We found the damp dirt-floored grotto beneath the verandah, reached by crawling between the hollyhocks, where only spidery dandelions tried to grow, and creeping Charlie, its crushed-mint smell mingling with cat spray and (once) the hot, sick stink of an alarmed garter snake. We found the attic, with boxes of old books and stored quilts and three empty trunks, and a broken harmonium, and Grandmother Adelia’s headless dress form, a pallid, musty torso.
Holding our breaths, we would make our way stealthily through our labyrinths of shadow. We took solace in this—in our secrecy, our knowledge of hidden pathways, our belief that we could not be seen.
Listen to the dock ticking, I said. It was a pendulum clock—an antique, white and gold china; it had been Grandfather’s; it stood on the mantelpiece in the library. Laura thought I’d said licking. And it was true, the brass pendulum swinging back and forth did look like a tongue, licking the lips of an invisible mouth. Eating up the time.
It became autumn. Laura and I picked milkweed pods and opened them, to feel the scale-shaped seeds overlapping like the skin of a dragon. We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving the leathery brownish-yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow. Then we went to the Jubilee Bridge and threw the pods into the river to see how long they’d sail, before they capsized or were swept away. Did we think about them as holding people, or a person? I’m not sure. But there was a certain satisfaction in watching them go under.
It became winter. The sky was a hazy grey, the sun low in the sky, a wan pinkish colour, like fish blood. Icicles, heavy and opaque and thick as a wrist, hung dripping from the roof and windowsills as if suspended in the act of falling. We broke them off and sucked the ends. Reenie told us that if we did that our tongues would turn black and drop off, but I knew this was false, having done it before.
Avilion had a boathouse then, and an icehouse, down by the jetty. In the boathouse was Grandfather’s elderly sailboat, now Father’s—the Water Nixie, high and dry and put to bed for the winter. In the icehouse was the ice, cut from the Jogues River and hauled up in blocks by horses, and stored there covered in sawdust, waiting for the summer when it would be rare.
Laura and I went out onto the slippery jetty, which we were forbidden to do. Reenie said that if we fell off and went through, we wouldn’t last an instant, because the water was cold as death. Our boots would fill, we’d sink like stones. We threw some real stones out to see what would happen to them; they skittered across the ice, rested there, remained in view. Our breath made a white smoke; we blew it out in puffs, like trains, and shifted from one cold foot to the other. Under our boot-soles the snow creaked. We held hands and our mittens froze stuck together, so that when we took them off there were two woollen hands holding on to each other, empty and blue.
At the bottom of the Louveteau’s rapids, jagged chunks of ice had piled up against one another. The ice was white at noon, light green in the twilight; the smaller pieces made a tinkling sound, like bells. In the centre of the river the water ran open and black. Children called from the hill on the other side, hidden by trees, their voices high and thin and happy in the cold air. They were tobogganing, which we were not allowed to do. I thought of walking out onto the jagged shore ice, to see how solid it was.
It became spring. The willow branches turned yellow, the dogwoods red. The Louveteau River was in spate; bushes and trees torn up by their roots eddied and snagged. A woman jumped off the Jubilee Bridge above the rapids and the body wasn’t found for two days. It was fished out downstream, and was far from a pretty sight because going down those rapids was like being run through a meat grinder. Not the best way to depart this earth, said Reenie—not if you were interested in your looks, though most likely you wouldn’t be at such a time.
Mrs. Hillcoate knew of half a dozen such jumpers, over the years. You’d read about them in the paper. One was a girl she’d gone to school with who’d married a railroad worker. He was away a lot, she said, so what did he expect? “Up the spout,” she said. “And no excuse.” Reenie nodded, as if this explained everything.
“No matter how stupid the man may be, most of them can count,” she said, “at least on their fingers. I expect there was knuckle sandwiches. But no sense in shutting the barn door with the horse gone.”
“What horse?” said Laura.
“She must have been in some other kind of trouble too,” said Mrs. Hillcoate. “If you’ve got trouble, you’ve most likely got more than the one kind.”
“What is the spout?” Laura whispered to me. “What spout?” But I didn’t know.
As well as jumping, said Reenie, women like that might walk into the river upstream and then be sucked under the surface by the weight of their wet clothing, so they couldn’t swim to safety even if they’d wanted to. A man would be more deliberate. They would hang themselves from the crossbeams of their barns, or blow their heads off with their shotguns; or if intending to drown, they would attach rocks, or other heavy objects—axe-heads, bags of nails. They didn’t like to take any chances on a serious thing like that. But it was a woman’s way just to walk in and resign herself, and let the water take her. It was hard to tell from Reenie’s tone whether she approved of these differences or not.
I turned ten in June. Reenie made a cake, though she said maybe we shouldn’t be having one, it was too soon after Mother’s death, but then, life had to go on, so maybe the cake wouldn’t hurt. Hurt what? said Laura. Mother’s feelings, I said. Was Mother watching us, then, from Heaven? But I became obstinate and smug, and wouldn’t tell. Laura wouldn’t eat any of the cake, not after she’d heard that about Mother’s feelings, so I ate both our pieces.
It was an effort for me now to recall the details of my grief—the exact forms it had taken—although at will I could summon up an echo of it, like a small whining dog locked in the cellar. What had I done on the day Mother died? I could hardly remember that, or what she’d really looked like: now she looked only like her photographs. I did remember the wrongness of her bed when she was suddenly no longer in it: how empty it had seemed. The way the afternoon light came slantwise in through the window and fell so silently across the hardwood floor, the dust motes floating in it like mist. The smell of beeswax furniture polish, and of wilted chrysanthemums, and the lingering aroma of bedpan and disinfectant. I could remember her absence, now, much better than her presence.
Reenie said to Mrs. Hillcoate that although nobody could ever take the place of Mrs. Chase, who’d been a saint on earth if there could be such a thing, she herself had done what she could, and she’d kept up a cheerful front for our sakes because least said, soonest mended, and luckily we did seem to be getting over it, though still waters ran deep and I was too quiet for my own good. I was the brooding type, she said; it was bound to come out somehow. As for Laura, who could tell, because she’d always been an odd child anyway.
Reenie said we were together too much. She said Laura was learning ways that were too old for her, and I was being kept back. We should each of us be with children our own age, but the few children in town who might have been suitable for us had already been sent away to school—to private schools like the ones we should be sent off to by rights, but Captain Chase could never seem to get around to arranging it, and anyway it would be too many changes all at once, and although I was cool as a cucumber and would certainly be able to manage it, Laura was young for her age, and, come to that, too young altogether. Also she was too nervous. She was the type to panic and thrash around and drown in six inches of water, through not keeping her head.