McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “A little baby like that one,” she said, “he’ll scream all the time. Their little hands are jittery. They have terrible fits where they keep grabbing. They keep squeezing their hands real tight and grabbing the air. They can’t stop shaking, but when you try to hold them they turn stiff as a board.”

  “To be perfectly honest,” Lance said, “I don’t really give a fuck about those babies.”

  “I know.”

  “I just don’t care.”

  “I know.”

  When they returned to the farmhouse, the car was sitting in the drive and dinner was cooking. The kitchen windows were steamed, and the moist air, warm and fragrant, settled like a perfume on Kirsten’s skin. She ran hot water and lathered her hands. The bar of soap was as smooth and worn as an old bone, a mosaic assembled from remnants, small pieces thriftily saved and then softened and clumped together. Everything in the house seemed to have that same thing, softened by the touch of hands—hands that had rubbed the brass plating from the doorknobs, hands that had worn the painted handles of spoons and ladles down to bare wood. Kirsten rinsed the soap away, and Gen offered her a towel.

  “You don’t have any other clothes, do you?” the old woman asked.

  “No, ma’am,” she said.

  “Let’s go pull some stuff out of the attic,” Gen said. She drew a level line from the top of her head to the top of Kirsten’s. “We’re about the same size, I figure. You won’t win any fashion awards— it’s just old funny things, some wool pants, a jacket, a couple cardigan sweaters. But you aren’t dressed for Iowa.” She pronounced it “Ioway.”

  “I’d appreciate that, ma’am.”

  “Doing the kind of work you do I don’t imagine you can afford the extras,” she said as they climbed a set of steps off the upstairs hallway. “But in this country we don’t consider a coat extra.”

  The old woman tugged a string, and a bare bulb lit the attic. In the sudden glare the room seemed at first to house nothing but a jumble of shadows. “I’ve held on to everything,” she said.

  “I met a man in town today,” Kirsten said. “He said he knew you and Effie.”

  “Johnny?” the old woman said. She slit the tape on a box with her thumbnail and handed Kirsten a sweater that smelled faintly of dust and camphor.

  Kirsten held the woman still and kissed her on the lips. “He said to give you that.”

  “What happens?” Gen asked, flatly, as if the years had worn wonder out of the question.

  “It was a combine,” Kirsten said.

  Gen nodded.

  “Your little girl doesn’t know she’s dead. She’s still out there.”

  “How do I know you know all this?”

  “I saw her,” Kirsten said. “And when me and Lance come to the door last night, we never knocked.”

  From a rack against the wall, the old woman took down a heavy wool overcoat and handed it to Kirsten.

  “You were waiting for her. You wait for her every year.”

  On the same rack was a wedding dress, draped in plastic, the veil floating loosely inside a pillowcase. Gen stepped in front of a cheval mirror and held the dress against her body, modeling it for a moment.

  “You made this,” Kirsten said, holding the silk to her skin.

  “Every stitch except the veil. That belonged to my mother.”

  “It wasn’t your husband’s fault.”

  “He feels the guilt all the same,” the old woman said.

  “He had to,” Kirsten said.

  “Had to what?”

  “Live,” she said. “He had to live his life, just the same as me and you. Just the same as your little girl.”

  They set four places with the good plates and silver and flowery napkins in the dining room. There was a ham pricked with cloves and ringed around with pineapple and black olives and green beans and salad and bread. Effie fussed over his wife as if he’d never had dinner with her, passing dishes and offering extra helpings, which she refused each time, saying help yourself; Kirsten eventually caught on, seeing that this solicitude was the old man’s sly way of offering a compliment and serving himself a little more at the same time. The food was good, and Kirsten would remember that it all glistened, the juices from the ham, the butter running off the beans, the oil on the salad. Gen’s part of the dinner was chorelike—she spent most of the meal up on her feet, offering, spooning, heating, filling.

  Effie’s conversation made a wide, wandering tour of the land. Jesse James used to hide out in this country, he said. Then he was talking about no-till planting, soil that wasn’t disked or plowed.

  “You got corn in just about everything,” he said. “In gasoline, spark plugs, crayons, toothpaste, disposable diapers—”

  “No, really?” said Lance.

  “You bet,” the old man went on, “and paint, beer, whiskey. You name it.”

  He said one out of four hogs produced in this country came from Iowa—which he too pronounced “Ioway.” Hogs till hell wouldn’t have it, he said, thundering the words. The topic of hogs led to a story he’d read about Fidel Castro roasting a pig in a hotel room in New York, and then he told about their travels, a trip to Ireland and another to Hawaii, which he pronounced “Hoy.”

  After dinner, there was pumpkin pie—prizewinning, Effie announced, as the tin took center stage on the cleared table.

  It was delicious, the filling warm with a buttery vanishing feel on Kirsten’s tongue. “What’s in it?” she asked.

  “Oh,” Gen said. “Cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, vanilla— but real pumpkin’s the key.” Gen, satisfied with the satisfaction at her table, smiled at her husband, who gravely put down his fork.

  “When you come,” Effie said, “Momma said you mentioned our little girl.”

  “Our little girl,” Gen said, looking at her husband.

  They didn’t speak directly, but checked, checked each other’s eyes or the turn of the mouth, checked for subtle signs, looked for agreement. It was like they found what they needed somewhere in the space between them, and spoke aloud only to verify that it was there, that they’d both seen it.

  “You knew about our girl,” Effie started again.

  The old man wouldn’t say the word because it was a broken word. “Your daughter,” Kirsten said.

  “I guess,” he said, then changed directions. “I wondered if you were an old friend. Maybe from school. Most of them have grown and gone away. I used to see—it would have been so long ago but . . .” He trailed off, his pale blue eyes wetly sparkling in the weak, splintered light of the chandelier.

  Lance said, “Kirsten’s been to the other side. She’s seen it.”

  “I would believe you,” Effie said. “Some around here don’t credit dowsers but we always have. We never had reason not to. We always had plenty water.” He cleared his throat. “I would pay you if you could tell us—where is she at?”

  Kirsten was about to speak when she felt a hand slide over her knee, the fingers feeling their way until they rested warmly in her hand, holding it tight. She glanced at the old woman.

  “It was only that picture on your wall,” she said to Effie.

  The picture was the one every child draws, the house, the leafy tree, the sun in one corner, the birds overhead, the winding walkway widening like a river flowing out from the front door, the family standing on the green grass, a mother with her triangle dress, the father twice as big as everybody, the stick fingers overlapped and linking.

  It was the picture every child drew a hundred times and no one ever saved.

  “It was just that picture,” Kirsten said. “I wish I could say it was more, but it wasn’t.”

  Effie pressed his fork against the crumbs of pie crust still on his plate, gathering them.

  “She just drawn it at school,” he said. “She put me and Gen in, her and her brother.”

  “Stephanie,” Kirsten said, “and Johnny.”

  The old man glanced at his wife.

  “She spelled all the na
mes on the picture,” Kirsten said.

  Gen whispered yes but it was Effie who had to speak up. “I never breathed right or walked right after,” he said. “Never farmed, neither.”

  In Kirsten’s mind her mother was always the dark, a pressure inside a great sleeping volume. And now, tonight, at this table, the old woman wanted her daughter to be the picture. It was something she could give her husband.

  “That was the best pie I ever had,” Kirsten said.

  “Show your ribbons, Momma,” Effie said.

  “Oh, no,” Gen said, waving her hand, shooing away the approach, the temptation of something immodest.

  “Well, that’s right,” Effie said. “The pie’s right here, huh?” He looked around the table. “The pie’s right here.”

  Kirsten hovered above the field and could hear the engine of the combine and the crushed stalks snapping under the header, a crackling noise that spread and came from everywhere at once, like fire. The stalks flailed and broke and dust and chaff flew up and then, ahead, she saw the little girl running down the rows, lost in the maze, unable to search out a safe direction. Suddenly the girl sat on the ground, her stillness an instinct, looking up through the dry dead leaves, waiting for the noise to pass. Kirsten saw her there—a little girl being good, quiet, obedient—but when the sound came closer, she flattened herself against the dirt, as if the moment might pass her by. When it was too late, she kicked her feet, trying to escape, and was swallowed up, and the noise faded, leaving a denuded strip behind, a scroll of dirt and stover that curved over the fields like handwriting. Then Kirsten saw her own reflection floating in the vague gray haze of the vanity.

  “Lance,” she said.

  “What the fuck?”

  “We’re leaving,” she said.

  “Why, what?”

  Kirsten gathered the old woman’s clothes in a garbage sack and had Lance carry them to the car. She made the bed and fluffed the thin pillows. The house was quiet.

  She sat again at the small painted vanity. She took a blue crayon from the cup and wrote a thank-you note. She wrote to the old woman that one second of love is all the love in the world, that one moment is all of them; she wrote that she really liked the pumpkin pie, and meant it when she said it was the best she’d ever had, adding that she never expected better taste and would remember it always; she thanked her for the hospitality and for fixing the car; and then she copied down the words to the song the woman she called Mother sang:

  Where are you going, my little one, little one?

  Where are you going, my baby, my own?

  Turn around and you’re two, turn around and you’re four.

  Turn around and you’re a young girl going out of the door.

  Lance was gone for a long time, and Kirsten, looking over the note, considered tearing it up each time she read it. As she sat and waited she felt a sudden release and reached under the elastic of her underpants. When Lance finally returned he was covered in dry leaves and strings of silk and tassel, as if he’d been out working in the fields. They went outside and pushed the car down the gravel drive, out to the road. It started up, beautifully quiet.

  “Wait here,” Kirsten said.

  She walked back to the yard. It was cool and the damp night air released a rich smell of dung and soil and dust and straw, a smell Kirsten was sure belonged only to Iowa, and only at certain hours. She pulled her T-shirt over her head. She was reaching for the clothespin that held the old woman’s bra when something made her look up. The old woman was standing at the upstairs window, her hand pressed flat against the glass. Kirsten took the bra from the line and slipped the straps over her shoulders. She fastened the clasp and leaned forward, settling her breasts in the small white cups. The women looked at each other for what seemed like an eternity, and then Kirsten pulled on her shirt and ran back to Lance.

  Under the moonlight they drove down mazy roads cut through the fields.

  “Goddamn, the Lord sure hath provideth the corn around here,” Lance said. He imitated the old man compulsively, “I’ll be plenty glad to get out of this Ioway. Ioway! And Hawaii—d’you hear the way that old guy said Hawaii? Hoy, it sounded like. Hoy, Christ Almighty. I’m sorry, but those people were corny. And yes, that’s a pun, purely intended. And going on about Castro’s fucking pigs in the bathtub. What’d he say, they cooked a hog in that hotel room? What the hell.” Lance was taking charge again, his mind hard, forging iron connections. He was feeling good; he was feeling certain. “And goddamn, I hate ham! Smells like piss!” He rolled down the window and yelled, “Good-bye, fucking Ioway!” He brushed corn silk from his sleeve and shook bits of leaves from his hair.

  “Here’s something for you.” He reached in his pocket and handed her a long heavy chain.

  “Looks to me like gold and emeralds, with a couple rubies mixed in,” he said.

  “That’s costume jewelry, Lance.”

  “It’s real,” he said, bullying the truth, hating its disadvantages, its need for verification, “and they won’t miss it, Kirsten. They’re old, honey. They’re gonna die and they got no heirs, so don’t you worry.” He grinned widely and said, “I got something out of the deal too.” He waited. Kirsten just stared at the cheap, gaudy chain, pouring it like water from one hand to the other.

  Lance said, “Look in back.”

  When she turned around, all she saw was dark countryside through the rear window, a trail of dust turning red in the tail-lights.

  “See?”

  “What?”

  “Under the blanket,” Lance said.

  She turned around again and pulled away the blanket. The rear seat was overflowing with ears of corn. Lance had turned the whole back of the car into a crib.

  “I picked a bunch of corn for the road.”

  “I got my period.”

  “Ioway corn,” Lance said. “Makes me hungry just thinking about it.”

  THE DEVIL of DELERY STREET

  by POPPY Z. BRITE

  MARY LOUISE STUBBS was thirteen the year the family troubles began. She was called Melly because four of her younger siblings could not say her full name, or hadn’t been able to when they were younger. Her fifth sibling, Gary, was only a baby and couldn’t say much of anything yet. Once that strange and dreadful year was over, her mother, Mary Rose, would not allow its events to be referred to in any more specific way than “our family troubles.” That was how Melly always remembered them.

  Her memories seemed to date from the afternoon of her cousin Grace’s funeral. Grace, the younger child of Mary Rose’s sister Teresa, had been carried away by a quick and virulent form of childhood leukemia. Now everyone was busy pretending that she had been a saint among nine-year-old girls. With the terrible unambiguous eye of an adolescent, Melly saw only hypocrisy in this. Grace hadn’t been any saint; she was actually kind of a sneaky kid who liked to pinch smaller children when no grown-ups were looking. Melly had loved her, but didn’t see the need to pretend she was now perched on the knee of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  The Stubbs family was gathered in their regular pew at Saints Peter and Paul, a dusty old brick church in downtown New Orleans, and Melly was having a hard time staying awake. She didn’t usually sleep during regular Mass, let alone funerals, but a scratching in the wall of her bedroom had kept her up last night. She’d meant to ask her father if he would buy some rattraps, but the memory of wakefulness had left her as soon as she brushed her teeth and combed her long, coarse dark hair. She had the Sicilian coloring of her mother, a former Bonano, as did most of the other kids; only Gary was shaping up to be Irish-fair like their father.

  Now, though, she began to nod off. Her brother Little Elmer, the next oldest after Melly, extended a finger and poked her in the ribs. “Father Mike ain’t that boring,” he whispered.

  “Shhh,” she replied. Father Mike was young, with soft dog eyes and a thick shock of wavy hair, and Melly had a little crush on him. Not a sexy crush—it would be almost a sin to think about a priest that wa
y—but a little warm feeling in her chest whenever she saw him.

  “You the one falling asleep, not me—”

  “Y’all both hush,” their father murmured from Melly’s other side, barely audible, and they shut up. Elmer Stubbs was a mild-tempered man, but there’d be misery later if Mary Rose caught them talking during a funeral Mass. Fortunately she was at the far end of the pew, twisting a Kleenex in her small, expressive hands. It was warm for March, and occasionally she’d reach up to blot the sweat from her brow, though she always pretended she was patting her jet-black beehive hairdo. How Melly loathed that beehive! “It’s 1974, Momma,” she said frequently, “time to comb it out.” And Mary Rose always replied, “Nuh-uh, babe, I don’t want to look like a hippie,” as if a slightly more modern hairdo would transform her from a diminutive Italian housewife into a pot-smoking flower child.

  Melly sat up straighter in the pew, stretched her eyes open, and hoped the rat would depart for more attractive horizons by tonight. They lived in a poor neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward, but their house on Delery Street was clean. Melly knew it was, because she had to do a lot of the cleaning. Some of their neighbors’ yards were full of chicken bones and crawfish shells and Melly didn’t know what-all else, scattered among rusty garbage cans and hulks of old cars. Surely a rat could fill his belly more easily at one of those houses.

  Her wishes went unanswered for the time being; at home later, as she was changing the baby in the upstairs bedroom he shared with four-year-old Rosalie, she heard more scratching and a series of bangs behind the wall. “What you doing, Mr. Rat?” she muttered. “Building you a whole ’nother house back there?”

  Gary laughed and showed her the clean pink palms of his hands, as he did when anybody spoke in his presence whether they were talking to him or not. He was the sweetest-natured baby she’d ever seen, and the only one of her siblings who made her think she might want kids of her own someday. He had a little fluff of sweet-smelling curly hair on the top of his head, and his eyes were the warm brown of pecan shells, not so black you couldn’t tell the irises from the pupils like her own. She pinned his clean diaper shut and hoisted him onto her shoulder. “You gonna kill that old rat for me?” she asked him, and he laughed again.