The Keeper (27 page)

I
t was her favorite place, out beyond the cemetery and into the deep pine and birch trees. Mushroom fungi grew there, spotted red and yellow. The soft ground was layered with leaves like the compost pile her father kept behind his shed. The sun did not filter through the sky, and all was dark. She wandered old paths, and kicked at used condom wrappers and beer cans: Pabst Blue Ribbon, Bud, Bud Light (for the girls, she imagined). After morning Froot Loops and armed with an apple or some berries for the road, she went there every day that summer of her seventh year.

Susan was a pretty girl. So pretty that people couldn’t help but look at her. In town they stopped her on the street. They bent down and said, “What a pretty smile! Are you going to be a movie star when you grow up?” April Willow gave her as many SweeTarts as she wanted at the library during story hour. Dr. Conway had her blow on his stethoscope because he said little-girl breath made things shiny. At the grocery store where her mother worked, she sat on cashiers’ laps while they petted her hair.

Her mother sewed light blue dresses for her. In the mornings before school she twirled and twirled until her hem reached the sky. “Little Miss Muffett,” her mother said. “You live in your own world, my dear.”

She did live in her own world. A world where if she flapped her arms fast enough, she could fly. If she drew a picture, it came to life. If she prayed to the Virgin Mary for a snow day, even in spring, it snowed. If she closed her eyes and fell asleep she might never wake up. And if she spun three times in front of a mirror and told Bloody Mary to go to hell, the bloody queen would appear behind the glass, captured.

But even she knew that these things would soon change. Her plump baby sister was already talking. She herself could now read, and even write. She kept a journal at school and in it she wrote: When I grow up I will have a dog. I will name him Sundance. We will live in a castle. I will have lots of babies. My castle will be so tall it touches heaven so that when people die I can visit them.

But things were changing. She could feel the change inside her, like a bubble about to burst. Things would be different soon. Her dreams told her so. Bad dreams. She would be different soon. And so she spent that summer in the woods, treading in Keds over moss-eaten earth, listening to buzzsaws that felled miles of trees, and savoring this premature end to her childhood. She crossed streams and tempted deer to eat berries from her hands. She lifted stones and inspected the multilegged insects that scurried from the light. She wrapped her arms around small trees, pretending they were phantom lovers. “Take me,” she said, though she was not sure what that meant, only felt it in her body like a question without an answer.

Once, she saw a moose and hid behind a tree, watching the lumbering thing trample bushes while birds fled. Another time, she saw a boy and girl, old but not really old—not grown-up old—naked and tickling each other to tears. The last time she went to the woods she saw a tiny woman sitting on a rock. She had long blond hair, and a pretty blue dress. The woman waved a tree branch tied with string over the water, and like magic the water rippled.

“Come here, Susan Marley,” the woman said. Her voice was like velvet. Thick and soft and monotone.

“Who are you? How do you know my name?” Susan asked.

The woman lifted her fishing rod from the stream. A minnow gleamed, its gills pumping helplessly, unable to breathe inside so much air. “Should I let it go?” she asked.

“Yes, let it go.” Poor minnow, Susan thought. Trapped on a hook.

The woman tore the fish from the hook. It flopped between her fingers; flop, flop, flop! Then she put it in her mouth and swallowed. She smacked her lips while it wriggled down her throat.
Smack!
The wet sound gave Susan goose bumps. “You eat them, Susan. That’s what you do with them, you eat them,” the woman said.

Terrible. Not for little girls. Didn’t this woman know that she was just a little girl? Susan took a step back. A twig snapped. Someone called her name. Who called her name?

Suddenly, the woman’s face turned bloody. A nest of black knots appeared in a line down her neck and below the high collar of her blue dress. “It’s us, Susan. The shit, the shinola. It’s us,” the woman said.

Susan ran that day, down the hill and through town where April Willow lightheartedly asked, “Where’s the fire?” all the way to her house. Her mother sat feeding the baby at the table, and Susan crawled on the brown linoleum and hugged her woman-sized legs. “What’s the matter, Miss Muffett?” Mary asked.

But Susan could not tell her she’d been out in the woods. She couldn’t tell her she’d been anywhere but at the park a block away. “I got scared,” she said. “I saw a raccoon at the park. I thought it might bite me.”

Mary put down the baby’s Minnie Mouse spoon and looked at Susan. “A raccoon? Did its mouth have white stuff, foam?”

Susan shook her head.

“Are you still scared?”

“Yes.”

Mary lifted Susan onto her lap and held her close. “Better?” she asked.

Susan closed her eyes. “Better.”

The next day, the last day before she would start the second grade, Susan went to the park instead of the woods. There were no scary ladies in the park, just kids who filled their buckets with sand. But the park got boring. She was bad at the seesaw because she always forgot that if she got off at the bottom, someone else fell. She hung upside down on the monkey bars for at least five minutes, but all the blood rushed to her face and she was afraid she might explode. Pop! Her head would fall right off. And for how long could a person swing? You never got anywhere. You never got anywhere in the park, for that matter, because it was a place with limits, when the woods went on forever.

She left the park and walked up the hill, waving at each person she saw. There was Mr. Willow, who was sad because he was lonely, so she smiled extra wide for him, and even did a curtsy. There were the Fullbrights walking their baby in the stroller, except she didn’t like them very much; their heads were full of sand. She pretended they were vampires and covered her neck when they passed. And there was Cathy Prentice, who’d just moved back to town with her new husband.

“Hey you!” said the new husband. Paul. That was his name; people called him Paul. She knew him from someplace, but she couldn’t remember where. “I’ve got your nose right here, you know that?” He put his thumb between his index and middle fingers. “You’re a silly man,” she said. “You’re a cutie,” he told her, walking away with his arm around Cathy’s waist.
That’s how people in love act,
she thought,
not like my mom and dad. Like them.
She watched their backs as they went down the hill, and his hand fell away.
Except they’re soft in all the wrong places, and hard in the places where they should be soft. Like crabs with their bones on the outside.

What did that mean? How can people be like crabs even when they look like people? Why was she seeing all these things when she usually had to look so hard? She had to scrunch her eyes real tight and concentrate concentrate concentrate just like the memory game with cards? Why were they coming to her now all at once?

She squeezed through the fence in the cemetery and entered the woods. On the rock she saw the woman. She was pretty again. Not scary. Susan tried to hide behind a hemlock bush, but the woman saw her.

Susan burst out from behind the bush and ran down a path in the other direction. “Come back,” the woman called. “I see inside you Susan Marley, and you’re already dead. You’re full of worms.”

Susan ran until her legs felt like cooked macaroni. Then she slumped against a tree and cried for a long while. In her mind she saw the woman’s face. It smiled at her. It beckoned. “Come to me,” it whispered. “I want to tell you a secret.”

She didn’t come. She also didn’t go home. Instead, she carved her name into the trunk of a tree with a broken piece of glass. She watched for deer and listened to the birds: a robin, a cardinal, a crow. But it was different now, not her woods. Everything was changed. She felt like a bubble had burst. Who called her name? Was someone playing a joke?

She went back to the river. She couldn’t help it. There was something about the woman that was so familiar. “Why did you do that?” she asked.

The woman put down her fishing rod. At the end of the string was a giant hook. “Do what?”

“Why did you eat a fish? It’ll swim in your stomach and make you sick.”

The woman smiled. Red threads spun out from her blue irises and black blood trickled down her neck. Everything nice about her turned rotten. And then she was pale and pretty again. And then she was both things at once. She patted the rock, “Sit here, next to me.”

“I don’t like you.” Susan shifted her weight between her legs as if she had to pee. Mom would be so mad if she knew that she was talking to a stranger in the woods. Mom would spank her silly. She wished Mom was here.

“But you want to sit next to me, don’t you, Susan? You want to ask me a question. I won’t hurt you. I promise.”

Susan peered inside the woman, and she knew this wasn’t true. The woman did want to hurt her. The woman wanted to scratch her face until she wasn’t pretty anymore. But there was something about the woman, an answer to a question that she couldn’t remember. An answer she had to know because at night she couldn’t sleep, worrying about it. At night she cried and she didn’t know why.

“Come here, my dear. I don’t bite,” the woman said.

Susan looked up at her.
Yes, you do,
she thought, and the woman smiled, as if she heard. But still, there was a question burning inside her, and she needed to know the answer. She went over to the rock and raised her arms. The lady put her hands on Susan’s waist and hoisted her up so that they sat side by side. Her touch wasn’t cold or warm. It felt like nothing, like never being born.

“Tell me a story,” the woman commanded.

Susan cocked her head. “A story? I heard about this man with hooks. Instead of hands he has hooks.”

The woman cast her string into the water but it made no sound, only ripples. Then she smiled. Her blue eyes got big and then small. Solid, and then far away. She was two things at once. She was many things, but mostly, she was hungry. “Tell me a different story. You know the one I mean.”

Susan twirled a lock of hair between her fingers. “At the sideshow circus in Bangor I saw a man who could put his legs over his shoulders. I’m too little to go in so I sneaked under the tent. You can’t tell Dad. He doesn’t know,” Susan said.

“That’s not the right story,” the woman said. Susan looked down at the water and smiled at her reflection. Pretty girl! Then she saw the woman’s reflection and she shivered. Two pretty girls. They looked just alike.

“I’ll start, and you finish,” the woman said. “Once upon a time there was a little girl, and she was very unlucky. She was born in a haunted place where nothing ever died.”

“I don’t like this story,” Susan mumbled. “I only like pretend stories and cartoons.”

The woman grinned, and her small teeth looked like knives. “It used to be a place like any other. It was founded, and people lived here, and mostly they were happy. There was a paper mill, and a river full of fish, and the soil was rich and fertile.”

In Susan’s mind, she saw Bedford. A pretty place. There were new houses clean and neat, and a train that cut through Main Street twice a day. Her great-grandpa poured the blacktop for the roads, and her great-great-grandpa chopped down the trees that made the hungry paper mill’s first meal.

The woman continued. “But there are places in the world that are alive. They have minds and memories and wills.”

“Like Bedford,” Susan said.

The woman nodded. “Yes. Like Bedford. At first the place was pretty, and the people were happy. They were lured here by the man who built the mill. His name was William Prentice, and he promised them picket fences and healthy bodies and opportunity for their children. He promised them dignified old age and clean air to breathe. They erected a statue of him when he died, and even now a stone angel stands watch over his grave.”

The woman stopped. She smiled at Susan. Such a warm smile. A hungry smile. The woman continued: “But William Prentice’s words became salt in their wounds. The chemicals in the river began to kill the animals. The people got sick. If the work didn’t break their backs, the dirty air did. It happened so slowly they didn’t notice it at first. Their pay got lower so they worked harder. Their lungs and ears and eyes and the health of their children suffered, so at night they slept longer, and drank more beer to dull the pain. They didn’t want to admit that a great man like William Prentice had lied. They didn’t want to admit the things they’d done, the sacrifices they’d made to feed the ashes of their own greed.”

Susan saw something in her mind. She saw William Prentice living in a mansion at the top of Iroquois Hill. He was a wealthy man in a three-piece suit. His face was clean-shaven and his fingernails were short and smooth. When he visited the mill he covered his mouth with a handkerchief to filter the fumes. He watched the people working there, who’d been maimed, whose eyes were tearing, who coughed black phlegm. He connected these things to the grown children of Bedford, who were shorter than their parents, and tended to get sick. He promised the people that he’d hire doctors, build better vents, and raise pay. Every time he made them, he intended to keep those promises. But then he’d leave the mill and walk into the bright sunshine, and he’d forget. So the people got sicker, and the fish started to float. And the frogs and turtles died. And only the strong survived.

The woman continued. “There were thirty-four men working the night shift the day the vents backed up. The doors were shut because it was winter. The fumes weren’t yet cool off the pulp. An accident became a tragedy.” The woman made a tsk-tsking sound, but Susan could tell she wasn’t
really
upset. Really, she thought it was funny. “Half the men were dead before the foreman opened the doors. The rest died within the hour.