Somebody snicked their cigar into a fall of pink ash and ambled over to look. Charlie grandly elevated the jar lid, and in the uncertain lantern light the man’s face changed. ‘Hey, now, what in hell is this — ?’
It was the first thaw of the night. Others shifted lazily upright, leaned forward; gravity pulled them into walking. They made no effort, except to keep one shoe afore the other to keep from collapsing upon their unusual faces. They circled the jar and contents. And Charlie, first time in his life, seized upon some strategy and clapped the lid down with a glass clatter:
‘You want to see more, drop aroun’ my house! It’ll be there,’ he declared, generously.
Tom Carmody spat from out his porch eyrie, ‘Ha!’
‘Lemme see that again!’ cried Gramps Medknowe. ‘Is it a brain?’
Charlie flapped the reins and the horse stumbled into action.
‘Come on aroun’! You’re welcome!’
‘What’ll your wife say?’
‘She’ll kick the tar off’n our heels!’
But Charlie and wagon were gone over the hill. They stood around, all of them, chewing tongues, squinting after. Tom Carmody swore softly from the porch. . .
As Charlie climbed the steps of his shack, carrying the jar to its throne in the living-room, he thought that from now on the place would be a palace. The incumbent king swam without moving in his private pool, raised, elevated upon his shelf over the skinny table.
This jar was the one thing that dispelled the grey sameness that hung over the place on the swamp-rim.
‘What’ve you got there?’
Thedy’s thin soprano turned him from his admiration. She stood in the bedroom door glaring out, her thin body clothed in faded blue gingham, her hair drawn to a drab knot behind red ears. Her eyes were faded like the gingham. ‘Well,’ she repeated. ‘What is it?’
‘What’s it look like to you, Thedy?’
She took a thin step forward, making a slow indolent pendulum of hips. Her eyes were intent upon the jar, her lips drawing back to show feline milk teeth.
The dead pale thing hung in its serum.
Thedy snapped a dull-blue glance at Charlie, then back to the jar, once more at Charlie, once more to the jar, then she whirled quickly to clutch the wall.
‘It — it looks. It — looks just like — you — Charlie!’ she shouted hoarsely.
The bedroom door slammed behind her.
The reverberation did not disturb the jar’s contents. But Charlie stood there, longing after her, neck muscles long, taut, heart pounding frantically, and then after his heart slowed a bit, he talked to the thing in the jar:
‘I work the bottom land to the buttbone ever’ year, and she takes the money and rushes off down home visitin’ her folks nine weeks at a stretch. I can’t keep holt of her. She and the men from the store they make fun of me. I can’t help it if I don’t know the ways to hold or touch or work her. Damn, but I try!’
Philosophically, the contents of the jar gave no advice.
‘Charlie?’
Someone stood in the front-yard door.
Charlie turned, startled, then broke out a grin.
It was some of the men from the General Store.
‘Uh — Charlie — we — that is — we thought — well — we came up to have a look at that — stuff — you got in that there jar — ‘
July passed warm and it was August.
For the first time in years, Charlie was happy as tall corn growing after a drought. It was gratifying of an evening to hear boots shushing through the tall grass, the sound of men spitting into the ditch prior to setting foot on the porch, the sound of heavy bodies creaking across it, and the groan of the house as yet another shoulder leaned against its frame door and another voice said, as a hairy wrist wiped clean the questioning mouth:
‘Kin I come in?’
With elaborate casualness, Charlie’d invite the arrivals in. There’d be chairs, soap-boxes for all, or at least carpets to squat on. And by the time crickets were itching their legs into a summertime humming and frogs were throat-swollen like ladies with goitres shouting in the great night, the room would be full to bursting with people from all the bottom lands.
At first nobody would say nothing. The first half-hour of such an evening, while people came in and got settled, was spent in carefully rolling cigarettes. Putting tobacco neatly into the rut of brown paper, loading it, tamping it, as they loaded and tamped and rolled their thoughts and fears and amazement for the evening. It gave them time to think. You could see their brains working behind their eyes as they fingered the cigarettes into smoking order.
It was kind of a rude church gathering. They sat, squatted, leaned on plaster walls, and one by one, with reverent awe, they stared at the jar upon its shelf.
They wouldn’t stare sudden like. That would’ve been irreverent. No, they kind of did it slow, casual, as if they were glancing around the room — letting eyes fumble over just any old object that happened into their consciousness.
And — just by accident, of course — the focus of their wandering eyes would occur always at the same place. After a while all eyes in the room would be fastened to it, like pins stuck in some incredible pin-cushion. And the only sound would be someone sucking a corn-cob. Or the children’s barefooted scurry on the porch planks outside. Maybe some woman’s voice would come, ‘You kids git away, now! Git!’ And with a giggle like soft, quick water, the bare feet would rush off to scare the bull-frogs.
Charlie would be up front, naturally, on his rocking chair, a plaid pillow under his lean rump, rocking slow, enjoying the fame and looked-up-toness that came with keeping the jar.
Thedy, she’d be seen way back of the room with the womenfolk in a bunch like grey grapes, abiding their menfolk.
Thedy looked like she was ripe for jealous screaming. But she said nothing, just watched men tromp into her living-room and sit at the feet of Charlie staring at this here Holy Grail-like thing, and her lips were set as seven-day concrete and she spoke not a civil word to nobody.
After a period of proper silence, someone, maybe old Gramps Medknowe from Crick Road, would clear the phlegm from his old throat’s cavern, lean forward, blinking, wet his lips, maybe, and there’d be a curious tremble in his calloused fingers.
This would cue everyone to get ready for the talking to come. Ears were primed. People settled much as sows in warm mud after the rain.
Gramps looked a long while, measured his lips with a lizard tongue, then settled back and said, like always, in a high thin old man’s tenor:
‘Wonder what it is? Wonder if it’s a he or a she or just a plain old it? Sometimes I wake up nights, twist on my corn-matting, think about that jar settin’ here in the long dark. Think about it hangin’ in liquid, peaceful and pale like an animal oyster. Sometimes I wake Maw and we both think of it. . .’
While talking, Gramps moved his fingers in a quavering pantomime. Everybody watched his thick thumb weave, and the other heavy-nailed fingers undulate.
‘. . . we both lay there, thinkin’. And we shivers. Maybe a hot night, trees sweatin’, mosquitoes too hot to fly, but we shivers jest the same, and turn over, tryin’ to sleep. . .’
Gramps lapsed back into silence, as if his speech was enough from him, let some other voice talk the wonder, awe and strangeness.
Juke Marmer, from Willow Sump, wiped sweat off his palms on the round of his knees and softly said:
‘I remember when I was a runnel-nosed kid. We had a cat who was all the time makin’ kittens. Lordamighty, she’d a litter ever time she turned around and skipped a fence — ‘ Juke spoke in a kind of holy softness, benevolent. ‘Well, we usually gave the kittens away, but when this one particular litter busted out, everybody within walkin’ distance had one-two our cats by gift, already.
‘ — So Ma busied on the back porch with a big two-gallon glass jar, fillin’ it to the top with water. It slopped in the sunlight. Ma said, ‘Juke, you drown them kittens!’ I ‘member I stood there, the kittens mewed, runnin’ ‘round, blind, small, helpless and snuggly. Just beginnin’ to get their eyes open. I looked at Ma, I said, ‘Not me, Ma! You do it!’ But Ma turned pale and said it had to be done and I was the only one handy. And she went off to stir gravy and fix chicken. I — I picked up one — kitten. I held it. It was warm. It made a mewin’ sound. I felt like runnin’ away, not ever comin’ back.’
Juke nodded his head now, eyes bright, young, seeing into the past making it stark, chiselling it out with hammer and knife of words, smoothing it with his tongue:
‘I dropped the kitten in the water.
‘The kitten closed his eyes, opened his mouth, tryin’ for air. I ‘member how the little white fangs showed, the pink tongue came out, and bubbles with it, in a line to the top of the water!
‘I know to this day the way that kitten floated after it was all over, driftin’ aroun’, aroun’, slow and not worryin’, lookin’ out at me, not condemnin’ me for what I done. But not likin’ me, neither. Ahhh. . .’
Hearts beat fast. Eyes shifted quickly from Juke to
