Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series)

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “Last one in’s a rotten egg,” cries Judah, and she wants to warn him that his wife has been unfaithful, that she’s spawning Sherbrookes who have no true Sherbrooke blood. But he is happy, oblivious; he does his flutter kick. He splashes and whoops and, in the water, stands on his head. The horses graze contentedly; there’s been no damage, Judah says, emerging again to dry off. He shakes the water off him like a dog. The horses shift and stamp. He blows and sputters and wheezes hugely, saying, “Do you hear me? There’s no damage, sister. Nothing. None.”

  Therefore, at the pond’s near edge, she does not slow her pace. She rucks up her gown a tuck higher and tiptoes through the cattails. The marsh grass is springy; it gives. She is dancing splendidly; she whirls and twirls and floats. Wild ducks flee from her and fly off south; she hears their wings. And now the water welcomes her; it is a bevy of partners, and she embraces each in turn. They yield and sing and sink.

  XVI

  “When in the cool of the evening we walk by the arroyo here—for such they call the stream bed that is dust and gravel now which once must needs have been mighty indeed to hollow these hills—Willard discourses to me on the workings of the Covenants, and how the Doctrine pertains. Let me impress upon you, brother, that the only begotten Son of God in the flesh is nonetheless part of a purposed and principled unity, one in three. Scarce half a century ago, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was organized at Fayette, and see what progress we make: heathen by the hundreds flocking to our fold! As if the Melchizedek priesthood—which as you know was directly bestowed by these resurrected apostles, Peter, James, and John, upon the prophet Joseph Smith and also Oliver Cowdery—as if this priesthood, I say, and also the lower Aaronic orders, were herdsmen watching over the lambs and the large-bellied goats. We run around the pen. We follow the leader in circles, close to. But just about and outside of the gate, remaining there for our protection against the importunate scavenging Wolves, is the whole of which the Shepherd seems but part: godhead and good appetite, an ignorance dispersed.”

  The dawn is late, with that irresolute lingering dark that means the end of October. Ian walks out by the barn, where Hal is stacking wood. He labors in the shadows—bent-backed, stooping, and chomping on his unlit pipe; Ian remembers, embarrassed, how yesterday he’d promised help but had forgotten.

  “Changed your mind, did you?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Had better things to do this morning?”

  “Mm-mn.”

  “Well.” Boudreau blows his nose. He checks the wind’s direction. “It’s not getting any warmer.”

  They work together in silence, stacking and facing off cords. Hal has backed up a wagon, with split maple wood and ash. “You can tell me anytime, shut up. Just mind my own business,” he says. “But what’s it like, I wonder.”

  “What?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six. Why?”

  “No reason.” Boudreau studies the alignment of the wood, then says, “We’ll keep this section clear. Back the wagon on in later.”

  “All right.”

  “I just thought I’d ask you, is all.”

  Ian knows there’s no use rushing: that impatience in him will slow Boudreau down. This is the spring’s dead wood, ready to burn. So he signifies his willingness to answer, saying nothing, sneezing in the barn’s thick outer air.

  “Because maybe,” Boudreau says—he ties twine together, slides the barn door shut again, and drapes his loop on a nail—“maybe you been to the Alagash?”

  “No.”

  “God’s country, that is.”

  Ian has chaff in his throat. He hawks and spits.

  “You know what my boy told me? He learned this in biology, he says; you know how your body cells die. Well, every seven years exactly every one of them is changed; you’re not the same person you was. There’s not a single cell alive in you that was living here seven years back.” Boudreau marvels at this; he thumps his chest. “This heart of mine even; it’s been eight different hearts. You figure fifty-six is eight times seven, right? You figure every time you change it takes you seven years; you’ve got to figure I been eight different people, seems like. Seven, anyways.”

  There are pigeons in the barn. They settle on the flashing, unalarmed.

  “You’re an educated person,” says Boudreau. “I want your opinion on that.” He holds his right hand up and ticks the fingers off, working backward to the thumb. He folds each finger down in the service of arithmetic, intent. “So what I want to know is, are you figuring to stay?”

  “How long? For seven years?”

  Boudreau nods. He studies Ian closely now, eyes large in the dim light. “And what sort of partner do you think you’re like to be?”

  “Partner?”

  Hal nods again. He plays with the brim of his cap. “I figure I got the know-how and you got the money and land.”

  “For what?” Ian asks. He can hear the pigeons flutter and ruffle, settling.

  “For anything you’ve got a mind to,” Boudreau says. He looks like a cardplayer now—cagey, holding his cap to his chest.

  “Development?”

  “Maybe.”

  “A shopping center?”

  “Why not?”

  “A bowling alley,” Ian says. “I’ve always been partial to them. We could use the bottom land.”

  “If you’ve got a mind to . . .”

  “Parking lots,” he continues. “We’re in need of parking lots around here.”

  Boudreau seems less certain now.

  “Shit,” Ian says. “Stock racing. That’s what we could do with it. Build us a track!”

  “If you want to . . .”

  “The answer is no.”

  Maggie runs to meet him. Her strides are panic-lengthened, and she wheels her arms. She appears to find no rhythm, swerving, jostled, jerked along and not quite falling; she has not run in months.

  “Where’s Hattie?” she cries out to Ian. “Where’ve you been?”

  He sees her terror, takes her arm.

  “Where is she?”

  “Wait,” he says. “First catch your breath.”

  She stands beside him, panting, flushed, sweat starting on her face; she leans on him and shuts her eyes. “I’m certain she’s gone. I was so sure you had left me.”

  “No.”

  “But she has. There’s no answer there, no matter what I say to her. It’s not the same sort of silence, Ian, not like last night when we knew she was listening.”

  “Let’s look at her window,” he says.

  Maggie is calmer now; her breathing subsides. But as they walk around the house, Ian supporting her, she says, “There’s no one alive in that room. I tell you I can feel it; she’s gone. She’s killed herself.”

  “Take it easy. We don’t . . .” They round the corner and see the fire ladder and the open window and her shawl on the yew bush beneath. Maggie stops. She starts to laugh. Her laugh is high-pitched and irregular, on hysteria’s edge. “I told you so,” she says.

  The ladder hugs the clapboard as if pasted on. There is no wind.

  “Well, anyhow, it’s one way in.”

  “It’s one way out, you mean.”

  “No,” Ian says. “I mean I’ll climb on up and take a look. It’s easier than knocking the door down. You meet me back inside.”

  “I’m staying here.”

  “Please. You were racing up that path to meet me; you’re shivering now. I’ll climb up and unlock the door. That way . . .”

  But Maggie takes the brown shawl from the branch it dangles on, and swaddles herself and says, “No.” He cannot argue with her; he has come to share her dread. So for something to do he tests the ladder, puts his weight on it and pulls. It holds; it seems securely hooked across the sill. He starts to climb.

  “It’s useless,” Maggie says. “She isn’t there, I know it. She’s gone—can’t you understand anything? Why can’t you understand that?”

&nb
sp; Ian continues to climb. As he clears the yew bush it comes to him that his mother’s right, that he’s some playacting suitor making his way up to vacancy. The window gapes above him, open, and she would not leave the window open were she still inside. He thinks perhaps he’ll find her corpse, and that she’s let the cold air in so as not to stink. This is absurd, he tells himself; this is as silly as believing she eloped. But he cannot keep from shaking as he clears the final rung; the ladder clanks beneath him and he hears Maggie talking, but not what she says. He puts his head above the ledge and, eyes shut, tumbles in. The room is unlit, rectangular, cold; there is nothing in the room.

  Maggie looks about her. Whenever she attempts to rest, the baby within her is restless; it’s used to motion, she assumes, and prefers being rocked when she walks. She holds her side and tries to keep the panic in, staring up at the ladder and wall. Her son has disappeared. There is some sort of order, apparently, in what she sees as order’s absence; it is like those number series she’d been tested on in grade school, to test her gift for patterning. It’s the sort of game that Judah liked, according with his sense of how things fit. The simplest questions showed a simple sequence; if the list ran two-four-six-eight, you could answer ten. If it ran four, fourteen, twenty-four, thirty-four, you could answer forty-four comes next. She says these numbers aloud.

  Her child will deal with all of this. Her child will bring vivacity into the dead surrounding space—bringing frogs and teddy bears and friends, wearing so rapid a sequence of clothes that Maggie cannot quite determine if it is male or female, young or old. It wears pajamas, nightgowns, jump suits, snowsuits, pants, skirts, blouses, sweaters, and has an assortment of hats. It is an infant, little girl, stripling, youth and debutante at once. It cries, wails, drinks from her breast, then from a bottle of gin without interval and is married, then both a mother and father. Her child eats Easter bunnies’ ears, then jelly beans and pizza, then selects a lemon tart from the dessert cart at Périgord Park. She tries to watch such fantasy unreeling like a series of home movies with the focus not quite right. Whatever it is, it is soon.

  For Jude the future’s guises had been threatful, indistinct. He saw plots behind each tax hike, and inroads every time they tarred a road. She has begun to understand how all his self-taught caginess about the law was meant to throw a smoke screen up—not against her own behavior but government authority—not to save the money but to thwart the I.R.S. Had he died intestate, Maggie as his lawful wife would anyhow have gotten what his maneuvering offered: the house and the land for life. And the trust funds were an ill-named joke: they signaled lack of trust.

  Yet Finney, with his chitchat about provisos six and nine, was heralding the future’s toll and telling her to watch out. She has a vision, suddenly, of their impoverished children’s children squabbling over resale rights, and who would get to keep what piece of tract land after the developers were done. They would have to sell the place in order to pay inheritance taxes; they would divide and subdivide and end up with the Toy House only, staring through a picket fence at the mansion-turned-museum that had been their family home.

  “How might we best live after those who go before? What remedy or comfort can we discover—with our great fathers dead, against this Present Age? It is my dream of waking that we follow their Example and survive. When Father died it was as if the light of the world went out for me, and all delight was snuffed. Things used to seem so organized . . .”

  Ian reappears. His head is framed by the window’s white frame. The wood requires painting. “I’m coming down,” he calls. “She’s not here.”

  “I know that.”

  “Yes.” In the silence she can hear doors opening and closing; Maggie knows it is too late to follow Hattie’s tracks. Her sister-in-law is light-footed, and she’d have gone off alone. Like those aged Eskimos that Judah said got up and left the fire’s circle, heading out to freeze, she must have headed for the hills, not town. It’s just exactly like her, Maggie thinks, her way of having the last bitter laugh.

  Ian comes out from the house. “Should we call the police?” he asks. “When did you notice this? When do you think it happened; how long has she been gone?”

  “Last night sometime. I thought maybe you’d run off together.”

  “We do have to notify someone; we’ll need help.”

  “I can’t have them ogling me, Ian. Not this morning, I can’t face them now.”

  He studies her. She is floating, inward, arms on her stomach as if it were buoyant. It may be a fool’s errand but he’ll make it anyhow, and spend the day hunting his aunt. There are flashlights in the car. Maggie nods at him and, trailing the brown shawl, walks past. She enters the house like a hospital hall; irresolute, he follows.

  “Well, go if you’re going,” she says. “I’ll wait.” So once again he gathers up equipment for the car—keys and blankets, a bottle of rye. He drives the land’s perimeter as he had done six months before, arriving. The stone walls of the property are bare. He has half expected, somehow, she’d be sitting by some gate. Or that he’d meet a car whose passenger seat she occupied, turning in the entry drive—sure she’d told them of her plan to spend a night after bridge with Doris, or that she’d gone to Arlington to visit Laura McKechnie who’d been begging her to come since Lord knows when. She’d feign innocence in any case, pretending not to know she’d been in any way missed or remiss; she’d scold him for his fretful search and say she knew the reason. “Just because you want to leave doesn’t mean I’m leaving, mister. Don’t call a kettle black until you’ve cleaned the pot.”

  But the few cars he encounters do not slow down; the village beneath him is quiet. He drives through Main Street twice, in case, where the houses yield no secrets to him, and the bar would not contain her, and the post office and grocery are empty. Nor does he think it likely that Hattie—who called departure “trespassing”—would leave. Still, there is the ladder and the evidence of escape. So she’d let herself down and gone for a walk and not returned for twelve hours at least, he calculates how far she could get in that time.

  She might have gone in circles. She would have stopped to rest. She might set out on what she took to be the path of least resistance, and find it was a marsh. There are paper streamers dangling from the trees, festooning them for Mischief Night; tomorrow will be Hallowe’en. There are exploded pumpkins on the southerly approach road, dropped from trucks. Ian parks and finds himself where first he’d parked, returning. He vaults the fence and is again at the shed field’s far edge. He stands beneath the oak, hears what he swears is the same hoot owl calling, and studies the Big House a half mile below. He paces the field’s width, then length, and, hunting his aunt’s traces, crosses the field and continues.

  That afternoon she takes to her bed. She has known for weeks that she will deliver the baby at home; the local hospital is stuffed with aging gossips, and the maternity ward has four-bed rooms, not singles or even a room with two beds. Ian protested it might be risky, and she said more babies have been born at home than ever came from hospitals; she’ll run the risk on that.

  She used to sing him “shortnin’ bread.” She used to chant the verses over and over until Ian slept; then Judah would yank on the rope to the cradle and set it steadily rocking. He’d sing the chorus with her in what he thought was harmony, but was a separate tune. She could remember “shortnin’ bread” and also the song that went, “You push the damper in, and you push the damper out, and the smoke goes up the chimbley all the same.” All it is is repetition; all it means is turning twenty-five-year circles until you start again.

  But try as she might to imagine her child, the life within her—even in continual motion, even with the hiccups—stays abstract. It is an alien memory, how twenty-five years ago she fondled two male babies and breast-fed and fed them formula and changed their clothes continually and handled their bodies with intimate ease. Since Seth died in his crib, she has made a point of forgetting what those early years were like; now
she finds herself hunting the memory. She has readied the old, stored layette. She polished the metal fittings on the cradle and put lemon oil on the slats. She kept herself busy for all of October—folding and unfolding the child’s receiving blankets, then washing and ironing and folding them again.

  Yet it is the exercise of duty, not desire. Maggie wonders what she’ll do and how she’ll manage with this child. All she knows is that she’ll have it, willy-nilly, and even if it has two heads to match its two splayed feet. She believes in abortion, of course; she’s a member of Planned Parenthood, and the future of the planet depends on birth control. But she has to have this baby, has never had any choice.

  XVII

  “On June 27, 1844—a heinous day, and I blush to have shared breath with those who breathed that afternoon—men blackened their faces with Cork. How far much blacker, however, were their souls to have counselled such Action! Even now, with Willard’s intercession that I learn Charity, that Meekness and Forgiveness and Obedience to things ordained are Christian virtues truly—and the Prophet shows us that much Evil springs from Ignorance, that it is not wicked but witless behavior we largely should disdain—nonetheless I find no charity within me when I consider how that mob, that rabble, that canaille broke into Carthage Jail. ‘To Carthage then I came,’ writes Augustine, says Willard, ‘where an unholy fire burnt all about mine ears.’ How much less holy, even, were the brands and flaming torches that these brigands flung about them, as if their insignia forever and ever must be the light of damnation, the heat that devours. When the scuffle was over, John Taylor was hurt. But Willard Richards escaped. Yet those lawbreakers had as quarry the leaders of us all, the Latter-day prophets themselves, and were it not profanity thus to blaspheme his title, I should call Joseph Smith indeed a pearl of Great Price among peas.