The only sound was the warm mountain light on the high turpentine trees, a tufted squirrel cluttering around and around on a green-furred log, the ants moving in a fine brown line at Old Lady’s bare, blue-veined feet.
“You been starving in there two days, dam you!” she panted, chiming the spoon against a flat rock, causing the plump gray miracle bag to swing at her waist. Sweating sour, she rose and marched at the cabin, bearing the pulverized flesh. “Come out, now!” She flicked a pinch of powder inside the lock. “All right, I’ll come get you!” she wheezed.
She spun the knob with one walnut-coloured hand, first one way, then the other. “0 Lord,” she intoned, “fling this door wide!”
When nothing flung, she added yet another philter and held her breath. Her long blue untidy skirt rustled as she peered - into her bag of darkness to see if she had any scaly monsters there, any charm finer than the frog she’d killed months ago for such a crisis as this.
She heard Charlie breathing against the door. His folks had pranced off into some Ozark town early this week, leaving him, and he’d run almost six miles to Old Lady for company - she was by way of being an aunt or cousin or some such, and he didn’t mind her fashions.
But then, two days ago. Old Lady, having gotten used to the boy around, decided to keep him for convenient company. She pricked her thin shoulder bone, drew out three blood pearls, spat wet over her right elbow, tromped on a crunch-cricket, and at the same instant clawed her left hand at Charlie, crying, “My son you are, you are my son, for all eternity!”
Charlie, bounding like a startled hare, had crashed off into the bush, heading for home.
But Old Lady, skittering quick as a gingham lizard, cornered him in a dead end, and Charlie holed up in this old hermit’s cabin and wouldn’t come out, no matter how she whammed door, window, or knothole with amber-coloured fist or trounced her ritual fires, explaining to him that he was certainly her son now, all right.
“Charlie, you there?’ she asked, cutting holes in the door planks with her bright little slippery eyes.
“I’m all of me here,” he replied finally, very tired.
Maybe he would fall out on the ground any moment. She wrestled the knob hopefully. Perhaps a pinch too much frog powder had grated the lock wrong. She always overdid or underdid her miracles, she mused angrily, never doing them just exact. Devil take it!
“Charlie, I only wants someone to night-prattle to, someone to warm hands with at the fire. Someone to fetch kindling for me mornings, and fight off the spunks that come creeping of early fogs! I ain’t got no fetchings on you for myself, son, just for your company.” She smacked her lips. “Tell you what, Charles, you come out and I teach you things!”
“What things?” he suspicioned.
“Teach you how to buy cheap, sell high. Catch a snow weasel, cut off its head, carry it warm in your hind pocket. There!”
“Aw,” said Charlie.
She made haste. “Teach you to make yourself shot-proof. So if anyone bangs at you with a gun, nothing happens.”
When Charlie stayed silent, she gave him the secret in a high fluttering whisper. “Dig and stitch mouse-ear roots on Friday during full moon, and wear ‘em around your neck in a white silk.”
“You’re crazy,” Charlie said.
“Teach you how to stop blood or make animals stand frozen or make blind horses see, all them things I’ll teach you! Teach you to cure a swelled-up cow and unbewitch a goat. Show you how to make yourself invisible!”
“Oh,” said Charlie.
Old Lady’s heart beat like a Salvation tambourine.
The knob turned from the other side.
“You,” said Charlie, “are funning me.”
“No, I’m not,” exclaimed Old Lady. “Oh, Charlie, why, I’ll make you like a window, see right through you. Why, child, you’ll be surprised!”
“Real invisible?”
“Real invisible!”
“You won’t fetch onto me if I walk out?”
“Won’t touch a bristle of you, son.”
“Well,” he drawled reluctantly, “all right.”
The door opened. Charlie stood in his bare feet, head down, chin against chest. “Make me invisible,” he said.
“First we got to catch us a bat,” said Old Lady. “Start lookin’!”
She gave him some jerky beef for his hunger and watched him climb a tree. He went high up and high up and it was nice seeing him there and it was nice having him here and all about after so many years alone with nothing to say good morning to but bird-droppings and silvery snail tracks.
Pretty soon a bat with a broken wing fluttered down out of the tree. Old Lady snatched it up, beating warm and shrieking between its porcelain white teeth, and Charlie dropped down after it, hand upon clenched hand, yelling.
That night, with the moon nibbling at the spiced pine cones. Old Lady extracted a long silver needle from under her wide blue dress. Gumming her excitement and secret anticipation, she sighted up the dead bat and held the cold needle steady-steady.
She had long ago realized that her miracles, despite all perspirations and salts and sulphurs, failed. But she had always dreamt that one day the miracles might start functioning, might spring up in crimson flowers and silver stars to prove that God had forgiven her for her pink body and her pink thoughts and her warm body and her warm thoughts as a young miss. But so far God had made no sign and said no word, but nobody knew this except Old Lady.
“Ready?” she asked Charlie, who crouched cross-kneed, wrapping his pretty legs in long goose-pimpled arms, his mouth open, making teeth. “Ready,” he whispered, shivering.
“There!” She plunged the needle deep in the bat’s right eye. “So!”
“Oh!” screamed Charlie, wadding up his face.
“Now I wrap it in gingham, and here, put it in your pocket, keep it there, bat and all. Go on!”
He pocketed the charm.
“Charlie!” she shrieked fearfully. “Charlie, where are you? I can’t see you, child!”
“Here!” He jumped so the light ran in red streaks up his body. “I’m here. Old Lady!” He stared wildly at his arms, legs, chest, and toes. “I’m here!”
Her eyes looked as if they were watching a thousand fireflies crisscrossing each other in the wild night air.
“Charlie, oh, you went fast! Quick as a hummingbird! Oh, Charlie, come back to me!”
“But I’m Acre!” he wailed.
“Where?”
“By the fire, the fire! And - and I can see myself. I’m not invisible at all!”
Old Lady rocked on her lean flanks. “Course you can see you! Every invisible person knows himself. Otherwise, how could you eat, walk, or get around places? Charlie, touch me. Touch me so I know you.”
Uneasily he put out a hand.
She pretended to jerk, startled, at his touch. “Ah!”
“You mean to say you can’t find me?” he asked. “Truly?”
“Not the least half rump of you!”
She found a tree to stare at, and stared at it with shining eyes, careful not to glance at him. “Why, I sure did a trick that time!” She sighed with wonder. “Whooeee. Quickest invisible I ever made! Charlie. Charlie, how you feel?”
“Like creek water - all stirred.”
“You’ll settle.”
Then after a pause she added, “Well, what you going to do now, Charlie, since you’re invisible?”
All sorts of things shot through his brain, she could tell. Adventures stood up and danced like hell-fire in his eyes, and his mouth, just hanging, told what it meant to be a boy who imagined himself like the mountain winds. In a cold dream he said, “I’ll run across wheat fields, climb snow mountains, steal white chickens off’n farms. I’ll kick pink pigs when they ain’t looking. I’ll pinch pretty girls’ legs when they sleep, snap their garters in schoolrooms.” Charlie looked at Old Lady, and from the shiny tips of her eyes she saw something wicked shape his face. “And other things I’ll do, I’ll do, I will,” he said.