Or so I foolishly thought.
10
The day I found out the cabin wasn’t mine alone was a strange day all around.
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, winter had set in for good. Nearly every day had been freezing-rain slippery or digit-numbing cold. The light died by five in the afternoon, and between the creeping dark and the icy wet, I spent less and less time at the cabin and felt rushed and distracted when I was there. Seemed like I’d arrive, get a fire going, read or write for an hour, and then, because of bad weather or darkness, have to hurry back. I’d worked out a direct path that avoided the brambly and steep places, but it was still a fifteen- or twenty-minute hike from Henry’s, and that was in good weather. I stayed at Henry’s when the weather was really raw.
On that particular Saturday, I woke to a high wind rattling the windows. It gusted so bad it bowed the trees and vexed the sculptures, setting more than a few rocking and clanging. Henry was outside early staking down the ones that needed it. By midmorning, rain was pouring off the eaves in sheets, and if that wasn’t misery enough, I was in bed with a cold and we were up to our eyeballs in what Fred called “bad company.”
The owners of the New York art gallery that sold Henry’s work had turned up unannounced right after breakfast. Mr. Sasser, the gallery’s founder and an old friend of Henry’s, had died the year before and left the gallery to his awful offspring, Lillian and Sid. They made me glad I was an only child.
Lillian and Sid arrived with a little white dog who had a pom-pom hairdo so silly he must have been mortified. First thing he did was head under the house and ambush the cat. There followed a yowling, caterwauling, no-contest scratch-and-tumble, after which that dog came yelping out and hid under Fred’s truck, whining and nursing his brand-new face tattoo. Weather or no, I saw the cat dart off in the direction of the Padre’s church. I was real put out he didn’t take me along.
Fred asked Lillian six times not to smoke her little black cigarettes in the house, but she lit up anyway and tapped her ashes into her hand. “Who in blazes does she think she is?” he groused, then muttered in stronger language under his breath.
Lillian was skinny as a stick and dressed all in black. She had long, red-lacquered fingernails and wore her dyed black hair pulled so tight off her face it looked painful. She had a bossy way of talking that made me want to slap her pasty-white face. Sid, light-years away behind sunglasses, agreed with whatever she said.
She called everyone sweetheart, though I overheard her call me “that cracker child” when she was talking to Sid. When I told that to Fred, he called Lillian a word I won’t write here. He wanted to say it to Lillian’s face, but I stopped him. “Sticks and stones,” I told him. “As Manny used to say, ‘Don’t get mad, sugar boots, get even.’”
Having Lillian around was hardest on Henry. She followed him everywhere like a black cloud, hanging on his every word.
“Artists are gods,” she told me, “and Henry Royster is the modern Zeus. I worship at his altar.” She actually said that, I swear.
“Beg pardon?” I replied, rolling my eyes. Not that she’d notice. She never looked at people when she talked to them.
“Zeus, sweetheart,” she said, like I was dumb. “Greatest of all Roman gods.”
If she didn’t know Romans from Greeks, I wasn’t going to set her straight. Later, while she was haunting Henry in his studio, spacey Sid wandered upstairs to use the bathroom and stopped in my doorway afterward.
I glanced up from my independent study. “Done worshipping at Henry’s altar?” I said.
Sid snorted. “I may know beans about art, kid, but I know which side my bread is buttered on, and so should you.” He lit a special cigarette of his own, breathed the smoke in deep, then exhaled it my way, like Ray used to do. He pointed out my windows toward the sculptures in the field. “We look out there and see junk. She sees art worth a million bucks. Guess who’s right?”
I didn’t like Sid presuming to know what I thought. “What’s this we stuff?” I said. “Got a rat in your pocket?”
Sid just smirked and slithered downstairs. After he went outside, I slid down the banister and locked myself in the study—the only room in the house with a bolt on the door—to read the art-magazine articles about Henry. They weren’t written in anything like plain English and sounded a lot like Lillian. One talked about how Henry was “formed” as an artist (“by tragedy”), how he “developed” (in “inspired isolation,” whatever that is). Another described his work as “monumental, elemental, and masterly” and Henry as “one of the great living artists of this century and the next.” Well, la di flipping da.
The one with Henry scowling on the cover was as straightforward as any. It talked about how he’d worked successfully at two careers, sculpture and cardiology, until he quit medicine to sculpt full time. But after his wife, Amanda, died of cancer, he disappeared, like he’d fallen off the earth. The art world lost track of where he was or what he was doing, and after a few years most people thought he’d died too.
When Fred came back from the store, I kept him company in the kitchen while he tenderized a rump roast. He said every time he poked it with a fork he imagined it was Lillian’s behind. That made me laugh. I asked him about the articles.
“Art manure,” Fred said. “That’s what Henry calls it.”
I smiled. “So it’s not true?”
“Oh, it’s truth of a sort. A high-toned, hot-air
