The Grass Harp, Including a Tree of Night and Other Stories Read online

  Despite the generally beneficial effect Dolly’s medicine appeared to have on those who sent for it, letters once in a while came saying Dear Miss Talbo we won’t be needing any more dropsy cure on account of poor Cousin Belle (or whoever) passed away last week bless her soul. Then the kitchen was a mournful place; with folded hands and nodding heads my two friends bleakly recalled the circumstances of the case, and Well, Catherine would say, we did the best we could Dollyheart, but the good Lord had other notions. Verena, too, could make the kitchen sad, as she was always introducing a new rule or enforcing an old one: do, don’t, stop, start: it was as though we were clocks she kept an eye on to see that our time jibed with her own, and woe if we were ten minutes fast, an hour slow: Verena went off like a cuckoo. That One! said Catherine, and Dolly would go hush now! hush now! as though to quiet not Catherine but a mutinous inner whispering. Verena in her heart wanted, I think, to come into the kitchen and be a part of it; but she was too like a lone man in a house full of women and children, and the only way she could make contact with us was through assertive outbursts: Dolly, get rid of that kitten, you want to aggravate my asthma? who left the water running in the bathroom? which one of you broke my umbrella? Her ugly moods sifted through the house like a sour yellow mist. That One. Hush now, hush.

  Once a week, Saturdays mostly, we went to River Woods. For these trips, which lasted the whole day, Catherine fried a chicken and deviled a dozen eggs, and Dolly took along a chocolate layer cake and a supply of divinity fudge. Thus armed, and carrying three empty grain sacks, we walked out the church road past the cemetery and through the field of Indian grass. Just entering the woods there was a double-trunked China tree, really two trees, but their branches were so embraced that you could step from one into the other; in fact, they were bridged by a tree-house: spacious, sturdy, a model of a tree-house, it was like a raft floating in the sea of leaves. The boys who built it, provided they are still alive, must by now be very old men; certainly the tree-house was fifteen or twenty years old when Dolly first found it and that was a quarter of a century before she showed it to me. To reach it was easy as climbing stairs; there were footholds of gnarled bark and tough vines to grip; even Catherine, who was heavy around the hips and complained of rheumatism, had no trouble. But Catherine felt no love for the tree-house; she did not know, as Dolly knew and made me know, that it was a ship, that to sit up there was to sail along the cloudy coastline of every dream. Mark my word, said Catherine, them boards are too old, them nails are slippery as worms, gonna crack in two, gonna fall and bust our heads don’t I know it.

  Storing our provisions in the tree-house, we separated into the woods, each carrying a grain sack to be filled with herbs, leaves, strange roots. No one, not even Catherine, knew altogether what went into the medicine, for it was a secret Dolly kept to herself, and we were never allowed to look at the gatherings in her own sack: she held tight to it, as though inside she had captive a blue-haired child, a bewitched prince. This was her story: “Once, back yonder when we were children (Verena still with her babyteeth and Catherine no higher than a fence post) there were gipsies thick as birds in a blackberry patch—not like now, when maybe you see a few straggling through each year. They came with spring: sudden, like the dogwood pink, there they were—up and down the road and in the woods around. But our men hated the sight of them, and daddy, that was your great-uncle Uriah, said he would shoot any he caught on our place. And so I never told when I saw the gipsies taking water from the creek or stealing old winter pecans off the ground. Then one evening, it was April and falling rain, I went out to the cowshed where Fairybell had a new little calf; and there in the cowshed were three gipsy women, two of them old and one of them young, and the young one was lying naked and twisting on the cornshucks. When they saw that I was not afraid, that I was not going to run and tell, one of the old women asked would I bring a light. So I went to the house for a candle, and when I came back the woman who had sent me was holding a red hollering baby upside down by its feet, and the other woman was milking Fairybell. I helped them wash the baby in the warm milk and wrap it in a scarf. Then one of the old women took my hand and said: Now I am going to give you a gift by teaching you a rhyme. It was a rhyme about evergreen bark, dragonfly fern—and all the other things we come here in the woods to find: Boil till dark and pure if you want a dropsy cure. In the morning they were gone; I looked for them in the fields and on the road; there was nothing left of them but the rhyme in my head.”

  Calling to each other, hooting like owls loose in the daytime, we worked all morning in opposite parts of the woods. Towards afternoon, our sacks fat with skinned bark, tender, torn roots, we climbed back into the green web of the China tree and spread the food. There was good creek water in a mason jar, or if the weather was cold a thermos of hot coffee, and we wadded leaves to wipe our chicken-stained, fudge-sticky fingers. Afterwards, telling fortunes with flowers, speaking of sleepy things, it was as though we floated through the afternoon on the raft in the tree; we belonged there, as the sun-silvered leaves belonged, the dwelling whippoorwills.

  ABOUT ONCE A YEAR I go over to the house on Talbo Lane, and walk around in the yard. I was there the other day, and came across an old iron tub lying overturned in the weeds like a black fallen meteor: Dolly—Dolly, hovering over the tub dropping our grain-sack gatherings into boiling water and stirring, stirring with a sawed-off broomstick the brown as tobacco spit brew. She did the mixing of the medicine alone while Catherine and I stood watching like apprentices to a witch. We all helped later with the bottling of it and, because it produced a fume that exploded ordinary corks, my particular job was to roll stoppers of toilet paper. Sales averaged around six bottles a week, at two dollars a bottle. The money, Dolly said, belonged to the three of us, and we spent it fast as it came in. We were always sending away for stuff advertised in magazines: Take Up Woodcarving, Parcheesi: the game for young and old, Anyone Can Play A Bazooka. Once we sent away for a book of French lessons: it was my idea that if we got to talk French we would have a secret language that Verena or nobody would understand. Dolly was willing to try, but “Passez-moi a spoon” was the best she ever did, and after learning “Je suis fatigué,” Catherine never opened the book again: she said that was all she needed to know.

  Verena often remarked that there would be trouble if anyone ever got poisoned, but otherwise she did not show much interest in the dropsy cure. Then one year we totaled up and found we’d earned enough to have to pay an income tax. Whereupon Verena began asking questions: money was like a wildcat whose trail she stalked with a trained hunter’s muffled step and an eye for every broken twig. What, she wanted to know, went into the medicine? and Dolly, flattered, almost giggling, nonetheless waved her hands and said Well this and that, nothing special.

  Verena seemed to let the matter die; yet very often, sitting at the supper table, her eyes paused ponderingly on Dolly, and once, when we were gathered in the yard around the boiling tub, I looked up and saw Verena in a window watching us with uninterrupted fixity: by then, I suppose, her plan had taken shape, but she did not make her first move until summer.

  Twice a year, in January and again in August, Verena went on buying trips to St. Louis or Chicago. That summer, the summer I reached sixteen, she went to Chicago and after two weeks returned accompanied by a man called Dr. Morris Ritz. Naturally everyone wondered who was Dr. Morris Ritz? He wore bow ties and sharp jazzy suits; his lips were blue and he had gaudy small swerving eyes; altogether, he looked like a mean mouse. We heard that he lived in the best room at the Lola Hotel and ate steak dinners at Phil’s Café. On the streets he strutted along bobbing his shiny head at every passerby; he made no friends, however, and was not seen in the company of anyone except Verena, who never brought him to the house and never mentioned his name until one day Catherine had the gall to say, “Miss Verena, just who is this funny looking little Dr. Morris Ritz?” and Verena, getting white around the mouth, replied: “Well now, he’s not half so fun
ny looking as some I could name.”

  Scandalous, people said, the way Verena was carrying on with that little Jew from Chicago: and him twenty years younger. The story that got around was that they were up to something out in the old canning factory the other side of town. As it developed, they were; but not what the gang at the poolhall thought. Most any afternoon you could see Verena and Dr. Morris Ritz walking out toward the canning factory, an abandoned blasted brick ruin with jagged windows and sagging doors. For a generation no one had been near it except schoolkids who went there to smoke cigarettes and get naked together. Then early in September, by way of a notice in the Courier, we learned for the first time that Verena had bought the old canning factory; but there was no mention as to what use she was planning to make of it. Shortly after this, Verena told Catherine to kill two chickens as Dr. Morris Ritz was coming to Sunday dinner.

  During the years that I lived there, Dr. Morris Ritz was the only person ever invited to dine at the house on Talbo Lane. So for many reasons it was an occasion. Catherine and Dolly did a spring cleaning: they beat rugs, brought china from the attic, had every room smelling of floorwax and lemon polish. There was to be fried chicken and ham, English peas, sweet potatoes, rolls, banana pudding, two kinds of cake and tutti-frutti ice cream from the drugstore. Sunday noon Verena came in to look at the table: with its sprawling centerpiece of peach-colored roses and dense fancy stretches of silverware, it seemed set for a party of twenty; actually, there were only two places. Verena went ahead and set two more, and Dolly, seeing this, said weakly Well, it was all right if Collin wanted to eat at the table, but that she was going to stay in the kitchen with Catherine. Verena put her foot down: “Don’t fool with me, Dolly. This is important. Morris is coming here expressly to meet you. And what-is more, I’d appreciate it if you’d hold up your head: it makes me dizzy, hanging like that.”

  Dolly was scared to death: she hid in her room, and long after our guest had arrived I had to be sent to fetch her. She was lying in the pink bed with a wet washrag on her forehead, and Catherine was sitting beside her. Catherine was all sleeked up, rouge on her cheeks like lollipops and her jaws jammed with more cotton than ever; she said, “Honey, you ought to get up from there—you’re going to ruin that pretty dress.” It was a calico dress Verena had brought from Chicago; Dolly sat up and smoothed it, then immediately lay down again: “If Verena knew how sorry I am,” she said helplessly, and so I went and told Verena that Dolly was sick. Verena said she’d see about that, and marched off leaving me alone in the hall with Dr. Morris Ritz.

  Oh he was a hateful thing. “So you’re sixteen,” he said, winking first one, then the other of his sassy eyes. “And throwing it around, huh? Make the old lady take you next time she goes to Chicago. Plenty of good stuff there to throw it at.” He snapped his fingers and jiggled his razzle-dazzle, dagger-sharp shoes as though keeping time to some vaudeville tune: he might have been a tapdancer or a soda-jerk, except that he was carrying a brief case, which suggested a more serious occupation. I wondered what kind of doctor he was supposed to be; indeed, was on the point of asking when Verena returned steering Dolly by the elbow.

  The shadows of the hall, the tapestried furniture failed to absorb her; without raising her eyes she lifted her hand, and Dr. Ritz gripped it so ruggedly, pumped it so hard she went nearly off balance. “Gee, Miss Talbo; am I honored to meet you!” he said, and cranked his bow tie.

  We sat down to dinner, and Catherine came around with the chicken. She served Verena, then Dolly, and when the doctor’s turn came he said, “Tell you the truth, the only piece of chicken I care about is the brain: don’t suppose you’d have that back in the kitchen, mammy?”

  Catherine looked so far down her nose she got almost cross-eyed; and with her tongue all mixed up in the cotton wadding she told him that, “Dolly’s took those brains on her plate.”

  “These southern accents, Jesus,” he said, genuinely dismayed.

  “She says I have the brains on my plate,” said Dolly, her cheeks red as Catherine’s rouge. “But please let me pass them to you.”

  “If you’re sure you don’t mind …”

  “She doesn’t mind a bit,” said Verena. “She only eats sweet things anyway. Here, Dolly: have some banana pudding.”

  Presently Dr. Ritz commenced a fit of sneezing. “The flowers, those roses, old allergy …”

  “Oh dear,” said Dolly who, seeing an opportunity to escape into the kitchen, seized the bowl of roses: it slipped, crystal crashed, roses landed in gravy and gravy landed on us all. “You see,” she said, speaking to herself and with tears teetering in her eyes, “you see, it’s hopeless.”

  “Nothing is hopeless, Dolly; sit down and finish your pudding,” Verena advised in a substantial, chin-up voice. “Besides, we have a nice little surprise for you. Morris, show Dolly those lovely labels.”

  Murmuring “No harm done,” Dr. Ritz stopped rubbing gravy splotches off his sleeve, and went into the hall, returning with his brief case. His fingers buzzed through a sheaf of papers, then lighted on a large envelope which he passed down to Dolly.

  There were gum-stickers in the envelope, triangular labels with orange lettering: Gipsy Queen Dropsy Cure: and a fuzzy picture of a woman wearing a bandana and gold earloops. “First class, huh?” said Dr. Ritz. “Made in Chicago. A friend of mine drew the picture: real artist, that guy,” Dolly shuffled the labels with a puzzled, apprehensive expression until Verena asked: “Aren’t you pleased?”

  The labels twitched in Dolly’s hands. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Of course you do,” said Verena, smiling thinly. “It’s obvious enough. I told Morris that old story of yours and he thought of this wonderful name.”

  “Gipsy Queen Dropsy Cure: very catchy, that,” said the doctor. “Look great in ads.”

  “My medicine?” said Dolly, her eyes still lowered. “But I don’t need any labels, Verena. I write my own.”

  Dr. Ritz snapped his fingers. “Say, that’s good! We can have labels printed like her own handwriting: personal, see?”

  “We’ve spent enough money already,” Verena told him briskly; and, turning to Dolly, said: “Morris and I are going up to Washington this week to get a copyright on these labels and register a patent for the medicine—naming you as the inventor, naturally. Now the point is, Dolly, you must sit down and write out a complete formula for us.”

  Dolly’s face loosened; and the labels scattered on the floor, skimmed. Leaning her hands on the table she pushed herself upward; slowly her features came together again, she lifted her head and looked blinkingly at Dr. Ritz, at Verena. “It won’t do,” she said quietly. She moved to the door, put a hand on its handle. “It won’t do: because you haven’t any right, Verena. Nor you, sir.”

  I HELPED CATHERINE CLEAR THE table: the ruined roses, the uncut cakes, the vegetables no one had touched. Verena and her guest had left the house together; from the kitchen window we watched them as they went toward town nodding and shaking their heads. Then we sliced the devil’s-food cake and took it into Dolly’s room.

  Hush now! hush now! she said when Catherine began lighting into That One. But it was as though the rebellious inner whispering had become a raucous voice, an opponent she must outshout: Hush now! hush now! until Catherine had to put her arms around Dolly and say hush, too.

  We got out a deck of Rook cards and spread them on the bed. Naturally Catherine had to go and remember it was Sunday; she said maybe we could risk another black mark in the Judgment Book, but there were too many beside her name already. After thinking it over, we told fortunes instead. Sometime around dusk Verena came home. We heard her footsteps in the hall; she opened the door without knocking, and Dolly, who was in the middle of my fortune, tightened her hold on my hand. Verena said: “Collin, Catherine, we will excuse you.”

  Catherine wanted to follow me up the ladder into the attic, except she had on her fine clothes. So I went alone. There was a good knothole that looked straight down
into the pink room; but Verena was standing directly under it, and all I could see was her hat, for she was still wearing the hat she’d put on when she left the house. It was a straw skimmer decorated with a cluster of celluloid fruit. “Those are facts,” she was saying, and the fruit shivered, shimmered in the blue dimness. “Two thousand for the old factory, Bill Tatum and four carpenters working out there at eighty cents an hour, seven thousand dollars worth of machinery already ordered, not to mention what a specialist like Morris Ritz is costing. And why? All for you!”

  “All for me?” and Dolly sounded sad and failing as the dusk. I saw her shadow as she moved from one part of the room to another. “You are my own flesh, and I love you tenderly; in my heart I love you. I could prove it now by giving you the only thing that has ever been mine: then you would have it all. Please, Verena,” she said, faltering, “let this one thing belong to me.”

  Verena switched on a light. “You speak of giving,” and her voice was hard as the sudden bitter glare. “All these years that I’ve worked like a fieldhand: what haven’t I given you? This house, that …”

  “You’ve given everything to me,” Dolly interrupted softly. “And to Catherine and to Collin. Except, we’ve earned our way a bit: we’ve kept a nice home for you, haven’t we?”

  “Oh a fine home,” said Verena, whipping off her hat. Her face was full of blood. “You and that gurgling fool. Has it not struck you that I never ask anyone into this house? And for a very simple reason: I’m ashamed to. Look what happened today.”

  I could hear the breath go out of Dolly. “I’m sorry,” she said faintly. “I am truly. I’d always thought there was a place for us here, that you needed us somehow. But it’s going to be all right now, Verena. We’ll go away.”