. Mary, where are the boys? Oh, here they are. Hello, fellas. My, you’ve grown, just in the short time I’ve been away. Michael, meet little Jimmy and Jerry and this is Jonah. Aren’t they sweet?” She worked hard to keep up the chatter in the empty cavern.

  “Sally, stop it!” His voice echoed in the silence.

  “Why, Michael? What’s the matter?”

  His breath stuck in his throat. She was insane. She talked such a good story that she had duped him into coming into this hellhole, and now he was stuck down here with a madwoman. He turned and darted down the tunnel.

  “Michael, wait!” She could hardly suppress the giggles that seemed to have overtaken her. Whatever had gotten into her to do such a thing to him? She followed him out, her tennis shoes silent on the tunnel floor. “Michael,” she called out musically to him. “You’ll never make it out of here aloooone.” She heard his footsteps echoing in the distance. She skipped along gaily behind him. She would be sure he wouldn’t get lost. But a good scare never hurt anyone, either.

  She was surprised at the way he circumvented her roundabout path. He seemed to know where he was going and didn’t get lost in the maze of tunnels and tributaries. He crawled through the smaller tunnels with amazing speed, and this gave her great amusement. All the way back she teased and tantalized him with bits and pieces of her thoughts. Always out of reach, her voice echoed around him. He remained steadfastly silent.

  When he stopped to sleep, she would sneak around him and wake him with great peals of echoing laughter, eerie in the pressing darkness. The low curses he muttered to himself tickled her even more. What had gotten into her that she would act this way? No matter. He was close to the stairs now. They passed the well tunnel and she hollered ahead to him, “Michael. Cockroaches almost ate me in there while I was coming to you. Doesn’t that make you hungry, Michael? Have some slugs, Michael,” and her insane giggles echoed through the night.

  When he’d had enough, he stopped short and hid quietly in a turn of the tunnel. When she skipped past him, he reached out and grabbed her. “Sally Ann. Am I on the right way out of here?” She laughed. “Tell me.” He shook her until she felt her eyes rattle in her head.

  “Oh, Michael. Don’t be a spoilsport. Of course you’re on the right way. I wouldn’t let my little baby, the love of my life, get lost in these dark, dirty tunnels, now, would I?” He threw her to the side and continued on, weak from hunger, heartsick and tired. He entered Monster Cavern. She followed, making monster noises, taunting him, wearing him down.

  “Come here, Sally Ann.” His voice was calm, quiet.

  “No, You’ll hurt me. You’ll feed me to the monster.”

  “Don’t be a petulant child. Come here. I want to talk to you.” He was sitting on a rock at the edge of the lake. She heard him pick up a handful of pebbles and start throwing them into the water. They landed with little plops. “Sally Ann, I want you to come back with me. They have places for people who need help readjusting to a new environment. I’ll pay for it, and you’ll like it there. There’s no reason for you to stay down here and . . .”

  “And ROT?” She shouted in his ear, surprising him. He stood up quickly, and his foot slipped on the rock. Arms waving wildly, he couldn’t regain his balance, and he fell backward into the water. Sally Ann sobered immediately and went to his aid, but she heard splashing and slapping sounds in the water and the old fear once again took over her mind. She crouched on the path and whimpered.

  “Sally Ann . . .” he gasped. “Oh, God! Sally, help me. Something’s caught my leg. Sally! Oh, please.” There was silence while he ducked under the water. He surfaced with a splash. “Sally!” One last scream, then he was gone. The surface of the water continued to agitate, and the waves lapped at her shoes as she stood in the middle of the path, horrified. Then all was silent.

  “Michael?” she called out softly. Silence. “Michael, don’t play any games with me. Come out of there.” She backed up, toward the entrance to the cave. “Michael?” A little louder, a little braver. “Oh, God, Michael!” She turned and ran.

  4

  Clint didn’t need to be told what had happened. He read it in her face, in her body, as they felt each other in greeting. He knew that an era was dead, that he no longer needed to view the other world as a threat. It was over; she was his now, like Mary, like the boys. He felt her loss. It was, after all, what had sustained her all this time. She would get over it. She was a survivor. Like him.

  The angry meanness that had consumed him soon after his mother had gone vanished with her return. He lay on his bed of moss, the only one awake, and contemplated his growing empire. Mary was pregnant again, but it wasn’t soon enough. He told her she had to have a girl.

  He would build something here far superior to anything up there. He and his mother. She would help him.

  She needed some time, he knew, to let the wound heal. Then they would go up there, together, and get what they needed.
Two more girls should be enough. Young ones.

  He turned over on his side and snuggled up to Mary’s back. His hand felt the smooth swell of her baby. Yes. He smiled to himself. This baby girl and two more.

  BEAUTY IS . . .

  CHAPTER 1

  Martha Mannes was forty-seven years old when her parents died. Her father died first, and she watched as her mother called Mr. Simmons who drove out from town and took her father away. So when her mother died, Martha left her in the bedroom and called Mr. Simmons. He held Martha’s hand for a moment, looked at her carefully, and kissed her on her forehead; then he left with her mother in the back of his long black car.

  Martha was alone.

  It was hard to remember just what her parents looked like. There was an old picture on her father’s desk, of a man, a woman, and a little girl. They looked vaguely familiar, so this was the woman she thought of when she thought of her mother.

  After her mother had gone, Martha continued to do all the things she’d always done. She baked bread, she went to town for groceries, she fed the chickens and gathered the eggs. She set three places at the table, and cleared away two unused.

  Sometimes she missed them, but most of the time she just missed all the things they used to do.

  Father used to yell a lot. “Tell your retard to chop some wood and start stacking it,” he’d say to her mother. Martha would see the stricken look on her mother’s face and get up to chop wood. She didn’t know why mother looked that way. Mother called her Martha; Father called her Retard.

  As the years went by, she noticed that no one yelled at her anymore, so she stopped chopping wood, mowing the lawn, and canning peaches. She hated canning the peaches. But she made bread. It was good, squishing the dough, and the white all over her hands and wrists and the counter and the floor. She made bread until the refrigerator was full, and she piled it up on the counter until it turned black and musty. Then she fed it to the chickens. “Chickens gotta eat,” she’d coo as she sprinkled the bread crumbs in front of their house.

  She was never allowed in the barn, so when the terrible awful smell came from there, some people came and brought her things to eat while they burned the barn so she didn’t have to think about it anymore.

  Since Martha wasn’t chopping so much wood and canning peaches and mowing the lawn, she had a lot of time to herself. She did a lot of wondering. She would stand in the wooden doorway to her little home and look out and wonder how the weeds got so high, and would they get as high as the roof. She never found out, though, because now and then a nice boy from town would bring his big machine and mow them down. She sat at the scrubbed table and fingered the wide glossy pink-white scars that ran all around her nose and wondered where they came from. She wondered where the sofa came from, and how come there were always baby chickens and what made the stove hot. And then she’d get dressed up and go to town and buy more yeast and flour and sometimes Mr. McRae, the shopkeeper, would give her a cookie or some other little treat.

  When Martha was fifty-four, she put on one of her mother’s dresses because hers didn’t fit her anymore. She looked in the mirror and thought she looked very familiar, just like her mother, so she sat down and put on powder from the little round flat thing with the cracked mirror, then tried lipstick. Her lips didn’t match so good when she tried to rub them together like her mother used to do, and the lipstick smeared on one side. She took a tissue and started to rub it, and suddenly a little face looked back at her from the mirror. A younger face, with darker curls, a girl with a lump of a nose that hooked to the side, surrounded by fat red scars. The girl had traced the scars in lipstick and mother was removing it with a tissue and a scolding. Mother was crying, and Martha didn’t understand. Then the vision was gone, and Martha went to town.

  She went to the bank first, where they all knew her. She asked for twenty dollars and they gave it to her. The pretty girl in the window told her she looked nice, and Martha repeated it to her. “You look nice today,” she said. She took her crisp bill and went over to the general store and bought what she always bought. Milk, yeast, flour, sugar, and root beer. The 4-H kept up a garden at her house which provided all the vegetables she wanted. Especially carrots. She loved to pull up the carrots, all warm from the sun, wipe the dirt off on her dress, and eat them.

  Mr. McRae, pleasantly scrubbed and mostly bald in his white apron, was always smiling. “Good morning, Martha. How are you today?”

  “Look nice,” Martha said.

  “Yes, you look very nice today. Do you want the usual?”

  “Flour . . .” Martha said, ticking off finger number one.

  “Yes. Wait just a minute and I’ll get it all for you.”

  Martha waited, looking at all the shiny jars with the colorful striped sticks inside. Mr. McRae returned with a sack full of groceries and set them on the counter.

  “What do you do with all this flour, Martha?”

  Her face screwed up in listening intensity. “Bake bread.”

  “Freshly baked bread, eh? Do you eat it all?” He glanced at her bulk.

  “Chickens gotta eat.”

  “You feed the bread to the chickens?”

  She looked at him blankly. “Chickens gotta eat.”

  He leaned over the counter closer to her. “I’ll tell you what, Martha. I’ll give you some real good food for the chickens, and you bring me the bread you bake, okay? And some fresh eggs?”

  “You want bread?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “I’ll buy it from you.”

  “You want eggs?”

  He nodded again.

  She laughed, a rasp, horrible in its lack of practice, her poorly sewn-on nose crinkling redly. “I get bread. I get eggs.”

  “Good. Here.” He put a small solid sack of chicken feed in with her groceries. “Feed this to your chickens, and bring me bread and eggs, okay?”

  She picked up the sack and left without acknowledgment. Mr. McRae shook his head as she waddled out of the store.

  Martha headed for home. A block away from the store, she had to go to the bathroom. She paused for a moment and thought about it, then turned and walked through the next door she came to.

  Her eyes opened in amazement. She’d never seen a place like this before. There was a long bench, only it was too tall to be a bench; stools were in front of it. There were little square tables and red booths. Three men sat in one booth, cigarette smoke curling to the ceiling. Sparkling glasses and bottles covered the wall behind the man who stood on the other side of the bench. He smiled at her.

  She hefted her sack and set it on the corner of the bar and said to him, “Bathroom.”

  “Follow me, Martha.” The smiling man with the white apron like Mr. McRae took her to the back of the room and pointed at a door.

  When she came out, the three men were sitting on the tall stools. They watched her approach with greedy enthusiasm. One of them stopped her with a big rough hand. “Can I buy you a drink, Martha?”

  “Drink?” She looked up into the cold blue eyes. Each tooth of his fierce smile was rimmed in gold, and a toothpick protruded from the corner of his mouth.

  “Yeah. You thirsty?” He turned and winked at his friends. The three of them looked at her, smiling expectantly.

  She smiled her crooked smile, trying to understand. “Thirsty. Okay.”

  “Draw her a brew, Mike.”

  “Come on, guys, leave the lady alone.”

  The smile faded, the toothpick trembled. “She said she’s thirsty, Mike. I’m buying.”

  The bartender leaned over the counter at Martha. He looked menacing, coming at her like that. “Wouldn’t you rather have a soda, Martha?”

  She cowered behind the one who cared about her thirst. “No,” she said.

  Mike set the tall mug of beer on the bar, while the one helped her up to a stool. She sipped the beer and made a face.

  “You have to drink it fast, Martha,” he said to her with a wink at his comrades. “Like this.” He picked
his beer up and chugged half of it down.

  “Fast?”

  “Um-hmmm.”

  She picked up the beer and drank three swallows before coughing and choking. The toothpick man patted her on the back.

  “That’s a good girl. Take a couple more swallows. It’ll go down easier.”

  She did as she was told.

  Mike watched all this with a wary eye. These guys were troublemakers. Poor old Martha, she didn’t hurt anybody; she was just a poor lost soul. These guys got no right to get her drunk. When she had finished her beer, a white mustache rimming her smeared upper lip, he said to them, “Okay. You’ve had your fun. Now get out of here.”

  But Martha, with a new feeling growing inside of her, put her hands up to the bartender’s face and simply said, “Stop.” The bar was unearthly quiet, with just the ticking of the clock in the background, while she tried to concentrate, wrestling with this new feeling, a new concept. It was a new idea, it was just out of reach, please, where did it go? Her eyes started to bulge a little bit, and perspiration stood out on her powdered forehead as she worked so very hard to grasp that one thing, but like a fine wire, it had sprung from her mind. It was lost.

  “Lost,” she said, slumping a little.

  “C’mon, Mike,” said the one missing a front tooth. “She just needs a little fun. Retards are entitled.”

  “Retard?” Martha picked up her head and examined each of the faces. “Daddy?”

  “Oh, Christ. Come on, Martha, maybe you better be getting on home.”

  She remembered. “Chickens gotta eat,” she said.

  Mike smiled and handed her the sack. She left the bar, her feet unsteady, strange thoughts confusing her as she walked home. She walked toward her tiny little house with weeds up to the windows and scrawny chickens picking at beetles. She felt the warm places where the man had touched her arm and then her back. She walked toward the faded memories of shame and disgust and tears and sorrow, and suddenly she remembered the thread of her thought. She let it come, let it find its own way through the crevices of her mind, tried not to block the path of new understanding, tried to remember her mother’s words. “Just relax, honey. It’ll come. Be patient.”