Vinita Hampton Wright

by Dwelling Places (v5)

  Here it is, Halloween night, a night that generally belongs to Satan. But she is safe in Mitchell’s house, enveloped in God’s Word. After the tape is over, they take turns praying for Young Taylor and all the other kids who are deceived and heading for trouble.

  At the end of each tape, Reverend Francis talks of a place where suffering Christians can “rest for a little season.” It’s a retreat center his ministry has built, thanks to the generous donations of listeners. “You come to the Haven of Life and Truth, and we will let you rest. We’ll feed you on God’s Word—we’ll even give you a white robe! And we’ll prepare you for the battle to come.”

  Mitchell’s eyes appear to gaze into the future itself. “Sometimes I think that what I need most is to rest a while at Reverend Francis’s Haven.”

  “It sounds like a wonderful place.”

  “Yeah, I’ll check it out one of these days.” He smiles at Kenzie. “We can both check it out.”

  Kenzie knows that even as she pedals hard and stares straight ahead, her new friend is watching until she disappears down the rise. It is reassuring to know this, because now her night vision has become home to dragons and white horses and demons, foretold by the prophets and winging their way to Beulah even now. Kenzie feels waves of fear from deep in her soul. But more than that she senses a new strength and determination that will give energy and power to her prayers.

  Mack

  Mack runs past the barn, down beyond the pond. His heart thumps violently, and his legs feel too heavy but labor forward anyway. Behind him he can hear his brother breathing hard, trying to follow him.

  “Mack! Wait! You’ve gotta wait for me!”

  But Mack runs anyway. If Alex catches up with him, something horrible will happen to them both. So Mack ignores his brother’s cries. Why are they always in trouble? Why are they running? Mack can’t understand the sharp pain in his heart, or why he can’t bring himself to look at Alex. The sight and sound of his brother cause Mack to hurt all over. And the fear makes his feet keep going.

  He wakes up cold, looks at the alarm clock, and sees that it’s one in the morning. Alex’s voice woke him. But of course not. His brother’s voice leaked out of a dream and into this dark, chilly room in the middle of the woods. Maybe Mack’s own voice woke him up. He watches his breath drift toward the ceiling. He can still feel his feet pounding over the pasture, can sense Alex just behind him. Mack used to tease Alex when they were small, used to take off when he got tired of Alex tailing him. Mack would just run somewhere, and Alex would yell and try to keep up, but Mack was not only older but faster. It was all in fun anyway.

  But in the dream it felt utterly wrong and dark and full of sadness. His brother’s voice still echoes around him, clear and desperate. A shudder goes through Mack, and for a few moments he feels that Alex is right beside him, a sensation he’s never experienced.

  Then again, it’s never felt this cold in the stone house. It can’t be below freezing. But he’s never been alone here in late October—what is it, Halloween? But before, Alex was here with him, or Dad or Young Taylor, or all three. A couple of times he and Jodie stole a night or two, but that was summertime. Another body in the room makes a difference, whatever time of year. He gets out of bed and wrestles with the woodpile, hops around a bit while the fire gets going.

  He does all of this without turning on a light. The moon is overflowing the cold sky, and the room seems in the middle of dawn or twilight. As the fire starts and snaps Mack stands at the north window and peers into the woods. There is nothing so still as trees on a frigid night. They appear to be waiting patiently for something—for snow or sunrise or deer.

  Mack puts on his coat and boots. The woods look like a dream, a place that holds secrets. Since talking with George, Mack thinks more about dreams and secrets. He still doesn’t put much stock in all the talking or in what his tired brain invents when he’s not conscious. But most things feel like dreams these days, like locations that are more than they actually are. He walks across the clearing, toward the creek. The twigs and crusty leaves that crackle under his steps send echoes into the web of branches above him. He winces for the noise. A night like this shouldn’t be disturbed. He looks for softer places and ends up on the side of the bank. The creek itself lies just over a small ridge. He finds the damp layers of fallen leaves, glued together with mud. His feet make no noise at all.

  He comes up over the ridge and notices a tree he hasn’t seen before, short and gnarly. How could that be? He knows this place by heart. But the tree moves, and he recognizes the large trunk as a long, dark garment. And what had seemed a broken end, a top without a top, is a face. What he first perceived to be light sky at the end of the trunk is a face whiter than the moon. Mack sucks in air and feels his eyes grow large to understand what image they are registering.

  He is seeing a profile. A man with a colorless face and dark hollows for eyes. The coat falls about the bank where he sits. Midway rest white hands, slender hands. One comes up to touch the nose briefly. This movement jars Mack to his center. His eyes and mind finally come together. He is looking at Alex. Alex, his dead brother. The dream was more than a dream after all. The angles of the face, the gesture of the hand. It is all perfectly familiar. The only things that don’t match are the ghostly skin and absent eyes.

  From where Mack stands, he knows that a person sitting where Alex sits cannot see him. Behind Mack is the house and trees, not the middle-of-night pale sky. He’s come halfway down the bank and blended into the muddy absence of color or shape. He stands, his legs grown straight into the bedrock, and his thoughts gasp and leap. It is Alex. Mack has never believed in ghosts. Such things are not part of his religion or his family’s stories. Yet the moon shines clearly on this person only yards away. Foggy breaths whisper from Alex’s mouth. Ghosts aren’t physical, are they? They wouldn’t breathe real air, don’t have hearts and lungs. None of this makes sense.

  Mack extends his arms behind him and forces his knees to bend enough so that he gradually seats himself against the slope of the bank. This is a hallucination. It’s the drugs or the stress or just his crazed mind and heart bursting out of bounds, going places they shouldn’t be going. He is not right in his mind. Until now he has believed that things really weren’t that bad, that it was mainly fatigue and grief that made his thoughts spin in his head with no place to land. That made him fear his own family, even himself. But this is a critical thing happening to him now. He is seeing, sensing a presence that cannot be. He almost shouts his brother’s name, sure that the image will evaporate instantly, but then he realizes that if he has so little control over his mind that this thing could appear, what else might it do?

  He should want to see his brother again, to talk with him, to seize the chance to say how much they’ve all missed him. But he imagines Alex standing up, facing him, and speaking truth that the living cannot bear. If only I could have talked to you. If only you had been stronger. If only you had helped me more to manage things.

  Mack has to get out of here. He’s shivering too violently to move with ease, so he inches backwards up the bank, the sounds of his movement covered by the gurgling of water in the stream. He crawls on all fours over the ridge but stays just the other side of it, where the ground is soft and soundless. He crawls along the bank at least fifty yards, then cuts across and back to the house from the other side. For a moment he considers getting in the car and driving somewhere, driving the roads until dawn, but he needs to get warm first. He all but sits on the stove until the trembling stops. He turns on the lamp by the sofa. He wishes like anything he had strong drink nearby, something to muffle his mind and take his fear away.

  An hour goes by. For every minute of it he tries to imagine what Alex is doing. Still sitting beside the water? Walking through the woods? Walking toward him? Standing just outside the door? At three o’clock, he grabs the flashlight and heads for the stream. It has to be someone else. The moon was playing tricks on him. He marches noisily to t
he place he was before. The bank is empty except for its usual rocks and trunks. No sign of anyone. Mack walks up and down the bank, then cuts through the woods on a return to the house. He walks beyond it to the drive and the old barn. He disturbs the cows, who shift and grunt at him. Pigeons glare down at him from their beds upon the rafters. Mack goes back to the house, suddenly exhausted. He turns the radio on for company, but sleeps almost as soon as he lies down.

  Rita

  Rita watches Amos hand out Tootsie Rolls to the three youngsters on her doorstep. They are Disney characters, she thinks. She has already given each a handful of assorted wrapped candies and chocolates from the bulk bins at Wal-Mart. Amos brought his coffee can full of Tootsie Rolls and stationed himself in her living room, where he can watch through the front window for trick-or-treaters and also see through the doorway to the television that’s on in Rita’s combination family room/dining room. Rita feels like telling him that kids hardly know what Tootsie Rolls are anymore, but she saves her breath. He thinks he’s helping. He thinks she wants company. In a way she does, but Amos is clumsy and forgetful, and she feels inclined to look after him. “Company” for her would be someone who needs no looking after. She considers briefly—very briefly—that maybe there’s good reason that some women become lesbians as they get older. They just get tired of taking care of men. They’d rather somebody take care of them. They find companions who can cook and deal with the house if necessary, somebody who understands the difference between bath salts and Epsom salts.

  This afternoon she talked with Jodie, who doesn’t bother with treats anymore. The few farm families nearby no longer have small children. Plus, Halloween’s not much fun if your own children are too big to dress up and take around. Still, Rita feels abandoned. She and Jodie used to haul Young Taylor and Kenzie all over town and through the countryside too. The kids haven’t done that for years, but it couldn’t hurt to at least stay in the spirit of the thing. Jodie could have come over and sat here with Rita. They could pass out treats together and just visit in between knocks on the door.

  She’s got two teenagers and a husband who’s not well, plus a job at the school. She doesn’t have the time or energy to hang around with anybody, much less her mother-in-law. Rita worries sometimes that she’s turning into one of those old people who feel that everybody ought to love and serve them and who grow resentful at every hint of neglect, such as not getting called on the phone daily or not getting invited to every gathering. She delivers soup to a couple of people like that, and she tells herself at nearly every visit, Just a little slip in your attitude, and that’ll be you.

  “Look at that little dollie—I think she’s supposed to be Heidi. You know, the little girl who grew up in the Swiss Alps with her grandpa? I just loved that story.” Amos is grinning at six-year-old Stacy Enders, pigtails bouncing, whose nine-year-old brother, Spiderman, is guiding her up the walk. Their mom, Jennifer, who used to babysit Young Taylor, waits in the idling car.

  “I think she’s supposed to be Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz—but you’re right, she could be Heidi.” Rita opens the door and the children cry, “Trick or treat!” A lump rises in Rita’s throat. She could be standing in the middle of 1963, when Mack was Superman, or in 1991, when Young Taylor was a midget with an ax buried in his head. “And are you Dorothy?” She puts a handful of candy into each of their plastic pumpkins.

  “No, I’m Buttercup!” She sees Rita’s blank look and adds, “You know—the Power Puff Girls.”

  “Well, so you are.” Amos bends down to drop in Tootsie Rolls. Spiderman lingers just long enough to say thank you (after all, Mom is watching from the car), and Heidi-Dorothy-Buttercup runs back down the walk.

  Maybe twenty kids come by in the course of the evening. Rita recognizes some of them as being connected to neighbors or people at church, the children of children she used to know, but many of them she doesn’t know by name. Genevieve, six doors down, knows them all.

  “If you’d get your hair done regularly like I do, you’d keep up better,” she’d said recently. “Everybody gets their hair done at Marybeth’s, and that’s where you find out things.” Marybeth Ross operates a small beauty salon out of her home; she started a few years ago using what had once been a large storage shed, but business was so good that her husband, Dave, converted their two-car garage into a nice space for her. Their various vehicles (which number between four and six—the Rosses have two teenage sons) have taken shelter under a carport and in the old barn that serves no other purpose now.

  “I can wash my own hair,” Rita had answered. “No reason on earth to pay someone else to do it.”

  “But Marybeth can keep it trimmed. And she’ll style it and spray it so you don’t have to touch it for the rest of the week.”

  Genevieve does in fact go week to week without running a comb through her own head of hair. This makes no sense to Rita.

  “Besides, half the reason to go to Marybeth’s is to get caught up with everybody. I know about every baby shower, wedding, and hospital stay even before it hits the church bulletin.”

  “Well, Genevieve, I don’t need Marybeth’s because I’ve got you, don’t I?”

  Genevieve just laughed at that.

  Genevieve helped her deliver Halloween to her old folks earlier this afternoon. They packaged up little boxes of dietetic hard candies and those single-serve puddings. Rita knows that single-serve puddings were invented for children, but they are perfect for the elderly who don’t eat a lot at one sitting and who can usually peel off the tops for themselves, even if their hands are messed up by arthritis.

  For Bernie Hallsted she bought some packaged cotton candy. Kenzie was the one who noticed it at the convenience store right here in Beulah. It was balled up in small striped-paper packages, hanging there on clips just like packs of potato chips. Kenzie brought some to Rita, and they decided that it wasn’t as good as the freshly spun cotton candy you get at the county fair. But it was pretty close. Bernie now talks in cycles, telling Rita the same stories several times in the course of a half-hour visit. And at least once a week he travels back a good fifty years to the time his daughter Amy won a blue ribbon at the fair for her calf. To celebrate, they ate barbecue. And Bernie bought Amy and her mom each a huge cloud of pink cotton candy. They stood and watched as the sugar blew into strands inside the glass case and the vendor caught them on the white paper tube. The stuff was still warm and felt sparkly as it melted on their tongues.

  “I’d give anything for some cotton candy,” Bernie says at the end of that story every time he tells it. So Rita makes sure he gets a pack every week or two. She doesn’t think that so much sugar would be good for him on a daily basis. In another hour he would probably forget that he’d eaten it anyway.

  Jodie

  Jodie hears the back door squeak. Moon floods the double bed and her solitary self. She gets up out of duty more than any sense that confronting Young Taylor will make any difference. She meets him in the family room. He’s turned on a light and is reaching for the remote. Jodie gasps in spite of herself. Her son is in his full Goth makeup. Long black trench coat, white makeup on his hands and face, what looks like black greasepaint around his eyes and mouth. She remembers then that it’s Halloween and checks her reaction as best she can.

  “Where are you trick-or-treating at three in the morning?”

  “I don’t trick-or-treat.”

  “Then where have you been in that getup?”

  “Out.”

  “That is not an answer. You tell me where you have been.” She aims words at him, one by one.

  “Out walking.”

  “But I heard the car.”

  “Well, I wasn’t walking around here.”

  “Where?”

  He fingers the remote and seems to be thinking hard. He speaks without turning back to her. “Out at the stone house.”

  “You’ve been with Dad?”

  “No. I didn’t want to wake him.”

  “You were
in the house watching him sleep?”

  He sighs, disgusted and impatient. “No. Just in the woods.”

  Jodie sits on the couch and looks at him. “Please help me understand why I shouldn’t be worried right now.”

  “I don’t like him being by himself.”

  The words take the wind out of her. Her children do this to her constantly, acting as if they are clueless and careless, only to prove through a single statement that they not only are full of understanding but have agendas of their own. “I don’t either. But he feels like this is what he needs to do.”

  “Or maybe he feels like you don’t want him here.”

  She forces herself to ignore the pain her son’s words have just inflicted. “I really don’t think that’s what he thinks. And as his wife, I probably know more about what he thinks than you do.” She can use words too. She feels slightly guilty, although she has aimed not to hurt but to stun. This child is old enough to do war with her; he is old enough to be put in his place. Some days she marvels at how heartless she has become.

  “Whatever.” Young Taylor heads for the stairs.

  “Don’t ‘whatever’ me. It’s not okay for you to run around the country in the middle of the night, especially in that getup. What if Jerry or the state patrol had stopped you? You expect them to see you and not think you’re on dope or something?”

  He starts up the stairs, not defiantly but deliberately. Jodie fights to keep words in, and for once she doesn’t spin into a maniacal bitch who threatens all but hell itself at her firstborn. She is tired of yelling and threatening. Tired of this kid who is set against them all.