The Other

by Thomas Tryon

The Perry house, stalwart, large, rambling. Once-white clapboards grimed to gray, paint blistered on green shutters framing tall windows, the glass pitted and watery, the patinated gutters pocketing last October’s leaves.

the footsteps, so soundless you had to make a face to hear them,

Niles felt a queer chill, like a slowly growing stain, spreading through all the walls and membranes of his stomach.

He did it, not because he was a daredevil, but because he had nothing else to do;

Holland, who collected big words as others collect stamps or money

the word her mouth had fashioned died stillborn on her lips.

“Not that. But families should be thick.” “Yes, of course. Like soup.” “But ours is broth,” he said with a droll look.

“Sunflower!” he shouted, grinning proudly and squinting against the light. She let her eyes rest upon his face for a moment; ah, the freshness of his features, the flower-soft skin with the golden fuzz below the hairline. This was her podsolnechnik, her sunflower now; gone were all the sunflowers of Russia, but in their place grew this one, this prize flower of her heart.

“Eeeyaiee!” As the steel tore through his chest, shattering flesh and bone, his scream sent the mice scurrying with fright, and hot blood, all red and frothy, with little ruffles like ghastly lace, spurted into the yellow hay, and in another moment Winnie and Mr. Angelini had come running from the pump, and, at the landing, her parasol quivering, Ada stood, her body rigid, her head slightly averted, listening as the cry reached her ears, with it, on the breeze, the lazy thrum of a harmonica, while the fingers of her trembling hand pressed ever more fiercely against the sharp points of the golden crescent moon pinned at her breast.

Russell Perry is in the parlor, in his coffin, open to view. It is from the parlor that the Perrys have always been buried. In the parlor they are christened, are betrothed, are married; dead, in the parlor they are laid out. It has always been so: the shades drawn, the casket on black-draped trestles looped with cords and tassels; sighing, whispery, shadowlike forms slipping in silently to mourn, to regret or—secretly, as some will—to savor, laying warm lips against cold unyielding flesh in last farewell. This is the Perrys’ way.

Aunt Vee always selected her words as she might fruit, squeezing each for ripeness and juiciness.

Like the lens of a camera, stopped down to a single vivid image, this gleaming iris doggedly focused for him the picture of Russell Perry’s round body tumbling out of the loft, down onto the cold steel jutting in the haymow.

He wondered what might be done to cheer her up. Not much, he supposed, when people died, people cried a lot; but that’s what death seemed to be, always crying, hurting, remembering . . .

“For love, I imagine. When one’s love of the beloved is greater than one’s love of life or of one’s self, one sometimes prefers death. It is not so much an immolation of the body, I think, of one’s physical being as—” she paused to select her words. “What, then?” “As an immolation of the heart.”

“We help one another by understanding one another: that is the only help there is. And the only hope as well.”

“Yeah, Stan, but that’s what folks want. It’s pure excapism, that’s all. Who wants t’see people starving in the movies—you can see that on the street any day. That’s why folks want to excape, see?”

In the blackness beyond the veranda, out of the patch of electric light, a swarm of fireflies hung suspended, their thoraxes and underbellies emitting a Morse code of phosphorescent dots and dashes, secret messages,

As the Sunflower turns on her god, when he sets, The same look which she turned when he rose.

They must have their dreams, that is what being children is all about, isn’t it? Childhood was but a few brief summers; winter a whole, cold, lifetime long.

Some loved the weather, some endured it, some suffered from it.

Red shadows dyed the whitewashed walls; on the floor lay dark drifts of snow, wine-colored in the light from the kerosene lamp hanging from a hook in the beam under her feet.

“Because I’m an uncle. That’s what uncles are supposed to do, rock and tickle and smile.

Gusts of wind spilled wet leaves across the floor, cartwheeling along on thin edges, sliding into corners, flying partway up the stairs.

And since then all the days had been beautiful, beautiful and sorrowful and infinitely changed.

Those eyes, they seemed so old, so tired, so used up as she knelt, drew the boy into her arms. The moon pin felt cold against his cheek. He didn’t want to cry, but the tears were not to be avoided. It hurt inside his chest where his heart pounded. And hers; he could feel it, faintly, through the material of her coat. Now, he knew, her arms holding him, her hands soothing, allowing no protest, the question would come; for this she had been following him, never letting him from her sight.

“Things cannot ever be the same again. Not for any of us. Not any more. We sometimes reach a point in our lives where we can’t ever go back again, we have to go on from there. All that was before is past now. It went too far. Everything has gone too far. It must stop, do you see? Now—it—must—stop.”

But he was gone, of course, he truly was dead then, he who I had been, the Other; and I became aware then how really alone I was.