Aidan and Isobel*
by Ed Davis, based on the theme of “Housekeeping”
That afternoon in fifth-period English class, I was feeling desperate when Aidan Brewster leaned over and whispered, “Do you need help on your paper route?”
I’d spread the word only that morning in ninth-grade homeroom that I needed a helper. Now I wasn’t so sure. Craig said Aidan was weird because he’d been so quiet since moving to town from Georgia in the middle of the year. But some people considered me weird, too, ever since my dad got sent to jail. Half the time I felt like I didn’t really fit in, either.
“Meet me at Jackson’s Pharmacy at six o’clock tomorrow morning,” I whispered back.
He nodded, his face totally blank.
Craig had been my helper, but now my best friend wasn’t speaking to me. Three weeks before school was out, I let him copy off my algebra test. After I confessed, Miss Sweeney moved us to opposite ends of the class after tearing up our papers and giving us zeroes. He hadn’t spoken to me since. Or shown up to do the route with me.
Aidan didn’t have a bike, so he trotted along beside my Huffy, stashing Gardner Gazettes behind storm doors twice as fast as I normally did, flying down the street like The Flash. Aidan didn’t crack jokes like Craig, but he was a lot faster. By the time we got to the end of Rhododendron Drive, the sun was coming up.
“The job’s yours if you want it, Ade.”
He just nodded, and before I could even tell him about pay, he cut through the alley and disappeared.
I didn’t see him the whole weekend. I had to deliver Sunday’s thick special edition by myself. He looked terrible when he came back to school on Tuesday.
“Where’ve you been?” I whispered while Mrs. Price rattled on about predicate nominatives.
“Sick,” he whispered back.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“No phone.”
I wasn’t surprised. One look at his beat-up old Keds and you knew he didn’t have a telephone.
“I need to know where you live so I can get hold of you when something goes wrong like this,” I said when Mrs. Price turned back to the board.
He nodded, his gaze forward, his hands clenched together on top of his desk. “I’ll show you,” he said. “After school.”
Even a block away, I knew we were headed toward The House of Usher. The crumbling brick two-story in the middle of the block was a wreck, complete with loose bricks under the windows, cracks in the foundation, and a sagging, paint-peeling wrap-around porch. The roof was black from coal soot, and the downstairs picture window was partly busted out, with a big piece of cardboard in it. The place had been empty for years, and Craig and I used to try to talk each other into believing it was haunted. It didn’t look haunted now, on a sunny afternoon with kids across the street screaming bloody murder. We stopped on the sidewalk, and I tried not to look at the yard, which was nothing but beat-down dirt. Ade looked miserable.
“Okay,” I said, pretending not to notice he lived in a dump. “If you ever don’t show up, I know where to find you.”
He began slinking toward the front door when it opened. I had already turned to leave when I stopped in my tracks. There stood the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Long, black hair cascaded around the whitest face—whiter than Mr. Jackson’s vanilla shakes.
Besides her lustrous hair, she was as pale as Ade was dark. And she was smiling like a princess receiving weary travelers.
When she saw me, her round, high cheeks glowed. “Who is this, Aidan?”
Ade glanced back at me, then back up at her. “Mike Stooky. I’m helping him on his paper route.” Without turning, he said, “Mike, this is my sister Isobel.”
“Hi, Mike Stooky!” When she laughed, it was like the tinkling guitar at the end of “A Hard Day’s Night,” my current favorite song. I was hypnotized. This girl’s curly black hair fell onto the shoulders of the strangest dress I’d ever seen on anybody who wasn’t acting in a play. It looked like wine-colored velvet. At 3:30 in the afternoon in a doorway on Macomb Street in Gardner, West Virginia, in 1965, that was pretty weird. But cool, too.
“So why don’t you invite—?”
But she never finished the question. Quick as a snake in creek water, Ade was on the porch, pushing her gently back inside and closing the door. Though I waited to see if it might open again, it stayed shut.
Then I remembered something I’d forgotten almost the instant I saw it. Isobel Brewster wore metal braces on her legs, just like Shelby Wysong, a girl in my Sunday school class a few years ago. I couldn’t even look at Shelby. But I wanted to look at the girl in the wine-colored dress all day.
Staring up at the peeling window frames, I wondered which room belonged to the princess. When a crow behind me cawed, I shivered. I remembered me and Craig egging each other on about breaking in when the place was empty. Now I wouldn’t have to. Something told me I’d see the inside of The House of Usher soon enough.
One Saturday morning, I saw my chance. “What grade’s your sister in?” I asked.
“She would’ve been in tenth.”
“Would’ve been?”
“If she’d gone this year. But she didn’t.”
I got an uh-oh feeling. “Why—”
“My father told me to ask you to eat dinner with us tonight.”
It took me totally by surprise. “I’ll have to ask Mom.”
“Okay. See you at 5:30.”
Ade took off just like he did that first morning. It was strange. Getting into his house was exactly what I wanted. So, why’d I shiver? Maybe it was my memory of the metal around Isobel Brewster’s beautiful legs as she’d stood at the front door.
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Brewster said, patting his belly and toasting his daughter. “An excellent repast, my lass.”
I lifted my Dixie cup of cherry Kool-Aid while Isobel bowed her head, blushing. It was only canned beef stew but tasted like steak and mushroom gravy prepared by her hands. Mr. B looked like Colonel Sanders and was so full of fancy talk during the whole meal that I felt like I was inside David Copperfield. He even toasted me before draining his jelly jar. “Uisge beatha,” he exclaimed. “That’s Gaelic for water of life.”
But I knew it was just liquor.
In the parlor, we sat on hard wooden chairs. Candle flames swayed with his every breath. I’d figured out while we ate that there was no electricity. Now the old man held a strange, curved wooden box. It looked like a cross between a guitar and a violin.
“A mountain dulcimer, my lad,” he said. “Cousin of the zither.” He held up what looked like a turkey feather before running it across the strings. Then he laughed. “Your face tells me you fancy it.”
I did. Peeking at Isobel, I could tell she did, too. A lot.
Mr. Brewster sang a couple of funny folk songs, with Isobel joining in with her tinkly voice that made me want to fly around the room. Then he began a song in a minor key about a woman who left her husband to go sailing on a ship with another guy. After a while, she saw he had a cloven foot. I shivered when the old man’s whispery voice sang about how the devil sank the boat and drowned them in the sea. Isobel was looking at her father like he was God, not the devil, and when I looked at him, he looked as if he might get up and go to his daughter and do something to her—but slap or kiss her, I didn’t know which.
I got my biggest surprise when I looked at Ade. He looked as white as Mom’s bleached sheets. And I saw where he was looking—not at Isobel, who stared dreamily into space—but at Mr. Brewster, who had his eyes clamped on his daughter. Looking back and forth between Ade and his dad, I didn’t see what was the big deal. Yes, thinking about that cloven hoof gave me the willies—but it was just a song, wasn’t it?
“I believe that will do for one evening,” Mr. Brewster said, laying the dulcimer under his chair. Then he turned to me. “Thank you, Master Mike, for honoring us with the pleasure of your company this evening.”
He was dismissing me! It was as weird as everything else I’d seen since getting there, but I said goodbye and headed toward the door. I felt Ade behind me as I grabbed the doorknob.
“Forgive him, Mike. Since Mother’s been gone, he gets stranger and stranger. If it weren’t for Isobel, I’d just take off.”
When I turned, I couldn’t see him clearly, his face half-blackened by shadow.
“At least you’ve got a dad,” I whispered back. Then I got the heck out of there. I couldn’t wait to get off to myself and think about Isobel singing with her head thrown back and her breasts thrust out.
Although Ade showed up for the route every morning, he had to sleep in the afternoons to be able to help his dad at night. Help him do what he’d never say. I kidded him, “Are you guys graverobbers or what?” He’d just put on his blank face, and I knew it was no use trying to get any information out of him.
In the meantime, Mom thought it’d be a great idea to invite my new friend over to eat with us. I didn’t think he’d come. But when I invited him over after we’d done the route, he said okay, wrote my address on his hand, and took off.
Our supper was a lot quieter than theirs. At first, Mom asked a bunch of questions and got some yeses and noes. But when Ade began gulping down meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans like there was no tomorrow, she shut up. When he burped, Mom giggled.
“Your father used to belch after a good meal, didn’t he, Mike? If we’d eaten beans, he might even—”
“It was the beer that gave him gas,” I put in.
“I bet he really liked your cherry pie, Mrs. Stooky,” Ade said, his longest sentence.
“Oh, he did,” she said, all glowy now. “But my chocolate cake was his favorite.”
“He never got much of it,” I said. “He was never home. He was too busy stealing food from poor people.”
“Michael Joseph.” I glanced away fast. She hadn’t used both my names since Dad left.
When she looked back at Ade, her voice changed, but her eyes stayed stern. “My husband did not steal food from poor people.”
Ade just stared at his empty plate.
“Howard was in charge of distributing free cheese, flour, sugar, and peanut butter to welfare families. There was a limit on how much they could get. Also, not all eligible families would show up, and the part that wasn’t given out—well, the government said it had to be returned.”
“What would happen to it?” Ade asked.
“Mike’s father took the leftovers and drove down into the hollers where he knew the folks who needed this stuff live, people who didn’t have cars or were too sick or crippled to get to the community centers where the commodities were given out.”
“He robbed West Virginia to feed people in Virginia,” I nearly shouted. “Who made him Robin Hood?”
Mom wouldn’t even look at me.
“He did what he thought was right. Those people needed that food, too.”
“But he traded it for liquor!”
I’d caught him unloading cartons of jars the day after he’d been to Virginia. “Jelly,” he’d said. But when I found them under his workbench in the basement, took one out, and held it to the light, it was clear as water, every jar the same. The same jars I’d caught Mom emptying down the drain after he was gone.
We were waiting, Ade and me, for her to tell us that what the newspapers had said wasn’t true, that what everybody had whispered at school was a vicious rumor, that my dad never drank enough to get drunk—not really—and he never accepted whiskey in trade for poor West Virginians’ food. Her hand moved to her neck and played with the silver cross he’d given her his last Christmas with us. She looked at Ade and spoke.
“Poor people sometimes gave my husband homemade gifts. It would hurt their feelings if he didn’t accept.”
Then she stood up, gathered plates and silverware, and carried them into the kitchen.
“Wanna see my guitar? It’s not electric, but it still sounds pretty cool.”
He shook his head. “I need to help Father.”
I was about to say it wasn’t polite to eat and run, but I kept my trap shut. It was really Isobel, not her brother, I wanted to know better. A lot better.
One morning on the route, Ade turned toward me and said, “So, Mike, do you like Isobel?” I didn’t have to answer. He read me like a headline. “So does everybody who meets her, sometimes too much, if you know what I mean. It’ll be for the best when she can finally drop out of school.”
“When will that be?”
“She’ll be sixteen in October.” He shook his head. “But she acts like a child of ten, sometimes.”
A child doesn’t fill out dresses like she does. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t think it was what you said to a guy about his sister.
Ade grinned. “Well, maybe you’d like to come over and get to know her better without anybody around.”
I must’ve looked like a panting dog.
“Come over today around four. Father’ll be sleeping, and I’ll read that book you gave me.”
I’d forgotten I’d lent him my beat-up copy of Ivanhoe. He slapped me on the back before taking off down the street.
She met me at the front door, looking so gorgeous I forgot how to talk.
“Would you like to go upstairs with me, Michael?”
It was what I wanted more than anything in the world, but now that it was being offered, all I could do was nod up and down like a three-year-old. Smiling and blushing a little, she took my hand and led me inside. When she closed the door, I thought I felt the walls tremble.
It was suffocating upstairs and very dark with all the curtains closed. She turned and took three steps down the hallway, stopped, and looked back at me from the shadows. When she crooked a finger, I followed on shaky legs.
We came to a door. The handle squeaked as she turned it. Trying not to think about the old man napping downstairs or Ade reading somewhere, I let her lead me into darkness and close the door. For five seconds, I felt like I was inside a coffin and almost panicked. But then I heard the rustle of her dress and felt something warm touch my cheek. Isobel had kissed me! All thoughts of backing out vanished into the dusty corners.
When she lit a match, the flash felt like knives in my eyes. After they adjusted, I made out a very high, small bed and the table that the candle dish sat on. There was a water stain on the old-timey wallpaper in the shape of a snake. After lighting the candle, she perched on the edge of the bed, exposing her ankles that looked bone white in the candle glow. Reaching down, she pulled her skirt up to her knee. With both hands, she quickly undid the clasps on her right leg and tossed the brace to the floor between us. The candle light surrounding her throbbed as she undid the other one—it thunked down on the floor, too. They lay between us like shiny skeletons. Then she stood up, took two steps, and clasped my hands.
It took me a few seconds to find my voice. “You can walk without them?”
“I wear them for pity. So, I don’t have to go to school, so I can stay home and take care of Father. Now come.”
While I watched, with my mouth hanging open, she lowered herself onto the bed, then moved toward the wall, making room for me. Even though I felt dizzy, I stepped over her braces and lay down on my back beside her. Panting and sweating, with the scent of hot wax filling the room, I imagined Madeline Usher in her coffin beneath the house. When her fingers touched my arm, I jumped.
“This was Mother’s bed,” she whispered.
When I turned my head toward her, I saw her hands were clasped tight across her chest, her eyes closed. She was waiting for me to do something. Craig would know exactly what to do next, but I didn’t. I needed her to help me. But when I glanced at Isobel, she looked dead. What would Mom think if she saw me now?
I was up and off the bed in a flash. I’d forgotten the pile of metal and leather on the floor. When I kicked one of the braces, it skittered under the bed. Finding the doorknob, I flung open the door so hard it slammed against the wall. I was down the stairs and out of the house so fast I didn’t even notice if Ade or his father was around. Gulping air, I put my hand over my racketing heart and slunk away fast, hoping no one saw me. I didn’t want to be seen again, ever.
It was hard getting to sleep. I cringed at the memory of her lying with arms crossed, hugging her chest, protecting herself from me. Then, for some crazy reason, I saw Mr. Brewster’s face the night of the singing, looking as if he wanted to kiss or slap her. A thought slammed into my brain so hard, I sat up straight, eyes open in darkness. Ade had tried to rescue her by fixing her up with me as if I might save her from his father. But I just wanted to do something I could brag to other guys about.
I flopped back on the bed. Tomorrow I’d tell Mom we had to get Isobel out of that house.
I managed to get to sleep. But in the middle of the night, I heard sirens, far away at first, then getting closer. I woke up and realized that the sirens were real. Yanking the covers up over my head, I squeezed my eyes tight until I saw red. I must’ve slept again. When the alarm went off, I had to swim up from the bottom of the sea. I had papers to deliver.
Outside, I smelled smoke—not the chimney kind, either. I couldn’t tell where the fire had been since it was still dark, but I figured the lighter it got, the easier it’d be to tell. I biked up to Jackson’s and picked up my papers. Ade wasn’t there. Had Isobel told him I’d humiliated her? I doubted it. All along the route, though, I had the feeling he was watching me from somewhere.
“Ade,” I said, sort of a whispery shout, “if you’re following me, please come out. We need to talk.”
By the time I got to Rhododendron Drive, I saw the tiniest tail of smoke coming from the direction of Macomb Street. I had known the whole time, but didn’t want to admit it.
Where The House of Usher had stood, there was nothing but an awful burnt smell. Three fire trucks were parked on the street, but only one guy was hosing the ashes while a bunch of people watched. When I screeched to a halt and threw my bike down, a cop turned around. It was Officer Pennington—Craig’s dad. Crap. If he was here, then. . . . I felt a hand on me and nearly jumped out of my skin.
“You shouldn’t get this close, Mike,” Craig said. “Come over here, and I’ll tell you what happened.”
“Are they all—?”
He shook his head. “Only one body was found.” He looked at me hard for a long moment. “The old man. The girl was taken by the welfare department.” He paused. “The boy’s disappeared.”
I knew from Dad what happened to orphans. If no relatives could be found, they’d be taken to foster homes, maybe eventually adopted. At sixteen, what were Isobel’s chances?
“My dad thinks Mr. Brewster’s still exploded.”
I looked at him like he was crazy. “Still?”
He nodded. “Everybody at the courthouse knew Mr. Brewster was making moonshine. Dad said they were just waiting for him to start selling it, but he hadn’t yet.”
“But you can buy alcohol legally.”
“Not like his. Down in Georgia, where he’d been caught and let go, they said he made the best and strongest stuff anywhere. Scottish recipe. You couldn’t beat it, Dad said.”
“Then how’d he let his still blow up?”
Craig shrugged. “Maybe somebody else did it.”
“Why?”
“Maybe some of the neighbors were on to him.”
“If everybody knew he was making it, why didn’t they arrest him?”
“Dad said it’s okay if you make a little bit . . . for yourself, you know. But not to sell.”
Hypocrites! I almost hollered. But then I remembered Craig’s dad the first night I had dinner with them after Dad left. “If you and your mother need anything, day or night, you have her call me, Mike.” And he had never said one more single word about it.
Before I could answer, Craig looked like he’d just remembered something. “Your friend Aiden is missing.”
“They’re sure he’s not . . . the body?”
He nodded. “It’s the old man.”
Though Craig’s dad and everybody seemed so sure of everything, I wasn’t.
“How do they know something else didn’t cause the fire? The Brewsters used candles for light. They didn’t have electricity.”
“You’re kidding.”
“If you’d ever bothered to talk to them, you would’ve found out they weren’t trash. They were just poor.”
I stood up, walked over to my bike, picked it up, and took off. Maybe we couldn’t be friends again after all.
Mom had left for work by the time I got home, so I went right to my room and fell on the bed. By the time I heard her key in the lock, I’d decided I wouldn’t expect much from a world that chained a girl to the bedpost and drove a boy to set a fire. Ade had probably been planning it all summer. Mom knocked before sticking her head inside.
“I heard what happened. They let me come home early.”
I sat up straight. “Why?”
“Honey, your best friend’s father just—”
“He wasn’t my best friend.” I grabbed my guitar, flopped back down, and began banging out non-chords.
“Well,” she said. “I’ll be out here if you need—”
“Close the door.”
I couldn’t believe it—she closed the door! She’d figured out that the last thing in the world you needed after somebody you cared about ran away was somebody else standing over you saying It’s gonna be all right.
There were articles in the paper about the fire and the still and the missing boy. No one knew where Ade had gone, Mom told me while she stood outside my door. She took time off just to sit in the living room and wait for me to come out and eat. By the third day, I did, a little. She told me I could quit the route if I wanted, and I hollered at her for the first time.
“If he ever comes back, don’t you know that’s where he’ll find me?”
But I was wrong.
Coming out of school into intense September sunshine, I saw him waiting for me at the bottom of the steps. He was wearing that same old plaid shirt with the hole in the pocket, and his hair was longer than Mick Jagger’s. Although I looked around, nobody was paying us any attention. I shuffled down the steps. At the bottom, I looked up, right into his eyes.
“I didn’t do it,” he said.
We just stood there like we were on an island with laughing, screaming, cursing kids all around us. I said, “Let’s get a Coke at Jackson’s. I’ll buy.”
We sat in the last booth. I brought two vanilla Cokes over, set one in front of him, and slid onto the bench across from him.
“Father must’ve gone to sleep, and the oil lamp fell over, catching the tarp, then the wood he used for fuel.” His eyes gleamed. “Keeping him awake was my main job . . . when I was there. I’d usually sing to him.”
I nodded. That night had been different. That night, Ade’s last best hope to help his sister had chickened out and run away. I didn’t need to ask him anything else. He’d probably been lying under some tree somewhere, saw the smoke—or smelled it—and came running. Isobel’s room, tacked onto the back of the house, was easy to climb into and out of. Had Ade even tried to get to the basement? It wasn’t a question I would ever ask.
“So, where’ve you been, Ade?”
“Carl Slocum’s. He’s a farmer outside Macon.”
“You mean you walked all the way back to Georgia?”
“Hitched.”
He might as well have said he flew.
“Mr. Slocum’s got over two hundred acres. He was dad’s corn supplier. When we lived there.”
“Corn?”
“You don’t make liquor out of air, Mike.”
I took a swig of Coke to hide my embarrassment. “Where’s Isobel?”
“Welch.” Ade turned up the coke and drank.
“McDowell County?”
“With good people. I watched them.”
We got quiet. He sipped the Coke, then slid it away as if it were cyanide. “I’m going now.”
“Listen, you can stay with us till—”
“I promised Mr. Slocum I would be back to help with the harvest.”
“Well, here then.” I got out my wallet and pulled out the five-dollar bill I’d been saving for new guitar strings. “This’ll help you get home.”
“No, thank you.”
“But you’ve got hundreds of miles to go.”
“I’ve made it this far, haven’t I?”
When he stood up, I did, too.
“Better I leave alone.”
“Ade, I’m sorry it didn’t work out . . . between me and Isobel.”
“It wasn’t you. I was stupid.”
For a few seconds, I couldn’t think of anything else. I asked him: “Will you write me?” I must’ve sounded pitiful.
He grinned. “Probably not.”
There was so much more I wanted to ask—which farm did Isobel live on, did he plan to see her again, and, if he did, would he tell her something for me? (What? That I’d find her someday and marry her? Baloney.) But he turned and walked right out the door, and I knew it was forever. I was glad that I was in the back booth because I didn’t want a single soul to see me trying not to cry.
By the time Mom got home, the pancakes and bacon I’d made were getting cold on the stove. But she smiled when she saw them. “Breakfast for supper,” she said, “just like your—”
But I was too busy setting the table to notice what she looked like when she shut up. The pancakes were overdone and rubbery but still chewable since I’d remembered to heat the syrup in a pan like Dad taught me. She wiped her mouth on her napkin and looked at me.
“Okay, what happened today?”
I took a deep breath. “I saw Ade.”
Her eyes widened. “How was he?”
“He didn’t have anything to do with the fire,” I blurted. “He was outside when it started.”
Why was I telling her? It wouldn’t get her husband out of jail any sooner. It would just worry her. But I bumbled on, like Dad used to after a few beers.
“He hitchhiked a whole bunch of extra miles from . . .”—uh oh—“where he’d gone to see somebody, just to come up here and tell me he didn’t do it.” One eyebrow lifted, and her lips parted ever so slightly, but she didn’t say anything, so I rushed on. “Wasn’t that big of him to come all that way to tell me?”
She nodded slowly. “I wish I knew all that boy knows, without seeing all that he’s seen.”
I glued my eyes back to my plate. I’d lain in my warm bed, whining about the way the world worked, while Ade walked for miles, hitched, and slept in barns. I decided right then it was time to grow up. I picked up the plates and took them to the kitchen. When I came back, I stood behind her chair.
“I’m ready to go with you,” I said. “To visit Dad.”
I hoped she would not turn around. If she cried, I might, too.
“We’ll go Sunday. After church.”
“I’ll wear his suit,” I said. “And the tie I bought him last Father’s Day.”
I laid my hands on her shoulders while they shook. I can’t remember which of her pretty blouses she was wearing, but right then, it felt to me like wine-colored velvet.
*“Aidan and Isobel” is one of four finalists from The Vincent Brothers Review’s “Housekeeping”-themed short story contests. The other three finalists—“Knick-Knack” by Lee Huntington, “The Wolf Girl” by Ant Torres, and “First, You Crack” by Diz Warner—will appear soon in The Vincent Brothers Review Weekly Reader, and our readers will be surveyed to choose the final place awards for this “Housekeeping” contest. Stay tuned!
Ed Davis has immersed himself in writing and contemplative practices since retiring from college teaching. Time of the Light, a poetry collection, was released by Main Street Rag Press in 2013. His novel The Psalms of Israel Jones (West Virginia University Press 2014) won the Hackney Award for an unpublished novel in 2010. Many of his stories, essays, and poems have appeared in anthologies and journals such as Write Launch, The Plenitudes, Slippery Elm, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Bacopa Literary Review. He lives with his wife in the village of Yellow Springs, Ohio.