She did not reply, and he wound through the nettles past the dark cathedral where the ghosts held sway and back down the slope into the bottomland.
A gaudy Christmas moon candled up out of the pines and watched Sutter above jagged black carvings of scrimshaw trees. His shadow appeared palely beneath his feet like some faint image developing on a photographic plate. He came out of the hollow following his shadow through the slashes of dreaming trees past the ruined mansion with its enormous keep of hoarded silence until he came upon the toy house with its windows blind save the refracted moon and its weathered walls bleached with silver light. Its dark tin roof seemed the very negation of light.
On the porch with fist upraised to pound on the door he thought he heard the furtive pitterpatter of hasty retreatingfootsteps. Some creature of the night perhaps who’d sensed his presence and struck for deeper timber.
He lowered the poised hand and twisted the doorknob and pushed the door open onto a darkness so profound the house seemed to store nothing save the dark itself. He stepped into the room and vanished, the dark simply took him. He stood invisible beside the framed oblong of moonlight. He stood holding his breath, listening. When he breathed again he could smell the room, stale smoke and kerosene and years of old cookery. The odor of curing wood and tinned mackerel and the sour musty female smell of the old witchwoman herself. Nothing of humanity here, the smell was the smell of some old vixen fox’s lair.
Young Tyler, Sutter called. If you’re here come on out. I just need to talk to you.
Silence. He tilted out a kitchen match and struck it on a thumbnail. Orange light filled the room, objects leapt out at him, shadows reared and subsided about the walls as if Sutter had suddenly unleashed into the room dozens of his darker selves.
There was a kerosene lamp atop an old sewing machine cabinet and he unglobed and lit it. Warm yellow light banished the shadows and the first thing he saw was the ricked wood. Goddamned if you wasn’t expectin a cold spell, he said aloud. His voice sounded harsh and unreal in the silence and it seemed to startle him.
With the light held aloft like a smoking torch he searched the house without expecting to find anyone and his expectations were fulfilled. He peered into cabinets and under beds and he prowled through cardboard boxes. The old witchwoman seemed to possess even less of the world’s goodsthan Sutter did and he deemed himself much the better housekeeper. The back door stood ajar to the night and all there was beyond it were the stygian trees. Long gone ain’t she lucky, he sang softly to himself. She’s a long gone mama from Tennessee. He shook his head and grinned ruefully to himself and turned back to the kitchen.
He found two tins of sardines and half a box of soda crackers. He pocketed the flat tins and tucked the crackers under an arm. He found a pone of cornbread so hard it seemed some sort of weird fossil or a flat cylinder of petrified wood and when he hurled it against the wall it rang like stone and spun onto the floor unbroken. I bet a man could drive a nail with that son of a bitch, he said. He found a little coffee in a tin and he took that and then he went out.
He paused by the ruined mansion and sat on the stone doorstep and popped the key on a tin of the sardines and opened them. He laid sardines side by side on one cracker and topped them with another making dainty little sandwiches. He ate until he’d finished one tin and then he lit a cigarette and sat smoking. Grinning to himself he imagined the old woman fleeing soundless out the back door and running sylphlike and blind into the bowering trees. Up and gone at just the imminence of his footstep, gone before his upraised foot touched the plank floor.
There may be something to this old fortunetellin business after all, he told the night.
After a while he dozed and he dreamed music and distant revelry and the rising and falling cadences of voices and he came instantly awake but he could still hear them. He’d long known this place for haunted but it did not bother him. All those lost voices, those lost shades drifting from room toroom like smoke. He felt he could have entered their conversation without interrupting it, could have fallen easily into their number and gone unnoticed.
When Phelan pushed against the funeral home door it did not open as he’d expected it to and for a moment he just looked at it in perplexity. He pushed again but the door was locked. The few times he’d been here before for the funerals of colleagues and family the door opening onto Walnut Street had always been unlocked during business hours. This permitted public access to the viewing rooms and chapel.
Phelan was wearing his Sunday clothes. Sport coat in a somber plaid and a blue tie loose at the throat and his shoes were shined. He knocked on the door and looked about. Quiet Sunday morning, cold in the air. Down the street a few late worshipers climbed the steps to the Presbyterian church, he caught scraps of subdued children’s laughter the wind brought. Phelan noticed that Breece hadn’t had the leaves raked lately and they lay about the lawn and in a loose windrow against the house. A garbage can had been overturned and the wind had kited papers into the box-elder hedge.
Yes?
The door had opened no more than three inches. Phelan could see a narrow section of Breece’s face and a necktie knotted tight beneath his ponderous chins. Below that a white smock.
My name is Phelan. I want to make an inquiry about Corrie Tyler. The door didn’t open. Perhaps it closed a fraction. What about her?
Phelan didn’t know what to make of this. Well, she’s dead, he said. I assumed there’d be a funeral.
Of course there’ll be a funeral, he said. Arrangements haven’t been finalized.
This time the door definitely moved toward the jamb, the slice of Breece narrowed, just one eye and a section of florid nose with its roadmap tracery of burst capillaries.
Phelan was a respectable schoolteacher who paid his bills and was well-thought-of in the community and was accustomed to being welcomed wherever he went but he wasn’t welcome here. In fact he’d never felt so unwelcome.
Hold on here a minute, he said. I want to talk about these arrangements.
No response. The eye Phelan could see looked distracted, and Phelan felt for a crazy moment that maybe he’d already left and Breece was just impatiently standing there watching where Phelan had been.
I know both of the Tylers and know the young man rather well, a student of mine. Perhaps it’s none of my business, but I’m aware of their financial situation and I doubt there’s any insurance. I’d like to help them in some way. I’d like to know what sort of financial arrangements have been made. I thought I’d pay part of them myself and perhaps take up a collection in the community.
It’s been taken care of.
Taken care of how?
Just don’t worry about it, Mr Phelan. As I said, it’s taken care of, nothing for anyone to pay. Nothing for you to be concerned about. As you said yourself, it’s really none of yourbusiness.
When are the services? I’d like to view the body.
I don’t mean to be indelicate, but the body was badly damaged in the accident. Face crushed and so on. Of course it will be a closed casket ceremony.
Something’s not right here, Phelan said. I’ve spoken with people in the sheriff’s department and been informed that she was unmarked. In fact, a deputy told me that the broken neck was her only injury and that when they arrived on the scene she looked as serene as a child who’d fallen asleep in that field.
I’m a professional, Mr Phelan. Who do you choose to believe? Don’t you think I’d know the condition of a body I’m preparing? At any rate it’s a moot point. The body has been claimed. The body is being transported. By an aunt, I believe. Perhaps there’ll be some sort of memorial service. You could attend that, of course.
I told you I know this family. Known both of them all their lives, I’ve taken an interest in their lives, had both of them as students. There’s no aunt.
Of course there is. From Michigan or somewhere, one of those upnorth states. Good day, Mr Phelan.
This can’t be, Phelan began, but the door had closed with the finality of a coffin lid and he heard the lock tumblers click into place and he was talking to a panel of polished oak.
He knocked and waited but there was only silence from within. After a long while he turned and went down the concrete steps into the wind, hand sliding on the polished steel railing, his face abstracted and uncertain.
He walked on past the cluster of churches. There was singing from within, one hymn segued into another, they wereleaning, leaning on the everlasting arm in the sweet by and by. He went on past Kittrel’s car lot with its plastic pennants snapping in the stiff wind and turned the corner and went on up the street toward the courthouse.
