‘It wasn’t clumsiness that caused my calamities, but you being within a mile of me at those times when I dropped a pot of beans or juiced my finger in the electric socket at home.’
‘Lady, in a town this size, everybody’s within a mile of someone at one time or other in the day.’
‘You admit being around then?’
‘I admit being born here, yes, but I’d give anything right now to have been born in Kenosha or Zion. Elmira, go to your dentist and see what he can do about that serpent’s tongue in there.’
‘Oh!’ said Elmira. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’
‘You’ve pushed me too far, I wasn’t interested in witchcraft, but I think I’ll just look into this business. Listen here! You’re invisible right now. While you stood there I put a spell on you. You’re clean out of sight.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘Course,’ admitted the witch, ‘I never could see you, lady.’
Elmira pulled out her pocket mirror. ‘There I am!’ She peered closer and gasped. She reached up like someone tuning a harp and plucked a single thread. She held it up, Exhibit A. ‘I never had a gray hair in my life till this second!’
The witch smiled charmingly. ‘Put it in a jar of still water, be an angleworm come morning. Oh, Elmira, look at yourself at last, won’t you? All these years, blaming others for your own mallet feet and floaty ways! You ever read Shakespeare?
There’s little stage directions in there: Alarums and Excursions. That’s you, Elmira. Alarums and Excursions! Now get home before I feel the bumps on your head and predict gas at night for you! Shoo!’
She waved her hands in the air as if Elmira were a cloud of things. ‘My, the flies are thick this summer!’ she said.
She went inside and hooked the door.
‘The line is drawn, Mrs Goodwater,’ Elmira said, folding her arms. ‘I’ll give you one last chance. Withdraw from the candidacy of the Honeysuckle Lodge or face me face-to-face tomorrow when I run for office and wrest it from you in a fair fight. I’ll bring Tom here with me. An innocent good boy. And innocence and good will win the day.’
‘I wouldn’t count on me being innocent, Mrs Brown,’ said the boy. ‘My mother says—’
‘Shut up, Tom, good’s good! You’ll be there on my right hand, boy.’
‘Yes’m,’ said Tom.
‘If, that is,’ said Elmira, ‘I can live through the night with this lady making wax dummies of me—shoving rusty needles through the very heart and soul of them. If you find a great big fig in my bed all shriveled up come sunrise, Tom, you’ll know who picked the fruit in the vineyard. And look to see Mrs Goodwater president till she’s a hundred and ninetyfive years old.’
‘Why, lady,’ said Mrs Goodwater, ‘I’m three hundred and five now. Used to call me SHE in the old days.’ She poked her fingers at the street. ‘Abracadabra-zimmity-ZAM! How’s that?’
Elmira ran down off the porch.
‘Tomorrow!’ she cried.
‘Till then, lady!’ said Mrs Goodwater.
Tom followed Elmira, shrugging and kicking ants off the sidewalk as he went.
Running across a driveway, Elmira screamed.
‘Mrs Brown!’ cried Tom.
A car backing out of a garage ran right over Elmira’s right big toe.
Mrs Elmira Brown’s foot hurt her in the middle of the night, so she got up and went down to the kitchen and ate some cold chicken and made a neat, painfully accurate list of things. First, illnesses in the past year.
Three colds, four mild attacks of indigestion, one seizure of bloat, arthritis, lumbago, what she imagined to be gout, a severe bronchial cough, incipient asthma, and spots on her arms, plus an abscessed semicircular canal which made her reel like a drunken moth some days, backache, head pains, and nausea. Cost of medicine: ninety-eight dollars and seventy-eight cents.
Secondly, things broken in the house during the twelve months just past: two lamps, six vases, ten dishes, one soup tureen, two windows, one chair, one sofa cushion, six glasses, and one crystal chandelier prism. Total cost: twelve dollars and ten cents.
Thirdly, her pains this very night. Her toe hurt from being run over. Her stomach was upset. Her back was stiff, her legs were pulsing with agony. Her eyeballs felt like wads of blazing cotton. Her tongue tasted like a dust mop. Her ears were belling and ringing away. Cost? She debated, going back to bed.
Ten thousand dollars in personal suffering.
‘Try to settle this out of court!’ she said half aloud.
‘Eh?’ said her husband, awake.
She lay down in bed. ‘I simply refuse to die.’
‘Beg pardon?’ he said.
‘I won’t die!’ she said, staring at the ceiling.
‘That’s what I always claimed,’ said her husband, and turned over to snore.
In the morning. Mrs Elmira Brown was up early and down to the library and then to the drugstore and back to the house where she was busy mixing all kinds of chemicals when her husband, Sam, came home with an empty mail pouch at noon.
‘Lunch’s in the icebox.’ Elmira stirred a green-looking porridge in a large glass.
‘Good Lord, what’s that?’ asked her husband. ‘Looks like a milk shake been left out in the sun for forty years. Got kind of a fungus on it.’
‘Fight magic with magic.’
‘You goin’ to drink that?’
‘Just before I go up into the Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge for the big doings.’
Samuel Brown sniffed the concoction. ‘Take my advice. Get up those steps first, then drink it. What’s in it?’
‘Snow from angels’ wings, well, really menthol, to cool hell’s fires that burn you, it says in this book I got at the library. The juice of a fresh grape off the vine, for thinking clear sweet thoughts in the face of dark visions, it says.
Also red rhubarb, cream of tartar, white sugar, white of eggs, spring water and clover buds with the strength of the good earth in them. Oh, I could go on all day. It’s here in the list, good against bad, white against black. I can’t lose!’
‘Oh, you’ll win, all right,’ said her husband. ‘But will you know it?’
‘Think good thoughts. I’m on my way to get Tom for my charm.’
‘Poor boy,’ said her husband. ‘Innocent, like you say, and about to be torn limb from limb, bargain-basement day at the Honeysuckle Lodge.’
‘Tom’ll survive,’ said Elmira, and, taking the bubbling concoction with her, hid inside a Quaker Oats box with the lid on, went out the door without catching her dress or snagging her new ninety-eight-cent stockings. Realizing this, she was smug all the way to Tom’s house where he waited for her in his white summer suit as she had instructed.
‘Phew!’ said Tom. ‘What you got in that box?’
‘Destiny,’ said Elmira.
‘I sure hope so,’ said Tom, walking about two paces ahead of her.
The Honeysuckle Ladies Lodge was full of ladies looking in each other’s mirrors and tugging at their skirts and asking to be sure their slips weren’t showing.
At one o’clock Mrs Elmira Brown came up the steps with a boy in white clothes. He was holding his nose and screwing up one eye so he could only half see where he was going.
Mrs Brown looked at the crowd and then at the Quaker Oats box and opened the top and looked in and gasped, and put the top back on without drinking any of that stuff in there. She moved inside the hall and with her moved a rustling as of taffeta, all the ladies whispering in a tide after her.
She sat down in back with Tom, and Tom looked more miserable than ever. The one eye he had open looked at the crowd of ladies and shut up for good. Sitting there, Elmira got the potion out and drank it slowly down.
At one-thirty, the president, Mrs Goodwater, banged the gavel and all but two dozen of the ladies quit talking.
‘Ladies,’ she called out over the summer sea of silks and laces, capped here and there with white or gray, ‘it’s election time. But before we start, I believe Mrs Elmira Brown, wife of our eminent graphologist—’
A titter ran through the room.
‘What’s graphologist?’ Elmira elbowed Tom twice.
‘I don’t know,’ whispered Tom fiercely, eyes shut, feeling that elbow come out of darkness at him.
‘—wife, as I say, of our eminent handwriting expert, Samuel Brown…(more laughter)…of the U.S. Postal Service,’ continued Mrs Goodwater. ‘Mrs Brown wants to give us some opinions. Mrs Brown?’
Elmira stood up. Her chair fell over backward and snapped shut like a bear trap on itself. She jumped an inch off the floor and teetered on her heels, which gave off cracking sounds like they would fall to dust any moment.
‘I got plenty to say,’ she said, holding the empty Quaker Oats box in one hand with a Bible. She grabbed Tom with the other and plowed forward, hitting several people’s elbows and muttering to them. ‘Watch what you’re doing! Careful, you!’ to reach the platform, turn, and knock a glass of water dripping over the table.
She gave Mrs Goodwater another bristly scowl when this happened and let her mop it up with a tiny handkerchief. Then with a secret look of triumph, Elmira drew forth the empty philter glass and held it up, displaying it for Mrs Goodwater and whispering, ‘You know what was in this?
It’s inside me, now, lady. The charmed circle surrounds me. No knife can cleave, no hatchet break through.’
The ladies, all talking, did not hear.
Mrs Goodwater nodded, held up her hands, and there was silence.
Elmira held
