The first real illness of my life came on the night of August 7, 1940, exactly three months after my fifth birthday. The day will always be fixed firmly in memory because it was the day the Jew came. He came into our little closed world smelling of strangeness and far places. Willalee and I had just come up from his house when we saw him far off down the road coming steadily and slowly, dust rising behind his wagon in the heat-distorted distance. My brother came out to join us where we stood under the oak tree.
The Jew traveled in a covered wagon pulled by a pair of mismatched mare mules. One of the mules was normal-sized, but the other one was small enough to be a pony, although she was not. The tiny mule had a cast in one eye, and her left ear had been split all the way down to her head so it made her look like she had three ears.
The Jew, whose name I never knew, always dressed in black, and on even the hottest days he wore heavy black pants and a black coat and a little black cap right on top of his head. He traveled a regular route through Appling County and Pierce County and Jeff Davis County and Bacon County. People said you could set your watch by where he was on any given day of the month, so regularly did he travel his route.
The inside of his wagon was better than anything Willalee and I could make up, filled as it was with spools of thread and needles and thimbles and bolts of cloth and knives and forks and spoons—some new, some used—and a grinding stone of a special design so that he could sharpen anything, and mule harness, and staples, and nails, and a thousand other things.
He did business almost exclusively with women, and whatever they needed, they could always find in the Jew’s wagon. If they didn’t have the money to pay for what they needed, he would trade for eggs or chickens or cured meat or canned vegetables and berries.
He had a water barrel strapped to the back of his wagon, and hanging from the sides of the canvas cover and from the sides of the wooden body of the wagon were frying pans and boiling pots and even washtubs and cast-iron washpots. He had also contrived to wire mason fruit jars onto the side of his wagon, wire them in such a way that when they swung they would not strike each other and break.
I can never remember anybody saying anything bad about him or anybody treating him badly. But he was different from the rest of us. When he spoke, he did not sound like us. For that reason he was mysterious and often used to scare the children with. People in the county would sometimes say to an unruly child: “If you don’t behave, youngun, I just might let you go on off with the Jew. Just let’m have you.” It was at least as effective as a whipping.
He came slowly into the lane in front of the house and stopped his wagon under the oak tree. Willalee, my brother, and I stood in the dust watching him. He had longer hair than we had ever seen on a man and a long dirty-white beard. The fingers on his hands were badly twisted. We wanted very badly to speak to him, to talk to him, but we were afraid. After the dust had settled under his wagon and he had been sitting there a long quiet time, he slowly turned his head, looked at us, nodded his head in the smallest of movements, and got stiffly down by stepping over onto the hub of the wheel.
Mama came out of the house with a pair of scissors in her hand. He stood by his wagon, and when she was near, he moved his head forward in a slight, stiff bow instead of taking off his hat as other men might have done. He did not speak.
“I got these for you to sharpen,” mama said.
He took the scissors from her and turned them slowly in his hands. Then: “For maybe a quarter?” he said, looking up from the scissors through his heavy eyebrows.
“I thought a dime,” mama said.
“For less than fifteen cents I couldn’t,” he said.
“I guess it’s worth that to me,” said mama.
“In the wagon,” he said, “I have some very good cloth. A nice bright print.”
“I ain’t got the money,” mama said, but she turned her eyes toward the back of the wagon.
“Let me show you,” he said. “It does no harm to look.”
“It don’t do no good neither, if you ain’t got the money,” she said.
But he was already starting for the back of the wagon, and she followed him. He opened one flap on the back and pulled a thin bolt of thin, brightly colored cloth halfway out and spread a small length of it over his hands.
“Feel it,” he said. “A very nice cloth.”
“I ain’t got the money,” she said. But she felt the cloth anyway, slowly, letting it trail through her fingers.
“Maybe some corn for my animals,” he said, “and a little hay.”
“We didn’t make much hay this year,” she said. “We ain’t got nigh enough for the stock on the place now.”
“You wouldn’t miss fifty ears of corn and two bats of hay,” he said. “For that much, I could maybe let you have three yards. It’s very good cloth.”
“It ain’t worth fifty ears and that much hay to me,” she said. “We didn’t make much hay this year.”
“Fifty-five ears then,” he said, “and one bat of hay.”
“I might could see my way clear to let you have forty-five ears and a bat,” she said.
“It is very little for such nice cloth,” he said. He looked into the darkness of the covered wagon for a moment as if expecting to find some answer in there. “But for you, why not a bargain?”
The expression on his face never changed while they talked. Mama left the scissors with him and went back into the house. He took his team out and led them to the lot and watered them at the trough. We followed him and watched as he put the corn and hay into a burlap sack. He did it all very slowly and with great deliberation. He never seemed sad and he never seemed happy. He did not speak to us, nor we to him. He spoke only when he was trading and then only so much as was necessary to business. He did all that he did in seeming exhaustion, but with utter patience.
We watched him wash his face and hands in the water trough at the lot, and then we watched as he put his team back to the wagon. His twisted hands worked quickly and surely over the scissors at his grinding stone. Mama came back out and watched him cut the bolt of cloth with the scissors he had sharpened. When he finished, she silently took two brown chicken eggs out of her apron and gave them to him. Just as silently he took them and stood holding them in his hand as though weighing them.
“I thought you might could use them,” she said.
He nodded silently and then turned and slowly reached deep into the back of his wagon and finally came out with three tiny peppermint balls. He opened his hand to Willalee, my brother, and me. The candy lay in his palm unwrapped and dusted with confectionery sugar.
“For you, and you, and you,” he said, giving each of us a candy.
He turned to my mother, gave his slight, stiff bow, and climbed over the wheel and onto the seat board of his wagon. When he lifted the lines, his pair of mismatched mules leaned into their collars and he was moving away. With the candies melting on our tongues, we stood and watched him go, feeling as though we had ourselves just been on a long trip, a trip to the world we knew was out there but had never seen.
That night I woke up with a burning fever. Mama, as was her custom when treating toothache, fever, sore throat, earache, eye strain, or headache, sent my brother down to the tenant house to get some wool. When my brother knocked on Auntie’s door in the middle of the night, she would know immediately what he was there for, and without turning on a light she would stand in her gown in the doorway lighted bright as day by the moon and with a pair of heavy scissors cut two thimble-sized pieces out of her hair.
Mama said the wool from Auntie’s head kept our ears warm and the oil from it eased the pain. Sometimes it seemed to help, sometimes not. This time it did not. The next morning the wool was still in my ears tighter than ever because she had pushed it deeper into my head every hour or two, but I still had the fever and my legs had begun to draw up. They were bent at the knees, and the ligaments were slowly drawing my heels closer and closer to the cheeks of my buttocks. It felt like both legs were knotted from hip to heel. The pain was enough to make me chew my lips and the inside of my mouth.
Daddy got home, sick himself and seriously hung-over, just in time to drive to the only farm I knew of in the county that had a telephone. The man who owned it didn’t really farm the way the rest of us did. His farming was done in the woods. He had a big turpentine distillery and a good-sized village of blacks living on his place. The blacks cut V’s into the faces of pine trees and nailed tin cups under the V’s to catch the raw turpentine when it drained out. They collected the turpentine in buckets, which they poured into barrels, which eventually found their way, usually on mule-drawn sleds, to the distillery.
Daddy called Dr. Sharp, who arrived at about noon looking starched and powerful as God as he always did, dressed in his black coat and carrying his black bag full of magic. It wasn’t long though before he looked as I had never seen him. He had determined with pins that there was feeling in both legs. But that was about as far as he got, which he freely admitted. He scratched his head and poked here and pulled there and finally said he didn’t know for sure what I had, but he thought it was infantile paralysis.
He left something for the pain and said he would be back out the next day. By the time he got back my legs were drawn as tight as they were going to get—as tight as they could get, with the heels pulled all the way up until they touched the backs of my thighs. Dr. Sharp even had Dr. Branch to come over from Baxley. But he was as baffled as Dr. Sharp. I got a few shots for the pain, and both Dr. Branch and Dr. Sharp said I would never walk again. It was a time of great grief for mama and a time of sheer terror for me because I could not imagine what in God’s name I would do for the rest of my life with my legs drawn up that way.
As it happens, about four days later, a band of gypsies came through in their wagons. It was not uncommon to see them traveling about the countryside, doing whatever they were allowed to do: repairing pots and pans and tubs, trading, doing a little carpentry—mostly roofs of barns and lots. But mostly they stole. At least most of the farmers were convinced they did.
Like the Jew, they dressed differently from the way we dressed, and they spoke to us in voices full of accents different from our own, at times spoke a language amongst themselves that made as much sense to us as the greaseless squealing of a wagon wheel. And because of their language and the way they dressed, we thought they had powers we did not have: powers for curses, potions, and various miraculous cures that could be had for a little money or a few chickens.
The head of the tribe, a very old man who looked strangely like the Jew even though he was not bearded and wore a bright cloth on his head instead of a black cap, had heard that I was sick and asked to be taken into the house to see me. He said he might be able to help me, said he might have something in his bag that could kill the disease, attack it and kill it. He had a bag just like the doctor’s, except the old gypsy’s was made out of the hide of a goat from which the hair had not been removed.
While the old man was looking at me, touching my legs and head in a tentative way, stopping now and again to search through his goatskin medicine bag and eventually selling a bag of herbs for $10—a sizable amount of money then—while he was doing that, the rest of the band went out to the lot and stole a brood sow. A theft we did not discover until the next morning.
I drank those herbs boiled in tea for ten days, but when I had finished, my heels were just as tight against my ass as they had ever been. We were out $10 and a brood sow.
Following the gypsy came a great parade of people: aunts and uncles and cousins and even Grandpa and Grandma Hazelton, who didn’t get out of the house much anymore because they were full of years and had the miseries; and people from neighboring farms; and after them, total strangers from other counties, all of them come to stare at me where I lay in a high fever and filled with the most awful cramps, come to stare at my rigid legs. I knew that they were staring with unseemly intensity at my legs, that they wanted most of all to touch them, and I hated it and dreaded it and was humiliated by it. I felt how lonely and savage it was to be a freak.
Sometime later, the fourth or fifth day of my illness, after Dr. Sharp and Dr. Branch both had come and after both of them had said they did not know for sure what was wrong but thought (the thought voiced in front of me) that I would never walk again and after my uncle had come—the one who spoke in tongues—after he had fallen on me in a fit of glossolalia, which did not seem to affect me one way or the other, there appeared at my bedside a faith healer brought in from another county, Jeff Davis. He stood by my bed for what seemed to me a very long time. He was a small man with an upper lip so long that you could not see his top teeth and very few of his lower ones. The flapping upper lip made him appear toothless, and he never took his hat off.
He seemed to me the most objective of men. What he knew he knew with the certitude of science. When he spoke of what he could do, it sounded like the recitation of fact. It did not trouble him in the least if you did not believe he could do what he said he could do. Such doubts were met with a numbing indifference.
“I can cure the thrash out of a youngun’s mouth,” he said, still looking at me.
“He ain’t got the thrash,” daddy said, a raging unbeliever at the foot of the bed.
“It is red thrash and yeller thrash and black thrash,” he said. “Yeller thrash is the worst.”
“It’s a God’s pity that ain’t what he’s got,” daddy said.
“God,” he said quiet as a whisper but full of fact. “God? Did you say God? It’s the way I do it. With the help of the Lord. With the help of the Lord. I couldn’t do no healing without the help of the Lord.”
Daddy snorted. He had a way of making it sound just like a horse does after he’s had a run. I had heard him and mama arguing about whether or not to bring the faith healer. The argument was resolved when he found out it was not going to cost anything. “Labor deserves its hire,” he would say, “but them sumbitches don’t do nothing.”
When somebody said in his presence that a preacher had made a good sermon on a particular Sunday, he would invariably say that he could make a good sermon, too, if somebody would give him a week’s wages to do it. “Purty goddamn good wages for a hour’s work.”
Mama brought a ladder-back chair to the side of the bed and then retreated into the shadows beyond the reach of the kerosene lamp. The faith healer sat down in the chair and carefully adjusted his hat until it was squared to his satisfaction. Now that he was sitting, the baggy, folding trousers and the heavy coat did not look as if there was really a body in them, only maybe a lot of old coat hangers. Also, I now saw that he was a little walleyed, but as best he could, he still fixed me with a steady stare. I remember thinking (thinking in anger, which in turn came out of fear) that if he was a healer, the first thing he ought to do is go look in a mirror and heal that wandering eye. But of course, I said nothing about it.
I did not know this man, not his name (although it was mumbled to me), nor his work, and more than that, he was not from our county, which amounted to making him not only a stranger but a foreigner as well. I had had my legs stared at now for days by a seemingly endless parade of people, and I had been probed and pulled and finally pummeled by Dr. Sharp and Dr. Branch, and I was still as bad off as ever. Nothing inspired me with any confidence, and certainly not this little toothless, starved, and wrinkled man. He must have known that I had no hope of him curing me because he sat and talked to me for a long time in his flat, matter-of-fact way about himself and his powers.
“I can draw far and I can stop blood,” he said. “Why, it was one time, Tom, Tom’s my middle youngun, Tom he got cut on the laig with a crosscut saw. They was a cuttin tobacker wood and he got cut on the laig with a crosscut saw and he was a bleeding bad. An when they come to me to go back down there in the woods where he was at cause he was hurt that bad, so bad he couldn’t come back up to the house, when they come for me and I went down there, I just took one look at it.
“Didn’t do a thing but look at it and said that verse out of Ezekiel. I said that verse and got that blood to stop right there where it was at.
“They’d been a puttin spider webs and I don’t know what all up in that cut there trying to get it to stop. But it didn’t stop till I got there, but when I got there and said the words, it stopped right away, youngun.
“Now the thing about far is you don’t want to drive it no deeper. That’s how come it is doctors cain’t do no good with burns is they drive the far deeper. But me, what I do is draw it out, draw that far right on out of there. But a doctor he will most gently drive that heat right down to the bones, drive it even to the holler of the body. That far gets in the holler of the body, it’ll jest cook an burn till it ain’t nothin else to burn up anymore before it goes out. Which time you usually dead.”
I could hear the rage mounting in my daddy’s breathing at the foot of the bed. When the little man paused for breath, he said: “What about legs? Git to the part about legs.”
Daddy’s voice was full of helplessness and sarcasm and unbelieving, but if the faith healer heard the quality of the voice, he never let on that he did.
“You take them laigs of yorn right there,” he said, pointing, as if there were some question as to which legs we were there to consider. “I cain’t say as I ever seed laigs jest like them. But them is the Lord’s laigs an He’s seed them laigs and He’s laid His hand on them laigs and He knows, so it don’t bother me none that I ain’t seed’m.”
Daddy could not contain himself. “Then git to it,” he shouted.
The little man turned his trowel-shaped face in the lamplight, and his steady voice, coming counterpoint to daddy’s shout, seemed less than a whisper. “I already got to it. I’m through.”
“Then why the hell ain’t his legs done nothing?” asked daddy. “His legs is jest like they was.”
“No, they ain’t. They jest look like they was. I said the verse out of Ezekiel an now it is between me and that boy and the Lord. An it ain’t any way his laigs is the way they was. Never be again, neither.”
A long-drawn silence followed his words, and I felt, as well as saw, my daddy trembling as he watched my legs, watched them as if he expected them to suddenly and miraculously loosen and straighten. Insects fluttered through the screenless windows and burned instantly crisp against the lampshade as the room wavered in the guttering light. I was the focus of their attention, the little man’s and mama’s and even daddy’s, as I realized that in his grief and however temporary, he was a believer.
As the silence stretched on, I was humiliated all over again because the action of mercy had not come down from God and touched my legs and made them well. They were just as bent and just as white and just as full of pain as they had ever been, and I thought about how it would be not only to suffer the whole world to look at how I was and find me freakish and unacceptable, but also to suffer the knowledge that God Himself would not intercede.
“His legs ain’t done a goddamn thing,” daddy said.
The little faith healer said, matter-of-factly: “You standin in danger of hellfire blasphemin when Ezekiel’s spoke by mouth or mind.”
Daddy did not say so much as sang in a lilting grief, his voice soft, the fight gone out of him: “My boy is crippled. A cripple.”
The faith healer stood up. “He won’t always be,” he said, and without looking at me again left the room. Finally, from down the hall, his thin, tiny voice came floating back to us: “It mought be today, or it mought be tomorrow. Whatever it is God will allow.”
That night, when all the lights were out and I was dozing fitfully, daddy came into the room and lay down beside me. I could see well enough to see he was crying, crying in the open way that I had never seen a man cry.
“You want to sleep on your old daddy’s arm, boy?”
When I slept with him, I always slept with my head on his arm. I lifted my head to his arm, and for the first time since the sickness started, I felt good.
“Why don’t you tell me about the boy in the swamp?” I said.
It was a story he had told me many times before, always told in a different way from the way it had ever been told before but always about a boy who lived in a swamp and swam and fished and lay in the sun all day and had a best friend that was an alligator. I went to sleep trying to pretend that surely in the morning I would wake up and find my legs straightened. I tried to pretend that the last thing the faith healer had said from the hall had helped me to believe. God might not cure me that night, but tomorrow He would make it so I could walk again. And if not tomorrow, the next day. For a whole week I woke up every morning expecting my legs to be straight, expecting to be able to swing over to the side of the bed and stand up and go out and get my goat and Willalee Bookatee and the wagon. But it did not happen.
Finally, I quit believing that it would. Right there, as a child, I got to the bottom of what it means to be lost, what it means to be rejected by everybody (if they had not rejected me, why was I smothered in shame every time they looked at me?) and everything you ever thought would save you. And there were long days when I wondered why I did not die, how I could go on mindlessly living like a mule or a cow when God had obviously forsaken me. But if I was never able to accept my affliction, I was able to bear it and finally to accept the good-natured brutality and savagery in the eyes of those who came to wish me well. Mainly because of Auntie’s sheer wisdom and terror. She made me see that in this world there was much more to worry about than merely being crippled.
After about a week, when it became clear that no miracle was going to save me from my bed, Willalee’s grandma came up to the big house to take care of me. Getting Auntie to stay with me all of the time was the best present anyone could have given me.
All of us children, although none of us would have been able to say it, knew that Auntie was too strange—weird even—for the big people. She belonged with children, being as she was, full of the most fantastic stories and marvelous comments upon the way of the world and all things in it, whether of the earth or air. A lot of grownups had seen me by myself or with Willalee Bookatee making stories out of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, but none of them had ever offered to join us. Not so with Auntie.
She didn’t like anything better than to get right in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue with us and fix once and forever how it was between the people smiling out of the slick pages. In great detail, she told us various powers they had and about the painful curses they laid, one upon the other. She knew more about their hidden but afflicted skins than Willalee Bookatee and I had ever been able to imagine.
Somehow all of us knew that Auntie behaved as she did because she had got way beyond just being grown-up. She had grown up and up and up until she got to the very top, as high as you could go. Then she started down, and having been on the downhill side of growing for such a long time, she had got right back to where we were, but with an imagination more fecund and startling than any we had ever encountered.
Late in the night, when I could not sleep for the cramps in my legs, she would sit up with me sometimes for hours, talking in her old, soft, mother’s voice of a world I had never heard anybody else even hint at. She loved to talk about anything with snakes in it. And even though the ring of truth that informed her voice made my skin go to goose pimples, at the same time I somehow knew that hers was a fine invention. I listened, hardly breathing, while she told me how her lifetime preoccupation with snakes had been set early for her.
“I weren’t even a yearlin gul,” she would say. “I was jest a little bitty thing, big as your thumb.” Long, scary pause. “An I seen him in the ditch.”
I had heard the story before, but I would shiver with a delicious horror. Because I had heard it before did not mean it held any less mystery for me.
“Jest walking along and this snake I seen in the ditch had a white man’s head. It was the marsah’s head on the snake in the ditch.”
Auntie had been born in the time of slavery. She had told me all about it a long time ago, but it never meant very much to me. It was hard to imagine what a slave might be, and it was impossible to think of people like my daddy and mama owning people like Willalee’s daddy and mama. It still is.
“The bluest eyes,” she said. “An marsah had the bluest eyes and that snake with marsah’s head on it had them eyes and them eyes looked at me. Stopped me right where I was walkin. One foots down an one in the air and couldn’t move. That snake done struck me stone still and dumb as a rock. Couldn’t even holler. And he come over to me where I was still standin with my foots in the air. What he done was he come up on me and say he hongry an says I gots to haf my vittles with him, bring’m haf ever day there in the ditch and I say I will. Say I will do anything if he jest take them blue eyes off me an let me go. He did and I did.”
“Did what, Auntie?” I said. I wanted the details. Details were everything.
“I did go back to the house and I did commence to start to haf up my vittles with that snake in the ditch. I took him on out there a biscuit with a hole in it. I took him on out there some of that fried poke. I took him on out there some rice, and I took him on out there vegetables when I could. An right from the first I commenced to get sick a little, chile. Didn’t know jest what, but I was feelin poorly, full of the miseries, an commenced to lose flesh off my body. So one day when my Uncle Ham was to the house, I axe if he ever heard tell of anybody or other feedin a snake.”
“What did he say? What?” I asked, knowing already what he said.
“Chile, he say. It was a youngun no biggern you up the other side of Lanter and she commenced to lose flesh. She was poor folks jest like us, but her mama and daddy taken vittles from their own plate an given it to that chile, given her all the syrup on all the clabber, tryin to build up that chile where she losin that flesh. Then something passin strange happen. Youngun say she got to eat by herself. She so sick, she got to have a long time and a slow time when she eat, else her stomach she know gone come up on her. She say the only thing to do is go out behind the lot to eat. So they kept on givin that gul the best they had on the table and she keep totin it all out behind the lot where she say she can have a long time an a slow time. One day her daddy followed her on out there to the other side of the lot an he find her out there sharin them vittles they’d taken an given her. Sharin with a snake. Her daddy jest went ahead on an killed that snake.” She stopped and regarded the far dark window and sucked her teeth in a contemplative, satisfied way. Then, almost as an afterthought, she turned back to me and said: “His gul was dead fore he could git her back to the house.”
Her voice had gone flatter and flatter, but it was coming faster, and she moved on the hard ladder-backed chair where she sat and I moved with her in my bed at the horror of it all.
“Chile, that how I got away from that blue-eyed snake with the marsah’s head. When I hern tell about that gul taken and died after her snake was kilt, I known the same thing gone happen to me I keep goin out there. God in His power and mercy taken and given me the strength to leave that snake in the ditch. I ain’t been sorry, neither. Naw, naawww, I ain’t been sorry.”
Late at night she would tell me about coachwhip snakes, snakes that could wrap themselves around your leg and whip you on the back and shoulders with their platted tails, running you until they ran you to death. Then they would eat you.
And she told me about hoop snakes, snakes that had spiked tails and could form themselves into a hoop and roll after you, up hills and down hills. When they caught you, they’d hit you with the spiky end of their tails and kill you. If the spike missed you and hit a tree instead, the tree would be dead in fifteen minutes, with all the leaves on the ground because that spiky tail held killing poison.
She especially liked to talk about joint snakes, which she sometimes called glass snakes. They were pretty and seemed to be one of the few things in her world that was not deadly. When you hit or touched a joint snake, it would break into pieces about as long as a joint of your finger. It would stay that way until you left and then join itself back together. It didn’t hurt the snake to be knocked apart, and it lived forever.
Perhaps most of all, she loved to talk about her daddy, dead these many years, dead so long that she had forgotten his name, calling him at various times Mr. William or Mr. John or Mr. Henry. Of all the names, though, and there were others, she favored Mr. William. He had never been bitten by a snake even though he had walked freely among them. He could just raise up his hand and tell the snakes to lie down and they would press themselves flat against the earth.
“Git down you snakes,” Mr. William would say. “An them snakes’d lie down flat like they weren’t no more’n a dog. I axe him how he did that and he said he didn’t know how he did that but he thought anybody could do that ifn they thought they could do that but he didn’t his own self know how he did that.”
In the middle of the night, when the rest of the family had gone to bed and had long since been asleep, she would talk of much more than snakes. The entire world for her was aberrant and full of shadows, but she understood the aberrations and the shadows, knew all about them and never seemed to find it strange that so little of her world was what it appeared to be. One night after I had been crippled in the bed for nearly two months, she was rubbing my legs with liniment, as had become her habit. She rubbed and kneaded the fleshless, wasted bones, talking while she worked. Suddenly, she stopped, cocked her head, and seemed to listen.
“Now them birds,” she said.
“Birds,” I said.
“I tol you bout them birds, chile.”
“No,” I said. “You ain’t told me bout no birds.”
“Did,” she said. “Did, too.”
She sometimes got terribly excited if you argued too much with her in the middle of the night. I didn’t want her thrashing about, falling over the furniture, getting the house up, so I just lay there shaking my head but without ever saying no to her again.
“Youngun, you oughten to have them birds in the house,” she said. “A house ain’t no place for no birds. Birds need to be shot. Need it bad. A wild bird oughten to be in your hand. In your house. A house is for folks. Trees and the sky yonderway for birds. I tol you bout the birds.”
Auntie was not just right in the head, and I knew it. She was, as they said in Bacon County, that way. You couldn’t go crazy in Bacon County; you were just that way. She was a little, frail thing who had an amazing strength in her spidery hands. Under the voluminous skirts she always wore, her bones seemed as brittle as a bird’s. She was born, she was quick to tell you, a slave. But she did not know how old she was. If you asked her, she would say, “Round about a hundret.” More than once mama had told me Auntie was that way because of her age.
In a deliberately whining voice I knew she could accept, I said. “I wish you’d tol me bout the birds, Auntie.”
Her head cocked again, listening. “You know a bird can go ahead on a spit like a snake,” she said. “Spit jest like a snake. I know you know that.”
I didn’t know a bird could spit like a snake, but once she said it, it sounded marvelously, horribly right to me. After the words came out of her old shrunken mouth that had known everything and said everything, it was hard for me to imagine a bird not spitting like a snake. And never mind that I had no idea how a snake might spit.
“Birds spit like a snake and never hit you but in one place,” she said, pausing, holding the silence like a measure while she looked at me expectantly. Then, when it was obvious I didn’t know: “Right in the mouf.”
She got out of the chair and came to the bed and stooped for me. She took me out of the bed like my daddy might have done, in spite of the fact that wasted as I was, I must have weighed as much or more than she did. She took me out of the room and through the long shotgun corridor running down the middle of the house to the room where the birds were kept.
At the screen door giving onto the bird room, she stopped, and we stood looking in. There was enough light from the moon falling through the two tall windows for us to see the outlines of the nests where they were built on little tree limbs nailed into position on a counter along one side of the room and see the birds themselves, grown restless now, their wings fluttering and their heads bobbing silhouetted in the moonlight.
“Look in there, youngun,” she said. “Look in there and bleve. A bird mought take you to hell. Mought take you anywheres at all. Me, I been grieved more than some, you up here in the house with them birds. Them spittin like snakes, lookin to hit you all up in your mouf. One hit you—an one gone hit you—that bird own you, own all of you. Now you look in there an bleve.”
Her old soft voice got sharp when she demanded that I believe. But she could have saved it; I’d been a righteous believer in the deadly accuracy of bird spit long before we came down the hall.
“Bird spit mix all up with your spit, and then your spit is his and he’s you. You listening, chile? Listen good to ole Auntie cause I think a bird . . . a bird moughta . . . a. . . .”
She could not seem to go on and turned, still holding me against her thin, bony breast, and went back down the darkened hallway to the room and put me in my bed. She sat again in her chair and was quiet a long time before she could speak. I waited because I knew there was more to come and she had scared me pretty good back there in the dark with the birds moving against the moonlit windows. Her mouth moved silently over some words.
“I think a bird is . . . spit in you mouf, chile.”
I struggled to sit up but couldn’t against my drawn legs, so I was reduced to getting as far away from her as I could on the other side of the bed. I was terrified. I could hear the house through the night settling around us, making all the night noises that an old house can make, beams creaking, boards popping, all of it settling deeper into its foundation.
Then in a hushed, scared voice she described in great detail how she had seen me come down the road toward the tenant house one night late, climb the fence, and start off into the cotton field. I had been wearing, she said, my gown and I had gone out into the cotton field and walked in one great circle before finally stopping and looking up into the sky at the moon for a long, long time. She had been at the window and had seen it all, and it scared her bad because she knew right off a bird must have been at my mouth and that I was not in control of what I was doing. It had been the doings of birds.
She sat a long, still time before she finally said: “Chile, if the bird done got you, don’t hex on old Auntie.”
She laughed in a startled kind of way. It sounded like real craziness, but she came over and tickled me. I didn’t laugh with her but lay like something dead because sleepwalking had been such a mysterious, unanswerable horror, had terrified me so profoundly that I was perfectly willing to believe that I was possessed by birds, had been guided to the field by them. She kept chuckling and clucking, but when I would not respond, she went back and sat in her chair.
“Jest two things,” she said. “Don’t you hex and don’t you conjure on Auntie. Not on ole Auntie.”
I was too afraid to look at her, but when I did find the courage after a while, she had her eyes fixed upon me, and they were no longer the eyes of the little old lady I had played with and laughed with in the pages of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. They were the eyes now of a long-caged ancient stinking monkey, crazed with some unknowable outrage.
She said: “Won’t do no good conjurin on me.” She leaned forward out of her chair. “I be a conjure woman, too.”
I knew even then what a conjure woman was, knew that it had to do with the bones of chickens and the stomachs of goats and hair and pins and fire and sickness and death.
When I could finally speak, I said: “Ain’t no bird spit in my mouth. I may be afflicted, but I ain’t no bird. Nothing in here but me.”
We never spoke of it again. Several times I tried unsuccessfully to work up the nerve to do it. But I did let the birds out of their room the next morning. Or rather I told mama to do it.
“Turn out the birds,” I said when she came in with my breakfast.
“Turn’m out?” she said.
“All of’m,” I said. “Don’t leave one in the house.”
She did not understand, but as sick as I was she would probably have done anything to keep from upsetting me. She didn’t understand, but I did. I had already learned—without knowing I’d learned it—that every single thing in the world was full of mystery and awesome power. And it was only by right ways of doing things—ritual ways—that kept any of us safe. Making stories about them was not so that we could understand them but so that we could live with them. A part of me knew that, at best, I had no right to keep flying birds in a closed room, and at the same time, another part of me knew that if there were no birds in the house, one could not spit in my mouth. It all made perfect sense to me. Fantasy might not be truth as the world counts it, but what was truth when fantasy meant survival?