The Cannibal Heart

by Margaret Millar

  They walked in single file out the door.

  James the gander waddled over from his usual place beneath the magnolia tree. No one knew for certain why he preferred this spot, though Mr. Roma had suggested that it was because the fresh-fallen magnolia petals looked like huge snowy goose eggs.

  He advanced on them, hissing in a half- friendly, half-warning manner. James’ origin was uncertain; he had simply appeared one day, and stayed. He was very old now, and his one eye had clouded and his temper was uncertain, but he still felt it was his duty to patrol the yard, and keep things in order. Though he actually despised people, he sometimes needed them, in the absence of geese or other ganders. At night, when he had a spell of loneliness, he rapped his bill against the lighted windows, or scraped it up and down the screen door of the kitchen, coaxing for a little companionship, however objectionable it might be. It was difficult to be fond of James because of his haughty contempt for the human race, but it was equally difficult to dislike him.

  Hissing, he followed them as far as the garage, then circled back again to the mag­nolia tree with cumbersome dignity.

  “Here, James,” Jessie called. “Come on, James.” The gander snorted, and shuffled around and around among the fallen petals of the magnolia.

  The beginning of the path that led to the woods was made of flagstones, bordered on the left with scraggly pelargoniums, and on the sea side a cypress hedge to break the wind.

  The cypress was dying from the drought, and when the wind touched it, it mourned and dropped its needles like tears. Further on, where the flagstones ended, the path was crackly with oak leaves that stung Jessie’s bare feet.

  At the pepper tree where Mr. Roma had hung Jessie’s swing, the path curved abruptly to the left, past a wide barranca filled with scrub oak, and huge boulders where the lizards sunned themselves at noon. Over the barranca there was a bridge made of planks and wire cable, but no one knew who had built it or how old it was and how safe. When the wind blew, the bridge rocked and squeaked, and the only ones who ever used it were the jays and the mocking birds who came to sing and quarrel and splatter their droppings, and the termites who tunneled through the planks, leaving behind tiny pellets of wood.

  With Jessie in the lead, they scrambled down over the boulders and up on the other side into a grove of eucalyptus and juniper trees. In a clearing in the middle of the grove was the small swimming pool, neatly covered with planks nailed together at the ends. It looked like a raised little dance floor, and this was precisely what Jessie had used it for until today.

  “Well, I don’t see any devils,” Mark said, with exaggerated surprise.

  “I just told her that,” Luisa muttered.

  “Why?”

  “I had to tell her something. She’s always following me. No matter where I go she follows me. I’ve got a life of my own to live.” She glanced at Mark out of the corner of her eye. “Besides, she wanted to take the boards off. She got a hammer out of the garage.”

  “I wanted it to be a wading pool,” Jessie said anxiously. “In case it rains.”

  “The boards are supposed to stay on. Mrs. Wakefield said so. She put them on herself.”

  Mark went over and tried to loosen one of the planks but it wouldn’t budge. “She did a good enough job. It seems a funny spot to build a pool in the first place.”

  “Mr. Wakefield liked privacy,” Luisa said. “He didn’t like anyone else around.” The mention of Mr. Wakefield seemed to make her uneasy. She glanced over her shoulder and added in a burst, “Can I go now? I’m supposed to be watching the beans.”

  “It’s getting chilly,” Evelyn said. “We might as well all go, if Jessie is satisfied. You’re not frightened anymore, are you, Jessie?”

  “No.” Jessie stared grimly down at her big toe where two ants were rather ticklishly playing follow the leader. Mr. Roma said all the ants were searching for water, which was why they often invaded the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. Thoughtfully, Jessie spit on the ground, and then with her forefinger she eased the thirsty ants off her big toe so they could locate the spit. “I was never frightened a bit.”

  She raised her head and saw Luisa’s faint sneer, and the amused skeptical glances exchanged by her parents. Their disbelief astounded her, and when she spoke again her voice trembled with intensity:

  “I’ll stay here and prove it. You just watch me!”

  Ducking past her mother she leaped up on the planks and began stamping her feet and shouting challenges.

  “Leave her alone,” Mark said. “She has to work out her own problems.”

  When they reached the house again they could still hear Jessie’s faint scornful chant mingling with the rise and fall of the sea and the sighing of the cypress—I’m the king of the castle and you’re the dirty rascals.

  Mark closed the windows of the living room so he couldn’t hear it. But it wouldn’t be shut out. It kept beating rhythmically inside his head and the pulse in his temple throbbed in time to it.

  He glanced across the room at Evelyn, sitting, mute and placid as a china doll, in the wing chair by the window. For a moment he felt a savage resentment against her placidity; it ripped through his body and out again, like an electric current. It seemed to Mark that she lived entirely on and off the surface; her strongest emotions were affection, dislike, anger. She enjoyed weeping at movies, and she was always careful to bring her own handkerchief. It had been one of the little things about her that amused him when they were first married, and it still did, if he was in the right mood. But the right moods were becoming more infrequent.

  “Did you ever sing that when you were a kid?” he said.

  “I suppose. I can’t remember.”

  “You must have been a funny kid. Did you ever have anything to say for yourself?”

  “I’ll go up and get your sweater.”

  “No, sit down. I don’t need it.”

  “I hope we’re not going to quarrel,” Evelyn said.

  “Why should we?”

  “I don’t know, but it seems that every time Jessie has a problem, it always turns into our problem, into an argument between you and me.”

  “I don’t feel like arguing,” Mark said. “Do you?”

  “Then why start something?”

  “I wasn’t,” she said patiently. “I was only pointing out what’s happened so often, so it wouldn’t happen again, so we’d be on guard.”

  “It sounds more as if you meant en garde.”

  “No.”

  “You’re not jealous, are you?” Mark said. “There’s no one around here to be jealous of except Luisa, and she’s a little on the young side.”

  “Don’t be silly. You know I’ve only been jealous once in my whole life.”

  “By God,” he said bitterly. “You’d think I’d have lived that Patty business down by now.”

  “Patty’s a ridiculous name for a woman her age. Patty. It sounds more like a cocker spaniel, or one of those hounds with awfully long ears.”

  “A basset.”

  “That’s it.” She crossed the room and put her arms around his neck and clung there. She was so small and light he barely felt her weight. “We mustn’t quarrel, darling!”

  “We’re not quarreling.”

  “Especially with that woman coming, and Jessie in one of her moods.”

  He bent down and kissed her lightly on the forehead, but he felt that little surge of rebellion pass through him again. Whether there had been a quarrel or not, she had won.

  He wanted suddenly, like Jessie, to stamp his feet and shout at the top of his lungs, I’m the king of the castle.

  4

  When her voice got tired Jessie sat down on the lid of the well and gently bit at the hangnail on her right thumb. The hangnail was the worst she’d ever had and she had an idea that she might leave it on to show to the visitor. Since
Carmelita had partly charmed her wart away with funny noises and hot castor oil, Jessie had no physical distinction left except the hangnail.

  Jessie took her thumb away from her mouth and examined the remains of the charmed wart on the joint of her forefinger. Though her parents said that no one could charm things away, Jessie could see the evidence for herself—the wart was nearly gone. She wondered how Carmelita got this awful power of diminishing things, and whether she could use it on animals or people, to turn whales into minnows, or Jessie herself into a storybook doll.

  “I could charm things,” she whispered to herself. “Carmelita can teach me and when I go back to school I’ll charm everyone’s diseases.”

  It was impossible to sit still on such an exhilarating thought. She jumped up laughing and spread her arms wide. It was wonderful to be herself, Jessie, powerful and unafraid,

  and with company coming. Dancing on her toes she started off down the path for home while the little lizards darted out of the way of her flying feet.

  Just before she came to the curve in the path she stopped for breath, and it was then that she heard clearly, above all the other little noises in the woods, a new noise that she didn’t recognize.

  She crouched down behind a boulder and listened. The rhythmic squeaking continued, and the harder she listened the more familiar it seemed. Yet it was oddly out of place. No one used the swing in the pepper tree except Jessie, herself, and, very rarely, Luisa; but the sound was now unmistakable, the crunch-squeak of rope against bark.

  She called out, “Luisa?” and her voice sounded very high and thin, as if Carmelita had charmed most of it away.

  There was no answer from Luisa. Jessie had expected none. Even if Luisa had heard her she knew Luisa wouldn’t answer anyway because she was mad. Luisa’s madness might last forever, and this thought made Jessie feel quite desperate and reckless. There was no use trying to appease Luisa, so she might as well do her best to scare her out of her skin.

  Cautiously she approached the curve of the path, keeping close behind tree trunks and boulders, and crawling on her hands and knees when she had to cross an open space.

  In spite of all her care she couldn’t prevent the leaves and twigs from crackling under her weight, and by the time she reached the place where she could see the swing, the squeaking noise had stopped. Crouched behind an oak tree, ready to pounce, she waited for the noise to begin again, so that she could catch Luisa unaware and dreaming.

  She waited for a long time, until her one foot went to sleep and she had to wake it by slapping and pinching. When she finally gave up her vigil and stepped out from behind the tree she saw that there was no one on the swing at all, though it was still moving in the wind.

  Furious at being tricked and missing her prey, she shouted feebly, “You’re a stinker! If you hide on me I’m going to tell!”

  She saw then, moving through the trees like two giant gaudy birds, Mr. Roma in his plaid shirt and a woman who wore a yellow dress and had a blaze of dark red hair.

  “It’s the little girl, Jessie,” Mr. Roma said. “She likes to make noises. It is good for her lungs.”

  Mrs. Wakefield smiled faintly. Her eyes didn’t change but the lines around her mouth deepened. “It must be funny to have a child around again.”

  “It is very lively.”

  “Lively, yes.” She turned away, blinking. “They are nice people, are they?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Mr. Roma said gently. “Mr. Banner is restless, he is lonely maybe, but not the lady or the little girl.”

  Mrs. Wakefield paused beside an acacia tree and touched it with her hand as if it were an old friend. The acacia had never been pruned and its grey fringed leaves drooped to the earth. The yellow blossoms, like tiny balls of chenille, had browned and withered.

  “Nearly everything has died but the trees,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “It pays to have deep roots.”

  Kneeling down on the carpet of withered blossoms she began to brush them away with her hand.

  “I’ll do it,” he protested. “Here. Look. I have my handkerchief.”

  “No. How old is the little girl?”

  “Nearly nine. She will be nine next month.”

  “Almost as old as Billy. You’ll have to have a birthday party for her.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Tell me the date so I can think of it when I’m gone.”

  “The eighteenth of July.”

  She repeated the date aloud. “It will be a nice thing to think of, a little girl’s birthday party.”

  Mr. Roma knew she would remember; the very first thing in the morning on July the eighteenth, she would think of Jessie’s birthday party. He wanted to make the picture real for her so that she would be, in a sense, at the party herself.

  “Carmelita will bake an angel’s food cake,” he said seriously, “with pink icing and nine pink candles. Inside the cake will be a ten-cent piece and a little silver horseshoe . . .”

  “And a wedding ring. Perhaps Luisa will get the wedding ring. She’d like that.”

  “Yes, the cake will be filled with many things,” Mr. Roma said.

  In the space which he had cleared of blossoms was a small square stone. Mr. Roma had placed it in the ground himself and he had no need to look at the words it bore:

  John Harris Wakefield, 1898–1947, God Rest His Soul.

  He turned his eyes away, toward the sea glimmering like a blue light beyond the grey leaves of the acacia. He didn’t want to see Mrs. Wakefield’s silent, tearless grief. He knew she would not weep, she had gone dry like an old well. The dryness showed in her skin, no longer delicate and fine but nearly as dark as Mr. Roma’s own; and in the stiff way she moved, as if her bones had bristled from lack of moisture. Even her eyes seemed parched, and caught in her dark eyebrows there was a fine spray of yellow dust from the road. Her beauty had changed, but it hadn’t vanished.

  Mr. Roma took off his grey fedora and held it over his heart.

  “We’d better go back,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “They will think I’m queer, coming out for a walk in the woods like this as soon as I arrive. They don’t know that John is buried here, do they?”

  “I didn’t tell them.”

  “It’s just as well. They might be superstitious about death, especially the child.” She smoothed the blossoms back over the stone until it was no longer visible. “Is she—is

  she very bright?”

  “Oh, yes. But she has had no experience—trains and zoos and airplanes and sub­ways and movies, yes—she knows all about the artificial things—but here in the country she is always filled with wonder and fear. She has a tender heart. She loves every­thing that moves.”

  “What a pity.” Mrs. Wakefield rose and brushed off the leaves that clung to her dress. The backs of her hands were baked and waffled by the sun. “She will grow up so suddenly and bitterly.”

  “No, no,” Mr. Roma said, but he knew it was partly true. Jessie was too lavish with her love. She splattered it around like an inexperienced painter, and Mr. Roma often found daubs and splashes of it in the most unexpected places. “Jessie will grow up to be a fine woman, like you.”

  “Like me?” Her face twisted in a sudden grimace of pain. “God forbid.”

  Side by side they began to walk back toward the house, past Jessie’s swing and the eucalyptus where the hummingbirds nested.

  “I’ve changed, haven’t I?” she said. “A lot.”

  “No more than any of us.”

  “A good deal more. I could see it in Carmelita’s eyes—a really profound shock. She looked at me as if I were the one who had died, not Billy.”

  “Carmelita exaggerates things with her eyes,” Mr. Roma said. “Luisa does, too. It means nothing.”

  “I was a fool to come back. I should have kept moving.” She shook her head as if to shake away the fact of her retu
rn. “They say tragedy ennobles people, gives them an inner peace. Well, I don’t feel noble or peaceful. I feel angry, terribly and helplessly angry.”

  “It is all right to be angry.”

  “Not when you can’t do anything about it except shake your fist at the sky and stamp your feet on the ground.” She was silent a moment. “When I was Jessie’s age my mother took me to a fortune-teller as a special treat. The old woman said, ‘This child will have a long and happy life,’ and for years and years I believed this with all my heart. Whenever I was depressed or lonely I would repeat those magic words to myself: This child will have a long and happy life. I often wish I could go back and find the old woman and thank her for the comfort she gave me. It was such a personal comfort—you understand? It wasn’t like being told that God was in Heaven and would take care of me providing I was good. No, the old woman knew her business. Her words were clear and precise and confident, and there were no strings attached, no provisos, like having to stop biting my fingernails and getting my pinafores dirty. This child was me, and the long and happy life was my irrevocable fate.”

  “You’re still a young woman,” Mr. Roma said anxiously, but she paid no attention to his remark.

  She said, with an uncertain smile, “If I found the fortune-teller again, I don’t know whether I’d call her a liar or ask her to repeat the words to me all over again.”

  “Maybe both.”

  “That’s right, maybe both,” she said. “But I’ve talked enough about my troubles. What will you do when the house is sold?”

  Mr. Roma had been expecting the question. “We will go back to Marsalupe. We have saved money here. I am thinking we will open a small restaurant.”

  “A restaurant?”

  “Only a very small one. A café.”

  “You’ve had no experience.”

  He glanced at her shyly. “I was thinking I would take one of these courses by mail—how to keep the books and what to buy. Carmelita will cook her special dishes like enchiladas, and beans with cheese, and tamales, and I will do the serving.”

  “It will be a very different life for you.”