The Salt Eaters (7 page)

“What ought I do about the Henry gal, Old Wife?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Don’t you? Ain’t you omniscient yet, Old Wife? Don’t frown up. All knowing. Ain’t you all knowing? What’s the point of being in all-when and all-where if you not going to take advantage of the situation and become all knowing? And all the wisdom of the ages is available to you, isn’t that so?”

“Is? I guess I have all I’m supposed to, Min, excusin your ear, beggin your pardon. I been tryin to get you to come to chapel for some time, Min, and now look like you want to traipse off after the Henry girl and go dancing in the mud. Her pull mighty strong. You best grab hold of that stool you’re on and come on to chapel.”

“I’m coming,” stretching up to pull down the branch where she’ll find the exact leaf that will dip just so, releasing onto her finger the droplet of dew she will roll between thumb and ring finger like a drop of mercury. “Seems to me you are not making the most of your situation, Old Wife. You studying?”

“You? You making the most of your situation, Min?”

“Ya know, Old Wife, here lately you getting to be downright Jewish.”

“Is that right?”

“Just a little around the edges. I ask you a question, you answer with a question.”

“For a fact?”

“Quit funning,” wagging her head and turning toward the break in the trees. The rainbow—lemon, lime, melon and sherbert-pink arching. “We got a problem here. I can’t quite reach this chile and you keep acting like you dumb as me stead of telling me what to do. Now, suppose you just dig on down into that reticule bag of yours and fish me out a bat bone or some magic root,” chuckling.

“You know I don’t traffic in such, Minnie Ransom.”

“You do too. Fess up, what you hauling round in that gris gris sack?”

“A few personals.”

“Personals. What you need with personals anymore? Don’t they orient you none around here? Didn’t they tell you anything?”

“Why I need some ‘they’ to tell me somp’n when I got you, Min?”

“Okay. I’m gonna hush now and we gonna concentrate on this growler scowler Henry gal that’s blocking my sun. She’s good material, ya know. We need to get her back into circulation.”

“I know this. Trouble is, Min, she got piss-poor guardians.”

“Well, don’t look at me. I ain’t fixin to die yet just to be her guardian … am I?”

“Am you which?”

“I’m hushing up as of now, cause I see you are determined to be raffish,” stepping high over the lemon grass toward the fountain, the cooling spray against her cheek.

“Your dress misbehavin, Min.”

“Wind.”

“Beggin your pardon, but wind my foot. You fixin to mess with that young doctor man behind yo corporal body. I seen you casting a voluptuous eye in that doctor man’s direction. You fixin to get into somp’n, Min.”

“Ahhh, so you are omniscient or clairvoyant one,” leaning against the fountain for a full appraisal of this woman friend who’d been with her for most of her life, one way and then another. Nothing much had changed since she passed. Old Wife’s complexion was still like mutton suet and brown gravy congealed on a plate. She was still slack jawed. The harelip was as deep a gouge as ever. Nothing much to recommend her, or to signal she was special. “You’d think they’da fixed that lip,” Minnie muttering to herself, sitting down on the ledge she’d built during her apprenticeship. A fountain made from ceramic pipes she’d thought much too lovely to be laid underground conducting sewerage. A pause to view the water, to watch the fishes glinting shots of shine around the pool, the aromas from the right wafting past like a brushstroke in a cartoon. Gardenias, lily of the valley, lavender, cosmos, fuchsia, woolly apple mint, spearmint and foxglove lush on either side of the chapel’s circle doors, bumblebees drunk and swollen staggering from petal to pistil.

“Come.”

The journey, though familiar, was not the journey usual. Was like the old times before the gift unfolded. The days when everyone but her daddy was worried crazy about her, running off from Bible college to New York to get sick and be sent home on the train lying down. They called her batty, fixed, possessed, crossed, in deep trouble. Said they’d heard of people drawn to starch or chalk or bits of plaster. But the sight of full-grown, educated, well-groomed, well-raised Minnie Ransom down on her knees eating dirt, craving pebbles and gravel, all asprawl in the road with her clothes every which way—it was too much to bear. And so jumpy, like something devilish had got hold of her, leaping up from the porch, from the table, from morning prayers and racing off to the woods, the women calling at her back, her daddy dropping his harness and shading
his eyes, which slid off her back like slippery saddle soap. The woods to the path to the sweet ground beyond, then the hill, the eating hill, the special dirt behind the wash house. The days when stomping along the path, her shoes in her jumper pocket, stomping to alert the snakes that someone was coming through, she’d encounter Old Karen, the Old One, Wilder’s woman, Old Wife, the teller of tales no one would sit still to hear anymore, not when the new tellers could prophesy with such mathematical certainty who would be ill and who well, who fertile and who sterile, who crazy and who all right, who deserved to live and who was bound to die and in precisely what manner.

And Minnie would slow down just as she was told. And the older woman would hold her there on the path like a mama cat with gripping teeth. A full-grown Minnie blocked, it seemed, to the women who hurled warnings at her back, by front-pew every-Sunday-spreading-no-gettin-around-them Karen Wilder hips. Not blocked but stopped by the thoughts, by the telling, watching the cracked lips slide away as though the teeth had been greased for some finicky photographer. Waiting for Old Wife to speak, Minnie’d be stomping in place, for while it was customarily polite to pause on the path and pass the time of day with neighbor or friend who’d chosen this route over the paved walks or the bus line or the highway, it was customarily safe to keep stomping because the snakes had to be warned people were afoot. So she did as she was told, not even thinking on the snakes people said were not in the woods but kept clear of the woods as much as possible and when they didn’t, stomped with the best of them.

Minnie’d be stock still finally, while Old Wife’s eyes stared at a spot just above her head where her hair had once puffed up before the New York trip, and stared at the sides of her as though remembering her filled out, young and plump, being
sent off to Bible college in Beaufort. Held her there and the greasy teeth finally parting and “Not long, now, Minnie, and take care,” coming out, jaws unhinged, looking like a vaudeville dummy. And Minnie’d stumbled off bewildered and spooked cause Karen Wilder after all was a teller of strange tales, and who could know then that the message wasn’t about death coming to sting her but about a gift unfolding? Minnie eased away sleepwalking till a slither along the side or a rustle overhead reminded her to pick them seven’s up and plant them down like she had good sense. Sleepwalk stomping to the mound, the hill, the special place, the rich dark earth, the eating dirt that smelled of paprika and curry, smelled of spice and sweet and bitter and sweat from the days when the Gypsies had planted their Sara, their Black Madonna, at the crest of that hill and the community of Sicilians on an adjacent hill, turned their Black Maria aside, giving Sara her back. And Minnie, climbing the hill like the Matterhorn or Jacob’s Ladder one, her eyes right on Sara’s wooden orbs, not daring to look back behind her toward Old Wife, felt the old cat eyes a pinpoint of light at the crown of her head.

And there, squatting in the dirt at the top of the bluff, still listening, Minnie was told to clear the path that led up to the cliffs, set the trees, fix the rainbow, erect a fountain and build the chapel in The Mind. And going there—the cooling dark, the candles, the altar—she saw the gift and knew, for at least that instant, where the telling came from.

And would go back again and again, live there nearly all the time, in the days when she had not trusted the gift, when instructions had come, it seemed, from her back teeth as she leaned against the starchy crochets of her parlor chair and let her jaws give into gravity, her tongue resting on the cusp, her lids locking out the banging dance. But what fine radio receivers
dental fillings are, she learned, screening out the waves from mundane sources—police car messages, helicopter traffic signals, then all the CB foolishness—to be available to the waves from the Source.

“Remember the time you first showed up at a session?”

“I’d been there all along, Min, I keep telling you.”

“It amused you some? The animal doctor and all?”

“Amuses me still,” grinning with the same greasy teeth after all this time.

A vet in Bangor, Maine, had been relaying instructions to a ham operator in Orlando, Florida, who’d sent out an S.O.S. on behalf of his wounded hamster. And Minnie had been well into step three of brewing the remedy tea for her patient until “apply poultice warm to hind legs and paws” stopped her in her tracks between the stove and the pantry wall.

“Spun you right up into two jars of ginger peaches.”

“But I learned to listen and to screen.”

“You learned to pray some, Min. You never be listening too much. Just a little around the edges,” grinning. “But you learned to pray some.”

“Learning still, Old Wife, learning still.”

“But ain’t learned to quit casting a voluptuous eye on the young mens, I notice,” chirping her teeth.

“When you gonna learn, you ole stick in the mud, that ‘good’ ain’t got nothing to do with it? They packed me off to seminary thinking helping and healing and nosing around was about being good. It was only that I was … available.”

“Hmph, I say, Min. Beggin your pardon.”

“You a blip, Old Wife.”

“Well, it takes one to know one.”

“But mostly you a stick-in-the-mud,” turning to watch the young doctor, Dr. Meadows, stroll over toward the stereo where the loa were setting up—drums, tambourines, flutes,
chekere, gourds—walking right through them.

“I swear by Apollo the physician”—members of The Master’s Mind glancing up at this odd chanting—“by Aesculapius, Hygeia and Panacea”—Cora Rider muttering—“and I take to witness all the gods, all the goddesses”—the loa nudging each other, puffing on cigars and rearing back on their heels—“to keep according to my ability and my judgment the following oath …”

“Quiet.” Mr. Daniels dropped hands to wheel around from the prayer circle to jab Dr. Meadows in the chest.

“That’s no proper kind of prayer,” Cora Rider muttered hoarsely, making it clear to all within ear and eyeshot that nothing a redbone said or did could be in any wise proper.

“Shush.”

“Shush, nothin. Coming in here with all that superstitious hocus-pocus like the good woman Ransom is some Count damn Dracula he got to protect his mariny self from.”

“Cora, if you please.”

Minnie sliding her palms down her thighs and winking at her companion. “No, good ain’t got a blessed thing to do with it, Old Wife.”

“Which it?”

“Any of it. Now here I am and there I am and all I am, free to be anywhere at all in the universe. And where I choose to be in just a little while is on my front porch having a nice tête-à-tête over tea with that Dr. Meadows, who would, I’m sure, be most interested in learning about the ancient wisdoms, the real, the actual, the sho-nuff original folk stuff behind them Greek imposters he’s calling up and they’re already there. Right there in the treatment room, if he’d only see.”

“Beggin your pardon, Min, but you color struck.”

“Anywhere at all in the universe, but I choose to be here with this growler scowler. And good ain’t the key. It’s just that
I’m available to any and every adventure of the human breath.”

“You always were one for capers, Min.”

“But just look at the chile’s face. And I bet she had parents that told her, grandparents I’m sure, that God don’t like ugly.”

“God like it all, Min.”

“Just a frowning and contorting up her face. A divine creation, the human face. And just look at her. One rough customer, that one.”

“Just like you for the world, Min.”

“I ain’t studying you, Old Wife,” hunkering down among the flowers by the chapel doors. “But I’ll tell you this. The face is a wondrous thing. You can go anywhere, anywhere at all with a human face, journey straight into the Fifth Kingdom of Souls if that’s your pleasure.”

“Say which?”

“You heard me, the Fifth. Seems to me, Old Wife, that by now you should so well know all these things, you’d have things to tell me. You been dead long enough?”

“There is no age nor death in spirit, Min. Besides, I do tell you things soon’s they come to me.”

“Where from? I’ve been asking you that for years. You don’t explain things clearly, Old Wife.”

“You don’t listen good, Min. Or maybe it’s me. I never was too bright.”

“When I was a young girl I thought you were the wisest.”

“You thought I was crazy as a loon.”

“Well, what with never combing your hair and coming to church in men’s overshoes and talking to snakes and things—you were crazy as could be. But I used to watch you, slip up alongside you in the tobacco sheds and listen to you hum and talk, cause I knew you were special.”

“You said I smelled, Min.”

“Well, you did smell. Of dirt and gumbo and wintergreen
and nasty salves and pitch. Girl, you smelled of everything. But so wise. You had a way of teaching us kids things.”

“Yawl called me a witch.”

“True. But for goodness sake, we were just foolish little creatures, no more’n eleven or twelve then. Later on I wasn’t too much the fool I didn’t learn to listen to you.”

“Didn’t.”

“Did too, so quit pouting. Remember how me and Sophie and Serge and Cleotus would hang around your candy stand?”

“Messing with my papers and trying to steal the pennies.”

“Naw now. We used to like to hear you and Wilder talking over the old days and things like that. I know you know that or you wouldn’t’ve been telling us kids things to do and think about and read and check out and reach for. We couldn’t’ve grown up without you, Old Wife. None of us.”