The Body of the Crime

== THE BODY OF THE CRIME ==
=== by Wilbur Daniel Steele ===
From The Best Stories of Wilbur Daniel Steele 1946 
The house in which daniel was born was the kind of
which we say, as we drive past it in the elmpillared margin of some New England
village: "What a monstrosity! " One day, when the Antique has caught
up with the Eighties, perhaps we shall say: "What a beauty! What noble
bays and airy cupolas and richness of brown scrollwork! They knew how to build
their houses in those days." 
Perhaps, too, we shall have matured enough to say of
men like Dan Kinsman, who was Daniel's father: "They knew how to build
their lives." 
When the young Daniel came home from his first year
away to prep school and saw with his changed eyes the unchanging house, the
weighing cornices and flying towers, squared bays, rounded bays, porte-cochere,
all cocoa brown in the shadows of the chestnuts 
"That's it," he thought, "it's not like
other fellows' houses." 
And when he studied this man, his father, it seemed
for a while he had found the answer to the riddle as old in its secret
wretchedness as the very beginnings of his memory. "And he, he's not like
other fellows' fathers." 
Other fellows' fathers, Daniel had found in his year,
were men who arrived cheerfully from lifting their incomes and departed grimly
to lower their medal scores. Forward-moving, tomorrowthinking young elders,
eager, industrious, mobile fellows fearful of nothing but of seeming to stand
still. 
But here was a father apparently content to be one
year where he had been the year before, possessed of but the same possessions,
the same small-town friendships, the same leisurely, half-patriarchal
judgeship, the same pedestrian pleasures, books and dogs, pruning hooks and
garden hoes and fishing rods. And he a strong, straight man alive, not yet
fifty, with black hair thick on his head, and lungs to laugh with when he
wanted. Strange! 
Now it came to Daniel it must be because his father
was so wanting in— that's to say, so strange this way— that he had always
seemed to his son so— so— Daniel groped for a word for a thing he'd never been
able to give a shape or name, and had to finish lamely— seemed so
"strange." 
Daniel could have laughed for joy to discover, now he
was grown up, that the trouble about his father was so little a one as this.
For all the weight of his fifteen years, he could have skipped for lightness,
to know that here was a difference from other fathers he now could grasp, even
learn to condone, yes, even admire, even fight for, with fellows with more—
well— say— money-grabbing dads. 
Yes, Daniel could have skipped for lightness on the
deep cavegreen turf of the hydrangea alley, where they walked and talked that
first June afternoon at home, he and his father, while Mother watched them with
her pale smile from her long chair in her high window. 
It was curious; Daniel had always loved his ailing,
beautiful mother, easily, and been near her and told her everything tellable,
easily, and not thought much about it. The one he would have given his life to
be able to love as easily, to be close to, friends with, whole of heart, was
this other, this darkly handsome man whom he himself was so absurdly like to
look at, his father. 
So today it was as if the year of forgetting had
worked a good miracle. It was a dream come true to find himself sauntering and
chatting with Dan Kinsman as affectionately at ease as though they had been but
two fellows gravely estimating the apple yield in the west yard and the hay
chances in the back mowing, chuckling together over the antics of Spot's pups
on the barn floor, waving answer to the view halloo of Doc Martin racketing by
in the antique twin-six, and, wonder of wonders at last, arm in arm, man and
man, marching indoors prepared to mount and demand of Mother if supper were
ever to be ready— as if she, poor fragile chatelaine, could know anything about
that. 
But, day of marvels! An elixir must have run in the
air. For here in their sight came Mother down the stairs to meet them, walking
by herself, suddenly, subtly revivified, the flush on her cheeks and the shine
in her eyes not more for their astonishment than for her own. 
So tonight there were three at table in place of two,
and it was like the sort of dream in which one wakes from an interior nightmare
to find everything finished that was horrid, and everything at its beginning
that is right and bright. Nor did it end with the supper table; afterward she
would go out abroad with them, as if greedy to share in the marvel of those two
men of hers who walked of a sudden as one, and by their walking so, seemed so
suddenly to have made her walk again. 
What a sight it was for the evening sun to see, level
and bloody rose beneath the eaves of the chestnuts! Dan Kinsman, bemused,
commencing words and swallowing their ends on half-choked chuckles, even as his
eyes, quick for once, kept slant track of Vivian's every oddly exuberant
gesture. Daniel, beatified, accepting wonders with a new omnivorous trust. And
Vivian Kinsman, unbelievable, a princess freed from some evil enchantment in
exile, returned to her kingdom, leading them. 
In the east yard, hidden for years, the low, excited
laugh was on her lips continuously. For this border, it was: "They're too
gorgeous, Dan; I love them!" For that bed: "But there never ivere
such flowers!" When she came in view of Father's season's pride, the
bastion of man-high crimson poppies, all she could do was put her hands to her
heart. 
Only when she caught sight of Spot and her puppies
taking the last of the sun at the barn door was there a shadow of change in the
exclamation of discovery. 
"You're going to keep them all, Dan!" She
drew Father's eyes. "All, Dan!" 
He would have temporized, laughingly: "Spot got
away this time, and — " 
"You're not going to drown them, Dan. I couldn't
bear to think — " 
The sharpness in her voice brought quickness to his. 
"Why, no, of course not, Vivian. I shall keep
them, of course— unless someone should want them very much— who'd give them a
good home." 
The sun touched distant woods. Father dared worry
aloud at last. 
"It'll be chilly in another second now,
Vivian." 
She turned back with a queer, mercurial docility,
asking only, when they came to the porch steps, that she might have some of the
crimson poppies for her room tonight. 
"I should so love to see them in the morning,
Dan, just three or four." 
"You'll have an armful, that's what you'll have,
dear; I'll go and get them now." 
Daniel took her in on his arm, feeling tall, now his
father was gone. She would go only as far as the living room for the moment,
where a slender summer fire was laid, ready for the match. When Daniel had
lighted it he studied the white figure lying back deep in Dan Kinsman's chair.
He said: "You're happy tonight, Mother." 
She needn't answer. Her eyes, fixed on the fire, were
alight with all its beginning, playing flames. And before he knew why,
"Have you always been happy here with Father," he demanded, "and
with me?" 
This must have seemed to need no answer, at first. But
then she sat up and fixed the boy with her straight gaze. "Always,
yes!" From vehemence it changed to mirth. "What ever put it in your
head, sonny?— yes, yes, yes!" And sinking back, with a little gasp at the
end of her laughter: "He's an angel, sonny, your father is, but he's an
awful slow-poke; won't you go and hurry him along?" 
Father had meant it when he said an armful; he had
gathered a whole great sheaf of the poppies, and rather a pity, for the blooms
were closed. But what matter if Vivian wanted them; they'd open again at day.
So he seemed to be thinking as he stood there, laden and bemused, in the falling
night. 
And so it was that Daniel, his son, came upon him,
deep in a preoccupation of his own, halted a rod away, and, without lifting his
gaze from the ground, said: "Has Mother liked it here in Kennelbridge,
Father?" 
Dan Kinsman had had a day of astonishments. Without
turning anything but his head, and that slowly, he studied his dim questioner. 
"It has liked your mother here," he said
quietly. 
The boy, given a riddle, raised his eyes to the man,
who was no more than a shadow shape in the dusk now— and, as shadows may be,
something distorted and magnified— between the blackening blood of the poppies
he carried and the dike he had torn them from. And Daniel forgot his riddle and
widened his eyes. The father knew the sign of old. All afternoon he had been
waiting for it, pulled between dread and the beginnings of an incredible hope.
Now he wheeled, cried, "Ah, Daniel, son!" and held out his arms,
careless of their sanguinary burden. And his son turned and ran. 
What good is it to be fifteen and a man, instead of
ten and a boy, or five and a child? When Daniel, fleeing, needles in his legs
and an icicle up his backbone, reached the firelight where he had left his
mother sitting, it was on the knees of veriest childhood he tumbled down, to
hide his face in the chair bottom beside her, wind his fingers in her skirts,
and sob it out in words aloud, at last: 
"Mother— why am I— why am I sometimes— sometimes
so fr-frfrightened of my— my fa-fa-father?" 
Mother had always answered his questions, till he asked
this question. Her failure now, her complete, unstirring silence, doubled the
magnitude of a terror till now his own shamed secret. And the doubled was
redoubled by the sound of that man's feet on the piazza, coming toward the
door. 
He groveled. "Mother, please, hurry— hurry and
tell me, tell me, Mother! What— what's there about my father— what's he done
that's such a— a horror? " 
Still, for answer, no word, no gesture. And it was too
late; a quiet door had opened and the feet were in the room. As Daniel
scrambled up and wheeled, a defending courage suffused him. He stood his
ground, and, not knowing why, spread his arms across the man's way, and not
knowing what, cried: "No! Don't! Don't come!" 
Through the water in his eyes he began to see his
father's face hung there before him, oddly gray, the stare of it fixed, not on
him, but on her behind him. And he grew aware of two things fighting in that
stare, the greater one like a stunned sorrow, the lesser like a reawakening hope.
As sometimes in crisis, it was of the lesser one the
man spoke now. 
"This, then, Daniel, is why you said what you
said out there, and sobbed, and ran away back here? It wasn't that old
queerness of yours coming back then, after all?" 
The husband's shock was gentler than the son's, for
all evening he had had in his mind as he watched Vivian the thought of a candle
when it gutters, how it will flame to its old brightness for an instant at the
last. 
Not so with Daniel. When he turned and knew that the
reason his mother had sat there and not answered him was that all the while she
had sat there in the deep chair dead, he fainted. 
Doc Martin had to mop his bald head with a troubled
handkerchief many times in the following days. On the third, the afternoon
after the funeral, stopping in at the Kinsmans' by right of the oldest and
closest friend and finding Dan there all alone, he asked: "Where's Daniel
hiding himself?" And if it sounded casual, and was meant to, already in
the soil of the doctor's mind uneasy little roots of wonder had begun to set. 
"Don't know; not far off, I guess." The
answer was given with an averted face. 
Why shouldn't it be? Men's faces, when they've just
buried their wives of twenty years— why may they not wish to keep what's written
on them to themselves? The physician mocked himself for a worrying idiot as he
went on home. 
But he had his head to mop again when he got to his
own house and found Daniel fidgeting up and down the piazza, inarticulate and
miserably mantling. It was all mysterious and awkward. He didn't know what he
was to do or say, and especially was this so when the boy's dumbness, laboring,
brought forth some mouse of words about the weather or the baseball standings.
But finally, "Dr. Martin," it came at a rush, "was my mother
happy, living here in Kennelbridge, with Father— and me?" 
It is unfortunate that at such moments men seem to
think they have to speak in the manner of oracles. As Dan Kinsman, three days
before, now Doc Martin: 
"Well, son, she lived here in Kennelbridge, with
you and your father, almost exactly ten years longer than I gave her to live.
Does that mean anything?" 
And thereafter he wondered why the boy's eyes,
savagely troubled, followed him slantwise everywhere. He wondered more. Seeing
the sun go and the dusk come, he wondered why the sensitive, naturally
unobtrusive lad stayed on, apparently aimless and plainly wretched, and stayed,
and made no move to go. It was after dark when Doc Martin appeared at the
Kinsman place, to find Dan out in the east yard, standing, chin down, hands
locked behind him. 
"I thought, Dan, you might wonder where the kid
was. He's over at my house. I'm afraid I've been— uh— keeping him." 
Dan listened, stock-still, without comment. It became
an ordeal. 
"I don't know just how to say it, Dan. The boy
seems badly upset. He has a lot of his mother in him, Dan— a lot of the thing
that made us all love her— and— want to spank her, sometimes. That sentimental
def enselessness— it went with her ailment, I've no doubt. That making a
mountain of emotion out of a molehill of— not that I mean this is a molehill—
but— damn it, old man! The boy— this house— this night after the funeral— I've
a hunch he'd more than half like to stay over with me. Thought I'd ask you."
"Yes." 
The one syllable, it sounded rough in the throat. As
he went away the doctor turned twice to study the figure posted there in
darkness, head heavy, face hidden. Anger? Sorrow? What? Headless, tailless
business! He told himself he wished he were dead and well out of it. 
He wasn't. After that night, any half plans there may
have been of father and son going off for a summer of travel together were
dropped. There was a camp in the Green Mountains where Daniel's school went,
and he was packed for it by the second morning. Dan came to Doc Martin,
unhappy, unused to lying. 
"I wonder if you'll do something for me, old man?
Drive Daniel over to the main line this noon. I shall be busy." 
The doctor did it. What their parting was he never
knew, for the boy had his bags out at the gate when he drove by, and the father
was "busy." If the friend of them both was profanely troubled he kept
it quiet and set himself for a gallant hour of cheer and small talk. The
problem of a book for the journey seemed a godsend. They went over the
newsstand's library with a mutual pretense of care, but as if it were not bad
enough that all the novels were detective novels, Daniel discovered after brief
browsings that there was none he could be certain he hadn't read. As he accepted
one at last —entitled Murder!— the physician had to stare. 
"Lord, son! To look at you anybody'd think you
were as mild as a lamb. And here you turn out a glutton for crime. Don't you
ever read anything else?" 
Daniel went red— even redder, the doctor thought, than
was asked for. 
"Oh, I forget 'em faster'n I read 'em. If you
asked me one single thing that had happened, a week after, I couldn't any more
remember it than I could " 
He got no further. He had touched by chance on a pet
dogma of the other's; and Doc Martin, figuratively, squared off. 
"Couldn't remember? Bosh! Ever tried?" 
"Tried?" Daniel was confused by this
vehemence. 
"Really tried, I mean. Rolled up your mental
sleeves and taken pick and spade to the humus of memory, to try and turn up some
one particular thing that's buried there? It's surprising. There are
authenticated records of long-term prisoners, men in solitary confinement, who,
simply for something for their minds to do . . ." 
And here they came, the classic cases, served up with
a zealot's gusto; the aged criminals reconstructing verbatim the nursery tales
of infanthood; the old fellows repainting in minutest detail places passed
through as children and thereafter wholly forgotten. And so forth. And so on. 
The man with a hobby is not to be held accountable.
Doc Martin, who had toiled to make talk— now his one fear was that the belated
train would make up time. 
"Can't remember! Actually, you can't forget!
Nothing you've ever felt, heard, seen, no matter how tiny— you may mislay the
record, but you can't lose it. No matter how dim, it's here in your cranium
somewhere, indelible, forever." 
The bent ear and big eye of his audience it was cruel
to give up. The train was in, but there was still the moment on the platform. 
"Theoretically, Daniel, you ought to be able to
remember the day of your birth. But it would probably take you as many as a
thousand years, in a dark cell, and after all — " 
After all, after the boy was up the step Doc Martin
recollected something he had been two days thinking on. 
"Daniel, listen! Your mother was happy. Her life
here was a clear, quiet, happy life, with those she loved deeply. Believe me,
Daniel." 
It was good for Daniel he liad the book called Murder!
At the end of his emotional tether he must have escape, and the surest escape
was here between these covers; he knew the taste of it beforehand, as the eater
of drugs knows the taste of his drug. Escape, yes. And a curious, helpless,
rather horrid surrender. 
Never remember? "Bosh!" For a little while
yet he left the book unopened, and thought of the mild old doctor and his
ferocious expletive. But was it true, even a half of what he had claimed, about
digging up buried things? ... If you tried hard enough? . . . Took a pick and
spade ... to buried things? 
There were five hours to ride, more than enough for
the book. Let it wait. 
To remember things forgotten! By dim footprints in the
mold of old fantasies, by broken twigs of sensation— this sort of sound
disliked for no reason, that odor as inexplicably agreeable— by clues so
thinner-than-air to be able to track back relentlessly— what? 
"Bosh!" It was Daniel's own bosh this time.
But the light in the deeps of his abstracted eyes burned no less steadily, nor
did the color of a strange excitation retreat from his cheeks and temples. 
There was a station. Express, the train only slowed,
going through. On the flickering platform stood an elderly woman, back to, a
stoutish figure glimpsed for a split second, gray-clad, with a purple hat with
a tulle quill. 
"Emma!" 
But then the boy lay back and derided himself. It was
that purple, forward-tilted hat. Emma, his old nurse, had been dead three— no,
two— years. It was three years ago she came to see him, from Albany, and that
was the year before she died. 
Yes, yes. She came in her nephew's car and brought
Daniel a sweater she had knitted for him. He could see her now, when he tried
to get into it, there on the big circular side piazza, and her chagrin.
"Mercy, when I was here last I never looked to see you grow so in two
years. Remember when I was here last time, Dannie?" 
"Course I do; what d'you think? And you said I
used to be a caution when I was little, and you hoped I'd got over it." 
"Bless you, Dannie, and have you?" 
Had he? Got over what? Three years ago he'd known
what, because three years ago he'd remembered what she'd said two years before
that. Something about: "I declare, you always were a caution, Dannie. The
first day ever I saw you . . . saw you . . . first day ever I saw you . .
." 
Concentrate on it! Try harder! 
". . . first day ever I saw you, do you know what
you said . . . what you . . ." 
In the Pullman, but unconscious of the Pullman, Dannie
knotted his brows. 
Don't give up. Go at it some other way. . . . 
Well, they'd been in his room; he was ready for bed,
and Emma had come up— she'd stayed overnight that next-to-last visit— and she'd
sat there in the blue rocker and talked and talked. Talked so long that Mother
had called: "Daniel, Emma's tired, so you must stop asking her so many . .
." 
But now he had it— the other thing— it was
"question." 
It wasn't "what you said." It was, complete:
"First day ever I saw you, do you know the question you asked me? Well,
most threeyear-olds, they'll ask you like, 'What's a zebra?' or 'What's a
airplane?' But the first thing you asked me was . . . thing you asked me was .
. ." 
No, after all, not quite complete. Why did the light
of recollection close again, just there? Especially when, by thinking on it,
that bedtime visit of Emma's had grown as vivid as a thing today. 
The expression of the boy in seat No. 5 was a set
scowl. A flush colored it, like anger. A "Bosh!" trembled on his
lips. He had a book to read, and, by hang, he'd read it now. A book called
Murder! 
"Murder!" 
Why, now he'd got that too! 
"The first thing you asked me— I was trying to
get you to go into the summerhouse and you were howling and pulling— and you
asked me, 'What is murder?' And if you don't call that funny for a
threeyear-old to be asking . . ." 
Murder? Three-year-old? Funny? . . . But leave those,
for the moment. 
Summerhouse! Latticework, probably. Light through it
in squares or diamonds, probably. Unless— ugh, it was chilly in the
Pullmanthere were vines. Vines? 
The train carried the corporeal weight of Daniel
Kinsman to the White River Junction that summer afternoon. But the part of him
that weighed nothing at all had started on an immensely longer journey, an
incalculably stranger quest. 
At camp, for the first while, they let him go his own
gait, without nagging him or themselves. Aware of his shocking loss, they even
let down the rules a little— rules, fundamentally, of good f ellowshiD— in his
case. Daniel, with his shut mouth, little appetite, and eyes fixed habitually
on nothing, was no good fellow for anyone. 
This was all right for a certain period. But when a
week and another week had gone, and a normal youngster should have been getting
some hold on healthy life, and Daniel was still not less separate, but if
anything more so, physically torpid, colorless of expression, unmistakably if
incomprehensibly not among those present, the responsible began to think of
doing something about it. 
At length the Head sat down and wrote a letter to the
boy's father, who had shut up house on Doc Martin's plea and gone off with him
to the Canadian woods. But that letter was destined not to be posted. Before a
stamp was on it, word came in that young Kinsman had not been seen since
lights-out the night before. At the end of a day and night of combing the
woods, beating the hills, a telegram was despatched to Canada. 
Locked, bolted, and shuttered though the house was,
Daniel knew a boy's way into it. One of the cellar windows was loose enough to
let a lock-pick wire in. 
Of all that Daniel had done, of all he was yet to
undertake, this one act was the hardest. That he could, in the night, enter
into that sealed, empty, pitch-black habitation, of which anyone might be
nervous— and he, with his mother dead and his imagination whipped keen by a fortnight's
flagellation, was horribly, icily afraid— gives the measure of the thing that
was stronger than the house's terror, its pull. 
If he were only in the house, only on the scene there,
only at home! Day by day, night by night, the brown house of home had kept the
dragline taut on him, by innuendo, by promise, by command. Whenever a peephole,
opened in memory, had closed again before the glimpsed stage could set itself
with half the properties of old actuality, "Ah, yes, but if you were there
it might be different," something had seemed to whisper. 
And now that he was here? Now that he was actually in,
his feet weighing on sightless stairs, hands guiding him along blind walls? Now
what was he to do? 
Nothing. When he had reached his own room, at the end
of gropings that brought sweat out of his neck, he pawed for his bed, found it,
and laid himself down along the middle of the mattress. There, inert— almost as
inert for hours at a time as a cataleptic— he remained. How long? 
By calendar it came to four days. In his consciousness
the lapse of time was not measurable, it was as well a dream's forty winks as a
dungeon's forty years. 
Of his rare actual moves he was to all intents
unconscious. Luckily it was summer, and the water not turned off; from time to
time he drank. Once he bolted raw oatmeal from a box in the pantry and was ill
with it. The electric current was cut, but there was the oil lantern he might
have lighted long before he did, had he cared. Rather, perhaps, had he dared.
Perhaps, more simply, had he felt the need. After all, his eyes were no longer
concerned with this shuttered Here and Now. 
They were concerned with the half-open door of a
summerhouse. 
Relatively, it may have been little more than a
scratching of the topsoil; actually, in that blank-eyed fortnight away at camp,
he had penetrated a surprising depth into the leaf mold of his fallen memories.
Most important, he had caught the trick of it, learned the heft and balance of
his tools, pick and spade, a dogged mental concentration working at one with a
reserveless mental surrender. 
So it had become child's play, literally, by fastening
on some fag end of sensuous recollection— a barked shin of escapade, sting of a
punishment, taste of the sweetmeat of some reward— to restore the outlines of
whole episodes in the comparatively recent years of his sixes, fives, even his
fours; to relive whole days, repeople whole scenes with shapes which began by
having no names, or with names wanting shapes, and watch these phantasmal
beings take on identities and lineaments— and lo! Auntie Prichard, of course,
the doughnut woman! Or Mary Belle— who could forget the girl with wire on her
teeth! 
He had learned a lot about the creature of pranks and
bush beatings that is the mind. He learned, at a price, that no lead can be too
paltry to follow. So it was, retrieving a boy's face plastered with freckles
and banged with red hair, he had given three long hours of his last camp
morning to trying to find the face a name. A dozen times he nearly had it; the
muscles of his tongue knew the feel of it, yet couldn't get the sound. It made
him mad. "I won't give it up, not if it takes all day!" 
And, "day," there it was. Georgie Day! Who
could forget Georgie Day? 
Accident? In the weird business Daniel was about,
there's no such thing. 
Georgie Day. Well, well! Immediately, fruitless hours
fruited magically. A house suddenly sprang up around the freckled rascal, and
around the house a tin-can-littered yard, and in the yard a tumbling barn, and
in the barn, rabbits. 
Rabbits? What about rabbits? Look! Here's a rabbit
running, bounding high with fright across a greensward in sunshine. No, none of
Georgie's; he and his have vanished from the scene. This is a wild one,
cottontail, surprised among berry bushes behind the home garden, retreat cut
off, scuttling across the west lawn for all its worth, and Daniel running after
it. 
Run, cottontail! Run, boy! Bounce, bunny! Whoop,
Dannie! 
"Here, Daisy! Where are you, Daisy? Where's that
dog?" 
Daisy? Why, Spot's mother, of course, elderly, sleepy,
all setterred. 
Yellow sunshine, green grass, little wild blue shadow,
hunting, praying, for some hole. And a hole, a hole at last! Squarish aperture
among massed leaves. Dive for it, bunny! Stop, boy! Into it, rabbit! Boy, stop
dead! Don't go near there, youngster! Frown if you please, stamp, mutter; yes,
you know you don't want to go near there. You know you don't. 
Why not? 
Pandemonium. Out comes rabbit, out comes Daisy, the
lazy, surprised asleep in there. And the two of them, fleeing, pursuing,
flicker past the transfixed Dannie, and away, into limbo. For it's the squarish
aperture in massed woodbine leaves, Crosshatch of lattice in their gaps,
lattice door ajar— it's this he's staring at. 
So it was, by uttering the irrelevant words "if
it takes all day," Daniel had found the way back to the summerhouse. 
Two weeks it had taken him to reach its viny exterior,
those two weeks away at camp. Had he had a hundred years, real ones, in place
of the hundred hours he could command, who knows but that he might actually
have succeeded in covering the rest of the journeymight have crept or leaped at
last across that one remaining rod of grass, gravel, and doorsill, and been
inside? 
Now he started sanguinely. Only a rod left— the last
dash— home stretch. Pooh! Thrown back from it, confused, he started again with
the same assurance, only again to be set on his heels by a wall, impalpable as
air, but impenetrable as glass. How many times did he relaunch the attack? In
one hour of the clock he could live a score in recollection, a hundred toward
the end, when hunger and fever had whipped the pace. No longer sanguinely, but
desperately, he tried one breach after another. 
For now there were several; he had multiplied his
points of attack. To the rabbit day he had added quickly the Emma day. It was
no task by now to reconstruct that episode entire. He could commence with the
breakfast table, where the new nurse was first introduced into the scheme of
his cosmos. He could mount then to his room with her, suffer the change into
denim play pants, come down, come out, and go towing around the yard at her
arm's end, dazzled by the sudden wealth of her "What shall we play? Anything
on earth you like, Dannie?" 
So, not once, but dozens of times, he came to the spot
where something in him balked, he began to howl, cleared Emma's grasp, let her
go on. He could see her face in all its mystification now— and see it, more was
the wonder, across the width of the rod he couldn't cross— in the doorway of
the summerhouse. And he could hear her expostulating still: 
"What is it, Dannie? Nothing but a toad here.
You're not afraid of a toad!" 
And he could feel something in his stomach's pit, that
came up, and was words. 
"What is murder, Emma?" 
Why on earth that? What was it in him, cold and hot—
not shame, not rage, not terror, alone, but like a misery of all three
compounded? Or like the feeling Daniel had to this day, immensely diluted,
whenever anyone in his hearing spoke of cycles or sickles or Seckles. 
And, coming to that, why on earth that? Did it all
come from "Seckle"? And did that come from the pear tree, down past
the east corner of the barn, which, since he was recollecting, he recollected
he had never liked? Recollected, in fact, that when they used to play
hide-and-seek at his house, and Daniel himself was "it," and one of
the boys hid behind that Seckle pear below the barn, he wouldn't go there to
spy him, not if he stayed "it" forever. 
So? Why wouldn't he? Time and time again he made an
effort to follow that trace, but it was of no use; there was nothing there that
was important, he had to tell himself; much better buckle down to business with
the shovel day. 
The shovel day he had added to the rabbit day and the
Emma day now. Where it came in the chronology he couldn't say; though he judged
from the longer time it had taken him to dig it out it must have been earlier.
At any rate, it was the farthest back he could remember being frightened by his
father. 
He had to work on it. Again, again, stubbornly again,
he would stand in a flushed twilight on the perimeter of that arc whose radius
was a rod, and watch the woodbine leaves put aside, and see his father emerge
from the dark interior, carrying a spade. 
Well, what about it? What so fearful was his father
doing? Going gardening, probably, in the evening's cool; tools may have been
kept in the summerhouse. So, what? Look more deeply into this! But try as
Daniel would, he couldn't. Each time, at sight of man and shovel, the child
gulped, turned, ran, with goblins grabbing after him, for the house and Mother.
Why? Why, oh, why, oh, why? 
And now at last, time lost all count of— grown to
months and years, it seemed, in the black house— now at last, let down by the
caving of the body beneath it, Daniel's mind began to surrender to exhaustion.
Daylight— what was actually the fourth daylight— creeping through the shutter
cracks in slim fans of grayness, did not waken him for a long time from the
sleep into which he had sunk near midnight. 
When it did he failed to fall immediately, as his
habit was, into his reminiscent reverie. Lying supine, staring at the ceiling,
it was the ceiling he saw this morning. He raised himself on the mattress,
intending to go downstairs, but with the act a dizziness took hold of him. He
lay back again and listened to his teeth knocking together. It is one thing for
a man, adult and idle, to starve himself for a while; for a growing boy it is
another thing. 
It was the first time there had been room in Daniel's
brain for a thought of failure. Was it not possible that the end of the time he
could hide and have solitude was approaching? No sooner the idea than he
repelled it. With a strength of panic he drove himself back to his task. Dig or
die, now! 
But the pick and spade, till now so docile, developed
the balkings and crotchets of a curious sabotage. Today, when he summoned the
old face of a playmate, straightway the features began to twist in the weirdest
fashion, magnify, diminish, like the grotesque faces that dissolve in dreams.
Or, coming on a new trail of old adventure unexplored, he found it leading him
into extraordinary places, out of all color with the rest of his past— and
realized with a start that it was something he had read, not lived. 
And presently, frustrated, he slept again. 
Each other day had been an age; this was but a dozen
blinks long, a day wasted. How could Daniel know the incalculable value of that
day his mind lay fallow? 
It was night once more when he arose, went into his
mother's room, and lay down on the bed there. It was nearly, if not quite,
somnambulism. Certainly he was unaware of any reason for the move. Whether he
fell asleep and woke up, whether he slept at all, or waked at all, whether at
any time he was actually, bodily, in the summerhouse, it would be now
impossible to say. It can only be said that the thing till the end had all the
stigmata of true nightmare. 
The will to terror, to begin with. Terror sprung of
its own seed, an effect wanting a cause, a shadow condemned to create the
object that casts it. And with this, alternately, a weightless, boundless
mobility, and a sense of being held from moving, arms pinioned, legs bound. 
Nothing was ever clear. Such moments as were lighted—
less than pictures; mere rags of sight vignetted on the dark— were whisked away
too quickly to be comprehended whole. Nor were these many. The pervading scene
was a blackness in which blacknesses moved, giving forth but muffled sounds.
Acts witnessed and no more, shadowy, separate, retreating rather than ever
coming nearer. 
"They're going away from the summerhouse,
ma'am," or, "carrying him away"— that adverb, "away,"
was forever recurring. And generally, somewhere near it, whether before or
after, blacknesses moved on blackness with a black burden; heavy breathing,
soft feet. 
It must be understood there was never an attempt at
sequence. No act revealed itself whole at any one time; at divers times divers
fractions of it would repeat themselves, mingled with stray fractions of other
acts or utterances. 
Take the one set of sounds. Sometimes it ran, out
there— door creak, oath, blow, scuffle. Sometimes quite reversed. Sometimes—
oath, blow, scuffle, door creak. 
And that querying cry, coming from close above, thrown
downout of a window?— into the dark, now it would be, "Dan, what are you
doing? Tom!" Then, like as not, next time it would be: "Tom, what are
you doing? Dan!" 
It is impossible to tell it, by a tenth, adequately.
For by the very mechanics of telling, nine tenths of the formlessness is lost;
fragments, released from the peculiar bedevilment of nightmare, inevitably fly
together. Detached words, fractional phrases, flickering by, flitting back
again; before they can be written here they must needs have formed themselves
by some degree into sentences, no matter if the sentences are forever changing
something of the forms. As, for instance, in the one, "Dan (Tom), what are
you doing " followed by, "Tom/ (Dan!)" 
There's the other sentence, into which at last the
word "murder" has come. By the time it has crystallized itself into
the sequence, "It was murder, Dan; I saw it; murder in cold blood!"—
by that time the light around it has crystallized, too, in a pattern, a pattern
of diamondshaped pencils striking in through gaps of latticework. And the
strait jacket of nightmare around one's limbs has taken the shape of the arms
of the crier-out. And the crier-out is Mother. 
"Don't come in that door; I'm afraid of you, Dan!
The blood on your hands is blood of brutal murder. Why? Don't tell me. Was it
because I loved him? I love my child, here in my arms. Must I be afraid for him
then? Must he be afraid of his father, now, as long as the two of you
live?" 
And this cry, too, vibrant with hysteria, has a vision
to go with it, a peephole vision of a close lantern, a red-flecked hand, a
spade with earth spots on it, and the tight, white, terrible mask of Father's
face. 
So, in telling, already this big, close lantern light
has extricated itself from the little lantern light at a distance. But in the
dream, if it was a dream, this very separation of the two became from the first
the thing, intuitively, the dreamer fought for. Wrestled for with tied hands,
ran after with hobbled feet; cried to with stopped mouth. 
In the beginning it was equally the one or the other
that might start it; toward the end of an aeon a kind of rule was established;
it was the little light far off that began, and the big one then, too soon,
that came and swallowed it, only to be swallowed in its turn by that blackness
with black things moving in it, or the door-creak sequence, containing the
scuffle, the oath, and the blow. 
Perhaps it was because of this that the desire of the
boy's dread centered more and more fiercely on that weakling spark, and he told
himself it was there that whatever was hidden was hidden, and awaited its
recurrence impatient of the other shadow plays. And when it came, and the voice
of the second woman in the bedroom— a nurse?— began, "It's digging they
are, ma'am, down there — ," and with that the light began to swell,
irresistibly, and stripe itself in the pattern that meant the summerhouse,
Daniel fought with all his bitter, puny power against the re-enwrapping arms,
the relifting hysteria of Mother's "Don't come in that door! I'm afraid of
you!" and the reopening peepshow of the red hand and the white face. 
And he cried: "Yes, but go on with the other!
Digging down where, down where?'''' till in the nightmare the lees of the sweat
of his exhaustion ran in icy dribbles down his skin. 
It was not till he gave up, beaten by weariness, that
it suddenly gave in. 
"It's digging they are, ma'am, down there under
" 
"Under what?" 
"—under that pear tree " 
"Pear tree?" 
"—with the little pears, below the barn. By the
light of the lantern, ma'am " 
Lantern! By the way, where is a lantern? Now, quick! 
"—they're digging in the " 
Digging! Pick and spade? Where are they? 
"—ground, burying something " 
A thing that is buried! 
"—under the pear tree, ma'am." 
Ever tried? Rolled up your sleeves, taken pick and
spade— to turn up something that is buried there? 
When Dan Kinsman and Doc Martin reached the house late
that night, and found it black, the one last hope, which neither had dared to
confess to, seemed to have followed all its fellows. Red-lidded with
sleeplessness, jaws ill-shaven, clothing long worn, they looked the men they
felt now, as, unlocking the front door, they went in. 
"What's the good?" 
It was the doctor that saw it, through one of the
living-room windows. 
"Hey! What's up out there? Somebody with a
lantern, down there behind the barn." 
They started out of the door at a walk, but then ran. 
They found a lantern, a spade, and a garden mattock
under the Seckle-pear tree, and a sprawling trench dug, and a weazen-faced,
wide-eyed boy to his knees in it, holding out toward them two brown bones. 
Dan spoke. "For God's sake, what are you doing
here?" 
Daniel spoke. "For God's sake, what are these
doing here?" 
Doc Martin spoke. "For God's sake!" That was
all. 
It wasn't that Dan was obstinate; it was simply that
he was dazed. 
"What are you doing here, son? Tell me!" 
It wasn't that Daniel was sullen; it was simply that
his legs were going to go out from under him at any moment now. 
"What are these, Father? You tell me!" 
"Son— sonny— you're sick." 
"I am sick. Who was Tom?" 
"Good lord alive! Dan, look here! Be quiet,
Daniel; wait till I get through with him. Dan, how long ago was it— I mean, how
old would this kid have been, that night?" 
"What night do you mean? " 
"Come out of it, man! That night when you heard
where Tom had been the week before, and called me, and I brought the chloroform
over, thinking maybe, perhaps, the dog might — " 
"Dog!" High in the roof of a boy's mouth,
the one syllable, echoing. 
"—and you, Dan, no maybe or perhaps about it, you
got him in the head with the spade, thank God, in time. What I asked you— how
old was Daniel then?" 
"Not old enough to remember anything. . . .
Daniel, who's been telling you — " 
But Doc Martin wouldn't have it. "No, man, you
talk to me. How old?" 
"Two, perhaps. Not three. A baby. A babe in arms,
actually, come to think of it. Vivian had him there in her arms." 
"Where?" 
"There in the summerhouse." 
"Vivian— in the summerhouse?" 
"Afterward. She— she had come there." 
"You've never told me." 
"No. I— it's something I Look here, Daniel, son,
you'd best 
be — " 
"No you don't, Dan. Talk! What's this about
Vivian, and Daniel, and the summerhouse afterward? Tell it, and tell it
straight." 
"She was ill, that's all. Frightened. And— and
you know how she was about animals and things— and she didn't understand.
Couldn't expect her to, not knowing anything. Hysterical. Went to the
summerhouse to see— and bolted herself in." 
"But when you explained?" 
"That's it. I was a fool, I suppose. I tried to
lie, at first. The mastiff was hers, from a pup; she adored him; it was all so
sudden; I couldn't bring myself to say the word— hydrophobia. A fool." 
"Yes, and a damned one." 
"She said she was afraid of me, Doc. She said it
was— it was — " 
"She said it was murder, Father. And— it was only
— Father!" 
"Son! Lord! What's the Hey! Catch him, Doc, or
he'll fall." 
"Catch him yourself, he's yours. Pick him up,
fool. Starvation; don't worry too much. Bring him along." 
"But if he should come to, and me carrying him.
I'm afraid — " 
"Don't be. Not any more."
Category:Steele
Category:Published