The pastor of our church took charge of the three children. There was a county orphanage two towns away but it had a very bad reputation—and these weren’t registered children; they had no birth or baptismal certificates. In those days, in that place, people were more casual about such things. Well, the pastor thought of us.
He talked to Willis about it.
I don’t know how much Willis liked the idea. But he knew I wanted kids and that I couldn’t have any. Maybe the pastor or some of the deacons leaned on him. Anyway, he agreed. And I think that was a brave thing to do.
He brought you three home.
“I don’t remember any of that,” Karen said dazedly.
“Well,” Mama said, “you were only just four years old—a young four at that. It’s hardly surprising. And Laura was still in diapers and Timmy was just newborn.”
“At least it makes sense,” Laura said. “It puts some order into things.” “Does it?”
“There must be a reason we’re the way we are.”
Mama said, “You shouldn’t even talk about that.”
“But we are talking about it,” Laura said. “Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about all along? Mama, that’s why we’re here.”
Karen watched her mother stand up, pace nervously to the sink.
Mama said—faintly—“It frightened your father.”
She turned to the window.
“I saw you do it once. I mean you, Karen. I remember that. It didn’t seem like such a bad thing. You showed me. You were proud of it. You drew a circle in the air and there was a nice place in that circle—a lake, some trees, a flight of birds. Like a postcard picture. It was pretty and it was the sort of thing a child might try to draw with crayons. I wasn’t frightened of it, not at that moment. Later I guess I was, because it was a miracle, you know, and frightening when you think about what it might mean. But you were so proud of it. Maybe somebody had showed you how, back before we got you. Or maybe you just knew. When I calmed down I said it was nice but don’t do it again and especially don’t show Daddy … I knew how he’d take it.”
Karen thought, I remember that! So long ago, but the memory popped right back up. How it had felt, making that circle, feeling the power in her… she had been proud.
She thought, It’s been so long! Once I was young and I could hear that song inside me, even when I didn’t want to. Now I’m empty. Drained, she thought, like a bottle.
“It was always Daddy,” Mama said, “who decided when we would move.”
“The Gray Man,” Laura said.
Mama nodded convulsively, her back turned. “You could call him that. I saw him once. One time only. Just before we left Pittsburgh. We were riding on the streetcar—I had some shopping to do. Karen, you were in school; but I had Laura and Timmy with me. And he got on the car.
“Timmy looked straight at him… both children seemed to recognize him. And I looked at him, too.
“I knew there was something wrong with him. He made me think of somebody who had been hurt somehow. When I was a girl we used to see veterans who had been gassed in France: he reminded me of that. He moved his head oddly; he had strange eyes under that old slouch hat. I thought he might be, you know, simpleminded.
“But then he sat down and looked straight at the kids and I saw them looking at him, and he smiled, and it was a horrible smile, and his eyes lit up in a terrible hungry way… and when I saw Tim smiling back at him I just felt faint, the way you would feel if you saw your child playing with a rattlesnake or something. I grabbed the kids and rang the bell and we got off at the next stop—ran off is more like it.”
Laura said, “We moved after that?”
“I told Willis about it… and yes, we moved pretty much directly after that.”
“Every time we moved, was it because of the Gray Man?”
“I think so. Mostly. Willis never talked about it.”
“You never asked him?”
“Hardly ever. And he wouldn’t answer.”
We never talked, Karen thought. Nobody ever talked.
Laura said, “I wonder if this Ben Williams is still alive. Maybe there’s somebody in Burleigh who would know… Mama, do you think so?”
Mama said, “You’re determined to go stirring this up?”
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
“Well … I doubt that you’ll be able to find anybody who can help. Most of that Assembly congregation must be scattered by now. The mill closed down years ago. A few of the men knew what happened that night when you three were taken from Ben and his wife. But they never seemed liable to talk about it. In a town of gossips, that is one thing people kept to themselves. And who else is there?”
Karen said, “There’s Daddy.”
Laura looked at her. Mama regarded her with obvious surprise.
“Your father,” Mama began, “would never—”
But then there was the bang and rattle of the big front door, and Michael rushed into the house.
Chapter Thirteen
Karen found her son in his room, cross-legged on the bed and breathing hard. He looked up sharply when she came through the door.
“Michael?” She closed the door for privacy. “Michael, what is it?”
“Willis,” he said.
Michael had been out in the hills south of town, he said, and Willis had picked him up and driven him back here. Willis wasn’t drunk but he was angry. Willis had accused him of practicing witchcraft or raising demons or something… Willis had tried to hit him.
Karen felt a sudden chill. “How do you mean, tried?”
My son, she thought. My father.
Michael said, “I didn’t let him.” “Michael, that’s silly … if he wanted to hit you, he would have.”
“I stopped him.”
Willis might be older now but he was still strong and he was twice Michael’s size. “How could you possibly stop Daddy?”
But Michael didn’t answer, and Karen—thinking about Michael and Daddy alone in the car—guessed she already knew.
“You wait here,” she said.
She asked downstairs, but Daddy hadn’t come in yet. So she went out through the side door into the cold, hugging her sweater around herself and breathing icy plumes.
The garage door loomed open. It was not a garage so much as it was a shed, a barnboard box leaning cockeyed against the north wall of the house. The seasons had put big gaps and rents in it. The interior was dark in the wintry light.
She moved cautiously around the pitted chromed fenders of the Fairlane, along a wall lined with rust-flecked garden tools.
“Daddy?”
No answer. But there was a flicker of light in the car: Willis’s cigarette as he turned toward her.
“Daddy,” she said, “I’m cold.”
He hooked open the right-hand car door with a weary gesture. “What do you want?”
“To talk,” she said.
The door hung open.
Trembling a little, Karen slid inside.
Willis sat crammed against the driver’s side, one arm up to cradle his head, the other resting on the wheel. The car was full of cigarette smoke. A crushed pack of Camels lay on the dash.
Karen looked at him, at his face. It took a certain amount of courage just to keep her eyes on him. She had seldom truly looked at her father; she had learned a long time ago that it was better not to. In her memory he was not a thing seen so much as a presence, a voice, a rumbling imperative. He was something fundamental, like lightning or thunder—and you can’t stare down the weather.