The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  One of Alice's favorite illustrations came from a book, The Wind Boy, in which the North Wind, cheeks puffed out and lips pursed, blew swirling gusts across the page. She could feel the face of that colossus above her now, eyes streaming, curled locks of gray hair disarranged. The mild, perfumed May afternoon had been replaced by a reckless cold. Alice ran in circles, slipping on the grass, and when she stopped running the hail collected like fallen stars in her hair and in the lap of her dress, which she held out like an apron. High above, the hailstones tore noisily through the leaves of the trees and piled up in curving tracks over the grass. It wasn't true, was it, Archie's story about finding a live frog in a hailstone? She examined one: they were like marbles, gray and knobbed and dirty looking, as though they brought with them on their screaming ride toward the earth particles of outer space, a gritty planetary grime like fireplace ash. She scooped up another handful; they were strangely dry.

  Then she felt the pace of the hail pick up. The sound intensified overhead, a moaning in the wind. The hail began to clatter like a train wreck on the roof high up and invisible in the crazily blurred sky.

  “Ouch!” she cried, as a hailstone struck her face. She ducked and held her hands over her head as she ran.

  “Alice!” She heard Archie's voice; he was calling to her from the porch, leaning over the rail. “Alice, come inside!”

  But this was too wonderful, too strange and wonderful, not to be out in it. She slipped on the grass and fell. From the porch she could hear Wally laughing as she scrambled to her feet, the whoosh of the hail filling her ears.

  “Ouch!” she cried again, and then in surprise, “Ow!” for it really hurt now and she skidded back toward the house, bent double under the storm of ice. Safe on the porch, panting, she shook her head like a dog. Crystals of ice flew off her.

  Wally jumped back. “Hey!” he said.

  Archie hustled her inside past James, who held open the door, smiling.

  “Mad girl,” Archie said, pushing her in front of him. In the hall he stood, breathing hard, looking down at her. “Go have a bath,” he said. “Go and have a bath, mad birthday girl.”

  In an hour it had all melted away. The air grew cool and heavy, the twilight full of drowsy, stunned mosquitoes and a haze that drifted in layers over the lawn. Alice wandered downstairs from her bath in bare feet and jeans and an old sweater.

  James and Eli were in the kitchen, the windows fogged with steam from a pot of water boiling on the stove. Just as Alice stepped into the room, Tad and Harry came in the back door, the three-legged dog scrabbling at the end of a leash behind them.

  “Here. Hold him, okay?” Harry handed Alice the leash and crossed the room to open the refrigerator.

  Alice took the leash and sat down in a kitchen chair. When the dog pushed past her knees to go under the table, the leash wrapped around the leg of the chair and Alice followed him to untangle the line. The dog sat down with the top of its speckled head grazing the underside of the table. The stump of the dog's leg held Alice's gaze; she found she could look at it for longer now, though she still wasn't ready to touch it. Suddenly the dog darted its head toward her. Alice froze in alarm; was he going to bite her? But he only licked her hand swiftly and then looked away. She stole her arm around him, her fingers in his rough coat. He began to pant.

  They sat to eat finally with a clatter of knives and forks, a scraping of chairs. Alice came up from under the table and took her seat between Archie and Tad, who reached over to give her a horse bite on the thigh; Archie frowned at them as he uncorked a bottle of wine fetched up from the basement, his glasses pushed back on the top of his head. Then he gave Alice a second look and leaned toward her, the corkscrew still in his hand. “Did the hail do that to you?” he said, staring at her forehead.

  Alice put her hand up to her face, the little cut just above her left eyebrow she had noticed when she cleared a circle on the steamed-over mirror in the bathroom. It had stung in the bath, just for a moment, when she'd soaped her face and slipped under the hot water. “Maybe,” she said. “I don't know.”

  Archie's eyes were fixed on her forehead.

  “What?” Alice said.

  “It's very strange.” Archie's eyes roved over her face.

  Alice stared at him.

  “Your mother,” he began, his eyes returning to her forehead, “your mother had a little scar.” He raised a finger and touched his own eyebrow. “Just here, where that hail got you.”

  “I remember that,” James said suddenly from the other end of the table.

  The other boys had fallen silent.

  “I do, too,” Wally said after a minute. “How'd she get it?”

  Archie put down the corkscrew and picked up his wineglass. He glanced down the table at the boys and then back at Alice, and his look, when Alice met it, was full of loneliness.

  She reached to put her hand up to the place above her eyebrow where the hailstone had struck her. No one said anything.

  “She got it from a hailstone,” Archie said finally. “When she was ten.”

  “You're kidding?” Harry stared at Archie.

  “That's so weird,” Tad said. “Really?”

  Alice did not say anything. The little cut above her eyebrow burned for a moment and then buzzed, and then the sensation died away. She felt excited. Coincidences such as this were part of her understanding of the world, the same part that contemplated stories without questioning, whether their events were believable or not, but this instance of concurrence drew her close to her mother in a way that felt especially strange and important. Archie had read enough Shakespeare to Alice for her to see that even stories for adults sought conclusions, couples marching off together paired like swans, or the apparently dead returned to life, or twins parted by shipwreck finding each other at last. The pattern of revelation, resolution, restoration was familiar to her. Alice had a pop-up book—supplied to her by Elizabeth—that displayed various anatomical parts with a startling three-dimensionality; erect penises leapt up out of the book's pages, a woman's abdomen was peeled back like layers of an onion to reveal a uterus, a pair of ovaries nestled like pears in her belly. On one page, an umbilical cord was strung from margin to margin like a watch chain. But though Alice knew she had been linked physically to her mother, this bridge between them—mother and daughter struck at the same age and in identical places by a hailstone—carried with it an extraordinary, even Shakespearean dispensation. Her brothers did not have scars caused by hailstones.

  Alice looked back at Archie. He seemed so sad to her sometimes. He rarely laughed, he often seemed tired, his shoulders sloped and hunched. This incident likewise seemed to have failed to charm or even amaze him. On the contrary, he looked more serious than usual, though Alice, with the communication of this revelation, felt blessed, singled out for special attention. Yet such moments in stories, she remembered suddenly, usually preceded something significant, a test of some kind. An ordinary boy discovers that he is actually a member of an ancient, magical race, destined to save it from destruction. A girl to whom heavenly creatures are revealed discovers that she must rescue her father from a terrifying enchantment. Alice had always admired the children in these stories, the ones who found themselves in the midst of bewildering adventures, charged with something terribly important. Was this one of those moments, she wondered? A little shiver ran over her.

  At that involuntary movement, Archie seemed to wake up from the trance of his inspection of her. His eyes widened a fraction, and then, after a moment, he gave her a rare smile. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy, “ he said. He looked back at his wineglass and took a long swallow. Then he raised his eyebrows and surveyed the table. “Well? Anyone?”

  “Uh, Lear?” James said.

  “No,” Eli said quietly. “It's Hamlet.”

  Archie pointed his fork at him, “Horatio's your clue. Exactly,” he said. “Ten points to Eli.”

  After dinne
r, Tad and Harry went out to the barn to play Ping-Pong. From the back door of the kitchen, Alice looked across the grass at the parallelogram of light that fell from the open barn door and illuminated the daffodils, most of them flattened by the hail, that ran along the stone wall. Only a few of the pale heads floated above the mist. Faintly Alice could hear the Ping-Pong game, the dull plocking sound. This was the hour when the pair of doves that roosted in the birch tree near the back door made their good-night noises; and there they were, with their fussy, throaty warbling sounds. Where had the doves gone during the hail, she wondered? The leaves of the trees rustled in the darkness, as if something were settling itself there, staring out at her.

  Alice helped carry plates to the sink and stood waiting with a towel while James washed the dishes. She could see their reflections wavering in the dark glass of the window, James's tall shape in his white shirt, Archie far off behind them where he sat reading at the table, the lenses of his glasses glinting. Her own face, when she stared at her reflection in the windowpane, was soft and smudged as a thumbprint. In a photograph from her parents’ wedding, her mother wore a bright red dress with a gold pin shaped like a whorled feather that Archie had given her; Alice had studied the photograph in minute detail. She had had to ask what the pin was, because it was too small in the photograph to make out clearly. She had been unable to see the scar on her mother's forehead, for instance, though of course she had not known to look for it. Wally crossed the room behind her. His shirt bloomed blurrily against the mirror of the windowpane for a moment, and Alice startled and nearly dropped the glass in her hand.

  James glanced over at her and grinned. “See a ghost?” Archie pushed back his chair from the table, folding the newspaper and slapping it against the table's edge. Eli, who had been sitting at the table beside him looking through an old gardening book of their mother's, didn't look up. “What fools these mortals be,” he said; this was what Archie usually said when he read the newspaper.

  “Quite right,” Archie said. He stretched. “Let's go,” he said to Alice.

  Alice had been waiting for this, the moment when she and Archie would leave the house together and walk down to the river. This was their tradition on her birthday, a tradition begun by Archie for Alice alone. It did not have the gaiety of the rituals developed by Alice's mother; it was instead a grave occasion. But Alice loved it. Now Archie helped Alice root in the drawers of the pantry until they found a candle stub; it was too tall, and Archie sliced off the end with his knife. Then he sat down at the table again to fold the tinfoil boat into which they would affix the candle stub and set it to sail in the big, calm pool of the river. The ceremony, the embarkation of the little boat with its flickering candle, had filled Alice all her life with a serious pleasure.

  The little cut on her forehead gave a sudden twinge, reminding her; the wonder of it, the strangeness of the coincidence, filled her again for the second time that evening. She felt very small suddenly, like something floating in the river and approaching the gnashing, tumbling confluence of the many branching streams that met just above the falls.

  Outside, when they stepped into the darkness, the sky overhead was streaked with clouds like ghostly ponies’ tails, the moon's face blazing down at them.

  “Time is like a fashionable host…” Archie began when they were seated on stones at the river's edge, listening to the water.

  All the MacCauley children were handy with Shakespeare. Tad and Harry, especially, had an endless store of lines taught to them by Archie which they used as ripostes or insults or excuses or purely irrelevantly. “Now, infidel, I have thee on the hip!”

  Where was Harry? Someone might ask Tad, and he would be unable to prevent himself from striking a pose and replying: “I saw young Harry with his beaver on.”

  “Potationspottle-deep,” they warned Archie, who liked his wine with dinner.

  Chided, they hung their heads and confessed: “I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.”

  Archie looked down at Alice now. “Well, somehow you've gotten very old,” he said.

  Above their heads, bats crossed the river in the black sky in pursuit of the night's insects. The stones were black; the little rills and rapids in the river frothed white in the darkness.

  “You know, I'm always grateful to Eli, whenever I come down his path,” Archie said into the silence that was filled with the musical rippling of the water, the childish sound of bubbles and splashing. “The older I get, the more grateful I am. It's a wonder none of you ever sprained an ankle coming down here at night to swim,”

  Alice sat on crossed legs beside her father. The stones did not hurt her. She was able to fit the sharp bones of her backside into comfortable little hollows, shifting the stones around beneath her. She loved to be outdoors at night. Everything smelled different, as though during the day the sun bleached away the scent of things; only at night did the cool darkness release them, a mysterious intoxication. She lifted her nose to the breeze, like a fox.

  She felt Archie reach for her, his arm fall around her shoulders. She turned to look up at him, and he touched the little wound above her eyebrow with a fingertip.

  “What are we to make of that,” he said quietly, but it wasn't a question.

  She leaned against her father's shoulder. He reached into the pocket of his coat and found the candle and matches. From the breast pocket of his shirt he unfolded the tinfoil boat and tweaked it clumsily until it held its shape. He offered it to Alice and opened the box of matches, striking one, and holding the flame to the bottom of the candle, letting it drip a pool of wax into the saucer of the boat. When he was done he affixed the candle and returned the matchbox to his coat pocket. Alice, looking up into his face, saw him glance upward as if suddenly aware of something that had passed swiftly over them, a rush of wings. His eyes were wide-open and startled, and Alice felt the hair rise on her arms.

  He looked down at her after a minute. “Owl,” he said. “They're so quiet.”

  Alice watched him raise himself painfully from the stones of the beach. She took the boat from him when he held it out to her. Together they crouched by the water, and Archie fished in his pocket for the matchbox and lit the candle. Then Alice released the craft with her fingertips into the water. They watched it wobble out and catch in the current, a little light that brought the darkness in close around them.

  Alice lifted her imaginary camera, made a silent click against her teeth with her tongue.

  Then suddenly the light sped away, borne off in the flow, and in the next moment it had gone out altogether, the fragile boat toppled and the candle extinguished.

  “Ah, well,” Archie said into the darkness beside her. “Another year come and gone.”

  They came up from the river and walked toward the house through the shadows in the orchard, between the old stone posts that had marked where the gate had once stood, and into the field. A length of white ribbon from the rope walk was still tangled in the branches of one of the trees, an end trailing over the grass in the darkness, shiny and out of place. They stopped for Archie to shake it free from the branch. He gathered it up and stuck it in his pocket. As they crossed the lawn toward the back door, Alice looked up toward the house and saw James at the screen, silhouetted there as if he'd been watching for them. When he saw them, he stepped forward and held open the door.

  “O'Brien called,” he said as Archie and Alice drew near. “He's on his way over here.”

  They stepped inside. “What is it?” Archie said.

  James glanced down at Alice for a second. “It's Helen,” he said to Archie.

  At that moment they heard the car in the lane. Archie went out the door again, letting it bang shut behind him. The headlights of O'Brien's car blazed in the dark, illuminating a stretch of the lawn and the crabapple tree with its twisted Oriental posture, the one Alice had pretended, when she was younger, was the enchanted figure of a princess trapped inside like Daphne, the girl who had been turned into a windswept laurel tree
to protect her from Apollo. From the back door, Alice saw Archie lean in the driver's window, his hand on the top of the car. After a moment, he stood upright again and opened the back door. Theo climbed out. Archie shut the car door and put a hand on Theo to draw him onto the grass away from the driveway. The tires squealed once as O'Brien backed up, reversed, and then headed up the driveway. Alice watched Archie look down at Theo standing beside him in the darkness. Theo had cinched his belt very tightly; even more objects seemed to be hanging from it. His waist looked as tiny as a grasshopper's.

  Alice glanced questioningly at James standing quietly beside her.

  Wally came up behind them, his hands in his pockets. “He got here fast,” he said.

  “What's happened?” Alice asked.

  Nobody answered her. James was watching Archie and Theo standing in the dark, Archie saying something softly to Theo. Wally took his hands out of his pockets and crossed his arms over his chest, his fists tucked under his armpits.

  “What happened?” Alice asked again. She had begun to feel frightened. “What's wrong with Helen?”

  But then Archie and Theo were coming toward the door. James leaned out and opened it for them.

  Theo was carrying a suitcase and his toolbox. He didn't look at Alice or say hello.

  Archie reached down and took the suitcase from Theo and set it on the floor. He made an expression of mock surprise. “Good Lord. What do you have in here?” he said. “Rocks?”

  Theo looked up at him. “A couple.”

  Archie looked surprised. “Well, you can never find a rock when you need one. Good to keep a few on hand,” he said after a moment. He glanced at James. “How about some cocoa?”

  “Sure thing.” James moved away.

  Alice wanted to ask again what had happened, but Theo's silence stopped her. Whatever it was, it must have been very bad; Helen must have been hurt in some way. When Alice's grandfather, Archie's father, had died a few years before, the news had arrived in the same way, people speaking in low voices, their heads close together. No one had told Alice immediately; no one had ever actually said the word dead. That evening when she had gone to find Archie and say good night, he had been sitting in the armchair in his study, a glass of whiskey in his hand. Alice had climbed into his lap, and he had closed his eyes and put his arms around her. There had been wetness on his face, and Alice had felt that she could not bear it. It was like the feeling that came over her whenever she heard “Puff the Magic Dragon,” the sorrow of the song too powerful, too overwhelming, little Jackie Paper gone away forever and leaving Puff alone. Sometimes the boys played the song just to torment her and sang along with it in lugubrious voices, trailing after her through the house, even under the dining room table where she went to escape; then she flew at them with her fists. Once Archie had punished Tad and Harry for this.