by Tanith Lee
If I had been three years younger, I suspect I would have thought myself the victim or some game. But peculiar things happen. Oddities, differences.
I sat down in the other chair.
“When a man dies, we put him in the earth. If you are religious, you reckon he waits there for the last trumpet, which summons him up to God.”
“In the earth,” she said. “But how can he stand it – is it some punishment?”
“He’s dead,” I replied, like stone. “He won’t know.” “How can he not know?”
In the window, the light of day was going out. And it came to me, as sometimes it did when a child, that perhaps this was the end, and the sun would never return.
In ten minutes or so, Abigail’s boy would sound the bell for dinner. Jedella did not join the communal table.
“Jedella,” I said, “I can’t help you. It’s too profound a question for me. Can I ask the minister to call on you?”
She said, “Why?”
“He may be able to assist you.”
She said, looking at me, her countenance bewildered and yet serene even now, as if she had seen that I and all the world were mad – ‘‘This is a terrible place. I wish that I could help you, but I don’t know how. How can you bear it, Mr Cross, when you witness such suffering?”
I smiled. “I agree, it can be difficult. But then, it could have been worse. We all come to it.”
She said, “To what?”
The bell rang. Perhaps it was early, or I had misjudged. I said, ‘‘Well, you’re very young, Jedella.” Some phantom of my father’s words, perhaps.
But Jedella went on looking at me with her Lethe eyes. She said, flatly, “What does that mean?”
“Now this is silly. You keep asking me that. I mean that you’re young. About 16, maybe.”
I confess, I tried to flatter, making her a little less than she appeared to be. One should always be careful with a woman’s age, one way or the other. In those days 16 was the dividing line; now it is more 20.
But Jedella, who Luke had thought a ghost, stared into my face. She was not flattered. She said, “Sixteen years do you mean? Of course not.” “Sixteen, eighteen, whatever it may be.”
Outside, my fellow boarders were going down the stairs; they would hear us talking and realize that John Cross had the woman in his room.
Jedella stood up. The last glimmer of light was behind her, and played about her slender shape, making her seem suddenly thin and despoiled. Abigail must have persuaded her to put up her hair. She was a shadow, and all at once, the shadow of someone else, as if I had seen through her – but to what?
“I am,” she said, “sixty-five years of age.”
I laughed. But it was a laugh of fright. For I could see her there like a little old lady, five years on from Homer’s daughter.
“I’m going down to my meal, Jedella. Are you willing to come?”
“No,” she said.
She turned, moved; the new lamplight from beyond the door caught her. She was eighteen. She went out on to the landing, and away up the house.
What we ate that night I have no notion. Someone – Clark, I think – regaled us with jokes, and everyone guffawed, but for Miss Pim, and Abigail, who did not approve. I chuckled too – but God knows why. Did I even hear what was said?
In the end we remembered, Homer was to go into the ground tomorrow, and a silence fell. I recall how Abigail lighted a candle in the window, a touching gesture, old superstition, but kind and sweet, to guide a soul home.
I had mentioned nothing of what Jedella had said to me, and no one had ventured to ask what she and I had had to converse on.
In my room, I walked about. I lit the lamp and picked up my books, and put them down.
Over in the west end of the house, she was, that girl with dark hair, who had come up from the morning mist, like a ghost.
In God’s name, what had she been talking of? What did she suggest? What did she want?
I have said, if I had been a few years younger, I would have thought it a game. And, 40 years older, as now I am, I might have deemed it quite proper, to go across the house and knock on the door. Times change, and customs with them. It was not possible then.
At length I went to bed, and lay in the dark, with all the gentle quiet of that place about me, my haven from the city. But I could not rest. She said she did not know what a funeral was, she inquired how he could bear it, Homer, going into the ground. She told me she was 65 years old.
She was mad. She had come from the river in stained glass shoes, and she was crazy.
I dreamed I was at my father’s burial, which once I had been, but no one else was there, save for Jedella. And she looked down into the pit of black earth, and she said to me, “Will you leave him here?”
I woke with tears on my face. I had not wanted to leave him there. Not my father, that lovable and good man, who had given me so much. But surely it had not been my father any more, down there in the dark?
The first light was coming, and I got up and sat by the window. The town was calm and the birds sang. Far off beyond the woods and the forests of pines, I could see, it was so clear, the transparent aurora of the mountains.
I knocked on Jedella’s door about 9.30 in the morning, and when she opened it, I said, ‘‘Will you walk with me?” I wanted no more clandestine meetings in the rooms.
The funeral was at two. Outside there was nothing out of the ordinary going on. The trees had on their scalding full colour. The stores were open, and a dog or two were nosing down the street. Jedella looked at all this, in a sad, silent way. She reminded me of a widow.
We went into the square, and sat on the vacant bench under the cobweb trees.
“I want you to tell me, Jedella, where you come from. If you will.”
She said, “Beyond the woods. Up in the pines. A house there.”
“How far away?” I said. I was baffled.
“I don’t know. It took me a day to reach this town. A day, and the night before.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t mean to come. I was only walking.”
“Why then did you leave the house – the house in the pines?”
“They had all gone,” she said. For a moment she looked the way I have only seen human things look after some great disaster, the wreck of a train, the random horror of a war. I did not know it then. What she spoke of was a terror beyond her grasp. It had hurt her, but it had no logic, like the acts of God.
“Who had gone?”
“The people who were there with me. Often they did, of course, but not all at once. The house was empty. I looked.”
“Tell me about the house.”
Then she smiled. It was the lovely, lilting smile. This memory made her happy.
“It was where I was, always.”
“Where you were born?” I asked.
As if from far off, she smiled on at me. “The first thing I remember,” she said.
She sat on the bench, and I realized absently that in her old-fashioned dress, she was clad as an old lady, like Homer’s daughter or Elsie Baynes, or some other elder woman of our town. The air was sweet and crisp and summer had died. I said, “I’d like to hear.”
“It’s a big white house,” she said, “and there are lots of rooms. I was usually in the upper house, though sometimes I went down. All around was a high wall, but I could see the tops of the trees. There were trees inside the garden too, and I walked there every day, except in winter. Then it was too cold, when the snow was down.”
“Who was in the house with you?”
“Many people. Oh, lots of people, Mr Cross. They looked after me.”
Curiously I said, as if encouraging a child. “Who did you like the best?”
“I liked them all – but you see, they didn’t stay for long. No one ever stayed.” She was sad once more, but in a deeper, softer way. She was indeed like a child, that was what I finally saw then, a child in
an old lady’s dress, which fitted. ‘‘When I was a girl,” she said, oddly mimicking my thought, “I used to be upset by it, the going away. But in the end, I knew that it had to be.”
“Why did it have to be?” I asked, blindly.
‘That was their lives. But I remained. That was mine.” “Tell me more about the house,” I said.
“Oh, it was only a house. It was where I lived. Some of the rooms were large, and some, my bedroom, for example, quite small.”
“What did you do there?”
“I read the books, and I painted on paper. And I played the piano. There was always something to do.”
‘‘Your father and mother,” I said.
Jedella glanced at me. “What do you mean?”
The sun was warm on my face and hands, and yet the air was cool. A blue shadow descended from the tower of the church. Something had hold of me now, it held me back. I said, “Well, tell me about something that you enjoyed especially.”
She laughed. Her laugh was so pretty, so truthful and young. ‘There were a great many things. I used to imagine places, places I’d never been – cities of towers from the books I’d read, and rivers and seas. And animals too. There are lions and tigers and bears, aren’t there?”
“So I believe.”
‘‘Yes, I believe it too. Have you ever seen them?”
“In cages,” I said.
She looked startled a moment. But then she brushed that away from her like a fallen leaf. “I longed to see them, and they said, one day.”
I said, “Did they tell you when?”
‘‘No. I suppose it was meant to be now. After I left the house.”
“Then they told you you must leave?”
“Oh no. But when they were gone, the doors were all open. And the big door in the wall, that too.”
I was trying now, quite hard, to follow along with her, not to delay or confuse by protestations. I thought how, when I had spoken of her being born, she had had that look of the polite guest at the party, when you say something he does not understand, but is too nice to debate on. “The door had never been open before?”
“No, never.”
“Did – they – say why not?”
“I never asked, because, you see, it was the way I lived. I didn’t need anything else.”
She was young – or was she young? – yet surely there had been some yearning, like her wish to see the animals from the books. The young feel they are prisoners even when they are not, or not decidedly. Something came to me. I said, “Did you see pictures in your books of lion cubs?”
“Oh yes,” she said.
I said, “And oncp, you were a child.”
“Of course.”
Above us the clock struck – it must have done so before. Now it was noon.
Jedella looked about her. She said, “Something’s very wrong here. Can’t you tell me what it is?”
“It’s the way we are, the way we live,” I said.
She sighed. She said, and there was that in her voice that filled me with a sort of primeval fear, “Is it like this everywhere?”
I said, intuitively, ‘‘Yes, Jedella.”
Then she said, “Abigail Anchor brought some books up to me. It was a kindness. I didn’t understand them.”
“In what way?”
“Things happen in those books – that don’t happen.” I could have said this might be true of much poor fiction. But clearly she did not imply this. You had books in your house,” I said. “What about those books?”
“Parts had been cut away,” she said. I said nothing, but as if I had, she added, “I used to ask where those pieces were. But they said the books had been there a long time, that was all.”
I said, blindly, as before, “For example, the lion cubs were there, and they grew up into lions. But you didn’t know how they had arrived there.” She was silent. I said, “And how long did the lions live, Jedella? Did the books say?”
Jedella the ghost, turned her dark eyes on me. She was no longer a temptation, not my muse. She said, “Always, of course. To live – is to live.”
“For ever?”
She said and she did nothing. I felt my heart beat in a wild random crescendo, and all at once that peaceful square, that town where I had come to be quiet, was rushing all apart, like a jigsaw, broken. Then it settled. My heart settled.
“Will you come,” I said, “to Homer’s funeral?”
“If you think so,” she said.
I got up and offered her my arm. “We’ll take some lunch in Millie’s. Then we’ll go on.”
Her hand was light on me, as a leaf of the fall.
She was quiet and nearly motionless all through the ceremony, and though she looked down at his old, creased, vacant, face, before the coffin was closed, she made no fuss about it.
But when everything was done, and we stood alone on the path, she said, “I used to watch the squirrels playing, in the trees and along the tops of the wall. They were black squirrels. I used to throw them little bits of cake. One day, John Cross, I saw a squirrel lying there on the grass in the garden. It didn’t move. It was so still I was able to stroke its side. Then someone came from the house. I think it was a man called Orlen. And he picked up the squirrel. He said to me, ‘Poor thing, it’s fallen and stunned itself. Sometimes they do. Don’t fret, Jedella. I’ll take it back to its tree, and it will get better.”
Over the lawn, Homer’s daughter walked, leaning on the arm of her son. She was rubbing at her face angrily muttering about the meat dishes and the sweet pie she had been going to make for the birthday. Her son held his hat across his middle, head bowed, troubled the way we often are at grief we cannot share.
“So the squirrel was stunned,” I said.
“Yes. And later he pointed it out to me, running along the wall.”
“That same squirrel.”
“He told me that it was.”
“And you think now that Homer is only stunned, and we’ve thrown him down into the ground, and now they’ll cover him with earth, so he can’t get out.”
We stood, two respectful and well-behaved figures. Her life had been an acceptance, and she was coming to accept even now the unacceptable.
“Jedella, will you describe for me very carefully the way you came here, from your house in the pines?”
“If you want.”
“It would be a great help,” I said. “You see, I mean to go there.”
“I can’t go back,” she said.
I thought she was like Eve, cast out of Eden because she had failed to eat the forbidden fruit. “No, I won’t make you, but I think I must. There may be some to all of this.”
She did not argue with me. She had begun to accept also her utter indifference and that she was outnumbered. She guessed something had been done to her, as I did. She had ceased to debate, and would never resist.
When I first took up my life here, I went frequently to walk or ride in the wooded country. Then I got down to my work and adventured less. To ride out on this cold bright morning was no penance, though I had grown a little stiff, and guessed I should feel it later, which I did. The horse was a pretty mare by the name of May.
We went with care along the route Jedella had outlined, even drawing – she had a fair hand with a pencil – landmarks I might look for. Beyond the road we climbed nto the woods and so up the hill called Candy Crag, and over into the pines.
I was high up by nightfall, and I could feel the cold blowing down from the distant snow-lined mountains. I thought, as I made my camp, I might hear a wolf call up on the heights, but there was only stillness and the swarm of the stars. Such great calm is in those places and the sense of infinity. Some men can only live there, but for me, I should be lost. I like the little things. This was enough, a night or two, a day or two, up so close to the sky. At dawn I went on.
A couple of times I saw my fellow humans. A trapper with his gun, a man far down on the river. Both glimpsed me, and hailed me, and I them. For the
rest, the wild things of the woods came and went, a porcupine, a deer, the birds, the insects. May stepped mildly through their landscape, her skin shining like a flame. I spoke to her now and then, and sang her a few songs.
I found the house with no trouble in the afternoon of that second day. Jedella had travelled more quickly than I, unless she had lost track of time.
You could see the mountains from there very well, a vast white battlement rising from the pelt of the pines. But near at hand, the forest was thick, so dense we had to pick our way. The house was in a clearing, as Jedella had told me, shut round with its tall white wall. It had a strange look, as if it had no proper architecture, no style of anywhere at all. Like boxes put together, and roofs put on, and windows set in. Something a child had made, but a child without fantasies.
The gate was open, and the sunlight slanted down through the trees and showed me a man standing there, on the path. He wore a white suit, and was smoking a cigarette. I had become used to the pipes and chewing-tobacco of my town. And somehow I had anticipated – God knows what. He was a very old man, too, but spare and upright, with a mane of thick, whitish hair, and eyebrows dark as bands of iron.
He lifted his hand, as he saw me. And this was not the lonely greeting of the trapper or the river man. I could see, he had expected me, or someone. Had he come there to wait for me?
I am not given to drama, except sometimes when I write, and can have it there on my own terms. But I eased myself off the horse and undid my saddlebag and took out the two brightly-coloured shoes that looked as if they were made of glass, and holding these out, I walked up to him.
“Jedella’s slippers,” he said. ‘‘Did she get so far in them?” “Quite far.”
“They’re not glass,” he said, “something I fashioned, when I was younger. A sort of resin.”
“I’d hoped,” I said, “you would come and fetch her.” ‘‘No, I can’t do that. I haven’t time now. It had to end, and she has to go on as best she can. She wouldn’t know me now, in any case. She saw me for five or six years, when she was a child, and I was in my 20s.”
“That would make her old,” I said.
“Sixty-five is her age.”