The Easter House. David Rhodes

Glove; the rule was that if you wanted something from the Yard, you could get it for free if one of the Easters didn’t know the exact location of the object, and C Easter always knew. Fisher would have a better chance with his son Glove.

      “GLOVE,” hollered C Easter, and Glove headed for downstairs. Fisher listened to sounds moving across the ceiling, thinking, So odd, a house where people moved so quickly, without finishing paragraphs or waiting for commercials, to answer a call.

      “Fish!” he said, midway down the open staircase.

      Fisher did not move, and waited until the young man had cleared the distance between them.

      “I want that aviary,” said Fisher, looking down to the floor.

      “Birdcage. You must mean the birdcage, Fish. The one between the bathtub and the stack of angle iron. Do you know of another one?”

      “No . . . that’s the one.”

      “What did you bring to trade?” asked Glove, carefully noticing the blanket bundle. “A blanket?”

      Fisher put down the blanket on the wooden floor and opened it up.

      “Candles,” said Glove.

      “Seventeen,” said Fisher.

      “Come on, Fish, you know the rules . . .”

      “I know, same size, same weight. But I couldn’t get nothing else, this is all I could get.”

      “You plan to trade the blanket?”

      Fisher hesitated. “No, I can’t trade the blanket.”

      “I see.” Glove would not trade.

      Fisher was despondent. “But what if I let you see what I got?”

      “What is it?”

      “I can’t tell anyone now; but someday I’ll show it to you and you’ll be the only one to know.”

      “How big is something like that? A secret?”

      “I don’t know,” said Fisher. “Bigger than an old aviary.”

      “Birdcage.”

      “Birdcage.”

      “O.K. It’s a deal.” Glove procured a hat from an off room, put it on, wedged a brown sack into the slight blue jacket he had already been wearing, and waited on the porch for Fisher to stretch the rubbers over his $45 wingtips.

      “Good pair of rubbers, Fish.”

      “They’re O.K.”

      They walked out into the yard, Fisher walking behind the older boy, but to the side, refusing to walk in Glove’s track. The snow had not covered the cage, and the top of it reached out into view. Glove lifted it up and shook the snow out of it. But Fisher took it away from him and didn’t care about the snow, wrapping it up in the blanket so that he could carry it from the swivel on top while letting the blanket fall down from its sides, disguising it.

      “Why do you want a birdcage, Fish?”

      “I dunno.”

      “Oh.”

      Fisher looked up to the third floor of the house, hoping to see The Baron staring out of a window, wrenching against his chains. Then he said goodbye to Glove and began walking home. Had Fisher been older, he might have wondered why several years ago half of Ontarion seemed to live at Easter’s Yard, spending days and nights inside the giant house and out into the Yard—why in the summer full-grown men, without drinking or playing cards, would gather at Easter’s Yard and watch the colored time move through the afternoons. He might have wondered why today no one went there—why even though the Easters and the other three men there were “good people,” as his father called them, no one would go there . . . except at night. He might have wondered what The Associate was—what it had been and what it was now. But if Fisher had been older, he would have known these things. He might then have wondered about the killing and the money.

      WITH CELL’S STORY

      Glove took careful notice around him, and watched Fisher merge into the snow, as though walking into the rounded folds of a curtain. He removed his hat and struck a farmer’s match inside it by popping it with the tip with his thumbnail. Then he lit a cigarette. He thought of the gray smoke coating his nerve endings, deadening them, seeping into his head and smothering those uneasy, sad feelings that even now he could pick up from the house. Even through the storm the sadness that they would not put in their faces or use in their words, that got into the corners and empty rooms because it must go somewhere, got to him. Even through the snow.

      Last winter was when he had known for sure that his house was suffering. He had thought then that it was a disease, something that happened when stale air attacked wood. He had thought it was the winter. Shrinking wood and ice and wind and furnace heat. He waited for spring, when the clear morning air could rip through the rooms; flies and mosquitoes and birds—not squawk birds, but songbirds with colors (he would let them in)—could swarm into the corners and eat the disease; when the night sounds could watch over the Yard while he slept. Winter was so damned quiet, he thought; if only you could open up and let everything in, let everything out, get everything out in the open: then your house would be all right. He had been right about a lot of that. But when spring came, the colored birds were kept out with screens, and in the summer the metal roof was like a grill and even those astringent trickles of breeze that crawled through the mesh and into the house seemed like a slow-burning flamethrower. It was better to keep the windows closed during the day.

      But this winter was worse . . . perhaps because he had watched it come, from his window at the level of the third floor, his headphones on, listening to his powerful radio and the voices.

      He flung the last three quarters of an inch of cigarette into the stack of angle iron and did not hear it strike the snow. Looking carefully along the street and through the immediate neighborhood, he walked deeper into the rubbish yard until he finally arrived at a stand of weed trees growing around an assortment of automobile wheels and engines. A grain elevator. For a final time he checked the windows of the house to be sure no one was watching, then walked in toward a 1946 school bus that he had towed into the cover of the trees in order to hide it completely. He had insulated the underneath with tightly packed straw. Inside a back compartment he had put an 80,000 BTU heater that blew into the bus, drawing air back (circulation) through an apparatus that seemed to all superficial inspection like a grain elevator that had fallen on the roof of the bus. He looked in the window and two black eyes stared back at him. Baron rolled down the window and Glove handed in the sack of food. Baron opened his mouth as if to speak, but Glove put his finger quickly to his lips. “Shhhhh,” he whispered, “shhhh.” The window was rolled up and Glove went quietly out of the cover of the trees back toward the house.

      Genius, he thought. Sometimes the characteristics of genius pass not from father to son, as one might suppose, but take a leap in time and land in a grandchild; and stay there, and end there. Three hundred years of family go into the making of these two, and two hundred years of aftermath. Every family has them, though not always do both of them rise to the surface; usually only one—the first. Sometimes after one hundred years a small cluster of an old family will gather to talk over their heritage and anything else they have in common (which is usually very little), drinking lemonade and eating potato salad from picnic tables. Someone will bring a family album and they will see a picture of an ancient relative and his eyes will be wild and they’ll fit together all the information they can gather about him (which in most cases will be scarce); and finally later, much later, a young member of the family will be talking to his girlfriend about his family (as though selling them), and say, “That’s John T., we believe he was a genius.” And the girl will look down into his eyes, and from then on everyone will believe it. The other one, the second, will stay in the ground.

      Glove knocked the loose snow from his shoes and went inside. He hung his coat in the off room and went upstairs, hearing his mother come to stand behind the door to her room. The voices