Once, on Ian’s seventh birthday, Judah forked a haystack in front of the Toy House. It bulked there in the middle of the driveway, and she wondered what he meant by that, who always salvaged hay. She’d have to beg a bale from him for garden mulch, even though the barn held thousands—yet here he piled it head-high. The night of Ian’s birthday, when his few invited friends had left, Judah gave a match to him and said, “Here. Light it. The whole heap’s yours.”
Ian was frightened of fire, as he had good reason to be. But Judah led him to the hay and held his hand and made him light it at the kerosene-soaked rim. Black smoke snaked up and billowed around them, and she wondered would it catch, because the hay was green. Then suddenly the smoke went white and then was red, was fire, and Judah stepped back. Ian encircled his waist. That had been his way of asking for protection; he did it with Maggie too, hiking her skirt.
She remembers wondering why Judah planned this pyre—what had been his purpose that night. There wasn’t much risk, really. The driveway was broad, and she noticed he had hoses ready, and the flames went straight on up. But ash was floating all around them, and charred wisps of hay would litter the flower beds, and it did seem a pure plain waste.
Then the first sparkler went off. Then a Roman candle exploded, and fireworks she could not name—great whorls of green and red and purple rockets and yellow ones unfurling all the way above the cupola of the Big House. The four of them watched, rapt. Judah had filled the haystack with so many fireworks it made the Independence Day display seem small. Ian crossed his arms and held them at his shoulder blades and rocked. His eyes, she said to Maggie, were like sparklers also; he’d been so blazing proud. The haystack burned until ten o’clock; she remembers consulting her watch.
It is that hour now; her cuckoo clock chimes. The Big House crests the highest hill for miles. It has four floors, counting the attic, and a walk-in cupola. There is a widow’s walk around it, and the rooftrees shape a cross. Peacock was a pious man and planned his house to be a signal beacon to the weary traveler; he wanted his heaven-aspiring edifice to stand truly rooted, four-square.
So Hattie thinks she might ascend—slip out the door and sneak through the attic and up to the cupola, taking a megaphone, hanging herself from the highest crosstie and proclaiming shame to all the town beneath. She would shout till breath was done how the Sherbrookes were dishonored by that widow-whore. She would dangle like a belt-end from the wooden hips of the roof. Her feet would dance in circles and her face would suffuse and be black.
Then Hattie thinks that Maggie would be glad of this—relieved the household guardian was gone. She’ll not give such satisfaction; she’ll endure. Yet she might take the midnight air, might slip out of the house the way Judah used to and go for a stroll. She ponders this. It would be undignified. She could not creep past those watchdogs outside, or set out unopposed. A locked door locks both ways. Yet in the very instant that she sees herself as prisoner, Hattie chooses to escape; she will oppose the ancient ways to all of this tinsel modernity and see who wins out in the end.
So she contrives a plan. Just because they’ve shut her in doesn’t mean she’ll stay that way; there are windows and drainpipes and fire escapes. She’s high-hearted as she hasn’t been in years; blood races in her veins. She imagines herself a princess preparing to elope—thinks she’ll take the bedsheets and knot them together and tie them to the bedpost and let herself down. She imagines herself on this ladder of sheets, and the tower cannot hold her, and she drops in her billowing gown to the arms of some prince on a princely white steed.
Or she could call the fire company. She could raise a false alarm, and men from the village would come on her say-so and stand beneath her window with a circle of stretched canvas while she leaped. She would bounce like an acrobat up from the hoop, then say, “Thank you, gentlemen,” and just walk away.
Then she remembers—there’s a fire ladder in a box on the top shelf of the closet. Judah had purchased ten for the house and placed them in each likely room and instructed her in their use. She’d mocked him, saying, “Can you imagine? Me on that rickety thing? Don’t be silly, Jude.”
But he’d been insistent, showing her how the metal rungs would hold three times her weight, and how the hooks on the ladder’s top end would fit to the window frame snugly. She’d never tested it, of course, but now’s the time for testing and she fetches the web-encrusted dusty box down from the topmost shelf.
There are instructions for use. There are little chain links between each aluminum rung. She lifts the thing out carefully, making certain not to twist it, making no noise. Then, cradling the bundle as once she would her nephews, with her hands squeezing so the handles can’t slip, Hattie lets the ladder fall. Its lightness pleases her. It is thirty feet long, and reaches. She adjusts the curved hooks to the sill; they hold. She jiggles and tests it; it holds.
Next Hattie composes herself. Such flight would be madness, she knows; it’s a girlish fancy and she’s eighty-two years old. She’s not the type and never was to shinny up drainpipes or climb down a ladder or a tree. But she hunts sense in nonsense now, and every argument she musters is its own reproof; why should she hide in her one room when there’s a wide world glimmering beyond? The men who threw gravel up at her window have long since been buried, and there were few enough of them to begin with; why worry about catching cold? The Big House shelters wastrel sons and unwed mothers; why shouldn’t she escape?
The ladder hangs away from her like something in a pool. It bends with the line of the house. She is not afraid of heights, but not partial to them either, and the descent would be perilous in her high-heeled pumps. She therefore takes sensible shoes. A hoot owl—or something very like a hoot owl—cries in the middle distance, and she hears it as an invitation and gathers her shawl.
Ian comes to the door. He tries the handle, finds it locked, and stands in the hallway, saying, “Aunt. Are you all right?”
“Do you remember,” Hattie asks, “the time we came back from—where was it, Wardsboro? And it was Memorial Day. My land, yes. And the woods were full of campers and it snowed?”
He tries the door handle again. She takes it for encouragement. She will not look at him, but will not be silent either, since he’s come to listen.
“Then those hills at Wilmington. And how you jumped on out and pushed? And we skidded past fifty stopped cars?”
“Yes,” Ian says.
“We’d never have made it, but for you shoving,” Hattie finishes, uncertain.
“Open up, I can’t hardly hear you.”
She smiles. She is on to his tricks.
“Please!”
“California is the fastest-growing state,” she tells the door. “Its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. The highest point in California is Mount Whitney, and the State Flower is the Golden Poppy.”
“I’m sorry,” Ian says. “I just can’t hear you through this door.”
“It’s in the Hammond Atlas. Everything’s there.”
She sits back, concentration released. The door is oak; he could batter at it till he breaks his wrist.
“You’re certain you’re all right, aunt?”
“Yes.”
“Can I bring you anything?” She hears, perceptibly, relief.
“Not now. Tomorrow, maybe.”
“We’ll see you in the morning . . .”
She tells him “No,” so softly that he does not choose to hear.
“For breakfast.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, aunt,” he says.
She shifts her position, crossing her ankles and crossing her wrists. “For what?” She has a hundred answers to that question; Ian offers none. He raps at the door with his knuckles, so hard the mirror on the inside shakes; she sees herself framed in it, shaking. “Why are you sorry?” she asks him again, but Ian beats a jaunty closing tattoo on the door-frame, says, “Sleep well, anyhow,” and leaves.
Hattie arranges herself on
the bed. She folds her brown wrap precisely and wonders how she otherwise might pass the time—how to beguile the hours, days, and weeks till her heart cracks. There are books to read and serving silver to polish, and Betsy Ferguson’s niece will not stop having babies, so there’s receiving blankets to make up. She sits alone with her mirrored second self for company, and talking to keep up her courage. “I’m not the one who’s pregnant,” Hattie says. “I haven’t brought dishonor on the house.”
Her digestion has been troublesome. There’s only so much wormwood you can swallow before your stomach hurts. It’s like a hardened artery or a sclerotic vein—although she has neither, thank goodness. But the bitterness and gall accumulate; they pinch in your lower intestine; they lie there like a self-accreting ball of bile. She wishes she could hawk it up and spit it at Maggie just once. But she is a mannerly person and therefore must swallow her knowledge and answers; she has to bite her tongue. She has done so before every meal. She speaks with honeyed sweetness, saying please and thank you and might I have another maraschino cherry, if you please.
Maggie has been companionable with her in the months since Judah’s death; Harriet acknowledges that. They’d shored each other up in isolation like a doorway frame you find somewhere standing in the woods, with everything around it burned or rotten and torn down. They’d formed a kind of arch, she thinks, standing upright and separate and at a certain point starting to lean. They leaned together, falling, and were each other’s support. Then you looked inside and saw the forest, looked outside and saw the forest, looked below you and saw only the lintel, then weeds.
Still, some magic is at work; it’s a wonder she’s having a child. Stranger things have happened, but none so strange since Hattie could remember hearing, or ever in the Big House. There’s bravery in it, she has to admit. There’s bravery and recklessness mixed in so close together it’s not like the sides of a doorframe, but more like cream and milk. And now she knows the ghost she fears is just the vanquished past and Maggie’s way of saying what’s important is anticipation, not remembrance, is every tomorrow to come. Hattie can admire this, but cannot accept it as true. She has to give credit where credit is due, and her sister-in-law can take credit for this: nothing in eighty-two previous years had made Hattie take to her bed. Her parents and brother and nephew have died; she never had married, and has outlasted all her suitors anyhow; the most part of her friends are dead, or in hospitals and on the way. But nothing—not two wars and one Great Depression and Lord knows how many setbacks, recessions, the flu—you could knock her down with a feather, Hattie thinks, you could blow her over and just leave her, she’s never in all her born days . . .
She wears cleanly night things, since they should not be embarrassed when they come to lay her out. It is a tester bed, handed down from her grandmother’s aunt. Her eyes are bothersome. If her eyes had been better, she thinks, she would have spotted this coming, could have seen it a mile down the road. She still could sue. She is not litigious—not like Judah anyhow, who’d jump into a lawsuit like a boy into a swimming hole, feet first and whistling, shutting his eyes, delighting in the thump and splash and wetting everyone who watched. Then he’d come up grinning, dripping, saying what the hey, that worked or didn’t work and let’s just try again.
Yet Samson Finney himself, she knows, would counsel against such a suit. It would cost the family whichever way, and the only ones to benefit would be the newspaper people. You wouldn’t want a fuss like that, not in this town at this time. She supposes the lawyer is Judah’s watchdog still; Miles Fisk would take an item like that and run a two-column lead.
So Hattie determines to go. She folds her hands, interlacing her fingers on the lace bodice that’s laundered and pressed. Jacob’s ladder ascended to clouds. In the picture book she’d used, and then the one she gave to Ian, heavenly ladders got lost at the top of the page in a sunburst that could dazzle you—so bright the rungs seemed silver. She will forgive them their trespasses, though Lord knows they’ve trespassed enough. She wishes them joy in the house.
“Hattie.”
This is the next visitation—foreseen.
“Hattie. Are you asleep?”
She presses her lips shut.
“Can you hear me?”
She twiddles her thumbs.
“She’s sleeping,” Maggie says. So Hattie knows there’s two of them outside, not only her sister-in-law. She reverses the direction of her thumbs, twiddling toward her own neck.
“Hattie?”
She holds her breath.
“I meant no harm,” says Maggie to the door. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I do apologize.”
She stops her thumbs’ rotation.
“I should have told you earlier. You had a right to know.”
The walls require paint; their rose tint has faded to pink.
“I just wasn’t certain, is all. It might have been Judah’s, I thought.”
There are cracks in the plaster besides; she’s watched the house disintegrate. The shape on the ceiling above her is like a spring-tooth harrow, and she imagines it dragged the whole length of the room. It’s as if the plaster were an ice-smooth field to plow.
“I could use your help,” Maggie says.
She has trouble restraining herself; she presses her palms to her ears. If she wanted, she could tell them both a thing or two.
“We all could.”
She hears Ian withdraw; his steps have Judah’s pace to them, although not the weight. Hattie cups her palms harder; she wishes that she had her conch shell handy, where you listen to the sea. If she started to talk she would burn off their ears.
“Well,” Maggie says.
She lies back and listens. Her pillow is horsehair, flat.
“Good night then.”
The mattress too is horsehair, and long-lasting, though it ought to be repacked. She imagines the horses that shed her mattress to be a matched, picked team. The stable hands would curry them for profit, selling off their coat.
“Sweet dreams,” Maggie offers. “I’m grateful for your attention.”
They would bear her away in the coach. She tries not to laugh out loud.
“It’s been such a pleasant chat.”
They would carry her out of this dark place, through the gates. Maggie and Ian could taunt her forever, but she would be upright in the carriage, trotting smartly, not able to hear.
“I know you’re in there listening,” she finishes, “so hear me out and then I’ll go. I’m in pain tonight and wish you’d be willing to help me.”
It is as if the oak has no protective density, no deadening resistance to her voice; it is as if the keyhole where she whispers is a trumpet. “Good night,” Maggie says. “Wish me luck.”
Now she arises like smoke. Hattie has no fear of cold or heights or what the neighbors would say if they chanced to see her on the ladder, no fear of falling when she swings out over the ledge. She has decided to escape and is not indecisive and has no regrets. They conspire in the corners, thinking that they’ve locked her in, but she has a trick or two left. She finds herself giggling, delighted, as she lets herself down rung by rung. She sneezes twice, and sways. The ladder takes her weight as if she were a schoolgirl or lover eloping; it lets her down springily, resilient, and she noses past the dark bay window of the dining room.
The house is warm. The clapboard’s slats retain, it seems, the sun’s heat from that afternoon, and the ivy rustles so as to cover her clinking descent. Her hands are cold, however, and she does fear cramp; she counts five rungs, then rests. For an instant, dangling there, halfway from the window, she yearns to climb back up and clamber into bed. But she does not have the strength to rise; she tries one rung, and it’s all she can manage to lift her first foot. There are lights above her, but the downstairs floor is dark.
“Hot night,” says Judah.
“Yes.”
“We’re not supposed to feel it, but we do. Sometimes I sweat like a horse. The weather’s changing h
ereabouts.”
“State your purpose.” Hattie confronts him. “Tell me what you’re after and I’ll let you know what’s what.”
“Still the same old girl,” he chuckles. “No monkey business.”
“That’s right.”
“In some things anyhow.”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s going on in this house?” Judah asks. “What’s happening beneath my roof?”
Those had been his final words—the last time that she spoke to him before he fell asleep, or seemed to, and Maggie took over the watch. He had been suspicious, but she, Hattie, was without suspicion and tiptoed out, never dreaming he would die that day or have nothing else to say, with unanswered questions.
She continues her descent. She cannot see. She drops her shawl. Her left foot misses, and she flails out for a further rung but misses, toes the ground. She stands in the shadow of the head-high yew trees, safe.
Next Hattie gathers up her nightgown like an evening dress. She holds the pleats so that they will not rustle, and she steps forward alone. Seth is a bat; Judah a fading, fire-rimmed presence; and her tester bed is not a carriage but a sleigh. She summons all her hardiness and plunges through the stream with Jamie Pearson once again (his red hair flaming in front of her; his drunken cackle making mock of her bared breasts) and shivers while Widower Powers warms his ring-bespangled hands in front of the coal grate.
Hattie advances. She follows the flagstone path. The moon has sunk behind the house, and it takes her several steps to come out from its shadow. She skirts the Toy House, then the sugarhouse and carriage barn and, keeping those buildings at her back, sets out for the pump house and pond. She raises her left hand as if there were partners and does a box-step fox-trot. She hums to keep up her courage, and does not retreat.
And all her great-hearted elders—Tommy Sherbrooke lost at sea; Peacock fording the isthmus, though in the death grip of pneumonia, to return to his imagined mansion made actual for his children, and his children’s children till time out of mind; her mother in a wheelchair and father asking permission to light a cigar—ride on every side of her, escorting. They are without fear. There is an inland sea she’s heard of, coming around the mountain: it is where they’re going to, her father says. They have donned bathing gear and brought umbrellas and picnic hampers; they’ve all prepared for such immersion. There is balm and sense-soothing liniment about; there are birds in abundance.
Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) Page 40