Drink for the Thirst to Come (20 page)

Barbary Ann cooed, asked what she might do.

M’lissa sat up. How was Rafe permitted? Phooey on hiding her feelings, how could he lay asleep and comfortable by the trees? Why’d he enjoy that comfort when she, they, did not?

A moment of sympathy, perhaps, or maybe B.A. sought to soothe her guest’s natural northern impatience, but Barbary Ann sat up and began the tale of Lady Ophelia, the Negro woman who, once upon a time, had lived where Rafe now spent nights doing only God knew what.

By all reckoning Ophelia was one scary old woman. First, she was a former slave who had lived almost forever. Second, she was a conjure-woman of great power. Most important, she had no kin or friend, no one knew where she was from. No one came by to say, “Ophelia! Why of course, she’s from up in…” or “Yassir, she’s kin to them folk down by…” then speak the names of known Negroes in another town or county. Barbary Ann told the tale as though the story came through her own eyes, that she’d seen the magics writhing in night-smoke, right there!

She had not. Ophelia may have lived almost forever, but of course was a woman dead by the time of B.A.’s great granddad’s boyhood. B.A.’s tale told that hot night had been embellished by time and whim by others and now were further festooned by Barbary Ann’s hospitality.

The Lady Ophelia had been the last woman resident of the place that, after, became the Tozier boys’ Boy’s Room. Already run down by life and hardship, she simply moved in one night. “Just as like it was her natural right! And no one, not Toziers, Wallaces, nor anyone dared say her nay! Some tried, none did!”

She never left, not ever again, not once in life. Folks did for her. And her, a colored woman! Toziers, other folks, white or Negro, town or country, anyone who came visiting, brought food, water, wood to burn in winter, they made up, cleaned out, kept the place repaired year-round.

“For her?”

“For her.”

“Why?”

“Why? She was a conjure-woman for goodness sakes is why! The most pow’ful conjure-woman maybe ever. Folks feared and required her. A woman who works the darkness is important, for goodness sake. They protected her, did for her.”

The Lady Ophelia dipped from the waters of Old Africa and made certain a bull was calved if a bull was needed, or a child was a born a boy if a boy was wanted. She cast darkness before despised neighbors, foretold time, dispensed futures, and unraveled dreams.

She died one day. “When next a visitor came bringing gifts and bearing secret need, he took one look into that old dark shack and ran himself all the way to Monocle calling alarm.”

The colored pastor came and behind him, his congregation. They dug a hole in the forest. Nervous Christian words were said over the little dark bundle. “And folks were content only after she’d been lowered into the ground and certain things thrown in after.”

“Things? What things?”

“Power things.”

“What?”

“Never you mind. Things! And red dirt and dead moss scraped in and over it all. Even us Toziers attended, can you believe?”

“Well, what of it?” Melissa said. She was still hot and now tired of the story.

“Well, for goodness sake,” Barbary-Ann said. “Ophelia says, ‘When you set to study revenge for wrong, what you must do is take the vera’ thin’ done-you, and turn it back on the doer!’ It’s what she says.”

“Yeah?” M’lissa started slowly.

B.A. was near asleep. The story was silly. To her, a hot night was nothing. In consequence she was somewhat irritable when she said, “I mean we could grab us one of those jumpin’ spiders Rafe locked you with, and of which you are so afraid, silly you. Catch it by moon’s full light and, before mornin’, make it into old Rafe’s breakfast chicory drink, and…” She yawned.

M’lissa shuddered, barely able to speak the eight-legged word. The thought of catching, grinding, drinking… Well, she shuddered. Thank Goodness there was no time for wait and worry. There it was above, full yellow moon rising, wet-hot and burning her eyes. She was too soaked-hot for sleep anyway. Worse, M’lissa knew by-and-by she’d HAVE to use the thunder mug under the bed, then have to carry the hateful thing, sloshing, across the lawn, over the bridge, past Rafe’s Boy’s Room, just to empty it into the hole in the back house
and
cousin Rafe watching what she carried!

In the minute it took Melissa to resolve to act, cousin B.A. was asleep. Melissa lay waiting. Moon heat and the metallic buzz of cicadas made sleep impossible to catch and hold.
Jaspers
, she thought,
it has GOT to be darn near dawn.
It was a mere hour after the tales had been told, but the awful moonlight barely crawled. The stars that survived full moon brightness wriggled along the rippled windowpanes above their bed.
Criminies,
Melissa thought,
they move!
Every few seconds a mosquito sang in her ear or stung the edge of an eyebrow. She whacked herself a crack every time and still the thing lived to sing again. Melissa was everywhere sweat-wet and skitter-bit. Between dozes, she rolled to and fro, angrier and angrier.

“Wake up!” Melissa finally said aloud and shoved her cousin off the bed.

“Criminies, M’lis’ Trish?” B.A. said. “What. Are. You. Doin’?”

Melissa peered over the side of the bed. “Time to get us some, you-know, spider. Time to make us a revenge!” She was glad the moon was at her back, knowing she did not look as sure as her voice sounded.

With imagination, the wet grass in the long yard felt cold between her toes. M’lissa Trish’s lady-nightie (her mother’s, cut down, pinned up) dragged in the dew. Barbary Ann, in Rafe’s left-back and snugged skivvy shorts and undershirt, shuffled behind. She hugged herself for shame. Bugs were now still in the hours between midnight and sun. A horse snickered in the distance. Somewhere there were frogs.

Barbary Ann carried an empty Prince Albert tobacco tin fished from her treasure box under the bed. The little red tin was about half the size of the hip flask Old Strog kept filled with bourbon whiskey and hidden among the
Argosy
and
Police Gazette
magazines in the raw attic next to the girl’s finished room at the top of the house. Their way ’cross the yard was lit by the electric lamp Bindle Tozier used to hunt night-crawlers. They danced across the towpath road, following the lantern’s yellow circles, M’lissa’s city-soft feet cut to fancied bloody ruin on gravel spalls. The black canal water below the bridge stank of life and death and Melissa couldn’t help but think it flowed too, too quiet. They gave the Boy’s Room a wide pass and whispered through the long grass off the trail. Their way took them near the old trees and their weeping Spanish moss.

“In there,” B.A. nodded toward the trees, “is where Ophelia lies buried!” Her whisper stirred the hanging moss.

“Hsssh,” Melissa said. By full moonlight, the bare wood of the Boy’s Room shone pure white. “Hush, can’t you?”

When they reached the back house, Melissa’s hands were shaking. Thoughts of spider, yes. Thoughts of Rafe, surely. They were about to begin eternal things, things she didn’t altogether believe, but…

Barbary Ann stuck the tobacco tin into Melissa Patricia’s hands.

“Huh?”

“Your vengeance,” Barbary said. “You harvest the spider bug.”

“I am not grabbing crawlies from a crapper. Not alone!”

“Oh, you are. You are, indeed,” her cousin huffed, “and you gonna grind and mumbo-jumbo it. Feed it, too, like Lady Ophelia says.” Barbary Ann leaned forward, her voice, old and witchy. She breathed sleepy breath into Melissa’s face. “‘Onc’t you set forth ’pon a c’reer of revengeance,” she squinted one eye, “ain’t no back-turn to’t. You are Vengeance hisself,’ she says! Ophelia says.”

Melissa Patricia’s head tingled. She shivered before. Locked in darkness by Rafe, daylight, a wooden door away and only daytime thoughts of hairy things to worry her, that was as nothing. Blame Rafe before but now she stepped by choice into darkness, sunlight, a quarter-world away. Melissa Patricia Tozier, 117 East Oak Street, Chicago, Illinois went alone into the back house. Her eyes and the lantern light went busy with fear. Jumping yellow circles from Bindle’s lamp made the unlit parts of the crapper seem darker still. Generation upon generation of Tozier outpourings exhaled from the earth-pit beneath the sagging wood floor. Melissa Patricia’s toes curled at the touch of soggy wood beneath bare feet. She hopped foot to foot. Every creak and gasp returned an echo from below. Absolutely, without a shade of doubt, she would NOT stick her hand down that hole, would not reach down where daytime air had been thick with flies (Who knew what else?) and which now was hideously silent. She would not look there. No! She scanned walls, rafters… She looked for… She did not wish to find… But she looked for that thing she sought…

Then saw. One. A big one. A leg twitched from the pages of the Sears book hung by the seat. The leg was thick as a pencil lead and bristly with hair.

“See one.” A bare breath, hissed to her cousin.

The leg twitched.

“A rightly one?” B.A. whispered back. “It has got to be ’propriate. By which I mean it has got to be B. I. G., big.”

The leg became two and, attached, the body.

“Ah. Ah. Yeah. Yeah-yeah. Big...”

M’lissa Trish opened the flip-lid of the Prince Albert can. She wished the opening were wider, the can longer. She stuck her hand toward the spider that now squatted on the edge of the catalog. For all the world, the critter breathed.

“Get him quick. If he’s a wolf, they jump!”

Shaking more than ever she had in her whole little life, M’lissa wiggled the can below where the spider quivered. She nudged the edge of the book with the can. The critter clamored. One leg, one long, thick, hairy leg brushed the tip of M’lissa Trish’s finger. Where it touched, she tingled. She shrieked a little then whooped the can’s tin lip over the twitching beast. The leg tried to grip her finger, a claw dug into her flesh, another leg grappled her skin, tried to climb her hand. She felt it cock itself for a leap. She shrieked again and the whole fat hair-covered body—a body with a pretty little light brown spot on its belly—went tick, tick, tick against the metal can, and,
snap
, M’lissa clicked the lid shut.

“What the
hey’re
you two doin’?” The door opened. Cousin Rafe’s boy-voice darn near ripped her spine getting to her head. He filled the night behind Barbary Ann. Both let a shriek could shatter glass and tore a wet streak through the black grass in white moonlight.

Rafe, candle in hand, was left at the back house door, scratching.

By the time they reached the kitchen, first fright was off the adventure and they could not stop giggling. Even so, Melissa was well aware the can she held was filled with spider. Through their giggles and shushes, the critter scrabbled,
tick, tick, tick,
against the sides and bottom.
Tick, tick, tick
.

Cousin B.A. gritted her teeth. “I endeavor to keep from peeing with the laughter,” she said. Melissa made sure Prince Albert’s top stayed good and tight-snapped. Every few seconds, she banged the can against her other hand, then held it to her ear. Each time, she heard skitters and scrabbles inside and whomped it again. Each time, she giggled less.

“What
are
you doing?” B.A. whispered.

“Stunning the thing.”
Whack.
“Killing it,” M’lissa whispered.
Whack.

The flashlight’s dome lamp threw yellow and dark circles on the kitchen’s varnished lathe ceiling.

“You cannot kill your vengeance spider like that, M’lissa Trish. Criminies, don’t you know a thing? He’s the haunt-catcher, don’t-you-know?”

Feeling, at just that moment, bigger than herself, Melissa looked her cousin right down. “I did not. And I was not
to
know such a thing, now was I, cousin?”

“Well it is a spirit-catcher,” Barbary Ann whispered. “That there in the can is waitin’ to be told what life it’s gonna catch and what it’s to become in the next world. You treat it with wishful respect, now.”

“And that would be how?” Melissa gave the can another
whomp
. “How might we kill a thing respectfully?”

“Why, you say worshipful words over him, alive. Then you grind him like you might could do a han’ful of cumin seed and make a pasty meal of him.” B.A. leaned and spoke words direct to M’lissa Trish’s ear. Her lips touched the hair that hung in sweated hanks from Melissa’s temple. The whispered words will not be repeated.

“Ready?” Cousin Barbary Ann breathed.

M’lissa Trish stood by Aunt Wallace’s mortar, the pestle poised to pulp the beast. “Ready… No, wait!” She retreated from the table and held the marble rod one-handed in front, drew her other arm away as though balancing with it.

“You fixing to walk tightrope or wreak your vengeance?” B.A. whispered.

“I am ready,” Melissa said.

Barbary flipped the lid and whooped the can upside into the bowl.

The spider flopped then scrabbled all eight directions at once. Melissa’s second or third downbeat whomped it. In fairness to her grit, her little grunted shrieks were quiet enough to not wake the house. The grown Toziers, above, therefore, did not hear Negro conjuring whispered in their kitchen that hot night. The
whomp
that first got the critter, knocked a lump of pale yellow jelly from the fat brown body, the loss of which did not improve the spider’s mood nor, it seemed, impair its ability to scramble the slick sides of the bowl. Another few strokes of the pestle, though, ground her up, legs, spider-hair, jelly, and eye-clusters. With each stroke, M’lissa tried her best to say the words her cousin had whispered. She squeaked them. Cousin Barbary prompted from behind. In 20, 25 repetitions of the short Negro verse, the back house spider was a gray paste in the bowl. By then, the effort had taken on the scent of cinnamon and cumin and cloves.

That nearly was it. They ground it together with a measure of dry roasted chicory from the can then poured the mix in a packet M’lissa Trish carried with her as the two giggled quietly up the steps by the creep of morning light.