The Magician's Lie

by Greer Macallister

  With all of its drawbacks, however, this new life had one commanding advantage over the old. I was in my mother’s company for hours at a time. She was the only one of us with the luxury of rising late, so I didn’t always see her in the morning before I started down the road to school, but she was always there when I came home in the afternoon. She would hand me the cloth to wipe the dust of the road from my shoes, then we took a small glass of milk each, seated at the kitchen table in silent companionship. At dinner every night, I drank in the novel sight of her lovely, animated face and the reassuring hum of her smoky voice. After so long without her, I found her slightest attention intoxicating. I could subsist for a week on one of her smiles.

  After dinner, she would often sit down with her cello between her knees and coax the most beautiful music from its strings. If he wasn’t in the fields, Victor would sing to accompany her. I wanted to do more than listen but had nothing musical to contribute, so I began to dance. Mother had taken me to New York a handful of times to see the ballet, and I emulated what I remembered of the ballerinas’ movements—long graceful arcs of the arms, fluttering pointed toes, the basic arabesque. My dancing made my mother smile, so I did it at every opportunity.

  I took to it so well that my mother decided I should have more formal training, but of course there was no dance school in Jeansville, nor possibly in the entire state of Tennessee. I was in no rush to leave, of course, so I asked if it might be possible for her to handle my instruction? She agreed that it was. She wrote away to a woman in Russia for lessons, and we regularly received letters of detailed instruction. Eagerly we put these into practice. The Cecchetti method involved repetition of motion after motion. But not carelessly, not just with a mindless echo. Every motion was important, and it needed to be performed consciously, with purpose. One day, I would make a certain set of motions with my leg, the next day, a set of motions with my arm. One week was the right side, one week the left. It took discipline, and while I may have been undisciplined in other areas of my life, in dancing I was absolutely obedient.

  And all was well. We were happy.

  Until a boy named Ray changed everything.

  Chapter Three

  Janesville, 1905

  Midnight

  “What kind of fool do you take me for?” asks Officer Holt.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “No, you don’t. I suspect you don’t beg anything.”

  She looks up at him, all wounded and meek. That face of hers, it’s too nimble. He reminds himself what she does for a living. Day in, day out, she fools people. He can’t let her do it to him.

  He says, “This story of yours. It isn’t real. It isn’t true.”

  “It is.”

  “Jeansville? You expect me to believe that?”

  She stammers, “Officer, sir, truly, I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “What’s the name of the town we’re in now, ma’am?”

  She looks down at her lap. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember. The last few weeks have been…trying. So I’m not entirely clear in my mind.”

  Of course she understands. She’s just pretending not to. It infuriates him. “I’ll help you. It’s Janesville.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Janesville,” he says, “and you expect me to believe you were raised in a town called Jeansville, that the two just happen to have similar names, and that you didn’t just make up the name of a town like you’re making up this story?”

  “Believe it or don’t,” she says with a little fire. “It’s the truth.”

  “I don’t want to hear this anyway. I want to hear about the murder. Tell me that part.”

  “I will. When I get there.”

  “Talk about the murder or don’t talk at all,” he says, disgusted. He wanted to hear her out, to let her explain her innocence, but he thought it would be the matter of a few minutes. That doesn’t seem to be what she has in mind. He needs to rethink everything.

  He eyes her ankles, still free. Maybe he should cuff them too. They look small enough. Onstage, her dress was long enough to reach the floor. Now that she’s sitting down, he can see everything below the knees. Her fancy little silk boots are smudged and caked with dirt. Those boots probably cost more than he earns in half a year, but that’s not why he’s staring. He’s trying to see if any of the smudges are dark enough to be blood.

  He turns up the lamp, but the circle of light doesn’t reach far. As small as the room is, more than half remains in shadow.

  “Officer!”

  He looks her in the face. “Didn’t I tell you to be quiet?”

  “As I live and breathe,” she says, gazing up at him, examining. “You really are rather handsome. Wasted on a town like this, I suspect. Are you married, officer?”

  She keeps looking up at him as if she genuinely expects an answer. He should blindfold her. He shouldn’t look her in the face. Heaven only knows what powers that eye has. If she bewitches him, all those handcuffs might as well be hair ribbons.

  He crosses the room in four long strides and grabs for the telephone.

  “Wait,” she says. “What are you doing?”

  “Calling the sheriff in Waterloo. Turning you in.”

  She bucks against her restraints, eyes wild. “No!”

  He lifts the receiver and places his finger on the lower grip slowly and deliberately, making a show of it, making sure she sees. Ready to signal for the operator. Ready to change the game.

  “I lift my finger, and she’ll come on the line. All I have to say is your name. It’ll be too late to turn back then. Now are you going to tell me about the murder, or…”

  “Please don’t,” she says. Fear is written on her face, in great large letters. “I’ll tell you everything. I will. I promise.”

  Satisfied, he hangs the receiver on the hook switch and sets the telephone back on the desk. Relief floods him at the successful bluff. He’ll be damned if he hands her over to Mose without knowing what she’s done. The glory should be his. Everything depends on it.

  “So tell me,” he says, folding his arms. “Why did you kill him? Your own husband?”

  “I swear, I didn’t know there was a murder until you told me I was arrested for it. Honestly.”

  “Honestly?” he scoffs.

  “Yes. I still don’t even know…” She trails off.

  “Know what?”

  “Anything! Where was he found? Who found him? What happened?”

  Her desperation—wide eyes, rapid breath—seems genuine. How is he supposed to tell the fake from the real with her?

  He wants to let her stew, so he opens the top drawer of the desk and rummages around, extending the silence. The only thing in the drawer is an apple. The acid in his stomach rises in anticipation, but he doesn’t let himself eat it. He has a better idea. If there’s an advantage to be gained from feeding her, he’ll gladly stay hungry.

  He stands up, polishing the apple on his sleeve, his mind zooming forward, figuring out a plan. “You’re hungry, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, very.”

  He holds the apple toward her, from a distance. “Would you like this?”

  “Of course,” she says, with an edge of anger. He needs to tread carefully.

  “If you’ll answer my questions, it’s yours,” he says.

  Gently he brings the apple close to her mouth, and she leans as far forward as the cuffs will allow. She takes a great large bite, and he feels the sensation travel all the way up his arm, an invisible vibration.

  “You’re toying with me,” he says in a neutral voice.

  She chews and swallows. He can see the knot of it in her pale throat.

  He offers her another bite, and she takes it, sinking her teeth in, tearing off a sizable chunk.

  “You can take smaller bites,” he says. “I’m going to let
you eat the whole thing.”

  She makes a noncommittal grunt and keeps chewing with gusto.

  Holt brings the chair from the desk and turns it to face away from her. He slings his leg over the seat and sits down in it backward, folding one arm across the top, extending the other toward her, with the apple in his hand.

  Trying to sound gentle but confident, he says to her, “You’re not telling me what you did.”

  She mumbles around a mouthful of fruit. “I’m telling you who I am.”

  “Let’s try something different. Tell me who he was. Your husband, I mean. The one they found under the stage, after the show, in Waterloo. Dead and bloody, stuffed into the Halved Man apparatus, right where you left him.”

  She stops midchew.

  “Your dead husband,” he continues. It’s time to put on more pressure. “Blood everywhere. Bruises, cuts, broken bones. Someone hit him and hit him hard. You, I suspect. It’s amazing what damage a woman can do when she wants to.”

  She turns her face away, looks down. He offers her the apple again, its hollow white side, but she makes no move toward it.

  Quietly she says, “He was beaten?”

  “Badly.”

  “Did you see the body?”

  “Yes.”

  She asks, “Did you see his face?”

  Something in him makes him reach out for her chin and pull it forward again. He wants to look her full in the face. With his other hand, he puts the white, bitten side of the apple in front of her mouth. He says, “Eat.”

  She takes a smaller bite this time. Her eyes don’t leave his as she chews and swallows it, her nimble face a storm of emotion. She looks angry and pleading and hungry and confused. A faint sheen of sweat is starting to form on her brow, under the tendrils of reddish hair. She takes a second small bite and chews it, his fingers on her jaw feeling every movement of muscle and bone, and he sees again the knot in her throat as she swallows.

  Then she says, “Please. Did you?”

  “No,” he lies.

  She drops her chin toward her shoulder, and he lets her. He thinks she looks queasy, but he might be flattering himself, thinking he has some effect on her.

  In silence, he feeds her the rest of the apple. She eats it all, down to the core and the seeds. At last, he is holding only half an inch of stem between his thumb and forefinger. He reaches out with his handkerchief and wipes a spot of apple from the corner of her mouth, and she says softly, “Thank you.”

  The air in the room is already stale and hot. He wishes the one barred window, eight feet up the wall, would give him fresh air to breathe.

  He makes a decision and rises from his chair, moving it away to give himself room. Then he drops to his knees at her feet, putting one hand on each ankle.

  “What are you doing?” She edges back, rocks herself against the chair. The legs move a little. She inches back but he holds on. Then she wrenches hard and pulls one leg free, trying to kick him.

  “Easy!” he shouts.

  Her dirty boot catches him in the shoulder, causing a sharp hot pain, which he hides. He shoves the kicking foot down hard and shifts his body sideways so he’s sitting on it, pinning the wild leg between his body and the chair. He prays the exertion won’t damage him, but if it does, so be it. He’s gambling anyway. He’s betting that she’s a prize rich enough to win him security, the security that began slipping away three months ago when he interrupted a man robbing a bank and slipped away even further this afternoon in a doctor’s office in Waterloo.

  She tries to kick again, wrenching her body around, straining against all five pairs of handcuffs. When none of that works, she lets out a howling, piercing scream.

  “Easy, I said! I’m not going to hurt you! Be quiet!”

  “Get away!” she shouts.

  He uses one hand to hold her foot in place while the other unlaces the boot. She keeps moving and shifting and twitching. He could explain to her why he needs to remove her boots, but it wouldn’t soothe her, so he isn’t going to waste the words.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he says one more time instead.

  “You don’t understand,” she says. She says it over and over again, quieter and quieter, “You don’t understand, you don’t understand, you don’t understand.”

  At first, he’s afraid it’s a spell. Some kind of incantation. But it goes on and on, as if she’s compelled. It doesn’t seem like she’s trying to bewitch him; she doesn’t even seem to know he’s there.

  When she finally pauses, breathless, he says, “That’s right. I don’t understand. Why don’t you explain it to me?”

  In a low clear voice, she says, “Okay.”

  Chapter Four

  1893–1894

  Invisible Knots

  The following June, I turned thirteen, an unlucky number. I was becoming a young woman. Mother showed me how to fashion my hair into a neat, low chignon instead of a braid down my back. My hips and breasts grew, and although I would never be a violin, I was no longer a flute. These changes didn’t bother me. But other changes did.

  When the harvest began, not long after, a slight adjustment was made to the bargain we had made with Silas. He and his wife continued to rent the house in town, but because their son Ray spent long days working on the farm, someone decided—it was never clear who—that he should come live in the farmhouse with us.

  Ray was sixteen that summer. Before he moved into the farmhouse with us, I could count on a single hand the number of times I had seen him. All I knew of him was that in childhood he’d narrowly escaped dying of a fever that had carried away his three younger sisters. Whether the fever had made him more precious or he had always been so, his parents fawned over him like a little prince. Like Victor, he worked for Silas as a general farmhand; unlike Victor, he seemed perfectly suited to it. He was built for physical labor, his arms and legs as thick as tree trunks. You could see his mother in the pale hair and aquiline nose, his father in the broad frame and cleft chin. His head was topped with an unruly crop of blond curls. As the summer went on, they got blonder in the sun. In the evenings, he ruined the triangular pleasure of our after-dinner entertainment by sitting in a chair and staring silently.

  I admit that I disliked him from the beginning, before I had much reason to do so. I’d caught my mother’s attention but feared I could lose it again at any moment, so I didn’t want his competition. In the beginning, he spoke so rarely that I thought perhaps the fever had left him touched in the head. Therefore I was equally annoyed whether he stared at a spot on the floor, or at my mother’s hands on the cello, or—as he most often did—at me.

  As the weeks went on, it seemed that he was always nearby, always lurking. The character of his attention changed. Every interaction with him was fraught. I would pass through the hall toward my room, flushed and exhausted from a solid hour of rigorous pirouettes. He would appear soundlessly to block my path, the sour tang of a day’s sweat on him, forcing me to stop short. He wouldn’t touch me. He reached out as if to lay his palm against the side of my cheek but then would pause just an inch or two away. He stared into my left eye, the flawed one, as if he could unlock a secret from it by staring. I blinked as little as I could. He didn’t say a word, and when I stepped away, he let me go.

  I thought I might mention it to my mother, but what could I say? It sounded silly to complain that he sometimes looked at me and, on occasion, almost touched me.

  It sounds silly even now. Even now that I know what was coming.

  ***

  For my birthday, my mother had bought me a rather extravagant gift. It cost enough that I later heard her and Victor arguing about it, him cursing that it was too much money, which it no doubt was. The gift was the tallest mirror I’d ever seen, a breathtakingly flat and large piece of silvered glass in which I could see the reflection of nearly my entire body. My room was otherwise
unadorned, only a faded hand-me-down quilt on the bed and a thin gray rug covering perhaps a third of the floor, so the mirror seemed all the more remarkable. The oval frame was dark wood, simple and lovely, with a subtle pattern of carved leaves. Mother insisted that it would help me correct my posture and perfect my positions. It did both of these things, but I also just liked to look in it and see myself, examining the tiniest details of my own appearance. I stared at the shape of my earlobes, one of which seemed ever so slightly higher than the other, and at the faint short hairs along my hairline, which stirred with my breath. I could finally see how odd my eye looked, how clear the dividing line was between the brown and the blue. I could see the speckles of shifting color in the iris and watch the pupil grow larger when the sunlight from the window faded at dusk. I brought my face so close to the mirror my breath fogged its surface, then made a game of holding my breath to see how long I could keep it clear.

  My pleasure in the mirror outlasted its novelty. Even three months later, when I was back in the daily routine of attending school, I often wished I was at home with the mirror instead. My behavior in the classroom grew worse, and my reputation with it. Mother was informed of my unwillingness to comply with the rules. I couldn’t puzzle out how she felt about it. In front of the young teacher, she told me this misbehavior couldn’t continue and promised I would be disciplined. In private, she said nothing. At the dinner table, she only told Victor that the classroom seemed to be run by a recent winner of the Harlan County Jump Rope Championship, and it was too bad the schools here weren’t better. When Silas’s wife remarked one evening that she had heard I was a discipline problem at the school, my mother replied archly that the brightest children were known for being the most unruly, then changed the subject to the weather.