Mr. Tall (18 page)

Jack had no idea how far the boat had descended, and he had grown almost bored with the process of bleeding the taproot when the last of the magic rubies was birthed from the wounded tree. He stared in disbelief at the hole until he felt the boat falter, then he scrambled out of the root ball and up the tree trunk, squealing like a kindled witch. He wrapped his arms and legs around the tree's biggest limb with no inkling how far he was about to fall. The boat dropped like a golden egg out of a goose but turned out to be only a two-headed giant or so above the ground when it fell. It was also dead-aimed for the roof of a tiny house. Jack had only a second or two to close his eyes and brace for impact. The crash sounded as if the whole valley of Ezekiel's dry bones had broken at once, but the tree remained providentially upright. Jack was none the worse for wear. The boat and tree, however, had smashed the house into a pile of mayhem and midden approaching the smithereen. From his perch in the tree Jack spied in the rubble half a burnt-looking cornbread pone, the intact globe of a kerosene lamp, a disemboweled feather pillow, a Sunday school
Quarterly
wrinkling in the rain, a wrecked wardrobe chomping a pair of overalls, and the lower part of a woman's leg, shod in a worn brogan laced halfway up, sticking out from beneath the brick pile formed by the toppled chimney.

“Hello, the house,” he called to the shoe, neither expecting, nor receiving, a reply.

Jack first hoped that the leg and the boot belonged to a robber's wife, which would spot him tolerable time to run away, given that robbers never came home until midnight, some nights as late as one or one thirty. But when he slid down from the tree and squatted beside the boot, he remembered that all the robbers' wives with whom he had lain had been lovely in their loneliness, and that he had never taken any of them away from the hard lives in which he had found them, although many of them had asked. And while he had killed a fair number of regular men over the years, he couldn't recall ever killing a woman who hadn't been a witch. This was new ground he was clearing. His first impulse was to take off before somebody happened by, but setting out seemed simultaneously like a good idea and the worst intention. He thought that saying a few words over the foot might be appropriate, but he had never learned any of those words. He poked the sole of the boot with his forefinger. He pinched the first little piggy and wiggled the foot back and forth. Finally he whispered, “Sorry to bother you, ma'am,” then stood and turned and picked his way through the wreckage, forlorn and baffled. Although killing the woman hadn't been his fault exactly, he was starting to believe the maidens in the wheat field had been right about his character, or lack thereof. And it did not, in fact, occur to him to dig the woman out.

Around the house-yard stood a passel of paltry outbuildings peculiar in their decrepitude. Each of them tilted so far toward toppling it seemed miraculous not one of them had fallen over. No two of the hovels canted in the same direction, which made them dizzying to contemplate. The door to the outhouse—the most upright of the shacks—banged open and the old man stomped out into the rain and the mud sop, struggling to pull up and secure his overalls while surveying the shambles.

“Dagnabbit, Jack,” he spat. “Can't a feller even loosen his dung bung without you dropping out of the sky in a stricken watercraft and busting up his living-house?”

“Old Man!” Jack cried. “It's you! You're alive! Why, I ain't seen you in forever and half a while.”

“No offense,” the old man grumbled, “but I'd be a heap better off if you wasn't seeing me now.” He walked to the door stoop and surveyed the shock of scrap that had lately been his house. He studied what little remained of the flying boat. He gazed into the top of the dead tree. He considered the fallen chimney. He turned and pointed a long, yellow-nailed finger at Jack. “You have visited carnage upon me,” he said. “You have wrecked my real estate and busted up my chifforobe. You have killed my old lady deader'n a plow-tongue. She always said, ‘Old Man, mark my words, you will come to regret trusting that Jack rascal with a flying boat,' and now I see that you have proved the poor thing prophetic, bless her heart.”

“I'm sorry,” Jack said, the words queer and toxic-tasting on his tongue. In the past he had said them only to notch a bit of this or that, usually maiden love-favors. But this time he really was.

The old man blinked in surprise and sniffled. “Why, thank you for the sentiment, Jack. Her biscuits'd bust your tooth out and her cornbread wasn't fit to eat, but she was a good old witch and I loved her.”

“Say what, now?” Jack said. “You mean to tell me that long as I've known you, lo these many years, all those times I run into you sitting by the roadside during my settings out, you were married to a witch?”

The old man scowled. “Who else did you think I'd be married to?”

“Not a dadblamed witch!” Jack cried. “You know how I hate a witch! I spent my whole career trying to cull the coven!”

“Then you might as well cull me, too.”

Jack grabbed his head and twisted it back and forth. “Oh, naw,” he moaned. “Not you. Please tell me you ain't a witch. How could you betray me like that and you the nearest thing to a friend I ever had?”

“Doggone it, Jack, I oughta spell you right now for saying such. Where do you think all them magical implements I give you come from? You can't go down to the crossroads and buy truck like that in the store. I made and spelled
everything
I give to you. You see them sheds falling over empty? They used to be full of conjuring components. I give you everything I
had.
That dab of seeing juice I sent by the twins was the last of what there was. Hell, when you was just a little feller, I'm the one bartered you the magic beans for that dried-up cow your conniving mama sent you to town to trade, and they was supposed to be my supper. So don't you come up in here and tell me I betrayed you.”

“Mama told me there wasn't nothing wrong with that cow!” Jack said.

“Oh, just hush,” the old man said. “That was the poorest cow I ever seen. There wasn't enough milk left in that sack to squirt a barn cat and it sitting in the bucket. You always have been too much of an idiot to know you was one.”

Jack stepped forward with his fists balled up. “You need to remember who you're talking to,” he snarled. “I'm
still
the only giant-killer in this settlement, and I don't need no magic gewgaws to cull out a witch as old as you.”

The old man reached into the side pocket of his overalls and produced a hissing copperhead, which he tossed at Jack's face. Jack opened his mouth to scream, but the snake disappeared into the air an inch before it struck him. Still, he beat and whacked his head and the front of his overalls as if the snake had landed around his shoulders; he danced a jerky jig and stared wildly about his feet.

The old man reached again into his pocket. “You want me to peg another one at you?”

Jack shook his head and whimpered unintelligibly.

“Son, you need to remember you ain't no match for any kind of witch, even one as old as me, unless you got some magic on your side. No regular man is. You're just lucky I'm a good witch.”

Jack staggered through the sucking mud past the old man, his heart crazed with beating, and melted onto the wet stoop. He had seen his reflection in the copperhead's eye. “That didn't seem like much of a good witch thing to do,” he said.

“Well, you had it coming.”

Jack conceded the point with a nod.

“To be honest with you,” the old man said, “I'm only mostly good. I will eat me a kid every once in a while, but only the bad'uns that sass their mamas and don't say their prayers. Now, the old lady, she had a sweet tooth for virgins and I had to hide her broom come full-moon time. Her people was all bad witches.”

“Did I ever run up on any of her people?”

“Let me see. You kilt three of her cousins in that haunted mill just this side of Argyle, and you disfigured one of her great-aunts up by Grandfather Mountain. It was sometimes a source of disharmony between me and the old lady, the nature of my calling.”

Jack shook his head. “I don't know how you come to spend all those years and spells and truck helping me when you could've boodled up all the treasure for yourself. You could've been the one diddled the maidens and flummoxed the giants and stole the gold and soared around in the flying boat with Hardy Hardhead and the Well boys. Why, you could've used your magic to make yourself king of the settlement.”

“Jack, you ain't going to understand a word of this, but being a king didn't interest me none, and I never developed a taste for treasure. But making sure no harm come to you once you set out? That there made me rich as I ever cared to be.”

A nameless cry laddered up the inside of Jack's ribcage toward the light. “But I'm ethically challenged,” he said.

“You are that.”

“And I never think about nobody but myself.”

“You do not.”

“I don't deserve a single thing you give me.”

“No, sir, not one. You always have been, and continue to be, a most unworthy vessel.”

“Then why—”

“Because, honey, that's what makes it count.”

Jack ruminated on the stoop about what the old man had said while the old man circled the tree and poked around in the wreckage, picking up and examining this or that—a wooden spoon, a page from a calendar, a handful of yellow shotgun shells. Every so often he absentmindedly pulled a brick off the chimney pile and tossed it aside. Finally he leaned against the tree and stared into space.

“It doesn't make a lick of sense, what you just told me,” Jack eventually said.

“That's how it ought to be. Anybody it makes sense to ain't doing it right.” The old man held a vegetable grater up to the light and peered through the bottom of it with one eye.

“What are you rooting around for, anyway?”

“Something outta this mess to give you, I reckon.”

Jack snorted. “I don't think you owe me anything else, considering.”

“You're right. I don't owe you a thing. But now that it's clearing up you're gonna need to set out here pretty soon.”

Jack hadn't noticed that the rain had stopped. He stood and stared up at the sky. The cloud still pondered by just above the level of the treetops, but white shreds of it had begun to waft loose and skim away. Water nattered down through the leaves of the laurel on the ridge behind the yard, and dripped from the wood of the balsam firs and oaks and rhododendron fronting the house. Somewhere farther off a creek loosed from its banks uproared through the countryside. Funny, as soon as he realized that the rain had passed, he began to cold-shimmy inside his soused overalls.

“I don't care to set out,” Jack said. “This has been one toilsome tale and I am fain to settle. Can't I just light here for a spell?”

“'Fraid not, Jack. The old woman's people'll be flying in here directly and they're gonna want to eat your liver, and since the storm stopped squalling that black dog is bound to be about. You need to leave this settlement and cross the creek before the water gets up over the bridge.”

“What's on the other side of the bridge?”

“Yonder, I reckon.” The old man picked up a chamber pot and wrinkled his nose and slung it aside. He hoisted a frying pan by the handle and tested its weight before tossing it after the chamber pot.

“Well. What's in Yonder?”

“I can't witch it out, Jack, to be fair with you. Nobody knows what lies in Yonder. All I can tell you is, it's where you got to go.” The old man lifted a soup pot smashed nearly flat and looked at Jack through a jagged hole ripped in its blackened bottom. “The old woman used to boil squirrels in this. Have you ever eat a boiled squirrel?”

“Can't say that I have,” Jack said.

“I don't endorse it,” the old man said. He dropped the pan onto the rubble at his feet and gave it a kick.

“So what happens if I don't cross the bridge?” Jack asked. “What if I don't go to Yonder? The last time I tried to cross a bridge, all hell broke loose.”

“Jack, honey, listen to me. I hate to say it, but you don't matter up in here no more. Your name is almost forgot. If you stay in this settlement, the black dog's gonna run you to ground, and nobody will never hear tell of you again. At least in Yonder there might be a new tale for you to set out in. Surely a character with your qualifications is bound to catch on in some kind of story.”

Jack considered the proposition. He was still
that
Jack enough to desire whatever attention he might find setting out in a new settlement, but he wasn't sure he had the courage to cross the bridge. What if worse things happened in the stories over there than the bad things that were happening over here? And worse yet, what if there weren't any tales over there at all?

“You think I might turn into a regular man over there?”

The old man cocked his head and considered Jack for a spell. “Well, that's a thought,” he said, “or you could stay a story man and a giant could gobble you in one chomp like you was a hushpuppy. Ain't no telling.” The old man picked up and eyeballed a saucepan, then tossed it over his shoulder.

“I'm afraid to go to Yonder,” Jack said, surprising himself. It was the first time he had ever said those words out loud.

“Well, you oughta be.” The old man pawed into a splintery pile of roofing shakes and extracted a five-gallon wooden bucket that looked as ancient as the old man himself. Its slatted sides were gray and splintery, its rope bail frayed. The old man lifted the bucket triumphantly and grinned. He picked his way out of the wreckage and presented the bucket to Jack. “There you go.”

Jack looked down at the pail, then up at the old man. “It's a bucket,” he said.