He guessed whatever had afflicted the Beales had driven them apart and ultimately scattered them like a handful of thrown stones. He didn’t know what he had expected, or even what he had hoped for. A descendant, perhaps, who would tell him old stories heard at Daddy’s knees. Hearthside memories you couldn’t buy with gold. Old foxed papers in spidery penscrawls, journals from a pastoral corner of dementia.
The road kept branching off, steadily deteriorating until the Jeep seemed to be leaping from one raincut gully to the next, steadily ascending, the red road winding through a field promiscuous with wildflowers and goldenrod, leveling out when the cedar row began. He smelled the cedars, faintly nostalgic, the road straightening and moving between their trunks, and then in the distance he could see the house.
A great graywhite bulk looming against the greenblack of the riotous summer hills, tall and slateroofed and stately and, he thought instantly, profoundly malefic. He was suddenly of two minds about it: he wanted to flee back to Chicago and he wanted the peace he intuitively felt he could find within its walls. There was a timeless quality about it that seemed to diminish any problems he might have. In this bright moment of revelation he knew that it was less than he had expected, and incalculably more. Part log, part woodframe, part stone, it seemed to have grown at all angles like something organic turned malignant and perverse before ultimately dying, for Binder saw death in its eyes, last year’s leaves in driven windrows on the front porch, two of the second-story windows stoned blind or blown out by hunters’ guns. The house seemed mantled with an almost indefinable sense of dissolution, profoundly abandoned, unwanted, shunned.
Great God, Binder said.
Greaves glanced at him sharply. Been added on to a time or two, hasn’t it?
Once or twice, Binder agreed. Or else they kept changing their minds while it was under construction.
Greaves stopped the Jeep. Water’s down there, he said, pointing southward where beyond gray and weathered cornstalks a stream moved bright as quicksilver in the sun. That comes down from the wellhouse. Good water, he added professionally, going into his pitch. Cold as ice, it’ll ache your teeth. The spring flows out of a cave on yonder hill.
Beale Cave, Binder said automatically.
That’s right, Beale Cave. But if you buy it you can call it Binder Cave or whatever you want.
It surprises me that a house in that good a shape sat empty so long.
Say it does? Hell. I could show you a halfdozen others in a ten-minute drive. They ain’t no work around here. And the big farmers have choked the little man right out of a livin. Folks is leavin here as they get old enough to have to work, cause there damn near ain’t nothin for em to do here. Starve or git on the welfare. Get them foodstamps. And the folks that’s stayin couldn’t keep up no such place as that.
I guess that’s right.
What do you work at?
Right now I am sort of looking for work.
Greaves produced a ring of keys large as a grapefruit, selected one, unlocked the deadbolted double doors, opened them onto a foyer the size of Binder’s Chicago living room. Walls rose plumb and sheer to a dizzying height. A staircase climbed into near-dark shadows. Arched doors opened left and right, shadowy furniture crouched shapeless in shroudlike draping.
It’s furnished, Binder said in surprise.
Oh yes. The furniture goes with it. It was rented as is until two years ago. Then Mrs. Lindsay decided to sell it.
You mean people lived here as recently as two years ago?
Certainly they did. Two old ladies, sisters they was. The Misses Abernathy. What did you expect? The house is a little rundown, couple of panes of glass out, but it’s certainly sound as a dollar, and it’s been kept up. Why does it surprise you that folks lived here?
I don’t know, Binder said lamely. I thought the Beales were farmers. This doesn’t look like the sort of house a farmer would build.
The Beales were wealthy, for those times anyway. And Drewry seemed to wind up with all of it; he lived here until his death. Greaves lit a cigarette, stood for a moment cupping the dead match. Mr. Binder, you look around all you want to. I’m gonna sort of inspect the outside. See what needs painting.
All right.
Greaves turned in the doorway. You get lost just holler right loud. I’ll be where I can hear you.
Cold smell of long burntout fires, hot smell of wood baking in the sun. The dry nearmetallic drone of dirtdaubers plying their craft in the hot still air. A startled bird whirring to instantaneous life at the opening of a bedroom door, flying with blind desperation into the broken glass of a window, a tinkle of glass striking stone two stories below. He looked down. Greaves in his khakis leaning against the Jeep, his round, bored face peering bemusedly up.
He saw nothing out of the ordinary, heard nothing he could not account for. He went back downstairs into the shady yard.
He told Greaves he wanted a six-month lease. Greaves shook his head. He didn’t know about that.
My client wants a quick sale, he said. She hasn’t said a word to me about leasing.
Well, give me an option to buy, then. If she’s been wanting a quick sale for two years and you haven’t gotten it yet then I don’t see what six months would hurt. I’d think she’d be glad to lease.
Greaves looked pained, as if Binder had maligned his ability to sell real estate. Well, it’s not that I couldn’t have moved the place, Mr. Binder. It’s the times. There’s a recession on, money’s tight, and the interest rate is higher than a cat’s back.
Binder was watching him. To say nothing of the place’s unsavory reputation, he said.
Greaves took off his glasses, wiped them gently with tissue he took out of his shirt pocket. Without the glasses his blue eyes looked vulnerable and defenseless. When he put them on he looked at Binder with an expression almost of amusement. Now where did you hear that, Mr. Binder? Surely not from banker Qualls?
No. Not from Mr. Qualls the banker. I read a book about this place.
Say you did? Oh, I got your number now. The famous Beale haunting. All that stuff in the eighteen hundreds. Do you mean to stand here in the cold light of day and tell me man to man that you believe any of that bullshit?
Binder just watched him, enjoying himself, imagining Greaves trying to figure out just how much he knew, amused too at the thought that the tales Greaves wanted to shield him from were the very tales that had brought him six hundred and fifty miles from Chicago, a hundred and thirty-five years too late.
You only got half my number, Binder said. I heard about the other stuff, too. He was shooting blind and in the dark here, but knew with a blood-quickening certainty that he had been right.
Greaves bit. You mean that Swaw business in the thirties? Mr. Binder, he said, looking away across the fields toward where the horizon ran, lush green folding into an austere blue of distance. You take a piece of land, any piece of land, and if a man had the longevity and the inclination to just sit and watch it for a hundred and fifty years, no telling what he’d see. You’d be surprised. People ain’t never been anything else besides people and ever now and then they’re going to slip up and do the same sickening things folks’ve been known to slip up and do before. And that don’t affect the land, neither. It don’t haunt it or cheapen it or wear it out. It’s still the same piece of ground it was in the beginning.
I’ve just heard folks’ve seen things here. Lights and such.
There’s certain folks that’ll see things most anywhere. Those Abernathy women lived here from…1966 to 1978, and never seen a light or heard a rat in the walls for all I know. Anyway, the rent money come the first of ever month regular as a clock ticking.