“You said there was another vehicle.”
“Well, there was.” He made it sound as if I’d been arguing the point.
“Did it go by your house too?”
For a long moment he said nothing, just looked off down the road to his house. Then he pointed that way with his briar stick. “Randalls lived down there further along from me. Bud Randall, he up and died like four, five years ago. Then there were the ... what the jumpin’ Jesus was their name? Lived here a long time.”
I wanted to shake him hard. But then I recalled the Sheriff once telling me you should never hurry a witness, unless it meant someone might die because the witness was too slow giving up the information. Witnesses have to find their own way, he’d said. That if you try to yank back from the path they want to go on down, they’ll forget something important. Happens all the time, the Sheriff had said.
Mr. Butternut wasn’t giving two hoots for whatever I thought; he was still on that name he couldn’t remember.
“Frazee!” he exclaimed. “That’s the next house, about a half mile down there. Frazees owned that fillin’ station”—he pointed his stick in that direction now—“but that was when there was lots of summer folks lived around here.” He was lost again in thought. “There’s a old summer cottage back in there, back from the road, but there ain’t no path to it no more, it’s been so long somebody ever lived in it. Calhouns did once. But you ain’t goin’ back in there, no ma’am.”
“Why not?” It was an automatic reaction with me, that if someone said I wasn’t to do a thing, I wanted to do it.
“They’s things.” He was looking off toward those woods. Now he was humming.
“What things?”
He shied me a glance like a flat stone skipped in water. Cunning, that’s what it was. Then he said, “I’m makin’ cocoa. Want some? Come on.”
Whether I did or didn’t, he turned and walked back down the road. I looked at my watch. More time gone and I still hadn’t found any new information. I supposed he’d already told the Sheriff or Donny about the car and truck. Yet, Mr. Butternut might still be the most likely source of something new coming to light. If I could just remember to let him find his own way to it. Which I doubted.
For all the Butternuts who must have lived in it, his house was small. It was also cold. In the cold fireplace sat an old potbellied stove. Mr. Butternut opened the little metal door and looked in. “Thought so. Them coals is nearly ashes. But we’ll get ’er goin’ in a minute.” He shoveled coal from the bucket through the opening and then took the bellows to it with a lot of enthusiasm. He must have been one of those people who get a kick out of fires. “There goes. Room’ll heat up in no time.” He stood and watched the black stove, looking satisfied. It was surprising how soon the coals started burning. I could see the flames’ reflection on his face, turning it several shades of pink. It was almost sinister.
He rubbed his hands with enthusiasm and said, “Now for the Ovaltine.”
“Cocoa, you said.” He didn’t answer. Pretended, probably, that he hadn’t heard. I was sitting at a long wooden table that was probably where all the Butternuts had eaten for a hundred years. Mr. Butternut got a fire in the cast iron stove going; it was a coal or wood-burning one, the kind we had in the little kitchen. This was the kitchen we used when we stayed at the hotel in the cold months. I love that stove. You lift the four black tops off with a special handle. Sometimes I cook mushrooms right on the surface without a pan.
Mr. Butternut muttered as he got the Hershey’s cocoa tin out of the cupboard and lined up the sugar and pan and other things he’d need. He was talking to himself as if no one were here at all, which I thought pretty much wasted the visitor experience. I doubted he had many of them. But, then, I don’t know—maybe if you’d lived nearly all your life alone, just having someone there wandering around might make you less lonely. Talk wasn’t even necessary.
I walked around the room that served as dining and living space-the kitchen was off to the right. There were two big easy chairs near the stove, gathered there for warmth and firelight. They were covered in a faded sprig-patterned muslin. The arms wore those separate little sleeves of the same material to keep the upholstery from rubbing too much. I took one off and the material underneath showed its little flower sprigs in blues, pinks, and yellows so much brighter you’d think a garden might have bloomed there on the chair arm.
“Don’t take nothin’ now,” said Mr. Butternut loud as a belfry bell and without turning from the milk pan he was watching on the stove.
“Of course, I won’t.” I got as much indignation into my tone as I could.
“You got to have a warrant to search the prem-ises, if that there’s what you’re figurin’ on doing.”
To his back, I said, “I told you I wasn’t part of the police. Anyway, I’m not searching, I’m only looking.” He said nothing to this, and I would have said he watched too many police shows, but I didn’t see a television set anywhere. Around the walls were stacks and stacks of magazines, mostly Time and National Geographic. Probably he just looked at the pictures, like I did. I didn’t see many books, only six or seven in a small green-painted bookcase. This stood at one end of a camp bed against the rear wall. A gooseneck lamp sat on top of the bookcase positioned for reading in bed. There were other rooms I could see through the door of this one; there must have been a bedroom back there, but maybe when it was cold, Mr. Butternut slept out here, to get the benefit of the potbellied stove.
The camp bed was covered with a light blue chenille bedspread, the kind that I’ve always loved. I sat down on it and ran my hand over the little tufts of cotton that crossed one another in a diamond design. I wondered what it would be like to be completely alone, like Mr. Butternut. I tried to picture myself here, lying at night on the bed with the lamplight falling over my shoulder onto the pages of a book. I looked in the bookcase: Hiawatha was there and a book called The Yellow Room and some mysteries. I imagined myself reading and listening to night sounds—which I had to make up: whippoorwills, maybe; tiny branches scratching and tapping against the curtained window; a bark, a howl.... When the howl overtook my imagination, I snapped my eyes open.
“Whatcha doin’?” Mr. Butternut was standing there with the cocoa mugs.
“Nothing. Just thinking.” I got up, took my mug, and followed him to the table. “I guess you don’t have anything to eat, do you?”
“Crackers, maybe. There’s that fancy restaurant you must’ve passed.”
“I know; I was there. But I didn’t eat.”
He had risen to get a box of saltines, which he put on the table. We sipped in silence for a few moments. It was not unpleasant, but I was disappointed I hadn’t found out more than I knew when I came. Except, of course, what cottages sat along this road and back in the woods.
Things. He had said there were “things” down the road. Probably, he was just making it up. I looked at my watch and saw less than an hour before Bunny was to return to the Silver Pear and pick me up. “What did you mean about ‘things’ happening in that house?” He better not ask “What things” again.
Mr. Butternut pursed his lips. “Brokedown House.”
“What?”
“That there cottage. Brokedown House.”
I considered the name. Brokedown House. It made a soft explosion in my mind, like a silent firework, showering sparks. Wow. “What about it?”
He sighed and ate a marshmallow. “Beats me. Except it’s gone pretty much to rack and ruin. I seen lights out at the back.” He ate his other marshmallow.
“There’s nothing so strange about that. Maybe it was a flashlight or a lantern.” I was pleased with myself for coming up with this reasonable view of a presence in the woods.
“You’re doin’ good considerin’ you ain’t never seen it.”
This really irritated me in the way things do if there’s truth in them. “It was probably just somebody hunting.”
He cracked a smile at me. “Ain’t hunti
ng season. Ain’t nothin’ much to poach till fall, anyways.”
“There’s squirrel. There’s rabbits. Raccoons.”
He flapped his hand at me, impatient with my ignorance. “You don’t know nothin’ about it.”
“Well, I’m only a schoolgirl.” Here was a defense rarely uttered.
He sighed as if he’d had to put up too long with schoolgirls.
But why did I stray from the point just to defend myself? I’d make a terrible policeman. “When did you see it? This light?”
“Last time’s couple days ago. Nights, I mean.”
“But when did it start? How long ago?”
He pursed his lips as he set down his mug. “Some time ago, but I don’t attend much to time. There’s things happened yesterday that seems like they did a year ago. And vice-y vers-y.” He chuckled.
“Then how about the truck or the cars you said you heard? Maybe you saw the truck go by and maybe you didn’t?”
“Oh, I seen it all right. I’m just not exactly sure when. Gettin’ old, I guess. But nothin’ happens round here gets by me, no, ma’am.”
It was then it occurred to me: Mr. Butternut had been in the road when Will and Mill and I came that first time. He’d been there this time, too. So why not nearby the night of the murder ? But he’d already told Donny he neither saw nor heard anything suspicious, except for the vehicles. “Are you sure you weren’t—?” No. “Do you think maybe something else happened, something you saw or heard and just forgot?”
“Well, now that’s kinda dumb. Ain’t you asking me do I remember something I forgot?” He dropped the spoon he’d been fooling with back in the mug. “I’m havin’ more o’ this cocoa. Want some? I’ve only got but one marshmallow, though. ”
Generously, I told him to have it, as I knew he would anyway. “What I meant was, maybe you saw something and didn’t know it was important.”
“Same difference. If a ‘coon run by me and I didn’t know it was important then, how would I know it was important now, ’less you told me a ’coon shot that woman?” He thought this was really rich and laughed the milk into the pan and the pan onto the stove.
I said, “Let’s go over there.”
He stopped stirring the milk. “Over where?”
What a pest. “To that house.”
“Brokedown House? No indeed, we ain’t.”
“I will then.” No, I wouldn’t; you wouldn’t catch me going into woods I didn’t know. But I got up and pushed my chair back. My resolve must have been serious, to make me give up a second cup of cocoa. But I wasn’t going there alone. “I’ll go by myself, then.”
“Now, girlie, that ain’t smart.” He was putting the one marshmallow into his cup, ready for the cocoa to be poured. “You got a gun?”
“Do I look like I have a gun?” I spread my arms wide.
He made a disagreeable noise in his throat. “Guess not. Well, okay, then.” He pushed the pan away from the burner. His briar stick was leaning against the counter, and he took it up. “Guess I’m ready as I’ll ever be.”
16
Brokedown House
Down the road we walked, carrying flashlights he had supplied, and arguing who would go into the woods first.
We stopped to argue by a bed of dark nasturtiums looking almost black in the shadows cast by a mossy oak, and I wondered who had planted them, for they didn’t appear to belong to any house here. Mr. Butternut said I should be the one to go in first, as it was my idea, and also he had a bad leg and needed his stick, which meant he had only one hand free if he had to shove something. I asked, Like what? He said, You never can tell. I said that he was the adult here, that I was just a kid, that he knew the woods and house a lot better, and even if he only had one hand free, still, he was bigger and stronger than I was. I actually didn’t think this, as he wasn’t much bigger than me, and probably no stronger. He wasn’t as limber, that’s for sure.
Like most arguments, this one was never settled; we just stopped talking about who’d go first when we got to a place where the end of a driveway headed off to the right. You could just make out the beginning of it because it was so overgrown with saw grass and moss and a wilderness of bushes. Felled limbs lay across its path; dead leaves were ankle thick. It seemed even denser than the woods surrounding the Devereau house, or maybe it was even part of it. I guess curiosity urged me on and I said all right, I’d go first.
“But you’re to come directly behind me.”
He agreed, but he didn’t do it. I picked my way through what seemed like solid walls of bushes. Rhododendron and mountain laurel were heaped so high I couldn’t see over the tops. It was as confusing as a maze. I had gone only thirty or forty feet when I looked back. Mr. Butternut was nowhere to be seen. I called several times, “Mr. Butternut! Mr. Butternut!” Finally he answered, but his voice was distant enough that I just knew he hadn’t even started in yet.
To get back I had to pick my way through brambles and briars. Then I saw him; he’d taken no more than a half dozen steps inward, probably only because he knew I was coming back. I was ten feet away and really mad. “You’re to stay close. You’ve hardly moved an inch. I can’t do all the work!” Since whatever “the work” was wasn’t clear, and since Mr. Butternut hadn’t wanted to do it in the first place, my argument was pretty weak. But he couldn’t remember anyway. He shone his flashlight in my face and I squinted and put my hand up to wave it off.
“It’s this here ol’ knee that’s actin’ up.”
“Come on.”
He did, but he was grumbling.
It was dusk, but I could scarcely see light above the tangle of branches and the tops of the black pines. I could barely see the sky.
“Mr. Butternut?”
Rustle of bushes, cracking of twigs, what sounded like thrashing about with his stick. “I’m here! Never did see so many vines and stuff....”
I had to go back to where he was. I found him, sitting on a log. “What’s wrong?”
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong, except we oughtn’t t’ be here anyways.” He was poking the dark with his flashlight again, making me squint.
“I’m going on ahead,” I said. “You’re the backup, so come on. It’s not that far, you said yourself.”
He wobbled up. “Said lots o’things I wisht I didn’t.”
Brokedown House wasn’t big, but still it seemed to loom. Whatever was left over from light outside did not penetrate inside. I switched on my flashlight. The place was still furnished with wicker chairs and tables and a love seat. If they hadn’t been painted white I don’t think I could have made out their shapes. Then I caught my foot on the corner of a heavy footstool and stumbled and dropped the flashlight. I straightened up. I thrust my arms out the way you do when you’re going by touch. For a few moments I felt I knew what it was like to be blind. I passed through an archway that might have been to another part of the living room or parlor. I think there were bedroom doors on either side of this part of the house. I groped for my flashlight, although the sound it had made when it fell told me that it had rolled and was out of reach. Because there’d been light a moment ago, the lack of it made the darkness darker. All I wanted to do was leave.
Mr. Butternut must have shuffled in behind me. There was total darkness until he clicked on his flashlight and shined it right at me. “Get that out of my face!” But the light remained.
I brushed at it as if it too were cobwebs.
“Girlie! Girlie!” His voice came from a distance.
From outside, from somewhere up the path. That moment looking into that white light must have contained every fright I ever felt. It held the nights when I was three or four and knew my bedroom at night was the most dangerous place on earth (I would have to go sit on the floor outside my mother’s door); it held the day I got lost in a crowd of people doing their Christmas shopping, walking around me as if I were a rock in the middle of a stream; it contained the time Mrs. Davidow had gotten so furious with me she lay down on the floor a
nd beat her heels; it held the doctors’ needles, the dentists’ chairs. The fright was all of that, it was acid, it was all of that distilled into that moment when the light was thrown, like liquid, full in my face.
My voice was a dry rasp in my throat. The air was choked with fear. My feet (which felt like they belonged to other legs than mine) were backing up. After that first lightning bolt of fear, I could think only of getting out. I turned and lurched toward the door. Once outside I moved as fast as the undergrowth would let me. I forced myself finally to stop and listen. There was nothing, no rustle of trees, no animal sounds, no sound to show I was being chased. There was no sound at all. How could there be no sound in such a place? A place where wild animals must hunt at night, where owls must roost in treetops. If a cone had dropped on velvet needles, if a star had laid a silver track across the sky, if the dead had turned in their graves—I swear I would have heard it, that’s how silent it all was.
Breathing hard, I leaned against the thick trunk of an oak tree, wondering where Mr. Butternut’s voice had come from. It seemed to me I should have reached him by now, or at least got closer to him. I knew I was closer to the road and I found my voice at last, cupping my hands around my mouth, I yelled: “Mr. Butternut! Mr. Butternut!”
He couldn’t be that far away—unless he’d turned tail and gone home. But I didn’t think he’d do that. At most, he’d just go back to the end of the driveway and wait for me. And then I heard it:
“...lie, Girl—...”
It was a thread of sound. Girlie, Girlie, was what he’d been calling. But half of it was lost in the night air. If there’d been anything to stir up the woods at all—a wind, a falling branch—I’d never have heard him at all.
He was too far away.
I finally realized what had happened; I had left by way of a side door, mistaking it, in blind fear, for the front. Instead of running toward the road, I had run away from it. I had gone deeper and deeper into the woods. Which meant I’d have to go back. I wouldn’t have to go in the house, but I’d have to go back; I’d have to pass by it, and me without a flashlight.
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