He spoke slowly, watching her face.
“When I lived here, as a child, I thought Hank was the biggest thing created. I thought he knew everything, was everything,
had
everything in this whole waterlogged world . . . except one particular thing that was mine. What this one thing is, was, doesn’t matter—think of it as an abstract thing, like a feeling of importance, or sense of self—it only matters that I needed it, as any kid needs something all his own,
all,
and I thought I had it, forever, never to be taken from me . . . and then I thought he took it away. Do you follow me?”
He waited until she nodded that she understood—
his eyes softer now, tender, the way his hands were; but still the burning
—then went on.
“So I tried to get it back—this thing. I mean I needed it
more
than he did, Viv. But I found . . . even after I had it . . . that he was too much for me. It was never mine again, never all mine. Because I couldn’t . . . ever take his place. See? I wasn’t big enough to take his place.” He released her hands and removed his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose with thumb and finger (my failure to Come Clean that evening I blamed, of course, on Hank—) sitting in silence for a long moment before he continued. (—though I know now that she was as much at fault as my brother, or as myself, or as any of the other half-dozen principals in the plot, dead and alive. But at the time I was capable of no such painful insights, and quickly blamed the about-face I made in my march toward Brotherly Love on the brother I was marching to love, on my brother and on the Tin Pan Alley moon and his old hack magic . . .)
“And never being big enough to take his place left me no place of my own, left me no one to
be.
I wanted to be someone, Viv, and there seemed only one way to do it—”
“Why are you telling me this, Lee?” Viv asked suddenly, in a fearful voice barely louder than the breeze rustling the dry flowers behind her. Her voice seemed to come from a great, empty cavern. She was reminded of the hollow weight that had grown inside her when she had tried to give Hank a live baby. The memory filled her with nausea.—
He wants something from me. He doesn’t know that the only thing I have left is the hollow of something gone
—“What are you telling me for?”
He looked back up at her without putting his glasses back on. He had been ready to go on by telling her how his whole return home had been motivated by the desire for revenge, how he planned to use her as an instrument in the revenge, how he had realized the error of his ways because of his growing fondness for all of them . . . but now he was stymied by her question: Why was he telling her? what reason had he to tell anyone, except, “I don’t know, Viv; I just needed someone to talk to. . . .” (Not that she did anything antagonistic toward me—it certainly wasn’t that—her blame lies in the way she tossed her hair back from her face, in the softness of her throat and the shine of firelight on her cheekbones . . .)
“But Lee, we’re hardly good friends; there’s Hank, or Joe Ben—”
“Viv, I needed
you
, not Hank or Joe Ben. I can’t . . . look, I couldn’t tell them the things I can tell—”
Something sounded in the darkness. Lee stopped, relieved momentarily by the distraction. Then from the direction of the slough bottom came a drawn-out “Heayoo-ooo . . .” and his relief turned to disappointment. “Damn. That’s Joe Ben. They’re coming back.” He made a desperate calculation. “Viv, listen; let me meet you tomorrow, please, and finish this. Let me talk to you somewhere alone tomorrow.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hey! I already have your invitation, if you remember right. To dig clams?”
“Rock oysters. But I was just kidding with you.”
“I’m not kidding now. Meet me . . . where? On the jetty at the beach, was that it?”
“But
why
, Lee? You still haven’t told me why.”
“Because. I need to talk with somebody. With you. Please . . .”
She put on her teasing face. “Why, suh, a lady o’
mah
position—”
“Viv! I’m asking you . . . I
need
you!”
The hand swung her facing him, gripping her wrist demandingly; but her attention did not fasten this time on his fingers, or even on the eyes gripping with the same demanding pressure, but beyond the fingers, behind the eyes, where . . . she can see the concentrated strain of his need to be, see the agonizing, stiff labor of unfolding, of opening, of trying to proclaim, This is
me!
“Viv, please?”—like the efforts of a dark, diseased flower, too long in the bud, struggling to unfurl its crippled petals before a last-chance sun. And, watching, feels that desperate blooming draw for the air and water and light that was her bounty, feels it at the same time swelling to try to fill that icy bubble beneath her breasts.—
Maybe. Maybe that is it. Maybe the hollow is not something gone, but something not given!
“Viv, hurry . . . will you?” This is me, the flower pleads, drawing, and she feels herself just beginning to fly toward answering that plea when the vetch pods rattle the dark behind them and Hank shouts, “Here ya go; ornament for the aerial!”—and she flew instead to throw her arms about her husband, bloody foxtail and all. “Hank! Oh, you’re
back.
”
“Yeah, I’m back. But
easy
, I ain’t been gone a month, you know.”
Leaving Lee to kneel and hide his disappointment in the chore of tending the coffee. He bit his cheeks over the blurred sight of the girl forsaking him so quickly to run to the mighty hunter—(The dumb cow! I should have had more sense than to expect her to understand anything except how to run mooing to her bull)—and cursed the smoke making his eyes burn so. (Yet, taking everything into consideration, I still deem it a very interesting evening with some very interesting results: first, while the old man muttered and masticated beside us, and Hank and Joe Ben and the hounds chased smaller animals in the slough bottom, Viv and I had a most pleasant chat and seeded a relationship destined to bear a very tasty fruit for me later; and second, the excitement of the hunt prompted brother Hank to get even drunker later that evening, enough so to shake loose his hold on the mean streak he had been hiding since my arrival (also, I think he saw Viv and me getting a bit too cozy at the campfire for his liking) and he tried to provoke a fistfight with me back at the house, called me a “pantywaist” and other endearing terms when I refused to indulge him, and thereby snapped me out of my sentimental somnolence and put me back on my road to revenge once more after much time lost dawdling; and last, as well as foremost, the detailed scheme that I fictionalized to have ready for my Clean Breast of It All proved precisely the plan I had been searching for. A scheme meeting all the requirements: safe enough to pass the cautionary restrictions set up by Old Reliable WATCH OUT AT ALL TIMES; certain enough of success to give my workworn body the patience to last out the few weeks necessary to the plan’s completion; diabolic enough to soothe my every mangled memory and vindicate each outraged obsession; and potent enough to stir up a spell capable of transforming a giant into a mewling babe . . . and vice versa.)
Viv realized too late how overdone her greeting had been, and looked to Hank to see if he suspected anything—
There is nothing to suspect, though; Lee was just talking, and not even
making sense; I barely heard
—Hank was looking about the firelit area with a puzzled frown.
“I thought the old man was here,” he remarked, watching her nervously.
“Henry just this minute left,” Viv said.
“Most of the dogs are still out,” Hank told them, coming to warm his hands at the fire. “On another fox, the way it sounds. But I thought I’d check here before we did anything else. Old Molly show up back here?”
“Hank doesn’t care for the way she hushed so fast,” Joe Ben explained gravely.
“We haven’t seen her,” Lee said. “Henry’s conclusion was the bear either scared her off or lost her.”
“Henry’s full of beans. Molly ain’t about to be scared off by any animal. Just about as unlikely, too, that she’d lose a trail hot as that one sounded. That’s why her hushing so sudden worries me. Any of the other dogs, it might not. But Molly’s too much dog to just hush like that unless she got into it some way.”
The weeds rustled. “Here’s Uncle and Dolly’s Pup,” Joe announced as two dogs slunk guiltily into the firelight, like criminals throwing themselves on the mercy of the court. “Little-bitty fox,” Joe scolded, then, hands on his hips. “Chasin’ a poor little-bitty fox . . . Why didn’t you help out with that
bear?
Huh?”
Uncle slunk on into the shack and Dolly’s Pup rolled onto her back as though her exposed undersides would explain the whole thing.
“What do you plan to do?” Viv asked.
“One of us ought to go look for her,” Hank said without enthusiasm. More dogs were coming into sight now. “You all take the dogs, except Uncle, to the house; I’ll take him on a leash and walk up toward the ridge.”
“No!” Viv said quickly, holding on to his arm. They all looked at her in surprise. “Well, you’ll be gone all night. She’ll be all right. Come on to the house, now.”
“What . . . ?”
They stand, radiating out from the fire. A breeze shakes the weeds; and Lee shivers, hating her, hating them all.
“Come on now. . . . Please?”
“I’ll go look,” Joe Ben volunteered. “I’m still up rearin’, and Jan’s asleep. Shoot, I’ll find that dog in no time.”
Hank was skeptical. “Last I heard her was east, up in the direction of Stamper Creek; you sure you want to head off up there by yourself?”
“You talk like I’m scared of ghosts or somethin’.”
“Ain’t you?”
“Goodness,
no.
C’mon, Uncle; we’ll show ’em who’s scared an’ who ain’t.”
Hank grinned. “Right sure now? It’s terrible dark, and remember what day it is now . . . last of October . . .”
“Foo. We’ll find her. You go on back to the house.”
Hank started to further tease his cousin but was stopped by the pressure of Viv’s nails in his arm. “All right,” he agreed hesitantly, then winked at Joe. “I don’t know
how
come it is but every time the woman here gets a little sniff of alcohol she wants to celebrate.”
Joe took a sandwich and a cup from the knapsack. “Oh yeah.” He nodded out at the night beyond the fire. “No tellin’ what a perceptive man’s liable to find out yonder first wee small hours of Halloween day.
All
manner of things.”
But once the others had left, his enthusiasm cooled quickly. “Dark, ain’t it, Uncle,” he confided to the dog tied to the shack.
“Well, you ready?” When the dog didn’t answer Joe decided to have another cup of the burned coffee, hunkering over the coals with the tin cup steaming between his hands. “Quiet, too . . .”
Though it was neither. The moon found holes in the clouds with skilled agility, making the forest glisten with frost, and the night animals, as though sensing their last chance of the year, were having a session equal to the event. The tree toads sang bright good-bys before burrowing into their nice snug mud; the shrews darted about the paths, uttering shrill squeaks of last-minute hunger; the killdeers flew jerkily from meadow to meadow, calling, “
Dee!
Dee! Dee,” with clear, sweet, reassuring optimism about the state of this beautiful frosty night.
Joe Ben was not reassured; in spite of his show of bravery before Hank, rain or shine, fair or foul, daytime was his time. And the forest at night might be beautiful, but if it was dark how was a man to know that?
So he put off the search for the missing dog for one cup of coffee after another. Not that he was scared of the woods after dark—there wasn’t a beast produced by all the northern wilds that Joe Ben would have hesitated tackling, barehanded, with
ev
ery confidence of winning, day or night—it was that, some way or other, alone at night, with the prospect of walking up to Stamper Creek he got to thinking about his father. . . .
After a long time Molly moves, trying to stand in the shallow water. Most of the fire in her hips is out now. And the pain is numbed by the cold. And it is no longer unpleasant to lie in the water. But if she does not go home now she knows she never will. She falls a lot at first. Then she begins feeling her limbs again and stops falling. She frightens a possum right in her path. The animal hisses and rolls to its side, twitching. She walks past without sniffing it . . .
Because if there was ever ghosts in this world, then old Ben Stamper’s ghost walked those woods out there right
now
, Joe was sure. It didn’t cut ice whether that ghost happened to be
solid
or not—Joe had never feared harm from the corporeal side of his father, even when the man was alive. Ben had never threatened his young with physical violence. It might have been better if he had; the threat of violence can be escaped by simply getting out of range of it . . . but the threat Joe had felt it necessary to escape was the dark portent he had seen stamped into his father’s face—like an expiration date stamped into a borrowed book—and since Joe carried the same face he had felt stamped with the same portent; changing the face had been the only way to change the stamp. “All right, Uncle, hush your whining; this one more cup and we’ll have a look.” So wouldn’t it be a pity to be wandering around and it so dark that you couldn’t see the change?
. . . She comes to the log she had jumped so easily before; now she drags her body over it, a leaden piece at a time: COLD. Cold little moon. Cold and hot and a long way. . . .
Joe cut himself a nice pitchy pine bough and shoved it down in to the fire. When it was blazing brightly he untied the dog and started off down the trail, leaning back against Uncle’s pull. But those pine boughs don’t work like they do in the moving pictures with the villagers out by the hundreds storming through the woods after some kind of
monster
that nabs the first guy without a torch and pinches his head off like a grape! Ten minutes later Joe was back firing up his torch again . . .