Yet I can’t help it. I think of that poor bird, and I am afraid of being a small helpless creature, afraid of being fragile and ineffectual. I have always been thin and small like a child, and I always feel, even behind the podium of a classroom, that my students and colleagues must not take me seriously.
Cold autumn sunlight pushes weakly through the heavy curtains behind me. The room is a semidusk of blue though it is not yet midday. On my desk lie a handful of artifacts I excavated from the swamp—a gunflint, a piece of a broken bowl, an animal bone fragment. I palm the gunflint, turn it over in my fingers, hoping it will bring me luck, will keep me safe.
A thud on the door jars my heart. Then something drags down across the wood in a long grumbling scratch, pulls back, and repeats. He is dragging the point of the knife along the door.
I can feel a sick taste in the back of my throat. I am trapped and small and caged like a weak little bird. Why should I be so afraid of this boy except that, even as a teenager, he is already taller than I am? I would like to be large, like a man. I almost envy Elizabeth for her sheer girth. I can only imagine what it must feel like to be that size. To be so huge, to take up so much space.
But here I am, curled up and making myself even smaller, reminding myself that we are not in the same time, that he cannot hurt me. I squeeze the gunflint.
Still, in the hall he looked so solid. The memories are often just as real as the present. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
The scratching stops and I think it must be over. Whatever this frightening memory is, whoever this disturbed boy is, it must be over.
Then a low voice calls softly through the door: “Let me in.”
My breath catches in my throat. Beneath the door I see the two dark shadows of his feet. His face, his hands, must be pressed against the wood. I sit still and try to make no sound even as I remind myself that he cannot hear me, it’s not really me he wants.
“I know you’re in there.” He speaks in an unhurried, pitchless croak. I hear the tip of the knife tap gently but insistently. “Come out, come out.” More scratching now, and it is deliberate; I follow the sound, the motion. He is carving an X on my door.
“I told you I wouldn’t hurt you,” he says through the door. “Last time was an accident. I’m better now.” More scratching, and this time it sounds like his nails. “I’m better now. You can come out.” The scratching grows, impossibly, as if a multitude of hands are clawing at the door in livid desperation. “But don’t look at me. Come out but don’t look at me. You can’t see me.” A bang, the flat of his palm. “You can’t see me.” His mouth seems to be pressed right up against the crack between the door and the hinge, and his voice sounds of something awful bubbling up from the recesses of his throat, and he beats his fist against the door.
I close my eyes and press my hands to my ears, pleading silently that the memory will stop. At some point a madman lived in this house, and I shake with sick fear at listening to his deranged railing against my door, his uncontrollable rage trapping me here in this room.
“Let me in! Let me in! Let me in!” he says amid the pounding of hands and the clattering of the knife.
Then all at once it stops.
My heart jackhammers and my breathing comes in gasps, but gradually it all slows, calms.
Then the near-inaudible voice presses to the crack in the door: “Auntie?” Tap. Tap. Tap. “I’m sorry. Auntie?”
I can hardly move. My breath is caught in my throat, the gunflint slick with sweat from my palm.
Auntie. I shake my head. It isn’t me. No, no, I am not an aunt.
At least, not yet.
3
I cannot expunge the faceless boy from my mind, even in the light of day; he lingers there as we clear away breakfast and ready ourselves for the drive to Elizabeth’s doctor. I keep trying to get her attention, knowing that the closer we get to the appointment, the more likely it is I will lose my nerve before I can tell her my suspicions about Julian.
But Mother is still within earshot as we pull on our shoes, and I don’t want to have this conversation in front of her—not when she is so keen on bringing this new life into the house. All morning she has been smiling, making pancakes, talking about how to prepare the house for a child. I don’t have the heart to dampen her spirits.
Perhaps I should sign to Elizabeth when Mother isn’t looking? It would be stilted, fumbling, ungraceful after so many years, but we used to converse in sign all the time. Just as my father and I had secret code words we shared with each other, made-up signs that only we would understand, so too had my silent language with my sister evolved. In the years following his death, however, she increasingly pushed away my attempts at signing. Whereas I thought it was a marvelous secret language, she seemed to think it was foolish, since we could both hear.
But what would I sign? We don’t have a sign yet for Julian, so I would have to spell out his name, and then—what? What would I say? That I think her unborn son will be dangerous? That I am afraid of him? I feel deeply lacking, without word or symbol to communicate the unutterable and perhaps incommunicable truth.
I can’t even come up with the words when we’re in the car, pulling away from the house, my mother’s face in the grimy window watching us go. Elizabeth plays with the radio to break the silence between us. She never could stand silence. I have never minded it, though. Perhaps that is why I have always felt more at ease in our silent house, in the silent swamp.
When you enter by canoe, there is a quiet mystery to the Great Dismal Swamp. Gray and hazy sunlight filters through tall thin trees that rise from their own rippled reflections in stagnant water to stand on top of themselves, and the way is veined with creepers and shrouded in the mists of time. Broom straw and river cane stitch the woods. Insects swarm in great black buzzing clouds that electrify the heavy sluggish air with a sense of disquiet.
I try to imagine what it was like for the people who once lived here, the maroons that those then-Wakefields, the ones of the early nineteenth century, helped in their escape.
I learned about one family by listening to the voices of the house—hearing them tell their stories to each other. If you are quiet enough, if you listen hard enough, there is much you can hear from the walls.
Here is what I heard: the father, Jonah, had been at a plantation eight miles from where his wife and daughter lived, and once a week on Saturday nights he would make the trek to see them, promising that soon they would be together—things that his wife, Clementine, did not believe. Once or twice she’d had to chastise him for putting notions in their daughter’s head, little Meriday being only ten years old.
But then one day Jonah appeared on a Sunday, wild-eyed and frantic. He gathered them up, told them they were leaving, and they went off under cover of darkness.
They found their way to Wakefield Manor, where Everett Wakefield put them up in the basement until it was safe to leave for the swamp. Constance seemed delighted by the family’s arrival, and was particularly taken with Meriday; she must have been unused to having playmates other than her brother.
While Jonah slept deeply that night, Clementine lay awake, gazing at her child’s face.
Her former master, John Garrow, was a genteel fellow known for his amiability—not like Jonah’s Thaddeus Carrington, who seemed to derive great pleasure from watching the quartermaster dole out beatings and never lifted a finger himself. But what many did not know was Mr. Garrow’s predilection for youth. As soon as a girl turned twelve, she would be invited into the house; sometimes she would come out pregnant, or else she would take up in a luxurious bedroom to tend personally to Mr. Garrow’s needs.