Pinkerton's Sister (88 page)

The hand of the LORD was upon her, and carried her out in the spirit of the LORD, and set her down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused her to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto her, Daughter of man, can these bones live?… Then he said unto her, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, daughter of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. So she prophesied as he commanded her, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army, and each of them had the face of Papa.

All the Daughters in the Happy Families pack had her face, a
fearsome pack of thirteen plain-faced Daughters, more than enough of them to vanquish the complete set of Dibbo Daughters, and each of them fully armed with the symbol of her father’s trade, but they were heavily outnumbered by the exceeding great army.

Can these bones live? Oh, yes. They could live all right. They could move, they could dance, and they could spin and turn and rattle up and down in an urgently insistent xylophonic rhythm. The music began quietly, almost inaudibly, designed merely as the background noise to the more important business of talking, the Mrs. Albert Comstock attitude to music in all its forms.

It was the Bones family who were playing, the Happy Families playing card players. They were a chamber quartet, a refreshing infusion of highbrow culture into the generally unashamedly populist approach of the majority of minstrel show performers. Mr. Bones, the Butcher, sliced his knife through the raw meat like a left-handed cellist possessed by the music as he sawed away with his bow. Mrs. Bones, the Butcher’s Wife, wielded her cleaver vigorously against the joint, playing one of the more obscure instruments of the percussion section. Master and Miss Bones, the Butcher’s Son and Daughter, added their own multi-textured layers to the rich tapestry of sound produced by their parents: he percussive in his instrument of choice, she opting for wind.

All around them, the other Happy Families swayed in unison to the rhythm, and joined in the singing.

Dem bones may have been dry, but the instruments they played were soaked, and a fine red mist of blood drizzled down upon their audience. The Masters and Misses in the front row held up their faces in eyes-closed bliss, drinking in the gentle rain from heaven after a long drought, something for which they had been dreaming and praying for a long, long time. Blood stained their clothes, ran down their faces in rivulets, trickling down from where it gathered above their eyebrows and in their hair, and pooled in the palms of their loosely curled upturned hands. Miss Pots – the looking-glass-changed Alice – found a bloody redness to coat not just her face but the whole of her, seeping in deep, and Master Pots proudly displayed his reddened tongue: he’d been licking the blood from the butcher’s implements. Miss Dip held her stained left hand away from her, in Lady Macbeth revulsion, but Master Dip – huge-headed and smiling broadly – held his dripping hands away from his sides, in proud display of a blooding, a symbol of manhood achieved. It was blackness, not redness, that dripped down, as if he’d zestfully slaughtered the Soot family, or massacred a minstrel-show challenge to the musical supremacy of the Bones.

They heard the word of the Lord.

“Could I have Miss D-D-Dip, the D-D-Dyer’s D-D-Daughter, please?”

The magic word.

“Miss Dip is at home.”

“Thank you.”

The magic word.

“Could I have Miss B-B-Bones, the B-B-Butcher’s D-D-Daughter, please?”

The magic word.

Slam!

(The door reverberated, its knocker activated into an almost
out-of-hearing resonance, the windows rattled.)

“Miss Bones is not at home.”

Slam! Slam!

(Bolts were shot firmly home. The key turned in the lock.)

The magic word had not worked.

No “Abracadabra!” No “Open, Sesame!”

The door remained closed against her. It was not Opened Unto her.

It was a looking-glass door, and as it closed against her she saw why Miss Bones was not at home, why the Miss was missing. She saw the reflection moving toward her.

She
was Miss Bones, knocking on the door and asking for herself.

She
was Miss …

She
…

It was only then that she realized that she was shivering, in great uncontrolled waves like spasms. It was like that time when she was trembling with fever once, the time when Mama had been bathing her face with cool water. Then she had been too hot; now she was too cold. There would be no soothing trickling sounds, no washing away of the pain. Water would be frozen in the bowl, a miniature part of that landscape of ice. An ice place. The spasms were like cramps in bed at night, that same sensation of coldness, an inward-pulling tightness in the veins, her body completely out of her control, her knee bone connected to her thigh bone, her thigh bone connected to her hip bone, her hip bone connected to her back bone, her back bone connected to her shoulder bone …

She heard the word of the Lord.

She would press the thumb and first finger of her right hand tightly together (about to kiss their tips, and hold them cupped upwards, a connoisseur’s gesture of approval after a tasting), and grip the end of the cotton fibers protruding from Papa’s ear with her fingernails. But she couldn’t. Her hands were shaking too much. She’d be unable to make them do what she wanted them to
do. She would tug at the cotton, as slowly and carefully as if she were drawing a splinter of wood out of her other hand. But she couldn’t. Caroline Renwick had called such splinters “spells,” a term her Yorkshire grandmother had used. She was drawing out a spell.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

It was the spell that was pricking her thumb, the spell that twitched as it sensed the nearness of wickedness, the wood swelling in the steady drip-drip of falling tears, just before they froze into ice. She could do it, if she could keep her fingers still, without having to touch the cold flesh, pulling it out in the way she had done to – most satisfyingly – disembowel her smug-faced doll, Lumpety.

Yard after yard of stuffing had emerged in a continuous chain from the small rent in the stitching near where the bellybutton would be. (“Bellybutton” was a slightly daring choice of word.) It was as if – the image had come into her mind yesterday – Roland Birtle really had – in the interests of being interesting – drawn out his not-so-small intestine, to the wonder of Miss Wouldhave, to demonstrate its length, to prove the veracity of the Fascinating Fact with which he had regaled her.

“Twenty-three feet!” he exclaimed, his voice rising, a performer drawing toward the climax of his act.

“Gracious!”

“Twenty-four feet!”

“Gracious!”

“Twenty-five feet!” This was his moment of triumph, as he pulled out the last few inches with a squelchy plop, and collapsed in upon his hollow self. (And that was the
small
intestine!) He had died being interesting. It was what he would have wanted. (I
told
you it was twenty-five feet long!)

“Gracious!” Miss Wouldhave exclaimed yet again, keeling over dramatically, stealing the limelight from Myrtle. Myrtle, knee-deep in small intestine, looked
furious
.

After the
mhwah!
kiss of the fingertips (
This is absolutely delicious!
), the initial cautious tug with the fingernails, the slight resistance, she would haul out the contents of the cotton-filled head hand over hand, like a winner in a tug-of-war contest. She’d yank away – right hand, left hand – yo-ho-heave-hoing in her deepest voice with the Volga Boatmen (matted beards, depressed expressions, bent forward at angles of forty-five degrees as they pulled ropes as thick as suspension bridge cables straining over their shoulders). She’d demonstrate a vivacious sense of fun as she yo-ho-heave-hoed away. It would warm her up nicely, bring the sensation back into her frozen and shaking hands, drawing the sunshine toward her, the Alabama warmth, the Georgia warmth of Dixie, of Macy.

she’d trill, heaving fit to bust, picking, picking, picking at the cotton, like a tarry-fingered oakum-picking prisoner settling into the rhythm of a life sentence, and the Volga Boatmen, seizing upon a less dirge-like incantation than the usual repetitious yo-ho-heave-ho (this tended to pall after a decade or so), joined in with a thrillingly incandescent intensity, approaching some thurible-swinging, climactic Hallelujah moment in a Russian Orthodox service (if they went in for Hallelujahs), the interior of the cathedral as impenetrably cloudy with incense as the opening of
Bleak House
was with fog. Their sonorous voices thundered above a timorous
Tum, tum, tum, tum, ti-tu
or
Tum-ti, tum-ti, tum-ti, tum
into a deeper, darker world elsewhere, where
tum
s,
ti-tu
s and
tum-ti
s faltered into shamed silence.

Down they’d jump, round they’d turn, holding the harvested contents of the hollowing head high above them (“Look what we’ve picked!”), and the hands of the Volga Boatmen (the only parts of them visible through the dense fog) would force their way skyward, all of them maypole dancers spinning cat’s cradle patterns with their ropes in the air, singing away in de land ob cotton as the Volga (oh, Lawdy) became, from bank to bank, an impenetrable entanglement of jammed boats, barges, and rafts stacked high with wood.

Papa’s face would sag inward like a leaking balloon, and become a flimsy crumpled mask – a shriveled death mask – with no head to wear it. The head caved in, ceased to exist, whooshed into nothingness, melted in warmth.

Look away, look away, look away, Dixie land!
Macy! Macy!
Lawks-a-mercy, it was Macy.

Old time dar am not forgotten.

“Look at what happens when you pick your nose!” she would cry warningly, demonstrating to an eagerly appalled audience, as
they leaned forward to obtain the best view. There were gasps – horrified, rather pleased – and the thunderous applause started. “Bravo!” someone shouted, clearly one of those embarrassingly demonstrative enthusiasts from the opera. “Bravo!” If the defunct nose-picker had been a woman, he would have shouted “Brava!” You just knew he would be pedantically correct in his expressions of acclaim. It took one pedant to recognize another, to admire his technique with a certain cool jealousy.

She leaned forward, going up on to tiptoe to try to see the death-changed face more closely, straining over the giant toothless grin of the neck.

Curse him! Curse him! Curse him!

She should be chanting these words in a double-double-toil-and-trouble incantation, circling counterclockwise, pointing her finger the whole time at the body of the suicide around which she moved.

She should grasp an ear in each hand, and tilt the bald head forward, adjusting the swivel, to see if her reflection still swam darkly within it as in a looking-glass.

Tilt. Tilt. Tilt.

It would creak with the wetness and the snow.

Alice moved her face closer to the curve of the skull, dropped forward at her tugging, to make out the details of the creased flesh in the whiteness of a little limb beneath the surface of glass, the tiny fingernails of a snow-colored arm.

(“Let me in – let me in!” a child’s voice sobbed. “I’m come home, I’d lost myself on the moor!…It’s twenty years …”)

Tilt. Tilt. Tilt.

If she tilted the head too far forward, if …

If the gash …

If the gash had been too deep …

The head would fall forward, bounce, and roll across the floor …

Me and my Papa …

Me and my Papa …

She would find herself looking into the smooth hairless surface above his left eye, the tips of her fingers letting go of the ears and reaching forward to touch the polished bumps. The main areas began just above the eye. She avoided looking at the eye, the dead eye of a mackerel glaring accusingly at her from a plate at lunchtime and spoiling her appetite. Mackerel sky, mackerel sky,/Not long wet, and not long dry. The clouds – cirrocumulus and altocumulus – patterned the sky, and what the weather would bring could be read within them. That’s what you could see in those clouds.

I have died so that you might eat me!

That was what the eye was saying. It made her feel guilty if she did eat the fish, and made her feel guilty if she didn’t.

(“Eat me, drink me, love me.”

(That was what Lizzie said to Laura in “Goblin Market.”

(She had tasted the forbidden fruit for her sake.)

She wished cook would cut off the heads before she served them.

Just above the eye, left of center – his left, her right: she had to reverse everything in her mind, looking in a mirror – there was
Order
,
Neatness
, and
System
. That was Papa, all right. There should be a huge bump there, like a cyst bulging out. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it, to see, in case it burst into sticky wetness. Her fingers hovered above the other nearer areas.
Locality
and
Exploration
. That was one. Further back, and a little more to the right, there were
Humor
,
Mirthfulness
, and
Wit
. Her hand would sink into a hollow up to her wrist, her fingernails digging at the
walnut of the brain. The body would twitch restlessly, like Frankenstein’s creature starting to come alive, as she activated areas of stimulation. Behind that, an area twice as large, was
Blandness
,
Agreeableness
, and
Youthfulness
. In the middle of the very back of the head, in the place where a murderess would place the barrel of a gun before she pulled the trigger, there were
Parental Love
, and
Love of Children.