The Magister (Earthkeep)

by Sally Miller Gearhart

  She's dancing, Jez thought, dancing split naked to the music in her head!

  The pulse suddenly stopped. The shadow of the long figure stood motionless, arms raised. Jezebel extended an enfoldment. It bounced back. Slowly the silhouette drew a thin rod from out of nowhere and raised it noiselessly to a striking position above its head. Then it crept along the wall toward her. Jez waited, watching the sharp lines of the shadow dissolve into a growing amorphous blob.

  The rod emerged first, a long walking stick that poked its crafty way into her line of vision. It was followed by Mad Becky, not naked at all, but immaculately clad in a red leotard of skin-tight spandex. The red contrasted with iridescent silver tights that hugged the thin legs and disappeared into the tops of red aerobics shoes.

  Jez barely breathed.

  The old woman stared at her out of cavernous black eyes and from under a shock of silver hair that grew in billows around her dark leathery face. Suddenly, she leapt toward Jez with a shriek. Jez cringed back from the fencing, and Mad Becky slipped the stick through the wire to poke at her belly, her breasts. Jez doubled over.

  "Stop it!" She yelled. "Stop it, Becky!"

  The prodding continued, accompanied by grunts of satisfaction and, Jez sensed, edges of fear. She reached up suddenly and caught the end of the stick.

  "Rebecca!" she shouted. "Reeba! Beckla! Becka, Becky, Beck!"

  Instantly the old woman howled and pulled back. Jez lost her balance and fell forward. With a mighty twist, Mad Becky jerked her weapon from Jez's hands and, with her own arms inside the fencing, began beating the stick all over Jez's body.

  "Stop, you crazy woman! Stop! I'm Jezebel! Jezebel!"

  Mad Becky halted. She frowned. Before she could move again, Jez had seized her hands and pinned them to the wire.

  "I'm the one you called," she whispered tensely. "I'm Jezebel. Jezzybell!"

  The old woman jerked free, letting her stick fall into the cage. Jez seized it.

  "You can have this if you'll let me out." She waited. "Open the cage, Becky."

  She pointed to the place where the wire was secured, surrounding Mad Becky with images of her hands on the rocks and wires, rolling back the fencing.

  The brightly clad figure did precisely that. As her cage bulged open, Jez thrust out the stick. "Here." She waited on her knees until Becky slowly took it. The black eyes were canny now, warily scanning the crouching figure before her.

  Jez spoke quietly.

  "I'm here. I came because you called me."

  She extended her hands.

  The old woman's eyes widened, then blinked twice. When they met Jez's eyes again, their blackness had softened, and for a moment an impish merriment flickered in their depths. With infinite slowness, Mad Becky reached out and took the proffered hands, folding them within gentle fingers. She raised Jez to her feet; releasing an audible sigh, she laid her hand delicately on Jez's cheek. Then gesturing to the passage from which she had come, she began to urge Jez toward it.

  When Jez started to speak, the old woman motioned her into silence and drew her insistently into the passageway. Jez followed with difficulty, stretching her cramped muscles into obedience and struggling to match Mad Becky's pace. They moved through tunnels and open areas where mounted crystal stalks revealed smaller corridors branching left and right. The walls were rough and gray at times, smooth and almost glassy at other times. Some mixed-texture surfaces seemed composed of figures that reminded Jez of shells and tiny sea animals.

  As they twisted down new passageways, Jez had the strong sense that they were drawing deeper into the mountain, toward some center of activity. She fought off the return of her lightheadedness, at last stopping the old woman so she could rest. She sank to the floor, dizzy and trying to balance in the midst of nowhere. Then she heard Mad Becky's voice for the first time.

  "Jezzybell."

  Jez raised her head.

  "Girl, I can't get to you." The conjure woman leaned on her walking stick, shaking her head. "You got a job to do," she went on softly. "You got a job to do, you ain't near ready for it, an' I can't get to you!"

  Jez summoned every mechanism of focus. "Becky, I. . .there's something here. . .I can't. . ."

  Then cool hands pressed her cheeks. The old woman knelt beside her, holding her head, washing away tightnesses, easing pressures. Jez drew a long breath and unleashed it in a sigh.

  "You got all it takes," she heard the old woman whisper, "all it takes to do what you come here to do. But girl, you got to trust me."

  Jez met the dark eyes, searched the craggy face. Tears rose in her eyes and moved her head into a nod. The old woman nodded with her, her eyes dancing.

  "I aim to take you to that room yonder." She pointed with her chin. "You close your eyes and lay your hand in mine. You ain't about to come to no harm."

  Jez pressed her lips together and let the conjure woman help her to her feet. As she gave herself over to her guidance, she heard a low musical note pulsing through the mountain, suggestive of a tremendous subdued power. It matched their footsteps, growing stronger by the moment and calling her to its center until at last she felt Mad Becky halting their progress at the opening to the room.

  Even through her shielded eyes Jez felt heat, and the intense brightness. As Mad Becky took her by the shoulders and turned her toward the source, every cell in her body trembled, her eyes flew open, and she suddenly stood bathed in a blinding unearthly light. At the same moment a pure vocal tone rose from the mountain crone's throat. It grew to full volume and steadied as she flung out her arms to the stark incandescence before them.

  "Becky, don't!" Jez cried, lunging forward to stop her singing. Then something brought her up short: Hundreds of crystals were being called into exquisite attunement by the ringing of the old woman's fundamental note. Jez put her hands to her ears as the proliferating overtones washed through her, echoing in her head.

  She felt herself stiffen and cry out even before she fell to the floor. Her dutiful monitor told her that the cold wind had already yielded to sweat, that her supine body was rounding to a high arch, and that tumultuous paroxysms were on their way. With a locking of her breath, she opened to the inevitable.

  And landed, swaddled by chords of crystal song, right in the middle of Mad Becky's fertile brain.

  At the same moment, she felt the conjure woman inside her own head, dwelling with her in a presence that distinctly differed from softself exchange – this was too high and too exhilarating, too unreal to be mistaken for that more earthbound phenomenon. She was aware of the thin leotard-clad body still transfixed by the crystals, and of the other body garbed in woodswarmth, bent grotesquely upward and pulsing with brutal spasms. But she and the old woman inhabited some third terrain.

  "I am filled with your whole life," Jez said, choosing a language unspoken for centuries.

  "And I with yours," her companion replied in still another ancient tongue.

  In the person of Hadashida Perkins, stage-named Rebecca Tsunami, Jez bowed to the applause of yet another enchanted audience, fed flocks of ducks and geese on a parkland lake, screamed at Becky's level-headed doctors, heaved Becky's bed through the window of a dingy little room, and lived again with Mad Becky the terrifying separation-from-self that had sent her wandering in the darkness of West Virginia’s defunct coal mines.

  She saw with Mad Becky's eyes the beams of sunlight that broke through the clouds over endless green hills of oaks and sugar maples drenched with rain.

  For her part, Mad Becky found her hands braiding the long black hair of Jezebel's mother, her knees brown and wet from working carrot rows at the collective farm, her eyes dropping Jezebel's tears into the ashes that had been Jezebel's baby girl, her lips forming Jezebel's lectures on transmog operation, and her heart locking with Dicken's in a storm-soaked soaring over the Caribbean.

  At the end of the hundredth story, with laughter and sadness linking their two suspended minds, the two women approached the matter of their present
meeting. The descent from their high exchange of minds began when Becky's voice hummed through the crystals, "You have a rock in your chest, Jezebel, blocking your flow." Her attention was focused on the distorted and arched body, still in light spasms, that Jez identified as her own.

  "A rock is causing me to do that?" Jez asked.

  "That and lots more." The old woman's mind textures were grumpy. "And I can't teach you what you must learn while you block your flow."

  Jez examined the rock that Becky was perceiving. "Men. You see my distrust of men."

  A rising unease threatened their link.

  "That is your rock," Becky's mind acknowledged.

  Before Jez could control it, defensive rejoinders rushed from her memory toward Becky. They flooded their mutual mindspace with images of Jez's encounter with Shaheed, her learnings from being in the body of Wundu, Dicken’s rapist, and her dreamwalking and spooning with Donal Jain.

  "And they are men, Beck!" her mind contended.

  Mad Becky agreed with her.

  "You've done some good work. You’ve begun to understand that violence could live within your own skin. And you’ve softened toward some men, become more understanding. But these men are exceptions for you. You still put the rest of their sex into a cage that you won't open."

  The old woman growled audibly, her mental textures tinged with resignation, then with decision. Her meanings began to come less from their shared mindplace than from the sticklike figure in the doorway to the crystal room.

  "We got more to learn than I figured on." Becky's mouth and head moved again with her words.

  The crystals were dimming now, the sound dying. Becky jerked her finger at Jez's body, limp at last and sprawled on the floor of the cave.

  "You got to climb back into yours, too."

  "Why?"

  Beck squinted.

  "Because you are the beggar, girl, and I am the conjure woman. Because I got the answers and you don't. That's why."

  She pointed again. Reluctantly, Jez slid back into her body, cringing at its confinement and its distress.

  Her clothes were dry, but stiff and uncomfortable. She rubbed blood from her chin and rolled her tongue around in a sore mouth. She was nauseated and exhausted. The old woman took her to a rockface whose dampness drew itself into a slow trickle. It terminated in a hollowed-out stone basin. Jez knelt before its clear coolness and immersed her lips in the water, drawing it into her parched throat.

  Later, when she stood to dry off from her long hot soak in Becky's big washtub, Jez breathed in with delight the freshness of the flannel nightgown handed to her.

  The old woman, long since deprived of her upper incisors, grinned back at her through the cuspid gap.

  "Crystal-cleaned," she said, then tucked Jez into a warm bed under layers of quilts. She squatted by her guest. "Jezzybell, you got to go easy for a while so's to be up for this work."

  Jez squeezed the old woman's arm. "I'll rest. But I need. . ."

  "You ain't wantin' half as much to get crackin' as me, girl. We got to git you educated fast. You git to sleep now. We got all the time we'll need."

  Before she dropped off, Jezebel scanned the environs of the mine in search of Dicken. She found her standing by the elevator shaft, her face a puzzle of calculation in the light of her glolobe. Jez formed another glolobe in her mind and sent it roaring upward from the bottom of the shaft. It flew around her stunned lover, brushing against her cheeks and lips. Then it fluttered in farewell just at Dicken's eye level and disappeared whence it came.

  There, thought Jez. That ought to let her know I'm okay. She was asleep before her next full breath.

  * * * * * * *

  Jez awoke with a refreshed body to a breakfast of mushroom and sourgrass salad with a cooked root that tasted deliciously like a potato. They ate in companionable silence, the crone and the witch, sisters in madness now, embarked upon a quest for meaning that Jezebel could not foresee.

  She followed the sharp white light of Becky's crystal candle through honeycombed tunnels to a room containing trunks of theatrical costumes. Their designs spanned cultures and centuries, and Jez could not imagine by what manner of transport they had come to that cavern. At Becky's direction, she draped herself in a spaghetti-strapped chemise while her companion wiggled into shrunken long-johns that looked and smelled squeaky clean. Then the mountain crone rummaged in a foot-locker labeled Mothertongue International Tour 2004. She withdrew a crumpled pair of orange culottes for Jez and, apparently satisfied that they would at last be properly attired, padded off down the corridor with her quartz light. Jezebel zipped up the culottes' side placket and strode after her.

  She then gave herself over to the discoveries of that day, absorbing all she could of the subterranean dwelling place of this legend of the West Virginia hills. More than once in the morning's activities the old woman’s eyes would turn cavernous again as she stared at a crack in the rocks or fondled some bizarre artifact.

  "Becky," Jez would whisper, "are you. . ."

  "I'm okay," Becky would assure her, focusing once more. "I'm okay."

  As their explorations became easier and more playful, Jez saw less and less of Mad Becky's empty black eyes, and more and more of their dancing joy. During those hours, and with Becky as her guide, she knelt to meals of boiled tugroots and anise-spiced kale, topped with the nutberry shreddings of tasty chinquapin; sipped a sinus-blasting tea that immediately sent her to a three-gallon galvanized bucket for relief of her bladder; probed without success the secrets of quartz filings that not only instantly heated both food and atmosphere, but also transformed her shit into an ash so fine and pink she could powder her nose with it; harmonized minor Hungarian folk songs and American show tunes; mastered, but never won at, a three-dimensional game of stones in wooden cups; learned, to the sound of a near toothless cackle, that there were scores of non-invasive ways to observe, identify, catalogue and remember the multifarious rocks and minerals, plants and fungi that lived in the surrounding hills and hollows.

  In her fatigue at the end of the day, Jez declined any dinner and in fact found satisfaction in emptying her insides of every trace of food or water. She sank onto the cushion-covered stones in the old woman's living area, resting her head against the wall. She reached out toward Dicken again, sending forth another glolobe of reassurance.

  Lazily, she watched as the conjure woman went about her preparations for bed. Old Becky moved in silence, and apparently with some new sense of purpose, adjusting the glow of crystal candles, cleaning food bowls, heating bathwater, arranging quilts and pillows over flat stones. Jez became uneasily aware that their comfortable visiting together had come to an end, that it had been only a preparation for a more important enterprise upon which they would embark the following day.

  "Becky," she began.

  The old woman silenced her with a gesture.

  "Time for sleep, girl," she said, motioning her to the washtub. She bathed Jezebel, then enfolded her in a heavy quilt and eased her to her bed. Jez was asleep before her head touched the pallet.

  * * * * * * *

  Hours later she burst into wakefulness. She threw off the quilt, careful not to disturb the figure that sprawled face down just beyond her. Her flesh was sore and her bones ached, but sleep had rejuvenated her spirits. In the low light of warmth-making quartz filings, old Becky's bare body lay under a sheen of sweat. The skinny brown back rose and fell with soft snores.

  Jez watched the movements, lulled by the sounds. In the crystal glow, the crone's scrawny arms and legs had a lean vibrancy, and her skin stretched wrinkleless over rounded ribs and joints. Barely perceptibly, the flat buttocks were rising and falling with the rhythm of her long breathings.

  Jez surveyed the movement of those twin mounds of flesh, increasingly aware of how her own hips could exactly cover them. In a lazy slow motion, she began to shed her nightgown, breathing in time to Becky's gentle noises. She sat for a moment, free of her clothes and absorbing the motions o
f Becky's lanky body.

  Jez edged closer to the sleeping figure and with quiet movements suspended herself above it, leaning upon her carefully placed hands and feet. She braced herself there in a rising anticipation, her breath moving now in its own cadences, her blood vibrant against her skin. Smiling, she closed her eyes and began her slow descent toward old Becky's body.

  Inches away from contact, the snores ceased and the body beneath her came alive. It grew rigid, softened suddenly into an invitation, and then into desire. Jez stopped her progress and held herself in prolonged expectancy. Below her, Becky strained upward toward the canopy of Jez's body. A low cry was being born in the old woman's throat.

  Jez took in one last breath and lowered her torso onto the woman beneath her. As she fitted her hips to Becky's backside, she felt her pubic bone lock into the cleft beneath the crone's buttocks. Becky gave birth to her cry and pressed herself hard against Jez's weight. They rolled, Old Becky hooting with pleasure.

  Jezebel laughed her own pleasure as she plunged her hand into the prodigal gray curls that tossed beside her. Becky turned upward into the embrace so that Jez could stroke and knead the dark, finely wrinkled skin of her breasts. Becky crooned. Both women grazed over their face-to-face bodies, Jez's hands and her lips purposefully seeking every fold and crevice of the mountain woman's skin. They plunged and tumbled amid exclamations of desire and delight.

  Jez hovered over Becky's mouth, and her eyes began to dance with the prospect of delicious discovery. She found a wild tenderness in those extraordinary lips. As her own tongue fell through the toothless hollow, she yielded to the welcome of that mouth and its ardent greeting of her every attention. Jez lingered there in long luxurious exploration.

  She tamed her teeth into a gentleness they had rarely known, the better to entrap Becky's eager nipples, the better to conspire with her own lips and tongue below the hairless mound where Becky's thighs converged, there delicately to tease a tiny button to a long and breath-halted burst of joy. To her astonishment, the old woman rose to a second climax. And with very little encouragement from Jez, to another, and still another and another, dancing and driving to the touch of Jez's hands, her fingers, her tongue.