by Kim Powers
It was obvious (wasn’t it? now she was doubting herself) that he had sent it; in sending Nelle that hand-carved coffin, Truman might as well have sent his signature in the sky, written with billowy jets of skywriting for all to see. There was no mystery there, except the mystery of why his cat and mouse games, his infuriating cleverness, had slipped so far, why he’d become a riddler whose riddles didn’t work anymore.
A hand-carved coffin, indeed. It was the principal device in one of his few recent works that hadn’t bombed, and this latest tale had supposedly, supposedly, stemmed from their time in Kansas, a tip from one of the detectives.
To a series of seemingly disparate people, all living in the same small town, someone had sent little hand-carved coffins, small enough to hold in the palm of one’s hand—a hand no doubt sweaty with fear and confusion once you saw what was inside them: a candid photograph of the recipient, taken unawares. And those seemingly random recipients, one by one, were soon dispatched to their deaths in a singularly gruesome manner: one couple was trapped in a basement fire, their only means of escape barred by a load of bricks; one person had his neck sliced clean through by a razor-sharp, almost invisible wire that had been stretched taut across a side street, to catch him as he drove in his open-air Jeep; another couple had been set upon by rattlers whipped up into a frenzy, waiting in a boiling-hot car with the windows rolled shut.
So much for “Write about what you know.”
She thought back to Truman’s desperation on the phone, the confession that he couldn’t write anymore: the person to whom you confessed that—as she had confessed in turn to him—wasn’t the same person you then turned around to hurt, was it? But then again, regular rules of behavior didn’t apply to Truman: he’d dedicated a book to her, then stabbed her in the back. Was this package—her very own hand-carved coffin and all it entailed—supposed to stir up old feelings, or scare her, or get her to do something? She couldn’t figure out what. Was she supposed to “read” the pictures on it, and in it, the same way Alvin Dewey had, once upon a time, studied his crime-scene photos looking for evidence? He’d said out loud to them, more than once, “How many animals can I find in these photos?” That’s what he called his clues: animals, a rare bit of poetry from a man who was salt of the earth.
That’s what she was looking for now—animals.
But whether they were the kind that bit or not, she didn’t yet know.
She went up to the attic to find them.
That’s where she always went to think, or write, or frankly, escape Alice: a small little lean-to room in the eaves of their one-story house. That’s when Alice threw up her hands—a woman rich as her sister, crawling up into a hot, dusty attic to write, like some animal crawling off to die, when she could build a million new offices. But that’s what Alice didn’t understand, despite their sisterly bond: that Nelle didn’t want a big fancy new office. She wanted her past, the cramped spaces in which she had written The Book; she wanted the heat of an attic to sweat the writing out of her. She wanted the walk-up garret she still kept in Manhattan; she wanted the messy corner of her father’s law office, upstairs in a forgotten building.
She wanted the past to repeat itself.
That would surprise people: that this woman who claimed to want nothing to do with the past had created a shrine to it, albeit one tucked away inside the drawers of several beat-up file cabinets she had retrieved from her father’s law office. (When she went there after he died, and couldn’t feel him there anymore, she knew it was time to move on; she packed it all up, even the desk he had used, and hauled it to her house to work—one more tidbit the neighbors used to claim she was becoming Boo Radley, hidden away under the slant of the roof.)
She sometimes played a game with herself: pretending she wasn’t the one who had kept all this stuff; she merely kept the stuff her father had kept, all the articles and tributes to and about her, from near the end of his life. That was her excuse: it was his tribute, not hers, and thus it became her tribute to him; she couldn’t get rid of that.
And part of that tribute was the Life magazine that had chronicled her, with the pictures that now covered the box in her hands.
That had been her very first thought—that someone had sneaked up into the attic and stolen it, her lone copy of the magazine; she couldn’t imagine anybody else holding onto it for all these years. Had that been Truman’s doing, too? Just as his phone calls had infiltrated her safe house in the middle of the night, had he hired a thief to do the same, literally? Sneak in and steal the magazine?
It’s the only thing that made any sense.
She found herself almost holding her breath as she yanked open the file cabinet drawer, hoping the magazine would be gone.
That, at least, would make sense.
But it was still there.
None of this made sense.
She gingerly lifted the magazine out. From her father having passed it around to neighbors so often—she teased him it was just to show off his own likeness, not hers—the magazine automatically fell open to the pictures of her, taken twenty-five years ago. She looked dark-haired and direct in them, with a smile that hinted at secrets (so unlike others probably saw her today: with a wrinkled face and too-big glasses, her eyes squinting behind them, as if to remember something). Those magazine pictures from so many years ago, nestled next to an ad for All-Bran cereal, which stopped constipation in its tracks.
Had Truman jealously kept a copy of the magazine all these years as well? He’d had more than his share of articles and covers; she’d only ever made the inside. He trumped her when he went back to Kansas to shoot the movie of His Book and made the cover, standing there in black and white on an old dirt road between the two actors who played the killers, a little dwarf sandwiched between the two of them. They didn’t know he was a killer, in a different way. “Bang bang bang,” he’d hold out his fingers and say, shooting his imaginary gun when he didn’t like something.
How would Truman like it if she cut up those pictures of him, slapped them on a box, and sent them to him, no note, no P.S., no return address, no nothing except mystery.
What did he want?
Damn this brain of hers.
Damn him.
She slammed the drawer shut and threw the magazine across the room.
There.
Think.
She looked at the first photo she’d taken from the tiny coffin she’d just received: let that take her back. Hold it in her hand, close her eyes, and concentrate, just as Truman had taught her to do in the Clutter house.
It had not been easy to do, get an audience inside. How they’d pulled that off she really didn’t know, even all these years later. All the other reporters had clamored to go, but it was still considered a crime scene, not that they really knew how to process that then; they just didn’t want people “trackin’ it up.” That was as sophisticated as the terminology got. Their entree had been arranged behind the scenes, probably with more than a little help from Marie Dewey. (Oh, how these women pulled the strings. Nelle sometimes thought she and Marie Dewey could have solved the crime on their own, given half a chance. Flashed their smiles, shined their eyes, and gotten a confession from the murderers, if they had just gotten to them first.)
It was her first house of death. Her father hadn’t yet died, and although her mother and brother had—within five horrible weeks of each other—their deaths were peaceful, as peaceful as death goes, that is. But these, no—these were violent; ghosts were certain to roam this country farmhouse, looking for release, or revenge. And for all of Truman’s grand boasts—the odd characters with whom he’d shared his life journey so far, the part of his childhood he’d spent in New Orleans, full of spells and voodoo—Nelle doubted he’d ever seen the site of four killings any more than she had.
Maybe because of that, he was completely silent for once, struck dumb by the sense of life, and now death, that saturated the place. He walked around on his own, almost reverentially, reaching
out to touch things as if trying to divine a spirit from them. He wasn’t thinking about writing, not yet. He wanted to know the people first. They weren’t allowed to take pictures; they’d have to photograph it with their minds, then compare notes back at the hotel, where Truman bragged he could re-create whole conversations from memory, something he’d been training himself to do since childhood.
Nelle shadowed him at first, the good assistant, then went off on her own. She was a lawyer’s daughter; she’d been taught there was a time and place for everything, in terms of talk. She’d also been taught never to commit anything to paper you didn’t want getting in someone else’s hands. So she knew when to listen: when to listen to other people, and when to listen to the air around her. Truman had taught her that, one of his earliest writing lessons up in their tree house, telling her to close her eyes and smell and listen and feel and see.
“I can’t see with my damn eyes closed,” she had said, sailor-mouthed at six.
“Yes, you can,” he’d said, and indeed, after a few patient moments, she learned she could: close her eyes, and hear the words around her. Now, as adults, she saw Truman do the very same thing: close his eyes and listen to the house, listen to poor Nancy and Kenyon Clutter tell what had happened that night.
After a respectful silence, Alvin spoke up. “This is what we figure happened. The killer comes in—we think it’s more than one, with so much blood—the killers come in, don’t know if they planned to kill ’em or not, but they get the dad and son and bring ’em down here to the basement . . .”
He stopped, seeing it with his eyes, the same way Nelle and Truman did.
“They never even got to say good-bye to one ’nother, maybe just look in each other’s eyes, knowin’ what’s comin’, but . . .”
He became as quiet as Truman, then turned and snapped at him, “So don’t you go telling me you don’t care about catching the damn killers, Mr. New Yorker.”
Truman knew not to answer back; at that moment, he knew he wanted to catch the killers, too.
“That’s what gets me the most, those kids, these children—knowing some man was in their house, some monster, knowing that horrors were being done, praying to God to make them stop, but they don’t. And then you think maybe God doesn’t even . . .”
Exist.
Despite what had happened, what he’d witnessed, Alvin Dewey couldn’t say the word; he could barely think it. He would never go that far. “You pray to God you never have to go through something like that in your life.”
Nelle had never seen Truman so quiet, so attentive, listening to Alvin Dewey in that cinder block basement.
Nelle looked at the picture she held now, of Truman and her there. She squeezed it tight, as if she could squeeze an answer, or at least a few questions, out of it: who was behind the lens, taking the picture, what was special about that moment, compared to any other moment in the house? She knew somebody was taking pictures; others had appeared over the years, just never this one. She remembered that flash of light down in the basement, so bright it made her head snap up in fright at the camera, as if she had just seen the killer herself.
That basement had been tainted by evil, that much was clear, but what was Truman trying to say by sending her a picture of it now, and of them in it? She studied it like Alvin Dewey might have, trying to remember what that good, honest, decent man had taught her: all the clues were there, you just had to stare down the picture until everything else in it disappeared, and you were left with answers.
But she couldn’t find them, not yet.
She shifted her eyes to the second picture from the little coffin, shuffling it on top like a card from a deck.
To the uninitiated, it might look like she was weeding any old garden, bent down, yanking at weeds, wearing a sun visor. But if you looked more closely, had special sight, you could see a corner of the little upright slab on which she steadied herself. It was one of three nearly identical markers, a tombstone each for her mother, father, and brother, reminders in chiseled granite and marble of the days when she thought her head and heart would explode with grief and loneliness, after three good-byes too many. Alice seldom went with her to the cemetery anymore; she didn’t think it was healthy. As old as she was, she said she preferred spending her company with the living—she’d be spending all her time with the other soon enough.
A picture, taken unawares, in a cemetery; it seemed the most despicable kind of invasion, of intimacy. Had Truman taken it, or hired somebody to follow her there, take her picture and snatch her soul, right out in broad daylight?
Why?
How dare he.
How dare they?
It was enough to drive her crazy, and she ripped both pictures in half.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
And then she regretted tearing up the pictures, afraid it would bring bad luck, like breaking a mirror. That’s what this new intrusion in her life seemed to be: bad luck, or a curse, when she’d done nothing to deserve it.
Somebody wanting a part of her that didn’t exist anymore.
She quickly grabbed tape from a dispenser and, one two three, taped the pictures back together.
There.
Now what?
She did what she usually did in that hot, dusty attic.
She took a pad and pen off the desk, then tucked her legs up underneath her in the wooden swivel chair; her joints creaked as much as the old wood did. She’d write a letter to her brother Ed; it’s what she always did to calm herself down, just close her eyes and let the pen go. It hardly mattered if she put the pen to paper; the thoughts were always there, paper to land on or not.
She’d been writing the same letter to him, over and over, for years now, asking questions only she could answer. She kept repeating her story, to make sure it had really happened.
It didn’t matter that he was dead.
My dearest, most precious Ed,
I close my eyes and the first thing that comes to mind is how much I miss you. Not how scared I am right now, or how confused, or how damn mad—even though all those things are true—but how much I miss you. How many times over the years have I written that? Too many. Sometimes I feel your presence, if I pray to God enough before I sit down. (I skipped him just now, but hope He’ll accept my apology, and let you come through anyway.) I’ve been feeling your presence a lot lately, always smiling and encouraging me; are you preparing the way for me, Big Brother? Is that what you’re trying to say, if I just listen and accept?
Most of me feels like I’m ready to go.
I need you more than ever right now. Somebody has sent me something that has shaken me to my very core. I don’t know why it should, I’m so used to getting every kind of crazy thing people send, but this has taken me back to some dark places. You weren’t even alive to see the magazine when it came out, nine or ten years after you died, nine or ten years when I lived with a dark cloud of grief over me and in me, and wrote the story of our childhoods as a way out of that grief. (It doesn’t seem possible, you being gone so long—I still see you as you were, in your uniform down on the base, holding your two babies. I was such a proud sister and aunt, who wanted to make you proud of me in turn, so I kept you alive in The Book. That’s why I gave Scout a brother, not a sister: I still had sisters, but I didn’t have you.)
This thing that got left off on the porch, it’s covered with pictures from that article, taken when I was in Daddy’s old office. I asked them if they wanted me to pretend to write, or really do it. Whichever is more comfortable for you, they said. How could I explain to them that writing was never comfortable for me? I said, Well, let me get going, then you just sneak in, when I’m not looking. (Someone else has just sneaked in, when I wasn’t looking.) They sneaked in alright, when I wasn’t doing anything except sitting there, frozen, chewing on a pencil to practically keep my teeth from chattering. I had to pick bits of pencil wood out of my teeth after that.
That’s what the world thinks a writer writing l
ooks like. (I go into that pose now, to see if it makes things any easier. It doesn’t.)
I loved snuggling up in Daddy’s old office, tucked up in that corner, like a dog who wants to burrow its way into the darkest, deepest place it can, its butt up to the wall, so nobody can attack it from behind. I think that’s what I was worried about—getting attacked from behind. I liked seeing what was out in front of me. After Daddy died, after The Book came out, I’d go to that office all the time, maybe meaning to write, maybe not. Whatever I went there to do, I’d get lost in doing nothing, except getting hypnotized by the dust motes in the air. I thought they held Daddy’s very breath, and if I just breathed them in enough, then I could be just like him. I’d take great gulps, then hold them, my cheeks puffed out like the black squirrel that played on the windowsill outside. I’d go through Daddy’s desk drawers and pick up objects on his desk and smell them and feel the grease on them and think this came from Daddy’s hand or he breathed this same air, so he’s still here. I’d go through his cabinets and rearrange stuff, endlessly, then I’d go back and rearrange what I’d already arranged. Sometimes I’d fall asleep, put my head down on his desk and wake up hours later, with a red streak across my forehead, my hair pushed up, and my eyes glued shut.
It wasn’t right to grieve that much over one person, but I did, just as I still do, for you.
I can’t seem to get away from people dying on me. You must think I’m crazy, going on like this.
Sometimes I think I am.
Daddy’s death distracted me for such a long time, then the hullabaloo over The Book; who could write during that, who could even breathe—except stale dust motes in the air? From a book I thought would come out and disappear, to one that did better than a million dreams put together. (But how hard it was: change after change they wanted, and I’d go into their offices and they’d have a new version all marked up, trying to get me to turn it into the book they had in their heads. You can bet there were no dust motes in the fancy offices on Fifth Avenue.) That’s tall clover for a country girl like me, who was practically living on Saltines and ketchup soup at the time.
