by Joe Hill
“No, ma’am. I mean, yes, ma’am.”
Rudy would’ve said something clever to make her whoop with laughter and clap her hands. Rudy belonged on the radio, a child star on someone’s variety program. Max never knew what to say, and anyway, wasn’t suited to comedy. It wasn’t just his accent, although that was a source of constant discomfort for him, one more reason to speak as little as possible. But it was also a matter of temperament; he often found himself unable to fight his way through his own smothering reserve.
“He’s pretty strict about havin you two boys in before dark, isn’t he?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“There’s plenty like him,” she said. “They brung the old country over with them. Although I would have thought a doctor wouldn’t be so superstitious. Educated and all.”
Max suppressed a shudder of revulsion. Saying that his father was superstitious was an understatement of grotesquely funny proportions.
“You wouldn’t think he’d worry so much about one like you,” she went on. “I can’t imagine you’ve ever been any trouble in your life.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Max, when what he really wanted to say was he wished more than anything she’d go back inside, lie down and rest. Sometimes it seemed to him he was allergic to expressing himself. Often, when he desperately wanted to say a thing, he could actually feel his windpipe closing up on him, cutting off his air. He wanted to offer to help her in, imagined taking her elbow, leaning close enough to smell her hair. He wanted to tell her he prayed for her at night, not that his prayers could be assumed to have value; Max had prayed for his own mother, too, but it hadn’t made any difference. He said none of these things. Thank you, ma’am was the most he could manage.
“You go on,” she said. “Tell your father I asked Rudy to stay behind, help me clean up a mess in the kitchen. I’ll send him along.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am. Tell him hurry, please.”
When he was in the road he looked back. Mrs. Kutchner clutched a handkerchief to her lips, but she immediately removed it, and flapped it in a gay little wave, a gesture so endearing it made Max sick to his bones. He raised his own hand to her and then turned away. The sound of her harsh, barking coughs followed him up the road for a while—an angry dog, slipped free of its tether and chasing him away.
When he came into the yard, the sky was the shade of blue closest to black, except for a faint bonfire glow in the west where the sun had just disappeared, and his father was sitting on the porch waiting with the quirt. Max paused at the bottom of the steps, looking up at him. His father’s eyes were hooded, impossible to see beneath the bushy steel-wool tangles of his eyebrows.
Max waited for him to say something. He didn’t. Finally, Max gave up and spoke himself. “It’s still light.”
“The sun is down.”
“We are just at Arlene’s. It isn’t even ten minutes away.”
“Yes, Mrs. Kutchner’s is very safe. A veritable fortress. Protected by a doddering farmer who can barely bend over, his rheumatism pains him so, and an illiterate peasant whose bowels are being eaten by cancer.”
“She is not illiterate,” Max said. He heard how defensive he sounded, and when he spoke again, it was in a tone of carefully modulated reason. “They can’t bear the light. You say so yourself. If it isn’t dark there is nothing to fear. Look how bright the sky.”
His father nodded, allowing the point, then said, “And where is Rudolf?”
“He is right behind me.”
The old man craned his head on his neck, making an exaggerated show of searching the empty road behind Max.
“I mean, he is coming,” Max said. “He stops to help clean something for Mrs. Kutchner.”
“Clean what?”
“A bag of flour, I think. It breaks open, scatters on everything. She’s going to clean herself, but Rudy say no, he wants to do it. I tell them I will run ahead so you will not wonder where we are. He’ll be here any minute.”
His father sat perfectly still, his back rigid, his face immobile. Then, just when Max thought the conversation was over, he said, very slowly, “And so you left him?”
Max instantly saw, with a sinking feeling of despair, the corner he had painted himself into, but it was too late now, no talking his way back out of it. “Yes, sir.”
“To walk home alone? In the dark?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see. Go in. To your studies.”
Max made his way up the steps, towards the front door, which was partly open. He felt himself clenching up as he went past the rocking chair, expecting the quirt. Instead, when his father lunged, it was to clamp his hand on Max’s wrist, squeezing so hard Max grimaced, felt the bones separating in the joint.
His father sucked at the air, a hissing indraw of breath, a sound Max had learned was often prelude to a right cross. “You know our enemies? And still you dally with your friends until the night come?”
Max tried to answer, but couldn’t, felt his windpipe closing, felt himself choking again on the things he wanted, but didn’t have the nerve, to say.
“Rudolf I expect not to learn. He is American. Here they believe the child should teach the parent. I see how he look at me when I talk. How he try not to laugh. This is bad. But you. At least when Rudolf disobey, it is deliberate, I feel him engaging me. You disobey in a stupor, without considering, and then you wonder why sometime I can hardly stand to look at you. Mr. Barnum has a horse that can add small numbers. It is considered one of the great amazements of his circus. If you were once to show the slightest comprehension of what things I tell you, it would be wonder on the same order.” He let go of Max’s wrist, and Max took a drunken step backwards, his arm throbbing. “Go inside and out of my sight. You will want to rest. That uncomfortable buzzing in your head is the hum of thought. I know the sensation must be quite unfamiliar.” Tapping his own temple to show where the thoughts were.
“Yes, sir,” Max said, in a tone—he had to admit—which sounded stupid and churlish. Why did his father’s accent sound cultured and worldly, while the same accent made himself sound like a dull-witted Dutch farmhand, someone good at milking the cows maybe, but who would goggle in fear and confusion at an open book? Max turned into the house, without looking where he was going, and batted his head against the bulbs of garlic hanging from the top of the door frame. His father snorted at him.
Max sat in the kitchen, a lamp burning at the far end of the table, not enough to dispel the darkness gathering in the room. He waited, listening, his head cocked so he could see through the window and into the yard. He had his English Grammar open in front of him, but he didn’t look at it, couldn’t find the will to do anything but sit and watch for Rudy. In a while it was too dark to see the road, though, or anyone coming along it. The tops of the pines were black cutouts etched across a sky that was a color like the last faint glow of dying coals. Soon even that was gone, and into the darkness was cast a handful of stars, a scatter of bright flecks. Max heard his father in the rocker, the soft whine-and-thump of the curved wooden runners going back and forth over the boards of the porch. Max shoved his hands through his hair, pulling at it, chanting to himself, Rudy, come on, wanting more than anything for the waiting to be over. It might’ve been an hour. It might’ve been fifteen minutes.
Then he heard him, the soft chuff of his brother’s feet in the chalky dirt at the side of the road; he slowed as he came into the yard, but Max suspected he had just been running, a hypothesis that was confirmed as soon as Rudy spoke. Although he tried for his usual tone of good humor, he was winded, could only speak in bursts.
“Sorry, sorry. Mrs. Kutchner. An accident. Asked me to help. I know. Late.”
The rocker stopped moving. The boards creaked, as their father came to his feet.
“So Max said. And did you get the mess clean up?”
“Yuh. Uh-huh. Arlene and I. Arlene ran through the kitchen. Wasn’t looking. Mrs. Kutchner—Mrs. Kutchner dropp
ed a stack of plates—”
Max shut his eyes, bent his head forward, yanking at the roots of his hair in anguish.
“Mrs. Kutchner shouldn’t tire herself. She’s unwell. Indeed, I think she can hardly rise from bed.”
“That’s what—that’s what I thought. Too.” Rudy’s voice at the bottom of the porch. He was beginning to recover his air. “It’s not really all the way dark yet.”
“It isn’t? Ah. When one get to my age, the vision fail some, and dusk is often mistake for night. Here I was thinking sunset has come and gone twenty minutes ago. What time—?” Max heard the steely snap of his father opening his pocket watch. He sighed. “But it’s too dark for me to read the hands. Well. Your concern for Mrs. Kutchner, I admire.”
“Oh it—it was nothing—” Rudy said, putting his foot on the first step of the porch.
“But really, you should worry more about your own well-being, Rudolf,” said their father, his voice calm, benevolent, speaking in the tone Max often imagined him employing when addressing patients he knew were in the final stages of a fatal illness. It was after dark and the doctor was in.
Rudy said, “I’m sorry, I’m—”
“You’re sorry now. But your regret will be more palpable momentarily.”
The quirt came down with a meaty smack, and Rudy, who would be ten in two weeks, screamed. Max ground his teeth, his hands still digging in his hair; pressed his wrists against his ears, trying vainly to block out the sounds of shrieking, and of the quirt striking at flesh, fat and bone.
With his ears covered he didn’t hear their father come in. He looked up when a shadow fell across him. Abraham stood in the doorway to the hall, hair disheveled, collar askew, the quirt pointed at the floor. Max waited to be hit with it, but no blow came.
“Help your brother in.”
Max rose unsteadily to his feet. He couldn’t hold the old man’s gaze so he lowered his eyes, found himself staring at the quirt instead. The back of his father’s hand was freckled with blood. Max drew a thin, dismayed breath.
“You see what you make me do.”
Max didn’t reply. Maybe no answer was necessary or expected.
His father stood there for a moment longer, then turned, and strode away into the back of the house, towards the private study he always kept locked, a room in which they were forbidden to enter without his permission. Many nights he nodded off there, and could be heard shouting in his sleep, cursing in Dutch.
“STOP RUNNING,” MAX shouted. “I catch you eventually.”
Rudolf capered across the corral, grabbed the rail and heaved himself over it, sprinted for the side of the house, his laughter trailing behind him.
“Give it back,” Max said, and he leaped the rail without slowing down, hit the ground without losing a step. He was angry, really angry, and in his fury possessed an unlikely grace; unlikely because he was built along the same lines as his father, with the rough dimensions of a water buffalo taught to walk on its back legs.
Rudy, by contrast, had their mother’s delicate build, to go with her porcelain complexion. He was quick, but Max was closing in anyway. Rudy was looking back over his shoulder too much, not concentrating on where he was going. He was almost to the side of the house. When he got there, Max would have him trapped against the wall, could easily cut off any attempt to break left or right.
But Rudy didn’t break to the left or right. The window to their father’s study was pushed open about a foot, revealing a cool library darkness. Rudy grabbed the windowsill over his head—he still held Max’s letter in one hand—and with a giddy glance back, heaved himself into the shadows.
However their father felt about them arriving home after dark, it was nothing compared to how he would feel to discover that either one of them had gained entry to his most private sanctum. But their father was gone, had taken the Ford somewhere, and Max didn’t slow down to think what would happen if he suddenly returned. He jumped and grabbed his brother’s ankle, thinking he would drag the little worm back out into the light, but Rudy screamed, twisted his foot out of Max’s grasp. He fell into darkness, crashed to the floorboards with an echoing thud that caused glass to rattle softly against glass somewhere in the office. Then Max had the windowsill and he yanked himself into the air—
“Go slow, Max, it’s a…” his brother cried.
—and he thrust himself through the window.
“Big drop,” Rudy finished.
Max had been in his father’s study before, of course (sometimes Abraham invited them in for “a talk,” by which he meant he would talk and they would listen), but he had never entered the room by way of the window. He spilled forward, had a startling glance of the floor almost three feet below him, and realized he was about to dive into it face-first. At the edge of his vision he saw a round end table, next to one of his father’s armchairs, and he reached for it to stop his fall. His momentum continued to carry him forward, and he crashed to the floor. At the last moment, he turned his face aside and most of his weight came down on his right shoulder. The furniture leaped. The end table turned over, dumping everything on it. Max heard a bang, and a glassy crack that was more painful to him than the soreness he felt in either head or shoulder.
Rudy sprawled a yard away from him, sitting on the floor, still grinning a little foolishly. He held the letter half-crumpled in one hand, forgotten.
The end table was on its side, fortunately not broken. But an empty inkpot had smashed, lay in gleaming chunks close to Max’s knee. A stack of books had been flung across the Persian carpet. A few papers swirled overhead, drifting slowly to the floor with a swish and a scrape.
“You see what you make me do,” Max said, gesturing at the inkpot. Then he flinched, realizing that this was exactly what his father had said to him a few nights before; he didn’t like the old man peeping out from inside him, talking through him like a puppet, a hollowed-out, empty-headed boy of wood.
“We’ll just throw it away,” Rudy said.
“He knows where everything in his office is. He will notice it missing.”
“My balls. He comes in here to drink brandy, fart in his couch and fall asleep. I’ve been in here lots of times. I took his lighter for smokes last month and he still hasn’t noticed.”
“You what?” Max asked, staring at his younger brother in genuine surprise, and not without a certain envy. It was the older brother’s place to take foolish risks and be casually detached about it later.
“Who’s this letter to, that you had to go and hide somewhere to write it? I was watching you work on it over your shoulder. ‘I still remember how I held your hand in mine.’” Rudy’s voice swooping and fluttering in mock-romantic passion.
Max lunged at his brother, but was too slow, Rudy had flipped the letter over and was reading the beginning. The smile began to fade, thought lines wrinkling the pale expanse of his forehead; then Max had ripped the sheet of paper away.
“Mother?” Rudy asked, thoroughly nonplussed.
“It was assignment for school. We were ask if you wrote a letter to anyone, who would it be? Mrs. Louden tell us it could be someone imaginary or—or historic figure. Someone dead.”
“You’d turn that in? And let Mrs. Louden read it?”
“I don’t know. I am not finish yet.” But as Max spoke, he was already beginning to realize he had made a mistake, allowed himself to get carried away by the fascinating possibilities of the assignment, the irresistible what if of it, and had written things too personal for him to show anyone. He had written you were the only one I knew how to talk to and I am sometimes so lonely. He had really been imagining her reading it, somehow, somewhere—perhaps as he wrote it, some astral form of her staring over his shoulder, smiling sentimentally as his pen scratched across the page. It was a mawkish, absurd fantasy and he felt a withering embarrassment to think he had given in to it so completely.
His mother had already been weak and ill when the scandal drove their family from Amsterdam. They lived for
a while in England, but word of the terrible thing their father had done (whatever it was—Max doubted he would ever know) followed them. On they had gone to America. His father believed he had acquired a position as a lecturer at Vassar College, was so sure of this he had ladled much of his savings into the purchase of a handsome nearby farm. But in New York City they were met by the dean, who told Abraham Van Helsing that he could not, in good conscience, allow the doctor to work unsupervised with young ladies who were not yet at the age of consent. Max knew now his father had killed his mother as surely as if he had held a pillow over her face in her sickbed. It wasn’t the travel that had done her in, although that was bad enough, too much for a woman who was both pregnant and weak with a chronic infection of the blood which caused her to bruise at the slightest touch. It was humiliation. Mina had not been able to survive the shame of what he had done, what they were all forced to run from.
“Come on,” Max said. “Let’s clean up and get out of here.”
He righted the table and began gathering the books, but turned his head when Rudy said, “Do you believe in vampires, Max?”
Rudy was on his knees in front of an ottoman across the room. He had hunched over to collect a few papers which had settled there, then stayed to look at the battered doctor’s bag tucked underneath it. Rudy tugged at the rosary knotted around the handles.
“Leave that alone,” Max said. “We need to clean, not make bigger mess.”
“Do you?”
Max was briefly silent. “Mother was attacked. Her blood was never the same after. Her illness.”
“Did she ever say she was attacked, or did he?”
“She died when I was six. She would not confide in a child about such a thing.”
“But…do you think we’re in danger?” Rudy had the bag open now. He reached in to remove a bundle, carefully wrapped in royal purple fabric. Wood clicked against wood inside the velvet. “That vampires are out there, waiting for a chance at us. For our guard to drop?”
