Blackbird House (16 page)

Jim couldn’t say no to that.
 
Just last year, Mattie Hammond, eighty-four years old and all on her own, had been snowed into her cottage during a blizzard.
 
The drifts had been so high, Mattie couldn’t open her front door and had nearly starved to death before Jim came to plow out the street.
 
Despite the blanket of white that could cause semi-blindness in some men while they were at the plow, Jim had noticed the square handkerchief Mattie had taped up in a window to signal her distress.
 
There were some things Jim Farrell couldn’t deny a neighbor, particularly on a snowy night, and other situations Grace couldn’t turn away from either, and because they didn’t like to argue with each other, no matter their differences, they left it at that.

Jim went out to his truck at four in the afternoon, headed for the department of public works.
 
It was the hour when everything turned blue the snow, the white fences, the white clapboards of the house that luminous time when the line between earth and sky disappeared.

“I want you boys to go shovel over at Rosalyn Brooks’,” Grace called into the living room.
 
She had ladled out a separate pot of tomato soup despite what Jim had advised.
 
“Take the shovels and bring this soup with you.”

When there was no response, Grace went into the living room and stood in front of the TV The boys would watch just about anything, but their favorite show was You Asked For It, on tonight at seven.
 
There were the most amazing things out there in the world, and all you had to do was ask and you’d see it right in front of you, on your very own screen.

“I’m turning this off,” Grace announced, then did so.
 
“I want you to shovel.”

“At the Brookses’,” Jamie said.
 
“We heard.”

“Can’t.
 
I’ve got a history paper,” Hank said.
 
“Sorry, Mom, but it’s due tomorrow.”

Hank was having his troubles in school, so Grace let him stay and sent

Jamie on his own, making sure he bundled up, handing him his hat, which

he often managed to forget, watching to make certain he pulled on his

scarf and his leather gloves.
 
The pot of soup was under one arm, the

shovel carried over his shoulder.
 
He was a quiet boy, not much of a

student, but lovable to his mother in some deep way, so that she

worried about him as she didn’t anyone else in this world.
 
Perhaps it

was true that mothers had favorites, at least now and then.
 
Grace

watched Jamie disappear into the blue of the field and felt a catch in

her throat.
 
Love, she presumed.
 
A moment of realizing exactly how

lucky she was, of being grateful that she was not Coral

Hadley, that her son was not out on the ocean, but was instead traipsing through the snowy reaches of their own familiar acreage.

When he was alone, Jamie tended to hum.
 
His mother was a fan of musicals, particularly The King and I, and Jamie found himself humming “Getting to Know You.”
 
His mother loved Yul Brynner, for reasons Jamie couldn’t understand.
 
The king he played was bald, for one thing; he was bossy as all get-out for another.
 
All the same, the song stuck.
 
Sometimes when Jamie walked through this field, in winter, at exactly this hour, he would see deer.
 
There were wild turkeys too, crazy birds that had very little fear of humans and would run straight at you if you invaded their territory.
 
There was a shortcut to the Brookses’, through the winterberry vines.
 
The berries were shiny and red; sometimes you’d happen upon a skunk as you made your way through the brambles, and that skunk would just go on feeding, calm as could be, rightfully assured that few creatures other than the neighborhood dogs would be stupid enough to interrupt or attack.

Jamie was in the winterberry, thinking about deer, singing softly to himself, when he heard it.
 
A clap of thunder.
 
A snowplow on the road.
 
A firecracker.
 
He stopped for a minute and breathed in snowflakes.

When he breathed out, his breath was like a steam engine.
 
It melted

the snow off the winter berries
 
He listened.
 
He was good at that, but

he heard nothing, so he went on.
 
He was that sort of boy,

intent on the task at hand.
 
He knew what his mother wanted him to do: shovel from the Brookses’ front door to their driveway.
 
He and Hank had done it before, last year.
 
Mr.
 
Brooks hadn’t been at home, but Mrs.
 
Brooks had made them hot chocolate, which they drank out on the front step.
 
Now, alongside the Chevy, there was Mr.
 
Brooks’ truck, a wreck of a thing, battered, leaking oil into the snow.

Jamie tried to balance the soup on the front step, but the step was made from an uneven piece of stone.
 
He went up to the door then, to deliver the soup before he started to work.
 
His breath did the same thing to the glass window set into the door as it did to the winter berries melted off the snow, then fogged it up.
 
But even through the fog he could see Rosalyn Brooks, right there on the floor with no clothes on and something red all over her face.
 
He should have backed away; he should have run home, done something, anything, but he had never seen a naked woman before, and it was as though he were hypnotized, frozen in place, while his breath kept melting the snow.
 
One minute he had been a fourteen-year-old boy with nothing much on his mind.
 
Now he was someone else entirely.

He was still holding on to the pot of tomato soup when he opened the door.
 
People didn’t lock up much in their town; there was nothing to steal and no one to steal it.
 
Jamie walked in as though he’d been drawn inside by a magnetic force.
 
The Brookses’ house was an old farm house, like the Farrells’, but it hadn’t been updated.
 
It was cold and empty, and the only light turned on was in the kitchen, all the way down the hall.
 
Everything looked blue inside the house, except for the thing that was red.
 
It was blood that was all over Rosalyn Brooks, but when she looked up and saw Jamie she seemed most panicked by the fact that she was naked.
 
She let out a strange sound and grabbed for a rag rug, trying to cover herself.
 
It was a sob, that’s what Jamie realized.
 
That was the sound.

“I brought you soup,” he said.
 
“It’s from my mother.”

Mrs.
 
Brooks looked at him as though he were crazy.

“She makes it herself.”
 
Jamie felt like running, but he didn’t seem capable of turning away.
 
He had the feeling he might be paralyzed.
 
“Are you all right?”

Rosalyn Brooks laughed, or at least Jamie thought that’s what it was.

“Just stay there,” he said.
 
“I’ll get you something.”

He put the soup on a tabletop and went to the hall closet, grabbing for the first thing he felt, bringing back a heavy black woolen coat.

“It’s okay,” he said, because of the way she was looking at him.
 
As though she was scared.
 
“It’s a coat.”

Rosalyn Brooks stared at him, then took the coat and put it on.
 
Jamie Farrell looked away; all the same, he glimpsed her breasts, blue in the light of the house, and her belly, which was oddly beautiful.
 
She had bruises all over, that much he noticed as well, on her legs and shoulders especially.
 
He saw now that her lip was split open and she could barely see through the slits of her eyes.

“Do you want me to heat you some soup?”
 
It was so cold in the house that Jamie’s breath came out in billows, and he was embarrassed by his own heat.
 
When Mrs.
 
Brooks didn’t answer, he figured she wanted him to take the pot into the kitchen, but as he turned to head down the hall, Rosalyn lurched from her prone position and grabbed his pants leg.
 
She did it so hard and so fast he almost fell over.
 
She looked at him then in a way that convinced him something really bad had happened.
 
Somebody else might have taken off running, back through the winter berries snagging his clothes as he raced through the bushes, but Jamie crouched down beside Mrs.
 
Brooks.

“Where’s Josephine?”
 
he asked.

That was the Brookses’ little daughter.
 
Josephine liked to pick the sweet peas in the field.
 
She liked the pears that dropped to the ground from the big tree in the Farrells’ yard.
 
Rosalyn looked up the stairs.
 
‘

“Is she in bed?”

“Asleep.”

At least Mrs.
 
Brooks could talk.
 
That was a relief.

“My husband had an accident.”

“Okay,” Jamie said.
 
“Should we call my dad?
 
He could help.”

“No.
 
You can’t call him.”

He could tell that whatever had happened was bad from her tone.
 
Still, he stayed.
 
Maybe Jamie felt he owed Rosalyn Brooks his allegiance because he’d seen her naked, or maybe it was all that blood, or the way his breath was so hot and the house so very cold.

“In the kitchen?”

Mrs.
 
Brooks nodded.
 
She was not yet thirty, a young woman, pretty under other circumstances.

“I’ll just go in there and get a dish towel to stop the bleeding,” Jamie said, for her lip and her scalp were oozing.

But when he rose, she grabbed his leg again.

“It’s okay,” he assured her.
 
“I’ll be right back.”

The hallway was even colder.
 
These old houses had no insulation, and the kitchen was especially chilly.
 
There was even more blood on the floor, especially around Hal Brooks’ body, which was right in front of the stove.
 
Jamie tried not to look too closely.
 
He grabbed a dish towel, ran cold water over it, then brought it back to Rosalyn.
 
He wondered if he had stepped in the blood and if it was on the soles of his boots, if he’d left tracks down the hall.
 
Then he stopped wondering.
 
He put those thoughts aside.
 
Rosalyn was sitting on the floor now, the coat buttoned; when he handed her the dish towel, she held it up to her lip.

“What do you want to do with him?”
 
Jamie said.

Outside, the blue was turning into darkness.
 
A black night.
 
So quiet you could hear the cardinals nesting in the hedges outside the Brookses’ window.
 
The snow fell harder.
 
Jamie figured his father was up on the main road with his plow by now.

They sat there in silence in the cold house.

“I’ll shovel your path, and then I’ll come back,” Jamie said.
 
“You think about what you want to do.”

“Okay” Rosalyn said.
 
“I will.”

Jamie went out and shoveled hard and fast.
 
It was heavy snow, thick and dense, the kind that he would have thought was good for snowball fights on any other occasion.
 
He wasn’t thinking that way now.
 
He was thinking of the pond beyond the field.
 
In the old days, food could be stored in the summer kitchen right up until July if enough ice was stacked against the walls.
 
He’d heard the old woman who’d lived in their house a while back had hauled blocks of ice from the pond until her horse, the one who’d lived in the barn they’d begun to tear down, slipped through the ice and drowned.

The kitchen floor at the Brookses’ was already clean when Jamie came back inside.
 
Rosalyn Brooks had mopped up, then washed her face and pulled back her honey-colored hair.
 
There were still streaks of blood in her scalp, but Jamie Farrell didn’t have the heart to tell her.

Rosalyn went to check on her daughter, then she came back downstairs

and put on her husband’s work boots
 
She looked even more delicate

wearing them.
 
She didn’t bother with gloves.
 
At least there was a

blanket around Mr.
 
Brooks, and

Jamie was grateful for that.
 
They tried to pull him along the floor, and when that didn’t work, Jamie went and got the wheelbarrow from the garage.
 
He was so hot he felt like taking off his hat and his scarf, but if he misplaced them, his mother would have his head.

It took all their combined strength to push the wheelbarrow through the snow.
 
The thick, heavy snow that they quietly cursed.
 
They stopped for a break halfway across the field; they both looked up at the falling snow.
 
Rosalyn put her arms out, and tilted her head back.
 
Jamie had never thought about the future, who he was, what he would do.
 
It had all been a haze.
 
Now he saw that blood was still seeping through Rosalyn’s hair and he thought she probably needed stitches.
 
He saw that his future was almost here.