Sybil (25 page)

"Are we going right away?" she asked.

"As soon as I look after Mama," her father said.

"Mama." He always called her that, but Sybil herself never said anything except "Mother." Sybil had stopped saying "Mama" long ago, when she was a very little girl. Now Sybil was six and two months, but her father hadn't noticed that her mother wasn't "Mama" to her anymore.

That's the way her father was. So handsome, so bright, so successful until just before coming here--to this one room on top of the hill. But his nose was in his work--designing and building all those wonderful houses, churches, and barns for people. Some folks called him "master builder." He just didn't have time to notice.

At the far end of this room, which served as living room, bedroom, and playroom, there was a figure that didn't move. Her mother. The kerosene lamp with which the room was lighted on dark days was glowing beside her.

Sybil could see her mother's gray-white hair, the bun in the back held together by three bone hairpins and the wisps and loops in front. Although it was the middle of the afternoon, she was wearing a dark blue flannel bathrobe and her feet were encased in gray-felt carpet slippers. Her hands were straight down and flat at her sides, and she hung her head so low that you could hardly see her face.

The pelican on the piano in the big house in Willow Corners: her mother was like that, or like the statue in the museum in Rochester. Her mother used not to be this way. She used to think well of herself, ran things, held her head high. "Hattie Dorsett holds her head so high," Sybil once overheard a neighbor say, "that I'm sure that she wouldn't see a crack in the ground."

Other things also were different from her mother here and her mother in Willow Corners. That mother did things to you; this mother didn't do anything.

Her father had walked over to her mother and motioned to Sybil. Sybil knew what that meant. She didn't like doing it, but her father had crippled hands and couldn't lift her mother by himself. Now that her mother was like this, she had to help him.

Her mother didn't pay any attention even though her father and Sybil were standing over her. She didn't notice when they lifted her from her chair onto the white enamel slop jar they kept just for her. A shadow passed over her father's face while they waited for her to finish. Then they lifted her back to her chair, and her father took the jar outside.

Sybil was alone with her mother. In Willow Corners, in the house with black shutters, Sybil was always afraid to be left alone with her mother. Here she was not afraid. This mother didn't do anything to her. She was a forty-seven-year-old woman who had to be treated like a baby.

They had to do everything for her mother now. She couldn't walk to the toilet, which was outside. They had to dress her and feed her. She swallowed so slowly that even the liquid meals lasted for hours.

In the big house her mother had cooked, and Jessie had cleaned. Here there was no Jessie, and her father cooked, got water from the spring, and washed clothes in the river. He had to do everything--with his hands, crippled with the neuritis he had back in Willow Corners.

Sybil turned from her mother to Norma, her doll. "Norma," she said as she put an extra blanket on her, "I'm going out. You'll be asleep, so you won't feel lonely."

"Mama," her father, who had come back, was telling her mother, "I'm taking Sybil out with me. Will you be all right?"

Why did he talk to her? She didn't hear him. She didn't hear anything. Her eyes were open, but when something passed in front of them, they didn't even blink. Her mother wasn't asleep, but she didn't hear or see. And she never answered when they talked to her.

"Sit down, daddy," Sybil said as she lifted his fleece-lined jacket from the padded box he had made for their clothes. The jacket was so woolly and furry. It looked so nice over his long trousers. He never wore overalls, but the men who worked for him in Willow Corners did.

When her father sat down, she buttoned the collar of his shirt and then helped him into his jacket. She also helped him with his buckled overshoes. "Foot up," she said.

It was so nice to be doing this for her father. It was only after his hands had been crippled that he had allowed her to do things for him again. When she was little, he had come home tired after a long day and she had put sweet-smelling salve on his feet. Then, all of a sudden he had decided to put the salve on by himself.

"Why can't I do it?" she had asked him. "Didn't I do it right?"

"Yes, yes, you did it fine," he had replied, "but you are too big."

This too big. She couldn't understand it. Was she too big for her father?

"All right, daddy," she said, "you can get up now."

She put on her red wool coat with the beaver collar, her brown knit leggings, her overshoes with three buckles, and her red wool stocking cap. She never looked in a mirror. She didn't like to look at herself. Her mother used to say that she had a funny nose.

"Daddy, I'm ready," she said.

"Coming," he replied. Then he walked to her mother's chair. To protect her against the afternoon chill in case the range did not provide enough heat, he placed her black coat around her shoulders as if it were a cape. Then he went out with Sybil.

Outside everything was white and beautiful. It had been autumn when they had arrived. Now it was the beginning of spring. Soon the trees would grow leaves. Sybil looked forward to that.

"A beautiful spot," her father had said. Her sled was outside the door, and her father said, "When we come back, you can go sleighing." How she loved sledding down this rounded, snow-clad hill on which their house stood. She never hit the furrow. She was careful.

They passed the woodpile. She loved helping her father carry wood from that pile. At first he couldn't pick up the wood or load it in his arms. She picked up a stick of wood, placed it across his arms. Her father was weak, and the work was hard for him. But he did it.

Sybil thought of that autumn day when she had come here with her father and mother. She would never forget that drive. Nobody spoke. Of the three, she herself, it was clear from the way the others behaved, cared least about losing their old home. Now and then she would try to place bits of talk into the long silences, but she knew that her parents weren't listening so she, too, finally said nothing. Her mother did say, though, "A chicken house is only fit for chickens."

Her father had replied: "It's clean, and there have never been any chickens in it." Then her mother's neck got red all over, and she had sneered: "No, we're the first. When I married you, I didn't think you'd turn me into a chicken. Your sister Clara did this to us. You were silly to let her." Her father turned away, concentrated on the driving, and said nothing.

Her mother didn't sneer anymore. At Christmas the change had come. Her mother told her parents and her brothers and sisters in Elderville, Illinois, that this year they would not exchange gifts. But the relatives sent things anyway, and her mother, who didn't have the money to buy anything for them, had become very depressed. Then she stopped talking, stopped doing anything.

Sybil remembered the time they had come just for a visit. Someday, her father had said, they would build a summer house here, and when she was big enough, she would have her own pony. Then all of a sudden they had just come. They hadn't built a house, but they had come anyway. Daddy and Mother hadn't liked it, but she had. It was much better here than in the big house.

It was fun to walk down the hill with her father and with Top, who had come along with them. He stopped when they reached the corn crib and the barn on the side of the hill. The barn had stalls, where they kept a cow and horses. Sometimes Sybil came here with her father to hitch horses. She was too little to lift the harness in place, but when she stood on the milking stool, she was big enough to help her father lift it.

It was nice to be going back to their tree. When it wasn't snowing, they came nearly every day to saw at it. She wanted to cut down the whole tree, but her father said it was so huge that it was not safe for just the two of them to cut it. They sawed, took the saw out, and then a man her father had hired axed the tree. Then they came back and sawed some more.

There were lots of trees, oaks and elms. Beautiful.

She was now with her father and Top in a plowed field covered with snow, where the oak tree waited for them. "Daddy," she said as she placed her hand on the tree, "it still remembers us."

"You certainly have a good imagination," her father said as, smiling, he handed her one end of the cross cut saw and took the other himself. Together they ran the saw, and the wood began to give.

"It's so peaceful here, Sybil," her father said. She knew he was trying to forget all the things that made him sad--mother and the rest.

The sun was bright. She could see their house on the hill in the sunlight. She and her father continued to work. They would have lots of wood. She could see their shadows on the field.

"I like shadows," she said.

Suddenly there was something else. She didn't know what. She could feel it. And her father was asking nervously, "Did you hear that loud laugh?"

"There's nobody here," she answered.

"But did you hear it?" he asked again.

"I heard it, but I don't know who it is," Sybil said as she stared at the silvered field.

The laugh was repeated. It was shrill, rising higher. Sybil began to tremble. She knew that laugh but was afraid to admit that she did. She had heard the laugh many times in Willow Corners. The laugh came when she was made to stand up against the wall. A broom handle struck her back. A woman's shoe kicked her. A washcloth was stuffed down her throat. She was tied to the leg of the piano while a woman played. Things were put up inside her, things with sharp edges that hurt. And cold water. She was made to hold the water in her. The pain, the cold. Each time worse than before and always that laugh along with the pain. When she was placed inside a trunk in the attic she heard that laugh. It was with her again when she was buried in the wheat crib and nearly smothered.

The laughter died and did not come again, but that sharp, shrill sound, coming to her in the March wind, had ripped away the quiet of the afternoon, its peace, its happiness gone.

Sybil looked up. Her mother was on the top of the hill in front of the house, near the sled. How? Only a little while ago she was like stone. At first she didn't move; then Sybil saw her drop onto the sled in a sitting position. With knees drawn up, feet on the steering bar, she pushed backward with her bare hands in the snow. The sled shot forward down the hill, gaining speed as it dizzily angled off to the left, straight toward the furrow of the plowed field under the snow.

Sybil, shocked and fearful, stood immobile. Then she stammered, "She'll hit the furrow. She'll hit the furrow!"

Her father, whose back was toward the hill, turned instantly in the direction of Sybil's petrified gaze and then shouted as he started running toward his wife, "Don't, Hattie, don't. Stop!"

Sybil herself did not run. The laughter had made her heart stand still, and her whole body froze with it. She wanted to run not toward the hill but away from it, but she could not run anywhere.

She could not even move.

She knew that some terrible danger would surely follow the familiar laugh. Was the Willow Corners mother back?

Her father was pretty far away now, but Sybil could hear him calling, "Hattie, Hattie, I'm coming." Sybil, still standing in the same spot, could hear herself breathe. Her mother was once again near and threatening. Her mother was like the dragon she heard about in church, a dragon breathing fire.

Sybil should be moving to avoid the fire. She could not. "Move. Save yourself." The voices: "You cannot save yourself. You're bad--bad--bad. That's why your mother punishes you."

The moving sled moved closer. She could not move. Her mother's black cape swept the snow and turned partly white. Black on white.

Top began to bark, then to move around in circles, not knowing what to do either. Another shrill scream. More laughter, closer this time. Then silence.

Her mother had hit the furrow. The sled rose up and threw her off. Her mother was flying through the air, a big black bird without wings. Her shadow, moving, zigzagging, was everywhere on the white snow.

Then her mother wasn't flying anymore. She was lying in the plowed field. Her father was leaning over her, taking her pulse.

"Daddy!" Sybil screamed.

Sybil tried to go to them but was stuck to the spot. Watching her father and mother as if they were far away, she clutched the saw tightly as if it could give her comfort and quiet her terror.

The only sound was the murmuring of the branches of the trees. Otherwise the field was as hushed as her mother had been when they had left her in the house on top of the hill.

The sun was sinking lower and was about to set. Sybil let the saw slip from her hand. She had been clinging to it perhaps because it was the link to the happy time, the months from Christmas to now, when her mother was silent and the Willow Corners mother did not exist.

Sybil stood near the stove while her father hovered on one knee over her mother in the chair. He was applying hot packs to her mother's badly bruised and swollen leg. Her mother was saying, "I thought sure it was broke. Put on some arnica when you get done with the hot packs."