Collected Short Fiction, page 582
“But I don’t need money,” Tommy protested. “My friends in the village will give me rice, and I can sleep in the courtyard here.”
“I think there is too much money, burdening souls with evil karma,” the lean old man broke in softly. “Your father was a famous traveler, who gathered dangerous riches. Since the wheel has turned for him, others desire his fortune. I think perhaps that is why the lawyers sent for you.”
A fly came buzzing around his dried-up face, and he paused to wave it very gently away.
“But your mother’s sister lives in that place named Kansas,” he went on. “It is arranged for you to go to her. She is your own race and blood, and she wants you in her home—”
“No! She never even saw me,” Tommy whispered bitterly. “She couldn’t really want me. Must I go?”
“It is to be.” Chandra Sha nodded firmly. “Your people are ignorant about the true principles of matter and the soul, but their own peculiar laws require obedience. The caravan leaves tomorrow.”
Tommy wanted not to weep, but he was only ten. He clung sobbing to the thin old Jain.
“But we have instructed you well,” the holy man murmured, trying to comfort him. “Your feet are already on the pathway to nirvana, and I will give you a copy of the secret book of Rishabha to guide and guard you on your way.”
Tommy went down out of the mountains with the caravan. He was bewildered and afraid, and the motion of the railway cars made him ill, but the lawyers in Calcutta were kind enough. They bought him new garments, and took him to a cinema, and put him on a great strange machine called an airplane. At last he came to Kansas and his Aunt Agatha Grimm.
He rode from the depot to her home in a jolting farm truck, peering out at the strange sun-flooded flatness of the land and a monstrous orange-painted machine called a combine that grazed like the golden bull of Rishabha through the ripe wheat.
The hired man stopped the truck beside a huge wooden house that stood like a fort in the middle of the endless land, and Tommy’s aunt came out to greet him with a moist kiss. A plump, pink-skinned blonde, with a sweat-beaded, face. He was used to darker women, and she seemed incredibly fair.
“So you’re Lizzie’s boy?” She and her sister had come from Alabama, and soft accents still echoed in her voice. “Gracious, honey, what’s the matter?”
Tommy had run to meet her eagerly, but he couldn’t help shrinking back when he saw her eyes. The left was warm and brown and kind as old Chandra Sha’s. But the right eye was different, a frosty, bluish green; it seemed to look straight through him. “Well, child, can’t you talk?” He gulped and squirmed, trying to think of words to say in English. But he couldn’t think at all. Somehow, the green eye froze him.
“Nothing,” he muttered at last. “Just . . . nothing.”
“Lizzie’s boy would be a little odd.” She smiled, too sweetly. “Brought up by jabbering heathens! But this is going to be your home, you know. Come on inside, and let me clean you up.”
The hired man brought the carved teakwood chest the monks had given him, and they went into the bighouse. The smell of it was strange and stale. The windows were closed, with blinds drawn down. Tommy stood blinking at the queer heavy furniture and dusty bric-a-brac crammed into the dim cave of the living room, until he heard a fly buzzing at the screen door behind him. He turned without thinking to help it escape.
“Wait, honey.” His aunt caught his arm, and seated him firmly on the teakwood chest. “I’ll kill it!”
She snatched a swatter from the high oak mantle and stalked the fly through the gloomy jungle of antimacassared chairs and fussy little tables to a darkened window. The swatter fell with a vicious thwack.
“Got him!” she said. “I won’t endure flies.”
“But, Aunt Agatha!” The English words were coming back, though his thoughts were still in the easy vernacular the monks had taught him. His shy, hesitant voice was shocked. “They, too, are alive.”
The brown eye, as well as the green, peered sharply at him. His aunt sat down suddenly, gasping as if she needed fresh air. He wanted to open the windows, but he was afraid to move.
“Thomas, honey, you’re upsetting me terribly.” Her pale fat hands fluttered nervously. “But I guess you didn’t know that I’m not well at all. Of course I love children as much as anybody, but I really don’t know if I can endure you in the house. I always said myself that you’d be better off in some nice orphanage.”
Or back with the monks, Tommy told himself unhappily. He could not help thinking that she looked as tough and strong as a mountain pony, but he decided not to mention that.
“But sick as I am, I’m taking you in.” Her moist, swollen lips tried to smile. “Because you’re Lizzie’s boy. It’s my duty, and the legal papers are all signed. But the judge gave me full control of you, and your estate, till you come of age. Just keep that in mind.” Tommy nodded miserably and huddled smaller on the chest.
“I’m giving you a decent home, and you ought to be grateful.” A faint indignation began to edge her voice. “I never approved when Lizzie ran away to marry a good-for-nothing explorer—not even if his long-winded books did make him rich. Served her right when they got killed trying to climb them foreign mountains! I guess she never had a thought of me—her wandering like a gypsy queen through all of them wicked heathen countries, and never sending me a penny. A lot she cared if her own born sister had to drudge away like a common hired girl!” Sudden tears shone in the one brown eye, but the other remained dry and hard as glass.
“But what I can’t forgive is all she did to you.” Aunt Agatha snuffled and dabbled at her fat, pink nose. “Carrying you to all those outlandish foreign places, and letting you associate with all sorts of nasty natives. The lawyers said you’ve had no decent religious training, and I guess you’ve picked up goodness knows what superstitious notions. But I’ll see you get a proper education.”
“Thank you very much!” Tommy sat up hopefully. “I want to learn. Chandra Sha was teaching me Sanskrit and Arabic. I can speak Swahili and Urdu, and I’m studying the secret book of Rishabha.”
“Heathen idolatry!” The green eye and the brown widened in alarm. “Wicked nonsense you’ll soon forget, here in Kansas. Simple reading and writing and arithmetic will do for the like of you, and a Christian Sunday school.”
“But Rishabha was the first Thirtankara,” Tommy protested timidly. “The greatest of the saints. The first to find nirvana.”
“You little infidel!” Aunt Agatha’s round pink face turned red. “But you won’t find—whatever you call it. Not here in Kansas! Now bring your things up to your room.”
Staggering with the teakwood chest, he followed her up to a narrow attic room. It was hot as an oven, and it had a choking antiseptic smell. The dismal, purple-flowered wallpaper was faded and water-stained. At the tiny window, a discouraged fly hummed feebly.
Aunt Agatha went after it.
“Don’t!” Tommy dropped the chest and caught at her swatter. “Please, may I just open the window and let it go?”
“Gracious, child! What on earth?”
“Don’t you know about flies?” A sudden determination steadied his shy voice. “They, too, have souls. It is wrong to kill them.”
“Honey child, are you touched?”
“All life is akin, through the Cycle of Birth,” he told her desperately. “The holy Jains taught me that. As the wheel of life turns, our souls go from one form to another—until each is purged of every karma, so that it can rise to nirvana.”
She stood motionless, with the swatter lifted, frozen with astonishment.
“When you kill a fly,” he said, “you are loading your own soul with bad karma. And, besides, you may be injuring a friend.”
“Well, I never!” The swatter fell out of her shocked hand.
Tommy picked it up and gave it back to her, politely. “Such wicked heathen foolery! We’ll pray to help you find the truth.” Tommy shuddered, as she crushed the weary fly.
“Now unpack your box,” she commanded. “I’ll have no filthy idols here.”
“Please,” he protested unhappily. “These things are my own.” The green eye was still relentless, but the brown one began to cry. Tears ran down her smooth sweet face, and her heavy bosom quaked.
“Tommy! How can you be so mulish? When I’m only trying to take your poor dead mother’s place, and me such an invalid!”
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I hope your health improves. And I’ll show you everything.”
The worn key hung on a string around his neck. He unlocked the chest, but she found no idols. His clothing she took to be laundered, lifting each piece gingerly with two fingers as if it had been steeped in corruption. She sniffed at a fragrant packet of dried herbs, and seized it to be burned.
Finally, she bent to peer at the remaining odds and ends—at the brushes and paints his mother had given him when she left him with the monks; there were a few splotched watercolors he had tried to make of the monastery and the holy men and his village friends; the broken watch the mountaineers had found beside his father’s body; a thick painted cylinder.
“That?” She pointed at his picture of a shy brown child. “Who’s that?”
“Mira Bai. My friend.” He covered the picture quickly with another, to hide it from that cold green eye. “She lived in my own village. She was my teacher’s niece, and we used to study together. But her legs were withered and she was never strong. It was last year before the rains were ended that the wheel turned for her.”
“What wheel?” Aunt Agatha sniffed. “Do you mean she’s dead?”
“The soul never dies,” Tommy answered firmly. “It always returns in a new body, until it escapes to nirvana. Mira Bai has a stronger body now, because she was good. I don’t know where she is—maybe Kansas! But someday I’ll find her, with the science of Rishabha.”
“You poor little fool!” Aunt Agatha stirred his small treasures with the swatter handle, and jabbed at the painted cylinder. “What’s that contraption?”
“Just—just a book.”
Very carefully, he slipped it out of the round wooden case and unrolled a little of the long parchment strip. It was very old, yellowed and cracked and faded. The mild brown eye squinted in a puzzled way at the dim strange characters. He wondered how much the green one saw.
“That filthy scribbling? That’s no book.”
“It is older than printing,” he told her. “It is written with the secret wisdom of the Thirtankara Rishabha. It tells how souls may be guarded through their transmigrations and helped upward toward nirvana.”
“Heathen lies!” She reached for it angrily. “I ought to burn it.”
“No!” He hugged it in his skinny arms. “Please don’t! Because it is so powerful. I need it to aid my father and mother in their new lives. I need it to know Mira Bai when I find her again. And I think you need it too, Aunt Agatha, to purge your own soul of the eight kinds of karma—”
“What?” The brown eye widened with shock and. the green one narrowed angrily. “I’ll have you know that I’m a decent Christian, safe in the heart of God. Now, put that filthy scrawl away and wash yourself up. I guess that’s something your verminous monks forgot to teach you.”
“Please! The holy men are very clean.”
“Now you’re trying to aggravate me, poorly as I am.” She snuffled and her brown eye wept again. “I’m going to teach you a respectable religion, and I don’t need any nasty foreign scribblings to help me whip the sin out of you.”
She was very sweet about it, and she always cried when she was forced to beat him. The exertion was really too much for her poor heart. She did it only for dear Lizzie’s sake, and he ought to realize that the punishment was far more painful to her than to him.
She tried to teach him her religion, but Tommy clung to the wisdom of the kind old monks of Mahavira. She tried to wash the East out of him, with pounds of harsh yellow soap, until his sunburnt skin had faded to a sickly pallor. She prayed and cried over him for endless hours, while he knelt with numb bare knees on cruel bare floors. She threatened to whip him again, and she did.
She whipped him when he covered up the big sheets of sticky yellow fly paper she put in his room, and whipped him when he poured out the shallow dishes of fly poison she kept on the landing. But she seemed too badly shaken to strike him, on the sultry afternoon when she found him liberating the flies in the screen wire trap outside the kitchen.
“You sinful little infidel!”
Her nerves were all on edge. She had to sit down on the doorstep, resting her weak heart and gasping with her asthma. But her fat pink fingers seemed strong enough when she caught him by the ear.
She called the hired man to bring a torch dipped in gasoline, and held him so that he had to watch while she burned the flies that were left in the trap. He stood shivering with his own pain, quiet and pale and ill.
“Now come along!” She led him up the stairs, by his twisted ear. “I’ll teach you whether flies, have souls.” Her voice was like a saw when it strikes a nail. “I’m going to lock you up tonight without your supper, but I’ll be up in the morning.”
She shoved him into the stifling attic room. It was bare and narrow as the monastery cells, with only his hard little cot and his precious teakwood chest. His tears blurred the painted carving on the chest—it was the blue snake of the deva Parshva, who had reached nirvana a very long time before.
She held him, by the twisted ear.
“Believe me, Thomas, this hurts me terribly.” She snuffled and cleared her throat. “But I want you to pray tonight. Beg God to clean up your dirty little soul.”
She gave his ear another twist.
“When I come back in the morning, I want you to get down on your bended knees with me and confess to Him that all this rot about flies with souls is only a wicked lie.”
“But it’s the truth!” He caught his breath, and tried not to whimper. “Please, Aunt Agatha, let me read you part of the sacred book—”
“Sacred?” She shook him by the ear. “You filthy little blasphemer! I’m going down now to pray for you. But when I come back in the morning, I’m going to open up your box and take away that heathen writing. I declare, it’s what gives you all these wicked notions. I’m going to burn it in the kitchen stove.”
“But—Aunt Agatha!” He shivered with a sharper pain. “Without the secret book I can’t guide anybody toward nirvana. I can’t help my father and mother, struggling under their load of karma. I won’t even know little Mira Bai, if I should ever find her.”
“I’ll teach you what you need to know.” She let go his tingling ear, and boxed it sharply. “We’ll burn that book in the morning. And you’ll forget every word it says, or stay in this room till you starve.”
She locked the door on him and waddled down the stairs again, weeping for his soul and wheezing with her asthma. She had a good nip of whisky for her heart, and filled herself a nice plate of cold roast chicken and potato salad before she went up to her own room to pray.
For a long time Tommy sat alone on the edge of the hard lumpy cot, with his throbbing head in his hands. Crying was no use; old Chandra Sha had taught him that. He longed for his father and mother, those tanned happy wanderers he could barely remember. But the wheel had turned for them.
Nothing was left, except the sacred parchment. When the ringing in his punished ear had stopped, he bent to unlock the teakwood chest. He unrolled the brittle yellow scroll. His pale lips moved silently, following the faded black-and-scarlet characters.
The book, he felt, was more precious than all Kansas. He had to save it to help his reborn parents, and to find Mira Bai, and even to aid his aunt. Her poor soul was laden, surely, with a perilous burden of karma, but perhaps the science of the book could find her a more fortunate rebirth.
Trembling and afraid, he began to do what the holy men had taught him.
It was the hired girl, next morning, who came up to unlock his room. She was looking for his Aunt Agatha.
“I can’t understand it.” Her twangy Kansas voice was half hysterical. “I didn’t hear a thing-;,all night long. The outside doors are locked up tight, and none of her things are missing. But I’ve looked high and low, and your sweet old auntie isn’t anywhere.”
The little boy looked thin and pale and drawn. His dark eyes were rimmed with grime, hollowed for want of sleep. He was rolling up the long strip of brittle yellow parchment. Very carefully, he replaced it in the painted case.
“I think you wouldn’t know her now.” His shy little voice was rusty and regretful. “Because the wheel of her life has turned again. She has entered another cycle, you see.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” The startled girl stared at him. “But I’m afraid something awful has happened to your poor old auntie. I’m going to phone the sheriff.”
Tommy was downstairs in the gloomy front room when the sheriff came, standing in a chair drawn up against the mantle.
“Now don’t you worry, little man,” the sheriff boomed. “I’m come to find old Miz Grimm. Just tell me when you seen her last.”
“Here she is, right now,” Tommy whispered faintly. “But if you haven’t been instructed in the science of; transmigration, I don’t think you’ll know her.”
He was leaning over one of the big yellow sheets of adhesive fly paper that Aunt Agatha liked to leave spread at night to catch flies while she slept. He was trying to help a big blue fly, that was hopelessly tangled and droning in its last feeble fury.
“Pore little young-un!” The sheriff clucked sympathetically. “His aunt told me he was full of funny heathen notions!”
He didn’t even glance at the dying fly. But Tommy hadn’t found it hard to recognize. Its right eye was a furious, bluish green, and the left was a tiny bead of wet brown glass.
