Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (46 page)

PART II

I

“February 17. Ten o’clock
p.m.
Train prompt. Felt unwell at supper, discarded cigar. Must see Bill Robinson—not half so decent as Joe Miller, but more than twice the doctor. Came across a letter from Anne-Maria this morning. She lost a child in infancy amongst the Andean tribes. She wrote my father that they butchered her with knives, and she never again could conceive. Her husband Willard Sheldon seemed insensible to grief. He did not leave off work. But nowhere was it written that a missionary’s wife need prove equally insensible or, dare I breathe it, unbending. I am ignorant of burial procedure amongst the Mormons overseas—if indeed they have a burial procedure—but will cause a stone to be erected in the infant Sherbrooke’s honor. This should be done in private. In the orchard, not the churchyard, where such stones are ours to ordain. The death is unrecorded and more than twenty years old: my phantasmal cousin. A gravestone fails to mark the place of the body’s abiding. That place is in the heart.”

Downstairs, a door slams. The noise there increases. Maggie remembers Judah’s song, the one she’d overhear him whistling and would urge him to put words to, but he’d claim he couldn’t sing or didn’t know the words, till finally—half-shy, his voice sticking, uncertain, deep in his throat, and higher than she’d ever think that bass of his could travel, Judah sang:
“Way down in yon valley, in a low lonesome place, where the wild beasts do whisper, and the winds they increase . . .”

She’d tease him, her head on his shoulder or in his lap, saying, “That’s not how it goes, that isn’t the verse.” He’d try again:
“Way down in yon valley, in a lonesome low place, where the wild beasts do whimper, and man seeks his peace . . .”
It was a song, she knew, about a wandering laborer who loved a woman, Saro Jane. She loved him too but wanted land, and therefore she was going to marry some rich landowner with servants, houses, security. The singer understood, and got on his horse and went west.

Her memory of Judah will not fade. He stands there, increasing, solid as the flesh he was and intervening always in her hope of breathing space, her ranging through the Big House rooms and up to the stone gates. He will not let her leave. He is her guardian in death as much as ever in his life, except that she accepts this now and does not seek release. She’d failed to take his measure at the time. She’d taken him on her own terms, or tried to anyhow, opposing his possessiveness with years of dispossession, assuming when she went away she could leave Judah behind.

Yet all those years he’d kept her on a leash. She’d broken free, of course, but only in terms of geography; in all the ways that counted she’d held back. Maggie learned to love confinement, though she called the house a cage. She’d come when he whistled, tail wagging, nails clipped, for all the world like some prize apricot poodle groomed for a dog-show display. He’d petted her, made much of her, and she’d been puppy-eager for the feel of his hand on her neck. She took a photograph of Judah holding the keys to the truck. His face had been in shadow, but sunlight glinted from the key ring in his fist. It was fat as a jailer’s, she’d teased him, bristling with duplicates, with keys that opened doors and trunks he’d long since left unlocked, or junked cars, or tractors traded away, though he kept a second set in case. “In case of what?” she’d ask, and he’d tell her if the Nickersons were fools enough to lose their keys or leave the tractor in some ditch he’d have to help them haul it from, or maybe he’d be standing by the icehouse, not planning to have opened it but needing to get out the ax.

Judah was wearing his corduroy jacket. The earflaps on his cap were down since it was early April. She can remember standing on the porch steps shivering, come back for good—not ten feet away from him and not five years ago. He bent to the key ring, attentive. She sees him this way, finally: an old man in love with exactness. There’s nothing that he needs to lock, no one for miles who’d trespass and no robbery she’s heard of in these parts. Yet Judah knew what opened what and rested secure in the knowledge; he’d make his rounds like Keeper Dan at feeding time in the book Jane liked.

“My love, she won’t have me,”
he’d sing,
“and I understand”
—not understanding how she kept him with her always, and the landowner she wanted was him, and the winds that increased where the wild birds do whistle were in their own green valley,
here
, not lonesome since she still was lying by her only husband’s side, not lonesome even now because of Jane.

“We knew Mr. Sherbrooke,” says Lucy Gregory. She drops her voice, confiding. “Your father was a perfect gentleman. He used to bring us pears.”

“That’s why we’re here,” says Elvirah Hayes. “We thought it’s time to say hello. It’s been so long.”

“Too long. We never once
entered
this house.”

They introduce themselves to Ian. Before the switch to automation, before the phones were worked by computer, they worked the village phones. Now they have been retired with no more than a by-your-leave, a handshake for their years of service—fifty-three if you put them together, addingLucy’s twenty-nine to Elvirah’s twenty-four. Never sleeping through the night if somebody’s youngster was poorly, answering questions, delivering messages so that generally speaking, says Lucy, and taking turns working the night shift, they spoke for the whole town. Before he, Ian, knew how to talk they’d heard folks talk about him; they must have made connections with every corner of America the morning he was born. So what they hope he understands is how much they miss Judah, how his father used to bring them bushels of the fruit they couldn’t grow at home. Home was Church Street, the third house down, the one on the south side with brown trim and the knocker in the shape of a Dalmatian. He shouldn’t be a stranger—now that they’ve been to the Big House, why they’ll expect him in theirs.

There is a third visitor. Examining titles, he stands by the bookshelf. He has gone directly to the books.

“So anyway,” says Lucy. “Here we are.”

They used to raise Dalmatian dogs; his father took an interest in the breed. He knew the finer points of breeding, Judah Sherbrooke did; when he walked through a kennel, it was as if you invited a judge. You couldn’t hope to have a keener eye. He’d spot a problem with the hip before there was a problem; once he said he
smelled
distemper clear across the yard. They ask Ian if he keeps dogs now, and shake their heads when he says no; Lucy says those were just the most marvelous pears.

“We knew your aunt too,” says Elvirah. “Of course.”

Harriet Sherbrooke was her age exactly, Lucy says, though Elvirah’s five years younger, and for fifty years they lived a mile apart—since she, Lucy, moved to Church Street from where she was raised in Londonderry, and Harriet never budged. They’d met fifty times if they’d met once; though not exactly what you’d call friends they were not exactly strangers, my land no, says Lucy, let no one imagine that. For half a century she’d not set foot inside this house but it wasn’t for lack of intending to—just the right time somehow never came up; we belonged to different choirs, understand, a different church, and played bridge with a different crowd. The term for it if Ian knew dogs is “run with a different pack.”

They’d looked at each other, they’d looked at the snow. They had nothing else to occupy this Thursday afternoon. If he doesn’t mind their asking, asks Elvirah, would his mother be about? He blows his nose. He wonders, should he offer to return their entrance fee? The third visitor—bent, white-haired, of indeterminate age—from across the room is saying, “This complete John Greenleaf Whittier you got. The spines ain’t even been cracked.”

“And what about your little sister?” Lucy asks. “We were hoping we might get a glimpse. A chance to pay our compliments.”

“We brought her a present,” says Lucy, “It’s three years late in coming, but better late than never. A person can always use scarves.”

“She knitted it,” Elvirah says. “She’s too modest to admit it, but it’s her handiwork.”

Lucy dips into her bright-green bag and pulls out wool. It is thick and pink, with fringes. He cannot tell, by its length, if it has been intended for Maggie or Jane. She rolls it up again. “On a day like this one,” Lucy says. “I myself always wear scarves.”

“Thank you. I’ll give it to her later. I’ll tell her you made it.”

“We were hoping . . .”

“When was this place wired?” The stranger in the corner points to the light switches. He pulls at his ear. “When did they put plumbing in this house?”

Ian offers information. He talks about the chandelier, the parquetry, the steam-heat system Peacock bought that seemed so dangerous insurance underwriters refused to underwrite it. The system prospered, Ian says, as did everything that Peacock touched—the man was a Midas for silver. When he touched rock, the rock split open and, hey presto! what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Comstock Lode. He sees himself in the dining-room mirror, expatiating, gracious, and thinks maybe Maggie is right: this isn’t worth it, he needn’t make Jane curtsy for a scarf.

Yet these are chosen visitors, the ones who come in when it storms. He should maybe offer them coffee. Ian points out plaster ornaments, and the tooled-leather peacocks on the walls. He shows them where the speaking tube emerges in the butler’s pantry, and how each bedroom in the house is numbered so the maids could know who wanted them where. He says, as if for the first time, trying to sound unrehearsed: “One way or another, we all make a museum out of our past. My family just happened to retain it more than most.”

The dried hydrangea in the pot are evidence of shape inhering, how the lifeless residue of what had once been vital holds for wintry seasons what it had burgeoned into seasons previous, how what has faded here is neither shape nor size but color, the white integuments turned to ocher, not the texture but the tint of watered silk. Maggie stares at the nine blossoms massed beside her bed. She counts them repeatedly, making certain that the ninth though short-stalked is actual, not imagined. Hattie called them snowball bushes, that’s what we call them in these parts, she said, not hydrangea; hydrangea bloom in June and July, but snowball bushes come along in August and September. So even the name of the flowers by her bedside is uncertain, even their number from her vantage changeable; she studies the deep-blue cone beneath that has a crack so it would hold no water, were water requisite.

Hattie said they ought to chuck it out. Her expression had been grim. She couldn’t bring herself to part with anything her brother owned, so instead consigned this relic to her bookshelf, saying well why not, there’s room enough, what difference does it make? Judah used to say that what you give a gift in is as important as the gift, part of it, so when he brought back flowers, they were in a vase to keep.

Then, months after Hattie’s death, cleaning the bookshelf, Maggie saw her own face staring back at her in the ultramarine glaze. Her reflection was foreshortened as it might have been in water, she picked up the vase and dusted it and traced the hairline crack positioned to the rear. A network of spiderweb-thin filaments in the patina fanned out from thatcentral one. She remembered how the water beaded on it, then was a ribbon, then a small puddle beneath. Hattie had been shocked, disbelieving that a thing so simple could make such a complicated mess, thinking probably she’d overfilled the vase or tilted it when setting it down, or the cleaning lady, Mrs. Russell, had been careless dusting.

Maggie stands. The blue-and-ocher shape beneath her now looks like a blossom-ball. She should roll it downstairs. She should make an entrance scattering crockery and petals all over the staircase. They would fall to their knees, collecting shards, apologetic, gathering the remnants of what was her regal nine-sided bouquet, but find no water, hunt for it, expecting that the oak treads would be slick with droplets, the carpeting soaked. She would tell them: “Rise”—descending, insouciant, stepping on flowers and clay.

Mexican bark paintings hang in the bathroom: bright riotous assemblies of women waving gourds, of cats entwined with birds and men on burros holding guitars. Red dogs gnaw yellow bones and blue parrots watch from vines that establish the border. Everything is drawn in profile, and the primary colors are bright. They come from bins in curio shops. She had purchased ten of these mementos, she remembers, for whatever five dollars had been worth in pesos in 1948.

It had been nighttime—so hot the long-bladed fans above her seemed to stir the air, not cooling it, like a spoon in tea. In the near distance a radio blared; bullfrogs and cicadas chorused out beyond the plaza; cars made a paseo, backfiring, by the water. She ate turtle steak and drank quantities of rum: her final day in Isla de Mujeres. Something of that seaside languor haunts her still this morning when she studies the bark paintings where they hang above the tub. Life was easy, sweet, and short: a cigarette, a dance, a hammock for the night. She had been the beautiful “gringa,” and a pilot in Mexico City flew her down to Merida, then Isla, for what he called the payment of her company, no string attached. She had been his single passenger; the plane delivered mail.

Did she know, he asked her, that “gringo” comes from the Spanish-American War? When Teddy Roosevelt’s army went through, he said, singing “Green Grow the Rashes O!” the natives could not understand and thought they sang, “
Greengo
the Rashes, ho.” Maggie had not known that, and she told him so. “I remember everything,” he said—she struggles for the pilot’s name: Jorge?—“about your presidents. Jefferson, Madison, Harrison, Taft. Zachary Taylor, even. Martin Van Buren was the number eight. Millard Fillmore, what sort of name is Millard for a man? Is it instead a duck?”