seventy-eight cents, was hidden in the bottom drawer. Inasmuch as he had no stamps, he figured it would
be legal simply to put six cents cash money in the r.f.d. box. So he wadded a nickel and a penny in toilet
tissue, gathered his letters and started downstairs, still whistling.
Down by the mailbox he ran into Zoo, and she was not alone, but stood talking with a short,
bullet-headed Negro. It was Little Sunshine, the hermit. Joel knew this, for Monday night at suppertime
Little Sunshine had appeared tapping at the kitchen window; he’d come to call on Randolph, for they
were, so Randolph said, «dear friends.» He was extra-polite, Little Sunshine, and had brought gifts to all
the family: a bucket of swamp honey, two gallons of home-brew, and a wreath of pine needles and tiger
lilies which Randolph stuck on his head and galavanted around in the whole evening. Even though he lived
far in the dark woods, even though he was a kind of hermit, and everybody knows hermits are evil crazy
folks, Joel was not afraid of him. «Little Sunshine, he got more purentee sense ‘n most anybody,» said
Zoo. «Tell the truth, honey, if my brain was like it oughta be, why, I’d marry him like a shot.» Only Joel
couldn’t picture such a marriage; in the first place, Little Sunshine was too old, not so ancient as Jesus
Fever, to be sure, but old all the same. And ugly. He had a blue cataract in one eye, hardly a tooth in his
head, and smelled bad: while he was in the kitchen, Amy kept the gloved hand over her nose like a
sachet-handkerchief, and when Randolph had carted him away to his room (from which sounds of
drunken conversation came till dawn), she’d breathed a sigh of relief.
Little Sunshine raised his arm: «Hurry, child, make a cross,» he said in a trombone voice, «cause
you done come up on me in the lighta day.» Awed, Joel crossed himself. A smile stretched the hermit’s
thick wrinkled lips: «Spin round, boy, and you is saved.»
Meanwhile Zoo tried unsuccessfully to conceal a necklace-like ornament the hermit had knotted
about her giraffish neck. She looked very put out when Joel asked: «What’s that you’ve got on, Zoo?»
«Hit’s a charm,» volunteered the hermit proudly.
«Hush up,» snapped Zoo. «Done just told me it don’t work iffen I goes round tellin everybody.»
She turned to Joel. «Honey, I spec you best run along; got business with the man.»
O.K., if that’s how she felt. And she was supposed to be his friend! He stalked over to the
mailbox, threw up the red flag, and put his letters inside, using the tissue-wrapped coins as a
paperweight. Then, determining from memory the general direction of the twins’ house, he trudged off
down the road.
Sand dust eddied about his feet where he walked in the misty forest shade skimming the road’s
edge. The sun was white in a milkglass sky. Passing a shallow creek rushing swift and cool from the
woods, he paused, tempted to take off his tight shoes and go wading where soggy leaves rotated wildly
in pebbled whirlpools, but then he heard his name called, and it scared him. Turning, he saw Little
Sunshine.
The hermit hobbled forward, throwing his weight against a hickory cane; he carried this cane
always, though Joel could not see its necessity since, aside from the fact they were very bowed, nothing
seemed wrong with his legs; but his arms were so long his fingertips touched his knees. He wore ripped
overalls, no shirt, no hat, no shoes. «Gawd Amighty, you walks fast, boy,» he said, panting up alongside.
«Else hit’s me what ain’t use to this daytime; ain’t nothin coulda got me out cept Zoo needed that charm
mighty bad.»
Joel realized that his curiosity was being purposely aroused. So he pretended to be uninterested.
And presently, as he expected, Little Sunshine, of his own accord, added: «Hit’s a charm guarantee no
turrible happenins gonna happen; makes it myself outa frog powder ‘n turtle bones.»
Joel slackened his gait, for the hermit moved slow as a cripple; in certain ways he was like Jesus
Fever: indeed, might have been his brother. But there was about his broad ugly face a slyness the old
man’s lacked. «Little Sunshine,» he said, «would you makeme a charm?»
The hermit sucked his toothless gums, and the sun shone dull in his gluey blue eyes. «They’s many
kinda charms: love charms, money charms, what kind you speakin of?»
«One like Zoo’s,» he said, «one that’ll keep anything terrible from happening.»
«Dog take it!» crowed the hermit, and stopped still in his tracks. He jabbed the road with the
cane, and wagged his big bald head. «What kinda troubles a little boy like you got?»
Joel’s gaze wandered past the ugly man, who was rocking on his cane, and into the bordering
pines. «I don’t know,» he said, then fixed his eyes on the hermit, trying to make him understand how much
this charm meant. «Please, Little Sunshine. . .»
And Little Sunshine, after a long moment, indicated, with a tilt of his head, that yes, the charm
would be made, but: «You gotta come fetch it yoself, cause ain’t no tellin when Little Sunshine gonna be
up thisaway soon. Sides, thing is, trouble charms won’t work noways less you wears them when theys
most needed.»
But how would Joel ever find the hermit’s place? «I’d get lost,» he argued, as they continued along
the road, the dust rising about them, the sun spinning toward noon.
«Naw you ain’t: humans go huntin Little Sunshine, the devilman guide they feet.» He lifted his cane
skyward, and pointed to a sailing shark-like cloud: «Lookayonder,» he said, «hit travelin west, gonna past
right over Drownin Pond; once you gets to Drownin Pond, can’t miss the hotel.»
All the hermits Joel had ever heard about were unfriendly say-nothings. Not Little Sunshine: he
must’ve been born talking. Joel thought how, on lonesome evenings in the woods, he must chatter to
toads and trees and the cold blue stars, and this made him feel tenderly toward the old man, who began
now an account of why Drownin Pond had so queer a name.
Years past, sometime before the turn of the century, there had been, he boasted, a splendid hotel
located in these very woods, The Cloud Hotel, owned by Mrs Jimmy Bob Cloud, a widow lady
bloodkin to the Skullys. Then known as Cloud Lake, the pond was a diamond eye sprouting crystal cold
from subterranean limestone springs, and Mrs Jimmy Bob’s hotel housed gala crowds come immense
distances to parade the wide white halls. Mulberry parasols held aloft by silk-skirted ladies drifted all
summer long over the lawns rolling round the water. While feather fans rustled the air, while velvet
dancing slippers polished the ballroom floor, scarlet-coated househands glided in and out among the
guests, wine spilling redly on silver trays. In May they came, October went, the guests, taking with them
memories, leaving tall stacks of gold. Little Sunshine, the stable boy who brushed the gleaming coats of
their fine teams, had lain awake many a starry night listening to the furry blend of voices. Oh but then! but
then! one August afternoon, this was 1893, a child, a Creole boy of Joel’s years, having taken a dare to
dive into the lake from a hundred-foot oak, crushed his head like a shell between two sunken logs. Soon
afterwards there was a second tragedy when a crooked gambler, in much trouble with the law, swam out
and never came back. So winter came, passed, another spring. And then a honeymoon couple, out
rowing on the lake, claimed that a hand blazing with rubies (the gambler had sported a ruby ring) reached
from the depths to capsize their boat. Others followed suit: a swimmer said his legs had been lassoed by
powerful arms, another maintained he’d seen the two of them, the gambler and the child, seen them clear
as day shining below the surface, naked now, and their hair long, green, tangled as seaweed. Indignant
ladies snapped their fans, assembled their silks with fearful haste. The nights were still, the lawns
deserted, the guests forever gone; and it broke Mrs. Jimmy Bob’s heart: she ordered a net sent from
Biloxi, and had the lake dragged: «Tol her it ain’t no use, tol her she ain’t never gonna catch them two
cause the devilman, he watch over his own.» So Mrs. Jimmy Bob went to St. Louis, rented herself a
room, poured kerosene all over the bed, lay down and struck a match. Drownin Pond. That was the
name colored folk gave it. Slowly old creek-slime, filtering through the limestone springs, had dyed the
water an evil color; the lawns, the road, the paths all turned wild; the wide veranda caved in; the
chimneys sank low in the swampy earth; storm-uprooted trees leaned against the porch; and
water-snakes slithering across the strings made night-songs on the ballroom’s decaying piano. It was a
terrible, strange-looking hotel. But Little Sunshine stayed on; it was his rightful home, he said, for if he
went away, as he had once upon a time, other voices, other rooms, voices lost and clouded, strummed
his dreams. «
The story made for Joel a jumbled picture of cracked windows reflecting a garden of ghosts, a
sunset world where twisting ivy trickled down broken columns, where arbors of spidersilk shrouded all.
Miss Florabel Thompkins pulled a comb through her red waist-length hair, the blunt noon-sun
paling each strand, and said: «Now don’t you know I’m just tickled to see you. Why, only this morning I
was telling sister: ‘Sister, I got a feeling we’re going to have company.’ Said, ‘So let’s wash our hair’ which
naturally made no hit whatsoever: never washes nothing, that girl. Idabel? Oh, she’s off to the creek, gone
to get the melon we’ve got cooling down there: first of the summer; Papa planted early this year.»
Florabel wasn’t nearly so pretty as moonlight had made her seem. Her face was flat and freckled, like her
sister’s. She
