Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Constance looked at me for a minute. “Miss Wickedness,” she said. “You wanted him to forget.”

“How could he know about the library books? He doesn’t belong in this house; he has nothing to do with our books.”

“Do you know,” Constance said, looking into a pot on the stove, “I think that soon we will be picking lettuce; the weather has stayed so warm.”

“On the moon,” I said, and then stopped.

“On the moon,” Constance said, turning to smile at me, “you have lettuce all year round, perhaps?”

“On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts. On the moon Uncle Julian would be well and the sun would shine every day. You would wear our mother’s pearls and sing, and the sun would shine all the time.”

“I wish I could go to your moon. I wonder if I should start the gingerbread now; it will be cold if Charles is late.”

“I’ll be here to eat it,” I said.

“But Charles said he loved gingerbread.”

I was making a little house at the table, out of the library books, standing one across two set on edge. “Old witch,” I said, “you have a gingerbread house.”

“I do not,” Constance said. “I have a lovely house where I live with my sister Merricat.”

I laughed at her; she was worrying at the pot on the stove and she had flour on her face. “Maybe he’ll never come back,” I said.

“He has to; I’m making gingerbread for him.”

Since Charles had taken my occupation for Tuesday morning I had nothing to do. I wondered about going down to the creek, but I had no reason to suppose that the creek would even be there, since I never visited it on Tuesday mornings; would the people in the village be waiting for me, glancing from the corners of their eyes to see if I was coming, nudging one another, and then turn in astonishment when they saw Charles? Perhaps the whole village would falter and slow, bewildered at the lack of Miss Mary Katherine Blackwood? I giggled, thinking of Jim Donell and the Harris boys peering anxiously up the road to see if I was coming.

“What’s funny?” Constance asked, turning to see.

“I was thinking that you might make a gingerbread man, and I could name him Charles and eat him.”

“Oh, Merricat, please. ”

I could tell that Constance was going to be irritable, partly because of me and partly because of the gingerbread, so I thought it wiser to run away. Since it was a free morning, and I was uneasy at going out of doors, it might be a good time to search out a device to use against Charles, and I started upstairs; the smell of baking gingerbread followed me almost halfway to the top. Charles had left his door open, not wide, but enough for me to get a hand inside.

When I pushed a little the door opened wide and I looked in at our father’s room, which now belonged to Charles. Charles had made his bed, I noticed; his mother must have taught him. His suitcase was on a chair, but it was closed; there were things belonging to Charles on the dresser where our father’s possessions had always been kept; I saw Charles’ pipe, and a handkerchief, things that Charles had touched and used dirtying our father’s room. One drawer of the dresser was a little open, and I thought again of Charles picking over our father’s clothes. I walked very softly across the room because I did not want Constance to hear me from downstairs, and looked into the open drawer. I thought that Charles would not be pleased to know that I had caught him looking at our father’s things, and something from this drawer might be extraordinarily powerful, since it would carry a guilt of Charles. I was not surprised to find that he had been looking at our father’s jewelry; inside the drawer was a leather box which held, I knew, a watch and chain made of gold, and cuff links, and a signet ring. I would not touch our mother’s jewelry, but Constance had not said anything about our father’s jewelry, had not even come into this room to neaten, so I thought I could open the box and take something out. The watch was inside, in a small private box of its own, resting on a satin lining and not ticking, and the watch chain was curled beside it. I would not touch the ring; the thought of a ring around my finger always made me feel tied tight, because rings had no openings to get out of, but I liked the watch chain, which twisted and wound around my hand when I picked it up. I put the jewelry box carefully back inside the drawer and closed the drawer and went out of the room and closed the door after me, and took the watch chain into my room, where it curled again into a sleeping gold heap on the pillow.

I had intended to bury it, but I was sorry when I thought how long it had been there in the darkness in the box in our father’s drawer, and I thought that it had earned a place up high, where it could sparkle in the sunlight, and I decided to nail it to the tree where the book had come down. While Constance made gingerbread in the kitchen, and Uncle Julian slept in his room, and Charles walked in and out of the village stores, I lay on my bed and played with my golden chain.

“That’s my brother’s gold watch chain,” Uncle Julian said, leaning forward curiously. “I thought he was buried in it.”

Charles’ hand was shaking as he held it out; I could see it shaking against the yellow of the wall behind him. “In a tree,” he said, and his voice was shaking too. “I found it nailed to a tree, for God’s sake. What kind of a house is this?”

“It’s not important,” Constance said. “Really, Charles, it’s not important.”

“Not important? Connie, this thing’s made of gold. ”

“But no one wants it.”

“One of the links is smashed,” Charles said, mourning over the chain. “I could have worn it; what a hell of a way to treat a valuable thing. We could have sold it,” he said to Constance.

“But why?”

“I certainly did think he was buried in it,” Uncle Julian said. “He was never a man to give things away easily. I suppose he never knew they kept it from him.”

“It’s worth money,” Charles said, explaining carefully to Constance. “This is a gold watch chain, worth possibly a good deal of money. Sensible people don’t go around nailing this kind of valuable thing to trees.”

“Lunch will be cold if you stand there worrying.”

“I’ll take it up and put it back in the box where it belongs,” Charles said. No one but me noticed that he knew where it had been kept. “Later,” he said, looking at me, “we’ll find out how it got on the tree.”

“Merricat put it there,” Constance said. “Please do come to lunch.”

“How do you know? About Mary?”

“She always does.” Constance smiled at me. “Silly Merricat.”

“Does she indeed?” said Charles. He came slowly over to the table, looking at me.

“He was a man very fond of his person,” Uncle Julian said. “Given to adorning himself, and not overly clean.”

It was quiet in the kitchen; Constance was in Uncle Julian’s room, putting him to bed for his afternoon nap. “Where would poor Cousin Mary go if her sister turned her out?” Charles asked Jonas, who listened quietly. “What would poor Cousin Mary do if Constance and Charles didn’t love her?”

I cannot think why it seemed to me that I might simply ask Charles to go away. Perhaps I thought that he had to be asked politely just once; perhaps the idea of going away had just not come into his mind and it was necessary to put it there. I decided that asking Charles to go away was the next thing to do, before he was everywhere in the house and could never be eradicated. Already the house smelled of him, of his pipe and his shaving lotion, and the noise of him echoed in the rooms all day long; his pipe was sometimes on the kitchen table and his gloves or his tobacco pouch or his constant boxes of matches were scattered through our rooms. He walked into the village each afternoon and brought back newspapers which he left lying anywhere, even in the kitchen where Constance might see them. A spark from his pipe had left a tiny burn on the rose brocade of a chair in the drawing room; Constance had not yet noticed it and I thought not to tell her because I hoped that the house, injured, would reject him by itself.