Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  “Not crazy, usually. Some got fevers, some got chills. You got a chill, a bone-deep chill. I can hear the ice in your marrow ever’ time you breathe, child.”

  “Why do you have a typewriter?”

  “It belonged to Emmanuel Berthelot, first boss man of the Berthelot Mills in Ladysmith. My daddy was his driver, and in 1936, when Old Emmanuel died, that machine came to my daddy as a bequeathment. My daddy passed it on to me when he passed on.”

  “I mean, what do you use it for? In your business?”

  “Besides typin’ letters and so on? Well, I keep files. Each and every soul I talk to gets a case history, complete as can be. Some of the fevered folks who visit me are decoys for the IRS.”

  “The IRS?”

  Sister Celestial smiled so that crow’s-feet formed around her limpid brown eyes. “Internal Revenue, child. Here’s my rhyme:

  I R Ass,

  U R Ass,

  If Us Do Sass

  The I-R-Ass.

  That’s why I keep my files. Files look fine and official, not to mention up-and-up, when they’re typewriter clean. This old batterbox types clean. Now sit down, child, so I can do you, hear?”

  Stevie sat. On the wobbly card table she put the folder containing the nightmare transcripts. But she was supposed to do Sister Celestial (for a story); Sister Celestial wasn’t supposed to do her. The whole idea of stopping here was to get material for an article, else her presence in this cozily warm house, across an expanse of slick red vinyl from a black woman with a manner as soothingly cynical as Dr. Elsa’s, made no sense. Why, then, had she brought the nightmare transcripts with her? To be done? Yes, probably. But whether she would be done with the obsessions these transcripts embodied, or done in by their more sinister implications, remained to be seen.

  Sister Celestial rolled a piece of typing paper into the Remington and held both forefingers over the keyboard. “Name?”

  “I thought you were supposed to tell your clients about themselves. I didn’t think they had to do it for you.”

  “Ma-ry Ste-ven-son Crye,” said Sister Celestial, typing out Stevie’s full name with two fingers. “Age?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Thirty-five. Address?”

  “Wait a minute, Sister. I—”

  “Box 609, Barclay, Georgia, 31820. Occupation?”

  “Sister Celestial, please—”

  “Writer.” Mercifully, the Sister stopped typing and looked up. “Well, that last one was easy. You told me it, didn’t you? Now the others . . . the others I got my ways of knowing. I’m like an I-R-Assman that way, child.”

  “Do you know the trouble you heard in my voice?” Stevie asked. “Do you know why I really let you get me inside your house?”

  “I reckon I may. It’d be better for both of us, though, if I didn’t have to dogtrot it onto paper before you told me. Talkin’ it out’s part of the answer. You talkin’, not me.”

  “A hotshot shrink in Atlanta would charge me fifty dollars for that little analysis,” Stevie said reminiscently.

  “I ain’t that precious, Miz Crye. ’Sides, I don’t shrink. I expand. I open doors, let out pleats, and undo hems. You’ll feel looser when you leave here.”

  “Or my money back?”

  “Every penny. And if I know Sheriff Gates, he’ll come along to help you collect. Been waitin’ to shut me down since Christmas. Don’t like my new sign.” She waved the tips of her typing fingers beneath her nostrils. “His sign’s an old one. Pisces. It stinks from everlastin’ to everlastin’.”

  The Sister’s clever disparagement of authority—first the IRS and now the county sheriff—made Stevie relax. Perhaps, like Seaton Benecke, Sister Celestial loyally read The Columbus Ledger. If so, close attention to Stevie’s feature stories over the last fourteen or fifteen months would have given the palmist a clue to her identity. As for guessing her age, pitchmen in carnivals did that sort of thing all the time, and Stevie had openly told the Sister in what town she lived and why she was in a hurry to get home. That the woman had known her given name and her post-office-box number disturbed her, yes, but these minor mysteries seemed both less urgent and less frightening than the fact that her Exceleriter had taken on an uncontrollable life of its own. Stevie decided not to fret about them. Whereas the Exceleriter had become the outlet of an evil intelligence and the harbinger of some unspecified doom, Sister Celestial seemed to represent the very antithesis of menace: light, hope, warmth, and humanity. Anyway, that was how Stevie wanted to view her and so she made the desire the deed.

  “How much for a half hour of your time?”

  “Go ahead and lean on me, Miz Crye. If you ever come back, we’ll settle up. This session’s a freebie ’cause I think I’m gonna see you again.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. Not even the sharpest inner eye can see tomorrow as whole as a Grade-A egg. I just got a feeling.”

  What a palmist-prophetess-healer! She did not ask to look at Stevie’s hand. She did not reach down and lift a crystal ball to the top of the table. She did not deal out cards, or palpate the bumps on Stevie’s noggin, or split a commercial tea bag and try to sort the shredded leaves with the aid of an oolong stick or a pekoe magnet. She just sat with her fingers poised over the lovely old Remington, her head half turned toward her client, listening attentively even during her fingers’ intermittent tattoos on the keyboard. Stevie was amazed by the woman’s studious secretarial mien and quick two-fingered meticulousness. It was not what Stevie had expected, but it was oddly calming—flattering, even. Her troubles mattered; the manifold woes of the world did not overwhelm and extinguish them as topics of interest and concern. Not here.

  Stevie kept her hands on her manila folder as she talked. She purposely did not refer to its contents, speaking instead of the precariousness of her position as breadwinner and surrogate father-figure. Of its frustrations, uncertainties, and daily trials. This was the stuff of her book proposal, but, here, without the literary filigree, the calculated recourse to redeeming humor, or the underlying profit motive. This was an unembellished cry that made Sister Celestial’s typewriter rattle and the times between its rattlings reverberate with the minor-key music of doubt and clinical self-accusation. A husband dead, two children to raise, a talent of modest proportions, an ambition incommensurate with that talent, an ego so fragile that even praise could bruise it, and a temper of volcanic dimensions, capped now by the lava dome of her own crusty concept of female machismo. These were the troubles Sister Celestial had heard in her voice, these were the troubles Stevie had borne for almost two years with spotty, self-conscious stoicism. They probably gave her voice a recognizable inflection, an ineradicable melancholy lilt, and so the prophetess had heard her lingering, ever-present hurt. Had heard it even through Stevie’s impatience and annoyance, the way the cry of a hungry gull is audible even over the relentless booming of the surf. The recitation of these troubles wore Stevie down. By the time she was casting about for an ending, tears spotted the backs of her hands and stained the manila folder beneath them. A fine, rousing rush of self-pity. A sad, humiliating spate of the Crye-Me-a-River-I-Cryed-a-River-Over-You blues. Jesus, Stevie. Jesus . . .

  “You still haven’t let it all out,” the black woman said.

  “That’s plenty, isn’t it?” She wiped her eyes on her car-coat sleeve.

  “That’s nothing, Miz Crye Baby. Nothing at all.” Sister Celestial had swiveled away from the Remington toward her, and her face, the harshness of her punning epithet aside, gleamed with cool compassion. She pointed her chin across the little room. “You see that gallery over there?”

  “That shrine?” Stevie said, looking over her shoulder.

  The Sister chuckled mordantly. “Call it how you like. Those my babies, child. Two boys, three girls, all of ’em got step by step from diapers to dress-ups. Single-handed, pretty much. Prophetess Joy found the formula, Miz Crye, and her and her offspring got me and mine through some truly baaaaad time
s. Mother Miracle sent two of those children to Columbus College and might of got another one through if he hadn’t skipped off to Saskatchewan.”

  “I can do it because you did it, huh?”

  “Maybe not. I’m a hard act to follow. And I had a tougher row of turnips to chop. My man didn’t die, either. He up and run off when I was carryin’ my fifth. My daddy long since dead and my mama gone to Michigan with a motor-car-makin’ man, I was twenty-two. I got to be Prophetess Joy ’cause that’s what I wanted to prophesy. People like to hear it, too, even when joy’s a long shot or a outright lie. Joy begat Promise, who begat Miracle, who begat Pauline, who begat this heavenly body. That’s the American way, the Land of Opportunities. Ronald Reagan’s trying hard to give you the same kind of chance I had, Miz Crye, so maybe you can do it, after all. Maybe you can.”

  “Thanks for the incentive.”

  “Didn’t any incentives come from me, not from me to you, and if they did, you’re worse off than even you think.” She swiveled back to her typewriter. “You still haven’t let it all out.”

  Stevie took a tissue from her pocket and wiped her eyes, sniffled into it. Twisted it into flimsy corkscrews. She had come to Sister Celestial’s house to interview her, but had wound up being interviewed. Could she tell this stranger—no longer a stranger, but suddenly her confessor and confidante—the impossible sequence of events that had twisted her life as she was twisting this Kleenex? Stevie thrust it deep into her coat pocket and stared at the Sister.

  “What’s your real name? You know mine. What’s yours?”

  “Betty Malbon,” Sister Celestial said forthrightly. “Why?”

  “I have to know you’re a real person, not something my mind’s made up.”

  “Pinch yourself, Stevie, if that’s okay to call you. Then pinch me.” Betty Malbon laid her arm across the red vinyl for Stevie to pinch.

  First, Stevie pinched herself on her left flank. An unnecessary experiment. Without pinching or jabbing or twisting her own mortal flesh, she hurt. Her pain was diffuse and amorphous, like a cloud. It lay like a cloud on her dully persistent awareness of her own inconsequential self. I hurt; therefore, I am. A philosophy she could rephrase as Don’t put Descartes before de hearse. Thinking has nothing to do with it. Hurting has everything, from your first footstep to your final falldown. Even though you’re overstating your own hurt, which is nothing to what the Sister and millions of others have suffered, you’re a piker when it comes to pain, for the elite, God bless ’em, are saints of unremitting wretchedness.

  “All right, child. Now give me a pinch.”

  Seizing a bit of Betty Malbon’s wrist between her fingers, Stevie twisted it as she had twisted her Kleenex.

  “Uncle!” cried Miz Malbon. “Uncle!” Stevie let go. “That proof enough for you, or you think I’m putting on a hurt I don’t really feel? I’m as real to me as you are to you. Maybe realer.”

  “I know. That’s what scares me. Sometimes, lying awake at night, or half-asleep, I feel myself fading away.”

  “Yes, I know. Dreaming.”

  “Not dreaming, only. Fading out. Fading away. My consciousness stolen and put to someone else’s purposes. This past week, though, that feeling’s been underscored by an impossible occurrence. Dr. Elsa, my best friend, didn’t believe it, and maybe I’m believing it only to keep from thinking I’m either crazy or the pawn of some megalomaniac force.”

  “Tell me, child.”

  Reassured by the Sister’s warm voice and bulk, Stevie told. She began with a rigorous tirade against the pricing policies of Pantronics Data Equipment Corporation, proceeded to an account of her trip to Hamlin Benecke & Sons in Columbus, and finished with a long, ill-organized epilogue about the typewriter’s behavior since. She tried to get everything in, but her story sounded scattershot and harebrained even to her, chock-a-block with flashbacks, flash-forwards, and shameful arpeggios on the Sister’s heartstrings. Teddy and Marella came into the story, and Seaton Benecke and ’Crets and, inevitably, Ted, dead of cancer at thirty-nine. Finally, Stevie opened her file folder and pushed the long page of nightmare transcripts toward the prophetess.

  “I dreamed these,” she said. “But the Exceleriter wrote them. They’re all about Ted. In the third one he says he died so I could fulfill myself—as if his dying would somehow free me from the tyranny of his life. He wasn’t a tyrant, though. It doesn’t make sense to me, Sister. It doesn’t make sense!” She ended near tears, this time angry ones.

  “May I read this?” When Stevie, tight-lipped, nodded her assent, the black woman opened out the half-page of examination-table paper, took a magnifying glass from her typewriter stand, and worked line by line through the transcripts. A slow and assiduous reader, she kept her brow furrowed as she read, but at one point tapped the page with her forefinger and smiled. “‘Licensed haruspex,’“ she quoted. “Entrail-reading. That’s a divining I don’t do. People still sometimes call me out to paw through pig or chicken guts, but not since my Delphinia days have I obliged ’em. The slime ’n’ the stink’s fit only for bustards. Birds, I mean.” Her brow furrowed again, and she read some more, quoting in a high-pitched murmur, “ ‘There’s another woman, Stevie.’ Hmmmmm, mmmmh-yeah. Another woman, he says.” She perused the remainder of that nightmare and almost the entirety of the next in thoughtful silence. Then she looked up at Stevie and declared, “And here he says this business about dying so you could develop yourself is a lie. Heartfelt, though. A heartfelt lie. That’s nice, now. Heartfelt lies are sweet, like syrup in an open head wound.”

  “He never lied to me when he was alive.”

  “You don’t believe this story here?”

  “It was a dream, Sister—a dream my lousy, lying Exceleriter stole from my head. Why should I believe it?”

  “You don’t believe it ’cause it came through your typewriter?”

  “That’s right. I can’t believe anything that machine puts to paper. It turned Marella into a living skeleton. It made me seduce my son.”

  “But it’s only typin’ what you’re dreamin’, ain’t that so?”

  “I guess. I don’t know. Maybe I’m dreaming what the Exceleriter types. It could just as easily work that way as the other.”

  “The question is, Miz Crye—Stevie—where do these dreams come from and is the dreamer outside you tellin’ lies or maybe layin’ down clues? Answer that and you got a solution, I think, a chance to pull through your trial and put things to rights. You got to diagnose these dreams, that’s all.”

  “Interpret them?”

  “Everything you’re worried about’s in these nightmares. The way your man ran out on you, why he did it, and what’s gonna happen next. Please leave these nightmares here with me. So I can diagnose ’em.”

  “For how long? For how much?”

  “Don’t worry about the fee.” She swiveled aside and typed out a line next to Stevie’s address. “That’s your telephone number. I’ll call you in a day or so to let you know how my oneiromancy comes out. By this Tuesday, maybe, it’ll all be straight again, your Pretty Damn Exasperatin’ machine as tame as this here rheumatic Remington.”

  “Oneiromancy?”

  “Dream divining, Stevie. Haruspicy’s out, but I’m good for chiromancy, horoscopy, astrodiagnosis, oneiromancy, water-witchin’, and several different kinds of sortilege. Automatic writing’s one of my tools, and teletypomancy’s a field I’d be happy to pioneer. You’re so fascinatin’, Stevie, I got to do you gratis. Tea leaves, fishbowls, and fish guts aren’t my style, but for a crack at a bit of oneirotypomancy—” Betty Malbon smiled broadly—“I’d pay you a fee.”

  She rolled the paper up and performed her two-finger dogtrot for another four or five lines, making notes or private comments on Stevie’s case. “Besides, child, I’m flat-out worried about you.”

  “Thanks,” said Stevie. “You can keep the transcripts.”

  Sister Celestial rotated back toward Stevie and put both her big hands on the table. “Just
don’t do a feature on me, all right? My new sign’s all the publicity I need, even if I haven’t been in the papers since ’79. I get gawkers enough as it is. Horn-blowers ’n’ toilet-paperers. All the uppity riffraff.”

  “I won’t. I’ll do something else. Tomorrow’s a workday for me, and I haven’t got a project yet—but I’ll think of something.”

  “Sure you will.”

  “It’ll drive me buggy—absolutely buggy—until I do, but I’ll put my mind to it. Maybe a travel piece for Brown’s Guide.”

  Although the Sister was facing her, nodding her approval of these tentative plans, the Remington suddenly began to type by itself. It churned out a brief line, activated its own carriage-return mechanism, and repeated this process three more times before falling silent again. In a stupor of disbelief Stevie and the prophetess watched the keys move up and down and the typebars flick in and out of their basket. When the clatter ceased, the women looked at each other.

  “You did that, didn’t you?” Stevie asked.

  “Child, I was sitting here no different from you. That machine’s a softie, but I’ve always had to touch it some to make it go. First time for everything, I guess, but I never hoped to play witness to a willful typing machine.”

  Trembling imperceptibly, but feeling the tremors quicken, Stevie stood up. “What did it write?”

  The Sister removed the sheet of paper from the cylinder and passed it over the table.

  “No, I don’t want it. Just read it to me.”

  Sister Celestial recited the Remington’s lyric:

  “Ladybug, Ladybug,

  Fly away home.

  Your house is on fire,

  And your children will burn.”

  “Oh, God,” said Stevie. “That’s the Exceleriter. That’s the Exceleriter talking through your machine. I’ve got to go.” She cinched her car coat about her waist and banged her shoulder into the piano trying to get around it. “If anything’s happened to Teddy and Marella, I’ll kill myself.” Clutching her shoulder, she ricocheted around the upright to the door. “That’s not an idle threat, Sister. I mean it. Dear God, I’ve let them down again. I’ll . . . I’ll kill myself.”