The Beginners (16 page)
Authors: Rebecca Wolff
But then I happened to pick up the phone one morning, early, and Cherry began to sob into it immediately, like I was a slot machine, her tears, quarters. I would begin pouring out consolation when she hit the lucky combination.
“Ginger,” Cherry said, hiccuping through her tears, “where have you been?” She did not wait for me to answer. “Meet me at the mill, okay, I really need to talk to you. Something terrible happened and I can’t tell anyone about it besides you. I have to go now—my mom’s coming up. I’ll be there at two-thirty.”
I PUT DOWN the phone and wondered how soon it would be proper for me to see the Motherwells again.
I should have stayed,
I thought, or felt. I could not—cannot still—tell the difference. I should have stayed.
I should have stayed,
I thought, or felt. I could not—cannot still—tell the difference. I should have stayed.
I thought of Theo’s early, incomplete warning at the kitchen table. He had enjoined us, as a unit, to
watch out,
as though we were indivisible. It had made me want to distinguish myself, I thought; to accelerate a process that had already been put in motion by Cherry’s increasing preoccupations, her leaning away from me. But if “watchfulness” meant keeping one’s self from harm, staying “safe,” then it had been an ineffectual warning indeed.
watch out,
as though we were indivisible. It had made me want to distinguish myself, I thought; to accelerate a process that had already been put in motion by Cherry’s increasing preoccupations, her leaning away from me. But if “watchfulness” meant keeping one’s self from harm, staying “safe,” then it had been an ineffectual warning indeed.
And here I WAS, still only a child, after all, with my childhood perfectly available to me, intact as the hymen of a virgin is purported to be. I thought of Cherry, and a veil of the old love, old loyalty came down gently over my eyes. I closed my eyes and lifted the veil; beneath it I saw not my own face, but hers. I could go and meet her, sit with her, stroke her hair, listen to her version of events. I could relay to her Randy’s tale of devotion. That would help her to forget any intrusions that might have been made upon her person.
But then I thought of a daring shortcut. I went to the cabinet where my parents kept the slender county phone book. Thibodeau was a common surname, and there were even several R. Thibodeaus, but after a few embarrassing attempts I hit on the one I was looking for.
ON THE THIRD DAY, still bruised but mending, I went back to work at the café. Halfway through my shift Raquel opened the door, making its little bell ring. She approached the counter, smiling, and asked me what time I got off. She suggested we go for a walk in the graveyard, the old one in the churchyard on the green. She asked me to meet her there at five-thirty. I had told my parents I would be home in time for supper, six-thirty-ish, but I supposed, opportunistically, that it was possible that I might still make it.
19.
T
hree towns live under that water. It is a morbidly fertile, eventually ghastly image if you give it time to settle in and materialize. Jack’s scale model at life-size: dark frame houses, barns and fences and even the odd stick of furniture, all standing down at the bottom of a remarkably deep, remarkably wide well of man-made origin. Now, this is what I call supernatural: times that float in recollection but are history till we reanimate them with powerful imagination. The past is frightening. But not for any reason I can put my finger on.
hree towns live under that water. It is a morbidly fertile, eventually ghastly image if you give it time to settle in and materialize. Jack’s scale model at life-size: dark frame houses, barns and fences and even the odd stick of furniture, all standing down at the bottom of a remarkably deep, remarkably wide well of man-made origin. Now, this is what I call supernatural: times that float in recollection but are history till we reanimate them with powerful imagination. The past is frightening. But not for any reason I can put my finger on.
Oddly enough, those had been the exact questions occupying the better part of me that day, while Raquel was coming to get me so unexpectedly at the café. “What is ghostly? What is otherworldly?”—meanwhile I was keeping my hands busy clearing plates, and filling coffee cups, and making change for customers to tip with or to plug the antiquated parking meters (nickels only) right outside our door on Main Street. I was thinking about drowned houses, their endless quiet; and graveyards, and about nightmares, musing on their respective potentials for actual fright, for real transports of terror. I was not thinking about Cherry, for I was after all a child, and a child knows how to create a new world for herself in the blink of an eye. The snap of a shutter.
A whole world of fright that the whole world knows about, the kind you get walking alone in the woods—not necessarily at night, though that helps—when you begin to allow your mind to wander toward what you know, surefire, will scare you. A face so ugly and dead, or madly gaping, or slackly grinning in idiocy, or covered in blood and abjectly weeping, that it fits the bill exactly and causes you to short-circuit and panic, and quickly enclose yourself in your own arms and then, as swiftly as possible (but without running because the last thing you want to do is attract attention to yourself, to your small, unprotected head) in your own house, and shut the door jerkily behind you. Only then can you stand to look around at what is not there behind you, but instead is inside you. It is inside you. So in the end it is only our imagination that is haunted. Or: what haunts us is imagination.
SHE WAS NOT AFRAID of the dead, she said; she was only afraid of other people. I wondered if she would talk this way if Cherry were there. I didn’t think so. I had noticed a very different tenor to Raquel’s conversation, or monologue, more accurately, when it was just me there, or me and Theo; anyway, when Cherry wasn’t around. A less worldly, more introspective tone, as though she was talking to herself, really, though she told me once that this was quite literally the last thing she would ever do. “I’ll talk to myself when I’m dead,” she said. But it was as though for Cherry she had developed a patter, one suitable to the ears of a typical teenaged girl. Now she would have no need for that kind of fake talk.
“I’ll tell you what really scares me,” she said. Now I was listening to her with one ear, as with my other I was attentive to the possibility of unnatural rustling in the hedges, the noise of dead people’s bodies risen up and watching. “What scares me is when you come face-to-face with some person or other, in a room somewhere, and you look into the other person’s eyes and instead of the flash of recognition, of acknowledgment, you receive instead a transmission of void, of absence, of abyss. It’s just hell, looking into another person’s eyes; it’s dead in there, you know. I become afraid.”
When you’re looking at a face, I corroborated silently, trying to talk to that face, and the harder you try not to, the more you see the impending mutation of the face, the way the eyes and the mouth threaten to slide, or gape, or hollow, to become unknown. And this is the face of a friend.
“Where
is
Cherry, by the way?” Raquel plucked her out of my thoughts like the fruit my friend was named for. “It’s not like you to be without her.” This was true, but I felt that Raquel was being disingenuous. She knew as well as I did—more likely, far better than I did—that things had changed.
is
Cherry, by the way?” Raquel plucked her out of my thoughts like the fruit my friend was named for. “It’s not like you to be without her.” This was true, but I felt that Raquel was being disingenuous. She knew as well as I did—more likely, far better than I did—that things had changed.
“I AM THE DIRECT descendant of a woman who was hung for a witch.” She said this the way you might say “I am the ghost of Christmas past,” or “I am a fugitive from a chain gang,” as though somebody else had written the words and said them out loud long before you were born, and with much more conviction. I just looked at her and waited. I was frightened. Not so much by her declaration as by the fact that we were still sitting, face-to-face, our crossed legs almost touching at the knees, in the churchyard, by a gravestone, under a tree, in the dark. There was barely any light at all from the moon, or the stars, or the houses around the green. We had stayed and stayed in the graveyard that late afternoon, and on into the evening. I was stiff with chill, with holding myself very still in the dark, and with the residual ache of my impact with the road. Every time I thought that we might leave, that we had reached the natural end of the episode, Raquel would begin to spin another tale, another train of thought, another musing preoccupation. Now I had the sense that all along, all day, she had been waiting till darkness fell to tell me this story. She had been saving it.
“This is called beginning at the beginning,” she said solemnly. Her face was close to mine. I could see its outlines, almost phosphorescent as my eyes adjusted to the nearness.
“I do not entertain notions of guilt or innocence, in the telling of this story. Her name was Sarah Goode. She was the wife of Joseph Goode, and the mother of eleven children, all but seven of whom died in their infancy, and she was my great-grandmother eleven times over. Sarah was an upstanding member of her community, a small farming village up north of the city.”
Everything was so quiet around us that her voice seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, from the night sky and from the headstones, the shapes of which I could just barely make out.
“She was an old woman, living peacefully with her husband on their farm, when certain townsfolk got it into their heads that she was a witch.
“You know, they did actually designate certain members of the community, usually those who had displayed an especial zeal for the task, as witch-finders, or as administrators of the tests they had devised, to identify witches more officially. My favorite of these was the infallible water test: If she floats, she’s a witch. If she drowns, she wasn’t.
“These small villages were rough places to try to make a go of it. The people struggled throughout the brutal winter and worked like demons—if you’ll pardon the expression—in the hot, lush summer, just to put up enough food and wood to make it through another winter. It must have made some hard, hard people, this closed circle of resources. Sarah was hard. When they took this seventy-something-year-old woman to the jail, all she did was stand still with her head bowed, and pray. She said to herself, and then, later, to those who sat behind the bench and sentenced her to death, ‘The will of the Lord be done, and no other.’”
At Raquel’s recitation of this solemn motto, a huge shiver ran up, and then back down, my spine, which I could not help but remember was exposed to an entire churchyard full of graves, which in turn were full of the moldered bones of centuries of my townspeople. I felt as though my back was bare, as though my sweatshirt and T-shirt and skin itself had been peeled away.
“There are many theories—socioeconomic, psychoanalytic, biochemical, even—defining the factors that contributed to this sweep of spiritual executions. The Goode family, which was particularly called out on the witchcraft charge—two of Sarah’s sisters were accused, too, and one hung—was well off, relative to the rest of that scrabbling community. They lived on a hill, literally
above
the rest of the town. Their farm was prosperous. They owned a lot of acreage, and even collected rent from some of the other families, a relationship always sure to incur rancor. The concept of “surplus” was unavailable to most, and this is just what the Goode family possessed. Their pantries were full, they had actual cash with which to purchase goods.
above
the rest of the town. Their farm was prosperous. They owned a lot of acreage, and even collected rent from some of the other families, a relationship always sure to incur rancor. The concept of “surplus” was unavailable to most, and this is just what the Goode family possessed. Their pantries were full, they had actual cash with which to purchase goods.
“But can you imagine such calculation? I like to think that the process was more subliminal, that the accusers (who were, you know, virtually all teenaged girls) were simply overcome with the power of their own imaginations, and with what they had succeeded in creating. Think of it: grown men sitting all day with a group of girls, eating up their every last utterance! They were possessed, I believe. By themselves. By an experience of transcendent meaning. They suddenly meant something.
“So they spun, and spun—and wouldn’t you?—the most fabulous truths they could come up with. ‘Goody Rich came to me in my bed and tweaked my nipple and told me I must sign the book or she would make my father’s cows go dry. Then a yellow bird hung upside-down on the beam and spoke in the voice of John Rector’s wife and said that she had walked beside the Black Man and drunk his spittle.’ Don’t you think, in a sense, that she had experienced just exactly that, the night before, lying in her bed, a fever of possibility upon her? In fact, I don’t see how anyone managed to escape the ecstasy of these girls, ‘the afflicted,’ as they were called. Once it was seen that they would invariably be believed, that their words had a universal, indisputable meaning, for once in their grim, untranslatable lives . . .” Suddenly, unaccountably, in the darkness that was all around us like light, she was at a loss for words.
“I’m not cold. Are you? The ground is damp, though.” Her voice held all the hesitant panic that moments of silence produced in her. “Shall I go on? I said I would begin at the beginning, which implies ending at the end.” She scooted back on her bottom a little, uncrossed her legs and then crossed them in reverse order. “That’s better,” she said. “Gosh. It’s getting late. It doesn’t even get dark till nine o’clock . . .”
I knew my parents would be worrying about me, and I chose not to care, and indicated this with the unwavering tenor of my silence. Raquel went on, and regained her footing as the story got steeper.
“These were very religious people. Pious as all get-out. They would dig their way through four-foot-high snowdrifts to get to the frigid church where they could see their own breath, and sit and listen to the minister stamp his frozen feet and rail against the sins of fornicators and pleasure-seekers. ‘Where?’ they must have wondered, looking around the congregation for any telltale signs. To these folk, morality was not an issue of free will. At least they had that responsibility removed from their overburdened shoulders. If you did wrong, if you sinned, it was because you had the Devil in you, with a capital D. It was because you had actually been visited by the Black Man, and he had gained control of your soul.
“Sarah had a short trial. She was hung two days later. One gets the sense that for her it was all a matter of bad timing. Two months later, or even six weeks, the townspeople had begun to look around at one another like puppies who have pissed the carpet.”
WHILE I HAD NOT always been the most attentive student, I did remember quite clearly my eighth-grade class’s inquiry into this black spot of history. I remembered, for example, that one of several theories ran that the town’s winter stores of grain had grown moldy in the humid coastal winds, and that the afflicted girls were high on psychedelic oats and barley and corn. Thus I could not doubt Raquel—why should I doubt her?—when she went on to tell of a concurrent history: how the Goode family, or at least what remained of it, had left their village and come inland to make a new life in this very region, in the prosperous Shift River valley.
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