William Gay: Little Sister Death

Even as she tried to think of David, another level of her mind twisted in guilty pain and she realized how much she missed her father. Grief cut her clean and deep as a surgeon’s scalpel, and in that moment she would have clawed the dirt from his casket to see his face.

She forced herself to quit thinking about that, to make her mind gray and blank as the television screen she was watching. But it wouldn’t completely go away, and a part of it wondered detachedly how much would he have decayed, would I know him, could I stand to touch him.

She forced her mind, by a sheer exertion of will, to forsake her father’s face, to think of David. She seemed to have known him forever. He was five years older than Corrie, but in certain respects a generation apart. In 1968, when he had been listening to Bob Dylan, she had been thirteen. There were fundamental differences that showed even in so insignificant a thing as the music they liked: he still played Dylan and the Stones, she liked middle-of-the-road and country, neither of which David could tolerate. He said it was junk, Muzak, throwaway plastic. He said Dylan was a poet, that if he hadn’t grown up in an electronic society Dylan would have been writing his apocalyptic visions for the little magazines, and he heard dark and sinister undercurrents in the music of the Rolling Stones that she just didn’t hear.

She was like her father: fiscally responsible, possessed of a healthy respect for the dollar. David simply didn’t care, though she guessed that was changing. Ever since they’d learned she was pregnant again, David seemed to think about nothing but ways to make money. He had been just as happy broke as he was when he had money. When he came back from Vietnam, he was discharged in California and blew his mustering outpay on a typewriter and a Suzuki motorcycle, which she had never even seen. He had wrecked it in Tempe, Arizona, only one state out of California, and had just walked off and left it.

The word Vietnam had dark connotations for Corrie, like a spectre watching over their shoulders. She blamed it for the changes in David. She had been thirteen when he left for his tour of duty, and up until then he had never spoken a dozen words to her in her life. She barely knew him. He was cleancut, a little reserved maybe, but the image of the boy next door. When she saw him four years later he looked.not exactly grubby, but not exactly the boy next door anymore. His hair was long, not shoulderlength or anything, but long, and he had a beard. But the worst thing was his eyes. They had changed, looked at you cold and impassively out of the dark beard-shadowed face, as if nothing much mattered to them one way or another.

There was a strong air of single-minded purpose about him, too much intensity: you couldn’t call him laid back. She really believed he could do anything he wanted to do. Even for a while when he had long hair and a beard and had gone about in old Army fatigues he had always known who he was, what he was, what to do about it.

He was a writer. Even then he had been writing stories and sending them away and getting them back along with the little impersonal rejection slips. But Corrie saw that David had known he was a writer; he was just waiting for the world to catch up, which it finally had, in Chicago.

He’s not much fun, is he? Ruthie had said before they were married. Ruthie had tried to seduce him, she guessed. David never said so, but Ruthie always tried to seduce everybody at some time or other, especially Corrie’s boyfriends. And the occasional man who didn’t succumb she dismissed as being no fun anyway.

Actually he had been quite a bit of fun. He could be charming when he wanted to, and he had wanted to quite frequently then, when they were going together, getting engaged, when things weren’t pushing at him so.

He could be persuasive, too. He had made love to her the first night she had gone out with him. She had been a virgin, couldn’t quite figure how it happened, and the next day she was assailed with guilt, not at the loss of some intangible something she had never been aware of possessing but at the idea that she had been so easy and at the thought that David would think her cheap. She was angry at herself, and a little puzzled. Why had she let him when she wouldn’t let anyone else?

It took her a while to see that she had done it simply because he had wanted her too. He had wanted her with the focused intensity he applied to all the things he wanted. No one else had wanted her that intensely. He had just assumed she was going to let him, and she had.

The descending twilight was hot and still. A blood sun of eventide. Silence save the sleeping droning of insects, the spill of water over the shelf of limestone. The rabbit came up out of the thick ferment of wild peppermint by the springhouse and leapt nimbly stone to stone across the damp dark loam. The air here was cool and it smelled richly of mint.

The rabbit went up the path that bordered the creek. It paused crossing a sandbar where a water moccasin lay curled. The snake stirred, somnolent eyes becoming alert, its entire attention focused on the rabbit. The rabbit gave no indication of fear. It watched the snake levelly with its black shoebutton eyes. The snake seemed to sense something amiss: it abruptly slithered up the branch, dropped with a splash into the creek, fled across the water in a series of S-shaped undulations.

The rabbit turned. She was a young rabbit, halfgrown perhaps, lean and stringybodied. She went up the embankment, feet scuttling in the sand, came out into a field of red clover. The clover was in bloom and the air was filled with droning bees and the red clover perfume but the rabbit did not pause to feed. She skirted the darker side of the field and went through a thick hedgerow grown up over a splitrail fence. She came up through the garden spot, watching the house. Her nose crinkled delicately as she scented the air.

She was watching the girl. The girl was playing under the dark of a beech tree.

Stephie came slowly up the steps, stopped and sat down on the porch. She looked out toward the toolshed at the lower edge of the yard, upward and beyond it to the green and umber sedgefield rising to meet the dark line of trees. Corrie knew she was looking for David. He had been ascending the ridge when Stephie had seen him last.

When is Daddy coming in? I’m hungry.

I don’t know. When he comes.

What does that mean, when he comes?

It just means your father does things the way he wants to and when he wants to.

Is that a good way to be?

Corrie paused. The child was watching her with calm, level eyes. Impersonal as a tape recorder, Corrie thought against her will. But this sounded like one of Stephie’s loaded questions: she seemed almost hypersensitive to any criticism that David might receive.

I suppose it is if you can do it. Some people can’t. I can’t, and sometimes when people do that kind of thing it makes it hard on other people.

Why is he hunting for a place an old house used to be?

Your daddy is writing a book. Sometimes he acts peculiar when he’s busy doing that. He…he gets involved with what he’s writing about.

I’m going to be a writer.

Corrie knew that Stephanie was sometimes disquieting to other people, especially when they listened to their conversations. They didn’t quite know how to talk to her, never knew what she knew and what she didn’t. Sometimes her friends had treated Stephanie as if she were afflicted with a disease with a high mortality rate instead of merely being precocious; Corrie herself thought of them as a family comprised of three adults, two regular-sized and one trial-sized.

And one on the way, she thought, a twinge of unfocused worry flickering through her.

He came onto the place with an air of discovery, an archeologist seeking the chaos of an older time. He hunkered in the windy sedge at the rim of the hill and examined it. He could see how the old homeplace and yard below him were set in the epicenter of a saucerlike depression in the earth perhaps a half mile in diameter, the house set at the end of a dual lane of cedars that flanked the drive, down which ran droves of curiosity-seekers to hear spectral voices and obscene babbling, watch phantom figures and lights drift about the fields. According to contemporary accounts, few came away disappointed. Binder didn’t plan on being disappointed either. He felt a growing obsession to unstring the secrets the house held, to unravel the Gordian knot time and myth had only tightened.