Things Invisible to See (28 page)

The only player not at home in Father Legg’s fold was Willie.

“Willie, don’t try to kill the ball,” Father Legg urged him as he took his stance at home plate. “Just meet it.”

Willie stood straight as a pole, gripping the bat like a weapon, and Ben pitched a fast one right over home plate.

“Strike one,” tolled Father Legg. “A bit late there, my boy.”

Ben threw a curve and Willie lunged for it.

“Thou shalt not lunge,” Father Legg cautioned him. “And choke up on the bat. Strike two.”

Willie looked up for the next pitch and his glance caught a bright figure settling herself into the bleachers: purple shorts, pink halter, huge sunglasses. His heart raced. He longed to do something spectacular, something that would astonish them all. The ball sped from Ben’s hand, and Willie lashed out with the bat. To his astonishment he heard a crack, as of a tree splitting, and Father Legg shouting at him, “Run! Run!”

He flew down to first, and at the burst of cheers he grinned up at Marsha. She was pawing through her huge purse. She had seen nothing.

“Ben, you bat now,” said Father Legg. “George, you take the mound.”

George went into his stretch. A high fastball.

“Let’s see your
fast
ball, Clackett!” shouted Ben. “I could count the stitches on that one.”

Willie turned to look once more at Marsha. She had taken off her sunglasses and was watching the game through binoculars. No, not the game. She was watching Ben, and Willie knew she had always been watching Ben, waiting for him, and in her sly way, faithful.

That night, eating supper with his mother, Willie rearranged the universe in his head.

“I don’t ask for much,” said Wanda, “but wouldn’t you think he’d want to eat supper with his own mother?”

“Terrible, just terrible,” said Willie. On the playing field of his mind, the South Avenue Rovers were losing to the Dead Knights.

“He could see Clare after supper,” said Wanda. “There’d be plenty of time after supper. He doesn’t listen to me.”

“He doesn’t listen to me, either.” said Willie. The game was over. The Rovers were gone, erased, presumed dead. Father Legg and Willie alone were spared.

“Still, I wish you’d talk to him,” said Wanda.

She noticed that Willie’s attention was wandering, and she got up and turned on the radio that she kept in the kitchen for company while she scrubbed the floor. Its green eye flashed. They waited for it to warm up.

“Let’s listen to the news,” she said.

Lowell Thomas’s urgent voice made them both sit up straighter.

“A smashing blow delivered yesterday by waves of German tanks, heavily supported from the air, crushed the defenses of Tobruk in Libya. The War Office tonight confirmed the loss of the town, already claimed by the enemy, who said twenty-five thousand prisoners, including several generals, had been captured.”

“Pass the bread,” said Willie.

“A bus carrying fifty-two children to a summer camp in Keene, New Hampshire, plunged into a ravine yesterday. All the passengers were injured, none critically. The driver of the bus claimed that the steering wheel broke off as he made a sharp turn. No charges have been filed against him.”

“Fifty-two children!” exclaimed Wanda.

Willie saw in his mind another bus, draped in bunting, carrying the South Avenue Rovers to their team picnic at Island Park.

He saw the front left tire blow as it reached the bridge.

He saw the bus skid.

He saw the steering wheel break off in the driver’s hands.

He saw all the passengers injured, unable to play.

He saw himself saved. He and Father Legg would have arrived earlier. And it would look like an accident—perhaps an oil slick? He could work out the details. He had time.

Although Ben came to visit every night, although he said he looked forward to seeing Davy and called him his special pal, Davy always remembered to ask him: “Will you tuck me in tonight?” And Aunt Helen said, “Davy, he came to see Clare.” And Ben said, “Davy’s my special pal. I always tuck him in, Mrs. Bishop.”

Nevertheless, in the crumb of silence between question and consent, Davy feared that this one time Ben might say, “Not tonight, Davy. I can’t tuck you in tonight,” so that when he heard the promise spoken, “I always tuck him in, Mrs. Bishop,” he felt as happy as on the first night he’d taken Ben’s hand and led him up to the third floor.

They said good-night to Grandpa, who expected it, and Davy climbed into bed and checked under his pillow for his defense stamps and thought of little ways to keep Ben sitting on the edge of his bed just a few minutes longer.

“Do you know any scary stories?” he asked.

“No,” said Ben, smiling.

“Do you know any gory songs? Do you know ‘The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout’?”

“Everybody knows that song.”

“Do you know ‘Be kind to your web-footed friends’?”

“Oh, sure,” said Ben. “I was kicking the slats out of my cradle at that one.”

Those were funny songs, not scary songs. Only one song had the power to terrify Davy, and he did not sing it often, though he did not know if it was the tune, which was slow and wandering, or the words, which were simple and not gory or terrible, nothing that would make his mother say, “For God’s sake, quit singing that terrible thing!” Sometimes he thought it was the way Ernestina sang it to him, crooning it, never looking at him when she sang but way out in the trees where the owl lived. But even when he sang the song to himself, he shivered, just as if she were singing it.

Ben stood up; in spite of all Davy’s enticements, he was leaving.

“I know a really scary song,” said Davy. “I can sing it for you.”

“Tomorrow night,” said Ben. “Save it for tomorrow night.”

But Davy, who never took it as certain fact that there would be a tomorrow night, sang after him:

“Death he is a little man

And he go from door to door.”

Ben, who was on the stairs, turned back.

“Where’d you learn that one?”

“Ernestina,” answered Davy.

“Stilts’s mother taught you that song?”

Davy nodded. He saw Ben turning to go again. “She got it from the rude doctor on Catherine Street.”

“What doctor?”

“Dr. Cold Friday.”

It was his last secret, and he gave it up gladly to keep Ben there.

“Who?”
Ben exclaimed. “Who did you say?”

“Cold Friday. Five times she died. Five times she come back—”

Ben did not wait to hear more; he was running down the stairs, whooping and shouting.

W
HEN YOU CROSS MAIN
Street into the west part of town, the streets that carry you over change their names: Liberty Street turns, after many adventures, into Goose Turd Lane. The roots of the elms run deeper than the roots of the people who live there and who will move on, looking for work in bigger cities. The houses are mostly duplexes, set close together, though here and there you see a small frame house with a hand pump in the yard. If you entered that house, you would find a wooden sink and a smaller pump in the kitchen, and you would admire how neatly some residents have tacked old sugar bags and newspapers on the bedroom walls for insulation.

If you walk along Catherine Street, just off Main, you will notice that on the left side live the black people and on the right side lives everybody else. On your left you will pass the barbershop, the Paradise Bar & Grill, and the harness shop; also the Oasis and the Promised Land. A sign in the harness shop says Furniture Cheap. The only suggestion of furniture for sale is a small table on which someone has arranged a family of old bottles. Those who know the owner of these bottles say that she has hidden something of herself in every building on this block—a bit of hair, a nest of nail parings—and this gives her power over the people who live there. It also gives them protection from devils, perturbed spirits, and the evil eye.

If you are a white man, it is unlikely you will ever meet this woman who lives over the harness shop and is known to everyone who cares to know such things as the root doctor, as if her name were too powerful to be pronounced. Her birthday and her given name, which she has never given out, were written in a family Bible and burnt up in a fire. So she says. She might be fifty or seventy, depending on the time of day, the light, and the weather. Sometimes she can be seen in the upper window over the harness shop, her conch shell applied to her ear; from this she receives messages, though in what language nobody knows. Probably Gullah, say the families who have come from one of the islands off South Carolina and speak that dialect. Trinidad, says the barber, whose father was born there and who hears his father’s voice in her most casual greeting. Others claim she has a mynah bird’s ear for picking up the accent of whomever she’s healed, a chameleon’s instinct for making a local color universal. She is a deep, brilliant black, as if newly arrived from the dark continent.

Several years ago she put her only competitor out of business. A conjure man from Georgia moved into the room over the barbershop and put his sign in the window there:

DOCTOR BUZZARD

MEDICINE—WATERS

INSPECTOR OF FISHING LICENSES FOR THE STATE OF MICHIGAN

He had skin the color of buckwheat honey and half a dozen testimonials from grateful patients which he hung on the barbershop walls. Shortly thereafter, the table of bottles vanished and a sign, of a size equal to his, appeared in the window of the harness shop:

COLD FRIDAY

MEDICINE—WATERS

INSPECTOR OF FISHING LICENSES FOR THE STATE OF ETERNITY

Below the printing was a little sketch of Elijah flying over the mountains of Detroit, an error to which Doctor Buzzard drew her attention.

“I never saw no mountains in Detroit,” said Doctor Buzzard.

“You just ain’t looked,” snapped Cold Friday.

His medicine failed, his waters cured nothing, and Doctor Buzzard departed. What were his testimonials next to her power? She had stood in the very heart of healing. She had seen God sitting in his armchair, in full armor with a breastplate of feathers from all the birds that ever were and ever shall be, and He had handed her a pass, signed with her name, good for traveling between the lands of the living and the dead. She had a duster made of the feathers of the skypoke, which flies to the devil and back, and an ostrich egg laid on Good Friday over a hundred years ago, and the yolk of that egg was a pearl, which anyone could see when she candled it. The sight of that pearl had cured many a case of pinkeye on Catherine Street.

Further, she had a little whip made from the bristles of a hog named Bathsheba that ran five hundred miles from Virginia to Georgia with the devil in her. And she had personally met the Whooping Slave of North Carolina, who was buried with his master’s treasure to guard it, and he had given her spells from beyond the grave and a speaking owl. Oh, there was no disease that a single feather from that owl could not heal. And she could beat off bad spirits with her cane which lay down and wiggled like a snake when she gave the command, but she never gave the command.

The illnesses of white people did not interest her, Ernestina explained, when Helen called to ask if Cold Friday was coming today. It was out of friendship for Ernestina that the root doctor had agreed to come at all. Possibly she might come today.

Helen asked about her fee.

“She do like treasure best,” said Ernestina. “Something she can use in her business.”

“What kind of treasure?”

“When she cured me of the rumatiz, I give her my little silver ring. Silver is ’specially bad for the devil.”

She won’t get mine, thought Helen, remembering the leftovers and hand-me-downs Debbie often gave Ernestina. And Ernestina was glad to have them. One person’s trash was another person’s treasure.

“Does she need bus fare?” asked Helen.

“No, ma’am. She got her own ways of gettin’ around.”

“How does she get around?” asked Helen nervously.

“In a car,” answered Ernestina.

“I’ve got more treasure in this house than I know what to do with,” said Helen. “If she wants treasure, she shall have it.”

She asked Nell to help her carry out the treasure. First they sifted through the old clothes in the basement. There was a fur coat she’d meant to pass on to somebody, as it was worn and something had nibbled at the sleeve. And there was that awful fox stole Hal’s sister wore before she died; Helen hated all those little heads and paws and tails hanging down and the grieving glass eyes and the dry noses painted black.

In the attic they found a glass orange tree that had most of its glass leaves and half of its glass oranges and some blue taffeta that Helen had bought for a dress she’d never made.

“We’re redecorating, are we?” said Grandpa. “I shall scarcely know my own room anymore.”

They arranged the treasure in a neat pile at the foot of the front lawn, and Helen remarked that you never knew how much treasure you had until you looked.

“I wonder if I should tip her,” said Helen.

“Oh, you wouldn’t want to tip her,” said Nell. “Not with all the stuff you’re giving her. You wouldn’t want to tip her.”

“Do you think she’s honest?” asked Helen. “You hear so many stories about cleaning women who take whatever they can get their hands on. She doesn’t have references.”

“Ernestina wouldn’t bring her if she were dishonest,” said Nell.

“Ernestina has never asked to be paid in treasure,” said Helen. “Have you ever heard of anyone else who asked to be paid in treasure?”

They agreed it might be prudent to hide what Helen called the really good stuff. Helen hid the really good stuff every time she and Hal went on vacation. She’d hidden her best silver coffee pot over a year ago and hadn’t found it yet.

“It’s in the house,” she’d say when anyone asked about it, by which she meant that it was still hers, though she hadn’t the use of it.

The tray and the sugar bowl and the creamer were safe, of course, under the four-legged bathtub on the third floor.