Dreamthorp

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by Williamson, Chet


  She heard a car pull up outside and looked out the window, the shotgun still in her hand. It was Charlie's car, and Charlie and Tom were climbing out of it. Tom was carrying a backpack and biker's helmet, but whether he had the figure or not she neither knew nor cared. All she cared about was that he was safe and had not been caught.

  She put the shotgun back in the gun case, closed the glass door, and went out onto the porch. She met Tom on the steps, and held him without saying a word. When they finally separated, he smiled and told her that he had gotten the carving.

  "All right," she said, "all right. But come in and have some lunch. You must be starving."

  He shook his head. "I'm okay. The main thing I want to do now is to get that carving buried. If Spencer at the museum notices that it's missing and puts two and two together, I don't want it found in my knapsack."

  "Besides," Charlie said, "the faster we get it back where it belongs, the faster this place gets back to normal." Although she was not aware of it, Laura must have expressed her disbelief in some small way, for Charlie added dryly, "Believe it or not."

  "I'm sorry, Charlie," she said. "I don't mean to throw a damper on your . . . burglary."

  "Don't use that word," he said. "You want to send your boyfriend to Sing Sing for the rest of his natural life?" The teasing tone vanished from his voice as suddenly as it had come, and she could tell that he felt self-conscious about what he and Tom had done and were still planning to do. "So. Do you want to come with us?"

  "Do you want me to?"

  "The more the merrier," Charlie said, "and I don't mean that facetiously. I really think that the more people who are there when we . . . re-inter this thing, the better."

  "The more people?" Laura asked. "Or the more believers?"

  Charlie was silent for a moment. "I don't know that it makes any difference."

  "I'd like to have you come, Laura," Tom said flatly.

  "All right then. I will." She smiled more airily than she felt. "Does this make me an accomplice?"

  Charlie nodded. "But don't worry. They have coed cells in Sing Sing now."

  Tom got a small shovel from his woodshed, and the three of them went to the site of the former sawmill, where Tom dug a small hole directly above where he had reburied the bones of the Indians. Charlie took the quartz carving from the backpack, knelt, and placed it into the grave. Then Tom shoveled the dirt back over it, patted it down, and strewed dead leaves and grass over the bare earth. They stood there silently for a while, until Charlie cleared his throat.

  "I, uh, thought it might be a good thing to use one of Grover Kraybill's . . . spells." He said the word as if he was embarrassed to. "So I brought a copy of his Powwow book along. Not his, the police kept that. Just a copy." Charlie opened the thin, paperbound book. "I didn't know which one to use, but I found a few that seem . . . relevant. This first one is to keep people from doing you an injury." He cleared his throat again, and Laura looked down at the ground. "'Dullix, ix, ux. Yea, you can't come over Pontio; Pontio is above Pilato. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.' Uh, I don't know what that one really means. The others make a little more sense."

  Laura looked at Tom and saw that he was having trouble keeping a smile off his face.

  "This one," Charlie went on, "is to fasten or spellbind anything, it says, so I guess that would include spirits." He paused, then said, offended, "Tom, are you amused?"

  "No, Charlie."

  "Well, look, I feel like enough of an asshole doing this, okay? So can we get serious?"

  "I'm sorry, Charlie. I'm just . . . uncomfortable, I guess. Nervous, you know?"

  Charlie gave him another disdainful look, then turned back to the book. "'Christ's cross and Christ's crown, Christ Jesus' colored blood, be thou every hour good. God, the Father, is before us; God, the Son, is beside us; God, the Holy Ghost, is behind us. Whoever now is stronger than these three persons may come, by day or night, to attack us.' We're supposed to say the Lord's Prayer now. Three times. 'Our Father—'"

  The three of them prayed together, going through the prayer three times. At the end, Charlie opened the book again. "Okay, this last one is a charm to gain advantage of a man of superior strength, which isn't quite what we've got here, but I figure it can't hurt." He cleared his throat again and began:

  "'I, Charles Lewis, breathe upon thee. Three drops of blood I take from thee: the first out of thy heart, the other out of thy liver, and the third out of thy vital powers; and in this I deprive thee of thy strength and manliness. Hbbi Massa danti Lantien. I. I. I."

  Tom snorted a laugh that he instantly tried to disguise as a cough.

  "You've got something to say, Tom?" Charlie asked angrily.

  "What, uh, does that mean, Charlie?"

  "Hell, I don't know, I didn't write it, okay?"

  "Right. Sorry. Go ahead."

  "I'm finished."

  "Oh." Tom nodded. "So, uh, that's it?"

  "That's it. I hope you were amused."

  "Charlie," Tom said, grinning, "I'm sorry, I really am. You know that I believe in what we're doing, but it's just that, once we were really doing it, it . . . I guess it seemed . . ."

  "Silly," Laura said. "It seemed silly. And you both felt self-conscious about it."

  "God's own truth," Charlie said, no less annoyed. "But I don't care whether it seems like a goddam laugh riot or not, it was what needed to be done, and we did it."

  "And now we wait," Laura said softly. "Wait and see if you're right."

  "And you don't think we are," Tom said.

  "I don't pretend to know. But if it's what you think it is, I don't believe that anything so strong can be laid to rest so easily."

  She watched the two men as they looked uncomfortably at each other, then down at the ground where they had buried the quartz carving. They said nothing on their way back to the cottages. Laura went first down the path, and they followed with heads bowed, like reprimanded children following their mother.

  The police did not come to Tom Brewer's cottage to inquire about the carving until Tuesday afternoon. Spencer, the curator, had discovered that the artifact was missing that morning, had reported its loss to the police, and had given them the names of the two suspicious and duplicitous men who had tried to acquire the piece the previous week.

  Stu Bottomly knocked on the door and introduced Tom to a Lieutenant Hidley, a tall, prematurely white-haired man who was a detective on the Harrisburg police force. Tom denied that he was anywhere near the museum since the day he and Charlie had visited Spencer, and told Hidley that he had no knowledge of where the carving was. He even invited him inside to look for it, but Hidley declined to do so. When he asked Tom if he could account for his whereabouts during the past few days, Tom said that he'd been spending time working alone, with Charlie, or with Laura Stark, and he certainly didn't have an ironclad alibi for every hour of the previous week. "I didn't think I'd need one," he told Hidley with a smile.

  Hidley thanked Tom, and he and Stu Bottomly went next door to Charlie's house, where Charlie would, as Tom well knew, give them the same story he had. Later, over beers, Charlie told Tom that he had suggested to Hidley that Spencer take another look in the storeroom.

  "I told him that fella struck me as not being able to locate his posterior with both hands. Stu laughed, but Hidley didn't. Some people have no sense of humor."

  They didn't hear from Hidley again.

  The rest of the week was very quiet. It was quiet because there were very few people left in Dreamthorp, and it was quiet because none of those particular people happened to be killed.

  Charlie and Tom talked about it frequently, and grimly teased each other about keeping the deathwatch. But as every day passed without incident, they began to feel less foolish about what they had done. On Friday afternoon they were sitting together on Charlie's porch drinking beers and listening to the sounds of John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" coming from inside, when Charlie told Tom that he had been down t
o the site of the old sawmill.

  "Alone?" Tom asked him, with only a trace of alarm.

  "Yeah. Maybe it was foolish, but I felt like I just wanted to go down there and . . . and feel. See if what we did had any effect."

  "And did it?"

  "I think it did. I'm alive to tell the tale, aren't I? And I didn't feel a damn thing. Not to say that I would have in any case, since I probably don't have a psychic bone in my body."

  "I don't think psychic powers exist in your bones, Charlie, but I know what you mean." Tom smiled. "I went over there myself."

  Charlie raised an eyebrow. "And?"

  "And the same as you. I sit here untouched, and I didn't feel or see or hear anything out of the ordinary either."

  "You think we done busted dem ghosts?"

  "I'm not breathing easy yet. And I wouldn't suggest a wholesale migration back to Dreamthorp either. But I do have my fingers crossed."

  On Sunday, Laura took Tom to her rod and gun club, and they shot at targets on the outdoor range. It was a hot day and dry, as though it had always been dry, and there were no other shooters on the range. They fired competition .22s and a .38 special, with Laura outscoring Tom in every round, although not by much.

  "You're good," she told him. "I thought you said you haven't shot in years."

  "I haven't," he said, smiling at her compliment. "I used to go out with my Uncle Jack sometimes and plunk at tin cans."

  "I didn't know you had an uncle."

  "I don't anymore. He died of lung cancer when I was in. school. Heavy smoker." Tom looked to the right of the range at the long, low brick building nearly hidden in the trees. "Your dad founded this place?"

  "He helped. Was the first president. He loved the outdoors."

  "He hunted a lot?"

  "He did, yes, but still he was a very . . . a gentle man, you know? Like that Robert DeNiro movie—he never fired unless he was sure he could kill in one shot. He hated to see animals suffer. After my mother died, he stopped hunting altogether. Just shot skeet and target. He still went fishing, though."

  Tom sat next to her on the bench rest and put an arm around her. "You loved him very much, didn't you?"

  "Yes. I did. He taught me an awful lot." She leaned against him, and he loved feeling the firm weight of her, the tightness of her muscles, the softness of her breasts against his chest. She was as tall as he was, but it didn't matter. They fit each other perfectly. He didn't have to bend to kiss her cheek—it was right there on the level of his lips—and he thought that the petite woman/tall man syndrome that had flourished over the years left a lot to be desired in the face of the real equality that he shared with Laura.

  Her size made her no less a woman. She had proven that both in and out of bed. Her orgasms had been stronger and more intense than Susan's or Karen's, as if she had been celibate for many years and was now discovering sex for the first time, although he knew that was impossible. She had been married, after all, and surely she must have had lovers before him. Still, at times she reminded him of a young girl in the first stages of love for whom every word, act, and touch was a further step into a new, strange, and wonderful land. She was a woman, mature and wise, and he knew that she loved him and knew that he loved her.

  "I love you, Laura," he whispered into her ear, and she turned toward him and kissed him. "I think . . ." he went on slowly, meticulously, "I think that we should get married."

  Her eyes glittered suddenly like a frightened doe's, as if she had been hoping to hear such words but, now that they were spoken, was afraid of them. "Oh, Tom," she said softly, and he could not tell what the words meant—agreement and submission, or sad denial.

  "There's nothing to stop us." He smiled and turned her face toward his. "We've been spending so much time together that we might as well be married. And I want to, Laura. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I think we'd be happy together. I know we would. So. Will you? Marry me?"

  As he looked into her face, he saw now that it was sadness, and he felt a coldness deep inside him and tried to prepare for refusal, though he did not know how he could bear it. "Tom," she said, drawing away from him, "I can't say yes or no. It . . . it isn't that simple."

  "Why not?"

  "I've got to tell you something first. . . ."

  "No you don't."

  "What?" She looked puzzled.

  "You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to. I don't want to pry into your past. What happened before doesn't matter." He said it partly because it was true and partly because he did not want to know, did not want to hear any stories of past indiscretions to bother his dreams.

  "But I want to tell you this. You have to know. It's something you have to know about me. Something that I didn't know about myself until . . . until recently."

  She looked at him with desperate, pleading eyes, and he was suddenly afraid to hear what she had to say. "All right," he said, regardless of his fear, "if you want to tell me, I'll listen."

  Then she told him, slowly but relentlessly, what she had felt for Kitty Soames, what she thought Kitty had felt for her, and what they had done together on the night that Gilbert Rodman had slashed his way into her life. "I loved her, Tom," she said. "I don't know what would have happened between us after that night, if we would have stayed together, I just don't know. But I believe that I loved her then as much as I had ever loved anyone before. Certainly more than I'd loved my husband.

  "But not as much as I love you now."

  He took her hand, kissed it, and held it against his cheek. "I think I understand," he said. "I really think I do. The . . . biology of it is just secondary. You needed someone, that was all. And Kitty was there for you."

  "And can you forget about it? Can you forgive it?"

  "I can't forget about it, no, because it's helped to make you who you are, so that's all right. As for forgiving it, I would if there were anything to forgive."

  "You say that now. But I want you to take time and think about it."

  "It won't make any difference if I think about it or not. I'll still love you."

  "You say that, Tom, but there have to be some doubts now. Some questions. Will I do it again? Will I slip?"

  "You wanted love, Laura. I'll give you all you need."

  "It's not that easy. You can't just say it and have it be so." She shook her head, stood up, and started to pack the pistols back into their padded cases. "Think about it for a day or two. Let it work on your mind. And if you still want me to, then I'll marry you, Tom." She looked at him, and he saw tears in her eyes. "I do love you, Tom. More than ever. More than anyone or anything."

  She picked up the cased guns and hurried toward the car. He followed, no longer knowing what to say or do. Although he had said what he felt he had to, he also felt horribly confused, and he knew that she was right. He had to think about what she had told him for a time, even though he felt that it would make no difference, that he would continue to love her and want her to share his life.

  But the image of the two women together intruded upon his thoughts, not with the simple and adolescent jealousy of a lover's past love but with the gnawing insistence that the memory of pornography exerts upon the penitent, seeking to subsume the sins of the flesh in contemplations of sanctity.

  Why had she told him? she wondered. And above all why had she not told him of what she had done in Philadelphia, of the revulsion she had felt, of the violent fear of those women that had made her physically ill?

  Because, she decided, she wanted no alibi. She had not wanted to say, Oh yes, I was bad, but I'm all right now, I'm normal now—heterosexual all the way. Because she wasn't, and she knew it. She had within her the capacity for love outside of biological preferences, she saw that now. The loathing she had felt toward those sad, desperate women was the same loathing she would have felt for sad and desperate men who were willing to give up their humanity and identity for a quick and loveless moment of animal passion.

  But she knew, something else
about herself as well. She was capable of giving love and receiving love exclusively. If she married Tom—and she wanted to—there was as little danger of her having an affair with a woman as there was of her having one with another man. It would not be difficult for her either, because one person loving her was all she needed, everything she wanted. She was sure of herself, and Tom's love had made her even more sure.

  So it was up to him. She had had to tell him. There had been no choice in the matter. She had known that he would talk about marriage someday, and had decided that when that day came she would tell him everything, and now she had. Now it was his choice. She had told him what she was, but, more importantly, he knew who she was.

  September

  "Every day travels toward death; the last only arrives at it."

  —Montaigne, quoted in Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  Nor does he work in black and white alone.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  "But where are you, my sweet Laura," whispered Gilbert Rodman.

  The strip of highway on which he stood seemed to contain a new mall every few hundred feet. It was not how he had pictured Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when he had taken the time to picture it at all. In Gilbert's mind the place was Pennsylvania Dutch country, filled with solemn-faced Amishmen wearing black hats and driving horses and buggies. But now he was faced with Hardee's and Brewer's Outlet and Radio Shack and Chi-Chi's, for crissake, as if an Amishman would eat at Chi-Chi's! Oh well, he thought, maybe I came in the wrong way.

  It had been the most direct way. He'd gotten off the Pennsylvania Turnpike at Harrisburg, then hitched his way down Route 283 until he started seeing exit signs for Lancaster. His driver, a trucker with A. Duie Pyle (with whom he made manure jokes about the company's name), told him that Prince Street would take him right downtown after a two mile walk, if he couldn't get a hitch from there.

 

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