Hal wiped his hands clean upon a clout, and took the book, and ran his thumb along the spine and along the gilded edges, and opened it, and gazed long and long upon the dedication to the author’s father, Henry Spurtle, printer of East Cheape. As one who leaves a mourner to his grief, Blanke crept to the door; but when he lifted the latch, Hal raised his eyes saying, “I thank you, Robert Blanke, poet and friend. I’d repay you, an I could.”
“Your thanks suffice, and Mistress Mary’s tale, more wonderful than any of Master Boccacio’s. And yet am I bold to beg the boon of you to read the book and learn what she became.”
“Beyond question shall you read her, aye, and dine with me before, if you will. So much would any father do for the man who returned his daughter to him. Further, I had in mind to print an edition of your poems, had you enough to make two perfect sheets or three, cut into octavo and bound in boards, the profit to be split between us.”
Blanke laughed aloud and clasped Hal’s hand and pumped it as he’d pump water out from his mouth. “Now am I fallen deeply in thy debt,” he cried. “Yet why speak of debt betwixt close kin? For if thou art her father, then am I her godfather, and we two bound together by love of her who has no like on earth. Now, thou hast a great work here in hand, must be pursued i’ the heat. Come Sunday next, I’ll be your man, and we’ll drink to Mistress Mary in good sack. In the meantime, I’ll look out my poems and copy them fair.”
Hal pressed his hand and took him to the door and latched it behind him and smiled at his journeyman, who was making his bed under the press, and at his new ’prentice, asleep already in the shadowed corner by the fire, and at the sheets of the pamphlet on cheese-making, all hung out neat to dry. And he went into his inner chamber and closed the door, and took The Philosophy of the Senses in his hands, and opened it, and began to read.
Nanny Peters and the Feathery Bride
Nanny Peters? You ain’t never heard of old Nanny Peters? My land, if that don’t beat all! Well, you set yourself down right here on the porch swing, and I’ll tell you about her.
Nanny Peters was half ox, half prairie dog, with just a touch of the Rio Grande to leaven the mixture. She could hoe forty acres of beans, birth twenty calves, and set a good dinner on the table by noon, all without breakin’ into a sweat. She had good, strong horse sense, and could tell a skunk from a woodchuck even on a dark night.
And cool! That woman was so cool, she didn’t need an icehouse—she just put the milk jug under her bed and it’d keep a week or more. Why, she didn’t even turn a hair when a big, sandy-white snake slithered in the front door one day, bold as brass. Nanny, she was scourin’ the pots after a bean supper, and that snake sashayed right on up to her with his mouth wide open, showin’ fangs like the horns on a Texas longhorn.
Nanny hears him slidin’ along on the floor (on account of the scales on his belly, see). So she waits for him to get real close, and then she jest grabs that snake ahind the jawbone and wraps him three times around her fist and commences to scour her good cast-iron pot her mama give her. She scrubs and scrubs with that snake until there warn’t a lick of crust left in the pot and the snake didn’t have no more scales on his back than a baby has on her bottom. What’s more, he was madder’n a wet hen and drippin’ pizen and leavin’ burnt marks on the floor and all.
So Nanny lets go the end of his tail and cleans the chimney with it, the snake givin’ her considerable help by whoppin’ around against the bricks. By the time the chimney’s clean, the snake’s feelin’ mighty humble. So Nanny tells him to expect more of the same should he think to call again and takes and heaves him out the back door.
Now, old Nanny Peters bein’ pretty strong in the arm from hoein’ and scrubbin’ and such, that snake sailed smack-dab across the state and landed five miles west of Abuquerque, New Mexico. He was half bald down the back and all covered with ashes and his tail was cut to shreds from frailin’ it on the chimney bricks and his skull was all flatted out on account of he’d landed on his head. By and by he got better, but he warn’t the same snake after—no, ma’am. His head stayed flatter’n a hotcake and his new scales grew in patchy. What’s worser yet, his tail healed in hard ridges that clattered together and kep him awake at night.
And that, jest in case you wondered, is why there’s rattlesnakes, and why they’re so dad-burned tetchy.
But that’s not what I set down to tell you about. Now, this here’s the story, so you listen close.
Nanny Peters was a great quilter. In fact, some say she invented quiltin’. She could piece a double-size “Road to Texas” or “Tippecanoe” while the bread was risin’, tack the top and the battin’ and the back together while the oven heated, and quilt it solid before the crust turned brown. Something elegantifferously complicated, like “Grandmother’s Flower Garden” or “Double Wedding Ring,” might take her a mite longer. Her seams was so straight that people came from far away as Houston to check their yardsticks by ’em, and her stitches was so tiny you couldn’t hardly see ’em, not even with a magnifying glass. And strong! My land, when the calico and battin’ wore out, there’s still be little white chains of stitches left, like a skellerton, and you could use it for a fancy bed throw or maybe a pair of lace curtains.
Nanny’s specialty was weddin’ quilts, and this was the reason for that. Let a couple spend their weddin’ night under one of Nanny’s quilts, and they was set for life. Whatever kind of rip-staver a man had been before his weddin’ night, he was a changed man ever after. If he’d been a boozer, he’d take the pledge—and keep it, too. If he’d been a gambler, he’d clean forget the difference between a deuce and a three-spot, and he wouldn’t care. A brawler’d get religion, a spendthrift’d pinch pennies till they squealed, a layabout’d bounce to work like a cougar, and as for a ladies’ man! Why, he’d rather crawl into a nest o’ wildcats, heels foremost, than think of lookin’ at a woman other than his wife.
This being the case, it won’t come as no surprise that girls got in the way of asking Nanny Peters if she’d kindly make them a weddin’ quilt. Why, it got to be that a girl wouldn’t walk down the aisle until she had Nanny’s quilt safely folded in brown paper and laid in her linen chest. Some Saturdays the girls’d be lined up from Nanny’s front door clear to Amarillo, beggin’ her for a quilt—nothing fancy, mind you, just “Log Cabin” or “Round the World” or “Drunkard’s Path” and they’d wait for it, if ’twas convenient, seein’ as the weddin’ was next week. And Nanny almost always obliged ’em, providin’ they was willin’ to help with the cuttin’ out.
But ever once in a while, Nanny’d look at a girl, all bright and shy and eager to get hitched, and Nanny’d shake her head and say, “No.”
Sometimes she’d say it sad, with a pat on the girl’s shoulder or a cup of fresh coffee to make the “No” go down easier, and sometimes like she was too busy countin’ clouds jest now and would be so long as that girl was askin’. Some of those girls Nanny said “No” to married their men anyway, and every last one of them ended up plum ramsquaddled: dead, or so put about by their menfolk’s bodaciousness that they might as well be dead and save theirselves the shame. It got so that Nanny’s “No” was enough to break off an engagement, even if the couple’d been courtin’ twenty year.
More than one girl tried to talk Nanny into changin’ her mind, but when Nanny Peters said “No,” it stayed said. Argufyin’, cryin’, shoutin,’ and bullyraggin’—none of it budged her an inch. Only one time Nanny Peters ever came a country mile near to changin’ her “No” to a “Yes,” and that’s the story I want to tell you.
But first I got to tell you about Cora Mae Roberts.
Cora Mae Roberts, now, she was one winsome girl. Pretty as a picture, with eyes like Texas bluebonnets and curls so yaller that if her bonnet fell off while she was feedin’ the chickens, you’d go plum blind lookin’ at her. But only if the sun was shinin’—they weren’t as yaller as all that when the sun was ahind a cloud. Her biscuits was like buckshot, her stitchin’ l
ike a picket fence, she could outscream a catamount, and she didn’t have the sense God gave an armadillo, but every single man in the county was after her, from the widderman who owned the feed store to the deputy sheriff who hadn’t nowhere to sleep but the jailhouse. By the time Cora Mae was sixteen years old, they was lined up five-deep around her daddy’s ranch house, offering her everything from the moon to dresses from Pittsburgh if only she’d marry them.
Now, some of Cora Mae’s suitors was good men, but some of them was more like coyotes on two legs. The worst varmint of them all was one of her daddy’s cowhands, a rip-tail roarer could whip his weight in wildcats and ride straight through a crab apple orchard on a flash of lightning. He was so hard he could kick fire out of a flint rock with his bare toes, and he had a thirst for whiskey would put a catfish to shame. His name was Jim Cleering, and he was the man of all men that Cora Mae Roberts wanted to marry.
Jim warn’t long on patience or temperance or even on readin’ or writin’, but his worst enemy’d admit he was a pretty critter. He was so tall he didn’t know when his feet was cold. There warn’t no bunk long enough for him, but that didn’t matter, ’cause his shoulders was so wide he couldn’t get in the bunkhouse door anyhow, so he just slep in the barn and scairt away the rats. His jaw was square as the jailhouse cornerstone and twice as hard. He was hairy as a bear and proud as an unbroken stallion, the yaller flower of the Texas plains. And if he warn’t, there warn’t a man alive dared to say so.
Nanny Peters said so, though, and said it so loud you could hear it through three counties. “That man’s no durn good,” she told Cora Mae. “He’s got more stalls than a good-sized stable and if you can’t see that, you’d miss a buzzard settin’ on a dead cow. He’ll spend your daddy’s money and whup your tail until it’s tough as saddle hide. It’d take more than a quilt to reform that man, and that’s a gospel fact.”
Then she held open the door for Cora Mae to leave and the next girl to come in and say her piece.
Well. Cora Mae, she didn’t think her piece was said yet. She wanted that man and she wanted that quilt to tuck him up in, and she warn’t going to leave until she had it.
First she cries, whoopin’ and hollerin’ and pourin’ saltwater out her eyes until you couldn’t tell the difference between Cora Mae Roberts and a four-star Texas thunderstorm. But Nanny jest fetches her bucket and a couple of yards of petticoat flannel for a nose rag and leaves her to it.
Then Cora Mae screams and, as I said before, she could outscream a catamount. On this occasion, she extends herself some. Her screaming’s louder than two catamounts and an entire pack of coyotes howling at the full moon. But Nanny jest rocks in her rockin’ chair, sayin’ less than nothin’.
Then Cora Mae cusses, and I most teetotaciously hopes you never hears the like of Cora Mae Roberts’s cussin’. The words she said’d burn the ears right off your head and singe your eyeballs naked, for she’d learnt ’em off her sweetheart, and Jim Cleering, he had a gift for profanity. Well, Nanny sets and listens until Cora Mae says a word makes Nanny’s hair jump straight out behind her, scatterin’ hairpins ever which way.
“Gal,” says Nanny, real pleasant-like. “Gal, that ain’t no way to address your elders.” And quickern’ a mocking bird after a fly, she takes the bucket Cora Mae’s cried into and douses Cora Mae with saltwater, takin’ the starch right out of her yaller curls and sendin’ up clouds of steam where the cold water met the air she’d heated up with her cussin’. And while Cora Mae’s drippin’ and gaspin’ like a landed catfish, Nanny takes her broom and sweeps her right on out the door.
But that’s not the end of the story, not quite.
One thing you have to give Cora Mae, she warn’t no quitter—no, ma’am. She’d set her heart on tamin’ Jim Cleering with one o’ Nanny’s quilts and she wouldn’t rest until she was sure that colt was broke to the saddle and a quiet ride for a lady. She’d do it by fair means if she could, but she wouldn’t stick at foul.
So Cora Mae thought and thought until her pore brain was smokin’ like a prairie fire, and then she come up with what she thought was one bodaciously smart trick. She’d wait for a full moon and then strip herself stark naked and roll around in the hog waller until she was all caked with sticky, smelly, sandy-brown Texas mud. Then she’d stick chicken feathers in the mud, and possum teeth and rattlesnake rattles and such, and she’d creep up to the foot of old Nanny’s Peters’s bed and plumb scare a quilt out of her.
Come the full moon, and Cora Mae Roberts was ready. She rolled in that waller and rolled in the hen litter, stuck possum teeth on her buttocks and a rattlesnake rattle in her navel, caught some glowworms and stuck ’em in her hair, and she crep through the winder of Nanny’s shack and commenced to wail and moan.
“Nanny Peters! Nanny Peters! This is the magic speakin’ to you,” she says.
Nanny sets up in bed and reaches for her spectacles. “Hmm?” she says. “That so?”
Put out that Nanny ain’t quiverin’ and beggin’ for mercy, Cora Mae wails and moans a mite louder. “You made a mistake, Nanny Peters, a terrible mistake, and if you don’t make it right, I’ll haunt you and haunt you until the day you die.”
“That so?”
“That’s so. And I’ll give you a taste of that hauntin’ beginnin’ right now.” And Cora Mae commences to shake mud and feathers and chicken dirt—not to mention possum teeth and rattlesnake rattles—all over Nanny’s bed and Nanny’s clean floor.
And what does Nanny do? Does she squeeze that girl into jelly or knock out five teeth and one of her eyes, or tie her fingers up in twenty-three separate knots? No, ma’am. Nanny takes a double-size blue-and-red “Rob Peter to Pay Paul” from the chest at the foot of her bed, wraps it in brown papers, and hands it to Cora Mae Roberts.
“Here you are, Cora Mae,” she says. “I hope this here quilt breaks Jim Cleering for you, ’cause he’s in powerful need o’ breakin’, and that’s a gospel fact.”
Two weeks later, give or take a day, Cora Mae Roberts married Jim Cleering and went to bed with him under the blue-and-red quilt pieced in the pattern called “Rob Peter to Pay Paul.” Three weeks later Jim Cleering was in the Silver Garter, twenty dollars in the hole to Wildcard Pete the gambler and too drunk to find his gun when the shootin’ started. Cora Mae was home nursin’ a broken jaw, which didn’t stop her screamin’ fit to be tied when they brought Jim home on a board with a bullet through his lung.
It was mighty tragic. Cora Mae never got over it. Of course she married lots of men after Jim: marryin’ was one of her weaknesses, along with whiskey and cussin’. But she took the quilt back to Nanny right away after Jim’s funeral, and she wouldn’t take another, not even though Nanny swore up hill and down dale that quilt hadn’t had nothin’ to do with him breakin’ her jaw and getting himself killed in the Silver Garter.
And I believe Nanny. I do indeed.
Miss Carstairs and the Merman
The night Miss Carstairs first saw the merman, there was a great storm along the Massachusetts coast. Down in the harbor town, old men sat in taverns drinking hot rum and cocking their ears at the wind whining and whistling in the chimneys. A proper nor’easter, they said, a real widow-maker, and huddled closer to the acrid fires while the storm ripped shingles from roofs and flung small boats against the piers, leaping across the dunes to set the tall white house on the bluffs above the town surging and creaking like a great ship.
In that house, Miss Carstairs sat by the uncurtained window of her study, peering through a long telescope. Her square hands steady upon the barrel, she watched the lightning dazzle on the water and the wind-blown sand and rain scour her garden. She saw a capsized dinghy scud past her beach in kinetoscopic bursts, and a gull beaten across the dunes. She saw a long, dark, seal-sleek figure cast upon the rocky beach, flounder for a moment in the retreating surf, and then lie still.
The shallow tidal pool where the figure lay was, Miss Carstairs calculated, not more two hundred yards from her aerie.
Putting aside the telescope, she reached for the bell pull.
The peculiarities of both ocean storms and seals had been familiar to Miss Carstairs since earliest childhood. Whenever she could slip away from her nurse, she would explore the beach or the salt marshes behind her father’s house, returning from these expeditions disheveled: her pinafore pockets stuffed with shells, her stockings torn and sodden, her whole small person reeking, her mother used to say, like the flats at low tide. On these occasions, Mrs. Carstairs would scold her daughter and send her supperless to bed. But her father usually contrived to slip into her room—bearing a bit of cranberry bread, perhaps—and would read to her from Linnaeus or Hans Andersen’s fairy tales or Lyell’s Natural History.
Mr. Carstairs, himself an amateur ichthyologist, delighted in his daughter’s intelligence. He kept the crabs and mussels she collected in the stone pond he had built in the conservatory for his exotic oriental fish. For her fifteenth birthday, he presented her with a copy of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. He would not hear of her attending the village school with the children of the local fishermen, but taught her mathematics and Latin and logic himself, telling her mother that he would have no prissy governess stuffing the head of his little scientist with a load of womanish nonsense.
By the time Mr. Carstairs died, his daughter had turned up her hair and let down her skirts, but she still loved to tramp all day along the beaches. In hopes of turning her daughter’s mind to more important matters, her mother drained the pond in the conservatory and lectured her daily on the joys of the married state. Miss Carstairs was sorry about the pond, but she knew she had only to endure and eventually she would be able to please herself. For five years, endure she did, saying, “Yes, Mama” and “No, Mama” until the day when Mrs. Carstairs followed her husband to the grave, a disappointed woman.
Young Woman in a Garden Page 27
