“He told himself a lot of stories. He came up with lots of reasons for what he did one hundred years ago. William Prentice ordered the bodies of those thirty-four men to be stacked in the basement of the mill. Then he set fire to the place, but not enough to raze the building; only enough to burn the bodies. That way nobody had to explain why the vents hadn’t worked, or pay the widows more than their due. The bodies of those men were buried in the basement of the mill. They salted the earth of Bedford. Nothing good could ever grow again.
“William died, and his children took over. They squeezed Bedford dry, until the stores started to close, and the money left, and the factories shut down. And the people finally realized that the promises were lies. The Prentices moved away and never looked back, but the people of Bedford were left behind. Their rage at what had been done to them had no place to go but within. It got buried underground, and captured in rain, and it roiled inside queasy stomachs. It fed the souls of the dead.”
“St—” Susan started to say:
Stop.
But the woman looked at her, and she fell silent. The woman’s eyes danced. So wild, they drew her inside them. They made her forget her own name.
“The first sign that the place had soured was the rain that began to fall every year. After the rain came a thickness of the air, and a change in gravity. The place became so full of all that had been buried that it began to overflow. It slipped into nightmares, and the most basic instincts of everyone who lived here. Though they did not know it, it affected every action they took and every decision they made. Finally, the place became haunted. The flotsam of the dead, the lost, and the living began to speak. The place was forsaken by God.”
“You’re a liar,” Susan whispered. But she knew it wasn’t a lie. Sometimes, when she was sitting at her desk in school or else walking down Iroquois Hill, she would see the town in a certain light, and the place would look like it was on fire. The place would look so angry it was the color red, ready to burn itself into charred embers. Ready to collapse on itself like a hole as deep as this woman’s eyes.
“And then do you know what happened?” the woman asked.
“No,” Susan whispered.
“Watch.” The woman smiled widely, too widely, and her lips split open. A drop of blood rolled down her chin and landed on the rock. Susan’s eyes played a trick on her, maybe, and the drop grew larger. It covered the rock like paint. It splashed against the dirt, and the trees, and the sky so that suddenly everything was red as a sunset. Beautiful, even, in a terrible kind of way. But then the sky started to darken, and the blood turned from red to black. Then everything went black.
“You stop! I don’t like this trick!” Susan shouted. The woman’s eyes danced, wild blue against black, pulling Susan deeper and deeper. Susan listened for the voice the woman carried inside of her, and instead of just one or two voices, she heard thousands of them. “Kill her!” one voice shouted, while another said, “I forgot how sweet she used to be. So sweet and pretty. Like a morsel I could eat,” and another worried about the rain, and another was sad that Paul Martin was dead
(dead?),
and another watched the stars on a clear night, and another laughed as black smoke curled its way through a house, and another imagined tying rocks to Susan’s waist and throwing her into the river so that certain things
(what things?)
would never have the chance to take place.
“Stop!” Susan shouted. She kicked the woman hard even though she couldn’t see her. She couldn’t see anything. All black. All terrible. And in the darkness the woman laughed.
“Do you see?” the woman asked.
“Yes, I see,” Susan answered. And she did see. She knew. She had always known, and now that she was getting older, she was beginning to understand.
The sunset lightened back to red and then orange and then yellow, until, finally, the sky was blue. The woman’s eyes stopped dancing, and she loosened her grip. She was crying and laughing at once.
“Do you know what happened next, Susan?” the woman asked.
Susan didn’t answer, even though she knew.
“It was inevitable that this sourness would seep inside the children conceived here. And so, one day, a little girl was born half dead like the town. She could hear and see the buried things. They crept inside her. They became a part of her. She carried them in her mind, her heart, her womb, like a woman pregnant with death itself.”
Susan closed her eyes. She tried to wish herself away. She’d flap her wings and fly back home. She’d teleport herself like a unicorn to her mother’s lap. “I’m just a little girl,” Susan said.
“When it was time, the girl died, and in her death she gave birth to their rage.”
“It’s not true. It doesn’t happen!” Susan shouted.
The woman’s eyes danced once more, and now there wasn’t any part of her that was pretty. Now black blood dripped all over the rocks, and the woman’s skin began to slide off her bones. “It’s true,” the woman said. “It happens now. It happened then. It will happen. It always happened.”
Susan was crying now, but too tired to heave her breath, too tired to blow her nose on the sleeve of her Wonder Woman T-shirt. “Why are you doing this to me?” Susan asked.
The woman grinned. “You came searching for me. I’m all you think about. You can’t let me go. No one can let me go.”
“You live in the woods?”
“We live here, Susan. We live everywhere.”
Susan understood, and did not understand. She remembered a dream about a lady who lost her own reflection. She remembered people from town who crossed the street when she came near. She remembered a house where a boiler beat like a heart, and a town where a paper mill one day filled the sky with black smoke. She remembered her own gravestone; a small, neglected thing. She knew the woman was telling the truth. “Why was I born this way? Why is Bedford this way?” she asked.
The woman smiled. “It was a bargain the people of Bedford made with William Prentice. They traded their lives for his lies. Their bargain salted the earth, so that nothing good could ever grow. Nothing can die here, so long as his paper mill stands. And because of you, nothing will live here, either. Now ask your real question. The one you came here for.”
Susan didn’t ask. She knew the answer. She did not want to hear it.
The woman smiled a dead smile. “Shall I tell you the answer, Susan Marley?”
“Please don’t.”
“I am you,” the woman said.
S
he awoke alone on the rock. There was a crick in her neck because she’d slept all funny, and it was dark. The bad lady was gone. Had there even been a bad lady? No, she was just a Little Miss Muffett. How scary! She hated scary dreams. What time was it? Mom was going to be so mad!
She started out of the woods, but something was wrong. Who was calling her name? She ran down the path and squeezed through the fence to the cemetery. Who called her name?
It was dark, and she couldn’t find her way out of the rows of headstones.
“Susan! Come here right now!” a voice demanded. Where had it come from?
“Don’t dawdle, little girl, it’s going to rain soon,” another voice answered.
“I feel so lonely, don’t you feel lonely?” someone else asked. “It’s so dark in here.”
“Come here, pretty girl. I like pretty girls,” another said.
And then they spoke all at once.
She started to run, and tripped on a stone. The big stone with the angel. The man below turned over and over. William Prentice. His hands were red, and he never slept. All down the row, they reached up from the ground. “Sleep,” she cried. “Go back to sleep.” But they pried at their coffins with their fingers. “Let us out,” they said.
“Let us out!”
She ran out of the cemetery and through the streets, to home. On her way, in each house she passed, she could hear the people inside:
With another woman, I’ll bet!—It’s my birthday tomorrow, and we’re going to get hammered—She always sleeps with her back to me, like I’ve got bad breath or something—I hate school—Ever feel like you’re watching your whole life, and you can see all the stupid things you do, but you just can’t help it? I feel like my life belongs to someone else.
Susan covered her ears with her hands. She sang, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” and who cared who saw her, who cared that she was talking to herself, but still, the voices would not stop.
When she got home, her mother nearly knocked the breath out of her with the force of her hug. “I was so worried, baby. We looked everywhere. I drove all over town. Oh, honey, what happened?”
It took Susan a moment to realize that her mother had spoken these words, rather than thinking them. “I was sleeping,” she said. “And then I woke up.”
“Sweetie,” Mary said, hugging her tight. “Don’t ever scare me like that again.”
Her father put her baby sister, whom he was carrying, down on the floor. He came between Mary and Susan. She saw inside him then. Saw that he was weak. Saw that because of his weakness, the haunted things in this town had found a home inside him, even though he did not know it. Because of what he carried inside him, he wanted to hurt her. Her mother knew this, but could not believe it.
Susan saw the arc of her life; all the things that would happen, and the things that might happen, too. She saw that the woman had lied. She had told only bad things, because she understood only bad things. But even in Bedford there were good things, too. Mostly, Susan saw her own inexorable corruption like a hunger never satisfied, and it terrified her.
Her father looked her up and down. He turned her around, inspecting every inch of her. He was shaking, and in his eyes were tears. “Did anyone hurt you?” he asked.
“No,” she said, crying. “No one touched me.”
“Thank God,” he whispered.
Her father pulled her close, and Mary joined him. They formed a circle around her. She cried in their arms. For a moment, just a moment, she felt safe. Fortified by the very people who would betray her, against the things to come.
But the voices did not stop. The voices never stopped.
T
he week-long rain had recently ended. It seemed to get more reckless every year. Of course, there had been that one year in ’79 that Ted Marley could remember. The pipe of the mill got flooded, and the town was closed off for three days. But now, as always, the rain was over. The snow was gone. And also, as always, the land seemed the richer for it.
It was a nice night. A little humid. The sulfur from the mill hung low in the atmosphere like a blanket between the earth and the stars. Ted Marley pushed his spade into the ground and dug into soft dirt. Some weeds were beginning to sprout. His spinach and tomatoes would be good this year. He knew this: how to make things grow. It was not in the naming of these things, their Latin roots, or the water or sun or places they were planted. It was an instinct that came from deep within. This year, his garden would bloom.
He was a small man with lean muscles that gave him a lanky appearance. He put down the spade and felt the earth with his hands. It smelled fresh and clean as it always did just after the rain. It smelled like the beginning of creation. He took his time, letting the soil fill his hands and fingernails, getting dirty.
Time passed. The stars shifted their place in the sky. He held out a flashlight and looked at the dirt. Had there been any money, he would have been a farmer. He would have worked in the field all day for something of his own. Corn, maybe. Corn so high that he would never be able to see where it was that he came from. Would never be able to see home. At night he would sleep with the animals. He would feed slop to the pigs and he would get down among them and sleep with them and he would never go back. He would be one of the animals. And he would watch his family from a distance far and very safely away.
There might have been a time, years ago, when he had thought he’d get out. He’d made plans, sitting on his uncle’s porch and watching the stars, to go places. But then he met Mary, and she’d wanted to settle down. He traded his job slinging beers at Montie’s Bar to peel bark off logs at the mill, and saved enough for a down payment on a house. He was not sure he’d ever loved Mary, but it had been relief to let go of all those dreams.
Now, he went into the house. Fixed himself a sandwich and watched the end of the ball game on the black and white Zenith. The Red Sox lost to Milwaukee. He tried to focus on these things but could not. He turned the volume down low and listened very hard. Listened.
He had a beer. And then another. A third. He was drinking for courage. He was drinking for absolution. He took the route he had taken so many times before that the air was rotten with history. He walked up the stairs and told himself that this time was different, this time he would go to sleep. He opened the door to his children’s room, just to check. He was their father, after all. Elizabeth tossed. He would not touch her. He had never touched her. He looked at the other one. Susan. Eleven years old. He grimaced when he thought of this. Eleven years old. Little girl. She behaved much older than her years. But no, he would not touch her. He would never touch her again.
He caressed Elizabeth’s shoulder. Sweet little thing. Quiet. Took after him in looks. Elizabeth did not wake. She turned in her sleep and he bent down and kissed her forehead. He ran his hand over the blanket tucked close, feeling the curve of her narrow hips.
It was easy being with her. She never tempted him. At work he would think of her. He would collect stories throughout the day to tell her that would make her laugh. He would never leave his family, as his own father had done. He would never leave Elizabeth to survive on her own. His hand moved farther down. He squeezed her thick little leg. His little girl. Perfect thing. Her breath hitched and he thought she might be awake. It made him angry that she was pretending to be sleeping. Afraid of her own father. He squeezed harder.
Susan stirred. She got up and unbuttoned the top of her flannel nightgown. He could see the flat plane of her chest that would one day become soft. She guided his hand away from Elizabeth.
Their fingers threaded. She was a strange girl. A cursed girl. A damned girl, just like him.
Susan guided him out of the room. They went down to the basement. There was a chill in the air. Though he had bailed out most of the water, there was still a half-inch film of it on the ground. The boiler hummed. Their faces were very close. He motioned for her to turn around so that she could not look at him. He could not really be a bad man. For her to keep these secrets, she had to love him very much.
She didn’t move. The bottom of her long flannel nightgown spread out on the wet floor like a pink flower. In her eyes he saw a man growing older by the day. A man, thin and sickly, with too much of a taste for liquor. A man who bore no love for his past, or his future. He was this man.
He began to cry. “Oh, Susan,” he said. He lifted her chin and saw that she was as unhappy as he. His quiet girl. His sad girl. He would comfort her. Her pain resolved into stillness. He kissed her on the lips. Tenderly. It always happened this way.
He pulled down her cotton panties so that they hung around her ankles. Then he turned her against the sawhorse and began. His shoes sloshed in the water. It made him sad, suddenly, that the rain had come and gone. That it had not washed either of them clean. Here it was, the ground not even dry, and he was inside her.
He never went too deep. He did not want to harm her. But this time, he did go deep. Had she thought that he was going to hurt Elizabeth? Had she really thought he would do that? He went deep. The water sloshed right along with him. It sprayed against the walls. It circled within itself in little tidal pools. The boiler kicked into motion and for a moment, he thought he heard the house itself rage against the thing he did.
When he was done, she turned and he saw that she had bled from below. She had also bled from her lower lip. Bitten into it to keep from crying or maybe just to keep from calling out. To keep from calling his name. He wiped the tears from her eyes and kissed where they had fallen.
Before his wife came home and they dressed and he told Mary, as he always told Mary, that they had been working on the bookcase together that he had intended for the last six months to build, Susan told him not to touch Elizabeth; never to touch Elizabeth. “If you touch her, I won’t tell. I’ll kill you.” She said this quietly and softly with the wet blood on her lips that made her look so lovely and she meant it. He knew she meant it.
The fury that she would betray him would come later. The biting fury because he knew he’d provided a better life for his family than he had gotten. But for now, it was fear he felt as he watched her hold her head erect, kiss her mother good night, and smile an angry smile at him with those knowing, ruined eyes. It was fear, because he wondered what he had created. He wondered if the soil had been sour to begin with, or if it was something he had done.