“Salvage for victory” is excerpted from Chapter 28 of Things Invisible to See, a novel set during World War II in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The scene is a conversation between a child and a woman who is taking care of him.
THE FIRST TIME Davy saw Ernestina, she was boiling water for tea and talking to Aunt Helen’s teakettle. She was polite and persuasive. She told it the advantages of boiling; she told it about the other pots waiting to take its place. She put her hands on her hips and said, “Pot, what is your determination in this matter?” and the pot boiled.
Then she poured the water into Aunt Helen’s flowered china teapot and added a tiny cheesecloth bag that did not smell like Lipton’s and carried the tea out to the screened-in porch.
She sat down in the rocker and opened her purse, which was chock-full of khaki yarn. She was small, like his mother, but older, and her skin had the color of chestnuts fresh from the burr with the shine still on them, and her faded blue dress smelled clean and friendly as newly shelled peas. Davy drew his little stool near her chair and admired her. She did not appear to notice him, and he was much surprised when she said, “Loose tooth?”
He nodded—how did she know? He could wiggle that tooth without opening his mouth just by pushing his tongue against it.
“If you keep your tongue out of the hole, you’ll get a gold tooth.”
The blue jays screamed in the arborvitae; the cat lolled in the myrtle bed below, waiting for one false move. Davy breathed deeply the strong, sweet smell of the tea. Aunt Helen never let him sit near the teapot for fear he would knock it over and scald himself; and because she had forbidden him to touch it, he longed for nothing so much as a taste of tea from that pot. He gathered his courage and blurted out, “Can I have some tea?”
“Hoo! Not this tea,” replied Ernestina. (Oh, would she let him try a different tea?) “This here is hog’s hoof tea for my bad leg. You could bring me a cup. I don’t know where your aunt keeps her cups.”
Eager to please, he brought her a flowered cup from the cabinet that held Helen’s best china. Ernestina thanked him gravely, as if he were a grown-up, and poured herself a cup and sipped it. Then she unlaced her shoes—black, with thick heels—and eased her feet out of them and wiggled her toes in their coarse black stockings. And what was that shining in her left shoe? A white stone?
“You have a stone in your shoe,” said Davy, pointing it out to her, for she seemed not to notice.
Ernestina nodded. “The root doctor give me that when my leg got conjured. You can hold it if you want.”
He picked up the stone and rubbed it between his fingers and thought he had never felt anything so old and gentle. And the rude doctor had put it into her shoe. That was a queer thing for a doctor to do.
“Can I keep it?”
“Nope. It come from the root doctor. My leg swole right up, and she dug under the doorstep and sure ’nough there was a conjure bag. Bones and hair and graveyard dirt.”
Davy stole a glance at her afflicted leg, and she saw him; he could hide nothing from her.
“It do look fine, don’t it?” she said. “The root doctor is a powerful healer.”
Clackety clack, sang her needles, gathering the khaki yarn, arranging it to suit them. She held up for his inspection the front of a sweater for her oldest son. She had four sons in the army and one daughter away at college studying to be a teacher. Ernestina sent the money to keep her there, and it took a lot of money, she told him—it took practically all she earned. Her husband hadn’t worked for a year; his liver was acting up. Before he got sick he wanted to join the Air Corps and be a pilot, but the Air Corps had no use for him, so he’d built a little plane of his own out of junk: broken radiators and old tires and rusty bedsprings, good scrap that the government wanted and would pay him for. He didn’t tell anyone about the plane except a few kids in the neighborhood who came for rides. He had real pilot goggles for them to wear, just like his.
“Where do they go?” asked Davy.
“The Lord knows,” said Ernestina. “The plane got no motor. But Henry keep a log book inside, with all the places.”
Except for the lack of a motor, the plane was very well equipped, she assured him. She herself had never been inside to see where it went or how it got there because she was deathly afraid of flying. But she had seen the log and the names of the places. And she had seen the snapshots he took of the kids in those places. The backgrounds were always blurred, or common—a wall, a field—which convinced her that travel did nothing to improve your mind and folks might just as well stay home. Now her pictures were sharp; you could always tell what you were looking at. Did he want to see some of her pictures?
Davy was delighted.
She showed him four pictures of her sons in uniform and then a picture of her husband, radiant and cocky in goggles and pilot’s cap, leaning out of a cockpit, and a creased snapshot of a young man posing under a palm tree. The young man was her brother who had died in Bataan and come back a week later and asked his girl friend for a pack of Lucky Strikes he’d left in a bureau drawer.
“He came back when he was dead?” exclaimed Davy.
“His ghost come back.”
“Did you ever see a ghost?”
“Nope. But I hear ’em when the trees murmur. They ’round all the time, crowds of ’em, the bad with the bad, the good with the good. They don’t mix theirselves up like living folks. And the good ones is always flying. If you feel the air from their bodies, you get well. Anything that bothers you won’t bother you no more.”
But though she had not seen spirits herself, she knew lots of folks who had. The good spirits looked like children, or birds. But they could be any shape they wanted to. Why, she knew the brother of a man whose wife took a drink from the spring at night and drank up the springkeeper. It took the shape of a snake, and that snake used to pop its head out of her mouth and whistle.
She set down her cup, and Davy crawled into her lap.
“Spirits is very fond of whistling,” she remarked. “They do it to get your notice. If you ask ’em what in the Lord’s name they want, they go away.”
“If I ask one of the good spirits to bring me some springy shoes, will it bring them?”
And he showed her the picture in the magazine.
“Maybe,” said Ernestina. “Maybe not.”
A week later, when Aunt Helen and his mom were at the movies and Ernestina came over “to be in the house,” as his mother put it, she woke him up and carried him to the window. The tops of the pear trees were blossoming hills of light.
“Full moon,” said Ernestina. “You can wish on it. Show it what you want.”
He opened the magazine to the page, and the moonlight fell on the springy shoes, a bargain at two dollars and ninety-nine cents.
“Is the moon watching us?” he asked. He loved the moon’s dirty face.
Not the moon, Ernestina told him. The moon was just a lamp. But the Moon Regulator, who lit the moon every night—he would see the page. And he would send Davy those springy shoes. Not tomorrow or the next day perhaps. But he would send them. You never could tell which day he would choose.
She did not put Davy back to bed right away but let him stay up to see the stars. With the shortages, he was surprised to see so many.
“Hoo! They’s just as many as they was ’fore the war,” said Ernestina.
“Can they see us?”
“I ’spect they can. You never know who’s watching.”
From the solemnity of her voice, he knew these were grave matters, and he must not speak of them to anyone. And because no one had ever entrusted him with a secret before, he greatly looked forward to Ernestina’s coming, and every morning he asked, “Is Ernestina coming today?” and mostly Aunt Helen would say no, but sometimes she would say yes, and then Ernestina would sip her tea (which she drank with ice in the hot weather) on the back porch, and he would sit in her lap, content to watch her hands twinkle the yarn off the needles. He had noticed that she never talked about herself to anyone but him. Only to him would she tell her troubles, and he listened politely, waiting for the squawk of blue jays, when he could turn the talk to his own liking.
“Tell about the jays taking sand to the devil.”
“What’s today?”
“Wednesday.”
“They ain’t doing it.”
“Tell it anyway, please.”
“Why you want to hear the same story over and over?”
“Tell about the jays.”
“Well—they take a grain of sand a day till all the sand from the top of the earth is in Hell. They gonna ransom the folks down there.”
The jays screeched.
“Tell about Hell,” whispered Davy.
“Never been there.”
“Tell about the coffins, then.”
“Don’t know why you want to hear the same story over and over.”
“Tell.”
“Well, there’s Main Hell and there’s West Hell. Bad folks’ souls turn to rubber coffins and bounce through reg’lar Hell to West Hell. That’s the hottest part.”
She was fanning herself with a church program she’d found in her purse.
“I wish I were freezing, don’t you, Ernestina?”
Ernestina shook her head no.
“I b’lieve I’d rather be too hot than too cold. I can’t stand the cold.”
And Davy, wanting to please her, said, “I can’t stand it either,” though just now he thought he would like it very much.
Mostly she talked about hot weather and cold weather, and how in the summer the iceman overcharged her, and how in the winter the furnace broke and once all her clothes froze solid in the washtub and Henry said, “I’ll get ’em out,” and he chopped them free with the ax.
“Chopped all my clothes to pieces,” she said.
Davy never knew why, one night, after grieving over her ordinary disasters, she said, “The worst cold I ever heard of was Cold Friday. A man got froze at the gate of his house with his jug of whiskey at his lips.”
Davy shivered.
“There was a funeral, and the heat departed out of the church, and the preacher and all the families froze solid. And the preacher’s dog froze on the doorstep. They stayed that way all Friday. The root doctor was a little bit of a girl, and she froze right along with the rest of ’em. But the Lord saw fit to thaw her out. And soon everybody callin’ her Cold Friday, on account she’s the only one made it through.”
Except for the regular creak of the rocker, the air held perfectly still, as if it were listening.
“Lord, Lord, she be a powerful woman!” said Ernestina. “Five times she died, five times she come back. She froze and come back, she drowned and come back, her house burnt up and she fell in the fire and come back, she got the sleepy sickness and was buried alive and come back, she choked on a bone and come back.”
“I hear an owl,” whispered Davy.
“Too early for owls,” said Ernestina.
“I hear one.”
“The owl is old-time folks. She won’t hurt you. Oh, she was born the year the stars fell.”
And he did not know if “she” meant the owl or Cold Friday.