Labrador

by Kathryn Davis

  “But that is not the worst of it,” said Mrs. McGuire, “that is not the worst of it by far. Can you believe that faithless woman refused to admit that she’d bewitched those cows?” Mrs. McGuire opened her mouth, approximating awe at such perfidy, and as I peered down her gullet, it looked to me like a tube where a snake might hide, preparing to spring out at me. I admit, I preferred this tale to the ones in which coffins made their slow, airborne way through people’s parlors.

  Eventually, Mrs. McGuire let me slide down from her lap, so that she could make a cup of tea for herself, and so that I could go to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. It was a very cold night, unusually cold for that time of year. During the night, in addition to all the other things that happened, Mama’s tomato plants withered, because she wasn’t there to cover them with bran sacks, and Mrs. McGuire scalded her wrist while pouring water from the kettle. You, of course, don’t know any of this, but I know you’ll believe every word of my story, because you always said I was lacking in imagination. Resourceful Willie, with your fabrications! I combed my hair and ran a washcloth over my face before presenting myself to Mrs. McGuire, who sat earnestly rubbing butter into her wrist; I wondered, at the time, whether it was a kind of penance Catholics did when they thought no one was watching.

  The burn was my good luck—it precluded the possibility of the usual good-night kiss and hug, the possibility of Mrs. McGuire’s features imprinting themselves in my face like a design in a cookie. I promised to say my prayers and then made my way through the pantry, where the glazed eyes of rabbits and waterfowl stared at me from the lids of tureens and pâté molds; the chill in this part of the house was constant and dull, like gunmetal, and it extended all the way up the stairs, down the hall, and into my big and watchful bedroom. Mama had left the night-light burning; its clown-face glowed from the wall socket. And, of course, your letter was lying there on my pillow when I pulled back the chenille bedspread. “Dear Kitty,” it said. “The old hag has got you now.” I could only read my name, but the printing was large and furious; it wasn’t until the next day that Mama told me what it said, and then you got punished—but I suppose you remember that. I put the letter on my dresser and climbed into bed.

  The noise was coming from the third floor, almost directly overhead. It was coming from our room: a noise like something thick being slid through a slot—like something thick sliding itself through a slot. I wasn’t frightened. I got out of bed and ran up the stairs, and I felt the way I did on Christmas mornings, nudging with my toe the full weight of the stocking at the bottom of my bed.

  The room was empty. It was empty, but the noise issued from its center, from the place where bands of moonlight coming in through the two windows appeared to intersect. But that’s not right—there was no sense of intersection, only of thickening, of tremendous thickening. Meanwhile, the noise reduced to a thinness that I no longer heard but felt, like a hair caught in my mouth, impossible either to remove or swallow.

  I stood there shivering in my pajamas, waiting. I stood there, small and bold, until, eventually, all I could hear was the ticking sound of old wood; a mouse moved around inside the walls, rolling ahead of it a nut or some other round thing—inside the walls of our house, Willie. The little round nut that was me rolled around and around inside the walls of our house, away from the currents of watery moonlight; around among the pieces of wood nailed together a long time ago by our great-grandfather, when he was alive and trying to impress the young lady whose eyes you are supposed to have inherited: bluish-green and—this is what Daddy said, not me—unforgiving. House, I thought, trying to bring myself back out of the walls of it and into my self. Eight gables—because our great-grandfather was a lover of literature and a show-off; a mansard roof with slate tiles; stone columns holding up the porch roof; a cellar a man could stand up in. People oohed and ahhed, but only from a distance. A summer house! Once upon a time the shake shingles were honey-colored, before the long winters turned them gray; once a young man sat with his new bride on the porch and it was the truth, then, that she owned all the land as far as her unforgiving eyes could see.

  My hands and feet were cold. Mrs. McGuire was at the foot of the stairs, yelling my name. “Kathleen! Kathleen!” she yelled, and the wind was blowing, making the pine trees bend all together from side to side.

  “You’ve been walking in your sleep,” Mrs. McGuire pronounced, as she led me back to my room. “I’ll have to tell your poor mother to put a pan of water under your bed.”

  Several days later I was walking up the driveway on my way home from morning kindergarten, when I saw bright orange flames billowing out of the northward-facing dormer: a great and dramatic gesture, like a woman welcoming her lover home after a long absence. Mama was standing in front of the house, idly nipping the air with a pair of pruning shears, while she surveyed the tangle of shrubbery that rose up all along the front porch. “Look!” I shouted. She turned, first to face me, smiling; then she tilted back her neck so that Grandfather’s old fishing cap—a green thing with a large visor like a duck’s beak—fell into the grass, as she followed the line indicated by my finger. She looked intently upwards for several seconds and then walked up to me, puzzled. “What is it, sweetie?” she asked.

  The flames were lively and I could see that they consumed nothing, only played against the flaking green paint of the window casing. “I thought I saw something,” I said. “A plane or something.” I never thought I was crazy; I was too literal a child to entertain such an idea. Instead, I ran into the house and up the stairs to the third floor, where I found the door flung open and the room filled with flames, in the way a box might be filled with moths: all that separate and distinct movement, that articulation of wings beating everywhere at once within a container. The flames gave off no heat; there was no smell of wood burning; no roaring or crackling. In fact, the room was dead quiet.

  You see, when I was a dull child of five, decked out in pale blue glasses, the luck that cannot be contained in the great inertia of heaven, but which is generated there and then dispelled, entered our house.

  I stood in the doorway watching the flames, and one by one they winked out, beginning at the edges of the room, until all that was left was a single tongue of fire suspended at the room’s exact center; it seemed to address itself to my presence in the doorway with the same frank and unwavering interest I’d noticed in babies, as they rode the aisles of supermarkets in their mothers’ shopping carts. And then, just as the burden of such scrutiny was beginning to make me blush, the flame vanished, and all around where it had been the room sprang into focus. I walked carefully. Through the west window I could see each needle on each of the branches of each of the pines; through the north window I could see Mt. Chocorua’s conical peak of granite, as pristine as a milk tooth against the blue sky. I picked up the two bowls and then put them back down again on the dresser, knowing that I was replacing them in their exact positions—exact even as to front, back, and sides, although they were a uniform pink and perfectly round. Then I went downstairs.

  You might say that everything had gone back to normal, except that normal, at least for the moment, no longer seemed to include the possibility of disaster. I followed Mama around outside, helping her pull up weeds, gathering them together into a small pile and then carrying them off to a larger pile behind the woodshed.

  “You’re such a good helper,” Mama said, and then the little breeze that was always waiting for its chance flew out of her mouth in a sigh—that sound which, if things were their old selves, would indicate that being a good helper wasn’t enough. But I knew differently.

  “Shouldn’t we burn them?” I asked, wanting to see ordinary fire for the purpose of comparison.

  Mama shook her head. “They won’t burn,” she said, and even though, I guess, what she meant was that the weeds were too green and damp, it was an ominous statement. I walked a little ways off, to put distance between myself and that place where weeds were immortal, an
d when I looked back Mama was stamping down the pile with her foot. She was so small and thin—it was easy for me, at a distance, to mix her up with you, Willie, especially when she’d tucked her prematurely gray hair up under that silly hat. Her expression was serious and seemed to have risen to the surface of her face from someplace deep inside her, where there was a leak.

  What else was there for me to do but wait for you? I stood watching for the flash of yellow at the end of the driveway that would signal the arrival of the school bus and, with it, your queenly descent, your desirable nonchalance as your schoolmates’ arms and faces rose to fill all the windows of the bus in homage. “So long,” I heard you call out, and then you were walking towards me, cradling your books against your chest.

  “What’s the scene, jellybean?” You spoke out of the corner of your mouth, like a thug, as you’d been instructed by Jojo Melnicoff. Remember him? The one who threw his milk at you because he loved you so much?

  You continued walking right past me and I saw how you’d unbraided your hair, how it fell, kinked and sparkling, all the way to your waist, out from under the little blue beret you wore that fall. Your hair was the color of fire and it flickered in my face as I tagged along behind you, so that I made the usual mistake, assigning to you the role of source, as if all my experiences had their first expression in your body—your eyes, your mouth, your immaculate shrug.

  “Willie!” I called out, and you looked back over your shoulder at me. “I saw something in the room.”

  You stopped walking and turned to face me. “What were you doing in the room?”

  “I didn’t go in,” I lied. “I just stood in the doorway.”

  “You’d better be telling the truth,” you said. You bent down to fiddle with your shoelaces, waiting, I now realize, for inspiration to hit. Then you straightened up. “I saw it, too,” you said, reaching out one arm in my direction, to let me know that we should confront this thing hand in hand, like the orphans we were. “I think it’s a rat,” you said. “And I think it’s got bubonic plague.”

  You began to drag me towards the porch, but already I was on my way to the third floor: I could see myself floating upwards like a feather in a draft, in the draft made by your excitement. How I loved you, Willie—still love you—more than Jojo Melnicoff ever did! I loved you so much that I could even bear the possibility of seeing the room’s secret pass into your hands, where you might wrench it into a different shape. I don’t think you ever believed in mutability, you were too much an agent of its process, just as a saint can no longer operate on faith, once she has looked into the face of God.

  We entered the room together; it was empty and cold, and through its windows I could see clouds unwinding with great rapidity—ragged, thin clouds—from an invisible spool. “Look!” you shouted, and I jumped. But there was nothing there, nothing at all.

  “What’re we going to do?” you asked. “The rat,” you pointed, “it’s bigger than I thought.”

  I pushed my glasses up high on my nose. “I can’t see it,” I said. I wasn’t trying to ruin your game, you understand; I only thought that perhaps the room’s mysteries were various and randomly visible.

  “That’s a shame,” you yelled, “because it’s coming right at you!” With your eyes you followed the rat’s movement from the corner of the room, across the floor, and then up my legs, at which point you made with your white spiky fingers for my throat. “It’s got you!” you screamed. “You’re going to shrivel up like a leaf, and then you’re going to die! You’re going to be covered with pustules from head to toe!”

  “With what?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” you moaned, “this is terrible.” Your hands moved from my throat and then you were holding on to me, rocking me back and forth. “There isn’t any cure,” you whispered. “Don’t die, Kitty. Please don’t die.”

  We were orphans and we only had each other. We looked at each other and I saw your face very clearly, the way I’d see everything at the end of a long car ride, after Daddy pulled the car into the driveway and turned off the ignition. I saw tears forming in the corners of your eyes, the corners nearest the bridge of your nose which, in their slight downward curving, have always made me think of the scrollwork on a violin.

  You threw yourself on the mattress, out of which silver-fish traveled, in their great alarm, in many directions. You sobbed and sobbed, and you were speaking as well, but I couldn’t hear a word you said, because your face was pressed into the blue-and-white mattress ticking. Do you remember? I sat beside you on the bed and stroked your hair the length of your back. It felt wonderful. And I said your name over and over: Will-lie, Will-lie, Will-lie—each syllable equal, like breathing.

  Finally you rolled over and looked at me. I don’t think, in all the ordeals we went through together, that I ever saw you look ugly. But such translucent skin as yours tended to reveal the places where blood and sorrow pooled just under its surface. Your eyes were pink, and the miracle is that when you cried you didn’t end up looking like a rabbit.

  “It’s happening again,” you said. “Stop it!” you yelled. And then you touched my arm. “Don’t look so worried, Kitty. I’m not mad at you.”

  “You’re not?” I caught a glimpse of the little feather that was myself peering in the window.

  You pressed your fingers to your eyes. “Everything gets so tiny,” you said. “And thin. Like the outside of a balloon when it’s about to burst.” You opened your eyes and then shut them again. “Stop doing that!” you said. “Please.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” I told you.

  “Don’t you know what I’m talking about?” you asked. “The faraway-and-wrong look? You know, don’t you, Kitty?” You were pleading.

  “Maybe,” I said. I was thinking of room 12—of the kids in room 12. That was, in our small rural school, the receptacle for the halt and the lame, the retarded and the hostile, the children in whom God’s sense of proportion had faltered: huge children towered over tiny children; children spoke all at once, in a rush of melodious labials, or they spoke more slowly than the land’s rebound from the weight of the glacier, and their words meant nothing at all.

  “It’s everywhere,” you said. “Isn’t it?”

  We held on to each other, and over your shoulder I looked around, cautiously, for the bright and mismatched plaids and stripes; for the pale faces snagged on a single thought; for the alien shoes. I was frightened, Willie. I could feel the room rise so high in the house that it passed through the roof and then flew away, beyond Mama or Daddy’s reckoning, beyond the reach of the pines or the mountains, beyond the gravitational pull of the small round world. We might have vanished altogether, except that something more powerful than gravity landed on the roof. It made the extinguished sound of a fist hitting a dummy, by which I understood that we had fallen under its jurisdiction. You never heard a thing. Nor did our parents as they stood, arm in arm, in the doorway, both of them a little breathless from the long climb.

  “What is it you kids do in here?” Daddy asked.

  “We play,” you said. You pinched my wrist, warning me.

  “I wondered what became of these bowls,” Mama said. She scowled at the floor. “One of these days …” she said, bending down to draw a line in the dust.

  They both stood, uneasily waiting, like visitors. I felt my heart sailing around in my chest.

  “Lemma” a voice said, the lips opening to speak within my ear. The voice was clear and rigid, as if it had never been softened through use, like a shirt pinned to a piece of cardboard. “Lemma.”

  That was the first time I heard Rogni’s voice.

  It was all that I had of him at first, just that word, lemma, like a slice of a larger word dissolving slowly on my tongue. Lemma defined the shape of those late-fall afternoons, when darkness came earlier and earlier, when my heart was filled with that excessive joy that is transformed, by every child who has ever felt it, into dread. It is not as if there was original sin, you see, but
instead colossal apprehension, which called forth darkness out of light.

  One morning in November, cold wet air blew in off the Atlantic and, with it, rain that froze as it fell, sheeting the world in ice. Cars couldn’t hold to the roads but spun wildly around and around, plastering their drivers like campaign posters to telephone poles. When the storm hit I was already at kindergarten, sitting on the floor among my classmates, all of us on our little mats, watching Miss Kern count the milk money. “I’m missing fifty cents,” she said. “Who forgot?” Suddenly the lights went out and the room grew tricky and strange, as if all the wooden blocks and games were jumping from shelf to shelf and there wasn’t a single thing Miss Kern could do to stop them. She continued to count the money; so intent was she upon that hoard of quarters that she didn’t even look up when the tall bearded man with eyes as black and moist as a seal’s appeared in the doorway.

  This was Peter, the janitor. His blue work shirt had long wrinkles pressed into it, contributing to our belief that he lived in the school basement, sleeping on the cement floor next to the furnace. One tongue of fabric stuck out over the front of his dungarees—you told me that you thought he was handsome. “You folks doing all right?” he asked Miss Kern, who looked up guiltily, as if, under cover of darkness, she’d been hiding our coins in her pockets.

  “We’re fine,” she said, dismissive. “Thank you.”

  Peter walked over to where Miss Kern sat tucking an upward-curving strand of hair into the downward curve of her pageboy; he stood extremely close to her—unnecessarily close, it seemed, so that I could feel Raymond Naples on my left and Becky Fine on my right moving forward on their mats and then stiffening, waiting to catch a glimpse of adult interaction. We all waited; this was the secret place into which we knew, someday, we would tumble, whether we wanted to or not.

  “Candles,” Peter said, handing Miss Kern a box. “The power’s out everywhere. Ice on the lines.”