What Eli Sees – Chapter 22
“Thanksgiving on Cemetery Road”
Thanksgiving at the Harwick house was strange and specific and would be talked about by the Crane family for decades: the year they had Thanksgiving in the haunted house and it was, against all probability, a good day.
Ruth came back from her sister’s with Claire and the food she had bought in New Haven and she cooked in the large kitchen with the radio on and the smell of it — turkey and sage and the particular sweetness of sweet potato with brown sugar — filled the house and pushed back at everything that had been in it. Agnes came with Thomas and Thomas’s mother, who was a quiet woman named Helen who shook Robert’s hand and looked at Eli with the expression of someone who had heard a great deal about him and was reserving her own assessment.
Mrs. Pearce came. This surprised everyone including Mrs. Pearce herself, who had not set foot in the Harwick house since her father had been carried out of the barn in 1952. She stood in the front doorway for a long moment before coming in, feeling the house — Eli watched her do this, watched her careful assessment of what she felt. She looked at the second-floor hallway with the old wariness. Then her expression changed.
“The corner,” she said.
“Still cold,” Eli said. “But the lines are holding.”
“Yes.” She stepped inside fully. “It’s different. The weight of it.” She looked around the entrance hall with new eyes, as if seeing it from the other side of something. “It’s a house,” she said. “Just a house.”
“Not entirely,” Eli said.
“No,” she agreed. “Never entirely. But closer.” She looked at him. “You did good, Elijah.”
They ate at two o’clock around the extended dining room table and it was loud and warm and the food was excellent and Thomas ate approximately twice his body weight in sweet potato and had to be talked out of a second piece of pie by his mother. Robert and Mrs. Pearce talked about the house’s history with the academic interest of two people who found the same topic fascinating from different directions. Claire talked to Agnes about things Eli couldn’t quite hear, serious things judging by Claire’s expression, which had lost some of its fifteen-year-old armor for the duration.
After dinner Eli and Thomas sat on the front porch in coats, their breath clouding, eating pie with forks directly from the dish in the un-self-conscious way of eight-year-old boys who had become actual friends rather than proximity-friends.
“Are you staying?” Thomas asked. “In Dunmore. After.”
“No,” Eli said. “Dad’s selling. We’ll be gone by Christmas.”
Thomas absorbed this. “Will you come back?”
Eli thought about the three dead still in the house. About his promise to his father on the porch last night. About Agnes, who was seventy-four with bad knees and would not be available to him indefinitely. About the gift he had and what it was for.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll come back.”
Thomas nodded, satisfied. “I’ll be here,” he said. “I’m always here. That’s kind of the thing about Dunmore.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Eli said.
Thomas thought about it. “Depends on why you stay,” he said, with the wisdom of someone who had a very good grandmother. “If you stay because you’re afraid to leave, it’s bad. If you stay because you love it, it’s the best thing.”
Eli looked at Cemetery Road in the Thanksgiving dark, at the bare elms and the frost-hard ground and the barn at the back of the property, dark and quiet and no longer the worst place he had ever been.
“I might love it a little,” he said. “From a safe distance.”
Thomas grinned his gap-toothed grin. “That’s a start,” he said.