October Light (20 page)

“We could figure something out.” Her hand was shaking. He hadn't seen Ginny shake this bad since the night after they'd been inspected by the people from the adoption agency.

He mentioned, as if thinking aloud again, “We wouldn't have room for her things, course. Mebby a suitcase, one or two.”

From upstairs, Aunt Sally called—she'd apparently opened the door to listen—“I wouldn't go where I'm not wanted, thank you.”

“You think you're wanted here?” Ginny's father called.

Ginny's eyes filled with tears, and the cigarette she drew to her lips shook violently. “Oh the hell with the both of you,” she said. “Lewis, let's go.”

“Now, Ginny,” he said vaguely.

But she'd opened the door. Cold air rushed in. He nodded to her father, apologetic, gave a left-handed wave, and followed her out. When he reached back with his left hand to close the door behind him—Ginny was already in the car and had turned on the headlights to hurry him—her father was holding the door on his side, pulling against Lewis. Lewis nodded awkwardly, let go, and went on toward the car. The old man called after them, “Don't worry, now. I'll straighten this out.” His voice had such determination that Lewis, hurried as he felt, had to pause and look back one more time, uneasy. Then Lewis gave his left-handed wave again and walked to where Ginny sat waiting, blowing smoke like a chimney.

Sally Page Abbott sat listening in her bed, waiting for signs that her brother had finally gone to sleep. She got nothing of the kind. No sooner would the house become quiet for a moment, leading her to believe that before long she'd be free to sneak down to the kitchen where the food was—a little something just to stave off diarrhea—than there it would be again, the dumpings and shufflings of his moving around, hay-foot, straw-foot, coming up the stairs, breathing hard, the way he breathed when he was carrying things. What he was up to, Great Peter only knew. She was tempted to go open the door a crack and look, but it was impossible to be sure he wasn't watching from somewhere, or listening and she was bound and determined to give that man no satisfaction. He would come down the hallway and move past her door, hay-foot, straw-foot, not pausing for a moment, though the hallway went nowhere, only to the closet beyond her room, and the place where the plaster of the wall was cracked from the chimney heat. She heard him grunting sometimes, and whistling just under his breath in a way that seemed curious, somehow cautious—whistling as he might when he was doing some moderately dangerous work such as electrical wiring. He worked for more than an hour after Ginny and her husband what's-his-name went home. (She squinted, trying to remember that man's name—she knew it as well as she knew her own, of course—but all she could think of, now wasn't that something?, was “Mr. Nit.”) Much of the time he worked so quietly she began to doubt he was still there. Then one time James said, shuffling away toward the head of the stairs, “The door's still unlocked, Sally, case you're wonderin.” She heard him go into the bathroom and close the door and, after a long time, come out, the toilet flushing—a sound unnaturally loud in the otherwise still house—and then she heard him go slowly downstairs, heard the door pulled closed at the foot of the stairs, and then silence except for the grunt of a pig once or twice and the ticking of her clock.

She sat up straighter to listen harder, her sharp-beaked head tipped forward and sideways like an eagle's. There was still not a sound, but he'd left the hallway light on, it came to her. Tight as he was, he'd never have gone off to bed and forgot there was a light on. She smiled and went on waiting. For the second night in a row, she saw when she looked at the onyx, Roman-columned clock, she'd been up past midnight. She couldn't have felt better, more young for her years, more wide awake. She tapped the bedspread with the paperback book, too excited and impatient for reading. “You see what it's come to, Horace,” she said. She hadn't the faintest idea what she meant, or even that she was speaking; it was merely a fragment of a daydream surfacing, diving again before she noticed.

It came to her then that perhaps her brother had gone to sleep after all. He'd be sitting up waiting, that was how it was, trying to surprise her when she sneaked into the kitchen—trying to starve her to submission as did all those tyrants of old—and before he'd known it he'd nodded off. She could just walk right down and …

That was it, yes, certainly: he was trying to lay an ambush. He'd done that with his poor son Richard, she remembered. Spied on the boy and jumped him when he was guilty. If he skimped on cow-feeding, as boys will do when it's fifteen below out and Jack Armstrong is playing on the radio, one day suddenly there James L. Page would be, stepping out grimly from behind some beam, pointing like an Angel of Judgment at the job left half done. If Richard came home late after an evening with the Flynn girl and tried to sneak into his bedroom with his shoes off, there James L. Page would be, waiting like the sheriff. “Your watch workin, Richahd?”

It was true of course that Richard had a tendency to sneak and play twice and was not always “forthright in his story-telling,” as Horace used to say, and true too that Ariah was far too soft on him, spoiled that child rotten, as a matter of fact; but after all, as Horace also said—Horace had been especially fond of Richard—
no
one was as forthright as James L. Page, “not even God,” as Horace put it, “or He'd never have given us the word in such a language as Hebrew.” Horace was furious whenever he heard of those ambushes her brother would lay for the boy, and though he knew well enough it was none of his business how James raised Richard, it was all poor Horace could do to keep from bringing it up, letting James know his mind.

She stared at the open book in her hand as if reading it, but her eyes went through the print, still studying what James had done to Richard. She didn't mean to say—she would be the
last
to say—that James was responsible for what that poor boy had done, how he'd gotten himself drunk and hanged himself. As well lay the blame on that silly, whimpery Ariah, meek as a fieldmouse all her life, and plain besides—all the Blackmers were plain, though hardly one in a century was ever simple as a nit, like Ariah. Not that Sally hadn't been fond of her, and pleased that she could make James happy. She shook her head, remembering how proud—and openly skeptical—her parents had been the day James got engaged to a Blackmer. Her father had flatly refused to believe it. He'd said nothing, as usual, glancing at Uncle Ira, who also said nothing, as usual—two peas in a pod, her father and Uncle Ira, glint-eyed and bearded, still as a pair of Stoughton bottles when they weren't out working—and then finally her father had said, as if someone had mentioned to him blizzards in July: “Don't b'lieve it.” Her mother had said, puzzled, “How
old
is this Ariah?” When they'd told her which one of the Blackmers it was, she'd had nothing more to say. It was clear that she too would believe in the marriage when the rings passed. But the Blackmers had known a good thing when they saw it. With a girl as plain and simple-minded as Ariah, it was either a Page or some African, and after the engagement had gone on a while it was the Blackmers who'd bought them a house of their own, later Richard's little house across the road and down the mountain a bit, the one James had drunkenly burned that night, God knew why, not even for insurance.

Poor Richard! He could have been a glorious boy, if James had just let him
be.
Besides handsome, he'd been wonderfully quick, and charming—though never around James, which was a pity. James might have liked him better if he'd allowed himself to know him. Everyone liked Richard. Little Ginny had downright worshipped him, which was why she'd renamed her adopted boy Richard—much to Lewis's disgust. On that matter, actually, Sally had to side with Lewis Hicks for once. It was a dreadful thing, changing a boy's name from John to Richard when he was six years old. It was somehow unnatural, a kind of bad magic. All of them had thought so, in fact, except Virginia. There had been a great thundering row about it between Ginny and her father, or so she'd heard up at Arlington. The woman next door had heard the shouting. She knew no details, or at any rate, being a close-mouthed Vermonter, chose not to tell them. No wonder if James had been upset, of course. He'd never admit it this side of the grave, but everyone knew he'd detested that boy. Blamed him for his second son's death among other things—it had been Richard left the ladder against the roof of the barn. (Richard blamed himself even more for it. Horace had once tried to talk to him about it, hoping to set him straight; but no chance, the chance of a hankie in a hurricane. Richard had treasured his guilt, as Horace told her. It was the one thing his father had taught him and he'd got down pat.) But it was long before the death of little Ethan that the trouble had started. It was as if James had taken a dislike to the boy when he was still a little mite in his cradle. “Don't be a cry-baby!” James was always saying.

Absently, she smoothed the gritty pages of her book.

They'd gone sleigh-riding once, she remembered, and it was cold. Richard was just seven; little Ginny wasn't born yet, Ariah was pregnant with her—“Big as a bahn,” James Page said proudly. It must have been zero if not ten below, so biting cold that the snow squeaked when you walked on it. The horses were flying, the big sleigh rushing along the slant without a sound, and even snuggled up between Horace and herself, with the blanket up over his face, little Richard was freezing. She and Horace were freezing too, though they had too much sense to say so. Richard called out, “Mommy, I want to go home! I'm
cold!”
James turned just enough to call past his shoulder—he'd been a big man then, beefy, his face red and raw from the wind, but of course he didn't mind it, not James—“Don't be a cry-baby! Blow on your hands!”

Meek little Ariah said, “I'm cold too, James. Let's do start back.”

“Hell,” he said, and reached over to slap her leg—he was always slapping her, mauling her, hugging her; no doubt she was better than you'd have thought up in bed—“don't always stick up for him. When I was Richard's age—”

Sally had glanced over at Horace, whose face was pink and white, like a turnip, and whose glasses looked to be frozen to his skin. His scarf was wrapped around and around him, and his stocking cap was pulled down as far as it would go, but both the scarf and the hat were storebought, not terribly substantial—not at all like the bright red home-made things James wore—so no wonder if Horace had had enough of this January fun, though he was damned if he was saying so. He merely bit his lips together, staring hard at James' head. He cried out, as if he meant it as a joke, “When
I
was Richard's age I nearly died of pneumonia.”

“Darling, it
is
cold,” Ariah meeped, and put her mitten on his.

“Hell,” he said, but he leaned far left in his seat and yelled
Haw!
at the horses, and around they came.

In the house, she remembered—or perhaps this was some other time—Richard had whimpered, sitting with his feet in the ice-water, so he wouldn't get chilblains, and his mother rubbed his back and ran her hand through his hair and petted him like a dog, singing to him in a kind of half-wit voice (or such was Sally's opinion; to hear Horace tell it, Ariah sang like an angel out of heaven), and suddenly James had said, jokingly, but his eyes were angry, “When I was his age, I was out laying bob-wire for spring fencing with Uncle Ira. If I cried because my feet got cold, Uncle Ira would just say, ‘Putty soon they'll freeze hard and stop huttin.'”

Horace said—only Sally and, possibly, Ariah had known exactly how angry he was—“I understand in the end he shot himself, your uncle Ira.”

“It want because his
feet
was cold,” James came back.

The memory made her realize what a chittering devil her brother had always been. It had momentarily slipped her mind. He was a kind of savage—even to the stick, the snake's head, the outlandish magic charms. He hadn't been that way as a boy, of course, though the seeds were no doubt there. She'd had to lead him by the hand to church or school, he was so shy and diffident; had had to protect him from the older boys; later had had to tease and cajole him or he'd never have made a move toward a girl. It was his uncle Ira that had changed him. He was a
strange
man, Uncle Ira. Not exactly human—he even smelled like an animal—as if his mother'd been brought low by a bear. No one would've been surprised, who knew her—Leah Starke, great-great-granddaughter of the famous colonel. “Boy!” Uncle Ira would say, voice low, and little James would leap. It was almost the only word the old man ever said.

She gave her head a little shake, as if the memories were dreams and she meant to awake from them. Still no sound in the house. Surely he was asleep—and sleeping like a log half buried in a pughole, if she knew her brother James. She'd find him there at the kitchen table, where he was waiting in ambush, and she could walk right around him and cook a Christmas dinner if she wanted and he'd never twitch his nose. She put the book on the white wicker table and dropped her legs over the side. At the door she stood listening again. Not a sound. Sally opened the bedroom door, and froze.

Aimed straight at her, suspended from the ceiling above the stairwell, was James' old shotgun, and all around her, stretched in some impenetrable pattern like the strands of a drunken spider's web, were strings leading up to the trigger. If she'd come out less cautiously, or happened to trip, James' shotgun would have blasted her head off. Her heart beat so painfully she had to gasp for air, pressing both hands to her chest. She couldn't believe it. He was worse than that horrible Captain in her novel! She touched the sides of the door to ward off dizziness, carefully stepped back, took one last, long and careful look, as repelled as she'd have been, perhaps, at sight of Mr. Nit's eels, then gently closed the door. “He's gone crazy, Horace,” she said, and realized only now that it was literally true.