The Winter People (15 page)

I killed myself again and again in my dreams.

I’d wake up weeping, full of sorrow to find myself alive, trapped in my wretched body, in my wretched life. Alone in this bedroom with its white walls stained yellow from years of dust, smoke, and grime. Only me and the wooden bed with the feather mattress, the closet where our ragged clothes hang, the nightstand, the dresser full of our underthings, and the chair Martin sits in each night to take off his boots. When Gertie was alive, this room, the whole house, seemed to glow and radiate warmth. Now everything is dim, ugly, cold.

I came to believe that there was no point going on without my little Gertie, my sweet tadpole of a girl. Every time I closed my eyes, she was there, falling down that well, only in my mind it was a fall that went on forever. She went on and on into blackness until she was a tiny speck, and then—nothing at all. And when I opened my eyes, there was only the empty room, empty bed, my empty, aching heart.

I stopped eating. I hadn’t the energy to leave the bed. I just lay there, drifting in and out, imagining my own death. Martin came and went. He tried to spoon-feed me, cooing at me as if I were an injured baby bird. When that failed to yield results, he tried yelling, screaming sense into me: “Damn it, woman! It was Gertie who died! Not you. You and I, we’ve got to carry on living.”

Lucius came to see me several times. He brought a tonic that is supposed to help build my strength. It was thick and bitter, and the only way I could get it down was by imagining that it was deadly poison.

My niece, Amelia, tried to rouse me. She came into the room gaily, in a new bright dress, her hair neatly plaited. She brought me tea and shortbread cookies that came in a tin all the way from England.

“I had Abe Cushing order them for me special,” she said, prying open the tin and offering me a cookie. I took one and nibbled at the edge. It tasted like sawdust.

While Martin was with us, Amelia chatted about the news from town—there had been a fire at the Wilsons’ house, Theodore Grant was fired from the mill for showing up too drunk to work, Minnie Abare was pregnant with her fifth child (she was hoping for a girl, of course, what with four boys already).

After a few minutes, Martin left us alone.

“The dead never really leave us,” she whispered, stroking my hair. “I have been to the spiritualist circle in Montpelier,” she told me. “Gertie came through. She rapped on the table for us, told us she is fine and misses you very much. The women of the circle want you to join us. They can come here, to West Hall. We’ll meet in my house, and you can see for yourself. You can talk to Gertie again.”

Liar
, I wanted to scream. But all I could do was close my eyes and drift back to sleep.

I woke up, sure Gertie was right there beside me. I could feel her, smell her. Then I opened my eyes and she was gone.

How cruel this life had become. How cold and empty and cruel.

And so I prayed. I prayed for the Lord I had by then forsaken to take me. Take me to join my Gertie. When this did not work, I prayed to the Devil to come and set my soul free.

Then, yesterday morning, Martin came in and kissed my forehead tenderly.

“I’m going into the woods to do some hunting. I was out scouting earlier and saw some nice tracks—a large buck, from the look of them. Amelia is coming by this afternoon. She’ll fix you lunch and sit with you until I’m home. I’ll be back before dark.”

I didn’t bother to nod, just rolled over and went back to sleep.

I dreamed Martin was chasing a deer through the woods; then the deer, somehow, had come into the house and was standing at the foot of my bed. I lifted my head for a closer look and discovered it wasn’t a deer at all, but Auntie.

She looked older, wiser, but still wore her deerskin coat with the quills, beads, and painted flowers. She smelled like leather, tobacco, and damp, tangled woods. I felt instantly comforted, and believed, for the first time in days, that things would be all right. Auntie was back. And Auntie could fix anything.

Auntie was talking to me. At first I couldn’t understand what
she was saying, and I thought she was speaking the language of deer, which is silly, because deer are silent animals. The bedroom was dark, full of shadows that moved and twirled around us. The bed felt high up, as if it were floating over the wide pine floorboards, going up higher and higher, Auntie perched at the end like the masthead of a ship.

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

“The closet,” she told me plainly. I was relieved that she was speaking words I could understand.

“My Gertie is gone,” I told her, beginning to weep. “My little girl.”

She nodded and looked at me a long time with her coal-black eyes. “Would you like to see her one more time?” Auntie asked. “Would you like a chance to say goodbye?”

“Yes,” I said, sobbing. “Just one moment with her. I would give anything.”

“Then you are ready. Do you hear me, Sara Harrison? You are ready.”

The bed came floating back down to the floor. The room brightened. Auntie turned and walked back into the closet, shutting the door behind her. I closed my eyes, opened them. I was awake. The room smelled like the air after a lightning storm. Judging by the light, it was still morning. Martin hadn’t been gone long.

I lay there a minute, thinking of the dream—of the deer and of Auntie. Remembering what she told me that long-ago afternoon when I first asked her about sleepers:

I will write it all down, everything I know about sleepers. I will fold up the papers, put them in an envelope, and seal it with wax. You will hide it away, and one day, when you are ready, you will open it up
.

I leapt from my bed and ran down the hall to Gertie’s room, which was my own bedroom when I was growing up. I was weak. My body felt as light and floaty as a bit of dandelion fluff, but was humming with a new, strange energy, a drive such as I had never known before.

I hadn’t been in her room since that terrible day, and I hesitated for a second before pulling the door open. Everything was just as she’d left it: the unmade bed, the tangled covers we’d hidden under
together on that last morning. Her nightgown was thrown on top of the bed; her closet door was open, and one dress was missing—the dress she put on to follow her father out into the yard and woods.

Look out, Papa. Here comes the biggest cat in the jungle
.

The dress she had chosen was her favorite, blue with tiny white flowers. We had made it together when school first started, out of material she’d picked out at the store. She helped cut the pieces and even did some of the sewing herself, pumping the treadle and guiding the fabric through the machine.

It is the dress we buried her in.

Over on the right side of her room, there were shelves that contained a few toys and books and little treasures she’d collected: pretty rocks, the beautiful magnifying glass Amelia had given her, a few funny little animal sculptures she’d made out of clay from the river, a ball and jacks I’d bought her at the general store. (Martin had asked me not to spend money on such things, but how could I help it?)

It took my breath away, being in her room. I could smell her, taste her in the air around me. It was almost too much to bear. Then I remembered what I’d come for.

I pushed the heavy, wood-framed bed aside, found the loose floorboard where the left rear foot of the bed had rested. I dug my fingers into the crack so deeply that I tore a fingernail, but soon I was able to work the board free.

There was Auntie’s envelope, right where I had hidden it when I was nine years old, the wax seal unbroken.

I tucked the envelope into my nightgown, pushed back the bed, then returned to my own room. I made a tent of the covers, as Gertie and I used to do, and opened the envelope, hidden. Inside were several pages carefully folded. I had to hold up one side of the blanket to let in enough light to read by.

There was Auntie’s familiar scrawl. It sent a wave of memories through me. Auntie teaching me how to write my letters, how to tell a poisonous mushroom from one that was good to eat. I felt her beside me once more, smelled her pine-tree, leather, and tobacco smell; I heard her voice, soft and musical, as she breathed life’s lessons into my ear.

Seven days, I thought to myself, as sinister wheels began to turn. What I wouldn’t give to have my Gertie back for seven whole days!

January 25, 1908

The noise woke him sometime after midnight—a scratching, a scuttling. His eyes shot open, and he lay in the dark, listening.

Pale moonlight came in through the bedroom’s frost-covered window, giving everything a bluish glow. He stared up at the plaster ceiling, listening. The fire had died down, and the room was cold. He inhaled, then exhaled, feeling as if the room were breathing with him.

There it was again. The scratching. Nails against wood. He held his breath and listened.

Mice? No. Too big for mice. It sounded like something large trying to claw its way out of the walls. Behind the scrabbling, he heard what sounded like the rustle of flapping wings.

He thought of the chicken he’d found in the woods this morning—another one of their hens taken. Only this time it didn’t seem like the work of a fox. He found the carcass up near the rocks. The chicken’s neck had been broken, and its chest had been opened up, the heart removed. He didn’t know of any animal that would do a thing like that. He’d buried the body in rocks, tried to put it out of his mind.

His own heart thudding now, he felt the bed beside him, expecting to find Sara’s warm body, but the bed was cold. Had she gone into Gertie’s room again? Were the two of them hidden under the covers, giggling?

No. Gertie was dead. Buried in the ground.

He remembered the way she’d looked when they hauled her body out of the well. Like she was sleeping.

He recalled the feel of her hair in his pocket, coiled softly like a snake.

“Sara?” he called.

He’d been sick with worry over Sara these last days. She had stopped eating, would not leave the bed, would not feed or wash herself. She seemed to get weaker and less responsive with each passing day.

“Honestly, there’s nothing we can do but wait,” Lucius told him. They had been standing in the kitchen, speaking in hushed voices. “Keep trying to get food and water into her, give her the tonic, offer whatever comfort you can.”

“I keep thinking about when we lost Charles,” Martin said. “How sick with grief she was.” He didn’t want to say what he was thinking, not even to his own brother: This time it was worse. This time, he feared, she might not come back to him.

It was one thing to lose poor Gertie, but if he lost Sara, too, his life would be over.

“I don’t want to frighten you, Martin,” Lucius said. “But if she doesn’t come around soon, I think it might be best if we sent her to the state hospital for the insane over in Waterbury.”

Martin’s whole body went rigid.

“It’s not a terrible place,” Lucius said. “They have a farm. The patients get outside every day. They would keep her safe.”

Martin shook his head. “She’ll get better,” he vowed. “I’ll help her to get better. I’m her husband. I can keep my own wife safe.”

But as far as he could tell, Sara was growing worse with each passing hour. And now here it was the middle of the night and she was missing.

“Sara?” he called once more, listening.

And there it was again—the scratching, tapping, fluttering—louder this time, more frantic.

He sat up, scanning the room in the darkness. He could make out the edge of the bed, the dresser to his left, and there, in the right corner, a form hunched, moving slightly, pulsating.

No.

Breathing. It was breathing.

The scream stuck in his throat, coming out as only a hiss.

He looked around frantically for a weapon, something heavy, but then the thing moved, raised its head, and he saw his wife’s long auburn hair shine in the dim moonlight.

“Sara?” he gasped. “What are you doing?”

She was sitting on the floor in front of the closet, wearing her thin nightgown, her bare feet as pale as marble against the dark floor. She was shivering.

She did not move, did not seem even to hear him. Worry gnawed at his insides like an ugly rat.

“Come back to bed, darling. Aren’t you cold?”

Then he heard it again. The scratching. Claws against wood.

It was coming from inside the closet.

“Sara,” he said, standing on shaking legs, blood pounding through his head, making a roaring sound in his ears. The room seemed to shift around him, growing longer. The distance between himself and Sara felt impossibly far. The moonlight hit the closet door. He could see it move slightly, the knob slowly turning.

“Move away from there!” he cried.

But his wife sat still, eyes fixed on the door.

“It’s our Gertie,” she said calmly. “She’s come back to us.”