MARY KITTREDGE

HER HOUSE IN ORDER

The Baby's finger fell off this morning while I was bathing her. I had to
pretend I didn't notice. I just waited, thinking determinedly of something else,
until she slapped, laughing at the bubbles in the basin, and when her tiny hand
emerged from the soapy water, pink and dripping, the finger was back.

I dried the baby and dressed her in a clean, fresh sleeper, gave her a bottle,
and put her down for a nap in the big, bright nursery which was one of the
reasons we liked this house so much, back when we first looked at it. We had
seen, it seemed then, hundreds of houses, each with its fatal flaw: too small,
too old, too decrepit, and most frequently of all, too expensive.

This house sat on ten acres of hillside, on the outskirts of a little town in
central Vermont. Tiger lilies bloomed by the tool shed, the single front step
was a solid slab of granite, and a grape arbor laden with luscious fruit stood
in the side yard, near the apple trees and the vegetable garden. The house
itself was a large, country-farmhouse-style structures silently we took in the
new roof and freshly pointed chimneys, shiny gutters and gleaming paint: white
for the clapboards, dark green for the dozens of sets of working wooden shutters
adorning the brand-new, double-hung windows. Despite all this, the ad had listed
a price that was well within our budget.

Disbelieving, we went in, forcing ourselves not to exclaim over the enormous
kitchen. Besides a big butcher-block table and a working woodstove, atop which I
could practically see a batch of homemade bread rising, it was equipped with a
garbage disposal, automatic icemaker, and double wall ovens, all things we had
never had before. The other rooms, too, retained the charm of a real,
old-fashioned New England homestead, but with every one of the modem
conveniences.

We wandered around the place in a daze, afraid to look at one another in case we
should burst out laughing; until now, we had lived crammed into a city
apartment, with twin six-year-old sons and a new baby. This house was so big,
and so perfect, it didn't seem we could possibly buy it for the listed price.
Even the cellar, which my husband assured me did not leak, held a new oil
furnace and extra-large electric water heater, along with a washing machine and
dryer. Remembering the garden, I thought that in summer I would hang the laundry
outside, and carry it back in fragrant armloads drenched with sunshine and the
smell of clover, but in winter the cellar would be useful. After a while my
husband went up to the attic to see if some awful defect could be hidden there,
while I went to talk to the real estate lady.

"Old folks died, settle the estate, they want a quick sale," she said, blowing
cigarette smoke out her thin nostrils. She wore a bright red suit and gold
jewelry, and her red fingernails drummed the butcher-block impatiently as she
glanced at the door and at her wristwatch, again. "So, you think your husband
might be interested?"

She stubbed her cigarette angrily into the chipped saucer she had appropriated
for the purpose. I wondered why she seemed so anxious to go, then realized that
on a sunny Sunday afternoon in August she was probably in a hurry to get back to
her own family. I thought about saying that my husband and I would have to
discuss it together before coming to any decision, but before I could speak his
footsteps came hurrying down the stairs and he burst into the room with a grin
on his face.

"Honey," he said, "we've got to take it. Go have a look at the attic, it'll make
a perfect kids' playroom. How much," he asked the real estate lady, "will it
take to hold it on deposit?"

Surprised, I hesitated. There were still a dozen questions to be answered about
the place, and it wasn't like him to be so impulsive. Annoyed, he glanced up at
me from his checkbook.

"Well, go on," he said, and I saw how much he really wanted the house, so I
shrugged off my twinge of hurt feelings and went on up the stairs. After all, I
wanted it, too; talking it over wouldn't have made any difference. Humming, I
let my hand slip easily on the burnished banister; going along the hall, I
looked into each bright, spacious bedroom.

The boys would not care for the flowered wallpaper, of course, but it was fine
for the baby, and the biggest bedroom had a view of the mountains. All had
white, freshly painted woodwork and sparkling cut-glass doorknobs, and polished,
wide-plank wooden floors that wanted only hooked or crocheted rugs, never any
wall-to-wall carpet.

Home, I thought tentatively and then more certainly, feeling a fragile bubble of
happiness begin growing as I opened the door at the end of the hall. The door
was perfectly proportioned but smaller than the others, as if it had been cut
for a little person; somehow it made me think of the white rabbit in Alice in
Wonderland. Mine, I thought, starting up the steep, narrow set of enclosed steps
leading to the attic. From above me came a faint, persistent buzzing, as if a
bee had become trapped and was trying to get out at one of the windowpanes.

The attic was a large, unfinished space with a low, slanted ceiling and chimneys
rising through it at intervals. Dormered windows pierced the roof along both
sides, and fanlights were set in at either end, giving the place the odd,
unpleasant effect of a many-eyed insect, looking inward. Crossing the plank
floor, I noticed that whoever had done such a wonderful job downstairs had not
bothered much about cleaning up here; dusty old clipping books, discolored file
folders, and even a few antique-looking photograph albums lay in a heap by one
of the chimneys, and the rafters were festooned with cobwebs.

Surely it was a trick of the grayish light seeping from the windows that made
the cobwebs shift stealthily, as if within them masses of spiders might be
readying to drop. The stale, motionless air grew loud with the buzzing of bees,
and my head filled with a smell like burning leaves. Turning, I glimpsed a
raggedy remnant of old curtain in a window where, surely, no curtain had hung a
moment before. A humped, indistinct shape moved slyly within its folds, then
dropped with a dusty thump to scuttle across the floor at me.

Clamping my lips together, for I knew somehow what the loose shape wanted to do
to me, I scrambled to the steps and stumbled down them, hearing the rustle of
cloth coming quickly and confidently up behind me, to the edge of the attic
floor. Then, as suddenly as an indrawn breath, it was gone, and I stood
terrified at the foot of the narrow stairwell, outside the small but perfectly
proportioned attic door.

Shocked and confused-- could it have really happened? -- and feeling as if I
must have been gone for hours, I made my way back downstairs to the kitchen of
the old house, where my husband and the real estate lady were shaking hands on
the deal.

"Well," my husband said happily, tucking away his checkbook, "we've got
ourselves a home."

I looked at the real estate lady, who was folding the check into her briefcase,
and at my husband, who frowned as he eyed me closely.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

The real estate lady stubbed out her cigarette. "The deposit is non-refundable,"
she said, snapping her briefcase shut with a final-sounding click.

"Well, of course it is," my husband replied heartily, putting his arm around me.
"We wouldn't have it any other way, would we, honey?"

I could have stopped it all, of course, right then and there: demanded the check
back, tom it up, and dealt with my husband's wrath and disbelief later. I almost
did, but as I opened my mouth to protest, something stopped me.

Maybe it was the look in my husband's eyes, silently asking me please to go
along with him on this. Whatever had upset me couldn't possibly be as
significant as the kind of deal we were getting, here, and it was the sort of
house he had always dreamed of having, only he'd never dreamed of being able to
afford it.

Maybe it was that, combined with my desire to believe there could not really be
anything such as I had experienced, or thought I had experienced, in the attic.
Not here, not anywhere. Or maybe it was something worse that made me return my
husband's embrace with a reassuring hug.

Through the window, I could see out into the garden, where somebody must have
strung a clothesline; for a moment I thought I glimpsed flapping cloth. A dish
towel or cleaning rag, probably, faded the color of old bones. Or nothing; when
I looked again it was gone. "Of course," I said. "Of course we're going to buy
this house."

The thing in the attic seemed suddenly no more than an illusion, a moment's
dizziness brought on by fatigue and by the stale, dusty air in the long-enclosed
space, and if I had any questions about the wisdom of my words, there were
answers enough in my husband's smile, or anyway they were enough at the time.

In September we moved into the house, spreading our few sticks of furniture
among the enormous rooms. I went to tag sales and church bazaars, which the
women around here seemed to put on every weekend, and bought things that looked
as if they belonged in a house like this: chenille bedspreads, braided rugs,
chairs and tables that settled comfortably into their places the minute I
brought them home, as if they had always been there. I found a piano for a
ridiculously low sum, had a man come and tune it, and the boys began taking
lessons; in the evenings, sometimes, I played it, too, discovering that I had a
talent for picking out the chords of the sad, old love songs on the antique
sheet music my husband presented to me one day, saying he had found it in an
abandoned trunk out in the tool shed.

Meanwhile he began his new job in Montpelier, starting off each morning very
early in the car, and often not returning until late at night. The boys attended
first grade, rollicking down the driveway to climb onto the big yellow school
bus while I stood watching from the kitchen window, holding the baby and helping
her to wave her little hand, teaching her to say good-bye. After that, I dressed
her and we began our day; I had no reason to go up into the attic that autumn,
and so I did not.

In November we bought another car so that I could drive to town for small items
that I needed from the market. The boys, too, needed to be driven places: to the
houses of friends, to movies in town, or to skate on the pond behind the school,
after which one of the other mothers might keep them until after dinner. As
winter came on, I found myself alone in the house more often, and with darkness
closing in earlier. The baby, in one of the quick changes of habit she seemed
prone to, now, as if trying them on to see which ones might suit her
permanently, began napping for long stretches in the late afternoons, sleeping
so quietly that if I had not known she was upstairs, I might have thought I had
imagined her, that she was just someone I dreamed up.

Her naps did give me a great deal of uninterrupted time in which to finish my
chores, though, so that one afternoon in the early part of December, it finally
happened: I had nothing to do. The laundry was ironed, folded, and put away, a
stewpot bubbled atop the woodstove, which I had taken to lighting right after
lunch, mostly to keep me company, and the house was completely clean from bottom
to top, except of course for all those dusty clipping books, stained file
folders, and crumbling photograph albums that I had seen lying up in the attic.

It occurred to me that I could send the boys up to get them, but then I
remembered they wouldn't be home until the next day; there was a sleep-over for
the first-grade boys, at the house of one of them whose mother was, apparently,
a canonized saint. And I certainly couldn't ask my husband, who would be sure to
say that the items weren't hurting anything where they were, so why not leave
them alone, but if I really wanted them I should feel free to fetch them; he is
a dear man, my husband, but when it comes to unnecessary chores he prefers the
ones he has thought up for himself.

What I could do, of course, was forget the whole notion, but the idea of that
made me feel angry; it was, after all, my house, and I suddenly did not see the
point of owning a house at all, if I was not to be allowed into the attic. So in
the end I did go up there, armed with the only weapon I had: a can of bug spray.
I don't know why I thought it might do anything to stop the attack of a
homicidal dish rag; still, I felt much better holding it as I confronted the
small, white door at the end of the upstairs hallway.

After a moment I reached out and unlatched the lock, which my husband had placed
up high where the boys could not reach it; against his expectations, they did
not like to play in the attic, preferring their bedrooms or the first-floor
spare room we had turned into a playroom for them. So my husband had taken to
storing things up there that we did not want the boys getting into: tools,
mostly, including some old but perfectly good ones he had found forgotten in the
cellar, under a tarp.

I turned the knob and opened the door, noticing how smoothly and silently the
door hinges worked despite their not being used often, and started up the
stairs. Halfway up I paused, holding my breath for the buzzing of bees or the
flop of fabric humping itself across the floor at me, but I heard nothing, only
the baby whimpering once in the room below before going back to sleep.

Bluish winter light fell slantingly through the windows; it was cold outside,
getting ready to snow. The cobwebs were thinner than I remembered, and paler
gray. Tiptoeing so as not to wake the baby, I hurried across the attic and
gathered up the clipping books, files, and tattered photograph albums, wrinkling
my nose at the smell of dust.

Glancing up, for an instant I thought I saw a face pushed to one of the windows,
its features mashed in an obscene leer, but when I forced myself to look again
it was only a shriveled leaf plastered damply to the glass, blowing off as I
watched in fright and then in foolish relief.

Silly. There was nothing up here, after all. Only when I reached the steps and
turned to look back at the large, silent attic did I see, in addition to my own
footprints, a disordered trail in the floor's thick carpet of dust, as if a
handkerchief had been dragged through it. Calmly, I went on down the stairs,
exited the stairwell, and closed the door behind me, perfectly aware that the
trail in the dust had not been there when I went up, a few minutes earlier. Then
from the baby's room I heard a tiny, gagging cough, and I dropped everything and
ran to her.

Later, I decided that something had upset her stomach. She was quiet, didn't
want to eat much, and refused the bottle I offered her when I put her down for
the night. Still, she slept peacefully enough; I left her door open so that I
could hear her in case she cried, but she didn't make a peep. When I was sure
she was settled, I opened the first clipping book.

It turned out to be a book of family souvenirs: children's report cards, a
baby's hair ribbons, postcards from the summer camp two little boys had
attended, with here and there a few old deckle-edged snapshots: blurry-faced
people in black and white, standing in front of the house or blowing out
birthday candles. For a moment I wondered what had happened to them all, but the
file folder I opened next answered that question only too well.

Yellowed newspaper clippings detailed the discovery of a local woman, alone in
the house, surrounded by the butchered bodies of her husband and three children.
Neighbors had noticed the absence of smoke from the chimneys, which in those
days meant the house was going unheated, and cows bawling untended in the
pasture, an unimaginable lapse from the family's routine unless something was
seriously amiss. Consulting among themselves, the neighbors broke in and found
out what the matter was.

Witnesses said the woman confronted them with a bloody axe, but when she saw
they were not about to be driven away, she cut her own throat with it, and died
before anything could be done. No motive for the tragedy was known, but friends
said the woman had recently stopped attending church, and had been acting
"peculiar." A trustee was appointed to care for the house, sell off the animals
and land, and settle the family's affairs, there being no surviving relatives.

Thoughtfully, I paged through more of the brittle old clippings until I found
one that bore a date, forty years earlier; perhaps the trustee had collected
them. Decent land was easier to come by then than now, and the parcel the house
stood on was not large, but ten acres with a dwelling and outbuildings should
have found a buyer quickly, all else being equal.

Which of course it was not. Stacking the file folders and clipping books beside
my chair, I got up and began turning lights out, leaving on one in the kitchen
for my husband to see by, when he came home. The real estate lady had said that
old folks died, implying that someone had been living here until recently, but
now I felt sure she had lied, knowing that by the time we learned the truth it
would be too late.

The real estate company had probably picked the place up from the town for a
fraction of the back taxes, and plowed a lot of improvements into it hoping to
make a killing, but people around here had long memories and nobody local would
have wanted the property at any price. Climbing the stairs to bed, I knew why
the house had been, in the end, so ridiculously inexpensive.

It had to be, to attract an out-of-town family who might buy it without
bothering to learn its history: that it was the site of a bloody, unexplained
multiple murder topped off by a violent suicide, and that it had stood alone,
unoccupied by any living person, since the day they carried the bodies out.

Later that night when my husband came home and crawled into bed beside me, his
body was cold as ice. I had let the stove go out, and forgotten to turn up the
thermostat; padding down the hall to adjust it and to check on the baby, I
resolved to wake him and tell him what I had learned. It was too much; I did not
want to know it alone. But when I reached the baby's room, I found her
shivering, her blanket fallen somehow between the slats of her crib. Retrieving
it from the floor, I saw by the glow of her night-light that it was covered with
dust, mingled with dark fibers from some fabric I could not identify.

I carried the baby back into bed with me, deciding not to wake my husband after
all. In the darkness I lay awake cradling her, listening to the distant rumble
of the oil furnace, the tinkle of hot water in the heating pipes. That morning I
had vacuumed the whole upstairs, paying special attention to the baby's room.
There should not have been any fibers on the floor.

The next day was Saturday, and I woke late to the smell of coffee. My husband
had taken the baby downstairs, fed her, and set her in her playpen. When she saw
me, her face split open in a toothless grin, and I thought about what I would do
to protect her. But this idea made me uncomfortable, somehow, and I turned away,
carrying my coffee into the living room where I found my husband paging through
the photograph album I had brought down from the attic. The file folders and
clipping book were nowhere in sight.

"How did you do it?" He looked up with a pleased, puzzled smile.

"Do what?" Around us, the room seemed snug and safe. He was sitting on the
maroon horsehair sofa, its arms and back lacy with the tatted antimacassars I'd
found for it at a rummage sale. The mantel clock I'd bought at an auction ticked
comfortably, its glass front displaying a painted scene of the Connecticut
valley, and the pale maple of the spindle back rocker shone like old gold
against the jewel colors of the braided rug.

"Slyboots," my husband said admiringly; it was the name he called me when I had
done some admirable thing, and presented it as a fait accompli. "Come on," he
said, "you can't pretend this wasn't on purpose."

I knew what he meant, I had noticed it the night before, not wanting to
understand. The piecemeal items of furniture I had collected, an end table here
and a footstool there, a box of old draperies sold out of somebody's garage --
all of them had settled in with the smug harmony of old friends coming together
after a long separation.

"I don't know how you did it," my husband marveled, "finding this stuff. Honey,
you're a genius."

Putting his arm around my waist, he drew me down, keeping his other finger
pressed to the edge of one of the snapshots, to mark his place in the book. In
the picture, a man relaxed in a spindleback rocker, while across from him bulked
a dark-colored horsehair sofa, its back and arms decorated with antimacassars,
and on the mantel stood an old clock with a painted scene of the Connecticut
valley barely visible on its faceplate.

"It's just like before," my husband said, and it was, too, right down to the
occupants. All at once it hit me that other people must have inspected this
house, and even considered buying it, before we did. Unsuitable families,
perhaps: too many children, or not enough boys. Possibly they lacked a baby
girl.

From the hall came a whispery rustle like the sound of a dust-mop being pushed
along the floor. I got up quickly, just as the baby let out a startled yell. By
the time I reached her, she lay on her back, howling and red-faced, her bottle
hurled halfway across the room.

"Hey, that kid's got a good arm on her," my husband joked, picking the bottle up
off the floor and brushing the dust from it, and I whirled on him, meaning to
blurt out all that I needed to say, but before I could utter a word, his nose
fell off.

I wanted to scream, to run out of the house and keep running through the clean,
white snow that had fallen overnight, but I couldn't because I was barefoot and
still in my pajamas, and the baby was only wearing a flannel jumpsuit, and on
top of that a car pulled into the driveway: it was the boys, arriving home.

The baby drew a shuddering breath and began shrieking. The kitchen door slammed
and the boys ran in, clamoring for their lunch. I smiled welcomingly at them so
as not to have to look at my husband, and if possible to distract their
attention from him, but they made a beeline for him anyway and flung themselves
at him, each boy clinging to one of his legs.

"Here," my husband said, putting the nipple of the baby's bottle into his mouth
to clean it, then handing the bottle to me, and when I looked up at his face
again, his nose was back.

Hacked to pieces, said a still, small voice in my head. She took an axe and
hacked them to pieces. Suddenly and without at all wanting to I remembered the
other thing that I had seen in the attic, leaning against one of the chimneys.

With an axe, the voice repeated maliciously. With an axe.

Shakily I handed the baby to my husband and went upstairs to dress, thinking
rather wildly about how difficult it must have been, cleaning up after a thing
like that. Maybe it was what had driven her to commit the final act: the
hopelessness, as she gazed around at the spattered walls, smeared floors and
dripping woodwork, of ever managing to put things right again, after what she
had already done.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, pulling on my socks, I looked again at the fresh,
clean flowered wallpaper someone had put up in the bedroom not long ago. I knew
clearly, if I pulled a strip of it down, what I would find beneath. I knew what
they had done all those years ago after they broke in and found that wretched
woman in the instant before she cut her own throat.

And I knew, or thought I knew, what happened after that: They had carried the
bodies out, all the bits of them that they could find, and then they had locked
the house up, leaving it to its own devices so that over time, as the stains
sank deeply into its porous old wood, carrying with them, perhaps, some memory
or reverberation of the terrible things that had happened in its rooms, and
without any new tenants to impose sanity upon it, to restore order by the sheer,
ongoing ordinariness of their lives, the house had produced a tenant of its own.

I finished tying my shoes and went down to the kitchen where my husband was
making peanut-butter sandwiches, cutting them with a large, sharp knife. I
averted my eyes as he brandished it playfully, flourishing it while the boys
watched, goggle-eyed, and poured myself another cup of coffee. Then I sat down
at the butcher-block island, on one of the old wooden stools I'd bought at a
flea market along the highway not far from our town.

The boys began devouring their sandwiches. Working happily, my husband carved
breast of turkey, silvered pickles like stubby fingers, tore lettuce from the
head. He had already bought himself a whetstone and a leather strop, planning,
he said, to get those tools back in shape over the winter. From the dining room
where we had put her playpen, the baby giggled.

"She's being good," said my husband through a mouthful of his sandwich, glancing
at the ceiling.

"What?" For practice, he had sharpened a hatchet. I could see it through the
kitchen window from where I sat, its wicked-looking edge half-buried in the
chopping block by the stovewood pile.

Chewing, he angled his head once more at the ceiling. "The baby. I put her
upstairs for a nap while you were dressing. She's being good."

"Oh." I sipped my coffee, thinking that the other woman, the one who had lived
here before, had arranged things just the way she liked them; you could see from
the snapshots that she kept everything in the house just so. And it was hard,
once you had things all organized to suit yourself, to allow anyone to change
them. In the pantry, something like a dustcloth or a rag used to polish silver
fluttered coyly into view and vanished.

"God, I love it here," my husband said, popping the last bite of his sandwich
into his mouth. The boys, too, had nearly finished their lunches.

"I know you do," I replied. "You know, though..."

Here I paused for another sip of coffee, as if an idea were only beginning to
occur to me. My husband watched with an alert look of apprehension growing in
his eyes.

"We could sell this house and buy a different one," I said. "One we would like
even more, maybe even with a swimming pool to use in summer. You'd enjoy that,
wouldn't you?"

He didn't answer, reaching for the knife he had used to cut the boys'
sandwiches. He laid the knife in front of him, frowning at it as if he could not
quite remember what it was for. Just then I noticed that the boys' ears had
fallen off. Lying in pairs on each boy's plate, the ears resembled servings of
strange vegetables.

"Or," I ventured faintly, placatingly, "maybe not."

When I looked back, the boys' ears had returned. My husband took the big, sharp
knife to the sink, cleaned it, and put it away, and a little while later I heard
the three of them laughing together, playing outside in the snow. None of them
had noticed anything wrong.

That was three months ago, and for a while I thought I had gotten a handle on it
all. To go on living here forever, never even thinking of leaving, seemed when
you came down to it really rather a small price to pay, especially since no one
but me ever perceives anything out of the ordinary, and until now nothing has
happened to the baby; whatever is in the house with us seemed to sense, after
the first few small incidents which I considered experimental, a sort of ghostly
testing of limits, that I would not tolerate anything that harmed or frightened
her.

Lately, though, the rules are becoming more stringent. In February, for
instance, when the snow was so deep and the days were so cold that I hated even
to put my face outdoors, I thought about a vacation: somewhere sunny and warm,
with palm trees, for a week. I didn't think it was so much to ask, but that
evening the boys' toes fell off, skittering around their bedroom floor like
wind-up toys until I thought I would lose my mind, and later that night my
husband's face fell into the book he was reading, so that until just before he
left for work the next morning, the whole front of his head resembled an anatomy
chart.

So I have been thinking again about the woman who lived here all those years
ago, wondering if the newspaper stories had it right, absolutely right and
complete. Before she stopped going to church services, did she give up card
parties and parent-teacher conferences, pot luck suppers and Ladies' Auxiliary
meetings? They found her in the house with an axe in her hands, and her family
had been taken to pieces, but in view of recent events I can't help wondering if
the connection is as direct as everyone assumed.

As I assumed, believing her somehow responsible for the things that are
happening to me now. But perhaps I have fallen into the classic trap of blaming
the victim, mistaking effect for cause. I suspect that I have, and into another
trap, too.

This morning when the baby's finger fell off, it came back, but a tiny drop of
blood appeared where the stub had been, red as a warning flag, and later when I
emptied her bath basin into the sink, the water swirled pink on its way down.

I'd been thinking about a trip to the store.