graememat ± @ poor shit.///
howzit 2b ded!
“They think I’m dead,” Graeme said, choking back a sob. “The guys are talking about me like I’m dead.”
Stephen said quickly, “The message isn’t coming through right. Once we get more electricity—”
Graeme stabbed angrily at a key, and the E-mail vanished.
“Maybe I am dead. Maybe we all are, and buried at Cross Hill.”
Stephen backed off, shuddering. At such times he didn’t want to deal with his brother’s moods. He didn’t want to think He knows so much more than I do, he’s so much smarter than I am. He went to announce to the others, “Graeme’s getting weird over that computer shit. I think we should pull his plug.”
Then there came the morning they couldn’t locate Graeme, calling for him up- and downstairs; calling for him out the windows, out the terrace doors overlooking the grove of ragged Chinese elms, and the weedy graveled lane known as Acacia Drive (though most of the acacia trees had sickened and died). Mother, her ashy-silvery hair swinging about her face, her girl’s forehead lined with vexation and worry, cupped her hands to her mouth and cried, “Gra-eme! Graeme! Where are you hiding? I insist you come here—at once.” As if it was a game of hide-and-seek she might bring to an abrupt end. Yet, like Father, who spent most of his waking hours on the third floor of the house, Mother was reluctant to venture outside; she shaded her eyes to squint toward the outbuildings, the old carriage house and the stable and barns with their rain-rotted, collapsing roofs, and in the direction of murky Crescent Pond, which was at the bottom of the hill, beyond Acacia Drive; but some timidity, or outright fear, prevented her from seeking Graeme in such likely places. After ten days at Cross Hill during which time she’d seen no one outside the family except hired help from Contracoeur, Mother was still wearing expensive, stylish city clothes; dresses, skirts and sweaters, not jeans (perhaps she owned none?) but silk slacks with matching shirts, impractical sling-back Italian sandals with prominent heels. Each morning, on even the most oppressive of mornings, she’d bravely made up her heart-shaped face into that tight, beautiful mask; though the skin of her throat was pallid, beginning to show signs of age. She wore her wedding rings, her square-cut emerald ring on her right hand, her jeweled wristwatch that sparkled on her small-boned wrist. In a breathy, almost coquettish voice Mother complained, “That boy! Graeme! He does these things to spite me.”
We searched for Graeme all morning. By noon a fierce pale sun dominated the sky. How vast Cross Hill was, this “historic” estate that had gone to ruin; how many hiding places there were out-of-doors in the handsome old barns, in the rotting grape and wisteria arbors, in the evergreens bordering the house, and in the wild grasses, some of them as tall as five feet, in the park surrounding the house; in the derelict greenhouses through whose smashed windows black-feathered birds (starlings, grackles, crows?) rose hastily at our approach, like departing spirits of the dead. “Where is Graeme?” Rosalind shouted after them. “Where is he hiding?”
By chance it was Rosalind who finally found Graeme squatting amid marsh grass and desiccated bamboo shoots on the far side of the Crescent Pond, staring like one hypnotized at the spider-stippled surface of the pond. “Graeme, we’ve been looking for you everywhere! Didn’t you hear us calling?” Rosalind cried in exasperation. She waved to Stephen, to call him over, wading through the thigh-high, sword-like grass. A look in Graeme’s pinched, pale face frightened Rosalind and so she continued to chide him. “Making us all look for you. Making us all worry. I hope you’re satisfied.”
Stephen trotted over, panting. He wore a frayed T-shirt, jeans splashed with mud the color of fresh manure. Rosalind noticed a thinly bleeding scratch above his left eyebrow that must have been made by a sharp branch. “Hey, kid? You okay?” Stephen asked.
Seeing that his hiding place had been found out, Graeme mumbled something evasive. He stood, but not very steadily; he must have been squatting there for a long time. His khaki shorts and T-shirt were covered in burrs. His soft brown, wavy hair, grown unevenly past his ears, looked tangled. He said, swallowing, “I—saw something. Last night.”
Yes? What? They waited.
“I don’t know. I saw it but I—can’t be sure. I mean, if I saw—what it was. Or …” Graeme’s voice trailed off miserably. It was clear that something had frightened him badly and that he didn’t know how to speak of it. He didn’t want to risk being laughed at and yet—
Yes? What? Graeme, come on.
“It was a—man, I think. Walking along the drive over there. About two o’clock. I couldn’t sleep and I came downstairs and I—saw something out the window.” Graeme spoke slowly, painfully. He drew his forearm carelessly across his mouth, wiping it. “I came outside onto the terrace. I saw him—it—in the moonlight.”
Stephen said, “Someone trespassing on our property?”
Rosalind said, making a joke of it, “You’re sure it wasn’t one of us?” That look in Graeme’s eyes spooked her.
Graeme said, choosing his words carefully, “It was a, a thing like a man—a man with no face.” He grinned suddenly. “A thing-with-no-face.”
Quickly Stephen said, as if he hadn’t entirely heard, “A hunter, probably. Trespassing on our property. Someone who lives nearby.”
Graeme vehemently shook his head “No. He—it—didn’t have any gun. It was just—walking. But not walking like a normal man. Along the drive there, and into the grass—in that direction. Like it knew where it was going, it wasn’t in any hurry. A thing-without-a-face.”
“How could it be without a face?” Stephen asked skeptically. “Anything in nature, any living thing, has to have a face. You must have been asleep and dreaming.”
“I wasn’t dreaming!” Graeme said agitatedly. “I know what’s real, and the thing-without-a-face was real.”
Stephen laughed nervously, derisively. He’d begun to back off, pushing the air with the palms of his hands in a dismissive gesture; the thin scratch on his forehead glistened with blood. “How could mere be a thing-without-a-face! You dreamt it.”
Rosalind said suddenly, stricken, “No. I dreamt it. I saw it—him—too. A man, a thing like a man, without a face—standing over my bed.” She covered her eyes with her fingers, remembering, as her brothers stared at her in horror.
Over my bed, in the night; in the moonlight; the shape of a man, a man’s head, yet where the face would be—raw blank featureless skin.
4. Other People
Our days at Cross Hill were tense and unpredictable as the sky over Contracoeur. Because of the mountains and the incessant winds that blew across chilly Lake Noir, the sky was forever changing: one minute a clear, pellucid blue like washed glass, the next mottled and roiling with clouds the color of bruised plums. Before an electrical storm, depending upon the direction and velocity of the wind, the temperature could drop as much as twenty-five degrees within a few minutes. Sometimes—this particularly disoriented the younger children—twilight began abruptly at midday, the sun buried in tattered clouds. There were thunderstorms so powerful the earth and sky seemed locked in convulsions; lightning raked the sky, revealed its depths cavernous and sinister as the cellar of Cross Hill (which was officially off-limits for exploration). The moss-rotted roofs and ill-fitting windows of the old house leaked; puddles formed on the once-elegant marble and parquet floors; Mother wept, and cursed our father’s enemies—“How can they be so cruel, so vindictive? If only they knew how unhappy we are!” Mother persisted in believing that, if Father’s enemies, some of whom were his ex-colleagues and friends, knew how miserable we were in this terrible place, they would take pity on us and exonerate Roderick Matheson completely, and welcome him back to the capital, where he belonged. If only they knew.
Father kept to himself, hidden away most of the time in his private quarters on the third floor of the house. On even the hottest, most humid and oppressive midsummer days, Father continued to work; it was said by Mother that he work
ed never less than twelve hours a day; he would not relent until he was vindicated. We might catch a glimpse of him at a safe distance—tramping through the tall grass, for instance, one of us sometimes glanced up and saw the flash of white of Father’s customary shirt at a third-floor window; never did we wave, for Father might misinterpret such a gesture as frivolity, or worse yet, mockery. It was at dinner we saw him, when we saw him at all. When he might appear in our midst, seated at the head of the table before we were called into the dining room by Mother, smiling and hopeful as a convalescent. He ate slowly, with forced appetite, and spoke little, as if to conserve his voice; he didn’t like to hear us chatter, but he didn’t like us to be absolutely silent, either—“Like mourners.” (Though Father seemed tired, he was capable of his old, cutting sarcasm, and outbursts of temper, directed especially at Stephen, whose awkward attempts to appear cheerful were misread by Father as “impertinence.”) There were many evenings, however, when Father ate alone upstairs, his food prepared for him by a woman from Contracoeur, Mrs. Dulne, whom Mother had hired as a part-time cook and cleaning woman and whose nusband, Mr. Dulne, also helped out as a general handyman and groundskeeper. (The Dulnes were very nice, if reserved and somewhat wary people; old enough to be our grandparents.) It was Mother who carried these meals on an ornate, tarnished-silver tray upstairs to Father, fretting and anxious that he should eat to “keep up his strength.” For all of our lives, our very futures, depended upon Father’s “strength.”
Occasionally, beginning in late June, visitors came to Cross Hill to see Father. Their long, dark, shiny cars seemed to appear out of nowhere, driving hesitantly up the rutted gravel lane. Perhaps these visitors were lawyers. Perhaps they were state investigators. On at least one disturbing occasion, they were a TV camera crew and a woman reporter; Mother barred the reporter from entering the house but was powerless to do much about the TV crew, who simply filmed her as she stood shrinking in the doorway crying angrily, “Go away! Haven’t you done enough! Leave us alone!” We were not allowed to speak with these strangers, and we were discouraged from observing them. We were discouraged even from recalling that we’d observed them. When one of Father’s invited visitors left the house late one afternoon, though he’d exchanged greetings with Stephen (who was working alongside Mr. Dulne in the tall grass beside the front walkway, clearing away brambles, bare-chested in the sun), it was Mother’s pretext that there hadn’t been anyone there at all; at least no one Stephen would have known. In fact, Stephen was sure he’d recognized his father’s visitor; he’d seen him at our house in the city several times; one of Stephen’s classmates at his old school was the man’s son; yet, to Stephen’s bewilderment, he couldn’t remember the man’s name. And when Stephen asked Mother about him, Mother professed ignorance: “Who? I didn’t notice. I was napping. This heat …” Stephen asked if Father would be presenting his case in court soon, and Mother said nervously, “Stephen, how would I know? I’m not allowed such information. But please don’t ask your father, dear. Promise!” As if any of us, particularly Stephen, required such a warning.
So the days, and the nights, were tense and unpredictable. For the first time in our lives, we Matheson children hadn’t anything to “do"—no friends to see, no private lessons, no school, no TV, no VCR, no video games, no computers (except for Graeme’s increasingly faulty computer), no movies, no malls; some of us were allowed to ride with Mother, and less frequently Father, into Contracoeur to make necessary purchases; but we were forbidden to wander about the town, above all we were forbidden to strike up conversations with strangers. To our surprise, we were assigned chores—as we’d never been assigned chores before in our lives, with our generous allowances and credit cards. Here at Cross Hill, so unjustly, we were given work but no allowances at all! Even ten-year-old Neale and Ellen had chores! Sternly, Mother told us that we must accept the fact that, for the time being, we weren’t the people we’d once been. She said, in a lowered voice, as if reciting words she’d been told by another, “We’ve become, temporarily, other people.”
Other people! We were shocked, embarrassed. We knew ourselves cheated. Recalling how Mother used to smile sadly and pityingly when speaking of the “poor;” those who dwelled in ghettos in the United States or in the strangely named Third World; seeing depressing, repetitive footage on television of famine-stricken or war-ravaged people in Africa, India, Bosnia, for instance. Both Father and Mother had been sympathetic with these tragic people but scornful of others, closely resembling ourselves, who had less money and prestige than the Mathesons; men in Father’s profession who’d failed to succeed quite as he had, and women who’d failed socially, unlike Mother with her countless friends, clubs, activities; those who’d tried, and failed, to achieve the Mathesons’ rank; failed through some moral flaw of their own, and so deserving of scorn.
Except, had we become those loathed other people ourselves?
Yet Cross Hill, and the view from the hill of the surrounding countryside, were beautiful, or came, by degrees, to seem so.
When we weren’t expecting it. When we turned, suddenly, and our eyes saw—before we had time to think.
The mountains were beautiful emerging out of the mist at dawn. Sunsets were beautiful: the western sky beyond the ridge of mountains a vast cauldron of flame that consumed itself, deepening by slow degrees to night. In the distance, visible on clear days, the buildings and spires of Contracoeur like a toy city on the Black River. And Lake Noir, whose size seemed always to be changing, at its largest and most turbulent when the wind was strong, like a roughened mirror that has sucked all light into it and so appears, an impossibility in nature, sheerly black. Graeme lowered his eyes so he wouldn’t be tempted to gaze from his bedroom window; he preferred to think he hated Cross Hill, he wanted only to return home. (But were we home, now that their beautiful suburban house had been sold? Their possessions taken from them? Now that his few friends had forgotten him; no longer sent E-mail to him at all, even to speak of him as dead?) Stephen, resentful of being captive at Cross Hill, and preparing to make a break, had nonetheless come to enjoy working with his hands, at least outdoors in good weather; shrewdly he thought The other place is lost; this is home. He’d been popular and much-admired in the city, he hadn’t much doubt that he’d be popular and much-admired someday, somehow, in Contracoeur; once he became known.
So dreamlike in beauty! floating in iridescent moisture-laden air!—the view from Rosalind’s window looking west to Mount Moriah seemed to pull her eyes toward it; Rosalind couldn’t resist. Despite her embittered young heart she found herself thinking If only we belonged here! We could be happy.
5. The Bicycles
Many things, moved with us to Cross Hill, were unaccountably lost. For weeks we’d searched for our bicycles, for instance. And then one day we found them—or what remained of them. Incredulously staring into the debris-cluttered gloom of the carriage house, wondering what had happened to our bicycles. Our bicycles, that had been so shiny, so beautiful, so expensive. “God damn! I can’t believe this,” Stephen said. For Stephen’s world-class road bike had been the most prestigious of all.
Not that Stephen had been a serious cyclist, but he’d had to have the best. And our parents had indulged him, of course.
Stephen, Graeme, and Rosalind, fighting back tears of anger and hurt, managed, with difficulty, to extricate the five bicycles from one another and to roll them, or drag them, out into the light. What a surprise! What a shock! There was Stephen’s twenty-gear Italian road bike that had cost more than $800, there was Graeme’s eleven-gear American Eagle hybrid, there was Rosalind’s five-gear Peugeot touring bike that had once been a lovely cool silver-lime color, there were the twins’ child-sized matching Schwinns with fat mountain bike tires—all rusted, battered, covered in cobwebs and what appeared to be rodent droppings. You could not have distinguished the quality of Stephen’s bicycle from the others; you could not have distinguished little Neale’s once shiny-red Schwinn from little E
llen’s once robin’s-egg blue Schwinn. We started uncomprehendingly, as if our bicycles were a riddle we had to solve, yet could not.
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