Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  Monday. 3 p.m. Crack in the cellar floor over by the clothes dryer. About an inch at the widest point. Cement seems to be disintegrating. Original dirt floor cemented in the ’40s? Ask Hiram Baldwin.

  Tuesday. 4:15 a.m. Pile of leaves and soot on the fireplace hearth. Flue open. Who would be fiddling with the flue in this heat? Kitchen door wide open. Remind Walter and Ruth to close it and lock it when they go up to bed.

  Tuesday after breakfast. Ruth and Walter adamant. She says she locked the kitchen door herself and he saw her do it.

  Wednesday. 3 p.m. Unmarked white panel truck parked out front. Two men in white coveralls walk toward our driveway. Stop to confer; turn to look at the house. One of them points at it. They get back in the truck and sit there several minutes before driving off (away from town). Delivery men with the wrong address? (Water-softener technicians?) I should have asked them their business.

  Wednesday. 4:30 a.m. The mantel clock has stopped. Also grandfather clock. Wound them yesterday evening as I always do. Both stopped at 3:45.

  Thursday. 11 a.m. I’ve never seen so many mole runs on the lawn. Stepped on one and the earth gave way. Must be connected with the drought.

  Friday. 2 a.m. Someone out for a late-night walk across the street. Can’t identify him from here. Poor bastard can’t sleep either. Not much of a vacation for Cora. Will make it up to her. Sending the troops home Sunday at the latest.

  Mole runs? Delivery vans? I could only infer that Henry was feeling the strain, seeing signs and portents in every circumstance. Keeping notes was his way of making work in the absence of real activity. I was concerned about his judgment, not so much about what he had recorded, but what he might have missed with his eyes fixed so firmly on the ground. When I told him I had read his notes, he thanked me, as if I were complimenting him on them. “You can see a pattern developing,” he said with a daft, cheerful grin. “Not at all,” I answered. “Of course you can,” he insisted. “A series of attempted break-ins.” I was close to losing my temper. “Now I understand,” I said. “You think the lawn is being torn up by were-moles. They’re climbing down the chimney and burrowing into the basement. They stopped the clocks with their little claws. They changed themselves into delivery men.”

  We were alone in the kitchen for a change. The others were finishing their lunch on the screened-in porch. “Keep your voice down,” said Henry. “You’re hysterical.” “I notice things, too,” I said. “You’re not the only one. There were seven dead flies on the windowsill in your office. Not three, not four, mind you. Seven. The Tapleys’ black cat crossed my path when I was taking out the garbage. This morning I woke up with two red bites on my neck. Were they spider bites? Not in this madhouse. I think they were mole bites.”

  Henry glanced at the door to the dining room, a possible escape route. “Are we having a fight, Cora?” “Don’t be silly,” I said. “We never fight.” “I said you were hysterical.” “That’s all right. I was making fun of you.” “Fun,” Henry said. “Never heard of it.” I went over to him and put my arms around him. Big as he was, his body felt light to me. “I brought this on us,” he said. “I went after it. I pushed too hard.” I held him closer. “We don’t have to live here,” I said. “We could move somewhere else.” Henry pulled away abruptly. The group was coming back from the porch with their dirty dishes. The dishwasher was full. I had forgotten to run it after breakfast. Walter was pestering Emily to give him the tray. “It’s too heavy for you, Em. You’re going to drop it. At least let me carry the pitcher.”

  Our guests dispersed after lunch to take a siesta, a habit they had formed while under our roof, and one they disavowed each day with the same stock remarks. “I never do this at home” (Emily); “I shouldn’t eat such a big lunch” (Ruth); “I think I’ll go upstairs and read for a few minutes” (Walter). Henry followed them, at my insistence, although he waited until they were aloft and crept up to his office by the back stairs. I heard his weight collapsing on the daybed from down in the kitchen.

  No one worried about leaving me alone in the daytime any more. I was contending with the ducks (three ducks for six people), struggling to cut them into quarters with knives that seemed to have lost their edge overnight. They had been sharp enough when I used them to dice the Hubbard squash for yesterday’s supper. A whetstone improved their performance, but after two or three passes they had to be ground again. The job was slow and the result was hack work. I hoped a rich olive sauce would disguise it.

  I put the ducks to roast in a slow oven and finished coring the apples, relieved to notice the corer hadn’t gone the way of the knives. I was so preoccupied with food preparation that it was past three o’clock before I looked out the window to watch for Sally. Her car was turning into the driveway at that moment, but all I could make out were the headlights. I was slow to take in what I was seeing. At first I thought she’d left the headlights on from the night before; then I realized she needed them for driving.

  The world outside the window was encased in fog, so thick it hid the trees, an occurrence unknown in Dry Falls since the Easter season, as marvelous to my eyes as snow to a South Sea islander. Fog was composed of minute globules of water. If there was moisture in the air, the drought must be over, with time enough left before winter for the grass to green up, brooks to fill, and wells to be replenished. I began to revise the death count in my garden. My Betty Priors would survive. I would be pruning dead branches in the spring, not tearing out dead rosebushes, a sickening task, since the roots could be as long and as fat as a human arm.

  I ran out to meet Sally. She was carrying her overnight case and a basket of dried flowers—statice, strawflower, and immortelle in the pastel colors referred to in seed catalogues as “art shades”: fawn, apricot, mauve, and pale yellow. “Ghastly, aren’t they?” Sally said. “But they deserve our respect. They made it through the drought.” I flung my arms around her. “It’s going to rain any minute. Can’t you feel it?” “I suppose so,” said Sally. “It’s raining all around us. I’ve just been to Windham doing errands.” “They’re not for me?” I asked, referring to the flowers. “Of course not. I wouldn’t insult you. They’re for the church. Will you walk me over there?” I put her suitcase on the kitchen steps. We decided to take the long way, down the drive and along the road. The fog was too heavy to hunt for the shortcut through the shrubbery.

  We shuffled forward, making slow progress, concentrating on the ground to avoid wandering into the road. I held onto Sally’s arm. We could see about two feet in front of us. The route from the rectory to the church was like uncharted territory; there were no familiar landmarks. The church and the house across the street were completely invisible. At one point we bumped into the mailbox at the foot of the driveway. The fog billowed around us as we walked, filling our nostrils. I smelled a faint, organic odor of decay—rotting vegetables, overripe cheese, spent bonfires. A little farther on we escaped another collision. The sign on the church lawn loomed up in front of us, black letters on gray-painted boards: SAINT ANTHONY THE HERMIT (Protestant Episcopal) ALL WELCOME. With the sign as a guidepost, we found our way over to the gravel walk leading up to the church.

  Once on the path, we had no need to be concerned about our footing. We stopped for a moment to rest. Sally put her basket down. The fog in our lungs made it hard to breathe. I felt the top of my head, wishing I had worn a scarf to keep my hair dry. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt without a collar. I touched my bare arms and the hollow of my neck, expecting to find them slick with dampness. In response to my dumb show, Sally patted her cheeks and her hair, taking care not to disarrange her pageboy bob. “Is your hair wet?” I asked her. She paused, open-mouthed, both hands on her head, considering my question. “No,” she answered at last. “But why not? Why isn’t it?”

  We drew closer together, as if for security. Our preconceptions had brought us this far and left us stranded, enclosed by cloudlike masses in surging motion. What kind of fog was this, which carried no moisture? What kind
of substance—dry as smoke, its whiteness shot with brown and dirty yellow, like pollution from the city blown inland? If every structure on Main Street were burning, if the city of Portland were a steel town, working at wartime production, the smoke and smog would not so engulf us.

  We had been suffering from extremities of weather since early spring—heat and drought, and now this foglike emanation. Who was I to judge by appearances? A fog may be dry and still be a fog. A fog might occur in any color of the rainbow. I had read about blue moons and green suns, black rains and red tornadoes. Meteorology was a wonderful science, a catchall for phenomena unclaimed by other branches of knowledge—fiery wheels of light following ships at sea, showers of sand falling on Naples and Tasmania, transportations of objects by hurricanes (bits of metal, fish, frogs, sprigs of grain). These were actual events, recorded not through hearsay and legend, but in almanacs and meteorological journals. As a gardener, I kept one eye on the skies during the planting and growing seasons. I was dependent on the state of the atmosphere. It consoled me, rather than the opposite, to learn how many unusual incidents had been classified as vagaries of the weather.

  What would Henry make of the fog? I could picture his excitement, fatigue wiped away by this windfall for his frustrated researches, so much richer than moles and delivery vans. I imagined him outside in the yard, making passes at the fog with an empty glass jar, trying to trap a sample for analysis. I could hear his mind working, manufacturing a connection between this fog and other suspicious cloud formations at the Easter Vigil, in the churchyard, in Adele Manning’s bedroom, in our own living room, linking them inevitably with the assaults on local women.

  Since I had been out in the fog for some time, I expected to be cross-examined. I could anticipate some of Henry’s questions: did the fog have a smell? a texture? was it luminous or slimy? was it uniformly dense, or patchy? could you make out any shapes in the clouds, any forms that were recognizable? By the end of the session I would feel as if I were trapped inside his theories, like a bait fish in the belly of a whale.

  I started up the path toward the church. Some defiance in my posture must have reassured her, because Sally retrieved her basket and followed behind me, instead of hanging on to my waistband or squeezing in beside me on the narrow walkway. The fog was thicker now and almost motionless. In Henry’s idiom, it was a manifestation of the Dry Falls assailant, and its thickening a sign that the assailant was gaining strength. In my present temper it was an impediment to visibility, an inconvenience, and—even more—a bitter disappointment.

  “It’s not going to rain,” I said. “It’s never going to rain.” “I know,” said Sally. “I got my hopes up.” “Perhaps we should try prayer,” I suggested. Sally thought this was hilarious. “You don’t mean that,” she laughed. “You haven’t tried it?” “No,” I answered. “I never thought about it.” “How odd,” said Sally. “You’re the preacher’s wife and I’m a churchgoer. So much for religious indoctrination.” “I’m not religious,” I said. “That’s Henry’s job.” “I thought I was,” said Sally. “But don’t you see? If we were cave people in the Stone Age, we’d be praying. It’s a natural impulse, a form of speech. It may be prior to speech, like breathing. We’re gardeners, small-time or not. We have a big stake in this. Prayer should have been the first thing that occurred to us.” “And the reason it didn’t,” I added, “is because we’ve left praying to the priests? Because religion cut us off from nature?” “The Christian religion,” said Sally. She burst out laughing again. “Does this mean I can quit the altar guild?”

  We had reached the church steps, where the fog was thinner, a fact from which I drew no conclusions. I entered the building ahead of Sally and switched on the wall sconces. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to complete visibility. I half expected to find that the fog had infiltrated the church interior. There were two empty vases on the altar, white porcelain encased in silver filigree, more suitable for irises or lilies than Sally’s modest everlastings. She took her basket and walked down the center aisle. I sat in the back pew, watching her go about her work, blending colors expertly.

  At a service in a crowded church I felt estranged, unconnected. In an empty church I experienced a sense of relaxation and a quickening of the spirit, as if the curtain were about to go up in a dimming theater. It was a friendly little building, well worn but well kept, hymnals faded and loose at the spines, brasses gleaming and altar linen spotless. Something resided in this vaulted space, however mankind had misportrayed it.

  Sally sat down next to me, surveying her arrangements with a critical eye. “They’re all vase,” she said. “The flowers look anemic.” “What do you think?” I asked her. “Should we pray in here or out in the open?” “It’s better here,” she said. “The fog might act as a sound barrier.” “Does that mean we should pray out loud? Should we pray in unison?” “We’re giving it too much thought,” Sally said. “It’s supposed to be instinctive.”

  She picked up the prayer book I had been leafing through, an edition dated 1945. “Is there something in here?” she asked. “The usual stuff,” I said. “‘Send us rain and showers that the earth may yield her increase for our use and benefit.’” “As if Nature were our servant,” she said. “It’s in the Bible,” I said. “Right up front, in Genesis. ‘God said unto them, “Replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”’” “You have a great memory,” said Sally. “So what do you propose?” I asked. “Shall we wait till the fog lifts and go up Pumpkin Hill with rattles and noise-makers?” “Are you in a hurry?” Sally asked me. “A little,” I said. “I have to get back to put the tea on and rescue the duck.”

  Sally leaned against the back of the pew. “It’s nice here with no one around. It’s a neutral zone.” By unspoken agreement we sat in the quiet nave for a decent interval, eyes open (Sally) and eyes closed (myself). I didn’t move my lips, although she may have. What formulas she used, if any, I would never ask her. Neither one of us got down on our knees. At first I listened to the silence and found it was full of sounds, the creak of old boards, a faint buzz from an electric light bulb, Sally’s breathing. I thought of rain, or, rather, tried to remember it, slanting rods of gray water, boiling puddles spreading on the ground, flower stalks quivering as the rainwater slashed them, petals smitten and scattered. I pictured gentler rains as well—showers, drizzles, sprinkles, and mists, falling harmlessly. I heard rain making music in my head on rooftops and gutters, splashing, clattering, tinkling. At last I settled like a pool in the woods stirred by pelting rain, till I was cleared all the way to the bottom of mental sediment.

  When we emerged into daylight from church light, calm and comfortable in our skins, the fog had diminished to a shimmer, a condition of the everlasting heat wave. Our prayers had not been rewarded, although dispersal of the fog was surely an unsought boon. Prayers were not always answered in kind, in order, in haste, or even in our lifetime. We took the short way back to the house through the hole in the shrubbery. The bushes were so dry and brittle that twigs snapped as we brushed past them.

  Walter was waiting for us in the kitchen, mopping his face with a wet paper towel. Accentuated by enormous dark circles, his brown eyes had a glint of irritation in them. “I dare not hope you’re going to turn off the oven,” he said. “If you’re hot,” I asked, “what are you doing in the kitchen?” “It heats up the whole house,” said Walter. “You should have turned on the ventilator.” “You could have turned it on yourself,” I said. “It’s not working.” “Yes, it is.” I reached under the range hood and pressed the switch. The fan came on with a roar. “Is that better?” I asked. “I couldn’t find it,” said Walter, blaming me for the design of the stove as much as for my negligence.

  Sally intervened to keep our wrangle from getting out of hand. “Have you been outside today, Walter?” “Briefly,” he said. “I heard the weather report from Windham. I
thought there might be some sign of rain.” “And there wasn’t?” urged Sally. “You’ve just been out,” he retorted. “Why are you asking me?”

  Ruth appeared in the doorway. “Oh, there you are, Sally,” she said. “Did you know it was raining in Windham? This blue sky is an insult.” “We went over to the church,” I said. “It seemed a little hazy.” “Not at all,” said Ruth. “I walked to the village for my mail. It was as clear as a bell.”

  I shooed them out of the kitchen to the screened-in porch, promising them a bottomless pitcher of iced tea. Ruth went to call Henry and wake Emily, who was still napping. Sally stayed behind to help me, putting glasses on a tray while I filled the ice bucket. “I’d say that was fairly conclusive,” I said. “Not a happy thought, is it?” she asked. “I guess we’re the only ones who saw it.” “Don’t mention the fog to Henry. I refuse to let it spoil your visit.” “It’s not a normal visit,” admitted Sally. I finished slicing a panful of hermit bars and piled them on a plate. “Throw this to the animals,” I said. “It may keep them from turning on us.”

  PART X

  Christ When We Arise

  Chapter Twenty-six

  One after another we came down to dinner in unaccustomed finery, the men wearing open-necked shirts and linen trousers (Henry’s oatmeal, Walter’s coral pink). The women were dressed in summer frocks and bits of jewelry. Bunches of blown-glass grapes dangled from Ruth’s ears. Emily’s neck was encircled by a string of little wooden pinecones, Maine’s modest state flower. As with colonials in a half-savage outpost, our attire had seen better days and more scrupulous maintenance. Ruth’s green polka-dotted shirtwaist, unbecoming to her dumpy figure, showed the wrinkles from the suitcase. Emily’s blue skirt and overblouse, made of some sort of heavy-duty cheesecloth, had been shaken but certainly not pressed. My white sundress had been in the closet for several years. There were grayish hanger marks on the straps to prove it. Only Sally lived up to homeland standards. Her black silk slacks and matching camp shirt were spruce and fetching.