The Black Clay Boy

By Lucius Shepard

(Reprint, added 01 November 2002.)

They'd robbed her of her life, sucked out the middle of her joy like marrow-eating ghouls. Memories she had, but they'd drained them of juice and left the husks stuck in her head like dead flies in a web. Left her bitter and dotty, an old cracked hag fit for taunting by the neighborhood children.

Take those Kandell boys.

Always traipsing across her lawn and peeing their initials in the snow-crust, shaking their tiny pale things at her as if the sight would do an injury. There they were now, sneaking up to the house, clumping onto the porch. A piece of notebook paper scrawled with a kid's crooked letters was slipped under the door. Hanging on to the knob for balance, teetering, Willa picked it up and read: "Old lady Selkie is a fuking bitch!"

She snatched open the door and saw them humping toward the fence, two blue-coated wool-hatted dwarfs sinking to their knees in the snow. "You got that right," she squalled. "Fucking with a C!" Yelling took the wind out of her, and she stood trembling, her breath steaming in ragged white puffs, her eyes tearing.

The Kandells stopped at the fence-line, and one gave her the finger.

"I see you back there," she shrilled. "I'll go down in my cellar and make me a Black Clay Boy. Jab pins in its eyes, and prick you blind!"

Now where the hell had she gotten that idea? A Black Clay Boy? Some senile trick of broken thoughts happening right for once. Well, maybe she could hex 'em. Maybe she'd shriveled up that pure and mean.

She shut the door, leaned against it, her heart faltering. The next second, a snowball splintered one of the side windows, spraying sparkles of glass and ice over her new sofa. She was too weak to shout again.

Smelly little shits!

A Black Clay Boy might be just the ticket, she thought. Might scare 'em. They'd run to their mommy, their father would come over to have a serious talk. She'd pretend to be a tired and desperate old woman, scared to death of his vicious brood.

No need to pretend, Willa.

Muttering under her breath, she hobbled down to the cellar, and with popping joints and many a gasp, she troweled a bucketful of the rich black bottomland that did for a floor. Then she lugged the bucket upstairs to the kitchen and set it on the table. The kitchen whined, buzzed, and hummed with the workings of small appliances and the electric motor inside the cold box . . . or could be the hum was the sound of her mind winding tight, getting ready to spew out shattered gears and sprung coils.

The wall clock ticked loud and hollow like someone clicking her tongue over and over.

Willa made the Boy's torso first, patting a lump of clay into a fat black lozenge. She added tubular arms and legs, rolling them into shape between her palms the way she did with dough before flattening it into a crust. Finally she added a featureless oval head. The whole thing was about two and a half feet long, and it reminded her of those shapes left by frightened men crashing through doors in the Saturday morning cartoons. Black crumbs of it were scattered like dead bugs on the white Formica. She reached into her apron pocket for a pincushion and. . . . Steam vented from the teakettle with a shriek, stopping Willa's heart for a dizzy split second.

Oh, God! Now she'd have to get up again.

It took her three tries to heave out of the chair. Sweat broke on her forehead, and she stood panting for almost a minute. Once she'd regained her breath, she crossed to the stove and shut off the flame. She kept a hand on the stove, stretched out the other hand to catch the edge of the table for balance, and hauled herself back across. She dropped heavily into the chair and nearly slipped off the edge.

One day soon she'd do that and fracture her damn spine.

She plucked a pin from the pincushion, and, hoping to hear a distant scream, she shoved it into the Boy's face. Pressed it home until the pinhead was flush with the clay, a tiny silver eye. It shimmered and seemed to expand. She blinked, denying the sight. It expanded again. Somehow it didn't resemble an eye any longer. More of a silver droplet, a silver bead. Her memories would be that way, she thought. Hardened into pearls. The bead melted at the edges, puddling outward like mercury (Don't tell me I need glasses!), and a memory began to unfold.

It was rich, clear, and full of juice.

"Oh, God!" she said. "It's a miracle."

The recollection rolled out from fifty years ago, during her marriage to Eden McClaren, the wealthiest citizen of Lyman, Ohio. She hadn't wanted to marry him. He was old, fiftyish, and even older in spirit, a dried-up coupon-counter. But her father had persuaded her. Man's so rich he builds his house on the finest piece of bottomland in the state, he'd said. You won't do any better than a man who can afford to waste land like that. Marry him, marry him, marry him. And her mother, who'd had her doubts, what with Eden being an atheist, had eventually chimed in, Marry him, marry him, marry him.

What was an eighteen-year-old girl to do?

Eden courted her in a manner both civil and distant. He'd sit on the opposite end of the porch swing, as far from her as possible, gazing out at the hedge, and say, "I'm quite taken with you, girl."

She would stare at her clasped hands, watching her fingers strain and twist, wishing he'd blow away in a puff of smoke. "Thank you," she'd say.

After their wedding supper of overdone beef and potatoes and stale bread pudding, he sat her down and informed her that she would have to perform her wifely duty once a week. More would fray the moral fiber, and less would be unsalubrious. Then he took her upstairs and deflowered her in a perfunctory fashion, propping himself above her, thrusting in and out, maintaining a rhythm of one, two, one, two, regular as a metronome, until he sighed and gave a quiver and rolled off, leaving her with a fair degree of pain and no pleasure, wondering why people made such a fuss over sex.

But she knew why.

Knew it in her heart, her loins.

She wanted a lover like lightning who'd split her wide open and leave her smoldering. And if Eden couldn't give her that pleasure, she'd pleasure herself. She'd done it a few times before, despite her mother's depiction of the horrid consequences. She didn't care about the consequences. But she had been frightened by having so much pleasure without someone to hold on to afterward, and so she decided to do it in front of the full-length mirror in her bedroom. That way at least she'd have her reflection for company.

She stripped and posed before the mirror. She was a beauty, though she'd never understand how beautiful. Red hair, green eyes, milky skin. Pretty breasts tipped with pink candy, and long legs columning up to that curly red patch a shade lighter than the hair on her head. She cupped the undersides of her breasts, thumbed the nipples hard, and ran her palms down her hips, her flanks. Then she touched the place, already slippery and open to its hooded secret. Her knees buckled, weakness spread through her, and she hung on to the corner post of the mirror stand to keep her feet. Her eyelids fluttered down, her breath came harsh. She forced herself to hold her eyes wide, wanting to see what happened to her face when the pleasure started to take. Her cries fogged the mirror, and her mouth twisted, and her eyes tried to close, tried to squeeze in all that good feeling, and. . . .

"Slut!" Eden shouted from the door. "Bitch!"

Despite his rage, he seemed to have enjoyed the show. His face was flushed, his crotch tented.

"I'll not have it!" he said. "I'll not have you trailing your slime . . . your filth. Fouling my house!"

For the next three days he railed at her, and on the afternoon of the third day he suffered a coronary and was confined to bed by Dr. Malloy, who tsk-tsked, and warned her to prepare for the worst.

"Curse you!" Eden said when she went into his room. As weak as he was, he warped his mouth into a frown and spat out, "Curse you!"

She wondered then what sort of curse a godless man could lay, but later she concluded it must have been one of rules and joyless limits.

They buried Eden in a comer of the bottomland. In a dream she saw his bones floating in blackness like the strange money of a savage isle. And from that dream she knew him more than she ever had. She followed the track of his blue-faced primitive ancestors with their bone knives and their terrified little gods hiding in the treetops, and she trod the rain-slick stones of Glasgow town, where black-suited Calvinists screwed their souls into twists, and she crossed the great water with a prissy man of God and his widow-to-be, watched their children breed the bloodline thin and down to this miserable cramped sputter of a soul, this mysteryless little man, sad birthright of the clan.

Scratch one McClaren, sound the horn.

Willa wanted to sell the bottomland and move to the city. She wanted to live free, to kick up her heels, to have life take her in its arms and then to a nice restaurant and maybe afterward to a hotel. What harm could come of that? Twenty-two, and she'd never had any fun.

Sell the bottomland? her family said. That'd be like selling Plymouth Rock! Bottomland's something you hang on to, something you cherish. We won't let you do it.

And they didn't.

She did Eden widow's service for a year, and for a year after that she hardly set foot off the land. One day her high-school friend Ellie Shane came to visit and said, "Willa, there's gonna be a party Friday at the old Hoskins place." She glanced left and right as if to defeat the wiles of eavesdroppers. "Gonna be college men and coupla businessmen from Chicago . . . and every one's a looker. You gotta come."

Willa couldn't say no.

This was in October, the air crisp, the leaves full turned. Bright lights sprayed from the windows of the old house, outshining the moon, and inside couples danced and groped and sought out empty rooms. Willa's man was lean and dark. He had a sharp chin and the Devil's toothy white grin, and he carried a silver pint flask that he kept forcing on her. She saw his thoughts working. . . . He'd get this townie ripped, slip it to her quick, and leave her spinning. But Willa passed on the liquor. He'd read law at Michigan, he said, but had left school to run his father's nationwide trucking firm. He tried all night to impress her with his money, never knowing he didn't have to try, that it wasn't his money she wanted. He guided her out onto the porch. A blond man was sitting with a girl on a bottomed-out sofa there, his hand hunching up under her skirt, a rat-sized creature looking for its burrow. Willa stood by the porch rail, gazing at the moon-dappled woods. Her man hemmed her in against the rail, moved in for a kiss. Willa slipped away and went halfway down the steps.

"My kisses are far my husband," she said. "But all the rest is yours." And with that she skipped down from the steps and ran into the woods.

She found an old oak with gnarly bark and a lightning scar, and leaned against it. Moonlight streamed through the webbed branches, illuminating the red-and-yellow leaves. . . . Wind seethed through them, and they looked to be shaking in separate dances, red-and-yellow spearpoints of flame. She undid the top two buttons of her blouse and touched the slope of her right breast. God! The chill of that touch went through her like something sharp and silver. She undid a third button. The wind coiled inside the blouse, fondling her. She lifted her skirt, skinned down her panties, and flung them behind the oak. She could feel herself moist and open. The man's footsteps crunched in the dead leaves. He peered into the shadows, his mouth set grim. Probably angry at her, thinking her a tease. He spotted her and came forward at a slow pace. Dark head, gleaming eyes. When he saw that she had unbuttoned the blouse, he walked faster. Stopped and tipped back the flask. His Adam's apple bobbed twice. He tossed the flask away and reached inside her blouse. His hands moved over her breasts, squeezing, molding, knowing their white rounds from every angle. "Christ," he said. "Oh, Christ." She closed her eyes and arched to his pressure. Moonlight penetrated her lids. After a few seconds she pushed him off and hiked up her skirt.

The man swallowed hard at the sight, made a soft noise deep in his throat. He tore at his buckle, ripped down his zipper, sprung out at her, a needle seeking its pole. He lifted her the necessary inch, settled into place, and plunged into her. She threw her arms back around the oak trunk, dug in with her fingers. Rough bark scraped her buttocks, but even the pain was good. He battered at her. The leaves hissed, the limbs shook, and a vibration went through the oak, as if what was going on between Willa and the man were threatening to uproot it. "Go slow," she said, the words pushed out hoarse by a thrust. "Slow, slow." That made him treat her too gently, and she told him how she needed it to build, guiding his moves. "There," she said. "There . . . like that." And even before her pleasure came, she cried out just for the joy of finally having a man hot and urgent inside her.

Afterward she went back to the party and paid no attention to him. He couldn't understand her, and his lack of understanding anointed her a mystery. He trailed her around, saying he had to see her again, he'd fly her to Chicago. Willa could have owned him, married him, and secured her future. But she had lights dancing in the miles of her eyes, and she wasn't worried about the future.

More's the pity, Willa.

Ah, God, Willa thought. Why hadn't they let her live? That part of her, that need, it was nothing sinful. How could they have wanted to be with her and not accept her all in all? She shook her head, ruing the wasted years, then glanced at the Black Clay Boy.

Was it her imagination, or was he quivering a little, as if he'd been trying to roll himself off the table?

Calm yourself, Willa . . . that's just the trembling of your head on its feeble stalk of a neck.

The Boy's silver-dot eye stared up at her. Hmm, Willa said to herself. Wonder what'd happen if I give him another. She plucked out a second pin and rammed it home.

The pinhead shimmered, began to expand into a memory.

"Lord Almighty," said Willa. "I can do magic."

After that night at the Hoskins place, Willa cut a wild track through the tame fields of Ohio possibility. Roadhouses knew her, hotels took messages for her, and midnight dirt roads where nobody drove echoed to her backseat music. Rumors smoked up from her footprints, and the word went around that while she wouldn't kiss you, you just hadn't lived till Willa McClaren doctored your Charlie. The people of Lyman scandalized her name. That Willa, they said, she wasn't never nothin' more than hips and a hole, and I hear it was her evil needs what put ol' Eden in the ground. Willa didn't care what they said. She was having her life in sweet spasms, and for now that was enough. When the time was right, she'd settle down.

Tom Selkie, a supervisor at the seat-belt factory over in Danton, knew Willa's reputation and asked her out to get himself a sample of that real fine Charlie-doctoring. That was all Willa'd had in mind, but in the back of Tom's Packard they experienced one of those intoxicating mistakes that people often confuse for love, and Willa let him kiss her. His tongue darted into her mouth, and though she liked how that felt, it startled her more than some.

"What's the matter?" Tom asked, and Willa blushed and said, "Me and Eden never did it with tongues."

Well, knowing this innocence in her made Tom feel twice a man, and he asked her straight off to marry. "Yes," said Willa, confident that fate had finally done her a turn by giving her both a good man and the Power of True Romance. But True Romance lasted a matter of weeks. Tom kissed better than he tickled, so to speak, and was more interested in drinking with the boys after work than in getting prone and lowdown with Willa. When she tried to awaken his interest, he rejected her; his rejections grew more and more blunt, until at last he suggested that something must be wrong with her, that her needs were unnatural. Bored with marriage and having little else to engage her, she got pregnant with her firstborn, Annie. The year after Annie, she bore a son. Tom, Too, his proud dad called him. The kids grew, Tom's belly sagged, and life just dragged along.

It was at the age of thirty-six that Willa next had Big Fun. She left the kids with Tom and caught the train to Cleveland to talk with a broker about some stock Eden had hidden under the fireplace bricks. On the train she struck up a conversation with Alvah Medly, a pricey hooker with silkburns on her hips and fingers prone to breaking under the weight of her many diamonds. She was a big sleepy cat of a woman, her languid gestures leading Willa to believe she had syrup instead of marrow in her bones. Voluptuous to the point that it seemed an ounce more weight would cause everything to slump and decay. She had long black hair and big chest problems and a rear end just made for easy motion. But she was no finer a looker than Willa, who had held on to beauty and could still pass for her twenty-two-year-old self.

Willa was curious about Alvah's fancyhouse life and asked dozens of questions, and Alvah, perhaps sensing something more than mere curiosity, said, "Honey, if you wanna know all about it, whyn't you give it a whirl?"

Willa was flabbergasted. "Uh," she said, "well . . ." And then, finding refuge in the dull majority of her life, added, "I'm married."

"Married!" Alvah said the word like it was something you'd scrape off your shoe. "Everybody's been married." She inhaled from a slim black cigar and blew a smoke ring that floated up to the corner of the compartment and spelled out a lie. "The life ain't nothin' but one long lazy lack of limitations."

The train rattled as it went over a crossing, and everything inside Willa's head rattled. Could what Alvah was saying be true? The whole vital world was barreling east, shaking side to side, and blasting out its warning to the sexless villages of the heartland.

"You come on over to Mrs. Gacey's tonight," said Alvah, "and I bet she'll give you a try."

"I don't know," said Willa distractedly.

" 'Course you don't, honey," said Alvah. "How you gonna know 'less you explore the potentials?" She chuckled, "And believe you me, there's some mighty big potentials come through the door of Mrs. Gacey's."

Willa couldn't think of anything to say. Her mind was miles ahead in Cleveland, in a room with a dark and faceless stranger.

"You come on over," said Alvah. "Mrs. Gacey'll fix you up with a room and a trick or two."

"Well," said Willa hesitantly. "Maybe . . . maybe just one."

That night she lay amid perfume and shadow on a harem bed draped in filmy curtains, wearing a scrap of silk and a few of Alvah's spare jewels. The door opened, and a gray-haired monument of a man walked in. His face had a craggy nobility that looked as if it should be printed on money. Willa was tense, but when she saw how the man stared. . . . Oh, she could almost see how she appeared to him. A red-haired, green-eyed bewitchment with her silk pushed up to reveal a hint of that down-pointed curly patch of fire between her thighs. The man parted the curtain and sat on the edge of the bed, drinking her in.

"Good evenin'," he said.

"Evenin'," said Willa, a little confused. She hadn't thought she'd have to talk.

"Now where in the world did Mrs. Gacey find a girl like you?" asked the man.

"Lyman," said Willa.

"Lyman." The man loosened his tie and seemed to be trying to locate the place in some interior atlas.

"It's near Danton . . . that's the Winton County seat."

"Ah, yes. I carried Winton three to one."

"Whatcha mean you carried it?"

The man looked at her askance. "You don't recognize me?"

"No," said Willa. "You famous or somethin'?"

"I'm the governor," said the man, unbuttoning his shirt.

"You are? I voted for you!"

The man unbuckled his belt and smiled a warm professional smile. "I trust your enthusiasm for my candidacy has remained undimmed."

Willa enjoyed her evening with the governor. It gave her a chance to try some things that Eden and Tom had considered either unnatural or unmanning. But there was a distance to this kind of passion that didn't appeal to her, and when Alvah came in to find out how things had gone, she told her she didn't think she had the stuff it took for the life.

"Oh, you got what it takes, honey," said Alvah, sitting beside her. "You just don't know it."

Her robe had fallen partway open, and the globes of her breasts were visible, marble-white and moon-smooth. Looking at them, Willa suddenly perceived in Alvah a kind of sad blankness, as if a greater sadness had been erased or paved over, and she felt a wave of affection for this sculpture of a woman. And maybe her affection washed across the space between them, because Alvah put a hand on Willa's stomach and caressed its curve, resting it on her upper thigh. One of her fingertips brushed the margin of Willa's curly hair.

"You're so beautiful," said Alvah, her voice a tongue of shadow in that perfumed place.

There was a squirmy feeling in Willa's stomach, and she was a bit scared . . . but not scared enough to ask Alvah to take her hand away. "You're prettier than me," she said meekly, entranced by the desire in Alvah's face and by an anticipation of forbidden fruit.

Alvah eased her hand an inch south and down between. "No, honey," she said. "It's you, it's you."

Willa tried not to respond, but she could feel her pulse tapping out the message, "Yes, I will," against Alvah's fingertip.

"Please," whispered Alvah, and that word was a little wind that went everywhere through Willa, that told her a thousand things no one had ever troubled to tell her, that elevated her to something perfect and needed, that showed Alvah's need to be as strong and unalloyed as her own. Please, please. The word lowered over her like a veil, like the veil of Alvah's black hair fanning across her stomach, curtaining her off from the moral precincts of Lyman and her marriage. Willa wouldn't have believed a woman could make her bum, and true, it felt strange to be loved and not have a body covering her upper half, but Alvah's kisses and touches gave a tenderness to pleasure that she had never known from a man's rough bark. And though Willa had dreaded the idea of doing to Alvah what Alvah had done for her, though she set to it out of duty not desire, she came to desire. It seemed she had entered some Arab kingdom of musk and honey, some secret temple where a new god basked in its own heat, and when Alvah's white stomach quaked and her thighs clamped tight, Willa knew for the first time what it was to have the power and pleasure of a man.

For six years thereafter Willa guest-starred at Mrs. Gacey's and passed the idle hours in Alvah's arms. Eden's stocks had proved worthless, but Willa's one-trick stands gave her the profit required to justify her Cleveland weekends to Tom, and she let him think that the stocks were the source of this extra money. Her relationship to Alvah was the closest thing to love she had ever known, soft and slow and undemanding, and she would have told far greater lies to maintain it. But all good things must come to an end, or such was the regulation of Eden's curse. When Tom got fired from the seat-belt factory (Woman, don't you even think 'bout sellin' that bottomland!), Willa was forced to take a job, and her weekends were no longer her own.

The memory evaporated, and Willa pinched up a nose from the Black Clay Boy's face. His chest rose and fell rapidly, and breath whined through his tiny nostrils. But no new memory breathed from him. She gouged out a mouth and listened hard. Heard a noise that brought to mind those lumps of sadness often disgorged from her own chest. But maybe that was his first word, because the noise opened just like the widening of a silver eye into a world as fresh as yesterday.

"What's happening?" Willa asked, becoming terrified now of magic and miracles.

The kitchen ticked and buzzed, and the Black Clay Boy lay silent. But Willa thought this absence was an answer all the same.

Willa waited tables at O. V. Lindley's Dirtline Café, its name deriving from the line of dirt that showed on the wrists of the farm boys who ate there when they took off their work gloves. They would come in drunk and sit swaying at the counter, pawing and teasing Willa, plugging the leaks in their souls with quarters'-worths of country and western philosophy from the glowing sage of the jukebox. She searched among them for a lover, but found no one of the proper measure. Sometimes she would go into the john on her break, skin down her panties, sit on the toilet, and remember Alvah, her hand moving between her legs. Sweat would pour off her, and she would bite back her cry. But even so, they caught her on occasion and would offer to help scratch her itch.

"What I got right here," she'd say, holding up her hand, "can do the job a damn sight better than any one of you."

And because she was still beautiful, they worried that she might be right.

Three years of this.

Time seemed to speed up, to turn a corner on an entire era and accelerate into an unfamiliar country, a place without hope or virtue. Before Willa knew it, she was wrapped in a web of trouble so intricate and thick that her own needs were suffocated. First, Annie--herself a redhead and possessing a streak of Willa's wildness--got pregnant by an unknown agency, her teenage stomach stretched by a baby boy who weighed fourteen pounds on delivery, and whom she was dissuaded from naming Nomad. Bruce, her second choice, was deemed acceptable. Willa went through Annie's high-school yearbook, looking for Bruces. Found two. One deceased, one long departed. After giving birth, Annie took to her room and would pass the days listening to vapid love songs on the radio and gazing out the window, leaving Willa to care for the infant. She spooned jar after jar of purée into its mouth, watching it pale and fatten under the harsh kitchen lights, wondering if this monster child might not be the ultimate credential of the efficacy of Eden's curse. She had begun to believe in the curse, that Eden had breathed some vileness out with the words that enveloped her like an aura and restricted her life--all her pleasures seemed to run a minimal course and span that accorded with Eden's notions of moderation.

Tom developed cancer (Don't sell the bottomland), and Tom, Too took something that caused him to vomit blood and avoid mirrors for almost a month. Not long thereafter he ran away from home. Willa found a note on his pillow confessing that he was Bruce's father. From his bed of pain, Tom shouted that all this was the fault of Willa's abnormal sexual urges, and while she did not accept his reasoning, she knew it was her fault in that she had not entered motherhood with love but out of boredom. Four years after his departure, Tom, Too returned, a convert to that mean, squinty-eyed form of Christianity that everywhere spies out its enemies. He begged forgiveness and received his father's blessing. The two of them would go bowling on Wednesday nights and walk home along the river, discussing philosophy (his brush with cancer had provided Tom with the insight that We Are Everyone of Us All Alone) and real estate (Tom, Too's chosen profession). Annie had moved with Bruce into a newly built garage apartment, and Tom, Too would visit them frequently, proclaiming that the boy needed a dad. One night Willa saw him coming down Annie's stairs long after the lights had been switched off. Two weeks later, following a whirlwind courtship, Annie married a fishing-tackle salesman and moved to Akron, vowing never to set foot in Lyman again.

Willa turned fifty-one.

Amazingly she looked to be in her early thirties, an age not without a hint of maturity yet nonetheless appealing. However, there was no one in sight who might respond to her appeal, and hoping to subsume her desires in spiritual pursuits, she began attending church with Tom and Tom, Too. And, lo, her faith was rewarded. The new pastor, the Reverend Robert Meister, was a ruggedly handsome man of thirty-five, with piercing blue eyes and a virile physique. A heavenly hunk. But his most attractive feature was his bachelorhood. Willa noticed the tension that flooded his face when he talked to the young girls after services, when they stuck out their gloved hands for him to shake. The poor man, she thought, imagining his solitary bouts of guilt-ridden self-abuse in a dark rectory bedroom. He didn't look at her the way he looked at the younger girls, but she determined that one day soon he would.

With a fervor that even drew grudging praise from Tom, Too, who had become the family's spiritual drill sergeant, Willa threw herself into church work. Nothing was too inconsequential for her attentions. She served on the Ladies' Auxiliary, she taught Sunday School, she organized fund-raisers and baked truckloads of cakes and cookies, all the while carrying on a flirtation with the Reverend, contriving to brush against him, touching his hand in conversation, gradually making him aware of her fundamental charms. And when the Reverend timorously suggested that she accompany him to a church conference on famine in New York, Willa knew that paydirt was near.

But two days passed at the conference, and the Reverend had yet to make his play. At last Willa contrived a trap. She ordered from room service, went to take a shower, and called out to the Reverend--who had at least been sufficiently bold to reserve adjoining rooms--asking him to answer her door when her order arrived. Then when she heard the waiter close the door behind him, heard the Reverend wrestling with the food cart, she walked buff naked into the room, affecting surprise that he was still there. The Reverend's jaw went slack, his eyes bugged, and turning back to the bathroom, Willa gave him a full view of her pert breasts, her long legs, and thighs undimpled by cellulite.

That evening over dinner, though nothing was said, Willa was, as ever, familiar with the Reverend, touching him often, letting him know that she was not displeased by the afternoon's event. But again he made no move to deepen their relationship. Desperate now, that night Willa disrobed and waited beside the connecting door until the Reverend's light was dimmed. She pressed her ear to the crack, and when she heard the beginning of heavy breathing, of creaking bedsprings, she threw open the door and walked in. The Reverend tried to conceal his actions, pretending to be wrestling with the bedclothes. But Willa was not to be denied. She flung back the covers, exposing the limp yet still tumescent evidence, and then with all the wiles she had learned while in Mrs. Gacey's employ, she proceeded to restore it to its former fisted grandeur.

The Reverend Meister proved Willa's equal in need, and together they explored the realm of Position, tying complex knots of heat and sinew that often took hours to unravel. Once Position had been exhausted, they began a study of Location. There was scarcely a place in Lyman that did not know their clandestine passion, and each grunting thrust, each stifled cry, was a godsend to Willa after those long and joyless years. She came half to believe that the Christian God had truly blessed her. "Hallelujah," she whispered as they lay in sweet congregation beneath the church's midnight altar. "Thank you, Jesus," she sighed as she stood pressed into a comer of the closet below the choir stalls, her skirts lifted high and the Reverend kneeling down to take communion. "Praise the Lord," she breathed, bending over a projector in the darkened Sunday School basement, while the Reverend mounted her from behind, and a dozen children sat in front, munching cookies and ice cream, their eyes fixed on a slide show of the Holy Land sans narration.

Willa lived in a green world again, in a world where hope and possibility conjoined. Her relationship with the Reverend was that rarest of commodities--they were friends who could make love and not allow their carnality to lead away from friendship. And in their lovemaking . . . well, let it suffice to say that the depth of Willa's devotion and the extent of the Reverend's commitment to excellence were compatible in every extreme.

But, lo, this too shall pass.

One night at the suggestion of Tom, Too, they had the Reverend over for dinner, and after the dessert dishes had been cleared away, Tom, Too displayed a packet of photographs he had taken, their subject being Willa and the Reverend. "Now this here," he said, handing one around, "it'll blow up real nice for the church newsletter. And this here"--he handed over another displaying a complex tangle of flesh, half of which comprised an illegality in the state of Ohio--"I was figurin' to do up some eight-by-ten glossies."

The Reverend lowered his eyes, and Willa shut hers.

"This has really got to stop," said Tom, Too. "Right, Dad?"

Tom was trembling, apoplectic, squeezing the arms of his chair.

Tom, Too held up yet another photograph that showed the lovers beneath the altar, the moonlit shadow of the cross thrown across them. "This one's got dandy symbolic value. Oughta raise a few eyebrows in the bishop's office." He searched among the remaining photographs. "Hey, Dad," he said breezily, picking one and sliding it over. "Check that out. . . . Never woulda thought Mom was so limber."

Despite his choler, Tom looked broken, frail, on the verge of passing out, and two weeks later, he suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed and requiring constant nursing.

"Wouldn't sell the bottomland if I were you," Tom, Too advised Willa, reminding her of the leverage of his photographs. "I been considerin' puttin' up a shoppin' mall . . . after it's mine legal, of course. I 'spect the state'll take care of Dad if you can't."

That tore it for Willa. She crumbled all at once. It was as if her beauty had been its own self, had been hanging on for hope of some lasting appreciation, and now had just given up. By the time she reached the age of sixty, she looked it. At seventy, she looked a spry seventy-five, and at seventy-eight, morticians would perk up when she passed, clasp their hands and say, "How you feelin' today, Mrs. Selkie," in a tone that made clear they really wanted to know.

Tom died nine years after the disclosure of the photographs, having never spoken another word, and after the funeral, the Reverend Meister dropped over to see Willa. He had married a mousy little woman, and had written a book that everyone said was going to make him famous. Willa had never expected him to stay alone and didn't resent his marriage. In truth, she rarely thought about him anymore, being already a little distracted, halfway to dotty. But she was pleased about his book, and even more pleased when he told her that she was partly responsible for his writing it.

"Me?" she said. "What'd I do?"

"It was your intensity," he said. "When you made love, it was pure, an expression of something that had to come out. It was all of life you were taking in your arms. And if you'd been allowed to express it fully, it would have taken other forms as well. You made me want to find a way to express my own truth, to equal that intensity."

She often thought she might have done something with her life, but was glad to hear it from somebody else. "That's the second nicest thing anybody ever said to me," she told him.

"What was the nicest?"

" 'Please,' " she said, remembering.

He didn't press for clarification, and for a while they talked about trivial matters.

"How's it being married?" she asked.

"I don't love her," he said. "I just . . ."

"I know," she said. "What's it like?"

He thought a second or two. "It's like being sick . . . nothing serious. Like being in mild constant pain, and having a nurse and air conditioning."

For some reason that started her crying. Maybe it was because having him near made her notice her old-lady smell. Because he still looked young and she looked like death warmed over. He put an arm around her, but she shrugged it off. "Leave me be," she said.

"Willa . . ."

"You can't help me," she said. "I'm crazy."

"You're not crazy."

"Not now," she said. "But the minute you go, I'm gonna be wanderin' around the house, talking to myself, thinking all kinds of crazy thoughts. Now you get outta here and leave me to it."

He got to his feet, pulled on his coat, looking helpless and grim. "God bless you, Willa," he said.

"Ain't no such thing as God," she told him. "And don't argue with me 'bout it, 'cause I can feel the place where he ain't."

"Maybe you can at that," he said glumly.

When he closed the door, she had the idea that he stood outside for a long time . . . or could be he'd just left a thought leaning against the door, a wish for her, like an umbrella he had forgotten.

Night had fallen. Out the window, bare trees cast blue shadows on the rippled snow, and the air was so crystal clear it seemed you might be able to reach out and break off a chunk with a star inside it and put it in the fridge to save for Christmas. Oh, God . . . but it was a lonely clarity. And oh, God, there was life in the old girl yet, and wouldn't she love to move her hips again, and wouldn't it be more than love to know that sweet feeling of being filled, of being needed, instead of sitting here with liver spots a plague on her hands, with her son a Christian villain, and her daughter estranged, and her grandchild a hulking teenage monster who visited once a year and stole money from her purse. With no future and all her memories played, all her lovers dead . . .

Not all, whispered the Black Clay Boy.

Yes, all! Even the Reverend Meister gone, a victim of that new disease taking the gay boys. Who'd have thought it? If she'd have stayed with him, she'd bet he wouldn't have strayed that far from heaven.

The Black Clay Boy seemed to smile at that.

"Quit makin' fun of me!" she said. "You're worse than them Kandell brats."

Much worse, Willa.

Lewd little bastard! I hear that sly tone, I know what you want!

And what's wrong with that? It's what you want, too.

She made a disparaging noise. "A runt like you couldn't give me a tickle."

You might be surprised, Willa.

Willa studied him. With his silver eyes and gouged mouth, he looked like a surreal Little Black Sambo. And, she realized, he favored Eden some. Eden had had that same unfinished look. She could, she supposed, give him hands and feet. But then he'd be traipsing his footprints all over her nice carpet, strewing black crumbs everywhere. Crazy old bat, she thought.

But he did look unfinished.

And of course she knew just what he needed.

What we both need, Willa.

"Do you really think. . . ."

I'm absolutely sure.

"I don't know, I. . . ."

How you gonna know 'less you explore the potentials?

"Well," she said hesitantly. "Maybe just once."

More would be unsalubrious, said the Black Clay Boy.

She came to her feet effortlessly, as if the idea was a power, and she went rummaging through the kitchen drawer until she found the perfect accessory, long and sharp and silver. She wedged the handle into the crotch of the Black Clay Boy, jammed it in, and tried to wiggle it. . . . It held firm. She'd always hated the bottomland for the hold it exerted, but now she was grateful for this quality.

God! She felt twenty-two again, all heart and hip, all nudge softness and clever muscle.

She picked up the Black Clay Boy, held him at arm's length, and went whirling into the living room, each whirl bringing her hot thoughts closer to a boil. Oh, she was mad, mad as the pattern on the wallpaper, mad as the wind shaping her name from the eaves, saying Willa, Willa, Willa, with each and every spin, mad and whirling among the dark armoires and the huge iron-colored sideboard and the Victorian mahoganies. The shadows watched her, and the furniture was leaning together, gossiping, and in the folds of the drapes were cores of indigo that she recognized to be the cores of ghosts waiting to live their wispy lives once she had done.

"Won't be a minute," she told them gaily, and went whirling into the bedroom where the Black Clay Boy would have her once and silent, where love would once more be red and biting. She lifted him high. His silvery member was God's measure of a man, flashing with moonlight, tipped with pure charge . . . and the measure, too, of Eden's curse. She knew that clear, now. Knew that Eden's bones and dry flesh and even drier spirit infused this little devil she held in her hands. She could smell his meager scent of talcum powder and stale sweat, could sense his spirit hovering inside this loamy shell, and she knew she could expect only an Eden's worth of pleasure from his embrace, but that was so much more than she had for years, well. . . . She not fell but floated down onto the bed, sinking into its bridal deep, and oh, she was eager, and oh, she could scarcely wait.

"Love," she said.

You never had it, Willa, whispered the Black Clay Boy.

"Love!" she cried. "Love, love, love."

Forever, said the Black Clay Boy, his voice acquiring a male sternness, a tone of command.

Forever, she thought she said, the word soft as a pillow. Love forever, Love for now, pin me deep and darling into the bottomland. Split me wide, and take me where the pleasure lies.

Lies, echoed the Black Clay Boy.

He quivered in her hands, wanting her, but she held him off, tasting the delicious anticipation of the pure silver moment of going inside.

Now, Willa, now!

"When I'm ready," she said, laughing, teasing. "When I'm ready and not a moment before."

Now!

"Yes!" she said, arching toward him, her eyelids fluttering down. "Yes, now!"

With the powerful thrust of a man, with all the violent sweet force of a man's need, she pulled him to her hard, and there was pain, yes, there was pain, but it was filling and deep and real, and if she'd had the strength, she would have plucked him out and pulled him in again and again and again.

Forever.

The perfect companion of that perfect gentleman, that perfect lover, the Black Clay Boy.

His strange blank face was inches away, his eyes appeared to widen. Maybe, she thought, this was the beginning of another memory.

Not hardly.

"Oh," she said sadly, and she could see the word come white from her lips like a spirit, like the white poor thing of her life, her need, her sorrowful ending. Like a blown kiss.

Better luck next time, he told her.

"Next time?" she said, hopeful. "You mean. . . ."

Just kidding, Willa, said the Black Clay Boy as he winked shut first one silver eye and then the other.

"The Black Clay Boy" first appeared in Whispers VI (Doubleday, 1987) edited by Stuart David Schiff, and was later reprinted in The Ends of the Earth fiction collection by Lucius Shepard.

Copyright ©1987 Lucius Shepard. All rights reserved.