The Stolen Child (11 page)

I recall two occasions when he stepped out of his inner world, and both times were unsettling. A few months after the scene at the winter recital, he brought up the matter of the woman in red and her strange story. We were tearing down my mother’s henhouse, having sold the birds and gotten out of the egg and chicken business after turning a handsome profit. His questions arrived in the intervals between the prying crowbar, squealing nails, and tearing lumber.

“So, you remember that lady and her story about the boy and the deer?” He ripped another plank from the frame. “What do you make of that? Do you think such a thing could happen?”

“Sounded incredible to me, but I suppose it might have happened. She seemed pretty sure of herself.”

Grunting with effort, he tugged away at a rusty nail. “So it might be true? How do you explain her thinking it was you?”

“I didn’t say it was true. She seemed convinced it happened, but it isn’t likely, is it? And anyway, suppose something like that did happen to her, she is wrong about me. I wasn’t there.”

“Maybe it was someone who looked like you?” He threw his weight into it, and the rest of the wall crashed down, leaving only the skeleton stark against the sky.

“That’s a possibility,” I said. “I reminded her of someone she saw once upon a time. Didn’t you tell her that everyone has a double in the world? Maybe she saw my evil twin?”

He eyeballed the frame. “This’ll tumble down with a few good kicks.” He knocked down the frame, loaded it up in the back of a truck, and drove away.

The second occasion occurred about a year later. His voice woke me at first light, and I followed the sound from my bedroom and through the back doorway. A feathery mist rose from the lawn and he stood, his back to me, in the middle of the wet grass, calling out my name as he faced a stand of firs. A dark trail of footsteps led into the woods ten feet in front of him. He was stuck to the spot, as if he had startled a wild animal that fled away in fear. But I saw no creature. By the time I drew near, the diminuendo of a few raspy calls of “Henry” lingered in the air. Then he fell to his knees, bent his head to the ground, and quietly wept. I crept back into the house, and pretended to be reading the sports page when he came in. My father stared at me hunched over the newspaper, my long fingers wrapped around a coffee cup. The wet belt of his robe dragged along the floor like a chain. Soaked, disheveled, and unshaven, he seemed much older, but maybe I had not noticed before how he was aging. His hands trembled as if palsied, and he took a Camel from his pocket. The cigarette was too wet to light despite his repeated attempts, so he crumpled the whole pack and tossed it in the trash can. I set a cup of coffee in front of him, and he stared at the steam as if I had handed him poison.

“Dad, are you all right? You look a mess.”

“You.” He pointed his finger at me like a gun, but that’s all he said. The word hung in the air all morning, and I do not think I ever heard him call me “Henry” again.

•                    CHAPTER 12                    •

         
W
e entered the church to steal candles. Even in the dead of night, the slate and glass building asserted its prominence on Main Street. Bound by an iron fence, the church had been laid out in the shape of a cross, and no matter how one approached it, the symbols were inescapable. Huge chestnut doors at the top of a dozen steps, mosaics from the Bible in the stained-glass windows reflecting moonlight, parapets hiding angels lurking near the roof—the whole edifice loomed like a ship that threatened to swamp us as we drew near. Smaolach, Speck, and I crept through the graveyard adjacent to the eastern arm of the church and popped in through a side door that the priests left unlocked. The long rows of pews and the vaulted ceiling created a space that, in the darkness, pressed down on us; its emptiness had weight and substance. Once our eyes adjusted, however, the church did not seem as smothering. The threatening size diminished, and the high walls and arched ceilings reached out as if to embrace us. We split up, Smaolach and Speck in search of the larger candles in the sacristy to the right, I to find the smaller votive candles in an alcove on the other side of the altar. A fleeting presence seemed to follow me along the altar rail, and a real dread rose inside me. In a wrought iron stand, dozens of candles stood like lines of soldiers in glass cups. A coinbox rattled with pennies when I tapped my nails against its metal face, and spent matches littered the empty spaces. I struck a new match against the rough plate, and a small flame erupted like a fingersnap. At once, I regretted the fire, for I looked up and saw a woman’s face staring down at me. I shook out the light and crouched beneath the rail, hoping to be invisible.

Panic and fear left as quickly as they had come, and what amazes me now is how much flows through the mind in such a short space of time. When I saw her eyes looking down on me, I remembered: the woman in red, my schoolmates, the people in town, the people in church, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, the kidnapping, drowning, prayers, the Virgin Mary, and my sisters, father, mother. I nearly had solved the riddle of my identity. Yet as quickly as it takes to say “Pardon me,” they vanished, and with them, my real story. It seemed as if the eyes of the statue flickered in the match light. I looked upon the enigmatic face of the Virgin Mary, idealized by an anonymous sculptor, the object of untold adoration, devotion, imagination, supplication. As I stuffed my pockets with candles, I felt a pang of guilt.

Behind me, the great wooden doors at the center entrance groaned open as a penitent or a priest entered. We zipped out through the side door and zigzagged among the gravestones. Despite the fact that bodies lay buried there, the cemetery was not half as frightening as the church. I paused at a gravestone, ran my fingers over the incised letters, and was tempted to light a match to read the name. The others leapt over the iron fence, so I scurried to catch up, chasing them across town, until we were all safely beneath the library. Every close call thrilled us, and we sat on our blankets giggling like children. We lit enough candles to make our sanctuary shine. Smaolach crawled off to a dark corner and curled up like a fox, his nose buried under a cloaking arm. Speck and I sought out the brightness, and with our latest books, we sat side by side, the scrape of turning pages marking time.

Ever since she had introduced me to this secret place, I loved going to the library. Initially, I went for the books first encountered in my childhood. Those old stories—
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
and
Mother Goose
, picture books like
Mike Mulligan
,
Make Way for Ducklings
, and
Homer Price
—promised another clue to my fading identity. Rather than help me recapture the past, the stories only alienated me further from it. By looking at the pictures and reading aloud the text, I had hoped to hear my mother’s voice again, but she was gone. After my first few visits to the library, I shelved such childish things and never again looked at them. Instead, I embarked upon a journey mapped by Speck, who chose, or helped me choose, stories to hold my adolescent interest: books like
The Call of the Wild
and
White Fang
, tales of adventure and derring-do. She helped me sound out words I could not decipher and explained characters, symbols, and plots that ran too wild or deep for my imagination. Her confidence, as she moved through the stacks and countless novels, inspired me to believe in my own ability to read and imagine. If not for her, I would be the same as Smaolach, filching comic books like
Speed Carter
or the
Adventures of Mighty Mouse
from the drugstore. Or worse, not reading at all.

Cozy in our den, she held on her lap a fat volume of Shakespeare, the type set in a minuscule font, and I was midway through
The Last of the Mohicans
. The flickering candlelight conspired with the silence, and we only interrupted each other’s reading to share a casual delight.

“Speck, listen to this: ‘These children of the woods stood together for several moments pointing at the crumbling edifice, and conversing in the unintelligible language of their tribe.’ ”

“Sounds like us. Who are these people?”

I held up the book to show her its cover, the title in gilt letters on a green cloth. We receded back into our stories, and an hour or so passed before she spoke again.

“Listen to this, Aniday. I’m reading
Hamlet
here and these two fellows come in. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet greets them: ‘Good lads, how do ye both?’ And Rosencrantz says, ‘As the indifferent children of the earth.’ And Guildenstern says, ‘Happy in that we are not over-happy. On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button.’ ”

“Does he mean they were unlucky?”

She laughed. “Not that, not that. Don’t go chasing after a better fortune.”

I did not understand the half of what she said, but I laughed along with her, and then tried to find my place again with Hawkeye and Uncas. As morning threatened and we packed our things to go, I told her how much I had enjoyed what she had read to me about Fortune.

“Write it down, boy. If you come across a passage in your reading that you’d like to remember, write it down in your little book; then you can read it again, memorize it, and have it whenever you wish.”

I took out my pencil and a card from the stack I had filched from the card catalog. “What did they say?”

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: the indifferent children of the earth.”

“The last of the Mohicans.”

“That’s us.” She flashed her smile before going to the corner to wake our slumbering friend Smaolach.

W
e would snitch a few books to take home with us for the satisfaction of lying abed on a chilled winter’s morning under weak sunshine and slipping out a slim volume to read at leisure. Between the covers, a book can be a sin. I have spent many hours in such a waking dream, and once having learned how to read, I could not imagine my life otherwise. The indifferent children around me did not share my enthusiasm for the written word. Some might sit for a good story well told, but if a book had no pictures, they showed scant interest.

When a raiding party went to town, they often came back with a collection of magazines—
Time
or
Life
or
Look
—and then we would huddle together under the shade of an old oak to look at the photographs. I remember summer days, a mass of knees and feet, elbows and shoulders, jockeying for a choice viewing position, their bare skin damp against mine. We stuck together like the slick pages clumped and wrinkled in the humidity. News and celebrity did not appeal to them. Castro or Khrushchev, Monroe or Mantle, none meant anything more than a passing fancy, an interesting face; but they were profoundly intrigued by images of children, particularly in fanciful or humorous situations, and any photographs of the natural world, particularly exotic animals from a zoo or circus or in the wild reaches of a faraway land. A boy on top of an elephant caused a sensation, but a boy with a baby elephant was talked about for days. Most beloved of all were shots of parents and children together.

“Aniday,” Onions would plead, “tell us the story about the daddy and his baby.”

A bright-eyed baby girl peeps up from a bassinet to stare at her delighted, grinning father. I read the caption to them. “ ‘Little bundle of joy: Senator Kennedy admires his new baby daughter, Caroline, in their Georgetown home.’ ”

When I tried to turn the page, Blomma stuck her palm on the photograph. “Wait. I want to see the baby again.”

Chavisory chimed in: “I want to see the man.”

They were intensely curious about the other world, especially at the distance photography allows, the place where people grew up, fell in love, had children, became old, and the cycle continued, unlike our relentless timelessness. Their ever-changing lives fascinated us. Despite our many chores, a persistent boredom hung around the camp. For long stretches, we did nothing but allow time to pass.

Kivi and Blomma could spend a day braiding each other’s hair, unraveling the plaits and starting all over again. Or they played with the dolls they had stolen or made from sticks and scraps of cloth. Kivi, in particular, became a little mother, holding a rag doll to her breast, tucking her toy baby in a cradle fashioned from a forgotten picnic basket. One baby was composed of the lost or broken limbs of four other dolls. As Kivi and Blomma bathed their dolls at the creek’s edge one humid morning, I joined them on the bank and helped to rinse the nylon hair till it lay plastered against the dolls’ plastic scalps.

“Why do you like playing with your babies so much?”

Kivi did not look up from her task, but I could sense that she was crying.

“We are practicing,” said Blomma, “for when our turn comes along to be changelings. We are practicing to be mothers someday.”

“Why are you sad, Kivi?”

She looked at me, the brightness now drained from her eyes. “Because it takes so long.”

Indeed it did. For while we all grew older, we did not change physically. We did not grow up. Those who had been in the forest for decades suffered most. The truly mischievous fought the monotony by creating trouble, solving imaginary problems, or by pursuing an enterprise that, on the surface, appeared worthless. Igel had spent the past decade in camp digging an elaborate system of tunnels and underground warrens for our protection. Béka, the next in line, was on a constant prowl to catch any unsuspecting female and drag her into the bushes.

Ragno and Zanzara attempted to cultivate grapes nearly every spring in hope of replacing our fermented mash with a homegrown wine. Of course, the soil resisted every enrichment, the days lacked sufficient sun, mites and spiders and insects invaded, and my friends had no luck. A vine or two would sprout, twist and meander along the trellis Ragno had built, but never a grape in all those years. Come September, they cursed their luck and tore down the remnants, only to begin again when March teased such dreams. The seventh time I saw them breaking the hard ground, I asked Zanzara why they persisted in the face of continued failures. He stopped digging and leaned against the cracked and ancient spade.

“When we were boys, every night we had a glass of wine at supper. I’d like to taste it again.”

“But surely you could steal a bottle or two from town.”

“My papa grew grapes and his before him and back and back and back.” He wiped his brow with an earth-caked hand. “One day we’ll get the grapes. You learn to be patient here.”

I passed much time with Luchóg and Smaolach, who taught me how to fell a tree and not be crushed, the geometry and physics behind a deadfall trap, the proper angle of chase to catch a hare on foot. But my favorite days were spent with Speck. And the best of all were my birthdays.

I still kept my calendar and had chosen April 23—Shakespeare’s birthday— as my own. In my tenth spring in the woods, the date fell on a Saturday, and Speck invited me to go to the library to spend the night quietly reading together. When we arrived, the chamber had been transformed. Dozens of small candles suffused the room with an amber glow reminiscent of the light from a campfire under the stars. Near the crack at the entranceway, she had chalked a birthday greeting in a scrolled design of her own devising. The general shabbiness—the cobwebs, dirty blankets, and threadbare rugs—had been cleared away, making the place clean and cozy. She had laid in a small feast of bread and cheese, locked away against the mice, and soon the kettle boiled cheerfully, with real tea in our cups.

“This is incredible, Speck.”

“Thank goodness we decided today is your birthday, or I would have gone to all this fuss for nothing.”

At odd times that evening, I would look up from my text to watch her reading nearby. Light and shadow flickered across her face, and like clockwork she brushed a stray lock from in front of her eyes. Her presence disturbed me; I did not get through many pages of my book and had to read many sentences more than once. Late that night, I awoke in her embrace. Instead of the usual kicking or shouldering away when I woke up with someone all over me, I nestled into her, wanting the moment to last. Most of the shorter candles had burned down, and sadly I realized that our time was nearly over.