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 was kind of snaggle-toothed, and her lips pouted in prissy discontent. She was half-reclining in a hammock («Mama made it herself, and she makes all my lovely clothes, except for my dotted swiss, but she doesn’t make any for sister: like Mama says, it’s better to let Idabel troop around in what-have-you cause she can’t keep a decent rag decent: I tell you this frankly, Mister Knox, Idabel’s a torment to our souls, Mama’s and mine. We could’ve been so cute dressed alike, but. . .») swung between shady pecan trees in a corner of the yard. She picked up a pair of Kress tweezers and, with a pained expression, began plucking her pink eyebrows. «Sister’s avowed. . . ouch!. . . ambition is she wants to be a farmer.»
Joel, who was squatting on the grass nibbling a leaf, stretched his legs, and said: «What’s wrong with that?»
«Now, Mister Knox, surely you’re just teasing,» said Florabel. «Whoever heard of a decent white girl wanting to be a farmer? Mama and me are too disgraced. Course I know what goes on in the back of her mind.» Florabel gave him a conniving look, and lowered her voice. «She thinks when Papa dies he’ll leave her the place to do with like she pleases. Oh, she doesn’t fool me one minute.»
Joel glanced about at what Idabel hoped to inherit: the house stood far away in a grove of shade trees; it was a nice house, simple, solid-looking, painted a white now turned slightly grey; an open shotgun hall ran front to back, and on the porch were geranium boxes, and a swing. A small shed housing a green 1934 Chevrolet was at one side. Chickens pecked around in the clean yard of flowerbeds and arranged rocks. At the rear was a smoke house, a water-pump windmill, and the first swelling slope of a cottonfield.
«Ouch!» cried Florabel, and tossed the tweezers aside. She gave the hammock a push and swung to and fro, her lips pouting absurdly. «Now me, I want to be an actor. . . or a schoolteacher,» she said. «Only if I become an actor I don’t know what we’ll do about sister. When somebody’s famous like that they dig up all the facts on their past life. I really don’t want to sound mean about her, Mister Knox, but the reason I bring this matter up is she’s got a crush on you. . .» Florabel dropped her gaze demurely, «and, well, the poor child does have a reputation.»
Though he would never have admitted it, not even secretly, Joel felt sweetly flattered. «A reputation for what?» he said, careful not to smile.
Florabel straightened up. «Please, sir,» she intoned, her old-lady mannerisms frighteningly accurate. «I thought you were a gentleman of the world.» Suddenly, looking rather alarmed, she collapsed back in the hammock. Then: «Why, hey there, sister. . . look who’s come to call.»
«Howdy,» said Idabel, surprise or pleasure very absent from her woolly voice. She carried a huge watermelon, and an old black-and-white bird dog trotted close at her heels. She rolled the melon on the grass, rubbed back her cowlicked bangs, and slumping against a tree, cocked her thumbs in the belt rungs of the dungarees which she wore. She had on also a pair of plowman’s boots, and a sweatshirt with the legend DRINK COCA COLA fading on its front. She looked first at Joel, then at her sister, and, as though making some rude comment, spit expertly between her fingers. The old dog flopped down beside her. «This here’s Henry,» she told Joel, gently stroking the dog’s ribs with her foot. «He’s fixing to take a nap, so let’s us not talk loud, hear?»
«Pshaw!» said the other twin. «Mister Knox oughta see what happens when I’m trying to get a wink in edgewise: wham bang whomp!»
«Henry feels kinda poorly,» explained Idabel. «I’m fraid he’s right sick.»
«Well, I’m right sick myself. I’m sick of lotsa things.»
Joel imagined that Idabel smiled at him. She did not smile in the fashion of ordinary people, but gave one corner of her mouth a cynical crook: it was like Randolph’s trick of arching an eyebrow. She hitched up her pants leg and commenced picking the scab off a
