“No, you don’t,” the giant rumbled, his back to her. She gasped, the answer to her unspoken thought more invasive than this uninvited hulking presence among the scraps of her life.
The giant knelt and began picking up the shards of the Natural Bridge, piling them in a calloused palm. They clicked together like a cricket’s legs. “You don’t hate nothing, Clarissa,” the giant said. “You’re just ashamed of a right smart of it.” He drew one last shard from between two floorboards, topped off the pile, then cupped his palms together and rocked them. “Afraid this plate here has been to breakfast,” he said, looking mournful, but in his hands the bits looked less like fragments of something broken, a ripped jumper, the insides of a jack-o’-lantern, and more like fragments of something yet to be made, the squares of a quilt, kindling. The cat twined around the giant’s ankle, purring, and rolled onto her back to present her belly.
“He lay down as a lion, and as a great lion,” the giant recited. “Who shall stir him up?”
He closed his eyes, brought his cupped hands to his mouth and blew into them, his cheeks inflated like a child puffing out a candle. “Restore unto Clarissa this geegaw, O Lord,” the giant said, and blew again, then opened his eyes and his hands. The smashed bits of plate were unchanged. The giant’s whole face wrinkled as he beamed at Clarissa. “Indeed, the Lord’s work is ever marvellous to behold,” he said. “You got any glue?”
Sitting on the edge of the bed frame now, a rope burn streaking across her thigh, she shook her head.
The giant grunted and stood, shoved double handfuls of plate into his jacket pockets like a bashful suitor. “My name’s Ralph Poole,” he said. His smile faltered on “Poole.”
Since the giant entered, Clarissa had not been studying about Charlie. But now, with a pang of guilt, she looked for him. She, the cat and the giant were alone in the room. The tatty curtains in the open window billowed in the rising breeze.
“Gone, of course,” said the giant Poole, shaking his head just as she realized, with something like nausea, that Charlie Poole was never coming back. “No matter,” the giant continued. “He ain’t no harder to find than cigarettes and beer.” He reached for the dipper, one huge hand enfolding the battered tin handle all the way to the bowl. He peered into the bucket as he stirred, the dipper clanking against the sides. “I reckon you know, Clarissa, that my little brother stinks like blinky milk. He is a varmint and a rake-hell and a hard, hard man.”
“I know him,” Clarissa said, enraged – I could have gone with him but you stopped me, somehow you stopped me - and blinking back tears. “But I don’t know you.”
The giant Poole lifted the streaming dipper, swung it toward her. “Drink,” he said.
The dipper rasped across her cheek once, twice, leaving a damp trail.
Still furious and sick at heart, she also was suddenly thirsty. She parted her lips. She drank the hot, metallic well water that had come to taste like home, looking into the giant’s eyes as he gauged her throat movements and tipped the dipper steadily, unerringly, as if his arm were hers.
When she was done he dipped more water and poured it onto her upturned face, onto her shoulders, her chest, and somehow she felt calmer and less naked, not more. The water was colder now and she shivered, her body awakening despite herself, as the rivulets coursed down her arms and back and backside and legs. Empty dipper still in hand, the giant Poole regarded her nipples without expression, a look Clarissa knew well.
She weaved a bit as she stood. Wanting to hurt him, she spread her feet a bit farther apart for balance, put her hands on her hips and said, “It’ll cost you.”
The giant Poole’s high-pitched chortle made Clarissa flinch and sent the cat streaking beneath the bed. “You think I don’t know that?” the giant asked.
He scooped her dress off the floor one-handed and tossed it at her. She tried to snatch it from the air but her body caught most of it, the fabric plastering to her damp skin. She had no trouble putting it on. Then the giant handed her the cat. It lay draped across his hand, purring.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To get some glue.”
Outside, the sun was past the ridge line, and a cloud was rolling through the hollow, spattering rain as it brushed the tops of the chestnuts and poplars. On the porch, leaning against the woodpile, were a gnarled walking stick and a double-headed, leather-handled drum. The giant reclaimed these as he passed. Clarissa held the cat close for warmth as she stepped from the porch onto the flat, mossy, rain-hollowed rock that served as a step, a puddle already collecting at its green centre, and then onto the clover that long since had taken the grass. Splintered locust wood, then water and stone, a damp cushion of green – she stood for a moment on each, her bare feet digging imaginary toeholds to mark the place as hers forever, and then walked forward, following the mist enshrouded figure of the giant along the path.
Entering the woods, the giant began to beat the drum one-handed with the stick, the steady boom boom boom flushing quail and squirrels and larger creatures, too, that crashed and slid and plopped out of sight as he advanced. Clarissa quickly saw that however she hurried, inviting stumbles over roots and thrashes among clinging, clammy leaves, the gap of twenty feet between her and the giant never closed, so instead she took her time, content with the drumbeat and the purring mass against her chest and the familiar underfoot treacheries of the trail. She tasted the rain and filled herself with the bullfrog-scented air.
In the thickest woods, just as Clarissa could only hear, not see, the giant before her, she heard another, more distant music: a banjo.
The drumbeats stopped, and Clarissa knew the march had stopped, too. She stood, swaying amid a copse of honeysuckle. She had not been lying when she told Charlie she purely hated the banjo and all the tunes he and Satan could commit with it, but he would play them, so she couldn’t help but recognize this one – “Budded Rose,” Charlie had called it.
“Too damn many notes flying out of this thing,” he once said, sitting drunk on her porch wearing only his bowtie and picking the evening away. “Better catch ’em, now. Hear that? Here they come. That’s one for your pocket, and one for your stove, and one for when you wake up hungry at night.”
At first she thought this “Budded Rose” was coming from that very porch, but then it was ahead of her, and then off to the side toward the rock fall, and then downslope and sharing a laugh with the water in the branch. It was everywhere; it was nowhere. Nowhere. Hungry at night, indeed. She wept into the cat’s fur, feeling as if she had awakened from the saddest of dreams.
Up ahead, the drumbeat resumed, and Clarissa walked forward again, though she was no longer following the giant but coincidentally walking along behind him. Clarissa was done following Pooles. The second had broken the spell of the first; now the first had broken the spell of the second. One day Clarissa would cast a third spell herself, and not on any damn Poole. Now if only Charlie’s banjo would hush.
To her relief, the giant, with more volume than skill, at this point began to sing.
I want to join that holy bright number
I want to join that holy bright number
I want to join that holy bright number
And turn some ransomed one home.