It’s about this time that Elphie has a run-in with a poltergeist. How old is she, exactly? Counting birthdays in Oz is not an exact science. But the girl has reached the age when chronology starts to grip its teeth. Undisciplined memories begin to line up. Elphie starts to suss out the notion of cause and effect, the relativity of events. The infant Ozma, for instance, didn’t disappear until the so-called Wizard of Oz arrived; otherwise he’d have had no one to overturn. First this, then that. The encounter at the riverbank happened when Nessa was small enough to be floated in an overturned warrior shield, not when she was big enough for Elphie to run her around in that wicker barrow.
If there was ever an actual poltergeist, it will remain in dispute. Nanny will insist she never saw hide nor hair of any interloper on the premises of the camp proper, and she and Boozy are the ones who paid attention.
There’s a night guard, too, a scrap-haired local named Ti’imit. He patrols the camp and stokes the fire—it’s the time of year when jungle cats pass through in migratory stealth from somewhere to otherwhere. Their presence quietens the jungle. Even the leaves and spiderwebs are on alert, or so it seems to Elphie. Things are beginning to seem to her. She isn’t sure how real such impressions are. But she notes them with a kind of pleasure, in that they help her feel distinct from the others. Nanny says, “Imagining such fancies, and from the likes of you, Elphie? Some foggy figment there when it patently is not? Get along with you, I thank Lurline that I have no taste or talent for such a pudding of nonsense.” On the other hand, Boozy nods affably at any outlandish assertion of Elphie’s, contradicting nothing—it isn’t worth the effort. Elphie’s parents, throughout, remain distracted.
Poltergeist or not, someone is squirreling around on the edge of the family’s long labored days, and only Elphie seems to notice.
First of all, things go missing. Nanny’s needles and threads. Who could want that small wicker hand-basket? Nessa is always in the clear, of course, because she can’t make off with anything. And Boozy is a woman of few personal items, the fewer the better. (Less to pack up when camp-breaking comes around again.) Can’t be Melena—Melena doesn’t know the business end of a needle from the Seven Lofty Sayings of the Bishop of Wend Hardings—which she also doesn’t know. And Frex, bless his clumsy fingers, can darn his own socks and reattach a button, but as to thievery, he is guilty only of stealing his bride from her family estate, as some would tell it. The smaller the infraction, the more publicly Frex detests it. He won’t even pick a wodge of clumpy rice from someone’s dinner plate without leave.
So when Boozy’s bamboo pincers disappear overnight, suspicion naturally falls upon Elphie. “She hexed ’em to the moon,” says Nessa promptly, with curious conviction. Her slightly lisping delivery is suspected of being put on.
“What did I tell you about hexing?” Nanny scolds.
“She hexed them,” says Elphie hotly, pointing at Nessa. “After all, isn’t that what she wants—a way to pinch things? She’s in sore need of a grasp.”
In sore need, a Nanny phrase if ever there was one, and Nanny catches it. “Don’t go putting on Nanny airs, you’re too highborn and weird for that,” she says. “If ever a false accusation was made to throw the constabulary off the scent, that sounds like one, Elphie. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“Maybe I ought to but I’m not.” But Elphie is bewildered. The pincers are required to turn over marrow-bean shoots sizzling in the skillet. Boozy threatens to quit unless the implement is returned.
“As long as we’re making claims against each other, Nanny, maybe you took them,” says Elphie.
“I am above kitchen,” says Nanny. “I sniffed at larder, snarled at laundry, I sailed past kitchen. I trained for parlor. If I only made it to nursery, more’s the pity, but I still eat with the family.”
Boozy snaps, “You eat no fried marrow-bean thingies till my pincers walk right back here. Or I quit. I quit good and hard, and when I’m ready, I quit for good. And for hard.”
“That’ll be the day,” says Nanny to the cook. “You wouldn’t leave her ladyship, not now, not in the state she’s in. You don’t have the moxie for it. And, I admit it, also you’re too kind.” She forces a wintry smile.
“I find my pincers and I clamp your scheming lying lips closed like they belong,” says Boozy, “and then I sew them up with your needle and threadlings if they turn up again, too. Enough of you and your airs! And I don’t train for kitchen, like the stupid girls you grow up next to. Kitchen is in my blood and it comes to me natural. Like hexing comes to her,” she finishes, pointing the soup ladle at Elphie.
“Why is this always about me?” Elphie feels angry and also a little proud at being thought that capable.
But it isn’t her, is it, doing the thieving. Is it? Might she be stealing things—in her sleep? Where would she put them? Why would she bother? To be noticed? Sure, Nessarose gets all the attention available, and always will—always will have to—but in most ways this suits Elphie just fine. She doesn’t crave centrality, she prefers to skulk and slide. Elphie is coming to realize the only place in this world where she might be invisible would be naked and lost in the jungle, where her natural coloring would be protective. An asset for once.
But independence is nearly as good. She tries to button herself at the collarbone in an invisible cloak of stealth. She doesn’t yet know that she has the kind of face that advertises her marketplace emotions, those sentiments legible from half a mile away. She isn’t sure she even has emotions. She hardly ever cries, for instance. She’s a secret unto herself. While this is bewildering, it’s also a relief. If she doesn’t understand who she is, she can’t be blamed for stepping outside of her own bounds.
But this is true of all children, she will think later in life, when she comes to know a few children in Kiamo Ko, and rather detests them. That she can remember being flummoxed during her own childhood won’t make her any more sympathetic to those still enmired there. Why don’t they just grow up and get it over with already?
The pincers; the sewing basket. The matter of the hexed marsh plum. One morning the missionary party rouses itself to find that the old ceremonial shield upon which Elphie once tried to float her baby sister into the next world is overturned on the grass. Its slightly convex basin is piled high with a heap of maggoty bananas. “Why would I bother myself with rotting fruit?” shouts Elphie, as much to herself as to the others, before they have time to begin to blame her.
She stomps toward Ti’imit, who has concluded his night watch and is lolling in an over-easy way upon the blanket Boozy has set out for him. “You must have seen something, if you’re up all night being the night watchman. Or do you snore your head off as soon as the rest of us go to bed?”
“Sleep is a demanding lady of the night, when she call I answer. I sleep with sleep,” he answers, “she my bad habit. But the fire is here in the morning, and so are all of you. That’s my job every night; to see you safe into tomorrow. So leave me in peace. And toss away those bananas, they are calling every pest in the neighborhood. You want answers, ask the next monkey you meet what a banana is for.”
For once she does what she is told—jettisoning the rotten fruit—but not because she is told it. The bananas are an affront to her, somehow, a challenge. First a perfect marsh plum, then a heap of aging bananas. What next? The deliquescing corpse of a gigantic muskmelon?
Elphie decides to become a detective. She teaches her eyes to sidle sideways while her head is pointed front and center. She will catch whatever pair of hands is about to pilfer the next useless item. She stands stone-still to scan the campsite. A bird actually lands on her shoulder once and—magnificently—she manages not to flinch. The bird takes her as a limb of nature, nothing more or less. She doesn’t know what kind of a bird it is, but realizes that it is more itself than any of the rest of them can be. Ever.
This is devastating to her and also exhilarating.
She decides to try an experiment. She takes the dolly from the place where Nanny tucks it into Nessa’s cot, whose high edges are shaped to keep the younger girl from rolling out, since she thrashes in her sleep. The dolly is an old abandoned thing of Elphie’s. She’s always hated it, that cursed poppet. A gift of Nanny from Colwen Grounds. Maybe it had been Melena’s. It once boasted of silly yellow locks made of wood shavings, but long ago Elphie pulled all the hair out. The creature is now bald and nearly featureless, its smug painted smile worn off with abuse. It has become Nessa’s toy, her only toy, but of course the younger girl can’t play with it, unless you count kicking a doll something of a game. The figure is as immobile as Nessa herself. They deserve each other, Elphie had thought when she finished hating it enough to pass it down to Nessa.
“Where you taking Ninnakins?” asks Nessa from the threshold of sleep.
“I’m putting her outside the tent to keep watch. You heard about those bananas. Some kind of joke, some kind of insult, I don’t know what. Ninnakins can watch out for us.”
“She can’t tell us nothing, she don’t talk,” says Nessa.
“Yet,” says Elphie, and then, more slyly, “perhaps one of us will hex her into a confession. Something is going on here. Maybe she’ll open that clamped smile and say something useful. Like: Nessa is the one behind these thefts.”
“Need her here,” says Nessa, but mawkishly; she doesn’t care much for Ninnakins either. It’s just the ritual of her.
“She’ll make a great night guardian. Somebody has to pay attention, Ti’imit just snores the night away. The big cats probably come and dance around the campfire to make fun of him. If Ti’imit is too groggy to notice who is playing these tricks, maybe Ninnakins will.”
Elphie hopes Ninnakins will be the next item to disappear. Nessa won’t be very sorrowful, but she might cry a little, and that would be worth it.
Ninnakins is propped up on a cushion of stacked palmetto leaves. Her blond-wood face gleams in the fire’s glow. Tired, unappealing, ripe for abduction. In the morning, however, she remains as alone and unmolested as before. Her expression is unchanged, as if this is what she has expected all along. A doll’s life is exhausting.
“Well?” asks Nessa, and Elphie throws the doll into Nessa’s cot, hitting her sister in the face. Nessa wails. “Oops,” says Elphie.
Ninnakins and Nessa kiss each other’s ouchies away as Nanny comes hobbling from her own tent next door to brook some pretense of peace between the sisters for the nine dozenth thousandth time since the marshlands first flooded with Lurline’s tears.