Fallen Land (14 page)

In the darkness, time thins and stretches as Paul crouches on the steep back stairs, watching the hallway that connects the four bedrooms his family once occupied. A green-blue glow from the street fills the landing, defining the outline of the boy, who is suddenly standing above Paul. At the top of the stairs the child’s small bare toes, pale and luminous in the night, curl over the nosing to touch the riser. The boy looks in Paul’s direction but seems not to see him. He can hear the child’s breath alongside his own, and the acceleration of his heart in his ears.

The boy looks right through him and then walks down the stairs, sour air streaming from a small open mouth. A cold smooth hand brushes against Paul’s own as he leans against the wall to move out of the way and a shudder rises from his tailbone, breaking loose along his spine as the hairs rise along his neck and arms. The staircase is full of the boy’s breath, acrid and decaying. Paul turns to watch the boy’s descent, the small hands reaching out to either side of the staircase, one of them gripping the banister when, all of a sudden, he disappears into darkness.

As the child approaches the bottom of the stairs he reappears, caught by the light from the kitchen windows, moonlight gazing in. When he turns the corner Paul follows him, tiptoeing down the steps to the kitchen. The child is either hidden in shadow or has already left the room. Pulling his flashlight from the pocket of his jeans, Paul presses it on, aiming the beam into the corners of the kitchen, but the room is empty.

Sounds come from the front of the house: an unlocking rasp and then the seal on the glass storm door sucking open, the hiss as it closes again. He kills the flashlight and puts it back in his pocket, running into the dining room and out to the hall. Through the storm door he can see the boy walking down the lawn to the road. Without pausing to think, Paul pushes open the door, flies across the grass, and catches the child up in his arms just as the boy reaches the street. As Paul cradles him the boy’s expression remains fixed, unresponsive, blind, although the eyes are open, looking past Paul, the whites caught in the light of the moon, the irises and pupils uniformly black. Gazing into those vacant eyes, transfixed by their whiteness, Paul nearly drops the boy.

Sleepwalkers should never be woken. Paul’s mother told him that as Carson began to walk. He holds the child tenderly, one arm supporting the boy’s back, one his legs, and carries him back into the house. That blank face, those staring, empty eyes. The body weighs almost nothing.

Paul puts the boy down in the hall and watches as he begins to climb the main stairs, disappearing again into darkness. At the second floor landing the child turns, walks down the hall, and begins climbing to the third floor, disappearing once more. He follows the child up endless flights, the boy receding always into gloom, the house expanding past the limits Paul knows, the two flights of stairs, public and private, crisscrossing each other, ever higher, beyond the three stories he built, the boy climbing and climbing without pause or fatigue, a ghastly unending ascent straight out of the house and into the remoteness of space, the world falling away around them.

He finds the boy at the far end of the attic playroom, forehead pressed against the balcony doors and looking out at the front lawn, across the empty street to the gaping foundations of two unfinished houses, cavities, twin eye sockets scraped clean with a spoon. Moonlight falls around the boy until a bank of fast-moving clouds turns the room black. The boy turns and walks past him, creeping down the stairs one step at a time.

At the boy’s bedroom Paul watches the child slip back under the covers and turn on his side to face the door. It is too dark to see whether his eyes are open or closed. The face, the triangular shape of chin and cheeks, the hemisphere of skull, the way the parts have put themselves together, remind Paul of his son’s face. For a moment Paul wonders if, by some miracle, this boy is Carson. The child sighs and turns over to face the wall. His whole body twitches, arms seizing and shaking as he cries out, a wail that shakes the windows. Eyes open, the boy sits up in bed looking straight at Paul, and screams.

Paul throws himself out of the room and down the back stairs, sliding through the kitchen, into the basement, past the workshop, through the hole at the back of the pantry. The hatch sticks in the sudden shift of air pressure, the storms moving across the state, swollen with humidity,
pull it shut, shut, throw the lock,
then the containment door, the spinning combination, barricading himself behind it and shut tight, tight, safe and enclosed. With his back against the metal door he pants, slumping on the floor of the bunker, the ceiling’s puzzle of fluorescent tubes ablaze.

“
W
HAT’S WRONG?”
Julia
TURNS OVER
to look at Nathaniel as he climbs back into bed. He knows she’s a heavy sleeper but the scream should have woken her.

“Copley. Just a bad dream. Nothing to worry about.”

“Does he need me?”

Get out of bed, go see for yourself if our kid needs you. By instinct, as a child, Nathaniel turned to his mother for comfort, although in his own case there was no comfort from any quarter except his brother. His mother always assured him his father had done nothing serious:
Your father doesn’t know his own strength, Nathaniel. No, it’s not broken. Stop crying. I can’t stand it when you put me between the two of you. You’ll have to work it out yourselves. Don’t involve me. Don’t be so soft. You’re going to ruin my breakfast, the food already tastes like cinders.
On visits to the hospital emergency room, his mother always concocted a story, and because of the way she spoke and the clothes she wore, her reputation in the community as a respected child psychologist and her capacity to make even the most esteemed professional feel inferior, the doctors and nurses never questioned her accounts of Nathaniel falling from trees or tripping over paving stones in the rose garden or catching a baseball with his upper lip at Little League. Nathaniel never played baseball.
He’s such a clumsy boy,
she would say,
nothing at all like his father or me. Who knows where he came from?
And then she would laugh, a screaming hoot that still caroms round in his ears.

“He thought he saw a giant. He’s fine.”

“A giant? Where?” She’s half-asleep again, her voice drawn and drowsy.

“He said a giant chased him out of the house and he tried to escape but he couldn’t. I told him there aren’t any giants, at least not in the house. He was covered in sweat.”

“Does he have a fever?”

“No. It’s a muggy night. I took the duvet off his bed and turned down the thermostat. I sat with him until he went back to sleep.”

Nathaniel looks out the window at the neighboring house, dark except for a light over the front porch that casts a yellow circle on the boards and steps. The neighbors have a three-story tower with a turret at one corner of the house, a mansard roof over the main structure, and a widow’s walk at the top. He can imagine how atmospheric the neighborhood will feel at Halloween: already haunted, no need for decoration.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
THE RAIN
has returned, so furious it sounds like hail pummeling the roof and windows. Nathaniel thinks he hears dripping but assumes it must be outside, a gutter overflowing and spilling onto the terrace that opens off their bedroom, and therefore no reason to worry. The survey found no major structural problems.

“Do you hear a drip?” he asks Julia.

“No. Don’t get so worked up, Nathaniel. It’s pouring.”

“Don’t you hear it?”

“Honestly, Nathaniel, I don’t hear anything but the rain.”

“You’re doing it again, Julia. Just acknowledge that you hear a drip.”

“I don’t hear a drip. Your hearing is more acute than mine.”

When Nathaniel goes to wake Copley, he finds clumps of dirt on the floor in the hall and in his son’s bedroom. It must be left over from those movers, but there is more dirt downstairs in the front hall, smears of mud in the shape of shoe prints and footprints and arcs of dirt going up and down both flights of stairs. He doesn’t remember there being any dirt when they went to bed, but it was a long day, the movers trekked in and out of the house for hours, it was raining off and on, and it is entirely possible a mess was made that neither he nor Julia noticed. Nonetheless, thinking of the menacing men, the way they came and went, the access they had to every corner of the house throughout the day, he decides to speak with the technicians at work about installing a home security system. Danger is everywhere, especially in the suburbs.

S
ince Donald died I have taken to sleeping on the floor. I wake with the sun in my face and turn over on the bedroll the way I used to as a girl when relatives came for reunions and holidays and homecomings. Shoulder’s out of joint, hip sore, hand asleep: shake sensation back into the digits and crack the bones to limber. All my suppleness is just about gone. As a child I camped on boards to let the adults have my bed. There were aunts and uncles on the couches, cousins in the barn, the hayloft. I never minded being put out of my room for family because mama and daddy raised me to believe instinctively in graciousness like that, giving elders respect. Now an elder myself, I wonder if it wasn’t a raw deal. No one left to respect me, I’m afforded respect by no one, young or old.
Dissed
is what the kids have been saying for dozens of years: everyone
dissing
me. Imagine how folks would react if I did what so many others did, picked up a gun and demanded respect.

These are ruminations from a partial night, the beast of fractured sleep, crawled out from the floorboards, long-clawed and slavering, green-toothed. Push it back in, fill the chink with wood dough, varnish it over, wait for the next generation to find it again.

I push this body upright and swing my back erect against the papered wall, fingers running up the posy print to feel ferns and rosebuds through layers of dust that stick to the pattern near the floor. My hands come back populated with orphan particles of earth and skin, remnants of hair. I rub them together until the residue disappears, settling in other parts of the bedroom, once my mother’s, my grandmother’s, great-grandmother’s. It’s the room where Donald and I slept, loved, eased Rebekah through her first twelve months, standing at the window with that disrespectful baby until she fell back into sleep, looking out at the moon on the corn, milklight shading the green-gold acres into creatures strange and sentient-seeming: cob-people, yellow kernel bodies, silken hair, wrapped up in their go-to-meeting of crisp viridian linen.

I meet them on the march in my dreams, a platoon of protectors filling this room where Donald died, his head in my hands, crouched on these boards, rainbow rug I made as a girl one winter bunched at my feet. I felt his final current pulsing down to dry riverbed silence, put my lips to his, brushed against the soft foam of beard, tasted him for the last time. The fire was out by the time I got to him and he did not say good-bye, not even with his eyes: empty stare, shock and stark terror, life leaving before he was prepared to go. It was not an easeful death and I do not know if I believe in such things, in the possibility that passing from one world to another can ever be done with ease.

Last night I walked out under the moon, through damp grass and down to the street, put my bare soles on cracking asphalt and went up the road, turned right onto Krovik’s old property, took myself up the driveway and through the unlocked gate into the backyard. The moon guided me along contours of lawn to the place I have been unable to visit since Krovik built his fence, the spongy earth where no grass has grown since 1919. A hole had opened up in the surface, big as two manhole covers, and through the hole I could make out the top branches of that old cottonwood tree, secreted in the earth. I sat down on the damp ground and swung my feet through the hole, letting them dangle in darkness and find their footing on a solid branch, put my weight on it by degrees, listened for cracking, felt for the giving way, but found I could stand quite easily, and as I stood there, waist-deep in the earth, the branch holding me sighed and curved, lowering me down into its arms until I could grasp other branches and debris from the benefactor’s burned-up house. I descended through limbs, all of them arcing upward along the sides of the hole, many of the larger ones broken. I passed through a section of chimney and walked down a flight of old stairs, finding my way by touch, hearing unfamiliar sounds, smelling mice and moles. I felt earth rain down upon me, sensed movement in the dark. My hands found the thick braid of rope, manila or hemp. Climbing down alongside the rigid braid I came to a branch where I could sit, turned on the flashlight, and looked at the skeletons in their rotting clothes, a good black suit, a dress that might once have been blue and must have belonged to Grandma Lottie. I pondered the remains of those men, hanging there in stillness, heads inclining toward each other, ear to ear, chin to shoulder.

Passing the men, I dropped down to the next branch and shone my light deeper. Water was seeping in, bubbling, frothing round the base of the tree. I began to climb back to the surface.

When I woke in the house this morning with the flashlight on, its beam fading at my side, my clothes speckled with grass clippings, I had to wonder.

Listening now to the rain, windows a-rattle in their frames, the kitchen door shaking on its hinges, I imagine the tread of feet I know, the sound of shifting weight upon the floor, an advance, a pause, a turn along the hall. Approach, approach, come forth.

Lightning flashes but there’s a long delay before the crack: the strike is more than a mile away, a storm from the northwest flown over the Rockies and building as it moves across the plains. I can feel the coming torrent, suspect a deluge, apocalyptic rain driving down upon us. It might be enough to make me a believer again, if I succumb to the fear. I will not succumb. I pray now to myself and myself alone. What would
I
do? What wouldn’t I, given the chance. If the waters rise, meet them with fire.

I push my body all the way up now, leaning against the weight of wall, letting this house help me as it always has. I speak to my own ear, murmuring through teeth clenched with effort and exertion, surprised by the strength of this old muscle-and-bone machine.

A strange eastern wind was blowing on the day the first condemnation notice came from the city, a declaration of eminent domain, as if the council were the lord of the land. I learned that is, in fact, the case. They can do what they like,
in the public interest
, for the “good” of the many over the good of the few. They mean to tear down this house to build a turning lane into Dolores Woods as a
traffic safety measure
and widen Krovik’s Abigail Avenue into a boulevard for
community improvement and essential correction of structural flaws in the existing roadway
. Though there are only twenty-one new families on the land that was once Poplar Farm, unnamed experts have determined that the flow of traffic past the neighborhood—I laugh at their description of that tinker’s swarm of houses—is
increasing substantially
,

owing not solely to the construction of said subdivision, Dolores Woods, but also to the general western expansion of the city. This has meant that, especially at the time of evening rush hour, westbound vehicles slowing down to enter Dolores Woods cause a hazardous backup to the flow of traffic on what remains a two-lane road. While the city’s long-term development plan envisions the widening of this stretch of Poplar Road to four lanes, the immediate traffic congestion and safety needs mandate the construction of a turning lane, which, along with the widened reconfiguration of Abigail Avenue, will have to be sited through your property, requiring the demolition of the existing one-story single-family home, two-story barn, silo, outhouse, as well as assorted other sheds, and subsidiary agricultural structures.

As I stood there, reading and rereading the letter, my hands shook, and then my whole body, so I had to sit down, chase my breath, tame the climb-a-hill pulse that ruptured my vision. Someone from the city had surveyed my property, made a census of the buildings without my permission, without me even being aware an intruder was present. I put the letter on the ottoman and walked back into the kitchen, hands still trembling as I turned the faucet, letting water run over my fingers, splashing it in my face. I felt blood pool in my feet, watched the east wind blowing across the garden, blasting dirt and grit and leaves against the kitchen windows. Black Eurus, a blustering roar and
lateral noise
: augury of hot nights and torrential rains, the trickster wind, unpredictable, bringing locusts, dividing waters, breaking ships, drying up springs and fountains, carrying forth desolation and lies. An east wind would wilt my crops at a touch.
Behold every tree, how it appears to wither, and every leaf to fall off
.

The letter laid out the offer on the house and my remaining land, the “fair market value” of $155,099.99. I wondered what those ninety-nine cents amounted to: a lone shingle, a cubic foot of earth, a branch from one of my trees? The trees. Christ, I knew they’d be taking down more trees. I did not want their money. I did not need their dollars. I resolved I would fight the city with all I had, and now I have lost.

I stomped up Krovik’s driveway that day, before he himself had lost everything, forced by other powers to leave his own house. After I pulled the fake antique doorbell, I could hear his approaching steps of thunder, and then the door flew open.

“I guess this is your doing,” I said, holding up the letter so he could read it.

A wet red furrow sliced across his face. He did not even try to keep from smiling.

“I don’t know nothin’ about it, Mrs. Washington. You’ll have to take it up with the city,” he said, and slammed the door. I could hear him hoot and holler as he stomped back into the bowels of his ugly white house.

It has been more than two years since the first condemnation notice and I have spent all that time fighting the city, delaying my loss, winning reprieves that were only ever temporary. I was supposed to be out of the house two months ago, when they came to put the bolt on the front door, but here I remain, and now, at the end of the battle, I have spent all I had left from the sale of the land to Krovik in the first place. By the time I ran out of money to fight, enriching a fool lawyer, the city lowered their offer to $75,000.25, owing to “the decline in the property market, meaning that a house of comparable size and age and condition could be acquired for the price being offered under the constitutional conditions of eminent domain.”

I consulted other, cheaper lawyers but all said there was nothing more to be done: accept defeat, leave the house by the first of July or face jail. Something happened to me then, a diminution but also a strengthening, a new resolve: I would not leave. I would stay until they came to get me, the last free woman to occupy these rooms. I do not know if it is the house, the land, or the combination of the two, but a spell of place hangs over me, keeping me here despite my better sense.

E
ARLY MORNING
BUT ALREADY A
rumbling comes from the road, a truck turning fast, spray from the tires slashing curbs and trees. Fearing it might be the city come to tear the place down, I step from the bedroom, snipping along the hall to the front of the house. In the living room I unlatch a window, heave it open, push my head into the rain, turn to see the truck parking in front of Krovik’s place. Out tumbles a fat man and a thin, and then the new owners, I suppose they must be, a dark-headed threesome, pale as a host of reanimated dead, arrive in their car. Rain runs down my neck, curling round my clavicle.

For once I’m glad to be alone, unobserved, unwatchable, a specter in a house filled with nothing but specters, all those dust-tingling dead. In the night I hear them moving moth-footed over floors and furniture, whispering among themselves. I know the histories of wars and battles. I know I’ve been vanquished, fought well but was outmatched, outgunned, overrun: raped and pillaged. Not my body, no, but that Krovik was nothing if not a rapist—maybe not of the flesh, but most certainly of the land.
We speak artillery when there are no other arms upon us.

The city’s “fair market price” is not much compared to what the land was worth, but it will keep me secure enough, along with the Social Security and my pension. I have sold everything I can: the car, all of the farm equipment Donald collected and cherished, the machines that kept him working and slowly drove him mad, machines bought on credit that drove us into debt, and drove me, in the end, to sell what so long sustained us. I will not live as well as I might have, but I will find a little place and, except perhaps a phone and a radio, survive without technology.

Yesterday afternoon, returning from my daily petition to the city planning offices, I stood waiting for my bus in the coffee-hour heat. The city does not know I remain here. They think I have left, that I campaign for the pardon of my house from a place of safety. Coming from downtown there is no direct route and I had to change buses halfway, walk three blocks south and get the other bus on the line that terminates just east of what is now Dolores Woods: the dolorous forest of infinite sorrow. A thirty-minute trip in the car takes more than two hours by public transportation and foot power, with the added pleasure of fat white men empowered to protect revenue, liveried in letters that conjure historical dread. Walking that quarter-mile from the bus stop to the house, trudging along the road where the traffic thins out to a stream of brittle gray cream, I saw this house waiting for me as if it knew I was coming, the early moon striking the windows and making it look as though Donald had come back, was waiting up, had a fire going, warming the house we occupied in speech and in silence. Not
occupied
. Lived. We lived here together in the fullness of the word, and the house, knowing our life, lived as well.