The Last Season (6 page)

“They're great, Ig. What do you play with them?”

Ig looked at me, not understanding but too smart to say anything for fear he'd been caught dumb. I realized he played nothing with them, as if once put in place they were forever in place, the wolf courteously beside the deer, the rabbit content with its fox. Ig lived in a world with no winners or losers. But then, he was a loser and didn't want reminding. I was a winner. I needed losers to remind me.

Batcha's reputation as a
c
àrovnica
— something I never even realized she was until after Jaja's death — had grown in the few months I'd been gone. The white witch of Pomerania was a damned industry now. She was even taking business away from Old Frank, the
jiza
from down by Black Donald Lake. A wicker basket sat beside her old rocker completely filled with poplar branches to be knit together in the form of crosses and sold. She could hardly keep up with demand, Poppa said. A quarter to Batcha for a cross and you were in the clear:
smentek
the devil bat wouldn't suck out your blood while you slept.

With Ig's help and Poppa's vise and hacksaw, she was splitting and selling nickels to other old women who were frightened of the
mora
nightmare, the girls cursed at baptism who unwittingly suck others' blood at night. For a dime they could buy here consecrated maple keys to bury under the front door and make sure
smolôk
the devil didn't sneak into their house when they were away. A dollar and she'd lance a boil with an old otter claw she kept in a special chest in her room.

Growing up with her always around, it had never seemed all that unusual to me. But now, coming from Vernon where Mrs. Riley had her sparkling medicine chest filled with every cure the television promised, Batcha seemed outrageously impossible. How, in 1960, could people still believe that every stroke of lightning in a storm strikes a devil or that the small whirlwinds that circled in the snow were caused by the souls of children who had died without being baptized? Yet Batcha and her customers believed precisely that, and I suppose at one time I believed it myself, at least until I got to California where every day the papers were full of the kind of insanity such thinking leads to.

I had myself seen her cure swollen cows' udders over at the Jazdas' by scratching the teats with a mole's foreclaw. And I remembered how when Jaja died she had forced Poppa to walk around the yard telling everything, chickens, bushes, trees, even a chipmunk, that the old man was dead, while she came along behind making the sign of the cross over everything Poppa spoke to. I remember he seemed embarrassed. But I also remember he did it. So not much had changed in Pomerania — they were still buying the old bitch's tricks.

The first morning back and I was awakened by Puck's barking and a pounding on the front door. Going downstairs, I could see my breath in the dawn light. The linoleum was frosted around the camp blanket Poppa had kicked against the door when we finally went to bed, and the storm door would barely open up, it had become so tightly stitched with frost; beyond, beating their arms against their sides, woolen scarves tied completely over their faces, an old man and woman asked for Batcha. I invited them in and made the fire, me putting my big coat on out of necessity while they took theirs off out of habit.

When they had unwrapped, I could see they were old Sikorski from down by Black Donald Lake, and his wife, a woman so thin she seemed merely the skeleton for the body she had just removed and hung over an empty spike. But Sikorski seemed not to recognize me. He asked if I'd mind checking to see whether Batcha would see them and then he sat down silently and uninvited on a kitchen chair.

I made a fire while Poppa and Ig got up, and soon Poppa had coffee and
Makowiec
cake out for them, which Sikorski gobbled up while his wife refused. She didn't look real, less like a person than something that had been drawn with a protractor, all angles, bends and lines. The only thing about her that was round was her face — she had one of those flat, expressionless looks so common in Pomerania, as if all the women were sisters and all their feelings were a family secret.

Batcha came out in her black housecoat and slippers, slouched slightly and stepping stiffly, her brown leggings riding low and wrinkled around her ankles. She had her hair tied back in a tight black bun — not a single grey hair to show for more than seventy years, the grey all reserved for eyes that moved like a cop's flashlight over the couple. Sikorski fidgeted with his cake and spoon and ran his other hand over and over a great dent of scar in his forehead while pretending to comb his hair with his fingers. His wife was crying.

Batcha smiled while the wolf eyes maintained their own scowl, and she indicated with a toss of her head that they were to follow her to her room. Sikorski looked nervously at Poppa and Poppa nodded and Sikorski got up and took his wife's bony hand and led her off behind Batcha. Watching, I saw his hand slip behind him as he entered Batcha's room. I saw the palm extend and then the ring and small finger fold back. The
mano pantea
, protection from the evil eye.

We ate our own breakfast while they stayed with Batcha, cries and prayers occasionally filtering out.

“Why have they come here?” I asked Poppa.

Poppa looked as if I should have known. “His wife has the cancer.”

“Shouldn't she see a doctor?”

Poppa shrugged. Ig giggled over his hot chocolate.

“She has and nothing has helped.”

“But what can Batcha do?”

“I don't know,” Poppa said. “Offer hope, maybe.”

“But is that fair?” I asked.

“Fair?” Poppa shrugged again. Ig was ignoring us, wolfing great spoonfuls of chocolate directly from the Nestlé's Quik can into his mouth. “Nothing else has been fair to her.”

I shook my head. “Why do you let her do it?”

Poppa poured himself another cup of coffee, I could see the heavy grains floating in it. Mr. Riley always had instant coffee, but I doubted Poppa had even heard of such a miracle.

“Your Batcha is very well thought of around here, Felix,” he said.

“She spooks me,” I said.

Poppa laughed. Ig joined in, too loud and not even aware of what might be the joke, just wishing to be involved.

“You're fifteen years old, son. Has she hurt you yet?”

“When's your birthday, Feelie?” Ig asked. He started singing “Happy Birthday,” high and tuneless.

“No, she hasn't hurt me yet. But she's hardly been nice to me, either,”

Poppa shook his head. “Batcha loves you in her own way, you know that.”

“Is today your birthday, Feelie?” Ig shouted.

Batcha's door opened and the Sikorskis emerged. The wife's eyes were red but her body seemed to have puffed out with them, as if somehow Batcha had packed her bones with new flesh while they sat praying in Batcha's room. I saw in Sikorski's hand at least a dozen poplar crosses; it was the hand of the sign, but the sign against the evil eye was no longer there.

“Today is Feelie's birthday!” Ig shouted at them.

Both Sikorskis smiled at me. I shook my head. “No, it's not.”

Ig whined. “But you said it was,” he said to Poppa.

Poppa ignored him. He was setting the Sikorskis' cups back out. Old Sikorski held out his free hand and indicated that he would be having none. They went straight for their coats. Poppa went and stood by them as they bundled up again in silence. Batcha, without so much as a farewell or a nod, returned to her room. Sikorski looked up when he heard her door click shut.

“You tell her we'll be back, Walter.”

“I will,” Poppa said.

Sikorski nodded to his wife as if she were a chainsaw Poppa and he were trying to figure out. “The doctor in Renfrew,” he said, “he said three weeks.”

Mrs. Sikorski looked down, avoiding Poppa's mechanic's stare. Poppa shook his head, as if it was no use, hopeless.

Sikorski went on. “They want her in the hospital. People die in hospitals.”

Poppa nodded.

Mrs. Sikorski looked up to get her scarf from the spike and I could see her eyes had been watering again. She looked quickly at Poppa, nodded a silent thank you and tied her scarf tight as her husband pulled at the door. It stuck fast.

“You have to lift it and then pull,” Poppa said. Sikorski did and the door popped open, a gush of cold air that made the hemlock roar in the box stove. The Sikorskis jumped out without a word and the door slammed shut.

Poppa stood for a while staring straight at the door, then turned and walked slowly back to the table. Puck, dumb enough that he probably figured Poppa was just coming in, wiggled out of his bed and across the floor, tail whipping against the chair legs, and tried to jump up on Poppa. Poppa cuffed him across the nose and Puck cowered down, peeing on the linoleum. Ig giggled and dug his spoon deep into the Quik. Poppa reached over as he passed by and grabbed up the chocolate, capped it and slammed it down on the shelf as he went through into the wood shed, closing the door behind him.

Puck whimpered in his corner. Ig whimpered at the tabled. The pee began flowing toward the far window, forming a long, thin, yellow trail. The old house had heaved. Jaja, who mitered even a birdfeeder and who carried a small clip-on level like a pen in his shirt pocket, would have been annoyed to see this. The home he had so carefully built had fallen out of balance.

True to their word, the Sikorskis came back in the late afternoon, two bundled wretches walking up the blue snow of the lane and carrying a burlap sack between them. Puck was squirting all over the floor even before they knocked, sniffing at the door crack and squealing, and when they came in, leaping at the sack and barking until Poppa booted the dog back to his blanket. The Sikorskis went into Batcha's room with the sack, and a bit later the old bitch herself came out to the kitchen and gathered up a large bowl, the butcher knife and some towels.

“What's going on?” I whispered to Poppa, but he only shook his head and refused to answer.

I went up to my room, wishing I was back in Vernon and able to lose myself in some
National Geographic
. I thought I could nap, but the house seemed filled with murmured prayers and Mrs. Sikorski's crying so I got up, came down, bundled up and went out to split some of the hardwood Poppa had stacked back of the shed.

After a while I forgot about what was going on in the house. And might have forgotten completely had I not gone to get one of Poppa's splitting wedges. Where we threw the ashes back of the shed someone had kicked a hole in the snow and then covered the work over again. But the frayed edges of the top of Sikorski's burlap sack were sticking free hardened with the cold, black with frozen blood.

I began to kick at it, imagining that inside might be Mrs. Sikorski's cancer. Had Batcha gone completely insane and begun to think of herself as a surgeon? But when I moved the sack around with my foot and forced the opening with the axe tip, I saw that whatever was inside had fur. It couldn't possibly be anything to do with the sick woman. Picking up the sack by the bottom, I shook hard. The blood cracked around the opening, split, and reluctantly the sack released its contents.

It was a cat. A black cat, with white paws. And there was a great black and matted slice in the chest where the heart had been.

Batcha was obviously sicker than even I had imagined. I threw the sack over the corpse and kicked snow back on top. The ground was too hard to bury it; the stink would be too much to burn it; I left it, knowing the foxes would soon enough find it and dispose of the thing properly. But whether to laugh or feel sad? What was worse, the Sikorskis' gullibility or their desperation? Or the fact that the bitch was profiting on others' fear?

I found the wedge and returned to the woodpile, quitting only when blisters broke on each hand. But by then the bitch and her lunacy had been worth a cord and a half of rock-hard maple.

I had a feeling this might be my last Christmas holiday at home. It was not just my disgust with Batcha and her ways. No matter what I did, nothing seemed to have the old feel to it. Ig and I set snares up along the cedar lines and caught six fat rabbits, but we would have had a dozen or more if Puck hadn't peed over every wire we set. We went ice fishing on Black Donald but caught only pike, no pickerel. And Father Schula made sure Danny and I came out to a bantam practice, obviously to show us off, and even that felt funny. The ice was all cobbly and some of the boards had given away in the corners. And while we had our own skates with us, Danny had to wear his brother Terry's equipment and I got stuck with Father Schula's.

I had no reason to feel astounded that a priest would have a jock, yet I was: I was conscious of the feel of it all the time, a kind of unholy sensation like getting an erection during mass, and it made me skate bowlegged as if I was protecting my privates with the chalice.

Father Schula also arranged for Danny and I to serve the midnight mass after the Christmas eve
Oplatck
. Poppa and Ig's maiden sister Jozefa had come from Pembroke, and their brother Jan arrived with his new girlfriend Sophia, a horse-faced woman from Renfrew with perfumed Kleenex stuffed up each sleeve and down the bubbling front of her fancy dress. Good old Uncle Jan had another new car, a big green Chevrolet Impala with rear fenders like blue heron wings and a trunk full of four cases of India Pale Ale. We spent
Oplatck
gathered around the kitchen table, Batcha leading Ig in prayers, Poppa leading Jan in beers, and all of us trying to swallow this thin, dry thing Batcha made which was supposed to cleanse us of all our sins of the past year. Naturally my
National Geographic
thoughts quickly led to Lucy Dombrowski's ass and from there to Danny Shannon's hands, and so by the time Uncle Jan's big Chevy pulled in to the St. Martin's parking lot I was desperate for news of Danny's Christmas resolution.