Mystery of Drear House

by Virginia Hamilton

  It was no Indian maiden. Macky had returned. He had been far enough behind Thomas that when Thomas spun around, there was room for Macky to step aside so they wouldn’t collide.

  The sound of Thomas’s ragged breath filled the woods. No, he was out of the woods. He was on the edge of it, over the crest of the hill. His chest was heaving. I’m so dumb! he was thinking. He saw the house down there. Turned warily back to Macky.

  Tall Mac Darrow was so still and remote against the trees. In the gloaming he gathered what light there was around him. He was ten feet away, standing with his hands poised on the gun. He cocked his head. “Seen my first rabbit of the day,” he said. “Poor scared rabbit. You run that way, anything’ll catch you.”

  “You tricked me!” Thomas managed to whisper.

  Macky almost smiled. Just a faint twitching of his mouth as he looked off into the dusk. “You can come over my house anytime you want. I bet you too scared, though.” He glanced once more at Thomas, at his defeat.

  Thomas coughed suddenly. He bent double over a painful stitch in his side.

  “There was, too, an Indian girl here. Once,” Macky said. Then he turned and walked away through the trees, east.

  The hillside below Thomas gathered darkness. The lights went on in the Drear house. He walked down, feeling tired and sick of himself. I acted like a scared rabbit. Scared of a dumb story, he thought. We were just talking together. He was only putting me on. We could’ve hunted trails together! He asked me to come over there, and I had to go and say no. Why did I have to do that? But then he said I could come over anytime.

  Maybe his mama is an invalid. Was it that I said she wasn’t? Maybe he just wanted to get even with me for all of us scaring his brothers and his dad.

  Friend or foe? I don’t think we’ll ever be friends!

  At the backyard Thomas calmed down. He stepped up onto the veranda. The back door was right there. Safety, just in time. For it was night. He felt something rush behind him. Something ghostly blew out of the woods, swept down the hillside to climb the shadowy house of Dies Eddington Drear. Thomas slammed the door in the face of the chill wind before it could catch him.

  3

  MACKY WAS A HUGE bear that came straight at him, lumbering right over him like a grizzly over a log. Thomas fell flat on his back as Macky’s bear-clawed feet stepped on him.

  It was a fleeting dream. Thomas awoke, feeling angry. He was lying facedown, with his nose pressed into the pillow. What … time? he wondered. Oh. Dawn. He saw faint light at the windows. It took him a moment to realize where he was, what day it was.

  The easy chair was placed so he wouldn’t have to wake up and see the black opening of the narrow fireplace. He stared at the floor-to-ceiling windows, which were bigger and longer than they needed to be. There’s nothing out there, he thought. Just the day coming.

  It’s a school day coming. Which day? Oh, my brain is fuzzy!

  He thought of yesterday. Pesty. Macky, at dusk. He closed his eyes. It’s Friday, and I won’t have to go to school. We’re going to get Great-grandmother—what time? Must not be time because Mama would be here if it was, to make sure I’m up.

  He closed his eyes, resting. But he couldn’t help thinking about Macky and what had happened in the woods.

  Glad it’s light, he thought. Things look different in the light.

  It was daylight when his mama came to wake him at six-thirty.

  “Thomas. Thomas,” she called softly.

  He didn’t open his eyes. He turned his head slightly, so he could put his chin in her palm, as her fingers gently touched his face.

  “Come on,” she told him. “You’ve got a long way, you and your papa.”

  They left at seven-thirty, after having dragged themselves out of warm beds, washed, dressed, and eaten. They would travel the distance in the family sedan, with the neat red trailer attached for Great-grandmother Jeffers’s belongings. They never disturbed the twins, Thomas’s baby brothers. The twins would sleep on until about eight. They would have two identical fits if they were to see Thomas and their papa going for a ride in the car without them.

  “You take care now,” Mr. Small said to Thomas’s mama when they were ready to go.

  “Mr. Pluto and I may do some house painting today,” she told them. “I am interested in having my kitchen a little brighter.”

  “Be careful using the ladder,” Mr. Small said.

  “I’ll be careful. Don’t worry.”

  “Good,” Mr. Small said.

  “You should wait until I get back so I can help,” Thomas told his mama.

  “There’ll be plenty paint left for you,” she told him. “Plenty more rooms.”

  They left the house of Dies Drear behind. Martha Small waved goodbye from the front veranda. Thomas looked back, waving. Even in the growing morning the Drear house appeared dark and shadowy.

  His mama grew smaller. She still waved. Thomas had many impressions. His mama diminishing to doll size as the car sped away. So long, Mama.

  The house got smaller, changed to a weathered doll’s mansion from the giant crow house. Goodbye, dreary house. I’m glad to be gone from you today!

  The gravel drive wound down and away from the hill. They crossed the old covered bridge and the stream that was so like a moat protecting the house. There was the woods at the top of the hill. Winter trees wore stripes of snow on their trunks and limbs. Zebras, Thomas thought. Winter wild animals.

  He wondered if Mac Darrow was up yet, out tracking somewhere among those striped tree animals. Sighing, Thomas sat up straight beside his father as they headed south on the highway, out of town.

  It was a long drive, but they would be able to get back home by eight or nine in the evening. Wouldn’t do to stay overnight and leave his mama and his brothers home by themselves.

  Anything might happen, Thomas thought. But we scared the Darrows away months ago, and nothing’s happened since. It’s a feeling, though. Papa feels it, too. But it’s been a long while without any trouble. The Darrows stay there on their own farmland most of the time. If you didn’t come into town on market or street fair day or go to church once in a while, you never would see them. Well, now there’s Macky at school, in the woods.

  But there’s something about the house of Dies Drear, too, Thomas thought. Like, maybe it’s waiting. Like, the time is up. The truce is over.

  He shivered. That’s too dumb, he told himself.

  “Well, we’re off,” his father said, rousing Thomas from his reverie.

  “Good and off,” Thomas said and his father chuckled.

  The heater was on. They were dressed in boots and warm jackets, ready for anything. Ready for winter highways and cold mountain highs.

  “Can’t wait to see Great-grandmother Jeffers,” Thomas said. “It’s been so long.”

  “Too long,” his father agreed.

  Great-grandmother Jeffers was his papa’s grandmother. She was the only elderly relative that his father had in North Carolina. Great-grandfather Canada Jeffers had passed away some time ago.

  Thomas patted his papa’s shoulder and smiled up at him. Mr. Small grinned, not taking his eyes from the road.

  They went south, first to Chillicothe, Ohio, and then on to Portsmouth, where they picked up Highway 52. The high hills made Thomas eager to see the mountains of North Carolina.

  Thomas often made figures out of wood, and before leaving home, he had begun a carving. Now he took out the square piece of white pine he was working on and his sharpened pocketknife. Whittling would give him something to do with his hands on the long drive.

  His hands moved expertly over the wood. His left hand appeared to feel out the shape he wanted from the pine while the right hand carved it.

  Mr. Small glanced around, amazed again at how his son seemed to be working with something soft, like clay. He could shave the wood so quickly.

  “Wish I could stop awhile and watch you do that,” he said admiringly.

  “It’s not going t
o be a whole lot,” Thomas said.

  “No? What is it to be?” asked his father.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Thomas said. Usually he didn’t think about what he was whittling. “But there’re some things on my mind.”

  He pictured his mama and his brothers back at the house of Dies Drear. He imagined the Drear house drawing away from the snow-white countryside. He thought about the old abolitionist Dies Drear, who had come from the East to help escaping slaves up from the Ohio River. Drear, moving through the house and outside it. Just vague notions and parts he recalled from the written history the foundation owners had given them about the Drear house and property, the section about the house as a station on the Underground Railroad.

  Thomas’s hands never stopped moving over the carving.

  They stopped for lunch and to fill the tank with gas. They took the interstate down through Virginia. Near Fancy Gap they picked up the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, which ran along the top of the mountains. Misty light and shrouds of rain hung over deep valleys. White patches of snow on the ancient range were swirled by fugitive winds. Thomas stared out the window, his hands turning and feeling the shape he was making in the white pine.

  “Hope we get there soon. Hope the sun comes out.” He spoke tiredly, suddenly bored with the long drive, of thinking about things over and over again.

  The sun did come out in long shafts of sunlight, illuminating the western Appalachians.

  “Nothing like my mountains!” he said, laughing.

  “Not quite your mountains, but almost,” his papa told him.

  “When do we get to North Carolina?”

  “Soon,” his papa said. And it wasn’t long after that that they crossed the state line. They headed southwest on the Blue Ridge Parkway, passing along between Sparta and Roaring Gap.

  “Just another eighty miles or so,” his papa said. Not long, and they were entering the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Pisgah National Forest.

  The very space, the air, somehow shaped by the bluish distance, was different from anything farther north or anything Thomas had ever known. The mountains took his breath away.

  In no time they found the little valley nestled where it had always been. And Great-grandmother Rhetty Jeffers’s house the way it always was.

  Wasn’t a house, like houses in Ohio. It was a mountain cabin, really, planted in the valley. The cabin was smack against a hill that rose to mountains. Great-grandmother called all of the Blue Ridge “my hills.” That way she made them fit her, made them her size so she could live with them, and they, with her.

  They crossed a creek and wound down a lane that ended in front of the cabin.

  There she was, standing by the lane, waiting for them: Great-grandmother Rhetty Laleete Jeffers.

  4

  SHE WAS DWARFED BY the cabin and the hill rising behind it. Great-grandmother Jeffers wasn’t more than four feet seven inches tall. The whole world and Thomas were taller.

  Great-grandmother held herself tall, shoulders high. Her face was awash with happiness. She peered at Thomas and his papa as though trying to see above a sunrise. Her hair was swept up in a ball at the top of her head. Thomas was shocked to see that it had turned almost completely white.

  “I knew it was you!” she exclaimed to them. She came forward gingerly, as though she were walking a tightrope. She wore a new coat and a dark blue dress and shoes to match. Her small, neat hands were clasped before her. “Heard the car winding ’round the hills. Great goodness, knew it was you, too!”

  “Grandmother Rhetty!” Mr. Small exclaimed. He was out of the car, coming around the front. He folded her close. She felt breakable. Her arms, so thin. “You look well,” he said, gently patting her shoulder.

  “Oh, I’m fine, ’cept for some slowness.”

  Thomas came forward. “Great-grandmother Jeffers, hi!” he said.

  “Well, Thomas, you come back.” He lowered his head to her shoulder as she folded him in. “Wasn’t expecting you. Now, I remember, your mama say on the telephone you’d be coming, too.” She kissed his cheek warmly. She hugged him tightly, then held him at arm’s length a moment to look him over. “Getting to be a big old boy! Missed you!”

  “Uh-huh, missed you, too, Great-grandmother,” he said.

  She looked far into his eyes. “So,” she murmured, “that Dies house, is it? You all had yourselves a something! I had my chicory roasting, don’t you know? It takes care.”

  She believed that chicory had the power to ward off calamity. It must’ve, too, Thomas decided. For almost everything had turned out all right in the North.

  Great-grandmother’s property came right up to the laneside. There sat her blue mailbox on its post as they turned in the yard. There wasn’t a walkway, just three or four stepping-stones, placed at points where the ground became soft after a hard rain.

  Thomas took note of it all. That faded blue of the mailbox. It reminded him of something—that old gate of hers he used to paint. It was nowhere to be seen. Must’ve fallen down. He breathed deeply of the fresh country air. “Oh, it smells so good out here!” he said.

  Great-grandmother Jeffers smiled. The smile was sad somehow. Then Thomas understood. He bowed his head.

  “Not easy at all, leaving all this,” Great-grandmother Jeffers said softly.

  “Will you see it again?” Thomas asked.

  “Oh, I plan to see it again. I won’t get rid of it.”

  “You didn’t sell it?” he said.

  “I would never sell land like this,” she said.

  “Well, that’s good. I thought you had.”

  “She’s rented it, Thomas,” his papa said.

  She took hold of Thomas’s arm for support but stood her ground. She was not yet ready to give up the view. It was her pride and joy.

  “And you never minded staying out here all by yourself?” Mr. Small was saying, marveling. He loved the mountains, but he had always been ready to leave them when he had to. College. Work. Advancement.

  Great-grandmother pursed her lips and said, “You know, after supper, couple times a week, I walk on over there to the Beau Chesters, my old friends.”

  Thomas remembered them.

  “Silva make a pie every so often, from apples she picks just in season and keeps in the cellar,” Great-grandmother went on. “That pie’s most still warm by the time I get there. We set down and have it. Then Beau and me, we walk to a mountain. Silva can’t walk these days, but she don’t mind we do. And we climb some of the mountain, me and Beau.”

  She nodded eagerly. “Me, holding Beau’s arm, and not a word need be spoken between us. Two old folks! It won’t even matter to us if we can’t make it back one time. Because of what you can see after supper! What you can just see!”

  That made Mr. Small laugh outright in amazement. Here was his grandmother, near ninety, and she still could climb a mountain in order to see the beauty around her. “Then you walk back here after that?” Mr. Small asked.

  She shook her head. “Silva ride me back in the pickup. We go slow, and we talk. And the night is falling,” Great-grandmother said. “Silva puttin’ on the lights. I most wait for that part, coming back.”

  “When she puts on the headlights?” Thomas asked.

  Great-grandmother Jeffers gave him a long look as though there were but the two of them, the way they had been together months ago. “It’s what gets caught in the headbeams,” she said, spoken gently. “Ghosts rise at dusk.”

  “Grandmother,” Mr. Small said.

  “I—I know that,” Thomas said. He realized he did believe that. The Indian maiden! He knew dusk to be a time of caution, when what was supernatural could enter the mind.

  Mr. Small cleared his throat as if to change the subject. Not knowing what to say, he remained silent. They stood there, surveying the cabin and the hill that rose sharply behind it. Beyond the hill, mountain faces and folds stood out from the silence as bold as thunder.

  Words couldn’t describe mountains planted forever just th
ere, Thomas thought. It came to him that mountains had a talent for size, hugeness, just as he did for whittling. He smiled, daring to compare himself to them. Mountains were carved out of nature, as he carved from what was natural. Not too different, that mountain and me, he thought.

  Thomas realized he was holding something. It was the carving. He’d had it in his hand the whole time. It was finished, and he hadn’t realized.

  “Great-grandmother, here,” he said, and gave it to her for a present.

  “Well, I’ll be!” she said, taking it. “Who is it? Mr. Dies Drear?”

  “No, it’s a boy like me,” he said. “Name of M. C. Darrow, called Macky.”

  “M. C. Darrow. Macky,” she said. “Well, I’ll be. He’s your friend?”

  “He’s ... a big boy,” Thomas said.

  She turned the carving over in her hands, feeling it and smoothing her fingers along its facets. “Heard about Darrows from your mother,” she said.

  Thomas nodded. “They’re the ones caused us trouble,” he murmured.

  Great-grandmother Jeffers and Thomas both stared at the carving as she turned it over and around. It was a perfect rendering of Macky’s head in miniature. “It’s a fine portrait, I can just tell,” she told her great-grandson. “Thank you, Thomas. I will cherish it,” she said. “And I want to meet this Macky and his family one time.”

  “You do?” Thomas said. He stared at her, an idea dawning.

  “Of course, I do,” she said.

  “That might prove difficult,” Mr. Small said.

  Great-grandmother smiled sweetly. “And I want to hear all about everything on the way to the North.”

  She slid the carving into her coat pocket and put her arm around her great-grandson. “Let’s go on inside now,” she told him. “I got everything ready.”

  Inside, it was the same place of old. Thomas had played here, slept here, so many times. Things were pulled apart now, but the house was still what he remembered. Great-grandmother had a few boxes full of things. She had furniture, bedding, and her mattress all ready to go. She had her best clothes on hangers, lying on the settee. There were two suitcases and a lamp she couldn’t part with. His papa started taking her brass bedstead apart. After that was done, they loaded everything in the U-haul.