San Diego Lightfoot Sue

by Tom Reamy

  With dumbfounded gladness they would accept money for their old polished oak iceboxes; enough money to buy new frost-free refrigerators with automatic icemakers. Money for black cast-iron washpots bought new automatic washing machines. Handmade quilts were too valuable to put on beds. Tourists bought the quilts and the villagers happily slept under electric blankets from J. C. Penney.

  The city people called it Folk Art. The villagers called it Free Enterprise.

  At Utley the highway makes an unexpected turn to the southwest, going nowhere near Morgan’s Cleft. The old unpaved road still goes toward the pass, following Indian Creek, to a few summer cabins and outlying farms. If you tried to follow it to Morgan’s Cleft, you would find yourself in the lane to the Crenshaw farm. If you backed up and tried again, you might find it—if you looked closely. The bushes are not quite as thick, the trees are shorter, the ground is more level, and an occasional grading is still visible.

  Some of the older people in Utley still remember those who fled the high valley nearly forty years ago. There weren’t many—only a dozen or so—coming down the mountain in wagons and some on foot, scattered over several months. Some were hurt and died quickly from infected wounds. Those who lived moved on hastily without explanation, but the folk beyond the Cleft always were a strange lot.

  —17—

  Hollis Middleton had been to the bank that day discussing a loan. He owned a piece of very choice property that stretched from the highway to Indian Creek just on the edge of Utley. A motel there should do very nicely. But it wouldn’t be just another motel. He would build a fishing veranda over the creek; the guests could fish and the motel kitchen would do the cleaning and cooking. He smiled at the idea and turned on the television set.

  He yelled up the stairs for his youngest girl to turn her stereo down so he could hear the TV. He thought he detected a barely perceptible drop in the volume. He adjusted the color so Raymond Burr wouldn’t look dipped in purple dye, and sat down to relax.

  He groaned when he heard the dishwasher go on in the kitchen and little silver speckles began dancing across the screen. He bore his affluence with stoicism.

  He heard a scream and a clatter of pots and pans from the kitchen. He arose with a sigh and went out there without too much hurry. His wife was a great screamer. She was rolling on the floor amid several pieces of her new waterless cookware. Their four-year-old grandson was wrestling with her.

  Hollis shook his head and laughed. “You two sure do play rough.” His grandson looked up quickly at the sound of his voice. The boy had a mouthful of flesh. Blood dribbled off his chin.

  Prologue (cont’d)

  It grew.

  Slowly and carefully, without haste or impetuosity, it grew. It had all the time in the world.

  San Diego Lightfoot Sue

  This all began about ten years ago in a house at the top of a flight of rickety wooden stairs in Laurel Canyon. It might be said there were two beginnings, though the casual sorcery in Laurel Canyon may have been the cause and the other merely the effect—if you believe in that sort of thing.

  The woman sat cross-legged on the floor reading the book. The windows were open to the warm California night and the only sound that came through them was the distant, muffled, eternal roar of Los Angeles traffic. The brittle pages of the book crackled as she turned them carefully. She read slowly because her Latin wasn’t what it used to be. She lit a cigarette and left it to burn unnoticed in the ashtray on the floor beside her.

  “Here’s a good one,” she said to the big orange tom curled in the chair she leaned against. “You don’t know where I can find a hazelnut bush with a nest of thirteen white adders under it, do you, Punkin?” The cat didn’t answer; he only opened one eye slightly and twitched the tip of his tail.

  She turned a page and several two-inch envelopes of white paper fell out into her lap. She picked them up and examined them, but they were blank. She stuck them back in the book and kept reading.

  She found it a while later. It was a simple spell. All she had to do was write the word-square on a piece of white parchment with black ink and then burn it while thinking of the person she wished to summon.

  “I wonder if Paul Newman is doing anything tonight,” she chuckled.

  She stood up and went to the drafting table, opened a drawer and removed a pen and a bottle of india ink. She put a masking tape dispenser on the edge of the book to hold it open and carefully lettered the word-square on one of the pieces of paper stuck between the pages. She supposed that’s why her mother, or whoever, had put them there—they looked like parchment, anyway.

  The word-square was eight letters wide and eight letters high; eight, eight-letter words stacked on top of one another. She imagined they were words, though they were in no language she knew. The peculiar thing about the square was that it read the same sideways or upside down—even in a mirror image, it was the same.

  She put the cap back on the ink and went to the ashtray, kneeling beside it. She lay the parchment on the dead cigarette butts. “Well, here goes,” she said to the cat. “I wonder if it’s all right to burn it with a cigarette lighter? Maybe I need a black taper made of the wax of dead bees or something.”

  She composed herself, trying to take it seriously, and thought of a man, not a specific man, just the man. “I feel like Snow White singing ‘Someday My Prince Will Come,’” she muttered. She flicked the cigarette lighter and touched the flame to the corner of the piece of paper.

  It flamed up so quickly and so brightly she gasped and drew back. “God!” she grunted and hurried to a window to escape the billows of black smoke that smelled of rotten eggs. The cat was already out, sitting on the farthest point of the deck railing, looking at her with round startled eyes.

  The woman glanced back at the black smoke spreading like a carpet on the ceiling and then at the wide-eyed cat. She suddenly collapsed against the window sill in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. “Come on back in, Punkin,” she gasped. “It’s all over.” The cat gave her an incredulous look and hopped off the railing into the shrubbery.

  * * * * *

  This also began about ten years ago in Kansas, the summer he was fifteen, when the air smelled like hot metal and rang with the cries of cicadas. It ended a month later when he was still fifteen, when the house in Laurel Canyon burned with a strange green fire that made no heat.

  His name was John Lee Peacock, a good, old, undistinguished name in southern Kansas. His mother and his aunts and his aunts’ husbands called him John Lee. The kids in school called him Johnny, which he preferred. His father never called him anything.

  His father had been by-passed by the world, but he wouldn’t have cared, even if he had been aware of it. Wash Peacock was a dirt farmer who refused to abandon the land. The land repayed his taciturn loyalty with annual betrayal. Wash had only four desires in life: to work the land, three hot meals each day, sleep, and copulation when the pressures built high enough. The children were strangers who appeared suddenly, disturbed his sleep for awhile, then faded into the gray house or the County Line Cemetery.

  John Lee’s mother had been a Willet. The aunts were her sisters: Rose and Lilah. Wash had a younger brother somewhere in Pennsylvania—or, had had one the last time he heard. That was in 1927, the year Wash’s mother died. Grace Elizabeth Willet married Delbert Washburn Peacock in the fall of 1930. She did it because her father, old Judge Willet, thought it was a good idea. Grace Elizabeth was a plain, timid girl who, he felt, was destined to be the family’s maiden aunt. He was right, but she would have been much happier if he hadn’t interfered.

  The Peacocks had owned the land for nearly a hundred years and were moderately prosperous. They had survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, and statehood, but wouldn’t survive the Depression. Judge Willet felt that Wash was the best he could do for Grace Elizabeth. He was a nice-looking young man and what he lacked in imagination, he made up in hard work.

  But the Peacocks had a thin, unfortunate blood l
ine. Only a few of the many children lived. It was the same with Wash and Grace Elizabeth. She had given birth eight times but there were only three of them left. Wash, Jr., her first born, had married one of the trashy O’Dell girls and had gone to Oklahoma to work in the oilfields. She hadn’t heard from him in thirteen years. Dwayne Edward, the third born, had stayed in Los Angeles after his separation from the army. He sent a card every Christmas and she had kept them all. She wished some of the girls had lived. She would have liked to have a girl, to make pretty things for her, to have someone to talk to. But she had lost the three girls and two of the boys. She had trouble remembering their names sometimes but it was all written in the big Bible where she could remind herself when the names began to slip away.

  John Lee was the youngest. He had arrived late in her life, a comfort for her weary years. She wanted him to be different from the others. Wash, Jr. and Dwayne had both been disappointments; too much like their father: unimaginative, plodding boys who had done badly in school and got into trouble with the law. She still loved them because they were her children, but she sometimes forgot why she was supposed to. She wanted John Lee to read books (God! How long since she’d read a book, she used to read all the time when she was a girl), to know about art and far away places. She knew she hoped for too much, so was content when she got a part of it.

  Wash didn’t pay any more attention to John Lee than he had the others. He neither asked nor seemed to want the boy’s help in the fields, so Grace Elizabeth kept him around the house, helping with her chores, talking to him, having him share with, her what he had learned in school. She gave him as much as she could. There wasn’t money for much but she managed to hold back a few dollars now and then.

  She loved John Lee very much; he was probably the only thing she did love. So, on that shimmering summer day about ten years ago, when he was fifteen, she died for him.

  She was cleaning up the kitchen after supper. Wash had gone back to the fields where he would stay until dark. John Lee was at the kitchen table, reading, passing on bits of information he knew she would like to hear. She leaned against the sink with the cuptowel clutched in her hand and felt her supper turn over in her stomach. She had known it was coming for months. Now it was here.

  He’s too young, she thought. If he could only have a couple more years. She watched him bent over the book, the evening sun glinting on his brown hair. He’s even better looking than his father, she thought. So like his father. But only on the outside. Only on the outside.

  She hung the cuptowel on the rack to dry and walked through the big old house. She hadn’t really noticed the house in a long time. It had grown old and gray slowly, as she had, so that you hardly noticed it happening. Then you looked at it again and it wasn’t the house you remembered moving into all those years ago. Wash’s father had built it in 1913 when the old one had been unroofed by a twister. He had built it like they did in those days: big so generations could live in it. It had been freshly painted when she moved in; a big white box eight miles from Hawley, a mile from Miller’s Comers.

  Then the hard times began. But Wash had clung to the land during the Depression and the dust. He hadn’t panicked like most of the others. He hadn’t sold the land at give-away prices or lost it because he couldn’t pay the taxes. Things had gotten a little better when the war began, but never as good as before the Depression. Now they were bad again. At the end of each weary year, there was only enough money to do it all over again the next weary year.

  She supposed, being the oldest, Wash, Jr. would get it. She was glad John Lee wouldn’t. She went upstairs to his room and packed his things in a pasteboard box. She left it where he would find it and went to her own room. She opened a drawer in the old highboy that had belonged to her grandmother and removed an envelope from beneath her cotton slips. She took it to the kitchen and handed it to John Lee.

  He took it and looked at her. “What is it, Mama?”

  “Open it in the morning, John Lee. You’d better go to bed now.”

  “But it’s not even dark yet.” There’s something wrong, there’s something wrong.

  “Soon, then. I want to sit on the porch a while and rest.” She kissed him and patted his shoulder and left the room. He watched the empty doorway and felt the blood singing in his ears. After a while, he got a drink of water from the cooler and went to his room. He lay on the bed, looking at the water spots on the ceiling paper, and clutched the envelope in his hands. Tears formed in his eyes and he tried to blink them away.

  Grace Elizabeth sat on the porch in her rocker, moving gently, mending Wash’s clothes until it got too dark to see. Then she folded them neatly in her lap, leaned back in the chair, and closed her eyes.

  Wash found her the next morning only because he wondered why his breakfast wasn’t waiting for him. She was buried in the County Line Cemetery with five of her children after a brief service at the First Baptist Church in Hawley. Aunt Rose and Aunt Lilah had a fine time weeping into black lace handkerchiefs and clucking over poor John Lee.

  On the way back from the funeral, John Lee rode in the front seat of the ’53 Chevrolet beside his father. Neither of them spoke until they had turned off the highway at Miller’s Comers.

  “Write a letter to Wash, Jr. Tell him to come home.” John Lee didn’t answer. He could smell the dust rising up behind the car. Wash parked it in the old carriage house and hurried to change clothes, hurried to make up the half day he had lost. John Lee went to the closet in the front hall and took down a shoe box, in which his mother kept such things, and looked for an address. He found it after a bit, worked to the bottom, unused for thirteen years. He wrote the letter anyway.

  He had left the envelope unopened under his pillow. Now he opened it, although he had guessed what it was. He counted the carefully hoarded bills: a hundred and twenty-seven dollars. He sat on the edge of the bed, on the crazy quilt his mother had made for him, in the quiet room, in the silent weary house. He wiped his eyes with his knuckles, picked up the pasteboard box, and walked the mile to Miller’s Comers.

  His Sunday suit, worn to the funeral that morning, once belonging to Dwayne, and before that, Wash, Jr., was white at the cuffs from the dusty road. His shoes, his alone, were even worse. It was a scorcher. “It’s gonna be another scorcher,” she always used to say, looking out the kitchen window after putting away the breakfast dishes. He sat on the bench at the Gulf station, cleaning the dust off the best he could.

  The cicadas screeched from the mesquite bushes, filling the hot, still air with their insistent call for a mate. John Lee rather liked the sound, but it had bothered his mother. “Enough to drive a body ravin’ mad,” she used to say. She always called them locusts but he had learned in school their real name was cicada. And when they talked about a plague of locusts in the Bible, they really meant grasshoppers. “Well, I’ll declare,” she had said. “Always wondered why locusts would be considered a plague. Far’s I know, they don’t do anything but sit in the bushes and make noise. Now, grasshoppers I can understand.” And she would smile at him in her pleased and proud way that caused a pleasant hurting in the back of his throat.

  “Hello, John Lee.”

  He looked up quickly. “Hello, Mr. Cuttsanger. How are you today?” He liked Mr. Cuttsanger, a string-thin man the same age as his mother, who had seemingly permanent grease stains on his hands. He wiped at them now with a dull red rag, but it didn’t help.

  “I’m awfully sorry about your mother, boy. Wish I coulda gone to the funeral but I couldn’t get away. We were in the same grade together all through school, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. She told me.”

  “What’re you doin’ here still dressed up?” he asked, sticking the rag in his hip pocket and looking at the box.

  “I reckon I have to catch a bus, Mr. Cuttsanger.” His heart did a little flip-flop. Not the old school bus either, but a real bus.

  “Where you off to, John Lee?”

  “Where do your buses go, M
r. Cuttsanger?”

  Mr. Cuttsanger sat on the bench beside John Lee. “The westbound will be through here in about an hour goin’ to Los Angeles. The eastbound comes through in the mornin’ headed for St. Louis. You already missed it.”

  “Los Angeles. My brother, Dwayne, lives in California.” But he didn’t know where. He had seen the Christmas cards in the shoe box, but he hadn’t paid any attention to the return address.

  Mr. Cuttsanger nodded. “Good idea, goin’ to stay with Dwayne. Nothin’ for you here on this played-out old farm. Heard Grace Elizabeth say the same thing. Your father ought to sell it and go with you. But I guess I know Wash better’n that.” He arose from the bench with a little sigh. He went into the station and returned with a small red flag. He stuck it in a pipe welded at an angle to the pole supporting the Gulf sign. “There. He’ll stop when he sees that. You buy your ticket from the driver.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cuttsanger. I need to mail a letter also.” He took the letter he had carefully addressed in block printing to: Delbert Washburn Peacock, Jr., Gen. Del., Norman, Okla., from his pocket and handed it to Mr. Cuttsanger. “I don’t have a stamp.”

  Mr. Cuttsanger looked at the letter. “Is Wash, Jr. still in Norman?” He said it as if he doubted it.

  “I don’t know. That’s the only address I could find.”

  Mr. Cuttsanger tapped the letter against the knuckle of his thumb. “You leave a nickel with me and I’ll get a stamp from Clayton in the mornin’. Sure was a lot simpler before they closed the post office.” He sat back on the bench in the shade of the car shed. John Lee followed his eyes as he looked at Miller’s Comers evaporating under the cloudless sky. An out-of-state car blasted through doing seventy. Mr. Cuttsanger sighed and accepted a nickel from John Lee. “They don’t even have to slow down any more. Used to be thirty-five mile speed limit signs at each end of town. Guess they don’t need ’em now. Ain’t nothin’ here but me and the café. Myrtle’s been saying for nearly a year she was gonna move to Hawley or maybe even Liberal. Closed the post office in fifty-five, I think it was. That foundation across the highway is where the grocery store used to be. Don’t reckon you remember the grocery store?”