Выбрать главу

— Don’t be sitting up, she said to him. -Come on back to bed, now.

— What is it? she said when he climbed back in silent and staring at the ceiling.

— Need something, he mumbled.

— I’ll give you what you need.

After a minute,

— Need something, I don’t know. I ain’t got nothing.

— You got me.

— We ain’t got nothing, woman.

She said nothing.

— I need to make me some money, one thing, he said.

— Well, who don’t.

— I got some ideas.

— Like what.

— I don’t know. Just ideas.

— We got a little money saved, she said.

— Nothing, he said. -I got more money in this tooth in the back of my head than you got stuffed in this mattress.

She’d every now and then take a pot of greens out to the cabin, kindly forget to bring it back next day, never the best pot, but one she’d used from way back in the cupboard, one Miss Birdie wouldn’t miss. One old skillet with rust spots she scrubbed down real good, reseasoned, and made the bread in then set in the windowsill empty and slipped back to the house to take it out the window from the shrub bed late at night. These she took on this and that weekend out to Aunt Vish, who took the item, held it before her at arm’s length to inspect it, nodded, set it down on the porch beside her. The Sunday afternoon she took the skillet out, she saw a twitch in the corner of Vish’s mouth.

— That’s better than the old one I got, she said, taking it and holding it in her lap to study it. She hefted it and set it back in her lap. -Bigger, too.

Then instead of setting the skillet down beside her feet she rocked a couple of times and launched herself feebly out of her chair with the skillet held before her and went into her cabin. Creasie, standing on the porch, heard her hard bare feet shuffling inside, heard the gentle clank of the skillet as she guessed Vish set it down on top of her stove. In a minute she came back out and handed Creasie a little snuff tin.

— Put just a pinch in a glass of tap water, pour just a little dash of vinegar in there, drink it first thing in the morning, she said. Seven days, she said. Don’t do it no longer than seven days, now, you hear me?

— Yes, ma’am. Seven days.

She took it home, started the next morning, using some vinegar she’d brought over from the Urquhart house in a little jar. She dipped water from the bucket of water she’d pumped at the well beside her porch steps, opened the snuff tin, and sniffed first. There was a light sandy-colored powder in there, like pale ground mustard or something, had no odor she could make out. She sneezed, blew her nose. Then took a pinch and dropped it into the cup of water, poured about a teaspoon of vinegar in, and drank it down. She stood there a minute, very still, but felt nothing but just a faint little ball of heartburn from the vinegar, which subsided. Went on over to the house to work. Same thing next morning, standing there, nothing. Same thing next morning. Frank standing in the kitchen door watching her, said, — What is that?

— Nothing, she said. -Just a remedy Aunt Vish give me.

— What’s ailing you?

— Nothing much, she said, unable to look at him. -Just a little ache in my bones.

Same thing the fourth day and the fifth. On the afternoon of the sixth day she was on her hands and knees in Miss Birdie’s bathroom scrubbing the tile floor and up out of her before she even knew she felt a thing funny came a quick gush of something yellow with little streaks and spots of red. She felt something lower down inside her then and quick got up onto the toilet, frightened not only of what was happening but that Miss Birdie might come back and see her sitting on her toilet and fire her right then and there. Same as up top, a little gush then fell from her into the toilet, and she was afraid to even look at it, her eyes tearing up anyway. She quick wiped herself and flushed, and it was only that she forgot to put the paper into the toilet and accidentally looked down and saw it in her hand that she knew it was a dull dark dried-blood brown, and she made a little cry and dropped it into the toilet, quickly cleaned up what she’d thrown up with toilet paper and then her scrubbing sponge, and wrung out the sponge in the tub, flushed the toilet, and scrubbed out the tub then.

— What’s the matter with you? Miss Birdie said to her when she came through the kitchen on her way out to rinse the bucket at the faucet tap outside.

— No’m, she said, just feeling a little puny. I’ll be all right.

Frank walked two miles and borrowed a pickup truck from Whit Caulder and drove her into town that night and waited in the truck while she walked down into the ravine and knocked on Vish’s door. Vish came to the door with her coal oil lamp and cracked it, looked out, said nothing.

— I’m scared, Aunt Vish, she said. -That potion made me throw up, and blood like something came out me down there, too.

Vish said nothing, stood watching her with her head stuck just barely out the door, her eyes moving up and down her, like examining her feet and then her hands and then her face again.

— Best not take the rest, then, she said.

— Am I going to be all right? She was near tears, her voice tight.

Vish nodded after a moment.

— You be all right.

They stood there saying nothing. She was afraid to ask, then made herself.

— Is it going to work then?

Vish looked at her, her brow bunched up then, like she was mad. Then that look went away.

— Now what you think, girl?

Creasie stood there composing herself. No longer about to cry. Just feeling washed out.

— No, Vish said as she closed the door and went back inside, leaving her there on the porch. -You go home and rest awhile, if you can. Ain’t going to be no babies.

The door closed to, and she heard the dry sound of Vish’s feet shuffling off. She heard the tap tap at the truck’s horn from Frank, waiting. He was leaning against the driver’s side door when she came out of the trail, and he helped her into the passenger seat and climbed in and started it up, turned on the headlights.

— Well, what’d you get this time? he said.

— Hmmm? she said.

— What did you get from the crazy old woman this time?

She looked at him, a man who might as well be a stranger driving her somewhere, so unfamiliar he looked to her in the dark inside the truck at that moment, so strange the whole scene, him driving her somewhere, which he’d never done.

— The truth, she said then. -The truth is what I got this time.

Frank mumbled to himself as he pulled them into the road headed back out to the Urquharts’.

— Be crazy as that old witch yourself, you keep coming here, he said.

ONE EVENING SHE went back to the cabin and Frank wasn’t there, and wasn’t there the next day either. A little crazy with fear, and starting to panic, she burned meals and dropped a dish, Miss Birdie scolding, stood there looking at Creasie, shaking her head. Then mumbled something to herself and sat down at the table.