Autumn Street (6 page)

"Watch your tongue, Elizabeth Jane," she said, through brittle lips. "Tatie cannot write. Nor can she read. She has never been to school. You are not to torment her with that silly book anymore. Now
sit down. We are waiting to begin this game."

Jess moved to her place around the star and began arranging the red marbles silently. I watched her for a moment and then turned and left the room.

Tatie was in the kitchen, humming as she put away the silverware. She looked at me, grinned, and said, "You better watch out your face don't freeze that way, you might scare somebody."

I put the autograph book on the table, turned to a blank pink page, and handed her my pencil. "Just write your name," I commanded. "You don't have to write a poem or anything."

But her face went as stony and stubborn as mine. "I told you this afternoon," she said, "I don't care nothing about writing in that book."

I grabbed her hand, still damp from the dishtowel, put the pencil into it, and begged. "Please. Just your name is all. I really need it, Tatie."

She wiped her hands slowly on the white apron of her black evening uniform, watching me. Then she leaned to the book with the pencil, smoothed the page flat, and made the beginning of a mark: a careful, curling line at the side of the pink page, before she put the pencil down. "I can't," she said, with angry, challenging dignity.

"You can
too,
" I said defiantly, putting the pencil again into her hand and clasping my own hand around
hers. I forced her hand to the page and guided it into a
T,
and then an
A.
"See? I told you you could. You make me so mad, not wanting to write in my hook!" I muttered, through clenched teeth, pressing her hand into an unresisting
T
, an
I
, and an
E.
"Now cross the
T
's."

"What?" She looked at me in bewilderment.

"Cross your
T
's," I ordered, tears hot behind my eyes. "You always have to cross your
T
's. Here." And I took her hand once more, more gently, as gently as she had often taken mine, and guided it to the top of the uncrossed
T
's. She drew the lines herself.

Then she looked at the pink page, at the huge, wavy signature, and chuckled. "Well, that don't look too bad," she said.

"Thank you," I whispered, and ran from the kitchen.

In the library the Chinese Checkers game was proceeding without me, in silence. Grandmother and Jess were carefully tending their marbles in little groupings across the board, and over them, with his blue marbles, Grandfather was jumping in direct, well-plotted lines, toward his win.

I held out the autograph book, open to the pink page. "She can too," I said.

"Sit down," said Grandmother, "and put that book away until your manners improve."

I held the book closer, insolently, in front of her smooth, unrouged, tight-lipped face, and waved it back and forth. "She can too can too can too" I cried over and over, stamping my feet on the thick, muffling carpet. The tears came and fell onto the star-shaped board, onto the marbles; my nose dripped onto my upper lip and I screamed at my grandmother, who sat stiffly immobile, "Say she can! Say it! Say she can!" until my mother rose from the mahogany desk and swiftly, silently, holding me close to her, carried me out of the library and up the long staircase to my bed.

O
NE WEEKEND LATE
in June, Charles took me into the pantry, behind the door, where Tatie couldn't see us, and showed me that he had a knife. It wasn't much of a knife: rusty, with a chipped blade; and when it was folded into its holder, it was very small. Still, it was both frightening and exciting that Charles had a knife.

"Where did you get it?" I whispered.

"Found it by the railroad tracks," he said.

"Maybe it belonged to Willard B. Stanton."

"
Who?
"

"The guy you told me about. The one who got flattened by the train."

Charles shook his head at me and rolled his eyes. "Elizabeth, you so dumb. Willard B. Stanton got flattened about twenty years ago. This ain't his knife. Anyway, it don't matter who it belonged to. Because now it belongs to me. This here is
my
knife."

"What're you going to do with it?" Please, God, I was thinking, don't let Charles want to be blood brothers with me. Pulling down our pants was enough. I don't want to cut myself with that knife, not even to be blood brothers with Charles.

"I dunno. We could go up to the woods and stab them turtles."

"No."

"Elizabeth,
some
time we got to go."

"No. Maybe sometime. Not yet."

"Well," said Charles, "we could scare Ferdie Gossett."

"
Who?
" Why did Charles know about so many things, so many people, that I didn't know about?

"You never seen Ferdie Gossett? That crazy guy who walks around town talking to hisself?"

I shook my head. "I'm not allowed to go away from this block."

Charles sighed, and we both were silent, thinking.
Everything worth stabbing or scaring was too far from Grandfather's house.

Except Noah Hoffman.

"Charles," I whispered, "we could scare Noah Hoffman."

Charles brightened. I was scared, myself, for having thought of it, but pleased that the idea appealed to Charles.

"Yeah," he said. "First we scare him. Then we
stab
him."

I cringed. "Not stab him, Charles. Not
kill
him."

"I didn't mean kill him, stupid. Just stab him a little bitty ole wound. Maybe in his leg or something. Remember what he done to that cat?"

I shuddered. A little bitty ole wound would serve Noah Hoffman right. Charles and I had watched him when he killed the cat. We had done nothing, had not known what to do.

"You and me, Charles," I said guiltily, "we're really no-account."

"Yeah," grinned Charles, putting the knife into his pocket. "But Noah Hoffman, he's the no-accountest of all. Let's go look crost the hedge and see what he's doing."

***

Noah and Nathaniel Hoffman, who lived in the house next door to Grandfather's, were twins. They
were the only twins I had ever known, and the circumstances of their birth intrigued me in the strange, secret way that birth intrigues all children. "They grew together in their mother's stomach," my own mother had told me, when I had asked how two brothers could both be seven years old at once and why they looked so alike. It had been before my brother's birth; Mama's stomach at the time was so overwhelmingly large with what she assured me was only
one
baby that I didn't see how it could be possible to have two at once. And Mrs. Hoffman was smaller than Mama had ever been: a tiny, thin woman with the nervous mannerisms of a bird. I looked at her stomach, flat behind her flowered housedress, and pictured Noah and Nathaniel both inside like a wooden key-ring puzzle I had once had: entwined, interlocked, separated by someone who knew the secret.

As was true of Jess and me, and Charles, there was no father at the Hoffmans' house. There had been one, once. But he had not gone to the war. He had simply disappeared, sometime during the night, while Mrs. Hoffman and the twins were sleeping. Nathaniel told Charles and me that one afternoon when he visited us shyly in Grandfather's yard.

"Our daddy just went away," he said, "and we didn't ever see him again. He left a note."

Later, from the hallway's shadows where I frequently hid and listened to grownup conversation, I heard Mama discuss the Hoffmans with my grandparents.

"I was talking to Margaret Hoffman today," Mama said, "and she told me that she's taking one of the twins to a psychiatrist in Harrisburg."

Grandmother sniffed. I didn't know what a psychiatrist was, but Grandmother's sniff indicated that it was something tasteless, something in the same category as Baptists, comic books, or lipstick.

"And the psychiatrist told her," Mama went on, "that the reason Noah is having so many problems is partly because of being a twin, and partly because of the father leaving."

"Hugo Hoffman was German," said Grandmother meaningfully.

"Yes, well, that may be. But it must be very difficult for a little boy to have an identical twin brother, and no other male relatives around."

"The father simply disappeared, at the beginning of the war," said Grandmother. "He was German."

"I believe he was second generation," said Grandfather quietly from the blue wing chair, "and that there was, ah, another woman involved."

"German is German," said Grandmother. And sniffed again.

I told Jessica later what I had heard Mama say. She raised her eyebrows briefly. "I'm not going to play with them anyway," Jess said. "I don't like boys. And especially I don't like Noah."

"Are you scared of him?"

"A seven-year-old? Of course not. I just don't like him."

I was afraid of Noah. So was Charles, though he said he wasn't. But Charles and I had watched Noah kill the cat.

Noah and Nathaniel looked spookily alike: tall for their age, thin, and blond. But it was easy to tell them apart. Noah never looked at you. His eyes darted back and forth. And he was never still. He moved constantly, tapping his feet, fluttering his fingers. He fell, and never cried; he broke things, and didn't care. He caused bad things to happen.

I had been in their yard one day in the spring when Noah smashed a rotten log with his fist. It crumbled, revealing swarms of lethargic yellow jackets. Dislodged, they began to hum and move. Some flew toward Noah and attached themselves to his jacket and pants. He ran to the back porch, and called his mother, and Mrs. Hoffman quickly pulled off his clothes and took him inside.

But he was unstung. I could hear through the open window that he was playing in his room.

And on the porch, slowly, the yellow jackets came out of his discarded clothes. Nathaniel had been sitting there all along, by the wicker chairs, playing quietly with a train he had made from oatmeal boxes; suddenly he looked up, startled, and began to cry. The bees were on his face.

The next day Noah announced, in an odd, triumphant fashion, "Look at my brother." Nathaniel's eyes were swollen closed, and he looked like the stretched face on a squeezed balloon. Even distorted as he was, he still looked gentle and puzzled, as always, while Noah taunted and jeered.

Later, when it was warmer and we could leave our jackets at home, I saw Nathaniel's scar for the first time. It was like a vaccination on his lower arm: perfectly round, deep pink, and formed of concentric circles, smaller and smaller until the center of the scar was just a pink dot.

"Noah did it," Nathaniel told me, in his soft, questioning voice, when I asked what it was. "He held the cigarette lighter from the car on my arm."

So there was good reason to be frightened of Noah, even before he killed the cat.

I didn't go through the hedge into their yard any more by late spring. Nathaniel's scar scared me; but more than that, Noah had begun to seem more and more malevolent as the weather became warmer. If
he saw me at the hedge, where I sometimes stood, lonely in Grandfather's yard, he lunged at me without warning, using his mother's clothespole as a lance. Behind him, Mrs. Hoffman's wash would fall and drag ignobly on the hard brown grass.

But Charles and I were accomplished at hiding. We watched the Hoffman boys often from hidden places in the hedge or along the fence. We saw Noah one evening after supper, alone in his yard, tease the cat, Pixie, until she playfully leapt into his lap. Then we watched as he carefully twisted her neck with his small hands until she was limp. He left her there by his wagon when his mother called him in for his bath.

We never told anyone. In the morning, when Nathaniel called solemnly through the hedge to me, "Pixie is dead," I called back words of sympathy and felt hate form in a hard knot beside fear. Later Jess, Charles, and I went into Hoffman's yard to attend the funeral of the cat. Noah had dug the grave with his shovel. We all stood at attention while he lowered Pixie in her shoebox casket, covered the grave with earth, and planted a little American flag on the top. Nathaniel held Jess' hand tightly and wept.

So when Charles found the knife and suggested a little bitty ole wound for Noah Hoffman, it seemed profoundly just to us both. We stood on Grandfather's back porch and watched over the hedge. But
the Hoffmans' house was unusually still.

We played in Grandfather's yard all afternoon. Beside the garage we carefully cut a worm in half with the knife. If you cut a worm in half, Charles told me, each half would grow into a whole worm. Ours didn't, though we waited, watching it, for quite a long time. Maybe, we decided, it could only do it underground; so we each buried half a worm.

Then we built, in the dirt, a racecourse for ants. We each got a cookie from Tatie, scattered cookie crumbs around the dusty oval of our racetrack, and we knelt and munched chocolate chip cookies and watched ants industriously dealing with the crumbs. The sun was fiercely hot. Above the tin roof of the Hoffmans' garage, when we looked through the hedge to their yard, the air seemed to shimmer and move.

Finally one of the twins came out of the house, carrying a comic book, and sat down on the steps of his back porch.

Charles fingered his pocket where the knife was. "That him?" he asked me. "That Noah?"

I looked carefully. The twins' short-trimmed haircuts were identical. They each had freckles across their cheeks. But the boy on the steps was sitting still, only his mouth moving silently as he sounded out words to himself, reading the newest Captain Marvel. His fingers weren't fluttering. His feet were motionless.

"No," I said. "That's Nathaniel."

Charles sighed. We waited. But Noah did not appear. Nathaniel came to the end of his comic and read the Charles Atlas advertisement on the back cover.

"Hi, Nathaniel," I called finally, through the hedge.

He looked up and smiled. "Hi," he called back. "Noah's sick!"

"Oh."

"He has a temperature of a hundred and four."

"Oh."