by Brad Watson
“You enjoy the dancing, then.”
“Oh, I do,” she said. “So much. I’ve never had so much fun.”
“Not even as a little girl, when you had no cares?”
“Not even,” she said. “But even a little child has worries.”
“I guess I’d forgotten that, if it’s so. I guess most grown-ups do forget, at some point.” After a bit he said, “And you have no worries now, about how all this might turn out?”
She didn’t answer, and looked away, so he let her be. They were quiet the rest of the brief ride home then, his thoughts drifting away as they tended to do more and more often. He sat alone on the front porch, smoking and sipping a bit. Jane came out to sit with him for a little while, unable to go straight to sleep. Then she kissed him on the cheek and went in. His wife came out momentarily. He looked up at her standing there.
“She had a good time,” he said finally, after she’d said nothing. Her expression didn’t change. She went back in. He took a long drink, coughed, rolled another smoke. He heard a dog barking off somewhere, maybe at the Key place, and thought about old Hound. How had Jane known he’d put the dog down, back then? He hadn’t spoken of it at all. He’d noticed the dog losing weight, walking like a cripple, eyes looking in pain, though he wagged his tail when Chisolm took up his rifle. Said he was going deer hunting and walked far down into the woods with the dog hobbling along, grabbed a shovel from his still shed along the way. They walked through the woods and out into the far pasture there and over to the very far edge of that. When he stopped walking, the dog plopped down, exhausted. He knelt next to him, stroked his forehead with a thumb. The dog looked up at him without raising his head.
“You got a broad forehead here,” he’d said to the dog, whose long ears lifted just the slightest at the words, then fell. “So you been around people a long time, you and those you came down from. What they say. People like a dog they can pet. Partial to the ones with your wide-set eyes.” The dog looked up at him again, but only a moment, too tired to even move his eyes anymore.
So then he’d done what he had to do. Out of kindness, he liked to think.
And when he’d gone back to the house with no deer and no dog, no one had said anything to him about it. Nor he to them.
ELIJAH TOOK TO riding over on Sunday afternoons on his bicycle to see her, and walked with her down to the pond and along the fences of the grazing pastures. The first time, they walked down to the edge of the woods bordering the lower pasture. Jane could hear her mother calling and could see her small figure up on the hill at the edge of their yard. They laughed and crossed the pasture back up toward the barn, behind the house, and into the leafed-out and budded pecan grove, the arrowhead-leafed shadows darting on the grass and on their faces as they passed through. They started for the barn but heard her mother calling out, closer now, Jane? and knew if they went in there she would come hustling up to scold and chaperone or herd them back to the house. So they sat down beneath one of the trees and took in the late spring air and let the breezes slide over them, breezes that felt to Jane like silken water, as if she were in the world but underwater. They looked down over the cattle pond and the stand of pines and small oaks beyond. Jane stole looks at him when she could, as he did at her, and when their eyes met they grinned and Jane felt that feeling run through her that thrilled her and kind of frightened her and, in some way she didn’t let herself hold on to, saddened her at the same time. How could a person’s face, his whole self, what was after all just an ordinary body, well shaped and good-looking but certainly another mortal walking around, come to seem so beautiful and take over a heart and a mind in that way? He wasn’t the only good-looking boy around, nor the only nice or even sweethearted one. But maybe he was. He seemed so, really, to her.
He was a little bashful. He was quiet. He wasn’t shy around people in general, it wasn’t that. She’d seen him banter and roughhouse with the others after church or lately along the wall of those waiting to dance again. But she could tell there was a softer kindness in him than most, if not all. So it seemed to Jane. She loved his sandy-colored hair, the smooth skin on his face, his clear blue eyes. He had dimples when he smiled that she imagined he didn’t like so much. It would embarrass a boy like him if she were to comment on them, so she held back on that, much as she would have liked to tell him how cute they were. But she was smart enough to know that boys didn’t like to be called cute.
She felt a little drunk. She’d had only a sip of buttermilk and a bite of bacon that morning, the only food in three days and the only thing besides a little water in two. She knew that was overly careful, and a longer stretch than usual, but the fasting had become a habit, one she enjoyed. In this state, an elevated sense of physical lightness and mental clarity, the Elijah Key sitting next to her seemed to be almost as much like something in a dream as in real life.
He looked at her, just a slight grin on his lips, head cocked back a bit the way he did.
“Are you all right?” he said.
She nodded her head. She wasn’t saying much of anything, to tell the truth. She nibbled the end of a stalk of Johnson grass she’d plucked on the way to the grove. The taste was sour and sweet at the same time.
He continued to look at her. The grin widened.
“What?” she said.
“Sometimes you seem like you’ve been hypnotized or something.”
“What’s that like?”
He’d seen one in town once, he said. A hypnotist. But it didn’t seem real. It seemed phony in an odd way. The hypnotist would do something like ask a person to close his eyes and he would talk to them in this lullaby way, not singing, just talking real quietly, or calm, or he might do that thing where he swung a pocket watch on its chain back and forth while he was talking and made the person go into a trance, and they would do anything he said to do.
“What kind of things?”
“Silly things, mostly. Like go over and drink a glass of water that’s not really there. I don’t know. I got bored at some point. But I thought it was funny the way the people would kind of go out of it, like they weren’t all there.”
“I’m all here.”
“I didn’t mean that. Anyway, when the hypnotist wanted to bring the man or woman out of the trance, he would snap his fingers in front of their face, like this,” and he snapped his fingers in front of Jane’s face. She laughed.
He got up and walked in a kind of slow circle in front of where she sat, hands in pockets, toeing at a fallen nut or twig here and there. He wore a pair of old Keds without socks and he kicked out of them and spread his toes in the grass.
“I could go barefoot all the time,” he said. “One thing I don’t like about working or going to school is wearing shoes.”
“I bet they’d let you dance at the dances without shoes.”
“I bet I’d get my toes stepped on all the time, ’cause that happens with shoes on, anyway.”
“I’ve never stepped on your toes.”
“No, you’re the best dancer, you really are.”
She looked away, embarrassed.
“I mean it. You’re a natural.”
“Do you like me?”
After a moment—“Yes.”
“Is that why you like me, ’cause I’m a good dancer?”
“That’s one thing I like about you.”
“What else do you like about me?”
He grinned and laughed, worked his shoes back onto his feet without using his hands, buying time or thinking.
“What?”
He hesitated, then reached up to take off his glasses and put them into his pocket. As if he was embarrassed to see her with the full clarity of vision they gave him.
“All right. Well. You’re pretty. And you’re nice. You’re not stuck up like other pretty girls, or most of them anyway. You don’t talk a lot of junk.”
“Maybe I don’t have much to say.”
“I’d bet you do. You just don’t talk just for the sake of ja
bbering on. Sometimes I think most girls jabber on so much because they’re afraid of not talking, or being with somebody and just being quiet. But that’s when you can really see somebody, when they’re quiet.”
He stopped and looked at her.
“Do you ever do that with animals, just sit and watch them, not saying anything, and just let everything get quiet until you can kind of hear everything, everything you couldn’t hear when your mind wasn’t calmed down, and you can see the animals calm down? Especially with horses, it’s like that.”
“That’s about the only way I can be around horses,” Jane said.
“You don’t like horses?”
“It’s not that I don’t like them. I guess I just don’t trust them.”
“Well, that’s probably smart. Any one with any spirit is going to be a little wild. Anyway, that’s something I like about you. What I was talking about before.”
There, he seemed to say, that ought to be good enough for you.
“But I’m strange,” she said then.
He looked at her seriously.
“I kind of like that,” he said.
She felt like asking, What about how else I’m strange, not the way you’re talking about? About how everybody knows there’s something wrong with me?
But if it didn’t seem to be something that was on his mind, that was good enough for her, too.
And after he’d gone, and she’d sat awhile in the grove by herself, and after she had walked back and was almost to the house, she stopped. She felt something building up inside her that she didn’t recognize. She wasn’t sure if it was love, or some kind of terrible fear that she didn’t recognize at all. Or both. And the voice of her mother was in her head saying, Just what do you think you’re doing, daughter? What do you think all that’s all about?
MRS. IDA CHISOLM knew it was most likely the devil’s work, but it seemed like the only person she could go to who might—black magic or not—give her some kind of words to think on, to lean on, and no one would know, if she was careful. She took money she’d hidden away from sewing work she occasionally did so she could pay the woman well enough to keep her mouth shut. On the other hand, the more she thought about it, the less she really cared what anyone would think about her going to a fortune-teller lady who read palms and had visions. It was the latter part that was a little frightening, though. It was said that before Eugenia Savell’s husband died they would dress up and go into their parlor and she would play the piano, old-timey songs, and the ghosts of dead soldiers from the old war would drift down from the high ceilings and dance. Some kind of ghostly minuet. Well, if that wasn’t the devil’s presence it would be hard to say just what it was.
She rode into town with Mr. Chisolm next time he went in for the stockyard and store supplies. Went with him into Tom Lyle’s big grocery and wholesale, where he made his order to pick up on the way home. When that was done she told him she would stay in town and do a little window-shopping on her own. Maybe get some fabric from Klein’s.
“All right, then. I’ll be done in a couple of hours.”
“I’ll be at the corner there.”
He stood there looking at her.
“What?” she said.
“Don’t get yourself run over by a train or something.”
“Ought to hope I don’t hitch a ride on one.”
“To where?”
“Away.”
As soon as he’d rounded the corner in the truck, the two cows shuffling for footing, making the occasional forlorn moo, she caught the streetcar toward the west side and got off in a neighborhood of what was once grand homes, now all looking a bit spooky with their mostly Victorian styles, most built just after the war when Sherman had burned almost everything down. Mrs. Eugenia Savell’s house was one of the few exceptions, having served as a hospital for both Union and Confederate troops during the battle. Which was part of what made the story of dancing ghost soldiers even spookier: It was said the ghost ladies were dancing with soldiers blue and gray, infinitely polite to one another in death, all sanctioned murderous allegiance no longer lingering in the spirit world.
The Savell mansion sat on a hill on a large lot, surrounded by an ancient-looking fence that looked to have been made of iron spears. The gate stood open. The house itself was not in the Victorian style, but some kind of Greek Revival. It loomed there, columns crumbling, the oddly pink plaster faded, cracked, chunks fallen off here and there and lying in pieces in the weedy grass around the house. She made her way up the brick walkway, peavine weed growing up through it. A monstrous live oak stood to one side of the house and, ironically enough, a woman’s-tongue tree just out from the gallery, its dried pods clattering in a bit of breeze. Ivy was taking over the house, climbing the peeling columns and ruined plaster, curling into closed windows beneath what looked like rotted sash. She realized she didn’t even know if this woman was still alive, much less still plying her trade, if you could call it that. She only knew of it because her own mother had pointed out the house one time when she was smallish, told her the stories, scaring her. She never forgot it. Still, she was amazed she knew how to find the place, walked right to it as if she had a map in her mind. She lifted an old boar’s-head knocker and clanked it against the door a couple of times, and waited. She heard footsteps, not heavy but light. Then the doorknob rattled, turned, and the big door opened just an inch or so. She could see wiry white hair and a red-veined eyeball there. After it looked at her for a good long bit, the door opened and what had to be Mrs. Eugenia Savell stood there in a ratty nightgown and an oversized pair of worn men’s house slippers, ankles and shins a crazy map of blue vein lines and bursts. Her liver-spotted hand on the door was long, blunt ends on fingers with yellowed uneven nails. She stared at Ida Chisolm in a long silence, in the face, then up and down. Her face lined and wrinkled as old cottonwood bark. Her eyes, though red-veined and cupped in softer, bruised depressions, alert and intelligent.
“You’ve come to me about someone else,” she said.
“I have.”
“Come in, then. Follow me.”
The old house was heavily cluttered with something between junk and odd collectibles, so numerous they had to follow a path through it all, and through a big open kitchen filled with potted plants, some taller than a man, and into a sunroom in the back, filled with other, more exotic plants like elephant leaf and bamboo, and a ficus big enough to shade a picnic were it out in the yard.
“Sit,” the woman said, pointing to a sofa she’d hardly noticed for all the foliage. Mrs. Eugenia sat herself down in an old wooden wheelchair. When she saw the expression on Ida Chisolm’s face she cackled and said, “You know I’ll need it one day. Right now, it’s just kind of fun.” Then she said, straight-faced, as if she’d been asked a question, “It was my husband’s.” She leaned close, grinning, the wrinkles closing up around her cheeks and eyes. “I did covet it, while he was still alive.” Then went serious and said, “Is this about your husband?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Child?”
“Yes. Daughter.”
“How old is she?”
“Sixteen.”
“Don’t tell me any more. Let me have your hand.”
She took her visitor’s hand in her larger, almost leathery one, closed her eyes, and went silent. Ida could see her eyeballs moving back and forth behind the papery lids.
“Something is wrong with her?”
A lump came into her throat and she couldn’t speak. Tears came to her eyes and so she closed them. When she opened them again and wiped tears with the back of her free hand, she saw Mrs. Eugenia looking straight into them, saying, “She’s not sick.”
“No.”
“But she is afflicted.”
Nodded. Said, “I want to know if she will ever be better. Normal, like other girls. Women.”
She thought Mrs. Eugenia would close her eyes again but instead she continued to look deeply into hers. Then she dropped Ida’s hand and rolled
her chair backwards, stopped, looked at her again, then out the window. Ida followed her eyes and saw that, oddly, the back yard was a beautiful garden, as immaculately tended for its flowers and hedgerows as the front was ignored. They sat there like that for what seemed minutes, silent. Until Mrs. Eugenia finally turned her chair by pushing on one wheel to face her again. The look of resignation in her face said everything.
“I don’t see a change,” she said then.
“Will she die?”
“Not young.”
Ida nodded again.
“She is strong. Even stronger than you,” Mrs. Eugenia said then. “She may even be relatively happy in life. Unlike you.”
Ida then laughed a curt laugh of her own.
“Nothing to be done about that, I suppose.”
“We are who we are,” Mrs. Eugenia said.
“Yes.” The bitterness now settling back deep in her heart, having lifted a bit in some silly, futile hope that a crazy old woman would tell her that her daughter would undergo a miracle and become whole. She reached into her purse.
“What can I give you, Mrs. Savell?”
“Call me Mama Jean,” Mrs. Eugenia said. “It’s my common name.”
“All right.”
“If you have a dollar, it would help me with my groceries, and some fertilizer.”
Then again, it was all strange enough to be true. She found a silver dollar in her change purse and laid it carefully into the surprisingly smooth palm held out to her, and the long, thick fingers closed over the coin, opened again with Mrs. Eugenia looking at it as if she’d made it appear there by sleight of hand.
“Mama Jean,” Ida said, “I wonder. There’s a story that the ghosts of old soldiers would visit you and your husband, and the ghosts of ladies in the town, and would dance here in your parlor.”
Mama Jean looked blankly at her as she posed the question, then blinked and looked at a spot in the other room.
“Not since I sold the piano to pay for my husband’s funeral,” she said.
Ida showed herself out. She could see a storm coming over Sand Mountain to the south. Sky full of hazy blue light above, a strange deep blue almost black in the hills, and silent, as if it meant business. They would have to hurry to get home before it hit. The creek would be up in such a rain, if it didn’t dump all of itself into the valley where the people of this town sat awaiting it, powerless like all of God’s children on this earth, who needed such reminding now and then that they were mortal. Ida Chisolm didn’t.
