Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  “You’re dismissing me, mère.”

  She kissed me on both cheeks. “I wonder where you came from,” she said. “You’re my sunny daughter. It’s the dark child who’s usually the changeling.”

  When my dark sister came to stay with us she preferred to sleep in the attic, which Hoyt Furman, the previous rector, had insulated at his own expense as a dormitory for visiting grandchildren. We stored a few things up there—boxes of photographs and canceled checks, a rack of dressy clothes and winter coats in their storage bags, some rolled-up remnants of carpeting, Henry’s father’s collection of fishing rods, and the Beaulac bed.

  Brought by clipper from Nova Scotia in the 1850s, the bed was fashioned out of oak by an ambitious amateur carpenter. With a high plain headboard surmounted by a broken pediment and a footboard too low in proportion to the height of the headboard, it stood a foot and a half off the floor on thick, clumsy legs. It still retained its original paint, a rusty-red color achieved at that period by mixing cow’s blood with whitewash. A motto was stenciled on the headboard in fading black letters, N’ESPÈRE RIEN, “hope for nothing,” the marrow of the Huguenot religion: only God knows which sinners will be saved; therefore hope for salvation is an illusion.

  The bed reminded its occupants that death could arrive at any moment. Perhaps its dark red color stood for the flames of hellfire. I have seen portraits of some of my ancestors, black-garbed, sharp-featured, unsmiling men and women named Raquin, Daillé, and Beaulac. It was easy to imagine them preparing for death while they composed themselves for sleep, as if each night were their last one. My father had banished the bed to the garage on the grounds of its monstrosity. Any bed that ugly, he claimed, would drink up human energy as thirstily as linseed oil. It ended up in our attic when Emily redecorated her house. Walter Emmet, who took a look at it last October, told us such pieces were beginning to be valued for their “primitive vigor.”

  We had furnished one corner of the attic like a proper bedroom. There was a nightstand, a reading lamp, an armchair, and an oval hooked rug by the bed. It was hospitable enough if the room was aired beforehand, although there was no closet, only space on the clothes rack, and the bathroom was on the floor below. On previous visits Hannah never unpacked her luggage or hung up her belongings. She let her clothes lie where she shed them, until the floor was covered with a patchwork of fabrics, a kind of makeshift carpet.

  Late Good Friday morning, while Hannah was in town waiting for Aaron Schmidt to replace her muffler, I took some extra blankets up to the third floor. Hannah’s jackets, jeans, and good trousers were hanging on the clothes rack, with her boots and sneakers arranged in rows underneath them. Her bags were stowed neatly under the bed. She had filled the night-table drawers with other necessities—museum postcards, sketchpads, colored pencils, a compass, a slide rule, cigarette papers, and a can of loose tobacco. She had thumbtacked a poster to the wall opposite the bed, an image that echoed the message on the headboard: a naked, gnomelike man handcuffed to a nuclear missile, biting his wrist in despair, drawing crimson blood, the only color in an all-gray palette. Unless she had changed her habits, we were in for a long one, a month or more of her smoke and spleen drifting down from the attic, infecting the household.

  The van came back from Schmidt’s Auto Shop at two-thirty, bounding up the driveway. The exhaust system was silent, but Hannah was leaning on the horn, startling the worshippers next door out of their meditations. Which of Christ’s last words was Henry up to by now? Was it “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”? I ran outside to try and persuade her to put a plug in it. She saw me coming and honked again. I pointed at St. Anthony’s.

  “All right, all right. I forgot. Get in. We’re going house hunting.”

  “Where?” I asked. “Henry wants an early supper.”

  “I ran into Lorraine Drago at Aaron’s. Some client has a cabin on his property. Free till October if I do some repairs.”

  “Where?” I repeated. “Is it far?”

  “Boy, I’m glad I’m not somebody’s wife. You’re on a short leash, kiddo.”

  I paid Hannah back with the best shot in my arsenal.

  “We’re taking Emily with us. She’d enjoy the outing.”

  If I expected an outburst from her, I was disappointed. She looked at her watch, then leaned over and opened the passenger door for me.

  “Let’s move it,” she said. “Drago’s going to meet us there with the keys.”

  Emily got into the back seat of the van next to a pile of canvas tarps sending out fumes of paint thinner. Hannah told her to open the window and let in some air. “No, no,” said Emily. “I’m fine. It’s a good, clean smell.” She sat straight up in the seat with her head and spine in perfect alignment, her hands resting loosely on her knees, alert but reposeful, like a yogi. On the way out the Poland Road to Moose Meadow Road, past the entrance to Violette Brook Campgrounds, up an unmarked dirt road rising steeply, she kept perfectly silent. Unlike Emily, I have a dread of empty air. I asked all the questions. “Where are we? Are we near the Rolfe place? I’ve never been up here. Have you, Hannah?”

  On our left we saw a clearing with an alley of Norway pines leading up to a rustic building on the scale of the great wooden “camps” in the Adirondacks. According to Lorraine, it had been built by a businessman from Texas, whose heirs rarely used it. The cabin Hannah wanted to see was on their property. Hunting parties had stayed there, and an occasional caretaker. An antlered buck and a doe, grazing on the winter-browned grass, stopped to glance up at us. Beyond the clearing the road became narrower, rough and pitted, a hazard to Hannah’s new exhaust pipe. Low-hanging branches brushed the sides and top of the van. Traffic passed this way seldom. White pines, larches, and hemlocks had reached their full height, eighty to a hundred feet tall. So little sun reached the forest floor that it was bare of undergrowth.

  I have lived in Dry Falls since my eyes first opened. I thought I knew every piece of land inside its boundaries and the name of every landowner. The house in the clearing was built years before I was born. By the date of my birth these trees had stood here for close to a century. I like to take hikes, go out by myself with a day pack and walk until I tire. If I had any favorite trail it was following Violette Brook upstream, climbing steadily for a mile or more, through deep woods that seemed, in contrast to these woods, skinny second growth. Did the streamside trail rise as far as this venerable forest? Had I failed countless times to reach it because my legs ached or the dinner needed cooking? The van startled a hunting hawk, which flew low in front of us, carrying a small creature in its beak. “Where are we?” I repeated. Hannah braked as the road dipped downward across a washout. “It’s not on the map,” she answered. “All I have is Lorraine’s directions.” Emily spoke from the back for the first and only time. “How dark it is,” she said. “I don’t feel welcome here.”

  The road ended abruptly at another long-neglected clearing. For the last fifty yards we drove over tussocks of uncut grass, still frosted with unmelted snow, rutted before us by the tracks of Lorraine Drago’s jeep. At the far edge of the open space stood a one-story hand-built log cabin with a fieldstone chimney. An overhanging roof supported by timbers covered a narrow porch that ran the length of the structure. I could see from a distance that some of the porch floorboards were missing.

  Lorraine emerged from the doorway, holding a padlock. She was wearing a Tyrolean hat and leaning on her knobby walnut walking stick. Her hair, dyed a flat mahogany, concealed the secret of her age. One of her legs was shorter than the other, owing to a childhood bout of polio, but she was as plucky as a tomboy. Limping over acres of rough terrain with prospective buyers, she took frequent spills, righting herself in an instant like one of these plastic clown toys that are weighted on the bottom. One of her bright brown eyes was larger than the other, an outward sign of psychic abilities, according to the researchers at Duke University, who had put her through a series of tests for extrasensory perception. Lorra
ine volunteered for these tests in the 1950s after a number of unreasonable experiences, such as “seeing” one of her listings consumed by flames and calling the volunteer firemen, who were already at the scene, putting out a blaze that had started with an oil leak. These days her extrasensory powers were lying fallow, unless they accounted for her success in the real estate business. She was known throughout the upper and lower Sebago regions for her talent at matching a client with the property of his dreams.

  Nothing captivated me like empty enclosures—houses, lofts, barns, silos, chicken coops. When I stood in these spaces my life began all over again. In my mind’s eye I took down a partition, added a window for light, chose a wallpaper pattern, placed the furniture. I was out of the van and inside the cabin ahead of Hannah, filled with expectancy, elated by new possibilities. Dirt and rubble were rarely obstacles to my daydreams. I could see past swags of cobwebs, rodent corpses or their skeletons, a pile of stained blankets in a corner harboring the smell of a vagrant who had bedded down there. I could overlook a trail of raccoon droppings studded with seeds and a patch of green moss on the ceiling where the roof had leaked. This time my imagination shut down. There were signs that the cabin had been vandalized—deep black scores in the floor planks, x’s or crosses, unrelated to the grain and condition of the wood, as if someone had taken a red-hot poker and gouged them out. When an empty building has been willfully damaged, it no longer seems uninhabited. The vandal’s presence lingers on like an unwanted guest.

  Hannah was pacing the length of the cabin with a light in her eye. Her excitement mounted as mine subsided. My virtues were purely domestic, but my sister had a carpenter’s skill and an adventurer’s spirit. She crouched on the hearthstones and looked up the chimney, emerging with a veil of soot on her cheekbones. She climbed on a wooden crate and scraped away the moss with her pocket knife. She spanned a section of wall between her hands, measuring to accommodate some object, probably a worktable. I pointed at the ugly black gouges. She turned around, annoyed by the interruption. “The boards are two and a half inches thick. Rent a sander and sand them down. What’s the matter with you?” I said I could see daylight though the logs in any number of places. “I’ll mix up a little mortar. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon.”

  Whether she is showing a mansion or a shack, Lorraine Drago left clients alone to explore the premises, free to make negative comments, argue among themselves, or go into raptures without fearing they will compromise their bargaining position. I expected to find her outside chatting with Emily, but she was parked on the lower step relacing her shoes, an ungainly pair of black walkers designed to follow the natural shape of the foot. My mother was absent from the scene. I thought she must have gone into the woods to look for wild plants. Emily was always equipped for collecting specimens. She carried waxed paper sandwich bags and a miniature trowel in the pocket of her skirt or jacket. I sat down by Lorraine. Daylight was waning but our legs were still in sunshine. “I hope Emily doesn’t roam too far afield,” I said. “Unlikely,” said Lorraine. “She’s sitting in the van.” “She won’t get out?” I asked. “She hasn’t. I didn’t make a fuss about it.”

  I went over to the van and opened the passenger door. I gestured toward the cabin. “I don’t know what you’re up to, mère. Can’t you show a little interest?” Emily bowed her head. Her hands were clenched in her lap. In distress she became unresponsive, almost slow-witted, giving no clue as to whether the matter was urgent or trivial. I was irritated to distraction by this habit. “You don’t like the cabin. You think it’s too isolated. You think it’s too ramshackle?” Emily hunched her shoulders and bent her head even lower. “Please get out. You’ll have a scene with Hannah. Come inside and pretend you like it.” Moving painfully, as if she were stricken with arthritis, Emily allowed me to hand her down. She leaned heavily on my arm as I walked her across the grass and up the steps. At the doorway she balked like a nervous racehorse at the starting gate. I put my arm around her and pulled her the last few inches over the threshold. Hannah was struggling to open the left front window, which was painted shut. She said, “One of you get over here and give me a hand.” I left Emily standing motionless in the center of the room. Hannah continued to pound on the window jambs, trying to loosen them.

  Conscious of family tensions, Lorraine had faded back into her jeep, well out of earshot. She was reading a newspaper. The sun had also retreated, to the spot where the van was parked. I was making my way toward the light when Emily came out again. I had taken her inside hunched and feeble, aging before my eyes. She walked down to join me with a brisk, decisive step, shoulders back, head erect, eyes front, the same woman who could move rocks unaided to build a stone wall. She had stayed in the cabin a matter of five or six minutes, a very short time to work such a change, too brief to allow for a ruckus with Hannah and a reconciliation.

  Emily spoke with an authority that matched her stride. “Lorraine will take me home. Hannah has the key and the padlock.” “Can’t you wait and drive with us? We won’t be long.” “I can’t prevent this,” she said. “It’s beyond my powers.” “She can fix it,” I said. “She’s like Francis. She knows how to fix anything.” “There are other cabins. There are several on Proud Lake. I’ll leave it up to Lorraine.” My mother was not a meddlesome person. If she had tried to influence people and events, she might have cut short years of sorrow. “You can’t go behind her back. She won’t stand for it.” “I have no choice,” said Emily. “Something is wrong here.”

  I watched Lorraine turn the jeep around and drive away, playing a farewell volley on her horn. Sometimes Emily had these prophetic fits, delivered in peremptory terms with no substance to ground them. Her utterances always concerned the prodigal daughter, never the stay-at-home. Perhaps she resorted to premonitions because Hannah had banned any other form of communication. There was no reasoning with psychics, maternal or professional. Their knowledge was superior, outweighing your hidebound demands for proof and results. Emily’s track record was not only poor, it was nonexistent. None of her dreams or “strange feelings” had ever come true, yet she was willing to gamble her fragile connection with Hannah on one of these forebodings.

  Any number of things were “wrong” with this decrepit log cabin planted in a virtual wilderness. It rotted. It sagged. It let in the wind and the weather as well as human and animal intruders. The only atmosphere emanating from it was one of neglect and maltreatment. Our accredited sensitive, Lorraine Drago, had inspected the premises often in the course of business without picking up any unusual vibrations. Some real estate agents will suppress disagreeable information to expedite a sale, but Lorraine bent over backwards in the opposite direction. She described the condition of a property before the first viewing, handing clients an itemized list of defects, along with estimates from local contractors for the cost of repairing them. It goes without saying that I, Cora, the earthbound daughter, mired as I was on the material plane, felt and saw nothing but dirt and breakage, a housewife’s nightmare. When it came to the paranormal I was tone-deaf and color-blind. Perhaps I was put here to check and balance the excesses of others—a husband who heard the voice of God, a mother who believed in dreams, a sister who renounced her kindred in the name of Art.

  That very sister—the squeaky wheel, the thorn in the flesh, the vixen in the henhouse—came out onto the porch with dirt smeared like war paint across her face. She positioned the padlock, but left it unattached. She waved at me, gave me the V sign. The palms of her hands and the knees of her trousers were coal black. When she was pleased, or merely unirritable, she brimmed with mischief.

  “I can work here,” she said. “Look at all the free lumber. And did you notice? Emily really hates it.” I hadn’t seen her look so self-satisfied since the age of fifteen, when she sneaked out of the house at midnight to meet a boyfriend and came back at four-thirty in the morning, undetected. I said, “I’m not in love with it myself. I’d rather live in a tent.” “That’s an idea,” said Hannah.
“I’ll cadge Henry’s pop-up while I’m working on it.”

  Hannah had the bit in her teeth. She jabbered all the way back to the rectory, ticking off extra items she needed to borrow (tools, dishes, gas camp stove, a cot, a kerosene heater), reminding herself to ask Lorraine about the depth of the well, figuring out which buddies from the old days she could weasel into helping her. Questions about how many trips her van could survive on that potholed, axle-busting road she brushed off as obstructive and unfriendly. She didn’t like hearing speculation as to whether the intruder might be a local or an out-of-town hunter who thought he’d established squatter’s rights to the cabin and might take out his resentment at her presence in some unlawful fashion. She accused me of trying to get rid of her. She said I was afraid she was “bad for Henry’s career.” I told her she thought the world owed her a living. She got in a dig about “preliberated women,” and their slave mentality. Compared to her, I told her, Francis was a paragon of selflessness. She said I wanted to keep Emily to myself. I said she could have Emily, since Emily was obsessed with her anyway. If we had been children instead of acting like children, she would have gone for my hair and I would have aimed at her stomach with both fists. These days we settled our conflicts by punishing each other with silence. When we got home I went into the kitchen and began slicing onions for soup. Hannah disappeared upstairs. She came down while the onions were caramelizing, walked straight past me, and slammed out again. I heard her drive off, scattering gravel.

  Chapter Nine

  Accepting a sexless marriage is a gradual process, subject to lapses. Every night brings a fresh opportunity for regression, reviving the hope that two bodies lying side by side will catch fire spontaneously. When proximity fails to work its remembered magic, every night is a new occasion for disappointment. There were nights when I slept close to Henry in our usual fashion, with my head on his shoulder and my right arm across his chest. There were others, and their number was increasing, when I waited until he fell asleep and pulled away from him. On Friday night, Good Friday, with Christ still hanging on the cross, I pulled away from him—the least erotic date on the calendar, when this clerk of God had been on his feet for fourteen hours hawking the gospel. I lay awake on my side of the bed very close to the edge. I threw off the covers. His body gave off too much heat. The bed was too small. I couldn’t sleep unless I left the bed.