Woodland cover ended a hundred yards from the house and a corn patch began; this was June, the young corn tall enough to conceal a man on all fours. That had to be me, for I was small and not wearing Katskil green, and if I got caught I’d at least have a chance to blarney out of it with a Moha accent. We worked down from the hillside through the woods, and I left Sam and Vilet at the forest edge, promising to whistle if I needed help. I crawled down between the corn-rows, sighting on that yellow smock like a target.[15] Late sunny morning was drawing into noon.
I was at the end of the corn-row when I caught a hint of women’s voices in the house, faint, not the clack of visiting housewives. The clothesline hung between a post and the corner of the house, which was low and rambling and well made, with small windows barred against wolf and tiger and the sneak-bandits who haunt lonely country. I would have to cross a small yard in line with some of the windows. The main door of the house was facing me, and at my right, not more than two hundred feet away, stood the back gate of the village stockade. Beyond the clothesline post I noticed a side door, toward the village, which probably belonged to the kitchen since a neat herb-garden grew just outside. I ducked across the yard, just then realizing that we hadn’t contrived a cover for my red thatch. Nobody challenged me, and at the corner of the house where the clothesline was fastened I was nicely hidden from the windows. I was clawing the yellow smock off the line when the stockade gate creaked open.
A gray-haired woman came through, turning with her hand on the gate to instruct someone inside in a manner he’d remember; she’d evidently caught the gate guard snatching forty winks. The pause gave me a chance. I was into that yellow smock and had a towel twisted around my hair so fast I can’t tell you how I did it. I’d gathered the remaining laundry into a wopse that hid more of me, by the time the dame ended her lecture and came on.
There’d been a flaw in my thinking: now that I’d become a winsome laundress it wouldn’t look right if I just strolled off into the woods with the wash. I was obliged to take the stuff into the house. Beastly damp. If the grayhaired woman was nearsighted and preoccupied she might take me for the proper owner of that yellow smock, so on my way into the kitchen I tried to give my rump a gentle womanly twitch. I can’t believe it was very attractive — wrong type rump.
The kitchen was big, cool, blessedly empty. Leaving the vifiage alone, that elderly woman couldn’t be coming anywhere but here. Probably visiting — the large white smock couldn’t belong to her, designed for someone shaped like a beer-barrel with two full-grown watermelons attached.
Voices came from the next room, where the front door was. One woman, who must have gone to the window right after I’d crossed the yard, said: “It’s her, Ma.”
Ma replied: “Kay, you know what to do.”
Not much in that, but it chilled me. The young voice was whiny, half-scared; Ma’s tone was high, hoarse and breathy, telling me that she owned the big white smock and liked to eat. I remembered hearing it said that country folk like to use the kitchen door, and I smokefooted into a storeroom with my bundle of wash, eased the door shut and got my eye to the keyhole in time to see Yellow-Smock and Ma come in. That store-room should have had access to the outside, but it didn’t — only one high barred window. I was trapped.
Ma was not only ruggedly fat but six feet tall, her dress an ankle-length job of dead black, with expensive cowhide slippers showing at the bottom. Her hair was done up inside a purple turban, and bone ornaments swung at her ears. I still think the man of that house was the village Guide, sober and responsible as they have to be: there was hunter’s gear hung in that store-room, and the location of the house was traditional for a Guide’s dwelling. Maybe when the man was at home the fat woman was a model housewife, her black gown and turban stashed away where he wouldn’t stumble on them. Dressed this way, she had to be a wise woman, and not the legal kind but the kind people sneak to for love philtres, abortions, poisons.
She set a crystal globe on the table, such as I’d heard of gyppos and Ramblers using in their fortune-telling, and plumped down there with her back to my keyhole, but not before I got a look at her face. Small cruel eyes, clever and quick-moving. Her beaky nose had stayed sharp while the rest of her face grew bloated in pale fat.
After that glimpse, her flat-faced daughter slinking by impressed me as a near approach to nothing. Going to the door to meet the gray-haired woman, whose knock I heard, she looked flat all over, as if during her growing up — she was somewhere in the twenties — her mother had sat on her most of the time. Her whispery greeting to the gray-haired woman was rehearsed and phony: “Peace unto you, Mam Byers! My mother is already in communication with your dear one.”
“Oh. Am I late?” Mam Byers spoke like a lady.
“Nay. Time is illusion.”
“Yes,” said Mam Byers, and added emptily: “How nice you look, Lurette!”
“Thank you,” said the flat-faced twirp, keeping it on a high plane. “Be seated.”
The fat woman had not turned her head. She sat motionless, a great bulging buzzard, giving me a view of the back of her fat neck, offering no greeting even when Mam Byers sat down at the table. I saw the lady’s face then, lean, haggard, haunted. The fat woman said: “Look in the deeps!”
Lurette closed the outer door against daylight and drew heavy curtains at the windows. She placed candles beside the crystal, and brought a burning splinter from the hearth in the next room to light them. Then she drifted off behind Mam Byers, watching for signals I think. I’ve never seen anyone who looked so much like a witless tool, as if she had given up trying to be a person and become a stick that her Ma used to poke things with.
“Look in the deeps! What do you see?”
“I see what I’ve seen before, Mam Zena, the bird trying to escape from a closed room.”
“Thy mother’s spirit.”
“Oh, I believe,” said Mam Byers. “I believe. I may have told you — when she was dying she wanted me to kiss her. The only thing she asked — have I told you?”
“Peace, Mam Byers!” She sighed, the great hag, and rested her enormous arms on the table, where I saw her fat sharp-pointed fingers curled like the legs of a spider. “What does the poor bird do today, my dear?”
“Oh, the same — beating at the windows. It was the cancer — the smell — you understand, don’t you? I couldn’t kiss her. I pretended. She knew I was pretending…” Mam Byers had set down her expensive leather purse. I knew a poor vifiage like this would have no more than one or two aristocratic families, and she would belong to one of them; it did her no good in dealing with these bloodsuckers. “Is it possible, Main Zena? Can you truly bring her, so that I could speak to her? — oh, it was so long ago!”
“All things are possible, if one has faith,” said Mam Zena, and Lurette was leaning over Mam Byers, stroking her shoulder and the back of her neck, speaking some words I couldn’t catch in her whiny whisper.
“Oh!” said Mam Byers — “I meant to give you this be — fore.” And she started taking silver coins from her purse, but her hands shook, and presently she shoved the purse into Lurette’s hands and seemed relieved to let go of it.
“Take it away, Lurette,” said Mam Zena. “I cannot touch money.” Lurette carried the purse away to a sidetable, and I saw her cringe at what must have been a burny-burn look from Ma. “Take my hands, my dear, and now we must wait, and pray a little.”
That was evidently a signal for Lurette, who slipped out of the room and was gone a few minutes. She returned silently, coming only as far as the doorway behind Mam Byers to set down a dish of smoking incense which stunk up the place in no time. Lurette on that errand was naked except for a slimpsy pair of underpants, in the middle of a costume change I guessed; as she disappeared again I noticed that she looked flatter than ever in the nude.