A Hidden Place

Chapter Ten

Nancy was not sure precisely when or how the fear had descended on the town. She knew only that it had come. The Courier was full of frightening headlines. Doors were more often locked. She was apt to be scrutinized when she was out after dark. The Depression had deepened; in Idaho the farmers had set up blockades, dairy farmers had spilled their milk into the road rather than sell it for two cents a gallon. In Washington the Bonus Expeditionary Force had been routed by the Army. A murderous contagion was abroad in the land, and Haute Montagne was sealing its borders.

She had never felt more alone. This is what it means, Travis had told her, and it seemed like infinities ago. This is what it means to be a misfit.

Nancy lay on the rosette bedspread in her room. Her mother kept the small house meticulously neat. They were not rich, but her mother’s job at the bakery was much envied, and she earned enough to keep them. Until recently, too, there had been Nancy’s salary from the Times Square. But that was gone. Mr. O’Neill had not forgiven her for walking out before the dinner rush. Nor had her mother forgiven her for losing the job. It meant a degree of hardship.

Nancy had some money saved back. Listless, she felt under the mattress for the pastille can she kept there and when she found it she thumbed it open. The last of her own cash. A little over seven dollars. Saved for a rainy day. Well, surely that day had come? In fact, it was raining, a lackluster rain sliding down the fogged windows. She hated to go out, but she had to.

Anna needed food.

This thing Anna had said was going to happen, Nancy thought—I just wish it would. Now. Regardless of the consequences.

She was tired.

When she went downstairs her mother was in the parlor, upright in a cane-backed chair with her feet flat on the carpet. “Surely to God,” Faye Wilcox said dully, “you cannot be going out now.”

“Have to, Mama.”

“Need I ask where? Or why?”

Nancy said, “I thought you had a meeting.”

“Damn the meeting,” her mother said, and Nancy was shocked. Faye Wilcox did not curse, not ever. Cursing, she had told Nancy, was of the devil.

It occurred to her that maybe she was now the more religious of the two of them, in some strange way: at least, she prayed more often. Clipped, furtive, practical prayers. Please God, let me get through this. She believed in Anna Blaise… and was that not in itself a kind of religious faith?

“Mama, don’t make yourself late.”

“There is nothing for me there. Not anymore.” She focused a sullen look on Nancy. “You’ve seen to that.”

“Mama, don’t.”

“Don’t tell me what to do! Do I tell you what to do?”

“I don’t want to argue.”

“I try. God knows. But you have wandered so far. Is it that Fisher boy? They say he’s living like filth at the edge of town. Is that where you’re going—to wallow in his filth? Or have you gone back to Greg Morrow? That foulmouthed trash. A girl is known by the company she keeps. Lie down with pigs and rise up with pigs. If Martin were here—” “I wish he was,” Nancy said. “Why? So that he could see what you’ve made of yourself? My God! Are you proud of it?”

In truth, she remembered her father only dimly. A child’s memories: the smell of pipe tobacco and the rattle of newspapers. But he had been good, and kind, and he had understood when Nancy recoiled from her mother’s absolutism; he had been somebody to go to when she needed to be consoled. She had been almost ten years old the last time she saw him.

“I thank the Lord sometimes,” Nancy’s mother said, “that he is not alive to see this.”

“Mama, stop it. You know he’s not dead.”

“I know no such thing!” Her mother rose up from her straight-backed chair. She had lost weight these last weeks, though she was still immense; her skin hung in flaccid pockets. “He died, of course he died! Why else… why else would he?…”

Why else would he leave me! she meant. But in fact he had not died. Nancy remembered too well the arguments, her mother’s petulant impatience with his drinking, his job, his language: how he had broken at last on the reef of her righteousness; she remembered him saying a secret good-bye to her, hugging her and saying he loved her: “Nancy, girl, this town is too small to contain me.” The trains had carried him off.

She had been tear-stricken but proud. This town, yes, this high-collared and corsetted town (which had previously seemed so huge to her): why, yes, of course, no such town could hold him! She should have known. Heart and soul, he was too big for it.

The memory always brought back the tears. She blinked and said, “All right, Mama. He’s dead. All right. I know.”

“You have to go out?”

“Yes.”

“I shall pray for you.”

“Yes, Mama.”

The money was running out quickly. She stopped by the bakery and calculated whether she ought to buy a loaf of bread to go with the canned goods and the paraffin. Anna did not seem to mind the cold; fortunately, since the switchman’s shack afforded scant protection from it. When it rained, the roof leaked in three places.

Susan Farris was behind the counter at the bakery. Nancy stood at the door, uncertain. Susan had been a year ahead of her in high school and it was Susan who had systematically barred her from the company of the popular girls. Susan’s hatred for her had been in some way instinctive, seemed to spring from nowhere… though it did not help, perhaps, that Susan had already been employed part-time at the bakery under the supervision of Faye Wilcox. Nancy did not imagine that her mother was a particularly kind or forgiving employer.

She turned on her heel. But Susan had caught sight of her and hailed her back. “Well, Nancy.” Her lilting voice concealed a knife-edge of sarcasm. Susan’s eyes were very blue, her hair blond, her broad Scandinavian mouth scarlet with Tangee lipstick. “You want something today?”

“Loaf of bread,” Nancy said. “The day-old.”

“Come down to bakery bread, are we? I thought your mother did her own.”

“We ran short.”

Mechanically, Susan loaded a crusty loaf into a paper bag and rang up the sale on the thick black keys of the cash register. Nancy tendered a dollar bill from her pastille can and took the change from Susan’s perfectly manicured hand. She examined the clutch of coins.

“I’m short a dime,” she said.

Susan turned back to her, squinting. “What’s that?”

“The change. You owe me a dime. You gave me—”

“I gave you change from a dollar, Nancy dear, no more no less. I counted.”

Wearily, Nancy extended her hand. “Count again. You must have—”

But Susan knocked her hand away. The change spilled out over the peeling tiles of the bakery floor; a tarnished quarter ran under the display case. Nancy dived after it. “Goddamn you, Susan Farris!”

“Curse me all you want,” Susan said loftily. “I would be ashamed if I were you.”

“Ashamed—”

“You think nobody knows what you’re doing with this food you buy? It’s no secret. Greg Morrow told me.”

Nancy stood up slowly.

“What did Greg Morrow tell you?”

Susan smiled. “That’s for me to know and—”

“This is not a game!” She was shouting, but she could not restrain herself. She had passed some critical border into a new and strange country. “It’s important!”

Susan’s smile evaporated. “Well, all right! Don’t wake up Mr. Lawrence, please! You want to know what Greg Morrow told me? Only the truth, Nancy dear. That you are still carrying on with that farm-boy, Travis Fisher. That he’s living like a tramp with the other tramps under the railway bridge, and that you bring him food, and that you and him—out there in the mud and the cold—that you, you—”

Nancy nodded curtly. “All right.” No need to force that obscenity past Susan’s sensitive lips. It was a lie, but not a particularly invidious one,- the lie concealed, after all, a far stranger and less comprehensible truth.

Nancy tucked her inadequate coinage back into the tin pastille box. She thought of what Anna Blaise had told her. A different place. Connected to here, but not here. We have always been among you. And she suppressed a surge of hysterical laughter. “Anyway” Susan went on, “I did not shortchange you,” adding, in a paroxysm of petulance: “It was only a lousy dime!”

Nancy took her bread and went to the door. The rain was coming down harder than ever. She tucked the paper bag under her coat. A phrase of her father’s reverberated in her mind. She could not recall when he had said it; perhaps he had not, perhaps it was a false memory. But she could hear his voice quite clearly inside her.

Don’t love anything too much. They’ll take it away from you.

But only if they know, Nancy thought. Only if they know.

Hooded and sopping, she trudged north along The Spur. It had occurred to her to wonder why she was doing this, whether she might be mad to pursue so single-mindedly so strange a thing. She passed a newspaper box and the headline in the Courier leaped out at her: HOBO KILLER STRIKES AGAIN. There were dangers involved, yes.

Tim Norbloom passed her in one of the town’s two police cars. A block ahead he slowed, and when she was abreast of the car he paced her a while. Nancy counted out forty steps and then stood quite still, teeth clenched, staring through the rain-blurred window. Defying him. Norbloom gazed back at her impassively—warm and dry inside there—and then stepped on the gas.

She understood. A pattern was emerging. The Courier, Susan Farris, the police, even her mother: all knitted together. They were the Conestoga wagons, circling, and Nancy had been elected Indian.

Abruptly the sidewalk under her feet was cold, foreign. The storefronts were drab beneath their awnings_; the rainwater sang in a minor key in the sewer gratings.

Understanding stabbed like a knife. She thought: J don’t live here anymore.

At 1:15 p.m. Helena Baxter, the acting chairwoman, called to order the meeting of the Baptist Women of Haute Montagne. This was unorthodox: but Faye Wilcox, who should have held the chair, was unconscionably late—even though it was Speech Day.

Liza Burack permitted herself a brief smile that lingered throughout the reading of the minutes and the tabling of the unfinished business.

The church meeting hall was crowded, though not uncommonly so for Speech Day. Liza had been given a chair on the platform behind the podium and she was able to see the faces of the members. There were twenty-five or thirty women altogether… not a startling number; significant, she thought, only when you assigned them names. Haute Montagne was (she had heard Creath use the phrase) a Good Plain Town, and it was ruled by Good Plain People. The Baptist Church was a Good Plain Church, too, and friendly with the Methodists and the Episcopalians, though it was generally acknowledged that the Baptists were a little—well, Plainer.

It was a small elite of businessmen who controlled the town, a city council that constituted also, in large part, the executive committee of the Rotarians,- there was Jacob Bingham who owned the hardware store, Bob Clawson the high-school principal, Tim Norbloom of the police department, a handful of lawyers. It had been a clique all but closed to Liza and to Creath, especially since the ice business had fallen on hard times. And Creath’s surliness had presented a problem. But now Creath was back on track (though strangely subdued); she envisioned him pursuing a deaconship, which would better his connections.

And there were the Baptist Women. That significant congregation of wives: Phil McDonnel’s wife, Bob Clawson’s wife, Tim Norbloom’s wife: every important wife, in fact, who had not been sequestered by the Methodists or the Episcopalians, all here today, all staring up at the podium. It would be difficult, Liza thought, but here was an important nexus of power; if she and Creath were to climb back to respectability they would have to begin here.

Faye Wilcox did enter at last, toward the end of the business meeting; head bowed, she unfolded a chair at the back. Helena Baxter offered to give over the podium but Faye only shook her head no. Poor Faye. She had neglected to wear a belt, Liza observed; her dress depended from her immense bosom like a sultan’s tent.

The business meeting ended. Helena Baxter, somewhat daunted—she was a Faye Wilcox partisan—announced the candidates’ speeches. The assembly applauded. Faye Wilcox, as incumbent, was scheduled to speak first.

She trudged to the podium with a visible weariness, and there were whispers of dismay. Liza herself felt a surge of sympathy… dear Lord, this was how she must have looked, those long years when her husband’s indiscretions had sapped so much of her strength and attention. Depleted. Well, she thought. Sympathy is all right. But it was only the natural order of things that was being restored. Faye, after all, was the usurper. Here was her comeuppance.

Her speech was brief and mechanical. She read it from typed pages of Hammermill Bond: “Woman, Helpmate in Troubled Times.” It called for a return to traditional virtues. The speech was a morass of pieties without much life or enthusiasm in it, Liza thought, and when Faye climbed down from the platform, the applause was scattered and contained.

Helena Baxter, frowning now, introduced Liza.

Liza took up the recipe cards on which she had written her speech cues and assumed the podium.

There was the sound of rain washing down the high mullioned windows, the musty smell of leather-bound hymnals stored in the next room. How long since she had done this! The thought of it made her a little afraid. She had chosen a stark theme: “Haute Montagne Must Awaken from Its Long Sleep.”

She cleared her throat.

“Difficult times,” she said, “are upon us.”

She let the words simmer a moment in the dusty air of the church.

“There is no doubt about it. Every woman in Haute Montagne must surely be aware of it. A glance at the headlines is enough. Hard times. Murders. Rebellion. Immorality of an indescribable nature. And we are not safe from it. We must not think we are. But the question is: What can we, as women, do?”

She was surprised at how easy it was. She ignored the cards. The words came fluently. All this had been pent up inside her, stifled in a misplaced propriety: she had lived too long in her glass house. Now she alluded freely to the past: “I have seen the effects of loose morality, as many of you know, on my own sister’s child, blood of my blood,” acknowledging and dismissing it (Travis is gone away); “and I have seen, too, the power of spiritual revival,” thinking of Creath at the altar, Creath born again. And she alluded similarly—delicately—to Nancy Wilcox: “Our own sons, our own daughters,” the emphasis hardly more than a caress, “are not immune to the spirit of the times,” and it was enough, yes_; heads nodded; Faye sat pale and unblinking at the back of the hall.

How simple it all was, really.

She finished with her last and boldest proposal: that the Baptist Women of Haute Montagne should petition the city council to impose a twilight curfew “for the protection of our young people.” It went over well. She saw Mary Lee Baxter and Beth McDonnel conferring, nodding. Faye Wilcox, she saw, had further embarrassed herself by skulking out of the hall.

She sat down once more at the rear of the podium, and the applause, astonishingly, went on and on. Liza acknowledged it with a smile.

Helena Baxter approached her after the meeting. “I must say, Liza, it was a very dynamic speech. I think everyone was impressed.”

“Thank you.”

“I want you to know, you have my support when it comes down to voting.”

“Really? But I thought—you’ve been so close to Faye—”

“The times are changing, though, aren’t they? You said as much yourself. Hard measures for hard times. I’ve never had such a sense that we could— well, influence things.”

Possibly so, Liza thought. Possibly so. And a strange and disturbing thought formed in her mind.

They believe me because they are afraid.

Their fear had become Liza’s ally.

Anna was very sick.

Nancy had doubled back along the railway tracks to make sure she was not being followed. The rain dripped through the box elders and enshrouded her as she trudged across the muddy fields to the switchman’s shack. How pathetic and inadequate it looked, she thought, huddled against itself in the rain like a cold wet animal.

The packed earth floor inside was dark and wet. The air was thick with the odor of mildew and rotting wood. Anna lay curled on a blanket.

Her clothes were wrinkled and old. Her hair was tangled, though Nancy sometimes tried to comb it out. She was asleep, Nancy saw, shuddering in her sleep like a dog.

Nancy touched her gently and a feeling of the woman’s strangeness, faint but distinct, flowed up her arm. Anna’s eyes opened and the irises were a profound blue, the color of the sky reflected in a clear, still pond.

“I brought food,” Nancy said, hoarse with the wetness in the air. The rain had found its way into the loaf of bakery bread, and she laid that out on a handkerchief. There were canned goods, too, and she had left the porcelain bowl outside to fill with rainwater.

“Thank you,” Anna said. She sat up. Her body was emaciated,- she was pale and cold. She looked at Nancy. “You’ve been crying.”

“No. … A little, maybe.”

“It’s hard for you.”

The commiseration was unnecessary; Nancy shrugged it off. “Anna? Please—how much longer?”

She closed her eyes a moment. Looking inward, Nancy thought.

“A week,” she said. “Two weeks. I cannot guarantee it.”

Nancy sighed.

“You need help,” Anna said.

“Yes.” She gazed at the not-human woman. “I need Travis.”

Anna said nothing.

“You think I’m crazy.”

“No. Hardly that.” Anna arranged the food in front of her—her fingers long and china-white, but still with that delicacy of motion Nancy thought of as aristocratic. “Travis is simply—difficult.”

“You selected him. You chose him.”

“Yes. He could have understood. He is still capable of it. And I think the best part of him wants to help. But there is a darker side to him, too, and it is very dark and unpleasant indeed. When he saw me in the Change that part of him was stimulated—its fears and denials. Now it controls him.” She tore a piece of bread from the loaf. “Old, bad pain in him.”

“But if you can touch him—inside—”

“Should I force him to come?” The Anna-thing smiled. “If I could, maybe I would. I can’t.”

“You do make people help you. Even Creath Burack. That time he picked you up.”

“It’s a kind of camouflage, nothing more or less than that. As significant as a chameleon’s ability to change its color. A reflex. Creath Burack gave me shelter because he saw in me some unclaimed part of himself—a dream he had never allowed himself to acknowledge.”

“Still,” Nancy said, “it was deceitful.”

“Not entirely. I paid for what he gave me.”

We do, Nancy thought. We do that. She said firmly, “I need Travis.”

“You went to him once.”

“I’ll go again.”

Anna shrugged.

Nancy said, “It is not futile.”

“There’ll be a price,” Anna said. “A payment. He is at least as lost as I am.”

Nancy said softly, “I know.”

The railway trestle offered scant protection from the rain. Everything here was wet, the air was wet, the swollen river roared against its banks. Birds had nested in the high iron spans of the bridge.

Nancy found him in the humid arch of stone where the iron struts were rooted. Travis sat there, one knee cocked and a cloth cap pulled down low over his eyes. The structure of the trestle made this a kind of cave. It was wet but relatively private.

She said, “You’re still here.”

“Nowhere to go,” he said, watching her, “except away from the weather. I’ll do that soon.”

She nodded and wondered how to begin. But he said, “Nancy—what you want from me—I can’t—”

“It’s the town.” The words rushed out of her, if she stopped, she thought, she might cry. “It’s the town, Travis, the town is what worries me. You don’t know how it is. They’re all so scared. Not just bad times, but people are afraid of all the murders going on. And more than that. There’s no trust. They suspect me. A police car followed me all along The Spur—just today—a police car! If this goes on—” She shrugged miserably her coat heavy on her shoulders, her hair wet and matted on her back. “I’m worried about somebody finding Anna. Or else I won’t be able to help her and she’ll die out there in the cold.” Travis was staring at the muddy ground, a constellation of broken glass. She wanted to shake him. “Travis, you understand? She’ll die.” “You know what she is.”

It was not a question. She said, “Does that matter anymore?” “Matter!”

“Well, what do you think she is? A witch? A demon? Some tent-revival devil?”

That was unwise. He recoiled from her. “You touched her, Nance.”

“Maybe she’s not human—whatever that means. All right. But it doesn’t mean she’s bad or dangerous.”

“You don’t understand.” He was frowning, lost in reminiscence. “She was so goddamn beautiful! Not just that, either. Fragile. Helpless. She made me want to—to—”

“Me,” Nancy said, breaking under the strain of it, crying a little now: “Help me, Travis! I don’t care what you think about her! Help me!”

He sat that same way, one leg crooked, while the rain fell in sheets across the broad boiling water of the river. He had not stopped frowning. “I guess now you know what it’s like. It’s no fun.” After a time he said, “I might help.”

Nancy huddled in her coat.

“On one condition.”

There will be a price. A payment.

Well, but wasn’t there always? It was too much to expect, she thought, that he would help her for some sentimental reason. Obviously he did not love her anymore,- all this ordeal had knocked the love right out of him. And out of me, she thought, confessing it to herself: out of me, too. She said, bleakly, “What condition?”

“Tell me.” He touched her, his hand hot on her. “Tell me what she is.”

After a moment she nodded yes.