Little Sister Death (7 page)

The rabbit went up the path that bordered the creek. It paused crossing a sandbar where a water moccasin lay curled. The snake stirred, somnolent eyes becoming alert, its entire attention focused on the rabbit. The rabbit gave no indication of fear. It watched the snake levelly with its black shoebutton eyes. The snake seemed to sense something amiss: it abruptly slithered up the branch, dropped with a splash into the creek, fled across the water in a series of S-shaped undulations.

The rabbit turned. She was a young rabbit, halfgrown perhaps, lean and stringybodied. She went up the embankment, feet scuttling in the sand, came out into a field of red clover. The clover was in bloom and the air was filled with droning bees and the red clover perfume but the rabbit did not pause to feed. She skirted the darker side of the field and went through a thick hedgerow grown up over a splitrail fence. She came up through the garden spot, watching the house. Her nose crinkled delicately as she scented the air.

She was watching the girl. The girl was playing under the dark of a beech tree.

Stephie came slowly up the steps, stopped and sat down on the porch. She looked out toward the toolshed at the lower edge of the yard, upward and beyond it to the green and umber sedgefield rising to meet the dark line of trees. Corrie knew she was looking for David. He had been ascending the ridge when Stephie had seen him last.

When is Daddy coming in? I’m hungry.

I don’t know. When he comes.

What does that mean, when he comes?

It just means your father does things the way he wants to and when he wants to.

Is that a good way to be?

Corrie paused. The child was watching her with calm, level eyes. Impersonal as a tape recorder, Corrie thought against her will. But this sounded like one of Stephie’s loaded questions: she seemed almost hypersensitive to any criticism that David might receive.

I suppose it is if you can do it. Some people can’t. I can’t, and sometimes when people do that kind of thing it makes it hard on other people.

Why is he hunting for a place an old house used to be?

Your daddy is writing a book. Sometimes he acts peculiar when he’s busy doing that. He…he gets involved with what he’s writing about.

I’m going to be a writer.

Corrie knew that Stephanie was sometimes disquieting to other people, especially when they listened to their conversations. They didn’t quite know how to talk to her, never knew what she knew and what she didn’t. Sometimes her friends had treated Stephanie as if she were afflicted with a disease with a high mortality rate instead of merely being precocious; Corrie herself thought of them as a family comprised of three adults, two regular-sized and one trial-sized.

And one on the way, she thought, a twinge of unfocused worry flickering through her.

He came onto the place with an air of discovery, an archeologist seeking the chaos of an older time. He hunkered in the windy sedge at the rim of the hill and examined it. He could see how the old homeplace and yard below him were set in the epicenter of a saucerlike depression in the earth perhaps a half mile in diameter, the house set at the end of a dual lane of cedars that flanked the drive, down which ran droves of curiosity-seekers to hear spectral voices and obscene babbling, watch phantom figures and lights drift about the fields. According to contemporary accounts, few came away disappointed. Binder didn’t plan on being disappointed either. He felt a growing obsession to unstring the secrets the house held, to unravel the Gordian knot time and myth had only tightened.

Where the house had stood was a tangle of riotous weeds and brush, the twin chimneys rising starkly out of the undergrowth. It was caught in the slow sweep of failing light, the sky beyond it redorange and metallic, flooded with garish colors as if all the light in the world had pooled there, congesting momentarily at the horizon and then draining off the rim of the world. Struck by the gradations of light and shadow Binder watched in an almost rapt stillness the subtle changes the shifting light brought, objects altering slowly as if undergoing some metamorphosis at their core, their very cells being rearranged. Though he was not an artist he studied the scene with the intensity of a painter, eyes marking color and shading, the tilt of the sedge, the darkening and accruing shadows seemingly drawn out of the earth itself.

He was watching the homeplace and he was pondering the nature of its evil, not wondering if there was evil indeed there but knowing it with an absolute certainty that he applied to very few things. What triggered it? he wondered. How did it work? And how did it ever come to be there? Something old and evil had happened here, so evil that everything that had come after was just echoes, just spreading ripples in the water so intense that Beale and his family had ultimately abandoned the house and rebuilt in the place he was now moving into. Though that didn’t help, did it, Old Jake? Binder thought. Whatever it was just walked across the ridge and knocked at your door.

Binder had seen old pictures where the house itself looked ungainly and out of proportion, the original log structure added to with seemingly with no eye for symmetry or even common sense, so that ultimately the house took on an air of inherent arrogance or just the unmindful disconcern of the very old, serene, and timeless.

There was, he saw again, juxtaposition of lineament that jarred him. No angle seemed to be true to the eye’s expectation. The horizontal seemed slightly out of level, the vertical just a fraction out of plumb. Perhaps this very imbalance lay at the root of things; an eye perpetually beguiled and a brain constantly reevaluating these images might draw insanity to it like a comforter. Yet he knew the evil predated the house, and he looked farther to the land itself, the sedgefield running stonily down the hill to the outbuildings, to what must have been the carriage house, and far beyond that, the ruins of the slave cabins.

It was an evil perhaps indigenous to the slope and rise of the land, to the stark austerity of the woods surrounding the ruined plantation. For whatever course, it was a verifiable fact that evil had happened here. He had the book, the old newspapers. Such word-of-mouth stories as he had been able to collect. Arcs had fallen here, and fallen again. Blood had run like the proverbial water. And before that, in the nineteenth century, the homeplace had been the setting for a sort of pastoral haunting so bizarre and irrefutable that word of mouth and finally an article in so prestigious a source as the
Saturday Evening Post
had drawn the curious hordes to listen for voices in the night whispers, to see Casper candles flit about the fields.

He had come equipped to unravel it all, to line the yellow sheets of foolscap with the place’s true history. It was a book he was compelled to write. By what? His interest, the writer’s interest, by some misalignment of his consciousness. What was his fault, how had it picked him?

Or had he picked it?

On the way back he passed through the old graveyard. Abandoned by the living, only the dead kept their watch. He sat down on one of the headstones. After a while he arose and started back, stopping for a moment at Jacob Beale’s headstone. It seemed imbued with lost knowledge, secrets carried to the grave, deadbolts he could open could he just find the right sequence of numbers.

J
ACOB
W
ILLIAM
B
EALE
1785 ∼ 1844

T
ORTURED BY A SPIRIT, NOW AT REST

O
RIGINAL STONE STOLEN IN
1937,
THIS ROCK PLACED IN
1941

He didn’t linger here. He had seen it before and it held nothing new for him.

It was a scant two hundred yards over the sedgefield and down the ridge to the house. Here he stopped again, studying the place. There was a look of great age about it. Save the anomolaic four-wheel-drive truck parked in the yard, he could have stepped backward into the middle of the previous century.

Behind Binder the field sloped continually upward in a stony tapestry of sedge and faded into a blue wood. That was where the old woman watched him from blueberry eyes in the warm, quilted leather of her face. Her hair was black without a streak of gray and frizzed out from beneath the man’s felt hat jammed on her head. She wore walking shoes and a shapeless pair of men’s corduroy pants and a gray sweater whose buttons were split away and she had clasped the front with safety pins. She was old, but she looked wiry and tough, as if her bones had been strung on rawhide thongs and her skin tanned to leather. Her hands were big-knuckled and large as a man’s.

One of these hands clasped the wadded mouth of a gunny sack. Something stirred in it. She lowered the weight to the ground to rest her arm, still watching the distant figure of the man, thinking, Well there you are, sure enough. Reckon how long you’ll be here? She released her grip on the sack momentarily. As if sensing this tentative freedom, whatever was in the bag leapt spasmodically against the restraining burlap, but she stayed it with a foot and went back to watching him. The bag stilled.

Just like a man, she thought. Look for an hour when there’s nothing in the world to see. You needn’t go lookin for it anyway, she told Binder’s angular figure. When it gits ready for you it’ll come huntin you up.

Her shadow had lengthened, she felt the lessening of the sun’s weight. She took up the bag and slung it across a shoulder. She would have liked to have watched the man longer but she did not want to be on the Beale farm after dark, and besides, the woods were full of dead treetops where logs had been cut and hauled away and they lay like deadfalls awaiting tripping. So at length she turned toward deeper woods, came out in a clearing above which a hawk wheeled, fleeing the raucous tormenting of a flock of crows. She stopped to watch. The hawk ascended into a darkening void, vanished. A whippoorwill called from the shadowed wood and she went on.

Below him the lights came on. The door opened and a rectangle of yellow spilled onto the yard. He could see Corrie, doll-size, approaching the steps, peering into the gathering night. He could imagine her face sweetly becoming slightly apprehensive as night drew on. Afraid of the dark, he thought derisively, who would have welcomed anything the night might choose to favor him with.

David, David.

He could hear her calling, the voice belllike yet faint with distance. He arose and took up his notebook, went stumbling blindly downhill toward the lighted house.

You were out a long time, Corrie said.

She thought you were snakebit, Stephanie told David.

My name is Mommy, Corrie said. Not she.

Binder laid aside his silverware, took up his coffee cup. I finally found the old Beale homeplace, he said. Greaves said it would be easy, and maybe in the wintertime it would, but this place is so grown up you can’t find anything. I fought blackberry briars all afternoon and finally just stumbled upon it. The two chimneys are there, just like Greaves said, but he neglected to mention there are trees growing right up beside them, taller than they are. Right up through where the floor of the house was, poplars forty or fifty feet tall. I keep forgetting this was all a hundred and forty years ago.

What else was there?

The pear tree old Jacob Beale set out in his yard. Dead, I’ll admit, but a pear tree nonetheless. The graveyard where the Beales are buried. The old orchard. You can see the configuration of the land, the lay of it, where the fields were, the old grape arbor. The spring is still there, of course, and the wreckage of the old stone springhouse.

A regular scenic tour, she said, smiling wryly.

What amazes me is that we got here while there was anything at all left…I expected to find everything razed, the ground bulldozed, house trailers setting everywhere.

He waited for her to echo his enthusiasm but she did not. She arose and began to clear the table. Binder lit a cigarette, glancing outside. The windows had gone opaque, dark stolen over the land. He could see his reflected image at the head of the table, the shadow of a beard he was beginning to grow blurring the edges of his face. Lit bright orange by the flare of the match, his reflection was oblique and conspiratorial.

How long do you think it will take you to block out the book? Do you think you can get the feel of it here—begin it, maybe— and then we could go back to Chicago to finish it?

I don’t know, Corrie. It’ll just come when it comes. Why? I don’t recall you being that fond of Chicago.

I wasn’t, but I’m not that fond of the Beale farm, either. This place, especially this old house, just drives me up the wall. Besides, there’s school to think about.

This is only July. There’s plenty of time to think about that. It’ll all be worth it, Corrie. I promise you.

Well. I hope it’s a good book.

I don’t know how good it’ll be but it’ll be commercial. And that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?

I suppose so. I know you can write. You don’t have to prove anything to me, David.

When the house had been modernized, a bathroom had been added in the largest downstairs bedroom, a partition erected so there was a narrow hall that ended in two doors, one to the bathroom, the other interconnecting with a smaller bedroom. They had bought Stephie bunk beds in Beale Station. Corrie had set them up in the smaller room and done what she could to brighten it up, but the walls were a drab dirty brown and the room still had the austere appearance of a dormitory or military barracks.

Or prison, she thought.

Binder read to Stephie until he thought she slept, then ceased. She lay with her eyes closed for a time, but when he softly closed the book and arose to leave she opened them. When she spoke her voice was blurred with sleep.

Daddy?

What?

I forgot to tell you about the lady I saw.

Lady? Where did you see a lady, babe?

Stephie had arisen on her elbows. Her face was animated now, no longer sleepy. Binder thought she looked like a tiny clone of her mother.

On the hill above the toolshed. She had something. A rabbit, I think. It kept trying to get away but she held it real tight and it didn’t.