Anansi Boys

She examined him coldly through the thick glass of her spectacles, then she said, “No. You not. True thing, that.”

She held out a gnarled hand. “Give me the water back. That’s better.” She sipped her water, dabbing at it with a small, purple tongue. “Is a good thing you’re here today. Tomorrow the whole house be fill with grievin‘ grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of them tryin’ to make me to die in the hospital, makin‘ up to me so I give them things. They don’t know me. I outlive all my own children. Every one of them.”

Fat Charlie said, “Are you going to talk about the bad turn you did to me?”

“You should never have break my garden mirror ball.”

“I’m sure I shouldn’t.”

He remembered it, in the way you remember things from childhood, part memory, part memory of the memory: following the tennis ball into Mrs. Dunwiddy’s yard, and once he was there, experimentally picking up her mirrored ball to see his face in it, distorted and huge, feeling it tumble to the stone path, watching it smash into a thousand tiny shards of glass. He remembered the strong old fingers that grabbed him by the ear and dragged him out of her yard and into her house…

“You sent Spider away,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

Her jaw was set like a mechanical bulldog’s. She nodded. “I did a banishment,” she said. “Didn’t mean for it to go so. Everybody know a little magic back in those days. We didn’t have all them kinda DVDs and cell phones and microwaves, but still, we know a lot regardless. I only wanted to teach you a lesson. You were so full of yourself, all mischief and back talk and vinegar. So I pull Spider out of you, to teach you a lesson.”

Fat Charlie heard the words, but they made no sense. “You pulled him out?”

“I break him off from you. All the tricksiness. All the wickedness. All the devilry. All that.” She sighed. “My mistake. Nobody tell me that if you do magic around a, around people like your daddy’s bloodline, it magnify everything. Everything get bigger.” Another sip of the water. “Your mother never believe it. Not really. But that Spider, he worse than you. Your father never say nothing about it until I make Spider go away. Even then, all he tell me is if you can’t fix it you not no son of his.”

He wanted to argue with her, to tell her how this was nonsense, that Spider was not a part of him, no more than he, Fat Charlie, was part of the sea or of the darkness. Instead he said, “Where’s the feather?”

“What feather you talking about?”

“When I came back from that place. The place with the cliffs and the caves. I was holding a feather. What did you do with it?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “I’m an old woman. I’m a hunnert and four.”

Fat Charlie said, “Where is it?”

“I forget.”

“Please tell me.”

“I ain’t got it.”

“Who does?”

“Callyanne.”

“Mrs. Higgler?”

She leaned in, confidentially. “The other two, they’re just girls. They’re flighty.”

“I called Mrs. Higgler before I came out. I stopped at her house before I went to the cemetery. Mrs. Bustamonte says she’s gone away.”

Mrs. Dunwiddy swayed gently from side to side in the bed, as if she were rocking herself to sleep. She said, “I not going to be here for much longer. I stop eating solid food after you leave the last time. I done. Only water. Some women say they love your father, but I know him long long before them. Back when I had my looks, he would take me dancing. He come pick me up and whirl me around. He was an old man even then, but he always make a girl feel special. You don’t feel…” She stopped, took another sip of water. Her hands were shaking. Fat Charlie took the empty glass from her. “Hunnert and four,” she said. “And never in my bed in the daytime except for confinements. And now I finish.”

“I’m sure you’ll reach a hundred and five,” said Fat Charlie, uneasily.

“Don’t you say that!” she said. She looked alarmed. “Don’t! Your family do enough trouble already. Don’t you go making things happen.”

“I’m not like my dad,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m not magic. Spider got all that side of the family, remember?”

She did not appear to be listening. She said, “When we would go dancing, way before the Second World War, your daddy would talk to the bandleader, and plenty times they call him up to sing with them. All the people laugh and cheer. Is so he make things happen. Singing.”

“Where is Mrs. Higgler?”

“Gone home.”