The Ten Thousand Doors of January(20)
“Thank you very kindly, sirs, but no, I’ve no interest in riverboats. I confess I’m a land man, looking for likely property.” His voice carried over the heads of the congregation, nasally and foreign-sounding, and Mama Larson huffed beside Ade. No one ought to speak above a respectful murmur while under the church roof.
“I heard in Mayfield there might be some affordable acreage near here—apparently it’s haunted, and not much used—and I took this opportunity to make myself known to you folks.” There was a rippling beside the stranger, a pulling-away. Ade supposed they didn’t much like the idea of a big-city northerner bulling into their church just to swindle them out of cheap land. They weren’t far enough south for carpetbaggers to be much more than badly inked cartoons in the Sunday paper, but they knew the signs. From the tone of their muttered replies Ade guessed they were stonewalling him (no, sir, no land hereabouts, you’ll have to look somewheres else).
The stream of people began to leave and Ade trailed behind Aunt Lizzie as they filed down the aisle. The stranger was still smiling with affable condescension at everyone, undeterred. Ade stopped.
“We got a house on our property that everybody knows is full of haunts—saw one myself, just yesterday—but it’s not for sale,” she told the stranger. She didn’t know why she said it, except she wanted to shake the smugness out of him and prove they weren’t poor rural folk who would sell land cheaply out of baseless superstition. And perhaps because she was curious, hungry for the man’s worldly otherness.
“Did you now.” The man smiled at her in what he must have thought was a charming manner, and leaned closer. “Permit me to walk you out, in that case.” Ade found her arm clamped to his suit sleeve, her feet stumbling alongside his. Her aunts were already outside, likely fanning themselves and gossiping. “Now, what’s the nature of these haunts? What did you see, precisely?”
But her desire to speak to the man had evaporated. She tugged her hand away, shrugging in a sullen, adolescent way, and would have left without speaking another word except that his eyes caught hers. They were the color of moons or coins, unspeakably cold but also somehow alluring, as if they possessed their own gravitational pull.
Even years later, curled beside me in the languorous warmth of the late-afternoon sun, Ade would shudder, just a little, as she described that gaze.
“Tell me all about it,” the stranger breathed.
And Ade did. “Well, I just was going to the old cabin for no reason and there was a ghost boy waiting there. Or at least that’s what I thought he was at first, on account of he was black and funny-dressed and speaking in tongues. But he didn’t come from hell or anything. I don’t know where he come from, exactly, except he ended up walking out of our cabin door. And I’m glad he did, I liked him, liked his hands—” She closed her teeth on the words, reeling and a little breathless.
The not-very-charming smile had returned to the stranger’s face as she spoke, except now there was a kind of predatory stillness beneath it. “Thank you awfully much, Miss—?”
“Adelaide Lee Larson.” She swallowed, blinked. “Pardon me, sir, my aunts are calling.”
She skittered out the church doors without looking back at the stranger in the neat suit. She felt his eyes like a pair of dimes pressed to the back of her neck.
Because of her aunts’ essential softheartedness, Ade’s punishments never varied. She was confined to the upstairs room where they all slept (except Mama Larson, who did not sleep so much as nap haphazardly in a variety of semisupine positions downstairs) for the following two days. Ade bore this confinement with poor grace—the Larson women would spend those days haunted by bangings and thumpings above them, as if their house hosted a particularly foul-tempered poltergeist—but no real resistance. In her figuring, it was best to lull them into complacence before climbing out the window and scrabbling down the honeysuckle on the evening of the third day.
On Monday she was supplied with a basket of fresh laundry to fold and a few stacks of ripped underclothes to mend, because Aunt Lizzie insisted that lying in bed all day was more reward than punishment, and said she might run off tomorrow evening herself and they could lock her upstairs next for some bed rest. At lunch the loft grew greasy with the smell of frying bacon and beans. Ade dropped a Bible on the floor to remind them to bring her up something to eat.
But none of her aunts appeared. There was an authoritative thumping on the front door, followed by the astonished silence of five women so unaccustomed to visitors they weren’t quite sure what action ought to follow a knock at the door. Then a timid chair-scraping and shuffling, and the door creaking inward. Ade lay flat on the floor and pressed her ear to the pine boards.
She heard nothing but the low, foreign rumblings of a strange man in their kitchen, and five women’s voices rising and falling around it like a flock of startled river birds. Once a hearty laugh boomed upward, drum-hollow and well practiced. Ade thought of the big-city man at the church service and felt a strange darkening, a fear of something nameless hanging on her horizon.
The man left, the door closed, and the twittering of the aunts crescendoed into something like cackling.
It was an hour or more before Aunt Lizzie brought up a plate of cold beans. “And who was that at the door?” Ade asked. She was still lying on the floor, having found herself paralyzed by a combination of lassitude and dread.