Wonders of the Invisible World

“You’ll be sleeping with the cows tonight,” Lockwood told the boy, ignoring his wife’s pleas. “And tomorrow you’ll go to Warren to speak with the sheriff. What do you think about that, little thief?”

  When Dobry Jablonski didn’t answer, Lockwood spat at the boy’s feet.

  He unlatched the gate, still ignoring Plumie, and went back to the orchard full of anger and righteousness, to deliver a lecture on the villainy of thievery, to teach the Slavs and Poles and whoever else worked on his farm a lesson.

  Plumie whispered into the air, as if God might hear her. “Oh please, oh please, oh please,” she whispered. And each plea flew away like a crow, silent, sleek, and mysterious.

  Word spread quickly that night, from household to household. Families who rarely spoke across their respective divisions talked of what had happened in the Lockwood orchard. Fathers and mothers warned their children not to steal, not here, not if they knew what was best for them. They scolded children who didn’t even work for Lockwood. They scolded children who didn’t work anywhere at all. Dobry Jablonski would be made into an example, and they knew this. This was exactly Lockwood’s intention, to have everyone in Temperance distribute this warning for him, as he’d assumed they would.

  Lockwood wandered around the house that night, oiling his rifle, occasionally peering out the window at the barn, where the Jablonski boy sat in manure, his legs splayed in front of him, his hands tied around a pole at his back. People had been tried for less, had gone to jail for less than stealing apples. Lockwood knew this, and he didn’t care that he might seal the boy into a dark fate by taking him to see the sheriff in Warren the next morning.

  At ten o’clock Lockwood joined his wife in bed, where he fell asleep as if nothing of great importance weighed on his shoulders, as if any other ordinary day had come to its inevitable end. Later I came to stand over them, the sleeping figures of my great-grandparents, and watched their mothlike breath hover over their parted mouths, watched the dip and rise of their stomachs as they inhaled and exhaled in unison.

  Lockwood’s dreams were busy that night. I watched them pass through his mind as his body slept. He dreamed of the white stag he’d seen at the back of his property. He dreamed of the stag lowering its head to take a long drink from Sugar Creek. When the stag had finally quenched its thirst, it raised its head and turned to look at him.

  There is more than this, it told Lockwood.

  And then Lockwood woke, sitting up in bed before me, shivering in a cold sweat.

  Breakfast first, he thought, splashing his face with water in the washroom. Then he’d put the boy in his truck and drive over to Warren. He’d have one of the hands manage the farm for the day. He’d give instructions to the letter and the work would get done as if he’d overseen it himself, especially with the Jablonski boy’s fate weighing on the pickers.

  Plumie had breakfast ready by the time he got downstairs. She fed him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee. He drank the coffee black and bitter, the steam curling into his flaring nostrils. After finishing, he rubbed bits of egg out of his mustache and stood to leave.

  Outside, while he sat on the porch to pull his boots on, he looked up to find a woman walking down the dusty road. She wore a scarf over her head. A babushka, the Slav women called them. Her skirts were nearly in rags; he could see that even from this distance. Her arms were folded under her breasts, as if she was sick or frightened. But if she was frightened, it did not stop her. She came toward him without hesitating, barefoot, turning off the road into his dirt drive and walking up the front yard to meet him.

  Lockwood stood on the porch looking down at her. “Morning, ma’am,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  The corners of the woman’s mouth were turned down, and her eyes were glassy. Lockwood figured this must be the boy’s mother. She had the same pale skin and green eyes. And what she did next nearly shocked him. It was something he’d never seen before. The woman got down on her knees before him and, in a thickly accented voice, begged for the life of her son.

  “Get up,” Lockwood said, trying to pull her from the ground. “Get up, woman.”

  But she would not rise. “It costs me nothing to beg,” she told him. “I already lost everything years ago. In Poland, my family was better. My father was a healer. We were respected, you see? Here, we are nothing. Things can change for the worse, not just better. I understand this now. If you did not know this already, I will tell you. My son is all I have in this world. His father is dead. If I do not have my son, I die also. Please. I beg you. I ask only for you to give me my son and he will repay twice what he took from you.”

  Lockwood did not immediately answer. This woman—Eva Jablonski, if he remembered her name correctly—was something else. He was reminded of a different world, of a different time, when peasants knelt to beg for their lives or for the life of another. He thought of some of the tales his father had told him as a child. He thought of how the lords in those old tales displayed their lordliness by pardoning or by setting a task before a beggar to earn what they wanted. And wasn’t he a kind of lord now? he thought. Wouldn’t it be right to make a pact with this woman who asked for something without shame?

  “I’ll make you a deal,” he told Eva Jablonski. The woman narrowed her eyes but held his stare. Lockwood turned to face the orchard, pointing toward it. “If you can pick that orchard clean by the time the sun sets, I’ll give you back your boy.”

  Eva Jablonski turned to face the orchard, assessing the task set before her. She blinked twice, nodded wordlessly, then stood again, gathering her skirts about her, to trudge toward the trees.

  Lockwood did not mention that nearly a quarter of the apples had been picked yesterday, that it had taken an entire day of five hands working together to clear just that one corner of the orchard. He had made the pact, and now he would see, as any lord would, if she kept her end of the bargain.

  All that morning Eva Jablonski climbed the orchard ladders deep into the branches of the trees, picking apples. The sun rose higher, grew hotter, and as the farm’s hands arrived, Lockwood informed them that there would be no work for them that day. They crossed the bridge over Sugar Creek anyway, and called up into the trees to Eva, asking her what had happened.

  Eva did not linger with them. She simply said, “I pick these apples, Dobry comes home,” and continued picking. The others looked at each other, wide-eyed, and started to climb the ladders to help. “No,” Lockwood said from behind the ring they’d formed around the tree Eva inhabited. “She must do this alone.”

  Though they couldn’t help Eva Jablonski pick the orchard, the hands rallied around her, carrying cups of water up the ladder to her occasionally, once two pieces of crusty bread. She stuffed the bread in her mouth and guzzled the water while still picking. Water sluiced down her chin, washing away trails of grime. “Good work, Eva!” someone shouted up to her. Someone else said, “Keep going!” But Eva didn’t acknowledge their cries. She continued picking, placing the apples in the bag around her neck, carrying them to the barrels by the corncrib with clockwork precision.

  Sometime in the early afternoon, Lockwood gave permission for the boy to be brought to the orchard, bound, to watch his mother work for him. She was not aware of his presence as he watched her struggle, sometimes becoming entangled in the branches, sometimes nearly falling, in order to save him. He cried, silently, the tears washing down his dirty face, as his mother heaved herself from tree to tree. She was not healthy; this much he knew. She had the same sickness that had killed his father. He could tell by the way she lumbered with the sacks of apples, coughing, wheezing harder as each hour passed, that she would soon not be able to pick any longer.

  By five o’clock that evening, Eva Jablonski had cleared more than half the orchard. This in itself was a feat no one had thought possible. She had a quarter of the trees left to pick before the sun set. She had two hours left, three at most, and many men began to beg Lockwood to accept what she had done so far as payment for her so
n’s transgression. Lockwood sat on the edge of the corncrib, chewing the stem of a daisy, and shook his head. “We’ve made a pact,” he told Eva’s supporters. “It would only be an offense to her if I changed the rules now.”

  By seven o’clock that evening, Eva Jablonski had picked nearly all of the apples in the orchard. The barrels were full to overflowing. The woman was hunched over in a terrible way. Sweat beaded and fell down her brow. Her mouth hung open; her tongue lolled like the clapper in a bell. “Only a few more, Eva,” her supporters said from below. “Keep going, only a few more.”

  She fell into a pile of rags and skin and bones at half past seven, when the light was amber, glazing over the orchard like honey, and shadows had begun to spread. No one moved to pick her up. They waited, breaths held, hands at their mouths. And after a moment, the woman looked around, blinking, narrowing her eyes as if she’d gone blind, then somehow pulled herself up and went on to the last tree.

  “She’s going to do it!” a woman shouted, smiling from within her babushka.

  Another mother, thought Lockwood. He wandered beneath the last of the apple trees, shaking his head at the marvel that was occurring. The fierceness or stupidity of mothers, he thought. Which of these traits did Eva Jablonski exhibit? He himself was unsure whether he’d do what Dobry’s mother was doing, if it were his own child who was endangered.

  Eva Jablonski picked through the apples in the last tree until the sun was nothing more than a red sliver on the horizon, lowering. She picked, then bagged the apple, picked, then bagged the next, heaving and sobbing, murmuring a nonsensical prayer. By the stunned and confused faces of her friends, it seemed not even those who spoke her language could understand what she was saying. And just as the sun lowered to the other side of the world, Eva Jablonski plucked the last apple from the last tree in the orchard.

  She held the fruit in her hand, held her arm high in the air, and a bellow of exhausted strength flew out of her. People began to cry out. “She has done it!” they shouted. “She has done it!” And even Lockwood himself applauded the woman’s tenacity, clapping his hands together slowly, shaking his head in admiration.

  Everyone waited for Eva Jablonski to climb down and embrace her son, but slowly the arm holding the apple sank; then the woman’s legs gave way beneath her, and she fell several feet before she was stopped halfway to the ground, caught in a tangle of branches. Her body hung in the tree for several moments before those below realized she was not moving, and finally a woman shouted, “Get her out! Quickly! Someone help her down from there!”

  Someone untied the woman’s son, and Dobry ran to the tree. His wrists red and raw from the twine that had held him, he climbed up to her and put his face next to hers but could not feel her breathing, could not hear the pulse of her blood. “Momma,” he whispered. “Momma, get up.” But Eva Jablonski remained still.

  Two big men climbed up to fetch the woman’s body. They pulled her down and laid her out on the ground beneath the tree, where everyone crowded to look at her for a long moment. Then, after they understood that Eva was dead, they picked her up and carried her away, back to her ramshackle one-room house at the edge of Temperance.

  Before they left, Dobry Jablonski turned back to Lockwood and stared hard, his green eyes flashing. “You killed my mother,” he said, and his voice had turned rough, as if he had become a man in an instant. His voice scraped with anger. Anger that was large, and growing larger by the second. Anger that was too large for a small boy to contain.

  Lockwood shook his head and said, “We made a pact, your mother and I. You should be proud of her. She kept her side. She has paid for your freedom.”

  But Dobry Jablonski continued to stare at Lockwood, who seemed unnerved by the boy standing in front of him, refusing to leave with the others. He was rattled enough to take from his pants pocket a silver watch and stretch it across the space between them, placing it in the boy’s hand. “Take this,” he told Dobry Jablonski. “May it be a help to you in your future.”

  Dobry’s eyes never left Lockwood’s. They held his gaze throughout the entire transaction. And then, as Lockwood slowly but surely backed away from the boy, Dobry lifted one finger, pointing it at the man like a wand, and with an air of finality in his hate-steadied voice, he said, “You will grow old before your time. You will die in a place where no man will be with you. Your land will be taken from you, and your sons and their sons and their sons will wither until your name has no meaning.”

  There was magic in those words. It nearly shimmered in the space between Dobry’s finger and Lockwood, like heat rising from a coal-patched road in summer. The silver pocket watch in Dobry’s other hand gleamed, as if possessed by a spark of magic.

  Lockwood cocked his head to the side, then spat on the ground between them.

  The boy said no more. Eventually he turned to leave, and followed the caravan that carried his dead mother down the back roads, back to their home.

  Lockwood did not give the boy’s words too much attention. But later that night, he awoke, soaked in his own sweat, from a dream of the boy and his green eyes staring at him as he recited those same words.

  Old before your time.

  You will die. Alone.

  Your sons will wither.

  And in the dream, the boy’s mother, Eva, rose from where she lay tangled in the branches of the apple tree, to pluck the words out of the air and tuck them deep inside a fold of her ragged skirts for safekeeping.

  The sound of thunder cracked the sky open like a pocket watch, and Lockwood jumped from his bed to see lightning illuminate his bedroom window. He crossed the room, feet cold on the bare floor, to pull back the curtains and watch the coming storm.

  Lightning flashed again, creating momentary cracks in the sky. And each time a bolt flashed, the barn and the orchard and the creek were briefly lit up below. Lockwood thought he should check on the cows. But just as he was about to go downstairs, he saw someone outside in the storm. A person. A person down in the orchard. The silhouette of a person standing beneath the swaying limbs of the apple trees.

  Lightning flashed once more, and there she was, a woman standing beneath the tree Eva Jablonski had died in. When the lightning disappeared, the landscape winked out of existence, leaving Lockwood in the dark of his room, shaking his head. Another flash appeared moments later, but this time the bolt cut straight through the heart of the tree, setting the leaves on fire while smoke poured from the hole the lightning had cut through the trunk.

  Lockwood ran downstairs and out of the house, barefoot, the rain soaking him, and crossed the railroad-tie bridge over Sugar Creek into the orchard. The woman he’d seen there—had she been hit by the lightning? When he reached the tree, though, he found no one. Licks of fire still crackled across the limbs while the trunk continued to smoke in the night.

  The Jablonski woman. This had something to do with her; Lockwood was sure of it. But he shook his head after entertaining that thought. Was he turning into his foolish father now? Somehow believing what the Jablonski boy had said? Believing that curses had power? Believing that he would die alone in the middle of nowhere? Believing that the family he was making would die in the soil he’d planted them in?

  The people of Temperance would come to call this plot of land Sorrow Acre. In time, though, they’d forget the reasons behind that name, and they would forget the woman who died as she toiled for her son’s life. They would pack up all of their regrets and blissfully forget all that they could forget, protecting themselves from the sorrow that filled the soil and the trees in this place like a poison. The pact Lockwood had made with Eva Jablonski had guaranteed this, Lockwood realized. Eva had kept her end of the bargain. And one day he would keep his.

  On the horizon, a creature of mist and shadow moved along the tree line, its eyes dark and glassy, its antlers flickering. Lockwood couldn’t see it this time, but he sensed its nearness, as he sensed my own presence in the nearby shadows, the same presence he’d feel when I was wit
h him several years later as we fell through a night sky in Europe.

  He was already making plans. How to find the creature, how to kill it. He didn’t know why, but he sensed the ill will the creature held for him. A war was about to begin in Europe. Rumbles and rumors of it had already begun. He would go there when they called for him to fight. He would go there even if they didn’t call for him. And several years later, he would meet the creature again, in its own woods this time, on the other side of the Atlantic.

  He would find it once more, after I’d flung myself out of the belly of an airplane with him. And after he found the stag again, he’d take the first step along the path each of his sons and grandsons would eventually take after him, until they had all withered and the name Lockwood no longer held any meaning.

  Do you understand now? the voice asked as the vision began to disappear into wisps of smoke around me.

  I was down in the dark hollow of the dead apple tree, blinking the last of the vision out of my eyes. I felt the earth beneath me again, smelled the dank odor of decaying wood, the mustiness of rotten apples, and quickly pushed myself out of that hole, sliding out onto a skin of ice, inadvertently making a blurry snow angel behind me.

  This is your story, Aidan Lockwood, the voice said. Do you understand me?

  I sat up to lean back against the trunk of the tree the woman had died in, caught in the web of gnarled branches strung above my very head, and nodded.

  “If I understand you right,” I answered her a second later, “then your name is Eva Jablonski. And your son cursed my family.”

  “What did she say then?” Jarrod asked later, after I’d gotten up from the ground in a hurry, after I’d refused to stay and listen to the woman in the tree any longer—she had said she had one more thing to show me, but I’d shaken my head, said no, said I’m sorry, said it was all too much—and had run across the railroad-tie bridge, returned to the house, passed by my mom at the dining room table whispering my father’s name like a mantra, gone past the open door to Toby’s room, where he sat in a chair with his bad ankle in a brace, staring out his window as if he might somehow see my dad appear at the edge of the woods to reveal that everything that had recently happened to us simply wasn’t true. After all that, I’d called Jarrod to ask if I could come over.