The Rope Walk

by Carrie Brown

  “Do you want somejuice?” Miss Fitzgerald said. “You should have one of those Ensures. I got the chocolate ones. You haven't had anything—”

  Kenneth didn't bother to answer her. He turned around to face Alice and Theo and held out his hands. “You're proof,” he said. “I've been looking for it my whole life, but now I know. There is a God, and he made you and sent you to me.” His hand as he took Alice's was cold and bony; she had to fight the urge to pull her fingers away. She was glad he was happy—and he was, clearly, happy and grateful—but she wished he had not ignored his sister like that.

  “You are the cleverest children in the world,” Kenneth said. “And the most good, the most kind and generous. Tell me everything. How exactly have you built this marvelous rope walk, and where does it go, and …”

  It was very gratifying to describe it, really, all the places they'd found the rope, and how they'd had to carry it there, and how they'd had to hack off roots and branches, and how they'd decided where the path should go, and how they'd raked it smooth. At one point, though, Alice looked up from their conversation to realize that Miss Fitzgerald had left the room without any of them noticing. Alice felt unsettled by this, as though something strange had happened to time, the clock's pliant hands bending forward and back in a forbidden reversal to erase her presence there entirely. It was as if she had never come in the room that morning at all.

  Over the next few weeks, Alice and Theo worked every morning on the rope walk and visited with Kenneth in the afternoons. Every day they gave him a progress report, telling him how far they'd come, what special sorts of difficulties they'd encountered and how they'd managed to overcome them. Apart from the weekend when his friends came back to visit and take pictures, and one two-day period when Kenneth had to go into the hospital, they did not miss a day, and his face lit up when he heard them come to the French doors in a way that made Alice's heart catch. She didn't think anyone had ever seemed so happy to see her as Kenneth was to see them. He loved hearing the news of the rope walk, how many feet they progressed each day. He gave Theo a beautiful silver tape measure with a pretty stone in the center that you pressed to release the measuring tape. Theo added it reverently to the collection in his toolbox.

  One afternoon Kenneth produced the old photograph albums that his sister had tried to interest him in one day. There were funny black-and-white pictures of himself as a handsome baby wearing puffy white shorts and a blouse and little white shoes, and others of him as a young boy, with a sculpture of a giant flying creature he'd built out of chicken wire in the backyard of the Grange house, and still others of him as a young man, dashing in a naval uniform on the deck of a destroyer. He showed them pictures of his boyhood dog, a Jack Russell terrier named Winnie Churchill that could hold on to a rope with its teeth and be lifted clear off the ground. There were photographs of Hope Fitzgerald, too, as a heavy, round-cheeked baby in a christening gown and cap, or slender in white graduation robes, and then surprisingly buxom and pretty in a debutante dress with a bell-like skirt and a tight bodice. In nearly every photograph she had dark rings around her eyes, but Alice was astonished to see her smiling in some of the pictures, the even white teeth in her mouth, the way it changed the shape of her face into something pleasing. Alice realized she'd never seen Miss Fitzgerald smile, not a genuine smile, anyway.

  Theo wanted to try building a bigger mobile, and one week they worked outside on the terrace making hollow shapes out of chicken wire covered with papier-mäche and suspending them from arms made out of long curved pieces of wood Kenneth unearthed from the garage. He seemed to Alice much thinner than when they'd met at the beginning of the summer; she didn't like it when he wore his shirt unbuttoned too low on his chest, for she could not keep her eyes averted from the way his body seemed to fall in on itself, collapsed under his breast bone. And sometimes a smell came from him—she couldn't describe it; it was like air that wasn't real, she thought, struggling—that filled Alice with a distaste she tried to conceal for fear of hurting his feelings, moving her head aside when he leaned over the photograph albums beside her, pointing.

  The days wore on through July, warmer and warmer, longer and longer, slow bees droning in the garden, the light of the sloping, golden afternoons so rich it seemed to melt over the towering trees at the edge of the lawn. Kenneth did some painting outside—he used a knife, not a brush, a technique Theo tried to copy and pronounced impossible—and it seemed to Alice, who stood marveling behind Kenneth at his easel, that somehow he caught exactly the quality of the long, falling rays that slanted over the garden. Sometimes the three of them lay on chaise longues out on the terrace and unrolled the awning for a little shade so Alice could read aloud to them outside. Kenneth's mood seemed milder, his voice softer, as if the heat and the sun and the light had reached under his skin to his bones, warming and comforting him, stunning him into quiet. Sometimes now when Miss Fitzgerald came to the door, a worried and worrying presence, he looked up in her direction and said, “It's time again, is it?” And she would nod. But he would get up without complaint. “Until tomorrow then, amigos,” he would say, taking his sister's arm and allowing her to lead him away into the back rooms where Alice and Theo had never been. Alice did not know what happened to Kenneth when his sister took him away like that, two old people bent over and hanging on to each other. She did not like to think about it, whatever it was—a sharp needle filled with medicine, a handful of pills, even a nap. The thought of Miss Fitzgerald forcing her brother to rest, lifting his feet to the bed—and Kenneth's new, almost docile willingness to cooperate, as if he had given up—made Alice feel sick. Better he should fight, she thought.

  But soon the rope walk would be finished, and then he could step out into the trees by himself, into the perfect silence. Kenneth still taught them a word almost every day. Today's had been sempiternal.

  “It means never-ending,” he told them, “as in the prayer: world without end, Amen. As in: this summer.” And he had closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the chaise longue. But Alice had stayed awake, cross-legged on the terrace with her chin in her hands, looking back and forth between Kenneth and Theo, who had curled up, his hands tucked between his knees, and fallen asleep with his mouth open.

  Alice made her imaginary camera and took a picture, her tongue clicking soundlessly against the roof of her mouth.

  ELEVEN

  THE NEXT MORNING, for the first time in weeks, Alice woke up early. She knew it was early; the trees were thick black shapes against a faint light in the sky, and the house was as silent as if a spell had been cast over it. Not only was she up early, she thought, suddenly alert; she was up first. And it was Saturday; Elizabeth would not be coming, and Archie would be sleeping in.

  Alice sat up in bed. Theo was sprawled sideways in the bed next to hers, his head half under the pillow, his feet hanging off the edge of the mattress. When Alice looked at Theo's palms and the pink soles of his feet, which at this moment were turned up vulnerably in her direction, she was always struck by how dark the rest of his skin seemed by comparison. Unless you looked at his hands and feet, she thought, Theo didn't look especially black at all.

  The surface of the table between the two beds was cluttered with objects Theo had been collecting, including a quart Mason jar filled with ants and grasshoppers and beetles that was Theo's earthquake early-warning device. Cockroaches, which Theo said were the best insects for the job and easy to come by in New York, though apparently pretty scarce in Vermont, had been proven by scientists to go into a frenzy of activity before an earthquake, thereby serving as reliable predictors of disaster.

  The day he had brought the jar into the bedroom, Alice had looked at the insects scrambling like people in a terrified mob stepping on each other in their haste to flee. “They look like they're in a frenzy now,” she'd said.

  Theo bent over next to her to look into the jar. “That's normal behavior,” he said. “That is not a frenzy, Alice. A frenzy is …” He made a
wild-looking face, tongue out, and shook his head violently as though trying to clear his ears.

  Now, with Theo sleeping beside her and the house quiet, she leaned over from her bed to look into the jar. Only one beetle seemed to be alive still, scaling the glass and fruitlessly falling back onto the heap of its dead brothers and sisters. It always seemed to be Alice who noticed that all the early-warning system participants had died, sending Theo back outside to collect more. It would be better, he had told her, if they could keep a bird in their room; birds had “sub audio traducers” on their legs, he explained, that allowed them to tune in to frequencies beneath human hearing; these “traducers,” he said, would alert them to an earthquake rumbling their way. Archie, however, had said no to a bird and Alice had felt secretly glad. Even though she didn't think she believed completely in the insects’ power to anticipate an earthquake, the jar held her attention in a worrisome way. It was hard to fall asleep with the insects’ desperate, fruitless assault on the glass walls of their prison taking place inches from your eyes, and she did not think she could ever look away from a bird in a cage whose only job was to warn you if disaster was coming. Plus, it seemed cruel.

  Along with the Mason jar/earthquake early-warning system, Theo had also collected stones from the river, a dusty piece of honeycomb they'd discovered at the base of a tree while they were working on the rope walk, a lopsided bird's nest fallen from a rafter in the barn, and, one day, in the soft bed of needles under the pine trees, some grubby things made out of what looked like sticky, chewed-up dirt that Theo said were weevil nests.

  “What's a weevil?” Squatting down on the pine needles, Alice inspected the objects Theo held in his hand. She had never heard of a weevil.

  “You don't know what a weevil is?” Theo looked amazed. He had stood up, the nests held reverently in his cupped hands, and he and Alice headed inside. “A weevil is a parasite, Alice,” he said, adopting his professorial tone. “It eats the bugs on animals, like raccoons and skunks and opossums, and then it makes these little nests out of its own poop. There's probably a hundred eggs in here.”

  They reached the bedroom, where Theo laid the nests carefully on the bedside table. He tapped one of them with his finger.

  Alice looked at the nests. “Will they hatch?”

  Theo looked at her blankly.

  “The eggs,” she said.

  “Oh, no. Not now,” he said airily.

  “Why not?”

  Theo looked exasperated. “Well, they can't be fertilized in here, can they?”

  Theo spoke with his usual conviction, but something about it did not seem right to Alice. “I think maybe these are just clumps of dirt,” she said. “I've never heard of a weevil. Maybe you mixed it up with weasel.”

  “Alice,” Theo said with infinite patience. “You do not watch television. There could be a new species discovered every day and you would not know about it because you are out of the loop, man. I saw this whole science show about weevils. They burrow in the guts of dead animals. This”—he indicated the nest— “could be part of a possum's bladder.”

  Alice made a disgusted face and turned away, but a moment later Theo jumped on her from behind. She sank under him in surprise, buckling onto the floor with Theo draped on top of her like a rug.

  “Alice is a weevil,” he said breathily in her ear. “Alice is a wascaly weevil.”

  “Stop it. Get off,” she said, laughing.

  “You are my weevil pwisoner,” Theo said. “Now I'm going to … wick you on your ear,” and he stuck out his tongue.

  Alice shrieked and rolled over, scrabbling under the bed for safety.

  Theo crawled in after her. “I see you, wittle weevil,” he said in a high voice, clutching at her ankle.

  Alice shrieked again and crawled out the other side.

  “I wuv you, wittle weevil,” he called as she clattered downstairs, screaming and laughing. “Come back, wittle weevil. Come back!”

  He had chased her all over the lawn and into the barn that afternoon. By the time he'd finally caught her, she was weak-kneed from hysterical laughter, and he was panting. He tackled her in the hay bales in the barn and they lay there, his arms around her waist, his head resting for a moment on her stomach. She felt the surprising weight of it; for its size, she thought, a head was a very heavy thing.

  “Your head is heavy,” she said.

  He rolled away and lay in the hay beside her. “That's because my brain is so big.” He turned and smiled at her.

  “I knew you were going to say that,” she said.

  His face was close to hers, his tawny lion eyes behind curly eyelashes traveling over her hair.

  “Your hair is so weird,” he said. He reached out a hand to touch one of her curls. “It's like mini-tornadoes.”

  Alice stayed still. Sometimes his hand brushed her cheek as he lifted a curl and watched it spring back into place, and she felt a strange fluttering in her chest at the accidental touch of his fingers against her skin, as though her heart had leaped upward on little wings, only to drop back to earth.

  “Hey, Alice,” he said. “When they come get me, let's hide, okay?”

  “You mean, when you have to go home?”

  “Yeah. Be thinking of good places to hide, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe we should store food there,” he said.

  “And a flashlight. And water.”

  “Now you're thinking.” He tapped the side of her head and smiled at her. “Your brain is big, too, Alice,” he said. And then he grinned. “Not as big as mine, but big.”

  The truth was that Theo's brain seemed to be in motion almost constantly, along with his body and his mouth. He reported one night at dinner that in fourth grade he had won the class chatterbox award.

  Archie caught Eli's eye across the table and smiled. “Really!”

  “I have a certificate,” Theo said, as if Archie had asked for proof.

  He loved to snap his fingers and to whistle and sing and he could make a convincing array of the percussive sound effects of rap music. He loved the names of rap artists, too, rattling them off for Alice as if speaking a foreign language: Busta Rhymes, Butta Babees, Wyclef Jean, Talib Kweli, Ludacris, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, 50 Cent. He especially loved to watch television, and he was appalled at Archie's restrictions, eventually wheedling Saturday-morning cartoons out of him, a novelty Alice enjoyed. Glancing at Theo as he sat on the floor beside her in front of the television set with his mouth hanging open, Alice thought that maybe he liked TV so much because it was the only time his brain was not in charge of things and he could rest. He was always planning something, or explaining something, or worrying about something. Alice discovered that he worried about bird flu, for instance, and he had persuaded her that she ought to be worried, too. He was in possession of terrifying statistics about the last pandemic; he said he had heard on a radio science show that the next one was just around the corner. For this reason, he informed Elizabeth one day, he had decided that he would no longer eat chicken, or duck, or any sort of fowl; it was too bad, he said, because Peking duck was one of his favorite Chinese dishes, but it really wasn't worth the risk.

  “What are you talking about, bird flu?” Elizabeth had replied impatiently. “You don't eat chicken, you go hungry.”

  Theo was worried about many things: bird flu, tidal waves, terrorists, suicide car bombers, hurricanes, floods, forest fires, global warming, sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, kidnappers, earthquakes, mud slides, easy access to handguns, nuclear attack, asbestos contamination, and being struck by lightning or a meteorite. Alice, who felt as though after a long and shameful innocence, she had woken up finally to the horrible truth about the world, which was that it was falling apart, sometimes found herself wanting to fight the panic he incited in her; he could be pedantic, mordant, and terrifying. And yet, with Theo, Alice felt that she had entered the real world at last, a step as ennobling as it was frightening. The dangers she faced, the pri
nciples she would be asked to defend, the wisdom for which she reached would be real: real dangers, real principles, real wisdom. And though along with these would come real suffering, she thought she was ready. Theo believed he could do anything, and when she was with him, Alice thought she could do anything, too.

  Unlike being awake in the middle of the night, usually a sign of emotional or physical distress, being the first one up in the morning had always filled Alice with elation, as if she stood before a secret door opening into a private world. She liked to move about the quiet house undetected, pretending that she was escaping from a jail cell or embarking on a mission to free a fellow captive, feats of daring that required masterful control and caution and stealth. She got out of bed now and peered round her doorway into the dim gray light of the hall.

  Lorenzo slept in Archie's room unless he had been banished for snoring. He was overweight, barrel-chested, and short-legged, troubled by arthritis for which Archie patiently fed him pills that had to be wrapped individually in raw bacon, or else Lorenzo would spit them out. Archie had acquired him for James and Wally after their mother's death, but Lorenzo had never in his heart been anyone but Archie's dog, seeming to understand at the time that it had been Archie's need for comfort that had been the greatest, that it had been Archie who could imagine, better than his young sons, the ways in which the care of a puppy could serve as a distraction from pain. James, who could be unashamedly sappy, liked to get down on his knees to hug and kiss Lorenzo, speaking nonsense to him in a ridiculous baby voice, but all the children loved Lorenzo, and each of them throughout their childhoods had wept private tears into his warm shoulder; no one could seem so sympathetic about your sorrow as Lorenzo, nor possessed of such patience for your sad tale, whatever it was.