Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ case attests that the channel is open, the miracle continues.

      So I have a minute, and maybe more, to figure out what to do. The night is long. There will be time for everything that is required. But to know my duty it will be necessary to know who I am. When did that begin to be a question? Maybe already that first day.

      I was eleven years old, could write my name backwards and upside down, but not pronounce it, and had seen several dead people already. The prospect of hearing them, too, did not particularly alarm me. So I had informed my aunt when, with exaggerated surprise, she brought me the letter from the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children: “We are pleased to offer you a place . . . Room and board . . . Reply soonest.” Since I saw that she had made up her mind to be rid of me, pride would have prompted me to say so in any case, but I spoke as I felt. Now, as the glossy, black, indignant-looking automobile we had retained in Springfield brought me ever closer to the school, my breath did come quicker, but it was with curiosity and excitement, not dread.

      I braced my hand against the ceiling as the car jolted over a rock. The road had deteriorated after Cheesehill and was now little more than two ruts running in parallel. My escort, a pinched, powder-white woman in weeds, rapped twice on the back of our driver’s seat with her cane.

      “You there! We shall be rattled to pieces!”

      Seal-brown fingers tightened on the wheel. “Got to beat that storm, ma’am, with the roads in this condition, or I won’t be making it home this side of tomorrow.” Indeed for some time the wind had carried the tang of rain, and a break in the trees showed the thunderheads heaping up over the ridge, though on us the sun still shone.

      “Storm? Storm? Are you frightened of a storm, at your age? If need be, the school can put you up for the night.”

      The driver made no reply but drove, if anything, faster.

      The dead people I had seen were my mother and Bitty. Of influenza. My father might have been dead too for all I knew, having skived off before Bitty was weaned. Truthfully, to hear them speak again would have been a very great shock. But I did not at all expect to. Their silence, when it came, had been complete.

      My reflection slid stilly over the hurtling trees, leaning over me in an admonishing way, like a censorious second self. I looked steadily through it, drinking in the strangeness of all I saw, wonderful to me, however unremarkable in itself: dark woods; muddy fields; a small, rank, weedy lake where, off the stove-in, upturned bottom of a red rowboat, a solitary heron was just tilting into flight. I half rose in sympathy with its effortful ascent.

      “Stop fidgeting, girl.”

      One might sink a hatpin in Miss Exiguous, I thought, coolly assessing the jet-tipped pair anchoring her black felt hat. Without returning my glance, she shifted uneasily on the seat and I perceived with dreary unsurprise that, like my aunt, she was one of those who feel toward colored folk the way some feel toward a spider or a snake: that even the mildest members of the species make uneasy company.

      Deliberately I returned my gaze to the window, though now that I was sitting back, I could see nothing of interest: only branches, sky, myself. I was a runty girl, small, dark, and odd looking, as I could have confirmed in the glass had I wished. A sufficiency of mirrors had already taught me not to hope. Not for a pretty face, at least, and the kind of luck that comes with it.

      Not that my face was hideous, but it had a plain, hard, assessing look incompatible with beauty. It expressed my nature truthfully enough. I was not a gay girl.

      Now I kept that face turned, with the pertinacity of a praying mantis, toward where I imagined the Vocational School to be. I had been shown a picture of a big black building, and a big black dress with a big white man-faced woman in it, and a line of children, some of them colored like me, with black bands around their sleeves. I had been told that “someone with your gifts, girl”—gifts!—would be admitted on scholarship, room and board included. It scarcely mattered. For inducements little greater than these I would have gone to Mongolia, or the moon.

      It seems incredible, but I am going, really going, I told myself. My stammer, the cause of so much misery, had set me free.

      I was only seven and just come from quarantine to my aunt and uncle’s big Boston house when I first heard the Voice (for so I thought of it). It growled and spat in my throat, and I was beaten with a strop, for my new guardians had no better notion than to try to scare it out of me. The sum of their ambition for me was that I should disappear into the nondescript throng of their own children, of whom there were six seven six or seven. Unfortunately I could not do so. If nothing else, my dark complexion would have set me apart—for though my mother was white Irish like my aunt, my father had been black—although my aunt feigned not to notice it, while pressing upon me, as my only luxuries, whitening creams and parasols. But no one scrupled to editorialize on my stammer. Even little Annabel, still in diapers, knew that to imitate me was to earn shouts of laughter from her older siblings, and smiles even from the adults.

      I can see her now, in receding view: fat feet drumming the parquetry, Hygienic Wood Wool diapers dangling from a single pin.

      (“My hat!”—Miss Exiguous, outraged, as a lurch crushed its cheap feathers against the car ceiling. She unfastened it and, having inspected it for damages, laid it on the seat between us, holding it there with one sinewy little hand.)

      Still, I thought well of myself, though I had little enough reason to do so, and had I suspected that a stammer betokened “exceptional natural aptitude for spirit communications” (as Miss Exiguous would subsequently inform me), I would have prided myself upon it, no matter how my cousins derided me. But I did not, and I fought the Voice. The Voice won. I had periods of fluency, but much of the time I could barely speak at all and was in a pretty pickle when it came to asking directions of a policeman or naming the capital of Lithuania. I did not go hungry—to point and grunt was not beyond me. Still, if what distinguishes us from the beasts is the capacity to speak, as I was often told, I was not quite human.

      At the school there would be others like me, or even worse. It would be interesting to meet the worse. Drooling perhaps. Jerking and hissing like geese.

      At home, I mean at the large Boston house of my aunt and uncle, a picture hung on the wall. It had once decorated a Slavic beehive, I had been told; I do not know how it came into their possession, or why they kept it. It looked barbaric amid their twinkling crystal, fringed lampshades, dark soft-glinting mahogany furniture. In it a crudely rendered, gape-mouthed lady was having her horribly long red tongue drawn out by a naked devil wielding a pair of oversized tongues, I mean tongs. Tongue-tongs: it was as if the near-homophone had itself brought them together—as if language held a barely concealed grudge against its chiefest organ. It, the tongue, was frayed at one end into what I took for roots, in the botanical sense. I had red, I mean read, of a tongue being pulled out “by the roots” and had drawn from this the lesson that a tongue was a sort of vegetable, not of a piece with the body in which it was fixed. My own experience had supported this view: Within my mouth, warmly fuming with self, something foreign had grown. So I had half-believed the picture and even entertained, in drowsy reveries, certain fearful corollaries: that if my tongue was not pulled out like a carrot, it would branch, flower, go to seed. Of course it was not my tongue but my Voice that had taken root in my mouth like a weed. I could not imagine the tongs that could pluck it out. But I thought that the devil wielding them might resemble a man-faced woman in black.

      I slumped, jamming my chin against my chest through the stiff, coarse cloth of a new pinafore, a parting gift from my aunt. A more loving, better-loved child might have been hurt to be thus packed away, but I was glad. Glad! Hateful Aunt Margaret. Hateful cousins. Hateful house. And hateful myself, there. I had been bad, very bad, СКАЧАТЬ