Orson Card: Vessel

The moon was low but it didn't matter, dawn was coming and there was enough light to find his way home, splashing through the stream until he came to the place where he had left his shoes. He wondered if his parents had even noticed he was gone. Probably not. It was damn sure Deckie wouldn't have told them he was missing. If Deckie even went to the room. Still, if they did notice he was gone, there might be some kind of uproar. He'd have to tell them where he was and what he was doing and why his feet and shirt and shorts were wet. He was still trying to think of some kind of lie when he came into the cabin, through the back door because there was a light on in the living room and maybe he could sneak into bed.

But no, there was someone in the kitchen, too, though the light was off. "Who's there?"

Reluctantly Paulie leaned into the kitchen door and saw, to his relief, that it was the nurse who looked after Nana. "I'm making her breakfast," the woman said, "but she's fretful. She moans when she's like that, unless somebody sits there with her, and I can't sit there with her and make her mush too, so would you mind since you're up anyway, would you mind just going in and sitting with her so she doesn't wake everybody up?"

The nurse was all right. The nurse wouldn't get him in trouble. He could hear Nana moaning from the main floor bedroom that had been given over to her so nobody had to carry her frail old body up and down the stairs. The light was on in Nana's room and she was sitting up in her wheelchair, the strap around her ribs so she didn't fall over when the trembling became too strong. Paulie could see the cot where the nurse slept. It was silly, really -- the nurse was a large, big-boned woman and the cot must barely hold her, not even room enough to roll over without falling out of bed. While tiny Nana had slept in a huge kingsize bed. It would never have occurred to them, though, that Nana should get the cot. The nurse was of the serving class.

I am of the serving class, too, thought Paulie. Because I have more of my father's blood than my mother's. I don't belong among the rich people, except to wait on them. That's why I never feel like I'm one of them. Just like Father never belongs. We should be their chauffeurs and yard boys and butlers and whatever. We should wait on them and take their orders in restaurants. We should run their errands and file their correspondence. We all know it, even though we can't say it. Mother married down, and gave birth down, too. I should have been on a cot in someone's room, waiting for them to wake up so I could rush down and make their breakfast and carry it up to them. That's how the world is supposed to work. The nurse understands that. That's why she knew she could ask me to help her. Because this is who I really am;

Nana looked at him and moaned insistently. He walked to her, not knowing what she wanted or even if she wanted anything. Her eyes pierced him, sharp and unyielding. Oh, she wants something all right. What?

She looked up at him and started trying to raise her hands, but they trembled so much that she could hardly raise them. Still, it seemed clear enough that she was reaching out to him, staring into his eyes. So he held out his hands to her.

Her hands smacked against one of his. She could no more take hold of him than fly, so he took hold of her, one of her hands in both of his, and at once the trembling stopped, the effort stopped, and the unheld hand fell back into her lap on the wheelchair. "The nurse is fixing your breakfast," Paulie said lamely.

But she didn't answer. She just looked at him and smiled and then, suddenly, he felt that light that was hidden within him stir, he felt the pain in his back again from the musket ball, and now the death of the Cherokee swelled within him and filled him for a moment with light. And then, just as quickly, it flowed out of him, down through his fingertips just the way it had come. Flowed out of him and into her. Her face brightened, she dropped her head back, and as the last of the Cherokee's deathlight left him, she let out a final groan of air and died, her head flopped back and her mouth and eyes wide open.

Paulie knew at once what had happened. He had killed her. He had carried death out of the cave with him and it had flowed out of his hands and into her and she was dead and he did it. He sank to the floor in front of her and the weariness and pain of last night and this morning, the fear and horror of the two long-ago deaths that he had witnessed -- no, experienced -- and finally the enormity of what he had done to his greatgrandmother, all of this overwhelmed him and when the nurse came into the room she found him crying silently on the floor. At once she took the old woman's pulse, then unstrapped her, lifted her out of the chair, and laid her on the bed, then covered her up to her neck. "You just stay there, son," she said to him, and he did, crying quietly while she went back to the kitchen and rinsed the dishes. It occurred to him to wonder that her response to death was not to waken everybody but rather to wash up after an uneaten breakfast. Then he realized: That's what the serving class is for, to clean up, wash up, hide everything ugly and unpleasant.

Hide everything ugly and unpleasant.

I didn't kill her, or if I did, I didn't mean to. And besides she wanted it. I think she saw the death in me and reached for it. I brought her what she couldn't get any other way, release from her family, from her body, from her memories of life unmatched by any power to live. Nobody will be sorry to see her dead, not really. Somebody can move into the Richmond mansion again and become the main bloodline of the Brides. The nurse will get another job and everything will be fine. So why can't I stop crying?

He hadn't stopped crying when the nurse went to waken Mother even the nurse knew that it was Mother who had to be told first. And even though she held him and murmured to him, "Who could have guessed you'd be so tenderhearted," he couldn't stop crying, until finally he was shaking like the girl in the cave, shivering uncontrollably. I have another death in me, he thought. It's dangerous to come near me, there's another death in my fingers, the cold death of a slavegirl waiting in some cave in my heart. Don't come near me.

Mother and Father left that morning, to take him home and make funeral arrangements in Richmond. Others would take care of arranging for the ambulance and the doctor and the death certificate. Others would dress the corpse. Mother and Father had to take their son who, after all, had found the body. No one ever asked him what he was doing up at that hour, or where he had spent the night, and if anyone noticed that his shirt and pants were damp they never asked him about it. They just packed up his stuff while he sat, tearless now, on the sofa in the parlor, waiting to be taken away from this place, from the old lady who had drawn death out of his fingers, from the people who had jockeyed for position as they waited years for her to die, and from the children who played dark ugly games with each other by the swimming pool when no adult could see.

At last all the preparations were done, the car brought round, the bags loaded. Mother came and tenderly led him out onto the porch, down the steps, toward the car. "It was so awful for you to find her like that," she said to him, as if Nana had done something embarrassing instead of just dying.

"I don't know why I got so upset," said Paulie. "I'm sorry."

"We would have had to leave anyway," said Mubbie, holding the door open for him. "Even the Brides can't keep a family reunion going when somebody just died."

Mother glared at him over Paulie's head. He didn't even have to look up to see it. He knew it from the smirk on Mubbie's face.

"Paulie!" cried a voice. Paulie knew as he turned that it was Deckie, though it was unbelievable that the older boy would seek a confrontation right here, right now, in front of everybody.