My House Gathers Desires

by Adam McOmber

  The Rite of Spring

  Paddaburn Moor, 1919

  After two weeks of rain, the river had risen to swallow an island of cattails near the dock. Reedy stems fluttered darkly in the stream. Elizabeth thought the morning sky, finally free of thunderheads, looked frail compared to the churning river. The water held a memory of the storm itself. From the dock, she watched the two boys in white shirts and ties prepare the rowboat—a flat-bottomed Whitehall owned by the school. By the look of its peeling paint and buckling hull, no amount of preparation could actually make the boat fit for water, but it would have to do. Headmaster Dove had insisted that a trip down the river, coupled with Elizabeth’s fine interrogation skills, would dislodge the boys’ secrets. “If anyone can get the truth from them it’s you, Mrs. Jordan,” Dove said, propped behind his desk, the lenses of his eyeglasses bright with the flare of a reflected sun. “You’ve become something of our little house detective, haven’t you?”

  Elizabeth wanted to respond tersely. She didn’t approve of Dove’s meandering, academic investigation. The proper authorities should have been called the moment the girl came out of the woods wearing only her undergarments. But Elizabeth restrained herself. Arguing with the headmaster was never productive. And an interview with the boys couldn’t hurt. She did, in fact, trust her own methods of deduction.

  On the boat dock, Elizabeth tucked one of her hands in the pocket of her overcoat for warmth. The other explored the ribs of her folded silk fan, an antique she’d pulled from the chest. Her mother had given the fan to her years ago, when she still thought of Elizabeth as the marrying kind. A good detective knew how to adopt the right character for an investigation, after all, and the boys, Conrad Deale and Martin Oole, might feel more at ease if they saw her not just as their stern Classics teacher, but also as a woman.

  Her thoughts were disrupted when the larger of the two boys, Conrad Deale—the one she thought of as being in charge—turned from where he squatted boat-side and said, “Maybe it’s better if we don’t take her out today, Mrs. J.” His tone was calm. Unflustered by recent events. He leaned on one of the painted oars, as if it were a shepherd’s staff. His body was mature-looking, though his face remained almost childlike.

  “Why do you say that, Conrad?” Elizabeth asked, curling her fingers around her mother’s fan. Conversation about the trip was unnecessary, but she would play along. Conrad Deale himself was aware that the outing was compulsory. They were going to the island to look at the purported scene of the crime.

  Conrad loosened his school tie. “The river can get a little difficult when it’s this high,” he said, “especially around the other side of the hill there.” He pointed to the grassy outcropping in the distance where Elizabeth sometimes sought out a comfortable place to read in the early months of summer after many of the boys had gone home. She found herself wishing that it was one of those warm days now, and that she was settled in the grass with a picnic of cheese and bread, reading passages from Ovid.

  “We wouldn’t want you to fall into the river, Mrs. J.,” Conrad said. He grinned.

  Elizabeth glanced at the other one, the foreigner, Martin Oole, to gauge his reaction to Conrad Deale’s words. The thin blond boy worked away at his preparations, sweeping dead leaves from the bottom of the Whitehall into a bucket and dumping them into the water where they were then folded into darkness. Martin Oole’s near fuguelike detachment had become a topic of conversation among teachers and staff alike at Harding. He’d been tested for various forms of deficiency and even retardation. The school nurses had come up with nothing.

  “I have surprising skill when it comes to watercraft, I can assure you, Conrad,” Elizabeth said, returning her attention to the more alert of the two boys. “I was on the rowing team as a girl.”

  Conrad Deale laughed. It was the sound of an entitled child who thought no trouble could come to him.

  Elizabeth tapped the folded fan against her skirt impatiently.

  “There’s a mouse,” Martin Oole said, poised in the boat with his bucket and broom. His voice was pitched higher than Conrad Deale’s. Not pleasantly high like some of the other boys, but airy and goatish.

  Conrad turned toward the boat. “Alive, Marty?”

  Oole shook his head. “Dead. All shriveled. It doesn’t have its eyes.”

  Elizabeth watched the two boys stare into the bottom of the Whitehall. “Don’t be morbid,” she said. “Just scrape the thing out and drop it into the water.”

  Conrad Deale turned toward her again as Oole pushed at the mouse with his boot. “No funerary rights, Mrs. J?” he said.

  She drew her spine straight. “Mr. Deale, perhaps it’s best if you play by the book today, considering your current situation.”

  Elizabeth watched as the body of the mouse fell headfirst from the bucket into the river and was swallowed by the gulping currents. She couldn’t help but think again of the poor farm girl who’d wandered out of the woods two nights before. The girl told a story about what Conrad Deale and Martin Oole had done to her and what they’d planned to do if she hadn’t gotten away. Her name was June Strump—a sad name for a sad girl. The fact that the authorities had not yet been notified of her situation, that Headmaster Dove was keeping June at Harding School under the auspices of “examination and treatment” while he privately investigated the crime, was an injustice. The notion that June’s own parents had been charmed by the headmaster and perhaps financially persuaded to leave her in his care, was most certainly obscene.

  Conrad balanced himself in the center of the boat and helped Elizabeth into the stern. He instructed Martin Oole to take a seat in the prow, in case there were fallen branches that needed clearing. There’d been no doubt in Elizabeth’s mind that Conrad would take it upon himself to row. His broad shoulders bespoke a need to row. The two boys faced Elizabeth, Oole’s narrow visage peering from behind one of Conrad’s shoulders, as if a vestigial head had sprouted there.

  Martin Oole wound the rotted mooring rope as Conrad guided them onto the river that was not as choppy as it appeared from the dock. Elizabeth fluttered her fan and commented on the way the willow branches dipped into the stream and drew pictures in the water. All the while, she thought of June Strump, whom Headmaster Dove had allowed her to interview prior to this excursion. Looking at June had filled Elizabeth with an overwhelming sense of sympathy. There were bruises on the girl’s doughy cheek where she said Conrad Deale had struck her. There were red scratches on her neck and chest as well from the boys dragging her by the legs through the underbrush. Her body was a map of their violence.

  It was not precisely a confession that Elizabeth wanted from the boys on the boat. She already believed June Strump’s story wholeheartedly. What she wanted instead was further information about the third figure in the woods that night, the man who June Strump claimed lurked behind the trees and watched as the boys beat and dragged her. The man whose existence the boys denied. If this adult watcher existed, he would change the entire nature of the event. He was the one Elizabeth wanted to incriminate.

  “How are you both fairing in all this?” Elizabeth asked the boys. She hoped to draw them in, to appeal first to their emotions.

  Conrad Deale dragged the oars through the water, guiding the boat past the tree-lined shores. “Tired mostly,” he said. “The beds that Dove gave us are stuffed with straw. I don’t see why we can’t just sleep in our bunks. Why do we have to be separated out?”

  “June Strump isn’t sleeping well either, you know,” Elizabeth said, happy to speak the girl’s name to them. “Nor can she return to her own comfortable environs.”

  The boys were silent, which was to be expected, she supposed.

  “June told me that if she sleeps,” Elizabeth continued, “she has terrible dreams. Dreams about the woods. About the two of you—and the man who stood behind the trees.”

  This statement was followed only by the plash of the white oars in the water.

  “Have you communicated with t
he man in the woods since your incarceration?” Elizabeth asked.

  Conrad Deale raised the back of his hand to wipe sweat from his face. “I suppose we haven’t, Mrs. Jordan,” he said. “Since there wasn’t any man. Like I told you already.”

  “And how about you, Martin?” Elizabeth asked. “You’re being awfully quiet. Perhaps you’ve come down with one of your headaches.”

  Oole stared at her with bloodshot eyes. “I’m fine, Missus,” he said softly. “I haven’t got a headache.”

  “We only wanted to talk to her,” Conrad Deale said, ceasing to row for a moment and allowing the boat to bob in the current. “In fact, Marty here wanted to talk to her. He thought she looked interesting when we saw her in the village. I disagreed. She looked cow-faced to me, but Marty hardly ever asks for anything so I let him invite her into the woods. We told her stories. Then everything got out of hand. The girl didn’t understand what we were trying to say, just like I thought she wouldn’t. She fought with us, tried to hurt us, and we fought back. We have bruises too, Mrs. J. Do you want to see them?”

  “That’s quite all right, Conrad,” she said. Elizabeth had heard about the bruises and the scratches on the boys’ chests and arms—like some animal had attacked them, the nurse had told her. Their clothing had been torn too when they came out of the woods. Elizabeth realized she’d been so preoccupied by her discussion with Conrad that she hadn’t seen Martin was no longer engaged in their conversation. She adjusted her position in the boat so she could once again speak directly to him and saw he was staring off toward the left bank of the river. Not staring dreamily—as a boy who’d lost interest might—but staring with concentration at something on the far shore. She followed his gaze and saw nothing but sharp shadows of willow and birch trunks.

  “What is it, Martin?” she asked. “What do you see out there?”

  He seemed to have to force himself to look at her again. “I thought I saw an animal,” he replied, voice hushed.

  “Not another dead one, I hope?” she said.

  “No, Missus,” Oole said.

  “Marty’s got a good eye,” Conrad said. “He’s always seeing things I’d never catch.”

  “Is that why you’ve taken him as such a boon companion, Conrad?”

  The boy shrugged. “We just fell in together. We talk.”

  “I’d like to hear about the subjects of your talks now,” she said. “These so-called stories.”

  “We already told Headmaster Dove all of it,” he countered.

  She waved her now open fan, as if she needed air.

  Conrad Deale lowered his chin, looking at her from beneath a furrowed brow. “You already know the kind of things we talk about, Mrs. J. You told us about them in the first place.”

  This quieted Elizabeth. She let the fan dip toward the bottom of the boat. “What do you mean I told you?”

  It wasn’t Deale who responded. Instead, Martin Oole broke in, not directing his comment toward Elizabeth, but speaking instead to the wooded shore. “The Master of the Animals,” he said.

  Elizabeth recognized the name. She’d covered this figure as a topic in her class on antiquities, however briefly. It had been during a lecture on ancient cults. There were drawings of the Master of the Animals—or at least a figure very like him—on the walls of the caves at Lascaux. He was a creature dressed in skins, one who asked for human sacrifice in order to guarantee the fruitfulness of the hunt. Elizabeth’s point of including such a figure in her lecture at all was to show the boys that religion was largely a function of circumstance. Gods were made as gods were needed. The Master of the Animals was really no more than a metaphysical gamekeeper imagined by men who wanted good luck in their endeavors. She devoted only a single class to such a topic because, though interesting for the boys, she found such things a bit too macabre. She didn’t think the children needed their heads filled with notions of chthonic sacrifice and atavistic possession. She glared at Martin Oole and said bluntly, “Are you telling me that a story about a character from ancient mythology persuaded you to attempt to rape a farm girl?”

  “We didn’t do that, all right?” Conrad Deale interrupted. “We were trying to demonstrate something in the woods. She misinterpreted all of it.”

  Elizabeth sat back in the Whitehall, narrowing her gaze. “And what precisely were you trying to demonstrate?”

  “We were performing a rite,” he said. “A ritual. We had a hollowed out bull’s horn that we found at the cigar shop in town. We filled it with wine—”

  “Where did you get the wine?”

  “We stole it from the cabinet in the kitchen,” Conrad Deale said. “All the boys steal wine. June didn’t like the horn though. She said she wasn’t going to drink from something that an animal had grown on its head. So we moved to the next step.”

  “The next step,” Elizabeth said. She attempted to control her anger. These were still only schoolboys. They were, perhaps, confused. “Did the man who stood behind the trees tell you to do these things?” she said.

  “There was no man,” Conrad repeated.

  Elizabeth breathed deeply. “Tell me what happened next.”

  “We danced,” he said.

  “June liked the dancing,” Martin Oole added. “But only for a while.”

  “She liked it until you forced her to take off her dress?” Elizabeth said.

  “We didn’t force her, Mrs. Jordan. She took off her clothes on her own.” Conrad stopped here and looked uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Martin Oole appeared to grow agitated, and Elizabeth had the sudden thought that the young Frenchman was touching Conrad Deale’s lower back, so she couldn’t see, but so that Conrad would know to stop talking. It was in that silence that she heard a sound on the shore, the crack of a branch coupled with a rustle of trees.

  “Gentlemen,” Elizabeth said, “is there someone following alongside our boat right now?”

  Both boys merely stared at her. In that moment, they were truly nothing more than children, frightened and wide-eyed. They were coming quite close, she could tell, to looking to her for guidance—she who’d told them the ridiculous story of the Master of the Animals. She who’d taught them about the rituals of sacrifice. Elizabeth wanted to reach out her hand to them, to simply ask them to come back and be good boys again. But in the next moment, Martin Oole spoke, breaking their moment of innocence. “I think it’s a dog,” he said. “But I can’t tell.”

  “Why don’t we ferry our boat over there where the sound came from and see what we can see,” Elizabeth said.

  “No,” Oole said, and Conrad Deale craned his neck to look at his friend, once again ceasing to paddle and allowing them to drift in the center of the dark river. “I’m afraid of dogs,” Oole said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Martin,” Elizabeth said. “Conrad, if you would just maneuver us toward the far shore so we can get a better look at what’s tracking us. Do as I say.”

  “Are you sure, Mrs. J.?” Conrad said.

  “Of course I’m sure. I never speak unless I’m sure.”

  The boy worked the oars expertly, keeping the left one still and paddling with the right until the boat headed toward the far shore where the foliage was so thick that Elizabeth could not be sure if someone stood there watching them. If it was the third man that June Strump had talked about—the man who stood and watched from behind the trees—she wanted to see him for herself. Elizabeth wasn’t afraid. She wouldn’t allow herself that emotion. She was doing this for June, for the way the poor dear looked, sitting in the nurse’s room, pretending to read the dry tomes that Headmaster Dove had left with her. Books that Elizabeth was fairly certain June couldn’t understand. And why should she want to understand them—they were the instruments of the society that she’d fallen prey to.

  Elizabeth tried hard not to see the trees themselves, but rather to look between the branches at the narrow patches of dark and light for any shifting movement. But as the bow of the boat touched the reedy shore, Elizabeth
was still not sure if there was anything to be seen at all.

  Elizabeth said it might be better if they got some exercise. Sitting in the boat too long was making them all sluggish. This was, of course, a calculation intended to push the boys further beyond their own boundaries, to bring them closer to revealing the truth by taking them to the site itself. Elizabeth and the boys made the upward climb from the river, and she was glad she’d worn her boots with a shorter heel. Conrad Deale walked ahead and Martin Oole followed behind, muttering something under his breath in French. She was about to ask Oole what he was talking about when Conrad said, “What’s that?” There was a significant amount of tension in his voice, especially for one normally so self-possessed. Elizabeth momentarily forgot about Martin Oole’s mutterings. She focused on her progress through the trees to the place where Conrad Deale stood pointing at the ground. She gazed into the tangle of plant life at his feet, trying to see what he was so intrigued by.

  “What do you mean, Conrad?” she said. “I don’t see anything at all.”

  Conrad Deale hunched, staring at the empty patch of ground for a few more moments, then turned to her. “I guess it isn’t anything,” he said. “I was imagining things.”

  “What did you think you saw exactly?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t anything really, Mrs. J.,” he said.

  Elizabeth suddenly realized that Martin Oole no longer stood behind them. In fact, he’d disappeared entirely. Conrad Deale’s exclamations had provided camouflage for the boy’s escape.

  “Conrad, where is Martin?”

  Conrad Deale leaned on the white oar that he’d carried with them from the boat. He appeared to consider her question and then said, “I suppose he’s gone back to the river to drown himself, Mrs. Jordan.”