«What place?»
«The Landing, silly.»
Joel said: «I may, but I haven’t seen it yet.» Her face was close to his, and he could tell she was disappointed with the answer. «And you, where’s your house?»
She waved an airy hand. «Just a little ways up yonder. It’s not far from the Landing, so maybe you could come visit sometime.» She tossed the firefly into the air where it hung suspended like a small moon. «Naturally I didn’t know whether to think you lived at the Landing or not. Nobody ever sees any of them Skullys. Why, the Lord himself could be living there with none the wiser. Are you kin to. . .» but this was cut short by a terrible, paralyzing wail, and wild crashing in the all-around darkness.
Idabel bounded into the road from the underbrush. She was flailing her arms and howling loud and fierce.
«You darn fool!» her sister screamed, but Joel did nothing, for his heart was lodged somewhere in his throat. Then he turned to check Jesus Fever’s reaction, but the old man still snoozed; and strangely the mule had not bolted with fright.
«That was pretty good, eh?» said Idabel. «I’ll bet you thought the devil was hot on your trail.»
Florabel said: «Not the devil, sister. . . he’s inside you.» And to Joel: «She’ll catch it when I tell Papa, cause she couldn’t have got up here without us seeing unless she cut through the hollow, and Papa’s told her and told her about that. She’s all the time snooping around in there hunting sweetgum: some day a big old moccasin is going to chew off her leg right at the hip, mark my word.»
Idabel had returned carrying a spray of dogwood, and now she smelled the blooms exultantly. «I’ve already been snake-bit,» she said.
«Yes, that’s the truth,» her sister admitted. «You should’ve seen her leg, Joel Knox. It swelled up like a watermelon; all her hair fell out; oh, she was dogsick for two months, and Mama and me had to wait on her hand and foot.»
«It’s lucky she didn’t die,» said Joel.
«I would’ve if I was you and didn’t know how to take care of myself,» said Idabel.
«She was smart, all right,» conceded Florabel. «She just went smack in the chicken yard and snatched up this rooster and ripped him wide open; never heard such squawking. Hot chicken blood draws the poison.»
«You ever been snakebit, boy?» Idabel wanted to know.
«No,» he said, feeling somehow in the wrong, «but I was nearly run over by a car once.»
Idabel seemed to consider this. «Run over by a car,» she said, her woolly voice tinged with envy.
«Now you oughtn’t to have told her that,» snapped Florabel. «She’s liable to run straight off and throw herself in the middle of the highway.»
Below the road and in the shallow woods a close-by creek’s sliding, pebble-tinkling rush underlined the bellowed comments of hidden frogs. The slow-rolling wagon cleared a slope and started down again. Idabel picked the petals from the dogwood spray, dripping them in her path, and tossed the rind aside; she tilted her head and faced the sky and began to hum; then she sang: «When the northwind doth blow, and we shall have snow, what does the robin do then, poor thing?» Florabel took up the tune: «He got to the barn, to keep he-self warm, and hide he-self under he wing, poor thing!» It was a lively song and they sang it over and over till Joel joined to make a trio; their voices pealed clear and sweet, for all three were sopranos, and Florabel vivaciously strummed a mythical banjo. Then a cloud crossed the moon and in the black the singing ended.
Florabel jumped off the wagon. «Our house is over in there,» she said, pointing toward what looked to Joel like an empty wilderness. «Don’t forget. . . come to visit.»
«I will,» he called, but already the tide of darkness had washed the twins from sight.
Sometime later a thought of them echoed, receded, left him suspecting they were perhaps what he’d first imagined: apparitions. He touched his cheek, the cornhusks, glanced at the sleeping Jesus — the old man was trance-like but for his body’s rubbery response to the wagon’s jolting — and was reassured. The guide reins jangled, the hoofbeats of the mule made a sound as drowsy as a fly’s bzzz on a summer afternoon. A jungle of stars rained down to cover him in blaze, to blind and close his eyes. Arms akimbo, legs crumpled, lips vaguely parted — he looked as if sleep had struck him with a blow.
Fence posts suddenly loomed; the mule came alive, began to trot, almost to gallop down a graveled lane over which the wheels spit stone; and Jesus Fever, jarred conscious, tugged at the reins: «Whoa, John Brown, whoa!» And the wagon presently came to a spiritless standstill.
A woman slipped down the steps leading from a great porch; delirious white wings sucked round the yellow globe of a kerosene lantern that she carried high. But Joel, scowling at a dream demon, was unaware when the woman bent so intently towards him and peered into his face by the lamp’s smoky light.
2
Falling. . . falling. . . falling! a knifelike shaft, an underground corridor, and he was spinning like a fan blade through metal spirals; at the bottom a yawning-jawed crocodile followed his downward whirl with hooded eyes: as always, rescue came with wakefulness. The crocodile exploded in sunshine. Joel blinked and tasted his bitter tongue and did not move; the bed, an immense four-poster with different rosewood fruits carved crudely on its high headboard, was suffocatingly soft and his body had sunk deep in its feathery center. Although he’d slept naked, the light sheet covering him felt like a wool blanket.
The whisper of a dress warned him that someone was in the room. And another sound, dry and wind-rushed, very much like the beat of bird wings; it was this sound, he realized while rolling over, which had wakened him.
An expanse of pale yellow wall separated two harshly sunlit windows which faced the bed. Between these windows stood the woman. She did not notice Joel, for she was staring across the room at an ancient bureau: there, on top a lacquered box, was a bird, a bluejay perched so motionless it looked like a trophy. The woman turned and closed the only open window; then, with prissy little sidling steps, she started forward.
Joel was wide awake, but for an instant it seemed as if the bluejay and its pursuer were a curious fragment of his dream. His stomach muscles tightened as he watched her near the bureau and the bird’s innocent agitation: it hopped around bobbing its blue-brilliant head; suddenly, just as she came within striking distance, it fluttered its wings and flew across the bed and lighted on a chair where Joel had flung his clothes the night before. And remembrance of the night flooded over him: the wagon, the twins, and the little Negro in the derby hat. And the woman, his father’s wife: Miss Amy, as she was called.
He remembered entering the house, and stumbling through an odd chamber of a hall where the walls were alive with the tossing shadows of candleflames; and Miss Amy, her finger pressed against her lips, leading him with robber stealth up a curving, carpeted stairway and along a second corridor to the door of this room; all a sleepwalker’s pattern of jigsaw incidents; and so, as Miss Amy stood by the bureau regarding the bluejay on its new perch, it was more or less the same as seeing her for the first time. Her dress was of an almost transparent grey material; on her left hand, for no clear reason, she wore a matching grey silk glove, and she kept the hand cupped daintily, as if it were crippled. A wispy streak of white zigzagged through the dowdy plaits of her brownish, rather colorless hair. She was slight, and fragile-boned, and her eyes were like two raisins embedded in the softness of her narrow face.
Instead of following the bird directly, as before, she tiptoed over to a fireplace at the opposite end of the huge room, and, artfully twisting her hand, seized hold of an iron poker. The bluejay hopped down the arm of the chair, pecking at Joel’s discarded shirt. Miss Amy pursed her lips, and took five rapid, lilting, ladylike steps. . .
The poker caught the bird across the back, and pinioned it for the fraction of a moment; breaking loose, it flew wildly to the window and cawed and flapped against the pane, at last dropping to the floor where it scrambled along dazedly, scraping the rug with its outspread wings.
Miss Amy trapped it in a corner, and scooped it up against her breast.
Joel pressed his face into the pillow, knowing that she would look in his direction, if only to see how the racket had affected him. He listened to her footsteps cross the room, and the gentle closing of the door.
He dressed in the same clothes he’d worn the previous day: a blue shirt, and bedraggled linen trousers. He could not find his suitcase anywhere, and wondered
