The Listener

by Robert R. McCammon

  Wendell didn’t come in this mornin’, the bossman had said. He don’t answer his telephone, neither. Get on over there and find out what’s wrong.

  It was shocking news. As far as Curtis knew, Ol’ Crab had never missed a day. Therefore as Curtis—wearing his street clothes of tan trousers and a blue-and-green-checked shirt—pedalled as furiously as his legs could handle along his usual route, he was sure that something was very wrong with Ol’ Crab. Just yesterday Mr. Crable had complained of indigestion, saying that he thought a pork chop he’d eaten the night before at Mandy’s Kitchen Cafe had come back to kick him in the gut. Curtis hoped it was just indigestion, but he’d read that heart attacks could sneak up on a person in that kind of disguise.

  He diverted from his route to aim toward Ol’ Crab’s house, and crossing St. Peter Street he entered the nearly sacred ground of Congo Square. Some of it was grassy, but in most places the grass had been stomped flat to the dirt by the feet of generations of the slaves and their children and their children’s children. They had thronged here by their thousands since the early 1800s to hold markets, meet together, play music, dance and sometimes by the flame of torches and the light of the moon offer frenzies to the voodoo gods. Now, as Curtis pedalled across the Square and squirrels darted out of his way to get back to their nests in the overhanging oaks, he heard the beat of drums and the crash of cymbals. He saw that a lone drummer had set his kit up in the shade to pound out a rhythm while nearby an old woman sold apples and oranges from a cart, and beside the cart was a lounge chair she’d put out to recline in under the leafy branches.

  Congo Square was indeed nearly sacred to the residents of the Treme, and particularly so for Curtis…but not for any reason the others might share.

  His mind drifted back in an instant to an evening in May of 1923, the sun just sinking to the west and the blue shadows beginning to crawl across the Square, and here and there a lamp burning as if to mark a path for his eleven-year-old self and his mama, who had hold of his hand and was pulling him along to a place he did not wish to go.

  On that evening, too, a drum was beating but at a distance; it was a low thumping sound off on the other side of the Square, and over there the younger Curtis could see torches burning and the shapes of figures moving about…but slowly, as if seen in the thickness of a fever dream. Orchid pulled him on toward their destination. It was where she’d been told to go by the young woman in the bright red headwrap who’d come to the house that past Sunday afternoon.

  Curtis was a child, but he surely knew what this was about.

  I want to know, his mama had said to the young woman who came to visit, if my boy is crazy in the head or not.

  He don’t look crazy, the young woman had said after a brief inspection.

  He hears voices, Orchid had answered. Sometimes they ain’t even in English, and he cain’t understand ’em. Other times he hears ’em clear enough. This has been goin’ on for two years now, and it ain’t gettin’ no better. Mercy, mercy, I’m already a sick woman and this thing is puttin’ me in my grave.

  On that May evening in 1923, Orchid had pulled Curtis toward the eastern side of Congo Square, where the oaks stood tall with gnarled intertwining limbs that must’ve been old when the first slave touched a drum and dreamed of the green hills of Africa. In the deepening twilight Curtis could make out three figures beneath one of the trees; they were illuminated by the ruddy glow of a pair of oil lamps set upon a small card table. Two of the figures were sitting in canvas chairs and one was standing, and in another moment Curtis saw who they were and his legs froze up. His heart pounded and his heels dug into the earth but at that time—nine long years ago—his mama still had some strength and determination, and she hauled him along like a flopping catfish on the end of a five-fingered hook.

  He had known they were going to see someone who could help him, according to Orchid, and he’d thought maybe it was another doctor but now he realized she was pulling him toward a reckoning with two of the most powerful and strangest characters who had ever cast their shadows in the Treme.

  Lady and her husband, Mister Moon. As a matter of fact, he had never seen them out by the light of full day, and so they likely only cast their shadows by the pale of the moon and the dance of red flame that spat sparks in the wicks of their lamps.

  But there they were. Standing behind them was the young woman with the red headwrap, and she came forward to meet Orchid and Curtis as they approached, one hauling and the other near bawling.

  “Comes Mister Curtis,” he heard Lady say, in a soft voice that for some reason made him think of cool water, but he was shocked because never in his life had anyone called him mister and he wasn’t sure he liked being so high in this voodoo woman’s regard.

  The other mister on the scene stood up from his chair and gave Orchid and Curtis a little bow. “Pleased,” he said nicely, but Curtis thought his voice was like the rattle of dry bones in a haunted house.

  “I’ve brought my boy,” Orchid said, as if they needed to be reminded, and she shoved Curtis forward like giving up an offering.

  When Curtis had regained his balance he stood like a statue and stared at the two of them. In the lamplight that could have resembled the flickering of crimson-eyed ghosts in St. Louis Cemetery Number One, Lady and Mister Moon might have been dapper phantasms, only they were all too real.

  It was said that Lady was born in the year 1858, which made her sixty-five years old. In this low light and with the wide-brimmed violet- colored hat she wore, her face was a mystery of shadows. Curtis had never seen her up close before, so he had no idea what she looked like. He had heard plenty, though: about her being a slave, and running away from the plantation with her mama into the swamp before the Civil War, and growing up in a colony of lepers, escaped convicts and other slaves in the bayou below New Orleans, and down there was where the voodoo gods and goddesses had found her and annointed her to be one of their own. He had heard more than plenty, and more than he’d wanted to hear: about the cottonmouth snake she kept in her house on St. Louis Street and called “Sister” for all the secrets it told her; about the trunk she kept full of shrunken heads of young’uns just his age who had stupidly wandered up behind the green wall of Giant Salvia, umbrella plants and huge Devil’s Trumpets that bloomed like tropical furies in her front yard; about the glowing purple orbs that constantly circled over and around her house as spectral watchmen, and sometimes at night it was said those orbs could be seen crawling spiderlike across the roof.

  There were other frightening things too, and Curtis kept them firmly in mind when he stared at what deceptively appeared to be a thin human woman in her violet-colored hat and dress and violet-colored gloves on slim-fingered hands at the end of spindly arms. She was the blue-black color of deepest Africa, untouched by the white explorer.

  As scary as Lady was, Curtis found Mister Moon to be downright spine-shiveringly creepy, no matter that he was a polite gentleman. It was certainly not Mister Moon’s fault that he’d been born with or been afflicted by a condition that had turned one side of his face pale yellow while the other side remained ebony, the two halves merging in a war of splotches down his forehead, the bridge of his elegant nose and his gray-tufted chin, but it was not easy to look upon. He too was a long tall drink of arsenic, dressed to kill in a trim-fitting black suit, a thin black tie decorated with red squares, a black top hat and black gloves, and on each wrist glinted the faces of two wristwatches. On a chain around his neck hung a gilded crucifix the size of the biggest pig’s foot ever cooked in a Treme stewpot.

  “Come closer, young man,” Lady said.

  Curtis didn’t move until Orchid pushed him forward some more, and even then his shoes dug up near-sacred earth.

  “I understand,” Lady said from beneath her hat, “you say you hear voices in your belfry. The ringin’ of other bells not your own, let’s say.” Her head cocked slightly to one side. “That
true?”

  “Tell her,” Orchid said before Curtis could even think how to answer. “Go on, this ain’t the time to be all stitch-lipped!” When Curtis again hesitated, Orchid said to the voodoo woman, “He don’t know how he’s killin’ me with this, ma’am! My back…somethin’ ain’t right…I’m weak all the time…can’t think straight, with all this weighin’ on my—”

  “Mrs. Mayhew,” Lady interrupted, but softly. “Why don’t you go over yonder where Mrs. DeLeon is cookin’ up a pot full of gumbo. See her over there at the fire?” She waited until Orchid nodded. “Go tell her I said the word ‘Biddystick’, and she’ll laugh and give you a free bowl.” She glanced at the young woman in the red headwrap and then at Mister Moon. “Both y’all go on with her, leave Mister Curtis with me. Scoot, now.” She waved her gloved fingers toward Orchid as if brushing crumbs off a table.

  The young woman moved silkily forward and hooked Orchid’s arm with her own, while Mister Moon plucked up an ebony walking-stick that had been resting beside his chair.

  “Tell her true, Curtis,” Orchid said; it had come out as a demand. She turned her sad eyes upon Lady once more, the corners of her mouth downturned. “You know my husband left me,” she said. “It happened six years ago. The accident at the dock, I’m sayin’.”

  “I know all ’bout that,” returned the reply. “I was sorry for you then, and I’m sorry for you now. Go on, get y’self a bowl of gumbo and be a little piece happy.”

  Orchid started to speak again but the young woman was gently pulling at her, and so Orchid gave Curtis a last look that had a pinch of urgency in it and then she allowed herself to be moved. Mister Moon swept past Curtis with his walking-stick, leaving in the air the scent of sandalwood and lemons.

  When the three had gone on toward Mrs. DeLeon’s gumbo pot, Lady drew in a long breath and let it out. “Now we can talk,” she said, with some relief in there. She lifted her face toward Curtis. He saw the light catch the sharp bones of her cheeks, the formidable ridge of her nose and the intense emerald-green of her eyes, which startled Curtis because they looked like spirit-lamps glowing with a fierce energy that could burn something to destruction if she allowed.

  “I imagine,” she said, “you’ve heard all kinds a’things about m’self. Things that give young’uns bad dreams. You know what I’m sayin’.”

  Curtis forced himself to nod.

  “We ain’t here to go over all that…” She paused, searching for the correct word. Then: “Description,” she said. “I want to know ’bout the voices. Your mama’s awful worried, and you know she loves you. If she didn’t, you wouldn’t be standin’ here. Oh, listen…ain’t that pretty?”

  The crickets had started up, and from the oaks came the shurrah…shurrah of the night’s insects awakening from their daily slumber.

  Curtis felt himself shiver, though the air was warm and humid. He pushed whatever fear he had down, because now was the moment to speak and there was no point in holding back any longer. “I don’t…exactly hear voices,” he said. She was silent, and he went on. “I hear my own voice. But…it’s hard to explain, kinda…I know that what I’m hearin’ are other people speakin’. In my voice, I mean. That’s the voice I know. It’s just that…the way things are said…it’s not me talkin’ to myself. I know that for sure.”

  “For sure?” she asked, and it sounded like a challenge.

  “As sure as I can be without the Good Father steppin’ down and tellin’ me,” he answered, and thinking it had been spoken too impudently he added, “Beg pardon, ma’am.”

  “And how can you be so almighty sure? Your mama says it started after your daddy left home, and she thinks that made your head go bad. Says she took you to see two doctors but both of ’em said it was your imagination and a passin’ thing. Says she’s at her wit’s end tryin’ to figure how to help you, and it’s breakin’ her down day after day. So how can you be so almighty sure?”

  Curtis couldn’t help it; the way the voodoo woman had spoken, with more than a dash of hot pepper in her voice, made his own pepperpot start to boil. “I heard somebody talkin’ in a different tongue,” he said. “I think it was what Mr. Danelli at the market speaks. Eyetalian.”

  “The word is Italian. Say it like that. The other makes you sound like you don’t have any learnin’.”

  “Yes’m,” he replied. He shrugged. “I couldn’t understand any of it. It was just there, and I didn’t hear it again.”

  “But there’ve been others?”

  “Sometimes. One of ’em sounded real far away…somebody yellin’ at somebody else, it sounded like. He used some bad words.”

  “How’d you know it was a he?”

  Curtis shrugged again, but she was waiting for an answer so he gave it to her. “He said somebody should bite his pecker.”

  “Oh.” Did she smile a little? It was hard to tell, under that hat.

  “But I can tell if it’s a he or a she,” he went on. “I don’t know how, it’s just somethin’ in the way it’s said.”

  “And you can tell the distance?”

  “Some are stronger than others. I mean…I don’t hear a whole lot of ’em. They come and go.” He squared his shoulders and looked directly at her. “It didn’t start when my daddy left. I was eight when that happened. I started hearin’ the voices when I was nine.”

  “Can you answer ’em?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am, I’ve never tried.”

  “Could you try now? By sayin’ somethin’ in your head and seein’ if I can hear it?”

  “Yes’m,” he said, and he closed his eyes and thought :Hello:. He saw not the word but the blur of a faintly golden iridescence moving out of his head and picking up speed, faster and faster away until it seemed to take wings and fly like a quick bird through the trees and gone.

  “Nothin’,” Lady said. “Try again. Stronger, if you can.”

  He did, and this time he squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth and thought of the word as a shout through space, and there it went—:Hello:—flying away in its luminous blur.

  “Nope,” Lady said.

  “That’s about the best I can do,” he admitted.

  Lady was silent but the oaks in the Square were thrumming with life, which Lady seemed to be listening to as if the small creatures were telling her secrets the same as her snake “Sister.” “They called your daddy ‘Ironhead’, didn’t they?” she asked.

  “Yes’m.”

  “You know why?”

  “No’m.”

  “That accident. As I heard it, the tar barrel fell off that platform and hit him in the head before it busted his shoulder and his ribs. But his head was like to be made out of iron, didn’t even leave a mark. Yessir, he must’ve had a mighty hard head.”

  “I guess,” Curtis said.

  “Come right up to me,” she told him, though he thought he was standing too close already.

  She started taking off her gloves. When he obeyed—however reluctantly—she put her hands on his head and started feeling around on his skull. “You have headaches?” she asked.

  “No’m.”

  “You know what’s gonna happen tomorrow, or the next day?”

  “No’m,” he replied, and he nearly smiled at that one because if he’d known about this yesterday he would’ve played he had a stomachache and stayed in bed.

  She kept running her hands over his head. Her fingers felt like bands of metal. “I’m gonna tell you somethin’. I’m havin’ some trouble with somebody here. Another woman. She don’t like me very much. I’m gonna think her name and you tell me if you hear it. Go ahead.”

  He listened, but all he heard were the trees speaking. “No’m, I don’t.”

  “All right, then. I’m ponderin’ over leavin’ N’awlins right soon. Got three places in mind to settle in. Nice quiet places where nothin’ much ever happens. I�
�m thinkin’ the names of those places. Can you tell me one of ’em?”

  “No’m,” he said, “I can’t do that.”

  “Huh,” she replied, a sound of both consternation and maybe confirmation. She ran a hand across his forehead, the fingertips pressing into the flesh, and then the examination seemed to be ended. “You ever see double?”

  He shook his head. “Just single, like everybody else I guess.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t really think you’re like ever’body else. Run over there to Mrs. DeLeon and fetch your mama back here. Bring me a cup a’ gumbo while you’re at it.”

  When Curtis had done so and Orchid, Mister Moon and the young woman in the red headwrap had returned to where Lady was sitting, Lady took the offered gumbo cup and Mister Moon settled himself back in his chair with the ebony walking-stick propped against his knees.

  “Well, ma’am?” Orchid asked anxiously. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Lady took a moment to eat some gumbo with the small wooden spoon that had come with the cup. “Let me tell you a little story,” she began. “When I was a girl on the plantation, the cook’s daughter—’bout thirteen or fourteen years old, I recall—said she was talkin’ to a man who lived in Buscarole, and that was maybe seven miles from where we were. Said she listened to him, and they talked back and forth in her head. Believe that or not, but she said he was an old man and he was a carpenter, and all of a sudden she was knowin’ ever’thin’ ’bout hammers and different types of saws, and all kinds of lumber and joints and pegs and…just things she could never have known unless somebody who did know was tellin’ her. Now yes, we did have a carpenter for the plantation but he was a white man with his own family and he lived at a distance, wasn’t no hanky-panky goin’ on. Ended up when Savina’s carpenter friend went silent, and she figured he must’ve either moved or passed away. So…I’ve heard of this kind of thing since then, but let me tell you it’s very rare. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with your boy, Mrs. Mayhew. Seems to have good sense and got an older soul than most. Seems to be a good boy. I swanee, ain’t nothin’ wrong. You just got yourself a listener. Early yet, still growin’, but a listener all the same.”