Uncle Arms stepped off the bus with two videotapes in his hand. He shook them in front of me. There was a diesel smell coming from beneath the truck.
— I’m going to take him back up to the house.
— This is your last chance, she said to me. It’ll feel good.
— I’d feel silly barefoot, I admitted. I’m wearing a suit, I said.
She sighed. — Just once you ought to find out how it feels to be free from all those clothes.
— I’ll consider that, I said.
Uncle Arms led me away, back through the trees and into his yard. Before we had walked five feet of his property, I asked, — Why are you doing all this?
Uncle Arms said, — Those students sleeping there are the descendants of conscientious objectors everywhere. Nowadays the enemy is this way of life that tells young girls they’re beautiful because of their bodies.
— But you’re running a modeling contest!
— My ladies win because of hardships. Fortitude is probably the only way teenagers can show character anymore.
— You’ll never know how it feels to suffer generations of shame, he said. I mean to have your parent’s mistakes continue on and affect you. I don’t like what my great-grandfather did, but I’m not giving the money back.
We weren’t far from the main house, but we were right next to the cabin. Even without lights it gave a ginger glow. The cabin was run through with an animate silence that reached out and cupped my ears. The shingled roof sunk low in the middle like it was being sucked down from the inside.
I still heard Uncle Arms, but from farther away. He said, — If I can try to make the lives of a few girls better now, that’s one way to balance out Otis Allen’s fortune.
I don’t want to say I was scared. I was thrilled.
If not for Uncle Arms my night would have consisted of television and hotel food. Right now Nabisase was probably back in her room, the preliminary night over, polishing the shoes she’d be wearing with a formal gown tomorrow. Muttering about the failures of Mom and me. Why would I rush to hear that? I’d have the rest of my life to get berated. Going to see my sister would have been the right thing to do, but tonight I felt like a little fun.
— I want to help you, I whispered.
— What?
— Uncle Arms, I want to be your friend.
When I was eating dinner in the house the cabin had looked quaint, but now it was much older. I thought it was a replica, the kind they sell in miniature at Home Depot, a pretty place to keep useful things like a lawnmower, rock salt.
— It’s handmade, Anthony. More than two hundred years ago.
There was a window, but were there chairs inside? A bed? An occupant?
— What can I do? I asked.
— This is quite a surprise.
I couldn’t see Uncle Arms because I wouldn’t stop watching the cabin. Tricks of lights against the window; when I tilted my head long shapes squatted.
— You wouldn’t find it hard to open a door, would you?
— I want to do something better than that.
— You don’t understand me, Anthony. This one gesture would help me a lot.
— How much?
He said, — I wouldn’t have to plant any of the protestors inside. I can’t trust them. They won’t wait until the right time. The second one gets in he’ll start chanting and throwing flyers. They’re too energetic.
— Are you going to hurt the people inside?
— I told you I wasn’t a monster.
Fierce loyalty is a boy’s game best played at night when the imagination can transform every shadow into a foe. Uncle Arms went back in the house and returned; he was as thin as a cane. He brought out two small glasses, the green bottle.
— At a certain time during the evening’s pageant you’ll hear a knock at the back of the auditorium. Then you’ll open the emergency door.
Here I’d thought the whole world was telling my story only to find myself stumbled into his.
While he’d gone into the house I hadn’t stepped away from the cabin. We drank five feet away from it. I didn’t want to get closer, but I didn’t run.
Uncle Arms asked, — Does your sister win a lot of these things?
— No, I said. She never has.
— Maybe this would be her year.
— Could you do that?
— Winner’s name means nothing to me. If it assures your cooperation and a few years of silence I’ll give her quite a bit.
— She was the girl with the old woman tied to her back.
— The orphan! Uncle Arms laughed. I like the blood you come from, he said.
I was glad to do something for my sister, but also to feel like a grown man. I entered the cosmos of backroom economies on November 11th. Her professionalism aside, Nabisase’s victory was rigged by an endomoprh and a goblin standing in crabgrass, and she would never know it. There are so many lives decided in this way.
After finishing the bottle of green liqueur I could barely stagger and I fell forward against the cabin walls. Once I was closer the silhouettes inside were easier to recognize. The backs of two wood chairs and iron pots hanging over the fireplace. A low slim bed in the corner. There was a form, wide as an oven and twice as tall, pressed up against the right side of the window pane like it was looking out. When I stumbled closer it moved away.
The door was made of three wide slats of wood joined together. They weren’t decorated. There wasn’t even a handle, only a hole in the door about level with the lower end of my stomach. Hanging through that hole was a leather string, like a bootlace. The hole in the shape of a heart.
Uncle Arms whispered from behind me.
— All the Quakers had to lock this door was a wooden board on the inside of the cabin. That leather string hanging out the hole is tied around it. When visitors are welcome the string dangles out. A visitor pulls on it, the board lifts and you walk inside.
He said, — That’s where the saying comes from. A hole in my heart. When the string wasn’t hanging out it meant that company wasn’t welcome.
— Who’s in there now?
— Open the door.
— What will I find inside?
— The unseen hand, he said.
My whole body was eager to find out. I touched the door and the wood was cold. I grabbed for the string, but it moved without me. Curling away slowly. It disappeared. Pulled backward from within.
19
Nabisase, thirteen years old, not safe, ossified, looked out the window of Grandma’s room; so stiff she might have been there for eighty years and continue for eighty more.
Grandma lay on her back on her bed on her best behavior in the Comfort Inn room.
Nabisase turned away from the low hills outside to sit on the bed and touch Grandma’s hip. Grandma made little gasps not only from pain, but in anticipation of more. She flinched. My sister pressed on Grandma’s thigh, asking, — Does it hurt here? Here? Where?
I’d driven over from Miser’s Wend at ten that morning. A Sunday. November 12th.
Mom’s bed, the one farther from the window, was tucked so professionally that it couldn’t have been slept in.
Rather than call ahead, as I’d tried the day before, I got on the elevator, pressed third floor and nobody stopped me. Walked the hall and right into Grandma’s room. I could’ve done that on Saturday, but I’d assumed there were guards posted.
Grandma skittered, sat up quickly, when she noticed me inside the room. The move made her squint with pain and she yelled, — How did you get in?
— Through the door.
— Wasn’t it locked?
— Mom’s gone. Nabisase spoke to me, but I didn’t recognize the voice. Not frantic or angry, even irate; the tones I was used to.
— Did you hear me? my sister asked.