gathering around the old lady as she spoke to them, praising them for their singing. When I went up the aisle, I glimpsed Mr. Buxley seated at a table in the vestry, writing in a ledger. I stopped for a word, and he explained he was entering the date of old Mrs. Mayberry’s death. He brought down another, showing me the entry of her birth sixty-seven years before; then he returned both ledgers to the shelf. Each volume was dated by year, a whole history of village births and marriages and deaths, the three important events of a man’s life, no matter where he may live.
I complimented him on the music I had heard; he said yes, it would pass very nicely for Tithing Day.
I walked along Main Street, looking at the houses with their neat gardens and fences, their windows, some with as many as eighteen panes of glass apiece, the handsome Colonial doorways. The kinds of houses I had never known in the city.
Passing Tamar Penrose’s place, I saw the child Missy perched on the limb of an apple tree, playing with her doll while some chickens pecked in the dirt below. She lifted her head and stared at me as I walked by. Suddenly I thought of the other doll, the one from the cornfield, and was shocked to realize I didn’t know what had become of it. As I tried to recollect the circumstances, I heard her give a little cry. She had caught her dress getting out of the tree, and when she tried to free it she lost her hold and tumbled to the ground. I ran back and opened the gate. She lay at the base of the tree looking stunned. I knelt and lifted her head and asked if she was all right. She stared at me; then her two hands came up and pressed her temples, as though to relieve the pain.
She was wearing a strange-looking cap of knitted wool, pulled down around her ears as though it were the dead of winter. Her dress had grass stains on it, her shoes were muddy.
“Hello,” I said.
She regarded me emptily; then a look of recognition floated into her washed-out eyes.
“Missy, do you remember me?”
“Mnmm-mean, um-paint-”
“That’s right. I’m a painter. Do you remember at Agnes Fair, what happened with the sheep?”
She shook her head.
“You pointed at me, remember?”
Another shake. She was staring at a chicken that was scratching in the dirt around the tree.
“Did someone tell you to point at me?”
A shrug.
“Did someone tell you to pick the Harvest Lord? Or did you pick him because you like Worthy Pettinger?”
Another shrug. She was watching the chicken’s bright little eyes with her dim ones.
I tried again. “When people ask you questions and you tell them things, are they just things you make up?”
She giggled, then spoke. “Sometimes.” Still she eyed the chicken. “Mnmm-um-sometimes not,” she added thickly, sucking air through her mouth.
“When they’re not, who makes them up? Where do they come from?”
“I don’t know.”
“You hear things? Things that someone says to you? Like a voice?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes I don’t hear, I just see.” Still staring at the chicken, she got up and started across the lawn to the porch. She stopped and gave me a quick look. I stepped toward her. She took another step. She seemed to be luring me to her. When I moved, she moved; when I stopped, she stopped, waiting until I moved again. She got to the steps and ran up, then spun around on the porch. When she saw I was coming up the steps, she threw herself in the porch swing and dug a loop of string from her pocket. She looked first at the place beside her, then at me. I sat on the faded canvas cushion and she set the swing in motion.
The rusty chains creaked. She looped the string over each hand, made a cat’s cradle pattern, and held it up for me to take. I inserted my fingertips and lifted it, producing a new pattern. She gave me a sly look, took the string, and made another. Her look challenged me as she waited for me to make the next move. I dipped my fingers into the maze and lifted it. The pattern slid, altered, held.
“Mnm-” she murmured, staring at it.
Again I tried. “Is it a game you play? Like cat’s cradle?”
“No game.”
“What kind of things do you see?”
“Mnm-it’s like looking through glasses,” she said, suddenly speaking distinctly. “Sometimes red, sometimes blue, or maybe black, and then everything’s colored black, and that’s the way it looks… When I see it like it’s supposed to look, that’s when they tell me what to say. Sometimes there’s fire and lightning. Um-and music.”
“Music?”
She thought a moment, a faint burrish humming issuing from her lips. “Like at the play. You know.” She made a flute-like sound and played her fingers on invisible stops; then she made drum sounds and pantomimed rat- tat-tat. “That kind,” she said. Without looking at me, she took my hands and laced the fingers, then began winding the loop of string through them. “Mnmm,” she murmured, her brows drawn together in a scowl of concentration.
“There.” She placed my hands in her lap and stared at me. I pulled at my fingers and discovered they were bound fast. As I tugged, she broke into a fit of laughter, hiking back against the cushion and waiting for me to free myself.
“Missy, untie the man.” Tamar Penrose stood on the step. She took the girl by the hand and opened the door and sent her inside. I got up, trying to loosen the intricate webbing that bound my fingers. Tamar came and examined my hands. “That’s a trick of hers.”
“I can get it.” I struggled to slide out of the knotted web.
“I’ll have to cut it. Come on in.” She stepped inside and waited for me. Out on the street dusk was falling; the occasional passing cars had turned their headlights on. I heard the familiar sound of a vehicle, then the more familiar clip-clop.
“Your little girl’s a good rider,” Tamar said, holding the door. “Missy, make a light.” She closed the door and led me to the kitchen, where the child had turned on the light; then she looked for a knife in a drawer. A large cat blinked on the sill over the sink. “Missy, hon, run out and rustle us up a chicken for dinner.” Missy went out through the screened-in porch. I heard her chasing around the yard, trying to catch a chicken.
“I didn’t know it was little girls you liked,” Tamar said in an insinuating tone, a smile playing at the corners of her red mouth as she sat me down and cut the string. “Isn’t there a law about that sort of thing? Maybe I should just leave you trussed up and call the Constable. Child-molesting and all that?” She laughed and I caught the scent of her perfume. “There,” she said when she had finally freed my fingers. “She’s a dickens, that one. What’s she been telling you?”
“Nothing. We were just playing cat’s cradle and-” I stopped, realizing how silly it sounded. I got up. “Well, thanks for the girl-scout job.”
“What’s your hurry? Now that you’re here, stay and have a drink.”
“Thanks, I’d better be on my way.”
“Come on.” She was getting glasses from a shelf and setting them on the table, her dress stretching provocatively over her full figure. “Roy Soakes brought me a jug of his pa’s corn whiskey. Ever tried moonshine? It’s just behind the door there; bring it-I’ll get the ice.”
She stepped into the back area where the refrigerator was, then went out to peer through the broken porch screening. Missy had caught a chicken, which was making a terrible squawking while she tried to control it. The screen door clattered as Tamar took a hatchet from a nail and went down the steps. I watched her seize the chicken, lay its neck on a box, and decapitate it; then she released the body, which ran in crazed circles, dripping blood onto the dry earth. When it had keeled over and lay kicking on its side, she picked it up by the feet and carried it to a pan near the steps. She tied the legs together and hung the still-flapping body on a nail where the blood drained into the pan below.
She came back in and washed her hands, then got out ice, and presently we were seated opposite each other at the table. The cat on the sill wafted its tail as we clinked glasses for luck. The child must have gone off somewhere, for she did not come in, nor did I hear her out in the yard.
“So.” Tamar hitched her chair closer to the edge of the table. “You’re a painter, is that it? What kind of
