But for the first time Sarah realized that Maria was a woman impossible to know. Many women—perhaps most women—would find Speke attractive. Dear Ham, he had so much life. So Maria’s affection for her husband made sense. Of course, he had money, too, but there was something further about Maria’s interest in the man she had married that troubled Sarah.
Today, though, was a day apart from all the others. What had been a household of odd silences was now a household of unease. Something had happened in the Outer Office, and Maria was determined to brave the biographer’s steady stare, just as Speke had been eager to avoid it.
Bell was going to figure it all out. He was going to overturn every secret on the estate, sooner or later. Sarah herself could deceive him. She was, she had to admit to herself, capable of anything. But Speke wasn’t, and Maria—but Maria probably knew nothing.
But what was there to know? There was something peculiar about Speke’s career. And Asquith, who had something to do with the early days of Speke’s writing, was still here, still at Live Oak. Sarah had heard the motorcycle arrive, but she had not heard it leave.
The thought of having this strange man here made her cold. She did not know why. Perhaps he would stay in one of the guest cottages. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to see him very often.
She found herself glad that Bell was here. Why was she afraid? Physically afraid. As though someone were about to hurt her.
A squirrel arrived at last, bright gold on his belly as he sat up and called to her in his speak-toy, yet authoritative way. She tossed a cracker in his direction, and he fell upon it, moving in jump-cut jerks.
She loved animals. Her mother had said that it was a waste of love to spend it on simple creatures, and not on human beings. Sarah was of another view. One loved what one could. This was another thing she and Speke had in common. He was a kind man, and donated thousands to groups that lobbied to protect wildlife. She handled the checks herself.
The smell of the air, the flavor of it, was delicious, wild thyme and that strange tang of creosote some of the trees exhaled. It was hard drought, though, and she was a person who loved the sound of rain rolling across the roof of her cottage at night. A jay joined the group, and she laughed. Perhaps all the animals on the estate knew who she was. Sarah, the lady who threw food. Maybe they knew her better than anyone, and all her thoughts and memories were, in truth, completely unimportant.
The animals could not entirely cheer her, however. She dusted the last of the cracker crumbs from her hands, and made a final kiss toward the birds. She found herself thinking that she was helping Speke hide something, and had been all along. Very soon she would have to decide whether to protect him, or to uncover the truth.
She stared, the sparrows at her feet. Yet another jay joined them, but she hardly noticed.
She put a hand to her throat. She could see no one. And yet, as she glanced away, hadn’t there been a shadow, with legs and arms, out there in the woods? She looked again, but it was one of those figures visible only when just looking away, like a sound you hear only when it ceases.
She was cold, her heart hammering.
Surely in a moment she would be able to laugh at herself. The cottages glowed in the half sun, half shade. This had always been such a sanctuary. It still was, the lichen-gray branches in the sunlight. It was dry lichen and the thready ghostlike moss, all aired to fossil-like fibers.
But the place had changed. She could not explain her sensation, and tried to dismiss the fear that kept her there, one hand on the door.
She could taste the sensation: she was being watched. She knew, at the same time, that the forest was not watching her, that no creature peered at her from that tangle of light and darkness. That shadow was the trunk of a tree she had seen many times before, not a shadow at all: a cleft red oak just beyond the buckbrush.
Sometimes, her father had told her, you can’t believe even what you see. He had said this solemnly, even sadly, with a policeman’s weariness with deception.
As a girl she had enjoyed lying on her bed, listening to the murmur of her parents’ conversation, the plaster of the ceiling illuminated by the hall light. In the wedge of electric light above her she had seen faces, frowns and grimaces in the stiff swirls of plaster. She had considered this power long gone, this ability to see things that were not there.
Now she wanted to laugh at herself. She was a steady woman, her father’s daughter. Here she was, worried about absolutely nothing. Everything on heaven and earth would be well, she told herself. There was no need to worry. A phrase from the church services she had not attended for years came back to her, and she could not begin to guess why: world without end.
As it was and ever shall be. To the Son and to the Holy Ghost. These little fragments of liturgy reassured her. But surely she did not need to be reassured. The sun was bright, and rested upon her like a great, warm hand.
When she slipped back into her office she was careful not to look back at the forest.
11
It was hot, and dust rose up around him.
Speke’s lungs filled with this dust. His eyes burned with it. Each hack, each plunge, each scoop with the shovel was a loud rupture of earth. The sun was an evil star, a white hole pouring light so urgent it had weight, and fell with something like a sound on the rocks, and on his shoulders as he dug.
He reassured himself. No one would be able to see him digging. His work here was secret. The trees were thick here, but he could not reassure himself completely. The shovel made an iron grunt each time it stabbed the earth. They would certainly be able to hear that.
What if Mr. Brothers decided to show up on that ridiculous little green tractor he drove around the estate, and got to thinking: I can’t let Mr. Speke dig a hole all by himself? Or, that damn fool Speke is trying to plant a tree up by the Outer Office, or whatever damn fool pretentious name he calls the place, and everyone with a brain knows that’s the rockiest soil in the county.
It amused him in a bitter way to recall that he had long been fascinated by the outcroppings of this place. He lanced the shovel blade into the earth and the clank reverberated up the handle. He coughed. This was dirty work, grime all over his pants, soil all over his arms, sweat turning it to mud, and he coughed and gasped, sun and earth battling him. The soil here was a jumble of mudstone and tuff-breccias, shot through with roots.
At last he had a hole, a raw crater, roughly the right size. Whatever you do, he reminded himself, don’t think. Don’t even pause for a second to consider what you’ve done. Put it all out of your mind.
Maria panted up the slope, and whispered, “They’re here!”
“They” meant Scamp. Television. The eyes of the world. Fine. Wonderful. Let’s get a candid shot of Hamilton Speke burying a long rolled-up rug with something heavy in it, something that gurgles and bends in the middle just like a dead body.
Speke dragged the rolled up rug, and it bent, and you could see the top of Asquith’s head if you looked down the tube, but he tried not to look. He gasped, and gritted his teeth. Asquith was surprisingly heavy.
You’re thinking—stop it.
The body fell into the grave—because that was, after all, what it was, a grave. However, it fit very badly. Speke had miscalculated. The hole was not all that big after all.
Mean little flies, mean little flies that bit, buzzed around his face.
He wrestled the rug and its contents. The rug had tassles that were not going to fit into the cavity, although the body—he hated to think about it that way—bent nicely if he stomped on it a little.
What was he doing? This was a sacred thing, a deceased human being, and he was cramming it into a burrow like a gigantic turd. He was trembling.
God forgive me.
He chopped with the shovel, and at last he had something the body could lie down in, because death was supposed have some dignity to it. It was like a nice, dignified sleep, or it ought to be if you weren’t being buried by Hamilton Speke, the Clown Murd
erer of Live Oak.
Self-control, he told himself. He absolutely was not going to vomit. No matter what, it would be an exercise of will. He would not allow himself to regurgitate anything from inside his body.
Think, he ordered himself, of something pleasant.
Shoveling soil over the body was very difficult. Flat, handsome stones seemed more loving, sprinkled over the carpet. With some larger rocks over those. And then some dirt, and then some more rocks because Speke had buried some poor dead birds and a cat once, and a skunk or something always dug them up. Nothing would dig up Asquith, he promised himself.
A trickle of sweat burned his eyes. This was taking a hundred years. Scamp would be cursing and pacing up and down, and planning increasingly ugly shots, ones that made Speke look jowly, as revenge for being forced to wait.
“I’ll finish it,” said Maria, suddenly at his side again.
“I’m almost done,” gasped Speke, stepping on a large stone to force it into place.
“You don’t have time,” she hissed. “Be quick.”
This was a strong woman, he realized. He did not really know her well at all, he realized for the thousandth time. What a mystery she consistently turned out to be. He loved her more than ever, seeing how devoted, and how sure, she was.
It hadn’t taken so long, after all. The blood was all cleaned up. Everything was back to normal. Speke took a moment, however, to be sure. No blood on the mantelpiece. The bronze Athena gazing out with her wise, blank eyes. The floor was bare where the tongue-and-groove oak had been exposed by the departure of the rug, but the rug was doing honorable duty. It was the equivalent of an expensive coffin.
Speke himself was doing fine. Just great. Except for the racing beat of his pulse, but that would pass. Something glittered in the bushes, something metallic and large, like a great insect.
The motorcycle! He had forgotten all about the Kawasaki. It was glittering there in the shade like a veritable skeleton. An exoskeleton, death’s steed—but he didn’t have time to bury it now.
Someone will see it. There was the helmet, staring in his direction, a phantom, decapitated head watching him from the seat of the motorcycle.
Panting heavily, Speke trotted up the slope to meet the film crew, gathered around a van and smoking cigarettes.
Scamp was in the shade chatting with Sarah. He gave a shout, and ran toward Speke, arms outstretched. They looked, ridiculously, like burly lovers meeting after decades. Scamp gave Speke one of his rib-cracking hugs, and then backed away.
“Mr. Dirt. Hey, get a shot of the man of words all covered with ranch.” He pinched Speke’s cheek and shook the flesh there, a gesture Speke particularly detested. “Out planting beans and oats and green peas. We can get a shot of you digging a canyon.”
A minicam was thrust at Speke’s face. “This isn’t such a good day,” Speke began.
“It’s a beautiful day!”
“If you could come back in a couple of days. Maybe next week—”
“Tomorrow I’m in Milan. My street cabaret film is getting an award. It’s a great honor.” Scamp shrugged. He was a big man, bigger than Speke, and older, with graying hair and a mustache, and an accent that was a jerry-rigged assortment of German, Italian, and Brooklynese. Speke thought he sounded like a combination of a Heidelberg scholar and Bugs Bunny. “So if I can’t shoot you today you won’t be in the special.” Another shrug, and then a wink.
“Maybe a couple of weeks …” Speke began.
Scamp pinched his cheek. “And you want to be in the special, Ham. People are begging to be in it and we say—no, to be in this special you have to be as great as Hamilton Speke.”
Speke felt his fists bunch, and planted his feet. Then he realized that the camera was getting all of this, every word, every scowl.
“A man of the soil,” called Scamp. “We can get you digging up big rocks—”
Scamp caught sight of Bell, sauntering, hands in his pockets. “The biographer and his subject discussing life. Having a conference on death. Jesus, don’t just stand there everybody. Confer. Come on, this is journalism, for Christ sake.”
“I was digging,” said Speke, weakly, half-hoping no one would hear him. “Digging up a stump.”
“A stump!”
He mouthed the lie again, looked away, blinking, wondering what fresh hell was next.
Directions were shouted, bellowed. Cigarettes were squashed into gravel. A hand swabbed his face, and Scamp bawled, “Leave him alone—I want him dirty. Roll in dirt some more.”
Speke remembered being a simple, quiet human, long ago, in another life.
“Give us some stump, Ham. Take us to the stump!”
He spun, the world blank and empty. “I don’t want to dig up a stump! I’m tired and I am hot. Would you please just give me a second to compose myself please.”
Sarah put a hand on Scamp’s shoulder. “Would you like some iced tea?”
Speke closed his eyes and thanked God for this cool woman.
Everyone wanted iced tea, naturally. Speke felt them all courteously ignoring him, and at the same time listening to each breath he took.
Fortunately, he knew of a stump. He knew it well. It was a behemoth stump he had attacked a few weeks before. Mr. Brothers had muttered something about dynamite, but Speke had insisted that the stump stay where it was as a challenge. He had promised himself that some day he would rip that dragon out of the ground.
Now he was going to do it on national television. When Maria appeared, he sent her back down the slope for the shovel. He was going to dig up a massif that had been commanding the estate for centuries. I, Hamilton Speke, before all of you, will with these two hands battle the world’s mightest taproot.
There was a moment in which he doubted the wisdom of all of this. But it was the perfect cover-up, wasn’t it? It explained why he was dirty. Bell would see the stump as metaphor for a sinuous writer’s block. Scamp would be delighted to see earth fly. And he himself would not have to stand there and endure Sarah’s quiet, questioning gaze.
Because Sarah was thinking. She was seeing through him, and trying to make sense of what he was doing. Such women are dangerous, he thought. Dangerous, and at the same, enticing.
He had never gotten to know Sarah as well as he should have. They had both worked to keep their relationship painstakingly professional. She had been loyal and steady, the lighthouse of his professional life. What was happening to him? He found himself thinking something very strange indeed. He found himself, for no reason, thinking that he loved Sarah.
Her eyes were on him even now. Those intelligent eyes, those eyes that saw and remembered. She’ll know, he told himself. Those beautiful eyes can’t be deceived.
“The stump!” he cried, lifting the shovel as would lift a rifle, and leading the tiny army down the slope to the west, past the garage, toward the stump. Sarah would realize that this was not the place where he had been digging all morning, off and on. She was thinking that even now, Speke guessed, as he brandished the shovel like a gun, like a battle-ax, like the first, ugliest weapon in the world.
12
That night Speke experienced the worst nightmare he had ever had.
He dreamed he had killed someone, another man, a person he knew well, and buried his body near a house where he lived.
Like most dreamscapes, this setting was hard to place but very intimate, and the man he killed was both familiar and hard to remember. Even the means of death was obscure—perhaps he had strangled the man, perhaps he had pushed the man from a height. It was hard to tell.
What was very vivid, extremely clear, however, was the sense of terrible dread. The dream was splashed with reds and yellows, and pulsed with despair. This was true, the dream said. All true.
He woke gasping, sweating and staring upward into the dark. His fingers clawed the sheets on either side of his body, and he struggled to shake the sleep from his mind. The dream would not let him go. It clung to him, until at last he sat up.
What a terrible dream, he thought. Thank God I’m awake.
It was always such a relief to crawl ashore from a dream like that.
And then he remembered.
He was icy. This time, to wake from a nightmare was no escape.
Maria slumbered beside him. He had the oddest feeling that she had not been there beside him all the while, that at some point in the night she had left the bed. But she was there now, her breathing even and slow.
He struggled into his bathrobe, and lurched through the darkened house, hating every wall that loomed, and every black doorway.
He was falling—that was how it felt. Plummeting downward, as fast as a body could fall, even though he knew he was standing upright on the solid floor, one hand out to touch the wall.
This was panic, the panic attacks he had experienced before he began therapy years ago. He hurried into his office. He hungered for the familiar, the feel of standing somewhere he knew well, somewhere he was used to commanding. His telephone. His notebooks. His computer beside his desk.
The crystal decanter was heavy in his sweating hands. The scotch splashed as he poured it, and he coughed at the first swallow. It brought tears to his eyes. He drank again, a long, stiff belt, and fell back into his chair.
He would have wept, but this was a feeling beyond grief.
A sin. He had committed a sin. He had done something unforgivable.
He blinked tears. I’ll never have a normal life again, he told himself. I’ll never be able to eat, or sleep, or just walk along looking at hills and trees. I’ll never be able to do anything because every second I’ll know.
And there is nothing I can do. It’s done. It’s permanent, forever, the most lasting thing I’ve done on earth.
There was no hope of controlling himself now. He shuddered, and climbed around his desk to grip the decanter again and drink directly from the crystal, pouring the scotch down his throat, a rivulet streaming down his chin.
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