The Cannibal Heart

4

When her voice got tired Jessie sat down on the lid of the well and gently bit at the hangnail on her right thumb. The hangnail was the worst she’d ever had and she had an idea that she might leave it on to show to the visitor. Since Carmelita had partly charmed her wart away with funny noises and hot castor oil, Jessie had no physical distinction left except the hangnail.

Jessie took her thumb away from her mouth and examined the remains of the charmed wart on the joint of her forefinger. Though her parents said that no one could charm things away, Jessie could see the evidence for herself — the wart was nearly gone. She wondered how Carmelita got this awful power of diminishing things, and whether she could use it on animals or people, to turn whales into minnows, or Jessie herself into a storybook doll.

“I could charm things,” she whispered to herself. “Carmelita can teach me and when I go back to school I’ll charm everyone’s diseases.”

It was impossible to sit still on such an exhilarating thought. She jumped up laughing and spread her arms wide. It was wonderful to be herself, Jessie, powerful and unafraid, and with company coming. Dancing on her toes she started off down the path for home while the little lizards darted out of the way of her flying feet.

Just before she came to the curve in the path she stopped for breath, and it was then that she heard clearly, above all the other little noises in the woods, a new noise that she didn’t recognize.

She crouched down behind a boulder and listened. The rhythmic squeaking continued, and the harder she listened the more familiar it seemed. Yet it was oddly out of place. No one used the swing in the pepper tree except Jessie, herself, and, very rarely, Luisa; but the sound was now unmistakable, the crunch-squeak of rope against bark.

She called out, “Luisa?” and her voice sounded very high and thin, as if Carmelita had charmed most of it away.

There was no answer from Luisa. Jessie had expected none. Even if Luisa had heard her she knew Luisa wouldn’t answer anyway because she was mad. Luisa’s madness might last forever, and this thought made Jessie feel quite desperate and reckless. There was no use trying to appease Luisa, so she might as well do her best to scare her out of her skin.

Cautiously she approached the curve of the path, keeping close behind tree trunks and boulders, and crawling on her hands and knees when she had to cross an open space.

In spite of all her care she couldn’t prevent the leaves and twigs from crackling under her weight, and by the time she reached the place where she could see the swing, the squeaking noise had stopped. Crouched behind an oak tree, ready to pounce, she waited for the noise to begin again, so that she could catch Luisa unaware and dreaming.

She waited for a long time, until her one foot went to sleep and she had to wake it by slapping and pinching. When she finally gave up her vigil and stepped out from behind the tree she saw that there was no one on the swing at all, though it was still moving in the wind.

Furious at being tricked and missing her prey, she shouted feebly, “You’re a stinker! If you hide on me I’m going to tell!”

She saw then, moving through the trees like two giant gaudy birds, Mr. Roma in his plaid shirt and a woman who wore a yellow dress and had a blaze of dark red hair.

“It’s the little girl, Jessie,” Mr. Roma said. “She likes to make noises. It is good for her lungs.”

Mrs. Wakefield smiled faintly. Her eyes didn’t change but the lines around her mouth deepened. “It must be funny to have a child around again.”

“It is very lively.”

“Lively, yes.” She turned away, blinking. “They are nice people, are they?”

“Yes, I think so,” Mr. Roma said gently. “Mr. Banner is restless, he is lonely maybe, but not the lady or the little girl.”

Mrs. Wakefield paused beside an acacia tree and touched it with her hand as if it were an old friend. The acacia had never been pruned and its grey fringed leaves drooped to the earth. The yellow blossoms, like tiny balls of chenille, had browned and withered.

“Nearly everything has died but the trees,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “It pays to have deep roots.”

Kneeling down on the carpet of withered blossoms she began to brush them away with her hand.

“I’ll do it,” he protested. “Here. Look. I have my handkerchief.”

“No. How old is the little girl?”

“Nearly nine. She will be nine next month.”

“Almost as old as Billy. You’ll have to have a birthday party for her.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Tell me the date so I can think of it when I’m gone.”

“The eighteenth of July.”

She repeated the date aloud. “It will be a nice thing to think of, a little girl’s birthday party.”

Mr. Roma knew she would remember; the very first thing in the morning on July the eighteenth, she would think of Jessie’s birthday party. He wanted to make the picture real for her so that she would be, in a sense, at the party herself.

“Carmelita will bake an angel’s food cake,” he said seriously, “with pink icing and nine pink candles. Inside the cake will be a ten-cent piece and a little silver horseshoe...”

“And a wedding ring. Perhaps Luisa will get the wedding ring. She’d like that.”

“Yes, the cake will be filled with many things,” Mr. Roma said.

In the space which he had cleared of blossoms was a small square stone. Mr. Roma had placed it in the ground himself and he had no need to look at the words it bore:

He turned his eyes away, toward the sea glimmering like a blue light beyond the grey leaves of the acacia. He didn’t want to see Mrs. Wakefield’s silent, tearless grief. He knew she would not weep, she had gone dry like an old well. The dryness showed in her skin, no longer delicate and fine but nearly as dark as Mr. Roma’s own; and in the stiff way she moved, as if her bones had bristled from lack of moisture. Even her eyes seemed parched, and caught in her dark eyebrows there was a fine spray of yellow dust from the road. Her beauty had changed, but it hadn’t vanished.

Mr. Roma took off his grey fedora and held it over his heart.

“We’d better go back,” Mrs. Wakefield said. “They will think I’m queer, coming out for a walk in the woods like this as soon as I arrive. They don’t know that John is buried here, do they?”

“I didn’t tell them.”

“It’s just as well. They might be superstitious about death, especially the child.” She smoothed the blossoms back over the stone until it was no longer visible. “Is she... is she very bright?”

“Oh, yes. But she has had no experience — trains and zoos and airplanes and subways and movies, yes — she knows all about the artificial things — but here in the country she is always filled with wonder and fear. She has a tender heart. She loves everything that moves.”

“What a pity.” Mrs. Wakefield rose and brushed off the leaves that clung to her dress. The backs of her hands were baked and waffled by the sun. “She will grow up so suddenly and bitterly.”

“No, no,” Mr. Roma said, but he knew it was partly true. Jessie was too lavish with her love. She splattered it around like an inexperienced painter, and Mr. Roma often found daubs and splashes of it in the most unexpected places. “Jessie will grow up to be a fine woman, like you.”

“Like me?” Her face twisted in a sudden grimace of pain. “God forbid.”

Side by side they began to walk back toward the house, past Jessie’s swing and the eucalyptus where the hummingbirds nested.

“I’ve changed, haven’t I?” she said. “A lot.”

“No more than any of us.”

“A good deal more. I could see it in Carmelita’s eyes — a really profound shock. She looked at me as if I were the one who had died, not Billy.”

“Carmelita exaggerates things with her eyes,” Mr. Roma said. “Luisa does, too. It means nothing.”

“I was a fool to come back. I should have kept moving.” She shook her head as if to shake away the fact of her return. “They say tragedy ennobles people, gives them an inner peace. Well, I don’t feel noble or peaceful. I feel angry, terribly and helplessly angry.”

“It is all right to be angry.”

“Not when you can’t do anything about it except shake your fist at the sky and stamp your feet on the ground.” She was silent a moment. “When I was Jessie’s age my mother took me to a fortune-teller as a special treat. The old woman said, ‘This child will have a long and happy life,’ and for years and years I believed this with all my heart. Whenever I was depressed or lonely I would repeat those magic words to myself: This child will have a long and happy life. I often wish I could go back and find the old woman and thank her for the comfort she gave me. It was such a personal comfort — you understand? It wasn’t like being told that God was in Heaven and would take care of me providing I was good. No, the old woman knew her business. Her words were clear and precise and confident, and there were no strings attached, no provisos, like having to stop biting my fingernails and getting my pinafores dirty. This child was me, and the long and happy life was my irrevocable fate.”

“You’re still a young woman,” Mr. Roma said anxiously, but she paid no attention to his remark.

She said, with an uncertain smile, “If I found the fortune-teller again, I don’t know whether I’d call her a liar or ask her to repeat the words to me all over again.”

“Maybe both.”

“That’s right, maybe both,” she said. “But I’ve talked enough about my troubles. What will you do when the house is sold?”

Mr. Roma had been expecting the question. “We will go back to Marsalupe. We have saved money here. I am thinking we will open a small restaurant.”

“A restaurant?”

“Only a very small one. A café.”

“You’ve had no experience.”

He glanced at her shyly. “I was thinking I would take one of these courses by mail — how to keep the books and what to buy. Carmelita will cook her special dishes like enchiladas, and beans with cheese, and tamales, and I will do the serving.”

“It will be a very different life for you.”

“Oh, yes. But better in some ways for Luisa. She doesn’t like boarding at my sister’s during the school months. And here, in the summer, it is too quiet for her.” He nodded his head. “Yes, it is time for a change.”

“Why?”

“You have looked after us too well, like children.”

“It hasn’t been a soft life.”

“We have always been secure,” he said gravely. “Good food and a nice place to live, not like the shacks in town where most of the colored people live.”

“I would like to ask you to come with me, but I don’t know where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing.”

She looked out across the sea. The sun was going down, the sky was greying, and the water gleamed silver like the skin of a fish.

“I may go back to Mexico,” she said. “There’s a little place on the coast where Billy and I stayed, Manzanilla. We came back by boat. It was terribly hot. Even at night it didn’t cool off, and I’d lie there with the portholes open, listening to the sea and wondering what was going to happen to Billy. Sometimes I couldn’t manage him anymore, he’d gotten so big, nearly a hundred pounds.”

Mr. Roma nodded. He knew from experience how powerful Billy could be. Though he had tired easily, he’d had, at times, a tremendous strength.

“You remember how he liked to see things move?” Mrs. Wakefield said. “Well, he never got tired of watching the sea and the gulls. We found a little place near the stern where no one else ever went, and I’d sing to him or read aloud. He didn’t understand all the words perhaps, but he understood that he was my son and I loved him.”

When they came to the cypress hedge, the wind veered and brought with it the supper smells from the kitchen.

Mrs. Wakefield said, “You’d better call the little girl.”

Hanging on a rusty nail in the shed was an old cowbell. Mr. Roma had found the cowbell years ago by the side of the road, but he had never been able to think of a use for it until Jessie came.

He brought the bell out and rang it loud enough to summon Jessie and to wake the dead.