Sister Emily's Lightship: And Other Stories

  Each day my little men went off to their mine and I tidied and swept and made-up the dinner. Then I’d go outside to play. I had deer I knew by name, grey squirrels who came at my bidding, and the sweetest family of doves that ate cracked corn out of my hand. The garden was mine, and there I grew everything we needed. I did not mourn for what I did not have.

  But one day a stranger came to the clearing in the woods. Though she strived to look like an old woman, with cross-eyes and a mouth full of black teeth, I knew her at once. It was my stepmama in disguise. I pretended I did not know who she was, but when she inquired, I told her my name straight out.

  “Summer,” I said.

  I saw “Snow” on her lips.

  I fed her a deep-dish apple pie and while she bent over the table shoveling it into her mouth, I felled her with a single blow of the fry pan. My little man helped me bury her out back.

  Miss Nancy’s stories had always ended happy-ever-after. But she used to add every time: “Still you must make your own happiness, Summer dear.”

  And so I did. My happiness—and hers.

  I went to the wedding when Papa and Miss Nancy tied the knot. I danced with some handsome young men from Webster and from Elkins and from Canaan. But I went back home alone. To the clearing and the woods and the little house with the eight beds. My seven little fathers needed keeping. They needed my good stout meals. And they needed my stories of magic and mystery. To keep them alive.

  To keep me alive, too.

  Speaking to the Wind

  I WAS YOUNGER THAN my cousin Michael by a year and a half, always content to follow where he led, but never content to stay at home like a good southern girl. Even at six, two years away from New York City where I had lived until war had brought us all back to my Grandma’s old brick house, I hung on to the obstinacy that was bred, or so my grandmother always said, in the stone bones of the north.

  “She’s her daddy’s girl, not yours, Belle,” she told Mamma. “She’s got that stone mind. Once made up it never moves.”

  But Mamma always laughed when Grandma said that. “I’ve got the same stone mind, then, Mom. I married him,” she reminded her mother.

  “And against my better judgement, too,” Grandma said, though she always liked Dad, flirted with him in that way Virginia women have that promises much but means nothing at all. She’d even flirted with him as he went off on the big boat, his second lieutenant’s khakis the color of dog poo. That’s what Michael had said, with his hand over his mouth so he could deny having said it. Dad went off to win the Big War; he’d promised and we all pretended to believe him.

  We were huddled in the house that day, marooned on the settee. Mama was reading George Macdonald to Michael and me, and we were all trying not to notice the wind. A hurricane had come through, rattling the windows for hours, moaning down the chimney like a sick woman. The sky had been black at midday, and if there had been any eye to the storm, Mama said, it never blinked over Hampton Roads.

  “Why can’t we just ride on its back,” I asked, pointing to the book. “Like Diamond does.” I half believed, half didn’t believe the story.

  “Because that’s the North Wind in the book, stupid,” Michael said. “Not a hurricane.”

  I was so used to accepting whatever Michael told me, I didn’t question his reasoning. Or lack of same.

  The time the hurricane punished us seemed like days, though it was only a single long morning, and then the thing finally passed. But there were still high winds squealing over the bay and upturned boats bobbing about like bathtub toys. Waves splashed against the sea wall as if the old storm were still making angry feints at the town. The air was electric with the tail end of the storm and we all felt it.

  “Very dangerous still,” Mamma said and coming from New York City we understood danger.

  As soon as the storm subsided, we piled into the car and Mamma drove us to back to Michael’s house. There the grownups made endless lists of storm damage, arguing over what had to be attended to first.

  Michael was the first to leave that boring parley, going outside onto the ruined lawn and calling me to follow.

  I let myself out while Mamma and Grandma continued to quarrel good-naturedly, Aunt Cecily helping first one side, then the other with her sharp answers. No one even noticed when I was gone.

  Michael didn’t greet me. It wasn’t necessary. He just turned and ran and I ran after him.

  If I had given thought to it, I would have said that I would follow Michael forever. He was my knight, my champion, closer to me than any brother.

  We galloped along the crumbling sidewalk, split by years of grass intrusions, like young colts let out of the barn. Then we cut across Miz Marshall’s lawn, and slipped through the back yard of the Parson house where we could hear Joshua Parson, the one whose head was too big for his body, calling out in his high genderless voice—“Mama-papa-baby-o,” the only sentence he knew.

  The sycamores’ heavy sighing covered any noise we made and the Parson’s dog, used to our daily incursions, did not bark but whined as if he would go with us.

  And then we were entirely free, spitting ourselves out onto the road that led to the sea wall. When we were close enough to see the spray and the gray misty bay beyond, we stopped, considering.

  “Let’s walk on the wall,” I said, the wind tearing the words from my mouth and forcing my lips into a kind of grimace. I suddenly loved the hardness of that wind against my face, enjoyed the way it molded my little print dress to my body and tore the red ribbons out of my hair.

  Michael hesitated.

  It was only a moment, really. But in that moment I suddenly understood how different we were. His hesitation wasn’t a lack of courage but rather an older child’s calculation of odds. He knew we’d be punished if we did what I wanted and he was figuring out whether it was worth the spanking. Michael understood many things I did not. He’d already guessed that my father would not come home whole. But I still had a young child’s faith in the persistence of youth, in the promise of magic, in the inconceivability of change.

  And yet it was a moment of change nontheless.

  “Come on,” I said.

  But still he stood, hesitating, as if it was not my place to make suggestions, only his.

  I gave him a disgusted look and ran head down into the wall of wind till I managed to get on to the stone wall overlooking the bay.

  As I climbed onto the gray rock, my red sandals gave me little purchase. My right knee scraped painfully on the stone. And once I was standing up, I was almost swept backward into the street by the force of the wind. If it had not been coming off the bay, but rather blowing toward it, I would probably have fallen in and drowned, for the tide was full and great gray-white waves beat time after time against the wall. They drenched me, as if a monstrous animal was spitting in my face.

  I licked my lips. My tongue tasted salt from the spray. Laughing, I turned to look behind me.

  Michael was still across the road his face puckered with anger and something else. Perhaps it was concern. Perhaps it was fear. I couldn’t read his expression. All I knew was that he suddenly looked like a little old man. He didn’t move.

  For the first time ever, I turned my back to him, and opened my arms wide to the wind. I spoke to it as one talks to a cat—softly but with authority, yet ever mindful of the claws. I made it some promises, promises that were couched in the grammar of the day, in the vocabic lapses of a six year old.

  In that instant the wind beast grabbed me up, its claws momentarily sheathed, and blew me out over the ocean. I was not guiled by its gentleness. At any minute it could change.

  Below I could see boats straining at their anchors, and waves like catspaws making runnels along the green water.

  “Higher,” I crowed with delight. “Higher!”

  The wind beast laughed at me and whipped me higher, till we were way up amongst the clouds.

  The closer clouds were white and strung out like pearls along a grey s
trand. I opened my mouth and drank them in, but they melted away, like cotton candy at the fair, only not nearly so sweet.

  Ahead the clouds were banked one atop another, cumbersome castles with rooms that constantly shifted.

  “There!” I cried, “take me there.” And the wind beast carried me where I willed: up to the cloud castles, across a growing thunderhead, over a flock of dark birds that moved as a single entity.

  In thanks I patted the wind’s great head down on the forehead, while its mane flew out in every direction, great streamers of white-gold hair.

  We flew high and low; we skimmed the bright caps of water and we busted through the clouds. We spun ships around in the bay and we toyed with lost kites and a red balloon. We were not always kind.

  But I was only six and—somewhere over the water—I grew tired of playing. I might have even yawned. I certainly felt heavy-lidded.

  The wind, too, seemed to have tired. It sagged a bit and flew more slowly now, back across the bay till we were a small shadow over the land. Cars and buses crawled like cumbersome ants beneath us as the wind bore me on toward the town.

  I knew that town, with its cozy bus lanes, the familiar white clapboard library and its brass-handled door, the rows of red brick workers’ houses in double lines back-to-back. So small, like a game board spread below me.

  The wind was softer now, and almost out of breath. It puffed and huffed, an old, tired cat.

  “It’s all right,” I whispered, stroking the back of its whitened head. “We can go home, now.”

  And then it set me down, in the sand beyond the seawall, the landscape exposed by the ebbing tide.

  “Janie! Janie!” Michael screamed, racing over to where I sat with my feet in a small tidepool. “Are you alright? What happened? Where have you been?”

  What could I tell him? What would he believe?

  Shrugging, I looked down into the depths of the tidepool. I watched as a wisp of wind, hardly more than a kitten’s claw, made a line across the water.

  A warning?

  Or a promise?

  “You disappeared,” Michael accused, guessing he’d be blamed if I got hurt.

  “I fell,” I said. “I’m fine.” Then I looked up at him and smiled. It was the wind’s smile, all wildness and air. He could not bear to look at it and turned away. Away from fairy stories and phantastes, into the world of mathematics and retorts and facts.

  But what did I care, who had sat astride the wind, who had flown above the earth and eaten the clouds. What did I care, then—or now—a grandmother whose own grandchildren have made friends of the wind beast, riding behind me over the miles of dark sea and brown sand.

  Sometimes bargains with wildness are better than any pledges to the polite and tame world.

  Better made.

  And better kept.

  The Thirteenth Fey

  IN THE MIDDLE OF a stand of white birch on a slight rise is a decaying pavilion, inferior Palladian in style. The white pilasters have been pocked by generations of peashooters, and several kite strings, quite stained by the local birds, still twine around the capitols. The wind whistles through the thin walls, especially in late spring, and the rains—quite heavy in November and April—have made runnels in the paper. It is very old paper anyway. As a child I used to see different pictures there, an ever-changing march of fates. My parents once thought I had the sight until they realized it was only a vivid imagination supplemented by earaches and low grade fevers. I was quite frequently ill.

  I was born in that pavilion, on the marble and velvet couch my parents used for the lying-in for each of my twelve brothers and sisters and me. And I was hung on my baby board in the lower branches of the trees, watched over by butterflies; the mourning doves to sing me to sleep, a chorus of crows to wake me. It was not until I reached my thirteenth year that I understood what my dear mother and her mother before her knew and grieved for but could do nothing about. It was then that I discovered that we are tied to that small piece of land circling the pavilion, tied with bonds of magic as old and secure as common law. We owe our fortunes, our existence, and the lives of our children to come to the owners of that land. We are bounden to do them duty, we women of the fey. And during all the time of our habitation, the local lords have been a dynasty of idiots, fornicators, louts, greedyguts and fools.

  As the last of thirteen children I was not expected to be of any special merit. It is the first and seventh whose cranial bones are read, whose palms are searched, whose first baby babblings are recorded. Yet I had been marked with a caul, had been early to walk, early to talk, early to fly. And then there were my vivid dreams, my visions brought on by ague and earache and the peculiar swirling patterns of moldy walls. I was, in my father’s words, “ever a surprise.”

  My father was a gentle soul. His elven ancestry showed only in his ears, which he was careful to hide beneath a fringe of greying hair, so as not to insult his wife’s innumerable relatives who dwelt nearby in their own decaying whimseys, reposes, and belvederes. They already believed my mother had married beneath her. But my father, though somewhat shy on magic, lived for his library, stocked with books of the past, present, and future. He was well read in Gramarye, but also in Astrology, Philosophy, and Computer Science, an art whose time was yet to come.

  My mother was never so gentle. She came from the Shouting Fey, those who could cause death and consternation by the timber of their voices. She had a sister who, on command, could bring down milk from dried-up cows with one voice, or gum it up with another. There was a great-aunt, about whom little else was said except that she could scream in six registers at once and had broken windows in all of the Western Counties as a child when bidden to do so by a silly prince one vivid day in spring.

  My sisters and brothers and I were a mix, of course, both gentle and loud. But I, the thirteenth fey, was supposedly the gentlest and loudest of all.

  The events I am about to relate really began nine months before the princess was born. Her birth had been long awaited. The queen, a wart-ridden harridan, was thought barren. Years of royal marriage had produced nothing but promises. Yet one steaming hot day, so the queen said, she had gone bathing in a mountain stream with her young women. More for the sake of cooling than cleanliness, I imagine. Humans are, for the most part, a disgustingly filthy lot. And a frog had climbed upon her knee and prophesied a child.

  Now I have known many frogs in my time and though the peepers especially are a solipsistic tribe, believing they alone bring spring up from the edge of the world, frogs have no magical talents and they do not have the gift of prophecy. The queen was entirely wrong. It was not a frog at all. It might have been a Muryan. Tiny, dressed in green, one might be mistaken for a frog by a distraught, hot, and desperate queen. But Muryans are a mischievous lot and their natterings are never to be taken seriously.

  The queen had rushed home, trailed by her still dripping handmaidens, and told the king. He was well past believing her promises. But much to everyone’s surprise (except my father, who expressed the gentle judgment that, according to a law to be enacted years hence called Probability or Murphy’s—I forget just which—occasionally a Muryan prophecy might be accurate) the queen gave birth some nine months later to a girl.

  They named her Talia and invited—or rather insisted—all the local feys come and bring a gift. We who were so poor as to be forced to live on moonbeams, the free fare of the faery world, had to expend our small remaining store of magicks on that squawling, bawling human infant whose father owned a quarter million acres of land, six rivers, five mountains, and the tithing of all the farms from the Western Sea to the East. It was appalling and unfair and Mother cried about it for days. But Father cautioned her to keep her voice low and, as she knew he was right, she did.

  The family gathered to discuss the possibilities but I was sick again with a fever and so had no part in the family council. Who would have believed that a bout of ague brought on by dancing one starry night in a wet field should
become so important to the fate of us all.

  Father portioned out the magicks at that meeting, one to each child and something for Mother and himself. But he forgot me, sick abed, and so left nothing but an old linden spindle, knotted about with the thread of long life, in the family trunk. The instruction sheet to it was in tatters, mouse nibbled, shredded for nests. Besides, the spindle lay on the very bottom of the trunk and was covered with a tatty Cloth of Invisibility that worked only occasionally and, as it happened to be one of those occasions, Father hadn’t even noticed it. Besides, having decided on gifts of beauty, riches, and wit—all appropriate and necessary gifts for that particular human princess—he wasn’t likely to think of giving a newborn the end of life spun out on a wooden distaff.

  So the family went to the christening without me, though Mother laid a cool cloth on my head, left a tisane in our best cup by my bed, and kissed both my cheeks before leaving.

  “Sleep well, little one,” she whispered. It was always special when she was careful to modulate her voice and I knew then how much she loved me. “Sleep well and long.”

  I expect her admonition forced itself into my fever dreams. I woke about an hour later, feeling surprisingly cool but parched. I had drunk up the tisane already and so cried out for some weak tea. When no one but the doves answered me with their soft coo-coo-co-rros from the rafters, I remembered where the family had gone.

  Rising from my sickbed, I slipped a silvery party dress on over my shift. The dress was well patched with spider webbing, but the stitches scarcely showed, especially in moonlight.

  I looked in the glass. My hair seemed startled into place and I combed it down with my fingers, not feeling up to searching for my brush. Then I pinched my cheeks to bring a blush to them.

  The doves coo-coo-co-rooed again, nannylike in their warnings. Their message was clear.