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 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.
“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 comfort-like, 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 patter 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?”
Charli
e 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 blowing 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 long-legs.”
“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....
Come into My Cellar
Hugh Fortnum woke to Saturday’s commotions, and lay, eyes shut, savoring each in its turn.
Below, bacon in a skillet; Cynthia waking him with fine cookings instead of cries.
Across the hall, Tom actually taking a shower.
Far off in the bumble-bee dragon-fly light, whose voice was already cursing the weather, the time, and the tides? Mrs. Goodbody? Yes. That Christian giantess, six feet tall with her shoes off, the gardener extraordinary, the octogenarian-dietitian and town philosopher.
He rose, unhooked the screen, and leaned out to hear her cry:
“There! Take that! This’ll fix you! Hah!”
“Happy Saturday, Mrs. Goodbody!”
The old woman froze in clouds of bug spray pumped from an immense gun.
“Nonsense!” she shouted. “With these fiends and pests to watch for?”
“What kind this time?” called Fortnum.
“I don’t want to shout it to the jaybirds, but—” she glanced suspiciously around—“what would you say if I told you I was the first line of defense concerning Flying Saucers?”
“Fine,” replied Fortnum. “There’ll be rockets between the worlds any year now.”
“There already are!” She pumped, aiming the spray under the hedge. “There! Take that!”
He pulled his head back in from the fresh day, somehow not as high-spirited as his first response had indicated. Poor soul, Mrs. Goodbody. Always the very essence of reason. And now what? Old age?
The doorbell rang.
He grabbed his robe and was half down the stairs when he heard a voice say, “Special Delivery. Fortnum?” and saw Cynthia turn from the front door, a small packet in her hand.
He put his hand out, but she shook her head.
“Special Delivery Air Mail for your son.”
Tom was downstairs like a centipede.
“Wow! That must be from the Great Bayou Novelty Greenhouse!”
“I wish I were as excited about ordinary mail,” observed Fortnum.
“Ordinary?!” Tom ripped the cord and paper wildly. “Don’t you read the back pages of Popular Mechanics? Well, here they are!”
Everyone peered into the small open box.
“Here,” said Fortnum, “what are?”
“The Sylvan Glade Jumbo-Giant Guaranteed Growth Raise-Them-in-Your-Cellar-for-Big-Profit Mushrooms!”
“Oh, of course,” said Fortnum. “How silly of me.”
Cynthia squinted. “Those little teeny bits—?”
“‘Fabulous growth in twenty-four hours,’” Tom quoted from memory. “‘Plant them in your own cellar—’”
Fortnum and wife exchanged glances.
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“Well,” she admitted, “it’s better than frogs and green snakes.”
“Sure is!” Tom ran.
“Oh, Tom,” said Fortnum, lightly.
Tom paused at the cellar door.
“Tom,” said his father. “Next time, fourth-class mail would do fine.”
“Heck,” said Tom. “They must’ve made a mistake, thought I was some rich company. Air mail special, who can afford that?”
The cellar door slammed.
Fortnum, bemused, scanned the wrapper a moment, then dropped it into the wastebasket. On his way to the kitchen, he opened the cellar door.
Tom was already on his knees, digging with a handrake in the dirt of the back part of the cellar.
Fortnum felt his wife beside him, breathing softly, looking down into the cool dimness.
“Those are mushrooms, I hope. Not … toadstools?”
Fortnum laughed. “Happy harvest, farmer!”
Tom glanced up and waved.
Fortnum shut the door, took his wife’s arm, and walked her out to the kitchen, feeling fine.
Toward noon, Fortnum was driving toward the nearest market when he saw Roger Willis, a fellow Rotarian, and teacher of biology at the town high school, waving urgently from the sidewalk.
Fortnum pulled his car up and opened the door.
“Hi, Roger, give you a lift?”
Willis responded all too eagerly, jumping in and slamming the door.
“Just the man I want to see. I’ve put off calling for days. Could you play psychiatrist for five minutes, God help you?”
Fortnum examined his friend for a moment as he drove quietly on.
“God help you, yes. Shoot.”
Willis sat back and studied his fingernails. “Let’s just drive a moment. There. Okay. Here’s what I want to say: something’s wrong with the world.”
Fortnum laughed easily. “Hasn’t there always been?”
“No, no, I mean … something strange—something unseen—is happening.”
“Mrs. Goodbody,” said Fortnum, half to himself, and stopped.
“Mrs. Goodbody?”
“This morning. Gave me a talk on flying saucers.”
“No.” Willis bit the knuckle of his forefinger nervously. “Nothing like saucers. At least I don’t think. Tell me, what is intuition?”