The Dark Closet (8 page)

The
current had at long last come back on. And even Twynne, standing nervously in his bedroom window at 3:00 a.m., could see the light cast by Winterhurst on the underbelly of the overcast night sky. Every light in the house was on from cellar to attic, and Crossett knew very well that when the current had gone off, only one light in the library had been on, because he had been in there reading.

The news
was enough to distract Anne from her reading almost immediately. Crossett realized then that he must mean more to her than he had recently determined, despite her complete preoccupation with books. Her life was revolving around them more and more, to the point that he could rarely hold an extended conversation with her or be assured of any kind of initiation of one on her part. She was insulating herself from something, but he could not imagine what. He had provided for her a beautiful home and a permanent place in the social registers of Washington, D.C. She was treated with deference not only by those of the immediate area in which they resided but by the residents of the outlying towns whose histories could easily rival Barrow’s, in the proper boundaries where no great events of history had transpired: Its inhabitants perpetrated their historic deeds in Walsall, Taunton, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. It was to Barrow they retired after exhausting themselves with political, judicial, and administrative duty, to ride, to eat, to drink, to walk among the waving tobacco fields, to entertain their illustrious friends, all beneath the lazuline skies and on the umber earth of southern Maryland.

Yes, he had taken care
of Anne Wirthington Brightwell in the manner expected of him and to his credit. She was free of worry of any kind, her purse was full with a generous allowance, and her time was her own. For her part she maintained their social status among the denizens of Barrow through suitable entertainment—that is, held parties on a generous and competitive scale. For her meticulous guardianship of their social class, Crossett and she reaped numerous invitations that kept Pearl, their maid, busy with evening babysitting.

It seemed a good life
to Crossett, one he envied, in fact. She did not have to worry with crop yields and tobacco prices, the migrant labor force, disgruntled sharecroppers, delinquent renters, competitive neighbors, or inoperative farm equipment. Yet, for some reason, she was not completely satisfied or she would be like the Anne Brightwell he had married eleven years ago, smiling, involved, devoted to Crossett, enamored of Crossett, committed to Crossett. Somehow, he had lost his hold on her.

“
Down the stairs?” she repeated breathlessly, her book dropping open into her lap.

“I
slipped or something. I can’t imagine how it happened except that I was still a little groggy with sleep.” He did not tell her about the soiree he had witnessed, because he was not yet certain if he had been dreaming.

Certainly a long t
ime passed before he had awoken entirely, and although he felt sure he had been fully awake for the latter half, he could not determine if his fall down the stairs was connected with the vision of the party below. So much of it was hazy now, and yet he had the feeling he had been led there in his slumber. He was also beginning to fear that these nighttime experiences were not going to end in and of themselves, as a string of nightmares mercifully ends or a series of recurring dreams.

Anne seemed
to sleep through it all as did the children, a fact that was becoming as equally disturbing as the events themselves. When he awoke late at night to sounds he could not be sure were a dream just ended or his walking state just begun, Anne lay still and breathless in the twin bed beside his. Her sleep was enviably deep, attributable at least in part to the earplugs she wore to block out Crossett’s snoring. They must have blocked out a great deal more, including sonances that seemed to emanate from a plane other than that in which Winterhurst existed to whose sounds and movements Crossett had, for some reason, become privy. His lack of sleep was becoming the pivotal aspect of it, engendering a feat of its own as Crossett faced day after day feeling worn and fatigued.

“No,” Anne said resolutely, slapping
the book closed and getting up from her chair. The cloudy day threw a gray light in through the window, leaving the corners of the sitting room blurred in dimness.

“This is not the first time it has
happened, you know. Last summer too you nearly took a bad spill on those stairs. If I had not been walking down them with you, you surely would have fallen. Braden fell down them two years ago and only the resilience of youth saved him from getting really hurt. I’m convinced. I’ve felt uncertain myself when coming down that staircase, no matter how practical a pair of shoes I have on—perhaps,” she said thoughtfully slowing her speech a little, ”it’s structural. Could the staircase have been constructed at a slight slant, one so small only an architect or builder could discern it?” She asked studying Crossett’s face. “It must be, Crossett. Look at the portraits along the walls of it. They just can’t seem to hang straight, no matter what. Since I’ve moved into this house, you’ve straightened those portraits nearly every morning for eleven years. It always looks as if a big wind has blown up those steps the night before.”

“I’m going to
have them checked. Perhaps it’s just that top step that’s a little off. After all, the house is very old. Perhaps the staircase has settled over the years into an increasingly dangerous position. I will call Jake Hawkins in the morning,” she finished abruptly and with conviction.

What was it
about those stairs, anyway? Crossett asked himself. They had never been right, even in the days Twynne and his brothers got their sport from locking him in the closet in Maude’s room. That hideous fall his father had taken—Crossett grimaced—that left him twisted and choked at their base. And why did the piercing gazes of his ancestors along the wall look so accusingly at him from their tilted frames each and every morning?

She studied him closely. “You just don’t
look well,” she said softly.

“
All those days shut up on the farm. It gets wearing.”

“I
would think it would be relaxing to be reclusive for a while,” she offered gently.

“N
ot at Winterhurst,” Crossett sighed.

“So you’ve said
before.”

There was
a pause.

“
What is it about Winterhurst?” she timidly ventured to ask.

“Oh
, I don’t know.” He shifted his weight in the bed. He did know. Before, it was just a general restlessness that seemed to lighten and shorten his sleep, a feeling that he had just heard something loud enough to awaken him but now silenced. Now it was those awful bangings late at night when everyone else had been asleep for hours—everyone but him, that is. Horrible concatenous bangings that woke him from his drifty sleep with a start so sudden he was not breathing right when he came to. Not apnea. Fear. Sometimes terror. Always weariness to discover he was awake again, just when he was sure he had been entering deep, restful slumber. Some nights it would happen three or four times, others only once, but always at least once. And where did it come from? He had lurked about the house in the dark for weeks now trying to locate its source in such a state of bafflement that he had finally concluded that it
moved.

“You say you don’t sleep.”

“Do I?”

“
Many times.”

“It’s not
as bad as all that,” he lied.

“What keeps
you awake?”

“Who knows? Some people are
just light sleepers.”

“All the time?”

“So I’ve been told.”

“The psychoanalyst?”

“She’s taking me apart and putting me back together again.”

“The right way this time …”

“I suspect.”

“How long will
it take  her? I mean, is it anything like laying bricks?” She bit her tongue. She knew any reference to her husband’s livelihood only made him angry. He moved restlessly again.

“Takes a long
time. Have to go through everything from childhood on. Just spill it all out.”

“And
in the end you’ll be able to sleep at night?”

“She makes no promises.”

“Then what are you paying her for?”

“For her
expertise. Her training. Her education. She’s a Ph.D., you know.”

“So is
Twynne, but you don’t pay him for his advice.” She knew she was getting too bold and then regretted it. She could not help herself. She felt doomed to do it and to pay the price over and over again. Perhaps it was a kind of death wish, a slow death wish, dying evening by evening, a little more with each ill-omened confrontation, until one day when they expected her to careen again into the forbidden territory, she would just lie still and gaunt while they waited for her to bait herself so the battering could continue.

“He already knows the whole story. He was there for  most of it.”

“So why not get his advice?”

“It’s not a
dvice
I get. You don’t understand.”

She hated it when he said that. It made her
feel so limited. She turned her head to look out the small window. The snow still fell, though very lightly, as it had been doing practically ever since the blizzard ended. It could not, however, do any more damage than had already been done, and people were getting used to it, learning to get around in it, shrug it off, even ignore it. They traveled about in the daytime again, to the drug store, the grocery store, the bank, with chains on their tires and frost for breath. No one could speak without the white smoke huffing a semicircle from their mouth, disappearing instantly as if there were some kind of boundary beyond which the whiteness dare not go. Not so with the cigarettes that waved their tiny orange orbs in the air on the ascent and descent. Their smoke hung in the air like a living thing, unperturbed by the cold, waiting for the dampness to drag it to the ground and vanquish it.

At least the
current was back on as a whole in the general region. Barrow had been hit the hardest. Walsall was luckier—only ten days without current. Walsall. Not a bustling city exactly, though it had had its day. Its claim in history lay on a dusty, hot day in August 1814 when the British after marching through Barrow, routed Walsall’s 6,000 militia men whose retreat left an open road to Washington, where the invading British burned the Capitol and White House. In those days Walsall had been a port city where the wide, deep Eastern Branch of the Potomac had snaked its way from the Chesapeake Bay to the harbor of Walsall to fill the waiting ships with hogsheads of tobacco bound for England. Famous old names in Leggett County still echoed down its narrow, cemented streets, names like Wallingham, Howards, Wirthington, Brightwell, Crauferd, and Gantt—men who had been justices, commissioners, militia men, ship owners, merchants, planters, and clergy for the fledgling county.

She
covered her shoulders as a shiver ran through her. The icy window was just a reminder of how cold she often felt inside. Summer was her season, because like a snake she could lie in the sweltering heat and draw her warmth from it, slink back into the underbrush when it grew too hot, beneath the surly underbrush that marked the forest floor. In winter she had to rely on people and how close she could get to them, a precarious existence because people always left. Sooner or later, they always left. Then all there was was herself, a cold empty room, and a lonely bed she could only think of as meant for two just because two had once lain in it and that somehow marked its character forever. Or was it three now? Could she count her husband? It reminded her of word problems in math when she was a child in school. She simply could not figure it out, and it ultimately led to failure every time she tried.

I’m sorry,”
she said gently. “I wasn’t trying to upset you.”

“It’s cold in here.
Why do you keep it so cold in here?”

She reached over and
laid her hand on the lukewarm surface of the steam radiator, which sputtered and spat back as her dark brows pursed a little. There was nothing to say. No way to get more heat.

“Sorry,” she said again,
biting her lip. She knew her apologizing only made her sound weak and drew less respect for her from him, but what else was there to say?

He turned his head to look at
her, aggravated that she would take no more action than to apologize for the situation. Her dark hair fell across her eyes as she turned to meet his gaze. She was very young. But she had the right name, a good name, a Barrow name, and the pedigree to go with it. What she did not have was the money. That had been lost long ago. How long ago was it? 1862. The Civil War had been the end of her family. Not surprising, he sighed. It was being run by a woman. The family, that is. That’s no way to run a family. A man ought to do that. But there were no sons, no brothers, and the husband had gone off to fight for the South, even though his plantation lay  in the middle ground—Maryland—for which Lincoln offered any number of reparations and inducements that were never taken. A shame, he thought, always a shame to see a great family laid so low by time and circumstance. And yet he wondered how much Lamerie herself could be held responsible for her own situation. After all, she just did not have the money, and so no one in Barrow was going to marry her and no one did. Off she went to Walsall to live and found a husband there, a Jake Hawkins, who did interior work for Walsall Home Improvement. He had done much work on the great houses of Barrow, including Winterhurst, for years. Hard worker. But still a blue collar man. No background. No money. Just his two hands and a ten-hour workday six days a week. Admirable, but still no name, no background.

She still had the house, the sprawling Wighte plantation home. And that was all she had:
There was not a single stick of furniture in it that she knew of, and it had been falling into ruin for a century. History painted for Barrow a white clapboard house with green shutters spanning the elongated windows over the sills of which venerable, fluffy boxwoods peeped beyond the maroon velvet draperies cascading from the window frames. The lawns swept down to the road over a tumble of green hillocks, pausing now and then to circumvent an arching oak or fanning maple, then descended on either side into the leafy dark emerald of the tobacco fields. Further beyond the low sweep of the soybeans spread a thick carpet over several sunny acres, and still further on, the cornstalks tapped their leaves impatiently in sultry July breezes. Everywhere the silence of the planted fields prevailed, except for the trill of laughter from the house or quarters that rode the windy eddies, sounding no more than a ghost of itself by the time the nodding corn had lifted their tasseled heads to hear it. In July and August the locusts sang too in the waiting fields, spinning their ballads from the thickly leaved forests at the fields’ perimeters. The cabins of the quarters were neatly arranged in two rows, all painted white like the great house, but shutterless with only little boxy windows that opened their wooden latches onto the tobacco fields through which the rustling of the broad green leaves could be heard from dawn until dusk.

The plantation itself was gone
now except for a few tangled acres around the house that sighed with the summer wiffets and froze with silence through the long Southern Maryland winter. Honeysuckle, Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans, buttercups, and dandelions peeped and bobbed through the bittersweet, hop, and green brier in spring—a dried, brown, brittle twist of vines and creepers to trip the foot and entangle the ankle in fall. In the depth of summer, in the cool of the morning, elephantine, senectuous black snakes slid from the cool damp underbrush into the grassy patches before the silent house to sun themselves.

It was some of the flattest land in Barrow, perfect for development,
said Harford Saxon when he bought the bulk of it. Speculation was that he would hold it as long as it took Barrow to catch up with the rest of the world and then he would sell it for housing. The very thought sent a gasp through Barrow’s finest, but it was unlikely such a thing would happen in the lifetime of the elders of Barrow. Crossett and Twynne, however, might live to see it. Saxon had held onto Wightefield for thirty years already. Another thirty, he said once to a lawyer in Barrow, was all the same to him. The money from the sale had supported her jobless father for the rest of his life. He did not believe, he told her, that a Wighte should not have to work; his philosophy left her penniless.

Saxon was deeply interested in the house at Wightefield,
too, but he could not seem to wrest it from Lamerie. No price had proved high enough, no argument persuasive enough. He even offered to buy it and let her live there for a modest rent, a very generous offer he thought. And good for him, too, because he knew the historic value of the place and salability of having a descendant living in the house when he put it on  tour. To console himself and to have a suitable home in which to wait out Lamerie and her financial problems (of which everyone in Barrow was aware so no less Harford Saxon), he bought Locust Vale, all 900 acres of it, and most certainly including the house, which he took as his (temporary) permanent residence. He rented out the land to several tobacco and corn farmers; dug a good-sized pond to attract geese; left to the ravages of erosion and storm waters the handsome oak-lined, one-half mile graveled main entrance; and paved the shorter, narrower back drive, which he lined with flowers and purple cabbage and footlights. The embankments of the back drive were testimony to its having been carved from the fields that lay on either side, not a flat, wide course like the main drive, which had not thus been stolen from the fields but only borrowed for as long as the oaks and tobacco cared to co-habit. The roots of the trees on the back drive clung to their eroding banks like the great clawed feet of some wild animal. Those in Barrow did not openly discuss it, but everyone generally saw the back drive of Locust Vale as still the servants’ entrance, no matter what it looked like.

Determined to
keep the house at Wightefield despite its apparent worthlessness, Lamerie realized that even though there was nothing left of it but its gray wooden clapboards, its historic value still remained. She knew she could not capitalize on it, but it was all that was left of the Wighte family besides herself, so she refused to let it go. That was one reason Crossett was attracted to her: She understood the value of lineage.

T
he taxes on it, however, were an abrasion on her marriage, as she did not have the money herself to pay them and had to depend on her husband to do it. Sometimes Crossett gave her the money, but not very often. When he did, she squirreled it away in case Jake ever left her—then she would be able to pay the taxes, at least for awhile, until she could think of something else.

Odd, Crossett
thought, that there had been no firm alliance between the two families. Everyone in Barrow had married into everyone else’s family at some point or other but not the Wightes and Mainwarings. Their paths never officially crossed; no alliance was never consummated. There had, however, been interest, at least from the Mainwaring side. Christopher John Mainwwaring IV had had some regard for one of the Wighte ladies, but she snubbed him, according to family lore. It seemed that Christopher John had too much of an affinity for his female slaves to make him a suitable match for a Wighte. The affront left its mark, however, because Christopher John’s warlike attitude toward the Wightes thereafter was well-documented in both the Mainwaring family papers and at the Barrow courthouse. He then turned his attention to the mistress of Wightefield, Lamerie Wighte, until his proclamations of love became so inappropriate that he was ultimately jailed for three months for trespassing. Shortly after his incarceration, on one May afternoon in 1861, he granted freedom to twenty-two of his slaves, most of whom were women and children and sent them north with a bag of coins for each. Things quieted down after that. Christopher John joined the Confederate army and headed for Richmond and Bull Run, paid a more seemly visit to Lamerie Wighte, and then joined General Lee in defending Richmond from General McClellan’s attack. Ultimately, he was so severely wounded on the battlefield at Antietam that he lost his right leg to a poorly equipped Confederate field doctor. He was reputed to have returned sorrowfully to Winterhurst where he lived in his house with two female house slaves.