Читать книгу The Price Of Silence - Kate Wilhelm - Страница 11

After the mourners began to drift away from the cemetery Monday morning, Todd lingered to stroll among the grave markers, some fairly elaborate, more of them modest stone or even wood. The wooden ones were weathering badly, most of the words illegible on many of them. A harsh wind was blowing out of the north, and she was cold, but she didn’t want to join the caravan of cars crawling along back to Brindle.

The cemetery was bleak, with a few clumps of sage, some tough-looking grass, shards of black obsidian gleaming in the sun, and a spray or two of plastic flowers on some of the graves. A marble headstone marked the grave of Michael Hilliard. Next to it was a smaller marble headstone: Jane Marie Hilliard, 1862–1888, then: Rachel Emmaline Hilliard, 1878–1880.

Todd gazed at the tombstones sadly. To lose a child only two years old must have been tragic. Jane Hilliard had been only sixteen when her child was born, only twenty-six when she herself had died. How lonesome it must have been out here a hundred years ago, just the desert, a few people in the way station, an occasional traveler.

The wind whipped a piece of paper past the graves, sent it skittering into a clump of sage where it clung for a second or two before it was released and blew off into the distance. Todd shivered, turned and left the cemetery. Warmer clothes, she was thinking, which meant a shopping trip on Thursday. High on her list was a warm hat, one she could pull down over her ears.

Ruth Ann was shivering when Thomas Bird stopped the car to let her and Maria out at the front door of the house. Thomas Bird drove on around to put the car in the garage.

“Coffee,” Ruth Ann said inside the house. “Strong and hot.” She started to walk toward the kitchen, but Maria took her elbow and turned her toward the hall.

“You go lay down and cover up. I’ll put on coffee and start some lunch.” Maria was dressed in her formal clothes, a long black dress and a heavy black woolen shawl. Today the ribbons in her braided hair were also black. She looked as broad as she was tall, but she was warm.

“Todd’s coming up with some pictures,” Ruth Ann said, yielding to the tug on her arm. “I won’t go to bed now, but I do want coffee. Let’s have lunch after she’s gone. Point her to the sitting room when she comes.”

Maria looked surprised, then nodded. Very few people were ever allowed in Ruth Ann’s sitting room. “I’ll bring coffee when it’s ready, and a cup for her. She looked frozen out there.”

“It’s the wind,” Ruth Ann said.

Maria agreed. “Change of season. It will blow awhile and settle down again. Summer isn’t done yet. Go on now. I’ll be in directly.”

Ruth Ann often thought of her house in a phrase her mother had used in the distant past: preacher-ready. Maria kept the large living room preacher-ready, the sofa, several chairs, a coffee table, end tables, all so clean they looked unused, and practically were unused, forever ready for the preacher. She entered her sitting room, and it was what the entire house would be like if left to her. The room was cluttered, with books, magazines, photographs of her two grandsons, of Johnny at every stage of his life, his and Carol’s wedding pictures, Maria and Thomas Bird’s wedding, odds and ends various people had given Ruth Ann over the years. A snow-scene paperweight, vases, ashtrays that she actually used now and then, a few very good paintings on the walls, an assortment of polished rocks from Sam, half a dozen beautifully carved birds, a gift from Thomas Bird. She had brought her old school desk to the house and it was in the sitting room, heaped with papers and photographs she had been sorting through. Her kind of room, she thought, sinking into a reclining chair bathed in sunlight. Leone had been right about the windows. From now until spring, the sun would enter this room and it was welcome.

After a few minutes she stood up, took off her coat and tossed it on a chair. Maria came in with coffee and arranged a carafe and cups beside the recliner, drew another chair closer, poured one cup of coffee, and on her way out picked up the coat. Ruth Ann knew that Maria would have this room preacher-ready in a minute if she permitted it.

When Todd arrived, she gasped at the room. She loved Ruth Ann’s house, but she had always thought it was almost too neat and tidy; in contrast, this room was perfect. She hoped she would be allowed in another time when she could linger and examine every object. She suspected that a story lay behind each one of them. “Your parents?” she asked, pointing to a studio portrait of a man and woman stiffly posed, unsmiling. The portrait was in an oval, carved metal frame, the glass bowed slightly.

Ruth Ann nodded. “Why do you suppose they always seated the man and had the woman stand in those old portraits? And they never smiled, did they? My mother was very beautiful.”

“I can tell,” Todd said. “Even without a smile, she’s lovely.”

She began to unpack her laptop. After she had it plugged in and positioned on an end table, they looked at the pictures she had taken with her digital camera at the cemetery. “I thought you would be able to see them better on the monitor than on the small camera screen. After you decide which one you want, I’ll put up the front-page layout with it in place.”

“You have the newspaper on your little computer?”

“Not really. Just on a CD, a compact disk. That’s how I can work at home. And the laptop is small, but it has even more room on the hard drive and more power than the computers in the office.”

Ruth Ann was impressed. She had known that Todd did much of her work at home, but she had assumed it was on a standard computer like hers at the office. She picked out the funeral picture to go with the obituary, and watched as Todd slid in a CD and opened a screen with the front page, then added the new picture. It looked like magic.

After Todd left, and lunch was over with, Ruth Ann thought again about how Todd was able to take old faded photographs and do whatever she did with them to make them as sharp and clear as if they had just been taken. The photograph of Louise when she was a teacher at the one-room school, faded, yellowed and brittle with age, had come to life again with Todd’s tricks. No wonder the new generation loved their toys, she mused.

But she was really thinking of the photographs she had come across in Louise Coombs’s box. She had a box just about like that of her own, as well as whatever her mother had preserved of her father’s papers. At first she had been thinking of no more than a simple print special edition for the centennial, perhaps a one-page insert, but she was reconsidering. Old pictures of the town as it had been, from its first days on. The people who had lived here, even letters…Todd said she could scan anything on paper, digitize it, enhance it, reproduce it.

Second by second, a much more elaborate special edition was reforming in Ruth Ann’s mind.

Usually Todd and Barney cooked dinner together, but since Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were her only really busy days, on those nights he most often made dinner and had it ready when she got home. That night, chilled again by the strong wind, she entered the house, then called out, “Fe, fi, fo, fum. That smells good and I want some.”

“Maniac,” he said from the kitchen. “Lasagna, ten minutes. Wash your hands.”

They ate at the kitchen table and she told him about the funeral. “There must have been a couple hundred people there. And I was freezing. That wind was brutal today.”

“I know. I walked down to Safeway. We need to get out our winter gear. Summer or winter here, no in-between apparently. Guess who I saw at Safeway.”

“I give already. Who?”

“Miss Sexpot herself. She wanted me to buy her a cup of coffee, to warm her up, she said.”

“Oh dear,” Todd said. “You’ll have to come by the office to borrow my whip and chair.”

“I told her I was mentally conjugating Greek verbs and couldn’t be distracted. You might try that line with Shinizer. It worked with the sexpot.”

“Two problems,” she said, shaking her head. “He wouldn’t know what conjugating means, and he doesn’t know a verb from a velocipede. Anyway, after I told him that what he claims is friendliness the law considers sexual harassment, he hasn’t come within ten feet of me. Deal. You take care of the sexpot and I’ll take care of the bum. I can, you know.”

“I know you can, tiger. Deal. What’s a velocipede?”

Grinning, she said, “It’s a two-wheeled horse that little boys rode in Victorian novels.”

He looked doubtful and she laughed and started to clear the table.

Todd was dreaming. She was standing on a vast dun-colored plain with not a landmark in sight, no grasses, no rocks, nothing, just the endless plain. A strong wind was blowing granules of ice at her and no matter how she twisted and turned, they kept blasting her in the face. She ducked her head and tried to protect her face, her eyes, but the wind was too strong. “Don’t cry,” she told herself. “Don’t cry.” Tears would freeze on her cheeks.

“Todd! Wake up!”

“Don’t cry,” she whimpered, struggling against the wind, weeping.

“Todd! Come on, wake up.”

She jerked awake with Barney’s hands on her shoulders. She was shaking with cold.

“A door must have blown open,” he said. “Where’s another blanket?”

She couldn’t stop shaking. “Closet shelf.” She pointed and pulled the covers tighter around herself. Barney hurried to the closet and yanked another blanket from the shelf, wrapped it around her. He was shivering, too.

“I’ll go close the door. Be right back.” Pulling on his robe, he left the room. She huddled under the covers, drew herself up into a ball, and realized that she was weeping, her face was wet. Even with the covers over her head, she couldn’t stop shivering, and she couldn’t stop crying.

Barney was back. “Come on,” he said. “This bedroom is like an icebox. I put a log on the fire. We’ll be warmer there.”

He had moved the sofa in front of the fireplace, where a hot fire was blazing. They sat holding each other on the sofa, wrapped in a blanket, not talking. Gradually the warmth reached her and the shivering subsided, with only an occasional tremor coursing through her. Barney got up and left, returned with a box of tissues. “Are you okay?” he asked. At her nod, he said, “I’ll make us some hot cocoa. Be right back.”

She didn’t know how long they sat on the sofa before the fire, sipping the sweet hot cocoa. Eventually they moved the blanket away, but they didn’t get up.

Then, warm through and through, even sweating a little, she said, “There wasn’t an open door, was there?”

After a moment he said, “No. Why were you crying?”

“I don’t know,” she said in a low voice. “It wasn’t just me. You were freezing, too, weren’t you?”

“I was pretty damn cold,” he said, “but you were like ice. And crying. You were dreaming, crying in your dream. Do you remember the dream?”

Miserably she shook her head. She had to fight back tears, because sitting there with the fire, with Barney’s arm around her shoulders, safe and comfortable, she felt a nearly overwhelming sadness, a loneliness such as she had never experienced before. “Let’s go back to bed,” she whispered.

Ruth Ann was dreaming that she was a small child in the old press room where the machinery was gargantuan, high over her head, making ogrelike growling noises. Her father spread blank newsprint on the floor and she began to help him paste up the news stories, crawling over the paper on hands and knees. She had a paste pot and a brush and carefully brushed the paste on an article, then crawled around trying to find where to place it. Her mother said, “For heaven’s sake! Look at you. You’re all over ink.”

Ruth Ann stood up and looked at her knees and both hands, then stamped her foot, and her mother said, “Don’t you stamp your foot at me, young lady.”

She stamped her foot again and her father laughed as the newly pasted news stories came unstuck and scattered.

She woke up when the cold descended, and this time when Maria glided into the room carrying the electric blanket, Ruth Ann had already put on sheepskin slippers and a heavy wool robe.

“I won’t be going back to bed until this air mass moves on,” Ruth Ann said. “In fact, I was going to go make a cup of tea. I’ll make two cups.”

“It’s the shadow,” Maria said. “It moves out when it’s ready. I’ll put this on your bed in case you want it later.” Maria had on a heavy robe, but her feet were bare.

“I can’t understand why you don’t get cold when this happens,” Ruth Ann said in the kitchen a few minutes later, seated at the table sipping the tea she had insisted on making herself the way she liked it, black and strong, and in a big mug. Maria had a cup, half tea, half milk, the way she liked it.

“I get cold, but not like you do,” Maria said. “And Thomas Bird, he hardly notices it.”

“Strange,” Ruth Ann murmured. “I was thinking earlier how many things are strange. People think that when you get old you suddenly get smarter, or at least wiser, and I doubt that. You just have more memories.”

“Isn’t that what wiser means? More things to compare and weigh with?”

“You won’t get smarter,” Ruth Ann said. “You’re already too smart for your own good.”

“What other strange things were on your mind?” Maria asked.

Ruth Ann drew her robe tighter. She was very cold, but the tea was helping, and she knew the cold spell would not last very long. It never did. “Earlier,” she said, “when Todd was here we were looking at that picture of my mother and father, and I began to realize one of the reasons I like Todd and Barney so much. They remind me of my parents. Isn’t that strange?”

“Not how they look.”

“No. No. They don’t look at all like them. How they act, how playful they are together, trusting and honest. Things like that. Their attitude, I suppose.” She held her mug of tea, the heat felt good on her hands. “My parents were like that,” she said softly. “Laughing, playing, teasing a little. I think funerals make you think of such things.” Then more briskly she said, “Maria, it’s two-thirty. Go to bed. I’ll be awake a bit, but you should go on to bed.”

Even this was strange, Ruth Ann thought when Maria agreed that she was tired. People probably thought of them as mistress and servant, but she knew that they were simply two old friends who could share a cup of tea and chat easily at two o’clock in the morning.

Back in her sitting room, Ruth Ann stood before the portrait of her parents. She wished that they had smiled for the photographer. She had never seen her father looking that stern, he certainly had never directed such a look at her. Now she felt as if his eyes were looking through her. That’s how they posed them in those days, she thought, but he was looking at her, demanding, commanding….

“Tomorrow, Dad. I’ll start tomorrow.” She had saved the newspaper, and her mother had saved the other papers. It was time to see what was in them.

Todd snuggled close to Barney, comforted by his deep breathing, by the warmth of his body next to hers, but she couldn’t go to sleep. Usually they both fell asleep almost instantly, the way children do, the way she had done most of her life, but she was wakeful that night. She had been crying in her sleep, she thought, disturbed by the idea that a dream could have induced real tears, even sobbing, and then vanished from memory leaving no trace.

She knew that hers had been a fairly easy life compared to most people she knew, especially compared to Barney. Nothing terribly traumatic had ever happened to her; she had loving parents, loving brothers even if they had teased her unmercifully, three living grandparents. The last time she had cried like that, she recalled, had been when the family dog, Dash, had died, and they all had cried over him. She had been eight.

She never had minded the cold before. Growing up in Colorado, she had skied and ice skated, enjoyed winter sports most of her life—but the cold air that had invaded the house was not like any cold she had ever known. Barney had felt cold, too, although nothing like the chill she had experienced twice now, or the feeling of loneliness and desolation that came with it…. It had started in the hotel that night. If she had not stayed in the hotel, maybe it would not have found her, targeted her. She tried to banish the thought, but it persisted. The cold had targeted her.

Not just her, she told herself. Others felt it, too, an inversion setting in and then dissipating—in what, the wind? That made no sense at all. No door had been open that night, and no wind had been blowing back in August the first time. She knew this kind of thinking drove Barney wild. It was exactly what he was struggling to denounce in his dissertation: superstition, fear of the inexplicable, feeling targeted by the unknown.

There is always an explanation, he would say, even if we don’t know what it is yet. She closed her eyes tight. If he had felt it the way she had, he wouldn’t be so certain of that.

She remembered Jan’s vehemence when she said there was something rotten about Brindle, how she hated it. “She’s right,” Todd heard her own voice in her head. “There’s something rotten here, something wrong, something evil.”