Psyche (18 page)

She never officially sat in on a game. The other men would have been as shocked as Butch himself at the idea of playing with anything that even remotely resembled a woman. In their lexicon, poker was a man's game, and it was a poor imitation of a man who thought otherwise. Nevertheless Psyche, in time, not only played with them regularly, but beat them consistently. It came about so naturally and gradually that Psyche herself was the only one consciously aware of what was happening, and she was very careful to keep it from becoming obvious, for she now looked forward to Saturday night, perhaps even more than Butch did.

The three miners with whom Butch consorted in this manner always came punctually at seven o'clock. Although they travelled different routes across the slag to reach their destination, they rarely arrived more than a minute or two apart from one another. Unwashed dishes were immediately removed from one end of the table, and the clutter of the day—or possibly several days —from the other end. Butch then fetched the cards from a drawer in the golden-oak dresser, while Psyche took four heavy glass tumblers and a bottle of whiskey from the shelf above the sink. Two cracked saucers were produced as ashtrays, and with no further preparation, and no time wasted on idle social interchanges, the game would begin.

Bert, Ed, and Norman were none of them mental giants, and Butch, during the earlier part of an evening, was able, by virtue of painful concentration, to pit his limited wits against them with
some success. As time wore on, however, and the level of the whiskey dropped lower and lower in the bottle, the effort would become too much for him, and his winnings would begin to trickle away, at first slowly, and then with alarming rapidity.

Decidedly fuddled, he would stare at his cards and mutter to himself while trying to make up his mind what to do.

Bert, a small gnome of a man with quick brown eyes in a brown nut-cracker face, was the brightest of the quartet, and always ready to prick the big man into rash action. “Come on, come on, Butch. You scairt to raise again?”

At this point a quiet voice would say, “Butch ain't scairt. Why would he be with cards like he's got?” And a slim hand would push a terrifyingly large bet into the centre of the table. “Any of you guys wanna see?”

Three faces would look first at Butch, who would fail to betray a pair of nines because he no longer knew what was going on, and then at Psyche, whose face would reflect a calm certainty of victory they could not believe induced by anything less than four of a kind.

When Butch held a really good hand, she never pushed the betting so far that it was not called and shown. There had to be occasional visible proof of his apparently extraordinary luck.

Refilling their glasses for them, rolling home-made cigarettes for Butch and herself, she played her rôle of audience as expertly as she played Butch's cards for him. She never actually picked up and sorted a hand, and she did not deal for him, but, speaking always through him, she did all his thinking.

Although she knew nothing about psychology or mathematics as sciences, she became more and more fascinated by the interlocking patterns of personalities and arithmetical probabilities which she seemed able to comprehend and manipulate with such ease. Exhilarated, wide awake, her mind working with a beautiful, satisfying precision, she would have liked to play every night and all night.

Mag, who went to bed early on Saturdays, often protested against the hours they kept. “You didn't ought to let the kid stay
up so late,” she would scold Butch. “It ain't good for a kid to be up in the night, smokin' and losin' sleep.”

“It don't hurt her none,” Butch would reply, while jingling the amazing amount of coinage he had found in his pants pocket on getting up in the morning.

This was difficult to contradict, because Psyche was as fresh on a Sunday morning as she was on any other morning during the week—in part because she was naturally resilient, and in part because she never drank with the men. They had given her a drink of Scotch one night, and she had immediately been very sick. Like a young coyote, who has once tasted poison and, protected by nature, survived in a similar fashion, she never touched whiskey again.

Although Mag did not know it, Psyche, in the summertime, lost as much sleep through the week as she did on Saturdays.

On warm summer nights, drawn by a restlessness she made no attempt to analyze, she often got up and slipped quietly out of the shack, to wander around the perimeter of the small valley, or climb the slag to watch a rising moon cut a luminous orange arc out of a silver-grey sky. On a moonlit night it was a land bewitched, removed from all reality, its silence so absolute it became a thing in itself, palpable, peaceful as death. Inarticulately one with the universe, feeling in herself the sum of everything that ever had been, or ever would be, she would linger sometimes until the moon set. For on such a night the “outside” drew very close, and the time when she would go out into it seemed close at hand.

Psyche's one great loss, in leaving school, was the loss of ready access to fresh reading matter. Although Butch and Mag could both read after a fashion, it was hard going at the best of times, so neither newspapers nor magazines found their way to the shack with any degree of frequency. The only book in evidence being
Fanny Farmer's Boston Cook Book
. Psyche read that.

After the second time through it, she told Mag, “This is kinda dull, when you just read it like. You want I should make some of these here cakes an' things?”

“It ain't as easy as it looks.”

“I can try. If it don't work out—well, it don't work out.”

It did work out. Mag might be too lazy to cook, but eating, if somebody else prepared the food, was one of her favourite pastimes, and she was ready enough to impart her skill to a willing neophyte.

If Psyche had had any natural tendency toward excess weight, she would have given evidence of it in the first months of this new activity. With energy to burn, and a tireless curiosity, she kept the big stove roaring from morning until night, producing cakes, muffins, soufflés, pies, and meat dishes which she and Mag sampled as fast as they came out of the oven. As neat in practical matters as she was orderly in mind, she in time rearranged and cleaned up the untidy shelves surrounding stove and sink. From there it was a short step to taking over the entire household, a development which did not particularly please Mag.

“For the luvva Mike, kid,” she complained, her lethargic peace disturbed by shifted furniture and clouds of dust, “you done it all yestidday. What's the matter with you that you gotta always be rushin' around?”

“I ain't tired, an' there ain't nothin' else to do.”

“Why don't you take a walk?”

“I've a'ready did that.”

“Couldn't you bake somethin'?”

Having by this time mastered that trade, Psyche was no longer interested in producing beyond capacity. “I've fixed enough for three days.”

“You could read. Where's that magazine I seen you with?”

“It's wore out. Anyway, it wasn't very interestin'.”

Mag, knowing that in a matter of minutes she was going to be ordered to remove herself from the couch, was getting desperate. “If I was to find you somethin' new to read, would you quit messin' around an' leave good enough alone?”

Broom in hand, Psyche paused. “Sure, but you ain't got nothin', have you?”

“I dunno for sure, but I useta have a old Bible.”

A shadow passed over Psyche's expressive face. Without being
told, she knew that the only possible place where she might find the Bible was in the trunk to which she had returned skates she had hoped never to see again. “I'll go look for it,” she said abruptly.

At first glance, the torn segment that was apparently all that remained of Mag's Bible did not seem sufficient reward for the reopening of an old wound and the necessity to handle blades still burnished after four years.

She took it in to Mag. “Is this it?”

“Yeah, that's it.”

Psyche eyed it with disfavour. “It don't look like much. How did it get tore?”

“I dunno. Perhaps a unbeliever done it.”

“It don't look very fascinatin'.”

Mag looked at the discarded broom, and said firmly. “It don't do for a kid to grow up without no Bible readin'. I don't know why I ain't thought of it afore, but it ain't never too late. You can start right now, kid.”

Psyche opened the partial Bible at the first page. When she was small Mag had taught her simple bedtime prayers, and had created for her a God so unquestionable that when He was referred to it was as if He had just stepped out of the room and might be back at any moment; but she had never before held a Bible in her hands.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

She read the first verse twice, and then, without taking her eyes from the page, slowly sat down on the floor and went on reading. A great deal of what she read she understood only in part, even after she had fetched and consulted her dictionary, but much of it was crystal clear.

“And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.”

There was an elemental simplicity in this easily comprehended in the empty world of slag.

Twilight had crept into the room when Psyche looked up, and said, “Mag, is this all supposed to be true what I read in here?”

Mag was more than half asleep. She fumbled for the knitting
which had fallen from her slack hands, and yawned. “Does it matter?”

“No,” Psyche replied, after some thought, “I guess it don't. It's the idea what counts.”

Twilight had crept into the long living-room when Sharon closed her book. She had read it twice, and she would read it again
.

Lighting a cigarette, she knew that she was more at peace with herself than she had been for a long time. While still following her obsession, she had now found something for her mind to bite on, could feel that she was playing an active part in re-discovering her child—if not literally, at least metaphorically
.

She unlocked the single, shallow drawer of a small inlaid desk, and placed a sheet of writing paper on top of a sheaf of similar sheets. Then, instead of immediately closing the drawer, she read over the notes she had just made in handwriting clear and legible even in the failing light
.

‘—adaptation to environment always qualified by hereditary factors.—If environment is static, the intelligent individual becomes restless: requires change and activity.—Imaginative individual will tend to place a higher value on both actual and moral law than the unimaginative——'

For more than six months, Sharon had been reading everything and anything she could find which concerned itself with instinct, memory, and heredity, in the hope that she could put together behaviour patterns which could reasonably be those of her long-lost daughter. That she could be entirely wrong in any conclusions she might draw, she knew quite well. But from what she had read so far, there did seem to be definite evidence in favour of what she so desperately wanted to believe—that her child could have shaped her environment to her own inherent needs, rather than allowing her environment to be the principal factor in determining the kind of person she would be
.

I will have to read them all again
, Sharon thought,
all the books
I have read so far. I will have to search through them once more, without prejudice if possible, before I go any further. And I must not
, must not confuse hope with
truth
.

I can hope that—wherever she is—she will always be all right
.

I can know—perhaps
—that her chances are
better than even. No more than that
.

1

H
E
came to the mines in the spring in search of material that was ‘stark'; a lean young man, prematurely grey, with brilliant hazel eyes, a hard ambition, and a talent not far removed from genius.

The product of a wealthy and consciously sophisticated background, he made no personal concessions to a bohemian profession. Affectations such as silk shirts, over-long hair, and flowing black ties, disgusted him. Immorality for immorality's sake he considered puerile. And to either live or work in a garret, when there was no necessity to do so, would have seemed to him an open confession of imbecility. Nevertheless, he was temperamentally a true bohemian in that he was a law unto himself. Possessed of great charm and few scruples, he acted always in his own best interests, the drive and imagination which were to make him a really great painter unallied with any sympathy for the needs of others. A supreme egotist, he believed in neither god nor devil; had he worshipped anything it would have been his own talent.

His plan to paint in the mining country was one of long standing, and he had so arranged his affairs that he was free from commitments of any kind for five months; free to concentrate wholly on the work which was his mainspring, the
raison d'être
to which everything else in his life was subsidiary.

Installing himself in the one hotel the town boasted, making no secret of his distaste for it, he proceeded at once to devote all his
time and attention to the world of slag, which, once discovered, stirred him profoundly. The barren, inhospitable grey mounds and purple-shadowed gullies excited his imagination as no other landscape had ever done before. For two days he roamed across a terrain as primitive as any released by receding Jurassic seas, absorbing its mood, searching a composition that would require no artificial rearrangement on paper. Finding at last exactly what he wanted, he set up easel and camp stool at the base of a triangular valley half a mile from the shack.

It was here that Psyche chanced across him.