“Where you been?”
“Oh, the Wood kid came over for a birdcage. I went out to get it for him. And we talked.”
“I just wondered.” She smiled.
Glove felt the grip of the house on him. He began to walk away.
“Glove,” she said, “you got to keep the windows in your room closed . . . it ain’t healthy for that cold air to be in your room. I shut it for you.”
“O.K., Mom.” He stood there.
“Isn’t it a comfort . . . I mean how good Baron must be getting on . . . happy, I mean?” She was still standing behind the door, holding on to it with her left hand.
“A comfort.”
“You ain’t seen him, have you, Glove?”
“No, Mom. I haven’t, but I’m sure he’s fine.” Downstairs the shouting grew louder. “Those are real doctors up there.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling. “He must be so happy. He deserved to be happy . . . such a comfort.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“Why . . . why don’t you ever”—she laughed and tossed a thread of hair away from her face—“call me Mother?”
“Mother! What do I call you?”
“Mom. Plain old Mom.”
“What’s the matter with that?”
“Nothing. Nothing.” She laughed. “I just wondered, that’s all.”
More shouting from downstairs.
“I wonder why they’re . . .” Glove began.
“It’ll get worse,” Cell Easter said. “It’s for the good, though,” she added, and then smiled.
“What do you know about it?”
“I know. Before, I didn’t. But now I know . . . and it’ll get worse, but then it will be better.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because I know.”
The angry, harsh voices exploded again downstairs, and the walls extracted the meaning of the words, leaving only the hard consonants to come up to the landing. To Glove it seemed as though the floor sagged under him.
“This house was poorly designed,” he said. “Your grandfather built it, Ansel Easter.”
Glove leaned against the hallway. How could it have been overlooked to tell him that? Why had he had to find out by himself, and put it together? Why did information never move through his family? Why, when in other families even the children knew the names of their parents’ parents’ friends, did his family seem to have come up out of the ground like a mushroom?
Suicide, he thought. It was the only explanation. A family suicide.
“Suicide,” said Glove.
“No,” his mother answered.
“Crazy. He was crazy, wasn’t he?” He was talking fast. “He was crazy. Of course. That’s why you think that—”
“He wasn’t crazy . . . not like Baron. He was misunderstood . . . by your father mostly . . . but he wasn’t crazy.”
“What happened? Something happened.” No, he thought then, I don’t want you to tell me.
Cell Easter and her son Glove went up another flight of stairs and into his room, because it was cooler there and the shouting downstairs could not reach them. She nudged him along with her hands. Glove’s gigantic radio, with its five aerials, switchboard, headphones, speakers, and interchangeable tuners, occupied a good one quarter of the room, spreading itself onto the table and connecting to three of the four chairs in the room, with the earphones draped over one post of the bed. With this radio he could hear men sending messages to each other in Alaska—lonely, isolated men who laughed to each other over their radio sets about trivial but grand things. Cell sat down in the only unconnected chair and told a story that she had ferreted out of her husband’s carefully protected history. One single green point of fierce light betrayed that Glove had it on; the glowing tubes of the transmitter were hidden.
“To begin with, the people here killed him. In the dark of the moon, at night, they came in this house to murder. They went through the house. They cut open his throat and kept him from screaming so that down on the second floor C and his brother Sam heard nothing; and it wasn’t until the next morning, when the blood came drip by drip onto the hallway from the boards above, that Sam went up and found him lying there, his head nearly off. Another slice had cloven his face. The blood stained the floor, but is covered now by a rug nailed down on top of it. I don’t tell this to make you sick, but to show what it must have been like for your father and Sam.”
“What people?” he asked. “Why would they do that? Things have reasons.”
“Because of hate . . . because of fear. Because evil will destroy goodness, will seek it out and destroy it, and Ansel Easter was a minister.”
“There were other preachers. There must have been—”
“No, not like the ministers we have now; they administer to the people. Your grandfather was a minister of God.
“In the beginning he was just a coal miner. He never went to a church school or learned how to compose sermons. But people would ask him to come up out of the mines and talk for them, organize their feelings and bring them out in the open. What I mean is that he never had any polish, the way the ministers are slick now and talk like funeral directors. Ansel Easter’s voice was cracked and, in the pulpit, throwing back his head to begin a hymn, would sound like yelling down a shaft for more light. Opening his heart. Even later, when C was almost a full man, Ansel’s old, hard arms still seemed to quiver, as though they were ready again to go back grubbing in the ground for pieces of coal, as though he had just taken a short rest and the screeching whistle was about to begin. His face was hard.
“God looked through his eyes. The good things that Ansel saw in the world He saw in the world. Those things that were not good, the ugly and evil parts, made Ansel despair. Once—if you can imagine such a man—he went to a traveling carnival and saw written on the side of one of the wagons: COME SEE THE MOST HIDEOUS CREATURE IN CAPTIVITY, HALF HUMAN, HALF BEAST. BEWARE. Pictures in color of the thing; awful pictures. Children stood in front of the sideshow screaming and crying and holding on to their mothers just from these representations. Ansel stood along with several other men, paid money, and went inside. The canvas enclosure smelled of human feces and rotting meat. There, inside a cage, fastened to an iron ring set in concrete by a log chain welded on the other end to a steel collar around the neck, was a thing so horrible that many of the men fled back outside for fear their wives or children would venture in, hurrying them on down the dirt midway. Two of the younger men made fun of the thing, but could not laugh.
“I have a picture of it.” And she pinched open one of the gold trinkets hanging from her bracelet. She pulled out a small, tightly folded photograph and unraveled it to its full 1½-inch size. The likeness had yellowed, which, compounded with numerous cracks, made the original impression nearly impossible to decipher by merely looking at it. But there was just enough so that by studying it several times, turned in varying degrees to the overhead light, up close and at a distance, at first making presumptions about what it might be—primeval creatures, water reptiles, larvae, and large insects—then thinking what it must be, Glove saw beyond a shadow of a doubt a photographic representation of something ghastly . . . something the height of an old woman, with pale olive skin, completely hairless, stretched taut like a drumhead over its bones and sinews, the entire body seemingly without cartilage, both feet perfectly symmetrical, all toes even. And its face . . . hardly larger than a shrunken head, but the eyeballs of natural size, pupils the same color olive as the skin, surrounded by a yellowish white, its nose long, narrow, a covered knife bone so sharp down the front