Death Benefits

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Death Benefits - book excerpt

Chapter 1

The children had been locked in the cellar before and knew He would release them eventually, though not without cost. The first time, several years ago, Thane had been terrified of the prehensile dark and the smells and the sudden knock against things, and when the light came on and the door unlocked, he turned wildly and dashed to the top of the steps and threw open the door only to have it slam back in his face. He was cast back upon Gari and Yardena, and all three fell down the stairs in a tumble of twisted arms, legs, bumps, and scratches. The next time, Thane restrained his terror, and Barengaria, being the oldest, opened the door cautiously. It slammed back, catching her fingers against the jamb.

"Oh, looky here. There's been an accident. Ha-ha," He said, when He opened the door. "Barengaria, you must be more careful."

Her fingernails turned black. They lifted off like the tin lid on a boiling pot. No one knew she ran a high fever until she fell down one morning in Homeroom, and, in attempting to revive her, Mrs. Decker removed Berengaria’s hand from her pocket and saw the mountainous fingernails, one of which she had just inadvertently ripped off. It oozed a bloody black and yellow liquid. She called the principal. When Mr. Skilling could find no home phone number listed for Barengaria, he called Thane and Yardena out of their classes to accompany her to the school Nurse’s Room.

"How did this happen?" the nurse asked kindly.

"It was an accident," said Yardena. "She has to be more careful."

"But why hasn't it been treated?"

Yardena and Thane stood silent. Mr. Skilling winked at the nurse and later explained that the family seemed particularly impoverished though they lived in that big, gray, clapboard house on Lane End, the one with the rotting boathouse. Surely she noticed the condition of their clothes. The children's mother died, he said, and the father -- stepfather to all three, actually -- seems a bit of a recluse. No phone listed. Can you imagine? No phone in this day and age.

Since the nurse could not imagine it and did not trust the younger children to convey the written instructions on treating Barengaria's hand to their father, she drove them home herself at the end of her shift. It was not out of her way. They climbed the decaying wooden steps to the front porch and stood before the door while the nurse rang the bell and rang the bell.

"When does your father get home from work?" she said.

There was no answer.

"Your father's not at home," she said.

The children stood silently while she rang the bell again. Standing on the exposed porch, she was aware of the wind.

"How will you get in?"

The sullen children did not respond. They stood on the porch in the late afternoon while the evening approached from the woods behind them. Birds twittered and screamed in the dilapidating gum tree that sullied the yard.

"Do you have a key?"

"He's not at home," said Thane.

"You can't come in," Yardena added.

High on the hill behind the house, a woodpecker rattled, was still, then rattled again.

The nurse looked at them with sudden distaste. The cleanest thing about the thin girl with strikes of dirty yellow hair and hollow cheeks was the startling white dressing on her hand. The boy was shorter, ruddier, browner, or perhaps simply dirtier, surely more unkempt. And the sober little girl with the round face and olive skin was the skinniest and most disheveled of all.

Sour children, damaged by poverty, neglect, and despair. Grim, latchkey children, closed to her, to any sympathy, permanently resistant to tenderness. Urchins, that's what they were. Scruffy shoes. Cloth coats, frayed at collar and cuff. They needed to be washed and pressed, fed something more than carbohydrates. But since they weren't her children, she turned to go. There were limits even to her professional kindness.

"Make sure your father gets that prescription," she said to Barengaria. "I'll pray for you."

Yardena lifted her gypsy face.

"What for?" she said.

"Thank you for driving us home," said Barengaria, aware that thanks were due for the nurse's irregular generosity.

But the nurse had already abandoned them.

They entered the house that day and hung their coats in the hall closet. They found Him in the kitchen with His back to the stove where their dinner eggs were boiling now so they would be cold by dinnertime. The lamp above the table funneled light on His work and the knife in His hand. He was shaping or shredding a piece of wood -- a bird, wings extended, talons holding a stick and a sheaf of arrows. The slivers fell in a small heap of white pine curls and crumbs on the paper spread at His feet.

"Ha-haaaaa, the children!" He brayed, His immense face tilting up as He sat back in the chair. His fists, closed on the knife and the worked wood, rested on the arms of the chair. The blade glinted.

"What do you have there? Let me see it."

He meant the square of paper. She held it out to Him. Six inches separated His steady hand from the trembling sheet. Barengaria slowly circled to His left, away from the knife, and lay the paper in His palm.

"What's this? Well, if it isn't a pre(fucking)scription. Salves and balms, is it? Soaking and washing? Change the bandage? No, I think not," He said, rocking forward, rising, crumpling the prescription, dropping it on the pile at His feet. "Let me help you with that hand."

He lifted the knife as the children scudded silently and quickly to the basement door -- open, available. They disappeared beneath the house.

Chapter 2

Always after that, the front door was bolted. But the storm door was open, and they knew then the basement was theirs. Some jolly malice, dangerous, powerful, and quite beyond their understanding of cause and effect, threatened their entrance through the front door. The children thought it had to do with the size of people: the larger they were, the louder they laughed. They respected seriousness, even severity, in a face -- they were in school, after all -- but smiles and laughter were unpredictable. Happy people stopped laughing as they approached.

When the children first realized they were banished to the basement, they were terrified of the dark and the rats He said lived there and ate children's toes and fingers. But they soon grew accustomed to the gloom and never heard scurrying. They heard only the distant almost musical squeak of the floorboards as He walked from room to room in the world above them.

Half the basement was dark and half was gloomy. One wall was divided into bins and slatted lockers each with its wooden door sealed with hasp and lock. The opposite wall had pigeon-holes and shelves made of rough-hewn planking alive with splinters that reached out and tugged at their clothes, a workbench with cold tools mounted on pegboard, and windows that looked out under the front porch to latticework designed to keep small animals from nesting under the house.

Even on bright summer afternoons, only gray light filtered through the lattice and under the porch to leak through the window wells where bottles stood, shoulders defined by dust and capped in black. There were no colors in the basement, only various shades of gray, lowlighted by shine from the window and fading to dark toward the wall.

The basement smelled of cut wood, old clothes moldering on rusty wire hangers, and rabbit droppings though no rabbits had ever been there. The floor near the oil burner was stained with slick and smelled of ancient sawdust soaked in oil. After great rains, water rose through cracks in the floor.

For years now, it seemed, they came from school through the woods to the basement. They stayed in the basement until dark. Sometime after dark the light in the basement turned on and the door unlocked, a signal that they were allowed into the kitchen where a naked twenty-five watt bulb cast a dull light above the sticky table. There was not much to eat and it was cold, but they ate quick and quiet before they filed carefully up narrow back stairs that rose steeply to one of the unfinished attics on the third floor that served as their communal bedroom.

A long, rectangular space ran beneath the mansard along the back of the house with a single light bulb suspended from a twisted wire in the ceiling. The left-hand wall was straight and unbroken, but the wall on the right under the mansard slanted in to give the room the feeling of a corridor or a tunnel. Barengaria and Yardena slept beneath the gables cut into the mansard. Thane slept under the window at the end that looked out onto a spit of land and the dark sea beyond. No light but moonlight illumined the treetops outside or glinted off the aluminum shell of the Airstream trailer abandoned in the yard.

No interior walls disturbed the open space. Halfway down on the left, a toilet with a cracked wooden seat and a stained porcelain washbowl stood in the center of the passageway. It was one of the shocks of going to school to discover that bathrooms were segregated by gender and toilets were set in stalls. They washed in the cold-water sink with a sliver of soap. They slept on squeaky iron cots once painted silver with "U. S. Army" embossed on the frame.

The two ends of their world were joined by a deciduous wood scarred with low guggling streams in steep folds of earth. Year after year, on the way to school and back, Yardena watched the woods change from gloomy green to brown and stark. The autumn now burned the leaves the wind drove down in showers that left the trees naked to the cold.

Some trees in their yard were naked winter and summer. He spilled chemicals around their trunks. The trees died. All but the strongest boughs cracked off in various winds that blew in from the sea and left slick trunks, white as bone, and irregularly covered with bark alive with vermin. Woodpeckers loved them. Their hollow knocking could be heard as long as the light lasted. Squirrels housed in the rotted caves where limbs once were. These trees did not sway in the wind. Yardena pitied them.

Once in the basement, the children always did the same thing. Barengaria settled herself primly on a sawhorse, ankles and knees together, back straight, as she had seen in a fogged film the gym teacher had shown during Health class. Yardena copied her sister silently while Thane sprawled knee-splayed on a stool. They held hands for a moment in imitation of an event Barengaria imperfectly remembered as something she used to do in the days before her mother married Him.

They always began with history. This comfortable ceremony provided a talisman for their pain and a doorway into peace. They no longer heard the words, which they had long since memorized, but they bathed in the tone and timbre of each other's voice, the rise and rhythm of familiar sentences.

Barengaria began. “My father, Eric d'Serafini, was a professor of Romance languages at Harvard University in Boston. He was the son of Alphonse d'Serafini, a member of the Patriarca family of Providence, Rhode Island, and Angelica de la Cruz of Buffalo, New York. He was one of seven children -- four boys and three girls -- whose names were Dante, Gina, Beatrice, Ricardo, Antonio, and Consuelo. I don't know who they married, where they live, or whether they have children who would be my cousins. My father was a good man but not very athletic. Mommy said his father bought him a chair. He died when I was a baby."