The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp (6 page)

They fell to kissing again, Miss Spaulding firmly under his spell. I’d thought she had better sense, but then I’d only seen her during a school day. The spectacles she always wears on a chain had fallen off her nose and were swinging free. Her hair was escaping from its bun, and Mr. Lacy was all over her. Before I could recover from this shock, I got another one, quite a lot worse.

Staring intently through the bush at these so-called lovers, I failed to protect my backside. Maybe I heard a twig snap behind me, maybe not.

A hand closed like a claw on my shoulder. Another thorny hand, scarcely human, clapped over my mouth. My breath was cut off, and my heart hollered. Pinned though I was behind the elderberry bush, I wrenched my head around.

I was staring up into a fearful face with eyes sharp as black diamonds boring into mine. Then I was scared for sure. There aren’t two faces like that anywhere in North America. It was my mama.

A
NY SCENE WITH
M
AMA IN IT
is always painful to recall. Though I could have walked, she dragged me clear back to town by the scruff of the neck. Over her humped shoulder was a sack of hickory nuts. Mama is a fortune-teller by trade, but in the fall we add to our income by nut gathering. We also do a certain amount of gardening, often in other people’s gardens.

On our homeward trip we paused once for her to cut a switch off a bush for my legs. Mama isn’t up-to-date on child raising and is liable to whup the tar out of me over any little matter.

At home she flung me into a chair and eased the sack onto the floor, saying, “Ooph’ll larn youoph to fool arounph in theph timber, youoph little—”

“Mama,” I said, “put your teeth in if you’re going to talk.” I can understand her anyhow but hoped to distract her. She won’t wear her teeth much, a good artificial pair, and will leave them around most anyplace. Luck wasn’t with me, as they were right there on the table between a pack of playing cards and her
crystal ball. She popped them in, which fills out her face no end, and turned on me.

“Now listen, Mama,” I said, talking fast. “I only went out to the woods to learn what a bunch of boys were going to pull on Halloween. You know yourself what damage they can do if some responsible person such as myself doesn’t put a stop to it.”

Mama’s snaky eyes narrowed. She thrust her terrible face closer to mine, and her earrings swayed. They were a pair of gambler’s dice hanging from her lobes, which is an example of Mama’s taste in jewelry. I talked faster.

“I didn’t set out to spy on Mr. Lacy, my history teacher, who’s two-timing Miss Fuller, the gym teacher with Miss Mae—”

“Shut up,” Mama remarked, taking up the switch. Her mean gaze fell on my legs.

“It was an accident, pure and simple. I just chanced onto that Lovers’ Lane, where—”

“You was creepin’ up on that house. I caught you at it.” Mama lashed the air with her switch, testing it. I tried not to notice.

“What house?” I inquired.

Thwack
went the switch on the tabletop with a dreadful sound. “The old Leverette place, don’t play goody-goody with me.”

It’s remarkable how plain Mama can speak with her teeth in. They grinned at me, but she didn’t.

“The old Leverette place?” I echoed. Mama seemed to be off on one of her tangents.

Thwack
on the table again. “You heard me. You
don’t go near that place. I tell you one time, you listen.”
Thwack
yet again.

“I don’t have any business in Old Man Leverette’s tumbledown place.”

“You can say that agin,” Mama mocked, but she’d turned loose of the switch. It rested on the table as a stern reminder. There was something going on in Mama’s mind.

“You keep clear of that place,” she advised, “or I’ll slap you to sleep.”

“Why, Mama?”

She grunted, somehow pleased. “I knowed you hadn’t figured it out. Ain’t I told you time and agin your Powers is puny compared to mine? I won’t have you dabblin’ in things you can’t handle. I got my reputation to consider.”

It began to dawn on me. “You mean the place is haunted?”

“I know what I know.” Her teeth clacked in some satisfaction. “You don’t know nothin’.”

Nobody likes to be talked down to that way, especially by a mother. I tried to reason the situation out. “It couldn’t be haunted by Old Man Leverette. He’s alive and kicking right here in Bluff City.”

Though she was still looming over me, Mama drew out a pouch of Bull Durham chewing tobacco from the black folds of her shroud. She pulled off a plug and popped it into her mouth. While she jawed it down to size, I gave the matter more thought.

“Was there a halo about the place?” I asked her. Mama can occasionally tell if a place is haunted if
she sees a mystical halo arching over its roof. It’s one of her better ways.

“If you had any Powers whatsoever,” she responded rudely, “you’d know that for yourself.”

At least she seemed to forget the switch. A plug of Bull Durham will soothe Mama every time. “It ain’t that kind of a haunting,” she offered, just to show her superior knowledge.

I sighed. There isn’t much you can do with Mama. Her temper was cooling, though. She ambled around the table and sat down. She can strike a kitchen match with one flick of her thumbnail. She did so now, lighting up a coal oil lamp. We’re not wired for electricity because of the expense and because Mama says the fad for it won’t last.

“Draw up your chair, and I’ll give you a readin’,” she says in quite a civil manner, like I’m a customer. There is no charting Mama’s moods.

She swept up her pack of cards. There’s nobody like Mama for handling a deck. She can shuffle in the air and cut them one-handed. “Take a card, any card,” she said, fanning them out on the table.

I turned over the two of clubs, having no doubt she’d give the same reading to any card I happened to draw. There’s a lot of show business in Mama.

“Hmmmmm.” She squinted at it, then up at me. “That’s real interesting, that is,” she said, gargling tobacco juice.

“Well, Mama, let’s have it. Am I going to make a long journey and meet a handsome stranger?”

Mama doesn’t take any sass. “If it’s yore fortune
you want to hear, I can give it to you in a nutshell: You won’t set down for a week if I catch you near the Old Leverette place. But I ain’t doin’ a reading on you. That there two of clubs is sending a message. If you don’t clam up, I ain’t tellin’ you what it is.”

Between Daisy-Rae and Mama it’s a wonder I have any grammar left. Her head began to bob and weave. Her eyes rolled back in her head, which is not a pretty sight.

“Oh, yeah,” she muttered, “I hear it clear. Here comes the message from the Great Beyond. Lay it on me!”

I waited patiently, having no choice. At last in a far-off voice she spoke:
“Not all the Unliving are dead!”

Then she jerked awake. “Where am I? What time is it? What’d I say?”

I sighed. “You said, ‘Not all the Unliving are dead!’”

“Did I? Ain’t that interesting!”

“If you say so, Mama. Is that the entire message?”

Her eyes squinched to glittering slits. “It’s more than enough to them with the Second Sight, which you ain’t got much of.” She parked her Bull Durham up in her cheek in a final way, so I figured the reading was over.

“Gittin’ about suppertime, ain’t it?” She glanced over to a bare cupboard and a cold stove. “How does a nice fried chicken sound to you?”

Reaching down on the floor, she fished up a burlap
sack and tossed it across the table at me. My heart sank.

“Git a nice plump one,” she ordered, “and don’t take all night about it.”

I took up the sack with a heavy heart I don’t mind doing chores, but I hate rifling around in other people’s henhouses every time Mama gets a taste for fried chicken.

“One of these fine nights,” I mumbled at the door, “I’ll get my head blowed off.”

“Keep yore head down,” Mama advised. Then, just as I was crossing the threshold, she added, “Who’d you say them two lovebirds was, carryin’ on in the woods?”

“That was Miss Mae Spaulding, my old grade—”

“Never mind about her,” Mama said. “Who was the dude?”

“Oh, him, he’s my history teacher, name of Mr. Ambrose Lacy, and a regular snake in the—”

“I thought I knowed him!” Mama nodded wisely. “He’s trouble with a capital
T
and always was!”

Over my shoulder I saw Mama’s gaze shoot to her crystal ball to make me think she’d read some special knowledge there. I doubted that, but how she knew of Mr. Lacy I couldn’t tell. Mama is not exactly a member of the PTA.

There was no time to ponder this point. “You stick to yore own business,” Mama said, sending a jet of brown tobacco juice onto the floor. “Curiosity killed the cat.”

But satisfaction brought that cat back,
I remarked
to myself as I followed Mama’s long, crooked finger pointing out into the night.

An open-sided streetcar, all lit up, clattered past on the tracks outside our house. I followed along in its wake, walking a rail with my sack over my shoulder.

There on the far side of the Armsworth barn, I supposed, Alexander and all the Armsworths were tucking into a good roast beef and mashed potato dinner. Some people have all the luck.

Hoping to make quick work of my chore, I planned to pay a call on the first henhouse I came to. When you’re borrowing chickens, it’s best to work the other end of town. But I was half-starved, and Mama’s temper is short.

As luck would have it, I came up on the back lot of Old Man Leverette’s town property. There, beyond a row of dry hollyhocks, was the Leverette privy, and there, at an angle across his punkin patch, the Leverette henhouse.

A light glowed from the window in the kitchen door, but it seemed locked up for the night. I waited a moment in the privy’s shadow and then drifted with care across the punkin patch.

Working along a woven-wire fence, I found the gate into the chicken yard and made my way across hen grit and worse. Then I eased open the crude latch on the henhouse door. From within came the little sighs and flutterings of chickens gone to roost.

Nothing you can name smells worse than the inside
of a henhouse on a windless night. I slipped inside and waited for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. The Rhode Island Reds were all but invisible on their perches, but the white breeds glowed dimly.

I took a careful step on the slick floor, and a large hen stirred by my ear. The bead of her eye observed me, and I froze. She tucked her head under a wing again. My watchful eye scanned down the row to find one of her sisters less alert.

Chickens aren’t the brightest of birds, but easily flustered.

I found a likely specimen, well feathered out. Her beak was tucked beneath her wing, and her neck curved plumply. My hand moved out, fingers itching. In a sudden gesture I had her by the throat, shutting off her wind.

Then things went seriously wrong.

From behind me the henhouse door was nearly wrenched from its hinges. Night air gusted in, and every hen in the place rose up and screamed bloody murder. I turned my particular fowl loose, and she flapped, squawking, away to the rafters.

There’s nothing louder than surprised chickens, and the air was white with feathers. I have no doubt they all laid eggs at once. I could have laid one myself.

“
REACH FOR THE SKY
,” a voice roared, “
I GOT YOU COVERED
.” I dropped my sack. It was one of those days.

“
TURN AROUND SLOW AND EASY
.”

As I turned, I saw a great bear-shaped shadow filling the henhouse door. I was also staring into both barrels of a shotgun. “Hold your fire.” I sighed. “I am unarmed.”

The barrels twitched. “
ARE YOU A BOY OR A DWARF
?”

“Neither,” I answered, somewhat discouraged.

As there’s no back way out of a henhouse, I was soon in the open air, which cleared my head, though both barrels were still trained on me.

“Why, there you are, Old—Mr. Leverette,” I said quite politely. “I been looking all over the place for you.”

“
I
’
LL BET
,” Old Man Leverette thundered. A rising moon played on his thatch of white hair and whiskers. He’s an immense old person, but spry. He squinted at me down his gun barrels. “Durned if you aren’t a girl!”

“That’s right,” I replied, “come to pay you a neighborly call. If you recollect, I dropped in on you last Halloween.”

“How many chickens did it cost me that time?” he asked in a threatening voice.

“It was a visit in your best interests. So is this one. Last year I saved your privy from being knocked over. This is your lucky day, as I’m back to do you another good turn.”

“If you ain’t cool as a cucumber!” Old Man Leverette marveled. His barrels lowered. “Seems like I do recollect a young gal hanging around my privy. What did you say your name was?”

“Letty Shambaugh,” I answered, since I always give Letty’s name whenever I’m in a tight corner.

He rested his shotgun in the crook of his arm. “Well, Letty, I was just setting to my supper, so talk fast and make it good.”

I meant to do my best. “It’s like this. Purely by chance I happened to overhear three boys from the high school laying plans to make a regular mess of your front porch and do you an injury the night before Halloween.”

“Do tell,” Old Man Leverette said. “Who’d you say these boys is?”

“I didn’t. Kindly don’t interrupt. They mean to set a paper sack of fresh horse manure on the porch floor in front of your door. They’re going to ring your bell and set the sack of horse manure afire. Then they’ll hide in your shrubbery and watch you run out and stomp on that sack to put the fire out. It could burn your feet and set your nightshirt afire. You could also slip in that mess and break your hip. At your age a broken hip is no joke. Of course, that won’t happen now that you’ve been warned by a responsible person such as myself.” I paused to catch my breath.

Old Man Leverette uttered an oath and tugged on his chin whiskers. “The old horse manure stunt,” he said in a remembering voice. “We used to pull that one when I was a kid.”