Here on Earth Page 8

  “I don’t care what he had. He shouldn’t have let you come back alone.”

  Gwen puts down the bag of cookies. This judge guy is more interesting than she would have imagined.

  “Cookie?” March offers the Judge, hoping to change the subject.

  Bill Justice takes two bites of a Mint Milano, and when there’s only a small piece left, he whistles.

  “Sister,” he calls.

  March and Gwen look at each other, confused.

  The Judge whistles again and holds out the piece of cookie, and then, all of a sudden, he gets a pained expression. His whole face falls.

  “Where’s the dog?” he asks, and when March looks blank he tosses the cookie bit on the table. “Shit,” he mutters. “Where’s the damned dog?”

  The Judge rises to his feet and heads for the door. He’s already pulling on his overcoat when March and Gwen reach him.

  “Judith got a dog last winter,” the Judge says. His breathing sounds off and he’s having trouble finding his car keys. “A West Highland terrier.”

  “A West Highland terrier?” March feels a bit dazed.

  “A little white dog,” the Judge says, impatient. “Have you seen her?”

  Now that it’s mentioned, March remembers Judith saying something about a dog she got for Christmas. Judith had been planning to come out to California for Thanksgiving, and she worried about putting the dog in the kennel.

  “There was something out on the porch last night,” Gwen pipes up, but when her mother and Bill Justice look at her, expectantly, she feels silly. “But it was a rabbit.”

  “I didn’t remember there was a dog,” March says. “There was no sign of it when we got here.”

  “Oh, fuck,” the Judge says.

  March gets goose bumps from the sound of those words coming from Bill Justice. It is so unlike him to speak in that manner, that she feels she has done something terrible, perhaps even criminal, in forgetting Judith’s dog.

  The Judge opens the hall closet and takes out a leash neither March nor Gwen noticed when hanging up their coats; then he goes outside without bothering to say goodbye.

  “It probably died because of us,” Gwen says. Her voice sounds sad, but also accusatory, as if the whole thing were really March’s fault.

  March grabs a sweater. “Look around the yard,” she tells her daughter. “I’m going with the Judge.”

  Bill Justice is already backing out of the driveway, but March runs over and taps on the window. When he stops, she gets into the Saab and they drive slowly along the road, windows open, calling over and over again for Sister, the little white dog.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” March says as they drive too fast over the bumps. Or perhaps the problem was that she was thinking too much about subjects she shouldn’t have allowed past the first circle of her mind. Just as before, Hollis is taking up too much room. “I was so upset about Judith.”

  Instead of listening to her excuses, the Judge is peering into the bushes as he drives. At the turnoff, they head for the village, driving so slowly that other cars honk, then pass them by. They keep the windows open and continue to whistle and call out. They try the main roads, and most of the back roads; they drive past the schoolyard and the park and St. Bridget’s Hospital. The Judge stops to phone Bud Horace, the animal control officer, from the pay phone outside the Red Apple market, but Bud has no reports of a white dog being sighted. At last, the Judge decides to look down by the Marshes. The sky is already purple; the first few stars have appeared, suddenly, as if someone had thrown a handful of silver across the edge of the world.

  “Hard to believe this is where Alan wound up.” The Judge shakes his head. They drive along the salty blacktop, then turn down a dirt path.

  “Sometimes I forget I have a brother,” March admits.

  “Well, you’ve got one,” the Judge says. “And that’s where he lives.”

  There is a ramshackle house at the very edge of the Marshes; it’s fashioned out of wooden shingles that are the color of a dove’s wings. Most people say it’s the Founder’s house, and that Aaron Jenkins built it with his own two hands, although others remember stories of a fisherman who lived down here at the turn of the century, a nasty fellow who set out eel traps and refused to speak when greeted by anyone from the village.

  “It’s parkland,” the Judge tells March, “but the town council lets him stay. Once or twice a year someone from social services comes over, but he won’t open the door for them. The ladies on the library committee pay for his expenses. Judith was the one who started that, and she usually brought him his groceries. She tried to check on him once a week or so.”

  “I had no idea. She never talked about him.”

  March looks out at the thick grass and the reeds. She has always blamed Alan for driving Hollis off, with his cruelty and his jealousy. Now she wonders if she herself wasn’t guilty of the same exact sin she has always blamed on her brother. Perhaps she also has carried a grudge too long.

  “Well,” March says, “with Judith gone, Alan can sell the house and Fox Hill and have enough money to take care of himself. That was his one good deed—allowing Judith to live there.”

  “He wasn’t the one who let her live there.” The Judge watches, closely gauging March’s reaction. “It was Hollis.”

  Well, there you have it—she truly didn’t know who owned Fox Hill. She has turned to the Judge, riveted.

  “Alan sold the place right after Julie died; he was desperate for money, he was drinking it all up, and he got a nice offer from some corporation based in Florida. That corporation turned out to be Hollis. I was coming over to tell you today. You’ve been left all of Judith’s personal effects, but Hollis owns the house.”

  The Judge clears his throat. He has always disliked Hollis, but not for the reasons other people might have, because of his mean streak. The Judge, after all, has seen men at their worst and at their best in his courtroom. As far as he can tell, the problem with Hollis is that he has always blamed others for what’s wrong with his life. He never takes any responsibility, and a man like that, the Judge knows, simply cannot be saved. Truth is, he wouldn’t want to be.

  “It appears that Hollis got everything he wanted,” the Judge says now.

  “It does look that way,” March says.

  “Well, let’s hope so, at any rate. Let’s hope he’s satisfied.”

  The Judge stops the car to call out his window for the dog; then he puts the car in park and gets out. March gets out too. She’s shaken by the proximity of the past. There is her brother, on the other side of these reeds. There is Hollis, beyond the hilltop and the trees, the owner of the house where she grew up and now sleeps, the owner of everything the eye can see. He was so poor and neglected when he came to them that he did not know it wasn’t necessary to stand by the back door, like a dog, to get his dinner.

  “Sit at the table,” March remembers Judith Dale telling him, and he sat there mute, staring at lamb chops and lettuce and apple pie as if he had no business to dream such things, let alone have them for supper.

  The water in the Marshes is rising with the tide; it seems purple and starry as well—an inverted sky.

  “Not a soul,” the Judge says.

  They don’t call out their windows on the ride back. They don’t bother to speak. The Judge takes the shortcut back to Fox Hill, avoiding the village and Route 22, which means zigzagging past the cemetery. He hadn’t been thinking of how this course might affect them, but the choice is clearly a mistake. Less than twenty-four hours ago, they were here to bury Judith. How is it that even grown men, old men who should be content with all that they’ve had, still want more? How is it that death always seems impossible, a trick of nature one should somehow be able to set in reverse? The Judge feels a sharp pain up and down his left arm, never a good sign.

  “I think we should stop,” March says as they approach the cemetery.

  March truly surprises him sometimes. In the past, Bill Justice viewed her
as spoiled; the selfish little girl her father could never say no to. But with March, you never can tell. Tonight, for instance, her impulse to visit Judith’s grave is one hundred percent on target.

  The Judge nods and drives through the iron gates, then along the narrow road which leads to the newest burial section. Scarlet leaves drop from the maples, adding to the carpet already on the ground. Now the sky is purple through and through; there are no other visitors, not at this hour. After they get out of the car and approach the grave, March can feel shivers along her skin.

  It’s cold here. Too cold to be left all alone. Later in the week, March will bring a pot of asters to plant, the wild variety which return year after year. She will, however, avoid the older section of the cemetery; she knows too many who have been buried there, more, in fact, than she knows among the residents living down in the village.

  The wind has begun to pick up, blowing the fallen leaves into little whirlwinds. How is it, March wonders, that life happens this way? Is it really possible to be a child one moment, asking for candy and a hand to hold, and then, in what seems like seconds, to be a grown woman walking through a cemetery on such a dark and bitter night? She’s confused being back here; she’s seeing shadows. It makes perfect sense that she doubts her own vision when she spies something beside Judith Dale’s grave.

  March closes her eyes; she’s dizzy, it’s true, but when she looks again, she’s certain something is there. All at once she feels a pressure inside her chest, like a fist which prevents her from breathing. At this instant, she could believe in ghosts, but when she concentrates she sees it’s no billowy mist that covers Judith’s grave. It’s no specter returned. It’s an animal at rest, a shaggy creature with leaves matted into its fur. March tugs on the Judge’s coat sleeve.

  “The dog,” she says. “Hey,” she cries to the terrier. She claps her hands and whistles.

  The dog sits up, ears twitching. It’s little and so dirty all of its fur has turned a muddy gray shade. It has been waiting here for a long time, it hasn’t eaten for days, and it’s not about to be disturbed from its vigil by strangers. As March approaches, the terrier growls, low down in its throat.

  March stops, startled by such a small dog’s depth of feeling.

  “It’s all right.” The Judge has come up beside March. “Sister,” he calls. “Here, girl.”

  At the sound of his voice, the dog leaps up and runs to him. The terrier is filthy, but the Judge bends down and picks it up.

  “You silly thing,” he says.

  The dog’s tail wags like mad against the Judge’s overcoat. It’s clearly in ecstasy to be held in his arms, and it yaps with what little voice it has left, since it has been howling each and every night.

  For all they know, this dog has been following the body of its mistress from the time she was first taken from the house. It may have been waiting in the alley beside the funeral parlor, pursuing the hearse down Route 22. This small creature is not at all confused about what it wants, unlike men and women, who have the ability to conceal their deepest desires. Men and women, after all, can hide their love away. Men don’t chase after cars. Women don’t throw themselves upon cement doorsteps, curled up in a heap, until somebody opens the door and finally lets them inside.

  Among men and women, those in love do not always announce themselves, with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you’re gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold. On this night, the Judge cries more quietly than it would ever seem possible for a man of his size. He keeps his face averted, buried against the dog’s fur. March doesn’t eyen realize he’s weeping, until a sob escapes. And that is how she finally knows that Bill Justice loved Judith. He loved her for thirty-five years, which for some people is as good as a lifetime. He loved her the way no one else ever has, and yet, in spite of that, he’s only entitled to grieve privately, in the dark. At least he has a right to that, and March wouldn’t think of intruding. She’ll stand beside him, in silence, beneath a sky that is now perfectly black, until he’s ready to drive her home.

  7

  At twilight, Fox Hill is the most beautiful place on earth, with its long, blue views of Guardian Farm and its twisted black trees. Hank comes here often at this time, accompanied by the dogs, who are unusually subdued at this hour, as if they knew that bickering and snapping would be a crime against the silence down below.

  Most of the time, Hank considers himself to be too obvious and too tall, but here on the hill, he is small and extremely well aware of his own insignificance. What is the difference between himself and a single blade of grass? The grass, as he sees it, is worth a thousand times more than he is, since it serves a purpose, and hard as he’s tried Hank has never been able to figure a single reason for his existence. All he’s ever been is a problem, a burden—but there must be a reason for this life that he has, there’s got to be. After all, he is here, just as surely as the fields he walks across. He is breathing this sweet, October air.

  Sometimes, when he stops thinking of himself as Hollis’s adopted nephew and his father’s only son, Hank has the sense that there might be something worthwhile inside of him. It is possible that no one perceives the world the way he does, or views this landscape with the clarity with which he sees. This alone would be a reason for him to exist. When he thinks about the idea of his own singular vision, the world suddenly seems filled with endless possibilities, and he wonders if this is what hawks experience at the moment of flight. Expectation, that’s what it is. The kind you feel when you’re seventeen, and the air is cold and fresh, and the dogs lie down beside you in the grass, and everything is quiet, the way it always is right before something is about to happen.

  The evening star rises into the dark blue night. But this star is only the beginning, like opening the cover of a book but not yet turning the first page. Below, in the pastures, there used to be dozens of horses, including the thoroughbred named Tarot’s Deck of Fortune, who was once entered in both the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes in a single year. Hank found a photograph forgotten in the barn, crammed between two stalls. When he saw the image of Tarot, draped in blue and white silks, Hank actually cried. He wished he had lived at the Farm in Mr. Cooper’s time. He’s heard from some of the older residents of the village that the ground used to shake when the horses ran together. You could feel it all the way in town; the floors of the bakery and the hardware store used to vibrate so badly several residents were convinced that the village was prone to earthquakes.

  Of all the racehorses once boarded here, Tarot is the only one left Belinda used to spoil him terribly; she’d feed him sugar cubes and whisper in his ear. She always rode at the end of the day, when the sky was halfway between black and indigo, like ink spreading out on a page. Tarot still gets restless at this hour; he paces when he’s down in the pasture, and if he’s in his stall, he kicks, and that’s when you’d better beware.

  Jimmy Pairish—who knows his horses if nothing else—has told Hank that before Tarot went crazy, Mr. Cooper had been offered five hundred thousand cash for him by a consortium in Atlanta. Even now, Tarot is still beautiful. He’s old, twenty-two, but few people would guess to look at him. Of course, he hasn’t been ridden for so many years that he’s even more headstrong than ever. The dogs are terrified of him, especially since last spring, when he kicked a pup who was too curious for its own good, snapping its spine, so that Hollis had to shoot the thing, to relieve the poor creature from its misery.

  Probably, Hank should be over at a friend’s house at this hour, instead of coming up here to the hill. The funny thing is, the kids at school think he’s rich. They probably assume he’s at some fancy dinner party, or down in Boston, at the opera or something. A real laugh, although Hank can understand why they’d be misled. Hollis is rich, but that surely doesn’t mean the wealth extends to Hank. The reality is, Hank is as poor as any orphan. He owns nothing; even the clothes on his back w
ere paid for by Hollis. The kids at school are certain that Hank chooses to wear old boots to be cool, and that he’s simply not interested in going out with them to the bowling alley on Friday nights because he’s got better things to do, but the mortifying fact is, he has no cash to spend.

  He’s a great guy, of course, he’s got a million friends. If he ran for student body president today, he’d probably win. It’s not his fault that he’s always too busy for social events. Like tonight, for instance, there’s a party at Willie Simon’s house. Willie’s parents are in the Bahamas and he’s got the key to their liquor cabinet and all the prettiest girls will be there. And yet, in spite of an invitation, Hank is here, on Fox Hill, thinking about horses and fate. He’s concentrating so deeply that it takes a minute before he realizes he’s not imagining someone walking down the road. It’s a girl in a black ski jacket. Hank gets to his feet to see her more clearly and convince himself she’s not a mirage.

  It doesn’t take long for Hank to realize this is the girl he saw at Mrs. Dale’s funeral. She’s small, but she has a tough sort of posture. She stops and takes out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, shakes one out, and lights it. Hank has the sense that he’s doing something bad watching her like this. She’s really pretty, but that’s not what’s getting to him. He feels like he knows this girl. He experienced the same thing at the funeral parlor; it’s as if he’d been waiting for her before he ever saw her. She was so upset after the service; she seemed to be crying, but as soon as people began filing out the door, she acted as if nothing was wrong. That was what got to Hank, that she wouldn’t let anyone witness her pain. It’s exactly what he’s been doing all his life.