Mr. Vertigo (8 page)

It never occurred to me to think of Mrs. Witherspoon. Not even when Mother Sioux dropped a hint one night about the master’s “widow lady” in Wichita did I put six and three together. I was backward in that regard, an eleven-year-old know-it-all who didn’t understand the first thing that went on between men and women. I assumed it was all carnal, intermittent spasms of wayward lust, and when Aesop talked to me about planting his boners in a nice warm quim (he had just turned seventeen), I immediately thought of the whores I’d known in Saint Louis, the blowsy, wisecracking dolls who strutted up and down the alleys at two in the morning, peddling their bodies for cold, hard cash. I didn’t know dirt about grown-up love or marriage or any of the so-called lofty sentiments. The only married couple I’d seen was Uncle Slim and Aunt Peg, and that was such a brutal combination, such a frenzy of spitting, cursing, and clamor, it probably made sense that I was so ignorant. When the master went away, I figured he was playing poker somewhere or belting back a bottle of rotgut in a Cibola speakeasy. It never dawned on me that he was in Wichita courting a high-class lady like Marion Witherspoon—and gradually getting his heart broken in the process. I had actually laid eyes on her myself, but I had been so sick and feverish at the time that I could scarcely remember her. She was a hallucination, a figment born in the throes of death, and even though her face flashed through me every now and then, I did not credit her as real. If anything, I thought she was my mother—but then I would grow scared, appalled that I couldn’t recognize my own mother’s ghost.

It took a couple of near disasters to set me straight. In early December, Aesop cut his finger opening a can of cling peaches. It seemed like nothing at first, a simple scratch that would heal in no time, but instead of scabbing over as it should have, it swelled up into a frightful bloat of pus and rawness, and by the third day poor Aesop was languishing in bed with a high fever. It was fortunate that Master Yehudi was home then, for in addition to his other talents, he had a fair knowledge of medicine, and when he went upstairs to Aesop’s room the next morning to see how the patient was doing, he walked out two minutes later shaking his head and blinking back a rush of tears. “There’s no time to waste,” he said to me. “Gangrene has set in, and unless we get rid of that finger now, it’s liable to spread through his hand and up into his arm. Run outside and tell Mother Sioux to drop what’s she’s doing and put on two pots of water to boil. I’ll go down to the kitchen and sharpen the knives. We have to operate within the hour.”

I did what I was told, and once I’d rounded up Mother Sioux from the barnyard, I dashed back into the house, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and parked myself beside my friend. Aesop looked dreadful. The lustrous black of his skin had turned to a chalky, mottled gray, and I could hear the phlegm rattling in his chest as his head lolled back and forth on the pillow.

“Hang on, buddy,” I said. “It won’t be long now. The master’s going to fix you up, and before you know it you’ll be downstairs at the ivories again, twiddling out one of your goofy rags.”

“Walt?” he said. “Is that you, Walt?” He opened his bloodshot eyes and looked in the direction of my voice, but his pupils were so glazed over I wasn’t sure he could see me.

“Of course it’s me,” I answered. “Who else do you think would be sitting here at a time like this?”

“He’s going to cut off my finger, Walt. I’ll be deformed for life, and no girl will ever want me.”

“You’re already deformed for life, and that hasn’t stopped you from hankering for twat, has it? He ain’t going to cut off your dick, Aesop. Only a finger, and a finger on your left hand at that. As long as your willy’s still attached, you can bang the broads till kingdom come.”

“I don’t want to lose my finger,” he moaned. “If I lose my finger, it means there’s no justice. It means that God has turned his back on me.”

“I ain’t got but nine and a half fingers myself, and it don’t bother me hardly at all. Once you lose yours, we’ll be just like twins. Bonafide members of the Nine Finger Club, brothers till the day we drop—just like the master always said.”

I did what I could to reassure him, but once the operation began, I was shunted aside and forgotten. I stood in the doorway with my hands over my face, peeking through the cracks every now and then as the master and Mother Sioux did their work. There was no ether or anaesthetic, and Aesop howled and howled, belting out a horrific, bloodcurdling noise that never slackened from start to finish. Sorry as I felt for him, those howls nearly undid me. They were inhuman, and the terror they expressed was so deep and so prolonged, it was all I could do not to begin screaming myself. Master Yehudi went about his business with the calm of a trained doctor, but the howls got to Mother Sioux just as badly as they got to me. That was the last thing I was expecting from her. I’d always thought that Indians hid their feelings, that they were braver and more stoical than white folks, but the truth was that Mother S. was unhinged, and as the blood continued to spurt and Aesop’s pain continued to mount, she gasped and whimpered as if the knife was tearing
into her own flesh. Master Yehudi told her to get a grip on herself. She apologized, but fifteen seconds later she started sobbing again. She was a pitiful nurse, and after a while her tearful interruptions so distracted the master that he had to send her out of the room. “We need a fresh bucket of boiling water,” he said. “Snap to it, woman. On the double.” It was just an excuse to get rid of her, and as she rushed past me into the hall, she buried her face in her hands and wept on blindly to the top of the stairs. I had a clear view of everything that happened after that: the way her foot snagged on the first step, the way her knee buckled as she tried to right her balance, and then the headlong fall down the stairs—the thumping, tumbling career of her huge bulk as it crashed to the bottom. She landed with a thud that shook the entire house. An instant later she let out a shriek, then grabbed hold of her left leg and started writhing around on the floor. “You dumb old bitch,” she said to herself. “You dumb old floozy bitch, now look what you done. You fell down the stairs and broke your goddamn leg.”

For the next couple of weeks, the house was as gloomy as a hospital. There were two invalids to be taken care of, and the master and I spent our days rushing up and down the stairs, serving them their meals, emptying their potties, and doing everything short of wiping their bedridden asses. Aesop was in a funk of self-pity and dejection, Mother Sioux rained down curses on herself from morning to night, and what with the animals to be looked after in the barn and the rooms to be cleaned and the beds to be made and the dishes to be washed and the stove to be fed, there wasn’t so much as a minute left over for the master and me to do our work. Christmas was approaching, the time when I was supposed to be off the ground, and I was still as subject to the laws of gravity as I’d ever been. It was my darkest moment in over a year. I’d been turned into a regular
citizen who did his chores and knew how to read and write, and if it went on any longer, I’d probably wind up taking elocution lessons and joining the Boy Scouts.

One morning, I woke up a little earlier than usual. I checked in on Aesop and Mother Sioux, saw that they were both still asleep, and tiptoed down the stairs, intending to surprise the master with my predawn levee. Ordinarily, he would have been down in the kitchen at that hour, cooking breakfast and preparing to start the day. But there were no smells of coffee wafting up from the stove, no sounds of bacon crackling in the pan, and sure enough, when I entered the room it turned out to be empty. He’s in the barn, I told myself, gathering eggs or milking one of the cows, but then I realized that the stove had not been lit. Starting the fire was the first order of business on winter mornings, and the temperature downstairs was frigid, cold enough for me to send forth a burst of vapor every time I exhaled. Well, I continued to myself, maybe the old guy is fagged out and wanted to catch up on his beauty sleep. That would certainly put a new twist on things, wouldn’t it? For me to be the one to rouse him from bed instead of vice versa. So I went back upstairs and knocked on his bedroom door, and when there was no response after several tries, I opened the door and gingerly stepped across the threshold. Master Yehudi was nowhere to be found. Not only was he not in his bed, but the bed itself was neatly made and bore no signs of having been slept in that night. He’s run out on us, I said to myself. He’s upped and skedaddled, and that’s the last we’ll ever see of him.

For the next hour, my mind was a free-for-all of desperate thoughts. I spun from sorrow to anger, from belligerence to laughter, from snarling grief to vile self-mockery. The universe had gone up in smoke, and I was left to dwell among the ashes, alone forever among the smoldering ruins of betrayal.

Mother Sioux and Aesop slept on in their beds, oblivious to my rantings and my tears. Somehow or other (I can’t remember how I got there), I was down in the kitchen again, lying on my stomach with my face pressed against the floor, rubbing my nose into the filthy wooden planks. There were no more tears to be gotten out of me—only a dry, choked heaving, an aftermath of hiccups and scorched, airless breaths. Presently I grew still, almost tranquil, and bit by bit a sense of calm spread through me, radiating out among my muscles and oozing toward the tips of my fingers and toes. There were no more thoughts in my head, no more feelings in my heart. I was weightless inside my own body, floating on a placid wave of nothingness, utterly detached and indifferent to the world around me. And that’s when I did it for the first time—without warning, without the least notion that it was about to happen. Very slowly, I felt my body rise off the floor. The movement was so natural, so exquisite in its gentleness, it wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I understood my limbs were touching only air. I was not far off the ground—no more than an inch or two—but I hung there without effort, suspended like the moon in the night sky, motionless and aloft, conscious only of the air fluttering in and out of my lungs. I can’t say how long I hovered like that, but at a certain moment, with the same slowness and gentleness as before, I eased back to the ground. Everything had been drained out of me by then, and my eyes were already shut. Without so much as a single thought about what had just taken place, I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, sinking like a stone to the bottom of the world.

I woke to the sound of voices, the shuffling of shoes against the bare wood floor. When I opened my eyes, I found myself looking directly into the blackness of Master Yehudi’s left trouser leg. “Greetings, kid,” he said, nudging me with his foot. “Forty
winks on the cold kitchen floor. Not the best place for a nap if you want to stay healthy.”

I tried to sit up, but my body felt so dull and turgid, it took all my strength just to lift myself onto one elbow. My head was a trembling mass of cobwebs, and no matter how hard I rubbed and blinked my eyes, I couldn’t get them to focus properly.

“What’s the trouble, Walt?” the master continued. “You haven’t been walking in your sleep, have you?”

“No, sir. Nothing like that.”

“Then why so glum? You look like you’ve been to a funeral.”

An immense sadness swept through me when he said that, and I suddenly felt myself on the verge of tears. “Oh, master,” I said, grabbing hold of his leg with both arms and pressing my cheek against his shin. “Oh, master, I thought you’d left me. I thought you’d left me, and were never coming back.”

The moment those words left my lips, I understood that I was wrong. It wasn’t the master who had caused this feeling of vulnerability and despair, it was the thing I’d done just prior to falling asleep. It all came back in a vivid, nauseating rush: the moments I’d spent off the ground, the certainty that I had done what most certainly I could not have done. Rather than fill me with ecstasy or gladness, this breakthrough overpowered me with dread. I didn’t know myself anymore. I was inhabited by something that wasn’t me, and that thing was so terrible, so alien in its newness, I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. I let myself cry instead. I let the tears come pouring out of me, and once I started, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to stop.

“Dear boy,” the master said, “my dear, sweet boy.” He lowered himself to the ground and gathered me in his arms, patting my back and hugging me close to him as I went on weeping. Then, after a pause, I heard him speak again—but he was no
longer addressing his words to me. For the first time since regaining consciousness, I understood that another person was in the room.

“He’s the bravest lad who ever was,” the master said. “He’s worked so hard, he’s worn himself out. A body can bear just so much, and I’m afraid the poor little fellow’s all done in.”

That was when I finally looked up. I lifted my head off Master Yehudi’s lap, cast my eyes about for a moment, and there was Mrs. Witherspoon, standing in the light of the doorway. She was wearing a crimson overcoat and a black fur hat, I remember, and her cheeks were still flush from the winter cold. The instant our eyes met, she broke into a smile.

“Hello, Walt,” she said.

“And hello to you, ma’am,” I said, sniffing back the last of my tears.

“Meet your fairy godmother,” the master said. “Mrs. Witherspoon has come to rescue us, and she’ll be staying in the house for a little while. Until things get back to normal.”

“You’re the lady from Wichita, ain’t you?” I said, realizing why her face looked so familiar to me.

“That’s right,” she said. “And you’re the little boy who lost his way in the storm.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said, extricating myself from the master’s arms and finally standing up. “I can’t say I remember much about it.”

“No,” she said, “you probably don’t. But I do.”

“Not only is Mrs. Witherspoon a friend of the family,” the master said, “she’s our number-one champion and business partner. Just so you know the score, Walt. I want you to bear that in mind while she’s here with us. The food that feeds you, the clothes that clothe you, the fire that warms you—all that comes
courtesy of Mrs. Witherspoon, and it would be a sad day if you ever forgot it.”