– by Grandma Whittier
Dearest Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on this poor confused tormented and just plain scared-silly old soul down on her bony knees in the dark for the first time in heaven knows how long begging bless me and forgive me but honest to betsy Lord i always figured that for one thing you had enough sparrows to keep your eye on and that for another you had done answered this old bird her lifetime's share the time after papa and uncle dicker topple and brother took us kids to the tum-of-the-century worlds fair in little rock and i saw the wild man from borneo running around in a cage all ragged black and half naked with hair sticking out a foot making this crazy low and lonesome sound way down in his chest as he chased after a white chicken and finally caught it right where the crowd had pushed me up against the bars so i couldn 't help but see every yellow fang as he bit that chicken neck slick in two then hunkered down there staring directly into my popeyes chewing slobbering and would you believe grinning till i could not help myself but to go and throw up all over him which peeved him so he gave a howl of awful rage and run his hand through the bars at me screeching such a rumpus that the sideshow man had to go in the cage with a buggy whip and a stool and drive him back whining in a comer of the filthy old cage but not before i got my bonnet tore off and had been put in such a state that papa had to leave the other kids with uncle dicker and take me home sick with the shakes so abiding terrible that from that night on through the entire summer i could not be left alone in my room without a burning lamp and even then still had practically every nights rest ruint by thesehorrible nightmares how this black man not a negro but a wild primitive black man that had been trapped and took from his home and family in the jungles of borneo and was therefore already crazed with savage lonesomeness and hate and humiliation was bound and determined to bust out of that puny little sideshow pen and come after me because of the way i had vomited at the loathesome sight of him and late one autumn afternoon sure as shooting i had just walked little emerson t home from playing in our yard because it was getting towards dusk and on my way from the whittier place coming back towards topples bottom i saw the cane shaking and something coming through the canebrake and heard a kind of choked-off baying moan so chilling i froze cold in my tracks as it came closer and closer till O Lord there he was that big old ball of black hair and that mouth and that chicken flopping in his hand lumbering out of the cane right at me then you can bet i run run screaming bloody murder right acrost the road ruts through the gorse stickers and in that dim light blundered over the edge of a gully and lit headfirst in a pile of junk farm machinery and scrap iron that brother had put there to keep the soil from gullying away so fast and laid there on my back in kind of a coma so as i was still awake and could see and hear perfectly well but could not move so much as a muscle nor mouth to holler for help while tearing through the gorse and dust and blackberries right on down at me here came this wild black head and Loving Jesus as though i wasnt already scared enough to melt now i saw that he was not only going to get me but i wouldn't even be mercifully passed out so i prayed Lord i prayed in my mind like i never prayed before nor till this instant that if i could just die just happily die and not be mortified alive that on my solemnest oath i would never ask another blessed thing so help me Great Almighty God but then i saw it wasnt the wild man from borneo after all it was only the mute halfwit colored boy that lived with the whittiers cropping hands and as was the occasional custom of the coloreds at that time he had stole a legern pullet from the whittiers coop and the sound i had heard was a mix-up of his cleft pallet moaning the chicken squawking and whittiers old redbone hound bawling after him in a choked-off fashion because mr whittier kept the dog chained to a six-poundcannonball from his navy days that the dog was towing behind him through the brush and i thought oh me i prayed to die and now i am going to lie here paralyzed and bleed to death or something and not be mortified after all but then that mute boy seen me hurt at the bottom of the gully and tossed the chicken to the hound and climbed down and picked me up and carried me out of the gully and back through the stickers onto the road just in time for brother happening past to take one look at me all bloody being toted by a goo-gawking black idiot and knock him down with a cane stalk and beat him nearly to death before his daughter my niece sara run to get papa who brought me into pine bluff in the back of uncle dickers wagon with my head a bloody mess yet still wide-open-eyed in mamas lap and the boy roped behind the wagon gaping and gagging at me in the lanternlight waiting for me to tell them but i couldn't speak no more than he could while all the way papa and brother and the other men who joined our little procession kept talking about hangings too good for the inbred maniac he oughta be burnt or worse till they carried me on into doctor ogilvies downstairs parlor and undressed me and cleaned me and doctored my wound as best they could with the doctor shaking his head at papa and mama and my sisters crying and all the time me seeing the lanterns passing back and forth on the porch and hearing brother and the men talking about what they aimed to do to that boy should i not pull through like it looked like i wasnt and then my eyes finally closed and i let out a long last breath and sure enough i died.
It was the queerest thing. I sailed right up out of my body while Doctor Ogilvie was saying, I'm sorry, Topple, she's gone – sailed right over the town through the night right on up to Heaven where the streets were lit with pure gold and the angels were playing harps and the moth I presume did not corrupt. Heaven. But when I started to go through the gates that were all inlaid pearl precisely like they are supposed to be this huge tall angel with an enormous book says to me, Wait a minute, little girl; what's your name? I says Becky Topple and he says Becky Topple? Rebecca Topple? I thought so, Becky; you have been marked by the Blood of the Lamb of God Almighty and you aren't due up here for another good seventy-seven years! The Son of Man Hisself has you down for not less than one entire century of earthly service! You're to be a saint, Rebecca, did you know that? So you got to go on back, honey. I'm sorry…
And sent me sailing back through the clouds and the stars to Arkansas and Pine Bluff and Dr. Ogilvie's house all fluttering at the parlor windows with torches and lamps like big angry millers and right down through the roof. I swear it was absolutely the queerest sensation, seeing my body in that room with all my folks and family crying and little Emerson T struggling with his papa to get to me, crying Becky aint dead aint dead cant be dead as I just drifted back into my body like so much smoke being sucked back down a chimney and took a breath opened my eyes and sat up and told them that the mute boy had not harmed me. No. Quite the contrary. That I'd been fooling around that gully and fell into the scrap iron and he had come along and seen me and saved me, thank the Lord (I had my fingers crossed, and said another Thank the Lord to myself) and I have never bothered you about another single thing since that, Jesus, as I solemnly promised. What was there for me to ask, actually? I have never doubted that angel with the book. Not from that instant to this have I ever faced mortal danger, nor never thought I would have to, either -- leastways till nineteen eighty-something rolled around. And I always figured that by then I would be more than tickled to be getting shut of this wore-out carcass and battered old mug anyhow. So I swear to You with God and that tall angel as my witness that I am not shivering scared here on my knees like some dried-up old time miser pinchin life like her last measly pennies. Because I'm not. What I am asking for is I guess a sign of some kind, Lord; not more time. Running out of time simply is not what I'm scared of. What I am afraid of I can't put a name to yet, having just this day encountered it like finding a new-hatched freak of nature, but it is not of dying. Moreover I am not even sure whether my fear is of a real McCoy danger or not. Maybe the simple weight of years has finally made its crack in my reason like it has in poor Miss Lawn and in loony Mr. Firestone with his Communists behind every bush and in so many other tenants at the Towers lots of whom I know are way younger than me -- made its cruel crack in my mind so that all these sudden fears these shades and behind-every-bush boogers and all this dirty business that seems to have leaked in are nothin more than just another wild black mistake from Borneo this old white hen is making… is what I'm wanting to know, Lord Jesus, is the sign I'm praying for
I stopped when I heard something way off. Oh. Just that old log train tooting at the Nebo junction. Bringing the week's logging down from Blister Creek. Unless they had changed their schedule sometime since those sleepless nights years ago it meant it was getting near midnight. Good Friday's about to turn into what I guess a body might call Bad Saturday. It sure didn't feel like Eastertime. Too warm. This was the first time Easter would be late enough in April to have Good Friday fall on my birthday since it must of been the first spring after marrying Emery. That first Oregon spring. It was hot and peculiar then, too. Maybe it'd cool some yet, bring down the usual shower on the egg hunt. Still, driving out from Eugene this afternoon I noticed a lot of farmers already irrigating. And the night air dry as a bone. Blessed strange.
I clenched my lips and reminded myself in a calm voice, This isn't strange at all, Old Fool. This is me-and-Emery's old cabin, our old Nebo place. But another voice keeps hollering back, Then why's everything seem so hellish strange? Well, it must be because this is the first night away from Old Folks Towers in about a century. No, that don't account for it. I spent last Christmas and New Year's at Lena's and things was no stranger than usual. Besides, I felt it before I left the apartment. The moment my grandson phoned this morning I told him I didn't want to go. I says, "Why, boy, tonight the Reverend Dr. W. W. Poll is having an Inspiration Service down in the lobby that I couldn't miss!" Having accompanied me a time or two, and knowing that the doctor's services are about as inspirational as a mud fence, he just groans, ugh.
"Sweetheart, think of it as medical," I says. "Reverend Poll's sermons are as effective as any of my sleeping prescriptions," I says trying to kid him away from it.
So I felt it then. He kept at me, though. He's like his grandpa was that way, when he gets a notion he thinks is for somebody else's good. I carried the phone over to turn down Secret Storm, making excuses one after another why I can't go till at length he sighs and says he guesses he'll have to tell me the secret.
"The real reason, Grandma, is we're all having a birthday party – a surprise birthday party if you weren't such a stubborn old nannygoat."
I says, "Honey, I sure do thank you but when you get past eighty a birthday party is about as welcome a surprise as a new wart." He says that I hadn't been out to visit them in close to a year, blame my hide, and he wants me to see how they've fixed the place back up. Like for a grade, I thought: another trait of his grandpa's. I told him I was sorry but I did not have the faintest inclination to aggravate my back jouncing out to that dadgummed old salt mine (though it isn't really my back, the doctor says, but a gallbladder business aggravated by sitting, especially in a moving car). "It was forty years out there put me in this pitiful condition."
"Baloney," he says. "Besides, the kids have all baked this fantastic birthday cake and decorated it for Great-Grandma's birthday; their dear little hearts will be broken." I tell him to bring them and their dear little hearts both on into my apartment and we'd drink Annie Green Springs and watch the people down in the parking lot. Ugh, he says again. He can't stand the Towers. He maintains our lovely low-cost twenty-story ultra-modern apartment building is nothing more than a highrise plastic air-conditioned tombstone where they stick the corpses waiting for graves. Which it is, I can't deny, but plastic or no I make just enough on my Social Security and Natural Gas royalties to pay my way if I take advantage of Poor People's Housing. My own way.
"So I appreciate the invitation, sugar, but I guess I hadn't better disappoint the Reverend W. W. Poll. Not when he's just a short elevator ride as opposed to a long ordeal in an automobile. So you all bring that cake on over here. It'll do us old geezers good to see some kids." He tells me the cake's too big to move. I says "toobig?" and he says that they was having not only my party, see, but a whole day-long to-do with music and a service their ownselves and quite a few people expected. A sort of Worship Fair, he called it. "Al-so," he says, in that way he used to twist me around his finger, "the Sounding Brass are going to be here."
Grandkids always have your number worse than any of your own kids, and the first is the worst by a mile. "Don't you flimflam me, Bub! Not thee Sounding Brass." He says cross his heart; he picked them all up at the bus depot not three hours ago, swallowtails, buckteeth, and all, and they have promised to sing a special request for my birthday, even though they don't usually dedicate songs and haven't done it in years.
"And I will wager," he says, "you can't guess which one." His words some way more extravagant than's even usual for him. I don't answer. I heard it then. "They are going to sing that version of 'Were You There' that you used to like so much." I say "You remember that? Why, it's been twenty years since I had that record if it's been a day." "More like thirty," he says. He said al-so as far as the ride went they had a special bus with a full-size bed in it coming for me at four on the dot. "So don't give me any more of that bad back baloney. This is your day to party!"
I realized what it was then, to some extent. There was somebody else with him, standing near at the other end of the line so he was grooming his voice for more than just his granny. Not Betsy, nor Buddy. Somebody else.
"In fact it could be your night to party as well. Better throw some stuff in a sack."
After we hung up I was in a kind of dither to think who. I started to turn my program back up, but it was the ad for denture stickum where the middle-aged ninny is eating peanuts. So I just switched the wretched thing clean off and stood there by the window, looking down at Eugene's growing traffic situation. Zoom zoom zoom, a silly bunch of bugs. The Towers is the highest building in all Eugene unless you count that little one-story windowless and doorless cement shack situated on top of Skinner's Butte. Some kind of municipal transmitter shack is I guess what it is. It was up there just like it stands today the very first time Emerson T and me rode to the top of the butte. We drove if I'm not mistaken a spanking brand-new 1935 Terraplane sedan of a maroon hue that Emerson had bought with our alfalfa sales that spring. Eugene wasn't much more than a main street, just some notion stores and a courthouse and Quackenbush's Hardware. Now it sprawls off willy-nilly in all directions as far as a person can see, like some big old Monopoly game that got out of hand. That little shack is the only thing I can think of still unchanged, and I still don't know what's in it.
I picked up Emerson T's field glasses from my sill and took them out of their leather case. They're army glasses but Emery wasn't in the army; when they wouldn't let him be a chaplain he became a conscientious objector. He won the glasses at Bingo. I like to use them to watch the passenger trains arrive Monday nights, but there isn't much to watch of a Friday noon. Just that new clover-leaf, smoking around in circles and, O, whyever had I let him make me say yes? I could still hear my pulse rushing around his words in my ears. I turned the glasses rear-way-round and looked for a while that way, to try to make my heart slow its pit-a-pat (nope, it hadn't been Betsy or Buddy, nor none of his usual bunch that I could think of offhand), when, without so much as a by-your-leave or a kiss-my-foot, there, right at my elbow, sucking one of my taffy-babies and blinking those blood-rare eyes of hers up at me was that dadblessed Miss Lawn!
"Why Mrs. Whittier -"
Made me jump like a frog. Her eyes, mainly. Vin rose bloodshot. She puts away as much as a quart before lunch somedays; she told me so herself. "- don't you realize you are looking through the wrong end again?" She shuffles from foot to foot in those gum-rubber slippers she wears then, in a breath that would take the bristles off a hog, she coos "I heard your television go off, then when it didn't come back on I was worried something might be the matter…?"
She wears those things for just that purpose, too: slipping. I know for a fact that as soon as she hears my toilet flush or one of my pill bottles rattle she slips into her bathroom to see if my medicine cabinet is left open. Our bathrooms are back-to-back and the razor-blade disposal slot in her medicine cabinet lines right up with the razor-blade disposal slot on my medicine cabinet, and if she don't watch out one of these days I'm going to take a fingernail file and put one of those poor bloodshot eyeballs out of its misery. Not actually. We're old acquaintances, actually. Associates. Old maids and widows of a feather. I tell her if she must know I turned it off to talk over the telephone.
"I thought I heard it ring," she says. "I wondered if it might be Good Book Bob dialing you for dollars again."
Once KHVN phoned and asked me who it was said "My stroke is heavier than my groaning." I remembered it was Job because the Book of Job was the only book of the Bible Uncle Dicker ever read aloud to me (he claimed it was to help me reconcile my disfigurement but I personally think it was because of him constantly suffering from his rupture), and when I answered right and won forty dollars and a brass madonna of unbreakable Lucite, Miss Lawn never got over it. If I was in the tub or laid down napping and the phone rang more'n once she'd scoot all the way around from her place in time to answer the third ring, just in case it might be another contest. That's how she thinks of me and of what she refers to as my "four-leaf-clover life." Sometimes she comes in and waits for it to ring. She swears up and down that I must be hard of hearing because she always knocks before she comes in; all I say is it must be with a gum-rubber knuckle.
"Well, it was not Good Book Bob," I assure her, "it was my grandson."
"The famous one?"
I just nodded and snapped the field glasses away in their case. "He's coming in a special bus this afternoon to take his grandmother to a big surprise party everybody's giving her." I admit I was rubbing it in a bit but I swear she can aggravate a person. "I'll probably be away to the festivities all evening," I says.
"And miss Reverend Poll's special service? and the donuts and the Twylight Towers Trio? Mrs. Whittier, you must be delirious!"
I told her I was attending another service, and instead of those soggy donuts was having a fantastic cake. But I didn't have the heart to Lord it over her about the Sounding Brass, though. Them eyes were already going from red to green like traffic lights. In the entire year and a half she's lived in the apartment next door I believe the only visits she's had from the outside is Jehovah's Witnesses. I says, I am, Miss Lawn: dee-lirious, and that I was going to have myself a good long hot soak in Sardo before I popped with delirium. So, if she would excuse-a pliz -- and went strutting into the bathroom without another word.
I like Miss Lawn well enough. We went to the same church for years and got along just fine, except her seeming a little snooty. I reckoned that came from her being a Lawn of the Lawn's Sand & Gravel Lawns, a rich old Oregon family and very high society around Eugene. It wasn't till Urban Renewal forced her to follow me to the Towers that I realized what a lonesome soul she actually was. And jealous… she can't hardly stand how people make over me. She says the way people make over me you'd think I was the only one in the building. I always say, Ah, now, I don't know about that, but I am glad people like me. Well, she says, they ought to like me; I never done anything to make people dislike me! I say, All I do is try and be nice and she says, Yeah, but you're too nice with them, gushy, whether they're good folks or bad; if I had to get friends by being too gushy like that I don't want 'em. Actually, I'm pretty snippy with people, but I say, Yeah, well, if you're gonna make friends you're gonna make 'em by loving thy neighbor, not all the time acting like you're passing judgment on him. Besides, I never ran into anybody I didn't think but was good folks, you get deep enough down. And she says, Well, when you been around as much as me you sure will find different; something will happen someday and you'll find out that there are some people who are rotten all the way down! "Then," she says, "we'll see how that mushy love-thy-neighbor way of yours holds up."
Forlorn old frog; what other world could she expect with that kind of outlook? Like Papa used to say: It's all in how you hold your mouth. Oh well, I don't know. A little later I called out to her that there was a bottle of cold wine in my Frigidaire.
I filled my tub just as steaming hot as I could stand and got in. The Sounding Brass! The last and of course only other time I'd been fortunate enough to hear them was after Lena left home to marry Daniel. I got so blue that Emerson drove me back to Arkansas for a family reunion and on the way back through Colorado took me to the Sunrise Service at the Garden of the Gods where the Brass family absolutely stole the show. Afterwards Emery became the Deacon Emerson Thoreau Whittier and traveled to a lot of religious shindigs. I usually begged off accompanying him; somebody needs to keep track of the farm, I'd say. After the house burned and we moved into town I came up with other excuses. Like Emerson's driving being so uncertain that it gave me the hiccups. Which it did. But it wasn't just that, nor just cars. It's anything scurrying around, helter and yon; get here, get there; trains, buses, airplanes, what-all. Right this minute my lawyers tell me I am taking a loss of sixty-five dollars a month on my gas check simply by putting off journeying to Little Rock to sign some papers in person. But I don't know. Consider the lilies, I say, they toil not, speaking of which I hear my Frigidaire door slam as Miss Lawn got over her snit in the other room, then the lid of my cut-crystal candy dish, then my television came back on. The poor old frog. When I finally finished my rinse and come out in my robe it was still on, blaring. Miss Lawn was gone, though, as was most of the candy I'd planned to take to the kids at the farm and all the Annie Green Springs.
I recognized my ride the instant it turned the corner into the parking lot. Even eighteen stories down and before I got out the field glasses there was no mistaking it, a big bus, all glistening chrome and gleaming white and five big purple affairs painted on the side of it in the formation of a flying cross. When I got them into focus I seen they were birds, beautiful purple birds. It turned and parked in the Buses Only and opened its front door. I saw get out first what I could tell immediately was my grandson by his big shiny forehead: another trait from his grandpa's side.
Then, behind him, bobble-butting out the bus door, come that big-mouthed doughball of a character from Los Angeles by the name of Otis Kone. Otis is a kind of full-grown sissy and has always rubbed me the wrongest of any of my grandson's gang. For instance the way he stood there, looking at the Towers like he might buy it. He had on a little black beanie and around his rump he had strapped a belt with a scabbard. He pulled out a big long sword and flashed it around his head for the benefit of all. About the only good I can say about Otis is that he always goes back to Southern California as soon as our rains start in the fall, and stays there till they stop. Which is to say he stays away most of the year, praise the Lord. Watching him parade around Devlin with that sword I says to myself, Uh-huh, that's who was giving me the willies from the other end of the phone!
Then, out come this other fellow. A big fellow, draped in white from crown to toe like an Arab. Was he something! I strained through the glasses to see if I knew him but his face was all a-swirl. In fact, it seemed that he was wrapped in a kind of slow swirl. He come out of that bus and sailed about like he was moving fast and slow at the same time, pausing in midair to reach back for somebody else then swirling around again, opening like a flower as he lit down. I saw he had a little child who was also dressed in white but only in short pants and shirt with nothing over his head. It was quite apparent then that both of them were of the black race. He set the little child on his shoulder and followed Otis with his sword and my grandson with his forehead into the building, out from beneath my sight. But you could imagine it: Miss Prosper the nurse and receptionist craning over the top of her Organic Gardening, the rest of the lobby loafers looking up from their games and so on. I bet you didn't hear so much as a checker move.
I just had time to get the last clippie out of my hair before there came two quick knocks at my door, then one, then two more.
"Let me in queeck, Varooshka; they are on to us! Ve must atomize the feelm!"
It was of course that nitwit Otis. I shudder to think what would have happened had he pulled that at Mr. Firestone's door by mistake. I opened as far as the chain would let me and seen it was just a wooden stage sword painted silver. He was wearing some patched-up baggy pants and the fly not even zipped. "Sorry," I says, "I gave all my rags to the mission," and made like to slam it before I said, O I am sorry. They laughed at that.
"Happy Birthday," Devlin says, hugging me. "You remember Otis Kone?"
I took Otis's hand. "Sure." I give it a good squeeze, too. "Sure I remember Otis Kone. Otis comes up from California every summer to try and get my goat." To which Otis says, "It's not your goat I'm after, Granny," wiggling his eyebrows, then made to reach for me. I spronged his fat little fingers with a clippie, harder'n I meant. He howled and duckfooted around the hall like Groucho. I told him to get his pointed head in out of the hall before somebody called the Humane Society. He slunk past so low I had to laugh in spite of myself. He is a clown. I was about to apologize for ragging him when the third fellow glided into sight.
"Grandma, this is my longtime friend M'kehla," Devlin says, "and his son Toby."
"Mrs…?" he asks. I tell him it's Whittier and he bows and says, "It's Montgomery Keller-Brown, Mrs. Whittier. The name M'kehla was… what would you say, Dev? a phase?" Then he smiles back at me and holds out his hand. "Everyone has told me about Great-Grandma. I'm very honored."
He was even grander than through the field glasses: tall, straight-backed, and features like the grain in a polished wood, a rare hardwood, from some far-off land (though I could tell by his voice he was as country southern as I was). Most of all, though, with a set to his deep dark gaze like I never saw on another earthly being. I found myself fiddling at my collar buttons and mumbling howdy like a little girl.
"And this man-child," he says, "is called October." I let go the hand, feeling relieved, and looked to the little feller. About five years old and cute as a bug, squinting bright up at me from behind his daddy's robe. I lean down at him. "Was that when you was born, honey? October?" He don't move a hair. I'm used to how little kids first take how I look, but his daddy says, "Answer Mrs. Whittier, October." I say, "It's all right. October don't know if this ugly old woman is a good witch who's going to give him one of her taffy-babies or a bad witch gonna eat him up," and stuck my false teeth out at him. That usually gets them. He eases out of the shrouds of his daddy's robe. He didn't smile but he opened his eyes wide enough so I suddenly seen what it was made them so strangely bright.
"Toby is the name I like best," he says.
"Okay, Toby, let's get some candy before that Otis consumes it all."
We all come in and I got refreshments. The men chattered about my apartment and low-income housing before they got around to what they had come about, the Worship Fair. I let little Toby look through the field glasses while my grandson showed me a little program of what was going to be happening. I said it looked like it was going to be a real nice affair. Otis dug down into one of his big pockets and come up with a handbill of his own that said ARE YOU PREPARED? with a picture of him in a priest's outfit. He was looking up at the sky through the tube out of a roll of toilet tissue, his mouth saying in big black letters "THE CHICKENWIRE PARACHUTE IS COMING," I knew it was just more of Otis's nonsense but I folded it up, put it in my overnight bag, and told him I was always prepared. And that I notice he is, too, and reach down like to zip up his baggy old pants. He turns his back to do it himself, ears red as peppers. Somebody's got to teach these city kids, I tell Mr. Keller-Brown, and he laughs. My grandson hefts at my bag and says, "Unh, who do you usually get to carry your purse?" I told him, "Don't razz a woman about her essentials," and if he didn't think he was stout enough to handle it I bet little Toby could. The little boy put the glasses right down and came and started to lug at the purse. I says, "Aint we the good little helper, though?"
Mr. Keller-Brown smiles and says, "We work on being the good helper, don't we, Tobe?" and the little fellow nodded back.
"Yes, Daddy."
I couldn't help but gush a little bit. "What a change from most of the little kids you see being let go hog wild these days, what a gratifying change."
The main elevator was still being used to clear out the collection of metal they found when they opened poor Mr. Fry's apartment, so we had some wait for the other one. I said I hoped we didn't miss the Brass family. Devlin says we got plenty of time. He said did I know that Mr. Keller-Brown was part of a gospel singing group himself? I says, Oh? What are you called? Because I might have heard them on KHVN. Mr. Keller-Brown says they were called the Birds of Prayer but he doubted I'd heard them, not on AM.
The elevator arrived with Mrs. Kennicut from 19 and the two Birwell sisters. I told them good afternoon as I was escorted on by a big black Arab. You could have knocked their eyes off with a broomstick. Otis gave them each one of his handbills, too. Nobody says a thing. We went down a few floors, where a maintenance man pushed on carrying a big pry bar much to Mrs. Kennicut's very apparent relief. He don't say anything either, but he hefts his pinch bar to his shoulder like a club. So nothing will do but Otis take out his sword and hold it on his shoulder, too.
We slid on down, packed tight and tense. I thought Boy, is this gonna cause a stink around me for months to come – when, from below, I felt this little hand slip up into mine and heard a little voice say, "It's crowdy, Grandma. Pick me up." And I lifted him up, and held him on my hip the rest of the ride down, and carried him right on out through that lobby, black curls, brown skin, blue eyes, and all.
I seen some rigs around Eugene – remodeled trailers and elegant hippie buses and whatnot – but I never saw anything on wheels the beat of this outfit of Mr. Keller-Brown's. Class-y, I told Mr. Keller-Brown, and was it ever. From the five purple birds on the side right down to a little chrome cross hood ornament. Then, inside: I swear it was like the living room of a traveling palace: tapestries, a tile floor, even a little stone fireplace! All I could do was gape.
"I just helped minimally," he explained. "My wife is the one that put it together."
I told him he must have quite some wife. Otis puts in that Montgomery Keller-Brown did indeed have quite some wife, plus his wife had quite some father, who had quite some bank account… which might have helped minimally as well. I watched to see how Mr. Keller-Brown was going to take this. It must be touchy enough for a Negro man to be married to a white girl, then if she's rich to boot… But he just laughed and led me toward the rear of the rig.
"Devlin told me about your back. I've got a chair here I think might suit you, a therapeutic recline-o-lounger." He pushed back a big leather chair. "Or there's the bed" – then ran his hand over a deep purple wool bedspread on a king-size bed fixed right into the back of the bus.
"Fiddlesticks," I says. "I hope it never gets to where I'm not capable of sitting in a chair like a human. I'll sit here awhile, then maybe I'll lay on that bed awhile, as my fancy takes me!" He took my arm and helped me into the chair, my face burning like a beet. I pulled my dress down over my legs and asked them what they were waiting on, anyhow. I could feel twenty stories of wrinkled old noses pressed to their windows as we drove out of the lot.
Me and my grandson gossiped a bit about what was happening with the family, especially Buddy, who seemed to be getting in two messes with his dairy business as quick as he got out of one. Up front, Otis had found a pint bottle of hooch from one of his big baggy pockets and was trying to share it with Mr. Keller-Brown at the wheel. Devlin saw the bottle and said maybe he'd better go up and make sure that addlehead doesn't direct us to Alaska or something. I told him, Phooey! I didn't care if they drunk the whole bottle and all three fell out the door; Toby and me could handle things! Devlin swayed away up to the front, and pretty soon the three men were talking a mile a minute.
The boy had his own little desk where he had been piddling with some Crayolas. When Devlin left he put the Crayolas back in the desk and eased out of the seat and sidled back to where I was. He took a National Geographic out of the bookcase and made like to read it on the floor beside my chair. I smiled and waited. Pretty quick sure enough his big blue eyes came up over the top of the book and I said peek-a-boo. Without another word he put the book down and crawled right up into my lap.
"Did Jesus do that to your face?" he asks.
"Why, don't tell me you're the only boy who never heard what Tricker the Squirrel done for the Toad?" I says and went into the tale about how Mr. Toad used to be very very beautiful in the olden times, with a face that shined like a green jewel. But his bright face kept showing the bugs where he was laid in wait for them. "He would have starved if it wasn't for Tricker camouflaging him with warts, don'cher see?"
He nodded, solemn but satisfied, and asks me to tell him another one. I started in about Tricker and the Bear and he went off to sleep with one hand holding mine and the other hanging onto my cameo pendant. Which was just as well because the therapeutic recline-o-lounger was about to kill me. I unclasped the gold chain and slipped out from under him and necklace both.
I backed over to the bed and sunk down into that purple wool very near out of sight. It was one of those waterbeds and it got me like quicksand, only my feet waggling up over the edge. Very unladylike. But wiggle and waggle as I might I could not get back up. Every time I got to an elbow the bus would turn and I would be washed down again. I reminded myself of a fat old ewe we used to have who would lose her balance grazing on a slope and roll over and have to lay there bleating with her feet in the air till somebody turned her right side up. I gave up floundering and let the water slosh to and fro under me while I looked over the selection in Mr. Keller-Brown's bookcase. Books on every crazy thing you ever heard of, religions and pyramids and mesmerism and the like, lots with foreign titles. Looking at the books made me someway uneasy. Actually, I was feeling fine. I could've peddled a thousand of these waterbeds on TV: "Feel twenty years younger! Like a new woman!" I had to giggle; all the driver would have to do was look in that mirror and see the New Woman's runny old nylons sticking spraddled into the air like the hindquarters of a stranded sheep.
And I swear, exactly while I was thinking about it, it seemed I felt sure enough a heavy dark look brush me, like an actual touch, Lord, like an actual physical presence.
The next I know we were pulling into the old Nebo place. Devlin was squeezing my foot. "Thought for a minute you'd passed on," he teased.
He took my arm to help me out of bed. I told him I'd thought so for a while, too, till I saw that familiar old barn go by the bus window. "Then I knew I wasn't in no Great Beyond."
The bus stopped and I sit down and put on my shoes. Mr. Keller-Brown came back and asked me how my nap was.
"I never had such a relaxing ride," I tell him. "Devlin, you put one of these waterbeds in your convertible and I just might go gallivantin'." Mr. Keller-Brown says, Well, they were going to drive to Los Angeles to sing Sunday morn and he would sure be proud to have me come along. I told him if things kept going my way like they had been I just might consider it. Little Toby says, "Oh, do, Grandma; do come with us." I promised all right I would consider it just as Mr. Keller-Brown scooped him up from the recline-o-lounger, swinging him high. I see he's still got a-holt of my pendant.
"What's this?" Mr. Keller-Brown asks. He has to pry it from the little tyke's fingers. "We better give this back to Mrs. Whittier, Tobe." He hands me the necklace but I go over and open the little, desk top and drop it in amongst the Crayolas.
"It's Toby's," I told them, "not mine." I said an angel came down and gave it to Toby in his dreams. Toby nods sober as an owl and says Yeah, Daddy, an angel, and adds – because of the cameo face on it was why, I guess – "A white angel."
Then Otis hollers, "Let's boogie for Jesus!" and we all go out.
We'd parked kind of on the road because the parking area (what used to be Emerson T's best permanent pasture) was full to overflowing – cars, buses, campers, and every sort of thing. The Worship Fair was going like a three-ring circus. There was people as thick as hair on a dog sitting around, strolling around, arguing, singing. A long-haired skinny young fellow without shoes or shirt was clamping a flyer under every windshield wiper, and a ways behind him another longhair was sticking christ's the one to the bumpers and sneaking off the flyers when the first kid wasn't looking. The first one caught the second and there then ensued a very hot denominational debate. Otis went over with his sword to straighten it all out and pass out some flyers of his own.
Across the orchard I could see they'd built a stage on the foundation where the house used to stand. At the microphone a girl was playing a zither and singing scripture in a nervous shaky voice. Devlin asked me if I knew the verse she was singing and playing. I says I thought the singing vas verse than the playing, but it vas a toss-up.
Back behind the stage we found Betsy and the kids. The kids wanted to give me my presents right off but Betsy told them to wait for the cake. The men went off to take care of getting the next act onstage and I went off with Betsy and the kids to look how their garden already was coming up. Caleb led Toby on ahead through the gate, hollering, "I'll show you something, Toby, that I bet you don't have in your garden." And Betsy told me that it was a mama Siamese, had her nest in the rhubarb.
"She just has one kitten. She had six hidden out in the hay barn but Devlin backed the tractor over five of them. She brought the last one into the garden. He's old enough to wean but that mama cat just won't let him out of the rhubarb."
We strolled along, looking how high the peas were and how the perennials had stood the big freeze. When we got to the rhubarb there was little Toby amongst the leaves hugging the kitten and grinning for all he was worth.
"That's the first time I seen the little scoot smile," I told Betsy.
"Toby can't have our kitten, can he, Mom?" Caleb asks. Betsy says if it's all right with his folks it was most decidedly all right with her. I said with all the traffic maybe we'd better leave the kitty in the garden until he asks his mama. The smile went away but he didn't turn loose. He stood there giving us a heart-tugging look. Betsy said he could carry it if he was careful. "We'll ask M'kehla," she says.
All the rest of the afternoon Toby hung on to that cat for dear life, Caleb worrying at him from one side and the anxious mama cat from the other.
Sherree took me in to show me her new curtains and we all had some mint tea. We could hear things out at the stage getting worked up. We moseyed back just as an all-boy chorus from Utah was finishing up. People had commenced to push in towards the stage so's it was pretty thick, but the kids had saved me a nice shady spot with a blanket and some of those tie-dyed pillows.
I didn't see Devlin or Mr. Keller-Brown, but that Otis, he was impossible to miss. He was reeling around in front of the stage making a real spectacle of himself, getting all tripped up in his sword, which was worked round between his legs, hollering Hallelujah and Amen and Remember Pearl Harbor. And somebody had spray-painted across the rump of his baggy pants: "The Other Cheek." I told Betsy he hadn't better turn that other cheek to me if he knew what was good for him.
The announcer was one of the local ministers. After the all-boys from Utah he asked if we couldn't have a little quiet and a little respect – he said this right at Otis, too – "a little respect for one of the all-time great gospel groups of all time: The Sounding Brass!" I says good, just in time, and sits me down on one of them pillows.
It started just like in Colorado Springs; a gong was rung backstage, soft and slow at first, then faster and faster and louder and louder. It's very effective. Even Otis set down. The gonging rose and rose until you thought the very sky was gonna open and, when you thought you couldn't stand it a moment more, made one last hard loud bang and they came running on stage and went right into "Ring Them Bells," the world-famous Sounding Brass.
At first I thought we all had been tricked! The Sounding Brass? These five old butterballs? Why, the Sounding Brass is tall and lean with natural red hair that shines like five halos, not these sorry old jokes. Because I mean to tell you the men didn't have a hundred scraggly old white hairs divided between the four of them! Plus the woman was wearing a wig looked like it had been made out of wire and rusted. And I'm darned if she didn't have on a minidress! I could see the veins from fifty feet away.
I finally just shook my head; it was them, all right. All their movements and gestures were exactly those I remembered. But it looked like they'd been set to moving and then forgot the grease. And their voices, they were just horrible. I don't mean old – I know a lot of older groups who sing fine, creaks, whistles, and all – I mean thin, hollow, like whatever had been there had been scraped away and left five empty shells. I recall reading how they'd had a lot of income tax problems; maybe that done it. But they were surely pathetic. They finished a couple of songs and people give them a little hand of pure charity. Then Jacob Brass stepped to the microphone.
"Thank you and buh-less you all," he says. "Now, the next number… well, we hear from reliable sources that it is the favorite of a very fine lady out there having her birthday on this beautiful spring day. Eighty-six years young. So puh-raise the Lord this Good Friday song is especially ded-icated to our Good Friday Birthday Girl, Mrs. Rebecca Whittier!"
I wanted to dig a hole and crawl in it. And let me tell you: if they sounded bad on their faster numbers they now sounded downright pitiful. To make matters worse that dad-blamed Otis got going again. They'd sing, "Were you there… when they nailed Him to the cross?" and Otis would answer back, "Not me, youse mugs! I was in Tarzana drinking Orange Juliuses I can prove it!" loud enough the people got to laughing. Which of course only encouraged him.
"Pierced Him in the side? Ech. I wasn't there then, either. I don't even go t' roller derby."
The Brass family was so peeved by the laughter that to the secret relief of all they stalked offstage as soon as they finished two choruses, absolutely furious.
Betsy says she's sorry my favorite number got messed up and I says me too, but little Toby says, very seriously, that it'll be alright, because here comes his folks. Then did the crowd hoop and holler! The Birds of Prayer was the other end of the stick from the Brass family. They pranced out all in purple, Mr. Keller-Brown and another big black fellow with a beard, and three pretty little colored girls. The fellow with the beard played organ and sung bass, and Mr. Keller-Brown played those big native drums and kind of come in now and then, talking to them. The three colored girls sung and played guitars and shook tambourines. After the Brass family they were like a breath of fresh air. My grandson comes through the crowd toward us, bouncing up and down to the rhythm.
"How'd you like your dedication?" he asks, taking a pillow alongside me so's he can reach the deviled eggs. I tell him it was fine but not a candle to them kids singing up there now. He grins, his lips all mustard. "So you like the Birds better'n the Brass?" A bushel, I say, that they were as good as anything I ever heard on KHVN. But I thought somebody said Mr. Keller-Brown's wife was one of the group? He says, "She is. That's her on the left." And before I thought I says, "But what about our little -" I stopped before I said "blue-eyed," but I'd said enough. My grandson shrugged and Betsy put a finger to her lips, rolling her eyes over at the little boy sitting there petting his kitty.
I could have bit my stupid tongue off.
Then the next thing that happened was after sundown. After the main of the crowd drove away or drifted off, a bunch of us walked down to the ash grove for my cake. Mr. Keller-Brown had pulled his bus down there and the kids had set up a table in front of where the cake was waiting. They sung "Happy Birthday, Great-Grandma" while Quiston scampered around with a box of matches trying to keep all those candles lit.
"Here!" says I. "You kids help Grandma blow 'em out before we start the woods a-blaze."
There was Devlin's three, Quiston, Sherree, and Caleb, and Behema's Kumquat May, and Buddy's Denny and Denise, and the usual passel of Dobbs kids all circled close to be first at the cake. Quite a cluster. I seen little Toby way in the back outside this ring of glowing faces. He was still holding that cat.
"Let Toby in there, Quiston. This many candles gonna need all the breath we can muster. Okay, everybody? One… two…" – with all of them drawing a lungful except little Toby there, his chin resting between the ears of that Siamese kitty, both of them looking right at me, expressions absolutely the same – "blow!"
When I could see again, his daddy was standing right where he'd stood, lighting a Coleman lantern. He'd changed out of his purple jumpsuit into his most spectacular outfit so far.
"Goodness me! Aren't you something! You're almost as pretty as this cake."
Actually, the cake looked like one of them lumpy tie-dye pillows whereas his robe was an absolutely beautiful affair, purple velvet and gold trim and wriggling front and back with some of the finest needlepointing I ever saw – dragons, and eagles, and bulls you could practically hear snorting. He thanked me kindly and did a slow swirl with the lantern held up hissing above him.
"You must've locked your little woman home with needle and thread for about six months," I says. I'd had a glass of sherry with Betsy before and was feeling feisty.
"Nope," he says, starting to ladle out paper cups of punch for the kids. "It only took three months. And I made it."
"Well, my, my," I says, aiming to tease him was all, "I never seen anything so delicate done by a man."
The kids all laugh again but he took it some way wrong and the laugh died off too quick. Instead of responding to my rib he went right back to handing out that punch. To try to smooth over my foolishness I says, "Go on. I bet your wife did too make it." By way of apology. But before he could accept my effort Otis stumbles up and butts across the front of us to take a Dixie cup.
"Oh, I'll vouch for M'kehla's wife, Grandma, she doesn't make anything." Otis pours the cup about half full of brandy before he adds, "Anymore."
The quiet got even quieter. I thought he was going to look two holes in the top of Otis's head. But Otis keeps sniffing his nose down in his booze like he don't notice a thing.
"My first Christian communion and from a Dixie cup," he moans. "How rural. At my Bar Mitzvah we drank from at least clear plastic."
After his success aping the Brass family, Otis had got worse and worse, singing and reciting and cutting up. Yet everybody had took it in good humor. Devlin told me once that Otis was like he was because he'd been given too much oxygen at birth, so nobody generally took offense at what he said. But you could tell Mr. Keller-Brown was aggravated, too much oxygen or whatever. He reached over and snagged the paper cup out of Otis's hand and threw it hissing into the fire.
"Is this your first communion, Mr. Kone? We'll just have to get something more fitting for your first communion."
I noticed back by the fire his wife's sister stood up from where she'd been talking with my two grandsons and Frank Dobbs.
Mr. Keller-Brown turns from Otis and hands me the punch ladle. "If you'll take over, Mrs. Whittier, I'll see if we can't find Mr. Kone a more appropriate vessel."
The sister comes hurrying over and says, "I'll get it, Montgomery -" but he says No, he'd do it, and she stops on a dime. Otis reaches for another cup mumbling something about not to trouble and he says No, it's no trouble and Otis's hand stops just the same way. He still hasn't looked up to Mr. Keller-Brown's eyes.
The kids are beginning to get upset, so I say, "Why, if Mr. Kone gets a glass to drink out of, Mr. Keller-Brown, oughten I get a glass to drink out of?"
Little Sherree, who is a Libra and a smart little peacemaker in her own right, joins in and says, "Yeah, it's Great-Grandma's birthday." And the other kids and Toby, too, says yeah yeah, Grandma gets a glass too! Those eyes lift off Otis and move to me.
"Certainly," he says, laughing off his temper. "Forgive me, Mrs. Whittier." He winked to me and jerked his thumb back at Otis by way of explanation. I winked and nodded back to indicate I knew precisely what he meant, that many's the time I wanted to wring that jellyroll's neck myself.
He went into the bus and the kids went back at the cake and ice cream. I never could stand having people fight around me. I've always been handy at oiling troubled waters. Like when I was living with Lena: Devlin and Buddy would get in terrible squabbles over whose turn it was to mow the lawn. While they were fussing I'd go get the lawn mower and mow away till they came sheepfaced out to take over. (More handy than straightforward, to be honest.) So I thought the storm was past when Mr. Keller-Brown come back out with three dusty brandy glasses and shared some of Otis's brandy. I blew at the dust and filled mine with the kids' punch and all of us clinked glasses and toasted my birthday. Otis said that he would sympathize with me, being eighty-sixed quite a number of times himself. Everybody laughed and he was down from the hook. Five minutes later he was running off at the mouth as bad as ever.
I opened my little pretties and doodads the kids had made me and gave them all a big hug. Buddy rolled some logs up to the fire. We sat about and sung a few songs while the kids roasted marshmallows. Frank Dobbs stamped around playing the mouth harp while the big black fellow with the beard patted at Mr. Keller-Brown's drums. Devlin strummed the guitar (though he never could play worth sour apples) and the fire burnt down and the moon come up through the new ash leaves. Betsy and Buddy's wife took their kids up to the house. Mr. Keller-Brown took Toby into the bus, him still hugging the kitty. He brought out a jar of little pellets that he sprinkled into the embers. Real myrrh, he said, from Lebanon. It smelled fresh and sharp, like cedar pitch on a warm fall wind, not sickening sweet like other incense. Then he brought out some pillows and the men settled down to discussing the workings of the universe and I knew it was time for me to go to bed.
"Where's that giant purse of mine?" I whispered to my grandson.
He says, "It's in the cabin. Betsy has made the bed for you. I'll walk you up that way." I told him never mind; that the moon was bright and I could walk my way around this territory with a blindfold on anyway, and told them all good night.
The crickets were singing in the ash trees, happy that summer was here. I passed Emerson's old plow; somebody had set out to weld it into a mailbox stand and had apparently give up and just left it to rust in the weeds, half plow and half mailbox. It made me sad and I noticed the crickets had hushed. I was taking my time, almost to the fence, when he was suddenly in front of me – a sharp black pyramid in the moonlight, hissing down at me.
"Backdoor! Don't you never come backdoorin' on me or my little boy again, understand? Never! Y' understand?"
Of course I was petrified. But, truth to tell, looking back, not utterly surprised. For one thing I knew immediately who it was behind that black pyramid and that hissing gutter drawl. For another, I knew what he was talking about.
"The motherfuckin necklace I let pass 'cause I say 'She old. She just old. She don't know.' But then to pull the same shit about the motherfuckin cat… that's backdoor!"
Two big hands from somebody behind grabbed both sides of my head, forcing me to look up at him. Fingers came all the way around over my mouth. I couldn't holler or turn aside or even blink.
"White angel white mother angel, my ass! I show you white angel!"
And then O sweet Savior it was like he pulled back the dark blouse of his face. Two breasts came swirling out toward me dropping out and down until the black nipples touched my very eyeballs… giving suck… milking into me such thoughts and pictures that my mind knew at once not to think or look. Let them slide, I said in my mind, sli-i-ide… and I made a picture of rain falling on a duck. This duck splattering around must have come as a shock to him because he blinked. I felt the invisible hands drop from my head and I knew there hadn't been nobody behind me.
"So don' let me catch you -"
The duck run out a great long neck and quacked. He fumbled and blinked again.
"I mean y' better don' try no secret influence on my son again, is all I wanted to tell you. Y' understand? A dude, a father's got to look out for his own. You understand?"
And was gone back in the bush before I could catch my breath to answer. I hotfooted right on up to the cabin then I hope to tell you! And without slowing one iota pulled the shades took two yellow pills got in bed and yanked the covers up over my head. I didn't dare think. I recited in my mind all the scripture I knew, and the words to "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and "O Say Can You See." I was into bread recipes before they took effect.
Just like praying for something, Lord, I don't like to take a pill for sleeping unless it's absolutely necessary. Often's the night I laid awake till dawn listening to the elevators go up and down the Towers rather than take one of these blessed pills. They always make me sleep too long and leave me feeling dopey as a dog for days. Don't even let you dream, usually. But now I found myself dreaming like a fire broke out! It was those thoughts and pictures I'd been given suck with. I hadn't shed them after all. I'd just covered them over like sparks in a mattress. Now they were blazing to life in icy flames, revealing a whole different version of life, and death, and Heaven. Mainly it was this shadow thing – sometimes it was an alligator, sometimes it was a panther or a wolf – rushing through my world and snapping off pieces, all the weak namby-pamby limbs, like snapping off Devlin's hands playing the guitar, or Frank Dobbs's leg while he was striding around, or my tongue from saying little oil-on-the-water fibs. Miss Lawn it lopped off absolutely. And Emerson T, and most of my past. Then it moved ahead, a dark pruning shadow snipping through the years ahead until only the bare cold bones of a future was left, naked, with no more fibs, nor birthday cakes, nor presents and doodads. For ever and evermore. Standing there. And out of this naked thing the heat begins to drain, till the ground was as cold as the soles of its feet and the wind the same temperature as its breathing. It still was because it was a true thing, but it was no more than the rock or the wind. And all it could do was to stand there gawking into eternity, waiting, in case God might want to use it again. Like an old mule or the ghost of a mule, its meaning spent, its seed never planted and wouldn't have grown anyway because it is a mule, a trick of God.
It saddened me to my very marrow. It seemed I could hear it braying its terrible bleak lonesomeness forever. I wept for it and I wished I could say something, but how can you offer comfort to one of the bleak tricks of God? It brayed louder. Not so bleak, now, nor far-off sounding, and I opened my eyes and sat up in bed. Out the window I saw Otis under the moon, howling and running in circles, way past wishing he'd blown the dust out of his brandy glass. Devlin and the others were trying to get him, but he still had his wooden sword and was slashing at them.
"Keep your place. It wasn't me not this wienie he had no call! Devlin? Dobbsy? Help me, old chums; he's put the glacier on your old – he had no justifications I'm already pruned!"
First begging for help then whacking at them when they came close, screaming like they'd turned into monsters.
"He's trimming me, boys, dontcha see? Me who never so much as – he had no right you black bastard all I was was just foolish!"
And get so wound up he'd scream and run right into the fence around the chicken yard. He'd bounce off the fence and hew the men back away from him then he'd howl and run into the wire again. The chickens were squawking, the men hollering, and Otis, Lord Jesus, was going plumb mad. This isn't just foolishness, I told myself; this is simon pure unvarnished madness! He needs help. Somebody to phone somebody. Yet all I could do was watch like it was more of my same cold dream rushing about in the moonlight and chicken feathers, until Otis got his sword snaffled in the wire and the men swarmed on him.
They carried him thrashing and weeping to the house, right past my cabin window. As soon as they were gone from sight I was up out of that bed. Without a further thought on the matter I put on my housecoat and slippers and struck out toward the ash grove. I wasn't scared, exactly. More like unbalanced. The ground seemed to be heaving. The trees was full of faces, and every witch-doctor and conjure-man story I ever heard was tumbling up out of my Ozark childhood to keep me company, but I still wasn't scared. If I let myself get the slightest bit scared, I suspicioned, I'd be raving worse than Otis under the curse of Keller-Brown.
But he wasn't sticking pins in dolls or such like that. He was sitting calm in his therapeutic recline-o-lounger reading one of his big books by the light of the Coleman lamp, a big pair of earphones on his head. Through the bus windows I could hear there was a tape or record or some such playing, of a bunch of men's voices chanting in a foreign tongue. His mouth was moving to the words of the chant as he read. I slapped on the side of the bus stairwell.
"Hello… can I come in a minute?"
"Mrs. Whitter?" He comes to the door. "Sure, man. Come in. Come on in. I'm honored. Honest."
He gives me his hand and seems genuinely happy to see me. I told him I had been thinking and if there'd been a misunderstanding I wanted to be the first – But he cuts right in, apologizing himself, how he'd acted abominable and inexcusable and hang on a second. Please. Then held up a big palm while he swirled around to flip a switch on his phonograph. The speakers went off but the tape still turned on the machine. I could still hear a tiny chorus chanting out from the earphones on the recline-o-lounger: Rah. Rah. Rah ree run. Like that…
"I'm glad you come," he says. "I been feeling terrible for the way I acted. There was no excuse for it and I apologize for getting so heavy on you. Please, come on in."
I told him it was understandable, and that was why I was there. I started to tell him that I had never said anything about the little boy having the kitten without his mom's consent when I glanced back to the waterbed. She wasn't there but the little boy was, lying propped up on a pillow like a ventriloquist doll, his eyes staring at a glass bead strung from the ceiling. He had on his own pair of earphones, and the bead twisted and untwisted.
"Well, I get to apologize first," I told Mr. Keller-Brown. That that was why I'd come. I told him that he'd been completely correct, and that I had no right telling his child those kind of whoppers and deserved a scolding. The chant went something like Rah. Rah. Tut nee cum. Mr. Keller-Brown says okay, we've traded apologies. We chums again? I said I guess so. Rah. Rah. Tut nee eye sis rah cum RAH and that bead turning slow as syrup on its thread. He says he hopes I'll still consider riding down to LA with them; they'd be honored. I say it's too bad it ain't to Arkansas; I need to go to Arkansas – for legal business. He says they go to St. Louis after Oklahoma City and that's near Arkansas. I says we'll see how I feel tomorrow; it's been a big day. He says good night and helps me back down the steps. I thank him.
At the bus window waving, his face gives me no clue whether he believed it or not. Everything suddenly turned ten times brighter as I felt him withdraw that terrible pruning shadow and return it to its sheath. Now forget it, I told myself, all, and made a picture of the rain stopping and the duck flying off.
I walked through the bright moonlight at the edge of the ash grove. The look of things was headed back to normal. There were crickets in the trees, nothing else. The ground ran level and the night was calm. I had just about convinced myself that it was all over, that it was all just a widder woman's nightmare, nothing more, nothing worse, when I heard the mama Siamese meowing.
The kitten was stuffed under some ash roots and covered with big rocks. I could barely move them. You were right, I told the mama; you should've kept him in the rhubarb. She followed crying as I carried it up to the cabin. I kept talking to her as I walked, and fingering the poor stiffening little kitty to see if it was cut or broke or what. And when I found it at the furry throat I was reminded of the time I was picking pears in the dusk as a kid of a girl in Penrose, Colorado, and reached up to get what I thought was sure a funny fuzzy-feeling pear, when it suddenly uncurled and squeaked and flew away and I fell off the ladder with bat bites all over my hand… was what I thought as my fingers recognized the cameo and chain knotted around its neck. O Lord, I cried, what have I got into now? And tossed it under the cabin porch without even trying to break that chain. Then I come inside and took another pill out of my bag and got right down on my knees for a sign. And a dumb old rooster just crowed. Okay. Okay then. If not a sign Lord Jesus to make me certain then how about the strength to act like i am for it looks to me like i am left with no choice but to go ahead along a fortress or harbor Amen Lord amen --
(to be continued)