Martha Calhoun

by Richard Babcock

  “You were real sick,” said Bunny. “The sickest you’ve ever been. You had a fever of 104, and it wouldn’t go away. I remember one night you woke me up because you were talking nonsense—the fever had gone to your head.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “Oh, nothing—nothing that made any sense. Words and phrases. Alphabet soup. Stuff about Tom. You kept calling his name. That’s what woke me up. I was groggy myself, since I hadn’t got much sleep, and I gave you four aspirin, like I used to take when I had a bad headache. The next day, Dr. Baker said I was lucky I didn’t poison you.”

  “Dr. Baker came a lot. I remember him being there all the time.” During the day, he seemed forever to be standing in the corner of the room, huddling with Bunny. They were always whispering, but his deep voice carried anyway. “Weak heart,” he kept saying. He was worried that the fever would damage my heart. “Weak heart,” I heard over and over, at least in my imagination. Tom picked it up, too. He started calling me “weakheart,” saying the words together quickly, like “sweetheart.” Weakheart. He still calls me that sometimes.

  “Dr. Baker’s all right,” said Bunny. “He’s the best man in town.”

  “Better than Eddie?” I asked, half teasing.

  “Don’t get smart,” said Bunny testily.

  “I was just kidding.”

  “Well, don’t kid. This is no time to kid, especially about Eddie. He’s done a lot for me. He’s been there when I needed him. Besides, who are you to talk? We wouldn’t be in all this trouble if you weren’t thinking about sex all the time.”

  I didn’t respond. One thing about Bunny, when she’s upset, she’ll say anything. I just looked away. But that was the first time I realized how serious it was with Eddie. I suspected he might have moved in with her.

  After Bunny left, I picked up the Exponent and brought it outside, spreading it on the lawn to read. There was nothing in the paper about the KTD and not much exciting about anything else. Percy Granville, the state treasurer, was insisting he hadn’t done anything wrong. An accident over near Emerson had claimed the county’s twenty-fourth traffic fatality of the year. A boy, just out of high school, had been driving alone when his car swerved into the path of a truck. Another story said the farmers were having a good year. The corn was much higher than last year at this time, and higher than the five-year average. In a picture, a farmer was standing in a field, his arms outstretched, and the corn up to his neck. “Sea of green,” said the caption.

  I flipped through the pages quickly. On the next-to-last page, something in the letters column caught my eye. WITCHES, read the headline over one letter:

  Though the vast majority of people in Katydid are good citizens who lead decent lives, there are a few who insist on living like wild things. They think they’re too good to follow the normal accepted rules of society. Instead, they respond only to their own, selfish desires and laugh at the proper lives the rest of us try to lead. When I think of these people, I think of witches, stirring a bubbling caldron and cackling over what they’re getting away with.

  People like this never last long. They usually only destroy themselves. I’ve seen them come and go, so, normally, I wouldn’t be too worried. But when I hear that one person in particular is passing on her tricks to her children, then I get nervous. Mayor Krullke and Chief Springer are doing all they can, I’m sure, but the dangerous influences on our children are everywhere these days. You only have to turn on the television, listen to the radio, or read the newspapers. In this kind of environment, the “witches” and their children have a chance to spread and do far greater harm. It’s up to the mothers and fathers in this town to make sure that doesn’t happen. We must demand that all the irresponsible parents are isolated and, if necessary, punished. We have a right to insist on this because it is our town, and because the welfare of our children depends on it.

  The letter was signed “A Concerned Mother.”

  I studied the message carefully. I tried to imagine who A Concerned Mother was. Mrs. Benedict, maybe. If the letter was about Bunny and me—and I was certain it was—then she had to be a suspect. But the language sounded too formal for Mrs. Benedict, and it didn’t seem like her to write a public letter. Besides, whoever had written it had only heard of the trouble. That wasn’t Mrs. Benedict. It must be some stranger, I decided, maybe someone new in town. “Isolated and, if necessary, punished.” What did that mean? I felt a chill and quickly folded the paper.

  Getting up, I saw Grandma Porter, sitting at her window in the neighbor’s house. She’d been waiting for me to notice her, and she waved at me to come over. I couldn’t very well ignore her, so I walked over to the chain fence just below her window. She leaned forward when I got close. Her face was puffy and wrinkled, but her eyes sparkled.

  “I seen you in the room,” she said, lifting her arm from the sill and pointing toward the Vernons’ house. Her knuckles were huge, like walnuts. “They got you locked up.”

  “No, I can leave when I want,” I said. “I mean, I can come outside, anyway.”

  “They locked me up, too,” she said eagerly. “They put me in here. But I’m gonna get away.” She craned to look around me, making sure I wasn’t hiding someone behind my back or down at my feet. “Harry is gonna come and get me and take me away.”

  “Oh, really? Who’s Harry?”

  She ignored my question. “He can’t take you, though. Two’s too many.”

  “That’s okay. I’m not going anywhere anyway.”

  She stared at me while her jaw worked silently. I backed away and then waved.

  “I’ll tell Harry about you,” she called out. “But you can’t come.”

  ELEVEN

  As three o’clock approached, I began to worry about Reverend Vaughn. It was important that he like me—Mrs. O’Brien had made that clear. He could be crucial to my case. More than that, though, I wanted him to like me. I wanted to prove that I was more than just a silly, mindless schoolgirl, like the Elvis fan he’d told me about. I wanted to prove that I was different—as Bunny always said I was—different from the other kids in Katydid. Different from the adults, too. He seemed like the kind of person who could understand. But the more I worried about him, the more I lost my confidence. What if I couldn’t think of anything to say? Yesterday, conversation had come easily, one thing following another, but that was because I’d been surprised by his visit. I hadn’t had time to freeze up. Today, my mind was a blank. Nothing would be worse than to sit there, helpless, knowing he thought I was stupid. I hated myself for having led a boring life, for not having interesting thoughts and opinions and experiences. All those years with Bunny, when talk was as simple as breathing in and out, now seemed like such a waste. He wouldn’t care about the things I knew.

  To reassure myself, I took a piece of Sissy’s note paper and made a list of possible topics of conversation. My favorite movie. (I’d just seen Trapeze and loved it.) The fair. Monroe and Miller. (Did he think it would last?) Ringling Brothers closing up. But, no, those were all too trivial—Reverend Vaughn is more serious than that. He’d think I was frivolous. I tried to come up with some others. Dutch elm disease. Percy Granville. (For some reason, I’d always noticed him. Maybe because of that name—Percy. Who’d ever give it to a baby?) President Eisenhower’s heart.

  Nothing was quite right, but I folded the piece of paper and tucked it in my pocket. Every now and then, as I waited anxiously for him to appear, my hand dropped down, and I fumblingly made sure the list was still there.

  He arrived driving a strange little bumper car, something called a Metropolitan. The front seat was far too cramped, and his body unfolded like an easel when he climbed out. From the living-room window, I watched him coming up the walk. He was frowning slightly, distracted by something, his eyes were on the ground. Still, as he got closer, he seemed to tower over the Vernons’ house, too straight and tall to fit through the front door without stooping. Getting up to let him in, I felt light-headed for a moment. My
heart was pounding, and I had to pause briefly until the feeling went away.

  We took the same walk we’d taken the day before, down Prosperity Street, out toward Sylvan Elementary. He was quieter this time, more withdrawn, and I worried that it was because of me. Had he heard something since he left yesterday?

  “It’s warm,” I said, as we scuffed along an unshaded section of sidewalk.

  “Yes, the sun.”

  “And so humid.” I let my shoulders slump, pretending to go limp.

  “That’s the worst.”

  We walked along silently. My face burned. It was as bad as I’d feared. Now I was too distracted to remember what was on my list, and I couldn’t possibly pull it out. I’d look like a complete fool.

  He stopped suddenly across from the KTD. “I wish people would do something,” he said. “Everyone just seems to accept the fact that it’s closing.”

  “What can they do?”

  He started walking again, looking down at his feet. “Oh, I don’t know.” He sounded irritated. “Maybe nothing that could help. But you can always do something, and anything is better than just giving up.”

  He was talking about me, I was certain. He thought I was just giving up on conversation, that I was an idiot, a small-town lump. I looked around—at the trees, the concrete sidewalk, the grass, the Byrnes’s blue Chevrolet parked at the curb. Wasn’t there anything to talk about?

  “What do you think about the president’s heart?” I asked, suddenly remembering.

  “It’s his head I worry about,” said Reverend Vaughn glumly.

  At Sylvan Elementary, we sat in the playground shelter, shaded from the hot afternoon sun. The picnic benches felt extraordinarily hard. I hadn’t noticed that before. I watched as an occasional breeze stirred the canvas swings, each hanging limply above its own little dust bowl.

  “How’s your case coming?” he asked after a while.

  “I don’t know. Okay, I hope.”

  “It’s hard to relax when something like that is coming up. Nothing else is important.”

  “I know.” My mood picked up instantly. I had an excuse for being a dull companion.

  “For what it’s worth, I think this whole thing will blow over,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I think the judge will realize that whatever happened, if anything really did happen, it will never happen again.”

  “You think?”

  “I bet. Besides, you’ll have your minister there speaking up on your behalf.” He pounded his chest, Tarzan-style, and I laughed.

  “How’d you end up as a minister, anyway?” I asked.

  “You mean, how’d I get into this line of work? That’s the kind of thing boys ask prostitutes.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Just kidding.” He leaned back, stretching out. “Actually, it was sort of an accident. I don’t come from a very religious family. We were what I call potluck dinner Congregationalists. We’d show up on Sunday and for the big events but never think about church the rest of the week. At least, I didn’t. But when I went away to college, I started hanging out at the chapel. I don’t really know why, except that I didn’t fit in well at school. It was just a little college, in Iowa, and everyone seemed to be a football player or a wrestler. But all the students had to go to chapel on Sunday, and, after a while, I found I was looking forward to those chapel services more than anything. It didn’t have much to do with religion—in some ways just the opposite, I suppose. I secretly gloated that everyone at this dumb little school had to stop whatever they were doing and come to the service. There was something equalizing about it. That, and I loved the organ music.”

  “Really?” I’d never taken organ music very seriously. The sound is so loud and pompous and windy. Tom can burp at will, and once, on one of our rare mornings in church, he’d belched in tune as the organist played a hymn. I was the only one who could hear him, fortunately. It was amazing—disgusting, but amazing. “Faith of Our Fathers! Living Still,” exactly in tune, right out of his stomach. Afterward, I asked him to repeat it, but he couldn’t manage without the organ blasting away. That was before Reverend Vaughn joined the church.

  “An organ’s so melancholy,” the minister said. “The music fills me up. I could listen to it forever.” He put his foot up on the bench and hugged his craggy knee. His pantleg slipped up a few inches and flashed a bit of color—he was wearing argyle socks, with streaks of bright red.

  “But it wasn’t until after college that I decided to become a minister,” he continued. “At first, I went back to my hometown, Wilcox, Iowa. It’s small, a lot like Katydid, only a lot farther from a big city. My dad worked in the bank there, and he got me a job in the bank, too. I hated it, though—all those numbers, everybody talking about money. I was miserable, so I started hanging out at the church. It was a nice place to go to be alone. And people used to go in there and practice on the organ.”

  “It sounds lonely,” I said.

  “Well, not really. I’d have a book and read, or sometimes I’d just sit there and think. I rather enjoy being alone.”

  “I guess you’re lucky.”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps. But I wasn’t even alone that much, because pretty soon the minister noticed me. He was an old guy who’d been there for years. I don’t think he quite understood, but he was rather touched that I came around. Nobody else who was young wanted to get near the place. Sometimes, he and I would talk about religion—I’d had a couple of courses in college and knew some ideas. He was quite enlightened about some things, actually.”

  Reverend Vaughn sighed and put his foot down. “Well, eventually, he started telling me I had ‘a calling’ for the ministry.” Reverend Vaughn made quote marks with his fingers. “ ‘A calling.’ It was mostly just that he was thrilled that someone was paying attention to him, poor old guy. But I suppose I halfway believed him. So I quit the bank and went off to divinity school.”

  “What was that like?”

  “Oh, it was like any other school. You had to learn things, take tests. There was nothing special about it just because we all had a calling, supposedly. But what was wonderful was that it was in Chicago. I couldn’t believe Chicago.” His face lit up. He had white, perfect teeth. “Do you ever go there?”

  “Sometimes. Not often. Last year, Bunny took me down to the Museum of Science and Industry. They’ve got a display set up so you can see yourself on television.”

  “That wasn’t far from where I went to school.” He sounded pleased. “I’d never been to Chicago before. I’d hardly been out of Iowa, and here were these beautiful, giant buildings, these streets crammed with people and cars. I got there and it was like that scene in The Wizard of Oz, when the picture suddenly goes from black-and-white to color. A whole world opened up. Everything had seemed so obvious and certain in Iowa, and suddenly, in Chicago, there were possibilities.”

  “And then you had to end up in Katydid,” I said.

  He smiled. “Katydid’s not so bad. It’s pretty, it’s got the square. I like the people here.”

  “But it sure isn’t Chicago.”

  “One thing Chicago taught me, and that’s that you make of a place what you want,” he said. “The possibilities are always there. It’s just a question of recognizing them.” He placed his hands on the table in front of him, folded, one across the other, as if in the small space beneath them he was hiding something. His fingers were long and slender, like tapered candles. Little tufts of blondish hair saved them from being too delicate. I thought they were the most beautiful hands I’d ever seen.

  By now, I’d forgotten all about my list and about my worries of not having something to say. We kept talking, and I started telling him about life with Bunny. Perhaps I was too talkative; thinking back later, I worried that I’d said too much. I wasn’t careful, as I’d tried to be with Mrs. O’Brien. Bunny would have been furious. I even told him about the night Bunny burned her dress, though I’d never talked to anyone except Tom about it. He a
nd I were very young at the time. It was very late, and we were both in bed when Tom smelled something funny and came to my room to wake me. Together we padded down to the kitchen. Bunny was in her bathrobe, kneeling on the floor. In front of her in a messy pile was a dress—a strapless gown with a yellow organdy skirt. It was an old dress that she never wore, but to me, it was the most beautiful piece of clothing she owned. She had put it on once just to show me. Her bare shoulders were white and with all that organdy spreading out around her legs, I thought she looked like a princess. When Tom and I found her, though, she was trying to set fire to the dress, using a lighter somebody had left at the house. The fabric smoldered and smoked but wouldn’t catch. The organdy just turned into black spider webs and dissolved. Bunny didn’t know we were watching. She was sobbing, and she kept flicking the lighter and holding it under the material until the lighter got too hot to hold. Then she’d drop it and suck on her fingers and pick it up again. Meanwhile, the kitchen was filling with gray smoke. Of course, when Bunny saw Tom and me, she stood right up and pretended that nothing had happened. She said something about there being a spot on the dress that she couldn’t get out. She bundled the material up and stuffed it in the trash can. Tom and I just stood there watching.

  “What was going on?” asked Reverend Vaughn.

  “Well, it happened not long after Bunny had broken up with Wayne Wadlinger. She never said anything, but I knew there was some connection.”

  “How did it make you feel?”

  I had to think for a moment. “It made me feel that I wished I could bring Bunny back down to Tom’s and my level, so she would only feel the things we felt. This was so different. Most of the time, she seemed like us—that was why she was so much fun. But every now and then, something would happen, and I’d realize how different we were. Like the burning dress. Why would anybody burn a dress? It worried me. It still does, I suppose.”