woods around Zephyr. So where had that feather come from?
I put the mayor’s feather aside, intending to return it to him though I
knew deep down in my heart I never would, and I slid the Saxon’s Lake feather
back into the White Owl box which was deposited once more into one of the
seven mystic drawers.
That night I dreamed again about the four black girls, all dressed up as
if for church. I guessed the youngest was maybe ten or eleven, the other three
around fourteen. Only this time they stood talking to each other under a
green, leafy tree. Two of them were holding Bibles. I couldn’t hear what was
being said. One of them laughed, and then the others laughed and the sound was
like water rippling. Then there was a bright flash so intense I had to close
my eyes, and I was standing at the center of thunder and a hot wind yanked at
my clothes and hair. When I opened my eyes again, the four black girls were
gone and the tree was stripped bare.
I woke up. There was sweat on my face, as if I had actually been kissed
by that scorching breath. I heard Rebel barking in the dark from the backyard.
I looked at the luminous dial of my alarm clock, seeing that it was almost
two-thirty. Rebel barked on and on, like a machine, and his voice was igniting
other dogs, so I figured since I was awake I’d go out and calm him down. I
started out of my room, and I saw at once that a light was on in the den.
I could hear a scratching noise. I followed it to the den’s threshold,
and there I saw my father, wearing his pajamas, sitting at his desk where he
wrote out the checks for the bills. He gripped a pen in his hand, and under a
pool of light he was writing or drawing something on a sheet of paper. His
eyes looked feverish and sunken, and I saw that moisture glistened on his
forehead just as it did on mine.
Rebel’s barking broke. He started to howl.
Dad muttered, “Damn it,” and stood up, being careful not to scrape his
chair on the floor. I shrank back into a shadow; I’m not sure why I did this,
but Dad looked like he didn’t want to be disturbed. He walked to the back
door, and I heard him go out to hush Rebel.
Rebel’s howling ceased. Dad would be back in a minute or two.
I couldn’t help it. I had to know what was so important for him to be up
at two-thirty doing.
I walked into the den, and I looked at the sheet of paper.
On it, my father—who was by no means an artist—had drawn a half-dozen
crude skulls with wings growing from their temples. There was a column of
question marks, and the words Saxon’s Lake repeated five times. The Lady was
written there, followed by another series of question marks. Down in the dark
was there, the pen’s point almost tearing through the paper. It was followed
in capital letters by two desperate questions: WHO? WHY?
And then a progression that made me feel sick to my stomach:
I am.
I am afraid.
I am about to have a breakd
The back door opened.
I retreated to my shadow, and watched as Dad entered the den. He sat down
again, and he stared at what he’d drawn and written.
I had never seen his face before. Not the face he wore now, at this quiet
hour before the sun. It was the face of a frightened little boy, tortured
beyond his understanding.
He opened a drawer and took out a coffee cup with Green Meadows Dairy
stenciled on the side. He brought out a pack of matches. Then he folded the
sheet of paper up, and began to tear it into small pieces. The fragments of it
went into the coffee cup. When the paper was all torn up, Dad struck a match
and dropped it into the cup, too.
There was a little smoke. He opened a window, and then there was none.
I slipped back to my room and lay down to think.
While I was dreaming of the four black girls in their Sunday dresses,
what was my father being visited by? A mud-covered figure rising from the
lake’s murky depths, borne up by a fleet of moss-backed snapping turtles? A
beaten and misshapen face, whispering Come with me, come with me, down in the
dark? A handcuff on the wrist of a tattooed arm? Or the knowledge that it
could be any man and every man who ends his life alone, forgotten, drifting
down into oblivion?
I didn’t know, and I was afraid to guess. But I knew this for sure:
whoever had murdered that unknown man was killing my father, too.
At last sleep overtook me, and gentled me away from these tribulations. I
rested, while around me my monsters kept their watch.
2
The Magic Box
THE SATURDAY NIGHT OF THE ZEPHYR ARTS COUNCIL AWARDS ceremony arrived. We all
put on our Sunday clothes, jammed into the pickup truck, and headed for the
library. My fright level, which had been hovering around eight on a scale of
ten, now moved past nine. During the week, my so-called buddies had been
telling me what might happen when I got up to read my story. If their
predictions came true, I would break out in hives, pee in my pants, and lose
my dinner from both ends in one simultaneous rush of shame and agony. Davy Ray
had told me that to be safe I ought to put a cork in my butt. Ben had said I’d
better be careful walking up to the podium in front of all those people,
because that’s when likely I’d have my accident. Johnny said he’d known a boy
who got up to read something in front of people and he forgot how to read
right then and there, had started babbling in what sounded like Greek or Zulu.
Well, I’d decided against the cork. But when I saw the lights on in the
library and all the cars parked out front, I started regretting my decision.
Mom put her arm around my shoulder. “You’re gonna do just fine,” she said.
“Yep,” Dad said. He was wearing his father’s face again, but he had dark
hollows under his eyes and I’d heard Mom telling him he might need to start
taking some Geritol. She knew something was wrong, of course, but she didn’t
know how deep the troubled current ran. “Just fine,” he told me.
The library’s meeting room was full of chairs, and at the front there was
a table and the dreaded podium. Worse yet, there was a microphone at that
podium! About forty people occupied the chairs, and Mayor Swope, Mrs.
Prathmore, Mr. Grover Dean, and some of the other contest judges were moving
around hobnobbing. I wanted to shrivel up and squeeze into a corner when Mayor
Swope saw us and started walking over, but Dad placed his hand on my shoulder
and I stood my ground.
“Hi there, Cory!” Mayor Swope smiled, but his eyes were wary. I figured
he thought I might go crazy at any second. “You ready to read your story
tonight?”
No sir, I wanted to say. “Yes sir,” was what came out.
“Well, I think we’re gonna have a good turnout.” His attention went to my
folks. “I suspect you two are awfully proud of your boy.”
“We sure are,” Mom said. “There’s never been a writer in the family.”
“He’s surely got the imagination for it.” Mayor Swope smiled again; it
was a very tight smile. “By the way, Cory: I got my hat out of my closet to
get it reshaped. You don’t happen to know what became of the—”
“Luther!” a voice interrupted. “Just the man I need to see!”
Mr. Dollar, all dressed up in a dark blue suit and smelling of Aqua
Velva, pushed up beside the mayor. I was never so relieved to see anyone in my
life. “Yes, Perry?” Mayor Swope asked, turning away from me.
“Luther, you’ve gotta do somethin’ about that dang-goned monkey!” Mr.
Dollar insisted. “That thing got on my roof last night and neither me nor
Ellen could sleep a wink for all the racket it was makin’! The thing even did
its business all over my car! I swear, there’s gotta be a way to catch it!”
Ah, Lucifer. The monkey was still loose in the trees of Zephyr, and woe
to the occupant of the house on whose roof Lucifer chose to squat. Because of
the resulting furor and threatened lawsuits for property damage, Reverend
Blessett had slinked out of town in mid-August and left no forwarding address.
“If you come up with a good idea, you let me know,” Mayor Swope answered
with a hint of irritation. “Short of askin’ the Air Force boys to drop a bomb
on the town, just about everythin’s been tried.”
“Maybe Doc Lezander can catch it, or we can pay somebody from a zoo to
come in here and…” Mr. Dollar was still talking as Mayor Swope moved away, and
Mr. Dollar followed him, prattling about the monkey. My folks and I took our
seats, and I fidgeted as more people entered the room. Dr. Parrish came in
with his wife, and lo and behold the Demon sashayed in with her fireplug
mother and candlestick dad. I tried to shrink down in my chair, but she saw me
and waved gleefully. Luckily there were no vacant chairs around us, or I’d
have walked up to the podium with a booger on the back of my neck. Then my
senses got another shock as Johnny Wilson and his parents came in. It wasn’t
two minutes later that Ben and his mother and dad entered, with Davy Ray and
his folks close behind them. I was going to have to brave their leering mugs,
but in truth I was glad to see them. As Ben had once told me, they were good
old buddies.
It must be said that the people of Zephyr were supportive of their own.
Either that, or there wasn’t much good on television on Saturday nights. A
closet was opened and more folding chairs brought out. The crowd hushed for a
few seconds as Vernon Thaxter, wearing only the last shade of his summer tan,
strode into the room with a big smile on his face. But people were used to
Vernon by now, and they’d learned where to look and where not to. “That
feller’s still nekkid, Momma!” the Demon pointed out, but except for a few
muffled chuckles and flushed faces, nobody made a scene. Vernon pulled a chair
into a corner at the back of the room and sat there, contented as a cow. Bull,
I mean.
By the time Mayor Swope and Mrs. Prathmore took a box full of plaques up
to the table at the front, there were around seventy lovers of fine literature
present. Mr. Grover Dean, a slender man of middle age who wore a neatly combed
brown wig and round glasses with silver frames, went to the front, carrying a
satchel, and he sat down at the table with the mayor and Mrs. Prathmore. He
unzipped the satchel and slid out a stack of papers that I presumed were the
winning entries in the three categories of short story, essay, and poetry.
Mayor Swope got up and tapped the microphone at the podium. He was
greeted with a squeal of feedback and a noise like an elephant breaking wind,
which brought a chorus of guffaws and made Mayor Swope motion for the man who
operated the sound system. Everybody quietened at last, the microphone was
adjusted, and the mayor cleared his throat and was about to speak when a
ripple of whispers crossed the audience. I looked back toward the door, and my
pounding heart leaped like a catfish. The Lady had just walked in.
She was dressed in violet, with a pillbox hat and gloves. There was a
veil of fine netting over her face. She looked frail, her bluish-black arms
and legs as thin as sticks. Supporting her with an ever-so-discreet hand to
her elbow was Charles Damaronde, he of the massive shoulders and werewolf’s
eyebrows. Walking three steps behind the Lady was the Moon Man, carrying his
cane and wearing a shiny black suit and a red necktie. He was hatless, his
dark-and-light-divided face and forehead there for all to see.
I think you could’ve heard a pin drop. Or, more precisely, a booger fall
from the Demon’s nose. “Oh my,” Mom whispered. Dad shifted nervously in his
chair, and I believe he might’ve gotten up and walked out if he hadn’t had to
stay for me.
The Lady scanned the audience from behind her veil. All the chairs were
taken. I got a quick glimpse of her green eyes—just a glint—but it was enough
to make me think I smelled steamy earth and swamp flowers. Then, suddenly,
Vernon Thaxter stood up and with a bow offered his chair to her. She said,
“Thank you, sir,” in her quavery voice and sat down, and Vernon remained
standing at the back of the room while Charles Damaronde and the Moon Man
stood on either side of the elegant Lady. A few people—not many, only five or
six—got up not to offer their chairs but to stalk out. They weren’t scared of
her like Dad was; it was their indignation that black people had entered a
room full of whites without asking permission. We all knew that, and the Lady
did, too. It was the time we lived in.
“I guess we can get started,” Mayor Swope began. He kept looking around
at the crowd, then toward the Lady and the Moon Man, back to the crowd again.
“I want to welcome you all to the awards ceremony of the 1964 Zephyr Arts
Council Writing Contest. First off, I’d like to thank every one of the
participants, without whom there could be no contest.”
Well, it went on like that for a while. I might have drowsed off if I
hadn’t been so full of ants. Mayor Swope introduced all the judges and the
Arts Council members, and then he introduced Mr. Quentin Farraday, from the
Adams Valley Journal, who was there to take pictures and interview the
winners. Finally, Mayor Swope sat down and Mrs. Prathmore took his place at
the podium to call up the third-place winner in the essay division. An elderly
woman named Delores Hightower shuffled up, took her essay from Mr. Dean, and
read to the audience for fifteen minutes about the joys of an herb garden,
then she was given her plaque and she sat down again. The first-place essay,
by a beefy, gap-toothed man named George Eagers, concerned the time he had a
flat tire near Tuscaloosa and the one and only Bear Bryant had stopped to ask
him if he needed some help, thus proving the Bear’s divinity.
The poetry division was next. Imagine my surprise when the Demon’s mother
stood up to read the second-place poem. This was part of it: “Rain, rain, go
away,”/ said the sun, on a summer day./ “I have lots of shinin’ to do yet,/
and those dark clouds make me get/ To cryin’.” She read it with such emotion,
I feared she was going to get to crying and rain on the whole room. The Demon
and her father applauded so loud at the end of it, you’d have thought it was
