“I can’t do that,” Justine said sadly. Duncan had tested her once after reading an article on J. B. Rhine.
“No, I doubt very much that you would be psychic.”
“Then how come I can tell the future?”
“People who have led very still lives can often sense change before others can,” Madame Olita said.
“My life isn’t still,” said Justine.
Madame Olita only sighed.
At the last lesson, she gave Justine a test. “It’s time for you to read my fortune,” she said. Justine had been wanting to do that. She settled down happily at the wicker table, while Olita gazed off toward the street. It was one of her irritable days. “Cut the cards,” Justine told her, and she said, “Yes, yes, I know,” and cut them without looking. Justine chose a very complicated formation. She wanted to do this thoroughly, not missing a thing. She laid each card out with precision, and then sat back and drummed her fingers on her chair arm. After a moment she moved one card a half inch to the left and resettled herself. She frowned. She stopped drumming her fingers.
Madame Olita looked over at her with cool interest. Still Justine didn’t speak.
“Never mind,” said Madame Olita. “You passed.”
Then she became full of bustle, issuing last-minute instructions. “Did I tell you that strangers should pay ahead of time? If they don’t like their fortunes they tend to walk out, they’ll walk right out on you.”
Justine only gathered the cards in silence, one by one.
“Watch where you work, too. Some places have license fees, sometimes hundreds of dollars. It isn’t worth it. Are you listening?”
“What?”
“Don’t go to Calvert County. Don’t go to Cecil County, don’t go to Charles.”
“But we live on a farm, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Ha.”
Justine wrapped the cards and set them on the table. She came to stand in front of Madame Olita.
“Be a little mysterious, I didn’t tell you that,” said Madame Olita. “They’ll have more faith. Don’t let on where you come from or how you learned what you know. Make a point of ignoring personal questions when you’re giving a reading. Will you remember all this? What else should you know?”
Then she gave up. “Well, goodbye, Justine,” she said.
“Goodbye,” said Justine. “Could I come back for a visit?”
“Oh … no. No, I’ll be going into the hospital for a while, I think. But I wish you luck.”
“Thank you,” said Justine. She turned to go.
“Oh, and by the way.”
Justine turned back. Madame Olita, sagging in her chair, waved one hand toward the cards. “You might as well take those along with you,” she said.
When fall came Justine worked up the courage to offer her services at the high school homecoming fair. She donated her fees to the school. After that people began traveling all the way out to the farm, several a week, mostly women, asking if they should get married, or divorced, or sell their land or have a baby or move to California. Justine was astonished. “Duncan,” she said, “I don’t want to be responsible for people. For telling them who to marry and all.”
“But I sort of thought you believed in this,” Duncan said.
She wound a strand of hair around her finger.
“Well, never mind,” he told her. “Just don’t say anything that would cause somebody harm. But I don’t think people take bad advice. They’ve got intuition too, you know. In fact I’d be surprised if they take any advice at all.”
So she continued receiving people in her small, warm kitchen, laying Madame Olita’s cards across the surface of Great-Grandma’s rosewood table. She became a gatherer of secrets, a keeper of wishes and dreams and plans. Sometimes when people very young or very old came in, full of vague hopes, unable or unwilling to say what they would like to ask, she merely reassured them. But sometimes she was so explicit that her own daring amazed her. “Don’t sell any family possessions, particularly jewelry, particularly your mother’s,” she would say.
“How did you know?”
She hadn’t known she did know.
Then sometimes people came whose flat, frictionless lives offered Justine no foothold at all, and she slid into whatever general advice came to mind.
“Don’t rely too heavily on a man who bites his fingernails.”
In the next room, Duncan snorted.
Justine charged three dollars for each reading. They needed it; their milk customers barely paid for the newspaper ad. Juggling the budget to meet the rent, scraping up money from half a dozen sources, Justine had the feeling that she had been through all this years and years ago. Then she remembered: Monopoly. When Duncan had wiped her out and she was selling back hotels and mortgaging her railroads and turning in her get-out-of-jail-free card, all to pay the rent on Boardwalk. Their present problems did not seem much more serious than that. She knew that Duncan would manage.
For Christmas they went home to Baltimore. The family was very cautious and tactful, circling widely around all delicate subjects. It broke Justine’s heart to see what an effort they made. She worried about Duncan—would he say something new to hurt them? She went to bed each night exhausted. But Duncan was meticulously polite. He passed around the gifts that Justine had made by hand and he even invited the family to come and visit some Sunday. (“Oh, well, but it’s so much more comfortable for you to come here, don’t you think?” everybody said.) On the fourth day, when he became very quiet, Justine was quick to agree that they should head back early. She felt sad saying goodbye, particularly to her grandfather, but each time now it seemed a little easier than before.
In February, when money was especially tight, Duncan got a part-time job in town reporting for the Buskville Bugle. “But you can’t spell!” said Justine.
“Never mind, you can.”
For three weeks he ricocheted around the countryside, attending cornerstone layings, turtle derbies, zoning meetings, a Future Farmers contest in parliamentary procedure, a lecture on crop rotation. He enjoyed everything he went to, indiscriminately, and came home full of new scraps of information. “Did you know you can call up earthworms by vibrating a stick in the ground? If you harvest crimson clover too late it will turn into balls in your horses’ stomachs. I’ve learned a quilting pattern from the eighteenth century.” But then writing articles made him irritable. He never did like going at something systematically. He would hand Justine great sheaves of yellow paper all scrawled over and crossed out, with doodles in the margins. When she ran through them with a red pencil, correcting his spelling and slashing through his long digressions, he lost his temper. “Occurrence, o-c-u-r-e-n-c-e,” he said. “Why wreck it up adding extra c’s and r’s?”
“Because that’s how it’s spelled.”
“A waste of letters. This language has no logic to it.”
“I can’t help that.”
“Why’d you cross out my butterfly paragraph?”
“In an article on potato blight?”
“There happened to be a particularly fine great spangled fritillary sitting on the farm agent’s shoulder, totally out of season, ignored by everybody, all the way through the lecture. You can’t expect me to overlook a thing like that.”
And he would type the article complete and hand it in to the office, where any reference to butterflies was immediately deleted.
“They have minds like a snake’s intestinal tract,” Duncan said.
The fourth week, he attended an amateur musicians’ contest. His article that night began very well, describing the contest’s history, its sponsors, and the instruments represented. The next paragraph switched suddenly to first person and related his own impromptu entry with a borrowed harmonica, playing “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” for which he won fourth prize. In the third paragraph he reflected on the oddity of the “impromptu,” which could easily be mistaken, he said, for the name of some obscure Rumanian composer.
Th
e newspaper editor said that, actually, they didn’t need a new reporter as much as they had thought they would.
By March, Duncan was becoming restless. Justine was not sure why. Everything was going well, six does had been dried off in preparation for their kidding in the spring. But Duncan rattled around the house like a bean in a box, staring out one window after another, starting inventions he didn’t finish, sending off to the Department of Agriculture for pamphlets on all sorts of impulsive projects: angora rabbits, fruit trees, popcorn. He painted half the kitchen yellow and then quit. He brought home a carload of rhododendron bushes with their roots balled up in burlap and he planted them all around the yard. “But Duncan,” Justine said, “do you think this is the proper time?” They were still wearing overcoats to bed; the ground was still cold and gray. “Why do I have to do everything properly?” he asked. “Don’t worry, I’ve got a green thumb. A green hand. I’m a whole green man.” And sure enough, the rhododendron took heart and started growing. But Duncan went off and forgot all about it; his strange mood hadn’t eased in the least. “To tell the truth, Justine,” he said, “this winter business is wearing thin. I imagined we’d be sitting by the stove oiling harness leather or something, but we don’t have any harness leather. Don’t you feel tired of it all?”
“No,” Justine said.
She watched, frowning, while he measured the kitchen for some shelves. She didn’t think he would ever finish them.
In April eight kids were born, all does. “Did you ever see such luck? We’ve got a whole damn herd,” Duncan said. Justine was glad because the bucks would have had to be killed. She spent hours playing with the kids, running across the field so that they would frolic behind her. They kicked up their heels and turned awkward half cartwheels. She set her face next to their muscular little muzzles; their yellow, slashed-looking eyes looked softly back at her. After the first few days they were switched to bottle feedings, and then to milk from a pan, while Justine crouched beside them and stroked their tufted spines. She fed them handfuls of grass to accustom them to solid food, and for most of the day she kept them in her yard. Meanwhile Duncan carried in endless buckets of warm milk, which he filtered and ran through the great silvery separator. There was suddenly a stream of customers with indigestion, allergies, or colicky babies, all desperate for goat milk, and the grocery store in Buskville had shown an interest in carrying Duncan’s cheeses. “There,” said Justine. “I knew it would work out!”
“Well, yes,” Duncan said.
In May, all the kids died in one night from eating rhododendron leaves.
Justine wandered around forlornly for days, mourning as if the kids had been human. But all Duncan would say was, “Isn’t it peculiar? You would think if rhododendron was poisonous they’d know it.”
“All those lovely little brown soft furry babies,” Justine said.
“But then, goats are fairly intelligent. Are intelligence and instinct inversely related?”
“At least we have the nannies still,” Justine said. “We don’t have to start completely over.”
“No.”
“And there’ll always be a new batch next year, and I won’t let them in the yard at all.”
Duncan picked up her hand. “Justine,” he said, “what would you think of getting out of the goat business?”
“What? Oh, Duncan, you can’t quit now. Not after one little setback!”
“No, that’s not the reason. I’ve been considering this for some time. I mean, there’s no challenge to it any more. Besides, it keeps you tied down, you always have to be around at milking time. It makes me feel stuck, I feel so—and I was thinking. You know what I enjoyed most this year? Building that hen house. Putting things together, fixing them up. Now Ma’s brother Ed has a sort of cabinetworks down in Virginia, making unfinished furniture and so on. If he could take me in—”
“Virginia? But that’s so far. And I never knew you wanted to make cabinets.”
“Well, I do.”
“We’re so nice and settled!”
“But I don’t like being settled.”
“And we would never get back to Baltimore. Duncan, I’ve already gone far enough, I don’t want to go farther. I couldn’t stand going farther.”
He waited a moment, looking down at her. Then he said, “All right.”
They didn’t talk about it again.
People came filing through Justine’s kitchen for advice on their spring problems: love affairs, unexplainable bouts of wistfulness, sudden waves of grief over people and places they had not even thought they liked. Justine laid her cards on the rosewood table.
“It will work out.”
“Just wait through this.”
“You will feel better a week from now.”
Duncan plodded through carrying buckets full of milk.
He had grown very silent, although if she spoke to him he always answered. He began drinking bourbon at night after supper. He drank from his great-grandfather’s crystal stemware. After the second glass his face became radiant and serene and childlike, and he would switch on a lamp in slow motion and start reading paperbacks. The technical books that he usually liked grew a film of dust while he worked his way through a stack of moldy, tattered Westerns the previous tenants had left in the barn. Whenever Justine looked over his shoulder stubbled men were drawling threats and cowboys were reaching for their guns.
“Duncan,” Justine said, “wouldn’t you like to sit out on the porch with me?”
“Oh, no thank you. Later, maybe.”
But later he went to bed, moving dreamily through the house, not asking if she were coming too. She sat alone at the kitchen table and shuffled her cards. Then she laid them in rows, idly, as if she were her own client. She yawned and looked to see what had shaped up.
She saw journeys, upheavals, surprises, new people, luck, crowds, hasty decisions, and unexpected arrivals.
Which meant, of course, that Madame Olita was right: it was not possible to tell your own fortune.
All the same, if she had had a client with these cards! She imagined how she would glance at him, interested for the first time, amazed at his quicksilver life after all the stale ones she had seen up till now. She imagined possessing such a future herself, having to consult the cards every day, so much was going on.
Then it seemed to her that she was not reading her fortune after all, but accepting little square papers that told her what was expected of her next. She had no choice but to stand up, and gather her cards, and wrap them in their piece of silk before she went to the bedroom to wake Duncan.
This time they moved in a rented truck, which was cheaper than Mayflower. They left behind Justine’s beloved goats, Duncan’s chewed-looking rhododendron bushes and his empty, echoing, beautifully built hen house. They took most of the Peck furniture as well as ten years’ supply of Bag Balm, which turned out to be excellent for chapped hands. And all the way to Virginia, his truck following behind the apple-green Graham Paige, Duncan studied the back of Justine’s head and wondered what was going on in her mind. He knew she hated this move. She had joined up with him, he thought, as easily as taking the hand of someone next to her on a sofa. How could she guess that immediately afterward she would be pulled not only off the sofa but also out of the house, out of the city, off to another state, even, clinging fast in bewilderment and asking herself what had happened? And now look: she was so bright and reckless, rattling down the highway, he was reminded of her mother’s terrible gaiety at the wedding reception. He knew that sooner or later she was going to break down.
Yet in Virginia, in their shallow hot apartment above Uncle Ed Hodges’s garage, Justine remained cheerful. She hummed as she settled their belongings in—only, perhaps, taking a little less care this time, leaving the damask curtains unhung and giving Aunt Marybelle, without a thought, the huge walnut breakfront when it wouldn’t fit through the apartment door. She located a church bazaar, where she told fortunes, and after that there was a steady t
rickle of clients. To Duncan they were indistinguishable from her Buskville clients—mostly women, faded housewives and very young girls—and their lives were indistinguishable too, and their futures, which even he could have predicted, but Justine was patient and kind with them and it was plain they all loved her. In the afternoons if she had no readings, she came to the cabinetworks and watched Duncan build things. At first she was shy among the blunt, sawdusty carpenters, but she warmed up after a while. She made friends with them and told fortunes for their wives and kept their children. Sometimes she even helped out with the work, sitting on a board for someone or sanding down a tabletop. And always she was so joyous. How long could this last?
She said she wanted a baby. Duncan didn’t. The idea of a family—a closed circle locking him in, some unlucky child whom he would lock in—made him feel desperate. Besides, he was not so sure that it was medically sound. Who knew what might be passed on? He pointed out their heredity: heart murmurs, premature births, their grandfather’s deafness.
“But!” Justine said. “Look at our teeth! They’re perfect, not a cavity in the lot. Nobody’s ever lost one.”
“Justine, if I hear one more word about those goddam teeth—”
But in the end he gave in. He agreed to a baby the way Justine, he imagined, had agreed to move to Virginia; he assumed it was necessary for her in some way that he would never understand. And all through her pregnancy he tried to take an interest. He listened to the details of every doctor’s appointment, he practiced her breathing exercises with her until he grew light-headed. Twice he drove her to Baltimore for overlong visits with the aunts, who fussed and clucked around her while Duncan skulked nearby with his collar turned up and his hands jammed deep in his pockets. It seemed to him that his part in all this was so incidental. But when he steeled himself to suggest that she might want to go to Baltimore for the birth as well, Justine turned a sudden level gaze on him and said, “No, thank you. I’ll have it here with you.” How did her mind work?