Girl in Landscape (22 page)

“He’s ferrying stuff over to Diana’s,” called Clement without looking up. “He took the bicycle.”

“What stufi?” said Pella.

“I don’t know. Just some stuff, his stuff.”

“I wish I had a bicycle,” said David.

“There’s only one,” said Clement. “We’ve got the only bicycle in town.” He turned and grinned at David
as if this were occasion for enormous satisfaction. David didn’t seem to agree. He frowned.

“You can ride it when Ray comes back,” said Clement.

“It’s too big for me,” said David, exasperated.

“Maybe we could buy David one in Southport,” suggested Pella. “We could all go.”

“I want to go to Southport!” said David.

“I don’t know how we’d get there,” said Clement, still poking at his vines. “I don’t really see what we need from Southport that Wa doesn’t stock in his shop, anyway. I doubt there’s any bicycles for sale.”

The house was in disarray. Jars of food sat out on the counter and the kitchen table. The shelf that had been Clement’s desk was heaped with bits of Archbuilder salvage, old implements and hardware and shards of pottery that Clement had dug out of the garden. His papers and laptop were gone.

David seated himself at the table. He fumbled forlornly with the plastic bag that held the fresh loaf of bread, mouthing words to himself, then looked up suddenly. “Hey!” he said. “When are we going to have school again?”

Clement got up from his knees, and went to the sink, smiling blandly. “I guess that’s up to Joe Kincaid,” he said. “He’s the teacher.”

Joe’s a teacher, Wa’s a shopkeeper, Snider Grant is a drunk, and what are you, Pella thought? A bedroom farmer. You lost an election and you lost a wife and you couldn’t keep a girlfriend. Now Pella wished he’d married Diana Eastling. Without her, Clement was unreachable,
finished. She’d been his last brush with credibility.

Then, watching her father rinse his muddy hands at the sink, Pella felt her guilt glow inside her.

It was in the shape of a small burning house.

From the ridge she watched the farm change colors with the sunset, the greenhouse become a pink-and-orange prism, the windows of the house first reflect the rust-smeared sky then darken until they were lit from within, the shadows of the chicken coop and planters and kiln stretch longer and longer across the toast-colored flagstones until they crossed the line of the fence and beyond, the whole homestead like a sundial on the face of the valley.

In an hour of watching she’d seen Doug Grant step outside once, to pour scraps of garbage into a tray in the chicken coop, then back inside. But no sign of Efram. She’d barely seen him since the day of the storm. Still, his force encompassed the days that followed the fire and the storm, just as it hung over the homestead now as she watched. Efram’s power was implicit. He’d revealed his control of the valley in glimpses and asides, stepping in to thwart Joe Kincaid or Clement here and there, then withdrawing. He commanded the valley that way, and Pella. The echo of his name, spoken by others, was stronger than any voice. He ruled by abdication.

From her vantage Pella saw Raymond’s bicycle tracks veering off to the right, toward his mourning corner
of the settlement. She saw Ben Barth’s tire marks, tracing his path away from Efram’s, toward Southport. To the east, behind a rise of towers, lay the charred and flattened remains of Hugh Merrow’s house. Farther out, the Archbuilder burial statue. The valley was a map of deaths and retreats.

There was a whisper of pebbles tumbling down a grade behind her, something more than household deer. She turned, expecting Efram. Instead, ambling double-jointedly up the ridge was Hiding Kneel. The Archbuilder saw Pella and bowed, tendrils flopping forward, and continued up the path. Pella felt a faint shock at being visible in her real body, her verging-past-girl-hood body. She would always now. She shouldn’t miss her secret intangible deer-self.

“Hail, Pella Marsh,” said Hiding Kneel, stopping a few feet from her.

“Hail,” Pella repeated automatically, then felt instantly stupid about it.

“Would you be observing the landscape?” said Hiding Kneel.

Pella nodded.

“My objective also,” said Hiding Kneel, moving closer. Pella stared at the Archbuilder, at the shiny, fur-ringed gaps of its eyes. It nodded at her, seeming to accept her gaze. “Your family is widely dispersed tonight.”

“What?”

“In passing, below, I saw Raymond Marsh also.”

“What was he doing?”

“Making circles,” said the Archbuilder unhelpfully. Circles of photographs to sit inside? Or circling bicycle tracks in the dust? Pella didn’t bother to ask.

Hiding Kneel brushed off a flat knee-high rock and gingerly sat, uncomfortably close to Pella, and gazed out with her over the valley.

“Below is Efram Nugent’s house,” it said.

“Uh-huh,” said Pella, trying to avoid conversation.

“Have you ever been inside it?”

She turned, surprised. “Once,” she said. “Have you?”

“Ben Barth and myself often played backgammon, when Efram Nugent was traveling.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Ben Barth has gone.”

“I know.”

“Doug Grant does not enjoy backgammon,” mused Hiding Kneel after a short silence. When Pella didn’t say anything, it added, “Do you perhaps play?”

“No,” said Pella. Seeing she was going to have to talk to Hiding Kneel about something, she said, “So you saw Efram’s walls? All the Archbuilder stuff?”

“Oh, they were very beautiful. A marvelous endeavor.”

“You liked it?” It seemed wrong that the Archbuilder could be so blithely approving of Efram.

“Very certainly,” said the Archbuilder.

“So why don’t you fix up all the wrecked stuff around here?”

“This would be …” Hiding Kneel stopped to
consider. “It would be to pretend a relation I do not have, to all the wrecked stuff.”

“You mean it isn’t yours to fix up?” Pella turned her head at a sound. A single household deer had appeared beside them on the ridge. It danced for stability in the wind.

“It isn’t,” agreed Hiding Kneel. “Nor is it mine to want it fixed.”

Pella wasn’t sure she appreciated the distinction. “You could at least make yourself a place to sleep.” She thought of her own crushed Archbuilder shell. “Where do you go at night?”

“There are various places to sleep,” said Hiding Kneel airily. “I go at night where I go in the daytime, but in repose.”

Pella was irritated. She couldn’t sort out this answer at all. Was Hiding Kneel explaining that it slept in the rocking chair at Wa’s store? That was the main place it went in the daytime.

“Well, Efram thinks you’re pathetic for not living up to all this stuff,” she said impulsively. She waved her hand at the ruins, grandly, the way Efram would. In the valley, night was arriving, the long shadows knitting together.

“Ah,” said Hiding Kneel, tendrils rustling as it nodded its head.

“You don’t care?”

“Efram Nugent’s love of ancestors is quite poignant.”

“He hates you.” Could she make it any clearer?
Hiding Kneel should be here to keep a watch for Efram, to make sure that no fires were set, no Archbuilders murdered tonight. Instead the Archbuilder had come to admire the sunset and pine for backgammon.

I’m the only one who understands, she thought hopelessly.

Hiding Kneel sat staring out at Efram’s homestead, seeming not to have heard.

“He doesn’t want you in the town,” she said. “If he gets his way you won’t be allowed around here.”

“Clement Marsh is a good man,” said Hiding Kneel. “It is his town I will be allowed in. His school is where I will study.”

“There isn’t any school,” said Pella. “My father doesn’t have a town for you. This is Efram’s place. Clement can’t make anything happen.”

“I was assured he was a potent statesman.”

“He’s nothing without my mother.” The words snuck out of her like a thread between her lips, a betraying filament that stretched back to Brooklyn, to Pineapple Street.

“Your mother?”

“She’s dead.”

“So you too are concerned with the superiority of your lost ancestors,” said Hiding Kneel. “Hence your receptivity to Efram Nugent’s valuation of the departed Archbuilders.”

“Caitlin isn’t my ancestor,” said Pella. “She’s my mother.”

“Yet you speak of her as legendary, like my departed fore-cousins,” said Hiding Kneel. “And Clement
Marsh, like we who remain, is correspondingly diminished. We tiptoe in the corridors of their reputation.”

“So basically you agree with Efram that you’re a bunch of chumps.”

“Possibly,” said Kneel, tilting its head humorously. “But perhaps those departed only seem greater to us because they are gone.”

“You never met Caitlin,” said Pella quickly, though not before she felt a sting of doubt. Was she unfair to Archbuilders? To Clement?

“I’m sorry to say, no,” said Hiding Kneel, as though it might have been a real possibility.

They sat in silence, until the Archbuilder said, “Why are you so angry at your father?”

“Because he’s like
you
,” she said, before she could think. Hot tears began to cover her face.

“I do not understand.”

“You couldn’t.” She didn’t herself. What did she mean? Were Clement and Hiding Kneel both helpless? Both sad?

Both good?

“Perhaps there is another reason,” suggested the Archbuilder.

“Yes,” said Pella. “Because he lived and Caitlin died.”

“Ah,” said Hiding Kneel, after thinking for a moment. “The elegance of the explanation is that it encompasses also why you are so angry at yourself.”

The two of them fell silent, as darkness closed over the valley and the farm below.

It began two days later, in front of E. G. Wa’s place, late in an empty afternoon. Pella was coming over the hill and she caught them at it. She could have been elsewhere. She only happened to see.

Doug Grant and Wa and Joe Kincaid stood over the figure in front of the store. It was Hiding Kneel, on all fours in the dust.

“
Get up
,” said Doug Grant shrilly, pulling on Hiding Kneel’s arm, his motions hectic. It was like he wanted to pull Hiding Kneel’s arm off. The Archbuilder was raked in a half circle on its knees. The other two men stood tensed, not aiding Hiding Kneel, not stopping Doug Grant from his harsh useless jerking at the Archbuilder’s limbs. In the bright sun the three men threw dark, liquid shadows across the rock. The Archbuilder wallowed in its shadow, like a swimmer in mud.

Pella moved down the hill toward the store. She
didn’t try to keep out of sight. As she neared she saw the shine on Hiding Kneel’s fur. The Archbuilder was leaking clear fluid, like glue. Bleeding. Pella stopped, a few yards away. E. G. Wa turned and saw her. Doug Grant glanced too. Then they turned back to the Archbuilder on the ground. No one spoke.

Moving roughly, but without the savagery of Doug Grant, Joe Kincaid grabbed the Archbuilder by the fur of its shoulders and hauled it to its feet. Joe Kincaid wore a hat. Beneath it his face was red and clotted with anger. Upright, Hiding Kneel staggered, but didn’t protest or struggle. The Archbuilder shook its head and tendrils as if regretfully declining some polite offer or suggestion. Pella stepped forward, entranced. It was as though she’d come over the hill into an imaginary world made up of parts of the true one. The moment was unreal, the four figures in silence and sunlight barely acknowledging her.

The spell broke when Doug Grant raised his knee into Hiding Kneel’s midsection. Pella heard the crack of shell. Now Joe Kincaid pulled Doug Grant away from the Archbuilder, who had doubled over without falling.

“Enough,” said Joe Kincaid.

“What?” said Doug Grant, breathing raggedly.

“Marsh,” said Joe Kincaid, and he pulled Hiding Kneel upright again. The fur of the Archbuilder’s chest and stomach were wet. The moistened fur parted in ridges, exposing the thinness of its torso. Its mouth was open wide, as though it were moaning soundlessly.

Doug Grant and Wa turned again to look at Pella. “She doesn’t care,” said Wa.

“Not her,” said Joe Kincaid. “We should take Kneel to Marsh. Clement. Make him see.”

“Clement Marsh is a good man,” said Hiding Kneel gently. Pella was shocked to hear the Archbuilder speak. She had begun to think of it as a kind of animal or plant, the way the men were destroying its body.

“Shut up,” said Wa.

“We should take it to Efram’s place,” said Doug Grant. “He’ll be back soon. Efram’ll know what to do.” He said to Wa, “Let me get Efram’s gun.”

Wa shook his head. “Don’t need a gun. It’ll do what we say.”

“Efram Nugent is a good man,” said Hiding Kneel with exactly the same intonation.

“Quiet!” said Doug Grant.

“No, we’ll go to Marsh,” said Joe Kincaid. His voice was heavy. It was clear they would do as he told them. Somehow he was the leader of this misshapen venture.

Pella followed the three men and the one Archbuilder to her house, pacing them a few yards behind, not bothering to hide. The men walked into the sun, heads down, ignoring her. She was sure they knew she was there. The men had fallen back into their dreamlike silence, as if acting under another hand, following some inevitable script. The hurt Archbuilder trudged along with them, not resisting, playing its part in the dream.

It wants to see Clement, Pella thought.

He was home. He was always home, now that Diana Eastling was gone. He came to the door in bare feet.
Pella stood to one side of the porch and watched. Clement stepped out blinking in the brightness of the day. He’d begun keeping the windows covered, to make the house a better place for the potato vines. Moist and cool. He himself seemed to be withering.

“Joe,” he said.

“Where’s David?” said Joe Kincaid.

“Why?” said Clement. “I don’t know where he is.”

Pella knew. David and Morris Grant were out in the valley together.

“He’s in trouble, Clement,” said Joe Kincaid. “You’d better take care of him. He and Martha and this Archbuilder—”

“Hiding Kneel,” said Clement, smiling humbly. He spoke as if he were making introductions, providing helpful clarifications.