Great mischief (16 page)

"Tell me, dearest, how did you come to take up this —er—career?"

"Hagging? Oh, some people are just bad. I was born mean, I suppose."

"You certainly aren't one to mince matters. But when did you actually go over to the Adversary?"

Wriggling a little—she had a cat's aptitude for making the lumps and hollows of a lap serve her comfort-she let her head fall back on his shoulder. Her charming profile close to his cheek was turned up to the ceiling in a rare moment of relaxation and intimacy. "It came about naturally. I hate my life, and why shouldn't I? That crowded pigsty of a house! So I took to going out at night by myself . . . night is lovely, you don't have to look at a lot of stupid faces . . . and people held it against me that I Tvasn't afraid of the dark the way they are. Then, my disposition is kind of surly—oh, I don't know, maybe it's just because my eyebrows are black, it could be as easy as that—anyway, they began to say I had the evil eye; they lelt me to myself, and even my sisters banded together against me. Well, old tales often come true that way: they said I had an evil eye, so I had one. You can well imagine that for once 1 was obliging."

"But how," Timothy persisted, "did you make a start? How did you learn the tricks?"

She seemed loath to go into particulars. "If you hate a place enough, and you are cooped up there, you escape into another plane. Now, you were tied down too, and took a pretty sweeping way of getting clear—" She nipped his cheek with her little white fangs.

Lucy managed to have her own kind of fun with bagging, Timothy learned. She kept Mrs. Sawyer awake all one night by snipping her nose with a pair of pincers; she tied people's hair in knots, and upset buckets of paint on the show-offs who walked under ladders. Timothy laughed till he cried at her account of having ridden Mr. Sylvester Sheedy, the prominent politician; that was a treat! she said—he had more gaits than a circus horse, but she had let him off finally because he made monkeys of so many smart people, and now she just doubled him up with cramps every once in a while.

"And by the way, what on earth made you pick me, a harmless pharmacist plying his trade?"

"Oh, I didn't like that solemn scientific manner of yours when I came into the shop. I could tell you were ripe for something of this sort; and when I got to the fire and found you weren't in it I knew right away what had happened. Then that bad conscience of yours made you come after me and give yourself away."

Timothy rubbed his forehead thoughtfully as if to test the offending member presumably located within.

The first clear day Timothy hired a horse and buggy from the livery stable, and they drove across the New Bridge into the country. Lucy had dressed up for him in her best dove-wing silk, and the silent compliment, the only kind she ever paid him, set his blood singing. The dress, tightly buttoned from the turnover collar to the hem, gave her small provocative person a Sunday-school artlessness which tickled his palate immensely. Her round hat with a feather circling its upturned brim was new and the occasion of a good deal of preening.

Having found a woody copse on the river's edge, they set out with basket and trowel to collect plants. Lucy seemed as verdantly innocent and fresh as the day; the bright painted weather on wood and river had blunted the grieving thorns she went armed with. " 'Gentle as falcon or hawk of the tower,' " Timothy quoted fondly; and for once she did not ridicule his sentiment. On a congenial impulse they unbuttoned their shoes and kicked them off to feel the fuzzy green shag of the earth with the soles of their feet. Nature was in a bounteous mood. The herbs piled up in the basket, the lure of the chase carried them through bogs, underbrush, and briars after spotted wintergreen and moth mullein, ginseng, and the lowly Jimson weed—"The stramonium extracted from Jimson weed has had remarkable results in curing mania," Timothy instructed her lovingly.

Lucy suggested that by a slight alteration it could be turned to more amusing uses.

"I know," Timothy said, not to be outdone; "magicians have sometimes used the seeds to induce hallucinations. It's one of the fascinating ambiguities of the plant world."

"How tiresome education makes people," said Lucy yawning. The yawn was amiable and intimate, however.

Timothy looked at her abashed. He was beginning to discover that Lucy had been given little schooling, and indeed he could not imagine what a schoolmistress would do with such a pupil. She never, he noticed, wrote anything down—a habit repugnant to his accurate pharmacist's mind; sometimes he wondered if she could write. ... "I remember things without putting them down," was her only answer to his tactful inquiries.

He thought of Penelope and her orphanage. "Education may make people tiresome sometimes; still, it widens their horizons and enriches their lives, you have to admit."

"Oh, I don't know. You learn things for yourself— or else you don't; and in that case I doubt if books can help you."

The very novelty of the idea bowled him over. His beloved books ... so many sere leaves? So many cobwebs to ensnare the brain?

They talked then of their herbs and what they could do with them, how to compound and how to dispose of them. "We'll write to the mountains for some others," Lucy said. "I have an acquaintance there, a witch doctor, who will send us samples from his part of the country. We must build up a good supply so we won't have to depend on the smelly apothecaries—forgive me, darling, you've graduated from that profession." She kissed both his cheeks consolingly. "It was only the bad drought last fall, you know, that got me into your clutches ... or you into mine."

Timothy was too beglamoured with her clutches to take offense at any word of hers. He brought a carriage rug and a hamper from the buggy and spread their lunch by the water. When they had restored themselves with cold capon and claret, they walked up and down under the trees talking about everything imaginable, and with earth, heaven, and hell for their fields of interest they could scarcely pause to draw breath.

One sorrow to him, however, was that Lucy's attention Avandered -when he tried to discuss morals with her. It seemed to him that, as Lucy, she thought differently from Sinkinda—or, perhaps, thought less; in the process of translation Sinkinda was abstracted to the more purely spiritual and intellectual element. Under his prodding, Lucy lazily produced a somewhat different view of the theory that so concerned him. "If you want my opinion," she said, chewing a blade of grass, "it's that through the ages people have called the opposition the Devil. They are always laying the new idea to Satan —whatever jolts their notions of good. He's none too pleased about this, I'm sure—lots of new ideas are half-baked. But he's hardened to being misunderstood."

"But according to that theory, life is sheer confusion. There's no Good or Evil that you can hold on to." Timothy ruffled his brow in distress. "Don't you even desire a moral order?"

"I think it's moonshine; you're just being frivolous."

His pained face sent her rolling over in shrieks of laughter; she began to tease him, she tweaked his nose, she pulled off his red waistcoat and hid it, she sailed his new straw hat over the bluff into the river. Then she slipped out of her long hot dress and ran about the woods in her chemise. Timothy chased after her, torn between delight and jealousy lest some other eye than his should see her thus.

Seeing her thus himself gave him the idea of spending the night there in the woods. Lucy agreed instantly; they had brought much more food than they could eat, so they had the leftovers for supper. Their fund of conversation seemed to burgeon rather than fade. Timothy drew on the list of suitable topics that he had prepared for Sinkinda, while Lucy produced a string of diverting stories—about a neighbor of hers who had died of spontaneous combustion and how at the autopsy they had found a pound and a half of snuff in her head; about the Hunter's Chapel murder, and the beautiful young woman who had shot down a prominent citizen of the Up-Cauntry and left him in his blood on the church floor; about—and this was Timothy's favorite—the Devil's driving up in his gig to call on the L s, who welcomed and wined the distinguished stranger and were quite put out to have him run off at cockcrow and jump clean across the Congaree River.

When other topics failed they talked interminably about themselves and their growing attachment to each other. Since even the most exotic love affair is not spared the curse of earthly imperfection, the sandflies and mosquitoes settled down on them with the darkness; they rubbed themselves with pennyroyal and built a smudge fire of moss, which at least discouraged their tormentors. They lay cosily on the carriage rug watching the dull embers and the pale flower of the smoke as it opened, swayed, drooped against the blue midnight. The thickets rustled with stalkers; it seemed to Timothy that in striking the match he had shattered Time, that this fire was one with the campfires of a thousand years which had held off the sleepless animal hunger; he and Lucy lost a personal identity in the long tale of man's loving and mating; even his rapt interest in the supernatural encounter, the unseen made flesh, was as old as curiosity and fear.

They stirred and sought words for the miracle. You are mine now . . . I never felt this way before. The vain and foolish vows—Love me and keep me— constantly made and tragically forsworn. Is it real? Is it I? Is it you? It's like falling through a dream. The old sayings became rich with great substance; the variable word suddenly stood solid.

"The miraculous thing is that miracles do happen."

"The trouble is to keep them. They slip through your fingers," Lucy murmured. But Timothy didn't believe this, for he had fed on honeydew and drunk the milk of paradise.

All this time he had not heard from the Golightlys except a letter from Anna Maria asking why he didn't come to Sunday dinner, a letter he didn't answer. At length Will's buggy stopped at his door, and Will himself came stamping up the brick walk. "Hullo, there!" he cried on catching sight of Timothy, then halted in an amazement he could not conceal. With unusual tact, however, he choked back his comments on Timothy's appearance. "Where've you been hiding yourself? I hear you've turned hermit since I been away." He had taken a vacation, a fishing trip)—"You should 'a' been along, Tim—it would 'a' stirred up your sluggish liver."

His fish stories spared Timothy for some time the awkwardness of answering his questions. Eventually, however, he narrowed his circumambient talk and focused on his cousin. "What you gonna do with all that stuff you got planted out there? Open a new pharmacy? If you won't hump yourself and get out of here, that's as good a way to invest your money as any."

"No," said Timothy, looking vague. "I don't want to run a pharmacy all my life. It's too confining. The world is too full of interesting things to see and do."

Will's thatchy eyebrows rose half an inch in his full-blooded face. "Well, this is a conversion! Just what I been trying to tell you all these years. You ought to get out into the country. The hunting season's over, of course; but why don't you try riding? That'll tone up your muscles like nothing else."

Timothy said he had tried riding and it had toned up his muscles, but on the whole he considered it a crude sport. "Regarding it from the viewpoint of the horse, I mean."

Will stared at him in amazement and some anxiety. "Well, come on and go devilfishing with me next month at Port Royal, Tim. There's a sport fit for the gods! There's no sensation in the world, lemme tell you, like being dragged along hell-for-leather by one of those monsters!"

Timothy stifled a shiver and said politely, "No, thanks, old man."

"Come," Will insisted, "you can't sit down on your hunkers all your life; are you just living on your capital? It won't hold out long at that rate, you know,"

Timothy admitted he hadn't even looked at his bankbook for quite a while. "I don't take any interest in accounts, these days."

"Hell and death! You ought to do something with your capital."

Timothy just stared. He really couldn't explain that "ought" and "should" had lost their content for him; they looked brown and frail as locust shells, he had thrown his out with the trash.

"See here, maybe you'd like to invest it in a promising little venture—I could put you on to a good thing I'm taking a flier in myself. It might be kind of hard for you to go back into the drug business; I've had to send all my patients to Dr. Lockwood while you were dawdling round, and you'd have to start from scratch, especially as Lockwood runs a good, up-to-date pharmacy."

Timothy did not feel like answering, so he didn't. Instead he occupied his mind with his cousin, whose person, as he stood there—grizzled, flat-footed, no nonsense or woolgathering about him—seemed quite fantastic. At all events he no longer desired Will's reality, uncertain as his own might be.

The rudeness of his silence flicked Will's temper. "Good God, Tim! You got to pull yourself together! There's no excuse for just going to the dogs like this!"

What was it that going to the dogs used to mean? Timothy wondered. Not this, not the heady discovery of an unknown world in which all his five senses seemed to waken at once to a delight in whatever was wry, nonsensical, other—that is, other than it appeared. Yet— he looked down at his bare feet, at his shirt open on his chest, he remembered the inexplicable bush of white hair above his face, now brown as snuff from working out of doors, and he thought he saw Will's point of view.

This second silence disturbed Will even more. He shifted his big feet and looked about the place. At length he said, "Well, I better be on the jump—Anna Maria will pick me clean if I'm late for dinner again."

Timothy accompanied him to the gate and so far recovered himself as to ask after the family. They were all pretty well. Will said. Anna Maria was having a spell of the cramps, but he couldn't find anything the matter with her. Sometimes he suspected she was just putting on.

"The little hussy!" Timothy muttered with a grin he couldn't suppress.

"How's that?" Will's eyes started in his hairy incredulous face.