Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 05 (10 page)

 
          
She
stopped long enough to smile all round again. Then: “They got a wagon and
pulled it under a tree and stood me on the wagon and put a rope around my neck
and threw the loose end over a branch. They were just about to drag the wagon
out from under me and let me hang. But right then, who came through the crowd
but Mr. Ruel Harpe.”

 
          
“I’d
had my eye on you, my dear,” he said, with his own smile. “I try to pay close
attention to people with special gifts.
John, for example.”

 
          
“He
came through and jumped up on the wagon with me,” Tarrah went ahead with her
tale. “He asked them, in Spanish, to let him speak for five minutes. They let
him do that. He pleaded my case. He reminded them what would happen to them at
the hands of the law if they killed me. At the end of the five minutes, he took
that noose of rope off my neck and took my hand and helped me down off the
wagon. We walked off through the gang and nobody said a word or made a move to
stop us. All the time, he talked about
Cry
Mountain
and 1 said Td like to be there. Then—he was
gone from beside me.”

 
          
“Vanished?”
I asked.

 
          
“He
was just gone from there. Next moment, I was here, right in this room where
we're sitting now. He fetched me here. I suppose he pulled on that rope of
Scylla's.”

 
          
“Exactly,”
nodded Harpe. “There, John, you have all our stories. And you can see how happy
we'd be to have you throw in with us.”

 
          
“I
don't see how you can do otherwise,” Alka said to me.

 
          
“No,” grated Scylla.
“It's a fair offer, John.”

 
          
“It's
sure enough a direct one,” I said, “but, folks, things like this take time to
think over. I'd like to think awhile. I'd like to walk outside.”

 
          
“Why not?”
Harpe granted me. “Walk out there and think. By
now, you'd know better than to get outside the stockade.”

 
          
I
got up and bowed to Harpe and those three women, and headed out at the
cave-tunnel where I’d been led in. I took along my old guitar, just from the
force of habit. 1 strummed the strings into a whisper of music, on my way to
the open.

 
          
I
had a better look at things than I'd had at first. The trees grew thick and the
ground under them had moss and
those bunches
of
toadstools, in different poisonous-looking colors. Here and yonder, flowers
grew, and hard to say what flowers they were, though I'd thought I knew most
kinds. Some of the tree trunks had vines a-growing up and round them, ivy and
honeysuckle and so on, with leaves in clumps that looked like faces. You all
know how leaves can grow like that, gentlemen, with pits of dark shadow in
amongst the green leaves, to make eyes and mouths, with the eyes a-staring at
you all.
Human faces.
Dog and cat faces. Snake faces.
I've seen those leaf-faces so often, and I nair did much like them.

 
          
I
walked along to that ripped-out gulley where wind could make the voice of the
mountain. It looked bigger and uglier than when Harpe had showed it to me. I
looked to the other side of it, I wondered myself could I jump over yonder.
Likely I could, but why take the chance right then? I came to the rugged rock
of the very edge, and stooped over to look into it.

 
          
How
far did it go down? I couldn't even make a guess, but it went down down down,
into a darkness so deep it looked almost solid, until it came to the red flamy
color down there. For all I could say for certain, that crack in
Cry
Mountain
could go all the way down to the middle of
the world. I looked and wondered, till I felt sort of dizzy, and stepped back
off away from it, into the clear and the safe. I strummed my guitar again, and
headed back toward the gate in the stockade.

 
          
A
stream ran to there. It came from a spring that bubbled and sighed. The stream
ran beside me as I walked. I came to the gate, the big tall rails it was made
of, and I saw a little space next to it where the stream flowed out and on,
thisaway and that, down the mountain. Betwixt the upright posts I looked out at
the woods on the other side.

 
          
In
amongst the thick-grown trees stood what first I thought was a trunk swaddled
up in vines as black as ink. But it stirred there, it wasn't a tree. It shifted
on two feet. It sort of fiddled with two long, shaggy arms. Then it slid
farther back into the woods and out of my sight. All I could figure of it was
it was what some call the
Sasquatch,
some call the
Bigfoot, brought up there by Harpe to guard his stockade.

 
          
It
was gone, and there was a flutter amongst some leafy branches, like a flock of
birds. Only they weren’t true birds. Not with those webby wings like bats. They
looked as big as geese, and they had long tails, like no bats on this earth.
Those tails were spiked at the ends, like arrows. They flew away and I made out
some other thing, so deep back in the trees that all I could tell for certain
sure was that it was big, big.
Bigger than a horse, than a
bull.
As big as an elephant, bigger.
I could
just get a glimpse of curling white tusks. On
Yandro
Mountain
they’d called such a thing a Bammat.

 
          
I
felt right much like a-singing a charm I knew. I swept the silver strings of my
guitar, and l sang:

 
          
“Three
holy kings, four holy saints,

           
At
heaven’s
high gate that stand,

           
Speak out to bid all evil wait

           
And stir no foot or hand ...”

 
          
“That’s
a pretty tune, John,” cooed a voice right next to my elbow, “though I don’t
like the lyric very much.”

 
          
I
swung myself round, purely embarrassed that somebody had been able to sneak up
on me thataway. Sure enough, it was Tarrah.

 
          
She
was a-smiling, with her full dark red lips that I reckoned had the only makeup
air place on her rosy tan face. She stood close to me with that smile.
A-looking on her, and what man wouldn’t give her a look, I figured she didn’t
wear aught under that tight blouse. She plumped out inside it at the front, and
you could see the two little buds of her nipples, a-shoving at the cloth.

 
          
“You
don’t mind that I came out to be here with you?” she asked.

 
          
“No,
I don’t mind.”

 
          
“You’re
sort of cute,” she giggled.

 
          
That
was a funny word to put on a man who’s a tad over six feet, who’s built rangy
and hard, who wears crumpled old country clothes and has a face that’s been
worked over by wind and weather, with a day’s whisker stubble on it. But “cute”
can be a sort of word of all work with some lady-folks. 1 used to know one who
said the
Grand
Canyon
was cute.
Meanwhile, Tarrah was a-going on with her talk:

 
          
“I’m
glad you’re going to be here with us,” she said. “Sometimes the place gets to
be a bore. It can be so much the same, sometimes.”

 
          
“I’m
not certain sure I’m a-going to be here with you all,” I said. “But Harpe can
travel out into the world if he has the fancy. Doesn’t he take you with him
sometimes?”

 
          
“Not
me,” she shook her ribboned head. “I think that once or twice he took Scylla
somewhere, to some big city or other. And he asked her what if she could have
any wish she wanted, and she said, T’d wish that I could look up the street and
everybody would fall dead, and then look down the street and everybody would
fall dead.’ Ruel tells that on her, and laughs, and says it taught him some
kind of lesson.”

 
          
She
nudged a shoulder to me, the way she’d nudged her knee to me at the table.
Whatair you might could say about that Tarrah girl, she didn’t have much of the
bashful in her.

 
          
“I’ll
bet you want to kiss me,” she whispered.

 
          
“If
I did want that, I wouldn’t,” I said. “Ruel Harpe is likely a-watching us.”

 
          
“Oh, Ruel.”
She shrugged her shoulders, and made herself
jiggle. “What if he did know I came out here to meet you? He more or less
wanted me to meet you.”

 
          
I
frowned about that. “Looky here, Tarrah, aren't you and those others more or
less his wives? Or lovers?”

 
          
“Ruel
has women, but they're all outside.” She
squinted
her
eyes to say it. “He goes away to be with those. He doesn't do much with me,
never did.
Not much, anyway.”

 
          
“Not
much?” I repeated her.
“How much?”

           
“Look, John,” she said, “Ruel Harpe
doesn't enter this conversation any further. Let's talk about us. You happen to
be a mighty big handsome man, and I've been told that I'm a goodlooking woman.”

 
          
“We
won't argue that point,” I said. “I mean, about you a-being good-looking.”

 
          
“So
why don't we have a kiss for ourselves? If I kissed you, you'd stay kissed.”

 
          
I
told myself that that was likely a true word. “Not just now, Tarrah,” I said.
“I didn't climb all this twenty-devil way up here to fall in love.”

 
          
“Aha,”
she said, “you think you might fall in love with me.”

           
“I'm not about to do that,” I said
back.

           
Her eyes squinted again, and they
raked me up and down like claws. She tightened her red lips.

 
          
“Shakespeare
said, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” she said after a second.

 
          
“No,
he didn't,” I said. “I believe that was said by somebody or other named
Congreve.”

 
          
I
swept my guitar strings again, and I sang:

           
“Take, o, take those lips away

           
That so sweetly
were
forsworn;

           
And those eyes, the break of day,

           
Lights that do mislead the morn . .
.”

 
          
“There's
some Shakespeare for you,” I said as I quieted the strings again. “I wonder
myself why he wrote those words.”

 
          
"You're
impossible," she almost spit at me. "Do you want me to say I love
you—is that what you want of me?"

 
          
"No,
ma'am," I replied her. "And don't say it, for it wouldn’t be the
truth. You nair saw me in all your bom days till about half an hour ago. Folks
don’t fall in love that quick."

 
          
"What
makes you so sure?" she said, and her voice shook.

 
          
"And
another thing," I went on.

 
          
She
lighted up about that.
"Something about you and
me?"

 
          
"I
reckon, about all of us up here on
Cry
Mountain
. Ruel Harpe travels all over the world, and
nair takes one of you all with him."