Little Sister Death

by William Gay

  David? She was calling him from somewhere below him, out of sight beneath the eaves.

  He lay with his face against the roof, unmindful of the hot slate burning his cheek.

  David. David.

  He closed his eyes. What?

  Something happened to the picture, she said.

  No shit, Binder said to himself. He didn’t say anything aloud.

  The TV was showing a fairly plain picture then it all went away and there was nothing but snow. It’s not even talking.

  Did it show me going ass over kneecaps off a ladder before it all went away? he asked her.

  What?

  Nothing.

  Are you all right, David?

  Yes. I’m all right.

  He guessed he was. He got up slowly, still holding on with his hands. The world turned like a stone-drunk carousel. He looked at his fingertips. The nails were bleeding. He felt for a handkerchief but didn’t have one, remembered tossing the shirt off the roof. He wiped the blood off his temple with his forearm, a slick smear of bright scarlet.

  He ascended the roof once more, unwired the antenna pole, and knotted the lead wire around the leg of the antenna. He began to pay out wire, lowering the antenna toward the eave of the roof.

  Get out of the way, Corrie. I’m lowering it down.

  What?

  Just get out of the way.

  The antenna tipped over the side. He braced his knees against the ridge of the roof to absorb the onset of gravity, let the wire slide through his palms until he felt the antenna settle onto solid ground. He threw the wire and it slithered away, vaguely serpentine, and vanished. He wiped the blood out of his eyes again and sat for a moment breathing hard, trying to get his bearings. He felt vague and dislocated. He hungered for the normality of fifteen minutes ago with an urgency that bordered on panic.

  Naked to the waist with a white cloth tied around his longish hair, he looked vaguely like a refugee from the sixties, aging flower child disenfranchised and purposeless in 1980. He climbed the steep embankment the house seemed shored up against and through the sedge toward a flat knoll with the antenna balanced across a shoulder, reeling out line as he went.

  She watched from the back porch, fretfully solicitous. A touch of concern in her voice when she called. David, it doesn’t matter about the TV, really, can’t you just let it go?

  No, he said. If you want to see The Tonight Show then you’ll damn well see it. Just keep the wire unreeling.

  He followed a rockchoked red gully, looking over the rim of the hot metallic sky, past the worn, faded timber of the sedge. He clambered out of the gully, hoping the reel of wire he’d bought would be enough, skirting last year’s cornfield. Binder wondered vaguely who had tended it, guessed the land had been rented on shares. Yet it might have been years old. The stalks were tilted and bleached to a delicate silvergray, seemed composed of some material of awesome complexity. The thin, paperlike blades hung sere and still in the windless day.

  He leaned the antenna pole against a shelf of limestone protruding from the red clay and stepped up, then leapt involuntarily backward, suddenly aware of swift movement, coppercolored and nearliquid. A snake big as his forearm flowed across the smooth limestone, its skin rippling. The snake turned, halfcoiled, and for a moment Binder was staring into its deadlooking eyes, the head flattened and poised.

  He looked about for a weapon, a rock small enough to throw. Go on, goddamn you, he said. I didn’t set out to kill you. You never did anything to me. The snake watched him hypnotically, eyes like shards chipped off black glass, old and evil and implacable. He had a momentary vision of Corrie’s tanned leg striding through the sedge, a movement too swift for the eye to follow, twin drops of scarlet beading on her calf. He slowly took up the aluminum antenna pole, smashed the end of it onto the snake’s head, its four-foot length instantaneously constricting into a writhing mass of flesh, convulsing in silent agony.

  He raised the pole. The snake’s mouth was open, the jaws unhinged, the fangs delicate hypodermics like sharp-curved fish bones. He lowered it deliberately, smeared the snake’s head across the stone. He leant, watching the snake for movement, the pole poised, pale pinkish stains on the white rock. The snake was very still.

  He felt watched. He turned. Some faint noise, perhaps a whisper of wind in the dry cornstalks. A black dog watched him stoically from the edge of the cornfield. An enormous dog, high-shouldered and lean, standing cold and still as ice. He felt lost in the raw beast. The oversized, erect ears looked like a photograph he’d seen of jackals or wild African hunting dogs, the muzzle long and snoutlike, slightly open. He could see quite clearly the row of teeth and the red-looking tongue bisected dark by a shadow. Get, he told it uncertainly. Get the fuck away from here. Nothing. He looked about for a stone or a stick and saw horrified out of the tail of his eye the dog vanish. It seemed to step abruptly sidewise and become for an instant the right half of a black dog, Binder whirling to see it vanish completely, not as if it were fading out but simply stepping behind something. But there was nothing to step behind. Through the gone half of the dog he could see the motionless corn blades, the rampant growth of morning glories, the crowlike convolutions of the parched earth contrasted against the corporeal and inarguably real-looking shorthaired half of the dog. In an instant, an eyesblink, it was gone too.

  He came closer. He studied the spot intently, leant for a moment openmouthed and foolish, halfcomic in profound scrutiny of the fissured clay.

  He went on up the slope with the antenna and hurriedly set it up, hooking the leadwire to it abstractedly and occasionally glancing back over his shoulder at the cornfield. He lashed the pole to a fencepost with a length of wire, angled the antenna toward where he guessed Nashville was.

  The cornfield seemed darker toward its center. Light entered at the rows’ end, ran like liquid down the middles, getting shallower and shallower. There seemed at the convergence of the rows some mass of shadows light could not defray. He clipped the wire with the sidecutters and pocketed them and started toward the cornfield. He stopped at the spot the dog had been. He stepped into the field a few feet, the cornblades whispering against his jeans. Then he turned and went back to the house.

  The TV was couched in the corner by the window, its screen flickering the particolored images of a game show, and Binder watched it, feeling a curious sense of triumph as if the television and he had been locked in combat, as if it had been some recalcitrant beast he had had to force to do his bidding.

  Lunch was soup and deviled eggs and tuna fish sandwiches. Binder set across from Corrie and drank iced coffee. His head ached and he wasn’t hungry. He felt slightly nauseated and soreness seemed to be creeping up on him like polluted water seeping from his bones.

  He sat the glass down. I saw a dog out there in the cornfield, he told her.

  A dog, she said, and he realized suddenly the enormity of the gap between what he had seen and what she had said. There seemed a vast gulf of windy space between the words and the still, dark beast watching him so calmly. He remembered that he hadn’t seen the feet and that it had dull yellow eyes.

  Probably homeless, she said musingly. A stray somebody dropped here? We ought to put out something for it to eat.

  His hand faltered halfway to his mouth with the glass of coffee. For a moment he thought he might say something, then he thought better of it and didn’t.

  The air conditioning man had come that day, an efficient, swarthy little fellow not given to conversation. Though Corrie had certainly tried, Binder thought, half smiling in the dark, remembering her bringing him iced tea and offering sandwiches, apparently delighted at seeing any strange face and reacting to the sight of the red and white truck winding toward them through the cedar rows as if it were the arrival of some long and eagerly awaited visitor. The old man shifted his cud of Beech-Nut and watched her with wary little berrylike eyes, as if she were bearing suspect intentions along with mintsmelling tea.

  You won’t never co
ol it, the man told Binder. Your best bet is to shut off some of them upstairs rooms. You won’t cool it this summer nor heat it this winter, not unless you’re a millionaire. Cost you four, maybe five hundred a month, and them fireplaces’d keep you humpin with a chainsaw.

  We’ll be back in Chicago this winter, Corrie had said. This place is depressing enough in the summer. Can you imagine what it’d be like in the wintertime?

  Lying there in the dark, under the cool, mechanical whine of the air conditioner, Binder thought he could. Already remote, the place shrouded with snow would be inaccessible, locked in silent peace. No telephone, no traffic, no gossip, just the quiet walls and the unlined yellow paper and time settling slowly over him like motes of dust spinning in the air.

  He couldn’t sleep. His head ached, the pain coming in waves so regular he could have charted them, ebbing and flowing like the black tides of the sea. And that was the way he came to see them, the waves beginning far out and uneven beyond a reef of slick black rocks starting in, whitecapping, breaking on the rocks with fingers of salty spray. Fading thin, but never completely going away. There was always a dull aching behind his eyes. He opened them, stared into the darkness. He could feel her naked back against him. His arm encircled her as if he could draw furtive comfort from her sleeping warmth. He cupped a breast gently, slid his hand down to the smooth mound of her belly, her waist already thickening in pregnancy. He thought simultaneously of the tiny form growing inside her (cells dividing even as she slept, no rest for the weary, a woman’s work is never done) and the book growing on lined sheets of yellow paper and in his head. We shall each be creative, each in our own way.

  He arose, went to check on Stephie, studied her sleeping face for a time. He went into the kitchen. In a cabinet he found a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol, took three with a glass of icewater from the refrigerator, stood for a moment with the cold glass against his temple.

  He sat on the sofa smoking, watching the television with the sound off. Late-night news, talking heads like prophets gifted with hindsight mouthing dark forebodings intercut with neon images of random violence.

  On the porch it was cooler, a degree of comfort between the sterile manufactured cold of the bedroom and the hot heavy air in the den. He sat on the damp stone steps, watching across the dark bottomland to where the horizon met the sky in a collusion of black he suspected more than saw. Distant lightning flickered there, vague and threatless, and he caught himself waiting for thunder that wouldn’t come. Orange electricity bloomed and faded, burnishing the silver clouds, tracing their outlines with bright neon fire, the afterimage burning on his retinas. Beyond the toolshed the sky was black and wetlooking, velvet drowning slowly in India ink.

  He talked to folks.

  He took a seat on a worn bench on the courthouse square, next to an old felthatted man whetting a knife. Occasionally the man would cease his work and inspect it critically, try the edge experimentally on the sparse gray hairs on his forearm, return to his patient whetting. Perhaps he had a need for a blade so painstakingly sharpened, Binder thought. Perhaps he was a butcher, a brain surgeon, a midnight slasher.

  He saw Corrie and Stephie cross the street and go into the beauty shop, Corrie pausing as she pushed open the door, turning to raise a hand. Birds bright as mockup birds of chrome and tinfoil foraged the withering grass, and they along with Corrie’s crisp dark curls seemed untouched by the suffocating heat. The old man’s longsleeved chambray shirt was dark with perspiration across the back and armpits, sweat soaked through the collar buttoned against his stark neck.

  Your name wouldn’t be Charlie Cagle, would it?

  Well it might, if you ain’t takin up money or sellin insurance.

  I’m not doing either one, Binder said.

  What are you doin then?

  Just passing the time of day. Been hot, hasn’t it?

  July is like that. You from around here, young feller?

  I live out at the old Beale place.

  Say you do? I allowed that place was boarded up now.

  No. The people who owned it kept it up. The house is in good shape.

  You a married man?

  Yes, Binder said, watching the rectangle of sundrenched glass that was the door to the beauty shop.

  I reckon she must be a right nervy little gal then. To live out there on that place.

  Why do you say that?

  It’s so far from town and kind of back in them woods and all. You got to admit it ain’t the cheerfulest-lookin place in the world.

  It’s not that for sure.

  That her went in that store and thowed her hand at ye a minute ago?

  Yes.

  I guess them old peafowls in there gives her a earful about the Beale place then, the old man said dryly. Reckon you might have to tote her to get her back home. Or hogtie her and drag her one.

  We’ve been out there two weeks. Nothing’s happened, Binder said, thinking of the dog, the watchful yellow ungleaming eyes and black flag of a tail dropping against the cornrows.

  Well, I lived in this county all my life and all I ever heard was tales folks told. So-and-so seen this, heard that. Jesse Bright he was back in there digging ginseng one time. He thought he knowed where he was, keepin his directions by the sun, but then it clouded up, come up a rain and he got off in a long hollow and didn’t know no mor’n a blind hog where he was. He blundered around awhile and said finally he started hearin this music, purty and far off, and just set down on a stump and took it all in.

  What sort of music?

  Just purty music. Said he ort to been scared but wadn’t. Somebody singin, but he said it sounded so far off he couldn’t make out the words. Said it sounded like a real purty church song.

  You believe that?

  I don’t believe it or disbelieve it. I’m just tellin you is all.

  When the Beale haunting first began, the spirit or whatever she was used to sing gospel songs, didn’t she?

  Is that a fact? Well, that was a mighty long time ago. How would you know a thing like that?

  I read a book about the Beale place.

  Say you did. What are you, some kind of writer?

  No, Binder said, grinning. Just some kind of reader.

  Writers come down here off and on. Folks puts em on somethin fierce, tells em the awfulest old bunch of bullshit you ever heard.

  Cagle began to whittle from a length of red cedar, the soft, curling shavings mounding delicately in the lap of his overalls. Binder could smell the aromatic cedar. He thought inanely of the time the old man seemed to possess so much of, the almost ceremonial preparation of the knife just to whittle something ultimately unrecognizable from softened wood.

  I spect a lot of that Beale haunt stuff was made up just to pass the time, don’t you? Folks didn’t have no television sets to hunker in front of back then. They had to addle their brains some other way.

  You may be right, Binder said.

  I may not be plumb right. It was a man claimed to be a writer come in here in the forties, not many years after Owen Swaw killed hisself. He was from up north somers. He prowled around out there a long time one summer huntin ghosts, then he left or I reckon he did. I never did know if he got his book wrote or not.

  Did you ever meet him?

  Shor I met him, the old man said, his tone insinuating that Binder had subtly insulted him. He looked me up special cause everbody figured I knowed Owen as well as anybody did. Me and Owen was cuttin timber right before he went crazy as shit and took a choppin ax to his old lady. He was a nice feller, this here writer was. Had a way of listenin like he was just soakin you up. Soft-spoken, talked with some kind of accent, said he was from Hungry or somers.

  What was his name?

  I was just tryin to think.

  Sunderson, somethin like that.

  Sunderson doesn’t sound Hungarian.

  Somewheres over there across the waters. It don’t matter. All I’m sayin is you find a feller wears them hornrimmed glasses and g
ot a college degree in his hippocket and you listen to his talking about that ghost stuff real serious and you put a little more weight to it. He was a doctor of somethin, some kind of doctor.

  Corrie came out of the beauty shop, Stephie behind her. They got into the pickup and it slowly backed onto the street, eased down and reparked before the A&P.

  You got a nice little family there.

  Thank you. How come Swaw killed his family?

  Nobody every knowed. I reckon he just went crazy all of a sudden. Killed his wife in the toolshed and went in the house and commenced on his daughters. Got three out of four of them and then he shot himself. Or so they say.

  You don’t think that was the way of it?

  Cagle was silent a moment. I don’t know, he finally said. Somethin was botherin Owen. I drunk a beer or two with him the day he shot hisself.

  What happened to the last girl?

  She was put up for adoption. I imagine a thing like that happen to you when you was a kid would mess you up some.

  I imagine so.

  She’s hollerin at you.

  Binder looked up. Corrie had come out on the sidewalk, was in fact not hollering but beckoning with an arm. I got to go tote groceries, he said. I’ll see you again.

  You want to know what I think?

  Sure I do.

  That place is charmed.

  It’s what?

  Charmed. All of it, the whole fifteen thousand acres. All of it old man Beale ever had title to.

  Charmed by who? Or what?

  I don’t know. Do I look two hundred years old?

  Well, did you ever hear or see anything out there? Funny lights, voices?

  No, I never.

  The old man arose and closed the knife, brushed off the front of his overalls. The soft nighweightless shavings fell plumb in the windless air, settled like shredded gossamer about his shoes. Listen, he said, somebody starts beatin on your door in the middle of the night you don’t have to get up and open the door, do ye? Your telephone rings, you can let her ring can’t ye? What I’m tellin you is you let stuff like that in. Me, let’s just say I heard somebody knockin. I left the door shut, though.