In the meantime, more folks have shown up at the front door. When they see what’s inside, some turn around and march straight back home. Others join the children in screaming. Still others start praying in whatever language they reserve for talking to God. One man, an Italian, Italo, who’s a stonemason with Rainer, runs into the house and hustles the children outside. When he’s seen them safely to his own house, a few streets over, he walks rapidly back to the house where Rainer is still gazing into Helen’s gold eyes. “Rainer,” he says, “what in the devil is this?”
The sound of his voice calls Rainer back from wherever the woman’s eyes have taken him. He shakes his head, then looks at Italo. His voice hoarse, he says, “This is bad business.”
Together the men turn to George, who’s jammed his hands in his pockets, for all the world like a little boy caught misbehaving. “How did this happen?” Rainer asks. George doesn’t answer him, just starts up again about what a miracle this is, how lucky they are to be here to see it, yes how lucky to see such a miracle. Italo crosses the floor to him, and slaps him. Rainer’s colleague is a small man, his bald crown making him appear older than he is, but George’s head swings with the force of the blow. His grin remains. Before he can pick up the thread of his babble, Italo slaps him again, and a third time. All the while, everyone’s doing their level best not to look at what’s sitting in the chair to George’s right. Helen had been pretty badly beaten-up by the mule-carts, most of the bones in her body broken, and she still looks, well, jagged, misshapen.
Finally, George, his lips and nose bleeding from Italo’s blows, drops the talk of miracles and says something about a man. “What man?” Rainer asks him. “The man in the house,” George says, “the man in the big house.” Neither Rainer nor Italo has the faintest idea what George is talking about, but he goes on. “He understands,” George says, that bloody grin making him look like a nightmarish clown. “The man understands what it is to lose—what it is to lose. He listens. He understands. He doesn’t see why a man should suffer for what he didn’t mean to do in the first place. Things happened, that was all. He doesn’t ask for what you don’t have. Strength — to add your strength to his. He gives you his cup. Not compassionate — no, he’s not compassionate; he’s interested, interested, yes. He will help you if you will help him. Things happened. Why not? Your strength. All he asks is that you drink from his cup. His task is almost done. Why not? He will help you if you will help him.” He repeats those words a half-dozen more times, until Italo slaps him. “He’s a fisherman,” George says, and something about that statement strikes him as so funny he starts to giggle, then to chuckle, then to laugh, then to howl. It doesn’t matter how many more slaps Italo gives him, he won’t stop laughing. When he looks at his wife, still sitting calmly in the chair, his eyes start and he laughs even harder. Rainer and Italo exchange looks, and leave the cabin, shutting the door behind them. You can still hear the fellow laughing. All the camp hears it. “This is bad business,” Rainer says again, and Italo agrees, it is.
There’s a crowd gathered outside the house, composed of maybe a third of the men and not a few of the women in the camp. Every one of them has a dozen whispered questions for Rainer and Italo. Yes, they all speak in whispers. Most of their questions the men can’t answer. Nor, it seems, can anyone answer Rainer’s only question: Who is the man in the big house, the fisherman?
By now, the sun is on its way up, and, hard as it is to believe after a night like this one, soon it’ll be time to start work. No matter what happens, your job is always waiting for you, right? The crowd breaks up. A couple of men ask Rainer and Italo to let them know when they learn anything. Inside the house, George’s laughter has worn itself down to a low moaning. Thinking that he should check on George one last time, Rainer steps toward the door. Italo catches his arm. “Not until we know,” Italo says, “not until we know what’s sitting in that chair.”
“But the man,” Rainer says.
“He’s made his choice,” Italo says. “It’s none of ours.”
Rainer isn’t happy, but he doesn’t try to go in, either. He manages to convince Italo that they need to find out who the man in the big house, the fisherman, is; though I get the impression that Italo would’ve been happy to walk away from that house and never give it a second thought. What they’re going to do once they discover who’s behind the night’s events, Rainer doesn’t say, not to Italo and not to Clara when she asks him a short time later, when he’s done relating the night’s events to her. Lottie and her sisters listen to their father’s story with a combination of wonder and terror as they prepare for their various days. When he’s finished, Gretchen stops loading her schoolbag and asks Rainer if this is like in the Gospels, the time Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. At that question, Clara flies into a rage, grabbing Gretchen with one hand and beating her about the head with the other, shouting, “How dare you? How dare you listen to your father and me?” Lottie and Christina are shocked. They’ve never seen their mother like this before, ever. Rainer leaps up and catches Clara’s hand, and the look she gives him says that, were she stronger, she’d do for him, too. “Let’s go, girls,” Rainer says, and the sisters are out of that house one-two-three.
VIII
It’ll take Rainer two days to learn the identity of the man in the big house. As it so happens, it’s actually Clara who figures it out. Late on the second afternoon after Helen’s return from the grave, Clara hears a trio of women at the bakery discussing the Dort estate and the queer character who inhabits it. Right on the spot, she knows she’s found what they’re looking for. She sidles up to the women, asking if they’re talking about one of the houses up in the mountains. “No, no,” the first woman says, “the Dort estate’s right here.” In about ten minutes, they sketch out for Clara what it’s taken me much longer to tell you. When Rainer walks in the front door later that night, he’s greeted by Clara, who says, “I know what you’re looking for.”
Really, it isn’t a moment too soon. In that same two days, things in the house next door have plummeted from bad to worse. Italo’s wife, you may recall, is looking after Helen and George’s children. About noon of that first day, Helen — or what was Helen — decides she wants those children back. How she knows where Italo has taken them, I can’t say, but know she does. She stands from her chair, leaves her husband where he’s still lying moaning on the floor, and sets out for Italo’s place. Those who see her making her way over to Italo’s say she doesn’t walk right. She moves the way you’d expect a person trying to use a pair of shattered legs and a broken spine would. And if that isn’t strange enough, the footprints she leaves are wet, as if she’s newly out of her bath and not bothered toweling off. She lurches her way to Italo’s, folks stopping when they see her and hurrying away in the opposite direction. She ignores them. When she reaches her destination, she stands in front of it, swaying from side to side, before stumbling forward and knocking on the door.
You have to give Italo’s wife, Regina, a lot of credit, because, although she sees Helen shuffling up the street toward her house, she hauls open the front door and stands there with her hands on her hips, facing this woman with the gold eyes. Regina’s an inch or two taller than her husband, whom she probably outweighs by a good twenty or thirty pounds, too. She isn’t stupid. She’s already sent the children, her own and Helen’s, into the back bedroom and told them not to open the door for love or money. (She’d kept them all home from school that day: Helen’s children because of the shock of the night before; her children to keep them company. Her views on education were flexible, you might say.) Regina doesn’t say a word to Helen. Later, she tells Italo and Rainer she was too afraid to speak. Why she opened the door in the first place, Regina wasn’t sure, but I think I know. Have you ever been so scared of something you move toward it, try to touch it, that kind of thing? It’s strange, isn’t it? I don’t know what the name for that reaction is, but I’m pretty sure it’s what drove Regina to confront this woman knocking on her door. Helen, the dead woman, the woman who was dead and isn’t any longer, is standing there on her ruined legs, looks at Regina, then looks at the room she’s guarding. She says, “The children.”