Authors: Thomas Cater
“What did you see” Virgil asked
, unable to restrain his curiosity
.
“I don’t know,” I said, “But I think I saw a snake.”
“What about your ear?” He asked.
I stopped smiling and caught my breath. I carefully touched
my ear. “Why do you ask?”
“You earlobe,” Virgil said, “it’s bleeding.”
There was a spot of blood on my ear and an infinitely
small insect, an acari, perched on the tip of my finger. “How do you suppose
that happened?”
Virgil mirrored my own confusion. The house’s two iron
gates began to swing back and forth and rattle on its hinges. The branches on
trees inside the gate began to sway toward the car, twitching and grasping, as
if a conscious force animated them.
“Would you look at that,” Virgil said. He shifted the
car into reverse and pointed at the trees engaged in a grotesque dance behind
the wall. “It looks like a storm is blowing up.”
“Only one thing wrong with that forecast,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Can’t you see?” I said, “There isn’t a breeze
stirring out here, not a breath of air anywhere.”
The limb of a tree scraped the car’s side window with
a shrieking sound and Virgil panicked, slammed the accelerator to the floor
with his foot, and threw
dust
and gravel everywhere. The tires
eventually
found
traction and the vehicle lurched forward.
“Let’s clear out of here,” he said.
Virgil kept his mouth shut tightly against the
temptation to say, ‘I told you so.’ I could almost sense the words gathering on
his tongue, even though his eyes were intent upon the road.
“It’s a strange house,” he said, leaving me to wonder
how deeply from inside he spoke.
“Strange? You can’t be serious; it’s a great house,
built like a…temple,” I said, repeating his earlier view, and then added, “Did
I tell you, I killed a snake?”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“I ‘think’ I killed a snake,” I said once more.
“That place is crawling with them,” he said,
impatiently.
I decided not to tell him that the snake I had killed,
whether imagined or not, was an ‘old world’ snake, one that was not indigenous
to the USA, and certainly not to West Virginia, but to Asia.
*
We drove through the little town of Elanville, passed
thin elderly men and women working in scraggly gardens behind ruined shacks.
Small knots of ragged children played near broken windows stuffed with rags to prevent
the chill air from creeping in.
Nearly everyone had physical peculiarities that I questioned,
which may have had something to do with my dreams since I return to the US.
I frequently dreamed of people with physical
impairments that prevented them from performing the simplest life-sustaining
tasks. Sometimes their problems extended to facial features, especially their eyes.
Virgil jumped on the brake again and slid nearly
sideways onto the berm before coming to a stop.
“Did you forget something?” I asked.
I stared out the rear window and at Virgil. His eyes
filled with an intensity that did not inspire confidence.
“There’s something about the wall that I forgot to
tell you,” he said. “I know a stone mason you might want to meet.”
He turned the key and the motor growled, gravel
sprayed from beneath the tires and the Ford slithered back onto the road. When
he reached the paved road, I was relieved to bid farewell to Elanville, which
should have told me something. He swerved suddenly on to another gravel road.
“This guy can tell you everything you want to know
about walls,” he said.
“What’s to know?” I replied. “It a good strong wall,
one of the finest I’ve ever seen.”
Grass was growing knee-deep between the tire paths and
Virgil was driving 60 miles an hour. At one point, the tires left the ground
and the car pancaked on its frame.
“Why are you driving so fast?” I asked.
Virgil’s brow was glistening with perspiration. He
glanced at the speedometer and eased off the accelerator.
“I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “I’m sorry. I am just
anxious to find Walter. He’s a stone mason and knows all about building walls.”
The road slanted up a steep incline and flattened out
on top of the ridge. Two houses were under construction and in various stages
of completion. A three-man crew was selecting round river rock for the fireplace
chimneys.
Virgil eased the wagon between two aging pickup
trucks loaded with sand and bags of mortar. A lean angular man with a scarred
and sallow complexion met us halfway. He kept both hands in the bib of his
coveralls and viewed our presence as a violation of some sort. He stuffed a
twist of chewing tobacco into the pocket of his cheek.
“Walter this is Charles Case; Charlie, this is Walter
Kepler.”
His hand was rough as concrete and nearly as hard. I
felt spoiled and pampered in the presence of men who thrived on physical labor.
I envied them their calluses.
“That’s a nice touch,” I said, indicating the stone
going up against the side of the house.
He nodded in pointless affirmation.
“Walter, I told Mr. Case about your accident at the
Ryder house.”
The builder spit contemptuously. “Accident, hell; it
weren’t no accident. Something out there took hold of me and wouldn’t let go.”
I’d pegged Kepler as the son of Hungarian immigrants with
ancestors that may have been celebrated sculptors, artists, possibly scientists.
The angry tone of his response, however, also raised the possibility of
bomb-throwing anarchists in the family tree.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Just what I said,” he replied, rolling up the sleeve
of his shirt and revealing three long scars that ran from elbow to wrist. “I
thought I was going to lose my arm trying to get free.”
I wanted to ask, ‘free from what?’ but felt I could
not handle any more contempt.
“Were you on the property?” I asked.
He shook his head and spat again
but with less
premeditation.
“No, I was examining the wall. I admired it for years
and thought I’d take a closer look. I’ve never seen a wall stand up so well to
the elements. Did you notice? You can follow the wall around the house and not
find a stone out of place.”
I considered it, but chose instead the more direct
route to the house. Walter rushed in with more details. “It’s an old wall, the
kind you might see in history books, especially books on Indian or early
American culture. I climbed on the wall to take a look and that’s when something
grabbed me.”
“What grabbed you?” I asked, feeling like a voyeur.
“Hell, I don’t know what it was, but my arm felt like
it was in the jaws of a vice, a vice with teeth.”
“How’d you manage to get away?” I asked, as if I too were
avoiding the inevitable confrontation.
“I managed to pull loose and jump over the wall.”
“While lying on the ground,” he said, “I heard a
strange moaning sound, but it could have been me. I was in a lot of pain.”
He worked the earth with the toe of his shoe and spat
again, gaining a little more variation each time with the rusty pattern of
expectorant.
“I got dizzy from holding my head at an angle,” he said,
“but I’d been sick all day with a headache and fever. Now that I think about
it, I don’t know what I was doing there in the first place.”
After a moment’s reflection, I thought I knew that
feeling too.
“Why are you asking these questions?” Walter wanted to
know. “Are you going to buy the Ryder house?”
Rather than invite ridicule, I did not answer.
He studied the tobacco stain on the ground as if it
were an ancient run
e
.
“It’s a curious house,” he said, leafing through a
file of forgotten memories, “especially the wall. There’s only one other like
it in the county.”
I was not surprised to learn there were similar walls
in the county, even though I should have expected it.
“Where?” I asked anxiously.
“The state hospital,” he replied.
In the moment of silence that passed between us, I
could hear the grass growing and the concrete footers hardening in the ground.
“They’re not exactly alike,” he said, “but I’ll bet a
month’s pay the man who built the wall around the Ryder house also built the
wall around the hospital.”
“And who was that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied, “but one thing I know is
stone work, and those walls are the work of one man.”
For obvious reasons, I felt relieved to learn that
people could survive behind them.
“Thank you, Mr. Kepler. I appreciate your assistance.”
“Anytime,” he said, shifting the cud of tobacco from
one cheek to the other and retracing his steps to the job site.
We returned to the car. “Is there any way to find out
who constructed those walls?” I asked.
“What difference does that make?” Virgil asked.
At a loss to explain my own rambling, I shrugged. The
wall, I knew, meant something important to the house, but I did not know what
or why. Was it keeping something in or out?
“There does seem to be something unusual about it,” I
said.
Virgil took his time responding. He was enjoying the
last rays of day light on his face. “There may be a building permit or
something on record at the courthouse, but you’ll have to wait until Monday to
find out.”
I scratched the stubble of a beard that was beginning
to itch and darken my neck and chin.
“That settles it,” I said. “If I’m going to hang
around all weekend, I might as well buy it.”
The elation I thought I would feel -- once I’d made
the commitment to buy -- fell short of expectations. My stomach did a little
anxious flip and I turned to see if Virgil would try to talk me out of it.
“Good, let’s get back to the office and get your
signature on a contract before you change your mind.”
Chapter Five
While Virgil
filled
in the dotted lines,
I painted the lobe
of my ear with iodine.
“
I must have cut it on greenbrier,” I said, knowing the
incident had occurred before running through the thick brush.
Virgil stopped typing, clasped both hands behind his
head and leaned in his chair.
“I read a newspaper article a few years ago about the
hospital. The writer quoted the super as saying 'there would not be a
maintenance cost if the buildings were as ‘impregnable’ as the wall’. At the
time, I thought he was exaggerating.”
“Did the paper mention the name of the mason?” I
asked.
“I think it was a mystery to the writer, too, but
unless I’m mistaken, it did say something about the old People’s Bank building
having some similar stone work done.”
He resumed typing while reconstructing the bridge to
the past: paused again and rocked slowly in the swivel chair.
“It’s not a bank anymore,” he said. “They tried to raze
it in the late 40s, but it gave contractors a lot of trouble. The stone work
crowning the top of the building was a problem, so they converted the building
into a drugstore and offices.”
While he ruminated, I raided a desk drawer and found a
pack of gum. I was enjoying the first shots of the sweet juices when the
connection fixed itself in my mind.
“So whoever built the wall around the mansion and the hospital
also did the stone work on the bank. He apparently knew something about masonry
others don’t,” I said. “The wall may also be related to other accidents.”
Virgil’s silence, I suspected, meant concurrence.
“Why don’t we have dinner together?” He asked. “We’ll
get my wife’s opinion. She’s an Upshyre County Republican and knows all about
this town and the people in it.”
*
Virgil’s home was only a few minutes from the office.
When he walked in the side door, his wife’s eyes flashed like sabers and then
cooled to a steel gray hardness.
The table was set, the food was cold and two small
children, a boy and a girl, had already succeeded in splattering each other
with food
.
He kissed her cautiously on the tense, upturned cheek.
Her ‘slice and dice’ eyes never wandered far f
rom his
.
“Why didn’t you say you were bringing company home for
dinner, Virgil?” she asked in a lilting voice.
A smile was transfixed on her tired but youthful face,
while her eyes sparkled at my presence. Those eyes, I could see, served as
hooks to troll in deep waters and impale vagrant hearts.