“Well, Paul is making hors d’oeuvres, and Doug is mixing drinks. Could I ask you to carry them around to my guests? Oh, and when we start the poetry, I want a spooky effect, so I have bought a washtub at a secondhand store and some dry ice. I want you to make sure there is water and dry ice in the tub, so we will have that, what is it, ‘ground fog’ effect?”
“Ooooooooh, I think that will be great! Where’s the tub? Where do you want to place it?”
They looked around and decided the little coat closet right inside the door was the best place. “We’ll have people put their coats on the bed,” decided Rafael.
The theme of the party was The Poe Tree, and each guest had to bring a Halloween-themed poem to read while wearing a costume suitable to the poem.
Godwin adored costume parties, but was less sure about poetry. Still, he remembered one verse of a poem the father of a childhood chum used to recite when the subject of ghost stories would come up. He looked the rest up on the Internet and hoped it would do.
His costume was that of a child from the early twentieth century: a Buster Brown suit. It consisted of a red, Russian-style tunic with a stand-up collar and a three-button fastening on his right shoulder, matching shorts, white ankle socks, and black Mary Jane shoes. The costume was topped with a broad-brimmed yellow sailor hat trimmed with a broad red ribbon. A shop appropriately named Licks on Water Street in Excelsior had provided the crowning touch, an enormous striped lollipop. He felt both exhilarated and ridiculous driving over to Rafael’s condo in his little sports car, like a child in a toy car. He both hoped no one noticed him, and hoped everyone did and thought his outfit too sweet to be endured.
Rafael wore a black velvet suit with a broad-collared white shirt and enormous floppy tie—he was Edgar Allen Poe—and he kicked off the party by reciting “The Raven” from memory. Most people are familiar with the opening verse, Once upon a midnight dreary . . . But few get as far as the final verse:And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door,
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
Rafael’s voice was low and thrilling. Godwin sat transfixed through the recital. Then he felt ashamed of his silly poem and went off to the kitchen to refill the tray with drinks while the others commented on the performance.
All of a sudden Rafael was behind him, his voice concerned. “What’s the matter? Did you not like it?”
“Oh, Rafael, I loved it! But now I think you’ll laugh at my little offering.”
“Never!” Rafael laughed softly, then caught himself. “If ever I have laughed at you, then I swear, ‘Nevermore!’ Do you understand?”
Godwin took a relieved breath. “All right. But get someone else to go next. I need to get this tray loaded.”
“Mi amigo, you are a good friend. Thank you.”
As Godwin brought the tray to the guests, one of them, dressed as Shakespeare, was standing and saying, “Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” There were two long verses that went with that chorus. Godwin hadn’t known that. “Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron boil and bake; Eye of newt, and toe of frog . . .”
Ugh! thought Godwin, handing the drinks around. His feet shuffled through a layer of chilly cloud riffling across the floor. One of the women present had drawn her feet up on a couch to get out of it.
Godwin selected a glass of orange juice and peach schnapps—a fuzzy navel, the drink was called—and sat down to listen to the next performance.
Penny, wearing a cowboy outfit, recited a haunting poem about an oak tree that died of shame when an innocent man was lynched on it:I feel the rope against my bark,
And the weight of him in my grain.
I feel in the throe of his final woe,
The touch of my own last pain . . .
Lillian, already a little tipsy, said, “Me, me! I have a nice sad one, may I say it next and be done?”
“You may,” said Rafael gravely. “But what are you dressed as?”
She was wearing a white filmy gown, uncinched, and a sparkly golden headdress shaped like a bishop’s miter. “I’m a candle, of course! My poem’s called ‘The Candle’s Out,’ by Ann Peters.” She stood with her eyes closed, and recited, in a mock-scared voice:Wind is wuthering ’round house wall—
These nights are hard for all—
Life’s candle flickering, guttering low,
That a Healer’s craft can only stall,
Strong were those arms, now so lax;
Stern were those lips, now in repose.
Illness melting flesh like wax,
Till Death—Grim Healer—Ends these woes.
A gust of wind, And Shadows fall.
The candle’s out this night and all.
She doffed her headdress, and bowed her head.
A sad silence fell. Godwin, wishing to lighten the mood, screwed his courage to the sticking point, caught Rafael’s eye, and nodded.
“Now we’ll hear from the little boy,” Rafael said. “Who are you supposed to be?”
“Why, I’m Buster Brown, who was a famous comic strip character,” he said. He stood, put down his glass, took a lick of his all-day sucker, and announced: “‘Little Orphant Annie,’ by James Whitcomb Riley.”
Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;
An’ all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ’at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ’at gits you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!
Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers,
An’ when he went to bed at night, away up-stairs
The pleased attention Godwin was getting encouraged him. He’d made his voice high and childlike. Now he drew out the words and gestured upward:A waaaaaaaaay up-stairs . . .
His Mammy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl,
An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down . . .
Godwin paused for effect, and whispered the next line with horrified delight:He wuzn’t there at all!
An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press,
And seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found was jist his pants an’ roundabout—
An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you
Ef you . . . don’t . . . watch . . . out!
Huge success! Applause! Godwin took three bows, then had to go to the kitchen and drink half a pint of bottled water to cool off. He was glad he hadn’t recited the whole poem—there were two more verses—better always to leave your audience wanting more.
Back in the living room, Dan broke out his button accordion and set off on the sad story of a ghost named Miss Bailey who, after hanging herself, had returned in spectral form to confront the man who drove her to it. But Godwin was still too elated to go back.
Jane was halfway through “The Cremation of Sam McGee” when Godwin noticed that the fog moving restlessly across the floors seemed to be getting a little thin. He put on heavy gloves and took another chunk of dry ice out of the ice chest in the kitchen and slipped quietly over to the front closet to check on the tub.
It was dark over there—Rafael had sought atmosphere by turning the lights down low and setting candles everywhere but in this distant corner—and he couldn
’t see very well. He bent over. The water was seething, but just barely. Did it need another chunk?
JANE finished “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by repeating the first verse—“There are strange things done in the midnight sun / By the men who moil for gold . . .”— in chorus with several others who knew at least that part of the poem by heart. There were cheers and laughter.
“Where’s Goddy?” asked someone.
They looked—it took a minute or two—and found his still form on the floor beside the open closet door.
Rafael picked him up and carried him to the couch, where, in a matter of seconds, Godwin started to wake up.
“Oooooh, my head!” he groaned. “Who hit me?”
Ten
ON Sundays, Betsy always attended the early service at
Trinity Episcopal. She found that if she didn’t go early, she tended not to go at all.
But eight o’clock on a Sunday morning in October was very early. The sun was just up and the ceremony so familiar it barely stirred her to complete wakefulness.
She was awake enough to give thanks for the prompt rescue of Godwin at Rafael’s party last night. “O Lord,” she prayed, “keep Your eye on that little sparrow. Thank you.”
Jill stopped her on her way out of church. “How’s it coming?” she asked.
“Not well. Did you know Joey Mitchell is a liar? I talked to him last night, and I don’t know which of his several stories to believe.”
Betsy went home in a renewed funk. But breakfast at home was also familiar, and therefore comforting. She had a Sunday routine of a soft-boiled egg and two strips of bacon. Actually, one strip, but Betsy had purchased one of those microwave bacon cookers and discovered that it worked better if she cut her bacon strip in half before draping the pieces over the plastic holder. Though she’d done the trick to herself—more trickery!—it still felt as if she were getting two strips. How oddly the human brain is constructed! she concluded; but in this case, good-oh.
She sat down with her bacon and egg, her morning cup of black English tea, and the Sunday paper.
To her surprise, there was a column on witchcraft from a guest editorialist, a clergyman from Texas. Apparently the news of the mysterious death, and rumors of its cause, were reaching far beyond the town.
Charily, she began to read:“THOU SHALT NOT SUFFER A WITCH TO LIVE!”
Her heart sank. But then the article continued:When that was written over three thousand years ago, people believed in witches. They believed a person could injure a neighbor, even kill him, with a spell or other occult method.
Modern man does not—or so you would think.
But apparently such beliefs have not died out entirely. The city of Excelsior, Minnesota, is filled with rumors that the unexplained death of one of its citizens was caused by a practitioner of the Wiccan religion. It is shocking and sad to find such superstitions alive and well in twenty-first-century America.
What makes this situation particularly dangerous is that followers of Wicca themselves believe they can injure an enemy with a spell, if only by putting themselves trebly at risk of the same injury.
There was a time when virtually everyone would laugh at such a notion, but that was when this was a Christian nation, one that had cast off not only the superstitions of the Dark Ages but the even more antique rules of the Old Testament.
Yet today, educated people rearrange the furniture in their houses in the belief that doing so can create health, wealth, and good fortune. Others believe distant planets, and even more distant stars, can affect their daily affairs.
Why have so many in our society abandoned Christ for feng shui, astrology, Wicca, or other beliefs? It’s a symptom of an old, old problem: We want to be our own gods. We want our illusions of personal self-sufficiency and power. And we want the benefits of spirituality without the costs of self-discipline, humility, and obedience.
Why does this worldview have such strength in this era of nonbelief? I think we have a new problem: a belief that there is no ultimate truth, that the only unforgivable sin is lack of tolerance. But the virtue of tolerance can easily become the sin of relativism. And that means any religion claiming to have a unique, authoritative truth is not only implausible, it is offensive.
If you remove God from a culture, it will seek elsewhere for belief—because despite the efforts of the secularists, man is and will remain a creature of faith. And the faiths he invents can be not only reservoirs of ignorance but a danger to himself and the very culture he depends on to protect him in his beliefs.
Leading, apparently, to the danger of a crowd gathering with torch and pitchfork to march off and execute, without trial, an innocent woman.
Well! thought Betsy, in her best Jack Benny voice. That last shot should offend as many people as possible. Including not just the slack-jawed, unsophisticated denizens of Excelsior but poor, innocent Leona.
THE next day, Monday, Betsy turned the shop over to three part-timers. She had given herself several tasks. One was to find a carpenter to repair the long white counter that thrust out from one wall of her shop. A customer had wheeled her baby in to show him off and ran the stroller straight into one of the glass cabinet doors, without injuring the baby, whose vehicle was built in the lines of a tank, but breaking not only the glass but the thin wood stiles that separated it into four panels.
Another was to interview a man who wanted to rent an apartment. Betsy owned the building her shop was in. On the ground floor were her own shop, a secondhand bookstore called ISBN’s—currently on its third owner—and a delicatessen famous for its roast beef sandwiches and huge sour pickles.
The second floor was divided into three apartments. Betsy had one; Frank and Joy, a young married couple, lived in another; and Doris Valentine rented the third. Last year Doris’s apartment had been burglarized and she nearly moved out, saying the place now held horrid memories. Betsy had decided to renovate the apartment—and so long as she was about it, the young couple’s apartment, too.
But now Doris was going to marry Phil Galvin. The wedding was very soon and would be small, a service in the tiny old chapel of Trinity Episcopal Church. “Because it has to be in church,” said Phil—surprisingly, because he was not a member of any church. Doris had been raised Catholic but she had wandered through many denominations over the years, with a detour into Buddhism that lasted only a few months. So it was also a surprise when she strongly agreed. She asked Godwin to be her Man of Honor, so Phil asked Betsy to be his Best Woman. Then Phil asked Betsy to find a minister to perform the ceremony, and Betsy was pleased when Father John of Trinity said he’d be honored to do it.
Godwin, meanwhile, had gleefully begun to plan the bride’s trousseau, starting with a wedding gown. It took some strenuous talking to get him to see that white taffeta under green chiffon sprinkled with sequins and rhinestones was not going to happen.
Phil had his own house, so naturally he was taking his bride home to live with him—and that meant Betsy was out a tenant.
“With the beautiful remodeling you did in here, you shouldn’t have any problem finding a new renter,” said Doris.
It started off well. The first day her rental ad appeared on Craigslist and in the paper, she got a half dozen calls.
Today she was showing the apartment to a young man who looked for all the world like Ichabod Crane. He brought his clingy girlfriend along to see Doris’s one-bedroom place. What on earth did she, an exceedingly attractive young woman, see in him? Betsy wondered. As they finished touring the little apartment, Betsy’s other tenants came to stand in the open door.
Ichabod and Miss Cling said they weren’t sure about the place. “It’s kind of small,” Ichabod noted after his girl whispered in his ear while casting sly looks at Betsy over his shoulder. Did she think Betsy might become a rival for his affections?
As they went out, Betsy’s other tenants said, almost in chorus, “Can we talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure,” Betsy replied. She
gave Miss Cling her card and told them she had more people interested in seeing the place, so they shouldn’t wait too long to make up their minds.
After they vanished down the stairs, Betsy turned to the couple and said, “Okay, Joy and Frank, what can I do for you?”
“We want to give notice, too.”
“Oh, no! Is something wrong?”
Joy smiled shyly and bumped gently against her husband. “Not at all. We’re pregnant, and it’s with twins, so we’ll need a bigger place. Isn’t that exciting?”
“Yes, it is, how wonderful for you!”
“We want a yard, too,” said Frank, beaming and putting an arm around Joy. “We’re having two boys, and they’ll need some space to be boys in.”
“I’m so pleased for you, congratulations! All right, today’s the twenty-fifth, your last day will be November twenty-fourth, all right?”
She went back to her apartment to make a note of their date of departure on her calendar and sat down to write a new ad. “For Rent: Newly renovated second-floor walkup, quiet, less than a block from Lake Minnetonka. On-site laundry room. Small, well-behaved pets welcome. Available November 25.” She raised the rent thirty dollars a month—she hadn’t raised it on Joy and Frank after the renovation—and gave a phone number and the Crewel World web site. She updated the web site to repeat the ad—there was already one for Doris’s apartment—and uploaded an “after” picture she had taken when the renovation was finished.
Then she went down to the laundry room in a corner of the basement and started a load. She caught up on her bookkeeping and her newsgroups, updated her grocery shopping list, went down to move the clothes into the dryer and start a new load, stopped in the shop to see how the part-timers were doing, and went out to continue her investigation.
One reason she had taken the day off was that the elementary schools in the district were out for the day for a teachers’ conference, so Shelly—who almost never attended the conferences—was home.
Blackwork Page 11
