Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished - Revised & Expanded Edition (69 page)

“There was Don to think about, and Julia who was bright and perky enough when Cass wasn’t around, and there was Peter van Nook. Peter was in the fifth grade. He was the son of factory people, and he came to school in the most horrible scarecrow pants and shirt. But his hair was always brushed and his fingernails were clean. He’d already read his way through most of H.G. Wells’ science-fiction novels and there was always one of those pulp magazines hidden in the back of his Spiral notebook--God knows where he got the money for them. Sometimes in the winter I’d catch him dreaming out the windows as if he could see way past the snow and the slush. He wrote beautiful papers about countries he made up in his mind. Sometimes he drew pictures to go with them. 

“The rest was pretty bad. It was the smell of shit and the blank wall of stalled minds. The ideals couldn’t get past those things, but I held onto the ideals some way--Don had something to do with that. So I kept them. Their horizons had shrunk a good deal, but I kept them. And they seemed to center more and more around Don and that little boy with the pulp magazines. Peter. The other boys used to call him Nooky. I guess that word meant the same then that it does now. But he was strong enough, that was the fine thing. He wouldn’t back off from them. He played ball and once he got hit by a pitch and his nose bled. I wanted him to go inside but he just sniffed it back and went on batting. He looked so little, waving the one big old splintery bat we had, blood on his nose and the front of his shirt. 

“Then I got word that my father was gone.”  

“I went home for the funeral and to mourn with my family, and it would have been easy to stay home, but I didn’t. I brought back a copy of
The Thousand and One Nights
for Peter. He was entranced. He asked me to write my name in it. A few weeks later, he came up to me after school. He wanted me to help him think of a way to earn the money for a library card in town. I offered to give him the money and he wouldn’t take it and I was glad. I sat him to chopping kindling for the school stove, half an hour after school every night, twenty cents a week. By the end of the first week I had kindling enough for the rest of the winter and Peter was starting on stove-lengths.  

“And it seemed I was staying on because I’d found somebody worth staying on for, but there was more than one. There was two. There was Don. 

“When I came back after the funeral he began courting me. I didn’t want to be courted; I wanted to grieve. There was a hole where my father had been. I kept seeing him on the Union Station platform, his arm around mother, in his overalls, in his walrus mustache. And I hadn’t cried when I left home. It almost seemed as if his death was God’s way of punishing me for not crying. 

“Don didn’t ask me to go riding until Thanksgiving. It snowed--just a powdering, like confectioner’s sugar, and Cass laid out a tremendous spread, all of it with a sour face, like something in her stomach was bad and hurting her. She sometimes mumbled to herself in the kitchen when she must have thought she was alone, strange little half-prayers that made me uneasy. It was as if God walked with her, like He walked with Esau. Except that Cass’s God wasn’t Esau’s. Sometimes she made faces. I don’t think she had any idea she was doing it. As if there were ropes and pulleys inside her head, and her God was yanking on them every now and again, just to remind her. I tried to ignore it. It was her affair. That’s the way people are in New England--or maybe everywhere. 

“When he asked me to go out riding in the snow I said I was too tired. He said: That’s not it, you know that’s not it. With no school how’d you get so tired? I said: My mind is tired, Don. My father died, don’t you remember? He said: If you brood over it, it will just hurt the longer. I’ll take you into Gates and buy you a sundae at Roth’s. I said: I’d rather not, Don, thanks. I’m full anyway. He said: Please? And I said all right, almost as if I were doing it to be polite, but I wasn’t, I wanted it to be just politeness because my father was dead and I hadn’t even cried the last time I saw him alive, but it wasn’t that way. I wanted to go. I wanted him to love me because I already loved him. 

“So we went riding that first time, and I can remember looking back just as we left the dooryard and seeing Cass looking out of the kitchen window at us. And the ropes and pulleys were making her muscles work with the faces she didn’t know she was making and I almost screamed because she looked like a gargoyle. 

“There was a lot of snow that early winter. I was out of school almost as much as I was in it. The sky was the color of lead and the smell of salt was always in the air, and the gulls would come right up to your feet for a scrap of bread or a piece of suet. Peter van Nook got his library card and asked me what he should get first. I recommended
The Count of Monte Cristo
.
That same day I caught Alvah and Karen Genack in the shed. She screamed at me and tried to claw my face. I had to slap her. She slapped me back and ran out. She left her bloomers on the floor. Alvah stood there with his…his penis still in…a state of excitement. He grinned and said: She wanted too much anyway. He took a step toward me and I said: Kindly tuck yourself in, Alvah. And he looked down at himself and then looked at me and then took another step. I shut him in the woodshed and locked the door. He started pounding on it. He pounded and cursed and kicked, and I went on with my third grade geography lesson. My heart was going like a crazy clock. Fifteen minutes or so later I saw him tramping down over the hill, plowing through snow up to his knees. He must have let himself out through the shed window. He came back the next day looking embarrassed and mumbled a little apology at the floor. I accepted it. Karen Genack never came back.  

“When the snow was hard enough on the roads, Don took me out in the sleigh, both of us all wrapped up in robes, and when it got near Christmas he put bells on the horse, which was named Jason, and it was so gay! It was all very gay and sweet, like a fine wine that makes your mind warm. 

“On Christmas eve, when we were coming home from town, he kissed me for the first time--he was very proper, you see. Very sweet and proper. It was snowing and almost dark and everything was white and gray and violet. His nose was cold on my cheek but his lips were very warm. He said: I’m afraid I love you, Edie. I said: Afraid? He laughed and said: No. No, not afraid. I said: I love you. Kiss me again. So he did and Jason found his way home by himself. 

“When the traveling was passable, I went home for a week. It was the longest week of my life. Mother cried on the last day, but she didn’t ask me to stay home. She wanted to, but she was very strong. When I got back, Don asked me to marry him. I said yes, and he almost squeezed the life out of me. We were in the entry and my bags were on the floor and we kissed each other until I saw stars. I said: Have you told your mother and father yet? He said: Not yet. Stay in the parlor this evening. We have to talk. 

“So we talked in the parlor after Mr. and Mrs. Knowles had gone up to bed. I was knitting a sweater and he sat beside me on the divan in front of the fire. The wind groaned outside around the eaves while we talked. Or rather, while Don talked. 

“He said: My father will be a happy man because of this, Edie. He’s made that clear. He thinks you’re a fine woman. But mother is apt to take on. You know her--or at least, you’ve seen her. She’s strange. She wasn’t, not always. Or not nearly so bad--I can’t remember her when there wasn’t at least a touch of the oddness. But it’s gotten worse, especially in the last two or three years. My father blinds himself to it. He does not like to see what he can’t cope with, and I am not sure I can blame him. Once a friend of his mentioned some kind of shaking disease and I asked him: Do you mean epilepsy? He said: Yes, that’s it. Epilepsy. Father wanted her to go see a doctor in Mechanic Falls. She screamed at him. She actually
screamed
at him. That was three years after Julia was born. Father hasn’t said anything since. 

“He said: She may have it--epilepsy, I mean. But there’s more, I think. Something in her mind itself, or her spirit. Have you sensed it? I said: Yes. 

“He said: I want us to go away, Edie. Not like thieves in the night, no. That wouldn’t be good or right. We’ll tell them both, be married, and let the pieces fall. But after that I want to go far away. 

“I said: Where? He said: Mr. Calligan at the bank recommends a town called Harding. He has a brother who works in a new bank there. Mr. Calligan says the town has a future. And Mr. Calligan will recommend me to his brother--I’m sure of it. 

“I asked: Where is Harding? He told me, and I said: Why, that’s halfway across the country (but the prospect rather thrilled me, and I imagine he could see that). He said: I told you I wanted to get away from here. How does it sound to you? I said: I love you. It’s all right with me. 

“After that we necked. It was very delicious, very satisfying. I felt him against me--hard--and it was the most amazing thing I had even felt in my life. It made me laugh and that made him laugh. He said: I’m going to bed now. While I can still go alone. I asked him when we were going to tell them and he asked me what I thought about the following night. I said that sounded fine. Then he kissed me on the base of the neck and said: Good night, Edie. I love you. 

“I don’t know how long it was before she came in. I sat on the divan in front of the fire, curled up like a pussycat. I felt like a pussycat, all warmness and content. There was the warmth and the love of a very definite singing in my brain. I think I dozed. Anyway, the next thing I knew, she was sitting across from me in Mr. Knowles’ wing chair, with the last of the fire playing across her face in orange lights and shadows. Her face was working, bunching, twisting. She scared me and I jumped and that made her smile, just a little twitch of the lips. She was holding a book on her knees. At first I thought it was her Bible, but it wasn’t. It was green. A bilious green. It reminded me of a copy of Hardy’s
Tess of D’Urbervilles
I had once. Your mind associates things: Whenever I see a book that color I think of Cass, sitting across from me and making her poor unconscious faces. 

“She said: He was touching you. 

“I couldn’t say anything. I was literally tongue-tied. 

“She said: He was touching your breasts. I saw. It’s coming out in him. Unto the third and fourth generations. I do not blame you. I blame myself. I blame him. 

“I was sleepy and confused and it was such a turnabout from the happiness. I said the first thing that came on my tongue, and of course that was: We’re going to be married. 

“She didn’t say anything. For a moment she just sat there with her face twisting and mugging at me (she didn’t know--I’m almost sure she didn’t know), and then she started to laugh. It was a dry, tittering sound, like leaves in autumn at the fall of night. She looked like a gargoyle. She said: You daren’t. 

“I said: What are you talking about? 

“She said: It would be monstrous. Your children would be monstrous. Unto the third and fourth generations. 

“I said: I’m sorry, Mrs. Knowles. 

“She began to scratch her arms. Her arms were brown and tough-looking, like the branches on old trees, and she made great white marks on them that turned red. Her face worked. A log in the fireplace popped and sparks went up the chimney. I said: Do you feel all right, Mrs. Knowles? 

“She said: He is a bastard. 

“I said: Bast-- 

“She said: He was gotten in me by a railroad conductor on the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad. He was a harsh man, a big man, and we did it while my husband was working for our daily bread. We did it for the carnal pleasure of the thing. He bit me. I asked him to bite me. John and I hadn’t been married two years. I took his thing in my mouth, and he put his filth in my mouth. Filth, filth. It was monstrous and filthy and I wallowed in it. He would come in with his tie pulled down and his vest open and I would reach for his fly. And he got my son Donald in me. Donald is monstrous. He is the devil’s bastard. 

“I stared at her. If I could have made a noise, I think it would have been somewhere between a laugh and a howl. 

“She said: I have repented my sin. I have scourged myself. I have begun my atonement. Do you understand? Do you understand? Unto the third and fourth generations. I will not allow you and Donald to spawn the devil. Do you understand?