Conjure Wife Read Free

even the sunlight in the bedroom seemed to sizzle and fry, as his mind rose to a sudden pitch of concentration on the puzzle. “Roseland and Hill, Roseland and Hill, Oh we went to Roseland and Hill,” — like a nursery rhyme somehow turned nasty, making the glass cylinders repugnant to his fingers, “— but we never came back.”
    Abruptly the answer came.
    The two local cemeteries.
    Graveyard dirt.
    Soil specimens all right. Graveyard dirt from particular graves. A chief ingredient of Negro conjure magic.
    With a soft thud Totem landed on the table and began to sniff inquisitively at the bottles, springing away as Norman plunged his hand into the drawer. He felt smaller boxes behind the big one, yanked suddenly at the whole drawer, so it fell to the floor. In one of the boxes were bent, rusty, worn bits of iron — horseshoe nails. In the other were calling-card envelopes, filled with snippings of hair, each labeled like the bottles. But he knew most of these names — “Hervey Sawtelle… Gracine Pollard… Hulda Gunnison…” And in one labeled “Evelyn Sawtelle” — red-lacquered nail clippings.
    In the third drawer he drew blank. But the fourth yielded a varied harvest. Packets of small dried leaves and powdered vegetable matter — so that was what came from Tansy’s herb garden along with kitchen seasonings? Vervain, vinmoin, devil’s stuff, the labels said. Bits of lodestone with iron filings clinging to them. Goose quills which spilled quicksilver when he shook them. Small squares of flannel, the sort that Negro conjure doctors use for their “tricken bags” or “hands.” A box of old silver coins and silver filings — strong protective magic; giving significance to the silver coins in front of his photograph.
    But Tansy was so sane, so healthily contemptuous of palmistry, astrology, numerology and all other superstitious fads. A hardheaded New Englander. So well versed, from her work with him, in the psychological background of superstition and primitive magic. So well versed —
    He found himself thumbing through a dog-eared copy of his own Parallelisms in Superstition and Neurosis . It looked like the one he had lost around the house — was it eight years ago? Beside a formula for conjuration was a marginal notation in Tansy’s script: “Doesn’t work. Substitute copper filings for brass. Try in dark of moon instead of full.”
    “Norman —”
    Tansy was standing in the doorway.

2
    It is the people we know best who can, on rare occasions, seem most unreal to us. For a moment the familiar face registers as merely an arbitrary arrangement of colored surfaces, without even the shadowy personality with which we invest a strange face glimpsed in the street.
    Norman Saylor felt he wasn’t looking at his wife, but at a painting of her. It was as if some wizardly Renoir or Toulouse-Lautrec had painted Tansy with the air for a canvas — boldly blocked in the flat cheeks in pale flesh tones faintly undertinged with green, drew them together to a small defiant chin; smudged crosswise with careless art the red thoughtful lips, the gray-green maybe humorous eyes, the narrow low-arched brows with single vertical furrow between; created with one black stroke the childishly sinister bangs, swiftly smeared the areas of shadowed white throat and wine-colored dress; caught perfectly the feel of the elbow that hugged a package from the dressmaker’s, as the small ugly hands lifted to remove a tiny hat that was another patch of the wine color with a highlight representing a little doodad of silvered glass.
    If he were to reach out and touch her, Norman felt, the paint would peel down in strips from the empty air, as from some walking sister-picture of Dorian Gray.
    He stood stupidly staring at her, the open book in his hand. He didn’t hear himself say anything, thought he knew that if words had come to his lips at that moment, his voice would have sounded to him like another’s — some fool