Bentley Little: The Collection

Jan and I put the front legs of our chairs back down on the wooden floor and moved over to the screen. I could smell my grandpa's medication as I stood next to him—a sickeningly acrid odor of Vicks, vitamin Bl, and rubbing al­cohol. He looked suddenly small, shrunken somehow, as though he had withered over the years, and I could see his scalp through the wispy strands of hair he combed back over his head. He was going to die, I suddenly realized. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for all time.

I was going to miss him.

He touched my shoulder lightly with his right hand while his left pointed across the meadow. "It's over there," he said. "You see the barn?"

I followed his finger. A large, square, dilapidated struc­ture of rotting, unpainted boards arose from the tall grasses beyond the chicken coops. I remembered playing there as a kid, when it was all new and freshly painted; playing hide-and-go-seek with my brother and my cousins, hiding in the secret loft behind the hay-baler, endless summer afternoons of sweaty searching. This was not the barn I once knew. I nodded, smiling, though I didn't feel happy.

His finger moved across the horizon, passing from the barn to a small cluster of shacks on the hillside to the west. "See those buildings there to the right of the barn?" Again I nodded. "On the hill?" I continued nodding. "That's it."

Jan was squinting against the afternoon sun, her hand perched above her eyes like a makeshift visor. "Which one is it? I see a couple buildings there."

My grandpa was already starting back across the floor. "It doesn't matter," he said. "Just stay away from the whole area." He sat down once again in his chair at the foot of the kitchen table. A sharp flash of pain registered on his face as he bent his gimp leg to sit down.

We, too, returned to our chairs. And we talked away the rest of the afternoon

.

Jan awoke screaming. She sat bolt upright in bed, the acne cream on her face and her sleep-spiked hair giving her the appearance of a shrieking harpy. I hugged her close, pulling her to my chest and murmuring reassurances. "It's okay," I said softly, stroking her hair. "It's all right."

She stopped crying after a few minutes and sat up, facing me. She tried to smile. "That was some nightmare."

I smiled back. "So I gathered. Tell me about it."

"It was about the bathhouse," she said, pulling the covers up around her chin and snuggling closer. "And I don't want you to take this wrong, but your grandfather was in it." Her eyes looked out the bedroom window as she spoke, and she gazed into the darkness toward the group of buildings on the hillside. "I was just sleeping here, in this bed, with you, when I woke up. I heard some kind of noise, and I looked on the floor, and there was your grandfather. He was crawling along the ground, looking up at me and smiling." She shiv­ered. "I tried to wake you up, but you were dead asleep. I kept shaking you and yelling, but you wouldn't budge. Then your grandfather grabbed me by the arm and pulled me down on the floor with him. I was screaming and kicking and fighting, but he had a hold on me, and he started pulling me out of the room. 'We're going to the bathhouse,' he told me. 'We're going to take a bath.'

"Then I woke up."

"That's horrible," I said.

"I know." She laid her head against my chest, running her fingers through my curly chest hair.

We fell asleep in that position.

The day dawned early, just as I'd known it would. Sun­light was streaming through the window with full force by six o'clock. Sunrise always seemed to come earlier on the farm than in the city for some reason. That was one thing I remembered from my childhood.

Jan was still asleep when I awoke, and I crept out of bed softly so as not to disturb her.

My grandpa was already up, planted in his chair at the foot of the table, drinking a tin cup of black coffee. He looked up and smiled as I walked into the kitchen. "Day's half over, city slicker. What took you so long?" His smile widened, the new ultrawhite dentures looking oddly out of place in his otherwise old face. "Where's your wife? Still asleep?"

I nodded. "I'm letting her sleep in. She had a pretty bad nightmare last night."

"Yeah, your grandma used to have nightmares, too. Bad ones. Some nights, she'd even be afraid to go to sleep, and I'd have to stay up with her." He shook his head, staring into his coffee cup. "There were some pretty bad times there."

I poured myself a cup of coffee from the old metal pot on the stove and sat down next to him. "You ever have night­mares?"

"Me? I'm too boring to have nightmares." He laughed. "Hell, I don't think I even dream."

We sat in silence after that, listening to the many morn­ing sounds of the farm. From far off, I heard the crowing of a rooster, endlessly repeating his obnoxious cry. Closer in, cowbells were ringing dully as four bovine animals moved slowly across the meadow to the watering pond. And of course, under it all, the ever-present hum of the flies.

"It's going to be a hot one today," my grandpa said after a while. "It feels humid already."

"Yeah," I agreed.

He added a dash of cream to his coffee, stirring it with the butt end of a fork. "What are your plans for today?"

I shrugged. "We don't have any, really. I thought maybe we'd go into town, look around a bit, then maybe go for a hike."

"Not there?" He glanced up sharply.

"No. Of course not. We'd just walk around the farm here. I think the barn's about as far as we'd care to go."

"Good." He nodded, satisfied. "For it is a haunted place, strange with secrets."

Jan walked into the room then, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes, and I blew her a kiss across the table. She smiled and blew a kiss back. I turned again to my grandpa. "You said that before. What is it? Part of a poem?"

"What?"

" 'It is a haunted place, strange with secrets.'"

His face grew pale as I spoke the words, the color drain­ing from his cheeks, and I felt my own flesh starting to creep as I saw his fear. I was immediately sorry I'd mentioned it. But there was no way to retract the question.

He looked from me to Jan; his eyes narrowed into un­readable slits. He took a sip of coffee, and I saw that his hands were shaking badly. "Wait here a minute," he said, standing up. "I'll be right back." Holding on to his bad leg, he limped across the room and out into the hall. He returned a few minutes later with a piece of folded brown paper which he tossed at me.

I unfolded the paper and read:

For He lives here with flies in shadow and dark

And He is happy here, at home

For it is a haunted place, strange with secrets

I handed the paper back to my grandpa, puzzled. "What is it?"

"I found it in your grandma's hand when she died. It's her handwriting, but I have no idea when she wrote it." He folded the paper and placed it carefully in the upper-right pocket of his overalls. "I don't think she ever wrote another poem in her life."

"Then why did she write this?"

He stared into his coffee. "I don't know."

Jan sat down at the table, pulling her chair next to mine. "How do you know she wrote it about the bathhouse?"

My grandpa looked up at her. It was a minute or so be­fore he answered, and when he did his voice was low, almost

a whisper. "Because," he said, "that's where she died."

***

We did indeed go into town, and we had some great ham­burgers at the lone diner: a dingy little hole-in-the-wall called Mac and Marg. After, we drove back to the farm and I gave Jan a guided tour of my childhood. I showed her the now-abandoned horse stalls where we used to lick the mas­sive blocks of salt with Big Red and Pony; I showed her the old windmill; I showed her the spot where we once built a clubhouse. I showed her everything.