Music for Chameleons (8 page)

Of all those we fed, there were three who will never slip my memory. First, the Presbyterian missionary, who was traveling around the countryside soliciting funds for his Christian duties in unholy lands. Mary Ida said she couldn’t afford a cash contribution, but she would be pleased to have him take dinner with us. Poor man, he definitely looked as though he needed one. Arrayed in a rusty, dusty, shiny black suit, creaky black undertaker shoes, and a black-greenish hat, he was thin as a stalk of sugar cane. He had a long red wrinkled neck with a bobbing Adam’s apple the size of a goiter. I never saw a greedier fellow; he sucked up a quart of buttermilk in three swallows, devoured a whole platter of chicken single-handed (or rather, double-handedly, for he was eating with both hands), and so many biscuits, dripping with butter and molasses, that I lost count. However, for all his gobbling, he managed to give us hair-raising accounts of his exploits in perilous territories. “I’ll
tell you somethin’. I’ve seen cannibals roast black men and white men on a spit—just like you’d roast a pig—and eat every morsel, toes, brains, ears, and all. One of them cannibals told me the best eatin’ is a roasted newborn baby; said it tasted just like lamb. I spec the reason they didn’t eat me is ’cause I didn’t have enough meat on my bones. I’ve seen men hung by their heels till blood gushed out their ears. Once I got bit by a green mamba, the deadliest snake in the world. I was kinda nauseated there for a spell, but I didn’t die, so the black men figured I was a god and they gave me a coat made of leopard skins.”

After the gluttonous preacher had departed, Mary Ida felt dizzy; she was sure she would have bad dreams for a month. But her husband, comforting her, said: “Oh, honey, you didn’t believe any of that malarkey? That man’s no more a missionary than I am. He’s just a heathen liar.”

Then there was the time we entertained a convict who had escaped from a chain gang at the Alabama State Prison in Atmore. Obviously, we didn’t
know
he was a dangerous character serving a life sentence for umpteen armed robberies. He simply appeared at our door and told Mary Ida he was hungry and could she give him something to eat. “Well, sir,” she said, “you’ve come to the right place. I’m just putting dinner on the table now.”

Somehow, probably by raiding a washline, he had exchanged his convict stripes for overalls and a worn blue work shirt. I thought he was nice, we all did; he had a flower tattooed on his wrist, his eyes were gentle, he was gently spoken. He said his name was Bancroft (which, as it turned out,
was
his true name). My uncle Jennings asked him: “What’s your line of work, Mr. Bancroft?”

“Well,” he drawled, “I’m just lookin’ for some. Like most everybody else. I’m pretty handy. Can do most anythin’. You wouldn’t have somethin’ for me?”

Jennings said: “I sure could use a man. But I can’t afford him.”

“I’d work for most nothin’.”

“Yeah,” said Jennings. “But nothing is what I’ve got.”

Unpredictably, for it was a subject seldom alluded to in that household, crime came into the conversation. Mary Ida complained: “Pretty Boy Floyd. And that Dillinger man. Running around the country shooting people. Robbing banks.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mr. Bancroft. “I got no sympathy with them banks. And Dillinger, he’s real smart, you got to hand him that. It kinda makes me laugh the way he knocks off them banks and gets clean away with it.” Then he actually laughed, displaying tobacco-tinted teeth.

“Well,” Mary Ida countered, “I’m slightly surprised to hear you say that, Mr. Bancroft.”

Two days later Jennings drove his wagon into town and returned with a keg of nails, a sack of flour, and a copy of the
Mobile Register
. On the front page was a picture of Mr. Bancroft—“Two-Barrels” Bancroft, as he was colloquially known to the authorities. He had been captured in Evergreen, thirty miles away. When Mary Ida saw his photo, she rapidly fanned her face with a paper fan, as though to prevent a fainting fit. “Heaven help me,” she cried. “He could have killed us all.”

Jennings said sourly: “There was a reward. And we missed out on it.
That’s
what gets my goat.”

Next, there was a girl called Zilla Ryland. Mary Ida discovered her bathing a two-year-old baby, a red-haired boy, in a creek that ran through the woods back of the house. As Mary Ida described it: “I saw her before she saw me. She was standing naked in the water bathing this beautiful little boy. On the bank there was a calico dress and the child’s clothes and an old suitcase tied together with a piece of rope. The boy was laughing, and so was she. Then she saw me, and she was startled. Scared.
I said: ‘Nice day. But hot. The water must feel good.’ But she snatched up the baby and scampered out of the creek, and I said: ‘You don’t have to be frightened of me. I’m only Mrs. Carter that lives just over yonder. Come on up and rest a spell.’ Then she commenced to cry; she was only a little thing, no more than a child herself. I asked what’s the matter, honey? But she wouldn’t answer. By now she had pulled on her dress and dressed the boy. I said maybe I could help you if you’d tell me what’s wrong. But she shook her head, and said there was nothing wrong, and I said well, we don’t cry over nothing, do we? Now you just follow me up to the house and we’ll talk about it. And she did.”

Indeed she did.

I was swinging in the porch swing reading an old
Saturday Evening Post
when I noticed them coming up the path, Mary Ida toting a broken-down suitcase and this barefooted girl carrying a child in her arms.

Mary Ida introduced me: “This is my nephew, Buddy. And—I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Zilla,” the girl whispered, eyes lowered.

“I’m sorry, honey. I can’t hear you.”

“Zilla,” she again whispered.

“Well,” said Mary Ida cheerfully, “that sure is an unusual name.”

Zilla shrugged. “My mama give it to me. Was her name, too.”

Two weeks later Zilla was still with us; she proved to be as unusual as her name. Her parents were dead, her husband had “run off with another woman. She was real fat, and he liked fat women, he said I was too skinny, so he run off with her and got a divorce and married her up in Athens, Georgia.” Her only living kin was a brother: Jim James. “That’s why I come down here to Alabama. The last I heard, he was located somewhere around here.”

Uncle Jennings did everything in his power to trace Jim
James. He had good reason, for, although he liked Zilla’s little boy, Jed, he’d come to feel quite hostile toward Zilla—her thin voice aggravated him, and her habit of humming mysterious tuneless melodies.

Jennings to Mary Ida: “Just the hell how much longer is our boarder going to hang around?” Mary Ida: “Oh, Jennings. Shhh! Zilla might hear you. Poor soul. She’s got nowhere to go.” So Jennings intensified his labors. He brought the sheriff into the case; he even
paid
to place an ad in the local paper—and that was really going far. But nobody hereabouts had ever heard of Jim James.

At last Mary Ida, clever woman, had an idea. The idea was to invite a neighbor, Eldridge Smith, to evening supper, usually a light meal served at six. I don’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before. Mr. Smith was not much to look at, but he was a recently widowed farmer of about forty with two school-aged children.

After that first supper Mr. Smith got to stopping by almost every twilight. After dark we all left Zilla and Mr. Smith alone, where they swung together on the creaking porch swing and laughed and talked and whispered. It was driving Jennings out of his mind because he didn’t like Mr. Smith any better than he liked Zilla; his wife’s repeated requests to “Hush, honey. Wait and see” did little to soothe him.

We waited a month. Until finally one night Jennings took Mr. Smith aside and said: “Now look here, Eldridge. Man to man, what are your intentions toward this fine young lady?” The way Jennings said it, it was more like a threat than anything else.

Mary Ida made the wedding dress on her foot-pedaled Singer sewing machine. It was white cotton with puffed sleeves, and Zilla wore a white silk ribbon bow in her hair, especially curled for the occasion. She looked surprisingly pretty. The ceremony
was held under the shade of a mulberry tree on a cool September afternoon, the Reverend Mr. L. B. Persons presiding. Afterward everybody was served cupcakes and fruit punch spiked with scuppernong wine. As the newlyweds rode away in Mr. Smith’s mule-drawn wagon, Mary Ida lifted the hem of her skirt to dab at her eyes, but Jennings, eyes dry as a snake’s skin, declared: “Thank you, dear Lord. And while You’re doing favors, my crops could use some rain.”

VI

Dazzle

SHE FASCINATED ME
.

She fascinated everyone, but most people were ashamed of their fascination, especially the proud ladies who presided over some of the grander households of New Orleans’ Garden District, the neighborhood where the big plantation owners lived, the shipowners and oil operators, the richest professional men. The only persons not secretive about their fascination with Mrs. Ferguson were the servants of these Garden District families. And, of course, some of the children, who were too young or guileless to conceal their interest.

I was one of those children, an eight-year-old boy temporarily living with Garden District relatives. However, as it happened, I did keep my fascination to myself, for I felt a certain guilt: I had a secret, something that was bothering me, something that was really worrying me very much, something I was afraid to tell anybody,
any
body—I couldn’t imagine what their reaction would be, it was such an odd thing that was worrying me, that had been worrying me for almost two years. I had never heard of anyone with a problem like the one that was troubling me. On the one hand it seemed maybe silly; on the other …

I wanted to tell my secret to Mrs. Ferguson. Not
want
to, but felt I had to. Because Mrs. Ferguson was said to have magical powers. It was said, and believed by many serious-minded people, that she could tame errant husbands, force proposals from reluctant suitors, restore lost hair, recoup squandered fortunes. In short, she was a witch who could make wishes come true. I had a wish.

Mrs. Ferguson did not seem clever enough to be capable of magic. Not even card tricks. She was a plain woman who might have been forty but was perhaps thirty; it was hard to tell, for her round Irish face, with its round full-moon eyes, had few lines and little expression. She was a laundress, probably the only white laundress in New Orleans, and an artist at her trade: the great ladies of the town sent for her when their finest laces and linens and silks required attention. They sent for her for other reasons as well: to obtain desires—a new lover, a certain marriage for a daughter, the death of a husband’s mistress, a codicil to a mother’s will, an invitation to be Queen of Comus, grandest of the Mardi Gras galas. It was not merely as a laundress that Mrs. Ferguson was courted. The source of her success, and principal income, was her alleged abilities to sift the sands of daydreams until she produced the solid stuff, golden realities.

Now, about this wish of my own, the worry that was with me from first thing in the morning until last thing at night: it wasn’t anything I could just straight out ask her. It required the right time, a carefully prepared moment. She seldom came to our house, but when she did I stayed close by, pretending to watch the delicate movements of her thick ugly fingers as they handled lace-trimmed napkins, but really attempting to catch her eye. We never talked; I was too nervous and she was too stupid. Yes, stupid. It was just something I sensed; powerful witch or not, Mrs. Ferguson was a stupid woman. But now and again our eyes did lock, and dumb as she was, the intensity, the
fascination
she saw in my gaze told her that I desired to be a client. She probably thought I wanted a bike, or a new air rifle; anyway, she wasn’t about to concern herself with a kid like me. What could I give her? So she would turn her tiny lips down and roll her full-moon eyes elsewhere.

About this time, early December in 1932, my paternal grandmother arrived for a brief visit. New Orleans has cold winters; the chilly humid winds from the river drift deep into your bones. So my grandmother, who was living in Florida, where she taught school, had wisely brought with her a fur coat, one she had borrowed from a friend. It was made of black Persian lamb, the belonging of a rich woman, which my grandmother was not. Widowed young, and left with three sons to raise, she had not had an easy life, but she never complained. She was an admirable woman; she had a lively mind, and a sound, sane one as well. Due to family circumstances, we rarely met, but she wrote often and sent me small gifts. She loved me and I wanted to love her, but until she died, and she lived beyond ninety, I kept my distance, behaved indifferently. She felt it, but she never knew what caused my apparent coldness, nor did anyone else, for the reason was part of an intricate guilt, faceted as the dazzling yellow stone dangling from a slender gold-chain necklace that she often wore. Pearls would have suited her better, but she attached great value to this somewhat theatrical gewgaw, which I understood her own grandfather had won in a card game in Colorado.

Of course the necklace wasn’t valuable; as my grandmother always scrupulously explained to anyone who inquired, the stone, which was the size of a cat’s paw, was not a “gem” stone, not a canary diamond, nor even a topaz, but a chunk of rock-crystal deftly faceted and tinted dark yellow. Mrs. Ferguson, however, was unaware of the trinket’s true worth, and when one afternoon, during the course of my grandmother’s stay, the plump
youngish witch arrived to stiffen some linen, she seemed spellbound by the brilliant bit of glass swinging from the thin chain around my grandmother’s neck. Her ignorant moon eyes glowed, and that’s a fact: they truly glowed. I now had no difficulty attracting her attention; she studied me with an interest absent heretofore.

As she departed, I followed her into the garden, where there was a century-old wisteria arbor, a mysterious place even in winter when the foliage had shriveled, stripping this leaf-tunnel of its concealing shadows. She walked under it and beckoned to me.