by Rick Wayne
Granny Tuesday smiled. She sat back in her wheelchair and relaxed for the first time. She even lifted her heavy rudder boot onto the footplate. But her hands were still shaking and she crossed them in her lap.
“You know what, Doc? I think I like you. A good Southern boy ain’t no fool. Excuse me. Southern man.” She waved a hand at the coffee table. “Go ahead and move those flowers outta there and no hard feelings.”
“I’m alright,” I said without moving. I looked very closely at my host. She sat patiently as if for a portrait. “You a hustler, Granny?”
“That’s a rude word and I don’t like it. I ain’t gonna warn you again to mind your manners.”
I leaned back against the bookcase and crossed my arms. “It’s just a word,” I said, copying my host. “I didn’t mean nothing by it. I’m kinda impressed, actually. Woman of your age and all.”
Granny squeezed her hands together as if she was frustrated with them. She turned her chair and paddled with her foot to a floor basket on her right. “And how old do you think I am?”
I shrugged and she put the smile back on her face as she reached into the basket and pulled out a short strip of twine from a bunch. It was brown and fuzzy, like a thin caterpillar.
“Do you mind?” She raised a hand to advertise her tremors. “I know it’s rude but it helps if they have something to keep them occupied.”
I motioned for her to proceed.
“Thankya.” With hands shaking like an unbalanced washing machine, Granny Tuesday tucked one end of the twine under the other and pulled a knot tight. She tugged the ends a couple times to test it, which seemed to satisfy her.
“All that’s just business,” she said, nodding to the henbane. “That’s what I am, a businesswoman. So how about you and me get down to business? How much for the penny?”
“How much are you offering?” I said, playing the chef’s game, as instructed.
“Well . . .” She ruminated as she tied a second knot, “Seein’ as how we’re just passin’ by the bye and don’t know each other right well, I imagine you’ll have to tell me what you want.”
I had the sense that if I suggested something in trade, anything at all, no matter how fanciful—a pot of gold, the method for cold fusion, the Empire State Building—Granny Tuesday would’ve immediately spat in her hand, slapped her knee, and shouted the word “Deal!” and I would have blundered right into whatever trap the chef had warned me to avoid.
I contemplated my response as she kept her shaking hands busy with the string.
“Oh, poo,” she breathed. “I used to be able to tie one a’ these in a hot second. Now look at me. Shakin’ like a pastor in a whore house.”
“Can I help?” I asked, buying myself a little time.
“No, no,” she said with a sigh. “It don’t help my hands none if yours do all the work.” She tugged another knot tight, this time with a grimace. “So?” she asked. “What can Granny do for you? Seems to me it has to be a mighty fine thing in trade.” She nodded to the coin in my pocket.
I went to shift my weight, as you do after you realize you’ve been leaning in the same spot for a while, but instead of obeying my command, my right foot sat like a cannon ball and I lost my balance and fell sideways to the carpet. My cheek fell in the puddle of henbane water she’d dumped earlier. I could smell the sap—sticky and sweet.
I tried to get up, but I couldn’t move. I had such a bad Charlie horse in my back that I couldn’t do anything but lie on the ground and hold myself as stiff, breathing in shallow gasps. It hurt.
“By knot of one,” Granny Tuesday chuckled as she turned the twine between her fingers like a rosary. “The spell’s begun.”
She stood from her wheelchair, shakily. “By knot of two, it cometh true.” She walked toward me slowly, singing the words. “By knot of three, so mote it be.”
I watched her spindly legs lift those heavy boots in awkward shuffling steps. She still had the twine in her hand. “By knot of four, my powers roar. By knot of five, the spell’s alive.”
When finally she was over me, I could see a series of irregularly-spaced knots in the cord. She dangled the line in front of my eyes for a better look. The first knot bound my beard hair, black and curly.
“By knot of six, it’s you I fix. By knot of seven, you pray to heaven. By knot of eight, comes your fate.”
I babbled in protest as Granny leaned against the nearby love seat and she tied the final knot, hands still shaking like running motors. Then, with a single hand to brace her, she bent down with a grunt.
“By knot of nine, what’s yours”—she reached into my pocket with fumbling fingers—“is mine.” She took the coin.
Granny Tuesday flipped the tarnished silver and caught it in the air with surprisingly steady hands.
She stood over me and held her prize between her thumb and forefinger. “I’ve been after this penny for nigh on seventy years,” she said. “A lifetime.” She slipped it into the pocket of her apron and tapped it. “And here you just waltz in with it, like you found it on the street. It’s fishy, mister. Now hows about you tell ol’ Granny the truth?”
I could barely move, and that included my throat.
“Righty.” She stood straight. “Guess’n you’ll hafta be my guest for a spell. Some time in the garden, I think, will straighten you out.”
She turned to a pair of white-shirted orderlies, including the linebacker-looking kid who had brought the henbane. Neither of them spoke.
“Virgil. Horace. Take this fella out to the garden and see that he gets all fixed up.”
My head hurt and I couldn’t move. After a grunt and a stab of panic, I remembered to open my eyes and found myself in an old wood-framed greenhouse. It was big—about sixty feet long and perhaps twenty wide—and looked at least a hundred years old. The once-white paint was flecked and chipped. The panes in the gabled roof were stained and opaque and let in just enough light to let me know it was daytime, but that was it. The windows on the sides, which sat atop the three-foot stacked-stone foundation, were equally unhelpful. My host stood next to her workbench, tending the large wire-framed aviary whose occupants hunted and pecked, flapped and hopped. A few even flew free. She didn’t seem to notice them. Or me. She wore a different calico dress than before and had replaced her apron with a dirty smock. She was barefoot now and seemed to prefer it. Her toes wriggled joyfully on the moss as she hummed some old country tune and heated a miniature tea pot over a candle.
I lifted my head slowly so as not to make a sound. The rafters under the glass were overgrown with white-flowered ivy whose leaves had woven themselves like thread between the dried brown strands of their forebears. Bunches of drying herbs hung upside down from a trellis at the back. The trellis arched over a long wooden table covered in potted plants of all sizes, from tiny sproutlings in rectangular beds to a giant speckled monstrosity whose green tentacles spilled over its tub and swept the ground. The floor seemed never to have been cleaned. Soil was left wherever it spilled and was slowly taking over the stone-slab floor. Velveteen moss covered every open patch and kept the tiny curling ferns at the margins. A faded bag of mulch, dropped in a corner and forgotten, had long since split down its length and given birth to a four-foot sapling.
The bulk of the space, all the way to the barnlike double doors at the far end, was filled with planter’s boxes, waist-high on stilts, two feet deep and four feet on a side. I saw a cluster of rare orchids next to a shrublike beach apple tree—a manchineel, quite possibly the deadliest plant in existence. There were purple monkshood flowers, several species of henbane, a tangle of nightshade, and more. All the boxes were neatly organized, their inhabitants grouped like with like, and they were full to overflowing—probably because of how they were being fed. Each raised box sported an IV stand, which stood in its soil like a scarecrow. The bags at the tops trailed clear tubes all the way to the dirt. There were a dozen at least, stretching from one end of the greenhouse to the other, and every one was full of blood.
> That’s where I was planted—kneeling in one of those boxes. The crumbly brown soil reached mid-thigh. My arms were bound at the wrists and shoulders to a wooden T-frame, like you might use to hang tomato plants. There was an IV stand next to me, filling from my brachial artery. My neighbor, a full wisteria, was blooming and kept my nostrils full of fragrance, which was good. I was so weak and queasy from the henbane that if I’d caught a single metallic whiff of my own blood, I would’ve puked all over myself.
“When I was a youngin’,” Granny said without turning from her tea, “my momma’d mix up some soapy water in a dish for us to play with.” She set the pot on the workbench. “She’d turn up a clothes hanger like this.”
She’d made a ring from a stiff wire. She poured half the foamy contents of a bottle into a flat dish and made circles in the liquid with the wire. She took it out and blew bubbles. Most of them popped immediately.
“As beautiful and as fragile as a life,” she said. “It was a lesson. That’s how Momma was. Even when we was playin’, we was learnin’. It’s the same lesson them men learned, the ones what passed you in the hall the other day.”
The other day.
“Which men?” I asked weakly. My throat was hoarse. It felt like someone had run an onion slicer over my vocal cords and left them to dry. I coughed. I was so thirsty.
“Them fellers in suits who come out ahead of you. Know who they was?”
I shook my head. I fought the urge to pull against my bonds, which dug into my skin and cut the circulation to my tingling hands. I struggled to make fists, but I was weak. I figured I only had one or two half-strength tugs in me before my muscles gave out and I decided it was better to save them for when I had some chance of escape. If one ever came. That wasn’t likely seeing as how I was too weak to manufacture one myself.
“Them fellers own a bunch of websites. You know those? Even one that will tell your fortune. They got a whole buncha ladies in a office somewhere, and you call up or go on the website and they’ll pull tarot for you or look at your palm. There’s a program for it. Can you believe that? A computer to read the stars.”
Granny swirled the wire again and blew bubbles with tiny refractive rainbow swirls. “I sent them a nice note and told them bad things happened to folks who read the heavens but don’t pay the right honors to the ghosts and spirits, but they didn’t believe me. I even went out to their offices one day to warn ’em, and they laughed. Their PR woman patted me on the back and even went so far as to suggest, without sayin’ of course, that the whole thing was a scam.” She scoffed. “Well, weren’t long before that bubble burst.”
She blew again before dropping the wire in the dish. “Seems like one of them fellers’ daughters had a terrible accident recently. She’s in the hospital with a rare infection. Might not survive, poor thing. And the other fella, he found out he’s a cuckold. The boy he’s been raising as his son in right truth came by another man. Painful.”
She moved back to her tea and poured some of the greenish clear liquid into a cup. It was teaming.
“I told ’em. I told ’em both that was just the beginning of their misfortunes, and that there weren’t nuthin’ that could be done about it now. That seemed to upset them mightily. ’Specially since I’d told them before that I could protect them.”
I snorted. So that was it. Protection.
“Fortune tellers give you a cut, Granny?” I coughed again.
“Every darn one.” She took a sip. “From here to Niagara. Healers and exorcists, too.” The old woman with the arthritic hands picked up half an apple and a knife and sliced it one-handed, dropping the slivers into her mouth. “You don’t sound so good, Doc.”
My host pulled one of three wooden chairs from under the workbench and turned it around to face me. It had half a dozen tiny snails, like living knots of wood, poking from its legs. I noticed then they were all over the greenhouse—small enough to fit three on a quarter and so numerous you might be forgiven for thinking they were seeds as you crunched a few underfoot.
Granny took a seat with a long groan. “Doc, Doc, Doc . . .” She took another sip of her tea and looked me over. “I didn’t want any a this. You know that? After I lost Mister Tuesday—in the war—I didn’t want nuthin’ to do with nuthin’.”
“Which war was that?” I joked.
She smiled patiently. “The only one. When it were finally done, I did alright for a time. But then old age come, like it do for all of us, and I couldn’t go driving round the hills and dells ministering to country folks like I used to. Hard life in the mountains.” She nodded to me. “You know how it is. Time come to settle down.
“So I come to the city. There’s really only one. Lots of folks in the city. All close together-like. Makes it easy for a old woman. Don’t have to travel. And then I met this . . . this black woman.” She emphasized the word. “Bethula Hatchie, she were called. She had the nerve to tell Granny she couldn’t do none of the palming and growing she’d done all her life—not without paying her some of my take.
“It never occurred to me before, that folks could tell other folks what to do like that. But she did. Folks listened, too. And they came to her to take their troubles away, paid for it even, when there weren’t no place left to go. When they were desperate.
“She said I had a choice. She said it in a nice way, but I knew her meaning. It were an easy choice, to tell the truth. I never knew how to do nuthin’ but what I do, what my momma taught me.”
She had finished most of her tea. She reached across and set the glass on the workbench before pushing herself up from her own knees. She shuffled to the nearest planter’s box. It held six odd-shaped rose bushes. And of course an IV stand. The bag was almost empty.
“Bethula Hatchie was the first person I planted in this here blood garden. I remember when she went in. She couldn’t believe it. None of them ever can. Like this fella.” She ran a gnarled hand over one of the rose bushes. “This here is the right Reverend Elmore Garrity. From Harlem. Baptist minister and pain-in-the-ass.” She spoke each word distinctly. “He said we was takin ’vantage and he come with the power ‘a Jesus to shut ol’ Granny down.”
I didn’t see any evidence of a man in the box.
“Lookit him now. All bloomin’ and peaceful.” She turned to me. “But I gotta be fair. The reverend was a fighter. We couldn’t quite get the roots to take, so we had to dig him up and cut him down smaller and replant all the bits. Then he took just fine.”
After she mentioned the butchery, the shapes of the bushes made a little more sense. A head. A torso. Couple arms and legs. Like the topiary of a mad man.
I looked down at myself, buried thigh-deep in potting soil. Thorned vines were already touching me, sharp and prickly, like hungry grabbing hands.
Granny went on. “His eyes were as wide as turnips when we went in, like he never once figured the world could be that cruel. It’s the same look some of my clients get when Granny has no more chances left to give them. Some people expect you’d drain the ocean ’fore runnin’ out of second chances. They prey on that. Take advantage.”
Seemed to me then that Amber had told me the exact same thing at dinner.
“But ya gotta pay your debts in this world,” Granny said with a nod. “Granny don’t like to be taken ’vantage of. So tell me, Doc. Do you know that look? The one folks get when they realize for the first time just how nasty a place the world really is?” She studied my face. “You ever gave anyone that look? Or have them give it to you?”
I nodded.
“Good!” she said with genuine glee. “I’m so glad. It’ll make all this so much easier if we don’t have to start from scratch.” She held up the silver coin. “You don’t know what this is, do ya?”
I shook my head weakly. I didn’t see the point in lying. I was too weak to play the chef’s game. It didn’t seem to matter anymore anyway.
“I didn’t think so. If you did, you never woulda come. Nothin’ I have to trade is worth this silver.
Not even my own life. This is a genuine, certified Moirai Penny.” She ran her thumb over the face. “A rare thing. Doesn’t happen but once a King’s Moon, a coin like this—all tangled in chance and destiny. This here is the silver that Robert E. Lee flipped on his retreat from Richmond. Did you know that?”
I shook my head, mostly to clear it so I could contemplate my options. There didn’t seem to be any.
Granny sat down again with a groan. “Lee knew Sheridan and his army were comin’ up from the south, but he didn’t know quite where or when. The question was whether to turn north and try to outflank Grant, who was on hard chase, or to follow the Appomattox River in an attempt to outrun ’em both and hold out for the possibility of fresh men and supplies.
“If it were heads, they’d turn on Grant.
“If it were tails, they’d follow the river.
“It were tails. Sheridan come up, Lee got trapped, and he surrendered to Grant at the courthouse at Appomattox and just like that, the glorious rebellion was over.
“But this silver weren’t done. No, sir.” She admired it. “Some forty years later it was in the pocket of Orville Wright, who had a disagreement with his brother that mornin’ about whose turn it was to take out the flying machine, and they flipped for it.
“Of course, between then and there it did quite a few other things, too. Got a woman hung at nine months pregnant. Caused a flood on the Missouri River. Triggered the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. But those first two are the ones of high note, so to speak.
“You can buy a lotta things with a Moirai Penny,” she said wistfully. “The Three Sisters don’t like these in circulation. No, sir. They gum up the works. Turn everything topsy-turvy. So they’ll take ’em in trade. The legal tender of fate. That’s what this is. Yessir, you can buy a helluva lotta things with a Moirai Penny.”
She turned to me. “So, how about you tell me how you came by such a wonder as this.”
I’d like to say that was the part where I crafted some master plan, where I lived up to my reputation as the clever man. But my head was throbbing and my hands tingled painfully and I could barely think to breathe. And I knew absolutely zero magic. I didn’t even believe in it.
