Little Sister Death (15 page)

Well, if you work at it, you’ve got to.take an interest.

She did not reply and he turned to study her face in repose, pillowed on a towel, her eyes closed, the sun throwing highlights of amber in her dark tousled hair. Delicate blue tracery of veins in her eyelids.

It’s going to storm, he said suddenly. There was no response. Perhaps she slept. He turned to look at Stephie. She had waded out of the shallows, was gathering wildflowers on the far bank. Don’t go in the woods, he told her.

Can I go just far enough to get those blue ones? she asked.

Go where it’s clean, not where there’s any undergrowth.

Okay.

Binder was watching Corrie’s quiet face. This was the spot where the slaves used to have their baptizings, he said.

Used to what? she asked without opening her eyes.

Baptizings. The slaves had their meeting here, revivals I guess, and the preacher used to dunk them under to reclaim their souls. The Beale Haunt, or whatever she was, used to take quite an interest in the proceedings. She professed a great interest in religion. Washed in the blood, I guess. She used to sing and quote scripture to beat the band. She knew who was a sinner and who wasn’t, and she used to show up every Sunday there was a meeting here and sort of supervise things. She used to yell out, Hold that nigger under a while longer, Preacher, he needs a double dose. Stuff like that.

You’re making that up hand over fist, she said drowsily. Every last word of it, and it’s not funny.

The hell I’m making it up. It’s in the book. If you had read it when I was trying to get you to, you’d know I was telling you straight.

It was just boring to me. Besides, it doesn’t matter. If you didn’t make it up, somebody else did.

I guess so.

Banked clouds rose in the southwest, momentarily obscured the sun. Winds behind or inside them drove them, the smooth surface roiling on itself like the aftermath of an explosion, the blossoming of some grotesque flower. The world darkened and the woods grew greenblack. The air turned denser. He could see Stephie’s bright head stooped to a flower in the glade. He kissed the hollow of Corrie’s throat, freed her breasts from the bathing suit, the flesh around the nipple puckering with the cold touch of his hand. Here, here, she said sleepily. What are you doing? What kind of girl do you think I am?

He lay atop her body, feeling its heat, an urgency growing in him, with his hand between her legs, thinking: What is this? A warming of the cold war, a crack in the icemaiden’s veneer. Past her upturned face he could see the far woods imbued with sudden motion, disappearing in a shifting curtain of rain, the weeds jerking under its weight as if swung toward them, the glass surface of the creek instantly cleft with myriad fractures, beginning to churn with the force of the rain, no longer blue but gray and alive with motion, some curious element forming in him.

There was only the green forest, the blue water, the bowl of blue sky to shelter them. No other in all the world. He made love to her gently, she with her eyes still closed, arms locked about his hips.

Hey, where are you going? she asked him. You weren’t thinking of leaving, were you? This is much nicer than an umbrella.

Her hair was soaked, water swimming in his eyes. Jesus, what a cold rain, he said. He leapt up, hopping onelegged into his pants, pitched her the towel, began to gather the soap and hairbrushes, gave up on getting it all. The hell with it, he said, grabbing her arm, turning her toward the opening in the woods. He called to Stephie, who came with a fist full of flowers. Thunder boomed above them. Lightning lit the world in a harsh white bloom of light, vanished, drove them soaked and windhurried up the wagon road, the trees writhing above them like some mythic wood bewitched to momentary life, the running figures dollsized and furiously animate in the green wood, the air stiff and choked with leaves.

Something in him loved a storm. Once they were in dry clothes they sat beneath the tin roof of the porch and watched it pass over them and downstream, lightning arcing earthward from the band of clouds like tracerfire from some armada of smooth, metallic, otherworldly craft, thunder rumbling hollowly in the bottomland, the echo rolling back from the hills. Then the storm passed and the clouds lay broken behind it. The sun came out but already it lay on the horizon. It sank and a cool blue whippoorwill dusk lay on the land, broken only by the darkened trajectories of bullbats and a chorus of frogs from the creek.

He had set up a makeshift desk in the hall where there was a breeze from the screened-in backporch. After supper he typed for a while, vaguely aware of sounds of domesticities from the kitchen, conscious at once of the material he was working on and of her unseen presence beyond the kitchen wall. He could hear the whirring of the electric ice cream freezer. He was obscurely happy, drawing comfort from sourceless and insignificant things he always took for granted: the work he was doing, the soft worn feel of the faded jeans he was wearing, the sounds of the night beyond the walls, the feeling of the peace they engendered, the chaos of the world walled out.

They ate the ice cream on the stone doorsteps, touched by a sense of closeness without having to voice it. It had been a long day, an unhurried purposeless day Binder had stolen from the book, like a day he had managed to hoard from his childhood, squander when the mood suited him.

Later he would remember it as the last outpost of normalcy, a waystation to darker provinces.

Sometime in the night the wind arose again, but the house did not notice. Couched against the base of the hill and with its stone foundation laid on solid limestone, it had felt such storms for over a hundred years, had stood so while an incalculable number of winds rose and ebbed. It slept on. After a while it began to dream.

Binder halfawoke. A wind was banging a shutter somewhere, he could hear it slamming against the weather boarding. It was thundering off in the distance, and he could hear rain.

The bedroom door opened, closed softly, and he guessed the storm had awakened Corrie or that she had gone to the bathroom; he heard her bare feet cross the room, but instead of turning toward the side of the bed and climbing back in, she sat on the foot. He felt the mattress sink slightly beneath her weight, the faint protesting creak of the springs. She clasped the calf of his leg gently and he opened his eyes, lay for a moment in darkness until lightning abruptly lit the room and he saw that he was facing the tousled back of Corrie’s head not four inches from his own.

Goddamn, he cried. He fairly leapt from the bed, ran across the room with his bare feet slapping the floor, whirling back when banked lightning in staccato progression showed the bed bare save the pale length of Corrie’s naked body, the rumpled bedclothes.

He ran to Stephie’s room, turned on the light. She was asleep with the covers thrown off, pajama-clad knees against her chest. He turned back the way he had come, went into the hall. He stood naked for a moment beneath the chandelier, confused and disoriented, looking wildly about the foyer, the staircases climbing incrementally into shadows.

A fierce bloom of light lit all the windows simultaneously with photoelectric brilliance, coincident to the boom of an explosion and Binder was sunk into oblivion. The silence there in the dark was enormous. It grew and expanded. He seemed deprived of all his senses save touch, sank to the floor. He could feel against his naked body the cold, smooth surface of floorcovering wet with rain driven through the open screen. The walls of the foyer seemed removed. He was lost in windy darkness, and the atmosphere of the house had changed, become profoundly malefic, as if the air had been charged by the switching on of some enormously evil battery.

Out of this silence came a feminine laugh, fey and whimsical, dry as the sound of cornshucks rustling together. The laugh rose in timbre, strangled itself instantly on a high gurgling note like the watervoiced call of a thrush. It was silent again.

I’ve got to get a hold of myself, Binder thought, but it took an enormous effort to remember his name. He sat waiting for the lights to come back on. They did not. The goddamned transformer, he thought, remembering the explosion. He tried to recall what he had done with the flashlight: the nightstand drawer. He arose, felt his way cautiously toward the wall until lightning mapped the room. He made the bedroom door, paused again, gained the wall in darkness, and felt along it until the room was briefly lit.

The flashlight was there. He snapped it on and felt better immediately. He looked at Corrie. He didn’t know how, but still she slept. He hesitated by the door of Stephie’s room, loath to turn and go, but ultimately the thought of someone else in the house was intolerable. There was no way he was going to get back to sleep. He wished the gun had been unpacked. Binder was trying not to think about the hand on his leg.

He was halfway up the stairs when the singing began. Vague, far-off, murmurous, no words he could decipher and maybe no words at all, maybe just the voice filtered through the walls and time and his consciousness, the melody familiar and curiously nostalgic, timeless. He thought desperately of songs he knew, anything to drown out the hypnotic song. The Beatles, he thought, think of the Beatles, listen to the music playing in your head.

He was on the landing, and the music had grown clearer, louder in volume. A feminine voice, a contralto, innocent and pure, a young girl’s voice.

He couldn’t understand the words yet. The beam of the flashlight played about the upstairs hall. All he could hear was the rasp of his own breathing. The singing was coming from behind a closed mahogany door. Cheek laid against it, he could feel the smooth, cold wood and hear the woodfiltered voice singing still.

He threw open the door. It was empty save a bed, a functional-looking chest of drawers. Silent, too, for the singing had stopped at the opening of the door as surely as if he had jerked the tone-arm of a phonograph off a record, cut off instantly in midnote. He could hear, rising above the silence, the wash of rain at the uncurtained windows. Turning with the light he saw only his reflection and the glassed-out silver motion of water. The air of the room felt electric and telluric, as if it had just been quit by the presence of another.

The singing commenced in the next room. Sweet, a capella, for some reason it made him think of a young girl at her toilet, preening before a mirror, singing softly to herself.

He turned with the light, crept stealthily into the hall, approached the bedroom door, twisted the knob gently. Abruptly he kicked the door so hard it slammed against the wall, played the light desperately over the room. Now the singing was behind him, descending the stair, and he began to understand the words:

Lay down, my dear sister

Won’t you lay and take your rest

Won’t you lay your head upon your Savior’s breast?

And I love you, but Jesus loves you the best

And I bid you goodnight…goodnight…goodnight

He descended the stairs two at a time, but the voice had turned a corner in the hall. Shining the light toward the corner he saw for an instant the hindquarters of a black dog. He ran toward it, the light bobbing from ceiling to floor, rounded the corner into the kitchen and swept the light from side to side.

Nothing.

The singing was faint and far off, indecipherable. A man’s hoarse and guttural voice abruptly said something. It might have been curse or invocation. The singing rose in timbre. The man’s voice began again, singsong, a nursery rhyme, patient and slow, as if laboriously explaining something to a child.

A is for ark, that wonderful boat

Noah built it on land getting ready to float.

Silence then except the singing.

The man said patiently,

B is for beast at the ending of the wood, who ate all the children

When they wouldn’t be good.

The voice slurred drunkenly off into an incoherent mumble.

Above the voices Corrie was calling David, David, a rising voice verging on panic.

The lights came on. The refrigerator compressor kicked in, began to hum reassuringly. He could hear the air conditioner whirring from the bedroom. The atmosphere of the house altered, seemed drained of evil.

She was sitting on the side of the bed, a blanket across her lap, hands cupping her breasts defensively, eyes wide with alarm until she recognized him.

Where were you, David?

Looking for something. I heard something.

Heard something? What? Why was it dark, was the power off?

I guess lightning knocked it out and they fixed it. I heard something walking.the door was open. I guess it was a dog.

A dog, she said in disbelief.

She said something else, but Binder did not hear. He checked on Stephie then lay down on the bed. The sheets were damp and cool, the air conditioner was drying the sweat on him. His head hurt. He closed his eyes, aware of her beside him, but he was thinking of the cool hand on his calf, the aching purity of the voice. He wondered at which point his fear had turned to exultance and he was remembering Charlie Cagle on the park bench saying, You let such as that in your own self.lSomehow he had done that, and the thought of his own complicity in it was more frightening than the singing had been.

An Excerpt from
The Beale Haunting
by J. R. Lipscomb

Jacob Beale was born in 1785 in Halifax County, Virginia. He was the eldest son of Henry Beale, a wealthy landowner and planter of English and Irish descent. For over a hundred years the Beales had been a wellknown English family.

He was educated to the standards of those primitive times, going to school in the wintertime and the rest of the year being trained in the management of the Beales’ lands, and proved to be an exceptional pupil, for almost immediately he began to prosper in the manner of his father and of Beales before him.

In 1809 he began to court a young woman named Elizabeth Anne Cotton. The Cottons were also a highly thought of family, being of good stock and acquisitive of possessions as befits those who would build an empire from a virgin wilderness. In the standards of the time, Miss Cotton had many other admirers, being most comely and healthy, stout enough to be an admirable helpmate, an attribute not to be taken lightly in those harsh times. She was known as Becky to these suitors, and widely sought after.