The Ozark trilogy

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  The cook set her arms akimbo and made a fuss like she’d made over the eggs, only more so. “Are you for sure of that, Shandra?” she demanded. “Seems to me your mind’s dead set this morning on seeing if you can’t do the day backwards and hindside to. Did you knock? Loud enough so as you could tell somebody was knocking?”

  “Three times three times, I did! And loud, the last time. And I called out. And it’s cruel of you going on and on about the eggs like I did it on purpose-”

  “I’ll have none of your sass,” said the cook, and Shandra closed her mouth abruptly. She stood a head taller than the cook, and likely outweighed her by twenty pounds, but Becca of McDaniels was a true Five, she’d as soon take your head off as look at you, and she ran the Brightwater kitchen the way her husband ran its stables. No sass, no slack, and no time to breathe from the minute you got there till you were through by the clock.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Shandra of Clark. “Begging your pardon.”

  “You knocked, and you called, and no answer, you say?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then you take that tea, which is strong enough now for goatdip, I expect, and you go straight to one of the Grannys and you tell them what you just told me. They aren’t as impressed by wards as we are.”

  “Nice having two Grannys in the Castle, don’t you think, Becca of McDaniels? It makes a person feel safe.”

  “If you don’t hightail it, and right this instant, it’ll take a sight more than a couple of Grannys to keep you safe, young missy!”

  Shandra gulped, and followed instructions. Down the hall again, up the stairs again-only one flight, praise the Gates, the Grannys were both on the second floor-down that hall, and she almost ran into Granny Hazelbide coming out to breakfast already.

  “Oh, Granny Hazelbide, I’m glad to see you!” said Shandra. “You’ll pardon me for holding you from your breakfast, I hope, but I’ve knocked and knocked and I can’t rouse Miss Responsible, and the cook said as I was to come tell you and you’d see what was up.”

  “She did, did she?”

  “She did. If you’d be so kind, Granny Hazelbide.”

  “Nothing that pleasures me more of a morning than traipsing up and down the stairs with the servingmaids,” said the Granny, “you tell Becca of McDaniels that. I have nothing better to do with my time.”

  “Yes, ma’am., Granny Hazelbide. And thank you kindly, ma’am.”

  “You were any more humble, you’d disappear altogether, you know that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The old woman humphed, and gave the floor a good one with her cane, but she followed Shandra briskly enough, grannying at her all the way, and the girl managed to keep her face straight even through the part about the epizootics, till she stood once again at Responsible’s bedroom door and gave it three knocks.

  Back at her came the silence, and she turned to the Granny. “You see?”

  “Where’s that girl got to now?” grumbled Granny Hazelbide, and she reached right out and grabbed the doorknob that Shandra of Clark wouldn’t of touched for ten dollers, nor for fifty either. And then Shandra did feel strange, for the Granny snatched back her fingers as she would have done from a live flame and cried out “Double Dozens!” like her voice was scorched, too.

  “Granny Hazelbide? Is something the matter?” quavered Shandra of Clark.

  “Girl, you set down that tray-right there on the floor’ll do-and you go get Granny Gableframe, fast as you can hoof it, and send her here to me! Go!”

  Shandra did, fast as she could as instructed, and then she fairly flew down to the kitchen to tell, stopping only to grab the tray as the two Grannys disappeared into Responsible’s room.

  “The Grannys sent me away!” she said, right out, before Becca of McDaniels could have at her again, and she set the tray of tea down on the big kitchen table so hard the teapot rattled. “They said for me to scat!”

  “And?”

  “And they both went into Miss Responsible’s room . . . and they did not close her door behind them. Which means they were afraid to touch it, seeing as how it burned Granny Hazelbide the first time!” Shandra clutched herself tight with both arms and wailed, “Oh, Becca of McDaniels, I’m plain terrified!”

  She had to tell it all, then, and everybody gathering round to hear, until the cook shushed her in no uncertain terms. “It’s none of our business,” she said, grim of eye and lip, “but the breakfast is. And if we’re to know what’s going on, we will; and if we’re not, life’ll go right along just the same. Now turn to, and no more nattering and lollygagging.”

  “But if-”

  “Turn to!” thundered the cook, her hollering twice as big as anything else about her, and that was that. If they died of curiosity, they’d just die of it. And 5handra berated herself for an idiot; if she’d “forgotten” that tray she’d of had to go back up after it and she might of been able to find out something, and as much trouble as she was in already it wouldn’t have made a scrap of difference. Trust her to make a mistake when all it got her was broad words, and then do a thing right when the mistake would of been worth it!

  Up in Responsible’s room, the two Grannys stood, one on each side of her bed, and pondered.

  “She’s breathing,” said Granny Gableframe.

  “Barely. Just barely. There’s none to spare, Gableframe.”

  “The mirror clouded over.”

  “But see her bosom? Still as my own hand-not a move, not a flutter.”

  Granny Hazelbide laid her fingers to the girl’s throat and pressed, hard, below the joint of the jaw.

  “Pulse there,” she declared. “It’s not thumping and pounding, but a pulse it surely is. She’s breathing.”

  “Tsk!” went Granny Gableframe. “Now whatever do you suppose?”

  “You? You’re senior to me-what do you think?”

  Granny Gableframe pinched her lips tight and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said slowly, “I surely don’t. But the wards on that door weren’t put there just to keep out the servingmaids, I can guarantee you that . . . see that mark on your palm where you gripped the knob? Looks like you’d gone and picked a handful of coals up out of a fire!”

  “Coals,” said Granny Hazelbide dryly, “don’t leave an asterisk when they burn,” and she turned up her palm, where the little scarlet star glowed sullen and sore.

  “Law!” breathed Granny Gableframe. “Will you just look at that!”

  The two old women stared at Responsible, and they stared at each other; and then Granny Gableframe said “Do you suppose?” and pulled the pillow gently from beneath Responsible’s head.

  There was nothing gentle about the way she first ripped off the pillowslip and then tore the ticking right down the way she’d of made cleaning rags.

  “It’s there!” she cried. “You see that, Hazelbide?”

  And she plunged her hand into the pillow and pulled it out, triumphant, holding the thing she found there gingerly with the tips of her fingers, and let the ruined pillow fall to the floor.

  Granny Hazelbide whistled a little tune under her breath.

  “More of ‘em, I wonder?” she said, when she got to the end of it.

  “I misdoubt that-one’s more than enough.”

  Granny Hazelbide looked again at the asterisk branded into her palm, and then she took the other pillows and patted them all over, muttering that she’d never seen such a girl for pillows and how many times had she told Responsible she’d end up with a double chin, and then she got to the last of them, and said: “Sure enough. Sure enough, there’s one in here or my birthname adds up to a minus Two and yours along with it. Look here, Gableframe, just look here!”

  “Well, who the Gates’d want to put two feather crowns in the pillows of one scrawny girlchild?” demanded Granny Gableframe.

  “More to the point, seeing as how it’s this particular scrawny girlchild,” said Granny Hazelbide, “who could?”

  Who could put burning wards
on the door, and feather crowns in the pillows, of Responsible of Brightwater? It was a nice question, and both Grannys pressed their fists to their top teeth, thinking on it.

  “Well, she won’t wake,” observed Granny Gableframe in the silence. “We’d best brush out her hair and make her tidy.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Not for us, nor for any Granny Magic, she won’t. We’ll get the Magician of Rank in here-maybe for him. But I’ll have her neat first, afore he sees her.”

  “And these nasty pieces of work?”

  Granny Gableframe looked with disgust at the feather crowns. They were squawker tailfeathers, tips together and fanning out from the center, making a circle big as a feast-day platter.

  “Notice,” said Granny Hazelbide, “how the feathers go? Widdershins, both of ‘em.”

  And so they did. Counterclockwise.

  “I’d burn them both,” said Gableframe, “except that might could be they’ll be needed later on to get to the bottom of this.”

  “Or pay for it.”

  “Ah, yes ... there’s that.”

  “Give me the one you have,” said Granny Hazelbide decisively. “I’ve already crossed those wards, might as well go whole hog. I’ll stand here and hold them, and keep my eye on that child-for all the good it’ll do-while you get Veritas Truebreed Motley the 4th in here, and then I’ll give them into his keeping. This is a tad past me, I don’t mind admitting.”

  “And me,” said Granny Gableframe; and she handed the feather crown to Granny Hazelbide and set to brushing Responsible’s hair and straightening her nightgown. “And it’s good fortune you have a Magician of Rank here . . . I don’t like the look of her.”

  “Will you hurry then, Gableframe? We’ve been standing here, gawking and gabbing, it’ll be near half an hour.”

  “Peace, Granny Hazelbide,” said the other. “You know as well as I do, there’s no chance of her dying. They could of put a dozen feather crowns in her pillows, bad cess to ‘em whosoever they may be, and she’d still be in no danger of dying. Not so long, Granny Hazelbide, as there’s no little girl in a Granny School on this round world as is named Responsible-and there’s none.”

  “One misnamed again, maybe?”

  “No-sir!” Granny Gableframe shook her head. “I’d know, if there were-there’s nobody senior to me excepting Golightly at Castle Clark-I’d know. My word on it. But I’ll get Veritas Truebreed, because there’s far too much here as I don’t know any more about than that servingmaid did-and I will hurry.”

  It was all over the town and out into the countryside before the day was over, and the ban that Jonathan Cardwell Brightwater had set on the comcrews as to how they’d be jailed for treason if they put one word out on the comsets hadn’t slowed it down one bit. It was that sort of news.

  Responsible of Brightwater, people were saying, lay on her bed like a poppet made of ivory wax, just barely breathing, her eyes closed and her lips sealed and making no response even when she was pinched and stuck with a sharp needle. And under her head, in her pillows, they said, there’d been two-not one, but two, and that never had happened before!-two feather crowns found, and both of them made widdershins! And they’d called in all the Magicians in the Kingdom, and the Magician of Rank as well, and not a one of them as could do anything for her, or even explain why not. And to send shivers up and down your backbone, if all that wasn’t enough, it seemed that as Veritas Truebreed Motley the 4th marched out of Responsible of Brightwater’s bedroom door, throwing up his hands and declaring himself helpless, the bright silver horseshoe nailed over the door flew off the nail that held it, all by its own self, and struck him right between his shoulder blades!

  “It fair curdles the blood in your veins,” they were saying. And “It’s not natural.” Mothers caught a suspiciously quiet clump of tadlings playing at making feather crowns and put an end to thatevery one of them sent off to find a perfect willow switch, take off every leaf, peel it down to the lithe core, and bring it back for application where it would do their characters the most good. You didn’t switch a child often, nor lay a hand to one in anger; but there were some things that had to be made so clear they’d never be forgotten. This was one of those things.

  There were no places on Marktwain given over entirely to drinking, as there’d been on Old Earth. Whiskey, made powerful as gunpowder, was kept as a medicine, made from the tall red Ozark corn; beer and wine were served in the home on festive occasions, and that was the end of Ozark drinking. But there were three hotels in Capital City, where a man could get a glass of berry wine, or a strong dark ale, for a private occasion-be it feast or distressand they did a heavy business in beverages that night.

  The men discussed it logically, gathered at the long tables set in the hotel diningrooms. Gabriel Micah Clark the 40th had offered as opener that it was his opinion the ruckus at the Castle was an example of pride going before a fall.

  “That Brightwater girl has called down the wrath of the Powers on herself,” he announced. “That’s how I see it.” And he blew the head of froth off his ale. “Been tempting fate now fifteen years-”

  “Oh, come off that, Gabriel Micah,” snorted his left neighbor, a lawyer of the McDaniels line and given to nitpicking by trade. “You can’t accuse a one-year-old babe of pride; a tadling’s not even civilized till it gets to be three.”

  “You know what I mean,” Gabriel Micah protested.

  “Put it clear or don’t put it at all,” insisted the lawyer.

  “Near on ten years at least, then, that split the hair fine enough for you? I mind her very well, I was working in the stables at the Castle then, and she but five years old, and you talk of pride! Why, she’d come right down to the stables and give us all what for about the tackle not being hung right, or the straw not clean enough on the stall floors. And ten minutes later you’d hear her in the Castle, like she was Queen of all the Shebas, ordering the servingmaids around and telling them where she’d found more dust than suited her fancy. You can’t tell me that’s natural!”

  “Well, some of that should be laid to the account of Thorn of Guthrie,” put in another. “If she’d been doing her job as mother-”

  “Thorn of Guthrie?” Gabriel Micah was amazed. “All that woman needs do to fill her role in life is breathe in and breathe out and let the rest of us have the privilege of looking at her.”

  “That may well be, but it makes for sorry mothering.”

  “For example, let’s consider Responsible’s sister Troublesome!”

  “For example, let’s not.” The Reverend was a tolerant man, considering, and he didn’t scruple to spend an evening here with the male members of his flock, listening to what they had to say and getting a certain perspective on the turn of their minds at any given time-but he had his limits.

  “Sorry, Reverend.”

  “I should hope.”

  “Like I said, Reverend, I beg your pardon for mentioning that one. But Responsible’s another matter, and I say she’s meddled and poked her nose where it wasn’t wanted, and wasted good money on folderols till the time came when even the Holy One couldn’t stand her any longer. And this is what it comes out to.”

  “There was that Quest of hers-talk of wasting money! Every Castle on this planet-always excepting those fool Smiths, and I don’t doubt they were up to something as wouldn’t bear the light of day or they’d of been in on it too-every Castle put on some kind of to-do for the `daughter of Brightwater’! I’ve heard it said it was the Grannys as ordered that, but I can’t see it. Can youall?”

  Everybody agreed that they couldn’t; it didn’t sound like the Grannys.

  “And there was her traveling outfit-you recall that? Three hundred dollers, good Kingdom money, that all cost, or I mistake myself!”

  The Reverend set his ale mug down with a thump, shaking his head.

  “How much, then?”

  “Excepting the whip and spurs, that have been in that Family now over three hundred years and did
n’t cost any of us a cent, though they may of been a strain on some of our grandfathers, that costume came to precisely sixty-three dollers and twenty-nine cents. I happen to know.”

  “Magic in it, then,” said the lawyer.

  “A needle goes a sight faster with a Granny pushing it,” agreed the hotelkeeper, filling glasses and mugs all round.

  “And then, there’s all the money-Reverend, you can’t tell us it wasn’t enormous sums of money!-as was spent on that fool Jubilee!” Gabriel Micah snickered. “What’s the opposite of `Jubilee,’ Reverend? A wake?”

  The Reverend gave him a chilly look.

  “You, Gabriel Micah-if I remember correctly, and I believe I do-you had a good time at the Jubilee such as you’ve not had since you were caught that time down by the creek, with-”

  “I recollect that, Reverend,” said the man hastily. “No need to review.”

  “Well? Are you trying to tell me that all the people in this Kingdom, and many a dozen more that were our guests, didn’t have a fine time at the Jubilee? Didn’t enjoy the fairs, and the picnics, and the competitions, and the plays, and even-one or two of you-the sermons, and all the rest of it? I’ll grant you Responsible didn’t have much fun out of it, but I didn’t hear any of the rest of you complaining as it was going on.”

  “No,” said another, “it was a right fine celebration. Fair’s fair, Gabriel Micah-and the rest of you, too. Not to mention, long as we’re talking her up, that it was Responsible of Brightwater as ordered five days’ wages paid to every last one of us out of the Castle funds so we wouldn’t have to work during the Jubilee.”

  “That was our own money-tax money!”

  “Howsomever; there’s a lot of other things it could of been spent on that we’d never of had any good from. And there was nothing to make her do that, you know. They could just as well of said work as usual and find time for celebrating after, if you’ve any energy left-and spent the tax money on theirselves. And you know it very well.”

  “Well, if she’s such a fine lady,” demanded Gabriel Micah, determined now to be spokesman for his position if he died trying, “then how come she’s lying up there now, as near dead as makes no nevermind, and nothing any of the Magicians can do to bring her out of it? That sound like some mark of heavenly favor to you?”