Housekeeping: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
Sylvie realized that her first scheme to keep us together had failed. She had little hope that the hearing—which, according to a letter we received in the mail, would take place in a week’s time—would turn out well. Still, she persisted in her housekeeping. She polished the windows, or those that still had panes, and the others she covered neatly with tape and brown paper. I washed the china and put it back in the cupboard and burned the boxes in the orchard. Sylvie saw the fire and came out with an armful of old magazines that had gathered in the porch. It was difficult to make them burn. Sylvie brought newspapers from the shed and we balled them up and stuck them in among the magazines and lit them with matches, and after a little while the magazines began to swell and warp and to page themselves and finally to ascend the spiraling air. That was a pretty day. The fruit trees were all bare, and their leaves on the ground were as limp and noisome as wet leather. The sky was a strong, plain blue, but the light was cool and indirect and the shadows black and precise. There seemed to be no wind at all. We could watch the heat from the fire pull and tease the air out of shape, stretching the fabric of dimension and repose with its furious ascending. The magazine pages went black, and the print and the dark parts of pictures turned silvery black. Weightless and filigreed, they spiraled to a giddy height, till some current caught them in the upper air, some high wind we could not feel assumed them. Sylvie reached up and caught a flying page on the flat of her hand. She showed it to me—in dark silver, a woman’s face laughing, and below that in large letters, BETTER LATE THAN NEVER! Sylvie tried to wave the page off her hand, and the corners and edges tattered away, leaving just the laughing face, from the brows downward. She clapped her hands in the pillar of heat, and the lady ascended in cinders and motes. “There!” Sylvie said, watching them fly. She wiped her sooty hands on the flanks of her skirt. I saw the fiery transfiguration of a dog, and the bowl he ate from, and a baseball team, and a Chevrolet, and many hundreds of words. It had never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged, though when I thought about it, it seemed obvious. It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words.
We burned papers and magazines until well after dark. We forgot supper. Again and again Sylvie stepped out of the firelight and in a few minutes reappeared with an armful of things to be burned. We had both become conscious of Fingerbone all around us, if not watching, then certainly aware of everything we did. Left to myself I would have shrunk under all this attention. I would have stayed in the house and read with a flashlight under the covers and have ventured out only for Wonder bread and batteries. But Sylvie reacted to her audience with a stage voice and large gestures. She kept saying, “I don’t know why we didn’t do this months ago,” loudly, as if she thought there were listeners beyond the firelight, among the apple trees. Everything to which Sylvie imagined anyone might attach merit she did with enormous diligence and effort. We burned the entire newspaper and magazine collection that night, and soapboxes and shoeboxes, as well as almanacs and Sears catalogues and telephone books, including the current ones. Sylvie burned Not as a Stranger.”That isn’t the sort of thing you should be reading,” she said. “I don’t know how it got in the house!” This was intended to impress the judicial gentlemen in the orchard, so I did not tell her it was a library book.
I loved to watch these bouts of zeal and animation—Sylvie flushed in the firelight, prodding her whole hoard into the quick of the fire, even the National Geographic with a fold-out picture of the Taj Mahal. “We’ll buy some clothes,” she said. “We’ll get you something in very good taste. Maybe a suit. You’ll need it for church, anyway. And we’ll get you a permanent. When you fix yourself up, you make a very nice impression. You really do, Ruthie.” She smiled at me across the fire. I began to imagine that Sylvie and I might still be together after the hearing. I began to think that the will to reform might be taken for reform itself, not because Sylvie could ever deceive anyone, but because her eagerness to save our household might convince them that it should not be violated. Perhaps Sylvie and I would trudge to church through the snow in pillbox hats. We would sit in the last pew nearest the door, and Sylvie would turn so she could stretch her legs. During the sermon she would spindle the program and hum “Holy, holy, holy” and yawn into her glove. No doubt she would attend the PTA with commendable regularity, as well. Already she had sent away for seeds so that she could make flower beds around the house in the spring, and she had put a new yellow curtain in the kitchen. Those days she cast about constantly for ways to conform our lives to the expectations of others, or to what she guessed their expectations might be, and she was full of purpose, which sometimes seemed like hope. “I ordered a turkey for Thanksgiving. I thought we could invite Lucille. And Miss Royce, too.” The fire was by now a heap of smoldering. Sylvie tossed a stick into it, which hit with a pneumatic whoof! and sent embers flying like feathers. In the peripheries of my sight, the shadows jumped skittishly.
“We should go in,” I said. “It’s cold.”
“Yes,” Sylvie said. “You go in and I’ll put some dirt on the ashes.” By meager moonlight and firelight she walked to the shed, and she took one of the shovels that had leaned against the wall until their tips rusted away. I stopped by the door and watched her stoke earth into the embers—one shovelful and a great waft of sparks and light rose in the air. Sylvie was all alight and around her the shadows leaped from behind their trees. A few more shovels of earth and fewer sparks flew and Sylvie stood in a duller light. Another shovelful and Sylvie and the orchard were extinguished. I sat down on the step outside the door to Sylvie’s room. Sylvie did not move. I did not hear her move. I waited to see how long she would be still. I thought the darkness might make Sylvie her old self again, that she might disappear again, to extend my education, or her own. But then she stood the shovel in the ground. I could hear the rasp as the blade went into the earth, and I heard her brush her hands against the skirts of her coat—a gesture that always meant some purposeful act had been completed. She walked toward me where I sat on the step. Since the moon was on the other side of the house, I was in shadow. I thought she might not see me, so I slid to one side, off the edge of the step. Her coat almost brushed me as she passed. I heard her in the kitchen, calling “Ruthie! Ruthie!” and then I heard her steps on the stairs, and I ran into the orchard, so that I would be well hidden when it occurred to her to look out a window. And why did I run into the orchard and squat in the shadows with my hand clapped over my mouth to smother the roar of my breathing? I heard her call Ruthie, Ruthie, Ruthie, in every part of the house, turning all the lights on as she went. Then she came out on the step again and said “Ruthie!” in a loud, intimate, reproving whisper. Of course she could not go calling through the orchards and fields for me in the middle of the night. All Fingerbone would know. High hard laughter rose in my mouth and I could not stifle it all. Sylvie laughed, too. “Come in,” she coaxed. “Come in where it’s warm. I’ll give you something good to eat.” I stepped back and back through the trees and she followed me. She must have heard my steps or the rush of my breath, because wherever I went, she seemed to know. “Come in, come in where it’s warm.” The house stood out beyond the orchard with every one of its windows lighted. It looked large, and foreign, and contained, like a moored ship—a fantastic thing to find in a garden. I could not imagine going into it. Once there was a young girl strolling at night in an orchard. She came to a house she had never seen before, all alight so that through any window she could see curious ornaments and marvelous comforts. A door stood open, so she walked inside. It would be that kind of story, a very melancholy story. Her hair, which was as black as the sky and so long that it swept after her, a wind in the grass . . . Her fingers, which were sky black and so fine and slender that they were only cold touch, like drops of rain . . . Her step, which was so silent that people were surprised when they even thought they heard it . . . She would be transformed by the gross light into a mortal child. And when she s
I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort. I felt giddily free and eager, as you do in dreams, when you suddenly find that you can fly, very easily, and wonder why you have never tried it before. I might have discovered other things. For example, I was hungry enough to begin to learn that hunger has its pleasures, and I was happily at ease in the dark, and in general, I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one. But then the sheriff came. I heard him knock. I heard him shout “Hullo?” After a minute Sylvie walked out of the orchard, quickly, toward the side door, but he came around the house and saw her on the step.
“Evening, Mrs. Fisher.”
“Evening.”
“Everything all right here? I seen all the lights.”
“Everything’s all right.”
“The little girl is fine?”
“Yes, fine.”
“Sleeping?”
“Yes.”
“With her light on?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“I don’t usually see the place all lit up like this, so late at night.”
Silence. Sylvie laughed.
“Could I see the little girl?”
“What?”
“Could I see Ruthie?”
“No.”
“She’s upstairs sleeping?”
“Yes.”
“Then it can’t hurt if I peek in the door.”
“She sleeps very lightly. She’ll wake up.”
“I’ll go up in my stockings, ma’am. It won’t be no bother, I promise.”
Silence.
“Where is she, Mrs. Fisher?”
“Around the house somewhere.”
“Well, I’ll step in and say good evening to her.”
“She’s not inside, she’s outside.”
The sheriff fingered the brim of his hat. “Where?”
“Probably in the orchard. I was looking for her.”
“You can’t find her?”
“She won’t let me. It’s like a game.”
I walked out of the orchard and went and stood on the porch beside Sylvie.
“Ruthie,” the sheriff asked, “would you like to come to my house tonight? You know, I got grandchildren myself. We got lots of room. The missus would be happy for the company. I’m just on my way to Lewiston. They got the Cranshaw boy we been looking for. Stold a car down there . . .”
“I want to stay here.”
“You’re sure, now.”
“Yes.”
The sheriff shifted his considerable weight. “What were you doing out in the cold with no coat on, in the middle of the night, with school tomorrow?”
I said nothing.
“Come on home with me.”
“No!”
“We’re nice folks, you know. My wife’s some cook, I tell you. We got apple pie at our house, Ruthie, the world’s finest, believe me!”
“No.”
“ ‘No, thank you,’ ” Sylvie said.
“No, thank you.”
“Well. All right, then. But I don’t have to tell you to get to bed now, do I?”
“No.”
“All right. But I’m going to be keeping an eye on you. I want you in school tomorrow, you hear?”
“Yes.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
“See you tomorrow,” the sheriff said, and walked to his car. “I want you to be here tomorrow, now. I want to talk to you tomorrow,” he called back to us.
11
The house was as dank as the orchard, and would not burn. Oh, the doilies on the couch blazed a while, and they left smoldering rings on the arms, but Sylvie slapped those out with her hand, saying they were worse than nothing. We had turned out all the lights as soon as the sheriff was gone, and so it seemed as if something fantastic were happening in the house. One moment I had no idea where Sylvie was, and the next moment the parlor curtains were a sheet of flames and Sylvie was kneeling in front of them, dull rose in the light with a black shadow behind her. But the curtains were consumed in moments and fell to the floor and went out. “Damn!” Sylvie said, and we laughed, but as little as we could, because we knew it was a solemn thing to burn a house down. To any other eye we might have seemed wild and pranking, unhuman spirits in the house, to whom lampshades and piano scarves were nothing, but that was only because we were in such haste and breathing was difficult.
Sylvie and I (I think that night we were almost a single person) could not leave that house, which was stashed like a brain, a reliquary, like a brain, its relics to be pawed and sorted and parceled out among the needy and the parsimonious of Fingerbone. Imagine the blank light of Judgment falling on you suddenly. It would be like that. For even things lost in a house abide, like forgotten sorrows and incipient dreams, and many household things are of purely sentimental value, like the dim coil of thick hair, saved from my grandmother’s girlhood, which was kept in a hatbox on top of the wardrobe, along with my mother’s gray purse. In the equal light of disinterested scrutiny such things are not themselves. They are transformed into pure object, and are horrible, and must be burned.
For we had to leave. I could not stay, and Sylvie would not stay without me. Now truly we were cast out to wander, and there was an end to housekeeping. Sylvie set fire to the straw of the broom, and held it blazing to the hem of the pantry curtain, and to the fringe of the rug, so there were two good fires, but then we heard a train whistle, and Sylvie said, “We have to run! Get your coat!” I did, and pulled on my boots. Sylvie put three bags of bread under her arm, and threw the broom at the woodpile, and took my hand, and we ran out the door into the orchard, which was very dark and cold, and across the garden, which was hilled and furrowed and full of the muck and stubble of slain vegetables. Just as we reached the edge of the fallow field that lay between the garden and the tracks, the train passed in front of us and disappeared. “Oh, no!” Sylvie said. The air was sharp and cold and painful to swallow. Then bang! we could hear a window shatter in the house behind us, and bang! another. Someone shouted. We turned around to see, but we saw neither flames nor smoke. “It wasn’t a good enough fire,” Sylvie said. “They’ll find out right away we’re not inside, and they’ll come looking for us. What a mess.”
“We’ll hide in the woods.”
“They’ll use dogs.”
We were still for a while, listening to the shouts and watching the lights come on in the neighboring houses. We could even hear children’s voices, and there was an uproar among the dogs.
“One thing we could do,” Sylvie said. Her voice was low and exulting.
“What?”
“Cross the bridge.”
“Walk.”
“Dogs wouldn’t dare follow, and nobody’d believe them anyway. Nobody’s ever done that. Crossed the bridge. Not that anybody knows of.”
Well.
“We’ve got to go if we’re going,” Sylvie said. “Are you all buttoned up? You should have a hat.” She put her arm around my shoulder and squeezed me. She whispered, “It’s not the worst thing, Ruthie, drifting. You’ll see. You’ll see.”
It was a dark and clouded night, but the tracks led to the lake like a broad path. Syl
“What if a train comes?” I asked.
And she answered, “There’s no train till morning.”
I could feel the bridge rising, and then suddenly a watery wind blew up my legs and billowed my coat, and more than that, there were the sliding and shimmering sounds of the water, quiet sounds but wide—if you dive under water and stay down till your breath gives out, when you come up into the air again, you hear space and distance. It was like that. A wave turned a stick or a stone on some black beach how many miles away, and I heard it at my ear. To be suddenly above the water was a giddy thing, an elation, and made me uncertain of my steps. I had to think of other things. I thought of the house behind me, all turned to fire, and the fire leaping and whirling in its own fierce winds. Imagine the spirit of the house breaking out the windows and knocking down the doors, and all the neighbors astonished at the sovereign ease with which it burst its tomb, broke up its grave. Bang! and the clay that had held the shape of the Chinese jar was shattered, and the jar was a whirl in the air, ascending . . . bang! and the bureau mirror fell in shivers the shape of flame and had nothing to show but fire. Every last thing would turn to flame and ascend, so cleanly would the soul of the house escape, and all Fingerbone would come marveling to see the smoldering place where its foot had last rested.