Little Sister Death (20 page)

Mommy was watching the set blandly, a half smile on her face, and Stephie knew that she hadn’t seen anything at all except Milne’s cartoon world.

Pooh and Piglet and Tigger were clustered before the canted cedar door, gesturing and talking. Piglet seemed to be trying to convince them to go inside the toolshed, Pooh hanging back, he looked confused and frightened, Piglet tugging at his arm, impatient, at length dragging him into the darkness.

Stephie leant forward, straining to see, Daddy said something murmurously and interrogatory, she couldn’t tell what. They were in now. She had seen with detached amazement that it was the same toolshed, the rotted floorboards rendered in Disney animation, the motley of tools strewn about the cartoon walls. Piglet had taken up an ax.

Something sinister here, the soundtrack had altered, there was a hypnotic buzz in her ears. Above it Daddy said, What the hell, not in shock or disbelief. She was feeling a mild hint of irritation, as if the picture was messed up.

Mommy looked up. What is it, David? she asked, precisely as Beaver Cleaver’s mother might have said it. David mumbled something she couldn’t hear.

What?

Hell of a thing to put in a cartoon for kids, he said, and looking up, Stephie saw that he looked confused, as if he was himself not quite certain what he had seen. She turned back to the TV

I think you left your mind in gear and it rolled away, Corrie said.

Piglet drove the ax into Pooh’s forehead, rocked it back and forth to dislodge it from the bone that anchored it, swung it savagely again and Pooh went down, his face pumping blood, not cotton or Styrofoam or other synthetic fiber, but a thick gout of foaming scarlet, Pooh trying to crawl toward the door and the ax falling metronomically, bisecting a cartoon rendering of flesh and muscle and splintered bone, Tigger making a mad scramble toward the door that the ax suddenly blocked, and before she knew what happened, she was vomiting, her stomach recoiling and spewing out a steaming barrage of hot acidic liquid onto David’s lap, David clutching her up, saying, Jesus, what’s the matter, Stephie simultaneously vomiting and crying, at last choking out, Turn it off, to Corrie who had jumped up startled, the curtains fallen and forgotten.

Later, she was sick off and on all night, Corrie up with her, up and down to the bathroom. Coming through the living room sometime in the small hours of the morning, Stephie was startled to find the TV on, David stretched out on the couch watching it.

Jesus, David. Pooh at three o’clock in the morning? Corrie said disgustedly.

Daddy, Stephie said, and when he didn’t reply she thought he was asleep: but when she approached him she saw he wasn’t, his eyes were open but did not seem to remark her, instead watched with a kind of bemused confusion the frolicking of cartoon animals on the particolored screen.

At night there were dreams of old plagues that the morning would not quite erase. From the first, the house just did not feel right to Corrie. It just did not feel right, like any house where a family would live and raise children. She could not quite put her finger on the word she wanted, and suddenly the word unclean drifted into her mind. That’s what it is, she thought, the place is filthy: though not in a literal sense, for the people Greaves hired had certainly done an adequate job. The place was spotless, as spotless as you would expect a hundred-year-old house to be. The trim was newly painted, the hardwood floors stripped and sanded and revarnished, the brightly colored drapes she had chosen should have brought life and freshness into the rooms, but they did not. The house seemed to absorb everything into itself, to darken everything a shade, to suck the very life out of it and leave a dry husk.

For no reason she could discover, the house made her think of the grandfather who had died when she was a child. Diseased, she thought, that is precisely the word I meant. There is something very wrong with the house, it has a cancerous growth in the insides that keeps ticking away like a time bomb. There seemed to be a dark malignancy in the bowels of the house. And after this, she became aware of its smell. Beneath the smell of paint and varnish and the crisp smell of new fabric, there was an undercurrent of malevolence, a smell no amount of cleaning would erase, the persistent seeping yellowbrown odor of the sickroom where someone is dying a slow death from cancer.

Diseased. And the house, something in the light or lack of it, played tricks on you. It caught you when you weren’t paying attention and brought you back. You thought you saw things out of the corners of your eyes. She didn’t believe in ghosts, thought the whole thing absurd, but there was no way around admitting that once she thought she glimpsed a woman in a green dress pass the window. She turned and it was gone. The ground floor of the house was flanked by a covered porch on the front and both sides and that was another thing she hated, the way the house looked and the sickening smell of flowers, not living flowers but the drying withering smell of banked funeral flowers. The ground-floor porches were too wide and they gave the house a disproportionate aspect, absurdly like a humped old woman with full skirts. The woman had been walking up the west side of the porch toward the front of the house, but of course there had been no one there and Stephie was playing quietly in the front yard and she felt like a fool for looking.

It just became one of the things she didn’t think about much lately, the things she filed away to be looked into later. Like the way David was absorbed in what he was writing, so much more so than with the first book. He didn’t even want to go into town anymore and put it off as long as possible. And the way Stephie did little except sit in front of the TV or reread books she had read dozens of times. Every day was waiting, every day was like life lived in airline terminals, bus stations, the waiting rooms of expensive specialists in terminal diseases.

But mostly the way one day segued into the next, each the deadly same, the hot sun baking everything, the white dusty road empty as a broken promise, not even a Bible salesman or a lost tourist to break the monotony. Days came and they went and she forced the inevitable frustration out of her mind, almost physically pushing them away, thinking, It’s only for the summer, one summer out of all the summers of our lives, it seemed a minimal price to pay: for she knew the book was working. She had read the letter from David’s agent, but she had known already. If the book worked the way David wanted and everybody believed in it and promoted it and it was a bestseller, she could quit worrying about the money. The money and Stephie’s school and all this morbid, sickening bullshit about ax murderers and hundred-year-old poltergeists and just get on with it, with their lives, go somewhere bright and cheerful, Florida maybe, swim in the sun and the salty sea with the diseased smell completely out of her nostrils, this monstrous, diseased homeplace no more than a bad memory, a day gone with no more to show than a number on the calendar, what I did on my summer vacation.

The snakes, the wasps, and then the sounds through the wall were all Corrie could stand, especially when she thought of Stephie. They agreed to let Stephie go stay with friends of the family for a few weeks, until school started or they moved back to Chicago for the winter.

The weather that year turned unseasonal. In late July the temperature climbed into the nineties and stayed there except occasionally when it eased over the one-hundred-degree mark. It was a fierce and strange malign heat that became a tangible presence, bad company that will not go home. The earth grew dry and fissured, miniature cataclysms appeared in the parched clay, widened and deepened, creeping like bower vines across the blistered dry earth.

Some days dawned with the mocking promise of rain but the sun hanging over the eastern field withdrew it, the dew vanishing, the bog along the lowland almost instantly sucked into nothingness until all there was was a malevolent red sun tracking across the horizon into a sky gone marvelously blue and absolutely cloudless.

Old men at their checker games allowed it had not been so dry and hot since the thirties, they could not agree on precisely what year. The secondary roads turned to a shifting layer of dust that rose listlessly in the slipstreams of passing automobiles, drifting down, talcuming the greenblack honeysuckle shrouding the shoulders of the road. Farmers began to fear for their crops, stood out at night studying the skies for a sign that was not there. Corn began to yellow in the field, the blades twisting limply on themselves in defeat. At night heat lightning flickered in the far-off dark, vague and impotent.

After unrelenting days of this, tempers grew short and there were random outbursts of violence. People did things they ordinarily would not have done, began to think the old laws did not apply. Calvin Huggins, a local pinball cowboy, would-be poolshark, the kind of gambler who raises his draw to an inside straight, was the first to make a fatal mistake. He drank a cold beer on payday when the shoe factory let off. He was sitting on a stool in the Snow White Café, the end one nearest the air conditioner, feeling the pleasant warmth from his paycheck through his pocket and cold beaded beer bottle against his palm and he thought of his wife home in the hot little rental house with the busted air conditioner, probably waiting on the money and he for no good reason other than the fact that this was payday and he was red and worn out from the heat suddenly thought, To hell with her. Her face, bitter and accusatory, drifted freefall into his mind. Fuck her, he thought. I never could do anything to suit her anyhow. He bought a roll of quarters for the pinball machine. The pinball machine had been at the back of his mind all day anyway, like a glamour woman who probably won’t but just possibly will. He went home at midnight drunk and broke, the grocery money and rent fed quarter by quarter down the remorseless gullet of the pinball machine.

At noon the next day, he was under the Pontiac Firebird that was his pride and joy, a metallic brown, just the color of the one Rockford had driven on TV, replacing the brake pads. He was on the last one, the right front, and had been moving the bumper jack corner to corner. He was ever one to tempt fate, it is a fact that a man who will draw to an inside straight will trust a bumper jack.

She watched from the porch with eyes that were just smoldering hate in her face.

Hey, you bringing that beer like I said or do I have to rattle your head around a little more?

Wordlessly, she brought the can of beer.

Set it on that block and hand me them fuckin visegrips, his final words.

The jack was tilted ever so slightly. Perhaps a finger might dislodge it, the weight of a cool evening breeze. Her eyes found there was a crowbar leant against a cottonwood and without even thinking, she took it up and positioned her feet and slammed the crowbar against the post of the jack with all her might. The jack skewed crazily, went sidewise and the drum came down on his right temple as he reached backhanded for the beer. She went in the house and stood at the sink washing dishes thinking no thoughts at all and watching nothing whatsoever out the window, and when she was sure he was dead she dialed 911 to tell them about the accident.

Long a watcher of the changes of the seasons and a believer in signs and portents, Annie Mae Hicks came out of a network of clay gullies just at dusk dragging an armful of honeysuckle vines and saw the first light bobbing across the field, angling down a distant rise toward the homeplace, a yellow light, not blinking as a firefly does but erratic as a lantern slung along by a man’s side. She didn’t think whose or what side it might be: she didn’t want to know. She just thought, so it’s finally back, but there was a kind of detachment, then a giddy relief. She knew intuitively it had nothing to do with her. Not this time. It’s them, she thought, them Yankees or whoever: I got nothing it wants anymore.

Her husband told it around town about the lights but no one paid much attention to him, he had cried wolf once too often. No one believed him exactly but still there was something about the Beale farm.

Coy Hickerson put it into words in the shade of the magnolia in the courthouse yard, trying to distract his partner into not noticing the potentially fatal move he had made on the checkerboard. Sometimes I think it’d be a good thing if that place burnt to the foundation.

You can’t burn dirt, Cagle said.

I don’t believe none of that bullshit about lights and voices, but I do believe in luck and that place is just as unlucky as it gets. Nobody never had any dealings at all with that place that didn’t come to a bad end. Them Beales had the right idea, just get the hell away from it and let somebody else sweat out the hard times.

Them Abernathy sisters lived out there till a few years ago, a man said from the circle of watchers. Nothing ever happened to them.

Hell, they died, Charles Cagle said, seeing the move and taking his double jump. Anyway, times don’t get no harder than that.

Everybody dies, that’s a given. They’s different ways of doing it.

Ginseng digging on the northeast corner of the Beale land, Thurl Cogdill slipped off a steep limestone bluff and broke his neck against a beech tree forty feet below and the searchers didn’t find him for a week. There was no way a truck could get in and out of there and they had to carry him, hot heavy work when you’re holding your breath, zigzagging the bluff, and lash him to the back of a four-wheeler ATV. Thurl was known to be addicted to ‘sang digging and they figured he had seen a bunch he just couldn’t resist. They were partly right. He had seen a four-prong bunch and a little patch of threes on a ledge against the cliff wall and he hesitated only momentarily before climbing out after it.

It was no big thing and he had been in more perilous places without mishap but something drew his eyes up from the hole he was scratching in the flinty soil and there was a black Mastiff coming around the ledge, not walking or running, just coming, gliding as implacable as a locomotive, something from a bad dream. The sight of the enormous black dog was disturbing enough. When the ledge curled around an outcropping of limestone the dog came straight through the fissured blue rock and for a fraction of a second it was translucent, the opaque of the rock filtered through the head and shoulders of the dog. Not remarking him, looking like a dog but acting like no dog Thurl had ever seen, he saw too late the dog was making no attempt to avoid him: it was just coming on. He scrambled upright just as the dog passed through the calf of his right leg, the leg going suddenly numb and cold, brittle as ice. Thurl panicked and half-mad with unreasoning fear and just wanting gone, away from the dog at whatever cost, overbalancing backward and windmilling his arms madly as if he might at this late date learn flight.