Strange Seed (2 page)

“Paul?” she said.

Paul Griffin turned from the window and saw that his wife was sitting up on the old overstuffed couch.
 
He sensed that she was watching him intently, wonderingly.
 

“Did I wake you?” he asked.
 

“No.
 
I haven’t been able to sleep.”
 
She hesitated.
 
“Is something wrong, Paul?”
 

“Nothing’s wrong.”
 
A pause.
 
“It’s that floor.
 
Have you ever tried to sleep on the floor?
 
It’s impossible.”
 
He felt himself grimace; lies, even half truths—as the remark had been—had never come easily to him.
 
He was thankful for the near-total darkness, thankful it hid him.
 
Rachel would know his deception, otherwise.
 

“Do you want to use the couch, Paul?”
 

“No.”
 
He made a nebulous gesture with his arm.
 
“Go back to sleep, Rachel.
 
I’ll be to bed soon.”

She wrapped herself in the large blue quilt she and Paul had been sharing and, stumbling once on the quilt’s trailing edges, joined him at the window.
 
He put his arm around her.
 
“You really should be asleep,” he told her.
 

“Uh-huh.”

He could dimly see her face now.
 
In the classic sense, he knew, it was not a particularly beautiful face.
 
The full, dark eyebrows were complemented by the large oval brown eyes and high forehead.
 
Her mouth appeared to be in a constant pout because of a slight natural downturn at its outside edges and was full and nearly as dark as her brows—that fullness was offset by a strong jaw line and a long, gently muscled neck.
 
It was a face, Paul mused, whose individual parts had struggled for preeminence; at last, a pleasing had been established.

He kissed her.
 
“Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For not being able to sleep without me.”

She smiled.
 
“Our first night in our first house, Paul.”
 
It had seemed, she realized, like an accusation.
 

“Yes,” Paul said.
 
He wanted to add,
Our first and, I hope, our last house,
but knew she’d sense the dishonesty in the remark.
 
“The first of many nights, Rachel.”

She leaned against him and mumbled what he thought to be an affirmative.
 

I’m uncomfortable with this house, Paul.
 
It frightens me.
 
I’ve never lived here before.
 
You have.
 
And that gives you an advantage.

“We’ve got our work cut out for us, Rachel.”

“Yes, we do.”

What do I know about houses like this, Paul?
 
About this kind of life?
 
It’s too quiet here.
 
There’s too little light.
 
We get used to noise and light.
 
We grow to identify with it, no matter how much we deny it.
 

“I can’t imagine why anyone would want to smash the windows like this, Rachel.”
 
He fingered a fragment of glass protruding from the window frame.
 
“I can’t imagine,” he continued, “why they’d want to do any of the fucking stupid things they did.”

Rachel nodded slightly.
 
Why indeed, Paul?
 
She had assumed that “country people” bore an almost instinctive respect for the rights and property of others.
 
But the house’s condition had caused her to rethink that assumption:
 
people, she’d decided, were the same everywhere; country people, city people—it made no difference.

“But it’s basically a very sound house,” Paul went on.
 
He pushed against the window casing with the palm of his hand.
 
“At least there’s nothing structurally wrong with it.”

Rachel nodded again.
 
“Let’s go back to bed, Paul.
 
It’s late.”

“You go ahead, darling.
 
I’ll join you in a minute.”
 
He put his hands on her shoulders and gently turned her around to face the couch.
 
“Go ahead,” he repeated.

Reluctantly, she went back to the couch, lay down, and adjusted the quilt so a good portion of it fell to the floor, where Paul, for lack of a better place, had chosen to sleep.
 
“Don’t be too long, Paul.”

“Just a minute or two.”

Rachel closed her eyes.
 
Yes,
she thought,
Paul had the advantage.
 
The house charmed him.
 
He had come home.
 
The transition would be easy for him, if it hadn’t already happened.
 
He was comfortable here, with the ghosts of his mother and his father and his boyhood self…

“Are you asleep, Rachel?”
 
Softly.

“No.”

“Oh…
 
I was going to go outside for a minute.”

“I wish you wouldn’t, Paul.”
 

“You could come with me, if you’d like.”

“It’s too cold…
 
No.”
 
She paused.
 
“It’s late.”

“I’ll just be a minute.”

“I wish…”
 
But he had already crossed through the large kitchen and was heading for the back door.

“Try to go to sleep,” he called.
 
In the next moment he closed the door behind him.
 

Henry Lumas’s night vision was excellent.
 
What would have appeared to other, less sensitive eyes as only a vaguely elongated, nearly amorphous mass, Lumas knew to the tall, thin young man who’d just moved into what had been the Newman house.
 

Paul?
 
Yes, that was the young man’s name.
 
And his wife’s name was Rachel.
 
A good name.
 

They were city people—that was obvious to anyone with eyes and ears.
 
How stiffly the young man walked, as if in pain; he was accustomed to the kind of awful confinement that only cities impose on a man.
 

She—his wife—moved gracefully enough, but as if it were expected of her, as if she granted her favors reluctantly, out of a sense of duty.
 
And that was unfortunate.

Curses, as well, came too easily to the young man.
 
He lacked patience (although, Lumas reflected, finding the house in that condition, the man had had good reason to curse).
 
He was quick-tempered.
 
He probably expected perfection, or at least that things run far more smoothly than things possibly could.
 
If so, life here would be a revelation.
 
Nothing ran smoothly here.
 
You depended on nothing, you counted on nothing, only the bad.
 

The Newmans had learned that quickly enough when, in the space of six months, their two children had died—one of pneumonia, the other of a disease even the doctor from town couldn’t diagnose—they’d learned.

These people would learn, too.
 
They’d have to learn.
 

Across the darkened, weed-choked fields that separated him from the house, Lumas saw that Paul was looking his way.

“Hello,” Paul shouted.
 
“Hello.”
 

For a moment, Lumas thought of answering.
 
Then he saw that Paul had turned and was going back into the house.
 

Lumas hesitated a second.
 
It was unlikely that the young man had seen him, though of no significance if he had.
 
He—Lumas—would introduce himself soon enough and offer the young couple his skills as a carpenter.
 

He turned.
 
What demanded his attention, now, were the traps he’d set out at various point in the forest.
 
Maybe one of the traps would hold more than the fly-ridden stump of some luckless animal’s hind leg.
 

For too long, that was all the traps had yielded.
 

“Paul?” Rachel called.
 
“Is that you?”
 
She sat up and peered into the kitchen.
 

“Yes, it’s me.
 
Were you expecting someone else?”

“No, I was…”
 
She paused.
 
“Who were you calling to out there?”

“No one.”
 
He crossed the room and sat next to her on the couch.
 
“I just wanted to hear my echo.
 
That’s pretty silly, huh.”

She smiled weakly.
 
“It’s late, Paul.
 
You said that man—Mr. Marsh?—you said he was going to pick you up at 7:00.”

“Yes,” Paul said.
 
“I know.”
 

Rachel wondered if the trace of annoyance in his tone was because she’d reminded him, or because there were only a few hours of sleep remaining.
 
She tried—not very successfully, because of the darkness—to study his angular face, the deep-set hazel eyes.
 
“Tell me what’s wrong, Paul.”

He raised his eyebrows briefly—a gesture Rachel had learned was indicative of confusion.
 
“It’s all very…discouraging, isn’t it?” he said.
 
“Maybe it was a bad idea to come here.
 
This house and…the condition it’s in—it must all be quite a shock to you.”
 
He took her hand.
 
“I mean,” he went on, his tone oddly paternalistic, “this isn’t New York City, is it?”

“No,” was all Rachel could say: Paul’s sudden mood had taken her been surprise.

“I’ve told you…you know what it’s like here, Rachel.
 
But that really doesn’t mean very much—it means nothing—until you’ve experienced it.”

“Paul, I—“

“No, no.
 
Let me finish.”
 
He inhaled deeply.
 
“I think I’m asking too much of you; that the…burdens of life here”—he grinned self-consciously—“may be, I don’t know—too much for you to handle.
 
It takes one hell of a readjustment, more than not being able to run to the grocery store or to a movie—so much more…”
 
He paused.
 
Rachel realized what he wanted from her.
 
She squeezed his hand reassuringly.
 

“Paul, I am not a weak woman.
 
I’ll be able to make the adjustment.”

“I didn’t say you were weak, only…”

“You’ll just have to take my word for it.
 
If you can make the adjustment, then so can I.”

Five minutes later, sooner than she had hoped, she’d convinced him.

Rachel struck the match; it flared briefly and went out. “Damn it!” she murmured.

She straightened. There were just a few matches left, and it was unlikely, even if one stayed lit, that she’d be able to get a fire started; she had never used a wood-burner, had seen them only as museum pieces. And besides, the firewood piled next to the huge, black iron stove—firewood left here by the Newmans—was probably too damp. Why, for God’s sake, hadn’t Paul cut some fresh wood before going into town early that morning with Marsh? He could have shown her how to use the stove—if
he
knew.

No fire meant no hot water, and that meant she wouldn’t be able to scrub the kitchen walls. The vandals had spattered the normally yellow walls with fireplace ash, mud, and what had proved to be a mixture of urine and feces. Cleaning the walls would go a long way toward relieving her of the pessimism that gripped her.

It must, she mused, have been a parting act of vandalism. The walls in the other rooms, except for the living room’s south wall—the other side was the kitchen’s north wall—remained virtually untouched. Yes. The artist signing his work. She caught herself on the thought:
 
Paul had been right when he’d referred to “the bastards,” more than one. And he’d been right when he’d pointed out that the vandals had doubtlessly come to the house from one of the “neighboring” farms, or from town, expressly for the purpose of vandalism; the narrow unpaved road in front of the house ended a quarter mile north, and there were no other houses on it along its three-mile span. Quite obviously, the house had not been the random target of some transient pack of vandals—the vandalism had been purposeful.

Rachel wince as she remembered the string of vicious obscenities that had erupted from Paul when he’d first seen the house. John Marsh, who’d driven them the ten miles from Penn Yan—because their own wretched eight-year-old Ford wagon had failed there; it was now awaiting a new carburetor; “Coupla days, Mr. Griffin.
 
It’s got to be ordered,” the mechanic said—had merely looked dumbfounded. “I dunno,” he mumbled. “I dunno.”