Strange Seed (11 page)

She averted her eyes.
 
“I don’t know. I guess it’s just a matter of knowing something one moment, then forgetting it the next.”

“’Something’?”

She smiled a little.
 
“That’s the best I can do.
 
I can’t tell you what I don’t know.
 
Sorry.”

Paul raised his eyebrows—confusion mixed with gentle admonishment.
 
He felt, Rachel was sure, that she was hiding something from him.

“Uh-huh,” he said.
 
“This is all getting very cryptic, isn’t it?
 
Never mind.
 
Lumas”—he nodded toward the bedroom—“thinks he’s dying, as I told you.
 
And he may be right, for all I know.
 
So anything he says I guess we can chalk up to that…”

“Do you think he’s dying, Paul?”

“How should I know?
 
Am I a doctor?
 
No.
 
But he’s been coughing up blood—you saw that.”
 
She grimaced.
 
“It might be tuberculosis, maybe an ulcer—“
 
He turned his head sharply to the left, his gaze on the darkened bedroom doorway, and put his hands on the arms of the chair, as if preparing to stand.
 
“Hank?” he called.
 
“Stay in bed, for God’s sake!
 
You’re in no condition…”
 
He stood, grabbed the kerosene lamp from the table beside the chair, and held it out so its light fell dimly into the bedroom.
 
He saw that Lumas was sitting up on the bed.
 
“Hank, lie down—you need to rest.”
 
Lumas stood very slowly, right hand to his stomach, the other hand against the bedpost.

“For Christ’s sake!” Paul muttered.
 
Out of the corner of his eye he saw slight movement on the couch.
 
He looked.
 
The child’s eyes had opened.

Lumas appeared in the bedroom doorway, his right hand still clutching his stomach.
 
“Hank,” Paul said, “please…go back to bed; you’re a sick man.”
 
He took a few quick steps toward Lumas, stopped, and saw to his left that the child had thrown the blanket to the floor.
 
“Rachel,”—he glanced at her—“cover him, would you?”
 
Rachel nodded, stood, went over to the couch, stooped over, picked up the blanket.

“Leave him be, Missus!” Lumas demanded.
 

Rachel looked up at him, then questioningly at Paul, who said, “Cover him, Rachel.”

“I said leave him be!” Lumas shouted.
 
A hint of violence had been added to the overwhelming power of his voice.

Rachel nervously straightened the blanket and looked confusedly at her husband.
 
“Paul?”

“For Christ’s sake, cover him, Rachel!”

Lumas’s movements were impossibly quick.
 
In a second he was above the child, and, in the next second, his huge hands had encircled the child’s throat.
 
For an instant, from opposite vantage points, Paul and Rachel watched a trembling, surrealistic tableau—blue veins bulging on the back of Lumas’s hands, and the firm muscles and arteries of the child’s neck bulging above them.

Then Paul, lantern still in his right hand, threw his left arm around Lumas’s throat and pulled.
 
“Jesus Christ, Hank!” he hissed.
 
“Let go, let go!”
 
But the older man’s strength was immense.
 
Paul held the lantern out for Rachel; she dropped the blanket and took the lantern.
 
Paul threw his freed arm around Lumas’s chest, planted his feet firmly on the floor, and pulled hard.
 
“Rachel!” he shouted.
 
“His hands, get his hands!”
 
But before Rachel could act, Paul broke the man’s grip on the child and the two of them—Paul and Lumas—fell backward to the floor.

In the moment’s silence that followed, Paul knew that one of his ribs had been cracked or broken.
 
A lower rib, he guessed—his sudden, panicked breathing was agony.
 
“Rachel,” he moaned, “get him off!”
 
But, he realized in the next moment, Lumas was already on his feet and was pointing stiffly at the child, still sitting up on the old couch, his perfect, dark face expressionless.

And from the floor, Paul could see Lumas’s nostrils flaring, his arms quivering, the great mound of white hair falling over his blood-soaked shirt.
 
“You go back!” the old man shouted.
 
“You go back!”
 
Each word was an abominable, gurgle-filled gasp.

Seconds later, Lumas turned, crossed through the kitchen, and fled out the back door.

Paul was tired, his ribs hurt, he was not, Rachel realized, in the mood for talk, especially for the kind of talk they had almost pointedly avoided in the past week.
 
It had been easy enough to avoid it.
 
Paul would complain that his ribs were bothering him, so he didn’t feel like talking, that he’d rather do some reading, and Rachel, after a feeble protest, would accept that.
 
Or he’d find some small chore to perform when they were in the same room and talk seemed imminent.
 
He had finished putting new screens around the front porch, had sanded down and re-hung the cellar door—with Rachel’s help—had begun patching the back steps, had torn apart and rebuilt the generator, hoping that would effect a repair; it hadn’t.

The silence, Rachel thought, had begun at the clinic a week earlier.
 
No, she decided, it had actually begun when they had pulled away from the house and Paul, sitting stiffly in the passenger seat, left hand pressed hard to his rib cage, had asked, “Is the boy upstairs?”

“Yes.
 
He’s in the back bedroom,” she’d answered.
 
“The door’s locked.

“Good.”

That had been the beginning of it, she thought—the beginning of their silence.

Later, in the examining room, it had grown more profound:
 
“How did this happen?” the doctor asked.
 
“You’ve got a couple cracked ribs there.”

And Paul had answered, too quickly, “I fell.
 
Off our back steps.”

Rachel had thought just briefly of contradicting him, but not as if it would be the right thing to do, but because the truth had already settled in, and she had been mentally toying with it.

Just as she had been for the last, silent week.

Paul, too, she realized, had been toying with the truth—had been turning it over, examining it from all angles, had been trying very hard to accept it.

Had
he accepted it? she wondered.
 
And if he had, was it the same truth she grappled with?

“Paul?” she said.

He lowered himself painfully into his winged-back chair.
 
“Got to get a new regulator for that damned thing,” he said, referring to the generator he’d just coerced—with various obscenities and fumbling with a screwdriver and hammer—into noisy and unsteady life.
 
“Going to keep blowing light bulbs if we don’t get a new regulator.”

“Can we get one in town?” Rachel asked.

“I suppose so.
 
Yes.”

“Well then…”

“All in its own good time, Rachel.
 
All in its own good time.”

Rachel took a deep breath.
 
“Why, Paul?”

“Why what?”

“Why ‘All in its own good time’?”

“I don’t understand.”

She sighed.
 
“Only because you don’t want to understand.”

An obviously forced chuckle came from him, then ended abruptly.
 
He put his hand to his ribs.
 
“Jesus Christ!”
 
He glanced toward the bedroom.
 
“I’m going to lie down a while.
 
My ribs feel better when I lie down.”
 
He prepared to stand.

“Please don’t,” Rachel said crisply.

He pretended a dumbfounded look.
 
“Oh, I understand—you like to see me in pain.”

“Of course not.”

“Well then, you’ll let me go lie down, won’t you!”

“Paul, I…”
 
She stopped, obviously uncertain how to continue.

“Yes?” Paul coaxed.

“We have to talk.”

He stood more quickly than she thought he could:
 
“You want to talk about the boy, right?”

Brief hesitation, then, “There are a couple of things we need to talk about.
 
Mr. Lumas, for instance—“

“He can take care of himself,” Paul snapped.
 
“He’s done it well enough all these years.
 
He doesn’t need us.”

“You seem very sure of that.”

“Listen,”—Paul sighed—“I saw him yesterday morning, when I was fixing the steps, and he looked just fine.”

“Where did you see him?
 
Did you talk to him?”

“As if I really want to—you seem to forget what he did.
 
You want to talk to him, you go right ahead.
 
But as far as I’m concerned—“

“So you didn’t talk to him.”

“I
saw
him, and he looked just fine.
 
Now, may I please go and lie down?”

“And what about the boy, Paul?”

He sighed heavily.
 
“We’ve been over it a thousand times: the boy—“

“Over it a thousand times?
 
What in the hell are you talking about?
 
We’ve hardly even—“

“He’s
your
responsibility, Rachel.
 
I’ve got myself to worry about.
 
I thought we discussed that.”

“
My
responsibility?
 
He’s
our
responsibility, Paul.
 
I don’t know, he’s probably the state’s responsibility, when you get right down to it.
 
We can’t just—“

“Well, it seems that that’s what we’re doing, Rachel.”

Silence.

“Oh, c’mon, darling,” he continued.
 
“You know very well why we’ve kept him this long.
 
It’s that damned road.
 
The fucking thing’s impassable in all the rain we’ve been having.”
 
He smiled feebly, as if at the punch line of a bad joke.
 
“As soon as the weather clears—“

“Paul, we’re kidding ourselves.
 
That child…has done something to us…
 
He’s…he’s—“
 
She stopped, unsure how to continue.

Paul said nothing for a moment: he seemed to be weighing her words.
 
“Oh?” he said.
 
“
What
has the child
done
to us?”

“You bastard!” she hissed.

“Precisely,” he said, smiling again.
 
“Now, may I please go lie down?”

She said nothing.

*****

It was a small square room, “claustrophobic,” Rachel called it; it had a low ceiling, and its walls had once been white but time and weather had turned them a bilious yellow.

Over the years, the afternoon sun through the one narrow window in the middle of the west wall had lefts its long, dark, rectangular imprint on the pine floor.
 
Now the window—like the east-facing window in the front bedroom—was boarded up:
 
“We’ll wait on that,” Paul had told the glazier the previous Monday.
 
“We’re not going to be using these rooms, anyway.”
 

And so the room would have been dark had it not been for the bare low-wattage bulb in the middle of the ceiling; trailing diagonally from the bulb to the northeast corner of the room, and from to a small hole in the floor, was a length of brown electrical cord.
 
Paul had installed the bulb when he and Rachel had concluded that leaving a kerosene lamp in the room would be foolish, at best.

And besides, Rachel pointed out, there was the child to consider.
 
How much he seemed to crave what little sunlight filtered into the room through openings between the boards on the window.
 
The feeble artificial light Paul had provided was no substitute, of course, but, for the moment, it would have to do.

Paul had also put a small folding cot against the south wall.
 
Rachel, hoping to cheer the room up, had covered its mattress with a bright pink sheet; the top sheet and pillow case matched it.
 
And because the combination of yellow walls and bright pink sheets had been, as Rachel called it, “nauseating,” she had, in an attempt to balance the colors, hung an old print—a landscape; green dominated—in an ornate white frame several feet above the bed.
 
Neither she nor Paul had commented on the effect it produced.