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

by Delbanco, Nicholas

  “The First President was brutally cut down. So too was Hyrum Smith. But whether with axes or long knives or rifles I do not know; it is all one. They cannot harm his free fleeing, whatever baying pack they constitute themselves: we are ascendant, brother, and shall survive even this! To be accused of Treason who was eminently Faithful; who was lieutenant general of the Nauvoo legion, pacific in men’s eyes! To have been vilified and fettered whilst these blackamoors moved freely against him, sneering, using I know not what vile imputations and piercing the Dear Flesh! Who uses the term Treason in any other context but to call such mob in Treason’s thrall traduces even language, much less its purposed intent. No. Governor Ford pledged protection. This pledge was empty, duplicitous. He is a latter-day Pilate whilst the Smiths are Saints. I cannot rid myself of rage—of sorrow rather, that His Presence is denied us who had every right to worship it continually. We are bereft of such huge-hearted men as walked this land before . . .”

  She had gone with Andrew, last year, to his country place in Westport. It was an eighteenth-century farmhouse, with white siding and dark green trim, and there was a heated outdoor pool. They ate at a waterfront restaurant, hearing foghorns, sampling the paella and the salad bar. Afterward they drove back home, and she watched comedians and chorus girls, the eleven o’clock news and the Johnny Carson show. The house was sparsely furnished; Andrew was deciding, he said, what sort of motif to employ. He thought the thing to do was to have an ancient house with only the most contemporary furnishings—or vice-versa, to have a modern house furnished with only antiques. Lately, he confided, he’d determined that perhaps one could also manage to marry the two, since Mies and Shaker styling share a principle; in both cases, less is more.

  Maggie had had trouble sleeping. She watched a late-night movie, fitful, half alert. She turned the sound off but retained the image—of six boys in a boat in the South China Sea, becalmed, without water or oars. They depended on one compass and a coolie for directions; when Maggie switched the sound off he was telling them his rickshaw was more suitable conveyance. She shut her eyes; she slept. At three o’clock, however, she was awakened from a dream of burial by the sound of something thrashing. She shook Andrew awake; the television nickered at them, indistinct. Then Andrew pulled the window up and she heard grunts and sloshing sounds outside. He said, “Christ, something’s in the pool.” She said, “You’ve got a cover on,” and he said, “Yes. But it’s plastic; it floats.”

  They ran outside, wearing raincoats; the night was opaque. The fog was thick, and somehow it refracted sound so that the grunting and the sloshing seemed to come from all directions; he turned the pool lights on, but they too were refracted and she could barely see. Then she saw, at the pool’s deep end, what seemed to be a remnant of her dream. A buck with horns high as the diving board was caught in the water and plastic, writhing, snorting, panicky. She also panicked and began to reach for him, but Andrew shouted: “No!” Its horns were huge; it slashed at her, she drew back from its fearsome reach.

  The water steamed; the buck was black and tangled in the torn blue cover; Andrew had the pool net out—the one he used for cleaning leaves—and was wielding it like a flimsy aluminum spear. The buck backed off; they drove it into the shallow end. There, on its knees and scrambling, slipping, the animal broke free at last and, charging up the three pink steps, impaled a plastic deck chair on its horns.

  Maggie laughed; she heard herself—a thin, high wail on the edge of hysteria. Stamping, streaming, the buck reared high with its white plastic garland and, with an upward thrusting, flung the chair into the pool. Then it was gone. It leaped into the darkness back behind the lights. She was not sure, for an instant, if such fierce animality had indeed been trapped or willful, but she held to the diving board, listening, rapt. Andrew said, “Shit. It’s been shitting all over the pool.”

  So then he started up the vacuum cleaner, and they pulled the deck chair out and took away the plastic cover and, for an hour, while she sat at the pool’s edge and watched, he vacuumed deer shit from the depths. If he didn’t catch it now, he said, it would be slime by morning. The night was cold; she shivered, watching; he worked with a shocked thoroughness that imitated calm.

  It was simple, Andrew said. The buck had walked out on the pool blanket, trying to drink. In summer they came for the roses; there was less food in the Westport woods than the herd required; the town dogs were leashed and garden fences were low, so they’d get used to foraging in people’s backyards—he’d seen deer before. “But in swimming pools?” she asked.

  “No. And nor a buck either.”

  “I tried to pull him out,” she said. “I was reaching for those horns.”

  “You must have been sleepwalking.”

  “This isn’t working,” Maggie said. “I—I need to go back to the city. Please.”

  “We just got here!”

  “It isn’t that simple.”

  “Of course it is. Take sleeping pills; have a Grand Marnier. Anything. For Christ’s sake, it’s my furniture he wrecked!”

  “Judah wants me to come to Vermont. Finney called to say so this morning.”

  “Who’s Finney?”

  “Our lawyer. Yesterday morning, I mean.”

  Andrew had remonstrated with her. He had said she was upset, said six good hours’ sleep would fix it and just because her husband’s lawyer said she ought to come back north didn’t mean she had to jump. As far as he could see, said Andrew, she was making a mistake; she was cutting herself off from diversion just when she needed diverting. But Maggie—on the diving board, legs tucked beneath her and her raincoat buttoned to the neck, watching the water spread and ripple with his extracting motion—had known she would return. Her husband was dying, she said—trapped and dying in the Big House—and she’d write him in the morning to tell him she’d be on the bus.

  She conjures up Andrew Kincannon. She has not done so in some time, but now that the baby is descending and her contractions start, she concentrateson its father. He shifts his shape, however, and is not palpable; it is as if he were wind chaff or pollen spores caught on a screen. Nor does she know, these moments, if what she feels is gratitude or scorn. Judah haunts the house in ways far more corporeal than Hattie’s daytime prowler or her lover in Manhattan: his foot has worn each floorboard, his back grazed every wall. She ranges the rooms—bearing something within her she’ll choose to call Sherbrooke, waiting for some indication of her dead husband’s feeling toward it, feeling it kick. It still would be simple to leave. She could go to New York afterward, she tells herself, or New Orleans, or some other country, and raise the child in peace. There would be attentive doctors, solicitous new friends. She would be nobody’s whore, but a widow, well provided for, and in a suitable climate. She could fly to Guatemala, where Anne-Maria once went. But she knows she will remain instead; she will suckle her baby this winter, when the grass is sere and branches stripped, and never leave the house.

  Maggie remembers a display in the Natural History Museum. When they first settled in New York, Ian had been young enough to want to examine the dinosaurs and reconstructed tribal totems and animals of the veldt. Later he loved weaponry and rocks. But she recollects, this evening, a cross section of New England farm soil such as hers. The exhibit showed seasonal change.

  The farm in spring was as she knew it, but the farm in winter showed a burrowing collection of things that seek protection from snow. The mole tunnels, for instance, were shown behind glass, and in the last such tunnel lay a mole. There were field mice and worms in abundance, and everything sought shelter from the frozen surface of the earth. She tells herself the blind snug mole is sensible; she remembers Judah shooting groundhogs, then stuffing them back in their holes. It is all a question of what sort of questions to put. If Andrew calls, she decides, she’ll tell him—but not until he asks.

  For he is as alien to the life around her as she herself would feel now on Fifty-Seventh and Fifth; they share nothing she wants to acknowledge t
hey share. The child inside her is the child she had been robbed of, earlier; it compensates Judah for Seth.

  Maggie supposes her dead husband is phrasing what she’d not quite phrased. Her teacher still, he squints at her: Adam’s curse was also a blessing, and labor a God-given thing. They would make snow families. Maggie lay on her back at the garden’s far edge, arms akimbo, waving. Then, jumping to her feet, she would leave angels incised in the drift. Ian would use coal and carrots and potatoes for the snowman’s features. He had been a purist, eight years old.

  She remembers their squabbles at play. Ian wanted only snow and made elaborate ice carvings on the snowman’s chest—undoing Judah’s tie. Judah used a tie with orange and black stripes and a Windsor knot; Ian couldn’t reach the knot and couldn’t untie it anyhow and therefore he yanked at the tie’s ends and severed Joe the Snowman’s head.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” Judah said.

  “Look what you made me do, Daddy.”

  “I didn’t make you.”

  “You did.” Ian stood there in pure opposition, lower lip trembling, left mitten holding the tie.

  “Like father, like son,” she had said. They turned to watch her approach; she had been muffled, walking.

  “Thank God we’ve got no daughter,” Judah said.

  She bent to Ian. “Don’t you pay any attention. The chip on your daddy’s shoulder is a chip off an old, old block.”

  Judah patted Joe the Snowman’s head back into shape. “No-neck Joe, that’s what we’ll call him. No-neck, no-necktie Joe.”

  “Mom? Let’s make snow angels in all different sizes. In every direction. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Ian peered from his snowsuit, consoled. “In every direction there is.”

  Birds fly left to right outside her window, and she tries to remember if that brings good luck. She lets the curtains fall. They hide her from sight; she is grateful for that; she moves within the room like a portly, aging vestal; Judah’d called her “Sacred Vessel” when she bore his sons. He did so half joking, of course, but beneath the banter there had been awe. So she tells him now, saying it aloud, “Hey, husband, the vessel done cracked.” She sees the wild ducks settle, early, on their southward flight. Before they were uneasy—squabbling with the Pekins for possession of the pond, settling on the edge of it for respite only, not rest. Now they appear to remain.

  Boudreau has reported to Ian that this was a good year for hay; we made it while the sun shone, the man says. The barns are piled to the rafters, the five silos full, and he will sell it in the winter when the others come up short, he’s sold a thousand bales already to make room. Ian returns to the car. He has walked all day, or nearly, crisscrossing the fields and following bridle paths and the sounds of startled creatures in the brush.

  He hears nothing human, however, and if his aunt is on the place she—like so much else, like everything he’d planned to keep—eludes him. Ian asks himself, has he elected recurrence? Is he being put through paces that his father ran? “What begins as mystery completes itself as politics,” his fifth-form teacher said. “Péguy. Charles Péguy, gentlemen. I trust your French is adequate. Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique. That’s what the poet-warrior observes.”

  Ian remembers nothing else about Péguy, nor what the phrase applied to. But he sees Mr. Kay again, bifocals at his nose-end, purple sweat-moons under his armpits, tapping his ruler for emphasis: “History repeats itself. That’s one of the reasons our esteemed Henry Ford called it bunk. He thought that interchangeable units increased efficiency, no doubt, but could be controlled. Witness the assembly line. Witness the shameful yet self-congratulatory miracle of Detroit. What are our Fords and Chryslers, gentlemen, I ask you to consider—(and be prepared to do so on Monday at length, for our little written exercise)—what are our Fords and Chryslers, I submit, but instances of Péguy’s formulation, not Ford’s: an idea outlasting its time.

  “Let me put it to you this way.” Mr. Kay pushed back his spectacles. His blue serge suit had chalk stains and his buttons had popped and cuffs frayed. He spoke with such weary precision, however, that Ian thought him noble—a daunted guardian of standards waging battle five mornings each week. “Putting aside the question of the motor car, of the internal combustion engine and what havoc it creates in the atmosphere, what pride of place it gives to oil and the possibility of corruption; putting aside the astonishing truth that soon we will have paved over, in this nation, an area the size of France and go hurtling over concrete at a breakneck pace to—where? oblivion? the Sunday picnic?—I offer you a second formula, my friends: those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. Your essay should be five pages minimum, typed, and with a cover sheet.” Their teacher finished with a flourish, straightening his cuffs. “Class dismissed.”

  So Ian asks himself, should he remain on the land? A question for him one last time, though it had not been for Judah, it seems his father’s question nonetheless. Is his mother’s photograph at thirty (yellowing, the birch trees brown, with Ian peeking at the camera from her knee’s protection, her hair unbound and her hands on her hips, elbows out) the emblem he hunted in Sally but had failed to find? Hattie and the villagers have locked him so entirely in place that he fears his own identity is gone.

  Everything that’s mystical ends up manipulation; all early authority fades. If man is a political animal, as Ian once believed, then he has been caged. He imagines his mother behind him, and he takes her hand. Her knuckles go white when she squeezes, and he asks her, offering, What kind of help can I be? What do you want of me; what can I do, how can I be of best use?

  When labor begins, Maggie does not recognize it as labor—only her accustomed tightening previous to sleep. Then the contractions come in earnest: a band of muscle wringing her as if she were the washing squeezed to dry. There are gigantic hands around her, fingers interlaced. She holds her breath, then breathes shallowly. She is unprepared. She has intended somehow, someway, to prepare herself for this. She has bought books about Lamaze, the methodology of painless childbirth, yoga, and breath control. There is a book by a Frenchman who insists that babies come out smiling if they come in darkened rooms, and she agrees with this: being born is enough of a trauma. Therefore she leaves the room lights off. We don’t need hospitals and people shouting and instant vitamin shots; she’s said this to Ian, persuasive, but Ian is not in the house. Hattie is dead in the attic, she fears. Her child will be a stillborn girl, and she will die in the process of birth, and Ian would return to find three generations of Sherbrookes to bury: the women of his line.

  Maggie musters self-control. She calls the doctor and he tells her to time the contractions, to tell him how long between contractions and call him back, okay. She hears the noise of his household on the other end; then he hangs up. She understands that her own household produces no similar noise; she stares at the hands of her watch, forgetful of her purpose in such staring. The contractions cease, Ian will be home, she tells herself, before things can get serious; her labor with him took two days. She waits eight minutes, twelve, fifteen, and calls the doctor to confess there’s nothing yet. He tells her therefore not to worry and to try to get some rest. She has a wakeful dream.

  Maggie is with Judah on just such an evening, though thirty years before. They are courting, have not yet been married. He shows her how to twist the wires of a barbed-wire fence together so they tighten, using a stick of wood as lever; he is repairing a gate. On the far side cows file past; they have beaten the path brick-hard. The cows have eaten everything but thistle; the pasture is infertile now, he tells her, more a place to exercise than feed. She will be Mrs. Judah Sherbrooke in two weeks. She wonders how the animals decide to cluster to a path, and where they decide to fan out. In certain meadows they walk single file, in sequence; in others they graze without order; this is also true of sheep. She listens for Ian, for Hattie, for the noise of the furnace or toilet or pump. She is alone in the house. She brushes her
hair at the dressing-room table, tallying three hundred strokes. Her arms go weary; she rests them on her stomach and pats the jumping, kicking thing inside. Again she has a contraction—thinking herself those wires now, with the twisting child a stick and everything rotated tightly, taut—but cannot remember how long since the last. Time is not sequential, she decides, but circular. The light that dusk, with Judah beside her, had a kind of thickness to it that she supposes was dust.

  In this fashion she prepares to pass the night. She is provided for, fenced in; she will let the doctor sleep. With such security about her, Maggie cannot bring herself to dial his number yet again.

  On school mornings, Ian remembers, the table offered everything a man and boy and two women could eat. Judah was back from the barns. He’d drawn feed for the cows, if it were winter, and milked them and set them out to pasture in the spring and fall and would come in for breakfast steaming, slapping his hands. But his father would wait to eat breakfast until he, Ian, arrived. There had been orange juice and milk and mugs of coffee that he learned to like. “Time was,” his mother told him, “when you wouldn’t take your bottle unless it had some coffee in it. To color the milk.”

  There had been cornbread and blueberry muffins and cheese and every sort of jam; there was bacon or sausage to go with the eggs. The eggs were scrambled one day, fried the next; therefore on three school mornings every week—Monday, Wednesday, Friday—he’d get scrambled eggs. He preferred once-over-lightly to sunny-side up, and always added catsup to the egg mush he made. “Don’t do that,” Hattie said, “it’s not good manners, Ian.”

  “I’m not,” he used to answer her. “It’s my fork that’s doing it”—pressing the tines through the yolk.