by Paula Fox
His scalp tingled. He began to climb, holding his breath as he went past Mrs. Scallop’s room. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her lying in her bed, a small mound like a risen cake in the oven, and he heard a faint fluttering of the air that was nearly a snore.
He went up the attic stairs on all fours, moving cautiously through the heaps of magazines. The orange had drained out of the moon; the light was pale now, weaker, but enough to show the hills of books and boxes and trunks and cases and crates and baskets.
The gun was not among them but in an unfinished room in the corner of the attic. Ned found it almost at once, as though it had a voice which had called to him.
He could hear his heart thudding as he squatted and rested his hands on the case. After a while, he made his way to the head of the attic stairs and listened.
He went back to the little room, opened the case and took out the Daisy rifle. He gripped it in his hands and stood up and went to the stairs and made his way all the way down to the kitchen without making one sound. He balanced the gun against the wall and went back upstairs to get his shoes.
When he was outdoors and well away from the porch, he sat down on the ground and put on his shoes. He knew now that he would have to try the gun just once. Then he would be able to do what his father had told him to do—take his mind away from it.
He glanced back at the house. Its shadow, enormous, black, nearly shapeless, lay on the ground. All around him were the smaller shadows of trees.
He began to follow the driveway as it curved out of sight of the house toward the small stable where Papa kept the Packard in bad weather. The tracks were almost completely overgrown with weeds and brush by the time the driveway reached the stable. It was really an old barn, much older than the house. Rough-hewn stones formed its foundation; ivy had straggled over much of its half-collapsed roof. Mama had told him that Cosmo, her black gelding, had been stabled there, and that at night she used to listen for his soft neigh and the thump of a hoof hitting the stable floor.
The night sky had changed; thin clouds drifted across the face of the moon. A slight breeze sprang up for a brief moment and rustled the tall grass that grew at the base of the stable. Grass grew inside, too. It wouldn’t be so long, Papa had said, before the stable would simply fall into the ground and become part of it—another thing he should take care of that he simply hadn’t the time or money to do.
Ned’s hearing had sharpened. He could hear the sleepy night sounds of birds, the rustle of field mice or voles, or perhaps a raccoon, as they moved about in the dry grass of the fields.
He lifted the gun to his shoulder just as he remembered lifting it at the shooting range Papa had taken him to when they went to the fair. He sighted along its barrel, pointing it first at the pines, then turning very slowly in a wide circle which followed the eastern range of the mountains, the river, the western bulge of Storm King Mountain; he aimed it high above the maple trees which partly hid the Makepeace mansion, brought it to the slope behind which stood his own house, all the way back until he had turned completely around and was facing the side of the stable.
As he blinked and opened his right eye wide, he saw a dark shadow against the stones which the moon’s light had turned the color of ashes. For a split second, it looked alive. Before he could think, his finger had pressed the trigger.
There was a quick whoosh, the sound a bobwhite makes when it bursts out of underbrush, then silence. He was sure there hadn’t been any loud report that would have waked anyone in the house, yet he had heard something, a kind of thin disturbance in the air. He walked over to the barn. There was no shadow now. There was nothing. He might have only dreamed that he had fired the rifle.
He felt tired, dull, as he trudged along the drive toward the house. It seemed a long time before he would be able to crawl under his sheet and go to sleep. He felt the gun hanging loosely at his side. He’d lost all interest in it.
As he came in sight of the house, nearly lost in the darkness now, for clouds filled the sky, he glanced up at the attic where he would have to carry the gun and replace it in its case.
He stood absolutely motionless. He was sure there was a face there, pressed against the glass, looking down at him the way the person had looked down at him through the heavy black wire screen of the asylum years before.
III
The Old Man
“Happy birthday, Ned,” his mother said. She was dressed and in her wheelchair. He could see from the door that she was holding something in her hands. “Come here to me,” she said.
Some mornings he walked to school and some mornings Papa drove him in the Packard. What was unvarying was that his mother’s door was closed when he tiptoed past it, his school books under his arm, and went downstairs to his breakfast. He could not remember her ever having been up this early to wish him Happy Birthday. It meant that Papa had risen very early to do her hair and help her dress and carry her to the chair. He dropped his books on the bed as he went to her. He felt shy; he wasn’t accustomed to seeing her at the start of his day.
Her hands opened. On her palms lay a gold pocket watch nearly as flat as a wafer, its chain wound round her fingers like a golden grass snake.
“This watch was my father’s,” she said. “Now it’s yours.” She lifted it up to him. He took it and held it to his ear. It ticked softly. “You can keep it by your bedside for now. When you go away to college, you can carry it in your pocket. You’ll always know what time it is.”
He looked at her hands as he did every day. Her thumb joints were more swollen than they had been yesterday. “Thank you, Mama,” he said.
“I think you were too little when you saw your grandfather to remember him. I know how glad he would have been to know that you have his watch. His initials are on the back, do you see? He was given it when he retired from the newspaper in Norfolk.”
The watch felt warm in his hand as though it were alive.
“Uncle Hilary left an écu for you. Papa has it. It’s a gold coin from France, very old. I think this is a golden birthday.” She smiled. He thought she looked uncertain. He sensed she wanted to say something more and was searching for words. He felt a sudden impatience and wished he was gone, out of the house and on his way. It was something he didn’t often feel when he was with her. But he had waked up that way, uneasy and in a hurry.
“He was sorry about the gun,” she said slowly, looking down at her hands. “He realized he should have spoken to your father first—before giving it to you.”
Ned felt his face turn red. She was looking at him now. He didn’t meet her eyes. “I don’t like guns either,” she said softly. “I’m afraid of them.” Standing there silently, unable to speak, he felt he was lying to her. “Oh, Ned!” she exclaimed, “I’m sorry, too!”
“I have to go,” he mumbled, and backed away out of the room and ran downstairs.
His class sang “Happy Birthday” to him. Some of the boys snickered and some of the girls giggled. Miss Jefferson had brought cookies she had made and a basket of Jonathan apples. In honor of Ned, she read a chapter from The Call of the Wild by Jack London. It was stuffy in the classroom, as hot as though it were still August. The other children looked at him, then at each other, and grinned from time to time, the way they always did when it was someone’s birthday, as if it were a thing a person had done, accomplished. It isn’t anything at all, he said to himself, just a day that comes along.
In the evening, Mrs. Scallop brought the cake she had made for him up to Mama’s room. Papa carried a big pitcher of fresh lemonade and Ned’s presents. Miss Brewster had sent him Treasure Island, and the Ladies’ Aid Society of the church had sent an anthology of poems by Rudyard Kipling. Papa gave him a new winter coat, a book called Robin Hood and His Merry Men and an atlas so he could learn where the countries were which his stamps came from.
“You must blow out all the candles or a strange fate will befall you,” warned Mrs. Scallop.
His mother laughed loudly. “O
h, Mrs. Scallop!” she exclaimed. “A strange fate befalls us all!”
Ned blew them out. Everyone clapped and he cut pieces of the cake and handed them around. Mrs. Scallop presented him with the most hideous rug, Ned thought, of all the rugs he’d seen her make. It would look nice beside his bed, she said, cozy to walk on when the weather changed. Ned was glad when he could be alone in his room. He found a pile of animal stories he had cut out of the newspapers over the years and kept in an old shoe box. He felt slightly embarrassed at his age to be still reading Thornton Burgess, but it was comforting to gaze for a long time at an illustration of the plump rabbit standing in front of a tree or in a vegetable patch. His birthday was nearly over. The house grew silent except for the leaking of the toilet flush which his father was never able to repair permanently.
Suddenly he tore up the handful of stories and dropped the pieces into his wastebasket. The gold watch ticked on his dresser, his new books piled up beside it. It had really been a very hard day. He knew it was all because of the gun, his worry over what he had done. In just a few days, that worry had come to be part of whatever he was thinking about. Had he really seen a face that night looking down at him from a window in the house? If he had, it must have been Mrs. Scallop’s face. But if it had been she—and if she had noticed the gun—why hadn’t she said anything? Perhaps he had been carrying the gun in such a way she couldn’t have seen it. Had the rifle made a much louder noise than he had thought and waked her up?
As though it had slid into the room, the wall of the stable appeared before him; he saw a flicker of movement, or moonlight wavering, or breeze-bent wild grass, something that drew the gun to it and made his finger press the trigger. He shook his head and it disappeared. He wished Uncle Hilary hadn’t come.
Papa had said—take your mind away from it. It had gotten into his mind. He could tell Papa what he had done. After all, Papa wouldn’t strap him the way he’d heard Billy Gaskell’s father strapped him for the slightest thing. No, Papa would only look grave, disappointed. But he’d forgive him.
Ned put his head under the pillow. At some point, he fell asleep.
For four more Sundays the heat held. The flowers arranged around the pulpit wilted in an hour. Old Mr. Deems, dazed by the heat, snored so loudly the sound of it cut like a buzz saw through the hymns. And on the way home from church, the wind that blew through the windows of the Packard felt as though it had come straight from an oven.
When Ned ate his early Sunday supper on the porch, the sky flared like fire, and the monastery bells, ringing for vespers, seemed to be working their way through hot tar.
He went up to visit his mother. A palmetto fan lay on her tray and she was drooped over it. He fanned her for a few minutes. She smiled her gratitude. “A person can imagine anything except weather,” she murmured.
The river was ink-blue and looked as unmoving as water in a basin.
“Are you all right, Neddy?” Her question took him by surprise. She had spoken urgently, and although her words were ordinary, they pierced him as if they’d flown straight to the painful place in his mind.
“I have to write a poem about autumn,” he said hurriedly. “It’s supposed to be for tomorrow and I haven’t done it yet.”
She rested her head against the back of the wheelchair and looked at him silently.
“Well, what I thought was that I’d write about the gypsies Papa and I saw today, just where the Waterville road is, two caravans”—he paused for a moment, staring at the interest that had come into her eyes as plain to see as a light going on—“and lots of thin black dogs running around, and children, and the women all dressed in bright clothes. Papa says they usually come in October.”
“That’s a wonderful idea, Ned,” she said. “Gypsies in the fall.”
He did have a homework assignment but he didn’t have to hand it in for a week, and it wasn’t a poem but a nature description. He’d been able to trick his mother. It made him feel a little sick.
A lie was so tidy, like a small box you could make with nails and thin pieces of wood and glue. But the truth lay sprawled all over the place like the mess up in the attic. At the thought of the attic, of the unfinished room and what lay in it, he felt as though a giant hand had been clapped over his mouth.
His mother was staring at him. He suddenly knew she was trying to read his face, and he felt a strange burst of relief. He hadn’t quite convinced her; in a way he couldn’t understand, that made him feel safer.
The next morning, the last Monday in October, started off hot, but Ned felt something different in the air. Perhaps it was the absolute stillness of the leaves and the blades of grass—a kind of waiting.
Ned, and the children he walked home with most afternoons, crossed the hot asphalt of the state road quickly, then drifted apart as they went up the steep curving dirt road. Ned glanced longingly at the stone house, so cool and mysterious-looking. Billy Gaskell, who was Ned’s age but taller and heavier than he, began to pick up pebbles and fling them ahead. They sent up puffs of smoke where they landed, and Evelyn Kimball, whose shoelaces were often untied and whose hair never looked combed, shrieked as though she were being pinched each time Billy flung a pebble. But Janet Hoffman, thin as the long pigtail that hung down her back, trudged along the road off by herself. Ned wished Evelyn would shut her mouth. She made the heat worse. He wandered over to the ditch thinking he would pause there and let everyone get ahead. There was an interesting-looking stick lying on the ground. As he bent to pick it up, it wriggled quickly away. He glanced further along the ditch. He saw two more snakes. One was orange and brown like the first, the other was white with green wedge-shaped markings.
“Ooh! Snakes!” breathed Evelyn, coming to stand next to him.
Billy lumbered toward them. “What’re you looking at?” He saw the snakes. Like lightning, he bent over and grabbed one. “Take out the fangs!” he cried.
Everything happened fast. Janet put her head down and aimed herself at Billy’s belly like a small goat and knocked him flat on the ground. The snake flew out of his hand, landing in the high grass on the other side of the ditch, and curled itself away out of sight. “Snakes are human, too!” Janet yelled. “You big bully!” She sat down on Billy, her skinny, scabby knees clutching him around his thick waist, and grabbed his lank brown hair, pulled up his head and let it bang back on the road.
Billy heaved himself up. Janet tumbled onto the road and Evelyn grabbed her arms and pulled her to her feet, spanking the dust from her dress. Ned was astonished to see that Billy was grinning. Then he started laughing, bending over himself and smacking his knees.
“Yah!” jeered Evelyn. “You got it this time, Billy. And from a nine-year-old girl. Ha! Ha!”
Billy was unperturbed. He marched on down the road, his big shoulders somewhat stooped, looking, Ned thought, like the buffalo engraved on the nickel. He lived a good mile beyond Ned’s turnoff, and nobody ever drove him to school, no matter what the weather was like. Janet’s path through the woods was already in sight. Just before she turned off to it, Ned said admiringly, “That was pretty good—what you did. But snakes aren’t really human.”
“They’re alive,” she said.
“Billy’s too dumb to know he got beat up,” Evelyn said as she kept step with him. Billy was far ahead of them now. “My daddy says the heat drives the snakes down from the mountains,” she went on. “I saw two in the yard near the henhouse.”
“Why’d he want to take their fangs out?”
“Those old snakes don’t even have fangs. They ain’t poisonous. He’s mean. He just wanted to do something to them.”
“But—why?” Ned muttered.
“Did you see the way Janet got him down! He didn’t even try to fight her back. And he’s twice as big. Big old dumb boy …”
She stumbled over a hummock of earth and the dust flew up around her. He looked at her face with its slanty pumpkin eyes as she righted herself. As long as he could remember, the Kimballs had been li
ving in their big, ramshackle house, and he and Evelyn had walked home from school together since he’d been eight. But she’d never spoken to him so much before. The snakes had made her talkative. He knew his mother liked Mrs. Kimball. When she came to take care of Mama, he’d heard Mrs. Kimball call her “precious,” and “dear heart.” Mr. Kimball was a carpenter but he didn’t get much work. Papa had once said he couldn’t think how the poor man provided for all those children.
“I chase the chickens sometimes,” Evelyn said to him in a confiding voice. “They run and squawk like they’re crazy.”
“But you don’t hurt them, do you?”
“No. I just scare them. Ma wrings their neck and we eat them.”
“That must hurt.”
“Well … it finishes them.” She burst into a shout of laughter. “That Janet! Skinny little beetle like that!” She waved and turned off up the road to the Kimball yard where chickens scratched in the earth around old car parts and piles of planks. Ned saw a raggedy little boy wearing a man’s shirt sitting on an upturned washtub. “Evie!” he shouted. “Evie is home!”
Ned turned left off the dirt road to the path he’d worn through the field that went all the way down to the state road, several hundred yards below, where Mr. Scully’s mailbox stood, nailed to a splintery post. He took the Waterville newspaper and the one letter out of the mailbox and went back up the hill to Mr. Scully’s house. He knocked on the kitchen door. Pretty soon he heard Mr. Scully moving inside like a mouse in a paper sack. Through the screen, whose rusty grid kept out horseflies but not houseflies, Ned could smell wood ash and dried apples.
“Hello, Ned,” Mr. Scully said. He was standing just behind the screen, a small stooped man dressed as always in an old green and black plaid wool shirt and black trousers. He opened the door suddenly, and Ned had to jump off the step then jump back on it and scoot inside before the screen door swung to. Mr. Scully stared at the letter in Ned’s hand. Although most of the time he moved as slowly as molasses moves across a plate, he snatched up his spectacles from the kitchen table and held out his hand for the letter. He peered at it and sighed. “Bother! It’s only a doctor bill,” he said. Ned knew he was always hoping to hear from his daughter, Doris, who had gone out West years ago.
