by Paula Guran
“Because—” said Emma. “Because you’re one of us, now.”
We could not untie the knot. It was too large, too tight: the rope must once have been wet and shrunk.
“There’s a knife, next to the bowl,” said Mouse. “I can’t reach it from here, the rope won’t let me—I tried and tried.”
The smell of rotting meat came from that bowl, and it was covered with flies. When Justina had finished cutting the rope from Mouse’s ankle—the rest of us were standing as close as we could to the boarded-up window, where the crookedness of the boards let in chinks of light—she said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
The door banged open. “What do you brats think you’re doing here?” It was a man, who brought with him a stench worse than rotting meat—the stench of whiskey.
“The drunkard father,” whispered Emma. We all stood still, too frightened to move, and from Mouse came a mouse-like whimper.
“You little bitch,” he said. “I know you. You’re Judge Beaufort’s daughter. You know how many times your father’s put me in that prison of his? You goddamned Beauforts, sneering down your noses at anyone who isn’t as high and all goddamn mighty as you are. Wait until he sees what I’m going to do with you—I’ll whip you like a nigger, until your backside is as raw as—as raw meat.”
Emma shrieked, a strangled sort of shriek, and dropped her branch.
“You’re not a man but a toad,” said Justina.
He stared at her, as though she had suddenly appeared in front of his eyes. “What—”
“No, not a man at all,” said Rose. “You’re a toad, a nasty toad with skin like leather, and you eat flies.”
“You don’t live here,” said Melody. “You live in the swamp by the Picketts’ house, where the water is dark and still.”
Somewhere, in some other country, where we were still Justina, Rose, Melody, and Emma, instead of witches, we thought, But we haven’t learned transformations yet.
“That’s right,” said Emma. “Go home, toad. Go back to the swamp where you belong. You don’t belong here.”
“Sophie,” he said, looking at Mouse. “I’m your father, Sophie.” He looked at her as though, for once, asking for something, asking with fear in his eyes.
“You know you are, Papa,” she said. “You know you’re a toad. I’ve tried to love you, but you haven’t changed. You’ll always be a toad in your heart.”
“Go home, toad,” said Justina. “We don’t want you here anymore.”
“Yes, go back to your swamp,” said Melody. “And I hope Jim Pickett catches you one day, and Mrs. Pickett puts you into her supper pot. The Picketts like toad. They say it tastes like chicken.”
Mouse’s father, the drunkard, hopped out through the door and away, we assumed in the direction of the swamp. We let out a sigh, together, as though we had been holding our breaths all that time.
We made Mouse a bed in the cottage, on the green sofa. Emma said, “Callie won’t let me have any more food. Since the revival came, she says she’s found religion, and she’s got jewels waiting for her in heaven that are more beautiful than earthly trinkets. She’s given me back my rings and necklaces.” So Rose stole some bread and jam from the cupboard when Hannah wasn’t looking, and Mouse ate bread with jam until she was full. Melody gave her a dress, because the rest of us were too big, although Melody didn’t have many dresses of her own. Emma brought soap and water so Mouse could wash her face, and combed her hair. Properly combed, it was as fine and flyaway as milkweed. Before we went home to our suppers, Melody read to her from The Poetical Works of Keats, which Emma had taken out of the library for her, while the rest of us curled up on the sofa in tired silence.
“Good night,” said Mouse, when we were leaving. “Good night, good night.” And because she was one of us now, we knew that she was happy.
The next day, Rose and Melody were punished for taking bread and jam without permission and for losing a perfectly good dress, which Hannah had just darned.
“The next lesson,” said Miss Gray, “is gaining your heart’s desire. For which you will need a potion that includes hearts. Today, I want you to go out and find hearts.”
“You don’t want us to kill squirrels, or something?” said Emma, incredulously.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Miss Gray. “Have you learned nothing at all this summer? The heart is the center, the essence, of a thing. It is what gives a stone gravity, a bird flight. Killing squirrels, indeed!” She looked at us with as much disgust as on the first day, when we had failed to see ourselves in the mirror. It was not fair—Emma had asked the question, and the scorn was addressed to us all. But when had Miss Gray ever been fair?
So out we went, looking for hearts.
This was what we put into our potions. Into Melody’s potion, she put all the plays of Shakespeare, with each mention of the word “heart” underlined in red, and each mention of the word “art” as well, even the art in “What art thou that usurp’st this time of night?”; The Poetical Works of Keats with each page cut into hearts; and a butterfly that she had found dead on her windowsill, a Red Admiral. With its wings outstretched, it looked like two hearts, one upside down. And we knew that Justina had been right: we were invisible that summer. Otherwise, Emma would have had to spend her pocket money on library fines. Emma put in the double yolk of an egg she had stolen from under the hens, which she insisted resembled a heart; chocolate bonbons that Callie had shaped into hearts; Cocoanut Kisses that we told her had nothing to do with hearts, but she said that she liked them; and hearts cut out of a Velvet Cake, all stolen from a Ladies’ Tea that her mother was giving for the Missionary Society. Rose put in a heart-shaped locket that her mother had given her; her mother’s rose perfume, which she said was the heart of the rose (the laboratory smelled of it for days); and water from the icebox that she had laboriously chipped into the shape of a heart. Mouse’s potion contained a strange collection of nuts and seeds: acorns; beechnuts, butternuts, and black walnuts; the seeds of milkweed and thistle; locust pods; the cones of hemlock and cypress; and red hips from the wild roses that grew by Slocumb’s Bluff. “Well,” she said, “Miss Gray did say that the heart is the center. You can’t get much more centery than seeds, can you?” Justina’s collection was the strangest of all: when Miss Gray asked for her ingredients, she handed Miss Gray a mask shaped like a heart on which she had sewn, so that it was completely covered, the feathers of crows. “The crows gave them to me,” she told us later, when we asked her where the feathers had come from, “once I explained what they were for. They seemed to know Miss Gray.”
“Nicely done,” said Miss Gray. “I think Justina’s spell will be the strongest, since she has been the most focused among you, although one can’t quite call this a potion, can one? But Emma’s and Melody’s potions will do quite well, and Mouse, I’ll help you with yours.”
“And mine?” asked Rose. If she had done something wrong, she wanted to know.
“Yours is complicated,” said Miss Gray. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Years later, Emma asked, “Rose, did you ever get your heart’s desire?” They were walking in the garden of the house where Emma lived with her husband, the senator. Above them, the maples trees were beginning to turn red and gold. Whenever the wind shook the maple branches, leaves blew down around them.
“That’s funny,” said Rose, reminding herself not to think of her deadline. This was Emma, whom she hadn’t seen in—how long? Her deadline could wait. “I don’t think we ever told each other what we wished for. I guess what happened afterward drove it out of our heads.”
“I suppose you wanted to fly,” said Emma. “I remember—you were obsessed with flying, then.”
Rose laughed. “I thought I was so good at keeping it secret!” She stopped and looked out over the lawn, where the shadows of the trees were lengthening. Soon, it would be time to dress for dinner. She worried, again, about her gray merino. Would it do for Rose’s party? “No,” she said
, “I wished that my mother would love me. You remember what she was like, even at the end. What a strange thing to admit, after all these years.”
“I wished that I could eat all I wanted and never get fat.” Emma absentmindedly pulled a maple leaf from her hair, which was bobbed in the current fashion.
“Well, you got your wish, at least. There’s no one in Washington as elegant as Mrs. Balfour.” Rose looked at Emma, from her expensively waved hair to her expensively shod feet, in the new heels. “How do you like being a senator’s wife?”
Emma let the leaf fall from her fingers. “Has the interview started already?” Rose laughed again, uncomfortably. Nothing is as uncomfortable, her editor had told her, as the truth. Emma continued, and to Rose her voice sounded bitter, almost accusatory, “So did she ever tell you that she loved you?”
How much easier it was, to answer questions instead of asking them. To pretend, for one afternoon, that she was here only as Emma’s guest. “No, she never told me. But she did love me, I think, in her own way. It took me a long time to understand that. It wasn’t a way I could have understood, as a child.”
“Understanding—that’s not much of a spell.”
Emma sat on a bench beside the ornamental pond, where ornamental fish, red and gold, were darting beneath the fallen leaves. After a moment, Rose sat beside her. She looked at the patterns made by lichen on the ornamental urns, then at the statue of Melpomene, whose name on the pedestal was almost obscured by moss. She did not know how to respond.
“Have you heard from Melody?” asked Emma.
“Not since last spring,” said Rose, grateful that Emma had broken the silence. “I don’t think she’ll ever come back. It’s easier in Paris. She says, you know, there are no signs on the bathrooms. But I’ve brought you a copy of her latest. It’s still in my suitcase. I meant to unpack it, but I must be losing my memory. You’ll like it—one of the poems is about being a witch. I think that’s what she asked for, to be a poet. It’s still hard to imagine: Melody, the studious, the obedient one, in Paris cafés with artists and musicians, and girls who dance in beads! Drinking and—did you know? Smoking!”
Emma picked up a piece of gravel and tossed it into the pond, where it splashed like a fish. The sound was almost startling in the still afternoon. “It broke up the group, didn’t it? When she left for college. I miss her.”
Rose stared up at the leaves overhead, red and gold against the sky. “I think it was broken before that.”
“We all paid a price, didn’t we?” asked Emma. “Do you remember the advertisement? Reasonable rates. She never charged us, but I think we all paid a price. You—all those years taking care of your mother while she had cancer, when you could have been, I don’t know, going to college, getting married, having a life of your own. Melody—she’ll never come home. If she did, she wouldn’t be a poet, just another colored woman who has to sit at the back of the theater. And me—”
Emma picked up another piece of gravel, then placed it on the bench beside her. “I can’t gain weight, you know. No matter what. I’ve tried. Such a silly problem, but—I don’t think James and I will ever have children.”
“Oh, Emma!” said Rose. “I’m so sorry.” What did her article matter? Emma had been her best friend, so long ago.
“Well, that’s the way of the world,” said Emma, her voice still bitter. Then suddenly, surprisingly, because this was Emma after all, she wiped her eyes, carefully so as not to smudge her mascara. “You gain and you lose, with every choice you make. That’s the way it’s always been. But you—” She turned to Rose and smiled, and suddenly she was the old Emma again. “All those years giving sponge baths and making invalid trays, when you barely stepped off the front porch, and now a reporter! Do you remember when we were reporters? Just before we were witches.”
“I don’t know if the society pages count,” said Rose. “Although I suppose everyone has to start somewhere. If only we had stayed reporters! But come to think of it—I really am losing my memory—I have news for you. I’ve heard of Justina! A friend of mine, a real reporter, who was in Argentina covering the revolution—they’re having another one this year—wrote me about an American woman who had married one of the revolutionaries, a man they call—why do revolutionaries always have these sorts of names?—The Mask. They call her La Serenidad, and there’s a song about her that they play on the radio. He wrote it down for me, but I don’t know Spanish.”
“Now isn’t that Justina all over?” said Emma, laughing. It was the first time, Rose realized, that she had heard her laugh all afternoon. After a pause, during which they sat in companionable silence, Emma continued, “Did you ever hear—”
“No,” said Rose. “You?
“No.”
It grew dim under the maple trees, and the air grew chill. Emma drew her shawl about her shoulders, and Rose put her hands into her jacket pockets. They sat thinking together, as we had so long ago, when we were children—wondering what had happened to Mouse.
Emma heard the news first, at breakfast. Her mother had just said, “Would you like some butter on your toast? Or maybe some jam? You look so nice and thin in that dress. Is it the one Aunt Otway brought from Raleigh?” when Callie came into the morning room and said, “Judge Beaufort, come quick! There’s thieves in Ashton. They’ve gone and murdered Mrs. Balfour, and they’ll murder us too, Lord have mercy on our souls!”
“What?” Emma’s father rose from the breakfast table. “Who told you this?”
“Mrs. Balfour’s Zelia. She stayed just to tell me, then ran on back to help. She’s already called Dr. Bartlett, though she says he won’t be able to do anything for Mrs. Balfour, poor woman. Blood all over her, Zelia told me, like she sprung a leak. May she rest in the lap of the Lord.”
“That’s enough. Tell Henry to get Mr. Caldwell and Reverend Hewes, and meet me there.” Then he was out the door.
“You haven’t finished your boiled egg,” said Adeline Beaufort. “Emma? Emma, where are you?”
We watched the events at the Balfour house, the largest house in Ashton, whose white columns leaned precariously left and right, from the top of a tulip poplar, the three of us—Emma, Rose, and Melody. We had looked for Mouse in the cottage, but she was nowhere to be found.
“I heard it all from Coralie,” said Melody. “Henry’s her sweetheart—at least, one of them. He said the front door was open, and when they went in, they found Mrs. Balfour lying on the parlor floor, with a bullet through her heart. There was blood all over the carpet, and a whole pile of silver, teaspoons and other things, scattered on the floor beside her. They think she heard the thief, then came down with the pistol that General Balfour had used in the war and found him going through the silver. He must have taken it away from her and shot her with it.”
“Gruesome,” said Emma. “Look, there’s the hearse driving up from Pickett’s Funeral Parlor.”
“And they found Justina in a corner of the parlor, barely breathing, with marks around her neck. They think she must have come down too, and he must have tried to strangle her and left her for dead.” Not even our imaginations could picture the scene. Surely death was for people we did not know?
Emma’s father came out, with Dr. Bartlett, Reverend Hewes, and Henry. We knew what they were carrying between them: Mrs. Balfour, draped in a black sheet, leaving the house where so many of her ancestors had died with more decorum.
“If he had the pistol, why didn’t he just shoot Justina?” asked Rose. “It seems like a lot of trouble, strangling someone. Do you think they’ll let us see her?”
“No,” said Emma. “Only Zelia can see her. That’s what Papa said—she’s just too sick. But why don’t we look—” and we knew what she was going to say. Why don’t we look in the mirror?
The cottage was surrounded by men from the tobacco fields, who had been summoned to form a posse. “Stay away from here, girls,” said Judge Beaufort. “That thief’s been sleeping in our cottage—can you believe his nerve? We
found a blanket and some food, even some books. We think it may be old Sitgreaves, the one with that idiot girl. He hasn’t been seen for a while. But it looks like he slept here last night. This time, we’ll send him to the prison in Raleigh, and that girl of his should have gone to the asylum long ago. I’ll make sure of it, when I find her. But until we catch him, don’t you go walking out by yourselves, do you hear?”
We looked at each other in consternation, because—where was Mouse?
“Miss Gray,” said Rose. “Let’s go talk to Miss Gray.”
The roses had fallen from the La Reine and lay in a heap of pink petals on the grass. The garden seemed unusually still. Not even bees moved among the honeysuckle.
“Something’s not right,” said Emma.
“Nothing’s right today,” said Rose. “Who wants to knock?” No one volunteered, so she knocked with the brass frog, which was as polished as always. But no one answered. Instead, the door swung open. It had not been locked.
The Randolph house was empty. The sofa in the parlor, where we had eaten with a witch for the first time, the table in the laboratory where we had sat, learning our lessons, all were gone. Even the cats, which had only been partially there, were wholly absent.
“It was all here yesterday,” said Melody. “She was going to show us how to make dreams in an eggshell.”
“I found something,” said Rose. It was a note, in correct Spencerian script, propped on the mantel. It said:
Dear Emma, Rose, and Melody,
Please stop the milk. Don’t forget to practice, and don’t worry. Sophia and I will take care of each other.
Sincerely, Emily Gray
We looked at each other, and finally Melody said what we were all thinking—“How did she know?” Because it was evident: Miss Gray had known what would happen.
We went to Mrs. Balfour’s funeral. Even Melody sat in one of the back pews of the Episcopal Church, beside Hannah. The organist played “Lead, Kindly Light.” We ignored the sermon and stared at the back of Justina’s head, in the Balfour pew close to the chancel, and then at her face as she walked up the aisle behind the coffin. She was paler than we had ever seen her, as though she had become a statue of herself. In the churchyard, she watched her grandmother’s coffin being lowered into the ground, and when Reverend Hewes said “Dust to dust,” she opened her hand and dust fell down, into the grave, on top of the coffin. Then she placed her hand on her mouth and shrieked.
