CHAPTER 10
WREN
There’s an old woman on the way down off Lazarus’s hill, and she’s the reason I learned that there had been witnesses all along, just never the kind anybody asks.
Lazarus rents his room from Pauline Pruitt, who has lived in the squat stone house at the foot of Cradle Hill for longer than I’ve been alive, longer than the Frosts owned the top of it, longer than Hartsend has had a paved road running through it.
She’s eighty if she’s a day, built like a fence post, with a face like something carved out of the mountain by weather that gave up trying to wear her down.
I’d seen her my whole time in this town, at Merle’s, at the post office, that flinty unbothered presence at the edge of every gathering, and I’d never once spoken to her, because she’s not the sort of woman who invites it, and because I’m not the sort of woman who risks it.
But the night I climbed his hill for the name and came down again with my hand already on a porch switch I hadn’t thrown yet, she was out on her porch in the cold dark in a man’s wool coat, splitting kindling with a hatchet at an hour no eighty-year-old has any business swinging a hatchet, and she looked at me coming down off her own rented hill at midnight, and she said, without stopping the hatchet:
“You’re the Mercer girl. The one from up top.” A thunk into the block. “The one he came down the mountain for.”
I stopped. The whole town has a way of saying the one from up top, the Frost house, the survivor, poor Wren, careful Wren, with that warm suffocating pity. She didn’t say it that way. She said it the way you’d note the weather. A fact about the mountain.
“He pays on time,” she said, when I didn’t answer, “and he carries my wood in, and he shovels out my husband’s old truck every morning like it’s a church chore, and he doesn’t sleep, which I know because I don’t either, and an old woman and a man who can’t sleep get to know each other’s lamps across a yard.
” Thunk. “Town thinks I’m a fool for renting to him. Town can mind its own porch.”
“You’re not afraid of him,” I said. It came out before I could stop it.
She straightened up then, slow, both hands on the hatchet handle, and she looked at me with eyes that had been watching that black hill above us for sixty winters, and she said the thing that rearranged my whole understanding of the country I grew up dying in.
“Girl, I watched that family longer than the law ever bothered to. I was down here at the bottom of this hill the whole time they were up at the top of it being whatever they were. And I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of, and it isn’t him.
” She set the hatchet down. “I’m afraid of how many girls I watched go up that road over the years and never once watched come down.
You understand me? A house like that, on a hill like this, for forty years, you live at the bottom of it long enough, you start counting the cars that go up.
The pretty wards. The quiet little visitors.
Foster placements, the county called them, when the county called them anything.
Up they’d go in the social worker’s sedan, all of them with that same look, and I’d see them at the fence for a season, a year, and then one day the old man’d come down to the post office and mention, real sorrowful, that the girl had run off, ungrateful thing, and nobody — nobody, in fifty years, ever once asked Pauline Pruitt at the bottom of the hill whether she’d seen a child walk down that road.
Because a child didn’t. I’d have seen it.
I see everything that comes off that mountain.
” Her jaw worked. “I counted them going up. I never got to count a one of them coming down. And I told myself it wasn’t my place, and I was a coward, and now I’m old and they’re all gone and the only thing I can do about any of it is rent a warm room to the one Frost who ever tried to get a girl down that hill instead of keeping her up it. ”
I stood in her yard in the cold and I could not breathe, because I was hearing Iris’s tin read back to me in an old woman’s voice.
Annie. Marguerite. Sophie. Dorothea. The girls who went up and never came down.
Iris counted them from inside the house, in a child’s pencil, in a tin.
And Pauline Pruitt counted them from the bottom of the hill, in cars going up that never came down, for fifty years, and the two of them, a doomed child and a flinty old widow, were the only two people in the entire history of that mountain who ever kept the count, and neither of them was ever, once, asked.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about how the dark gets to keep working.
It isn’t that nobody sees. People see. An old woman at the bottom of a hill sees every car.
A little girl carves names into a headboard.
A deputy four years widowed pulls a thread.
People see. The horror doesn’t survive on nobody-seeing.
It survives on nobody-asking, on a whole town agreeing, year after year, that the seeing isn’t their place, that the counting isn’t their business, that a child who “ran off” from a respectable man’s charity is a story you nod at and forget.
The monster needs the dark, yes. But more than the dark, it needs the silence of people who saw just enough to know and decided it wasn’t theirs to say.
I have been all three. I saw, and I knew, and I said nothing, worse than nothing, I stood in a grey dress and pointed the count in exactly the wrong direction.
“He talks to you?” I asked her. My voice wasn’t steady. “Lazarus?”
“Man barely talks at all. But he sat on my porch one night, couldn’t sleep, neither could I, and I told him what I just told you, about the counting, about the cars, because I’m old and I’m done keeping it, and you know what he did?
” She looked up at the black shape of the ruined house against the stars.
“He didn’t act surprised. He just got real quiet, quieter than usual, which I didn’t think was possible, and after a while he said, ‘I got one of them down the hill, Mrs. Pruitt. Just the one. It cost everything I had and I’d pay it again.
’ And then he carried in my wood and went to his cold room and didn’t sleep.
” She picked the hatchet back up. “That’s not a monster, girl.
I’ve lived next to the real thing. I know the difference.
A monster keeps them up the hill. That boy spent his whole life trying to get one down it, and your town put him in a cage for the only good thing that ever came off that mountain, and they did it on the word of —” she stopped herself, and looked at me, not unkindly, and didn’t finish it.
She didn’t have to.
On the word of the girl he saved.
“His truck,” I said, because I had to say something or I was going to come apart in an old woman’s yard. “You said he shovels out your husband’s truck.”
“Diesel plow rig. Hasn’t run right since Harold passed, but that boy’s got it turning over again.
Stubborn machine. Stubborn man.” She jerked her chin up the mountain.
“Built to go up things that say you can’t.
I keep telling him to just take the thing.
Where’s an old woman going in a snowstorm?
” A thin dry almost-smile, the first crack in the fence post. “Maybe one of these nights he will.”
I didn’t know yet how those words would land.
I didn’t know that the last time I’d see that stubborn diesel rig, it would be carrying the two of us down off this mountain on the longest night of the year with a dead man’s tape unspooling behind us.
You never know which thing an old woman says in a cold yard is going to turn out to be the hinge of your whole survival.
I just knew, walking the rest of the way down the hill that night, that I’d been wrong my whole life about being alone in the count.
There was a girl in a tin and a widow on a porch and a deputy with a green Bronco and a man who didn’t sleep, and every one of us had been keeping the same terrible arithmetic in secret, each of us sure we were the only one, none of us ever once asked.
We could have stopped it. Any two of us, if we’d ever once compared our counts.
That’s the part I’ll carry. Not that nobody saw.
That so many of us did, and stayed quiet, and called the quiet survival, until a man came down off a mountain and a tape came out of a fire and the count, finally, fifty years too late, got read out loud.