Miss Lizzie (16 page)

At last William came around the house and began his ramble across the lawn. He might have been humming to himself, so nonchalant was he. Then suddenly, where the lawn ended, he dipped behind his oak.

I tarried for only a moment, then cantered over to the tree. Poking my head around it, I watched him as he ambled twenty yards ahead down a shaded path. When he had gone another fifteen yards, I started to stalk him.

Another hundred yards in, he turned to the right. When I reached the spot, I saw that here the path met a crumbling stone wall, one built back in colonial times, probably, by settlers in their pre-tomahawk stage. The irregularly rounded black rocks were splotched with gray lichen and furred with a moss so green it seemed to glow.

And there was William, bounding from stone to stone atop the wall, skimming from shade to light down the tunnel of trees. And then, abruptly, he sprang off to the left.

Hurrying now, afraid I had lost him, I ran awkwardly along the stones, squinting through the foliage. And saw it, off to the side: a flutter of white among the trees. William's shirt.

I rushed down the path till I had him in sight once more and then, relaxing for the first time, began to notice that the forest was not so dim and dark after all; not so grim, so monolithic. It was open and inviting; it was luminous. All around me, gold danced with green. Sunlight wheeled down through the treetops, splashed against the leaves, washed across the grasses and the wildflowers. Butterflies floated and swooped; slim slight dragonflies with iridescent eyes hovered and darted and hovered again. The pale-brown leaves atop the ground, speckled bright yellow by the sun, looked soft enough to sleep on.

More trees lived here than I would have believed possible. I would not know all their names until much later, but I saw hickories as tall and straight as the masts of ships, gnarled crabapples, shaggy sycamores, delicate dogwoods and their white flowers, each petal tipped with a droplet of dark brown. (The blood of Jesus, my grandmother said.) There were thickets of mountain laurel and honeysuckle. Silver birches, their peeling bark as fragile as onionskin, arched skyward and then dipped their branches toward the earth as though (so Mr. Frost has pointed out) they had been ridden there by the exultant swing of laughing boys.

It was, in short, an Enchanted Place, and, like any other princess in such a locale, I very shortly became lost. William was no longer in sight, and I was no longer certain that the path I followed was the one he had taken. I made tentative forays in several directions; but no William. At last, giving way to panic, I called out his name. No answer. Called it out again. No answer.

The forest closed in again around me, and a low cloud with a black underbelly and an impeccable sense of timing went grinding across the sky and blotted out the sun.

I plopped down hopelessly to the ground and learned that dead leaves, sunspeckled or otherwise, are not soft. They are crumbly and prickly, they make bare legs itch, and they cling to a white cotton dress as though stapled there.

My dress! Somehow it had gotten stained with green, smeared with gray. Grandmother would have a fit!

But then Grandmother would never see me again, nor the dress. Not until next spring, when some hearty woodsman (boots, overalls, hefty axe slung over broad plaid shoulder) stumbled upon the bleached little skeleton lying amid the leaves and the branches and the yellowed cotton tatters.

There would be a funeral, of course, tiny brittle bones rattling in the tiny casket, and everyone would weep at the young life so soon snuffed out. I pictured Grandmother's grief, and Grandfather's, and Father's, and William's (his mingled with an overwhelming and, one hoped, suicidal sense of guilt), and I began to cry.

A rustle in the forest. The woodsman? Already?

It was William, a look of annoyance on his face. “What are
you
doing here?”

I stopped crying. “Looking for you.”

“What for?”

“I wanted to see what you were doing.”

“None of your business.”

“I'll tell Daddy.”

“Oh, yeah? Tell him what?”

“That you've got a secret in the woods.”

He gave me a shrewd look. “What kind of secret?”

“I don't know, but I'll tell him you come in here every day and you're hiding something.”

“Hiding what?”

“I don't know, but Daddy will find out.”

He scowled. “Amanda, how come you're such a brat?”

“I am
not
a brat. Come on, William, please tell me what it is?”

He hesitated. I saw my advantage, and pressed it. “Oh, William,
please
? Just show me. I won't tell anyone, I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

He was wavering, indecision on his face.

“I swear I won't. I
swear
it.”

His eyes narrowed. “Swear it on a Bible?”

“We haven't got a Bible.”

“They've got a whole bunch of them at Grandma's.”

“All right, I will. I'll swear on one of those.”

“Swear that if you tell, you'll go to hell and burn in fire forever?”

“Uh-huh. I swear.”

“I'll get a Bible, you know, and make you swear on it.” (He did.)

“That's okay. I swear it, I really do.”

“Well. Okay. Follow me.”

I think that, judging by his pride, he had wanted all along to show someone.

It was a fort. He had built it two years before and had, since then, continually made improvements. It was constructed of branches, each about two inches thick and seven feet long, nailed to either side of a long overhanging limb of oak to form a sort of A-frame eight feet in length and five feet, at the base, in width. A canvas tarp was slung over it, to make it waterproof; and. atop this, leaves had been piled to provide camouflage. (Indeed, from four feet away the structure was invisible.) A small clearing extended before it, in the center of which lay a semicircle of fire-blackened rocks. The fort, William told me, was designed as a family shelter, to be used in the event the Huns invaded Massachusetts. (The War was still in progress: grown men in the United States had devised schemes no less preposterous than William's refuge.)

“Can I go inside?” I asked him.

“Okay. But don't touch anything.”

Inside, the floor of hard-packed earth gave off a woodsy smell of loam and mushroom. (To this day I cannot eat morels without recalling William's fort.) Against the far wall he had built shelves of rocks and planks, and these were lined with cans of peas, carrots, corn, corned beef, honey, jam, marmalade. There was no sign, however, none at all, of Little Bo Peep.

I clambered back outside. “William, all that food. You took it from Grandma's pantry.”

“I only borrowed it,” he said. “And besides, when the Huns come, Grandma and Grandpa will get to eat it.”

I eyed the fort skeptically. “We're all going to live in that?”

“We'll build additions.”

“What about when the food runs out?”

“We can eat roots and berries. They're all over the place. And we can trap rabbits.”

“Rabbits? Oh no, William!”

“Only if we have to. To survive, I mean.”

“What about water?”

“There's a stream just over there.”

“What about the animals?”

“What animals?”

“You know. Bears and things.”

“There aren't any bears around here.”

“Yes, but snakes.…”

“Animals,” he said with absolute conviction, “don't bother you if you don't bother them.” Over the years I have learned that, with the exception of sharks and human beings, he was quite right.

I looked at the fort, looked back at William. “Can I come here?”

“What do you mean?”

“When you're not here. Can I come and play inside?”

“No, of course not. It's mine.”

“You said it was for everybody, for the whole family.”

“Yeah, but only when the Huns come.”

I could hardly count upon the Huns; they were notoriously unreliable. “What about when you're not here? What about when you go over to the Bromptons' house? Sometimes you stay there for days. Someone could come along and find it.”

“It's been here for two years, and no one's ever found it.”

“Yes, but part of that was in wintertime and no one was around. I could guard it for you. If anyone came, I could go up to them and tell them I was lost, so they'd have to take me to Grandma's. They'd never find it then.”

He considered this.

“Please, William? I
promise
I'll never tell anyone.”

He had the grace to forbear pointing out that the threat I implied—of actually telling—was empty; I had already sworn an oath.

“Well, okay. But only when I'm gone. And no dolls or anything.”

(I did bring my dolls—reasoning that if William had actually known them personally, he would have wanted them to share the fort—but I never told him.)

He looked over the fort, as pleased as Carnegie admiring his first library, then turned to me. “Do you like it?”

“William,” I said, “I love it.”

He beamed.

I watched Miss Lizzie as she turned over the middle card of three that lay atop the coffee table. It was the ace of spades. She scooped up the cards, shuffled them, used her thumbnail to split the deck, and, holding one-half in each hand, spread them simultaneously into perfect fans. Then, flawlessly, the cards rustling like leaves in a breeze, she melded them together. She glanced up, saw that I was watching, and smiled. “Can I get you something, dear? Some more tea?”

“No, thank you, Miss Lizzie. I'm all right.” But I was thinking of the fort.

We had spent last summer at our grandparents', and the fort had still been there, still stocked with provisions, although William no longer went there every day—at sixteen he had other things on his mind, chiefly girls. (In two years his shyness had dropped away, possibly because, with the faulty taste that only one's older brother can possess, the girls he chose to court were so simpering and witless.)

Now, a year later, might he not have gone there once again? Had it not been designed, after all, as a refuge?

But I had sworn an oath, under pain of hellfire, never to tell anyone about the fort.

On the other hand, logically speaking I was already damned. Throughout the day, idly, I had been examining the image of Amanda amid the flames, turning it round and about as one might a bright shiny aggie or a gleaming shard of costume jewelry. There was, in the end, only one eternity; you could not be sentenced to it twice.

Yet violating the oath somehow seemed so much worse than wishing Audrey dead.

“Miss Lizzie?” I said.

She was palming the king of hearts. Distracted, she said, “Yes?”

“What do you think hell is like?”

“I don't know, dear. Pittsburgh?” Then, looking up, she saw by my frown that I was serious. “Why do you ask, Amanda?”

I shrugged. “Just curious, I guess.”

“Well, child,” she said, kindness in her tone, “I think that perhaps that's a question you should ask your father.”

“I will,” I said. Fat chance. “But I wanted to know what you thought about it.”

She smiled. “What I think may be very different from what your father thinks.”

“That's all right. What
do
you think?”

“Well,” she said, “this is only my opinion, mind, but I really don't believe that hell exists. At least not the way the books and the Billy Sundays talk about it.”

For a moment I was speechless. Startled not so much by what she said—startling enough—as by her saying it,
thinking
it, without being snatched from the face of the earth and hurled at once into that very place. Stammering, I said, “But—but where would we
go
then? Afterward? I mean the bad people. Where would they go?”

“I don't think they go anywhere. I think they stay here on earth.”

“You mean like ghosts?”

“No, not like ghosts.” She smiled faintly, thoughtfully. “Well, some of them, perhaps.” I thought then of her mother, her father. Had they haunted her, hacked and bleeding? Had they come to her on lonely moonlit nights?

She said, “I think most of us stay here, through our actions, through the events we set in motion. Through the people we've known.”

“But what about our soul? What about our spirit? Where does my
me
go when I die?”

She smiled. “Where was it before you were born?”

I thought about that. “In the Mind of God?”

She nodded. “All right. Yes. The Mind of God. That's as good a way as any of putting it.”

“And we all go there?”

“We all
are
there, I think. We're all pieces of it, expressions of it. Everything is. If you look into the eyes of a dog or a cat, any animal, you can see it there, that Something, that Force. The Mind of God.”