Drink for the Thirst to Come

by Lawrence Santoro

  “In there,” B.A. nodded toward the trees, “is where Ophelia lies buried!” Her whisper stirred the hanging moss.

  “Hsssh,” Melissa said. By full moonlight, the bare wood of the Boy’s Room shone pure white. “Hush, can’t you?”

  When they reached the back house, Melissa’s hands were shaking. Thoughts of spider, yes. Thoughts of Rafe, surely. They were about to begin eternal things, things she didn’t altogether believe, but…

  Barbary Ann stuck the tobacco tin into Melissa Patricia’s hands.

  “Huh?”

  “Your vengeance,” Barbary said. “You harvest the spider bug.”

  “I am not grabbing crawlies from a crapper. Not alone!”

  “Oh, you are. You are, indeed,” her cousin huffed, “and you gonna grind and mumbo-jumbo it. Feed it, too, like Lady Ophelia says.” Barbary Ann leaned forward, her voice, old and witchy. She breathed sleepy breath into Melissa’s face. “‘Onc’t you set forth ’pon a c’reer of revengeance,” she squinted one eye, “ain’t no back-turn to’t. You are Vengeance hisself,’ she says! Ophelia says.”

  Melissa Patricia’s head tingled. She shivered before. Locked in darkness by Rafe, daylight, a wooden door away and only daytime thoughts of hairy things to worry her, that was as nothing. Blame Rafe before but now she stepped by choice into darkness, sunlight, a quarter-world away. Melissa Patricia Tozier, 117 East Oak Street, Chicago, Illinois went alone into the back house. Her eyes and the lantern light went busy with fear. Jumping yellow circles from Bindle’s lamp made the unlit parts of the crapper seem darker still. Generation upon generation of Tozier outpourings exhaled from the earth-pit beneath the sagging wood floor. Melissa Patricia’s toes curled at the touch of soggy wood beneath bare feet. She hopped foot to foot. Every creak and gasp returned an echo from below. Absolutely, without a shade of doubt, she would NOT stick her hand down that hole, would not reach down where daytime air had been thick with flies (Who knew what else?) and which now was hideously silent. She would not look there. No! She scanned walls, rafters… She looked for… She did not wish to find… But she looked for that thing she sought…

  Then saw. One. A big one. A leg twitched from the pages of the Sears book hung by the seat. The leg was thick as a pencil lead and bristly with hair.

  “See one.” A bare breath, hissed to her cousin.

  The leg twitched.

  “A rightly one?” B.A. whispered back. “It has got to be ’propriate. By which I mean it has got to be B. I. G., big.”

  The leg became two and, attached, the body.

  “Ah. Ah. Yeah. Yeah-yeah. Big...”

  M’lissa Trish opened the flip-lid of the Prince Albert can. She wished the opening were wider, the can longer. She stuck her hand toward the spider that now squatted on the edge of the catalog. For all the world, the critter breathed.

  “Get him quick. If he’s a wolf, they jump!”

  Shaking more than ever she had in her whole little life, M’lissa wiggled the can below where the spider quivered. She nudged the edge of the book with the can. The critter clamored. One leg, one long, thick, hairy leg brushed the tip of M’lissa Trish’s finger. Where it touched, she tingled. She shrieked a little then whooped the can’s tin lip over the twitching beast. The leg tried to grip her finger, a claw dug into her flesh, another leg grappled her skin, tried to climb her hand. She felt it cock itself for a leap. She shrieked again and the whole fat hair-covered body—a body with a pretty little light brown spot on its belly—went tick, tick, tick against the metal can, and, snap, M’lissa clicked the lid shut.

  “What the hey’re you two doin’?” The door opened. Cousin Rafe’s boy-voice darn near ripped her spine getting to her head. He filled the night behind Barbary Ann. Both let a shriek could shatter glass and tore a wet streak through the black grass in white moonlight.

  Rafe, candle in hand, was left at the back house door, scratching.

  By the time they reached the kitchen, first fright was off the adventure and they could not stop giggling. Even so, Melissa was well aware the can she held was filled with spider. Through their giggles and shushes, the critter scrabbled, tick, tick, tick, against the sides and bottom. Tick, tick, tick.

  Cousin B.A. gritted her teeth. “I endeavor to keep from peeing with the laughter,” she said. Melissa made sure Prince Albert’s top stayed good and tight-snapped. Every few seconds, she banged the can against her other hand, then held it to her ear. Each time, she heard skitters and scrabbles inside and whomped it again. Each time, she giggled less.

  “What are you doing?” B.A. whispered.

  “Stunning the thing.” Whack. “Killing it,” M’lissa whispered. Whack.

  The flashlight’s dome lamp threw yellow and dark circles on the kitchen’s varnished lathe ceiling.

  “You cannot kill your vengeance spider like that, M’lissa Trish. Criminies, don’t you know a thing? He’s the haunt-catcher, don’t-you-know?”

  Feeling, at just that moment, bigger than herself, Melissa looked her cousin right down. “I did not. And I was not to know such a thing, now was I, cousin?”

  “Well it is a spirit-catcher,” Barbary Ann whispered. “That there in the can is waitin’ to be told what life it’s gonna catch and what it’s to become in the next world. You treat it with wishful respect, now.”

  “And that would be how?” Melissa gave the can another whomp. “How might we kill a thing respectfully?”

  “Why, you say worshipful words over him, alive. Then you grind him like you might could do a han’ful of cumin seed and make a pasty meal of him.” B.A. leaned and spoke words direct to M’lissa Trish’s ear. Her lips touched the hair that hung in sweated hanks from Melissa’s temple. The whispered words will not be repeated.

  “Ready?” Cousin Barbary Ann breathed.

  M’lissa Trish stood by Aunt Wallace’s mortar, the pestle poised to pulp the beast. “Ready… No, wait!” She retreated from the table and held the marble rod one-handed in front, drew her other arm away as though balancing with it.

  “You fixing to walk tightrope or wreak your vengeance?” B.A. whispered.

  “I am ready,” Melissa said.

  Barbary flipped the lid and whooped the can upside into the bowl.

  The spider flopped then scrabbled all eight directions at once. Melissa’s second or third downbeat whomped it. In fairness to her grit, her little grunted shrieks were quiet enough to not wake the house. The grown Toziers, above, therefore, did not hear Negro conjuring whispered in their kitchen that hot night. The whomp that first got the critter, knocked a lump of pale yellow jelly from the fat brown body, the loss of which did not improve the spider’s mood nor, it seemed, impair its ability to scramble the slick sides of the bowl. Another few strokes of the pestle, though, ground her up, legs, spider-hair, jelly, and eye-clusters. With each stroke, M’lissa tried her best to say the words her cousin had whispered. She squeaked them. Cousin Barbary prompted from behind. In 20, 25 repetitions of the short Negro verse, the back house spider was a gray paste in the bowl. By then, the effort had taken on the scent of cinnamon and cumin and cloves.

  That nearly was it. They ground it together with a measure of dry roasted chicory from the can then poured the mix in a packet M’lissa Trish carried with her as the two giggled quietly up the steps by the creep of morning light.

  Who could sleep after that? Anyway, the night was still hot and horrible. They waited until they heard Lady Cal, the colored lady, come to do for the Toziers, preparing breakfast, firing the stove to full heat for the day’s hot meal at lunch. The girls jumped to their clothes and ran down for the grits to be set to boil, the coffee to be perked, and cousin Rafe’s chicory to be steeped. Barbary Ann set a while and talked with Lady Cal. She talked about Lady Cal’s son, about the awful hot weather, about the best way to make poultice…

  M’lissa Trish hovered by the stove. Finally, Lady Cal turned and said, “Give that pot a stir now, so it don’t thicken to a lump!” Into the chicory Melissa poured
the contents of her envelope. If this is a film, Melissa thought as she poured, today, just today, someone else’ll decide for that stuff. Someone else’ll get struck down by my revenge. She swallowed hard as she poured. Maybe even my own self.

  But that morning it was just Rafe tucked full of chicory and swallowed down the charm of spider taken in the full of the moon. By that his soul was doomed to come wandering. The girls knew it. They giggled through breakfast, bit the insides of their cheeks so not to bust with laughing. Rafe stared and made faces, no idea in heck what those darn girls were about.

  M’lissa and B.A. cringed at one another other during the noon hot-meal and by cold supper were half-asleep and had pretty much forgotten it all. Except that evening, M’lissa Trish noticed a knothole in the wall above the stove, high up near the lathe-work ceiling. From the varnished pine knot, a pair of furry brown spider legs dangled into the dim light of the kitchen’s single bulb. The leg stayed through the meal.

  That’s right, Melissa Patricia remembered, that is right. SOMEbody’s soul has been caught. SOMEbody’s.

  Then there was that awful war, the Second World War. By the time M’lissa Trish returned to the south, grown into a lady (but not by much), Rafe Tozier was gone and dead, killed in the Pacific Theater of Operations, a U.S. Marine Corps Corporal, battlefield commission to Second Lieutenant pending. A terrible thing, the last boy gone from the Boy’s Room, gone from life, and no more to come bearing the Tozier name.

  The south to which 15-year-old Melissa (she now was just Melissa; a month before, she had favored Pat) returned was booming. Booming maybe, but it was a somewhat sadder place, a place of so many newly dead. In addition to the loss of Second Lieutenant (pending) Rafe Tozier, the passing of Old Strog (the oldest person Melissa had ever known) now further diminished the family. A year before, Strog had the last portion of his second leg cut off. He never fully recovered and certainly was not able to make the trip to the Corners where the Cities Service Whites-Only would welcome him. He now lay buried in pale red-earth alongside Rafe and a passel of Toziers, Wallaces, Preckwinkles, Leblancs and other older names and branches that braided the family back into the dark shadows before time had gathered them all together on this continent.

  Cousin Barbary Ann was inconsolable over the old man’s passing and about her brother. That surprised Melissa. B.A. seemed never actually to like the boy as others had. She always made faces, spoke unwell of him while others smiled and said loving things. B.A. spoke unwell of Rafe even in her short infrequent letters to Chicago, always found space to make firm-footed complaint of her brother, complaint that continued to the day he left for boot camp.

  In her even less-frequent replies, Melissa mentioned Rafe once, and that in benevolent observation of the news of his loss. She was shocked, of course. Maybe not shocked. Who is shocked over a single death in so vast a war? In a way, isn’t it expected, Death? Isn’t it magical, somehow, when someone doesn’t die? Still, she was surprised. To her credit, Melissa was touched by it. And, of course, she lamented the waste. So good-looking a boy being, well, wasted like that. She remembered his hair in the sun, the gold of him, his smile, the scent of…

  In further truth, however, Melissa could not say Rafe’s passing grieved her. Of course she had not the experience of the boy, day by day, an entire life-long. All she knew was the nasty summer boy who lived below the big house in the relative cool of the Boy’s Room and, once, had locked her in that damn smelly outhouse that one awful hot day. Then ignored her.

  There had been no summer visit for years. Thus, the cousins hugged tight when hugging was going around at the train station. Barbary Ann, who still liked that name, or, sometimes, just B.A., Barbary Ann had grown pretty and soft. Her face was matured by grief, Melissa thought.

  But, damn, if her tears weren’t fresh. And Rafe Tozier, months in the grave. But when Melissa thought the long close hug was over, B.A. clenched her again.

  “Buried a suit is what we did, cousin,” she confided to Melissa. B.A. expanded upon that as they settled into the same room at the top of the house. The house seemed smaller and bigger at once, the paint peeled more like scabs than ever. “Oh, cousin, we buried a uniform of clothes. And not even his, just Marine Corps dress with the medals he was owed and the officer bars that came awarded after he was gone.” She spoke with an edge of sweetness and horror, a question hanging in her voice.

  “Why?” Melissa barely said.

  “Nothing left for burial, the gov’ment said. Can you imagine?”

  “Imagine,” Melissa said. She looked at the floor as she shook her head. She did not want B.A. to see how dry her cheeks were. Dry not so much about Rafe, but over B.A. That cousin of mine, she hated to admit, is just a silly, pretty thing! Girl’ll never amount to anything.

  “Imagine? Nothing left of a whole human being,” B.A. sniffled. Then and there, looking at her cousin’s wet pretty face, Melissa remembered the night the two of them had spelled Rafe with that old ground-up spider.

  “Remember,” Melissa began. And she remembered that silly night.

  “Sometimes, you know, M’lissa, sometimes the best times we’ve got are the back end of the worst, darlin’!” Melissa couldn’t quite grasp that thought, but agreed to be nice. “So we all wish for a happy, happy end, some happy day.” With that, B.A. assembled a brave and miserably happy face.

  The visit’s second day was hotter. Bright heat hugged Melissa, every breath felt drawn through a steamed towel. “You’re young women now,” Aunt Wallace said. “Yes, and old enough to go shopping to town by yourselves.” With silent gravity, the War Board ration point-book was entrusted to niece Melissa from Illinois (“‘Land of Lincoln,’ indeed!”) and the girls were sent walking to Monocle.

  The heat rose in snaky waves from Mr. Roosevelt’s half-mile of Kingfish-inspired asphalt. Monocle was not so far as it was. The town had spread up that straightened WPA road and now covered over most of the old canal. Passing through the wartime bustle, the girls shopped for yard goods and notions, for canned and fresh and the weekly meat ration from Talifierro’s. Mr. Talifierro pointed with his long shiny chin as he weighed out their ration of bacon on the big white scale. “Look a’that nigger’s stroll, won’tcha?”

  The cousins turned to look. Crossing the busy main street, a small colored boy walked. He was deliberate, slow, looking no way but ahead, not frightened, paying heed neither to the uncertain clomp of horses and wagons or to the huge military vehicles as they cleared their big-geared diesel throats, downshifting. Sweating uniformed drivers swerved and cursed in rippling midday.

  “Niggras don’t care ’bout death, hisseff,” Mr. Talifierro said. “That’n at least! You’d think he was a haunt or something, ’stead of just a spook. Haw-haw.”

  A man or two picked up Mr. Talifierro’s muley haw-haws. A pair of small white boys leaned noses against the shop window. Some ladies shook their heads, fearful for the boy.

  Melissa bit the knuckles of her right hand until he reached the pavement and turned the corner. Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid boy. On the way home, their purchases dangling in a cotton web-bag hung between them, Barbary Ann grumbled. “Now I want you to know, Mr. Talifierro, there, was pure mush-mouthed ignorant,” she said, “calling that Negro boy a ‘nigger.’ Even, ‘niggra,’” she said. “Why, nobody—nobody—calls them that anymore, the coloreds. They are colored people, for goodness sake. Negroes.”

  The tale was brought out at table that evening. B.A. quoted butcher Talifierro on the subject of “spooks.”

  With the word “spook” raised twice in one day, the notion of “haints,” of ghosts, “spirits of air and waters” came to Melissa. Around her, in the silence between the still-sad adults at table, through the dark house and outside in twilight, there drifted the enduring dead. A suit of clothes, indeed, she thought. So thinking, Melissa remembered the night she and B.A. caught, killed, and ground that old wolf spider, fed it to cousin Rafe to vengeance his spirit for having locked her in the
outhouse dark. They’d done it right there, right where they sat. Melissa laughed into the hungry circle.

  “Why, what is tickling you, M’lissa Trish?” Aunt Wallace asked in the expectant silence. “Something amuse you?”

  “Just something,” Melissa said. “A little nothing long ago.”

  Everyone smiled and waited.

  “No, that’s all. Just a silly thing, something of no matter. Pay me no mind.”

  They stared until more important concerns arose. Of course she could not speak of cousin Rafe, his spirit caught and taken by the dust of a wolf spider. She couldn’t wrap a story of one so recently dead into a memory of silly girls shrieking in the night long ago. Of course the story was more about how the spider had nearly leaped on her and crawled over her hand in the outhouse and, all squished, had yet tried to run at her up the marble side of Aunt Wallace’s mortar bowl. Even so, no, she could not speak of curses and the beloved dead in one breath.

  Melissa smiled again when she noticed the knothole above the stove, where wall and ceiling met. She wondered if a small, hairy spider leg would show.

  It did not.

  Sweltering in bed next to cousin B.A., Melissa asked why, in all this heat, why had she not moved down to the Boy’s Room.

  “Silly thing. It is the Boy’s Room.”