Transgressions, Volume 4

by Ed McBain

  Zallman’s hair was thinning at the temples, there was a dented look to his cheeks. His eyes were those of a man older than thirty-one or -two. He’d begun to grow a beard, a goatee, to disguise his appearance, but you could see that it was a temporary experiment, it would not last. Yet Leah thought Mikal Zallman handsome, in his way rather romantic. A narrow hawkish face, brooding eyes. Quick to laugh at himself. She would allow him to adore her, possibly one day she would adore him. She was not prepared to be hurt by him.

  Eventually she would tell him the notquite-true I never believed you were the one to take Marissa, Mikal. Never!

  The little family, as Zallman wished to think them, ate their picnic lunch, and what a delicious lunch it was, on a wooden table on the bank of a pond, beneath a willow tree so exquisitely proportioned it looked like a work of art in a children’s storybook. He noted that Marissa still had trouble with food, ate slowly and with an air of caution, as if, with each mouthful, she was expecting to encounter broken glass. But she ate most of a sandwich, and half an apple Leah peeled for her, since “skins” made her queasy. And afterward tramping about the pond admiring snowy egrets and great blue herons and wild swans. Everywhere were lushly growing cattails, rushes, flaming sumac. There was a smell of moist damp earth and sunlight on water and in the underbrush red-winged blackbirds were flocking in a festive cacophony. Leah lamented, “But it’s too soon! We’re not ready for winter.” She sounded genuinely hurt, aggrieved.

  Zallman said, “But Leah, snow can be nice, too.”

  Marissa, who was walking ahead of her mother and Mr. Zallman, wanted to think this was so: snow, nice. She could not clearly remember snow. Last winter. Before April, and after April. She knew that she had lived for eleven years and yet her memory was a windowpane covered in cobwebs. Her therapists were kindly soft-spoken women who asked repeatedly about what had happened to her in the cellar of the old house, what the bad girls had done to her, for it was healthy to remember, and to speak of what she remembered, like draining an absess they said, and she should cry, too, and be angry; but it was difficult to have such emotions when she couldn’t remember clearly. What are you feeling, Marissa, she was always being asked, and the answer was I don’t know or Nothing! But that was not the right answer.

  Sometimes in dreams she saw, but never with opened eyes.

  With opened eyes, she felt blind. Sometimes.

  The bad girl had fed her, she remembered. Spoon-fed. She’d been so hungry! So grateful.

  All adults are gone. All our mothers.

  Marissa knew: that was a lie. The bad girl had lied to her.

  Still, the bad girl had fed her. Brushed her hair. Held her when she’d been so cold.

  The sudden explosion, flames! The burning girl, terrible shrieks and screams—Marissa had thought at first it was herself, on fire and screaming. She was crawling upstairs but was too weak and she fainted and someone came noisy and shouting to lift her in his arms and it was three days later Mommy told her when she woke in the hospital, her head so heavy she could not lift it.

  Mommy and Mr. Zallman. She was meant to call him “Uncle Mikal” but she could not.

  Mr. Zallman had been her teacher in Skatskill. But he behaved as if he didn’t remember any of that. Maybe Mr. Zallman had not remembered her, Marissa had not been one of the good students. He had only seemed to care for the good students, the others were invisible to him. He was not “Uncle Mikal” and it would be wrong to call him that.

  At this new school everybody was very nice to her. The teachers knew who she was, and the therapists and doctors. Mommy said they had to know or they could not help her. One day, when she was older, she would move to a place where nobody knew Marissa Bantry. Away out in California.

  Mommy would not wish her to leave. But Mommy would know why she had to leave.

  At this new school, that was so much smaller than Skatskill Day, Marissa had a few friends. They were shy wary thin-faced girls like herself. They were girls who, if you only just glanced at them, you would think they were missing a limb; but then you would see, no they were not. They were whole girls.

  Marissa liked her hair cut short. Her long silky hair the bad girls had brushed and fanned out about her head, it had fallen out in clumps in the hospital. Long hair made her nervous now. Through her fingers at school sometimes lost in a dream she watched girls with hair rippling down their backs like hers used to, she marveled they were oblivious to the danger.

  They had never heard of the Corn Maiden! The words would mean nothing to them.

  Marissa was a reader now. Marissa brought books everywhere with her, to hide inside. These were storybooks with illustrations. She read slowly, sometimes pushing her finger beneath the words. She was fearful of encountering words she didn’t know, words she was supposed to know but did not know. Like a sudden fit of coughing. Like a spoon shoved into your mouth before you were ready. Mommy had said Marissa was safe now from the bad girls and from any bad people, Mommy would take care of her but Marissa knew from reading stories that this could not be so. You had only to turn the page, something would happen.

  Today she had brought along two books from the school library: Watching Birds! and The Family of Butterflies. They were books for readers younger than eleven, Marissa knew. But they would not surprise her.

  Marissa is carrying these books with her, wandering along the edge of the pond a short distance ahead of Mommy and Mr. Zallman. There are dragonflies in the cattails like floating glinting needles. There are tiny white moth-butterflies, and beautiful large orange monarchs with slow-pulsing wings. Behind Marissa, Mommy and Mr. Zallman are talking earnestly. Always they are talking, it seems. Maybe they will be married and talk all the time and Marissa will not need to listen to them, she will be invisible.

  A red-winged blackbird swaying on a cattail calls sharply to her.

  In the Valley of the Shadow of Death I will protect you AMEN.

  SHARYN MCCRUMB

  Sharyn McCrumb holds degrees from the University of North Carolina and Virginia Tech. She lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains but travels the United States and the world lecturing on her work, most recently leading a writer’s workshop in Paris in summer 2001. Her Ballad series, beginning with If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990), has won her numerous honors, including the Appalachian Writers Association’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature and several listings as New York Times and Los Angeles Times notable books. In the introduction to her short-story collection Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories, she details the family history in North Carolina and Tennessee that contributed to her Appalachian fiction. One of the continuing characters, Sheriff Spencer Arrowood, takes his surname from ancestors on her father’s side, while Frankie Silver (“the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina”), whose story McCrumb would incorporate in The Ballad of Frankie Silver, was a distant cousin. “My books are like Appalachian quilts,” she writes. “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I place them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the nature of the mountain south.” The seventh and most recent title in the Ballad series, Ghost Riders, appeared in 2003. Her most recent novel is St. Dale.

  THE RESURRECTION MAN

  Sharyn McCrumb

  Haloed in lamplight the young man stands swaying on the threshold for an instant, perhaps three heartbeats, before the scalpel falls from his fingers, and he pitches forward into the dark hallway, stumbling toward the balcony railing where the stairwell curves around the rotunda. From where he stands outside the second floor classroom, it is thirty feet or more to the marble floor below.

  The old man in the hall is not surprised. He has seen too many pale young men make just such a dash from that room, from its stench of sweet decay, hardly leavened by the tobacco spit that coats the wooden floor. They chew to mask the odor—this boy is new, and does not yet know that
trick. The tobacco will make him as sick as the other at first. It is all one.

  He makes no move to take hold of the sufferer. They are alone in the building, but even so, these days such a thing would not be proper. The young man might take offense, and there is his own white linen suit to be thought of. He is not working tonight. He only came to see why there was a light in the upstairs window. More to the point, he has long ago lost the desire to touch human flesh. He stays in the shadows and watches the young man lunge for cold air in the cavernous space beneath the dome.

  But the smell of the dissecting room is not escaped so easily, and the old man knows what will happen if the student does not get fresh air soon. Somebody will have to clean up the hall floor. It won’t be the old man. He is too grand for that, but it will be one of the other employees, some acquaintance of his, and it is easy enough to spare a cleaner more work and the young man more embarrassment. Easy enough to offer the fire bucket as an alternative.

  A gallon bucket of sand has been set outside the dissection room in case a careless student overturns an oil lamp, and in one fluid motion he hoists it, setting it in front of the iron railing, directly in the path of the young man, who has only to bend over and exhale to make use of it, which he does, for a long time. He coughs and retches until he can manage only gasps and dry heaves. By the time he is finished he is on his knees, hunched over the bucket, clutching it with both hands. The retching turns to sobbing and then to soft cursing.

  A few feet away the old man waits, courteously and without much interest in the purging process. If the student should feel too ill to return to his work, he will call someone to tend to him. He will not offer his shoulder unless the tottering young man insists. He does not care to touch people: The living are not his concern. Most of the students know him, and would shrink from him, but this one is new. He may not know whom he has encountered in the dark hallway. For all the boy’s momentary terror and revulsion, he will be all right. He will return to his task, if not tonight then tomorrow. It is the night before his first dissection class, after all, and many a queasy novice has conquered his nerves and gone on to make a fine doctor.

  The young man wipes his face with a linen handkerchief, still gulping air as if the motion in will prevent the motion out. “I’m all right,” he says, aware of the silent presence a few feet away.

  “Shouldn’t come alone,” the old man says. “They make you work together for a reason. ’Cause you joke. You prop up one another’s nerve. Distractions beguile the mind, makes it easier, if you don’t think too much.”

  The young man looks up then, recognizing the florid speech and the lilt of a Gullah accent beneath the surface. Pressing the handkerchief to his mouth, he takes an involuntary step backward. He does know who this is. He had been expecting to see a sweeper, perhaps, or one of the professors working here after hours, but this apparition, suddenly recognized, legendary and ancient even in his father’s student days, fills him with more terror than the shrouded forms in the room he has just quit.

  He is standing in the hall, beside a bucket filled with his own vomit, and his only companion is this ancient black man, still straight and strong-looking in a white linen suit, his grizzled hair shines about his head in the lamplight like a halo, and the student knows that he looks a fool in front of this old man who has touched more dead people than live ones. He peers at the wrinkled face to see if there is some trace of scorn in the impassive countenance.

  “I was here because I was afraid,” he says, glancing back at the lamp-lit room of shrouded tables. He does not owe this man an explanation, and if asked, he might have replied with a curt dismissal, but there is only silence, and he needs to feel life in the dark hall. “I thought I might make a fool of myself in class tomorrow—” He glances toward the bucket, and the old man nods. “—And so I came along tonight to try to prepare myself. To see my—well, to see it. Get it over with. Put a cloth over its eyes.” He dabbed at his mouth with the soiled handkerchief. “You understand that feeling, I guess.”

  “I can’t remember,” said the old man. He has always worked alone. He pulls a bottle out of the pocket of his black coat, pulls out the cork, and passes it to the young man. It is half full of grain alcohol, clear as water.

  The young man takes a long pull on the bottle and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. The two of them look at each other and smile. Not all of the students would drink from the same bottle as a black man. Not in this new century. Maybe once, but not now. The prim New Englanders would not, for his race is alien to them, and while they preach equality, they shrink from proximity. The crackers would not, because they must always be careful to enforce their precarious rank on the social ladder, even more so since Reconstruction. But this boy is planter class, and he has no need for such gestures. He has traded sweat and spit with Negroes since infancy, and he has no self-consciousness, no need for social barriers. It is the way of his world. They understand each other.

  “You don’t remember?” The young man smiles in disbelief as he hands back the bottle. “But how could you not recall the first time you touched the dead?”

  Because it has been nigh on sixty years, the old man thinks. He points to the bucket. “Do you remember the first time you ever did that?”

  His life is divided into before the train and after the train. Not after the war. Things for him did not so much change after the war as this new century’s white folks might suppose. The landmark of his life was that train ride down from Charleston. He remembers some of his earliest life, or perhaps he has imagined parts of it for so long that they have taken on a reality in his mind. He remembers a rag quilt that used to lay atop his corn shuck mattress. It had been pieced together from scraps of cloth—some of the pieces were red and shiny, probably scavenged from silk dresses worn by the ladies up at the house. His memories are a patchwork as well: a glimpse of dark eyes mirroring firelight; the hollowed shell of a box turtle … someone, an old man, is making music with it, and people are dancing … he is very young, sitting on a dirt floor, watching legs and calico skirts flash past him, brushing him sometimes, as the dancers stamped and spun, the music growing louder and faster …

  There was a creek, too … He is older by then … Squatting on a wet rock a little way out into the water, waiting for the frog … waiting … So still that the white birds come down into the field for the seeds as if he were not there … Then crashing through the cattails comes Dog, reeking of creek water and cow dung, licking his face, thrashing the water with his muddy tail … frogs scared into kingdom come. What was that dog’s name? It is just sounds now, that name, and he isn’t sure he remembers them right, but once they meant something inside his head, those sounds … He has never heard them since.

  Older still … Now he has seen the fields for what they are: not a place to play. Sun up to sun down … Water in a bucket, dispensed from a gourd hollowed out to make a dipper … the drinking gourd. He sits in the circle of folks in the dark field, where a young man with angry eyes is pointing up at the sky. The drinking gourd is a pattern of stars. They are important. They lead you somewhere, as the Wise Men followed stars … But he never set off to follow those stars, and he does not know what became of the angry young man who did. It is long ago, and he resolved to have nothing to do with drinking gourds—neither stars nor rice fields.

  He listened to the old people’s stories, of how the trickster rabbit smiled and smiled his way out of danger, and how the fox never saw the trap for the smile, and he reckoned he could do that. He could smile like honey on a johnny cake. Serenity was his shield. You never looked sullen, or angry, or afraid. Sometimes bad things happened to you anyway, but at least, if they did, you did not give your tormentor the gift of your pain as well. So he smiled in the South Carolina sunshine and waited for a door to open somewhere in the world, and presently it did.

  The sprawling white house sat on a cobblestone street near the harbor in Charleston. It had a shady porch that ran the length of the hou
se, and a green front door with a polished brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head, but that door did not open to the likes of him. He used the back door, the one that led to the kitchen part of the house.

  The old woman there was kind. To hear anyone say otherwise would have astonished her. She kept slaves as another woman might have kept cats—with indulgent interest in their habits, and great patience with their shortcomings. Their lives were her theatre. She was a spinster woman, living alone in the family house, and she made little enough work for the cook, the maid, and the yard man, but she must have them, for the standards of Charleston’s quality folk must be maintained.

  The old woman had a cook called Rachel. A young girl with skin the color of honey, and still so young that the corn pone and gravy had not yet thickened her body. She was not as pretty as some, but he could tell by her clothes and the way she carried herself that she was a cherished personage in some fine house. He had met her at church, where he always took care to be the cleanest man there with the shiniest shoes. If his clothes were shabby, they were as clean and presentable as he could make them, and he was handsome, which went a long ways toward making up for any deficiency in station. By then he was a young man, grown tall, with a bronze cast to his skin, not as dark as most, and that was as good as a smile, he reckoned, for he did not look so alien to the white faces who did the picking and choosing. He was a townsman, put to work on the docks for one of the ship’s chandlers at the harbor. He liked being close to the sea, and his labors had made him strong and lean, but the work was hard, and it led nowhere. The house folk in the fine homes fared the best. You could tell them just by looking, with their cast-off finery and their noses in the air, knowing their station—higher than most folks.