Running with the Demon (22 page)

He opened the yearbook and held it out for John Ross to see. Ross limped gingerly over for a look, and for the first time Nest noticed the polished black staff leaning against the wall next to the umbrella stand. The staff was covered with strange symbols carved into wood black and depthless beneath the staff’s worn sheen. Nest stared at the markings for a long moment as John Ross and her grandfather studied her mother’s yearbook. There was something familiar about the markings. She had seen them somewhere before. She was certain of it.

She looked at John Ross anew and wondered how that could be.

Moments later, Gran called them in to dinner. She seated them at the big dining-room table, Nest next to John Ross across from Robert and herself. She placed the food on the table, then finished off her bourbon and made herself another before taking her seat. She picked up her fork and began to eat with barely a glance at her company. Very unlike Gran, who was a stickler for good manners. Nest thought something was clearly troubling her.

“Did you know my mother a long time?” Nest asked, curious now to know more about this stranger.

Ross shook his head. He took small, careful bites as he ate. His green eyes were distant as he spoke. “No, I’m afraid I didn’t. I didn’t meet her until her second year, and she went home at the end of it. We only had a few months together. I wish I had known her better.”

“She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

John Ross nodded. “She was.”

“You were a year ahead of her at Oberlin, you said,” Old Bob encouraged. “Did you stay on and graduate?”

“Caitlin could have graduated, too, if she’d wanted,” Gran said quietly, giving him a sharp glance.

“I think Caitlin was one of the smartest people I’ve ever known, Mrs. Freemark,” John Ross offered, looking now at Gran. She looked back at him very deliberately. “But she was fragile, too. Very sensitive. She could be hurt more easily than most. I admired that about her.”

Gran put down her fork and sipped at her bourbon. “I don’t know that I understand what you’re saying, Mr. Ross.”

Ross nodded. “It’s just that most of us are so hardened to life that we’ve forgotten how to respond to pain. Caitlin wasn’t like that. She understood the importance of recognizing the little hurts that other people ignore. She was always concerned with healing. Not physical injuries, you understand. Emotional hurts, the kind that inflict damage on your soul. She could identify and heal them with a few well chosen words. She was better at it than anyone. It was a genuine gift.”

“You said you dated? You and Caitlin?” Old Bob helped himself to more of the roast, ignoring the look Gran shot him. Nest watched the interplay with fascination. Something about John Ross being here had Gran very upset. Nest had never seen her so on edge.

“On and off for some of that year.” John Ross smiled, but kept his eyes fixed on his plate. “Mostly we were just friends. We went places together. We talked a lot. Caitlin talked about you all the time. And about her home. She loved the park.”

“I have to tell you that she never mentioned you, Mr. Ross,” Gran observed pointedly, watching his face.

John Ross nodded. “I’m sorry to hear that. But she kept a lot to herself. I don’t suppose I was very important to her in the larger scheme of things. But I admired her greatly.”

“Well, she may have mentioned you, and we’ve just forgotten,” Old Bob soothed, giving Gran a warning glance. Gran sniffed and sipped some more of her drink.

“She had a lot of friends while she was at Oberlin,” Ross added suddenly, glancing around at their faces as if to confirm that what he was saying was true. He looked at Gran. “This roast is delicious, Mrs. Freemark. I haven’t tasted anything this good in a long time. I’m very grateful you included me.”

“Well,” Gran said, her sharp face softening slightly.

“She did have a lot of friends,” Old Bob declared. “Caitlin had a lot of friends, all through school. She had a good heart. People saw that in her.”

“Did you know my father?” Nest asked suddenly.

The table went silent. Nest knew at once that she had asked something she should not have. Gran was glaring at her. Her grandfather was staring at his plate, absorbed in his food. John Ross took a drink of his water and set the glass carefully back in place on the table.

“No,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry, but I never met him.”

The dinner conversation resumed after a few moments and continued throughout in fits and starts, with Nest’s grandfather asking questions of John Ross, Ross offering brief replies, and Gran sitting angry and still throughout. Nest finished her meal,
asked to be excused, and left almost before permission was given. She walked out onto the porch and down the steps to the backyard. Mr. Scratch was sprawled on the lawn sleeping and Miss Minx was watching him with studied suspicion. Nest moved to the rope swing, seated herself in its weathered old tire, and rocked gently in the evening heat. She felt embarrassed and frustrated by her grandparents’ reaction to her question and wondered anew why no one ever wanted to say anything about her father. It was more than the fact that he got her mother pregnant and never married her. That was no big deal; that happened all the time. It was more than the fact that he disappeared afterward, too. Lots of kids grew up in one-parent households. Or with their grandparents, like she was doing. No, it was something more, and she wasn’t even sure that it was something anyone could actually explain. It was more like something they suspected, but could not put words to. It was like something that was possible, but they were refusing to look too closely at it for fear that it might be so.

A few minutes later John Ross came out the back door leaning on his cane, carefully negotiated the worn steps, and limped over to where she twisted and bobbed in the swing. Nest steadied herself as he came up, grounding her feet so that she could watch him.

“I guess that question about your father touched a sore spot,” he said, his smile faint and pained, his eyes squinting as he looked off toward the approaching sunset. The sky to the west was colored bright red and laced with low-hanging clouds that scraped across the trees of the park.

Nest nodded without replying.

“I was wondering if you would walk me to your mother’s grave,” Ross continued, still looking west. “Your grandfather said it would be all right for you to do so. Your grandmother gave him one of those looks, but then she agreed, too.” He turned back to her, his brow furrowed. “Maybe I’m misreading her, but I have the uncomfortable feeling she thinks she’s giving me just enough rope to hang myself.”

Nest smiled in response, thinking of Wraith.

Ross ran his hand slowly down the length of his staff. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think your grandmother trusts me. She’s a very careful woman where you are concerned.”

Nest supposed that was so. Gran was fierce about her sometimes, so consumed with watching out for her that Nest would find herself wondering if there was a danger to her that she did not realize.

“So, would that be all right with you?” Ross pressed. “Would you be willing to walk me over to the cemetery?”

Nest nodded, climbed out of the swing, and pointed to the gap in the hedgerow. She led the way wordlessly, setting a slow pace so that he could follow, glancing back to make certain he was able to keep up. In point of fact, he seemed stronger and more agile than she had expected. She wondered what had happened to his leg, if there was a way she could ask him without being rude.

They crossed the yard, pushed through the gap in the hedgerow, and entered the park. The evening ball games were already under way, the diamonds all in use, the benches and grassy areas behind the backstops crowded with families and fans. She led Ross down the service road behind the nearest backstop to the crossing gate at the park entrance, then along the roadway toward the burial mounds and the cliffs. Neither of them spoke. The day’s heat hung thick and heavy in the evening air, and there was little indication that the temperature would change with night’s coming. The insects buzzed and hummed in dull cacophony in the shade of the trees, and the sounds of the ballplayers rose sharp and sudden with the ebb and flow of the games’ action.

After a moment, she dropped back a step to walk beside him. “How long are you visiting?” she asked, wanting to know something more about him, about his involvement with her mother.

“Just a few days.” His movements were steady and unhurried. “I think I’ll stay for the fireworks. I hear they’re pretty spectacular.”

“You can sit with us, if you’d like,” she offered. “That way
you’ll be with someone you know. You don’t know anyone else in Hopewell, do you?”

He shook his head.

“This is your first visit?”

“This is my first visit.”

They crossed the road at the divide and turned west toward the turnaround and the entry to Riverside. John Ross was looking off toward the cliffs, out to where the Rock River flowed west on both sides of the levy and the railroad tracks. Nest watched him out of the comer of her eye. He seemed to be seeing something beyond what he was looking at, his gaze distant and distracted, his expression riddled with pain. He looked almost young to her for an instant, as if the years had dropped away. She thought she could see the boy in him, the way he was maybe twenty years ago, the way he had been before his life had taken him down whatever rough road it was he had traveled.

“Were you in love with my mother?” she asked him suddenly.

He looked at her in surprise, his lean face intense, his green eyes startled. He shook his head. “I think I could have been if I had gotten to know her better, but I didn’t get the chance.” He smiled. “Isn’t that tragic?”

They walked up through the spring-mounted children’s toys toward the spruce groves. “You look like her,” Ross said after a moment.

Nest glanced over at him, watching him limp alongside her, leaning on his staff, his gaze directed ahead to where they were going. “I don’t think I do,” she said. “I don’t think I look like anybody. Which is just as well, because I don’t much like the way I look, just at the moment.”

Ross nodded. “We’re our own worst critics, sometimes.” Then he cocked an eyebrow at her. “But I like the way you look, even if you don’t. So sue me.”

She smiled in spite of herself. They passed through the spruce trees to the turnaround and the cliffs. There were two cars parked at the cliff edge and a family on the swings nearby.
She thought back to Bennett Scott and the feeders, picturing it in her mind, remembering the night and the heat and the fear. She thought about Two Bears and wondered suddenly if he was there in the park again. She glanced about to see if she could spy him, but he was nowhere in sight. She let her thoughts of Two Bears and the spirits of the dead Sinnissippi drift away.

She led Ross to the gap in the fence line and through to the cemetery beyond. They walked along the edge of the blacktop roadway, through the rows of marble and granite tombstones, across the immaculate grass carpet, and under the stately, silent old hardwoods. The mingled scents of pine and new-mown grass filled the air, rich and pungent. Nest found herself strangely at ease. John Ross made her feel that way. The longer she was with him, the more comfortable she felt—as if she had known him a long time rather than for only a few hours. It was in the way he talked to her, neither as a child nor as an adult, but simply as a person; in the way he moved, neither self-conscious nor protective of his damaged body, not favoring it in an obvious, discomforting way, accepting it as it was; and mostly in the way he was at peace with the moment, as if only the here and now mattered, as if taking this walk with her were enough and what had gone before or what would come after had no place in his thoughts.

They walked through the rolling green of the cemetery and down its tree-shaded rows of markers to where her mother lay, out on a bluff overlooking the river and the land beyond. Her mother’s headstone was gray with black lettering and bore the words
BELOVED DAUGHTER & MOTHER
just beneath her name, Caitlin Anne Freemark. Nest stared at the grave without speaking, immutable and remote, borne to other times and places on the wings of her thoughts.

“I don’t remember her at all,” she said finally, tears springing to her eyes with her admission.

John Ross looked off into the trees. “She was small and gentle, with sandy hair and blue-gray eyes you couldn’t look away from. She was pretty, almost elfin. She was very smart, intuitive about things others would miss entirely. When she
laughed, she could transport you to a better time and place in your life if you were sad or make you glad you were there with her if you were happy. She was daring and unafraid. She was never satisfied with just being told how something was; she always wanted to experience it for herself.”

He stopped, went silent suddenly, as if he’d come up against something he did not care to explore any further. Nest did not try to look at him. She brushed at her eyes and bit her lip to steady herself. It was always like this when she came to visit. No matter how much time had passed, it was always the same.

Afterward, they walked back through the cemetery to the fence line in the waning light, listening to the dying sounds of a distant mower and the occasional honk of a car horn out on the highway. There was no one in the cemetery this night; its tree-sheltered, rolling green expanse was cradled in silence and empty of movement. The Midwest evening was sultry, the air tasted of sweat, and it felt as if time had slowed its inexorable march to a crawl. There was a sense of something slipping away, gone like chances at love or hopes for understanding.

“Thank you for telling me about her,” Nest said quietly as they walked down the blacktop roadway toward the park fence. Her eyes were dry again and her mind was clear.

“Well, you remind me of her,” John Ross replied after a moment. “That helps me in telling you what she was like.”

“I have pictures,” said Nest. “But it isn’t the same.”

“Not if you don’t have the memories of the times those pictures capture, no.” Ross limped steadily forward, his staff clicking softly against the blacktop with each step.