The Puzzleheaded Girl

by Christina Stead

  His fat fair wife and her fat fair daughter were sitting in rocking-chairs in the kitchen in a jolly mood. They had just received a three-burner kerosene stove from town; they had used a big farm stove like the Dilleys’. Up to this moment they had spent money only on necessary farm improvements and on a small radio. They were not like the Newbolds, who had every new electrical improvement.

  “My daughter is going to have the money when she marries. When she goes to church on Sundays, all the boys look at her, don’t they, Maureen?”

  The girl laughed, rocked back and forth. “Maureen is the catch of this township,” said the mother, looking back from the stove on which her eyes rested. “We thought you’d be getting flooded out,” said Mrs. Thornton laughing and rocking. “Mr. Thornton was saying, They’ll have water through the kitchen by this time; that cellar is always full of water in winter.”

  The daughter laughed and rocked. They talked about her sow which had farrowed three times in a year. Last time it had had seventeen piglets of which it had eaten two and smothered one; but that still made thirty-six living piglets in a year.

  “And they’re all Maureen’s,” said Mrs. Thornton. “The sow’s hers; she looks after it and they’re all her pigs. She sells them and the money’s hers.”

  The fat, small-eyed daughter grinned.

  They had sent the boy Johnson, a white-skinned lad of heroic build, for Mr. Thornton, who now arrived, very gay.

  Said he, “We’ve not a drop of water in here; all watertight.”

  “I always wondered myself why all the houses were built on top of these hills where the lightning can strike,” said Clare.

  “That house down there is always the same, winter it’s waterbound,” said the farmer.

  “In winter, all you have to do is lean out of the kitchen window and dip in the pail,” said Mrs. Thornton.

  “Always twenty foot of water in the cellar,” said the daughter. “You know that hailstorm we had? Came right up to our fence and turned back, didn’t touch a blade nor an ear. Laid everything in Strassers’ flat and they’re poor, haven’t a cent. Everything that side, laid flat. Stopped right at our fence. I wish I had shown you, to see.”

  They looked brightly at each other.

  “You have to have luck,” said Mrs. Thornton. “The berry farm failed. I knew it would. One of them got sick; and then the Dilleys had their daughter get sick with the lung-sickness, that’s the damp; and then the Davies came. You could see right through that boy when he came and the father’s a very weak-looking man,” she chuckled, “and the bottle didn’t help.”

  “Mother,” said Mr. Thornton, “that’s Mr. Parsons’ friend.”

  “Oh, excuse me. Mr. Thornton looks after the house; well—and the—” She began to laugh and poked her daughter in the arm; they both laughed. The daughter could not take her eyes off the visitors. She laughed in a vain way and at the same time her eyes devoured their valises, their town shoes and Clare’s light coat.

  Mr. Thornton sobered down and said, “There’s nothin’ to be done with that house. You might as well pull it down and move it farther up into Sobieski’s fields. But Mrs. Sobieski wanted money and she sold off that bottom bit of the field that is no good and all the long bit of creek the cows could fall into. It’s not much more than a water-meadow. And it was a crazy idea to build that deep cellar; it’s just a watertrap. Keep fish there.”

  At this amusing idea, the mother and daughter went into a gale of laughter. “Yes, fish.”

  “Couldn’t it easily be fixed up?” said Parsons. “There must be a local engineer who could build a dam and there are new ways of treating walls for seepage. Deepen, widen, dam the creek, get permission.”

  Mr. Thornton thought it might easily cost $10,000. He’d talked to engineers, had one over. “The house and ground is worthless as it stands.”

  “Well, that wooden bridge stood up to the flood the last three days and is as firm as a rock,” said Clare.

  “Do you mean to say we can build TVA and not fix a little thing like that,” said Sam Parsons.

  Mr. Thornton became very intent. He’d had it studied; it couldn’t be done. Mr. Parsons, surprised, said that the whole fault lay in the narrow gorge the creek ran through in the panhandle part of Dilley’s and the sharp right angle it turned. Mr. Thornton argued emphatically, while the mother and daughter looked on with rounder eyes, ready to laugh, but aware that Thornton was upset. “It catches all the water from all these hills and you’d need to pull down the house and make the whole place a dam.”

  He presently took them off in his car. At parting Clare told the Thorntons she would see them in a few days.

  “Oh, are you a-comin’ back?”

  “Oh, yes. We’ve rented it till the end of October.”

  Staring, the Thornton women watched them and their valises into the car; and then suddenly again were overcome with fun.

  “Well, just send me a line when you’re a-comin’ back and I’ll open up the place for you,” said Thornton placably, as he saw them off at Flemington station.

  It blew, it rained for two weeks; and in three weeks they returned. As they approached they saw the cottage radiant through the trees. Mr. Thornton was waiting for them on their porch. The creek banks were soiled with floodmarks, the water was not yet clear and all things were greyed by the flood; but the sun shone. They joyously hurried to the house.

  Mr. Thornton gave them the key saying, “Excuse me for not a-goin’ in with you. I’m very busy now with the farm. If you want anythin’, come to me.”

  They unlocked the door. The floor was muddy. The chairs, tables, benches, windowsills and all downward surfaces were hung with beards of grey-white mould up to nine inches long. “The Spanish moss has migrated from Florida.” The stove was rusted. It smelled like a cellar or cave. The cellar of the stone house was full to the opening, the steps ran down under water, a swimming pool. Thornton’s secret; they laughed. They cleaned, aired and sunned everything, keeping one of the chairs to show visitors; but no visitors came yet and in a few days of sun the chair was clean. The birds sang, the woodchuck family reappeared in the vegetable patch; the grapes ripened on the outhouse. The skunks and weasels had gone, there were fewer mice; the wrens had deserted their last brood dead in the nest. After a couple of weeks everything was nearly as before; the insects had returned though they no longer thickened the air; the twanging insect in the house twanged as before. Yet it was a pity to look at the ravaged creekside from which all the delicate plants had gone. The great ravens were still there, one sitting on a naked branch and one picking in the sun on the track.

  They looked through the house, peered from the windows of the little locked room. “Oh, why not buy it? It doesn’t always rain.” The Dilleys’ land was only a hand’s breadth of riverbank, a woodchuck’s backyard. The surrounding hills and combing trees were blameless as before; the sunlight golden through the damp invisible vapours was like a woman’s yellow mane thrown over everything; under, her damp warm meadowy skin.

  “Poky was singing loudly again today. She sings in that corner of the kitchen that is under the little room. Why don’t you come and look at her things, poor woman?” Sam always refused. He had seen nothing but the Indian dress and turned away from that. “I don’t want to see it, don’t let me see those things.” They now always called it Poky’s Place.

  “She tries to get rid of everyone; it is still her place.”

  “Don’t say those things.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  Bill Jermyn with Clare, and Joyce Jermyn with Sam, were walking along a tree-tufted edge. On one side a crumbling hillside, on the other, private unfenced woods protected by high trees linked and walled with poison ivy and poison oak.

  “What do you think of the haunting by knives and axes? It isn’t real,” said Clare, “but it’s astonishing.”

  Bill Jermyn was a blue-black brunette, with a melancholy nutcracker face, handsome sunk eyes and
a strong-set body blanketed in hair; this hair showed through the opening of his blue shirt and on his arms. Clare looked at this hair, glanced away, thinking, Bats fly into women’s hair because they don’t get the echoes back. I don’t get the thoughts back from hairy men. But Clare and Jermyn were close friends. They were interested in things like this.

  “I say it’s a low hollow where all the water and all the vapours concentrate; not only that, it’s protected; things grow faster, breed thicker and then the trees and plants take the air. At night you have no oxygen at all with all those old trees bending over you taking the air from you. It’s like sleeping in an old fourposter with curtains and canopy and carpet. And though you’re surrounded, it’s lonely. You’re overlooked. That imaginary man in the attic—you’re overlooked by the dark bushy hairy hill. It’s lonely here, lonely and timeless, or it has jungle time, millennial time only, dangerous to man.”

  “Oh, no. It’s millennial time we managed very well with,” said Clare, laughing; “and I am not afraid.”

  “Are you afraid of knives?”

  “I never was.”

  “There is something there—the vapours perhaps? This something which also appeared to you as a strong force pushing you downstairs, brought out the idea of axe-murders in Poky; and in you, a fear of knives.”

  “I wonder you didn’t hear the mice in the night,” said Clare.

  “I wonder myself,” said Joyce, a black-eyed impatient beauty, young, rounded. She had a rich, drawling, accusing voice. “Bill’s scared of mice; they’re nasty symbols to him, sex symbols, horror symbols. He got out of a property deal that way, found there were mice there and got a letter from his psychoanalyst.”

  When they got home, Jermyn climbed one of the trees and stayed there for forty minutes, his blue shirt visible through the leaves, an attractive blue-black four-cornered bird.

  When he came down he said, “What I’d like to do is buy the place away from Thornton; he’s after it for that sow daughter of his.” He left them for a walk and called on Mrs. Sobieski. He was a young man with a melancholy ingratiating manner. He found out what she thought the Dilleys’ place was worth and whether she would sell a bit of her field above the house. He arrived back, smoking his short-stem pipe, with the loping walk of handsome legs and when he got to where they were sitting on the porch, he slung his legs over the balustrade and said he thought he would buy it and rent it or loan it.

  “Another thing is the electric light. One thing I noticed about your story was that the electric light being on all night was the storm-signal for Poky’s crime down here; and it was the storm-signal for the Davies—Laban went away and the light was on all night; a lighted cabin in all these dark thickets. As in the musicians of Bremen.”

  And, fixing the pipe again in his mouth, he looked towards the bridge and barn, his fine tragic chinchopper face musing.

  In a few moments he took the pipe out again to add, “You know Professor Abe Carter has collected funds for a writers’ refuge? He’s looking for a place. I can make something out of this idea. I’ll get Carter to contribute some of the money he’s collected, buy Dilley’s place, call it Dilley’s Place, summer camp for writers, say there’s a ghost—you have first option. Give me a few days and I might do something with Dilley’s place. Besides, I don’t want old man Thornton on his hill to get it; just cussedness; because he’s been playing for it. There’s something to this place. Easy to work out a dam.”

  “Get a couple of beavers,” said Clare.

  “Whoever built this place? In this lap of the hills, a catchment place, a gorge? Naturally anyone who put in a deep cellar was delirious. And insane he who built it in the first place. And then, after winters and summers, he goes and builds a wing in masonry.”

  “He thought the cellar would take all the water,” said Clare.

  “Who was the architect, who the engineer? Well, here it is and beautiful as a russet apple. Where’s your outhouse? It’s that, smothered in grapes? I’ll join you with the whole thing worked out.” So saying, the handsome young man hopped off the railing, after a while came out again with the farmers’ encyclopaedia and crossed the yard. They had gone for a walk to see the birds at their stations along the track, especially the buff-and-blue humming birds. When they returned, Bill Jermyn was just returning full of grace from the grape harbour, book in hand. “By the way, what is that strumming or singing that I hear coming from the grapes?”

  “That is the ghost.”

  “It is?”

  “Oh, I’m certain.”

  “That’s very curious,” said Jermyn, strolling around, climbing, sounding and poking. “Is it a loose wire, an Aeolian harp? Could be an old vine somewhere, some nails.”

  “The sound has been getting louder for months.”

  “It isn’t flies in a spider’s web?”

  “Yes, brass flies in a brass web, I always said that,” said Clare. There was a wind that night. The next morning Joyce said, “What were you people doing running up and downstairs all night? I was awake. We did our best to get a baby last night; and we overdid it, I couldn’t sleep, though he did.”

  “It was the mice.”

  “The mice? That?”

  “Yes. They do that every night. And fall down the walls.”

  Joyce looked serious and presently she and Bill Jermyn went for a walk, up and down the track, quite visible from the windows but separated by a palisade of trees, wheeling lights, the impassable barricade of Rhus radicans, the creek and its voice. When she came back Joyce said, “There are snakes in the water; watersnakes. Oh, I know I shall get pregnant here; the place is alive,” she shuddered, “alive…and then I’ll get out of here.”

  The next night she stumbled up the steep dark wooden stairs with a jug of water and a glass. “I may want an aspirin in the night and I wouldn’t go down there at night.”

  She brought up her water and something to eat. “Nothing would make me go on those stairs in the dark hours. I might tread on a mouse. I hate it here. Why is it artists like to live in primitive conditions, with a john a hundred yards away, so that you can step on a snake going to it; or some bull get you or man rape you; remote from life among the farming clods, little boys with sticks driving cows, in a mice-eaten weasel-bitten shack with disgusting little vines that work themselves round your finger while you’re reading a book on the back step. Would such hard luck have come to Poky in the city if her parents had had the sense to stay there? All country cottages are mistakes, follies.”

  At another time she said restlessly, “The trouble with me is Jermyn’s not my type. I’ve got to find my type. I’ve been too long about it. Now I suppose I’m going to have a baby by him. I didn’t have the sense to get out first. Jermyn’s a good type for a father and he’ll always be able to support the child and me. But as soon as I have it I’m getting out. What I ought to be looking for is a wolf. There are no wolves here. There’s nothing here for me.”

  The next afternoon was warm and close. Lightning the colour of fireflies flickered; the south flared, thunder rolled in the distance, rolling iron barrels. Suddenly it roared overhead; and from the sky, violent rain. A grey long-haired animal leapt the creek, and howling, whining in fear, rushed to the porch and crawled under it, where it lay trembling.

  “There couldn’t be a wolf round here!” cried Joyce. “I saw a wolf!” “It’s an alsatian dog!” “It’s a wolf,” snapped Joyce. “What a place! It’s the backwoods. It’s a timber wolf.” “Well, you asked for a wolf and it seems that here you get what you want.” “A wolf?” “Yes, you asked for a wolf. In Poky’s day a wolf was a wolf.” “Don’t make a joke of it,” cried Joyce: “it’s too horrible. I’m not staying here tonight.”

  When the storm had passed they tried to lure the dog from the porch with a piece of meat. He lay close to the earth, in the warm damp narrow space, trembling and whining. “You do have mighty cracks of thunder here,” said Jermyn. “It’s like the Catskills.” Joyce declared she was going back t
hat afternoon. “I wouldn’t spend another night here: by the morning you may be invaded by bears and moose. This is just a piece of the great northern world that has got loose. And I know Poky hears every word we say.” “You always claim that you’re not superstitious,” said Bill Jermyn. “I am not. These are facts. I can believe what I see. I said wolf and a wolf came,” grumbled Joyce.

  When dusk came, but before they put on the light, they looked from the kitchen windows and there, almost invisible in the grass emptying of light, ran a pale animal. First he ran crouching, then he began to lope; he sped across the bridge, up the track towards the blackberries. “It’s a lost dog: no one round here has an alsatian,” said Clare. “It’s a spectre,” said Joyce. She got up early in the morning, packed and came down. “Bill is taking me away. You finish out your summer here if you can. Rather you than me. But I bet you won’t finish out the summer here.”