My Heart Laid Bare (21 page)

SHE WAKES, AND
her heart hammers in terror, and the voice yet sounds, gentle, comforting, the very voice of her tall fair brother: “Millie!—don't be sad any longer!—
I am a dead man.
”

For on the morning of 22 March Thurston's appeal was denied by the New Jersey State Supreme Court; and on the morning of 23 March Gordon Bullock was angrily dismissed by Father.

And that night Millie dreams she is back in the courtroom again, attending her brother's trial which is (evidently) still in session . . . and, suddenly, to her astonishment, Thurston rises to his feet and approaches her; takes her hands warmly in his; his smile Thurston's smile; his manner of stooping to kiss her cheek, Thurston's; his eyes as she delights to recall, and his brotherly joy in
her.
His wrists are unmanacled, his head is high, he is so transported with the ecstasy of his secret he comes very close to lifting Millie in his arms, as, in childhood, he had frequently done.

But his words, ah! his words!—
these
, Thurston would never say.

And equally upsetting is Elisha's stiff response when Millie tells him of the dream.

Indeed,
is
this Elisha?—'Lisha who has always been so charmed by her, and so patient with her moods and spells and premonitions? Not meeting her eye, nor taking her trembling proffered hand, he says: “You know that dreams rarely mean anything, Millie. Why trouble to repeat this one? Father would not like it.”

“But Elisha,” Millie says, hurt, “it was so very real. Thurston stood before me, as close as you—
closer
than you—”

“Nonetheless it was only a dream,” Elisha says, “by definition a fancy of the dreamer's, and not to be taken seriously by anyone else.”

“But if it is true—if his words are true—”

“Of course it cannot be
true
,” says Elisha impatiently, baring his teeth in a smile, “—since it is only a dream.”

“But like no other dream I have ever had.”

“Well! As to that—‘like no other dream,' indeed!” he says. “
That
has the ring of mere rhetoric.”

Poor Millie stares, perplexed. Can it be? Elisha has turned against her?—as indifferent to her, now, as the brute Harwood? And when she glanced at her mirrored reflection, before running to him, her beauty had fairly blazed out at her . . . or so it had seemed. “Rhetoric? Mere rhetoric?” she says faintly. “What do you mean?” But Elisha will not meet her eye. He stands in a patch of mottled sunlight, his skin exuding cold, it seems, and no hint of the old brotherly warmth to which Millie has been accustomed.

“What you say strikes the ear as false,” Elisha says with a shrug of his shoulders. “And in any case it is
only
a dream.”

“But why are we quarreling? I had come to you for—”

“‘We' are not quarreling, Millie,” Elisha says. “There is no ‘we' in this matter.” Then, seeing her look of childish injury, he says, more reasonably: “Dreams cannot be intelligently discussed because they cannot be shared. They are nothing but vapor, after all—mere wisps of idle thought.”

“But if that were true!—
I am a dead man!
—poor Thurston!” Millie whispers.

Elisha makes a gesture as if to silence her; but freezes, and does not touch her at all.

Now passes a long strained moment, during which the two agitated young people stand, unspeaking, staring at each other, scarcely knowing where they are, or what has arisen between them. Millie, greatly distressed, sees in Elisha's eyes that curious startled look she saw there, or imagined she saw, some months before . . . when, in Contracoeur, in the midst of a crowd of pedestrians on Commerce Street, he appeared suddenly, miraculously, alongside her . . . Elisha, her brother, yet so very wonderfully
not
Elisha! . . . but a stranger, a Negro, in eyeglasses, bowler hat, and prim dark clothing . . . powdered-gray hair and somber whiskers that do not disguise the fact that the man is hardly middle-aged, but bold, brash,
defiant . . . and secretly exulting in the subtleties of The Game, to which only
he
and
she
, in all of Contracoeur, are privy.

Why, it is Elisha, her tall dark-skinned brother,
her
'Lisha, yet not
hers
at all, but a dashing stranger of the “black” race: just as she is Millicent, yet not Millicent, in a dusty traveling cloak, and demure braided hair, her expression yet sickly and pious, and her eyes reddened from weeping.

And what it is that passes between them at that moment—Millie is to remember only haphazardly afterward.

Now, months later, they find themselves alone together in the parlor as they were alone together on Commerce Street. Unexpectedly, secretly alone. From an adjoining room come the bright sharp persistent notes of Darian's spinet, a brilliant cascade of arpeggios. From somewhere outside, the less melodious, rougher sound of Harwood's whistling punctuated by the rhythmic
thwack!
of his ax as, for sport as much as practicality, he splits logs. Elisha says coolly, “Why do you stare at me, Millie? Is something wrong?”

And Millie licks her numbed lips and whispers, “Only my dream.”

I
t was seven weeks to the day before Christopher Schoenlicht was scheduled to be hanged, on a raw windy April morning in Muirkirk, that Elisha and Harwood had their terrible quarrel, never to be satisfactorily explained.

Seven weeks to 29 May; and Thurston languishing in prison, and
Father away, and the entire household under the strain—
Is he to die?—He cannot die!
—and it was winter still, snow on the ground in pocked and stubbled patches, and the marsh still frozen over, and the sky still a hard cold winter sky, so fierce a cobalt-blue one's eyes were pierced with light.
Will nothing ever change? Will we be locked in winter forever?

EXCEPT: ELISHA OBSERVES
his brother Harwood packing his valises, bound for Leadville, Colorado, where Father is sending him for six months; whistling thinly under his breath; his soiled golfing cap set sportily on his head, hair in lank greasy quills, a clumsily knotted tie bulging out of his vest coat. Elisha observes in silence, drawing his thumbnail slowly across his plump lower lip: Harwood, his brother whom he does not love and who has never loved
him
, bound for the West and a new career (but the Lichts are always beginning new careers, there is nothing remarkable about that), Harwood dapper and sly with his new pencil-thin moustache, his air of watchful gravity, his sense of
purpose
(but the Lichts have always been fired by purpose, there is nothing remarkable about that), yet alternating with his old “nervy” “prickly” manner, so that the household is never quite settled when he's home: and everyone, even Father, has been waiting for him to leave.

Yet it's odd, Elisha thinks it extremely odd, that Harwood won't be in the East when Father requires help (surely Father will require help from both Elisha and Harwood is freeing Thurston?); that Harwood, with an excuse of illness (he who is never ill) failed to attend a single session of Thurston's trial; and seemed uneasy, even annoyed, when informed of its progress.

Harwood, who'd once sneered at Elisha when they were boys the mysterious ugly-sounding epithet “nigger” . . .

Nigger?
What's that?

By this time Harwood is aware of Elisha watching him. But stubbornly,
defiantly, he won't turn. Continuing with his slow, awkward packing as if such an activity, involving folding, stacking together, a certain measure of gentleness and order, was new to him and untrustworthy. Harwood with thick neck and shoulders, torso solid with muscle, skin the hue and seeming texture of lard; snoutish nose, small resentful eyes; worried forehead; bristles of hair in ears; cheeks bunching upward in an unconscious grin or tic . . . the young man is shorter than Elisha by perhaps two inches but heavier by at least thirty pounds so Elisha thinks
He will hurt me
Elisha calmly thinks
He will take pleasure in hurting me
still more calmly, with resignation
Yet it can't be helped.

Saying bluntly what he'd wished for months to say, in a level, easy voice, “Thurston would not have committed such an act but
you
would,
you
did, yes?” And Harwood, whistling, misses but a beat or two, a strand of hair slipping across his forehead, he makes no reply, and Elisha says, thumbs hooked in his belt in a casual swaggering gesture, “Then why are you going away now? why
now
?” and this time Harwood grunts a reply, not quite audibly, head ducked, securing the first of the valises, and then the other: they are expensive new purchases, handsome russet-brown leather, small brass buckles and trim, just to draw one's finger along the smooth hide, just to carry one in each hand, the weight, the splendid odor of the leather, the assurance, the excitement: how Elisha envies his hateful brother, who will walk so calmly out of their lives, and out of their grief—!

Harwood is loading up a buggy in the front drive, Harwood is moving methodically, taking his time, Harwood is careful to give no indication that he is troubled by Elisha's presence, annoyed that Elisha follows him outdoors, asking in a voice that has begun to tremble, “Why now? why is he sending you away now?”—to which Harwood mutters a vague quick reply over his shoulder that has to do with the copper mine in Colorado, one or another “partnership,” “no time to waste”—as Father has said. Elisha sees that his brother is edgy, resentful, perhaps even frightened: for Harwood of late is always frightened: since Thurston's arrest, since the trouble in Atlantic
City, Elisha has noted that Harwood is always frightened: so he says again, softly, now slightly short of breath, daring to pull at his brother's sleeve: “Thurston would never have done it but
you
—
you
would!”

Being touched, Harwood is galvanized at once: he drops the valises in the snow, leaps away, turns crouching, head lowered and jaws working, eyes narrowed and mean: saying, as if the word gives him pleasure, as if he has been waiting to say it for a very long time:
“Nigger.”

So they fight.

So it begins.

Suddenly the brothers are at each other, grappling, shoving, striking with fists—bare fists on bare flesh—shouting profanities—epithets of the sort the household has never heard—Elisha wild, rangy, aggrieved, Harwood slower and more calculating—Elisha is no fighter, hasn't been trained, hasn't any instinct, Elisha swings and misses, swings wide and misses, Elisha is thrown off balance as Harwood waits, knees bent, shoulders raised and hunched—
he
is cunning, a fighter by instinct, knows he can depend upon his weight, his strength, his entire body enlivened by the need to
hurt
, the ecstatic delight in
hurting
, for every fight is a fight to the death. Why otherwise does his fear so rapidly drain away, and this splendid manly strength suffuse his being?

The fight is no contest, as any sporting gentleman would see at a glance, for one of the young men is fighting out of emotion, and the other is fighting simply to do injury; one of the young men imagines the struggle a matter of justice, a means by which justice will be exacted out of pain, and the other young man knows that the fight, like all fights, is simply about fighting: the very word an incantation:
fight.

To do injury, to give hurt.

In theory, to kill.

(But one must not allow oneself to go that far: at least, not in the presence of witnesses.)

(For Millie has run up behind them, screaming for them to stop.)

(And old Katrina is somewhere in the house. And little Darian and Esther.)

A blow to Elisha's jaw so powerful that his body is thrown back like a rag doll, his eyes roll in their sockets, blood springs from his mouth—immediately there's a second blow, harder, crueler, with the force of a sledgehammer, against Elisha's unguarded chest, to his heart. A blow so hard that Harwood winces, his knuckles cracked.

And Elisha is down, half-sitting in soiled snow, bleeding from his torn mouth yet more profusely and alarmingly from the chest—for a surface artery has been broken. Harwood picks up his valises and strides jauntily to the buggy saying, through a mirthless twitchy grin, “Goodbye,
nigger.
”

In this way Harwood Licht departs Muirkirk, for the vast open sky and windswept spaces of the West.

WHAT OF ELISHA?
—never in his life has this self-confident young man felt such physical
shock
; for Harwood, within minutes, has driven him into a place beyond pain, so numbed, so much in a state of visceral astonishment, he hardly feels pain; though knowing that, yes,
pain will come—soon.
Sprawled gracelessly in snow, panting through bloodied mouth like a dog, hardly aware even of Millie's cries, Elisha Licht, a.k.a. “Little Moses,” thinks bemused
Why, I am not a god after all, it seems.

What of Millie?—an equal shock overcomes her, for even as Elisha is being pummeled by Harwood, falling to the ground, handsome face no longer handsome but contorted in childlike fear, rich dark skin no longer dark but ashen, and bright blood soaking his stylish wing-collar shirt and close-fitted woollen trousers and sprinkled like dirty raindrops on the snow—even as these horrors occur, quite apart from Millie's sisterly wish that the brothers cease fighting, and her cries of “Stop!
Stop!
” she realizes suddenly that she loves Elisha, not as a brother, for Elisha is
not
her brother,
but simply as Elisha, 'Lisha, a stranger she must no longer deceive herself she knows.

In that instant the old Millie, the child-Millie, dies.

In that instant the young woman Millie, seeing her beloved is fallen, and bleeding, and in need of aid, hurries to him, wasting no time in stifled little cries and screams; mature, deft and determined as never before in her life Millie tears open Elisha's shirt and rips a strip from her cotton petticoat and wads it and presses it against the mysterious wound with as much force as her strength allows; kneeling beside him in the snow, comforting him, partly embracing him, her arm cradling his head against her shoulder, her voice rapid and soothing, trying to show no alarm, for now such intimacy is allowed, now such intimacy is needed, when the wadded cotton is soaked with blood another must be quickly torn, and pressed against the broken artery, and Elisha, frightened Elisha, with none of his Negro swagger now, none of his coolness in her presence, trembles in terror murmuring, “Don't let me die, Millie!—don't let me die!” and Millie grasps him tighter and says, as if scolding, “Why, it's nothing, the bleeding will stop soon,
he
has not the power to hurt
you
.”