Those who had finished their meals threw the bones in the fire, which sputtered and crackled with the new fat. We were bored by doom and gloom. While I listened to our new leader and his message, I noticed some of us did not accept his sermon. Whispers and murmurs ran along the circle. At the far end of the fire, Smaolach was not paying attention, but drawing in the dirt with a stick.
"You think you know better than me?" Béka yelled down to him. "You know what to do, and how to keep us alive?"
Smaolach kept his eyes down, pushed the point into the earth.
"I am the eldest," Béka continued. "By rights, I am the new leader, and I will not accept anyone challenging my authority."
Speck raised her voice in defense. "Nobody questions the rules... or your leadership."
Continuing to make his map, Smaolach spoke so softly as to almost not be heard at all. "I am merely showing my friends here our new position, as I estimate it from the time traveled and by calculating the stars in the sky. You have earned the right to be our leader, and to tell us where to go."
With a grunt, Béka took Onions by the hand and disappeared into the brush. Smaolach, Luchóg, Speck, Chavisory, and I huddled around the map as the others dispersed. I do not remember ever seeing a map before. Curious as to how it worked and what all of the symbols represented, I leaned forward and examined the drawing, deducing at once that the wavy lines stood for waterways—the river and the creek—but what to make of the perfectly straight line that crossed the river, the bunches of boxes arranged in a grid, and the jagged edge between one large oval and an X in the sand?
"The way I see it"—Smaolach pointed to the right side of the map— "there is what's known and what's unknown. To the east is the city. And I can only guess that the smell of the air means the city is heading our way. East is out. The question is: Do we cross the river to the south? If so, we cut ourselves off from the town." He pointed with the stick to the set of squares.
"If we go south, we would have to cross the river again and again for supplies and clothes and shoes. The river is a dangerous place."
"Tell that," Chavisory said, "to Oscar Love."
Luchóg offered an alternative. "But we don't know that another town might be somewhere over the other side. No one has ever looked. I say we scout for a place on the other side of the river."
"We need to be near the water," I volunteered, and put my finger on the wavy lines.
"But not in the water," Speck argued. "I say north and west, stick to the creek or follow the river till it bends up." She took the stick from his hand and drew where the river curved to the north.
"How do you know it bends?" Chavisory asked.
"I've been that far."
We looked at Speck with awe, as if she had seen the edge of the world. She stared back, defying anyone's challenge or disbelief. "Two days from here. Or we should find a place near the creek. It dries up in August and September some years, but we could build a cistern."
Thinking of our hideaway beneath the library, I spoke up. "I vote for the creek. We follow it from the hills into town whenever we need supplies or anything. If we go too far away—"
"He's right, you know," said Luchóg, patting his chest a?d the empty pouch beneath his shirt. "We need things from town. Let's tell Béka we want to stay by the creek. Agreed?"
He lay there snoring, slack-jawed, his arm flung over Onions at his side. She heard our approach, popped open her eyes, smiled, and put a finger to her lips to whisper hush. Had we taken her advice, perhaps we would have caught him at a better time, in a more generous mood, but Speck, for one, never had any patience. She kicked his foot and roused him from his slumber.
"What do you want now?" he roared through a yawn. Since his ascension to leadership, Béka attempted to appear bigger than he was. He was trying to imply a threat by rising to his feet.
"We are tired of this life," said Speck.
"Of never having two nights in one bed," said Chavisory.
Luchóg added, "I haven't had a smoke since that man nearly shot off my head."
Béka raked his face with his palm, considering our demands in the haze of half-sleep. He began to pace before us, two steps to the left, pivot, two steps to the right. When he stopped and folded his arms behind his back, he showed that he would prefer not to have this conversation, but we did not listen to such silent refusals. A breeze rattled the upper branches of the trees.
Smaolach stepped up to him. "First of all, nobody respects and admires your leadership more than me. You have kept us from harm and led us out of darkness, but we need a new camp, not this wandering aimlessly. Water nearby and a way back to civilization. We decided—"
Béka struck like a snake, choking off the rest of the sentence. Wrapping his fingers around Smaolach's throat, he squeezed until my friend dropped to his knees. "I decide. You decide to listen and follow. That's all."
Chavisory rushed to Smaolach's defense but was smacked away by a single backhanded slap across her face. When Béka relaxed his grip, Smaolach fell to the ground, gasping for breath. Addressing the three of us still standing, Béka pointed a finger to the sky and said, "I will find us a home. Not you." liking Onions by the hand, he strode off into the night. I looked to Speck for reassurance, but her eyes were fixed upon the violent spot, as if she were burning revenge into her memory.
CHAPTER 21
I am the only person who truly knows what happened in the forest. Jimmy's story explained for me the mystery of the drowned Oscar Love and his miraculous reappearance several days later. Of course, it was the changelings, and all the evidence confirmed my suspicion of a failed attempt to steal the child. The dead body was that of a changeling, an old friend of mine. I could picture the face of the next in line but had erased their names. My life there had been spent imagining the day when I would begin my life in the upper world. As the decades passed, the cast of characters had shifted as, one by one, each became a changeling, found a child, and took its place. In time, I had come to resent every one of them and to disregard each new member of our tribe. I deliberately tried to forget them all. Did I say a friend of mine had died? I had no friends.
While gladdened by the prospect of one less devil in the woods, I was oddly disturbed by Jimmy's account of little Oscar Love, and I dreamt that night of a lonely boy like him in an old-fashioned parlor. A pair of finches dart about an ironwork cage. A samovar glistens. On the mantelpiece sits a row of leather-bound books gilded with Gothic letters spelling out foreign tides. The parlor walls papered crimson, heavy dark curtains shutting out the sun, a curious sofa covered with a latticed needlework throw. The boy is alone in the room on a humid afternoon, yet despite the heat, he wears woolen knickers and buttoned boots, a starched blue shirt, and a huge tie that looks like a Christmas bow. His long hair cascades in waves and curls, and he hunches over the piano, entranced by the keyboard, doggedly practicing an etude. From behind him comes another child, the same hair and build, but naked and creeping on the balls of his feet. The piano player plays on, oblivious to the menace. Other goblins steal out from behind the curtains, from under the settee; out of the woodwork and wallpaper, they advance like smoke. The finches scream and crash into the iron bars. The boy stops on a note, turns his head. I have seen him before. They attack as one, working together, this one covering the boy's nose and throat, another taking out the legs, a third pinning the boy's arms behind his back. From beyond the closed door, a man's voice: "Was ist los?" A thumping knock, and the door swings open. The threshold frames a large man with outrageous whiskers. "Gustav?" The father cries out as several hobgoblins rush to restrain him while the others take his son. "Ich erkenne dich! Du willst nur meinen Sohn!"
I could still feel the anger in their eyes, the passion of their attack. Where is my father? A voice pierces the dream, calling "Henry, Henry," and I awaken to a damp pillowcase and twisted sheets. Stifling a yawn, I yelled downstairs that I was tired and that this had better be good. My mother shouted back through the door that there was a telephone call and that she was not my secretary. I threw on my bathrobe and headed downstairs.
"This is Henry Day," I grunted into the receiver.
She laughed. "Hi, Henry. This is Tess Wodehouse. I saw you out in the woods."
She could not imagine the reasons for my awkward silence.
"When we found the boy. The first one. I was with the ambulance."
"Right, the nurse. Tess, Tess, how are you?"
"Jimmy Cummings said to give you a call. Would you like to meet somewhere later?"
We arranged to meet after her shift, and she had me write down directions to her house. At the bottom of the page, I doodled the name: Gustav.
She answered the door and stepped straight out to the porch, the afternoon sunlight stippling across her face and yellow sundress. Out of the shadows, she dazzled. All at once, it seems in retrospect, she revealed what I grew to adore: the asymmetrical mottling of the colors in her irises, a blue vein snaking up her right temple that flashed like a semaphore for passion, the sudden exuberance of her crooked smile. Tess said my name and made it seem real.
We drove away, and the wind through the open window caught her hair and blew it across her face. When she laughed, she threw back her head, chin to the sky, and I longed to kiss her lovely neck. I drove as if we had a destination, but in our town there was no particular place to go. Tess turned down the radio, and we talked away the afternoon. She told me all about her life in public school, then on to college, where she had studied nursing. I told her all about parochial school and my aborted studies in music. A few miles outside of town, a new fried-chicken joint had opened recently, so we bought ourselves a bucketful. We stopped by Oscar's to steal a bottle of apple wine. We picnicked on a school playground, abandoned for the summer except for a pair of cardinals on the monkey bars, serenading us with their eight-note song.
"I used to think you were the strangest bird, Henry Day. When we were in elementary school together, you might have said two words to me. Or anyone. You were so distracted, as if you heard a song in your head that no one else could hear."
"I'm still that way," I told her. "Sometimes when I'm walking down the street or am quiet by myself, I play a tune, imagine my fingers on the keys, and can hear the notes as clear as day."
"You seem somewhere else, miles away."
"Not always. Not now."
Her face brightened and changed. "Strange, isn't it? About Oscar Love, that boy. Or should I say two little boys, alike as two pins."
I tried to change the subject. "My sisters are twins."
"How do you explain it?"
"It's been a long time since high school biology, but when an egg divides—"
She licked her fingers. "Not twins. The drowned boy and the lost boy."
"I had nothing to do with either one."
Tess swallowed a sip of wine and wiped her hands with a napkin. "You are an odd one, but that's what I liked about you, even when we were children. Since the first day I saw you in kindergarten."
I sincerely wished I had been there that day.
"And when I was a girl, I wanted to hear your song, the one that's playing in your head right now." She leaned across the blanket and kissed me.
I took her home at sunset, kissed her once at the door, and drove home in a mild euphoria. The house echoed like the inside of an empty shell. The twins were not home and my mother sat alone in the living room, watching the movie of the week on the television. Slippers crossed on the ottoman, her housecoat buttoned to the collar, she saluted me with a drink in her right hand. I sat down on the couch next to the easy chair and looked at her closely for the first time in years. We were getting older, no doubt, but she had aged well. She was much stouter than when we first met, but lovely still.
"How was your date, Henry?" She kept her eyes on the tube.
"Great, Mom, fine."
"See her again?"
"Tess? I hope so."
A commercial broke the story, and she turned to smile at me between sips.
"Mom, do you ever ..."
"What's that, Henry?"
"I don't know. Do you ever get lonely? Like you might go out on a date yourself?"
She laughed and seemed years younger. "What man would want to go out with an old thing like me?"
"You're not so old. And you look ten years younger than you are."
"Save your compliments for your nurse."
The program returned. "I thought—"
"Henry, I've given this thing an hour already. Let me see it to the end."
Tess changed my life, changed everything. After our impromptu picnic, we saw each other every day of that wonderful summer. I remember sitting side by side on a park bench, lunches on our laps, talking in the brilliant sunshine. She would turn to me, her face bathed in brightness, so that I would have to shade my eyes to look at her, and she told me stories that fed my desire for more stories, so that I might know her and not forget a single line. I loved each accidental touch, the heat of her, the way she made me feel alive and fully human.
On the Fourth of July, Oscar closed the bar and invited nearly half the town to a picnic along the riverbank. He had arranged the celebration in gratitude to all of the people who had helped in the search and rescue of his nephew, for the policemen and firemen, doctors and nurses, all of Little Oscar's schoolmates and teachers, the volunteers—such as myself, Jimmy, and George—the Loves and all their assorted relatives, a priest or two in mufti, and the inevitable hangers-on. A great feast was ordered. Pig in a pit. Chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs. Corn and watermelon trucked in from down south. Kegs of beer, bottles of the hard stuff, tubs of ice and sodas for the youngsters, a cake specially made in the city for the occasion—as big as a picnic table, iced in red, white, and blue with a gold THANK YOU in glittering script. The party began at four in the afternoon and lasted all night. When it became dark enough, a crew of firemen shot off a fireworks display, fading sparklers and candles popping and fizzing when they hit the river. Our town, like many places in America at the time, was divided by the war, but we put Vietnam and the marches behind us in deference to the celebration.
