When she had dressed us, there was still clothing on the grass—hers. I then realized that she had walked to the gate dressed, stripped down there, and waited for us—“dressed” as we were.
That’s politeness.
Dressed, we all got into the car. Mr. Farnsworth waited a moment before starting up his driveway. “Katie, our guests are Christians.”
Mrs. Farnsworth seemed delighted. “Oh, how very interesting!”
“So I thought. Alec? Verb. sap. Not many Christians in these parts. Feel free to speak your mind in front of Katie and me…but when anyone else is around, you may be more comfortable not discussing your beliefs. Understand me?”
“Uh… I’m afraid I don’t.” My head was in a whirl and I felt a ringing in my ears.
“Well…being a Christian isn’t against the law here; Texas has freedom of religion. Nevertheless Christians aren’t at all popular and Christian worship is mostly underground. Uh, if you want to get in touch with your own people, I suppose we could manage to locate a catacomb. Kate?”
“Oh, I’m sure we could find someone who knows. I can put out some feelers.”
“If Alec says to, dear. Alec, you’re in no danger of being stoned; this country isn’t some ignorant redneck backwoods. Or not much danger. But I don’t want you to be discriminated against or insulted.”
Katie Farnsworth said, “Sybil.”
“Oh, oh! Yes. Alec, our daughter is a good girl and as civilized as one can expect in a teenager. But she is an apprentice witch, a recent convert to the Old Religion—and, being both a convert and a teenager, dead serious about it. Sybil would not be rude to a guest—Katie brought her up properly. Besides, she knows I would skin her alive. But it would be a favor to me if you will avoid placing too much strain on her. As I’m sure you know, every teenager is a time bomb waiting to go off.”
Margrethe answered for me: “We will be most careful. This ‘Old Religion’—is this the worship of Odin?”
I felt a chill…when I was already discombobulated beyond my capacity. But our host answered, “No. Or at least I don’t think so. You could ask Sybil. If you are willing to risk having your ear talked off; she’ll try to convert you. Very intense.”
Katie Farnsworth added, “I have never heard Sybil mention Odin. Mostly she speaks just of ‘the Goddess.’ Don’t Druids worship Odin? Truly I don’t know. I’m afraid Sybil considers us so hopelessly old-fashioned that she doesn’t bother to discuss theology with us.”
“And let’s not discuss it now,” Jerry added, and started us up the drive.
The Farnsworth mansion was long, low, and rambling, with a flavor of lazy opulence. Jerry swung us under a porte-cochère; we all got out. He slapped the top of his car as one might slap the neck of a. horse. It moved away and turned the corner of the house as we went inside.
I’m not going to say much about their house as, while it was beautiful and Texas lavish, it would not necessarily appear any one way long enough to justify describing it; most of what we saw Jerry called “hollow grams.” How can I describe them? Frozen dreams? Three-dimensional pictures? Let me put it this way: Chairs were solid. So were table tops. Anything else in that house, better touch it cautiously and find out, as it might be as beautifully there as a rainbow…and just as insubstantial.
I don’t know how these ghosts were produced. I think it is possible that the laws of physics in that world were somewhat different from those of the Kansas of my youth.
Katie led us into what Jerry called their “family room” and Jerry stopped abruptly. “Bloody Hindu whorehouse!”
It was a very large room with ceilings that seemed impossibly high for a one-storey ranch house. Every wall, arch, alcove, soffit, and beam was covered with sculptured figures. But such figures! I found myself blushing. These figures had apparently been copied from that notorious temple cavern in southern India, the one that depicts every possible vice of venery in obscene and blatant detail.
Katie said, “Sorry, dear! The youngsters were dancing in here.” She hurried to the left, melted into one sculpture group and disappeared. “What will you have, Gerald?”
“Uh, Remington number two.”
“Right away.”
Suddenly the obscene figures disappeared, the ceiling lowered abruptly and changed to a beam-and-plaster construction, one wall became a picture window looking out at mountains that belonged in Utah (not Texas), the wall opposite it now carried a massive stone fireplace with a goodly fire crackling in it, the furniture changed to the style sometimes called “mission” and the floor changed to flagstones covered with Amerindian rugs.
“That’s better. Thank you, Katherine. Sit down, friends—pick a spot and squat.”
I sat down, avoiding what was obviously the “papa” chair—massive and leather upholstered. Katie and Marga took a couch together. Jerry sat in that papa chair. “My love, what will you drink?”
“Campari and soda, please.”
“Sissy. And you, Margie?”
“Campari and soda would suit me, too.”
“Two sissies. Alec?”
“I’ll go along with the ladies.”
“Son, I’ll tolerate that in the weaker sex. But not from a grown man. Try again.”
“Uh, Scotch and soda.”
“I’d horsewhip you, if I had a horse. Podnuh, you have just one more chance.”
“Uh…bourbon and branch?”
“Saved yourself. Jack Daniel’s with water on the side. Other day, man in Dallas tried to order Irish whisky. Rode him out o’ town on a rail. Then they apologized to him. Turned out he was a Yankee and didn’t know any better.” All this time our host was drumming with his fingertips on a small table at his elbow. He stopped this fretful drumming and, suddenly, at the table by my chair appeared a Texas jigger of brown liquid and a tumbler of water. I found that the others had been served, too. Jerry raised his glass. “Save your Confederate money! Salud!”
We drank and he went on, “Katherine, do you know where our rapscallion is hiding?”
“I think they are all in the pool, dear.”
“So.” Jerry resumed that nervous drumming. Suddenly there appeared in the air in front of our host, seated on a diving board that jutted out of nowhere, a young female. She was in bright sunlight although the room we were in was in cool shadow. Drops of water sprinkled on her. She faced Jerry, which placed her back toward me. “Hi, Pipsqueak.”
“Hi, Daddy. Kiss kiss.”
“In a pig’s eye. When was the last time I spanked you?”
“My ninth birthday. When I set fire to Aunt Minnie. What did I do now?”
“By the great golden gawdy greasy gonads of God, what do you mean by leaving that vulgar, bawdy, pornic program running in the family room?”
“Don’t give me that static, Daddy doll; I’ve seen your books.”
“Never mind what I have in my private library; answer my question.”
“I forgot to turn it off, Daddy. I’m sorry.”
“That’s what the cow said to Mrs. Murphy. But the fire burned on. Look, my dear, you know you are free to use the controls to suit yourself. But when you are through, you must put the display back the way you found it. Or, if you don’t know how, you must put it back to zero for the default display.”
“Yes, Daddy. I just forgot.”
“Don’t go squirming around like that; I’m not through chewing you out. By the big brass balls of Koshchei, where did you get that program?”
“At campus. It was an instruction tape in my tantric yoga class.”
“‘Tantric yoga’? Swivel hips, you don’t need such a course. Does your mother know about this?”
Katherine moved in smoothly: “I urged her to take it, dear one. Sybil is talented, as we know. But raw talent is not enough; she needed tutoring.”
“So? I’ll never argue with your mother on this subject, so I withdraw to a previously prepared position. That tape. How did you come by it? You are familiar with the applicable laws concer
ning copyrighted material; we both remember the hooraw over that Jefferson Starship tape—”
“Daddy, you’re worse than an elephant! Don’t you ever forget anything?”
“Never, and much worse. You are warned that anything you say may be taken down in writing and held against you at another time and place. How say you?”
“I demand to see an attorney!”
“Oh, so you did pirate it!”
“Don’t you wish I had! So you could gloat. I’m sorry, Daddy, but I paid the catalog fee, in full, in cash, and the campus library service copied it for me. So there. Smarty.”
“Smarty yourself. You wasted your money.”
“I don’t think so. I like it.”
“So do I. But you wasted your money. You should have asked me for it.”
“Huh!”
“Gotcha! I thought at first you had been picking locks in my study or working a spell on ’em. Pleased to hear that you were merely extravagant. How much?”
“Uh…forty-nine fifty. That’s at student’s discount.”
“Sounds fair; I paid sixty-five. All right. But if it shows up on your semester billing, I’ll deduct it from your allowance. Just one thing, sugar plum—I brought two nice people home, a lady and a gentleman. We walk into the parlor. What had been the parlor. And these two gentlefolk are faced with the entire Kama Sutra, in panting, quivering color. What do you think of that?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“So we’ll forget it. But it is never polite to shock people, especially guests, so let’s be more careful next time. Will you be at dinner?”
“Yes. If I can be excused early and run, run, run. Date, Daddy.”
“What time will you be home?”
“Won’t. All-night gathering. Rehearsal for Midsummer Night. Thirteen covens.”
He sighed. “I suppose that I should thank the Three Crones that you are on the pill.”
“Pill shmill. Don’t be a cube, Daddy; nobody ever gets pregnant at a Sabbat; everybody knows that.”
“Everybody but me. Well, let us offer thanks that you are willing to have dinner with us.” Suddenly she shrieked as she fell forward off the board. The picture followed her down.
She splashed, then came up spouting water. “Daddy! You pushed me!”
“How could you say such a thing?” he answered in self-righteous tones. The living picture suddenly vanished.
Katie Farnsworth said conversationally, “Gerald keeps trying to dominate his daughter. Hopelessly, of course. He should take her to bed and discharge his incestuous yearnings. But they are both too prissy for that.”
“Woman, remind me to beat you.”
“Yes, dearest. You wouldn’t have to force her. Make your intentions plain and she will burst into tears and surrender. Then both of you will have the best time of your lives. Wouldn’t you say so, Margrethe?”
“I would say so.”
By then I was too numb to be shocked by Margrethe’s words.
Dinner was a gourmet’s delight and a social confusion. It was served in the formal dining hall, i.e., that same family room with a different program controlling the hollow grams. The ceiling was higher, the windows were tall, evenly spaced, framed by floor-length drapes, and they looked out on formal gardens.
One piece of furniture wheeled itself in, and was not a hollow gram—or not much so. It was a banquet table that (so far as I know) was, in itself, pantry, stove, icebox—all of a well-equipped kitchen. That’s a conclusion, subject to refutation. All I can say is that I never saw a servant and never saw our hostess do any work. Nevertheless her husband congratulated her on her cooking—as well he might, and so did we.
Jerry did a little work; he carved a roast (prime rib, enough for a troop of hungry Boy Scouts) and he served the plates, serving them at his place. Once a plate was loaded, it went smoothly around to the person for whom it was intended, like a toy train on a track—but there was no train and no track. Machinery concealed by hollow grams? I suppose so. But that simply covers one mystery with another.
(I learned later that a swank Texas household in that world would have had human servants conspicuously in sight. But Jerry and Katie had simple tastes.)
There were six of us at the table, Jerry at one end, Katie at the other; Margrethe sat on Jerry’s right, his daughter Sybil on his left; I was at the right of my hostess, and at her left was Sybil’s young man, her date. This put him opposite me, and I had Sybil on my right.
The young man’s name was Roderick Lyman Culverson III; he did not manage to catch my name. I have long suspected that the male of our species, in most cases, should be raised in a barrel and fed through the bunghole. Then, at age eighteen, a solemn decision can be made: whether to take him out of the barrel, or to drive in the bung.
Young Culverson gave me no reason to change my opinion—and I would have voted to drive in the bung.
Early on, Sybil made clear that they were at the same campus. But he seemed to be as much a stranger to the Farnsworths as he was to us. Katie asked, “Roderick, are you an apprentice witch, too?”
He looked as if he had sniffed something nasty, but Sybil saved him from having to answer such a crude question. “Mothuh! Rod received his athame ages ago.”
“Sorry I goofed,” Katie said tranquilly. “Is that a diploma you get when you finish your apprenticeship?”
“It’s a sacred knife. Mama, used in ritual. It can be used to—”
“Sybil! There are gentiles present.” Culverson frowned at Sybil, then glared at me. I thought how well he would look with a black eye but I endeavored to keep my thoughts out of my face.
Jerry said, “Then you’re a graduate warlock, Rod?”
Sybil broke in again. “Daddy! The correct word is—”
“Pipe down, sugar plum! Let him answer for himself. Rod?”
“That word is used only by the ignorant—”
“Hold it! I am uninformed on some subjects, and then I seek information, as I am now doing. But you don’t sit at my table and call me ignorant. Now, can you answer me without casting asparagus?”
Culverson’s nostrils spread but he took a grip on himself. “‘Witch’ is the usual term for both male and female adepts in the Craft. ‘Wizard’ is an acceptable term but is not technically exact; it means ‘sorcerer’ or ‘magician’…but not all magicians are witches and not all witches practice magic. But ‘warlock’ is considered to be offensive as well as incorrect because it is associated with Devil worship—and the Craft is not Devil worship—and the word itself by its derivation means ‘oath breaker’—and witches do not break oaths. Correction: The Craft forbids the breaking of oaths. A witch who breaks an oath, even to a gentile, is subject to discipline, even expulsion if the oath is that major. So I am not a ‘graduate warlock.’ The correct designation for my present status is ‘Accepted Craftsman,’ that is to say: ‘witch.’”
“Well stated! Thank you. I ask forgiveness for using the term ‘warlock’ to you and about you—” Jerry waited.
A long moment later Culverson said hastily, “Oh, certainly! No offense meant and none taken.”
“Thank you. To add to your comments about derivations, ‘witch’ derives from ‘wicca’ meaning ‘wise,’ and from ‘wicce’ meaning ‘woman’…which may account for most witches being female and suggests that our ancestors may have known something that we don’t. In any case ‘the Craft’ is the short way of saying ‘the Craft of Wisdom.’ Correct?”
“Eh? Oh, certainly! Wisdom. That’s what the Old Religion is all about.”
“Good. Son, listen to me carefully. Wisdom includes not getting angry unnecessarily. The Law ignores trifles and the wise man does, too. Such trifles as a young girl defining an athame among gentiles—knowledge that isn’t all that esoteric anyhow—and an old fool using a word inappropriately. Understand me?”
Again Jerry waited. Then he said very softly, “I said, ‘Do you understand me?’”
Culverson took a deep breath. “I u
nderstood you. A wise man ignores trifles.”
“Good. May I offer you another slice of the roast?”
Culverson kept quiet for some time then. As did I. As did Sybil. Katie and Jerry and Margrethe kept up a flow of polite chitchat that ignored the fact that a guest had just been thoroughly and publicly spanked. Presently Sybil said, “Daddy, are you and Mama expecting me to attend fire worship Friday?”
“‘Expect’ is hardly the word,” Jerry answered, “when you have picked another church of your own. ‘Hope’ would be closer.”
Katie added, “Sybil, tonight you feel that your coven is all the church you will ever need. But that could change…and I understand that the Old Religion does not forbid its members to attend other religious services.”
Culverson put in, “That reflects centuries, millennia, of persecution, Mrs. Farnsworth. It is still in our laws that each member of a coven must also belong publicly to some socially approved church. But we no longer try too hard to enforce it.”
“I see,” agreed Katie. “Thank you, Roderick. Sybil, since your new church encourages membership in another church, it might be prudent to attend fairly regularly just to protect your Brownie points. You may need them.”
“Exactly,” agreed her father. “‘Brownie points.’ Ever occur to you, hon, that your pop being a stalwart pillar of the congregation, with a fast checkbook, might have something to do with the fact that he also sells more Cadillacs than any other dealer in Texas?”
“Daddy, that sounds utterly shameless.”
“It sure is. It also sells Cadillacs. And don’t call it fire worship; you know it is not. It is not the flame we worship, but what it stands for.”
Sybil twisted her serviette and, for the moment, looked a troubled thirteen instead of the mature woman her body showed her to be. “Papa, that’s just it. All my life that flame has meant to me healing, cleansing, life everlasting—until I studied the Craft. Its history. Daddy, to a witch…fire means the way they kill us!”
I was shocked almost out of breathing. I think it had not really sunk into me emotionally that these two, obnoxious but commonplace young punk, and pretty and quite delightful young girl…daughter of Katie, daughter of Jerry, our two Good Samaritans without equal—that these two were witches.