Demon Box

  It was the queerest thing. I sailed right up out of my body while Doctor Ogilvie was saying, I'm sorry, Topple, she's gone - sailed right over the town through the night right on up to Heaven where the streets were lit with pure gold and the angels were playing harps and the moth I presume did not corrupt. Heaven. But when I started to go through the gates that were all inlaid pearl precisely like they are supposed to be this huge tall angel with an enormous book says to me, Wait a minute, little girl; what's your name? I says Becky Topple and he says Becky Topple? Rebecca Topple? I thought so, Becky; you have been marked by the Blood of the Lamb of God Almighty and you aren't due up here for another good seventy-seven years! The Son of Man Hisself has you down for not less than one entire century of earthly service! You're to be a saint, Rebecca, did you know that? So you got to go on back, honey. I'm sorry...

  And sent me sailing back through the clouds and the stars to Arkansas and Pine Bluff and Dr. Ogilvie's house all fluttering at the parlor windows with torches and lamps like big angry millers and right down through the roof. I swear it was absolutely the queerest sensation, seeing my body in that room with all my folks and family crying and little Emerson T struggling with his papa to get to me, crying Becky aint dead aint dead cant be dead as I just drifted back into my body like so much smoke being sucked back down a chimney and took a breath opened my eyes and sat up and told them that the mute boy had not harmed me. No. Quite the contrary. That I'd been fooling around that gully and fell into the scrap iron and he had come along and seen me and saved me, thank the Lord (I had my fingers crossed, and said another Thank the Lord to myself) and I have never bothered you about another single thing since that, Jesus, as I solemnly promised. What was there for me to ask, actually? I have never doubted that angel with the book. Not from that instant to this have I ever faced mortal danger, nor never thought I would have to, either -- leastways till nineteen eighty-something rolled around. And I always figured that by then I would be more than tickled to be getting shut of this wore-out carcass and battered old mug anyhow. So I swear to You with God and that tall angel as my witness that I am not shivering scared here on my knees like some dried-up old time miser pinchin life like her last measly pennies. Because I'm not. What I am asking for is I guess a sign of some kind, Lord; not more time. Running out of time simply is not what I'm scared of. What I am afraid of I can't put a name to yet, having just this day encountered it like finding a new-hatched freak of nature, but it is not of dying. Moreover I am not even sure whether my fear is of a real McCoy danger or not. Maybe the simple weight of years has finally made its crack in my reason like it has in poor Miss Lawn and in loony Mr. Firestone with his Communists behind every bush and in so many other tenants at the Towers lots of whom I know are way younger than me -- made its cruel crack in my mind so that all these sudden fears these shades and behind-every-bush boogers and all this dirty business that seems to have leaked in are nothin more than just another wild black mistake from Borneo this old white hen is making... is what I'm wanting to know, Lord Jesus, is the sign I'm praying for

  I stopped when I heard something way off. Oh. Just that old log train tooting at the Nebo junction. Bringing the week's logging down from Blister Creek. Unless they had changed their schedule sometime since those sleepless nights years ago it meant it was getting near midnight. Good Friday's about to turn into what I guess a body might call Bad Saturday. It sure didn't feel like Eastertime. Too warm. This was the first time Easter would be late enough in April to have Good Friday fall on my birthday since it must of been the first spring after marrying Emery. That first Oregon spring. It was hot and peculiar then, too. Maybe it'd cool some yet, bring down the usual shower on the egg hunt. Still, driving out from Eugene this afternoon I noticed a lot of farmers already irrigating. And the night air dry as a bone. Blessed strange.

  I clenched my lips and reminded myself in a calm voice, This isn't strange at all, Old Fool. This is me-and-Emery's old cabin, our old Nebo place. But another voice keeps hollering back, Then why's everything seem so hellish strange? Well, it must be because this is the first night away from Old Folks Towers in about a century. No, that don't account for it. I spent last Christmas and New Year's at Lena's and things was no stranger than usual. Besides, I felt it before I left the apartment. The moment my grandson phoned this morning I told him I didn't want to go. I says, "Why, boy, tonight the Reverend Dr. W. W. Poll is having an Inspiration Service down in the lobby that I couldn't miss!" Having accompanied me a time or two, and knowing that the doctor's services are about as inspirational as a mud fence, he just groans, ugh.

  "Sweetheart, think of it as medical," I says. "Reverend Poll's sermons are as effective as any of my sleeping prescriptions," I says trying to kid him away from it.

  So I felt it then. He kept at me, though. He's like his grandpa was that way, when he gets a notion he thinks is for somebody else's good. I carried the phone over to turn down Secret Storm, making excuses one after another why I can't go till at length he sighs and says he guesses he'll have to tell me the secret.

  "The real reason, Grandma, is we're all having a birthday party - a surprise birthday party if you weren't such a stubborn old nannygoat."

  I says, "Honey, I sure do thank you but when you get past eighty a birthday party is about as welcome a surprise as a new wart." He says that I hadn't been out to visit them in close to a year, blame my hide, and he wants me to see how they've fixed the place back up. Like for a grade, I thought: another trait of his grandpa's. I told him I was sorry but I did not have the faintest inclination to aggravate my back jouncing out to that dadgummed old salt mine (though it isn't really my back, the doctor says, but a gallbladder business aggravated by sitting, especially in a moving car). "It was forty years out there put me in this pitiful condition."

  "Baloney," he says. "Besides, the kids have all baked this fantastic birthday cake and decorated it for Great-Grandma's birthday; their dear little hearts will be broken." I tell him to bring them and their dear little hearts both on into my apartment and we'd drink Annie Green Springs and watch the people down in the parking lot. Ugh, he says again. He can't stand the Towers. He maintains our lovely low-cost twenty-story ultra-modern apartment building is nothing more than a highrise plastic air-conditioned tombstone where they stick the corpses waiting for graves. Which it is, I can't deny, but plastic or no I make just enough on my Social Security and Natural Gas royalties to pay my way if I take advantage of Poor People's Housing. My own way.

  "So I appreciate the invitation, sugar, but I guess I hadn't better disappoint the Reverend W. W. Poll. Not when he's just a short elevator ride as opposed to a long ordeal in an automobile. So you all bring that cake on over here. It'll do us old geezers good to see some kids." He tells me the cake's too big to move. I says "toobig?" and he says that they was having not only my party, see, but a whole day-long to-do with music and a service their ownselves and quite a few people expected. A sort of Worship Fair, he called it. "Al-so," he says, in that way he used to twist me around his finger, "the Sounding Brass are going to be here."

  Grandkids always have your number worse than any of your own kids, and the first is the worst by a mile. "Don't you flimflam me, Bub! Not thee Sounding Brass." He says cross his heart; he picked them all up at the bus depot not three hours ago, swallowtails, buckteeth, and all, and they have promised to sing a special request for my birthday, even though they don't usually dedicate songs and haven't done it in years.

  "And I will wager," he says, "you can't guess which one." His words some way more extravagant than's even usual for him. I don't answer. I heard it then. "They are going to sing that version of 'Were You There' that you used to like so much." I say "You remember that? Why, it's been twenty years since I had that record if it's been a day." "More like thirty," he says. He said al-so as far as the ride went they had a special bus with a full-size bed in it coming for me at four on the dot. "So don't give me any more of that bad back baloney. This is your day to party!"
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  I realized what it was then, to some extent. There was somebody else with him, standing near at the other end of the line so he was grooming his voice for more than just his granny. Not Betsy, nor Buddy. Somebody else.

  "In fact it could be your night to party as well. Better throw some stuff in a sack."

  After we hung up I was in a kind of dither to think who. I started to turn my program back up, but it was the ad for denture stickum where the middle-aged ninny is eating peanuts. So I just switched the wretched thing clean off and stood there by the window, looking down at Eugene's growing traffic situation. Zoom zoom zoom, a silly bunch of bugs. The Towers is the highest building in all Eugene unless you count that little one-story windowless and doorless cement shack situated on top of Skinner's Butte. Some kind of municipal transmitter shack is I guess what it is. It was up there just like it stands today the very first time Emerson T and me rode to the top of the butte. We drove if I'm not mistaken a spanking brand-new 1935 Terraplane sedan of a maroon hue that Emerson had bought with our alfalfa sales that spring. Eugene wasn't much more than a main street, just some notion stores and a courthouse and Quackenbush's Hardware. Now it sprawls off willy-nilly in all directions as far as a person can see, like some big old Monopoly game that got out of hand. That little shack is the only thing I can think of still unchanged, and I still don't know what's in it.

  I picked up Emerson T's field glasses from my sill and took them out of their leather case. They're army glasses but Emery wasn't in the army; when they wouldn't let him be a chaplain he became a conscientious objector. He won the glasses at Bingo. I like to use them to watch the passenger trains arrive Monday nights, but there isn't much to watch of a Friday noon. Just that new clover-leaf, smoking around in circles and, O, whyever had I let him make me say yes? I could still hear my pulse rushing around his words in my ears. I turned the glasses rear-way-round and looked for a while that way, to try to make my heart slow its pit-a-pat (nope, it hadn't been Betsy or Buddy, nor none of his usual bunch that I could think of offhand), when, without so much as a by-your-leave or a kiss-my-foot, there, right at my elbow, sucking one of my taffy-babies and blinking those blood-rare eyes of hers up at me was that dadblessed Miss Lawn!

  "Why Mrs. Whittier -"

  Made me jump like a frog. Her eyes, mainly. Vin rose bloodshot. She puts away as much as a quart before lunch somedays; she told me so herself. "- don't you realize you are looking through the wrong end again?" She shuffles from foot to foot in those gum-rubber slippers she wears then, in a breath that would take the bristles off a hog, she coos "I heard your television go off, then when it didn't come back on I was worried something might be the matter...?"

  She wears those things for just that purpose, too: slipping. I know for a fact that as soon as she hears my toilet flush or one of my pill bottles rattle she slips into her bathroom to see if my medicine cabinet is left open. Our bathrooms are back-to-back and the razor-blade disposal slot in her medicine cabinet lines right up with the razor-blade disposal slot on my medicine cabinet, and if she don't watch out one of these days I'm going to take a fingernail file and put one of those poor bloodshot eyeballs out of its misery. Not actually. We're old acquaintances, actually. Associates. Old maids and widows of a feather. I tell her if she must know I turned it off to talk over the telephone.

  "I thought I heard it ring," she says. "I wondered if it might be Good Book Bob dialing you for dollars again."

  Once KHVN phoned and asked me who it was said "My stroke is heavier than my groaning." I remembered it was Job because the Book of Job was the only book of the Bible Uncle Dicker ever read aloud to me (he claimed it was to help me reconcile my disfigurement but I personally think it was because of him constantly suffering from his rupture), and when I answered right and won forty dollars and a brass madonna of unbreakable Lucite, Miss Lawn never got over it. If I was in the tub or laid down napping and the phone rang more'n once she'd scoot all the way around from her place in time to answer the third ring, just in case it might be another contest. That's how she thinks of me and of what she refers to as my "four-leaf-clover life." Sometimes she comes in and waits for it to ring. She swears up and down that I must be hard of hearing because she always knocks before she comes in; all I say is it must be with a gum-rubber knuckle.

  "Well, it was not Good Book Bob," I assure her, "it was my grandson."

  "The famous one?"

  I just nodded and snapped the field glasses away in their case. "He's coming in a special bus this afternoon to take his grandmother to a big surprise party everybody's giving her." I admit I was rubbing it in a bit but I swear she can aggravate a person. "I'll probably be away to the festivities all evening," I says.

  "And miss Reverend Poll's special service? and the donuts and the Twylight Towers Trio? Mrs. Whittier, you must be delirious!"

  I told her I was attending another service, and instead of those soggy donuts was having a fantastic cake. But I didn't have the heart to Lord it over her about the Sounding Brass, though. Them eyes were already going from red to green like traffic lights. In the entire year and a half she's lived in the apartment next door I believe the only visits she's had from the outside is Jehovah's Witnesses. I says, I am, Miss Lawn: dee-lirious, and that I was going to have myself a good long hot soak in Sardo before I popped with delirium. So, if she would excuse-a pliz -- and went strutting into the bathroom without another word.

  I like Miss Lawn well enough. We went to the same church for years and got along just fine, except her seeming a little snooty. I reckoned that came from her being a Lawn of the Lawn's Sand & Gravel Lawns, a rich old Oregon family and very high society around Eugene. It wasn't till Urban Renewal forced her to follow me to the Towers that I realized what a lonesome soul she actually was. And jealous... she can't hardly stand how people make over me. She says the way people make over me you'd think I was the only one in the building. I always say, Ah, now, I don't know about that, but I am glad people like me. Well, she says, they ought to like me; I never done anything to make people dislike me! I say, All I do is try and be nice and she says, Yeah, but you're too nice with them, gushy, whether they're good folks or bad; if I had to get friends by being too gushy like that I don't want 'em. Actually, I'm pretty snippy with people, but I say, Yeah, well, if you're gonna make friends you're gonna make 'em by loving thy neighbor, not all the time acting like you're passing judgment on him. Besides, I never ran into anybody I didn't think but was good folks, you get deep enough down. And she says, Well, when you been around as much as me you sure will find different; something will happen someday and you'll find out that there are some people who are rotten all the way down! "Then," she says, "we'll see how that mushy love-thy-neighbor way of yours holds up."