Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  “Four,” she said.

  Buddy capitulated and listened through all of the seven rules. When the woman had finished, she folded her hands on the desk and smiled. “But this is an independent film,” said Buddy. “I’m a student. It’s a project for school.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Grass, and frowned again. “Well. We don’t have any rules about that.” Then she brightened. “But maybe we’d like to see it when you’re done.”

  “Of course,” said Buddy.

  “What else can we do for you?” she asked. “Let’s see, you got one of the new pamphlets; would you like to take a look around the museum? It’s free of charge. Tours of the historic district are during the week, at eleven and two—”

  “I’m interested in talking to people who knew my mother,” said Buddy, desperately. “Beth Miller, later Crawford.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Grass. “She was Tobacco Queen in forty-seven, wasn’t she? My husband remembered her right away. He went to school with her. A few years ahead, of course.”

  “Maybe I could talk to him,” said Buddy.

  “Well, now, I don’t know how much he could help you,” she said.

  “But you said he remembered her.”

  “From the newspaper, of course,” said Mrs. Grass. “His family sent him clippings when he was in the war, and even after. They kept him up to date on everything going on in Naples. He’s got whole scrapbooks filled with articles about—oh, just everything—swimming contests, the big rain in forty-six, the new mayor who’s dead now. Books and books of it. I can’t get him to part with them for anything.” She mock frowned.

  “Did he know her during the fifties?” asked Buddy.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “My mother.”

  “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Grass. “He went to Norfolk after the war, stayed there for years and years.”

  “Well, what about you?” asked Buddy. “Would you be willing to give me an interview?”

  “Oh, my,” said Mrs. Grass, smiling. “Oh, dear.” The novelty of the suggestion appeared to occupy her for several moments. “I’d love to help you,” she said. “But I’m not a true Neapolitan. I only came here twenty years ago. I didn’t know your mother at all.”

  “Oh,” said Buddy.

  “You know what, though,” said Mrs. Grass. “You ought to try Eugene Stubbs, over to the Chronicle. He’s the one wrote all those articles about your mother. Every time she threw a baton in the air, Gene got out a column about it.” She sighed and added, “and Ed pasted it into his scrapbook.”

  “Where can I find him?” asked Buddy.

  “He’ll be over there in the Chronicle building, I guess,” she said, pulling a Xeroxed map from a desk drawer. She made a star on it in ballpoint. “Here we are,” she said. “And here’s the Chronicle, right where Beverley and Vine meet. Gene’s office is on the second floor, right at the back.”

  “Thank you,” said Buddy. “I appreciate your help.”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” she said, reverting to the collective again. She was smiling as he shut the door behind him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Indians

  WEDNESDAY WAS CLEAR but cold, a shiny blue sky with sterile-looking clouds whipped up against it. Joan got up before I did; I lay in bed and listened to her shower noises. When they stopped, I swung my legs out of bed and sat there with my head bowed, my hands on my knees. When Joan had passed by, trailing a whiff of shampoo, I went to take my turn in the bathroom.

  I showered quickly and then wiped the steam from the mirror and shaved. Combed my hair, and went into the bedroom to dress.

  As I descended the stairs I could hear the characteristic grunting of the percolator. Joan was in the kitchen, setting the breakfast table. I leaned against the pantry door and watched the coffeepot. It whined and groaned and finally rattled silent. I poured out two mugs and set them on the table.

  “How’s your day look?” I asked Joan.

  She seemed surprised at the sound of my voice, as if she had had it on good authority that I was mute.

  “Medium,” she said. “One or two troublemakers. One college-bound. A parent conference in the afternoon.”

  “Mmm,” I said, into the coffee, turning away. “Do you want to go to the movies tonight?”

  She didn’t answer. I turned back; she was standing by the stove, looking at me, one hand balancing a wooden spoon against the rim of the skillet.

  “Careful,” I said. “They’re burning.”

  She turned her attention to the eggs.

  “Are you going to talk to him?” she asked.

  “Who?” I asked. “Oh. No,” I said. “Not if I can help it.”

  “He’s been all over town,” she said. “I heard it at school.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” I said.

  “How long is he going to be here?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He’s on his spring vacation. Maybe two or three weeks.”

  “That’s a long time,” said Joan, slipping toast onto my plate.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll keep him away.”

  She nodded, and took her place across from me. Her face was very taut.

  “Don’t worry,” I repeated, reaching across to her, seeking her hand. After a minute, she touched her fingers to mine. “I’ll protect us,” I told her.

  “I know,” she said, looking away.

  I grew up, for all intents and purposes, in a world of women, a manicured, sweetened, neatened version of the world, all its corners and sharp edges and harshnesses taken away, everything smoothed out, a linen napkin of a childhood. So clean and featureless was it, that when I look back I remember almost nothing in particular, just a general haziness of impressions, the days blurring into one another, until one day I stood nearly full grown at eleven, a man-boy at my mother’s graveside, with a wristwatch buckled onto my left wrist and a tie knotted at my neck.

  The coffin had been carried by two uncles and some of my father’s friends. They walked carefully and slowly, in step like sorrowful soldiers, while my father and Jack and I trailed after, behind us Ellen and her husband, and far behind, the full complement of my mother’s friends, plentiful and snuffling. Jack and I walked on either side of our father, who limped from an injury he had gotten in the Great War. The day was wet, and the grass slick, and my father sometimes fell behind, so that Jack and I walked a few steps together, ahead of him. I panicked when this happened, and slowed so that my father would catch up, and come between us again.

  Ahead of us lay the grave; and for a moment I stopped breathing, overwhelmed by the depth of it, imagining lying in there myself, and the black earth thrown down on top of me. I worried for my mother, who would lie in there alone, and for myself, for what Jack might do to me if he had the chance, and no one were looking.

  Jack and I were separated by four years, a veritable chasm between boys. As children we rarely played together; but on rainy days, confined to the house (meaning Jack hadn’t been able to slip outside unnoticed), he went down to the cellar to play, and permitted me to toddle after him. The cellar of our house was unused and damp, a fascinating place with an old-library smell. In generations past, the house kitchen had been located there, but now it held nothing of value. We ventured together into the blackness under the house, and I watched while he played at excavation. He buried bird bones, the remains of the victims of Sammy, the tomcat, in a pile of ash, and then found them again with a flourish. He moved on to other investigations, venturing into the least lit corners to retrieve the damp artifacts of civilizations which had gone before ours, lifting ancient lidless jelly jars from the dust, examining them with scholarly gravity.

  I must have been nearly five on the day Jack found the empty barrel, evil and rotting. Somehow he cajoled me into crawling into it, and when I had drawn my legs in, he tipped it back upright. He hung over me, laughing, for a few minutes, and then his face disappeared, and the cellar light went off.
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br />   At first, I was not too frightened; the darkness was warm and friendly; I may even have been laughing as he went up the steps. Soon enough, however, I discovered that I was alone, and began to cry. The splintery walls of the barrel rose high above my head; I made vain attempts to climb out, but could not manage it. The monster stories Jack had so obligingly related to me whenever we were alone came rushing back, and I hallucinated fangs, foam, hairy werewolves, all in the barrel with me or approaching the barrel across the cool stone floor, step by step. I whimpered and moaned, my own voice distorting eerily in my little prison, and frightening me the more. Finally, I fell asleep.

  I don’t know how long I was abandoned there; it may have been less than an hour, but it was certainly more than a few minutes, as my sister and mother had had time to miss me and grow worried. They made a search of the house, and Ellen found me, and lifted me into her arms. I must have been a repellent sight, all mucus and ancient mildew, but she clasped me tightly and kissed me, and took me upstairs to my mother. “Here he is,” she said, and my mother’s face, which was tightened and strange with anxiety, fell into its soft familiar lines again. “Naughty baby,” said my mother. “Worrying us like that.” The two of them fussed over me gently. They imagined, I suppose, that I had climbed into the barrel for fun, and had somehow turned it up on end with my weight. I was too young to articulate an indictment of Jack, and so they never knew the truth. They carried me off for a wash; and over my mother’s shoulder I spied him, playing with some lead soldiers on the floor. He didn’t even look up.

  The incident was promptly forgotten within the family, for when I asked Ellen about it much later, she had no recollection of it. Only I remembered it, and I considered it a watershed experience—it endowed me with the beginnings of a lifelong mistrust, and it introduced me to the concept of mystery. Not whodunit, in this case, but why?

  Perhaps it was merely a prank, a feat of nine-year-old irresponsibility; or perhaps Jack was seeking to punish me, for some plaything of his I had destroyed. Perhaps he was jealous of me, something I might have understood better had I ever been an older brother. Or maybe, and this is what I suspect, Jack’s motives were truly murderous, and he had hidden me with diabolical purpose, intending that I should never be found.

  Jack had no doubt been surprised by my arrival in the first place; and at first, I was clearly useless, a sailor-suited blob who made messes and drooled on himself. But instead of condemning me straight away, he was patient, and held himself off through my infancy, watching with the best of optimistic goodwill to see what I might turn into. When five years—an eternity—had passed, Jack took stock of things. I was still no more than an irritation, worse now than before, because now I was fairly mobile and talkative. The way I see it, Jack, looking me over, said Right, that’s enough, and went about getting rid of me. Perhaps the barrel incident was his Pilatean crisis, a washing of hands intended to be final.

  Jack, for his part, probably gave the matter very little thought. From his point of view, it must have been simple: he had waited on the sidelines for me to reach an interesting age, and when it became clear that I was a failing investment, he did the logical thing and shut me up in a barrel to take my chances. When I reappeared scant hours later, whimpering in the arms of my sister, he accepted my survival with a philosophical shrug. Having done his bit to help the situation, he was well out of it.

  Because we shared a bedroom, and could not escape one another entirely, he took it upon himself to be my tormentor. Knowing my tendency to nervousness in the darkness after bedtime, he told me grisly stories (gleaned largely from forbidden comic books), or more usually (which was more cruel), he lay silent in the dark and ignored me when I whispered to him. I listened to his evil tales, rapt and terrified, and suffered from his silences.

  Jack, who moved silently through the house and the town, whose eyes and ears were everywhere, was privy to all kinds of information. He overheard a remark to the effect that I was an unplanned baby, and he gleefully passed the information on to me.

  “You know what that means,” he said, and paused significantly.

  “What?” I breathed.

  “They got you from the Indians,” said Jack, with all the authority of ignorance. “So you better act right, or they’ll give you back.”

  I was thrilled by the information, and in the way that children will do, I worried over it, embroidering the bare facts Jack had given me with tidbits of my own. I was a resourceful child, working in scraps of National Geographic articles melded with Wild West tales; and, piecemeal, the story emerged. Jack’s nasty fiction might have been wasted on another child, but I was gullible and literate, with a wide streak of self-pity. At bedtime, forbidden a reading lamp, I told myself about the Indians, and thoroughly frightened myself.

  I had been gotten from the Indians in trade, usually for six fine Arabian horses, although when I was sad and feeling diminished, my price was a lone bushel of wheat. I conjured up a sleek-headed, ruddy squaw, my natural mother, who wept as she handed me over. My tribe (bloodthirsty but honorable) rode away into the sunset, leaving me behind. Years later (my imagination supplied a variety of reasons here), having lost patience with the white man, the tribe plotted its revenge, which included a bloody ambush and of course a kidnapping.

  I dreamt of their arrival, in soft moccasins and long feathered headdresses, creeping up behind me. Alone in the front yard, I expected at any moment to feel that heavy hand descend upon my shoulder. Turning around, I would look into the face of the chief. He had sharp black eyes in a weathered face; his hair was plaited; he spoke not at all. Or he spoke in chopped imperatives: “Come. Hurry.”

  I worried about the fearsome manhood rituals which I would be compelled to undergo in order to become a full-fledged member of the tribe. I knew, with heartsick objectivity, that I would not make a good brave: I could not ride bareback or use a bow and arrow or track a deer. Moreover, I was something of a sissy.

  From birth, I had been vastly spoilt by my mother and Ellen. If I dropped something, it was instantly gathered up and folded into my fat little fist; if I whined, the women hearkened immediately, my mother stopping her sewing and my sister her reading, to placate me. “What is it, baby?” “What do you want?” They surrounded me, in a fluffy feminine mass, and cooed and coddled. Beyond the tight cluster of my mother and sister, I glimpsed my father’s face, longing, almost sorrowful. He couldn’t get at me. “Walk to Daddy,” they told me. Stumbling, I was whisked away before he reached me, taken up into the loving arms of mother or Ellen. “Don’t cry, baby, there’s a good boy.” Through the mist of their hair, over the soft shapes of their shoulders, I saw my father’s long and sun-browned face, distant and unreachable as a mountain peak. Once, at a picnic when I was four, I cried when he held me. My mother scooped me away, scolding. “It’s your beard, Jacky,” she said. “You swing him too high,” reproached Ellen. But, sniffling, back in familiar arms, I knew the truth, which was neither of these but something deeper, far more injurious: I was afraid of my father, who was a stranger to me.

  Daily more fearful of the Indians’ scorn, I sharpened compensatory skills—I studied the patterns of the stars and learned how to make fire without matches. I developed a hefty self-consciousness, fancying that the Indians were spying on me, secretly appraising my development. I feigned stoicism, performing for them. I was afraid of the Indians, and logically it might have served my ends better if I had tried to appear so unappetizing that they lost all interest in me, but I knew what Jack hadn’t told me: that it didn’t matter how I behaved, the Indians would come. They would set terrible trials for me, and if I failed, they would deem me useless and send me off into the plains to die.

  The Indians dominated my nightmares and formed my dichotomous self-image (half mama’s boy, half tough Indian brave), until I was eight or nine. Then, like all childhood horrors, they faded into the mists, along with other delusions in which I had once firmly believed, like the watermelon that would grow
in my stomach if I ate the seeds.

  Ellen married when I was nine; and Jack took up residence in her old room on the third floor, while I stayed in the bedroom we had shared, just down the hall from our parents. The new distance was a relief, helping us to avoid one another; and on the infrequent occasions when we were alone together, I was wary. He had tipped his hand, all those years ago, when I was five. He had shown himself to be, at heart, my enemy.

  Thenceforward, my life was different from his, as different as though we were growing up in separate families altogether. And so it was that I was spared the normal boy’s youth in Naples, a muddy, irreverent life-style, in which Jack indulged heartily, roaming the town in the company of other boys, or with a scruffy, redolent dog, through the farms just outside of town. I was afraid of Henry, Jack’s dog (Jack, in an idle moment, had explained that Henry’s saliva was highly corrosive), and I didn’t get along easily with other boys, tending to want my own way and to cry when I was tackled in a game. Consequently, while Jack took himself off on his boy errands around the neighborhood, wandering far afield and coming in late for supper, sleepy and thickly grimed, I stayed at home, whiling away my time in solitary, tidy play. I occupied myself with any one of dozens of games I had invented to amuse myself, or trailed my mother around the house. Not for me the spitting contests or the fat pink worms harvested from the banks of the flood-swollen river, carried in coffee cans lined with dark river mud. Worms with their moist blind ends nauseated me; I found fishing repugnant; at ten, I could not throw a baseball any distance or intercept one in mid-flight without dropping it.

  I spent summer days in our front yard, reading, always reading. I had a favorite spot, in the crotch of an apple tree. I took my lunch high into the leaves and lay there from breakfast to supper. Sherlock Holmes was an early favorite; the tales absorbed me, so that, looking up when my mother called, I’d be surprised to see nineteen-thirties Virginia and not, as I’d expected, nineteenth century London. Climbing down, my eyes aching and my head thick, as though stuffed with cotton batting, I’d spy Jack coming in from his forays, river damp and whistling. During wintertime, I watched from the porch while Jack and his comrades stockpiled snowballs, packing them tightly, building a neat pyramid of them, ammunition against the afternoon skirmish. Later, I watched the battle, also from the porch, until a stray snowball caught me on the cheek and chin, drawing blood. I removed myself promptly indoors, where I could observe in safety.