If You Could See Me Now (15 page)

I turned my head in time to see a deer bounding for cover, lifting its haunches like a woman leaving a diving board.

Alison. I plunged blindly off to the right, hindered by my heavy boots. She had appeared to me, she had signaled. Somewhere, she was waiting for me. Somewhere deep in the darkness.

A long time later and after I entered a circle of trees, I admitted that I was lost. Not finally lost, because the slope of the forest's
floor told me which way the fields and the road were, but lost enough not to know if I had been circling. More disturbingly, after I had fallen and rolled against a lichen-covered boulder, I had become unsure of lateral direction. The woods were too dark for me to see farmhouse lights in the distance—in fact, distance did not seem to exist at all, except as an infinity of big close dark trees. I had edged my way into one clearing, perhaps half a mile back; but it may have been
up
, not
back
, and was at least some distance up, for I had come down the slope before going right again. All in all I thought I had been looking for nearly an hour, and the trees about me seemed familiar, as if I had been at this same spot before. It was only the little clearing, blackened at its center with the cold ashes of a fire, which proved I had gone anywhere at all, and not turned and turned in the same place before the same trees until I was lost and dizzy.

Because, really, it did look familiar—the giant bulge of a trunk before me had been before me earlier, I had looked up at an identical thick curve of branch, I had knelt on an identical shattered log. I shouted my cousin's name.

At that moment I had an essentially
literary
experience, brewed up out of Jack London and Hawthorne and Cooper and Disney cartoons and Shakespeare and the brothers Grimm, of panic which quickly passed into fear. The panic was at being lost, but the fear which rushed in after it was simply of the woods themselves, of giant alien nature. I mean that the trees seemed inhabited by threatening life. Malevolence surrounded me. Not just nature's famous Darwinian indifference, but active actual hostility. It was the most primitive apprehension of evil I had ever known. I was a fragile human life on the verge of being crushed by immense forces, by forces of huge and impersonal evil. Alison was a part of this; she had drawn me in. I knew that
if I did not move, I would be snatched by awful twigged hands, I would be shredded against stones and branches, my mouth and eyes filled with moss. I would die as the two girls had died. Lichen would pack my mouth. How foolish we had been to assume that mere human beings had killed the girls!

From this frozen encounter with spirit it was terror that finally released me, and I ran blindly, plungingly, in any direction I could find—in far greater fear than I had run from the hooligans in Arden. Low branches caught my stomach and brought me crashing down, rocks skittered under my slippery feet, twigs clutched at my trousers. Low leaves rustled at my eyes. I was just running, glad for running, and my heart whooped and my lungs caught at breath.

I fell many times. The last time, I peered up through creepers and nettles and saw that the malevolence had gone; the god had departed; human light was darting into the vegetation, the light which represents our conquering of unreason, and I brought my body complaining up into a squatting position to see from where the light was coming. I could feel Alison's letter in my pocket. My personality began to reassemble. Artificial light is a poem to reasonableness, the lightbulb casts out demons, it speaks in rhymed couplets, and my body began to shake with relief, as if I had stumbled into the formal gardens of Versailles.

Even my normal cast of mind returned to me, and I regretted my momentary betrayal of belief. It was betrayal of Alison and betrayal of spirit. I had been spooked, and spooked by literature at that.

As this specific Teagardenish guilt whispered through me, I finally saw where I was and knew the house from which light fell. Yet my body still trembled with relief when I made it stand and walk through the domesticated oaks.

She appeared on the porch. The sleeves of a man's tweed jacket hung below the tips of her fingers. She was still wearing the high rubber boots. “Who is that out there? Miles? Is that you?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “I got lost.”

“Are you alone?”

“You're always asking me that.”

“But I heard two of you.”

I just stared at her.

“Come on in, Miles, and I'll pour you some coffee.”

When I came up on the porch she scrutinized me with her good eye. “Why, Miles, you're in a terrible condition! You're all over dirt. And you've torn your clothes.” She looked down. “And you'll have to take off those boots before you can come into my kitchen.”

Gently I removed the mud-laden boots. I was aware of numerous small aches and sores on my face and hands, and I had somewhere banged my leg in the same place I had when I had accompanied the chair down the stairs of the root cellar.

“Why, you're limping, Miles! What were you doing out there at night?”

I lowered myself into a chair and she placed a cup before me. “Auntie Rinn, are you sure you heard someone else in the woods? Someone besides me?”

“It was probably one of the chickens. They do get out and make an awful ruckus.” She was sitting poised on a chair across the old wooden table from me, her long white hair falling to the shoulders of the gray tweed jacket. Steam from the cups rose wispily between us. “Let me take care of your face.”

“Please don't bother,” I said, but she had already bounced up and was at the sink, dampening a cloth. Then she took a covered pot from a shelf and returned. The cloth was cool and soothing against my cheekbones.

“I don't like saying this to you, Miles, but I think you should leave the valley. You were troubled when you first came here, and you are more troubled now. If you will insist on staying, I want you to leave Jessie's house and come to stay here.”

“I can't.”

She dipped her fingers in the pot and dabbed a thick green mixture on my cuts. It made my entire face throb. A woodsy fragrance snagged in my nostrils. “This is just an herbal mixture for your cuts, Miles. What were you doing out there?”

“Looking for someone.”

“Looking for something in the woods at night?”

“Ah, yes, someone broke most of the glass on my car and I thought I saw them running up this way.”

“Why were you trembling?”

“I'm not used to running.” Her fingers were still rubbing the green mixture into my face.

“I can protect you, Miles.”

“I don't need protection.”

“Then why were you so frightened?”

“It was just the woods. The darkness.”

“Sometimes it is right to fear the dark.” She looked at me fiercely. “But it is never right to lie to me, Miles. You were not looking for a vandal. Were you?”

I was conscious of the trees bending over the house, of the darkness outside her circle of light.

She said, “You must pack your things and leave. Come here or go back to New York. Go to your father in Florida.”

“I can't.” That thick smell hung over my face.

“You will be destroyed. You must at least come here to stay with me.”

“Auntie Rinn,” I said. My entire body had begun to shake again. “Some people think I have been killing those girls—that
was the reason they attacked my car. What could you do against them?”

“They will never come here. They will never come up my path.” I remembered how she had terrified me when I was a child, with that look on her face, sentences like that in her mouth. “They are only town people. They have nothing to do with the valley.”

The little kitchen seemed intolerably hot, and I saw that the woodstove was burning, alive like a fireplace with snapping flames.

I said, “I want to tell you the truth. I felt something monstrous out there. Something purely hostile, and that's why I was frightened. I guess it was evil I felt. But it all came out of books. Some toughs chased me through Arden, and then Polar Bears shook me up, as he would say. I know the literature about all this. I know all about Puritans in the wilderness, and it caught up with me. I've been repressed and I'm not myself.”

“What are you waiting for, Miles?” she asked, and I knew that I could prevaricate no longer.

“I'm waiting for Alison,” I said. “Alison Greening. I thought it was her I saw from the road, and I ran up into the woods to find her. I've seen her three times.”

“Miles—” she began, her face wild and angry.

“I'm not working on my dissertation anymore, I don't care about that, I've been feeling more and more that all of that is death to the spirit, and I've been getting signs that Alison will come soon.”

“Miles—”

“Here's one of them,” I said and took the crumpled envelope out of my pocket. “Hovre thinks I sent it to myself, but she sent it, didn't she? That's why the writing is like mine.”

She was going to speak again, and I held up my hand. “You
see, you never liked her, nobody ever liked her, but we were always alike. We were almost the same person. I've never loved any other woman.”

“She was your snare. She was a trap waiting for you to enter it.”

“Then she still is, but I don't believe it.”

“Miles—”

“Auntie Rinn, in 1955 we made a vow that we would meet here in the valley, and we set a date. It's in only a few weeks from now. She is going to come, and I am going to meet her.”

“Miles,” she said, “your cousin is dead. She died twenty years ago, and you killed her.”

“I don't believe that,” I said.

“M
iles,” she said, “your cousin died in 1955 while the two of you were swimming in the old Pohlson quarry. She was drowned.”

“No. She drowned,” I said. “Active verb. I didn't kill her. I couldn't have killed her. She meant more to me than my own life. I would rather have died myself. It was the end of my life anyhow.”

“You may have killed her by accident—you may not have known what you were doing. I am only an old farm woman, but I know you. I love you. You have always been troubled. Your cousin was also a troubled person, but her troubles were not innocent, as yours were. She chose the rocky path, she desired confusion and evil, and you never committed that sin.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. She was, I don't know, more complicated than I was, but that was part of her beauty. For me, anyhow. No one else understood her. And I did not kill her, accidentally or any other way.”

“Only you two were there.”

“That's not certain.”

“Did you see anyone else that night?”

“I don't know. I might have. I thought I did, several times. I got knocked out in the water.”

“By Alison's struggles. She nearly took you with her.”

“I wish she had. I haven't had a life since.”

“Not a whole life. Not a satisfied life. Because of her.”

“Stop it,”
I shouted. The heat of the kitchen was building up around me, seeming to increase with every word. The stuff on my face was beginning to burn. My shout had frightened her; she seemed paler and smaller, inside all those wrinkles and the man's baggy jacket. She slowly sipped at her coffee, and I felt a great sad inevitable remorse. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I shouted. If you love me it must be the way you'd love some wounded bird. I'm in a terrible state, Auntie Rinn.”

“I know,” she said calmly. “That's why I have to protect you. That's why you have to leave the valley. It's too late now for anything else.”

“Because Alison is coming back, you mean. Because she is.”

“If she is, then there is nothing to do. It is too late for anything. She has hooks in you too deep for me to remove them.”

“Thank God for that. She means freedom to me. She means life.”

“No. She means death. She means what you felt out there tonight.”

“That was nerves.”

“That was
Alison
. She wants to claim you.”

“She claimed me years ago.”

“Miles, you are submitting to forces you don't understand. I don't understand them either, but I respect them. And I fear them. Have you thought about what happens after she returns?”

“What happens doesn't matter. She will be in this world again. She knows I didn't kill her.”

“Perhaps that doesn't matter. Or perhaps it matters less than you think it does. Tell me about that night, Miles.”

I let my head drop forward, so that my chin nearly touched my chest. “What good would that do?”

“Then I will tell you. This is what Arden people remember
about you, Miles. They remember that you were suspected of murder. You already had a bad reputation—you were known as a thief, a disturbed, disordered boy with no control over his feelings. Your cousin was—I don't know what the word is. A sexual tease. She was corrupt. She shocked the valley people. She was calculating and she had power—I recognized when she was only a child that she was a destructive person. She hated life. She hated everything but herself.”

“Never,” I said.

“And the two of you went to the quarry to swim, no doubt after Alison had deceived your mothers. She was ensnaring you even more deeply. Miles, there can exist between two people a kind of deep connection, a kind of voice between them, a calling, and if the dominant person is corrupted, the connection is unhealthy and corrupt.”

“Skip the rigamarole,” I said. “Get on with what you want to say.” I wanted to leave her overheated kitchen; I wanted to immure myself in the old Updahl farmhouse.

“I will.” Her face was hard as winter. “Someone driving past on the Arden road heard screams coming from the quarry and called the police. When old Walter Hovre got there he found you unconscious on the rock ledge. Your face was bleeding. Alison was dead. He could just see her body, caught on a rock projection down in the water. Both of you were naked. She had been…she had been abused.” Her complexion began to redden. “The inference was there to be made. It was obvious.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I think she seduced you and died accidentally. That she died by your hand, but that it was not murder.” Now her blushing was pronounced: it was a ghastly effect, as if she had rubbed rouge into her cheeks. “I have never known physical love, Miles, but I imagine that it is a turbulent business.” She raised
her chin and looked straight at me. “That is what everybody thought. You were not to be charged—in fact, many women in Arden thought that your cousin had gotten just what she deserved. The coroner, who was Walter Hovre in those days, said that it was accidental death. He was a kindly man, and he'd had his troubles with his own son. He did not want to ruin your life. It helped that you were an Updahl. People hereabouts have always looked up to your family.”

“Just tell me this,” I said. “When everybody was silently condemning me while hypocritically setting me free, didn't anyone wonder who had made that phone call?”

“The man didn't give his name. He said he was frightened.”

“Do you really think screams from the quarry can be heard on the road?”

“Evidently they can. And in these times, Miles, people remember your old story.”

“Goddam it,” I said. “Don't you think I know that? Even Duane's daughter has begun to hear rumors about it. Her crazy boyfriend, too. But I'm bound by my past. That's the reason I'm here. I'm innocent of the other thing. My innocence is bound to come out.”

“I hope with all my heart that it does,” she said. I could hear the wind rattling the branches and leaves outside, and I felt like a character from another century—a character from a fairy tale, hiding in a gingerbread house. “But that is not enough to save you now.”

“I know what my salvation is.”

“Salvation is work.”

“That's a good Norwegian theory.”

“Well, work, then. Write! Help in the fields!”

I smiled at the thought of Duane and myself mowing hay side by side. “I thought you were advising me to leave the
state. Actually Polar Bears won't let me leave. And I wouldn't, anyhow.”

She looked at me with what I recognized as despair. I said, “I won't let go of the past. You don't understand, Auntie Rinn.” At the end of this sentence, I shocked myself by yawning.

“Poor tired boy.”

“I am tired,” I admitted.

“Sleep here tonight, Miles. I'll pray for you.”

“No,” I said automatically, “no thanks,” and then thought of the long walk back to the car. By now the batteries had probably run down, and I would have to walk all the way back to the farmhouse.

“You can leave as early as you like. You won't bother a dried up old thing like me.”

“Maybe for a couple of hours,” I said, and yawned again. This time I managed to get my hand to my mouth at least halfway through the spasm. “You're far too good to me.”

I watched her bustle into the next room; in a moment she returned with an armful of sheets and the fluffy bundle of a homemade quilt. “Come on, youngster,” she ordered, and I followed her into the parlor.

Together we put the sheets on the low narrow seat of her couch. The parlor was only marginally cooler than the kitchen, but I helped her smooth the quilt over the top sheet. “I'd say, you take the bed, Miles, but no man has ever slept in my bed, and it's too late to change my habits now. But I hope you won't think I'm inhospitable.”

“Not inhospitable,” I said. “Just pigheaded.”

“I wasn't fooling about praying. Did you say you've seen her?”

“Three times. I'm sure I did. She's going to come back, Auntie Rinn.”

“I'll tell you one thing certain. I'll never live to see it.”

“Why?”

“Because she won't let me.”

For a solitary old woman close to ninety, Rinn was an expert in the last word. She turned away from me, switched off the lights in the kitchen, and closed the door to her bedroom after her. I could hear fabrics rustling as she undressed. The immaculate tiny parlor seemed full of the smell of woodsmoke, but it must have come from the ancient stove in the kitchen. Rinn began to mumble to herself.

I slipped off my jeans and shirt, sat down to remove my socks, still hearing her dry old voice rhythmically ticking away like a machine about to die, and stretched out between the papery sheets. My hands found one nubbly patch after another, and I realized that they had been mended many times. Within seconds, to the accompaniment of the dry music of her voice, I passed into the first unbroken and peaceful sleep I'd had since leaving New York.

Several hours later, I woke to two separate noises. One was what seemed an incredible rushing clatter of leaves above me, as though the woods had crawled up to the house and begun to attack it. The second was even more unsettling. It was Rinn's voice, and at first I thought her praying had become a marathon event. After I caught its slow, insistent pulse I recognized that she was saying something in her sleep. A single word, repeated. The whooping clatter of the trees above the house drowned out the word, and I lay in the dark with my eyes open, listening. The smell of woodsmoke hung unmoving in the air. When I heard what Rinn was saying, I folded the sheet back and groped for my socks. She was pronouncing, over and over again in her sleep, my grandmother's name.
“Jessie. Jessie.”

That was too much for me. I could not bear to hear, mixed up with the windy racket of the woods, the evidence of how greatly I had disturbed the one person in the valley who wanted to help me. Hurriedly I put on my clothes and went into the kitchen. The undersides of leaves, veined and white, pressed against the back window like hands. Indeed, like the pulpy hand of one of my would-be assailants in Arden. I turned on a small lamp. Rinn's voice went dryly on, scraping out its invocation to her sister. The fire in the woodstove had died to a red glowing shadowy empire of tall ashes. I splashed water on my face and felt the crust of Rinn's herbal mixture. It would not wash off: my fingers simply bumped over it, as over the patches on the sheets. I inserted a fingernail beneath the edge of one of the crusty spots, and peeled it off like a leech. A thin brown scale fell into the sink. I peeled off the rest of the dabs of the mixture until they covered the bottom of the sink. A man's shaving mirror hung on a nail by the door, and I bent my knees to look into it. My heavy bland face looked back at me, pink in splashes on forehead and cheek, but otherwise unmarked.

Inside a rolltop desk crammed with the records of her egg business I found the stub of a pencil and paper and wrote:
Someday you'll see I'm right. I'll be back soon to buy some eggs. Thanks for everything. Love, Miles
.

I went out into the full rustling night. My mud-laden boots felt the knotted roots of trees thrusting up through the earth. I passed the high cartoon-windowed building, full of sleeping hens. Soon after that, I was out from under the dense ceiling of branches, and the narrow road unrolled before me, through tall fields lighter than the indigo sky. When it traversed the creek I once again heard frogs announcing their territory. I walked quickly, resisting the impulse to glance over my shoulder. If I felt that someone or something was watching me, it
was only the single bright star in the sky, Venus, sending me light already thousands of years old.

Only when the breeze had dissipated it over the long fields of corn and alfalfa did I notice that the odor of woodsmoke had stayed with me until I had gone halfway to the road, and left Rinn's land.

Venus, light my way with light long dead.

Grandmother, Rinn, bless me both.

Alison, see me and come into my sight.

But what came into my sight as I trudged down the valley road was only the Volkswagen, looking like its own corpse, like something seen in a pile of rusting hulls from a train window. It was a misshapen form in the dim starlight, as pathetic and sinister as Duane's Dream House, and as I walked toward it I saw the shattered rear window and the scooping dents on the engine cover and hood. Eventually it hit me that the lights were out; the battery had died.

I groaned, and opened the door and collapsed onto the seat. I passed my hands over the pink new patches of skin on my face, which were beginning to tingle. “Damn,” I said, thinking of the difficulty of getting a tow truck to come the ten miles from Arden. In frustration, I lightly struck my hand against the horn mechanism. Then I saw that the key was gone from the ignition.

“What's that for?” asked a man approaching me from the high slope of the Sunderson drive. As he crossed the road I saw that he had a thick hard belly and a flat face with no cheer in it. He had a pudgy blob for a nose, signaling his family connection to Tuta Sunderson. Like the hair of most men called “Red,” his was a dusty tobaccoish orange. He came across the road and laid an enormous hand on top of the open door. “Why do you wanta go honkin' that horn for?”

“Out of joy. From sheer blinding happiness. My battery's dead, so the car won't move, and the damned key's gone, probably lying somewhere in that ditch. And you might have noticed that a few gentlemen in Arden decided to work over the car this evening. So that's why I was honking the horn.” I glared up into his doughy face and thought I saw a glint of amusement.

“Didn't you hear my callin' you before? When you jumped out of this-here jalopy and tore on up toward the woods?”