Go on to the courthouse, said Jeth Walker. He held his silk top hat in front of him like a stubby toy cannon. You’ll never feel right about it until you see for yourself.
Not with the Union Militia there, she said. They would find something against me.
You can come with us, he said. We’re, a ha, going on the road. We lost our tavern there at Greenville to taxes same as you.
We had performances and music there for fifteen years before we lost it, said Sarah.
And so we’re just getting up a traveling show. I taught that pig to dance and I do Master of Ceremonies.
Adair said, That pig dances?
Ain’t that skirt cute? Sarah said. I made it myself out of a tablecloth I found just lying around. And Pru sings.
The young woman said, I’m the one who sings the last song about “comin through the rye” in a kilt. It’s real short. I wear silk tights and lace-ups. You just do what you have to do. We don’t pretend to be quality.
Adair watched the pig in the tablecloth skirt come to the back kitchen door and stand on the sill stone. It waved its snout in the air.
Watch this, said Jeth Walker. He began to whistle “Arkansas Traveler.” The pig stood up on its hind legs and shuffled uneasily toward them. It made pig noises and the skirt dangled around its hooves. Jeth Walker put on the top hat and did a few dance steps himself. Now, we are doing a short excerpt from a play as well, so that we have cultured and refined things as well as mere sensations for the masses. We do short scenes from The Hermit of Gervais.
I never saw it, said Adair. Performances always made my hair stand on end on the back of my neck. I get too excited and I end up crying.
You could come along, said Sarah.
Yes, you could be in it. The young woman gave baby Jim a handful of cooled boiled turnip. We all have misery to face up to, girl. I lost my husband in Price’s raid and here I am with the baby and everything. So you just got to get along how you can.
She could be the Saucy Girl, said Jeth. You see, there has to be the Aristocratic Girl that he marries, and then the servant is the Saucy Girl, and she says smart and impertinent things.
Pru Lester said, then the Aristocratic Girl, she isn’t saucy. She’s easy to do. She never does anything, she’s just real refined and snooty. I’m her because I don’t have time to learn scripts because of the baby. All I have to do is say Brigit I Want You and Oh Help Me, Sir and Please Don’t Cut My Hand Off and such as that. Please Don’t do whatever they are doing.
There’s not much other way to get your living here, said Sarah. People losing their land to taxes and you couldn’t have done much here alone anyway.
I couldn’t go onstage. I get too agitated, said Adair. What do you do? Adair turned to Sarah and made herself smile.
Oh, I’m a guard and a messenger and I play guitar, and make costumes and scenery. I get to wear britches a lot. I find them handy.
Can you sing? Jeth asked Adair.
Well, I used to, but anymore I start crying. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
The young woman handed baby Jim to Sarah and sized up Adair with a measuring stare.
Well, she could let her hair down and stand in front of the Noble Ruins and sing Oh Frail Lamp of Love Extinguished and cry. She would do very well.
Her eyes, said Sarah. They’re so black, they would show up well onstage.
No, she couldn’t stand up to it, said Jeth. The people adoring her the way they do with the Saucy Girl. And us traveling to the cities, Pocahontas and Poplar Bluff and Cape on the steamboats.
Sarah Walker nodded. Regretfully. And the Saucy Girl lines are hard because they’re so smart, they get the best laughs. People scream.
Adair let all this fall into silence as a fire dies down.
I better go on, she said. I might come upon some news of what happened to my father one of these days. She took herself in hand and turned to Pru and smiled. I am sure you are very beautiful as the Aristocratic Girl, she said. I know you all make people happy.
Well, said Sarah.
Who was your father? Jeth took off the hat and laid it on the table as if to make it sit still, and sat down bareheaded.
Marquis Colley. He was the justice of the peace and he taught the common school.
Well, we’re just plain old people, said Pru. She rocked baby Jim on her hip again.
Adair said, And he and my mother came here from Tennessee in 1845, and he helped set up the school board and the county courthouse. She listened for a moment to the mockingbird singing with wild joy over her new nest in the sycamore. And he loved to read in his law books and he was very mild with us. He died somewhere alone without ever sending a last word to us or knowing what become of us. She stopped and wrapped her hands together in her lap. My mother is buried up there on the Devil’s Backbone.
A hot wind moved over the valley meadows and poured through the Shawnee Oak as if through a reeded instrument in a long, blooming hush. Lucy the cat slowly stalked in the back door paw by paw and came and sat before Adair. She gazed up into Adair’s eyes in a searching, intense stare and then gathered herself and sailed into Adair’s lap.
Go on to Vandiver’s, Adair said. I can’t take care of you.
My grandmother died in the bale shed of the Mingo gin, said Sarah Walker. Nobody knew she was gone for a week.
Well hush, Mrs. Walker, said Jeth.
ADAIR TOOK WITH her the last fragment of the tennessee mirror wrapped in burlap, and a few other things of use in a traveling and solitary life. She found articles in her mother’s clothes trunk—a haversack, stockings, a shawl—and took the blankets from her bed upstairs. She told the Walkers they could take whatever they wanted or could find. They were disturbed and regretful and tried to press other things on her, but Adair had learned the specific gravity of possessions and how they weighed a person down.
She walked back up Stanger’s Steep, leading Whiskey, to search for the Log Cabin quilt and the silver dollars and other things she had been forced to leave there, traveling mostly at night. Against the high ridges of the Irish Wilderness she thought she saw the mournful spirit of the soldier in the snare and how against the pale barrens above Pike Creek he hung upside down like the Hanged Man, swaying in the moonlight, and then he was a woman upside down with her skirts tied around her ankles but Adair turned her head away and walked on with Whiskey behind her.
She went back along the Steep until she saw at a distance Dolly’s bones beneath the oak tree and the skull hanging in the halter, and did not go any farther but turned back to search the trace. She didn’t find anything nor did she expect to very much, because of the soldiers coming down the Steep to the surrender points and others on the road who were poor and desperate, and someone had found the silver dollars. Maybe they needed them more than Adair did.
After a week she came back to her home place and sat up on the barrens at the ridge of Copperhead Mountain. The traveling show people had gone on. It looked as if the Vandivers were storing hay in the house now, and more of the windowlights were gone. She stayed there three days and let Whiskey graze in his slow, limping walk.
On the third day at sunset she was combing out her hair when she saw a man in civilian clothes and a broad hat ride down the road and past the Shawnee Oak. He rode a bay horse. He got off and stood before the empty house, holding his horse’s reins in a bandaged hand. There was a folded umbrella tied to the pommel of the saddle, suspended there like a sword.
Major Neumann called out, Adair? He waited. Adair! he shouted. Adair!
He walked into the house and after a few minutes she saw him in her bedroom window looking out. One side of his face was bigger than the other. After a while he came back out again.
Adair! he called. He turned to the hills around. I said I would come for you! Adair!
The light of the world faded to gray and shoals of lightning bugs drifted down the valley in white, insubstantial fires, millions of icy bone-lights.
She sat with her long hai
r flying loose and the silver brush in her hand and Whiskey grazing nearby. She watched as ghosts watch from the other side of a looking glass, come from a distant place of being and not of the same world.
Adair! I will not stop looking until I find you!
Over the folded blue mountains an evening wind came up, stroked over the trees in silky rushes. She saw the thin edge of a new moon glinting through the trees over Courtois and then it rose with the old moon glowing in its arms, as if to present to the summer night this dark, mysterious gift.
Will Neumann sat on the veranda and Adair saw the flash of a match, the deep glow of his cigar as he settled to wait.
She rose to her feet and laid the silver brush down on her bundle. She gathered her skirts in her hand and began to walk down the hill, hurrying, before the light failed.
An Excerpt from Lighthouse Island
Chapter 1
The winds carried dust to every part of the great cities; left it on roofs and windowsills and uneven streets. It scoured glass to an iridescent glaze. The city covered the entire earth, if people think of the earth as “where I live.” At night the wind sang through the abandoned upper floors of buildings with a noise like oboes and this erratic music could be heard at street level where people walked in the heat to their work in offices and in the recycling dumps and the cement works, to work on the pumps that kept the water, contaminated with gypsum from Silurian seas, flowing through the pipes. In the interstadial spaces between the borders of gerrymanders, prisoners painfully attended the cactus fields and the soybean fields.
There was not enough pressure to move water any higher than four stories and so upper stories had to be abandoned and demolished and new, dust-leaking roofs built over the remains. Television reports on demolitions were very popular. The city covered mountains; houses were fastened to the steep places and they sprang up in four-story shells along abandoned watercourses and the sinks of vanished springs. The city plated the entire planet if you thought of the planet as “my neighborhood,” a place where nobody was ever left alone.
On a hot, dry afternoon a four-year-old girl was taken out into a crowded street by her parents and abandoned. It was in the Sissons Bend neighborhood. The girl knew by her parents’ manner that something remarkable was about to happen, but she thought as they were walking along that it would have something to do with shoes or maybe a musical toy.
Her parents had given her a coin purse of red leather—in it were five coins—and a note, and another piece of paper on which were drawn the constellations of the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia’s Chair, and the North Star. Her mother handed her the paper and said, Look to the North Star and we will always be there. You’ll be lonely for a while but things will get better.
Then her parents disappeared in the crowded streets as if they had been teleported somewhere. The girl stood there without knowing what to do. A slow crawling fright rose inside her and it increased with every moment as passersby bumped into her and looked down at her briefly and then hurried on. The girl stared at the crowd as if she had been electrocuted with some kind of cunning electricity that could not be felt unless you moved and so she tried to stand still with the purse and the two papers in her hand but she was knocked down and then scrambled to her feet with gritty hands and stood carefully unmoving again.
The street was choked with people moving to new locations carrying children and bags of clothes and solar casserole pots and kerosene cans piled on carts that wove through and around the overloaded buses. The buses ground along in first gear and the little electric Buddy cars were loaded with three and four passengers and their roped suitcases. As far as anyone knew, the world had become nothing but city and the rains had failed for a century. They were on the move because the water faucets had gone dry in one distant part of the city but were rumored to be springing clear and full of pressure out of the standpipes in another. These were ordered migrations and agents in tracksuits paced alongside them. The man of the neighborhood watch saw the girl and frowned. He came toward her.
She was taken to an orphanage where she lived with other abandoned children like herself. She was given porridges and beet tops and a quart of water a day. She sat with the other children in front of a television in a battered wooden chassis. The blue light sucked up her attention like a pulmotor. After a week or so she went blind.
She could not see the eye doctor but he could see her and he lifted her chin and stared into her green-gray blind eyes, her auburn hair sliding in planes, and then said, this is going to sting. The day-care attendant said it was for a blood test. The doctor said he was sure it was vitamin A deficiency. Maybe she was especially sensitive to vitamin A deficiency or maybe she had been weaned too early and was raised on bulgur wheat and pastas. Before long, after the paperwork was approved, she would have a prescribed daily dosage of retinyl palmitate. But retinyl palmitate was synthesized from retinol and retinol had to be prepared and transported at very low temperatures in an oxygen-free atmosphere and the industrial unit that made it went through constant breakdowns in refrigeration, the gas-packing apparatus frequently blew its tubes, and delivery by truck was rarely on schedule owing to ruptured tires. In the meantime she must have animal foods. She should be served eggs and cod liver oil and milk. And so he went away.
An attendant patted her shoulder and said it wouldn’t be too long before she could watch her favorite programs again and just that brief touch made the girl’s heart grow full and she did not feel so desperate. The attendant’s name was Shaniya. Shaniya thought of herself as a nurse-practitioner and often gave out medical information that was totally wrong. In this case she held forth on the fact that Raisa’s eyes would be weak for the rest of her life. Raisa thought it might be from crying so much so she decided to try to stop crying.
Raisa could hear the television but she could not see it so she sat on the floor and listened intently to the voices because they might say something about what had happened to her mother or her father but in general they were the voices of walking palm trees and animated clocks and cabbages and bright, knowing children.
That’s a clock that’s talking, one of the girls said. Can’t you tell?
She can’t see, said another.
Their breath smelled like corn crisps and their fingers felt grimy and when they asked what her name was all she could do was to repeat what she heard her parents say: Raisa. But the way things had changed so quickly she wasn’t sure.
She doesn’t have any eyes, said a girl beside her.
Yes I do, said Raisa. I have eyes. She put her hands with their pale narrow fingers against her eyeballs and felt them trembling inside the sockets like small infant animals but it was a creepy feeling so she gripped both hands together in a knot and felt tears running in hot streams down her cheeks. They’re right in there.
A girl beside her said, They’re in there. The girl put her hands against Raisa’s eyes. They’re inside her head.
See, I told you, said Raisa.
Then why can’t she see?
Raisa, why can’t you see?
I don’t know. Raisa searched for a reason and wiped her face on her skirt hem. Maybe my eyes aren’t turned on. My mother is going to come and turn them on.
On the television there were things the others said were magic pencils, a happy spoon named Banji, and a spider, who danced to frenetic
music. There were adventures with children who yelled at one another in unresonant voices. They argued about how to do something or which door led to the magic kingdom, or a place where some treasure lay. There it is! shouted an unspecified vegetable. The puppets Pepper Spray and Long Shot exchanged caustic remarks as they rifled a kitchen for cod cakes. Lucy Swiffer and the Space Shuttle Pirates rocketed to other worlds while Raisa came to understand that treasures lay in dark places, behind closed doors, that these doors were reached by perilous journeys through wastelands and clothes closets.
Raisa had thick auburn hair that slipped out of its braids in slick tangles so t
hat her hair was frequently pulled by older children. She could not fend them off. She smelled them in their jammed closeness, their odors of germicidal soap and peanuts. From time to time the television changed to a program about vacations or resorts. She sat suspended in front of the invisible screen where a booming, washing noise sounded.
What’s that? she called. What is that?
The ocean.
What ocean? Where is it? Where?
Somewhere.
Come to Lighthouse Island, said the television.
They were always thirsty and Raisa could hear the building’s holding tanks being pumped full and bottles being filled at the tap downstairs, long before the other children. She heard the carts being stacked and put her hand to her mouth. Water time, she said. I can hear them.
I don’t hear it, said another girl.
They’re coming, said Raisa. I know. And then, just as she had said, the water cart came down the hallway.
Conversations among the attendants left her nervous. She had to puzzle out these words to stay alive. They argued about the food she was to be given and wasn’t: the eggs and milk and liver. Adult workers weren’t even getting eggs and milk and liver. One attendant said, Why hasn’t she been sent to the dryers?
And Shaniya said, Give her a break. She’s very functional. The retinyl stuff will be here one of these days. Please.
Raisa liked being alone. She felt her way to a sofa and then crawled into the space behind it. They were being called to come and eat. The children went away. She heard a click and a short, crisp sound, like a quick burning, when the television was turned off. She put her fingertips against each other and fell into stillness. Solitude. In the distance she heard a deep, repeated thunder that rattled the windows in their frames and it seemed to come from a long way away, beyond the street noises. The windows were always open because it was so hot and she felt the puff of air after the explosions.
She hid in silence between the wall and the sofa and listened. The remote sounds of human life were like intricate figures in a textile made up of distant singing and a crowd walking and Buddy car horns and bus motors. She heard televisions from other windows, and pigeons. It was all absorbing and everything mattered in this poised delay where she lived, suspended in hope, which seemed to have located her in spite of everything, hope that her parents would come and for her sight to return.
Enemy Women Page 32
