It is a picture
Tansy herself will never have to look at, suggesting that perhaps there is
a God in heaven.
She turns a page (golden memories has been stamped on the front of
her scrapbook), and here are Tansy and Irma at the Mississippi Electrix
company picnic, back when Irma was four and Mississippi Electrix was
still a year away from bankruptcy and everything was more or less all
right. In the photo, Irma is wading with a bunch of other tykes, her
laughing face smeared with chocolate ice cream.
Looking fixedly at this snapshot, Tansy reaches for her glass of coffee
brandy and takes a small sip. And suddenly, from nowhere (or the place
from which all our more ominous and unconnected thoughts float out
into the light of our regard), she finds herself remembering that stupid
Edgar Allan Poe poem they had to memorize in the ninth grade. She
hasn’t thought of it in years and has no reason to now, but the words of
the opening stanza rise effortlessly and perfectly in her mind. Looking at
Irma, she recites them aloud in a toneless, pauseless voice that no doubt
would have caused Mrs. Normandie to clutch her stringy white hair and
groan. Tansy’s recitation doesn’t affect us that way; instead it gives us a
deep and abiding chill. It is like listening to a poetry reading given by a
corpse.
“Once upon a mih’nigh’ dreary while I ponnered weak ’n’ weary
over many a quaint ’n’ curris volume of forgotten lore while I nodded
nearly nappin’ sun’ly there came a tappin’ as of someone gen’ly rappin’
rappin’ at my chamber door—”
At this precise moment there comes a soft rapping at the cheap fiber-
board door of Tansy Freneau’s Airstream. She looks up, eyes floating,
lips pursed and glossed with coffee brandy.
“Les’ser? Is that you?”
It might be, she supposes. Not the TV people, at least she hopes not.
She wouldn’t talk to the TV people, sent them packing. She knows, in
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some deep and sadly cunning part of her mind, that they would lull her
and comfort her only to make her look stupid in the glare of their lights,
the way that the people on the Jerry Springer Show always end up look-
ing stupid.
No answer . . . and then it comes again. Tap. Tap-tap.
“’Tis some visitor,” she says, getting up. It’s like getting up in a
dream. “’Tis some visitor, I murmured, tappin’ at my chamber door,
only this ’n’ nothin’ more.”
Tap. Tap-tap.
Not like curled knuckles. It’s a thinner sound than that. A sound like
a single fingernail.
Or a beak.
She crosses the room in her haze of drugs and brandy, bare feet whis-
pering on carpet that was once nubbly and is now balding: the ex-
mother. She opens the door onto this foggy summer evening and sees
nothing, because she’s looking too high. Then something on the wel-
come mat rustles.
Something, some black thing, is looking up at her with bright, in-
quiring eyes. It’s a raven, omigod it’s Poe’s raven, come to pay her a visit.
“Jesus, I’m trippin’,” Tansy says, and runs her hands through her thin
hair.
“Jesus!” repeats the crow on the welcome mat. And then, chipper as
a chickadee: “Gorg!”
If asked, Tansy would have said she was too stoned to be frightened,
but this is apparently not so, because she gives out a disconcerted little
cry and takes a step backward.
The crow hops briskly across the doorsill and strides onto the faded
purple carpet, still looking up at her with its bright eyes. Its feathers glis-
ten with condensed drops of mist. It bops on past her, then pauses to
preen and fluff. It looks around as if to ask, How’m I doin’, sweetheart?
“Go away,” Tansy says. “I don’t know what the fuck you are, or if
you’re here at all, but—”
“Gorg!” the crow insists, then spreads its wings and fleets across the
trailer’s living room, a charred fleck burnt off the back of the night.
Tansy screams and cringes, instinctively shielding her face, but Gorg
doesn’t come near her. It alights on the table beside her bottle, there not
being any bust of Pallas handy.
Tansy thinks: It got disoriented in the fog, that’s all. It could even be rabid,
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or have that Key Lime disease, whatever you call it. I ought to go in the kitchen
and get the broom. Shoo it out before it shits around . . .
But the kitchen is too far. In her current state, the kitchen seems
hundreds of miles away, somewhere in the vicinity of Colorado Springs.
And there’s probably no crow here at all. Thinking of that goddamn
poem has caused her to hallucinate, that’s all . . . that, and losing her
daughter.
For the first time the pain gets through the haze, and Tansy winces
from its cruel and wiry heat. She remembers the little hands that some-
times pressed so tidily against the sides of her neck. The cries in the
night, summoning her from sleep. The smell of her, fresh from the bath.
“Her name was Irma!” she suddenly shouts at the figment standing so
boldly beside the brandy bottle. “Irma, not fucking Lenore, what kind
of stupid name is Lenore? Let’s hear you say Irma! ”
“Irma!” the visitor croaks obediently, stunning her to silence. And its
eyes. Ah! Its glittering eyes draw her, like the eyes of the Ancient
Mariner in that other poem she was supposed to learn but never did.
“Irma-Irma-Irma-Irma—”
“Stop it!” She doesn’t want to hear it after all. She was wrong. Her
daughter’s name out of that alien throat is foul, insupportable. She wants
to put her hands over her ears and can’t. They’re too heavy. Her hands