Rituals

by Mary Anna Evans

  “I couldn’t figure out why you were stalling,” Willow said. “I started making up stuff to say while I waited for you to stand up.”

  “Be glad I stalled. Otherwise, I’d have fallen on my face, and you’d have had to scrape me off the stage.”

  Faye nursed her zero-proof tea for a quarter-hour, watching Dara sparkle for her very small audience. During that time, Myrna’s color did improve and Ennis disappeared. She guessed that Sister Mama had told him to come home promptly and report on her patient’s condition, though how she was communicating so well with her nephew was anybody’s guess. Maybe they’d developed a sign language system, or maybe her speech got better when she wasn’t angry.

  Faye had spent that quarter-hour honing her own observation skills. She could see Tilda in her daughter’s lean form, although Dara must have gotten those hips and that flamboyant personality somewhere else. Her faultless posture, so like her mother’s, was a form of physical dignity. Faye could also hear a crisp intelligence in Dara’s words that harked back to Tilda.

  Faye suspected that Myrna too had inherited the family smarts but, for whatever reason, she chose to hide them. She more than made up for those hidden brains with social acuity. It would be a mistake to underestimate either woman.

  Different as they were, Myrna and Dara were blood relatives. Though their approaches to life were different, Faye could see that kinship. After Elder Johnson left, Dara got up and sat in his chair, pulling it close to her aunt. The two women shared an emotional effervescence that bore no resemblance to Tilda’s reserve. It was touching to watch them together.

  They hugged. They forced tea on everyone present. They gossiped. My, how they gossiped.

  “Do you think Ennis could’ve gotten out of here any faster, Auntie? He knows the whole town has heard about this little girl taking him down a notch or two.”

  The Armistead women—Faye had already ascertained that Dara clung to the family name as tightly as her mother—had grinned at Amande over her lunchtime victory, and Faye had watched the girl relax into friendship with them both. Willow had sat quietly through the Armistead women’s goofy jokes, sipping his tea and watching his wife’s every move. Faye had rarely seen a man so smitten after years of marriage.

  Other than her own Joe, of course.

  When it came to Dara, Willow had plenty to watch. She possessed the gift of quiet drama. Her voice was soft and her gestures were slight, but she had the power to make you watch every movement of those expressive hands. Her tasteful bracelets, one on each wrist, slid gently back and forth as she moved. Her riotous red curls swung softly. Her dress was embroidered with beads and splashed with all the jewel tones there were. She would surely make a memorable picture sitting behind her mother’s crystal ball, caressing it with hands so like Tilda’s.

  Faye felt a pang when she realized that the crystal ball had probably not survived the fire. Dara had lost many things in the fire that were far less important than her mother. Still, for the rest of her life, she would have moments when she woke up and thought, “It’s gone. The portrait of my great-grandfather. It’s gone.”

  While Faye was thinking, Dara’s conversation with Myrna had taken a turn in the same regretful direction. Tears were rolling down Myrna’s cheeks as she said, “If only she hadn’t been so stubborn. And you, Dara. You’re as stubborn as she was, and now it’s too late. The two of you lost years that you’ll never get back. Why didn’t you go sit on her doorstep and stay there until she forgave you? I told you to do that.”

  Dara’s eyes were glittering, too. “Mama passed her gifts to me. Is it so surprising that I got her bullheadedness, too? You’re right. I should have lived on her doorstep, if that’s what it took to get her to speak to me. You told me to do that, and I should have. I do have one consolation. She will come to me now. From the other side, she’ll see my heart and she’ll come.”

  Now Myrna was weeping openly. “But not to me. Why don’t I have the family gifts? I’m just a worn-out old lady who’s never talked to anybody that wasn’t standing right in front of me, in the flesh.”

  It was Willow’s turn to reach a hand across the table and take hers. “And on the telephone. You’ve talked to me many times when I wasn’t right in front of you, and I was always glad to hear your voice. We all have our gifts, Miss Myrna.”

  Faye gave Myrna a good hard look. She was weeping, but the tremors were gone and her cheeks were pink. Sister Mama’s 150-proof miracle had done its work. Dara no longer needed Faye as an ally in forcing Myrna to see a doctor. It was time for her and Amande to go.

  She rose, gave hugs and handshakes where they were appropriate, and took her daughter out the door with her, leaving this family to make its own peace.

  Chapter Eight

  Ennis closed the door to his bedroom and dropped onto the bed. He was glad to see Miss Myrna respond so well to his great-aunt’s root medicine. Sister Mama had tried to teach him her secrets, back when she could talk better, but Ennis hadn’t had a lot of patience for lessons that looked a lot like the chemistry homework he’d hated so much.

  “Just tell me what root to use for what sickness,” he’d said.

  “There’s more to it than that. That’s why you need to listen to me. No. That ain’t right. You need to listen to your patients…what they’re sayin’…what they ain’t. You gotta listen to their chests and you gotta hold your hand on their pulses a long time. Not just till you’ve counted the beats, no. A body’s heart will speak for it. You got to learn to listen.”

  It was no use. Ennis didn’t have her healing gifts, and he didn’t really want them. When it came to website-building and search engine-optimization, however, he was hell on wheels. Sister Mama had built quite a respectable online presence before Ennis came to live with her, but he had taken her business to a whole new level. It was an understandable error of youth that he hadn’t thought ahead to the day when Sister Mama wouldn’t be there.

  She’d needed him to help out around the house when he’d first come to live with her, but she could still walk and talk and boss him around. He’d counted on having her on his hands for a long time, fiddling with the roots and herbs while he focused on making money.

  How could a twenty-year-old, full of life, have imagined the second stroke that wiped away almost everything his aunt had once been?

  She still had her moments. Sometimes she could spit out a few sentences, then finish making her opinion known through sign language. She had a letter board she used, pointing to letters that spelled the words she couldn’t say any more. When he’d told her that Myrna Armistead needed her, she’d rallied enough to mix the tinctures herself.

  And then there were those other times. He didn’t like the town talking about the way he’d treated Sister Mama at the diner, but they didn’t have to live his life, now, did they? They didn’t have to wipe up after an old lady who drooled about half the time. He didn’t want to spend his time with the shell of his aunt. He wanted to be with the pretty young girl who had shamed him in public.

  He also wanted to know what he was going to do when Sister Mama could no longer tell him how to do root medicine. He figured he could just shut the local practice down. All the real money came from the Internet, anyway. But how was he going to handle the mail-order business?

  He knew the recipes for her various hexing powders and love potions. He also knew that she was adamant that there was more to her work than just mixing a few powders and putting them in a bag. He believed her when she said that Goofer Dust packaged by a nonbeliever wouldn’t work. Worse, it might even hurt somebody.

  Ennis, who was a nonbeliever most of the time, was seriously considering converting all of Sister Mama’s product lines to pure talcum powder and sugar water. Nobody knew what she was selling, anyway. Goofer Dust made out of talcum powder couldn’t hurt anybody, and neither could a tincture made of sugar water, flavored with a dash of moonshine.r />
  He had no answer to the question of how he was going to hold on to his biggest income stream, the online private clients. They emailed, they texted, they Skyped, and Sister Mama told them what to do to feel better. Was he going to prescribe talcum powder to all of them? Or maybe these special clients would be happy to buy tiny vials of her very potent homebrew with no herbal tinctures in it, whatsoever. He had a theory that Sister Mama’s moonshine alone could cure things that modern medicine wouldn’t touch. This probably meant that he needed to hurry up and learn to make homebrew.

  Ennis was tired of trying to figure out how to keep the Sister Mama gravy train rolling after she passed, but maybe he wouldn’t have to do it much longer. He prided himself on his ability to make deals, and he had the mother of all deals on the hook right now. If he landed it—and he did intend to land it—he could show Sister Mama and everybody in Rosebower his back as he moved on to something bigger. Lots bigger.

  Failing to land it might trap him in Rosebower forever, hoeing magical herbs until he himself needed somebody to push his wheelchair around.

  All of these problems circled around the one central question that drove Ennis these days. It grated on his peace of mind so much that he did stupid things, like losing his temper with his aunt in public. It disturbed his sleep. This one central question never left his forebrain.

  What was he going to do when Sister Mama was gone?

  ***

  “I don’t like to leave you, Auntie.”

  Dara brought Myrna’s footstool and arranged some magazines, a cup of tea, and a box of candy on the table next to her aunt’s favorite chair.

  “I’m fine. Those magazines will keep me occupied till bedtime. There’s no need for you to stay here with me when you’ve got work to do.”

  Dara watched Myrna’s eyes droop. Her aunt would be reading no magazines tonight.

  “I’ll come back after the show and help you get upstairs to bed.”

  The lids jerked open. “I can climb my own stairs. I did it for thirty-five years before you were born.”

  Dara thought, Nothing lasts forever, Auntie. And nobody lasts forever, either. But she only said, “You’ll call me if you change your mind about needing help?”

  There was a faint nod. The eyelids were settling again, but Myrna was a talker. She could talk until the instant that sleep took her. “I talked to Elder Johnson about your mother’s memorial service.”

  “We should plan for a crowd. The whole town will want to pay their respects, and we’ll need to feed them something afterward.”

  “Your mother didn’t want that. Think, Dara. How did Tilda feel about crowds? She wanted a cremation, then a brief time of remembrance with only family in attendance.”

  “But Auntie. You, me, and Willow are all the family she has. We might as well have had the service while we sat in your dining room this afternoon.”

  Myrna was dozing off with her tea, candy, and magazines still untouched. “It’s what your mother wanted. She told me when I witnessed her will. Tilda was a private woman of great faith. You couldn’t make her into something else when she was alive, and you can’t do it now. Go do your show. I’ll be fine.”

  Willow was waiting by the door as Dara shut it behind her. They did the same damn show nine times a week, but she could see that he was taut with nervous energy. In a moment, she would be, too. No performer could engage an audience without that energy. Dara’s mother had exuded the same energy, even when she had an audience of one.

  There is a knack to being fascinating. Performers have it. Regular people just don’t.

  Dara was torn between her grieving aunt and the audience that was already gathering. She and Willow made a good living, entertaining Rosebower’s tourists with their daily dose of magical shock-and-awe. Willow did a masterful job of working the audience, day in and day out, but Dara was the one who owned the stage. She knew it. He knew it.

  She was tired of the daily shows, but she needed them like a drug. She wanted to stay here with Myrna, but she wanted an audience more. Theoretically, she had a partner who could have carried on without her on days when she was sick. She should have been able to take a day or two off after her mother died so horribly, but she couldn’t.

  She could carry the show without Willow, if need be, but he couldn’t carry it without her. And they both knew it.

  Working notes for Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes:

  An Unauthorized History of Spiritualism in Rosebower, New York

  by Antonia Caruso

  Dara Armistead is not her mother. She resembles her mother in no way, beyond the fact that they are both tall, strong-willed women. I know for a fact that she lacks her mother’s integrity.

  Any reader of my eventual book will know that I do not believe Tilda Armistead had psychic powers, because I do not believe that anyone has them. Still, intellectual honesty requires me to repeat this mantra daily: “I could be wrong.”

  It is possible that I am wrong in my belief that the physical world is all there is. It is possible, though I think it’s highly unlikely, that some people can communicate with our dearly beloved ones who have passed to the other side. If so, then I admit the possibility that Tilda Armistead was the real thing. I do not give Dara Armistead that much credit, because there is no question that she is a fraud.

  It is no wonder that the two women didn’t speak for the last fifteen years of Tilda’s life. It’s more surprising that their relationship lasted as long as it did, but distance can be a precious buffer between incompatible relatives. When Dara went away to college, she married Willow and they lived somewhere down south for a while. My contacts in the illusionists’ world remember them faintly. They seem to have made quite a splash in a few of the old Confederate states. I’ve heard Myrna say that it nearly killed Tilda when her daughter would go for months without even letting her know she was alive.

  Eventually, though, the young couple saw the potential for making a killing in the family business. They moved home to Rosebower and, from the moment they hit town, Tilda’s relationship with her daughter was doomed.

  I have uncovered this much hard evidence in the public record: Dara and Willow applied for a business license to practice as psychics within the city limits of Rosebower, and the town’s governing council denied their request. Nothing in the public record tells us why.

  Dara Armistead is Rosebower royalty. She is not some upstart Rust Belt retiree who wants to move here and supplement her Social Security check by reading palms and tea leaves. There is a story behind Dara Armistead’s rejection by the town her ancestors founded. There has to be. And I think I know what it is.

  These people believe in what they are doing. When they deliver a message from dead Cousin Fred and departed Aunt Martha, they believe they are helping their tearful clients. Dara’s exhibitionist antics horrify them, and there can be no question that they horrified her mother. After Rosebower rejected Dara, she threw their disapproval right back in their faces, building her business barely outside the town limits on property she inherited from her father. In other words, she and Willow work just out of reach of the town council and its annoying ethics requirements.

  I have attended the circus that Dara and her husband call a “Spiritualist event” on several occasions. Once every day, and twice on Saturday and Sunday, they pack the tourists into their small custom-built auditorium. I have to admit that they put on a good show, but it is unadulterated old-fashioned hucksterism.

  Willow appears to be very good at cold readings, particularly when his victims are lonely middle-aged women. He takes their faces between his manly hands and stares deeply into their eyes, making bold statements and asking searching questions:

  “There is someone special in your past, someone who hurt you.”

  For how many middle-aged women is this statement not true? I can say honestly that it’s true for me.

 
The poor vulnerable victim sheds tears over her faithless lover, and then Willow is off to the races. When he guesses wrong, he is excused, because he has already been right about the doomed love affair. And when he nails something obvious, like, “Your children have never appreciated the sacrifices you made for them,” everyone in the room is on his side.

  He doesn’t fool around with parlor tricks like stealing the poor sucker’s watch and having an accomplice hide it someplace amazing. He does not plant fake suckers in the audience who will agree that his most far-fetched statements are miracles of mind-reading skill. He merely chooses the most vulnerable person in the room—and it’s usually a woman—then he manipulates her emotions for the entertainment of a crowd.

  It’s sad to watch, really.

  Dara doesn’t bother going out among her guests. She remains on the stage at all times, which is a good use of her theatrical flair. She’s really a very talented magician. In particular, she is adept at sleight-of-hand. My, how she can make tarot cards spin and fly and disappear!

  I find it intriguing that she uses a camera and overhead monitor to give the audience a close-up view of her impressive card-handling skills, but there comes a point in the show when the lights go down and the viewer is left with Dara inside the centerpiece of her cheap-but-spectacular stage—a mostly transparent cage built of glass and mirrors that harks back to crystal balls like her mother’s.

  I think her crystal stage is built to hide trickery, but I also think that it is no accident that Dara has made herself the center of her world.

  Chapter Nine

  Faye should have guessed that Amande had something up her sleeve when she turned down pie. Looking at the heavy-laden dessert cart, Faye couldn’t comprehend Amande’s attitude. She tried in vain to find one treat that didn’t feature chocolate, coconut, cherries, or caramel. What wasn’t to like?