Housekeeping: A Novel (13 page)

For that summer Lucille was still loyal to us. And if we were her chief problem, we were her only refuge. She and I were together, always, everywhere. Sometimes she would only be quiet, sometimes she would tell me that I ought not to look at the ground when I walked (my posture was intended not so much to conceal as to acknowledge and apologize for my increasingly excessive height), and sometimes we would try to remember our mother, though more and more we disagreed and even quarreled about what she had been like. Lucille’s mother was orderly, vigorous, and sensible, a widow (more than I ever knew or she could prove) who was killed in an accident. My mother presided over a life so strictly simple and circumscribed that it could not have made any significant demands on her attention. She tended us with a gentle indifference that made me feel she would have liked to have been even more alone—she was the abandoner, and not the one abandoned.
As for her flight into the lake, Lucille declared that the car had been stuck, that Helen had accelerated too much and lost control of it. Then why had she left us at our grandmother’s, with all our things? And why had she driven her car off the road to the middle of the meadow? And why had she given the boys who helped her not just her money but her purse? Lucille accused me once of trying to defend Sylvie at our mother’s expense. We were both silent for some time afterward, regretting that the comparison had been made. For by now we knew, though the certainty was not especially reassuring, that Sylvie was ours. Our mother swept and dusted, kept our anklets white, and fed us vitamins. We had never heard of Fingerbone until she brought us here, knew nothing of our grandmother until we were left to wait for her on her porch. When we were supposed to be asleep Lucille and I used to watch our mother sitting on the couch, one foot tucked under her, smoking and reading
The Saturday Evening Post
. Always at last she would raise her eyes from the page and gaze into the center of the room, sometimes so intently that one of us would get up for a drink of water and to assure ourselves that there was no one in the room with her. At last we had slid from her lap like one of those magazines full of responsible opinion about discipline and balanced meals. Sylvie could never really surprise us. As we sometimes realized, we were now in Sylvie’s dream with her. In all our truancies, perhaps we never came to a place where she had not been before us. So she needed no explanation for the things we could not explain.

For example, once we spent the night in the woods. It was a Saturday, so we had worn our dungarees, and
had carried our fishing poles and a creel that contained cookies and sandwiches as well as jackknives and worms. But we had not planned to stay the night, so we had no blankets. We walked miles up the shore to a small inlet where the water was shallow and still. These waters were full of plump little perch disturbingly avid for capture. Only childen would trifle with such creatures, and only we among children would walk so far for fish that bit with equal avidity within a hundred feet of the public library. But we went there, leaving the house at dawn, joined at the road by a fat old bitch with a naked black belly and circles of white around her eyes. She was called Crip, because as a puppy she had favored one leg, and now that she was an elderly dog she favored three. She tottered after us briskly, a companionable gleam in her better eye. I describe her at such length because a mile or so from town she disappeared into the woods as if following a scent and never appeared again. She was a dog of no special consequence, and she passed from the world unlamented. Yet something of the somberness with which Lucille and I remembered this outing had to do with our last glimpse of her fat haunches and her palsied, upright tail as she clambered up the rocks and into the dusty dark of the woods.

It became a hot day. We rolled our jeans up in wide cuffs and unbuttoned our blouses so that we could tie them in a knot above our waists. Sometimes we walked on a narrow rim of sand, but more often we limped across beaches of round gray stones the size of crab apples. When we found flattish stones, we skipped them. When we found stones the shape of eggs, we threw them high, with a backward spin, and when the water received
them with a gulp, we said we had cut the devil’s throat. In some places brush and grass grew right down to the water, and then we would wade on slippery rocks covered with strands of silt, dim and drifting like drowned hair. I fell in, with the creel, and then we ate our sandwiches, because they were wet already. It was not noon, but we planned to roast perch on green sticks and to look for huckleberries.

The shore was littered with driftwood. There were trunks with stiff tangles of roots, and logs all stripped of their bark and spindled tight like cable. In places they were heaped, one huge carcass on another, like ivory and bones in an elephant graveyard. When we found twigs, we snapped them into finger lengths and stashed them in our pockets, to be smoked as we walked.

We walked north, with the lake on our right hand. If we looked at it, the water seemed spread over half the world. The mountains, grayed and flattened by distance, looked like remnants of a broken dam, or like the broken lip of an iron pot, just at a simmer, endlessly distilling water into light.

But the lake at our feet was plain, clear water, bottomed with smooth stones or simple mud. It was quick with small life, like any pond, as modest in its transformations of the ordinary as any puddle. Only the calm persistence with which the water touched, and touched, and touched, sifting all the little stones, jet, and white, and hazel, forced us to remember that the lake was vast, and in league with the moon (for no sublunar account could be made of its shimmering, cold life).

The sky was whited by a high, even, luminous film,
and the trees had an evening darkness. The shore drifted in a long, slow curve, outward to a point, beyond which three steep islands of diminishing size continued the sweep of the land toward the depths of the lake, tentatively, like an ellipsis. The point was high and stony, crested with fir trees. At its foot a narrow margin of brown sand abstracted its crude shape into one pure curve of calligraphic delicacy, sweeping, again, toward the lake. We crossed the point at its base, climbing down its farther side to the shore of the little bay where the perch bit. A quarter of a mile beyond, a massive peninsula foreshortened the horizon, flung up against it like a barricade. Only out beyond these two reaches of land could we see the shimmer of the open lake. The sheltered water between them was glossy, dark, and rank, with cattails at its verge and water lilies in its shallows, and tadpoles, and minnows, and farther out, the
plosh
now and then of a big fish leaping after flies. Set apart from the drifts and tides and lucifactions of the open water, the surface of the bay seemed almost viscous, membranous, and here things massed and accumulated, as they do in cobwebs or in the eaves and unswept corners of a house. It was a place of distinctly domestic disorder, warm and still and replete. Lucille and I sat down and tossed pebbles at dragonflies for a while. Then we fished for a while, opening the belly of each fish as we caught it from gills to tail and gutting it with our thumbnails, tossing the guts up onto the beach for raccoons. Then we made a shallow fire, and pierced a few of the perch through the gills with a green stick, and set it up like a spit between two forked sticks. This was
our invariable method, though at worst the spit collapsed and the fish dropped into the fire, and at best, which was very little better, their tail fins scorched and smoldered before the gleam of consciousness had quite left their eyes. We ate them in considerable numbers. We found ripe huckleberries on bushes that grew up among the rocks behind the shore and ate them, too. These rituals of predation engrossed us until late afternoon, and then we suddenly realized that we had stayed too long. If we had hurried back then we might have got home before it was entirely dark, but the sky was increasingly beclouded and we could not be sure of the time. Both of us were frightened at the thought of making our way along the miles of difficult shore, with the black woods above us on our right hand and only the lake on our left. If the clouds brought a wind and waves, we would be driven up into the woods, and the woods at night terrified us. “Let’s stay here,” Lucille said. We dragged driftwood halfway out on the point. We used a big stone in its side as one wall, we made back and side walls of driftwood, and we left the third side open to the lake. We pulled down fir limbs and made a roof and floor. It was a low and slovenly structure, to all appearances random and accidental. Twice the roof fell. We had to sit with our chins on our knees to avoid bringing a wall down. We sat for a while side by side, adjusting our limbs cautiously, scratching our ankles and shoulder blades with the greatest care. Lucille crawled out and began writing her name in pebbles on the sand in front of the door. Evening seemed to have struck an equilibrium. The sky and the water were one luminous gray. The
woods altogether black. The two arms of land that enclosed the bay were like floes of darkness, pouring into the lake from mountains brimming darkness, but stopped and turned to stone in the brilliant ether.

We crawled into our hut and fell uneasily asleep, never forgetting that we must keep our heels against our buttocks, always aware of the mites and flies in the sand. I woke up in absolute darkness. I could feel the branches at my side and the damp at my back, and Lucille asleep against me, but I could see nothing. Remembering that Lucille had crawled in behind me, and that she crouched between me and the door, I scrambled out through the roof and over the wall into darkness no less absolute. There was no moon. In fact, there appeared to be no sky. Apart from the steady shimmering of the lake and the rush of the woods, there were singular, isolated lake sounds, placeless and disembodied, and very near my ears, like sounds in a dream. There were lisps and titters, and the sounds of stealthy approach—the sense of a disturbing intention, its enacting inexplicably deferred. “Lucille,” I said. I could hear her stand up through the roof. “What time do you think it is?” We could not guess. Coyotes cried, and owls, and hawks, and loons.

It was so dark that creatures came down to the water within a few feet of us. We could not see what they were. Lucille began to throw stones at them. “They’re supposed to be able to smell us,” she grumbled. For a while she sang “Mockingbird Hill,” and then she sat down beside me in our ruined stronghold, never still, never accepting that all our human boundaries were overrun.

Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes. Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent. While it was dark, despite Lucille’s pacing and whistling, and despite what must have been dreams (since even Sylvie came to haunt me), it seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace, if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent.

When the light began to come (we were warned, as Sylvie said we would be, by the roar of the woods and the cries of birds, far ahead of time) Lucille began to
walk toward Fingerbone. She did not speak to me, or look back. The absolute black of the sky dulled and dimmed and blanched slowly away, and finally half a dozen daubs of cloud, dull powder pink, sailed high in a pale-green sky, rust-red at the horizon. Venus shone a heatless planetary white among these parrot colors, and earth lay unregenerate so long that it seemed to me for once all these blandishments might fail. The birds of our world were black motes in that tropic.

“It doesn’t seem to get any lighter,” I said.

“It will,” Lucille replied. We walked along the shore, more quickly than we had walked by daylight. Our backs were stiff and our ears hummed. Both of us fell repeatedly. As we were easing our way past a mass of rocks that jutted into the lake, my feet slipped on a silty face of submerged stone and I slid full-length into the water, bruising my knee and my rib and my cheek. Lucille pulled me up by the hair.

At last it became ordinary day. Our jeans clung, our cuffs dragged, our hair hung in damp snarls. Our fingernails and our lips were blue. We had lost our fishing rods and our creel, as well as our shoes. Hunger sat heavily in our bowels, like guilt. “Sylvie will kill us,” Lucille said, without conviction. We climbed up the embankment to the railroad tracks, leaving a dark trail where our passing precipitated the mists that still dimmed the weeds and grasses. The railroad ties felt warm and ordinary under our feet. We could see some of the orchard trees, twisted and crotched and stooped, barren and age-stricken. We took a little path through the trees, down to the nearest door, the door that opened into my
grandmother’s room. Sylvie was sitting in the kitchen, on a stool, perusing a back issue of
National Geographic
.

When we came into the kitchen Sylvie stepped down from her stool, smiling, not at us, and pushed two chairs in front of the stove. She had put two folded quilts on the wood box behind the stove. She wrapped one of them around Lucille and one around me, and we sat down. She poured boiling water and then a can of condensed milk and a quantity of sugar into the coffeepot and poured us each a cup. “Brimstone tea,” she said.