That was in December, just before Christmas break. Earlier that evening, down by the general store, all the children of Severna Forest had gathered under an old spruce, where a false Santa sat on a gold-leafed wooden throne and handed out presents. I knew he was a false Santa, but most of the others there didn’t. It was actually Sheriff Travis, handing out presents bought and delivered to him by the parents of all these greedy little kids. He sat in his chair, surrounded by bags of wrapped toys, and made a big fuss over whether or not this or that child had been good throughout the year. When he called my name I went up and dutifully received my present from his rough hands. It was a Fembot doll, the arch nemesis of the Bionic Woman doll that Molly had rejected. I was in my bed playing with my new toy when she appeared at my window.
“Go down and get your coat,” she said. “It’s cold out there.” I did as she told me. My father had left for the hospital shortly after we got home from seeing Santa, and my mother was asleep in her room, exhausted by an all-night flight from Lima. But almost all the other Severna Forest adults were down at the clubhouse, having their Christmas party. Several of them were famous for getting drunk on the occasion, Sheriff Travis especially. He kept his Santa suit on all night, and people talked about his antics for weeks afterward. They were harmless antics, nothing crass or embarrassing. He sang songs and said sharp, witty things, things he seemed incapable of saying at any other time of the year, drunk or not.
When we left my house, there was already about an inch of snow on the ground. The storm picked up as we climbed a tree outside the clubhouse. We waited there while the party began to die down. I could see my parents’ friends dancing with each other, and Sheriff Travis standing on tables and gesticulating, or turning somersaults, or dancing with two ladies at once. Music and laughter drifted through the blowing snow every time someone opened the door. I got sleepy listening to the sounds of adult amusement, just like Colm and I always did when our parents had one of their dinner parties, something they did often back before he died.
I fell asleep in the tree, with my head on Molly’s shoulder. We were wedged close to one another, so I was warm. It was snowing heavily when she jabbed me with her elbow and said, “Wake up, it’s time to go.” She climbed down the tree and hurried off. I jumped down, knocking the accumulated snow from my back and shoulders, and chased after her. She was moving back toward our houses, toward the tee of the seventh hole. When I caught up with her I could see another vague shape stumbling through the snow, about thirty yards before us. We had to get closer before I could make out the distinctive silhouette of the Santa hat.
Sheriff Travis lived down by the river, in a modest cottage that I imagine must have been lonely for all its smallness, because his children were gone and his wife was dead. He was taking a shortcut over the golf course. I knew he would cross through the woods beyond the green to Beach Road. He was singing “Adeste Fideles” in a loud voice and did not hear us come up behind him.
Molly had taken out her dagger and handed me a short length of lead pipe. “Be ready,” she said. When we were less than ten yards away, she ran at him, looking slightly ridiculous trying to rush through the deepening snow with her short legs. But there was nothing ridiculous about the blow she struck, just above his wide black belt, about where his kidney would be. He fell to his knees and she struck again, this time at his back, almost right in the middle, and then again at his neck as he collapsed forward. He screamed at the first blow, just like I thought he would, a great, raw scream like the one my father let go in the hospital room when Colm finally stopped breathing. She stabbed him one more time, in the right side of his back. In the dark his blood was black on the snow. He lay on his face and was silent. I stood in the snow, clutching my pipe and wondering if I should hit him with it.
Molly grabbed my hand and dragged me after her. She ran as fast as she could, through the woods, then along Beach Road to a point just below our houses. “I got him,” she was saying breathlessly, in a high voice. “I got Santa.” Twice we had to crouch down behind tree trunks to escape the passing headlights of the party’s last few stragglers. We tore up through the ravine, past Gulliver’s headstone, and she gave me a push up the tree by my house, saying only, “Put your coat back downstairs!” before running off to her own house. I did as she said. I would have anyway, and it grated on me that she thought I would be careless. I still had the pipe. I put it deep in my closet, where the Spider-Man toys were piled.
Back in bed I looked out my window at the storm, which was still gaining strength. It would be almost a blizzard by morning. School would be canceled. I lay watching the snow that I knew was covering our child-sized footprints, covering Santa Travis’s body. I thought of him dying, the coldness of the snow penetrating in stages through his skin and his muscle and his bone, a dark veil falling over his sight like somebody was wrapping his head in layer after layer of sweet-smelling toilet paper, like Colm and I used to do when we played I Am the Mummy’s Bride, or The Plastic Surgeon Just Gave Me a New Face. I imagined Colm, waiting patiently by the door to where he was, waiting and waiting, peering at the slowly approaching figure.
~ * ~
But Sheriff Travis did not die. A concerned citizen, worried because of the storm, had called his house. When he didn’t answer, people went looking for him. They found him where we left him, alive. At the hospital my father operated to repair his lacerated kidney and fretted over his hemisected spinal cord.
When Sheriff Travis woke up he said he remembered everything. Despite the darkness of the night, and the falling snow, he gave fairly detailed descriptions of his attackers. Two large black men had done it, he said, one holding him while the other stabbed him and called him “Honky Santa.” Police called on the community just outside the Severna Forest gates, and two men were arrested after Sheriff Travis identified them in a lineup. I saw them in the paper.
Molly was furious that Sheriff Travis hadn’t died. She stood in my room, kicking my bed so hard that the wall shook and the first mate sign fell down with a clunk.
“Why?” she said in a loud voice. “Why couldn’t he have died?”
I thought about her hungry blue stone while she kicked my bed some more, until my father came to the door and said, “Everything OK in here?”
“Yes, sir,” she replied. “We were just kicking the bed.”
“Well, please don’t.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, blushing. I looked at the sunlight on the carpet and wanted my father to leave. Don’t make her angry, I was thinking.
When he was gone she said, “It’s just not fair.”
I thought it would be many more months before she returned for me at night. I thought we would lie low, but she came back after only two weeks had passed, at the beginning of the second week of January. She had been in Florida with her grandparents over break, while a bitter cold descended over the Atlantic coast from New York to Richmond. The river and even parts of the Chesapeake were frozen over. She came for me the first night she was back.
When we went down the ravine to Beach Road, I thought for sure we were going to Sheriff Travis’s house, to finish him off. But upon reaching the road she crossed it and stepped over the riverbank, onto the ice. She turned back to me. “Come on,” she said, sliding over the ice in her rubber boots. She went past the pier and the boat slips, out to the wide center of the river. Her voice came drifting back to me: “Don’t be such a slowpoke.” I hurried after the place where I thought her voice was coming from, but I never caught up with her — perhaps she was hiding from me. It was a clear yet moonless night, and she was wearing a dark coat and a dark hat. I stopped after a while and wrapped my arms around myself. I was cold because my parents were both home and I had not dared go down for my coat. Instead I had worn two sweaters, but they weren’t enough to keep me warm. I knelt on the ice and looked down at it, trying to catch Colm’s image. I heard Molly’s boots sliding over the ice out in the dark, and I thought about a story people told about the ghost
of a girl who drowned skating across the river to Westport, to see her boyfriend. On nights like this, people said, you could see her, a gliding white figure. If you saw her face you would die by water one day. I looked downriver, searching for either the ghost or Molly but seeing only the lights of the bridges down past Annapolis. There was a flash, and for a moment I thought it was the winter equivalent of heat lightning, until I heard the Polaroid whirring.
She took my picture again, and again, from different sides. I suppose she was trying to upset me, or make me afraid. Maybe she thought I would run and slip on the ice. I just knelt there, and then I lay down on my back and looked up at the stars. My father had shown me the constellation of Gemini. It was the only one I ever looked for; and though I didn’t see it then, I made out my brothers shape in any number of places. Molly came sliding up to me. She stood behind my head; I could not see her, but I could see her panting breath.
I thought she would speak, then. In my mind I had heard her speak this speech; I had played it out many times: “I need you,” she would say. “For my parents. They’re stuck in here and I must let them out. You don’t mind, do you?” Of course I didn’t. I would have told her so, if I could have. I had been expecting her to say this ever since she had stabbed the horse, because I didn’t know what animal she could turn to after that, besides me. That night Colm had said to me, “So soon!” But it was not so soon, and I had waited.
She didn’t say anything, though. She only knelt near me and put a hand on my belly. She wasn’t smiling, just breathing hard. The camera hung around her neck and the dagger was in her hand. She raised my sweaters and my pajama top so that I felt the cold on my skin and the goose bumps it raised. She put the tip of the dagger against my belly, and when she looked at me I was so tempted to speak.
“Goodbye,” she said, and gently slipped it in. I heard my brother’s voice ring in my head: “Now!” For just a moment, as I felt the metal enter me, I wanted it, and I was full of joy; but a tall wave of pain crashed over me and washed all the joy away. A cresting scream rose in me and broke out of my mouth, the loudest sound I had ever heard, louder than Sheriff Travis’s scream, louder than my father’s scream, louder than any of the dogs or cats or rabbits. It flew over the ice in every direction and assaulted people in their homes. I saw windows lighting up in the hills above the river as I scrambled to my feet, still screaming. Molly had fallen back, her face caught in a perfect expression of astonishment. I turned and ran from her, not looking back to see if she was chasing me, because I knew she was. I ran for my life, sliding on the ice, expecting at any moment to feel her bodkin in my back. I cried out again when I climbed over the sea wall and ran across the road, because of the pain as I lifted myself. I clambered up the ravine, hearing her behind me. On the spruce that led to my bedroom she caught me, stabbing my dangling calf, and I fell. She came at me again, and I kicked at her; she didn’t make a sound. I held my hands out before me and she stabbed them. With a bloody fist I smashed her jaw and knocked her down. I got up the tree and into my room, too afraid to turn and close the window. I rushed down the stairs into my parents’ bedroom, where I slammed the door behind me and woke them with my hysterical screaming. My mother turned on the light. Despite my long silence the words came smoothly, up from my leaking belly, sliding like mercury through my throat and bursting in the bright air of their room.
“I want to live!” I told them, though my heart broke as I said it; Colm’s image appeared in the floor-length mirror on the opposite side of the bed. He was bloody like me, wounded. He looked at me as my parents jumped out of bed with their arms out, their faces white with horror at the sight of me. I cried great heaving, house-shaking sobs, not because of the pain of my wounds, or because my parents were crying, or because I knew Molly was on her way back to the river, where she would turn her knife on herself and at last take a human life for her soul-eating dagger. I didn’t cry like that over the animals and people, now that I knew just how much a knife hurt, though I did feel guilty. And I wasn’t crying at my pending betrayal of Molly, though I knew I would say I had no part in any of it and there would be no proof that I had. I cried because I saw Colm shake his head, then turn his back on me and walk away, receding into an image that became more and more my own until it was mine completely. I knew it would speak to me only with my own voice, and look at me with my own eyes, and I knew that I would never see my brother again.
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* * * *
2006
BRADFORD MORROW
* * *
THE HOARDER
Bradford Morrow (1951-) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but grew up in Colorado, receiving a BA from the University of Colorado, then undertaking graduate studies at Yale University. He traveled for the next ten years and worked in various jobs, including as a jazz musician, translator, rare-book seller, and medical assistant. He has taught at Princeton, Brown, and Columbia, and has been a professor of literature at Bard College for twenty years, where he has been the editor of Conjunctions, the prestigious literary journal, for its more than fifty issues.
After five volumes of poetry, Morrow turned to the novel; his first, Come Sunday, was published in 1988. The Almanac Branch (1991) was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His next novel, Trinity Fields (1994), which the author identified as the first volume of his New Mexico Trilogy, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Giovanni’s Gift (1997), among readers’ favorites of his books, came next, followed by the second volume of the New Mexico Trilogy, Ariel’s Crossing (2002). He has also written two children’s books: A Bestiary (1991), illustrated by eighteen contemporary American artists, and Didn’t Didn’t Do It (2007), charmingly illustrated by Gahan Wilson.
Among Morrows awards are an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1998), the O. Henry Prize, for his short story “Lush” (2003), the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing (2007), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007).
“The Hoarder” was first published in the anthology Murder in the Rough (New York: Mysterious Press, 2006).
~ * ~
I
have always been a hoarder. When I was young, our family lived on the Outer Banks, where I swept up and down the shore filling my windbreaker pockets with seashells of every shape and size. Back in the privacy of my room I loved nothing better than to lay them out on my bed, arranging them by color or form — whelks and cockles here, clams and scallops there — a beautiful mosaic of dead calcium. The complete skeleton of a horseshoe crab was my finest prize, as I remember. After we moved inland from the Atlantic, my obsession didn’t change, but the objects of my desire did. Having no money, I was restricted to things I found, so one year developed an extensive collection of Kentucky bird nests, and during the next an array of bright Missouri butterflies preserved in several homemade display cases. Another year, my father’s itinerant work having taken us to the desert, I cultivated old pottery shards from the hot potreros. Sometimes my younger sister offered to assist with my quests, but I preferred shambling around on my own. Once in a while I did allow her to shadow me, if only because it was one more thing that annoyed our big brother, who never missed an opportunity to cut me down to size. Weird little bastard, Tom liked calling me. I didn’t mind him saying so. I was a weird little bastard.
When first learning to read, I hoarded words just as I would shells, nests, butterflies. Like many an introvert, I went through a phase during which every waking hour was spent inside a library book. These I naturally collected, too, never paying my late dues, writing in a ragged notebook words which were used against Tom at opportune moments. He was seldom impressed when I told him he was a pachyderm anus or runny pustule, but that might have been because he didn’t understand some of what came out of my mouth. Many times I hardly knew what I was saying. Still, the desired results were now and then achieved. When I called him some name that sounded nasty enough — eunuch’s tit — he would run after me with fists flying and pin me down dem
anding a definition and I’d refuse. Be it black eye or bloody nose, I always came away feeling I got the upper hand.
Father wasn’t a migrant laborer, as such, and all our moving had nothing to do with a fieldworker following seasons or harvests. He lived by his wits, so he told us and so we kids believed. But wits or not, every year brought the ritual pulling up of stakes and clearing out. His explanations were always curt, brief, like our residencies. He never failed to apologize, and I think he meant it when he told us that the next stop would be more permanent, that he was having a streak of bad luck bound to change for the better. Tom took these uprootings harder than I or my sister. He expressed his anger about being jerked around like circus animals, and complained that this was the old man’s fault and we should band together in revolt. It was never clear just how we were supposed to mutiny, and of course we never did. Molly and I wondered privately, whispering together at night, if our family wouldn’t be more settled had our mother still been around. But that road was a dead end even more than the one we seemed to be on already. She’d deserted our father and the rest of us and there was no bringing her back. We used to get cards at Christmas, but even that stopped some years ago. We seldom mentioned her name now. What was the point?
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