of the brothers, the one to whom their parents had given the most responsibility and some authority. In the matter of the closet, Crossett was now the impotent one, a situation his brothers enjoyed. That was not to say that other alliances could not still be forged, but the subject of the eventide attacks was non-negotiable.
It wa s Twynne who seemed to take especial joy in the capture and imprisonment.
“What did you see in there?” he would goad after the pale and shivering Cro ssett had fallen from the closet door against which he had been pressed for the last hour. “Any ghosts?” And they would all laugh, Twynne and Crossett’s brothers, until the stir of his parents were heard and they would scurry back to their beds.
“I’ll bet there’s a whole family of ghosts up there in the attic,” Twynne would whisper through the wall as Crossett lay in bed afterward. “You go up there, don’t you, when you’re in there? You go up there, don’t you? You’re not scared, are you …” Yes, Crossett would think, even now, I’m scared. No, he never went up the stairs to the attic. He pressed his body against the door until his hands were white as snow and prayed every prayer he could remember from Sunday school.
The thrill of torturing Crossett must have infected them all, for it wa s a trick they unforgivingly played on him until he was at least seventeen years old. Nor did his brothers and friend completely cease at that time but periodically played the game until Crossett was almost twenty-two and by then too stocky himself to be shoved any longer into a dark closet, although a titanic struggle would ensue among the five men until the grunts and groans threatened to awaken Crossett’s ill-tempered father. The very nature, however, of those then infrequent and sporadic assaults kept Crossett’s nerves raw and twitching. He had, mercifully been left in peace since he was twenty-two.
And now to discover at forty-four that the youthful pragmatist Twynne had believed all along in that which he could not see, in those apparitions he had accused Crossett of fearing, was a frustrating revelation. Or might Twynne be playing once again with his old friend in a more sophisticated manner? It was impossible, at least now, to read Twynne on this, Crossett thought. He shrugged his shoulders. Nonetheless, he might as well follow Twynne’s advice by looking though the family records. It would be something to do on a dark, snowy evening in the basement, and for all he knew he might find out if what he had seen the other night was just what a middle-aged man might see who was trying to scare away the ghosts of his youth.
Crossett stood now befo re Winterhurst, watching its dark-eyed windows as the snow fell silently from the sky. Roaming the farm at night did not bother him; skirting the house on nights far darker than this, nights without the incandescence of the snow to light them, did not rankle his nerves . But scuffling over the wooden floors within without a lamp to light his way made his stomach churn even now, despite the fact that he had spent the last twenty-two years practicing the art of bravery like some nocturnal knight in the armor of determination. He had discovered in that time that one cannot learn fearlessness through rote memorization.
His boots crunched the icing snow beneath them as he made his way to the basement door. Ridiculously, he thought he felt regretful that he could not just live in the cellar of this old house, so warm and cheerful did it seem as he entered it this time. At the oil stove Anne was stirring something hot whose herbed odor filled the bricked cavern; along the floor the children scooted their wagons filled with stuffed and stitched passengers on a journey through their mistresses’ imaginations; laughter echoed through the old archways preceding and succeeding them as they traversed that countryside in which only a child can roam. Three large kerosene lamps shielded dancing
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