Crows have a great deal to say to one another, and some of it is fairly obvious, just as it is with people. Certain sure that one crow will let all the others in the neighborhood know when a dog or cat makes an appearance.
After a few moments to reassure the crow that I meant it no harm, I did some cawing.
The bird listened carefully. Then it flew away and I saw it drop a white bomb smack on the windshield of Mamadee’s Cadillac.
When I crawled back inside, I stripped the case off the pillow, to stow a clean pair of underpants, socks, Daddy’s undershirt, and Betsy Cane McCall and my paper dolls. I shucked my dress and threw it on the floor. Kicked my Mary Janes into a corner. I considered cutting the silk string from around my neck and flushing it down a toilet or throwing it out the window, keys after it. My shoulder blade hurt. I checked the inside of my dress and found a blood spot inside it from the pinprick.
I carried the dress out to the front stair landing and threw it down into the foyer.
“Liar!” I shrieked.
Again, nobody responded. It was as if I were alone in the house.
I went back to my room and flung myself face down on the bed. The close air thickened with the scent of lilies.
A beam of sunshine fell upon my face like a gentle warm hand. I floated, weightless and elegant, upon a current. One toe held me to the earth, my only mooring a slender ribbon of green. I was all ear, white and fleshy ear, and the current that rocked me whispered a ceaseless song in a familiar voice.
The sounds of the silver and china in use downstairs in the dining room woke me, along with pangs of hunger. The odor of the clove-studded ham wafted up the stairwells. Mamadee and Mama were the only diners. The only conversation at the table consisted of polite murmurs of please-pass-the-something and thank-you and you’re-welcome.
Nobody came up to bring me anything to eat or to tell me I could come downstairs.
I played all the swing and bebop records from the crate in the closet as loudly as I could crank the volume on the record player. All at once the turntable began to slow and the needle screeched in the groove. The turntable stopped. I unplugged the record player and plugged a lamp into the socket to see if the socket was live. It was not. I checked the other sockets in the room and all were just as dead. Someone had shut off the power to the room.
They must have forgotten that I did not need a record player. I sang all the songs that I could remember at the top of my lungs.
I peed in the pot and threw it out the window, twice.
The records were strewed all over the floor. When I collected them up to re-sleeve them in their cardboard jackets and line up in their crate, I saw something glint under the bed. Flat on my stomach, I squiggled under far enough to retrieve it.
I flung myself onto the bed and studied on the thing from under the bed. It was made of braided silk threads, like a fancy tie-back on a drapery, but very fine and light. It was not a tie-back, though. One loop of the braid sported a tiny gold buckle. Another separate Y-shaped loop went around the first in three places. It looked a little like a pair of suspenders on a belt, only for someone very small.
The Y loop fit over Betsy Cane McCall’s head with ease, to hang upon her very small shoulders, but the belt part of it was far too big for her. I was able to wind the little belt part around her a couple of times. Then I pulled one of her little sweaters over it and it was safely hidden away. Somewhere, I concluded, was a doll it fitted. Something to look for in the vastness of Ramparts.
By twilight of the long spring day, I was very hungry indeed. Sprawled on the bed in the gathering dark, I heard the sounds of Mama and Mamadee and Ford having their suppers from trays in their rooms. At first it made me furious again, until I realized that it might be a good time to sneak downstairs to the kitchen.
So I did. Never having bothered to dress again, I was barefoot in my underpants. I padded into the empty kitchen. The aluminum-foil-shrouded Easter ham was the first thing that I saw when I opened the refrigerator door. Beneath the foil, it was carved into perfect slices. The smell of it spurred my already intense hunger. I snatched a slice and bit into it, even as I was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation that it was meat, dead meat, between my teeth. Cold dead meat, cold as clay. The thick desiccating salt, the cloying sugar-syrup taste, with a bit of tough tooth-resistant skin on it, billowed in my mouth. My stomach revolted. I like to swoon and puke and choke all at the same time. I spat out the bite into my free hand and thrust both pieces of meat back under the foil. My mouth felt gritty, as if I had been eating dirt.
The remnants of the lemon meringue pie rested on a lower shelf of the icebox. Scooping up a handful of meringue and lemon filling, I filled my mouth. The sharpness of the lemon, the cleaner bland sweetness of the meringue, overcame the ham tastes, and its cool sliminess slid past the constriction in my throat easily. The remains of the pie disappeared, as I ate with my fingers until I was full. I followed the pie with sweet tea from the pitcher. It was not a neat meal. Gobbets and orts of piecrust, lemon filling and meringue ringed the floor where I stood in front of the open icebox. I burped loudly. Some of the pie was crusted around my mouth. I ran my tongue out as far as it would go and around my mouth by way of cleaning my face.
Then I wandered into the dining room to look at my eggs in their basket. It was all the Easter basket I was getting. The year before, the Easter Bunny had left a huge basketful of candy with a stuffed bunny in it. Ford had called me stupid and told me the secret; that’s how I found out that Daddy was the Easter Bunny. Remembering it made me feel aggrieved all over again—at Ford for telling, at Mama for failing to provide a basket this year, for Daddy, and not just because he was no longer able to be my Easter Bunny.
Tansy had cleared the table, so my homemade basket was all there was on it again. When I was close enough, I saw that every egg in the basket was smashed flat. For a fraction of a second, I could hardly breathe. Then I saw that under the mound of fragments, there was another egg, a whole one, the only whole one left. Brushing away the bits and pieces of shell, I picked out that one whole egg and held it in one palm. It was blown out and dyed, but not by me. I knew my own. It was pink as an azalea blossom, and patterned in a contrasting web of green.
Mama left her room upstairs. I turned toward the dining room door and waited.
She paused in the doorway to ask, “Calley, what are you doing?”
I held out the egg in my palm. “Somebody smashed my eggs. I found this one. It’s not mine.”
Mama came closer to take it from me. She barely glanced at it. “Looks like the other ones to me.”
“Well it isn’t.”
Mama made a face at the basket of smashed eggshells. “After all the time Tansy spent helping you with those eggs, you smashed them all to bits.”
“I did not!”
Her fingers closed around the one whole egg and crushed it. For an instant, she blinked rapidly and then opened her palm and looked down. In the tangle of fragments was a small roll of paper. She dumped the mess on the table and picked out the note. Unrolling it, she gave it a hasty look, as if looking at it too long might blind her. Green ink, pink paper. Then she handed it to me.
“You’re so hungry,” she said. “Eat it.”
I shoved it into my mouth, chewed frantically and then spat the cud of paper at her. And turned and ran again. She didn’t bother to come after me.
Twenty
ONE night in early May, Mama and Mamadee sat out on the verandah. They smoked cigarettes and rocked side by side in tall green-painted rockers. The crescent moon peeked through the leaves of the nearby live oak in front of the house.