Isis - Douglas Clegg [13]
And still, I walked the hallways and the stairs; I ate now and then, and watched the sea from windows; I sat in the gardens and stared at the flowers and vines as they grew and died and grew, and I wondered why people could not be like this, why if we planted them, they could not grow again.
Edyth remained with us though I ignored any teaching or guidance she offered. No one ever told of what she and Spencer had done; nor did I wish to, though I hated her with all my heart. I blamed her for Harvey’s death.
I blamed Spencer for it as well.
I blamed our mother and Dr. Witherspoon’s tonic and our father and Our Father Who Art in Heaven.
I blamed myself.
I blamed the pictures of the nude women my grandfather had tucked into the old Bible.
3
I had been too weak to attend Harvey’s funeral, but they buried him in the Tombs, as many Villiers before him had been buried. I watched from my window as the doors were opened, and the men crouched down to take his coffin through the entryway. I thought of him there, among our ancestors, and wondered how room had been made for his coffin, or how it was sealed, or if they placed it into the stone wall as some had been buried, or into one of the few stone biers left in that passageway of death.
My father returned for two months only, and then left again for his foreign wars. I have no memory of his visit. Lewis came from university but—too much like my father—did not stay long, either. Like my father, my eldest brother was a stranger to me by then, and I barely recognized him.
My mother wept for ages, and when I tried to comfort her, she said, “When they put him in the Tombs, I remembered how scared he was of the trunk. In the play. Do you remember? How he didn’t want to go in it, because it scared him to be confined like that in a box. When he was a boy, he didn’t like small spaces. I hate thinking of him there.”
“He’s not there,” I whispered as I combed my fingers through her hair. “He’s in heaven.” I began crying, too, and my mother turned away from me.
“There is no heaven,” she said. “It’s what people say because they don’t want to think about that trunk they will be put in when they die.”
My mother, whose health had not returned, remained ill through even the summer season and rarely left her room.
We had become a house of invalids, a house of silences, and a house of sorrow.
4
I asked Spence to walk with me to Harvey’s grave on a particularly golden day. I still used a cane, and would need his support as we walked the uneven paths through the gardens along the stone walls.
At the doors of the Tombs, I said a few prayers si lently. Spence sat down in the grass and offered me his arm to curl up beneath, for his mood had changed. We sat as if we were little children, rather than a girl of sixteen and a man of nearly twenty. We sat the way Harvey and I had often sat down together, out on the grassy summer cliffs.
“Are you all right these days?” he asked.
“Not too much all right,” I said.
“I worry for you.”
“I worry for all of us,” I said.
“I’ve seen you at night. When you walk up and down the stairs.”
“Do I do that?” I asked, not sure I believed him.
He nodded. “At first I thought you might be sleep-walking.”
“Perhaps I am.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “What about this?” He lifted my arm so that my sleeve fell down a bit. There, on my forearm, were small marks, as if a cat had clawed me.
“I suppose it will take a while to heal.”
He looked me in the eyes as if not believing me.
“My shoulder still hurts, sometimes,” I said.
“But these,” he tapped my forearm. “These aren’t from your fall.”
“Yes they are,” I said.
We were both silent for several minutes. I had begun wishing intensely that Harvey was with us.
“I miss him so much,” Spence said. “You know that, don’t you? I miss him so much. He’s the first