“I prayed for the power to help ease our financial strain,” I said. From the ever-widening crack in the floor, the Devil chuckled.
I had not prayed for this at all.
My voice rang out in that close room.
“I prayed for a way to help us all.”
“You’re a good girl, Lulu,” my father said. “You’re a good sister to Leo. Poor little boy, he’ll always be a child, and who will be here for him when your mother and I are in Glory? Just you, and you’ll be a fine sister to him no matter what becomes of our baby boy.”
Thinking of Leo’s future was agony. Until that moment, no one had outright said that he would end up in my care, but no one had to. My brother, who squeezed my heart dry, was the single reason I could not truly picture myself in the world beyond Cedartown. How would a man who couldn’t walk on his own and whose speech made no sense to strangers earn his living on a farm or in a city? Leo wouldn’t ever be able to do his business in the privy on his own.
“Mrs. Wolf says Mesmerists have a duty to use their powers to cure disease.”
Daddy toyed with my letter.
“Mrs. Wolf was deluded,” he said. “It’s a sorry thing that my own good hard work can’t lift this family higher.”
Daddy held my letter up, the sunlight flashing the page bone white. And then he tore the letter in two.
I grabbed at it, but he held the paper out of my reach.
“You can paste the letter back together and I can carry it to the post office for you, but you know how that will look when your cousin reads a letter made of scraps. That’s evidence of your trying to renounce an honest statement and then thinking the better of it. Inconsistency.”
He slipped the two halves of the letter between the pages of Modern Marvels of Alchemy.
“You can borrow the book,” he said, not looking at me.
Mrs. Wolf’s book? My heart jumped into my throat, but I stayed silent in case I’d misunderstood him. Mrs. Wolf so clearly wrote about love and charity, about the reward in our work when she began to mesmerize.
“The Mesmerist book,” Daddy added, as if he’d heard my thoughts. “Consider it a loan of light entertainment.”
I was dismissed.
Now that The Truth of Mesmeric Influence didn’t need to be hidden, where would I keep it? Leaving the book out on a table the way I would a school book or one of Momma’s novels seemed discourteous to Mrs. Wolf. Exposure to the ordinary trials of life could leach the information right out. After some reordering of the glass-tipped hairpins in my box of keepsakes and protecting the fingernail-sized window panes of mica chips by covering them with a square of fabric, the book fit into box, if I put my found buttons in each corner. The top of the box wouldn’t quite lie flat this way, but I had made a safe and sound bed nonetheless.
Who was Mrs. Wolf? There was no illustration, no lithograph anywhere in the pages, but I could hear her voice when I read. My mother’s voice clanged like a fork striking a metal bowl. My own voice was low, and sometimes I spoke so quietly that teachers asked me to speak up. Mrs. Wolf’s voice was musical, I was sure. She was an alto singer, a sound like breath blown across the top of a bottle.
She wrote, Miss Elslag, returning from her place of worship, was struck to the ground by lightning. The shock rendered her dumb, with the ability to speak only the words yes or no when asked.
She could have been telling me my own story. Miss Hurst, lying in her bed during a lightning storm, was struck by the fury inside her. Her inexplicable emotions made a connection with the transference of human energy we Mesmerists know as Magnetism.
What had happened to Miss Elslag? Momma was calling from downstairs, so I lay a glass-tipped pin against the page to hold my place, and put The Truth of Mesmeric Influence into its bed.
After supper, Momma plucked the forks and knives from my hand before I could clean them.
“Go and see your daddy,” she said. “He’s got big plans for you tonight.” She cupped my chin. “I’ll wash up. It’ll give Leo something new to look at.”
I tried to pull my face from her grip.
“Don’t you know?” she said, sparkling. “You’re a great, great gift to us.”
I nodded, my chin still in her vise. I held my breath to block the thick stink of mouths and teeth on the dirty fork tines. When she let me go, I ticked Leo’s ribs to make him laugh, and hurried to my father’s study.
He was waiting for me with a pocket notebook and a fresh pencil. He smiled to beat the band, which made me want to look behind me to see who he was really smiling at.
He laughed.
“Lulu, teaching you will be easy as pie. You’ve already seen for yourself how ready folks are for humbug if they don’t recognize what’s happening to them.”
Dale must have been ready for humbug—she was the one who’d thought up the vermin and fireballs big as thumbs. I took a seat across from his desk and tucked my fingers into my palms to keep from picking at the arm rest.
Daddy flipped open his notebook and cleared his throat.
“Your average person, if he figures out he’s been humbugged, won’t make a peep about it because he doesn’t want to admit he’s guilty of falling for the humbug,” he began.
That was true. Mr. Campbell hadn’t looked straight at me since the day I’d captivated him. He knew I’d done something, but he would never own up to it. Each time he avoided my gaze my stomach fluttered. I’d won a game that he hadn’t agreed to play.
Daddy reached beneath his desk and pulled out a broom. The straw had been stripped from the business end. From beside his desk, he kicked out a long past useful wooden chair. Someone had cut down the old chair’s legs. He pointed to the chair, and without questioning him, I went to sit in it. The thing was cut so close to the floor that I nearly had to squat. I felt more oversized than usual, as if I were a grown baby. With nothing else to do, I reached upward for the destroyed broom.
“What good is this if it won’t sweep?” I asked.
“Exactly what you’re doing,” Daddy said, mimicking how I held the broom. He extended his arms out before him, making the wooden stick the crossbar of an “H.”
There didn’t seem to be any other way to hold the broom, but fooling with the thing made no sense, and I set the broom down.
“This gift you have, making innocent people believe, is unusual in a young person. I’ve seen it work, and I’ve also seen it fail,” Daddy said. He began to pace. “Your cousin believed she saw electricity right here in our house, but I knew, and so did you, that all she saw was lightning out your window. Your sticking her with that pin gave her the go-ahead to surrender to her secret beliefs. All she needed was permission, Lulu.”
Jumping up and running out of the room was a bad idea. But he was acting like Dale, loading significance onto one stupid thing I’d done. Startling my cousin or staring into someone’s eyes until they lost their way wasn’t me giving anyone the go-ahead for what they privately wanted.
He talked on, flipping through a notepad.
“In your lessons with me, you will learn to manufacture the impression of great feats of strength,” he said. “Not hoodoo. Nothing more than understanding how people find what they desire in the simple aspects of life they observe. Also, we’ll learn some basic action of the fulcrum and the lever.”
“Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion,” I volunteered, always the good student. Mrs. Wolf already said as much. She’d written in the first few pages of her book how the mesmerized patiently observe