William Gay - Little Sister Death

You won’t never cool it, the man told Binder. Your best bet is to shut off some of them upstairs rooms. You won’t cool it this summer nor heat it this winter, not unless you’re a millionaire. Cost you four, maybe five hundred a month, and them fireplaces’d keep you humpin with a chainsaw.

We’ll be back in Chicago this winter, Corrie had said. This place is depressing enough in the summer. Can you imagine what it’d be like in the wintertime?

Lying there in the dark, under the cool, mechanical whine of the air conditioner, Binder thought he could. Already remote, the place shrouded with snow would be inaccessible, locked in silent peace. No telephone, no traffic, no gossip, just the quiet walls and the unlined yellow paper and time settling slowly over him like motes of dust spinning in the air.

He couldn’t sleep. His head ached, the pain coming in waves so regular he could have charted them, ebbing and flowing like the black tides of the sea. And that was the way he came to see them, the waves beginning far out and uneven beyond a reef of slick black rocks starting in, whitecapping, breaking on the rocks with fingers of salty spray. Fading thin, but never completely going away. There was always a dull aching behind his eyes. He opened them, stared into the darkness. He could feel her naked back against him. His arm encircled her as if he could draw furtive comfort from her sleeping warmth. He cupped a breast gently, slid his hand down to the smooth mound of her belly, her waist already thickening in pregnancy. He thought simultaneously of the tiny form growing inside her (cells dividing even as she slept, no rest for the weary, a woman’s work is never done) and the book growing on lined sheets of yellow paper and in his head. We shall each be creative, each in our own way.

He arose, went to check on Stephie, studied her sleeping face for a time. He went into the kitchen. In a cabinet he found a bottle of extra-strength Tylenol, took three with a glass of icewater from the refrigerator, stood for a moment with the cold glass against his temple.

He sat on the sofa smoking, watching the television with the sound off. Late-night news, talking heads like prophets gifted with hindsight mouthing dark forebodings intercut with neon images of random violence.

On the porch it was cooler, a degree of comfort between the sterile manufactured cold of the bedroom and the hot heavy air in the den. He sat on the damp stone steps, watching across the dark bottomland to where the horizon met the sky in a collusion of black he suspected more than saw. Distant lightning flickered there, vague and threatless, and he caught himself waiting for thunder that wouldn’t come. Orange electricity bloomed and faded, burnishing the silver clouds, tracing their outlines with bright neon fire, the afterimage burning on his retinas. Beyond the toolshed the sky was black and wetlooking, velvet drowning slowly in India ink.

He talked to folks.

He took a seat on a worn bench on the courthouse square, next to an old felthatted man whetting a knife. Occasionally the man would cease his work and inspect it critically, try the edge experimentally on the sparse gray hairs on his forearm, return to his patient whetting. Perhaps he had a need for a blade so painstakingly sharpened, Binder thought. Perhaps he was a butcher, a brain surgeon, a midnight slasher.

He saw Corrie and Stephie cross the street and go into the beauty shop, Corrie pausing as she pushed open the door, turning to raise a hand. Birds bright as mockup birds of chrome and tinfoil foraged the withering grass, and they along with Corrie’s crisp dark curls seemed untouched by the suffocating heat. The old man’s longsleeved chambray shirt was dark with perspiration across the back and armpits, sweat soaked through the collar buttoned against his stark neck.

Your name wouldn’t be Charlie Cagle, would it?

Well it might, if you ain’t takin up money or sellin insurance.

I’m not doing either one, Binder said.

What are you doin then?

Just passing the time of day. Been hot, hasn’t it?

July is like that. You from around here, young feller?

I live out at the old Beale place.

Say you do? I allowed that place was boarded up now.

No. The people who owned it kept it up. The house is in good shape.

You a married man?

Yes, Binder said, watching the rectangle of sundrenched glass that was the door to the beauty shop.

I reckon she must be a right nervy little gal then. To live out there on that place.

Why do you say that?

It’s so far from town and kind of back in them woods and all. You got to admit it ain’t the cheerfulest-lookin place in the world.

It’s not that for sure.

That her went in that store and thowed her hand at ye a minute ago?

Yes.

I guess them old peafowls in there gives her a earful about the Beale place then, the old man said dryly. Reckon you might have to tote her to get her back home. Or hogtie her and drag her one.

We’ve been out there two weeks. Nothing’s happened, Binder said, thinking of the dog, the watchful yellow ungleaming eyes and black flag of a tail dropping against the cornrows.

Well, I lived in this county all my life and all I ever heard was tales folks told. So-and-so seen this, heard that. Jesse Bright he was back in there digging ginseng one time. He thought he knowed where he was, keepin his directions by the sun, but then it clouded up, come up a rain and he got off in a long hollow and didn’t know no mor’n a blind hog where he was. He blundered around awhile and said finally he started hearin this music, purty and far off, and just set down on a stump and took it all in.

What sort of music?

Just purty music. Said he ort to been scared but wadn’t. Somebody singin, but he said it sounded so far off he couldn’t make out the words. Said it sounded like a real purty church song.

You believe that?

I don’t believe it or disbelieve it. I’m just tellin you is all.

When the Beale haunting first began, the spirit or whatever she was used to sing gospel songs, didn’t she?

Is that a fact? Well, that was a mighty long time ago. How would you know a thing like that?

I read a book about the Beale place.

Say you did. What are you, some kind of writer?

No, Binder said, grinning. Just some kind of reader.

Writers come down here off and on. Folks puts em on somethin fierce, tells em the awfulest old bunch of bullshit you ever heard.

Cagle began to whittle from a length of red cedar, the soft, curling shavings mounding delicately in the lap of his overalls. Binder could smell the aromatic cedar. He thought inanely of the time the old man seemed to possess so much of, the almost ceremonial preparation of the knife just to whittle something ultimately unrecognizable from softened wood.

I spect a lot of that Beale haunt stuff was made up just to pass the time, don’t you? Folks didn’t have no television sets to hunker in front of back then. They had to addle their brains some other way.

You may be right, Binder said.

I may not be plumb right. It was a man claimed to be a writer come in here in the forties, not many years after Owen Swaw killed hisself. He was from up north somers. He prowled around out there a long time one summer huntin ghosts, then he left or I reckon he did. I never did know if he got his book wrote or not.

Did you ever meet him?

Shor I met him, the old man said, his tone insinuating that Binder had subtly insulted him. He looked me up special cause everbody figured I knowed Owen as well as anybody did. Me and Owen was cuttin timber right before he went crazy as shit and took a choppin ax to his old lady. He was a nice feller, this here writer was. Had a way of listenin like he was just soakin you up. Soft-spoken, talked with some kind of accent, said he was from Hungry or somers.