Great mischief

by Pinckney, Josephine, 1895-1957

  Not a living creature stirred—if indeed they still traveled the territory of the living. The fear of Retribution parched his tongue. Far down the church aisle of his memory he heard the familiar denunciations; the sound of sin beat down from scowling pulpits and rattled in his hollow head. Trees lined his road, their bare limbs straining and streaming back in the hideous wind; prophets like bass-horns shouted after him, but he was too fleet for these evangelical threats. Faster than sound he ran ahead of their brassy syllables—

  By this time his lungs were bursting. The hope of escape strangled and died. He felt the roadway soft under him like an unpaved street. . . . But even this shred of consciousness flowed away in the wind as he lurched, fell, and gave in at last to the luxury of defeat.

  The shred of consciousness tightened about his brain again and squeezed it once or twice. How weak our hold is on time, a voice seemed to be saying; and truly he had no idea whether hours, days or years had passed over him since . . . But now space moved in about him, black and cramping. Space was rectangular, he discovered, with narrow chinks of brightness, the very shape of a tomb. Above his face as he lay on his back a slab of blackness pressed down. In his utter deflation of mind and body he rested content to be a corpse, until suddenly consciousness coiled round him again and gave a venomous squeeze—for if it was a tomb he was alive in it. He twisted on his side, started up, staggered about, and struck a vertical object, tallish, bony, and slick to the touch. The rectangle tipped and swayed. . . . Then the sheer force of his grip on the upright seemed to steady the rocking walls, which settled with a jolt to their proper orientation. It was his own room that enclosed him, the hard ribby frame of his armchair that his fingers clutched.

  He fell into it; the familiar twang of the springs under the horsehair more enchanted his ears than all the harps of heaven. He lay back gasping, trying to quell the riot in his body, the pained protest of his blood vessels, engorged by fear and horror.

  At last he stirred out of his thick exhaustion, stumbled across the room, and opened the shutters. A deep shadow leaned out from the house into the garden and pointed toward the east; it must be about four o'clock of a brisk spring afternoon.

  His clothes were covered with dust, his sock soles worn through. He turned and crept downstairs, creaking in every joint. The house was still; looking into the back yard, he saw Polio dozing in the wheelbarrow under a tree. "Polio! wake up, boy—" His throat muscles, he found, were stiff as if from screaming.

  Polio turned his head. He looked at his employer with blank face, covering his private impression.

  "Come on in and heat up the kettle."

  Luckily the kettle was on the stove. Polio carried it upstairs and made a fire in the bedroom. Timothy dragged his tin tub to the hearth and squatted in it while Polio basted his painful limbs with hot soapy water. A hot bath being miraculously a tonic for the soul as well as the body, these little simplicities gradually restored him, he began to pluck up heart. When he had dressed he went into the room across the hall and looked about. It was tightly shuttered, but by the stream of light from the hall door he saw the fan of soot before the fireplace scarred over with marks like lettering. The cipher was beyond his translation; only the sole of a hurrying bare foot had left an imprint in a universal script.

  He drank some black coffee, went out to the street, and sat down on the curbstone. People would think this queer—but if you had attracted the attentions of a hag you needn't worry any longer about making yourself conspicuous, and this reflection brought him some comfort. He had to consider what to do now. From where he sat he could see the dormer window of his own room twinkling above the wall as the sun struck fire from the rich burgundy of the tiles, and his heart bled for his dream of living there. But where could he go?

  The Golightlys' house he rejected immediately; the bedrooms had open fireplaces with particularly wide chimneys. Besides, he shrank from the humiliation of revealing his plight to them. Nor was there anyone else whom he would have know of it—Lucy least of all. There remained the streets, with such safety as they might bring. He thirsted for more information on the habits of nocturnal spirits, and cursed his lack of foresight in burning up his library with his sister. Wretchedly pondering his dilemma, he sat on until dark.

  He went home after a while and freed Polio, who was tugging at the leash, and carefully locked up the house. He got rid of an hour or so on a park bench; then the lights of a saloon down the block flared companionably. He sipped his whisky slowly, and for a while the chatter and the mere closeness of human bodies soothed and diverted him. But presently he noticed that no one joined him at his table; he began to feel that eyes moved quickly away when he met them, that a whisper went hither and yon among the leaning heads. He grew more and more edgy, sitting like a long bolster against the wall. They could hardly know of his disgrace—but he was no longer any judge of what could happen and what could not. He paid for his drinks and left, aware that he went in jerks like a man distraught.

  The streets had emptied. From the spaces between the houses eddies of darkness flowed out, bringing danger and his own conviction of defeat to overwhelm him. Now physical fatigue sapped his limbs of all substance. He tried to rally himself: Where was his courage? But this was not the day for it, he thought; at any rate, he could see no escape. His guilt was too plain. He went back and let himself into his house.

  The light of his lamp wavered on the walls as he mounted the stairs. The house was quiet as a tomb, his room empty. He set the lamp on the table and looked about him thoughtfully for a few minutes. Then he dragged the washstand over to the fireplace and pushed it against the opening. He locked the door across the hall and, returning to his room, locked his own door. Then he sat down in the armchair to wait.

  The lamp he had brought from downstairs had been better tended than his own and its light burned clear and steady. The usual night noises came up from below, and once he heard a cat. Grimalkin, no doubt, mew petulantly. Putting his head back, he stared up at the ceiling, his ears straining for noises on the roof, but no sounds came down to him except the wind in the trees, sighing and soughing in a pleasant, familiar melancholy. The muscles in the back of his neck began to hurt, and he bowed his head on his chest for a moment to rest them.

  When he came to, the cool challenge of morning was in the air and he felt in all his body the divine refreshment of a night's sleep. Incredulous he ran to the window and opened the shutters; the salt-tasting air rushed in, from the little hood of his dormer he saw the innocent blue water and absorbed through the pores of his skin the early damp rising from the ground.

  His numbed brain began to stir again. He began to think of ways to amend his situation. He would take steps. He would go ask the advice of Maum Rachel. When he had breakfasted he put some bread and cheese in his pocket and walked several blocks to the end of the car line.

  He found the driver turning the car on the turntable while the horse sidled before it. Robinson was an old acquaintance, so Timothy walked through to the front platform and rode beside him. They exchanged the dry facts they always exchanged, and these unalterable platitudes, this relaxed and disconnected talk, steadied the shifty universe. The streets quivered with released energies; like the spring shrubs, people put on green and purple over their winter drab. Robinson was so wholesomely common, his face so blue with morning stubble, that Timothy could not but marvel at the richness of a Creation which fathered forth the incongruous persons of his nocturnal visitor and the kindly carman.

  The marvel of the steam engine never failed to excite him, but today its noble pace seemed sluggish to his changed sense of speed. The country rolled past at an easy gait, and after a short time a sign saying "Otranto" dawdled by close to the window and stopped. Timothy got out.

  The stop was a mere shed at a crossroads; the locomotive shook its bell like a brass mane, huffed, puffed, and jangled away, leaving him alone in the road. Silence surged in its wake like an inward-curling plume and disposed of its fussy
sociability. But the journey before him had to be undertaken in loneliness; it was only thanks to this untenanted countryside that he needn't go like King Saul disguised and at night. He started to walk briskly, for the plantation to which Maum Rachel had returned to spend her old age was a good three miles away.

  Spring in these woods was not delicate but violent; the mustard-green fuzz of the oaks outbrazened the other greens, the swamp maples dashed red flecks against the pure sky; after being winter-pent in the spare twigs, leaves rushed up into being—no time to be lost. They glittered, tossed, demanded attention, their sheen made the spring shadows blacker. Medicinal plants sent up dank noon smells from the ditchbank at Timothy's feet. Red man's, white man's, black man's magic—they rose beside him, they ran down the gray ravelings of the moss ... he was astonished that he should ever have considered going abroad to look for answers.

  The high-pitched yelping of two or three mangy curs announced his arrival as he turned into a narrow tunnel that led through the underbrush to Maum Rachel's cabin. She came to the door and looked out, a tall woman with a regal carriage, shading her old eyes, which were milky with cataracts. She and Timothy greeted each other with a sentiment, a sentimentality even, held strictly in leash; Maum Rachel could have burst into a high screaming, and Timothy in his present state of nerves might almost have done the same. But they kept their balance, and stood gravely still, their hands clasped.

  Had she heard about the fire, Timothy wanted to know. To be sure she had—what a time, what a calami-tation! "I have to talk to you," he said looking at the colored children streaming toward the stranger like flies to the molasses jug.

  Maum Rachel raised her arm with a swift gesture of doom and the children scattered. "Come dis side, suh," she said, walking stiffly down the steps, and led the way across the little clearing.

  The big house had burned long since by some feckless accident and only a few jagged fragments stood above the brick foundations. The front steps came out from under the mat of honeysuckle that had covered the ruin, and on these Timothy sat down and told his story while Maum Rachel stood before him wrapped in her dark brown silence. Her nose was flat but not thick—the bridge had two sharply carven angles where it sloped away on either side, and in her long sunken cheeks it made one plane with forehead and chin. It was like a ceremonial mask—which Timothy used to think she put on or off; she was sometimes one person and sometimes another. He did not mention his guilt in the deaths of his sister and Mr. Dombie, knowing she would assume this from what followed.

  The implications, he saw, troubled Maum Rachel's moral sense no whit. Danger threatened her foster child; her partisanship was single-minded. All those night creatures were bad now, she assured him, boo-daddies, boo-hags, plat-eyes, were raging round. Lavinia Coaxum over by Goose Crick had been ridden forty nights straight. She had wasted away to a shadow until somebody sat by her bed and caught the hag in a bottle with a needle in it. The needle stuck the hag and killed it, and Lavinia had gotten well. Who were his enemies? she wanted to know.

  Timothy spoke frankly. "It must be Sister Penny, Maum Rachel. She has a motive, God knows."

  Maum Rachel shook her turbaned head. Hags are human people, not ghosts. They get a holt on you by stealing something that belongs to you—a lock of your hair, most likely, or a nail paring.

  Timothy stroked his shorn head nervously, while he tried to remember if anyone bore him malice. The barbers at the Palace Shaving Saloon had no motive for picking up his hair, furthermore they were excluded by reason of sex. 'Tor a long time I had a notion Sister was still alive somewhere; but that doesn't make sense either."

  "Miss Penny never did have no patience sence she was little. If she love you or hate you she'd be at it till Jedgment. I don't feel her roun' nowheres."

  "A strange young lady named Miss Farr did come into the shop looking for nightshade. I suspect she dabbles in witchcraft, but she had no reason to be my enemy—"

  Maum Rachel considered the puzzle with pursed lips.

  The hag, she said, must have gotten a hold on him some way.

  "Maum Rachel, she was so curious-looking!"

  "Sho'—sho'. Mos' likely she done slip her skin an' lef it behin' de do' somewheres. If you kin fin' de skin, Mas' Timity, an' fill it full o' red pepper—"

  "I couldn't! Besides, she seemed to be wearing it— fortunately—and wearing it rather well, come to think of it. It was just an unusual color."

  Well, he had better sprinkle some pepper about before she came again, in the chimney and on the floor. Red pepper was mighty aggravating to hags without their skins.

  "But there must be something else I can do, Maum Rachel," he said, feeling this remedy a bit too simple.

  The only true cure was to catch the hag in a bottle as Lavinia Coaxum's mother had, and jab her with a needle. He must get a friend to sit up with him while he slept and watch for her.

  But if Timothy had no enemies, neither had he any friends, he discovered, at least none he could call on to perform so delicate a service. Besides, it took quickness and skill. Polio was too young and would bolt at the mere suggestion.

  "I uster could ketch hag befo' me yeye gone back on mc. but me old man hab anoder wife yonder 'cross Goose Crick an' she put cunjer on me 'tel I can't see good."

  "There must be some other way."

  Maum Rachel covered her face with her long sinewy hands and studied and studied. Well, yes—other things worked sometimes. There was a strong charm she could make. It would take goofer dust—graveyard dust-stump water, and . . . well, different things. If he would lead her to the graveyard she would try.

  The air was thick with pollen when they went through the green tunnel toward the road. Maum Rachel leant on Timothy's arm and felt the path before her with her crooked stick. They talked devoutly of old times, of Timothy's parents, of the happy days before the War, of his dead sister and brother, working on each other's feelings with humor for half-forgotten pranks and with sorrow for these remembered deaths.

  The Negro graveyard lay not far from the house. A grove of oaks enclosed it like a Romanesque crypt, the thick, squat trunks and the flat arched boughs seemed cast into a deep sleep by their own shade; the hum of innumerable insect-wings came from its depths like the very sound of sleep. Once inside, Maum Rachel dropped Timothy's arm and made her way about with certainty in her bent limbs. She talked to herself in a low voice and sometimes she stooped and picked up this or that. On the simple mounds about them a few personal belongings had been set, a mug, an oil lamp, the medicine used in the last illness, for which the dead might have further need. A new grave near Timothy's feet held a dish of peas and rice half-eaten.

  Maum Rachel did not touch any possession of the dead. Timothy, however, made no attempt to spy upon her; he leaned against a tree trunk without thought; only his nerves vibrated to the implications gathered in this deserted spot. All that was ambiguous about life, the half-seen, the underheard, beat against his eyeballs, and his fingers dug into the deep-cleft bark of the oak with a drowning grasp. The activities of his mind were shriveled away by a childish hope of succor. An inconsecutive rustling, the occasional snapping of a loud twig, kept him aware of Maum Rachel's still hunt.

  She appeared suddenly at his elbow, startling him out of nothingness; in that lulled light her skin had the gray shimmer of black stone. As they dragged their slow way back along the road, Maum Rachel did not tell him what she held knotted in her soiled apron; instead she diverted him with tales of the ghosts that sometimes flew out of the graveyard like a flock of buzzards, of the adversities that had befallen people in the neighborhood because of cunjers thrown on them; by this same blasted pine she had seen a calf going through the woods one night with his head cut off. . . .

  Timothy listened with the old enthrallment. His experiences of the last two days acquired depth and texture from these tales and others like them which he had heard with faith and a shivering delight at Maum Rachel's knee. His years in the shop seemed short and
brittle, the advances of scientific learning looked pretentious and naive against the ancient, instinctive wisdom that welled in this little pocket in the underbrush, shielded from a civilization that corrupts the instincts.

  It would take her a while, Maum Rachel said when they reached her cabin, to fix things up. Mas Timity had better go for a little walk.

  "I have to catch the evening train—" Timothy looked at his watch.

  If he would come back by dusk-dark, Maum Rachel thought she would have everything ready.

  Timothy walked over to the creek toward which the big house had faced. At the end of what had been an allee he stopped to admire the view, the placid dark blue water edged with cresslike plants. His stomach suddenly gave him a stab of reproach, and he took his lunch from his pocket. A white gleam in the growth at his feet caught his eye; he pulled away the vines and found a statue, broken into sections, from the old garden. In spite of the defacement of time he easily recognized the goddess Diana. She looked very chaste indeed after the visions he had been seeing—her limbs and narrow flanks youthful and untried. "You couldn't do me any good in the fix I'm in," he said explanatorily; "you're not in my mythology." And sitting down on her flat little huntress's belly, he ate his bread and cheese.

  A magical calm descended on the water with the descending sun. Pearly colors glossed over the surface of the creek. A flock of coots flew in and circled low over his still head with a wooden creaking of wings. They struck the calm water in a wild urgence, slicing deep into the darkness underneath, and vanished, full of anxious nighttime talk, into the sedge. Timothy felt his heart bared in some physical sense to their anxiety, to all the impounded fear and loss that underlay the world.

  Diana began to prove as hard of muscle as rumor reported, and he got up and went down to the creek-side and drank deeply. When he returned to Maum Rachel's cabin he found her ready for him. A mule and a farm wagon stood by the door; her husband had come home and would take Timothy to the train. Maum Rachel drew Timothy aside and slipped two balls, each sewed up in cloth, into his hand. He must hide them in the chimneys; she had made them extra strong to keep all evil spirits away from his rooftree.