Quiet Dell: A Novel (14 page)

Hart must have closed his eyes, for he saw the berries falling onto many confusing paths. He saw then the road in the playhouse mural, curving its way so far from the snowcapped peaks, and the man in the coolie hat, pulling the cart with the piles of shapes. The cart was full of ice for baby Grethe, too late, for her fever was raging and the damage done.

“Buster, my boy, are you sleeping?” Mr. Pierson’s hand was on Hart’s knee. “My copilot must stay awake.”

“Am I going to drive the car soon?” He rubbed his eyes.

“Ah yes, you’ve been most patient. I believe we’ll do that tomorrow,
as your mother expects us for supper. We’re pressed to arrive in time, and look at that sky. Rain, I think.”

Annabel was reciting poems in the backseat, with Grethe grading each performance, needlessly, for Annabel started over unless she was perfectly satisfied. She repeated “The Swing” again, but Hart could barely hear the words over the rushing of air from the open windows. The sky up ahead did look dark, but just now there were blue patches, and the green depth of the trees on either side looked lit and brilliant.

•   •   •

Three gasoline pumps stood sentinel before a storefront. They were like robots, Hart thought, with big dials on their chests and round silver heads proclaiming their names in circular letters:
American Ethyl Gasoline, American New Action Gas, Amoco-Gas.
Their straight silver tanks repeated the names on oval badges, and the hoses looped from one shoulder to the other. The building itself was weathered. Bright metal signs glinted from every surface:
Kendall, The 2000 Mile Oil; Treat Yourself To A Good Chew, Mail Pouch Tobacco; Postal Telegraph Here
. The garage bay door was open, but Hart didn’t see anyone. Then two men came out of the storefront and sat down casually on the long bench in front of the big window.

Mr. Pierson turned to the girls in the backseat. “I happen to know they sell ice cream here. Anyone for ice cream? Annabel?”

“Oh yes. I want vanilla, with a cherry.”

“Strawberry?” ventured Grethe.

“I know Hart wants chocolate, don’t you, Hart?” Annabel said.

Hart only yawned. They’d slept very little the night before, their naps punctuated with games and songs that Mr. Pierson said were just the thing to keep them alert. Twice yesterday, again this morning, they’d stopped along the road with the picnic basket, once in a farmer’s meadow, then in a shady glade along a railroad tracks, and last, at a deserted outlook with tables. Mr. Pierson praised Annabel for bringing such a lot of food. They ate from china plates Annabel had packed, which was why the blasted basket was so heavy. Mr.
Pierson told the children to move around a bit, encouraged games of tag, and led rounds of Simon Says. Now the food was gone. Mr. Pierson bought snacks each time they stopped for gas.

He was in the store now, paying for the fuel.

“I hope Mother won’t be mad about the plates,” Grethe was telling Annabel. “You shouldn’t have packed her good china.”

“Then what would we have eaten from? It was ever so nice, with real plates and utensils, and the tablecloth to sit on.” She sighed. “Anyway, it wasn’t my fault.”

None of them said more, for the plates and the basket were gone. It was so curious. Mr. Pierson had shown them the view from the outlook, pointing out the rills of water tumbling into a ravine far below, and the hairpin turns in the road, looping here and there like bright stripes suddenly visible between the tops of trees. He’d carefully put everything back into the basket after their meal and walked across the highway to the outlook, as though to see the vista once again, carrying the basket. He stood even beyond the sign, with the basket at his feet. Then he turned suddenly, sending it over the edge with his foot.

The girls didn’t see; they were behind a stand of rocks, performing necessities. Hart saw. He’d watched Mr. Pierson approach the very edge with the basket and wondered if he would jump. But Mr. Pierson had only kicked the basket over and done a kind of pirouette affecting surprise, as though he knew Hart was watching, and then looked down again, as if to see that the basket had really vanished.

“How clumsy of me,” he’d said. “I shall have to buy your mother a beautiful new basket. It does give you girls a lot more room, however, to lie down and nap, for we will certainly get in after dark.”

He was back at the window of the coupe. “We’re fueled up. Now, then. Annabel, you come with me to help with the ice cream.” He winked at the girls. “They have all the flavors, and I’ve made special arrangements about the cherry.”

They were gone, into the store.

“Hart,” Grethe said in the quiet. “I miss Mother. I wonder why she didn’t telephone us, all the time she was away.”

Hart watched the two men who sat talking on the long bench by the store window. He might get out and ask them why a man would throw a basket of dishes and silverware into a ravine. He might send a postal telegram to Charles, but they’d left so quickly that Hart had not withdrawn his money from the bank. He had only a few coins in his shirt pocket, which he’d grabbed from the tin in the kitchen. Suppose his mother needed another loan?

“Did she say she’d call?” Hart asked.

“No. They sent those postcards.”

The cards were in the mail tray at home. They didn’t sound like his mother, and weren’t in her hand. Hart supposed she’d asked Mr. Pierson to be friendly and send them mail, but why pretend to be her, and sign her name, with “Mr. Pierson says hello” off to the side?

“It’s starting to rain,” Grethe said, “with the sun out. There might be a rainbow.”

The wooden roof over the gas pumps was bright white in the darkening light, and the cement block of the building was painted silver.
Gibson Motor Company,
read the big white letters,
Norwood, West Virginia.

•   •   •

Later, near evening, the rain is drenching. He can barely see the turn onto the narrow dirt road. The children are asleep, lulled by the pounding rain. He slows the coupe, not to startle them, easing the car onto mud, for Quiet Dell road is standing water and the creek along one side is nearly to its banks. The garage is near, and there’s no other habitation for a mile since he burned the tenants out, months ago. He steers to the left side of the road and imagines the car afloat, riding the stream to Clarksburg, but he sees the garage, a simple hulk with a flat slant roof, intricate enough belowground. He will assure their sleep with the chloroform and rag in the glove box, open the garage door, and back the car inside. His blood is
singing. He’s entered that outer region in which it all begins; a penumbra around his head pulses like the charged gray emanation of a sunspot. He peers into a cloudiness in which flashes of brilliant red appear.
Nederlandse koninklijke purpura,
his father used to say, Dutch Royal purple, a
kneuzing
well deserved, the color of his backside if not his face, each time, for only a
nestbeschmutzer,
a diseased cur, shits in its own cage, betrays its own.
Schaamte schaamte schaamte
. He feels a surge and grips the wheel, but the coupe slides to the right and halts, subtly tilted, the back right wheel in mud to the axle. The arcs of the headlights appear to fly into the downpour at a rakish angle; he leaves the engine engaged, an essential vibration, and applies the brake. The boy first, and when he is senseless, the girls, while he gets the boy inside, down the ladder to the cell. He takes the bottle of liquid from the glove box, grips the rag, inhales deeply, not to be affected in the close interior of the car. He holds his breath then, and begins.

•   •   •

A sick smell, prickly sweet, fists her shut, until the car door opens like a bottom and drops her out. The sluice of water is on her face and all around her, for she has fallen into a lake and someone pulls her roughly through long drowned grass that clings and tries to hold her. The car door slams. She gasps, swallowing rain. She is in his arms, crushed close.

“Where is Hart? Where is Grethe?”

“Inside, my dear, out of the rain.”

“What is this place?”

“One of my properties. I’m afraid you’re carsick. Would you like to walk or shall I carry you? This mud will ruin your shoes.”

He is nearly shouting over the rain and she is dizzy, the downpour tumbling around her. She struggles to stand and he lets her lean against the car.

“We’ll just wait where it’s dry, until I can rescue our automobile from the ditch.” He keeps his hand upon her.

Annabel sees the garage building through driving rain in the
dark and knows about the basement rooms. It’s like a shoe box cut in squares, deep down inside where he was pounding. Driving nails, making the walls thick and black. Stairs steep as a ladder go below. She sees it from above, with the roof ripped off and the smell steaming out, a butcher shop smell pouring out like a pot boiling over. She sees the trapdoor standing open, and Pierson pushing someone she can’t see down the hole.

She begins to run, dodging his hand, and he chases her, grabs her by her clothes as her shoes fly off in the mud. He hits her so hard that she flies back against the car. There’s a shattering inside her, glass flying apart in splinters too small to count. She sees then, from above, Pierson stuffing her muddy shoes in his pocket; she herself moves easily, high above him, as though a string of yarn, unwinding from a skein, might connect her to that other girl below. She sees that she is wearing her grandmother’s slippers, but they fit perfectly, and are no longer worn but look new; they shine and bear her up. There is no rain here, though she sees the rain, a shifting, downward mass of transparent color. She finds herself in some new element, moving as a swimmer might tread water, and rises farther still. She thinks to call for her mother but knows her mother is not here.

Grethe and Hart, though, perhaps are here.

She sees Pierson, dark, hunched and wet, a furry, swollen spider sidled here and there by the mud that rises in ridges when he tries to pass. Then he’s a ragged, fattened wolf, lurching to one side, for he has dropped her shoes out of a pouch in his belly. His belly drags the ground, heavy, filled with rocks that he has swallowed one by one. He pulls a girl by her bound hands. That is not she, Annabel knows, for she is looking down at him. She can see the bright rain and smell the mud, clinging to itself like the mercury that fell out of Grandmother’s broken thermometer. Rain floods the muddy clearing and dense green woods, separating and running in rivulets, tossing and stirring and dredging up the ground that is black and thick as chocolate.

Then she’s on the road with Pierson before her. She moves
toward him, trying to reach the girl, to slide her from him, but there is only a trace of motion when she moves her hand, a shimmer. He pulls the child by the rope that binds her wrists, feeling around in the mud with his other hand for her shoes, to stuff them back in his pockets. The shoes fall into the mud again, bewitched or slippery, hard to hold. Annabel sees, across the road, Mrs. Pomeroy, in wet mud beside the car, where she fell when Pierson pulled Annabel out, for the doll had been her pillow. Annabel must have her. She moves close in a terrible slow drift but cannot grasp the belted dress or fabric face; her hand disappears in what she sees. She thinks about the inside of the car, somewhere dry and safe, and sees Mrs. Pomeroy wedged deep into the fold of the backseat. His hand will not find her; she is only cotton batting, crushed and squeezed so small. The golden cord about her waist is Grandmother’s golden cord, the cord that binds one soul to another.

Annabel sees the cord then, longer, thicker, shining, tied to a rafter in the garage ceiling, for she is inside the dim garage. Rain hammers the roof. A long trapdoor lies flung open, and rough wooden steps disappear into the dark below. Annabel touches the cord and feels instead her grandmother’s silken hand, reaching for her as though across a great distance. The air around her swells and brightens. Her own grandmother is here, clear and luminous.

Annabel sees in the shadowy garage, as though by candlelight, a mess of clothes and objects on the floor, open boxes and trunks, but her grandmother has only to move her arm and beckon to pull Annabel near and lift them up, high and higher, above the hulk of the building, the muddy road, the rain.

Annabel sees forests and meadows, green swaths and deep valleys, half lit in sunlight, shading darkest near the garage and its hidden rooms. She hears the meadow creatures and their sounds, clicks and whirs of song and flight, rise and flow all around her, so distinctly, though she is high above. The dark is gone.

She is here, with Grandmother near and all about her. But where are the others?

Annabel remembers what Grandmother told her:
When I am
gone
. Is Annabel gone, then, though she is not old, or been of service, or lived the long life Grandmother wished for her?

Her grandmother’s image shimmers as though disturbed. Her gown, flung wider, casts warmth like the glow of a hearth, and Annabel feels her words in realms of quiet color:
I have found you. You are not there, below.

Is this my death? she wants to ask.

My darling, there is no death, not as we suppose, as some still fear.

But where are they, then, where are the others? Annabel tries to see below, but she cannot open her eyes. She feels Lavinia touch her face.

Child, look
. Her grandmother’s open palms are full of small shimmering gems, like crystals, like diamonds. Each one is perfect, clarified. Annabel sees that tears are real in this place. Tears can be petals or pollen, or mist or rain, her grandmother tells her, but the tears of grief are stones of light.

Annabel sees them falling, shining as they drop.

Never mind
. Her grandmother’s hand upon her bears her up, to show her that the others are wherever she wants to see them,
for you are a child, and see easily. Know they may see you, just as clearly
.

Annabel sees Hart with a bandage on his head, running below her through the buzzing pasture with Duty, yelling triumphantly. There is a lake, and summer and winter together, and a pony with a cocoa mane and dappled flanks.