‘Great-grandma, now listen—what you’re doing is no better than breaking a lease. This house will fall down without you. You must give us at least a year’s notice!’
Great-grandma opened one eye. Ninety years gazed calmly out at her physicians like a dust-ghost from a high cupola window in a fast-emptying house. ‘Tom…?’
The boy was sent, alone, to her whispering bed.
‘Tom,’ she said, faintly, far away, ‘in the Southern Seas there’s a day in each man’s life when he knows it’s time to shake hands with all his friends and say good-by and sail away, and he does, and it’s natural—it’s just his time. That’s how it is today. I’m so like you sometimes, sitting through Saturday matinees until nine at night when we send your dad to bring you home. Tom, when the time comes that the same cowboys are shooting the same Indians on the same mountaintop, then it’s best to fold back the seat and head for the door, with no regrets and no walking backward up the aisle. So, I’m leaving while I’m still happy and still entertained.’
Douglas was summoned next to her side.
‘Grandma, who’ll shingle the roof next spring?’
Every April for as far back as there were calendars, you thought you heard woodpeckers tapping the housetop. But no, it was Great-grandma, somehow transported, singing, pounding nails, replacing shingles, high in the sky!
‘Douglas,’ she whispered, ‘don’t ever let anyone do the shingles unless it’s fun for them.’
‘Yes’m.’
‘Look around come April, and say, “Who’d like to fix the roof?” And whichever face lights up is the face you want, Douglas. Because up there on that roof you can see the whole town going toward the country and the country going toward the edge of the earth and the river shining, and the morning lake, and birds on the trees down under you, and the best of the wind all around above. Any one of those should be enough to make a person climb a weather vane some spring sunrise. It’s a powerful hour, if you give it half a chance…’
Her voice sank to a soft flutter.
Douglas was crying.
She roused herself again. ‘Now, why are you doing that?’
‘Because,’ he said, ‘you won’t be here tomorrow.’
She turned a small hand-mirror from herself to the boy. He looked at her face and himself in the mirror and then at her face again as she said, ‘Tomorrow morning I’ll get up at seven and wash behind my ears: I’ll run to church with Charlie Woodman: I’ll picnic at Electric Park; I’ll swim, run barefoot, fall out of trees, chew spearmint gum…Douglas, Douglas, for shame! You cut your fingernails, don’t you?’
‘Yes’m.’
‘And you don’t yell when your body makes itself over every seven years or so, old cells dead and new ones added to your fingers and your heart. You don’t mind that, do you?’
‘No’m.’
‘Well, consider then, boy. Any man saves fingernail clippings is a fool. You ever see a snake bother to keep his peeled skin? That’s about all you got here today in this bed is fingernails and snake skin. One good breath would send me up in flakes. Important thing is not the me that’s lying here, but the me that’s sitting on the edge of the bed looking back at me, and the me that’s downstairs cooking supper, or out in the garage under the car, or in the library reading. All the new parts, they count. I’m not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I’ll be around a long time. A thousand years from now a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade. That’s my answer to anyone asks big questions! Quick now, send in the rest!’
At last the entire family stood, like people seeing someone off at the rail station, waiting in the room.
‘Well,’ said Great-grandma, ‘there I am. I’m not humble, so it’s nice seeing you standing around my bed. Now next week there’s late gardening and closet-cleaning and clothes-buying for the children to do. And since that part of me which is called, for convenience, Great-grandma, won’t be here to step it along, those other parts of me called Uncle Bert and Leo and Tom and Douglas, and all the other names, will have to take over, each to his own.’
‘Yes, Grandma.’
‘I don’t want any Hallowe’en parties here tomorrow. Don’t want anyone saying anything sweet about me; I said it all in my time and my pride. I’ve tasted every victual and danced every dance; now there’s one last tart I haven’t bit on, one tune I haven’t whistled. But I’m not afraid. I’m truly curious. Death won’t get a crumb by my mouth I won’t keep and savor. So don’t you worry over me. Now, all of you go, and let me find my sleep…’
Somewhere a door closed quietly.
‘That’s better.’ Alone, she snuggled luxuriously down through the warm snowbank of linen and wool, sheet and cover, and the colors of the patchwork quilt were bright as the circus banners of old time. Lying there, she felt as small and secret as on those mornings eighty-some-odd years ago when, wakening, she comforted her tender bones in bed.
A long time back, she thought, I dreamed a dream, and was enjoying it so much when someone wakened me, and that was the day when I was born. And now? Now, let me see…She cast her mind back. Where was I? she thought. Ninety years…how to take up the thread and the pattern of that lost dream again? She put out a small hand. There…Yes, that was it. She smiled. Deeper in the warm snow hill she turned her head upon her pillow. That was better. Now, yes, now she saw it shaping in her mind quietly, and with a serenity like a sea moving along an endless and self-refreshing shore. Now she let the old dream touch and lift her from the snow and drift her above the scarce-remembered bed.
Downstairs, she thought, they are polishing the silver, and rummaging the cellar, and dusting in the halls. She could hear them living all through the house.
‘It’s all right,’ whispered Great-grandma, as the dream floated her. ‘Like everything else in this life, it’s fitting.’
And the sea moved her back down the shore.
Exorcism
She came out of the bathroom putting iodine on her finger where she had almost lopped it off cutting herself a chunk of coconut cake. Just then the mailman came up the porch steps, opened the door, and walked in. The door slammed. Elmira Brown jumped a foot.
‘Sam!’ she cried. She waved her iodined finger on the air to cool it. ‘I’m still not used to my husband being a postman. Every time you just walk in, it scares the life out of me!’
Sam Brown stood there with the mail pouch half empty, scratching his head. He looked back out the door as if a fog had suddenly rolled in on a calm sweet summer morn.
‘Sam, you’re home early,’ she said.
‘Can’t stay,’ he said in a puzzled voice.
‘Spit it out, what’s wrong?’ She came over and looked into his face.
‘Maybe nothing, maybe lots. I just delivered some mail to Clara Goodwater up the street…’
‘Clara Goodwater!’
‘Now don’t get your dander up. Books it was, from the Johnson-Smith Company, Racine, Wisconsin. Title of one book…let’s see now.’ He screwed up his face, then unscrewed it. ‘Albertus Magnus—that’s it. “Being the approved, verified, sympathetic and natural Egyptian Secrets or…”’ He peered at the ceiling to summon the lettering. ‘“White and Black Art for Man and Beast, Revealing the Forbidden Knowledge and Mysteries of Ancient Philosophers”!’
‘Clara Goodwater’s you say?’
‘Walking along, I had a good chance to peek at the front pages, no harm in that. “Hidden Secrets of Life Unveiled by that celebrated Student, Philosopher, Chemist, Naturalist, Psychomist, Astrologer, Alchemist, Metallurgist, Sorcerer. Explanator of the Mysteries of Wizards and Witchcraft, together with recondite views of numerous Arts and Sciences—Obscure, Plain, Practical, etcetera.” There! By God, I got a head like a box Brownie. Got the words, even if I haven’t got the sense.’
Elmira stood looking at her iodined finger as if it were pointed at her by a stranger.
‘Clara Goodwater,’ she murmured.
/> ‘Looked me right in the eye as I handed it over, said. “Going to be a witch, first-class, no doubt. Get my diploma in no time. Set up business. Hex crowds and individuals, old and young, big and small.” Then she kinda laughed, put her nose in that book, and went in.’
Elmira stared at a bruise on her arm, carefully tongued a loose tooth in her jaw.
A door slammed. Tom Spaulding, kneeling on Elmira Brown’s front lawn, looked up. He had been wandering about the neighborhood, seeing how the ants were doing here or there, and had found a particularly good hill with a big hole in which all kinds of fiery bright pismires were tumbling about scissoring the air and wildly carrying little packets of dead grasshopper and infinitesimal bird down into the earth. Now here was something else: Mrs Brown, swaying on the edge of her porch as if she’d just found out the world was falling through space at sixty trillion miles a second. Behind her was Mr Brown, who didn’t know the miles per second and probably wouldn’t care if he did know.
‘You, Tom!’ said Mrs Brown. ‘I need moral support and the equivalent of the blood of the Lamb with me. Come along!’
And off she rushed, squashing ants and kicking tops off dandelions and trotting big spiky holes in flower beds as she cut across yards.
Tom knelt a moment longer studying Mrs Brown’s shoulder blades and spine as she toppled down the street. He read the bones and they were eloquent of melodrama and adventure, a thing he did not ordinarily connect with ladies, even though Mrs Brown had the remnants of a pirate’s mustache. A moment later he was in tandem with her.
‘Mrs Brown, you sure look mad!’
‘You don’t know what mad is, boy!’
‘Watch out!’ cried Tom.
Mrs Elmira Brown fell right over an iron dog lying asleep there on the green grass.
‘Mrs Brown!’
‘You see?’ Mrs Brown sat there. ‘Clara Goodwater did this to me! Magic!’
‘Magic?’
‘Never mind, boy. Here’s the steps. You go first and kick any invisible strings out of the way. Ring that doorbell, but pull your finger off quick, the juice’ll burn you to a cinder!’
Tom did not touch the bell.
‘Clara Goodwater!’ Mrs Brown flicked the bell button with her iodined finger.
Far away in the cool dim empty rooms of the big old house, a silver bell tinkled and faded.
Tom listened. Still farther away there was a stir of mouselike running. A shadow, perhaps a blowing curtain, moved in a distant parlor.
‘Hello,’ said a quiet voice.
And quite suddenly Mrs Goodwater was there, fresh as a stick of peppermint, behind the screen.
‘Why, hello there, Tom, Elmira. What—’
‘Don’t rush me! We came over about your practicing to be a full-fledged witch!’
Mrs Goodwater smiled. ‘Your husband’s not only a mailman, but a guardian of the law. Got a nose out to here!’
‘He didn’t look at no mail.’
‘He’s ten minutes between houses laughing at post cards and trying on mail-order shoes.’
‘It ain’t what he seen; it’s what you yourself told him about the books you got.’
‘Just a joke. “Going to be a witch!” I said, and bang! Off gallops Sam, like I’d flung lightning at him. I declare there can’t be one wrinkle in that man’s brain.’
‘You talked about your magic other places yesterday—’
‘You must mean the Sandwich Club…’
‘To which I pointedly was not invited.’
‘Why, lady, we thought that was your regular day with your grandma.’
‘I can always have another Grandma day, if people’d only ask me places.’
‘All there was to it at the Sandwich Club was me sitting there with a ham and pickle sandwich, and I said right out loud, “At last I’m going to get my witch’s diploma. Been studying for years!”’
‘That’s what come back to me over the phone!’
‘Ain’t modern inventions wonderful!’ said Mrs Goodwater.
‘Considering you been president of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge since the Civil War, it seems, I’ll put it to you bang on the nose. Have you used witchcraft all these years to spell the ladies and win the ayes-have-it?’
‘Do you doubt it for a moment, lady?’ said Mrs Goodwater.
‘Election’s tomorrow again, and all I want to know is, you running for another term—and ain’t you ashamed?’
‘Yes to the first question and no to the second. Lady, look here, I bought those books for my boy cousin, Raoul. He’s just ten and goes around looking in hats for rabbits. I told him there’s about as much chance finding rabbits in hats as brains in heads of certain people I could name, but look he does and so I got these gifts for him.’
‘Wouldn’t believe you on a stack of Bibles.’
‘God’s truth, anyway. I love to fun about the witch thing. The ladies all yodeled when I explained about my dark powers. Wish you’d been there.’
‘I’ll be there tomorrow to fight you with a cross of gold and all the powers of good I can organize behind me,’ said Elmira. ‘Right now, tell me how much other magic junk you got in your house.’
Mrs Goodwater pointed to a sidetable inside the door.
‘I been buying all kinds of magic herbs. Smell funny and make Raoul happy. That little sack of stuff, that’s called thisis rue, and this is sabisse root and that there’s ebon herbs; here’s black sulphur, and this they claim is bone dust.’
‘Bone dust!’ Elmira skipped back and kicked Tom’s ankle. Tom yelped.
‘And here’s wormwood and fern leaves so you can freeze shotguns and fly like a bat in your dreams, it says in Chapter X of the little book here. I think it’s fine for growing boys’ heads to think about things like this. Now, from the look on your face you don’t believe Raoul exists. Well, I’ll give you his Springfield address.’
‘Yes,’ said Elmira, ‘and the day I write him you’ll take the Springfield bus and go to General Delivery and get my letter and write back to me in a boy’s hand. I know you!’
‘Mrs Brown, speak up—you want to be president of the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge, right? You run every year now for ten years. You nominate yourself. And always wind up getting one vote. Yours. Elmira, if the ladies wanted you they’d landslide you in. But from where I stand looking up the mountain, ain’t so much as one pebble come rattling down save yours. Tell you what, I’ll nominate and vote for you myself come noon tomorrow, how’s that?’
‘Damned for sure, then,’ said Elmira. ‘Last year I got a deathly cold right at election time; couldn’t get out and campaign back-fence-to-backfence. Year before that, broke my leg. Mighty strange.’ She squinted darkly at the lady behind the screen. ‘That’s not all. Last month I cut my fingers six times, bruised my knee ten times, fell off my back porch twice, you hear—twice! I broke a window, dropped four dishes, one vase worth a dollar forty-nine at Bixby’s, and I’m billing you for every dropped dish from now on in my house and environs!’
‘I’ll be poor by Christmas,’ said Mrs Goodwater. She opened the screen door and came out suddenly and let the door slam. ‘Elmira Brown, how old are you?’
‘You probably got it written in one of your black books. Thirty-five!’
‘Well, when I think of thirty-five years of your life…’ Mrs Goodwater pursed her lips and blinked her eyes, counting. ‘That’s about twelve thousand seven hundred and seventy-five days, or counting three of them per day, twelve thousand-odd commotions, twelve thousand much-ados and twelve thousand calamities. It’s a full rich life you lead, Elmira Brown. Shake hands!’
‘Get away!’ Elmira fended her off.
‘Why, lady, you’re only the second most clumsy woman in Green Town, Illinois. You can’t sit down without playing the chair like an accordion. You can’t stand up but what you kick the cat. You can’t trot across an open meadow without falling into a well. Your life has been one long decline, Elmira Alice Brown, so why not admit it?’
&nbs
p; ‘It wasn’t clumsiness that caused my calamities, but you being within a mile of me at those times when I dropped a pot of beans or juiced my finger in the electric socket at home.’
‘Lady, in a town this size, everybody’s within a mile of someone at one time or other in the day.’
‘You admit being around then?’
‘I admit being born here, yes, but I’d give anything right now to have been born in Kenosha or Zion. Elmira, go to your dentist and see what he can do about that serpent’s tongue in there.’
‘Oh!’ said Elmira. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’
‘You’ve pushed me too far, I wasn’t interested in witchcraft, but I think I’ll just look into this business. Listen here! You’re invisible right now. While you stood there I put a spell on you. You’re clean out of sight.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘Course,’ admitted the witch, ‘I never could see you, lady.’
Elmira pulled out her pocket mirror. ‘There I am!’ She peered closer and gasped. She reached up like someone tuning a harp and plucked a single thread. She held it up, Exhibit A. ‘I never had a gray hair in my life till this second!’
The witch smiled charmingly. ‘Put it in a jar of still water, be an angleworm come morning. Oh, Elmira, look at yourself at last, won’t you? All these years, blaming others for your own mallet feet and floaty ways! You ever read Shakespeare? There’s little stage directions in there: Alarums and Excursions. That’s you, Elmira. Alarums and Excursions! Now get home before I feel the bumps on your head and predict gas at night for you! Shoo!’
She waved her hands in the air as if Elmira were a cloud of things. ‘My, the flies are thick this summer!’ she said.
She went inside and hooked the door.
‘The line is drawn, Mrs Goodwater,’ Elmira said, folding her arms. ‘I’ll give you one last chance. Withdraw from the candidacy of the Honeysuckle Lodge or face me face-to-face tomorrow when I run for office and wrest it from you in a fair fight. I’ll bring Tom here with me. An innocent good boy. And innocence and good will win the day.’
‘I wouldn’t count on me being innocent, Mrs Brown,’ said the boy. ‘My mother says—’