It was Sunday noon, the day after the parade, and Aunt Helen and Stephanie lay flat on their backs in the grass near the Koi fountain in Grandpa Drummond’s garden. An early hint of summer’s warmth replaced the cold wind that had blown all night Thursday and all day Friday, when Helen had walked around the backyard with a sour look on her face and Stephanie had been afraid to go out to play with her. The two of them now were able to bask in the sunny green carpet, though the grass did feel a little damp on their backs if they lay in one place too long. From their reclining positions, the desert sky was so blue, so endlessly blue, and whenever Aunt Helen sat up she liked noticing the way it crowned the crumbled gray and lavender mountains with their high saddles and rocky cliffs.
Stephanie noticed that Aunt Helen had been sighing frequently since they had been out lounging in the grass. Stephanie didn’t know it, but the sounds Helen was making were sighs of contentment, full of understanding of her new relationship with the world.
By the end of the parade late on Saturday, Aunt Helen's mood had begun to soar. Helen approved of the way Stephanie had handled Mr. Thom; it was great fun seeing him turn purple. Helen felt she was glimpsing creative freedom in her niece. Stephanie’s irrepressible spirit encouraged her aunt to think that it might be possible for her to paint without listening to the critic. She only hoped—and the news was promising–that Mr. Thom wouldn’t succeed in his efforts to removed Grandpa Drummond from the Mountain Man Club. Her father was spending a few hours on the phone making sure Mr. Thom didn’t get his way.
Some of Stephanie’s creative acts at her grandparents’ mansion had been discovered earlier that Sunday morning, but neither Drummond nor Hilda could conceive of their curator-granddaughter making the messes. Drummond surmised that a bug had eaten the cocoons off the belt and planned on having the entire house fumigated as soon as possible, which might help with the moth-eaten trophy heads, also. Drummond and Hilda imagined that the elk head had fallen on its own and the force had knocked out the lion's eye. Drummond recorded a message for Dr. Adobe asking him for an estimate to mend the library wall and he planned to get estimates for repairs from a wallpaper hanger, too. Because he never really examined his artworks closely, he failed to notice the boy in the oil painting scribbled in with permanent marker.
Aunt Helen, her head on the grass that Sunday noon, turned to look into the deep shade of a nearby bush. She frowned at what she saw. How had two of her father’s most valuable pots arrived underneath a shrub along with the skull of a beaver? Helen thought for a moment and then realized that Stephanie had told her there was a skull she wanted to bury; Helen figured that must be it. Sometime later that afternoon, Helen decided, the valuable pots crammed with wet leaves and beans would have to be washed and set back carefully on their shelf.
“Do you know something?” asked Aunt Helen, philosophically as she turned away from the bush and gaped lazily at the sky. She didn’t complete her rhetorical question but left it dangling.
“What?” asked Stephanie dutifully, after a minute’s lag.
Aunt Helen told Stephanie that there was something she had always wanted to do that wasn’t painting and it was something Stephanie and she could do together.
“Hmmm,” said Stephanie, mulling over interesting activities that she had contemplated so far in her life, “Did you maybe want to own a baby snake and put a teeny bonnet on it?”
“No,” said Aunt Helen thoughtfully, and she raised one finger from her hands that folded over her chest. For a second she remained stymied as to the best reply to her niece. “Stephanie, I’ve never wanted to do that. That’s a very odd thing to want to do, actually. It worries me that you would want to bother a snake that way.”
“Why, what do you mean ‘bother’?” asked Stephanie adopting her aunt’s high degree of astonishment.
“Well, that’s not respecting the animal, putting a bonnet on it, but let’s don’t get distracted. No, what I’ve wanted, what I’ve always wanted when I lived at this house, I should say, besides being able to paint all the time, as you know, was to see if I could take a sip, or even a big drink, out of one of those black O’odham baskets which Grandpa Henry bought on the reservation. The two in the bottom of the big green bookcases near the front door.”
Stephanie stared long and hard at her aunt to try to figure out what she was up to. This secret ambition struck her as stupid. She couldn’t see the thrill in it. Then, suddenly, she grabbed her elbows and hugged herself tightly. Her eyebrows rose and she sucked in her breath dramatically. “Aunt Helen,” said Stephanie slowly, “Are those black baskets poisoned?”
Aunt Helen frowned. “No, no they’re not. It’s just devil’s claw that makes the black baskets black. They used devil’s claw instead of soaptree yucca. It’s supposed to be waterproofing. The O’odham wash their dishes in big old black baskets. They don’t think they’re sacred or anything. I’ve always wanted to try drinking out of one to see if they’re really waterproof. Do you see what I mean?”
“But Aunt Helen,” Stephanie said ominously, “devil’s claw sounds a lot like a poison, don’t you think? You know—a devil’s claw. Get it? The claw of a devil?”
“No... it isn’t poison,” Aunt Helen protested. She stopped talking and thought about this for a while. Of course, she knew very well that devil’s claw wasn’t poisonous, but what good was it to insist on the mundane truth and what fun it would be to pretend! “Well,” said Aunt Helen cautiously but with a small amount of fun creeping into her voice, “it would be a dangerous thing to attempt, but couldn’t we see if see they are poisoned?”
“Honestly?”
“Yes. Let’s get those two. Near the front door. Two big black baskets,” said Helen.
Stephanie stood up and started to run. She stopped before she had gone a few steps. “But wait. What do you think we ought to drink in them?”
“I’ll have a root beer,” said Helen, “You get what you want. Out of the refrigerator. Don’t let anyone stop you.”
“I’m gonna get the same. Root beer,” said Stephanie happily.
Stephanie turned and darted inside. She took a path through the old house that led directly to the low bookshelf, which she remembered because she had gotten the turquoise rocks off the skull there late Friday night. The black baskets were displayed on small stands, the centers of the baskets cupped toward each other. She nested them together and scrambled away to the kitchen.
She pulled the refrigerator door open and picked out two root beer cans. As she ran back outside the frosty cans conked against each other in the center of the top basket.
“Perfect,” said Aunt Helen when Stephanie reemerged. “I shall prepare the potions for us.”
Helen sat cross-legged and Stephanie imitated her. Helen put the baskets side-by-side and popped open the first can.
Ever so carefully, tilting the can gently, she poured the bubbly brown brew into one basket. She popped open the other can and filled the other basket.
Helen held her basket up in the air and checked the bottom.
“Is it holding? Look underneath,” asked Stephanie, “We don’t want our poison running out.”
“Yes, it is holding,” said Helen. “We’ll give the poison time to get into the root beer, if it’s going to.”
Helen placed her basket on the grass again. The black root beer bubbled merrily in the basket.
“Is that enough time?” asked Stephanie.
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Helen.
“Now, now, we drink our poison,” said Stephanie solemnly. “Life has been pretty good, maybe okay, but time for poison anyway.”
“Sure,” said Aunt Helen.
“To our poison,” said Stephanie.
“To our poison!” cried Aunt Helen.
Stephanie picked up the basket and tilted some into her mouth. She held the root beer in her mouth while Helen grabbed her black basket and quaffed from the edge.
Stephanie swallowed. “Down the hatch!” Stephanie said after she had swallowed, r
emembering a pirate’s line.
“The hatch,” said her aunt.
“Look at that,” said Helen, lifting his basket above her head to examine the dry bottom, “it’s really good. We’ll wash them out later with the hose.”
“But I’m not dying,” Stephanie said, slightly put out.
“Neither am I!” said Aunt Helen happily. “Oh God, neither am I! Today I am most definitely not dying, Stephanie. And first thing tomorrow I’ll finally start my first really great painting. I’ll be painting the pictures I’ve always seen in my head. And I’m not worried about doing well. I’m not judging the work. I’m just going to do them the way they turn out. The way they become will be the way they are supposed to be. Isn’t it fabulous and fun? Isn’t it great that today we don’t have to die?”
Stephanie smiled and hugged her aunt. “Yeah, Aunt Helen, it’s really great,” she was hanging on her aunt’s neck. “And you know something...I really like you.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean really, you know.”
“Oh, I know.”
“Aunt Helen, when are we going to bury the skull I found in Grandpa Drummond’s house?”
“Now! I forgot! We’ll have a ceremony. Definitely, but wait! Wait here!” Helen leapt up and ran into the house.
Stephanie had almost grown tired of waiting for Aunt Helen when an astonishing and horrible figure flung open the French doors and dashed across the lawn toward her. This figure was shaking its legs and wiggling its hips and yes, hooting wildly like some kind of banshee. The figure was wearing that terrifying Mexican mask, the one with the stringy black hair that Stephanie had used to frighten her aunt in bed.
As the horrid thing got closer to an increasingly startled Stephanie, it was Aunt Helen’s voice that suddenly cried, “Now it is time! Time for that wonderful burial!”
And so it was time, their special time together, a time they never forgot.
But as the world will have it, later times came also. Stephanie’s parents took her home that night and Stephanie slept in her own bed. She absconded with Terror Tales in her little suitcase without her grandparents’ permission. Their neighbor, Mrs. Webster, revealed that she was surprised, but glad, to see them back alive on Monday morning, but she hoped Stephanie’s parents would consider themselves lucky and never venture south of the border again.
And Helen was all right. Uncle Will came to pick her up on Monday morning and found her worlds better mentally, a feat she always attributed to her short weekend spent in the company of her uninhibited, eight-year-old niece.
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