After Alice Fell(36)
Another arrow flies from the window, a dark shaft against the bell of sky. It lands within a hairsbreadth of the first and is followed by a hurrah.
“Don’t move from the stairs.” I bound up and into the house. I catch Cathy moving from Toby’s room across to her sewing room. I take the stairs two at a time and round onto the landing. She leans the bow against the wall and sets three arrows atop a long table. Then she flicks back a linen curtain.
“What the hell are you doing?”
She glances over her shoulder at me and dips her hip like a coquette. But she doesn’t answer, just pulls up the window before grabbing an arrow and maneuvering the bow out the window. She nocks and aims. “Stay clear!”
By evening, Lionel has joined. A happy trio mangling paper targets. Lionel stands just to the side of Cathy, his hand caressing her arm, his whispers making her blush. Then his hand drops down her bodice and pauses on her backside before stepping away to let her shoot.
She is better than good. She is better than Lydia. Showier, annoyingly so. Lydia was patient and quiet, never curtseyed nor flounced.
Lionel’s eyes are half lidded as he follows her movements. He smiles and swaggers near to her, then away, wooing and flirting. It takes Toby jumping and pulling his father’s arm to garner attention. But it is given extravagantly, with Lionel intent on every word his son says. A hand cupped to the back of the boy’s head and thumb circling a caress.
I wander the dining room, window to window, just out of view of the happy family in the yard. The sun is near to set, the sky a dusty purple as the last of the day burnishes the tips of the trees and the rusted weathervane on the old barn across. A pop of red bursts from a silver maple. A scarlet tanager. Cathy lifts and aims, following the arc of the bird as it crosses the yard and grazes the hedge.
I step to the glass and rap. She turns, arm and arrow still aimed to the sky. She says something I can’t hear and pivots away, releasing the arrow as she moves. It slices the outer edge of the straw and drives into the dirt, the acceleration enough to bury half the shaft.
She makes a pirouette, hand twirling, and bows deep before strutting to the arrow and then pulling and tugging like a mime before giving up. With a pout and drop of her shoulder, she places her palms together and pleads for Lionel to help. He gives her a kiss, leans to the arrow, and pulls it out.
Then he jogs to the windows, cupping his palm to the glass and peering in at me. “Come out,” he calls.
I pull up the window and spread my hands to the frame. “Best five out of ten at forty yards?” I ask.
“Make it sixty.” Cathy’s already measuring off the yards with long strides to the road. “Then we have a game.”
“I think we might be in trouble,” Lionel murmurs as he watches her mark the way. “Whatever you do, don’t make a bet.”
Chapter Fifteen
Cathy won’t let us forget she beat us. She swings her foot in church, fanning herself before turning to me with a twist of a grin and mouthing “I won.”
I smack the side of her thigh, point my nose to her psalm book. “You’re in the wrong place.”
Her eyebrow arches and drops. She flicks the fan and gives great attention to the sermon.
Toby sits between her and Lionel. He is taken with the flood of light on the high, arched beams. His mouth hangs open and he points his finger to various streams, following their shape along the white walls and across the dark wood pew boxes. Lionel nods off, the book slid to the side and the spine tucked between his leg and his son’s.
It is my first sermon in years. Reverend Howkes, aged to near dust, does not project from the pulpit, and fumbles his notes as he speaks of Lazarus of the Four Days. I watch the bob of heads of those seated in front of us, the arcs and flutters of the women’s fans and the men’s handkerchiefs. All of it useless in stirring the thick air. The reverend sweats; it rolls down his long forehead, and he blinks to keep the sweat out of his eyes. Were I more Christian, I would sympathize with his plight in losing his notes, and thus forgetting his long-winded story. But I am not more Christian and so do not.
I am instead aggrieved by the heat and Cathy winning by a point and the derringer hidden away in a rucksack. Tomorrow—after meeting Kitty Swain—I’ll remove the gun. Put it in the farthest corner of a drawer. I flick my fan, then drop it to my psalm book, setting the whole of it to my lap. There won’t be that to worry on. My shoulders loosen and I settle against the pew.
The air glistens with motes of golden dust. I tip my own head and follow the ceiling beams to the strong white columns of the meetinghouse, each one cut from a single tree. The windows are bubbled and warped.
We sing without accompaniment, voices tremulous in the heat, feet shuffling one to the other, turning the pages in our books as one. Somewhere behind us a child bellows and shrieks. Toby cants forward to look at me—for indeed there is not a voice as loud as the Runyons’ Frederick Hiram—and blows out his lips and lets out a braying laugh. It transforms then into a peal of joy, and his head tips all the way back to take in the brilliance of light. He bites at it, as if he can eat it all up: the song and Frederick Hiram’s colicky yells and his father’s complicit grin and Cathy’s earnest off-tune soprano.
I think, We move on.
Cathy is right. We must move on, or there is no family at all.
Perhaps it is best to let it be. To send Kitty a letter and make my pardons. We are moving on, I will write, because—