He dragged me to the shed, as so often before. The hutches were all empty, tufts of fur tugged at my sentiments, I ignored them. Pellets rolling underfoot. Scatter of husked millet on the ground—mice had been at the rabbit feed. Sunlight edged through chinks in the walls, showed up feathers dancing in midair, chaff, dust. My crouch was practiced. I swayed away from a halfhearted kick. The key grinding in the padlock did not worry me excessively. I had been locked in before.
Then the flames came flowering up the boards.
When I flew like a phoenix out of the fire, my feathers black and brazen, I saw a greater glow reflected on the clouds. The factory was on fire, pianos shrieking, their wires snapping and singing.
Or, if it was a typewriter factory (I am at least reasonably sure it was one of the two, a choice between kinds of music), thousands of keys chattering in symphony to the touch of typists of blown flame, hunched and rearing, rising to pace the room, hunching again to snap out a contentious phrase.
Typewriter ribbon burns black and violet, with crawling veins of yellow.
And in the middle of the flames the twisted thing that had been my father.
I did not see it but I saw it, because I had seen it and made him see it with my words.
I stood on the lawn, barefoot, swaying, my hands held stiffly out beside me, trembling and staring, not at the jumping flames of the burning shed, but at those smoldering clouds. Clouds? Smoke, it must have been. My bare feet were stiff and cold, which seemed unbelievable to me, with the heat of the fire still beating on my burned face, and my hair smoking and curling, and my scorched hands singing with pain. Someone found me there, and though I was not liked and was indeed barely tolerated by the neighbors, who found me unsettling, my strangeness was temporarily forgotten in the brilliance and warmth of the interesting tragedy I had survived, and someone wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and sat me down with a mug of hot toddy and told me what I already knew.
At first some were inclined to look at me askance, for this was the second time I had lost a parent and that was at best uncanny and at worst suspicious, but a little later someone came in and the word went around that the fire, the little fire, that is, had been put out, the shed leveled, but that the padlock still held door to frame, that it seemed I had been locked in, apparently by my own father, and that stopped the whispers and the looks, for it struck all and sundry as so terrible that nobody knew what to say and one after another found an excuse to slip away until none was left but the neighbor whose blanket still draped my shoulders, who said blankly but not really unkindly that I had much better spend the night at her house than go home alone after what had happened, and they would figure out in the morning what to do with me.
In the morning my stutter was a hedge, a thicket, a wall of thorns. The chief of police came and spoke gently to me, but I struggled and spat and finally began plucking fretfully at my lips and smacking my own cheek and seizing my jaw in both bandaged hands to move it by main force, until at a glance from the chief my neighbor took my hands and bore them down and held them until I was calm again; but answers I could not give. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s simple,” said the chief of police, just as if I were not there, “as well as dumb. Maybe Harwood thought he was doing her a kindness. To go through life with that defect, and alone! I don’t envy her. No, I don’t envy her one bit.”
“What am I to do, officer?” said the neighbor in a confidential tone. “I want to do my Christian duty by the child, but I can’t keep her forever and quite honestly the creature gives me the heebie-jeebies. I don’t suppose that you—”
“A girl child,” said the police chief, quickly. “A bachelor’s home.”
“Oh! Yes? Oh yes, no, I see that that wouldn’t do. But then who—”
“No doubt there’s family,” said the chief, comfortably.
“Yes, of course.”
But there wasn’t. When the chief turned back to me, I waved him impatiently away, miming writing; when instruments were brought, I quickly and decisively wrote, “No living relatives—all dead.” And then, after a considering pause, “I am my father’s sole heir.” And so I turned out to be.
There was a closed-casket funeral, a perfunctory and ill-attended one, and then the coffin was sped into the ground. I, dressed in black, watched the dirt fall on its lid, my face still. The others watched me. It was not known, I gathered, whether I was aware that my father had tried to kill me. It was now generally said, though no one could explain how such a private matter came to be known, that he had developed a horror of me, because of my handicap, and thought that ghosts spoke through me, and that he meant to burn me to shut them up, but that even after the flames rose up around me, he heard me talking, in a low, cool, reasonable, bloodless, unrelenting, adjudicating voice, so that, understanding he would never be rid of me, he had done for himself as well, the poor bastard. It was also said that he had killed his wife and that I had known it and taken my revenge on him. How a child could do such a thing nobody knew, but everyone agreed that if any child could, it would be that one—myself—who scarcely seemed like a child at all.
The Stenographer’s Story, contd.
The alarm, though we did not recognize it for what it was, was given by the spiders, via one Mildred Sparks. “Oh dear Lord. Oh dear Lord save us. They’re everywhere! That’s it, I’m climbing on the table—oh dear Lord, there’s one on the table.”
Every old building in the country will have its spiders. But these were not the sober brownish specimens we were used to but the big, wiry, green and gold spiders of the meadows and brakes. What they were doing in the house I found out the next morning when, as the others were doing, I climbed up on my bedrail to peer out the high windows, against which the rain chattered like teeth, and saw the churning cocoa-colored swirl that had taken a bite out of the playfield, and the groundskeeper heaping sandbags in the chapel door.
We dressed all anyhow and clattered downstairs where we ran excitedly from one window to the next, pressing our faces to the panes across which drops continuously raced, now to the left, now to the right, now, as if in defiance of gravity, straight up. The rain ripped and tore at the undulating trees; made the gravel jump in the paths; filled the inverted sculptures in the garden, bringing inexorably to light some penny candy wrappers and a corncob pipe someone had surely thought gone forever. The teachers attempted to herd us into our classrooms, then gave up and joined us in our vigil.
All that morning we watched the waters rise. Our filmmaker ghosted up out of whatever basement he had been skulking in and joined the rattle of his hand-cranked camera to the hiss of the rain. I went repeatedly to the front door to gaze out over the shallow but fast-moving expanse of brown on which the familiar border shrubs marked out a phantom driveway. Every time the flood was a little closer to the school—if it was still a school, for everything was strange. Teachers were walking barefoot through the halls, displaying bunions and hairy toes; Clarence was talking to one of the cook’s helpers; big girls were romping with little ones they normally shunned; and the Headmistress, who could have imposed some order on this scene, was closed in her office and did not respond to my quiet knock.
Lunch was served as usual despite flooding in the kitchen, and that settled everyone’s nerves. The school returned to something like its normal routine, with periodic interruptions to check the progress of the flood. During Restorative Time some of the girls declared the reading room out of bounds to spiders and went vigorously to work with brooms. I was too restless to join them, and wandered through the building, looking out at the flood from different angles. From the library I could see the statuary in the garden, poking incongruously out of still water. The rain had stopped, but the flood continued to rise; from the windows of the music room I could see the stream chewing away at the steep cutbank, further undermining the trees that overlooked it. One had already fallen and lay with half its roots exposed and its leafy top half submerged in the flood.
Someone was down there next to it at the edge of the water. He turned and I saw that it was Dr. Peachie. His shirt was off. I observed with a little jolt three patches of coarse black hair, one on his white stomach, the other two punctuated by the dots of his nipples. Nipples, I thought. Hearing the word in my mind shocked me. I unlatched the window. “What are you doing?” I called. Of course he could not hear me for the rush of the waters. I kicked off my shoes, hitched up my pinafore, scrambled over the sill, and, with a feeling of delicious lawlessness, jumped down onto the cold, squelchy grass. On the way down to the stream I passed a tiny mole that had pulled itself out of its flooded tunnel but drowned all the same, there in the grass.
Dr. Peachie had set his bag down on the bank atop his bunched-up shirt and now, walking his hands along one branch of the fallen tree, was edging into the churning waters. Once, the river swept his feet out from under him and he hung from the branch, pulled almost horizontal. I do not know how he got his feet under him again. I hoped he would turn back then, but after a moment he cautiously went on feeling his way toward a tangled clump of soaked branches that the river was busy trying to take apart. On it a drenched creature clung and shuddered.
“What is that?” I said, then repeated it, yelling over the water’s roar. I had come down to the edge of the cutbank.
“The cat!” he called back. “It is providential, actually, your coming just now. Do you think you might bring me my shirt—perhaps move my bag a little farther from the drink first.” I did so and returned. “Now if you could tie my shirt around your waist or something, that’s the way, and then come down here and—not wade, the current is too fierce, but if you are not afraid, scramble out just a little way on this tree, using the trunk as a walkway—see, there are plenty of branches to hold on to, and you are so slight, there is no risk they will break under you—and then you could pass me my shirt, because it has only just occurred to me that the blighted creature will try to climb onto my head if I do not wrap him in something and then he and I will very likely both drown!”
I tucked my pinafore into my underdrawers and climbed dubiously down the spongy bank—which, having been severely undercut on a previous occasion, was in the process of collapsing further—to the base of the tree, whose roots, I saw, were still partly anchored in the ground, making it a more stable perch than it had appeared. Once I had clambered around the tangle of muddy roots it was easy enough to creep out on the trunk, though the force of the water ripping by below me made my breath come fast. The cat watched us, his ears flattened, his eyes wild.
“Listen, I am going to pick him up the way a mama cat would, by the back of the neck. He will probably fight like a demon, but if you can throw the shirt over him—I mean, not throw perhaps, but drape—we can bunch it up and—but make sure you do not overbalance!”
One arm clamped around his branch, he stretched out the other. “Ow! You devil! I am trying to save your miserable skin, you idiot! That’s better. There. Now you look like a mummified cat from an Egyptian tomb, very aristocratic. Catic. Stop laughing, young lady. Do you think you could take him while I endeavor to join you in the tree? Then the whole family can make our way back to the bank and congratulate ourselves on our little adventure.”
But there was no bank to go back to. In the short time we had been struggling with the cat the flood had carelessly flung out an arm and encircled the base of the tree. In doing so, it had further undermined the cutbank, a great chunk of which had collapsed into a muddy pile that was already being swiftly swept downstream.
I gauged the distance. I did not think I could jump it. “This is stupid,” I said severely.
“Yes, isn’t it?” he said blankly. “I most earnestly beg your pardon. I seem to have gotten us into a fix.”
After pulling himself onto the trunk, over which the water was starting to lap, and creeping along it to the rampart of the roots, he made several attempts to ford the channel, but it was deepening itself by the minute. After a fence post came racing sleekly down it like a log down a lumber chute and clobbered him on the elbow, he climbed back up into the branches. “That does it,” he said, grimacing. “I concede defeat. I expect someone will notice us soon and extend a ladder or something. Until then we perch in this tree like partridges.”
I considered the widening gap. I did not think a ladder would bridge it.
“I think we can be quite comfortable here,” he was saying, ripping off some smaller branches and weaving then together into a messy sort of mat to pad the crook of one of the higher branches. “Up you go. Yes, well”—this to the cat, which had emitted an outraged yowl—“you will just have to suffer. Now if you don’t mind, we will fasten this fellow around you thus,” he said, his arms encircling me, “but you may easily untie him.” He demonstrated. “Please don’t hesitate to release the blighter to his fate if, heaven forbid, you find yourself obliged to swim. There are limits. Limits,” he said to the cat, in a stern voice.
He seated himself astride the branch. “Now let us converse like civilized beings. You may call me Nick. What is your name?”
I told him.
“Now I remember. You are the Headmistress’s . . . particular . . .”
“Teacher’s pet is the term you are avoiding. But I’m not.”
“I shouldn’t think she has pets,” he said agreeably. “Autocratic old bag, isn’t she?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I was shocked.
“I bet you know almost everything there is to know about this school. But I bet you don’t know— That is to say, does she ever let you out?”
“Out?”
“Out. To visit family, say.”
“I don’t have any family. Not to speak of.”
“To town, then. Anywhere.”
“Of course. If we want to go. I mean, we’re not prisoners,” I said, nettled.
“Do you want to go?”
Under our feet the waters raced away, away. “Yes. I don’t know. Yes.” Was he courting me? The thought rang through me. There commenced a fine (and, I hoped, invisible) trembling in my arms and legs. I knew I was not beautiful though I had a neat figure. I hoped he did not think that because I was colored, I was easy.
“You must allow me to take you to, let me see . . . Plunkett.”
The contrast between his majestic manner and the plebeian destination made me laugh despite my confusion of mind. “Why? What’s in Plunkett?”
He widened his eyes. “The most wonderful root beer floats. Also a moving-picture house.”
“I have never seen a moving picture,” I confessed shyly, and my face grew hot.
“Well, we will see about correcting that oversight, just as soon as we get off this tree.”
The branch that was our principle support was curtsying and shuddering as the floodwaters, having completely submersed its leafy extremity, added their force to the downward pull of our combined weight. “Do you know,” he added, “I think I will clamber over to that branch there, so that when your tremendous poundage drags you down, down, down into the drink, you don’t take me with you to your watery doom.”
We settled into a comfortable silence. I had never had such a normal conversation in my life. I might have drowsed a little, the cat (now somnolent) a damp but warm weight on my lap. I had time to think all sorts of things—absurd things, considering our situation. For instance that there might, after all, be something for me besides the school. Another last chance.
I would have liked to linger on that pleasant thought. But my mind raced on. I thought of my mother and how the neighbors had treated her for bearing a black man’s children. It made scarcely any difference that my parents were married, for to cohabit with a black man was tantamount to whoredom whether church and state had sanctified the union or not. Some white men, I knew, had even threatened to kill my father for bringing ruin upon “one of our women.” Perhaps it was why he went away, or perhaps they did kill him and my mother kept it from us. Or perhaps he was
footloose and faithless just as my aunt had always said, adding, “like all his race.” For a white man it was different, a Dr. Peachie might do as he pleased, up to a point, but I did not have that luxury and now I began to resent the free-and-easy manners that moments ago had seemed so appealing.
“I’m damned cold,” Nick said abruptly. He sounded irritated. “I wish I had let the monster drown. I wish I had never come to this pestilential place! If I thought . . . I say, Jane, you spend a lot of time with the old bat. How long do you give her?”
“You’re the doctor,” I said stiffly. Now that he mentioned it, I was cold too, through and through.
After an arrested moment he laughed. “I am! I certainly am! Well, sooner or later, this way or t’other, there’s a change a-comin’. But don’t you worry. You stick with Nick Peachie, girly, and he’ll see you right.” He took one hand from the log for the frivolous purpose, as I noted with disapproval, of laying a finger alongside his nose, like his namesake St. Nicholas, whom he did not at all resemble. His eyes were very wide and bright, the pupils entirely ringed with white. I rather wished he would shutter them. “Brrr! Not to be ghoulish, not-so-plain Jane, but let’s make a pact that if we die, we’ll—say, I’ve just had an idea! Let’s suppose this channeling-the-dead gambit can be made to work—” He saw me stare and added mollifyingly, “I mean in a thoroughly modern, methodical fashion, without any hocus-pocus.” He went on, “Isn’t it true that the spirit world is everywhere and nowhere, so that your medium-wallah can turn the spigot, so to speak, as easily in Timbuctoo as in Cheesehill, Massachusetts? Now tell me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that a cooperative ghost could carry messages from one mouth in Nova Zembla to another in Java or Paraguay with only the briefest layover in the hereafter, and no need for telephone wires. And then shove over, Mr. Alexander Graham Bell! Picture it: a worldwide capillary system of mediums joined, as it were, mouth to mouth to mouth to mouth to mouth—ah ha ha! Picture it!”
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