Ella Maud

by Nicholas Nicastro

  She turned. “Are you ready?”

  “Go ahead.”

  She opened the door so he could see what was within. It was gloomy, and it took a moment for his eyes to resolve what he was looking at.

  It was a sort of shrine. On either side of a low dresser were two small candles, burning. Between them was a big framed portrait of Nell, garlanded with dried flowers. It was a picture he knew well: a three-quarters view, looking to the left, in a church dress with a high lace collar, hair pulled back. It was tinted, with her cheeks rouged unnaturally and her dress as yellow as a buttercup.

  He came closer. Other photos—casual portraits, and pictures of her with her sisters and her cousins—stood in their various squares and ovals. Between the pictures was a miscellany of things Nell had once owned. A pair of kid riding gloves. A Methodist hymnal. A dish of hairpins, nestled in the center of which was a lock of Nell’s hair tied with red ribbon. He lifted the latter and examined it; the lock was thin, so it was not exactly the color he remembered, seeming more blonde than brown.

  A brochure of the Old Dominion Steamship Line. A thimble, and a work of unfinished embroidery. Leaning against the side of the dresser, the broken parasol he had returned that night.

  “I’ve never shown this to anyone else,” said Ollie.

  “It is something,” he said.

  His eyes fell on an unframed picture. It was from the same sitting as the big portrait, likewise tinted, with Nell looking into the camera. Looking at it, it dawned on him that he had seen it before. And then he realized he had not just seen it—he had owned it. He picked it up and turned it over. On the back was an inscription in Nell’s handwriting:

  To my dear Jim, from his little bluebird.

  This was one of the photos Jim had returned to Nell on her last night. He looked to Ollie, holding it up.

  “So you did find these.”

  Even by candlelight Jim could see Ollie’s face go pale.

  “I…yes.”

  “Because I sat for weeks in those courtrooms, and know for a fact you testified the pictures didn’t turn up. Your father too. He said you combed the property for them.”

  She only looked at him, her expression somewhere between panic and hopelessness.

  “Ollie?”

  “Oh dear,” she said.

  “Ollie, I do believe you owe me an explanation. What’s going on?”

  “Father will be back soon.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “He can shoot me if that’s his pleasure.”

  She held out her hand for the picture, and in the depth of his shock, he gave it to her.

  “I’m so sorry I wasn’t honest with you, Jim. You have to understand, there were other things to consider…”

  “You’re sor—you’re sorry…” he sputtered, suddenly feeling more unwell than before. Nerves aflame, head swimming, he sat down on the bed to steady himself.

  “Ollie, you didn’t just lie to me. You lied to the whole world. You’d better start explaining, or there’s going to be hell to pay.”

  She folded the picture, stuffed it in the waistband of her skirt, and said, “I don’t care about the world. I’m done with all that. But you’re right, Jim—I owe you an explanation, at least.”

  She closed the bedroom door, and turned the lock. She was, at that moment, too afraid to come any closer to him, so she leaned back against the door. Looking into space, her features were still, but her face was alive with flitting shadows from the candles. In the gloom, her widow’s weeds made her hands and face seem disembodied.

  Then the specter began to speak.

  VI.

  “I think it’s about time to retire, Roy.”

  Ollie and Roy Crawford were left alone in the dining room after Carrie went to bed and Nell and Jim went out on the porch. Roy was in the chair at the head of the table, looking awkward as he recrossed his legs every other minute. Ollie made small-talk with him for as long as she could stomach, until the effort of extracting conversation from livestock and the weather and his mother’s health exhausted her.

  “Yep, reckon I might as well get along…” he declared with arduous bonhomie.

  Most of the length of the porch stretched in front of the dining room windows. Ollie couldn’t see her sister and Jim out there, but she could hear an indistinct murmuring. At times, the sound crested into audible speech; she thought she heard the words “care” and “don’t”. But she didn’t want to look like she was trying to overhear.

  As usual, they parted in the hall. Roy flushed and fumbled for her hand, which she surrendered. He placed a kiss on it that was more scratchy mustache than lips.

  “Good night, Ollie.”

  “Good night, Roy.”

  She noticed the front door was left open. She shut it after him, not bothering to check if Nell and Jim were still outside. Then she pushed the dining room chairs back in their places, snuffed the lamps, and went upstairs.

  Her sister was in the bedroom when she reached it. Nell was sitting on their bed, head in her hands.

  “Nell?” Ollie said.

  The other shot erect, as if surprised. Her face was red, and in her eyes, that wild look Ollie recognized from other emergencies.

  “He’s leaving!” she cried.

  Ollie shut the door. “Lower your voice. What are you talking about?”

  “Jim says he’s quitting me.”

  “So?” she asked as she sat next to her. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “It’s what you wanted! Never me!”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “I don’t know what I was saying. You twisted my head all around!”

  “Nell, calm down—”

  “Don’t tell me to calm down! Can you imagine the cheek of it, him telling me that? He doesn’t leave me; I leave him!”

  “You’re just upset.”

  “I need to go after him. I want my shoes—”

  “That would be the stupidest thing you could do,” Ollie said. “Running after him. You would be under his thumb forever.”

  “I don’t care. To be humiliated like that! I need to find him—”

  She tried to get up, but Ollie held her arm.

  “Let go of me.”

  “Nellie, please. Listen to me—”

  “No! Let go!” she repeated, struggling.

  “Remember that we talked about this. We knew this would happen. Remember what you told me?”

  Nell managed to gain her feet. She was dragging Ollie off the bed now as she tried to break Ollie’s grasp.

  “Ollie! Stop it!”

  “Remember you told me to sit on you if I had to. You told me not to let you go back to him. You said don’t let you.”

  “You said that, not me,” said Nell.

  They were both on their feet now, pulling in opposite directions. Nell tried to pry Ollie’s right hand from her arm as Ollie held onto the headboard with her left. They struggled in near silence for a few moments—until Nell broke away and hurtled backwards. She just managed to turn her head as it struck the corner of the dresser.

  “Nell!” cried Ollie in a screaming whisper.

  Her sister collapsed to the floor. Ollie rushed to her, cradling her in her arms. There was a welt on Nell’s left temple where it had struck the corner. Ollie stared into Nell’s eyes as she held her: the pupils were wide open, and she did not blink.

  She managed to drag Nell onto the bed. Nell began to make a sound now—a low groan from deep in her throat. Ollie seized her hand and shook it.

  “Nell, wake up!”

  She didn’t wake up. Instead, the groan grew louder and less human. Panicking, Ollie put her hand over Nell’s mouth. The sound subsided. But then Nell’s extremities began to shake, her body wracked with shivers. Her limbs commenced to thrash.

  Ollie threw herself on the bed to hold her down. The bed jumped, the headboard slapping against the wall. The fit went on for the time it took for the downstairs clock to strike twelve. Nell’s body g
radually softened, and Ollie rose off her.

  “Nellie? Can you hear me?”

  Nell’s eyes and mouth were open, but more in the manner of holes in some inanimate thing.

  “I’m going to fetch the doctor,” Ollie said.

  From Nell’s mouth there suddenly issued a gush of white foam. Soapy effluent poured over her chin and covered the pillow under her head. Frantic now, Ollie grabbed the first thing at hand—her own night dress—and used it to sop up the mess. But the torrent kept coming, and the material was saturated. Not knowing what else to do, she seized the blanket from the foot of the bed and threw it over Nell—including her head.

  On her way out, Ollie almost slipped on a photograph dropped on the floor. Ollie picked it up, turned it over, and stuffed it down the front of her shirtwaist.

  Outside, from the landing, Ollie saw her father downstairs as he returned from the privy. Then, without intending to deceive, or even thinking at all, she cried,

  “Papa, Nell is not here!”

  Eight hours later, with the morning light searching under the blinds, she and William Cropsey stood over Nell’s body. He demanded an account of what happened, and Ollie told him plainly, with no effort to excuse herself. As she spoke, even as the room brightened, his face became darker.

  “So this was all about Jim Wilcox?”

  “She was out of her mind. She would have run after him. Oh God, what have I done!”

  And she buried her face in her hands, thinking that now, at last, she could break down. But her father wrenched her hands away.

  “This has nothing to do with you. It was him.”

  “But Jim wasn’t here.”

  “Don’t say his name! Don’t ever say it in this house.”

  “I…I don’t know…”

  “That son of a whore! That slough of shit! He twisted her brains with his lies and his presents and his flattery—!”

  She felt her composure slipping again and covered her mouth.

  “—It doesn’t matter if he was here,” he went on. “He’s responsible, nobody else. He’ll wear a noose for this!”

  He punched the headboard hard enough to propel it into the wall, where it left a crack in the plaster. After examining his fist, he gazed at Nell. He placed a hand on her arm and left it there, as if assuring himself of her stillness. As it lay there, his hand trembled.

  “Cover her up. Lock your door. And keep your mouth shut,” he commanded. Then he left.

  The next day, the 21st, felt like three days. Caring for her mother took her mind off the truth, but it was never far out of her mind. The charade of looking for Nell brought out a talent she didn’t know she had. To preserve the big lie, she was obliged to hatch other, smaller deceptions that multiplied, each demanding its own care and feeding. Whether out of fear or shame, she turned out to be a good liar, keeping her swelling flock of falsehoods all moving in the same direction. She fooled her siblings, and she fooled her mother, and she deceived the Sheriff easily, steadily, with scarcely any compunction.

  Sometimes, when she had time for doubts, she wondered where she had gotten the nerve of a riverboat grifter. And at her most self-honest, she knew that she had already been lying for a very long time. There was scarcely a moment free of calculation from the moment she realized that Jim was not the proper match for Nell. She was lying to Roy Crawford when she encouraged him to come around. She and Nell lied steadily to their parents when they smoked, or stayed out late, or read the wrong books. She even lied when she didn’t have to, as when her monthlies left her indisposed, and she blamed it on “fatigue”.

  When she retired the very first night, utterly exhausted, she saw that Nell’s body had vanished. Upon seeing William Cropsey the next morning, her eyes interrogated him, but he ignored her. “That is none of your concern,” his diffidence said. Perhaps he is right, Ollie thought. Imagining her in some ice cellar somewhere, some chilly temporary coffin, made her fear her mask would slip. Her mere absence, on the other hand, made lying easier.

  Mere deceit was one thing, but guilt was another. To her, her crime was so obvious it could be read on her face. The way she lit the stove proclaimed her guilt, as did the ways she filled the lamps and stacked the dishes. She misbuttoned her clothes like a murderess. She left the privy door open like a murderess. She kicked dust-balls into corners like a murderess. When the deliverymen had to deliver more hard ice to their house than usual, it seemed as incriminating as publishing a confession in the newspaper. She caught Uncle Hen staring at her as she fretted at the window; had her father included him in their conspiracy? She dared not ask, and he told her nothing.

  For along with Nell, Ollie lost her father that November morning. There was no small talk between them anymore, but only reproving glances and shared anxiety. William Cropsey had never been a warm man. Nell’s fate ignited a fury in him that could be felt across a room. The pitiful circumstances—where justice would only lead him to lose another daughter—seemed to burn any trace of common sympathy out of him. He had no patience for her mother’s incapacity. He could not tolerate Ollie’s questions. The only thing that gave him satisfaction, it seemed, was to see Jim Wilcox suffer.

  The final line was crossed that Christmas, when her father put Nell in the river. The wait for her body to be discovered was mercifully short—only two days. When they towed her to shore, she envisioned Nell rising from the shallows to point out her killer. It put her in mind of a poem by Poe, one of the few she had memorized…

  I stand amid the roar

  Of a surf-tormented shore,

  And I hold within my hand

  Grains of the golden sand

  How few! yet how they creep

  Through my fingers to the deep,

  While I weep- while I weep!

  O God! can I not grasp

  Them with a tighter clasp?

  O God! can I not save

  One from the pitiless wave…?

  …except, it had been her grasp that had assured that last grain of golden sand had slipped away. Her life was indeed a dream within a dream, of a contrived reality she despised yet from which she could not dare wake up. It took all her strength not to visit the end of Fearing’s pier some dark night, cast herself into the void, and wake up at last.

  She had to be alone with Nell one more time. The night after the inquest, she rose in the middle of the night. She stole downstairs, and finding the key on its usual hook, entered the shed.

  Under the light of the full moon, she could see Nell’s body on the table, covered by a sheet. Trembling, bathed in a cloud of her own exhalations, she rolled down the material. Nell’s head was bald, her scalp pulled down in a heap at the crown of her head. Her skin was blue, her lips like black parentheses containing nothing.

  Ollie bent and kissed her mouth. When she rose, some of her cold, eel-like flesh peeled away, and stuck to Ollie’s lips. She knew she should have been disgusted by this, but was not. She rolled down the sheet, locked the shed door, replaced the key, and went back to bed with that bit of Nell still stuck to her.

  The trial was the climax of her betrayal. She had been doing quite well at first—better than she imagined she would when she anticipated that cruel day. But when she got to the point in her story when she was supposed to have seen Nell alive for the last time, the misery came on suddenly, like a squall whipping up under a cloudless sky. She recalled that the ancients believed the wind came from caves at the end of the world. This was exactly how her grief felt—like a force blasting out of hard, empty chambers deep within herself. When she imagined these untouched places, the more hopeless she felt. For what was left of Nell within her was still there, lost in those shadows.

  She cried because she lied, and because nothing she said was untrue. She cried for what she left out, for what Mr. Ward knew never to ask. And she cried for what that other lawyer, so without pity, would soon demand of her, when his turn came.

  And yet, she survived this ordeal not once, but twice. She sinned against tr
uth with impunity, but no thunderbolt came down on her head. No trap doors opened. Instead, she was admired for telling the story everyone in that mob had come to hear.

  “The court recognizes how difficult this must be,” the judge said. “Does the witness wish for a brief recess?”

  “I will go on,” she said, and went on playing her role, until there was nothing left of her faith. Questions posed and processes proceeded, and the cakewalk of sophistry. It occurred to her that none of the clocks in the courthouse agreed with each other. She would never marry, because she would never bring a child into a world where someone like herself was possible.

  VII.

  When Ollie was finished with her story, Jim was silent. The significance of what he had heard, its enormity, eluded his grasp. Every memory he had for the last twenty years was altered in light of it. Every choice had to be revisited. The task so daunted him that he preferred to believe none of it.

  “No. It can’t be. What can I have done to you, that you could do that to a man?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” she replied. “And you did nothing.”

  He looked at his hands. As he regarded the creases there, the scars of all the lost years, he felt his nerve cracking. He leaned over, face in hands, and suddenly, all at once, shed the tears he had long refused to show. He wept with relief, and outrage, and pity for his poor mother, who died far from him and would never know of his innocence. And he shed tears for poor Nell, whom he had lost so long ago and never truly mourned.

  Ollie watched and could do nothing. She had no standing to comfort him. Instead, it occurred to her that Jim looked very much like Nell, head in hands, on that very bed, that night when Ollie found her in their room.

  He dried his face with his hands and rose.

  “Hand over that picture.”

  She didn’t move.

  He put his hands around her throat. He had wasted over the years, but the occasion brought back some of his old strength. He closed her windpipe, and met her eyes as she stared back, unresisting. Both of their faces turned red. Ollie, feeling an animal urge to fight him, clutched the doorframe behind her instead.