Crying Child Page 8

  “You’re not hurt,” he said flatly. “What’s the matter?”

  “Someone in the woods,” I said, wheezing. “In the graveyard. A woman.”

  “The same person you saw yesterday?”

  “I guess so… I don’t know.”

  “What are you so scared of? Did she threaten you?”

  “No, no. She just…” I stopped, seeing from his level stare that I was not making a good impression. “She was peculiar looking,” I finished lamely.

  “How? Wild-eyed, foaming at the mouth, or just plain ugly?”

  “I didn’t—see her face.”

  Will sighed loudly.

  “I’m in a hurry, Jo. One of my patients is in labor. It’s her fourth, so she could have it any second, and she had a bad time with the third. Get in the car. I’ll take you home and on the way you can tell me all about your terrifying experience.”

  He grabbed my arm, none too gently. I pulled back.

  “If you’re in that much of a hurry, go ahead. I’ll walk.”

  “And meet your scary lady again? It’s on my way; get in, I tell you.”

  This time when he took my arm I didn’t resist. I had enough incipient bruises already. My offer had been sheer bravado. I wouldn’t have gone back into those woods for anything.

  Will was definitely in a hurry; we went down the track much too fast for comfort, and when he took the curve along the cliff edge I closed my eyes.

  “Speak up,” he said brusquely. “You’ve only got about five minutes.”

  I was in no mood to speak up. I wanted to sit there like a sulky child, with my lower lip sticking out. I knew he wouldn’t believe me. He would just decide that Mary wasn’t the only hysterical neurotic in the family. But I wasn’t quite that childish; I told him what had happened. Naturally, the flat, reluctant statements failed to convey any of the atmosphere which had made the experience so terrifying—the only thing that had made it terrifying, for as I heard my own statement I realized how banal it sounded. When I had finished I looked at Will out of the corner of my eye. He was smiling. There was genuine amusement in that smile, but it wasn’t a nice kind of amusement. He was laughing at me.

  “Annie Marks?” he said calmly.

  “Who is Annie Marks?”

  “Just a poor crazy old lady who likes to dress up in her grandmother’s clothes and wander around in the woods. I should have thought of her before. She lives with her daughter and son-in-law, a few miles down the road.”

  “How many miles down the road?”

  “This is a little out of her way,” he admitted. “But it must have been Annie. Who else could it have been? Her behavior is quite characteristic; you probably scared the poor thing half to death when she saw you lurking like a banshee at the door of the mausoleum.”

  I felt like crawling down under the seat. Will was grinning broadly and humming quietly to himself. The scrap of music acted like a key, opening his thoughts to me, and I could see the scene that was in his mind, the one he found so hilarious. It comes at the end of the first act of The Magic Flute, when that arrant coward Papagallo, sneaking around a corner, meets his enemy the Moor sneaking around the other side. They stare at one another in horror for a few seconds, croaking out disconnected gasps of musical terror; then, with a Mozartianly blended scream, they both flee in opposite directions. Poor old Annie and poor old Jo must have looked just the same…

  We stopped in front of the house. Will jammed on the brakes with an excruciating jolt and leaned across me to throw the door open. His smile had disappeared, and the eyes he turned on me told me that he had forgotten the joke and was remembering another scene in which I had recently figured prominently.

  “Better put some iodine on those scratches,” he said.

  After the car had gone off in a cloud of dust I studied my scars. They were hurting now and they looked even worse. There wasn’t a square inch of skin on my calves that wasn’t scraped, bruised, or scratched. I was going to be a lovely sight in short skirts for days to come. My state of mind was a perfect complement to my legs; it too was bruised, scraped, and scratched.

  “Oh, damn,” I said.

  There was a chuckle from behind me—exactly the sort of noise poor old weak-in-the-head Annie might have made. I whirled around. Mr. Willard—no, it was no use, I couldn’t even think of him that way, much less address him by that name—Jed stood there smiling at me.

  “Sorry,” I said, in some confusion. I wasn’t sure how he would react to profanity from a young female. I had watched my language pretty carefully with Mrs. Willard, because I was sure how she would react.

  He waved one hand. The other hand held the rake, which seemed to be supporting his leaning form, but I was beginning to know that his shiftless appearance was misleading.

  “I’d say it was a pretty mild comment,” he said. “Considering… Don’t mind young Will. The Appleby girl’s in labor, and Will takes his job seriously.”

  I didn’t ask how he knew the Appleby girl was in labor when Will himself had apparently discovered that fact only minutes before I ran into him. I was ready to believe that this smiling, vague-looking man and his stolid wife knew everything.

  “Nasty scratches,” Jed went on, looking me over. “Better put something on ”em.“

  “I will,” I said meekly.

  “Yellow soap, too. Bertha has some. Good for poison ivy if you use it right away.”

  I looked mournfully at my bare legs. I hadn’t thought about poison ivy.

  “Something scare you?”

  I looked up, startled at the accuracy of his guess, and met a pair of very knowing blue eyes. He had, as I have said, an affable face even when he wasn’t smiling—one of those faces that invite confidences. And as Mary always said, reticence was not precisely my chief character trait.

  “I met Annie Marks,” I said, falling into step with him us he headed for the back of the house.

  “She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “I know; I probably scared her. But not more than she scared me.”

  He chuckled again.

  “Pretty startling, at that, coming on someone sudden-like. Especially in the woods. They aren’t places for people.”

  The words struck home, they fit so well with what I had been thinking. Forests were inhuman places. They were meant for birds and animals, but not for people— unless they were people who were still close to the original primitive origins of man. Quiet people, hunters and stalkers; people who could move as the beasts did, keeping the silence of the shut-in places.

  We went into the tool shed and Jed hung the rake neatly on a hook among an assortment of gardening equipment.

  “Nature is frightening,” I said, half to myself.

  “It’s unpredictable. But that is why it’s so interesting.”

  “You must find it interesting. You do a marvelous job; I don’t see how one man can keep this place in such beautiful condition.”

  “I like the work. I tried accounting; even got me a CPA.” The corners of his mouth twitched slightly at my expression of surprise; but he went on in the same even tone. “I couldn’t stand being cooped up. Or the monotony. Some people say that mathematics is exciting. It wasn’t to me. Ten digits, that’s all there are, and they always act the same way. Two and two always make four— ”cept in some of the new mathematics, but bookkeepers don’t get into that. But when you work with living things you never know what’s going to happen. No two plants are exactly alike. One may die no matter how much care you give it. Another will fight to live through drought and disease and poor soil. Like people.“

  I sat down—or up—on a high stool by the workbench. I was fascinated by his view of the world, and his even voice and relaxed attitude were soothing to my nerves.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why do some live and others die?”

  Jed shrugged.

  “I don’t suppose I’ll ever know. Why should I figure it out when all the great thinkers and teachers have failed? But that’s the ques
tion that keeps me from getting bored.”

  I was about to speak when something stirred in a darkish corner of the shed. The object lifted and stretched itself, and paced out into the light. It was one of the coon cats, like those Will owned, but it was bigger and plumier than any of his—a big reddish-gold animal, looking like a miniature lion with its ruff and round golden eyes. The enormous tail, as long as my forearm, gave it a look of fantasy—a creature out of legend, a storybook lion.

  “Isn’t he a long way from home?” I asked.

  “She,” Jed said. “She’s not one of Will’s. Belongs to Bertha.”

  “I thought she didn’t like cats.”

  “Oh, she doesn’t mind cats. Always room for a good mouser. She just thinks Will goes a little bit too far.”

  He scratched the cat under its chin and it raised its head, its eyes slitted in ecstasy.

  “You’ve seen Will’s place?”

  “Yes. I love the house. It must be very old.”

  “Seventeen thirty. It was the original Fraser house, you I now. Wasn’t till 1825 or so that Captain Hezekiah moved into the big house.”

  “You’re doing it too,” I said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Looking…sideways…when youmentionhis name. Will had the same funny look when he talked about the Captain. What did the man do, for heaven’s sake?”

  Jed’s pale eyes twinkled.

  “Heaven had nothing to do with it.”

  “So I gather. But my lord, I wouldn’t think any sea captain would be a very saintly character. What was so particularly awful about Hezekiah?”

  Jed picked up an oily rag and began to wipe the gardening tools.

  “He sold his soul to the Devil.”

  “Oh,” I said, after a moment. “Is that all? I thought you New Englanders did that all the time.”

  “Hmmph.” Jed seemed to be struck with this idea. “You know, you’ve got a point there. It does seem to crop up over and over, doesn’t it? Captain Ahab, and that young farmer whose soul was saved by the silver tongue of Dan Webster… The Hawthorne stories are full of it. Maybe New Englanders are too susceptible to Satan.”

  “Stories like that must have circulated about a lot of self-made men. People hate to admit that their neighbors are smarter or more successful than they are.”

  “That’s part of it, sure. Natural envy. But they didn’t invent tales like that about all successful men. Old Hezekiah acted like a man who had intimate acquaintance with damnation.”

  When I remembered the carvings on that horrible mausoleum, Jed’s phrase was singularly apt. I wondered who had done the carving. No local stonemason, I was willing to bet.

  I said, seemingly at random, “You take care of the graveyard, don’t you? Do you know about the grave outside the fence?”

  “Sure. I set the stone up every couple of years. Keeps falling down; something peculiar about the subsoil, I guess.”

  “It’s fallen down again,” I said.

  Like a distant foghorn the stentorian voice of Mrs. Willard floated to my ears.

  “Jed! Dinner’s ready!”

  Jed scooped up the cat, which hung from his hands like a fur piece, blinking affably. I tagged along after him as he walked toward the house.

  “Who was she?” I demanded. “Miss Smith?”

  The urgency in my voice surprised Jed.

  “Why, I don’t know as I ever gave the matter much thought.From the date on the stone she’d be from Hezekiah’s time, but—”

  “A servant,” I said. “Governess or housekeeper?”

  Jed came to a stop.

  “Well, now, that’s odd,” he said slowly. “I never thought of that. Figured—if I thought about it at all— that she’d be a stranger, a traveler maybe, who got sick ,and died here, so that all they ever knew about her was the name on her trunk. Somebody from a wrecked ship, maybe.”

  “Of course, that’s much more plausible, isn’t it? There must have been many shipwrecks along this coast… And naturally people in nearby houses would take in the injured who were saved or washed ashore. But wouldn’t they advertise, or try to notify the relatives if someone died on their hands?”

  Jed shook his head.

  “It wasn’t so easy in those days to communicate with people. She might not have had surviving relatives who cared anything about her. Or they might have been lost when the ship went down.”

  “That’s true. Why didn’t I think of that? I’ve seen anonymous stones in old cemeteries, memorials to unknown seamen washed ashore after a shipwreck. That must be the explanation.”

  “Maybe so…-”

  Mrs. Willard called again, and Jed started walking.

  “It’s a curious thing, though,” he said thoughtfully. “Now you’ve got me wondering about it myself. You know, Jo, there’s a pile of old family papers, documents and diaries and such, in a chest upstairs. You just might find something there.”

  “About Miss Smith?”

  “Well, it’s not too likely, I’ll admit. But there ought to be some papers from Hezekiah’s time, since you’re so interested in him.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t pry into private family papers.”

  “I don’t suppose Ran would take you to court,” Jed said drily. “He ought to look through the stuff himself, see what’s worth keeping, but I don’t suppose he ever will. He never gave a hoot for that sort of thing. He’d probably think you were doing him a service. Keep you out of mischief, too.”

  We reached the house, so I didn’t respond to that last joking comment. Mrs. Willard was at the door looking exasperated, and Jed went off to wash up. The Willards had dinner about an hour before the rest of us had lunch. It was no notion of inferior status that made them prefer to eat alone; they stuck to the old custom of eating their big meal in the middle of the day, and Mrs. Willard thought nothing of cooking two sets of meals rather than succumb to the newfangled notion of dining on soup and salads at noon. So I left them to their meat and potatoes, and Prudence the cat to her dish on the floor, but I didn’t escape without a lecture from Mrs. Willard, and a bar of yellow soap, which she ordered me to use—all over.

  On the stairs I met Mary. My conversation with Jed had let me forget, for a time, the unpleasantness of the previous night, but the sight of Mary brought it all back to me. I felt so guilty I couldn’t look her in the face.

  “Good heavens, Jo,” she said. “If you aren’t a living testimonial to the dangers of exercise. You should have stayed slothfully in bed, like me.”

  “You certainly look great,” I said.

  It was true. The sight of her, looking fresh and rested and elegant in her white sandals and expensive little print dress relieved my mind, though it didn’t make me feel any less guilty.

  Mary didn’t seem to notice my discomfort. She caught sight of the bar of soap—it was not inconspicuous, by color or size—and burst out laughing.

  “I see Mrs. Willard caught you. You ought to use it, though, if you’ve been in the woods. You used to be horribly susceptible to poison ivy. Remember the time we were camping in West Virginia and you got it on your bottom?”

  “Do I,” I said. “How old was I, about six?”

  “Seven.” Mary took my arm. “Come on, I’ll go up with you and make sure you don’t cheat.”

  She continued to chat as I got undressed. To hear her talk, you wouldn’t have thought she had a care in the world. I even enjoyed hearing her scold me, she sounded like the old Mary.

  “I’d have thought by now you would have learned to take care of your clothes,” she said, holding up the shorts I had just discarded. “Look at this—a big rip. They look like new shorts, too.”

  “They were cheap,” I said carelessly. “Four-fifty, on sale.”

  “Oh, Jo.”

  She looked so distressed that I laughed.

  “Now don’t start that, Mary. I know I’m just a poor underprivileged orphan who can’t afford a decent mink. But you are not going to rush me off to Saks for a whol
e new wardrobe.”

  “Your birthday is coming up.”

  “Coming up! It’s in August, my friend, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “There are a couple of decent shops in the village. We’ll go shopping this afternoon. Gosh, Jo, do you realize how long it’s been since we had a good shopping binge together?”

  There are more important things than pride, as Ran had said. I looked at Mary’s eager face and I wasn’t even aware of a mental struggle.