I slipped off my jeans and shirt, sat down to remove my socks, still hearing her dry old voice rhythmically ticking away like a machine about to die, and stretched out between the papery sheets. My hands found one nubbly patch after another, and I realized that they had been mended many times. Within seconds, to the accompaniment of the dry music of her voice, I passed into the first unbroken and peaceful sleep I’d had since leaving New York.
Several hours later, I woke to two separate noises. One was what seemed an incredible rushing clatter of leaves above me, as though the woods had crawled up to the house and begun to attack it. The second was even more unsettling. It was Rinn’s voice, and at first I thought her praying had become a marathon event. After I caught its slow, insistent pulse I recognized that she was saying something in her sleep. A single word, repeated. The whooping clatter of the trees above the house drowned out the word, and I lay in the dark with my eyes open, listening. The smell of woodsmoke hung unmoving in the air. When I heard what Rinn was saying, I folded the sheet back and groped for my socks. She was pronouncing, over and over again in her sleep, my grandmother’s name. “Jessie. Jessie.”
That was too much for me. I could not bear to hear, mixed up with the windy racket of the woods, the evidence of how greatly I had disturbed the one person in the valley who wanted to help me. Hurriedly I put on my clothes and went into the kitchen. The undersides of leaves, veined and white, pressed against the back window like hands. Indeed, like the pulpy hand of one of my would-be assailants in Arden. I turned on a small lamp. Rinn’s voice went dryly on, scraping out its invocation to her sister. The fire in the woodstove had died to a red glowing shadowy empire of tall, ashes. I splashed water on my face and felt the crust of Rinn’s herbal mixture. It would not wash off: my fingers simply bumped over it, as over the patches on the sheets. I inserted a fingernail beneath the edge of one of the crusty spots, and peeled it off like a leech. A thin brown scale fell into the sink. I peeled off the rest of the dabs of the mixture until they covered the bottom of the sink. A man’s shaving mirror hung on a nail by the door, and I bent my knees to look into it. My heavy bland face looked back at me, pink in splashes on forehead and cheek, but otherwise unmarked.
Inside a rolltop desk crammed with the records of her egg business I found the stub of a pencil and paper and wrote: Someday you’ll see I’m right. I’ll be back soon to buy some eggs. Thanks for everything. Love, Miles.
I went out into the full rustling night. My mud-laden boots felt the knotted roots of trees thrusting up through the earth. I passed the high cartoon-windowed building, full of sleeping hens. Soon after that, I was out from under the dense ceiling of branches, and the narrow road unrolled before me, through tall fields lighter than the indigo sky. When it traversed the creek I once again heard frogs announcing their territory. I walked quickly, resisting the impulse to glance over my shoulder. If I felt that someone or something was watching me, it was only the single bright star in the sky, Venus, sending me light already thousands of years old.
Only when the breeze had dissipated it over the long fields of corn and alfalfa did I notice that the odor of woodsmoke had stayed with me until I had gone halfway to the road, and left Rinn’s land.
Venus, light my way with light long dead.
Grandmother, Rinn, bless me both.
Alison, see me and come into my sight.
But what came into my sight as I trudged down the valley road was only the Volkswagen, looking like its own corpse, like something seen in a pile of rusting hulls from a train window. It was a misshapen form in the dim starlight, as pathetic and sinister as Duane’s Dream House, and as I walked toward it I saw the shattered rear window and the scooping dents on the engine cover and hood. Eventually it hit me that the lights were out; the battery had died.
I groaned, and opened the door and collapsed onto the seat. I passed my hands over the pink new patches of skin on my face, which were beginning to tingle. “Damn,” I said, thinking of the difficulty of getting a tow truck to come the ten miles from Arden. In frustration, I lightly struck my hand against the horn mechanism. Then I saw that the key was gone from the ignition.
“What’s that for?” asked a man approaching me from the high slope of the Sunderson drive. As he crossed the road I saw that he had a thick hard belly and a flat face with no cheer in it. He had a pudgy blob for a nose, signaling his family connection to Tula Sunderson. Like the hair of most men called “Red,” his was a dusty tobaccoish orange. He came across the road and laid an enormous hand on top of the open door. “Why do you wanta go honkin’ that horn for?”
“Out of joy. From sheer blinding happiness. My battery’s dead, so the car won’t move, and the damned key’s gone, probably lying somewhere in that ditch. And you might have noticed that a few gentlemen in Arden decided to work over the car this evening. So that’s why I was honking the horn.” I glared up into his doughy face and thought I saw a glint of amusement.
“Didn’t you hear my callin’ you before? When you jumped out of this-here jalopy and tore on up toward the woods?”
“Sure,” I said. “I didn’t have time to waste.”
“Well, I been waitin’ on the porch to see you come back. I sacked out up there a little bit — didn’t think you’d be so long. But just in case, I took your keys out of your jalopy. And I turned off your lights to save your battery.”
“Thanks. I mean it. But please give me the keys. Then we can both get to bed.”
“Wait up. What were you doin’ up there anyhow? Or were you just runnin’ away from me? You were sure goin’ like a jackrabbit. What are you tryin’ to get away with, Miles?”
“Well, Red, I can’t really say. I don’t think I’m trying to get away with anything.”
“Uh huh.” The amusement became more acid. “According to my ma, you been doin’ some pretty peculiar things up to Updahl’s. Says that little girl of Duane’s been hangin’ around more than she should. Specially considering the problem we got here lately. You kinda got a thing about hurting girls, don’t you, Miles?”
“No. I never did, either. Quit wasting my time and give me my keys.”
“What’s so good you got up in those woods?”
“Okay, Red,” I answered. “I’ll tell you the truth. I was visiting Rinn. You can ask her yourself. That’s where I was.”
“I guess you and that old witch got somethin’ going.”
“You can guess all you want. Just let me go home.”
“This ain’t your home, Miles. But I guess you can go back to Duane’s. Here’s your keys for this piece of shit you’re driving.” He held them out by extending one big blunt finger protruded through the keyring so that ring and keys looked dwarfed, like toys. It was a gesture obscurely obscene.
July 16
It was just eatin’ at me that Ma had to be working in the same house as that Miles Teagarden — I’ll tell you, if I’d been in Duane’s shoes, I wouldn’t of let my daughter hang around a man with a reputation like that. And some say he learned, good. I’d have run him off first thing, with a load of birdshot. So I thought, let’s see what we got here, and started comin’ down the drive to talk to him as soon as I saw his car begin to slow down outside below our house. Well Miles he jumps out of his car and looks away like he was seein’ things, and he just begins to run like crazy. When I yelled he just kept on running.