FSF, January-February 2010 Read online

  They found they had things in common. Rupert had a dry sense of humor and a bitter wit. Cinderella had dealt with worse and knew what was bitter and what was wit and when to tell the difference. It wasn't hard for the two cast-off exiles to become friends.

  When Charles was murdered, Rupert came to Cinderella before dawn.

  “Charming is dead.” Rupert stood in the doorway staring up at her.

  “Did you kill him?”

  “I did not,” he said indignantly. “But I'll be blamed for it. I'm getting out while I can and before the war starts. I don't know where I'll be going.”

  “I see.” Cinderella was not surprised by his leaving. She was surprised at how it made her sad.

  “Come with me.” Rupert started to say more, closed his mouth, and waited.

  Go with him? Travel with a little girl and a dwarf? It was likely Rupert had enough means to take care of them for at least a little while. She guessed she knew that much about him. She liked him well enough. Besides, no doubt that woman would eventually come around to get rid of any possible claimant to the throne. Charlena's ancestry was well known.

  “I have to pack.”

  Between the two of them, they made small bundles of needful things that either could carry. As they set out, Cinderella carrying the sleeping Charlena and following a grim and silent Rupert, she found herself smiling. Rupert was a dwarf, grumpy, and obviously still obsessed with that woman. At the same time, he had come to save them at great risk to himself: a woman and a child were additional burdens on top of being a dwarf on the run. Maybe he would leave if things got too tough. Maybe he wanted her to sleep with him. Maybe she should. Maybe she would. There were worse fates.

  But for the moment it seemed a good friend was helping her escape to the hope of a new life.

  That's about as good as it gets.

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  * * *

  Short Story: THE LATE NIGHT TRAIN

  by Kate Wilhelm

  In our sixtieth anniversary issue, Kate Wilhelm explored some family relations in “Shadows on the Wall of the Cave.” Her new story follows suit with a very dark examination of matters both familial and fantastic.

  I am sitting at the kitchen table in my parents’ house with an open book, but I am not even trying to read the words. It is too cold in my upstairs room to take refuge there. I never gave a thought to how small the house is when I was growing up in it. Four downstairs rooms: kitchen, dining room, living room, a short hall with the bath and staircase on one side and my dad's room on the other. And two unheated bedrooms upstairs. My sister and I shared one of them, my brother had the other. It seemed room enough then.

  When I plugged in a space heater in my room, it threw a circuit breaker and I don't dare try that again. There is no escape from a blaring television announcer, shouts, screams, cheers, commercials: a basketball game. Dad likes to watch basketball, and Mom is pretending an interest. They both have significant hearing loss and probably don't realize how painfully loud the sound is. I should buy some ear plugs, I think, and wonder why I didn't do it before. For upstairs, earmuffs would be more appropriate.

  I am trying to resolve our dilemma, to all appearances one that has already solidified beyond resolution during the past seven months, since Dad's stroke in June. Now he is in a wheelchair, and my mother and I are in straitjackets. Also, I am trying to decipher the curious message my own brain is sending me by way of a train whistle.

  The first time I heard the train whistle in the night, I paid little attention, simply rolled over, pulled the cover up, and returned to sleep. I gave it scant thought the following day. Just a fluke of a wind current carrying sound abnormally, I decided. I knew no train track was within miles, far too distant to hear the trains.

  The next time I heard it, a week or two later, I sat straight up in bed. There was a line of light showing under my door from the downstairs hall. It was three in the morning and it was very cold in my room. As children we left the door open for heat from below to drift in, but when Eleanor reached puberty, she kept it closed, because Roger's room was right across the hall. Now I keep it closed at night. If Dad got up and saw a light upstairs, it would set him off in a rage.

  The whistle sounded, drew closer, faded away. In the silence that followed, I heard Dad going to the bathroom. His wheelchair makes a squeal at random intervals. He claimed not to hear it, and my mother agreed. If he said black was white, she would nod.

  I must have been dreaming, I thought uneasily, and translated a squeal to the sound of a train whistle. I knew it would be a long time before I could go back to sleep; I was too sore and it had been hours since a hot bath had relaxed my muscles enough to allow sleep in the first place. I had spent much of the day in the orchard, trying to rake up the fallen apples. Dad had insisted it had to be done.

  By way of mild protest, I had said, “I thought Mr. Garry cleaned it up when he did his.”

  “They had a falling out,” Mom said, even as Dad started one of his ranting rages, cursing their neighbor Garry for being nosy and insolent, and me for being too lazy to earn my keep.

  “Let it go,” I ordered myself in bed, wide awake, listening for the squeal on his return to bed, thinking of how my feelings for him had changed. What had been fear had become simple hatred.

  All through childhood and adolescence, I had feared him, not because he was physically abusive, but for his rages that came with ferocity and unpredictability over major things, like not coming straight home from school, to minor ones, like leaving a light on at night. At those times he had yelled obscenities, cursed all three children and his wife, the world and everyone in it. He had knocked things off tables, flung chairs over, broken whatever was within reach.

  As much as I feared the rages, I came to dread even more his cutting, mind-numbing sarcasm and insults. “You fat pig, the boys must line up just to get a smile from someone as fat and ugly as you are.” Eleanor would run from the room in tears. It wasn't just her. He had a trigger for each of us. My brother fled when he was sixteen, and Eleanor when she was seventeen. I left the day after graduation, a week before my eighteenth birthday, and although I have visited frequently, I have not lived here since then until now.

  At twelve, when Eleanor left, I was too young to run away, and I couldn't understand then why Mom stayed, but now at thirty, I well understand that she no longer has the choices she might once have had. She is as stuck as I am.

  The crazy train whistle, I remind myself, and try to remember the circumstances the next time. Before Christmas, and bitterly cold, with snow on the ground and frost-decorated windows. I had to go shopping that day, and was waiting for Mom to add items to my list. Since her heart attack a few years ago, she can't tolerate extremely cold weather and has given up leaving the house until spring.

  “Get some dormant oil spray for the trees,” Dad ordered.

  “Dad, for heaven's sake, let Mr. Garry do them the way he's always done.”

  Mr. Garry has tractors, motorized everything, farm hands to do the chores, and he had included Dad's one and a half acres along with his own forty- or fifty-acre orchard. I thought it was simple generosity for a long time, then came to realize he was also protecting his trees by keeping disease and insect pests out of Dad's adjoining grove.

  “He puts a foot on my ground, I'll shoot him,” Dad said. “You hear me, you let him in here, he's dead.” He began to curse and yell and Mom gave me a warning look.

  “I added it to the list,” Mom said, almost inaudibly. It would have made little difference if she had screamed the words; his voice filled the house.

  I took the list from my mother, glanced at it, and waited for her to count out money. It might be enough, or not.

  “And bring me the receipts,” Dad yelled. “All the change and the receipts. You hear me? I want to see it all! And it better be right. Stupid, you think I don't notice five dollars missing, or three, but I do, and I want the change, all of it.”

  I su
ppose that was what did it that day. I had been making up the slight difference with my own money week after week, watching my savings account erode with the inevitability of a glacier flowing into the sea.

  “I haven't been stealing your money!” I yelled back at him. “And what's more I don't intend to get a spray for those damn trees! If Mr. Garry doesn't do them, they won't get done. I'm not going to try to spray an acre and a half of trees with a five-gallon sprayer in this weather, or in any weather! Sell the trees to Garry and be done with them.”

  I turned and walked from the room, shaking. I never had talked back to him before.

  “You listen to me, stupid! Don't you turn your back on me when I'm speaking to you! Come back here! Or get your ass out of my house and stay out! Stupid! Thief! Lying stupid thief!”

  He was screaming obscenities when I left the house. Briefly I worried about my mother having to listen, but not for long. She had put up with him all my life, and I had no doubt for all her married life. I could still remember nightmarish road trips and my terror that he would hit someone, kill us all, or have a stroke in his fury, and her silence. Now I wished he would get angry enough to bring on another stroke, this time a fatal one.

  That is the clue, I think at the table, the whistle came after an especially ugly day or two. Something has to break this impasse. I have to find a way to talk them into selling the property and moving to an assisted-living retirement community. With his meager pension, Social Security, and the proceeds of a sale, they could do it, just barely. But it would be better than living out here miles from the nearest village, with one in a wheelchair and the other too weak to push the chair or help him in or out of it.

  Her heart attack happened a few months after he retired, not a voluntary retirement, I suspect, and during those months she dropped a circle of friends. When I asked why she never saw any of them any longer, she said, “Oh, well, you know, when you get older your interests change.” He drove them off, the way he drove off Mr. Garry. In a community of retirees, she could make some friends again, have a few activities of her own.

  “But he's always had an orchard,” she said in the fall when I first suggested it.

  “That's the point. He'll never manage it again. He can't.”

  “We'll see,” she said vaguely. “I'll bring it up with him.”

  She will never dare bring it up with him. As long as I can remember, the only way she ever dealt with him was by bending whichever way the wind was blowing, do anything or say anything to try to keep the peace. And apparently she's oblivious that it isn't working, and never worked. No one could keep the peace with him.

  When we children were all young, she usually tried to deflect his rages from us on to herself, and often it worked, which made me feel guilty. I was the one who tracked in mud, or who failed to take out the garbage, or whatever the particular offense was that time. At the same time I was glad whenever he turned away from me to anyone else.

  Whatever any of us does, money will reach a crisis point very soon. The house is in disrepair. I'm afraid of the wiring, and the water heater is not going to last much longer. I found a job in the village in September, ten miles away, minimum wage, but a job. In the two weeks I kept it, Mom had to call me home three times. He got his chair mired in rain-softened earth, trying to get out to inspect his trees. Again when she set the brake on his chair and didn't have enough strength to release it, and he couldn't either. And he had fallen from his chair and she couldn't get him back into it. I quit the job before my supervisor fired me outright.

  * * * *

  He didn't want a Christmas tree, but I put a small one on an end table. Mom's smile when she saw it made it worth the gamble that crossing him always was. He hated the lights and wouldn't have them on when he was watching television, and since that was all hours of the day that he was up, the lights were seldom on, only after he went to bed at night, or when he took a nap. He wheeled into the living room that day, found the lights on, and knocked the tree off the table, cursing. I was starting dinner, heard the crash, and hurried to see what happened.

  “Clean up that goddamn mess! Get that crap out of here!”

  I walked back to the kitchen. I didn't touch it the rest of the day, or the next morning, and he was a madman in his fury. When Mom started to pick things up, he turned his wrath onto her. She burst into tears and ran from the room to her own makeshift bedroom in the dining room. After her heart attack, we had moved her bed so she could get some rest, and she had not wanted it moved back. Her refuge.

  “See what you've done!” he screamed at me. “You're trying to kill us! You think you'll inherit my land, my trees, sell out and make yourself a little fortune. You want to kill her! Clean up that goddamn mess like I told you!”

  Silently I cleaned up the mess. Then I went to see to Mom. She was lying on her bed weeping.

  “Why do you let it happen?” I asked, sitting next to her, stroking her back. “You know he'll kill you with his temper fits. Or he'll kill himself. But you don't have to stand and watch. Walk out. Leave the room, come in here, and close the door.”

  “It's the stroke,” she said, still weeping. “It changed him. He'll get better again.”

  “It didn't change him, Mom. Face it, he's always had that crazy temper. The only difference is that he didn't lose it as often before. Now it's every day. But it's the same.”

  “No. No. He'll get better. You'll see.”

  That night I heard the train whistle. It sounded closer, almost at the end of the driveway. It was fifteen degrees. I read at one time or another that freezing to death isn't very painful after the first minute or two. It is said that people begin to feel comfortable and simply go to sleep.

  I know why I hear it, I realize suddenly. I yearn to go out and board the train.

  The basketball game is over, and I duck my head and pretend to be reading. He doesn't speak to me as he wheels himself down the hallway to the bathroom. After he finishes in there and is ready for bed, Mom will have a bath and go to bed. And the house will be peaceful and quiet until I go up. The best time of day, when they're both in bed.

  He can manage in the bathroom and his bedroom. There are rails and handholds everywhere, but it's always a long process, and apparently a grueling one for him. When he comes out in his flannel pajamas with a lap robe around him, he looks exhausted. Around three in the morning he'll be up again, and then at eight, until a nap. That's a good hour also. Sometimes my mother and I have a cup of coffee and talk a little, although neither of us has much to say. All day she is on full alert, aware when he's moving, when he's settling down for a nap, when he goes in to get ready for bed. She is constantly straining to hear him, and I never say anything when she has that intent look on her face. By the time he's in bed, she is too tired to stay up longer than it takes for her bath. Fatigue alone won't ensure her sleep. She has sleeping pills as well.

  And this is how it will be forever, I think, for her, for him, and for me, or until one of us is dead and the other two are free to do something else, or are forced to. Without me, they would have to move, sell the land, go somewhere else. Whenever I call Eleanor in Seattle, there is a baby or a small child crying for attention in the background. She can't help out. No one knows where my brother is.

  If he would just die, I could take Mom with me, rent an apartment, get my old job back perhaps, and start living again. If she goes first, I'll call county authorities to come take him away. One of his rages will be proof enough that he is insane. But as long as there are three of us, the pattern that has been established is how it will continue to be.

  And I yearn for the night train, a trip to anywhere.

  During one of our quiet afternoons I asked Mom if she ever heard a train whistle in the middle of the night.

  She looked puzzled, then averted her gaze. “I did once,” she said after a moment, as if an elusive memory had come into focus. “A long time ago, when Eleanor was little. A trick of my ears, I guess. There's no train close enough
to hear.”

  “Only one time?”

  She nodded. “I was pregnant again and there were other things on my mind.”

  Pregnant with me, I realized. Had I, from the safety and comfort of the womb, first heard it with her thirty years ago?

  * * * *

  This time when I hear the train I get up. I already have on heavy wool socks, and pull on my boots. I put on my robe, and take my down jacket from the closet. We had to keep our coats and jackets in our rooms, not in the family closet by the front door, where they were in his way. I don't have a light on, but I don't need one, the light seepage from under the door is enough. I find my gloves on the closet shelf and put them on. All my actions are dreamlike, unhurried. There's no need to hurry. The night train is always on time and so are the passengers.

  I am at the bottom of the stairs when he comes out of the bathroom in his robe, with the lap robe on his legs. He is turning to go back to his room when I take the handles of the chair and guide it the other way.

  “What the hell are you doing? Goddamn it, let go! Take me back to bed!” His voice is loud as I wheel him to the front of the house, then reach around him to open the door. Mom won't hear him, not with her hearing loss, and the sleeping pill, behind a closed door. He is yelling hoarsely, with a note of panic in his voice.

  The cold air takes my breath away and he cries out, then is gasping, pleading. I feel as if I'm floating down the ramp, and turn onto the driveway. Mr. McHenry keeps it plowed all winter.

  It isn't far to the end of the driveway, fifty or sixty feet, and the train is drawing closer, the whistle like a piercing scream. I stop at the edge of the road and set the brake, and Dad is crying and cursing.

  I leave him there to wait for the night train.

  My bed feels warm after the cold outside, and I'm hardly even settled into it before I fall asleep.

  * * * *

  It was a dream, a wish-fulfillment nightmare, I tell myself, coming awake very early. It is still dark outside, and I hurry from my room to go downstairs to turn up the thermostat and start a pot of coffee before Mom and Dad begin stirring. The house is very quiet. Too quiet.