‘Don’t try nothing on me,’ warned Old Lady. ‘I’m brittle as spring ice and I don’t take handling.’ Then: ‘What about your folks?’
‘My folks?’
‘You can’t fetch yourself home looking like that. Scare the inside ribbons out of them. Your mother’d faint straight back like timber falling. Think they want you about the house to stumble over and your ma have to call you every three minutes, even though you’re in the room next her elbow?’
Charlie had not considered it. He sort of simmered down and whispered out a little ‘Gosh’ and felt of his long bones carefully.
‘You’ll be mighty lonesome. People looking through you like a water glass, people knocking you aside because they didn’t reckon you to be underfoot. And women, Charlie, women—’
He swallowed. ‘What about women?’
‘No woman will be giving you a second stare. And no woman wants to be kissed by a boy’s mouth they can’t even find!’
Charlie dug his bare toe in the soil contemplatively. He pouted. ‘Well, I’ll stay invisible, anyway, for a spell. I’ll have me some fun. I’ll just be pretty careful, is all. I’ll stay out from in front of wagons and horses and Pa. Pa shoots at the nariest sound.’ Charlie blinked. ‘Why, with me invisible, someday Pa might just up and fill me with buckshot, thinkin’ I was a hill squirrel in the dooryard. Oh…’
Old Lady nodded at a tree. ‘That’s likely.’
‘Well,’ he decided slowly, ‘I’ll stay invisible for tonight, and tomorrow you can fix me back all whole again, Old Lady.’
‘Now if that ain’t just like a critter, always wanting to be what he can’t be,’ remarked Old Lady to a beetle on a log.
‘What you mean?’ said Charlie.
‘Why,’ she explained, ‘it was real hard work, fixing you up. It’ll take a little time for it to wear off. Like a coat of paint wears off, boy.’
‘You!’ he cried. ‘You did this to me! Now you make me back, you make me seeable!’
‘Hush,’ she said. ‘It’ll wear off, a hand or a foot at a time.’
‘How’ll it look, me around the hills with just one hand showing!’
‘Like a five-winged bird hopping on the stones and bramble.’
‘Or a foot showing!’
‘Like a small pink rabbit jumping thicket.’
‘Or my head floating!’
‘Like a hairy balloon at the carnival!’
‘How long before I’m whole?’ he asked.
She deliberated that it might pretty well be an entire year.
He groaned. He began to sob and bite his lips and make fists. ‘You magicked me, you did this, you did this thing to me. Now I won’t be able to run home!’
She winked. ‘But you can stay here, child, stay on with me real comfortlike, and I’ll keep you fat and saucy.’
He flung it out: ‘You did this on purpose! You mean old hag, you want to keep me here!’
He ran off through the shrubs on the instant.
‘Charlie, come back!’
No answer but the pattern of his feet on the soft dark turf, and his wet choking cry which passed swiftly off and away.
She waited and then kindled herself a fire. ‘He’ll be back,’ she whispered. And thinking inward on herself, she said. ‘And now I’ll have me my company through spring and into late summer. Then, when I’m tired of him and want a silence, I’ll send him home.’
Charlie returned noiselessly with the first gray of dawn, gliding over the rimed turf to where Old Lady sprawled like a bleached stick before the scattered ashes.
He sat on some creek pebbles and stared at her.
She didn’t dare look at him or beyond. He had made no sound, so how could she know he was anywhere about? She couldn’t.
He sat there, tear marks on his cheeks.
Pretending to be just waking—but she had found no sleep from one end of the night to the other—Old Lady stood up, grunting and yawning, and turned in a circle to the dawn.
‘Charlie?’
Her eyes passed from pines to soil, to sky, to the far hills. She called out his name, over and over again, and she felt like staring plumb straight at him, but she stopped herself. ‘Charlie? Oh, Charles!’ she called, and heard the echoes say the very same.
He sat, beginning to grin a bit, suddenly, knowing he was close to her, yet she must feel alone. Perhaps he felt the growing of a secret power, perhaps he felt secure from the world, certainly he was pleased with his invisibility.
She said aloud, ‘Now where can that boy be? If he only made a noise so I could tell just where he is, maybe I’d fry him a breakfast.’
She prepared the morning victuals, irritated at his continuous quiet. She sizzled bacon on a hickory stick. ‘The smell of it will draw his nose,’ she muttered.
While her back was turned he swiped all the frying bacon and devoured it tastily.
She whirled, crying out, ‘Lord!’
She eyed the clearing suspiciously. ‘Charlie, that you?’
Charlie wiped his mouth clean on his wrists.
She trotted about the clearing, making like she was trying to locate him. Finally, with a clever thought, acting blind, she headed straight for him, groping. ‘Charlie, where are you?’
A lightning streak, he evaded her, bobbing, ducking.
It took all her will power not to give chase; but you can’t chase invisible boys, so she sat down, scowling, sputtering, and tried to fry more bacon. But every fresh strip she cut he would steal bubbling off the fire and run away far. Finally, cheeks burning, she cried, ‘I know where you are! Right there! I hear you run!’ She pointed to one side of him, not too accurate. He ran again. ‘Now you’re there!’ she shouted. ‘There, and there!’ pointing to all the places he was in the next five minutes. ‘I hear you press a grass blade, knock a flower, snap a twig. I got fine shell ears, delicate as roses. They can hear the stars moving!’
Silently he galloped off among the pines, his voice trailing back, ‘Can’t hear me when I’m set on a rock. I’ll just set!’
All day he sat on an observatory rock in the clear wind, motionless and sucking his tongue.
Old Lady gathered wood in the deep forest, feeling his eyes weaseling on her spine. She wanted to babble: ‘Oh, I see you, I see you! I was only fooling about invisible boys! You’re right there!’ But she swallowed her gall and gummed it tight.
The following morning he did the spiteful things. He began leaping from behind trees. He made toad-faces, frog-faces, spider-faces at her, clenching down his lips with his fingers, popping his raw eyes, pushing up his nostrils so you could peer in and see his brain thinking.
Once she dropped her kindling. She pretended it was a blue jay startled her.
He made a motion as if to strangle her.
She trembled a little.
He made another move as if to bang her shins and spit on her cheek.
These motions she bore without a lid-flicker or a mouth-twitch.
He stuck out his tongue, making strange bad noises. He wiggled his loose ears so she wanted to laugh, and finally she did laugh and explained it away quickly by saying, ‘Sat on a salamander! Whew, how it poked!’
By high noon the whole madness boiled to a terrible peak.
For it was at that exact hour that Charlie came racing down the valley stark boy-naked!
Old Lady nearly fell flat with shock!
‘Charlie!’ she almost cried.
Charlie raced naked up one side of a hill and naked down the other—naked as day, naked as the moon, raw as the sun and a newborn chick, his feet shimmering and rushing like the wings of a low-skimming hummingbird.
Old Lady’s tongue locked in her mouth. What could she say? Charlie, go dress? For shame? Stop that? Could she? Oh, Charlie, Charlie, God! Could she say that now? Well?
Upon the big rock, she witnessed him dancing up and down, naked as the day of his birth, stomping bare feet, smacking his hands on his knees and sucking in and out his white stomach like blowi
ng and deflating a circus balloon.
She shut her eyes tight and prayed.
After three hours of this she pleaded, ‘Charlie, Charlie, come here! I got something to tell you!’
Like a fallen leaf he came, dressed again, praise the Lord.
‘Charlie,’ she said, looking at the pine trees, ‘I see your right toe. There it is.’
‘You do?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said very sadly. ‘There it is like a horny toad on the grass. And there, up there’s your left ear hanging on the air like a pink butterfly.’
Charlie danced. ‘I’m forming in. I’m forming in!’
Old Lady nodded. ‘Here comes your ankle!’
‘Gimme both my feet!’ ordered Charlie.
‘You got ’em.’
‘How about my hands?’
‘I see one crawling on your knee like a daddy longlegs.’
‘How about the other one?’
‘It’s crawling too.’
‘I got a body?’
‘Shaping up fine.’
‘I’ll need my head to go home, Old Lady.’
To go home, she thought wearily. ‘No!’ she said, stubborn and angry. ‘No, you ain’t got no head. No head at all,’ she cried. She’d leave that to the very last. ‘No head, no head,’ she insisted.
‘No head?’ he wailed.
‘Yes, oh my God, yes, yes, you got your blamed head!’ she snapped, giving up. ‘Now, fetch me back my bat with the needle in his eye!’
He flung it at her. ‘Haaaa-yoooo!’ His yelling went all up the valley, and long after he had run toward home she heard his echoes, racing.
Then she plucked up her kindling with a great dry weariness and started back toward her shack, sighing, talking. And Charlie followed her all the way, really invisible now, so she couldn’t see him, just hear him, like a pine cone dropping or a deep underground stream trickling, or a squirrel clambering a bough; and over the fire at twilight she and Charlie sat, him so invisible, and her feeding him bacon he wouldn’t take, so she ate it herself, and then she fixed some magic and fell asleep with Charlie, made out of sticks and rags and pebbles, but still warm and her very own son, slumbering and nice in her shaking mother arms…and they talked about golden things in drowsy voices until dawn made the fire slowly, slowly wither out…
The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind
‘In the shape of a pig?’ cried the Mandarin.
‘In the shape of a pig,’ said the messenger, and departed.
‘Oh, what an evil day in an evil year,’ cried the Mandarin. ‘the town of Kwan-Si, beyond the hill, was very small in my childhood. Now it has grown so large that at last they are building a wall.’
‘But why should a wall two miles away make my good father sad and angry all within the hour?’ asked his daughter quietly.
‘They build their wall,’ said the Mandarin, ‘in the shape of a pig! Do you see? Our own city wall is built in the shape of an orange. That pig will devour us, greedily!’
‘Ah.’
They both sat thinking.
Life was full of symbols and omens. Demons lurked everywhere, Death swam in the wetness of an eye, the turn of a gull’s wing meant rain, a fan held so, the tilt of a roof, and, yes, even a city wall was of immense importance. Travelers and tourists, caravans, musicians, artists, coming upon these two towns, equally judging the portents, would say, ‘The city shaped like an orange? No! I will enter the city shaped like a pig and prosper, eating all, growing fat with good luck and prosperity!’
The Mandarin wept. ‘All is lost! These symbols and signs terrify. Our city will come on evil days.’
‘Then,’ said the daughter, ‘call in your stonemasons and temple builders. I will whisper from behind the silken screen and you will know the words.’
The old man clapped his hands despairingly. ‘Ho, stonemasons! Ho, builders of towns and palaces!’
The men who knew marble and granite and onyx and quartz came quickly. The Mandarin faced them most uneasily, himself waiting for a whisper from the silken screen behind his throne. At last the whisper came.
‘I have called you here,’ said the whisper.
‘I have called you here,’ said the Mandarin aloud, ‘because our city is shaped like an orange, and the vile city of Kwan-Si has this day shaped theirs like a ravenous pig—’
Here the stonemasons groaned and wept. Death rattled his cane in the outer courtyard. Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.
‘And so,’ said the whisper, said the Mandarin, ‘you raisers of walls must go bearing trowels and rocks and change the shape of our city!’
The architects and masons gasped. The Mandarin himself gasped at what he had said. The whisper whispered. The Mandarian went on: ‘And you will change our walls into a club which may beat the pig and drive it off!’
The stonemasons rose up, shouting. Even the Mandarin, delighted at the words from his mouth, applauded, stood down from his throne. ‘Quick!’ he cried. ‘To work!’
When his men had gone, smiling and bustling, the Mandarin turned with great love to the silken screen. ‘Daughter,’ he whispered. ‘I will embrace you.’ There was no reply. He stepped around the screen, and she was gone.
Such modesty, he thought. She has slipped away and left me with a triumph, as if it were mine.
The news spread through the city; the Mandarin was acclaimed. Everyone carried stone to the walls. Fireworks were set off and the demons of death and poverty did not linger, as all worked together. At the end of the month the wall had been changed. It was now a mighty bludgeon with which to drive pigs, boars, even lions, far away. The Mandarin slept like a happy fox every night.
‘I would like to see the Mandarin of Kwan-Si when the news is learned. Such pandemonium and hysteria; he will likely throw himself from a mountain! A little more of that wine, oh Daughter-who-thinks-like-a-son.’
But the pleasure was like a winter flower; it died swiftly. That very afternoon the messenger rushed into the courtroom. ‘Oh Mandarin, disease, early sorrow, avalanches, grasshopper plagues, and poisoned well water!’
The Mandarin trembled.
‘The town of Kwan-Si,’ said the messenger, ‘which was built like a pig and which animal we drove away by changing our walls to a mighty stick, has now turned triumph to winter ashes. They have built their city’s walls like a great bonfire to burn our stick!’
The Mandarin’s heart sickened within him, like an autumn fruit upon the ancient tree. ‘Oh, gods! Travelers will spurn us. Tradesmen, reading the symbols, will turn from the stick, so easily destroyed, to the fire, which conquers all!’
‘No,’ said a whisper like a snowflake from behind the silken screen.
‘No,’ said the startled Mandarin.
‘Tell my stonemasons,’ said the whisper that was a falling drop of rain, ‘to build our walls in the shape of a shining lake.’
The Mandarin said this aloud, his heart warmed.
‘And with this lake of water,’ said the whisper and the old man, ‘we will quench the fire and put it out forever!’
The city turned out in joy to learn that once again they had been saved by the magnificent Emperor of ideas. They ran to the walls and built them nearer to this new vision, singing, not as loudly as before, of course, for they were tired, and not as quickly, for since it had taken a month to rebuild the wall the first time, they had had to neglect business and crops and therefore were somewhat weaker and poorer.
There then followed a succession of horrible and wonderful days, one in another like a nest of frightening boxes.
‘Oh, Emperor,’ cried the messenger, ‘Kwan-Si has rebuilt their walls to resemble a mouth with which to drink all our lake!’
‘Then,’ said the Emperor, standing very close to his silken screen, ‘build our walls like a needle to sew up that mouth!’
‘Emperor!’ screamed the messenger. ‘They make their walls like a sword to break your needle!’
The Emperor hel
d, trembling, to the silken screen. ‘Then shift the stones to form a scabbard to sheathe that sword!’
‘Mercy,’ wept the messenger the following morn, ‘they have worked all night and shaped their walls like lightning which will explode and destroy that sheath!’
Sickness spread in the city like a pack of evil dogs. Shops closed. The population, working now steadily for endless months upon the changing of the walls, resembled Death himself, clattering his white bones like musical instruments in the wind. Funerals began to appear in the streets, though it was the middle of summer, a time when all should be tending and harvesting. The Mandarin fell so ill that he had his bed drawn up by the silken screen and there he lay, miserably giving his architectural orders. The voice behind the screen was weak now, too, and faint, like the wind in the eaves.
‘Kwan-Si is an eagle. Then our walls must be a net for that eagle. They are a sun to burn our net. Then we build a moon to eclipse their sun!’
Like a rusted machine, the city ground to a halt.
At last the whisper behind the screen cried out:
‘In the name of the gods, send for Kwan-Si!’
Upon the last day of summer the Mandarin Kwan-Si, very ill and withered away, was carried into our Mandarin’s courtroom by four starving footmen. The two mandarins were propped up, facing each other. Their breaths fluttered like winter winds in their mouths. A voice said:
‘Let us put an end to this.’
The old men nodded.
‘This cannot go on,’ said the faint voice. ‘Our people do nothing but rebuild our cities to a different shape every day, every hour. They have no time to hunt, to fish, to love, to be good to their ancestors and their ancestors’ children.’
‘This I admit,’ said the mandarins of the towns of the Cage, the Moon, the Spear, the Fire, the Sword and this, that, and other things.