Читать книгу The Easter House - David Rhodes - Страница 8

WITH CELL’S STORY

Glove took careful notice around him, and watched Fisher merge into the snow, as though walking into the rounded folds of a curtain. He removed his hat and struck a farmer’s match inside it by popping it with the tip with his thumbnail. Then he lit a cigarette. He thought of the gray smoke coating his nerve endings, deadening them, seeping into his head and smothering those uneasy, sad feelings that even now he could pick up from the house. Even through the storm the sadness that they would not put in their faces or use in their words, that got into the corners and empty rooms because it must go somewhere, got to him. Even through the snow.

Last winter was when he had known for sure that his house was suffering. He had thought then that it was a disease, something that happened when stale air attacked wood. He had thought it was the winter. Shrinking wood and ice and wind and furnace heat. He waited for spring, when the clear morning air could rip through the rooms; flies and mosquitoes and birds—not squawk birds, but songbirds with colors (he would let them in)—could swarm into the corners and eat the disease; when the night sounds could watch over the Yard while he slept. Winter was so damned quiet, he thought; if only you could open up and let everything in, let everything out, get everything out in the open: then your house would be all right. He had been right about a lot of that. But when spring came, the colored birds were kept out with screens, and in the summer the metal roof was like a grill and even those astringent trickles of breeze that crawled through the mesh and into the house seemed like a slow-burning flamethrower. It was better to keep the windows closed during the day.

But this winter was worse . . . perhaps because he had watched it come, from his window at the level of the third floor, his headphones on, listening to his powerful radio and the voices.

He flung the last three quarters of an inch of cigarette into the stack of angle iron and did not hear it strike the snow. Looking carefully along the street and through the immediate neighborhood, he walked deeper into the rubbish yard until he finally arrived at a stand of weed trees growing around an assortment of automobile wheels and engines. A grain elevator. For a final time he checked the windows of the house to be sure no one was watching, then walked in toward a 1946 school bus that he had towed into the cover of the trees in order to hide it completely. He had insulated the underneath with tightly packed straw. Inside a back compartment he had put an 80,000 BTU heater that blew into the bus, drawing air back (circulation) through an apparatus that seemed to all superficial inspection like a grain elevator that had fallen on the roof of the bus. He looked in the window and two black eyes stared back at him. Baron rolled down the window and Glove handed in the sack of food. Baron opened his mouth as if to speak, but Glove put his finger quickly to his lips. “Shhhhh,” he whispered, “shhhh.” The window was rolled up and Glove went quietly out of the cover of the trees back toward the house.

Genius, he thought. Sometimes the characteristics of genius pass not from father to son, as one might suppose, but take a leap in time and land in a grandchild; and stay there, and end there. Three hundred years of family go into the making of these two, and two hundred years of aftermath. Every family has them, though not always do both of them rise to the surface; usually only one—the first. Sometimes after one hundred years a small cluster of an old family will gather to talk over their heritage and anything else they have in common (which is usually very little), drinking lemonade and eating potato salad from picnic tables. Someone will bring a family album and they will see a picture of an ancient relative and his eyes will be wild and they’ll fit together all the information they can gather about him (which in most cases will be scarce); and finally later, much later, a young member of the family will be talking to his girlfriend about his family (as though selling them), and say, “That’s John T., we believe he was a genius.” And the girl will look down into his eyes, and from then on everyone will believe it. The other one, the second, will stay in the ground.

Glove knocked the loose snow from his shoes and went inside. He hung his coat in the off room and went upstairs, hearing his mother come to stand behind the door to her room. The voices from the men downstairs grew louder. He heard his father laugh, but there was shouting too. He tried to make it by. She opened the door.

“Glove.”

“Yes,” he said and stopped walking.

“Where you been?”

“Oh, the Wood kid came over for a birdcage. I went out to get it for him. And we talked.”

“I just wondered.” She smiled.

Glove felt the grip of the house on him. He began to walk away.

“Glove,” she said, “you got to keep the windows in your room closed . . . it ain’t healthy for that cold air to be in your room. I shut it for you.”

“O.K., Mom.” He stood there.

“Isn’t it a comfort . . . I mean how good Baron must be getting on . . . happy, I mean?” She was still standing behind the door, holding on to it with her left hand.

“A comfort.”

“You ain’t seen him, have you, Glove?”

“No, Mom. I haven’t, but I’m sure he’s fine.” Downstairs the shouting grew louder. “Those are real doctors up there.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “He must be so happy. He deserved to be happy . . . such a comfort.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Why . . . why don’t you ever”—she laughed and tossed a thread of hair away from her face—“call me Mother?”

“Mother! What do I call you?”

“Mom. Plain old Mom.”

“What’s the matter with that?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” She laughed. “I just wondered, that’s all.”

More shouting from downstairs.

“I wonder why they’re . . .” Glove began.

“It’ll get worse,” Cell Easter said. “It’s for the good, though,” she added, and then smiled.

“What do you know about it?”

“I know. Before, I didn’t. But now I know . . . and it’ll get worse, but then it will be better.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because I know.”

The angry, harsh voices exploded again downstairs, and the walls extracted the meaning of the words, leaving only the hard consonants to come up to the landing. To Glove it seemed as though the floor sagged under him.

“This house was poorly designed,” he said. “Your grandfather built it, Ansel Easter.”

Glove leaned against the hallway. How could it have been overlooked to tell him that? Why had he had to find out by himself, and put it together? Why did information never move through his family? Why, when in other families even the children knew the names of their parents’ parents’ friends, did his family seem to have come up out of the ground like a mushroom?

Suicide, he thought. It was the only explanation. A family suicide.

“Suicide,” said Glove.

“No,” his mother answered.

“Crazy. He was crazy, wasn’t he?” He was talking fast. “He was crazy. Of course. That’s why you think that—”

“He wasn’t crazy . . . not like Baron. He was misunderstood . . . by your father mostly . . . but he wasn’t crazy.”

“What happened? Something happened.” No, he thought then, I don’t want you to tell me.

Cell Easter and her son Glove went up another flight of stairs and into his room, because it was cooler there and the shouting downstairs could not reach them. She nudged him along with her hands. Glove’s gigantic radio, with its five aerials, switchboard, headphones, speakers, and interchangeable tuners, occupied a good one quarter of the room, spreading itself onto the table and connecting to three of the four chairs in the room, with the earphones draped over one post of the bed. With this radio he could hear men sending messages to each other in Alaska—lonely, isolated men who laughed to each other over their radio sets about trivial but grand things. Cell sat down in the only unconnected chair and told a story that she had ferreted out of her husband’s carefully protected history. One single green point of fierce light betrayed that Glove had it on; the glowing tubes of the transmitter were hidden.

“To begin with, the people here killed him. In the dark of the moon, at night, they came in this house to murder. They went through the house. They cut open his throat and kept him from screaming so that down on the second floor C and his brother Sam heard nothing; and it wasn’t until the next morning, when the blood came drip by drip onto the hallway from the boards above, that Sam went up and found him lying there, his head nearly off. Another slice had cloven his face. The blood stained the floor, but is covered now by a rug nailed down on top of it. I don’t tell this to make you sick, but to show what it must have been like for your father and Sam.”

“What people?” he asked. “Why would they do that? Things have reasons.”

“Because of hate . . . because of fear. Because evil will destroy goodness, will seek it out and destroy it, and Ansel Easter was a minister.”

“There were other preachers. There must have been—”

“No, not like the ministers we have now; they administer to the people. Your grandfather was a minister of God.

“In the beginning he was just a coal miner. He never went to a church school or learned how to compose sermons. But people would ask him to come up out of the mines and talk for them, organize their feelings and bring them out in the open. What I mean is that he never had any polish, the way the ministers are slick now and talk like funeral directors. Ansel Easter’s voice was cracked and, in the pulpit, throwing back his head to begin a hymn, would sound like yelling down a shaft for more light. Opening his heart. Even later, when C was almost a full man, Ansel’s old, hard arms still seemed to quiver, as though they were ready again to go back grubbing in the ground for pieces of coal, as though he had just taken a short rest and the screeching whistle was about to begin. His face was hard.

“God looked through his eyes. The good things that Ansel saw in the world He saw in the world. Those things that were not good, the ugly and evil parts, made Ansel despair. Once—if you can imagine such a man—he went to a traveling carnival and saw written on the side of one of the wagons: COME SEE THE MOST HIDEOUS CREATURE IN CAPTIVITY, HALF HUMAN, HALF BEAST. BEWARE. Pictures in color of the thing; awful pictures. Children stood in front of the sideshow screaming and crying and holding on to their mothers just from these representations. Ansel stood along with several other men, paid money, and went inside. The canvas enclosure smelled of human feces and rotting meat. There, inside a cage, fastened to an iron ring set in concrete by a log chain welded on the other end to a steel collar around the neck, was a thing so horrible that many of the men fled back outside for fear their wives or children would venture in, hurrying them on down the dirt midway. Two of the younger men made fun of the thing, but could not laugh.

“I have a picture of it.” And she pinched open one of the gold trinkets hanging from her bracelet. She pulled out a small, tightly folded photograph and unraveled it to its full 1½-inch size. The likeness had yellowed, which, compounded with numerous cracks, made the original impression nearly impossible to decipher by merely looking at it. But there was just enough so that by studying it several times, turned in varying degrees to the overhead light, up close and at a distance, at first making presumptions about what it might be—primeval creatures, water reptiles, larvae, and large insects—then thinking what it must be, Glove saw beyond a shadow of a doubt a photographic representation of something ghastly . . . something the height of an old woman, with pale olive skin, completely hairless, stretched taut like a drumhead over its bones and sinews, the entire body seemingly without cartilage, both feet perfectly symmetrical, all toes even. And its face . . . hardly larger than a shrunken head, but the eyeballs of natural size, pupils the same color olive as the skin, surrounded by a yellowish white, its nose long, narrow, a covered knife bone so sharp down the front that the skin seemed about to break apart there, leading to an irregular hole of a mouth with pointed teeth inside (possibly filed down by the manager of the carnival, for the effect). Its tongue thick but long, able to reach out of its mouth and into its nose. Its five-fingered hands slight, as though made from number-ten wire. An olive sexual organ, shaped like a piece of corn smut.

“My God,” said Glove. “What are you doing with this? Why do you carry it around? Get rid of it.”

Cell took it back and replaced it devoutly in its hiding place, snapping the gold plastic heart shut on it. “It’s to remind me,” she said, “that there are such things in the world.”

“I should think you could just remember.”

“Maybe I could, but, anyway, your grandfather stood there with these other two men looking at Ernie.”

“Ernie!”

“Ansel named him Ernie.”

“Named that thing a human name! Ernie!”

“Stop interrupting. If you don’t want to hear the rest, just say so.”

Glove was quiet.

“Anyway, again, those other two men stood there until a fly lighted on Ernie’s shoulder, and despite the stretch of the skin, the whole covering of his shoulder flinched over his bones, the way a horse’s does. The fly fluttered away, but settled back again. And again the olive skin flinched. The two men shoved their hands in their pockets and stood with both legs close together, staring. The fly was buzzing back over the spot, and Ernie turned his head slightly towards it and his tongue snapped out of his mouth, his feet jerking a little, and stopped it in mid-air, carrying it back towards his mouth. Then he rubbed his feet together. One of these younger men made a heaving motion, but gagged successfully instead, and both went back outside and hurried off away into the sultry heat.

“‘Why do you let them do that to you?’ Ansel asked the thing. The canvas walls were hot and the sunlight came through in streaks of dust. Ernie’s eyes snapped from their gaze at the floor to meet your grandfather’s eyes.

“‘Nothing should live like you do,’ Ansel said.

“Into the dirt-filled showroom came the barker, wiping his forehead on his sleeve. From his stashing place behind a fold of canvas he pulled a gallon water jug wrapped in a dripping, badly worn towel, a precaution he had taken against the heat. He unwound the metal cap on top and, not bothering to use it as a cup, drank directly from the round mouth of the jug, and water ran down both sides of his chin. His thick-brimmed hat fell off. There was not much water left.

“‘That thing can’t talk, Mister,’ he said. ‘He’s stupid.’ He took another swallow and replaced the cap, holding the water for a minute in his mouth.

“‘He’s not,’ said Ansel. ‘How can you keep him here like this?’

“‘He’s not that stupid,’ the barker said and picked up his hat, not bothering to dust it off, ‘like a rabbit, that’ll chew its foot off to escape. He’ll eat when you throw food in and will even use a blanket to keep warm on cold nights. I even see him picking at the locks as though he were trying to open them . . . he’s smart, for an animal.’

“‘He understands talking,’ said Ansel. ‘It’s a man.’

“‘That’s crazy,’ said the barker as he looked outside at the dust and the blinding light and the three or four people still standing far away, watching. Things were not well with him. He had not made good money since Kansas City, where some people came back to pay three and five times for another look. He didn’t like the Midwest. He didn’t like anything about it. Everywhere there were flies. It was useless to return outside; he would sell no more admissions today.

“‘Look at his eyes,’ said Ansel. ‘He understands.’

“The barker came over to the cage and looked in absent-mindedly. He pointed his finger. ‘You call that understanding?’”

“‘Yes,’ said Ansel. ‘I do.’

“‘Down South, where I got him, people were hunting him with dogs. But he was a good climber and could lose them in the creek willows and live oaks. I got a glimpse of him one night eating out of a garbage pail and decided to trap him. Because of the way he looked, most people thought he was like a human.’ The barker sat down on a box. ‘But I just thought to myself—Now, where would something like that be safe in the daytime? So then I knew he’d have to live up high—not wanting to be bothered by the large ground animals, or the dogs. He’d also have to be up high to see from a long distance when the wolves were out, because they could run him down on a flat, even ground. At first I figured he’d be in trees. The people down there thought like you, that he might be human-like, because he could move along on his two legs, and had eyes that didn’t fill up the entire eye socket. Naturally, because of thinking like that, they also thought he was some kind of a supernatural thing, with powers and abilities beyond the comprehension of normal people. Further, they thought these powers and abilities were not good and attributed murders and pillages, most unexplained, to them. That, and they couldn’t catch him.

“‘But I reasoned again he would have to live up high in the daytime, but not always in trees. Cross-over trees—trees that he could use to escape—weren’t tall enough to give him cover. So I knew he’d have to be up high, with a clear view, but not always in trees.’

“Your grandfather hadn’t taken his eyes off the cage, but was listening closely to the barker, knowing that they liked to talk by the nature of their work.

“‘But I noticed one thing that no one else’d taken into consideration. While he was leaning over the garbage pail, taking out and sifting through the heap, I noticed his hide, and, as you can see, there was no fur. He was shivering in the morning air, his breath misting down from his nose. This thing needs heat, I told myself.’ Inside the cage Ernie hadn’t taken his eyes away from Ansel. Ansel’s hands twitched unconsciously.

“‘So where could he be safe and warm? I wondered. It was winter and I began looking. I knew the thing would be too stupid to burn wood itself, and would have to use the heat of people. So I knew it would be in an attic somewhere, half sleeping in the daytime, watching through a window for dogs and danger.’ Ansel sat down and waited for the end of this. The barker continued talking with no regard for time.

“‘I couldn’t find him. I knew he was in an attic somewhere, but I supposed that he had several to choose from, and people weren’t overly friendly about letting me into their houses. So what I was finally forced to do was rent an old place near the woods, jack the heat up, and wait in a darkened corner of the attic. Nothing, for a long time. Then I heard him early one evening scrambling up the side of the house like a spider. I saw his head looking in through the window. Then he was gone again. I knew he’d be back and sat quietly, wrapped in a wool blanket, eating dried fruit. I’d been there for so long by then that the rats and mice roamed freely across the attic floor. Later that night he came back again for another look and I saw his head outside the window because it was dark against the sky. Then he scrambled back down the side.

“‘The next time, opening the window by sliding his fingers in through the crack and flipping the latch open, he came onto the floor without making the slightest noise. The rats fled into the walls. He left the window open and began walking cautiously in a circle along the walls, covering the room. I think by the time he was almost to where I was he knew something was wrong, but by then it was too late and I had the net over him. Nearly as strong as two men, he was.’ The barker stopped talking.

“‘You got to let him go.’

“‘I might be persuaded to sell him,’ said the barker. ‘But I’ll never just let him go . . . though this would be fine country for him.’

“‘He can understand words,’ said Ansel. ‘He can think. He’s a man.’

“‘No, he isn’t. That’s crazy. Have you ever seen anyone else like him? Look at his feet. Look at his organ, man.’

“‘He may have been distorted, by birth, or by chance . . . but to keep him like this is against God.’

“‘Even if what you say is true—about the birth—even so, after something’s been that twisted it’s no longer the same thing as it might have been if everything had turned out normally.’

“‘But he understands,’ said Ansel. ‘Nothing should live like that. Turn him loose. Let him stay with me.’

“The barker thought of the few coins in his pocket. He coughed. ‘It’ll cost you money,’ he said. ‘Of course you can get some of it back, though, here and there. People will pay.’

“Ansel did not press to insist that this was immoral. ‘How much?’

“‘Three hundred.’

“‘Too much.’

“‘For a human being!’ said the barker indignantly. ‘Too much for a human being! How can a man be not worth three hundred dollars? That’s not much money for a human life.

“This line of reasoning presented your grandfather with some problems. He left, and when he returned, groups of two and three people were slowly coming into a much larger group in the dust outside the sideshow. This gathering at first was timid, brought together by accidental interest. But some of the men who’d gone into the show began talking, and then the group decided that something would be done. Though unsure of what that would mean, they were generally becoming hostile. One woman suggested that a fire be set to the canvas, for fun, and as the momentum of the idea was being drawn into actuality your grandfather stepped out into the dust, the creature stepping so carefully beside him, the chain gone. The barker, watching them from inside, counted three hundred dollars out in ones and fives and silver—collection-plate money. The crowd moved back and was quiet. They made a passageway and your grandfather walked between them with Ernie glowering up at their faces from his some four feet, thick, dark marks on his neck. Some of the people followed them nearly home, watching at a distance. Before the two stepped up onto the front doorstep of the house on Everett Street, where they lived before moving here, he’d been named, and Ansel introduced him to C and Sam and your grandmother as Ernie. And he lived with them.

“Actually, he didn’t live with all of them, because your grandmother left shortly after that, never to return. Can you imagine a man with principles like that?”

Glove sat and listened, becoming very interested.

“So then there was this man (this was a little later) Johnie Fotsom, who I think lived—It doesn’t matter. He started writing these novels about your grandfather, true stories, and sold some copies, and it came out in a cheaper edition and sold some more. The Holy Man, Man of Faith, The Broken Lantern. Critics hated them. All men of learning—any learning—deplored them. Young people hated them. Atheists found them ‘cheap sensationalism’ and ‘hocus-pocus sentimentality.’ But still they sold. There was one scene in Man of Faith where Ansel was pictured walking toward town during the Depression with seventeen cents in his pocket and a starving family at home when a freshly, cleanly killed rabbit falls out of the sky at his feet. He looked up, expecting a large hawk or eagle, and saw nothing. There are several then about how close to God he was and how God would purify the impure people around him—one account of how Dr. McQueen lost a hand to an exposed window fan that he had forgot about being behind him as he reached for a piece of billiard chalk on the ledge. One where a man’s wife hangs herself. And so almost overnight Ansel received a fairly immense sum of money from Johnie Fotsom for the use of his name and his life. Ansel took the money and everyone in his church thought he shouldn’t have, because a lot of money . . . for nothing! No honest work. Of course everyone knows writers are a seedy lot, but to accept money from one, especially a not very good one, and be glorified in the public eye . . . Whatever, there was a surge of resentment against your grandfather (spearheaded by Rabbit Wood’s father) and some talk of ousting him from the ministry of the First Friends Church. Many in the congregation were afraid of him, because they couldn’t understand saintliness, and most felt that Ernie was an affront to the community.

“But before a real confrontation could arise, a half-dozen carpenters imported from Cedar Rapids—strong, hard-eyed men that never talked while they were together—began working on this house; and even before the foundation was set, it was obvious to everyone that it was going to be a building of giant size, much bigger than many of the rural people had ever seen, and bigger than any Christian man could ever use. The town people, at noon, stood back and watched as our front porch went up, as the studs for the walls climbed up three stories.”

“Wait a minute,” said Glove, showing signs that his mother recognized, signs of becoming very upset, his hands twitching nervously. “So someone begins to build a house, on his own land—his own place! What business is it of anyone else? What can it possibly matter to them? Why can’t people just mind their own lives?”

“I don’t know,” said Cell, sitting up straighter in the chair. “C could tell you. He’s been to college, and that’s what’s the main thing of education—showing you what’s your business and what’s somebody else’s.”

“Still,” said Glove. “It was none of their business.” The green light shaded his hand.

“Maybe I didn’t explain well enough. There were whole families destroyed, little children had terrible, uncommon accidents, disease would break out among healthy people. And all this they thought might be Ansel’s doing. They were afraid. And so, with things like that, everyone was going to be absolutely sure that something was not their business before they ignored it for even a little while. Maybe I didn’t explain that there was more, that Ansel worked his sons into the ground, making them cut wood with him. There were stories of how much corn he could pick by hand, ungodly amounts.”

Glove then remembered the only other thing he knew, at that time, about Ansel Easter . . . he remembered someone saying that his grandfather had taken all the broken, cracked, and rusted parts from his automobile as they’d worn out, the mufflers, clamps, old tires, hoses, brake shoes, carburetor gaskets, etc., and put them in the trunk, like a chain the car must wear for its sins. They said he didn’t beat his children for their transgressions but inflicted nightmarish lectures upon them that would live like weights in their memories.