Joel gazed down on the jumbled green, trying to picture the music room and the dancers («Angela Lee played the harp,» Miss Amy was saying, «and Mr. Casey the piano, and Jesus Fever, though he’d never studied, the violin, and Randolph the Elder sang; had the finest male voice in the state, everyone said so»), but the willows were willows and the goldenrod goldenrod and the dancers dead and lost. The yellow tabby slunk through the lilac into tall, concealing grass, and the garden was glazed and secret and still.
Miss Amy sighed as she slipped back into the shade of the room. «Your suitcase is in the kitchen,» she said. «If you’ll come downstairs, we’ll see what Missouri has to feed you.»
A dormer window of frost glass illuminated the long top-floor hall with the kind of pearly light that drenches a room when rain is falling. The wallpaper had once, you could tell, been blood red, but now was faded to a mural of crimson blisters and maplike stains. Including Joel’s, there were four doors in the hall, impressive oak doors with massive brass knobs, and Joel wondered which of them, if opened, might lead to his father.
«Miss Amy,» he said, as they started down the stairs, «where is my dad? I mean, couldn’t I see him, please, ma’am?»
She did not answer. She walked a few steps below him, her gloved hand sliding along the dark, curving bannister, and each stairstep remarked the delicacy of her footfall. The strand of grey winding in her mousy hair was like a streak of lightning.
«Miss Amy, about my father. . .»
What in hell was the matter with her? Was she a little deaf, like his cousin Louise? The stairs sloped down to the circular chamber he remembered from the night, and here a full-length mirror caught his reflection bluely; it was like the comedy mirrors in carnival houses; he swayed shapelessly in its distorted depth. Except for a cedar chest supporting a kerosene lantern, the chamber was bleak and unfurnished. At the left was an archway, and a large crowded parlor yawned dimly beyond; to the right hung a curtain of lavender velvet that gleamed in various rubbed places like frozen dew on winter grass. She pushed through the parted folds. Another hall, another door.
The kitchen was empty. Joel sat down in a cane-bottom chair at a large table spread with checkered oilcloth, while Miss Amy went out on the backstops and stood there calling, «Yoo hoo, Missouri, yoo hoo,» like an old screech owl.
A rusty alarm clock, lying face over on the table, ticktucked, ticktucked. The kitchen was fair-sized, but shadowed, for there was a single window, and by it the furry leaves of a fig tree met darkly; also, the planked walls were the somber bluegray of an overcast sky, and the stove, a woodburning relic with a fire pulsing in it now, was black with a black chimney flute rising to the low ceiling. Worn linoleum covered the floor, as it had in Ellen’s kitchen, but this was all that reminded Joel of home.
And then, sitting alone in the quiet kitchen, he was taken with a terrible idea: what if his father had seen him already? Indeed, had been spying on him ever since he arrived, was, in fact, watching him at this very moment? An old house like this would most likely be riddled with hidden passages, and picture-eyes that were not eyes at all, but peepholes. And his father thought: that runt is an imposter; my son would be taller and stronger and handsomer and smarter-looking. Suppose he’d told Miss Amy: give the little faker something to eat and send him on his way. And dear sweet Lord, where would he go? Off to foreign lands where he’d set himself up as an organ grinder with a little doll-clothed monkey, or a blind-boy street singer, or a beggar selling pencils.
«Confound it, Missouri, why can’t you learn to light in one place longer than five seconds?»
«I gotta chop the wood, Aint’ I gotta chop the wood?»
«Don’t sass me.»
«I ain’t sassin nobody, Miss Amy.»
«If that isn’t sass, what is it?»
«Whew!»
Up the steps they came, and through the back screen door, Miss Amy, vexation souring her white face, and a graceful Negro girl toting a load of kindling which she dropped in a crib next to the stove. The Major’s suitcase, Joel saw, was jammed behind this crib.
Smoothing the fingers of her silk glove, Miss Amy said: «Missouri belongs to Jesus Fever; she’s his grandchild.»
«Delighted to make your acquaintance,» said Joel, in his very best dancing-class style.
«Me, too,» rejoined the colored girl, going about her business. «Welcome to,» she dropped a frying pan, «the Landin.»
«If we aren’t more careful,» stage-whispered Miss Amy, «we’re liable to find ourselves in serious difficulty. All this racket: Randolph will have a conniption.»
«Sometime I get so tired,» mumbled Missouri.
«She’s a good cook. . . when she feels like it,» said Miss Amy. «You’ll be taken care of. But don’t stuff, we have early supper on Sundays.»
Missouri said: «You comin to Service, Ma’am?»
«Not today,» Miss Amy replied distractedly. «He’s worse, much worse.»
Missouri placed the pan on a rack and nodded knowingly. Then, looking square at Joel: «We countin on you, young fella.»
It was like the exasperating code-dialogue which, for the benefit and bewilderment of outsiders, had often passed between members of the St. Deval Street Secret Nine.
«Missouri and Jesus hold their own prayer meeting Sunday afternoons,» explained Miss Amy.
«I plays the accordion and us sings,» said Missouri. «It’s a whole lota fun.»
But Joel, seeing Miss Amy was preparing to depart, ignored the colored girl, for there were certain urgent matters he wanted settled. «About my father. . .»
«Yes?» Miss Amy paused in the doorway.
Joel felt tongue-tied. «Well, I’d like to. . . to see him,» he finished lamely.
She fiddled with the doorknob. «He isn’t well, you know,» she said. «I don’t think it advisable he see you just yet; it’s so hard for him to talk.» She made a helpless gesture. «But if you want, I’ll ask.»
With a cut of cornbread, Joel mopped bone-dry the steaming plate of fried eggs and grits, sopping rich with sausage gravy, that Missouri had set before him.
«It sure do gimme pleasure to see a boy relish his vittels,» she said. «Only don’t spec no refills cause I gotta pain lickin my back like to kill me: didn’t sleep a blessed wink last night; been sufferin with this pain off and on since I’m a wee child, and done took enough medicine to float the whole entire United States Navy: ain’t nona it done me a bita good nohow. There was a witch woman lived a piece down the road (Miz Gus Hulie) usta make a fine magic brew, and that helped some. Poor white lady. Mis Gus Hulie. Met a terrible accident: fell into an ol Injun grave and was too feeble for to climb out.» Tall, powerful, barefoot, graceful, soundless, Missouri Fever was like a supple black cat as she paraded serenely about the kitchen, the casual flow of her walk beautifully sensuous and haughty.
She was slant-eyed, and darker than the charred stove; her crooked hair stood straight on end, as if she’d seen a ghost, and her lips were thick and purple. The length of her neck was something to ponder upon, for she was almost a freak, a human giraffe, and Joel recalled photos, which he’d scissored once from the pages of aNational Geographic, of curious African ladies with countless silver chokers stretching their necks to improbable heights. Though she wore no silver bands, naturally, there was a sweat-stained blue polka-dot bandanna wrapped round the middle of her soaring neck. «Papa-daddy and me’s countin on you for our Service,» she said, after filling two coffee cups and mannishly straddling a chair at the table. «We got our own little place backa the garden, so you scoot over later on, and we’ll have us a real good ol time.»
«I’ll come if I can, but this being my first day and all, Dad will most likely expect me to visit with him,» said Joel hopefully.
Missouri emptied her coffee into a saucer, blew on it, dumped it back into the cup, sucked up a swallow, and smacked her lips. «This here’s the Lord’s day,» she announced. «You believe in Him? You got faith in His healin power?»
Joel said: «I go to church.»
«Now that ain’t what I’m speaking of. Take for instance, when you thinks bout the Lord, what is it passes in your mind?»
«Oh, stuff,» he said, though actually, whenever he had occasion to remember that a God in heaven supposedly kept his record, one thing he thought of was money: quarters his mother had given him for each Bible stanza memorized, dimes diverted from the Sunday School collection plate to Gabaldoni’s Soda Fountain, the tinkling rain of coins as the cashiers of the church solicited among the congregation. But Joel didn’t much like God, for He had betrayed him too many times. «Just stuff like saying my prayers.»
«When I thinks bout Him, I thinks bout what I’m gonna do when Papadaddy goes to his rest,» said Missouri, and rinsed her mouth with a big swallow of coffee. «Well, I’m gonna spread my wings and fly way to some swell city up north like Washington, D.C.»
«Aren’t you happy here?»
«Honey, there’s things you too young to unnerstand.»
«I’m thirteen,» he declared. «And you’d be surprised how
