Ann stood.
Put on your coat!
Ann put on her coat.
Now, march!
No! thought Ann Leary.
March!
‘Ann,’ said her mother, ‘don’t keep Tom waiting another minute. You get on out there now and no nonsense. What’s come over you?’
‘Nothing, Mother. Good night. We’ll be home late.’
Ann and Cecy ran together into the spring evening.
A room full of softly dancing pigeons ruffling their quiet, trailing feathers, a room full of peacocks, a room full of rainbow eyes and lights. And in the center of it, around, around, around, danced Ann Leary.
‘Oh, it is a fine evening,’ said Cecy.
‘Oh, it’s a fine evening,’ said Ann.
‘You’re odd,’ said Tom.
The music whirled them in dimness, in rivers of song: they floated, they bobbed, they sank down, they arose for air, they gasped, they clutched each other like drowning people and whirled on again, in fan motions, in whispers and sighs, to ‘Beautiful Ohio.’
Cecy hummed. Ann’s lips parted and the music came out.
‘Yes, I’m odd,’ said Cecy.
‘You’re not the same,’ said Tom.
‘No, not tonight.’
‘You’re not the Ann Leary I knew.’
‘No, not at all, at all,’ whispered Cecy, miles and miles away. ‘No, not at all,’ said the moved lips.
‘I’ve the funniest feeling,’ said Tom.
‘About what?’
‘About you.’ He held her back and danced her and looked into her glowing face, watching for something. ‘Your eyes,’ he said. ‘I can’t figure it.’
‘Do you see me?’ asked Cecy.
‘Part of you’s here, Ann, and part of you’s not.’ Tom turned her carefully, his face uneasy.
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you come with me?’
‘I didn’t want to come,’ said Ann.
‘Why, then?’
‘Something made me.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ann’s voice was faintly hysterical.
‘Now, now, hush, hush,’ whispered Cecy. ‘Hush, that’s it. Around, around.’
They whispered and rustled and rose and fell away in the dark room, with the music moving and turning them.
‘But you did come to the dance,’ said Tom.
‘I did,’ said Cecy.
‘Here,’ And he danced her lightly out an open door and walked her quietly away from the hall and the music and the people.
They climbed up and sat together in the rig.
‘Ann,’ he said, taking her hands, trembling. ‘Ann.’ But the way he said her name it was as if it wasn’t her name. He kept glancing into her pale face, and now her eyes were open again. ‘I used to love you, you know that,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘But you’ve always been fickle and I didn’t want to be hurt.’
‘It’s just as well, we’re very young,’ said Ann.
‘No, I mean to say, I’m sorry,’ said Cecy.
‘What do you mean?’ Tom dropped her hands and stiffened.
The night was warm and the smell of the earth shimmered up all about them where they sat, and the fresh trees breathed one leaf against another in a shaking and rustling.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ann.
‘Oh, but I know,’ said Cecy. ‘You’re tall and you’re the finest-looking man in all the world. This is a good evening; this is an evening I’ll always remember, being with you.’ She put out the alien cold hand to find his reluctant hand again and bring it back, and warm it and hold it very tight.
‘But,’ said Tom, blinking, ‘tonight you’re here, you’re there. One minute one way, the next minute another. I wanted to take you to the dance tonight for old times’ sake, I meant nothing by it when I first asked you. And then, when we were standing at the well, I knew something had changed, really changed, about you. You were different. There was something new and soft, something…’ He groped for a word. ‘I don’t know, I can’t say. The way you looked. Something about your voice. And I know I’m in love with you again.’
‘No,’ said Cecy. ‘With me, with me.’
‘And I’m afraid of being in love with you,’ he said. ‘You’ll hurt me again.’
‘I might,’ said Ann.
No, no, I’d love you with all my heart! thought Cecy. Ann, say it to him, say it for me. Say you’d love him with all your heart.
Ann said nothing.
Tom moved quietly closer and put his hand up to hold her chin. ‘I’m going away. I’ve got a job a hundred miles from here. Will you miss me?’
‘Yes,’ said Ann and Cecy.
‘May I kiss you good-by, then?’
‘Yes,’ said Cecy before anyone else could speak.
He placed his lips to the strange mouth. He kissed the strange mouth and he was trembling.
Ann sat like a white statue.
‘Ann!’ said Cecy. ‘Move your arms, hold him!’
She sat like a carved wooden doll in the moonlight.
Again he kissed her lips.
‘I do love you,’ whispered Cecy. ‘I’m here, it’s me you saw in her eyes, it’s me, and I love you if she never will.’
He moved away and seemed like a man who had run a long distance. He sat beside her. ‘I don’t know what’s happening. For a moment there…’
‘Yes?’ asked Cecy.
‘For a moment I thought—’ He put his hands to his eyes. ‘Never mind. Shall I take you home now?’
‘Please,’ said Ann Leary.
He clucked to the horse, snapped the reins tiredly, and drove the rig away. They rode in the rustle and slap and motion of the moonlit rig in the still early, only eleven o’clock spring night, with the shining meadows and sweet fields of clover gliding by.
And Cecy, looking at the fields and meadows, thought, It would be worth it, it would be worth everything to be with him from this night on. And she heard her parents’ voices again, faintly, ‘Be careful. You wouldn’t want to lose your magical powers, would you—married to a mere mortal? Be careful. You wouldn’t want that.’
Yes, yes, thought Cecy, even that I’d give up, here and now, if he would have me. I wouldn’t need to roam the spring nights then, I wouldn’t need to live in birds and dogs and cats and foxes, I’d need only to be with him. Only him. Only him.
The road passed under, whispering.
‘Tom,’ said Ann at last.
‘What?’ He stared coldly at the road, the horse, the trees, the sky, the stars.
‘If you’re ever, in years to come, at any time, in Mellin Town, Illinois, a few miles from here, will you do me a favor?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Will you do me the favor of stopping and seeing a friend of mine?’ Ann Leary said this haltingly, awkwardly.
‘Why?’
‘She’s a good friend. I’ve told her of you. I’ll give you her address. Just a moment.’ When the rig stopped at her farm she drew forth a pencil and paper from her small purse and wrote in the moonlight, pressing the paper to her knee. ‘There it is. Can you read it?’
He glanced at the paper and nodded bewilderedly.
‘Cecy Elliott, 12 Willow Street, Mellin Town, Illinois,’ he said.
‘Will you visit her someday?’ asked Ann.
‘Someday,’ he said.
‘Promise?’
‘What has this to do with us?’ he cried savagely. ‘What do I want with names and papers?’ He crumpled the paper into a tight ball and shoved it in his coat.
‘Oh, please promise!’ begged Cecy.
‘…promise…’ said Ann.
‘All right, all right, now let me be!’ he shouted.
I’m tired, thought Cecy. I can’t stay. I have to go home. I’m weakening. I’ve only the power to stay a few hours out like this in the night, traveling, traveling. But before I go…
‘…before I go,’ said Ann.
/>
She kissed Tom on the lips.
‘This is me kissing you,’ said Cecy.
Tom held her off and looked at Ann Leary and looked deep, deep inside. He said nothing, but his face began to relax slowly, very slowly, and the lines vanished away, and his mouth softened from its hardness, and he looked deep again into the moonlit face held here before him.
Then he put her off the rig and without so much as good night was driving swiftly down the road.
Cecy let go.
Ann Leary, crying out, released from prison, it seemed, raced up the moonlit path to her house and slammed the door.
Cecy lingered for only a little while. In the eyes of a cricket she saw the spring night world. In the eyes of a frog she sat for a lonely moment by a pool. In the eyes of a night bird she looked down from a tall, moonhaunted elm and saw the lights go out in two farmhouses, one here, one a mile away. She thought of herself and her Family, and her strange power, and the fact that no one in the Family could ever marry any one of the people in this vast world out here beyond the hills.
‘Tom?’ Her weakening mind flew in a night bird under the trees and over deep fields of wild mustard. ‘Have you still got the paper, Tom? Will you come by someday, some year, sometime, to see me? Will you know me then? Will you look in my face and remember then where it was you saw me last and know that you love me as I love you, with all my heart for all time?’
She paused in the cool night air, a million miles from towns and people, above farms and continents and rivers and hills. ‘Tom?’ Softly.
Tom was asleep. It was deep night; his clothes were hung on chairs or folded neatly over the end of the bed. And in one silent, carefully upflung hand upon the white pillow, by his head, was a small piece of paper with writing on it. Slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, his fingers closed down upon and held it tightly. And he did not even stir or notice when a blackbird, faintly, wondrously, beat softly for a moment against the clear moon crystals of the windowpane, then, fluttering quietly, stopped and flew away toward the east, over the sleeping earth.
Invisible Boy
She took the great iron spoon and the mummified frog and gave it a bash and made dust of it, and talked to the dust while she ground it in her stony fists quickly. Her beady gray bird-eyes flickered at the cabin. Each time she looked, a head in the small thin window ducked as if she’d fired off a shotgun.
‘Charlie!’ cried Old Lady. ‘You come outa there! I’m fixing a lizard magic to unlock that rusty door! You come out now and I won’t make the earth shake or the trees go up in fire or the sun set at high noon!’
The only sound was the warm mountain light on the high turpentine trees, a tufted squirrel chittering around and around on a green-furred log, the ants moving in a fine brown line at Old Lady’s bare, blue-veined feet.
‘You been starving in there two days, darn you!’ she panted, chiming the spoon against a flat rock, causing the plump gray miracle bag to swing at her waist. Sweating sour, she rose and marched at the cabin, bearing the pulverized flesh. ‘Come out, now!’ She flicked a pinch of powder inside the lock. ‘All right, I’ll come get you!’ she wheezed.
She spun the knob with one walnut-colored hand, first one way, then the other. ‘O Lord,’ she intoned, ‘fling this door wide!’
When nothing flung, she added yet another philter and held her breath. Her long blue untidy skirt rustled as she peered into her bag of darkness to see if she had any scaly monsters there, any charm finer than the frog she’d killed months ago for such a crisis as this.
She heard Charlie breathing against the door. His folks had pranced off into some Ozark town early this week, leaving him, and he’d run almost six miles to Old Lady for company—she was by way of being an aunt or cousin or some such, and he didn’t mind her fashions.
But then, two days ago, Old Lady, having gotten used to the boy around, decided to keep him for convenient company. She pricked her thin shoulder bone, drew out three blood pearls, spat wet over her right elbow, tromped on a crunch-cricket, and at the same instant clawed her left hand at Charlie, crying, ‘My son you are, you are my son, for all eternity!’
Charlie, bounding like a startled hare, had crashed off into the bush, heading for home.
But Old Lady, skittering quick as a gingham lizard, cornered him in a dead end, and Charlie holed up in this old hermit’s cabin and wouldn’t come out, no matter how she whammed door, window, or knothole with amber-colored fist or trounced her ritual fires, explaining to him that he was certainly her son now, all right.
‘Charlie, you there?’ she asked, cutting holes in the door planks with her bright little slippery eyes.
‘I’m all of me here,’ he replied finally, very tired.
Maybe he would fall out on the ground any moment. She wrestled the knob hopefully. Perhaps a pinch too much frog powder had grated the lock wrong. She always overdid or underdid her miracles, she mused angrily, never doing them just exact, Devil take it!
‘Charlie, I only wants someone to night-prattle to, someone to warm hands with at the fire. Someone to fetch kindling for me mornings, and fight off the spunks that come creeping of early fogs! I ain’t got no fetchings on you for myself, son, just for your company.’ She smacked her lips. ‘Tell you what, Charles, you come out and teach you things!’
‘What things?’ he suspicioned.
‘Teach you how to buy cheap, sell high. Catch a snow weasel, cut off its head, carry it warm in your hind pocket. There!’
‘Aw,’ said Charlie.
She made haste. ‘Teach you to make yourself shotproof. So if anyone bangs at you with a gun, nothing happens.’
When Charlie stayed silent, she gave him the secret in a high fluttering whisper. ‘Dig and stitch mouse-ear roots on Friday during full moon, and wear ’em around your neck in a white silk.’
‘You’re crazy,’ Charlie said.
‘Teach you how to stop blood or make animals stand frozen or make blind horses see, all them things I’ll teach you! Teach you to cure a swelledup cow and unbewitch a goat. Show you how to make yourself invisible!’
‘Oh,’ said Charlie.
Old Lady’s heart beat like a Salvation tambourine.
The knob turned from the other side.
‘You,’ said Charlie, ‘are funning me.’
‘No. I’m not,’ exclaimed Old Lady. ‘Oh, Charlie, why, I’ll make you like a window, see right through you. Why, child, you’ll be surprised!’
‘Real invisible?’
‘Real invisible!’
‘You won’t fetch onto me if I walk out?’
‘Won’t touch a bristle of you, son.’
‘Well,’ he drawled reluctantly, ‘all right.’
The door opened. Charlie stood in his bare feet, head down, chin against chest. ‘Make me invisible,’ he said.
‘First we got to catch us a bat,’ said Old Lady. ‘Start lookin’!’
She gave him some jerky beef for his hunger and watched him climb a tree. He went high up and high up and it was nice seeing him there and it was nice having him here and all about after so many years alone with nothing to say good morning to but bird-droppings and silvery snail tracks.
Pretty soon a bat with a broken wing fluttered down out of the tree. Old Lady snatched it up, beating warm and shrieking between its porcelain white teeth, and Charlie dropped down after it, hand upon clenched hand, yelling.
That night, with the moon nibbling at the spiced pine cones, Old Lady extracted a long silver needle from under her wide blue dress. Gumming her excitement and secret anticipation, she sighted up the dead bat and held the cold needle steady-steady.
She had long ago realized that her miracles, despite all perspirations and salts and sulphurs, failed. But she had always dreamt that one day the miracles might start functioning, might spring up in crimson flowers and silver stars to prove that God had forgiven her for her pink body and her pink thoughts and her warm body and her warm thoughts as a young miss. But so far
God had made no sign and said no word, but nobody knew this except Old Lady.
‘Ready?’ she asked Charlie, who crouched cross-kneed, wrapping his pretty legs in long goose-pimpled arms, his mouth open, making teeth. ‘Ready,’ he whispered, shivering.
‘There!’ She plunged the needle deep in the bat’s right eye. ‘So!’
‘Oh!’ screamed Charlie, wadding up his face.
‘Now I wrap it in gingham, and here, put it in your pocket, keep it there, bat and all. Go on!’
He pocketed the charm.
‘Charlie!’ she shrieked fearfully. ‘Charlie, where are you? I can’t see you, child!’
‘Here!’ He jumped so the light ran in red streaks up his body. ‘I’m here. Old Lady!’ He stared wildly at his arms, legs, chest, and toes. ‘I’m here!’
Her eyes looked as if they were watching a thousand fireflies crisscrossing each other in the wild night air.
‘Charlie, oh, you went fast! Quick as a hummingbird! Oh, Charlie, come back to me!’
‘But I’m here!’ he wailed.
‘Where?’
‘By the fire, the fire! And—and I can see myself. I’m not invisible at all!’
Old Lady rocked on her lean flanks. ‘Course you can see you! Every invisible person knows himself. Otherwise, how could you eat, walk, or get around places? Charlie, touch me. Touch me so I know you.’
Uneasily he put out a hand.
She pretended to jerk, startled, at his touch. ‘Ah!’
‘You mean to say you can’t find me?’ he asked. ‘Truly?’
‘Not the least half-rump of you!’
She found a tree to stare at, and stared at it with shining eyes, careful not to glance at him. ‘Why, I sure did a trick that time!’ She sighed with wonder. ‘Whooeee. Quickest invisible I ever made! Charlie. Charlie, how you feel?’
‘Like creek water—all stirred.’
‘You’ll settle.’
Then after a pause she added, ‘Well, what you going to do now, Charlie, since you’re invisible?’
All sorts of things shot through his brain, she could tell. Adventures stood up and danced like hell-fire in his eyes, and his mouth, just hanging, told what it meant to be a boy who imagined himself like the mountain winds. In a cold dream he said, ‘I’ll run across wheat fields, climb snow mountains, steal white chickens off’n farms. I’ll kick pink pigs when they ain’t looking. I’ll pinch pretty girls’ legs when they sleep, snap their garters in schoolrooms.’ Charlie looked at Old Lady, and from the shiny tips of her eyes she saw something wicked shape his face. ‘And other things I’ll do, I’ll do, I will,’ he said.