threads? I did that to her. She screamed and sobbed like a child, but I did that. I did it and chased her up the stairs as she ran from me, trying to hold her precious eye in her hands. And do you think he tried to stop me?”
“I would have tried,” Rowan said thickly, bitterly. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you wanted to know! And to know what happened to one, you must know what happened to the one before her. And you must know, above all, that this is what I did to break the chain.”
The woman turned and stared at Rowan, the cold white light shining in her glasses and making them blind mirrors suddenly. “This I did for you, and for me, and for God, if there is a God I drove her through that window. ‘Let’s see if you can see him if you’re blind,’ I cried. ‘Then can you make him come!’ And your mother, your mother screaming in the cradle in that very room there I should have taken her life. I should have snuffed it out then and there while Antha lay dead outside on the flagstones. Would to God I had had the courage.”
Again the old woman paused, raising her chin slightly, the thin lips once again spreading in a smile. “I feel your anger I feel your judgment.”
“Can I help it?” Rowan whispered.
The old woman bowed her head. The light of the street lamp settled on her white hair, her face in shadow. “I couldn’t kill such a small thing,” she said wearily. “I couldn’t bring myself to take the pillow and put it over Deirdre’s face I thought of the stones from the old days of the witches who had sacrificed babies, who’d stirred the baby fat in the cauldron at the Sabbats. We are witches, we Mayfairs. And was I to sacrifice this tiny thing as they had done? There I stood ready to take the life of a small baby, a crying baby, and I could not bring myself to do what they had done.”
Silence once again.
“And of course he knew I couldn’t do it! He would have ripped the house apart to stop me had I tried.”
Rowan waited, until she could wait no longer, until the hate and anger in her were silently choking her. In a thick voice, she asked:
“And what did you do to her later on-my mother-to break the chain, as you’ve said?”
Silence.
“Tell me.”
The old woman sighed. She turned her head slightly, gazing through the rusted screen.
“From the time she was a small child,” she said, “playing in that garden there, I begged her to fight him. I told her not to look at him. I schooled her in turning him away! And I had won my fight, won over her fits of melancholy and madness and crying, and sickening confessions that she had lost the battle and let him come into her bed, I had won, until Cortland raped her! And then I did what I had to do to see that she gave you up and she never went after you.
“I did what I had to do to see that she never gained the strength to run away, to search for you, to claim you again and bring you back into her madness, and her guilt and her hysteria. When they wouldn’t give her electric shock at one hospital, I took her to another. And if they wanted to take her off the drugs at that hospital, I took her to another. And I told them what I had to tell them to make them tie her to her bed, and give her the drugs, and give her the shock. I told her what I had to tell her to make her scream so they would do it!”
“Don’t tell me any more.”
“Why? You wanted to know, didn’t you? And yes, when she writhed in her bedcovers like a cat in heat, I told them to give her the shots, give them to her-”
“Stop!”
“-twice a day or three times a day. I don’t care if you kill her, but give it to her, I won’t have her lie there, his plaything writhing in the dark, I won’t-”
“Stop it. Stop.”
“Why? Till the day she died, she was his. Her last and only word was his name. What good was it all, except that it was for you, for you, Rowan!”
“Stop it!” Rowan hissed at her, her own hands rising helplessly in the air, fingers splayed. “Stop it. I could kill you for what you are telling me! How dare you speak of God and life when you did that to a girl, a young girl that you had brought up in this filthy house, you did that to her, you did that to her when she was helpless and sick and you … God help you, you are the witch, you sick and cruel old woman, that you could do that to her, God help you, God help you, God damn you!”
A look of sullen shock swept the old woman’s face. For one second in the weak light, she seemed to go blank, with her round blank glass eyes shining like two buttons, and her mouth slack and empty.
Rowan groaned, her own hands moved to the sides of her head, slipping into her hair, her lips pressed shut to stop her words, to stop her rage, to stop the hurt and pain. “To hell with you for what you did!” she cried, half swallowing the words, her body bent with the rage she couldn’t swallow.
The old woman frowned. She reached out, and the cane fell from her hand. She took a single shuffling step forward. And then her right hand faltered, and plunged towards the left knob of the rocking chair in front of her. Her frail body twisted slowly and sank down into the chair. As her head fell back against the high slats, she ceased to move. Then her hand slipped off the arm of the chair and dangled beside it.
There was no single noise in the night. Only a dim continuous purring as if the insects sang and the frogs sang and the faraway engines and cars, wherever they were, sang with them. It seemed a train passed somewhere close, clicking rhythmically and fast beneath the song. And there came the dull faraway sound of a whistle, like a guttural sob in the darkness.
Rowan stood motionless, her hands dropped at her sides, limp and useless, as she stared dumbly through the rusted mesh of the screen, at the soft lacy movement of the trees against the sky. The deep singing of the frogs slowly broke itself away from the other night songs, and then faded. A car came down the empty street beyond the front fence, headlights piercing the thick wet foliage.
Rowan felt the light on her skin. She saw it flash over the wooden cane lying on the floor of the porch, over Carlotta’s black high-top shoe, bent painfully in as if the thin ankle had snapped.
Did anyone see through the thick shrubs the dead woman in the chair? And the tall blond woman figure behind her?
Rowan shuddered all over. She arched her back, her left hand rising and gripping a hank of her hair and pulling it until the pain in her scalp was sharp, so sharp she couldn’t quite bear it.
The rage was gone. Even the faintest most bitter flash of anger had died away; and she stood alone and cold in the dark, clinging to the pain as she held her own hair tight in her trembling fingers, cold as if the warm night were not there, alone as if the darkness were the darkness of the abyss from which all promise of light was gone, and all promise of hope or happiness. The world gone. The world with all its history, and all its vain logic, and all its dreams, and accomplishments.
Slowly, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, sloppily like a child, and she stood looking down at the limp hand of the dead woman, her own teeth chattering as the cold ate deep into her, truly chilling her. Then she went down on her knee and lifted the hand and felt for the pulse, which she knew wasn’t there, and then laid it down in the woman’s lap, and looked at the blood trickling down from the woman’s ear, running down her neck and into her white collar.
“I didn’t mean to … ” she whispered, barely forming the words.
Behind her the dark house yawned, waited. She couldn’t bear to turn around. Some distant unidentifiable sound shocked her. It filled her with fear; it filled her with the worst and only real fear she’d ever known of a place in all her life, and when she thought of the dark rooms, she couldn’t turn around. She couldn’t go back into it. And the enclosed porch held her like a trap.
She rose slowly and looked out over the deep grass, over a tangle of vine that clawed at the screen, and shivered now against it with its tiny pointed leaves. She looked up at the clouds moving beyond the trees, and she heard an awful little sound issuing from her own lips, a kind of awful desperate moaning.
“I didn’t mean to … ” she said again.
This is when you pray, she thought miserably and quietly. This is when you pray to nothing and no one to take away the terror of what you’ve done, to make it right, to make it that you never never came here.
She saw Ellie’s face in the hospital bed.
“I didn’t mean to do it!” It came so low, the whisper, that nobody but God could have heard. “God, I didn’t mean to. I swear it. I didn’t mean to do this again.”
Far away somewhere in another realm other people existed. Michael and the Englishman and Rita Mae
