The Cannibal Heart

by Margaret Millar

  THE CANNIBAL HEART

  For an old friend, a fine critic, and an

  over-imaginative angler, Harry E. Maule

  The Cannibal Heart © 1949 The Margaret Millar Charitable Unitrust

  This volume published in 2017 by Syndicate Books

  www.syndicatebooks.com

  Distributed by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  The Cannibal Heart eISBN: 978-1-68199-024-8

  Cover and interior design by Jeff Wong

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  1

  About a hundred yards below the house, to the south, the woods began, and it was here that Luisa said the devils lived. Some of them were shut up in the old well, now gone to salt and useless, and covered with a concrete slab. The others lived in the swimming pool which had been boarded over so they wouldn’t escape.

  Jessie tried to see the devils by lying on her stomach across the planks and peering through a knothole. Inside, there was nothing but blackness and a very faint rustling noise.

  “I think I hear something,” Jessie said.

  “That’s them.” Luisa hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on the planks with fierce delight. “If you don’t quit pestering me and following me around all the time I’ll let them loose. I’ll tell them to sneak into your room while you’re sleeping.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.” But the protest was feeble. She knew Luisa would dare. She had, also, an uneasy feeling that if there were any devils in the woods, they belonged to Luisa and would obey her. Luisa wore a veil of mystery. Though she was only fifteen she was already different from other people, and Jessie respected this difference, and despised it, and was a little afraid of it, too. Luisa had wild dark eyes that she could roll up until only the whites were visible, like peeled grapes. She could turn her eyelids inside out by pressing them with her thumb, and when she combed her long black hair in the kitchen, it gave off sparks and made the music, coming from the radio, crackle and splutter. Luisa’s family was a little mysterious, too. Her mother, Carmelita, spoke nothing but Spanish—sometimes so fast and loud that Jessie’s ears twitched—and Luisa’s father, Mr. Roma, had skin as dark and creased as a walnut, and white kinky hair that he kept pressed down tight under a felt hat with two jay feathers stuck in the band.

  “Luisa, are you really a Mexican?”

  “Half.”

  “What’s the other half?”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You must be awfully ignorant for a child nearly nine.” Luisa got up, and stretched and yawned with a show of boredom, but Jessie could tell from her expression that Luisa was offended again. “There’s other nasty things in this woods you don’t know about, Jessie Banner.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t live here like me.”

  “Now I do. We’re going to stay in California until school starts and . . .”

  “You’re still only a renter. I’ve lived here ever since the house was built, practically before you were born. I know everything about it, and about Mrs. Wakefield, too.”

  Jessie stirred, and sighed. Luisa was always doing that when she was offended, trapping her into asking questions and then leaving the questions half-answered, or not at all.

  She had to ask, anyway; the trap was too tempting. “Who’s Mrs. Wakefield?”

  “You’ll know soon enough. She’s coming to get some of her things she left behind. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. My father had a letter from her. She’s going to stay in Billy’s room.” Luisa put her hands on her hips in exaggerated disdain. “Now I suppose you’ll want to know who Billy is.”

  Jessie shook her head and tried to look incurious. “I don’t care. Anyway, you’re only doing that.”

  “Doing what, for goodness’ sake?”

  “That. I know lots of Billys at school, anyway. Dozens.” This was true. Where she went to school, in New York, Billy was a very ordinary name. She didn’t understand how, when it came from Luisa’s mouth, it could sound so tantalizing. Spoken by Luisa, it was like one of the words that set off explosive giggling in the cloakrooms or on the playground.

  Feigning indifference, she climbed down from the planks and began to pick the dirt out of her scraped knee. In just two weeks she had accumulated more scratches and cuts and bruises than she had in a year at home, and all over her legs and arms there were round

  red itchy patches that Mr. Roma said were fleabites. Evelyn, her mother, had been quite shocked at this and insisted they must be only mosquito bites, which seemed more respectable. But no, Mr. Roma said, there hadn’t been any mosquitoes for three years on account of

  the drought. Only fleas, small as pinheads and just as sharp and strong.

  She dug her nails into one of the bites, until pain covered the itching. “What are the nasty things in the woods?”

  “You’d be scared out of your skin, Jessie Banner.”

  “I wouldn’t be.”

  “You mustn’t tell a soul, promise on your brother’s blood.”

  “I promise.”

  “All right then. It’s a dead man.”

  “Right here? Under the—the planks?”

  “You really are ignorant. He’d rot under there. You just better go home to your mother and play with your dolls.”

  “I hate dolls,” Jessie lied passionately. “I never play with dolls. Where’s the dead man?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know.” Luisa rustled away through the fallen leaves, making a moaning eerie sound in the back of her throat.

  “Luisa, wait for me! Luisa?”

  But Luisa hid behind a tree and refused to answer to her name.

  Jessie looked around carefully at the trees in the hope that she could spot a flutter of Luisa’s dress behind one of them, or find evidence of her presence in the sudden squawking of resentful jays, or the scuttling of lizards seeking cover in the brush.

  Every tree stood bland, denying Luisa’s very existence. In the distance the sea muttered, and from under the planks that covered the dry pool came soft sounds like little unnamable things tittering in the dust below.

  She put her hands over her ears and began to run. When she reached the edge of the cliff the muttering of the sea had swollen into a roar that drowned the other noises. She paused, gasping for breath and holding her arm tight against the stitch in her side.

  From here she could see a thin grey ribbon of smoke rising from the kitchen chimney, and the barnlike garage on top of which Luisa lived in three rooms with her parents—quite exciting, not like other people who were forced to live in plain houses.

  From a distance the big stone house seemed to be growing right out of the cliff like magic. She knew perfectly well it hadn’t grown, of course; it had been built, Luisa said, and Mrs. Wakefield had lived there with someone named Billy who wasn’t like the Billy Jessie knew at school.

  She stooped and peered over the edge of the cliff so she could watch the shiny black cormorants swoop out from their nests in the holes of the cliff side and dive for fish. But she suddenly detested the big ravenous birds; and everything—the sea and the grey house, the fleabites on her legs and the woods pressing on her heels—seemed alien and monstrous. She wished she were back at home, walking in Central Park with one of her aunts, or riding jam-packed on the subway where there were so many people so very much alive that she couldn’t imagine dead ones.
Her face squeezed up, as if it might, without asking her permission, begin to cry. She herself never cried, especially not if there was a chance that Luisa might be spying on her.

  She rose and pushed her straight yellow hair back off her forehead. She began walking toward the house, whistling blithely and as loud as she could, in case Luisa was within earshot.

  2

  Evelyn’s face was needled with dust and her brown hair blowing against her neck felt as dry and stiff as straw.

  “Next time you should wear a hat,” Mr. Roma said. “Mrs. Wakefield always wore a hat when she drove into town, a straw hat with a brim. She had a very fair complexion.”

  He turned out to avoid a hole in the road, and the boxes of groceries slid across the back seat and the milk cans, packed in ice, rattled and gurgled.

  “On this road,” he said, “it is like the desert. You must keep covered up for protection.”

  In spite of the heat he wore a heavy plaid wool jacket buttoned to the neck, and a grey fedora jammed well down on his head so that only a little of his white hair showed at the back of his neck. He had eyes like brown plush, and a full sensitive mouth that quivered when he was moved to emotion; but it was chiefly the prematurely white hair that gave Mr. Roma his air of distinction. To Evelyn he looked like an English colonel charred by a tropic sun. She was surprised when he told her he was a mulatto.

  “Perhaps,” Mr. Roma said, “next Saturday I could go alone and do the shopping.”

  “Oh, no. I really enjoy shopping.”

  “It’s not much of a town to buy things in,” he said in a half-deprecating, half-hopeful tone. Marsalupe was the only town he knew very well, and while he realized its limitations, he wanted other people to approve of it, especially strangers from the East. “There are no delicacies.”

  “I don’t like delicacies much,” Evelyn said with a faint smile.

  “You can always order things from Los Angeles. Mrs. Wakefield did that sometimes. Once, hearts of palm in a can. Mr. Wakefield had a sudden craving for it. It’s a great delicacy. Compared to hearts of palm, caviar is as common as dirt.” After a time he added, “From this curve it’s only a mile and a half. Already you can smell the sea.”

  Evelyn couldn’t smell the sea, though she sniffed hard to oblige Mr. Roma, who always spoke as if he had a controlling interest in the sea as well as in the house built on the cliff above it.

  “Don’t you smell it, Mrs. Banner?”

  “Well, not quite. It’s not like a smell, exactly. It’s more like a feeling against my skin.”

  “I smell it very clearly.”

  “There, I think I do now. Yes, I’m sure of it.”

  Evelyn didn’t like anyone to be disappointed. It was this characteristic that led some of her friends into thinking she was weak-willed; and once Mark, in a fit of temper, had told her she was wispy, that she had a wispy personality and a wispy mind. Sometimes, especially when she first got up in the morning and wasn’t quite awake, she felt wispy, like a floating, detached piece of fog. But once she’d washed the sleep from her eyes she saw herself quite distinctly as a person of substance, and by the time she went into the adjoining bedroom to help Jessie dress, she felt as clear and sharp and hard as a diamond.

  The fact remained that at thirty-two Evelyn was, as she always had been, a very practical creature. It was often practical to make people, like Mark or Mr. Roma, feel good; and so she smelled the sea and told Mr. Roma that she felt refreshed already.

  Mr. Roma was very pleased to have the salubrious qualities of his ocean recognized, and he rounded the next curve with such sweeping grace that Evelyn clutched at the door with both hands to balance and the groceries and the milk cans and the books for Mark slid in noisy unison to the other side of the jeep.

  For the past eight years Mr. Roma had been making his Saturday trips to Marsalupe for supplies. It was only a matter of nine miles, but few people used the road and it was left in bad repair. During the wet season Mrs. Wakefield’s heavy Lincoln used to sink to its hub caps in mud, and during the dry season the road was dusty and full of holes, and there was about a mile of slide area where unexpected boulders brushed the old Lincoln’s tires and tortured its ageing springs. After the war Mrs. Wakefield bought a second-hand jeep which raced along the road like a tireless and indestructible child. When Mrs. Wakefield departed suddenly, over a year ago, she left the jeep with Mr. Roma.

  Every month Mr. Roma received a check from Mrs. Wakefield’s bank, to cover his salary and necessary repairs for the house. Together, he and Carmelita had kept the place ready for occupancy, expecting that at any time Mrs. Wakefield would send word that she and Billy were coming home. But the only news he had of her were two letters, the first from Billy’s nurse.

  “Dear Mr. Roma: Mrs. Wakefield wrote and asked me to put the house in the hands of a real estate agent here in San Diego. She wants you to stay on until a sale is made. This may not be for a long time because of the drought affecting the water supply and also because the house is quite out of the way and most people have to go out and scrounge for a living just like me! Mrs. Wakefield and Billy returned from Port-au-Prince three months ago but set out again immediately on a cruise down the coast. (By a funny coincidence they went on the Eleutheria, which is, I recall, one of the last ships poor Mr. Wakefield helped to design. Life is odd, isn’t it?) My best wishes to yourself and Carmelita, and tell Luisa I wish her all kinds of luck on her exams.

  Norma Lewis

  P. S. I’ve just talked to the real estate man and he says there’s not a chance of selling the house until something is done about the water situation—I guess he means rain. Meanwhile he has an opportunity to rent it furnished, for the summer only, to some people from New York, a man and wife and a child of school age. The man has some connection with publishing books, and he’s got good bank references. He’s willing to pay $2000 up to September 15th (including you and Carmelita, of course). I think it’s a good offer, considering the disadvantages of the place. Anyway I said, go ahead. I guess it’ll be all right, though I do think it would be nicer if Mrs. Wakefield kept in closer touch with me!

  N. L.”

  A week after the Banners had moved in, the second letter arrived. It was an abrupt little note from Mrs. Wakefield herself, telling Mr. Roma that he might expect her within a week or two, and that she wanted to “straighten out a few things.”

  “One more hill,” Mr. Roma said, shifting into second. “Maybe you would care to stop and see the view?”

  “For a minute.”

  “Mrs. Wakefield’s been all over, in nearly all the countries, and she says right here is the most wonderful view in the world.”

  Evelyn smiled again. She couldn’t help being amused by Mr. Roma’s soft intensity, his air of innocent earnestness. “Perhaps it’s because this is her home, she has a sentimental attachment.”

  Mr. Roma gave her a sharp glance. “She has no such attachment.”

  “She must be unusual then.”

  “Unusual, oh, yes. She’s a real—a real gentlewoman.” He handled the word awkwardly, as if he was aware that it was obsolete but could find no newer word to take its place.

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Some people think so. It is a matter of opinion. She has fine eyes and hair—red hair, quite dark.”

  He stopped the jeep at the top of the hill. The road curved down below them through a grove of giant eucalyptus trees. Beyond the trees the sea shone blue and silver, with the cliffs zigzagging along its shore. As far as the eye could see, the cliffs stretched, a wilderness of stone, with here and there part of a house visible, or a tendril of rising smoke that implied a house with people living in it. There were no people to be seen, though—no movement at all except the sea. From such a height even the sea looked sluggish, and the breakers crawled languidly along the beach.

  “There’s an island out there,” Mr
. Roma said, pointing. “Twenty miles or so.”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “Not today—there is a slight haze—but on some days you can see it quite clearly.”

  She thought instantly of Jessie, how eager she would be to see the island and explore.

  “It would be fun to go over there some time, rent a cruiser in Marsalupe . . .”

  “There’s no place to land.”

  “How do people live there?”

  “No one does. There are no people on the island because there is no water.”

  “Water,” Evelyn repeated. She had never before in her life thought of water except as something that came obligingly, hot or cold, from a tap. But out here it was all she heard about, and everywhere she looked she saw reminders: the disconnected showers; the big tub under the kitchen sink where Carmelita saved the rinse water to use later on the vegetable garden, soap and all; the bricked-in flower beds, empty and baked into clay by the incessant sun, and the lawn that was so dry and crisp it crackled under one’s feet. When the rains start, people said, or, When the dry season is over. They measured time in cups and gallons.

  When they passed the grove of eucalyptus trees the house itself came into view. It was a comfortable house, built sturdily and economically of adobe brick and native stone. But to Evelyn the place had a curious air of unreality, as if the people who had lived there had formed a small compact group independent of the outside world, the daily newspaper, the radio, the postman. In actual fact, the newspaper came (a day or two late), the mail was delivered, and there was a Capehart in the living room. But still the impression of isolation was so strong that Evelyn hesitated before turning on the radio, and once it was turned on she soon lost interest. “We’re becoming a couple of lotus eaters,” Mark had said, and it was true that, day by day, they were being absorbed by the house and the sea and the woods. Any other life seemed more and more remote.