The Clock Winder

2

“It’s simple,” said Elizabeth. “That stump is the chopping block. There’s the axe. And there sits the turkey, wondering when you’ll start. What else could you want?”

“If it’s all that simple why ask me to do it?” the boy said. He was standing beside her in the toolshed doorway, looking at the turkey in its crate. The turkey paced three steps to one side, three steps to the other, stopping occasionally to peer at them through the slats.

“Look at him, he wants to get it over with,” Elizabeth said.

“Couldn’t we call in a butcher?”

The boy was a college senior named Benny Simms — pleasant-faced, beanpole-thin, with a crewcut. He lived two houses down, although his mother was beginning to question that. “He lives at your place,” she told Mrs. Emerson on the phone. “Every weekend home he’s out visiting your handyman. Handywoman. What kind of girl is she anyway? Who are her people? Do you know anything about her?” Elizabeth had heard of this call, and other mothers’ calls just like it, from Mrs. Emerson, who reported it in a voice that tried to sound amused but came out irritated. “This is one problem I never had with Richard,” she said. “I find there are drawbacks that I hadn’t foreseen when I hired you.” She was still trying to switch Elizabeth over to housekeeping, which was probably why she sounded irritated. She tapped her fingernails on a tabletop. “I don’t know, people surprise me more all the time. ‘Above all else, be feminine,’ I used to tell my daughters, and here you are in those eternal blue jeans, but every time I look out the window some new boy is helping you rake leaves.”

“Oh, well, the leaves are nearly gone by now,” Elizabeth said.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“I’ll be indoors more. They won’t be stopping by so much.”

“It’s more likely they’ll just start invading my kitchen,” Mrs. Emerson said.

Benny Simms picked up the axe that was leaning against the toolshed. He ran a finger down the blade and whistled. “I just did sharpen it,” Elizabeth told him. “I guess you did.”

“Did you know the Emersons have a whetstone wheel? The old-fashioned kind, that works with a foot pedal. I found it in the basement.”

“Nothing about the Emersons would surprise me at all,” Benny said.

“I like things like that. Things without machinery to them. Machinery is something I don’t understand too well.”

“I would’ve thought you’d know all about it,” Benny said.

“No. Yard work now, or carpentry, or plumbing — things that you can see reason to right on the surface …”

“Then why can’t you kill the turkey?” asked Benny.

“Well.”

He handed her the axe. Elizabeth turned it over several times, studying the glint of the blade very carefully but moving no closer to the turkey. She was wearing what Mrs. Emerson called her uniform — moccasins, dungarees, and a white shirt, and a bulky black jacket with a rib-knit waist now that the weather had turned cool. A wind from the east was whipping her hair around her face. She kept brushing it back impatiently without lifting her eyes from the axe. “I’m not too certain about that bevel,” she said. “It looks a little bluish. I hope I didn’t go and ruin the tempering.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Benny. “What’d you take this job for, if you can’t kill turkeys?”

“Well, how was I to know? Would you expect that to be a part of my job? First I heard of it, in she walked yesterday carrying the crate by the handle. Passed it over to me without even slowing down, walked on through the house peeling off her gloves. Said, ‘Here you are, Elizabeth, take care of this, will you? Have it ready in time for Thanksgiving dinner.’ Tomorrow! I didn’t know what to say. I suspect,” she said, setting down the axe, “that she planned it all on purpose, to turn me to housekeeping.”

“Most people get their turkeys from the supermarket,” Benny said.

“Not her.”

“All plucked and wrapped in plastic.”

“Not Mrs. Emerson. She won it at a church bazaar.”

“Oh, is that what you win? I’ve heard of prize turkeys before but I thought they’d have their feathers off.”

“Nope. You do it all yourself.”

“Do you know how to pluck them?”

“Oh, sure,” said Elizabeth. “The feathers and the innards, that’s no problem.”

Benny was brushing his crewcut on end, over and over. “Innards. Jeepers,” he said, “I’d forgotten them. You’ll have to fish out all those half-made eggs.”

“I tend to doubt that,” Elizabeth said. She smiled suddenly and shut the toolshed door, dropping the wooden crossbar into place. “Oh, well, I don’t know why I asked you anyway. If you can’t, you can’t.”

“I’m awful sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

They started up the hill toward the front yard — Elizabeth ahead, with her hands deep in her jacket pockets, Benny still brushing up his crewcut as he walked. “What I stopped by for,” he said, “was to ask if you wanted to come with me this afternoon.”

“I’d love to.”

“I’m going — don’t you want to know where you’d be coming with me to?”

“Where am I coming with you to?”

“I’m going out to the country for my mother. Picking up some pumpkins for pumpkin pie.”

“Oh, good,” said Elizabeth. “Maybe I’ll get Mrs. Emerson a pumpkin too. Big as a footstool. Drop it in her lap and say, ‘Here you go, take care of this, will you? Have it ready in time for Thanksgiving.’ ” She laughed, but Benny didn’t.

“I don’t know why you stay with that woman,” he said. “Couldn’t you find someone else to work for?”

“Oh, I like her.”

“What for? The whole family’s crazy, everyone knows that.”

Elizabeth had stopped to empty bits of leaves from one moccasin. She shook it out, standing one-legged in the grass. “Other people have said so too,” she said, “but I don’t know yet if they’re right. So far I’ve only seen Mrs. Emerson and Matthew.”

“Matthew. Well, he’s okay but Andrew is stark raving mad. Wait till you see him.”

Elizabeth bent to put her moccasin back on, and they continued toward the street. Squirrels were racing all around them, skimming over the grass and up the skeletons of the trees. “Lately we’ve got squirrels in the attic,” Elizabeth said. “No telling how they got there, or what I do to get rid of them.”

“When I was little Mrs. Emerson used to scare me to death,” said Benny. “Also Andrew, and Timothy a little too but that might have been just because he was Andrew’s twin. I wouldn’t even come in for cookies, not even if Mrs. Emerson called me herself with her sweetie-sweet voice. I’d heard stories about them since I was old enough to listen. That Andrew is violent. And do you know that Mrs. E. went to pieces once because she thought her first baby got mixed up in the hospital?”

“I hear a lot of people have that thought,” Elizabeth said.

“Maybe so, but they don’t go to pieces. And they don’t try and give the babies back to the hospital.”

Elizabeth laughed.

“I wonder if my mother would care to hire you,” Benny said.

“It’s not too likely. Besides, I believe I’d like to stay and meet these people.”

“When would you do that? Some don’t come home from one year to the next.”

“Well, one’s coming today, as a matter of fact,” Elizabeth said. “The one here in Baltimore. Timothy. That’s what we’re killing the turkey for.”

“I could ask my mother if she needs any carpentry done.”

“Never mind,” said Elizabeth. She tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Go on, now. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

“All right. I hope you manage that turkey somehow.”

“I will.”

She climbed the steps to the veranda, unzipping her jacket as she went. Inside, the house was almost dark, filled with ticking clocks, smelling of burned coffee. The furniture was scarred and badly cared for. “Mrs. Emerson,” Elizabeth had once said, “would you like me to feed the furniture?” Mrs. Emerson had laughed her tinkling little laugh. “Feed it?” she had said. “Feed it what?” “Well, oil it, I mean. It’s drying out, it’s falling to pieces.” But Mrs. Emerson had said not to bother. She had no feeling for wood, that was why — the material that Elizabeth loved best. The hardwood floors were worn dull, black in some places where water had settled in, the grain raised and rough. In a house so solid, built with such care (six fireplaces, slate in the sunporch, a butler’s pantry as big as a dining room, and elegant open inserts like spool-bed headboards above every doorway), Mrs. Emerson’s tumble of possessions lay like a film of tattered leaves over good topsoil, their decay proceeding as steadily as Mrs. Emerson’s life. Strange improvements had been tacked on — a linoleum-topped counter, crumbling now at the edges, running the length of the oak-lined breakfast room, dingy metal cabinets next to the stone fireplace in the kitchen. In the basement there were five separate servants’ rooms, furnished with peeling metal bedsteads and rolled-up, rust-stained mattresses; on the second floor most of the doors were kept shut, darkening the hall; on the third floor there was an echo, the wallpaper was streaked brown beneath the shuttered windows, the floor outside the bathroom bore a black ring where someone had long ago left a glass of water to evaporate, unnoticed. The two attics off the third-floor rooms were crammed with playpens, cribs and potty-chairs, bales of mouse-eaten letters, textbooks no school would think of using any more. There was a leak beside one chimney which only Elizabeth seemed concerned about. (Periodically she was to empty the dishpan beneath it; that was all.) Mrs. Emerson, meanwhile, set antique crystal vases over the scars on the dining room buffet and laid more and more Persian carpets over the worn spots on the floors. The carpets glowed richly, like jewels, calling forth little sparkles of admiration from the ladies who came to tea. Elizabeth hated Persian carpets. She wanted to banish all their complicated designs to the basement and sand the floors down to bare grain — something she knew better than to suggest to Mrs. Emerson.

She climbed the stairs, creaking each step in turn, trailing her hand along the banister. In the hall she stopped a moment to listen to Mrs. Emerson, who was in her bedroom talking to the maid. “Now, Alvareen, if Mr. Timothy gets here by lunchtime I don’t want you serving any bread. He’s gained fifteen pounds since he started medical school. Heart disease runs in the family. Give him Ry-Krisp, and if he asks for bread say we don’t have any. Can you understand that? Meanwhile, I want to see a little cleaning done. I don’t know how things have been allowed to slide so. The baseboards are just furry. Do you know what Emmeline used to do? She ran along the baseboard crevices with a Q-tip, down on her hands and knees. Now that’s cleaning.”

“Yes’m,” said Alvareen.

“Are you out there, Elizabeth?”

Elizabeth crossed the hallway to the bedroom. Mrs. Emerson was sitting at her little spinet desk, wearing a dyed-to-match sweater and skirt and a string of pearls, holding a gold fountain pen poised over a sheet of cream stationery. She looked like an advertisement. So did everything else in the room — the twin beds canopied with ruffles, the lace lampshades, the two flowered armchairs that turned out to be shabby only if you came up close to them. It was hard to imagine that Mr. Emerson had lived here too. He had died of a heart attack, people said, in one of the twin beds — almost the only Emerson to do things without a fuss. Now the beds were neatly made and there were little satin cushions arranged at the heads. The only thing out of place was Alvareen, a black hulk of a woman in a gray uniform, standing beside Mrs. Emerson with her hands under her apron. “Mrs. Emerson, I’ll be going now,” she said.

“Yes, yes, go on. Elizabeth, have you taken care of that turkey?”

“Not yet,” Elizabeth said.

“Why not? I can’t imagine what’s holding you up.”

“I was just going to fetch an old shirt,” said Elizabeth. “I don’t want to get all bloody.”

“Oh. Now, I’m not interested in the details, I just want him seen to. At one o’clock tomorrow I want to find him stuffed, trussed, and ready to carve. Is that clear?”

“Who’s going to cook him?” Elizabeth asked. “Not me.”

“Alvareen, but I’m having to pay her double for the holiday. No one else will do it.”

She smoothed the lines between her eyebrows, looking tired and put-upon, but Elizabeth didn’t offer to change her mind about cooking. One piece of housework, she figured, would turn her magically into a maid — and just when Mrs. Emerson was getting used to her as a handyman. At teas, catching sight of Elizabeth as she climbed the stairs or passed a doorway, Mrs. Emerson would cry, “Wait! Girls, I want you to see Elizabeth. My handyman, can you imagine?” And the ladies would round their mouths and act surprised, although surely the news was all over Roland Park by now. “Oh, Pamela, I swear,” one of them said, “you always find some different way of doing things.” Mrs. Emerson beamed, setting her cup soundlessly in its little fluted saucer.

“I’ve brought you in some firewood,” Elizabeth said, “and later I’ll drive out for the stuffing mix. Would you like a big old pumpkin?”

“Excuse me?”

“A pumpkin. I’m going out to the country with Benny this afternoon.”

“Now, what would Alvareen know to do with a pumpkin? She can barely warm up a brown-and-serve pie. I don’t remember giving you the afternoon off.”

“I did a full day’s work in the morning,” Elizabeth said. “Carried in the firewood, caulked three window frames, mended the back porch railing, and sharpened all your tools. Also I oiled the whetstone.”

“What whetstone is that?”

“The one in the basement.”

“Oh, I never knew we had one. Well, Richard worked five full days a week. Morning and afternoon.”

“Richard wasn’t on hand round the clock whenever you called for him,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, never mind that, can’t you just stay? Timothy’s coming home.”

“I won’t take long.”

Mrs. Emerson rose and went to her dresser, where she began going through a little inlaid box full of bobby pins. She dug out bobby pins and put them back in and dug out more, as if some were better than others. Then she began shifting hairbrushes and perfume bottles around. “I don’t know what I depend on you for,” she told Elizabeth. “You’re never here when I need you.”

Elizabeth said nothing.

“And the country, all these trips to the country and anywhere else that comes to mind. Washington. Annapolis. Lexington Market. The zoo. Any place you’re asked. It’s ridiculous, can’t you just stay put a while? Timothy said he might be here by lunch. I was counting on your standing by to help me.”

“Help you do what?” Elizabeth asked.

“Well, maybe we’ll need more firewood.”

“I just got through telling you, I brought some in. MacGregor delivered a truckload this morning.”

“What if we burn more than you’d planned on? Some problem will turn up. What if we need a repair job all of a sudden?”

“If you do, I’ll see to it later,” Elizabeth said. “And Timothy will be here.”

“To be truthful, Elizabeth, it’s nice to have things thinned out a little when just one of my children is here. Somebody to lighten the conversation. Couldn’t you stay?”

“I promised Benny,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh, go then. Go. I don’t care.”

When Elizabeth left, Mrs. Emerson had started opening all her bureau drawers and slamming them shut again.

Elizabeth’s room was across the hall from Mrs. Emerson’s. The air in it smelled heavily of cigarettes — the Camels Elizabeth chain-smoked whenever she was idle — and there was a clutter of paperback detective stories and orange peels and overflowing ashtrays on the dresser. In the lower drawers were odds and ends belonging to Margaret, who had lived in this room until she left home. Her Nancy Drew mysteries were still in the bookcase, and her storybook dolls lined one wall shelf. The other children’s rooms were stripped clean; Margaret’s was different because she had left in a hurry. Eloped, at sixteen. Now she was twenty-five, divorced or annulled or something and drawing ads for a clothing company in Chicago. “And moody, so terribly moody,” Mrs. Emerson said. “The few times she’s been back I’ve wondered if she’d go into a depression right before my eyes.” Mrs. Emerson had a way of summing up each child in a single word, putting a finger squarely on his flaw. Margaret was moody, Andrew unbalanced, Melissa high-strung. But coming from her, the flaws sounded like virtues. In Mrs. Emerson’s eyes anything to do with nerves was a sign of intelligence. Other people’s children were steady and happy and ordinary; Mrs. Emerson’s were not. They were special. On the bookshelf in the study Margaret’s pale, pudgy face scowled out from a filigree frame, her lipstick a little blurred, her lank hair a little mussed, as if being special were some storm that had buffeted her. In this pink lacy room she must have seemed as out of place as Elizabeth, who sat on the satin bedspread in her dungarees and scattered wood chips across the flowered carpet whenever she was whittling.

Wood chips marked the doorway to the room, and trailed across the hall and down the top few stairsteps. “You must think you’re Hansel and Gretel,” Mrs. Emerson once said. “Everywhere you go you drop a few shavings.” She had seen Elizabeth’s carvings — angular, barely recognizable figures, sanded to a glow — and not known what to make of them, but apparently they had settled her mind. Before then she kept asking, “What are you going to do, in the end? What will you make of your life?” She liked to see plans neatly made, routes clearly marked, beelines to success. It bothered her that Elizabeth had just bought a multi-purpose electric drill that would sand, saw, wirebrush, sink screws, stir paint—anything—which she kept in the basement for her woodworking. “How much did that thing cost? It must have taken every cent I’ve yet paid you,” Mrs. Emerson said. “At this rate you’ll never get to college, and I have the feeling you don’t much care.” “No, not all that much,” Elizabeth said cheerfully. Mrs. Emerson kept nagging at her. That was when Elizabeth showed her the woodcarvings. She dragged them out of her knapsack, along with a set of Exacta knives and a sheaf of sandpaper. “Here you go, I’m planning to set up a shop and make carvings all my life,” she said. “Are you just saying that?” Mrs. Emerson asked. “Or do you mean it. It’s a mighty strange choice of occupations, and I never knew you to plan so far ahead. Are you just trying to quiet me?” But she had turned the carvings over in her hands, looking at least partly satisfied, and after that she didn’t nag so much.

Elizabeth pulled the knapsack out of her closet and dug down to the bottom of it, coming up finally with a man’s ragged shirt that was rolled into a cylinder. She shook it out and put it on over her jacket. Down the front of the shirt were streaks of paint in several different colors, but no blood. She had never even killed a chicken before. Not even a squirrel or a rabbit, and that at least would have been killing at long distance.

Across the hallway Mrs. Emerson was talking into her dictaphone. “This is going in Melissa’s letter. Melissa, are you sure you don’t need that brown coat with the belted back that’s hanging in the cedar closet? Something else, now. What was it I wanted to say?” There was a click as the dictaphone was shut off, another click to turn it on again. “Yes. Mary. Now, the last thing I want is to offend that husband of yours. I’m not any ordinary mother-in-law. But would you be able to use my old fur coat that I got four years ago? I never wear it, I was just going through my winter things this morning and stumbled across it. Young men can’t generally afford fur coats so I thought — but if you feel he’d be offended, just say so. I’m not any ordinary …”

Elizabeth stood by her window, flattening the rolled sleeves of her paint-shirt and wondering what she would do if it took more than one chop to kill the turkey. Or could she just refuse to do it at all? Say that she had turned vegetarian? But that would give Mrs. Emerson an excuse to clap her into housework. Elizabeth had nothing against housework but she preferred doing things she hadn’t done before. She liked surprising herself.

“Andrew, I understand about Thanksgiving but on Christmas I set my foot down,” Mrs. Emerson said. “I’m not thinking of myself, you understand. I’m managing quite well. But Christmas is a family holiday, you need your family. Tell your doctor that. Or would you rather I did? It doesn’t matter to me what he thinks of me.”

She could go on like this all night, sometimes. To Elizabeth it seemed like so much busywork. If she couldn’t write those messages right then, or bother remembering them, were they worth committing to tape? Maybe she just liked pressing all those buttons on her little beige machine. But Mrs. Emerson said, “I take pride in my correspondence, letter-writing is a dying art. I refuse to turn into one of those people who sit themselves at a desk to say, ‘Well, nothing to report at this end, everything going as usual …’ ” At two or three in the morning, waking just enough to shut her window or reach for another blanket, Elizabeth would hear sudden, startling sentences floating across the dark hallway. “I resent what you said in your last letter, Melissa. Everyone knows I am not the sort of mother who interferes.” “Where is that necklace I lent you? I never said you could keep it.” Her voice was clear and matter-of-fact, the ordinary daytime voice of a woman who had been awake for hours. “How could you just hang up on me like that? I’ve been thinking and thinking, the older you get the less I understand you.” “Do you have Emily Barrett’s address?” “Someday you will be alone.” “Where is the photograph you promised?”

On the student desk in the corner sat Elizabeth’s own mother’s letter, weeks old, sheets and sheets of church stationery hoping for an answer.

… Honey if you were going to be gone so long you should have said so when you left. We would never have let you for one thing and for another we would have cooked you a finer last meal and made a bigger to-do. I could just cry thinking of that plain old meat loaf and succotash I gave you. But your sister’s wedding was still on my mind and I never knew you were planning anything but hopping off for a short summer job. I thought sure you would be back for school. Well the college called and I didn’t know what to say, I remembered you had talked about taking time off but we never thought you were serious. And we thought you meant to go by bus like ordinary people, not with just a wedding guest that none of our side knew. How could you be sure what he drove like? Nowadays they let just anyone on the road, all kinds of things can happen. But there you went and didn’t say a word more about it. I don’t know if you were planning to be gone so long or it just happened. You often do get carried away. Anyway here you are now in Baltimore you say. You should see all the times I’ve crossed addresses out and written new ones in for you since you sat here back in May eating that meat loaf and succotash.

Well there is not too much to report here. Everybody is fine although as usual your father is working too hard. He just lets these women walk all over him, taking up his time for missionary circles and all kinds of lectures and tea-parties and slide-showings and paltry illnesses and so forth, when I tell him he should rest more and behave like ordinary pastors, confine himself to sermons and funerals and maybe a few deathbeds. He eats it all up, I believe. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself if they would stop pestering him. Now Mrs. Nancy Bledsoe has gone and given him a dog, a female collie that chews up everything including magazines and table legs, and you know how scared he is of dogs and never would have anything to do with them. She says it is a token of appreciation for all he did while her mother was dying. He said thank you kindly although I notice he has no notion what to do with the thing, doesn’t know how to pet it, backs off when it jumps on him, asked me right out one day after a lot of hemming and hawing what was wrong with her that she squats to piddle when everyone else’s dogs raise their legs. Now Christmas will be coming up which is the busy time for all those deaths and melancholies as well as church services and so on.

Polly is looking so sweet and pretty now that she is married and she is just real active in the Young Wives Fellowship. I don’t know if she has told you yet about the event they are expecting in March. Me a grandmother, I’m just tickled pink. I always did want to have someone to spoil rotten but hand back when he got to fussing. Honey I just wish you would settle down yourself some, finish at Sandhill College or get married, one. I know you don’t like to hear me say that but I just have to tell you what’s on my mind. Mrs. Bennett talking the other day said there is always one in every family that causes twice as much worry as all the others, not that you would love them any the less for it, well, I knew what she meant although of course I didn’t say so.

Dommie Whitehill still comes calling on us and asks all about you, where you are and what you are doing and who you are going around with and so forth. I could just cry for that boy. You will never find anyone sweeter than Dommie, I don’t care how far you look, and that is something that is getting mighty hard to find these days and nobody waits forever.

Elizabeth I have oftentimes told your father he should drop you a line. He says it is up to you to write first and take back all you said so I wish you would. Honey he is just so hurt but would never show it for the world, you know how proud he is. Nobody is as strong as they look. I have thought of calling you on the long distance but not knowing how your employer might feel about it I didn’t. You could, though. Just one word is all it would take and it would make him so …

Elizabeth changed into older dungarees, tattered and spotted and faded white at the seams. She took a leather belt from her dresser, but instead of putting it on she raised it over her head and spun it by the buckle like a lariat, in a huge wide beautiful circle. The tongue of the belt flicked a storybook doll — Margaret’s doll but Elizabeth’s room, no one’s but her own. She awoke here every morning feeling amazed all over again that she had finally become a grownup. Where to go and when to sleep and what to do with the day were hers to decide — or not to decide, which was even better. She could leave here when she wanted or stay forever, fixing things. In this house everything she touched seemed to work out fine. Not like the old days.

When she descended the stairs, threading the belt through her jeans, she found Alvareen in the front hallway wiping the baseboards. “I’m going to take care of that turkey now,” Elizabeth told her.

“That right?”

“You wouldn’t like to do it, I don’t guess.”

“Not me.” Alvareen sat back on her heels and refolded the dustcloth. “Honest to truth, you think she could find the money somewhere to buy one. What you all have for supper last night?”

“Tuna fish on saltine crackers, open-face, topped with canned mushrooms.”

Alvareen rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, a sign she was amused. She loved to hear what was served up on her sick-days.

“For vegetables she spread oleo on celery sticks, with a line of green olives straight down the middle.”

“You making this up?”

“No.”

“Can’t be anyone to cook as bad as that by accident,” said Alvareen. “Must be she wants to discourage your appetite. She’s tight with a dime.”

“Elizabeth?”

“Just going,” Elizabeth called up the stairs.

“I thought you’d have left by now.”

“Just on my way.”

She waved a hand at Alvareen and walked out the front door, crossing the veranda briskly but slowing as she reached the yard. There wasn’t a person in sight, no one to offer to help. She dragged her feet all the way to the toolshed. When she opened the door the turkey rushed to the back of his crate with a scrabbling sound. Elizabeth squatted and peered inside. “Chick, chick?” she said. He strutted back and forth within his three-step limit, his wattle bobbing up and down. Away from the light his wings lost their coppery sheen. He looked drab and shabby, his feathers a little ragged, like someone who had slept with his clothes on. “Well, anyway,” Elizabeth said after a moment. She untwisted the wire that held the crate shut and reached in, carrying out a set of motions that she had rehearsed in her mind. One arm circled his body and pinned his wings down, the other clutched his legs. He struggled at first and then relaxed, and she straightened up with the turkey tight against her chest. “You surely are a big buster,” she told him. There by the chopping block lay the axe, right outside the toolshed door, but it would take her a minute longer to get herself prepared. She set the turkey down. He was too fat to run far. He ambled out the door and down the hill, jerking his neck self-righteously with each step, while Elizabeth followed a few feet behind. She could still grab him up if he started running, but neither of them seemed in any hurry. They walked single file through the trellis, past the blackberry bush, under the rotting roof of the gazebo that showed squares of sky between its warped shingles. Then back again, toward the toolshed. That turkey had no sense at all. He circled the chopping block twice, and still Elizabeth let the axe stay where it was. He headed back through the trellis. They walked like two people filling time, sauntering with exaggerated carelessness, trying to look interested in the scenery. Then the turkey started speeding up. He didn’t run, just took longer and longer steps, never losing his dignity. Elizabeth walked faster. Trees and shrubs and the second trellis skated past them, perfectly level. Then they reached the end of the yard and Elizabeth suddenly darted beyond the turkey and skidded down the bank into the alley, heading him off. A car screeched to a stop not two feet from her. The turkey became interested in something on the ground and stayed there, just at the edge of the bank, pecking unconcernedly.

The car was a dirty white sportscar. The driver was a round-faced blond boy wearing an Alpine hat with a feather in it. When he climbed out he bumped his head against the doorframe. “I wish you would watch where you’re going,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Elizabeth. She couldn’t give him more than a glance because she had to keep her eyes on the turkey. Without looking around she reached toward a bush behind her, snapped off a switch, and started up the bank. “Shoo, now, shoo!” she said.

“Out walking your turkey, I see,” said the boy.

“I’m getting up nerve to kill him.”

“I see. Are you Elizabeth? My name’s Timothy Emerson. I knew we were going to have a turkey dinner, but Mother never mentioned it was still on foot.”

“It may be forever on foot,” Elizabeth said. “This whole business is harder than it looks.”

“Can I help?”

But he wore a plaid sports coat and wool slacks, much too good for killing turkeys in, and even the effort of climbing the bank after her had turned his face pink. “Just stay where you are, keep him off the road,” Elizabeth told him. “That’s all I need.”

“I could run over him with my car if you like.”

She smiled, but her attention was still on the turkey. She gave a flick of her switch and the turkey moved away, slowly now, still examining the ground. “What you need is a leash,” Timothy said.

“I can get him to the chopping block easily enough, but then what? I just hate to tell your mother I’m not equal to this.”

“Let him run off,” Timothy said. “Buy one at the supermarket. Mother’ll never know.”

Elizabeth bent one ankle beneath her and sank down to the ground, still holding the switch. The turkey moved a few steps further off. “Is it you that the unicycle in the basement belongs to?” she said.

“Me? Oh, no, that’s Peter’s. I was never one for exercise. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you used it, though.”

“I was just hoping to see it used,” said Elizabeth. “I’m not one for exercise either.”

“Really? I thought you would be.”

“How come?”

“I expected to see you out playing football with the little neighborhood boys,” Timothy said.

“What would I want to do that for?”

“Well, you are the handyman, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” said Elizabeth, “but that’s got nothing to do with football. I wonder if other people have the same idea? I’ve been getting the strangest invitations lately. Tennis, bicycling, nature walks — if there’s one thing I don’t like it’s nature, standing around admiring nature. I come home feeling empty-headed.”

“Why go, then? Look, your turkey is heading toward the road again.”

The turkey was a good twenty feet off, but Elizabeth merely glanced at it and then settled herself more comfortably on the ground. “I always go where I’m asked,” she said. “It’s a challenge: never turn down an invitation. Now, does Peter really know how to ride that unicycle? I mean, bump downstairs on it? Shoot basketballs from it, like they do in the circus?”

“Your turkey!”

Elizabeth looked around. The turkey was picking his way down the shallowest part of the bank, talking to himself deep in his throat. “What about him?” she asked.

“Aren’t you afraid he’ll get away?”

“Oh, I thought I was going to give up on him and go buy one from the supermarket.”

Timothy stared at her. “Well, I only said — you didn’t seem — I never heard you make up your mind about it,” he said. So that Elizabeth, for the first time giving him her full attention, wondered why he wore such a jaunty feathered hat set at such a careless angle. He sounded like his mother, who was forever tying herself into knots over plans and judgments and decisions. But his eyes must have been his father’s — narrow blue slits whose downward slant gave him a puzzled look — and she liked his hair, which stuck out in licked-looking yellow spikes beneath the hat. She smiled at him, ignoring the turkey.

“Are you really going to let him just walk off?” he said.

“Sure,” said Elizabeth, and did — rose and brushed off her dungarees, stood on the edge of the bank to watch the turkey cross the road at an angle and start up someone’s back yard. Finally he was only a jerking coppery dot among the trees. “Now I have to go to the grocery store,” she said. “Anything you need?”

“Maybe I could take you there.”

“Oh no, I like to drive. You could get your car off the road, though.”

“Or I might come with you. Is that all right? I’m always on the lookout for something to do while I’m home.”

He hadn’t been home at all yet, but Elizabeth didn’t bother reminding him. “Fine,” was all she said, and she reached under her paint-shirt to pull, from her jacket pocket, a set of keys dangling from Mrs. Emerson’s lacy gold initials.

The car was a very old Mercedes with a standard shift that tended to stick and make grinding noises. Elizabeth was used to it. She drove absentmindedly, keeping the clutch halfway in and watching the scenery more than the road, but Timothy changed positions uneasily every time she shifted gears. He kept one hand tight on the dashboard, the other along the back of the seat. “Have you been driving long?” he asked her. “Since I was eleven,” Elizabeth said. “I haven’t had time to get a license yet, though.” She swerved neatly around an on-coming taxi. The roads here in the woods were so narrow that one car always had to draw aside when it met another, but Elizabeth made a game out of never actually coming to a full stop. She ducked in and out of parking spaces, raced other drivers to open sections of the road and then rolled easily toward their bumpers as they backed to let her by. “I can see that I’m making you nervous,” she told Timothy, “but I’m a better driver than you realize. I’m trying to save the brakes.”

“I’d rather you saved us,” Timothy said, but he loosened his grip on the dashboard. Then they hit Roland Avenue, and he settled back in his seat. “I don’t suppose you know if Andrew’s coming,” he said.

“He’s not.”

“I was afraid to ask Mother on the phone. She can go on and on about things like that. But Matthew will be there.”

“Nope.”

“What, no Matthew? He practically lives there.”

“He used to,” said Elizabeth. “Then your mother said he was wasting his life on a dead-end job. Running a dinky country newspaper and getting all of the work but none of the credit. I don’t know why.”

“The owner drinks,” Timothy said.

“She said for him to come back when he got a decent job. He never did. It’s been three weeks now.”

“Matthew is the crazy one in the family,” Timothy said.

“Oh, I thought that was Andrew.”

“Well, him too. But Matthew is downright peculiar: I don’t believe he hears a word Mother says to him. He visits her every week, no matter what she’s up to. Brings tomatoes he’s grown himself, stays an hour or two.”

“Not any more he doesn’t,” Elizabeth said. “Will he get another job, do you think?”

“No.”

“Well, what then? Won’t he ever come home again?”

“Oh, sooner or later Mother will give up. Then he’ll wander in again and that’ll be the end of it.”

“I doubt if he’s crazy at all,” Elizabeth said.

She parked haphazardly in a space barely longer than the car, and they climbed out. Standing on the curb she peeled her paint-shirt off, shut it in the car, and brought a curling vinyl wallet from her jacket pocket. “I wonder how much turkeys cost,” she said.

“Let me pay. It was my idea.”

“No, I have enough.”

“Aren’t you saving up for college or something?” “Not really,” Elizabeth said.

The grocery store was vast and gloomy, even under the fluorescent ice-cube trays that hung from the ceiling. There was a smell of damp wood, cardboard, cracker crumbs. They had barely stepped inside when someone said, “Timothy Emerson!”—a sharp-edged woman in a fur stole, one of Mrs. Emerson’s tea guests. “Don’t tell me you’re honoring your mother with a visit,” she said. “Did she recognize you?” She flung out a little peal of laughter. Elizabeth slid past her and went over to the meat counter. “I’d like a turkey,” she told the butcher. “Kind of fat.”

“Fifteen pounds? Twenty?”

“I wouldn’t know. Could you let me hold one?”

He disappeared into a back room. Mrs. Emerson’s friend could be heard all over the store. “… never known a braver woman, just so sweet and brave. Disappointments never faze her. I said, ‘Pamela,’ I said, ‘why don’t you sell that big old house and find yourself an apartment now that—’ ‘Oh no, my dear,’ she told me, ‘I’ll need all that space for my children, if ever they choose to come home.’ “

The butcher reappeared, carrying three turkeys. “This one?” he said. “This one?” He held them up one by one, while Elizabeth frowned and twirled her car keys. “Let me try that last one,” she said finally. She reached across the counter for it and weighed it in her hands. “Wait a minute. I’ll be back.”

“How is your twin brother, dear?” the friend was saying. “I understand he’s in the care of a doctor again. Now, wouldn’t you think he should be in his own home? New York is no place for a, for someone who’s …”

“Try this,” Elizabeth told Timothy. “Add intestines and such. Feathers. Feet. Do you think he’s about the right size?”

Timothy, who had lit a pipe, stuck the pipe between his teeth and took hold of the turkey. “Feels okay to me,” he said.

Mrs. Emerson’s friend said, “It’s Elizabeth, isn’t it? How are you this fine day? Planning for a great many dinner guests?”

“Well, not exactly,” Elizabeth said. “Forget you saw me buying this.” She left the woman staring after her and went back to the butcher. “I like it,” she told him, “but I could do without that piece of metal in his tail.”

“That’s to pin his legs down.”

“I’d prefer it without, anyway,” Elizabeth said.

While he was wrapping the turkey she went off in search of stuffing mix. Timothy by now was coasting down the aisle on the back of a shopping cart. He took several long strides and then hopped on the rear axle, leaning far forward to keep his balance. The pipe in his round face looked comical, like a snowman’s corncob. “This is something I’ve always wanted to do,” he told her when he had coasted to a stop. “Mother never took us to grocery stores; she telephoned. Up until Margaret ran away with the delivery boy.”

“Telephoned!” Elizabeth said. “Didn’t it cost more that way?”

“Why not? We’re rich.”

He wheeled the cart over to the meat counter, where they collected the turkey. Then Elizabeth went off to find snacks for Alvareen’s sick-days. Timothy followed, pretending the turkey was a baby in a carriage. “Who do you think he favors?” he asked, and he lovingly rearranged a patch of butcher’s tape. Then he hopped on the cart and coasted off again. “I must find Mrs. Hewlett,” he called back. “She has such a consuming interest in little Emersons.” Periodically, in her trips down the aisles, Elizabeth caught sight of him. He whizzed past sober ladies and grim-faced clerks, a flash of yellow hair topped with a red feather. When she met him at the check-out counter he had parked the cart and was carrying a gigantic sack of dog food that hid his face and reached to his knees. All she saw were his hands clutching the sides of it. “I know we don’t have a dog,” he said, poking his head around the sack, “but I can never resist a bargain, can you?” And he turned to put it back again, his knees buckling, staggering beneath its weight, all to make her smile.

But when they were back in the car his mood had changed completely. He sat hunched in his seat, staring out the side window and fiddling with his pipe but not smoking it. “I’d have liked to find a turkey with a couple of feathers left,” Elizabeth told him. Timothy didn’t answer. Then when they stopped for a light he said, “Maybe we could just drive around for a while.”

“Where would you like to go?” said Elizabeth.

“I don’t know. Nowhere. Home,” he said, and he slouched down in his seat and tapped his dead pipe on his knee all the rest of the ride.

Elizabeth parked in front of the house. The minute the car doors slammed Mrs. Emerson appeared on the veranda, stepping forward and then back on the welcome mat with both hands clasped in front of her. “Timothy!” she said. “What are you — why—?”

“My car is down back,” Timothy said. He climbed the steps and bent to kiss her on one cheek. Mrs. Emerson’s face was tilted up to him, her eyes half closed by the frown she wore, and she kept her hands pressed tightly together. “I still don’t understand,” she said.

“How are you, Mother?”

“Oh, just fine. I’m doing beautifully. I’m managing very well.”

“You look well.”

Elizabeth passed them and went into the house, carrying the groceries. As soon as she reached the kitchen she dumped the whole bag in one swoop, stripped the turkey of its wrappings and set it on the counter. Then she put the other items away more slowly and folded the paper bag. Alvareen came in with a scrub pail full of gray water. “Is that him?” she asked, looking at the turkey.

“Pretty neat job, wouldn’t you say?”

“Then what’s that other feller doing, running around out back?”

“Oh, Lord.”

Elizabeth went out the kitchen door and found the turkey squatting by a basement window. “Shoo!” she said, and clapped her hands. The turkey moved a few feet off before he stopped again. “Shoo, boy! Shoo!”

Mrs. Emerson appeared on the back porch, followed by Timothy. “Now, how on earth—” she said. “I thought I told you to kill that thing.”

“I was just getting set to,” Elizabeth said.

“Then what did I see in the kitchen? What is that creature on the counter?”

Timothy handed his pipe to his mother and came down the porch steps. “Drive him this way,” he told Elizabeth. “I’ll be here to grab him.”

“I would rather drive him off again.”

“Explain that, please,” Mrs. Emerson said. “I gave you a perfectly simple chore to do, one that Richard would have seen to in five minutes. The only thing in my life I ever won and you shoo him off like a common housefly. Then try to fool me with one from the butcher. That is what you did, isn’t it? That’s where you and Timothy came in from together, looking so smug?”

Because neither Elizabeth nor Timothy felt like answering, they concentrated on the turkey. They closed in on him tighter and tighter, although the last thing they wanted to do was catch him. The turkey did a little mumbling dance with himself, stiff-legged.

“I can’t trust anyone,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Oh, Mother. What’d you ask her to do it for, anyway? She’s too tender-hearted.”

“Too what? Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson set the pipe down, in the exact center of the top porch step, and folded her arms against the cold. “It isn’t the turkey I mind, it’s the deception,” she said. “The two of you going off like that, laughing at me behind my back. Conspiring. That naked, storebought-looking bird lying on my kitchen counter.”

Timothy had driven the turkey to a spot directly in front of Elizabeth, but Elizabeth made no move to catch him. She was watching Timothy, who was growing pinker and stonier but not answering back. He stood so close to her that she heard the angry little puff of his breath when his mother spoke to him.

“This was your idea, wasn’t it. Elizabeth never did such a thing before. I always felt I could rely on her. Now I don’t know, I just don’t know. It isn’t enough that you leave me all alone yourself, you have to drive everyone else off too. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that what you’re hoping for?”

“Good God,” said Timothy, and then in one swift lunge he scooped up the turkey and carried it squawking and flapping to the toolshed. He took such long steps that Elizabeth had to run to keep up with him. It seemed that the whole upper half of his body had turned into beating, whirling, scattering feathers. When he reached the chopping block he jammed the turkey down on it and held it there. Then for a moment everything stopped. The turkey held still. His head lay limp on the block, his eyes seemed fixed on some inner thought.

“Timothy? Wait,” Mrs. Emerson called.

Timothy reached for the axe without looking at it, hefted it in his hand to get a better grip and chopped the turkey’s head off. It took one blow. The turkey’s wings began flapping, but with doomed, slow beats that carried the body nowhere. The beady eyes stared at a disc of blood. Mrs. Emerson cried, “Oh!”—a single, splintering sound. Elizabeth said nothing. She stood at Timothy’s side with her hands in her jacket pockets, staring out over the trees and pinning her mind on something far away from here.