They had made a batch of orange wine and another of wheat. They had chopped oranges, lemons, and raisins endlessly, baked wheat on cookie sheets in the oven until a musty golden smell filled the kitchen, all while Mrs. Emerson was out at a meeting. (She might not take to having a brewery in her basement, and they had never bothered about a government permit. Matthew was all for sending off for one but Elizabeth was too impatient to begin.) They had lugged the kettles down the stairs and filled them with buckets of water and sacks of sugar. “It may turn out too sweet,” Matthew said gravely. “It may,” said Elizabeth. They never talked much. When he found out she was planning a visit home he said, “I’ll miss you,” and Elizabeth, instead of answering as she would to someone else (“Miss me, what for? I’m only going for the weekend”), said, “I’ll miss you too. Want to come with me?” “That would be better,” he said, “and you won’t have to ride with strangers.” He was forever protecting her, but not in that fretful way that wore on her nerves. He lent her his rain-hat, and scooped her hair out of the way when she shrugged herself into her jacket. On walks through the woods to his house he would let her go single-file, unhampered by hand-holding or the troublesome etiquette of briars held back for her and roots pointed out; but once inside, in a living room splintery with cold, he might come up behind her to stand motionless and silent, his arms folded around her and his chin resting on her head, warming the length of her back.
“Any time the basement door is open there’s the strangest smell coming up,” Mrs. Emerson once said. “Have you noticed?” She thought it was a new kind of detergent Alvareen was putting in the washing machine. Elizabeth never told her anything different.
She twirled the spoon dreamily, resting her head against a shelf, listening to the fizz of the bubbles. Up in one corner a spider spun a web between two waterpipes, but the strands looked like another slant of sunlight. Leaves that had sifted through the grate rustled in the window-well, as dry and distant as all the past autumns that had dropped them there.
Footsteps crossed the kitchen. “Elizabeth?” Timothy called.
“Down here.”
He came to the doorway above the basement steps; she saw the darkening of the patch of light on the floor. Then he snapped a switch on, paling the sunbeams. “Where?” he said.
“Here by the tubs.”
While he descended the stairs she uncovered the second kettle and began stirring it. It had a burned, toasty smell. She was afraid they might have overbaked the wheat. She lowered her head and breathed deeply, inches from the wine. “Ah,” said Timothy. “Eye of newt. Toe of frog.” But the scene upstairs must still be hanging over him; his voice was as heavy as the hand he laid on her shoulder. “What is it, anyway?” he asked.
“Just wine.”
“You handymen certainly have some odd chores.” He moved toward the window, and peered up at the spider in its web. “I came to see if you wanted to take a drive. Have lunch at my place or something.” He poked at the web and the spider scuttled higher, a fat brown ball with wheeling legs. “Are you scared of spiders?”
“Nope.”
He turned away, hands back in his pockets. “I hear you’re going home,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“But just for the weekend.”
“That’s right.”
Elizabeth straightened up. She hung the spoon on its nail, pulled the cheesecloth back over the kettles and knotted the strings that held it there. When she turned to go, she found Timothy just taking something from one pocket: a pistol, bluish-black and filmed with grease. “What on earth,” she said. He shifted it in his hands, as carelessly as if it were a toy.
“Evil-looking, isn’t it?” he said. “I found it in Andrew’s room.”
“Is it real?”
“Well, probably. How can you tell? I would break it open but I’m scared of the thing.”
“Put it down, then,” Elizabeth said. “Stop tossing it around like that, will you?”
“Me? Two-Gun Tim?” He set his feet apart like someone in a western, one thumb hooked in the pocket of his slacks, and tried to twirl the pistol by its loop but failed. When it dropped they both sprang away and stared at it, as if it might explode spontaneously. Nothing happened. Timothy bent to pick it up, holding it this time by the barrel, firmly, the way his mother must have taught him to hold scissors. “Ah, well,” he said.
“What would Andrew want with a gun?”
“He collects them.”
“Well, that’s a very silly hobby,” said Elizabeth, and she led the way to the stairs, making sure to keep out of the pistol’s aim.
“Oh, I don’t mean collects. I don’t mean as a hobby. I mean he collects them like a boat collects barnacles; they flock to him. What are you laughing at? I’m serious. When Andrew takes a walk he finds guns under bushes, when he goes to the attic he stumbles over them, when he answers the doorbell it’s a mailman with the wrong package, and what’s in the package? Guess. He’s never bought a gun in his life, he wouldn’t think of it. He’s the gentlest soul you can imagine. He spends all his days in the New York Public Library doing research for professors, but when he comes out to go home what does he find in the litter basket? A gun among the orange peels, handle up. It’s crazy.”
“He wouldn’t have to accept them,” Elizabeth said.
“Why not? It’s fate.”
“Then what does he do with them?”
“Oh, stows them away.”
They were in the kitchen now. Timothy had forgotten all his caution; he dropped the gun in his pocket, carelessly, and then gave the pocket a pat. “We don’t mention this to Mother, you understand,” he said. “I come pistol-hunting before every visit, just to be on the safe side. Not that he would do anything. I don’t want you thinking — oh, there was a sort of accident once, someone got shot through the foot. But you’re an outsider here. You don’t know what Andrew’s really like. He felt terrible about it. He was just—”
“Oh, stop, I’m not interested,” Elizabeth said, although up till then she had been. She had the sudden feeling that troubles were being piled in front of her, huge untidy heaps laid at her feet, Emersons stepping back waiting for her to exclaim over the heaps and admire them. She headed out the back door, toward the toolshed. Timothy followed. When he came up beside her she saw that one of his pockets hung heavier than the other. She thought of an old Sunday comic strip: Dick Tracy’s crimestopper’s textbook, warning against men with lopsided overcoats. “You be careful you don’t get yourself arrested,” she told him. Then she reached inside the toolshed for a hoop of hose, closing the subject.
But Timothy said, “The worst is getting rid of the damn things. You’d never believe how hard it is. The last one I sent out with the garbage, under the coffee grounds. Elizabeth?”
“What,” said Elizabeth. She backed across the lawn, feeding out coils of hose.
“I cheated on a test.”
Another trouble, added to the heap. “Did you?” she said.