Death of the Black-Haired Girl

28

THE LAST CLASS OF the first semester took place after Maud’s death, before the Christmas holiday and the beginning of winter break. The meeting scheduled for that week was always a class out of time, a time for wrapping up. Sometimes it was merry, celebratory; sometimes, when people were overly busy and in a hurry, it was glum. After Maud, it was ten minutes of death in life, and if any words were spoken by anyone — by himself or any of the students — Brookman couldn’t remember. One kid, a boy, came up to him after the class with a dim procedural question. Brookman put him off, promised an e-mail he’d never send.

At the department office, the secretary, who disliked him for reasons he never understood, gave him a questionable finger-wave from a backroom. He managed not to tell her to go fuck herself.

On the street outside he noticed a tall man with a sallow fighter’s face and a gray crewcut looking at him with hard-eyed fascination. The man wore a tie, a dark red scarf and a blue overcoat. There was a shorter man with him who was also watching Brookman pass. They were not each other’s friends. They had no interest in their attractive surroundings or in the colorful characters who passed through the gate. Then it occurred to him that they were out-of-town policemen. He had seen at least one of them before but did not think it had been around the college. He passed people he knew, or who knew him, without recognition.

“You spent a lot of time at the office today,” Ellie told him when he got home after six. She looked good, but not quite as radiant as she had been during the first pregnancy — a bit pale and more tired. Otherwise, she was not showing her condition.

There was one odd thing, which was they were having more sex. Brookman found this strangely, maybe perversely, satisfying. Ellie went about indicating her inclination silently, several times a week. When she came, which was more frequently than usual, she let him know it, moaning, breathless. Sometimes her face was wet as though with grief. She had always gone to sleep quickly but slept lightly. Listening for grizzlies, he had teased her in the days before Maud — alert to the wolf stalking the fold. Sometimes now, afterward, he told her that he loved her. She said nothing back, though she would often touch him. Her touches encouraged him but made him feel sad.

As he registered every remonstration of Ellie’s, he watched Sophia with unsubtle caution for signs of resentment or withdrawal. Sophia watched him too, unconfiding, uncomfortable. She in turn was aware of his anxious observation. It was a delicate business to be conducted in such fearsome times, the guiding and nurturing of this wise, perceptive child at the cusp of adolescence. Sophia was both more and less sophisticated in certain ways than her contemporaries. Their bantering, fond relationship was a treasure of his life and he dreaded the loss of it.

During his hours in the office, he sometimes closed the curtains as he had when Maud visited. He ignored his e-mail and phone calls. Never answered his door. At times he drank, making sure that when he did, he had something to read. These were his two principal ways of controlling his guilt and grief. He had read Susanna Moodie’s memoir Roughing It in the Bush in the federal detention center in Homer. It was a popular book among some of his homesteading friends in the old Alaska and he had a copy in his office. He did not get far rereading it. So he turned to work like Anthony Powell’s. He read The Quiet American and Hemingway’s Men Without Women along with a history of the siege of Berlin. Often he drank, keeping strong mints handy.

“People are looking at me strangely,” he told his wife later that evening.

“Well, you’re a strange guy, eh? Aren’t you?”

Brookman went to check that Sophia was not in earshot. An afterthought. Then he went to pour himself a drink.

“Don’t you think people look at me strangely?” she asked him.

“They suspect I pushed her.”

Ellie failed to answer him at first.

“They once suspected you hit me,” she said. “You took a swing at me.”

“I’ve never hit you. And I never took a swing at you.”

“Oh, ya. Years ago. The second time I ducked. You fight like my brothers. On one foot.” After a moment she said, “Maybe they suspect me. Maybe they think we both hit her.” Brookman laughed and shuddered.

“I didn’t hit Maud, for Christ’s sake. You were right behind me.”

“Yes, I followed you out,” Ellie said. He sat down on a kitchen chair, watching her in profile as she did the washing up. Her face was very handsome, not without faults. Her long, fine nose turned up slightly at the tip. While courting her, quite in love, he had discovered that she was a woman who believed, however humbly, that her course in life was directed by God and that her choices must be made to honor Him. Naturally, she did not always tell the whole truth but she was not a good liar. “I followed you out,” she said truthfully. “Yes. The two of you.”

“I didn’t hit her,” Brookman said.

“I might have,” Ellie told him. “If she had turned toward my house.”

A picture came to his mind, as vivid as though he had seen it, of snow falling past Maud’s open blue eyes, flakes piling on their dead, still pupils. On her hair. At her throat. It did not incline him against Ellie. He had no clear idea how it made him feel.

“I’m going out.”

“Taking the car? Bring in oatmeal.” Ellie watched from the kitchen. Now she would not have the Christmas holiday she had been looking forward to — since being allowed a post-Mennonite Christmas — and her life was slowly changing from the inside out.

On the road Brookman drove with a defensive reticence that annoyed his fellow motorists. At the back of his mind was that some kind of unofficial police presence was on his trail. He had left the house without a destination.