The thing about cigarettes, the Reverend has discovered, is that when you breathe through them they breathe right back, like another set of lungs, and this sensation of having your breath returned to you, along with the almost respiratory heat of the smoke, makes smoking a cigarette very much like exchanging a kiss—but a kiss that you can control, measuring it out in increments, however shallow or deep you wish them to be. It is one of his pet theories that this, as much as the nicotine, is what makes it so hard to quit smoking. He waits for a few late arrivals to settle into their chairs and then stiffens his posture as a sign that everyone should fall quiet. He learned to do this— to broadcast this aura of preparedness, like a runner poised on his mark—within weeks of accepting his parish. It never fails to work. United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson, drinking from a paper bag in the corner of the pavilion, stops to blow his nose loudly, explosively, into a handkerchief. When the Reverend asked him earlier if he would mind moving into the chairs until the ceremony was over, the congressman’s eyes flared into frightened blue stars and he gripped the banister behind his bench and said, You can’t make me go, this is where I live. The Reverend can feel a crawling sort of itch in the back of his throat, but it is only five-thirty, and he has another two hours before he will be safely home to light another cigarette. He coughs and tells the congregation, those who are gathered here to remember Celia Brooks, that he will read to them first from the book of Jeremiah. When his father died, Reverend Gautreaux found that he had underlined more than a thousand verses in his Bible, some with a watery blue ink that had faded to the color of a robin’s egg and others with a fluorescent yellow highlighter. This particular verse he had marked for some reason with a pair of stars and an exclamation point. The Reverend lifts the silk tail from his Bible, and Christopher listens as he begins to read.
For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt; I am black; astonishment hath taken hold on me. Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered? The Reverend shuts his Bible and holds it against his stomach with both hands. Christopher watches the wind gather up his hair, tossing it about like streamers of grass, and listens as he says that it is hard for us not to react with anger, yes, with anger and confusion, when those we love are taken before their time. The air is piping through the trees, and his voice keeps rising and dropping away. Christopher is thinking about all the fathers he has read about, the ones who have lost their daughters to unknown circumstances, unknown powers, like the Arkansas millionaire who built a high stone wall around his house and then, when his daughter was returned to him, sank all his money into the world’s largest display of Christmas lights, which he donated to Walt Disney World after his neighbors complained about the crowd of sightseers. The Reverend is talking about the difficulty of knowing the mind of God. Why does He allow so many of us to come to grief? Whose world are we living in, after all? Christopher can feel his eyes stinging in the wind, but the eyedrops he bought are still at home in the medicine cabinet. It is only a few minutes later, when the Reverend says his daughter’s name again, Celia Elizabeth Brooks, and then something about how as long as we remember her she is inside all of us, that United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson begins to shout.
The congressman slashes his arms through the air in a wild X, the bottle in his hand whipping this way and that so that arcs of brass-colored liquor keep spattering onto the floor of the pavilion. She’s already dead, he cries, you can’t do this again, my wife is already dead. He can hear the distant chop of the reservoir, see the people in their folding chairs paused in a far-away stillness, but everything around him seems to be wrapped in a layer of wool. All his attention is gathered around the man in the black robe, a bat, who has been mocking his Elizabeth. He thinks of her burial plot, so many miles away, already scattered with the first few leaves of autumn. In October, when he travels north, he sees entire flocks of swallows and robins migrating south for the winter, thousands of them flying in clots and waves, and he imagines that he is a counterweight connected to them by an invisible steel rod, balancing their motion with his own. For a while, during the final months of his wife’s illness, the wasting smell of her body made him sick to his stomach, and he had to wear a surgical mask over his face as he washed and fed her. He has never forgiven himself. He watches the Reverend Gautreaux walking slowly toward him, palms extended, asking him to calm down, calm down, saying that everything will be all right. How dare he! The congressman hurls his liquor bottle at the man, but it rolls past his shoulder and hits one of the columns, shattering inside its paper bag with a heavy concussive sound. Sara Cadwallader and Sheila and Tim Lanzetta, who are sitting across the aisle from Celia’s parents in the front row, leap at the noise and skip back from their chairs.
Sara Cadwallader watches the Reverend back carefully away from the crazy man in gray clothing, moving with such an awkwardly wooden gait that he reminds her of her cats, Mudpie and Thisbe, treading over the floor vent in her living room, shaking their feet after each step as though their pads were sticking to the metal. The Reverend moves slowly down the stairs, stopping finally in the aisle beside her, and the crazy man looks away from him for a moment, right into Sara’s eyes. He has a crusted shaving cut above his lip, and his corneas are stained a pale yellow, and she has a curious desire to wave to him. Then he seems to notice the rest of the people in the crowd. He says something she does not understand and climbs onto his bench and from there into the rafters of the pavilion, shouting, Stay away from me, keep away, and glass liquor bottles begin raining down from him in twos and threes, breaking against the railing or bouncing and sailing into the chairs. There are so many of them that she thinks he must have hundreds up there. She takes cover behind the Reverend, who himself takes cover behind a wastebasket. Sara lives two houses down from the Brookses, and when Celia was seven years old, she used to invite her over for Kool-Aid and cookies and let her play with Mudpie and Thisbe. They were just kittens then, and they would press against Celia and purr, slinking through her ankles and collapsing onto her feet. It is hard for Sara to believe that someone so young could come and go from the world so quickly. Maybe she is not really gone, though, Sara thinks. Maybe no one is ever really gone. Maybe when we die we simply drift in and out of the people we have left behind, touching each of them in turn, like God does. This is what she likes to imagine, at least. She watches a few of the bigger men go in after the crazy person, braving the shower of glass inside the pavilion, but it is Rollie Onopa who manages to hoist himself into the rafters.
Rollie crawls over the dusty wooden beams on his hands and the balls of his feet, keeping to the outside edge of the pavilion, where the ceiling slants down to the narrowest wedge of space. Leaves and candy wrappers and potato chip bags have collected there in a deep hummock, and though they crumple beneath him with a sound like burning kindling, the congressman is too busy taking aim at all the people below to notice him. Rollie sees three long rows of bottles behind the congressman, green and brown and crystal-clear—several years’ worth of determined drinking, he would guess. He creeps along one of the cross-beams, approaching his quarry from behind. There is a flat, circular bird’s nest the size of a Frisbee in his path, and when he crawls over it he sees that it was actually constructed inside a Frisbee. He has a keen admiration for birds, for their grace and beauty and cleverness, but bird lovers have always seemed a bit nutty to him, and he doesn’t like to tell people about it. Stealing up on the congressman, he feels like he did as a child playing spy, when the giddy hammering of his heart never quite made him laugh but always came close. Before the congressman can turn around, Rollie grabs him in a bear hug. In the moment of silence that follows, he hears his daughter saying that her dad will catch him, you just watch, he’s probably got him already. When he tucks her in at night and she asks him if he loves her, he always says, Honey, you’re the whole ball of wax, and she answers, Dad, that’s really gross. The congressman tosses h
is head back and forth, growling, That’s-e-nough, one slow syllable at a time. He bucks against Rollie, and Rollie loses hold of him. Then, before he can stop him, the congressman tumbles backward out of the rafters, knocking his head on the ceiling, and falls lurching and thrashing into the arms of the men below.
Rollie leaps to the floor and helps them carry him down the stairs, past the chairs and the lamps and the picnic tables, and past Enid Embry, who is already tidying up the shards of broken glass, sweeping them into a single long drift with the edge of her foot. This afternoon a guest on The Art Bell Show said that aliens have infiltrated every town in America, disguising themselves as drifters, and Enid would not be at all surprised if United States Congressman Asa Hutchinson were one of them. Nothing is beyond explanation. Just look at all the trouble he has caused, not to mention the mess he has made. He is lucky that nobody got killed. She listens to him yelling, Don’t hit me, let me go, thy rod and thy staff, thy rod and thy staff, as those brave men pin his arms and legs to the ground and try to calm him down. After she has finished sweeping the glass from the first row of chairs, she brushes every last speck of it onto a sheet of cardboard that she finds lying by the wastebasket and throws it all away. There, she thinks. She has done her part. Everyone who hasn’t wandered over to help subdue the congressman is standing before the pavilion, watching and whispering, except for the Reverend, who is sitting with his head on his knees, and Janet, who is busy smoothing a line of ointment over a cut on Kimson Perry’s hand. The stormclouds have unfolded across most of the sky, and when Enid gazes out at the reservoir, she can see a thin blade of sunlight receding over the water. There is no rain, but listening closely she can hear a faint grumble of thunder, and she looks overhead, waiting for the first spark of lightning to flash. She sees a movement in the sky, swift and erratic, a sudden darting flicker of UFO gray, and feels a fishhook catch of excitement in her chest. But it is only a squirrel, high in the branches of an oak tree, swaying back and forth in the wind.
The Green Children
—based on an account in the Historia rerum Anglicarum, written in 1196 by William of Newburgh—
They say I was the first to touch them. When the reapers found the children in the wolf-pits—a boy and a girl, their skin the pale flat green of wilting grass—they shuddered and would not lay hands on them, prodding them across the fields with the handles of their scythes. I watched them approach from my stone on the bank of the river. The long, curving blades of the scythes sent up flashes of light that dazzled my eyes and made me doubt what I was seeing—a boy and a girl holding fast to each other’s garments, twisting them nervously between their green fingers, their green faces turned to the sun. The reapers nudged and jabbed at them until they came to a stop at my side, where the river’s green water lapped at their shoes. I allowed myself to stare.
Alden took me by the shoulder and said, “We think that it must be the rotting disease. They were calling out when we found them, but none of us could make out the tongue. We’re taking them to the house of Richard de Calne.”
I understand little of medicine, and in those days I understood even less, but I could see that, despite the coloring of their skin, the children were healthy. The veins beneath their arms were dark and prominent, the sharp green of clover or spinach leaves. Their breathing was regular and clear.
“Will you carry them across the river?” Alden asked me, and I took my time before answering, cleaning the gristle from my teeth with the tapering edge of a twig. I know the rules of bargaining.
“Two coins,” I said. “Two coins for each. And one for the rest of you.”
The reapers fished the silver from their satchels.
If I was not the first to touch the children, I was certainly the first to carry them.
I lifted the boy onto my shoulders (one of the men had to rap the girl’s wrist with the butt of his scythe to make her let go of him) and was halfway across the river when Alden summoned me back. “Take some of us across first. If you leave the boy there alone, he’ll run away.” So I carried two of the men to the opposite shore, and then the boy, and then I returned for the girl, balancing her in the crook of my arm so that she straddled the hummock of muscle like a rider on a pony. This was years ago, when I could haul a full trough of water all the way from the river to the stables, or raise a calf over my head, or shore up the wall of a house while the sun dried the foundation. The water was as high as my waist when my foot fell on a patch of thick, jelly-like moss and shot into the current. The girl wrapped her arms around my neck and began to speak in a panic, a thread of shrill, gabbling syllables that I could not understand. “Wooramywoorismifath!”
I regained my balance, throwing my arms out, and heard one of the reapers laughing at me from the riverbank. The girl was crying now, convulsive sobs that shook her entire body, and I took her chin in my fingers and turned her face toward mine. Her eyes were as brown as singed barley, as brown as my own. “I know these people,” I said to her. “Look at me. I know them. No one will hurt you.” A yellow slug of mucus was trailing from her nose, and I wiped it off with my finger and slung it into the water, where the fish began to nip at it. “Don’t cry,” I said, and with three loping strides I set her on the other shore.
As the reapers led the children into Woolpit, I kneaded the coins in my pocket, feeling their satisfying weight and the imprint of their notches. Seven birds came together in the sky. The coming week would bring a change of fortune. It was the plainest of signs.
The river spills straight through the center of town, with the fields, the church, and the stables on one side and the smithy, the tavern, and the market on the other. It is an angry foaming dragon, the current swift and violent, and only the strongest can cross it without falling. The nearest stepway is half an hour’s walk downstream, a wedge of stone so slippery it seems to sway beneath you like a lily pad, yet before I took my place on the shore, the people of Woolpit made that journey every day. I was just a boy then and liked to stand on the bank casting almond shells into the water, following beside them as they tumbled and sailed away, memorizing the trails they took. By the time my growth came upon me I knew the river well, every twist and eddy and surge of it. I soon discovered I could cross it with ease. I had found my work.
The days after the green children appeared were busy ones. I would rest on my stone no longer than a moment before a new party of townspeople would arrive, their coins gleaming in their hands, eager to see the wonders at the house of Richard de Calne. One by one I would hoist them onto my back and wade into the water, leaning against the current and rooting my feet to the ground, and one by one I would haul them back to the other shore when they returned some few hours later. At night, as I lay on my pallet, the muscles of my back gave involuntary jerking pulses, like fish pulled from the river and clapped onto a hard surface. The sensation was entirely new to me then, though I have experienced it many times since.
The people who had seen the green children spoke of little else, and I listened to their accounts as they gathered in clutches on the strand:
“The girl is covered in bug bites, and the boy just lies there and shivers.”
“I hear that de Calne has hired someone to train them in English.”
“Green to their gums! Green to the roots of their hair!”
“Have you seen the midget who lives at Coggeshall Abbey?”
“I made a farting noise with my tongue, and the girl smiled at me.”
“The chirurgeon says that it’s chlorosis—the greensickness.”
“They’re the ugliest specimens I’ve ever seen—uglier than a boil, uglier than that hag Ruberta.”
“I can see them glowing like marshfire when I close my eyes.”
“Did I tell you my milk cow dropped a two-headed calf last year?”
“Mark my words—they’ll be dead before the first frost.”
The river was swollen with rain from a storm that had broken in the hills, but the sky over Woolpit was so wi
ndless and fine that the current ran almost noiselessly between its banks. As I carried the townsfolk through water as high as my gut, I gave my ear to them and learned that the green children had eaten nothing for several days, though bread and meat and greens had all been set before them. I learned that though they did not eat, they did drink from the dippers of water they were given, and that sometimes the girl even used the excess to clean her face and hands. One of the men who had examined the children for hidden weapons said that their hair was handsomely clipped, their teeth straight and white, and their clothing was stitched from a strange-looking material with many narrow furrows: it fell on their bodies with the stiffness of leather, yet was soft and smooth to the touch. “They huddled together as soon as I drew away,” I heard him say. “They clutched their stomachs and cried.”