Amber Sparks - The Unfinished World - And Other Stories

How it works is this: We set up something called a séance in the dining room. It sounds fancy, but it just means a meeting with dead people. We move all the tables out, and Pa and me drag in the big table and the medium’s chair from the shed out back. Pa built that chair special for Katie, with a false back where she keeps the things she needs. I always sit next to Katie so we can both keep a hand free. I’m an important part of the séances. When all the people come in — no more than six because our little cabin just ain’t that big — we get them sat down and douse all the lights. It’s always at night because it has to be real dark, black as molasses hung right over the moon, so nobody can see a thing except for what we want them to. Katie’s got a whole bag of tricks. She can do voices, so sometimes she’ll speak in a high, soft child’s voice. Sometimes she’ll do a woman, but deep-voiced and brassy, a warm, twangy kind of voice. That voice always makes me a little sad, because she sounds like someone it would be awful nice to know — someone kind and with a sound of home about them.

Sometimes I’m supposed to open the false panel and pull out the fishing pole, and attach a letter or a handkerchief or some other white thing to it, and wave it about until the visitors all go into hysterics. Katie has a lever she works with her foot — it hooks into the bottom of the table and she can make the table tip this way and that, and the ladies all scream and gasp at that one. My favorite, though, is the bell trick. Katie puts a little gold bell smack in the middle of the table, a little glass dome over top of it. You can see it all through the séance, not moving, even while you hear the muffled sounds of a bell ringing out. It’s a pretty spooky effect, and of course nobody thinks that maybe Katie’s got a bell hidden away in that panel, wrapped in a piece of muslin so’s to make that muffled sound. It’s a real good trick.

After the séance, the women usually cry and the men shuffle their feet and look at the floor, and everybody calls Katie a miracle and gives her lots of money. She just smiles and smiles, my pretty sister, and all the while you can see her green eyes filling up with cash.

At bedtime Katie used to tell me stories about how we were, us people, a long time ago. How we were all holy once. How the earth was full of plenty, how everybody loved everybody, and how there was no sin. And how nobody went hungry, and how people were kind and gentle, even to the animals. And how a woman went and ruined it all for everybody else.

Ain’t that just like a woman, I would say, and roll my eyes like Pa when he talks about god. And Katie would laugh, and pretend to cuff me, and instead she’d muss my hair and tell me to be off to bed. Ain’t it just, she’d say, and she would smile the kind of smile she uses for the strangers who come to our place and do not ever leave it.

How it works is this: When a guest comes to stay the night, Ma and Katie string up the curtain splitting our little cabin in two. Pa and I bring the tables in, and Ma and Katie make them look real nice with clean white tablecloths and fresh cut wildflowers from the field out back. Ma makes a hearty dinner, with fried potatoes and steak and soda biscuits, and a dried apricot pie for dessert. Katie brings out a glass of good whisky, wearing the kind of dress barmaids at the Blue Saloon would blush at. But Pa says it’s for the greater good. He says everything is for the greater good, and that we shouldn’t feel bad about these men, these fat, lonely men who worship nothing but money and god. I’m too afraid of Pa and his black pinprick eyes to ask him anything. But once I asked Ma what he worshipped and she scowled at me and said I was a fool. So I think maybe he doesn’t worship anything, and I suppose that I don’t either. Or maybe I just worship Pa. Maybe worship and afraid is the same thing.

Anyhow there’s Katie in her tight blue bodice, making sure the men’s eyes are on her all the time, and she’s pouring whisky down their gullets. And there’s me, opening the trapdoor right behind the chair and there’s Pa, coming up swinging his sledgehammer, and there’s Ma with the rope, binding their hands, and there’s Katie with the big butcher knife, slicing the throat clean open just like you’d kill a hog. And I suppose in a way, they are like hogs, and ever since we all fell down from Eden we’re animals, all of us, turning on each other every day. Only some folks like us Benders just do it more direct. Or maybe we’re just better at it.

If we fell so long ago, Katie says, it could hardly be our fault that we went bad. But long ago seems like not that long ago to me. Long ago, Katie and I went to school, and we studied hard, and I thought maybe I would be a carpenter like Pa, or that maybe I would go into the army and learn to fight and use a gun. And long ago the world was small enough, and big enough, and we had friends and Pa did a good trade and even Ma would smile now and then. I’m not too sure when long ago became just now, but it happened too quick for me to notice. I think sometimes maybe it was when Pa hurt his hand, or maybe it was when our little sister Susan died so sudden of the measles, or maybe it was when me and Katie started fainting, and the townsfolk started giving us the sideways eye. In any case, somewhere in between long ago and now, we learned how it works. We got smart.

How it works is this: They come for us at dawn, sun up like an egg, the raw, angry posse with fists around guns and torches and knives. We cleared out in time, because we’re smart, we’re Benders, and we’re always one step ahead. We leave behind the bodies in the orchard and we take the money — some ten thousand by Pa’s reckoning — and we light out in the wagon just before daybreak. Later they brag, that posse, they tell all kinds of tales: they found us and they beat us all to death; they found us and they skinned us all alive; they found us and they shot us all or burned us all or fed us all to starving coyotes. They gave us to the savages who beat time with our bones.

But none of this is true. How it works is this: We’re always going to be one step ahead. We see things most folks can’t. We see the dead, and we see the real ugly souls of the living. And we see better in the dark than you.

This is the troubled edge of the kingdom. It is rumored that dragons sleep near, just off the coast of our dreams. Our days are short, and our troubles grow along with the darkness. We are alone and mad here in our isolation. We live in heaps of blight and scarce, scraggly vegetation, good for nothing but lighting our fires. Our trees are all dead; the branches crack and snap like brittle bones.

It was not always like this. Once this was a green place, full of memory and music. Once it was, perhaps not paradise, but clean, whole, a lively place at least. There was a sense that things were growing, becoming. There were so many rhymes then, so many songs, burbling up from the soil and rivers like laughter. I was training to be a singer myself, learning to sound both the new and also the ancient notes, learning to weave the stories of the kingdom’s heroes into complex melodies. My brothers were learning to be great kings, like the kings of the days long past. There was a sense that the people were renewing themselves, and the people dreamed of a golden age come again to the world. On our days off, my brothers and I hunted and fished and swam and flew our kites. We took pictures of one another, my eldest brother always pulling faces and making our parents laugh. On our favorite days, my youngest brother and I would drive to the great shore and feed the swans, watching them gracefully sail through water like small white ships.