“That part about womankind is insulting,” the widow said.
“I didn’t write it,” he said. “The folk wrote it.”
“Menfolk,” she said.
“Eight,” I said, and only after I said it did I realize why I had said it.
“Hm?” Wheatstraw asked, without looking up.
The widow held a tipped teacup, looking at nothing, as a thread of tea like a spider’s descended to the saucer.
“Eight,” I repeated. “Milk, silk, two; tree, sea, four; horn, thorn, six; lamb, kind, eight.” I sang, rather than spoke, in surprise at my voice: “Oh, you must answer my questions nine…It ain’t questions nine, it’s questions eight. What’s the ninth question?”
Wheatstraw looked at the widow, and the widow looked at Wheatstraw. “Maybe that’s it,” Wheatstraw murmured. “‘What’s the ninth question,’ maybe that’s the ninth question.”
“No,” I said.
“Why no?” Wheatstraw cooed.
“Because,” I said. “Because that would be stupid.”
Wheatstraw laughed and slapped his thigh with his hat. The widow slammed two plates together.
“Indeed it would be,” she snapped. “Petey, take these plates. Take them, I say. Do a lick of work for once in your lazy son-in-law of a life.”
“So what’s the ninth question?” I asked again.
“That’s for you to tell us,” Wheatstraw said.
“To tell you, you mean,” the widow said, driving him from the room beneath a stack of dishes. “Don’t drag me into this.”
“Oh, excuse me, Lady Astor, whose house is it? The girl’s a wizard, Sarah, and you can’t stow a wizard in the china cupboard like a play-pretty, like one of your ghosts, like Mr. Dellafave in there,” he shouted as he passed a china cupboard. Its door trembled, and someone inside squeaked.
“You know the rules,” Wheatstraw continued as we all entered the kitchen in a clump. He dumped the dishes into the sink with a crash and whirled to face us. I tried to hide behind the widow, though she was a foot shorter. Wheatstraw pointed at her like he wanted to poke a hole in the air. His gentleman’s fingernail was now long and ragged, with something crusted beneath, and his eyes were red as a drunkard’s. “Just look at her,” he said. “Just stand near her, for pity’s sake! She’s stoked with magic like a furnace with coal, and the wide world is full of matches. She’s in a different world now, and she has got to learn.” He turned to me. “Tea party’s over, my dear. From now on, it’s test after test, and you have your first assignment, your first nine questions.”
“Eight,” I said.
He threw back his head and roared like a bull. I clapped my hands over my ears and shrieked. Our dresses billowed as if in a strong wind. The cords stood out on Wheatstraw’s neck. His hot breath filled the room. Then he closed his mouth, and the roar was gone. “All righty then,” he said. “Eight it is. You owe the Old Concern eight answers—and one question.” He jammed his hat two-handed onto his head down to his eyebrows, then sprang into the sink. He crouched there, winked, and vanished down the drain with a gurgle. His hat dropped to the porcelain and wobbled in place until it, too, was snatched into the depths. Wheatstraw’s voice chuckled through the pipes, and ghosts flowed keening from the faucet.
“Showoff,” the widow said. She squeezed my arm. “He’s a liar, too. Absolutely terrible at whist.”
“When he said I had to answer those questions, was that a lie, too?”
“Ah, no, that part was true enough.”
“And the part about me being…a wizard?”
The widow smiled. “Truest of all,” she said.
“ALL wizards have much the same talents,” said the widow, as she washed the unbroken dishes, and I dried them, “just as all carpenters, all painters, all landscapers do. But each wizard also has a specialty, some talent she is especially good at. Some work at the craft for decades before realizing what their specialty is. Some realize what it was only in hindsight, only on their deathbeds, if they ever realize it at all. But other wizards have their talents handed to them, almost from birth, the way we all are granted the earth and the sky.
“I myself was no taller than a turnip when I realized that many of the little friends I played with every day, in the attic and beneath the grape arbor and in the bottom of the garden, were children that others could not see, and I realized, too, that my parents did not like for me to speak of them, to say, ‘Oh, Papa, how funny! Little Merry just passed through your waistcoat, as you were stirring your tea.’ How cross he became that day.”
She wrung dry a dishcloth in her tiny fists. I blew soap bubbles from my palm into the face of a sleeping tabby as it floated past. The bubbles bobbed through the cat, or was it the other way around? The widow had been scrubbing dishes with pumice, so the bubbles were reddish in color and seemed more substantial than the wholly transparent cat. Then the bubbles vanished, and the tabby remained.
The widow continued: “And so I began keeping my talent secret, and once you start keeping your talents secret, why, you’re well along the path of the wizard.”
“My talents are a secret even from me,” I said.
“There now, you see how wrong you can be?” said the widow. She popped my shoulder with the dish towel. “You play with dead cats. You converse with all my boarders. You unbind the front door and then bind it again without half-trying. You come here from Tennessee in a single step, as if the world were a map you could fold. My goodness, that’s a step even Paul Bunyan couldn’t take, and Paul is a big, big man.” After a moment’s reverie, she shook her head and with a great splash yanked free the plug. “Well, that’s done!” she cried over the rush of the emptying sink. “May it all go down Wheatstraw’s gullet.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed my cheek. Her kiss was quick, dry, and powdery, like the dab of a cotton swab. “Never you fret, child,” she said, taking my arm and leading me down the steps into the garden. “You’ve got talent to burn, as Mr. Winchester would have said. And now that you’ve begun to focus, well, you’ll tumble across a specialty or three very soon, I daresay.”
“Mr. Wheatstraw said I’m in a different world now.”
The widow snorted. “Different world, indeed! You can’t change worlds like garters, my dear. This is the same world you were born into, the same world you are stuck with, all the days of your life. Never forget that. But the older you get, and the more traveling you do, why, the more of this world you inevitably will see—and inevitably be able to see, I daresay.”
“Because I walked through the diorama, you mean?”
“That was a powerful bit of traveling, indeed it was. Doubtless it broadened your mind a bit. Who knows? A few weeks ago you might have been as ignorant of the spirit world as my carpenters, might have looked right through Mr. Dellafave without even seeing him, much less being able to converse with him. And what a shame that would have been,” she said, not sounding quite convinced.
I considered telling her that Mr. Dellafave was in love with her, but decided she knew that already. Instead, I finally dared to ask a question.
“Mrs. Winchester. In all these years since Mr. Winchester died, has he ever, well…visited?”
“Ah, that’s sweet of you to ask, child,” said the widow, with a sniff and a toss of her head. “No, not yet, though early on I looked for him and listened for him, by day and by night. Especially by night. I confess I even hired a medium or two to conduct a séance—for those were all the rage, a few years ago.” She waved absently as we passed a headless brakeman, who raised his lantern to her. “A phantom herd of buffalo might have stampeded through the parlor without those frauds noticing. And the mess! We mopped up ectoplasm for days.” She leaned against the trunk of an English yew and stared, not unhappily, into the sky. “I finally concluded that Mr. Winchester—like my mama and papa, and my old nurse, and my little dog, Zip, that I had when we were first wed, and my poor child Annie—that I will be reunited with none of them until I’m as insubstantial as that lady
in the pond over there.”
In silence, we watched the woman as she rose from the water, stood a few moments on the surface, then sank out of sight amid the lily pads, her face unreadable. Her dress was from an earlier time. Where had all her lovers got to, I wondered, and what did she remember of them?
“I’ll tell you the puzzle that worries me,” the widow Winchester abruptly said, “and it’s not Mr. Winchester, and it’s not where all the dogs go. What worries me is that in all these years of receiving the dear departed in my home, I have met not one—not one—who was, in life, a wizard.”
“SARAH!” the man yelled. “Sarah!”
The widow and I ran to the bay window in the parlor. I knew that voice.
A two-horse wagon had pulled up in front of the house, and a big man in a black suit and black hat was climbing out of it. It was a warm fall day, but his hat and shoulders were dusted with snow, and ice clung to the spokes of the wheels. The wagon was faded blue and covered with painted stars and crescent moons. The side read:
WIZARD OF THE BLUE RIDGE
MAGICIAN OF THE OLD SOUTH
PURVEYOR OF MAGIC AND MIRTH
He removed his hat and called again: “Sarah! I got him! I finally got him!”
It was Mr. Farethewell.
By the time we reached the front door—which the widow opened with a wave of her hand—a horse and rider had galloped up. It was Petey Wheatstraw, dressed like a fox hunter in red coat, white breeches, and high boots.
“Winchester, do something!” he yelled as he dismounted. “Farethewell’s gone crazy.”
“Crazy, nothing,” Farethewell said. “He’s trapped like a bug in a jar.”
“Who is?” the widow asked.
“Old Scratch himself!” Farethewell replied. “Here’s your Devil.”
He went to the back of the wagon and began dragging out something heavy, something we couldn’t yet see.
The widow looked to Wheatstraw. “Is this true?”
He threw up his hands. “Who knows? No one’s seen the Old Man in days.”
Farethewell dragged the whatever-it-was a little closer to the end of the wagon, and an old boot thumped to the gravel. I stepped closer, out of the shadow of the porch.
“Well, hello, Little Britches,” said Farethewell. “Sarah told me you were here. So you decided to pull some magic after all?” He pulled a flask from his jacket, looked at it, then laughed and flung it across the yard. It landed in the rosebushes with a clank.
“She told you?” I cried. I got behind a pillar. Just the sight of Farethewell made me feel flushed and angry. “You know each other?”
“Well, he is a wizard,” Wheatstraw said.
Farethewell stood there, hands on hips, and looked pleased with himself. The widow peered into the wagon.
“Where is he? Is that his boot?”
Farethewell snatched her up and hugged her and spun her around. “That ain’t his boot. That’s him! He’s in the boot! Come look, Little Britches!”
“Don’t you call me that,” I yelled, but I stepped off the porch anyway. Farethewell took hold of the boot with both rough hands and walked backward, hunched over, dragging the boot toward the house as if he dragged a big man’s corpse. The boot tore a rut in the gravel.
“Couldn’t be,” Wheatstraw said.
“It is!” Farethewell said.
“Blasphemy,” the widow said.
“Bad for business, anyway,” Wheatstraw said.
Farethewell let go of the boot and stepped back, gasping, rubbing the small of his back with his hands. “I run him down in the Sierras,” he said. “He’d a got away from me, if he had just let go of that chicken. Seven days and seven nights we fought up and down them slopes. The avalanches made all the papers. I’ve had this boot since Appomattox. It’s my teacher’s boot, hexed with his magic and with his blood. On our eighth day of wrestling, I got this jammed down over the Devil’s head, and just kept on jamming till he was all inside, and now the Devil will pay!”
We all gathered around the boot.
“It’s empty,” the widow said.
Wheatstraw cackled. “Sure is. Farethewell, you are crazier than a moonstruck rat.”
I did not laugh. Peering out through the laces of the boot was a face. The two blue eyes got wider when they saw me. The face moved back a little, so that I could see more of it.
It was Farethewell in the boot.
I looked over my shoulder. Yes, big Farethewell stood behind me, grinning. But the tiny man in the boot was Farethewell also, wearing a robe and pointed hat, as I last had seen him at Professor Van Der Ast’s.
The little Farethewell hugged himself as if he were cold and began silently to cry.
“What’s the matter, child?” the widow asked. I shrugged off her little spindly hand of comfort. It was like twitching free of a spider.
“What you see in there?” Wheatstraw asked.
“Tell them, Little Britches!”
“Don’t take on so, dear. What could you possibly see? This has nothing to do with you.”
“Maybe it does,” said Farethewell. “Who you see in there, girl? What’s this varmint to you?”
“What’s his name this time?” Wheatstraw asked. “The Old Man answers to more names than the Sears and Roebuck catalog.”
I didn’t answer. Little Farethewell was backing up, pressing himself flat against the heel of that old floppy boot. I stepped forward to see him better, and he shook so the whole boot trembled.
“He’s scared,” I said, more loud and fierce than I meant to sound, for in fact this scared me worse than anything—not that I was faced with a second Farethewell the size of a doll you could win with a ball toss, but that I was more fearsome to him than his larger self was. What kind of booger did he take me for? This scared me but made me mad, too. I snarled and made my fingers into claws like Boola the Panther Boy and lunged.
“Yah!”
Little Farethewell twitched so hard the boot fell over. The sole was so worn you could see through it nearly, and a gummy spot at the toe treasured a cigarette butt and a tangle of hair.
“He’s ours,” big Farethewell hissed into my ear. “Whatever face he’s showing you, girl, whoever he once was to you, he is ours now and no mistake. All the way here, off the slopes and down the river and through the groves, it was all I could do to keep him booted and not kicking the boards out of the wagon, but now you got him broken like a pony. And a girl loves a pony. He’s mine and yours together now.”
“Don’t listen,” the widow said.
“Sarah. You forgetting what we got in there? You forgetting Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, Petersburg? The tuberculosis that carried off your William, the marasmus that stole Annie from the cradle? Don’t you care what this thing has done to the world, what it still could do? Ain’t you learned nothing?”
“Some things ain’t fit to be learned,” the widow said, “and some wizards breathing God’s free air are cooped up worse than this creature is. Petey, tell him. You’ve seen worse than Cold Harbor, worse than any of us.”
Wheatstraw did not answer at once. He did not seem to be listening. He was in the act of dusting a metal bench with his handkerchief. He slowly refolded the handkerchief, then flicked off one last spot of dust and sighed and settled himself on the bench, perched on the edge as if delicacy alone could keep his breeches away from the iron. The moment he sat, a transparent cat jumped onto his lap and settled itself. Wheatstraw scratched between its ears as it sank out of sight, purring, until Wheatstraw was scratching only his leg.
“What I see,” Wheatstraw finally said, “is that whatever half-dead thing you dragged in, Farethewell, it ain’t yours anymore. It’s Pearl’s.”
“Pearl’s!” said Farethewell and the widow, together.
“Pearl’s,” Wheatstraw repeated. “Otherwise, she couldn’t see it, could she? So it’s hers to do with as she will. And there ain’t no need in y’all looking like you just sucked down the same oyster. Folks making up thei
r own minds—why, that’s the basic principle of the Old Concern, the foundation of our industry. And besides,” he added, as he leaned back and tipped his felt hat over his eyes and crossed his legs at the ankles, “she’s done made it up anyhow.”
When he said that, I realized that I had.
“No,” Farethewell said.
I picked up the boot. It was no heavier for me than a dead foot. The thought made me shiver.
“Wheatstraw,” said Farethewell. “What have you done to me, you wretch? I can’t move.”
“It ain’t my doing.”
“Nor mine,” said the widow.
“Pearl. Listen to me.”
I held up the boot and looked at it, eye to eyelet. The trembling shape no longer looked much like Farethewell—more like a bad memory of him, or a bad likeness of him, or just a stain on a canvas that put you in mind of him, if you squinted just right. To whatever it was, I said, “Go home.”
Then I swung the boot three times over my head and let it fly.
“Noooo!” Farethewell yelled.
The boot sailed over the fence and past the point where it ought to have fallen back to earth and kept on going, a tumbling black dot against the pale sky like a star in reverse, until what I thought was the boot was just a floater darting across my eye. I blinked it away, and the boot was gone.
Mr. Farethewell stared into the sky, his jaw working. A tear slid down his cheek. He began to moan.
“Whoo! Don’t reckon we need wait supper on him tonight,” Wheatstraw said.
“I knew it,” the widow said. She snapped her fingers in Wheatstraw’s face. “I knew it the moment she and her fetches stepped out of the ballroom window. Her arrival was foretold by the spirits.”
“Foretold by the spirits, my eye,” Wheatstraw said. “She’s a wizard, not the three-fifty to Los Angeles.”
Farethewell’s moan became a howl.
I suddenly felt dizzy and sick and my breath was gone, like something had hit me in the gut. I tried to run, without quite knowing why, but Farethewell already had lunged across the distance between us. He seized my shoulders, shook me like a rag, howled into my face.
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