"Ssh," I whispered. "The two of us together can keep her out better, and we can both sleep." Embraced in each other's arms, we fell asleep.
And the morning came . . . without the
grandmother . . . without food.
The hungry days passed by endlessly, miserably.
Only too soon the cheese and crackers were gone, though we ate most sparingly of what we had. And that was when we really began to suffer. Chris and I drank only water, and saved what milk there was for the twins.
Chris came to me with the shears in his hand, and reluctantly, with tears, he cut off the front top hair close to my scalp. I wouldn't look in a mirror when it was done. The long part that was left, I wrapped about my head, and over that I formed a scarf into a turban.
Then came the irony, the bitter irony of the grandmother not coming to check!
She didn't bring us food, or milk, or clean linens, or towels, or even the soap and toothpaste we had run out of. Not even toilet paper. Now I regretted throwing out all the tissue our expensive clothes came in. There was nothing left to do but tear pages from the oldest books in the attic and use that.
Then the toilet bowl stopped up, and overflowed, and Cory began to scream as filth flooded over and filled the bathroom. We didn't have a plunger. Frantically, Chris and I wondered what to do. As he ran for a coat hanger made of wire to straighten out and push down whatever clogged the drain, I ran to the attic to fetch old clothes to mop up the flooding mess.
Somehow Chris managed to use the wire coat hanger, and the commode worked normally again. Then, without a word, he got down on his knees beside me, and we both mopped up the floor with the old clothes from the attic trunks.
Now we had filthy, smelly rags to fill up a trunk, and add to the secrets of the attic.
We escaped the full horror of our situation by not talking about it much. We just got up in the mornings, splashed water on our faces, cleaned our teeth with plain water, drank a little water, moved about a little, then lay down to watch TV, or to read, and the devil to pay if she came in and caught us rumpling a bedspread. What did we care now?
To hear the twins cry for food put scars on my soul that I would bear for the rest of my life. And I hated, oh, how I hated that old woman--and Momma--for doing this to us!
And when mealtimes rolled by with no food, we slept. For hours on end we slept. Asleep you don't feel pain or hunger, or loneliness, or bitterness. In sleep you can drown in false euphoria, and when you awaken, you just don't care about anything.
There was one hazy, unreal day when we lay listless, all four of us, with the only life going on confined to the small box over in the corner. Dazed and tired, I turned my head for no reason at all just to look at Chris and Cory, and I lay without much feeling at all as I watched Chris take his pocket knife and slash his wrist. He put his bleeding arm to Cory's mouth, and made him drink his blood, though Cory protested. Then it was Carrie's turn. The two of them, who wouldn't eat anything lumpy, bumpy, grainy, too tough, too stringy, or just plain "funny look- ing," drank of their older brother's blood and stared up at him with dull, wide, accepting eyes.
I turned my head away, sickened by what he had to do, and full of admiration that he could do it. He could always solve a difficult problem.
Chris came to my side of the bed and perched on the edge, and looked at me for the longest moment, then his eyes lowered to the cut on his wrist that wasn't bleeding as freely now. He lifted his pocketknife and prepared to make a second slash so I too could be nourished by his blood. I stopped him, and seized hold of his jack-knife and hurled it away. He ran fast to get it, and again he cleaned it with alcohol, despite my vow never to taste his blood, and drain from him more of his strength.
"What will we do, Chris, if she never comes back?" I asked dully. "She will let us starve to death." Meaning the grandmother, of course, whom we hadn't seen in two weeks. And Chris had exaggerated when he said we had a full pound of cheddar cheese stashed away. We baited our mousetraps with cheese, and had been forced to take back the bits of cheese to eat ourselves, when everything else was gone. Now we'd been without one bit of food in our stomachs for three whole days and four days with only a little cheese and crackers. And the milk we saved for the twins to drink--gone ten days ago, too.
"She won't let us starve to death," said Chris as he lay down beside me and took me into his weak embrace. "We'd be idiots, and spineless, to allow her to do that to us. Tomorrow, if she doesn't show up with food, and our mother doesn't show up, we'll use our sheet-ladder to reach the ground."
My head was on his chest and I could hear his heart thumping. "How do you know what she'd do? She hates us. She wants us dead--hasn't she told us that time and time again we should never have been born?"
"Cathy, the old witch is not dumb. She'll bring food soon, before Momma comes back from wherever she's been."
I moved to bandage his slashed wrist. Two weeks ago Chris and I should have tried to escape, when both of us had the strength to make the perilous descent. Now, if we tried to make it, surely we'd fall to our deaths, what with the twins tied to our backs to make it even more difficult.
But when morning came, and there was still no food brought up to us, Chris forced us into the attic. He and I carried the twins who were too weak to walk. It was a torrid zone up there.
Sleepily, the twins sagged in the corner of the schoolroom where we put them down. Chris set about fashioning slings so we could attach the twins securely to our backs. Neither of us mentioned the possibility that we could be committing suicide, and murder, too, if we fell.
"We'll do it another way," said Chris,
reconsidering. "I'll go first. When I reach the ground, you'll put Cory into a sling, tie him in fast so he can't kick free, and then you'll lower him down to me. Next, you can do that for Carrie. And you can come down last. And fo
r God's sake, put forth your very best efforts! Call upon God to give you the strength-- don't be apathetic! Feel anger, wrath, think of revenge! I've heard great anger gives you superhuman strength in an emergency!"
"Let me go first. You're stronger." I said weakly.
"No! I want to be down there to catch in case anyone comes down too fast, and your arms don't have the strength mine do. I'll brace the rope about a chimney so all the weight won't be on you--and Cathy, this is really an emergency!"
God, I couldn't believe what he expected me to do next!