by John Crowley
My legal responsibility, is what it is, Floyd was saying.
Well sure. (Sam’s voice, from Sam’s chair.)
Can’t have her where I can’t see her.
But I’ve got my responsibilities too, Sam said (and Hildy’s breast warmed where her breath was held). She’s a very sick child, and I have to be sure she’s not going to get worse. Now now now. (This maybe in response to some gesture of Floyd’s.) I could put her in the hospital here. I could do that.
There was a shuffling of protest or realignment of forces below that Hildy, even ear to the grate, couldn’t interpret; then Warren insisted on having what had happened explained to him.
“Just hush. Just hush Warren. Please.”
Don’t mean no offense to you, she heard Floyd say.
No. Sure.
You understand, Doc. What it is. We’re Christian people.
Uh huh, Sam said. Hildy thought she knew what face he had when he said it.
Now yall down there. To that hospital. Yall worship the Popa Rome. Now for us thad be no different than worshippn the Devila Hell.
Scandalized, Hildy with drawn breath waited for Sam’s reply, which she couldn’t imagine but whose irrefutability she could sense already.
But Sam only said: Well, I’m not going to argue with you.
He rose, then, apparently, and Hildy heard him say: I tell you what. You go see her, in the little back house there, and see she’s all right. And then we’ll talk.
That was all. Silence fell in the room below. Hildy (while Warren pestered her, whadeesay whadeesay) had a paralyzing insight, that the world of grown people was divided from the world she knew by a gulf, and that she must one day cross it, and think and feel as they did, and not as she now did; and that only then would she know if her horror now at what Sam had done—and not done—was justified, or not: just as a person asleep and dreaming can only judge her dream when she awakes.
Pierce in his bed heard the bungalow door open; he heard Floyd Shaftoe studying his daughter, granddaughter—he could hear the man’s breathing, while Bobby said nothing. When they did speak they spoke both at once and so low and quick that it was like foreign language.
Cmon. You ain’t stayn here.
Will if I want.
You ain’t sick.
I like to die.
Well you ain’t sick now. Cmon.
Won’t.
Floyd said nothing more for a moment. Pierce (as though his ear were huge, sensitive as an antenna) could now hear Bobby’s breath: quick, angry, and the phlegm whistling faintly in her throat.
They teach you things? Floyd asked. They make you swar to things? Did they?
None your business.
You have some damn respect.
Pismire.
You’re comn home.
Won’t. Don’t you touch me. You touch me I’ll kill you. I’ll cut your throat while you lie sleepn. I will.
You’re a devil. They turned you on me. You’re accursed.
Silence then. The door of the bungalow closed. Pierce lay unmoving while the mephitic curses the Shaftoes had loosed (the more terrible for being all constrained whispers) evaporated, and Bobby’s hot breathing slowed. His own heart beat hard; it was evident to him that Bobby could never leave here, never return to where she had come from, that she had only escaped harmless from Floyd by the most terrific daring and pluck, and that to go back would be death: the wrongness of it was self-evident, and would not be permitted in the world he lived in, which Sam and Winnie managed and not Floyd.
A little later Winnie came in, and told Bobby gently that her father wanted her to rest here, with them, and get better. And that after she rested a day or two, Dr. Oliphant would take her back to her father’s house.
That night then, in the bungalow, the Invisibles gathered (slipping out one by one on various pretend errands and across the breezeway, violating the quarantine that was anyway effectually over); they got Bobby to dress in a clean nightshirt of white, and when that was done they found the vial that Pierce had filled at the Blessed Sacrament font—it had been moved and hidden several times in the last two days, maybe losing efficacy as it was handled, but unspilled at least.
There was no question who would administer the sacrament. Sister had once read out the rules from her blackbound book (pressed for the details by Hildy): An ecclesiastic, if one is present, rather than a lay person; a Catholic, rather than one not of the faith; a man, rather than a woman—though except in cases of extreme necessity, a parent should not baptize his child (but why? Hildy wondered, and wonders still).
Bobby changed her mind at the last instant, but after some forceful argument—her last chance, and surely she knew enough now to take it; they wouldn’t abandon her, they would continue her instruction somehow—she consented. They had her kneel, with her sponsors on either side, Bird and Hildy, and Pierce (certain they would be interrupted any second, but by whom?) uncapped the vial of stolen theurgy. After baptism, just for a moment, just until the first venial impulse, the first wrongful desire, inevitably shadows it again, the soul is as white as God meant it to be: and if the roof were to fall in on all of them now, Bobby alone would find herself without an instant’s hindrance before the throne of God. Pierce’s heart filled, he poured out the dribble of oily fluid over Bobby’s dark curls, she giggled at the tickling rivulets. The world turned palpably beneath them where they knelt. “Baptizo te …,” he read from his missal.
“Bapteezo?” Warren said, struck in the funny bone.
“Baptizo te, Roberta, in nomine + Patris et + Filii et + Spiritus Sancti.”
“Amen,” they said. And didn’t know what next. Pierce, faintly sick with wonder and dread, lay down the book and vial. Bobby wiped a trickle of fluid from her ear with the shoulder of her nightgown, looking at nothing; then she got up quickly, climbed into Bird’s bed, and faced the wall unmoving.
“Bapteezo,” Warren said, laughing helplessly. “Bapteezo!”
The next day, pale and slow and all but silent, Bobby put on her flimsy print dress, more raglike now even than when she had first appeared among them, then her sweater (her fingers blindly feeling for the remaining buttons and their holes while her eyes looked elsewhere) and her fur-collared coat. In a paper bag she carried other clothes, Bird’s and Hildy’s, that Winnie had chosen for her, and some cans of food and a loaf of bread; and a picture-book of angels she had chosen herself from the Oliphants’ books. Hildy sorted through her holy cards and selected a few that weren’t favorites—then, generously, one that was, the Little Flower in soft brown robe and black hood like a nuthatch, her arms full of roses—and gave them to Bobby to have.
In the back of the Nash she sat next to the window, looking not out though but at the back of Sam’s head; she took Pierce’s hand in her small one and held it. Pierce said nothing either, only staring at Sam too, who had been unable or unwilling to keep Bobby, and who now kept up a patter of jokes none of them laughed at as he steered the car up the black winter mountain to Hogback, where the Shaftoes lived, to give her over to Floyd. Where a rattleboard bridge crossed the tumbling crick, and a cabin stood on a grassless yard beneath the beetle of the mountain, Sam stopped; he reached behind him to open Bobby’s door. He wouldn’t trust his car on that bridge, he said; she’d have to walk from here.
Floyd Shaftoe came out onto the porch of the cabin and stood, making no sign. A dog barked monotonously from the stake where he was tied. Bobby humped her bag of stuff from the car and started across the bridge, not looking back at Pierce but bearing nonetheless indelibly on her soul the sign he had put there of an inward and invisible grace.
Joe Boyd explained fuckn to him, down in the basement of the main house while he filled the automatic furnace stoker with coal. Pierce insisted that the discussion be kept on an impersonal or scientific level, using the right words, which Pierce happened to know—penis for boys, pelvis for girls. It was warm in the dim basement; coal dust clung in the damp hairs of Joe Boyd’s arms and
brows. He explained the mechanisms. He explained too about prostitutes, a subject that interested him; prostitutes, he said, were women who were willing to do the thing with someone if he paid, and since they got money for doing it, it was no imposition, it was all equitable and fair. Joe said there were no prostitutes in Bondieu, only in big cities like Huntington; when Joe was ready to do it, and had the money, that’s where he would go, he said. He also told Pierce about the Studilac, which was a Studebaker with a Cadillac engine implanted in it, and about the fastest car on the road.
What had become of him? April had come and he felt burdened, as though he still wore his brown wool winter coat, only not on the outside but under his skin. He longed to turn entirely inside out, to be hatched, as from an egg. So silent and abstracted did he seem, staring for long periods at vacancy and drifting to a standstill in halls and doorways, that Winnie decided he must not be well yet. She brought it up to Sam, who supposed it could be so; and it was decided that every afternoon for a time he must spend an hour or two in his room, the blind drawn against the burgeoning spring, to rest, to nap better still, which he protested he wasn’t capable of; still he had to lie in the semidarkness and not even read books.
He obeyed, mostly, lying with his hands behind his head and watching the sunlight cross the drawn blind, studying the curious braided ring that dangled from the string. He sang. He even fell asleep sometimes, with cataleptic suddenness, awaking after an hour with open mouth dry and forehead damp. He dreamed, too: often of the same room he lay in, which seemed a waste to him when he awoke. Once though he dreamt of Bobby: Bobby and his cousin Bird lying together in a bed not like his but more like his parents’ bed in Brooklyn. Bobby and Bird were prostitutes: Pierce lay naked in the bed between them, the covers up around all their necks, they looking at him smiling and willing and presumably also naked, and the fuckn about to begin. And Pierce was filled with an immense and joyous expectation, no feeling he had ever felt before, a compound of gratitude and a leaping glee at once wholly private and wholly frank: the same unspeakable glee and gratitude he would later feel (in a fainter waking grownup form) whenever he found himself, what luck, in circumstances anything like those.
He never told Father Midnight about Bobby in confession. Not about the baptism, which he had decided could not have been a sin no matter how complicated it was to explain; nor about the Sunday morning when the Oliphants were all at church and he was home with Bobby. He had no direct information that that was a sin either; his indoctrination in the Decalogue had for the time being skipped over those numbers; but he chose not to mention it in any case, entered it somehow elsewhere in his moral books, an account that, now opened, would not ever be closed, and was nobody else’s business at all.
“Certainly I remember her,” Winnie said. “A little girl that woman brought in. The woman with the animal name.”
“Mousie.”
“And the girl had some sort of nursery rhyme name or fairy tale name herself.” She glanced at Pierce, lesson done. “Well?”
Well: he had himself only in the last day and night, on the plane and the bus to his mother’s house, begun to remember, or to imagine he remembered, much more than that. How he had hidden her, right there in his uncle’s house, his uncle’s bedroom, unbeknown ever after to Sam. How he had opened his eyes on her as though turning inside out, and for the first time entered that condition or story or situation which he would find himself entering over and over again, without ever quite exiting from it, as though the teller of an old tale had forgotten the (happy) ending and only kept idiotically repeating the opening entanglements to jog his memory.
An old tale, a fairy tale.
Not until this day, though, had Pierce connected the forest fire he had set himself with the fire which the Salamander set to show Floyd Shaftoe its power. Bobby Shaftoe’s past had seemed to him at the time utterly incommensurable with his own, hers stretching behind her an untellable distance just as his did but in some entirely different dimension, unable to share parts; things that had happened to her could not also have happened to him. And when later on in the course of other researches he again came upon the connection between salamanders and fire, he had forgotten Floyd Shaftoe altogether. Only now, when Floyd came before him again, issuing out of the once-was, did he put two and two together. And now it was too late, too late to find out for sure if the fire he set had been the fire that showed Bobby’s grandpap the power of the Salamander.
But even if those fires really were the same fire—if both had been the one that began at the Oliphant’s trash baskets beside the old garage, in that summer of 1952—still it might have been the Salamander who started it: might have been the Salamander who snatched the burning paper from Pierce’s rake, and blew it into the waiting mulleins and the milkweed. He experienced, and not for the first time this week, this winter, the sensation that he was simply creating the story backward from this moment, reasons and all. But isn’t that what memory is always doing? Making bricks without straw, mortaring them in place one by one into a so-called past, a labyrinth actually, in which to hide a monster, or a monstrosity?
“But can you tell me something?” Winnie said to her son with a tentative smile. “As long as we’re on the subject.”
“What?”
“Why really did you take Opal’s diamond ring away that time?”
“Not the ring really. Just the stone.”
“Well.”
“No I can’t,” Pierce said, feeling with dreadful sharpness the cruelty of what he had done, had surely done out of solipsistic childish necessity, but still. “I mean I remember doing it, but I’m not sure now I know why.”
“Sam was so hurt,” Winnie said. “That you would do that.”
“Oh god,” Pierce said. “Embarrassing.”
The soft sky they looked at had begun to darken; a wind lifted one by one the fronds of the will-less palms, and let them go again.
“Well,” Winnie said softly. “It surely doesn’t matter anymore.”
Pierce took from his mother’s pack one of her cigarettes and lit it. The little velvet ring box, lined in rose satin, opened in his mind like a cut. He was suddenly sure—and his heart shrank to think of it—that he had taken that stone, the stone out of Opal’s wedding ring, in order to give it to Floyd Shaftoe; and he knew that if he could just keep this moment from passing away, for just a moment more, he would remember why.
TEN
Floyd Shaftoe was the seventh of seven sons named for the counties of the Cumberlands. That he was a seventh son gave him powers, powers he would not have known about if those he grew up with had not told him of them, and made him use them: he could draw the fire out of a burn, for one, pluck it out with his fingers and then shake it away. (His mother, as the mother of seven sons: there were things she could do as well. She could blow down the throat of a child with catarrh, who like to die, and the child would pass the matter and live.)
He had not been given his gifts for nothing; he knew that from an early age. Even now as a mature man, a Christian man and a grandfather, he did not know if he had come to the end of the meaning of his gifts or the duties they entailed.
He had been born with a caul: the granny-woman who had seen him born had saved the caul, dried it, and given it to him in a pouch to wear—and though he wouldn’t do that, he had buried it carefully in a place known only to himself. And if he had thought thereby to evade a fate that the caul had carried with it, he had not succeeded. On certain nights—it might be the night of Little Christmas, or the last night of October, or when the moon was full at midsummer; less often as he grew older and the world grew worse—Floyd Shaftoe would hear his name called, not urgently but surely, at his window as he lay asleep: and he would answer. For he was one of a band, men and women born (he supposed) with the same signs as himself; and there were as many of the others, with whom his kind contended for the health and wealth of the earth: and he could no more refuse a summons to walk out against them than he could re
fuse to dream or die.
When he was twelve years old Floyd had seen his mother laid away, dead of her last child and first girl, dead too. There had been no preacher for her, no one to read or sing; his father made the box himself, and his brothers dug the grave.
In that summer Floyd first heard his name called at the window while he slept.
He awoke, and listened for the call to come again, while his ear remembered the sound and where it had come from. The call did not come again, but seemed to lie beyond the window, waiting. Floyd stepped out from among his sleeping brothers in the bed (somehow able not to waken them with his movements) and then lightly out the window. It was the shortest night of the year, and the moon was full; he could see as though it were day, but not the one who had called his name. Nevertheless that one led him, and though Floyd could not see him he trusted him to know the way and the reason.
Down along the cove he followed, but then felt himself to be alone, left to his own devices, set a lesson, as when his old man had showed him how to hoe a row, and then left him to do it. He walked along noiselessly on long bare feet, and at length he began to notice others on the path with him. One or two, a man, a woman: he passed them by and glanced into each face as he passed, though they took no notice of him. He over-took a tall man in a brimfallen black hat, and when he passed by him and glanced into his face, he saw it was a man he knew: his face was set in a grimace, and his breast was shot away horribly by the slug the deputy had slain him with last winter.
God bless you, Floyd said, but his neighbor answered nothing. More folk were on the path along the cove now, and the path forked in a way Floyd did not recall it doing, leading down sharply beneath the ridge. Floyd saw that they were entering a cleft in the mountain, troops of them now coming in from every footpath; some of them were bound, some were naked, some seemed to moan noiselessly, some to laugh. When Floyd found himself drawn near the cleft in the mountain, he held himself back against the tide of them, not at all wanting to enter there; and one who was just then going down in turned to look back, as though her name were called, and stared at Floyd. She had the baby that had died with her in her arms, swaddled in the shroud she wore. The others going down into the mountain jostled her, pushing past, as though eager for their beds; and at length they carried her within along with them, though her face turned back to Floyd till she was gone.