Saffron and Brimstone: Strange Stories (15 page)

I headed back towards Main Street. There was some early morning traffic now, people heading off to do their shopping at Shaw’s and Wal-Mart. On the corner I waited for the light to change, glanced at a storefront and saw a sign taped to the window.

—

ST. BRUNO’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH

ANNUAL RUMMAGE SALE

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 7

8:00
a.m.
–3:00
p.m.

LUNCH SERVED FROM 11:30

—

Penobscot Fields had once been the lupine-strewn meadow behind St. Bruno’s; proximity to the church was one of the reasons Blakie and Katherine had first signed on to the retirement community. I wasn’t a churchgoer, but during the summer I was an avid haunter of yard sales in the Rockland area. You don’t get many of them after Labor Day, but the rummage sale at St. Bruno’s almost makes up for it. I made sure I had my wallet and checkbook in my bag, then hurried to get there before the doors opened.

There was already a line. I recognized a couple of dealers, a few regulars who smiled or nodded at me. St. Bruno’s is a late-nineteenth century neo-gothic building, designed in the late Arts and Crafts style by Halbert Liston: half-timbered beams, local dove-grey fieldstone, slate shingles on the roof. The rummage sale was not in the church, of course, but the adjoining parish house. It had whitewashed walls rather than stone, the same half-timbered upper story, etched with arabesques of dying clematis and sere Virginia creeper. In the door was a diamond-shaped window through which a worried elderly woman peered out every few minutes.

“Eight o’clock!” someone called good-naturedly from the front of
the line. Bobby Day, the greying hippie who owned a used bookstore in Camden. “Time to go!”

From inside, the elderly woman gave one last look at the crowd, then nodded. The door opened; there was a surge forward, laughter and excited murmurs, someone crying “Marge, look out! Here they come!
”
Then I was inside.

Long tables of linens and clothing were at the front of the hall, surrounded by women with hands already full of flannel sheets and crewel-work. I scanned these quickly, then glanced at the furniture. Nice stuff—a Morris chair and old oak settle, some wicker, a flax wheel. Episcopalians always have good rummage sales, better quality than Our Lady of the Harbor or those off-brand churches straggling down towards Warren.

But the Lonely House was already crammed with my own nice stuff, besides which it would be difficult to get anything back to the island. So I made my way to the rear of the hall, where Bobby Day was going through boxes of books on the floor. We exchanged hellos, Bobby smiling but not taking his eyes from the books; in deference to him I continued on to the back corner. An old man wearing a canvas apron with a faded silhouette of St. Bruno on it stood over a table covered with odds and ends.

“This is whatever didn’t belong anywhere else,” he said. He waved a hand at a hodgepodge of beer steins, Tupperware, mismatched silver, shoeboxes overflowing with candles, buttons, mason-jar lids. “Everything’s a dollar.”

I doubted there was anything there worth fifty cents, but I just nodded and moved slowly down the length of the table. A chipped Poppy Trails bowl and a bunch of ugly glass ashtrays. Worn Beanie Babies with the tags clipped off. A game of Twister. As I looked, a heavyset woman barreled up behind me. She had a rigidly unsmiling face and an overflowing canvas bag: I caught glints of brass and pewter, the telltale dull green glaze of a nice Teco pottery vase. A dealer. She avoided my gaze, her hand snaking out to grab something I’d missed, a tarnished silver flask hidden behind a stack of plastic Easter baskets.

I tried not to grimace. I hated dealers and their greedy bottom-feeder mentality. By this afternoon she’d have polished the flask and stuck a seventy-five-dollar price tag on it. I moved quickly to the end of the table. I could see her watching me whenever my hand hovered above something; once I moved on she’d grab whatever I’d been examining, give it a cursory glance before elbowing up beside me once more. After a few minutes I turned away, was just starting to leave when my gaze fell upon a swirl of violet and orange tucked within a Pyrex dish.

“Not sure what that is,” the old man said as I pried it from the bowl. Beside me the dealer watched avidly
.
“Lady’s scarf, I guess.”

It was a lumpy packet a bit larger than my hand, made up of a paisley scarf that had been folded over several times to form a thick square, then wrapped and tightly knotted around a rectangular object. The cloth was frayed, but it felt like fine wool. There was probably enough of it to make a nice pillow cover. Whatever was inside felt compact but also slightly flexible; it had a familiar heft as I weighed it in my palm.

An oversized pack of cards. I glanced up to see the dealer watching me with undisguised impatience.

“I’ll take this,” I said, and handed the old man a dollar
.
“Thanks.”

A flicker of disappointment across the dealer’s face. I smiled at her, enjoying my mean little moment of triumph, and left.

Outside the parish hall a stream of people were headed for the parking lot, carrying lamps and pillows and overflowing plastic
bags. The church bell tolled eight thirty. Blakie would just be get
ting up. I killed a few more minutes by wandering around the church grounds, past a well-kept herb garden and stands of yellow chrysanthemums. Behind a neatly trimmed hedge of boxwood I
discovered a statue of St. Bruno himself, standing watch over a granite
bench. Here I sat with my paisley-wrapped treasure, and set about trying to undo the knot.

For a while I thought I’d have to just rip the damn thing apart, or wait till I got to Blakie’s to cut it open. The cloth was knotted
so tightly I couldn’t undo it, and the paisley had gotten wet at some
point then shrunk—it was like trying to pick at dried plaster, or Sheetrock.

But gradually I managed to tease one corner of the scarf free, tugging it gently until, after a good ten minutes, I was able to undo t
he wrappings
.
A faint odor wafted up, the vanilla-tinged scent of pipe
tobacco. There was a greasy feel to the frayed cloth, sweat, or maybe someone had dropped it on the damp grass. I opened it carefully, smoothing its folds till I could finally see what was tucked inside.

It was a large deck of cards, bound with a rubber band. The rubber band fell to bits when I tried to remove it, and something fluttered onto the bench. I picked it up: a scrap of paper with a few words scrawled in pencil.

—

The least trumps.

—

I frowned. The Greater Trumps, those were the picture cards that
made up the Major Arcana in a tarot deck—the Chariot, the Magician,
the Empress, the Hierophant. Eight or nine years ago I had a girlfriend with enough New Age tarots to channel the entire Order of the Golden Dawn. Marxist tarots, lesbian tarots, African, Zen, and Mormon tarots; Tarots of the Angels, of Wise Mammals, poisonous snakes and smiling madonni; Aleister Crowley’s tarot, and Shirley MacLaine’s; the dread Feminist Tarot of the Cats. There were
twenty-two Major Arcana cards, and the lesser trumps were analogous
to the fifty-two cards in an ordinary deck, with an additional four representing knights.

But the least trumps? The phrase stabbed at my memory, but I couldn’t place it. I stared at the scrap of paper with its rushed scribble, put it aside and examined the deck.

The cards were thick, with the slightly furry feel of old pasteboard.
Each was printed with an identical and intricate design of spoked wheels, like old-fashioned gears with interlocking teeth. The inks were primitive, too-bright primary colors, red and yellow and blue faded now to periwinkle and pale rose, a dusty gold like smudged pollen. I guessed they dated to the early or mid-nineteenth century. The images had the look of old children’s picture books from that era, at once vivid and muted, slightly sinister, as though the illustrators were making a point of not revealing their true meaning to the casual viewer. I grinned, thinking of how I’d wrested them from the clutches of an antiques dealer, then turned them over.

The cards were all blank. I shook my head, fanning them out on the bench before me. A few of the cards had their corners neatly clipped, but others looked as though they had been bitten off in tiny crescent-shaped wedges. I squinted at one, trying to determine if someone had peeled off a printed image. The surface was rough, flecked with bits of darker grey and black, or white, but it didn’t seem to have ever had anything affixed to it. There was no trace of glue or spirit gum that I could see, no jots of ink or colored paper.

A mistake, then. The deck had obviously been discarded by the printer. Not even a dealer would have been able to get more than a couple of bucks for it.

Too bad. I gathered the cards into a stack, and started wrapping the scarf around them when I noticed that one card was thicker than the rest. I pulled it out: not a single card after all but two that had become stuck together. I set the rest of the deck aside, safe within the paisley shroud; then gingerly slid my thumbnail between the stuck cards. It was like prising apart sheets of mica—I could feel where the pasteboard held fast towards the center, but if I pulled at it too hard or too quickly the cards would tear.

But very slowly, I felt the cards separate. Maybe the warmth of my touch helped, or the sudden exposure to air and moisture. For whatever reason, the cards suddenly slid apart so that I held one in each hand.

“
Oh.
”

I cried aloud, they were that wonderful. Two tiny, brilliantly inked tableaux like medieval tapestries, or paintings by Brueghel glimpsed through a rosace window. One card was awhirl with minute figures, men and women but also animals, dogs dancing on their hind legs, long-necked cranes, and crabs that lifted clacking claws to a sky filled with pennoned airships, exploding suns, a man being carried on a litter, and a lash-fringed eye like a greater sun gazing down upon them all. The other card showed only the figure of a naked man, kneeling so that he faced the viewer, but with head bowed so that you saw only his broad back, a curve of neck like a quarter-moon, a sheaf of dark hair spilling to the ground before him. The man’s skin was painted in gold leaf; the ground he knelt upon was the dreamy green of old bottle-glass, the sky behind him crocus-yellow, with a tinge upon the horizon like the first flush of sun, or the protruding tip of a finger. As I stared at them I felt my heart begin to beat, too fast too hard but not with fear this time, not this time.

The Least Trumps. The term was used, just once, in the first chapter of the unfinished, final volume of
Five
Windows One Door
. I remembered it suddenly, the way you recall something from early childhood, the smell of marigolds towering above your head, a blue plush dog with one glass eye, thin sunlight filtering through a crack in a frosted glass cold frame. My mouth filled with liquid and I tasted sour cherries, salt and musk, the first time my tongue probed a girl’s cunt. A warm breeze stirred my hair. I heard distant laughter, a booming bass-note that resolved into the echo of a church clock tolling nine.

—

Only when he was certain that Mabel had fallen fast asleep beside him would Tarquin remove the cards from their brocade pouch, her warm limbs tangled in the stained bedcovers where they emitted a smell of yeast and limewater, the surrounding room suffused with twilight so that when he held the cards before her mouth, one by one, he saw how her breath brought to life the figures painted upon each, as though she breathed upon a winter windowpane where frost-roses bloomed: Pavell Saved From Drowning, The Bangers, One Leaf Left, Hermalchio and Lachrymatory, Villainous Saltpetre, The Ground-Nut, The Widower: all the recusant figures of the Least Trumps quickening beneath Mabel’s sleeping face.

—

Even now the words came to me by heart. Sometimes, when I couldn’t fall asleep, I would lie in bed and silently recite the books from memory, beginning with Volume One,
The First Window: Love Plucking Rowan Berries
, with its description of Mabel’s deflowering that I found so tragic when I first read it. Only later in my twenties, when I read the books for the fifth or seventh time, did I realize the scene was a parody of the seduction scene in
Rigoletto
. In this way Walter Burden Fox’s books eased my passage into the world, as they did in many others. Falling in love with fey little Clytie Winton then weeping over her death; making my first forays into sex when I masturbated to the memory of Tarquin’s mad brother Elwell taking Mabel as she slept; realizing, as I read of Mabel’s great love affair with the silent film actress Nola Flynn, that there were words to describe what I did sometimes with my own friends, even if those words had a lavender must of the attic to them:
tribadism, skylarking, sit Venus in the garden with Her Gate unlocked.

My mother never explained any of this to me: sex, love, suffering, patience. Probably she assumed that her example alone was enough, and for another person it might well have been. But I never saw my mother unhappy, or frightened. My first attack came not long after Julia Sa’adah left me. Julia who inked my life Before and After; and while at the time I was contemptuous of anyone who suggested a link between the two events, breakup and crackup, I can see now that it was so. In Fox’s novels, love affairs sometimes ended badly, but for all the lessons his books held, they never readied me for the shock of being left.

That was more than eleven years ago. I still felt the aftershocks, of course. I still dream about her: her black hair, so thick it was like oiled rope streaming through my fingers; her bronzey skin, its soft glaucous bloom like scuppernongs; the way her mouth tasted. Small mouth, smaller than my own, cigarettes and wintergreen, tea oil, coriander seed. The dream is different each time, though it always ends the same way, it ends the way it ended: Julia looking at me as she packs up her Rockland studio, arms bare so I can see my own apprentice work below her elbow, vine leaves, stylized knots. My name there, and hers, if you knew where to look. Her face sad but amused as she shakes her head. “You never happened, Ivy.”