Certainly it was magic for Susannah, and of all the wonders ahead and behind, those few moments in the Jaffordses’ door-yard always maintained their own unique luster. Not two of them jumping in tandem, not even four, but six of them, while the two great grinning idiots spun the rope as fast as their slab-like arms would allow.
Tian laughed and stomped his shor’boots and cried: “That beats the drum! Don’t it just! Yer-buggerl” And from the porch, his grandfather gave out a laugh so rusty that Susannah had to wonder how long ago he had laid that sound away in mothballs.
For another five seconds or so, the magic held. The jump-rope spun so rapidly the eye lost it and it existed as nothing but a whirring sound like a wing. The half-dozen within that whirring—from Eddie, the tallest, at Zalman’s end, to pudgy little Lyman, at Tia’s—rose and fell like pistons in a machine.
Then the rope caught on someone’s heel—Heddon’s, it looked like to Susannah, although later all would take the blame so none had to feel bad—and they sprawled in the dust, gasping and laughing. Eddie, clutching his chest, caught Susannah’s eye. “I’m havin a heart attack, sweetheart, you better call 911.”
She hoisted herself over to where he lay and put her head down so she could kiss him. “No, you’re not,” she said, “but you’re attacking my heart, Eddie Dean. I love you.”
He gazed up at her seriously from the dust of the dooryard. He knew that however much she might love him, he would always love her more. And as always when he thought these things, the premonition came that ka was not their friend, that it would end badly between them.
If it’s so, then your job is to make it as good as it can be for as long as it can be. Will you do your job, Eddie?
“With greatest pleasure,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows. “Do ya?” she said, Calla-talk for Beg pardon?
“I do,” he said, grinning. “Believe me, I do.” He put an arm around her neck, pulled her down, kissed her brow, her nose, and finally her lips. The twins laughed and clapped. The baby chorded. And on the porch, old Jamie Jaffords did the same.
FOUR
All of them were hungry after their exercise, and with Susannah helping from her chair, Zalia Jaffords laid a huge meal on the long trestle table out behind the house. The view was a winner, in Eddie’s opinion. At the foot of the hill was what he took to be some especially hardy type of rice, now grown to the height of a tall man’s shoulder. Beyond it, the river glowed with sunset light.
“Set us on with a word, Zee, if’ee would,” Tian said.
She looked pleased at that. Susannah told Eddie later that Tian hadn’t thought much of his wife’s religion, but that seemed to have changed since Pere Callahan’s unexpected support of Tian at the Town Gadiering Hall.
“Bow your heads, children.”
Four heads dropped—six, counting the big ‘uns. Lyman and Lia had their eyes squinched so tightly shut that they looked like children suffering terrible headaches. They held their hands, clean and glowing pink from the pump’s cold gush, out in front of them.
“Bless this food to our use, Lord, and make us grateful. Thank you for our company, may we do em fine and
they us. Deliver us from the terror that flies at noonday and the one that creeps at night. We say thankee.”
” Thankee!”‘cried the children, Tia almost loudly enough to rattle the windows.
“Name of God the Father and His Son, the Man Jesus,” she said.
” Man Jesus!” cried the children. Eddie was amused to see that Gran-pere, who sported a crucifix nearly as large as those worn by Zalman and Tia, sat with his eyes open, peacefully picking his nose during the prayers.
“Amen.”
“Amen!”
” TATERS!” cried Tia.
FIVE
Tian sat at one end of the long table, Zalia at the other. The twins weren’t shunted off to the ghetto of a
“kiddie table” (as Susannah and her cousins always had been at family gatherings, and how she had hated that) but seated a-row on one side, with the older two flanking the younger pair. Heddon helped Lia; Hedda helped Lyman. Susannah and Eddie were seated side by side across from the kids, with one young giant to Susannah’s left and the other to Eddie’s right. The baby did fine first on his mother’s lap and then, when he grew bored with that, on his father’s. The old man sat next to Zalia, who served him, cut his meat small-small, and did indeed wipe his chin when the gravy ran down. Tian glowered at this in a sulky way which Eddie felt did him little credit, but he kept his mouth shut, except once to ask his grandfather if he wanted more bread.
“My arm still wuks if Ah do,” the old man said, and snatched up the bread-basket to prove it. He did this smartly for a gent of advanced years, then spoiled the impression of briskness by overturning the jam-cruet.
“Slaggit!” he cried.
The four children looked at each other with round eyes, then covered their mouths and giggled. Tia threw back her head and honked at the sky. One of her elbows caught Eddie in the ribs and almost knocked him off his chair.
“Wish’ee wouldn’t speak so in front of the children,” Zalia said, righting the cruet.
“Cry’er pardon,” Gran-pere said. Eddie wondered if he would have managed such winning humility if his grandson had been the one to reprimand him.
“Let me help you to a little of that, Gran-pere,” Susannah said, taking the jam from Zalia. The old man watched her with moist, almost worshipful eyes.
“Ain’t seen a true brown woman in oh Ah’d have to say forty year,” Gran-pere told her. “Uster be they’d come on the lake-mart boats, but nuramore.” When Gran-pere said boats, it came out butts.
“I hope it doesn’t come as too much of a shock to find out we’re still around,” Susannah said, and gave him a smile. The old fellow responded with a goaty, toothless grin.
The steak was tough but tasty, the corn almost as good as that in the meal Andy had prepared near the edge of the woods. The bowl of taters, although almost the size of a washbasin, needed to be refilled twice, the gravy boat three times, but to Eddie the true revelation was the rice. Zalia served three different kinds, and as far as Eddie was concerned, each one was better than the last. The Jaffordses, however, ate it almost absentmindedly, the way people drink water in a restaurant. The meal ended with an apple cobbler, and then the children were sent off to play. Gran-pere put on the finishing touch with a ringing belch. “Say thankee,”
he told Zalia, and tapped his throat three times. “Fine as ever was, Zee.”
“It does me good to see you eat so, Dad,” she said.
Tian grunted, then said, “Dad, these two would speak to you of the Wolves.”
“Just Eddie, if it do ya,” Susannah said with quick decisiveness. “I’ll help you clear the table and wash the dishes.”
“There’s no need,” Zalia said. Eddie thought the woman was sending Susannah a message with her eyes—
Stay, he likes you—but Susannah either didn’t see it or elected to ignore it.
“Not at all,” she said, transferring herself to her wheelchair with the ease of long experience. “You’ll talk to my man, won’t you, sai Jaffords?”
“All that ‘us long ago and by the way,” the old man said, but he didn’t look unwilling. “Don’t know if Ah kin.
My mind dun’t hold a tale like it uster.”
“But I’d hear what you do remember,” Eddie said. “Every word.”
Tia honked laughter as if this were the funniest thing she’d ever heard. Zal did likewise, then scooped the last bit of mashed potato out of the bowl with a hand nearly as big as a cutting board. Tian gave it a brisk smack.
“Never do it, ye great galoot, how many times have’ee been told?”
“Arright,” Gran-pere said. “Ah’d talk a bit if ye’d listen, boy. What else kin Ah do ‘ith meself these days ‘cept clabber? Help me git back on the porch, fur them steps is a strake easier comin down than they is goin up.
And if ye’d fatch my pipe, daughter-girl, that’d do me fine, for a pipe helps a man think, so it does.”
“Of course I will,” Zalia said, ignoring another sour look from her husband. “Right away.”
SIX
“This were all long ago, ye must ken,” Gran-pere said once Zalia Jaffords had him settled in his rocker with a pillow at the small of his back and his pipe drawing comfortably. “I canna say for a certain if the Wolves have come twice since or three times, for although I were nineteen reaps on earth then, I’ve lost count of the years between.”