“I took you from your mother’s arms. In the confusion, your parents never knew what happened. I told them you were washed overboard, but I hid you in the bow of a lifeboat, underneath a sail bag. And I used you to buy our lives. Used you for a bargaining chip. Every sailor knows. The wind is always interested if there’s a soul involved. Especially a child’s soul. Something new and pretty it can gloat over.”
For a long moment, while it all soaks in, nobody speaks. Then Fairfax leans across the table and says in a voice too thin to be convincing, “That’s a lot of bull.”
Tony, his face tight, scrutinizes Captain Fletcher. “I don’t believe you. If you’re telling the truth, why didn’t the wind take her then, on the spot? Why wait until now?”
The captain flashes him a crazy grin. “Wind can’t take a person’s soul against his will. Or so the story goes. It’s a matter that can’t be decided till the age of majority.”
“You mean all Electra has to do is say, No, you can’t have me?” says Tony, his voice breaking with anger and incredulity.
The captain shrugs and starts to lift his bottle. Tony reaches out and stops him.
“You’re making all this up, right? I mean, what kind of bargain is that?”
The captain answers softly. “What do you take me for? Listen for yourself. Does that sound like an old man’s imagination?”
Tony turns his head, just slightly. He hears it, too—the wind again, more insistent this time, whistling at the keyhole, curling around the garish sign outside, making it tap against the bricks.
“It made me promise she’d be brought up right—kept clean and perfect till the time. That’s why I gave her to the nuns,” says Fletcher, his dazed eyes focused on something far away, something none of us can see. “The wind has its ways of stacking the deck. Just like anybody else. It’s been sniffing around her all along, whispering about how she should like some things and hate others, trying to persuade her she’s got nothing to lose. But that’s not the worst of it.”
He lifts his bottle with trembling hands and takes a long pull. This time, Tony makes no move to stop him. “What do you think will happen to me if she says no? What do you think will happen to you and everybody else she gives a damn about? Ask her. I’m sure she knows by now” He shakes his head. “You can’t imagine the kinds of death the wind can think up for a man, even if you’ve seen them with your own eyes.”
Fairfax is on her feet, flailing at the air while Tony holds her back. “You son of a bitch! What gave you the right to gamble away somebody else’s soul? Your soul. It should have been your soul!”
“My soul? You stinking brat. You don’t know much about bargains, do you? Why should the wind take mutton when it can have lamb instead?” This time when he laughs it fills the whole room, a horrible, deranged hooting sound, almost a cry of pain. When it’s over, he wipes spittle on his sleeve and takes another long drink. “And as for what gave me the right, it was numbers. Simple, stinking numbers.” He winks at me as if we are members of the same conspiracy. “You know all about numbers, don’t you, my girl. Think you love ’em, eh? Think you know all about them. Well look what they’ve done to me!”
I push back my chair, rise from it unsteadily, too numb to feel the floor beneath my feet. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s all in the numbers. A hundred and twenty-nine to one. A hundred and twenty-nine men, women, and children, sunk to Davy Jones. Or one baby girl… one baby girl …”
I back away, tipping over the chairs, bumping into tables.
Outside, the wind has risen to a shriek. The walls shake. The windows rattle in their frames.
“It’s a lie!” Fairfax screams. “Everything he said is a lie!”
How I wish I could believe her.
The other patrons, mostly sailors and whores, have begun to rise from their tables and grope toward the walls with the edgy jerkiness of impending panic. The bartender glances up at the ceiling, raises an arm to shield his head from bits of falling plaster, then whirls toward me and shouts, “You! Get outa my bar!”
“Stop!” says Tony. “Don’t go any closer to the door.” And he throws himself over the clutter of tables and chairs to seize me by the wrist.
I am lost in a wasteland of fears and confusions. I want to live. I want to find my mother and father. I want to feel what it’s like to be someone with an inherited past, long and complicated and rich. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.
At the same time I think of the way I used to look up at the stars and wonder why I was different—an introvert, cold and frightened at a man’s touch, ecstatic only at the laws of mathematics. I held the hope of change inside me like a candle in a lantern. Now I see the truth. I am different because my soul has never been my own. Maybe I will never change. Maybe I cannot.
I stare at Tony’s fingers curled tight around my wrist, and I cry, “Don’t let go of me! Oh God, yes, let go of me!”
“Electra!” His eyes are rimmed with tears. “People care about you. All of us care—Fairfax, Roddy, Lavinia, me. You can’t just give up. I love you, Electra! I won’t let you go.”
I have only an instant to feel astonished at his words, only an instant to wonder at the way they rekindle the candle in the lantern. Then the front window splinters into a million pieces. Tony’s face is suddenly speckled with blood. He closes his eyes tight and staggers backward with a cry of surprise. As if from a great distance, I hear the other customers shouting, screaming. My clothes are plastered flat against my body. The wind is pulling at me, and the inside of my skull vibrates with the message I have come to know by heart: A bargain is a bargain, part and parcel.
Fairfax launches herself at me, wraps her arms around one of my legs as the wind drags me toward the door. “Don’t go! He said you don’t have to go,” she shrieks. The mirror behind the bar bursts outward in a spray of deadly shards.
The pieces of my life hang in the air before me. Bits which have always seemed random before coalesce now into something whole, something with a shape—not elegant or beautiful, but pleasing nonetheless, and powerful somehow. I think of Sister Jude bent over her books, of Fairfax practicing the cello with her eyes closed, of my dusty hats and boxes of pretty buttons, warm days spent on windy beaches, Roddy’s suspenders and Lavinia’s pomegranate wine, the completeness theorem, Tony DiMarini, who says he loves me, smiling and sipping cocoa by the light of a lunar eclipse. Every person, every place, every event, speeding toward one point in time: this moment of choice.
I look down at Fairfax, clinging to my ankle, her hair like a mane of flames, streaked now with dark blood. Behind her, Tony has fallen to all fours, shaking his head as if to clear it. With a fresh spurt of terror, I understand exactly what the wind wants. It wants me to believe that Captain Fletcher is right. That it’s a simple matter of numbers. My life in return for the lives of those I love. But it’s not just my life the wind is after. It’s my soul. And if I succumb, it will be worse than death. Much worse.
Tony climbs back to his feet and tackles me like a football player, grabbing frantically for a hold the wind can’t break. But slowly, slowly, I feel myself slipping away from him. “Don’t let go, Tony, oh God, don’t let go!” I scream, and I squeeze my eyes shut. The darkness magnifies the sting of plaster and bits of glass peppering my skin. But it’s better than seeing.
I am already far beyond surprise when, through the blackness and the incredible din, I hear a whisper. “I think you will be back.” I almost feel the brush of lips against my ear. The voice is Sister Jude’s. In that moment, the chaos of the external world recedes, and I think, Of course. Why didn’t I see it before? And I remember that any equation can be solved in a number of ways and that often the most elegant paths to solution are the least obvious.
I open my eyes, and the chaos roars in again. I throw up an arm to protect my face, and the words come to me as if I’ve always known them. I cry into the wind. “Mary, Mother of God, intercede for me. To Our Holy Father I offer my life in s
ervice as His bride!”
The wind stops completely, as if my words have shocked it somehow. But only for the barest instant. Then it rises again with a noise like a freight train, a howl that makes me clap my hands to my head. The air pressure in the bar drops abruptly. The roof’s blowing off, I find myself thinking calmly. There’s a shower of concrete and an oddly inconsequential wash of pain, mental or physical, perhaps both, muffled and diluted by the gradual loss of consciousness.
In our mountain valley, the sun is rising. I pause, kneeling at matins, to look out through the window of the chapel. The peaks above the convent, already touched with copper brilliance, stand out hard-edged against the deep blue sky. The upper reaches of the forest shimmer in a golden halo of light. I like this view, an orderly one, full of God’s own formulations. It is far removed from the sea, a good place to make a new start, especially when one is named after a ship.
My hand goes to my neck and Sister Jude’s crucifix, one of the few worldly possessions I brought with me when I came here. I ask for strength. I still can’t think of my past without a stab of yearning, as if I have cut myself on a small, sharp jewel that will never wear smooth. No one died at Jimmy’s Tavern except Captain Fletcher. He, and only he, lost his life when the roof blew off, while the rest of us were spared. All of those I love in that other world remain.
Letters come at intervals. Sister Michael writes that Sister Jude spends her days dozing in the sun. From Roddy and Lavinia I receive news of good books and the condition of the garden. Lavinia never fails to mention the two boxes of small treasures I asked her to keep for me in the moments before I left, unable, though I tried with all my might, to assign them to the trash bin.
Fairfax and Tony write seldom. They are more likely to appear at our door every few months, bearing gifts of pomegranate wine, warm scarves for the snowy winter, or varieties of fresh fruit we cannot raise ourselves at these elevations. If the day is warm, I walk with them in the woods. If not, we sit together in the public room, where a fire keeps the chill away.
Fairfax talks about her music, which consumes her now as it never did before. On each occasion, she has discovered something new—a special technique, the name of an unknown composer, or the fresh interpretation of a particular phrase.
But Tony never talks about his work. Instead, he always asks, the look in his eyes a little less hopeful each time, “Will you ever leave this place?”
And I always reply, “No, Tony. I won’t.”
It is then that I feel the most pain from the little, sharp jewel of yearning and I push it away, wrap it in the protection of rationality, and seize the truth. This life is right for me. And even if it were not, a bargain is a bargain, part and parcel.
THE TUCKAHOE
It’s getting on towards dark, and I keep hoping maybe I’ve caught a fever and I’m out of my head. Maybe there isn’t anything waiting under the house to get me as soon as I step outside. Maybe Pa and Lemmy are just playing a trick on me, and they’ll come strutting through the front door any minute now, smug as a couple of torn turkeys. Oh, how I’d like that. Pa, he’d laugh at me, because that’s his way, to make a joke out of Ruben, who’ll never be a man. And Lemmy would probably hook his thumbs in his belt and call me his sissy little brother, seeing me wrapped up in Momma’s quilt like this, shaking, and nothing sticking out except my nose and the barrel of Grampa’s Colt pistol. But I wouldn’t mind. It would be all right, just this once. If they came in here alive and whole, if they could prove tuckahoe is just tuckahoe, and that empty thing on the porch isn’t really what’s left of Momma. Then they could laugh all they want, and it would be all right. Just this once.
The rain started in again a couple hours ago, just like last night. Makes my heart crawl up into my throat and lie there twitching like a half-dead frog. I lit all the lamps and tried to make a fire in the fireplace. But the fire, it won’t seem to burn right. It looks just the way I feel, puny and wavery, like it might not be here in the morning. I tried to give myself a good talking-to, just like Momma would if she saw me now. “Ruben,” she would say, “the Lord helps them that helps themselves.” But I don’t think the Lord had much to do with this rain, nor with the thing that ate Momma.
Last night, when the storm first started, I had a feeling this wasn’t any regular rain. Didn’t seem natural the way it poured out of the sky. It came down in long, wavy curtains, like somebody’d emptied a bunch of big tin washtubs all at one time. There weren’t any drops at all except from the splashes when it hit the ground. And the lightning felt wrong, too. I’ve never seen such lightning before. Why, it lit up the sky blue and white all night long, one bolt right after another. Early on in the evening, I saw it hit the two big old poplars down by the road, both at the same time. Before the rain put the fire out, they were burnt to pure cinders, and there was nothing left this morning except black poles.
The thing that made my skin creep worst of all, though, was the smell. I mostly like the smell of rain, especially this time of year, when the tree sap is running and the ground is already a little damp. But this smelled funny, kind of like that oily stuff Pa sprays on the crops sometimes to kill the bugs. I told Pa that. I said the rain smelled real bad, like oil or something. I even went out on the porch and got a little on my fingers so he could smell it for himself.
But Pa, he has a stubborn streak, and most times he doesn’t pay any attention till something turns around and bites him right on the toe. He looked at me kind of sideways, scratching his beard, and he said, “Ruben, I don’t smell a blame thing. Quit acting like an old woman.” And Lemmy made it worse by laughing outright.
I saw right then I might as well not waste any more breath on those two, so I just shut my mouth and went over to the table to watch Momma kneading bread. I like to watch her when she has her sleeves rolled up and her hands all covered with flour. Sometimes a lock of fine, brown hair falls down in her eyes, and she asks me if I’ll tuck it back for her. Last night, when I tucked her hair back in, she whispered, “The rain don’t smell right to me, neither, if you want to know the truth.” Remembering that now makes me feel like crying.
After a while, I lay down by the fire and tried to read in one of my schoolbooks about this fellow who discovered the South Pole, but it was no use. I kept getting this stickery feeling all up and down my back. Made me think Lemmy or somebody had sneaked up behind me and was trying to scare me. But every time I twisted around to look, there was nobody there at all, just the front window lit up all cold and blue, and the curtains of rain outside, and the roar of thunder. The more I stared at that book, the more I thought about the window, and the queerer I felt about what I might see through it if I turned around again. The hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stood up, and pretty soon a cold sweat broke out on my lip, right where I’m starting to get a few little mustache hairs. I made up my mind the only way to get myself over being afraid was to go take a good long look through the window to prove there was nothing peering in, fearsome or otherwise.
I put my book down on the rug where I’d been lying, and I got up and walked to the window, which was misted over a little on account of its being warmer inside than out. I spit on my sleeve and rubbed a little place in the glass. I couldn’t see too good, because the rain and lightning made everything look so different. The straw grass on the front acre might have been a stranger’s pond, and Momma’s chicken coop loomed up in the night like one of those dinosaurs I’ve seen in books. I squinted for a long time, and finally after I had things figured out a little, I saw the chickens were all riled up, flapping around in the rain. That struck me as just plain unnatural, for chickens are pretty much like people when it comes to staying indoors on a wet night.
Then I saw the other thing, and it gave me a chill so deep I felt like I’d been dropped down a well. Through that little place in the glass, I made out something creeping towards the root cellar. I stood still as a lump of salt to get a better look, though my blood was hammering inside my veins,
and my knees felt like cheese. The next bolt of lightning lit up everything almost as clear as day, and just for a second, even with the rain, I got a perfect sight of the thing.
There’s a funny kind of toadstool that grows down in the dimmest part of the woods. Tuckahoe, Pa calls them, but Momma says they aren’t like any tuckahoe she ever saw, and we aren’t to eat them under any circumstances. I wouldn’t want to anyway, for the sight of them puts me off my feed. You never find just one or two, coming up separate around dead wood like regular mushrooms. These tuckahoe like to grow from the heart of a living tree, a hundred or more together in a slippery, gray clump, like overgrown frogs’ eggs. No single one of them is bigger than a man’s thumb, but I have often seen nests two feet around stuck onto unlucky maples and dogwoods. Lemmy, he gets bored sometimes and knocks the clumps down and hacks them up with a stick for fun. But me, I’d rather stay as far away from them as I can.
Tuckahoe. That’s what I thought of as I watched that thing crawl across our front acre in the stinking rain. I felt the sweat gathering into little streams on my forehead while I told myself to stop and think. It couldn’t be tuckahoe because it was too big, big as a man. Besides that, it was moving, and fast, too. Tuckahoe couldn’t move by itself, not that I ever heard of anyway.
I could feel a howl building up in my throat, getting ready to come out whether I wanted it to or not, when all of a sudden there was a big crash from the back of the house and the whole place shook. I think I did let out a yell then, but nobody paid any attention because they were all running to see what had caused the commotion. By the time I got my wits together enough to follow them, Pa and Lemmy were standing by the back door looking out into the storm. A good-sized limb from the old oak tree by the kitchen had torn loose in the wind and come down on the roof. Pa was growling and cursing, and Momma was out in the rain with a Farm Journal over her head, trying to see if the roof was all right.
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