The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

by Kathryn Davis

  The coughing seemed to come closer, although perhaps it too, like the music, had merely increased in pitch. The broken chords had reassembled themselves; I could hear their ominous and somehow liturgic progression, the sense of hooded figures making their steady way through vast hallways of stone. Dark and damp, measured organum, a steady beating of gradually swelling chords: step, step, step; cough, cough, cough. “Truth has nothing to do with it,” a voice said, coughing, and when I looked past Sam’s shoulder I could see Helle approaching out of the shadowy cave where the stream disappeared into the cedar woods, leaping lightly on the balls of her feet from rock to rock. Or to be more precise, I saw Helle dressed in Nightingale’s hideous third act costume, her head encased in its helmet of beaks, flashing knifelike, scissorlike; her body tessellated with flashing, observant eyes; her brown wings extended on either side for balance; her russet tail trailing in the water. “Chook-chook-chook, piu piu piu,” she said. “The joke’s on you.”

  So we might imagine them, Helle said, all of them gathered together for the last time on the beach: the two scullions and the downstairs maid, the valet, the master and the mistress, the cook. The twins as well; we shouldn’t forget the twins. Flo and Ruby, over there in the bushes, a spider monkey and a little white cat—she knew they were there, even though they were trying to hide. An ascending chorale, could we hear it? The most beautiful thing she’d ever written. Heavenly music—listen! she said—the complicated mess of human affairs finally transformed into celestial music. Of course, the higher the music soared, the greater the danger. Nightingale and his army of birds were flying overhead, on the lookout as always for signs of human pride and arrogance. Sam and I were stealing the show, she complained. Midnight, time to unmask, but Sam and I had ruined everything; the guests were too distracted by the rumors of our impromptu drama in the stream to be interested in her own, which had been weeks in the planning. She lifted one winged arm—Oh my God, she’s got a gun, said a man dressed like a nurse—and I realized she was holding her father’s pearl-handled dueling pistol, pointing it, at least for the moment, at my chest. Thunder and lightning, she said—appropriately dramatic, didn’t we think? Meanwhile, the birds were beginning to land on the beach.

  Although the thunder and lightning came in fact from the loudspeakers, drops of real rain were now falling into the stream, where Sam had turned to face Helle, his arm looped protectively around my shoulders. “It isn’t loaded, is it?” he asked, and I heard a bitter, high-pitched laugh at my back. Maren, I thought, and absurdly wondered if she’d been there all along.

  “Go ahead and shoot,” Maren Blackburn called, “I dare you. What’s stopping you?”

  “Except Frances is not my quarry,” Helle admonished, stately, annoyed. “I would never hurt Frances. Summa petit livor,” she continued. “Envy always wants the best for itself, to quote my father. Well, to quote Ovid, really. A warning which I’ve decided to take as advice.” With her free arm Helle tugged off the beak-studded helmet and, as she did so, the arm holding the pistol swung out toward the bank, causing the by now large crowd standing there to let out a short, collective gasp.

  “I’ve got it,” yelled a Zorro (Lyle Judkins, according to the police report), only he was mistaken: his hand closed over air, over rain.

  “I may be old,” Helle laughed, “but I’m quicker than you. Quicker and smarter.” She lifted the gun, this time purposely aiming it at the crowd. “You stupid people,” she said. “Don’t you understand? I’m trying to protect you. You stupid, stupid people.”

  At this very minute, she explained, the birds were setting upon the people on the beach, tearing them apart, providing Nightingale with bits and pieces of their bodies—the valet’s shiny black hair and eyebrows, one scullion’s pretty lips, the other’s nimble fingers, the downstairs maid’s perfect breasts, the cook’s long white thighs, the master’s prick, the mistress’s cunt, the twins’ little red hearts. Fuglespil, she said, was a dark opera, an opera born out of her need to define, once and for all, the monstrous nature of the artist. “If only I were one of you,” Helle sang, her raspy voice accompanying the sweet voice of Nightingale, which floated down to us out of the loudspeaker and across the rain-spattered meadow, “then you would never know, how terror stalks you all the time, how it’s the force that shapes the rhyme, that steals your breath to set the beat, the rutting gib, the bitch in heat; my gift your grace, the lying trace of form with which I cursed you.”

  “You’re crazy,” Sam said, and Helle rotated her feathery arm in his direction, bringing the gun’s muzzle into alignment with his head. The rain was starting to fall harder, splashing into the water, making the willow leaves quiver timidly up and down, up and down, the lanterns sway wildly to and fro, to and fro, extinguishing some of the candles. A hint of brewing wind, a vague yawning coolness, more like the idea of coolness than coolness itself, insinuated itself into the hot tunnel of air above the stream. “Point that thing away,” Sam said, and then, when Helle ignored him, he held out his hand, friendly, entreating, like a child trying to get its ball back from a stubborn pup. “Give it to me,” he said. “Come on, you know better.” Just like a man, Helle laughed, couldn’t make up his mind. Confusing craziness and ethics, direction and desire. Typical. By now the glass harmonica was playing, solo, the opera’s concluding measures, a phrase repeated over and over, that simple and vaguely familiar line of melody, something like the last phrase of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” only disturbingly altered, rendered sinister by repetition. Maybe Helle would listen to me, Sam whispered into my ear. I could feel his lips moving there, wet, tense; his grip tightening on the knob of my shoulder. How hard it was to hear him over the noise of the rain! For it was pouring. The downpour we’d all been waiting for. The sound of fire rather than water, as Helle had once described it to me, of fire consuming everything around it. Filled with poison, as Sam had once suggested. If she’d listen to anyone, he said, it’d be me. But I didn’t move, didn’t open my mouth.

  “What I was planning this time,” Helle said, “was to destroy Nightingale instead. A few months one way or the other, what difference would it make? Bang! and then it’s supper, though I wouldn’t be stuck having to watch you eat it. A fabulous supper, if I say so myself. Better than the stuff they supposedly serve in Asgard, unless you happen to be partial to pig flesh and drinking horns full of mead. But that was years ago, that opera. And now here’s the Don, trying as usual to get his supper ahead of everyone else. His supper—a certain young lady in Introduction to Hegel, a C student, but cute. A certain Mrs. Pinsky, summer resident on the lake. Zaftig, a departure from his usual taste. Possibly a certain front-office secretary, blond, ditto a departure. Oh, I know what you’re thinking—maybe it’s not too late, maybe I could still shoot myself, yes? Sam’s right, all you have to do is say the word. Three choices, as I see it: shoot myself, shoot the Don, shoot the whole lot of you. The last being impractical; the first, no longer pertinent.”

  Did she have a mysterious third ear, as uncannily attuned to random sensory data as that mysterious tattooed eye? Otherwise I couldn’t figure out how she’d overhead Sam’s remark. “There’s a fourth choice,” he said, shouting. “You could shoot nobody.” He’d let go of me and was inching toward Helle, the rain pounding down all around us, a deafening roar that seemed to have its source inside my head, where the four confusing possibilities tore at each other tooth and nail in a frightening and predatory tangle. “Oh no you don’t,” Helle said. A clever ploy, trying to distract her with a philosophic dilemma—for who, after all, could ever hope to put a bullet through nobody’s heart?—but she was wise to his tricks. Although in a way Sam was on the right track: once you saw the Don as nobody, once you understood that nobody was trying to satisfy his rapacious appetite here in the stream, then it hardly mattered if you pulled the trigger. No one had ever gotten into trouble for shooting nobody. Another philosophic dilemma, Sam shouted. How could no one pull a trigger? Besides, how could he be hungry if h
e didn’t have a body? Touché, Helle admitted. Her mistake. The sad truth was, no one’s life had ever been saved by art.

  “Isn’t that so, Frances?” she said, and I heard a small click. An almost imperceptible noise, but enough to finally rouse me—all at once I was aware of how my mask, a gluey and disintegrative mass, was slipping loose, sliding down my neck and onto my shoulders. Of course, I thought, no wonder I can’t think clearly. I scraped the rest of the mask away, let the rain wash my face, turning it this way and that, feeling the cold drops hit my skin, some of them running into my mouth and eyes. The world at last sprang into focus: I could see the little brown feather pasted to Helle’s cheek, her tongue licking forth from her furiously smiling mouth, her eyes like two pinpricks in her papery head, through which I thought what I was seeing was the far-off darkness of the cedars; and then my view of her was completely blotted out by the darker shape of Sam, his wet dark robes clinging to his back, a tender white crescent visible at the nape of his neck. For just a second he paused, turning to look at me, and I could recognize in his expression the same happiness I’d felt when I first saw him standing there beside me in the water, a happiness which flickered dimly, and went out. Behind me Maren; to my left the crowd-filled meadow; to my right a monkey and a cat, crouched on the stream bank. “No!” I yelled, but I confess my meaning was ambiguous. I confess, I confess, although now it’s too late. “No,” I said again, softer this time, and the gun went off. Once, twice, three times. All three bullets straight through Sam’s heart.

  Part Five

  THE GIRL WHO TROD

  ON A LOAF

  I

  AND THEN NOTHING. Nobody, no one. The stream kept pouring from its spring in the cedar woods, heading toward Pocket Lake; the rain kept falling, not so hard as before, yet steady, persistent; the music played from the loudspeaker, waltzes once again, as if to lure us all back to the meadow, where we would keep on dancing forever, the women locked safely in the firm arms of the men. Although the command was clear: Don’t anybody touch anything, said a man in a Dracula costume, and we didn’t, standing there separate and horrified on the stream bank as if we understood his warning to mean that we shouldn’t touch each other. This was Tom Milkwood, I realized, the deputy sheriff, a heavyset man with a reddish beard skirting his chin and no mustache, like an Amish farmer. Even-tempered and diligent, a little shy—he used to flirt with me shyly in the diner, telling jokes and forgetting the punch lines. Don’t anybody leave, he said now, until I get your names. We were material witnesses to a crime, he cautioned us, and should watch what we said. Only as it turned out, Helle was more than willing to admit that she was the one who’d shot the gun. She handed it over proudly, then asked with some concern whether the rain would have washed away the fingerprints. No such luck, said Tom Milkwood, wrapping the gun in his cape. By now the oils in her fingers would have left their mark, and you had to really put some effort into it to get rid of them. But Miss Ten Brix should keep her thoughts to herself until she’d consulted a lawyer. In the meantime, he was going to read her her rights, and suggested she listen carefully. “But I can tell you what you’ll find,” Helle said. “You’ll find my prints. I can assure you that the only prints you’re going to find on that gun are mine. People will try to tell you there was a struggle, as if Mr. Blackburn and I had struggled for possession of the gun. But I can assure you he never so much as laid a finger on it.”

  What I remember is how quiet the world became, the stream quietly moving, the rain quietly falling, the music quietly playing. No sound, even though I know people were whispering, sobbing, screaming; even though I know that at some point there was the wailing of sirens, the abrupt and tense conversation of professional men whose job it was to take photographs, to gather evidence, to remove the body. They took him away; the stream washed away the blood. “Well, Frances,” Helle said, “the wolf is there, all you have to do is climb through. Only be quick about it, because if you don’t, someone else will.” She had her arm linked through Tom Milkwood’s as if he were about to escort her not into a squad car but onto the dance floor. “My own chances to fly,” she added, indicating the condition of her wing feathers with a sly, birdlike tilt of the head, “are not so good.” Wolf, I said—are you insane? Wolf, wound, Helle shrugged, why equivocate? Of course I suspected what she meant, just as I knew that the walls quietly assembling themselves around me were as impervious to escape as the walls of my own house were full of holes, bad wiring, mice. Silent walls, gray and silent walls.

  In Dürer’s famous engraving it’s not easy to differentiate Melancholia from the wall of the unfinished tower behind her, from the bell and the hourglass hanging there, the bell silent, the hourglass running out; from the sorrowful putto perched beside her on a grindstone or the spectral hound at her feet. This is a world in which no single detail is allowed to achieve prominence, the burin’s restless cross-hatchings having rendered all surfaces equally gray, equally stippled with a gray and melancholy light. Scales and compass, inkpot and tongs—Frances Thorn surrounded by those tools with which she once hoped to pry her spirit loose from its brittle human brainpan, tools that are ultimately the agents of her confinement. So you might imagine me, a dull and motionless creature caught in that gray, cross-hatched net where the accomplice is doomed to live out her days, endlessly weighing, endlessly measuring. Only there’s no tool adequate to such a task, for, as I discovered, to have become an accomplice is to have lost all weight, all contour. You disappear, even though you can still see yourself in the mirror. Nothing, nobody, no one. “The lying trace of form,” I thought, “with which she cursed you.”

  Sometimes at night I would find myself looking through the picture window, confusing the sound of small animals tunneling through the unmowed grass with a man’s footsteps. Sometimes I would dream that a man was touching my body, a stranger, and one for whom I knew I would never feel anything more than weary displeasure, because no matter how hard he tried he never was able to figure out the places where I was most vulnerable to a man’s touch. The summer turned cold and wet; the dwarf apples rotted in the apple trees, the dwarf cornstalks rotted at the root, snails clung to the undersides of the rotting leaves of dwarf cabbages, dwarf beets. Meanwhile, tourists flocked to the Branch Road to get a look at the trailer, and business at the diner was brisk, although I had only Kosta’s word for this. He’d had to let me go, public opinion, as he told me regretfully, being what it was. There was an inquest, a trial. Helle was guilty of manslaughter, according to the jury, their verdict based on witness testimony, most of which implied that the shooting had been an accident.

  “So did the good people of Salem join ranks,” wrote Wallace Bench in a Sun Herald editorial, “to uphold what they assumed was a moral imperative. We can only surmise that for the good people of Canaan murder would appear to be a less heinous crime than adultery. Or, failing that, that the surprising verdict in the Blackburn case was due to a triumph of sentimentality, to an overriding unwillingness to send an old, sick woman to the electric chair. Where, in our opinion, she most certainly belongs.” Ah, Mr. Bench, Helle said, when I showed her the clipping. It would be a relief to think that there was at least one person in Canaan who understood what had really happened that night. The only problem was that Wallace Bench was merely trying to exact revenge for all the letters she’d sent the paper complaining about his use of the masculine pronoun to the exclusion of the feminine. Basta, basta! she cried, and then suddenly started wheezing, lifting her arms above her head the way she’d been taught by the public health nurse. The pillows, Frances! she wheezed. By now she was once again living in the trailer, ever since her failing health had made it necessary for her to be removed, after a month, from what she liked to refer to as “the slammer.” An officer of the court was hired to keep guard, although, as he himself concluded after his first day on duty, Helle was going nowhere. He would show up late in the morning, make a cup of coffee and take it outside, where he’d sit in one of the beach chairs,
reading mystery novels. A busman’s holiday, Mr. Spot? Helle would ask him, when she saw him thus engaged.

  I helped her onto the bed—the little maple bed in which, only two years earlier, Ruby had put her dolls to sleep—and propped the pillows up under her hips. A technique called postural drainage, another of the public health nurse’s tricks for coaxing breath back into Helle’s failing lungs. The idea was that if you elevated her hips, gravity would draw away the mucus pooling in her chest; she was supposed to remain in this position for at least half an hour, without talking. “Such a chatterbox,” the nurse would say. “You need to relax, honey. Let your muscles go loose.”

  But what, you might ask, was I doing propping up pillows under this woman’s hips? Why hadn’t I taken Kosta’s advice—moved away from town, started a new life for myself and the twins in some faraway city? What was I waiting for? The flickering apparition of a man whose greatest mistake it had been to confuse the unsound surface of my lust with a firmly planted stone in a darkly rushing stream? Did I think that if I waited around he would come back to me, his damp body once again whole, his heart in one piece, all impediments to our love finally erased by his immateriality? But even the faintest sudden noise made me freeze with terror: Lyle Judkins’s tractor starting up; the telephone; a thermometer falling to the floor, cracking apart to release hundreds of tiny balls of mercury. No, it’s more likely I was motivated by both the penitent’s need to subject herself to the overt daily censure of her peers and the victim’s need to subject Helle to a subtle version of that same censure, one which I alone was capable of inflicting. In other words, I wanted to atone for my own sins while punishing Helle at the same time.