The Children(7)

The family spent the first night in that room, on the floor, beneath blankets thick and cold as snow. In the morning Edith slept late, face turned into her pillow. The children followed their dad into the kitchen. The faucet creaked and yawned and put forth a sullen trickle of wet rust that thickened slowly to water. Llewellyn ground coffee with a hand crank and rattled around the stove, looking for the pilot light.

“Stay back,” he said as he lit it, bright hair hanging like a second flame. “God knows the state of the gas lines, we might go up at any moment.” Tilting his head skyward, he shouted, “‘Beware! Out of the ash, I rise with my red hair’!” He winked. “Good acoustics. We’ll put on plays here, like something out of Austen. Amateur theatricals. You two hoodlums are Sebastian and Viola to the life. Or perhaps your mam will write us a play. And I’ll—I’ll direct.”

His words had come faster and faster. Now he subsided, staring moodily into his empty cup. He preferred tea; the coffee was for his sleeping wife.

The children glanced at each other, each wanting the other to say the thing that would rouse their father. Sometimes you wanted to shake Llewellyn like a dressing bottle, get his highs and lows to properly mix. Through the window behind him, Guinevere saw a distraction: a man walking out of the trees, a toolbox in each hand. She pointed. “Look.”

The man was lanky and sun-cured. He might’ve been twenty-five and he might’ve been forty. He walked in lockstep with a beautiful russet dog whose fur matched his hair exactly.

“Oh, goody,” Llewellyn said truculently. “Neighbors.”

Of course he went out to meet the stranger. He liked people, liked to be seen by and among them. Ennis shoved up beside her at the window and they watched the two men stand awhile talking. Llewellyn’s bullish posture softened. He threw his head back in unheard laughter.

A thought pricked her, quick as a flu shot: their father could not be happy out here in the woods.





Four

1998




The stranger was the house’s caretaker. He would check the gas lines and fix the lights and clean out the flues.

“How’d he know we were here?” Guinevere asked.

“He must’ve seen us coming,” Llewellyn said distractedly. “Our car. Lights in the window.”

“We don’t have lights yet.”

He’d stopped listening. “Explore the house,” he called over his shoulder. “I want a full report by sundown.”

They would’ve done that anyway. The house was as good as a country for exploration: three stories high, plus an attic. Its walls ranged in color from flax to chocolate and gave the effect of being inside a cigar box. As the sun climbed the air sweetened, light moving like a cat’s paw through the warbled window glass.

The rooms were fully furnished, everything made of wood and immovably heavy. Guinevere loved all of it: the chair with clawed lion’s feet, the folding screen so finely worked the wood looked like filigree. She started to count the carved bees hidden in the bedposts and window ledges and walls, and stopped when she hit thirty. It seemed impossible that this house had sat so long without a family inside it. The whole place breathed cedar and kindliness.

Except for one room. On the third floor, behind the last door they opened, not counting the attic hatch. A long room lined with seven windows, looking down over the orchard and the woods beyond.

It was emptier than the others, nothing inside it but a big wooden desk peppered eccentrically with drawers. Guinevere crossed the room to look closer. On each drawer was a little hand-shaped pull, cupped or closed or pointing or splayed, all cast in a gold-colored metal.

The desk looked like something a witch had made. Possibly from the body parts of her neighbors. She touched her own index finger to a tiny tarnished one. Who would want a desk like this?

Ennis yanked at a gold fist. The drawer made a rattling sound and didn’t open. He said, “I don’t like this room.”

She didn’t, either. It was warmer than the hall, and so quiet you felt it like an earache. One of the seven windows was open. Guinevere could see trees outside, moving in the wind. None of that coolness washed into the room.

Her left eye popped with fractured colors, like she was blinking away something bright. “Let’s go,” she said, and tugged Ennis back to the hall.

Now the attic. She had to climb onto her brother’s shoulders to reach the pull that brought the ladder down. She tested the first rung with one bare foot. Then climbed it, hand over hand, into a room that ran the length of the house.

The attic had a low peaked ceiling and slanted windows through which a blueness flowed. Ennis ran straight to the wooden racks on the southern wall, hung with guns of all sizes. By the next day Llewellyn would discover the cache himself and hide it away. But the children found it first. They lifted the old artillery in reverent hands, sighting down tarnished barrels.

“We’ll build a lookout station,” Ennis said, “and store our guns up there. So we can keep watch over the woods.”

Guinevere nodded. It was a good plan. “What are we watching for?”

“Pirates,” he said definitely.

When they tired of weaponry they moved to the banded chests lined up along the eastern wall. One was stacked with quilts, dusted with pale gray particles that might have been lavender. The quilts were patterned with fruit and honeybees and leaping rabbits, their colors barely faded. Another chest smelled of vinegar and vanilla and was full of books. Guinevere picked through the words on a cover.