Scarborough Fair and Other Stories (13 page)

“Let her alone! We haven't done anything to you. Leave us be!” Sophy hollered, the effort costing her a whole long string of hard hacking coughs.

“Give me my book and we'll go,” Luly told her.

Sass could hear Sophy's thoughts. She was about to break and give it to them. But Sass knew that wouldn't do any good. Luly would try to use the book then to get all of the rest that rightly belonged to Sophy, and maybe do them both harm and a good many other folks as well. She was mean. And even if Sophy did give them the book, that boy was even meaner than his mama and he was bound and determined to kill him a pussycat.

Oh, they needed help and they needed it bad. Sass heard a cat crying and realized it was herself, bawling for her mama over and over again. Then she heard her mama's singing again in the back of her mind, the song Mama always sang when she returned to the nest when she heard Sassafras howling from fear and worry.

“Hush, little kitten, don't you yelp

Mama's come a-runnin' here to help.

Moles in the yard and mice in the barn

Mama's gonna keep her babe from harm.”

A pudgy ringed hand side-swiped Sass and then closed around the kitten's leg.

But just then they all became aware that a siren had been blaring outside because suddenly it cut off and there was a banging on the front door, then it slammed open. “Where's the fire?” A masculine voice yelled.

“Here!” Sophy called. “In here!”

Three young men in heavy boots stormed into the room. They started coughing too, as soon as they came in.

Luly let go of Sass's foot and both she and her boy stood up. “We'll just be
(cough)
going now, Sophy but you give us a call when you find that thing we were discussin',” Luly said, as if the visit had been a friendly one.

“It's nothin', boys,” Willie laughed loudly to cover up what Sophy was trying to tell the firemen. “You know how hysterical these old maids get about burnin' outhouses and cats in trees.”

The Pewterballs skedaddled out of there quicker than the outhouse had gone up in flames.

Sophy was telling the volunteer firemen, two of whom were father and son, the son being a high school classmate of Sophy's, what had happened.

Sophy began talking excitedly, trying to tell them what the horrible Pewterballs had done, but she was coughing so hard in between her words that the men, who were coughing too hard to be able to listen carefully, didn't pay much attention to her. The excitement was all over, the fire was out, and the house was still full of nasty-smelling smoke. They were in quite a hurry to get out of there. Her classmate's daddy offered to take Sophy over to their house for the night but Sophy said she didn't want to leave her kitten alone and the daddy said that they had a big old dog who would take exception to a cat. So they left, the daddy giving Sophy his telephone number.

Sass crawled out from under the bed.

Sophy sat up the rest of the night in her mama's rocker and Sass curled in her lap and slept a fear-exhausted sleep. The house still stank from the fire but Sass was too played out to care.

Later in the day, when Sophy had cleared the house with electric fans and nice smelling candles as best she could, the girl told Sass, “I should just get rid of that book, kittycat. It doesn't work anyway. I did that protection spell just like it said in there and it didn't do a darn bit of good. And if those firemen were what it brought, all I can say is that it took its time gettin' them here.”

Sass jumped down and went to her box to scratch. Sophy laughed, “I know you don't think much of it either but Miss Ally set too much store by it for you to be poopin' on it.” She plucked the book from the box and shook the cat litter off it while Sass did her duty.

When Sass returned, Sophy was sitting at the table with the book open, staring at it. “You know, there's something peculiar about this book if it is the spellin' book Miss Ally used for her white witchin'. There's plenty of recipes, like it says, with funny ingredients in them and they all sound magical enough but it doesn't seem right somehow. I thought witchin' had more to it than that. Aren't there spells or somethin' you have to say?”

Sass stepped onto the open book and lay down. Right away she knew the book
was
magic because she could feel all the magical words soaking into her right through her belly, filling her full of spells and sorcery. She felt something else too. She felt something of her own dear mama about this book and it confirmed what she had been reckoning ever since Sophy told her about Miss Ally's cat disappearing. Miss Ally had been mama's boon companion and this was
her
book. And now it was theirs, hers and Sophy's. She stood up and put a paw on Sophy's hunched over shoulder and licked her cheek, backed up, sat down on the book and mewed in a humorous tone. What was missing from the recipes was right under Sophy's nose and right behind Sass's own! It was herself. And as for the spells—her mama loved her and would not have left her all alone in the world without teaching her the magic words she needed to follow her career of controlling world events to suit herself. All those little purred nursery rhymes and lullabies
were
the magic words.

The book was only to give people like Miss Ally and Sophy a list to look at so that they could do the tedious gathering of items a cat couldn't easily describe or tell them where to locate without learning human language.

Excited by her new insight, Sass leaped back and forth from the kitchen counter to the table and batted at the remnants of the ingredients Sophy had used in the useless warding spell of the previous day.
Now
they could make it work.

Sophy looked at her sadly. “You poor little thing. Did all that smoke addle your brains? You act like you belong in the county asylum.”

But while Sophy was young and much burdened with cares beyond her years, she was not stupid. She followed Sass's directions and began putting together the same ingredients as the night before. Only this time, there was a difference. Instead of keeping her mama's song to herself, Sassafras sat on Sophy's shoulder as she mixed, grated, pounded, boiled and stewed the fixin's for the ward spell. And while Sophy did all the manual labor requiring the use of thumbs and fingers, Sass purred her the protection spell Mama had taught her, the one that had come into her head when Sophy mixed up the potion before.

“Hush little baby don't you cry

“You'll have your own place by and by

“Mice in the walls and moles in the lawn

“Feed my kit when Mama's gone on”

But that, Sass remembered as she sang to Sophy, was just the first verse.

The second was:

“Hush, little children, don't be afraid

“Wait till you see what mama's made

“Sprinkle all around like tomcat pee

“Keep our house safe as safe can be.”

But then she remembered a more crucial verse, one that called for an ingredient only she could provide. It came into her head just as Sophy was about to blend all the fixin's together.

Sass hopped down, went over to the doorjamb and stretched herself up as high as she would go, almost a whole entire foot, and scratched her little claws for all they were worth, till some of the casings came away with the wood splinters.

Then she mewed for Sophy to come pick them up.

Sophy had come to know that mew and learn that it meant she needed to pay right smart attention to what was being told her.

She gathered up claws and splinters and all in the dustpan and with a look at Sass, dumped them into the brew.

Sass sang her the last verse, purring triumphantly.

“Hush, my kit, don't flap your jaw

“Put you in just a little claw

“Gives your ward-juice mighty paws

“To smack them breakin' mama's laws.”

They worked all day long brewing up a huge batch of the magic mixture until Sophy's arms ached and Sass's purrer was worn to a frazzle.

But then it was time to sprinkle it. This time they had enough to circle the house, the drive where Sophy's truck was parked, the henhouse and the barn even though it didn't have ary a horse or cow anymore, and the biggest trees. Sophy sprinkled the mixture onto the snow and Sass purred her spells as they circled the properly, widdershins, counterclockwise, singing the spell through three times three times seven.

For a long time, they were left in peace and the Pewterballs didn't come near enough for Sophy to know of it or be troubled by it.

Sass grew in length, strength, and beauty and she and Sophy were soon able to talk to each other right clearly with no words passing anybody's lips. She and Sophy practiced lots of the spells, as much as they could by themselves. Sophy carried potion with her whenever she left the house and farmyard and Sass was careful never to hunt outside the charmed circle. One day, Sophy took the recipe book to the town library and used the copy machine to make another book, which she put with her school things.

Then spring came, and as Sass shed much of her heavy long coat, so the farmyard shed the snow, which melted, running away in little rivulets from the charmed circle.

Back came Luly Pewterball and her awful offspring, one sunny day while Sophy was at school.

Sassafras recalled the burping gasping noise of Willie Pewterball's truck and ran for cover when she heard it.

She hid under the sofa, up inside the frame where she had pulled loose the stuffing to make herself a cozy nest.

They weren't likely to find her there, she thought.

“Well, I'll be if this ain't our lucky day, Willie!” Luly cried. “There's my very book lyin' open there on the table where that careless girl must have left it! She doesn't deserve such a treasure.”

“Then take it and let's go, Mama. This place gives me the creeps.”

“It's not like you to be so timid, Willie.”

“No ma'am, but let's leave all the same.”

When Sophy came home and found the book gone, Sass told her what had happened and she called the sheriff. Of course the Pewterballs lied about it.

But that was all right, because Sophy had her copy and right away between them they whomped up a spell to get the book back.

“Hush, little children, don't you yearn

“Bad folks got them a lot to learn

“Their luck will sour and their guts will burn

“Till what's yours is safe returned.”

That spell was not purred like the others but transmitted in a low, threatening growl. Sassafras enjoyed singing it a lot.

Once it was made, all they had to do was wait. Normally, you had to put a potion or something within range of the people that needed spellin', but in this case the recipe said, the thing that had been stolen provided the contact.

Sass made up her own verse now, which showed she was getting bigger and better at this.

“Luly and Willie, time to weep

“You won't rest and you won't sleep

“You won't drink and you won't eat

While our spell book's in your keep.”

On the third day after the theft, Sophy found the recipe book in her mailbox with a note from Luly attached.

“Keep it. The damn thing doesn't work anyway.”

Sophy giggled as she showed it to Sass but Sass just washed her tail and smiled to herself. Of course the spell book wouldn't work without a cat to sing the words. And as mean as Willy was to animals, he was about as likely to turn into a horny toad as he was to get any cat to do charms for him and his horrible mama.

The Pewterballs picked up and left town after that and nobody heard from them again except the skinny gal who had come with Luly on the first day. She was nicer now and taking her medicine real regular these days. She came by to return what she had stolen from Sophy's house and to tell her that she had received a letter from Willie, wanting cigarette money, since the prison guards wouldn't give him any without him buying them.

Sassafras winked at Sophy and Sophy winked at Sass but neither one of them let on about what they knew.

by

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

and

Rick Reaser

They fought all the way to the Vietnam Memorial, which wasn't surprising since they'd been fighting about one thing and another for the last thirty years. Their fights weren't noisy, they were the low, nasty kind, full of sharp hisses and angry looks like poison darts. It hadn't always been that way. You'd think after all those years and raising three kids everything would have been ironed out by now, smooth and sweet as one of the well blended milkshakes they used to share at the soda fountain before Woody got drafted. Sometimes it was almost like that for them, but always there was a distance, however slight, like the edge of a sock caught in a drawer that kept it from closing. In the Johanson's marriage, the thing between them wasn't a sock. It was a ghost.

Had Woody Johanson never gone to Vietnam, or been in the firefight which killed his buddy, Nick Amato, maybe Woody and his high school sweetheart, Becky would have been happy. But Nam was always there, like the scar Johanson carried as a permanent souvenir from the firefight that got him a three day R&R at a field hospital. The scar was a tangible reminder, as was Amato's lighter, the deluxe metal Zippo with the 1st Cav insignia, Johanson had borrowed just before all hell broke loose. The lighter had been in his pocket when Amato hit a trip wire at the beginning of the firefight.

The last tactile physical sensation Amato remembered was the intense, searing pain as he was blown to pieces that sank into the monsoon muck of the forest floor without a trace. The pain had lasted only a moment, and then what he supposed he would call his spirit—the core of himself anyway—was free. But he didn't want to be free to wander Vietnam forever. He wanted to stay himself, stay with his friends, and go home to the States. The only thing left of him and his was the lighter Johanson carried. No sooner had the idea of attaching himself to the lighter and to Johanson occurred to him than it was done.

Maybe it had been made easier because Johanson got hit too and was out of it long enough for Amato to join him. Johanson's wound wasn't mortal, but it was bad enough to get him a free helicopter ride to the nearest hospital. It didn't take much from an AK-47. Like the rounds in the M-16's, the bullets tumbled once they hit something, smashing more flesh and destroying more tissue as they went, so there was no such thing as a clean wound.

Johanson's wound gave Amato the weirdest sensation. He was aware that the body he was in hurt, but his friend's pain couldn't touch him.

However, poor old Woody was spouting blood like a fountain and too out of it to do anything about it. Amato knew then that if he couldn't do something to help, he would be out of body a second time—this time with the company of his friend, who from everything he'd told Nick, had a lot to live for.

Unlike Nick, Woody Johanson had a home to return to, parents who had been together his whole life, a piece of land to inherit, a high school sweetheart waiting for him. He was a calm, stable sort of guy, no drugs, no booze, faithful to his girl from what he said. He even blamed Nick for starting him smoking, and said he should get to keep the flashy lighter Nick had bought himself at the PX for his birthday. Woody said he deserved some compensation for the money he was going to end up spending on smokes because of Nick's bad influence. It was a joke between them. Woody was stubborn as hell and hung onto the lighter until Nick snuck it away from him again, then borrowed it back and the same thing happened all over again. But he was a square in the best sense of the word, a squared away guy who knew who he was and where he was going. Nick, on the other hand, had considered himself something of a free spirit even before he literally became one.

His mother was dead, his dad, a musician, reborn as a melancholy alcoholic who disappeared when Nick turned fourteen, leaving his son on his own. His mom's relatives lived out of state, and his dad's were all dead but Nick didn't want to go into a foster home so he got by, staying with the family of one school friend after another, making up stories and elaborate schemes to cover for his dad's absence while he finished high school . Maybe his friends' folks knew all along that he was lying, but they went along with it. Most of them had big families anyway, and he made himself useful and got part time jobs to help out. He was half Italian, by nature quick to get upset over stuff and just as quick to calm down, and pretty smart and he went out of his way to fit in, to make nice, to be agreeable. He didn't want them regretting that they helped him. And if every once in awhile one of them patted his cheek or ruffled his hair or called him by a pet name like his folks used to do before his Mom died, that made him want to try harder. The last family he lived with was pretty upset with him when he joined the army. They said he'd get killed and they'd never see him again. But he was old enough to be on his own and he wanted to travel and he wanted to go to college some day too and get to be somebody who knew about the interesting things he saw when he visited museums and galleries, the things he read about in books. He figured all he had to do was make it through Nam alive and he could get a free education. Meanwhile, he'd see what the world was like outside of New York City. He'd meet different people.

And he did. Like Woody. He admired Woody's cool, and Woody was impressed by his edgier, let's-see-what-happens, approach to life.

Dying together was not what they had in mind when they became buddies. And dying twice in one day was not the kind of unique experience Amato favored. He reached automatically to staunch the flow of blood from Woody's arm. To Nick's relief and surprise, when
he
reached,
Woody's
arm moved and Woody's hand applied the necessary pressure till the area was secured, the medevac chopper landed, and the medics applied the pressure dressing. That was when Nick realized that by attaching himself to the lighter Woody carried, he could, at least temporarily , take charge of parts of Woody's body.

So Amato stopped the bleeding, but the damned thing still got infected, as they learned once Johanson was bunked down at the hospital, safe except for the swollen red arm and a raging fever.

Nick surfaced in time to see a girl—not a Vietnamese girl but an American with red pigtails and big round hazel eyes—bending over him.

“Geez,” he said. “Dying ain't so bad. You're one of the angels right?”

She smiled at him, “Cool it, GI, you are way too hot as it is. Besides, you think I haven't heard that line before?”

“I bet you hear it all the time,” he said. He noticed the olive drab fatigues then, and the lieutenant's bars. Her voice was low-pitched and soft when she talked to him. She smelled like perfume—not a lot, maybe some just left over on her skin after a night out and a morning shower. A hint of vanilla and gardenias. Her nametag said “Ryan.”

“Shhhhh,” she said as she took his blood pressure. He noticed there was a needle in his arm with an IV drip. She had a basin of cool water on the bedside stand and dipped a white washcloth in it and laid it on his—Johanson's—head. He anticipated the touch from the time she lifted it dripping from the basin and wrung it out, until she smoothed it over his forehead, but he didn't feel a thing. He couldn't feel it when she brushed Johanson's hair back from his forehead to make room for the cloth either. Then she moved on to the next patient and a corpsman put ice filled plastic gloves against Johanson's groin and armpits, to finish bringing the fever down.

As the fever cooled down, he watched her moving around the ward, sitting at the station charting. A tall curvy girl, the kind he'd always been attracted to. He was short and wirey himself and had to try a little harder to impress tall girls, who always wanted someone to look up to. She wasn't taller than he—had been—he guessed, and was quite a lot shorter than Woody.

Johanson kept tossing and turning though, which gave Nick a chance to talk to the nurse again. “Can he—I—have something for pain?”

She came right away with a pill, but took his temperature again first. “Hey, way to go. You're cooling off,” she said before she gave him the pill. She had to put it in his mouth. It took more concentration than he seemed to have to move anything but Johanson's mouth and eyes.

“ Can I have a smoke?”

It was night time by then and everybody else seemed to be asleep. She cranked the bed up and handed him an ashtray, but he couldn't manage it, so she stood there by him and helped him light the cigarette with her own lighter.

“Want one?”

“No, I don't smoke,” she said. “We just carry lighters for the patients.”

“There's one in my—was one in my pocket.”

She checked the drawer of the stand. “It's still there.”

“Good,” he said, and he told her it belonged to his friend.

“Did he get med-evaced too?” she asked.

“I don't know. I didn't see him after I got hit,” he said, which was sort of true. He changed the subject and told her about the joke he and Woody had with the lighter.

The mortar attack happened the second night they were there, and Lt. Ryan and the corpsman ordered everybody who could move under the bed. Amato couldn't get Johanson's body to move for him. Lt. Ryan—he had heard the other nurses call her Shari, trotted briskly down the ward, her flashlight and the corpman's the only lights. They covered all the guys who couldn't get out of bed with extra mattresses. When she came to Johanson, she clucked her tongue and said, “Can you get up? You seem to be pretty weak still from your fever. Here, I'll help you.” The truth was, Johanson was whacked out on pain meds and weak from the wound infection and fever. The IV he was hooked up to with its hose and pole sort of confused Amato too much to make the kind of basic moves he was able to negotiate with Johanson's body.

Steadying him with a hand on the IV stand pole, Shari Ryan pulled him out of bed, lowered him to the floor, and then, with a kind of a worried frown, lay face down beside him.

A mortar crumped so close by the windows in the quonset huts rattled. The IV bottle clanged against the metal pole and the lieutenant held onto it so it didn't tip over and break the bottle. He stretched Johnansen's uninjured arm protectively toward her and she made a funny sound. It took him a minute to realize it was a giggle. “Don't worry, Johanson,” she told him with a reassuring smile that was as excited as it was nervous. “The VC use the hospital too. They're not going to hit us on purpose. They couldn't get treated afterward if they did. Besides, they're lousy shots.”

“Not always,” he told her.

“I'm sorry. I guess they got you, didn't they?” she asked as another mortar crumped. Her eyes glittered in the dark like a wild animal's but there was something in her attitude of a kid playing hide and seek.

“And my friend,” he said.

So then she asked where he was from and he told her—all the standard stuff, about growing up in the City and some of the funny stuff that happened before his Mom died. She'd never been to the City and asked him what it was like, about the museums and galleries and all of the places he liked the best. He told her some of the stories behind some of the things he'd seen, some of the artists he'd met, about the band his dad used to play in.

She said, “You are
so
lucky. I would love to see those places.”

“Hey, I'll take you there when we get out of here. Really,” he said, perfectly sincerely. “So where you from?”

“Colorado,” she said, and told him about growing up with horses, cows, dogs and a small army of cats.

“So you're a cowgirl?”

“Not me. My sister was. I'm the throwback. I always made friends with the cats who were better lapsitters than mousers and I'd go find someplace to sit and read.”

“Animals are great,” he said. “Some of the people I stayed with had cats and dogs and there was the zoo...” and he told her a funny story about one of the sea lions that had been in the newspaper when he was a kid.

He wished for the first time since coming to Nam that the enemy would never stop shooting. Lying there in the dark, with the mortars thundering and the rockets whistling, it was very cozy, and he felt very close to her, even though when he did manage to get Johanson's hand to touch her shoulder, he, Amato, couldn't feel anything. He just lay beside her, smelling that sweet scent and listening to her voice, and her muffled giggle when he said something she thought was cute. She told him he was going to get to go home and he asked for her address, which she wrote down on a little piece of paper she took from her pocket and tucked into his hand.

But he still couldn't feel it or really touch her. And when she left after finally getting him back into bed, it started to hit him what had happened to him.

As Johanson regained his senses a little, Amato found he wasn't able to say anything or even get Woody to say something for him. He could only watch while Woody acted baffled when Shari Ryan asked him about some of the things she'd talked about with Nick while they were under the bed. Johanson was flattered by the attention from the pretty nurse, but puzzled by the references to conversations he didn't remember and a little reserved. He said no, he wasn't from New York City, the lieutenant must have him confused with someone else. His friend Amato had been though. Maybe he'd been talking about Amato when he was delirious and the lieutenant misunderstood. Did she know if a Spec 4 Nick Amato had been admitted? Shari looked hurt, and sounded a little more professional.

But ol' Woody wasn't stupid and he wasn't completely immune to a pretty face. He spent more time in the hospital stateside, and he wrote to Shari a couple of times, even got up the nerve to send her a Christmas present. Amato knew this, but he didn't really instigate it. He felt as if he and Woody were together inside a long tunnel and Woody was at the mouth of it, where he could talk to everybody and see the sun and move around, while Amato was trapped in the back in a dark narrow part, trying to come to terms with the fact that he was dead. He didn't notice a lot of what Johanson did and if he influenced his friend's behavior at all, he wasn't aware of it or much of anything else.