Great mischief

by Pinckney, Josephine, 1895-1957

  More and more Timothy talked to himself. Actually it was Lucy he talked to, or Sinkinda, remembering their words, their gestures, going over and over with them the weighty matters that rumbled in his head. Why should Retribution overtake me? Lots of people seem to escape it. Of course, a Judgment Day will come when all the accounts are in. . . . He heard the trumpet sounding, he saw the earth giving up its prisoners to the judging, and his bones turned to water.

  In his giay mind only his sins made a scarlet thread. He counted them doubtfully. Shouldn't he think about repenting them? He thought about it, and found that somehow sins look more formidable after beins: com-mitted. He regretted burning the Bible, an absorbing and educational book which had only been the tool of Unseen Forces. Yet it was hard to think of it as sacrilege. As to Sin in the narrow sense, he said delicately, sparing himself—for it was even harder to think of his romance with Lucy as fornication—we usually get paid off in this life, by desertion, sleepless nights, anger, and bitterness. I certainly did. Now about Sister . . . He imagined her rearing up, severity on her large eyelids, confronting him with the sin of fratricide.

  Whew! he said. Then his jaw hardened. I repent some, but not all, he said. Anyway, I doubt if repentance really gets you off.

  Many a night as he lay wakeful, islanded in the mosquito net, he resolved to try to find Lucy, to reason her into making a new start with him; and a despairing hope that she might be missing him as he longed for her would make his heart beat thickly. But when he came out from under the canopy in the morning he saw that it was useless; her skeptic wisdom had recognized that their moment had passed. Curiously, he never seemed to see her on the street—though possibly that was because he had grown absent-minded again, trudging with his head down the better to brood on his wretched state. Once he walked across town to the edge of Ashley River and looked at the opposite bank where they had sported in the shade. The grove glistened in summer emerald; Timothy was sick for his lost delight and cried out, "Why do we always have to pay for our fun?"

  August plodded along growing heavier and grayer; even the sun had gone gray in an aged sky. At last it ended . . . tomorrow it would be September, he thought, going to bed early that evening for want of better entertainment. But what gifts could September bring to a man whose will was paralyzed by the sheer lack of friction and contrast? Under the coverlid of the heat his limbs lost the power to move, and he drifted easily into a state that was half trance and half expectancy.

  This can't last, he said to himself, letting go his hold on consciousness; and as if the words had touched a secret spring, he was awake again in the rumpled bed, straining to discover what had roused him. Then he heard it far below, stirring through the deep arches of the earth. He stared about the half-lit room as if he expected the tenuous and abstract wave of sound to roll visibly through it. He felt a slight jerking, though whether of his limbs or of the house he couldn't tell.

  Suddenly the rolling deepened and rushed at him; the house shook in the clutch of a giant claw. The china rattled like loose teeth, and with terrified eyes he saw the wardrobe come out from the wall in a solemn and horrible dance; he sprang up as it tottered and crashed across the place where he had lain, carrying the bed to the floor with a splintering of slats.

  This escape appeared to be only momentary, for the house shook more furiously and the tiles skipped and clattered off the roof. The jarring went on in a screaming crescendo, the walls swayed inward. Flying down the steps, Timothy blessed the long practice that made his footing sure. In the lower hall the door swung open-he hadn't locked it of late, having neither hope nor fear of intruders—and he clearly heard the stamp of hoofs outside his gate. Then a whiff of burning leather came to him and he was back in the old house for a moment watching the Bible curl in the flames. He felt life pass over his head and waited for the blow to fall.

  Yet the powerful instinct to run out from the plaster showering on him propelled him down the path. There was no black gig-horse in sight. The Negroes were pouring into the street in utter demoralization; across the way he saw the oysterwoman going round and round in her long white nightgown and seeming to his dazed eyes to rear up monstrous in size. She caught sight of Timothy and stopped her spinning. "De Day of Jedgment, Doctor! Oh, Jedus—come down!" Falling on her knees, she began to repent loudly a bloodcurdling list of sins.

  The scream of a horse shattered his nerves and he whirled about to see the livery stable afire and the hostlers dragging out the frantic animals. Mechanically he started for the stable door to help, but the horses broke away and ran wildly down the street, and he took out after them, heading for the center of town. Lucy-Lucy! he kept saying, but the pressure on his head would not let him think out her place in this catastrophe.

  A dry whitish mist filled the air through which the lampposts loomed like emaciated monsters with enormously bloated heads. The earth cracked under him as he ran; the engraving in the dining room at home was coming true before his eyes. The half-naked people bursting out of doorways, the women clutching their children, the crippled carried out by their friends, a dead girl doubled against a churchyard wall ... he knew it all from childhood. Others beside the oyster-woman screamed out embarrassing confessions and prayed for forgiveness.

  Chunks of masonry clogged the roadway and slowed Timothy's pace. The white choking dust thinned suddenly and between the shreds he caught a glimpse of witchlike figures flying over a low wall. He put on speed, but couldn't come up with them. A black shrieking face with horns appeared at a cellar grating, rattled it insanely, and dropped from sight again.

  He saw no signs yet of the Highnesses. Heaven had withdrawn behind the film of plaster dust; and the Monarch from below merely knocked, so far, against the crust of the earth. How would death come? And at what moment? The Highnesses lacerated your nerves by not letting you know. It was not quite straightforward of them, he thought. From present indications they would shake down the world and its inhabitants and grind them to rubble by slow stages.

  Timothy had covered several bocks when Satan made his presence felt again; the street rose in waves that ran visibly before him, carrying the weightless cobblestones on their backs. He was thrown to the sidewalk; under his ear he heard the long muffled pounding like infernal artillery.

  The earth steadied once more. Timothy got up; his demoralization was settling now into a sort of fatalism. He would keep going until his call came; for his desire to know if Lucy was safe still spurred him. Running along the Farrs' street he quickly saw that their house, although of clapboard, was standing; Satan had looked out for his own. The doors hung open and he went through the lower rooms, striking matches and calling. But those usually crowded apartments were silent caves that gave back nothing but a quaver of his own voice.

  No neighbors could be found, either, to set him on Lucy's tracks—indeed, the people he tried to question in the streets were all strangers in that quarter, he gathered, having run there on the same crazy impulse that sent everyone looking for safety somewhere else. The probability that Lucy was well able to take care of herself brought him thin comfort—it only defined and gave depth to the differences in their realities. He came down the front steps of the Farrs' disordered house thinking that his reality was to know to his marrow the sensation of being tribeless and unfriended.

  He pulled himself together and hurried toward a large square from which a comfortingly human clamor rose. The street lamps had gone out, but the square was well if fitfully lighted by a row of houses ablaze along one side. Hundreds of people had gathered there, bringing their dead and injured on mattresses, and had made low shelters with coats and blankets. Timothy picked his way among them, feeling that he had gone far back in time and come on a village of barrows and cromlechs.

  The Negroes had drawn to one side of the square and, kneeling in a great congregation, begun to sing: "We will all pray togedder on dat day . . . I'll fall upon my knees and face de risin' sun . . . oh, Lawd, hab mussy on me . . ." and their voices d
rew a long sound of beauty and continuity through the horror. "You cyan' hide— you cyan' hide—you cyan' hide w'en de worl's on fiah "

  Obviously you can't; yet somehow there was comfort in the singing of it. Timothy could see no sign of Lucy, but, wheeling this way and that, he suddenly found himself face to face with Will Golightly. They rushed at each other and embraced. "Thank God, you're all right, Timothy!" Will cried. "I've been fretting about you!" To touch Will's muscular naked shoulder, to be fretted about, lifted Timothy on a wave of pure happiness.

  The wave washed over and engulfed even Will's family; they all shook hands with solemn cordiality. Anna Maria, always resourceful, had made them a tent from a blanket and a clotheshorse, "Where were you, Timothy," she cried, "when the first shock came? We had just finished a late supper of cold duck and were going to bed; how we got out, the good God alone knows. Our house is gone, you know, the chimney fell and split it right in two. But that's nothing, since we all escaped with our lives." She had prudently taken time to save the remains of the duck, and, looking larger than life in her cambric wrapper, she was now passing it out to her family, in which she hospitably included Timothy.

  The girls, Timothy saw, had saved their new shoes; indeed, people all about them had idiotically rescued treasured articles—a sewing machine, a picture frame, a tureen from which no soup would ever be ladled. They jostled one another and exchanged rumors of buildings destroyed, friends killed, tidal waves about to engulf the town. "Hell and death," said Will, hitching up his trousers; "if your time has come to meet your Maker, it don't make a damn bit of difference if it comes with fire or with flood," and he fell to work on an unconscious woman whose limp body had been deposited near them by her husband.

  Timothy squatted beside Will and held his doctor's satchel, thankful just to be near his cousin. "You know. Will, I've made up my mind about certain things: I'm convinced more than ever Evil isn't just the new idea, the challenge to the accepted Good. Of course, people hate giving up their old morals—even it they don't use them—for new ones; but Lucy was wrong. Evil is more than that."

  "Lucy who?" Will gave him an abstracted glance, feeling his patient's pulse. "Here, Tim—chafe her wrists with spirits while I listen to her heart again."

  Timothy, suddenly conscious of his draggled nightshirt, tucked it closer about him and attended to the lady's wrists. The smell of this liniment was so invigorating that he surreptitiously took a small swallow. His frittered mind was beginning to work again and all his natural obstinacy came out and hardened his long jaw.

  "It's a dead end, that explanation of things. You begin to tolerate Evil and where do you wind up? I'm against toleration." He rubbed with evangelical zeal. "Of course the Manichaeans have a good theory. They think that Good and Evil have equal power in the world, but that someday in a great catastrophe Good will rise up and vanquish Evil." He considered this idea thoughtfully for a moment and then added, "But I wasn't raised a Manichaean, so I don't believe that. And Hell looks a lot closer than Heaven right now."

  The woman moaned and came to. "Oh . . . oh . . . where am I?" She raised her head and, seeing two half-naked men bent over her, fell back in her faint again.

  Timothy took advantage of her retirement from the conversation to ask quickly, "What do you think about it, Will?"

  "Damn me, how should I know? All you can do is to try and keep Good ahead of the game. You have to control fifty-one per cent of the stock—that's my idea."

  "It's a great idea," said Timothy, struck back on his heels, "or would be if the game weren't over. I wish you'd mentioned it before."

  "God Almighty, Timothy! You're the hell of a fellow, sitting there arguing about Good and Evil in the middle of an earthquake."

  "Earthquake! So that's what you think it is! It's the end of the world, man!"

  As if in his support, the deep, hoarse voice began again, like the roar of the universe. The earth came loose from its foundations, and the tower of the church opposite rocked and crashed into the square. The light from the burning houses shot up; in this pallid glare they stared at each other, suspended; then it slowly dimmed in the upsurging smoke.

  The fresh shock had brought the patient to her senses; she sat up between them with a quavering cry. Will helped her to her feet and turned her over to her friends. "Well, Tim—we're liable to know all the answers any minute now, so don't worry about them." And clapping his cousin on the shoulder he went bounding across the square to attend to the newly injured.

  Timothy watched him go in perplexity. Dear Will, impulsive, generous, always able to escape thinking by action. And yet, suppose—good God, suppose this certainty of doom he felt was only his doom advancing! A hideous heresy edged into his mind: Judgment Day was an absurdity. If the dead of ten thousand years were already learning the harp or burning below, they had been judged as they fell. There would be no prisoners at the bar should a Great Day come.

  This revelation knocked his underpinnings out as none of the seismic shocks of the evening had been able to do. He sat down suddenly on the grass. For in that case he was going to his appointed goal alone. Judgment Day, he saw, would have been easy by comparison; everybody would be catching it at the same time. He dropped his head in his hands and groaned for Judgment Day lost. The Highnesses, he couldn't help feeling, had done themselves out of a great show.

  When the hysteria in the square had died down a little, the young Golightlys returned to the duck carcass.

  "Will you be all right here?" Timothy asked, getting up. "There's something I have to do. . . ." Obviously they would do as well here as anywhere, and he took his leave. An uncontrollable restlessness had taken hold of him.

  The conviction that his time had come made him feel meager and naked. One simple reason suggested itself; he looked about him and appropriated without a qualm a pair of trousers lying on the sidewalk. As he tucked his nightshirt in, the sweet solace of respectability stole over him and he went on with more confidence. The glare from the houses retreated behind him. In the quiet canal of the street he followed, he began to collect the thoughts that were bubbling up and spilling out of his head. He wanted to prepare his case, to say what he could for himself when he got down there. . . .

  Between the darkness and his preoccupation he collided with a smooth hairy body—a horse being led along by a colored man. As they disentangled themselves, Timothy said, "You have to re-examine Good and Evil constantly; they change their appearances, like Satan at the reception."

  The whites of the man's startled eyes showed in the dimness. "Hallelujah!" he exclaimed, and hurried away with his horse,

  Timothy went on talking: "About Sister and Mr. Dombie ... I was caught in that trap. . . . Being kind and dutiful to sisters doesn't always work out. I had to get from under. Though I chose the wrong method—you can't just kill very trying people, I suppose. You have to deal with them some other way."

  Like a fresh quake under foot it came over Timothy where he was headed. Down the street a little way gaped the site of Partridge's Pharmacy. The smoke and dust seemed to take him by the throat, but some door still swung there, drawn on air, through which he had to pass, and he went on. As he came nearer he could see the brick foundations, full of charred rubble; but the horror of its ruin had diminished now, for ruin had come to join it; it had merely anticipated this night by a few months.

  A column had fallen across the street from a building opposite; a fireman was putting a lantern on it to warn passers in the roadway. When the firemen had gone, Timothy took the lantern and walked along the foundation wall of the house to the gap where his bedroom had been.

  The cellar was like a well; the chimney had fallen into it, but the brick arch that had been its basement support still stood and made a shallow cave against the wall. As he turned the lantern on it he saw in the arch the sharp gleam of a pair of half-moon eyes. The old stab of love and fear went through him. Then he jumped into the cellar and stumbled over the intervening: bricks.

  "Have you
come for me, Sinkinda?"

  She sat sidewise, framed in the arch like a demonic saint in a catacomb. He saw that she had on her dark gTcen habit and her look of lazy anticipation.

  "I knew you'd turn up here, sooner or later."

  Timothy looked at her hopelessly. She said, "Aren't you ready to go yet? It's not very agreeable here just now."

  "No, it's dreadful . . . there's nothing to stay for, God knows. And the suspense is ghastly. I want to get it over with. The only thing is, I do wish—"

  Her eyebrows went up in inquiry.

  "Well, it hurts a man's pride to live all his life on earth and not know whether he was right or A'rong. If I only had a little more time to get my mind straightened out on that score."

  "The ruling passion strong in death!" She touched him with a quick gesture that was waspish but not uncomforting. "Most people in their last moments want time to be with their lovers, or just to enjoy life—but you want more time to find a moral. I will say, Timothy, that of all my victims you're the most charmingly unexpected and the most provokingly consistent."

  "Thanks."

  Sinkinda uncoiled herself from the arch and went off, hunting among the debris in the cellar. A little breeze brought the chink of glass and metal to him as she turned the shards of his old life. Then she came back, her bare feet making a dry whisper on the bricks, her tawny colors picking up and extending the circle of the lantern's light. She held in her hand the broken pharmacist's slate on which he used to jot down his orders. She handed it to him with the slate pencil. "Here, write your list of topics. And make haste—because the time is running out."

  Timothy came to with a start and took them from her. He moved the lantern nearer, sat down, crossed his legs, and tried to concentrate. The earth had stopped shaking for a while, but he found writing difficult. "I see you have to go on without knowing. The problem is too big for our narrow experience. But in spite of all the confusion a few things remain. Senseless cruelty is bad."