Demon Box

Actually, the cake looked like one of them lumpy tie-dye pillows whereas his robe was an absolutely beautiful affair, purple velvet and gold trim and wriggling front and back with some of the finest needlepointing I ever saw—dragons, and eagles, and bulls you could practically hear snorting. He thanked me kindly and did a slow swirl with the lantern held up hissing above him.

“You must’ve locked your little woman home with needle and thread for about six months,” I says. I’d had a glass of sherry with Betsy before and was feeling feisty.

“Nope,” he says, starting to ladle out paper cups of punch for the kids. “It only took three months. And I made it.”

“Well, my, my,” I says, aiming to tease him was all, “I never seen anything so delicate done by a man.”

The kids all laugh again but he took it some way wrong and the laugh died off too quick. Instead of responding to my rib he went right back to handing out that punch. To try to smooth over my foolishness I says, “Go on. I bet your wife did too make it.” By way of apology. But before he could accept my effort Otis stumbles up and butts across the front of us to take a Dixie cup.

“Oh, I’ll vouch for M’kehla’s wife, Grandma, she doesn’t make anything.” Otis pours the cup about half full of brandy before he adds, “Anymore.”

The quiet got even quieter. I thought he was going to look two holes in the top of Otis’s head. But Otis keeps sniffing his nose down in his booze like he don’t notice a thing.

“My first Christian communion and from a Dixie cup,” he moans. “How rural. At my Bar Mitzvah we drank from at least clear plastic.”

After his success aping the Brass family, Otis had got worse and worse, singing and reciting and cutting up. Yet everybody had took it in good humor. Devlin told me once that Otis was like he was because he’d been given too much oxygen at birth, so nobody generally took offense at what he said. But you could tell Mr. Keller-Brown was aggravated, too much oxygen or whatever. He reached over and snagged the paper cup out of Otis’s hand and threw it hissing into the fire.

“Is this your first communion, Mr. Kone? We’ll just have to get something more fitting for your first communion.”

I noticed back by the fire his wife’s sister stood up from where she’d been talking with my two grandsons and Frank Dobbs.

Mr. Keller-Brown turns from Otis and hands me the punch ladle. “If you’ll take over, Mrs. Whittier, I’ll see if we can’t find Mr. Kone a more appropriate vessel.”

The sister comes hurrying over and says, “I’ll get it, Montgomery—” but he says No, he’d do it, and she stops on a dime. Otis reaches for another cup mumbling something about not to trouble and he says No, it’s no trouble and Otis’s hand stops just the same way. He still hasn’t looked up to Mr. Keller-Brown’s eyes.

The kids are beginning to get upset, so I say, “Why, if Mr. Kone gets a glass to drink out of, Mr. Keller-Brown, oughten I get a glass to drink out of?”

Little Sherree, who is a Libra and a smart little peacemaker in her own right, joins in and says, “Yeah, it’s Great-Grandma’s birthday.” And the other kids and Toby, too, says yeah yeah, Grandma gets a glass too! Those eyes lift off Otis and move to me.

“Certainly,” he says, laughing off his temper. “Forgive me, Mrs. Whittier.” He winked to me and jerked his thumb back at Otis by way of explanation. I winked and nodded back to indicate I knew precisely what he meant, that many’s the time I wanted to wring that jellyroll’s neck myself.

He went into the bus and the kids went back at the cake and ice cream. I never could stand having people fight around me. I’ve always been handy at oiling troubled waters. Like when I was living with Lena: Devlin and Buddy would get in terrible squabbles over whose turn it was to mow the lawn. While they were fussing I’d go get the lawn mower and mow away till they came sheepfaced out to take over. (More handy than straightforward, to be honest.) So I thought the storm was past when Mr. Keller-Brown come back out with three dusty brandy glasses and shared some of Otis’s brandy. I blew at the dust and filled mine with the kids’ punch and all of us clinked glasses and toasted my birthday. Otis said that he would sympathize with me, being eighty-sixed quite a number of times himself. Everybody laughed and he was down from the hook. Five minutes later he was running off at the mouth as bad as ever.