Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Lee Smith

  Jinx refused to grow an African violet. “Oh, I hate these!” she had announced immediately. “They’re too weird, like fuzzy little animals.” Yet she painstakingly produced a small lopsided basket in Mrs. Morris’s basket-weaving workshop, concentrating so hard that she bit her tongue until it bled. Whatever Jinx did, she did too much, I had noticed.

  I stuck with the plants, as always, which meant, at this time of year, starting seedlings from scratch in the flats. I planted one tray of pansies and later, another of snapdragons, sharing space with Mrs. Fitzgerald, who showed up to work silently and methodically beside me.

  She must be getting better, I thought, for she had obviously been issued a day pass from the top floor, though she did not look much better, face flat and pasty, eyes down. She carried her tray over to the light table carefully, positioning it just so beneath the hanging fluorescent tubes, then wiped her dirty hands right down her pale gray skirt—she wore no smock—and left immediately, speaking to no one, though Mrs. Morris paused in another conversation to look up. I watched Mrs. Fitzgerald go, too, remembering how much she had always loved flowers—flowers both in the ground and on the canvas, huge and phantasmagorical—and hoping that this joy might come back to her. She always got better at Highland, didn’t she? Miss Malone had said so.

  “Gotcha!” a voice behind me, a poke in the back. I whirled around and it was Pan in his usual motley, stamping his boots, red-faced and grinning at me beneath a wool cap, though he wore no overcoat, as usual, never seeming to mind the cold or even to feel it.

  “Hello,” I said, while from across the room, Mrs. Morris gestured to him. But he shook his head, waving to her with brick-red hands—where were his gloves, in this weather? Then he headed back to the utility room with me following involuntarily. He leapt up to grab a big pair of clippers off the wall, then turned to see me standing there. That rare, wide smile spread all the way across his face; though snaggletoothed, he had the whitest teeth, the biggest grin.

  “Come on,” he said, or I thought he said. Half the time when I was with him, I wasn’t sure what he said, or if I was making up what he said, right out of my own head. He turned to go.

  “Wait for me outside then. Down by the well,” I had the presence of mind to whisper, for I had to get my coat and I knew I could not be seen leaving with him. He disappeared without my knowing if he had understood me or not. Heart in my throat, I said good-bye to Mrs. Morris, refusing her customary offer of tea, which I usually accepted. I buttoned up my coat and put on my gloves and my hat and wound my matching muffler—all knitted by Mrs. Hodges, of course—around my neck, then paused at the door to look back once again at this place I loved so much—filled with light and green things growing, flowers all in their rows, the scent of cinnamon and cloves, the productive bustle of activity. Warmth.

  But I was headed outside, into the heart of winter.

  By then, it was close to four o’clock, on one of the coldest days yet. The last of the sun shot over the snow at a brilliant, blinding slant. In fact, I couldn’t see Pan at all as I tried to peer down the hillside; but when I reached the old covered well, there he was sitting on top of it, feet dangling, as if he had been there forever. Roy Rogers sat below, immobile and alert.

  “Here I am,” I said unnecessarily, moving to the side so that I could actually see him in the sun’s last glare.

  “ ’Bout time.” His whole face was open and ruddy, that big grin. I started smiling, too, and couldn’t stop, though my mouth didn’t seem to work right in this extreme cold. He slid off the well and stood very close to me, looking straight into my eyes. His own eyes were tawny, golden, one of them slightly darker than the other. It was a little like being hypnotized.

  “Why aren’t you working?” I asked. “Don’t you have to cut something down?” I pointed to the clippers.

  “Naw,” he said, or maybe it was “now,” for then he whistled sharply to his dog, who leapt up and stood quivering. “Going home.” He jerked his head toward the forest below and started off down the cleared pathway with me struggling to keep up behind him, though he didn’t actually know I’d be following—how did he know? The kids on the crews used to say that Pan had eyes in the back of his head. He never once looked back, nor did I. I couldn’t even see them in front of me—Pan and his dog—as we walked straight into the setting sun. Then he plunged abruptly off the cleared walkway into the open snow and then I could see them, and I could see each tree’s long purple shadow lying out behind it as I followed him into the forest. It was such hard going in the deep snow that finally I began to step into his footsteps, which was easier.

  And where was the path? I had thought there would be a path. But no, on we went down the hill past great outcroppings of rock and clumps of rhododendron as big as a house—what Ella Jean used to call a “laurel hell.” Once Pan held up his hand and stopped dead in his tracks, so I did, too—and so did Roy Rogers, to my amazement. For five deer were crossing a little clearing ahead of us, picking their delicate way on spindly legs. We didn’t move a muscle until they were gone. The deeper we went into the forest, the darker it got, though the snow itself took on a pale blue radiance that seemed to rise up from the ground. I wasn’t even cold—or tired—when suddenly we were there, Pan’s hut, or cave, or whatever it was—I could never decide what to call it, set right into the side of a cliff covered in rhododendrons. Now I saw why he needed the clippers. Weighed down by snow, a great limb from one of the huge evergreen trees above had fallen across the entrance. Working in that blue half-light, Pan quickly cut and pulled branches and brush back from a simple plank door, then lifted up the latch to let me in.

  It was much warmer inside, though the darkness was total. A match flared, then the yellow light of a lantern. Roy barked once, and was fed. Pan put something from his pack into Roy’s waiting bowl; whatever it was, it disappeared in an instant. Then Pan crossed to the small fireplace and lit a fire that caught instantly, too.

  I had a moment to look around. It was like being in a fairytale, or a children’s book, or an animal’s house. A house like a hole in the ground, with no windows, its dirt floor deep in pine straw packed down into a sort of mat. Rudimentary wooden furniture made by Pan himself—for I had often seen him over at Brushwood building things for Mrs. Morris, chests and benches and such, sanding them and rubbing them with linseed oil until the wood gleamed. Pan had a little square table with the lamp on it, one chair, a couple of wooden chests, for clothes and supplies, I guessed, and a shelf that held a number of small wooden animals that he had obviously carved himself. The raised bed tick was covered by old blankets and quilts more of which also hung on the walls, such as they were. The space was so tiny that it seemed entirely natural to me when Pan dusted off his hands and helped me take off my coat, hanging it from a peg before leading me over to the bed, as there was no place else for both of us to sit and be comfortable. He took off his boots and put on some moccasins that he had made from some kind of animal skin. I took off my high-topped shoes and my damp socks. He gave me two of his own socks to put on, one orange, one brown. To be in this strange dwelling was like being in the hold of a boat, I decided, deep inside a sailing ship upon the high seas, crossing the ocean.

  Pan grabbed up an old guitar and played me a tune. “Oh Polly, pretty Polly, come go along with me,” I sang along with him. “The first time I saw you, it wounded my heart.” I had not known he could play guitar. And I was fascinated to realize that he had no hesitation with words when he sang, though his regular speech was sparse and halting at best. I lay back on the blankets to listen, but then he put the guitar aside and began matter-of-factly to unbutton my dress, as if it were a job of work to be done. And indeed, it took him forever, with all those little bone buttons up the front so difficult for his hard, thick fingers, biting his lip and saying “pretty girl, pretty girl” over and over until it was almost a song, too. Then he pulled my dress off and took off his own shirt and undershirt and I could see all the springy brown hair on h
is muscled chest and his white arms like sculpture in a museum. Pan had a particular smell about him, earthy and somehow familiar. I unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants and he came to me finally, which was what I wanted, I knew it then, everything I wanted then or ever. The bed tick smelled piney and musty, like nothing else in the world, and the yellow firelight leapt all over the colors and patterns of the quilts on the wall, fans and flowers, diamonds and interlocking rings.

  “AIN’T YOU HUNGRY?” Suddenly Pan sat up, his thick hair touseled and sticking out every whichaway, which made me laugh, and I started tickling him which made him roll over on me again.

  “Now I am really hungry!” I announced after that, and sat wrapped in a blanket to watch him get up and pull his pants on and disappear behind the quilt at the back where the cave grew narrower and deeper, as I would learn. He came back with a big piece of raw meat and some potatoes, which he cut up on a smooth rock by the fire and then fried in a long-handled iron skillet right there, sprinkling the food with salt and pepper, those familiar little paper packets from the dining hall. Had Flossie given these to him? And what about the old guitar? I remembered all the instruments on the porch that night we “sang the moon up” at the Bascomb homestead in Madison County.

  Pan brought the whole skillet over to me, right there in the middle of the bed. “Can I have a fork?” I asked, and he brought that, too, and we ate sitting in the bed with the old black skillet on a pallet on our crossed knees, facing each other and sometimes feeding each other, too, Pan eating with his hands, though carefully, with his customary precision, me half naked and not even caring, though I did put my coat and my shoes on eventually to slip outside and pee, amazed at the brightness of the moon and all the sounds of night creatures in the forest. When I opened the plank door to come back in, I heard music again, the most beautiful, plaintive song, which he was playing on his harmonica. There is nothing like a harmonica to express yearning, I think. Pan just shrugged when I asked him what the melody was, then nodded when I asked him if he’d made it up.

  He reached into the chest that doubled as a table by the bed, came up with a bottle, then screwed off the top and took a big drink of it before handing it over to me. “Brandy,” I said. I took a long swallow that burned all the way down but went straight to my head as I went on talking and talking, telling all those secrets I’d been so good at keeping. Though his eyes stayed right on me, bright as a bird’s, I knew he didn’t understand most of what I was talking about, but it didn’t matter. It never mattered. I was more myself with Pan in his lair than I had ever been before, or ever have been since. I talked until we finished the brandy and he reached for me, and then I slept like a stone until sometime later in the night when I woke up in a panic and started shaking him.

  “Oh Lord,” I cried, “I’ve got to get back. You’ve got to take me back right now.” For with no windows, I couldn’t tell what time it was—it could have been noon, for all I knew! And I had morning music groups with Phoebe Dean.

  “Okay, it’s okay.” Pan was dressed instantly, though it took me a few more minutes.

  It turned out to be that magical time just before dawn, a time that I had never experienced out in nature before, the pearly sky lightening to the palest pink then deepening to salmon, winter trees like black lace against it, scratchy little tracks everywhere visible now in the snow, a rabbit jumping across our path, a nearby owl still to be heard.

  “Looky there.” Pan pointed up and there was the owl himself in the crook of a massive tree; his huge head with its unblinking eyes swiveled all the way around to watch us as we left. “Too—tooo—whooo?” he called after us. “Me!” I felt like screaming out the answer. “Me, Evalina, that’s who!” As before, Pan went ahead, with me stepping in his footsteps where it was easier to walk. Now it seemed like no time at all until the forest opened upon the long white slope of the Highland Hospital grounds yet at a different place, I believed, from where we had entered. I could not be sure. Pan came to a stop, me beside him. Looking back at our single track, I wondered, was I even there? Now I could see the gracious buildings clustered on top of the hill, two hawks swooping figure eights against the gorgeous sky. The melody from “Morgen” ran through my mind. “And all around us will sing the muted silence of happiness.” A gray van drove slowly up the main driveway with its lights on, then the red and white grocery truck. Once again, I was starving. I turned to kiss Pan good-bye, but he was already gone.

  “FREDDY’S BACK!” THE girls chorused later that day when I returned to Graystone after work, bone-tired yet still exhilarated. Our sitting room looked fussy and foreign to me now, like a room in an old French novel. Amanda and Myra had made brownies, which smelled wonderful baking.

  “He is?” I hung up my coat and sank down upon the couch, scarcely able to comprehend this news.

  “Yep,” Jinx said matter-of-factly. She stood in the middle of the floor holding the blue mixing bowl and licking chocolate off the spatula. “Freddy’s already been here twice. He’s after you, Evalina. He wants to jump your bones.”

  Everybody giggled.

  “Oh, he does not!” I said.

  But just at that moment, Freddy himself burst in the door with a whoosh of cold air and his red cheeks redder than ever, wearing that silly hat with the earflaps, crossing over to the sofa to grab me up in the biggest hug. “Here you are! Man, I’ve been missing you!” he cried.

  And Reader, I confess: My heart did not sink but soared to see him again, to hear him say, “my girl,” and to watch him fill up our whole parlor with goodness and vigor. I found myself smiling foolishly along with the others when he produced a cloth bag filled with gifts “from home”—which I began opening one by one, as everyone else tactfully disappeared—except for Jinx, of course, who recognized no social cues. Jinx had no more manners than a goat.

  One by one, I opened the sweetest gifts:

  —A needlepoint purse made by Freddy’s sister Elaine, with a repeating pattern of roses and hearts;

  —A dainty gold locket which had belonged to some great-aunt or other, long deceased. Her initials were E.M.M.;

  —A carefully wrapped package of divinity fudge, which I had never heard of, though apparently it is considered a great treat in Indiana;

  —A loaf of his mother’s prize Nut Bread (“Very appropriate!” I had to say)—plus the family recipe written out in her spidery hand along with the notation, “How to keep Freddy happy”;

  —Two mysterious hand-sewn items made of red-and-white-checked gingham cloth gathered up by elastic, with ruffles all around their bottoms.

  “What do you think these are?” One in each hand, I held them aloft.

  “Damned if I know.” Even the gift-giver looked perplexed.

  “I know,” Amanda announced, gliding through. “They’re for the kitchen. You put one over your toaster and the other over your Mixmaster.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  “So nobody has to look at them, I guess,” Amanda said. “You know, to beautify your kitchen. I used to have some of those myself, back in the Dark Ages.”

  “Or you could just wear them, I reckon,” Jinx suggested, grabbing one to pull it down over my head like a dustcap. Immediately, Freddy put on the other. Then we couldn’t even look at each other without going off into fits of laughter, while Jinx got so tickled that she had to lie down and bang her heels on the floor like a little girl. Suddenly Freddy stopped laughing and stared at me, very serious beneath his ruffled hat, until I had to turn away. From that day forward I was his girl for real, and we both knew it.

  But this had nothing at all to do with Pan.

  JANUARY 25, 1948. How well I remember this afternoon! Like one of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s arresting paintings hung in permanent exhibition on the wall of my memory . . .

  A canceled music group had given me a free hour to duck into the Art Room, where I sat chatting with Miss Malone as I attempted to shape a little clay animal for Pan’s collection of “critters,” as he ca
lled them. This was to be an elephant, for Pan had no African or exotic animals at all, only realistic depictions of the creatures in his own forest. But I was finding this simple project harder going than I had expected, as my elephant kept tipping forward, to Miss Malone’s amusement and my annoyance. “His head’s too big,” she said, which gave me a sharp pang as I thought of Robert.

  To change the subject, I pointed at the exhibit wall before us, where several of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s latest paintings were on display, all very different from her pastel scenes of travel in Europe, or the amusing, magical renderings of fairy-tales and Alice in Wonderland. The new paintings obviously reflected the more withdrawn, serious Mrs. Fitzgerald who had come back to us now—incomprehensible scenes done in glaring colors—blood red, royal blue. Each was crowded with human figures in attitudes of tragedy, torpor, or even death. Some were clearly women, with round, high breasts exposed; others were probably men, though it was impossible to distinguish the sex of many, much less decipher the meaning of these pictures.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Miss Malone. “What do these mean?”

  “Well, she’s very preoccupied with religion,” Miss Malone began.

  “But wait—Mrs. Hodges told me she was in love with a Russian general,” I said.

  “Oh, that!” Miss Malone smiled. “That’s just an idée fixe, it comes and goes, it’s been going on for years now. I guess the religious fixation has, too, but it’s gotten more intense recently. Much more intense. Notice the crosses everywhere—and there are Bible verses printed out on the back of all the canvases, too. Each one is a specific scene from the Bible, though I admit, it’s sometimes hard to tell—”