Follow Me to Ground(35)

We came back to where we started, these last few years. The two of us in the attic, and one of us wondering what we’d done.

I’d slide down the walls and sit beside him. Study his bruised lips and his tongue limp between them.

The wound taking him over and turning him back to soil. An untended flowerbed that spat up its seeds.

Tucked into the corner of the floor and the harsh slope of the wall he lay wilting – he wilted quite softly, in fact, as certain flowers do in our forsaken summer heat. His skin was the heaving droplet hang of their saddened petals.

Until the very end, a sound came out of him.

A chord from a song I didn’t recognise.

Just the one chord; over and over.

For a time I thought he wanted to tell me something, to scold me, hurt me, to follow me through the house and remind me of what I’d done.

But now I don’t think that he could help it, or that he even felt it happening. Now, I think song was lodged so deep inside him , that the whole of him, his length and breadth, was threaded through and through with so much song, that his flesh carried on producing it.

For years, the sound of it.

And then silence.

Until today, and this knocking at the door.

Tall, fair boy. Looking down at me with a cautious kind of pity. I pull at my hem.

–So it’s not true?

–What?

–You’re not a witch.

–Do I look like a witch?

–No, but it’s what my mother said and she didn’t often lie.

Before I can stop myself, I laugh. Quick, dry sound. An alien feeling in my throat. It offends him and he stands a little straighter.

–When I was little she said you were a monster I’d one day have to kill. She said you murdered my daddy.

–Someone murdered your daddy but it wasn’t me.

Thinking of Olivia leaning over Harry with a pillow, mixing into his coffee some vial of poison. But he ignores me, says

–I couldn’t sleep most nights, when I was little, thinking of you. She said you murdered him so you could eat him, and that I had to kill you. That if I killed you he’d jump right out of your stomach.

And now he looks at my stomach, the slight bulge where my dress is sticking.

–But look at you. A girl.

A contempt for females. That, too, he’s gotten from her.

–The real Miss Ada. The first one. She was your sister? Your mother?

My breath is sore, now, in my chest. I haven’t spoken this much in so long.

–Your mother was under a lot of strain, with Harry dying, and then her brother—

–Who’s Harry?

Mist-like, evening light. Denying the storm and its promise of rain. I am afraid that if I look away for too long he’ll come up and simply walk away, that The Ground will have leeched his memory and he won’t know I’m here, waiting.

–Your father. Your mother’s husband.

He creases his eyes and his nose follows.

–My father’s name was Samson.

He seems to be getting larger, blocking the door to the hall.

–And my mother had no brother.

There’s something wrong with me. I wish you’d look inside.

And Olivia’s hand flaring across her stomach and the unborn baby inside.

Flared large and white like a sheet caught on the line.

There was a stain on one of the blankets; its pale yellow corner seemed to have been dipped in a red and purple dye, and I recalled then, as I hadn’t for a time, how Father had once spooned mulch into my soundless mouth. A little jar he’d bring up with him, and sit next to me with a silver spoon seeming twig-like in his hand.

–Eat, Ada, and you’ll soon be strong.

There’d been an evening when he had left me to feed myself, and unable to use the spoon I’d dipped the blanket’s bunched corner into the jar and held it there till it was full and sopping, and then I suckled from it. The coarse cloth slow to give up its heady brew. I’d a name for it, I remember, the first words I ever strung: Blueberry sediment crush, because Father had said it would nestle inside me and if ever anyone saw inside me all they’d see would blueberry after blueberry, wet and purple and red. Sitting with the blanket tugged into my lap I marvelled at how well the colour kept: bright, bold stain I hadn’t been able to lift with the small pocket of my mouth.

Later, when he came back, he sat down with his back against the wall and said that he himself had never cared for the unseemly shape of spoons.

–I’m here to ask you where my father is. She said you’d know.

–Why didn’t she come herself?

Now he shrugs. I’m asking him things he’s asked himself.

–She said it wasn’t the right time.

–Seems a funny thing to wait on.

–Where is he?

He tried to tell me. Over and over he tried to tell me.

Sick is sick. It has to go somewhere. And now here is this boy with his china cup cheekbones and his almond eyes.

No wonder The Ground is churning.

–I think you should go, now. Maybe come back another time.

–She said to come soon as she died, and now she’s dead.

–There’s nothing I can do for you.

Something I’d seen but wouldn’t look at.

That short-tailed animal with its bloodied snout.