Stillhour

In the spring my uncle Delbert began to be pleased with himself in a new way, which is always expensive for everybody else.

"A lady," he said, three or four times, at the counter and in the doorway and once over the fence. "A lady has spoken to me."

The lady was Mrs. Cornelia Ashby. Her family had cut the mine out of that ridge, and everything above the hollow had been theirs; everything that was now a trailer or a slag pile or a road had once been grass they owned. The thirties took most of it and the years after took the rest, and what remained, at the top of the ridge, behind iron gates that had rusted into a permanent open, was a house called Stillhour.

Nobody went in. Not because of a rule. Because the hollow had decided, at some point before I was born, that whatever was in there was not for us, and nobody had revisited the decision.

A boy was wanted. To walk up, to sit, to be company. There had been one before me, years back, and he had lasted a month, and I never got a good answer about why.

Della washed me in a tin tub with water she had boiled twice and put me into the clothes Emmet wore to the courthouse, which did not fit me at any point. Then my uncle walked me up the ridge road and did not come through the gate.

"You go on," he said. "She don't want me."

The gate hung open on one hinge. The drive was gravel, grown through, and it went up between rows of dead trees nobody had cut down so nobody would have to look at the stumps. The big house stood at the top with its windows shuttered and its gutters full of leaves, and one corner of the roof had gone, and the whole of it had that quality that buildings get when nobody has argued with the weather for a long time.

The front door was open. I went in.

The hall was dark and dry and smelled of dust and of something older than dust, and off the hall was a room with a long table laid for a great many people, and on the table was a cake. It was not a cake anymore. It was a cake's idea of itself, grey and blackened, with the sugar work gone to a kind of lace, and it stood on a stand under a cloth that had rotted into ribbons, and behind it was a wall of dark mahogany, and in the middle of the mahogany, in the only place the light reached, sat a clock.

The clock said twenty past nine.

I looked at it a while. Then I noticed the other clock, on the chimney shelf, and it said twenty past nine. And there was a third on the wall by the window, and it said twenty past nine, and a fourth in brass on a bracket, and I turned around slowly in that room and every hour in it had stopped at the same minute of some evening I had not been alive for, and there were no windows open and nothing had moved in that room in a lifetime.

A woman was sitting in a chair by the dead fire. She had on white — a dress that had once been a dress, with yellowed lace and a long veil thrown back over the chair, and a shoe on one foot and no shoe on the other, and a single silver watch pinned to her breast that ticked.

She was not old and she was not young. She had the kind of face that had been very handsome and had not been given much to do for a long while.

"You are the boy," she said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You are not what they sent me the last time."

"I don't know what they sent you the last time, ma'am."

"No." She seemed to find this agreeable. "Neither do I. Sit down. Not there. There."

I sat.

"You will come again," she said. It was not a question.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Why?"

I thought about it, because she was looking at me and I did not want to be wrong. "Because you asked me to," I said.

Something went across her face and was gone. "Play," she said. "Go and play."

I went out into the hall, and there was a girl in the hall.

She was about my age and she was the most finished thing I had ever seen up close — not pretty the way the girls at the school were pretty, but done, the way the good saddles in the window in Wheeling were done. Dark hair, and a plain white dress that must have come from somewhere that was not a store, and she looked at me the way you look at weather through a window.

"Well?" she said.

"Well what?"

"Are you going to cry?"

"No."

"All the ones they send cry." She looked me over once, without hurrying, from my borrowed shoes to my hands. "Your hands are dirty."

"They're not dirty. They're stained."

"Is there a difference?"

"Yes."

"Show me."

I showed her my hands. Coal gets into the creases and stays, and the same coal that warmed the water I washed in had been in the ground under the water, and a thing like that does not come off, it only proves itself.

She looked at them from a distance, as though they were a picture in a book she had already read.

"Stained," she said, agreeing with me. "How nice." Then she turned and went up the stairs, and at the fourth step she said, without turning round, "You may call me Vera," and after the seventh, "I have no idea why they want you," and she said the last word as though want were the mistake in the sentence, and it may have been.

I walked home down the ridge in the dark. At the bottom I turned around, and there above the hollow was the flare on its stack, and there above that, at the top of the hill, was one shuttered window with a light in it, and I stood in the road and looked at the two lights for a long time.