Other Voices, Other Rooms (9 page)

Amy closed her fan with a reproachful snap. “You never thanked me,” she said.

“For what, dearheart?”

Holding hands with Randolph was obscurely disagreeable, and Joel’s fingers tensed with an impulse to dig his nails into the hot dry palm; also, Randolph wore a ring which pressed painfully between Joel’s knuckles. This was a lady’s ring, a smoky rainbow opal clasped by sharp silver prongs.

“Why, the feathers,” reminded Amy. “The nice bluejay feathers.”

“Lovely,” said Randolph, and blew her a kiss.

Satisfied, she spread the fan and worked it furiously. Behind her, the girandole quivered, and shedding lilac, loosened by the ragged pounding of the pianola, scattered on a table. A lamp had been placed by the empty hearth, so that it glowed out like a wavery ashen fire. “This is the first year a cricket hasn’t visited,” she said. “Every summer one has always hidden in the fireplace, and sang till autumn: remember, Randolph, how Angela Lee would never let us kill it?”

Joel quoted: “Hark to the crickets crying in grass, Hear them serenading in the sassafras.”

Randolph bent forward. “A charming boy, little Joel, dear Joel,” he whispered. “Try to be happy here, try a little to like me, will you?”

Joel was used to compliments, imaginary ones originating in his head, but to have some such plainly spoken left him with an uneasy feeling: was he being poked fun at, teased? So he questioned the round innocent eyes, and saw his own boy-face focused as in double camera lenses. Amy’s cousin was in earnest. He looked down at the opal ring, touched and sorry he could’ve ever had a mean thought like wanting to dig his nails into Randolph’s palm. “I like you already,” he said.

Randolph smiled and squeezed his hand.

“What are you two whispering about?” said Amy jealously. “I declare you’re rude.” Suddenly the pianola was silent, the trembling girandole still. “May I play something else, Randolph, oh please?”

“I think we’ve had quite enough . . . unless Joel would care to hear another.”

Joel bided time, tasting his power; then, recalling the miserable lonesome afternoon, spitefully gave a negative nod.

Amy pursed her lips. “. . . the last chance you’ll ever have to humiliate me,” she told Randolph, flouncing over to the curio cabinet, and replacing her blue fan. Joel had inspected the contents of this cabinet before supper, and had yearned to have as his own such treasures as a jolly Buddha with a fat jade belly, a two-headed china crocodile, the program of a Richmond ball dated 1862 and autographed by Robert E. Lee, a tiny wax Indian in full war regalia, and several plush-framed daintily painted miniatures of virile dandies with villainous mustaches. “It’s your house, I’m perfectly aware . . .”

But a queer sound interrupted: a noise like the solitary thump of an oversized raindrop, it drum-drummed down the stairsteps. Randolph stirred uneasily. “Amy,” he said, and coughed significantly. She did not move. “Is it the lady?” asked Joel, but neither answered, and he was sorry he’d drunk the sherry: the parlor, when he did not concentrate hard, had a bent tilted look, like the topsy-turvy room in the crazyhouse at Pontchartrain. The thumping stopped, an instant of quiet, then an ordinary red tennis ball rolled silently through the archway.

With a curtsy, Amy picked it up, and, balancing it in her gloved hand, brought it under close scrutiny, as if it were a fruit she was examining for worms. She exchanged a troubled glance with Randolph.

“Shall I come with you?” he said, as she hurried out.

“Later, when you’ve sent the boy to bed.” Her footsteps resounded on the black stairs; somewhere overhead a doorlatch clicked.

Randolph turned to Joel with a desperately cheerful expression. “Do you play parcheesi?”

Joel was still puzzling over the tennis ball. He concluded, finally, that it would be best just to pretend as though it were the most commonplace thing in the world to have a tennis ball come rolling into your room out of nowhere. He wanted to laugh. Only it wasn’t funny. He couldn’t believe in the way things were turning out: the difference between this happening, and what he’d expected was too great. It was like paying your fare to see a wild-west show, and walking in on a silly romance picture instead. If that happened, he would feel cheated. And he felt cheated now.

“Or shall I read your fortune?”

Joel held up a clenched hand; the grimy fingers unfurled like the leaves of an opening flower, and the pink of his palm was dotted with sweat-beads. Once, thinking how ideal a career it would make, he’d ordered from a concern in New York City a volume called
Techniques of Fortune-Telling,
authored by an alleged gypsy whose greasy ear-ringed photo adorned the jacket; lack of funds, however, cut short this project, for, in order to become a bonafide fortune-teller, he had to buy, it developed, a generous amount of costly equipment.

“Sooo,” mused Randolph, drawing the hand out of shadow nearer lamplight. “Is it important that I see potential voyages, adventure, an alliance with the pretty daughter of some Rockefeller? The future is to me strangely unexciting: long ago I came to realize my life was meant for other times.”

“But it’s the future I want to know,” said Joel.

Randolph shook his head, and his sleepy sky-blue eyes, contemplating Joel, were sober, serious. “Have you never heard what the wise men say: all of the future exists in the past.”

“At least may I ask a question?” and Joel did not wait for any judgment: “There are just two things I’d like to know, one is: when am I going to see my dad?” And the quietness of the dim parlor seemed to echo when? when?

Gently releasing the hand, Randolph, a set smile stiffening his face, rose and strolled to a window, his loose kimono swaying about him; he folded his arms like a Chinaman into the butterfly sleeves, and stood very still. “When you are quite settled,” he said. “And the other?”

Eyes closed: a dizzy well of stars. Open: a bent tilted room where twin kimonoed figures with curly yellow hair glided back and forth across the lopsided floor. “I saw that Lady, and she was real, wasn’t she?” but this was not the question he’d intended.

Randolph opened the window. The rain had stopped, and cicadas were screaming in the wet summer dark. “A matter of viewpoint, I suppose,” he said, and yawned. “I know her fairly well, and to me she is a ghost.” The night wind blew in from the garden, flourishing the drapes like faded gold flags.

FIVE

Wednesday, after breakfast, Joel shut himself in his room, and went about the hard task of thinking up letters. It was a hot dull morning, and the Landing, though now and again Randolph’s sick cough rattled behind closed doors, seemed, as usual, too quiet, too still. A fat horsefly dived toward the Red Chief tablet where Joel’s scrawl wobbled loosely over the paper: at school this haphazard style had earned him an F in penmanship. He twitched, twirled his pencil, paused twice to make water in the china slopjar so artistically festooned with pink-bottomed cupids clutching watercolor bouquets of ivy and violet; eventually, then, the first letter, addressed to his good friend Sammy Silverstein, read, when finished, as follows:

“You would like the house I am living in Sammy as it is a swell house and you would like my dad as he knows all about airplanes like you do. He doesn’t look much like your dad though. He doesn’t wear specs or smoke cigars, but is tall like Mr Mystery (if Mr Mystery comes to the Nemo this summer write and tell all about it) and smokes a pipe and is very young. He gave me a .22 and when winter comes we will hunt possum and eat possum stew. I wish you could come and visit me as we would have a real good time. One thing we could do is get drunk with my cousin Randolf. We drink alcohol bevrages (sp?) and he is a lot of fun. Its sure not like New Orleans, Sammy. Out here a person old as us is a grown up person. You owe me 20¢. I will forget this det if you will write all news every week. Hello to the gang, remember to write your friend . . .” and with masterly care he signed his name in a new manner: J.H.K. Sansom. Several times he read it aloud; it had a distinguished, adult sound, a name he could readily imagine prefixed by such proud titles as General, Judge, Governor, Doctor. Doctor J.H.K. Sansom, the celebrated operating specialist; Governor J.H.K. Sansom, the people’s choice (“Hello, warden, this is the Governor, just called to say I’ve given Zoo Fever a reprieve”). And then of course the world and all its folks would love him, and Sammy, well, Sammy could sell this old letter for thousands of dollars.

But searching for i’s not dotted, t’s uncrossed, it came to him that almost all he’d written were lies, big lies poured over the paper like a thick syrup. There was no accounting for them. These things he’d said, they should be true, and they weren’t. At home, Ellen was forever airing unwelcome advice, but now he wished he could close his eyes, open them, and see her standing there. She would know what to do.

His pencil traveled so fast occasional words linked: how sorry he was not to have written sooner; he hoped Ellen was o.k., and ditto the kids . . . he missed them all, did they miss him? “It is nicehere,” he wrote, but a pain twinged him, so he got up to walk the floor and knock his hands together nervously. How was he going to tell her? He stopped by the window and looked down at the garden where, except for Jesus Fever’s tomcat, parading before the ruined columns, all seemed stagnant, painted: the lazy willows, shadowless in the morning sunshine; the hammered slave-bell muffled in the high weeds. Joel shook his head, as if to rock his thoughts into sensible order, then returned to the table, and, angrily pencilling out “It is nicehere,” wrote: “Ellen, I hate this place. I don’t know where he is and nobody will tell me. Willyou believe it Ellen when I say I have notseen him? Honest; Amy says he’s sick but I don’t believe oneword as I don’t likeher. She lookslike that mean Miss Addie down the street that use to be making suchalot of unecesary stink. Another thing is, there are no radios, picture shows, funny papers and if you want to take a bath you got to fill a washtub with water from the well. I can’t see how Randolf keeps clean as he does. I like him o.k. but I don’t like it here onebit. Ellen did mama leave enough $ so as I could go away to a school where you can live? Like a military school. Ellen I miss you. Ellen please tell me what to do. Love from Joel XXXXXXXX.”

He felt better now, easier in his mind; say what you will, Ellen had never let him down. He felt so good that, stuffing the letters in their envelopes, he began to whistle, and it was the tune the twins had taught him:
when the north wind
doth blow, and we shall have snow . . .
What was her name? And that other one, the tomboy? Florabel and Idabel. There was no reason why he had to mope around here all day: hadn’t they invited him to visit? Florabel and Idabel and Joel, he thought, whistling happy, whistling loud.

“Quiet in there,” came Randolph’s muffled complaint. “I’m desperately, desperately ill . . .” and broke off into coughing.

Ha ha! Randolph could go jump in the lake. Ha ha! Joel laughed inwardly as he went to the old bureau where the lacquered chest, containing now his bullet, the bluejay feather, and coins amounting to seventy-eight cents, was hidden in the bottom drawer. Inasmuch as he had no stamps, he figured it would be legal simply to put six cents cash money in the r.f.d. box. So he wadded a nickel and a penny in toilet tissue, gathered his letters and started downstairs, still whistling.

Down by the mailbox he ran into Zoo, and she was not alone, but stood talking with a short bullet-headed Negro. It was Little Sunshine, the hermit. Joel knew this, for Monday night at suppertime Little Sunshine had appeared tapping at the kitchen window; he’d come to call on Randolph, for they were, so Randolph said, “dear friends.” He was extra-polite, Little Sunshine, and had brought gifts to all the family: a bucket of swamp honey, two gallons of home-brew, and a wreath of pine needles and tiger lilies which Randolph stuck on his head and galavanted around in the whole evening. Even though he lived far in the dark woods, even though he was a kind of hermit, and everybody knows hermits are evil crazy folks, Joel was not afraid of him. “Little Sunshine, he got more purentee sense ’n most anybody,” said Zoo. “Tell the truth, honey, if my brain was like it oughta be, why, I’d marry him like a shot.” Only Joel couldn’t picture such a marriage; in the first place, Little Sunshine was too old, not so ancient as Jesus Fever, to be sure, but old all the same. And ugly. He had a blue cataract in one eye, hardly a tooth in his head, and smelled bad: while he was in the kitchen, Amy kept the gloved hand over her nose like a sachet-handkerchief, and when Randolph had carted him away to his room (from which sounds of drunken conversation came till dawn), she’d breathed a sigh of relief.

Little Sunshine raised his arm: “Hurry, child, make a cross,” he said in a trombone voice, “cause you done come up on me in the lighta day.” Awed, Joel crossed himself. A smile stretched the hermit’s thick wrinkled lips: “Spin round, boy, and you is saved.”

Meanwhile Zoo tried unsuccessfully to conceal a necklace-like ornament the hermit had knotted about her giraffish neck. She looked very put out when Joel asked: “What’s that you’ve got on, Zoo?”

“Hit’s a charm,” volunteered the hermit proudly.

“Hush up,” snapped Zoo. “Done just told me it don’t work iffen I goes round tellin everbody.” She turned to Joel. “Honey, I spec you best run along; got business with the man.”

O.K., if that’s how she felt. And she was supposed to be his friend! He stalked over to the mailbox, threw up the red flag, and put his letters inside, using the tissue-wrapped coins as a paperweight. Then, determining from memory the general direction of the twins’ house, he trudged off down the road.

Sand dust eddied about his feet where he walked in the misty forest shade skimming the road’s edge. The sun was white in a milkglass sky. Passing a shallow creek rushing swift and cool from the woods, he paused, tempted to take off his tight shoes and go wading where soggy leaves rotated wildly in pebbled whirlpools, but then he heard his name called, and it scared him. Turning, he saw Little Sunshine.

The hermit hobbled forward, throwing his weight against a hickory cane; he carried this cane always, though Joel could not see its necessity since, aside from the fact they were very bowed, nothing seemed wrong with his legs; but his arms were so long his fingertips touched his knees. He wore ripped overalls, no shirt, no hat, no shoes. “Gawd Amighty, you walks fast, boy,” he said, panting up alongside. “Else hit’s me what ain’t use to this daytime; ain’t nothin coulda got me out cept Zoo needed that charm mighty bad.”

Joel realized that his curiosity was being purposely aroused. So he pretended to be uninterested. And presently, as he expected, Little Sunshine, of his own accord, added: “Hit’s a charm guarantee no turrible happenins gonna happen; makes it myself outa frog powder ’n turtle bones.”

Joel slackened his gait, for the hermit moved slow as a cripple; in certain ways he was like Jesus Fever: indeed, might have been his brother. But there was about his broad ugly face a slyness the old man’s lacked. “Little Sunshine,” he said, “would you make
me
a charm?”

The hermit sucked his toothless gums, and the sun shone dull in his gluey blue eye. “They’s many kinda charms: love charms, money charms, what kind you speakin of?”

“One like Zoo’s,” he said, “one that’ll keep anything terrible from happening.”

“Dog take it!” crowed the hermit, and stopped still in his tracks. He jabbed the road with the cane, and wagged his big bald head. “What kinda troubles a little boy like you got?”

Joel’s gaze wandered past the ugly man, who was rocking on his cane, and into the bordering pines. “I don’t know,” he said, then fixed his eyes on the hermit, trying to make him understand how much this charm meant. “Please, Little Sunshine . . .”

And Little Sunshine, after a long moment, indicated, with a tilt of his head, that yes, the charm would be made, but: “You gotta come fetch it yoself, cause ain’t no tellin when Little Sunshine gonna be up thisaway soon. Sides, thing is, trouble charms won’t work noways less you wears them when theys most needed.”

But how would Joel ever find the hermit’s place? “I’d get lost,” he argued, as they continued along the road, the dust rising about them, the sun spinning toward noon.

“Naw you ain’t: humans go huntin Little Sunshine, the devilman guide they feet.” He lifted his cane skyward, and pointed to a sailing shark-like cloud: “Lookayonder,” he said, “hit travelin west, gonna past right over Drownin Pond; once you gets to Drownin Pond, can’t miss the hotel.”

All the hermits Joel had ever heard about were unfriendly say-nothings. Not Little Sunshine: he must’ve been born talking. Joel thought how, on lonesome evenings in the woods, he must chatter to toads and trees and the cold blue stars, and this made him feel tenderly toward the old man, who began now an account of why Drownin Pond had so queer a name.

Years past, sometime before the turn of the century, there had been, he boasted, a splendid hotel located in these very woods, The Cloud Hotel, owned by Mrs Jimmy Bob Cloud, a widow lady bloodkin to the Skullys. Then known as Cloud Lake, the pond was a diamond eye spouting crystal cold from subterranean limestone springs, and Mrs Jimmy Bob’s hotel housed gala crowds come immense distances to parade the wide white halls. Mulberry parasols held aloft by silk-skirted ladies drifted all summer long over the lawns rolling round the water. While feather fans rustled the air, while velvet dancing slippers polished the ballroom floor, scarlet-coated house-hands glided in and out among the guests, wine spilling redly on silver trays. In May they came, October went, the guests, taking with them memories, leaving tall stacks of gold. Little Sunshine, the stable boy who brushed the gleaming coats of their fine teams, had lain awake many a starry night listening to the furry blend of voices. Oh but then! but then! one August afternoon, this was 1893, a child, a creole boy of Joel’s years, having taken a dare to dive into the lake from a hundred-foot oak, crushed his head like a shell between two sunken logs. Soon afterwards there was a second tragedy when a crooked gambler, in much trouble with the law, swam out and never came back. So winter came, passed, another spring. And then a honeymoon couple, out rowing on the lake, claimed that a hand blazing with rubies (the gambler had sported a ruby ring) reached from the depths to capsize their boat. Others followed suit: a swimmer said his legs had been lassoed by powerful arms, another maintained he’d seen the two of them, the gambler and the child, seen them clear as day shining below the surface, naked now, and their hair long, green, tangled as seaweed. Indignant ladies snapped their fans, assembled their silks with fearful haste. The nights were still, the lawns deserted, the guests forever gone; and it broke Mrs Jimmy Bob’s heart: she ordered a net sent from Biloxi, and had the lake dragged: “Tol her it ain’t no use, tol her she ain’t never gonna catch them two cause the devilman, he watch over his own.” So Mrs Jimmy Bob went to St. Louis, rented herself a room, poured kerosene all over the bed, lay down and struck a match. Drownin Pond. That was the name colored folks gave it. Slowly old creek-slime, filtering through the limestone springs, had dyed the water an evil color; the lawns, the road, the paths all turned wild; the wide veranda caved in; the chimneys sank low in the swampy earth; storm-uprooted trees leaned against the porch; and water-snakes slithering across the strings made night-songs on the ballroom’s decaying piano. It was a terrible, strange-looking hotel. But Little Sunshine stayed on: it was his rightful home, he said, for if he went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed his dreams.

The story made for Joel a jumbled picture of cracked windows reflecting a garden of ghosts, a sunset world where twisting ivy trickled down broken columns, where arbors of spidersilk shrouded all.

Miss Florabel Thompkins pulled a comb through her red waist-length hair, the blunt noon-sun paling each strand, and said: “Now don’t you know I’m just tickled to see you. Why, only this morning I was telling sister: ‘Sister, I got a feeling we’re going to have company.’ Said, ‘So let’s wash our hair,’ which naturally made no hit whatsoever: never washes nothing, that girl. Idabel? Oh, she’s off to the creek, gone to get the melon we’ve got cooling down there: first of the summer; Papa planted early this year.” Florabel wasn’t nearly so pretty as moonlight had made her seem. Her face was flat and freckled, like her sister’s. She was kind of snaggletoothed, and her lips pouted in prissy discontent. She was half-reclining in a hammock (“Mama made it herself, and she makes all my lovely clothes, except for my dotted swiss, but she doesn’t make any for sister: like Mama says, it’s better to let Idabel troop around in what-have-you cause she can’t keep a decent rag decent: I tell you this frankly, Mister Knox, Idabel’s a torment to our souls, Mama’s and mine. We could’ve been so cute dressed alike, but . . .”) swung between shady pecan trees in a corner of the yard. She picked up a pair of Kress tweezers and, with a pained expression, began plucking her pink eyebrows. “Sister’s avowed . . . ouch! . . . ambition is she wants to be a farmer.”