Thinking of her parents, she would tell herself fiercely that they must be nice. But if so—then how had she come here? It was an unequal equation with which she would struggle until the tears came, and it was necessary to bury her head under rough blankets so that Butch and Mag, on the other side of the thin partition, might not hear her choked breathing. Steadfastly refusing to discard her original hypothesis that her parents, solely because they were her parents, must be good in all ways, she fabricated solution after solution to account for their apparent desertion of her, no one of which she could find wholly convincing. If she could have thought of them as dead, it would have been easier to exonerate them of all blame. She could not bear to do this.
Naturally enough, it did not occur to her then to search in herself for clues to the heritage which had come to mean so much to her. She was eleven years old before she ever objectified herself at all.
It was late in November of that year that heavy rains during the night, combined with a sudden, sharp frost in the early hours of the morning, together produced the illusion of another ice age. When the sun rose, its rays struck a blue-white ice crust from which they glanced off in rainbow colours. To Psyche it was a glimpse into fairyland, a fairyland into which she sallied forth immediately breakfast was over. Skating without skates, floating between vividly blue sky and a world caught fast beneath a prison of glass, she turned her back on the shack and felt as if she were suspended, bodiless, between heaven and earth.
Would this, she wondered, be the way she would feel if she were dead? If she were nothing more than a soul on its way up to heaven? Would she still be herself? And what, after all, was herself? Was it bright hair, straight nose, and thin arms and legs, or was it something more than that? Suddenly she had to find out. Whirling around, keeping a slippery balance with difficulty, she made her way back to the shack as fast as she could. Once inside, she went straight to the clouded mirror above Mag’s untidy bureau. Disregarding dusty red hair combings, spilled face powder, and a pin-tray full of cigarette stubs, she stood on tip-toe and leaned as close to the mirror as possible.
Carefully she took stock of her features, one by one, in search of something elusive which they might betray if she stared at herself long enough and hard enough. But, as she stared, her face became gradually that of a stranger, frighteningly unfamiliar. The eyes—which could not be her eyes—seemed to be getting larger, the pupils wide and black within a thin banding of blue iris; opaque, unfocussed, those eyes not only gave her back nothing of herself, but seemed to threaten her very identity as a person.
With a real effort of will, she wrenched herself free. As she moved back, the edge of the bed caught her behind the knees, and she sat down with unexpected suddenness. She felt, though more keenly, as she had on the night when she had tried to see how long she could hold her breath. She had experienced on that occasion the same floating vagueness, the same feeling of being a long way off from anything known, and had had the same awful fear that she might not be able to come back into herself again.
Now, glad to be sitting down, she tried to think out what she had discovered about herself. At first, it seemed to her that the answer to this was nothing. And then the very fact that she had learned nothing became an answer of sorts in itself. Her face, it seemed, was a mask which not only hid her real self from herself but also, probably, from other people. From this she moved on to the realization that no matter what she thought, no one need know her thoughts if she did not want them known. There could, it would seem, be no trespassing on a ‘self without the owner’s consent. Why she should be so pleased, and even comforted by this quite remarkable but, as far as she could see, not very useful discovery, she could not make out. It was, of course, nice to know that you belonged to yourself in rather a special way, but it would be much more helpful to know exactly what it was you belonged to. Probably this was something you could learn only if you watched yourself for a long time; watched what you did when you did it, and thought about what you thought. And if you shouldn’t like what you finally saw as your real self, would it be possible to change it in any way, or did you just have to stay the same always whether you were satisfied with that or not? Then again, if you could change, would you still be able to feel that you were you?
Finding this all very confusing, she decided to see if Mag could be of any help to her.
Mag, her sleeves rolled up, was baking a pie. On the corner of the table nearest the stove. Fanny Farmer’s Boston Cook Book lay open at the correct page. Mag neither looked at it nor needed it. It was simply a badge of office, a reminder that when she had first walked out with a heavy-set young policeman she had been not only a cook but a good one. Her pies, usually apple, were now her single exercise in this proficiency.
Psyche hitched herself up on to the table, and, picking up a small piece of dough, absently kneaded it into a grimy ball between her fingers. “Mag, if you was changed—I mean, if you wasn’t yourself exactly, what would you be?”
“Tight,” said Mag.
“No—no. I mean if you was changed on purpose, sort of?”
“I dunno, kid. I ain’t never wanted to be nothin’ that I ain’t.”
Getting down from the table, Psyche went slowly over to the window. The ice on the crests of the slag hills was already melting: as impossible now to recapture its sharp, clear, many-coloured beauty, as to feel again the inner excitement it had engendered.
“I am me,” Psyche said experimentally under her breath. It did not seem to mean much any more.
“You want to cut up them apples, kid?”
Small rivulets of water were tracing dark veins down the sides of the slopes and gathering in shallow pools which reflected a sky blurred by the return of a haze rarely absent for long.
With an oddly fatalistic shrug, unconscious period to a broken spell, Psyche said, “Sure, if you like, but I can’t never find the damn knife.”
“Try dumpin’ the box out on the table,” Mag advised.
Falling in with this suggestion, Psyche happily fetched the cardboard cutlery box and allowed its heterogeneous contents to rain out upon the table with all the clatter possible. Neither she nor Mag ever objected to a noise.
In what was essentially a silent comer of the universe, sounds of any kind had a real significance. When a thick cloud ceiling pressed close against the slag, the passing of cars on the highway could be heard, and Psyche, scarcely knowing she did it, would count the number that went by in a morning or an afternoon. In the spring and fall, when wild ducks called as they steered a course high above the shack, their migrations would be remarked upon and referred to again and again in the days that followed. The strident reveille of the old alarm clock, ringing at odd hours during the night and day, was greeted as a pleasantly familiar, rather than an irritating, punctuation to sleep or conversation. And when storms broke in a tumult of wind and rain, thunder and lightning, around the tiny house, its inmates enjoyed the disturbance of a peace at times oppressive in its tranquillity.
Neither Butch nor Mag, however, began to comprehend the extent of Psyche’s loss when the old gramophone broke down, perhaps because music was of no importance to them, and perhaps because, as Psyche had been forced to play it, it had been inaudible to them.
Resurrected from amongst a stack of equally useless articles in the storeroom, it had been set up on an orange crate beside her bed, and had become overnight a possession that ranked second only to Feather Duster. The lid of the imitation-leather case was gone; the few records that remained were worn and scratched; and since there were neither needles nor tone arm, it could only be operated with a pin held in a hand, both mobile and steady, that learned how to follow a revolving, threadlike course without independent wavering. But this was enough. Leaning close against the machine, listening with absorbed concentration, Psyche was able to capture ghostly music that had the remote perfection of a scene looked at through the wrong end of a telescope; music, stripped of all mechanical impurities, which was t
he thin skeleton of a past which became for her an enthralling present. “After the Ball”, “Moonlight and Roses”, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”—she smiled, and grew sad, felt a queer restlessness, and smiled again.
The night when Butch came home to find Mag alone in the main room of the shack, and only two places laid for the evening meal, his broad face became creased with immediate, dumb anxiety.
“Where’s the kid? She sick?”
Mag shook her head. “No, she ain’t sick. She just don’t want nothin’ to eat.” “Wassa matter with her?”
“The phono’s gone on the bum,” Mag told him laconically.
Butch scratched his head as he always did when thought of any kind was demanded of him. “She set great store by that old thing, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, but we ain’t got the money to go gettin’ another, so don’t go athinkin’ of anythin’ stoopid like that,” said Mag, revealing that she had already thought of it herself.
“Mebbe there might be somethin’ else?” Butch asked hopefully. He had a great respect for Mag’s ability to cope with any crisis needing more than brute strength, the single contribution he himself was ever in a position to make. That this would, on a future occasion, be all that was required of him in one of the most awful crises of the kid’s life, he could not foresee, and so he was humble in his reliance on a judgement he knew to be superior to his own.
Mag, in both their opinions, was equal to the occasion. “We’ll give her one of them mouth organs. I already wrote the letter.”
Psyche treasured the mouth organ, when it came, because it was shiny, new, and hers, but as a gateway to music it was a complete failure. Although moved by, and responsive to music of any kind, she had no inherent creative talent for it, and the discordant noises which were all she was able to extract from her new toy were actually offensive to her. They tended, if anything, to thrust farther away, rather than to bring back, her lost puppet world where tiny figures laughed and wept and danced to rhythmic harmonies now dissolved like smoke in a rising wind.
With no one to call her a baby, Psyche still took Feather Duster with her wherever she went. His once bright face was grey with age, and his plumed head was balding in spots, but his value as a companion was as great as it had ever been. She was growing like an exotic young weed, and her shapeless pullovers and denim trousers were always too small for her; but even with this and Feather Duster thrown in, she was already essentially too beautiful to be found laughable by any but others of her own age, and as yet she had had none of these to deal with. When they went into the town, a place more depressing than the slag surrounding it, and as devoid of growth, it was to find a world of adults, for they always went in the evenings when the children were in bed. And the social life of the shack itself was limited to Saturday nights, when three miners, who worked the same shift as Butch, came in to play poker with him.
It was Butch, in closer contact with civilization than Mag, who one day uneasily broached the subject of “schoolin’ for the kid”.
Mag disposed of this radical idea. “I ain’t never had no proper schoolin’, an’ I done all right, ain’t I?”
“I went to school,” Butch reminded her with no little pride.
“An’ you can’t read nor write no better than me,” Mag told him tartly. “I’ve teached the kid how to make her letters and how to read some. Anyway, girls is different.”
After some consideration, Butch conceded that, in certain respects at least, girls were different. There, for the time being, the matter was dropped, and Psyche was left to her own devices for another year.
Free to wander pretty much as she pleased, to come to careful conclusions unbiased by ready-made social strictures, she developed an independence of mind and spirit rarely achieved by a child as young as she was. But, denied the tests that not only give proof of special ability but also provide stimulus, her physical growth was far in advance of any possible intellectual maturity. Having absorbed all that Butch and Mag could teach her, their limited fund of knowledge dredged to its shallow depths, her naturally active intelligence was stirred only occasionally, and only by something seen, felt, or observed outside the shack itself.
Butch and Mag might waste no love on the slag, but Psyche was fascinated by the elemental emptiness of a land that owed its changing moods to the slow rotation of the earth itself. It was exciting to her to discover that, even here, no day was quite the same as any other, that the pewter-coloured hills reflected nuances of colour as perceptible as the differing hues of the great, unobstructed span of sky above it.
Exploring the four points of the compass, she found that the wastelands seemed to continue to the north indefinitely; certainly beyond her courage or desire to go. To the west were the mines, the core and source of the blight that devastated the countryside. From a vantage point higher than most, she would stare at tall derricks rising out of haze that thickened here to the density of a dark cloud, its heart pierced by the unholy glow of huge smelters. Feather Duster clutched tightly to her, she would listen to the rattle of winch and chain, the harsh gears of heavy trucks, and the hoarse scream of whistles implementing spoken commands beyond her hearing. She came often to the miniature mountain top from which she had first surveyed this scene, but she never lingered long, and never approached any closer to a sound and fury that repelled her as much as it interested her. Although she knew that Butch went there every day, she rarely thought of him in connection with this patternless turmoil. She preferred to pretend that it was the home of dragons, a witches’ cauldron stirred deep in the earth, a threat from which—when she was ready— she must flee as fast as her long legs would take her.
Eastward she discovered the outer fringes of the slag, and a stunted, leafless tree-line; a foreign country that genuinely frightened her by its dissimilarity from anything she knew or had imagined.
“Is them woods, yonder to the east?” she asked Mag. “They don’t look like you said woods did.”
Mag glanced up from knitting one of the shapeless woollen bags that Butch must accept as socks, and sniffed audibly. “Them’s not proper trees. Why, kid, like I told you, a proper woods has leaves, an’ grass, an’ little flowers growin’ everywheres, just wild like.”
“You mean with nobody havin’ planted them?”
“Sure.”
Psyche’s voice was no more than a whisper. “You mean free— for anyone to pick what wanted to?”
“Ain’t I told you that a hundred times?”
“Yeah, but I can’t never believe it. Is some of them blue, perhaps?”
“Most like. You’re sure crazy over blue, ain’t you, kid?”
“I always was,” Psyche said, and it was almost as if she were telling the big woman something she might not otherwise have known.
Leaving his car in front oí the house, Dwight walked around to the gardens at the back where Sharon was nearly always to be found at the end of a summer’s day.
She was there, and, rising from her chair, came to meet him, graceful and unhurried.
He is back, she told herself. Another day has gone, and he is home again. I must not run. I will not run. He is there. I can see him, and in a moment I will be able to touch him. There is no need to run, and I will not do it.
Watching her, seeing the blue of her dress reflected in the blue of the delphiniums behind her, Dwight thought, what would I do if ever she were not here? Then, his quick stride slowing, his eyes swept the wall of blue which extended across the entire back of the garden, and he realized with shocking suddenness the significance of something that he had not even noticed before. How long had it been going on, this steady, purposeful planting? When had the pink and white of phlox and carnations first begun to be submerged in this sea of delphiniums?
A hurt that he steadfastly refused to dwell upon, a hurt now eight years old, became mingled with fresh pain caused by the knowledge that whereas he had once shared Sharon’s every thought, now there was a corner of her mind she kept locked
against him, and which he dared not try to explore. If she had done this, what else might she not have done to fortify memories for a child whom he did not believe they would ever see again; a child whom he did not believe was necessarily alive.
His arms, when they closed around her, held her almost too forcefully, but all he said was, “Sharon—my darling.”
Sharon, her face pressed hard against his shoulder, said nothing beyond his name. “Dwight.”
The direction in which Psyche most often set out when she left the shack was south. This was not only because she now fetched most of the deliveries left at the mail-box—sometimes making three or four trips in a single day for this reason alone—but because the highway was a magnet that she neither tried nor wished to resist. It was her road to Damascus, her way to Mecca, the actual, tangible starting point of the long journey to the ‘Outside’ on which she had become more and more certain that she herself would some day set out.
Lying on the further side of the first of the two uneven ridges which, with intervening depressions, separated the highway from the shack, she would wait with infinite patience for the appearance of a car, any car, going south. Those going north she paid no attention to, scarcely even saw. Old cars, chugging past with difficulty, worried her, for she doubted if they had the strength and stamina to reach a goal too nebulous and visionary to be other than worlds away. The real rewards of her vigils were the swift, bright chariots, flashing with chrome, which only a heretic would have believed incapable of reaching their enchanted destination.
She came to know the truckers well, and they watched for the fair head usually to be seen peeping over a slate-grey rise a hundred feet back from the mail-box. They took to bringing her little presents of candy and gum, and, when the summer sun beat down on the unprotected slag, bottles of pop chilled against fast-melting blocks of ice, chips of which she would still be sucking when they had gone. At another season of the year, when bitter winds blew across wastes of arctic white, she would be invited into the warm cabs of the trucks to drink scalding tea or coffee from thermoses which always seemed to contain enough to allow their contents to be shared with her.
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