Rhoda rested her arms on the marble of the balcony, and said, “You tell lies. Everybody knows it. Nobody believes anything you say.”
“You want to know what you done after you hit that boy? Okay, I’ll tell you what you done then. You jerked that medal off his shirt. Then you rolled that sweet little boy off the wharf, among them pilings.” He laughed silently to himself, thinking: I got her listening to me now. I got her real worried.
Rhoda stared down at him, her clear, luminous brown eyes stretched wide in innocent surprise. “I’d be afraid to tell lies like that,” she said primly. “I’d be afraid I wouldn’t go to heaven.”
“Don’t bother to give me that innocent look, Miss Rhoda. I ain’t no dope like them others. I ain’t—”
But at that moment Mrs. Forsythe came onto the balcony, and Leroy dropped suddenly to his knees and began pruning the sweet olive bush. “Who were you talking to, Rhoda?” asked the old lady. She looked about mildly, but seeing nobody, she said, “I was sure I heard voices out here.”
“I was reading out loud to myself,” said Rhoda. She picked up her book, opened it, and said, “I like to read out loud. It sounds better to read out loud.”
Below them, Leroy crouched against the side of the building, laughing with pleasure at his cleverness. That mean little girl talking about him lying! That little girl could out-lie anybody in town without half trying! His fantasy about Rhoda and the stick was real smart. He didn’t believe it for a minute himself! He wasn’t dumb enough to believe a little eight-year-old girl would have the nerve to do a thing like that. But it was real clever, anyway. Not everybody could think up a story like that on the spur of the moment. And then, when Mrs. Forsythe’s voice ceased, and he heard the screen door shut, he rose cautiously and said in a whisper, “You know I’m telling the God’s truth. You know I’ve done figured out what happened.”
Rhoda leaned forward on the marble balustrade and said, “Everything you say is a lie. You tell lies all the time, Leroy. Everybody knows you tell lies.”
“It ain’t me that tells lies all the time,” said Leroy. “It’s you that tells lies all the time.”
And then, as though to close this little balcony scene of hate, Rhoda took her book inside, and Leroy pruned at the branches of the sweet olive with pleasure, as though it were the child, and not the shrub, he snipped.
Mrs. Penmark parked at the Fern School gate, and Miss Octavia, spying her through the blinds, came down the walk to meet her. They rode for a time in silence, or discussing things in which neither had the least interest; and then, as they approached Benedict, and came down the long avenue of live oaks and azaleas, Miss Fern said, “You must examine our oleanders while you’re here. They’re very old. My grandfather planted them originally as a hedge to screen the place from the road, but now they’re like trees. They’re in full bloom at this season, as you see.”
Then, as the two women got out of the car, Miss Fern said she’d phoned the caretakers at Benedict the evening before, and lunch would be ready at noon. It would be a simple one: crab omelettes, buttermilk biscuits, a green salad of some sort, and iced coffee. She did hope Mrs. Penmark like crabs. “They are so plentiful at this time of year,” she said. “All you need do is scoop them up in the shallow water near the beach. Once, when I was a little girl like Rhoda, my father had the idea of building a pen out into the water, so we could put crabs there and fatten them up to eat when they weren’t plentiful at all; but it was as impractical as most of my father’s ideas. You see, the crabs, when they were penned together, ate one another before we could eat them.”
They walked about the grounds, examining everything. They stood on the bridge that spanned Little Lost River, and looked at their shallow reflections in the black, sluggish water; then, hearing the luncheon bell, they came back to the house. Afterward, Christine said she’d like to go to the wharf alone, if Miss Fern would permit it; and Miss Fern nodded graciously and said, “Of course. Of course. I’ll join you there later, if that’s agreeable. I want to take some cuttings from the flame-colored oleander for a friend in town who’s always loved that color. It’s a sort of botanical sport, and I’ve never seen that exact shade anywhere else. We have lots of time. I’ve no plans at all for the afternoon.”
Christine went to the end of the wharf, and stood there in indecision; then, knowing why she wanted to visit this place alone, she opened her bag, took out the penmanship medal, and dropped it among the pilings. In a way, she was as guilty as Rhoda, she thought. She flinched a little, seeing how furtive, how dishonest she had become, how greatly her character was disintegrating under the force of her anxiety and guilt. But this seemed the best way to dispose of the medal now, for she had known, after her visit to the Daigles, she could never return it to them. Then, as though to justify her action, she said softly to herself, “Rhoda is my own flesh and blood. It’s my duty to see that she isn’t harmed.”
She went into the summerhouse, a rickety structure which hurricanes had almost demolished, and stood there in uncertainty, trying to arrange her thoughts logically. Perhaps her worries were justified, perhaps not. But how could she know? How could she be entirely certain? Doubt was a dreadful and destroying thing, she thought. It would be better to know surely, no matter what the answer was. She sat down and raised her hands in a gesture of impotent helplessness.
Miss Fern joined her, a basket of the cuttings she had taken resting on one arm. They sat in silence, watching the level bay, with only gray mullet breaking the silence as they jumped in long, graceful arcs over the sandspit that ran out from shore. Then, at length, Miss Fern said, “Smooth those lines out of your brow. You’re so much prettier when you’re smiling. Believe me, there’s nothing in the world worth a frown, much less a tear.”
Christine said, “Will you tell me what you think happened that day at the picnic? I’m nervous and worried, as you see.”
Miss Fern said in surprise, “Why, I thought you knew.” Then, lifting her cuttings and arranging them one by one in the basket, she said it was her belief that the boy, to escape Rhoda’s persistence, had hidden on the wharf, perhaps in the summerhouse where they now were. But Rhoda had found him, and when he saw her approaching, he became confused and backed away from her into the water.
Christine said. “Yes. Yes, I can imagine that.”
Miss Fern continued, saying that Claude, despite his seeming frailness, was a good swimmer, and, of course, Rhoda knew that. Once in the water, she had every reason to expect him to swim to shore. How could she have known the pilings were at that exact spot? Children were quite strange, she felt. We should not judge them by the standards we use in judging adults. Children are often so insecure and helpless. Perhaps the thought in Rhoda’s mind at the moment of the boy’s falling into the water was that he’d ruin his new suit, and she’d get a scolding for causing it. The guard’s calling to her at about that time had made her even more panicky, perhaps, and she ran ashore. Perhaps she stood behind those crepe myrtles to watch; but when Claude didn’t swim ashore at once, she probably thought, with the odd logic of childhood, that he’d hidden under the wharf to frighten her. So she did nothing at first; and of course later on, when it was too late to do anything, she was afraid to admit what had happened.
She put down her basket, shaded her eyes, and looked at the blue, rippling bay. She said, “I think the worst thing we have to face, since you want me to be frank with you, is this: Rhoda, in an emergency, deserted under fire like a frightened soldier. But then so many soldiers, so many older and wiser people than herself, have run away at their first barrage.”
They got up and moved down the wharf, and impulsively Miss Fern rested her hand on Christine’s forearm. “I am not your enemy,” she said. “You must not think of me that way again. If you need me, you must come to me at once.”
“I have been so distressed about the boy’s death,” said Christine. “So anxious, and so guilty, too.”
Miss Fern said she could understand Mrs. Pen
mark’s feelings very well; but insofar as guilt was concerned, she was hardly in position to give advice to others, since she, herself, had been raddled with irrational guilts all her life. It was all so foolish, so illogical, to feel that way, for guilt, when you examined it dispassionately, could be seen to be only a painful form of pride.
But it was only natural to expect that we all have our particular guilts, since our development, our very place in the world we live in, is based on that premise. We are taught from the beginning that the human impulses we have are shameful and degrading, that man himself is entirely vile, that his very birth is the end result of a furtive sin to be wailed over and atoned somehow. She thought it rather ingenuous of those who were shocked when the bishops and preachers and cardinals the Communists took broke down so easily under stress and confessed every evil action, every ill-defined sin their captors put into their mouths: they had been conditioned to an acceptance of their individual guilts from the cradle onward. The surprising thing, in her opinion, was not that they confessed to monstrous impossibilities so soon, but that they held out as long as they did.
Christine said, “I don’t know. I’m not really intellectual.”
They got into the automobile, and Miss Fern, continuing her theme, said that unless man was able to comprehend infinity, that baffling anomaly of a universe without dimensions, he could not comprehend the nature of God. She thought the efforts of mortals like ourselves to catalogue, to limit, to attribute our own moral precepts to Him, or even to define His nature, were both foolish and presumptuous.
Christine thought: I’m going to accept what Rhoda told me. I’m going to give her the benefit of every doubt. There’s no reason to think the death of the old lady in Baltimore, and the death of the little Daigle boy are connected. There’s nothing else I can do but trust her, unless I want to worry myself sick.
Miss Fern continued to speak softly, breaking off her discourse occasionally to point out an unusual tree, or some historical landmark with which she was familiar. She said, “How can we know that our own concepts of good and evil concern God in the slightest? How can we be so sure He’d even understand our tests and definitions? Certainly there’s nothing in nature, in the cruel habits of animals, that should lead us to think He does.”
Christine said, “Perhaps so. I don’t know.”
“Monica Breedlove once referred to me humorously—it was in a speech for one of her drives—as ‘that simple, romantic Whistler’s Mother among school ma’ams.’ ” She laughed disdainfully, steadied her basket on the seat beside her, and said, “Actually, it’s the other way round. Monica thinks man’s mind can be changed through lying on a couch and talking endlessly to another man who is often as lost as the patient. Really, Monica is far more trusting and romantic than I.”
After lunch, Rhoda asked permission to sit in the park, and Mrs. Forsythe said she could. She took her book and went to her usual place under the pomegranate tree. She had hardly turned to the correct page when Leroy, who could never leave her alone very long, came into the park and pretended to sweep the path behind her. He swept the same spot over and over, and at last he said, “There you sit reading a book and trying to look cute. Maybe you’re thinking about how you hit that little boy with a stick. Is that what you’re thinking about right now? Is that what makes you look so pleased and happy?”
Rhoda, in the tone that a bored but tolerant adult might use, said, “Finish sweeping the walk and get away from me. I don’t want to listen to you. You talk silly all the time.”
Leroy put down his broom for a moment and examined the pomegranate tree, snickering and nodding his head. He picked off a dead branch and held it in his hand; then, coming in front of the child, weighing the branch in his palm, he said innocently, “Is this about the size stick you hit him with?”
“Sweep your path. Either that, or talk to somebody else.”
“After you rolled little Claude in the bay, he tried to pull himself up on the wharf again; but you hit him on the back of his hands that time until he had to turn loose, and drown; but before he done that, you fetched him another good lick on the temple, and that was the lick that bled so free.”
Rhoda looked about her for a bookmark, as she did not want to damage her property by turning down a leaf. Before her, on the path, was a small, soft pigeon feather; she picked it up, blew on it to rid it of dust, and marked her place with it. Then, putting the book on the bench beside her, she stared calmly at him.
“You make out like you don’t know what I’m talking about,” said Leroy in delight, “but you know what I’m talking about, all right. You ain’t dumb like them others—I got to admit that, no matter how mean you are. You know what time it is, just like I know what time it is. You ain’t no dope—that I must say—and that’s why you didn’t leave that bloody stick where people could pick it up. Oh, no! You got better sense than that. You took that stick with you when you ran off the wharf, and when you were among the trees, with nobody to see you, you went down to the beach and washed off that bloody stick good. Then you threw it in the woods where nobody could find it.”
“I think you’re a very silly man.”
“I may be silly, but I’m not silly like you are,” said Leroy. He was enjoying the scene more and more. That mean little girl was letting on like she wasn’t interested, but she was interested, all right! She was scared, deep down, but she wouldn’t admit it. “You’re the silly one, not me,” he continued, “because you were silly enough to think you could wash off blood, and you can’t.”
“Why can’t you wash off blood?”
“Because you can’t, that’s why. You can wash and wash, but it won’t come off, leastways, not all of it will come off. Everybody knows that but you. You’d know it, too, if you didn’t talk so much, and not listen to what people who know about things say.”
He began sweeping the path vigorously. “Now, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, unless you start treating me nice,” he said. “I’m going to call up the police, and tell them to start looking for that stick in the woods; and they’ll find it, too. They got what they call ‘stick bloodhounds’ to help them look; and these stick bloodhounds can find any stick there is, provided it’s got blood on it. And when them stick bloodhounds bring in that stick you washed off so careful, thinking nobody could tell, if that stick looked clean to you, they’re going to sprinkle some kind of powder on it, and that poor little boy’s blood will show up to accuse you of what you done. It’ll show up a pretty blue color, like a robin’s egg. And then them policemen—”
He turned away quickly, for he saw Mrs. Penmark come into the park, seeking her daughter, and walk toward them. She felt the tension at once and said to Leroy, “What have you been saying to her this time? What have you done to annoy her?”
Leroy said, leaning against his broom, “Why, Mrs. Penmark, I wasn’t saying nothing out of the way to her. We were just talking a little.”
“What did he say to you?” asked Christine.
Rhoda got up from the bench, picked up her book, and said, “Leroy said I ought to run about and play more. He said I was going to make myself nearsighted if I kept on reading all the time.”
But Mrs. Penmark had seen the cold, angry look in her daughter’s eyes, and she saw now the smirking expression of triumph which came over Leroy’s face at the child’s words. Again she felt anger rising in her, but controlling her voice and hands, she said, “I don’t want you to speak to Rhoda again under any circumstances. Do you understand?”
Leroy opened his eyes in a hurt, simulated astonishment, and said, “I didn’t say nothing out of the way to the little girl. You heard what she told you.”
“Just the same, you’re not to speak to her again. If you worry her again, or any of the other children, for that matter, I’m going to report you to the police. Is that entirely clear?”
She took her daughter’s hand, and together they walked around the lily pond toward the gate. When they reached it, as Christine tugg
ed at the heavy handle, Rhoda turned and gave Leroy a hard, thoughtful, appraising glance. She made one of the conventional answers of childhood, an answer both wise and very deep: “What you say about me, you’re really saying about yourself.”
That night after supper, Leroy took off his shoes, laughed, and told his wife of the affair. His own three children were sitting on a bench under the althea bush, stringing four-o’clock flowers on grass, their bare, tough toes digging into the packed earth. When he’d finished, Thelma lowered her voice, so that the children could not hear her, and said, “I done told you to leave that girl alone, Leroy. You’re going to get yourself in bad trouble. You’re going to keep messing with that child until you get yourself in a big jam.”
“I just like to tease that mean little girl. I couldn’t get nowhere with her before, but I got her listening to me now.”
“You’re heading for trouble, is all I can say.”
“I’m not going to get in no trouble. That little Rhoda is a cute one. She don’t run away crying and blabbing. That little Rhoda’s mean, all right, but she’s cute, too.” He sat quietly, smiling, nodding, and digesting his dinner.
There was a curious smell about the place, a vague moldiness which could not be traced to its source, as though the beds had been rained on and had dried out in the shade. Thelma went into the house and got herself a can of beer. When she returned, she said, “Rhoda may not tell on you, but somebody’s going to hear you, like Mrs. Penmark almost heard you today. Then there’s going to be trouble. Suppose she does hear you, and calls the police like she said. The police’ll take you down to the station house and kick your teeth in.”
Leroy stretched, laughed indulgently, and said, “What do you think I am, anyway? A dope?”
SEVEN
Afterward Christine felt relief, as though Miss Fern’s certainty had dissipated her own doubts, and during the next days she went about her duties of preparing meals, sewing, and looking out for her child and her house. She went to an afternoon wedding with Mrs. Breedlove where both wept a little behind their handkerchiefs; she shopped for an old-fashioned, hard hair mattress that Kenneth wanted for his bed; she went to a dance given by the treasurer of her husband’s company for his nieces from New Orleans. She was determined to deny her fears, to forget her uncertainties, and she did so as long as she kept herself busy, or was with others; but at night, with Rhoda asleep and the house so quiet that vibration and sound were magnified in her mind, her doubts came back to trouble her.
The Bad Seed Page 12