by Joy Williams
The boy rolls himself back further on the bed and draws himself out. It’s raw and narrow. An eye blinks moistly. The hairs are short, lighter in color than the hair of his head.
The child shakes her head. A boy in school has a mastoid the size of a walnut behind his ear. An old woman in church has wattles like a turkey and there is a man who has no mouth. Each day he wears a fresh red white and blue handkerchief over his face. The child has seen pictures of terrible things. The Bible has told her of terrible things she cannot even picture.
“Will they be able to take it off in the hospital?” She decides that she will ask her cousin questions and see what he has to say. Then she will compare his answers with what she already knows.
“No, no, it’s good. It’s what men have.” He moves her fingers around it. “It’s for you to play with.”
The child strokes it carefully. It is very warm and muscled. Like a fish fillet. There seems to be something softly crackling beneath the skin.
“Does it hurt if you fall?” She saw him becoming impaled by it with the slightest stumble, quivering like a jackknife on the floor. “Does it get in your way?”
“Yes,” the boy says. “All the time. This is the way you show you love someone,” he tells her.
The child does not want to hurt her cousin’s feelings. She smiles.
The snow is turning to sleet. It falls like broken glass. He moves his feet up onto the bed and settles the little girl beside him. She is thinking of asking him for a hank of his beautiful hair.
On the floor is a pink and white package of Dentyne gum. The child knows an excellent trick. She can take one of the smaller wrappers inside the package and fold it two times. It spells
DIE CHUM
which she thinks is terrific. She wants to show her cousin this, but her father has disapproved of the trick and so she pretends that she has forgotten it.
Her cousin is saying something to her. His voice is slow and turgid, the words coming out as though they are things, eating their way through milk.
She does not want to be discourteous but she is bored and she twists away from the boy’s grasp.
AN IMPALPABLE SUBSTANCE, at the same time being very dense; the child unconceived. She often worried about never being born. It was idleness, she knew. For here she was. Her name was Kate.
If she had not been born, her father never would have realized that he did not have her to love. She would have known though, small gelatinous thing rotting in a womb the other side of the stars. She, floating in a cold and bloodless place, would have known that she had been the none end result of a stroke sterile and unfinished. She would have known, even though she would have been more dead than her mother was now, that her nothingness had left no absence in her father’s heart.
They had been living together alone for more than a month, the little girl and her father. Her hair was carelessly braided. There was a smudge of supper still around her mouth. The house was huge but they did almost all their living in two rooms, as they had been in the habit of doing even before the wife and mother passed away. The room that they are in now is warm. There is a fire but it is a noisy one. The kindling is fir and it snaps and cracks loudly until it is wasted and the good oak logs begin to burn. Outside, the child can hear the black wreath on the door, twisting on its nail in the wind. Neither speaks. The remnants of their supper is on the hearth. Cocoa and swordfish, the last of the summer’s frozen catch. Downstairs, in the cellar, behind a bench of potted sleeping chrysanthemums, behind the jars of jelly and green tomatoes, leans an oil painting, delivered just that morning by several members of the congregation.
The child had answered the door. She was barefoot, wearing a woolen bathrobe. Behind her the house was dark. The painting was wrapped in brown paper and part of the paper was dark from the falling snow. It was too large for the child to lift. They brought it inside to the kitchen. The child offered them tea. No one unwrapped the painting. The Reverend did not appear. They drank tea and looked around the bare kitchen. On the wall was a calendar but it’s wildly inaccurate—a dated car journeying through a constant August, advertising a brand of tires that is no longer sold.
Before the mother died, things were more … under control, more up to date. The rooms had furniture, clean slipcovers, rugs. In the cupboards were candles and cans of food. The children were sent off to school with thermoses of soup. A piece of fruit. A slice of meat. Raw vegetables. Healthful, balanced meals. There were always flowers on the table. Even in the winter, there were paper arrangements. There was a smell of wax and washing and cooking. Of life being mildly but thoroughly employed.
But now … the house is so empty. Everything has been sold or given away. The members of the congregation comment on this without coming to any decision. There are leaves in the hallway, a box on the floor filled with summer dresses, cracks in the plaster and windowpanes. Some purpose has been forgotten. Some simple lesson and requirement of family life has been found unnecessary and not resumed. The rooms are being abandoned, their services discontinued. There’s no telling how long this has been going on. It was this way before the funeral. The day of the funeral, when the women of the church arrived to fix the salads, set up the folding chairs, when the men came to remove the remains, they discovered that there was a great deal to do. They freshened things up as best as they were able. It was a house, it was clear, where someone had been sick for a very long time. And yet, of the Mrs. there was little trace. Two rooms, right off the kitchen, there was a woman’s place it seemed, a private place. The walls pale yellow, birds and fruit carved into the mantel, a canopied bed. But the comforter was flung back to expose the mattress ticking. Rust and water marks. An ant cake in the corner. A sense of departure, dismissal …
As for the other rooms, there seemed no plans for their use. Most are completely empty, the others almost so. One enormous sunroom on the third floor, spreading out above the sea, has a few of the child’s toys in it, a record player, a stack of albums. They would look through them briefly. Classical music. Churchly music they supposed. And there was the child’s room. They didn’t enter that. There was a faded stencil of tiny animals on the door. The door was closed. They had a strong sense of what was right. There are three bathrooms. One has a tub filled with damp clothes and towels. Another has a tub filled to the brim with water. Cold. There is a fat creamy bar of soap in the dish. A bumpy rubber mat to keep a bather from a slip and a nasty fall. A box of powder on the commode top. Perhaps the Mrs. had drawn herself a bath, poor thing, just before she passed away. They don’t blame the Reverend for wanting to keep it up, if indeed it’s so. Perhaps it’s just a gummy drain. They remember in Mr. Smiley’s salt-box, in the dining room, the table’s still set as it was on the night fifty years before when the Smileys Sr. failed to return for dinner and failed ever to return again, having been crushed when a haywagon overturned on them. It was how young Smiley showed his due to them. They can understand that.
The third bathroom seems functional enough. Shaving brush. Bubbles of toothpaste in the sink. They didn’t go in. No one had the need to.
UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES they had examined the house as best they could. It had been a fine house. Once everyone had wanted to live in it. That wasn’t so long ago. Now it was as dark and strange to them as an idea of Europe. They had to walk through it again to see what the problem was.
The child stood in the kitchen eating dry cereal from a bowl. She looked feverish and thoughtful. The oil painting was leaning against the wall. It slipped flat onto the floor without a sound. Someone picked it up and set it on the table. The child showed no interest in the painting. She was really not a very curious child, they thought. Children were supposed to be curious and shy. She ate Cheerios, picking out the perfect O’s. They made themselves some more tea. Outside the kitchen window was a sparrow strangled in the end coils of the clothesline. It could have just happened or it could have happened in the last month. No one mentioned it. They didn’t want to bring it to t
he attention of the child. She was really not a very observant child, they thought. The wind blew in from the sea but the bird didn’t move. Icicles sparkled on its breast like spurs.
“I have a cold,” the child said, “and won’t be going to school for a week. I have all my books at home and I also have books from the library. They’re overdue. I have an excellent one called The Lore of the Horse. One white foot, buy a horse, two white feet, try a horse, three white feet, look well about him, four white feet do without him. Daddy doesn’t ride. If he did it would be wonderful. We could employ ferries and planes when necessary and ride right around the world. I know everything about horses. Horses know everything about us. You can tell the future by reading the hairs in a horse’s mane. Of course you shouldn’t do that.”
“I’d bet you’d like to run off to the circus and be a bareback rider,” Morgan, the carpenter, said. His wife looked at him and rattled her teacup. “Little girls do not run off to the circus,” she said. “Only little boys do.”
“Well, where do they get their girls from then,” he said loudly, not looking at her but at his neighbor, the man who sharpened blades.
“I have seen a circus only once in my time,” the man who sharpened blades of all sorts said. “And it was not an astounding thing as they would like to have you believe. For example, the bareback rider, who, in this case happened to be a young man (he said this sadly to Mr. Morgan), a heavy-set fellow of another extraction, missed. He did not miss the first time or the third time, but in the middle of his act, he made a poor judgment and did not come in contact with the horse at all. Of course this is what everyone remembered. Had he done his job as he was supposed to, no one would have thought about him further.”
“Isn’t that the way, though,” someone said.
“Why should I run off anywhere?” the child said.
“He didn’t mean that, dear,” Mrs. Morgan said. “You want to stay right here for now and take care of your father.”
“Daddy cares for me beautifully,” the child said, “and I care for him.”
The house was still. There was not even the sound of a clock. Then there was a dry scrabbling at the door and the child got up and let in her dog. The hair beneath the dog’s chin was gray. The child went to the refrigerator and made a sandwich which she fed to the dog. “We have everything pretty much in order now,” she said. “Though we thank you very much and though they were delicious, we won’t be needing any of your casseroles in the future. Those noodles and meatballs that one of you dropped off Tuesday night were really delicious. We added a little wine and we ate it all right up.”
“Wine?” Bettencourt, the fisherman, said the word so angrily that it seemed to all present that he had cursed. He still wore his crude gloves, stained with grease and with a hole in each thumb. His lips were blue, even in the summer, from working on the water and his eyes were half shut.
“A full red wine is always a great help in cooking,” the child said.
“I had no idea your father partook,” one of the ladies said.
“I don’t think wine is good for you, dear,” another lady said, venturing to touch the child’s shaggy bangs. Each felt giddy with a liberty they couldn’t understand. The Reverend didn’t seem to be home. They had almost forgotten the painting, the solemn, thoughtful reason for their visit. Hadn’t the sea always seemed safer than this house? Wasn’t there something about this house that was as difficult to discover as the nests of the sea birds? They glanced around it stubbornly, all but a few ignoring the child. Dirt in the potato bin; no potatoes. Up on the sill, a big seed of something, its root end hanging over a dry glass. Another relic of the mother. Nothing visible. Why were they so curious and confused? Two women left the room and softly padded up the stairs. The child heard them. She put more water on to boil. She slipped about, like an unpunished, untethered pet, across the floor boards, creaking and familiar and all her own. She watched the women go up the stairs.
“It’s bad for anyone’s kidneys, wine,” Bettencourt said.
“That’s only the very good wine,” the child said, “with the stones, the silt, on the bottom. And that’s only if you drink that part, the bottom of it. We haven’t the means to buy very good wine, so I’m sure we’re quite safe.”
“Oh my dear,” the lady said, still stroking the child’s bangs, “where do you hear such things?”
“Well, Daddy tells me everything of course. He tells me the things I should know and the things I shouldn’t know. And he tells me which is which. As God says, ‘I set before you the way of life and the way of death.’ That’s in Jeremiah. And Daddy has done that for me.”
“You’re a lucky little girl,” Morgan said boisterously. “And you’re just a little girl certainly but soon you’ll be all grown up and what will you be?” He sucked on his teacup, found it was empty, swallowed, regardless, twice. “What will you want to be then, eh?”
“The child has a cold,” Mrs. Morgan said. “Don’t push.”
The child looked out the window, past the sparrow, along the rock ledge that plunged into the sea. Beneath the surface were the fishes and beneath them, caves, and beneath the caves were sightless, creeping creatures, wailing with a whale’s song from everlasting starvation and beneath the creatures was the bottom of the earth and below that, the wealth and terror of everything. The child chewed on her hands. The seaweed on the ledges was delicate as lace, sheathed in ice and shining in the sunlight. There was dead ice and living ice, her father had told her. One was white and one was blue. Everything was living and dead together. There was always some part of you that was dead. There was always some part of you that didn’t need anything and couldn’t help a living soul.
“Well, I just couldn’t know what you mean by that,” she said. “I am what I am. Next Tuesday morning we’re getting up before the sun and we’ll spend the next three days singing and talking to all those people off of Marlsport, on those islands. We did the same last year, if you remember. Father and I were gone three days. It was a very rewarding experience. Everyone got together and baked Daddy a cake in the shape of a Bible open to the Psalms. It was the largest cake I’d ever seen. I don’t know where they could have got the pans. It was white with red icing. It was close to Valentine’s Day that year and Daddy cut me a big piece of cake and served me first and said, ‘This is for my one and only Valentine.’ ”
They catch each other’s eyes above the child. The two women who have left the kitchen can be heard as they move about through the empty rooms. Peter gets up abruptly from his stool by the stove. Peter farms a little. A luckless man, with allergies, but vain. He gives the child a little pat and then goes to a closet, opens it. Turns away. Pushes on a light. Then walks with a quick step through the house. Some present murmur. They feel like a mob. They feel slightly dangerous to themselves. The women think of a vast sale, the sale of the century, where fantastic bargains are offered. The men are ruttish, warm. They think how long the nights are, how cold; how little warmth familiarity brings. They are in this house at last. Though they have been guests here before, it was not the same. They would like to take something from here. What? They want to steal something from this place, anything, something trivial. Who knows? They want to push this child away, put her in her place, this silly simple child who makes them feel so rancorous. Nothing is here for their taking. This makes Bettencourt nervous, almost sick. He has always had this problem.
BETTENCOURT HAS TO THIEVE A LITTLE, otherwise he feels that he himself has been robbed. Each year, late in the spring, he and his wife drive down to Boston for two days. It is their anniversary. Each year they stay at the Parker House. He steals dinner rolls, glasses. The last time he took $1.85 from the pay radio in their room. Once, on the trip home, on the new highway snaking around the city, a station wagon in front of them lost a suitcase from its luggage rack. The rope securing it to the roof broke and a dimity-covered suitcase sailed across the highway. It landed in Bettencourt’s lane, exploding on contact into a br
ight flower of ladies’ weaknesses, clothes, hats, little purses and boxes and bottles. Bettencourt was a slow driver. He witnessed this slowly. He braked to a stop beside the broken suitcase. The station wagon backed up. Bettencourt’s ready help was much appreciated. The occupants of the station wagon were a man and two shiny blond women just off the ferry at Woods Hole. Bettencourt was fearless and shambling quick. His wife screamed for his safety as the cars whistled past. Everything was snatched from the asphalt and thrown in the back seat of the wagon amidst many regrets and wild thanks from the women. The rest of the trip was without incident for Bettencourt. His wife sat in the back seat. When they crossed the border into Maine, she sang all the verses of the Maine Stein Song. She had been doing this all her life, every time they came back from Boston, even though she had never gone to the university. Bettencourt never sang along. In this particular case, he drove with a pair of panties in his pocket. They were the color of peaches. On the left hip of them was Tuesday in pretty scroll-sewn letters. The thought that all the days of the week were represented in such a way made him gloomy and dissatisfied. The panties, he thought, were of silk. There wasn’t enough to them to cover his wife’s elbow. He had them still, and he enjoyed having them, even though he didn’t look at them very often.
Now Bettencourt is in the Reverend’s house. It is all he can do to keep from scowling at the child. She seems both burden and obstruction. She seems to block something in his mind. Like the black water, he works every day, setting and pulling his traps and nets, there is something into which he cannot look. She stands by the window, regarding them all absently, patting her dog. She is tightly cinched into her bathrobe. The cord of it belonged to some other garment and was too long. She had wrapped it around herself twice.