Psyche

by Phyllis Young

  Wrapped in an old cotton quilt, her untidy masses of red hair pushed up into a torn hairnet, she established herself in a derelict wicker chair, lifted her feet onto an unopened case of beer, and settled down to her vigil in darkness broken only by the glimmer of the one star hung in the corner of the window.

  An hour passed, and then another. Psyche turned over again and again, and twice cried out, unintelligible sounds which died down to troubled mutterings which, in their turn, gave way to abnormally heavy breathing. It was after two oclock when she woke up.

  “Mag——!”

  “I’m right here, kid,” the big woman said softly.

  Reaching out a hot hand, Psyche searched for, and found, the comfort of a firm, large clasp.

  “Are you hungry, kid?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t have no dinner. I could fix you some soup.”

  “No, I ain’t hungry. Mag—I don’t want to go back to school no more. I don’t want to go never again.”

  Mag had been ready for this. “You don’t need to,” she said quietly. “Butch an’ me, we don’t want that you should, an’ if any busybody comes around lookin’ for you we’ll say you’re sixteen. Nobody can prove no different. You can read real good, an’ you can write some. I reckon you got enough leamin’. From now on you can just stay to home where you won’t have no troubles.”

  “No troubles——” Psyche murmured, and, relieved not only of

  immediate physical fear, but also of all the secret burdens of the past two years, fell into a deep, quiet sleep.

  On an evening a few days later, Butch hitched his chair closer to the stove, cleared his throat noisily, and said, “I been thinkin’.”

  Mag, easing her unruly curves into a more comfortable juxtaposition with the lumpy surface of the couch, sniffed derisively. “You’re kiddin’.”

  Unmoved, Butch repeated weightily, “I been thinkin’—suppos-in’ them two bastards was to come here while I was away to the mines.”

  Mag spared a glance toward the motionless curtain of the storeroom. Then, looking at Butch with more respect than she was in the habit of granting him, she said, “Yeah? You reckon it wouldn’t be so good?”

  “They’re the meanest two bastards I ever come across,” Butch told her simply. “I seen ‘em, an’ I knows. They was bloody scairt, but—I dunno. I been thinkin’ it ain’t awful safe for you an’ the kid out here all alone like. Well, you knows that gun I bought when I left the force——”

  “I ain’t totin’ no gun!” Mag interrupted flatly.

  “I wasn’t thinkin’ of you,” Butch said. “I was wonderin’ if mebbe the kid could get so’s she could use it some.”

  In the yellow lamplight Mag’s broad, perpetually flushed face was a study in conflicting emotions. “You aim to teach shootin’ to the kid?”

  There was regret but no uncertainty in Butch’s heavy voice. “I reckon I gotta. Things ain’t the way they used to be. Seems as if there ain’t no law an’ order no more.”

  A rough target was chalked on a plank which Butch set up at a little distance from the shack, and after that, on Sunday mornings while the garbage was being burnt, Psyche learned how to handle a heavy-duty Colt revolver. It was to be a long time before she made practical and, in some ways, disastrous use of the art of self-defense as taught to her, and both she and Butch, enjoying these sessions, almost forgot that there was any purpose in them other than amusement. She proved an apt pupil, and was soon winning a fair proportion of the small bets they made between them.

  “She’s a natural for it,” Butch told Mag with great satisfaction.

  “I can see that. She’s gonna be better’n you afore long if you don’t look out. But I don’t see no need for her to be carryin’ that thing week-days as well’s Sundays.”

  “Leave her be. She’s just playin’, an’ she ain’t got much to amuse her.”

  This last was a truth which could not be very well denied, and from time to time it worried Mag that Psyche should be so much alone.

  “It’s a lousy shame there’s no kids close for you to see,” she said to Psyche one day.

  “I don’t want none.”

  “How’s about that Polack kid a piece back from here? You musta knowed him at school.”

  Psyche had known him. He was a boy with a liberally indulged penchant for lifting the girls’ skirts, and a congenital dislike of the truth in any form. “I’d sooner be seen with a dead rat.”

  Mag shrugged. She had done her duty. “Well, just as you say, kid. His folks don’t speak English so good, so mebbe it’s just as well. I don’t want you for to get no furrin’ way of talkin’.”

  “I’d get me more’n that with that two-bit bastard,” Psyche remarked absently, and, lifting the gun holster down from a nail on the wall, buckled it firmly around her slender hips. “Think I’ll go an’ practice shootin’ for a time. Butch an’ me’s havin’ a competition come Sunday.”

  “Mind you don’t go out of the valley with that thing!”

  “I won’t.”

  The slamming of the door, as Psyche went out, was not unlike a pistol shot. The sound still ringing in her ears, Mag looked at Feather Duster, lying forgotten on a shelf behind the stove, and sighed heavily without quite knowing why she should do so.

  6

  THE next three years of psyche’s life, cradled between her unhappy schooldays and the stormy night when she was to leave the slag for good, were peaceful and relatively contented.

  The seasons flowed over the tarpaper shack in an orderly progression, effecting remarkably few visible changes in it. Late autumn winds scraped fresh rents in its vulnerable sides; wounds which Butch, in due course, transmuted into patches very soon indistinguishable from the scores of others that had preceded them. The deep, bitter frosts of winter heaved the unproductive, slate-hued ground, altering the slope of the shack’s uneven floor, changing rather than sharpening the angle at which the shabby furniture leaned. Spring, when the snow melted from the sides of the slag hills to form transient lakes and waterways on the floor of the little valley, was, on the whole, kind to it; bringing nothing in the way of renewal, it yet took nothing away. And the molten disc of the summer sun no longer noticeably affected window-frames and a door bleached to the colour and texture of dried driftwood.

  Butch and Mag suffered some change during this period, but they had reached a middle age where the mere passing of time simply served to make them more truly and wholly themselves. Small habits became more deeply ingrained, physical attributes more marked.

  Butch’s stubble field of hair was touched with grey, and he scratched it oftener. His round, brown eyes retreated further into caves of friendly wrinkles, and his great shoulders strained more obviously at the seams of shirts which were never quite large enough for him.

  Mag simply grew fatter, a state of affairs which led her into discarding any pretense at dressing properly. Equipping herself with an assortment of initially bright-coloured garments which she referred to as ‘wrappers’, she was rarely seen in anything else. This concession to her vast size resulted in an almost complete cessation of the sporadic trips to town in which she had indulged in former years. A four-mile walk in, and consequently a four-mile walk back, was now too high a price to pay for what invariably turned out to be a poor movie, and a bottle of beer which she could drink more cheaply and comfortably at home. Although the supply was years in excess of the demand, she still knitted enormous vari-coloured socks for Butch; her only real occupation of any kind, she liked it for itself rather than for the dubious results achieved.

  Psyche changed greatly, although it would have been difficult to assess that change in so many words, to notice any particular difference at any given time. She put on a little more weight, but not much. Her hair turned a darker gold, but she was still strikingly fair. The clean planes of her face grew firmer, less childish, but, except when she smiled, there was an innocence in her expression that was extraordinarily appealing. Her sm
ile, amused, tolerant, and faintly challenging, was entirely adult.

  The chief difference in her was that whereas formerly she had acted first and thought afterwards, now she had a considered purpose in nearly everything she did. However much she had disliked the school, it had nevertheless given her some idea of her potentialities, had made it impossible to return to the aimless existence she had led before she went there. On her own initiative she discovered three new fields to conquer in a place where previously she had thought she had explored every possibility.

  They were an odd combination. Psyche’s major interests between fifteen and eighteen. She read anything and everything she could lay her hands on, from the bloodied fragments of newsprint in which meat had been delivered, to the Bible. She found she had a real flair for cooking, and developed it to the full. And, quietly and unobtrusively, she learned to play first-class poker.

  When she first started hovering behind Butch on Saturday nights while he was playing cards with his three cronies, he did not like it. “Go away, kid,” he would rumble, “you give me the jumps.”

  Later, because she never withdrew very far or for very long, he got used to her being there, and she would sit beside him on the scarred wooden bench, silent, but alert and observant. Eventually he would not play without her, and, if she were not there when he sat down to the table, would bellow, “Where’s my little rabbit’s foot?”

  She never officially sat in on a game. The other men would have been as shocked as Butch himself at the idea of playing with anything that even remotely resembled a woman. In their lexicon, poker was a man’s game, and it was a poor imitation of a man who thought otherwise. Nevertheless Psyche, in time, not only played with them regularly, but beat them consistently. It came about so naturally and gradually that Psyche herself was the only one consciously aware of what was happening, and she was very careful to keep it from becoming obvious, for she now looked forward to Saturday night, perhaps even more than Butch did.

  The three miners with whom Butch consorted in this manner always came punctually at seven o’clock. Although they travelled different routes across the slag to reach their destination, they rarely arrived more than a minute or two apart from one another. Unwashed dishes were immediately removed from one end of the table, and the clutter of the day—or possibly several days —from the other end. Butch then fetched the cards from a drawer in the golden-oak dresser, while Psyche took four heavy glass tumblers and a bottle of whiskey from the shelf above the sink. Two cracked saucers were produced as ashtrays, and with no further preparation, and no time wasted on idle social interchanges, the game would begin.

  Bert, Ed, and Norman were none of them mental giants, and Butch, during the earlier part of an evening, was able, by virtue of painful concentration, to pit his limited wits against them with some success. As time wore on, however, and the level of the whiskey dropped lower and lower in the bottle, the effort would become too much for him, and his winnings would begin to trickle away, at first slowly, and then with alarming rapidity.

  Decidedly fuddled, he would stare at his cards and mutter to himself while trying to make up his mind what to do.

  Bert, a small gnome of a man with quick brown eyes in a brown nut-cracker face, was the brightest of the quartet, and always ready to prick the big man into rash action. “Come on, come on, Butch. You scairt to raise again?”

  At this point a quiet voice would say, “Butch ain’t scairt. Why would he be with cards like he’s got?” And a slim hand would push a terrifyingly large bet into the centre of the table. “Any of you guys wanna see?”

  Three faces would look first at Butch, who would fail to betray a pair of nines because he no longer knew what was going on, and then at Psyche, whose face would reflect a calm certainty of victory they could not believe induced by anything less than four of a kind.

  When Butch held a really good hand, she never pushed the betting so far that it was not called and shown. There had to be occasional visible proof of his apparently extraordinary luck.

  Refilling their glasses for them, rolling home-made cigarettes for Butch and herself, she played her rôle of audience as expertly as she played Butch’s cards for him. She never actually picked up and sorted a hand, and she did not deal for him, but, speaking always through him, she did all his thinking.

  Although she knew nothing about psychology or mathematics as sciences, she became more and more fascinated by the interlocking patterns of personalities and arithmetical probabilities which she seemed able to comprehend and manipulate with such ease. Exhilarated, wide awake, her mind working with a beautiful, satisfying precision, she would have liked to play every night and all night.

  Mag, who went to bed early on Saturdays, often protested against the hours they kept. “You didn’t ought to let the kid stay up so late,” she would scold Butch. “It ain’t good for a kid to be up in the night, smokin’ and losin’ sleep.”

  “It don’t hurt her none,” Butch would reply, while jingling the amazing amount of coinage he had found in his pants pocket on getting up in the morning.

  This was difficult to contradict, because Psyche was as fresh on a Sunday morning as she was on any other morning during the week—in part because she was naturally resilient, and in part because she never drank with the men. They had given her a drink of Scotch one night, and she had immediately been very sick. Like a young coyote, who has once tasted poison and, protected by nature, survived in a similar fashion, she never touched whiskey again.

  Although Mag did not know it, Psyche, in the summertime, lost as much sleep through the week as she did on Saturdays.

  On warm summer nights, drawn by a restlessness she made no attempt to analyze, she often got up and slipped quietly out of the shack, to wander around the perimeter of the small valley, or climb the slag to watch a rising moon cut a luminous orange arc out of a silver-grey sky. On a moonlit night it was a land bewitched, removed from all reality, its silence so absolute it became a thing in itself, palpable, peaceful as death. Inarticulately one with the universe, feeling in herself the sum of everything that ever had been, or ever would be, she would linger sometimes until the moon set. For on such a night the “outside” drew very close, and the time when she would go out into it seemed close at hand.

  Psyche’s one great loss, in leaving school, was the loss of ready access to fresh reading matter. Although Butch and Mag could both read after a fashion, it was hard going at the best of times, so neither newspapers nor magazines found their way to the shack with any degree of frequency. The only book in evidence being Fanny Farmer’s Boston Cook Book. Psyche read that.

  After the second time through it, she told Mag, “This is kinda dull, when you just read it like. You want I should make some of these here cakes an’ things?”

  “It ain’t as easy as it looks.”

  “I can try. If it don’t work out—well, it don’t work out.”

  It did work out. Mag might be too lazy to cook, but eating, if somebody else prepared the food, was one of her favourite pastimes, and she was ready enough to impart her skill to a willing neophyte.

  If Psyche had had any natural tendency toward excess weight, she would have given evidence of it in the first months of this new activity. With energy to burn, and a tireless curiosity, she kept the big stove roaring from morning until night, producing cakes, muffins, soufflés, pies, and meat dishes which she and Mag sampled as fast as they came out of the oven. As neat in practical matters as she was orderly in mind, she in time rearranged and cleaned up the untidy shelves surrounding stove and sink. From there it was a short step to taking over the entire household, a development which did not particularly please Mag.

  “For the luvva Mike, kid,” she complained, her lethargic peace disturbed by shifted furniture and clouds of dust, “you done it all yestidday. What’s the matter with you that you gotta always be rushin’ around?”

  “I ain’t tired, an’ there ain’t nothin’ else to do.”

  “Why do
n’t you take a walk?”

  “I’ve a’ready did that.”

  “Couldn’t you bake somethin’?”

  Having by this time mastered that trade, Psyche was no longer interested in producing beyond capacity. “I’ve fixed enough for three days.”

  “You could read. Where’s that magazine I seen you with?”

  “It’s wore out. Anyway, it wasn’t very interestin’.”

  Mag, knowing that in a matter of minutes she was going to be ordered to remove herself from the couch, was getting desperate. “If I was to find you somethin’ new to read, would you quit messin’ around an’ leave good enough alone?”

  Broom in hand, Psyche paused. “Sure, but you ain’t got nothin’, have you?”

  “I dunno for sure, but I useta have a old Bible.”

  A shadow passed over Psyche’s expressive face. Without being told, she knew that the only possible place where she might find the Bible was in the trunk to which she had returned skates she had hoped never to see again. “I’ll go look for it,” she said abruptly.

  At first glance, the torn segment that was apparently all that remained of Mag’s Bible did not seem sufficient reward for the reopening of an old wound and the necessity to handle blades still burnished after four years.

  She took it in to Mag. “Is this it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Psyche eyed it with disfavour. “It don’t look like much. How did it get tore?”

  “I dunno. Perhaps a unbeliever done it.”

  “It don’t look very fascinatin’.”

  Mag looked at the discarded broom, and said firmly. “It don’t do for a kid to grow up without no Bible readin’. I don’t know why I ain’t thought of it afore, but it ain’t never too late. You can start right now, kid.”

  Psyche opened the partial Bible at the first page. When she was small Mag had taught her simple bedtime prayers, and had created for her a God so unquestionable that when He was referred to it was as if He had just stepped out of the room and might be back at any moment; but she had never before held a Bible in her hands.