William Gay: Little Sister Death

Where the house had stood was a tangle of riotous weeds and brush, the twin chimneys rising starkly out of the undergrowth. It was caught in the slow sweep of failing light, the sky beyond it redorange and metallic, flooded with garish colors as if all the light in the world had pooled there, congesting momentarily at the horizon and then draining off the rim of the world. Struck by the gradations of light and shadow Binder watched in an almost rapt stillness the subtle changes the shifting light brought, objects altering slowly as if undergoing some metamorphosis at their core, their very cells being rearranged. Though he was not an artist he studied the scene with the intensity of a painter, eyes marking color and shading, the tilt of the sedge, the darkening and accruing shadows seemingly drawn out of the earth itself.

He was watching the homeplace and he was pondering the nature of its evil, not wondering if there was evil indeed there but knowing it with an absolute certainty that he applied to very few things. What triggered it? he wondered. How did it work? And how did it ever come to be there? Something old and evil had happened here, so evil that everything that had come after was just echoes, just spreading ripples in the water so intense that Beale and his family had ultimately abandoned the house and rebuilt in the place he was now moving into. Though that didn’t help, did it, Old Jake? Binder thought. Whatever it was just walked across the ridge and knocked at your door.

Binder had seen old pictures where the house itself looked ungainly and out of proportion, the original log structure added to with seemingly with no eye for symmetry or even common sense, so that ultimately the house took on an air of inherent arrogance or just the unmindful disconcern of the very old, serene, and timeless.

There was, he saw again, juxtaposition of lineament that jarred him. No angle seemed to be true to the eye’s expectation. The horizontal seemed slightly out of level, the vertical just a fraction out of plumb. Perhaps this very imbalance lay at the root of things; an eye perpetually beguiled and a brain constantly reevaluating these images might draw insanity to it like a comforter. Yet he knew the evil predated the house, and he looked farther to the land itself, the sedgefield running stonily down the hill to the outbuildings, to what must have been the carriage house, and far beyond that, the ruins of the slave cabins.

It was an evil perhaps indigenous to the slope and rise of the land, to the stark austerity of the woods surrounding the ruined plantation. For whatever course, it was a verifiable fact that evil had happened here. He had the book, the old newspapers. Such word-of-mouth stories as he had been able to collect. Arcs had fallen here, and fallen again. Blood had run like the proverbial water. And before that, in the nineteenth century, the homeplace had been the setting for a sort of pastoral haunting so bizarre and irrefutable that word of mouth and finally an article in so prestigious a source as the Saturday Evening Post had drawn the curious hordes to listen for voices in the night whispers, to see Casper candles flit about the fields.

He had come equipped to unravel it all, to line the yellow sheets of foolscap with the place’s true history. It was a book he was compelled to write. By what? His interest, the writer’s interest, by some misalignment of his consciousness. What was his fault, how had it picked him?

Or had he picked it?

On the way back he passed through the old graveyard. Abandoned by the living, only the dead kept their watch. He sat down on one of the headstones. After a while he arose and started back, stopping for a moment at Jacob Beale’s headstone. It seemed imbued with lost knowledge, secrets carried to the grave, deadbolts he could open could he just find the right sequence of numbers.

JACOB WILLIAM BEALE 1785 ∼ 1844

TORTURED BY A SPIRIT, NOW AT REST

ORIGINAL STONE STOLEN IN 1937, THIS ROCK PLACED IN 1941

He didn’t linger here. He had seen it before and it held nothing new for him.

It was a scant two hundred yards over the sedgefield and down the ridge to the house. Here he stopped again, studying the place. There was a look of great age about it. Save the anomolaic four-wheel-drive truck parked in the yard, he could have stepped backward into the middle of the previous century.

Behind Binder the field sloped continually upward in a stony tapestry of sedge and faded into a blue wood. That was where the old woman watched him from blueberry eyes in the warm, quilted leather of her face. Her hair was black without a streak of gray and frizzed out from beneath the man’s felt hat jammed on her head. She wore walking shoes and a shapeless pair of men’s corduroy pants and a gray sweater whose buttons were split away and she had clasped the front with safety pins. She was old, but she looked wiry and tough, as if her bones had been strung on rawhide thongs and her skin tanned to leather. Her hands were big-knuckled and large as a man’s.

One of these hands clasped the wadded mouth of a gunny sack. Something stirred in it. She lowered the weight to the ground to rest her arm, still watching the distant figure of the man, thinking, Well there you are, sure enough. Reckon how long you’ll be here? She released her grip on the sack momentarily. As if sensing this tentative freedom, whatever was in the bag leapt spasmodically against the restraining burlap, but she stayed it with a foot and went back to watching him. The bag stilled.

Just like a man, she thought. Look for an hour when there’s nothing in the world to see. You needn’t go lookin for it anyway, she told Binder’s angular figure. When it gits ready for you it’ll come huntin you up.

Her shadow had lengthened, she felt the lessening of the sun’s weight. She took up the bag and slung it across a shoulder. She would have liked to have watched the man longer but she did not want to be on the Beale farm after dark, and besides, the woods were full of dead treetops where logs had been cut and hauled away and they lay like deadfalls awaiting tripping. So at length she turned toward deeper woods, came out in a clearing above which a hawk wheeled, fleeing the raucous tormenting of a flock of crows. She stopped to watch. The hawk ascended into a darkening void, vanished. A whippoorwill called from the shadowed wood and she went on.

Below him the lights came on. The door opened and a rectangle of yellow spilled onto the yard. He could see Corrie, doll-size, approaching the steps, peering into the gathering night. He could imagine her face sweetly becoming slightly apprehensive as night drew on. Afraid of the dark, he thought derisively, who would have welcomed anything the night might choose to favor him with.

David, David.

He could hear her calling, the voice belllike yet faint with distance. He arose and took up his notebook, went stumbling blindly downhill toward the lighted house.

You were out a long time, Corrie said.

She thought you were snakebit, Stephanie told David.

My name is Mommy, Corrie said. Not she.

Binder laid aside his silverware, took up his coffee cup. I finally found the old Beale homeplace, he said. Greaves said it would be easy, and maybe in the wintertime it would, but this place is so grown up you can’t find anything. I fought blackberry briars all afternoon and finally just stumbled upon it. The two chimneys are there, just like Greaves said, but he neglected to mention there are trees growing right up beside them, taller than they are. Right up through where the floor of the house was, poplars forty or fifty feet tall. I keep forgetting this was all a hundred and forty years ago.

What else was there?

The pear tree old Jacob Beale set out in his yard. Dead, I’ll admit, but a pear tree nonetheless. The graveyard where the Beales are buried. The old orchard. You can see the configuration of the land, the lay of it, where the fields were, the old grape arbor. The spring is still there, of course, and the wreckage of the old stone springhouse.