The Avram Davidson Treasury (25 page)

Well, you know, each summer, a few of the churches used to get together and charter a boat and run an excursion. All the young couples used to go, but my sister always made some excuse. See, she was always afraid of the water. This particular summer the same thing happened, but her friends urged her to come. My brother-in-law, he didn’t care one way or the other. And then, with all the joking, someone said, Let’s ask Mrs. Grummick to read it in the beans for us. It had gotten known, you see. Everybody laughed, and more for the fun of it than anything else, I suppose, they went over and spoke to her. She said that Sister and Jim could come inside, but there wasn’t room for anybody else. So we watched through the window.

Mrs. Grummick spread her beans on the table and began to shove them around here and there with her fingers. Some she put to one side and the rest she little by little lined up in rows. Then she took from one row and added to another row and changed some around from one spot to another. And meanwhile, mind you, she was muttering to herself, for all the world like one of these old people who reads by putting his finger on each word and mumbling it. And what was the answer?

“Don’t go by the water.”

And that was all. Well, like I say, my sister was just looking for any excuse at all, and Jim didn’t care. So the day of the excursion they went off on a picnic by car. I’d like to have gone, but I guess they sort of wanted to be by themselves a bit and Jim gave me a quarter and I went to the movies and bought ice-cream and soda.

I came out and the first thing I saw was a boy my own age, by the name of Bill Baumgardner, running down the street crying. His shirt was out and his nose was running and he kept up an awful grinding kind of howl. I called to him but he paid no attention. I still don’t know where he was running from or where to and I guess maybe he didn’t know either. Because he’d been told, by some old fool who should’ve known better, that the excursion boat had caught on fire, with his parents on it. The news swept through town and almost everybody with folks on the boat was soon in as bad a state as poor Billy.

First they said everybody was burned or drowned or trampled. Later on it turned out to be not that bad—but it was bad enough.

Oh, my folks were shook up, sure enough, but it’s easier to be calm when you know it’s not your own flesh and blood. I recall hearing the church clock striking six and my mother saying, “I’ll never laugh at Mrs. Grummick again as long as I live.” Well, she never did.

Almost everyone who had people on the boat went up the river to where it had finally been run ashore, or else they waited by the police station for news. There was a deaf lady on our street, I guess her daughter got tired of its being so dull at home and she’d lied to her mother, told her she was going riding in the country with a friend. So when the policeman came and told her—shouted at her they’d pulled out the girl’s body, she didn’t know what he was talking about. And when she finally understood she began to scream and scream and scream.

The policeman came over toward us and my mother said, “I’d better get over there,” and she started out. He was just a young policeman and his face was pale. He held up his hand and shook his head. Mother stopped and he came over. I could hear how hard he was breathing. Then he mentioned Jim’s name.

“Oh, no,” my mother said, very quickly. “They didn’t
go
on the boat.” He started to say something and she interrupted him and said, “But I tell you, they didn’t
go
—” and she looked around, kind of frantically, as if wishing someone would come and send the policeman away.

But no one did. We had to hear him out. It was Sister and Jim, all right. A big truck had gotten out of control (“—but they didn’t go on the boat,” my mother kept repeating, kind of stupidly. “They had this warning and so—”) and smashed into their car. It fell off the road into the canal. The police were called right away and they came and pulled it out. (“Oh,
oh!
Then they’re all
right!
” my mother cried.
Then
she was willing to understand.) But they weren’t all right. They’d been drowned.

So we forgot about the deaf neighbor lady because my mother, poor thing,
she
got hysterical. My father and the policeman helped her inside and after a while she just lay there on the couch, kind of moaning. The door opened and in tiptoed Mrs. Grummick. She had her lower lip tucked in under her teeth and her eyes were wide and she was kind of rocking her head from side to side. In each hand she held a little bottle—smelling salts, maybe, and some kind of cordial. I was glad to see her and I think my father was. I
know
the policeman was, because he blew out his cheeks, nodded very quickly to my father, and went away.

Mother said, in a weak, thin voice: “They didn’t go on the boat. They didn’t go because they had a warning. That’s why—” Then she saw Mrs. Grummick. The color came back to her face and she just leaped off the couch and tried to hit Mrs. Grummick, and she yelled at her in a hoarse voice I’d never heard and called her names—the kind of names I was just beginning to find out what they meant. I was, I think, more shocked and stunned to hear my mother use them than I was at the news that Sister and Jim were dead.

Well, my father threw his arms around her and kept her from reaching Mrs. Grummick and I remember I grabbed hold of one hand and how it tried to get away from me.

“You
knew!
” my mother shouted, struggling, her hair coming loose. “
You
knew! You read it there, you witch! And you didn’t tell! You didn’t tell! She’d be alive now if she’d gone on the boat. They weren’t all killed, on the boat—But you didn’t say a
word!
”

Mrs. Grummick’s mouth opened and she started to speak. She was so mixed up, I guess, that she spoke in her own language, and my mother screamed at her.

My father turned his head around and said, “You’d better get out.”

Mrs. Grummick made a funny kind of noise in her throat. Then she said, “But, Lady—mister—no—I tell you only what I see—I read there,
‘Don’t go by the water.’
I only can say what I see in front of me, only what I read. Nothing else. Maybe it mean one thing or maybe another. I only can read it. Please, lady—”

But we knew we’d lost them, and it was because of her.

“They ask
me,
” Mrs. Grummick said. “They
ask
me to read.”

My mother kind of collapsed, sobbing. Father said, “Just get out of here. Just turn around and get out.”

I heard a kid’s voice saying, high, and kind of trembling, “We don’t want you here, you old witch!
We hate you!
”

Well, it was
my
voice. And then her shoulders sagged and she looked for the first time like a real old woman. She turned around and shuffled away. At the door she stopped and half faced us. “I read no more,” she said. “I never read more. Better not to know at all.” And she went out.

Not long after the funeral we woke up one morning and the little house was empty. We never heard where the Grummicks went and it’s only now that I begin to wonder about it and to think of it once again.

I
NTRODUCTION BY
K
ATE
W
ILHELM

There is magic, indeed there is. Not in amulets or powders, not in rings with powers, or wells that grant wishes. The real magic is in words; the real magician is one who has mastered that magic. Avram was a magician. In a few words he opens the door to reveal another world, magic
. Oh, my, but a woman your age shouldn’t be working, the ladies said. No, no, I couldn’t, really. Magic. A
revealed world. Or later:
“Another day. And everything is left to me. Every single thing… Don’t take all morning with those few dishes.”
Another world, narrower, meaner. And again:
Her thrust she hand into she bosom… “You ugly old duppy! Me never fear no duppy, no, not me!”

Deftly, with enviable precision, savage wit, an undeceived eye and infallible ear Avram created his magic spell and in a very short story answered the question: “Where Do You Live, Queen Esther?” But more, by drawing us into his universe, his universe also entered us. It is now part of us. That is the enchantment of words woven by a master magician.

WHERE DO YOU LIVE, QUEEN ESTHER?

C
OLD
,
COLD
,
IT WAS
, in the room where she lodged, so far from her work. The young people complained of the winter, and those born to the country—icy cold, it was, to them. So how could a foreign woman bear it, and not a young one? She had tried to find another job not so far (none were near).
Oh, my, but a woman your age shouldn’t be working,
the ladies said.
No, no, I couldn’t, really
. Kindly indeed. Thank you, mistress.

There was said to be hot water sometimes in the communal bathroom down the hall—the water in the tap in her room was so cold it burned like fire: so strange: hot/cold—but it was always too late when she arrived back from work. Whither she was bound now. Bound indeed.

A long wait on the bare street corner for the bus. Icy winds and no doorway, even, to shelter from the winds. In the buses—for there were two, and another wait for the second—if not warm, then not so cold. And at the end, a walk for many blocks. The mistress not up yet.

Mistress …
Queen Esther thought about Mrs. Raidy, the woman of the house. At first her was startled by the word—to she it mean, a woman live with a man and no marriage lines. But then her grew to like it, Mrs. Raidy did. Like to hear, too, mention of
the Master and the young Master,
his brother.

Both of they at table. “That second bus,” Queen Esther said, unwrapping her head. “He late again. Me think, just to fret I.”

“Oh, a few minutes don’t matter. Don’t worry about it,” the master, Mr. Raidy, said. He never called the maid by name, nor did the mistress, but the boy—

As now, looking up with a white line of milk along his upper lip, he smiled and asked. “Where do you live, Queen Esther?” It was a game they played often. His brother—quick glance at the clock, checking his watch, head half turned to pick up sounds from upstairs, said that he wasn’t to bother “her” with his silly question. A pout came over the boy’s face, but yielded to her quick reply.

“Me live in the Carver Rooms on Fig Street, near Burr.”

His smile broadened. “Fig! That’s a fun-ny name for a street… But where do you live at home, Queen Esther? I know: Spahnish Mahn. And what you call a fig we call a bah-nah-nah. See, Freddy?
I
know.”

The older one got up. “Be a goodboynow,” he said, and vanished for the day.

The boy winked at her. “Queen Esther from Spanish Man, Santa Marianne, Bee-Double-You-Eye. But I really think it should be Spanish
Main,
Queen Esther.” He put his head seriously to one side. “That’s what they used to call the Caribbean Sea, you know.”

And he fixed with his brooding, ugly little face her retreating back as she went down to the cellar to hang her coat and change her shoes.

“The sea surround we on three sides at Spanish Man,” she said, returning.

“You should say, ‘surrounds
us,’
Queen Esther… You have a very funny accent, and you aren’t very pretty.”

Looking up from her preparations for the second breakfast, she smiled. “True
for
you, me lad.”

“But then, neither am I. I look like my father. I’m
his
brother, not
hers
, you know. Do you go swimming much when you live at home, Queen Esther?”

She put up a fresh pot of coffee to drip and plugged in the toaster and set some butter to brown as she beat the eggs; and she told him of how they swim at Spanish Man on Santa Marianna, surrounded on three sides by the sea. It was the least of the Lesser Antilles… She lived only part of her life in the land she worked in, the rest of the time—in fact, often at the same time—she heard, in the silence and cold of the mainland days and nights, the white surf beating on the white sands and the scuttling of the crabs beneath the breadfruit trees.

“I thought I would come down before you carried that heavy tray all the way upstairs,” said the mistress, rubbing her troubled puffy eyes. Her name was Mrs. Eleanor Raidy—she was the master’s wife—and her hair was teased up in curlers. She sat down with a grunt, sipped coffee, sighed. “What would I ever do without you?”

She surveyed the breakfast-in-progress. “I hope I’ll be able to eat. And to retain. Some mornings …” she said darkly. Her eyes made the rounds once more. “There’s no pineapple, I suppose?” she asked faintly. “Grated, with just a little powdered sugar? Don’t go to any extra trouble,” she added, as Queen Esther opened the icebox. “Rodney.
Rodney?
Why do I have to shout and—”

“Yes, El. What?”

“In
that
tone of voice? If it were for my pleasure, I’d say, Nothing. But I see your brother doesn’t care if you eat or not. Half a bowl of—”

“I’m finished.”

“You are not finished. Finish now.”

“I’ll be
late,
El. They’re waiting for me.”

“Then they’ll wait. Rush out of here with an empty stomach and then fill up on some rubbish? No. Finish the cereal.”

“But it’s
cold.
”

“Who let it get cold? I’m not too sure at all I ought to let you go. This Harvey is older than you and he pals around with girls older than he is. Or maybe they just fix themselves up to look—eat. Did you
hear
what I say? Eat. Most disgusting sight I ever saw, lipstick, and the
clothes?
Don’t let me catch you near them. They’ll probably be rotten with disease in a few years.” Silently, Queen Esther grated pineapple. “I don’t like the idea of your going down to the Museum without adult supervision. Who knows what can happen? Last week a boy your age was crushed to death by a truck. Did you have a—
look
at me, young man, when I’m talking to you—did you have a movement?”

“Yes.”