Deathwatch - Final (7 page)

Ruth ran at her. I was too slow off the mark to prevent it. She raised her heavy arms, and it was then I saw she held the glowing kerosene lamp. A groan spiraled out of me, and I leapt forward.

But not before she'd hurled the light at Regina's head.

I never knew if at the last moment some semi-sentient part deep inside herself caused Ruth to change her aim, or whether Regina thwarted it. I saw Regina blink, she stepped aside, and the kerosene lamp whizzed past her striking the large mirror on the opposite wall. The glass exploded outward with a huge crackling noise. Glittering shards danced madly in the air. Then, as if the fiery orange reflection itself held power, the flames and glass streamed back toward Ruth as quick as the furious trail of a burning comet.

Ruth began to shriek. The top of her head was alight, and in the instant she put her hands to her hair, they caught fire, too. She screamed again.

I snatched at the bedcovers, wrenching myself so hard I felt my back muscles twist in an agonizing spasm. The thought flashed through my mind that I'd been standing scant inches away from Ruth, that I
should
be burning, too. But I threw the covers over her head and shoulders, trying to smother the flames. Ruth was coughing and sobbing at the same time.

"Got you now, got you now," I called, holding onto her swaying figure and trying to half carry, half drag her to the rumpled bed across the dark smoky room.
Oh dear
Christ,
I mourned, inwardly. The smell of charred flesh, hair, wool was thick in the air. Ruth coughed. The wracking sound and her moans were muffled under the heavy pad of the blankets.

I heard the noisy scuffle of running feet from the second floor, the slam of the cellar door, someone shouting indistinct words. But underneath those sounds and the chaotic whirl of my own madly chattering brain, I heard another: the dark glee of Regina's low laughter.

***

The door to the office was jerked wide.  Andrew and Gabriel crowded the threshold. “What happened, what happened?” the hired man shouted.

In the glare of the lamp he held high and the sting of my own watering eyes, I saw what he and Andrew found:

The dark room with its wisps and threads of eddying smoke; Ruth wheezing, sprawled on the bed, her head and face swollen with lump-like blisters, her hands flailing in the drifts and clots of burnt-up hair. And Ellie out of her sick bed and lying right cheek down on the cold floor, her good leg buckled nearly beneath her, the wound of the stump leaking blood and pus.

- 13 -

"
I
ought to send you out of my house this minute, Granville," Andrew said.

It was a half hour after he and Gabriel had stormed into the office. Ruth lay anesthetized between us on the table.

I didn't answer. I knew whatever I said would only make him angrier. But in his voice I heard his belief that if I'd watched Ellie more closely she'd never have lost her leg, that she would not have been lying on the floor. Worse, I heard his accusation that it was somehow my fault that Ruth had been so grievously injured.

He passed a trembling hand over his wet brow. I saw his drink-bleared eyes go out of focus and his attempt to bring himself back to mental alertness. His gaze sharpened, but I knew he'd come to the stage where he didn't trust himself or his own judgment; no matter how incompetent he thought I was, I was sober.

"I ought to hang up my shingle, turning Ruth Wickstrom over to a hack like you...."

I looked down over the rim of my cotton mask; her normally expressive face was hidden under the mucky swamp of the burns. Her nose was putty melting toward her slab of a chin. There were only narrow blackened remnants of her lips; I knew that whatever reconstructive surgery I could manage there would be nothing more than two rubious lines of scarified flesh--nothing to what human lips were at all.

"All right," he glared at me. "Just do it."

I nodded at Andrew Saunders, and I picked up the enucleator--never letting myself think about what a cold term, what a nasty instrument it was--then inserted it like a pry lever. A moment later, the white, fishy heat-boiled globe that had been Ruth's brown right eye was cupped between my gloved fingers.

- 14-

A
week later Ruth was conscious. It was twilight;  the room was gray with shadows when I went to her sickbed in Saunders's office to check on her. Her brown mummy claw of a hand snatched at my white medical coat as I bent over her.

"You got to get em out Stuart, or go yourself." She stared hard up at me.

"You hearing this?" she asked. Her voice was more hiss than whisper, the result of her burnt lungs. Her lips had trouble making the words.

"Yes," I said. "But how?" I let Ruth's hand dawdle in the folds of fabric coating my chest.

"Send em to school—somewhere," she stopped to catch her breath. "Abby's smart. And they'll take Ellie, even if she's a cripple, to get Abby on board. There's not many places'll scruple at double tuition. You send ’em on to one of them schools in the city, or if old Andrew balks at that, one of the girls' seminaries in Connecticut or Massach--"she paused, and I heard her breath whistling in her throat.

"There now—easy," I soothed.

"You're a fool, Stuart Granville." It wasn't quite a yell; she couldn't manage that. But her good eye bored into me. "Don't you know now they're separated Regina can take ’em when she will? Don't you know as a spirit she's bound to the place? But she'll get stronger, and if she does, sure as Satan, she'll burrow down inside their minds. What then, Stuart. What then, henh?" She coughed, but she was too weak even to stifle it with her fist. I touched my hand to her mouth tenderly.            "Andrew will never let them go--he'll say he hasn't got the money, and he'll resent me for interfering," I said. I stroked the cropped wiry mat of her hair.

"I'll tell you what then," she went on as if I hadn't spoken. "Regina will win. She'll get so strong that whether they're here inside the house or not, it'll be the same to her." She licked her lips. She didn't ask, but I poured from the pitcher and handed her the glass. She sucked the wax-coated paper straw briefly. "Thanks," she muttered. "You're a good nurse." We both smiled at that. Ruth's smile was the light in her good eye--her lips were too raw to stretch into something we all take for granted.

"I turned it over and over in my mind a thousand times. What else have I got to do--lying the livelong day in a bed? I think maybe Regina could only come through because the girls were separated. A body can't be in two places--two minds at the same time. And even a spirit might be bound by the same law."

I held the glass so she could sip at the straw and drink again.

"Don't wait, Stuart. If she gets too strong....I believe it was her plan all along, a way to get--not just out of the grave--but out abroad into the world. Think of it, the girls going out into public for the first time, why, if she gets enough of a hold on em, she'd sail right out the front door with which ever one was carrying her at the moment." Ruth closed her lids. Looking at the right one was like seeing a paper shade sucked half way through a broken window by a draught of wind: The wrinkled flesh sank, partly, into the empty space.

"Ruth, Ruth," I said, lightly squeezing the sensitive hand I took in mine, "but I'm nothing more than a hired man." I dropped her fingers, raked my hair. "Same as you and Gabriel. Do you think Saunders will listen to me? All he has to do is utter the word ‘expense,’ and I haven't a defense left in the world. How can I tell a man what he can afford or not?"

She didn't answer, but her face took on a hard look.  I saw her hand clench at her side into a tight fist as if she'd instantly made up her mind to say something she didn't really want to--not at all.

"You know good as me
why
they should go away to school."

She knows about Abby, I thought, feeling my jaw muscles knot.

"I always thought I'd be here to look after my girls." She swallowed hard, and I saw what was left of the corded tendons in her throat tense. "Even if I loved Abby and Ellie--and I did--I had to learn to love them in a different way." She would not look at me, not even so much as to let her good eye wash over my chin. "It was a lesson. They were my penance." She turned her head, gazed blankly at the far wall. "Now, they're yours."

I felt her hand groping for mine.

"Lord, Lord," she whispered and squeezed my knuckles white.

- 15 -

I
only saw Regina twice that long summer. And I believe now, Ruth--even during the time she was bedridden--held her back in some way. Or perhaps she was subdued by my sudden mood swing away from lust toward innocence. However it was, that summer—with its days of heat and blossoming and freedom--was in so many ways Abby's first. I saw her pleasure in simple things--catching fireflies, stretching her hand to snatch the highest fat blooming pink rose from the wooden arbor, inveigling me to play statue tag by moonlight--and they brought a delicious tropic heat that stole the agonizing winter from my heart.

"It's hot--even for night," I said. It was August, we were on the porch, a gibbous moon skimmed the treetops.

"I can do a cartwheel," Abby announced. She let go of the crank on the ice cream pail she'd been turning. Her face was flushed with exercise; in the glow from the houselamps I saw the beads of perspiration glimmering on her upper lip. She skipped off the porch, batting absently at a mossy hanging pot filled with wilting petunias.

"You're supposed to be making ice cream," I said, pointing at the ‘freezer.’

"Strawberry." Her pink tongue skated across the line of her lips. "Yum."

"And wasn't it your idea to have an ice cream supper?"

She'd read about them in the newspaper, boys and girls sitting at the long trestle tables under the trees at the Methodist Church or in Deer Gate meadow. Wanted to have one--with lemonade, and the best tablecloth, all of us dressed up--sitting in the yard. I couldn't make her understand it was called a ‘supper,’ but it was really a kind of social where desserts were served; you were supposed to eat something--some kind of dinner at home--first. It was hot, none of us wanted to cook, and ice cream for supper seized her mind. I'd given in, of course.

"You crank, it's nearly solid and hard to turn," Abby said.

I nodded, adding more sugar, dumping in more of the plump red fruit.

"You're not watching my star turn," she said, putting her hands against the crisp, summer stunned grass and churning her legs over her shoulders. Her dress--white muslin with a blue satin sash--belled upside down over her torso. There was a twinkle of pantalettes, the white toes of her stockings. I turned away to crank the ice cream freezer.

"Pantalettes are hot," she said, now sitting cross-legged in the grass. "Can I take off my stockings?" She didn't wait for my answer, but began tugging at the sweat damp silk.

"You're spoiling that child," Ruth whispered at me from the shadows. She was sitting deep inside the cushions of a heavy wicker chair. Gabriel had carried her outside. She was stick thin, a folding tripod of a woman beneath her wraps.

Before I could answer, we heard the faint squeak of wheels: Ellie's chair moving over the threshold, out onto the porch boards. Like her sister, she was wearing white, too.

"Help me, Stuart," Abby called, skittering up the steps. "I want to get Ellie onto the lawn." She began to maneuver the handles on the back of Ellie's chair. I steered and lifted it down the broad shallow stairs, while Abby yapped and ran around me like a puppy.

She began pushing her sister in circles on the dry grass. "It's almost ready," she announced heading for a circular moonlit table set with big clear goblets, folded napkins, spoons; then: "Is it ready yet, Stuart?"

"Nearly."

"Ice cream. Cartwheels. Best white dresses," Ruth shook her head. "Even you--in a linen suit."

"She's had so little--I don't consider this an indulgence at all," I said, waving my hand over the freezer. The girls were having a race now; Ellie pumping the chair wheels hard, Abby hopping on one foot to make it fair.

"That child is in love with you," Ruth said. Her face was swathed in a veil of white gauze. I saw it sway lightly from the puff of air when she spoke.

I'm looking at a ghost, I thought.

"What's the age of consent in the South, Stuart?" Ruth said. I heard one sharp creak of the rockers, the soft pat of her toes.

"Twelve or thirteen, maybe." My lips tightened in a narrow line, I kept my eyes on the hand turning the ice cream freezer. I wouldn't look at her. "I don't really know, it wasn't--isn't--a thing my family held with."

"Ever had a girlfriend?" she asked.

I gasped. "Ruth, please--" I begged.

I heard the rocker moving against the boards again. I saw her hands lifting the crown of her veil--as though she meant to remind me of her dreadful staring face. "People with nothing are relentless," she said. "Answer me."

"It's why I drank." I swallowed uneasily. "Why I started drinking and kept on with it. The first Christmas I came home from college we were both seventeen. We got engaged. It was fine between us all that month. Then I got back to school--it wasn't other girls--there weren't any in my class. Well one," I laughed. "But she had a mustache and could lift a hundred pound sack of grain one-handed over her head." I felt Ruth's eyes on me, pushing me deeper inside the old memory. "Livvy--Olivia, that is, who was my fiancée, wrote me every day. You know, the kind of gushing letters...." I suddenly sat on the porch rail, staring at my hands. "Letters about how it was all going to be when we got married. Even," I breathed, "even what kind of furniture we'd have. Our babies she said--they'd have her thick blonde hair and my blue grey eyes."