The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

The alarm, though we did not recognize it for what it was, was given by the spiders, via one Mildred Sparks. “Oh dear Lord. Oh dear Lord save us. They’re everywhere! That’s it, I’m climbing on the table—oh dear Lord, there’s one on the table.”

Every old building in the country will have its spiders. But these were not the sober brownish specimens we were used to but the big, wiry, green and gold spiders of the meadows and brakes. What they were doing in the house I found out the next morning when, as the others were doing, I climbed up on my bedrail to peer out the high windows, against which the rain chattered like teeth, and saw the churning cocoa-colored swirl that had taken a bite out of the playfield, and the groundskeeper heaping sandbags in the chapel door.

We dressed all anyhow and clattered downstairs where we ran excitedly from one window to the next, pressing our faces to the panes across which drops continuously raced, now to the left, now to the right, now, as if in defiance of gravity, straight up. The rain ripped and tore at the undulating trees; made the gravel jump in the paths; filled the inverted sculptures in the garden, bringing inexorably to light some penny candy wrappers and a corncob pipe someone had surely thought gone forever. The teachers attempted to herd us into our classrooms, then gave up and joined us in our vigil.

All that morning we watched the waters rise. Our filmmaker ghosted up out of whatever basement he had been skulking in and joined the rattle of his hand-cranked camera to the hiss of the rain. I went repeatedly to the front door to gaze out over the shallow but fast-moving expanse of brown on which the familiar border shrubs marked out a phantom driveway. Every time the flood was a little closer to the school—if it was still a school, for everything was strange. Teachers were walking barefoot through the halls, displaying bunions and hairy toes; Clarence was talking to one of the cook’s helpers; big girls were romping with little ones they normally shunned; and the Headmistress, who could have imposed some order on this scene, was closed in her office and did not respond to my quiet knock.

Lunch was served as usual despite flooding in the kitchen, and that settled everyone’s nerves. The school returned to something like its normal routine, with periodic interruptions to check the progress of the flood. During Restorative Time some of the girls declared the reading room out of bounds to spiders and went vigorously to work with brooms. I was too restless to join them, and wandered through the building, looking out at the flood from different angles. From the library I could see the statuary in the garden, poking incongruously out of still water. The rain had stopped, but the flood continued to rise; from the windows of the music room I could see the stream chewing away at the steep cutbank, further undermining the trees that overlooked it. One had already fallen and lay with half its roots exposed and its leafy top half submerged in the flood.

Someone was down there next to it at the edge of the water. He turned and I saw that it was Dr. Peachie. His shirt was off. I observed with a little jolt three patches of coarse black hair, one on his white stomach, the other two punctuated by the dots of his nipples. Nipples, I thought. Hearing the word in my mind shocked me. I unlatched the window. “What are you doing?” I called. Of course he could not hear me for the rush of the waters. I kicked off my shoes, hitched up my pinafore, scrambled over the sill, and, with a feeling of delicious lawlessness, jumped down onto the cold, squelchy grass. On the way down to the stream I passed a tiny mole that had pulled itself out of its flooded tunnel but drowned all the same, there in the grass.

Dr. Peachie had set his bag down on the bank atop his bunched-up shirt and now, walking his hands along one branch of the fallen tree, was edging into the churning waters. Once, the river swept his feet out from under him and he hung from the branch, pulled almost horizontal. I do not know how he got his feet under him again. I hoped he would turn back then, but after a moment he cautiously went on feeling his way toward a tangled clump of soaked branches that the river was busy trying to take apart. On it a drenched creature clung and shuddered.

“What is that?” I said, then repeated it, yelling over the water’s roar. I had come down to the edge of the cutbank.

“The cat!” he called back. “It is providential, actually, your coming just now. Do you think you might bring me my shirt—perhaps move my bag a little farther from the drink first.” I did so and returned. “Now if you could tie my shirt around your waist or something, that’s the way, and then come down here and—not wade, the current is too fierce, but if you are not afraid, scramble out just a little way on this tree, using the trunk as a walkway—see, there are plenty of branches to hold on to, and you are so slight, there is no risk they will break under you—and then you could pass me my shirt, because it has only just occurred to me that the blighted creature will try to climb onto my head if I do not wrap him in something and then he and I will very likely both drown!”

I tucked my pinafore into my underdrawers and climbed dubiously down the spongy bank—which, having been severely undercut on a previous occasion, was in the process of collapsing further—to the base of the tree, whose roots, I saw, were still partly anchored in the ground, making it a more stable perch than it had appeared. Once I had clambered around the tangle of muddy roots it was easy enough to creep out on the trunk, though the force of the water ripping by below me made my breath come fast. The cat watched us, his ears flattened, his eyes wild.

“Listen, I am going to pick him up the way a mama cat would, by the back of the neck. He will probably fight like a demon, but if you can throw the shirt over him—I mean, not throw perhaps, but drape—we can bunch it up and—but make sure you do not overbalance!”

One arm clamped around his branch, he stretched out the other. “Ow! You devil! I am trying to save your miserable skin, you idiot! That’s better. There. Now you look like a mummified cat from an Egyptian tomb, very aristocratic. Catic. Stop laughing, young lady. Do you think you could take him while I endeavor to join you in the tree? Then the whole family can make our way back to the bank and congratulate ourselves on our little adventure.”

But there was no bank to go back to. In the short time we had been struggling with the cat the flood had carelessly flung out an arm and encircled the base of the tree. In doing so, it had further undermined the cutbank, a great chunk of which had collapsed into a muddy pile that was already being swiftly swept downstream.

I gauged the distance. I did not think I could jump it. “This is stupid,” I said severely.

“Yes, isn’t it?” he said blankly. “I most earnestly beg your pardon. I seem to have gotten us into a fix.”

After pulling himself onto the trunk, over which the water was starting to lap, and creeping along it to the rampart of the roots, he made several attempts to ford the channel, but it was deepening itself by the minute. After a fence post came racing sleekly down it like a log down a lumber chute and clobbered him on the elbow, he climbed back up into the branches. “That does it,” he said, grimacing. “I concede defeat. I expect someone will notice us soon and extend a ladder or something. Until then we perch in this tree like partridges.”

I considered the widening gap. I did not think a ladder would bridge it.

“I think we can be quite comfortable here,” he was saying, ripping off some smaller branches and weaving then together into a messy sort of mat to pad the crook of one of the higher branches. “Up you go. Yes, well”—this to the cat, which had emitted an outraged yowl—“you will just have to suffer. Now if you don’t mind, we will fasten this fellow around you thus,” he said, his arms encircling me, “but you may easily untie him.” He demonstrated. “Please don’t hesitate to release the blighter to his fate if, heaven forbid, you find yourself obliged to swim. There are limits. Limits,” he said to the cat, in a stern voice.

He seated himself astride the branch. “Now let us converse like civilized beings. You may call me Nick. What is your name?”

I told him.

“Now I remember. You are the Headmistress’s . . . particular . . .”

“Teacher’s pet is the term you are avoiding. But I’m not.”

“I shouldn’t think she has pets,” he said agreeably. “Autocratic old bag, isn’t she?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I was shocked.

“I bet you know almost everything there is to know about this school. But I bet you don’t know— That is to say, does she ever let you out?”

“Out?”

“Out. To visit family, say.”

“I don’t have any family. Not to speak of.”

“To town, then. Anywhere.”

“Of course. If we want to go. I mean, we’re not prisoners,” I said, nettled.

“Do you want to go?”

Under our feet the waters raced away, away. “Yes. I don’t know. Yes.” Was he courting me? The thought rang through me. There commenced a fine (and, I hoped, invisible) trembling in my arms and legs. I knew I was not beautiful though I had a neat figure. I hoped he did not think that because I was colored, I was easy.

“You must allow me to take you to, let me see . . . Plunkett.”

The contrast between his majestic manner and the plebeian destination made me laugh despite my confusion of mind. “Why? What’s in Plunkett?”

He widened his eyes. “The most wonderful root beer floats. Also a moving-picture house.”

“I have never seen a moving picture,” I confessed shyly, and my face grew hot.

“Well, we will see about correcting that oversight, just as soon as we get off this tree.”

The branch that was our principle support was curtsying and shuddering as the floodwaters, having completely submersed its leafy extremity, added their force to the downward pull of our combined weight. “Do you know,” he added, “I think I will clamber over to that branch there, so that when your tremendous poundage drags you down, down, down into the drink, you don’t take me with you to your watery doom.”

We settled into a comfortable silence. I had never had such a normal conversation in my life. I might have drowsed a little, the cat (now somnolent) a damp but warm weight on my lap. I had time to think all sorts of things—absurd things, considering our situation. For instance that there might, after all, be something for me besides the school. Another last chance.

I would have liked to linger on that pleasant thought. But my mind raced on. I thought of my mother and how the neighbors had treated her for bearing a black man’s children. It made scarcely any difference that my parents were married, for to cohabit with a black man was tantamount to whoredom whether church and state had sanctified the union or not. Some white men, I knew, had even threatened to kill my father for bringing ruin upon “one of our women.” Perhaps it was why he went away, or perhaps they did kill him and my mother kept it from us. Or perhaps he was footloose and faithless just as my aunt had always said, adding, “like all his race.” For a white man it was different, a Dr. Peachie might do as he pleased, up to a point, but I did not have that luxury and now I began to resent the free-and-easy manners that moments ago had seemed so appealing.

“I’m damned cold,” Nick said abruptly. He sounded irritated. “I wish I had let the monster drown. I wish I had never come to this pestilential place! If I thought . . . I say, Jane, you spend a lot of time with the old bat. How long do you give her?”

“You’re the doctor,” I said stiffly. Now that he mentioned it, I was cold too, through and through.

After an arrested moment he laughed. “I am! I certainly am! Well, sooner or later, this way or t’other, there’s a change a-comin’. But don’t you worry. You stick with Nick Peachie, girly, and he’ll see you right.” He took one hand from the log for the frivolous purpose, as I noted with disapproval, of laying a finger alongside his nose, like his namesake St. Nicholas, whom he did not at all resemble. His eyes were very wide and bright, the pupils entirely ringed with white. I rather wished he would shutter them. “Brrr! Not to be ghoulish, not-so-plain Jane, but let’s make a pact that if we die, we’ll—say, I’ve just had an idea! Let’s suppose this channeling-the-dead gambit can be made to work—” He saw me stare and added mollifyingly, “I mean in a thoroughly modern, methodical fashion, without any hocus-pocus.” He went on, “Isn’t it true that the spirit world is everywhere and nowhere, so that your medium-wallah can turn the spigot, so to speak, as easily in Timbuctoo as in Cheesehill, Massachusetts? Now tell me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that a cooperative ghost could carry messages from one mouth in Nova Zembla to another in Java or Paraguay with only the briefest layover in the hereafter, and no need for telephone wires. And then shove over, Mr. Alexander Graham Bell! Picture it: a worldwide capillary system of mediums joined, as it were, mouth to mouth to mouth to mouth to mouth—ah ha ha! Picture it!”

I did, though not a little affronted at the idea of using the dead for nothing more elevated than a telecommunications system. He rattled on, “And surely it is only a matter of time before we can cut out the medium, or rather become the medium, and have only to open our mouths to transmit the words of others without having, or needing to have, the least idea what we are saying. Like birds, tweet tweet—”

“In fact this is what we already do. The Headmistress says—”

“Aha! You see? You quote! And”—for he saw my frown—“why not indeed? Why form your own thoughts when all the wisdom of better men, and of course women, is at the tip of your tongue? Why ever read another book? The information to which the dead are privy is perhaps a little behindhand, yesterday’s paper so to speak, but there are ways around that—if one wishes to put a person’s present body of knowledge at one’s disposal, one has only to kill him off! It may come to pass that people regard life as a mere apprenticeship for the more lasting use to which they may be put hereafter. Tweet and retweet!”²³

He kept on chuckling and attempting various birdcalls with a levity that seemed entirely out of keeping with our situation and, annoyed, I turned my face away and, absently patting the now stupefied cat trussed against my chest, let my attention drift.

But now what was he talking about? “New leadership, just as soon as we can pry the old girl loose. A good man at the helm.” He saw the question in my face: “Not me, thank you very much! I’m no babysitter, or pettifogging administrator. I will be quite occupied enough with—well.” He cleared his throat. “But you, now; there will be a place for someone who knows where they keep the twine and whether the bodies are filed under D for dead or E for extremely fucking dead, excuse my French. You could do quite well for yourself as a secretary or even an assistant mistress. I’ll put in a word for you, see if I don’t.”

I said nothing. He did not press me, or seem to notice how utterly my mood had changed. Do quite well for myself! Put a word in! He did not have the faintest idea of my true character. A good man at the helm! Change a-coming! Was everything I had worked for to be, with a fatuous laugh, snatched away?

An exclamation—“Good Lord!”—jerked me from my reverie. I tightened my grip on the branch, feeling how the floodwaters now swirled cold around my dangling feet, and looked wildly about. The day was noticeably darker. “Jane, what the devil is that?

A gray behemoth was wheeling slowly around a snag in the shallow waters near the new shoreline. Now I saw it shake itself loose and glide slowly toward the plunging waters of the main current, then plunge into the body of the flood and come wallowing, rolling, sounding and breaching, fluking and lobtailing toward us. As may be seen by my choice of verbs, I first took it, absurdly, for a whale. Then, “The Sky Lung!”

“The what?”

“Our—sort of balloon—the carriage house must be—”

I did not have time to explain further, because the Sky Lung now flung itself at us, as if with murderous intent. If it had been fully inflated, it would have bounced, or burst, or indeed have already taken flight. But it was a loose wallowing sac, and it wrapped a trailing part of itself around the branches of our perch. The rest of it tried to keep going.

“Hold on!”

The branch was bucking wildly. At the perigee I was dipped in the flood to the hips. The cat stuck its claws into my stomach and screamed.

“We have to disentangle it, or we will be for it! Hold on to my belt, there’s a good girl.”

I worked my fingers under his belt and leaned out along my own higher branch as, holding his own branch with his knees as if he were breaking a “bronco,” he scooted farther out and in water up to his waist began shoving and pulling and kicking at the Sky Lung.

For a moment it seemed possible that he would succeed. Then with one great rending that almost unseated me twice, first on the yank and then on the recoil, the tree split down the center, and his half, still attached to the Sky Lung, was instantly swept downstream. I almost certainly could not have saved him, but I did not try. At the first great tug I had removed my hand from his belt.

For a moment I saw his white, shocked, denatured face raised unseeingly to mine, and then the Sky Lung with its cargo, moving smoothly now, swept around a curve and was gone.

It was a long, cold, roaring, heaving night. Unseen things rushing downstream thumped the tree and sent vibrations right through me. There were cracking, rending sounds. I locked my arms around the straining branch and endured. The cat, half crushed beneath me, was a hot reminder of life. Gradually the wild, springing motion settled into a smooth, regular swaying. It lulled me into a wakeful sort of sleep in which I never quite lost consciousness of the branch that had become my world.

I was awoken by the plaintive yowls of the cat. It was morning. The river, still high, but flat and glassy, had slipped back between its banks. The tree was half a tree. I was alone with the cat in it. And here was the Headmistress with the groundskeeper and a stout stick, wading through the smooth brown water to help me home.