William Gay - Little Sister Death

She had watched Pooh four or five times before and already knew it word for word, scene for scene. It was the one about the blustery day, when it was raining all over the Hundred Acre Wood.

Daddy was taking a break from writing, and she was sitting on his lap in the recliner, the chair tilted back and Daddy’s socked feet bookending each side of the TV set, Mommy on the couch hemming a pair of curtains, a homey scene out of lxave It to Beaver .

The soundtrack was singing, The rain, rain, rain came down, down, down. Pooh and Piglet and Tigger were rambling through the Hundred Acre Wood looking for a house for Owl, Tigger bounding on ahead. They came through a spinney of larch onto a stony field stumbling downhill in the sun, and at the bottom of the field stood the old toolshed, angular and oblique, in the midday heat, the sides encroached with poison oak, greenblack, and simultaneously with the sight of the toolshed Daddy jumped and she could feel the harsh intake of his breath in her hair. The image flickered, muted, as if some light tremor had jarred the Hundred Acre Wood, rumbled way beneath the earth. Daddy had relaxed against the cushions and she knew intuitively that he wasn’t seeing what she was anymore.

Mommy was watching the set blandly, a half smile on her face, and Stephie knew that she hadn’t seen anything at all except Milne’s cartoon world.

Pooh and Piglet and Tigger were clustered before the canted cedar door, gesturing and talking. Piglet seemed to be trying to convince them to go inside the toolshed, Pooh hanging back, he looked confused and frightened, Piglet tugging at his arm, impatient, at length dragging him into the darkness.

Stephie leant forward, straining to see, Daddy said something murmurously and interrogatory, she couldn’t tell what. They were in now. She had seen with detached amazement that it was the same toolshed, the rotted floorboards rendered in Disney animation, the motley of tools strewn about the cartoon walls. Piglet had taken up an ax.

Something sinister here, the soundtrack had altered, there was a hypnotic buzz in her ears. Above it Daddy said, What the hell, not in shock or disbelief. She was feeling a mild hint of irritation, as if the picture was messed up.

Mommy looked up. What is it, David? she asked, precisely as Beaver Cleaver’s mother might have said it. David mumbled something she couldn’t hear.

What?

Hell of a thing to put in a cartoon for kids, he said, and looking up, Stephie saw that he looked confused, as if he was himself not quite certain what he had seen. She turned back to the TV

I think you left your mind in gear and it rolled away, Corrie said.

Piglet drove the ax into Pooh’s forehead, rocked it back and forth to dislodge it from the bone that anchored it, swung it savagely again and Pooh went down, his face pumping blood, not cotton or Styrofoam or other synthetic fiber, but a thick gout of foaming scarlet, Pooh trying to crawl toward the door and the ax falling metronomically, bisecting a cartoon rendering of flesh and muscle and splintered bone, Tigger making a mad scramble toward the door that the ax suddenly blocked, and before she knew what happened, she was vomiting, her stomach recoiling and spewing out a steaming barrage of hot acidic liquid onto David’s lap, David clutching her up, saying, Jesus, what’s the matter, Stephie simultaneously vomiting and crying, at last choking out, Turn it off, to Corrie who had jumped up startled, the curtains fallen and forgotten.

Later, she was sick off and on all night, Corrie up with her, up and down to the bathroom. Coming through the living room sometime in the small hours of the morning, Stephie was startled to find the TV on, David stretched out on the couch watching it.

Jesus, David. Pooh at three o’clock in the morning? Corrie said disgustedly.

Daddy, Stephie said, and when he didn’t reply she thought he was asleep: but when she approached him she saw he wasn’t, his eyes were open but did not seem to remark her, instead watched with a kind of bemused confusion the frolicking of cartoon animals on the particolored screen.

At night there were dreams of old plagues that the morning would not quite erase. From the first, the house just did not feel right to Corrie. It just did not feel right, like any house where a family would live and raise children. She could not quite put her finger on the word she wanted, and suddenly the word unclean drifted into her mind. That’s what it is, she thought, the place is filthy: though not in a literal sense, for the people Greaves hired had certainly done an adequate job. The place was spotless, as spotless as you would expect a hundred-year-old house to be. The trim was newly painted, the hardwood floors stripped and sanded and revarnished, the brightly colored drapes she had chosen should have brought life and freshness into the rooms, but they did not. The house seemed to absorb everything into itself, to darken everything a shade, to suck the very life out of it and leave a dry husk.

For no reason she could discover, the house made her think of the grandfather who had died when she was a child. Diseased, she thought, that is precisely the word I meant. There is something very wrong with the house, it has a cancerous growth in the insides that keeps ticking away like a time bomb. There seemed to be a dark malignancy in the bowels of the house. And after this, she became aware of its smell. Beneath the smell of paint and varnish and the crisp smell of new fabric, there was an undercurrent of malevolence, a smell no amount of cleaning would erase, the persistent seeping yellowbrown odor of the sickroom where someone is dying a slow death from cancer.

Diseased. And the house, something in the light or lack of it, played tricks on you. It caught you when you weren’t paying attention and brought you back. You thought you saw things out of the corners of your eyes. She didn’t believe in ghosts, thought the whole thing absurd, but there was no way around admitting that once she thought she glimpsed a woman in a green dress pass the window. She turned and it was gone. The ground floor of the house was flanked by a covered porch on the front and both sides and that was another thing she hated, the way the house looked and the sickening smell of flowers, not living flowers but the drying withering smell of banked funeral flowers. The ground-floor porches were too wide and they gave the house a disproportionate aspect, absurdly like a humped old woman with full skirts. The woman had been walking up the west side of the porch toward the front of the house, but of course there had been no one there and Stephie was playing quietly in the front yard and she felt like a fool for looking.

It just became one of the things she didn’t think about much lately, the things she filed away to be looked into later. Like the way David was absorbed in what he was writing, so much more so than with the first book. He didn’t even want to go into town anymore and put it off as long as possible. And the way Stephie did little except sit in front of the TV or reread books she had read dozens of times. Every day was waiting, every day was like life lived in airline terminals, bus stations, the waiting rooms of expensive specialists in terminal diseases.

But mostly the way one day segued into the next, each the deadly same, the hot sun baking everything, the white dusty road empty as a broken promise, not even a Bible salesman or a lost tourist to break the monotony. Days came and they went and she forced the inevitable frustration out of her mind, almost physically pushing them away, thinking, It’s only for the summer, one summer out of all the summers of our lives, it seemed a minimal price to pay: for she knew the book was working. She had read the letter from David’s agent, but she had known already. If the book worked the way David wanted and everybody believed in it and promoted it and it was a bestseller, she could quit worrying about the money. The money and Stephie’s school and all this morbid, sickening bullshit about ax murderers and hundred-year-old poltergeists and just get on with it, with their lives, go somewhere bright and cheerful, Florida maybe, swim in the sun and the salty sea with the diseased smell completely out of her nostrils, this monstrous, diseased homeplace no more than a bad memory, a day gone with no more to show than a number on the calendar, what I did on my summer vacation.