It was early summer when I took to the dirt road again. I’d forgotten about the old man. But in almost the same way, when the sun was cooling and the air was haunted by lazy bees, I saw an old woman. Women strangers are less malevolent than men, and rarer. She was sitting on the gray rock, in a long green skirt summer-dusty, with a daisy-colored shawl and a blouse the precise hue of cottonwoods seen in a late hazy day’s muted light. “Hello, boy,” she said.
“I don’t recognize you, either,” I blurted, and she smiled.
“Of course not. If you didn’t recognize him, you’d hardly know me.”
“Do you know him?” I asked. She nodded. “Who was he? Who are you?”
“We’re both full of stories. Just tell them from different angles. You aren’t afraid of us, are you?”
I was, but having a woman ask the question made all the difference. “No,” I said. “But what are you doing here? And how do you know—?”
“Ask for a story,” she said. “One you’ve never heard of before.” Her eyes were the color of baked chestnuts, and she squinted into the sun so that I couldn’t see her whites. When she opened them wider to look at me, she didn’t have any whites.
“I don’t want to hear stories,” I said softly.
“Sure you do. Just ask.”
“It’s late. I got to be home.”
“I knew a man who became a house,” she said. “He didn’t like it. He stayed quiet for thirty years, and watched all the people inside grow up, and be just like their folks, all nasty and dirty and leaving his walls to flake, and the bathrooms were unbearable. So he spit them out one morning, furniture and all, and shut his doors and locked them.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Upchucked. The poor house was so disgusted he changed back into a man, but he was older and he had a cancer and his heart was bad because of all the abuse he had lived with. He died soon after.”
I laughed, not because the man had died, but because I knew such things were lies. “That’s silly,” I said.
“Then here’s another. There was a cat who wanted to eat butterflies. Nothing finer in the world for a cat than to stalk the grass, waiting for black-and-pumpkin butterflies. It crouches down and wriggles its rump to dig in the hind paws, then it jumps. But a butterfly is no sustenance for a cat. It’s practice. There was a little girl about your age—might have been your sister, but she won’t admit it—who saw the cat and decided to teach it a lesson. She hid in the taller grass with two old kites under each arm and waited for the cat to come by stalking. When it got real close, she put on her mother’s dark glasses, to look all bug-eyed, and she jumped up flapping the kites. Well, it was just a little too real, because in a trice she found herself flying, and she was much smaller than she had been, and the cat jumped at her. Almost got her, too. Ask your sister about that sometime. See if she doesn’t deny it.”
“How’d she get back to be my sister again?”
“She became too scared to fly. She lit on a flower and found herself crushing it. The glasses broke, too.”
“My sister did break a pair of Mom’s glasses once.”
The woman smiled.
“I got to be going home.”
“Tomorrow you bring me a story, okay?”
I ran off without answering. But in my head, monsters were already rising. If she thought I was scared, wait until she heard the story I had to tell! When I got home my oldest sister, Barbara, was fixing lemonade in the kitchen. She was a year older than I but acted as if she were grown-up. She was a good six inches taller, and I could beat her if I got in a lucky punch, but no other way-so her power over me was awesome. But we were usually friendly.
“Where you been?” she asked, like a mother.
“Somebody tattled on you, “ I said.
Her eyes went doe-scared, then wizened down to slits. “What’re you talking about?”
“Somebody tattled about what you did to Mom’s sunglasses.”
“I already been whipped for that,” she said nonchalantly. “Not much more to tell.”
“Oh, but I know more.”
“Was not playing doctor,” she said. The youngest, Sue-Ann, weakest and most full of guile, had a habit of telling the folks somebody or other was playing doctor. She didn’t know what it meant—I just barely did--but it had been true once, and she held it over everybody as her only vestige of power.
“No,” I said, “but I know what you were doing. And I won’t tell anybody.”
“You don’t know nothing,” she said. Then she accidentally poured half a pitcher of lemonade across the side of my head and down my front. When Mom came in I was screaming and swearing like Dad did when he fixed the cars, and I was put away for life plus ninety years in the bedroom I shared with younger brother Michael. Dinner smelled better than usual that evening, but I had none of it. Somehow I wasn’t brokenhearted. It gave me time to think of a scary story for the country-colored woman on the rock.
School was the usual mix of hell and purgatory the next day. Then the hot, dry winds cooled and the bells rang and I was on the dirt road again, across the southern hundred acres, walking in the lees and shadows of the big cottonwoods. I carried my Road-Runner lunch pail and my pencil box and one book—a handwriting manual I hated so much I tore pieces out of it at night, to shorten its lifetime and I walked slowly, to give my story time to gel.
She was leaning up against a tree, not far from the rock. Looking back, I can see she was not so old as a boy of eight years thought. Now I see her lissome beauty and grace, despite the dominance of gray in her reddish hair, despite the crow’s-feet around her eyes and the smile-haunts around her lips. But to the eight-year-old she was simply a peculiar crone. And he had a story to tell her, he thought, that would age her unto graveside.
“Hello, boy,” she said.
“Hi.” I sat on the rock.
“I can see you’ve been thinking,” she said.
I squinted into the tree shadow to make her out better. “How’d you know?”
“You have the look of a boy that’s been thinking. Are you here to listen to another story?”
“Got one to tell, this time,” I said.
“Who goes first?”
It was always polite to let the woman go first, so I quelled my haste and told her she could. She motioned me to come by the tree and sit on a smaller rock, half-hidden by grass. And while the crickets in the shadow tuned up for the evening, she said, “Once there was a dog. This dog was a pretty usual dog, like the ones that would chase you around home if they thought they could get away with it—if they didn’t know you or thought you were up to something the big people might disapprove of. But this dog lived in a graveyard. That is, he belonged to the caretaker. You’ve seen a graveyard before, haven’t you?”
“Like where they took Grandpa.”
“Exactly,” she said. “With pretty lawns, and big white-and-gray stones, and for those who’ve died recently, smaller gray stones with names and flowers and years cut into them. And trees in some places, with a mortuary nearby made of brick, and a garage full of black cars, and a place behind the garage where you wonder what goes on.” She knew the place, all right. “This dog had a pretty good life. It was his job to keep the grounds clear of animals at night. After the gates were locked, he’d be set loose, and he wandered all night long. He was almost white, you see. Anybody human who wasn’t supposed to be there would think he was a ghost, and they’d run away.
“But this dog had a problem. His problem was, there were rats that didn’t pay much attention to him. A whole gang of rats. The leader was a big one, a good yard from nose to tail. These rats made their living by burrowing under the ground in the old section of the cemetery.”
That did it. I didn’t want to hear any more. The air was a lot colder than it should have been, and I wanted to get home in time for dinner and still be able to eat it. But I couldn’t go just then.
“Now the dog didn’t know what the rats did, and just like you
and I, probably, he didn’t much care to know. But it was his job to keep them under control. So one day he made a truce with a couple of cats that he normally tormented and told them about the rats. These cats were scrappy old toms, and they’d long since cleared out the competition of other cats, but they were friends themselves. So the dog made them a proposition. He said he’d let them use the cemetery anytime they wanted, to prowl or hunt in or whatever, if they would put the fear of God into a few of the rats. The cats took him up on it. We get to do whatever we want,’ they said, ‘whenever we want, and you won’t bother us.’ The dog agreed.
“That night the dog waited for the sounds of battle. But they never came. Nary a yowl.” She glared at me for emphasis. “Not a claw scratch. Not even a twitch of tail in the wind.” She took a deep breath, and so did I. “Round about midnight the dog went out into the graveyard. It was very dark, and there wasn’t wind or bird or speck of star to relieve the quiet and the dismal inside-of-a-box-camera blackness. He sniffed his way to the old part of the graveyard and met with the head rat, who was sitting on a slanty, cracked wooden grave marker. Only his eyes and a tip of tail showed in the dark, but the dog could smell him. ‘What happened to the cats?’ he asked. The rat shrugged his haunches. ‘Ain’t seen any cats,’ he said. ‘What did you think--that you could scare us out with a couple of cats? Ha. Listen--if there had been any cats here tonight, they’d have been strung and hung like meat in a shed, and my young’uns would have grown fat on--’”
“No-o-o!” I screamed, and I ran away from the woman and the tree until I couldn’t hear the story anymore.
“What’s the matter?” she called after me. “Aren’t you going to tell me your story?” Her voice followed me as I ran.
It was funny. That night, I wanted to know what happened to the cats. Maybe nothing had happened to them. Not knowing made my visions even worse—and I didn’t sleep well. But my brain worked like it had never worked before.
The next day, a Saturday, I had an ending—not a very good one in retrospect—but it served to frighten Michael so badly he threatened to tell Mom on me.
“What would you want to do that for?” I asked. “Cripes, I won’t ever tell you a story again if you tell Mom!”
Michael was a year younger and didn’t worry about the future. “You never told me stories before,” he said, “and everything was fine. I won’t miss them.”
He ran down the stairs to the living room. Dad was smoking a pipe and reading the paper, relaxing before checking the irrigation on the north thirty. Michael stood at the foot of the stairs, thinking. I was almost down to grab him and haul him upstairs when he made his decision and headed for the kitchen. I knew exactly what he was considering—that Dad would probably laugh and call him a little scaredy-cat. But Mom would get upset and do me in proper.
She was putting a paper form over the kitchen table to mark it for fitting a tablecloth. Michael ran up to her and hung on to a pants leg while I halted at the kitchen door, breathing hard, eyes threatening eternal torture if he so much as peeped. But Michael didn’t worry about the future much.
“Mom,” he said.
“Cripes!” I shouted, high-pitching on the i. Refuge awaited me in the tractor shed. It was an agreed-upon hiding place. Mom didn’t know I’d be there, but Dad did, and he could mediate.
It took him a half hour to get to me. I sat in the dark behind a workbench, practicing my pouts. He stood in the shaft of light falling from the unpatched chink in the roof. Dust motes maypoled around his legs. “Son,” he said. “Mom wants to know where you got that story.
Now, this was a peculiar thing to be asked. The question I’d expected had been, “Why did you scare Michael?” or maybe, “What made you think of such a thing?” But no. Somehow she had plumbed the problem, planted the words in Dad’s mouth, and impressed upon him that father-son relationships were temporarily suspended.
“I made it up,” I said.
“You’ve never made up that kind of story before.”
“I just started.”
He took a deep breath. “Son, we get along real good, except when you lie to me. We know better. Who told you that story?”
This was uncanny. There was more going on than I could understand—there was a mysterious adult thing happening. I had no way around the truth. “An old woman,” I said.
Dad sighed even deeper. “What was she wearing?”
“Green dress,” I said.
“Was there an old man?”
I nodded.
“Christ,” he said softly. He turned and walked out of the shed. From outside he called me to come into the house. I dusted off my overalls and followed him. Michael sneered at me.
“‘Locked them in coffins with old dead bodies,’” he mimicked. “Phhht! You’re going to get it.”
The folks closed the folding door to the kitchen with both of us outside. This disturbed Michael, who’d expected instant vengeance. I was too curious and worried to take my revenge on him, so he skulked out the screen door and chased the cat around the house. “Lock you in a coffin!” he screamed.
Mom’s voice drifted from behind the louvered doors. “Do you hear that? The poor child’s going to have nightmares. It’ll warp him.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” Dad said.
“Exaggerate what? That those filthy people are back? Ben, they must be a hundred years old now! They’re trying to do the same thing to your son that they did to your brother... and just look at him! Living in sin, writing for those hell-spawned girlie magazines.”
“He ain’t living in sin, he’s living alone in an apartment in New York City. And he writes for all kinds of places.”
“They tried to do it to you, too! Just thank God your aunt saved you.”
“Margie, I hope you don’t intend—”
“Certainly do. She knows all about them kind of people. She chased them off once, she can sure do it again!”
All hell had broken loose. I didn’t understand half of it, but I could feel the presence of Great Aunt Sybil Danser. I could almost hear her crackling voice and the shustle of her satchel of Billy Grahams and Zondervans and little tiny pamphlets with shining light in blue offset on their covers.
I knew there was no way to get the full story from the folks short of listening in, but they’d stopped talking and were sitting in that stony kind of silence that indicated Dad’s disgust and Mom’s determination. I was mad that nobody was blaming me, as if I were some idiot child not capable of being bad on my own. I was mad at Michael for precipitating the whole mess.
And I was curious. Were the man and woman more than a hundred years old? Why hadn’t I seen them before, in town, or heard about them from other kids? Surely I wasn’t the only one they’d seen on the road and told stories to. I decided to get to the source. I walked up to the louvered doors and leaned my cheek against them. “Can I go play at George’s?”
“Yes,” Mom said. “Be back for evening chores.”
George lived on the next farm, a mile and a half east. I took my bike and rode down the old dirt road going south.
They were both under the tree, eating a picnic lunch from a wicker basket. I pulled my bike over and leaned it against the gray rock, shading my eyes to see them more clearly.
“Hello, boy,” the old man said. “Ain’t seen you in a while.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. The woman offered me a cookie, and I refused with a muttered, “No, thank you, ma’am.”
“Well then, perhaps you’d like to tell us your story.”
“No, ma’am.”
“No story to tell us? That’s odd. Meg was sure you had a story in you someplace. Peeking out from behind your ears maybe, thumbing its nose at us.”
The woman smiled ingratiatingly. “Tea?”
“There’s going to be trouble,” I said.
“Already?” The woman smoothed the skirt in her lap and set a plate of nut bread into it. “Well, it comes sooner or later, this time sooner. What do
you think of it, boy?”
“I think I got into a lot of trouble for not much being bad,” I said. “I don’t know why.”
“Sit down, then,” the old man said. “Listen to a tale, then tell us what’s going on.”
I sat down, not too keen about hearing another story but out of politeness. I took a piece of nut bread and nibbled on it as the woman sipped her tea and cleared her throat. “Once there was a city on the shore of a broad blue sea. In the city lived five hundred children and nobody else, because the wind from the sea wouldn’t let anyone grow old. Well, children don’t have kids of their own, of course, so when the wind came up in the first year the city never grew any larger.”
“Where’d all the grown-ups go?” I asked. The old man held his fingers to his lips and shook his head.
“The children tried to play all day, but it wasn’t enough. They became frightened at night and had bad dreams. There was nobody to comfort them because only grown-ups are really good at making nightmares go away. Now, sometimes nightmares are white horses that come out of the sea, so they set up guards along the beaches and fought them back with wands made of blackthorn. But there was another kind of nightmare, one that was black and rose out of the ground, and those were impossible to guard against. So the children got together one day and decided to tell all the scary stories there were to tell, to prepare themselves for all the nightmares. They found it was pretty easy to think up scary stories, and every one of them had a story or two to tell. They stayed up all night spinning yarns about ghosts and dead things, and live things that shouldn’t have been, and things that were neither. They talked about death and about monsters that suck blood, about things that live way deep in the earth and long, thin things that sneak through cracks in doors to lean over the beds at night and speak in tongues no one could understand. They talked about eyes without heads, and vice versa, and little blue shoes that walk across a cold empty white room, with no one in them, and a bunk bed that creaks when it’s empty, and a printing press that produces newspapers from a city that never was. Pretty soon, by morning, they’d told all the scary stories. When the black horses came out of the ground the next night, and the white horses from the sea, the children greeted them with cakes and ginger ale, and they held a big party. They also invited the pale sheet-things from the clouds, and everyone ate hearty and had a good time. One white horse let a little boy ride on it and took him wherever he wanted to go. So there were no more bad dreams in the city of children by the sea.”