Robert Stone: Death of the Black-Haired Girl

He did not die there in the pain and the cold as he expected but found his way to the cabin and to Ellie. Sleep failed him. His arm for weeks remained useless to him. He was, in a way, never the same again, though only he and Ellie would understand that.

When he went to the nearest doctor, at a gold mine forty kilometers away, the Russian medic there manipulated his elbow joint with a triumphant smirk. “Nothing wrong with your arm, dude.” The Russians had lately taken to addressing people as “dude,” especially Americans, who they thought had no business being around.

“It hurts like crazy,” Brookman told him.

“Bummer,” said the medical man.

He talked to Ellie about it as the use of his arm came back.

“Things like that come over me sometimes,” she said. “Sort of fainting fits. I used to get them a lot when I was small. You must have caught it from me.”

“It had a content, you know,” he said. “That falling. It seemed to be about something. You know? Everything that happened at home.”

“Sure,” she said.

The driver of the car that had killed Maud Stack was a graduate of the college that fielded the visiting team for which his younger brother played. He was a decorated U.S. Army captain and a veteran of Desert Storm. Since his service, he had suffered problems with alcohol and pills. He had not wanted to go to the game. After the accident he had gone into a panic-driven fugue state and done all the dumb things — reported too late that his car was stolen, tried to do the body work on it himself, took it to a shop to attempt to conceal his own work. His girlfriend went to the police without his knowledge to confess to being the driver. When he found out, he walked into police headquarters and confessed to the crime. He had the court’s sympathy but got a year inside.

The weather continued erratic in the months after Maud’s death. Days dawned in murky spring-like warmth and turned frigid in the afternoons. Other days took opposite turns. On one of the cold mornings Jo drove down to a dead factory town called Old Brighton to see a psychiatrist friend of hers named Victor Lerner. Dr. Lerner was the son of a famous Hungarian therapist who had fled to Harvard during the Second World War. Victor had lost a coveted chair of his own by eloping with a student patient to an ashram in India run by his cultic mentor.

Since his dismissal Dr. Lerner had eventually regained his license and worked for the state on a contract basis. Most of his duty consisted in certifying applicants for disability benefits. He had an office out of which to conduct his sparse private practice, a crumbling nineteenth-century mansion that had belonged to an Old Brighton mill owner.

Jo Carr and Victor Lerner had been involved with radicals in South America, but in different parts of the continent. Their bond was that they had both attempted to subscribe to some of the totalist metaphysical fantasies that had thrived in the previous century. Jo occupied one of the rickety chairs facing his Goodwill Industries blond, maple-like desk. Across the dismal street behind him, visible through his office window, car after car of a freight train rattled by on the Boston & Maine tracks. The open cars carried stacks of empty wooden pallets secured by metal binders.

Victor and Jo had been talking about the death of Maud Stack. They had to suspend their conversation until the last freight car passed.

“And the dreams?”

“I dream about a place on the highest ridge of the Andes.”

“You’ve been there before in dreams.”

“Yes. And in the sky I see the stars. I see the constellation they call the Easel. Sacred in some places.”

“How does that make you feel?”

She almost laughed. He had asked her the same question many times before. “It’s a nightmare, Vic.”

“And the associations…”

“A corner of something constant, a spirit deep in history. A created order. And all of the notions we’ve both seen people lose their lives to.”

“Structuralist thinking,” Victor said.

“I dream of that terrible priest. I see him on the street. He belongs to the rest of it.”

“You don’t need me to explain these things, Jo. You’ve already explained them to me.”

“History… history is poisoned by claims on underlying truth. We’ve both been burned by people who think they represent them. Underlying truth. Do you think any of these things are objectively out there?”

“Jo, on a scale of yes and no, I would have to say no. Counterintuitive as that may be.”

“Why counterintuitive?”

“Ah,” Victor said as another freight took sound and shape behind him. “Because people always want their suffering to mean something.”

The rest of what he said was drowned out by the noise of the train.

Jo never stopped regretting that she had not been given more time to help old Stack somehow. How she might have found a friend in him, and of course whether she could have encouraged him toward survival. She had the feeling he might have been fun to know. As Maud would have been, Jo was sure, had the kid lived into knowability. And people had once considered Jo herself diverting company. Thinking about what she might have done for Stack, for Maud, helped her through the futilities of her job.

Stack died three months after his daughter. His ashes were placed with those of his wife and daughter in the crypt at Holy Redeemer.

ROBERT STONE is the acclaimed author of seven novels and two story collections, including Dog Soldiers, winner of the National Book Award, and Bear and His Daughter, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2006.