Tonight, the hay in the fields is already brittle with frost, especially to the west of Fox Hill, where the pastures shine like stars. In October, darkness begins to settle by four-thirty and although the leaves have turned scarlet and gold, in the dark everything is a shadow of itself, gray with a purple edge. At this time of year, these woods are best avoided, or so the local boys say. Even the bravest among them wouldn’t dare stray from the High Road after soccer practice at Fire-men’s Field, and those who are old enough to stand beside the murky waters of Olive Tree Lake and pry kisses from their girlfriends still walk home quickly. If the truth be told, some of them run. A person could get lost up here. After enough wrong turns he might find himself in the Marshes, and once he was there, a man could wander forever among the minnows and the reeds, his soul struggling to find its way long after his bones had been discovered and buried on the crest of the hill, where wild blueberries grow.
People from out of town might be tempted to laugh at boys who believed in such things; they might go so far as to call them fools. And yet there are grown men who have lived in Jenkintown all their lives, and are afraid of very little in this world, who will not cross the hill after dark. Even the firefighters down at the station on Main Street, courageous volunteers who have twice been commended for heroism by the governor himself, are always relieved to discover that the fire bells are tolling for flames on Richdale or Seventh Street -any location that’s not the hill is one worth getting to fast.
The town founder himself, Aaron Jenkins, a seventeen-year-old boy from Warwick, England, was the first to realize that some localities are accompanied by bad luck. Jenkins built his house in the Marshes in the year 1663. One October night, when the tide froze solid and refused to go back to sea. he received a message in his dreams that he must flee immediately or be trapped in the ice himself. He left what little he owned and ran over the hill, even though there was a terrible storm, with thunder just above his head and hailstones the size of apples. In his journal, exhibited in the reading room at the library, Aaron Jenkins vows that a thousand foxes followed on his heels. All the same, he didn’t stop until he reached what is now the town square, where he built a new home, a neat, one-roomed house that is currently a visitors’ center where tourists from New York and Boston can pick up maps.
Those foxes who chased after Aaron Jenkins are all but gone now. Still, some of the older residents in the village can recall the days when there were foxes in every inch of the woods. You’d see them slipping into the henhouses, or searching for catfish out by Olive Tree Lake. Some people insist that every time a dog was abandoned, the foxes would befriend the stray, and a breed of odd reddish dogs with coarse coats came from these unions. Indeed, such dogs were once plentiful in these parts, back when farms lined Route 22 and so many orchards circled the village that on some crisp October afternoons the whole world smelled like pie.
Twenty-five years ago, there were still hundreds of foxes in the woods. They would gather and raise their voices every evening at twilight, at such a regular hour people in the village could set their watches by the sound. Then one dreadful season the hunting ban was lifted, and people went crazy; they’d shoot at anything that moved. Most folks still regret what went on; they truly do. For one thing, the rabbits in these parts are now so fearless you’re likely to see them sitting on the steps to the library, right in the middle of the day. You’ll catch them in your garden, helping themselves to your finest lettuce and beans. You’ll spy them in the parking lot behind the hardware store, comfortable as can be on a hot afternoon, resting in the shadow left by your car. They’re pests, there’s no doubt about that, and even the most gracious ladies on the library committee find themselves setting out poison every now and then.
There are so many rabbits along the back road to Fox Hill that even cautious drivers risk running over one. This, of course, is simply one more reason to avoid the hill. March Murray, who was raised here, agrees that it’s best to stay away, and she has done exactly that for nineteen years. All this time she has lived in California, where the light is so lemon-colored and clear it is almost possible to forget there are other places in the world; these woods for instance, where one could easily mistake day for night on an October afternoon, where the rain falls in such drenching sheets no birds can take flight. It is exactly such a day, when the sky is the color of stone and the rain is so cold it stings the skin, that March returns home, and although coming back was not in her plans, she is definitely here of her own free will.
The simple act of returning, however, doesn’t mean she’s a local girl right off, that she would, for instance, still know every shopowner in town by name as she once did. In the time she’s been away, March has certainly forgotten what rain can do to an unpaved road. She used to walk this way every day, but the ditches are much deeper than she remembers, and as they drive over branches tossed down by the storm, there is an awful sound, like the crunching of bones or a heart breaking. The rental car has begun to lurch; it strains all the way uphill and sputters each time they have to traverse a deep puddle.
“We’re going to get stuck.” March’s daughter, Gwen, announces. Always the voice of doom.
“No, we won’t,” March insists.
Perhaps if March hadn’t been so intent on proving her point, they wouldn’t have. But she steps down hard on the gas, in a hurry as usual, and as soon as she does, the car shoots forward into the deepest ditch of all, where it sinks, then stalls out.
Gwen lets out a groan. They are hubcap-deep in muddy water and two miles from anywhere. “I can’t believe you did that,” she says to her mother.
Gwen is fifteen and has recently chopped off most of her hair and dyed it black. She’s pretty anyway, in spite of all her sabotage. Her voice has a froggy quality from the packs of cigarettes she secretly smokes, a tone she puts to good use when complaining. “Now we’ll never get out of here.”
March can feel her nerves frayed down to dust. They’ve been traveling since dawn, from San Francisco to Logan, then up from Boston in this rental car. Their last stop, to see to the arrangements at the funeral parlor, has just about done her in. When March gets a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror, she frowns. Worse than usual. She has always had very little appreciation for what others might consider her best features-her generous mouth, her dark eyes, her thick hair, which she has colored for years to hide the white streaks which appeared when she was little more than a girl. All March sees when she gazes at her reflection is that she’s pale and drawn and nineteen years older than she was when she left.
“We’ll get out of here,” she tells her daughter. “Have no fear.” But when she turns the key the engine grunts, then dies.
“I told you,” Gwen mutters under her breath.
Without the windshield wipers switched on, it’s impossible to see anything. The rain sounds like music from a distant planet. March leans her head back against the car seat and closes her eyes. She doesn’t have to see to know that directly to her left are the fields of Guardian Farm and the stone walls where she used to balance, arms out, ready for anything. She truly believed that she carried her own fate in the palm of her hand, as if destiny was nothing more than a green marble or a robin’s egg, a trinket any silly girl could scoop up and keep. She believed that all you wanted, you would eventually receive, and that fate was a force which worked with, not against you.
March tries the engine again. “Come on, baby,” she says. This road is not a place where she wants to be stuck. She knows the nearest neighbor too well, and his is a door she doesn’t plan to knock upon. She pumps the gas and gives it her all and there it is at last: the ignition catches.
Gwen throws her arms around her mother’s neck, and for now they both forget all the fighting they’ve been doing, and the reasons why March insisted on dragging Gwen along instead of leaving her at home with Richard. So a mother doesn’t trust a daughter? Is that a federal offense? Exhibit A: birth control pills at the bottom of Gwen’s backpack wedged between the Kleenex and a Snickers candy bar. Exhibit B: pot and rolling papers in her night table drawer. And C of course, the most definitive evidence of all: the dreamy look on any fifteen-year-old girl’s face. C for cause and effect. C for ceaseless trouble, and for cry all night, and for cool as ice to your mother no matter what or when. How could Gwen guess that March knows fifteen inside out; that she knows, for instance, whatever feels most urgent and unavoidable to you at that age can follow you forever, if you turn and run.
“The sooner we get out of here. the better,” Gwen informs her mother. She’s dying for a cigarette, but she’ll simply have to control herself. Not exactly what she’s best at.
March steps on the gas, but the wheels spin them deeper and deeper into the mud. There’s no longer any hope of going forward; in fact, they won’t be going anywhere at all without the help of a tow truck.
“Damn it,” March says.
Gwen doesn’t like the way her mother sounds. She doesn’t like the whole situation. It’s easy to see why tourists don’t usually come here, and why the maps in the visitors’ center are yellow with age. In these woods, autumn brings out ghosts. You may not see them or hear them, but they’re with you all the same. You’ll know they’re present when your heart begins to beat too fast. You’ll know when you look over your shoulder and the fact that there’s no one directly behind you doesn’t convince you that someone’s not there.
Gwen reaches over and locks her door. There aren’t even any streetlights out here, not for miles. If you didn’t know where you were going, you’d be lost. But, of course, Gwen’s mother knows the way. She grew up here. She must know.
“Now what do we do?” Gwen asks.
March takes the keys from the ignition. “Now,” she tells her daughter, “we walk.”
“Through the woods?” Gwen’s froggy voice cracks in two.
Paying her daughter no mind, March gets out of the car and finds herself shin-deep in water. Sloshing through the puddle, she goes around to the trunk for her suitcase and Gwen’s backpack. She’d forgotten how cold and sweet the air is in October. She’d forgotten how disturbing real darkness can be. It’s impossible to see more than a foot in front of your own face and the rain is the kind that smacks at you, as if you’d been a bad girl and hadn’t yet been punished enough.
“I’m not walking through this.” Gwen has gotten out, but she’s huddled beside the car. The mascara she applied so carefully while she waited for her mother behind the funeral parlor is now running down her face in thick, black lines.
March isn’t going to argue; she knows that doesn’t work, and in all honesty, simple logic never convinced her of anything when she was Gwen’s age. People tried to tell her she’d better behave, she’d better take it slow and think twice, but she never heard a single word they said.
March grabs her suitcase, then locks up the car. “You decide what you want to do. If you want to wait here, okay. I’m walking to the house.”
“All right,” Gwen allows. “Fine. I’ll go with you, if that’s what you want.”
Gwen gets her backpack. No way is she staying out here all alone. Not for a million bucks. Now she understands why her mother, as well as her father-who also grew up here, right down the road-never come back. The reason they’re finally visiting is actually pretty horrible; if Gwen allowed herself, she’d have a mini-breakdown right now. She’s shivering so badly that her teeth are actually chattering. Wait till she calls Minnie Gilbert, her best friend, to tell her: My teeth were chattering like a skeleton hanging on a rope, and I couldn’t even have a goddamn cigarette because there I was, right next to my mother. All for the funeral of some old woman I’m not even related to.
“Are you okay?” March asks as they make their way down the road.
“Perfect,” Gwen says.
Thursday is the day of the funeral and Gwen may faint, especially if she wears her tight black dress, which is scrunched into a ball at the very bottom of her backpack. Judith Dale was the housekeeper who raised March-whose mother had died when March was little more than a baby-and although Mrs. Dale came out to visit in California once a year, Gwen can no longer picture her face. Maybe she’s blocking it out, maybe she doesn’t want to think about nasty things like death and getting old and being stuck in a horrible place like this with one’s mother.
“Do you think the casket will be open?” Gwen asks. Finally, the rain is easing up.
“I doubt it,” March says. After all, Judith Dale was one of the most private people March has ever known. You could tell Judith anything, you could pour out your soul, and it wouldn’t be until much later, perhaps even years afterwards, that you’d realize she’d never told you anything about herself and that you didn’t even know what her favorite dessert was, let alone who she loved and what she believed in.
Now that the rain is ending, they can hear things in the woods. Mice, probably. Raccoons come to drink from the puddles.
“Mom.” Gwen says when something flies overhead.
“It’s nothing,” March assures her. “An owl.”
Not long ago there were mountain lions roaming these woods, and black bears, who came down to the orchards to eat their fill in October. There were moose who would charge anything that moved. Even when March was a girl, the sky was still so clear children in town were often disappointed to discover they couldn’t reach up and pull the stars right out of the sky.
“Are we almost there?” Gwen asks. Her idea of exercise, after all, is to ride on the back of someone’s Honda.
It is now dusk, that odd and unreliable hour when you see things which don’t exist, at least not in present time. It is almost possible for March to catch sight of the ladder her brother, Alan, left beside those sugar maples. That dark shape in the woods may be the bucket Judith Dale used to collect blueberries. And there, by the stone wall, is the boy March once loved. Unless she is very much mistaken, he has begun to follow her. If she slows down, he’ll be beside her; if she’s not careful, he’ll stay for good.
“Why are you running?” Gwen complains. She’s out of breath, trying her best to keep up with her mother.
“I’m not running,” March insists. All the same, she gives her daughter a list of reasons to hurry: Call for the rental car to be towed. Phone Richard and let him know his worries were for nothing-they’re fine and have arrived in one piece. Contact the Judge to set up a time when they can go over Judith’s estate. Call Ken Helm, who’s always done odd jobs for the family, and have him check out the house to see if repairs are needed. Surely, there are squirrels in the attic, as there always were at this time of year.
Gwen’s good boots are caked with mud and she’s freezing. “I can see why you and Dad never come back here. It’s disgusting.”
March’s shoulders hurt from carrying her suitcase, or maybe it’s just tension in her neck. This old dirt road is all uphill. Probably she should have taken Route 22 and made a left at what people in town call the devil’s corner. If Richard hadn’t been in the middle of a term and had come with her, she might have gone that way, but she’s not ready to face that piece of road with only Gwen for company. Not yet. She has told both Richard and herself that the past is the past-what happened once doesn’t matter anymore-but if this were true, would she feel as though someone had just run an ice cube down her skin in a straight line?
“I think I see the house,” Gwen announces.
Ken Helm, the handyman, was the one who found Mrs. Dale. He knocked at the door after delivering the bricks needed to repair the chimney early on Monday evening, when the sky was the color of a velvet ribbon falling over the hills. At first he’d thought no one was home, but then the wind had come up and pushed the door open, and there Judith was, in the chair by the fireplace, no longer with us. March’s father’s old friend and partner, Bill Justice, known throughout the commonwealth as the Judge, told March all of this when he phoned the next morning. At least there were no hospital stays, no pain, no heroic measures. And yet this information brings March no comfort, especially because she believes that Bill Justice, who has been an attorney for fifty years and a judge for thirty of those years, was covering the mouthpiece of his telephone in an attempt to conceal the fact that he was crying.
“That’s definitely a chimney.” Gwen squints against the darkness. “I see it now. And there’s a gate.”
On the plane ride here, March had fallen asleep, something she dreads when traveling, since she’s always logy and disoriented after napping. In her dreams, she saw her father, who has been dead for nearly twenty-five years. In March’s dream, Henry Murray was standing in the doorway to their living room, wearing the sweater that March had loved best, the brown wool one with deep pockets, where he always kept peppermint drops. He and Bill Justice were the only lawyers in the village, and although they were partners they participated in the most friendly of feuds concerning which was the more popular.
“Do you want Murray or do you want Justice?” Bill used to joke, and maybe he had to, since Henry Murray was everyone’s favorite. Children would beg for a peppermint drop each time he walked into town, and they’d follow behind, asking for a second and a third. When he died suddenly, while working late at his office, every boy and girl in the village reported smelling mint in the night air, as if something sweet had passed them right by.
Every time she thinks of her father, March experiences a sharp pain in her side. It is astounding to consider how many losses a single individual can sustain. Richard has no family left at all, except for March and Gwen, and March has little more-only her brother, Alan, from whom she’s so estranged it no longer makes sense to consider him blood, which is doubly true for Alan’s son, a boy she’s never even met.
“So this is it,” Gwen says.
They are standing at the gate.
March puts her suitcase down to take a good look.
“I can’t believe you ever lived here,” Gwen says. “Yikes.”
In the dark, the house looks tilted and old. The section that burned down-the original kitchen and dining areas-has been rebuilt as a modest addition. March lived in this house until she was twenty-one. Hers is the window above the porch roof, the one with the black shutters which need to be set back onto their hinges. That was where she spent most of her time in those last years. Waiting at the window.
Is she surprised to find that she is thinking of Hollis now that she sees that window once again? She was only seventeen when he left, but she’d already been in love with him for most of her life. That terrible winter when he went away, when the sky was always the color of ashes and the chestnut tree in the front yard was encased in ice, she began to find white strands threaded through her hair.
Tonight, in that same yard where the chestnut tree still grows, there is something jostling the quince bushes. Gwen moves as close to her mother as she can get; she’s ice, inside and out.
“Mom?”
If Gwen sounds frightened, that’s because she is. This is not what she expected when she agreed to come east with her mother for the funeral. She figured she’d miss a week of school; she planned to sleep until noon every day and eat nothing but candy bars and cereal, full-out enjoying the break from real life. Now, on this dark night, she feels much too far from home. Who is this woman beside her, with the long dark hair and the sad countenance? Gwen, who’s brave enough-or foolhardy enough-to argue with security guards when she’s picked up for shoplifting at the Palo Alto Shopping Center, is actually shaking now. What has she let herself in for? How possible would it be to turn and run for home?
“Look,” March says to her daughter. “It’s only some rabbits.”
Sure enough, several brown rabbits are beneath the hedge of quince. The largest of them comes out, as if to do battle with March and Gwen, as if the entire hill belonged to a creature small enough to fit in a large sunbonnet or a cast-iron pot.
“Scat,” March tells the rabbit. “Go on.” When it doesn’t move she rattles her suitcase, and off goes the rabbit, into the woods. “See?” she tells her daughter. “No problem.”
But Gwen is far from convinced about this place. “Should we go in?” She is whispering, her voice a raspy, breakable thing.
“We’ll have to sleep on the porch if we don’t.”
They both have to laugh at this; it’s not too dark to see that the gutters have sloshed torrents of water over the porch. Not a place you’d want to spend the night, unless you were a centipede, or some other creepy-crawly. March reaches beneath the mailbox, and there is the extra key, wedged underneath, as always.
“You definitely lived here,” Gwen says.
March used to see this same sky every morning; she used to take these porch steps two at a time, always in a hurry, always wanting more. From where they stand, March can see Judith’s garden and instantly, she feels comforted. In spite of everything, some things remain constant. The garden is exactly as it was when March was a child. The spearmint still thrives in weedy bunches, and the scallions, with their sharp bitter scent, haven’t been the least affected by the chilly weather. The last of the season’s cabbages are nestled against the fence, as they always were in October, in neat, tidy rows, like well-behaved green toads.
Maybe she’ll regret coming back, but right now there is nowhere on earth that could feel more familiar. There, in the lower yard, March can make out the orchard, her favorite place of all. The apple trees are twisted, like little old men, their backs turned to the wind. March used to climb these trees every afternoon at this time of year, grabbing at Mc-Intoshes and Macouns, turning the stem of each apple exactly eight times as she recited the alphabet, the way girls do to learn the identity of their true love, making sure to pull the twig free only after she’d reached the first letter of his name.
He arrived like a bundle of mail, on a gray and windy day. March remembers it perfectly well: It was a Saturday and her father had been away for nearly a week, at a conference in Boston. For much of that time March had been slightly ill. with a low-grade fever and sniffles, and Mrs. Dale had kept her supplied with orange juice and mint tea. March had woken late that day, something she rarely did at the age of eleven, when it seemed that the whole world was right out in front of her, waiting and ready for her alone.
On that Saturday, March’s brother, Alan, normally the late sleeper in the family, was already in the kitchen drinking coffee when March traipsed in, searching for breakfast. Alan, who was ten years older than March, had graduated from Boston University, but he hadn’t done well. He’d registered to audit a few courses at Derry Law School, still hoping to follow his father in his profession, something he would never manage to do.
“We’ve got a boy,” Alan said.
“No we don’t.” Even at eleven, March knew that her brother was a braggart, and was careful not to believe much of what he said.
“Really,” Alan insisted. He had just begun dating Julie, the girl he would later marry, and was more good-natured than usual. He didn’t call March an idiot or a moron the way he usually did, or refer to her by her given name, Marcheline, for spite. “Dad brought him back from Boston. He found him wandering the streets or something.”
“Yeah, right,” March had said. “Liar.”
“Want to make a bet?” Alan said. “How about your allowance for the rest of your life?”
Judith Dale came in with a basket of laundry she had taken off the line. She wore her hair caught up in those days, and she favored slacks and cardigans, along with peace and quiet.
“People can’t just get people,” March said. “Can they?” She always turned to Judith to back her up, but now Judith shrugged. She was hazy about details, but she admitted she had made up the guest bedroom with clean sheets and a quilt that was usually stored in the attic.
March went to the window, but she couldn’t see a thing. Alan came up behind her, eating a piece of buttered toast and flicking the crumbs from his chest.
“He’s right there,” Alan said, pointing toward the orchard.
And true enough, there he was, just beyond the gate. He was thirteen and skinny, with long, dark hair that hadn’t been washed for weeks.
“What a prize,” Alan said, with his usual disdain.
The boy must have felt himself being watched, because he suddenly turned and glared at the window. The clouds were thin and wispy that day, blown about by the wind.
When March waved, the boy was so surprised that he just stood there, blinking. March would have laughed at his discomfort if she hadn’t realized, all at once, that she did not want to stop looking at him.
“Do we get to keep him forever?” March could sense, deep inside, that it was better to whisper.
“God, I hope not,” Alan said.
Out in the orchard, the boy continued to stare at her. The grass hadn’t yet been mowed that season and all the daffodils were closed up tight, to protect themselves from unpredictable weather.
“I’ll take him,” March volunteered.
“Get serious,” Alan had said, but when he walked away March stayed precisely where she was.
“I am serious.” she said out loud, although there was no longer anyone who could hear her. Nearly thirty years later she can still recall the way those words felt in her mouth, how delicious they were, how absolutely sweet. “From now on, he’s mine.”
Everything she knew about him, she learned from Judith Dale. He’d been an orphan in Boston, so poor he’d eaten nothing but crackers and whatever else he could steal. Few people would give him the time of day, let alone a dollar for his supper, but March’s kindhearted father had brought him home.
“And that’s all we know?” They were sitting out on the porch on a fine, blue day, filling up the bird feeders Judith liked to hang from the chestnut tree. “What about his parents? His religion? Does he have brothers and sisters? Are we sure he’s thirteen?”
“You are so nosy,” Judith said. “His name is Hollis and he’s here to stay. That’s all you need to know.”
At first, the new boy wouldn’t eat dinner-not even when there were lamb chops and asparagus, then strawberries for dessert. He wouldn’t look anyone in the eye, including Henry Murray, whom he obviously respected, for Mr. Murray was the one person to whom Hollis didn’t talk back. He was certainly fresh enough to most people, but in an edgy, self-contained fashion. It was the way he looked at you that could make you nervous. It was everything he didn’t say.
After three months, Hollis was still avoiding them all. The less he revealed, the more interesting March found him. She kept wishing she’d run into him, but when she did-once when he was throwing rocks at some invisible target beyond the orchard, and again when they all but crashed into each other in the hall one night en route to the bathroom-she was completely mute in his presence. Since March had always been a great one for talking, this behavior was particularly puzzling.
“Speak up,” Judith Dale would have to tell March whenever Hollis was near, but March couldn’t oblige. She even took to drinking rainwater, which she had overheard Mrs. Hartwig, a matron who worked in the school cafeteria, vow was a sure cure for a tongue-tied child.
Still, Hollis and March hadn’t spoken, not even to ask the other for bread and butter at suppertime. And then one day in the summer, she got her wish. It was July, March believes, or maybe the first week of August. At any rate, it was brutally hot and had been for ages. March had been going bare-foot and the soles of her feet were black. She was pouring a glass of Judith’s mint iced tea for herself when she saw the dragonfly pass by overhead. It was larger than the ones you usually saw skimming over the flat surface of Olive Tree Lake, and so blue March had to blink. She followed the dragonfly into the living room, where it perched on the drapes, and there was Hollis, in her father’s chair, reading one of Henry Murray’s textbooks, a complicated treatise which concerned homicide.
“I want to catch that dragonfly,” March said.
Hollis stared at her. His eyes were absolutely black. “Well, good for you,” he finally answered.
The dragonfly was beating its iridescent wings against the fabric of the drapes.
“You have to help me.” March was amazed at how sure of herself she sounded, and maybe Hollis was as well, because he put his book down and came over to help.
In a panic, the dragonfly tried to get away; it banged into the window glass, and then, truly desperate, twisted itself into the long strands of March’s hair. March could feel the dragonfly, almost weightless; she could still feel it after Hollis had plucked it from her tangled hair. Hollis shoved the window open and let the dragonfly outside, where it disappeared immediately, as if swallowed by the sky.
“Now are you happy?” Hollis asked March.
He smelled quite strongly of soap, since Mrs. Dale had insisted he take a shower each day, but also of some other scorching scent, which March would later come to believe was anger.
“No. But I will be soon,” March told him. She took him into the kitchen and got out two tubs of pistachio ice cream. They consumed a pint apiece, and by the time they were done they were shivering, even though the heat was as sweltering as ever. March can still remember how cold her tongue felt, from all that ice cream.
“You’d better stay away from him,” Alan warned March. He relayed some ugly rumors: That Hollis had murdered someone and had then been released into their father’s custody. That his mother was a prostitute who’d been murdered herself. That March had better lock away what few valuables she had-a silver comb left to her by her mother, and a gold-plated charm bracelet-since Hollis was most definitely a thief.
March knew it was jealousy that drove her brother. When Henry Murray introduced Hollis as his son, Alan always turned pale. Alan had never gotten along with his father, and had disappointed him in every way, and now he’d been replaced by someone who hadn’t known what shampoo was and still didn’t have the faintest idea of how to behave in company. At dinner parties or on holidays, Hollis would sit there reading from one of those miserable law texts, and he wouldn’t answer when spoken to; the only people he paid any attention to were Henry Murray and March.
“Why don’t you go someplace where you’re wanted?” Alan asked Hollis.
“Why don’t you shut up?” Hollis said right back, and he didn’t even bother to look at Alan, who was eight years older and a full-grown man, despite his foolish ways.
Alan took every opportunity to humiliate Hollis. In public, he treated Hollis as though he were a servant; at home he made certain the boy knew he was an outcast. Often, Alan would sneak into Hollis’s room, where he’d do as much damage as possible. He poured calves’ blood into Hollis’s bureau drawers, ruining Hollis’s limited wardrobe, knowing full well Hollis would rather wear the same clothes every day than admit defeat. He left a pile of cow manure in the closet, and by the time Hollis figured out where the stench was coming from, everything Henry Murray had given him, the books and the lamps and the blankets, had been contaminated by the smell.
The kinder Henry Murray was to Hollis, the more bitter Alan grew. During that first winter when Hollis was with them, Henry Murray came home from a conference in New York with gifts for all. He presented March with a thin gold necklace and both boys with beautiful pocketknives, made of steel and mother-of-pearl. Alan had botched his classes at the law school, and now the fact that he and this creature he’d had foisted upon him were being treated equally, like brothers in fact, sent him sulking. By the time they sat down for dinner that night, Alan was steaming with rage.
“He’s too young for a knife,” Alan told his father. “You’d never let me have one at his age. He can’t be trusted with it.”
“You’ll be fine,” Henry Murray said warmly, ignoring Alan in order to address Hollis, who sat to his left.
“God, you are blind,” Alan proclaimed. It was Judith Dale’s day off, but she had left them their dinner. They were having roast chicken and potatoes and green beans, but now Alan pushed his plate away, upsetting his water glass. “No one in his right mind would give him a weapon. You have to be crazy.”
If there was one thing Henry Murray couldn’t stand, it was a man who was not fair, and that was what his son seemed to be. Hollis said nothing in his own defense, and that’s what March couldn’t bear to see: The way he wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. The way he seemed to fold up inside himself, going farther and farther inside, until the part of him having dinner at their table was only the smallest comer of his soul.
“Shut up, Alan,” March said. “You’re the one who’s crazy.”
March was sitting to her father’s right, and he now put his hand on her arm. “I don’t want you to talk like that,” he told her. “Not to Alan. Not to anyone.”
Hollis still hadn’t touched his food. He was staring at his plate, but March had the sense that he was watching everything. “You’re just jealous,” she told Alan.
Alan gave a short trumpeting laugh. He nodded toward Hollis. “Of that?”
Henry Murray put down his knife and his fork. “Leave the table,” he said.
“Me?” Alan truly was shocked. “You want me to leave?”
“Come back when you can act decently,” Henry Murray said, and it was clear, from his tone, that he didn’t expect such an occurrence anytime soon, certainly not that evening.
Alan got up so hastily that his chair fell with a clatter behind him, sideways on the floor. March had been staring at Hollis all this time, so she noticed that he now proceeded to eat his supper. He cut his food carefully; he looked back at her and didn’t even blink. March was possessed by the giddiest feeling. She would make Hollis laugh; she would see if she could. She crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out at him.
“What do you think you’re doing?” her father said to her.
March hadn’t imagined her father catching her. “Nothing,” she quickly told him.
When she looked at Hollis, she saw that if she hadn’t gotten a laugh out of him, then at least she’d gotten a grin.
“She wasn’t doing anything,” Hollis agreed.
“That’s good to hear.” Henry Murray finally turned his attention to his food. “One rude child is more than enough.”
Alan should have been too grown-up for games of revenge, he should have set his mind to finding a job or studying for his classes, but after that dinner he went after Hollis wholeheartedly. He waited for the time to be right, and at last, on a cold winter day, when a beautiful light snow was falling, Alan and some of his cronies captured Hollis on the path which led to Olive Tree Lake. Staked out long enough to have ice form around their nostrils, fueled by six-packs of beer, these friends of Alan’s were ready to beat someone senseless. They tackled Hollis and spat in his face. They held him down and took turns hitting and kicking him, usually in the ribs, carefully aiming with their fists and their boots.
The horizon was gray that day, and crows were circling in the sky. Alan and his friends hit Hollis until his nose and mouth gushed with blood. They wanted him to call for them to stop, to beg for mercy, to cry, but he did none of these things. He closed his eyes, so that he wouldn’t accidentally be blinded by one of their punches. He cursed them so deeply inside his mind that his expression revealed nothing. There was blood seeping into the snow, and from the other side of the lake came a droning sound, as Mr. Judson, who owned so much land up there, rode his snowmobile through the woods.
Finally, when they had tired of beating him, Alan and his friends tied Hollis to a tree, where he stayed until dark, never once calling out. When he didn’t show up for dinner, Alan took the opportunity to call him irresponsible and thoughtless. When he still hadn’t shown up at nine, March went looking for him. By the time she found him, Hollis was burning with fury and embarrassment. March cut the ropes with the mother-of-pearl pocketknife she knew he kept in his pocket, while Hollis kept his face averted.
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” he said when she was through.
There were bloody, red marks on his wrists where they’d tied the knots too tight.
“I don’t,” March had said. and that was the truth. Even then, it was Alan she’d felt sorry for; for Hollis she felt something entirely different from pity. “I know Alan did this. Tell on him. I’ll say I saw it all.”
“But you didn’t,” Hollis said. He wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hands, then rubbed snow on his cheeks and hands. His coat had been ripped off, and now he tore at his shirtsleeve. “You didn’t see this either.” He motioned for her to hand back the knife; he took it in his left hand. Quickly, deeply, he cut a long gash up his right arm.
“Stop that!” March said.
Ignoring the wound he’d inflicted, Hollis stood up and threw the ropes Alan and his friends had tied him with as far as he could, so that they disappeared into a distant drift of snow. After that, they walked back home, a trail of blood behind them. Halfway home, Hollis’s teeth started chattering, even though his coat was thrown over his shoulders; when they reached the front door and were at last safely inside the warm hallway, he collapsed.
Henry Murray drove them to St. Bridget’s Hospital, where twenty-three stitches were needed to close up the gash in Hollis’s arm.
“Who did this?” Henry Murray demanded to know as he and March sat in the waiting room. “Was it Alan?”
March stared at the floor and could not bring herself to answer, and this response her father took to be a definitive yes.
That night, Henry Murray informed Alan that if he wished to continue living in his house, he would have to treat Hollis with respect. Moreover, he would have to write a letter of apology, and, out of his own funds, he would have to pay for the hospital bill, along with a new coat, since Hollis’s had been ruined. Alan’s knife, of course, was confiscated, in spite of his many denials.
“Don’t add liar to your list of credentials,” Henry Murray said, and after that Alan stopped proclaiming his innocence.
That night, March couldn’t sleep. She went to the kitchen for a glass of milk, and on her way back to her room, she stood outside Hollis’s door, then knocked and pushed the door open. He was in bed, but not yet asleep. March stepped inside and closed the door behind her. She could see by the moonlight reflecting off the snow in the yard. Hollis’s arm was bound with white cloth.
“You know why I had to cut my right arm?” Hollis asked. He had carefully thought it out while tied to the tree. “So no one would think I did it to myself.”
“How did you make yourself do it?” March asked. She sat on the bed to get a better look at his arm. “Didn’t it hurt?”
“That’s a stupid question.”
Hollis had that mean edge in his voice, and March might have turned and left, if she hadn’t then realized that he was crying. She stretched out beside him, her head on the pillow, while he cried. She stayed there a long time, watching him, and that was how she found out just how much it hurt.
She remained with him until he fell asleep, and although they never spoke of that night, or the fact that she had been there beside him in bed, they became allied in all things. Whenever some schoolmate wanted March to come visit, or if her father insisted she spend time with girls her age-his partner’s daughter, Susanna, for instance-March suffered through the social engagement, counting the minutes until she could be with Hollis. Sometimes she made excuses, she said she was feverish or sick to her stomach, and she ran all the way home to Fox Hill.
She especially remembers the summer when her father died, when she was fourteen. At night the moon seemed huge, the silver moon of August that rises when the hermit thrush begin to appear in gardens. That year, the peepers in the woods had gone wild. They called from the far-off shores of Olive Tree Lake and from every puddle in the yard. They clambered into the garden, where Judith’s mint grew, and sang all night long, a muddy refrain that made it difficult to sleep. Whenever March closed her eyes, she heard the peepers, like a living pulse, the background of hot August nights so black and deep they carry you far from peaceful rest and dreams.
Hollis would already be out there, on the flat part of the roof, whenever she climbed through her window. They had to be quiet, so as not to wake anyone. They kissed with their eyes closed at first, as if that would make for more silence and secrecy. March told no one, not Mrs. Dale whom she’d always confided in, or pesky Susanna Justice who always demanded to be apprised of the most intimate details of everything. It was the sort of summer when it was not possible to notice the existence of anyone other than yourself and the one you loved, and so March was doubly stunned when Alan woke her one morning, shaking her by the shoulder, announcing that their father had died.
Although Henry Murray had drawn up hundreds of wills for his clients, he hadn’t redrafted his own since before March was born. Alan, therefore, inherited all of Fox Hill. Mrs. Dale stayed on, of course, and March’s expenses were all paid for, but Hollis was sent to live in the attic. Now Alan had his chance to do as he pleased, and he began by writing up a weekly bill which charged Hollis for board and lodging. It took Hollis two years straight after high school before he could pay Alan Murray back, but he did it. He worked at the bakery on Main Street, putting in a full day before noon, and then headed over to the Olympia racetrack, where he learned that a man had a chance to double his money if he was willing to wager what he already had. On evenings and weekends, he drove a truck for the Department of Public Works, spreading salt on the roads in winter, cutting down branches and gathering trash from Route 22 when the weather was fine.
The weather happened to be exceptionally fine on the day that he left. March would soon graduate from high school, and she remembers that while she and Judith Dale were talking about her future, which seemed completely wide open back then, they had decided to clean the windows, the better to see the gorgeous blue sky. No matter how many possibilities March came up with-college, travel, a job in Boston -all futures included Hollis, that much was certain.
When Hollis came in to announce he had quit all his jobs, he felt he had never before been free. He had worked off his debt to Alan with the help of a gelding named Sandpaper who had run a race with twenty-five-to-one odds at the Olympia track, and who had amazed all bettors, including Hollis, by managing to win. Now, he could walk away, clean and clear, ready to start over. It was the most important day in Hollis’s life: the moment he’d been working toward ever since Henry Murray had died, but March didn’t realize this. Lately, Hollis had been working so much she’d gotten used to missing him; she’d begun to look elsewhere for companionship. She was going next door to the Coopers’ for dinner; she’d become friendly with the daughter, pale red-haired Belinda, and was thinking about nothing more than what she might wear that evening. Her blue dress came to mind, and so she didn’t have room to pay as much attention to Hollis as she might have.
“Would you rather be there with them or here with me?” Hollis demanded to know.
His question had taken her by surprise as she was choosing a pair of earrings from her jewelry case, and she answered too slowly-she must have, because he grabbed her, something he’d never done before.
“Stop it,” she said to him. He’d always been jealous of her friendship with the Coopers, but she’d never paid much attention, until now. He was twisting her wrist; as soon as she shook free, she backed away. “Leave me alone,” she said.
March had never spoken to him this way, and her irritation came as a shock to both of them. It was just that he wanted so much from her; she never had a minute to think.
“Are you making a choice?” Hollis said to her then.
“No,” March had spat back, not considering how easily hurt he could be. “You are.”
It is always a mistake to tell someone, Don’t you dare walk out that door, and a far worse mistake to actually cross the threshold and walk out on someone you love. Ever since that day, March has wondered what she could have done differently: Stayed home from the Coopers’? Thrown her arms around him? Admitted that all day long she’d been planning her future with him? Halfway through dinner, she sensed how wrong she’d been; she left and ran all the way home, but it was already too late.
After he’d gone, she waited upstairs at her window, day after day, week after week. There were no letters, not even a postcard, and by the time March graduated from high school, she no longer bothered to walk down the drive to check the mailbox. Still, each spring the doves who nested in the chestnut tree in the yard returned, and March took that as a sign of Hollis’s loyalty and his love. The girls she’d gone to school with went off to college, or took jobs in the village, or married boys they loved, but March stayed by her window, and before she knew it the pane of glass had become her universe, the empty road her fate.
After three years, she no longer recognized herself when she looked in the mirror. She wasn’t certain how it had happened, but she no longer seemed young. At last, on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, March Murray did not go to her window. She never found out whether or not the doves returned that year to nest in the chestnut tree. She didn’t hear the peepers call that spring or smell the mint which grew beside the door. Instead, she packed her suitcase and waited while Mrs. Dale called for a taxi to take her to the airport. Alan had lent March the money for a round-trip ticket to California, but while she was waiting to board, March went into the rest room and tore the return section of the ticket into pieces, then tossed it into the trash.
March had spent a lifetime up in her bedroom, waiting for Hollis, trying to figure out what she’d done wrong. She’s spent another lifetime since as a wife and a mother; she is a completely different person now. Here she is, making up the beds in this cold, empty house on Fox Hill where she hasn’t been for so long. Her hands are quick as she pulls the clean bed linen over the mattress. It was a young girl who came to this bed, one who cried easily and counted stars instead of sheep on nights when she couldn’t sleep. March doesn’t cry now; she’s far too busy for anything like that. Still, there are mornings when she wakes with tears in her eyes. That’s when she knows she’s been dreaming about him. And although she never remembers her dreams, there’s always the scent of grass on her pillow, as if the past were something that could come back to you, if you only wished hard enough, if you were brave enough to call out his name.
Every evening at this time, Hollis checks the perimeters of his property. He can do it on foot or in his truck, he can do it blindfolded, if need be. Like any poor relation, he knows precisely what belongs to him. Even those blueberries are his, although it gives him some deep, bitter pleasure to watch the squirrels and raccoons enjoy the fruit. They can eat their fill, as far as Hollis is concerned, without ever once having to beg, as he used to each and every day.
Hollis has long believed that the past can only hurt you if you let it. If you stop to consider all that was done and undone. Best not to dwell on what went wrong. Even better-don’ t think at all. There are days when Hollis actually manages to do so, relying instead on instinct and habit. Of course, there are evenings such as this, when he can’t stop thinking. He knows March Murray is coming back for the funeral; she may already be here, up in her old room where the shadows fall across the floor at this hour. At times when he can’t block out his thoughts, Hollis tries to rearrange his perspective. He goes over all he owns, which now includes not only all of Guardian Farm and Fox Hill, but most of Main Street as well. He has land down in Florida, along the west coast and in Orlando and down in the Keys. He is also co-owner of a racetrack outside of Fort Lauderdale, and the best part about all this is, he never even has to return to that state where he spent so much miserable time; he gets all his checks in the mail.
This year Hollis will be forty-two and he’s done all right for a beggar who looked so ragged that the Coopers’ care-taker threatened to call the police the first time he saw him. He’s done just fine for a boy who left Fox Hill with fifty-seven dollars in his pockets. All that he owns should be enough. Hollis has squared the debts owed him, he should be satisfied, but he’s not even close. He’s starving for something, and even though he forces himself to eat three meals a day, he keeps losing weight, as if he were devouring his own flesh.
He’s not going to think about what’s bothering him; he simply refuses to get farther inside his own head. Instead, he’ll see to the old pony that belonged to his son, which has come down with colic. There are the usual measures-keep the pony standing and feed it mineral oil-but Hollis always blows a little salt into each of the afflicted animal’s nostrils as well. It’s a trick he learned years ago at the tracks down in Florida, one of the few tactics he’d dare to reveal. An old wives’ tale, scoff the regulars down at the Lyon Cafe, but those who have tried Hollis’s salt remedy haven’t been unhappy with the results.
Well, nobody ever said Hollis was stupid. That’s never been the complaint. Still, his presence is something most men down at the Lyon would prefer to do without. Hollis is the richest man in town, and probably in the county as well; he contributes generously to the Policemen’s Association and the Firemen’s Fund, and a ward at St. Bridget’s Hospital has been named in his honor, but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to socialize with him, or that Hollis doesn’t notice that the town elders only court him when they need a new roof for the library or funds for a stoplight.
One thing wealth buys in a town this size is respect. Other men might flinch when Hollis joins them at their table, but they don’t dare suggest he find another seat. They talk to him courteously, all the while wondering why the hell he doesn’t just go home. He doesn’t even drink, he only sits there, with a Coke or a ginger ale, for reasons the regulars are still trying to figure out. Jack Harvey, who specializes in air-conditioning and heat installation, insists that Hollis’s motive, when he joins them at their table, is to ensure he’ll be ready to snatch up their souls if they have one drink too many. Whenever Hollis finally leaves, and a cold wind blasts through the door as it slams shut behind him, then his neighbors are brave enough to refer to him as the devil. Mr. Death, that’s what they call him when his back is turned, and they drink a toast to his departure.
It’s the women in town who turn to look when Hollis walks by. They pity him, they really do. He lost not only his wife but their boy, Coop, who was sick every day of his life, as weak as paste and in need of constant nursing from the start. It’s lonely for a man to live like that, and the women in town know who among them have gone home with Hollis over the years. They’re not always the prettiest or the youngest. They’re women who know the score, who won’t make demands, who may have a husband who works nights or a boyfriend in the next state. They’re the ones who know that Hollis isn’t about to give them anything they want or need, but who still can’t turn him down. He’s been hurt, that’s what the women who have slept with him say, and he needs someone. They don’t have to mention that getting older has only served to make Hollis even more handsome than he was back in high school, when they would never have had a chance with him, when he wouldn’t look at anyone but March Murray.
Tonight, Hollis searches through the cabinets for the canister of salt, then reaches for his jacket, which is so worn the fabric is past repairing. The same is true of the house; it has begun to come apart, and this pleases Hollis. He hasn’t had the place painted in fifteen years, hasn’t repaired the roof, which leaks in twenty-six spots when the rain comes down hard. The destruction of the house which once belonged to the Coopers is a small, but enjoyable, satisfaction. Hollis likes to find cobwebs in the parlor where Mr. Cooper used to smoke his cigars. Annabeth Cooper’s perennial garden, of which she was always so proud, has been destroyed by Japanese beetles and mildew. In Richard Cooper’s bedroom you can hear the raccoons, who are living in the walls, and in Belinda’s old room the edges of the marble mantel have disintegrated into dust. The Wedgwood, so elegant at parties, is currently being used for the dogs and is now so chipped no one would imagine this china came from London in wooden crates, and that each bowl and plate had been wrapped in a swathe of white cotton.
Hollis slams through the side door, ignoring the sleepy red dogs, who all rise to their feet to follow, working out of instinct, just as surely as Hollis does. These dogs are strays, the ones people say are descended from mongrels abandoned to breed with foxes over a hundred years ago. Whatever their lineage, the dogs look evil, with their coarse coats and yellow eyes; their piercing yelps often frighten off deliverymen and letter carriers. The dogs are sensitive to Hollis, however. They know his moods, and when he pauses to take a deep breath and look at the sky, they push against each other and whine. They’re anxious when Hollis slows down, but Hollis is merely appreciating what’s around him. He’s always favored October, with its gloomy, cold core, and he can never get enough of looking over his land. Why shouldn’t he stop to appreciate all that he once envied and now owns? He gave up everything for this land, so he might as well stand here and feel that it’s his.
The year when Henry Murray brought Hollis home, there were more than fifty racehorses at Guardian Farm. Hollis had no interest in horses, and doesn’t to this day, but March was fascinated, not only with the Coopers’ horses but with their wealth. Her father gave most of what he earned away and much of the work he did after hours was pro bono. Even though Henry Murray was an esteemed member of the community, March had only one pair of new shoes a year whereas Susie Justice, for instance, had four or five. At that point, March cared more about shoes than she did about the welfare of the poor, and maybe that’s why she was interested in the Coopers’ horses: each one was worth more money than her father would ever manage to earn.
Hollis remembers that he and March hid on the far side of a stone wall so that March could count the horses. It was a hot, windy day and March had to keep grabbing at her long, dark hair so it wouldn’t fly into her eyes. The wind echoed, like a drumbeat or a warning, and everything smelled like grass. Mr. Cooper’s horses were hardly the same species as the bony haybags found in backyards along Route 22. These horses had run at Belmont and at Saratoga; they were so fast they could outrace the storm clouds that came down from Fox Hill.
As soon as Hollis married Belinda, he sold off nearly all the horses, and now there are only three in a barn large enough to house dozens: his son Coop’s lazy, old pony; the ancient workhorse, Geronimo, who used to pull bales of hay into the fields for the thoroughbreds; and Tarot, Belinda’s horse, who killed two of his riders before they took him off the track. Hollis hates them all. He hates the sound and smell of horses; he hates the stupid ones, who shy at garter snakes and pools of rainwater, and he hates the smart ones, like Tarot, even more. Right now, as he nears the barn, Hollis can hear the pony whimpering. It’s a faint, small sound, but it sets Hollis in mind of how horrible a horse’s scream is. Before he can stop himself from thinking, he sees a white horse fall to its knees. It falls like snow, like a drift which can cover you completely. Well, Hollis isn’t about to dwell on that. He turns off all consciousness when it comes to the years he was away. Some people might say three years isn’t that long to be gone, but Hollis knows it’s time enough to have a hole form inside you. It’s exactly the right amount of time to leave you empty, forever after, no matter who you once were or what you once might have been.
Tarot is in the first stall, which has been his home since the day he came to the Farm. A bay thoroughbred, dark as mahogany, he would have brought more at auction than any of the horses Hollis disposed of, if his reputation hadn’t been so notorious. Breeders up and down the East Coast still refer to Tarot when they want to call up a horse whose potential is chewed to pieces, a champion who went so haywire he might as well have been sold for dog food. Even though he would behave for Belinda, people in the village still talk about the times when Tarot escaped. Some of the shopkeepers-Sam Deveroux, who owns the hardware shop, for instance, and Mimi Frank, who styles hair at the Bon Bon-insist that Tarot breathed out fire when he ran through the town. They swear there was one warm evening in May when he singed all the lilacs on Main Street. To this day, the flowers that bloom on these bushes carry the scent of sulfur; they’ve been known to burn a child’s hand, if one is foolish enough to grab for a bunch of the blossoms.
People in town wonder why Hollis bothers to keep a worthless old racehorse around. The women like to think it’s a mark of respect for Belinda, who loved the horse so, but the men joke it’s simply because Hollis refuses to take a low price for his property. Neither assessment is correct. Hollis retains the horse because he is a waste, just as Hollis himself is. Every night they face off, and each time they do, they despise each other a little more. This feud doesn’t mean that Hollis would ever get rid of Tarot. All in all, you don’t take the only creature mean enough to be your equal out behind the barn so you can shoot him in the head.
“Hey, buddy,” Hollis whispers as he approaches Tarot’s stall. As usual, the thoroughbred looks right through him. “Fuck you too.” Hollis is always astounded by how damned haughty a horse can be. “Double fuck you.”
On that day when he and March first came here, they were caught by Jimmy Parrish, who now uses a cane and spends all his evenings at the Lyon Cafe, spouting racetrack statistics and boring people silly. Back then, Jim was the foreman at Guardian Farm, and he took his job seriously. It was a dog who gave them away, one of Annabeth Cooper’s stupid poodles, who yapped like crazy and led Jimmy Parrish right to the stone wall where they were hiding.
The Coopers weren’t friendly with people in the village and No Trespassing signs lined the perimeters of their property. Even their parties, given all summer long, had guests imported from New York and Boston, although local people were always well aware when Annabeth Cooper threw one of her bashes. Truckloads of roses would be delivered from Boston, and so much champagne was served that the bees got drunk and wandered into houses all over the village, buzzing like crazy, but too giddy and confused to sting.
Hollis and March knew they weren’t wanted at the Coopers’, but they came to count horses anyway. Hollis can still hear the wind the way it was on the day they were caught. He hears it in his dreams, and when he walks across the pastures he now owns. It was impossible to make out what March was saying over the roar of the wind, but Hollis could see her foot was caught between two stones. Annabeth Cooper’s poodle was snapping; it had surprisingly large teeth for a dog of its type, and it must have struck flesh, because March’s hand was bleeding.
“I’m phoning the police,” Jimmy Parrish had shouted, loud enough for them to hear.
March was wearing a white shirt which billowed out like a flag in the wind. She knew that Hollis had had several run-ins with the police. He’d been caught taking some magazines he couldn’t afford at the pharmacy, and the owner of the liquor store had ratted on him when he tried to buy a six-pack of beer. He was a city boy, brought to Fox Hill with his city ways intact, and March didn’t hold it against him. Still, one more strike and he might just be out.
“Go,” March mouthed to him. “Go on,” she insisted.
Afraid of the police, spooked by the wind, Hollis turned and ran. Hollis was a good runner, but there’s not a day that goes by when he doesn’t wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t been so fast, if he’d been caught, or if he’d simply stayed where he was. What if he and March had spent that day up at Olive Tree Lake instead of spying at the Farm? Is this how fates are made and futures cast? An idle choice, a windy day, a dog that can’t mind its own business?
Some people know the exact moment when they’ve lost everything. They can look back and see it plain as day and for the life of them they can’t understand why they didn’t spot the situation as it was happening. Why didn’t Hollis stop running? Why didn’t he stay by her side? He waited for March for what seemed like forever, on the rutted back road which led from the Farm to Fox Hill. As the afternoon went on the wind died down, but the blood rushing in Hollis’s own head had replaced the sound. His head was pounding, and the more time that passed, the worse his headache became. Finally, the sky turned inky. The peepers were calling and the moon was climbing into the sky by the time March appeared.
She was holding a handful of roses cut from Annabeth Cooper’s own garden; Unity and Double Delight and Peace were all clutched to her chest as she ran toward him. That’s what Hollis saw first, pink roses in the dark night. All at once he felt like crying, and he might have done so, if March hadn’t started talking right away. It wasn’t that he was listening to what she said-certainty he didn’t want to hear how smart Richard Cooper was, or that his sister, Belinda, was so kindhearted she kept an opossum as a pet, feeding it bread softened in warm milk. allowing it to sleep on the quilt at the foot of her bed, even though Mrs. Cooper had forbade any animals but her poodles in the house. No, he didn’t need to hear those details, because he knew what had happened from the look on March’s face. In a single afternoon, all because of a stupid dog and a stone wall, it had happened. He had lost her.
As soon as Guardian Farm legally became his, Hollis cut down all of Annabeth Cooper’s roses. They used to grow by the split-rail fence, and they’re a lot more stubborn than Hollis would have imagined. Every year or so he has to take a sickle and hack away at the branches which insist on growing back. This past spring he found a red rose on the ground beneath the fence, and it was just as startling to him as a pool of blood would have been. He kicked the flower beneath a hedge of evergreens, and yet he continued to see it from the comer of his eye. He saw that rose long after it had already wilted, and died.
Tonight, however, it’s not roses he’s thinking of. It’s revenge. Once you get a taste of getting back at someone, it sticks with you. It makes you count up all your assets and your enemy’s losses, again and again, even though the figures have remained the same for years. Of course, it’s hardest to calculate the worth of a human being. Hollis’s adopted nephew, Hank, for instance, is usually an asset, but tonight he’s a total loss. He was supposed to make certain Coop’s pony stayed on its feet, but he’s fallen asleep in a rocking chair, and the pony is down on its knees, moaning in a pile of hay.
“Good nap?” Hollis says.
Hank immediately gets up, stumbling over one of his own boots. He’s grown more than six inches in the past year; he’s six three and still growing and he always feels clumsy and much too tall. His coloring is fair, like his father, Alan’s, with hair the color of straw and a ruddiness that rises into his face whenever he’s embarrassed.
“Shit,” Hank says, although there’s no need for him to curse himself. Hollis will do that for him.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Hollis asks. “Or have you given up thinking?”
“Sorry,” Hank says, for all the good it will do. He never does anything right, at least not in Hollis’s eyes.
Hank has been thrown off all day; he’s been thinking, all right, but what’s on his mind is Judith Dale, who used to take care of him and Coop. She used to cook dinner every evening after Belinda died; she fixed corn fritters and curried turkey soup, pumpkin custard and wild grape pie. You simply couldn’t stop eating when Mrs. Dale made you something; you wished for a triple stomach, like that of a cow, so you could keep on shoveling it in and asking for more. Now, Hank and Hollis mostly have bologna-and-cheese sandwiches and things out of cans-soups and chilies that don’t taste like much unless you add half a shaker of salt. Mrs. Dale wouldn’t have tolerated a diet like that. She believed in homemade things. Every year, on Hank’s birthday, she would bake a chocolate cake. Even after Coop died, when Hollis told her they didn’t need her anymore and she went back to live in the house on Fox Hill, she sent Hank a chocolate cake once a year, and he always ate every bit.
In the past few years, Hank has made certain to stop by Fox Hill every few weeks and check on Mrs. Dale. Just ten days ago, he’d gone over and cleaned out her gutters, even though she insisted she could easily hire Ken Helm from the village to do the job. Afterward, she’d given Hank a piece of cranberry-orange pie at her kitchen table. No one could turn down one of Mrs. Dale’s desserts, and she often brought pies out to the old house in the Marshes, the one people said was built by the town founder, Aaron Jenkins. She carted bags of groceries out to the Marshes as well, and heavy woolen blankets and clean gloves and socks. She brought out matches and soap, and sweaters she found at the rummage sale held once a month at Town Hall.
She saw to just about every item a person might need to exist in this world, at least when it came to physical matters. But she never trod on emotional territory, and wouldn’t think to give counsel unless directly asked. She never, for instance, suggested that Hank go out to the Marshes himself. She never said, “Go see your father.” She may have thought about it, she may have even been convinced that unless Hank went out to that ramshackle place, where the reeds were taller than a full-grown man, his life would forever be lacking, but she never said more than “Lemon or milk?” after she’d poured his tea, and she always hugged him close when it came time for him to leave.
Hank didn’t even know Judith Dale had passed on until this afternoon. He had stopped at the hardware store on Main Street and was standing in the pet department, looking for mineral oil for Coop’s ailing pony, when he overheard someone in the next aisle discussing Judith Dale’s funeral. Immediately, Hank felt something behind his eyes go all hot, but he didn’t cry. He stood there in the pet department until he didn’t feel dizzy anymore; then he went to the register, paid, and left.
Tonight. while he should have been taking care of the pony, he was thinking instead of the look on Judith Dale’s face when she told him that Coop had died. It was a winter night, cold and filled with ashy starlight. Hank was out feeding the dogs; as he walked back to the house he could hear his own footsteps on the frozen earth. Judith Dale was waiting for him, holding the screen door open, and a stream of yellow light swept across the ground. She put her hand on Hank’s shoulder, and to his great surprise he saw that she had to reach up to do so. “We’ve lost him,” Mrs. Dale said, and in that instant Hank realized he had never before seen real grief.
This is the reason he’s forgotten his chores now, all these years later-an oversight not usually in his nature. He’s been too preoccupied with wondering what happens when you lose someone. His mother, for instance, who died when he was so young he doesn’t even remember her. His father, as well, whom he d prefer not to remember. Hollis and Belinda’s son, Coop, who died at the age of twelve, and never found out what happened at the end of Treasure Island, the book Mrs Dale had been reading to him in the last month of his life.
Hollis is slipping a rope around the pony’s neck, doing Hank’s job himself, and although the pony is stubborn and rolls its eyes, it gets to its feet when the rope is tugged. Hollis spills out some salt into the palm of his hand, then blows it into the pony’s nostrils. The single character trait shared by father and son was their dislike of horses. Coop was allergic to animals and broke out in hives if he got close to anything with a tail. It was Belinda who insisted the boy needed a pony, and it’s Hank who’s set on keeping this pathetic creature in memory of the boy.
“Sorry about falling asleep,” Hank says. “It won’t happen again.”
“Give me one good reason, and I’ll get rid of this thing,” Hollis says of the pony.
Hank nods. He knows Hollis means what he says. Hank keeps his mouth shut and his thoughts to himself, as he always has. He’s used to Hollis’s ways, just as Hollis is used to him, after all these years.
“You heard about Mrs. Dale?” Hollis asks now.
Hank nods again. You’ve got to tread carefully with Hollis. You’ve got to watch what you say.
They’ve walked outside together, into a starry night that’s unusually clear and cold for this time of year. All that rain which fell earlier will freeze tonight, so that the ground will give them some trouble tomorrow when they go to bury Judith Dale. Mrs. Dale was a good woman, Hollis will grant her that. A busybody and a pain in the neck, but she never judged what she didn’t understand and that, Hollis knows, is rare. Unlike Alan and the boys in the village, she treated him fairly, but that doesn’t mean he has to moan and bellyache down at the funeral parlor. Ashes to ashes, that’s all there is. If you can’t change a fact of life, then be smart enough to walk away from it, that’s always been Hollis’s motto. Walk away fast.
“If you want to go to the funeral, that’s your business,” Hollis tells his nephew.
“Thanks,” Hank says. “I might.”
If Hollis did go to the service it would be for one reason alone. March Murray. Instead, he’s going to wait for her to come to him. It will happen, he knows that much. He’s gotten everything else that was ever denied him, all that’s left now is March. He has never loved anyone else, and he never will. He thought he couldn’t live without her, and in a way he was right. It’s a half life he’s been living, one where you go through the motions without any of it mattering. He simply has to give it more time, that’s all. People who think you can’t will certain things into being with the power of your pride are fools, plain as that. She’s already back in town. It’s only a matter of time before she’s back with him, and for that, Hollis can wait a while longer.
Tonight, he’ll go to bed in the spare room off the kitchen, since he can’t stand to enter the bedroom where he slept when he was married. In the morning, while people in town are getting dressed for the funeral service, while March Murray is brushing her long dark hair, Hollis will fix himself black coffee, as always. He’ll begin the chores he does routinely-paying the bills, speaking with his lawyer, making certain rents are collected and debts are paid. At noon, when his neighbors have left the chapel to gather at the cemetery beyond the golf course, off Route 22, he’ll walk the boundaries of his property to make certain none of the fences are down and no one has trespassed. He’ll do this, as he does every single day, and he won’t stop until he’s completely exhausted, knowing full well that if he ever did stop, if he ever really looked around him, every single inch of this acreage he owns would serve to remind him of all that went wrong.
On the day of Judith Dale’s funeral, the sky is as gray as soapstone. Mothers in town fix their children oatmeal for breakfast and insist that wool mittens and socks be retrieved from dresser drawers. The doors of the library squeak when they’re pushed open, the way they always do when the weather begins to change. Over on the comer of Elm Street and Main, the bakery must have loaves of the cinnamon bread they’re so famous for in the oven, because the scent is everywhere; it’s as if someone had tossed dough over the whole town. This is the sort of day best spent in bed, but March and Gwen are dressed and ready to go at eight-thirty when Susanna Justice, March’s oldest friend, comes to fetch them in her red pickup truck, apologizing for the dog hair her Labrador retrievers have left on the seat, bemoaning the fact that March and Gwen will have to scrunch together in order to fit.
“Listen, I don’t know what I’d do without you,” March says, and she tells the saga of the rental car, which has already been towed back to town. “You are a true friend. I’m grateful.”
The surprising thing is, March means it, and she never thought herself capable of such sentiments when she and Susie were girls. They were thrown together because their fathers were partners, but they hated each other all the same. For two years solid they refused to speak even the simplest phrases to each other, not even “Pass the sweet potato pie” at Thanksgiving dinner. Now, of course, neither can remember exactly why they’d constructed their wall of silence.
“It was because you were an idiot,” Susie says as she does her best to clear out the cab of her pickup. Aside from the dog hair, there are files and stray bits of paper and dozens of maps.
“Actually it was because you were a know-it-all,” March shoots back. “And you still are.”
They both have to laugh at this. Susanna is a reporter for the local newspaper, The Bugle, and in fact, she does know everything that’s going on in town. She knows not only how much old Mr. Judson got for his land up at Olive Tree Lake, but also that he refused to sell to Hollis at an even better price, although he allowed Hollis to take him out to dinner in Boston and send him a crate of vintage Chablis. Not that she would ever mention this bit of business to March; nor the fact that half a dozen women in town are so crazy for Hollis they would walk out on their husbands or boyfriends and abandon their real lives if only they were asked.
Why, Susanna Justice has acquired more information than most people would have room for in their heads. She knows what the school committee budget will be next year, and that the animal control guy, Bud Horace, is too much of a softy to pick up stray dogs. In all of this jumble, there are plenty of facts she could have done without knowing. Who died last night at St. Bridget’s Hospital, whose husband gets nasty when he has too much to drink at the Lyon Cafe, who was found in a parked car at the rest area on Route 22, with a gun between the seats and a suicide note taped to the glove compartment.
“Honey, all you have to do is squeeze me and I give out worthless information,” Susie always says.
She even knows when the sales take place at Laughton’s Lingerie Shop (every January and July, second Saturday of the month) and how much the jelly doughnuts cost at the Bluebird Coffee Shop (fifty cents). She’s always learning something new, and it has recently come to her attention that Ed Milton, the chief of police, kisses with his eyes closed and looks like an angel when he sleeps. Some information, however, she’s been aware of all her life; it’s old news. For example-that her old friend March Murray wouldn’t know good luck if it came up and slapped her in the face.
“You think you’re so hot living out in Palo Alto. Well, for your information, Eileen Singleton is retiring on Tuesday after forty-three years of work at the library.”
“Oh, gosh,” March says. “Stop the presses.” She winds her long hair into a knot, which is kept in place with a silver comb, one that she cast herself. She and Susie are wearing similar silver bracelets, among the first March ever dared to try. What started out as a hobby has become more and more rewarding, both financially and artistically.
“That’s nothing,” Susie says, brushing at the dog hair stuck to the one dress she owns that’s sober enough to wear to a funeral. Susie has cropped blond hair and gray-blue eyes and black is definitely not her color, dog hair or no. “You want real news? Mr. and Mrs. Morrisey are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter, Jane-remember that bitch?-to some guy they don’t think much of who’s got a job with the DPW in Gloucester and is really cute. I saw him at the engagement party and double wow. He probably will be a problem. Halfway through the party, he asked me for my phone number. Everyone has to invite me to everything, you know, if they want a mention in The Bugle.”
“That’s because you’re a superior being,” March says.
“As are you,” Susie says. “Hence our friendship.”
Gwen, who’s been listening in and who now struggles to climb into the cab of the pickup in her extremely short skirt, cannot believe how ridiculous her mother and Susanna Justice are when they get together. Susie comes out to California once or twice a year, and they’re just as stupid on the West Coast as they are right here. “You are both so mature,” she says disdainfully.
Gwen’s tiny black dress isn’t the only reason Susanna Justice and March shut up and stare. Gwen is wearing gloopy black mascara and has moussed her hair so that it spikes up in the front, like a little bed of nails. Wait till she tells her friend Minnie: There I was, trapped like a rat, with the two of them giving me fashion attitude. I couldn’t get away, I was trapped, I tell you, trapped in a way no human being should ever be.
“You’re letting her go like that?” Susie asks March.
“Letting her?” People who haven’t had children have the oddest ideas.
“Can we just go to the funeral and get this over with?” Gwen says in her froggy voice. Before coming outside, she sneaked a cigarette in the bathroom, then doused herself with some Jean Naté she found in the medicine cabinet which she thinks has gotten rid of the scent of smoke.
“Oh, yeah, definitely,” Susie says, getting in behind the wheel. “Let’s not let Judith’s funeral take up too much of your precious time.”
“Exactly,” Gwen says. She’s flipped down the visor in order to get a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She wishes for two things: bigger eyes and a thinner face. She can’t abide her own reflection, so how could anyone else? Maybe her mother and that stupid Susie aren’t so wrong when they judge her. Cutting her hair was certainly a mistake, she sees that now. Her look is so wrong it’s almost a joke. She’d like to be the human equivalent of an Afghan hound. Instead, what she sees is a beagle looking back at her.
“Do you mind?” March says.
Scrunched in next to Gwen, March has to struggle to push the visor back up so it won’t jab either of them in the eye as they ride along the bumpy back road. This day is going to be awful. It’s the sort of day you wouldn’t mind losing completely, even if it meant your life would be twenty-four hours shorter.
“I can’t believe Judith is really dead,” March says. “She took care of everyone and never complained. I can’t think of a single selfish thing she ever did. Not ever. She was the greatest.”
“She was something, all right,” Susie concurs.
March might have called Susie on a statement like that, but the road has become so bumpy Susie is concentrating on navigating past the ruts. And anyway, Susie always took pride in being cryptic. What is that supposed to mean? March was always saying when they were younger and thrown together for the day, and Susie would always look at her as if March were crazy and any implications sprang from March’s own unreliable imagination.
“This is where my rental car died,” March says as they approach the deepest of the ruts.
“Then hold on,” Susie says, and for old time’s sake she floors the gas pedal for a real roller-coaster ride.
“You guys are nuts,” Gwen shouts, but Susie and March, supposedly older and wiser, pay no attention to her. For a little while at least, as they shake and rattle over the bumps, they manage to forget today’s destination. They forget how long it’s been since they’ve walked down this road, arm in arm. They were fierce and fearless girls back then, in their jeans and boots and sweaters, and March, for one, was absolutely confident of what her future would bring: total happiness and true love, that’s what she wanted. Nothing more or less would do, just as no other place would ever be home: nowhere but the hill would ever be as comfortable or as beautiful or as real.
Susanna Justice suddenly steps on the brakes, hard, so they’re all snapped back by the force of their seat belts.
“Do you believe that goddamn thing?” Susie says, as a rabbit runs right in front of them.
This landscape is definitely real, if nothing more. From the minute March woke this morning, in the old bed where she’d slept for thousands of nights, she knew coming back had been a mistake. She opened her eyes, and already she was thinking of Hollis. When she saw the lattice of frost on the inside of her windowpanes it was exactly as if she never had left. Her room was always the chilliest in the house. Often, she would find that the tumbler of water she’d left beside her bed had frozen solid. She remembers how she would hold the glass up and breathe on the ice until it melted into streams that spelled out Hollis’s name.
The first thing she did today, after she pulled on her navy-blue dress and a black sweater, was go downstairs in her bare feet and try to phone Richard. From where she stood, by the telephone table, she could see Gwen, asleep on the couch in the little sewing room. She could see through the oval window, past the garden and the trees. Her heart was racing, that was the silly thing. She had begun to make a bargain with herself, the kind that women who are in love with the wrong man always resort to: If Richard answered by the fifth ring, she would be all right. She would be perfectly safe, and safety, after all, was what she had opted for, even though she was back here looking out at the apple trees she used to climb. And then she’d realized how early it was in California, only a little past three a.m., and she’d hung up quickly, but she’d been all right without talking to him; she’d made tea in one of Judith’s pretty ceramic pots and in no time she was fine.
Or so she had thought. Now that she’s face-to-face with the pastures of Guardian Farm her skin feels cold. She wishes she had brought along gloves and a heavy woolen scarf. At this moment, she’d prefer to be a million miles away.
“Don’t worry,” Susie says. She’s noticed the distress on her friend’s face. “He won’t show up at the funeral. Take my word for it. He’s still refusing to do whatever it is he should.”
March gives Susie a look which she hopes will silence her, but it’s too late.
“Who are we talking about?” Gwen asks.
Gwen always does that-listens when you don’t want her to, ignores you whenever there’s something you want her to hear.
“No one,” March tells her.
“A figment of our imagination,” Susie insists on adding. “Or some of us, anyway.”
“Yeah, right,” Gwen says tartly. “Like I know what you mean.”
“She means she’s a know-it-all,” March says, but inside she’s thinking, Lucky for me that you don’t understand. Lucky for you.
They’ve left plenty of time to get to the service, and yet somehow they’ve managed to be late. The parking lot is already crowded when they pull in, and why shouldn’t it be? Judith Dale had a lot of friends, from the library, where she’d been a member of the board for ages, and from the garden club, which did so much to beautify the town, and from St. Bridget’s as well, where she volunteered in the children’s ward two nights a week, reading stories and playing games of Candyland.
March remembers wondering why it was that Mrs. Dale didn’t have children of her own. She’d asked her once, when it was late at night and she’d been sick with a fever and Mrs. Dale had been sitting up with her, spoon-feeding her rice pudding and endless cups of tea.
“That’s not what was intended for me,” Mrs. Dale had told her.
What Mrs. Dale had meant by that, March never quite understood. Was it God she was referring to, or the hand of fate, or the choices she herself had made, perhaps a long time ago? At any rate, there were sides of Mrs. Dale which were secret, and sides which were not. She liked rain, and children, and going off by herself on holidays from which she brought back small tokens as gifts: pretty matches, hair combs, mints with pink and green candy shells. She believed in home cooking and in the supreme beauty of yellow roses, six dozen of which March has ordered for this service. The scent of roses is sweet and ripe and sorrowful, making March dizzy as she goes to sit in the front row of the chapel, between Gwen and her father’s old law partner, Susie’s father, the Judge.
The Judge is tall, six foot four, and so imposing that some people say there are criminals who confess at the mere sight of him. But today, he seems a shakier version of himself; he will be seventy-two next month and his age shows, in his large hands, which tremble, in his pallor and his faded blue eyes. He keeps one hand on March’s, but for whose comfort, even the Judge isn’t certain.
Since there’s not room in the pew for everyone, Louise Justice, the Judge’s wife, is sitting directly behind them. Every once in a while she leans forward and pats March or the Judge on the shoulder.
“This is such a shock,” she whispers, again and again.
Judith Dale left instructions for the service to be simple, just as the marker she chose for herself is to be a plain gray stone. Gwen had no idea how depressing such a service could be. She is sitting up straight, studying the closed coffin. She actually seems frozen in place, her skin white as ice. With her spiky hair and her excess of mascara, she looks fairly ghoulish. Several people who have come up to give March their condolences have avoided Gwen completely, or have shaken her cold hand without saying a word.
Now, while Harriet Laughton is giving the final address, on behalf of Judith Dale’s friends on the board of the library, Gwen leans close to her mother. For one brief moment, March thinks her daughter wants a hug.
“I’m going to be sick,” Gwen whispers.
“No,” March says, even though the scent of roses and the heat inside the chapel are cloying. “You won’t be.”
“I’m not kidding,” Gwen insists. It’s the smell of death that’s getting to her. It’s the very idea. “Oh, boy,” she says, sounding scared.
March and Gwen make their way out of the pew; then March circles an arm around her daughter and guides her into the aisle, toward the door. She can hear a murmur of concern: the voices of Judith Dale’s friends, kindhearted volunteers from the library and the hospital.
“You just need fresh air,” March tells Gwen.
Gwen nods and gulps, but she feels like she may not make it. She manages a dash for the door, and when she races past Hank-who is in the last row, along with Ken Helm, who considered Mrs. Dale one of his favorite customers, and Mimi Frank, who cut Mrs. Dale’s hair-he looks up in time to see Gwen slipping out of the chapel, quick as a shadow. It’s not often you see someone you don’t know in the village, and Hank has the sudden urge to get out of his pew and follow this girl. She looks so distressed, and she’s beautiful besides, but Hank isn’t the sort to storm out of a funeral service. He stays where he is, seated beside one of the vases of yellow roses March ordered from the Lucky Day Florist on Main Street. He’s wearing his one good white shirt, a pair of black jeans he hopes don’t look too beat-up, and his boots, which he polished last night. He borrowed a tie from Hollis, who has a closetful of expensive clothes; he combed his hair twice.
All the same, Hank has a shivery feeling under his skin, in spite of how overheated the chapel has become, and when the service is over, he’s one of the first to leave. This way, so quick to be out the door, he’s more likely to get another look at the girl. And he does-she’s over on the curb, so dizzy that she needs to keep one hand on the fender of the hearse, for balance. Three crows are flying above the parking lot, making a horrible racket. The sky is so flat and gray Gwen has the urge to put her arms over her head for protection, just in case stones should begin to fall from the clouds.
Six strong men-Ken Helm, the Judge, Dr. Henderson, Mr. Laughton, Sam Deveroux from the hardware store, and Jack Harvey, who installed an air conditioner for Mrs. Dale last summer-help to carry the coffin from the chapel. Just seeing them struggle with its weight brings tears to Gwen’s eyes. Here she is, with her short skirt and her hair all spiked up, looking like a perfect fool, completely unprepared for real life. Well, ready or not doesn’t matter. Something is about to happen. Gwen can feel it. Time itself has changed; it’s become electrified, with every second standing on end.
Gwen can see her mother now, in the doorway of the chapel, a look of heartbreak on her face. Here comes the coffin, carried even closer. This is not the sort of thing that usually affects Gwen; she has a talent for blocking out bad news. All she has to do is shut her eyes and count to a hundred, but she’s not closing her eyes now. Oh, how she wishes she had stayed at home. How easy it would have been to go on thinking about nothing, to ignore death and fate and the possibility that a life can easily be shaken to its core. That is how you know you’ve left childhood behind-when you wish for time to go backward. But it’s too late for that. Whether Gwen likes it or not, she’s here, under this gray and mournful sky, and her eyes are open wide.
After the cemetery, and the buffet supper at Harriet Laughton’s house-where March is called poor dear at least a dozen times, and Gwen is asked so often whether something is wrong with her eyes that she finally goes into the Laughtons’ powder room to remove her mascara with a white washcloth-March phones Ken Helm, who always says no job is so odd he can’t get it done, and asks if he’ll drive them back to the hill.
“Not that way,” March all but shouts when she realizes Ken intends to take Route 22.
“Gee whiz, Mom.” Gwen can’t believe how touchy her mother has become. “What’s the difference?”
“About two bucks,” Ken Helm says, deadpan as always. “That back road is one slow shortcut.” Ken stares into the woods. “Make a tree sound and its fruit will be sound. Make a tree rotten and its fruit will be rotten.”
Intrigued, Gwen leans forward. “Meaning?”
“We’re all responsible for ourselves, aren’t we?” Ken takes the bumps in the road easily. “And what we harvest.”
“Are you trying to tell us that orchard of Mrs. Dale’s needs work?” Gwen asks. “Is that your point?”
“No,” March says. “He’s letting us know that you pay for what you get. Two dollars more, for instance, for the back road.”
“That’s it,” Ken says. “Matthew 12:33.”
It’s twilight when they reach the house, which means it’s still a sunny afternoon in Palo Alto. Richard is probably in his office, on the far side of the quad. Sunlight streams in from the west at this time of day; the windows are so high Richard has to use an iron rod in order to pull down the shades. He needs to take care at this hour; the specimens he keeps lined up on the window ledge are susceptible to light damage.
The house on Fox Hill is cold when they get inside, but before March bothers with checking on the heat or lighting a fire, she goes to phone Richard. She’s still wearing her jacket; her purse strap is draped over her shoulder as she dials. She feels a little desperate, perhaps even more than a little.
“How about some tea?” she calls to Gwen.
“Fine,” Gwen says, throwing herself into the easy chair patterned with roses.
“No, I mean, you make it. Please.”
March simply wants her daughter out of the room. She wants to be alone with her husband and be told that she continues to be the same exact woman she was when she kissed him goodbye at the airport. She wants to hear him say it out loud, because at this moment, standing here in this house, she doesn’t feel the same. If she weren’t such a rational creature, she’d think the night air was calling to her; she’d believe there were still peepers in those muddy puddles, even though this isn’t their season. Her heart is beating in a different rhythm here; faster, a dangerous pace.
Richard had visited her during those years when she was waiting for Hollis, but she never made anything of it back then. She’d been friendly with his sister, Belinda, and Richard was the sort of kind, slightly dazed person to whom charity came naturally. He rescued lost dogs and stopped for hitchhikers, so it made perfect sense that he’d come to call on March, bringing candy and books, as if getting over Hollis was not unlike recuperating from some horrible illness.
March might have never noticed that Richard was courting her, in his own mild way, if not for the night of Alan and Julie’s wedding. The wedding was held on New Year’s Eve, the year March was nineteen, and by then March could barely feel anything. She could stick a pin in her finger and not even bleed. She could go without eating for days and not feel hunger. She could stay up all night with no need for sleep. The only indication that she was alive at all was that the new shoes Mrs. Dale had insisted she buy hurt her toes.
On the night of the wedding, March was alive enough to overhear many of their guests whisper their opinion of her. What a sorry thing she was, that’s what they were saying. Wasting away, growing old before her time. Only nineteen and look at her, so pale and gray she was little more than a ghost. Look at her hair, with all those white strands. Look at the way her hands had begun to shake. To console herself, March drank five glasses of Mrs. Dale’s champagne-laced cranberry punch, then gave in and danced with Richard. Richard was so tall that March couldn’t look him in the eye as they danced, and perhaps that was best, since she would have been extremely surprised to discover how ardent his expression had become.
Then a senior at Harvard, Richard spent his days at classes and his evenings doing good deeds, volunteering at a shelter-where he folded laundry and mopped floors-and tutoring freshmen students who were overwhelmed by their class work. If not for March, he wouldn’t have returned to Jenkintown at all, since he and his father were no longer speaking. That he came back so often, March had convinced herself, was simply because she was another one of his projects. But on the night of Alan’s wedding, as she danced with him, she realized this wasn’t the case. It was the way he held his arms around her and the slow sound of his breathing which informed her that pity was not Richard’s motivation. Actually, it never had been.
After Alan’s wedding, Richard began to appear several times a week. He brought March boxes of apricots and books from the library. He presented her with potted tulips from Holland and fancy Vermont maple syrup. Often, when Mrs. Dale had the night off, Richard insisted on coming to the house to cook dinner. Alan’s new wife, Julie, who couldn’t fix anything more complicated than a grilled cheese sandwich, acted as his assistant, dicing peppers and carrots, stopping only long enough to take March aside and whisper that she’d be crazy to let Richard Cooper get away from her now.
March watched Richard sometimes, as he sat in the living room and read from one of his textbooks, and he looked so familiar and comfortable that she felt like weeping. She allowed him to kiss her, and she kissed him back, but when she went up to her bedroom and stood at her window to watch the road below, it wasn’t Richard she was looking for.
“You probably shouldn’t come here anymore,” she finally told him one day when the air outside had turned meek, the way it often does before a storm. “I’ll never be in love with you.”
She thought he’d be hurt when she said this, but instead Richard took her hands in his. He was going off to Stanford, for graduate work, and he wanted March to go with him. He’d had a last bitter argument with his father, which concerned Mr. Cooper’s interests in a logging company that was destroying a species of wood spider so tiny it was invisible to the naked eye. In fact, the fight was about greed and love, the sort of brutal argument that can get you written out of your father’s will and drive you three thousand miles away.
Richard had nothing to lose by asking March to marry him, and he wasn’t destroyed when she said no. He was a biologist, after all, with a specialty in entomology, and he knew what reversals often happened in a single life cycle. He sat beneath a palm tree outside his rented apartment in Palo Alto and wrote to March every week, and she wrote back from her bedroom on the second floor. She informed him that the leaves were changing, and that his sister Belinda no longer seemed interested in anything but her horse, and that the hunting ban had been lifted on the hill, so that shot-guns could be heard all day long. She told him much more than she would have imagined, and revealed herself in many ways, although she did not write that she often woke from sleep with tears in her eyes, or that she sometimes heard Hollis’s voice inside her own head.
After she finally stopped waiting for Hollis, Richard was there, right on time, when she arrived in San Francisco. In fact he’d gotten to the airport two hours early, and had been awake since dawn. That first night in California, March slept in his bed. It is the bed they still have; the headboard is more than a hundred years old. Richard found it in a junk shop in Menlo Park, but actually it’s quite a good piece, fashioned of golden oak. March has often wondered why anyone would have ever gotten rid of such a wonderful bed; if, perhaps, the previous owner had died or if he’d loved someone so completely he couldn’t bear to sleep in the same bed once she’d gone.
Richard is stretched out on that bed when March phones, his thin, angular frame completely relaxed. Though it’s late in the day in California, he’s just getting around to reading the morning paper. He appreciates the topsy-turvy in life; he’s always believed, for instance, that mutation is good for a species. If he’d been someone who was easily convinced by statistics, rather than a man who rejoiced in the odd and unprecedented, he would never have gone after March in the first place.
“I’m so glad you’re there,” March says when he picks up the phone.
Richard laughs. “Well, I can’t say the same for you.”
“It’s awful here,” March says. “That’s for sure.”
“That’s why we left,” Richard reminds her. “Did you see your brother?”
“He wasn’t at the funeral, and I don’t have the heart to go looking for him. Although, I guess I really should.” Then out of March’s mouth comes a thought she’s been thinking all day: “Hollis wasn’t there either.”
She can hear Richard breathing; it’s almost as if he’s in the same room. She shouldn’t have mentioned Hollis.
“I didn’t ask about him,” Richard says, “did I?”
After March had married Richard and soon after she discovered she was pregnant, Judith Dale finally told her that Hollis had come back. He had been living above the Lyon Cafe for some time, spending a great deal of money, impressing everyone in town with his new financial status. March remembers how she sat there in the backyard after that call from Judith; her chair was beside the lemon tree, and her feet, which had swollen with her pregnancy, were soaking in a basin of cool water. She dialed Jenkintown information, then phoned the Lyon, and she did it all quickly, before she could stop and think. When she asked for Hollis, she was told he didn’t have a phone, although the bartender who answered was willing to go upstairs to get him. She waited, completely unaware of the scent of lemons. She didn’t notice that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
It took exactly twelve minutes for the bartender to retrieve Hollis from his rented rooms. As soon as she heard his voice, March panicked. She listened to him say Hello twice, and then she hung up. After that, she was nervous every time the phone rang. Had he guessed his caller was March? Had he cared? All through her pregnancy she felt sick to her stomach and trapped in some deep, irrevocable way. When her doctor informed her that her blood pressure was elevated and she needed to spend at least six hours in bed, on her left side, she wasn’t surprised. She was affixed to this place and to her own body; anchored by flesh, blood, and her own exhaustion, she dared not fight her condition. She slept away mornings and afternoons, so dreamy she didn’t hear the birds in the trees or Richard’s voice when he tried to rouse her from sleep.
On the day when Hollis phoned her, March had just woken from a nap, and at first she thought she was still dreaming. March, he said. That’s all he said at first, her name, and she had to sit down before she could listen to more. Why did you leave? he asked. Why did you do this to us?
Don’t be mean, that’s what she said to him, forgetting where and who she was, at least for the moment.
You’re the mean one, he’d said to her. It’s you.
They spoke every night after that, hushed and secret calls, conversations so passionate their words burned. March was seven months pregnant, but that didn’t keep her from calling him. For some reason, she thought it could go on and on that way, but then he made it clear that he wanted her to come back to him. He’d fly out and get her or messenger a first-class ticket. March looked out at her lemon tree. She could feel the baby inside of her moving, and that’s when she knew she couldn’t go. Hollis, however, seemed incapable of understanding that she was too far along in her pregnancy to pack a suitcase and leave.
If you wanted to, you would, he kept saying. If you loved me, you’d do it.
Each night he sounded more bitter. Each night, his disappointment grew. Finally, March called the Lyon to discover that Hollis had moved out. After Gwen was born, March was so distracted, in such a milky trance, that she was able to keep herself from thinking about him. By the time she admitted to herself how much she wanted him, he had married Belinda and it was too late to do anything other than sit beside the lemon tree and cry, then go and wash her face before the baby woke from her nap.
“I’ll be home before you know it,” March tells Richard now.
It’s the oddest thing-she feels as though she is lying, and she’s not. He’s so far away, that’s the problem. She’s more connected to whatever is close by-the teakettle whistling in the kitchen, the first star in the sky.
“Five days tops,” she says. “We’ll go over the estate, pack up the house, and we’re gone.”
It takes Richard a long time to answer, as if the distance between them has somehow slipped them into different time warps.
“I don’t know.” Richard is stretched out on his bed, but he might as well be floating through space. “I worry about you being there.”
“Well, don’t.” March can barely hear him now. It must be the connection, or the disparity between a starry night and a bright afternoon. “I love you,” she tells her husband, but her voice sounds wavery, as if she needed to convince either him or herself.
After March hangs up the phone, a dog somewhere on the other side of Fox Hill begins to howl. Looking out the window, it’s possible to view a vista that appears to reach on without end; it’s as if she can look across the darkness into another universe.
“Did you want milk and sugar?” Gwen calls from the kitchen, where she’s fixing the pot of tea. When there’s no answer she goes to the doorway and sees her mother with her coat still on, standing by the phone. “Mom?”
“You know what?” March says. “I’m too tired for tea. You have it. I’m going to bed.”
Not that she could sleep if she tried. Not in this house. When March goes to her room, she sees the same quilt, fashioned of red and white squares, that was on her bed when she used to think about Hollis. It was as if his image had been implanted inside her eyelids; she carried him with her night or day, eyes opened or closed. She thought about Hollis so much you’d guess there’d be nothing left to think, but here she is, doing it all over again.
It started with all that kissing out on the roof, on hot nights when they couldn’t sleep. In the morning, they’d always pretend nothing had happened. They avoided each other or were overly polite; sometimes, they did manage to forget for an hour or two, long enough to go swimming at Olive Tree Lake, where they raced against each other in the deep water for hours, as though they were nothing more than friends.
When Henry Murray died, at his desk, in his office on Main Street, everything in the house went black for two weeks. All the mirrors were covered with old sheets, and the door was left open so visitors could stop and pay their respects. March mostly remembers sitting in a corner and watching neighbors arrive with bouquets of lilies and platters of food. Once, Hollis sat down beside her. He didn’t own a suit, and was wearing jeans and a white shirt; when he tried to take March’s hand, she pulled away from him. Hollis took up so much space, and at that moment, March had no room for him. But with Hollis it was all or nothing, always. He was sulky and nasty-tempered for days afterwards, leaving March to feel guilty-about what exactly, she was never quite sure.
She should have learned her lesson then; it was so easy to wound him and so very difficult to make amends. She didn’t search him out to apologize for slighting him until several days later, when the house had cleared out. But when she knocked on his door, he didn’t answer; his belongings were no longer in the bedroom closet or stored in the oak dresser. Alan had decided that Hollis had best move up to the attic, seeing as how he wasn’t a member of the family-he was really, Alan reminded Hollis, nothing at all-and that was where March found him. He was sitting on his bed, under the eaves, where a spider was hard at work on its web. The air was close up here, and filtered through a haze of dust, so that everything you looked at seemed silvery and swirling.
“What do you want?” Hollis said. He had a hard, annoyed tone, and he gave her one of his stares, a mean, superior look that could make almost anyone feel like an idiot.
It was best not to talk to Hollis when he got like this. March sat down on a wooden stool and picked up a book from a box of her father’s law books that was being stored up here. Criminal Procedure. She wondered if criminals had the same talent she did: to appear to be doing one thing-leafing through an old, dusty book-white you were really doing something else completely inside your mind. In March’s case, she was imagining that she was kissing Hollis as she sat there and dust floated by.
There was a sharp, stinging odor in the attic, as if a trail of sulfur had been poured over the wide pine floorboards. It was probably the scent of fury, which, in Hollis’ case, was often overpowering. The heat had a heavy, yellow cast, and it was oddly exhausting. Hollis lay down on his metal bed and turned his face toward the wall. There were squirrels nesting on the other side of the plaster; their feet skittered back and forth, like drumbeats inside the eaves.
“Go away,” Hollis said. “Get lost.”
March knew he could be cruel, she’d seen it herself. In a fight he was particularly dangerous because his own blood didn’t frighten him; he didn’t care if he got hurt. Boys at school had learned this the hard way; even those far stronger than Hollis were amazed at how much punishment he could take. Alan had given up physically harassing him; sticks and stones were nothing to Hollis. broken bones still less. It was humiliation that did the trick. The supper eaten at the kitchen counter. The bed in the attic. Anything secondhand, second-rate, run-down, charitably donated.
“Fine,” March said after he told her to go. She was genuinely amazed by the cool authority of her own voice. “Your loss.”
March felt as if she were outside of herself, perched somewhere in the rafters of the attic, watching calmly as her earthly form flung the heavy law book on the floor. A cloud of dust rose between them. She would have done anything for Hollis at that moment. Thrown herself out the window. Relinquished every possession. Slit her wrists. But she certainly wasn’t about to let him know.
Hollis turned to look at her as she headed toward the door. When it seemed that, indeed, she truly was leaving, he stood up, confused. “Wait,” he said.
It was probably ninety degrees outside, and much stuffier up in that attic. March thought about that night when she’d watched him cry himself to sleep. She thought about all of their kisses. A single leaf fell from the chestnut tree in the yard, and March swore she could hear it, falling and falling. When Hollis came over to her, March could feel how hot he was. She was only fourteen, but she knew what she wanted. She wanted him to look at her that way.
“Don’t be mean to me,” he said.
March laughed. He always said that. “You’re the mean one.”
“No, I’m not. It’s you.”
She knew what was going to happen if she stayed, and yet she couldn’t imagine leaving. That was when she began to wonder if the scent of sulfur wasn’t fury but desire, and if, perhaps, it might not be rising from her own skin. She’ll never know how she had the nerve to kiss him the way she did. This wasn’t anything like what they’d been doing on the roof on nights when they sneaked out their windows. Those kisses were shy, tentative things, and this was everything; this was what was deep inside. As soon as she kissed him like that, Hollis could tell how far she was willing to go. He didn’t have to be a mind reader to divine that. It was the way she leaned her head back; it was the way she closed her eyes. She thought she was so smart, keeping all her secrets safe, but in a single instant she revealed every one.
Hollis locked the door and they went to his bed, which hadn’t yet been made up with sheets. When he got on top of her, March heard herself say Oh as if she meant to tell him something, but her voice sounded peculiar and he wasn’t listening anyway. He knew how to kiss, he really did; he knew how to touch you in ways that made you feel like crying, and caused you to want him even more. He must have had the ability to make a girl lose her reason completely, because there they were, in the attic, with Mrs. Dale cooking chicken cutlets for dinner in the kitchen and Alan drinking a beer out on the porch, and March wasn’t stopping him when he pulled down her jeans. A truck delivering some fencing Alan had ordered turned into the driveway, but March didn’t understand what the deliveryman was calling out. She couldn’t understand anything, except how hot she was inside. His fingers were burning her up when he reached into her underpants; he seemed to be going right through her, but she must have been crazy, she was crazy by then, because she never once thought to tell him to stop.
Alan was still talking with the deliveryman from the hardware store when Hollis pulled his zipper down. March grabbed her long hair away from her face. There was a wasp hitting against the window, and all that dust, and outside the fencing was being tossed down from the truck. She knew this would happen, back when she was standing in the doorway. She knew once you’d started something with Hollis, you’d better be ready to go all the way.
All the same, March had a nervous feeling in the center of her stomach; she was starting to have pins and needles in her legs, as she always did when she was frightened.
“Maybe we shouldn’t.”
When she closed her eyes and turned away, she could feel him. All that heat, right next to her. “You know we’re going to.” He was whispering, but his voice sounded thick. “You know we will.”
Of course, he was right, and she knew it. She went to the attic every night after that, and now she wonders how they managed to keep their secret. Sometimes they’d do it with their clothes on, hurried and silent, and he’d cover her mouth so she couldn’t make a sound. Don’t say anything, he’d whisper in her ear, when they heard someone downstairs, Judith Dale on her way to the bathroom, or Alan coming home late from a date. Don’t move, he’d say, and he’d make love to her that way, forbidding her to shift her body, not even an arm or a leg, until she was so overcome with desire she thought she would faint.
That winter, they grew even more daring, and March sometimes didn’t get back to her own bed until six or seven. By then the house was already growing light and she had to run through the halls or be found out. Whenever Mrs. Dale wondered about noises in the night, March blamed the squirrels nesting in the wall, or the family of raccoons who had come inside for the winter. Or perhaps it was the wind-that might explain the moaning Mrs. Dale heard, as if someone’s heart was about to break. They were shameless; they did it three times a night, and there were days when March was so exhausted she’d fall asleep in class. At noon, she was often so tired she would put her head on the table in the cafeteria and miss lunch completely. Belinda Cooper, who went to a girls’ boarding school in Connecticut and was only home on weekends, was completely puzzled when March would come over to visit, only to curl up at the foot of the bed, where she would sleep for hours. Of course it was Susanna Justice, who had inherited her father’s talent for judgment, who finally figured it out.
“I don’t believe it,” Susie said after taking a good look at the dreamy expression on March’s face. “You’re doing it with him, aren’t you? Now I know you’re insane.”
Susie went with March to a doctor she’d heard about in Boston for birth control pills. The girls said they were going shopping, and in fact, both made certain to hurriedly buy a pair of shoes before starting for home.
“I wish it was anyone but him,” Susie had said. “I wish you weren’t so stupid.”
They were waiting for their bus across from South Station. The girls had been on hiatus from despising each other, but March could tell they’d be back to hating each other before the afternoon was through.
“Well, maybe love is blind,” March said archly.
“Maybe you are too,” Susie slung back.
To this day, Susie doesn’t understand why March fell in love with Hollis. Susie has always demanded hard evidence and documentation, and there is no explanation for something such as love, considering what grief it can bring. Now, for instance, what would compel March to go up the crooked old stairs to the attic? There’s nothing but junk on the other side of the door, boxes of it, and yet she can’t seem to stay away. The explanation she gives herself is one Susanna Justice would never accept. It is simply that March has discovered that when she kneels beside that old metal bed, she can feel the wind rattling the roof; she can still hear every leaf as it falls from the chestnut tree to the cold ground below.
Bill Justice drives over to Fox Hill after lunch, if anyone could consider crackers and tea a proper lunch. His old Saab grunts and acts ornery whenever the ditches are too mucky, but Bill Justice just keeps going, and so does the Saab. When he gets to the house, he parks and gets out; the smell of wood smoke immediately brings tears to his eyes. Bill wipes at his face with his big, gnarled hands. For a moment, he’s completely disoriented. What day is this? He can’t quite recall. What is it he’ll find when he walks through the door? He can’t figure that either.
Bill is known to be a rational man, one who loves logic and facts. He can weigh murky, emotionally charged information-rage and love, for instance; divorce and hit and runs-and come up with a fitting legal solution. Who gets the children, who keeps the house, how many years is enough time served, what constitutes a crime of passion. However, at this moment, standing in front of the house on Fox Hill, everything seems like a puzzle. And then someone waves to him from the window and he realizes it’s March’s daughter. That’s it. March is the one who lit the fire in the fireplace. She’s waiting for him to go over Judith’s estate.
“It’s that judge guy,” Gwen calls to her mother.
Gwen has been standing by the window, fogging up the glass with her breath and feeling as trapped as a fly in pudding. Being here is beyond nowhere. This morning she had to help her mother begin to sort through Mrs. Dale’s belongings, and the whole time Gwen was carrying boxes up from the cellar she’d been wishing she could teleport home. She has tried to call her best friend, Minnie, three times, but the line is always busy. This is beyond purgatory. That’s what she planned to tell Minnie, if Minnie ever shut up long enough for her to get a call through. It’s worse than hell. It’s hell times two.
“He’s got a briefcase with him,” she tells her mother, who’s in the kitchen fixing coffee.
The Judge has one hand over his eyes and he’s staring at the house. He walks toward the gate, then takes a step back.
“He’s kind of stumbling around,” Gwen reports.
“The Judge doesn’t stumble,” March informs her daughter as she brings the coffeepot and two china cups over to the dining room table. She comes to stand next to Gwen at the window, then waves to the Judge. He waves back and swings the gate open.
“I’ll bet he was great-looking when he was young,” Gwen decides.
March snorts.
“What?” Gwen asks.
“When are you going to understand-you can’t rate people by the way they look.” The funny thing is, March never realized how handsome Bill Justice was, but now she remembers that her father used to tease him about their women clients being the only ones who preferred Bill. “Anyway, he’s over seventy.”
“Well, I bet he was cute,” Gwen insists. “He’s still not too bad. For somebody ancient.”
“A perfect day for October,” the Judge says as he comes inside. “Unfortunate that we have to use it to tend to such sad business.”
He kisses March’s cheek, then takes off his overcoat. He seems a little bewildered when he sees the cardboard boxes filled with Judith’s belongings that are strewn across the dining room table.
“I thought I should go through everything,” March explains.
“Of course you should.” The Judge sits down and accepts some coffee.
“You can’t believe some of the things I’ve found already.” March holds up a blue ribbon. “Alan’s. From some debating team he was on.”
“Alan,” the Judge says sadly. “There’s a man who ruined his life.”
Gwen has been looking out the window, idly eating Pepperidge Farm Mint Milanos from the bag. Now, she shifts her attention.
“How ruined?” she asks the Judge. “Completely ruined? Totally ruined?”
“Gwen!” March says. She turns to the Judge. “She’s never even met him. Do you think I should bring her to visit him?”
“He wouldn’t see you. He wouldn’t open the door.” The Judge notices a silk scarf in one of the boxes; when he narrows his eyes he realizes that the blobs of orange are lilies, like the ones which grow in his own yard. “How long do you plan on staying?” he asks March.
Gwen stops chewing so she can hear the answer. Her whole life depends on this.
“I thought a week.” March looks around at the accumulation of a lifetime. “But there’s so much to do. And so much of what’s left in the house was Alan’s or mine. I found all my sweaters, every one I ever wore, from kindergarten on up, folded into two boxes in the attic.”
“Richard should have come with you,” the Judge says.
“Oh, no.” March pours more coffee. For some reason, just the mention of Richard’s name makes her feel flushed, as if she’d already betrayed him, somehow. It was going up to the attic, that was the problem. She keeps seeing dust, out of the comer of her eye. She keeps hearing the door shut, the way it used to when she and Hollis sneaked up there; she keeps feeling the way she did whenever he was near. “Richard had classes. Midquarter exams. He couldn’t leave.”
“I don’t care what he had. He shouldn’t have let you come back alone.”
Gwen puts down the bag of cookies. This judge guy is more interesting than she would have imagined.
“Cookie?” March offers the Judge, hoping to change the subject.
Bill Justice takes two bites of a Mint Milano, and when there’s only a small piece left, he whistles.
“Sister,” he calls.
March and Gwen look at each other, confused.
The Judge whistles again and holds out the piece of cookie, and then, all of a sudden, he gets a pained expression. His whole face falls.
“Where’s the dog?” he asks, and when March looks blank he tosses the cookie bit on the table. “Shit,” he mutters. “Where’s the damned dog?”
The Judge rises to his feet and heads for the door. He’s already pulling on his overcoat when March and Gwen reach him.
“Judith got a dog last winter,” the Judge says. His breathing sounds off and he’s having trouble finding his car keys. “A West Highland terrier.”
“A West Highland terrier?” March feels a bit dazed.
“A little white dog,” the Judge says, impatient. “Have you seen her?”
Now that it’s mentioned, March remembers Judith saying something about a dog she got for Christmas. Judith had been planning to come out to California for Thanksgiving, and she worried about putting the dog in the kennel.
“There was something out on the porch last night,” Gwen pipes up, but when her mother and Bill Justice look at her, expectantly, she feels silly. “But it was a rabbit.”
“I didn’t remember there was a dog,” March says. “There was no sign of it when we got here.”
“Oh, fuck,” the Judge says.
March gets goose bumps from the sound of those words coming from Bill Justice. It is so unlike him to speak in that manner, that she feels she has done something terrible, perhaps even criminal, in forgetting Judith’s dog.
The Judge opens the hall closet and takes out a leash neither March nor Gwen noticed when hanging up their coats; then he goes outside without bothering to say goodbye.
“It probably died because of us,” Gwen says. Her voice sounds sad, but also accusatory, as if the whole thing were really March’s fault.
March grabs a sweater. “Look around the yard,” she tells her daughter. “I’m going with the Judge.”
Bill Justice is already backing out of the driveway, but March runs over and taps on the window. When he stops, she gets into the Saab and they drive slowly along the road, windows open, calling over and over again for Sister, the little white dog.
“I wasn’t thinking,” March says as they drive too fast over the bumps. Or perhaps the problem was that she was thinking too much about subjects she shouldn’t have allowed past the first circle of her mind. Just as before, Hollis is taking up too much room. “I was so upset about Judith.”
Instead of listening to her excuses, the Judge is peering into the bushes as he drives. At the turnoff, they head for the village, driving so slowly that other cars honk, then pass them by. They keep the windows open and continue to whistle and call out. They try the main roads, and most of the back roads; they drive past the schoolyard and the park and St. Bridget’s Hospital. The Judge stops to phone Bud Horace, the animal control officer, from the pay phone outside the Red Apple market, but Bud has no reports of a white dog being sighted. At last, the Judge decides to look down by the Marshes. The sky is already purple; the first few stars have appeared, suddenly, as if someone had thrown a handful of silver across the edge of the world.
“Hard to believe this is where Alan wound up.” The Judge shakes his head. They drive along the salty blacktop, then turn down a dirt path.
“Sometimes I forget I have a brother,” March admits.
“Well, you’ve got one,” the Judge says. “And that’s where he lives.”
There is a ramshackle house at the very edge of the Marshes; it’s fashioned out of wooden shingles that are the color of a dove’s wings. Most people say it’s the Founder’s house, and that Aaron Jenkins built it with his own two hands, although others remember stories of a fisherman who lived down here at the turn of the century, a nasty fellow who set out eel traps and refused to speak when greeted by anyone from the village.
“It’s parkland,” the Judge tells March, “but the town council lets him stay. Once or twice a year someone from social services comes over, but he won’t open the door for them. The ladies on the library committee pay for his expenses. Judith was the one who started that, and she usually brought him his groceries. She tried to check on him once a week or so.”
“I had no idea. She never talked about him.”
March looks out at the thick grass and the reeds. She has always blamed Alan for driving Hollis off, with his cruelty and his jealousy. Now she wonders if she herself wasn’t guilty of the same exact sin she has always blamed on her brother. Perhaps she also has carried a grudge too long.
“Well,” March says, “with Judith gone, Alan can sell the house and Fox Hill and have enough money to take care of himself. That was his one good deed-allowing Judith to live there.”
“He wasn’t the one who let her live there.” The Judge watches, closely gauging March’s reaction. “It was Hollis.”
Well, there you have it-she truly didn’t know who owned Fox Hill. She has turned to the Judge, riveted.
“Alan sold the place right after Julie died; he was desperate for money, he was drinking it all up, and he got a nice offer from some corporation based in Florida. That corporation turned out to be Hollis. I was coming over to tell you today. You’ve been left all of Judith’s personal effects, but Hollis owns the house.”
The Judge clears his throat. He has always disliked Hollis, but not for the reasons other people might have, because of his mean streak. The Judge, after all, has seen men at their worst and at their best in his courtroom. As far as he can tell, the problem with Hollis is that he has always blamed others for what’s wrong with his life. He never takes any responsibility, and a man like that, the Judge knows, simply cannot be saved. Truth is, he wouldn’t want to be.
“It appears that Hollis got everything he wanted,” the Judge says now.
“It does look that way,” March says.
“Well, let’s hope so, at any rate. Let’s hope he’s satisfied.”
The Judge stops the car to call out his window for the dog; then he puts the car in park and gets out. March gets out too. She’s shaken by the proximity of the past. There is her brother, on the other side of these reeds. There is Hollis, beyond the hilltop and the trees, the owner of the house where she grew up and now sleeps, the owner of everything the eye can see. He was so poor and neglected when he came to them that he did not know it wasn’t necessary to stand by the back door, like a dog, to get his dinner.
“Sit at the table,” March remembers Judith Dale telling him, and he sat there mute, staring at lamb chops and lettuce and apple pie as if he had no business to dream such things, let alone have them for supper.
The water in the Marshes is rising with the tide; it seems purple and starry as well-an inverted sky.
“Not a soul,” the Judge says.
They don’t call out their windows on the ride back. They don’t bother to speak. The Judge takes the shortcut back to Fox Hill, avoiding the village and Route 22, which means zigzagging past the cemetery. He hadn’t been thinking of how this course might affect them, but the choice is clearly a mistake. Less than twenty-four hours ago, they were here to bury Judith. How is it that even grown men, old men who should be content with all that they’ve had, still want more? How is it that death always seems impossible, a trick of nature one should somehow be able to set in reverse? The Judge feels a sharp pain up and down his left arm, never a good sign.
“I think we should stop,” March says as they approach the cemetery.
March truly surprises him sometimes. In the past, Bill Justice viewed her as spoiled; the selfish little girl her father could never say no to. But with March, you never can tell. Tonight, for instance, her impulse to visit Judith’s grave is one hundred percent on target.
The Judge nods and drives through the iron gates, then along the narrow road which leads to the newest burial section. Scarlet leaves drop from the maples, adding to the carpet already on the ground. Now the sky is purple through and through; there are no other visitors, not at this hour. After they get out of the car and approach the grave, March can feel shivers along her skin.
It’s cold here. Too cold to be left all alone. Later in the week, March will bring a pot of asters to plant, the wild variety which return year after year. She will, however, avoid the older section of the cemetery; she knows too many who have been buried there, more, in fact, than she knows among the residents living down in the village.
The wind has begun to pick up, blowing the fallen leaves into little whirlwinds. How is it, March wonders, that life happens this way? Is it really possible to be a child one moment, asking for candy and a hand to hold, and then, in what seems like seconds, to be a grown woman walking through a cemetery on such a dark and bitter night? She’s confused being back here; she’s seeing shadows. It makes perfect sense that she doubts her own vision when she spies something beside Judith Dale’s grave.
March closes her eyes; she’s dizzy, it’s true, but when she looks again, she’s certain something is there. All at once she feels a pressure inside her chest, like a fist which prevents her from breathing. At this instant, she could believe in ghosts, but when she concentrates she sees it’s no billowy mist that covers Judith’s grave. It’s no specter returned. It’s an animal at rest, a shaggy creature with leaves matted into its fur. March tugs on the Judge’s coat sleeve.
“The dog,” she says. “Hey,” she cries to the terrier. She claps her hands and whistles.
The dog sits up, ears twitching. It’s little and so dirty all of its fur has turned a muddy gray shade. It has been waiting here for a long time, it hasn’t eaten for days, and it’s not about to be disturbed from its vigil by strangers. As March approaches, the terrier growls, low down in its throat.
March stops, startled by such a small dog’s depth of feeling.
“It’s all right.” The Judge has come up beside March. “Sister,” he calls. “Here, girl.”
At the sound of his voice, the dog leaps up and runs to him. The terrier is filthy, but the Judge bends down and picks it up.
“You silly thing,” he says.
The dog’s tail wags like mad against the Judge’s overcoat. It’s clearly in ecstasy to be held in his arms, and it yaps with what little voice it has left, since it has been howling each and every night.
For all they know, this dog has been following the body of its mistress from the time she was first taken from the house. It may have been waiting in the alley beside the funeral parlor, pursuing the hearse down Route 22. This small creature is not at all confused about what it wants, unlike men and women, who have the ability to conceal their deepest desires. Men and women, after all, can hide their love away. Men don’t chase after cars. Women don’t throw themselves upon cement doorsteps, curled up in a heap, until somebody opens the door and finally lets them inside.
Among men and women, those in love do not always announce themselves, with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you’re gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold. On this night, the Judge cries more quietly than it would ever seem possible for a man of his size. He keeps his face averted, buried against the dog’s fur. March doesn’t eyen realize he’s weeping, until a sob escapes. And that is how she finally knows that Bill Justice loved Judith. He loved her for thirty-five years, which for some people is as good as a lifetime. He loved her the way no one else ever has, and yet, in spite of that, he’s only entitled to grieve privately, in the dark. At least he has a right to that, and March wouldn’t think of intruding. She’ll stand beside him, in silence, beneath a sky that is now perfectly black, until he’s ready to drive her home.
At twilight, Fox Hill is the most beautiful place on earth, with its long, blue views of Guardian Farm and its twisted black trees. Hank comes here often at this time, accompanied by the dogs, who are unusually subdued at this hour, as if they knew that bickering and snapping would be a crime against the silence down below.
Most of the time, Hank considers himself to be too obvious and too tall, but here on the hill, he is small and extremely well aware of his own insignificance. What is the difference between himself and a single blade of grass? The grass, as he sees it, is worth a thousand times more than he is, since it serves a purpose, and hard as he’s tried Hank has never been able to figure a single reason for his existence. All he’s ever been is a problem, a burden-but there must be a reason for this life that he has, there’s got to be. After all, he is here, just as surely as the fields he walks across. He is breathing this sweet, October air.
Sometimes, when he stops thinking of himself as Hollis’s adopted nephew and his father’s only son, Hank has the sense that there might be something worthwhile inside of him. It is possible that no one perceives the world the way he does, or views this landscape with the clarity with which he sees. This alone would be a reason for him to exist. When he thinks about the idea of his own singular vision, the world suddenly seems filled with endless possibilities, and he wonders if this is what hawks experience at the moment of flight. Expectation, that’s what it is. The kind you feel when you’re seventeen, and the air is cold and fresh, and the dogs lie down beside you in the grass, and everything is quiet, the way it always is right before something is about to happen.
The evening star rises into the dark blue night. But this star is only the beginning, like opening the cover of a book but not yet turning the first page. Below, in the pastures, there used to be dozens of horses, including the thoroughbred named Tarot’s Deck of Fortune, who was once entered in both the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes in a single year. Hank found a photograph forgotten in the barn, crammed between two stalls. When he saw the image of Tarot, draped in blue and white silks, Hank actually cried. He wished he had lived at the Farm in Mr. Cooper’s time. He’s heard from some of the older residents of the village that the ground used to shake when the horses ran together. You could feel it all the way in town; the floors of the bakery and the hardware store used to vibrate so badly several residents were convinced that the village was prone to earthquakes.
Of all the racehorses once boarded here, Tarot is the only one left Belinda used to spoil him terribly; she’d feed him sugar cubes and whisper in his ear. She always rode at the end of the day, when the sky was halfway between black and indigo, like ink spreading out on a page. Tarot still gets restless at this hour; he paces when he’s down in the pasture, and if he’s in his stall, he kicks, and that’s when you’d better beware.
Jimmy Pairish-who knows his horses if nothing else-has told Hank that before Tarot went crazy, Mr. Cooper had been offered five hundred thousand cash for him by a consortium in Atlanta. Even now, Tarot is still beautiful. He’s old, twenty-two, but few people would guess to look at him. Of course, he hasn’t been ridden for so many years that he’s even more headstrong than ever. The dogs are terrified of him, especially since last spring, when he kicked a pup who was too curious for its own good, snapping its spine, so that Hollis had to shoot the thing, to relieve the poor creature from its misery.
Probably, Hank should be over at a friend’s house at this hour, instead of coming up here to the hill. The funny thing is, the kids at school think he’s rich. They probably assume he’s at some fancy dinner party, or down in Boston, at the opera or something. A real laugh, although Hank can understand why they’d be misled. Hollis is rich, but that surely doesn’t mean the wealth extends to Hank. The reality is, Hank is as poor as any orphan. He owns nothing; even the clothes on his back were paid for by Hollis. The kids at school are certain that Hank chooses to wear old boots to be cool, and that he’s simply not interested in going out with them to the bowling alley on Friday nights because he’s got better things to do, but the mortifying fact is, he has no cash to spend.
He’s a great guy, of course, he’s got a million friends. If he ran for student body president today, he’d probably win. It’s not his fault that he’s always too busy for social events. Like tonight, for instance, there’s a party at Willie Simon’s house. Willie’s parents are in the Bahamas and he’s got the key to their liquor cabinet and all the prettiest girls will be there. And yet, in spite of an invitation, Hank is here, on Fox Hill, thinking about horses and fate. He’s concentrating so deeply that it takes a minute before he realizes he’s not imagining someone walking down the road. It’s a girl in a black ski jacket. Hank gets to his feet to see her more clearly and convince himself she’s not a mirage.
It doesn’t take long for Hank to realize this is the girl he saw at Mrs. Dale’s funeral. She’s small, but she has a tough sort of posture. She stops and takes out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, shakes one out, and lights it. Hank has the sense that he’s doing something bad watching her like this. She’s really pretty, but that’s not what’s getting to him. He feels like he knows this girl. He experienced the same thing at the funeral parlor; it’s as if he’d been waiting for her before he ever saw her. She was so upset after the service; she seemed to be crying, but as soon as people began filing out the door, she acted as if nothing was wrong. That was what got to Hank, that she wouldn’t let anyone witness her pain. It’s exactly what he’s been doing all his life.
Now, he wonders if he should announce himself, cough or holler; or maybe he should turn heel and get out of there fast. But he’s too interested to leave. Beside him, the dogs are jittery, so Hank holds up his hand as a signal, forbidding them to bark.
Down on the dirt road, Gwen paces back and forth while she smokes, so she won’t freeze. Beneath her T-shirt and the ski jacket she’s worn only twice before on trips to Big Bear, her arms are covered with goose bumps. She’s got on two pairs of wool socks, and some old boots she found in the hall closet, but it isn’t enough. She’s simply not used to the cold. And this is only October, it’s mild as far as people around here are concerned. Well then, in Gwen’s estimation, people around here are crazy. Let them live in New England and pull on long underwear and gloves and go about their business, all the while pretending they aren’t freezing their asses. Maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe this kind of weather does something for you, if you ever get used to it-it purifies you and gets right down to the bone, leaving only the parts that can face up to hardship.
In spite of the cold, Gwen is relieved to be out of that dreadful old house. Since they’ve arrived, they don’t seem to be going anywhere fast. Gwen’s mother is spending all her time sorting through Mrs. Dale’s belongings, dividing them into what should be thrown out, given away, or kept. March doesn’t seem to be sleeping at night, a fact Gwen knows because she herself is sleeping in the little sewing room and can hear her mother searching around in the attic, or in the kitchen at odd hours, fixing tea. Only last night, Gwen woke to see her mother on the stairway landing, looking out the window, concentrating so hard you’d think the most important thing in the world was out there.
And then there’s the dog. Gwen’s mother waits on the dog, as if she’s doing some sort of penance for forgetting it in the first place. She feeds the raggedy thing canned tuna fish and cooked chicken, in spite of the fact that the dog has twice tried to bite. The stupid beast sits by the front door and howls, and when Gwen is forced to take it for a walk after supper, the awful creature will not follow unless Gwen tugs and curses and, finally, begs it to come along nicely.
Last night, when she called her friend Minnie to complain and decompress, Minnie wasn’t home. Her mother said she was sleeping at Pepita Anderson’s house, but that’s nothing more than a code all the girls use, a fake friend, a disembodied name given to parents when you want to be out all night. The old Pepita excuse, Gwen planned to tease Minnie, if she ever got to talk to her. Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself. I hope you had a whole bunch of fun, because I sure am not having any. If she were home, Gwen would probably be over at the Shopping Center; at least she could spend some money and feel better. Here, when she wants to get away from her mother there are only these silver fields, and the fading light, and the woods filled with things that are probably watching her-raccoons and weasels, and hopefully nothing more.
As she walks along this empty road, Gwen realizes that nobody knows her. No one could begin to imagine what it’s like to be her. Ever since she got here, she’s been desperate to get back to California, but if she’s really going to be honest, what is she going back to? She’s a loser, that’s the truth. She hates school, she hates all her friends, except for Minnie-who, when you come right down to it, is even more of a loser-she hates her last two boyfriends, both of whom she had sex with for reasons she can’t remember anymore. Admittedly, the sex was nothing. She’d heard so much about it, but it turned out she was floating outside her body while she did all those things. It wasn’t love, that’s for sure. It was all so nothing. If a nuclear bomb fell from the sky, would it really matter? Wouldn’t it be better to be blown away, completely and utterly, before she screws up the rest of her life?
She started to think like this at the funeral parlor, and she’s been morbid ever since, going over weird concepts. What, for instance, will she do with the rest of her life? Now that she’s here, with no outside stimulus-no TV, telephone, mall, pot, boy-who is she really? Why can’t she go back to being the way she was before she came here, when she barely thought at all?
Gwen puts out her cigarette on the road, crushing the embers beneath her boot. She leans on a rickety wooden fence, and reaches into her pocket for a scarf. But before she can loop the fabric around her throat, she begins to feel a tingling sensation on the back of her neck. It’s as if someone was breathing on her; either she’s going crazy, or someone is right there behind her. She might have turned and run home without stopping to see what sort of creature breathed out such warm air, if she hadn’t then heard a noise, one so small it resembled a question mark. Even before she turns and sees Tarot, Gwen feels as if she’s entered into a dream. This night, with its dark and silver edges, this horse on the other side of the fence who has come to her without being called. And perhaps that is why she has no second thoughts as she slips through the railings and goes into the pasture; it’s a dream, and it’s hers, and she’s desperate to see what happens next.
Up on the hill, Hank grabs one of the youngest dogs, who’s begun to yelp, and gives it a shake. He wants to see this, and he doesn’t want some idiot dog to announce his presence. Hank tries to be responsible in most things, and usually he is. He knows he should climb down the hill, fast, and stop this girl. If she stays in the pasture, she could get hurt. Tarot has charged at much lesser things-at the wind, for instance, at butterflies and bees. But Tarot seems completely hypnotized, maybe because the girl is so beautiful against the blue-black sky, or maybe Hank is the one who’s been hypnotized. In fact, the only time Gwen has even seen a real live horse has been at county fairs. She doesn’t even think to be afraid. She’s comfortable enough to stand beside Tarot and talk to him when most grown men would run. That’s what she’s doing down there in the field, where frost coats the soles of her borrowed boots. She’s telling this evil old horse that he’s gorgeous, and he seems to like what he’s hearing. He steps closer to Gwen, carefully, slowly, as if to hear more of whatever she has to say.
It is very odd, indeed, to see the horse everyone called a killer trail along, mild as can be, as the girl heads toward the rotten stump Hank should have pulled last spring. It had been a huge maple tree, before lightning split it in two. Ken Helm took it down, in exchange for the wood, and Hank was supposed to come here with some dynamite and get rid of what was left. Now, he’s glad he forgot. What remains of that old maple is the perfect height for this girl to get onto so she can throw herself onto Tarot’s back. When she nearly falls off, she gives Tarot a little slap, which, in other circumstances, would have sent him racing.
“Stand still,” she tells him. “You big cutie.”
Although Gwen knows nothing about horses, she’s right about his size. Tarot is sixteen hands high, which is even bigger when you’re up on his back, looking down at the ground.
“Be a good boy,” she tells him.
For his part, Tarot seems too shocked to move. If this girl does get hurt, Hank will have to live with it. A broken leg, a crumpled spine would be his fault. And yet, he does nothing to stop her. The muscles in his arm have tightened; his pulse is going fast. He keeps a hand on the yelpy dog, willing to shake it like a dust mop if the dog dares to bark and startle Tarot.
Gwen is leaning forward, her hands holding on to the horse’s mane. She’s afraid that if she blinks this will all disappear and she’ll wake in her bed to find she never even left the house; she never borrowed these boots, or walked along the road, or found this beautiful horse. If this is a dream, she wants to go on sleeping. She doesn’t make a sound; that’s how much she wants this to be real. And as he watches from the highest point on Fox Hill, Hank wants it for her just as badly. In this pasture, in the dark, Gwen’s life has made a major turn, something as rare as planets leaving their orbits to crash into each other and fill up the night. In a place she never wanted to be, on a night that will be cold enough to freeze the apples on the trees, she is no longer alone.
The Coward sits on a hard-backed chair, wearing gloves and boots, since the old house where he lives hasn’t got a bit of heat. He does not deserve heat, he knows that. He deserves exactly what he’s got, which is nothing, in spades. He’s not quite fifty, but most people would guess he’s twenty years older than that. His skin is sallow and pockmarked. His long hair and beard are gray. He’s thin as a twig, and as crooked as one too. When he happens to catch sight of himself in the reflection of his battered coffeepot, he always gets a good laugh. He is what he appears to be, there’s no hiding that. His inside is affecting his outside, like a rotten piece of fruit.
Years ago, when the Coward was a boy, he was on the debating team at the local high school. He had a slick quality, which always helps in an argument, and was often applauded for his speaking voice. Words, however, are nothing to him now. There are weeks when he doesn’t talk to anyone. He doesn’t complain to the fleas who live in his mattress; he doesn’t bother to shoo the flies away from his morning cereal-that is, when he remembers to eat. He has ruined his life, and although he can’t blame it all on drink, drinking has become his whole universe. Sometimes, he doesn’t bother to get out of bed before he starts. It’s just as easy to lie there and reach for the bottle; he doesn’t even have to open his eyes.
This morning some woman was knocking at his door. She must not have known that the Coward’s philosophy of life makes him temperamentally unfit for human contact, although he did appreciate Judith Dale’s visits. When he heard the stranger out on his porch, the Coward knew it wasn’t Judith, since she is dead, and there’s no one else he allows to visit. He crawled to the window on his belly so he could peek outside. The woman out there had long, dark hair; in spite of a heavy, woolen coat, she looked as if she were freezing. She was ill at ease, and kept glancing over her shoulder. She knocked several times, and when there was no answer she called out “Alan” in a clear, pretty voice which startled the Coward. That name-which he never uses anymore and would never sign on a piece of paper, even if offered a hundred dollars cash-made him cover his ears and count to a thousand. Luckily, by the time he was done, the woman had left.
If she’d really wanted to see him, of course, she could have merely pushed the door open, since the Coward never bothers to lock it. Probably, his caller had heard his dreadful history. Not even the charlatan at last summer’s circus fair outside Town Hall would read his fortune. That’s how bad his past has been, and his future looks no better. People used to say the Coward fed his dog gunpowder, to make it more vicious, and this was the reason everyone avoided the Marshes. But that dog died years ago, of arthritis and old age, and the Marshes are still unknown territory for most local residents. Anyone who goes there goes at his own risk.
Of course, twelve-year-old boys are always looking for trouble, and teenagers need their thrills. Sometimes there are groups daring enough to make their way through the muck and the reeds. They pitch winter apples and stones at the roof of his house, defying the Coward to come chase them away, but he never does, and he never will. Even on nights when stones are thrown, the Marshes are silent, and that silence is scary enough to chase off most unwanted visitors.
To the children in the village, who whisper the Coward’s story at slumber parties, his is a cautionary tale about what can happen to spoiled boys who think they have everything. Greedy, thoughtless habits take you down a road you can’t get off, even when you’ve seen the error of your ways. Before you know it, you’ve grown up to be a man who doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself, and then your fortune is your own affair, and hopeless is probably the best you can ask for.
The Coward knows all this-it’s the reason he has never fought for his son. He doesn’t deserve the boy any more than he deserves heat or light or hope. If the Coward happens to be out wandering on a starless night, he avoids Fox Hill, and if he ever comes within a mile of Guardian Farm’s property lines he begins to shake and he’s unable to stop until he’s safe in his house with a drink halfway down his throat.
Although he can barely remember it now-his memory is foggy, and he’s thankful for that-there was an occasion when he went to search out his son. One look, that was all he wanted. A minute; a single word. It was pathetic, really, and he knew it even at the time. He crept up to the schoolyard for a peek at Hank, but five years had passed since he’d last seen the boy and among all those children out for recess, the Coward could not tell which one was his. Unlike the common duck, which can distinguish its young from another’s in a crowded pond or stream, unlike a swan, who will kill for the sake of its hatchling, the Coward had forgotten his own son’s features. This, of course, only made him despise himself more. He is, after all, called the Coward for good reason.
In the past years, his single companion was his old dog, whom he still misses-a wretched boxer someone had set out to drown in a burlap bag. The drowning was somehow bungled, and when the Coward dragged the bag out of the marsh at low tide, there was one dead puppy inside, and another live one who was, from that moment on, forever grateful. Not that the Coward didn’t try to dissuade the misguided beast. He could throw a frying pan at the poor dog’s head, and it would insist upon licking his hand. He wishes he still had that dog, although he is convinced it was the stupidest creature on earth, foolish enough to misjudge its own master and believe him worthy of loyalty.
Though it now seems ridiculous, the Coward once considered himself lucky. He had inherited all his father owned, and was free to do as he pleased. The only dark spot in his life had been Hollis, and he always resented his father for bringing this false brother home. But Hollis, who had recently returned to the village, was nothing to Alan anymore. Why, Alan could pass him on the street and not even feel compelled to acknowledge Hollis’s existence. He had, after all, far better things to think about. His marriage, for one. Julie, the woman who had become his wife, was said to be the sweetest girl in town. There was something peaceful about her, as if snow had settled inside her soul. Often, she slept fourteen hours straight, and when she woke there was a smile on her lips. Their son took after her-Hank rarely cried as an infant, and as a toddler he put himself to bed when he was tired, climbing into his own crib.
On the day the fire started, the Coward was out in a hammock beneath the chestnut tree. It was Mrs. Dale’s day off, so Julie was fixing dinner, which, like all her meals, would surely turn out to be a well-intentioned disaster. Hank, who was three. was sitting on the floor, playing with measuring cups. The child was there when the Coward walked through the kitchen on his way to the yard, and he was probably still there when the fire leapt from the rear burner of the stove, attaching itself to the curtains, and then to the wood countertop, and finally to the pink dress that Julie was wearing, a pretty cotton shift the Coward had bought her in Boston.
In minutes, the smoke was so thick that people standing on the steps of the library in the village could see it; by the time the lirefighters arrived, sparks were shooting into the sky. The firefighters worked like mad that day, desperate to stop the flames before they spread through the woods; they were far too busy to notice Alan Murray standing at the gate, so close to the blaze that he was covered with soot. The air was brutal, a burning, black soup, and yet Alan had been standing there long enough to have his eyebrows singed off. He was crying tears that were so scalding they burned little holes in his face, the scars of which, like pinpricks or small pox, have never faded away.
The heat and the flames had paralyzed Alan. His wife and his child were trapped in that house, but he could no more go inside and search for them than he could jump up and land on the moon. Ken Helm, who was one of the volunteers, was the first to notice Alan, and it was Ken who realized there were still people left inside. Alan was crying beside the purple clematis, which had grown by the garden gate for as long as anyone could remember, but had now burned to ashes, and he didn’t stop crying when they brought Hank out. Someone had been left behind in that burning house, and although it was Julie’s body that was taken from the wreckage, that someone who’d been lost turned out to be Alan himself.
People in town started talking about him at the funeral, as he tore out his hair and called for his wife. They whispered when he lost his money, spending wildly-rebuilding the house, conned into dreadful business deals, practically giving it away. They talked when night after night he had to be carried out of the Lyon Cafe, and when he had to sell Fox Hill to pay off all he had borrowed. Some people say that Hollis bailed him out by covering his debts and buying the hill at a fair price, but Alan knows Hollis never intended to be kind. He bought Fox Hill anonymously, through his lawyer, well aware that Alan would never have sold to him. At any rate, due to extreme carelessness, the money from the sale of Fox Hill disappeared fast. Alan and his boy were often tossed out of rented apartments; Alan tended to fall asleep while smoking, and once he would have burned himself alive, and perhaps been glad of it, if Hank, then four, hadn’t thrown water on the smoldering easy chair where his father slept.
At last, Alan took his son to live in the Marshes, to this house people say the Founder built, a shack really, nothing more. Hank was often discovered wandering alone, his clothes filthy and coated with mud. People who didn’t even know him would insist on taking the child to the Bluebird Coffee Shop, where they’d buy him big bowls of macaroni and cheese or thick tomato soup. Hank always ate each meal as though it were his last, wolfing down his food, even when it was hot enough to burn his tongue. Clearly, if the board of the library hadn’t appropriated clothes for him at every flea market and rummage sale, this child would have gone around town naked. That’s how drunk Alan was by then; that’s how pathetic he’d become.
Hollis went out to the Marshes for the first and last time on a Sunday afternoon that year when Hank was four, plowing through the mud in Mr. Cooper’s old pickup, which he continues to drive to this day. Now that Hollis was married to Belinda, he owned more acreage than any other man in the county; he must have wanted to gloat over his victory, but he never got the chance. He found Alan passed out on the floor. That day he brought Hank with him when he returned to Guardian Farm, and the boy has been with him ever since. People say Hollis is good to Hank, or so the Coward has heard, and that makes perfect sense. No doubt Hollis has some idea of the pain his mercy causes the Coward. No doubt at all.
There are times, of course, when the Coward wonders what their lives might have been like if he had treated Hollis, if not like a brother, then like a human being. When he starts to think about what might have been, that’s when the Coward begins to drink gin, his favorite liquid in all the world. So transparent and empty, just like the rest of his life. The one remnant of a schedule which remains in his life is his Friday routine, for that is the day when he takes the single journey that matters to him-across the Marshes, down Route 22, to the liquor store on the edge of town. He goes after dark, always, and all he needs to do is sign an X on the account page. It took a while, but he finally figured out why Mike Howard was letting him have all this booze on credit, when he’s never gotten paid back. Of course, he thought when it hit him. Naturally. Hollis would gladly foot the bill for arsenic as well, if that had been his pleasure.
On clear days, the Coward sits on the sagging porch of his old house and considers everything in the Marshes that could kill you, if quick suicide was what you were after. You could, for instance, eat the thin, poisonous pods of milkweed stalks or ingest the bitter leaves of the mallows. You could reach down and pluck one of the orange mushrooms that not even the ants will go near. But the end results would be nasty, and messy as well. Gin, however slow, doesn’t make you foam at the mouth like the mushrooms would. There are many ways to accomplish what the Coward’s after, but liquor is the most civilized method. In fact, it’s the last piece of civilization in his life.
At night, when people in the village are fast asleep, he still hears the sound of fire. It’s a sound from hell, all twisted and hot. You get thirsty when you hear a sound like that in your dreams. You get terribly thirsty and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it, except to take the same route every Friday and make certain not to answer your door. You never know who you’ll find out there on your own porch; it may be someone who believes it’s a righteous person’s duty to convince the Coward he has to stop drinking and turn his life around, when it’s abundantly clear he’s never going to do that. He’s here for good; for better or, more likely, for worse, all the rest of his days.
Since her return to Fox Hill, all March has accomplished is an orderly mess. There are currently twenty-five boxes in the kitchen, all labeled to go to the Library Association’s booth at the Harvest Fair, which is always held in the basement of Town Hall. Most of the objects March has packed, she knew by heart: The cake pans Mrs. Dale seemed to collect, dozens of them. The lace curtains, the throw pillows, the ceramic candlesticks from England. March’s father’s law books have already been donated to Deny Law School, carted there by Ken Helm, who’s been running all March’s errands, since she decided not to replace her rental car. Eight silver place settings, brought out only on holidays, have been mailed home to California, where they will most likely never be used.
Judith, who didn’t care much for jewelry, had only three good pieces: A gold necklace, which March has given to Harriet Laughton, one of Judith’s dear friends. A pair of heavy gold earrings, rarely worn, has been presented to St. Bridget’s Hospital, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder at the next fund-raising drive. The lovely, square-cut emerald Judith never took off, March now wears on her right hand. Luckily, March found the emerald in an envelope stuffed into a night table drawer she was clearing out. March studied that ring so often, as Mrs. Dale folded laundry or planted mint or tucked her in at night, that she cannot help but wonder if the emerald has affected her career choice. The jewelry she fashions is simple in design; as with this ring, the overall effect often depends on small, but perfect, stones. She favors green and blue in her work: topaz and tiny sapphires, crystals and aquamarines, Chinese jade and emeralds, of course, although none has appealed to her as much as the stone she now wears.
Today, while March works on organizing the house, Judith’s little dog sits by the window, waiting for rabbits. Each time the dog spies one, out in the orchard or calmly chewing mint by the back door, it goes completely berserk.
“Will you stop that?” March complains, because whenever the dog barks, she’s startled all over again.
Aside from the dog, the house is amazingly quiet. There’s no TV switched on, no radio, no sound of traffic. And there’s definitely no Gwen. March had expected she’d have to argue constantly with her daughter; she’d imagined Gwen would want to sleep until noon or one, when she’d rise only to throw herself in an easy chair to complain, grouse, whine, and threaten, all the while eating cookies or frozen pizza, spreading crumbs on the rug and talking about teenage suicide statistics.
None of this has happened. When March wakes in the morning, Gwen is already gone, her bed in the sewing room neatly made, her cereal dish washed and drying on the dish rack that March will have to pack up today. She’s been out for a walk, Gwen explains when she returns later in the day; she’s been running, getting herself in shape. March wouldn’t believe a word of it-Gwen is usually the most sedentary creature on earth; getting off the couch to search for the remote is often the most movement she manages to accomplish-but there’s a rosy cast to the girl’s skin when she comes back to the house, and a fine film of sweat on her forehead, all of which seems proof of her honesty.
With no distractions-no Gwen, no car, no one other than Susie calling on the phone-March should be done clearing out the house, but the work is going slowly, as if each trinket and kitchen utensil, every sweater and scarf were stuck in molasses. Now and then, March comes across some item which truly surprises her, and then she gets completely side-tracked. This morning, for instance, she found a box of matches from a restaurant called the Blue Dolphin, a small, family-run place down by Lamb’s Cove, less than ten miles away. Seeing those matches, she remembered a night nearly thirty years earlier, an evening Mrs. Dale had off, but because taking care of children is not a job that’s easily compartmentalized, as soon as Judith came home she went upstairs to check on March.
When she came to sit on the edge of March’s bed, Judith Dale smelled of garlic and cologne, a combined scent that was both lemony and pungent. She had appeared so dreamy and young that March had scrambled to her knees to get a better look. Mrs. Dale’s hair was curled, from the damp salt air at Lamb’s Cove. She’d shown March this box of matches, with its smiling dolphin logo; she’d said this restaurant had the best shrimp scampi and the most fabulous cheesecake, and some grown-up drink called a mimosa that March has had a fondness for ever since hearing its beautiful name. Now, March realizes it was love that made the menu so special, and that Mrs. Dale’s dinner partner that night was probably Bill Justice.
Though March is trying to divest, she has kept the box of matches, just as she has held on to one of her brother’s blue ribbons from his high school debating team. She went out to the Marshes to visit him, but, exactly as the Judge had warned, Alan wouldn’t open the door. In all honesty, she was relieved. What would she say to him after all these years? Why presume that she knows him? If you’re disconnected from someone for a long enough time, does blood still commit you to one another? Does history, or fate? Alan is not the only one March has attempted to contact. Twice, she has phoned Hollis. She’s embarrassed about it, she’s mortified, yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself. Both times she called, she felt completely possessed-some demon held the receiver, and dialed, and waited, and then, thank goodness, hung up. If she was giving herself a test, she has failed. Now that she’s gone this far, she wants to keep calling. His voice is deeper than she remembers, and much more interesting than it should be.
“Take my advice,” Susanna Justice had recommended when they went out to the bowling alley, which serves the best burgers, last night. “Go home before anything happens.”
March had vowed she wouldn’t tell Susie about the calls, but as soon as Gwen wandered off with two local girls Susie had introduced her to, March admitted she’d been phoning him.
“It’s nothing,” March vowed. “It’s like a game.”
“There are no games,” Susie had insisted. “Other than Monopoly.”
Susie is a big fan of Richard Cooper’s, and she always has been. She’s told herself that if she could find a man as good as Richard, she’d marry him tomorrow. But of course, she may have found exactly that in Ed Milton, the new police chief, and what does she go and do but cancel a date with him in order to have dinner with March at the bowling alley. As they dined, they had a perfect view of Gwen and the two girls from town, whose mothers March and Susie went to school with about a million years ago. The girls rolled one gutter ball after another, and from the look on Gwen’s face, she was the only one who cared.
“Hollis is bad news, and he always has been,” Susie said. How Hollis manages to get his way in this town never fails to amaze her, but he knows who to charm and who to pay off, and in the end, if he wants something-whether it’s business zoning at the end of Main Street or the DPW to plow his properties first-he gets it. “You’re going to be sucked in all over again.”
“He’s a whirlpool, is that what you’re saying?” March had laughed. “Don’t worry so much. I’m married, remember?”
“I remember,” Susie had said, pointedly.
“Don’t say the rest of that,” March had warned.
“Fine.”
“Because I do too, Susie. I remember real well.”
Today, to spite Susanna or to prove something to herself, she phones Richard three times. But Richard is busy and distracted, and really, all he wants to know is when she’s coming home.
“The end of the week,” March promises, but already she’s thinking she’d like to stay for Founder’s Day, which celebrates the night when Aaron Jenkins ran over Fox Hill more than three hundred years earlier.
Gwen has heard all about Founder’s Day from the girls who have befriended her, and now when they go for sodas at the Bluebird Coffee Shop, Lori and Chris assume the Founder’s celebration is the reason Gwen is so intent on staying in Jenkintown. Those girls would never guess that Gwen rises before dawn so she can visit the horse down the road. They think she doesn’t meet them in the evenings because she’s afraid to walk across Fox Hill in the dark, but in fact, she has better things to do. She’s down in the pasture when darkness falls, feeding a beautiful old horse some fallen apples and the sugar cubes she steals from the coffee shop.
Gwen has no idea that the man who owns the fence she sneaks under, who owns the grass beneath her feet and the horse whose mane she likes to braid, always knows when someone has trespassed. Hollis has found a piece of frayed rope, a makeshift rein he supposes, kept beside the tree stump. He has seen footprints in the frost. He never likes anyone on his property-what’s his is his, after all-although when he first saw these signs he thought March might be his trespasser, and he felt truly exhilarated. He felt the way he used to when he’d play cards down in Florida and bluffed someone into letting him win.
Ever since March arrived, he has been keenly aware of her proximity. He goes to stand outside in the dark, cold morning with the knowledge that she is just down the road. Whenever he drives into town he is mindful that he could run into her anywhere-at the hardware store or waiting for a red light to change on Main Street. However it finally happens, she must come to him. That’s the way it has to be; that’s the way it will be. This is the reason Hollis is biding his time, no matter how difficult this is for him; it’s why he stands there in the morning with his desire locked inside of him rather than rushing to knock on her front door. He’s not some beggar. He’s not some fool. It’s the night that causes him problems; that is the time when he can no longer bear the way he feels. That’s when he drives over to the hill. He makes sure to cut his lights and engine before she can notice his presence; he parks there and watches the house, the way he has, every now and again, for all these years.
Hollis no longer believes March is the trespasser who is wandering through his pastures. Whoever does leaves cigarette butts on the road and candy wrappers in the weeds. She’s careless and thoughtless, nothing like March; a teenager probably, with some silly notion that fenced beasts should be set loose. Hollis is even surer of his theory when he notices that Hank has a flushed, distant look to him when he comes in for supper. On this day, Hank seems to be hurrying with his chores and he turns down an offer of food-a dead giveaway that something’s wrong.
“Someone’s been riding Tarot,” Hollis says.
Hank is at the refrigerator, getting himself a can of soda; a pinkish tint spreads across the back of his neck as soon as Hollis mentions the horse. Bingo.
“Know anything about it?”
Hank opens his soda and waits for his pulse to slow down. “Nope,” he says.
“Really?” Hollis’s voice sounds flat; he doesn’t give much away.
“Want me to check it out?” Hank doesn’t even know why he’s lying, except that he feels Hollis will ruin this for him if he finds out about the girl. He knows he owes Hollis. The fact that he’s here at all, eating three meals a day at this kitchen table, is a measure of Hollis’s charity. And yet he keeps his secret. He has, in fact, been watching the girl every evening, and each time he does, he falls for her a little bit more. What he feels for her is tearing him apart and keeping him together and, it appears, it is also turning him into a liar. “I can hang out tonight, and see if anybody shows up.”
Hollis finishes his dinner-a bologna and cheese sandwich and a bag of chips-and brings his plate to the sink. “I’m impressed,” he says coldly. “I didn’t think you could lie right to my face.”
“I don’t know who she is.” The one time Hank is dishonest, and he’s caught-well, it figures. “That really is the truth.”
“I’m not surprised, since you don’t seem to know much of anything.” Hollis washes his plate and stacks it on the drain board. “Does she come from the village? From Route 22?”
Hank shakes his head. “From over the hill.”
“Then I’ve got news for you,” Hollis says. If Hank were paying more attention to Hollis’s tone, he’d hear something rare-Hollis is actually pleased. “I know who she is.”
They go up to the hill together. Twilight is coming earlier, and the dusk is no longer purple, but is instead that inky blue which is always a sign of colder weather to come. When they get to the very top, which looks out over all the pastures below, Hollis crouches down. Everything he sees, he owns. There’s only one thing left, and he’s about to get that too.
“I’ll bet your little friend is staying at the house on Fox Hill.”
There’s something strange in Hollis’s voice, but Hank is too wound up to notice. Hank nods at the road; sure enough, here comes the girl. “That’s her.”
She’s wearing her black ski jacket and tight black jeans and heavy boots that make a clumping noise. This girl may be March’s daughter, but she didn’t inherit much from March, at least not in Hollis’s opinion. She’s nowhere near as pretty, and she’s stupid as well. There she goes, ducking under the fence, heading for the old stump, where she searches for the rope Hollis confiscated and now has in his pocket. It’s Richard she resembles, and maybe that’s why Hollis feels such immediate distaste. Here is the reason March would not come back to him. Frankly, Hollis isn’t impressed.
Gwen seems puzzled when she can’t find the rope, but she climbs onto the stump anyway, then whistles.
“Jesus Christ.” Hollis snorts. “She thinks she’s calling a fucking dog. Look at her.”
Down in the pasture, Gwen is unaware that she’s being watched, but for some reason she feels nervous. This is her secret, and she doesn’t want to share it. She needs to come up with a good excuse to stay on here. She’ll say she’s heard the high school in Jenkintown is great, so much better than the one she’s been attending, or she’s been involved with drugs back at home. She’s already decided-she’s not going back to where she was a major nothing, inside and out. Tonight, it’s even colder than usual, but Gwen’s made sure to wear the leather gloves she found in one of those boxes her mother is packing. She claps her hands and whistles again and the horse appears from the woods and trots right to her, as he always does. She leans close and whispers a greeting, while the horse, supremely pleased at being told how wonderful he is, noses for the carrots she keeps in her coat pockets.
Up on the hill, Hollis rises to his feet. He watches the girl pull herself onto the horse with no reins and no saddle and no idea, it would seem, of any danger.
“Well, there she is,” he says. “March Murray’s daughter. That makes her your cousin.”
Cruelty never loses its flavor, at least not for Hollis. The look on Hank’s face is exactly what Hollis expected: pure confusion.
“That’s what she is to you,” Hollis goes on. “Your first cousin.”
They go down the hill in the dark. What is Hank supposed to do now? Stop thinking about her twenty-four hours a day because they are somehow related? Well, he can’t do that. He’s not going to do that.
“Get off,” Hollis calls when they get to the fence.
Gwen and the horse, who have been walking through the meadow, stop dead when they hear his voice.
“Right now,” Hollis shouts.
Startled, Gwen quickly swings her legs over and gets down. The horse hovers behind her.
Hollis tosses the rope to the girl. “Put it around his neck and lead him out.” He swings open the gate.
As far as Gwen is concerned this guy has a lot of nerve to boss her around, but the horse seems to belong to him, so she does as she’s told.
“That’s dangerous,” Hank says. “She can’t lead Tarot.”
Gwen shoots Hank a look of what she hopes is contempt, but says nothing. He’s gorgeous, she sees that-she’d have to be dead not to. If she was at a mall with her friends back home, they’d probably follow him anywhere. But it’s different here, and Gwen feels as if something major were at stake.
“Take him down the road, then into the barn. It’s too cold to keep him out all night anymore.”
Now that her ability has been put in question by the boy, Gwen ignores the way the older, bossy guy is ordering her around. She’s dealt with bullies before, and she knows you can’t win an argument with his type. She leads the horse down the road, and Tarot follows, mild as milk, all the way back to Guardian Farm. The air is silvery and sharp; Gwen is shivering, but she wouldn’t think of complaining, not about the cold and not about how far they have to walk to reach the Farm.
All the dogs begin to bark when they reach the driveway.
“If you want to ride this horse, that’s fine,” Hollis says. “But make sure you use the right equipment, and put him back in his stall when you’re done.”
Hank is shocked by this magnanimity, it’s not at all like Hollis but he isn’t about to ask any questions. Gwen is trying her best to keep her euphoria in check. It will be just as if the horse really belonged to her.
“Show her where to put him,” Hollis tells Hank.
Gwen follows Hank to the barn, and waits while he opens the door to the first stall.
“He’s hard to get in there,” Hank warns. “He broke one of the dogs’ backs last year, so watch out.”
Gwen pats the horse, and Tarot goes into his stall, as calm as any lamb.
“How did you do that?” Hank asks, following her out of the barn.
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” Gwen uses her snippiest tone.
“That’s why I asked,” Hank says, confused. “I would like to know.”
Gwen laughs. “Are you for real?”
She’s ready to laugh again, but then she sees the way he’s looking at her. He’s extremely real, she sees that now, and he’s not like anyone she’s ever met before. Most people are so guarded, but what he feels is right there in his face. He’s not hiding his interest in her, and what Gwen doesn’t know is that he couldn’t hide it even if he tried.
“Let’s go,” Hollis says. He’s in the truck with the engine running, that same old pickup of Mr. Cooper’s Hollis refuses to get rid of, though he could surely afford far better. “I’ll give you a ride home.” Hank and Gwen both approach the truck, which gives Hollis a chuckle. This boy’s got it bad. “You don’t need a ride home,” Hollis tells Hank, who’s hanging around this girl like a lovesick pup, and is left to mope in the driveway when they make the turn onto the road.
The truck smells like gasoline and it rattles when it goes over inclines and through ditches. All the way to Fox Hill, Hollis asks Gwen questions. She figures it’s like an interview. After all, she’ll be responsible for his horse. No, she doesn’t know how long they’re staying, and her father isn’t with them. he’s a professor with too many deadlines to be here, and all her mother’s been doing is looking through mementos from the past.
The way Hollis sees it, this girl is going to assist in keeping March in town until they’re together again. She’s going to be his little helper, and she won’t even know it. She wants that old horse? Fine. Let her have it, if that’s what it takes to get March to stay.
When they get to the top of the hill, and the house is in sight, Hollis pulls over. “I’d appreciate it if you gave your mother a message from me,” he says, in that strange, inhuman voice he’s got.
“Sure,” Gwen says. This guy gives her the creeps, but she supposes that the least she can do in return for riding his horse is to deliver his stupid message.
“Tell her I’ve been waiting.” Hollis nods at his own words. Sometimes he feels as though he’s been waiting forever, as if it were his occupation or his trade.
“You being?”
“She’ll know. Just tell her.”
Gwen nods and opens the rusty truck door. She doesn’t like this guy one bit, plus she’s freezing; once she’s out of the car she races up to the house.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been running all this time,” March says when Gwen comes through the door. She’s been worried sick and has already called Lori’s and Chris’s moms, and has had to hash over old times from their school days even though all she wanted to know was whether or not they’d seen Gwen.
“Actually, I’ve been riding.”
“Don’t get funny with me.”
“Down the street. At that farm place. There’s a horse I’ve been riding.”
March has been sitting on the rag rug in front of the fire, sorting through old picture postcards her father mailed home from business trips. Now, she stands to face her daughter.
“You’ve been going there? Without permission?”
“I got permission.” Gwen doesn’t know why her mother has to be so upset about this. “The guy over there said I can ride whenever I want.”
“Oh, really.” March has the funniest feeling along the backs of her knees, of all places. It’s as though she has pins and needles, only worse. She felt certain he would never come to her, he has too much pride for that. She told herself all she had to do to be safe was avoid him, but maybe that isn’t the case.
“He told me to say he’s been waiting.”
Gwen watches her mother carefully. After all, March could forbid her to go see Tarot-she knows the horse’s name now, and it suits him-and then she’d have to have a major temper tantrum, which she’s really in no mood for. But for once, March doesn’t seem concerned about possible dangers.
“Did he say anything else?” March asks.
“Yes, and all of it was boring.”
For as many questions as March asks, Gwen does nothing more than shrug; finally she excuses herself and goes up to bed. Sister is at the door, scratching to be let out, refusing to be ignored, so March goes to the closet for the leash and clips it on. “Don’t you dare bite me,” she warns the dog, when it curls its lip.
By now, the moon is in the center of the sky. She made her choice years ago, didn’t she? She left and didn’t come back, not even when he called her, and yet here she is, on this dark night; here, and noplace else. There are still bullet holes in some of the apple trees in the orchard from the time open hunting was declared, the year that Hollis left. Six hundred and fifty-two foxes were killed in a single season. Boys hung fox tails from the handlebars of their bicycles and Hal Perry, who owns the Lyon Cafe, offered a free draft and a photograph taken and hung on the wall to anyone who brought in two pelts in the same day. Every once in a while, a fox is sighted and people get all fired up; the story always gets printed up in The Bugle, and for a night or two, the rabbits may tremble, but the very next evening they’re back, fearless as ever.
Tonight, for instance, there’s a rabbit calmly chewing chives, who doesn’t budge when March comes out of the house. Sister starts barking and tugs at the leash. When the dog realizes it can’t get to the rabbit, it sits down and whines. The dog sounds pitiful, and so March. who’s been cooped up all day and now feels light-headed just thinking about Hollis, docs something she really shouldn’t. She reaches down and unclasps Sister’s leash. Sister looks up at March, then takes off after the rabbit, who darts into a thicket of wild raspberries.
Looking up, March feels as though she’s never seen the moon before, or at least, not for a very long time. She walks along the road a bit, but it’s only when she reaches the crest of the hill that she sees a truck pulled over onto the side of the road. March holds the dog’s leash in one hand. She can still hear Sister running after the rabbit. She can hear branches snapping in the woods.
Hollis would never sit in a beat-up old truck with the headlights turned out. He would never come to her like this. He’d wait for her; he always did. It must be a stranger parked there, and knowing she’s being watched makes March turn and hurry back into the yard. Sister is already up on the porch, yipping to be let in. It won’t be until tomorrow that March will find the rabbit on the far side of the garden, its neck bitten through by the terrier’s sharp teeth. That’s when she’ll have the nerve to walk up and inspect the roadside, but of course in the morning the truck will be gone, and there won’t be a single sign to show that he’s ever been here, except for the tire tracks which lead directly to Guardian Farm.