Siri Hustvedt - The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

“Why?” Dolores said.

Lily’s leg brushed Dolores’s hip. The contact made her uncomfortable, and she felt her face getting hot. “Dick,” Lily began and corrected herself, “Mr. Bodler says he saw Martin Petersen carrying”—Lily rubbed her face—“me”—she paused—“across the field out here last Thursday night, but I wasn’t there.”

“You?” Dolores squinted at Lily.

“Remind you of anything?” Lily said. “Like Jesse James?”

“No,” Dolores said, but her lips were parted in an expression of confusion.

Dick sat up.

“Well, let’s face it,” Lily said, “it wasn’t Jesse James.”

Frank had turned to Lily, and he stepped forward.

Dolores looked at Lily and spoke between her teeth. “I saw Jesse, and I saw me. I know what I saw, and it scared the bejesus outa me. It wasn’t Martin Petersen, and it sure as hell wasn’t you.”

Lily shouted at Dick. “How did you know it was Martin? Wasn’t it getting dark? I’m not saying you didn’t see anything, but how could you be so sure? In the police log last week there was a report about a man carrying an injured woman just outside of town. It’s the same thing, don’t you see? I’ve got it right here.” Lily dug into her back pocket for the clipping and waved it in front of Dolores. “You didn’t call the police, did you?”

“I never call them clowns,” Dolores said. She took the clipping from Lily, stared at it and sucked the inside of her cheek.

Frank walked over to Dolores and held out his hand for the clipping. She gave it to him, and he read it for at least a minute. Kindergarten speed, Lily said to herself. “Wonder whose pig it was,” he said finally.

“You’re sayin’ Marty Petersen’s walkin’ round town with a dead woman and that’s what I’ve been seeing?” Dolores said, “Wearin’ cowboy duds? That it ain’t visions? Is that what you’re sayin’?”

“Maybe,” Lily said. “I’m not sure.”

“What about the music?” she said. “I heard music.”

Lily ignored her.

Still holding the bit of wrinkled newspaper, Frank sat down on a crate piled with magazines and spat into the coffee can. “That boy was born with thin blood,” he said. “Runs in our family.” He spoke slowly.

“Who’s he talking about?” Lily asked Dolores.

“Must be Marty.”

“You and Martin are related?” Lily said in a loud voice.

Frank nodded. “As I was sayin’, he inherited it, thin blood, female-like, if you know my meaning, a little like Dick here.” He lowered his voice when he mentioned his brother. “Only Dick ain’t clever, and Marty’s wicked clever — not just with his hands neither. He reads a lot a books, comes here and pages through every one we get in to see if he wants it, and takes whatever he likes. He’s got big ideas ’bout things, an’ when he ain’t cursed by stutterin’, he goes on and on till I can’t take it no more, a regular chatterbox he is, once he gets goin’.”

Lily interrupted him. “How are you related?”

Frank looked at her. “Our mother and Martin’s grandmother was sisters.”

“I had no idea.”

Frank nodded. “Norwegians,” he said. “Those girls was born here, but their parents come from a little place in Sogn Valley, name of Underdahl. Took the name from there: Underdahl.” Lily watched the back of Frank’s head in the mirror and saw his bald spot wave in the reflection.

Dolores looked at Lily. “Like you.”

“There are lots of Dahl names,” Lily said, as if an explanation was called for. “It means ‘valley’ in Norwegian — Overdahl, Grondahl, Folkedahl — lots of them.” She heard her voice drop. She knew it was silly, but the coincidental overlapping of her own name with Helen Bodler’s maiden name unsettled her.

“Sure,” Dolores said. “I went to school with a girl called Hallingdahl.”

They were all silent. Helen Underdahl, Lily said to herself, and burped. It was a silent burp, but she tasted vomit in her mouth and swallowed to get rid of it. She looked at Frank and in a loud measured voice said, “Do you think Martin is capable of—” She stopped. “Would Martin hurt anybody?”

Frank leaned forward on the crate. “The truth is, Miss Dahl, you can’t know nothin’ about nobody now, can you? Seems to me you yourself could hurt somebody if the time and place was right. That’s so, ain’t it? Even them that’s closest to you, you can’t really know ’bout them. One day you wake up and find out. Folks say, ‘It ain’t possible, can’t happen.’ You live a little longer, and it happens.” Frank nodded his head. “People are full of surprises. I seen a lot a things that weren’t supposed to happen, Miss Dahl, and it ain’t so easy to say who’s to blame. That’s the nature of things. The day comes when you wake up in the mornin’ and look out the window and you can’t see nothin’ but grasshoppers so thick they black out the sky. And then before you know it, a drought sets in, and your fields burn as sure as if you’d taken a torch to your own crops. That’s just the way of nature, but then the price of eggs goes so low, it ain’t worth sellin’ em. Costs more to raise the chickens. An’ whose fault is that, Miss Dahl? Was it them politicians in Washington, don’t know a heifer from a steer?” Frank shook his head and stuck a pinch of tobacco into his cheek. He narrowed his eyes. “And the day comes when a goddamned inspector from the goddamned Twin Cities drives up in his fat car and tells you you gotta slaughter your animals, every last one of ’em. Hoof-and-mouth, he says. But it turns out, Miss Dahl, they wasn’t sick. Them cows wasn’t sick.” He raised a fist at Lily. “And the day comes when you don’t know your own people, don’t know what they are or what they’re thinkin’, and that’s gotta be the worst. They turn their backs on you and leave you high and dry. It don’t matter that it ain’t you done nothin’. You’re mixed up in it somehow, and that’s all that matters. Pity’s cheap, Miss Dahl, and those that pity don’t like to come too close. They stand at a good distance cluckin’ their tongues and shakin’ their heads, but they won’t get their hands dirty, and that ain’t much when all you’ve got left is a patch of land with the devil’s mark on it.” He nodded. “Folks surprise you. That’s all there is to it. You’re askin’ me if that boy could do somethin’ bad. I’m tellin’ you, you bet he could, but that don’t make him much different from nobody else.”

Lily looked at Frank. The length of his speech had astonished her. In a low voice she said, “Martin’s got pictures and articles of dead people on his wall — murdered people — did you know that?”

“You think that’s different from havin’ the pictures in here?” Frank tapped his temple with a finger.

Lily’s mouth was dry. “I, I don’t know,” she said.

Dick was stirring on the bed, and when Lily turned to look at him, she saw that he was sitting up. He let go of the cards and watched them scatter onto his lap and the bed. Until then, she had felt the man had been absent, absorbed only in the numbers and the faces on the cards in his hand. Lily didn’t know what he had heard or not heard, but his face took on a sudden expression of joy. He threw back his head, opened his mouth and laughed without making any sound, his chin bobbing. He hugged himself and began to rock back and forth on the bed, bumping both women with his shoulders. Lily moved out of his way and knocked Dolores in the shin with her knee.

“He don’t mean nothin’ by it,” Dolores said to Lily. “It’s one of his peculiars.” She smiled. “Peculiarities. Every once in a while it comes over him — just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I think we oughta leave him alone. Frank’s the only one who can get him out of it, if it don’t stop by itself.”