“This is for you sweet Lola Price,” he said with a bow as he held out his hand and in it was a Spanish gold piece.
Now at this point in time during her story my grand momma would open her worn out old purse and take something out wrapped in a white cotton handkerchief. She would unfold it one corner at a time building up the suspense until the first edge of the gold piece would gleam in the light. Then she would hold it up and say, “See here it is, my beautiful gold piece, now everyone knows I am not lying.” But of course no one believed her story except the very few who knew that the truth was proven by more than a shiny coin but for grand momma it was her proof until the day her purse was stolen outside of the feed store in Supply and her coin was gone.
The family had all warned her not to carry it around, it was far too valuable and everyone in the county knew about the crazy woman who carried around the gold coin but she just couldn’t bring herself to be apart from it and quite frankly she never got over losing it, she died later that year of what the doctors called pneumonia but I always thought she had just given up. We sprinkled her ashes off the beach at Sandy Landing cause that was what she wanted.
I leaned forward and checked on the water level in the canvas pond and then I leaned back in the lawn chair again and let the remainder of grand mommas story replay in my head, it was almost like she was here with me again.
“Oh that is beautiful,” I said as the moonlight glimmered on the surface of the golden coin.
“I am so glad you like it,” he said, “I remember that your kind is very fond of shiny things. I will admit that I am a bit perplexed since it seems to have no real value but if you like it then I am pleased.” And with those words he handed it to me. No man before or since has ever given me anything nearly as nice.
“Where did you get it?” I asked naturally curious as to how he came across a big gold coin in the middle of the swamp.
“Oh your kind drops all sorts of things in the black water,” he said with a grin, “including each other sometimes. I could show you quite a few corpses with stones tied around their feet and why shouldn’t I look through their pockets because who knows when I will need a special gift for a lovely lady.”
I shuddered and held the coin out in front of me in the flat of my hand.
“You mean to tell me that this came out of a dead man’s pocket?” I squealed.
He shrugged slightly, “all money comes out of a dead man’s pocket eventually, and he was not going to be using it there at the bottom of the channel plus he must have at least a hundred more; he isn’t going to miss just one.”
I watched the moon light dance across the surface of the coin and I guessed he was right, I closed my hand around the coin and smiled, “well thank you, I do love it.”
“Excellent,” he said, “Now teach me a human game. After dinner games are customary are they not?”
“Well, yes, I suppose that or singing or storytelling. I could teach you checkers,” I offered. “Do you know how to play checkers?”
“No,” he said as he sat down in front of me, “teach me.”
I made a board in the sand and we used oyster and clam shells for game pieces and I taught him checkers. He loved it; he groaned when he lost and clapped his hands like a child when he won. We were having a wonderful time when he looked up into the sky and sighed.
“The Goddess Moon is setting and I am afraid I must go soon,” he said as he reached out and took my hand. “I shall always treasure my time with you for unlike your kind my kind keeps our memories as our treasure not shiny bobbles. But before I go I will give you the gift the Goddess sent.”
And with those words he leaned over and kissed me and I really can’t tell you what happened after that, not because you are too young to hear of such things but because I can’t put them into words, such joy defies words.
When we were done we both lay back on the beach and looked out over the swamp as the moon sank behind the cypress line far off past the marsh. Suddenly I heard a strange crunching sound and as I looked on his legs began to change. They melted together, his white skin turned iridescent and his feet splayed to the sides to form a fishes’ tail. My mouth dropped open again but he just sat up and patted my hand.
“What a night we have shared Lola Price; what a night!” he said and then he rolled over and slid down to the water’s edge like a seal. “Farewell,” was the last word he said before he slipped into the black water. The last I saw of him was his great tail as it flipped up and splashed me all the way up on the beach.
The next thing I knew I heard the sound of the oars and the flat boat coming up the creek. I hurried to get my clothes back on but when my brother got there he knew something had happened cause my clothes were all catty whompus and my hair had twigs and moss in it and quite frankly I think my face was glowing with the pure joy I had just experienced. Well I told him the truth, the whole story but he called me a liar and a trollop and he said if I ever let on to momma and daddy that he had left me here alone so as I could meet up with my boyfriend then he was going to hit me so hard upside the head folks would think I was even more stupid than I already was.
I didn’t say a word to nobody but about four months later my momma knew that I had been with someone cause my belly was getting bigger and the baby inside was starting to move. It felt like a mouse when you hold it in your hands, so small and wiggly, every time it moved I thought of that night and it made me smile.
Finally they got the story out of me and I told them everything and I thought that would make it okay cause it wasn’t like I had done something so wrong, no I had been there and I was sure it was something very right but that was not how my daddy saw it. He was madder than I had ever seen him, even madder than when my brother Thompson had run the wagon off the road and into the creek.
Daddy blamed Thompson cause he was supposed to be watching me that night and daddy kept yelling that it was one of Thompson’s good for nothing friends had had his way with me and he had better tell who it was or else. I swore up and down that I was telling the truth but no one believed me. I thought about showing them the coin then but I was afraid daddy would take it or call me a whore for taking the money so I kept it hidden for a long time.
Momma finally calmed him down but things were never the same between me and daddy after that until years later when the first change happened. A few weeks later they took me all the way into Wilmington to see a doctor and they made me tell the story again. He didn’t believe me either and I heard him whispering to my parents about how people often make up stories to hide the real event from their memory and that someone must have attacked me and my crazy story was my way of coping with the bad thing that had happened to me.
Silly man didn’t have the foggiest idea of what he was talking about but my parents seemed to take some comfort in his words so they took me home and five months later little Locke was born. He had the darkest fuzz of hair on the top of his head and eyes so dark they looked like ink. There was the smallest spot on the back of his neck that looked like tiny scales but it disappeared after a few months which kind of made me sad cause it reminded me of his daddy.
Momma and daddy loved him dearly even though I had shamed the family and over the years people stopped pointing at me and whispering behind my back and by the time Locke was about to turn sixteen our lives had gotten back to being pretty normal, and that’s when it happened for the first time.
We were all out on the dock down at the fishing pond frying catfish for Locke’s birthday. The full moon was rising over the pine trees and the frogs were singing; it was a wonderful evening. Momma and daddy were there, and three of my brothers, Thompson wasn’t there cause he had gotten himself killed a few years earlier down near Carolina beach, he always was a terrible swimmer. Two of my brothers had gotten married and their wives were there and my four nieces. It was a nice family gathering and no one had even had an argument yet when all of a sudden Locke started to scream. He was sitting on the dock with his feet i
n the water and I thought a gator had hold of him he was caterwauling so. My brother Wallace grabbed him and pulled him back but then he dropped him as if he were a poisonous snake. Everyone looked at Locke’s legs and we watched them change. I had seen it before so truthfully I wasn’t so surprised but no one else took it so well.
Sophia, Wallace’s wife fainted and would have fallen backwards into the pond if my daddy hadn’t caught her. My mother was reciting the Lord’s Prayer and I remembered fondly how that had been my first response to the magic that was happening before us. Everyone just stood there crying or gasping or praying until I finally yelled, “help me get him in the water, he has to get to the water.”
Thank goodness my brother Robert had enough wits about him to help me and we gently lowered Locke into the water just as his head began to flatten out and those darling whiskers sprouted out around his mouth. He sunk down under the water but almost immediately he swam back up and rolled a bit at the surface so he could look at me with one of his black eyes.
“It’s alright baby,” I said, “just swim around and I am sure you will turn back in the morning.” And with that he gave a powerful swish of his tail and he disappeared into the murky depths of the pond. Of course I wasn’t sure at all if that was true but I told him that to make him feel better.
Everyone stood or sat there in absolute silence until my daddy finally spoke.
“Please forgive me Lola,” he said quietly, “all these years you have been telling the Gods honest truth and none of us, not one of us believed you. Can you forgive me?”
“There is nothing to forgive daddy,” I whispered. “I just hope he comes back.”
Then my brother Wallace spoke in the matter of fact way that he had, “Locke is a carp Lola, did you know that your boy was a carp?”
“Well his daddy was a carp so I figured this might happen sooner or later,” I replied and then no one said anything else for a long time they just stared out at the pond and jumped a bit every time a bubble popped up.
And that was where she always ended the story and yes my daddy did come back in the morning. He crawled up on the bank of the pond naked as a jay bird and my grand momma wrapped him in a towel and took him into the old house that has stood since before the civil war and they continued the same ritual every month until grand momma died and then my mother took over. She had not known about the “condition” when she married dad but my mother is a very practical woman in most respects so she dealt with it. The family was sworn to silence; they knew no one would believe them anyway and they sure didn’t want to be thought of like crazy old Lola was with her ridiculous fish stories so my daddy’s “condition” remained a family secret and he handled it pretty well until the drinking started.
About two years after I was born he started to get real drunk before the change and eventually he was drunk almost all the time until he could not even make it down to the pond to spend the night in his fish body. Mom and I were his constant caretakers and it was our job to see to it he didn’t die in the back yard gasping for air.
I saw the first red rays of the morning sun slipping through the pines and I watched as my daddy returned to his human form. I grabbed the old towel from the back of the chair and helped him to stand. I wrapped him up and we turned towards the house. He looked so tired and even sadder than usual.
“Why do you have to drink so much? I know it must be awful turning into a fish but I can’t see where drinking helps.” I asked him trying not to sound too judgmental.
My father laughed a little as water dribbled out of his mouth.
“I don’t drink because I am a fish son; I drink because I have to return to being a man. It is much easier to be a fish than a man.”
My father had never said anything like that before and quite frankly I was very glad to hear that becoming a fish was not the worst thing that could happen to a person. Well that was two days ago and tonight, I turn sixteen and I couldn’t think of a better place to do it than here at Sandy Landing where all of this craziness started. Here, forty years since she was here, sitting in the very spot that my grand momma was when the werecarp gave her the gift, a son that could turn into a fish just like him and I was pretty certain that tonight I too would change just like my daddy.
The big moon is starting to rise over the marsh as I walk into the dark water. I can feel crawfish crawling over the tops of my feet and the slimly silt squeezes up between my toes. The moon light is dancing across the surface of the water and splashing against my calves and suddenly I feel something else, it tickles more than the crawfish. My feet are tingling and then my legs. I wonder if this hurts?
I don’t know if I laid down in the water or fell over but the next thing I know I am floating on my back looking up at the Spanish moss hanging from the huge live oak that hung over Sandy Landing.
The world looks different, clearer somehow and as my head goes beneath the water I understand completely what my father meant, being a fish is awesome. I heard the water striders skittering across the surface; I tasted life itself in the waters that surrounded me and flowed across my gills. For the first time in my life I understand what it means to be truly alive, hell I am like some kind of superbeing. My father has never truly understood that his “condition” is a gift but I sure do.
And now I am off to do what I have waited sixteen years to do. I am going to find that dead pirate with a hundred Spanish gold pieces in his pockets and Wayne Price is going to be rich. No changing in the fishing pond behind the falling down old house for me, no sir, I am going to see the world both the wet and dry part; I won’t be stuck here in nowhereville anymore.
A gremlin’s tale.
(This story is a continuation of two other stories that appear in the first anthology in this series Monsters, Magic, and Machines. It takes place in Memphis, Tennessee in 1886. This is a world in which all the creatures of myth are real and magic is just as powerful as science, but the history of the world has continued along a familiar path as if these differences mattered very little. Kate has been in this world for just a few months. She was brought here through a magical portal to be a sacrifice to a demon by a power mad state senator whose plan was thwarted by a meddling dwarven lawyer. )
Mistress Katie’s Clock
© 2013, Jonathan David Baird
Kate looked at Thaddeus and frowned. She did that a lot but only because he always acted like she was a wayward teenager who had just been caught trying to steal the family car. She had been his legal secretary for three months now and she was getting used to life in this strange version of the 19th century. She had started to dress the part but preferred to wear what Thaddeus referred to as men’s clothing. The look on his face assured her he did not like what she was wearing this morning. Not that Thaddeus knew what men’s clothes were; he wore a kilt for Christ’s sake. In fact he was much more fastidious than most women she knew. Thaddeus was immaculately clean at all times, if he could help it, and he still complained about the mud he had gotten on himself and in his clothing when they had first met.
She looked over at him; this morning he had a jet-black tricorn hat with a single green feather jauntily thrusting from it, and sitting upon his immaculately coifed crimson hair. His full lush beard came to a braided fork and was tied with black velvet cords each cord ending in a tiny brass eyelet. He sported a red silk waistcoat and a black woolen jacket. He looked every bit the model of the modern legal profession. A gold chain attached to his belt loop ran up to the breast pocket of his waistcoat. This would suggest a pocket watch except that the shape seen in the pocket was rectangular rather than round. Kate knew he kept her cell phone in that pocket. The battery had run down but Thaddeus was ever hopeful of getting it recharged. And yes he was in a kilt again this morning, an expertly tailored one with a blue green tartan hung about his waist. A smart silver pin in the shape of a writing quill was attached to the kilt near the bottom of its right side. Below this his knobby naked knees peek out from under the kilt but were contraste
d by expensive white woolen hose, which covered his shins and feet. On these feet are low black shoes which look to be made from some exotic leather and were topped by twin golden buckles. Ahh, she thought “The Employer”… The one and only dwarven lawyer this side of creation. She was pretty sure that was true, but she hadn’t personally met or talked with any other dwarves since she had come to Memphis.
Kate’s thoughts of work and employers vanished entirely when through the door of the office walked a God on Legs. His name was Silas Tanager and Kate had it bad for him. It wasn’t because he was particularly handsome but he did have a really cool scar running along his left cheek, not the one on his face. It was because he was a bad boy and Kate loved the bad boys. He had first shown up at the office two weeks ago when Thaddeus bailed him out of jail. Silas was an old customer mainly because he was a riverboat gambler and didn’t take kindly to being cheated. Gambling was not like the friendly Las Vegas or Atlantic City style venues she remembered from her time and place; here it was serious even deadly business. Silas was right in the middle of that business and had brushes with the law quite frequently. Two weeks ago Silas had knifed a man who had been pulling aces out his sleeve at a poker game aboard the Voyager. The riverboat had been docked here in Memphis at the time and so Thaddeus personally went and bailed him out. The man Silas stabbed had died after holding on for almost a week and today had been Silas’ trial. Thaddeus had assured Kate that it was mostly a formality. Both men had been armed and at least one other gambler testified that he saw the aces fall out of the man’s sleeve. Thaddeus had also warned her about getting too comfortable with Silas, but Thaddeus warned her about everything. Just this once she thought she would ignore the dwarf’s warnings.
Silas swept into the room and grabbed a chair in front of Kate’s desk. Prig, Kate’s pet piglet, scrambled out of the way of the chair he had been resting under. Prig made a low extended oink of annoyance. Thaddeus was not the only person in Kate’s life that disliked Silas.
Goggles, Gears, and Gremlins (SteamGoth Anthology Book 3) Page 8