Blossoms Meet the Vulture Lady (6 page)

“Cane? You mean a man with a cane …” Vicki paused in confusion. “You mean some man with a cane was here? Who? What man?”

“It ain’t only men that wear men’s boots. It ain’t only men that carry canes.”

“Pap, if you know something, tell me!”

“Not a man,” Pap said. “A woman.”

“A woman?”

Pap swallowed. He had the trembles so bad now that he stuffed his hands in the bib of his overalls to keep them from fluttering.

Maggie and Vern breathed in at the same time. When they breathed out, they said the name for him:

“Mad Mary.”

“Mad Mary? That old woman that goes around eating animals off the road. She’s got Junior? You can’t be serious! The woman really is mad!” Vicki said.

“She won’t hurt Junior,” Pap said.

“Then why did she take him?”

Pap shook his head slowly, from side to side. “That’s what I don’t know.”

Mad Mary loved a good storm. It was the time she felt safest and happiest in her cave.

The rest of the world was out there worrying about electricity going out and lightning striking and leaks in the roof and wind damage. Mad Mary didn’t have to worry about one single thing.

Mad Mary drew on her pipe. She had filled it with wild tobacco.

She leaned back in her rocking chair. This rocking chair was the only stick of real furniture she had, the only furniture she needed. At night she rocked in it before the fire. On sunny days she pulled it out on the ledge and rocked out there. On cold and stormy nights she pulled a quilt on her lap for comfort.

On the fire in front of her simmered the rabbit, the squirrel, and the onions. She had thrown in a potato and two carrots too. She bent forward from time to time and stirred the bubbling mixture with a handmade spoon.

The light from the fire played on the cave walls. The flickering shadows magnified the bunches of herbs drying on the walls, and made the corners deep and foreboding.

Junior groaned in his sleep, and Mad Mary glanced over at the ledge where he lay. The noise startled her for a moment. She had forgotten he was there.

He moved—he was under a quilt too—but he did not wake up.

“You sleep. You’re safe,” she said. Smoke curled around her pipe.

Junior had turned over and was now facing Mad Mary. One arm was flung out of the covers, in her direction, as if he were asking for something.

The lightning flashed, lighting up his features, turning them white. Mad Mary waited to see if the lightning would wake him, but it didn’t.

“I never saw a child that worn out.” She shook her head, remembering the cruel condition in which she had found him. “Poor little thing. Maybe I ought to wake him up for supper. He’s probably starved. They never left him anything to eat but some raw hamburger.”

She hesitated. “No,” she said finally, “he probably needs sleep as much as anything.”

Then she bent over her stew. Wonderful-smelling steam misted her face. It was done. She began spooning it out, ladling it onto an old pie tin. She balanced the pie tin on her quilt-covered lap and began to eat.

Outside, the rain poured and the thunder rumbled. Mad Mary forgot the storm. Mad Mary forgot Junior. By the flickering firelight she ate her varmint stew.

“I wanted to go with them.”

“You didn’t want to go any worse than me.”

“Yeah, but you have a hurt ankle, Pap,” Maggie said. “You couldn’t go.”

“Oh, yes I could,” Pap said, his chin jutting out stubbornly.

Maggie and Pap were sitting on the front porch, in the swing, waiting for the police. All they had been talking about was how much they had wanted to go with Vern and Vicki on the search for Mad Mary’s place. Both of them wanted to be where the action was.

By turns, they pushed the swing back and forth, back and forth.

“I was the logical one to go,” Pap said, “because I went to school with the woman. I knowed her. We was in a talent show one time in grade school.”

Maggie was so startled, she stopped the swing. It bobbed awkwardly on its chains.

“Pap, you and Mad Mary were in a talent show?”

“My talent, naturally, was rope tricks,” he went on.

That talent show was one of Pap’s favorite childhood memories. For a long time he had even had a picture of himself in the western costume his mama had put together for the talent show. He wished he still had it. He remembered himself as looking like Will Rogers.

Maggie looked at him. She was having a hard time bringing the picture into focus. Finally she said, “I can see you doing rope tricks, but what on earth was Mad Mary’s talent?”

“Singing. Everybody said she got to sing because her daddy owned the mill. Folks were jealous of the Cantrells back then, because of their money, but as I remember it, she done all right. I remember she wore a yellow dress, and her mother was the only lady there that had on gloves and a hat.”

“Mad Mary sang, Pap?” Maggie still couldn’t take it in.

“High.”

She shook her head in amazement. “Were you friends with her, Pap?”

“I don’t reckon you’d call us friends. We sat side by side in school for three years. They done it alphabetically back then, and Blossom came right before Cantrell. In fifth grade Dickie Lee Bunker skipped a grade, and from then on he sat between us.”

He shook his head. “No, we wasn’t friends, but she was as much my friend as anybody’s. The Cantrells always did keep to themselves. Anyway, she knows me. One time—oh, this was after the Cantrell family place burned and Mary made a shed out of the ruins. She was the talk of the town back then.”

“She still is.”

Pap ignored Maggie’s comment.

“The place burned down and Mr. Cantrell with it,” he went on, “and for some reason Mary wouldn’t leave and come into town like a normal person. Nobody could talk any sense to her. She just kept poking around in the ruins and dragging out a shutter here, a door there. The week after her father’s funeral she started dragging the stuff down to the river—boards, bricks, you name it. She made the whole shed by herself. She always was strong, both in will and body.”

It was Pap’s turn to set the swing in motion.

“Well, anyway, this particular day I saw Mary in the grocery store. We was reaching for the same can of Carnation milk. We excused ourselves and then she looked at me close and said, ‘Weren’t you the little skinny boy who was always doing rope tricks?’

“I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, and didn’t you used to sing Ave Maria?’”

Pap stuck his chin out again. “That’s why I ought to be the one going to hunt for her. She’d remember me. I wouldn’t startle her. Them she won’t know from strangers, might bolt like a scared animal and carry Junior halfway to Blowing Rock.”

Pap scratched his unshaved chin. The whiskers grated against his fingers.

“No, Mary never was one to cotton to strangers.”

Mud was sitting by Junior’s coyote trap. He was torn between following Pap and Maggie to the house or going with Vickie and Vern on their trip into the woods.

Normally there wouldn’t have been any question about the matter. He would have gone with Pap. But the last thing Pap had said to him was “Go with Vern.” He had pointed it out for him so there would be no mistake. “The dog might be some help to you, Vicki.”

“All right. I’ll take him with us. Now, Pap, you call the police as soon as you get home. Maggie, you make sure he does.”

“I will.” Maggie kicked the dust. “But I still don’t see why I can’t come with you.”

“I told you, shug. I need you to go with Pap.”

When her mom called her shug, Maggie always obeyed. She got in one final “But I still don’t see why.”

Mud sat listening to this in front of the coyote trap. The people had lost interest in him, and Pap and Maggie had already started across the clearing. Pap was pushing the wheelbarrow.

“Come on, Mud,” Vern called. He snapped his fingers twice.

Mud got up and stretched. He lifted his leg in the direction of the coyote cage, and then abruptly he lowered it.

Mud smelled hamburger. He sniffed the ground. The smell seemed to be coming from inside the cage. He walked slowly toward it. With his head lowered he paused and sniffed again.

“Come on, Mud,” Vern’s voice called. The voice was fading into the distance. Vern and Vicki were already out of sight. Maggie and Pap were too.

Mud’s nose began to run. He could see that at the back of the trap lay a large piece of hamburger meat. It was under a piece of metal. Mud hesitated, then he lowered his head and crawled into the cage.

Although the cage was taller than he was, something told Mud to move in a crouch. When he was halfway inside, he tried to scrape the metal toward him with one paw. His sharp toenails left scratches in the dust.

He couldn’t reach it. He crawled all the way in. He pawed the metal circle.

And this time, he could reach it. The tin-can sandwich flipped over like a tiddlywink. Before Mud could take it in his mouth, however, there was a terrible whooshing noise behind him. Leaves and dust and blackberries and bugs flew into the air. Then there were two clicking noises, and silence.

Mud had darted back in fear, but he found he was up against a door. He tried to dart the other way. Wire. He leapt up in alarm. He struck his head on the roof of the cage. He spent the next minutes twisting desperately this way and that, hitting boards or wire wherever he turned.

His yellow eyes grew wild. He panted with fear.

For the second time that day Junior’s coyote trap had made a catch.

Hello, Mud.

“Well, at last,” Pap said, getting to his feet. “Here come the police. Perfect timing,” he added scornfully, “here comes the rain too.”

“I like the police,” Maggie said, remembering the events of the Blossoms’ last July. “They sure helped us last summer.”

“I ain’t said nothing against them. Just their timing,” Pap said.

The police car stopped at the porch. A policeman opened the front door and ducked as if he were trying to get under the rain. He ran for the porch. The other policeman followed with one hand steadying his gun.

“You took your time,” Pap commented.

“We got here as fast as we could, sir.”

“Well, let’s go in the house and sit down,” Pap said. “We’ve got some trouble to tell you about.” He held the door open. “You boys know who Mary Cantrell is, don’t you?”

“Would that be Mad Mary?” the policeman asked.

“It would,” Maggie said, and she followed the policemen into the house.

Junior awoke.

For a minute he thought his eyes were still closed. He was in absolute, total blackness. He had never seen anything like it. He touched his face, felt the slits in his swollen eyelids.

No, his eyes were open. But he couldn’t see a thing. How could this be happening? He choked with sudden fear. He was blind!

A moan began deep in his chest. His hands groped on either side of his body. He felt nothing familiar, nothing he had ever felt before. What was this? And this?

Rags!

He was lying in a bed of rags. His hands fumbled over the cloth. Not rags, old blankets. His fear grew. These were not like any old blankets he had ever felt before. And beneath the unknown blankets was—He drew in another ragged breath.

Stone!

He was lying on stone! The feel of the cold, hard stone made Junior stop breathing entirely. His hands trembled over the stone to see where it ended. It didn’t. The wall was stone too.

The discovery left him petrified. He could not move. When at last he began to breathe again, he noticed for the first time how different the air was. Junior had never breathed air like this before. And there was a strange, foreign smell in the cold air. A smell of old smoke and cooking, but even the cooking smell wasn’t familiar.

Where was he? His hands moved over his body to see if that was still the same. It was, but he was under a cover, a quilt. It was ragged, too, and it smelled musty. Junior threw it away with a strangled cry.

He staggered to his feet. He had begun to really cry now, but it was such a new sort of crying, he didn’t even recognize it as his. It was the wail of a lost, hurt animal. He stretched out his arms and began to stumble blindly across the uneven floor.

At once he tripped and fell forward. His face struck stone. His front teeth went through his lip. He tasted blood.

Junior screamed. The scream echoed in the still cold air, and the sound of his amplified scream scared Junior so much, he screamed again.

He began to crawl forward on his stomach, moving in desperation, screaming as he went, wiggling from side to side like a lizard. Suddenly his hand touched something that felt familiar.

His scream caught in his throat. His hand moved over the new object.

A shoe!

Junior wanted to cry, this time with relief. Where there was a shoe, there had to be a person. This was the first time Junior could believe he might still be in the real world. His hand moved up. It was a boot. Shoelaces.

Then his trembling hand recognized the top of a sock. And above that, the rough skin of a leg.

“Pap?”

Suddenly a kitchen match flared above him, and Junior looked up. He saw a sight he would never forget for the rest of his life. It was a Halloween mask come to life.

The blood rushed from his head so fast, his face turned white as paper. His eyes rolled up into his head. A voice far, far away said, “It’s just me.”

Junior saw no more and heard no more. For the first time in his life Junior fainted.

The coyote trap was a miserable place to be after the storm began.

At first Mud kept getting up and shaking himself. He never had liked the feel of rain dripping through his fur. Then he would curl back into a mound. Then the rain dripping through his fur would get on his nerves again and he would get up and shake.

But after a while his yellow fur was so soaked, he looked brown. About that time Mud gave up on getting dry and crouched as far back in the trap as he could get. His golden eyes were dark with misery.