The Avram Davidson Treasury (24 page)

I
NTRODUCTION BY
M
ARTHA
S
OUKUP

I happened on short science fiction and fantasy during heady times, the 1970s. Many of the great anthology series were publishing then
: Orbit, Universe, New Dimensions, Dangerous Visions:
exciting books filled with stories by strong new voices. A walk to the library after school would reap an armful of stories by Lafferty, Delany, Wolfe, Wilhelm, Bishop, Piserchia, Effinger, Silverberg, Dozois, Russ, so many, too many to keep in your head. Fine voices, quirky, intelligent, and fresh: half of what I learned about science fiction and fantasy I learned from stories like theirs.

But the hottest new voices couldn’t top what Avram Davidson had done in a collection of short stories, written as much as two decades before they came along. Pocket Books issued a paperback edition of his 1962 collection
Or All the Seas with Oysters
in 1976. The copy I bought then sits on the arm of my chair now. The story ending the book, in the place of honor, is “The Woman Who Thought She Could Read.”

The stories in that reprint taught me as much about what short stories could do as any book I’d read. I wondered then and wonder still: Why write a novel when you can make a few thousand words like “The Woman Who Thought She Could Read” this rich?

Davidson gives his characters voices as distinctive as his own. Their voices reveal things about them they don’t know about themselves, from the narrator recollecting his boyhood. It seems there are more characters than there are, because Davidson creates in this story a warm, but unsentimental, sense of a community; and from the community a sense of a whole America of several generations ago, living and breathing and laughing and worrying, loving, screaming. The curious boy recalled by his adult self; the cheerful immigrant midwife and bean-reader Mrs. Grummick; friends and neighbors painted, sometimes, in strokes just a sentence or three long. He even tosses in vivid characters long dead before his story opens. It deepens the sense of ongoing community. Folks. You recognize them when he shows them to you.

So why write a whole novel? (Well, there are other reasons.) Other writers can say this much about a time and a place: the way that time and place create the people in them, the way those people (eccentrically, clumsily, caringly) create that time and place. Two nights ago I went to a Chekhov play; Chekhov could.

It is always worth remarking when a writer has done this. It is doubly worth remarking when he has done it with economy and grace.

Here is a story where Avram Davidson has, and has. Remark it.

THE WOMAN WHO THOUGHT SHE COULD READ

A
BOUT A HUNDRED YEARS
ago a man named Vanderhorn built the little house. He built it one and a half stories high, with attached and detached sheds snuggling around it as usual; and he covered it with clapboards cut at his own mill—he had a small sawmill down at the creek, Mr. Vanderhorn did. After that he lived in the little house with his daughter and her husband (being a widower man) and one day he died there. So the daughter and son-in-law, a Mr. Hooten or Wooten or whatever it was, they came into his money which he made out of musket stocks for the Civil War, and they built a big new house next to the old one, only further back from the street. This Mr. Wooten or Hooten or something like that,
he
didn’t have any sons, either; and
his
son-in-law turned the sawmill into a buggy factory. Well, you know what happened to
that
business! Finally, a man named Carmichael, who made milk wagons and baggage carts and piewagons, he bought the whole Vanderhorn estate. He fixed up the big house and put in apartments, and finally he sold it to my father and went out of business. Moved away somewhere.

I was just a little boy when we moved in. My sister was a lot older. The
old
Vanderhorn house wasn’t part of the property any more. A lady named Mrs. Grummick was living there and Mr. Carmichael had sold her all the property the width of her house from the street on back to the next lot which faced the street behind ours. I heard my father say it was one of the narrowest lots in the city, and it was separated from ours by a picket fence. In the front of the old house was an old weeping willow tree and a big lilac bush like a small tree. In back were a truck garden and a few flowerbeds. Mrs. Grummick’s house was so near to our property that I could look right into her window, and one day I did, and she was sorting beans.

Mrs. Grummick looked out and smiled at me. She had one of those broad faces with high cheekbones, and when she smiled her little bright black eyes almost disappeared.

“Liddle boy, hello!” she said. I said Hello and went right on staring, and she went right on sorting her beans. On her head was a kerchief (you have to remember that this was before they became fashionable) and there was a tiny gold earring in each plump earlobe. The beans were in two crocks on the table and in a pile in front of her. She was moving them around and sorting them into little groups. There were more crocks on the shelves, and glass jars, and bundles of herbs and strings of onions and peppers and bunches of garlic all hanging around the room. I looked through the room and out the window facing the street and there was a sign in front of the little house, hanging on a sort of one-armed gallows.
Anastasia Grummick, Midwife,
it said.

“What’s a midwife?” I asked her.

“Me,” she said. And she went on pushing the beans around, lining them up in rows, taking some from one place and putting them in another.

“Have you got any children, Mrs. Grimmick?”

“One. I god one boy.
Big
boy.” She laughed.

“Where is he?”

“I think he come home today. I
know
he come home today.” Her head bobbed.

“How do you know?”

“I know because I know. He come home and I make a bean soup for him. You want go errand for me?”

“All right.” She stood up and pulled a little change purse out of her apron pocket, and counted out some money and handed it to me out of the window.

“Tell butcher Mrs. Grummick want him to cut some meat for a bean soup. He knows. Mrs. Schloutz. And you ged iche-cream comb with nickel, for you.”

I started to go, but she gave me another nickel. “Ged
two
iche-cream combs. I ead one, too.” She laughed. “One, too. One, two, three—Oh, Englisht languish!” Then she went back to the table, put part of the beans back in the crocks, and swept the rest of them into her apron. I got the meat for her and ate my French vanilla and then went off to play.

A few hours later a taxicab stopped in front of the little gray house and a man got out of it. A big fellow. Of course, to a kid, all grownups are real big, but he was
very
big—tremendous, he was, across, but not so tall. Mrs. Grummick came to the door.

“Eddie!” she said. And they hugged and kissed, so I decided this was her son, even before he called her “Mom.”

“Mom,” he said, “do I smell bean soup?”

“Just for you I make it,” she said.

He laughed. “You knew I was coming, huh? You been reading them old beans again, Mom?” And they went into the house together.

I went home, thinking. My mother was doing something over the washtub with a ball of bluing. “Mama,” I said, “can a person read beans?”

“Did you take your milk of magnesia?” my mother asked. Just as if I hadn’t spoken. “Did you?”

I decided to bluff it out. “Uh-huh,” I said.

“Oh
no
you didn’t. Get me a spoon.”

“Well, why do you ask if you ain’t going to believe me?”

“Open up,” she ordered. “More. Swallow it. Take the rest. All of it. If you could see your face! Suppose it froze and stayed like that? Go and wash the spoon off.”

Next morning Eddie was down in the far end of the garden with a hoe. He had his shirt off. Talk about shoulders! Talk about arms! Talk about a chest! My mother was out in front of our house, which made her near Eddie’s mother out in back of hers. Of course my mother had to know everybody’s business.

“That your son, Mrs. Grummick?”

“My son, yes.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“Rachel.”

“No, I mean your
son …
what does he do…”

“He rachel. All over country. I show you.”

She showed us a picture of a man in trunks with a hood over his head. “The Masked Marvel! Wrestling’s Greatest Mystery!” The shoulders, arms, and chest—they could only have been Eddie’s. There were other pictures of him in bulging poses, with names like, oh, The Slav Slayer, Chief Thunderwing, Young Kehoe, and so on. Every month Eddie Grummick sent his mother another photograph. It was the only kind of letter he sent because she didn’t know how to read English. Or any other language, for that matter.

Back in the vegetable patch Eddie started singing a very popular song at that time, called “I Faw Down And Go
Boom!
”

It was a hot summer that year, a long hot summer, and September was just as hot as July. One shimmering, blazing day Mrs. Grummick called my father over. He had his shirt off and was sitting under our tree in his BVD top. We were drinking lemonade.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “we used to make lemonade with brown sugar and sell it in the streets. We used to call out

Brown lemonade

Mixed in the shade

Stirred by an old maid.

“People used to think that was pretty funny.”

Mrs. Grummick called out: “Hoo-hoo! Mister! Hoo-hoo!”

“Guess she wants
me
.” my father said. He went across the lawn. “Yes ma’am …” he was saying. “Yes ma’am.”

She asked, “You buy coal yed, mister?”

“
Coal?
Why, no-o-o…not
yet
. Looks like a pretty mild winter ahead, wouldn’t you say?”

She pressed her lips together, closed her eyes and shook her head.

“No! Bedder you buy soon coal. Lots coal. Comes very soon bad wedder. Bad!”

My father scratched his head. “Why, you sound pretty certain, Mrs. Grummick, but—uh—”

“I
know,
mister. If I say id, if I tell you, I
know.
”

Then I piped up and asked, “Did you read it in the beans, Mrs. Grummick?”

“Hey!” She looked at me, surprised. “How you know, liddle boy?”

My father said, “You mean you can tell a bad winter is coming from the
beans?
”

“Iss true. I know. I read id.”

“
Well,
now, that’s very interesting. Where I come from, used to be a man—a weather prophet, they called him—
he
used to predict the weather by studying skunk stripes. Said his grandfather’d learned it from the Indians. How wide this year, how wide last year. Never failed. So you use beans?”

So I pushed my oar in and I said, “I guess you don’t have the kind of beans that the man gave Jack for the cow and he planted them and they were all different colors. Well, a beanstalk grew way way up and he climbed—”

Father said, “Now don’t bother Mrs. Grummick, sonny,” but she leaned over the fence and picked me up and set me down on her side of it.

“You, liddle boy, come in house and tell me. You, mister: buy coal.”

Mrs. Grummick gave me a glass of milk from the nanny goat who lived in one of the sheds, and a piece of gingerbread, and I told her the story of Jack and the beanstalk. Here’s a funny thing—she believed it. I’m sure she did. It wasn’t even what the kids call Making Believe, it was just a pure and simple belief. Then she told
me
a story. This happened on the other side, in some backwoods section of Europe where she came from. In this place they used to teach the boys to read, but not the girls. They figured, what did they need it for? So one day there was this little girl, her brothers were all off in school and she was left at home sorting beans. She was supposed to pick out all the bad beans and the worms, and when she thought about it and about everything, she began to cry.

Suddenly the little girl looked up and there was this old woman. She asked the kid how come she was crying. Because all the boys can learn to read, but not me. Is
that
all? the old lady asked.

Don’t cry, she said.
I’ll
teach you how to read, only not in books, the old lady said. Let the
men
read books, books are new things, people could read before there were books. Books tell you what
was
, but you’ll be able to tell you what’s
going
to be. And this old lady taught the little girl how to read the beans instead of the books. And I kind of have a notion that Mrs. Grummick said something about how they once used to read
bones,
but maybe it was just her accent and she meant beans…

And you know, it’s a funny thing, but, now, if you look at dried beans, you’ll notice how each one is maybe a little different shape or maybe the wrinkles are a little different. But I was thinking that, after all, an “A” is an “A” even if it’s big or small or twisted or…

But that was the story Mrs. Grummick told me. So it isn’t remarkable, if she could believe
that
story, she could easily believe the Jack and the Beanstalk one. But the funny thing was, all that hot weather just vanished one day suddenly, and from October until almost April we had what you might call an ironbound winter. Terrible blizzards one right after another. The rivers were frozen and the canals were frozen and even the railroads weren’t running and the roads were blocked more than they were open. And coal? Why, you just couldn’t
get
coal. People were freezing to death right and left. But Mrs. Grummick’s little house was always warm and it smelled real nice with all those herbs and dried flowers and stuff hanging around in it.

A few years later my sister got married. And after that, in the summertime, she and her husband Jim used to come back and visit with us. Jim and I used to play ball and we had a fine time—they didn’t have any children, so they made much of me. I’ll always remember those happy summers.