Avram Davidson - The Woman who Thought she Could Read

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THE WOMAN WHO THOUGHT SHE COULD READ

Avram Davidson

[07 feb 2002—scanned, proofed and released for #bookz]

Avram Davidson's ironic fantasies are treasures. He is a modern master, author of such

novels as The Phoenix and the Mirror and the classic chronicles of Dr. Ezsterhazy. His stories have

been praised by such luminaries as fantasy authors Peter S. Beagle and Damon Knight for being

perhaps the best of all contemporary fantasies. He characteristically juxtaposes the supernatural

or the magical with the naturalistic and gritty reality of contemporary life. This is a story about

losing magic but it is still, somehow, an affirmation of wonder. One wants magic to redeem us.

But the world stacks the deck against us and the magic is sometimes inadequate to the task in the

face of common ignorance. This story offers an interesting contrast to Anne McCaffrey's "A

Proper Santa Claus" (pp. 183-91).

About a hundred years ago a man named Vanderhorn built the little house. He built it one and a half

stories high, with attached and detached sheds snuggling around it as usual; and he covered it with

clapboards cut at his own mill—he had a small sawmill down at the creek, Mr. Vanderhorn did. After

that he lived in the little house with his daughter and her husband (being a widower man) and one day he

died there. So the daughter and son-in-law, a Mr. Hooten or Wooten or whatever it was, they came into

his money which he made out of musket stocks for the Civil War, and they built a big new house next to

the old one, only further back from the street. This Mr. Wooten or Hooten or something like that, he

didn't have any sons, either; and his son-in-law turned the sawmill into a buggy factory. Well, you know

what happened to that business! Finally, a man named Carmichael, who made milk wagons and baggage

carts and piewagons, he bought the whole Vanderhorn estate. He fixed up the big house and put in

apartments, and finally he sold it to my father and went out of business. Moved away somewhere.

I was just a little boy when we moved in. My sister was a lot older. The old Vanderhorn house

wasn't part of the property any more. A lady named Mrs. Grummick was living there and Mr.

Carmichael had sold her all the property the width of her house from the street on back to the next lot

which faced the street behind ours. I heard my father say it was one of the narrowest lots in the city, and

it was separated from ours by a picket fence. In the front of the old house was an old weeping willow

tree and a big lilac bush like a small tree. In back were a truck garden and a few flowerbeds. Mrs.

Grummick's house was so near to our property that I could look right into her window, and one day I

did, and she was sorting beans.

Mrs. Grummick looked out and smiled at me. She had one of those broad faces with high

cheekbones, and when she smiled her little bright black eyes almost disappeared.

"Liddle boy, hello!" she said. I said Hello and went right on staring, and she went right on sorting her

beans. On her head was a kerchief (you have to remember that this was before they became fashionable)

and there was a tiny gold earring in each plump earlobe. The beans were in two crocks on the table and

in a pile in front of her. She was moving them around and sorting them into little groups. There were more

crocks on the shelves, and glass jars, and bundles of herbs and strings of onions and peppers and

bunches of garlic all hanging around the room. I looked through the room and out the window facing the

street and there was a sign in front of the little house, hanging on a sort of one-armed gallows. Anastasia

Grummick, Midwife, it said.

"What's a midwife?" I asked her.

"Me," she said. And she went on pushing the beans around, lining them up in rows, taking some

from one place and putting them in another.

"Have you got any children, Mrs. Grummick?"

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