The Jar Read online

  «Hush up, now. It's been dead a long, long time. Maybe since before you was born!»

  «He made a sign!» screamed Mrs. Tridden. «That's my Foley! My baby you got there! Three-year-old he was! My baby lost and gone in the swamp!»

  The sobbing broke from her.

  «Now, Mrs. Tridden. There now. Set yourself down, stop shakin'. Ain't no more your child'n mine. There, there.»

  One of the womenfolk held her and faded out the sobbing into jerked breathing and a fluttering of her lips in butterfly quickness as the breath stroked over them, afraid.

  When all was quiet again, Granny Carnation, with a withered pink flower in her shoulder-length gray hair, sucked the pipe in her trap mouth and talked around it, shaking her head to make the hair dance in the light:

  «All this talkin' and shovin' words. Like as not we'll never find out, never know what it is. Like as not if we found out we wouldn't _want_ to know. It's like magic tricks magicians do at shows. Once you find the fake, ain't no more fun'n the innards of a jackbob. We come collectin' around here every ten nights or so, talkin', social-like, with somethin', always somethin', to talk about. Stands to reason if we spied out what the damn thing is there'd be nothin' to chew about, so there!»

  «Well, damn it to hell!» rumbled a bull voice. «I don't think it's nothin'!»

  Tom Carmody.

  Tom Carmody standing, as always, in shadow. Out on the porch, just his eyes staring in, his lips laughing at you dimly, mocking. His laughter got inside Charlie like a hornet sting. Thedy had put him up to it. Thedy was trying to kill Charlie's new life, she was!

  «Nothin',» repeated Carmody, harshly, «in that jar but a hunch of old jellyfish from Sea Cove, a rottin' and stinkin' fit to whelp!»

  «You mightn't be jealous, Cousin Carmody?» asked Charlie, slow.

  «Haw!» snorted Carmody. «I just come aroun' ta watch you dumb fools jaw about nuthin'. You notice I never set foot inside or took part. I'm goin' home right now. Anybody wanna come along with me?»

  He got no offer of company. He laughed again, as if this were a bigger joke, how so many people could be so far gone, and Thedy was raking her palms with her fingernails away back in a corner of the room. Charlie saw her mouth twitch and was cold and could not speak.

  Carmody, still laughing, rapped off the porch with his highheeled boots and the sound of crickets took him away.

  Granny Carnation gummed her pipe. «Like I was sayin' before the storm: that thing on the shelf, why couldn't it be sort of-all things? Lots of things. All kinds of life-death-I don't know. Mix rain and sun and muck and jelly, all that together. Grass and snakes and children and mist and all the nights and days in the dead canebrake. Why's it have to be _one_ thing? Maybe it's _lots_.»

  And the talking ran soft for another hour, and Thedy slipped away into the night on the track of Tom Carmody, and Charlie began to sweat. They were up to something, those two. They were planning something. Charlie sweated warm all the rest of the evening…

  The meeting broke up late, and Charlie bedded down with mixed emotions. The meeting had gone off well, but what about Thedy and Tom?

  Very late, with certain star coveys shuttled down the sky marking the time as after midnight, Charlie heard the slushing of the tall grass parted by her penduluming hips. Her heels tacked soft across the porch, into the house, into the bedroom.

  She lay soundlessly in bed, cat eyes staring at him. He couldn't see them, but he could feel them staring.

  «Charlie?»

  He waited.

  Then he said, «I'm awake.»

  Then she waited.

  «Charlie?»

  «What?»

  «Bet you don't know where I been; bet you don't know where I been.» It was a faint, derisive singsong in the night.

  He waited.

  She waited again. She couldn't bear waiting long, though, and continued:

  «I been to the carnival over in Cape City. Tom Carmody drove me. We―we talked to the carny-boss, Charlie, we did, we did, we _sure_ did!» And she sort of giggled to herself, secretly.

  Charlie was ice-cold. He stirred upright on an elbow.

  She said, «We found out what it is in your jar, Charlie―» insinuatingly.

  Charlie flumped over, hands to ears. «I don't wanna hear!»

  «Oh, but you gotta hear, Charlie. It's a good joke. Oh, it's rare, Charlie,» she hissed.

  «Go away,» he said.

  «Unh-unh! No, no, sir, Charlie. Why, no, Charlie-Honey. Not until I tell!»

  «Git!» he said.

  «Let me tell! We talked to that carny-boss, and he―he liked to die laughin'. He said he sold that jar and what was in it to some, some-hick-for twelve bucks. And it ain't worth more'n two bucks at most!»

  Laughter bloomed in the dark, right out of her mouth, an awful kind of laughter.

  She finished it, quick:

  «It's just junk, Charlie! Rubber, papier-maché, silk, cotton, boric-acid! That's all! Got a metal frame inside! That's all it is, Charlie. That's all!» she shrilled.

  «No, no!»

  He sat up swiftly, ripping sheets apart in big fingers, roaring.

  «I don't wanna hear! Don't wanna hear!» he bellowed over and over.

  She said, «Wait'll everyone hears how fake it is! Won't they laugh! Won't they flap their lungs!»

  He caught her wrists. «You ain't gonna tell them?»

  «Wouldn't wan me known as a liar, would you, Charlie?»

  He flung her off and away.

  «Whyncha leave me alone? You dirty! Dirty jealous mean of ever'thing I do. I took shine off your nose when I brung the jar home. You didn' sleep right 'til you ruined things!»

  She laughed. «Then I won't tell anybody,» she said.

  He stared at her. «You spoiled _my_ fun. That's all that counted. It don't matter if you tell the rest. _I_ know. And I'll never have no more fun. You and that Tom Carmody. I wish I could stop him laughin'. He's been laughin' for years at me! Well, you just go tell the rest, the other people, now-might as well have your fun―!»

  He strode angrily, grabbed the jar so it sloshed, and would have flung it on the floor, but he stopped trembling, and let it down softly on the spindly table. He leaned over it, sobbing. If he lost this, the world was gone. And he was losing Thedy, too. Every month that passed she danced further away, sneering at him, funning him. For too many years her hips had been the pendulum by which he reckoned the time of his living. But other men, Tom Carmody, for one, were reckoning time from the same source.

  Thedy stood waiting for him to smash the jar. Instead, he petted and stroked and gradually quieted himself over it. He thought of the long, good evenings in the past month, those rich evenings of friends and talk, moving about the room. That, at least, was good, if nothing else.

  He turned slowly to Thedy. She was lost forever to him.

  «Thedy, you didn't go to the carnival.»

  «Yes, I did.»

  «You're lyin',» he said, quietly.

  «No, I'm not!»

  «This―this jar _has_ to have somethin' in it. Somethin' besides the junk you say. Too many people believe there's somethin' in it, Thedy. You can't change that. The carny-boss, if you talked with him, he lied.» Charlie took a deep breath and then said, «Come here, Thedy.»

  «What you want?» she asked, sullenly.

  «Come over here.»

  He took a step toward her. «Come here.»

  «Keep away from me, Charlie.»

  «Just want to show you something, Thedy.» His voice was soft, low, and insistent. «Here, kittie. Here, kittie, kittie, kittie― HERE KITTIE!»

  It was another night, about a week later. Gramps Medknowe and Granny Carnation came, followed by young Juke and Mrs. Tridden and Jahdoo, the colored man. Followed by all the others, young and old, sweet and sour, creaking into chairs, each with his or her thought, hope, fear, and wonder in mind. Each not looking at the shrine, but saying hello softly to Charlie.

  They waited for the ot
hers to gather. From the shine of their eyes one could see that each saw something different in the jar, something of the life and the pale life after life, and the life in death and the death in life, each with his story, his cue, his lines, familiar, old but new.

  Charlie sat alone.

  «Hello, Charlie.» Somebody peered into the empty bedroom. «Your wife gone off again to visit her folks?»

  «Yeah, she run for Tennessee. Be back in a couple weeks. She's the darndest one for runnin'. You know Thedy.»

  «Great one for jumpin' around, that woman.»

  Soft voices talking, getting settled, and then, quite suddenly, walking on the dark porch and shining his eyes in at the people-Tom Carmody.

  Tom Carmody standing outside the door, knees sagging and trembling, arms hanging and shaking at his side, staring into the room. Tom Carmody not daring to enter. Tom Carmody with his mouth open, but not smiling. His lips wet and slack, not smiling. His face pale as chalk, as if it had been sick for a long time.

  Gramps looked up at the jar, cleared his throat and said, «Why, I never noticed so definite before. It's got _blue_ eyes.»

  «It always had blue eyes,» said Granny Carnation.

  «No,» whined Gramps. «No, it didn't. They was brown last time we was here.» He blinked upward. «And another thing-it's got brown hair. Didn't have brown hair _before!_»

  «Yes, yes, it did,» sighed Mrs. Tridden.

  «No, it didn't!»

  «Yes, it did!»

  Tom Carmody, shivering in the summer night, staring in at the jar. Charlie, glancing up at it, rolling a cigarette, casually, all peace and calm, very certain of his life and thoughts. Tom Carmody, alone, seeing things about the jar he never saw before. _Everybody_ seeing what he wanted to see; all thoughts running in a fall of quick rain:

  «My baby. My little baby,» thought Mrs. Tridden.

  «A brain!» thought Gramps.

  The colored man jigged his fingers. «Middibamboo Mama!»

  A fisherman pursed his lips. «Jellyfish!»

  «Kitten! Here kittie, kittie, kittie!» the thoughts drowned clawing in Juke's eyes. «Kitten!»

  «Everything and anything!» shrilled Granny's weazened thought. «The night, the swamp, death, the pale things, the wet things from the sea!»

  Silence. And then Gramps whispered, «I wonder. Wonder if it's a he―or a she―or just a plain old _it?_»

  Charlie glanced up, satisfied, tamping his cigarette, shaping it to his mouth. Then he looked at Tom Carmody, who would never smile again, in the door. «I reckon we'll never know. Yeah, I reckon we won't.» Charlie shook his head slowly and settled down with his guests, looking, looking.

  It was just one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma, forever dreaming and circling, with its peeled dead eyes staring out at you and never seeing you…

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