by Harvey Click
There wasn’t much honesty in the note he’d sent. Even the word “colleague” was a lie: Mary Ash had no job and no prospects so far as he knew. He knew she was a member of the Numipu tribe, more commonly known as the Nez Percé, and that was about all he knew.
Three months ago she had barged into his office at Ohio State University and said she was interested in his work on Native American religion and magic. Pretty soon she was coming home with him and not leaving until morning, and then not leaving at all. For three months Dexter hadn’t been able to focus on anything except one small part of the universe that stood a little over five feet tall and weighed a little over a hundred pounds but had an attitude big enough for a giant. And now that attitude was beginning to get on his nerves.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Yesterday my article was published, so today you tell me I shouldn’t have written it. What am I supposed to do, buy up every copy and burn them?”
“You’re right, it’s too late now,” she said. “But if anything happens, just remember you’re the one who set the gears moving.”
“Jesus, Mary, aren’t you taking this a little too seriously? No one reads anthropology quarterlies anyway.”
She didn’t say anything, and Dexter noticed he was grinding his teeth. Gears moving, your name’s on it and people can find you, and maybe she was right, maybe it was stupid to publish the article. All his life he’d been sober and self-disciplined, and he wondered why he was suddenly acting like a child at the age of thirty-five.
He turned onto the narrow road that led to Heathenhead. He had delayed their arrival as long as possible, but now it was time to face Aunt Naomi’s temper. Bad enough to bring a guest, but if she knew about the article she would probably disown him.
“Maybe you’re right, maybe I shouldn’t have published it,” he said.
Mary made a sarcastic noise and said, “You’re just afraid your aunt might get her hands on it.”
“She’ll never see it,” he said. “Still, it seems like a dirty trick. She’s spent her whole life making sure no one outside the family knows about the Talking Horn.”
“Smart woman,” Mary said.
Dexter pulled into the long, twisty driveway. The house was hidden somewhere back there behind thick brush and trees, half of them dead. The yard had always been wild, even years ago when Naomi had employed a groundskeeper. Now there was only the housekeeper, Miss Barkley, and she wasn’t young. He eased the car past a clot of thorny brambles, and the stone house suddenly sprang into view.
It always caught him by surprise. It resembled a demon crouching in the trees, two towers jutting like horns above its narrow three-storied face. It seemed to lean against the sloping ground but couldn’t topple because of the wings heaped asymmetrically at either side. Tall chimneys and steeply pitched roofs formed a crazy jumble of angles that defied gravity and aesthetics. A rickety front porch wrapped itself halfway around the side like a crooked grin, and the cousins were sitting behind the decayed railing like morsels caught in the demon’s rotting teeth. Dexter smiled as he pictured a long tongue darting out of the front door to lick them up.
“Hope they tarred and feathered the architect before they hanged him,” Mary said.
“Ebenezer designed it,” Dexter said as he dodged a tangle of tree roots snaking up through the gravel. “I think the Horn made him nuts as well as rich. By the way, don’t mention—”
“I know,” she said. “Don’t tell your aunt how the great Ebenezer murdered a child. It was just some fucking redskin anyway.”
Right now Dexter didn’t like her attitude any better than the family history. “Look, you don’t have a monopoly on self-righteousness,” he said. “Half the blood in my veins is just as native as yours. All I’m saying is, I want you to treat my aunt with some respect while you’re here.”
Mary didn’t say anything.
According to the family history, a medicine man named Fallen Crow gave the Talking Horn to Dexter’s great-great-great-grandfather, Ebenezer Radcliff, after he saved the lives of the shaman and his family, but Dexter’s research had unearthed a less attractive story. A journal written by Ebenezer’s fur-trading partner said that Ebenezer had murdered Fallen Crow’s youngest child and threatened to kill the rest of the family one by one until they gave him the Horn. The details weren’t pretty, and Dexter didn’t want his aunt to know them.
He parked the Explorer beneath a dying oak and got the bags from the back. They picked their way over the broken shards of a sidewalk and climbed crumbling steps to the porch.
Dexter forced a smile at his unsmiling cousins, relieved that they apparently hadn’t brought their children this year. As he introduced them, he was conscious of how pretentious their names must sound to Mary. Even his own name was pretentious.
Edlyn nodded curtly and drummed the arm of her rocking chair with sharp red fingernails while her slight gray husband watched her pinched expression to see what he was supposed to do.
Winston, fatter than ever, emptied his brandy snifter and slurred two or three incoherent words. His wife, who seemed to shrivel thinner each year, noticed Mary’s turquoise necklace and stared at it like a detective examining a bloodspot. Her tiny eyes darted to Mary’s tight black braids, two more irrefutable clues.
Ellery was dressed as usual in a tweed suit. He’d been playing a bad actor playing an English squire ever since his first vacation in England. His expensive side-by-side shotgun leaned against the wall behind his chair. He brought it each year and sometimes disappeared into the woods to take a shot at whatever chipmunk or field mouse dared wander into his path. He made a British-sounding noise, and his wife reached for another drink.
Gilbert was the only one to form an intelligible sentence. “Well, well,” he drawled. “Perhaps next year I’ll bring Jimmy to meet Aunt Naomi again.”
Several years ago, he’d brought his tattooed lover to Heathenhead. Naomi had called Gilbert into her study for five minutes, and Jimmy was never seen again.
Dexter stared the cousins down. He knew they were intimidated by the copper pigment and roughly chiseled cheekbones he’d inherited from his Cherokee mother. He was tall and lean and knew how to make his face hard as rock. They soon found other places to look.
He banged the bronze knocker, and Miss Barkley opened the door, a stocky woman with a thick face as utilitarian as a mop bucket.
“You’re looking well,” Dexter said. “How’ve you been?”
“Old and stubborn.”
“How’s Aunt Naomi?”
“Older and stubborner.”
“This is my friend Mary Ash.”
Miss Barkley grunted and said, “She wants to see you in her study. Both of you.”
Dexter led Mary through the foyer and down a dark hallway to a small sitting room. “You can wait here,” he said. “I’ll talk to her, and if she’s too upset we’ll find a room in Rhinebeck.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not afraid of your aunt.”
“That’s because you don’t know her,” he said.
“I’m in her house, I better at least say hi.” Mary glanced around the room. “Everything looks strange in here,” she said. “Something funny about the light.”
“It’s the windows,” Dexter said. “Look.”
The leaded panes were so old that the glass was thin at the top and thick at the bottom, making the trees outside look misshapen like the foliage of a dream. Puny rays of distorted light seeped into the room and hung like yellow smudges in the thick air.
“It’s more than the glass,” Mary said. “This house is weird enough to stand up and walk.”
“Maybe so,” he said. “Well, let’s get this over with.”
He led her past dusty paintings and disused gas lamps to the study, wondering if houses really do make people what they are. He knocked, and Naomi yelled, “Come in!”
“Don’t let her spook you,” he whispered. “She likes to talk tough, but she’s probably unarmed.”
He ope
ned the door and ushered Mary into a room lit by a dim Tiffany lamp on a massive desk. The mahogany walls, black with age, were splotched with obscure shapes that he knew to be stuffed game heads, Indian relics, mummified beaver furs, and Ebenezer’s original ink drawings for the monstrous house, fading within their frames into the prevailing darkness. The air smelled ancient, as if the old patriarch’s cigar smoke still fogged the corners of the room.
Naomi sat behind the desk in her wheelchair, a large, white-haired woman as stony-faced as Heathenhead Cliff itself. A portrait of Ebenezer glowered above her shoulder.
“Hello, Aunt Naomi,” Dexter said. “This is my friend Mary Ash.”
Nothing moved except Naomi’s gray eyes behind her wire spectacles. “You’re an Indian,” she said loudly at last. Her voice grew louder each year as her ears grew deafer.
“Nez Percé,” Mary said.
Naomi opened a desk drawer and lifted out a magazine. As she fumbled through the pages, her pale hands shaking, Dexter saw that it was the quarterly containing his article. One of the cousins must have discovered it somehow.
“I quote,” her voice boomed out. “ ‘In 1830 a Hudson River fur trader acquired from a Cayuga medicine man a ceremonial talisman called the Talking Horn. It remains to this day in the possession of one of the fur trader’s descendants. The author has had the opportunity to examine this artifact.’ ” Her granite-gray eyes moved from the page to Dexter’s face. “Need I continue?”
“No.”
“I suppose you’ve already told your young friend all there is to know about the family history. Am I correct?”
“Yes,” Dexter said quietly.
“Speak up!” she shouted. “Last month my ninetieth birthday passed unmarked by a card from you. My ears are growing silent.”
“Yes, Aunt Naomi, I told Mary about the Horn. And I did mail you a birthday card.”
“Perhaps my memory is failing,” she said, “though I do recall quite vividly a card that arrived only two days ago, informing me that you were bringing a stranger to the Ceremony. On the same day I mailed you my response. I suppose you didn’t receive it in time?”
“No, I didn’t. You could have called.”
“You know I dislike telephones; I cannot hear a word they say. But in my card I stated unequivocally that your friend is not welcome.”
“Let’s not talk about her in third person like this,” Dexter said.
“She is a third person, an uninvited person,” Naomi said. “And because you’ve seen fit to familiarize her with our family secrets, she may as well become familiar with the family manners in the bargain. She may as well learn that we are not a trusting family, not a warm and cozy family.”
Naomi watched him with eyes hard as boulders beneath a pale forehead furrowed with age.
“As for this paper you published, do you imagine that your literary coyness will fool anyone?” she said. “We’ve kept our secret to ourselves for better than a century and a half, and now you’ve virtually handed the thieves our address.”
Her words weren’t very different from Mary’s. Dexter felt both women staring at him.
“Aunt Naomi, the thieves you imagine don’t exist because no one believes in this kind of stuff anymore,” he said. “No one’s going to be pounding on your door.”
“You’re as pig-headed as your grandfather,” the old woman said. “Only time will tell what disaster you’ve invited to my door, but tonight we shall find out what Ebenezer has to say. Dinner will be at 7:30. I shall see you then, if I live that long.”
Dexter got up, feeling small and childish. His aunt’s affection had always been icy, but losing it was painful. She was the only living relative he respected, and he knew that when she died whatever was unique about the Radcliffs would die with her.
“Stay for a moment, Dexter,” she said. “Send the girl out.”
Mary stepped into the hallway and shut the door. Dexter turned back to his aunt.
“I suppose the others are out there on the veranda getting drunk,” she said. “Once a year they visit, but the moment my head is turned they flee to the porch. They can scarcely bear the sight of my face, and they wouldn’t come here at all if it weren’t for the Ceremony, and they wouldn’t even attend the Ceremony if they didn’t believe that I still have money. Is that true, or is my mind failing along with the rest of my body?”
Dexter found a chair in the darkness and sat down.
“Yes, it’s true,” Naomi answered herself, her voice no longer booming but quiet like the voice he remembered from his childhood, a voice that reminded him of starched doilies and fragile lamps and the fretful manners of a spinster aunt already old when he was a baby.
“I had some small hope for a couple of them when they were young,” she said. “I hoped at least one of them would grow into the kind of man who watches us in that portrait. I hoped for one reliable relative who would protect our traditions and instruct our children with Radcliff ways and stand respectfully over the graves of our dead like that oak near the cemetery that was strong and tall long before I was born.”
She moved her wheelchair farther from the lamp’s weak circle of light.
“I remember your grandfather so clearly,” she said. “My brother Hartley was born when I was two years old. He may have been pig-headed, but all these years I’ve cherished his memory. We played together everywhere, in the attic, the towers, the woods—we used to scale the cliff-face like two bold mountain climbers. Hartley was the best friend of my life, but while he had the good sense to move away and raise a family, I stayed here in this terrible house with nothing but silence and memories as my friends. There, I’ve never said that before. There are many things I feel like saying this year. Death is knocking on the door, telling me to have my last say.
“You’ve always been my favorite, Dexter. When you were a child you looked very much like Hartley, despite your Cherokee blood, and time has etched his features even deeper into your face. His hair was black like yours, and he wore it just as shaggy. I believe you’re Ebenezer’s favorite too; I believe that’s why the Lottery Stones have picked you each year since you turned seventeen. Of the little family I have left, I’m certain you’re the only one who ever visited me for any reason other than the vast family fortune that supposedly molders in my vaults. The others started out well enough, clever and pretty in their youth, but their greed has made them weak and absurd. Their little minds have been fixed on nothing but my money. But I have a secret for you, which I’ll whisper in the dark.”
She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I have no money,” she said. “It’s all gone, spent on taxes and an old woman’s needs. There’s nothing in my safe but the Talking Horn and a mounting pile of debts. The voice of our ancestor is the only treasure left, and I believe that you, Dexter, the one I liked best, I believe that you have thrown it to our enemies.”
“Aunt Naomi—”
“Don’t interrupt me,” she said. “Listen for a while and learn a little of what the long years have taught me. Charles Darwin died decades before I was born, but his disciples and toadies still rule every syllable of what passes for philosophy these days. With their simple-minded nonsense they’ve waged war against whatever magic or miracle this life has to offer. They’ve lobotomized the church and psychoanalyzed its mysteries and explained the presence of God out of the communion wafer. These so-called rationalists understand the pagan world even less. They believe that druids lived too long ago to attend the proper universities and therefore shouldn’t be feared.
“All your life you’ve seen evidence to the contrary, Dexter, and yet you’ve chosen to embrace the Darwinians. For you the old beliefs are colorful curiosities to be caught and smothered and pinned to paper like a schoolboy’s butterfly collection. I had hoped that you would guard our treasure from the skulking warlocks when I’m gone, but you’re too well educated to fear the darkness where they hide.”
She paused, but Dexter couldn’t find anything to say.
>
“Now all of your beliefs must change,” she said. “You’ve thrown open the door, and there’s no one but you to protect us from whatever hobgoblins come slithering in. I’m too old, and those fools on the front porch aren’t fit for the job. But for you to be fit, you must abjure the thin doctrine of rationalism. You must open your eyes to the things that cannot exist. You must unlock your ears to the sounds that nothing can make.”
Her granite face moved out of the small circle of light into the shadows.
“You must believe the impossible,” she said. “Now leave me alone. I need to rest until dinner.”
***
The stone face stared down at them with eyes older than history. Wind, rain, and ice had chiseled its high forehead, jutting cheekbones, and grimly set mouth as accurately as human hands had sculpted Mount Rushmore. According to his journal, Ebenezer Radcliff had chosen this land because of the “heathenish visage” in the cliff, but when Dexter was a child he imagined instead that the ancient face had chosen Ebenezer to guard its sacred talisman here.
Today this didn’t seem to him such a childish idea. Certainly Heathenhead Cliff had defined the course of his own life. It had inspired his childhood interests, his university studies, his career, and all of his publications, including the article that had infuriated his aunt. Maybe it had even influenced his choice of a lover. He glanced at Mary and noted how her cheekbones and eyes and solemn mouth echoed those in the cliff. She could be its daughter.
“Let’s make love,” she said. “Here. Now.”
She unfastened her skirt and let it fall. She pulled off her boots and sweater and removed her bra and panties. Only her jewelry remained, which he’d never seen her take off, turquoise necklace, that odd wire bracelet, and the silver chain around her waist. A chilly breeze swept through the woods stirring the pines and hardening her dark nipples. She folded her arms over her small breasts and shivered.