“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why doesn’t he just teach his kids what he knows while he’s still alive?”
Sully laughed. “Wisdom can’t be taught, girl.”
“Is that what you do? Eat people and hope you learn something?”
“Nah,” he said with a sniff. “I just eat ’em.”
When the oven timer went off he got up, arranged the rope in a neat little coil on the yellow linoleum, and took the casserole out of the oven while I set the table. Sully laid the steaming dish at the center of the table and began spooning it out. The cheese was perfect, crusty on top and gooey underneath. He dug into the casserole like he hadn’t eaten a morsel all day. I took seconds, then thirds. It was like a bunch of melted vegetables mixed into a mashed-up cheeseburger.
“Ah,” he said. “That’s mighty tasty. Never tastes the same way twice.”
Contentedly full, I leaned back in my chair.
“You had your fill?” I nodded, and he kept eating until he was just scraping out the crusty cheddar along the lip of the dish. I’d never seen anyone show such a bottomless appetite, but there were hollows under his cheeks like he’d had nothing all his life but bread and water.
Sully got up and took our dishes to the sink. I looked over at him as he began to wash them. “Don’t look so surprised, Missy. I always leave everything just like I found it, even if she don’t know the difference.”
When he was through with the dishes he took the tin of pear halves in white grape juice out of the cabinet and managed to open it after a moment or two struggling with the electric can opener. With his stained and gnarly fingers he pulled the pale, tender pieces out of the juice one at a time, laying them on a small baking sheet.
“What are you making now?” I asked as he turned on the broiler at the bottom of the oven.
“Car’melized pears.” He slipped a chunk of butter into the frying pan and dropped in heaping spoonfuls of brown sugar as it melted. “Why have one sweet when you can have two?”
Once the sugar mixture had melted to his liking, he drizzled it onto the pears, sprinkled them with cinnamon and cloves, and tucked them in the broiler. Then he brought the carrot cake over to the table and cut himself a wedge as big as his head. “Want some?”
I shook my head. I did, but it wouldn’t have felt right when Mrs. Harmon and I were meant to have it together. Sully gobbled up the cake, drank Mrs. Harmon’s buttermilk straight from the carton, and went back to his weaving while the pears sizzled in the oven.
I took Mrs. Harmon’s yarn and needles out of my bag and found a little pattern pamphlet for a baby cardigan at the bottom of her basket. There were cast-on instructions on the back, which I frowned over before giving up to watch Sully loop and tuck and wind the silver locks.
“Do you remember who all the different kinds of hair belonged to?”
He held up a section of the rope and pointed to it with a crooked pinky finger. “See this thick fuzzied-up bit here? That’s what kids today call a dreadlock. Had a mighty tricky time weavin’ them in, but I did it.” He shook his head. “Found that boy drowned in his own spew.” I cringed. “Had a lot of cleanin’ up to do before I could eat that one. Still, a stomach tastes better when there ain’t nothin’ in it.”
I wouldn’t know. My eye caught on a length of red-gold hair a few inches down from the dreadlocks. It was the loveliest color I’d ever seen. “What about that one?”
“That one…” He paused. “She meant it.”
It hit me then, the difference between us. I had victims. He did not.
I carried my dish to the sink and rinsed it out. “You said you were ten when your grandfather died?”
He nodded. “Why?”
“It just seems kind of old for your first one.”
“Corpses ain’t so easy to come by,” he pointed out. “My daddy wasn’t the undertaker.”
“But you said he told you that you were different.”
“I used to eat things,” he said. “Gobbled up the fleece in my mama’s basket faster than she could spin it. She knew my daddy would try roughin’ it out of me if he found out, so she hid it from him. Went on for years. I’d tear up an old shoe and keep on chewin’ ’til I could swallow. Only the soft things. One time I ate a whole quilt my grandmother sewed in nineteen oh-two. Wouldn’t eat nothin’ that would give me away to the old man.” He kept weaving as he talked, but he had this remote look in his eyes again, like he could see the past in a swirl of mist hovering over my right shoulder. “When my mama cut my sister’s hair I swallowed the clippings straight off the floor like they were oysters. Gobbled up her rag doll, and she cried and cried. Too scared of me to say nothin’ to my daddy.” He paused. “I sure am sorry for that.” Sully looked at me. “You ever eat somethin’ you wasn’t supposed to?”
I gave him a look. “Apart from that,” he added, and I shook my head. “They got a name for it now,” he went on. “A fancy word for when you can’t help gobblin’ up things that ain’t meant to be eaten. Newspapers, dirt, glass. Hell, even poo. Makes you wonder if they don’t got a name for this.” He leaned back in his chair and rested his hands on his belly.
That gave me a thought. “Have you ever been to a doctor?”
Sully raised an eyebrow. “You ever been to the moon?”
I smiled as I rolled my eyes. “What I mean is … do you think it’s hereditary?” His lips curled slowly into a cat-and-canary smile. It made me shiver. “What?” I said.
He leaned back in his chair and scratched the side of his neck, the smile fading. “I can’t say for sure my granddaddy was an eater, but I got my reasons for thinkin’ he might have been.”
I felt curiosity prickling beneath my skin. “What kind of reasons?”
“Thinkin’ back over all the time we passed in the woods together … huntin’, fishin’, learnin’ to get by in the wild … some memories are clear, and others are hazy. And I think maybe the hazy ones are hazy for a reason.”
I thought I understood. It was kind of like how I knew that Penny Wilson had hair so blond it was almost white, and a long, sharp nose in a long face, and blue eyes a little too prominent to be pretty. “Like you might actually remember, or you might just be making it up?”
“Nah,” he said. “I ain’t makin’ it up.”
“What about your dad?”
Sully shot me a hard look. “What about him?”
I shrugged. “If your granddad was an eater, maybe…”
“Maybe nothin’,” Sully retorted. “I never had nothin’ in common with my daddy, and that’s a fact.” He rose and took the pears out of the broiler, spooned them into dessert dishes, and poured out the extra caramel sauce straight off the pan.
After he set the dish in front of me I thanked him, took a bite of pear, and sighed. The taste of the cloves and caramel mingled with the pears so perfectly. I decided I was done talking about dead people. “This is really good.”
“Sure it’s good,” he said between bites. He wolfed his down in two or three seconds. “I never have just one sweet. Life’s too short.”
When we were finished Sully said, “I feel like a bit of music.” He went into the living room, bent low on his heels, and began to browse the record collection in the glass-fronted cabinet under the front window.
“You got better taste than I’d have given you credit for,” Sully said to Douglas Harmon’s portrait on the mantelpiece. “He’s got Bobby Johnson. One of the best guitar players of all time.” He slid the record out of its sleeve and laid it on the turntable. “They say Bobby Johnson met the devil on the road one night, somewhere in Alabama, and the devil said, ‘I’ll teach you to play the blues better than anybody, and all it’ll cost is your soul.’ And Bobby Johnson made the bargain.”
I sat down in the armchair by the fireplace as the music came on. It was a scratchy recording, the singer humming as he picked at the strings of his guitar, and when he began to sing I heard something untempered, something rich and unrestrained. “
Ah, the woman I love, took from my best friend, some joker got lucky, stole her back again…”
Sully pulled a pipe and a pouch of tobacco out of his pack, stuffed a pinch of it into the bowl, and struck a match. He took a puff on his pipe.
“When a woman gets in trouble, everybody throws her down. Lookin’ for a good friend, none can be found…”
The record ended, and I said, “There isn’t any devil, you know.”
“Why, you think he’s only a story?” Sully threw back his head and laughed. “I’ll tell you somethin’. Sometime I make a little game of going into bars, orderin’ a round of drinks, and tellin’ ’em all about me”—he cupped his hand to the side of his mouth, as if whispering on a stage—“only they don’t know it’s me. And all the boys say I got a mighty fine imagination. I tell ’em to watch behind ’em as they’re walkin’ home, lock the door, and look under the bed, and they just go on laughin’.” He took the skipping needle off the record and turned it to the B side. “That’s how stories start. We tell ’em about ourselves like they ain’t true, ’cause that’s the only way anybody’s gonna believe us.”
A memory of my own drifted up, of the time somebody stole the radio out of our station wagon and Mama made me go with her into the police station to report it. I must have been about twelve—the list of names on my heart wasn’t that long yet—but I was terrified the cops would take one look at me and know what I’d done. There was a framed needlepoint above the door that said THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE, and I remembered the man behind the counter noticing me looking at it and laughing at how ironic it was.
I was still thinking of that needlepoint when the phone rang. Sully didn’t react, and the answering machine on the kitchen counter clicked on. He puffed on his pipe as we listened to the message. “Hi, Aunt Liddy, it’s Carol. Just calling for a chat. I was thinking about driving down to Edgartown tomorrow for some shopping, and I thought I could take you out to lunch. Give me a call when you get this, okay? Lots of love, talk to you soon, bye.”
Sully grunted and took the pipe from his mouth as the machine clicked off. “Where you headed after this?”
“Minnesota.”
The man lifted a caterpillar eyebrow. “What you goin’ to Minnesota for?”
“That’s where my dad’s from. And I don’t know … maybe he’s still there.”
“Ain’t you been listenin’, Missy? I told ya, go pokin’ through the past and you’ll only come to grief.”
“Isn’t it better to know?” I pulled a ball of yarn out of the wicker knitting basket and ran my fingers over the soft wool. “You said you thought your grandfather was an eater. I think my dad is too.” It was the first time I’d consciously thought it, let alone said it out loud, and I made myself shiver. “I want to know where he came from, and why he left us.”
Sully shook his head. “It don’t matter why your daddy left you, he left and that’s that.”
I teared up. I couldn’t help it. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Ah, now,” he said kindly. “I’m always movin’ from place to place, but as long as I’m kickin’, you got a home with me.”
“I thought you said it was better not to make friends.”
“I been known to change my mind.” Sully blew a plume of smoke and paused to admire it as it dissipated. “What do you say?”
“Thanks.” I plucked a tissue from a box on the side table and pressed it to my eyes. “I’ll think about it.”
The ticking clock reinserted itself into the silence, and Sully picked up the newspaper. Finally he said, “You better git to bed. We gotta be up early so her niece don’t find us here.”
I stood, lobbed the ball of yarn back into the basket, and picked up my rucksack. “Well,” I said. “Goodnight, Sully.”
He kept puffing on the pipe as he turned the page and scanned the headlines. “Sleep tight, Missy.”
I changed into my pajamas, brushed my teeth, and went into the Spare Oom. As I was closing the door the white cat bounded out of Mrs. Harmon’s room down the hallway and stuck his paw between the door and jamb, mewing like he wanted to be let in. “Sorry, Puss.” I kneeled and gently pushed him back into the hallway. I’d never slept with an animal before, and I was afraid he’d keep me awake.
Something made me turn the key in the lock. If he was honest, he’d never know.
I flipped off the light and got into bed. The moonlight glinted off the sphinx on the night table and the faces of the cherubs carved along the headboard, casting lights in their little wooden eyes as if they were watching me. Watching over me. I missed Mrs. Harmon and wondered how long it would be before somebody slept in this spare bed again. Probably never.
Of course, I’d napped far too long that afternoon. Sleep wouldn’t come. The dark was oppressive, and the silence covered me like a blanket I didn’t need. When I finally drifted off I dreamed of the invisible man and his invisible knife, and through the fog I felt the pain wending its way back into my ear. Knife, twist. Knife, twist. He pressed the knife to my mouth.
* * *
In the morning I found another note on the kitchen table, but this one made me smile.
MISSY:
I got a feeling you won’t take my advice to heart about not looking for your daddy. But if you change your mind, just come back to town and wait somewhere for me and I’ll find you. Life with ole Sully is never dully.
SULLIVAN
P.S. Picked this up in my travels, thought you might like to have it.
Beside the note was a paperback book, the size of my palm and at least fifty years old. The crimson cover was stamped in silver: RINGLING BROS. KEEPSAKE BOOK. I opened it at random and found no words, only a red-and-black illustration of three tiny acrobats in midair. Two had big, curling mustaches, and the other wore red slippers that laced up to her knees. I turned the page, and another. Aha, I thought. A flip book! So I flipped, and the gentlemen on their trapezes flung the lady acrobat from one page to the next and back again. Maybe it’s not so bad if a stranger knows you better than you think.
After a quick breakfast I said goodbye to the friends I’d made over the past twenty-four hours, the brass sphinx and the white cat and Mrs. Harmon at her Emerald City wedding. At the mantel my fingers hovered over the row of lovely old jewelry, and I picked up the cream and pink enamel locket. When I pressed the button, the lid popped open and there he was again, Mr. Harmon, smiling to the side. I closed the locket, unfastened the clasp, and put it around my neck. I knew I shouldn’t take it—the jewelry, all of it, rightfully belonged to her niece—but I needed something to remember her by.
A few minutes later I boarded the local bus, and this time I knew I was going in the opposite direction of the Shieldses’ house. I would never see my mother again, not even through a picture window.
There was nothing of interest in Edgartown now, so instead of looking out the bus window I played with the circus flip book. I closed my eyes and imagined what it must be like to sail through the air, pretending you could fly while you waited for someone to grab you by the ankles.
It was just before ten o’clock when I got to the Greyhound station. I went up to the counter, where a woman wearing too much lipstick sat filing her nails. “When’s the next bus to Minnesota?” I asked. “I need to go to Sandhorn.”
“That near St. Paul?”
“I don’t think so.”
“If you don’t know where you’re going, then how d’you expect me to help you?”
I wanted to grab that nail file and shove it up her nose. “I thought you’d be able to tell me where the nearest station is,” I said.
“Look, kid. You can get yourself a map, or you can get on that bus to St. Louis that’s pulling out of gate one in about a minute and a half. That’s what I’d do, if I were you. Won’t be another westbound bus ’til eight o’clock tonight.”
The clerk was rude but sensible. I bought the ticket to St. Louis.
4
More highways, more snori
ng strangers and queasy attempts at losing myself in a book, more meals out of vending machines. It took two days to get to St. Louis, so I had plenty of time to mull over all the strange and wonderful things Sully had talked about: sleeping rough and killing your own supper, getting thoroughly comfortable living out of a rucksack, devil’s bargains, and telling the truth like it’s only a story—that part I thought about for a long while, because you can accept it even if nobody else can.
Then I thought of how life might be once I found my dad, and it felt like unwrapping a peppermint candy I’d been saving for ages. I knew there had to be a good reason why he’d left us, because even though Mama never talked about him I knew she still loved him. Why else would she go on wearing his ring?
Hour after hour I stared out the bus window, imagining his face and his voice and his hands. He was half a head taller than Mama, and he still wore his wedding ring too, and he wouldn’t wait ’til he was dead to tell me everything he knew. I even pictured how he would sign Francis Yearly on the credit card slip when he took me out to an Italian restaurant. My dad would teach me how to get on in the world, so it wouldn’t matter that no one knew the truth about me. We would find friends like Sully, and that would be enough. My dad and I would live in a house with place mats and picture frames, and we would volunteer at a soup kitchen on Sunday mornings when everyone else was at church.
I was in a weird mood when I finally got off the bus—exhausted and elated at the same time, as if I knew exactly how to get to that castle I’d built in the sky. I only realized when I got in line to buy my next ticket that I had fifteen dollars left in my wallet.
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