Little Sister Death

by William Gay

  His eyes fell on the ax. Before he knew what he was about he had grasped it up by the handle and sprung forward, buried it to the eye in her face, rocked it free of the bone automatically like a man splitting a cut of wood, and stood with it poised to fall again, looking down at her still body on the floorboards at his feet. A dark moonlit stain of blood crept toward him.

  Daddy? Retha said. You coming back to bed?

  Shut up, Swaw told her. Goddamn your soul to hell.

  He walked out with the ax in his hand. He felt the cold dew on his feet, sweat drying on his body. He looked down and he was naked. The silver moon was above and behind him, wrought his shadow twisted and black as pitch, a moving recess to infinity he might stumble into.

  He heard the door of the toolshed fall to. He looked back. She was standing naked in the wet grass watching him. Her eyes burned with a fierce luminosity. He turned and went on. He heard her following him, her feet scuffing softly in the grass.

  A black dog came out of the tall weeds and sniffed at Swaw’s tracks. A man stepped out of the shadows of the sycamore and stood leant against its bole watching him. A gangling black man came up from past the toolshed and followed him, his angular walk aping Swaw’s dragfooted progress. The white man against the sycamore had long silver hair, muttonchop whiskers. Swaw did not notice. He went up the stone steps and into the dark recesses of the house.

  Here, pig pig pig, he called softly into the shadows. He went stealthily into the first bedroom he came to. The door creaked softly on its hinges. A pale yellow glow escaped as he pushed it open wide. Two here, rousing up at his step. He raised the ax. One scrambled up, fled past him, the other frozen dumb, mouth open. The last thing she saw was her naked father coming at her with the ax, its gleaming arc lit by the bare bulb of the nightlight.

  He went out and sat on the stone steps and sobbed for a few moments. Then he couldn’t remember why he was crying and ceased. The girl squatted in the wet grass watching him. She was all black and silver, white body gleaming like a beached fish stranded in the moonlight. The two men and the Mastiff were gone.

  He wanted a drink. He felt for the bottle but he was naked and he couldn’t for the life of him remember what he had done with his clothes.

  He went into the bedroom to hunt them, found instead his shotgun leant in the corner and a cardboard box of shells sitting on the mantle. The box bore a picture of flying ducks. He took out two of the red waxed cylinders and loaded both barrels and went out again.

  The shot that wounded one of his daughters brought the other out of the hall closet, arms outstretched and supplicant, shrieking. Swaw, cursing his luck and whirling after her, slipped in the slick blood and cracked his elbow on the floor. He struggled up, aiming on the fly at a frantic fleeing figure outlined in the moonlit yard. The explosion jarred his shoulder, blew off the top of her head and flung her limp as a rag doll through the screen and into the yard.

  He went to reload. Images and memories flickered like frames of film in his mind: he couldn’t remember his name but he could remember the girl’s eyes, the serpent motionless below the screened lid, the way the crimped ends of the shotgun shells felt. The air smelled like cordite. A blue haze of smoke shifted dreamily beneath the hall ceiling.

  She was heading for the steps, bloody from the wound, a hand held out to him. Daddy, she said. There was a petulant whine to her voice that he couldn’t stand anymore. He shot her off the top step and turned the gun on himself, leaning down and taking the smooth, cold steel of the barrel into his mouth. He could see her white body against the black grass, limbs flung out and twisted as if she had fallen from some enormous height.

  In his last attempt at coherent reasoning, Swaw figured he could fire the gun with his toe, and for once he was right.

  Beale Station, 1982

  He called Pauline from a payphone outside the 7-Eleven.

  How much have you got?

  Fifteen or twenty thousand words.

  First draft or edited?

  I don’t know yet how much work I’ll have to do on it.

  And you’re living down there, leased this place? Jesus, David. Can you afford that?

  Well, I’m doing it. It’s a gamble, I guess.

  And it seems to me a wholly unnecessary one. Why did you have to live there to write a book about the place? Christ, you could have flown down and looked the place over, spent the night there if you had to. This living there, leasing or buying, it just seems…overkill, so unnecessary. I hope you never write a book about the Taj Mahal. I don’t think that’s for sale.

  He felt inadequate, and he knew she was right. He could feel cold sweat along his sides, the beginnings of a headache, and for the first time a worm of doubt wriggled into his consciousness. He could see Corrie through the glass front of the market, and he wondered how long it would be until she was asking the same questions.

  The book’s coming along great. Anyway, I work better with my back against the wall. I get complacent if I’m not on the edge.

  You’d know more about that than I would. But we’re not talking about Moby-Dick here, or Remembrance of Things Past. All I suggested was a little thriller you could knock off to tide you over until you could get back to work on your novel.

  I know that.

  When can you send something along?

  I’ll try to get you three or four chapters and an outline in a week or so.

  Whenever you can. If it’s good enough maybe we can go for a quick paperback sale.

  Pauline?

  Yes?

  I want you to find me a book. There’s no way I can do it here, and New York City is the best place in the world to find an out-of-print book.

  There was a pause, he guessed she was getting a pen and scratchpad.

  Okay, what is it? Let’s have it.

  I don’t know the title. The author’s name sounds something like Sunderson, and he’s a doctor of something. Probably a psychiatrist. The book is about the Beale haunting, and it’ll probably have reference to that in the title.

  If you need it, I’ll do my damnedest. Do you know who published it, or when?

  Or that it was, he thought to himself. No, he told her. It would have been about nineteen forty-four or forty-five.

  All right. I’ll try.

  Thanks a lot.

  He rang off and came out of the phone booth wringing wet with sweat into a day not much better. He hurried into the air-conditioned market.

  You about ready?

  More than. What did Pauline say?

  She wants my typescript. She thinks she might sell it from an outline.

  He got a six-pack of beer from the cooler, a Playboy and Esquire from the magazine rack, a tin of aspirin at the counter.

  She drove, and he opened his shirt to the breeze, felt the wind drying the sweat to a glaze of salt, drank one of the beers ice cold and took three aspirin. They must have helped, for by the time they wound up the chert road home his headache was gone and he was thinking about the book again, blocking out the first scenes and planning what to begin typing.

  She turned from putting away the groceries. You didn’t say anything about my hair.

  In fact he hadn’t noticed it, but he said, I was just teasing you. It’s very becoming. I like it.

  Did you know that they actually have dances around here? Just a few miles down the road?

  I didn’t know that.

  In a country schoolhouse that was closed when the county schools were consolidated. The Sinking Creek School. I’ll bet it’s real old. There’s a band and everything, a fiddle player. A caller for the square dances.

  In the living room Stephie had turned on the television set, put a videocassette of Winnie the Pooh into Binder’s VCR. It sounds very nice, he told Corrie noncommittally.

  I don’t suppose you’d want to go, would you?

  Tonight?

  Well, yes, she said, knowing already that he wouldn’t but not really disappointed, not really expecting it. After all, he w
as working, not sitting in a bar in Chicago drinking beer. The bills had to be paid. She was thinking about the videocassette recorder, too: one of David’s seven-hundred-dollar toys. Where the money went.

  I need to work tonight, Corrie. I have to do it when I can do it. I can’t explain it to you. But I promise you I’ll take you this summer. Do they have them every weekend?

  I believe so. They were talking about it in the beauty shop. Will you really go?

  Sure I’ll go. It might be interesting. Binder hated dances but privately he thought he might be able to use it for the book, and if not this one for another. When he was working he always felt hypersensitive to stimuli, to things he ordinarily wouldn’t even notice, and later in his manuscripts he would come across things that brought back moments of remembering, bits of conversation he had overheard, or simply the way someone had looked.

  David?

  He looked at her.

  When we moved here, did you know that a man had murdered his family here and then killed himself?

  No, I didn’t. All I knew was the Beale legend. I heard about it in town today, but God’s sake, Corrie, it was fifty years ago. What difference could it make?

  None I guess, now. We’re already here.

  I’ll tell you what I will do today. I’ll take you swimming.

  A real big spender, she said, smiling again.

  With the remainder of the Cokes and a picnic basket of sandwiches, the three of them went down a footpath west of the house, came out on an old wagon road cut deeply into the earth, grown over with the lowering branches of enormous beech and sycamore, the road itself faint and vestigial, the ghost of a road. Off to the right was an area clear of underbrush, the earth mossy and damp, dark with shade broken by columns of light falling through the cathedrallike trees, the ground dappled with points of sun like strewn coins.

  The haunted dell, he said.

  What? She had dropped his hand.

  Virginia Beale was called the Fairy Queen of the Haunted Dell. I think this is it.

  She smiled at him, but a brief smile and one abruptly taken back.

  You’re always on, aren’t you?

  He shrugged. When I’m working, he said. Sorry. I always make the mistake of assuming the rest of the world is as interested as I am in what I’m working on.

  You have a positively grotesque ego.

  They came out of the bowered wood where the creek widened and deepened and a shelf of limestone rose out of the water, a table of rock fifteen or twenty feet long, the creek deep and bluelooking near the stone.

  She ran ahead and waded out until her dark head vanished, only a forearm and waving hand showing, then surfaced, laughing and shivering, sleek hair plastered to her skull. She climbed onto the hot slab of limestone.

  My God, it’s icy, she said. I swear there are ice cubes floating in it.

  He dove from the shallows and swam underwater across the pool, eyes open, the tabled rock floating past squared and geometric like some ancient structure hewn from stone. A rainbow trout turned in the sundrenched water, spun broken points of light at him. He rose toward the light, broke the glasslike surface of the water, dogpaddled to the shelf of rock.

  Jesus, he said. It must be ten or twelve feet deep. And every bit as cold as you said.

  He spread the beachtowel on the hot stone, lay back on it. This whole creek goes underground not a quarter mile from here, he said. It all roils around and funnels down into the ground. There’s a big cylinder of rock with sides worn smooth as glass. It pours spewing down into the ground, and you can hear it churning around down in there. That’s why they call it Sinking Creek.

  You know a lot about this place for a novice.

  I don’t think I’m a novice anymore. I’ve covered a lot of ground around here in the last few days.

  Exactly why escapes me.

  Well, if you work at it, you’ve got to.take an interest.

  She did not reply and he turned to study her face in repose, pillowed on a towel, her eyes closed, the sun throwing highlights of amber in her dark tousled hair. Delicate blue tracery of veins in her eyelids.

  It’s going to storm, he said suddenly. There was no response. Perhaps she slept. He turned to look at Stephie. She had waded out of the shallows, was gathering wildflowers on the far bank. Don’t go in the woods, he told her.

  Can I go just far enough to get those blue ones? she asked.

  Go where it’s clean, not where there’s any undergrowth.

  Okay.

  Binder was watching Corrie’s quiet face. This was the spot where the slaves used to have their baptizings, he said.

  Used to what? she asked without opening her eyes.

  Baptizings. The slaves had their meeting here, revivals I guess, and the preacher used to dunk them under to reclaim their souls. The Beale Haunt, or whatever she was, used to take quite an interest in the proceedings. She professed a great interest in religion. Washed in the blood, I guess. She used to sing and quote scripture to beat the band. She knew who was a sinner and who wasn’t, and she used to show up every Sunday there was a meeting here and sort of supervise things. She used to yell out, Hold that nigger under a while longer, Preacher, he needs a double dose. Stuff like that.

  You’re making that up hand over fist, she said drowsily. Every last word of it, and it’s not funny.

  The hell I’m making it up. It’s in the book. If you had read it when I was trying to get you to, you’d know I was telling you straight.

  It was just boring to me. Besides, it doesn’t matter. If you didn’t make it up, somebody else did.

  I guess so.

  Banked clouds rose in the southwest, momentarily obscured the sun. Winds behind or inside them drove them, the smooth surface roiling on itself like the aftermath of an explosion, the blossoming of some grotesque flower. The world darkened and the woods grew greenblack. The air turned denser. He could see Stephie’s bright head stooped to a flower in the glade. He kissed the hollow of Corrie’s throat, freed her breasts from the bathing suit, the flesh around the nipple puckering with the cold touch of his hand. Here, here, she said sleepily. What are you doing? What kind of girl do you think I am?

  He lay atop her body, feeling its heat, an urgency growing in him, with his hand between her legs, thinking: What is this? A warming of the cold war, a crack in the icemaiden’s veneer. Past her upturned face he could see the far woods imbued with sudden motion, disappearing in a shifting curtain of rain, the weeds jerking under its weight as if swung toward them, the glass surface of the creek instantly cleft with myriad fractures, beginning to churn with the force of the rain, no longer blue but gray and alive with motion, some curious element forming in him.

  There was only the green forest, the blue water, the bowl of blue sky to shelter them. No other in all the world. He made love to her gently, she with her eyes still closed, arms locked about his hips.

  Hey, where are you going? she asked him. You weren’t thinking of leaving, were you? This is much nicer than an umbrella.

  Her hair was soaked, water swimming in his eyes. Jesus, what a cold rain, he said. He leapt up, hopping onelegged into his pants, pitched her the towel, began to gather the soap and hairbrushes, gave up on getting it all. The hell with it, he said, grabbing her arm, turning her toward the opening in the woods. He called to Stephie, who came with a fist full of flowers. Thunder boomed above them. Lightning lit the world in a harsh white bloom of light, vanished, drove them soaked and windhurried up the wagon road, the trees writhing above them like some mythic wood bewitched to momentary life, the running figures dollsized and furiously animate in the green wood, the air stiff and choked with leaves.

  Something in him loved a storm. Once they were in dry clothes they sat beneath the tin roof of the porch and watched it pass over them and downstream, lightning arcing earthward from the band of clouds like tracerfire from some armada of smooth, metallic, otherworldly craft, thunder rumbling hollowly in the bottomland, the echo rolling back from the hi
lls. Then the storm passed and the clouds lay broken behind it. The sun came out but already it lay on the horizon. It sank and a cool blue whippoorwill dusk lay on the land, broken only by the darkened trajectories of bullbats and a chorus of frogs from the creek.

  He had set up a makeshift desk in the hall where there was a breeze from the screened-in backporch. After supper he typed for a while, vaguely aware of sounds of domesticities from the kitchen, conscious at once of the material he was working on and of her unseen presence beyond the kitchen wall. He could hear the whirring of the electric ice cream freezer. He was obscurely happy, drawing comfort from sourceless and insignificant things he always took for granted: the work he was doing, the soft worn feel of the faded jeans he was wearing, the sounds of the night beyond the walls, the feeling of the peace they engendered, the chaos of the world walled out.

  They ate the ice cream on the stone doorsteps, touched by a sense of closeness without having to voice it. It had been a long day, an unhurried purposeless day Binder had stolen from the book, like a day he had managed to hoard from his childhood, squander when the mood suited him.

  Later he would remember it as the last outpost of normalcy, a waystation to darker provinces.

  Sometime in the night the wind arose again, but the house did not notice. Couched against the base of the hill and with its stone foundation laid on solid limestone, it had felt such storms for over a hundred years, had stood so while an incalculable number of winds rose and ebbed. It slept on. After a while it began to dream.

  Binder halfawoke. A wind was banging a shutter somewhere, he could hear it slamming against the weather boarding. It was thundering off in the distance, and he could hear rain.

  The bedroom door opened, closed softly, and he guessed the storm had awakened Corrie or that she had gone to the bathroom; he heard her bare feet cross the room, but instead of turning toward the side of the bed and climbing back in, she sat on the foot. He felt the mattress sink slightly beneath her weight, the faint protesting creak of the springs. She clasped the calf of his leg gently and he opened his eyes, lay for a moment in darkness until lightning abruptly lit the room and he saw that he was facing the tousled back of Corrie’s head not four inches from his own.