Tom Carmody spat from out his porch eyrie. ‘Ha!’
‘Lemme see that again!’ cried Gramps Medknowe. ‘Is it a octopus?’
Charlie flapped the reins; the horse stumbled into action.
‘Come on aroun’! You’re welcome!’
‘What’ll your wife say?’
‘She’ll kick the tar off’n our heels!’
But Charlie and wagon were gone over the hill. The men stood, all of them, chewing their tongues, squinting up the road in the dark. Tom Carmody swore softly from the porch…
Charlie climbed the steps of his shack and carried the jar to its throne in the living room, thinking that from now on this lean-to would be a palace, with an ‘emperor’—that was the word! ‘emperor’—all cold and white and quiet drifting in his private pool, raised, elevated upon a shelf over a ramshackle table.
The jar, as he watched, burnt off the cold mist that hung over this place on the rim of the swamp.
‘What you got there?’
Thedy’s thin soprano turned him from his awe. She stood in the bedroom door glaring out, her thin body clothed in faded blue gingham, her hair drawn to a drab knot behind red ears. Her eyes were faded like the gingham. ‘Well,’ she repeated. ‘What is it?’
‘What’s it look like to you, Thedy?’
She took a thin step forward, making a slow, indolent pendulum of hips, her eyes intent upon the jar, her lips drawn back to show feline milk teeth.
The dead pale thing hung in its serum.
Thedy snapped a dull-blue glance at Charlie, then back to the jar, once more at Charlie, once more to the jar, then she whirled quickly:
‘It—it looks—looks just like you, Charlie!’ she cried.
The bedroom door slammed.
The reverberation did not disturb the jar’s contents. But Charlie stood there, longing after his wife, heart pounding frantically. Much later, when his heart slowed, he talked to the thing in the jar.
‘I work the bottom land to the butt-bone every year, and she grabs the money and runs off down home visitin’ her folks nine weeks at a stretch. I can’t keep hold of her. Her and the men from the store, they make fun of me. I can’t help it if I don’t know a way to hold on to her! Damn, but I try!’
Philosophically, the contents of the jar gave no advice.
‘Charlie?’
Someone stood in the front-yard door.
Charlie turned, startled, then broke out a grin.
It was some of the men from the General Store.
‘Uh—Charlie—we—we thought—well—we came up to have a look at that—stuff—you got in that there jar—’
July passed warm and it was August.
For the first time in years, Charlie was happy as tall corn growing after a drought. It was gratifying of an evening to hear boots shushing through the tall grass, the sound of men spitting into the ditch prior to setting foot on the porch, the sound of heavy bodies creaking the boards, and the groan of the house as yet another shoulder leaned against its frame door and another voice said, as a hairy wrist wiped a mouth clean:
‘Kin I come in?’
With elaborate casualness, Charlie’d invite the arrivals in. There’d be chairs, soapboxes for all, or at least carpets to squat on. And by the time crickets were itching their legs into a summertime humming and frogs were throat-swollen like ladies with goiters shouting in the great night, the room would be full to bursting with people from all the bottom lands.
At first nobody would say anything. The first half-hour of such an evening, while people came in and got settled, was spent in carefully rolling cigarettes. Putting tobacco neatly into the rut of brown paper, loading it, tamping it, as they loaded and tamped and rolled their thoughts and fears and amazement for the evening. It gave them time to think. You could see their brains working behind their eyes as they fingered the cigarettes into smoking order.
It was kind of a rude church gathering. They sat, squatted, leaned on plaster walls, and one by one, with reverent awe, they stared at the jar upon its shelf.
They wouldn’t stare sudden-like. No, they kind of did it slow, casual, as if they were glancing around the room—letting their eyes fumble over just any old object that happened into their consciousness.
And—just by accident, of course—the focus of their wandering eyes would occur always at the same place. After a while all eyes in the room would be fastened to it, like pins stuck in some incredible pincushion. And the only sound would be someone sucking a corncob. Or the children’s barefooted scurry on the porch planks outside. Maybe some woman’s voice would come. ‘You kids git away, now! Git!’ And with a giggle like soft, quick water, the bare feet would rush off to scare the bullfrogs.
Charlie would be up front, naturally, on his rocking chair, a plaid pillow under his lean rump, rocking slow, enjoying the fame and looked-up-toness that came with keeping the jar.
Thedy, she’d be seen way back of the room with the womenfolk in a bunch, all gray and quiet, abiding their men.
Thedy looked like she was ripe for jealous screaming. But she said nothing, just watched men tromp into her living room and sit at the feet of Charlie, staring at this here Holy Grail-like thing, and her lips were set cold and hard and she spoke not a civil word to anybody.
After a period of proper silence, someone, maybe old Gramps Medknowe from Crick Road, would clear the phlegm from a deep cave somewhere inside himself, lean forward, blinking, wet his lips, maybe, and there’d be a curious tremble in his calloused fingers.
This would cue everyone to get ready for the talking to come. Ears were primed. People settled like sows in the warm mud after a rain.
Gramps looked a long while, measured his lips with a lizard tongue, then settled back and said, like always, in a high, thin, old-man’s tenor:
‘Wonder what it is? Wonder if it’s a he or a she or just a plain old it? Sometimes I wake up nights, twist on my corn-mattin’, think about that jar settin’ here in the long dark. Think about it hangin’ in liquid, peaceful and pale like an animal oyster. Sometimes I wake Maw and we both think on it…’
While talking, Gramps moved his fingers in a quavering pantomime. Everybody watched his thick thumb weave, and the other heavy-nailed fingers undulate.
‘…We both lay there, thinkin’. And we shivers. Maybe a hot night, trees sweatin’, mosquitoes too hot to fly, but we shivers jest the same, and turn over, tryin’ to sleep…’
Gramps lapsed back into silence, as if his speech was enough from him, let some other voice talk the wonder, awe, and strangeness.
Juke Marmer, from Willow Sump, wiped sweat off his palms on the round of his knees and softly said:
‘I remember when I was a runnel-nosed kid. We had a cat who was all the time makin’ kittens. Lordamighty, she’d a litter any time she jumped around and skipped a fence—’ Juke spoke in a kind of holy softness, benevolent. ‘Well, we give the kittens away, but when this one particular litter busted out, everybody within walkin’ distance had one-two our cats by gift, already.
‘So Ma busied on the back porch with a big two-gallon glass jar, fillin’ it to the top with water. Ma said, “Juke, you drown them kittens!” I ’member I stood there; the kittens mewed, runnin’ ’round, blind, small, helpless, and funny—just beginnin’ to get their eyes open. I looked at Ma, I said, “Not me, Ma! You do it!” But Ma turned pale and said it had to be done and I was the only one handy. And she went off to stir gravy and fix chicken. I—I picked up one—kitten. I held it. It was warm. It made a mewin’ sound. I felt like runnin’ away, not ever comin’ back.’
Juke nodded his head now, eyes bright, young, seeing into the past, making it new, shaping it with words, smoothing it with his tongue.
‘I dropped the kitten in the water. The kitten closed his eyes, opened his mouth, tryin’ for air. I ’member how the little white fangs showed, the pink tongue came out, and bubbles with it, in a line to the top of the water!
‘I know to this day the way that kit
ten floated after it was all over, driftin’ aroun’, slow and not worryin’, lookin’ out at me, not condemnin’ me for what I done. But not likin’ me, neither. Ahhhh…’
Hearts jumped quick. Eyes swiveled from Juke to the shelved jar, back down, up again apprehensively.
A pause.
Jahdoo, the black man from Heron Swamp, tossed his ivory eyeballs, like a dusky juggler, in his head. His dark knuckles knotted and flexed—grasshoppers alive.
‘You know what that is? You know, you know? I tells you. That be the center of Life, sure ’nuff! Lord believe me, it so!’
Swaying in a tree-like rhythm, Jahdoo was blown by a swamp wind no one could see, hear or feel, save himself. His eyeballs went around again, as if cut free to wander. His voice needled a dark thread pattern, picking up each person by the lobes of their ears and sewing them into one unbreathing design:
‘From that, lyin’ back in the Middibamboo Sump, all sort o’thing crawl. It put out hand, it put out feet, it put out tongue an’ horn an’ it grow. Little bitty amoeba, perhap. Then a frog with a bulge-throat fit ta bust! Yah!’ He cracked knuckles. ‘It slobber on up to its gummy joints and it—it am human! That am the center of creation! That am Middibamboo Mama, from which we all come ten thousand year ago. Believe it!’
‘Ten thousand year ago!’ whispered Granny Carnation.
‘It am old! Looky it! It donn worra no more. It know betta. It hang like pork chop in fryin’ fat. It got eye to see with, but it donn blink ’em, they donn look fretted, does they? No, man! It know betta. It know that we done come from it, and we is goin’ back to it.’
‘What color eyes it got?’
‘Gray.’
‘Naw, green!’
‘What color hair? Brown?’
‘Black!’
‘Red!’
‘No, gray!’
Then Charlie would give his drawling opinion. Some nights he’d say the same thing, some nights not. It didn’t matter. When you said the same thing night after night in the deep summer, it always sounded different. The crickets changed it. The frogs changed it. The thing in the jar changed it. Charlie said:
‘What if an old man went back into the swamp, or maybe a young kid, and wandered aroun’ for years and years lost in all that drippin’, on the trails and gullies, in them old wet ravines in the nights, skin a-turnin’ pale, and makin’ cold and shrivelin’ up. Bein’ away from the sun he’d keep witherin’ away up and up and finally sink into a muck-hole and lay in a kind of—scum—like the maggot ’skeeters sleepin’ in sump-water. Why, why—for all we can tell, this might be someone we know! Someone we passed words with once on a time. For all we know—’
A hissing from among the womenfolk back in the shadow. One woman standing, eyes shining black, fumbled for words. Her name was Mrs Tridden, and she murmured:
‘Lots of little kids run stark naked to the swamp ever’ year. They runs around and never comes back. I almost got lost maself. I—I lost my little boy, Foley, that way. You—you don’t suppose!!!’
Breath was snatched through nostrils, constricted, tightened. Mouths turned down at corners, bent by hard, clinching muscle. Heads turned on celery-stalk necks, and eyes read her horror and hope. It was in Mrs Tridden’s body, wire-taut, holding to the wall back of her with straight fingers stiff.
‘My baby,’ she whispered. She breathed it out. ‘My baby. My Foley. Foley! Foley, is that you? Foley! Foley, tell me, baby, is that YOU!’
Everybody held their breath, turning to see the jar.
The thing in the jar said nothing. It just stared blind-white out upon the multitude. And deep in rawboned bodies a secret fear-juice ran like a spring thaw, and their resolute calmness and belief and easy humbleness was gnawed and eaten by that juice and melted away in a torrent! Someone screamed.
‘It moved!’
‘No, no, it didn’ move. Just your eyes playin’ tricks!’
‘Hones’ ta God!’ cried Juke. ‘I saw it shift slow like a dead kitten!’
‘Hush up, now. It’s been dead a long, long time. Maybe since before you was born!’
‘He made a sign!’ screamed Mrs Tridden. ‘That’s my Foley! My baby you got there! Three-year-old he was! My baby lost and gone in the swamp!’
The sobbing broke from her.
‘Now, Mrs Tridden. There now. Set yourself down, stop shakin’. Ain’t no more your child’n mine. There, there.’
One of the womenfolk held her and faded out the sobbing into jerked breathing and a fluttering of her lips in butterfly quickness as the breath stroked over them, afraid.
When all was quiet again, Granny Carnation, with a withered pink flower in her shoulder-length gray hair, sucked the pipe in her trap mouth and talked around it, shaking her head to make the hair dance in the light:
‘All this talkin’ and shovin’ words. Like as not we’ll never find out, never know what it is. Like as not if we found out we wouldn’t want to know. It’s like magic tricks magicians do at shows. Once you find the fake, ain’t no more fun’n the innards of a jackbob. We come collectin’ around here every ten nights or so, talkin’, social-like, with somethin’, always somethin’, to talk about. Stands to reason if we spied out what the damn thing is there’d be nothin’ to chew about, so there!’
‘Well, damn it to hell!’ rumbled a bull voice. ‘I don’t think it’s nothin’!’
Tom Carmody.
Tom Carmody standing, as always, in shadow. Out on the porch, just his eyes staring in, his lips laughing at you dimly, mocking. His laughter got inside Charlie like a hornet sting. Thedy had put him up to it. Thedy was trying to kill Charlie’s new life, she was!
‘Nothin’,’ repeated Carmody, harshly, ‘in that jar but a bunch of old jellyfish from Sea Cove, a-rottin’ and stinkin’ fit to whelp!’
‘You mightn’t be jealous, Cousin Carmody?’ asked Charlie, slow.
‘Haw!’ snorted Carmody. ‘I just come aroun’ ta watch you dumb fools jaw about nuthin’. You notice I never set foot inside or took part. I’m goin’ home right now. Anybody wanna come along with me?’
He got no offer of company. He laughed again, as if this were a bigger joke, how so many people could be so far gone, and Thedy was raking her palms with her fingernails away back in a corner of the room. Charlie saw her mouth twitch and was cold and could not speak.
Carmody, still laughing, rapped off the porch with his high-heeled boots and the sound of crickets took him away.
Granny Carnation gummed her pipe. ‘Like I was sayin’ before the storm: that thing on the shelf, why couldn’t it be sort of—all things? Lots of things. All kinds of life—death—I don’t know. Mix rain and sun and muck and jelly, all that together. Grass and snakes and children and mist and all the nights and days in the dead canebrake. Why’s it have to be one thing? Maybe it’s lots.’
And the talking ran soft for another hour, and Thedy slipped away into the night on the track of Tom Carmody, and Charlie began to sweat. They were up to something, those two. They were planning something. Charlie sweated warm all the rest of the evening…
The meeting broke up late, and Charlie bedded down with mixed emotions. The meeting had gone off well, but what about Thedy and Tom?
Very late, with certain star coveys shuttled down the sky marking the time as after midnight, Charlie heard the slushing of the tall grass parted by her penduluming hips. Her heels tacked soft across the porch, into the house, into the bedroom.
She lay soundlessly in bed, cat eyes staring at him. He couldn’t see them, but he could feel them staring.
‘Charlie?’
He waited.
Then he said, ‘I’m awake.’
Then she waited.
‘Charlie?’
‘What?’
‘Bet you don’t know where I been; bet you don’t know where I been.’ It was a faint, derisive singsong in the night.
He waited.
She waited again. She couldn’t bear waiting long, though, and continued:
/> ‘I been to the carnival over in Cape City. Tom Carmody drove me. We—we talked to the carny-boss, Charlie, we did, we did, we sure did!’ And she sort of giggled to herself, secretly.
Charlie was ice-cold. He stirred upright on an elbow.
She said, ‘We found out what it is in your jar, Charlie—’ insinuatingly.
Charlie flumped over, hands to ears. ‘I don’t wanna hear!’
‘Oh, but you gotta hear, Charlie. It’s a good joke. Oh, it’s rare, Charlie,’ she hissed.
‘Go away,’ he said.
‘Unh-unh! No, no, sir, Charlie. Why, no, Charlie—honey. Not until I tell!’
‘Git!’ he said.
‘Let me tell! We talked to that carny-boss, and he—he liked to die laughin’. He said he sold that jar and what was in it to some, some—hick—for twelve bucks. And it ain’t worth more’n two bucks at most!’
Laughter bloomed in the dark, right out of her mouth, an awful kind of laughter.
She finished it, quick:
‘It’s just junk, Charlie! Rubber, papier-mâché, silk, cotton, boric acid! That’s all! Got a metal frame inside! That’s all it is, Charlie. That’s all!’ she shrilled.
‘No, no!’
He sat up swiftly, ripping sheets apart in big fingers, roaring.
‘I don’t wanna hear! Don’t wanna hear!’ he bellowed over and over.
She said, ‘Wait’ll everyone hears how fake it is! Won’t they laugh! Won’t they flap their lungs!’
He caught her wrists. ‘You ain’t gonna tell them?’
‘Wouldn’t wan me known as a liar, would you, Charlie?’
He flung her off and away.
‘Whyncha leave me alone? You dirty! Dirty jealous mean of ever’thing I do. I took shine off your nose when I brung the jar home. You didn’ sleep right ’til you ruined things!’
She laughed. ‘Then I won’t tell anybody,’ she said.
He stared at her. ‘You spoiled my fun. That’s all that counted. It don’t matter if you tell the rest. I know. And I’ll never have no more fun. You and that Tom Carmody. I wish I could stop him laughin’. He’s been laughin’ for years at me! Well, you just go tell the rest, the other people, now—might as well have your fun—!’