Bedtime Story (9 page)
Authors: Robert J. Wiersema
I had been waiting all day for this moment, and I wanted to get it right. Jacqui was covering a half-shift this evening, so after getting David his snack I waited while she changed and bustled around the kitchen, making some toast to tide herself over.
“It’s my column,” I explained, though it should have been obvious.
“I can tell,” she said. “It’s been a while.”
“I thought you might like this one.”
I tried not to watch her as she read; the piece wasn’t long, but the time seemed to stretch agonizingly slowly. I ran water in the sink, started taking things out of the fridge, put a pan on the stove—anything to avoid even glancing at her. She hated me watching her read.
Which was too bad. She was beautiful when she was reading.
Jacqui had been my first reader almost since the day we met. She would give my English papers a quick once-over, but when it came to those early short stories, she was tireless. I would hand her fresh pages and she would hand them back to me so covered in red ink they seemed to be bleeding.
I became a better writer, writing for her.
O
FF THE
S
HELF
C
HRISTOPHER
K
NOX
The summer that I was eleven, my life was changed forever. No, more than that—the world was changed forever, and I was pulled along with it.
The summer that I was eleven, my father died. His death was neither quick nor merciful: he died of lung cancer, and spent weeks wasting away in a hospital bed. He had always been a strong man, a builder, and I imagined that I would grow up to be like him: broad-shouldered and confident, always with an easy smile and a kind word. My father was the sort of man that I wanted to be. That I still want to be, truth be told.
The last time I saw him, I barely recognized him. The cancer had laid waste to his body: the man who had towered over me was now tiny and frail. His hair was gone, and his hands shook when he reached out to touch me. He still had the same smile, though—that was how I recognized him, the only way I could be sure that this small man was really my father.
That was three weeks before he died—I didn’t see him after that. My mother sent me with my younger brothers to stay with my father’s parents on their farm in Henderson, B.C. Even if you’ve heard of it, you’ve probably never been there—it’s that sort of town.
My brothers took to country life with a passion. Too young to understand what was happening to our father, they treated our displacement as a vacation. They spent their days playing in the fields, or exploring the woods behind the farm, cutting trails and building forts.
I mostly stayed in the house, close to my grandparents, close to the telephone, waiting for it to ring with my mother’s frequent updates.
It was a terrible, nightmarish summer, and I’m not sure I would have survived it, save for the discovery I made in the basement one afternoon. I don’t even know what I was looking for—probably something my grandmother had sent me to find to keep me out from underfoot—but I discovered a box in a stack in one corner, a box marked with the name Richard Knox. My father’s name.
I didn’t take it upstairs: I dug into it right there, angling it so the ceiling light would shine into it.
At first, the box seemed like a disorganized mess, a hodgepodge of newspaper clippings, ribbons and trophies, yearbooks and photographs, report cards and a few envelopes that still held letters. It took me a while of digging through to realize that I was actually holding my father’s childhood in my hands, sifting through his memories, all the things he had chosen to preserve.
At the bottom of the box, I found a handful of books—paperbacks in fairly poor shape, battered and spine-broken, obviously well read and deeply loved. I ignored the westerns (I still do), but there were four other books, books that promised adventure and daring, with bright pictures of knights and swordsmen, battles and beautiful maidens on their covers.
I put everything else back into the box, but I carried those books with me out into the summer afternoon sunlight. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that those books, four fantasy novels by an author named Lazarus Took, saved my life, but they saved me in a way that only the experience of reading can. I devoured those books, one after another, then I went back and began to reread them, more slowly, with greater attention and devotion.
I spent those weeks reading, lying in the field or perched up in one of the apple trees, up in the room that I was sharing with my brothers or in the privacy of the hayloft.
Like the best books, the novels I found in my father’s box were capable of magic—they took me to another world, made me feel
more deeply there than I could allow myself to feel in the real world. While I was reading, I ceased to be little Christopher Knox—I became someone else entirely.
And that’s what books should do for us. I haven’t thought about Lazarus Took in decades, but I still recall how it felt to read those novels, the impact they had on my life, on my heart. Everyone has books like that in their past, forgotten treasures from their childhood. What are yours?
She cleared her throat, and I turned toward her.
“This is good,” she said, gesturing with the paper.
“Thanks.” I could feel my face warming.
“I didn’t …” she began, and glanced away. “Why didn’t you tell me how important that book was to you?”
I shrugged. I had been thinking about it since the day I found
To the Four Directions
at Prospero’s. “I wasn’t really able to put it into words,” I said lamely.
Jacqui gestured with the paper again. “You seemed to do just fine with this.”
“Yeah.” That was my curse: I was always better with words on paper than I was with actually talking to people. Especially the people closest to me.
“You should tell David,” she said. “Maybe …”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t want—” I broke off. “I don’t think it’s something that I want to talk to him about yet. My dad dying …”
She nodded, and seemed about to speak, but we both heard a sound outside the kitchen door. Seconds later, David appeared, clutching his sandwich plate.
“I brought my dishes down,” he said, with a wide smile. “What’s for dinner?”
I hadn’t heard him come down the stairs. How long, I wondered, had he been standing outside the room, listening?
“So are you all brushed up?” I asked as I came through Davy’s door. He was sitting up in bed, covers draped over his lap, holding his new
baseball glove. “Had a pee?” He nodded. “Nolan fed?” I glanced over at the hamster cage.
“Yes, Dad,” he said in the much-exasperated tone that was part of the routine.
I stopped at the bookshelf by the door and picked up our leather bookmark. “So, what do you want to start next?”
“What about the one you gave me? I brought it up from downstairs.”
When I turned to him, he gestured with the baseball glove toward his bedside table where
To the Four Directions
lay beside the lamp.
I stepped toward the desk, rested my hand on the back of his chair. He wasn’t looking at me.
“Are you sure?” I asked, pulling the chair over to the bed. “You didn’t seem too keen on it.”
He shrugged, pushing a ball into the web of the glove. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not
The Lord of the Rings
, but it might be all right.”
I resisted the urge to kiss the top of his head. “Well, let’s find out,” I said, opening the book. “Assume the position, sport.”
He didn’t lie down the way he usually did. “Dad,” he said, extending the glove slightly toward me. “Can you help me with this?”
I looked at the glove, with absolutely no idea what to do with it.
“Can you help me put this under my mattress?”
“Isn’t that going to be uncomfortable?”
“It’s just for another couple of nights. Coach says—”
“Right.”
Together we managed to get the glove set firmly in place. When he lay down he shifted several times, twisting and contorting, the way a cat will settle to the contours of its bed and manage to look completely comfortable once it’s done.
“You all right?” I asked, when he seemed settled.
“I think so,” he said, shifting a bit more. “It’s a bit lumpy …”
“Pea under your bed, Princess?” I asked, putting on a fake British accent.
“No, I didn’t!”
We both laughed. Quick-witted, my boy.
“Okay.” I opened the book again. “
To the Four Directions
, by Lazarus Took.”
“Read by Christopher Knox,” he said, imitating the introductions used in the audio-books we listened to in the van.
I smiled, at home in at least this little bit of routine.
A few pages into the first chapter, he stopped me.
“You don’t have to do that anymore, you know.”
“Do what?”
“That thing you do where you call the people in books David for me? You don’t need to do that anymore—I’m eleven years old now.”
“I didn’t.” It was an old trick, a way of helping David relate to the story and the characters, but I hadn’t done it in a long time. David Baggins just hadn’t seemed right.
Had I slipped into the old habit?
I glanced down at the book.
“No, look here.” I held up the book to him.
“I’ll get a beating if I am late to the stables,” Tamas complained. But that didn’t stop him from following Dafyd through the winding alley in the dark
.
“You worry too much, Tamas,” Dafyd said. “You have time for a little food. The stable-master will be asleep for hours yet.…”
“And here.” Flipping a page.
Tamas risked a nervous glance at Dafyd, and Mareigh caught the look
.
“Dafyd,” she said, her voice dropping sternly
.
“It’s spelled differently, with an
f
and a
y
, but it’s all David. I wasn’t making it up.”
“Okay,” he said, turning onto his side again. “I believe you.”
“Shall I go on?” I asked, with mock obsequiousness.
“By all means.”
After the death of the handmaiden, Captain Bream and the chosen twenty of his men took to the road earlier than planned, riding hard in formation around Dafyd and the magus. If the Berok had infiltrated the castle, time was of the essence. They had ridden out of Colcott before
dawn, and for the first day, the men took the River Road through the heart of the country. Outside of Colcott Town, the country had given way to smaller villages, clutches of buildings gathered at the edge of the Col River. The road was busy, but the merchants and travellers gave the King’s Men wide berth.
The horsemen did not slow, and arrived at the garrison as dark was beginning to fall. The horses were boarded, the men fed, and Dafyd collapsed into the first bed that could be found for him, sleeping dreamlessly.
There had been no idle conversation as they rode, and Dafyd was left alone with his thoughts of the handmaiden who had died in the throne room, who had given her life for his, and of the King who was, even now, dying, hoping for Dafyd to save him. He ached not only from the riding, but for his mother, and Tamas. And Arian. Always Arian.
The next morning, they forded the Col at a town called Donder.
On the south bank of the river, the road was quiet. What few settlements they passed were little more than fishing camps. They rode hours without seeing another face.
The country began to change around them. The great trees and green that Dafyd had known all his life seemed to shrink and turn brown the farther they rode from Colcott Town, and the air was dry, dusty, without the constant moistness of the sea breezes.
Partway through the afternoon, the magus rode up on Dafyd’s right.
“I am guessing that this is the farthest you have ever ventured from the island,” he said.
After hours of silence, Dafyd was surprised to be spoken to, and it took him a moment to respond. “Yes.”
“To see the country, its people … it gives us a sense of what is at stake.” A touch of sadness had entered the old man’s voice.
Dafyd nodded. The thought had weighed heavily upon him for days. “I had no idea that the King was ill,” he said.
“It is the best-kept secret in the kingdom,” the magus said. “Or it was, until the Berok attacked. Now …” He paused. “The two go hand in hand. The King has been sick for some time, and when the Queen had to step in, no one could know. If the Berok ever got a hint that the
King was incapacitated”—he shook his head—“they certainly would have invaded before now.”
“But would the kingdom not rally around the Queen as much as around the King?”
“It is not a matter of the kingdom rallying,” Loren said solemnly. “Were such a grave illness to become known, it would embolden the Berok, knowing that without an heir, one of their own is next in line for the throne.”
Dafyd’s face betrayed his confusion.
“Ah. You are too young to recall,” Loren said.
“Too young to recall what?” Dafyd asked, his head reeling at the thought of a barbarian on the throne.
“Fifteen years ago, after the Battle of Deren Plain, King Horace and the Berok king met to broker what they both hoped would be a lasting peace between the kingdoms.” Loren spoke quietly, and Dafyd had to strain to hear him. “To seal their bond, they arranged a marriage between their children, between the prince, Horace’s only son, and Tanis, the eldest daughter of the Berok king. Their union, the royal wedding, was to unite the kingdoms.”