Monthly Story (September, '24): Prowler

fiction

Until the winter of Pearl Harbor and that curious business with Virginia Cathers, I had never given any thought to my name and what it meant. We have a Sparks Street and we are the seat of Madison County. I figured all that amounted to, if I threw in a nickel, was a cup of coffee at Murphy's Five and Dime breakfast counter. They saved me a place there each morning, a huge honor: I got the one jammed up next to the cash register so I'd get elbowed and crowded by everybody paying checks. "You can't sit there," one of the regulars invariably told any wayward stranger. "That stool belongs to Madison Sparks in the morning."

I played my part. I accepted politely enough their politely enough nodded hellos, just as my father had done when he used to stop in on his way to court, just as my grandfather had done when he owned the building. I stayed clear of the banter, learned the name of whichever mill dolly waitressed, spent my customary fifteen minutes, and left a respectable tip. Only Dick Rudy, the hick I rented the chicken farm to, ever spoke more than a few words to me there, but I can't even tell you what he might have been doing in town that early in the morning. The bars didn't open until noon.

"Couldn't hardly count on no rain this past summertime," he nearly always started with as he slid onto the stool next to mine. He'd stab his pointy, rodent face out and blow the stinking words up my nose. "Honest working men like you and me, Mr. Sparks, why, hell, we can't make do in weather like that."

No matter the previous summer had been rainy, Dick Rudy made the same complaint when he saw me, maybe three times a month, year in and year out: too little rain and "honest men like you and me" couldn't make ends meet. I watched the furtive smiles hide behind coffee cups up and down the counter. "That runt Dick Rudy," they'd tell each other later, "he sure is a corker." That runt, we all knew, had killed men with his bare hands in the trenches in France. "A good name means nothing to him," my father once said. He often hired Rudy for dirty jobs.

I taught high school back then, a ten minute walk from Murphy's. Teaching the children of farmers and paper mill hands was an easy, undemanding task the way I did it. The public school seemed to think my year in Europe after college—a year of checking castles off the list my father had prepared and of lounging around dingy rented rooms leafing through French detective magazines—qualified me to teach history. Who was I to disabuse them of their illusions?

Not that my parents ever approved. "You can't put off choosing a real profession forever," Dad lectured, leading me into his study after dinner one evening. To dramatize the gravity of this invitation into his inner sanctum, he pulled the sliding pocket doors closed behind us. As I took the visitor's seat, Dad sagged into the swivel chair behind his desk and gestured to the walls of leather-bound books.

"Use this room," he said. "I think, if you give it half a chance, you may find you enjoy the Law."

He had done a lot of good, first as a lawyer, then as a judge. He dreamed I would continue his work. And it would have been easy to get a start. He could fire off a letter to the Dean of Law at Dickenson, a personal friend, and my mediocre academic performance could be overlooked. But I have never had any ambition.

Writing this now, of course, all this time later and in light of what I've allowed myself to become, I wonder why I'd insisted on coming home as a teacher. I'll insult good teachers by admitting I thought it would be easy, but I did think that, and I acted on that belief from the beginning. I ate my breakfast at Murphy's, walked that ten minutes to school, and counted the heads in my home room. I spent the rest of my time passing out workbooks and staring at the days washing in through those tall school windows. Gilbert Stuart's George Washington watched from atop the blackboard as the clock ticked and I struggled to stay awake. I was never any good at teaching. 

The notion made popular today, by the movies, I suppose, is that teachers of my time, the Thirties, were all somehow like Virginia Cathers, that they all staged a sort of tweedy superciliousness to impress some myth of themselves upon the memories of their students. Well, not in my case. If the memories of my students extended into their weekly quiz—the Civil War was fought for what reasons? The Emancipation (blank) freed the slaves—that was good enough for me. Most of those kids were going to trade their school books in for a place in the paper mill anyhow—or, soon enough, in the war effort. It didn't matter what you taught. In truth, the less they knew the better.

But I hadn't really come home to teach. Though I didn't know it then, I'd simply come home to be home. Often after school I took long walks in the country out near Warrior's Ridge, where I knew of Delaware hunting camps along the hollows and creeks. This had been one of my father's passions. He filled our basement with the tagged hammer stones and arrow heads he'd collected around those camps. I added a bit to this, proudly showing him each new find until disappointing him again by going on to a new enthusiasm.

  He died too soon to know I’d found something longer-lasting. I started spending evenings in the carriage barn out back doing upholstery. I ran electricity out and put in wood heat, and started by fiddling with a set of dusty dining room chairs hanging forgotten from the rafters. I did only authentic antique restoration. In a matter of a few years, I'd worked my way through all the upholstered furniture in our house, which is saying something, let me tell you. I carried a treadle sewing machine down the narrow corkscrew stairs from our third floor and mail-ordered for the other tools I would need. I haunted the college library researching methods and materials. Neighbors brought me pieces to do. If the piece interested me, your only cost was materials; if I didn't want to do it, no amount of persuasion worked. If I'd known myself better, and had had the backbone, I would have given up teaching to follow that craft, maybe even campaigned to save and restore the fine buildings and homes in town that were already falling into disrepair. I didn’t see this possibility then and neither did my parents. Dad, poor fellow, died knowing he couldn't solve the puzzle of his only child's profession. Mother was no happier.

"Madison," she used to tell me, "you will become nothing unless you make a family.” She’d wave her arm to indicate the house and I suppose the street and the town. “All of this, carry it on.” I didn’t get it. A real family type herself, she'd had me and then absolutely refused to ever get pregnant again.

My mother had views, though.

She never stood still to talk to you, but dusted obsessively, especially after the last maid passed away in her third floor quarters. You had to follow Mother from room to room to keep up a conversation, and no matter how many years you did it you always felt you were interrupting her work.

I'd follow her into the front parlor where she re-dusted and re-polished the mantelpiece, then into the music room as she put yet another coat on the Steinway. We even continued our conversations as she did the wide veranda railings that wrapped around half the house. I'd poke her ribs and say not to worry, the field's open. Living there in Marshfield with all those teacher's college girls, I'd tell her, gave me plenty of chances. "You're getting too old for college girls," she'd answer. "And besides. . ." She didn't have to finish the sentence, and she didn't need to worry. I hardly noticed those mill-town dollies dressed up to play school teacher, and I told her so. "But you don't listen to me," she'd say, and so I retreated to the carriage barn to work on another piece of upholstery.

Mother died, disappointed I hadn't married, right before Hitler buggered Poland in 1939. I remember hearing the news on the radio in Shriver's store and thinking, "Well, maybe she's better off missing what is about to happen." I remember it so clearly because most days I'd have just picked my pipe tobacco from the humidor along the wall and shrugged, maybe buying a detective magazine before leaving. But that day I noticed this event that would change everything once and for all, and everybody around me seemed convinced we could stay out of it. Nobody cared what Madison Sparks had to say on that subject, or any other.

So Mother was not long gone then, and I had the whole house to myself. No parents. No brothers and sisters. No near relatives. No friends. No wife. No new branches in Marshfield's air, but—to my mind, at least—deep, deep roots. The little bit of money from the bank started coming to me, and most months the farm property rent arrived under my front door. Dick Rudy seldom got it to me on time, of course, and I'm sure he cheated me out of a month whenever he could.

But after my parents died, I was lonely. It is cliché to declare no place on Earth more lonely than a small town when you are different or unpopular; but cliché or not, it is true. They had wanted me to replace them in their roles. The problem was that, though I saw the value of what my family had been, I had no personal ambition and, if I'd faced myself honestly, I'd have seen that my way of valuing them was vague and aimless. Eventually, violent, too.    

Virginia Cathers and I met at what we called "passing time," the four minutes our students had between classes. She walked up the hallway to stand next to me between first and second periods her first day at our school. "Shall we watch the pageant together, Mr. Sparks?" she asked and just stood there looking down at me. I'm sure it was down. I'm sure she was taller, and, though she wore glasses, a second pair dangled from her neck. She extended her right hand.  "I'm Virginia Cathers, the new teacher," she said.

For some odd reason, I bowed, unable to shake hands with this woman. "Yes, I know.  English."

She took the hand back and bowed with great, mute ceremony. "Yes. And Latin. My first love."

A wonderful idea, watching the pageant together. Something strange, frightening, and possibly even wonderful happened when the classes changed and, though I'd been teaching then for several years, I'd never until that day noticed it. The teachers stood outside their classroom doors and, by their very presence, prevented the simple intensity of life that happened in that short time from becoming a riot. Children were asked out, declined, and then changed their minds between history and math. A level headed child dropping a book off in her locker would fall in love and live topsy-turvy—you just knew—for the next four years from a simple look or a single phrase spoken at exactly the right moment. It was a show to see, and we teachers stood like trees on the banks of this hormonal river and, if we wanted, we could let the waves lap at our feet or we could stand back and stay dry. The one thing we couldn't do was stop the current.  

  When Virginia walked back to her room after our four minutes, I watched her hips move under her tweed skirt, and later I watched her in the cafeteria. She came to me again that afternoon—greying blonde hair up, the fair, pedantic throwback child to a Gibson Girl—and turned the long smoothness of her bare neck into a secret light. She held me with slow, watery eyes. My God! My own eyes teared as the floor wax and disinfectant of our school filled my nostrils and lungs. It was probably then I noticed her wedding band.

Aside from a brief romance on the river in high school, I had never been in love. I went home that night and lay on my bed and stared at the cracking plaster ceiling. I listened to a car putt-putting by on Academy Street, then Fred Hendershot’s horse clomp along with a wagon of cut firewood for winter, as if I'd never heard the sounds before, and late, late that night, after the street had gone to sleep and after I'd forgotten to change out of my clothing and turn out the light, I listened to the electricity humming into the house, and I thought about the currents I'd felt standing with Virginia Cathers as the children of mill hands and farmers exploded in love and hope down the hallways of Marshfield High School.

I went on that way for weeks, watching her, imagining what I should do about that wedding band, going home at night and dreaming about her. She spoke often and early of her husband, apparently older and wise and brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

"I truly believe he is doing the textbook on teaching methodology," she told me in the faculty lounge. "Absolutely groundbreaking. He comes from dirt-floor poverty, you know?” She shook her head in wonderment. “From that to a full professorship. Really."

Then he and Virginia came to my door unexpectedly one November evening. They had just returned from a visit to Philadelphia, a long drive over bad roads in those days. After coming in the back from a walk by the river, I saw two silhouettes through the frosted glass pane of the vestibule door. They wanted to know if I could look at a piece of furniture. They thought they'd just stop and ask. The visit confused me, so I still can't do more than record a catalog of impressions: Virginia did the talking while he, older, short and slight, and walleyed as a fish, smiled his thin smile and watched my answers. She overcompensated badly by throwing her face into different angles of the light, tossing her hair and laughing inappropriately, not aware, I'm sure, of the pain she caused.

Standing in my vestibule with them, I thought of how she had said, "Groundbreaking," and widened her eyes and lifted her frame in the faculty lounge, and then I looked over at the husband in the flesh and clearly heard a woman acting out being in love after love had passed.  I'm sure I said I'd have to look at their furniture to decide. I didn't do just anything. I had a set speech, but I knew I'd do it. And then I stood on the front porch as they went away down Academy Street. He seemed to go along sideways, that walleye scanning his front like a beacon. Snow White and the Dwarf.

She and Wallace had moved up from Philadelphia so he could grace our own Felicity State College, and they'd bought a Queen Anne on Sparks Street. You could see patches of their house through the trees from my rear balcony. My parents would have appreciated Virginia, if not her husband. Noting the tweed suits and glasses on a cord she always wore, strangers tuned into the stereotypes knew at a glance she either taught English and Latin or was the school librarian. Those were her reading glasses around her neck. She needed another pair just to see, so when she read a passage from a play or a poem in class—which she did constantly—she'd pull off the just-seeing glasses, put on the dangling pair, then take up the book in one hand and gesture with the regular glasses. On and off they'd come the entire class period, changing her face from spinster aunt to hidden beauty. I drank often from the hall fountain so I could pass her room and watch for that amazing change.   

"A little theatre in the classroom, Madison," she'd tell me. Or if she played even more formal that day, "Theatre is important in the classroom, Mr. Sparks."

She and my mother would have agreed about much. Mother used to say over and again that standards, to be kept up, had to be exercised, and that meant acting. Virginia would have been perfectly comfortable, as I was not after coming home to live, to join Mother and Dad in their Friday evening charade. They put out the best china and linen for dinner, lit the candles, and pretended to bring a bottle of wine up from the cellar. Dad wore his tux and Mother a gown. Afterward, in good weather, they'd walk arm-in-arm down Academy Street to the Star Theatre, across the square from Murphy's, and then past the county courthouse on the other side. 

The idea of dressing like that to promenade past the line of teenagers and farm families in their best bib overalls buying tickets to see the latest Buster Keaton was just too much for me. What do the kids say now? Too much of a come down? I don't imagine it would have made any difference to Virginia. She might have laughed along with Mother afterward about the stares and whispers. "Why, if we didn't do this much," Mother used to chuckle, "they wouldn't even wear clean overalls."

Virginia could have done all that and found it as funny as they did.

The night Virginia and Wallace stopped by my house, I stretched out on my back in my bed, hands safely clasped between the pillow and my head, and I heard my family pointing Virginia out to me as an example and saw the similarity between Virginia's nubby teacher's act and the part my parents amused themselves with after Dad lost his last election. Then I thought of how mechanically Virginia's hips moved as she walked away on Academy Street, how they were a machine in need of oil. This crude thought was too much for me and so I got up, taking my pipe and tobacco from the night stand. 

I ended up dressing, then swiveling wildly in Dad's desk chair, rebelliously propping my dirty walking shoes on his oak desk, and leafing through his shelves of law books without stopping to read a word. I paced back and forth between the high vestibule and the dining room chandelier. I paced my balcony, then my parents' balcony in front. I wandered all three floors opening doors and looking into rooms. I dusted from room to room, searching for the sounds the house made: the shutter that banged in a storm, the somebody pushing furniture across a bare floor, the muffled conversations. I turned on every light in the house, then I turned every light off and kept dusting from shadow to shadow in the darkness. I opened the door to the master bedroom where I suppose I was conceived and, overcome by a despair I had imagined in Virginia's eyes as she spoke of her husband, I writhed on the huge bed thinking hard about her, imagining she had given up the pretense and finally come to me. 

Nothing worked, and so I threw on my mackintosh and wool touring cap, and tramped down Academy Street, past the dilapidated Carpenter Gothic Methodist Church, and leaned against a column in front of the courthouse, looking across the Square to the Exchange Building, which my grandfather and his iron money had built. The Exchange Building, with its variegated stone quoining and steeply pitched roofs of patterned slate, is a high, endless arcade of a building. A few businesses—Murphy's, for one—still maintain space in the lower floors, but even then most of the upper floors had gone to cheap apartments. Still, I thought, that building is the best of us. My father's court was behind me through tall doors.

Then I walked to the river. A light snow had fallen since I'd gone to bed, but the sky had cleared off and the moon was up, lighting the night between continents of sprawling shadow.  Great shapes of darkness glided by in the river. It was by then past midnight, and I walked until dawn.

As usual, they saved me a place at Murphy's for breakfast. I caught Denny Hendershot falling into his coffee and instinctively swung around to see what it was about. Half the place was trying not to laugh out loud. Dick Rudy, his bloodshot killer's eyes dull in perpetual hangover, and Andy Shriver were waltzing arm-in-arm into the restaurant area like my parents on promenade. I turned around and kept eating. We'd been through it all before. Rudy owed me rent; he wanted to let me know the Sparks family didn't hire and fire anymore. I could have told him we didn't give out Christmas food hampers anymore, either, so he shouldn’t expect one next month.

 That day, as often happened, I needed heavy doses of coffee to get myself to so much as hand out the workbooks. Between second and third period Virginia walked up the hallway to stand next to me while classes changed. Watching that drama with Virginia set me off all over again and later, home and flat on my back upstairs on my bed, I couldn't get Virginia and Wallace being together out of my mind. That night may have been the first I prowled up the alley behind their house expressly to see what I could see. 

A day or two after Virginia and Wallace came asking me to upholster their couch, I stopped, by appointment, at their house with my book of fabric samples. Wallace led me into a front parlor much like my own, furnished in bookcases and floor lamps and spaces made for reading and working. Piles of papers and books and magazines flowed off end tables and chairs and made themselves into ragged stacks here and there on the floor. Naturally, I had been in the house many times before they bought it. I had most probably been in every house on Academy and Sparks Streets at some time or another, and could probably tell you something interesting about the wainscoting, design style, or masonry of every significant house in the neighborhood, but I'd never seen their place in this condition. An elaborate cobweb had formed in a dark corner of the entryway; one of them had some time ago spilled a glass of milk behind a pile of yellowing magazines, and the milk was now dried and caked in a frozen splash across the woodwork. And from the looks of the mantelpiece, Virginia and Wallace didn't own a dust rag.

"That's it there."  Wallace pointed to a faded gold camelbacked couch with arms like wings cradling downy pillows. A graceful piece, but not yet an antique. I probably would have turned it down under normal circumstances. "Can I get you a cup of hot chocolate, Madison?" asked Virginia. She stood watching us from the edge of the adjoining dining room, her hands clasped dramatically at breast level over the dangling glasses. "I'm so excited you are going to do this," she said.

I unbuttoned my coat and told her yes and, though I'd immediately figured fourteen yards of fabric for the job, got out the tape measure and went through the motions to be sure. After Virginia brought in the cups on a tray and we sat there politely making arrangements, I noted how closely he watched each of us, not so much together, as each of us individually. When Virginia spoke, he turned his head sideways to her, and she readjusted her seat, refolded her hands each time. 

"I was telling Madison yesterday," she began, "about the inventive idea you. . ."

"How much," he wanted to know right off, "do you estimate your work will cost us?"

I didn't like this at all. I gave him a rough figure—materials only, and depending on which fabric they chose—and he said nothing, just stared.

Virginia smiled warmly, tilted her face. "They tell me you do marvelous. . ." 

He waved her quiet and she sat straighter. "How long is this going to take you?" They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. I looked down at my hands to answer.

They chose fabric and hired a couple of men with a truck to lug the couch into my carriage barn, and Wallace tagged along to supervise. He wandered around my shed fingering tools and, of all things, checking for dust, examining the rafters. I think he wanted me to invite him to sit down and talk, but he didn't know how to arrange it. Somehow I got the impression he thought I was a sort of rustic craftsman, a teller of yarns perhaps, a Dick Rudy maybe, somebody with all the local myth and lore. He called me "Sparky" starting then, as if that would naturally be what people called me. It irks me even now, all this time later,  that he took the liberty. But I didn't encourage him to stay and he finally left, hands in pockets and going off lonely and irritable.

After that, walking up the alley behind their house every night late, sometimes two or three times, became my habit. They had no children. They slept with the windows wide open in the cold weather. They owned a Cocker Spaniel who sometimes rushed out of the lilac bushes barking. I started carrying table scraps to keep him quiet. I also took pains to stay in the tire tracks through the new snow in the alley. At the back of the house and on the third floor, they had a room with book-lined walls where one of them seemed to work into the wee hours. It had a separate wooden stairway to the back yard. 

Home on my own rear balcony, I paced and watched through the trees for any change in their light or movement in their windows.

Wallace began dropping in to check my progress even before I'd gotten the old fabric off the frame. He'd stand behind me hurrumphing and fooling with the loose change in his pockets. I was only glad my back was to him.

"How's Virginia?" I'd ask. 

"You should know. You see her every day."

My sweet cherry pipe tobacco comforted me.

"She seems pretty busy."

"Too damned busy, if you ask me."

I imagined they must have had sparkling conversations at home. I wished he would leave me alone. He showed up to mark my progress every evening at seven, expecting to find me slaving away in the carriage barn, as if I were somehow his employee. The problem was that I never worked that way. I might choose to work long into the night one night and a quarter of an hour the next, as it suited my mood. I told all my customers that when they brought their furniture. Often I didn't touch a job for two nights running. But Wallace found me at his couch at 7:15 the first evening he dropped by and incorrectly reasoned I'd always be there at that time.

Now that he'd made his assumption, I had to stay on the job steadily, because once, on an evening I had no intention of working, I happened to look out the third floor window to see him rattling the locked carriage barn door, glancing around as if a wheel in his brain had come off.  A friendless creature, really, I thought. So I ran downstairs and outside, pretending to have been held up. After that, because I couldn't find the words to tell him to leave me alone, I resigned myself to simply plowing through the job as quickly as possible. And when he came around, I brought a ratty wingback chair from the basement out for him. Though I placed it a good two yards away from my work space each day before he arrived, he always moved it closer. And then the chair made him talkative.

"That business in Czechoslovakia," he declared confidently, "would have satisfied this Hitler fellow if they'd've just left him be." I hardly believed my ears. I listened to the radio each day with horror. I’d been in Munich and seen the fascists marching in ‘32.

"And how do you find our children, Sparky?" he asked from the throne. I couldn't quite grasp the question. His children? I might have said "our children" about my town, my school, but here he was an outsider. Lucky for us both my back was turned as he spouted these absurdities. 

But I sure accommodated my schedule to suit him. I wondered more than once as I cut and sewed and measured for his upholstery if, after I finished, he'd ever leave. It was almost as if he knew what role Virginia played in my thin fantasy life and that the longer he stayed the less I might feel for her. It was as if he knew how revolting I found him. She had lived with this creature how many years? They slept in the same bed, after all. I wondered how she had stood it, why she had stood it, what was wrong with her that she had stood it. And, yet, there I was every evening at seven, opening the doors to my shop, setting his chair two yards away.

But I was lonely and, playing the rustic good fellow he wanted me to be, I'd tell him, "Have a seat and relax a while," when he appeared in the doorway. He needed to be invited to sit no matter how many times he came over. If you didn't invite him, he'd stand around in your light all evening. "Where's Virginia," I asked. That was all he really wanted to talk about.

"She doesn't know how to give homework," he said. "She doesn't know how to pace herself. Never did." He adjusted the cushion of his seat. "But why tell you?" And then before I could think of an answer, "The idea is not to give the little stinkers so much to do you have to spend your entire life correcting it all. You have to come up for air once in a while and be a human being."

So he thought she worked too hard and still couldn't measure up.

"Don't expect too much from these children," he warned. "Remember, they don't expect anything from you." He grinned slyly, shifting in his clothing, changing the subject. "You go out walking after we meet," he put to me. "Where do you go?"

I saw no reason to deny it. "Here and there."

He watched me out of the corner of his face. "They say you prowl." 

I knew this, of course, but I didn't like actually hearing it about myself. "I have trouble sleeping, so I take long walks."

"Me too. Maybe you've seen my light. I sit up late and work. Maybe I should walk, too.  Where exactly do you go?"

"No. Can't say I have seen your light." I didn't have to tell him a thing. I strained, stretching webbing over the base of the couch frame.

But much later that night I slid up the alley behind their house and saw his light was on.  I still don't know exactly why, but I had a strange sensation and hurried away to the river, meaning to sit on the rocks and stare at the paper mill night shift lights on the water. I walked downstream for a while. Debris floated by, shadow first, then lit up for an instant in the mill lights, then shadow again. The islands downstream were lumps of sleeping animals. I found a favorite sycamore from childhood and climbed to a seat fifteen feet up, my back resting comfortably against the trunk. Again that strange feeling came over me. I was downwind from somebody soaked in alcohol and urine. I stayed very still in that tree for a long time.

I woke the next morning to the sound of church bells. December 7, 1941. I didn’t find out about Pearl Harbor until I turned on the radio that afternoon.

The next school day, when Virginia walked up the hall to stand by me while classes changed, we hardly spoke. Everybody had seen the nervous crowds of young men ready to enlist as soon as they opened the courthouse doors. A different, deadly sort of playacting had transformed our students. I remember wishing I had done better by them. The world always finds a way to distort us. And after the halls cleared, I made a point of passing Virginia’s room on my way to the water fountain. I peeked in on her act each way, and I saw the beauty she must have been sitting once upon a time in the seats of Wallace Cathers' college classroom. That's how it must have been. She was his perpetual student. I saw the rich golden hair as it had been, the slender body that had now taken on an incidental middle-aged thickening. And once this started, once I began seeing this, I couldn't look at her and not see both the person she was becoming and the person I wanted her still to be.

That changing perception is what I saw late that night when Virginia stood waiting in the shadows next to my back door. Upset by the turn of world events, I had posted a sign—“No Work Tonight”—on my carriage house door and gone walking. When I came up the alley behind their house, I saw the light on in Wallace’s study. Now, there stood Virginia next to my back door. The December wind filled her cape like a sail, turning it right and then left in dark heroic poses. I opened the kitchen door and held it for her. We moved like muffled sound through the unlit house. Heedless and sick to my soul, I opened doors for us to search through rooms, leaving articles of our clothing in each: my coat strewn over dirty dishes on the kitchen table, Virginia's cape lost in a passageway, shoes blouses pants shirts littering the piano, the ottoman, the banisters, the beds until Virginia stood before me wearing nothing but those blasted dangling glasses resting over her bare heart. I knelt to kiss her Mound of Venus as she touched fingertips to my hair.

"He knows I’m here," she said. "I told him."

The next evening, I stood staring at my work as Wallace lectured angrily from the wingback.      

"What I mean," he insisted, "is you'll be happier if you don't expect anything from them. Maybe one of them will surprise you," he told me. I didn't understand what he was talking about—or why he wasn’t talking about the catastrophe. "Don't ever marry a younger woman, Sparky. You'll only be unhappy." I sucked in my gums. "She doesn't really love you," he sighed. I was under the surveillance of that eye. "This isn't the first time, you know. She doesn't love anyone. Only these children she thinks she teaches in this place. They supposedly surprise her with what they could be, she tells me." He mimicked the squeaky pitch of a weakling. "She's simply trying to say they can do more, much more than anybody's ever given them credit for. It's that history of negativity she thinks she can cure. Well, Sparky, you and I know better than that." Wallace snorted and turned away from me. "Do you hear what I say?"

I told him I heard what he said.

He snorted again and tried to sound jokey. "What can I say? Thirty years I've taught young people to be teachers. All those years, and I try to tell this child what I know to be true, and she won't listen." He paused. He spread his palms innocently, imagining, I suppose, that he was making Virginia wait. "What is she trying to do?" he asked. "She wants to fire them up to Shakespeare. She wants to transfer her passion for books. Maybe she hears voices? God damn! People should stop wanting! Settle themselves down. They might as well go off chasing the wind in the meadows, Sparky." His shoulders shook, but he kept his face straight, tucked his chin back into the loose skin of his neck. "A noble task, wanting to inspire," and his chin jutted now, "but they don't want to learn. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, believe you me, nobody cares if it makes a sound." He curled his face into a smashed bread roll. "She doesn't love you," he hissed. "She doesn't love the boy of parents who played dress up. Oh, you think those fellows at the Five and Dime don't talk to me. You think I miss out, Master Sparky. The 'Judge' and his lady. Don't make me laugh. People like you are finished."

That's what finally did it for me. When the smelly old fish stood up to leave, he said, "She won't want you any more than she wants me."

I walked down the muddy alley behind their house later that night, having already decided everything. I fingered the contents of my overcoat pocket nervously. His light was on, and when I stopped by the bare lilac bushes I thought I saw movement on the wooden stairway leading to that room. Only nerves. I moved through the bushes to inside their yard. That damned dog smelled me and came out wagging his tail, and I gave him his cold roast beef scraps. As I climbed the stairs, I still didn't really know what to do, had no clear "plan" in mind. Every step creaked my giveaway. Finally, I stood looking through the window at his back as he worked at the desk. I could barely breathe. My heart cantered irregularly.

I tapped lightly on the pane and he turned around. "Open it," I mouthed silently. "Open it."

A thought seemed to cross his lips as he scanned the window. He hesitated, then walked across the room to open the window.

"What is it?"

My lips moved, but no words came out. 

"What is it?"

I tried again. "Do you want to see where I go?" 

He regarded me with a contemptuous curiosity. "I'll get a sweater and jacket," he said and turned away. 

"Better get a hat, too," I heard myself whisper.

We followed the muddy alley as far as it went and then crossed the soft ground of a meadow to the river's edge. I stood shivering on a rock, my coat pulled tight against the wind. "My God, the water's high," I said.

He snorted at my stupidity. "Snow melt. What do you expect?" And he kept picking his way up the bank. I watched his silhouette go. We were downstream from the paper mill. I thought about the tracks I'd made across his backyard and across mine. They'd find out where he'd been spending his evenings. They'd see two sets of tracks along the river bank and put two and two together.

We kept walking, made our way under the bridge, watched the flickering lights of the mill until they became only a star. I knew the currents and knew if you tossed a stick in at the bend the river would carry it into the deep water of the middle. When Wallace and I walked close together, all I could do was to stare at his collar. I paid attention to any car lights a hundred yards away on the road and kept fooling in my pocket. He stood on a rock watching the twisting current swell and fall in the darkness.

"You must be lonely to walk out here by yourself so much," he blurted. "I don't envy people like you."

That's when I brought the length of clothesline out of my pocket and looped it over his neck and pulled him off his pedestal. He tried first swinging around out of my hold to face me, but I moved with his movement, even as he tried it in the opposite direction. I squeezed harder and shook him like grabbing a tree branch to shake fruit to the ground. He tried to pull me toward the road next, but I kicked his legs apart and brought him slowly to the ground, and I think he knew then he was going to die. He pushed against me to get up, managed to get to his hands and knees, but I planted my knee between his shoulder blades and rode him to the ground.  He choked and so I squeezed harder, squeezing the sound down to nothing. I didn't care. I felt powerful, like I didn't want to do this thing anymore but now had to and knew I could. His eye turned, begging me, and I whispered "No" aloud. I loosed my grip then playfully, so he could beg me again, but he didn't. “The judge and his lady,” I smiled.

As I retightened, afraid this would all go wrong, I felt the hot, stinking air leave his body, laughing in one huge, bug-eyed spasm, his final live defilement.

The tragic widow bravely waited for news of her husband one street away from me. She no longer came to school. I dared not go near her. I stood alone in the hallway at passing time, and she eventually moved back to Philadelphia. I never learned for sure what became of her.

They found Wallace Cathers in the spring, and when they did he had bloated and burst, decomposing and spread-eagle, slowly turning in the yellow froth of a whirlpool made where the river bank had collapsed and dropped an elm into the current. I heard the coroner’s young assistant vomited during the autopsy. And though everybody knows—and knew then, way back in the ancient history of 1941—that I often can't sleep and spend half my nights prowling the countryside like some weird memory, the police never even questioned me about what I might have seen.

It was a strangely derailed investigation from the start. Perhaps Madison Sparks committing mayhem with a noosed rope and dumping the body into the river was too astonishing to imagine. Like all my family had done to build Marshfield, I was discounted as weak, ineffectual, inconsequential. Only Dick Rudy let on he knew a thing or two, but he chose for his own reasons to keep his knowledge between us.

"Wonder what happened to that college fellow of yours," he mused aloud when I tried collecting the rent the month after Wallace disappeared. That stopped me in my tracks. Then he told me with a squint he drank a little and didn’t always make it home after the bars closed. "You and me," he said, "we know the old ways. What people do is none of my affairs," he assured me. Damned magnanimous of him. Then, adjusting his squint and spitting a wad suspiciously close to my new shoes, "You don't scare me, Maddy-boy. An old man like that. I killed better than both you."

The Carpenter Gothic Methodist Church burnt down eons ago and was replaced by a box done in Eisenhower-era pink brick. The War gave us all sorts of synthetic materials I don't understand, that are somehow not created by human hands. Older people in Marshfield—the ones in nursing homes and retired to front porch gliders—still talk about my parents and their comic opera Friday evenings, so I guess my people have indeed passed into local lore and myth. In 1941 I killed a man, but the world was at war and no one came to ask me why, and so I will some day pass into myth as a harmless eccentric, the laughingstock tail end of something not quite remembered.