Ozark Trilogy 3: And Then There'll Be Fireworks (9 page)

“Please do come in,” said Lewis Motley readily enough. “I’m ... well, no, I can’t say I’m delighted to see you. We’ll no doubt end by regretting that you dropped by, I’m aware of that. But I am most assuredly
interested
to see you ...Do come in, and sit down.”

Troublesome’s eyes flicked over the room, and she clucked her tongue in amazement.

“What is it?”

“All this furniture.” She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. “Brightwater’s got a rocker for the Grannys, and beds all around, and that’s about it. Everything else has gone for firewood long ago.”

“I was just thinking how
bare
it was. And how much I liked it bare.”

“A matter of your point of view, I expect,” said Troublesome. “It looks mighty grand to this pair of eyes.”

“You’re on Kintucky,” he reminded her. “How, I don’t know—we’ll come back to that. But on Kintucky we could burn fires day and night for a hundred years and we’d still only have cut down the undergrowth. If we could eat trees, we’d be well fed here.”

Troublesome reached for the offered chair, turned it backwards so she could lean her arms and chin on its back, and stared at him until he began to feel uncomfortable. And then it dawned on him why he felt that way, and he hollered till he got a servingmaid’s attention and told her to bring up some food and drink.

“Not that it’ll be much,” he warned her. “Bread, I expect. And coffee, if we’re lucky and Gilead’s set some by for the odd special occasion.”

“Considering it’s been near on two days since I’ve had anything but water ... and you do have glorious water on Kintucky, I meant to comment on that ... I’m not likely to complain. And the Mule I left in your stable was not the least bit ungrateful for what he was getting there.”

“The Mule,” mused Lewis Motley Wommack. “You came in by Mule, did you? Now, Troublesome, I don’t mean to seem to doubt your word, but— “

“Just from the coast,” she sighed. “One leg after another, solid on the ground. The rest of the trip was in a pathetic beerkeg that’s got the nerve to call itself a ship, and for which the only good word I’ve got to offer is that it didn’t sink on the way over here. No doubt it’ll make up for that oversight on the trip back, always providing it’ll still even
be
there when the Mule and I trek back down to the shore. No, Lewis Motley Wommack, I am not claiming I can get a Mule to fly; I had trouble enough getting it to move atall.”

“Well, it might have been that you could. Considering your reputation.”

Troublesome let that pass, and he went on.

“
Will
you tell me why you’re here and how you got here?” he insisted; he was rapidly running out of patience. “It’s about as likely as a goat playing a dulcimer, you know. I think I’m entitled to an explanation.”

“Passel of Grannys sent me,” said Troublesome. “They near killed themselves, poor old things, getting up Mount Troublesome to talk me into it and then back down again. And they used up everything they had left in this world to bribe the captain of that purely pathetic boat and his patheticker crew, and putting together supplies enough for this carry-on. The supplies they meant me to have while I rode the Mule here, those
I
left for bribe, along with a trinket or two, to keep my trusty friends from heading back to Brightwater and stranding me here. And the Holy One defend them if they do strand me ... if I have to
swim
back, I’ll find them, every last one of them, and they’ll rue the day they ever did any such a misbegotten trashy thing.”

“Oh, they’ll be there,” said Lewis Motley.

“You think so?”

“You put it very well,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “I doubt very much they’d care to have your lifelong vengeance on their coattails, Troublesome of Brightwater.”

“Let us hope you are right,” said Troublesome grimly. “For their sakes, and everybody else’s.”

“How does everybody else figure into it?” he asked, and she passed along the Grannys’ tale to him, while he sat there shaking his head. For a while it was his wonderment at the Grannys going to all this trouble and expense, and Troublesome going along with it, for no more motivation than some old tea leaves and a gold ring on a thread in a stray wind. And then when it began to be clear to him that it had to do with Responsible of Brightwater, it was his dis-ease at the position he was being put in. True, this was Responsible’s infamous sister; and true, if there was anything bodacious to do, she’d either done it or invented it. But there was such a thing as tattling, and there were certain kinds of tattling that were even more despicable than other kinds, and he felt like a skinnywiggler on a hot rock before she got to the end of it.

“Hmmmmm,” he said, by way of response, and fooled around with his beard some. And then “hmmmm” again.

Troublesome gave him a measuring glance, and cleared her throat. “If it’s your gallantry as is causing you pain, Lewis Motley, you can set that aside. The Grannys already told me Responsible lost her maidenhead during the Jubilee, and seeing as how you were there at the time and footloose, and seeing as how you are the most spectacular example of manflesh
I
ever laid eyes on, I do believe I can add up two and two and come out with four. And if I already know you were bedding my sister, we can perhaps just acknowledge that and move on to something more significant.”

Lewis Motley cleared
his
throat, and blessed the fates that had put this female on Brightwater and him clear across an ocean away from her.

“Well?” she asked him. “Does that simplify matters for you some?”

“It does,” he began, and was much gratified that the servingmaid came in just then with the bread and the coffee and gave him a chance to collect himself.

“Yes,” he said again, when he’d got his breath back. He took a drink of the coffee and made a face; it wasn’t much more than troubled water, weak the way they made it to stretch the last of the beans, and grain added in with a liberal hand. “That was abrupt, but it did ease my mind. I wouldn’t have felt justified in telling you that, but if you know it already we’ve cleared the air. Now what
exactly
is the question the Grannys think I know the answer to? Because I warn you, Troublesome of Brightwater—I doubt it.”

Over her shoulder he saw the flash of a long robe in the hall, through the door the servingmaid had left decently open instead of shut tight as she’d been shocked to find it, and he called out for his sister to join them. He knew the look of that robe, though he wasn’t aware it was exactly the color of his eyes, by a frayed place at the back of the hem that came from too many hours spent on Muleback. It would be useful to have his sister here as a buffer between himself and Troublesome, now the indelicate part of the conversation was past; furthermore, he enjoyed showing her off.

“Jewel!” he called to her. “We’ve got company—come see!”

“Company?” She stepped in the door, one hand on the sill, the long sweep of her sleeve falling almost to the floor. “Are you wasting my time with foolishness again, Lewis Motley?”

Troublesome gasped, and clapped both hands to her mouth, and through her fingers she said, “Jewel of Wommack, I declare I never in all this world would of known you!”

The grave eyes of a woman grown looked back at her, that had been a child’s eyes so short a time ago, calm, and possessed of a natural authority. The copper hair was hidden away completely under the wimple, and most of the face as well, but Jewel was all the more beautiful for the mystery the Teacher’s habit lent her. For the first time she could remember, Troublesome of Brightwater was uncomfortably aware that she herself could do with a change of clothes and a tidy-up.

“Troublesome of Brightwater,” said the Teacher, the first of all the Teachers. “I never thought to see you again, and now here you are ... What brings you here?”

“She’s just about to set me a question,” said her brother. “Sent here by the Grannys of Marktwain assembled, on a mountaintop no less, for that precise purpose. You sit down with us, sister mine, and have a cup of this terrible coffee, and if I can’t answer that question perhaps you can help me a tad.

“It has to do with Responsible of Brightwater,” he added, as if it were an afterthought of an afterthought, and he watched Jewel’s lashes drop to shield her eyes as she took the third chair and poured her coffee.

“The Grannys know full well,” said Troublesome, seeing no reason to waste time, “that the magic they were able to do was done on mighty puny power. But they were sure enough they were right to put this expedition of one together, and sure enough to convince me to try it. Jewel of Wommack, they are of the opinion that your brother knows how it came about that Responsible of Brightwater has been in a sleep like unto death these past two years. And if he knows that, they believe, it just might could be he’ll also know how she can be waked up.”

She looked at the man, in a silence so thick she could have stirred it with her coffee spoon, and then at his sister, and her heart sank.

“Ah, Dozens!” she said despairingly. “Dozens! You didn’t even
know
, did you? I can tell, just looking at you! Without the comsets, and Kintucky out here on the edge of nowhere, and no travelers anymore ... I suppose nobody on Kintucky knows. Ah, the waste of all this! Bloody Bleeding
Dozens!
”

Lewis Motley was so taken aback he couldn’t have spoken a word, or moved, but Jewel of Wommack reached over and took the other woman’s hand in both of hers.

“Tell us,” she said, in the voice that every Teacher was trained to use, or sent to do research and keep out of the classrooms if she couldn’t. It was a voice that could not be disobeyed because it left no possible space for disobedience.

“My sister,” said Troublesome, and because the exhaustion in her face frightened both the Wommacks, Lewis Motley shouted again for a servingmaid and demanded the last of their whiskey, “just into summertime, after the Jubilee, fell into a kind of sleep. Or a coma ... To look at her, you would think she was dead, but she has no sickness, and the name Veritas Truebreed Motley puts to it is
pseudocoma
. Just a sleep that does not end and cannot, so far as we’ve been able to tell, be ended. And since the day it began, everything has gone from bad to worse on Marktwain and Oklahomah; we hear there is
war
on Arkansaw. What may be going on in the rest of the world nobody knows ... or even if there is a rest of the world any longer. Since the trouble started with whatever happened to my sister, the Grannys are convinced that there’s a connection there—that if we could wake Responsible there would be hope for Ozark again. And they were certain—certain sure! —that Lewis Motley Wommack had the key to it ... Law, but they’re going to be in a state over this, and I don’t blame them, I don’t blame them one least bit!”

“Just a minute, Troublesome,” said Jewel.

“If Lewis Motley Wommack didn’t even know about this,” insisted Troublesome, “then the Grannys have made a mistake to end all mistakes, and a minute—nor a dozen minutes—won’t change that.”

The servingmaid came running with the whiskey, and Jewel poured it out with a level hand and passed Troublesome of Brightwater the glass.

“You drink that,” she said calmly. “And then, let’s us
ask
him. Before we decide to speak of mistakes and waste and the end of the world, let’s just ask him. Might could be he knows more man you think he knows, provided the questions are put to him properly.”

Lewis Motley had his whole face buried in his hands, and they could see the muscles of his arms straining under the cloth of his sleeves.

“Never mind throwing chairs, dear brother,” warned Jewel emphatically, keeping a wary eye on him. “This is not the time nor the place.”

“
Curse them!
”

The bellow shook the lamp hanging above their heads, and although neither Troublesome nor Jewel jumped, they both had to grip their chairs not to.

“Curse them all, the
idiots!
I never had any such thing in mind—they must all have been crazy! Oh, it I could only get my hands on them, it I could just— “

Troublesome looked at Jewel of Wommack. “He knows something,” she said, over the din. “He knows something after all.”

“He knows everything, from the sound of his conniption fit,” said Jewel coldly. “Now it’s just a matter of getting it out of him ... once he’s worn himself out. Talk of
women
having hysterics!”

“I’ve been a damned fool,” said her brother.

“Not for the first time, nor yet the hundred and first.”

“But this time is exceptional.”

“Then the sooner it’s admitted to, the sooner well know if it can be mended. I suggest you tell us what you’ve gone and done, Lewis Motley.”

“Can I have some of that whiskey?”

“You can
not
. That’s for medicine, and precious little we have left of it! There’s nothing wrong with you but temper, and if you haven’t died of temper before this you won’t die of it today. Just speak up.”

Lewis Motley sighed a long sigh, and began. “Your sister,” he said to Troublesome, “was causing me a good deal of ...misery.”

Troublesome was dumbfounded.

“Misery? In what way, causing you misery? She was clear back on Marktwain, you were all the way over here on Kintucky.”

“I hesitate to say it of her.”

“Say it!” commanded Troublesome.

“Your sister would not grant me privacy of mind,” he said then, and the words fell, quaint and formal, in the stillness of the room.