Great mischief

by Pinckney, Josephine, 1895-1957

  A powerful contralto crying "Buyeyster!" sounded down the block, and Timothy took a pan and went out. The morning sun beamed on his face; his whole being sopped it up as he leaned on the front gate. It's as good as Brown's Iron Bitters, he thought, strengthens the nerves, purifies the blood, invigorates the constitution. And doesn't taste bad. While he waited for the oyster-woman, the natural world came up in all its clarity and crowded round him. He watched a chameleon on the gatepost sunning its brilliant green back. It turned its bulging eyes on him warily; the skin of its neck, wrinkling in tiny folds, made it look timeless, the descendant of dragons. The harsh angle of leg and thigh, the little spraddled hands, the pointed reptilian head, were fierce and endearing. As he stood relishing this little fantasy of nature's, the lizard threw back its head, jerked it as if it were about to neigh, but instead of a sound it puffed out its blanket of innocent petal-pink from its throat and drew it in again.

  "Eh-eh! De mo' feller leetle de mo' he have to strut some." A round brown face appeared on the other side of the gate.

  "That's so, Mamie," said Timothy, enchanted with both of them. "I feel like strutting a little myself." He handed her his pan, which she filled from the cedar pail. Today she gave him an extra ladleful.

  Encouraged by this sign of favor, he began to ask questions. "What do you think about Good and Evil?"

  The oysterwoman had certain curious identities with her wares, "No, sir," she said with finality, and, dropping the dipper into her bucket, prepared to move.

  "Hold on a minute. Do you know Mr. Farr's youngest daughter, Miss Lucy?"

  "No, sir."

  Whether it was caution or conspiracy, the Negroes of the town would give him nothing. He and Mamie scanned each other closely and deliberated for a moment.

  From the corner of his eye Timothy saw a slight movement above his head and backed off a little. On the gatepost crouched the brindled cat, watching the lizard, which still basked just below. The cat's pale eyes with their narrow vertical slits were fixed in menace; the tip of her tail waved. Slowly she raised and extended one hooked paw.

  "Scat!" Timothy shouted in the cat's face. With a furious yellow glance she dropped from the wall and streaked across the garden. The lizard, too, sprang off the post and scuttled among the leaves and twigs. Through the powerful force of its fear, its color changed before Timothy's eyes to a drab greenish-brown as it lost itself among the weeds.

  "That damned cat—she'd better leave my lizards alone. I like having lizards around," he explained; "they keep down the mosquitoes and the pests that eat my plants."

  Lizards, the oysterwoman agreed, were good for all sorts of things, but bad too if the wrong set of people got hold of them. Some people could slip in at night and put one inside your head if they wanted to harm you. Then you woke up choking and might die of shortness of breath, or your blood might turn to clabber. Sperrits were mischee-vous this time of year; everybody better be careful. She grasped the handles of her barrow, and with a great shout of "Buyeyster!" she trundled along the pavement.

  Timothy couldn't make out whether a warning coiled in these generalities or not. Mamie, he had decided, did not "belong." She merely acknowledged the baffling tactics of both God and the Devil and kept out of the controversy as far as possible. Yet he recognized in her some quality sturdy and profound that brought him reassurance. Like a convert who finds another believer, he took comfort tliat she shared his heterodoxy.

  That afternoon he had another visit from Lucy. This time she came boldly in at the front gate, listing under the weight of the large basket on her arm.

  "Good evening," cried Timothy, hurrying to welcome her. But when they met in the path she stopped short, and gave him a mischievous glance. "You look like the Devil!"

  As always her bold manners both shocked him and aroused a sneaking admiration. He covered his shorn upper lip with his hand and said self-consciously, "Is that an aspersion or a compliment?"

  "Whichever you like. The shape of your face is clear, now. That's all."

  Clearly stamped, he gathered, with a paternity not of the Partridges. Was he a changeling in the cradle, then? But he fastidiously rejected the taint of bastardy; he preferred to think his great misdeeds had earned him this distinction, or even his little misdeeds—his first dabblings in magic, his unchristian attitude to Mr. Dombie . . .

  She had come to help him with his garden, Lucy was saying, since it was plain that, left alone, he'd never make anything of it.

  Timothy took the basket. "You shouldn't be carrying this—it weighs a ton."

  "Oh, I'm strong," she assured him. "Small but wiry." She took off her hooded cape; her head, her neck, and her little high bosom emerged from its folds, and Timothy said, "Small but personable, let us say."

  Her shrug was half-challenging. She began to unpack the basket, which yielded surprises. A bag of fertilizer, a bottle, and at the bottom two of the blue English-ware jars from Timothy's shop. "Where did you get them?" he cried with vexation and delight.

  "I saved them from the fire. And several others—I'll bring them next time. You can use them when the plants are ready to be ground up. I scorched my fringed shawl to get them out."

  Timothy could well imagine her dashing into the burning house to bring out some trifle she wanted. "You're a silly girl, and a bad one, I'm afraid. You stole my jar of frogs and newts, too."

  "I stole nothing," she said sourly. "I paid you extra for them—fifteen cents extra. Remember? That's a lot for dried frogs. I needed them for something special. And I'm returning the blue jars now."

  They fell to work on the plants, Lucy weeding while Timothy fed them. He tested the dark mixture in the bag with nose and thumb and decided it was better not to ask what composed it. It smelt evil enough to produce a Malay jungle in his meager yard. While their hands flew in these congenial tasks, they talked with devout absorption of the properties of plants and the uses, scientific or otherwise, to which they could be put. Lucy told him about a garden in her neighborhood that had some rare shrubs in it; she had the habit of snipping off a few twigs when she went by—very few, not enough to hurt anybody. "And do you know"—she sat back on her heels and held her trowel pointed outward, ready to plunge it in some adversary's heart—"a man ran out one day and drove me away with a broomstick? Told me to keep my evil eye off his place!"

  "What did you do?"

  "Oh, I put the triple curse on him—it was all I could do for the moment. I cursed the whole lot—from the head of the house to the nannygoat in the back yard! 'Evil eye, is it?' I said. 'Very good—I'll put it on you.' "

  Timothy, the moralist, was revolted by this amorality, but Timothy, the postulant of Evil, found it as stimulating as a dose of strychnine.

  Darkness drove them at last from their congenial occupation. Lucy hated to stop, she could see perfectly well, she said, but Timothy insisted on gathering up the tools. "Well, I'll come back and finish the work some other time. Perhaps I'll tell you now about my idea. I think we should go into partnership. You have the ground, I have the knack of growing things. We could make money."

  "Look here, you can't keep coming to my house like this. People will gossip."

  "Gossip?" The word blew from her lips like a soap bubble and floated harmlessly across the garden. "I don't think that will bother us. Luckily you moved into a bad neighborhood; nobody here has a good name to lose."

  "All the same," he said, leary of the scheme, "it would be better perhaps if I went to your house. If you should ever run into my cousin, Anna Maria Golightly, the fat would be in the fire."

  Lucy glowered. "I'd love to meet Mrs. Golightly here."

  "Oh, do you know her? What have you got against her? They're a nice wholesome pair, the Golightlys—"

  "They are that. Anna Maria is so wholesome she makes me feel sick. And the fatuous way they go on about those nasty dogs of theirs—" Timothy could almost see her fur rising.

  Her opinion of the Golightlys, he found with a pang, precipitated th
e change that was taking place toward them in his own feelings. As he sat torn between loyalty and candor, she interrupted: "By the way—here's a bottle of hair tonic for you. You look kind of funny, you know, with those short bristles. This is a special mixture; it'll bring results, I promise you."

  Timothy took the bottle and mumbled his thanks. She threw her hooded cape around her with an unconscious grace that pounced on him from its folds and wiped out his doubts; in the falling dusk the long pure lines gave her the severe sweetness of a primitive madonna—a freakish resemblance, he had to add. He escorted her as far as the car line, but she refused curtly to allow him to see her home.

  Her enthusiasm for his plants so beguiled Timothy that he thought he could see them growing. She came in quite often, and, as she had predicted, his neighbors proved difficult to scandalize. No one seemed to notice them as they dug, snipped, and compared notes on the old fields and moist places outside the city where rare plants could be found; Lucy, too, loved the fungi, the ferns and mosses that grew in dripping hollows, the reedy grasses in the woods-pools, a taste that went with her white skin under which the delicate blue veins ran like the tracing of a leaf. They planned expeditions to the country to collect herbs.

  Between his day and his night activities, Timothy lived through the spring in a state of high inebriation. As the weather warmed he gave up having a fire, and Sinkinda took to coming by the shorter route of his own chimney. He looked forward eagerly to his talks with her; their elevated moral plane gave him great satisfaction. The rides were still a nightmare, an experience of tingling fear and humiliation, but after a while he began to feel a thread of perverse pleasure even in these, as victims are said to come to love their torturers. Moreover, his muscles and heart gradually adjusted themselves to this exercise. Each time he woke up less tired the following day. You can get used to anything, he reflected complacently.

  Sinkinda for her part seemed to ride him more lightly all the time. "You are really an accomplished equestrienne," he told her one evening. She crowed derisively, but he had an idea that his old-fashioned compliment pleased her. In a strange way he began to find her beautiful; her fluid limbs, built for riding on air, her sultry eyes and brow, even the curious sanguine of her skin from which the purposeful blood seemed ready to burst with its own verve—all her subtle violence of mind and body held him in a wondering thralldom.

  One evening as Timothy and Lucy were absorbed in their stint on the flower beds he noticed that the dark came very suddenly, and looking up he saw a tall black cloud standing djinnlike above his wall. Immediately it began to cast its swollen drops down on them. They snatched up their tools and ran for shelter; the storm lashed at them from behind and beat on the closed door. The pounding of the tropical downpour on the roof and shutters brought Timothy a heady delight, for with Lucy in the house he felt safe from menace. Bursting with hospitality, he got out some cold victuals and a bottle of wine, and they had a gay supper to the wild fiddling outdoors like the strains of a demoniac band hidden in the shrubbery.

  Timothy's study, where they set their table, had lost its bare look and begun to acquire the congenial clutter of his old home. His blue jars shone on the shelves; he had raked the secondhand shops for old books, which he seldom had time to read but which gave the study an air he fondly imagined to be Faustian. He had even acquired a pair of carboys and mixed a purple liquid for them even more alchemical than the green and amber tinctures in his shop windows.

  Their somber gleam took Timothy's mind back to the shop and his first sight of Lucy, blown into his life from a rainy world like this one. As then, the wildness pelting from above communicated itself to her, and through her to him. They had come a long and devious way (the more he considered it) from the shop to this evening alone in his private apartment; their seclusion flicked his imagination, or that part of it which begins in the channels of the blood.

  He wanted to take her hand, but, in spite of a new daring in his heart, he was at a loss how to make the first move with a creature so ambiguous.

  The rain enclosed them in a sort of dream where everything turned topsy-turvy. To add to Timothy's confusion, words, which he had always looked on as solids, had changed their content—they weren't at all what they used to be. Righteousness had become a dreary virtue; piety—how sniveling it sounded; and virtue itself—how undesirable. As to love, he hadn't the glimmer of an idea what thing it meant.

  Lucy, of course, made no effort to talk, and nowadays he found their silences not awkward but more communicative than speech. He went and stood beside her chair. After a time he said, "Love is the most changeable of words . . . like a great net of fish. I loved my sister, you know—was it good or evil? It used to seem right—"

  "But you carefully fixed things so the house would burn up and rid you of her."

  "So I did. I had to do it. I can see her now—a fine, upstanding woman, with fine strong bones. And her will was a bone. Even her blue eyes were calcareous. Nothing but fire would destroy her."

  "I don't see why you didn't do it long ago."

  Speaking thus of his act in the most natural manner in the world, Timothy stood taller. What guilt he felt was for having been a sedulous brother all those years.

  Lucy relapsed into silence, and again it was Timothy who broke it. "I don't even wonder that you know all this about me. But I also know about you. You are Sinkinda somehow; I can't understand by what sort of saturation."

  "I'm changeable too; I've learned how to go from our world to the other—and back. Let's let it go at that. But you've done some changing yourself."

  There was challenge even in the way she sat, her feet on the rungs of the chair, and turned her eyes on him with some of their old intensity. He shivered—and felt suddenly warm again. Her image wavered before his eyes, perhaps because he had taken off his spectacles and slipped them into his pocket, but even without them he was fully aware of the real girl under her inappropriate flounces and of her appeal to something that was explicitly human and physical.

  She got up restlessly and said, "It has stopped raining," It was true; there was a sharp cessation of all noise, as if everyone living had been drowned.

  Lucy went toward the door and Timothy followed her, carrying the lamp. Their shadows leapt before them. In the hall they stood and looked at each other, their faces full of brilliance and darkness across the fluted chimney. They stood thus a long time, then Lucy put her hand around the top of the chimney and blew the light out. Timothy set the lamp on the hall table, and as he bent down, he felt her arms about his neck. A thrill of purely reflex fear shook him; but it passed as he found them round and real, her fingers warm and desiring. He turned and kissed her in the circle they made, a magic circle he could not break nor wanted to.

  After that Lucy came at night, not Sinkinda. Timothy never knew when she would appear; she forbade him to call at her house or even to write—her sisters would pry into the letters. So he had to wait upon her caprice, to sit through long evenings listening for the little stirs and scratches in the yard that heralded her approach. These vigils anguished him as sharply as his waits for Sinkinda had, with the difference that his fear now was that his visitor would not come.

  In Lucy, Sinkinda's wildness was mixed with qualities endearingly human—her nipping sense of fun, her little jealousies, her love of contention for its own sake —each time she left him she tied on her shawl with a brisk air of going forth to a potential conflict. Their conversation ran to distinctly less elevated topics, but on the whole he was satisfied with the exchange.

  Timothy worked the garden mostly by himself now, digging furiously to get through the hours until Lucy should arrive. But the plants flourished without her ministrations; perhaps her thumb was so potently green that it had been enough for her merely to give them a start, or perhaps it was the potently smelling fertilizer that accounted for their prodigal growth.

  His hair also grew astonishingly; under his faithful applications of the tonic it sprouted whit
e and vigorous from his scalp. This gave rise to a fable in the town that his hair had turned white in a single night from the shock of the fire—but when, Timothy, reflected, had fable ever let itself be corrupted by fact? And he encouraged the story in small ways as he went about his business. The curve of his lips grew more sardonic; it would have delighted his Gothic soul if he could have let it be known that he was the lover of a hag. Only that vestigial virtue, a gentleman's honor, sealed his lips.

  He took a sudden interest in dress and selected for himself a handsome black suit with a three-button coat. His figure, alas, still resembled a bed-slat; night-traveling did nothing to put flesh on one's bones. A new ox-blood waistcoat with a gold watch chain across it lent him, he thought, studying himself in his looking glass, a touch of desirable corpulence. He had mislaid his watch some time back; having shed people, he had rid himself of the necessity for petty divisions of time, but charms on watch chains were popular this season, an attractive and practical fashion. His glasses spent more time on the bureau and less on his nose; he had never really needed them to see the world, he found; only to keep from being seen. He still had a hankering for raven hair, but Lucy forbade him to resort to dye. "You'll do very well as you are, Timothy; with your young face and that white mop, you are something to make people turn around and stare. The combination is kind of stylish and kind of perverse. I like you that way."

  If this were true, Timothy was intoxicated with perversity—another changeling word. And whatever Lucy liked in him was right and desirable. That she should condescend to his companionship filled him with wonder, as indeed did everything about her. Holding her on his knee in the big armchair in his room, he questioned her closely about her life.

  "Tell me, dearest, how did you come to take up this —er—career?"

  "Hagging? Oh, some people are just bad. I was born mean, I suppose."

  "You certainly aren't one to mince matters. But when did you actually go over to the Adversary?"

  Wriggling a little—she had a cat's aptitude for making the lumps and hollows of a lap serve her comfort-she let her head fall back on his shoulder. Her charming profile close to his cheek was turned up to the ceiling in a rare moment of relaxation and intimacy. "It came about naturally. I hate my life, and why shouldn't I? That crowded pigsty of a house! So I took to going out at night by myself . . . night is lovely, you don't have to look at a lot of stupid faces . . . and people held it against me that I Tvasn't afraid of the dark the way they are. Then, my disposition is kind of surly—oh, I don't know, maybe it's just because my eyebrows are black, it could be as easy as that—anyway, they began to say I had the evil eye; they lelt me to myself, and even my sisters banded together against me. Well, old tales often come true that way: they said I had an evil eye, so I had one. You can well imagine that for once 1 was obliging."