by Paul Harding
“Come along. I’m right in here,” a voice barked. I startled and turned to run but remained on the landing. It was Mrs. Hale, and she sounded exactly the same as when she’d told Peter Lord that we sledded like girls and when she’d asked my grandfather what she owed him for fixing her clock. Her voice was clear and strong, her words as composed as if set in sharp, indelible black ink on cold, blue-white paper. I went up the rest of the stairs and crossed a wide landing to an open doorway. If running into Mr. Wallace wandering around his house at night had been like finding a puzzled half-ghost, half-man, fuzzy and vague from fumbling around between realms, Mrs. Hale seemed like the pure concentration of all the light and air and earth and people of Enon, from every lap it had ever taken around the sun, not merely from its relatively brief and no doubt fleeting career as a village of colonists but from its centuries as home to more original souls and a tract of forest, and its millennia under glaciers and at the bottoms of unnamed oceans, all taken in by her ancestral house and focused through the precisely configured windows, aligned and coordinated with the clocks and orrery and rendered into the small, prim, neatly dressed figure sitting on a plain wooden settle beneath an electric candle, in the middle of the room, the temple, the dim penetralia, everything else shrouded in darkness, as if she were an artifact in a museum or a prophet in a pew.
I stood at the door dumbfounded and already abashed to the point of reform, the forthcoming speech I imagined already a formality, already perfunctory if not for the agonizing, extra efficacy of having to hear in full the details of the charges of which I already knew I was guilty. Mrs. Hale sat with her hands folded in her lap, looking straight at me, with perfect poise—with what both of my grandparents unhesitatingly would have called character. I had the impulse to check the bottoms of my shoes to see if I had tracked dirt into the house, to smooth my hair down, to tuck my shirt in. My shame doubled, trebled. It struck me how repulsive it was for me to be inside her house, the outrageousness of it made all the starker by her sitting there with such patience and self-possession that to judge by her it was as if I were prevailing upon her tact in some small matter of manners.
I tried but could not suppress a gasp at my idiocy. “Mrs. Hale,” I said.
“Do not speak, Mr. Crosby,” she said. “I know who you are and why you are here. You will find none of what you came for in this house. I am sorry for your loss, but it is time you stopped this carrying on. It is disgraceful.”
Tears brimmed in my eyes and ran down my cheeks. I was humiliated and in awe of the woman. She possessed the majesty of plain speech.
“Mrs. Hale,” I said. It would have been foolish of me to tell her I had not come for drugs. That was somehow immaterial to her.
“I know what you are doing out there at night, Mr. Crosby,” she said. “It is not a mystery. With all your crawling, you’ll soon be going on your belly. You’ll spend your days swallowing dirt and hoping for bare heels to bite.”
“Mrs. Hale,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Crosby.”
“I am sorry.”
“Well and fine, Mr. Crosby, but your sorrows are selfish.
You are a maker of dismal days. You burn your daughter in strange fires when I should think you would be grateful for the blessing of having had a lovely child. Enough is enough.”
I understood as she spoke that Mrs. Hale was not going to call the police. She was not going to report the break-in, or call the offices of The Daily Bread, or speak any more sternly than she already had, or, as a matter of fact, speak any more at all. I had been dismissed.
She sat still and erect on the settle, looking at a point high on the opposite wall, toward whatever it was that moored her to her convictions, clearly finished with the affair, clearly weakened and frail and, worst, frightened, another victim of my violence. The hardness of her consideration toward me was so nearly unbearable that I almost offered to help her lie on her bed or to make her tea or to care for her lawn for free for the rest of her life, gestures that themselves would have been violent, would have demonstrated that I had missed her point precisely, that I rejected precisely the straightforward responsibility she had extended to me, enacted for me.
For an instant I thought of murdering Mrs. Hale. She seemed so impossibly decent. But her dignity provoked me into humility and silence. After bowing my head and standing mute before her for a moment, I turned from the door and walked back down the hall, the wide pine floorboards creaking. I descended the dark, narrow staircase. The grandfather’s clock on the bottom landing read one-thirty. I paused in front of it for several seconds. The silence of the house was so deep that each tick of the clock seemed to enfigure in sound the brass works rotating behind the dial. The clock seemed a device for preserving and telegraphing the heartbeats of my grandfather and my grandmother and my mother and Kate, and a coffin, and a reliquary, and finally just a plain old beautiful clock. Somewhere I could not remember the orrery sat in its room, still, latent, potent in the darkness. I descended from the landing and followed the hallway back to the front door. I stepped outside into the dark night and closed the door behind me.
I WALKED ACROSS THE meadow and into the woods, into the Enon River sanctuary near where my grandfather and I and Kate and I had fed the birds from our hands so many times. I imagined the birds dropping dead from the trees until the ground was covered in a tangled mass of corpses, the beak and broken wings and soiled feathers and needle-thin bones of one animal interlaced and looped with those of the next and all the bodies knitted together. And I imagined that the plaited bodies might be lifted in a single pane and draped over my shoulders and clasped together at my throat with claws and worn like a cape or robe. It would be very light, made as it was from feathers and hollow bones. It would be very long and I would wander from the tame boundaries of the sanctuary out into a real wilderness with a great train following me that would comb up insects and grass and bark and snag on stumps, and that would constantly force me to stop and turn to gather or yank free or untangle, only to have it catch again a moment later on another barb. Bones would snap and wings unscrew from their sockets and I would leave a trail of looping feathers and scattered limbs. My thrashings would knot the garment as much as they rent it. The garment would attract living, wild birds as I passed below their nests and they would alight on it and become entangled. Over time, the garment would be transformed, expelling those first, tame birds and accumulating dark pheasants and crows and elusive little songbirds. After many years, the cape would no longer contain any of the birds from which it had been originally formed. It would become more and more gruesome as it metamorphosed from entirely dead birds to a mixture of the dead and the living. It would writhe and twist with black and brown and flutter scarlet and yellow and purple. The snared birds would peck one another bare and pick out one another’s eyes and preen themselves and eat one another and defecate upon one another and couple, all while they screeched and sang and made nests and brooded over eggs that were not theirs but had boiled up beneath them through the thickets of bones and plumage, even as their own eggs had sifted away to hatch somewhere else or fallen from the cloak onto the ground or in cold puddles, where their quickening yolks would cool and cloud to mere jelly. Sparrows would raise waxwings and crows beget finches and there would be generations of birds that were born, lived, sang, struggled, and died wholly ensnared in that monstrous cloak.
When I came to the creek that ran from Enon Swamp to the lake, I stopped and filled the backpack I had brought with me with as many stones as I could shoulder. I walked through the woods to Cedar Street, crossed the street, and marched through more woods to Enon Lake.
The night was moonless and lidded with clouds so thick that they were invisible within the darkness they made. The clouds seemed low enough that I had to hunch down not to crack my head on them. My mind blazed with ravishing lies. I thought, I cannot accept this gift of myself, myself as a gift, of my person, of having this mind that does not stop burning, that deceives itself an
d consumes itself and immolates itself and believes its own lies and chokes on plain fact. Mrs. Hale is right, but I cannot stomach it. My grandfather always told me that whether or not I believed in religion or God or any kind of meaning or purpose to our lives, I should always think of my life as a gift. Or that’s what he told me his father had told him and that his father had told him, in a tone of voice that suggested that such a way of thinking had seemed to him as remote and as equally magnificent and impossible as it did to me, even as he passed it along as practical advice. But it’s a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and sent stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating.
But that was only how I’d felt since Kate died. I felt as if it was always true and that I was merely deluded before, that I believed in, was enchanted by, a lie of love and goodness, simply because I had it so good for a time. But it was not a lie while I lived it. It was true. It was as true as my despair after her death. I would never have called myself an optimist, or even happy in the sense of being satisfied. I was always restless and ill at ease, running too hot. But Kate gave my life joy. I loved her totally, and while I loved her, the world was love. Once she was gone, the world seemed to prove nothing more than ruins and the smoldering dreams of monsters.
I WALKED INTO ENON Lake with the intention of drowning myself. My idea was to sink myself with the rocks in the backpack. The water was cold and pure and clean. It washed my filthy hands and my filthy face and my filthy hair. I was exhausted and scorched and the water quenched me. I could practically hear the water hiss as I immersed myself in it. I unshouldered the backpack full of rocks and it sank behind me. I waded out until I was up to my neck. My clothes weighed me down but I still had to half-tread with my arms and hands. I exhaled the air in my lungs. I ducked under the surface and sank into the cold quiet water.
There had been so many times when I had felt embarrassed for my daughter that I was her father, mostly times when, after I’d been fired by a client or had failed to make enough money to last the winter without having to dip into the money from selling my mother’s house, Kate would hug me and kiss me and tell me, “It’s okay, Dad,” and I’d have to act comforted by her while being overwhelmed by what a wonderful kid she was and how humiliated I felt at having put her in the position of consoling her own parent. I realized that what I had been doing since Kate’s death was nothing short of violence. It was not grieving or healing or even mourning, but deliberate, enthralled persistence in the violence of her death, a willful preservation of the violence imparted to her and to our family by that car battering her and dispatching her from her self and from this world, and my perversity—that was the word for it, I realized in that instant, under the cold water—my perversity was perfected by the fact that I knew better, that I had known all along that the drugs and punching the wall and breaking my hand, on purpose, of course, of course, of course, I thought—and ravaging my family’s home and digging around in the dark and ruining the peace of other people’s homes and terrorizing them was the deliberate cultivation of the violence of the instant of the collision of the car with my girl and, worse, the deliberate, angry sowing of it on neighbors and strangers and worst of all Kate, whatever that name now meant—memory, angel, voodoo doll. And yet I knew better. I had known every second of every day that what I was doing was wrong and I had done it anyway.
The water’s mercies were brief. My breath gave out. The foreign, submarine world suddenly alarmed me. I surfaced and gulped at the air and scrambled back toward the shore, reaching the edge of the water on my hands and knees. When I attempted to stand, I tottered under the weight of my soaked clothes and sprawled on my back, my legs still in the shallows. I unzipped my sweatshirt and peeled out of it like I was shedding a bloated second skin. Exhaustion overtook me and I lay panting and freezing on the sandy gravel. The last tatters of storm clouds streamed across the bright summer stars. I barked a laugh.
“Mercy, mercy me; this is sad,” I gasped. “Enough is enough is right. Charles Washington Crosby, you have got to get your shit together.” I would have curled up and fallen asleep where I lay if I hadn’t been so cold and dismayed with myself. Instead, I got to my feet and started back toward home, dragging my heavy, limp sweatshirt by the hood over the ground behind me.
When I had crossed the golf course and reached the top of the hill behind the cemetery, I paused and looked down at the irregular ranks of headstones. From where I stood, Kate’s stone was obscured behind the maple tree. No matter, I thought, glancing at my dark, dirty sweatshirt. I look like an old ghoul dragging around some fawn I snatched from its mother’s bed. I’ll get some dry clothes and some sleep and come back tomorrow.
Directly in front of me, halfway down the hill, maybe seventy-five yards away, a spark of light flashed and backlit two or three large rectangular headstones, so quickly that had the afterimage not pulsed its way across my vision, I’d have been convinced that it hadn’t happened. I squinted at the dark. The light sparked again, and again, and blinked into a tiny flame. A young girl’s voice laughed and another shushed at it. I realized it was the two girls I had seen drinking wine and reading tarot cards and talking about boys. I could just make out a cigarette and a face in the light for a second before the lighter went out again. One of the girls laughed again and the other tried to hiss her quiet but started laughing, too. They hushed each other but I could still hear them talking in delighted, hurried undertones and it was charming, how happy they sounded to be together, raising a little hell, acting up a little. I thought about the nights when Peter Lord and other friends and I used to range all over Enon, not really even a little truly feral after all, maybe, but boisterous and happy. And I thought about what fun I’d had with Kate hiking all over the village, too, and how when she’d been younger, how thrilling it had been for her whenever we’d wandered off a bit too far and had had to walk home in the dark.
I started back across the hilltop, intending to sneak away without the girls noticing me and maybe getting scared, ruining their good cheer. I must have grunted or something, I’m not sure what, but I made a noise and the laughing stopped. I froze and the girls froze.
“Carl?” one of the girls called. “Carl, is that you?” For all I’d been through in the past year, I felt more petrified than at any other time. Christ, I’m going to jail tonight after all, I thought, imagining the girls shrieking and being frightened half to death at the sight of me, soaking and strung out and wretched.
“Carl, cut the shit; I’m serious.”
As idiotic as I felt, I croaked out, “Um, no. Ah, hi. It’s not—Carl. I’m—”
The girls got up on their knees. I dropped my sweatshirt and started walking toward them, with my hands out at my sides, almost like I was approaching a skittish animal. I didn’t know what else to do.
“Who’s that?” one of the girls asked.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak—I mean, I didn’t know you guys were there.”
“Who are you?” the girl repeated.
“Well,” I said, “I’m Charlie.” It sounded so strange to say that. It felt so odd that there was nothing else I could say to these young girls, girls near to my daughter’s age, that the only appropriate thing for me to say seemed to be no
thing more than my name.
“Charlie, huh?” the other girl said. They both stood up. One of the girls was noticeably taller than the other, very slim, with dark eyes. She wore a black sweatshirt with the hood pulled over her head. Her long, snaky, jet-black hair cascaded out from the hood and down the front of the sweatshirt. She stood a step in front of the other girl, who was fairer, with lighter eyes. The other girl’s hair had been dyed black, too, but she’d let it half-revert back to its natural red color. She wore a black leather jacket that had a white skull with a Mohawk and the word EXPLOITED spray-painted across the front of it. She wore a black skirt with black leggings and high, heavy black leather biker boots. They were trying to be cool, but they were nervous. I thought of Kate and felt like they were not being nervous enough. I walked toward them until I stood about ten feet away. I deliberately kept my body turned a third away from them, to show that I wasn’t going to move any closer in their direction.
“Sorry, guys,” I said. I looked down at my soaking, muddied self. “Sorry. I’m not having”—I wasn’t sure what to say—“such a good night.”
The shorter girl elbowed the taller girl and the taller said, “Ohh; it’s you.”
“Sorry—” I said. “It’s me?”
“Yeah, it’s you—Kate’s dad.”
I knew they knew. It was as simple as that, but I still feigned a little. “ ‘Kate’s dad’? What are you talking about?”
“Kate’s dad,” the girl said. “You’re Kate’s dad. The kid—the girl—that died last year. The eighth grader. You’re her dad, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Yeah, that’s right, but—”
“Don’t worry, man,” the girl said. “It’s okay. Kind of everyone knows.”
“Everyone knows what?” I said.
“Yeah. I mean, the guys know. I mean, these older guys we kind of know, at school, and some girls; they’ve seen you walking around at night a few times. Everyone kind of knows about you. I mean, not the cops or the parents, just some of us. No one told them it was you that did that break-in. We know you walk all around at night. Everyone kind of thinks it’s cool.”
