William Gay - Little Sister Death

Go where it’s clean, not where there’s any undergrowth.

Okay.

Binder was watching Corrie’s quiet face. This was the spot where the slaves used to have their baptizings, he said.

Used to what? she asked without opening her eyes.

Baptizings. The slaves had their meeting here, revivals I guess, and the preacher used to dunk them under to reclaim their souls. The Beale Haunt, or whatever she was, used to take quite an interest in the proceedings. She professed a great interest in religion. Washed in the blood, I guess. She used to sing and quote scripture to beat the band. She knew who was a sinner and who wasn’t, and she used to show up every Sunday there was a meeting here and sort of supervise things. She used to yell out, Hold that nigger under a while longer, Preacher, he needs a double dose. Stuff like that.

You’re making that up hand over fist, she said drowsily. Every last word of it, and it’s not funny.

The hell I’m making it up. It’s in the book. If you had read it when I was trying to get you to, you’d know I was telling you straight.

It was just boring to me. Besides, it doesn’t matter. If you didn’t make it up, somebody else did.

I guess so.

Banked clouds rose in the southwest, momentarily obscured the sun. Winds behind or inside them drove them, the smooth surface roiling on itself like the aftermath of an explosion, the blossoming of some grotesque flower. The world darkened and the woods grew greenblack. The air turned denser. He could see Stephie’s bright head stooped to a flower in the glade. He kissed the hollow of Corrie’s throat, freed her breasts from the bathing suit, the flesh around the nipple puckering with the cold touch of his hand. Here, here, she said sleepily. What are you doing? What kind of girl do you think I am?

He lay atop her body, feeling its heat, an urgency growing in him, with his hand between her legs, thinking: What is this? A warming of the cold war, a crack in the icemaiden’s veneer. Past her upturned face he could see the far woods imbued with sudden motion, disappearing in a shifting curtain of rain, the weeds jerking under its weight as if swung toward them, the glass surface of the creek instantly cleft with myriad fractures, beginning to churn with the force of the rain, no longer blue but gray and alive with motion, some curious element forming in him.

There was only the green forest, the blue water, the bowl of blue sky to shelter them. No other in all the world. He made love to her gently, she with her eyes still closed, arms locked about his hips.

Hey, where are you going? she asked him. You weren’t thinking of leaving, were you? This is much nicer than an umbrella.

Her hair was soaked, water swimming in his eyes. Jesus, what a cold rain, he said. He leapt up, hopping onelegged into his pants, pitched her the towel, began to gather the soap and hairbrushes, gave up on getting it all. The hell with it, he said, grabbing her arm, turning her toward the opening in the woods. He called to Stephie, who came with a fist full of flowers. Thunder boomed above them. Lightning lit the world in a harsh white bloom of light, vanished, drove them soaked and windhurried up the wagon road, the trees writhing above them like some mythic wood bewitched to momentary life, the running figures dollsized and furiously animate in the green wood, the air stiff and choked with leaves.

Something in him loved a storm. Once they were in dry clothes they sat beneath the tin roof of the porch and watched it pass over them and downstream, lightning arcing earthward from the band of clouds like tracerfire from some armada of smooth, metallic, otherworldly craft, thunder rumbling hollowly in the bottomland, the echo rolling back from the hills. Then the storm passed and the clouds lay broken behind it. The sun came out but already it lay on the horizon. It sank and a cool blue whippoorwill dusk lay on the land, broken only by the darkened trajectories of bullbats and a chorus of frogs from the creek.

He had set up a makeshift desk in the hall where there was a breeze from the screened-in backporch. After supper he typed for a while, vaguely aware of sounds of domesticities from the kitchen, conscious at once of the material he was working on and of her unseen presence beyond the kitchen wall. He could hear the whirring of the electric ice cream freezer. He was obscurely happy, drawing comfort from sourceless and insignificant things he always took for granted: the work he was doing, the soft worn feel of the faded jeans he was wearing, the sounds of the night beyond the walls, the feeling of the peace they engendered, the chaos of the world walled out.

They ate the ice cream on the stone doorsteps, touched by a sense of closeness without having to voice it. It had been a long day, an unhurried purposeless day Binder had stolen from the book, like a day he had managed to hoard from his childhood, squander when the mood suited him.

Later he would remember it as the last outpost of normalcy, a waystation to darker provinces.

Sometime in the night the wind arose again, but the house did not notice. Couched against the base of the hill and with its stone foundation laid on solid limestone, it had felt such storms for over a hundred years, had stood so while an incalculable number of winds rose and ebbed. It slept on. After a while it began to dream.

Binder halfawoke. A wind was banging a shutter somewhere, he could hear it slamming against the weather boarding. It was thundering off in the distance, and he could hear rain.

The bedroom door opened, closed softly, and he guessed the storm had awakened Corrie or that she had gone to the bathroom; he heard her bare feet cross the room, but instead of turning toward the side of the bed and climbing back in, she sat on the foot. He felt the mattress sink slightly beneath her weight, the faint protesting creak of the springs. She clasped the calf of his leg gently and he opened his eyes, lay for a moment in darkness until lightning abruptly lit the room and he saw that he was facing the tousled back of Corrie’s head not four inches from his own.

Goddamn, he cried. He fairly leapt from the bed, ran across the room with his bare feet slapping the floor, whirling back when banked lightning in staccato progression showed the bed bare save the pale length of Corrie’s naked body, the rumpled bedclothes.

He ran to Stephie’s room, turned on the light. She was asleep with the covers thrown off, pajama-clad knees against her chest. He turned back the way he had come, went into the hall. He stood naked for a moment beneath the chandelier, confused and disoriented, looking wildly about the foyer, the staircases climbing incrementally into shadows.

A fierce bloom of light lit all the windows simultaneously with photoelectric brilliance, coincident to the boom of an explosion and Binder was sunk into oblivion. The silence there in the dark was enormous. It grew and expanded. He seemed deprived of all his senses save touch, sank to the floor. He could feel against his naked body the cold, smooth surface of floorcovering wet with rain driven through the open screen. The walls of the foyer seemed removed. He was lost in windy darkness, and the atmosphere of the house had changed, become profoundly malefic, as if the air had been charged by the switching on of some enormously evil battery.

Out of this silence came a feminine laugh, fey and whimsical, dry as the sound of cornshucks rustling together. The laugh rose in timbre, strangled itself instantly on a high gurgling note like the watervoiced call of a thrush. It was silent again.

I’ve got to get a hold of myself, Binder thought, but it took an enormous effort to remember his name. He sat waiting for the lights to come back on. They did not. The goddamned transformer, he thought, remembering the explosion. He tried to recall what he had done with the flashlight: the nightstand drawer. He arose, felt his way cautiously toward the wall until lightning mapped the room. He made the bedroom door, paused again, gained the wall in darkness, and felt along it until the room was briefly lit.