Who Made Stevie Crye? (17 page)

XXXIII

The house was cozy
. A glance from the doorway showed Stevie that the front room served the Sister not only as entertainment area and business office, but also as a shrine to the beauty and achievements of her children. Framed photographs of four or five young people in Sunday finery, mortar boards, or military uniforms hung like religious icons in one corner. A plump paisley sofa and an upright piano partitioned the room into smaller “rooms,” among which Stevie could imagine Sister Celestial floating as the whims of memory, fortune, or will directed her. Because the piano’s gap-toothed grin blocked easy access to the recesses beyond, Stevie halted and stared at its dingy ivory keys.

Sister Celestial was in the niche beyond the piano. Looking over the ferns arrayed in red clay pots atop it, she said, “You like to hear this baby play, child? Rattle you off a tune all by itself?”

“Ma’am?” Stevie’s eyes widened.

“Shut that door and come on in. This is a player piano. It runs through rolls. Sometimes I feed it a roll, sit back, and let some W. C. Handy or Leadbelly fill up my hungriness for blues. Can’t play a nursery rhyme myself. You like to hear some automated jass, gal?” She said
jass
instead of
jazz
, and Stevie had the clear impression that the Sister was teasing her, both about the piano’s roll-playing capabilities and her own stereotypical tastes in music.

“I didn’t come here to listen to the piano.”

“Of course you didn’t. You’re a woman in trouble looking for a story. You came here to solve your problems. Come on, then. Get around here where we can do somethin’ for you.”

Sister Celestial’s head, with its cap of tight iron-gray ringlets, disappeared behind the green-velvet plumes of the ferns. Stevie edged around the piano and found the woman sitting in a coaster chair of varnished oak behind a wobbly card table whose torn vinyl surface was patched in several places with masking tape. The vinyl itself was like a sheet of melted Valentine’s candy, sticky and red. To the prophetess’s right, wedged against the wall, was a typewriter stand on which the Sister had enthroned an ancient Remington. This machine appeared to be sixty or seventy years old, a model, Stevie surmised, not unlike the one on which Mark Twain had prepared the first typewritten manuscript ever submitted to a publishing company. What a deluge old Mark had precipitated. Now, even though word processors were threatening to make typewriters passé, Stevie had found an antique in active use. She gaped at it as she had gaped at the piano.

“You type?” she asked.

“I do a two-finger dogtrot, child. Sit down in that folding chair there. We’ll take your contentment temperature and try to bring it back up to ninety-eight-point-six.”

Stevie did not sit. “Are the people who visit you crazy?” She wondered if Sister Celestial’s bulky Remington, a Platonic paradigm of the Typewriter (with a capital T) made manifest, were a phantom on the order of the monkey that had jumped down from Seaton Benecke’s shoulder. Maybe she was not seeing a typewriter at all. Maybe her mind was deceiving her again.

“Not crazy, usually. Some got fevers, some got chills. You got a chill, a bone-deep chill. I can hear the ice in your marrow ever’ time you breathe, child.”

“Why do you have a typewriter?”

“It belonged to Emmanuel Berthelot, first boss man of the Berthelot Mills in Ladysmith. My daddy was his driver, and in 1936, when Old Emmanuel died, that machine came to my daddy as a bequeathment. My daddy passed it on to me when he passed on.”

“I mean, what do you use it for? In your business?”

“Besides typin’ letters and so on? Well, I keep files. Each and every soul I talk to gets a case history, complete as can be. Some of the fevered folks who visit me are decoys for the IRS.”

“The IRS?”

Sister Celestial smiled so that crow’s-feet formed around her limpid brown eyes. “Internal Revenue, child. Here’s my rhyme:

I R Ass,

U R Ass,

If Us Do Sass

The I-R-Ass.

That’s why I keep my files. Files look fine and official, not to mention up-and-up, when they’re typewriter clean. This old batterbox types clean. Now sit down, child, so I can do you, hear?”

Stevie sat. On the wobbly card table she put the folder containing the nightmare transcripts. But she was supposed to
do
Sister Celestial (for a story); Sister Celestial wasn’t supposed to
do
her. The whole idea of stopping here was to get material for an article, else her presence in this cozily warm house, across an expanse of slick red vinyl from a black woman with a manner as soothingly cynical as Dr. Elsa’s, made no sense. Why, then, had she brought the nightmare transcripts with her? To be
done
? Yes, probably. But whether she would be
done with
the obsessions these transcripts embodied, or
done in
by their more sinister implications, remained to be seen.

Sister Celestial rolled a piece of typing paper into the Remington and held both forefingers over the keyboard. “Name?”

“I thought you were supposed to tell your clients about themselves. I didn’t think they had to do it for you.”

“
Ma-ry Ste-ven-son Crye
,” said Sister Celestial, typing out Stevie’s full name with two fingers. “Age?”

“How did you know that?”

“Thirty-five. Address?”

“Wait a minute, Sister. I—”

“
Box 609, Barclay, Georgia, 31820
. Occupation?”

“Sister Celestial, please—”

“
Writer
.” Mercifully, the Sister stopped typing and looked up. “Well, that last one was easy. You told me it, didn’t you? Now the others . . . the others I got my ways of knowing. I’m like an I-R-Assman that way, child.”

“Do you know the trouble you heard in my voice?” Stevie asked. “Do you know why I
really
let you get me inside your house?”

“I reckon I may. It’d be better for both of us, though, if I didn’t have to dogtrot it onto paper before you told me. Talkin’ it out’s part of the answer. You talkin’, not me.”

“A hotshot shrink in Atlanta would charge me fifty dollars for that little analysis,” Stevie said reminiscently.

“I ain’t that precious, Miz Crye. ’Sides, I don’t shrink. I expand. I open doors, let out pleats, and undo hems. You’ll feel looser when you leave here.”

“Or my money back?”

“Every penny. And if I know Sheriff Gates, he’ll come along to help you collect. Been waitin’ to shut me down since Christmas. Don’t like my new sign.” She waved the tips of her typing fingers beneath her nostrils. “
His
sign’s an old one. Pisces. It stinks from everlastin’ to everlastin’.”

The Sister’s clever disparagement of authority—first the IRS and now the county sheriff—made Stevie relax. Perhaps, like Seaton Benecke, Sister Celestial loyally read
The Columbus Ledger
. If so, close attention to Stevie’s feature stories over the last fourteen or fifteen months would have given the palmist a clue to her identity. As for guessing her age, pitchmen in carnivals did that sort of thing all the time, and Stevie had openly told the Sister in what town she lived and why she was in a hurry to get home. That the woman had known her given name and her post-office-box number disturbed her, yes, but these minor mysteries seemed both less urgent and less frightening than the fact that her Exceleriter had taken on an uncontrollable life of its own. Stevie decided not to fret about them. Whereas the Exceleriter had become the outlet of an evil intelligence and the harbinger of some unspecified doom, Sister Celestial seemed to represent the very antithesis of menace: light, hope, warmth, and humanity. Anyway, that was how Stevie wanted to view her and so she made the desire the deed.

“How much for a half hour of your time?”

“Go ahead and lean on me, Miz Crye. If you ever come back, we’ll settle up. This session’s a freebie ’cause I think I’m gonna see you again.”

“Why?”

“Never mind. Not even the sharpest inner eye can see tomorrow as whole as a Grade-A egg. I just got a feeling.”

What a palmist-prophetess-healer! She did not ask to look at Stevie’s hand. She did not reach down and lift a crystal ball to the top of the table. She did not deal out cards, or palpate the bumps on Stevie’s noggin, or split a commercial tea bag and try to sort the shredded leaves with the aid of an oolong stick or a pekoe magnet. She just sat with her fingers poised over the lovely old Remington, her head half turned toward her client, listening attentively even during her fingers’ intermittent tattoos on the keyboard. Stevie was amazed by the woman’s studious secretarial mien and quick two-fingered meticulousness. It was not what Stevie had expected, but it was oddly calming—flattering, even. Her troubles mattered; the manifold woes of the world did not overwhelm and extinguish them as topics of interest and concern. Not here.

Stevie kept her hands on her manila folder as she talked. She purposely did not refer to its contents, speaking instead of the precariousness of her position as breadwinner and surrogate father-figure. Of its frustrations, uncertainties, and daily trials. This was the stuff of her book proposal, but, here, without the literary filigree, the calculated recourse to redeeming humor, or the underlying profit motive. This was an unembellished cry that made Sister Celestial’s typewriter rattle and the times between its rattlings reverberate with the minor-key music of doubt and clinical self-accusation. A husband dead, two children to raise, a talent of modest proportions, an ambition incommensurate with that talent, an ego so fragile that even praise could bruise it, and a temper of volcanic dimensions, capped now by the lava dome of her own crusty concept of female machismo.
These
were the troubles Sister Celestial had heard in her voice,
these
were the troubles Stevie had borne for almost two years with spotty, self-conscious stoicism. They probably gave her voice a recognizable inflection, an ineradicable melancholy lilt, and so the prophetess had heard her lingering, ever-present hurt. Had heard it even through Stevie’s impatience and annoyance, the way the cry of a hungry gull is audible even over the relentless booming of the surf. The recitation of these troubles wore Stevie down. By the time she was casting about for an ending, tears spotted the backs of her hands and stained the manila folder beneath them. A fine, rousing rush of self-pity. A sad, humiliating spate of the Crye-Me-a-River-I-Cryed-a-River-Over-You blues. Jesus, Stevie. Jesus . . .

“You still haven’t let it all out,” the black woman said.

“That’s plenty, isn’t it?” She wiped her eyes on her car-coat sleeve.

“That’s nothing, Miz Crye Baby. Nothing at all.” Sister Celestial had swiveled away from the Remington toward her, and her face, the harshness of her punning epithet aside, gleamed with cool compassion. She pointed her chin across the little room. “You see that gallery over there?”

“That shrine?” Stevie said, looking over her shoulder.

The Sister chuckled mordantly. “Call it how you like. Those my babies, child. Two boys, three girls, all of ’em got step by step from diapers to dress-ups. Single-handed, pretty much. Prophetess Joy found the formula, Miz Crye, and her and her offspring got me and mine through some truly baaaaad times. Mother Miracle sent two of those children to Columbus College and might of got another one through if he hadn’t skipped off to Saskatchewan.”

“I can do it because you did it, huh?”

“Maybe not. I’m a hard act to follow. And I had a tougher row of turnips to chop. My man didn’t die, either. He up and run off when I was carryin’ my fifth. My daddy long since dead and my mama gone to Michigan with a motor-car-makin’ man, I was twenty-two. I got to be Prophetess Joy ’cause that’s what I wanted to prophesy. People like to hear it, too, even when joy’s a long shot or a outright lie. Joy begat Promise, who begat Miracle, who begat Pauline, who begat this heavenly body. That’s the American way, the Land of Opportunities. Ronald Reagan’s trying hard to give you the same kind of chance I had, Miz Crye, so maybe you can do it, after all. Maybe you can.”

“Thanks for the incentive.”

“Didn’t any incentives come from me, not from me to you, and if they did, you’re worse off than even
you
think.” She swiveled back to her typewriter. “You still haven’t let it all out.”

Stevie took a tissue from her pocket and wiped her eyes, sniffled into it. Twisted it into flimsy corkscrews. She had come to Sister Celestial’s house to interview her, but had wound up being interviewed. Could she tell this stranger—no longer a stranger, but suddenly her confessor and confidante—the impossible sequence of events that had twisted her life as she was twisting this Kleenex? Stevie thrust it deep into her coat pocket and stared at the Sister.

“What’s your real name? You know mine. What’s yours?”

“Betty Malbon,” Sister Celestial said forthrightly. “Why?”

“I have to know you’re a real person, not something my mind’s made up.”

“Pinch yourself, Stevie, if that’s okay to call you. Then pinch me.” Betty Malbon laid her arm across the red vinyl for Stevie to pinch.

First, Stevie pinched herself on her left flank. An unnecessary experiment. Without pinching or jabbing or twisting her own mortal flesh, she hurt. Her pain was diffuse and amorphous, like a cloud. It lay like a cloud on her dully persistent awareness of her own inconsequential self. I hurt; therefore, I am. A philosophy she could rephrase as Don’t put Descartes before de hearse. Thinking has nothing to do with it. Hurting has everything, from your first footstep to your final falldown. Even though you’re overstating your own hurt, which is nothing to what the Sister and millions of others have suffered, you’re a piker when it comes to pain, for the elite, God bless ’em, are saints of unremitting wretchedness.

“All right, child. Now give me a pinch.”

Seizing a bit of Betty Malbon’s wrist between her fingers, Stevie twisted it as she had twisted her Kleenex.

“Uncle!” cried Miz Malbon. “Uncle!” Stevie let go. “That proof enough for you, or you think I’m putting on a hurt I don’t really feel? I’m as real to me as you are to you. Maybe realer.”

“I know. That’s what scares me. Sometimes, lying awake at night, or half-asleep, I feel myself fading away.”