Little Sister Death (6 page)

No. Not from Mr. Qualls the banker. I read a book about this place.

Say you did? Oh, I got your number now. The famous Beale haunting. All that stuff in the eighteen hundreds. Do you mean to stand here in the cold light of day and tell me man to man that you believe any of that bullshit?

Binder just watched him, enjoying himself, imagining Greaves trying to figure out just how much he knew, amused too at the thought that the tales Greaves wanted to shield him from were the very tales that had brought him six hundred and fifty miles from Chicago, a hundred and thirty-five years too late.

You only got half my number, Binder said. I heard about the other stuff, too. He was shooting blind and in the dark here, but knew with a blood-quickening certainty that he had been right.

Greaves bit. You mean that Swaw business in the thirties? Mr. Binder, he said, looking away across the fields toward where the horizon ran, lush green folding into an austere blue of distance. You take a piece of land, any piece of land, and if a man had the longevity and the inclination to just sit and watch it for a hundred and fifty years, no telling what he’d see. You’d be surprised. People ain’t never been anything else besides people and ever now and then they’re going to slip up and do the same sickening things folks’ve been known to slip up and do before. And that don’t affect the land, neither. It don’t haunt it or cheapen it or wear it out. It’s still the same piece of ground it was in the beginning.

I’ve just heard folks’ve seen things here. Lights and such.

There’s certain folks that’ll see things most anywhere. Those Abernathy women lived here from…1966 to 1978, and never seen a light or heard a rat in the walls for all I know. Anyway, the rent money come the first of ever month regular as a clock ticking.

Can you show me where the old houseplace was?

I can’t today, he said, glancing at a wristwatch. I’ve got to show another place on Sinking Creek. But I can tell you good enough so’s you can find it.

All right. Will you ask her about the lease?

I sure will, Mr. Binder. I’ll do what I can. You sure you want it, ghosts and all?

He called the motel the next afternoon. The place was Binder’s for six months. A bird in the hand, he figured.

Jesus, a mall, Binder said, still not quite believing it. Beale Station with a Walmart and a McDonald’s and JCPenneys, a mall, everything.

Cheer up, Corrie told him, laughing, opening the car door. It’s probably haunted too.

Fairy Queen of the Haunted Mall, Binder said crossing the parking lot, Stephie skipping along before them, Corrie swinging on his arm.

There was a brief magic to the day. They bought living-room drapes and kitchen curtains and a bedspread and curtains for Stephie’s room. Stephie begged for not one but two videocassettes of Disney’s
Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
. Binder splurged on a pair of aviator sunglasses.

To Corrie time seemed to accelerate, to move at a different pace than the time the homeplace ran on. They ate at McDonald’s and saw a movie at the multiplex and suddenly the day was gone and it was time to go home.

They fell silent on the road ascending through the cedars. The house rose before them somber and still silent and imbued with the quality of patient waiting.

Everybody out, Binder said. Home sweet home.

Corrie gave him a swift callid look, as if to see was he serious or not.

Corrie had been fighting nervousness all day by staying busy. Unpacking, replacing the faded curtains with her own, trying to force her mind blank, free of anything that would make her think of her father. Alone in the house, the afternoon seemed endless. She caught herself listening for footsteps. Once she thought she heard voices that led her from room to room, listening, but ultimately there was only the moribund silence of the July day.

What could David be doing out there? she wondered. All there is is woods, how long does it take to look at a tree? She had a sudden image of David dying of snakebite. Hadn’t the real estate agent specifically warned them about snakes? Copperheads always been bad on Sinking Creek, he’d said. I wouldn’t feel right about my job if I didn’t warn you. Specially with this little blondheaded gal here.

I could finish unpacking, she thought, seeing the cardboard boxes still stacked in the hall. But she hated the thought of it; anyway, what would she do with it? And it would just have to be repacked when they left.

David had said he would help her, and she guessed he figured he had. He had unpacked his books and put them on shelves, cleaned his typewriter and changed the ribbon and arranged it on a makeshift desk he’d constructed of two filing cabinets and an old door he found in the toolshed. With his books shelved and his workspace prepared, David felt at home anywhere.

The remaining boxes were all David’s as well, except for one or two belonging to their daughter, Stephanie. Magazines. David had a peculiar reverence for the printed word that apparently forbade him throwing away anything it was printed on, so that during their marriage they had moved from apartment to apartment an ever-increasing number of boxes filled with old
Esquire, Playboy, Harper’s
, battered old copies of
Ramparts
and
Rolling Stone
.

She smiled wryly at one box marked S
TEPHANIE
.

He had apparently communicated this trait to his daughter; she was five years old and she already had her own twinebound box containing back numbers of
Children’s Digest
and
Humpty Dumpty
.

The thought of Stephanie drew Corrie to the screen door. She heard the slow creak of the swing chains, saw Stephanie rocking listlessly. Stephie, as she was called, had her mother’s fair skin and hair, but temperamentally she seemed closer to David: she already showed signs of being as imaginative as he was. Corrie might have said over-imaginative. Sometimes David and Stephie seemed attuned to a wider spectrum of sensory impulses than Corrie knew existed.

David taught her to read early. Her kindergarten teacher in Chicago had suspected she was gifted, and a series of tests administered to her bore this out. David reacted to the news as if he had been personally and entirely responsible. I told you so, he kept telling Corrie, as if she had maintained that the child was a congenital idiot. Or as if his genes had been transmuted to Stephie pristine and untainted by Corrie’s. Though she guessed that wasn’t fair; after all, it had been David who had read to her from the time he had gotten the child’s attention, and at a period in his life when time had been at a premium.

She opened the door and went out onto the porch. Stephie sat idly turning the pages of a book about gnomes, but she was no longer looking at them with any semblance of interest.

She looked up at Corrie. Can we watch TV?

No, we can’t. Sorry.

Why not?

Daddy didn’t hook it up to the antenna yet.

David had said that he would, but Corrie had turned it on a little past noon and there was only the blank white screen, the white noise of static emanating from the speaker. The lead wire wasn’t even hooked to the little screws on the back of the set, and when she finally found a screwdriver and leant over the set to fix it she had seen through the window the antenna itself leaned against the back porch wall, still in its cardboard carton. Maybe he would tomorrow. Or tonight, if he came in in time.

Corrie had left the sound on anyway, turned all the way up. At least it was something out of this century. Nothing else in the house seemed to be.

Don’t you want to play in the playhouse Daddy fixed you?

She closed the book. I suppose so, she said. She arose and went somewhat grudgingly down the flagstone steps toward the playhouse under the elm. She played as if it were work she was forced to do, Corrie thought, thinking of herself. Today she had felt like a child forced to play grownup in a cavernous nineteenth-century house with someone else’s furniture, someone else’s past.

Though not forced, she thought hastily. David had been scrupulously fair about that. It had been a joint decision. Except that David had thought of it, David had been the one enthused about it, and David had a way of leading you along on the ragged edge of his enthusiasm until you were someplace you hadn’t planned to be, wondering how you got there. She could have gone to Orlando and stayed with her older sister Ruthie and her husband Vern; she could have stayed in Chicago. But she knew that David would have done it anyway. He would have come alone, and that would have been worse.

David had been a drifter when he married her, and though he had made an enormous effort to change or at least convince her he had changed, there was still a lot of drifter in him: a refusal to put down roots, to think of any one place as home, a disinclination to do for very long anything he didn’t want to do. He just wouldn’t be bored. There was no pretense of politeness about him. She had heard him kill a hundred boring conversations just by shutting up.

A goddamned hippie, her father (her father: the word fell through her mind like a stone settling slowly through deep water) had called him contemptuously. Among other things, a lot worse. Those had been hard times, when she and her father had both said ugly unforgivable things to each other, things that still rang in her ears. She had always been her father’s favorite, and suddenly a gulf had opened between them she couldn’t close. She hadn’t had an excuse for the things she had said, though her father had the best one in the world: he was dying of an undiagnosed brain tumor, was already dying the moment she accused him of just going crazy and mean.

Even as she tried to think of David, another level of her mind twisted in guilty pain and she realized how much she missed her father. Grief cut her clean and deep as a surgeon’s scalpel, and in that moment she would have clawed the dirt from his casket to see his face.

She forced herself to quit thinking about that, to make her mind gray and blank as the television screen she was watching. But it wouldn’t completely go away, and a part of it wondered detachedly how much would he have decayed, would I know him, could I stand to touch him.

She forced her mind, by a sheer exertion of will, to forsake her father’s face, to think of David. She seemed to have known him forever. He was five years older than Corrie, but in certain respects a generation apart. In 1968, when he had been listening to Bob Dylan, she had been thirteen. There were fundamental differences that showed even in so insignificant a thing as the music they liked: he still played Dylan and the Stones, she liked middle-of-the-road and country, neither of which David could tolerate. He said it was junk, Muzak, throwaway plastic. He said Dylan was a poet, that if he hadn’t grown up in an electronic society Dylan would have been writing his apocalyptic visions for the little magazines, and he heard dark and sinister undercurrents in the music of the Rolling Stones that she just didn’t hear.

She was like her father: fiscally responsible, possessed of a healthy respect for the dollar. David simply didn’t care, though she guessed that was changing. Ever since they’d learned she was pregnant again, David seemed to think about nothing but ways to make money. He had been just as happy broke as he was when he had money. When he came back from Vietnam, he was discharged in California and blew his mustering outpay on a typewriter and a Suzuki motorcycle, which she had never even seen. He had wrecked it in Tempe, Arizona, only one state out of California, and had just walked off and left it.

The word Vietnam had dark connotations for Corrie, like a spectre watching over their shoulders. She blamed it for the changes in David. She had been thirteen when he left for his tour of duty, and up until then he had never spoken a dozen words to her in her life. She barely knew him. He was cleancut, a little reserved maybe, but the image of the boy next door. When she saw him four years later he looked.not exactly grubby, but not exactly the boy next door anymore. His hair was long, not shoulderlength or anything, but long, and he had a beard. But the worst thing was his eyes. They had changed, looked at you cold and impassively out of the dark beard-shadowed face, as if nothing much mattered to them one way or another.

There was a strong air of single-minded purpose about him, too much intensity: you couldn’t call him laid back. She really believed he could do anything he wanted to do. Even for a while when he had long hair and a beard and had gone about in old Army fatigues he had always known who he was, what he was, what to do about it.

He was a writer. Even then he had been writing stories and sending them away and getting them back along with the little impersonal rejection slips. But Corrie saw that David had known he was a writer; he was just waiting for the world to catch up, which it finally had, in Chicago.

He’s not much fun, is he? Ruthie had said before they were married. Ruthie had tried to seduce him, she guessed. David never said so, but Ruthie always tried to seduce everybody at some time or other, especially Corrie’s boyfriends. And the occasional man who didn’t succumb she dismissed as being no fun anyway.

Actually he had been quite a bit of fun. He could be charming when he wanted to, and he had wanted to quite frequently then, when they were going together, getting engaged, when things weren’t pushing at him so.

He could be persuasive, too. He had made love to her the first night she had gone out with him. She had been a virgin, couldn’t quite figure how it happened, and the next day she was assailed with guilt, not at the loss of some intangible something she had never been aware of possessing but at the idea that she had been so easy and at the thought that David would think her cheap. She was angry at herself, and a little puzzled. Why had she let him when she wouldn’t let anyone else?

It took her a while to see that she had done it simply because he had wanted her too. He had wanted her with the focused intensity he applied to all the things he wanted. No one else had wanted her that intensely. He had just assumed she was going to let him, and she had.

The descending twilight was hot and still. A blood sun of eventide. Silence save the sleeping droning of insects, the spill of water over the shelf of limestone. The rabbit came up out of the thick ferment of wild peppermint by the springhouse and leapt nimbly stone to stone across the damp dark loam. The air here was cool and it smelled richly of mint.