Nathaniel

by John Saul

  But Michael didn't seem to hear her. His gaze seemed far away, and when he spoke, there was a hollowness in his voice. "Why did Grandpa beat Dad?" he asked. And then another vision flashed into his mind, a vision that seemed far in the past. It was the dream he'd had of his father falling from the hayloft, falling onto the pitchfork. Only there was someone else in the loft with his father, and suddenly he could see that person, see him clearly. It was his grandfather.

  He looked up at his mother. "Mom, why did Grandpa want to kill Dad?"

  Janet's thoughts tumbled chaotically in her mind. Amos beating Mark? Killing Mark? It made no sense.

  "They were only dreams, honey," she said, her voice taking on a note of desperation. "You have to remember that the dreams you have don't have anything to do with the real world. All they mean is that something is happening in your mind, and you're trying to deal with it. But the things you dream about aren't real—they're only fantasies."

  Michael's brow furrowed as he considered his mother's words. But there were too many memories, too many images. His father, his grandfather… Dr. Potter. His frown deepened.

  Janet nodded. "I know, honey. Dreams are like that. When you're having them, they seem terribly real. Sometimes they still do, even after you wake up. But in a while, you realize they were only dreams, and forget them." She stood up, and drew Michael to his feet. "I want you to come out and say hello to Grandpa now, and then we're going to go over to see Grandma. Okay?"

  But Michael drew back. "Do I have to? Can't I stay here?"

  Janet frowned. "No, you can't. Grandpa needs you to help him with some things, and after all he's done for us, I can't see that you wouldn't want to help him."

  "But—sometimes he scares me!" Michael protested.

  Suddenly Janet reached the end of her patience. "Now, that's enough. Your grandfather loves you very much, and he'd never do anything to hurt you, just as he never did anything to hurt your father. So you're going to pull yourself together, and act like a man. Is that clear?"

  Michael opened his mouth, then closed it again. Silently, he nodded his head, then started up the short staircase that led out of the storm cellar, his mother behind him.

  Just outside, where he must have heard everything they'd said, they found Amos Hall. But if he had heard them, he gave no sign.

  Janet leaned over to give her mother-in-law a kiss on the cheek, but for the first time since they'd met, Anna made no response. Instead, she moved her face away, and continued darning one of Amos's gray woolen work socks.

  "It was so good of you to get the truck for me," Janet began, but Anna glanced at her with a look that made Janet fall silent.

  "We couldn't very well have you begging favors off strangers, could we?" she said in a distinctly cold voice.

  "Strangers?" Janet echoed. "You mean Ione Simpson?"

  "I'm sure Ione and Leif Simpson are very nice people, but you do have a family, Janet. If you need something, I wish you'd just ask us."

  Janet sank into a chair across from the older woman, barely able to believe that Anna was insulted by what had happened yesterday. "Anna, Michael and I walked into town and had every intention of walking back. But we bumped into Ilone, and she offered us a ride."

  "So you invited her to dinner? It seems to me that you might have thought of having us first. We've worked so hard on the place, and after all, it was our home—"

  "—And it's still a mess," Janet interrupted, improvising rapidly. "Last night was hardly what you could call a party. Ione brought over some things she had in the 'fridge, and we just sort of had a picnic." She thought Anna's expression softened slightly, so she pressed on. "It was all

  very impromptu, but if I hurt your feelings, I'm sorry. Of course, I'll fix my first real dinner for you and Amos, but that's not what last night was. Forgive me?"

  Anna's eyes narrowed for a moment, but then she smiled. "Of course I do. It's just that—well, you know how people gossip in small towns. I just don't want people to start claiming there's trouble between us. And that's what they'd say, you know."

  "Why on earth would they?" Janet asked, now genuinely puzzled by Anna's words. There had to be more to it than simply an imagined slight.

  "They've always talked about us around here, even though we've been here longer than anyone else," Anna replied.

  "Well, you can believe I won't give anyone anything to talk about," Janet declared. Then, before Anna could begin worrying the subject any further, she decided to change it. "I think Michael and I found some of your things last night."

  Now it was Anna who was puzzled. "Mine? What do you mean?"

  "Late last night, we decided to explore the attic." She waited for a reaction, but there was none. Instead, Anna only looked at her with mild curiosity. "We found all kinds of things. I assumed they must have belonged to you."

  Now Anna's brows knit thoughtfully. "If it was in the attic, it wouldn't have been mine. I don't think I've ever been in the attic of that house in my whole life. And when we moved in here, we brought all our things with us."

  Janet stared at her. "You were never in the attic? But you lived in that house so many years—"

  Anna's eyes met hers. "But I never went to the attic. I started to, once, but Amos stopped me. He told me there was nothing up there, and that it was dangerous. He told me the floor's weak, and if I went up there, I'd fall through and break my neck."

  "And so you never went?" Janet asked, amazed. "If Mark had ever told me something like that, you can bet it would be the first place I'd go." Of course, she thought, Mark never would have told me something like that.

  Anna set her darning aside and wheeled herself over to the stove where a pot of coffee was simmering. Picking it up with one hand, she used the other to maneuver herself back to the table, where she poured each of them a cup of the steaming brew. Only when she'd set the pot on a trivet did she speak. "Well, Mark wasn't Amos, and I wasn't you. When Amos told me to leave the attic alone, I did just that."

  "But what about the children? Didn't they ever go up there?"

  "If they did, I don't know about it," Anna replied. "And I suspect that if their father told them not to, they didn't. Both Laura and Mark had great respect for their father."

  "But still, they were children—"

  "Children can be controlled," Anna replied, her voice oddly flat.

  Suddenly Michael's words flashed through Janet's mind, but when she spoke, she managed to keep her voice light.

  "What did he do, beat them?"

  Anna stiffened in her chair. "Did Mark tell you his father beat him?" she asked.

  Janet shrank back defensively. "No—no, of course not."

  "Amos may have used the strop now and then," Anna went on, ignoring Janet's words as if she'd never uttered them. "But I'm not sure I call that a beating." Her voice took on a faraway note that made Janet wonder if the old woman was aware she was still speaking out loud. "A child needs to know respect for his elders, and he needs controls. Yes, controls…" Her voice faded away, but a moment later she seemed to come back into reality. "Amos always controlled the children," she finished.

  "But a razor strop—"

  "My father used one on me," Anna replied. "It didn't hurt me."

  No, Janet thought to herself. It didn't hurt you at all. All it did was make you think that whatever a man told you to do, you had to do. All it did was make you into a nice obedient wife, the kind of wife I could never have been, and the kind that Mark, thank God, never wanted. No wonder he ran away.

  But even as she allowed the thoughts to come into her mind, she rejected them. They struck her as somehow disloyal, not only to Anna and Amos, but to Mark as well. Mark, after all, had been her husband, and she had loved him, and who was she to begin questioning the manner in which he had been raised, particularly when the people who had raised him were showing her nothing but kindness. Once again, she retreated to safer waters.

  "But what about the things we found in the attic? What shall I do
with them?"

  Anna's eyes suddenly became expressionless. "I'm sure I don't know," she said. "I don't know what there is."

  "There's a lot of silver and china. And there's a—" She stopped short, for Anna's eyes were suddenly angry.

  "Don't tell me," Anna commanded. "There are some things I don't want to know about. If there were things in that attic, then Amos knew they were there, and knew what they were. They would have come from his family— that house was built by his ancestors over a century ago."

  Janet's mind churned.

  Abby Randolph's diary, written just a hundred years ago.

  But Abby had died. All her children had died except Nathaniel, and then, after that terrible winter, Abby and Nathaniel, too, had died.

  "… that house was built by his ancestors. …" and then she remembered. According to the old legend and the diary, Abby Randolph had been pregnant that winter.

  The child must have survived. It must have been a girl, and it must have survived.

  Janet felt a sickness in her stomach as she realized what had gone on in her house so many years ago. She gazed at Anna, who had once more picked up her darning and was now placidly stitching her husband's sock.

  How much did Anna know? Had Anna known she was living in Abby Randolph's house, that her husband was a descendant of the only survivor of that long-ago tragedy?

  Janet decided she didn't, and knew that she would never tell her. Indeed, Janet wished that she herself had never found the diary. Suddenly, the ghosts of Abby and Nathaniel were very real to her.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Michael followed his grandfather into the barn, then up the ladder to the loft, where the bales of hay—what was left of last winter's supply—were neatly stacked under the sloping roof. He stood back while Amos cut the wire from three bales, and when Amos handed him a pitchfork, he seemed reluctant to take it.

  "It won't hurt you," Amos admonished him. "Not unless you get careless and stick the tines through your foot."

  Michael took the fork gingerly, then made a desultory stab at one of the bales. A few pieces of hay came loose, but the fork stuck in the bale itself.

  "I'll break 'em up, and you pitch it over the edge," Amos offered. He peeled off his shirt, and a moment later set to work, his powerful torso moving rhythmically as he quickly began breaking the neat bales down. Hesitantly, Michael began using his own fork to throw the hay down into the bin below the loft. As he worked, his head began to ache.

  He tried to ignore the now-familiar pain, tried to concentrate on what he was doing, but it grew worse, radiating out from his temples and growing into a throbbing that seemed to fill his head. Then the light in the barn began playing tricks, fading away so that the loft seemed to

  disappear into a black void, only to come back with a brilliance that washed the color out of everything.

  In his mind, filtered by the pain, he heard Nathaniel whispering to him, telling him to beware, warning him of danger.

  And then he saw his father.

  It was like last night, and though Michael worked on, doggedly forking the hay over the edge of the loft, he suddenly was no longer aware of himself. It was as if his mind had left his body and was now in the far corner, watching as some other being went on performing his tasks. But then, as he watched, something changed, and suddenly he was watching his father.

  And his grandfather was there too, breaking up the bales for his father just as he had been for Michael himself.

  And then the two men weren't working anymore, but were facing each other, and Michael could see the anger in both their faces. His father was staring at Amos, and there was something in his eyes that Michael recognized. And then he knew. His father's eyes had the same emptiness he'd seen in Nathaniel's eyes. And then he heard his father speak.

  "You killed her, didn't you? You were there when she was born, and you took her away and killed her."

  "No, Mark—"

  "I saw it, Pa. I saw what you did. Nathaniel showed me, Pa. This afternoon, Nathaniel showed me."

  Amos's eyes widened. "Nathaniel? There is no Nathaniel, damn you."

  "There is, Pa," Michael heard his father say. "Nathaniel lives, and he showed me what you did. He wants vengeance, Pa. He wants it, and he's going to get it."

  And then, as Michael looked helplessly on, his grandfather began moving forward, moving toward his father.

  Michael knew what was about to happen.

  He wanted to cry out, wanted to warn his father, just as he had wanted to warn him in the dream last night.

  In the distance, as if from very far away, he could hear a dog barking. It was Shadow, and though Michael knew the big dog was nowhere around, he also knew that the shepherd was trying to help him.

  Suddenly his voice came to him, and a scream erupted from his throat to fill the vastness of the barn and echo off the walls in a keening wail. The pain in his head washed away, only to be replaced by another pain, a searing that shot up through his body like a living thing, twisting him around so that suddenly he was facing his grandfather, his eyes wide, his face contorted into a grimace of agony.

  Then, as he felt himself begin to slip into the darkness that was gathering around him, once again he heard Shadow. The barking grew louder. It sounded furious—as if Shadow was about to attack…

  At first he was only aware of a murmuring sound, and was sure that Nathaniel was talking to him again, but slowly the voices became more distinct, and he recognized his mother's voice, and his grandmother's. And there was a third voice, not quite so familiar, but one that he recognized. And then he knew—it was Eric's mother. He opened his eyes to see Ione Simpson smiling at him. "Well, look who's back," Ione said. "Feeling better?" Michael tried to remember what had happened, but what he could remember made no sense. He'd seen his father, but that was impossible. And he'd had a headache, and Nathaniel had been talking to him, warning him about something. Slowly, he became aware of a throbbing pain in his right foot, and he struggled to sit up. Ione placed a gently restraining hand on his shoulder.

  "Not yet," she told him. "Just lie there, and keep your foot up. Okay?"

  Michael let himself sink back onto the cushion that was under his head, and fought against the pain that seemed to be growing every second. He looked around, recognizing his grandmother's parlor. His mother was there, and so were his grandparents, and they looked worried.

  "What happened?" he asked at last.

  "A little accident," Ione told him. "It seems you aren't quite an expert with a pitchfork yet."

  Michael frowned, and another fragment of memory came back to him: his grandfather, moving toward his father. But it hadn't been his father. It had been himself. "I—I didn't—" he began, but his mother interrupted him.

  "Of course you didn't, sweetheart," she assured him. "It was just an accident. The pitchfork slipped, and went through your foot."

  Now Michael raised his head just enough to gaze at his right foot, which was propped up high on a second cushion, swathed in bandages.

  "It isn't nearly as bad as it looks," Ione Simpson assured him. "It looks like the fork went right between the bones, and it doesn't seem like anything's very badly hurt."

  Michael stared at the foot for a long moment, then gazed curiously around the room. Something was wrong—if he was hurt, where was the doctor? He frowned worriedly. "Is Dr. Potter here?"

  Ione's smile faded away, and her eyes left Michael. Then his mother was bending over him. "Dr. Potter couldn't come," she said. "But it's all right, honey. Mrs. Simpson's a nurse, and she knows what to do."

  But Michael's frown only deepened. His mind was continuing to clear and as it did, another memory came back to him, a memory from the previous night. "Dr. Potter," he whispered. "Why couldn't he come? Did—did something happen to him?"

  A silence fell over the room, finally broken by the gruff voice of Amos Hall. "He might as well know," he said.

  "Amos—" Janet began, but the old man shook his head.


  "Dr. Potter died last night, Michael," he said. Michael's eyes widened, and the color drained from his face. "Do you know what a stroke is?" Mutely, Michael shook his head. "It's a blood vessel bursting inside the head. That's what happened to Dr. Potter last night. They found him this morning."

  In his mind's eye, Michael had a sudden vision of Dr. Potter, slumped in a chair in front of a fire, his face scarlet, his eyes filled with pain and fear. He shook his head. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I didn't mean to do it. I didn't mean to…" His voice trailed off, and his eyes met his grandfather's. There was a look in his grandfather's eyes that terrified him, and after only a second, he tore his eyes away and listened to his mother's voice.

  "It's all right, sweetheart," she was saying. "No one thinks you meant to hurt yourself—it was just an accident. And you'll be all right. The foot will heal right up in no time at all."

  Michael started to say something, but then, once again, he saw the strange look in his grandfather's eyes, and he changed his mind.

  "Can you tell us what happened, honey?" Janet asked. "Do you remember any of it?"

  Michael ignored her question. "Can we go home, Mom? Please?" Janet's encouraging smile gave way to a worried frown.

  "Now?" Michael nodded.

  "But Michael, you need to rest for a while."

  "I don't want to rest," Michael said. "I want to go home."

  Suddenly Amos's voice cut in. "Your mother has some things to do, and you need to rest. And you need to be looked after. You'll stay here."

  Now a look of real fear came into Michael's eyes. "Can't I go with you?" he begged his mother. "I can stay in the truck, and my foot doesn't hurt much. Really, it doesn't."