Read Online The Writing on the Wall: A Novel by W. D. Wetherell - Free Book Online
Authors: W. D. Wetherell
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the shallow, all but imperceptible, gouges left by the nib of Beth’s pen.
She would have liked to uncover more, starting on the wall to the right, but she was too tired now, not only her wrists but her understanding. Taking the putty knife she peeled back a strip near the top, just to assure herself there were indeed more words. Who had written them was plain enough now, the girl had gone to great lengths to explain. What it was meant to be wasn’t as clear, but it appeared to be an explanation or confession. Why she had done it was harder to guess, though with patience, with more wall cleared, perhaps that would become obvious as well. Some of her motives were understandable enough. The feeling of having something cooped up inside demanding its way out. The comfort of confiding in the future. Wanting to put words down just to find out if they made any sense. Anyone could understand this, really anyone, you didn’t need matching pain of your own.
That night, for the first time since arriving, Vera slept without waking up for her midnight vigil. She took a walk around the house in the morning, trying to see it all from Beth’s point of view, how it must have looked in 1920. The lilac near the kitchen seemed ancient, it was so high and tangled, and she remembered reading that in the old days wives would plant them near a window just to enjoy their perfume. Some of the shade trees must have been a hundred years old, too, they were so high and rotten. When she walked around to the front she could look up the road to the small gray farmhouse—Asa Hogg’s place, the addled one, the man who had seen too much of war. She walked across the grass, trying to imagine discovering a favorite book trampled in the mud—then, guessing, decided that right there must be the spot, halfway between the porch and the road near a lichen-covered flagstone sunk well down into the grass.
Too much had been added or subtracted over the years to make the yard look original. All the debris, the rusty swing set, the corroded lawn chairs, seemed to be from the Fifties or Sixties, and it overwhelmed anything earlier. Looking back at the hills or even up at the sky gave Vera a better, purer sense of it—what it must have been like to be young and spirited in a land that was emptying out.
When she went back inside, before starting on the next wall, she searched through the last lines from the night before. Reading, she had been taken out of herself, her absorption had come as a relief, and yet the old danger still persisted, of tripping back to the present on a random phrase. She found it now, Alan’s compromise— “Thirty days seems perfectly reasonable.” It was as if she had put the words there herself, they fit so ironically. Thirty days, the length of Cassie’s sentence. Thirty days for smiling. Thirty days in an army stockade for smiling at the wrong time, the wrong place. Thirty days for Cassie to prove herself in prison. Thirty perfectly reasonable days for Vera and her walls.
As before, the only way to escape this was to busy herself working. The parlor was perfectly square, which meant this next wall was the same breadth as the first, which meant a day’s worth of scraping. It was both easier and harder, knowing what was hidden underneath. Impatience made her hurry, always fighting down the temptation to just hack the wallpaper away, regardless of what it did to the plaster, but at the same time the writing made things easier, since the words seemed actively helping her, demanding their way out, pressuring up on the strips of paper while she pulled. By late afternoon she had the entire wall uncovered, and there was still enough sunlight filtering through the window that she could read without needing the lantern.
The distance to school never bothered me. Our town does not have enough pupils for a high school of its own and neither does the next town so it meant going three towns south to where the first big railroad bridge crosses
She would have liked to uncover more, starting on the wall to the right, but she was too tired now, not only her wrists but her understanding. Taking the putty knife she peeled back a strip near the top, just to assure herself there were indeed more words. Who had written them was plain enough now, the girl had gone to great lengths to explain. What it was meant to be wasn’t as clear, but it appeared to be an explanation or confession. Why she had done it was harder to guess, though with patience, with more wall cleared, perhaps that would become obvious as well. Some of her motives were understandable enough. The feeling of having something cooped up inside demanding its way out. The comfort of confiding in the future. Wanting to put words down just to find out if they made any sense. Anyone could understand this, really anyone, you didn’t need matching pain of your own.
That night, for the first time since arriving, Vera slept without waking up for her midnight vigil. She took a walk around the house in the morning, trying to see it all from Beth’s point of view, how it must have looked in 1920. The lilac near the kitchen seemed ancient, it was so high and tangled, and she remembered reading that in the old days wives would plant them near a window just to enjoy their perfume. Some of the shade trees must have been a hundred years old, too, they were so high and rotten. When she walked around to the front she could look up the road to the small gray farmhouse—Asa Hogg’s place, the addled one, the man who had seen too much of war. She walked across the grass, trying to imagine discovering a favorite book trampled in the mud—then, guessing, decided that right there must be the spot, halfway between the porch and the road near a lichen-covered flagstone sunk well down into the grass.
Too much had been added or subtracted over the years to make the yard look original. All the debris, the rusty swing set, the corroded lawn chairs, seemed to be from the Fifties or Sixties, and it overwhelmed anything earlier. Looking back at the hills or even up at the sky gave Vera a better, purer sense of it—what it must have been like to be young and spirited in a land that was emptying out.
When she went back inside, before starting on the next wall, she searched through the last lines from the night before. Reading, she had been taken out of herself, her absorption had come as a relief, and yet the old danger still persisted, of tripping back to the present on a random phrase. She found it now, Alan’s compromise— “Thirty days seems perfectly reasonable.” It was as if she had put the words there herself, they fit so ironically. Thirty days, the length of Cassie’s sentence. Thirty days for smiling. Thirty days in an army stockade for smiling at the wrong time, the wrong place. Thirty days for Cassie to prove herself in prison. Thirty perfectly reasonable days for Vera and her walls.
As before, the only way to escape this was to busy herself working. The parlor was perfectly square, which meant this next wall was the same breadth as the first, which meant a day’s worth of scraping. It was both easier and harder, knowing what was hidden underneath. Impatience made her hurry, always fighting down the temptation to just hack the wallpaper away, regardless of what it did to the plaster, but at the same time the writing made things easier, since the words seemed actively helping her, demanding their way out, pressuring up on the strips of paper while she pulled. By late afternoon she had the entire wall uncovered, and there was still enough sunlight filtering through the window that she could read without needing the lantern.
The distance to school never bothered me. Our town does not have enough pupils for a high school of its own and neither does the next town so it meant going three towns south to where the first big railroad bridge crosses
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