Housekeeping: A Novel (17 page)

I walked after Sylvie down the shore, all at peace, and at ease, and I thought, We are the same. She could as well be my mother. I crouched and slept in her very shape like an unborn child.

“Wait here,” Sylvie said when we came to the shore. She walked down to a place where trees grew near the water. After a few minutes she came back. “The boat is not where I left it!” she said. “Well, we’ll have to look for it. I’ll find it. Sometimes it takes a while, but I always find it.” She climbed up onto a rock that stood out from the hillside, almost to the water, and looked up and down the shore. “I’ll bet it’s over there.” She climbed down from the rock and began walking south. “See those trees? I found it once before, in a place just like that, all covered with branches.”

“Someone was trying to hide it,” I suggested.

“Can you imagine? I always put it right back where I find it. I don’t care if someone else uses it. You know, so long as they don’t damage it.”

We walked down to where a stand of birch and aspen trees sheltered a little inlet. “This would be a perfect place for it,” Sylvie said, but it was not there. “Don’t be discouraged,” she said. “We’re so early. No one could have got to it first. Wait.” She walked up into the woods. Behind a fallen log, and behind a clump of fat, low-growing pines, was a heap of pine boughs with poplar branches and brown needles and leaves. Here and there
an edge or a corner of tarpaulin showed. “Look at that,” Sylvie said. “Someone went to a lot of trouble.” She kicked away the branches until on one side the tarpaulin and the shape of the rowboat were exposed. Then she lifted the side of the boat until it fell over upright on the heap of branches. She pulled at the tarpaulin that had been spread under the boat until she found the oars. She stuck them under the seat. The boat made a thick, warm sound as we pushed it through the pine needles. It scraped dully across some big rocks, then dragged through the sand. We pushed it into the water. “Get in,” Sylvie said. “Hurry.” I climbed in and sat down on a narrow, splintery plank, facing the shore. “There’s a man yelling at us,” I said.

“Oh, I know!” Sylvie pushed the boat out in two long strides, and then, with a hand on each gunwale, half leaped and half pulled herself into it. The boat wallowed alarmingly. “I have to sit in that seat,” she said. She stood up and turned around and stooped to hold the gunwales, and I crawled under her body and out between her legs. A stone splashed the water inches from my face, and another rattled into the bottom of the boat. Sylvie swung an oar over my head, settled it into the lock, crouched, and pulled us strongly away from the shore. A stone flew past my arm. I looked back and saw a burly man in knee boots and black pants and a red plaid jacket. I could see that he was wearing one of those shapeless felt hats that fishermen there decorate with preposterous small gleams and plumes and violent hooks. His voice was full of rage. “Just ignore him,” Sylvie said. She pulled again, and we were beyond reach. The man had followed us into the
water until he was up to his boot tops in it. “Lady!” he bawled. “Ignore him,” Sylvie said. “He always acts like that. If he thinks someone’s watching him, he just carries on more.”

I turned around and watched Sylvie. Her handling of the boat was strong and easy. When we were about one hundred yards from the shore she turned the boat toward the north. The man, now back on the beach, was still yelling and dancing his wrath and pitching stones after us. “It’s pitiful,” Sylvie said. “He’s going to have a heart attack someday.”

“It must be his boat,” I suggested.

Sylvie shrugged. “Or he might just be some sort of lunatic,” she said. “I’m certainly not going to go back and find out.” She was unperturbed by our bare escape and by her drenched loafers and the soggy skirts of her coat. I found myself wondering if this was why she came home with fish in her pockets.

“Aren’t you cold, Sylvie?”

“The sun’s coming up,” she said. The sky above Fingerbone was a floral yellow. A few spindled clouds smoldered and glowed a most unfiery pink. And then the sun flung a long shaft over the mountain, and another, like a long-legged insect bracing itself out of its chrysalis, and then it showed above the black crest, bristly and red and improbable. In an hour it would be the ordinary sun, spreading modest and impersonal light on an ordinary world, and that thought relieved me. Sylvie continued to pull, strongly and slowly.

“You wouldn’t believe how many people live out here on the islands and up in the hills,” Sylvie said. “I bet
there are a hundred. Or more. Sometimes you’ll see a little smoke in the woods. There might be a cabin there with ten children in it.”

“They just hunt and fish?”

“Mostly.”

“Have you ever seen any of them?”

“I think I have,” Sylvie said. “Sometimes if I think I see smoke I go walking toward it, and now and then I’m sure there are children around me. I can practically hear them.”

“Oh.”

“That’s one reason I keep crackers in my pockets.”

“I see.”

Sylvie rowed on through the gilded water, smiling to herself.

“I’ll tell you something. You’ll probably think I’m crazy. I tried to catch one once.” She laughed. “Not, you know, trap it, but lure it out with marshmallows so I could see it. What would I do with another child?”

“So you did see someone.”

“I just stuck marshmallows on the twigs of one of the apple trees, almost every day for a couple of weeks. Then I sat sort of out of sight—there’s still a doorstep there with lilacs growing on both sides of it. The house itself fell into the cellar hole years ago, of course. I just sat there and waited, but it never came. I was a little bit relieved,” she said. “A child like that might claw or bite. But I did want to look at it.”

“This was at the place we’re going to now.”

Sylvie smiled and nodded. “Now you’re in on my secret. Maybe you’ll have better luck. And at least we
don’t have to hurry. It was so hard to get home in time for you and Lucille.”

Sylvie pulled and then pulled, and we slid heavily through the slosh and jostle of the water. Sylvie looked at the sky and said no more. I peered over the side now and then, into the murky transparencies of the upper waters, which were clouded and crude as agate. I saw gulls’ feathers and the black shapes of fish. The fragmented image of jonquil sky spilled from top to top of the rounding waves as the shine spills on silk, and gulls sailed up into the very height of the sky, still stark white when they could just be seen. To the east the mountains were eclipsed. To the west they stood in balmy light. Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable. They reminded me of my grandfather’s paintings, which I have always taken to be his vision of heaven. And it was he who brought us here, to this bitter, moon-pulled lake, trailing us after him unborn, like the infants he had painted on the dresser drawers, whose garments swam in some ethereal current, perhaps the rim of the vortex that would drag them down out of that enameled sky, stripped and screaming. Sylvie’s oars set off vortices. She swamped some leaves and spun a feather on its curl. The current that made us sidle a little toward the center of the lake was the draw of the river, and no vortex, though my grandfather’s last migration had settled him on the lake floor. It seemed that Sylvie’s boat slipped down the west side of every wave. We would make a circle, and never reach a shore at all, if there were a vortex, I thought, and we would be drawn down
into the darker world, where other sounds would pour into our ears until we seemed to find songs in them, and the sight of water would invade our eyes, and the taste of water would invade our bowels and unstring our bones, and we would know the seasons and customs of the place as if there were no others. Imagine my grandfather reclined how many years in his Pullman berth, regarding the morning through a small blue window. He might see us and think he was dreaming again of flushed but weightless spirits in a painted sky, buoyant in an impalpable element. And when our shadow had passed he might see the daylit moon, a jawless, socketed shard, and take it for his image in the glass. Of course he was miles away, miles south, at the foot of the bridge.

At last she pulled us toward a broad point that lay out into the lake. I could see that the mountain standing behind and against the one from which the point extended had a broken side. Stone showed pink as a scar on a dog’s ear. “You can see where it is from here,” Sylvie said. “They built right beside those cliffs.” She brought us up against the shore and we climbed out of the boat and dragged it up on the beach. I followed Sylvie inland along the side of the point.

The mountains that walled the valley were too close, the one upon the other. The rampages of glaciers in their eons of slow violence had left the landscape in a great disorder. Out from the cleft or valley the mountains made spilled a lap of spongy earth, overgrown with brush. We walked up it along the deep, pebbly bed left by the run-off and the rain, and there we came upon the place Sylvie had told me about, stunted orchard and
lilacs and stone doorstep and fallen house, all white with a brine of frost. Sylvie smiled at me. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

“It’s pretty, but I don’t know how anyone could have wanted to
live
here.”

“It’s really pretty in the sunlight. You’ll see in a little while.”

“Well, let’s not wait here, though. It’s too cold.”

Sylvie glanced at me, a little surprised. “But you’ll want to watch for the children.”

“Yes. All right.”

“Well, I think you better just stay in one place and be very quiet.”

“Yes, but it’s too cold here.”

Sylvie shrugged. “It’s still early.” We walked back down to the shore, and found some rocks against which we could sit, out of the wind, facing the sun. Sylvie crossed her ankles and folded her arms. She appeared to fall asleep.

After a while I said, “Sylvie?”

She smiled. “Shhh.”

“Where’s our lunch?”

“Still in the boat. You’re probably right. It would be good if they saw you eating.”

I found a bag of marshmallows among the odds and ends that Sylvie had bundled into a checkered tablecloth and brought along for lunch—a black banana, a lump of salami with a knife through it, a single yellow chicken wing like an elegant, small gesture of defeat, the bottom fifth of a bag of potato chips. I ripped the cellophane and took out marshmallows to fill my pockets. Then I sat down by Sylvie and made a small fire of driftwood
and skewered one through its soft belly with a stick and held it in the flame until it caught fire. I let it burn until it was as black as a lump of coal, then I pulled off the weightless husk with my fingers and ate it, and held the creamy part that still clung to the stick in the flame until it caught fire; and so the morning passed.

Sylvie stood up and stretched, and nodded at the sun, which was a small, white, wintery sun and stood askant the zenith although it was surely noon. “We can go up there now,” she said. I followed her up into the valley again and found it much changed. It was as if the light had coaxed a flowering from the frost, which before seemed barren and parched as salt. The grass shone with petal colors, and water drops spilled from all the trees as innumerably as petals. “I told you it was nice,” Sylvie said.

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water—peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing—the world will be made whole. For to
wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.

Sylvie was gone. She had left without a word, or a sound. I thought she must be teasing, perhaps watching me from the woods. I pretended not to know I was alone. I could see why Sylvie thought children might come here. Any child who saw once how the gleaming water spilled to the tips of branches, and rounded and dropped and pocked the softening shadows of frost at the foot of each tree, would come to see it again.

If there had been snow I would have made a statue, a woman to stand along the path, among the trees. The children would have come close, to look at her. Lot’s wife was salt and barren, because she was full of loss and mourning, and looked back. But here rare flowers would gleam in her hair, and on her breast, and in her hands, and there would be children all around her, to love and marvel at her for her beauty, and to laugh at her extravagant adornments, as if they had set the flowers in her hair and thrown down all the flowers at her feet, and they would forgive her, eagerly and lavishly, for turning away, though she never asked to be forgiven. Though her hands were ice and did not touch them, she would be more than mother to them, she so calm, so still, and they such wild and orphan things.

I walked out of the valley and down the little apron of earth at its entrance. The shore was empty and, after its manner, silent. Sylvie must be up at the point,
I thought. I imagined her hiding the boat more securely. That would be a reasonable precaution for her to take, convinced as she was that these woods were peopled. I sat on a log and whistled and tossed stones at the toe of my shoe. I knew why Sylvie felt there were children in the woods. I felt so, too, though I did not think so. I sat on the log pelting my shoe, because I knew that if I turned however quickly to look behind me the consciousness behind me would not still be there, and would only come closer when I turned away again. Even if it spoke just at my ear, as it seemed often at the point of doing, when I turned there would be nothing there. In that way it was persistent and teasing and ungentle, the way half-wild, lonely children are. This was something Lucille and I together would ignore, and I had been avoiding the shore all that fall, because when I was by myself and obviously lonely, too, the teasing would be much more difficult to disregard. Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, “Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.” Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire. I had been, so to speak, turned out of house now long enough to have observed this in myself. Now there was neither threshold nor sill between me and these cold, solitary children who almost breathed against my cheek and almost touched my hair. I decided to go back up and
wait for Sylvie by the cellar hole, where she could not help but find me.