But when Castalia noticed me, her entire upper body shifted this way. She fixed me with a look. It was different from her usual punishing stare. It said, “Oh, the little one.” It saw me. In this emergency, I’d been spared whatever I usually stood for. I was just a girl fifteen hurrying to be of use, knowing next to nothing. But meaning well.
“You,” she called. “Go back in the house, child. Do this. Now. Boil water, yeah, go boil water. That you job.”
I minded her. Right off. I closed the front doors and leaned back against them, one hand over my chest. I would help! I’d be good help. Won’t any question of my not doing what she’d just ordered. Even while the girl out there screamed, “Lonnie, oh Jesus, why two?” I was lost inside Castalia’s new tone of voice. I found the red-rimmed saucepan where she’d martyred my brush. I filled it at the kitchen pump, I set it on a hot stove. But mostly I thought of how she’d spoke to me. Once the water boiled, I risked stealing back out, a towel wrapped around the pan’s handle. Into the farm wife’s screaming, I hollered, “Water, boiling water—like you said.” I set the saucepan on the sidewalk near their wagon, hurried back up on the porch where Castalia seemed to want me stationed.
From here I could freely study the mule-drawn cart stopped at a angle before our garden gate. Something important was happening under cover of the wagon’s rough side planks. I heard a girl scream straight up, then heard her say she sure regretted doing that on a street like this, then do it again way worse. Her husband stooped beside her in the wagon. His head kept checking from the wife’s face down to her jolted body where Castalia worked, then back mostly at the girl’s face. He gazed down hard, like his wife’s face itself was changing from a big egg into some hatching yellow chick. All I could really see was her blanched fist, vined around his red one. And he was crying, “I knew we should of started out earlier. You just had to scrub that one last floor, you.” He laughed while crying, saying it.
Lower in the cart, I watched Castalia’s broad back struggling between uplifted dead-white knees. In the window of a house directly across Summit, one old couple held aside lace curtains and peeked but didn’t exactly rush out as volunteers. All at once, Castalia rocked back like some fisherman when he heaves his catch from one element into another. She reeled backwards most powerfully, buttocks flattening against her upper calves. She moved with such force that the wagon’s springs squeaked, its platform tilting so I worried all of them might topple out its back. Her red hat popped clean off and rolled—a pill—along brick street.
Castalia pitched hard forward, then suddenly held up a slick red sea creature spiraled to a trailing coral-colored line. She held this prize high in everybody’s noon air—like some fisherman showing off a catch in his own element. As her right hand bound the thing’s fin end, her left paddled the back till its wide mouth (seeming the whole front third) gave one unsealing hiccup. Then came a sound that seemed far bigger than its little fishy source. The sound was too human for me to quite abide or admit or stand—a wail so real and familiar it caused the old couple watching yonder to look at each other, nod, then smile and let their drapery drop.
Castalia turned the little noisemaker rightside up. She propped it in her lap. Using her apron, she seriously smeared at its eyes and nose. Then, after straightening a tangle in its line, she bowed more forward, seemed to place it on the mother’s chest. Castalia next straightened, hands joined before her. She tipped her head, seeming to enjoy a bloody sight hidden from me. I wanted to see.
I hardly heard the poor farm girl’s sounds begin again. I just stood here on a unfurnished porch, jiggling two cool white porcelain doorknobs. I was remembering the tone of Castalia’s voice. (The miles and woes, the many uses of the laughs packed in it!) If the four surface inches of her beauty could be stuffed into a humid sound—it might be as slippery and deep but bell-clear as her direct order to me. That now seemed a song compared to usual growls she aimed my way. “You, child. Go back into the house. Do this. Now. That you job.” I’d hardly met her, but standing here, I already missed her so. Hers was suddenly the voice of the one person on earth I most wanted to know.
14
NEXT afternoon was Castalia’s half-day off. She was bound home to do laundry for the two grown cranky sons she called “my big boys.” “Have a nice … one,” I added as she trailed home lugging about ten pounds of leftovers. (She’d stashed our dinner for tonight in the warming oven.)
“Have a nice what? I hates folks what says mess they don’t even mean. You go try to have a nice whatever you wanted me to have one of, you.” And snorted, slamming the door. But, child, to my ears—since delivery of Billy and Barney, yesterday’s twins—Castalia sounded kinder than she ever had before.
I waited till the garden gate creaked, till—trudging downhill—she joined another off-duty maid ripe with gossip for their joint hike downhill. I waited till Castalia couldn’t possibly come back for nothing she’d forgot. Then I waited six minutes past that, and six more slow ones.
Finally I set down the novel I’d pretended to read. I glided barefoot to the kitchen and toward her personal closet, four feet to the stove’s left. That cast-iron thing—her dark friend and spy in here—seemed to be watching, like it might could snitch. First I checked around the closet’s seams for possible hairs glued on. Anything might give away my snooping. Not the least my being the World’s All-Time Worst Liar.
Finding no likely booby traps, slow, I chanced opening the closet door. I expected almost anything—a sound, a humongous out-flopping bile-green snake, you name it. I found three loaded shelves and, below, a tangle of mops and brooms, one splintered gold-topped walking stick. Down among buckets, three ruined pairs of ladies’ shoes very seriously run down at the heels.
On the top shelf here: a half-gallon jar of clear liquid. Across its label, a skull and crossbones hand-drawn in smudgy lead pencil. I slid this aside, took down the tin lunch bucket she’d used to help release them twins (now the talk of Summit Avenue). Inside: twine, three pair of scissors each in its own cotton-lined case, some needles big as a upholsterer’s, lots of black catgutty thread that looked like sixty-pound fishing line, a pair of what appeared to be tongs, much gauze and adhesive tape, eye drops, smelling salts, a single baby pacifier—in them days called a sugar tit. Seemed too simple a catalogue of tools for a job so important—no better than other cleaning gear packed here. Behind clear poison, I set her lunch pail back most careful right where it’d been.
I kept checking over my shoulder and into the bright kitchen. Black-and-white lino. The big Seth Thomas clicked like egging me on. Horse hooves punished Summit’s cobblestones. Coast seemed mostly clear.
Hooked to the closet’s door, cleaning rags brightly colored as her clothes—the beautiful hues of Israel’s twelve tribes intermarried. Tacked nearby, one pastel picture of a mild Jesus knee-deep in sheep. Beside Him, a pretty black model clipped from some magazine pomade ad, her face’s silhouette jutting out so bold. The hand-sketched map of Africa I first took to show a crudely done water pistol pointing downwards. This map had one star penciled (red) at its western edge—a star much wider than the tiny river it seemed meant to mark.
On Castalia’s top shelf, brilliant hatpins were stuck in a man’s sock stuffed with fir needles that I sniffed. A heavy-bound maroon volume was called You and Your Live Minks: For Profit and As Exceptional Pets. Charts showed a person how to build proper ventilated running cages. One sketch demonstrated the male mounting position over a glazed-faced female coiled almost C-shaped underneath—and willingly, it seemed. (Animals, darling—what are you going to do with them? Us?) One picture gave you a cutaway of mink innards, blind babies were pictured as packed in yonder, chummy, blind, piglet-like. Was a chapter on your delivering the babies if Mother Mink herself couldn’t get it right. But most diagrams concerned how to skin your exceptional pets without messing up their pelts. Pages were nubbled with flecks of food—like this had been a favorite cookbook used too near ingredients. Heavy black graphite
stars studded the margins. Hand-jotted notes ran: It say this but I lost me four doing it. Double they feed. Anybody know that!
I stood here smiling. Was like flipping through my own school history textbook with its inked funny faces and frequent: “I doubt that very much. Them and who else’s Army. Yeah? well so prove it.”
I placed every single object exactly where I’d found it. Maybe owing to nervousness, each item I touched seemed to mean more than it should. Each thing’s texture and color caused it to appear one of a kind, even her brooms, even her sour mops. Here you had your usual scouring supplies. (Except for saved cardinal and blue jay feathers—jammed into a wad of clay like a badminton birdie. Back of it—easy to miss in one corner—I touched a old-timey store-bought paper doll—a blond girl in a camisole, smiling in a open pointless way. Her figure was rigid, about a foot tall. My fingers noticed a new texture—staples pressed into her cardboard, no, pins had been pushed in till they burred and braided a surface. Metal had partway rusted under the thing’s arms and down between her stiff and perfect straight legs. Extra gingerly, I put that right back.)
Kids shouted in the alley behind our house and I leapt a right good distance, then—hand over my mouth—laughed at myself. Still, I hurried through the rest. I just had to see whatever else she’d pack-ratted away. Had to view it whilst my nerves held, child. Witnessing what I did of yesterday’s births had someway given me courage. Seemed I’d never find the gumption for such a inventory again. Quick: two hairnets flecked with gold, some rainbow-tinted emory boards that appeared to have been chewed for snacks. I found a four-leaf clover preserved in waxed paper. I found ruby-red nail polish and two photogravure pictures showing cardinal birds in flight. I found one smooth jawbone off what might’ve been a deer or goat. I found a New Testament torn, by force, out of a Bible and held together with pink rubber bands.
That was it.
Well, I centered the bottle of clear poison (cleaning fluid?), shut the closet door—feeling relieved, even considering the paper doll. I’d chose not to be bothered by that. For one thing, it looked a good deal older than I was, pins in it had rusted years before I ever stumbled onto the scene. Weirdly winded but feeling cheerful, I leaned back against the counter. Then I begun noticing delft-blue canisters of cooking staples lined—small to large—within easy reach. Out of SUGAR, I’d seen her fish a certain spiny something. But no way could I go direct to it. If this had all been occurring at night, especially during a thunder-and-lightning storm, it wouldn’t of been. No way did I possess that caliber of brass. Daylight proved plenty rough enough. I kept listening to the ticking of the Seth Thomas in its nice round fruitwood case. Now it seemed to parse out question marks, tinny fishhooked shapes. A nice cup of tea? I felt spooked of going near SUGAR without some darn good reason. “I live here,” I said aloud, mad-sounding. (But then, I’ve always been superstitious, am, still am, way too much so not to go ahead and admit it. Seems like the more modern this here century has got, darling, the more Dark to Middle Ages it’s become. And me? Interested in magic and in self-defense. I’ve kept abreast.)
Into the stove I stuffed kindling, twists of old Herald Travelers. Lighting these, I filled a new saucepan that now seemed semi-holy from its uses in yesterday’s births. Having heated water for Billy and Barney’s arrival, I felt easier around a stove that’d always seemed so much Castalia’s home base. I mention this because today was the first time I ever lit this famous wood stove that I myself would slave over so many years to come. (Before I got the Amana gas one almost too late to enjoy.)
Only after my tea was steeping did I dare barefoot it to the counter. Slow-moving, like trying and not alarm the blue-and-white china-looking tin cylinder marked SUGAR—I prized off its lid, I eased my whole hand in. Fingers struck a buried metal ladle that made me jump. Then, irked by my own sissiness, I jammed the scoop aside and touched a spinier-type item.
My fist, sifting white from out its every fold, slowly pulled something heavy toward daylight. Here we had a shell-crusted crucifix four inches long, made of splintery matchwood. A decal at its top said “Souvenir of Nags Head NC.” Glued across it, dozens of tiny openmouthed shells. (The cross seemed filmed or coated like it’d been baked in something brown, cured for days at a low heat—like my poor hairbrush.) Dry sugar threaded from every pearly mouth of every shell. Mounted to the cross’s back—one cutout cardboard picture. It showed the head of a redbird in profile against some dogwood blossoms. This’d been snipped from a magazine, glued to cardboard, varnished so many times it’d got stiff then glassy. It had then been wired behind the little Christ.
He was made of greening brass. Details of His thorn crown and loincloth seemed rubbed away by handling. Strips of fur—fur as good as possible—mink—were glued over the beard of Him. Strung to His body by kite string—six baby teeth. Teeth’d been drilled straight through so that these lines would fit and hold teeth close against His ribs. Baby molars wedged, large-looking, bunched under His either spindly outstretched arm. Jesus’ open palms, both his X-ed feet, His spiny crown had all been daubed any old way with ruby-red fingernail polish. His crotch just shone gory with it. Across the redbird under-plaque, red nail lacquer spelled the words: “Reba Know Better. Reba Be The Real Inproved One HIM.” The brown fur of His pelt beard shifted under Lucy’s up-close breath. His mouth was open like from screaming and His upturned eyes were such awful bloody holes and I threw that thing straight into white powder and clamped its lid on so doggone quick. Couldn’t believe I’d held it in my actual hand so long!
I mashed down the tin top hard, held it there for one full minute. You can never be too safe. I listened—pretending to worry that Cap might come in at the front door—but knowing in my heart I really now expected to hear muffled coin-sized cries from a screamer in and under glittery white mounds. Heebie-jeebie-ville, child.
Daintily then, so daintily, I carried my clinking cup and saucer from out that kitchen. Off quick to anyplace else, somewhere privater and darker. After sliding shut both rolling parlor doors, making sure the velvet drapes stayed drawn, I drank cold tea with greedy slurps. I meant to prove I was still here, yet basically fine. Lucy Mean-as-ever. For forty minutes, it was just me there in the dim room, deciding something hard—but not sure what. Not yet.
My husband found me, tense across my neck and shoulders, staring noplace. He turned on the gas lamp without asking after my mood. “Who died?” he asked. Cap then told me a new joke from downtown about two gentlemen sheep ranchers. The standing prank ran as how a man’s loving relations with a ewe felt lots like real human coupling. So two ranchers are on horseback and they come across a ewe lamb caught in barbed wire, her hindquarter up and jammed right swayingly their way.
One rancher nods down in her direction. “Bill? I sure do wish that it was night and she was Lillian Russell.”
“Heck,” says Bill. “I just wish it was night.”
I laughed so hard my husband stared at me. I slacked off quick then, wiping my damp eyes. “Good one,” says I, confused. “Wish it was night! Good one. You’re lucky you get to hear jokes.”
He looked at me hard. “What have you been into? And what, young lady, has she told you?—If she ever turned you against me, she’d be out of here so fast.—But, enough of that.—How was your day? What did she leave the two of us for supper?”
“I ain’t peeked!” I spoke too loud. “Corn beef and cabbage.”
15
RETURNING from the honeymoon, I needed to believe in something. What besides Here could somebody like young Lucille claim? Surely not yet Us, not when that two-letter word included the mammoth mystery man seated here in the buggy, to my left. As for the comfort and safety of just Me? well, sure, later that became the underpinning of whatever story I am trying and tell you here. Otherwise, what would any of this mean? But at fifteen, I was yet too much in my own foreground for seeming of much value to myself. Hadn’t yet noticed how I was, first of all, a Citizen of Myself. Later I’d discover that and with a
vengeance, child. Takes time, though, but in story time, I’ll try.
Back from Atlanta, noplace felt rightly mine. Maybe only downhill Baby Africa with its black-and-blue porch dreams, its unlit paths, the generations piled up like rich leaf-mold layers waiting to be turned onto some diamond lamp oil for the future.
Summit Avenue’s deserted sidewalks seemed gaslit less to show you where to stroll after sunset. I wondered: What had made me consider Falls so doggone rare? Maybe I just loved the town for being the one that’d let me start in it.
“Things look exceptionally lovely tonight, do they not, Lucille?” His deep voice scared me. Cap didn’t turn my way, just accepted my two bobbing nods.
To sit here, my engagement ring lighting up one streetlamp at a time—dying between—to feel that Falls won’t that great, it made my own body feel less healthy.
(I pictured farm families coming miles to town in strawy open wagon beds. After a full day’s work, they arrived Friday and Saturday evenings just in time to see Summit’s huge white homes and tidy yards at sunset. Then they took usual evening spins towards the Square’s one hardworking free water fountain and then looked over towards Lucas’. Then they faced the drive six miles back out into mule-drawn darkness. Their children stretched out in the wagon’s back, hands laced behind heads, kids laid flat in dungy straw whilst looking up at stars that are both local and yet not. I imagine them: feeling pretty satisfied with what they’d seen in Falls! The responsibility I felt, picturing all this, knowing better now.)
I pulled my satchel closer and knew: Lucy, this town couldn’t save you if it tried. And it won’t try. It’d sooner send you down the drain, and it’ll call that Entertainment. Good clean fun.