Autumn Street (7 page)

"It went almost to the top of the thermometer," Nathaniel said in an awed voice. "The doctor came last night."

It was almost startling to hear Nathaniel talk. When Noah was with him in the yard, Nathaniel barely spoke at all.

"You want to come over and play?" he called.

"Can Charles come?"

"Yeah, bring Charles. You can help me feed the ducks."

The ducks! Charles and I looked at each other with delight.

The Hoffman twins had been given baby ducks for Easter. My envy had reached heights almost to the point of physical pain when I had stood on the back porch, looked over the hedge, and seen the two
tinted ducks—pink and green—waddling in the grass.

"Outrageous," Grandmother had said, when she saw them. I had nodded mutely. But when Grandmother went inside, I stayed on the porch and watched; and I wanted a bright-colored duck who would follow me, quacking jauntily, with all my heart. I wanted a little duck more than I wanted a kitten, which had already been refused me; certainly more than I wanted a turtle, which would grow massive and flee to lurk in the woods, hungry for flesh; and I would even, given the opportunity, have traded my mother's then-unborn baby for a small, fluffy, garishly dyed creature that would walk on little webbed feet like a wind-up toy, the way the Hoffmans' ducklings did.

The twins named them Donald and Daisy. They set up an old canvas wading pool, and the ducks floated forlornly on top of the shallow water from the garden hose. They grew larger, louder, more demanding, and less attractive. Their dyed feathers grew out, and were streaked at the ends with pink and green; closer to their bodies, they were thick and white: real duck feathers. I thought them beautiful. I thought their loyalty, as they waddled behind the twins in squat postures of devotion, a heroic, humbling thing.

But my heart went out to Donald Duck. Donald was Noah's; and my heart went out to him from behind the hedge in throbs of sorrow and despair. Noah had
devised a game. He had wanted, from the beginning, to leash Donald, and had tried an old dog collar and leash, but the duck's head was too small. Donald slipped loose from any device that Noah concocted. Noah kicked him, sometimes, in anger and frustration, the way I had often seen him kick Pixie. But Donald was stupid, dependent, and humbly submissive; he refused the collar but followed Noah still, walking flat-footedly behind him around the Hoffmans' yard. A leash on a duck that loyal, it seemed to me, was unnecessary. But Noah kept trying.

Finally he found a bizarre method that worked. He discovered that if he fed Donald something of which he was particularly fond, like rye bread, and tied a thread around the bread first, Donald would swallow the thread as well. Then Noah; triumphantly holding the other end of the thread, would lead Donald, gagging and choking, around the yard, dragging him faster and faster as the duck tried, on his short legs and clumsy webbed feet, to keep up. Eventually the thread would break. Then Noah would begin tying up the next piece of rye bread.

Nathaniel timidly pleaded with him to stop. He tried to bribe him with promises of new, unread, unrumpled comic books. For my part, behind the unwieldy and protective hedge, I tried prayer. I cried, silently, watching poor Donald fluttering frantically
at the end of the taut, diabolical leash. But Noah continued the game. It made him laugh.

And now Noah was sick, and Charles and I were invited into the Hoffmans' yard to help feed the ducks. Maybe, I thought, pushing through the hedge happily, prayer works after all.

Donald waddled into my lap as I sat on the ground, and I fed him little pieces of bread to which I had attached no threaded traps; and he fluttered and settled down and peed warm onto my leg. I felt the stubby grass under me and the sunshine on my face, and I was blissful, knowing that Noah was upstairs with a temperature of a hundred and four.

"When you think Noah gonna get better?" asked Charles, patting the pink-and-white back of Daisy gingerly. I knew he was thinking of the little knife in his pocket. But the knife didn't matter to me now. I prayed silently that Noah would not get well. Not yet, anyway.

Nathaniel shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe tomorrow."

Charles looked gloomy. He had to go home that evening.

The next day, Noah was worse. I went alone into the Hoffmans' yard where Nathaniel was sitting again on the porch steps.

"His temperature is a hundred and six," Nathaniel
said, with a kind of wonder. "The doctor came again. Noah sees things that aren't there—faces on the ceiling—and my mother had to stay up all night, rubbing him with alcohol.

"He has pneumonia," Nathaniel added.

"Noah pneumonia," I repeated dreamily, liking the sound. "Noah pneumonia."

We got the ducks out of their pen, sat on the grass, and stroked the mottled feathered backs. "Which one do you think can swim faster?" I asked.

"Daisy," said Nathaniel with satisfaction.

"I bet Donald can," I said. I was already thinking of Donald as mine. "You want to have a duck race?"

Mrs. Hoffman appeared on the back porch. She looked tense, tired, and distracted. "Noah's asleep," she said to us. "I have to go to the drugstore to get some more medicine. Is your mother home, Elizabeth?"

"Yes. She's feeding the baby."

She stood there indecisively, holding some prescriptions in her hand. Finally she said, "I'll only be gone about fifteen minutes. If you children hear Noah wake up"—she looked up toward his bedroom window, open to the sunshine—"would you go up and give him some sips of ginger ale?"

Nathaniel and I nodded.

"Don't let him cry."

We nodded again. It seemed a crazy injunction,
not to let Noah cry. Noah never cried. He made Nathaniel cry. He had made
me
cry. But Noah never cried.

"I'll be right back," she said, and disappeared.

"Let's have a duck race across the wading pool," I said, after she had gone.

We put the ducks in one at a time, again and again, holding bread to them from the opposite side of the pool and timing their brief swims. The timing was erratic; we had no stopwatch, not even an ordinary wristwatch. We called out numbers from one to ten as they swam. Each of us cheated, speeding the count for our own duck.

Upstairs, Noah began to cry. We could hear the sound through the open window, through the heat-laden air of the yard.

I concentrated on the duck race, whispering instructions to Donald—
my
duck, Donald—as he quacked resdessly beside me, waiting for his turn. It occurred to me in some corner of my consciousness that the crying did not sound like Noah.

Noah's voice had always been deep, uncommonly so for a small boy. Now, his cry was a high, fearful wail, ending in sobs before it took itself upward again to that curious high pitch unlike his voice. It was mingled with unintelligible words: choked, wet, and
panicky, that came at the end of the sobs. It was a sequence, a litany: wail, sob, words, and then the wail again.

"Noah's crying," said Nathaniel nervously. He put his duck, out of turn, into the pool, and began to count loudly, "ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE" as the pink-splotched creature swam to the opposite side.

"Watch mine," I insisted, and thrust my duck into the water. "ONE TWO THREE..."

We put our ducks in out of order, forgetting, ignoring all the rules we had made, put them both in together, tearing off scraps of bread, racing back and forth between the low sides of the pool, capturing the ducks, flinging them back in, counting, counting, so that we were reciting the numbers together, louder and louder; and it didn't matter who won, who lost, as long as we didn't hear the sound that came from the window of Noah's room.

It's not
my
brother, I found myself thinking.

And: I hate Noah anyway.

In the end, Nathaniel and I lay laughing, exhausted from the frenzied counting, on the damp grass, with the ducks fluttering their feathers fastidiously to dry them, and we declared them both winners; and upstairs the crying had stopped.

It was the next day that Noah died. By then he
was in the hospital, taken there during the night. Frightened, I hid in the shadows of Grandfather's house and listened to the grownups talking.

"The doctor told Margaret Hoffman that nothing could have saved him, he knew that from the night he was delirious and saw the faces on the ceiling," my mother said in a low voice to my grandparents.

"A tragedy," said Grandfather from the blue wing chair.

"Dreadful," said Grandmother. "But we must remember, too, that he was a dreadful child."

Yes, I thought. Noah was a dreadful child. But I was filled with dread myself.

***

"What happens," I asked nonchalantly at dinner, as Tatie was removing the soup bowls before she served the roast veal, "if you do something very bad and don't ever get caught?" Nervously I reached down with one hand, pulled a scab painfully from my knee, and dropped it to the rug.

No one answered me.

"You'll have to be more explicit, Elizabeth," said Grandfather finally. "We don't know what you mean."

"Well, sometimes there are bad things that people do, but they're not against the law, so they don't have to go to jail. Sometimes nobody even knows that they
have done it." By now I was sorry that I had brought the subject up.

"In that case," said my mother, "I think the best thing to do is to go and tell the person they've done it
to
that they're sorry."

"What if the person isn't around?" I rubbed my thumb in the bloody spot on my knee. "I mean, maybe the person might even be dead, or something."

That put the whole question into Grandmother's realm. Grandmother was High Church.

"Then the person should go to Confession. Making one's Holy Confession to the Lord, and asking forgiveness, is the only thing to do under those circumstances." Grandmother nodded to Tatie, who stood in the doorway with the platter of veal, and Tatie began to move around the table, serving each of us from the left.

"And if you don't do
that,
then you go to Hell and burn forever," said Jessica with satisfaction, lifting a piece of veal with her fork and grinning across the table at me as the steam rose from it.

"I don't believe that," I muttered.

"Shhh," said Mama, warning me. She changed the subject.

That night I went upstairs before Jess and knelt beside my bed, my grass-stained knees firmly on the thick hooked rug. I folded my hands. By now my
father's face was a blur in my memory, but his forgiving hugs were still more comforting to me than those I had never experienced from Father Thorpe's Episcopalian Gawd. So I began, "Our Father," stopped, re-began, "My Father," and made my confession to a deity whom I pictured wearing a major's cap, and who, I remembered vaguely, had once put a dab of shaving cream on the tip of my nose.

"Please forgive me," I whispered, "because I didn't mean to, but it was partly me that killed Noah Hoffman."

"What on
earth
are you doing, Liz?" asked Jess, opening the bedroom door suddenly.

"Looking for a worm. I had it in my pocket and it fell out onto the rug." Hastily I whispered, under my breath, "Amen," and went to bed puzzled, frightened, and absolved.

***

Mama and my grandparents went to Noah's funeral. While they were gone, Charles and I wandered out to the backyard and held a funeral of our own, behind the lilacs. We buried the knife. Neither of us said very much.

Then we went back to the kitchen, into the pantry, and washed our hands.

"You two sick?" asked Tatie suspiciously.

My stomach lurched. In my mind, in my memory,
I could hear Nathaniel's little voice call, "Noah's sick!"

"No," said Charles, "we jest wanna eat ice. It's hot out."

Tatie chipped some ice and gave us each a chunk. "Don't you drip on the floor now, you hear?" she said.

"Come on, Charles, let's take it outside."

We sat beside each other on the back steps and sucked ice. The day was muggy and oppressive and still.

"Charles," I said, finally, "you told me that children don't die."

He stood up and threw his ice angrily into the hollyhocks. "So?" he said defiantly. "It was a lie. Maybe I tole you
lots
of lies, Elizabeth!"

He turned his back on me, ran across the yard, and disappeared behind the garage. I sat alone for a while on the steps, holding the ice against my teeth until they ached. Finally I followed him and found him sitting in the dirt, disconsolately arranging pebbles in patterns.

"I can show you how to make letters if you want," I said.

"Okay."

I made an
A
from the pebbles.

"That's an
A.
It's the first letter of the alphabet."

"Yeah, I know the alphabet all the way through."

I rearranged the pebbles. "That's a
B.
"

"Yeah."

"Charles,
did
you?"

"Did I
what?
"

"Tell me lots of lies."

Charles picked up the pebbles of the
B
and threw them against the side of the garage. Small puffs of dust rose as they fell to the dirt. "No," he said, not looking at me. "Only jest that one, and it wasn't really a lie. It was because I didn't know."

"O
H
, J
ESS
," I groaned, "
I
wish
I
could be a boy."

Jessica looked over at me quizzically. We were sitting on the shaded side porch, the green slatted blinds pulled partway down against the sun. We each had an embroidery hoop, linen stretched tightly across the circular center. Grandmother had been teaching us both to embroider. It seemed the most boring thing I had ever done.

"What's the matter now?" asked Jess, working her needle neatly through her piece of linen.

"
Look,
" I said glumly, and showed her mine.

Jessica giggled. "Why do you do it crooked?" she asked.

"I can't help it! The needle just goes crooked when I try to do it. And look: those are bloodstains. I keep jabbing myself.