William Gay - Little Sister Death

A regular scenic tour, she said, smiling wryly.

What amazes me is that we got here while there was anything at all left…I expected to find everything razed, the ground bulldozed, house trailers setting everywhere.

He waited for her to echo his enthusiasm but she did not. She arose and began to clear the table. Binder lit a cigarette, glancing outside. The windows had gone opaque, dark stolen over the land. He could see his reflected image at the head of the table, the shadow of a beard he was beginning to grow blurring the edges of his face. Lit bright orange by the flare of the match, his reflection was oblique and conspiratorial.

How long do you think it will take you to block out the book? Do you think you can get the feel of it here — begin it, maybe— and then we could go back to Chicago to finish it?

I don’t know, Corrie. It’ll just come when it comes. Why? I don’t recall you being that fond of Chicago.

I wasn’t, but I’m not that fond of the Beale farm, either. This place, especially this old house, just drives me up the wall. Besides, there’s school to think about.

This is only July. There’s plenty of time to think about that. It’ll all be worth it, Corrie. I promise you.

Well. I hope it’s a good book.

I don’t know how good it’ll be but it’ll be commercial. And that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?

I suppose so. I know you can write. You don’t have to prove anything to me, David.

When the house had been modernized, a bathroom had been added in the largest downstairs bedroom, a partition erected so there was a narrow hall that ended in two doors, one to the bathroom, the other interconnecting with a smaller bedroom. They had bought Stephie bunk beds in Beale Station. Corrie had set them up in the smaller room and done what she could to brighten it up, but the walls were a drab dirty brown and the room still had the austere appearance of a dormitory or military barracks.

Or prison, she thought.

Binder read to Stephie until he thought she slept, then ceased. She lay with her eyes closed for a time, but when he softly closed the book and arose to leave she opened them. When she spoke her voice was blurred with sleep.

Daddy?

What?

I forgot to tell you about the lady I saw.

Lady? Where did you see a lady, babe?

Stephie had arisen on her elbows. Her face was animated now, no longer sleepy. Binder thought she looked like a tiny clone of her mother.

On the hill above the toolshed. She had something. A rabbit, I think. It kept trying to get away but she held it real tight and it didn’t.

A rabbit? Binder thought. Aloud he said, What did the lady look like, Stephie? Did she look like anybody we know?

No, she was real old. Sort of fat and mean-looking. Grouchy.

Where did she go?

I don’t know. Just away. The way you went. She…she shook her hand at me.

You mean she waved? Or what?

Sort of…she waved her hand but it wasn’t fingers. Her fingers didn’t wave.

Shook her fist? he wondered. At a child?

Her eyelids fluttered. He could see sleep rising up in her blue eyes like a soft mist. It was a brown rabbit, she said drowsily. Then she fell silent.

He sat beside the bed, waiting until she was sound asleep. Sometimes she pretended, letting him get all the way to the door, then calling, Daddy.

He was thinking about rabbits. Something about rabbits. Then he remembered the man the real estate agent had sent to clear the place of weeds and brush. He and Stephie had been watching the red tractor moving through the lawless growth of pigweed and sassafras and all at once there was a hellacious noise beneath the blade of the bush hog. The driver got off swearing, kicking through the weeds to find the stump he had hit. But there was no stump. He approached Binder with a curious look on his face.

Hope that wadn’t you or your little girl’s rabbit box, he said.

Go in the house, he told Stephie.

I want to see the rabbits, she said stubbornly.

I said go in the house. Tell Mommy I said to give you some ice cream.

Binder went to see. The operator had raised the mower. Beneath it, shattered, they saw dowels and lashes of wood, a near-unidentifiable wreckage of splinters.

You can’t prove to me that ever was a rabbit box, he said. But the weeds were showered with bright drops of blood, sticky bits of hair and flesh and white shards of bone, as if some furry creature had exploded all over the lawn.

I’ll keep this to myself, Binder thought. It wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted Corrie to know, high-strung as she was, and with her father dying.if Stephie hadn’t told her already.

Did you tell Mommy about seeing the lady? he asked. But this time she really was asleep.

Corrie sat in silence for a time, a prolonged silence that Binder had come to recognize. It meant that Corrie was going to ask him something she knew he’d rather not be asked.

David?

What? Binder was holding his notebook but he wasn’t working. He was waiting.

You think it would bother you if Ruthie and Vern came up for a few days sometime this summer?

I guess not, he said reluctantly, mildly annoyed but at the same time realizing that he couldn’t deny her so simple a request. He planned to be deep in the book all summer and to have little time for small talk. Vern was very big on small talk.

Vern was successful. He had once been a construction worker, a few years ago, and had fallen from a rigging of scaffold. Binder had once maintained, not entirely facetiously, that Vern had jumped in order to sue the company. He had won an enormous lawsuit, had even been rolled into the courtroom in a wheelchair. The money was no more than in his hands than Vern was healed by a traveling evangelist in a miracle bright and incandescent that Binder figured was probably the peak of the faith healer’s career. Vern and Ruthie had immediately moved to Florida and gone into the motel business.

Vern didn’t like Binder. In fact he probably didn’t like Binder almost as much as Binder didn’t like him. Vern didn’t trust anyone who didn’t have a job or wasn’t rich; he felt if you weren’t filthy rich you ought to be punching a timeclock somewhere. He had never really understood what it was that Binder did. The idea that a grown man would spend his time writing made-up stories in a notebook amazed him, and the idea that there were folks in New York who would pay Binder for this was simply beyond his comprehension.

I don’t care if they come, it’ll be company for you and Stephie and God knows there’s enough room. But Vern’ll have to find his own games to play. I’ll be busy then and he needn’t look to me for entertainment.

I told them you’d be working. I’ll be glad to see Ruthie again, though. It seems we never see each other anymore except when there’s trouble in the family. Ruthie worries about me. You know how big sisters are.

No, I don’t. When did this plan come about, anyway?

After Daddy’s.when Daddy died.

She had crossed the room, came up behind him where he sat. He felt her hands alighting on his shoulders, saw in the mirrored windows their reflections merge. She leant her face to the top of his head, her hair so fair against his own. He could smell her hair.

Poor, lonely David. You were an only child when I found you.

He smiled at her reflection. I was an only child before that. You want something else, I can tell. What?

Fix the TV so it works tomorrow?

All right.

It’ll liven up the place some.

He was silent a time. Look, he finally said. I don’t want you thinking I’ve dragged you into something against your will. I’m only here to write the book. And I’ve always wanted to see this place, and this seemed like a good chance to do it. You could have stayed in Chicago. Or Orlando.