The Good Neighbor (35 page)

The Good Neighbor

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It was a single entry, but a long one. Someone had finally writ ten her true thoughts in this book—but it wasn’t Marly.

The entry was dated May 16, 1888. She read:

I must unburden myself here, in this book, in which my de parted Mother had undertaken to tell the simple story of her days, and allow it to bear silent witness to what I have done. I cannot go to my grave with this secret, for its weight is too much to bear, though it was not myself as a grown woman who committed the crime I am about to relate, but myself as a little girl. I hope that this fact, more than any other, will give the Reader reason to seek some room in his heart to for give me, although I know that even the allowance which we accord the carelessness of youth knows its limits, and that I have far, far surpassed those, generous as they may be.

Nearly thirty years ago, we had a brother, Henry, whose remains are buried in the family plot next to his brothers and sisters. When he was just a year old, Henry wandered away from the house and drowned in the stream. I had been watching him, though my parents had not instructed me to do so and did not know that I did this. I was watching him not to protect him, but to wait for opportunity. Evil child that I was! Whence came this black-heartedness in me? I shall never know, nor shall I ever forgive myself. It was a childish notion that took root in me and grew in twisted fashion, a demon plant whose seed flourished because of something I saw, and one that poisoned all the rest of my days. If I had the courage, I would have taken my own life years ago. Oh, but that I had! But I shall live out my ap pointed days and meet my judgment when the time is right. Having taken one little life already, I cannot take another
—
though it be a life that has no value to it.

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I drowned little Henry. Now it is written, I cannot un write it. Why I did this is hard to tell, even to myself. But I must try. I had thought something happened, a year earlier, to get my mother with child. A man had come to Adencourt, a man of dark temperament and unhealthy character
—
and I had seen evidence of this in both his body and his soul. He was the medicine salesman, McNally, and he brought great harm on my family, and might have brought more, had my mother not seen fit to bring her own punishment on him. I will not write that deed here, for that is a matter for her own judgment, and it is not for such a one as me to condemn her, for what she did was no doubt right

I thought, simple, foolish idiot that I was, that Henry was the child of McNally, not of my father. He was the only child of us to have yellow hair, like McNally’s. The rest of us were dark. And so I decided that something must be done to get rid of him. All was not right in our house. We had been plagued with misfortune after misfortune. Something was eating away at us, I knew not what
—
until McNally came, and Mother did what she did, and then Henry came some months after. And I, nine years old, reasoned that Henry must be done away with. When he was a year old I took him to the creek and held him under, until he stopped his strug gles, and saw that another Musgrove child had left this earth and gone on too early to his reward; a year in which I had hesitated, and planned, and waited for confirmation that this plan was either right or wrong. I waited also for my courage to gather itself, and on one dark day, after Henry had already learned to walk, it did. When his little body surfaced and collected in the eddy of the great boulder across the road, I had already come back to the house, and taken pains to conceal the evidence of what I had done
—
for already I knew that I had made a terrible mistake, one that could never be unmade. Hamish was the one who found him, and Father

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brought his little body up from the river, and we laid him to his rest. The shame that burned in my heart from that day to this has left a mark on my soul that I feel must be visible to all.

Oh, Henry, Henry! I hope, when we shall meet in the hereafter, that your little soul has the wisdom to look into my heart and see what purpose hid there, not out of a desire for evil, but for good, and that you shall not judge me too harshly. But I know also that should your desire be for vengeance, it shall be yours. I shall not attempt to escape my fate. Nor could I leave this house for the last time, on the oc casion of the funeral of our mother, without dropping, if only for a moment, this weight that I have carried for so long. Evil is the heart of woman! Evil is the heart of a girl child who had seen too much, and become affected by it, through no design of her own! How I have suffered, will continue to suffer, all the rest of my miserable days, and throughout eternity!

Ellen Musgrove

Well, thought Francie.

She closed the book and set it quickly on the floor beside her. Her heart was racing, as if she’d been running; she realized that she’d been holding her breath as she read, and she let it out.

Henry’s tombstone would have been one of the illegible ones, she thought. And Ellen’s name wasn’t to be found in the cemetery either, unless it too, was, illegible—but then, she was one of the few children who had survived into adulthood. She must have been buried somewhere else, then. Not here.

And she was a murderer.

Francie picked up the diary again and reread the entry. She thought she had it after that: Ellen had believed, at one time, that her mother had been raped by this McNally. And there was

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something about McNally the girl feared—maybe something more than the childish fear of strangers. So Ellen had drowned her little brother because she thought he was McNally’s child, and because she had hoped this final sacrifice would bring an end to the suffering of the Musgroves. Francie thought she under stood what that meant—it was all for the children, the others that were lost. So many had died that it must have seemed to the little girl as if they really were being punished for some thing—as if, lurking behind the clouds, there was a host of irrita ble deities who had to be appeased, or they would make their wrath felt in terrifyingly random ways. It was not the first time in human history that the ignorant had made this desperate bid to assure their own futures, she thought. Think of the Aztecs, cutting out the hearts of the best and brightest of their youth; think of the Puritans at Salem.

Ellen had written that Henry’s body had collected in the water near the “great boulder.” Francie hadn’t yet been to explore the river, but she remembered a large rock peeking up over the road. She put her boots and jacket on now and traipsed down the drive way, to visit the scene of this crime.

In Indiana, Francie remembered, Michael and she had played on the banks of a creek much like this one—for this was truly a creek, not really a river, at least not anymore. Somewhere near the source of this water, a dam must have been installed, for it seemed inconceivable that such a feeble trickle of water could have carved out this whole valley. In Indiana, they’d caught crawdads and minnows, and made little boats out of leaves, and waded back and forth in exploration of the creek’s bed. It was easy to imagine the Musgrove children doing the same thing, one hundred fifty years ago. Less easy to imagine was herself doing to Michael what Ellen said she had done to Henry. To see that little face looking up at her from under the surface, terrified and uncomprehending, and feel the thrashing of his chubby limbs growing weaker and weaker,

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until finally they stopped—no. Not even in her darkest moments could she ever have imagined herself doing such a thing.

Ellen Musgrove was a monster.

The river was about fifty feet wide, though once, she could see, it had been wider, and probably deeper. Rocks like dinosaur eggs lined the bottom, having tumbled over each other these last ten thousand years to end up here. It wouldn’t have been comfortable wading—there would have been a lot of twisted ankles. The trees flittered like the hands of a mute, their dry finger-bones clacking in the wind. She found the boulder Ellen must have meant—no one could ever have moved it, not without setting men and equip ment to the task. This rock would have been sitting here long be fore the first people appeared, in the path of the receding glaciers. It would have seen everything. Francie dug her toes into a crevice and pulled herself onto its back.

It was a great, large, warm rounded rock, its top clear of snow, and if the water had been deeper it would have made a perfect div ing platform. From her perch, feeling like a princess on an ele phant, Francie looked down into the stream. Indeed, the current swirled into a pool that had carved out a place at the base of the rock, and only in this place did the water lie still, becalmed, filled at the moment with small sticks that had followed the same path as Henry’s body.

How horrible it must have been for them all. She could imagine the boy, limp and dripping, being plucked from the water, carried across the road and into the house, the wailing of the family mem bers filling the air—yet again. Each young death would have been a fresh blow to them, each one more than they could bear. And Ellen, the nine-year-old murderess. Would she have cried, too? Did she know what she was doing, or was she just responding to some ancient and unconscious urge to save her tribe from yet more suf fering, fulfilling a need to eliminate the strange and the unwanted? She had done what she believed was right. Francie understood that much to be true. Beyond that she understood nothing.

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This poor family, she thought. How these people must have cried. They had all suffered—but no one but the diary knew of the burden that Ellen had carried all her life. The diary—and now Francie.

Suddenly, Francie remembered the butterfly pin she’d found in the secret room under the stairs. It had been woven from blond hair. She had assumed it was a girl’s, because it was so long and pretty—but she realized now that it must be Henry’s. His had been the only blond hair in the family, Ellen wrote. It would have been cut from his head before he was committed to the earth, and woven into a remembrance of him. Ellen must have been the one who placed it down below the stairs—along with the diary, and her old rag dolls, and that strange bottle of snake oil. She must have done so in the hope that someone would find it someday. And when that happened, what did she hope for then? Did she hope that finally her spirit would be released, because her guilt had finally been revealed? Had she lacked the courage to confess to anyone before her own death, choosing instead to let the diary do the confessing for her?

“Ellen,” said Francie aloud, to the water. “How could you do it to him? How could you?”

She received no answer, except the gentle trickle of the frigid water over the egglike stones, which seemed once again to be an echo of her voice, in some strange, liquid language.

“I can’t forgive you,” Francie whispered. “It’s not my place to forgive you. There’s no one left who can do that, Ellen. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. How could you do it? How could you kill that baby?”

The water was whispering explanations back to her—explana tions she could almost understand, with her poet mind. But what ever it was saying was too faint, and too old, to hear.

26
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Forgiveness

I
n the dream, or perhaps nightmare—or perhaps it was real— Colt was sitting in a courtroom. He knew that he was dead be

cause it looked just like a courtroom on earth, except there were no walls, ceiling, or floor. All around him was an impenetrable black nothingness, as if he had ended up in some part of the uni verse where stars had not reached yet. They were floating in a void, and a void was precisely what Colt had always imagined death to be—just a big black bowl of nothing, with a helping of nothing on the side. Nothing with nothing in it.

Yet here he was, sitting at the defendant’s table. So he was wrong—there was
not
nothing. And there was a judge in front of him. Or, rather, there was
someone
, sitting up on the bench—but he couldn’t make out any features. In fact, the judge didn’t appear to have a body at all. He—or she, or it—was just an amorphous black shadow, invisible against the nothingness. Yet still he could sense its presence.

“How do you plead?” asked the shadow.

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“Plead to what?” Colt said. “I didn’t do anything! This is all Flebberman’s fault!”

The shadow grunted knowingly.

“If you didn’t do anything,” it asked him, in a suspiciously fa miliar voice, “then why are you
here
?”

Colt felt suddenly short of breath. “I’m ready to wake up now,” he said.

There were whispers, as if the shadow was conferring with someone else.

“All righty,” it said brightly. “You can wake up. But we’ll see you back here soon, and we’ll expect an answer then.”