Blackwood wives was lying bent and scattered on the floor. Tablecloths and napkins hemmed by Blackwood women, and washed and ironed again and again, mended and cherished, had been ripped from the dining-room sideboard and dragged across the kitchen. It seemed that all the wealth and hidden treasure of our house had been found out and torn and soiled; I saw broken plates which had come from the top shelves in the cupboard, and our little sugar bowl with roses lay almost at my feet, handles gone. Constance bent down and picked up a silver spoon. “This was our grandmother’s wedding pattern,” she said, and set the spoon on the table. Then she said, “The preserves,” and turned to the cellar door; it was closed and I hoped that perhaps they had not seen it, or had perhaps not had time to go down the stairs. Constance picked her way carefully across the floor and opened the cellar door and looked down. I thought of the jars and jars so beautifully preserved lying in broken sticky heaps in the cellar, but Constance went down a step or two and said, “No, it’s all right; nothing here’s been touched.” She closed the cellar door again and made her way across to the sink to wash her hands and dry them on a dishtowel from the floor. “First, your breakfast,” she said.
Jonas sat on the doorstep in the growing sunlight looking at the kitchen with astonishment; once he raised his eyes to me and I wondered if he thought that Constance and I had made this mess. I saw a cup not broken, and picked it up and set it on the table, and then thought to look for more things which might have escaped. I remembered that one of our mother’s Dresden figurines had rolled safely onto the grass and I wondered if it had hidden successfully and preserved itself; I would look for it later.
Nothing was orderly, nothing was planned; it was not like any other day. Once Constance went into the cellar and came back with her arms full. “Vegetable soup,” she said, almost singing, “and strawberry jam, and chicken soup, and pickled beef.” She set the jars on the kitchen table and turned slowly, looking down at the floor. “There,” she said at last, and went to a corner to pick up a small saucepan. Then on a sudden thought she set down the saucepan and made her way into the pantry. “Merricat,” she called with laughter, “they didn’t find the flour in the barrel. Or the salt. Or the potatoes.”
They found the sugar, I thought. The floor was gritty, and almost alive under my feet, and I thought of course; of course they would go looking for the sugar and have a lovely time; perhaps they had thrown handfuls of sugar at one another, screaming, “Blackwood sugar, Blackwood sugar, want a taste?”
“They got to the pantry shelves,” Constance went on, “the cereals and the spices and the canned food.”
I walked slowly around the kitchen, looking at the floor. I thought that they had probably tumbled things by the armload, because cans of food were scattered and bent as though they had been tossed into the air, and the boxes of cereal and tea and crackers had been trampled under foot and broken open. The tins of spices were all together, thrown into a corner unopened; I thought I could still smell the faint spicy scent of Constance’s cookies and then saw some of them, crushed on the floor.
Constance came out of the pantry carrying a loaf of bread. “Look what they didn’t find,” she said, “and there are eggs and milk and butter in the cooler.” Since they had not found the cellar door they had not found the cooler just inside, and I was pleased that they had not discovered eggs to mix into the mess on the floor.
At one time I found three unbroken chairs and set them where they belonged around the table. Jonas sat in my corner, on my stool, watching us. I drank chicken soup from a cup without a handle, and Constance washed a knife to spread butter on the bread. Although I did not perceive it then, time and the orderly pattern of our old days had ended; I do not know when I found the three chairs and when I ate buttered bread, whether I had found the chairs and then eaten bread, or whether I had eaten first, or even done both at once. Once Constance turned suddenly and put down her knife; she started for the closed door to Uncle Julian’s room and then turned back, smiling a little. “I thought I heard him waking,” she said, and sat down again.
We had not yet been out of the kitchen. We still did not know how much house was left to us, or what we might find waiting beyond the closed doors into the dining room and the hall. We sat quietly in the kitchen, grateful for the chairs and the chicken soup and the sunlight coming through the doorway, not yet ready to go further.
“What will they do with Uncle Julian?” I asked.
“They will have a funeral,” Constance said with sadness. “Do you remember the others?”
“I was in the orphanage.”
“They let me go to the funerals of the others. I can remember. They will have a funeral for Uncle Julian, and the Clarkes will go, and the Carringtons, and certainly little Mrs. Wright. They will tell each other how sorry they are. They will look to see if we are there.”
I felt them looking to see if we were there, and I shivered.
“They will bury him with the others.”
“I would like to bury something for Uncle Julian,” I said.
Constance was quiet, looking at her fingers which lay still and long on the table. “Uncle Julian is gone, and the others,” she said. “Most of our house is gone, Merricat; we are all that is left.”
“Jonas.”
“Jonas. We are going to lock ourselves in more securely than ever.”
“But today is the day Helen Clarke comes to tea.”
“No,” she said. “Not again. Not here.”
As long as we sat quietly together in the kitchen it was possible to postpone seeing the rest of the house. The library books were still on their shelf, untouched, and I supposed that no one had wanted to touch books belonging to the library; there was a fine, after all, for destroying library property.
Constance, who was always dancing, seemed now unwilling to move; she sat on at the kitchen table with her hands spread before her, not looking around at the destruction, and almost dreaming, as though she never believed that she had wakened this morning at all. “We must neaten the house,” I said to her uneasily, and she smiled across at me.
When I felt that I could not wait for her any longer I said, “I’m going to look,” and got up and went to the dining-room door. She watched me, not moving. When I opened the door to the dining room there was a shocking smell of wetness and burned wood and destruction, and glass from the tall windows lay across the floor and the silver tea service had been swept off the sideboard and stamped into grotesque, unrecognizable shapes. Chairs were broken here, too; I remembered that they had taken up chairs and hurled them at windows and walls. I went through the dining room and into the front hall. The front door stood wide open and early sunlight lay in patterns along the floor of the hall, touching broken glass and torn cloth; after a minute I recognized the cloth as the drawing-room draperies which our mother had once had made up fourteen feet long. No one was outside; I stood in the open doorway and saw that the lawn was marked with the tires of cars and the feet which had danced, and where the hoses had gone there were puddles and mud. The front porch was littered, and I remembered the neat pile of partly broken furniture which Harler the junk dealer had set together last night. I wondered if he planned to come today with a truck and gather up everything he could, or if he had only put the pile together because he loved great piles of broken things and could not resist stacking junk wherever he found it. I waited in the doorway to be sure that no one was watching, and then I ran down the steps across the grass and found our mother’s Dresden figurine unbroken where it had hidden against the roots of a bush; I thought to take it to Constance.
She was still sitting quietly at the kitchen table, and when I put the Dresden figurine down before her she looked for a minute and then took it in her hands and held it against her cheek. “It was all my fault,” she said. “Somehow it was all my fault.”
“I love you, Constance,” I said.
“And I love you, Merricat.”
“And will you make that little cake for Jonas and me? Pink frosting, with gold leaves around the edge?”
She shook her head, and for a minute I thought she was not going to answer me, and then she took a deep breath, and stood up. “First,” she said, “I’m going to clean this kitchen.”
“What are you going to do with that?” I asked her, touching the Dresden figurine with the very tip of my finger.
“Put it back where it belongs,” she said, and I followed her as she opened the door to the hall and made her way down the hall to the drawing-room doorway. The hall was less littered than the rooms, because there had been less in it to smash, but there were fragments carried from the kitchen, and we stepped on spoons and dishes which had been thrown here. I was shocked when we came into the drawing room to see our mother’s portrait looking down on us graciously while her drawing room lay destroyed around her. The white wedding-cake trim was blackened with smoke and soot and would never be clean again; I disliked seeing the drawing room even more than the kitchen or the dining room, because we had always kept it so tidy, and our mother had loved this room. I
