Jordan County (28 page)

She had come to him readily enough that first time, unbidden, when she mocked him with her laughter, but it was weeks before she spoke to him. They had all their old troubles, holding off from one another. And when she finally did speak to him, one night late as he was falling asleep, her voice was so weak he could hardly believe it was Ella who had spoken.

“You dont sound like yourself,” he said.

— It’s mee, all right.

Her voice was reedy, worn, like a voice over a long-distance telephone line with a faulty connection. Some of the words were lost entirely; others had a false, drawn-out emphasis, usually misplaced so that the effect confused her meaning. This angered him, for he thought at first that she was speaking thus on purpose, to mystify him with the mumbo-jumbo spiritualists were supposed to practice on their clients in the belief that it lent verisimilitude; which perhaps it did when the
seance was false, but which in this case merely made him angry. She explained it to him, however. It was caused by the deterioration of her vocal organ. She seemed embarrassed at having to speak of this, like a person obliged to mention a distasteful subject.

“Will that keep on?” he asked, frightened at the thought of someday losing her voice completely. “Will it keep on getting worse?”

— Yess.

The word died away with a hissing sound, as if her tongue would not fit properly against her teeth.

First he felt revulsion; then he was angry. The two emotions held; then anger won. She might have known this would happen, he told himself. He had so much to ask, a thousand things, not only about her life but also about his own, and yet she had waited. What was worse, however, was that even now, with no telling how little time left, she would not answer his questions, except those to which he already knew the answers. Otherwise she ignored them.

She was intent on something else, a subject Hector did not want to talk about: the ax.

— Youd never have used it.

“I would.”

— You thought you would but you wouldnt.

“I would. I would.”

— N-no, Hector. Never in all this world.

“I would!”

He sat bolt-upright, angry and ready to defy her, no matter at what cost.

— No, you wouldnt. Not when it came right down to doing it. You know how you are; I dont believe you even thought you would. Not really.

“I would! I would!”

He was shouting now, but he knew it was no use. She was no longer there to hear him.

That was the beginning. She came to him from time to time
in this manner, always at will and seldom at his bidding. He learned never to cross her, for as soon as he began to disagree with her, her voice would diminish; it would grow weaker and weaker, and finally he would be left addressing the empty air. That was her advantage, and she had always been one to press advantages, as he well knew. But he had certain advantages, too. Realizing that he had been almost childish that first time, shouting and clenching his fists as he had done, he learned now to be sly in their relationship. Sometimes he could even outwit her. Originally he had feared that she possessed extraordinary powers — the ability to read his mind, for instance — but this was not true, even though at times it seemed to be.

He discovered also that she was governed by some sort of regulations, a list of do’s and donts, for when he tried to steer the conversation into certain channels she would cut him off. It’s not
allowed
, she would murmur. He had to learn to curb his curiosity, for if he persisted she would leave him. If he became violently insistent, as he had done the first time, she would not return sometimes for days on end.

For one thing, though it was the very purpose for which he thought of himself as having called her up, she would tell him nothing about her past life. It’s not
allowed
, she would say with a note of warning in her voice, and that would end it. For another, she would not appear to him: not because it was against the regulations (at any rate she never said it was) but rather on her own account. She had always been vain, and now she seemed ashamed of her appearance. He did not yet know why, though he suspected.

In the course of time he became reconciled to not collecting facts for the notebook. Besides, now that she was with him again, he no longer felt the need to reconstruct her life. Even the talking, which was quite trivial in the main and might have passed between any two people seated by any fireside, served for little more than to assure him that she was there. Except for needing this assurance — Ella being invisible — he
would have been content to sit quietly, saying nothing. But from week to week her voice faded more and more. He could see that a time was coming when she would no longer be with him. When that time came, as it surely would, he would want to return to the biographical project.

So he would slip in an occasional question, trying to catch her off guard, to trick her into giving him forbidden information. They would be talking about some commonplace thing and he would ask her, without any change of tone, without any note of urgency in his voice: “That drummer at the hotel: where did you meet him, Ella?”

— Well, I was downtown that morning, shopping, and.…

But he never really fooled her. She always caught herself before she told him anything vital.

— I’ve told you time and again, it’s not allowed.

Another time, under pressure of a jealousy he had never felt before, he asked her if she still saw the dead drummer, off in that other world.

— Mm: I see him sometimes.

— Ah. And do you …?

— No, no. There’s nothing like that. He’s just like you, now, Hector. There’s no blood, you see.

But then she stopped again and would go no further. He never really fooled her. So finally he explained it to her, told her his predicament. “Youll go and I’ll be left alone. I’ll turn back to that notebook no better off than I was before. I’ll have it all to go through again, from back where I started months ago. Why,
why
wont you help me, Ella? It’s for your sake, after all.”

— No it’s not; you know it’s not. It’s for your own sake. Youve been self-centered all your life, Hector Sturgis. And besides, youre worried about something there’s no need for.

“But arent you going to fade?”

— I’ll fade. I’m fading now.

“Then what will I do? What will I do when youre gone?”

— Dont fret, Hector. We’ll be together.

“Not if you keep fading, we wont. Even if you were here I wouldnt know it; I couldnt be sure. How would I know you were with me? How would I know?”

— Shh.

Then he thought he understood what she meant. “Do you mean I’m going to die? I’m going with you?”

— Shh. We wont talk about it now.

“But I
want
to talk about it; I want to know!”

He called after her, cried her name. “Ella! Ella!” he shouted. But it was no use. She was gone. He was alone.

This time he was afraid that he had taken things too far; he was afraid that she was gone for good. For five days he sat in the room, alone and miserable, bereft. When she returned at the end of that time, she warned him not to try to find out things that were not allowed, and she made him understand that this was a final warning. She made it clear, for once and for all. There was something in her voice, cracked and broken as it was, that told him she was dreadfully in earnest. It was no longer a game. Whatever future risks he took, he would take against heavy odds, the possibility of losing all his life seemed meant for now.

Outside, the world was sheathed in ice and people stirred as seldom as possible. They wrapped their heads in shawls and turned their collars high about their ears, lumbering along the streets like bears. They did not pause to speak to one another, satisfying themselves with quick, furtive waves of recognition. Rabbits and squirrels and birds, the woodland creatures, were locked in rigid misery; the earth itself was stiff and cramped with cold. But here inside the room, behind the bolted door, Hector had a different world — a universe within a universe, like Chinese boxes, and the fireplace was its glowing heart. If the temperature did not suit him, all he had to do was tilt the scuttle at the grate. No misery, human or otherwise, could reach him except at his bidding. It was as if he had seceded from the race. If doubts came (was she real? or was it all a delusion born of grief and regret and an
inability to admit that she was gone for good, with so much left unspoken and undone?) she herself came to reassure him. For the most part, her kindness and consideration were far beyond any he had ever thought her capable of showing. No doubt was ever valid once she had allayed it; she was real as real. As for the decomposition — the one problem for which she offered no solution, no consolation — he told himself he would worry about that when the time came. There was plenty of time, here at the glowing heart of his particular universe, his nestled box.

He would have been content to stay here, never stirring, but finally she told him it was wrong to keep himself cooped up the way he did. It was not only wrong, it was unnatural. People all over town were talking about him.

“Talking?”

— Yes.

“What do they say?”

— They say.…

“Yes?”

— They say youre crazy, Hector.

So he yielded to her in this as well. Heavy snow had come behind the sleet storm, and he began to go for long walks in the woods, carrying bread in his pockets to be strewn for the birds; the snow had blanketed their food. Thus it was that farmers, riding along the slushy roads on their way from town, saw him standing alone in a wilderness of snow and fallen branches, making a sluing motion with one arm, broadcasting crumbs for a semicircle of hungry robins and blue jays and sparrows. When the farmers got home they told their wives about it. “He feeds the birds,” they said, as if this were the final, irrefutable proof of his insanity.

They told it in town as well, the next time they came in.

“He leaves the house now,” they said, sitting in the perfumed warmth of the barber shop, the air redolent of lather and bay rum, the razors making an intermittent, luxurious rasp against napes and jowls. “Guess why.”

“Why?”

“To feed the birds.”

After a silence someone said from down the line, “Maybe he thinks he’s Saint Francis. Somebody told me he was growing a funny-looking beard.”

“Or Napoleon,” another added, the voice muffled under a hot towel. “Was he wearing a three-corner hat? Did he have one hand in the front of his coat and a spit curl on his forehead?”

They would laugh at this for a while — rather moderately by now, however, for it was beginning to wear a bit thin already — and pass on to another, newer topic.

The women were the ones who kept it going. They continued, ohing and ahing over scraps of information, much as a dog will worry a chip or a rag.

“Feeds the
birds
?”

“Yes. Henry saw him the other day.”

“Actually
saw
him?”

“Yes. Off in the woods, feeding them.”

“Oh. Oh, thats bad.”

“But thats not all.
Henry
says —” And so forth.

Hector knew nothing of all this, beyond the recent information that they were saying he was crazy. He was happy and oblivious, having Ella with him. Always now, when he came back from walks in the woods, he found her waiting for him. She never failed him now; he had never known such a period of happiness. But her voice became weaker and weaker. He had to strain to hear her now. It was only by the closest attention that he was able to distinguish what she was saying, and even then he lost most of the words. He did not ask her to repeat them, however: partly because the topics of conversation were so trivial that the loss did not matter, and partly because he knew that it embarrassed her to have him call attention to these evidences of her deterioration.

All the same there was no doubt that she was slipping from him. Soon he would be left alone, with all the anguish loneliness would bring, and he would not have seen her even once during all these visits. He tried again to persuade her to make
herself visible to him; she had never denied that she could do so at will. But she refused. At first she was almost coy about it, assuming a tone of modesty and shame quite out of keeping with her character in life. Later, though, she threatened to leave for good and all if he kept harping on the subject. This frightened him into being satisfied with what he had, out of fear of otherwise having nothing.

Through all these months, while winter lost its grip and spring came on, he never saw her but once, and even that once was only in a dream.

In this dream he wakes suddenly out of a sound sleep. Lying flat on his back he looks down the length of his body, beyond the foot of the bed and across half the width of the room, to where Ella is sitting in the chair he used to sit in while he waited with the ax. It is between dawn and sunrise; a faint glow of daylight, pearly and sourceless, comes through the windows at his left.

‘It’s Ella,’ he thinks. ‘She has come back. She has finally come. After all these months of waiting and hoping, hoping and waiting, she is here.’

He sees her vaguely, in outline as it were, and it stirs a memory of something he once saw in a Washington theater when he was at school: the figure of a woman seated behind a diaphanous curtain on a dimly lighted stage. She is slouched in the chair, her legs crossed at the shins, one hand relaxed in her lap, the other supporting her head from the rear, the elbow resting against the low back of the chair. She seems infinitely patient, infinitely calm. This too is memory: he identifies it as the classic pose which he has seen in the attitudes of the women on Grecian urns. She is looking at him, her head tilted slightly back, eyes limpid in dark sockets, a limpidity amounting almost to liquefaction, as if they held their shape merely by surface tension; a shake of her head might break the tension and cause them to trickle down her cheeks, like tears.

But no matter how he strains he cannot make out the features of her face. He can see them in outline; they are there,
all right—mouth, nose, chin, brow—but they are ill-defined, as in a photograph blurred by motion or poor focus. At first he thinks this is because of some fault of vision, because his eyes are still heavy with sleep and will not function properly; but when he looks more closely, raising himself in bed, supporting his weight with both hands behind him on the mattress, and straining his eyes in the poor light, he sees that this is because the face, each individual feature of the face, has decomposed, has crumbled into ruin.