Little Sister Death (10 page)

No, Binder said, grinning. Just some kind of reader.

Writers come down here off and on. Folks puts em on somethin fierce, tells em the awfulest old bunch of bullshit you ever heard.

Cagle began to whittle from a length of red cedar, the soft, curling shavings mounding delicately in the lap of his overalls. Binder could smell the aromatic cedar. He thought inanely of the time the old man seemed to possess so much of, the almost ceremonial preparation of the knife just to whittle something ultimately unrecognizable from softened wood.

I spect a lot of that Beale haunt stuff was made up just to pass the time, don’t you? Folks didn’t have no television sets to hunker in front of back then. They had to addle their brains some other way.

You may be right, Binder said.

I may not be plumb right. It was a man claimed to be a writer come in here in the forties, not many years after Owen Swaw killed hisself. He was from up north somers. He prowled around out there a long time one summer huntin ghosts, then he left or I reckon he did. I never did know if he got his book wrote or not.

Did you ever meet him?

Shor I met him, the old man said, his tone insinuating that Binder had subtly insulted him. He looked me up special cause everbody figured I knowed Owen as well as anybody did. Me and Owen was cuttin timber right before he went crazy as shit and took a choppin ax to his old lady. He was a nice feller, this here writer was. Had a way of listenin like he was just soakin you up. Soft-spoken, talked with some kind of accent, said he was from Hungry or somers.

What was his name?

I was just tryin to think.

Sunderson, somethin like that.

Sunderson doesn’t sound Hungarian.

Somewheres over there across the waters. It don’t matter. All I’m sayin is you find a feller wears them hornrimmed glasses and got a college degree in his hippocket and you listen to his talking about that ghost stuff real serious and you put a little more weight to it. He was a doctor of somethin, some kind of doctor.

Corrie came out of the beauty shop, Stephie behind her. They got into the pickup and it slowly backed onto the street, eased down and reparked before the A&P.

You got a nice little family there.

Thank you. How come Swaw killed his family?

Nobody every knowed. I reckon he just went crazy all of a sudden. Killed his wife in the toolshed and went in the house and commenced on his daughters. Got three out of four of them and then he shot himself. Or so they say.

You don’t think that was the way of it?

Cagle was silent a moment. I don’t know, he finally said. Somethin was botherin Owen. I drunk a beer or two with him the day he shot hisself.

What happened to the last girl?

She was put up for adoption. I imagine a thing like that happen to you when you was a kid would mess you up some.

I imagine so.

She’s hollerin at you.

Binder looked up. Corrie had come out on the sidewalk, was in fact not hollering but beckoning with an arm. I got to go tote groceries, he said. I’ll see you again.

You want to know what I think?

Sure I do.

That place is charmed.

It’s what?

Charmed. All of it, the whole fifteen thousand acres. All of it old man Beale ever had title to.

Charmed by who? Or what?

I don’t know. Do I look two hundred years old?

Well, did you ever hear or see anything out there? Funny lights, voices?

No, I never.

The old man arose and closed the knife, brushed off the front of his overalls. The soft nighweightless shavings fell plumb in the windless air, settled like shredded gossamer about his shoes. Listen, he said, somebody starts beatin on your door in the middle of the night you don’t have to get up and open the door, do ye? Your telephone rings, you can let her ring can’t ye? What I’m tellin you is you let stuff like that in. Me, let’s just say I heard somebody knockin. I left the door shut, though.

He saw with a kind of momentary and icecold clarity that the place had attracted them, had drawn them as a magnet draws iron filings, dangling its erotic past before already faulted vessels, biding its time during the tenancy of those it could not use, waiting.

You let such as that in.

The Old Beale Homeplace, 1933

Owen Swaw had a fight with his landlord over a broken double-shovel plow and found himself abruptly thrown off the place in midsummer, the crop he had planned to share in contention and hard feelings all around. Swaw had a wife and four daughters that ranged from grown to nearly grown.

Lawed off a place we lived on four year, the woman said, bitterly. Her name was Lorene. Lawed off and not even by a sheriff. Lawed off by a man a sheriff sent. If I’da had sons stead of daughters I’da never been throwed off to begin with. Them as can done gets em, she said. Them as don’t makes do as best they can.

Swaw was used to hard times. He had known no other. He was used to field peas and cornbread when he had them and he was used to not having it too. He was used to shotgun shacks with cracks you could have thrown a good-sized housecat through and floors through whose cracks a man could watch his chickens scratching for worms, if he was lucky enough to possess any chickens. In 1933 a man on Swaw’s status level was a good deal more likely to possess a housecat than he was a chicken, and Swaw was no exception.

He was used to bonechilling cold in the wintertime with everyone crowded around a tin woodstove trying their best to keep it warm and kicking through snow to cut wood that was frozen to the heart. A sharecropper didn’t have time to cut his wood in the summertime. In July and August he was used to heat that wouldn’t abate even at night, when you’re exhausted but awake, feeling the droplets of sweat sliding across your naked ribs, wanting to cry out Great God is the place afire, listening through the thin board walls to the woods just outside your door, the whippoorwills and crickets and owls, and knowing that day was coming and another day’s work but the harder you tried to sleep the more elusive it became.

He wasn’t one like the colored man in the story. A white man and a colored man went hunting together and killed a turkey and a buzzard. At the end of the day they divided up the game. Well, the white man said, it’s all the same to me. You take the buzzard and I’ll take the turkey or you take the turkey and I’ll take the buzzard. The colored man considered this for a time. Well, he said. It shore sounds fair but seems like I wind up with the buzzard most of the time.

Swaw was used to getting the buzzard, and he was pretty sure he had it now. He was getting more of it every day, piece by scrawny piece, from his wife and four squabbling daughters.

Then luck stepped in, a commodity with which Swaw had barely a passing acquaintance. Swaw had a friend who had one of the few steady jobs in Limestone County. He was helping log the timber of the Beale place. This friend’s name was Charlie Cagle and he told Swaw he could get him a few days’ work cutting timber. Cagle even let them store their household plunder, such as it was, in his barn and sleep on mattresses in an empty back room of his house.

They were logging off the original homeplace and Swaw had never seen such timber. The land had never been cut over, and these were enormous beech trees of such girth you barely had room to pull a crosscut saw back and forth, trees you’d spend half a morning felling that sounded like thunder when they finally came down.

In the thirties you worked long hours, and even in the summer the sun would be sinking when they came out with the mules past the old Beale houseplace, out of the woods and across a sloping fallow field. There was a knoll above the houseplace, and this was where the old Beale graveyard was. Once they had stopped and walked among the old graves, oblong declivities in the earth, each marked by leaning old-timey stones, marble lambs at repose and stark spires and graven angels. The hill dropped off then and there were the twin chimneys rising out of the riot of sassafras and sumac bushes like chimneys flanking an invisible house, a house no longer here. The great pear trees loaded, Swaw noticed, with green pears bigger than his feet. Swaw guessed you could have kicked your way through the brush and followed the line of the foundation rocks, but he had no desire to do so. He hadn’t lost a damn thing there and he’d bet there were copperheads in there big as a man’s legs.

The place gave him the all-overs anyway, but he would have been hard put to explain why. There was just a curious quality about the place. He had heard the wild tales from the time he was a kid but he didn’t put any stock in them, and besides, that wasn’t what he dreaded anyway. For one thing, it just never seemed to be light enough to suit him there, or perhaps that was because it was usually dusk when he passed it. For another, the place reminded him somehow of a church or some other sacred spot. A place where something solemn and momentous had happened a long time ago, steeped in a kind of patient waiting for it to happen again.

But he couldn’t put it into words exactly. All he knew was he didn’t like going past it and if there had been another road out he would have taken it, let Charlie Cagle laugh at him all he damn pleased. So going out he wouldn’t look too close. He would walk along, weary, feeling the chambray workshirt stiffening with drying salt against his back, concentrate on the sounds the mules’ hooves made over the stony field and their trace chains chiming halfmusically in the twilight, and he would be glad Charlie was walking along the wagon road with him.

Then one day in late July Charlie broke his arm and took the mules and went in early. A hackberry they were sawing split twelve or fifteen feet in the air. It kicked back, and it was a wonder they both weren’t killed. They had abandoned the saw and ran like hell, Charlie’s arm flopping like a broken chicken’s wing as he ran, stopping only when they heard the hackberry tumbling off down a hillside. Charlie left to get his arm set and left Swaw to trim up and mark the timber they already had down.

Of course, Swaw quit as soon as Cagle was out of sight and whittled himself a sharp stick and went to digging ginseng. Swaw would work as hard as you wanted him to as long as you watched him, but if you ever looked away he’d be long gone, almost as if the photoelectric weight of your eyes triggered some delicate sensory mechanism in his brain that kept the ax or saw moving.

Ginseng grew in abundance around these beech trees and this was found money. Clear money above his dollar a day he was going to get anyway and digging was a sight easier than swinging a chopping ax. He liked digging it anyway. He fairly flew at it, like a miser turned loose in a roomful of money and allowed to keep all he could pick up. Before long his overall pockets were bulging.

At the cry of a whippoorwill he leapt up, startled. All at once he looked up, as if he had been awakened from sleep or in a trance. Oh shit, he said. He swallowed hard. All there was of the sun was a thin rind of gold drowning in mottled red, and a thick blue darkness was seeping out of the hollows like rising waters. A fine thread of fear ran through him. He trudged out of the woods, into the field, his gait gradually increasing until his legs were fairly scissoring across the field.

He told himself he wasn’t going to look when he passed the graveyard. If you don’t look, it won’t be so, he told himself. He looked anyway and there was a girl sitting on Jacob Beale’s tombstone, plaiting her long blond hair. She was watching Swaw with bold eyes out of a pretty, sullen face, and when she arose the pale fall of her hair swung behind her. She beckoned him.

He ran, listening to the sob of his breathing, thinking desperately that that must have been old Clyde Simpson’s daughter and knowing full well all the time that Simpson’s daughter was dumpy and heavyset and had a flat, stupid-looking face.

Cagle could work the mules snaking timber one-armed, so he was back to work in a few days. Swaw didn’t see the girl for over a week. He kept his mouth shut, too. Then one Monday at dusk she came walking out from beneath the pear tree, humming to herself. Swaw could hear her, could hear the melody that had a haunting childhood familiarity about it, and he was about to say, There by God, now what do you say to this, when he saw Charlie’s bland, preoccupied face, jaws patiently worrying their quid of tobacco. His eyes widened and he turned to the stolid mules, walking stumblefooted down the slope, stopping momentarily to crop grass, coming on when the slack pulled out of the lines, and Swaw thought, They don’t see it. Nary one of them does. This is supposed to be just for me. A moment of blinding insight crept over him.

The girl was visible from the knees up, her calves and feet lost in the weeds, and even as he watched she changed from a pale sepia transparency to flesh and blood, a live woman of seventeen or eighteen standing there petulant and curiously erotic, so that he felt a rush of desire, a quickening of the blood in his groin that sickened him. She tossed her hair back. She seemed to be waiting for something. Her face was bright and conspiratorial, as if she and Swaw shared some secret the world didn’t even suspect. She raised a hand and pointed at him. Her mouth opened. He could see the clean line of her teeth. Her lips moved. You, the lips mouthed.

Cagle asked, Hey, what the hell’s the matter with you?

She vanished.

What?

What the hell’s the matter with you?

I thought for a minute I seen something.

You look like you know damn well you did.

Did you not see anything back there?

All I see is night comin and you wastin time.

They commenced walking. Swaw didn’t say anything. He began to roll a cigarette. His fingers started to shake, the little brown flakes of tobacco sifting about his moving feet, the plain rice paper shredding so that he wadded it in his fingers and dropped it covertly beside the pack.

Owen, I ain’t sayin you seen somethin and I ain’t sayin you didn’t, but I know what I’d do if I did. I’d put it out of my mind damn quick. I’d tell myself somethin likely it could have been and I’d hold on to that as hard as I could.

Swaw didn’t put it out of his mind. His mind was playing with her image like a cat worrying a mouse. She went just like that, like blowin out a coal-oil lamp. He wondered where she went to. He thought she went somewhere he remembered with a vague familiarity, someplace he had been years ago.