ORSON SCOTT CARD

VESSEL

PAULIE HARDLY KNEW HIS cousins before that first family reunion in the mountains
of North Carolina, and within about three hours he didn't want to know them any
better. Because his mom was the youngest and she had married late, almost all
the cousins were a lot older than Paulie and he didn't hit it off very well with
the two that were his age, Celie and Deckie.

Celie, the girl cousin, only wanted to talk about her beautiful Arabians and how
much fun she would have had if her mother had let her bring them up into the
mountains, to which Paulie finally said, "It would have been a real hoot to
watch you get knocked out of the saddle by a low branch," whereupon Celie gave
him her best rich-girl freeze-out look and walked away. Paulie couldn't resist
whinnying as she went.

This happened within about fifteen minutes of Paulie's arrival at the mountain
cabin that Aunt Rosie had borrowed from a rich guy in the Virginia Democratic
Party organization who owed her about a thousand big favors, as she liked to
brag. "Let's just say that his road construction business depended on some words
whispered into the right ears."

When she said that, Paulie was close enough to his parents to hear his father
whisper to his mother, "I'll bet the left ears were lying on cheap motel pillows
at the time." Mother jabbed him and Father grinned. Paulie didn't like the
nastiness in Father's smile. It was the look that Grappaw always called
"Mubbie's shit-eatin' smile." Grappaw was Father's father, and the only living
soul who dared to call Father by that stupid baby nickname. In his mind, though,
Paulie liked to think of Father that way. Mubbie Mubbie Mubbie.

Late in the afternoon Uncle Howie and Aunt Sissie showed up, driving a BMW and
laughing about how much it would cost to get rid of the scratches from the
underbrush that crowded the dirt road to the cabin. They always laughed when
they talked about how much things cost; Mubbie said that was because laughing
made people think they didn't care. "But they're always talking about it, you
can bet." It was true. They hadn't been five minutes out of the car before they
were talking about how expensive their trip to Bermuda had been ha-ha-ha and how
much it was costing to put little Deckie into the finest prep school in Atlanta
ha-ha-ha and how the boat salesmen insisted on calling thirty-footers "yachts"
so they could triple the price but you just have to grit your teeth and pay
their thieves' toll ha-ha-ha like the three billy goats gruff ha-ha-ha.

Then they went on about how their two older children were so busy at Harvard and
some Wall Street firm that they just couldn't tear themselves away but they
brought Deckie their little accident ha-ha-ha and they just bet that he and
Paulie would be good friends.

Deckie was suntanned to the edge of skin cancer, so Paulie's first words to him
were, "What, are you trying to be black?"

"I play tennis."

"Under a sunlamp?"

"I tan real dark." Deckie looked faintly bored, as though he had to answer these
stupid questions all the time but he had been raised to be polite.

"Deckie? What's that short for? Or are you named after the floor on a yacht?"
Paulie thought he was joking, like old friends joke with each other, but Deckie
seemed to take umbrage.

"Deckie is short for Derek. My friends call me Deck."

"Are you sure they aren't calling you duck?" Paulie laughed and then wished he
hadn't. Deckie's eyes glazed over and he began looking toward the house. Paulie
didn't want him to walk off the way Celie had. Deckie was two years older than
Paulie, and it was the important two years. Puberty had put about a foot of
height on him and he was lean and athletic and his moves were languid and Paulie
wanted more than anything to be just like Deckie instead of being a
medium-height medium-strong medium-smart freckled twelve-year-old nothing.

So naturally he tried to cover up his stupid duck joke with an even lamer one.
"Have you noticed how everybody in the family has a nickname that ends with ie?"
Paulie said. "They might as well hyphenate that into the family name. You'd be
Deck Ie-Bride, and Celie would be Ceel Ie-Caswell."

Deckie smiled faintly. "And you'd be Paul Ie-Asshole."

Paulie stood there blushing, flustered, until he finally realized that this was
not a friendly joke, this was Deckie letting him know that he didn't exist. So
Paulie turned and walked away from Deckie. Did Celie feel like this when she
walked away from me? If she did then I'm a rotten shit to make somebody else
feel like this. Why can't I just keep my mouth shut? Other people keep their
mouths shut.

Later he saw Deckie and Celie hanging around together, laughing until tears ran
down Celie's face. He knew they were talking about him. Or if they weren't they
might as well be. That was the kind of laughter that never included Paulie, not
at school, not at home, not here at this stupid family reunion in this stupid
forty-room mansion that some stupid rich person called a "cabin." Whenever
people laughed in real friendship, close to each other, bound by affection or
mutual respect or whatever it was, Paulie felt it like a knife in his heart. Not
because he was particularly lonely. He liked being alone and other people made
him nervous so it wasn't like he suffered. It hurt him because it was exactly
the way people were with Mubbie. Nobody liked him and he still kept joking with
them as if they were friends, even Mother, she didn't like him either, any idiot
could see that, they were probably staying together for the sake of "the child,"
which was Paulie of course. Or rather Mother was staying for Paulie's sake, and
Mubbie was staying for Mother's money, which was always useful for tiding him
over between sales jobs, which Mubbie always joked his way into losing after
having piled up an impressive record of lost sales and mishandled contracts. I'm
just like him, Paulie thought. I joke like him, I make enemies like him, people
sneer at me behind my back the way they do with him, only I'm not even studly
enough to get a rich babe like Mom to bail me through all the screw-ups that lie
ahead of me in life.

If I could just learn to keep my mouth shut.

He even tried it for the next couple of hours, being absolutely silent, saying
nothing to anybody. But of course the moment he wanted to shut up, that was when
all the aunts and uncles and the older cousins had to come up and pretend to
care about him. No doubt Mother had noticed that Paulie was by himself and told
them to go include Paulie. People did what Mother said, even her older brothers
and sisters. She just had a way of making suggestions that people started
following before they even had a chance to think about whether they wanted to.
So when Paulie tried to get by with nods and smiles, he kept hearing, "Cat got
your tongue?" and "You can't be that shy" and even "You got something you
shouldn't in your mouth, boy?" to which Paulie thought of about five funny
answers, one of which wasn't even obscene, but at least he managed not to say
them out loud and completely scandalize everybody and make himself the
humiliated goat of the whole reunion, with Mother apologizing to everybody and
saying, "I can assure you he wasn't raised that way," so that everybody
understood that he got his ugly way of talking from Mubbie's side of the family.
Of course, Mother would no doubt end up saying that sometime before the week was
over, but maybe Paulie would get through the first day without having to hear
it.

Dinner was bad. The dining room table was huge, but not big enough for
everybody. Naturally, they had to have Nana, Mother's grandmother, at the table,
even though she was so gaga that she had to be spoonfed some poisonously bland
gruel and never seemed to understand anything going on around her. Why didn't
they send her to the second table with the little children of some of the older
cousins, nasty little brats with no manners at all and a way of whining that
made Paulie want to insert silverware really far down their throats? But no,
that was Paulie's place.

Deckie and Celie were assigned to that table, too, but they ducked off into the
kitchen to eat there, and bad as it was with the brats, Paulie knew it would be
worse in the kitchen where he hadn't been invited. So he had to sit there and
try to listen over the noise of the brats as Uncle Howie at the other table
bragged about Deckie's tennis playing and how he could turn pro if he wanted,
but of course he was going to Harvard and he'd simply use his tennis to
terrorize his employees when he was running some company. "His employees won't
have to try to lose in order to suck up to Deckie," Uncle Howie said. "They'll
have to be such damn good tennis players that they can give him a good game. And
that means his best executives will all be in top physical shape, which keeps
the health costs down."

"Till one of them drops dead of a heart attack on the tennis court and the widow
sues Deckie for making him play."

The whole table fell silent except for one person, who was laughing uproariously
because after all, he made the joke. Mubbie, naturally. Paulie wanted to die.

After the dead silence, punctuated only by the laughter of one social corpse,
Mother turned the conversation back to the achievements of the other children.
It was a cruel thing for her to do, since naturally the others asked her about
what Paulie was doing, and naturally she answered with offhand good humor, "Oh,
you know, he gets along well enough. No psychiatrists' bills yet, and no bail
money, so we're content." The others laughed at this, except Paulie. He wondered
if maybe some of the older cousins had been to shrinks or had to be bailed out
of jail, so that maybe Mom's little joke had a barb to it just like Father's
did, only she knew how to do it subtly, so that even the victims had to laugh.
But most likely nobody in this scrupulously correct family had ever been in a
position where either a shrink or a bail bondsman was required.

Paulie ate as quickly as possible and excused himself and went to the room that
had Deckie's stuff in it too, piled on the other twin bed, but mercifully Deckie
himself was off somewhere else being perfect and Paulie had some peace. His
mother made him bring some books so when he was off by himself she could tell
the others he was reading, and Paulie was smart enough to have packed books he
already read at school so that when the adults asked him what he was reading he
could tell them what the story was about, as if they cared. But the truth was
that Paulie didn't like to read, it all seemed pretty thin to him, he could
think up better stuff just lying around with his eyes closed.

They must have thought he was asleep, must have peered in the door and decided
he was dead to the world, or they probably wouldn't have held their little
confab out in the hall, Mother and her brothers and sister. The subject was
Nana. "She's already got all her money in a trust that we administer," Mother
was saying, "and she can afford a round-the-clock nurse, so what's the problem?"

But the others had all kinds of other arguments; which in Paulie's mind all
boiled down to one: Nana was an embarrassment and as long as she remained in the
Bride mansion in Richmond their family could never return to their rightful
place among the finest families of Virginia. Paulie wanted to speak up and ask
them why they didn't just put her in a bag, weight it down with rocks, and drop
it into the James River, but he didn't. He just listened as every one of Nana's
grandchildren except Mother made it plain that they had less filial affection
than the average housecat. And even Mother, Paulie suspected, was opposing them
because whoever ended up in that mansion would be established for all time as
the leading branch of the family, and Mother couldn't stomach that, even though
by marrying Mubbie she had removed herself from all possibility of occupying
that position herself. At home she talked all the time about how her brothers
and sisters put on airs as if they were all real Brides but the spunk was gone
from the family after Mother and Father died when they went out sailing on the
Chesapeake and got caught in the fringes of a spent hurricane. "Nana is the only
remnant left of the old vigor," she would say.

"Drooling and grunting like a baboon," Father would always answer, then laugh as
Mother ignored him.

"She still understands what's going on around her," Mother would say. "You can
see it in her eyes. She can't talk or eat because Parkinson's has her, but it's
not Alzheimer's, she's sharp as a tack and I have no doubt that if she could
write or speak, she'd wipe my brothers and sisters right out of the will. And
since she can't do that, she does the only thing she can do. She refrains from
dying. I admire her for that."

"I refrain from dying every day," Mubbie would say, every time as if he hoped it
would be funny if he just got to the right number of repetitions. "But you never
admire me for that." At which Mother always changed the subject.

The conversation in the hall went the rounds until finally Aunt Rosie said, "Oh,
never mind. Weedie's never going to bend" -- Weedie was Mother, who preferred
the nickname to Winifred -- "and Nana can't live forever so we'll just go on."

They went away and Paulie wondered how Nana would feel if she could hear the way
they talked about her. Didn't it ever occur to any of them that maybe she would
be just as happy to be rid of them as they would be to be rid of her? Paulie
tried to imagine what it would be like, to be trapped in a body that wouldn't do
anything, to have to have somebody wipe your butt whenever you relieved
yourself, to have to have somebody feed you every bite you ate, and know that
they hated you for not being dead, or at least wished with some impatience that
you'd just get on with it.

And then, drowning in self-pity, Paulie wondered whether it was really different
from his own life. If Nana died, at least it would make a difference to
somebody. They'd get a house. Somebody would move. People would have more money.
But if I died, who'd notice? Hell, I probably wouldn't even notice. Not till it
was time to eat and I couldn't pick up a fork.

It was dark by now but there was a full moon and anyway the parking lot around
the so-called cabin was flooded with light, especially the tennis courts where
the thwang, thunk, thwang, thunk, thwang of a ball being hit and bouncing off
the court and getting hit again rang out in the night's stillness. Paulie got up
from his bed where maybe he had fallen asleep for a while and maybe not. He
walked through the upstairs hall and quietly down the stairs. Adults were
gathered in the living room and the kitchen, talking and sometimes laughing, but
nobody noticed him as he went outside.

He expected to see Deckie and Celie playing tennis, but it was Uncle Howie and
Aunt Sissie, Deckie's parents, playing with intense grimaces on their faces as
if this were the final battle in a lifelong war. They both dripped with sweat
even though the night air here in the Great Smokies was fairly cool.

So where were Deckie and Celie? Not that it mattered. Not that they'd welcome
Paulie's company if he found them. Not that he could even be sure they were
together. He knew Deckie was out somewhere because his stuff was still piled on
his bed. And the sounds of tennis had made Paulie assume he was playing with
Celie. But for all he knew, Celie was in bed with the little girl cousins in the
big attic dormitory. Still, he looked for them because at some level he knew
they would be together, and for some perverse reason he always had to push and
push until he forced people to tell him outright that they didn't want him
around. The school counselor had told him this about himself, but hadn't told
him how to stop doing it. In fact, Paulie was half-convinced that the counselor
had only told him that as an oblique way of letting him know that he, too,
didn't want Paulie around anymore.

There wasn't a sound coming from the pool, though the lights were on there, so
Paulie didn't bother going in. He just walked the path around the chainlink
fence that kept woodland animals from coming to drown in the chlorinated water.
It wasn't till Celie giggled that Paulie realized they were in there after all,
not swimming but sitting on the edge at the shallow end, their feet in the
water, resting on the steps going into the water. Paulie stood and watched them,
knowing that he was invisible to them, knowing he would be invisible even if he
were standing right in front of them, even if he were walking on the damned
water.

Then he realized that Celie was only wearing the bottom part of her two-piece
swimming suit. Paulie's first thought was, How stupid, she's only eleven, she's
got nothing to show anyway. Then he saw that Deckie had his hand inside the
bottom of her swimsuit and he was kissing her shoulder or sucking on it or
something, and that's why Celie was laughing and saying, "Stop it, that
tickles," and then Paulie understood that Deckie liked it that she didn't have
any breasts yet and he knew just what Deckie was and in that moment relief swept
over Paulie like a great cleansing wave because he knew now that despite
Deckie's beautiful tan and beautiful body and charmed life, Deckie was the sick
one and Paulie didn't want to be like him after all.

Only then did it occur to him that even though Celie was laughing, what Deckie
was doing to her was wrong and for Paulie to stand there feeling relieved of all
things was completely selfish and evil of him and he had to do something, he had
to put a stop to it, then and there, if he was any kind of decent person at all,
and if he didn't then he was just as bad as Deckie because he was standing there
watching, wasn't he? And letting it happen.

"Stop it," he said. His voice was a croak and between the crickets and the
breeze in the leaves and the thwang, thunk of the tennis match, they didn't hear
him.

"Get your hands off her, you asshole!" Paulie yelled.

This time they heard him. Celie shrieked and pulled away from Deckie, looking
frantically for the top of her swimsuit, which was floating about ten feet out.
She splashed down the steps into the pool, reaching for it, as Deckie stood up,
looking for Paulie in the darkness outside the chainlink fence. Their eyes met.
Deckie walked around the pool toward him.

"I wasn't doing anything, you queer," said Deckie. "And what were you doing
watching, anyway, you queer?"

The words struck home. Paulie answered not a word. They were face to face now,
through the chain link.

"Nobody will believe you," said Deckie. "And Celie will never admit it happened.
She wanted it, you know. She's the one that took off her top."

"Shut up," said Paulie.

"If you tell anybody, I'll just look disgusted and tell them that you and I
quarreled and you warned me you'd do something to get me in trouble. They'll
believe me. They know you're a weasel. A sneaking weasel queer."

"You can call me whatever you like," said Paulie. "But you and I both know what
you are. And someday you'll mess with somebody's little girl and they won't just
call the cops so your family lawyers can get you off, they'll come after you
with a gun and blow the suntan right off your face."

Paulie said all that, but not until Deckie was on the other side of the pool,
walking into the poolhouse. By then Celie had her top back on and was climbing
out of the water. She didn't even turn to look at him. Paulie had saved her, but
maybe she didn't want to be saved. And even if she did, he knew that she'd never
speak to him again as long as he lived. He'd seen the wrong thing, he'd done the
wrong thing, even when he was trying to do the right thing.

He didn't want to go to bed, not with Deckie lying there in the next bed. He
thought of taking a swim himself, but the thought of getting in the water they
had been using made him feel polluted. He walked away into the brush.

It got dark immediately under the trees, but not so dark he couldn't see the
ground. And soon he found a path that led down to the stream, which made that
curious rushing, plinking sound like some kind of random musical instrument that
was both string and wind. The water was icy cold when he put his bare feet into
it. Cold and pure and numbing and he kept walking upstream.

The trees broke open over the stream and moonlight poured down from almost
straight overhead. The water had carved its way under some of the trees lining
the banks. None had fallen, but many of them cantilevered perilously over the
water, their roots reaching out like some ancient scaffolding, waiting for
somebody to come in and finish building the riverbank. In the spring runoff or
during a storm, all the gaps under the trees would be invisible, but it was the
end of a dryish summer and there wasn't that much water, so the banks were
exposed right down to the base. If I just lay down under one of these trees,
when it rained again the water would rise and lift me up into the roots like a
fish up to an octopus's mouth, and the roots would hold me like an octopus's
arms and I could just lie there and sleep while it sucked the life out of me,
sucked it right out and left me dry, and then I'd dissolve in the water and
float down the river and end up in some reservoir and get filtered out of the
drinking water and end up getting treated with a bunch of sewage or maybe in a
toxic waste dump which pretty much describes my life right now so it wouldn't
make much difference, would it?

The bank was higher on the left side now, and it was rocky, not clay. The stone
was bone dry and shone ghostly white in the moonlight, except for one place,
under a low outcropping, where the rock was glistening wet. When Paulie got
closer he could see that there was water flowing thinly over the face of the
rock. But how could that be, since all the rock above the overhang was dry? Only
when he stooped down did he realize that there wasn't just shadow under that
outcropping of stone, there was a cave, and the water flowed out of it. When the
stream was high, the cave entrance must be completely under water; and the rest
of the time it would be invisible unless you were right down under the overhang,
looking up. Yet it was large enough for a person to slither in.

A person or an animal. A bear? Not hibernation season. A skunk? A porcupine?
Maybe. So what? Paulie imagined coming home with spines in his face or smelling
like a skunk and all he could think was: They'd have to take me away from here.
To the doctor to get the spines out or back home to get the smell of me away
from the others. They'd have to ride with him in the car all the way down the
mountain, smelling him the whole way.

He ducked low, almost getting his face into the water, and soaking his shorts
and the front of his T-shirt. He was right, you could get into the cave, and it
was easier than it looked at first, the cave was bigger inside than it seemed
from the size of the opening. The spring inside it had been eating away at the
rock for a long time. And if there was an animal in here, it kept quiet. Didn't
move, didn't smell. It was dark, and after a while when Paulie's eyes got used
to the darkness it was still pitch black and he couldn't see his hand in front
of his face, so he felt his way inward, inward. Maybe animals didn't use this
cave because the entrance was underwater so much. Bats couldn't use it, that was
for sure. And it would be a lousy place to hibernate since there was no getting
out during the spring flood.

The water from the spring made a pool inside the cave, not a deep one, but pure
and cold. The cleanest water Paulie would ever find in his life, he knew that.
He dipped his hand into the water, lifted it to his mouth, drank. It tasted
sweet and clear. It tasted like cold winter light. He crawled farther into the
cave, looking for a place where he could lie down and dream and remember the
taste of this water straight from the stone heart of the earth.

His hand brushed against something that wasn't rock, and it moved.

Paulie knelt there, hardly daring to breathe. No sound. No alarm. No movement of
any kind. And he could see, just a little bit, just faint dark grays against the
black of the background, and there wasn't any motion, none at all. He reached
out and touched it again, and it moved again, and then tipped over and thudded
softly and now when he handled it he realized it was a shoe, or not really a
shoe but a moccasin, the leather dry and brittle, so it broke a little under his
hand. Something clattered out of the moccasin when he lifted it up and when he
cast around to find whatever it was, he realized it was a lot of things, small
hard things, bones from somebody's feet. There was a dead body here. Someone had
crawled into this cave and died.

And then suddenly in the darkness he could see, only he wasn't seeing anything
that actually lay there. He was seeing an Indian, a youngish man, broad
cheekbones, nearly naked, unarmed, fleeing from men on horseback, men on foot,
running up the stream after him, calling and shouting and now and then
discharging a musket. One of the musket balls took him, right in the back, right
into a lung. Paulie almost felt it, piercing him, throwing him forward. After
that he could hardly breathe, his lung was filling up, he was weak, he couldn't
run anymore, but there was the cave here, and the water was low, and he had
strength enough to climb up under the overhang, taking care not to brush against
it and leave a stain of blood from his back. He would lie here and hide until
the white men went on and he could come back out and go find Iris father, go
find a medicine man who could do something about the blood in his lungs, only
the white men didn't go away, they kept searching for him, he could hear them
outside, and then he realized it didn't matter anyway because he was never going
to leave this cave. If he coughed, he'd give himself away and they'd drag him
out and torture him and kill him. If he didn't cough, he'd drown. He drowned.

Paulie felt the moment of death, not as pain, but as a flash of light that
entered his body through his fingertips and filled him for a moment. Then it
receded, fled into some dark place inside him and lurked there. A death hidden
inside him, the death of a Cherokee who wasn't going to leave his home, wasn't
going to go west to some unknown country just because Andrew Jackson said they
had to go. He held inside him the death of a proud man who wasn't going to leave
his mountains, ever. A man who had, in a way, won his battle.

He knelt there on all fours, gasping. How could he have seen all this? He had
daydreamed for hours on end, and never had he dreamed of Indians; never had the
experiences seemed so real and powerful. The dead Cherokee's life seemed more
vivid, even in the moment of dying, than anything in Paulie's own experience. He
was overwhelmed by it. The Cherokee owned more of his soul, for this moment,
than Paulie did himself. And yet the Cherokee was dead. It wasn't a ghost here,
just bones. And it hadn't possessed Paulie -- he was still himself, still the
bland nondescript nothing he had always been, except that he remembered dying,
remembered drowning on his own blood rather than coughing and letting his
enemies have the satisfaction of finding him. They would always think he got
away. They would always think they had failed. It was a victory, and that was an
unfamiliar taste in Paulie's mouth.

He stretched himself out beside the skeleton of the Indian, not seeing it, but
knowing where the bones must be, the long bones of the arms, the ladder of the
ribs, the vertebrae jumbled in a row, the cartilage that once connected them
gone, dissolved and washed out into the stream many years ago.

And as Paulie lay there another image crept into his mind. Another person
splashing through the stream, but it wasn't a sunny day this time, it was
raining, it was bitterly cold. The leaves were off the trees, and behind him he
could hear the baying of hounds. Could they follow his scent in the rain?
Through the stream? How could they? Yet they came on, closer and closer, and he
could hear the shouts of the men. "She went this way!"

She. Now Paulie became aware of the shape of the body he wore in this memory. A
woman, young, her body sensitive to the chafing of the cloth across her small
young breasts. And now he knew what she was fleeing from. The master wouldn't
leave her alone. He came at her so often it hurt, and the overseer came after
him as soon as he was gone, until finally she couldn't stand it, she ran away,
and when they found her they'd whip her and if she didn't die from the lash then
as soon as she was half-healed they'd come at her again, only this time she'd be
kept chained and locked up and she wasn't going back, never, no matter what.

As she ran up the stream she saw the outcropping of rock and happened to stumble
just then and splash on all fours into the icy river and then she looked up and
saw that there was a cave and almost without thinking she climbed up into it and
lay there shivering with the bitter cold, hardly daring to move, fearful that
the chattering of her teeth would give her away. She slid farther up into the
cave and then her hand found the half-decomposed leg of someone who had died in
that cave and she shrieked in spite of herself and the men outside heard her but
they didn't know where the shriek came from. They knew she was close but they
couldn't find her and the dogs couldn't catch her scent so she lay there by the
corpse of the dead Indian and shivered and prayed that the spirit of the dead
would leave her alone, she didn't mean to bother him, she'd go away as soon as
she could. In the meantime, she got more and more numb from the cold, and
despite her terror at every shout she heard from the men outside, their voices
got dimmer and dimmer until all she could hear was the rushing of the water and
she got sleepy and closed her eyes and slept as the stream outside rose up and
sealed the entrance of the cave and her breathing drew the last oxygen out of
the air so that she was dead before the cold could kill her.

As before, the moment of her death came into Paulie's fingers like an infusion
of light; as before, the light filled him, then receded to hide within him; as
before, her last memories were more vivid in his mind than anything he had ever
experienced himself.

I should never have drunk the water in this cave, thought Paulie. I've taken
death inside me. It's a magic place, a terrible place, and now I'm filled with
death. What am I supposed to do with this? How am I supposed to use the things I
saw and felt and heard tonight? There's no lesson in this -- this has nothing to
do with my life, nothing to teach me. All that's different is that I know what
it feels like to die. And I know that there are some people whose lives were
worse than mine. Only maybe that's not even true, because at least they
accomplished something by dying in this cave. They had some kind of small
victory, and it's damn sure I've never had anything like that in my life. Since
I'm the source of all my own problems, blundering and babbling my way through
the world, who can I run away from in order to get free? This girl, this man who
died here, they were lucky -- they knew who their enemies were, and even if they
died doing it, at least they got away.

He must have slept, because when he woke he was aware of aches and pains all
over his body from lying on stone, from sleeping in the cool damp air of the
cave. Fearless now of the dead, he felt around until he had traced the
Cherokee's whole skeleton, and then, crawled farther in until he found the bones
of the girl, the crumbling fabric of her cotton dress. He took a scrap of the
dress with him, and a piece of the brittle leather of the Cherokee's moccasin.
He put them in his pocket and crawled back to the entrance of the cave. Then he
slid down, soaking his pants and shirt again.

The moon was low but it didn't matter, dawn was coming and there was enough
light to find his way home, splashing through the stream until he came to the
place where he had left his shoes. He wondered if his parents had even noticed
he was gone. Probably not. It was damn sure Deckie wouldn't have told them he
was missing. If Deckie even went to the room. Still, if they did notice he was
gone, there might be some kind of uproar. He'd have to tell them where he was
and what he was doing and why his feet and shirt and shorts were wet. He was
still trying to think of some kind of lie when he came into the cabin, through
the back door because there was a light on in the living room and maybe he could
sneak into bed.

But no, there was someone in the kitchen, too, though the light was off. "Who's
there?"

Reluctantly Paulie leaned into the kitchen door and saw, to his relief, that it
was the nurse who looked after Nana. "I'm making her breakfast," the woman said,
"but she's fretful. She moans when she's like that, unless somebody sits there
with her, and I can't sit there with her and make her mush too, so would you
mind since you're up anyway, would you mind just going in and sitting with her
so she doesn't wake everybody up?"

The nurse was all right. The nurse wouldn't get him in trouble. He could hear
Nana moaning from the main floor bedroom that had been given over to her so
nobody had to carry her frail old body up and down the stairs. The light was on
in Nana's room and she was sitting up in her wheelchair, the strap around her
ribs so she didn't fall over when the trembling became too strong. Paulie could
see the cot where the nurse slept. It was silly, really -- the nurse was a
large, big-boned woman and the cot must barely hold her, not even room enough to
roll over without falling out of bed. While tiny Nana had slept in a huge
kingsize bed. It would never have occurred to them, though, that Nana should get
the cot. The nurse was of the serving class.

I am of the serving class, too, thought Paulie. Because I have more of my
father's blood than my mother's. I don't belong among the rich people, except to
wait on them. That's why I never feel like I'm one of them. Just like Father
never belongs. We should be their chauffeurs and yard boys and butlers and
whatever. We should wait on them and take their orders in restaurants. We should
run their errands and file their correspondence. We all know it, even though we
can't say it. Mother married down, and gave birth down, too. I should have been
on a cot in someone's room, waiting for them to wake up so I could rush down and
make their breakfast and carry it up to them. That's how the world is supposed
to work. The nurse understands that. That's why she knew she could ask me to
help her. Because this is who I really am;

Nana looked at him and moaned insistently. He walked to her, not knowing what
she wanted or even if she wanted anything. Her eyes pierced him, sharp and
unyielding. Oh, she wants something all right. What?

She looked up at him and started trying to raise her hands, but they trembled so
much that she could hardly raise them. Still, it seemed clear enough that she
was reaching out to him, staring into his eyes. So he held out his hands to her.

Her hands smacked against one of his. She could no more take hold of him than
fly, so he took hold of her, one of her hands in both of his, and at once the
trembling stopped, the effort stopped, and the unheld hand fell back into her
lap on the wheelchair. "The nurse is fixing your breakfast," Paulie said lamely.

But she didn't answer. She just looked at him and smiled and then, suddenly, he
felt that light that was hidden within him stir, he felt the pain in his back
again from the musket ball, and now the death of the Cherokee swelled within him
and filled him for a moment with light. And then, just as quickly, it flowed out
of him, down through his fingertips just the way it had come. Flowed out of him
and into her. Her face brightened, she dropped her head back, and as the last of
the Cherokee's deathlight left him, she let out a final groan of air and died,
her head flopped back and her mouth and eyes wide open.

Paulie knew at once what had happened. He had killed her. He had carried death
out of the cave with him and it had flowed out of his hands and into her and she
was dead and he did it. He sank to the floor in front of her and the weariness
and pain of last night and this morning, the fear and horror of the two long-ago
deaths that he had witnessed -- no, experienced -- and finally the enormity of
what he had done to his greatgrandmother, all of this overwhelmed him and when
the nurse came into the room she found him crying silently on the floor. At once
she took the old woman's pulse, then unstrapped her, lifted her out of the
chair, and laid her on the bed, then covered her up to her neck. "You just stay
there, son," she said to him, and he did, crying quietly while she went back to
the kitchen and rinsed the dishes. It occurred to him to wonder that her
response to death was not to waken everybody but rather to wash up after an
uneaten breakfast. Then he realized: That's what the serving class is for, to
clean up, wash up, hide everything ugly and unpleasant.

Hide everything ugly and unpleasant.

I didn't kill her, or if I did, I didn't mean to. And besides she wanted it. I
think she saw the death in me and reached for it. I brought her what she
couldn't get any other way, release from her family, from her body, from her
memories of life unmatched by any power to live. Nobody will be sorry to see her
dead, not really. Somebody can move into the Richmond mansion again and become
the main bloodline of the Brides. The nurse will get another job and everything
will be fine. So why can't I stop crying?

He hadn't stopped crying when the nurse went to waken Mother even the nurse knew
that it was Mother who had to be told first. And even though she held him and
murmured to him, "Who could have guessed you'd be so tenderhearted," he couldn't
stop crying, until finally he was shaking like the girl in the cave, shivering
uncontrollably. I have another death in me, he thought. It's dangerous to come
near me, there's another death in my fingers, the cold death of a slavegirl
waiting in some cave in my heart. Don't come near me.

Mother and Father left that morning, to take him home and make funeral
arrangements in Richmond. Others would take care of arranging for the ambulance
and the doctor and the death certificate. Others would dress the corpse. Mother
and Father had to take their son who, after all, had found the body. No one ever
asked him what he was doing up at that hour, or where he had spent the night,
and if anyone noticed that his shirt and pants were damp they never asked him
about it. They just packed up his stuff while he sat, tearless now, on the sofa
in the parlor, waiting to be taken away from this place, from the old lady who
had drawn death out of his fingers, from the people who had jockeyed for
position as they waited years for her to die, and from the children who played
dark ugly games with each other by the swimming pool when no adult could see.

At last all the preparations were done, the car brought round, the bags loaded.
Mother came and tenderly led him out onto the porch, down the steps, toward the
car. "It was so awful for you to find her like that," she said to him, as if
Nana had done something embarrassing instead of just dying.

"I don't know why I got so upset," said Paulie. "I'm sorry."

"We would have had to leave anyway," said Mubbie, holding the door open for him.
"Even the Brides can't keep a family reunion going when somebody just died."

Mother glared at him over Paulie's head. He didn't even have to look up to see
it. He knew it from the smirk on Mubbie's face.

"Paulie!" cried a voice. Paulie knew as he turned that it was Deckie, though it
was unbelievable that the older boy would seek a confrontation right here, right
now, in front of everybody.

"Paulie!" Deckie called again. He ran until he stopped right in front of Paulie,
looking down at him, his face a mask of commiseration and kind regard. Paulie
wanted to hit him, to knock the smile off his face, but of course if he tried to
throw a punch Deckie would no doubt prove that he had taken five-years of boxing
or tae kwan do or something and humiliate Paulie yet again.

"Celie and I were worried about you," Deckie said. And then, in a whisper, he
added, "We wondered if you stripped off the old lady's clothes so you could look
at her naked, too."

The enormity of the accusation turned Paulie's seething anger into hot rage. And
in that moment he felt the death stir within him, the light of it pour out into
his body, filling him with dangerous light, right to the fingertips. He felt the
terrible fury of the helpless slave girl, raped again and again, her
determination to die rather than endure it anymore. He knew that all he had to
do was reach out and touch Deckie and the slavegirl's death would flow into him,
so that in his last moments he would feel what a violated child felt like. It
was the perfect death for him, true justice. There were a dozen adults gathered
around, watching. They would all agree that Paulie hadn't done anything.

Deckie smiled nastily and whispered, "Bet you play with yourself for a year
remembering me and Celie." Then he thrust out his hand and loudly said, "You're
a good cousin and I'm glad Nana's last moments were with you, Paulie. Let's
shake on it!"

What Deckie meant to do was to force Paulie to shake his hand, to humiliate
himself and accept Deckie's dominance forever. What he couldn't know was that he
was almost begging Paulie to kill him with a single touch. Death seeped out of
Paulie, reaching for Deckie. If I just reach out ....

"Shake his hand, for heaven's sake, Paulie," said Mother.

No, thought Paulie. Deckie is slime but if they killed every asshole in the
world who'd be left to answer the phones? And with that thought he turned his
back and got into the car.

"Paulie," said Mother. "I can't believe..."

"Let's go," said Father from the driver's seat.

Mother, realizing that Father was right and there shouldn't be a scene, slid
into the front seat and closed the door. As they drove away she said, "Paulie,
the trauma you've been through doesn't mean you can't be courteous to your own
cousin. Maybe if you accepted other people's overtures of friendship you
wouldn't be alone so much."

She went on like that for a while but Paulie didn't care. He was trying to think
of why it was he didn't kill Deckie when he had the chance. Was he afraid to do
it? Or was he afraid of something much worse, afraid that Deckie was right and
Paulie had enjoyed watching, afraid that he might be just as evil in his own
heart as Deckie was? Deckie should be dead, not Nana. Deckie should have been
the one whose body shook so much he couldn't stand up or touch anybody. How long
would Celie have sat still if Deckie had pawed at her with quivering hands the
way that Nana reached out to me? God afflicts all the wrong people.

When they got home they treated Paulie with an exaggerated concern that was
tinged with disdain. He could feel their contempt for his weakness in everything
they said and did. They were ashamed that he was their son and not Deckie. If
they only knew.

But maybe it wouldn't make any difference if they knew. Tanned athletic boys
must sow their wild oats. They live by different rules, and if you have such a
one as your own child, you forgive him everything, while if you have a child
like Paulie, basic and ordinary and forgettable, you have to work all your life
just to forgive him for that one thing, for being only himself and not something
wonderful.

Mother and Mubbie didn't make him go to the funeral -- he didn't even have to
plead with them. And in later years, as the family reunion became an annual
event, they didn't argue with him very hard before giving in and letting him
stay home. Paulie at first suspected and then became quite sure that they were
much happier leaving him at home because without him there, they could pretend
that they were proud of him. They weren't forced to compare him quite so
immediately with the ever taller, ever handsomer, ever more accomplished Deckie.

When they came home, Paulie would leave the room whenever they started going on
about Sissie's and Howie's boy. He saw them cast knowing looks at each other,
and Mother even said to him once, "Paulie, you shouldn't compare yourself to
Deckie that way, there's no need for you to feel bad about his accomplishments.
You'll have accomplishments of your own someday." It never occurred to her that
by saying this, she swept away all the small triumphs of his life so far.

There were times in the years to come when Paulie doubted the reality of his
memory of that family reunion. The light hiding within him stayed dark for weeks
and months on end. The memory of the swimming pool faded; so did the memory of
Nana's feebly grasping hands. So, even, did the memory of the death of the
Cherokee and the runaway slave. But then one day he would move something in his
drawer and see the envelope in which he kept the tattered fragment of a
threadbare dress and the scrap of an ancient moccasin, and it would flood back
to him, right clown to the smell of the cave, the taste of the water, the feel
of the bones under his hand.

At other times he would remember because someone would provoke him, would do
something so awful that it filled him with fury and suddenly he felt the death
rising in him. But he calmed himself at once, every time, calmed himself and
walked away. I didn't kill Deckie that day. Why should I kill this asshole now?
Then he would go off and forget, surprisingly soon, that he had the power to
kill. Forget until the next time he saw the envelope, or the next time he was
swept by rage.

He never saw Deckie again. Or Celie. Or any of his aunts and uncles or cousins.
As far as he was concerned he had no family beyond Mother and Mubbie. It was not
that he hated his relatives-- except for Deckie he didn't think they were
particularly evil. He learned soon enough that his family was, in a way, pretty
ordinary. There was money, which complicated things, but Paulie knew that people
without money still found reasons to hate their relatives and carry feuds with
them from generation to generation. The money just meant you drove better cars
through all the misery. No, Paulie's kinfolk weren't so awful, really. He just
didn't need to see them. He'd already learned everything they had to teach him.
One family reunion was enough for him.