The Evidence Against Her (32 page)

Agnes rushed into the hallway and looked into the other bedrooms, feeling foolish that she hadn’t remembered to close and latch the bedroom door, and then she heard her father-in-law’s voice in the front hall and she began to move toward the landing.

Warren had looked in on Agnes and Betts when he got home from church and found them both asleep. He had lowered the shade to keep the sun out and quietly made his way out of the room, hurrying down the stairs to steer Dwight and Claytor over to Uncle Leo’s before they burst loudly into the front hall. The picnic was getting under way, but Warren wanted to let his wife rest as much as she could; Lily could manage as hostess on her own until Agnes woke up.

It was John Scofield who, a little less than an hour later, first caught sight of Betts—without a stitch of clothing on— running sturdily across the yard toward the general company, making a gleeful yodeling sound of pure exuberance. And just then he felt truly fond of her—his determined little granddaughter with her yellow hair spiking out in all directions. He crossed the yard to intercept her, but when Betts saw her grandfather coming she swerved and headed off at a right angle with a whoop of elation. She loved the air against her skin, the attention she’d attracted, and she was purely delighted with her own speedy trajectory across the yard.

Leo and Lily had spotted her, as well, but they were walking along the drive with Agnes’s father, Dwight Claytor, who was in Washburn to give a short speech the following day after the parade. They were quite a distance away, and they moved slowly in Betts’s direction, since Leo didn’t have his cane and was leaning against Lily’s arm rather heavily. Dwight and Claytor were with Warren and Howie and Richard Claytor—who had come with their father for the Fourth of July celebration—on the far side of Leo’s house, where the horseshoe tournament had begun. There was no one else to catch up to Betts but John Scofield, and he pursued her with diligence and finally caught her and boosted her up to his shoulder to deliver her back to her mother.

He was smiling as he came into the front hall and spotted Agnes at the top of the stairs. “This little lady is determined to bring scandal down on our heads, Agnes! There she was—”

“Bring her to me,” Agnes said, only seeing John Scofield’s grin as he approached the stairs cupping Betts’s bare bottom in his large hand.

“Yes. I’ll do it. I’ll certainly do it. I’m—”

“Bring her to me,” Agnes said again, without the slightest inflection of humor or amusement, standing like a statue on the landing where it turned. She was still disoriented from sleep.

John mounted the stairs slowly, juggling Betts from one side to another in an attempt to hold the rail, but finally giving up. “I’ll certainly do it,” he said, still teasingly. “I’ll deliver this child before she gets away from me.” He had just reached the stair two steps down from where Agnes stood when Agnes reached forward and hooked her arm around her daughter, who was doing her best to avoid the transfer. She was delighted to have her grandfather’s attention. Agnes couldn’t get a secure hold on Betts, who was squirming out of her reach.

Agnes leaned forward until her face almost met John Scofield’s, as though she were about to kiss him. She had a sleep-induced expression of bemusement, although, in fact, she was stiff and awkward with outrage. She had turned slightly to one side, with Betts’s torso clasped against the shoulder that was turning away from her father-in-law, when John Scofield released the little girl entirely, so that Agnes had to lunge forward to catch her.

John’s arm flew up in the air over his head, and Agnes was momentarily baffled as his face went slack with surprise. And then he was tumbling backward. Agnes was too startled and muddleheaded even to make a sound. She just stood holding Betts, who made no sound either. And then there was Lily kneeling over her uncle for a long moment that Agnes could never afterward put into a context of chronological order.

She remembered hearing her father and Leo come in the back way as she stood looking down at her father-in-law lying flat at the foot of the stairs. He looked as if he had arranged himself there on purpose, except that one leg was bent beneath him. She remembered hearing Leo calling out to her, “Well, Agnes, John found my grandniece running around as naked as a jaybird. He’s bringing her around front . . . .”

And she remembered Lily looking up at her with her face seeming more than usually pointed and pale. “He fell, Agnes. Uncle John fell down the stairs,” she repeated slowly, in a cadence like a children’s verse. In the determined meter of “London Bridge,” as though she were instructing Agnes. “Uncle John fell down the stairs.”

Lily had let her father lean on the proffered arm of Mr. Claytor, and she hurried toward Agnes and Warren’s house when she saw her uncle John with Betts in hand heading up the front walk and then disappearing through the front door. She felt unreasonably alarmed as she approached the front door herself. When she entered the lower hall, the sun streamed into that shady alcove and was almost blinding. She immediately caught sight of Agnes on the upper landing, clasping Betts in one arm, her other arm extended as though she were conferring a benediction on the stilled figure of John Scofield, whom Lily finally saw lying motionless at the bottom of the stairs. Lily had gasped in surprise; she was appalled, but in spite of herself she was briefly swept over with admiration for Agnes. A single thought skittered briefly through Lily’s head: I don’t blame her. I don’t blame her for a minute. And in that instant there was not a moment’s hesitation about where her allegiance would lie.

But Agnes was in shock. Leo Scofield had come with Dwight Claytor around to the back door where the steps were shallower. He moved slowly across the threshold of the front parlor, having some difficulty navigating without his cane, and then he came to a stop. He had come into the front hall and clasped the balustrade for support and looked down with a perplexed expression of irritation at his brother John. Dwight Claytor stood off to the side, staring up at his daughter and his little granddaughter with a peculiar expression of alarmed recognition. Leo stood for a long while, gazing down at his brother, and then he spoke with a note of exasperation. “I don’t like
this,
John! You come along, now. You come along. You look like a damned fool! You look like a fool, John.”

And then Leo Scofield stood there without saying a thing for several minutes, finally straightening and putting his hands in his pockets. “I wish you’d get up, John,” he had said in a different tone altogether, like a boy trying to persuade a friend to join some game. “I wish you’d get up. I don’t think it could all just come to this.”

Agnes was never able to recall much of anything else about that day. She didn’t remember John being carefully moved to the parlor; she didn’t remember that Warren had suggested that the family not spread this news during the picnic, nor did she know that Leo Scofield had not gone back out into the crowd, or that Robert and Lily had overseen the festivities as best they could. She never even made the connection between this awful event and the several years that followed when she was more content than she had ever imagined in her whole life that she would be. Certainly she expressed shock and sorrow about the death of her father-in-law, but the fact is, she felt no responsibility one way or another.

Now and then, over the years, Agnes would catch Lily observing her with a speculative expression, and Agnes’s own father’s manner was increasingly formal in his daughter’s company. But Agnes didn’t associate either detail with the circumstance of that terrible Fourth of July. It never occurred to her not to agree with her children when they became sad remembering that they didn’t have their grandfather Scofield among them. But she really agreed with them out of her understanding of the children’s own sincere regret. Although Agnes was genuinely sorry to witness the grief of her mother-in-law and her husband and the children, of Leo Scofield, and George as well, she was never visited with the slightest disquietude about John Scofield’s demise.

•  •  •

By the time Dwight and Claytor started back to school in September, the initial shock of John Scofield’s death had abated. Audra and Lillian Scofield had returned immediately from Maine, and the rest of the family, of course, had not gone away that summer. The hottest months elapsed while the Scofields adjusted to their new circumstances, and on November 15, 1926, on the morning of little Dwight’s eighth birthday, Agnes gave birth to a baby boy. He was named Warren Howard Scofield, after his father, but with a different middle name because Warren didn’t want anyone to take to calling his son Junior. And, in fact, the baby was always called Howard simply to avoid confusion.

Just before Christmas, Robert Butler’s second volume of poems was published, and he gained a good deal of national attention, although in Washburn, where he was so well known and liked, no one but Lily and Warren had any idea what the poems could mean. They seemed to most of his acquaintances uncharacteristically dark and severe. Agnes had not even had time to read them with the new baby in the house and the household itself to contend with.

In the summer of 1927, the whole family finally did go to Maine, although once again, Lillian and Audra Scofield went up at the beginning of June, and the rest of the family joined them in August. Warren was only able to stay for two weeks, because of various worries about the Company and some complications he was trying to sort out about his father’s affairs. But a vacation in Maine became an annual event, and by the time Betts Scofield and Trudy Butler started school it seemed to all the Scofields that they had always gone away for the month of August.

Howard was the happiest of Agnes’s children. Even by the time he was three years old he had unwittingly become the family conciliator. He was not as handsome a child as the twins had been at his age, but he had a rakish look, with one eyelid that was slightly “lazy.” There wasn’t a person in Washburn who wasn’t glad to see Howard as he was taken around town on errands with his mother or with Evie McCauliff, who planned to work for Mr. and Mrs. Scofield until she had children of her own. Sometimes Dwight or Claytor would pull Howard along with them in their wagon, and usually Betts would be just behind them, sometimes with Trudy Butler tagging along as well.

As time went on, Agnes Claytor Scofield began to feel that she had managed to do the very thing that she had been sure would elude her. She had been sure of her failure to obtain it since she was a little girl. But she went about her days beginning to believe that she had managed to create a happy family. And she even believed that it would go on forever and ever.

She remained dedicated to the schedule of her days, mustering her forces against any ambush of chaos. It never crossed her mind to consider the possible untrustworthiness of the love of any of the four children of the household. And she was certain that each of those children knew that he or she was unreservedly beloved by at least one other person in the world— that not one of them could outlive her absolute devotion.

This serene elation was a constant in her life during the children’s younger years. Whatever arguments or squabbles the children were involved in during any one day seemed vastly unimportant to Agnes by evening, when in the summer, for instance, she and Warren sat out on the porch after the baby was in bed. The other children were generally back at Lily’s after supper, where they found a thousand things to do under Lily’s guidance.

Warren always sat in the rocking chair with his long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, and Agnes generally settled on the swing and pulled her legs up, sitting sideways to the yard. All along the ridge beyond the verge of trees that marked the end of the property, lights began coming on in the windows of the houses in the new section of town that had gradually grown up to the north of Scofields.

Warren and Agnes sat together during that first wave of summer evening quiet that Agnes always thought of as dogs’ hour. The light still sifted palely through the tops of the trees, and each household dog settled down within the boundaries of his own property and spoke across the yards in short bursts of two or three barks delivered perfunctorily, proprietarily, settling the question of territory for this night.

Agnes sat catty-cornered on the swing, swaying now and then by pushing off with her foot. But as the dogs settled in and quieted while their families ate supper, Agnes drew her feet up and lay her cheek down on her arm stretched across the back of the swing. The hour passed from dogs’ hour to bird call—the day falling silent with only the chittering, cooing, and chirrups of the settling nuthatches, mourning doves, chickadees, and the occasional jarring, primeval cawing of the crows. Now and then she and Warren would talk about one thing or another, but all the urgency went out of whatever they might discuss just then.

Agnes would sit and look out at the darkening yard, thinking each moment that she ought to call the children home from Lily’s, or check on the baby. But usually she stayed on, waiting for the dark to fall. And then she and Warren often sat on still, watching as the lightning bugs drifted up from the grasses, through the dark green of the trees like sparks. Eventually the fireflies no longer flickered, and the sky showed a few stars, and the night turned a pale orchid color against all the variations of green and brown vegetation and the gray white houses of Scofields. And always there was a moment when it seemed to Agnes that it wasn’t the case that darkness fell; it was really that the light, all the voices, any complaints—the doings of any particular day—slowly evaporated, leaching upward into the wide, absorbent sky.