“‘One day Cane made a decision. If he could not be brown and green like the rest of the gators, he could at least have the other thing he most coveted: song. He began his hunt by swallowing birds whole. Soon he had a whole array of songs and voices to choose from, but he found the chirps and squawks far from satisfying. He realized that what he most wanted to hear when he opened his mouth was a human voice.
“‘From that day forward, Cane spent his days and nights hunting for the perfect voice. He cut off heads and tore out throats with his razor-sharp teeth to extract the voice he sought, but always in vain. For each time he tried to sing with a borrowed voice, all that came out were the moans of his wretched victims.’”
Teddy and I didn’t move a muscle. Zora continued, rushing now to the end.
“‘King Cane’s reign of terror lasted over a hundred years. When he finally died, heavy with disappointment at not achieving his life’s goal, his bone-white body sank to the bottom of the swamp. On its way down, his skin came loose from his skeleton like a giant cracked eggshell, releasing Cane’s covetous spirit into the air.
“‘Until this day, Cane’s spirit still searches for and possesses the bodies of other gators who, like him, are different from their gator brethren. Those he would make kings are all distinguished by great size, unique coloration, or some other aberration. And they continue Cane’s hunt for the perfect human voice.’”
At the end of the story, neither Teddy nor I spoke.
Zora herself then broke the silence. “I think there’s a gator king right here in Eatonville.”
I didn’t know what to say. Zora had seen Mr. Pendir with a gator snout, and here in our hands was a book that began to explain how that was possible. “You think Mr. Pendir is one of them?” I asked. “You think he’s a possessed gator king out to steal people’s voices?”
Teddy tugged at a string on his shirt, mulling the situation over. “It don’t say anything about gator kings being half human. It just says they’re different colors and sizes.”
“But it also don’t say they can’t be,” Zora countered defensively. “It says ‘other aberrations’— being half gator, half man has got to be the biggest aberration there is! And remember, he stole the head of a man with the most beautiful voice.”
“Sonny didn’t have a particularly fine voice,” I added. “But he talked big and loud about beating gators.”
“What about Old Lady Bronson?” Teddy asked.
Zora raised her eyebrows. “Could be she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and with her crackly old voice she wasn’t worth dragging down.”
Teddy had no answer to that, so Zora smoothed the page of her book and resumed reading.
“‘Sometimes, in the haunted hours twixt midnight and dawn, on the edge of a gator king’s swamp, the souls of his many maimed and murdered victims can be heard moaning softly in unison. This, paradoxically, leads to the only reputed method of stopping a gator king’s murderous rampage.’”
“What?” I asked, breathless with curiosity.
Zora pressed on. “‘Go, in those hours, to a place where a gator king has been known to wreak his havoc. When you hear the moans of his victims, answer them with a lullaby. If the gator king is in earshot, your song will paralyze the beast, compel him to liberate the souls in his thrall, and send him to his watery resting place. The end.’”
“Hey,” said Teddy. “If the gator king hears you singing, won’t he just come and steal your voice, too?”
Zora shook her head. “Not if it’s a lullaby you’re singing.” Her voice was tired, and her eyes wider than I had ever seen them. “It has to be a lullaby.” She closed the book like she was keeping its wisdom safe between the green covers and clutched it against her chest over her heart. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“What?” Teddy and I answered in unison.
“We have to go to the Blue Sink tonight, listen for the moaning victims, and sing them a lullaby. That’s the only way we can liberate Sonny’s and Ivory’s spirits and send the gator king to his final rest,” Zora declared.
“OK,” said Teddy, cottoning to the adventure. “But we need a plan.”
“I’m getting to it.” I wasn’t sure she had been, really, but it took her only as long as my thought to come up with what sounded like one. “Carrie, you have the sweetest voice, so you gonna do the singing. Teddy, you the strongest, so bring the biggest stick you can find in case the gator king comes after us and we need to whomp him one. But be careful — if it is Mr. Pendir, he’s already survived an attack by three gators. Even if you just stun him long enough for us all to climb up a tree, it could save our lives!”
For a second I thought about the gator king trying to steal my voice, but then I pictured Teddy crashing a tree branch on the gator’s head and us scrambling out of the way.
“And what about you, Colonel?” Teddy asked. “You gonna wait for us back at the fort?”
“I’m gonna bring this here book,” she said, patting it. “Everything we need to know is right in here.” Then she got even more serious. “Wait a little while, till you know everybody in your house is good and asleep. Then sneak out real quiet, and come to Blue Sink as fast as you can. I know I don’t want to be waiting out there by myself late at night, full moon or no!”
“Ain’t you scared?” I asked. I meant to say “I’m scared,” but it didn’t come out that way.
“Yes,” she answered. “But we have to do it, scared or not.”
Teddy couldn’t resist. “Well, actually,” he said, “I’m not.”
The three of us burst out laughing, and I felt the weight of sadness lift slightly in me for the first time since Ivory died. We would be the looking and finding folks like in his song. We would look for his spirit and find it, and we would set it free. I just hoped that the gator king, whoever he was, knew enough to be paralyzed by my singing, not tempted by it!
That night I lay in bed and waited for the soft sound of my mama’s breathing. Normally the sound lulled me to sleep, but I was too nervous to feel anything like sleepy.
I never had runaway fantasies. I never pictured myself creeping out of my bed in the middle of the night and tiptoeing out of the house so I could join the circus or the gypsies or the traveling medicine show. Knowing firsthand what my father’s leaving did to my mama, I couldn’t imagine anything worse you could do to a person than leaving without telling. But that’s just what I did. I got up in the middle of the night and crept away, while my mama slept the deep sleep she’d earned on the pallet next to mine.
It had just finished raining. Grass slimed my ankles and calves. Crickets chirruped. Then a water moccasin slithered by fast like a streak of black lightning, making me jump. As I groped for my balance, the tree branches began to move all at once with the force of an angry parent’s switch, and the fear of getting caught or, worse, of my mama waking up and finding me gone, steadied me. I knew there was a moon that night, but the sky was so cloudy I couldn’t see it. For near a quarter mile I could hardly breathe. I felt confused, like the world had tilted. A place I had visited my whole life looked like no place I’d ever been. I don’t know how I made it to Blue Sink.
When I finally found it, Zora and Teddy were already there, lying on their stomachs in the wet stretch of grass between Pendir’s house and Blue Sink’s bank. In fact, I found them by tripping over Teddy’s big feet.
“Lay down here between us,” Zora whispered. I did. My heart almost stopped when I looked over and saw something big lying right next to Teddy on the other side.
“What’s —?”
Teddy gestured to it casually. “That’s my clobbering stick. Just in case.”
Zora snorted. “Small tree, more like. You should have seen him drag it over here. Now that all three of us are here,” she said, “let’s start.”
“Start what?” I knew what we were here to do, but darkness had written Eatonville in a strange, frightening language, and I couldn’t read it.
“We’re going to start singing to the spirits,” Teddy answered, a put-on confidence framing the edge of his words. “How about ‘Washed in the Blood of the Lamb’?”
Zora shook her head. “That ain’t a lullaby. A lullaby is something you sing to a baby, something sweet to make him —”
“Oh, like ‘Shortenin’ Bread,’” said Teddy.
Zora sighed. “I suppose ‘Shortenin’ Bread’ is a lullaby, but I was thinking of a song that —”
Now it was my turn to interrupt. “I have one. I have the right one.”
Dark as it was, I could feel Zora’s and Teddy’s eyes on me.
“Well, go on, then,” said Zora, taking my hand. “Start singing.”
“Yeah, you start and we’ll just come in,” Teddy said tenderly, and he took my other hand.
I closed my eyes and imagined myself in bed, my daddy next to me with his hand on my head, smoothing my hair while he sang.
“Sleep, little pretty one, hush, now, hush,
Mama gonna hold you till the mornin’.
Sleep, little pretty one, shush, now, shush,
Mama gonna hold you till the dawnin’.
You’ll never know hunger
And you’ll never know fright,
Pappy work all day so you can sleep at night.
You’ll never know cold
And you’ll never know fear,
Pappy work all day so you can sleep now, dear.
So sleep, little pretty one, hush, now, hush,
Mama gonna hold you till the mornin’.
Sleep, little pretty one, shush, now, shush,
Mama gonna hold you till the dawnin’.”
The more we sang, the more noise the swamp made. It was like we had sounded an alarm and were waking up everything in it. Fish jumped out of the water, their splashes blasting in our ears like explosions. The Spanish moss began to shake, caught up in a gust of wind, like a giant angrily tossing his hair. I thought maybe the tree would pull up its roots, stand on its sinews like legs, and pluck up all three of us in its branchy claws. But we kept singing, holding hands tight. All the while we still waited for a sign of the gator man.
Then we heard it. All of us heard it. I don’t know if fear or magic was getting the best of us, but we all heard a voice — soft and eerie as the wind calling to us. We stopped singing at the exact same second, on the very same word. The moment we did, all the fear I’d been carrying lifted me up and pulled me from Teddy and Zora. I thought the voice was Ivory’s, and I ran — I didn’t know where, or why, but I was running too fast to breathe.
Then the ground gave away and I was flying. No, I was falling; I fell, quick and slow at the same time. I didn’t know where I had landed until Zora called my name, her voice coming from somewhere above me. I had run clear over the edge of Blue Sink and landed on a hard bed of mud and rocks. The same place we’d found Old Lady Bronson.
My left shoulder hurt something terrible. The last thing I remember after that was Zora and Teddy standing right over me. “Carrie, are you all right?” Zora was saying. “Please, Carrie,” she begged. “Please be all right!”
Standing right behind them was a much taller figure.
We hadn’t just been imagining things. We had heard a voice. It was Mr. Pendir’s.
He carried me up Blue Sink’s rocky, slippery hill and all the way to the Hurstons’ house. In his arms, with Zora and Teddy nearby, I was in too much pain to question anything.
When we got to the Hurston house, Zora and Teddy guided Mr. Pendir to the dining room, where he laid me on the table. By then I was singing like I had a brand-new pair of lungs and was trying them out for the very first time. In my addled state, I was still singing to set Ivory’s spirit free.
“I went down to the gypsy
To get my fortune told,
She said what’s lost is lost
Even if it’s got a home. . . .
feel all alone . . .
feel so alone . . .
looking and finding folks
Feel all alone . . .”
Teddy held my right hand and tried to shush me, but sweetly, very sweetly. His eyes were shiny with tears. He squeezed my hand, and some water spilled out of his eyes. I stopped singing and held on to his hand.
Mrs. Hurston came rushing into the dining room with a candlestick, Sarah right behind her.
“What in the world?” Mrs. Hurston asked. “Mr. Pendir?”
Mr. Pendir was a slim, bald, pecan-brown man. His voice was gentle and a little hoarse, like a soft humming machine that didn’t get much use, but it was also gentle and comforting to listen to.
“I heard these kids outside my house. Then this one here,” he said, nodding his head down at me, “she ran right over the edge.”
Mrs. Hurston was at my side immediately.
“Y’all better be glad Daddy ain’t here,” Sarah said. “If he was, he’d a ripped a tree up out the ground by now and would be whipping y’all with the roots!”
Zora ignored her sister. “Just help Carrie, Mama!” she whispered. “Just help her!”
“Where does it hurt, baby?” Mrs. Hurston asked softly.
Despite the hammering pain, I was beginning to come back to myself. “My shoulder,” I said in a voice that sounded like a mouse squeak. The power it had when I was singing had gone. I felt weak. I could hardly feel anything besides Teddy holding my hand.
Mrs. Hurston turned her ear so it was right up close to my lips. “What did you say, child?”
“It’s her shoulder, Mama,” said Zora. “Look!”
She didn’t have to ask which one. Zora told me later that my two shoulders looked like a pair of steps framing my head, the left considerably lower than my right.
“Mr. Pendir,” Mrs. Hurston instructed, “we’re gonna have to set this bone together. You hold her left arm against her body real tight.”
Mr. Pendir took hold of my arm and pressed it into my rib cage. I didn’t yell out, but I began streaming tears. I was too awake for my own good. I wished I was asleep, but there was no use in trying. The pain was too much.
“Got her tight?” Mrs. Hurston asked Pendir.
“Yes,” he answered.
Then Mrs. Hurston started grunting. I couldn’t stand to watch her face contort, so I closed my eyes and started to sing again. From underneath my armpit she pulled the left side of my body up with as much force as I had ever felt. Barely five feet tall, Lucy Hurston was a testament to big strength coming in dainty packages. When my left shoulder was flush with the right one, Mrs. Hurston herself started singing.
“This girl ain’t gone be lopsided,” she sang. “Both her arms gone swing the same. Both her arms gone swing the same!”
Mr. Pendir wandered off into the kitchen and came back with a piece of firewood. He took it and made me a splint on the spot.
Zora spoke directly to Mr. Pendir for the first time. “How’d you know to do that?”
Mr. Pendir shrugged. “Just carpentry. Setting bones and the like ain’t no different than building anything else. You always got to make sure what you’re working is plumb — put straight.”
We all had been put straight. Mr. Pendir wasn’t a monster, much less a gator man. There he was in the Hurston home, humble and helpful. Mrs. Hurston warmed him a cup of coffee in the embers of the hearth, and he smiled in shy thanks. He was simply a man, a citizen of Eatonville.
And fully human.
My injury hurt Zora more than it hurt me. Besides receiving all the blame for me getting hurt, she thought she deserved it. Since I was laid up at home, rags wrapped around my arm and torso to keep me stable while my bones healed, it was hard for anyone to send a chiding word in my direction — even my mama, who surely had a right to.
So Zora came to visit me every afternoon, supposedly to catch me up on schoolwork, but it always started and ended with her reminding me that it was all her fault. “Nothing was worth you getting hurt,” she kept saying. “Not even catching the gator king.” First I tried to
argue with her, and then I just rolled my eyes every time she brought it up, but I could have rolled them from here to China for all the good it did.
A week after our failed try at defeating the gator king and rescuing the souls of his victims, I was sitting on the front step, sweating through my makeshift bandages and wishing I could skip off and search out something to do. Mama couldn’t miss work on the day shift, but she had asked to miss three nights so she could come home, make me dinner, and stay with me. Now that I was healing well, she had gone back to the second shift. To make up for the money she’d lost those three nights home with me, on her off nights she went and picked oranges in the grove two blocks north of the hotel, for as long as it held light. My end of the bargain was a promise to stay still and eat the corn bread and pork rind she left for my suppers.
From where I stood, the consequences of breaking my rest were too steep, anyway. I had no intention of becoming lopsided, and though I was at the point where doing nothing seemed like the hardest work I could do, I kept at it. If I didn’t, I might never be any good to my mama.
Zora was later than usual, and I was going back and forth between worried and plain old lonely. Then I looked up to see . . . Teddy! Zora had said he was grounded till heaven knew when, so I hadn’t expected to see him for a long time.
“Hey.” He was holding out something wrapped in a towel. “My mama made it. She knows you like it.”
I knew what it was without opening the towel: peanut brittle. Every year Teddy’s mama made a big batch of it at Christmas, and I always got a nice-size piece. Maybe it was because I always wrote her a note to say thank you and tell her how she made the best peanut brittle I’d ever tasted. Maybe she might have sent it anyway, because she was like that. In any case this piece was twice the size of what she usually sent at Christmas. I smiled, and it felt funny. I realized that I hadn’t smiled in a week.
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