by Téa Obreht
Josie returned triumphant and dropped something into her hand.
Nora turned it over. It was a bead of some kind, about the size of a seedpod or rosary, pitted and painted up with a maelstrom of blue circles. She tapped it with her fingernail.
“What is it?”
“After I seen the beast, I reasoned I’d best be quite certain before I say a word of it to Mister Toby. So I went out to the barn first thing in the morning. You can’t imagine, ma’am, what it took for me to do it, fearful as I was that whatever I seen should still be out there.”
“I suppose there were tracks?”
“I couldn’t say, ma’am. I never was no good at reading sign.” An extraordinary understatement. “But just as I was reproaching myself for not being better—having the chance to learn it off so fine a gentleman as Mister Lark—this shone out at me from the grass. Like it was set there by Providence to remind me to keep faith with what I seen.”
“What is it?”
“I couldn’t guess. But I never seen the like. And taking the risk that it might be unholy, I took it up and put it aside for just this moment.”
The bead felt hollow. Its heft was unfamiliar. “Probably some old Indian trinket.”
“But for it to appear exactly in that spot—when hours before I had watched the beast stand at the barn window, not two feet from where I found it?”
Nora looked outside. Light twanged up and down the laundry line below. She could see the stubbled backfield, and the dry snarl of the brush where it thickened toward the bluffs.
“Josie,” she said. “Whatever this may be, it has undone you further.” She pointed. “Your window doesn’t overlook the goddamn barn at all.”
SHE CUT A SWITCH FROM outside and laid it on the table between them. The gesture itself had often proved enough for even the boys. It was certainly enough for Josie. She wept. Nora took the opposite chair and waited.
Toby—whom she had never struck, but for whom the mere sight of a switch was likewise wounding enough—was peering through the cracked kitchen door. She could see him out of the corner of her eye.
“Let’s just get it all laid out,” she said to Josie, “and we’ll have no more of this.”
Josie sounded like someone had stuffed her mouth with wet cotton. “I laid it all out for you already.”
“Why are you crying?”
“Because you so determined not to believe me, Missus Lark, and I done nothing but lay it out for you, and certainly nothing to earn this whipping.”
“What whipping?”
“The one you about to give me.”
“I’m just sitting here.”
“Till you lay hands on that switch. I heard from Mister Rob how you get when you of a certain mind.”
Nora skated a hand across the tablecloth, smoothed it as flat as she could. There were three, six, nine, twelve blue-threaded squares between her and Josie’s bloodless fingertips on the far side.
“Weren’t we upstairs together just now?” she asked. Josie nodded. “Haven’t you just finished telling me that you sat up in bed the other night and ‘seen the beast’ out by the barn?”
“I said I seen the beast.”
“By the barn.”
“I guess so.”
“But as was just established: your window doesn’t overlook the barn, Josie. The barn’s clear around the other side of the house from your room.”
Josie took a breath and went over it all again, more slowly this time. When she got to the end, she said: “Maybe I mistook where it was standing.”
“But didn’t you find that blue kernel behind the barn, because you knew where to look?”
Josie dropped her face into her hands and howled. Nora waited her out. It wasn’t the lie itself she found galling. Not really. It was the flimsy construction she couldn’t abide—haphazard and poorly thought-out, just like the lie of pretty much any soul who cared to meet Nora on this particular ground. Ruses too vague or too elaborate, crowned with some excremental detail that would collapse under the slightest pressure. As if Nora herself, now having to sniff out liars rather than be one, were some rube who didn’t know to investigate any declaration accompanied by flinching eyebrows or twisting mouths. Hadn’t she raised three sons?
Sparrows rustled in the creosote outside. A splinter that had steadily been working its way through Nora’s stocking for the better part of ten minutes had become a constant and untenable prickle in the bottom of her foot.
“Come now, Josie,” she said. “That’s enough crying.”
This brought Toby out of the kitchen. He put his little paw on her knee. “Mama,” he said. “I can’t see.”
“A moment, lamb.”
“But Mama—I can’t see.”
His bad eye still wandered, but the good one followed her finger. She sent him back to the kitchen. He, too, was sobbing by the time he’d felt his way along the wall. Having reached the doorway, he made his final stand there: rested his elbows on the doorjamb and drenched his sleeves with bitter tears.
“There’s just about two ways to see it,” she said to Josie. “Either you didn’t see the beast. Or you weren’t in your room. Take a moment to reflect on which is worse. If the former, perhaps you’re just humoring my son, against my directive, out of some misguided notion about what’s right and fair. But I got a ransacked springhouse says it’s the latter, for you are lying up and down, girl. What puzzles me is why.”
The two of them keening like this raised a sting into her own eyes. Her nose prickled. She couldn’t tell if this was owed to Toby looking such a sorry picture, or because she was still that wounded he’d thrown in with Josie against her.
But Josie would not fold. She made a muffled gargling noise whose final notes alighted, very faintly, on something about being mistaken.
“What’s that?”
“I said I must’ve been mistaken.”
Nora pushed back from the table. “When I was a girl, my mother forbade me leave the house after dark. But I had older brothers who exerted a terrible influence over me. I used to climb out the attic window with them come midnight and run down into the timber camp shanties and bang tambourines till daybreak. Well, one night Patsy Ford’s old dog up and vanished, and Patsy, being a man all about the shortest line betwixt two points, accused this Dakota boy who lived downriver of making off with him.” In the kitchen doorway, Toby had lifted his face from his arms. It was blotchy as a squash. “So Patsy got himself a posse and went downriver to where the Dakota boy lived, and wouldn’t you know it, there in last night’s stewpot, he found some fur that he reasoned certainly did belong to old Rufus.”
“Poor Rufus,” Josie said miserably.
“Indeed—only I’d been out on one of my nightly jaunts and seen Rufus snatched by a coyote with my own eyes. So there I was, twelve, and more frightened of my mother than my children have ever been of me, and the only person who knew that this Dakota boy was innocent. But if I confessed, I would doom myself.”
“What did you do?”
“Confessed. Said I’d lied on my whereabouts, and took my punishment, but got the Dakota boy out of it.” In truth, she had spent a sleepless night mulling it over, but kept it to herself, and the Sheriff had flayed the skin from that child’s back so thoroughly that the neighborhood kids were still finding pieces of his bloodied shirt in the bushes two weeks later. She hadn’t thought of him in years.
“I admire that, ma’am,” Josie said, both hands clasped. “But I ain’t lying on my whereabouts.”
“All right,” Nora said. “Come with me.”
Her getting up raised a fresh wail from Toby. Switch in hand, she led the way upstairs, Josie shuffling along behind her, Toby howling below, clinging to the banister as if it were the mast of a foundering ship. They went from room to room, looking through the windows. She knew the view from
hers and Emmett’s, of course: the brown foreyard, the corral, and then nothing but scrubland, dotted here and there with the stumps of bushes they had cut down for an unobstructed view of the surrounding plain. Still, the details she had failed to retain were a surprise: their window also framed the ruins of their first henhouse, and the wall they’d started while they were still arguing about where to put the huerta. The sight of these markers—at least in this fresh context—moved her. It was like looking at something for the very first time.
The other rooms held more surprises. Toby slept in the little hall nook to the right of the stairs. His window, if one could call it that, overlooked mostly the stovepipe and a snarl of the upper branches of the scrub oak now digging its roots under their foundations.
Across the hall was the comforting order of Dolan’s room: quilt turned down, his good shoes side by side under the bed, his books stacked carefully in their crate, the curtains fluttering through the open window, in which were framed the corral and the garden, where yet another brazen hare was, at this very moment, laying waste to Nora’s cabbages. Its transgression presented a much-needed excuse for getting rid of Toby, whom she ordered to go and chase it off. But she could hardly hear herself for his wailing. He had made it all the way to the top of the stairs, and now stood between her and Josie and declared he wasn’t going anywhere.
“Suit yourself,” Nora said.
Thinking back on this moment, she would wonder whether she’d been close to giving up. What was the point, she wondered, of this endeavor? But it was this refusal, this pointed throwing-in with Josie, that set her on her path again. She made for the attic.
Rob’s room was musk and misrule. Clothes, like the debris of some detonative force, were everywhere. Boxes of his many keepsakes, lidless and flung about. Wood shavings and whittling tools circumscribed his little carving table like some occult layout. A dozen or so of his tiny wooden creatures, awaiting sale in town, were arrayed in a haphazard menagerie along the window-ledge. Nora pulled the curtains aside and looked down over the yellow grass, the hills topped with knotty trees and the scattering of shingles that were missing from the barn roof.
In the doorway behind her, Josie was sobbing. Her pitch had softened from fear to resignation.
Well. Here it was after all: the only window that overlooked the barn.
Nora sat down on the bed. “Toby,” she said, after a minute. “We’ve left Gramma below all alone—will you please?”
“I can’t see,” he said.
“Go tend her, please. I’ll warm you a poultice in a little while.”
But he still would not abandon Josie. He clung to her skirt with one hand. Josie’s shoulders were still shaking, but through all her distress she seemed to have intuited the dangers of putting her arm around him now.
Lowering the switch to the floor went some distance toward reassuring Toby. He took a long while to wipe his nose, then disappeared. Nora could hear him raking his way down the banister, gouging her wallpaper with determination as he went.
“Well,” Nora said once he was out of earshot. “It seems this is the place.”
She looked around Rob’s room. The hurricane of him. Rob, least like Emmett in body but possessed of habits through which his father’s fixations and predilections shot out like water boring through fissures in a dam. Rob couldn’t see right angles: his books spilled in a corner, his basin tilted here, his jug there. The toes of a stray sock peered out from under the bed. From the flung-open doors of the box he used as a chifforobe dangled, in every possible configuration, the outspread viscera of belts and suspenders and trouserlegs; an embarrassing tall hat that gave him the air of a New York dandy; a too-small Sunday coat destined, in another year or two, for Toby.
“I don’t suppose Rob saw the beast, too?” Nora said.
“No ma’am. He didn’t wake.”
It was one thing to be accosted about Rob by an erstwhile whore in the Amargo thoroughfare—but another thing entirely to fight the vision now rising to her mind: Rob prostrate, sleeping with one arm flung above his head as he had when he was a boy, and covered half by rumpled quilts and half by moonlight, which as it streamed into the room shone silver on Josie’s bare breasts beside him—which, in this fleeting and fatal vision, were small and pert and freckled, just like the rest of her, God help us. The effort to smother the thought only amplified it, as in every girlhood mass when Nora had found herself squirming in the pew, panic-stricken, while unbidden oaths—our goddamn Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy fucking name, thy kingdom come, thy goddamn will be done, on earth as it is in fucking heaven—tumbled catastrophically through her thoughts.
“What about Dolan?” she managed.
Dolan, with his neat room and his absurd notions, ghouling around the house with tools he’d disdained all his life, releasing exonerated plagues of mice into the woods behind the house. What a show he’d put on these past months, deriding Rob’s intellect to Josie. And all the while: this. The outrage flooding Nora on his behalf was muddied by a distinct feeling of—what? Strange, sour vindication. Hadn’t she warned him about being so goddamn eager? Perceptive indeed.
“Mister Dolan don’t know yet,” Josie said.
“Which of you has the happy task of telling him?”
“Mister Rob, I expect.”
“Mister Rob.” She let herself laugh. Across the room, Josie was shifting her feet. She did not brace herself against the wall, nor have the decency to look as rueful as she should. She stood there, instead, as though her rightful place were somehow in this room, among the explosion of Rob’s things—as though this disarray, by which even Nora felt a little oppressed, were so familiar to her as to be invisible. And now it was Nora who suddenly felt strange sitting at the foot of this particular bed. She got up and slung Rob’s denims over her arm.
“I suppose, under the circumstances, the springhouse door is the least of your lies.”
Josie stood even straighter. “I must object, ma’am—they weren’t lies.” They had thought long and laboriously on it, she and Mister Rob, and resolved that lies and omissions did not amount to the same thing. They had taken great care to avoid provoking any questions that might force them toward falsehood until such a time as they revealed their engagement to the entire family. “I’m that sorry to be telling you like this, in his absence.”
“Are you,” Nora said. “Are you ‘that’ sorry.” Josie did not look sorry at all. “Now will you tell me what happened in the springhouse?”
From Josie’s innermost being now came a long sigh of resignation and relief. She had done her level best not to lie about that, either, ma’am. But she supposed it was only right to come out with it now, though she would prefer to have the others witness for her character. The thing was, the boys had spent days trying to find a way toward convincing their mother that Mister Lark was dead. They’d had to hear all about it from every soul that came in to buy the paper or post a letter—about the dray someone had seen being taken apart up at the Sanchez place, and a lot of whispered talk. Nora’s refusal to press Sheriff Harlan more urgently for answers—or for that matter, why she thought it prudent to involve him at all—mystified them. Josie herself liked Sheriff Harlan just fine—he was a kind man, and he made her laugh—but the boys were suspicious of the Ash River Clarion’s steadfast support of his reelection.
“So Mister Rob thought: if they could just get you to see it their way.”
To this end, they had gone into the springhouse last night together, all three of them—even Mister Dolan—to séance with Mister Lark. (How strange it seemed, Nora thought, hearing that disparity between Mister Rob and Mister Dolan now—how the former, on Josie’s tongue, felt like some delicate pet name, while the latter conjured up a village spinster.)
The séance had been Rob’s idea. If it succeeded, it would put the question of their father’s death to rest. Josie practi
cally had to be dragged to the shed, on account of the beast—which she had seen. Whatever Missus Lark might think of her, she swore she’d seen it. She had only overcome her fear and relented because it tore at her to see the boys so desperate, the both of them, in the wake of the suppertime fight. Mister Dolan was just heartbroken about his own lack of self-control—he had surprised himself as much as anyone, punching through that door, and so close to Nora’s head. Josie supposed there was no way of telling it from his behavior right after, for he had hardly covered himself with glory when he had continued to shout and thrown a plate. But that had owed more to shock than anything else. He had gone upstairs afterward and just wept with disappointment. He hadn’t thought he could face his mother ever again.
“I’m only telling you all this, ma’am,” Josie said, “to let you know his state of mind afterwards. You know yourself what a skeptic he is—what it would take to enlist him into séance. He was that sorry, ma’am. Just beside himself. Kept thinking on how those woodchips might’ve gone in your eye, and he just cried.”
For hours, they had sat in the springhouse together. Josie held a piece of Emmett’s shirt and reached out to him. She’d called him every name he might answer to: Mister Lark, and Emmett Lark, and just Emmett—even Father, since the boys were there. Outside, she had heard distant nighttime noises coursing on in their usual way. The tapping on the springhouse roof was just the branches of the scrub oak. At one moment, something had brushed up against that blue darkness that lived in her, and she had grown hopeful it might be Mister Lark. But the spirit had not answered her. It hadn’t knocked or moved the pocketwatch she put on the table.
They had given up around three in the morning, and gone to bed.
“When I saw the springhouse wrecked this morning, I did curse myself so,” Josie said. “I feared perhaps Mister Lark’s manifestation might’ve just took a little longer than it should, and we were too quick giving up on him. Maybe all that mess in the springhouse was just Mister Lark raging because he’d finally arrived, only to find us already gone. But you were right—we must have just forgot to latch the door, and it was nothing but the dogs after all.”
