The Adventures of Flash Jackson Read online

  “I’m flattered,” I said.

  “Don’t be,” said Miz Powell. “Just understand. You must remember that every irrational fear has some basis in the unconscious. Perhaps it’s just an ancient instinct that’s more prevalent in some than in others. Or perhaps it’s something else. A symbol, if you will. And snakes are positively loaded with metaphor and meaning.”

  “So Lilith was the snake in the garden of Eden?”

  “Lilith has been many things, my dear,” said Miz Powell. “There are goddesses similar to her in Hindu culture. The Israelites knew about her even when they were nothing more than a bunch of simple nomads, thousands of years ago. She is everywhere. She has a job.”

  “Which is?”

  “She is that which does not surrender,” said Miz Powell. “She is indomitable.”

  In other words, I thought, she is Flash Jackson.

  It was directly as a result of this conversation that, several weeks later, at the end of my second trimester, I steeled myself, drove into town with Mother, and bought a snake. Just a little one, mind you—none of your Amazonian anacondas for me. I wanted my baby to live to a ripe old age, not to end up as a headline on a supermarket tabloid. He was only a milk snake, colored in brilliant reds and yellows and laced with black, no longer than my forearm when all stretched out. He was to be fed one baby mouse every other week, and he would live in an aquarium in my bedroom. This was how I was going to begin the process of overcoming my snake-o-phobia, or whatever the hell you call it.

  (Note to self: Look up the name for fear of snakes. Write it on a piece of paper, chant the spell of getting rid of things. Burn it. Eat the ashes. Do this while holding the snake. That’s the only sure way.)

  “What are you going to name him?” Mother asked.

  “Who?” I responded. “The snake or the baby?”

  “The snake,” she said.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” I said. Naming something implied ownership, even more so than handing over the cash and taking it home. Sorry. Not “it.” “He.” Or possibly “she,” since it was hard to tell with snakes.

  “And as long as we’re on the subject, what are you going to name the baby?” she asked. “There’s only three months to go, you know.”

  “Oh really, Mother?” I said. “I had no idea.”

  “Don’t get sarcastic. I was only asking.”

  “I haven’t figured that out either. Furthest thing from my mind.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to spend some time thinking about it?”

  “Don’t you think you ought to mind your own business?” I asked.

  But I am getting ahead of myself. When I was around two months’ pregnant, I had walked up the hill to the Shumachers’, where Brother had been boarded. I stopped and chatted a while with Mrs. Shumacher and her daughters, but the conversation was awkward. Did they know about Adam? I wondered. No, it seemed that they were merely unsure of what to say to someone like me, someone who could take off and live in the woods like a mystic, someone who was, in their eyes, a witch. I was going to have to get used to this hesitation, even in people I’d known all my life. It was appropriate. A witch does not socialize readily. She must be treated with some degree of respect and standoffishness. My fuzzy scalp, which I didn’t bother concealing, must also have shocked them—no sane woman would do such a thing. So, after several minutes of stilted conversation, I asked to pay up what I owed for Brother’s feed and stable space, said I probably ought to get going, and asked casually, as a throwaway question, if Adam happened to be around, because there was something I wanted to ask him.

  He was behind the barn. Every large dairy farm has a manure pit outside the milking area, which the droppings of the cows can be shoveled or sluiced into. It collects over the course of the year and makes excellent fertilizer, which can be sold, which is therefore as good as gold. Nothing is ever wasted on a farm. Every so often the pit has to be emptied, however, and this is not the most pleasant job in the world, as it entails standing in piles of old cow shit as deep as your hips.

  This is where I found Adam now. He wore a pair of Wellingtons to protect his legs, and a handkerchief over his mouth. His shoulders and back gleamed with sweat as he shoveled it into a wheelbarrow, which he would then roll up a ramp and dump into another pile on the ground that was already chest-high. He didn’t notice me. I watched him work for a while, gauging my feelings. Admiration of his strength. A warm memory of what had happened in the woods. Some sort of palpable connection, twanging between us like a rubber band, that meant he was the father of the child I was carrying.

  “Adam,” I said.

  He stopped, turned, and looked at me. On his face I saw the same expression that had been there when I surprised him in the woods, chopping down the tree. Shock. Was I always destined to be surprising this man? Would he ever be glad to see me?

  “Hello dere,” he said.

  “How’s it going?”

  He shrugged. “Pretty busy,” he said.

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  I sat down on the edge of the pit, my legs dangling over. The smell of cow manure has never seemed unpleasant to me, though I prefer that of horses, which is sweeter. He leaned on his shovel and looked at my feet.

  “You home now?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You lost your hair?”

  “I shaved it off,” I said.

  He nodded. He seemed to have difficulty meeting my gaze. Is it going to be this way with everyone from now on? I wondered. Adam looked around again, everywhere except at my eyes.

  “Zo,” he said. “What’s new?” Without waiting for an answer, he starting filling the wheelbarrow again, the shovel rasping along the concrete floor of the pit. Farmers didn’t leave much time for conversation while they worked. It interfered with the job at hand.

  “Just came by to say hi,” I told him.

  “Yah,” he said. “Everything all right?”

  Now was my chance to tell him. I had already decided by then that I was going to keep the baby. I’d toyed with the notion of adoption only briefly, as a way of making the burden seem lighter. But there had never been any other reasonable course of action for me. It was the way things were supposed to be in my family. Our babies were not born just for the sake of having babies. They were born for a reason.

  “I’m about nine weeks,” I said.

  He stopped working and looked up at me once more, this time meeting my eyes. I had shocked him again.

  “Zo?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  He sighed. Then he threw the shovel away from him and kicked at a clod of manure.

  “Shit,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”

  Adam rolled his eyes and put one fist to his head, banging gently on his skull as if trying, belatedly, to knock some sense into himself. He climbed out of the pit and went to a hose, where he rinsed his head in cool water. Then he just stood there, hands on hips, looking out across the pastureland. In the distance, Mr. Shumacher could be seen heading toward the house, carrying a pickax.

  “Adam?”

  “What.”

  “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk. I really just came to get Brother,” I said.

  “In the barn,” said Adam.

  I got up and went into the barn, a knot in my stomach and another one in my throat. Brother whickered madly when he saw me, knocking at the door of his stall when his foreleg. We nosed each other for a brief moment, and then I gathered his tack and let him out, slipping a simple rope halter over his neck.

  “At least you’re glad to see me,” I told him. I put his blanket and saddle on and slipped the bit in his mouth. The leather of the bridle was cracking—it hadn’t been oiled in a long time. I would have to attend to that when I got home. I mounted him and we left the barn at a slow walk.

  When
I came out into the sunlight Adam was nowhere to be seen. I checked the manure pit again, but the shovel was still lying where he had thrown it. He was gone. Mr. Shumacher was closer now. I saw his arm rise and swoop lazily side to side. I waved back. I ought to have waited and said hello to him, but I couldn’t have faced another Schumacher just then. So I pulled Brother’s head around and heeled him once in the ribs, and we trotted down the driveway out to the road, where I urged him into a canter and got the hell away from there.

  Miz Powell had come over to Mother’s for tea that afternoon. This qualified as a Grand Event, in Mother’s book; it was only the second time such a thing had happened, and so it merited the breaking out of the good china and the last of the ancient biscuits. Miz Powell had lost none of her Englishness. She still wore her white gloves and hat wherever she went, and she held her cup with pinky extended. Mother was exalted by her very presence.

  When I told her what had happened—or had not happened—that afternoon, Miz Powell said: “What were you hoping he would say, dear?”

  “He ought to have offered to do the decent thing,” said Mother. “Marry her.”

  “Mother, for heaven’s sake,” I said. “I don’t want to marry Adam. I just wanted to tell him. To be fair.”

  “Fair?” Mother cried. “After what he did to you? He ought to be ashamed of himself, taking advantage of a poor girl like that! It’s practically rape!”

  Miz Powell and I exchanged glances.

  “It wasn’t rape, Mother,” I said. “I was as responsible as he was. I wanted it to happen.”

  Mother blushed from her forehead to her throat. She glared at me and tilted her head towards Miz Powell, as if to suggest that my slut-tiness was a subject best not discussed in front of company. Miz Powell, of course, showed no signs of discomfort.

  “It was a natural experience,” she told Mother. “In every respect.”

  “I don’t know what your father would say,” Mother said. She had been told soon after my arrival that I was pregnant, and had accepted the news with only a little apprehension; in fact, she was delighted, as I knew she would be. Mother responded rationally to almost nothing, but she was always predictable. Her reaction to my pregnancy was the least of my worries. The idea of having a baby around was exciting enough that it blotted out every other aspect of the situation. But here was a fresh opportunity for drama, and in front of Miz Powell, no less. It was too good for her to pass up. She pressed a napkin to her mouth and crinkled her eyes shut, squeezing out a few careful tears.

  “Would you zip it?” I said. “Two weeks ago you were glad I was having a baby.”

  “He ought to do the right thing,” Mother repeated into her napkin.

  “The right thing,” said Miz Powell, “is whatever Haley decides. Not Adam.”

  At that, they both looked at me, waiting. I cleared my throat.

  “The hell with Adam,” I said. “I’m going to buy the Grunveldt house and raise the baby on my own. With whoever’s help,” I added. “Whoever wants to help can help. And whoever doesn’t want to help doesn’t have to. It’s mine. I can do it. Grandma did it. I can do it. It’s our way. This is the way the women in our family do things.”

  “What do you think it will be, Haley?” asked Miz Powell. “Boy or girl?”

  “A girl,” I said. “Of course it’s going to be a girl.”

  Mother cried anew. Miz Powell sat back and sipped her tea with satisfaction, evidently assured that all was right in the world. And I looked down at my belly, soon to be large again, and thought: Who are you, anyway?

  “Tears of joy, my dear Mrs. Bombauer,” Miz Powell said to Mother. “That’s what you should be crying. Tears of joy. Your daughter has finally accepted the fact that she’s a woman. And it’s about bloody time, I should say.”

  For a witch to make it on her own in this modern world, she must go into business. And for that, she needs supplies. In my case, this meant herbs, and lots of them. While I was still able, I took off on Brother and scoured the countryside, two big baskets hanging from the saddle. Fall had only just begun to arrive then, and plenty of herbs were still in season. But I knew it was going to be another early winter, and there was little time to waste.

  I would have preferred to go somewhere else, but I had no choice but to return to the general area where Grandma and I used to live, because that was where the herbs were. Many grew here naturally, but she had spent innumerable years quietly encouraging others to grow which were not indigenous to our part of the world, but which did well nonetheless. I don’t know where Grandma would have gotten the first generation of seeds—probably bartered for them with people who had been dead several decades now, perhaps even centuries, traders who had visited places she’d never seen. I stayed clear of the place where her house once stood, and of the creek, and of my rock face and my oak grove, but most of all I stayed away from the place where they had shot Bear. Part of me couldn’t stand to think of a being that immense and powerful lying helplessly on the ground while they pumped hot lead into him; another part was afraid I would go feral again, if given half a chance. I had made another commitment now, another decision, and no one was going to sway me from it—not even myself. The call of the woods was strong in me, but the call of motherhood was stronger.

  Yet the mother in me didn’t trust the animal in me, not a bit—no more than mothers in ancient times would have entrusted their children to the guardianship of wolves. I knew the woods was no place to raise a child. The world existed for a reason, all of it, the muck and decay and the violence and the noise and the pollution; and I existed within it. It was no good pretending I didn’t. I was needed. And my child would be needed too.

  Yet I would always come back to the forest. Grandma’s garden was the forest, and I knew it well enough to be sure of which herbs grew best in full sunlight and well-drained areas, and which prospered in soggy, marshy places. Lavender, parsley, basil, chives, chamomile, garlic, St.-John’s-wort, sweet flag: all these things, plus dozens of other, lesser-known plants, I gathered in plenty and zipped up in plastic bags. With these, I could cure everything from acne to gunshot wounds. At the end of each day, I rode home and dumped the baskets on the floor of what had once been the Grunveldt living room, and was now going to be my laboratory and consulting room. After a week, I had enough material to last through winter and into spring, enough to treat a small town. The floor was ankle-deep in slippery plastic, the air fragrant with crushed leaves. I was nearly ready.

  Not every herb dries well. Some must be used fresh. Others are only suitable in a tincture, and yet others are best used in poultices. There was always the problem of how to keep them in optimal condition, ready for instant use. I was lucky, because I had one thing that Grandma didn’t have: a freezer. Everything that couldn’t be dried or preserved in alcohol, I froze, in the hopes that they would still make a fine tea or poultice if ever they should be needed. Then I had Mother buy me three gallons of grain alcohol, and in dozens of old Mason jars I drowned the rest in booze, sealed them up, and stored them in the basement, which offered the necessary cool and dark to keep them as long as possible.

  Then, with snow promised by Thanksgiving, I hung a bundle of agrimony on the porch as a sign that I was open for business. I expected it would be a while before those folks who had entrusted Grandma with their health would find their way to my door. Old habits die hard. Until they did, I wouldn’t have much money. I’d spent most of what I had on the house, so I prepared myself for a lean winter.

  I had no intention of depending on anyone. Mother had given me some furniture, Miz Powell a teapot and some dishes that had belonged to her late sister. I received nothing from the Schumachers. I hadn’t seen them since my last visit to the farm. I didn’t even know if they knew I was pregnant, and if so, by whom. That was all right—they would find out soon enough, without any assistance from me. That was the small-town telegraph, the gossip chain. It was going to be having a field day with me.

  With the help
of some hired men, I moved my belongings from my old bedroom to my new one next door, a hundred yards away. The Grunveldt house was large and had come cheap, but it was empty and cold; there was a rickety furnace in the basement, but I was going to resist using it for as long as I could, because of the cost of fuel. My main source of heat was a massive cast-iron stove in the kitchen—wood, after all, was free.

  The stomp of my woolen-socked feet echoed oddly on the bare floors and walls. Frankie, in phantasmic form, continued to follow me from room to room, like a puppy. I could feel him just behind me, but he hadn’t mastered the trick of materialization; even if I whipped around fast, I never was able to catch him.

  “What is it, Franks?” I asked one day. “What’s the matter, buddy?”

  My theater.

  “Yeah, so you said. What is it about this theater, anyway? Why is it so important?”

  Voices.

  “Whose voices?”

  Everyone’s. The Indians. Me.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “That. Look, Franks, what exactly do you want me to do about it? I’m having a baby here. I’m trying to pull things together so this kid has some kind of a life. I don’t have time to go building theaters. Understand?”

  I know.

  “But maybe later.”

  I had never known anyone so persistent that they couldn’t give up on something even after they were dead. I wondered how on earth I would ever appease Frankie on that count. What good would a theater do out here, in the middle of nowhere? No one would ever come to it. Even if I was able to put one together, say in the Grunveldt’s barn or something, it would just stagnate and rot. And I didn’t know the first thing about theaters anyway. I had never even been to one, unless the high school productions in the gym counted. Which I was pretty sure they didn’t.