The Ozark trilogy

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  They told her, and they watched her face go thoughtful, and Granny Gableframe pinched the next Granny down on the bench, gently; they knew then that they had her.

  “I agree,” said Troublesome slowly, “that it’s sure to be Lewis Motley Wommack the 3rd. I do agree on that. Not a thing Jeremiah Thomas Traveller could have done that would account for what’s happened, but that Wommack boy is something else again, and I do believe he lay with Responsible while the Jubilee was going on.”

  “So that’s who it was!” exclaimed Granny Hazelbide. “How did you know?”

  “Ask me no questions. Granny, I’ll tell you no lies,” said Troublesome. “It makes no nevermind how I knew. But you’ve chosen right, for sure and for certain—However ... you’ve nothing here but missing pieces.”

  “Explain yourself!”

  “Did you learn, before your magic wound down, that if somebody went to see this ‘important man’ it would make some difference in the course of events on Ozark?” Troublesome stared them down, and they had to admit that they hadn’t.

  “And did you learn that just because he’s the cause of Responsible’s hearty nap he knows how to wake her up again?

  “And did you learn that even if my sister was awake again, she’d be able to do something about all this tribulation we suffer from? Did you?”

  It was no to both, of course, and they had to admit it.

  “But you’d send me half round the world on a wild goose chase, on the slim tagtail of a chance that there might be some use to it?”

  And they agreed that they would.

  “Well,” said Troublesome. “I never heard such nonsense.”

  “Sass!”

  “No, I never did. Unless it was youall coming up here like you did, risking pneumonia coming up and breaking every bone in your bodies going down— ‘cause you pay me mind, now, if you thought you had a hard time getting up here, you just wait till you try getting back down! It’s a heap faster, but it’s not a safe trip. No way, no way in this world, am I going to take any part in such a fool project, and you should of known better than to ask me.”

  “Your sister lies— “

  “Tell me no more about how my sister lies!” shouted Troublesome. “And tell me no more about the suffering of the people down there below! Wasn’t it those very same people that would not heed my sister when she tried to warn them, and voted away the government that was holding them all together? Wasn’t it?”

  “Troublesome— “

  “And for all my sister had done for them, was it not those very same people that showed her no more gratitude than they would a stick? That’s the people we’re talking about, amn’t I right, Grannys? Don’t you ask me to feel sorry for those people—I despise them for a pack of contemptible ignorant two-faced good-for-nothing belly-creeping serpents, do you hear me? If their stomachs hurt them and their backs pain them and their hearts are broken, they’ve asked for that, and no call to come whimpering to me! They made their beds, let them wallow in them and cry in their pillows.”

  “And your sister?” said Granny Hazelbide, ever so carefully, in the hush. When Troublesome got going, she gave a spectacular performance, and even the Grannys were impressed just a tad.

  “It is well known,” said Troublesome of Brightwater in tones of ice, “that I have no natural human feelings. My sister can rot there for all I care—not that she will, that doesn’t go with it, but she’s welcome to—and you know it perfectly well. Ask any man, woman, or tadling on Marktwain about the compassion and the warm heart of Troublesome of Brightwater and see what you get back, if you don’t know it already!”

  Troublesome wasn’t out of breath, but she was out of patience and way beyond out of hospitality. She stood up then and ordered them off, ignoring what they said about needing to rest, stuffing a careless handful of peachapples in a sack with some cold biscuits and shoving it at them for food on the journey home, telling them where the water was safe to drink and which paths to stay shut of. Warning them of a place where the snakes were thick this time of year because of a rock that got warm each day in the sun, and all but slamming her door behind them. They were back out in the weather and the downhill trek ahead of them before they could catch their breaths, and they heard the thump of that bucket as it hit the wall when she gave it a toss across the room.

  “Well!” said Granny Frostfall. “I’ve seen manners, and I’ve seen manners ... but she does beat all. She is every last thing she’s made out to be, and some left over, and I’ll wager she eats nails for breakfast when she’s got no company to see her.”

  “She has a reputation to maintain,” pointed out Granny Hazelbide.

  “What’s important,” said Granny Gableframe, “and all that matters now except for getting down this dratted mountain, is that she’ll do it.”

  “We’re sure of that, Gableframe? I don’t see it!”

  “Oh, we’re sure,” said Gableframe; and Granny Hazelbide and Granny Sherryjake agreed. “We had her the minute she asked us to tell her about it, don’t you know anything atall? If she’d turned us a deaf ear, now, and refused to even listen, and sent us all packing without so much as letting us tell her why we were here ... well, that would of been Troublesome’s way.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Granny Hazelbide. “We’ve got her fast, the Twelve Corners preserve us all.”

  “But how’ll she know where to go? How to find the ship?”

  “I had that all on a slip of paper before ever we started up this overblown hill,” sniffed Granny Hazelbide. “And tucked away safe in the pocket of my skirt. And it’s tucked away safe now in her own hand, everything she needs to know. She gave that bucket quite a fling, there at the last, and she may well pitch the bench we sat on into her fire—but she’ll keep that piece of paper safe. Every last detail she needs to know, it’s on there.”

  “Law, Granny Hazelbide,” said one or two. And “My stars, Hazelbide.”

  “Well, I know her,” said the Granny. “I know her well.”

  “Can’t say as I envy you that.”

  “I don’t envy myself that, but there’s times it’s useful,” said Granny Hazelbide. “And now let’s us head for home. Might could be we’ll make it before dark. Like Troublesome said, it’s a sight faster going down than coming up.”

  Chapter 3

  Smalltrack was neither a supply freighter nor a pleasure craft. The smell aboard, in spite of a powerful scrubbing, made you instantly aware that it had been a fishing boat for a very long time. Having the Mule aboard didn’t improve matters, since Dross had no respect whatsoever for a human being’s ideas about waste disposal; she added a new fragrance to the prevailing reek of blood and entrails and ancient slime. The captain and the four men of his crew had been on workboats of one kind or another all their lives; if they noticed the smell atall, they paid it little mind. They knew themselves fortunate that it was wintry weather, and no hot sun broiling down to bring everything to a constant simmer and perk. As for their passenger, if she found conditions not to her liking, they didn’t mind that atall.

  If pushed, all five would have acknowledged a relish for the idea that Troublesome of Brightwater might not be all that comfortable crossing the Ocean of Storms to Kintucky in their racketydrag old boat. They didn’t precisely want her to suffer, being good-natured men, but they were in mutual accord that she had a trifle discomfort coming to her. If the mechanisms of the universe saw fit to provide that discomfort without any call for their hands meddling in it, why, they found that positively Providential. It spoke to their sense of the fitness of things.

  They were Marktwainers—four, including the captain, being Brightwaters by birth, and a single McDaniels finishing up the party—and they were conscious enough that the woman who spent her time silent on an upturned barrel in the stern, looking out over the rough water, was their kinswoman. It comforted Gabriel John McDaniels the 21st that he was just a tad less related to her than the other four, but they all recognized it as a burden to be bo
rne. Relations, like poison plants and balky Mules and the occasional foolfish spoiling a catch, were part of the territory; wasn’t anybody didn’t have kinfolk they’d just as soon not of.

  They’d had their instructions from the Grannys:

  “You leave her alone, she’ll leave you alone.” Same instructions as for most pesky and viperous things in this world, and they’d proved accurate enough. She sat there on her barrel by the hour, peering through hooded eyes they none of them would of cared to look into directly. If she wanted a drink of water, or something to eat, or a blanket to wrap round her strong thin shoulders, she got it without bothering any of them. If there was anything she wanted that she didn’t have—and likely there was, though it was said she lived a spare and scrimped existence on her lonely mountaintop—she didn’t mention it. And if a line fouled near to her, or a solar collector was wrong in its tilt, she fixed whatever was awry, without fuss and without error and with no assistance from the crew.

  “Uncanny, she is,” muttered Haven McDaniels Brightwater the 4th, some six hours out to sea. “Just uncanny!” He cleared his throat and stared up at the gray flat lid of the sky as if he was indifferent to the whole thing, just mentioning it in passing. “Can’t say as how I wouldn’t rather of had something else along ... say a serpent, or maybe a Yallerhound.”

  Gabriel John McDaniels spat over the side to signify his disgust and demanded to know what Haven McDaniels had come along for, if that was the way he felt about it.

  “What’d you expect?” he asked, jamming his hands into his pockets and setting his feet wide against the roll of the boat. “You expect a fine lady sitting on a tusset? With needlework to her hand, maybe, and a kerchief to her delicate little nose? That is Troublesome of Brightwater back there, just as agreed upon with the Grannys, and exactly as advertised.”

  “I know it,” said Haven McDaniels sullenly. “You think I don’t know it?”

  “Well, then,” Gabriel John answered him, “there’s no call to comment on it. I strongly misdoubt the Grannys would of offered each of us the sum they did if we’d been taking a Yallerhound to Kintucky. We’re being paid for the hazard of the thing ... and she’s rightly named, is Troublesome! Rightly named, her as could fry your heart in your chest with no more’n her two blue eyes, if she’d a mind to.”

  The captain heard that, and it didn’t surprise him. He’d heard the rest, too, but he’d been ignoring it. One of the advantages to captaining so small a boat was that neither crew nor anybody else aboard could keep anything from him. He spoke up sharp and quick.

  ‘That’s enough of that, Gabriel John McDaniels,” he rapped out. “Days we’ve got ahead of us, this trip. Bad weather and poor food and none of us truly fit ... last thing we need here is superstitious claptrap fouling the air.”

  “Now, Captain— “

  “I said it was enough. You hear me? I can speak louder, should there be call for to do so. You look to the weather, Gabriel John, and to this leaky woodbucket we travel in so precariously, and leave the tall tales to the tadlings and the Grannys. I’m purely astonished, hearing such stuff from a full-grown man, and him with four years’ full service now on the water.”

  Gabriel John McDaniels was not impressed, and he was not about to drop his eyes to the captain. He’d not spent his own childhood roaming the Wilderness Lands of Marktwain with the man, but his daddy had; and many a night he’d seen the two of them with more whiskey in them than had pleased his mother. He held Captain Adam Sheridan Brightwater the 3rd in no awe.

  “You’re obliged to take that stand,” he said, speaking right up. “We know that, all of us. But there on that nailbarrel sits the Sister and the Mother and the Greatgrandmother of Evil, the Holy One help us all, and we all of us know that, too! If she so chooses we’ll have storms and leaks; and if she don’t so choose we’ll have an easy journey of it. That’s no tale for tadlings, now—that’s same as saying the sun’s more use to solar collectors than snow is.”

  There were two Michael Callaway Brightwaters standing near, one of them a 20th and the other a 37th, something of a nuisance in such close quarters. They hadn’t much use for one another, or for Gabriel John, but they shook their heads like one man now and allowed as how he was absolutely right and the captain could leave off his tales any time.

  “We’re not fools,” said the one they called Black Michael—not that his hair was any blacker than Michael Callaway the 37th’s, that was called simply Michael Callaway in the ordinary fashion, but you couldn’t be having them both speak up every time one was wanted. And Michael Callaway nodded, saying:

  “We came for the money, same as you, Captain. And what trouble we’ve got on our plates is trouble we bought ourselves. Complaining about it, that’s not seemly; I agree to that. Howsomever, Captain, you’ll do us the favor of telling us no lies, thank you very much.”

  The captain stared at the three of them, considering, and at the eloquent back of Haven McDaniels Brightwater the 4th, pretending to be fooling with a sail—him that had started all this—and he shrugged his shoulders.

  “All right,” he conceded. “I’ll not dispute youall on it. I don’t care for her myself ... they say she was a child once, but I’m hard put to it to believe it. But I’ll not listen to prattle over the matter, either, mind you. As Michael Callaway rightly says, this is our own doing, of our own free will, and talk’ll change nothing. Furthermore and to go on with, such talk heard at the wrong end of the boat might well provoke the lady. You’ll do me the favor of not chancing that. That’s my last word!”

  Truth was, he thought as he turned away from them with a set jaw intended to impress them with his firmness of purpose, the sight of her made his blood run colder than the seawater. No woman should stand six feet tall like she did; no woman should fit to a fishingboat like she’d been born on one, when she’d spent her whole life in Castle and in mountain cabin; no woman should have the dark fierce beauty that somehow flamed around her, putting him in mind of the black roses that grew near the edge of Marktwain’s desert in deep summer.

  Anybody’d described her to him, and him not knowing, he’d of thought she’d stir his loins. Especially out on this b’damned ocean with no other woman for many a mile and many a long lonely night. Yet when he looked at Troublesome of Brightwater, for all the sweet curve of her breasts and hips and the perfection of her face, he would of sworn he could feel his manhood shriveling in his trousers. He’d as soon of bedded a tall stake of Tinaseeh ironwood.

  That didn’t mean he’d tolerate a dauncy and fractious crew, whatever the feelings she raised in him or in them. He’d keep the men too busy to have time left over for mumblings and carry-ons. He wanted to get this fool trip over with—he needed the money the Grannys had come up with, and how they’d done it he couldn’t imagine, but it was none the less a fool trip for all that—and he wanted to find himself back in his own bed, cozy with his own wife, that was a soft round woman more his style. With a voice like the call of an Ozark housedove just as the sun was coming up, and no more like that female in the stern than if they’d been different species altogether.

  “You turn to,” he barked over his shoulder at the men, “and I’ll do my share, and we’ll get this out of the way and be home to brag on it before we have time to think.”

  Nobody said “if we get home”; they weren’t whiners. They’d been offered a fair sum of money badly needed, and they’d do the job it was offered for. Still, it was a sorry time of year to take to sea in a boat this size and age, Troublesome or no Troublesome. Had the boat been newer, that would of been a help; had it been larger, they couldn’t have handled her with only the five, and that would not have been a good thing. It would cause a certain amount of fuss and feathers to drown five good men, for sure—but if they drowned a daughter of Castle Brightwater they’d set every Granny on Ozark whirling like a gig ... that happen, they’d better hope they all drowned with her. It’d be more comfortable in the long run.

  Behind the men, Tro
ublesome chuckled under her breath, and Gabriel John jumped like he’d been pinched.

  “Knows what we’re thinking, that one does,” he said flatly.

  “And so does the Mule, and that doesn’t bother you.”

  “She bothers me,” insisted the man doggedly, “considering what I was thinking just then when she laughed.”

  The captain turned back and grabbed Gabriel John’s shoulder in his fist. “That’s one word too many,” he said through his teeth. “One word too many! You guard your thoughts and keep ‘em proper; and you sail this boat and keep your mind on your business. I don’t intend to have to say any of this again.”

  As they’d said, there were certain stands he was obliged to take.

  It happened that Troublesome did know what they were thinking. But not because of any telepathic powers, such as the Mules had, or the Magicians of Rank. No special powers were required to read those stiff backs with the muscles knotted round the necks—whopping headaches they were going to have, later on!—or the rigid shoulders, or their muttering back of their hands and out of the corners of their mouths. It amused her mightily to think that they could believe she had special skills and still be fretting about their hides; it showed a lack of common sense. After all, if this boat went down, she’d go down with it. Or perhaps it was their souls that they were really worried about, and not their hides; perhaps they thought the wickedness might blow off of her in the seawind and stick to them forever and ever more. She chuckled again, and watched the muscles in their backs twitch to the sound, before she turned her head to look out over the water.

  She wasn’t sure of what she’d seen out there, not yet. Might could be it’d been only a trick of the light slanted on the water, such as had ages back made men think dragons swam in the oceans of Old Earth. Might could be it had been the squint of her eye against that light, or her irritation of mind. There was not a single reason to believe that a creature never seen since First Landing—seen then by a group of exhausted people that might have been over given to imagining—should choose to show up a thousand years later and swim alongside her to Kintucky. It was as unlikely a happenstance as had come her way within memory, and she wasn’t going to assume it for gospel too quickly.