THREE
The sound of Susannah’s singing voice accompanied by the giggles of the children—all children great and small—drew Eddie and Tian back around to the other side of the house.
Zalman was holding one end of what looked like a stock-rope. Tia had the other. They were turning it in lazy loops with large, delighted grins on their faces while Susannah, sitting propped on the ground, recited a skip-rope rhyme Eddie vaguely remembered. Zalia and her four older children were jumping in unison, their hair rising and falling. Baby Aaron stood by, his diaper now sagging almost to his knees. On his face was a huge, delighted grin. He made rope-twirling motions with one chubby fist.
“ ‘Pinky Pauper came a-calling! Into sin that boy be falling! I caught him creeping, one-two-three, he’s as wicked as can be!’ Faster, Zalman! Faster, Tia! Come on, make em really jump to it!”
Tia spun her end of the rope faster at once, and a moment later Zalman caught up with her. This was apparently something he could do. Laughing, Susannah chanted faster.
“ ‘Pinky Pauper took her measure! That bad boy done took her treasure! Four-five-six, we’re up to seven, that bad boy won’t go to heaven!’ Yow, Zalia, I see your knees, girl! Faster, you guys! Faster!”
The four twins jumped like shuttlecocks, Heddon tucking his fists into his armpits and doing a buck and wing. Now that they had gotten over the awe which had made them clumsy, the two younger kids jumped in limber spooky harmony. Even their hair seemed to fly up in the same clumps. Eddie found himself remembering the Tavery twins, whose very freckles had looked the same.
“ ‘Pinky . . . Pinky Pauper . . . ’ ” Then she stopped. “Shoo-fly, Eddie! I can’t remember any more!”
“Faster, you guys,” Eddie said to the giants turning the skip-rope. They did as he said, Tia hee-hawing up at the fading sky. Eddie measured the spin of the rope with his eyes, moving backward and forward at the knees, timing it. He put his hand on the butt of Roland’s gun to make sure it wouldn’t fly free.
“Eddie Dean, you cain’t never!” Susannah cried, laughing.
But the next time the rope flew up he did, jumping in between Hedda and Hedda’s mother. He faced Zalia, whose face was flushed and sweating, jumping with her in perfect harmony, Eddie chanted the one verse that survived in his memory. To keep it in time, he had to go almost as fast as a county fair auctioneer. He didn’t realize until later that he had changed the bad boy’s name, giving it a twist that was pure Brooklyn.
“ ‘Piggy Pecker pick my pocket, took my baby’s silver locket, caught im sleepin eightnineten, stole that locket back again!’ Go, you guys! Spin it!”
They did, twirling the rope so fast it was almost a blur. In a world that now appeared to be going up and down on an invisible pogo-stick, he saw an old man with fly-away hair and grizzled sideburns come out on the porch like a hedgehog out of its hole, thumping along on an ironwood cane. Hello, Granpere, he thought, then dismissed the old man for the time being. All he wanted to do right now was keep his footing and not be the one who fucked the spin. As a little kid, he’d always loved jumping rope and always hated the idea that he had to give it over to the girls once he went to Roosevelt Elementary or be damned forever as a sissy. Later, in high school phys ed, he had briefly rediscovered the joys of jump-rope. But never had there been anything like this. It was as if he had discovered (or rediscovered) some practical magic that bound his and Susannah’s New York lives to this other life in a way that required no magic doors or magic balls, no todash state. He laughed deliriously and began to scissor his feet back and forth. A moment later Zalia Jaffords was doing the same, mimicking him step for step. It was as good as the rice-dance. Maybe better, because they were all doing it in unison.
Certainly it was magic for Susannah, and of all the wonders ahead and behind, those few moments in the Jaffordses’ dooryard always maintained their own unique luster. Not two of them jumping in tandem, not even four, but six of them, while the two great grinning idiots spun the rope as fast as their slab-like arms would allow.
Tian laughed and stomped his shor’boots and cried: “That beats the drum! Don’t it just! Yer-bugger!” And from the porch, his grandfather gave out a laugh so rusty that Susannah had to wonder how long ago he had laid that sound away in mothballs.
For another five seconds or so, the magic held. The jump-rope spun so rapidly the eye lost it and it existed as nothing but a whirring sound like a wing. The half-dozen within that whirring—from Eddie, the tallest, at Zalman’s end, to pudgy little Lyman, at Tia’s—rose and fell like pistons in a machine.
Then the rope caught on someone’s heel—Heddon’s, it looked like to Susannah, although later all would take the blame so none had to feel bad—and they sprawled in the dust, gasping and laughing. Eddie, clutching his chest, caught Susannah’s eye. “I’m havin a heart attack, sweetheart, you better call 911.”
She hoisted herself over to where he lay and put her head down so she could kiss him. “No, you’re not,” she said, “but you’re attacking my heart, Eddie Dean. I love you.”
He gazed up at her seriously from the dust of the dooryard. He knew that however much she might love him, he would always love her more. And as always when he thought these things, the premonition came that ka was not their friend, that it would end badly between them.
If it’s so, then your job is to make it as good as it can be for as long as it can be. Will you do your job, Eddie?
“With greatest pleasure,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows. “Do ya?” she said, Calla-talk for Beg pardon?
“I do,” he said, grinning. “Believe me, I do.” He put an arm around her neck, pulled her down, kissed her brow, her nose, and finally her lips. The twins laughed and clapped. The baby chortled. And on the porch, old Jamie Jaffords did the same.
FOUR
All of them were hungry after their exercise, and with Susannah helping from her chair, Zalia Jaffords laid a huge meal on the long trestle table out behind the house. The view was a winner, in Eddie’s opinion. At the foot of the hill was what he took to be some especially hardy type of rice, now grown to the height of a tall man’s shoulder. Beyond it, the river glowed with sunset light.
“Set us on with a word, Zee, if’ee would,” Tian said.
She looked pleased at that. Susannah told Eddie later that Tian hadn’t thought much of his wife’s religion, but that seemed to have changed since Pere Callahan’s unexpected support of Tian at the Town Gathering Hall.
“Bow your heads, children.”
Four heads dropped—six, counting the big ’uns. Lyman and Lia had their eyes squinched so tightly shut that they looked like children suffering terrible headaches. They held their hands, clean and glowing pink from the pump’s cold gush, out in front of them.
“Bless this food to our use, Lord, and make us grateful. Thank you for our company, may we do em fine and they us. Deliver us from the terror that flies at noonday and the one that creeps at night. We say thankee.”
“Thankee!” cried the children, Tia almost loudly enough to rattle the windows.
“Name of God the Father and His Son, the Man Jesus,” she said.
“Man Jesus!” cried the children. Eddie was amused to see that Granpere, who sported a crucifix nearly as large as those worn by Zalman and Tia, sat with his eyes open, peacefully picking his nose during the prayers.
“Amen.”
“Amen!”
“TATERS!” cried Tia.
FIVE
Tian sat at one end of the long table, Zalia at the other. The twins weren’t shunted off to the ghetto of a “kiddie table” (as Susannah and her cousins always had been at family gatherings, and how she had hated that) but seated a-row on one side, with the older two flanking the younger pair. Heddon helped Lia; Hedda helped Lyman. Susannah and Eddie were seated side by side across from the kids, with one young giant to Susannah’s left and the other to Eddie’s right. The baby did fine first on his mother’s lap and then, when he grew bored with that, on his father’s. The old man sat next to Zalia, who served him, cut his meat small-small, and did indeed wipe his chin when the gravy ran down. Tian glowered at this in a sulky way which Eddie felt did him little credit, but he kept his mouth shut, except once to ask his grandfather if he wanted more bread.
“My arm still wuks if Ah do,” the old man said, and snatched up the bread-basket to prove it. He did this smartly for a gent of advanced years, then spoiled the impression of briskness by overturning the jam-cruet. “Slaggit!” he cried.
The four children looked at each other with round eyes, then covered their mouths and giggled. Tia threw back her head and honked at the sky. One of her elbows caught Eddie in the ribs and almost knocked him off his chair.
“Wish’ee wouldn’t speak so in front of the children,” Zalia said, righting the cruet.
“Cry’er pardon,” Granpere said. Eddie wondered if he would have managed such winning humility if his grandson had been the one to reprimand him.
“Let me help you to a little of that, Granpere,” Susannah said, taking the jam from Zalia. The old man watched her with moist, almost worshipful eyes.
“Ain’t seen a true brown woman in oh Ah’d have to say forty year,” Granpere told her. “Uster be they’d come on the lake-mart boats, but nummore.” When Granpere said boats, it came out butts.
“I hope it doesn’t come as too much of a shock to find out we’re still around,” Susannah said, and gave him a smile. The old fellow responded with a goaty, toothless grin.
The steak was tough but tasty, the corn almost as good as that in the meal Andy had prepared near the edge of the woods. The bowl of taters, although almost the size of a washbasin, needed to be refilled twice, the gravy boat three times, but to Eddie the true revelation was the rice. Zalia served three different kinds, and as far as Eddie was concerned, each one was better than the last. The Jaffordses, however, ate it almost absentmindedly, the way people drink water in a restaurant. The meal ended with an apple cobbler, and then the children were sent off to play. Granpere put on the finishing touch with a ringing belch. “Say thankee,” he told Zalia, and tapped his throat three times. “Fine as ever was, Zee.”
“It does me good to see you eat so, Dad,” she said.
Tian grunted, then said, “Dad, these two would speak to you of the Wolves.”
“Just Eddie, if it do ya,” Susannah said with quick decisiveness. “I’ll help you clear the table and wash the dishes.”
“There’s no need,” Zalia said. Eddie thought the woman was sending Susannah a message with her eyes—Stay, he likes you—but Susannah either didn’t see it or elected to ignore it.
“Not at all,” she said, transferring herself to her wheelchair with the ease of long experience. “You’ll talk to my man, won’t you, sai Jaffords?”
“All that ’us long ago and by the way,” the old man said, but he didn’t look unwilling. “Don’t know if Ah kin. My mind dun’t hold a tale like it uster.”
“But I’d hear what you do remember,” Eddie said. “Every word.”
Tia honked laughter as if this were the funniest thing she’d ever heard. Zal did likewise, then scooped the last bit of mashed potato out of the bowl with a hand nearly as big as a cutting board. Tian gave it a brisk smack. “Never do it, ye great galoot, how many times have’ee been told?”
“Arright,” Granpere said. “Ah’d talk a bit if ye’d listen, boy. What else kin Ah do ’ith meself these days ’cept clabber? Help me git back on the porch, fur them steps is a strake easier comin down than they is goin up. And if ye’d fatch my pipe, daughter-girl, that’d do me fine, for a pipe helps a man think, so it does.”
“Of course I will,” Zalia said, ignoring another sour look from her husband. “Right away.”