Deathwatch - Final (16 page)

"No."

"The man will be here Friday to pick up the desk."

"I need that desk--"

Noreen bared her teeth and shook her head, no.

"But my dear, it's all different now. There's no distraction and I've gotten on swimmingly."

"You mean the last four days." His mother laughed and reached over and seized the wine glass. "Too bad, Cedric."

"Noreen, please."

Tom heard the desperation in his father's voice.

"You tell me, Cedric, what shall I toast to?" She sipped and held the glass up, "Because the first time I caught you when that little whore came in my house, you said she'd be an inspiration. Said the writing was going like a house afire." She tilted her throat and swallowed all of the wine in a single gulp. She banged the glass down and it rang against her plate. "And now that she's gone, you're telling me you're glad to be without the distraction." Noreen's green eyes blazed. "How far are you from the end, by the way?"

"Scant pages."

"How many pages?"

"The work of a lifetime. You can't rush these things." He looked away.

"Just what I thought," she said, her lips turned down in a sneer. "All right. Get out. All of you." She stood up, and everyone scattered.

Tom saw his father leading Rose from the room, her skinny hand riding his forearm, her sunken old mouth working. She muttered something Tom couldn't catch; at the door, Cedric suddenly turned. "Noreen," he said, "I think you might be making a mistake--"

"Let me alone." Her voice was tired, her eyes had a faraway look.

Noreen stared at her pale worn hands, at the broken grimed nails and yellow calluses as if the alien hands of a stranger had been grafted onto her wrists. Then she lowered her face against them and began to cry.

In the passageway, Tom's grandmother clenched her fist into a tight knot, held it up against her shriveled lips and whispered, "It isn't sweat and tears we want, it's blood." She shook her fist.

After she hobbled into the parlor, Tom saw two small reddish splashes on the scarred wainscoting. They were wet and he rubbed them with the ball of his thumb. Blood, he thought, at the same time from behind him in the dining room, he heard his mother give out a small gasp.

"Mother," he said, reversing his footsteps and leaning into the doorway. She was wiping her hands furiously on a napkin, then pressing it hard against her palm.

"It's nothing," she said. "A blister that opened. Go away, now."

He nodded, saying nothing. But the white napkin was soaked with blood.

***

Tom slipped down the stairs. The fire was banked, no more than a dim red glow. His parents’ argument whirled in his head. Was his father really on the verge of completing the manuscript? He felt his way in the dark to the desk. He knew there was a lamp on the right, and he turned up the wick and got it lit. The pile of manuscript pages was on the corner of the writing table. He began to glance through it. He saw it was an edited or recopied version. There were very few scratched out sentences; here and there a word was inserted or deleted with a thin black line. The stack was quite high.

He sat in the chair and opened the drawer.  It was stuffed with earlier versions of his father's book. These were the pages that were smudged, crossed through, and occasionally torn where his father had saved a few paragraphs. This put a new light on his father's work. The family opinion was that Cedric spent his days smoking and scratching his chin with the tip of his pen. But here was work, honest effort. He pulled the stack of pages closer: Chapter 8, Chapter 14. Somewhere toward the middle, Cedric had neatly lettered Part IV. There were hundreds of pages of copperplate script. He skipped ahead, stacking the manuscript face down on the left. In his hands he held the last fifteen pages Cedric had written. He only scanned, but the book was exactly what he expected; his father was a devout admirer of Dickens, (had even written a letter to him but never received a reply) and the plot involved a character named Sedgewick. The pages Tom held were entitled,
In which Sedgewick Finds his Past
--clearly a conclusion. There were lots of names; threads, he supposed, his father had carried though to the end. He read some scattered paragraphs and laid all but the last few pages aside. Sedgewick was in a graveyard digging up his mother's coffin, when suddenly the pen tailed off leaving a long ragged black stroke that ran down the blank space of the white page. He squinted to read the small uneven script, cramped against the edge of the paper.

       
Her cunt is hot, I fill her belly to fill myself
.

Cunt. His face burned. Here was a word written he'd only even heard aloud once or twice in his life. He felt his stomach muscles knot. He must've read it wrong. Wherever the thought came from, surely it wasn't on the paper. He squinted and then opened his eyes to look again.

It was there.

He moved the page aside, and looked at the one beneath it. The creamy paper was badly wrinkled, as if it’d been crushed into a ball, then smoothed out. In the middle of all that space was the single word Ellen had written three times. Just like that,  
EllenEllenEllen.
  It looked pale against a spattering of black ink drops, brownish smears.

Tom felt his heart beat faster. He moaned softly. His cousin's name was written in blood.

He was afraid, but he made himself look at the rest.

The pen stroked down wildly again, and on the next page he saw Sedgewick was back in gear, pulling at chunks of turf with his hands, then cutting a wider swath with a spade, his shovel at the ready to dig down.

It was like Cedric suffered a mental lapse, some kind of peculiar blank filled with dark imaginings.

He shoved the pages out of the way and put his head down on his arms. The words his father had written were terrible. He thought of Ellen crying in the kitchen, then running out to the rain, and Tom was aware inside himself there was a hollow place so vast, so empty it might never be filled again.

He'd known it, of course. He'd known, he realized, even before Ellen told him. What else had those night noises been? The creaking bedroom door, the lanternlight clicking as it moved down the hall, down the stairs. The soft half-grunts from the direction of the kitchen.

It was his father swiving Ellen. It was his father making her sleep in the room off the kitchen and creeping down the stairs at night when the rest of the house was asleep; but those small sounds had penetrated Tom's dreams. And the last noise, Tom mourned, the last noise was most terrible of all: a little girl weeping.

***

He blew out the light, but he didn't have the energy to climb the stairs to his sleeping loft. He sat, knees splayed in the chair, his fingertips still tingling from the touch of that page, from the awfulness of what he read. Tom shut his eyes. What in the name of Christ did sex have to do with writing?

Because as near as he could figure it, that's what his father seemed to think--that potency created a kind of magic that fed his work. Ellen was gone, and the work stopped. He rubbed his eyebrow with his fingers. There were a lot of things grown-ups said or did that made no sense, but he couldn't even begin to get any sort of handle on this one--

There was a low bubbling sound in the corner of the room. Tom sat forward. He waited. Perhaps it was just an ember sliding through the grate. There was a squeak--so low he wasn't sure he'd actually heard it. Tom stood up, trying to see across the shadowy space of the room.

He heard the soft rubbing squeak again, and he knew his grandmother was in the room. She chuckled, but the sound was like a bitter whisper.

"Not sex, no. It was the baby." The rocking chair moved more slowly than he would have thought possible. "You come here, boy." She swiveled around and pulled the drape cord. The nightsky was cloudy, the moon barely visible.

He walked toward her, and he could see her rheumy eyes, the shape of her face.

She reached out and pinched the flesh of his arm. "It's dead now--that's why the work stopped." She nodded. "It's dead because she's dead."

He stepped back, and she gave him a dreadful smile.

"In a ditch, boy. She's lying there--"

"No--"

"You'll see. When they bring ’er back," she said. "You think I'm crazy don't you?" Rose laughed. "But mind, see if I'm right. He'll have to get another woman. Noreen won't give ’im anymore." She pointed toward the desk, and Tom saw her skinny arm quiver. "You're in that book--just like your brothers and Delia. But he needs another woman to finish it. Another life." Her dark eyes gleamed. "That's why I'm here, to help."

Tom wanted to run, but he stood there, afraid her hands would fall on him the second he turned.

"You're going to see," she hissed. "And you're going to help, too. You interfered, and it killed her."

Her hand snaked out and caught his shirtfront. She dragged him forward until he was wedged against the arm of the rocker. He felt the wood pressing on his thighs, and he caught a whiff of her scent. She smelled so old. He tried to turn away, but her fingers crawled higher, and she gripped his neck and pulled his face to hers.

"Your touch killed her. I set my finger on that life, and when she ran off, I had to kill her. She was going to kill herself," Rose spat viciously. "Don't you know if she killed herself your father would never have finished?" She turned on him. "She wouldn't have left if you hadn't interfered, hadn't kissed with her.

"You killed the life that fed the work of a lifetime. My boy would've done me proud. But you stopped it." Her voice went hard, and he felt her sharp nails digging in the skin of his neck. "Do it again, and see what happens."

He felt a sudden stabbing pain in both eyes. He tried to pull away, but she held onto him. He felt his skin break out in a sweat. The pain moved a notch higher and he moaned softly. Mother Mary, it's like spikes being pounded in.

He blinked, but he couldn't see. There was nothing but darkness. His hands flew up, he was sure his shaking fingers would find gaping holes. But in his panic, he couldn't tell. He would've sworn there was blood running down his cheeks. His breath came out in hot choked gasps.

She squeezed his throat, his hands tore at her wrists, and then the pain stopped abruptly, his vision cleared.

"You interfere again and I'll blind you--and that'll be just the beginning of what I do," Rose said. He felt a sharp pain in his groin, he gasped, and she shook him off. Tom stumbled and landed on his hands and knees. His face was damp with tears. "Answer the door," she said.

A second later, there was the sound of rushing horses and a heavy wagon skidding to a stop. Tom heard the crump crump of footsteps hurrying along the path. Someone shouted and pounded at the wooden door of the house.                                                   

A farmer with a heavy mustache stood on the step. He stared deeply into Tom's eyes, then dropped his gaze. He held his dirty hat in both of his big hands. "Where's yer folks, lad?"

"Asleep." Tom hung on the brass knob. The man had an anxious look about him.

"Might you have a sister, now?"

"What is it? Who's there?" Noreen's voice drifted down.  Tom heard his father stirring above him. Cedric's door opened in the hall.

The man spoke more quickly. "Name of Ellen?"

"My cousin." Tom felt the words bubble up on his lips.

The man wiped his eyes with his dirty sleeve. "I didn't see her, she ran in front," he pointed to the horses. "She--I didn't hit her, she jumped to get out of the way and fell over the side of a low stone bridge." He suddenly took Tom's shoulders in his hands. "Pink cloud. This here's Pink Cloud, right?" The man nodded, as if he were answering his own question. "The name were written in a little book she carried. Ellen Wood of Pink Cloud, County Meath. I drove all night."

His parents were rushing down the stairs.

"I can't tell ’em lad. She's in the cart," he whispered, backing down the steps and moving away from the house. "Her neck's broken."

So, Tom told Cedric and Noreen that Ellen was dead.

***

It was raining the day they were burying Ellen. Tom walked along slowly behind the pallbearers, their shoulder muscles shifting under the black woolen jackets, her wooden casket swaying. Just a light steady drizzle, he kept thinking--nothing so dramatic as the huge pelting drops she’d run out into only the week before.

Now that Ellen was on her way to the cemetery, Tom found he hated his aunt. His hatred had come to him quite suddenly. It was because May sat guard over Ellen's coffin the whole three days. She ate whatever anyone brought to her; she snatched her sleep in fits and starts; nod off, then shake her head like an old dog and begin moaning again.

It was a stupid reason to be angry, but there it was; he hated Auntie May because he wanted to say goodbye to Ellen in his own way, but he couldn't--not with her mother right in the room.

The first night, after the farmer brought her in, Tom lay awake tossing in his bed until dawn. His arms were crooked under his head, and he tried to think of what would please Ellen. Earlier, while they were laying her body on the sofa, he rummaged in the wagon and found the little red leather book the farmer told him about; it was blank beyond her name. Tom recognized it, it belonged to Cedric. He wondered when his cousin took it from the desk.

Maybe Ellen was going to keep a diary, think of the book as her friend and confidante--as Tom himself had been.

Did you ever have a nickname, he asked her once.

Never had time for one, I guess, she said, her hand plunged deep inside the sock she was darning.

They both laughed, and then she laid the sock aside, settling it on her knee and touched his hand very lightly. Tom, she said, her eyes dark sapphires in the firelight, I  don't think anyone had enough time for me to bother about it. He looked at her questioningly and she went on. I mean, I don't think anyone ever liked me that much.