by Lynn Cesar
“Bushmill. Why doncha go see your Dad’s friend? Harst?”
“Because I don’t like Dr. Harst.”
So quick he’d thrown it at her, she’d answered on instinct and instantly saw she’d answered right. The tiniest crinkle of humor on Fratelli’s face. He knew that all that was Dad’s was her enemy; it was why he was sure she wanted to sell. “’S okay. I hear he’s outta town f’a while.”
“Anyway, I stopped by to tell you to pick all the rest off those trimmings from Jack’s trees. I make it at least fifteen more flats. Just pay me now and take it whenever you want.” I’ve got nothing to hide. Walk right onto my property.
He stared at her a moment, winked, and pulled out a wad of bills. “I pay you for twenny flats. Old friends here, ay?”
“Old friends, yes, Mr. Fratelli. But my partners back in ‘Frisco and me, we don’t see land values the same way you do. For Dad’s orchard and the house, we’re looking at least eight hundred thousand.”
“Karen! You talkin’ crazy! Look, I talk to my people… but you talkin’ crazy!”
“Ah, Mr. Fratelli! It would’ve been nice to sell it to you, somebody that really knows the place, not some rich developer.” She saw swift calculation in his eyes. “I’ve got to go. Just pick that fruit whenever you want.”
And as she turned, she noticed, among the shoppers rummaging through Dad’s fruit, was Helen Carver.
“Helen,”
“Hi. Karen… . I’m so sorry… about your Dad.” She had a thin, pretty face, but an aura of exhaustion enveloped her, seemed even to dull her still-blond hair. As a girl in high school she had always been quiet, conventional, though never unfriendly, despite Karen’s— even then— reputation as a drinker and a rowdy.
“It’s okay,” Karen said absently, looking in this tired face for the young woman she’d once known. “I didn’t really like him much.”
Helen blinked. Something like compassion in her eyes both galled and touched Karen in equal measure. She asked, “Are you a fan of Fox Fruit, too?”
“Well, Marty is, I guess.” The cheerless smile she gave Karen saying this… . This Helen not as shy as that young woman had been.
Again Karen felt that touch on her spine. What had she drunk, when she drank Dad’s brandy? “Helen, I’m waiting for a bus. Want to have a cup of coffee?” They had never been close, but Karen saw a furtive longing in her eyes. Life with Marty Carver had to be worse than lonely. He probably didn’t let her have friends, it would be a kind of insubordination. “Come on. We can catch up, as they say.”
Fratelli watched the two women walk off towards the Koffee Kup across the street. He called Sal over. “Go pick the resta those Fox trees, even the bruised. Get everyt’ing that ain’t crushed.” Sal roared off in the pickup. His father began restacking with expert hands the dwindling peaches and apricots, as he smiled at Duina Tyler, May Tyler’s grandmother She was aiming her handsome, seamed face disapprovingly at the wares. “This is a sorry lot, Mr. Fratelli. Look at all the bruises!”
“Miz Tyler! Maybe you need glasses! Looka these apricots! Plump! Just ripe! Perfect! Mr. Tyler gonna love ‘em!”
He watched her frowning some more, knowing what was coming. Mr. Fratelli understood the chill of age, the longing for some touch of that energy, that appetite of youth. Understood that it would have been Mr. Tyler himself who had sent her down here, once the word had gone round what was on sale.
“They’ll do for jam,” she said. “Gimme a flat of ‘em.”
“’At’s fifty bucks well spent, Miz Tyler!”
XVIII
Sal Fratelli drove unwillingly down the Fox acres’ gravel drive. He’d never liked this place. For one thing, everything to do with agriculture, dirt-farming, his old man in that apron stacking fruit all these years— he was sick and tired of.
Sal was a grower himself, true enough— on some private paths he had created in the wooded fringes of his neighbor’s acres. But dope was different. Dope was cash, pure and simple, and cash meant out of this farm-and-cowflop town. Another season, and he and Cherry would have their hundred K, and get their nice little condo in the city. Growlights in closets then: contained, controlled growth. He guessed there was a kind of magic after all in bringing things up from the dirt, tiny green miracles spreading and branching, and fat rolls of green bills swelling in your pocket.
Cherry whined, quite a bit, especially near harvest. Sheriff Carver lives right next door! Blah blah blah. The sheriff’s nearness worried Sal from time to time, but the reassurances he gave Cherry worked for him, too. These were wooded five-acre parcels and the crop was hidden across Mr. Kettrick’s property line, in deep brush the old man hadn’t entered, let alone cleared, in years. Trim a few suckers this afternoon when he got home and, in another week, all the buds would be boxed and locked… .
Turning onto the dirt road past the house, he pulled up next to the back yard and got his crates out of the bed of the pick-up, sighing as if they weighed a thousand pounds. Sal did not like being here. Karen was okay— who cared what people did in bed? She had nerve— he’d heard about what she’d said to that asshole in the 8-Ball. It was Jack, dead or not, he didn’t like. People whispered things about him and Sal had never laid eyes on that dark-eyed brute without a shuddery feeling that they were true. Something about his land, something about this dirt under his feet that Sal didn’t like.
He laid his flats by the heap of lopped branches and began plucking the fruit that studded them. All the apricots and peaches that he’d stacked for his old man, but he could almost swear these were different. They felt fuzzier, unpleasantly clingy to his hands, creepy to the touch, almost like skin. What a scary son of a bitch old Fox had been! Built like a brick shithouse, his mind always far away somewhere back behind his eyes… . Sal’s hands flickered, deft amid the tangled twigs. Just get the hell done and out of here. He had his own crop to get trimmed before dark.
“Hello.”
It was a little old woman, in a thrift-shop hat! Where did she come from? Dusty old Levi’s jacket on her sparrow-thin torso. In road-worn jeans and tired black track-shoes as scarred as a blackberry-picker’s arms.
“Jeez, Lady! You scared me— ” He left it hanging, stopping himself from saying “shitless” just in time. “What’re you doin’ here?”
The old woman smiled a grave smile, showing a calm that slowed Sal’s galloping heart. A kind of peace came off of her like a wave-front. There was a strangely heartwarming erosion around her bright eyes, as if her seamed face were a bit of cliff side, a small corner of your own land you’d come to love. He stared at her, thinking how wonderful her eyes were, as if they contained… stories. Yeah, a thousand great stories you’d heard as a kid, but had somehow forgotten since your boyhood.
“I’m here— what is your name? Is it… Salvatore? I’m here to look after the house. Will you be going somewhere after this? To— how do you say it?— to cultivate a crop of your own?”
Sal stood slack. How did she know his name? Had she come here to blackmail him? How did a housecleaner for the Foxes know his private business?
“No,” smiled the old woman, as if he had spoken aloud. “I do not care about your crop. I am afraid for you, Salvatore. I have a feeling… some danger will come to your home tonight.”
“What… what’re you saying?”
She let his question hang, listening elsewhere, watching him… and smiled sadly. “No,” she said. “Forgive me… Sal. I’m a foreigner. I’ve said the wrong thing. I’ll go inside now. Perhaps I will see you again.”
She’d unsettled him so much, that he let her go, though he wanted her to stay, to explain. Dad hired wetbacks. Did he know about the dope? Did everybody? He watched her walk up onto the back porch. She paused there, seemed to muse a moment, then decisively twisted the knob and thrust herself inside.
Uneasy, Sal plucked apricots. Had to concentrate, to pull at the correct angle— ninety degrees off what his long-trained hands had learned with vertical tre
es. The fuzzy heft of the fruit seemed even more unpleasant than before. His fingers twitched them into the paper sockets of the crates, glad to be done with each one, unwilling to grip the next, and working all the faster for that reason.
* * * *
Quetzal walked slowly through the kitchen, feeling already the thing she sought. Such gloom and grief inside this house! That poor young woman! To have returned to this place! Quetzal must find… Emily. The whole house, whose duena she had so long been in life, murmured her name. Must find Emily, calm her and give her courage, alone in the dark as she was, before her spirit must face what she had still to face!
Quetzal made, in the air before her, the upward-curving sign of the Serpent, who was both Earth and Sky. She made the sign of the Cross as well. Why not? Any of those who loved light, who loved all that was kissed and encouraged by the sun, these could cross themselves, too, and what harm?
Here was the dining room and it still reverberated with a contact between the mother and the daughter. Here the daughter, Karen, had almost been murdered and here Emily, already dead, had reached out and saved her. Here would be the mother’s loving, lingering soul. There. There was what the little witch sought. There was Emilia herself, framed in a photograph!
She unlatched the breakfront and lifted it out, a small icon where the woman’s tender, undying spirit still lived. Quetzal caressed the glass that coffined the face, the face of the soul she needed for this ugly, bloody war she was about to wage. She could feel the woman’s heart, a steady-glowing coal of grief and love and steel-sinewed will, hovering in the wind of Time like an inextinguishable flame, stubbornly haunting this crude image of herself.
Quetzal looked long into those half-tone eyes. The photograph had been taken close up, a field of vague leaves just behind her. Yes. Emily was here now, just behind those gray eyes and was also inhabiting those same orchard leaves outside this house, haunting their sun-struck, breeze-stirred multitude in the latening gold light. Emily was everywhere here, had been dead for scarcely a heartbeat, a mere three years.
“Emily,” Quetzal said softly. “Ven a mi corazon. Mi corazon es tu cama, tu casa, tu puerta al mundo. Mis ojos son tus ventanas. Come forth from my eyes. Be born anew from my eyes.”
She reached out with her heart, her whole mind, a thrusting-outwards of naked love. Having done this, she sighed and stood relaxed, letting go of her effort, her life-or-death mission, standing slack in the faith that she had reached out with all she had in her and that the answering touch would come.
It came as a shiver like a swift-branching vine up the trellis of her spine and ribcage. She had to unclench from the shock that all her seventy years of witch-work had never dulled— unclench and let the cold, hungry soul writhe up through her, like a long-sounded whale, huge and cold from the arctic waters of death, erupting mightily back up to the sky, to the earth-spanning air.
Quetzal bucked and quivered, and dead Emilia launched out of her, pouring from the windows of Quetzal’s eyes in a brutal, icy flux that pulled stinging tears down the witch’s gaunt cheeks.
Dizzied, she swayed, struggling to focus her eyes again, to see the inquietude in the air before her, the squirm of an energy twisting this way and that in the dining room’s gloom. Afternoon light filled the kitchen, but only a few rays reached in here. In the faint glow Quetzal saw a liquid stir. A few moments later— for the ghost must find its place among the new, more cramped dimensions of this earthly space— the closet door-handle twitched, then twitched more decidedly and, at last, the door came open. A long moment later, a shotgun came out of the closet, moving upright, its stock skittering lightly across the floor as if it were hauled out by an invisible child too short to take it up in arms. It wavered unsteadily upright, as if its invisible possessor were seeking a grip on it. Suddenly, it rose decisively into the air, hanging horizontally some four feet above the floor. The slide was worked, a live shell jacked out clattering onto the floor.
And only then, as she bent to retrieve it, was Emily vaguely revealed, a smoky blur squatting down, reaching a pale arm of faintest mist, plucking up the shell and thumbing it back into the chamber. Then the gun hung there at port-arms, the vaporous shape that held it thinner than the mere memory of smoke, no shape at all, really.
“My daughter,” said Quetzal. “Mi hija. Put it down. We need a weapon more potent and primitive. Among the tools of this man— once a man— you married, we will find what we need. Then we must gather your sisters who have died, and who will die, in this valley. And then, we will fight.”
* * * *
Over their coffee, both Karen and Helen were awkward with the conventional pleasantries. Tired and in pain, Karen couldn’t understand why she’d gotten herself into this. “So. How are your kids?”
“We just have one. Marty Junior. He’s thirteen.”
Helen’s wan smile touched Karen. How would the kid be? Marty Junior! Karen took a chance. “I’ll bet he likes to be called something besides Marty. Does he have a nickname?”
“His friends call him Skip.” Helen’s eyes winced saying this, but they held Karen’s, who saw this worn-down woman might be submissive to her martinet master, but her spirit was not broken, was perhaps just in hiding. Karen decided to take a chance.
“Helen. I’m a crazy dyke drunk, right? No— please, I’m not fishing for kindness. I’m just trying to open your ears to me, because I want to help you. Just listen a moment, okay?”
Helen surprised her, reaching out and gripping her forearm with an unexpectedly strong hand and looked at her with a directness for which Karen was unprepared. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Karen. I think you’ve… suffered a lot. I’ve always liked you. Always… admired you.”
Tough old Karen Fox— as she’d always thought of herself— this touched her so sharply that actual tears jumped into her eyes. “I was never very nice to you,” she blurted. “I remember when I came up to you and Marty at your table in the restaurant that time, with my lover and I acted so— ”
Helen’s grip on her arm and her steady golden eyes, stopped her. “I always liked you, Karen. I thought you were brave. You know why I married Marty? Basically, because he told me to and I didn’t have the backbone to refuse. I mean, it was what I was supposed to do. An eligible guy… . But you were the opposite of me and I always admired you for it.”
Karen had to wipe her eyes on her sleeve, but felt no embarrassment. Even the cracked bone in her hand seemed relieved by this sweetness. Somebody she’d never even troubled to think about had been out there in that earlier world of hers— that world so full of nightmare and pain— thinking of her, liking her. She started to speak and had to clear her throat. Grinned crookedly.
“That means a lot to me. Look. What I have to tell you will make me sound crazy, but please try to hear it. First, don’t eat that fruit, not even a bite. I think Marty will want you to… and— Marty is dangerous. I don’t exactly understand it myself, but he was like… my father’s apprentice. My father is… my father was a very dangerous man. My lover, Susan, was killed three days ago. They said it was a traffic accident, but I think Marty had something to do with it. I’m so sorry, but I truly think it. I think my father had something to do with it… . You’ll know I’m crazy now, I guess, and I guess I just can’t help that. I just saw my bus pull in down there and I have to go, but I couldn’t leave without trying to warn you. I know I sound insane… but leave him, Helen. Take your boy and leave him.” She rose and, impulsively, kissed Helen’s cheek. Then stumbled out to catch her bus.
* * * *
Raul and Isauro, in the cab of their rusty old Chevy pick-up, glanced back simultaneously at the knock on the cab’s rear window. The old woman they’d picked up a few miles back up the highway was standing there in the truck bed as easy as you please, balanced against the truck’s rocking and swaying— standing there perfectly poised though she was so skinny, so old— and motioning for them to pull over.
Isauro did so, at the rusty gates and
mossy old wooden sign of the Spaith walnut orchard. They watched the old woman take up the pair of axes she’d been carrying when they picked her up and, gripping the hafts of both with one sinewy hand, jump out of the bed, incredibly spry for her apparent age. Spry, but surely addled in the head, because once on the roadside, she made a strange gesture towards the bed she’d just jumped out of, seeming to beckon… and a moment after, gently touched the air beside her. Then she shouldered the axes, saluted Raul and Isauro, and walked down the road into the orchard.
“Una vieja loca,” said Isauro, as he whipped the Chevy back onto the highway.
“Una bruja,” said Raul, somewhat dreamily. And Isauro nodded.
“Hija,” said Quetzal, speaking to the empty air, it seemed, as she walked down the lane so profusely littered by the narrow golden leaves of the walnut trees. “My daughter. We are seeking one of your sisters.”
When she had walked perhaps a quarter mile, she stopped. “We are near,” she told the air. “I will dress you now, daughter. It will help you to take hold of this world you have returned to.”
She gestured and a little wind-devil rose, snatching up a whirling cone of leaves, which began to snag on a vertical core, creating a patchy mosaic of yellow leaf and empty air. The shape of a naked woman stood beside the witch and wonderingly raised leaf-fingered hands before her leaf-sketched face. “You are clothed,” said Quetzal, “in the flesh of our enemy. Our enemy is Xibalba, the green god who blankets this earth, piercing its soil with his roots, who feeds on its rain and its sunlight, and who has been the cradle and the shelter, the food and the clothing of our race since our beginning. He who now would feed on us and destroy us utterly. Xibalba has learned to steal our minds and our eyes, the better to hunt us. But it is we, your sisters and I, who will go hunting Xibalba. Take this, Emilia, and follow me.”
She held out one of the axes. The ghost, with leafy fingers, gripped the haft. The autumnal mosaic of her face… smiled. The strange pair left the road and stepped into the lane between the trees.