With Shuddering Fall Read online

  “Let’s get a ride with this car,” Karen said suddenly.

  “Don’t you want to walk? I think we have a lot of things to talk about.”

  Karen watched for the car. It was not yet in sight. “I’ve got to get home,” she said mechanically. “My father—I have to do something with my father.”

  “What about me?” Jack said. “You make a gahdam fool out of me, don’t you? Don’t you? If I didn’t know you better I’d think you did it on purpose and laughed about it later, or else did it to make me more interested. But it’s not for either reason, is it? Is it?”

  The car seemed almost upon them, yet it had not turned the bend. Karen waited patiently. She hoped it would be someone they knew, perhaps one of the hired men. “Someday someone’s going to drag you off into the woods or into a barn,” Jack said, lapsing back to the contemptuous, loose manner he had feigned in the tavern. “Then you’ll wish it had been me. You’ll wish you had somebody that loved you then. Even if it was just a bother to you. Gahdam son of a bitch of a—”

  Karen stared at him. She could not tell if he was swearing at her or not. He stopped, licking his lips. They looked at each other. “When I used to kiss you,” he said awkwardly, “you had it in your mind that it was somebody else, didn’t you? Wasn’t that why it turned out so strange? I mean . . . in your mind it was somebody else doing it. Who else was it?”

  “I don’t know,” Karen said. She stared at the hard clay road, as if the answer were as important to herself as to Jack. “I don’t know.”

  “Watch out for the car.”

  Karen looked up. The car was turning the bend, going fast. Very fast. It was a strange car—new, gleaming, flashing even in the waning light. “I’ll make him stop,” she said.

  Jack pulled her arm. “Come on,” he said. “It’s nobody we know.”

  “I’ll make him stop,” she said. She raised her hand and waved in a deliberately childish way. Something told her the man was not going to stop, so she stepped out into the road. Jack lunged for her. “He’ll stop, he’ll stop,” Karen said, struggling with Jack. “Leave me alone.”

  “Gahdam it, you want to get killed! I swear you want to get killed!” Jack cried.

  The car rushed upon them. It looked absurdly large: a great silver front, headlights like eyes, broad curving windshield that distorted the figure of the man inside. Karen saw his shocked white face in the instant before Jack yanked her to the side of the road. The car skidded in the frozen clay, turned slightly, screeched to a stop some distance away. “Hell to pay now,” Jack said. “I sure do hope it wasn’t anybody we know.”

  “He’ll give us a ride now,” Karen said. “Come on.”

  She ran to the car, leaving Jack to plod behind, muttering. “Mister,” she cried, “mister, are you going—Are you going—”

  She stopped. The man had gotten out. He stared at her with such undisguised hatred, such a malicious intent, that for an instant her voice failed her. “I ought to of kilt you, you little bitch,” he said. “I ought to of ground you and that bastard both down. A son of a bitch of a country trick if I ever knew one.”

  He was breathing fast. A tall, pale man with black hair, straight black hair. His face looked as if it had been hacked out of stone with a blunt, murderous instrument. Before the purity of his anger Karen’s whole manner, her persona failed; she stood breathing shallowly, watching him, wondering if she would cry after all. When Jack came she turned and took his arm. “What the hell are you trying to do?” the man said. “Do you want to try it again? I’ll be glad to try it again. This time I’ll slam it into you, both of you. Goddam back-country idiots.”

  He turned to get into the car. “Just a minute,” Jack said nervously. “You can’t—She didn’t—”

  “We want a ride,” Karen said.

  “A ride,” said the man. His face was amazingly blank.

  “To the Herz farm. Do you know that? Are you from around here—or—”

  The idea struck Karen about the same time that it struck the man himself. He was lighting a cigarette; suddenly he looked up at her. “So you’re Herz, huh? Which one of you? You? Is the old man dead yet?”

  “No,” said Karen. She stared at the man. “I don’t think so.”

  “I wish to hell I never came back,” the man said. Karen had expected a change in his manner, but there was none. Some of the savagery of his anger had faded, but his expression was as frozen, as malicious as before; he stared at her bluntly. He put her in mind of a hawk, one of the soiled, shabby birds of prey that circled the skies. “All right. Get in, then. I’ll drive you home. Goddam back-country idiots,” he muttered, too loudly for them not to hear.

  3

  After church on Sunday, with the voices of the choir haunting her and the vision of the priest holding aloft the sacrament burned into her mind, Karen would return to her room and go to her window and kneel. There she would close her eyes and clutch her hands before her. At these times her brain would be a chaos: buzzing with light, song, incantation, the picture of herself approaching the altar, kneeling to receive the sacrament. At her first communion she had nearly fainted when she returned with the other children to their pew. Her family had spoken of dizziness from hunger, of fear, but Karen remembered it to be happiness that had overwhelmed her. Her father had understood. He had said little but his eyes on her were fierce, bright, proud. When Celine had muttered something about showing off he had turned to her abruptly and ordered her to leave the room: how vividly Karen remembered that! But she had felt no triumph; she had felt only pity for Celine that this strange happiness, so new to Karen, was perhaps inaccessible to Celine.

  Now as she kneeled she began to feel the warmth of her room. With her eyes still closed she tilted her head to let her hat fall to the floor—a round little hat made of mink, dark brown and soft. She unbuttoned her coat—black cashmere with a great puffy mink collar; she let it fall to the floor. Storming her mind were visions of the church, the smell of incense, the heraldic ring of the bells, the spontaneous joy of the congregation. Staring at the priest’s back, at his gold and green vestments, Karen had felt the power of his words, his chant: he pulled them on, ahead, joined them into one when he turned and raised his hands to them. Powerless to resist, hearts swelling with the queer haunting song, the steady murmur of Latin, they had kneeled, closed their eyes, had felt themselves swept forward. . . . At the communion rail Karen knelt beside her father. She did not look up, but clasped her cold hands tightly. To her left the priest approached her. Her mouth was dry, her throat kept swallowing nervously, as if she had no control of it; all about her sound and smell and color threatened to distract her from her prayer. She forced everything away until she felt alone, small, an absurd figure braced against collapse by the strength of her prayer alone.

  Release! Released, they turned away, heads bowed, fingers clasped. They followed the slow line back to their pew. Karen had felt dizzy with excitement; her throat stung her, tears threatened. Now in her room she pressed her forehead against the window and let herself breathe in short, shallow, soblike breaths. Prayers crowded her brain, demanded to be said. She remained kneeling for some time, her eyes shut tight, lips moving silently—the secret ecstasy of these prayers, their burning, breathless power, excited her so that only a shout from outside brought her to herself.

  She looked up. Her eyes were wet, cheeks wet. She blinked against the sunlight. Down in the drive stood her father and someone—Karen squinted against the light—it was one of her brothers; they were talking about something. Karen’s heart suddenly swelled with love for them and she got to her feet. She ran to her door. Descending the stairs, she caught sight of herself in a mirror: she looked pale, as if frightened. She opened the heavy door and ran down the steps, her shoes clicking on the cold stone.

  Karen ran down to her father and brother. They turned to her. She laughed and took her father’s hand. Her breath showed in a frenzied halo about her mouth. “I heard you all the way up in my room,” s
he said.

  “You look hot,” her father said. “Are you coming down with a fever? And look at her, coming outside without a coat on! What did you do with your coat?”

  “It’s up in my room,” Karen said. “How are you, Ed? We didn’t see you at church.”

  “We went early,” he said. Her oldest brother, a man of thirty-five with four children of his own, he had always seemed to Karen remote and uninteresting. But she felt this morning a strange compulsive interest in him. “The baby’s got toothache,” he said.

  Karen’s father put his arm around her shoulders. He was bulky in his storm coat: a giant of a man, some people thought, with a large, heavy head. Karen could see her father in Ed. They had the same thick brows, though her father’s now were iron-gray instead of black, the same gray eyes, the same hard-looking, prominent cheekbones. Karen with her light hair and pale, childish complexion, her gentle features, might have belonged to another species. But the difference between them did not discomfort her; it made her feel instead the force of attraction between opposites. “Had some trouble with my girl here a day or so ago,” her father said. “It was like pulling teeth to get her to come with me to old Rule’s. I told you he was sick, didn’t I? My girl here didn’t much want to go—got sulking on me. We brought him back some soup, though.”

  Ed nodded vaguely. “I heard he was sick. Who’s taking care of him?”

  “He won’t have a doctor. Says he won’t let one in. His son’s back there now—Shar. You remember Shar?”

  Ed shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “Look, if you want me over this week you let me know. I’m glad to help. If I were you I—”

  Karen laughed. “If you were him what? You wouldn’t work so hard? Is that it?”

  Ed looked embarrassed; their father laughed. Karen felt feverish. “But you don’t work so hard now! And you’re not him!” she said.

  Her father appreciated that. Karen understood it in the way he laughed. “These women get out of hand,” he said. “Look, Karen, I think you’re getting a fever. I do for a fact. You’d better go back inside.”

  “All right,” Karen said. “I hope the baby gets better, Ed. That’s . . . Timmy, isn’t it?”

  “Billy Ray,” Ed said. He looked more surprised than hurt that anyone should forget the baby’s name. “Say, Karen, you been crying or something? You look a little funny.”

  “I’m all right,” Karen said. She lowered her gaze as they looked at her. Her brain was in a turmoil: she could not understand herself. She wanted to give herself up to crying, convulsively, yet at the same time she wanted to hug both her father and Ed—her father for his love, Ed for his slowness—and draw them to her.

  “Jack’s coming for dinner today,” her father said, winking. “That’s what’s got into her.”

  “Oh. Jack?” Ed said. He nodded vaguely.

  “It isn’t Jack,” Karen said. Her face went hot suddenly. “It isn’t. It has nothing to do with him.” For an instant her father’s knowing expression annoyed her, angered her. Then she laughed at their grins. “You don’t understand,” she said. “It has nothing to do with him.”

  Hurrying breathless up the steps, Karen heard Ed’s voice: “There’s things to lift around, you let them men do it. That’s why you hired them. Don’t go messing with it yourself.” Inside the house she leaned back against the door. In spite of her shivering she felt hot. “Damn him,” she thought of Ed. “Damn him.” Then she felt shame for it—for her sudden hatred of her brother. She could not understand herself.

  SUNDAY MORNING WAS ALWAYS DIFFERENT from the rest of the day, and from the rest of the week; and Karen felt its passing with regret. Since having quit school she had surrendered most of her life outside her home and she was jealous of the drain of energy the routines of life demanded—drawing out her father, for instance, into different roles, different masks, so that she could never hope to know him entirely; the morning at church pulled them back together, stabilized them, united them as it had in the dim past when the Herz pew had been filled with children. Once church was over its sanctity would not last long, not when there was so much to do: already people were drawn to other matters, other concerns.

  And it seemed to Karen now, as it had in the past few days, that she could sense a peculiar rigidity, a tension, in her father that had not been there before. This tension she felt in herself, a secret inner waiting for release. She knew what it was, of course, and, standing at her window and staring at the featureless sky, she thought of the old man dying—it was his death they awaited. Its promise was with them everywhere. The timeless, ghostly sanctity of Sunday morning finished, now time took over again, and time had its peculiar eroding demands. Surely this was why her father looked as he did that day at dinner and seemed so distracted that his manner confused and worried Jack. Karen made herself talk lightly, she drew her father and Jack into conversation together, she turned to Celine often to exchange a feigned glance, to smile as if in the recognition that being female, they had something in common. If Celine understood Karen’s insincerity she did not let on. The meal did not last long, food lay uneaten on Karen’s plate, cold and greasy; the men smoked; a clock ticked somewhere. So the meaningful part of Sunday came to an end.

  Rule’s son Shar had come to eat with them the day before. He had come in with Karen’s father, silent, contemptuous, not even looking at Karen and Celine; he ignored everyone but Herz himself, and even to him he spoke with a brief shrugging manner that before long turned Herz cold. To his question about what Shar did, Shar had said simply, “I drive a car.” The conversation had ended with that. At the end of the meal Shar had stood, refusing coffee, and to everyone’s embarrassment insisting upon paying. . . . Karen had been unable to look at him. Since meeting him in the road that evening with Jack she had been unable to reconcile him with the memory of the thin, dirty boy who had lived back in the hermit’s shack so long ago. He had fought in pear fights with Karen’s brothers against impossible odds, he had stolen Herz’s corn, tomatoes, strawberries. He had stolen pumpkins, only to throw them down on the rocky shore of the creek for everyone to see. Now friends with her brothers, now enemies, he had always been on the periphery of their lives—despised by their mothers, by the schoolteacher, alternately despised and admired by the children themselves.

  Now, a man of thirty, Shar belonged to neither world—not the dim, safe past or the static present. What was he to them but a stranger from lower land, the region of paved roads and cities and, far away, the sea itself? Once so like her brothers, so joined with them in their harsh boyish insolence, he now revealed himself as a creature of another species, a stranger. Karen had felt, watching her father and Shar at supper that night, a sense of warning, of something unavoidable they must—together—defeat, and at the same time a sense of vague uncontrollable excitement, a desire for this violence to happen. “I drive a car,” Shar had said—his face had been squinted against a haze of smoke. At that moment he looked to Karen sharply familiar. His face looked as if it had been finely drawn, line by inked line, features shaped out of his strong face by the delicate and painstaking strokes of a pen. No doubt he looked like his father at that age: straight black hair, dark eyes carefully lashed as if to emphasize his contemptuous secrecy. He had a simple, graceless manner, unlike Jack, and a series of repetitive gestures; he ate as if the food they gave him had no taste. After he had put some dollar bills on the table before Karen’s angry father they had waited, silently, for him to leave. But as if he understood their anger and liked it, he hesitated; he said conversationally, “You people have a hell of a lot of dogs around here still. What do you do with them? Hunt?” Karen, watching Shar, did not see her father’s gesture.

  “I remember that black hound once, one of your boys’ dogs,” Shar said. “The kids were at school and I came around and that one—there—you,” he said to Karen, as if he did not know her name, “—she was standing outside one of the barns and crying. I came over to see what it was and in
side the black hound was rolling around, having puppies. You know how dogs are. And the little girl was about sick with watching it, and her face all wet and dirty, but she kept standing by the door; she stood there crying. I remember that.” Karen looked at her father. “Did that ever happen?” she cried. “I remember it just as plain,” Shar said. “It was me you told to make them puppies go away.”

  The memory of Shar’s presence, the haunting fact of his father’s impending death, possessed Karen as soon as the excitement of Sunday morning ebbed. The Sunday dinner had not been finished before she caught herself picturing Rule’s cabin and the dirty bed in which the old man lay. How odd it was that she had forgotten him in church, that she had not prayed for him—as if his illness could not intrude upon the sanctity of the Mass! Jack had had to repeat something to her before she understood—she was distracted, troubled, her strangeness annoyed her father; she was sorry. “Are you worried about something?” Jack asked. His collar looked tight and she wanted to reach out and touch his straining, nervous throat. “That old man is sick,” Celine said softly. Karen was surprised at her sister’s understanding. She looked over to her father and saw that he had not thought of that himself; his expression of annoyance softened. “Not much we can do about it,” he said. He smoked his pipe with a complacent, comfortable sigh. “Girls her age worry about everything.”

  After dinner Karen and Jack went for a walk. They walked slowly across the grounds, not holding hands, not looking at each other. Before the impending seriousness of their conversation Karen could feel only dismay, boredom, impatience. When he suggested they stop, Karen insisted upon climbing the hill to the Herz cemetery. “I used to go up there every day,” Karen said, “for my mother. Now I forget about it or put it off.” They climbed the hard frozen path. Karen could hear Jack’s breath. At the top the Herz family was arranged in rows, some graves marked by intricate stones—one, Karen’s grandmother’s, had a child-sized angel. In summer the cemetery was kept well and had always attracted Karen; in winter old dead weeds, seemingly sprung out of nowhere, cluttered everything. Karen walked slowly along the path. “There. There are the babies,” she said. For some reason children’s graves were marked by tiny markers, some made only of wood. Two feet high and a foot across: they leaned a little forward, identically, as if they were trying to crawl down to the path. “Allan Henry Herz, 4 months 15 days, God’s Will Be Done,” Karen read. “That was one of my father’s brothers. And here—‘Ethan, 1 month 10 days’; no inscription for him. He was my father’s brother too.” Jack looked anxiously at Karen. But instead of being depressed by this she seemed, on the contrary, to be excited, almost feverish. She wore her blond hair straight to her shoulders, without any curl or wave, and now, when the cold breeze blew it against her face, she brushed strands away angrily. She seemed to have forgotten Jack. “But over here are ours,” she said, crossing to a group of stones and markers beneath an oak tree. “See, ‘Patricia Ann Herz, 3 years approximately. A Blessing to Her Mother and Father.’ She was my sister—it could be me here. It could be me. And this one—‘Baby Herz, He Never Saw the Light of Day.’ Never born. Never even born.” Behind the markers an angel prayed with closed eyes and stiff uplifted hands. As a child Karen had squatted in the grass at the other end of the cemetery watching the angel, waiting for it to move; now she stared at it as if it had spoken to her. Jack nervously lit a cigarette.