Some People Talk with God

by John Enright

  “Do you hear a statement being made here?” Morgan asked. “Wait, I’ll go get her down here and maybe she can express it in words as well.”

  Denise, of course, did not come down alone. She brought half of her crew with her. Oh, how Amanda hated these sorts of scenes, these cat fight scenes. With men you could try to use diplomacy and logic and there were parameters; with women there were no rules besides attack. And, it being Denise, Amanda knew she should stay out of it or risk losing it again.

  “The girls will finish the clean up,” Denise said. “We were just having our meditation hour before we were so rudely interrupted.” Denise turned to the girls behind her. “Finish up here,” she said. They looked at each other, confused, and then set about bagging the rest of the trash and moving dirty dishes to the sink. “It’s been a busy day. What’s your problem?”

  “What’s with the blood on the porch?” Morgan asked.

  “As part of Litha we reconsecrated our Covenstead today. It’s a ritual.”

  “It’s blood on the porch,” Morgan said.

  “It is ceremonial blood, an essential aspect of High Priest Lloyd’s consecration of the Craftplace.”

  “High Priest Lloyd?” Amanda asked.

  “Yes, he came with his coven from Saugerties to observe Litha with us and to strengthen the spirit of this place.”

  “Are you going to clean it up?” Morgan asked.

  “We can’t do that. There is no need. Blood is the essence of nature, as sacred to the Earth Mother as her own menses. Nature herself will cleanse it.”

  “Not on the porch she won’t, not without a little help anyway.”

  “If you remove it, the Earth Mother’s distain will be upon you.”

  “I’m not washing your mess off the front porch, sweetheart, but I might call the sheriff back here to see where the blood came from.”

  “It’s just ox blood, of course.”

  “A sacred ox, I hope.”

  Amanda watched Morgan. How she enjoyed these confrontations. One of the girls had turned and was scowling at Morgan. Morgan turned on her, “What are you looking at, sister?” Then she turned back to Denise and walked over to her. “No more of this shit, Denise, or I will get the law back out here.”

  “For what?”

  “How about harboring an underage runaway car thief?”

  The girls behind Amanda all stopped what they were doing and turned toward Denise.

  “I did a little background check on your Susan. She’s only sixteen and she’s wanted back home in Ohio. People there miss her, including the district attorney.”

  “How dare you! How dare you continue to persecute that poor innocent child!” Denise stood her ground as Morgan advanced.

  “Actually, I’d rather leave poor, innocent juvie Susie out of it as well, but you dragged her into this. I’m just saying cut the crap and get out. Time’s up. Time to move on and paint some new place with your blood.”

  “Do you have any idea what that man did to her? Do you? He not only ravaged her but he cast some sort of spell on her, broke her mentally. She was so distraught and confused I’ve had to send her away for evaluation.”

  “You did what?” Amanda said.

  “She won’t be committed or anything, just admitted for observation. With her family’s concurrence.”

  “You mean her sister’s,” Morgan said.

  “Her sister is family. It’s for the poor girl’s own good. High Priest Lloyd has accepted her into his coven and will take her in for evaluation. He’s a psychiatric nurse at a very prestigious clinic. He can get her in as a hardship victim case.”

  “Had to get her out of the way, did you?” Morgan said, shaking her head. “You’re a piece of work, Denise. But that doesn’t change anything.”

  “Except for Susan,” Amanda said. “That girl doesn’t belong in an institution. You do.” There Denise was, using people again. Amanda was still holding her high heel shoes. She threw one at Denise, which missed widely. Denise ducked unnecessarily.

  Morgan laughed. “Ladies, ladies, let’s not go there. So, Denise, are you thinking that if you get Susan on the right drugs and coached well enough to your script, she will cop to being raped? Or had her presence just become too much a dangerous embarrassment? No matter; your thirty days are ticking.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” Denise said. “A member of Lloyd’s coven is a lawyer, and he said you can’t just evict a church. It’s prejudicial. You’ll be getting papers soon contesting the eviction. You’ve got a world of trouble coming. This place will be mine before this is over. Drop that, girls. Come on. Let the help clean up.” And Denise turned and left, followed by her obedient crew.

  Morgan went and picked up Amanda’s shoe where it had landed in the wing chair and brought it back to her. “And I thought I was so clever when I brought that troop in here,” she said. “Oh, well, they can’t stay once reconstruction begins. How many years have you had these shoes?”

  ***

  The offices of the Hudson Register Star in Warren Street were only four or five blocks from Dominick’s hotel, in the middle of the old brick downtown business district. Sissy had said that she probably wouldn’t be there Monday but that she would leave the books for him. She had—two tomes on the history of the Underground Railroad in New York and New England and a folded copy of a paper Sissy had written in college about its activities in Greene and Columbia counties. She had gotten a B+ on the paper. He read her paper first, over lunch. There was nothing fancy about her prose. Her premise was that free blacks had done most of the heavy lifting hereabouts and had been ignored in the historic record. Her prof had faulted her for insufficient library citations—“an over-reliance on anecdote”—when her point was that very little had been previously written about black involvement. There was nothing about Diligence or the Rev. Van Houten in either her paper or the indexes of the books.

  Back in his hotel room Dominick called Morgan on her cell phone. There was nothing new on his car. “They’ll keep it hostage a couple of days,” Morgan said. “Hey, it’s their rice bowl. I bet the CI guys over here don’t get that many chances to play with their nifty toys. Patience, Nemo. I’ll keep checking on it and get back to you as soon as there is any news.”

  “Who’s Nemo?” Dominick asked.

  “Did I say Nemo? I meant Dominick. Anyway, I’ll keep you informed.”

  Dominick spent the afternoon with Sissy’s books. They were dry if comprehensive, the sort of history that tried harder to seem exhaustive than interesting and pained itself to avoid any appearance of conjecture. As usual he wished for more and better maps. The weather had turned hot, but Dominick didn’t want to close the windows. He left them open and turned the air-conditioning to its coldest setting. Hotel rooms were meant to be abused. The edges of the desk were scarred by cigarette burns. The phone didn’t ring. Around the time when he started thinking about supper there was a knock at his door. It was Sissy.

  “You got the books?” she said when he opened the door. “What are you doing for dinner?” She wasn’t wearing a dashiki today, but jeans and a white-on-yellow short-sleeve aloha shirt over a coral tank top. She was smiling. It was one of those smiles that made you want to smile back.

  “I thought I would get something to eat,” Dominick said, opening the door to invite her in. “Any ideas?”

  “Got just the place,” Sissy said, but she didn’t come in. “Change, and I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  It was true Dominick wasn’t dressed to go out. He quickly changed into street clothes and met Sissy in the lobby. The restaurant they strolled to was small and out of the way on a side street off Warren. The menu was one hundred percent vegetarian. The food wasn’t bad, but as far as Dominick was concerned tofu and steamed vegetables were only and always tofu and steamed vegetables. They ate with chopsticks. They talked about the Underground Railroad.

  At one point Sissy laughed, her private ironic laugh—Dominick had begun to catalog her various laug
hs—and said, “You know, I have never got to talk about this with anyone else before. My teachers didn’t talk with students. Daddy can’t understand why anyone would waste their time worrying over things from so long ago. And everyone else is in one kind of denial or another.”

  “You know a lot of local history,” Dominick said.

  “Daddy’s family has been here for more than two hundred years.”

  “And your mother’s family?”

  Sissy put down her chopsticks and took a sip of tea. She was no longer laughing. “You had to ask, didn’t you?”

  Dominick looked up from his plate. He had innocently asked the wrong question, but there was no taking it back. He said nothing.

  “My mother was a prostitute down in the city. Daddy was her pimp. She loved him. She tricked him into knocking her up. Me. They left the city and came up here to Daddy’s family to raise me. Daddy traded being a pimp for being a cabbie. My mother died when I was twelve. End of personal history.”

  “I guess he loved her, too,” Dominick said.

  “She was an alcoholic.”

  “Alcoholics can be lovable.”

  “You really don’t care, do you?” Sissy still hadn’t picked back up her chopsticks.

  “Listen, Sissy, I’m sorry I asked that question, but it really makes no difference to me. You are who you are, not your mother, not your father—you. And I find you engaging and interesting and a bit distracting.”

  “Distracting?” A half smile returned to her face.

  “That’s meant as a compliment. What’s this?” Dominick poked his chopsticks into a side dish that had just been put on the table.

  “Fried okra, my favorite here,” Sissy said. “I find it very … distracting.”

  After dinner they sat on a bench in the little park with the railroad tracks across from Dominick’s hotel and talked. It was a hot, still night. Sissy was a Christian, one of those unquestioning ones for whom a church was as much a given part of life as family itself or electricity. “Just look at history, religion is everywhere, everybody believes in God,” she said. “You can’t deny it. It was the churches—Quakers first then the rest—that made the abolition of slavery a political issue in the United States.”

  “The South was pretty Christian, too,” Dominick said. “The Bible has no problem with slavery.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, we no longer live in Biblical times. Jesus had no slaves.”

  Sissy, in addition to being a Christian, a prohibitionist, and a vegetarian (“Buffalo wings are my one weakness”), espoused the tenets of feminism and animal rights, gay marriage and pro-choice. Dominick got the feeling that she had few sympathetic local ears for her particular salad of causes. He listened, occasionally making positive sounds. He enjoyed being with her—her youth, her health, her naïve ideology, something. He wanted to reach out and touch her, feel her tight braids or the moist warmth of her skin. It had been a long time since that yearning. He wanted to stretch out the time that they sat there beside one another in the mottled shadows of the distant streetlights. She was laughing again—laugh 4.a: a funny thought from out of nowhere.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I can’t tell you,” she said, still laughing to herself. “Maybe later, some other time. Look, I have to go. Now. Don’t go getting lost on me, Dominick. Good night.”

  Dominick didn’t watch her walk away. Her aroma lingered there without her. He hadn’t told Sissy about his discoveries at the Van Houten house, the trunks and the papers. He wondered why he hadn’t and if he ever would. Perhaps he should just return them to their hiding place and let whatever secrets they contained resume their aging process. He lit a long-overdue Churchill and waited for the midnight train.

  ***

  The Chevy’s front end was getting worse, the shimmy and the pull, and Amanda didn’t feel comfortable about driving all the way to Albany and back again. Morgan wanted to go up to see their lawyer. Tuesday morning they’d been served with legal papers. Denise’s Wiccan lawyer was seeking a temporary restraining order against the “forcible eviction.” Amanda gave Morgan a ride as far as the Hudson train station and promised her on the way that she would look into buying a newer car. But not today; she wasn’t in the mood. She stopped at the St. George, but Nemo wasn’t in. She left a message that she had stopped by.

  When she got back home she was glad to see that Denise’s Bronco was gone along with the rest of the cars. So she would have the place to herself for a while. Morgan hadn’t seemed worried about the temporary restraining order. “We might as well get it started and done with,” she had said. “Don’t worry. They haven’t got a case.”

  Amanda had sort of taken over Nemo’s place on the back veranda. It was another scorcher day, and she fixed herself a tall iced tea and went out to sit there in the deep shade. Just a couple of days without Susan’s attention and the kitchen garden was already drooping and sad. Amanda went and found the hose and started soaking the raised beds the way she’d seen Susan do it. God knows why. Within a few weeks it would all be ground into muck by the contractor’s trucks and machinery. The salad greens were recovering. The cherry tomatoes were already setting. Now don’t go getting attached to this place, she told herself. It will all be gone soon enough. You already failed once as a farm girl, remember? Reed and you raising goats and giving each of them pet names like Lamb Chop and Rib Roast to remind yourselves what they were bound for. Whatever happened to Reed? I wonder if Ricky knows where her father is.

  She was going off somewhere into the past as she moved the hose from bed to bed. That’s what usually happened when she got time alone now, she went backwards. It didn’t use to be that way, she thought. There had been a time, she was sure, when she only thought forward and couldn’t care less about what had already happened. Now even her dreams were like walking down library aisles of shelved memories. She was somewhere else altogether when the voice brought her back.

  “Hey, hi there. There was a car out front, so I figured someone was home, but no one answered the door. Nice garden.” She was a large, young, light-skinned black woman, smiling at something.

  “You surprised me. I didn’t hear you drive up,” Amanda said. “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Denise?”

  “No, I’m not. Denise isn’t here right now.” Amanda let go of the hose and wiped her hands together.

  “Are you a member of the church? I understand this place is a Wiccan church.”

  “No, I am not a member of any church, and, no, this place is no longer a Wiccan house.”

  “Still got your pentacle up there,” the woman said with a nod toward the side of the house. “Would Susan be around by any chance?”

  “No, Susan is gone. She no longer lives here. Look, what is this about? Who are you? If you’re police you have to identify yourself.”

  “Sorry. I’m Sissy.” She came over to shake Amanda’s hand. “I’m a reporter with the Register Star. I’m just following up on the incident report from out here the other day. You know, to get the victim’s side of the story.”

  “There was no victim. Certainly not Susan.”

  “Oh, but the police report—”

  “Was wrong,” Amanda said. “Nothing happened. There was no incident, so there is nothing to investigate. And that’s enough questions.” Amanda walked past the woman to turn off the faucet around the corner of the porch.

  “Okay, okay, don’t get all hostile.” The infernal woman was smiling again. “I just try to get our sisters’ stories out there when I can. No Susan, no story.” She followed Amanda around the side of the porch. “Would you know where I might find Susan?”

  “No, I don’t know. And you can leave now. This is my property, and I am asking you to please vacate it.”

  “Certainly, sister. I’ll go. Could I use your ladies room first? It’s a ways going back.”

  “Of course. Inside the kitchen door to your left. You’ll find it.”

  “Thanks,” she said.
“This is a great old place you got here.”

  Amanda was embarrassed. Why had she acted so rudely to this woman? She was only doing her job, and Amanda had treated her like an intruder, a threat of some type. It was true that nothing that went on here was any of her business, but if the story was going to get out anyway … She followed the woman into the kitchen in time to see her shut the bathroom door behind her down the hall. Amanda washed her hands at the kitchen sink. She had already forgotten the woman’s name. She was drying her hands on a tea towel when the woman came back into the kitchen.

  “I love these old houses,” the woman was saying. “You’re lucky to live here. Thanks for the use of your loo.”

  Amanda couldn’t think of anything to say. “I’ve forgotten your name,” she said.

  “Sissy,” she said, “Sissy Douglas. Yours?”

  “Amanda,” Amanda said. “Would you like some iced tea before heading back?”

  “I’d love some,” she said. That smile again. “No more questions.”

  They were seated on the back veranda—Amanda in Nemo’s chair, Sissy on the top step of the stairs to the garden—drinking their iced teas. “You’ll have to stake those beans soon,” Sissy said.

  “Which ones are those?” Amanda asked. “I don’t know anything about gardens. This was Susan’s job. I was just watering it to keep them alive. I hate to see things die.”

  “So Susan’s not coming back?”

  “Question,” Amanda said.

  “You know, I first got interested in this case after meeting the accused, who also claims that nothing ever happened.”

  “You’ve met with him?”

  “A couple of times. And I believe him. He is definitely not the rapist type. But you never know.”

  “No, you never know,” Amanda said. What exactly was the rapist type? “But Susan was never raped, never even bothered by the man. She told me so. As a matter of fact, she stole his car, and he chose not to report it.” Now why did you say that?