by Sheri Holman
The woods are so dark. Where’s Jason and his hockey mask?
Wallis freezes with the nightgown clutched to her chest. Jasper’s voice is so loud and close, it could be in the room with her. They are talking on the back porch; she can hear them through the open window above the bed. She climbs up onto the mattress and peers out. Eddie is pointing to a white dot that smoothly transverses the sky. Is it ours or the Russians’? She no longer mistakes satellites for falling stars.
That’s the problem with horror today, he says. It’s all anxiety and faceless slaughter. When I began, at least we knew the enemy.
I’m sorry I told her, Jasper is saying. You trusted me.
It’s not your fault, Eddie answers. It was a long time ago.
Wallis turns from the window and pulls off her sticky T-shirt. She drops the nightgown, soft and smelling of the woods, over her head. She thinks about her spell and the kiss, and glancing at the herbal book she dropped on the bed, Wallis wonders what sort of magic she can make with the tools of the larger forest.
Cora stored her linen in the second drawer. Wallis yanks away the garish bedspread and remakes the bed with a patched sheet and an unremarkable quilt. It’s not like the ones she sometimes sees hanging in her friends’ mothers’ dens next to their macramé. This quilt has a drab gray stripe with random squares of color, but it fits her mood. If Mom were here, she’d tell Wallis to be respectful of other people’s things, but Mom is not here and Cora is dead and these are Wallis’s things now as the last living female Alley. She wonders if there is jewelry—a pocket watch or a ring? Her other grandmother died when her mother was only a teenager, but she left a strand of pearls in the event of a future granddaughter, which Mom has promised her when she’s sixteen.
The bottom drawer is the deepest and heaviest yet. Wood scrapes against wood and she thinks—family silver. She drags forward a box about the size of a portable sewing machine. It’s no jewelry box, she sees immediately, placing it on the newly made bed. Her fingers hover over its brass latches before she flips them up and lifts away the top.
She touches the burnished wood crank, the brass plate that reads Pathé. The film is still thread on its iron reel, unmarked, but what else could it be? She thinks immediately to call her father—Your movie. It’s not lost!—but she stops. He and Jasper are walking the perimeter of the house and Jasper is explaining how the circuit would flow. They have just arrived and already the men want to change everything.
I want to show you something, she can hear herself say.
Wallis replaces the lid and returns the projector to the back of the bottom drawer. She fits the ugly bedspread around it and pushes the drawer closed. She has, at last, something he desires. Their footsteps are on the breezeway now, then someone knocks at her door.
“Sweet dreams,” her father says.
It is difficult for her to answer. She has the tingling aftershock in her chest of having touched an ungrounded wire, feeling the danger only after she’s let go.
“Sweet dreams,” she replies.
The sheet is bunched under Jasper’s cheek and twisted between his legs; his mouth hangs open against the arm he’s used as a pillow. He’s still asleep, drugged by the heat of the morning. Overnight a smudge has risen above his upper lip, a rustier red than his orange hair, and stubble creeps along his jaw toward his ears. Two days ago, Wallis thinks, we were enemies, but no more. We have kissed each other and now we are in love. I must be kinder to this face, she thinks, stepping over him to join her father in the kitchen.
Eddie has lit the potbellied stove and put a pan of water on to boil for coffee. He sits at the long, torn-oilcloth-covered table in his cut-off shorts and white T-shirt, his bare feet hooked in the chair rung. Before him is a growing list of provisions he wants to buy and things he’s identified as in need of repair. He needs to buy shingles for the roof and a nail gun. Charcoal and potatoes and kerosene and paint. Up here, in this place, it is easy for Wallis to see her father as a capable man, cooking and cleaning and planning repairs, not needing to talk much about it. Without Mom, he seems younger and older at once.
“You shouldn’t put ground beef next to caulk,” she says, reading his list over his shoulder. “They don’t go together.”
“It’s a list, not a grocery bag,” Eddie replies. “Words will not contaminate each other.”
Wallis spoons a mound of coffee crystals into a mug and adds water from the pan on the stove.
“You didn’t pack the creamer?” she asks.
“It builds character to take it black,” Eddie says, looking up. “What are you wearing?”
He is seeing her for the first time and is not pleased. Wallis has buttoned herself into the faded green dress and rolled up the sleeves. The hem is frayed and it has been patched in several places, but it fits as if it had been made for her.
“I found it in your mother’s dresser,” she says, “along with some other things. Can I have it?”
“You look like a bag lady,” he says.
“Are you planning to wear it?” Wallis asks.
“It’s not my color,” Eddie answers.
“Good. Then it’s mine.”
She’d like to take her coffee out to the front porch where she can watch the mist rising from the hollow, but she doesn’t want Jasper sleeping at her feet like a hound. Instead, she paces the room, reading the yellowed and peeling kitchen walls. Dunkirk Evacuated. Verdun Falls. Churchill to Commons: Prepare for Hard and Heavy Tidings.
“Why are all these newspapers pasted up?” she asks.
“Poor people used them to keep the drafts out,” he says. “We were a little short on interior decorators up here.”
Under the window near the sink, Queen Wilhelmina has fled to England. In the corner by the door, the Blitz has begun. What Wallis knows of World War II is mostly D-day and the Holocaust, but there is no mention of the Jews on these walls. “In this new system of force,” she reads aloud from a longer column, “the mastery of the machine is not in the hands of mankind. It is in the control of infinitely small groups of individuals who rule without a single one of the democratic sanctions that we have known. The machine in hands of irresponsible conquerors becomes the master; mankind is not only the servant; it is the victim, too.”
Eddie rises and reads over her shoulder.
“That’s from Roosevelt’s ‘Stab in the Back’ speech,” he says. “Delivered right after Mussolini entered the war. Breaking news, circa 1940.”
“Life must have sucked growing up without TV.”
“Back then people could wait a few days to learn about all the things they couldn’t control,” Eddie answers, returning to the table and his lists. “Nowadays we’re much more impatient for our impotence.”
Wallis joins her father at the table. The checkered tablecloth has black burn holes from dropped matches. She can see down through the furry scorches to the wood below.
“Why haven’t we ever come here?” she asks.
“There’s been nothing to bring us,” her father replies.
“Meeting my grandmother?”
“She died before you were born, while your mother was pregnant with you, actually.”
Wallis takes a long sip of coffee, watching her father over the rim of the cup.
“Why won’t you talk about your mother? Are you ashamed of her?”
“Why would I be ashamed?” he asks, surprised.
“Tell me something about her then.”
Eddie sips his own coffee and considers.
“She believed in telling ghost stories at bedtime,” he says at last. “I never knew until I met your mother that parents were supposed to comfort their children to sleep. I thought they were supposed to scare them into staying in bed.”
“That’s not what I mean,” says Wallis. “Tell me real things.”
“That’s not real? That’s the realest thing I can think of.”
“I mean like—was she pretty?”
“Beautiful. I thought so,
at least.”
“Like Mom?”
“Nothing like your mother. More like you.”
Wallis feels herself expanding under the comparison.
“Did she have enemies?”
“That’s a strange thing to ask,” Eddie says. “Why would she have enemies?”
“I don’t know,” Wallis replies. “Did she?”
“Quite a few. If you don’t die with at least a handful of people hating you, you probably haven’t lived a very honest life.”
“Do you have a handful?” she counters.
“Nowhere close. But then again, I’m not dead yet.”
Wallis looks around the papered room with its sieges and expired horoscopes. The water running in the sink sounds like a fountain into which she could toss coins. Mom never lets her make wishes at the fountain at the mall. It’s a waste of pennies, she says.
“Let’s leave this place exactly as it is,” she says. “Don’t change anything.”
“You like it here?” Eddie asks.
“I love it.”
“What do you love?” Jasper asks. He has come in behind her father and stretches, half-naked, in the doorway, lifting his ropey arms over his head to show his muscles and unmucked stall of armpit hair. Then he is beside her at the sink, shoveling Tang into a mug and running it under the open spigot.
“This house,” she says, coloring.
“I had a dream about this house,” he says, “but it wasn’t this house. It was made of candy and we ate the whole thing.”
“That’s a nice dream,” says Eddie.
“Was there a wicked witch to shove in the oven?” she asks.
“No, you weren’t there,” Jasper says flatly. He turns his attention to Eddie. “So, what’s the plan for today?”
Wallis pushes her chair back and walks to the stove for more coffee. She doesn’t want to look at either of them. Her father is watching her, even as he talks to Jasper.
“There are a few loose stones in the chimney, and the roof over the porch really needs to be patched,” he answers.
“What about the wiring?”
“I’m having second thoughts,” Eddie replies, glancing at Wallis. “I think we should get a real electrician.”
“You don’t trust me?” Jasper asks.
“It’s not that,” Eddie says swiftly. “I don’t want you to fry yourself.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Jasper says.
“I know you do. It’s just not worth dying over.”
“Which means you don’t think I can do it.”
“I like this place just the way it is,” Wallis turns to say. “I don’t want the two of you to ruin it.”
Eddie gathers his list. “Both of you—let me think about it. Right now I’m headed to town for supplies. I must fetch my daughter some cream for her coffee.”
“Let me get my shoes,” Jasper says.
“We worked all day yesterday,” says Wallis. “Can’t we go exploring?”
Eddie looks between them—Wallis with her coffee, Jasper with his Tang—each of them with false smiles at the corners of their mouths—brown and orange—still kids, so messy. He reaches out and wipes Wallis’s mouth with the edge of his T-shirt like he used to do when she was a careless toddler. And because he doesn’t want the foster boy to feel left out, with a melodramatic sigh, he reaches out and wipes Jasper’s, too.
“Stay here,” he says to Jasper. “You and Wallis start on the barn. Later, we’ll figure out how to electrify this old place. We’ll need heat if we’re coming up this winter.”
Wallis glances at Jasper, her soon-to-be brother. Jesus Christ, she thinks. We. They really plan to keep him.
None of the dozen keys on the old ring Wallis found fit the padlock to the barn door. She’s tried each one, twice, while he’s stood beside her, waiting. It’s not her fault the lock won’t open but after the third go-round, he grabs the ring from her and begins trying them all again himself. He is systematic, going around the ring, inserting and jiggling until all have been tested.
“So where did you learn about wiring?” she asks, needing to break the silence. Kissing him is beginning to feel like having kissed a mirror in a darkened room, the way girls do as practice for a real boy.
“At Eastlake,” he says, naming the high school across town from hers.
“Are you going back there in the fall?”
“There’s nobody to make me.”
“School is important,” she says. “I would go even if nobody made me.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Jasper says. “You just say that because you’ve been told to.”
He tries a key that goes in easily, the same one she thought would work. He turns it so hard it starts to bend, but the lock doesn’t budge. He moves on to the next.
“Don’t you have any friends there?” she asks.
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“People around me die, Wallis,” he says in frustration. “Kids don’t really like to hang out with that.”
“It’s not like it’s your fault,” she says, but wonders if she believes that, if she would have chosen to hang out with him had he not shown up in her house.
“People don’t know what to say to you. They look at you like a crack, you know, like you’re this big hole that’s opened up,” he says, tossing the useless keys to the ground. By his foot is a broken piece of millstone, and he takes it up.
“Sometimes it feels like I’m living in some cartoon where all the carpets and drapes and floor lamps get sucked down and I’m Wile E. Coyote or some such fuck, hanging on to the mantel for dear life. It feels like everything, the whole world, has rushed in and keeps piling up, pressing down, tighter and tighter till—BAM—and Jesus it feels so good to just let go.”
He brings the rock down hard on the old padlock and it goes flying across the yard. With both hands he pulls back on the heavy barn door, flooding the threshing floor with sun. Their shadows fall across it long and tall.
The barn is built of warped chestnut plank like the house, with a loft and a peaked roof that slopes away on either side like the top half of a drawn star. To the right of the double doors are the stalls for livestock. Eddie said his mother had kept a cow, but once there must have been a horse, too, for she finds, in a jumbled heap of farm equipment, an old leather saddle and a pair of stirrups. Metal milk cans lie on their sides and a three-legged stool is woven into the tines of a pitchfork. Above the corncrib hangs a sheaf of tobacco leaves, half-eaten by weevils. Wallis opens the lid of the corncrib to find hinges and oily car parts scavenged over the years. Crammed in around it all and drifting from the loft above is hay seasoned by decades of rain and snow that has worked through the gaps, mildewed and packed down with age. A ladder leads to the loft, and from it dangles a long winch rope tied off with a baling hook.
“I’ll take this side,” Jasper says. “You take that one.”
He tugs the pitchfork from the pile and sets about clearing the floor of hay. He pitches it into a big stack that he’ll then pitch out the sliding side door and into the woods behind. He hates being left behind and he works quickly and angrily to let her know, as if he can make time speed up and Eddie return with each ferocious thrust of the fork. He strips off his shirt to work, as he did yesterday, and she sees his back splotchily sunburned, threads of hay settle in his hair and cling to the nape of his neck.
Wallis falls to work sorting and categorizing the equipment and the bin. The heavy iron gears and pulleys are useless now, worth nothing more than scrap. Still, she loves the weight of them, each with its embossed patent number and named manufacturer. Reaching down into the corncrib, she comes up with a coffee tin of rusted, square-headed nails like the one she took from her father’s casket. She pours them onto her flat palm, measuring them like money. Whose soul might a girl purchase with a handful of coffin nails? She retrieves the millstone Jasper dropped outside the door and uses it to hammer a long row of them into a beam along the wall. From the
nails she hangs the hoe and shovel and saw she finds. And the long mowing scythe with its splintery handle and dulled sickle. Is this how her grandmother did it? With a quick swipe to the neck?
“I don’t get what’s wrong with Eddie,” Jasper says as if talking to himself. “He’s rolling over like a dog. Like twenty years is nothing.”
It takes her a moment to realize he’s talking about Captain Casket and the television station.
“He’s been doing Captain Casket a long time,” Wallis answers. “Maybe he’s bored.”
“All those letters he’s gotten over all the years. All the people who have showed up wherever he goes. It’s like they meant nothing to him.”
Jasper has gathered a high pile of hay and climbs the ladder to the loft to pitch more down on top. He lifts the fork and tosses; pitch-toss, pitch-toss, as rhythmic as a spinning wheel. The air is golden with chaff and straw, she can think only of Rumpelstiltskin producing skein upon skein while the miller’s daughter sleeps sound, trusting it will all come out right in the end. Jasper’s pitching becomes the music of square-headed nails rolling against tin, of milk pails tipped and spilled, the old wagon wheel with its broken spokes, the memory of his mouth on hers in the conductor’s ball of light. The sun fills the loft window and she squints to see him above her.
“You like to think some things are going to last, you know,” he says, staring down at his growing pile. “Like you’re not the only asshole who cares.”
“I care,” Wallis says.
“About what?” Jasper counters. “Name one thing in this world that really matters to you.”
He challenges her from high above and she has a light-headed, queasy feeling of needing to make the right answer. You, she could say, you matter, but she would be saying it because it came to her like a line in a movie.
“Have you ever had a girlfriend?” she asks instead. He stutters, the fork poised midair, before finding his rhythm again.
