The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (17 page)

“Dick’s the one seen you.”

Lily waited for the accusation.

“Yesterday evenin’ in the field.”

Not last night, she thought. Last night I was at rehearsal and then at Martin’s.… She looked at Dick.

“Guess it don’t matter now,” Frank said.

Dick leaned toward her again. He closed one eye as though that would improve his vision.

Frank was silent. The three of them sat without saying a word for at least a minute. Then, not able to take it anymore, she shouted, “I don’t understand.”

Neither man answered. They glanced at each other. Then, apparently responding to the look from his brother, Dick slowly rose from the chair and shuffled into the kitchen. Intermittent clatter sounded from that room for several minutes. Frank reached into his shirt pocket and retrieved a pouch of chewing tobacco, took a pinch of the tiny brown leaves between his thumb and index finger and lodged the tobacco inside his cheek. As far as Lily could tell, he had no consciousness of her presence. Maybe I can just stand up and leave, she thought. She eyed the spade again, considered getting up, then stayed put.

Eventually, Dick emerged from the kitchen carrying a brown plastic tray with a tin coffeepot, three cups and some oblong cookies smeared with white frosting arranged on a plate. His boots never left the floor. He pushed his feet forward like a child on skates for the first time, his eyes fixed on the cups, his hands trembling. The room had no table on which to lower the tray, but Dick clearly had his next move planned. He came to a full stop and began to bend his knees a little at a time. Once he had lowered himself about six inches, he held the position for a couple of seconds as if to confirm that he had gone that far, bent over and abruptly set the tray on the floor. Cups clinked, cookies slid, but the tray was stabilized in a spot beside one of the toasters. Without standing up, Dick started the business of pouring coffee. He handed her a cup, and Lily looked into the black liquid. Grease bubbles floated on its surface, but she brought the dirty cup to her lips and drank. It didn’t taste bad—a little oily, but strong and good.

Dick watched her intently. “Egg,” he said.

“Pardon me?” Lily shouted.

Frank shouted back at her. “There’s an egg in the coffee!”

Dick nodded. He righted himself and poked the cookie plate under her nose. Lily took a cookie.

Once they had settled themselves with the coffee and cookies, Lily roared at Dick, “I don’t understand. You couldn’t have seen me here last night. I wasn’t here.”

Dick nodded, but Lily wasn’t sure what the nod meant, whether he was signaling that he had heard her or that he agreed with her. He spoke in that odd voice of his. “I seen Marty carryin’ you across the field and over the road.”

“What?” Lily said, but not loudly enough. Then she corrected herself and yelled, “Marty?”

“Marty Petersen from down the road,” Frank said.

“Yesterday?” Lily said.

Dick continued, his eyes on the window. Slowly he extended his arms in front of him, his elbows bent. Lily watched the coffee cup in his right hand tip dangerously. “I seen Marty carryin’ you like you was fainted or…” He didn’t finish but lowered his arms without spilling and then rubbed the cup with both hands. “It was you,” he said to the window. “I seen your eyes and face and hair. I called to him.” Dick changed his voice. “‘Mar-ty!’ I says. ‘Who you got there? Come back, Marty,’ but he din’t answer me. He walks on ’cross the road and down by the creek and into the woods. I ain’t got the legs to run no more, so I goes into Frank and tells him what I seen.” Dick glanced at Lily for an instant, then fixed his eyes on the window again. He nodded, squinted, turned back to her and said, “But here you are in the peak of health.”

Lily leaned forward and stared at Dick. “What time was it?”

Dick looked at Frank, his face a question.

Frank said, “I’d say early evenin’. Wasn’t dark yet.”

Both men were silent. Lily looked from one to the other. It was crazy. The whole thing was nuts. She waited for them to speak.

Neither one said a word for at least half a minute. Then Frank took a breath and said, “Well, that’s that.”

Lily stared at Frank and swallowed. He gave a little push and raised himself from the chair, then started for the kitchen. This was her cue to leave, and she didn’t feel she could ignore it. She set her cup carefully on the floor, nodded at Dick, who didn’t respond, and then followed Frank to the door.

She tried again. “It must have been someone else,” she said. “And if it was someone else, it could be, well…” She didn’t finish that sentence but added another. “I don’t think we can just let it drop like this.” Lily hugged the bag with the shoes in it and looked down at the floor. Frank’s boots had left prints on the linoleum, which was already thick with mud.

He didn’t answer her. Instead, he opened the screen door and held it ajar for her.

Lily walked outside, turned on the stone step and looked at him. “Mr. Bodler,” she said. “If you see anything else, will you promise to call me? I can leave you my number.”

He let the screen door slam shut and eyed her through it. “Ain’t got no phone.”

Everybody has a phone, Lily thought. It doesn’t matter how poor you are. Everybody’s got a telephone.

Frank put his nose close to the screen. “It’s Dick,” he said in a confidential tone that surprised her. “Don’t like ’em, don’t like hearin’ those faraway voices without no bodies. Even before he lost his hearin’, he din’t like it.” Frank shook his head at Lily. “Said it was like talkin’ to a spirit, and what’s the sense of aggravatin’ him with that? We had one. Sold it to Pete Lund. He collects them old phones, and we got a good price for it. Don’t miss it neither. Folks come here or we go there, don’t matter.”

Lily nodded at him. “I see,” she said. “Good-bye, then.”

The man did not say good-bye. Neither brother seemed able to punctuate comings and goings in the usual way, and Lily found the absence of these words unnerving. She watched Frank turn, move across the kitchen floor and disappear. Then, instead of walking to her bicycle, she took a right and headed for the woods behind the house.

Lily chose a spot at the foot of a small cliff that followed the creek. The place was deeply familiar to her. As a child, she had roamed up and down Heath Creek, and the landscape had lived inside her ever since. Still, as she stood at the edge of the steep bank overlooking the water, she felt a change. It had been years since she had visited this spot, and it appeared to have shrunk. It took her several seconds before she realized it was she who had grown and that her new height had changed the proportions of everything else. The current of the swollen creek pushed at countless stalks of snake grass that bent over the water. The light through the trees glinted unevenly on the gray water. After she scrambled down the earth wall, she kneeled near the place she had picked out and dug with her hands. The soggy ground loosened easily, and when the hole was finished, she lifted the shoes from her bag, still wrapped in the cloth, and laid them gently inside it. After pressing them firmly into the hole, she pushed the wet dirt over them and fussed for a few minutes with the look of the surface, patting and smoothing until the spot was round and even. She examined her work, then leaned back on the wet ground and closed her eyes. She heard a woodpecker—a distant dull hammering, then a rustle of foliage from above. Lily looked sharply toward the noise, her ears straining to hear more. Leaves moved, a branch snapped. Would Frank have followed me? she thought. She stared at the cliff. It was one thing to get down, another to get up. If someone was there, by the time she crawled to the top, he would be long gone. She stood up, brushed her filthy hands on her shorts, stamped the mud off her sneakers and stared at the spot. Before she left, she found a smooth, oblong stone and put it there to mark the place.

Grabbing roots to steady herself as she dug her toes into the cliff, Lily scrambled to the top. She imagined Dick chasing Martin across the field on his short, stiff legs, and then Martin carrying a young woman in his arms, a woman with long dark hair like her own. There had to be a resemblance for Dick to make that mistake. Once she had scaled the cliff and was standing at the top, she looked beyond the house into the field and asked herself how it was possible that Dick, slow as he was, hadn’t managed to catch up with Martin. Martin had been carrying somebody, hadn’t he, so how fast could he run? Or maybe Dick had hallucinated the whole thing. Lily walked to her bike and pushed it up to the road. “She’s not alive,” Lily remembered Martin’s words and looked up at the sky. The cool wind blew against her face and then she heard a sound in the grass to her right. A brown rabbit darted past her and she watched him until he disappeared behind a hillock.

Lily rode to Martin’s house. She dreaded going, but she felt compelled to see the little house in daylight. Martin and his truck and his house and the map and the pictures all seemed worse in memory than they had when she was there, and now that Dick had told his strange story, she wanted to see the place again. She turned down the dirt road to Martin’s house and pedaled up a shallow hill that she had barely noticed when Martin was driving and stopped at its crest. She could see Martin’s truck in the driveway, and then Martin himself came running from behind the house, head down, and barreled through the door. Her bicycle bumped on the wet gravel and slid a couple of times as she coasted down the hill to the house.

What will he say when I tell him about Dick? she thought as she walked to the steps. Looking up at the door, Lily saw that it was open. Through the screen door she heard a squeaking noise and then the sound of somebody humming. She walked up the steps and looked into the living room straight at Martin. He was sitting in the rocking chair, which had been moved to the center of the room. The black fabric she had seen the night before was draped over his head as he rocked violently back and forth in the chair. And while he rocked, he hummed. Hectic, low and tuneless, the humming sounded more like an accelerated chant than real music. Lily didn’t understand what she was seeing, but she had a powerful sense that Martin’s rocking shouldn’t be interrupted, that whatever he was doing, he was doing it alone. She saw him push his feet off the floor to make the rocker go fast, heard the excited murmur of his voice and looked at the black cloth swing with his motion. Then she turned around, walked down the steps to the driveway and climbed onto her bicycle. All the way into town, Lily saw Martin rocking in that chair. Why would he do that? Did it mean something? He had run like crazy into the house to rock and hum with his head covered. By the time Lily crossed the city limits, she wished she could keep on riding her bicycle all the way to Florida.

*   *   *

That night Lily watched Mabel and Ed from her window. They were sitting in chairs across from each other in Ed’s room and didn’t budge from their seats for over an hour. Mabel waved her hands as she talked and Ed sketched. Lily saw his arm move in long, broad strokes, and then she saw him change the motion and shake his wrist. When he finished one drawing, he would rip it out of the large book, throw it to the floor and begin again. While he drew he leaned toward Mabel at the edge of his seat. Once he pushed back a lock of Mabel’s hair with his left hand, but Lily wasn’t able to see the woman’s expression because she was too far away. Several minutes later she watched Mabel cock her head to one side and hold her palms up. The gesture sent a small shock through Lily. She recognized it. They had practiced it together for Hermia when she speaks to Lysander early in the play: “Then let us teach our trial patience, / Because it is our customary cross, / As due to love as thoughts, and dreams, and sighs, / Wishes and Tears, poor Fancy’s followers.”

After work the next day, Lily found herself standing outside Ed’s door. She couldn’t keep herself away any longer. She heard Mabel talking, but she shut her ears to the words, knocked and opened the door before either of them answered it. It looked as though neither of them had moved since the night before. It couldn’t have been true, but they were sitting where they had been sitting, heads together, with sheets of paper scattered on the floor around them. Lily shut the door behind her.

Ed turned to her. “Lily?” he said. “Where have you been?”

Mabel looked at her, too. Her sincere expression irritated Lily.

Where have I been? she said to herself and answered, “Around.”

“We’ve called you several times,” Mabel said.

So it’s “we” now, Lily thought, but the fact that they had phoned comforted her.

“I guess I was out.” She took several steps toward them. “How’s it going?”

“Well,” Ed said. “I’ve been listening to Mabel for two days.” He paused, reached out his hand for hers, and Lily gave it to him. He held it tightly in both of his, and looked up at her. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

“Are you?” she asked. Her voice had no irony. She wanted to know.

“Of course I am,” he said. The man stroked her hand, and Lily looked into his eyes. She saw nothing guarded in them, but at the same time she didn’t know what to look for. She thought about Oscar Hansen on a gurney in Swensen’s Funeral Home.

Mabel had turned her eyes away from them, and when Lily looked at her, she saw the woman’s shoulders shake for an instant. Then she moved her hand out of Ed’s grip and looked down at the drawings. In all of them, Mabel was sitting in the canvas chair, her position only slightly different in each one. Her expression, however, was never the same. One fiercely animated face after another looked up at Lily from the floor. Mabel glared in one, squinted and frowned in another, her lips were parted, her lips were closed, her hands were raised from her elbows or splayed at either side of her face. These were images of the intense, shivering Mabel she knew, and despite the fact that they were still, Lily could almost feel them move.

Lily looked at Mabel. “Don’t you get tired of talking? Isn’t it hard?”

Mabel laughed. “I’m exhausted. But I’ve remembered moments in my life I haven’t thought about for years.” She paused. “It’s almost terrifying.”