The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  Almost every day after their session of reading and conversation, Kenneth made them a gift of something. They staggered home under the weight of these offerings: on Theo, Kenneth bestowed a cunning red leather martini kit containing a shaker made out of shiny rings that slid into each other like a telescope, a measuring cup like two little cones stacked point to point, a pair of martini glasses secured neatly under elastic straps, and a flask with a green glass hole in the flat circle of its belly. Kenneth also gave Theo a pair of binoculars in a tooled leather case made of alligator hide and a set of chisels in a rolled canvas pouch with clever pockets inside for the tools.

  Upon Alice, Kenneth bestowed a black woolen poncho embroidered with flowers sewn in brilliant threads, a spirit lamp with an etched glass hurricane shade, a statue of the conjoined figures of Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza mounted on sway-backed horses, eight inches high and woven entirely of a silvery grass, and a necklace of faceted jet beads. The zebra skin had been waiting for them one afternoon, rolled up by the French doors and tied with twine, and they had dragged it to the fort, deciding to lay it inside rather than over the door, chiefly because it was so heavy that all of Theo's ingenious contrivances for keeping it up failed.

  One day there was an old phonograph player on a round table painted like a drum in Kenneth's room, and he played records of operas for them, which Theo mimed, leaping around on the rugs, his hand to his chest, his mouth open, and his eyes squeezed shut. Another day Kenneth had the children string a line for him between two chair backs outside on the terrace, and he showed them how to construct a mobile of washers and paper clips that they bent with tiny pliers into geometric shapes. He'd gone shopping with his sister one morning and come back with a TV and a DVD player; movies came in the mail for him every few days. Together they watched The Sound of Music and Singin in the Rain and The Wrong Trousers, with Wallace and Gromit, which Theo loved. Every day Kenneth wanted to know about the status of their camp in the woods. On some afternoons he was strong enough to walk outside to the terrace with them and down across the lawn that Eli had mown, out to the edge of the trees where he stopped, leaning on his stick and staring into the cool dimness of the woods as if he could see something there, flickering among the leaves. Sometimes Miss Fitzgerald came in while Alice was reading and hesitated in the doorway, as if waiting for them to see her there and stop. Though she could feel Miss Fitzgerald's eyes on the back of her neck as she bent over the book, Alice kept her voice steady, proceeding through the adventures of the explorers through the cottonwoods and over the plains and down through the lofty caverns of the Missouri. She read about their perilous sojourns in the small pirogues up the river in advance of the boat, the ice moving on the water and the travelers’ vain attempts to thaw it and free their craft by dropping hot stones onto the floes, the distribution of rum to all the men on Christmas Day. Antelopes and elk and buffalo roamed across the plains. Alice imagined them advancing along the flat line of the horizon like the black silhouette figures at the puppet stage at school. Swans and wild geese flew overhead in formations of giant Vs. Bears reared up from the shallows of the river and charged the men, who escaped only to suffer other traumas—frostbite and fevers and snakebite. On either side of the river, the bluffs rose as high in some places as three hundred feet, and Lewis described the fantastic architecture of the cliff sides, the “eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well-stocked with statuary … We see the remains or ruins of eligant buildings;” he wrote, “some collumns standing and almost entire with their pedestals and capitals; others retaining their pedestals but deprived by time or accident of their capitals, some lying prostrate an broken

  The accounts rarely failed to mention the game killed that day, and Alice sometimes felt she could smell blood souring the air as she read, or hear the calls of the wild geese, or the shouts of the men on the river. It was as if her life, her life in this room with Theo and Kenneth, sometimes melted away and was replaced by the world of the flat plains flowing for miles away from the banks of the Missouri, the wind of that other time and place in her hair and on her cheeks. As Lewis and Clark gave her their descriptions, Lewis's especially so full of poetry that she could feel his awe as every day brought him to a new vista, she understood that the language you used to describe something, so that someone else could see it, too, was important. She thought of Thomas Jefferson sitting alone in his house in Virginia, spreading over his knees the hides and skins Lewis and Clark sent back east, examining the tiny preserved leaves and plants with earth clinging to their roots, unfolding the pages of his explorers’ letters and reading them by candlelight, his lips moving over the words. The image brought a lump to her throat.

  The days seemed made up of equal parts pleasure and the anticipation of something Alice could not name, the two states sometimes so close together that they slid into one queasy sensation of perpetual alertness, like waiting for the curtain to rise on the stage at the theater. Helen continued to languish in her bed at the hospital. The O'Briens’ house now had become unfriendly and cold without her. Only O'Brien was ever there, and usually just at night now, one light on in the kitchen, another in the garage. Alice knew Archie talked to O'Brien every day and two or three nights a week went to the hospital, sometimes to take O'Brien out to eat, but she did not know what had been decided about Theo. It was as if Archie and O'Brien were also waiting for something, some news or event that would make Theo's fate clear. But Theo himself seemed unperturbed. He did not say again, after that first night, that he missed his mother. He said instead that he was thinking all the time of how to help Kenneth, but that the right idea had not yet arrived. Both he and Alice wanted passionately to do something for Kenneth, something heroic on the order of Lewis and Clark's magnificent trek westward. But they could not think of what that thing might be.

  And then finally, one day, Theo hit on it. Kenneth himself gave them the answer.

  It was nearly the end of June now, and after a stretch of sultry days, with the sky a bleak white haze above them, wet heaps of solid clouds had built up in the west, tumbling down from the mountains and rolling in black waves across the valley. That day, Miss Fitzgerald had hovered around Kenneth's room all afternoon, coming in and out with mail, or flowers in a vase, or a tray with lunch, which he had refused to eat. Finally, after she had come in bearing an album of old photographs she wished him to look through, he had raised his voice. “I am sick of being in this room,” he shouted at her. “You do not give me a moment's peace.”

  He had struggled to his feet from his place on the settee, grasped his cane, and staggered outside onto the windy terrace.

  Theo and Alice, frozen in position, had met each other's eyes, Theo looking to Alice like a wary dog, prepared to run. But run where? Not through the creepy house where Miss Fitzgerald had retreated, dropping the photograph album on the floor and rushing from the room. And not out to the terrace, where Kenneth stood with his back to them, staring out over the grass toward the trees blowing in the coming gale, leaning on his cane, his shoulders heaving. They were trapped.

  Finally, Theo had gotten to his feet and come quietly to the table to stand by Alice. He leaned against the arm of her chair. She pressed back against him with her shoulder, and he leaned closer, the two of them bolstering each other against the uncertainty, the unhappiness in the room.

  “I just want to go for a walk!” Kenneth's bellow from the terrace outside startled them both so much that they jumped and then pressed tightly against each other, Alice in her chair, Theo beside her, shrinking away from Kenneth's rage.

  “I want to go for a walk in the woods, by myself.” Kenneth threw back his head and lifted his cane from the stones of the terrace as if to strike something, but it only whipped through the air. He staggered.

  Alice feit Theo tremble beside her. Her hands were white-knuckled around the book.

  Then Kenneth quieted, both hands on his cane now, leaning over it, his head down, defeated. “Fo
rgive me,” he said, loud enough for them to hear, but not in rage anymore, and Alice knew he was addressing them. “Do you know what this is like? Here's your word of the day. This is an ambuscade …” He did not finish his sentence, but he turned around and came back shakily into the room. “I'm tired,” he said. He didn't look at them, making his way back to the settee and sitting heavily, his cane clattering onto the floor. “That's enough for today.” He reached up and tore away the white X of tape that held open his eyelid. The eyelid fell, and Alice thought, for a moment, of what Kenneth would look like when he was dead. Somewhere in the house the telephone began to ring.

  “Forgive me,” Kenneth said again. He turned his face aside.

  Alice looked at Theo.

  He tugged on the sleeve of her shirt. Let's go, he mouthed.

  Soundlessly, Alice replaced the book on the table and got to her feet. They tiptoed from the room out to the terrace, onto the grass, and home.

  They did not speak of what had happened right away. They went to their fort, even though the wind was blowing hard by then, and the river looked whipped up and dangerous. Tiny leaves blew past the opening as they sat inside on the zebra skin, their chins on their knees, staring out at the wild air filled with scraps of green and yellow and white, bright against the bulging purple of the sky.

  “A rope walk,” Theo said at last.

  Alice turned to look at him.

  “He needs a rope walk,” Theo said. “Like at your party. So he can go outside by himself. He needs something to hold on to, a line. He can put his hand on it and follow it.”

  Alice feit her heart begin to race. “We could clear a path,” she said. “We could make a trail.”

  Theo jiggled up and down beside her in excitement. “Yes, yes!” He turned to look at her with shining eyes. “It could be huge, he could go as far as he wanted but all he would have to do when he got too tired is turn around and it would lead him home.”

  “Not like Hansel and Gretel,” Alice said. “It would never disappear.”

  Theo gave a huge sigh and collapsed theatrically beside her, his shoulders sagging, his chin dropped to his chest. “That's it,” he said. “I've been thinking it and thinking it, but I couldn't see it until just now.” Then he jumped up. “Let's start right now,” he said. “Let's go get some rope.”

  Alice scrambled to her feet. “There's rope in the barn,” she said. “Tons of it, all kinds.”

  They stared at each other. And then, as if on cue, they both squealed with excitement andjumped up and down, grabbing for each other's hands, cavorting over the small promontory of their island under the rushing sky, a confetti of leaves whirling around them. When Theo pulled her to his chest and hugged her, Alice wanted to cry suddenly—more tears, she thought in surprise—but this time they were tears of exhilaration, as if her body was too small to contain this much feeling, and she hugged him back, her arms clasping him against her—he felt so bony and thin—with a gladness that was fierce and brave and somehow, suddenly, adult.

  “Let's not tell,” she said, drawing back from him, breathing hard. “Let's not tell anyone.” And she liked the frisson of danger that swept over her as she said these words, the sense of a secret blooming between them like a rare and exotic flower.

  “Okay,” Theo said, his hands still on her shoulders.

  “It'll be a surprise,” Alice said.

  “Yes,” Theo said. “Let's surprise everybody.”

  TEN

  THERE WAS PLENTY OF ROPE in the barn. From under the stairs up to the haymow they dragged out nests of heavy, hairy coils that seemed magnetically charged, straw and feathers and dirt and bits of twine woven into the braid. In the old horse stalls they found more: sleek lengths of tightly woven yellowing cord tied into figure eights and hung on nails, loops of slippery, synthetic cable under the straw, tangles of old clothesline, heaps of bristly twine. Alice was amazed at how much they collected. It took them a full morning to haul everything they found out onto the grass where they could inspect it. Theo did not seem surprised to have found so much—naturally, he said, as if he were an expert on such things, a barn would be a repository of old rope—but he and Alice were daunted by how much it weighed, especially the thick stuff. Also, a lot of it needed to be untangled, which meant finding a loose end and then one of them marching off with it across the grass while the other person stayed behind to wrestle with the writhing loops and coils.

  After lunch that first day, they decided to take what they could carry to the Fitzgeralds’ and begin from there, coming back for more when they ran out. Theo magnanimously offered to carry the heaviest rope, which he wore around his neck and hung over his shoulders like an ox's yoke. He walked with his neck stretched forward, his face turned toward the ground, one hand steadying the load on his shoulders, the other grasping his toolbox. He made Alice think of an old donkey, trudging along under his awkward burden.

  At the Fitzgeralds’ they went around the side of the house toward the terrace, as usual. They hadn't knocked at the front door since their first visit weeks before, and they had no wish to run into Miss Fitzgerald, in any case. They stopped at the gate now, looking across the back lawn toward the terrace to make sure Kenneth wasn't out in the sun, waiting for them, as he often was. They didn't want him to see the rope, having decided that they would wait to surprise him instead with the finished product. The terrace was empty, so they pushed open the gate and hurried across the grass to the edge of the woods where they pushed a few yards into the trees and then stood in the shade, breathing hard. Theo extricated himself from the coils over his shoulders, set down his toolbox, and stood up, resting a hand on Alice's shoulder as they stared into the thicket ahead of them.

  “Do you have a machete?” he asked. “A machete would be good.”

  As they peered into the dusty, twinkling light that fell between the trees, the forest appeared impenetrable, a fortress of vines and thorns, the underbrush a wall fortified with fallen branches, here and there the felled trunk of a massive tree that had crashed to the earth, all of it banked high at the edge of the lawn by decades of grass clippings thrown from the mower, raked leaves, and detritus tossed from the garden into the woods.

  The busy world and its ordinary sounds thrummed at their backs: through an open window in a house nearby, an unanswered telephone rang continuously; car doors slammed shut; a delivery truck reversed out of a driveway to a steady warning beeping. Ahead of them, the silence of the woods beckoning them into its shady, leafy quiet seemed formal to Alice, the hush of a great medieval hall. She always felt dwarfed in the woods among these big trees, aware of an alert listening that seemed to be taking place around her, a watchful attention that communicated the tolerance of something ancient for a younger, more heedless presence. Alice felt as if she were both the center of the universe, all the unseen eyes of the world trained upon her from deep within the leaves, and an insignificant interloper.

  Over the weeks of her reading aloud to Kenneth and Theo from the accounts of Lewis and Clark's adventures, the strangeness of that new world and its inhabitants had been taking shape in her mind: the mysterious mound rising from the flat line of the prairie, thought by the Indians to be inhabited by demons eighteen inches tall and armed with spears; the peculiar tribe of the Flathead Indians, whose broad, compressed brows were obtained by clamping infants’ heads between two boards; the ghastly ceremonial capes of the Chopunnish Indians, made of human scalps and ornamented with the dangling fingers and thumbs of warriors killed in battle. For Lewis and Clark, the world had produced an endless chain of danger and heroics, the assault of a giant black panther, the desperate predicament of men who clung above the white froth of one-hundred-foot falls, gashing handholds in the cliff walls with their knives in order to climb to safety. Everywhere they went the men were threatened, attacked, driven onward (or back) by mosquitoes or beasts, raging waters, snow and ice, disease, even irrational fear.

  Now, as Alice stood by Theo's side and imagined cutting
a trail among the trees for Kenneth, someplace he might set his uncertain feet, the woods seemed tame, domesticated by comparison with the wilderness encountered by Lewis and Clark. She stood quietly with Theo's hand on her shoulder, just as Clark must have stood beside his friend Lewis, she thought, the two comrades staring out at the shadows of the clouds racing over the plains, the herds of bison that moved over the brown earth in the far distance like swarms of bees or pools of spilled ink.

  They were doing something good here, she hoped, something difficult and grown-up. And yet in the deep silence of the woods before them like a held breath, in the way her eye could find no final resting place, no end through the trees, in the solemn shafts of light that fell as though into a cavernous chamber, she felt awfully small somehow. Perhaps Lewis and Clark had felt that, too.

  It was harder work than they had anticipated. To hold the ropes in place, they discovered they had to nail through them into the trunks of the trees; otherwise the ropes slipped and sagged toward the ground. And cutting a path was filthy, difficult business; they came away from their labors scratched and bleeding, their hands raw, welts rising on their arms and legs. But after a week, they looked back toward the Fitzgeralds’ house and saw that they were well out of sight—maybe even earshot—of it, and that the path they had hacked through the brush was clear and smooth: a sleepwalker could have moved down it, gliding like a wraith. As they drew deeper into the woods, the going became a little easier. Here a deep sea of leafy cover spread over the ground, the neat thickness of the pile choking out the undergrowth, and the trees rose up around them like stanchions for a huge bridge. They did not talk much during their labors, beyond complaining cheerfully about the difficulty of the task, a way of confirming for each other and for themselves the virtue of the work, its heroic proportion. Theo backed away from the trail with vines gripped between his hands, staggering from side to side as though he was wrestling an alligator. Alice, on her knees, hacked away at roots. Sweat ran down her face.