Her hair was a light blond, almost white in the sunshine, and when I first knew her she had to wear it braided tight around her head – her grandmother braided it for her, and she hated it. Like Gretel or Snow White in one of those damn dumb picture books for children, Mary Lou said. When she was older she wore it down and let it grow long so that it fell almost to her hips. It was very beautiful – silky and shimmering. I dreamt of Mary Lou’s hair sometimes but the dreams were confused and I couldn’t remember when I woke up whether I was the one with the long blond silky hair, or someone else. It took me a while to get my thoughts clear lying there in bed and then I’d remember Mary Lou, who was my best friend.
She was ten months older than I was, and an inch or so taller, a bit heavier, not fat but fleshy, solid and fleshy, with hard little muscles in her upper arms like a boy. Her eyes were blue like washed glass, her eyebrows and lashes were almost white, she had a snubbed nose and Slavic cheekbones and a mouth that could be sweet or twisty and smirky depending upon her mood. But she didn’t like her face because it was round – a moon face she called it, staring at herself in the mirror though she knew damned well she was pretty – didn’t older boys whistle at her, didn’t the bus driver flirt with her? – calling her “Blondie” while he never called me anything at all.
Mother didn’t like Mary Lou visiting with me when no one else was home in our house: she didn’t trust her, she said. Thought she might steal something, or poke her nose into parts of the house where she wasn’t welcome. That girl is a bad influence on you, she said. But it was all the same old crap I heard again and again so I didn’t even listen. I’d have told her she was crazy except that would only make things worse.
Mary Lou said, “Don’t you just hate them? – your mother, and mine? Sometimes I wish—”
I put my hands over my ears and didn’t hear.
The Siskins lived two miles away from us, farther back the road where the road got narrower. Those days, it was unpaved, and never got plowed in the winter. I remember their barn with the yellow silo, I remember the muddy pond where the dairy cows came to drink, the muck they churned up in the spring. I remember Mary Lou saying she wished all the cows would die – they were always sick with something – so her father would give up and sell the farm and they could live in town in a nice house. I was hurt, her saying those things as if she’d forgotten about me and would leave me behind. Damn you to hell, I whispered under my breath.
I remember smoke rising from the Siskins’ kitchen chimney, from their wood-burning stove, straight up into the winter sky like a breath you draw inside you deeper and deeper until you begin to feel faint.
Later on, that house was empty too. But boarded up only for a few months – the bank sold it at auction. (It turned out the bank owned most of the Siskin farm, even the dairy cows. So Mary Lou had been wrong about that all along and never knew.)
As I write I can hear the sound of glass breaking, I can feel glass underfoot. Once upon a time there were two little princesses, two sisters, who did forbidden things. That brittle terrible sensation under my shoes – slippery like water – “Anybody home? Hey – anybody home?” and there’s an old calendar tacked to a kitchen wall, a faded picture of Jesus Christ in a long white gown stained with scarlet, thorns fitted to His bowed head. Mary Lou is going to scare me in another minute making me think that someone is in the house and the two of us will scream with laughter and run outside where it’s safe. Wild frightened laughter and I never knew afterward what was funny or why we did these things. Smashing what remained of windows, wrenching at stairway railings to break them loose, running with our heads ducked so we wouldn’t get cobwebs in our faces.
One of us found a dead bird, a starling, in what had been the parlor of the house. Turned it over with a foot – there’s the open eye looking right up calm and matter-of-fact. Melissa, that eye tells me, silent and terrible, I see you.
That was the old Minton place, the stone house with the caved-in roof and the broken steps, like something in a picture book from long ago. From the road the house looked as if it might be big, but when we explored it we were disappointed to see that it wasn’t much bigger than my own house, just four narrow rooms downstairs, another four upstairs, an attic with a steep ceiling, the roof partly caved in. The barns had collapsed in upon themselves; only their stone foundations remained solid. The land had been sold off over the years to other farmers, nobody had lived in the house for a long time. The old Minton house, people called it. On Elk Creek where Mary Lou’s body was eventually found.
In seventh grade Mary Lou had a boyfriend she wasn’t supposed to have and no one knew about it but me – an older boy who’d dropped out of school and worked as a farmhand. I thought he was a little slow – not in his speech which was fast enough, normal enough, but in his way of thinking. He was sixteen or seventeen years old. His name was Hans; he had crisp blond hair like the bristles of a brush, a coarse blemished face, derisive eyes. Mary Lou was crazy for him she said, aping the older girls in town who said they were “crazy for” certain boys or young men. Hans and Mary Lou kissed when they didn’t think I was watching, in an old ruin of a cemetery behind the Minton house, on the creek bank, in the tall marsh grass by the end of the Siskins’ driveway. Hans had a car borrowed from one of his brothers, a battered old Ford, the front bumper held up by wire, the running board scraping the ground. We’d be out walking on the road and Hans would come along tapping the horn and stop and Mary Lou would climb in but I’d hang back knowing they didn’t want me and the hell with them: I preferred to be alone.
“You’re just jealous of Hans and me,” Mary Lou said, unforgivably, and I hadn’t any reply. “Hans is sweet. Hans is nice. He isn’t like people say,” Mary Lou said in a quick bright false voice she’d picked up from one of the older, popular girls in town. “He’s . . .” And she stared at me blinking and smiling not knowing what to say as if in fact she didn’t know Hans at all. “He isn’t simple,” she said angrily, “he just doesn’t like to talk a whole lot.”
When I try to remember Hans Meunzer after so many decades I can see only a muscular boy with short-trimmed blond hair and protuberant ears, blemished skin, the shadow of a moustache on his upper lip – he’s looking at me, eyes narrowed, crinkled, as if he understands how I fear him, how I wish him dead and gone, and he’d hate me too if he took me that seriously. But he doesn’t take me that seriously, his gaze just slides right through me as if nobody’s standing where I stand.
There were stories about all the abandoned houses but the worst story was about the Minton house over on the Elk Creek Road about three miles from where we lived. For no reason anybody ever discovered Mr Minton had beaten his wife to death and afterward killed himself with a .12-gauge shotgun. He hadn’t even been drinking, people said. And his farm hadn’t been doing at all badly, considering how others were doing.
Looking at the ruin from the outside, overgrown with trumpet vine and wild rose, it seemed hard to believe that anything like that had happened. Things in the world even those things built by man are so quiet left to themselves . . .
The house had been deserted for years, as long as I could remember. Most of the land had been sold off but the heirs didn’t want to deal with the house. They didn’t want to sell it and they didn’t want to raze it and they certainly didn’t want to live in it so it stood empty. The property was posted with No Trespassing signs layered one atop another but nobody took them seriously. Vandals had broken into the house and caused damage, the McFarlane boys had tried to burn down the old hay barn one Halloween night. The summer Mary Lou started seeing Hans she and I climbed in the house through a rear window – the boards guarding it had long since been yanked away – and walked through the rooms slow as sleepwalkers our arms around each other’s waists our eyes staring waiting to see Mr Minton’s ghost as we turned each corner. The inside smelled of mouse droppings, mildew, rot, old sorrow. Strips of wallpaper torn from the walls, plasterboard exposed, old furniture overturned and smashed, old yellowed sheets of newspaper underfoot, and broken glass, everywhere broken glass. Through the ravaged windows sunlight spilled in tremulous quivering bands. The air was afloat, alive: dancing dust atoms. “I’m afraid,” Mary Lou whispered. She squeezed my waist and I felt my mouth go dry for hadn’t I been hearing something upstairs, a low persistent murmuring like quarreling like one person trying to convince another going on and on and on but when I stood very still to listen the sound vanished and there were only the comforting summer sounds of birds, crickets, cicadas; birds, crickets, cicadas.