by Haven Kimmel
Hazel blinked against the light, against the slight aura on the edge of the high chair. A child’s wheelchair. She closed her eyes, felt herself falling, but when she opened them, looked around, she was still standing. She moved her eyes and they jerked from object to object, as if the attic were the set of some stop-frame animation, a gothic Little Drummer Boy. She knew enough from working in the clinic to realize she might be having a seizure; she might be having a stroke, although it was unlikely. Getting downstairs was best, but for the moment she’d need to sit down.
The rough planks of the attic floor had been swept, but were gritty and had a charred smell. Hazel went all the way down, resting her cheek against the back of her open hand. She was fine and conscious, had access to all the usual nouns. The picture of an apple in her mind conjured the word apple, and when she wondered if the attic had ever burned she saw a fire and thought the word fire, so she hadn’t had a stroke. But if she tried to lift her head she felt it again, the overwhelming, sweeping sense of falling that caused her stomach to drop. Sweat ran down her back, soaking her bra strap. Head down then, she thought, and eyes closed.
She was not dreaming. She wasn’t dreaming because she knew where she was and she knew why she had decided to lie down on the attic floor. The board beneath her palm was threatening her with splinters; her right hip pushed painfully against a key in her pocket. She could picture Edie in her bedroom watching television, speaking to no one, and she could even conjure up Edie’s new, peculiar scent: it was a funk, in both ways. Edie had come home not right—scarred and depressed and smelling bad. She talked ceaselessly about making her way back to British Columbia, where the shreds of a commune were still trying to make a go of growing hemp and eating nothing but what fell on the ground. Food that volunteered, they called it, and Hazel knew if she could remember that, she was conscious.
But why, then, was she also seeing another world as clearly as if she were there? She was thinking her own thoughts about her own life and time, and watching something else unfold against her closed eyelids in clear, manifest detail. There was a man. Jack Lynch, he was black Irish and his mother used to call him Black Jack. He lived in a shed at the edge of a cemetery…it was the Wilbur Wright Cemetery, about half a mile away. In it was the lone Civil War grave, of a settler who’d gone back to Georgia to fight for the Confederacy. Jack was the groundskeeper, Hazel knew, he ran the three cemetery dogs, and they lived together in the shed, under a magnificent spreading tree.
A hanging tree, a Lynching tree. Black Jack was tall and thin, a shuffling man with big hands and a cockeyed, lined face. He was a couple degrees past handsome and into ruination. She watched him leave the cemetery—a moment ago it was daylight, but darkness fell in seconds as Hazel watched—and walk down the road that curved in front of the graveyard. The dogs followed him, silent: a wolfhound, a shepherd, a block-headed terrier. They followed him a quarter mile or so, then turned and ran back home. They made no sound, but Hazel could hear Jack’s boots on the gravel: scraping, insistent.
He passed the old woods—wait, Hazel thought, those aren’t there anymore. That acreage had been cleared for hay. He put his hands in his pockets, whistled, pulled out a comb and ran it through his hair. He turned onto Hazel’s road, kicking along in the gravel. Before the road was paved, she realized—it was still the County Road. So that was what it looked like.
He was coming there, to her house. Hazel tried to open her eyes, to raise her head, and her vision swirled as if she’d had too much to drink. When she lay back down, the scene had changed and Hazel was studying a girl of nineteen, Marguerite Henrietta Post, someone Hazel felt she knew but in the way she knew a virus was incipient or that a coming storm would bring with it a high wind. Marguerite’s hair was strawberry blond and she had a mole on the side of her neck. Her mother was buried in the Wilbur Wright Cemetery and that was where she met him, Black Jack. Marguerite’s father was a judge, he was Teutonic and coldhearted, worse than Albert Hunnicutt but similar. And corrupt, where Albert was not. Marguerite was sitting in…she was sitting in Hazel’s room but it looked very different; the walls were papered black and covered in a pattern of hand-painted blooming peonies. But Marguerite’s bed was in the same place as Hazel’s, facing the window. She sat in a rocking chair, wearing a long gray dress. Her mother was dead; her father was ill with tuberculosis and mostly out of his head.
Hazel saw Marguerite growing older, and fast, a speeding past of hands and hair and silk, then back again to where she rocked, nineteen, in Hazel’s room. Marguerite’s room. Her hands rested on her abdomen. Jack was in the lane, it was the middle of the night, Hazel could see him from above, as if from the veranda, and there were animals—rabbits and mice and all manner of small things—running away from where he stepped. The animals were fanning out and away from him and Marguerite was inside waiting, her father delirious, his pillowcase flowered with a spray of blood.
Hazel rolled over on her back, taking the weight of her head off her hand. Marguerite had called him but Hazel couldn’t imagine how she did so; in what language, along what conduit? Marguerite wore gray but all around her was blackness, a miasma of damage. Hazel had never seen the likes of her before. Or she had, but couldn’t remember where. Marguerite lifted one hand from where it rested on her stomach. She winced, and brushed the hair away from her forehead, which was perspiring…
…and Jack slipped in through the unlocked back door, sleek as Mercury. He stopped in the kitchen, where things were very much the same as now, the same low, misbegotten sink, the same stone floor, except it was dirty, there were dishes piled up everywhere. They had even let leaves blow up against the cabinets and the pie safe. He rummaged through the bread box, found something and ate it. In the butler’s pantry, which had been wrecked, he pillaged the last of the Judge’s brandy, tossed it on a pile of unmarked bottles in the corner while Marguerite—
—drew in a deep breath and wiped her forehead and there they were: two thick scars, branching out beneath Marguerite’s hairline. The window was open (it hadn’t been a moment before) and the owl leapt off the sill and circled the room.
Hazel didn’t know what the bird wanted; she had never known, but Marguerite did, and she barely glanced up as the draft off his wings moved her hair. Or Hazel had known but refused to bite. A bite. She could see Marguerite’s mother’s grave, silver in the moonlight. Dead ten years, since Marguerite was nine, a hard age for girls, an in-between. Marguerite suffered as her mother suffered, similar to the way her father was suffering his own way out of life, and perhaps it wasn’t all that strange, Hazel thought, the experiment of Family gone so radically wrong: mother dead, the hanging judge dying, the daughter with her black heart panting now in the nursery. The owl flown and Black Jack creeping up the stairs, tiptoeing down the wide hallway, his arms outstretched for balance, not touching either wall.
Together they delivered the baby. Hazel didn’t see this part, but she could have written it if asked, she knew the script as well as anyone. The greatest violence the human species knows, worse than tumbling off the bridge at Remagen, worse than being trampled underfoot by wild horses; she had seen the souls of women fly out through their mouths in the depth of it and later they were changed. They did not recover although they claimed they did. The affluent took the ether from the mask, delivered in the amnesiac twilight they were blessed to be able to afford. Better, Hazel believed, to forget the entire thing and take what you are handed, even if it’s the neighbor’s baby, even if it grows up to be a stranger. It was the poor, or the outlawed like Marguerite, who endured it in a long, blind panic and recalled it with spite.
The baby was a girl. They placed a coral bracelet on her plump right wrist, a tiny band handed down through many daughters. Her profile was flawless, the nose and chin, the downy forehead, her eyes closed and her black lashes resting on her cheeks. Amazing to Hazel how we all arrive in a bloody fog but soon enough look like nothing but love; she was love itself, the round bottom and belly, the
ten toes as small as pearls, the mouth opening in a kitten’s yawn, so helpless.
Jack placed his daughter on newspapers in a small trunk. He closed and locked it, then opened the third mahogany door in the upstairs hallway and climbed the attic stairs—Hazel could hear him coming. He crossed the floor as quietly as he could, stepping over her, and even in his day the attic was filled with older things: a spinning wheel, pieces of a loom, burlap bags advertising the Jonah Mill. He moved aside a part of the wall, right behind where Caroline kept her Christmas decorations—Hazel had no idea those boards moved—and placed the little trunk back in a small crawl space next to the dumbwaiter. There were the workings of the pulley, the hemp rope guaranteed to last two hundred years wrapped around the steel wheels. A simple, timeless arrangement.
Jack slid the boards closed, brushed his hands together, stood. Hazel waited for him to leave but he hovered above her, leaned over her. He lit a cigarette and Hazel knew then she was—
“Hazel?”
She opened her eyes and Edie was leaning over her, smoke curling around her hair and up toward the ceiling. Her eyes were dull, her skin dusty over her fading tan.
Edie sat back, stretched her legs out, took a hit off a crookedly rolled joint. “Mama said you were up here doing God knows what, I said leave it to Hazel to get completely sucked in by all that crap and forget what she’d gone up there for. I said leave it to Hazel.”
Hazel sat up, rubbed the back of her head.
“You sick?”
“No.” She could move her eyes without the jerkiness. She wasn’t falling. “Are you sick?”
“Sick and tired, maybe. Rather die than stay here, that’s for sure.”
“There’s a box,” Hazel said, pointing with her thumb to the corner, “behind those boards. They move.”
“Yeah, well, there’s also a box sitting right in plain sight, like an attic would have.”
Hazel turned too quickly, felt her vision dim. There it was, the green box the angel was kept in. She stood, walked over and picked it up.
“This was, coming back here, what you might call a last resort if you know what I mean. Things had gotten hairy, a couple people had taken a dive and Mad Dog, he ran the place, was mad at me over something I didn’t…”
A whole colony of dead flies littered the windowsill but she gripped it anyway, squatting down beside the dumbwaiter. She reached out and touched the three boards, expecting them to still feel warm from Black Jack’s hand.
“…I was trying to tell him—man, this is no way to get where we’re trying to go, this My Stuff Your Stuff drama, if something of mine is laying around and you need it, take it, be free! It ain’t as if I hadn’t done the…”
Hazel pushed lightly against the boards and nothing happened. Exhale, she told herself, seeing the first gray dots of dizziness. She pushed again and the three boards moved as one, an inch or so and Hazel stopped, sat down. In that open space was a darkness so complete she would have to call it pure, something she had seen once before, inside a man’s mouth, behind his missing teeth. A townie who brought his daughter in to Caroline one afternoon. The daughter was twelve. The midwife in town, Lulamae, knew crawl spaces, Hazel guessed. Caroline, too, for that matter, although in a different way.
“Haze? What are you doing? What’s back there?”
She turned toward her sister, who sat in the sunlight, encased in her own brand of innocence. Smoking. “Nothing,” Hazel said, sliding the doors closed.
“Are we putting up this retarded angel, or what? I’m thinking I need to get good and drunk if it’s going to be Family Power Hour at the Hunnicutt Asylum.”
Hazel laughed, stood, and brushed off her jeans. “You carry the treetop to Caroline, be the hero.”
“Well”—Edie stood, stubbed her joint out on the floor—“it’ll be the first time, won’t it?”
Edie went down the steps before her and Hazel paused, hesitated before looking back. Everything was perfectly normal, if in better order. It made sense, didn’t it, the high chair, the wheelchair. The dressmaker’s model and the useless sewing machine. The crutches for the Uncle, his suits waiting for him, zipped up tight and hanging beneath the eaves. Small animals radiated out from under Black Jack’s bootfall, and the bird swooped, just an owl and her kind, calling the Earth Mother.
“Admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“Say it out loud: say, ‘I was entirely wrong about Millie.’”
“I wasn’t entirely wrong about Millie.”
“Say, ‘I don’t know a thing about my sister.’”
“You don’t know a thing about your brother, either.”
“True enough.”
They lay on Claudia’s bed, staring at the ceiling.
“Is Oliver ever going to fall asleep?”
“Eventually he will.”
“What’s he doing?”
Claudia listened. “He’s singing. No, now he’s spitting.”
“Isn’t he tired? I am so bone tired I’d like to die.”
“He’ll fall asleep soon.” Claudia rubbed her fingertips over the bedspread, glanced at Rebekah, who was wearing a pale pink nightgown. She looked like herself, and also she was like a form, like the idea of a woman. Claudia wanted to tell her how she could have been a photograph in a book, but couldn’t find the words.
“This reminds me of a slumber party,” Rebekah said, yawning.
“Really? Slumber parties are this boring?”
“I’m not bored.” Rebekah brushed her hair back from her forehead, let her arm fall above her head. “Slumber parties were fun, we had them all the time. Except that my cousins always fell asleep before me and I would be the only person awake for what felt like ages.”
“Why?” Claudia turned on her side, watched Rebekah’s face in profile.
“I don’t know,” Rebekah said, shrugging. “That’s just how I was.” She paused, listened for Oliver. “Is he asleep?”
The baby was silent, then began spitting and kicking his legs again.
“No. I swear he’ll fall asleep eventually. Millie jumbled up his schedule. Also she’s too loud.” Claudia pulled the bedspread up a little higher around her waist. “Can I tell you something?”
“Sure.” Rebekah sat up, resting her weight on her left elbow.
“Something has…”
Rebekah’s eyes were the green of a fern—of a fern seen from a distance, hanging on the porch of someone Claudia didn’t know. That’s how everything felt suddenly, as if she were passing a house she admired and there was a garden, a garden enviable by Ludie’s standards. Claudia could see how fine it all was, how lucky she was to be passing by before the morning mist was burned off by the sun, but that’s all she could do—walk past. It wouldn’t work, what she was about to say.
“What?” Rebekah pressed her hand against Claudia’s arm, and it seemed easy for her, this physical emphasis. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing, nothing. I don’t mean to be dramatic, I’ve just come to realize something. I should have known it a long time ago, or probably I did know it and turned away.” Claudia shook her head. “It hardly matters one way or the other.”
Oliver, who had been quiet for minutes, suddenly let out a startled wail, as if waking from a dream.
“Yikes,” Rebekah said, covering her heart with her hand as Claudia jumped up, saying, “I’ll get him.” She was tangled in the bedspread and nearly fell.
“Claudia, you’re going to break your—”
“Take the end of this, then I’ll unwrap—”
By turns they freed her, and Claudia made her way to the crib, where Oliver had become so distressed he’d kicked his blanket up over his head. “What a problem,” Claudia said, uncovering him and lifting him up, his little body still such a surprise in her hands. How could something so insubstantial bear within it Oliver’s nature, his character, everything that would compel him into adulthood?
“Don’t forget,” Rebekah said from behind her, sl
eepily.
“Don’t forget what?”
“Don’t forget what you were telling me. As soon as he’s back down I want to hear it.”
Claudia lay Oliver on his changing table, tapped his pacifier against his chin until he grinned at her and opened his mouth. “Okay,” she said. “I won’t forget.”
By the time Claudia had changed Oliver, given him the rest of his evening bottle and rocked him back to sleep, Rebekah was also asleep, her lips slightly parted, a ribbon of hair out of place and covering one eye. Claudia sat down beside her, pulled the blankets up over her exposed shoulder. She reached out and slipped the strand of hair off Rebekah’s face, tucking it behind her ear. The tip of Claudia’s finger brushed Rebekah’s skin, just barely. She sat that way as long as seemed right, then went downstairs, turning off lights behind her.
It was Christmas Eve, and there were gifts to place under the tree, Rebekah’s cookies to put on a plate by the fireplace. She left a note beside the plate that said Rebekah and Oliver have been very, very good this year, then she lay down on the couch with a blanket and slept without dreaming, the lights of the tree playing over her face like fireflies.
Chapter 7
REBEKAH DIDN’T WANT to go to church, and she had tried to make it clear that she didn’t want to go, had vowed to never enter a church again, but somehow Claudia hadn’t heard, or else she was ignoring her. It had been a long time, a long relief of a time since Rebekah had risen earlier than she’d wanted to and frantically tried to find a missing skirt, a pair of stockings without a tear, her Bible, the tortoiseshell barrette Vernon approved of. Oh, it was all idiotic. Fine, Claudia loved this minister and loved the church, and insisted that he was nothing like the ministers of Rebekah’s lost youth. That was probably all true. She seemed to think, Claudia did, that Rebekah didn’t want to go because she’d been traumatized by the Mission, as if they’d made her participate in a Full Gospel Sex Ring with goats down in the basement Fellowship Hall. In fact, Rebekah didn’t want to go because taking her to a safe, liberal, kind-hearted hour of worship would be like taking a cheetah out of the zoo and back to the savannah for a visit, but she would only be allowed to see the home she was stolen from through a window. Through the grimy window of a tourist’s van. That’s what it would be like.
