Ozark Trilogy 3: And Then There'll Be Fireworks (4 page)

“Troublesome,” she said sadly, “have you no feelings atall?”

“Probably not,” said Troublesome promptly. “Feelings about what?”

“Times are
hard
, young woman,” said Hazelbide, “times are fearsome hard! You talk of sitting by our fires ... there’s precious little left to lay a fire
with
, down in the towns. People are suffering, and your own sister lies near death in the Castle. How can you sit these and face us and make jokes over it all?”

“Would it help,” Troublesome put the question, “if I moaned about it instead? Would it ease anybody’s fever, stop anybody’s bleeding, or put food in anybody’s stomach or fire on their hearth? Would it wake my sister—who is
not
, by the way, anywhere near death. Not as near as the seven of you, I assure you.”

“Ah, you’re heartless,” Granny Hazelbide mourned. “Just heartless!”

Troublesome said nothing at all, but waited and watched, and they began to smell the porridge on the stove and their stomachs knotted.

“Well, we want you to make a journey,” said Granny Gableframe when it finally became clear that they’d get no more out of the girl. “A long and a perilous journey. And that’s why we’re here ... to ask you. Politely.”

Troublesome stared at her, black brows knit over her nose, and gave a sharp “tchh” with her tongue.

“A journey? Go on a trip?”

“Yes. And a good long one.”

She stood up and went to the stove and began passing the porridge over to them, warning them to use their shawls to hold on so they’d not burn their fingers.

“Certainly can’t hurt the shawls, the state
they’re
in,” she said.

She watched them while they ate; and seeing that they were truly hungry, she didn’t bother them, but busied herself pouring more tea and serving more porridge until it seemed to her that everybody was at last satisfied and she could gather up the motley collection of serving things in her apron and put it all into a pan of hot soapy water.

Whereupon she sat down, shaking her hands to dry them, and said, “No more excuses, now. You’re dry, and you’re warm, and you’re fed and watered. It’s too cold for you to be taking baths at your age, so you’ll have to stay dirty, and I’ve no remedies for your other miseries; I’ve made you as comfortable as I’m capable of. Now I’ll have you tell me about this journey, thank you kindly.”

“We want you to go to Castle Wommack,” said Granny Hazelbide, and Troublesome almost fell off her makeshift stool in astonishment.

“To Kintucky? Granny, you’ve lost your mind entirely! However would I get to Castle Wommack?”

“On a ship.”

“Granny Hazelbide, there’s no ship goes to Kintucky any more, and no supplies to last the journey if there were. You’ve been nibbling something best left on its stem,
I
say.”

“We have a ship,” said Hazelbide, putting one stubborn word after another, “and a crew—not much of a crew, but it’ll serve in this instance—and supplies enough to get all of you to Kintucky and back. Including the Mule you’ll be taking along to get you from the coast to the Castle.”

“Dozens!” said Troublesome. “I’d of said that was impossible.”

“It wasn’t cheap.”

“It took all we had,” put in Granny Whiffletree, “and all that the Grannys had on Oklahomah, and a contribution or two—not necessarily voluntary, if you take my meaning—from a few useless Magicians and Magicians of Rank. But we did it.”

“Bribed the ship captain, did you? And bribed the crew?”

“That we did.”

“And you think they’ll stay bribed!”

“We do. The captain’s a Brightwater, and all but one of the crew as well. And that one’s a McDaniels. They’ll stay bribed.”

“Supposing,” hazarded Troublesome, leaning forward, “that I was such a lunatic as to go gallivanting off to Kintucky in the middle of the autumn ... just suppose that,
which
I’m not ... what precisely is my goal, other than to drown myself and the captain and the crew and that poor Mule?”

They told her, and they watched her face go thoughtful, and Granny Gableframe pinched the next Granny down on the bench, gently; they knew then that they had her.

“I agree,” said Troublesome slowly, “that it’s sure to be Lewis Motley Wommack the 3
^rd
. I do agree on that. Not a thing Jeremiah Thomas Traveller could have done that would account for what’s happened, but that Wommack boy is something else again, and I do believe he lay with Responsible while the Jubilee was going on.”

“So
that’s
who it was!” exclaimed Granny Hazelbide. “How did you know?”

“Ask me no questions. Granny, I’ll tell you no lies,” said Troublesome. “It makes no nevermind how I knew. But you’ve chosen right, for sure and for certain—However ... you’ve nothing here but missing pieces.”

“Explain yourself!”

“
Did
you learn, before your magic wound down, that if somebody went to see this ‘important man’ it would make some difference in the course of events on Ozark?” Troublesome stared them down, and they had to admit that they hadn’t.

“And
did
you learn that just because he’s the cause of Responsible’s hearty nap he knows how to wake her up again?

“And
did
you learn that even if my sister
was
awake again, she’d be able to do something about all this tribulation we suffer from? Did you?”

It was no to both, of course, and they had to admit it.

“But you’d send me half round the world on a wild goose chase, on the slim tagtail of a chance that there
might
be some use to it?”

And they agreed that they would.

“Well,” said Troublesome. “I never heard such nonsense.”

“Sass!”

“No, I never did. Unless it was youall coming up here like you did, risking pneumonia coming up and breaking every bone in your bodies going down— ‘cause you pay me mind, now, if you thought you had a hard time getting up here, you just wait till you try getting back down! It’s a heap faster, but it’s not a safe trip. No way, no way in this world, am I going to take any part in such a fool project, and you should of known better than to ask me.”

“Your sister lies— “

“Tell me no more about how my sister lies!” shouted Troublesome. “And tell me no more about the suffering of the people down there below! Wasn’t it those very same people that would not
heed
my sister when she tried to warn them, and voted away the government that was holding them all together? Wasn’t it?”

“Troublesome— “

“And for all my sister had done for them, was it not those very same people that showed her no more gratitude than they would a stick? That’s the people we’re talking about, amn’t I right, Grannys? Don’t you ask me to feel sorry for those people—I despise them for a pack of contemptible ignorant two-faced good-for-nothing belly-creeping
serpents
, do you hear me? If their stomachs hurt them and their backs pain them and their hearts are broken, they’ve asked for that, and no call to come whimpering to me! They made their beds, let them wallow in them and cry in their pillows.”

“And your sister?” said Granny Hazelbide, ever so carefully, in the hush. When Troublesome got going, she gave a spectacular performance, and even the Grannys were impressed just a tad.

“It is well known,” said Troublesome of Brightwater in tones of ice, “that I have no natural human feelings. My sister can rot there for all I care—not that she will, that doesn’t go with it, but she’s
welcome
to—and you know it perfectly well. Ask any man, woman, or tadling on Marktwain about the compassion and the warm heart of Troublesome of Brightwater and see what you get back, if you don’t know it already!”

Troublesome wasn’t out of breath, but she was out of patience and way beyond out of hospitality. She stood up then and ordered them off, ignoring what they said about needing to rest, stuffing a careless handful of peachapples in a sack with some cold biscuits and shoving it at them for food on the journey home, telling them where the water was safe to drink and which paths to stay shut of. Warning them of a place where the snakes were thick this time of year because of a rock that got warm each day in the sun, and all but slamming her door behind them. They were back out in the weather and the downhill trek ahead of them before they could catch their breaths, and they heard the thump of that bucket as it hit the wall when she gave it a toss across the room.

“Well!” said Granny Frostfall. “I’ve seen manners, and I’ve seen manners ... but she does beat all. She is every last thing she’s made out to be, and some left over, and I’ll wager she eats nails for breakfast when she’s got no company to see her.”

“She has a reputation to maintain,” pointed out Granny Hazelbide.

“What’s important,” said Granny Gableframe, “and all that matters now except for getting down this dratted mountain, is that she’ll do it.”

“We’re sure of that, Gableframe? I don’t see it!”

“Oh, we’re sure,” said Gableframe; and Granny Hazelbide and Granny Sherryjake agreed. “We had her the minute she asked us to tell her about it, don’t you know anything atall? If she’d turned us a deaf ear, now, and refused to even listen, and sent us all packing without so much as letting us tell her why we were here ... well, that would of been Troublesome’s way.”

“Oh, yes,” said Granny Hazelbide. “We’ve got her fast, the Twelve Corners preserve us all.”

“But how’ll she know where to go? How to find the ship?”

“I had that all on a slip of paper before ever we started up this overblown hill,” sniffed Granny Hazelbide. “And tucked away safe in the pocket of my skirt. And it’s tucked away safe now in her own hand, everything she needs to know. She gave that bucket quite a fling, there at the last, and she may well pitch the bench we sat on into her fire—but she’ll keep that piece of paper safe. Every last
de
tail she needs to know, it’s on there.”

“Law, Granny Hazelbide,” said one or two. And “My stars, Hazelbide.”

“Well, I know her,” said the Granny. “I know her well.”

“Can’t say as I envy you that.”

“I don’t envy my
self
that, but there’s times it’s useful,” said Granny Hazelbide. “And now let’s us head for home. Might could be we’ll make it before dark. Like Troublesome said, it’s a sight faster going down than coming up.”

Smalltrack
was neither a supply freighter nor a pleasure craft. The smell aboard, in spite of a powerful scrubbing, made you instantly aware that it had been a fishing boat for a very long time. Having the Mule aboard didn’t improve matters, since Dross had no respect whatsoever for a human being’s ideas about waste disposal; she added a new fragrance to the prevailing reek of blood and entrails and ancient slime. The captain and the four men of his crew had been on workboats of one kind or another all their lives; if they noticed the smell atall, they paid it little mind. They knew themselves fortunate that it was wintry weather, and no hot sun broiling down to bring everything to a constant simmer and perk. As for their passenger, if she found conditions not to her liking, they didn’t mind that atall.

If pushed, all five would have acknowledged a relish for the idea that Troublesome of Brightwater might not be all that comfortable crossing the Ocean of Storms to Kintucky in their racketydrag old boat. They didn’t precisely want her to suffer, being good-natured men, but they were in mutual accord that she had a trifle discomfort coming to her. If the mechanisms of the universe saw fit to provide that discomfort without any call for their hands meddling in it, why, they found that positively Providential. It spoke to their sense of the fitness of things.

They were Marktwainers—four, including the captain, being Brightwaters by birth, and a single McDaniels finishing up the party—and they were conscious enough that the woman who spent her time silent on an upturned barrel in the stern, looking out over the rough water, was their kinswoman. It comforted Gabriel John McDaniels the 21
^st
that he was just a tad less related to her than the other four, but they all recognized it as a burden to be borne. Relations, like poison plants and balky Mules and the occasional foolfish spoiling a catch, were part of the territory; wasn’t anybody didn’t have kinfolk they’d just as soon
not
of.

They’d had their instructions from the Grannys:

“You leave her alone, she’ll leave you alone.” Same instructions as for most pesky and viperous things in this world, and they’d proved accurate enough. She sat there on her barrel by the hour, peering through hooded eyes they none of them would of cared to look into directly. If she wanted a drink of water, or something to eat, or a blanket to wrap round her strong thin shoulders, she got it without bothering any of them. If there was anything she wanted that she didn’t have—and likely there was, though it was said she lived a spare and scrimped existence on her lonely mountaintop—she didn’t mention it. And if a line fouled near to her, or a solar collector was wrong in its tilt, she fixed whatever was awry, without fuss and without error and with no assistance from the crew.

“Uncanny, she is,” muttered Haven McDaniels Brightwater the 4
^th
, some six hours out to sea. “Just
un
canny!” He cleared his throat and stared up at the gray flat lid of the sky as if he was indifferent to the whole thing, just mentioning it in passing. “Can’t say as how I wouldn’t rather of had something else along ... say a serpent, or maybe a Yallerhound.”