Against the Ruins Read online

  He pushes me face down against the bed, holds me there. Lyra runs to the corner of the room, hides in the shadows.

  “We’ve sinned against God,” William yells into my ear. “Those circles, those circles of hell, that’s where you’re going, where all of us will go if we don’t beg for our lives. I’ve heard them.”

  I’m shaking as I whisper, “Lyra, go to your room, everything will be all right, go in your room and close the door. Please do this for Mama.”

  She begins inching away, but William rears up from the bed and grabs her by the arm. Oh God. There’s blood on his chest, stains on both arms. Lyra screams as he pushes her down beside me. I grab her into my arms as William yells, “I said pray, you wicked child. You’ve sinned, you must pay for your sins.”

  My terrified voice: “Run to your room, honey. Go on. Now.” I push her to her feet. She starts crying and holds onto me.

  William leaps up and runs around the room, cries that he has to find his mother’s Bible; he turns and bellows, “What did you do with it, Louise? What have you done with my mother’s Bible?”

  “William, please tell me what’s wrong!”

  He runs toward the living room, there’s a crash, he runs back into the bedroom, looks at Lyra and me as though just realizing we’re there, and snarls, “If you two move, I’ll have to shoot you.”

  He begins talking to someone who isn’t there. He runs back to the living room, stumbles into the hall, the dining room—another crash, things are falling. I grab Lyra and pull her through her room and into the bathroom; I’m trembling and crying as I tell her to lock the bathroom door and do not come out—

  Then William’s suddenly there, he grabs me and drags me back to the bedroom and shoves me to my knees again. I try to get up but he—he’s crying now—knocks me to the floor; my knees hitting the wood sounds like bones breaking, and I cry, “What’s wrong, William, why do we have to pray?” and then he yells again—

  Now I see more blood on the bed. I feel sick looking at it, I can’t seem to move. Blood all down William’s left arm—oh God, there’s so much blood—

  No—I’m not back there. No. It was a long time ago. Thank God.

  I’m in a bed that feels strange, someone is whispering. I can’t tell who it is. I feel—disorganized, a jumbled closet no one’s opened for years.

  Can’t get my eyes to open. I start to say something but no sound comes out. Perhaps I’m gone, maybe I only think I’m still here. Yet I feel—younger.

  I know my name. Louise. My name is Louise. I must still be here. I wish I knew what day it is.

  I’m so tired—

  Something woke me—I’m in a hospital again, I can tell by the smells. Very noisy too. Was that a nurse or dear Dr. Dumaine?

  Wait—that’s my child’s voice. My baby girl’s. Isn’t it? Lyra! Lyra, you’re here. That must be your hand touching mine, which is so swollen and pinned down by tubes. What torture that I can’t look into your eyes.

  I must really be sick this time.

  Darling Lyra. Even now it’s hard for your old mother not to call you “darling baby girl”—like I did when you were little. You’re whispering—I can’t quite make it out. A minute ago I felt like I was in Brantley again, back when my three brothers and I were children and we rushed outside whenever an airplane flew by—airplanes being rare and exotic then. We’d look up and wave like mad. I didn’t always see the plane but I said I did. I didn’t want to be left out. Some things are there even when you can’t see them, I’d say when telling you this story. My mantra, for more reasons than one.

  Now you’re here, I feel so clear, Lyra. Yes, talk to me. I can hear you. What was that? You went back to Lincoln Street?

  Well … of course. Of course you would.

  I seem to be alone now. I couldn’t tell my child that since I’ve been lying in this bed I’ve been reliving Lincoln Street too, reliving the worst day there. I try not to remember it, I’ve kept it at bay for years, but now it keeps returning. It won’t let me alone. Why after all this time—

  Why on earth didn’t I phone an ambulance that night? Can shock be that bad? I didn’t even think of it, perhaps because we couldn’t afford such things.

  I don’t want to go back there—still clinging to the bloodied bedspread. Still wondering how life can change so abruptly. It’s the next morning. I’m still kneeling by the bed when I open my eyes. I remember the night, the blood, the praying, and I put my head back down—I will not wake up to today, I’ll wake up to yesterday, to how much there is to look forward to when we get a house of our own and have a second baby. Then I look at William mumbling in his sleep and it comes back again, the terrible screaming senseless night, and I jerk across the bed, check the bandage I put on his arm and sigh, relieved—no fresh blood. I slump back down. One moment the world was one thing and now it’s another. A dial was spun, and I’m in a foreign country.

  What happened?

  Oh, God—where is my baby?

  I stumble to my feet and run into Lyra’s room—

  I hear you talking to me—right now, in this hospital room. But no, you’re under your sheets. You’re only six years old. Too young for this. I pull the covers back but you don’t open your eyes as I kiss you on the cheek. I wonder how much you saw and heard and lean over, head in my hands—I want yesterday back, I’ll make sure you don’t see what happens. There I am, taking care of my beautiful child, hustling you out of the room before William grabs me, taking your hand and speeding you over to Uta’s house. I tell her William is sick and could she look after you for a while and Uta says why of course and you stay there and when it gets dark she puts you down in her spare bedroom, reads you a story, and you never know.

  My tears spill, hard slow exhaustion confusion dismay tears.

  I stare through the doorway at William, at the blood on the bed, a scene from a war—

  What is wrong with him?

  I walk over and gaze down at him—he looks like himself now, his slender face peaceful, like the smiling shy boy in that old jeep. “Who goes on a Florida honeymoon in an army jeep?” my stepmother asked, and I laughed: “We do, we do!”

  As I lay my head down on William’s thigh, on the blue pajamas streaked with blood, I begin to cry. No, I can’t, I can’t fall apart. I lean back up. It’ll be all right, it has to be all right, if only I could get some sleep, in a few minutes I’ll call school and say I’m sick and then call a doctor—

  William stirs. He glances at me and then stares at the ceiling.

  “Sweetheart, how do you feel this morning?”

  Nothing but that fixed stare at the ceiling. I reach over and touch his forearm. Rigid, like steel.

  “Sweetheart, do you have classes today?”

  It’s like he’s not there. But he seems to be thinking something, perhaps hearing something.

  I stare at the clock. Get Lyra to school. He’ll just rest this morning. I can’t think beyond that.

  In the bathroom I sponge blood off my school dress and brush my teeth while staring at the wicker clothes hamper. It could use a coat of paint, it would look much better green, I’ll paint it soon. Then my face crumbles like an old cookie. What does a clothes hamper matter now? I comb my hair, staring into the medicine-chest mirror. I’m older than I was yesterday.

  Why so much praying, so much talk of sin? My God, he—

  Get Lyra to school. I head for your room, hesitate. Where is William’s service pistol?

  Get my child out of the house. Now. In your room, I close the door and sit down beside you and whisper, “Time to get up, sweetie.”

  You open your eyes and I just hold on to you for a minute and say I’m sorry that things were so—odd—last night, and do you remember that your daddy kept practicing saying prayers? That’s to help him become a minister. I hurry you into the bathroom
and peek at William; it unnerves me how he seems to be asleep with his eyes open. I know nothing about … nervous conditions. I’ll fix breakfast, maybe he’d like something to eat. Just get Lyra to school first.

  In record time I get you dressed and for once I don’t care if you make your bed. I explain that your father isn’t feeling well and he’s resting, and I take your hand as we walk past him into the kitchen. You don’t look at him. I fix your cereal, remember the milk out front and tell you to drink your juice and stay in the kitchen. Opening the front door, I peer left and right, cross the porch and open its door for the milk bottles and the newspaper.

  When I return, you say, “Daddy was bleeding.”

  I lean down and hug you. “It’s okay, everything’s going to be all right. Your daddy is tired today.”

  You ask if I’m tired too and suggest that we spend the day making fudge. I laugh so hard tears roll down my cheeks. I barely notice that you don’t touch your cornflakes; I do notice that from time to time you look over your shoulder toward the bedroom door.

  Back in your room, I get out your navy blue coat with the red cuffs I attached when the sleeves got too short. I say I hope you have a good day at school.

  “We don’t have school on Saturday.”

  Saturday. It’s Saturday.

  “Put on your play clothes, Lyra.”

  I hustle you into corduroy pants, a sweater, and your car coat. When we pass by him, William is still staring into space, and again I say that your father is very tired. But you’re no fool, you see that he has his eyes open while the rest of him looks asleep. Walking you out into the yard, I prattle that everything is going to be fine and force my lips into an imitation smile.

  “What a nice December day—look at the sunshine, sweetie—soon old Santa will be coming.”

  “Is my daddy real sick?”

  I say no, not exactly, and well no, everything is okay, and you be sure and tell anyone who asks that things are fine. I lean down and give you a hug. “I have to take care of Daddy and I need you to be a big girl and stay out here and play. But don’t worry, I’m right inside if you need me.”

  Across the street, Johnny Truesdale is playing hopscotch. I wave him over and say why don’t you two play together this morning. His mother, Rosa, wearing her scarlet bathrobe and big foam hair curlers, appears on her porch and calls out, “They can play over here if you like. I’ll just be wrapping up gifts this morning. Alone. All alone.”

  She knows.

  “Thank you. William is—he’s—sick this morning. I don’t want Lyra to catch anything.”

  Johnny, in his Roy Rogers shirt, walks across the street, asks you, “Who was hollering at your house last night?”

  You say, “My daddy can sleep with his eyes open.”

  “I heard tell onc’t of a horse that could do that,” Johnny says. “Kept him from falling down when he was sleeping standing up. Can your daddy sleep standing up?”

  As you two head toward Johnny’s house, you say you don’t know. I wait for you to tell him about the blood, the praying, seeing your mother thrown to her knees. I almost hope you do tell him.

  I wish this would go away, this going back to then—it does no good to think about it. Are you still here, Lyra? I know it’s idiotic that I’m talking to someone who can’t hear me.

  You know, I think I sensed something odd—some invisible emanation—from the moment we set foot on Lincoln Street. Maybe I taught the pathetic fallacy too well. I wonder if you remember that first day. A Friday, all April azaleas and soft Carolina sunshine, and we’re standing in front of that ramshackle two-story in Elmwood Park. Next door is Uta’s granite house. Up and down the street more clapboards like ours, all on the come-down. Well-off German and Irish immigrants, many working for the Seaboard Coastline Railroad, began building these houses in 1904 on the former site of the state fairgrounds; the neighborhood was fashionable then, full of evening strollers heading up to the governor’s mansion to view the gardens. But as the century aged, as wars and depressions and changes in faith settled in, the well-off ferried themselves across the Broad River to the tract ranchers in sparkling new suburbs. By the time we arrived in Columbia, Elmwood Park’s stately homes had been carved into haphazard apartments for stragglers and strangers. For people like us.

  The house looked tired to me that first day; it was sliced into two apartments—the upstairs empty, the downstairs ours. The carved oak front door to our five rooms is caked with careless paint layers, the metal doorknob rusty. In the entryway I smell mildew, mothballs, old cooking grease. The rooms are damp, cold. The living room lies behind double glass doors, its fireplace choked by an ugly brown oil stove. Through another door of glass panes is a tiny dining room. The dining room makes me feel better, and I put an arm around your shoulder.

  “Now we can get a real table, Lyra. It’ll be a little like home in Brantley, the dining room with the long oak table and brick fireplace, my brothers and the ghost of dear Daddy perching their feet on the hearth to light their pipes or Lucky Strikes. I’m going to clean up this house and we’ll be happy like that here.”

  I remember the tinny uncertainty in my voice. I’d never lived in a city, never lived so far from relatives. I was still reeling from William’s abrupt decision to uproot us so he could study for the ministry—he didn’t even go to church until we got married.

  I don’t know if my uncertainty was made better or worse when Uta Moazen came over to introduce herself. I soon learned that neighborhood children believed Uta was a witch; her dark stone house was intimidating. Flowers that would flourish in no other soil leapt from the ground in her garden. Uta herself was tall and stately. Long straight back, black eyes, a black dress with white collar most days, one sleeve pinned up. Her left arm had been amputated just above the elbow. At our front door she introduced herself and, with her intact arm, proffered a casserole dish covered by a tea towel embroidered with Dutch girls in braids. She gave me a penetrating look and said, “I’m glad you’ve moved here. This is the right place.”

  I led the way to the kitchen—our living-room furniture wasn’t there yet, not that it amounted to much. Uta sat at the breakfast table and I poured her coffee, said how glad I was to meet my first neighbor. I gazed into her piercing eyes, which never seem to blink, and then at the single long slender hand. Two or three rings on each finger, as though compensating for the missing hand. Her silver-white hair hung to her shoulders in ringlets; oddly, they made her look regal rather than ridiculous.

  You come into the room and I introduce you to Uta, and you look at the empty sleeve and are about to say Where’s your arm? when—thank the dear Lord—my look stops you dead. After you crawl under the table with a coloring book, Uta explains that she’s of Irish descent, that her relatives fled the famine and her grandfather eventually took a job with the railroad in Columbia.

  “My grandparents landed in America right before you people started cooking up civil war. If you’d been hungry, you’d not have got the bloody energy for fighting. Not that that ever stopped an Irishman, mind you.”

  “It’s in the water,” I say. “My brothers asked the tooth fairy for rifles.”

  Uta laughs. “Got a sense of humor, you do. I like that.”

  I think our lives entwined right then, as though someone knew what would happen later.

  You poke your head out and ask Uta if she was a Yankee in The War. She gives you a withering glance. “My dear child, I’m Irish. I can’t ever be anything else.”

  She gets up, motions me to the kitchen window, and points at her house. “See that stone on the left side of the porch post—people call that a column but it’s square for mercy’s sake—see how at the bottom there’s one stone that’s slightly different? Over on the left? It’s smaller, darker. My grandfather brought that stone from County Galway. It’s our returning stone.”

 
In a second she adds, “Corr baille, we call it in Gaelic. The need for home. I’m waiting for when that stone grabs me up and carts me back to my country.”

  You poke your head out again and give me a wide-eyed stare. I suspect you’re picturing our one-armed neighbor riding down the street on a rock.

  Uta is still staring out the window. “There goes that crazy one.” She turns back to me. “Have you seen her?”

  I stare out the window again—a bedraggled woman in a brown dress, head down, talking to herself, is pulling a child’s red wagon down the street. The woman’s gait is odd, she stumbles often.

  “Loony as a bat,” Uta says. “Spent five years in the insane asylum on Bull Street. The place is only a few blocks away, you know. Horrible place, people in chains. The husband put her in there, some say he did it just to get rid of her. When she got out she was completely mad, and he took the children and moved. People tried to force her out of the neighborhood. Poor wretch.”

  Uta backs away from the window. “My father said if you looked the mad in the eye, you’d go off your own head. The banshee.”

  As we sit back down, she adds, “My da, now there was a superstitious man. He truly took to South Carolina, fancied all those burned-out ruins in the country. Loved scary stories too—he fit in here splendidly.”

  She lowers her voice.

  “Elmwood Park is haunted, don’t you know? They once held the state fair here, circuses came—we live where the snake charmers plied their trade. Sometimes I think I hear a carousel. Before that, this was a potter’s field: we’re living over the dead too. Imagine the ghosts. During the Civil War they trained soldiers in the fairgrounds buildings, then made ammunition there, then turned the buildings into a hospital for the wounded, they did. I studied on the history some time back. An elephant mauled a man to death here too. Circus people were bringing the giant creature across the bridge, and he balked and threw a man and a horse into the river, and they calmed the elephant down, but when they got over here he suddenly picked up another trainer and dashed him against the ground over and over. Tore the man to pieces.”