William Gay - Little Sister Death

David?

What is it? He was sitting on the porch steps, his head leant against a column. Staring off toward the toolshed.

What are you doing?

Resting. What are you doing?

There was something beating on the walls.

He didn’t say anything.

I thought it might be you.

No, he said. It wasn’t me.

It was beating on the bedroom wall.

It was?

What are you doing?

Thinking about those wasps. We’ll have to get some spray and a sprayer and wipe them out. I don’t know what to do about the snake. I don’t relish ripping up that old floor.

Just stick a match to the whole thing. That’s what I’m going to do.

No, he said gently. We can’t do that. But I’ll kill the snake, Corrie, I promise you.

Somebody’s going to get bitten if you don’t. I said I would.

When are you coming to bed?

Not now. I just need to unwind. In a few minutes.

I wish you would. I’m afraid in there.

I will in a minute.

She went back inside. Her head ached, and when she lay back down the bed seemed to turn drunkenly, to tilt, so instinctively she clutched the covers. She wondered if there was any way the baby could have been affected.

She thought about her father. For a moment his face was frozen in her mind with the clarity of a photograph. His image would not recede: the pale almost protuberant eyes, the bony ridge across his forehead, the pale scalp through the receding reddishgray hair.

They had been living in Chicago when Ruthie called. They had flown to Knoxville that same night to find the old man seemingly better; Ruthie, prone to exaggeration, had him near death of a heart attack, the flowers already ordered likely as not, but the old man himself said he was tough as the butt cut of a whiteoak log.

Ruthie and Vern flew back to Florida. Vern ran a hotel there, and it wasn’t often he could get away. Corrie said, well, as long as they were there they’d stay a few days with her father. Her father had never really liked David, and she was thinking that a few days might bring them, if not closer, at least to some understanding of each other. Her father was a merchant, and David was so far outside the normal range of his realm of acquaintances they might have been from different planets.

They had been making love for what must have been hours that night when the first knock came on the wall, David thrusting deep inside her, nearing orgasm, continuing despite the knocks and her attempt to get up, his arms tightening about her, his weight pinning her to the bed.

I have to see about him.

In a minute.

It may be time for his heart medicine.

He did not reply nor alter the rhythm of his thrusting. She was suddenly devoid of sensation, pushing at him, not playing anymore. The knock came again, and she was fighting him, trying to unwrap his arms, to stop the metronomic piston stroke inside her. She felt cold there between her legs, dead. His arms felt strong as steel bands, his stomach slapping hers. She could feel his hot breath on her throat.

She heard him fall against the wall, slide down it. David, please, she was crying, feeling him thrusting faster, beginning to come just as she shoved with all her might against him, forcing him off the side of the bed onto the floor, his penis sliding out of her.

Goddamn, David said.

She had a momentary vision of him leaping up, standing there naked and outraged, pendulous cock swinging. For a long time, that was the way she saw him: an enormous engorged penis swinging from a diminutive insignificant little man so far behind it you could barely make him out.

Her father was dead when she ran into the room, his face slack, eyes bulging and dull.

The will was read. There was twelve thousand dollars. Corrie had been his favorite.

Yet no one knew about that knock except she and David, and they had never spoken of it. The closest to an apology he had come was the gentle way he treated her the next week or so.

No one knew, so she must have dreamed it. Or, she had half a thought she wouldn’t let herself pursue: the house knew.

Late in the afternoon he would walk back across the fields and watch dark fall over the homeplace. Dusk gathered first in the dell where lay the ruins of the old houseplace, and it seemed to Binder that dusk dwelt there always, crept out when the shadows lengthened like ink seeping into blotting paper. He knelt against a great beech and smoked his third cigarette of the day, watched the mosaic of trees go dimensionless and depthless, jagged brushstrokes rendering black trees against the paler heavens. A solitary whippoorwill called. Night birds took up the cry. A moon of palest rose cradled up out of the hollow, cypresses darkened to red as the day waned. Dusk drew on and the moon turned the color of blood, fierce and malign, enormous, he felt he could rise and stretch his arms and touch it. A foreign moon out of another age and another world, it should have risen over Stonehenge a thousand years ago. The skeletal pear tree turned to a twisted hieroglyphic of blackened bone, a clue left him by a prior race could he but decipher it.

David, he could hear her calling, and for a moment he had forgotten who and where he was and the voice seemed to have drifted across a hundred years of ruined landscape.

He crushed the cigarette carefully against the heel of his shoe and arose. He went through the old cemetery, mostly given now to scrub sassafras and sumac, marble tombs, graven angels and crumbling spires recumbent in poison oak rising out of the honeysuckle. The lettering so worn you could hardly tell the tale. Old musty yellowed yesterdays, a bloody deranged tale carried to the grave. He thought of the bones beneath this quiet hillside, of the secrets he would never know, the words he would never hear, that had never even been spoken, and he felt an almost tangible sense of loss. JACOB BEALE, the oblong block of granite read, NOW AT REST. Somehow Binder doubted it.

He loved the solitude, the dreamy sameness of the days. Time folded in on itself, one century the same as the next. Time was really only a concept, he thought, a way to get a handle on things, and he had discovered that he didn’t need it: the house must have looked the same a hundred years ago. And the same dark enigma dwelt here then.

He didn’t watch TV anymore except videocassettes with Stephie. He particularly didn’t watch the news anymore. It had come to seem absurd, the curious doings of folk he wanted no truck with, folks fighting and dying in obscure countries for no reason he could fathom, Mercedes-driving good-old-boy evangelists with the clayest of feet, caught in seedy motel rooms playing doctor with whores.

It wasn’t real, none of them were and he wanted no part of any of it. The IRS wasn’t real, nor the CIA or the FBI or IRA or IBM or NBC. It was a game, a complex invention of boys playing grownup, a way to while away the time until the dark fell.

What was real was the slow timeless heart of midday, the sleepy drone of insects, the almost imperceptible murmur of the creek, and the hypnotic way the greengold pillars of light fell shifting through the trees into the haunted dell. The endless-looking fields that undulated away toward vague blue-looking woods, fireflies bobbing random as spirit lights. These are things that matter, he thought, and wondered about the wasted years when he hadn’t known, with a kind of resigned regret. These are things with an aura of permanence about them.

That and the intangible mystery he could not put his finger on, which changed and teased like a will-o’-the-wisp, achingly nostalgic, faintly erotic, a musky heady taste in the back of his mouth, like a lost fragment of a dream or a life he ought to be able to retrieve could he just put his mind to it.

At some clockless hour he arose stiffly from the typewriter and placed what finished manuscript he had in a manila envelope and fastened the thumbclasp and stored it in a desk drawer. Corrie had always read his work and let him know in subtle ways if she thought he was getting a little flamboyant but he was going to sit on this. He wasn’t sure if it was good or bad or indifferent but he did know it was the stuff of nightmares.