Archibald Samuel - Arvida

Their father shook his head.

“I don’t know anything about anything. Especially not what you’re talking about.”

The old man kissed the little girl on the top of her head and walked towards the little halo of light over the back door.

Their father said “Come my beauty, we’re going,” and she ran to the car without looking at him and like Monsieur Roberge without looking at the bear.

In the car her father cleared his throat several times. He hummed and cleared his throat again. All along the way the adolescent repeated in her head: “Don’t talk don’t talk please don’t talk.” They only saw the trees and the telephone poles and the houses and garages and barns in silhouette and the night was an incandescent black light that shone on things just enough to hide them behind their shadows and its work was complete except for a few naked bulbs aglow over the lintels.

She knew what he would have said.

He would have said:

“The world is a hard place for men and maybe worse for women and it’s hard for a man to bring children into it and maybe even worse if they’re girls. You can show boys all you know and hope they’ll handle things just like you did but girls are delicate things and it’s tempting for a father never to teach them anything and to hope nothing will ever happen to them and to try to protect them from the world instead of showing them how to live in it.”

All during the ride she repeated “Don’t talk, papa,” because if he’d talked she’d have had to tell him that she’d learned all that a long time ago all on her own and his silence hadn’t protected her from anything.

When they got back to the house everyone was sleeping and cats were lying here and there in the darkness and the TV’s blue glow was pulsing and in fits and starts turning their grey fur a bit paler. In the half-light the grandfather clock tolled midnight and the little girl was limp with a fatigue that kept her from sleeping and she knew that the next day she’d be dizzy and would have a stomach ache but she was fine with that because she didn’t want to sleep right away. She brushed her teeth and left the bathroom to her father and wished him good night. In her room she let her jeans drop to her ankles and pulled off her socks and her sweater. She undid her brassiere and let it fall to the ground and with her nails scratched the moist undersides of her breasts. Lucie hadn’t moved or talked and her breathing was deep.

She lay down on her side to look at her sister. She didn’t want to wake her but it felt good to see her on the other side of the room.

When she was very little she’d often had the same dream. She was in a familiar place like her room and she was playing with a doll or petting a cat and all at once the door behind her slammed and the room got small and in her arms the cat was dead and from under her button eyes the doll was weeping blood. Something enormous was moving in the closet and the doorknob was turning and slowly the door opened, creaking on its hinges. She always woke up before having seen what was stirring in the darkness. If she’d had those dreams later that would have explained it but she’d had them well before so it must have been a sort of premonition because that’s how things happened precisely. She always felt safe when he appeared and in a flash there were no more escape routes. Nothing stirred in the closet because she wasn’t always in her room, sometimes she was in the garage or out in the fields but there was nowhere to run to, nothing in the closet but inside him there was something that rasped and seethed. He looked a lot like her father and as with many men who looked like her father there was neither the same softness nor the same strength in his face and in his eyes.

She was not sure of having tried one day not to struggle and not to flee and not to be afraid. She remembered one time but perhaps she was imagining it because she’s the little girl now. She’s living in her dream and she’s lying inside it swathed in a little pink nightie hiked over her hips and he’s in front of her on his knees beside the bed and on the other side of the room her sister is looking at her with dead eyes and all the doors are locked and thick boards are nailed across the windows.

With one finger, then two, he slips into the hollow of her womb a shameful warmth. As always he’s gentle with her and as always he’s careful not to rush her and not to hurt her. As always he leaves no mark on her body and no scar, only on her skin the flush of an inscrutable pleasure and shame in her heart. Shame she tries to throw off as always all alone hidden deep in herself but suddenly someone’s behind her in the bed and her arms are slender and her breasts are warm pressed up against her back. She’s known boys and she’ll know others but it’s her sister who is the first to murmur in her ear “my love” and to repeat “my love” until she’s calmed.

Her grandmother when she was alive was not afraid to reveal secrets and terrible truths.

To honour an ancient custom they had placed at the edge of the village a high wooden cross on a stone pedestal to hold the devil at bay. The township was big, however, and many were the villagers who lived on unhallowed land.

The grandmother didn’t believe that the devil had residence in America. She did see him implanted where he was born in Europe along with Communists and Protestants. She said that the cross was useful all the same to protect them from the little gods who had come to America in boat holds or who were already there at the time of the Indians. The grandmother had talked to her a lot about those spiteful gods that reigned as despots on parcels of land of no more than a few acres. They were bonded to the earth, and their aspect changed according to the seasons. They were robust in spring and alluring in summer and not far from obese just before harvest but when winter moved in to dislodge autumn they began to waste away. They hid themselves, grey shadows on snow, behind bushes and their hair fell out and their eyes sank deep into their orbits and they could no longer close their mouths completely over their pointed teeth. They were the earth and relied on the earth and served the earth. They worshipped the sun and at twilight they dreamed up ghoulish dances to bring down the rain.

They knew the earth needed light and water but also blood. They were the ones who sometimes sucked blood from the necks of cows and ripped out their viscera in a cruel game and left mutilated bodies lying there so the crimes would be blamed on extraterrestrials or wolves. They were haughty and sadistic and even if their names were forgotten and no one believed in them, they demanded sacrifices from the infidels. They stole from houses what was their due as offerings and whispered their rage and desires into sleepers’ ears at night so that the earth might obtain in good time all it thirsted for.

With her sister behind her murmuring “my love” she realizes that to her too he’d said that what was happening to her would not happen to her sisters and that she was the single chosen one. With her sister at her back murmuring “my love” she realizes that they had been sacrificed both of them on the altar of the minor gods and that this sacrifice had saved neither one nor the other. In this house and in the other houses of the township, on the hallowed land of the village and beyond the tall cross, everyone is sleeping and everyone’s eyes are closed.

*

The light had not totally left the world but the sun yes and the brightness was like a memory of itself that likened everything to its own imprint on a poorly exposed piece of film. The adolescent was walking with the dogs on the fields of the Lord between the roads that framed the blueberry plantings. For hours she’d been looking for tracks. With darkness coming on she now knew she’d find no more.