A Visit to the House on Terminal Hill

by Elizabeth Knox

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  The Zarene Valley, 1953

  The visit had been Teal’s idea, one he’d come up with thanks to his progressive methods. Things hadn’t gone quite to plan, but nor had they gone completely awry. For instance, he and lawyer Barnes hadn’t aimed to stay the night but, after a fruitless and peculiar talk with the countrified recluse they’d hoped to ferret out of his property, darkness got the jump on them, and they were obliged to accept the recluse’s invitation.

  Teal simply promised himself that they’d do better tomorrow. He wasn’t feeling at all discouraged.

  He had chosen the room where the bed was already made, while Barnes took the other, its mattress still doubled up on bare bedsprings. As Teal lay down he did think regretfully of his overnight bag, which was in the car they’d left parked on Summit Road. “It can’t be helped,” he thought, as he snuggled under the covers. The thing was to stay positive and keep one’s eyes on the prize.

  At midnight Barnes raised the house with his screams. Teal and their host went to his aid. It was only then that Teal noticed how sunburnt the lawyer was. And he was able to dismiss Barnes’s strange complaints about their host as the result of sunstroke. Sunstroke and a nightmare. Teal apologized for his friend’s behavior, sent the recluse back to bed, and settled Barnes. He stayed with him. At dawn Teal allowed Barnes to “take the next watch”—as Barnes put it. Why not indulge the old soldier’s flashback to wartime, if it made the poor sun-touched fellow feel better? Teal went back to sleep telling himself that he was doing his friend a favor, and offering him a lesson. Let Barnes watch him sleep like a baby. Let him learn from that.

  Teal slept, and dreamed he was swimming. The past was the water he was pushing behind him. Silky, green water—like the Pitt River the first time he’s seen it.

  When Teal woke Barnes wasn’t in the room. Teal put on his pants and wandered around the house looking for the lawyer. He found Barnes’s briefcase, which had been moved from the bedroom to the library. Legal papers, and engineering plans were scattered on the desk. But this was no great cause for alarm. Barnes had likely moved the case himself. The lawyer had simply risen early, and had been going over the documents with their host, trying to close the deal. He and the recluse had only just stepped out somewhere, hopefully to the henhouse to find eggs for their breakfast.

  Teal said reassuring things to himself, but still kept up his search. His nosy wandering finally brought him to an empty room. The room’s only furniture was a long, deep window seat. The seat’s lid was open. It was ridiculous to think of looking for Barnes in there, but Teal couldn’t stop himself crossing the bare floor to take a quick peek.

  The seat contained a large, thick roll of scabby, gray fabric. It looked like old carpet underlay. It had dark patches on it, as if it had been used to wrap something oily. Teal stooped to finger the stains.

  It was then that his host crept up behind him and pushed. Teal fell face-first into the window seat. The lid slammed shut on him, and the lock turned.

  * * *

  Teal first yelped, then began to shout in rage. He churned inside the box, and managed to turn himself faceup, though his hips were still twisted. He couldn’t bring his knees or fists to bear on the lid. He could only press on the obstruction with his shoulder and head. There was a bit of give on the latch, and at each big blow, light cracked the close, black space.

  A moment of light. A blow. Another moment of light. Then the latch lost its give. The recluse had sat down on the window seat.

  Teal willed himself to stay still. His struggles had stirred up the air inside the box. It was mildewy, meaty, and reminded Teal of the mummified rat he’d once found jammed in the angle of a roof. He gulped the bad air. Then he said, “Hello?” It sounded feeble.

  “Hello,” answered the recluse. He said it as if they were meeting for the first time, which they kind of were, because Teal hadn’t thought the guy disturbed or murderous before.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Teal said. That was better—he sounded properly outraged.

  “Let’s just open a discussion,” said the recluse. It was exactly the phrase Teal had used to the man yesterday afternoon when they’d all sat over tea—a medicinal, homegrown peppermint and dried lemon peel mix. The recluse had been proud of it, and had gone on about it, as if he was one of those biddies whose great joy in life is a country-fair jam-making competition. Teal had sipped the tea, and listened to the young man talk, and had thought, “This guy was raised by old women.” The recluse had said that this was his great aunties’ house. The recluse was like an old woman, Teal thought—lonely, eager, gullible. He had glanced at Barnes, who met his gaze over the gilded rim of his teacup and moved his eyebrows fractionally to say wordlessly: This’ll be easy.

  “Let’s just open a discussion,” said the voice above where Teal lay, in the dark, and in fear. The voice was mild, and friendly.

  Teal schooled himself into stillness. His own voice came out reasonably steady. “What do you want to discuss, Mr. Zarene?”

  “Please put it all to me again.”

  “All what, Mr. Zarene?”

  “Your plans.”

  “The government’s plans.”

  “The government’s plans as you see them.”

  “This won’t do any good, Mr. Zarene.”

  “And what makes you suppose I care to do good, Mr. Teal?”

  Teal surprised himself by letting out a small sob. He bit his lip savagely to make himself stop.

  “You’re only trapped, Mr. Teal. Trapped—but at least you won’t be lonely.”

  “Because I have your company?” Teal said. “Is that it? You were unhappy at the idea of us going away?”

  “‘Unhappy’ would be an exaggeration. After all, you’re not that charming. Or perhaps I haven’t seen the best of you yet. You’ve been quite impersonal so far. All your talk has been about the Lazuli Dam Project and progress, and what the government can offer me.”

  Teal swallowed. His mind raced, and then found somewhere comfortable to settle. He tried to sound apologetic, but reasonable. “Mr. Barnes and I were businesslike because we didn’t want to waste your time. I see now that we should have relaxed a little, especially once you gave us dinner and asked us to spend the night.” He shut his mouth firmly. He wouldn’t babble. He waited, resisting the urge to give the lid a small testing push. The man might have got up while Teal was talking. He did seem to be rather stealthy. He might not be there now. He might not be listening.

  Teal couldn’t seem to shut himself up. “I’m sorry we only turned up with papers. We should have brought a bottle. Brandy or whiskey…”

  “Or cow’s milk,” said the recluse, sounding nostalgic.

  Teal heaved a sigh. The young man was still there. Again he mustered his intelligence. “There was a cow, we came upon it, lost in the bush, on our way up the hill. We should have reported it.” This was risky. It was a kind of confession, but Teal still had faith in his own judgment, and he judged that if he off
ered this strange character something real he might tempt him to open the window seat if only to look him in the eye. Teal was seeing it all now—the young man hadn’t been simple, only unworldly and isolated. Teal recalled the way he’d watched their faces, like someone watching a beautiful sunset. The young man seemed beyond shyness, so solitary he had forgotten that, when he was looking at someone, he was also being looked at. Oh, it was all clear now—as if the dark inside the window seat had helped Teal see things he’d failed to notice at the time. He said, “Barnes and I did think that the cow might belong to you, rather than the people down in the valley.”

  “I don’t know anything about a cow,” the recluse said.

  There was a long silence. Teal’s fingers fumbled at a crumbling fold in the underlay. There was something lumpy beneath it, points and edges poking painfully into his back. He wriggled and the thing collapsed a little, but was no less lumpy. The mildew-meat smell draped its stinking wings over Teal’s head and seemed to ask him to give up and stop breathing.

  “Please continue,” said the recluse.

  “I’m not sure how,” Teal said, because honesty was best.

  “The story you told me about why you came is almost the same one you told yourself, I bet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and your friend sat there making a big show of dealing with me honestly because there were things you’d decided I didn’t need to know.”

  “Mr. Barnes and I are on salaries. We don’t stand to make any money from the deal you make with the government.”

  “More claims to honesty,” the recluse said. “That isn’t what I want to hear. Tell me, why did you come? How did you get here? What was in your mind as you made your way up the hill?” He shifted a little, and the lid creaked. He made himself more comfortable while Teal lay in blackness and began to give some thought to all the things that had brought him to that blackness.

  * * *

  Teal was a practical man raised by a practical man. His father’s favorite saying was “In life, whatever you choose to do, you should make a good fist of it.”

  (Teal might be able to make a fist now, but since the lid of the window seat was pressing down on his hips and nose and chest he couldn’t really push with his fists, only raise them maybe six inches so that his bunched thumbs could drum on the wood.)

  In the war Teal had enlisted too late to get into the fight. But he had served, so, afterward, he got free entry to college. He took geology and surveying. His class was full of returned men who had a seasoned, silent way of just getting the job done, whatever the job was. Teal adopted their unquestioning ways. He only later realized that those men had a kind of mental windowless room in which they could be their true selves. All their questions were in these internal reserves—questions and doubts, the doubts keeping the questions quiet. But Teal imitated their self-possessed manner, and practical habits. It served him well. By the time he graduated he already had a reputation as a person who kept things close to his chest, a steady, clever man. He landed a good job in the Department of Public Works.

  At that time the government was buying up farms around Southland’s cities for big tracts of public housing. The government was also attempting to buy land along the banks of several rivers, for hydroelectricity schemes, so that there would be enough power for all those new houses.

  Teal’s big break came when he was sent to the Alexander Peninsular to talk to people living downstream of the diversion on Pitt River. He was given the task of bringing Faesu villagers in on the project, and the idea of progress.

  Teal’s most important meeting had taken place in a Faesu roundhouse in the largest village. During the meeting Teal and his colleagues were expected to sit on the floor with everyone else, and talk in turn, and bow their heads in prayer. Teal had mouthed prayers while looking through his eyelashes at the younger men, who were sitting straight-backed and waiting for their elders to finish. Teal took note of their missing fingers and shrapnel scars, and the Returned Servicemen’s League badges winking on the lapels of the few of them who owned Sunday suits. And when he did get up to speak, he spoke to those men. He called for a show of hands. Who had been in the Engineering Corps? A lot of them had. They had been farm laborers and sheep shearers when they signed up, so of course the army had put shovels in their hands. But now they had skills in demolition, handling explosives, constructing bridges, and driving heavy machinery. “Southland still has a use for those skills,” Teal said. “The whole world is being built, if it isn’t—like Europe—being rebuilt.”

  Teal talked, and when he got back to Founderston, he pulled strings. He found a job for a chief’s son driving a big earthmover. And for the chief’s nephews he found jobs setting charges in the quarry. In this way the Faesu were gradually purchased by pay packets.

  Five years later there was a tunnel through the rock spur that separated Pitt River from Queen Carolyn River. Half the Pitt’s water flowed west to the hydroelectric dam—and the eel traps in the river were empty, the navigable channels had silted up, and the steamer that had plied the Pitt for ninety years was permanently moored at a crumbling dock.

  Teal lay in the dark and thought about the old man who, at the end of that first meeting, stood and said, “The river is our mother.” And Teal had thought, “Fat mother, lazy mother, always serving up eel and boiled squash.”

  The meeting closed with another prayer. Then they were invited to enjoy a feast the village had put on for them.

  The earth oven in the pumpkin patch had quietly steamed all day, attended by boys with shovels. The boys had lit another fire aboveground to keep themselves warm. When everyone filed out of the roundhouse the earth oven was opened, and the flax mats wrapping the parcels of pork and eel and pumpkin and sweet potato were lifted out. The boys’ fire made the billows of steam an allover orange glow. The pumpkins were orange. The dogs were ginger. The chickens were red. The village was all sunset colors. And it was the end of something.

  Teal never set foot in a church these days unless he was at a friend’s wedding. His friends were all marrying now. He wasn’t even stepping out with anyone. Teal thought of his boyhood, when he’d proudly swung a censer in St. Lazarus Temple. He thought of his bachelor flat in Founderston, with its foldaway bed. He thought of his meals of sardines on toast—because why should he care about fish breath when he had no one to kiss? He thought about the big nothing of his spiritual and bodily life. He thought of all this and he shouted out in the dark that he was a sinner. He put his heart into it. He had seen the light, and that his own light was fading. Fading like that cold autumn evening five years ago in the Faesu village.

  Teal sobbed for a time. Tears crawled into his ears.

  The recluse said, “Do you think that’s what I want to hear?”

  “What do you want?” Teal moaned.

  “I want to know how you got up here,” the recluse said. “I want to know what route you took, and what you were thinking that made it possible for you to find your way through.”

  Teal tried to remember the recluse’s first name. “Mr. Zarene,” he said—and hoped the rest of it would follow on. The man did have a name. Teal had read it somewhere. But the name wouldn’t come to him. It wouldn’t be thought. Teal said, “I did what you asked, I looked back at the steps that brought me here. I imagined you were asking me to reflect on the wrongs I’d done you. And others like you.”

  “There are no others like me. And you haven’t done me any wrong.”

  “Then let me out!” Teal yelled. He sobbed and thrashed. The lumpy, odoriferous thing buried under the folded underlay shifted and slumped. Teal found he had more room to move. His blows had more force. The lid quivered and jumped.

  But it didn’t open.

  Teal eventually exhausted himself. As he subsided he began to hear the recluse again. The man was going, “Ssshh, sshh,” in a gentle, chiding way.

  “I did do something to you,” Teal said, weeping again. “I tried to make you betr
ay your family. I promised that you’d be all right. I sketched out a picture of you on a private island, safe, and above everything.”

  The recluse laughed. “Oh—so you did.” He sounded happy, and surprised. “I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  Teal gritted his teeth. “Think,” he thought. “Think, Teal, think.”

  * * *

  The landscape of the Palisade Range was vast and thirsty, pasture riddled with rabbit holes. The car’s exhaust pipe came loose on the gravel ridge in the center of the road. They carried on, the car farting loudly.

  They were Tom Teal and Albert Barnes. Teal was a surveyor, and fixer, twenty-seven; Barnes was forty, and a lawyer. They came from the Department of Public Works, tasked with the mythically difficult job of prizing the Zarene family out of Zarene Valley, a valley that would vanish under a lake when a dam was built at the top of the Lazuli Gorge. Barnes hadn’t had any luck making appointments to meet with the Zarenes. There was a Zarene Valley Trust. The trust owned the valley, and the three trustees lived there. They didn’t have telephones—and they wouldn’t respond to letters. Zarene family members living elsewhere in Southland were easier to approach because they had phones and addresses—like regular twentieth-century people. But when any of them were contacted they would only say, “I have no influence on what happens in the valley.”

  Barnes was going around in circles; then, a few weeks back, Teal’s boss sent him a bunch of photos taken by the Southland Air Force, who were busy with the peacetime project of aerial mapping. Teal studied the photographs and discovered something he hadn’t known before: there was a house on the hill at the head of the valley. The valley was glacial, and the hill was a glacial moraine, one of those great heaps of stones left behind when a glacier retreats. The glacier had vanished with the ice age, and the moraine had long ago been covered by forest. The house in the forest was large and set on a well-groomed lawn. It was clear from the photograph that its roof was in excellent condition. It was bigger than any other dwelling in the valley. Teal had taken the photo to Barnes, and put it under the lawyer’s nose. “Any money these hillbillies have—most of it seems to flow up here. Whoever lives in this house is the one we need to speak to.”