was a very big house indeed, a bracketed house, built all of
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squared fieldstone with beautiful glints to the masonry. A
cupola topped it.
Once, come out of the cold into a public library, Sarsfield
had pored through a picture-book about American architectural styles. There was a word for this sort of house. Was it
“ Italianate” ? Yes, it rose in his memory—he took pride in
no quality except his power of recollection. Yes, that was the
word. Had he visited this house before? He could not account
for a vague familiarity. Perhaps there had been a photograph
of this particular house in that library book.
Every window was heavily shuttered, and no smoke rose
from any of the several chimneys. Sarsfield went up to the
stone steps to confront the oaken front door.
It was a formidable door, but it seemed as if at some time
it had been broken open, for long ago a square of oak with
a different grain had been mortised into the area round lock
and keyhole. There was a gigantic knocker with a strange
face worked upon it. Sarsfield knocked repeatedly.
No one answered. Conceivably the storm might have made
his pounding inaudible to any occupants, but who could spend
the winter in a shuttered house without fires? Another bronze
plaque was screwed to the door:
TAMARACK HOUSE
P r o p e r t y o f t h e A n t h o n y F a m il y T r u s t
G u a r d e d by P r o t e c t iv e S e r v ic e
Sarsfield doubted the veracity of the last line. He made his
way round to the back. No one answered those back doors,
either, and they too were locked.
But presently he found what he had hoped for: an oldfangled slanting cellar door, set into the foundations. It was not wise to enter without permission, but at least he might accomplish it without breaking. His fingers, though clumsy, were strong as the rest of him. After much trouble and with
help from the Boy Scout knife that he carried, he pulled the
pins out of the cellar door’s three hinges and scrambled down
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93
into the darkness. With the passing of the years, he had become something of a jailhouse lawyer—though those young inmates bored him with their endless chatter about Miranda
and Escobedo. And now he thought of the doctrine called
“ defense of necessity.’’ If caught, he could say that self-
preservation from freezing is the first necessity; besides, they
might not take him for a bum.
Faint light down the cellar steps—he would replace the
hinge-pins later—showed him an inner door at the foot. That
door was hooked, though hooked only. With a sigh, Sarsfield
put his shoulder to the door; the hook clattered to the stone
floor inside; and he was master of all he surveyed.
In that black cellar he found no light-switch. Though he
never smoked, he carried matches for such emergencies.
Having lit one, he discovered a providential kerosene lamp
on a table, with enough kerosene still in it. Sarsfield went
lamp-lit through the cellars and up more stone stairs into a
pantry. “ Anybody home?’'’ he called. It was an eerie echo.
He would make sure before exploring, for he dreaded shotguns. How about a cheerful song? In that chill pantry, Sarsfield bellowed a tune formerly beloved at Rotary Clubs. Once a waggish Rotarian, after half an hour’s talk with the hobo
extraordinary, had taken him to Rotary for lunch and commanded him to tell tales of the road and to sing the members a song. Frank Sarsfield’s untutored voice was loud enough
when he wanted it to be, and he sang the song he had sung
to Rotary:
“There’s a long, long trail a-winding
into the land o f my dreams,
Where the nightingale is singing
and the white moon beams;
There’s a long, long night o f waiting
until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I ’ll be walking
down that long, long trail to yo u !”
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No response: no cry, no footstep, not a rustle. Even in so
big a house, they couldn’t have failed to hear his song, sung
in a voice fit to wake the dead. Father O ’Malley had called
Frank’s voice “ stentorian” —a good word, though he was not
just sure what it meant. He liked that last line, though he’d
no one to walk to; he’d repeat it:
“Till the day when I ’ll be walking
down that long, long trail to you!’’
It was all right. Sarsfield went into the dining room, where
he found a splendid long walnut table, chairs with embroidered seats, a fine sideboard and china cabinet, and a high Venetian chandelier. The china was in that cabinet, and the
silverware was in that sideboard. But in no room of Tamarack
House was any living soul.
Sprawled in a big chair before the fireplace in the Sunday
parlor, Sarsfield took the chill out of his bones. The
woodshed, connected with the main house by a passage from
the kitchen, was half filled with logs—not first-rate fuel, true,
for they had been stacked there three or four years ago, to
judge by the fungi upon them, but burnable after he had collected old newspapers and chopped kindling. He had crisscrossed elm and birch to make a noble fire.
It was not very risky to let white woodsmoke eddy from
the chimneys, for it would blend with the driving snow and
the blast would dissipate it at once. Besides, Anthonyville’s
population was zero. From the cupola atop the house, in another lull of the blizzard, he had looked over the icy countryside and had seen no inhabited farmhouse up the forgotten dirt road—which, anyway, was hopelessly blocked by drifts
today. There was no approach for vehicles from the freeway,
while river and marsh protected the rear. He speculated that
Tamarack House might be inhabited summers, though not in
any very recent summer. The “ Protective Service” probably
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95
consisted of a farmer who made a fortnightly inspection in
fair weather.
It was good to hole up in a remote county where burglars
seemed unknown as yet. Frank Sarsfield restricted his own
depredations to church poor-boxes (Catholic, preferably, he
being no Protestant) and then under defense of necessity,
after a run of unsuccessful mendicancy. He feared and detested strong thieves, so numerous nowadays; to avoid them and worse than thieves, he steered clear of the cities, roving
to little places which still kept crime in the family, where it
belonged.
He had dined, and then washed the dishes dutifully. The
kitchen wood-range still functioned, and so did the hard-water
and soft-water hand pumps in the scullery. As for food, there
was enough to feed a good-sized prison: the shelves of the
deep cellar cold-room threatened to collapse under the weight
of glass jars full of jams, jellies, preserved peaches, apricots,
applesauce, pickled pork, pickled trout, and many more good
things, all redolent of his New England youth. Most of the
jars had neat paper labels, all giving the year of canning,
&nb
sp; some of name of the canner; on the front shelves, the most
recent date he had found was 1968, on a little pot of strawberry jam, and below it was the name “ Allegra” in a feminine hand.
Everything in this house lay in apple-pie order—though
Sarsfield wondered how long the plaster would keep from
cracking, with Tamarack House unheated io winter. He felt
positively virtuous for lighting fires, one here in the Sunday
parlor, another in the little antique iron stove in the bedroom
he had chosen for himself at the top of the house.
He had poked into every handsome room of Tamarack
House, with the intense pleasure of a small boy who had
found his way into an enchanted castle. Every room was satisfying, well-fumished (he was wanning by the fire two sheets from the linen closet, for his bed), and wondrously old-fashioned. There was no electric light, no central heating, no
bathroom; there was an indoor privy, at the back of the
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woodshed, but no running water unless one counted the hand
pumps. There was an oldfangled wall telephone: Frank tried,
greatly daring, for the operator, but it was dead. He had
found a crystal-set radio that didn’t work. This was an old
lady’s house, surely, and the old lady hadn’t visited it for
some years, but perhaps her relatives kept it in order as a
“ holiday home” or in hope of selling it—at ruined Antho-
nyville, a forlorn hope. He had discovered two canisters of
tea, a jar full of coffee beans, and ten gallons of kerosene.
How thoughtful!
Perhaps the old lady was dead, buried under the other
boulder among the maples in front of the house. Perhaps she
had been the General’s daughter—but no, not if the General
had been bom in 1836. Why those graves in the lawn? Sars-
field had heard of farm families, near medical schools in the
old days, who had buried their dead by the house for fear of
body-snatchers; but that couldn’t apply at Anthonyville. Well,
there were family graveyards, but this must be one of the
smallest.
The old General who built this house had died on January
fourteenth. Day after tomorrow, January fourteenth would
come round again, and it would be Frank Sarsfield’s sixtieth
birthday. “ I drink your health in water, General,” Sarsfield
said aloud, raising his cut-glass goblet taken from the china
cabinet. There was no strong drink in the house, but that
didn’t distress Sarsfield, for he never touched it. His mother
had warned him against it—and sure enough, the one time
he had drunk a good deal of wine, when he was new to the
road, he had got sick. “ Thanks, General, for your hospitality.” Nobody responded to his toast.
His mother had been a saint, the neighbors had said, and
his father a drunken devil. He had seen neither of them after
he ran away. He had missed his mother’s funeral because he
hadn’t known of her death until months after; he had missed
his father’s, long later, because he chose to miss it, though
that omission cost him sleepless nights now. Sarsfield slept
poorly at best. Almost always there were nightmares.
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97
Yet perhaps he would sleep well enough tonight in that
little garret room near the cupola. He had found that several
of the bedrooms in Tamarack House had little metal plates
over their doorways. There were “ The General’s Room” and
“ Father’s Room” and “ Mama’s Room” and “ Alice’s Room”
and “ Allegra’s Room” and “ Edith’s Room.” By a happy
coincidence, the little room at the top of the back stair, on
the garret floor of the house was labelled “ Frank’s Room.”
But he’d not chosen it for that only. At the top of the house,
one was safer from sheriffs or burglars. And through the skylight—there was only a frieze window—a man could get to the roof of the main block. From that roof, one could descend to the woodshed roof by a fire-escape of iron rungs fixed in the stone outer wall; and from the woodshed, it was
an easy drop to the ground. After that, the chief difficulty
would be to run down Main Street and then get across the
freeway without being detected, while people searched the
house for you. Talk of Goldilocks and the Three Bears! Much
experience had taught Sarsfield such forethought.
Had that other Frank, so commemorated over the bedroom
door, been a son or a servant? Presumably a son—though
Sarsfield had found no pictures of boys in the old velvet-
covered album in the Sunday parlor, nor any of manservants.
There were many pictures of the General, a little roosterlike
man with a beard; and of Father, portly and pleasant-faced;
and of Mama, elegant; and of three small girls, who must be
Alice and Allegra and Edith. He had liked especially the
photographs of Allegra, since he had tasted her strawberry
jam. All the girls were pretty, but Allegra—who must be
about seven in most of the pictures—was really charming,
with long ringlets and kind eyes and a delicate mouth that
curved upward at its comers.
Sarsfield adored little girls and distrusted big girls. His
mother had cautioned him against bad women, so he had
kept away from such. Because he liked peace, he never had
married—not that he could have married anyway, because
that would have tied him to one place, and he was too clumsy
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to earn money at practically anything except dish-washing for
summer hotels. Not marrying had meant that he could have
no little daughters like Allegra.
Sometimes he had puzzled the prison psychiatrists. In
prison it was well to play stupid. He had refrained cunningly
from reciting poetry to die psychiatrists. So after testing him
they wrote him down as “ dull normal’’ and he was assigned
to labor as “ gardener’’—which meant going round the prison
yards picking up trash by a stick with a nail in the end of it.
That was easy work, and he detested hard work. Yet when
there was truly heavy work to be done in prison, sometimes
he would come forward to shovel tons of coal or carry hods
of brick or lift big blocks into place. That, too, was his cunning: it impressed the other jailbirds with his enormous strength, so that the gangs left him alone.
“ Yes, you’re a loner, Frank Sarsfield,” he said to himself,
aloud. He looked at himself in that splendid Sunday-parlor
mirror, which stretched from door to ceiling. He saw a man
overweight but lean enough of face, standing six feet six,
built like a bear, a strong nose, some teeth missing, a strong
chin, and rather wild light-blue eyes. He was an uncommon
sort of bum. Deliberately he looked at his image out of the
comers of his eyes—as was his way, because he was nonviolent, and eye-contact might mean trouble.
“ You look like a Viking, Frank,” old Father O ’Malley had
told him once, “ but you ought to have been a monk.”
“ Oh, Father,” he had answered, “ I ’m too much of a fool
&nb
sp; for a monk.”
“ Well,” said Father O’Malley, “ you’re no more fool than
many a brother, and you’re celibate, and continent, I take it.
Yet it’s late for that now. Look out you don’t turn berserker,
Frank. Go to confession, sometime, to a priest that doesn’t
know you, if you’ll not go to me. If you’d confess, you’d not
be haunted.”
But he seldom went to mass, and never to confession. All
those church boxes pilfered, his mother and father abandoned, his sister neglected, all the ghastly humbling of him
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99
self before policemen, all the horror and shame of the prisons!
There could be no grace for him now. ‘ ‘There’s a long, long
trail a-winding into the land o f my dreams. . . . ” What
dreams! He had looked up ‘‘berserker” in Webster. But he
wouldn’t ever do that sort of thing: a man had to keep a
control upon himself, and besides he was a coward, and he
loved peace.
Nearly all the other prisoners had been brutes, guilty as
sin, guilty as Miranda or Escobedo. Once, sentenced for rilling a church safe, he had been put into the same cell with a man who had murdered his wife by taking off her head.
The head never had been found. Sarsfield had dreamed of
that head in such short intervals of sleep as he had enjoyed
while the wife-killer was his cellmate. Nearly all night, every
night, he had lain awake surreptitiously watching the murderer in the opposite bunk, and feeling his own neck now and again. He had been surprised and pleased when eventually the wife-killer had gone hysterical and obtained assignment to another cell. The murderer had told the guards that he just couldn’t stand being watched all night by that terrible
giant who never talked.
Only one of the prison psychiatrists had been pleasant or
bright, and that had been the old doctor bom in Vienna who
went round from penitentiary to penitentiary checking on the
psychiatric staffs. The old doctor had taken a liking to him,
and had written a report to accompany Frank’s petition for
parole. Three months later, in a parole office, the parole officer had gone out hurriedly for a quarter of an hour, and Sarsfield had taken the chance to read his own file that the
parole man had left in a folder on his desk.
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 12
