They came before noon, spent an hour looking around the house and yard, then left. Probably it would be safe now to return to the house, she thought, but she did not stir from her hole in the hill. They returned shortly before dark, and spent more time going over the same ground they had covered before. Now she knew it was safe to go to the house. They never went out after dark, except in groups; they would not expect her to wander about in the dark alone. She stood up, easing the stiffness out of her legs and back. The ground was damp, and this spot was cool, sheltered from the sun.
She lay on the bed. She knew she would hear him when he entered the house, but she couldn’t sleep, except in a fitful, dream-filled doze: Ben lying with her; Ben sitting before the fire sipping pink, fragrant tea; Ben looking at her painting and becoming pale . . . Mark scrambling up the stairs, his legs going this way and that, a frown of determination on his face. Mark squatting over a single leaf of a fern, still rolled tightly at the end, and studying it intently, as if willing it to uncoil as he watched. Mark, his hands pudgy and grimy, gleaming wet, pushing the clay this way, smoothing it, pushing it that way, frowning at it, oblivious of her . . .
She sat up suddenly, wide awake. He had come into the house. She could hear the stairs creak slightly under his feet. He stopped, listening. He must sense her there, she thought, and her heart quickened. She went to the door of the workroom and waited for him.
He had a candle. For a moment he didn’t see her. He put the candle down on the table and only then looked around cautiously.
“Mark!” she said softly. “Mark!”
His face was lighted. Ben’s face, she thought, and something of hers. Then his face twisted and when she took a step toward him, he took a step backward.
“Mark?” she said again, but now she could feel a hard, cold hand squeezing her heart, making it painful for her to breathe. What had they done to him? She took another step.
“Why did you come here?” he yelled suddenly. “This is my room! Why did you come back? I hate you!” he screamed.
Chapter 19
The cold hand squeezed harder. Molly felt for the door-frame behind her and held it tightly. “Why do you come here?” she whispered. “Why?”
“It’s all your fault! You spoiled everything. They laugh at me and lock me up. . .”
“And you still come here. Why?”
Suddenly he darted to the workbench and swept it clean. The elephant, the heads, the foot, hands, everything crashed to the floor and he jumped up and down on the pieces, sobbing incoherently, screaming sounds that were not words. Molly didn’t move. The rampage stopped as abruptly as it began. Mark looked down at the gray dust, the fragments that remained.
“I’ll tell you why you come back,” Molly said quietly. She still held the doorframe hard. “They punish you by locking you up in a small room, don’t they? And it doesn’t frighten you. In the small room you can hear yourself, can’t you? In your mind’s eye you see the clay, the stone you will shape. You see the form emerging, and it is almost as if you are simply freeing it, allowing it to come into being. That other self that speaks to you, it knows what the shape is in the clay. It tells you through your hands, in dreams, in images that no one but you can see. And they tell you this is sick, or bad, or disobedient. Don’t they?”
He was watching her now. “Don’t they?” she repeated. He nodded.
“Mark, they’ll never understand. They can’t hear that other self whispering, always whispering. They can’t see the pictures. They’ll never hear or get a glimpse of that other self. The brothers and sisters overwhelm it. The whisper becomes fainter, the images dimmer, until finally they are gone, the other self gives up. Perhaps it dies.” She paused and looked at him, then said softly, “You come here because you can find that self here, just as I could find my other self here. And that’s more important than anything they can give you, or take away from you.”
He looked down at the floor, at the shambles of the pieces he had made, and wiped his face with his arm. “Mother,” he said, and stopped.
Now Molly moved. Somehow she reached him before he could speak again and she held him tightly and he held her, and they both wept.
“I’m sorry I busted everything.”
“You’ll make more.”
“I wanted to show you.”
“I looked at them all. They were very good. The hands especially.”
“They were hard. The fingers were funny, but I couldn’t make them not funny.”
“Hands are the hardest of all.”
He finally pushed away from her slightly, and she let him go. He wiped his face again. “Are you going to hide here?”
“No. They’ll be back looking for me.”
“Why did you come here?”
“To keep a promise,” she said softly. “Do you remember our last walk up the hill, you wanted to climb to the top, and I said next time? Remember?”
“I’ve got some food we can take,” he said excitedly. “I hide it here so when I get hungry I’ll have something.”
“Good. We’ll use it. We’ll start as soon as it gets light enough to see.”
It was a beautiful day, with high thin clouds in the north, the rest of the sky unmarred, breathtakingly clear. Each hill, each mountain in the distance, was sharply outlined; no haze had formed yet, the breeze was gentle and warm. The silence was so complete that the woman and boy were both reluctant to break it with speech, and they walked quietly. When they paused to rest, she smiled at him and he grinned back and then lay with his hands under his head and stared at the sky.
“What’s in your big pack?” he asked as they climbed later. She had made a small pack for him to carry, and she still carried the laundry bag, now strapped to her back.
“You’ll see,” she said. “A surprise.”
And later he said, “It’s farther than it looked, isn’t it? Will we get there before dark?”
“Long before dark,” she said. “But it is far. Do you want to rest again?”
He nodded and they sat under a spruce tree. The spruces were coming down the mountains, she thought, recalling in detail old forestry maps of the region.
“Do you still read much?” she asked.
Mark shifted uneasily and looked at the sky, then at the trees, and finally grunted noncommittally.
“So did I,” she said. “The old house is full of books, isn’t it? They’re so brittle, though, you have to be careful with them. After you went to sleep every night I sat up and read everything in the house.”
“Did you read the one about Indians?” he asked, and rolled over on his stomach and propped his head up in his cupped hands. “They knew how to do everything, make fires, make canoes, tents, everything.”
“And there’s one about how boys, a club or something, used to go camping and relearn all the Indian methods. It can still be done,” she said dreamily.
“And what you can eat in the woods, and stuff like that? I read that one.”
They walked, rested, talked about the books in the old house, talked about the things Mark planned to make, climbed some more, and late in the afternoon they came to the summit of the mountain and looked down over the entire valley, all the way to the Shenandoah River in the distance.