Sorcerer's Apprentice Read online

  There was a time, long ago, when many sorcerers lived in South Carolina, men not long from slavery who remembered the white magic of the Ekpe Cults and Cameroons, and by far the greatest of these wizards was a blacksmith named Rubin Bailey. Believing he was old, and would soon die, the Sorcerer decided to pass his learning along to an apprentice. From a family near Abbeville he selected a boy, Allan, whose father, Richard Jackson, Rubin once healed after an accident, and for this Allan loved the Sorcerer, especially the effects of his craft, which comforted the sick, held back evil, and blighted the enemies of newly freed slaves with locusts and bad health. “My house,” Richard told the wizard, “has been honored.” His son swore to serve his teacher faithfully, then those who looked to the Sorcerer, in all ways. With his father’s blessing, the boy moved his belongings into the Sorcerer’s home, a houseboat covered with strips of scrapmetal, on the river.

  But Rubin Bailey’s first teachings seemed to Allan to be no teachings at all. “Bring in fresh water,” Rubin told his apprentice. “Scrape barnacles off the boat.” He never spoke of sorcery. Around the boy he tied his blacksmith’s apron, and guided his hand in hammering out the horseshoes Rubin sold in town, but not once in the first month did Rubin pass along the recipes for magic. Patiently, Allan performed these duties in perfect submission to the Sorcerer, for it seemed rude to express displeasure to a man he wished to emulate, but his heart knocked for the higher knowledge, the techniques that would, he hoped, work miracles.

  At last, as they finished a meal of boiled pork and collards one evening, he complained bitterly: “You haven’t told me anything yet!” Allan regretted this outburst immediately, and lowered his head. “Have I done wrong?”

  For a moment the Sorcerer was silent. He spiced his coffee with rum, dipped in his bread, chewed slowly, then looked up, steadily, at the boy. “You are the best of students. And you wish to do good, but you can’t be too faithful, or too eager, or the good becomes evil.”

  “Now I don’t understand,” Allan said. “By themselves the tricks aren’t good or evil, and if you plan to do good, then the results must be good.”

  Rubin exhaled, finished his coffee, then shoved his plate toward the boy. “Clean the dishes,” he said. Then, more gently: “What I know has worked I will teach. There is no certainty these things can work for you, or even for me, a second time. White magic comes and goes. I’m teaching you a trade, Allan. You will never starve. This is because after fifty years, I still can’t foresee if an incantation will be magic or foolishness.”

  These were not, of course, the answers Allan longed to hear. He said, “Yes, sir,” and quietly cleared away their dishes. If he had replied aloud to Rubin, as he did silently while toweling dry their silverware later that night, he would have told the Sorcerer, “You are the greatest magician in the world because you have studied magic and the long-dead masters of magic, and I believe, even if you do not, that the secret of doing good is a good heart and having a hundred spells at your disposal, so I will study everything—the words and timbre and tone of your voice as you conjure, and listen to those you have heard. Then I, too, will have magic and can do good.” He washed his underwear in the moonlight, as is fitting for a fledgling magician, tossed his dishpan water into the river, and, after hanging his washpail on a hook behind Rubin’s front door, undressed, and fell asleep with these thoughts: To do good is a very great thing, the only thing, but a magician must be able to conjure at a moment’s notice. Surely it is all a question of know-how.

  So it was that after a few months the Sorcerer’s apprentice learned well and quickly when Rubin Bailey finally began to teach. In Allan’s growth was the greatest joy. Each spell he showed proudly to his father and Richard’s friends when he traveled home once a year. Unbeknownst to the Sorcerer, he held simple exhibits for their entertainment—harmless prestidigitation like throwing his voice or levitating logs stacked by the toolshed. However pleased Richard might have been, he gave no sign. Allan’s father never joked or laughed too loudly. He was the sort of man who held his feelings in, and people took this for strength. Allan’s mother, Beatrice, a tall, thick-waisted woman, had told him (for Richard would not) how when she was carrying Allan, they rode a haywagon to a scrub-ball in Abbeville on Freedom Day. Richard fell beneath the wagon. A wheel smashed his thumb open to the bone. “Somebody better go for Rubin Bailey,” was all Richard said, and he stared like it might be a stranger’s hand. And Allan remembered Richard toiling so long in the sun he couldn’t eat some evenings unless he first emptied his stomach by forcing himself to vomit. His father squirreled away money in their mattresses, saving for seven years to buy the land they worked. When he had $600—half what they needed—he grew afraid of theft, so Beatrice took their money to one of the banks in town. She stood in line behind a northern-looking Negro who said his name was Grady Armstrong. “I work for the bank across the street,” he told Beatrice. “You wouldn’t be interested in part-time work, would you? We need a woman to clean, someone reliable, but she has to keep her savings with us.” Didn’t they need the money? Beatrice would ask Allan, later, when Richard left them alone at night. Wouldn’t the extra work help her husband? She followed Grady Armstrong, whose easy, loose-hinged walk led them to the second bank across the street. “Have you ever deposited money before?” asked Grady. “No,” she said. Taking her envelope, he said, “Then I’ll do it for you.” On the boardwalk, Beatrice waited. And waited. After five minutes, she opened the door, found no Grady Armstrong, and flew screaming the fifteen miles back to the fields and Richard, who listened and chewed his lip, but said nothing. He leaned, Allan remembered, in the farmhouse door, smoking his cigars and watching only Lord knew what in the darkness—exactly as he stood the following year, when Beatrice, after swallowing rat poison, passed on.

  Allan supposed it was risky to feel if you had grown up, like Richard, in a world of nightriders. There was too much to lose. Any attachment ended in separation, grief. If once you let yourself care, the crying might never stop. So he assumed his father was pleased with his apprenticeship to Rubin, though hearing him say this would have meant the world to Allan. He did not mind that somehow the Sorcerer’s personality seemed to permeate each spell like sweat staining fresh wood, because this, too, seemed to be the way of things. The magic was Rubin Bailey’s, but when pressed, the Sorcerer confessed that the spells had been in circulation for centuries. They were a web of history and culture, like the king-sized quilts you saw as curiosities at country fairs, sewn by every woman in Abbeville, each having finished only a section, a single flower perhaps, so no man, strictly speaking, could own a mystic spell. “But when you kill a bird by pointing,” crabbed Rubin from his rocking chair, “you don’t haveta wave your left hand in the air and pinch your forefinger and thumb together like I do.”

  “Did I do that?” asked Allan.

  Rubin hawked and spit over the side of the houseboat. “Every time.”

  “I just wanted to get it right.” Looking at his hand, he felt ashamed—he was, after all, right-handed—then shoved it deep into his breeches. “The way you do it is so beautiful.”

  “I know.” Rubin laughed. He reached into his coat, brought out his pipe, and looked for matches. Allan stepped inside, and the Sorcerer shouted behind him, “You shouldn’t do it because my own teacher, who wore out fifteen flying carpets in his lifetime, told me it was wrong.”

  “Wrong?” The boy returned. He held a match close to the bowl of Rubin’s pipe, cupping the flame. “Then why do you do it?”

  “It works best for me that way, Allan. I have arthritis.” He slanted his eyes left at his pupil. “Do you?”

  The years passed, and Allan improved, even showing a certain flair, a style all his own that pleased Rubin, who praised the boy for his native talent, which did not come from knowledge and, it struck Allan, was wholly unreliable. When Esther Peters, a seamstress, broke her hip, it was not Rubin who the old woman called, but young Allan, who sat stiffly on a fiddle-back chair b
y her pallet, the fingers of his left hand spread over the bony ledge of her brow and rheumy eyes, whispering the rune that lifted her pain after Esther stopped asking, “Does he know what he doing, Rubin? This ain’t how you did when I caught my hand in that cotton gin.” Afterwards, as they walked the dark footpath leading back to the river, Rubin in front, the Sorcerer shared a fifth with the boy and paid him a terrifying compliment: “That was the best I’ve seen anybody do the spell for exorcism.” He stroked his pupil’s head. “God took holt of you back there—I don’t see how you can do it that good again.” The smile at the corners of Allan’s mouth weighed a ton. He handed back Rubin’s bottle, and said, “Me neither.” The Sorcerer’s flattery, if this was flattery, suspiciously resembled Halloween candy with hemlock inside. Allan could not speak to Rubin the rest of that night.

  In the old days of sorcery, it often happened that pupils came to mistrust most their finest creations, those frighteningly effortless works that flew mysteriously from their lips when they weren’t looking, and left the apprentice feeling, despite his pride, as baffled as his audience and afraid for his future—this was most true when the compliments compared a fledgling wizard to other magicians, as if the apprentice had achieved nothing new, or on his own. This is how Allan felt. The charm that cured Esther had whipped through him like wind through a reedpipe, or—more exactly, like music struggling to break free, liberate its volume and immensity from the confines of wood and brass. It made him feel unessential, anonymous, like a tool in which the spell sang itself, briefly borrowing his throat, then tossed him, Allan, aside when the miracle ended. To be so used was thrilling, but it gave the boy many bad nights. He lay half on his bed, half off. While Rubin slept, he yanked on his breeches and slipped outside. The river trembled with moonlight. Not far away, in a rowboat, a young man unbuttoned his lover. Allan heard their laughter and fought down the loneliness of a life devoted to discipline and sorcery. So many sacrifices. So many hours spent hunched over yellow, worm-holed scrolls. He pitched small pebbles into the water, and thought, If a conjurer cannot conjure at will, he is worthless. He must have knowledge, an armory of techniques, a thousand strategies, if he is to unfailingly do good. Toward this end the apprentice applied himself, often despising the spontaneity of his first achievement. He watched Rubin Bailey closely until on his fifth year on the river he had stayed by the Sorcerer too long and there was no more to learn.

  “That can’t be,” said Allan. He was twenty-five, a full sorcerer himself by most standards, very handsome, more like his father now, at the height of his technical powers, with many honors and much brilliant thaumaturgy behind him, though none half as satisfying as his first exorcism rune for Esther Peters. He had, generally, the respect of everyone in Abbeville. And, it must be said, they waited eagerly for word of his first solo demonstration. This tortured Allan. He paced around the table, where Rubin sat repairing a fishing line. His belongings, rolled in a blanket, lay by the door. He pleaded, “There must be one more strategy.”

  “One more maybe,” agreed the Sorcerer. “But what you need to know, you’ll learn.”

  “Without you?” Allan shuddered. He saw himself, in a flash of probable futures, failing Rubin. Dishonoring Richard. Ridiculed by everyone. “How can I learn without you?”

  “You just do like you did that evening when you helped Esther Peters….”

  That wasn’t me, thought Allan. I was younger. I don’t know how, but everything worked then. You were behind me. I’ve tried. I’ve tried the rain-making charm over and over. It doesn’t rain! They’re only words!

  The old Sorcerer stood up and embraced Allan quickly, for he did not like sloppy good-byes or lingering glances or the silly things people said when they had to get across a room and out the door. “You go home and wait for your first caller. You’ll do fine.”

  Allan followed his bare feet away from the houseboat, his head lowered and a light pain in his chest, a sort of flutter like a pigeon beating its wings over his heart—an old pain that first began when he suspected that pansophical knowledge counted for nothing. The apprentice said the spell for fair weather. Fifteen minutes later a light rain fell. He traipsed through mud into Abbeville, shoved his bag under an empty table in a tavern, and sat dripping in the shadows until he dried. A fat man pounded an off-key piano. Boot heels stamped the floor beneath Allan, who ordered tequila. He sucked lemon slices and drained off shot glasses. Gradually, liquor backwashed in his throat and the ache disappeared and his body felt transparent. Yet still he wondered: Was sorcery a gift given to a few, like poetry? Did the Lord come, lift you up, then drop you forever? If so, then he was finished, bottomed out, bellied up before he even began. He had not been born among the Allmuseri Tribe in Africa, like Rubin, if this was necessary for magic. He had not come to New Orleans in a slave clipper, or been sold at the Cabildo, if this was necessary. He had only, it seemed, a vast and painfully acquired yet hollow repertoire of tricks, and this meant he could be a parlor magician, which paid well enough, but he would never do good. If he could not help, what then? He knew no other trade. He had no other dignity. He had no other means to transform the world and no other influence upon men. His seventh tequila untasted, Allan squeezed the bridge of his nose with two fingers, rummaging through his mind for Rubin’s phrase for the transmogrification of liquids into vapor. The demons of drunkenness (Saphathoral) and slow-thinking (Ruax) tangled his thoughts, but finally the words floated topside. Softly, he spoke the phrase, stunned at its beauty—at the Sorcerer’s beauty, really—mumbling it under his breath so no one might hear, then opened his eyes on the soaking, square face of a man who wore a blue homespun shirt and butternut trousers, but had not been there an instant before: his father. Maybe he’d said the phrase for telekinesis. “Allan, I’ve been looking all over. How are you?”

  “Like you see.” His gaze dropped from his father to the full shot glass and he despaired.

  “Are you sure you’re all right? Your eyelids are puffy.”

  “I’m okay.” He lifted the shot glass and made its contents vanish naturally. “I’ve had my last lesson.”

  “I know—I went looking for you on the river, and Rubin said you’d come home. Since I knew better, I came to Abbeville. There’s a girl at the house wants to see you—Lizzie Harris. She was there when you sawed Deacon Wills in half.” Richard picked up his son’s bag. “She wants you to help her to—”

  Allan shook his head violently. “Lizzie should see Rubin.”

  “She has.” He reached for Allan’s hat and placed it on his son’s head. “He sent her to you. She’s been waiting for hours.”

  Much rain fell upon Allan and his father, who walked as if his feet hurt, as they left town, but mainly it fell on Allan. His father’s confidence in him was painful, his chatter about his son’s promising future like the chronicle of someone else’s life. This was the night that was bound to come. And now, he thought as they neared the tiny, hip-roofed farmhouse, swimming in fog, I shall fall from humiliation to impotency, from impotency to failure, from failure to death. He leaned weakly against the porch rail. His father scrambled ahead of him, though he was a big man built for endurance and not for speed, and stepped back to open the door for Allan. The Sorcerer’s apprentice, stepping inside, decided quietly, definitely, without hope that if this solo flight failed, he would work upon himself the one spell Rubin had described but dared not demonstrate. If he could not help this girl Lizzie—and he feared he could not—he would go back to the river and bring forth demons—horrors that broke a man in half, ate his soul, then dragged him below the ground, where, Allan decided, those who could not do well the work of a magician belonged.

  “Allan’s here,” his father said to someone in the sitting room. “My son is a Conjure Doctor, you know.”

  “I seen him,” said a girl’s voice. “Looks like he knows everything there is to know about magic.”

  The house, full of heirlooms, had changed little since Allan’s last year with Rubin. T
he furniture was darkened by use. All the mirrors in his mother’s bedroom were still covered by cloth. His father left week-old dishes on the hob, footswept his cigars under the bare, loose floorboards, and paint on the front porch had begun to peel in large strips. There in the sitting room, Lizzie Harris sat on Beatrice’s old flat-bottomed roundabout. She was twice as big as Allan remembered her. Her loose dress and breast exposed as she fed her baby made, he supposed, the difference. Allan looked away while Lizzie drew her dress up, then reached into her bead purse for a shinplaster—Civil War currency—which she handed to him. “This is all you have?” He returned her money, pulled a milk stool beside her, and said, “Please, sit down.” His hands were trembling. He needed to hold something to hide the shaking. Allan squeezed both his knees. “Now,” he said, “what’s wrong with the child?”

  “Pearl don’t eat,” said Lizzie. “She hasn’t touched food in two days, and the medicine Dr. Britton give her makes her spit. It’s a simple thing,” the girl assured him. “Make her eat.”

  He lifted the baby off Lizzie’s lap, pulling the covering from her face. That she was beautiful made his hands shake even more. She kept her fists balled at her cheeks. Her eyes were light, bread-colored, but latticed by blood vessels. Allan said to his father, without facing him, “I think I need boiled Hound’s Tongue and Sage. They’re in my bag. Bring me the water from the herbs in a bowl.” He hoisted the baby higher on his right arm and, holding the spoon of cold cereal in his left hand, praying silently, began a litany of every spell he knew to disperse suffering and the afflictions of the spirit. From his memory, where techniques lay stacked like crates in a storage bin, Allan unleashed a salvo of incantations. His father, standing nearby with a discolored spoon and the bowl, held his breath so long Allan could hear flies gently beating against the lamp glass of the lantern. Allan, using the spoon like a horseshoe, slipped the potion between her lips. “Eat, Pearl,” the apprentice whispered. “Eat and live.” Pearl spit up on his shirt. Allan closed his eyes and repeated slowly every syllable of every word of every spell in his possession. And ever he pushed the spoon of cereal against the child’s teeth, ever she pushed it away, gagging, swinging her head, and wailing so Allan had to shout each word above her voice. He oozed sweat now. Wind changing direction outside shifted the pressure inside the room so suddenly that Allan’s stomach turned violently—it was if the farmhouse, snatched up a thousand feet, now hung in space. Pearl spit first clear fluids. Then blood. The apprentice attacked this mystery with a dazzling array of devices, analyzed it, looked at her with the critical, wrinkled brow of a philosopher, and mimed the Sorcerer so perfectly it seemed that Rubin, not Allan, worked magic in the room. But he was not Rubin Bailey. And the child suddenly stopped its struggle and relaxed in the apprentice’s arms.