By the mid-twenties, the village of Millworth had converted from gas to electricity. But the cost of stretching the electrical lines the extra few miles to the Manikin, as well as wiring the interior of the house, would have been, as Mrs. Craxton was told by her accountant, prohibitive. And rather than organize a federation with neighboring farmers to bring the lines over Firethorn, Mrs. Craxton simply did without. So the famous Craxton hauteur was compromised by coal and kerosene and candlelight. During the long winters, the Manikin received few guests and sank into a heavy, hibernating somnolence. The cloud cover hung over the house like a granite ceiling. The wheels of the touring car were deflated, the gas tank drained, and the automobile shut up in the garage until March, or April during years when the thaw came late. A pickup truck was used as long as the roads were navigable, but after heavy snows trips to Millworth were made by horse and sleigh.
Though Mrs. Craxton insisted to her friends that she preferred an old-fashioned country winter and scoffed at their dismay, after they were gone she felt as though she were looking through the wrong end of a telescope at civilized society—she knew it to be there in front of her, as close as the library full of her husband’s unreadable books, as close as the piano, which she no longer played because she despised the noise her clumsy, arthritic fingers made, as close as the bell that summoned Ellen. There was Ellen, at least—Ellen, and every evening a cup of hot cocoa. But the cold defied coals and hot baths and cocoa, so Mrs. Craxton’s bones ached day and night. Night was worse, with its wind demons and clamoring solitude. What had she done to deserve this? After all the unspeakable suffering of her lifetime—the loss of one son to diphtheria when he was sixteen weeks, the loss of another son in a climbing accident when he was twenty-two, her husband’s sudden death twelve years ago, not to mention her own fractured hip—she deserved to be comfortable, to enjoy all the luxuries of the modern world. Instead, she was living like a savage among preserved skins and skeletons, and therefore she felt entirely justified in indulging her savage disposition.
But though she despised her one remaining son for leaving her to rot alone in this godforsaken place, she didn’t blame him, not entirely. He could not help his faults. So she scolded Hal even as she privately forgave him for his neglect, and she clung to the hope, what she assumed would be the last hope of her life, that the next time he returned to the Manikin, he would stay put.
Then Lily arrived, and Mrs. Craxton changed her mind: she’d rather have Lily than Hal for a companion, she decided. On that gray day at the beginning of November when Red Vic fetched Lily, Mrs. Craxton set out to convince the girl to make the Manikin her permanent residence. And since she wanted Lily to fall in love with the house, Mrs. Craxton dreaded the coming winter more than ever.
* * *
Lily: as colorful as a fresh nosegay, her heels sinking into the mud, leaving egg-carton prints. Red Vic should have driven the car right up to the front door. Mrs. Craxton shoots a glance that says, Stupid man, an Indian, no wonder! I’ll have a word with you later. Not now, though. Now she welcomes Lily Stone with open arms and a smile to assure her that she will fit right in, she’ll be the center of attention, as beloved as a daughter. It’s one of the many sad facts of Mary Craxton’s life that she never had a daughter. But here’s Lily to make it up to her at last.
The novelty of her arrival—not just an afternoon visit, the girl intends to stick it out through the winter—draws a crowd. Billie, Eva, and Ellen stand behind Mrs. Craxton’s chair on the porch. Peter walks up from the barn, chewing on a sprig of hay and wearing such a slaphappy grin that Mrs. Craxton would have admonished him for his impudence, if she had noticed. Nora carries the baby and follows Sylva around the side of the house—Sylva holds her sons by their wrists to keep them from bolting across the muddy drive and knocking the delicate young lady flat on her back. Even old Boggio leaves his studio to observe the scene.
“Welcome, Lily.” The occasion warrants a special effort, so Mrs. Craxton rises from her wheelchair and extends a hand, which Lily presses between her palms. Then Mrs. Craxton sinks back into her chair, gesturing toward the door. Ellen wheels the chair around, up and over the threshold, and into the living room, where a tray of Sylva’s shortbread and a pot of coffee have already been set out, as though to convince Lily that the Manikin’s treats are generated by an unspoken wish, that the servants will not only heed her but anticipate her.
And mock her—though they give her no reason to suspect this. They mock her for her high-heeled shoes, for her shin-length leopard-print coat, for her jewels and the hours she wastes masking her face. Their laughter as they huddle together has a shrillness to it because already they sense that her demands will be impossible, that like all spoiled city girls she will expect them to turn off winter entirely with a flick of a switch. And to turn it on, so she can watch the snow dancing merrily behind the windowpane. She is trouble, this modern bird. Whoever fails her first will be the first to go.
No one is more acutely aware of Lily’s influence than Ellen. She considers the danger as she watches the girl from her sentry’s position a few feet to the right of the wheelchair and listens to Mrs. Craxton’s fawning inquiries: “How was the drive, my dear? Do you play patience? Do you miss your family?”—so many questions, with ample time ahead for them to become better acquainted. There is more at stake than a season’s friendship. From other people, Mrs. Craxton has always demanded respect. From Lily, she wants the kind of devotion that excludes others, an impossible desire, Ellen knows, as consuming as it is futile, especially for one as inexperienced in affection as Mrs. Craxton. Lily Stone has come to the Manikin not to devote herself to her hostess but to use her—to what end, Ellen still can’t say. But no good will come of it, she’s sure. The old woman has never seemed so pathetic, or so ancient, even as she flutters her hands about to impress the girl with her gaiety. And when Lily makes a weak stab at wit—“If I keep eating this way you’ll have to add me to your collection of stuffed beasts”—Mrs. Craxton erupts in such a howl of laughter that Lily turns to look at Ellen, as though to assure herself that the banshee’s keeper were nearby. Ellen returns her glance as coldly as possible, instantly regretting it, for in that brief exchange she has earned the girl’s contempt.
A few minutes later, at Mrs. Craxton’s direction, Ellen leads Lily up to her room, a grand corner room with an eastern and southern exposure, a massive fieldstone fireplace, a four-poster bed. Ellen draws open the curtains and prepares to leave, but there is one task left, apparently.
“Undress me,” Lily says. The direction takes Ellen’s breath away, and she turns around to see the girl standing in the middle of the room, arms akimbo, as though waiting to be fitted by a dressmaker.
Ellen swallows her outrage and manages to reply quietly, “Yes, of course.”
This is only the beginning, Ellen thinks as she struggles to free the clasp above the buttons. Lilian Stone may be a slender-thighed, small-breasted, fashionable nymph, but the effect of her is that of a boulder rolling down a hill, crushing everything in its way. She has grown into her surname. She wears it well, like her expensive clothes. And will flatten Ellen if she doesn’t jump aside at the last minute.
The naked girl rests her hands on the back of her neck in a gesture that suggests an experienced tease, then stalks across the room to stand exposed at the window. Ellen follows and reaches around her shoulder to shake out the curtains, knowing even as she does it that such an act will not go unpunished.
“Leave me,” Lily says, staring at the curtains with her penny-colored eyes.
“I was just—”
“Leave me.”
If she were a different sort of housekeeper, Ellen would go directly to Mrs. Craxton and report the girl’s vulgar display—without a stick of clothing, for the world to admire! But she is the sort whose anger finds relief in physical exhaustion. She spends the next hour washing Lily’s dirty prints from the floor of the front hall, and by the time the marble is clean to her satisfaction, she’s ready for another job: Mrs. Craxton’s bath. Then dinner. The day will be over before she knows it, she tells herself. In the blink of an eye.
* * *
From the edge of the backyard, Peg watches the stranger at the window for a few long seconds before the curtain hides her again; even from this distance she can see that the girl is naked. She stands as though on display, as though daring Peg to stare. It is like a statue’s dare, composed, indifferent to the judgment of her audience. The image so enthralls Peg that she forgets completely about the chance of being discovered, gun in hand, by her mother, and she forgets as well about Junket, who stands beside her, breathing lightly, his Maynard propped upon his shoulder pointing at the figure in the window.
“Pow.”
Now Peg remembers him, turns to witness his childish joke. He jerks backward with the kick of each imagined shot. “Pow. Pow. Pow.” Easily hitting his target at one hundred yards’ distance. Shattering her, until the curtain closes.
Urged out by Lore, Peg and Junket are on their way to Craxton’s Pond to dismantle a new dam and perhaps bring down a mallard or two. Junket hasn’t spoken a word or even looked Peg in the eye yet. But she is resolved to repair the damage she’s done to their friendship and convince Junket to forgive her. So even though she’d like to crack his fancy new gun in half, she lets him be. The beautiful girl won’t ever know how Junket has humiliated her, and Junket can go on thinking there’s nothing funnier. Target practice. Pow. No harm done.
Machine romps out of the woods to fetch them. They can’t see Lore but they hear his whistle, and they hurry down the slope with the dog, slipping along the path leading into the woods, kicking up pine needles and wet leaves as they go, woolly mockernut hickory, orange maple, and the thick, canoe-shaped leaves of the chinquapin oak. Closer to the pond the ground is yellow with beech and poplar leaves, the trees almost bare, each like an exclamation point. The beavers love the poplars best—they gnaw at the trunks to get to the gummy inner bark, toppling the trees and carrying off the branches to pile on their dam.
As they follow the pond to the mouth of the creek Peg falls behind, not because she can’t keep up but because she’s still thinking about the figure in the window, Mrs. Craxton’s guest for the winter. Ellen has been fretting all week that this visitor will disrupt the order so carefully established at the Manikin. Another occupant is like a new tax levied without warning—she thinks it unjust that she has no say in the matter. She can look after this Lilian Stone readily enough—she could look after one hundred guests. But there should be no other guests. Mrs. Craxton is hardly more than a ghost, and Hal Craxton just a fleeting shadow. Ellen has grown comfortable with the arrangement. It is as though she is managing an extravagant hotel and prefers it to remain empty, pristine, undefiled. The overwhelming absurdity of the Manikin is just this: a staff of eight, and little to do. Oh, Ellen makes vigorous work for everyone. But Peg is convinced that the house and grounds could be managed by a staff of two.
A guest on an extended visit might see through the pretense of hard work to the truth. She might tell the truth to Mrs. Craxton. And Mrs. Craxton might decide to trim some of the fat. Ellen surely knows the truth, and that’s why she fears the Manikin’s new guest, even if she won’t admit it. Peg feels free to admit it, though, just as she feels free to blame her mother for her loneliness. And feels free to leave at any time. She means to exercise this last freedom soon enough, but until then she has to be content maintaining a position of quiet superiority: the privilege of insight and honesty.
Who is this Lilian Stone beyond her name and wealth? In order to find out, Peg needs opportunities to observe her more closely. She will volunteer to carry trays and clear dishes and make beds, to do whatever she must to be near her. She even considers gathering a bouquet of the late-blooming orchids, white and yellow lady’s slippers still freckling the marshy land at the south end of the pond, to put in the guest room. No, she’s not lovesick. What Peg wants, clearly enough to admit it, is to become that modern girl, to change places.
After losing sight of Junket and Lore, Peg wanders back along the path and then steps out to the water’s edge. Brown water sloshes against the shore, and the tip of the beached canoe bobs slightly, buoyed by an extra few inches of water after two nights of rain. Junket and Lore will be wondering where she’s gone off to—she catches sight of Lore’s jacket through the trees on the opposite shore. She steps away from the water, and the clatter of rocks underfoot stirs an otter from its hiding place; it darts from the bank and in good otter fashion splashes out, glides underwater for a few yards, rises and twists onto its back, plucks at its whiskers, swishes its heavy tail and propels itself in a serpentine course, rolls onto its belly and disappears, surfaces on its back, claws the air, and glides effortlessly into a clump of reeds, like a toy sailboat pushed by the gust of a child’s breath. Other than a soft splashing it makes no sound.
Even as Peg watches the otter’s antics, she feels someone’s gaze on her, and when she finally turns around she almost expects to find Lilian Stone standing next to her, clothed again, smiling, her expression artfully frozen, one brow arched, the other flat above a half-winking eye. In a subdued voice she would ask, Why didn’t you shoot?
“With this?” Peg says aloud, holding up Lore’s old shotgun to the woods, and thinks, Pump an otter full of shot?
You’re delightful, she would say, the girl in the window, the Manikin’s winter guest. Then, Peg is sure, she would burst into mocking laughter.
* * *
Rosettes of water-chestnut weed floating on the water. Quackgrass. Feathergrass. Cattails. Who lives here? Dabbling ducks. Swamp rabbits. Brown trout. Beavers. Muskrats. Otters. Beech and birch and spruce. No slurring sound of conversation, no smell of kerosene hanging in the damp air. How it is in Lore’s paradise: imagine. No change other than the slow, necessary deterioration of the earth. Listen to it groan. The tangy smell of wet leaves and bracken. Bones. The dream of soft flesh tearing. A dog’s dream. Fathers. Sons. A gun swallowed by muddy water. Buried bones. A gun’s dreamless sleep. The sleep of the drowned. Bulrushes. Ironweed. Pied-billed grebes. Marsh wrens. Tiny bitterns. A gun. A pond. A splash. The only echo a father’s soft groaning. A drowned gun. A boy’s spite. Everything remains alive, except the gun.
* * *
The Maynard, goddammit! Lore saved for a year so he could buy that Maynard, and what does Junk do, Junk his only son and the reason for Lore’s life? Why, the little savage tosses it like a spear into the heart of the pond. A boy’s spite. There’s nothing more vicious. A boy’s spite and, even worse, his lack of remorse. If hate were possible, Lore would force Junket to pay, to reimburse his father for that lost year. But where Junket is concerned, anything, absolutely anything, can be forgiven. Lore doesn’t have to wait for the wisdom of hindsight to know that the Maynard is a trivial loss compared to other possible losses.
The flight of metal caught Lore’s attention, and he turned just in time to see the gun dive, barrel first, into the water. And there was Junket on the bank looking as thoroughly satisfied as he ever did standing over a kill. What went wrong? They had been heading toward the mouth of the creek, Machine trekking ahead then falling back to sniff his spoor, Lore walking about fifty yards in front of Junk. With the suddenness of an accident, the boy turned evil—or mad—and tossed his gun into the pond.
Even now, he meets his father’s astonishment with a grin. Junket’s expression would shame Lore, if he let it. Instead, he feels incited by the challenge, and under his son’s gaze he peels off his jacket, removes his wool hat, unbuttons his flannel shirt, and steps out of his trousers and boots, all with the slow, deliberate movements of a striptease dancer. In his checkered boxers he slurps through the mud and reeds into the water. And just like the gun—or, a few minutes earlier across the pond, like Peg’s otter—Lore dives, disappearing beneath the surface.
Instantly the cold seizes him, binds his limbs so he can’t pull himself up for a gulp of air, and for those few seconds until Junket pulls him out, Lore hovers somewhere between delirium and consciousness, his mind awake but bewildered, the cold penetrating like electricity, pain so overwhelming that the sentient aspect of himself separates from the body, and he knows he feels, without feeling, the cold. He hears his exhaled breath bubbling through the cloudy water. It doesn’t occur to him to distinguish between the surface and the muddy bottom of the pond. What has happened to the sky? The gun must be resting somewhere on the bottom of the pond, as comfortably as a feather on grass. What has happened to direction? Lore doesn’t think to ask. He doesn’t care. And time? What has happened to time? A fraction of a second lasts long enough for him to wonder how much time has passed. A minute? An hour? And then he gulps, cold water rushes into his throat, and he becomes a tangle of reactive nerves twisting and jerking with almost suicidal effort, like the loon he once caught in a fishing net. The bird had panicked and in its struggle managed to strangle itself before he could set it free. The loon. The long, limp neck of the loon—this is the only image that remains in his murky consciousness.
Afterward, lying on the sloped bank gasping for air, his first thought is oddly pleasant. It is surprisingly easy to die, he understands now. If he weren’t such a responsible man, he might have given in to the seduction.
But he’s Lore Bennett, groundskeeper of the Manikin, so he climbs to his feet as soon as his strength returns and slaps his hands against his arms to hasten the warming blood to the surface. Well, I’m the fool, he thinks. Yes, he’s the fool, thanks to his son. He doesn’t bother to ask the simple question why. But Junket tells him anyway, trying to contain the clacking of his own shivering teeth while Machine nuzzles his cupped hands, whispering, as though to keep the trees from hearing: he threw away the gun because he’s bored with Craxton’s acres; because he needs a change; because there has to be more to life than harvesting another man’s orchard and shooting his game. And even though the boy’s apology is implicit, he doesn’t come right out and admit that what he’d done was selfish. As Lore reads him, Junket is sorry for goading his father to a point beyond sanity, but if the Maynard had been retrieved and returned to him, Junket would have disposed of it in some other fashion. So no adequate reconciliation follows. Lore gives his jacket to his son and dresses in his dry shirt and trousers while Junket tries to explain himself. When the boy drifts off from his shivering whisper into silence, Lore doesn’t encourage him to continue. The silence that replaces Junket’s voice is not the same as the silence of the forest—between father and son will remain an empty borderland, a desert, impassable, uninhabited. Or this is what Lore fears—that they will not even attempt to cross over this no-man’s-land. They will be like foreign nations, dependent upon treaties and pacts to keep their peace, with different languages and currencies and laws.
Lore will never know that while they were heading toward the beaver dam, Junket had seen Peg on the opposite shore, her back turned to him. With the pond between them, she’d made a perfect target, the distance in itself a challenge, the block of her coat a smoky blue. He could have taken her down with one perfect shot between the shoulder blades. For the second time that day, Junket had located a girl’s body in his peep sight and centered his shooting eye. Another joke, more wicked than the first—with his finger resting on the trigger’s paddle, he’d thought, Accident. Implied in the word was his defense against the accusation: Peg’s death at Junket’s hand. Accident. The whole narrative—murder, accusation, and the jury’s pardon—was contained in that single word.
And beyond that word, self-disgust. How could he have allowed himself to take the joke this seriously, this far? Suddenly the gun had seemed contaminated. He hadn’t been able to hold it, to look at it, especially to own it. So he’d thrown the gun into the pond in an effort to avert the hateful accident, causing another, as it turned out. His father had nearly drowned because of him. This is what he should have used as his explanation, he thinks after he has already fallen silent: Not because of boredom or impatience, Papa. Because of me.
* * *
Peg is waiting for them midway up the path, and along the walk home Lore spins an unlikely tale to explain their wet clothes and the missing gun. Junket stumbled, Lore says, and dropped the gun in the water, and, crazy boy, he went in after it, so Lore went in after Junket and dragged him to safety. But Peg hardly seems to be listening, and back in the yard she turns away without a word, slowly, mechanically, like a china doll in a music box. Here are Junket and Lore, hair dripping, lips blue in the autumn air, and she doesn’t care what happened. Hoity-toity, the servants called Mrs. Craxton’s visitor even before she arrived. Miss Hoity-toity. And now it’s Junket’s impression that Peg is aspiring to the same.
Lore and Junket go to their separate rooms. Junket strips off his wet clothes and climbs into bed, the natty wool blanket prickling his skin. He doesn’t need sleep—he just wants to be alone. But sleep comes to him anyway, surreptitiously, so he thinks he is only dozing until he opens his eyes and finds the room dark. He assumes he has slept through most of the night. The memory of the afternoon returns to him: his gun, and the startle of that first splash when the Maynard hit the water. His father’s doomed attempt to retrieve it. The rescue. But he can’t take credit for dragging the wet lump of a body from the water, no more than a man can take credit for denouncing himself as a murderer. Remember murder, Junket? The idea of it, and the story you would tell to absolve yourself?
Adventure for Junket has been bound up in blood ever since he was old enough to accompany his father on a hunt. As a young child, he tended to give human qualities to animals; now he has imagined Peg as his prey, himself as a murderer. He took the analogy too far and had to sacrifice his gun in penitence. He won’t hunt again. He is afraid of himself, knows now that he is capable of murder. He went beyond the conception, stroked the velvety trigger and felt a warm blush of pleasure at the idea. That he could accept it as possible: murder. How macabre. Even though Junket doesn’t know this word, he imagines its meaning—the dance of death, Peg leading the way to the cemetery in Millworth, himself hard on her heels.
“You awake?” His father stands in the doorway combing back his hair. “Hurry up, if you want supper.” So it’s only early evening. Oriented in proper time again, Junket feels groggy, as if his father had woken him at 3:00 A.M., and he remains in bed listening to his father’s chatter continue from the other room, one of Lore’s rare attempts at conversation. He predicts a hoarfrost tonight. He remarks upon a pumpkin in the field: “Must be eighty pounds by now”—has Junket seen it lately? When Junket doesn’t reply, Lore gives up. “I’ll be up at the house,” he says.
Junket hears the clop of his father’s boots down the stairs and outside. Soon the ground will be frozen. He imagines the footprints and ruts in the mud hardened like plaster molds. And the skeletons dancing over the surface, shaking tambourines that make no sound.
* * *
Yet how tame Junket’s imagination is now compared to his early childhood. Peg’s as well. They’ve forgotten so much, all their wild games and childish passions. There was one game in particular that lasted through a summer, though it had promised to go on forever. Every day the floor of Junket’s bedroom would collapse, and they’d fall into a different world, where rocks could sing or trees grew five hundred miles high or people were made of glass. The test was to exist inconspicuously in these dangerous, invented places, so most of the game involved hiding—from the glass sheriff, from monstrous birds, or even from Machine, then just a puppy with lollipop paws. Sometimes they would have to leave Junket’s room in order to escape, and they would hide in the hayloft or the cellar. Once, they crept into the Manikin’s kitchen, past Sylva, who was stirring a pot of soup at the stove, and instead of heading up the backstairs to Peg’s room they snuck through the dining room, where they caught a glimpse of Mrs. Craxton sitting before her audience of stuffed animals in the living room.
They padded up the front staircase to the absolutely forbidden second floor and followed the long corridor, counting fifteen doors in all. Peg opened each while Junket kept watch behind. The rooms were furnished lavishly, with sitting chairs and sofas and beds as wide as hay wagons.
When they heard a woman cough lightly on the backstairs—a maid coming to dust, probably—Peg pulled Junket inside a room and quietly closed the door behind them. This was the room, years later, where Lily Stone would come to live for the winter. But on this day they were in a world where adults drank the blood of children and maids carried handy jackknives in their apron pockets for the purpose of slitting little throats. So it wasn’t enough to hide behind one closed door. They’d be safer in the closet, Peg decided, and Junket agreed.
They spent the rest of the hour in the dark walk-in closet in the Manikin’s grandest guest room. A few of Mrs. Craxton’s old dresses and silk bathrobes hung on the rack, but other than these and a stack of hatboxes the closet was empty. Did Junket smell stale blood? Peg wanted to know. Yes he did. And bones—he said he smelled old bones. That’s because they buried the slaughtered children in the walls, Peg explained. They were sitting on the floor, their knees drawn up to their chests, and Junket squirmed sideways until he was touching Peg. When he drew in his breath, he hiccoughed loudly; Peg clapped a hand over his mouth. His second hiccough was somewhat muted, but the jerk of his shoulders caused Peg’s hand to slip partly over his nose. Junket panicked when he couldn’t inhale properly, yanked her hand away, and hiccoughed with such force that he fell backward against the boxes.
The bar of daylight underneath the door made shapes visible, enabling Peg to see enough of Junket’s body to grab him by the shoulders and pull him toward her. Then, in desperation, she kissed him. She even pushed in her tongue, slid it along the smooth enamel and the ridges where the teeth overlapped. Junket’s tongue shrank back, made timid by the surprise. But Peg continued to kiss him, and he found himself cracking his mouth open a little wider to see what she’d do. She hesitated, which made Junket bolder, and he pushed his tongue forward to meet the tip of hers. The surge of intimacy was irresistible. Junket’s fingers, still childishly plump, crawled inside Peg’s blouse and up to feel those mysterious bumps, not hard like acorns, which is what he’d expected to feel, but more like the rubbery cartilage of kneecaps. And her skin felt so silky, so expensive, that he wanted to wrap it around his own shivering self.
Later, Peg matter-of-factly explained that her method was the best cure for hiccoughs. It worked, yes? And when they had left the vampire castle behind and were back in Junket’s room, he asked her where she’d learned to kiss like that. “Like what?” she said, obviously offended. Junket shrugged and never mentioned it again.