Barga

Just a year after my father’s demise, his face, or to say the image of him, started corroding from my memory. Now, after almost a decade, the only memories I’ve left of him are the stories he used to tell every time my brother Nivin and I had a fight. And the times he took us to the woods, as soon as it started drizzling, to hunt for the monitor lizards.

‘Never attempt to catch this guy from up front,’ he used to say, skinning the animal. ‘If it manages to clasp its teeth around your leg, either one of you must die before it would release its grip.’

My father was a man full of fascinating stories. In summer nights, we used to sleep on the veranda to escape the heat and my father would take us from the mysteries of treasure pots to the fables of misty ghosts through the legends of forest–dwellers. Like a perennial stream, until he died, he had never run out of stories. Often, when he repeated a story, I used to point it out and he would narrate the same story in a different but a compelling way. The only problem with his tales was the moral he tried to attach to them as an epilogue. For instance, at the end of his tales about the lizards, he used to say: ‘Hold on to what you love with as much rigor as that lizard.’

I was so captivated by his stories that after my mother’s death, I started accompanying him to the fields and helping him with his chores as he went on narrating his stories one after the other. In that way, I hung around him for most of his life while my brother squirmed at us and roamed about with the goons he called friends.

One day, Nivin approached me as I was assembling the cart. ‘Why don’t you join us, Njani?’ he said. ‘What good it’ll do you loitering around with the old man?’

‘Leave about good for a second. What bad has come out of it that you’re so bothered?’

‘I think it’s high time you hang out with the people your age.’

‘What’s your problem, eh?’

‘Everyone thinks you’re a sissy. Even my friends say that you’re a baby who’s reluctant to get off from his father’s lap. They’re saying it to my face, Njani. It’s ruining my repute.’

‘Now I understand you. That’s what this is all about, then?’

He stormed out of the house stomping and cursing. After that incident, he refused to talk to me for a couple of years after which he grew up and started helping my father in the fields.

Speaking of my brother, the only similarity Nivin and I shared was a birthmark on our thighs. He always hated the fact that we were twins and I came out of my mother first — or at least that’s what the witcher woman told my father. So my father considered me the elder one, to Nivin’s distaste, even though he looked older and taller and thought he was wiser than me.

So he preferred calling me by my name instead of Anna which used to upset my father a great deal. Whenever he heard my brother calling me Njani, he would lose his calm and thrash him with a tamarind stem until my mother interfered. A few times she too couldn’t stop him but would fall prey to his angst.

Growing up, I observed this in several other twins — the younger one of them always looks elder. I tried to convey this to Nivin many times but his head was as thick as his skin.

 

One day, we were fighting for the deer meat. Nivin wanted a stew made out of it while I preferred roasting it on coals. My father then intervened and narrated this story, I think, to gross us out. He began:

‘Like me, my father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and great-great-grandfathers, everyone had only sons as their progeny. Except for my brother who had two daughters — both of them were still-born. Some villagers considered it a boon on our lineage while some, a very few of them, deemed it to be a curse.

‘It was said that one of my grandmothers wanted a girl-child and prayed the mountain gods for years together but it looked like they weren’t kind to her prayers. Still not deterred, in her fifties, she adopted a girl from her distant relatives despite the resistance from both sides of the family. Even though such a thing called adoption was unprecedented in our village up until then, somehow she managed to get her husband’s and the birth mother’s approval.

‘They looked after the baby with their life. The husband brought crabs from the fields, tied a wire to their claws so that the baby could walk them like a dog. When the baby got tired of playing, they fried the crabs on coals and ate their meat. The woman never left her side and was said to have taken the baby along even when she had to pass water. Together, they did everything they could do to keep the baby happy.

‘When the baby was five, the husband brought home a wounded crane from his farm so that the baby could play with it. To his joy, the baby got excited, as soon as it saw the crane, ran to the bird jumping, and started playing with it. The old man, contented on watching the baby’s mirth, went for his daily dose of toddy. The old woman was busy preparing sticks for her cooking while the baby was left alone with the crane in the veranda. The crane might have mistaken the baby’s eyes which were moving rapidly for fish or god-knows-what and tried to have a bite. The old woman heard shrills and rushed to the baby to find her eyes — both of them — gouged out by the crane. An eye was strewn on the floor soaked in blood and the crane was picking at it with its beak. And the other one was dangling on her milky cheeks now turned bloody by the optic nerve. Howling, the woman kicked the bird with all her might. The bird bugled and would have flown away but for its wound.’

There was a strange custom in our village. If anyone’s on the verge of dying or unsure of survival, they rotate a live black hen around their head. They believed that if the hen dies, the person lives and if the bird lives, the person dies. In this case, my father told us, instead of wasting a hen, they thought they could use the culprit crane. It died immediately, but to their shock, the baby died after two days.

 

Our village priest used to run a school in his backyard, taking in kids under three years and teaching them to write and read until they were of ten years. The only reason my father sent us there was that the priest charged neither money nor grain for his services. Those were the times when the closest thing we’d had to a slate was a fistful of sand filled in a brick stencil and we had to use our forefingers to write on it. Our initial excitement, with which we had rushed to the school, had worn out after an hour into the writing practice. Not a single pupil went home that day without bleeding fingers.

It was worse in my case. While my brother’s skin had just a shear, my fingernail came off entirely leaving me in agony for over a month. My father scampered to the school the next day and abused the priest with such a harsh tongue that it compelled the poor fellow to provide finger caps made of cloth from then on. Even after that consolation, my father was hesitant to send me back. But somehow Nivin convinced our mother and continued his classes nonetheless. Two years into Nivin’s education, the priest died in a farming accident — he was unloading his cart of rice bags when they fell on him — and the school was closed, for, as it turned out, his sons and daughters were as ignorant as the village folks.

It’s a fact that everyone has love-and-hate relation with their families. But as for me, I had nothing but love for my father and reserved the antithetical for Nivin. At thirteen, he could carry a plow to the field all by himself while I couldn’t even lift it off the ground. Even though we were married to the girls from the same house, Nivin managed to garner more dowry than me. To add to my vacillations, he made it a custom to remind me of my setbacks from time to time. Like when he used to go to school and boast about it, saying that he would grow up to be a learned man while I would turn a ruffian. For quite some time, I tried to bottle my angst and stopped talking to him altogether when I couldn’t take it anymore.

One day as I was leaving for the weekly market, my father called for me.

‘Njani, why don’t you call for your brother so that we could have a chat?’ he said snuffing his naswar.

I remained silent, upon which he replied: ‘Is there something wrong between you both?’

I shrugged my shoulders. He continued nonetheless: ‘Do you care for a story, Njani?’

‘This isn’t the time, Bapu,’ I began, ‘I am leaving for the market — ’

‘Sit down,’ he cut me off and began his story before I could even sit.

‘The relation between my father and his brother, my uncle, was worse than the two of youse. It was worse than enmity, you can say. Whenever there was an occasion in the family, dealing with these brothers was a more daunting task to our relatives than making preparations for the event, for inviting one would upset the other. In functions they both had to attend, they cursed at each other, forgetting and foregoing their dignity. I saw them both swearing to kill one another and describe in detail how horridly one would kill the other.  Want to know the reason for their hatred?

‘My grandfather had no property besides his agricultural land. So, on his deathbed, he distributed it equally between the brothers, and passed away. Everything was calm until the start of the cropping season.  No one in the family knew then there was a storm in store for them — a storm which would last two decades. My uncle accused my father of encroachment on his land. To be honest, my father did no such thing. So, the family stood behind him and my uncle went to the village heads.

‘My father being a sincere man, and they knowing it, the village heads denied to call for a meeting at first. Not dejected, my uncle bribed some of them and made them call my father for the meeting. It went on for a month and my uncle, to bear the expenses of the village heads, had to sell a part of his land. And at the end of it, they decreed that my father was not guilty and there was no such encroachment as accused.

‘Unable to digest the truth and defeat, my uncle, who had a bad taste for them, next sought the help of a revenue officer who lodged a complaint against my father. The case went on for years in the mandal court all the while my uncle’s family starved. His wife died of cholera so he married again and that woman eloped with some bloke just after a year. His children died malnourished while my uncle was busy in the mandal. My dad worked hard on his field, managed his duties and did everything at his disposal to increase the produce on the crop every year. My father was relieved of the case not until you were born, and the verdict was in his favor. As to my uncle, no one knows what happened to him. Some say he committed suicide. Others say they’ve seen him begging in the Barangaon city. We’ve never been there so we don’t know the amount of truth in that news.’

As he completed his story, I looked at him puzzled as to why he narrated it to me.

‘I know how you feel about your brother.’

I opened my mouth but he waved his hand to dismiss my trial of protest. ‘I’m thinking of transferring the land to both of you, this year. You’re old and ready enough, I think. And let me say you this. We don’t worship mythical heroes or gods in our village, Njani. All that we villagers, look upon as success is the highest amount of produce on a crop in a season. I think you can beat your brother at that, don’t you?’

I nodded half-heartedly.

‘And take this as my advice. Never waste your money on pleasures. Do you know the reason they respect me in the village?’

I shook my head.

‘My father, dying, gave me half an acre of land. I bought out the surrounding lands of it and augmented it into two acres. I can say with a bit of pride that I was the only one who managed to do that in my generation. No matter how weak and feeble you are in your childhood, how insecure you are about your strengths, people will forget them once you’re successful in their eyes. That’s the reason, in folklore, heroes are said to have been born with golden armor and wicked people are said to have been born killing their mothers.’

 

My old man died a year after we’d had that conversation. As promised, he gave both of us an acre of land. And thus began my trials to shellac my brother. The first year, I tried every trick in the book to produce more grain than Nivin. I spent most of my days in the field, took my meals there and drank water from the stream flowing nearby and slept in the meadows for the fear of wild boars.

But all in vain, for at the end of the season, Nivin had managed to turn out the same amount of grain as I. To be upright, he managed a bagful excess, but he donated it to the local deity. So, in a way, we were on the same level in terms of yield.

I worked harder the next year but again it was Nivin who had the upper hand. I would’ve gone mad if not for my wife, who blessed me with a boy snatching away my distress. The year after that, Nivin’s grain weighed two times more than mine. It was then that my wife told me: ‘I think your brother’s cheating you.’

How?, I wondered.

‘He might be stealing from your heaps of grain. Otherwise, think of it, how can he produce more than you without working as hard as you? Listen to me and appoint someone to guard the crop at nights.’

I took heed and selected her brother for the watch-guard.  But he reported every morning that there was no such foul play as we feared. Yet I paid him to guard for the entire season. This time Nivin produced the highest grain in the village and people began talking about him.  I was so upset that I couldn’t eat food for a week.

Just when everything was going downhill, there came a stranger in our village. He built a shack for himself on the river bank. The entire village took him for a sorcerer and dreaded running into him. People chided when someone brought up his topic, but talk they did of him nonetheless. They were even reluctant, my wife told me one evening, to go to the river to bathe.

Intrigued, I decided to pay a visit to this enigmatic person and went to the river one fine morning. The shack was empty except for a bed and some earthly pots blackened by soot. From the window, I could see the man standing in the river and folding his hands at the rising sun. Sunlight glinted in the drops of water falling from his palms. The wind made his long jet black hair dance to its tune. The scenery was so serene that for a second I forgot all my woes and wanted to join him in the water. He came in as he completed his respects and I took a good look at him. He had broad shoulders, a divine face and looked no more than forty.

After a brief introduction, we began talking, and before I could realize, we talked into the nick of the night. I left unwillingly but returned the next day first thing in the morning. I connoted all my problems to him and he said he would help me. All that I had to do was to believe in his god and pray to Him seven times a day. I did it with unperturbed conviction for a month when he gave me a root wrapped in a leaf. ‘Dip this in your blood and throw it in your field,’ he advised and I abided. Surprisingly, that season, my production increased and was equal to that of Nivin. That cleared any doubts I had had for my friend. And from then on, I started blindly following his words.

The main reason I have trusted him was he never asked for money, grain or a favor. One time when I offered him money, he shook his head smiling and said: ‘I’m here to help you, Njani. And I’m not a man of apprehensions, mind you. When I need a help from you, I’ll definitely ask for it. You can be sure of it.’

The next year, Nivin, had a heavy loss and had to sell a part of his land to clear his debts. I was overjoyed on hearing this but soon it morphed into pity for my brother. I asked him to seek my friend’s help but he was, as always, resistant to counsel.

Even my produce hit an all-time low one season. When I sought for my friend’s aid, he introduced his brother, who looked just like him but only younger. He guided me to change my name by adding a consonant to it. So I changed it to Njanni but there was no change in my produce.

I confronted the brothers seething with anger, when they said in unison: ‘Give us a last chance.’ I did and they asked me to remove a room in my house. I went along with their whims despite my wife’s rebuffs. But at the end of the year, I got the highest grain not only in the village but the entire mandal. As per the custom, the villagers made me a member of the grain board, awarded me two quintals of wheat and gold-coated tiger claws. Somehow the villagers got a whiff of my secret and one by one they thronged to the shack. I never saw the shack empty again. My friend got so occupied with the villagers that I had to send a note asking for a rendezvous which he rejected.

After a month, as I sobered from my success, my friend paid a visit to my house along with his brother and a village head in tow. ‘As for the services we rendered, Njani, we want to charge you a fee,’ he said standing in my veranda. ‘Even though it won’t be sufficed, I would like to have your acre of land.’

Before I could utter a word, he continued: ‘As for my brother, he would have the grain you produced this year.’

I was knocked out of my wits and words failed me. My wife rushed out of the house and started shouting at the edge of her voice, hurling curses at the trinity. Soon, the whole village was standing in our veranda with pricked ears and piqued interests. My friend jotted down the conversations I had with him over the years; only he called them dealings. I was partly relieved that he didn’t reveal my feelings towards my brother. Not one soul spoke up in my defense and it was pretty evident that they were all under his spell. Thus, I was robbed off my land, grain and dignity. The next day my wife left me along with my sons.

A few sympathizers dropped in on their way to the fields the next day to say that they would stand by me. Together we went to the river bank, in hopes of demanding justice, but there was no sign of a shack. Apparently the brothers were wanderers and had left for another village in search of a different friend. On enquiry, I got to know that they sold my land to the village head that was with them on that fateful day.

To my surprise my brother came for my rescue and was ready to give me a part of his land. I didn’t want to live at someone’s mercy, least of all his. So I started working as a laborer in my own field. I waited for my day. After all, my father used to say, every dog has its day. It came after two years, on my trip to a nearby hamlet, where I heard people talking about two brothers with powers in hushed tones. But by the time I had reached them, they had fled. So, I had set out on an expedition asking the wayfarers if they’d seen two identical people in saffron clothes.  I lived on wild berries, stream water and slept on the tree branches. I begged, robbed and threatened the travelers for food.

When I had run out of money, I started working in a roadside inn where my friends, on one of their escapades, chanced upon me. They tried their best to slip but I was too slick, by then, for them to escape. I bid a goodbye to my inn-mates and directed my friends to a groove.

‘I know you are cheats. But tell me this,’ I asked them at knife-point. ‘Do you people really have powers?’

‘Would you be standing there threatening us if so?’

‘Then how did you increase my produce every year?’

‘Who told you it increased?  It was just higher than everyone else’s.’

 

As Njani was busy writing his story, a young man in saffron clothes entered his room silently. ‘Swami,’ he bowed down, ‘the other masters are waiting for you.’

‘In a minute,’ Njani said, closing his book, and went for his friends but only after donning a saffron shawl around his shoulders and a smile across his face.

Featured image: “The City of Masulipatam,” 1672, from Columbia University

“Here Comes the Bribe” by Sam Hellman

A newspaper reporter and fiction writer with a healthy sense of self-deprecation, Sam Hellman wrote in 1925 that “those who have been reading my stuff will hardly believe that I am a college graduate with an early academic penchant for Greek accusatives and Latin gerundives.” In his humorous stories, witty commoners with crude dialect dress each other down in farcical situations. In spite of his highbrow studies, Hellman observed people and their language while traveling the country after college. In “Here Comes the Bribe,” a scrappy Long Islander accidentally finds success in politics.

Published on April 5, 1924

 

Politics, I has heard said or read, makes beds strange fellers. Many a true word is spoken of a pest. Ever since I let them Doughmorons fluke me into grabbing off that job in the legislature I ain’t had no more sleep than a guy with the hives doing a six-day bike trick on the corrugated roof of a boiler factory.

Ordinarily a new cuckoo elected from Long Island to one of them per-dime grafts attracts about as much attention out in the state as the second vice president of the Lotto Club of Gimme, Utah, would in Somewhere, east of Suez; but in my cases things is different. Besides being the only Democrat that ever copped in the county, the platform I run on was woozy enough to make the big city papers throw a mess of infernal triangles offa the front page to get room for spelling my name wrong, and also for surprising me with reporters’ ideas of what I would ’a’ maybe said if they’d seen me.

You lads that cuts your breakfast short every Thursday morning and rushes mad to the news stand with a nickel in your hand remembers how Luke Cravens, the boss of the party, slicked me into getting on the ticket with a promise that they was no chance of winning, but a good one of getting the bum’s rush outta Doughmore, which, as more than two million and a quarter folks knows, has been the heights of my ambitions from the day the frau and the Magruders f.o.b.’d me into this limousine layout.

I guess it ain’t fair to blame what happened on Luke, him not having no way of knowing that the Republican bird was gonna beat it with a frill and the building-and-loan jack the day before the election; but I don’t see where I could ’a’ done anymore. It looked like a cinch that I’d be trimmed bad, and besides would get the air from the club crowd on account of the bill I was talking about introducing to slap a heavy tax on golf balls, sticks, links and such.

Instead, here I is with a Hon. stuck in front of my monniker and stronger’n ever with the pill pushers, them blah boys having figured out that what I was aiming at was a deep schemes to keep the rough-raffs outta the game.

After election night I don’t get to see Cravens for a week. Finally, I drifts into the village to give my sorrows swimming lessons and I meets up with him.

“Heard the latest?” I inquires.

“Not lately,” he comes back. “What’s yours?”

“I’m resigning,” I tells him.

“I know one better than that,” says Luke. “They was once a Scotchman and — ”

“I’m resigning,” I repeats.

“Sure you are,” returns Cravens. “Talking about something in general, what’s your ideas on nothing in particular?”

“What do you think I am?” I yelps. “Kidding or cuckoo?”

“If you ain’t serious,” says Luke, “you’re kidding; if you is, you’re what comes after the ‘or.’ What’s eating you?”

“I’m all et,” I answers. “Got any notion what I been through since last Tuesday?”

“Better’n you have,” says Cravens, prompt. “The boys has been running you ragged for cuts of the cake they expects you’ll get for ’em in Albany. In facts, I sent a dozen or so lads up to see you myselfs.”

“That’s damn nice of you,” I barks, grateful, “and I’ll set you up to a quart of wood alcohol the first chance I gets. You responsible for them bobos that drug me outta the hay at three a.m. and them janes — ”

“Janes?” says Luke. “What janes?”

“Well,” I tells him, “I don’t remember the names of more than two or four hundred of ‘em, but they was one old gal that wanted to know where I stood, if anywheres, on Sunday shows; another that tried to smoke me out — ”

“Don’t let them worry you,” cuts in Cravens. “That gang usually gets after the candidates before the election; but not figuring you for a chance, they laid off until right now.”

“They ain’t no ‘right now’ in them cases,” I growls. “It’s wrong whenever.”

“You gotta put up with that kinda stuff,” says Luke. “You must remember you is in the public eye.”

“Yeh,” I comes back, “like a cinder. Can you resign with a lead pencil or do you gotta do it with ink?”

“Forget it!” snaps Cravens. “Don’t be a scoffjob. They ain’t a politician in the state that’s sitting prettier than you is. In a coupla years we’ll have you in Congress, and you might be governor someday.”

“Uh-huh,” says I; “and I might also get to be the mother of the late queen of Armenia, but I ain’t got none of them kinda itches. I’d sooner sleep tight than be President. Anyways, after what I has been doing since I seen you last, I just gotta get out from under.”

“What you been doing?” inquires Luke.

“Nothing,” I answers, “excepting to kid everybody that come to see me into believing that I was wild about the hop they was whooping it up for. I shooed out four women with a cross-my-heart that I’d have the law on the sun for making cider cheat. If that don’t annoy you none, what do you think of the eleven boys I promised the same job to?”

“What job’s that?” asks Cravens.

“Road overseer,” I tells him.

“Don’t worry about that,” says Luke. “It ain’t even vacant. I thought you told me you didn’t know nothing about politics.”

“I don’t and I won’t,” I answers.

“You plays it perfect,” comes back the County chairman. “Promise ’em everything; deliver only to them that does.”

“Does what?” I bites.

“Delivers,” says Cravens. “When do you grab the night boat for Albany?”

“When’d you lose your ear sight?” I yelps. “Ain’t I just got done telling you that — ”

“Now, now,” interrupts Luke, soft, “be mother’s little angel pet. You can’t quit, Dink. We ain’t never elected a Democrat here before, and if you does a yellow we’ll never have another. You can’t expect every Republican to play ball for us by jumping the works with a skirt and the roll. Besides, I thought you was wild about getting away from Doughmore. Here’s a chance to leave it flat for three months, anyways.”

“That part of it’s all right,” says I; “but I ain’t keen about making no sucker outta myselfs. Here I is promised all up to vote nine different ways on everything, from getting after the Pullman folks on this berth-control proposition some wren talked my arm off about, to taking snipes outta little gal’s mouths — ”

“Listen, bo,” cuts in Cravens, “they is only one way of making a sucker outta yourself at the legislature.”

“How?” I asks.

“By going to the mat for something on the account of a campaign pledge,” explains Luke. “It ain’t even good form to mention ’em after election.”

“Ain’t I supposed to act like the voters wants?” I inquires. “Or is I supposed to do like I thinks personal?”

“Thinking’s even rude,” replies Cravens; “but they is two ideas about the subject you brung up. Some holds that a guy should do like he wants to do — ”

“And the other?” I butts in.

“And the other,” goes on Luke, “that he shouldn’t never do nothing that he don’t want to.”

“Smelligent,” says I. “Where does the people get off in that kinda misdeal?”

“They don’t,” answers Cravens. “They keeps right on riding and paying fare.”

II

If it wasn’t for the Magruders I would ’a’ passed up the job in spite of all that Luke said and done to skid me into it, but them babies is got a way of rubbing my fuzz the wrong way and making me do a lotta tricks I shouldn’t oughta. All Jim and Liz has to do is to be for a thing for me to pick up a club and beat its brains in. I ain’t ordered ham and eggs since I found out they liked ’em.

After I finishes up my talk with Cravens, in the which I promised to think it over a couple days, I beats it home and finds the Magruders cluttering up the front porch.

“Has you resigned?” asks Lizzie.

“Want me to?” I comes back.

“Jim says,” answers the measle, “that you — ”

“Never mind what Jim says,” I cuts in. “Ain’t you got no ideas in your own name? Don’t you ever get anything in the box score excepting assists?”

“I got a mind of my own,” snaps the Magruder nix.

“All right,” I admits; “but why don’t you take it outta the safety deposit and show it to us sometime? I ain’t gonna swipe it.”

“I wouldn’t trust a politician,” says Lizzie, cold; “not even with nothing.”

“Is you really gonna take the job?” butts in Jim, quick, to cover up his wife’s fox paws.

“Why not?” I inquires.

“Well,” says he, “it’s a pretty dirty game, ain’t it?”

“Ever play in it?” I wants to know.

“I wouldn’t touch it with a six-foot pole,” he comes back. “They ain’t nobody in politics but a lotta grafters.”

“We once lived in a house,” says I, “where we had a furnace that was always on the bum. One day it got so cold I went downstairs to see what the hell. I found out the janitor was peddling the coal I’d bought and hadn’t taken the ashes out for a month. So I canned him, cleaned the thing out myself and never did have no trouble after that.”

“You should oughta get the kinda furnace we is got,” remarks Lizzie. “Jim says — ”

“The furnace I’m talking about,” I continues, “is a figure in speech.”

“Ours is a Little Diamond Hot Box, ain’t it, Jim?” inquires the sciatica.

“Where’d Lizzie go?” I asks, acting kinda surprised.

“I’m here,” she answers, wide-eyed.

“You’re here, all right,” says I; “but you ain’t there. What I was trying to broadcast,” I goes on, turning to Magruder, “before that frau of yourn turned on the statics, was the idea that if you don’t like dirt you can’t cuss it outta the room; you gotta grab a broom and sweep.”

“I suppose,” sneers Jim, “you’re gonna make politics as clean as a hind tooth, huh?”

“I’ll maybe try,” I answers. “What’ll you do? Stand around while some dip frisks your pockets and bawl out the coppers instead of taking a crack at the crook?”

“Jim ain’t afraid of nothing,” says Lizzie.

“I ain’t afraid of my wife neither,” I shoots back.

“You calling me nothing?” busts out the misses, who ain’t said a word so far.

“Not a thing,” I returns, hasty. “You vote at the last election, Jim?”

“What for?” he comes back. “They don’t count ’em anyways.”

“Well,” says I, “it’s a cinch they don’t count them that ain’t cast. When I gets to Albany — ”

“So you’re going?” interrupts Magruder.

“Yeh,” I tells him. “I kinda feels that I owes that much to prosperity. I’m looking ahead to the time when Dink O’Day Day will be celebrated from Rock Bound, Maine, to Climate, California, and when statutes of me in the parks will be as thick as empty shoe boxes after a church picnic.”

“You’ll look swell in the legislature,” sarcastics Jim. “What do you know about parlor-mantel law?”

“No more’n I know about kitchen-sink law,” I admits; “but it won’t take me more’n a minute and a half to run it down and make it drop from exhaustion.”

“I never seen a guy hate his wife’s husband like you does,” says Magruder. “Ever hear of Roberts’ Rules and Orders?”

“I don’t wear no man’s collars,” I answers, “and that bird Roberts ain’t gonna give me no orders. Anyways, Luke Cravens is the boss of the district. Where does this Roberts boy — ”

“You wouldn’t understand,” cuts in Magruder, “even if you knew. For example, suppose you was to get on the floor of the house — ”

“Who’s gonna put me there?” I yelps. I don’t want you to get no ideas I’m such a stupe as I sounds, but I’m even willing to carry that reputation for the pleasures of razz-jazzing Magruder.

“I mean,” he explains, “if you was making a speech on some bill and a bobo should get up and move that it should be put on the table, what would you do?”

“It all depends,” I answers, “on the way he said it. If he was nice and polite, I’d put it there; but if he tried to rough-bluff me into doing it, I’d leave it just where it was and he’d probably spend the next few minutes picking a inkwell outta his hair.”

“Flying codfish!” hollers Jim, waving his hands like a yell leader. “And you’re the kinda guy that’s gonna make laws for fifteen million people!”

“That’s what,” says I; “but what do you expects if right thinkers like you won’t take no interest in politics and’d rather play golf than vote?”

“Talking about golf,” comes back Magruder, “is you really gonna introduce that tax bill?”

“I’ll tell the popeyed world I am,” I replies. “A dollar on each ball and five fish on each club.”

“Think you can put over a grab like that?” he asks.

“I wouldn’t be so surprised,” I answers. “When I gets done telling the boys about the terrible housing conditions of the ducks on Long Island on account of the land being drug out from under ’em for golf courses, I expects the tax’ll go with one big sob. D’you know things is so bad on the North Shore that seven and eight ducks is gotta sleep on one rock?”

“I didn’t even know ducks slept on rocks,” remarks Lizzie.

“You should study national science, gal,” I returns. “What’d you suppose they slept on? Credit? Where’d you imagine the expression ‘duck on the rock’ come from?”

“I don’t know,” says she.

“I don’t know the name of the saloon neither,” cuts in Kate, slipping me the glare to sidetrack. “Please stop teasing Lizzie and try and give a imitation of talking sense.”

“Who should I imitate?” I inquires. “Jim?”

“You couldn’t go further and do worse,” suggests the Magruder exposed nerve; and when I starts laughing she goes on, all flustered, “I means, you could go further and do no worse.”

“That’ll be enough,” yelps Jim. “I’ll do my own answering back from now and on. Cutting the kidding cold,” he continues, turning to me, “I thought that golf-tax idea of yourn was to keep the cheap johns from building links around Doughmore and the other swell clubs.”

“Even a natural error like you,” says I, “couldn’t be no wronger. Can you see me pulling chestnuts at a fire for the plutocats around here? I’m a friend of the common people and — ”

“The commoner, the friendlier,” interrupts the frau.

“Maybe,” I admits; “but I promised the duck growers of this district that I’d go to the front for ’em, and a promise and a performance with Dink O’Day is as alike as two peas in a puddle. Experts has tried with instruments and them slow movie cameras to find a difference between ’em, but without no luck. It was funny. Oncet they was studying a promise of mine, and when I told ’em after a coupla hours it was really a regular performance and not no promise a-tall, they just gave up.”

“Doing business with a politician,” remarks Magruder, “I guess they hadda. When you gets to Albany them experts’ll be able to leave their naked eyes at home and still see the difference.”

“What makes you think so?” I inquires.

“Didn’t I hear you tell that Glumph woman you was gonna pass a law to stop all picture shows on Sunday, Wednesday and the nights the Ladies’ Aid met?” asks Jim.

“You did,” I tells him.

“Yeh,” jeers Magruder; “and wasn’t I there when you promised Mildew down at the Tivoli that you’d put the censors on the hummer and fix it so the film folks could do anything they wanted to, within reason and without?”

“Such is the case and the facts in it,” I confesses. “What about it?”

“How you gonna keep both promises?” demands Jim.

“What,” says I, “leaving out present company, could be simpler? I’ll introduce the bill the Glumph frill wants and also the one Mildew’s after.”

“How,” yelps Magruder, “can you be on both sides at oncet?”

“Ah,” I returns, “that’s what makes politics a art. What’s wrong with the way I’m doing? Some of the folks in the county wants this; some others don’t want that. Who’m I to say what’s proper for ’em? I’m just like a waiter in a restaurant. Everybody that comes in asks for something different. I puts in the order. If the chef don’t wanna cook up the mess, whose fault is it? A jane drifts in with her trap all set for a pair of fried wizzle-wumph eggs, sunny side up. Is it my business to tell her they ain’t good for her complexions and try and set her up to a platter of raw ox ears?”

“You mean rare, don’t you?” inquires Lizzie.

“I don’t know no more what you’re talking about than you do,” says Jim; “but how you gonna vote on these different things when its comes to a show-down?”

“O’Day,” I replies, “is far enough down on the roll call for my judgment and my conscience to get together before I has to. I’m gonna introduce everything that anyone wants and let ’em take their chances. Personally, nothing don’t interest me excepting my duck bill, and I shall fight for it with all the powers I has, with faith in the right and — ”

“Oh, hire a hall!” snaps Magruder.

“The Monday Club’s got a dandy place,” says Lizzie. “You can get it for fifty dollars a night; besides, they is still got the decorations up from the Pappa Eta Motza sorority dance.”

III

Me and Cravens goes to Albany together, Luke figuring on introducing me around to the high moguls of the party and seeing that I get started off K.O.

“You’ll be kinda busy getting settled,” says he, “so I has taken a little work off your hands.”

“What work?” I asks.

“Well,” he answers, “I figures they is about eight jobs you’ll get to hand to the boys in the district and I’ve picked ’em for you. Seeing as I got you into this, the leastest I can do is to save you from being bothered. I has even notified the lads we’s named.”

“That’s nice,” says I; “but — ”

“’S all right, Dink,” cuts in Luke. “They ain’t no thanks necessary. It’s maybe taken up some of my time and all that; but when I likes a guy, going to trouble for him’s a pleasure.”

“Yeh,” I returns; “but how about them fifty or sixty birds I promised plums to?”

“Albany,” answers Cravens, prompt, “is quite a town. They is a coupla good hotels, and I knows a restaurant I’ll take you to, where you orders tea and gets what you meant.”

Not caring nothing about them jobs at Doughmore, I don’t chase the subject no further. Anyways, I don’t aim to stay long. My ideas is to stick around the legislature just enough to see what makes the thing tick and maybe pull a stunt or two that’ll get me in bad with the jokes at home, after which me and politics’ll call it a day.

Luke makes me acquainted with a bunch of bobos that is supposed to run the works and winds up by taking me to the mansion to meet the governor. He turns out to be a decent feller.

“I has heard a lot about you,” says he to me.

“I’ve seen your name mentioned, too,” I comes back, not to be undone in courtesies.

“I wanna talk to you someday about taxes,” he goes on. “I understands you has studied ’em deep.”

“Governor,” I replies, “I don’t wanna brag, but if they is anything about taxes I don’t know it musta been sprung the day after tomorrow.”

“That’s fine,” smiles the big chief. “They is causing us a lotta trouble. ‘

“Unwrinkle your brow, gov,” I cuts in. “My golf bill will solve everything.”

“I must look into it,” says he, and me and Cravens beats it.

“I thought,” remarks Luke, “that you canned that tax idea of yourn when the Doughmorons started being for it.”

“No,” I tells him, “I’m going through with it just to prove to them coupon barbers that they give me the wrong rap.”

“Well,” says Cravens, looking at me kinda narrow, “the play might work out good for you at that.”

“You mean,” I asks, “the bill might pass?”

“It’s got as much chance of doing that,” he answers, “as one of them ducks of yourn would have in a scrap with three wildcats, four hyenas and a pair of Australian gluffaws.”

“I don’t get you,” I returns, puzzled.

“No?” smiles Luke. “All right, Rollo, roll your own hoop. If you should want me to cut in later on, you knows where to find me.”

I’m still all up in the air trying to figure out what Cravens’s been driving at when I gets to the hotel by myselfs and runs into Shem Conover, a baby from up in the state that was knocked down to me earlier in the day as a real slicker in jamming stuff through the House.

“I been waiting to see you,” says he. “I wanna little chin-chin.”

“About which?” I inquires.

“That golf-tax bill you’re touting,” he answers. “Need any help?”

“I ain’t so sure I’m going through with it,” I tells him, not liking the bimbo’s looks.

“Who’s been talking to you?” he asks, slipping me the narrow eye like Cravens done.

“What you getting at?” I yelps, getting kinda peeved at the mystery stuff.

“Listen, bo,” says Conover, “and don’t try and gruff me off the lay. If you wanna get any action with that bill of yourn you gotta be sweet to me. I’m chairman of the committee that’s gonna get it, and if you don’t put me in the line-up — ”

“What’ll you do?” I barks.

“I’ll fix it,” he comes back, slow, “so that the chloroform won’t work when you want it to, and when you gets ready to deliver the body you’ll find the livest corpse you ever seen.’

“I’ll sue the Central for this,” says I. “When a lad buys a ducat for Albany they ain’t got no right to dump him off at Matteawan.”

“You’re in Albany, little one,” remarks Conover, cold; “and when you is in Albany you gotta do like the Albanians does. Do I get a hand dealt me?”

“I ain’t gonna introduce the bill,” I growls, “and besides — ”

“Too late,” interrupts Shem. “If you run out on it I’ll have it introduced as a committee measure. The idea’s too cushy to drop. They worked it with patent medicine down in Arkansas and with baking powder out in Missouri, but the golf act’s a new one on the sandbag circuit. Give it a coupla thinks,” he finishes up, and drifts away casual.

I looks around expecting a guy in blue with a bunch of keys to grab him, but nothing like that don’t happen. Dizzy and woozy, I drifts across the street to the restaurant Luke told me about and squats me down.

“What’ll you have?” asks the waiter.

“A cup of tea, God forbid,” says I.

It’s wonderful what a little oolong will do for a lad that gets the kind he means instead of the sort he asks for, and right away I begins to perk up some. But it don’t last long. I’m about to yell for an encore when I looks up to see a feller standing besides me, a stout, surtaxy appearing citizen with a wide grin.

“Know who I am?” he inquires.

“Considering the luck I been in all day,” I answers, “you couldn’t be nothing excepting a revenue agent.”

“My card, Mr. O’Day,” says he, and slips it.

“‘August P. Stevens,’” I reads aloud, and then to myselfs, “‘representing the Universal Outdoor Co.’”

“You cover all that territory by yourselfs?” I asks.

“No,” he comes back; “I’m mostly in Albany and Washington.”

“What do you sell,” I wants to know, “scenery or air?”

“I don’t sell,” he returns, looking me straight in the eyes. “I buy.”

“What?” I asks.

“Different things,” he answers, evasive. “I suppose you know we is one of the largest sporting-goods houses in the world. Naturally, we is interested in your bill to tax golf balls and sticks. Shall I sit down?”

“If your lumbago’ll let you,” I replies; “but you might as well know later than sooner that I’ve heard enough of that bill this afternoon to last me until three weeks after my funeral. I ain’t even sure I’m gonna flip it into the hopper.”

“The boys around here,” says Stevens, “’ll tell you that I’m a square shooter and don’t mince up no words. With me a spade’s a spade and I know how to dig. What do you need to help you make up your mind about that bill?”

“Which way?” I mumbles, fanning for time.

What a zero brain I’d been not to get jerry to that talk of Luke and Conover about sandbags and chloroform and the such!

“Our way, of course,” answers the sportsgoods man. “You forget the golf tax and we’ll not forget you.”

“I see,” says I; “you wanna bribe me not to put the bill in.”

“Oh,” returns Stevens, “you can put it in; but it’ll get sick in the committee room, be operated on and die under the ether. All you gotta do is to let the dead stay dead and get all wound up in something else. You ain’t got a thing to lose. They ain’t no chance of jamming the tax over and — ”

“What do you wanna buy me off for then?” I cuts in.

“Well,” says Stevens, “they is always a outside possibility of anything going through in the last-minute rush. Besides, we don’t wanna have taxes on balls and clubs even discussed.”

“You can’t stop that,” I retorts. “I’m full of it now.”

“Full of what?” he inquires.

“Disgust,” I snaps, and ducks outta the place.

IV

They ain’t no meeting of the legislature the next day, and I runs down to Doughmore, first having wired Cravens that I was coming and for him to meet me. I ain’t one of them holier than thous, but raw work always did get me sore, even in them times when I didn’t ask a dollar bill for references. Luke sees right off that I’m riled.

“Do I look like a grafter?” I asks.

“The light ain’t so good here,” he comes, back, calm. “What makes you doubtful?

I cuts loose and tells him everything that happened to me in Albany after he left. He listens with about as much excitement as I was retailing a bright crack pulled by my third cousin’s infant progeny.

“You don’t seem surprised none,” I remarks at the finish. “Is they all dips up in Albany?”

“No,” replies Luke, “they is about 95 percent honest; but at every session in every legislature they is always a few sandbaggers — guys that push in stick-up bills, not with any hopes of passing ’em, but on it gamble that somebody will get all scared up and buy ’em off. The railroads used to be the prize marks, but — ”

“Say,” I shoots out a yelp, “you ain’t got no ideas that I’m a sandbagger, is you?”

“Well,” returns Cravens, “at first I thought that blah of yours about golf and ducks was just some pretty fun you was having with the Doughmorons; but when it flopped with them and you kept right on yelling tax, even in front of the governor, I begun to get a little suspicious.”

“Honey sweets the Malay’s pants!” I hollers.

“Huh?” inquires Luke.

“That’s Latin,” I explains, “for lads with evil minds that thinks everybody else is got ’em.”

“Evil mind, eh?” says Cravens, kinda peevish. “Any bird that’ll go to the front for a new nuisance tax, when everybody in the country is nearly bent over double carrying the load of ’em they got now is either a stupe or a grafter. And you ain’t so stupish.’

“Damn it,” I barks, “I’ll  — ”

“Listen to me,” interrupts Luke. “I ain’t calling you a crook, but what do you expect people’ll think of a bobo in these times that’ll talk up another gouge, and picks out a nice juicy game like golf for the victim?”

“I was only kidding,” I mumbles, feeble;

“I suppose,” admits the chairman; “but like the feller remarked after lugging careless baby six blocks, they is such a thing as carrying a kid too far.”

“It seems to me,” says I, suddenly remembering his stuff in Albany, “you was willing to take your bit.”

“I was,” he answers, cool, “I don’t never throw no spoons away when it’s raining soup.”

“Gosh,” I groans, “I’m in a swell fix. If I don’t introduce that bill now they’ll say I been bought off. If I does, I’ll have to go to the mat for it and keep fighting all the time I’m gonna resign,” I announces, blunt.

“That’ll be the worst yet,” says Cravens “Then they’ll figure you was bought off good and was afraid of a investigation.”

“What shall I do?” I asks.

“Just forget all about it,” advises Luke. “I’ll fix things with Stevens and Conover so nothing’ll ever be mentioned about the golf bill.”

“Sure you can?” I wants to know.

“Certain sure,” says Cravens. “Won’ I the guy that sent ’em to see you?

On the way to the house I meets up with Lizzie. “I just been to the Monday Club,” she tells me. “You still wanna hire a hall?”

“No,” I answers, “not a hall — a hole.”

“A hole?” repeats Lizzie. “What you gonna do with a hole?”

“Crawl in,” says I.

Featured image: “Flying codfish! And you’re the kinda guy that’s gonna make laws for fifteen million people!” (Illustrated by Tony Sarg)

Clap Your Hands

Gia’s mother had the English written down on an envelope. She whispered the words as they walked, because Gia couldn’t be certain she spelled them all correctly. Her mother wouldn’t pass her second-grade teacher an error-filled note. Mrs. Klein was a dottore, an expert. Their family must present well. Gia was never to show a brutta figura, her ugly side, to the world. This was very important, very Italian.

Gia could remember the smells of lemon and sea from their old apartment in Nervi, the bright colors of the old stone buildings, but she no longer felt the pull of Italian ways, just as she no longer dreamed in her first language. She kept both these truths from her parents. Gia was sure they would find them ugly, even if she did not.

When they reached her classroom, it was the vice principal, Mr. Puhl, who greeted them. “Good morning,” he said to Gia. “You are …”

“Vespucci, Gianna Maria,” her mother answered. She forgot the American order. In Italy your last name, which represented your family, was most important, but here — where every tongue tripped over the syllables — it only meant different.

“Oh, our Eye-talian,” he said. Gia was happy her father was away, cooking at his boss’s new restaurant. He gave pronunciation lessons. Italian was like singing — you had to make the right sounds or it was awful to hear. “Mrs. Klein is sick today. You’ll be in with Miss Cooper this morning.”

Her mother breathed in deep. “About Il Museo Dinosaur,” she began. The practice had worked. She pronounced dinosaur well, cutting hard at the end so the R didn’t get mushed by a vowel.

Mr. Puhl scrunched his face and turned to Gia. This happened every day, with both her parents, and it felt worse than ugly. Her mother had trouble sticking with English only, but museo was so close, and where else would you see a dinosaur, except for Barney on TV? Second graders took the same field trip every year. Gia hated adults sometimes. They made easy things so hard.

Gia checked with her mother. Mrs. Klein waited patiently through her fumbles; Mr. Puhl obviously would not. Her mother looked at the envelope again, her knuckles white, but she tapped Gia’s shoulder, her signal to take over. “My mother has questions about the field trip. She wants to know more about the museum and why we’re coming back at dinnertime.”

Mr. Puhl showed Gia his teeth but continued to look confused. “You don’t have to go.” He glanced at his watch. “You can spend the afternoon in another classroom.”

Gia translated, and her mother squeezed her shoulder. She knew Gia wanted to see the dinosaur bones and the space show, but she didn’t know Manhattan, and she wasn’t sure Gia’s father would approve of the location or the hours. He had a lot of opinions about how Gia and her mother lived, but chefs didn’t like to be bothered at work, and they worked all the time. Gia’s mother had to decide. Sometimes he came home and laughed at her worries. Sometimes he yelled. This was also ugly, but he made beautiful food, which was all anyone cared about. Gia wanted her mother — and herself — to matter more, which meant returning to Italy, which Gia no longer thought of as home, even though it was. Gia was an alien, like her parents, but she didn’t feel like one unless they were around making things feel strange. The envelope bounced in her mother’s shaky hands. Gia sighed. “I can just stay home that day.”

Her mother wiped her palms on her pants, as if her sweat was making them move. “Is maybe, yes?” she said to Mr. Puhl. “But more talk for me.”

“Maybe and yes mean different things,” Mr. Puhl said, and Gia groaned, although she meant to do it only on the inside. Her mother flashed her the quit it now gesture. Rudeness to adults was ugly. Gia knew he started it wouldn’t fly as an excuse. No matter how American Gia became, her mother expected her manners to stay Italian.

“Hello,” Miss Cooper said, squeezing next to Mr. Puhl. “Are you visiting me today?”

“The address of the museo, please?” her mother read out loud. Italian was a fast language, and her mother forgot to be slow with English, which needed more space between the words. She always sped up when nervous. When she returned home, she’d call her sister, Zia Paola, and speak without practice or help from her child.

“For the field trip next week?” Miss Cooper was the new, young teacher and looked directly at Gia’s mother as she spoke. Something Mr. Puhl hadn’t done at all, something a dottore should have known to do. Her mother’s back straightened, and she offered Miss Cooper a small smile.

“I must to say where with mio marito — husband,” her mother corrected, emphasizing the H with her lips, since it was silent in Italian. Miss Cooper’s eyes were a pretty mix of green and brown, and they stayed fixed on Gia’s mother.

“You two follow me.” Miss Cooper walked them to her classroom, where she had a subway map pinned to the wall. “The Museum of Natural History is at 81st Street and Central Park West, right where the big park is.”

Miss Cooper stepped back so Gia’s mother could take a closer look. She raised the envelope and wiggled her hand. Miss Cooper passed her a pencil, and as she took notes, Miss Cooper asked Gia, “Have you been on the subway?”

Gia nodded.

“Do you know your stop?”

“Halsey Street.”

“So you ride the L train, then.” Gia nodded. Manhattan was the other direction from her father’s cousins in Canarsie, down by the ocean that smelled more like Nervi. Miss Cooper traced Gia’s finger from the museum to where the C train met the L at 14th Street. “Only one change, and you’d be home,” she said.

Her mother’s small smile grew. “Come late?” she said. “How — no.” Her mother took a deep breath. “Why. Home. Late?”

“Traffic,” Miss Cooper said. “The ride back takes time, but we give them a snack on the bus.”

Gia’s mother pulled the permission slip from her purse and signed it. Miss Cooper placed it in the basket on her desk, then she walked to the reading nook and brought back a book, Kids’ Songs Around the World. She flipped through and gestured to Gia’s mother. “Could you help me pronounce the words to this song?”

Her mother laughed and said, “Canti Batta Le Manine.”

Gia sang the “Clap Your Hands” song for Miss Cooper. Her mother relaxed, like she did when she was home, safe in her own language. When Gia finished, she waited. Miss Cooper showed her mother bella figura, the nicest compliment, and Gia would sing or do anything she wanted.

Featured image: Shutterstock

A Man of Few Words

Along with STOP and END and DANGER, Sam’s brother taught him to recognize a few other words and phrases, such as FRIEND OF THE COURT. They were the people Sam paid child support to every month. They, in turn, sent it to his ex-wife, Ember. His brother had told him, “If you ever get a letter from them, call me right away, and I’ll come over and help you with it.” But Pete had moved eight hours away for a new job. So, when it came to reading, Sam was now on his own.

When he didn’t reply to their letter, the Friend of the Court sent more. And more. The only problem was that he couldn’t read them. But he knew they had to do with his support payments.

This was all his fault, he knew. He had been mad because Ember just couldn’t seem to get to their meeting place on time or missed their appointments altogether. So he decided the money would end, too. He had a right to see Destiny on a regular basis, and since Ember wouldn’t listen to reason, he figured the checks were all he had to bargain with.

He had been planning to withhold the support checks for only a little while — just to bring Ember to her senses — but then he’d had the accident. He’d been on the line, passing a truck panel to his neighbor, but the guy was flirting with the girl next to him and took too long to reach for it. The next thing Sam knew, another panel was coming straight at him. He slipped as he tried to reach for it, messing up his back in the process. He was out of commission for weeks, which meant he got only 80 percent of his pay. The joke, once again, was on him.

There was a college kid at the plant who was taking a break from school to save up some money to go back. Sam thought he’d ask him for help with the Friend of the Court letters. Matt seemed like a nice kid — he was majoring in special ed after all — and for that reason alone he thought he could trust him.

“Hey, Matt,” he said, the next time he saw him in the cafeteria. The kid was new and usually sat by himself reading a book. “Look, I got some papers from the court I really need help with. They have to do with my visitation with my kid.”

Maybe it was the way Sam held the envelopes out to Matt, as if he was presenting a damaged child. The boy took one look and seemed to understand. “Sure, sure, I’ll help. Do you want to look them over here?”

“No. Not here. Let’s go out to lunch tomorrow. I’ll pick up the tab. That’s the least I could do.”

“You really don’t have to do that,” Matt said.

“I don’t have to, I want to.”

So, the next day they drove out to a strip mall in his truck — all paid for, he said to the kid, to let him know he could afford lunch — to a place he figured none of the other men would be. He didn’t want anybody to see him being read to like a child.

They walked to a booth at the back of the restaurant where they could have some privacy.

The boy pretended this kind of thing happened every day. He tried to look casual, like there was no shame in this.

The waitress came over and said, “You boys ready yet?”

The boy spoke slowly, pretended to read the menu aloud to himself. “Let’s see … Fish sandwich. Catwich. Flame-broiled …”

Sam jumped in. “How’re your burgers? They any good?”

“I have one practically every day for lunch,” she said, tapping her pencil on her little green pad.

Sam closed the menu and gave it back to her. “I’ll have a burger. With lettuce, ketchup, and mustard. And fries. Your fries good?”

“The onion rings are better.”

“Sold,” he said. “And a Coke.” That was the way to handle that.

The kid looked uncomfortable. Probably worried about Sam picking up the tab. “I’ll have the same.” The way he said it, like he just swallowed a bug, made Sam laugh.

“Sure thing,” she said, looking from one to the other.

Sam waited until she was out of earshot and slipped his hand into the big manila envelope he’d brought with him. “Okay,” he said. He pulled out the letters and set them on the table like he was laying out a row of hunting knives and making the kid select one.

“O-key dokey,” the kid answered, like he was trying to make a little joke, but when the boy said that, Sam began to think he hadn’t picked the right person. The little freckles on his face, the careful way he laid out his paper napkin on his lap. In fact, come to think of it, there were times Matt didn’t seem too bright for a college boy, but he was the only person Sam had now.

“I need you to tell me what these say,” Sam said. “Basically, I don’t know which way is up with all this crap. I had them all in order nice and neat, and then they slipped off the table. I put them back the best I could. Now I got a hell of a mess on my hands.”

“Well, this shouldn’t be a problem,” Matt said in a voice a little too loud for Sam’s satisfaction. He pointed to an envelope. “See, you look at the date on the envelope and then … ”

Sam looked out the window. “I can’t see the dates. I need new glasses. That’s why I can’t read what they say.” But he knew the boy knew this was just an excuse.

“Um, well, never mind about that.” The boy looked over the envelopes and shuffled them like some kind of magician, his lips pursed. “Ah,” he lowered his voice, “they’re from the Friend of the Court.”

“I know that,” Sam said. “What I need to know is what they say inside. I have a little girl. Destiny. Her mother left me and took her, and now I pay support money to the Friend of the Court every month. Some friend.”

“So, how do you write the checks?”

His brother had given him a bunch of envelopes that were addressed to the court, and each month he went to the post office or a bank and got a money order for the amount owed. He could sign his name, the letters high and wide, like a child’s. “And I print Friend of the Court on the line where you put the payment information.”

The waitress came back with their food. Both men sat silent.

“Anything else I can bring you?” she asked, her eyes resting on the envelopes.

Matt scooted them under an elbow.

Sam smiled and said, “No, thanks. I think we’re fine.”

They waited until she left.

Matt tentatively opened the envelope at the top of the pile and began reading. “Samuel Jacobson, 1320 …”

“You don’t need to read that part. What does it say after that?” He pointed to the huge block of words on the page. “What does it say here?”

The kid nodded, looking happy to be given guidance. “Okay … ’” He scanned the letter. “Basically, it says you’re behind in your child support payments and that visitations will stop completely until you make a payment and set up a schedule to pay the rest.”

“Could you read it all?” Sam said.

So now, they settled in to how this would be done. The boy went through the letters, one by one. The news wasn’t good. By the third letter the kid seemed to be comfortable at his new job, just delivering the message.

When they were done, Sam gathered up the envelopes from the table and stuffed them back into the big envelope. “I do thank you,” he said.

“For what?” the boy said, sitting back. “This is awful. I feel bad. I hate to give you such bad news.”

“I can handle it.”

“But you can’t see your little girl until you catch up with the support payments. This is terrible. And all because you were laid up. They should know that. They obviously don’t.”

The boy grabbed his burger. “I wished you’d asked for my help sooner.”

Sam felt he could take offense to that, to the word “help.” But what did it matter? The boy was right. He was helping him. And he did need help.

“Would you like me to call them for you and explain?”

Sam shook his head. “No, that’s okay. Now that I know what those letters say, I’ll call. I have to call myself.”

 

Ember was one of the few people who knew he couldn’t read. They’d met in high school, and in no time she figured out what scores of teachers hadn’t been able to see or didn’t care to. She had left him a note on his locker to meet her after school at her house, and when he didn’t show up, she’d been really hurt. “How could you just blow me off like that?” she said the next day at school. She was trying not to be mad, he could see, but her eyes were welling up with tears. He didn’t want to lose her, so he told her. He was worried he’d still lose her, but instead she turned all motherly toward him, touched his face and said, “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Look, your secret’s safe with me.”

Ember always told him he was smart. “I know you are. Everybody knows you are. I’ll help you.”

He couldn’t do the in-class writing assignments, and for that, his teachers made excuses. He was just a little hyper. He couldn’t sit still. He was a boy, after all. They let him turn in his papers late.

So Ember would come over after school and coach him, but, with his parents and brother at work, their after-school meetings usually led to other things.

She ended up writing all his essays for him, reading assignments to him after school, and covering for him with friends. They got married the summer after graduation.

Despite his problem with reading, he thought his and Ember’s relationship had been pretty good. She took care of things that needed to be read the same way he fixed a flat tire or maintained the car and the house. But when Destiny was born, he had to leave the important things to Ember, like reading the directions on medicine bottles or the notes from daycare. But out of the blue one day, she asked him, “What if something happens to me? How would you deal with having to take care of Destiny?” He told her he’d make do, he had before he met her and he did it when she wasn’t around. “Making do isn’t good enough when you have a baby, Sam,” she had said, and he saw something change in her after that. She was less patient with him, quicker to judge.

“The problem is that you’re stubborn, Sam,” she started saying. “Just plain stubborn. You’d learn to read if you just put your mind to it.”

He knew putting his mind to it wasn’t the problem. He remembered being in first grade, with all the other kids around him who were picking up words — all of a sudden, learning how to read. Sounding the words out, then smoother and smoother like planing wood the sounds turned into words, the words into sentences. It was like, one by one, a switch within them was being turned on. But it never was turned on in him. He waited for it but it never came. The words still looked like squiggles. He had a good memory, and that saved him. He could hear something once and remember it, then repeat it when it was his turn to read. He was a good kid, and that saved him, too. His family moved around a lot when he was in elementary school. His father just didn’t seem to be able to keep a job. “Last hired, first fired,” he always said. Sam went to a lot of different schools, sometimes moving in the middle of the year. Their neighborhoods were usually rough ones, and the teachers didn’t want trouble. For that alone, he was passed from grade to grade. He was held back only once, and that was the year he had mono.

He let Ember try to teach him. That was a disaster. He couldn’t stand to see her cringe when he stumbled or missed a word, a look of utter disbelief on her face. He knew she was trying to be supportive but her face got tighter and tighter as she tried to make it look as if she wasn’t ashamed for him, her mouth finally becoming a thin line, as if she was sucking in the words she wanted to say so they wouldn’t escape.

Sam called the Friend of the Court to explain his circumstances. He was back at work now. He’d catch up on the payments. He wanted them to make out a new payment schedule. But no matter what he said, the woman who answered the phone would say only, “Put it in writing.”

When he saw Matt, he told him, “You were right. We have to write a letter.”

He and Matt met the next day, the same routine. This time, the boy brought along a pen, paper, envelopes, stamps.

They got the table at the far corner again.

“Lucky for us they don’t get much business,” Sam said.

The waitress came for their order. “You writing a book there?” she asked, pointing at the pad of paper with her pen.

“I broke my glasses,” Sam said. “My nephew here has to read my paperwork for me.”

After she left, Matt said, “So, should I call you Uncle Sam now?”

They laughed.

They waited until the waitress gave the order to the cook and tended to a new table, far from theirs. Matt said “Shoot” and picked up pen and paper.

“I know how to do this,” Sam said. “I know what she told me, the Friend of the Court.”

“What did she tell you?”

“That’s my business,” Sam said.

Matt pushed the pen and paper away. “Sam. I’m supposed to help you and you won’t fill me in on the whole story. What she said matters. It matters in how I put things down for you.”

Sam said nothing, just stared.

Matt lowered his voice. “It’s just that I can’t read your mind, you know.”

Sam fumed, got out his lighter, the one his brother gave him for Christmas years ago, when he had the motorcycle. The silhouette of a beautiful woman’s body, the curve of her spine like the letter S, so perfect, hair so long, and the HD for Harley Davidson fitted tightly behind her like a dress she’d just taken off that still held the shape of her body.

He wanted a cigarette but was trying to quit. Besides, you couldn’t smoke in restaurants anymore, which was probably a good thing. He kept opening and closing the lighter.

“That’s a beauty,” Matt said.

“Here.” Sam handed him the lighter. “Have a look.”

“Do you ride?” Matt asked, handing it back.

“I used to,” he said. “Ember made me give it up when she had the baby. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done was to sell that bike. The only person who offered me what it was worth was a guy who had hardly ever been on a bike. Can you imagine? The only thing that made me feel better was all the stuff I bought for Destiny with it. We did her room up real nice. Even started a little college fund for her. That made me feel good.”

Matt looked at him. “Maybe we should write about that in the letter. What you just said.”

“No way.”

“I just mean … it’s so hard. I’m not trying to find out your business. You know,” Matt said, leaning forward. He looked around for the waitress and said, real low, “You know, there are classes for … ”

Sam thought the kid was going to say, people like you.

“I could teach you,” Matt said. He started to get enthusiastic, rearranging the papers all over the table like it was his own little desk. “I’ve been thinking I wanted to get back into doing some volunteer work.”

“Volunteer work?” Sam couldn’t believe his ears. He wasn’t a man asking for a favor any longer. Now he was an entire charity project.

“Sure, I’d be happy to do that for you.”

It was the words “for you” that really killed Sam. For you.

Matt kept his voice low. “When I was in college, I volunteered in this literacy program, teaching people how to read. I know how to do it.”

Sam looked at him. Matt’s eyes were light brown with little flecks of green in them. He’d trusted the kid this far and he hadn’t failed him. Maybe he could trust him with this.

“Do you know your alphabet? Your letters?” Matt asked.

Sam nodded.

“Well, that’s great. That’s a great start. Some people don’t know their letters. So you’re starting from a good place.”

The next thing was hard for Sam to say. “I know the letters all right but I can’t seem to put them together into words.”

“That’s okay. That’ll come next. It takes a little time.”

They were quiet for a while. Then Matt said, “I have a theory.”

“What’s that?”

“I noticed that the people who don’t want to start with kid books don’t do as well as the other folks. Their progress is a lot slower.”

“I don’t want to read baby books. I want to read real books.”

“Sam, I’m telling you. It’s like our brains are wired a certain way. You have to start out with the basics, sort of train your brain to absorb the words.”

Sam slapped the lighter down on the table. “Look, man. I really just need to have one letter written. My daughter has a birthday coming up in a couple of months. I want to see her for her birthday. I don’t want her to think her father missed her birthday.”

His voice was not going to crack. He made a big deal of reaching inside his wallet to get the money order. Largest one he’d ever bought. He’d catch up. He knew he would.

Matt put the money order in the envelope and addressed it. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “But if you ever need anything else …” Then he got busy with the letter explaining how much and when Sam could pay.

 

And now, everything reminded him of his daughter: the toys and clothes she had left behind when she visited, a commercial on TV for a baby doll he thought she might like. He didn’t like the latest doll Ember had bought her. With its Goth, cat’s-eye makeup and torn, slutty clothing, it looked more like a tiny teen hooker than a little girl’s doll. One time, he even thought he saw Destiny on the street on his way to the hardware store and his heart brightened and quickened. He didn’t recognize the woman she was with, but it could have been a babysitter or a friend of Ember’s. The little girl had the same shade of blonde hair, a similar blue coat like the one he got her last Christmas, but it wasn’t Destiny. In fact, he was shocked at how he could have even thought it was her. And he was afraid for a second that the girl’s mother might have worried about the attention he was paying her daughter, how he turned around and smiled at the girl as he passed.

Three weeks after their lunch, Sam called Matt’s name across the lunchroom. Threw the lighter in his direction. Matt almost didn’t catch it, even though Sam had given him plenty of time to see it coming and a straight, slow pitch.

Matt walked over to Sam. “It’s beautiful,” Matt said. “I can’t accept this.”

“Don’t be such a college boy,” Sam said, and Matt laughed.

They sat down together at a table farthest away from their coworkers. Matt asked, “So you’ve seen your daughter? Things are straightened out?”

“Not yet. But the Friend of the Court is letting me send a birthday card to the house. They sent me their new address.” He had bought a card on his way to work, signed it DAD in big, gawky letters, and gave the sealed envelope to Matt to be addressed.

“I can talk to Destiny on her birthday,” Sam said. “And they said that the visits can start again next month. As long as there’s no trouble between me and her mom. Looks like her mom’s accepted the payment schedule.”

“That’s great, Sam. That’s great. And look, if you ever need me again. I’m serious about my offer.”

But with this, Sam got up from the table and shoved off, still smiling, as if he hadn’t heard a thing.

 

Sometimes Sam felt as if his whole life was one work-around after another. When you don’t know how to read, you memorize the shape of certain letters you need. A teacher hands you a book and tells you to read it out loud, but you tell her you forgot your glasses. You forget your glasses the next day and the next and they just figure out you’re poor and won’t be bringing your glasses anytime soon. The school nurse gives you an eye test, which you flunk on purpose so they still think your eyes really are bad. They refer you to an eye doctor, but you never show up with those new glasses. So, they skip over you during reading time because they don’t want to embarrass you. You pick up a job application and tell the manager that you can’t fill it out right then because you have to take your mother to a doctor’s appointment. You ask politely if you can fill it out at home and bring it back. And they’re fine with that because everybody’s in a rush and they’re just happy to get a body to fill that job. You get your brother to fill out all your job applications, do your health forms, prepare your taxes. When you get hired, you show up on time and you get along with everybody and no one’s the wiser. Now that you’ve been at the plant ten years, there’s no need to look for a job anymore, no more applications to fill out, no letters of introduction to write. Then all of a sudden, there’s this.

 

On his daughter’s birthday, he sat on his bed all night and waited for her call, phone in hand. He and Ember had had so much fun setting up for Destiny’s birthday parties. She was a good mother. She’d been a good wife, until she wasn’t. Some things break in ways you can’t see and because you can’t see them, there’s no way you can fix it. Sometimes when he looked back at it all, it seemed as if one day Ember was kind and supportive and understanding and the next she was impatient and mean and distant. It was like that light that went on in other kids’ heads when they learned to read. She saw the light, and he still didn’t. And, just like reading, he didn’t even know where the switch was.

Five minutes before Destiny’s bedtime, his phone rang.

“Hi, Daddy!” she fairly screamed.

“Hi, punkin! Oh, it’s so good to talk to you. I miss you.”

“I miss you, too, Daddy. That was a funny card you sent.”

“Was it a funny card, punkin? Did you like it?”

“Why did you send me a boy’s card?”

He felt his smile dissolve and the heat of embarrassment creep through his body like a bad flu. He thought of the drawing of the child on that card. Surely, it was a little girl, with short blond hair, like Destiny’s. That was why he bought it. Because the child looked like her. He thought she’d like that.

He couldn’t read it, of course, but he could make out the H and the B, which he knew were for Happy Birthday. And there were candles and a cake on the front of the card so he knew it was a birthday card. And a big number 6 for her age.

“Snips and snails and puppy dog tails,” his little girl was saying. “That’s what little boys are made of. That’s what the card says, Daddy.” He could picture her pursing her lips together like she did when she was mad.

“Why would you do that, Daddy?”

He felt his whole face contract as if in pain. What could he say?

“Oh, you’re so smart,” he told her. “You’re Daddy’s smart little girl. I played a trick, and you figured it out.”

“Well, of course I did, Daddy! It’s right there on the card. I read it.”

When Destiny was really little and gave him a book to read, he would make up stories to go along with the pictures since she didn’t know how to read yet. He had been so relieved when she started reading in kindergarten. She wasn’t afflicted with whatever it was that stopped his brain from putting simple letters together to make words. He hadn’t passed that on to her, and he thanked God for that. He thought of something he could say to her, another excuse.

“Actually, honey, when I went to the drugstore to buy the card, I forgot my glasses, so I couldn’t see the writing very well. I thought the little girl looked like you.”

“But it’s not a girl, it’s a boy. Why did you do that, Daddy?” repeating herself like she always did when she was tired.

He heard Ember say, “Tell your Daddy goodbye now. You have to go to bed.”

“Goodbye, Daddy. See you soon I hope. I love you.”

He started to say, “I love you, too,” and wanted her to know that the money he put inside the card was for her to buy herself a toy she wanted, but Ember had the phone now. She whispered, “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. You’re a smart guy. You can do this. Get some help before she figures it out.”

He wanted to say something to her but nothing would come. Then he realized she’d hung up.

He went after his bedroom as if it were a person. It took him no time at all to destroy the living room. The kitchen was harder. And still, with all the pots and pans, the bright things he’d bought at Wal-Mart to live in this dungeon without his wife and only child, it wasn’t enough. When he was done, when there was nothing left to tear up, bend, or wreck, he lay in a heap in the living room. It was only when he tried to get up that he saw the blood. Streaks of it on his knuckles where they’d been cut by some useless belonging he never wanted to see again. He felt a strange sort of sadness, as if a friend had died.

He caught up with Matt after work the next day. The kid was waiting at the bus stop, his backpack hanging off one shoulder, an open book in his hands. Sam offered him a ride home.

As Matt got in the truck, he glanced at Sam’s knuckles. “Jesus, what happened?”

Sam said nothing and stared ahead as he drove. The kid talked about going back to school one day after he’d saved enough money. He talked about his family and a girl he was interested in, but Sam heard only bits and pieces, a few words here and there. They drove all the way to Matt’s apartment before Sam turned to him. It took all of his strength to start the speech he’d been working on all day. But all he could say was, “You’d have to promise me you’d never tell anyone.”

Matt nodded and said, “Of course not. Of course,” as he clutched his book to his chest, his face as serious as if he was hearing the most incredible confession. He reached into his backpack and brought out three small books. Kiddie books. One had ABC on the cover, with an apple, a bird, a cat scattered among the letters.

Matt studied Sam’s face and then said, “Just think. Someday you could read books to your daughter.”

He liked the sound of that. Reading books to his daughter. Sitting on the couch in his apartment with his little girl on his lap just like they used to when she was a baby. They could go to the library together and choose them. They could go to the bookstore. Just like any other family. Just like any other dad. It was something important that cost hardly anything but would mean all the world. The kind of thing both of them would remember forever.

Sam took the books. The kid was smart after all.

Featured image: Shutterstock

The Silhouette

Mattie and his parents were the few year-round residents at the lake. The rest were summer people; they came during the hot months when the rhododendron blossoms bent heavily toward the earth, and the summer air carried the sweet scent of pine. The bike lane, weaving from the main road into the woods and down to the lakeshore, was crowded with runners, tandem bikes, and groups of families taking a stroll; the lake was spotted with striped sails of Sunfish and motor boats of varying size. The pace quickened in the summer for Mattie and his parents, who owned the only bike and boat rental shop on the east side of the lake; but for the summer people, like the McLeods, it was a time to slow down, to swim and sail, to read books on their porches, to work jigsaw puzzles, and to feel at the end of the day that still not enough had been accomplished.

Cabins of all sizes ringed this small lake in northern Michigan, each having its own weathered dock jutting into the water and a narrow path that pushed through bulrush up to screened porches and open decks. On the western edge of the 245-acre lake, nestled in among tall, white pines, the McLeod family’s cabin seemed to tilt, reaching for the sun that dappled off the water through the branches.

Isabelle pushed the screen door open and let it slam shut behind her. As she ran down the sandy path that led to the dock, she waved to Mattie while he finished wrapping the frayed rope in figure eights around the horn cleat. She watched his tanned arms and hands work, their muscles long and sinewy and roped with veins. He squinted up at her as he grabbed the oars. His hair was tousled and curled over his ears, his smile crooked.

“Hey, Belle, there’s the birthday girl. How does it feel to be 16?”

“Hi, Mattie.”

“Look what I have for you.” He reached into a paper bag resting on the floor of the boat and pulled out a broad-brimmed straw hat. Its red ribbon wrapped around the brim and tied in a bow at the back, draping down. “No more sunburned noses for you.” He placed it carefully on her head.

“Mattie, I love it.”

“Kids, can I get your picture?” Grandma McLeod waved a camera in her hand, carefully stepping over rocks and clumps of grass.

“Hi, Mrs. McLeod.” Mattie planted one of the oars solidly to his side like a staff and draped his arm around Isabelle’s shoulder. The August sun was still high and the air warm against their skin; a slight breeze blew long strands of Isabelle’s dark hair across her face.

“Cheese.”

 

Isabelle squinted as she looked across the still lake. The gentle sun peered above the treetops, rising at a more southern point on the lake than she had ever seen, signaling the coming of autumn. Ripples trailing a pair of ducks sparkled and danced at the water’s edge, and fallen golden pine needles twirled in a soft wind against the house. The morning gave promise to a beautiful September day.

“Do you have any idea how sexy you look right now?” Brian was still in bed, propped up against two pillows, his eyes droopy, his hair falling across his forehead.

“You don’t have your contacts in.”

The dinghy that had been tied to the dock next door the night before now glided with a single silhouette rowing slowly to the center of the lake.

“I’m going for a swim.” She turned from the sliding doors that led out to a balcony.

“Oh my God, you know it’s going to be freezing.”

“I’ll just see how far I can get.”

“I’ll watch you from the window, crazy girl.”

“Go back to sleep. I promise I won’t go over my head. Besides, I’m a good swimmer.”

The bed creaked as Brian slumped further down under the covers.

Isabelle struggled to pull up her one-piece bathing suit, slide on her cracked flip flops, and grab a towel all at once. Stumbling, she made her way down the stairs to the living space. A room smaller than she remembered, it had an overstuffed chair covered in knobby brown tweed fabric and a sofa loosely draped in an ill-fitting slip cover of dark green acrylic. Both faced east, out toward the lake. Next to each rested a lamp on metal TV tables. A braided rug of various shades of tan, brown, and green covered a mottled, yellowing linoleum floor; a worn gray path ran from the front door to the sliding door that led to the deck overlooking the water. On one side of the room was a small white refrigerator, sink, and a porcelain-enamel stovetop. The stove had a shallow chip that left a nickel sized spot of base metal showing black. Honey pine wood cabinets stood under a small stretch of Formica counter top and hung on either side of the window over the sink.

On the south wall of the room, a bookcase sagged from its double- and triple-stacked books; the lowest shelf still held Isabelle’s old games and the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. Opposite that was a large chest of drawers. Hanging above the chest, a wood-framed mirror reflected a blue ceramic bowl filled with pine cones of various sizes and a rooster pitcher labeled Pisa, Italy, in cursive. A Polaroid photograph was stuck diagonally into the frame of the mirror — an image of a girl standing on a dock holding a large straw hat in her hand, her hair in a long plait wrapped around the front of her shoulder and across her bathing suit top. Next to her leaned a sun-bleached, towheaded boy gripping a canoe paddle. The photo was yellowed and creased in the upper corner. Isabelle examined the picture before sticking it back in the slot between the wood and glass, and then opened each drawer of the dresser. Pulling hard, unsticking the bottom one, she found the straw hat from the photograph, its red ribbon crimped but still attached to its brim. She set it on her head before heading out.

The rowboat was probably 500 feet offshore by the time Isabelle made it to the end of the splintered dock, but she still couldn’t tell which direction the silhouette was facing. She almost waved but thought Brian might have decided to watch from the balcony, so she dropped her towel, kicked off the flip flops, and hung her toes off the edge. Jesus, he was right: the water was freezing. The sun glinted off the lake. She didn’t regret not wearing her sunglasses; the brightness eased her. It bleached out the darkness of the past year. The straw hat barely shaded her face, and when she closed her eyes the warm colors behind her lids moved slowly like a kaleidoscope. The slap of the water against the wooden pilings and the cool morning air made the world light and open.

Isabelle forced her feet, ankles, then knees into the frigid water and without a splash slid off the edge of the dock. Keeping her toes from touching the muck at the bottom, her head rose and dipped like a bobber on a fishing line. The skin on her scalp tightened, and her body shuddered from the cold. With her arms circling through the water and her legs scissor kicking, she swam away from the shore until the chill lessened. Then she flipped on her back and stared at the sky. The white underbelly of a loon, his wings stretched wide, glided overhead. Isabelle heard his one-note hoot, signaling his search for family members. The loon circled back, and his long rising and repetitive yodel echoed off the water’s surface, trailing into the branches of pine trees. She knew he was defending his territory. She let her legs drop into the lake, righting herself from the back-float, and doggy paddled in place. She searched for the boat again. The silhouette, a dark speck against the sky, drifted farther and farther away.

After her swim, Isabel moved quietly, trying not to bang too much in the kitchen. She set the black, oily, cast iron frying pan on top of the stove. She pulled out the eggs and bacon and butter she and Brian had bought at the convenience store the night before, nesting them together on the red Formica countertop. Separating and stretching individual slices, she slapped the bacon strips in rows on the heated skillet. The bent metal trim from the counter caught her loosely woven sweater when she moved against it.

“Damn it,” she whispered.

“What’s wrong, babe?”

Isabelle jumped and swung around. Brian stood in the middle of the room watching her.

“I didn’t hear you come down the stairs. Man, you’re light on your feet.” She turned back to the stove where the bacon now sizzled in the pan.

“What are you making?”

“Scrambled eggs and bacon. Or I can do fried or poached.”

“Scrambled’s okay. Would you like me to make them?”

She heard the glass door to the deck slide closed. “No, I’ve got it.” When she turned he was gone, facing out toward the water. She rubbed her thumb against the chip in the porcelain and watched the bacon burn.

The silhouette had disappeared from the lake sometime between Isabelle’s morning swim and the confluence of eggs, toast, and coffee passing under her palate. The dinghy bounced against the dock next door from the afternoon waves and wind, but the house to which it belonged was dark and still. Brian was out on the dock trying to understand the engineering behind a fishing rod while Isabel sat curled reading in the overstuffed chair with its greasy arms and distant smell of rain and earth. She could feel herself drifting off as random images blended with the words on the page. When she awoke, a low cloud cover had snuck in over the lake, casting a hue of green and gray; she turned on the only two lamps in the room.

In the late afternoon, Brian and Isabelle sat on the end of the dock in rusted folding chairs. The clouds had dissipated, leaving thin gray brush strokes against a darkening sky. With the sun setting at their backs, they sipped wine from yellow plastic tea cups.

“Izzy, why are we here?”

The silhouette in the dinghy glided away from the shore again, heading for the center of the lake. She hadn’t seen it leave the dock.

“Because this place is technically yours and mine, now.”

“Let’s sell it.”

“Yea, maybe.” The water churned as the wind picked up. Twilight fell on them like a veil.

“Free money.”

“I’d like to hold off for awhile before we do anything.”

“I’m just saying that since this place is practically falling down, maybe we should cut our losses and sell it as-is and be done with it. The land alone, I should think, would be worth something.”

The silhouette bobbed up and down and settled in one spot directly in front of the dock. It looked black against the twilight sky and disappeared from view when it dipped below the skyline.

“I’m not ready to be done with it.”

“Honey, it’s just that since I’ve known you, you’ve never visited this place. Now that your parents are gone, why hang on to it? Let it go. We could use the money.”

“I don’t know why we didn’t come here, Brian.”

“I do.” He held the cup to his lips. “Just look at the place.”

The silhouette traversed the lake heading to the south side. “I’m going in, Brian, I’m cold and it’s getting dark.”

The lake and darkening sky reflected off the glass of the sliding door that had replaced the old wood framed screen sometime in the last 15 years. Isabelle stumbled over its track heading straight for a lamp. She turned the knob and the bulb crackled and popped.

“Shit,” she said aloud.

She reached for the other lamp knocking it to the floor.

“God dammit.”

The base cracked and the shade popped off. The bulb lay bare against the linoleum floor; the small filament was exposed, with sharp glass edges protruding around it. Her towel and book hit the floor, and as she reached for the broken light, a sob escaped from deep within her throat. She turned the screw of the light switch over and over, clicking faster and faster. Isabelle dropped down to the cold floor squarely with her legs straight out, and, still holding the shattered light, wept.

Several minutes passed with the darkness smothering her. Her skin prickled with sweat. She wondered if Brian had heard the commotion. She made her way to the dresser to where the mirror reflected the only light in the room from the lake. As she stared at the photograph, she let herself remember. His hair had been white and his smile curled up one side forcing a dimple and exposing a slightly protruding tooth. He squinted hard against the sun as though it was a natural state and he was accustomed to it. His wet navy blue swim trunks hung low on his hips, leaving a distinct white line below his tanned torso, and they clung to his thighs from their wetness. His arm dangled casually across her shoulders while his fingers looped under her bathing suit strap at the top of her shoulder. This is how she always thought of him: bright and strong and hanging on to her.

An hour after sunset Brian and Isabelle sat at the square dining table. Candle lights flickered off the wine bottle, leaving shadows from the bowls and plates on the vinyl tablecloth.

“Tell me again how both lamps broke?”

“They didn’t both break. One just burned out, and I accidentally knocked the other one off the table. I’ll get some new ones tomorrow and some light bulbs.”

“There’s really no need.”

“We need more light in this room, Brian.”

“We’ve got the lamp from the bedroom. I’ll take it back up when we go to bed tonight, and then tomorrow we leave.”

“For when we come back.”

“I didn’t know we were coming back. The agency can sell it without us being here.”

“I’m coming back at least once more. You don’t have to come with me. You didn’t need to come this time.” She stabbed the salad with her fork. She had yet to touch the plate of pasta and marinara sauce from a jar. “I’m not going to sell the cabin without going through everything and bringing stuff home.”

“What stuff?”

“Like my books and the rooster pitcher that I brought back from Pisa for my grandma.”

“Those books are children’s books, Isabelle.” He twirled a mound of spaghetti onto his bent fork and stuffed it in his mouth, chewing slowly and swallowing. With a paper towel, he dapped at the corners of his lips and mustache.

“We’re not going to use the pitcher at home. It’s tacky.”

“I’m taking the things that mean something to me. My grandma was so happy when I gave it to her. That’s where her mother was born.”

“I like the mirror over the dresser.” He pointed over his shoulder, “Minus the photo.”

She knew Brian waited for a reaction. She brought the cracked tea cup half full of red wine to her lips and gazed out the sliding door. The reflection of her sitting across from him, the flickering candles between them, was set against a black background. They looked lonely.

“I’d like to head out by ten tomorrow morning. I’ve got to spend some time at the office in the afternoon.” He leaned back in his chair and drew his fingers through his black hair. With a strong angular face, Brian had an air of authority. His dark eyes were softened by his full eyebrows and long lashes, but his mouth was set with both corners pulling the mustache of his Van Dyke toward his chin.

“That’s fine. I’ve got some shopping to do.” She hesitated as if weighing her next words against his downward smile. “I’ve got lamps to buy.” When he brought the cup to his mouth, all she could see were his eyes. She thought they squinted for a split second.

 

The photo had been taken late in the afternoon. Given permission to leave the bike shop early, Mattie spent an hour on the lake with her before taking her to the movies. His father gave him the keys to the old family Chevy C10 pickup for the first time since he had gotten his license, to take her to the opening of Star Wars. He woke up early to wash the truck before going to work, vacuuming the interior, and using Windex on the windows. He covered frayed rips in the upholstery with a green-and-white beach towel, stretching it across the bench seat. He inserted Isabelle’s favorite Earth, Wind, and Fire eight-track into a tape deck and queued it up to “Reasons,” her favorite song.

After the movie, Mattie drove Isabelle to a nearby wildlife sanctuary that closed at dark. With Isabelle sitting close enough for him to drape his arm around her shoulder, he gently drove through ruts and over large rocks down a dirt road that wound through a heavy pine forest. Isabelle giggled as her head bounced against his shoulder. When they reached a clearing at the end of the road, a lone silver birch stood tall, spreading its dark branches against a sky brightened by the light of the moon; a clump of mistletoe hung from a low branch. Mattie turned off the engine.

“I love it here, Mattie.”

“I know. I do, too.” He reached across her lap to open her door. “Stay right there, birthday girl.” He climbed out his side of the truck and walked around front. She watched him pass through the headlights and come to her side. He held out his hand. “May I help you into the back of the truck?”

“Mattie Miller, what are you planning?”

“Please.” His hand was big and warm, and his thumb pressed gently into the back of hers as he grasped her fingers. After Mattie lowered the red tailgate, he lifted her at her waist while she pushed herself up with her arms, hopping backward onto it.

“I’ll be right back.”

“What in the world are you up to?” She heard him fumbling in the darkness of the truck’s cabin, the headlights went off and the music began to play. Mattie left the driver-side door open and Isabelle felt the truck rock slightly as he pulled himself up onto the tire and then onto the weathered wooden boards of the flatbed. In the dark, she made out his silhouette as he moved toward her.

“May I?” He took her hand and slid his arm around her waist and began to sway.

“Mattie, you can’t dance.”

“I can when I’m inspired.” He pulled her closer and held her hand against his chest, touching his cheek to hers. She drew a long, deep breath to smell the sweetness of his neck. His skin felt damp and smooth. As the music from the cabin of the truck blended with the chorus of wood frogs, Isabelle felt Mattie’s body sway. Blowing the stray hair that curled around her ear, he whispered, “I love you, Belle.”

 

“Izzy, do you want me to plug in the lamp next to you or keep it on my side?”

“I’d like to read a bit, can I have it?”

Brian had already plugged it into the outlet behind the small, white nightstand on his side of the double bed. Saying nothing, he yanked the black, cloth-covered cord and dragged it by the lamp’s base over to the other side and plugged it in. Isabelle pulled up a fresh pair of underwear under her nightgown, grabbed her book and glasses, and crawled under the frayed sheet.

“Are you kinda done with the whole sex thing, Izzy?”

Isabelle had sensed that this question was looming and was sorry that it came now.

“No.” She looked over the top of her glasses and saw that he had pulled out his iPad and was already scrolling. She scrunched farther down under the sheet and began to read.

Still awake several hours later, Isabelle heard the wind pick up, and branches from the pine growing close to the house scraped against her window. A wind chime that her grandmother had hung from the balcony made the night feel lonely and near. Brian was snoring. Isabelle tugged the crocheted quilt of black and green and red yarn up from the foot of the bed and wrapped it around her head. She never remembered feeling cold at the cabin until now. She used to wonder what the lake must be like after Labor Day, what Mattie did in the days when the shadows of the pines stretched long across the water and the chilled air smelled of earth and decaying leaves. She tried to imagine snowflakes disappearing as they touched the water’s surface with layers of ice forming along the shoreline and around the dock pilings. She pictured cabins closed up tight with their docks barren; all the deck chairs and umbrellas stored away in the sheds. She thought of Mattie alone sitting on the deck next door, bundled in a sweater and turtleneck listening to the geese fly overhead, watching the stars and planets rotate in the winter sky. A fire of pine branches and birch faggots popping and spitting from the stone fireplace that his father had built. His mother in the kitchen making something warm like stew or chili; all the foods that Isabelle never ate at the lake. The Miller’s cabin would be alive with a glow from each window, set alone in the darkness of the winter. And now, as the northern wind plucked the haunting chimes and the scratch of the pine branches kept time against her window, Brian lay next to her, and she was cold.

The next morning, Isabelle dumped the remains of the half & half down the drain and put the carton in the trash. “Should we bring the eggs home?” she asked.

“Nah, pitch ’em. Let’s pitch everything.”

“I’m going to the lake one more time, then I’m ready to leave.”

As she walked down the dock, Isabelle spotted the silhouette on the lake; it moved slowly toward her. The sun left black dots on the inside of her eyelids each time she blinked, but she saw the rower more clearly than ever before. He wore a blue life preserver, giving him oversized shoulders and arms that looked like sticks. As he maneuvered the oars, he turned the boat so that it glided perpendicular to the edge of her dock, and she watched him slide past her to the dock next door. He wore a red baseball cap that shadowed his face. White curls looped up around the back of the cap, and his tan neck was slightly burned. After he tied the weathered rope in figure eights around the horn cleat, he secured the oars inside the boat. With ease, he pulled himself up on the dock and unzipped his life vest. Throwing his arm up into the air, he waved to Isabelle with a smile; a wide gap split his two front teeth. A boy. She waved back without saying hello and watched him run up the gray, weathered planks to the cabin.

A rush of embarrassment rose from her chest to her throat. It strangled her as she let out a choked cough. A small boy. She stared at the dinghy as it bumped softly against the rubber pads on the edge of the dock, water lapping at its sides. She felt something release from her core, her muscles relaxed, and she nodded toward the lake and its gray quietness. The water was empty of sails. Hovering over the far side of the lake, a bank of clouds roiled and the tops of the pines swayed like wheat. She felt a slow rhythmic bounce of the dock making her turn as she pressed the straw hat firmly on the crown of her head. For a moment, she imagined a tall, white-haired boy with a curious smile loping toward her with his arms swinging, his eyes squinting against the sky painlessly.

“Are you ready?” Brian wore his pressed khakis, leather dress shoes, and sunglasses.

She steadied her voice, “I just saw a little boy that’s staying next door. I think he’s the one I keep seeing on the lake.”

Brian’s face showed no sense of recognition. He zipped up his jacket against the breeze, and it seemed to Isabelle that he was looking at the water for the first time.

“It looks different today,” he said.

A sudden gust of wind blew the straw hat off Isabelle’s head and into the lake. Lightly, it floated with its red ribbon trailing and sinking down into the water.

“Oh, no.” She fell to her knees and reached out to grab it, but the shallow waves licked the hat away. She stretched farther out over the water.

“Isabelle, let it go.”

“I love that hat.”

“It’s old. I’ll get you a new one.”

Isabelle leaned back on her heels, pressing her palms into her thighs as she watched the hat drift under the dock next door and catch in the stiff stalks of cattails growing out of the murky water along the shore. “Would you like to stop on the way home to pick up some new lamps? We can pick them out together, and you can look for a new hat.”

Isabelle remained kneeling, squinting away the brightness. “I don’t really need them.”

Featured image: Shutterstock

Don’t Have to Be Crying

Grace refuses to let go of the birds. Two days after the hurricane makes landfall, rejiggering the Jersey coastline, my stubborn sister continues to obsess over them.

“Why doesn’t he ask where the birds have gone?” Grace complains to the television from her recliner. There is continuous coverage of the hurricane’s aftermath. In this segment, a reporter quizzes an environmentalist about the storm’s impact. The pair converse on a dune under a cloudless sky, a harsh contrast to the tempest’s black clouds and screaming winds. Crime scene tape frames their patch of beach like a sandy boxing ring.

“Thousands of people have lost their homes, and you’re worried about the birds?” I chide from the sofa.

“It’s their home, too. Somebody needs to think about them.” Unlike many coastal residents, the birds possessed the good sense to evacuate, thanks to innate radar that senses an approaching storm, Grace explains. “But with the dunes shifting and the marshes mostly underwater, they may not have homes to come back to.”

I respect Grace’s assessment. The retired midwife adores birds, and has crowded her backyard with birdhouses and birdbaths. But these days, she has weightier matters to ponder.

Turning back to coverage of the coastal disaster playing out a hundred miles away, I listen as dazed survivors recount the rivers of seawater that churned through their streets, heroic rescues by surfboard and Jet Ski. A house jutting out of the sea at a precarious angle, like a toy bobbing in a child’s bath, serves as the disconcerting backdrop for these accounts.

Grace eases her recliner upright. “I can’t watch any more of this,” she says, struggling to her feet. “We have to go. They need us.”

I fight the urge to assist her, knowing she hates being coddled. “Your cane, Grace?”

Snorting at the silver three-legged crutch beside her, she shuffles toward the kitchen unaided.

“So what’s this crazy talk?” I ask, tailing her.

“It’s not crazy, Merrill. I want to go.”

“Why? To help the birds?”

“Of course not the birds.” She turns to me and moistens her cracked lips. “To help those people. We can’t just stand here and do nothing.”

Standing being a relative term, I think, watching her. I don’t dare point out she can barely stand herself. My protests would be futile; from birth, Grace lacked the DNA to stand by and do nothing. To my shame, being the younger sister had never prevented Grace from rescuing me, whether from a schoolyard bully, an abusive husband, once even from financial ruin after an unwise investment.

But now, the sibling tides have turned. It now falls on my shoulders to liberate Grace, if only I possess the wingspan and can summon the courage.

“You’re always asking me what I want,” she continues. “Well, I want to help.” The ash spikes of hair that sprouted on her head after treatment quiver with determination, like the crest on a cockatoo.

I take Grace’s hand and massage a dollop of lotion into her papery skin, avoiding the violet stain of bruises inflicted by IVs. “But the storm hit a hundred miles away, and —”

“I don’t care.” Grace yanks her hand away, her steady cornflower gaze an ultimatum. “I’m playing the card. I want to go.”

I want to argue, but my sister possesses a powerful hand, one in which cancer trumps all.

“But Marjorie comes today.”

Grace dismisses her hospice nurse’s scheduled visit with a smirk and a wave. “Tell her to come tomorrow.”

“But she has other patients.”

“Fine. She can skip me, then. Now do me a favor and help me to the toilet.”

She rarely asks for help, so I offer my arm. Grace leans on me as far as the powder room, and then slips inside alone.

While I wait for her to finish, I watch another reporter interview teenage volunteers as they dispense meals on a makeshift food line, and cock my head. The task seems doable, and not too taxing. But should I take a terminally ill woman straight into the eye of the storm relief effort?

Torn, I call Grace’s husband to ask his opinion.

“It’s a long ride,” my brother-in-law Tom says in a tired voice. I picture him lifting his glasses to knead the bridge of his nose, as he often does these days. “You know how exhausted she gets.”

“Then I’ll take her wheelchair.”

“What if something happens?”

Would his “what-if” be any less devastating if it occurred a hundred miles away instead of here, I wonder. To Tom, I say, “If something happens, I’ll deal with it.”

He expels a resigned sigh. “It’s up to you, Merrill.”

I hang up, my decision made. The clock is ticking, my opportunities to revise our story and square things with my sister dwindling.

I pound on the bathroom door. “Hurry up, Grace. We’re going.”

Energized by her appreciative whoop, I load her wheelchair, cane, and a tank of compressed oxygen into my trunk. Back in the kitchen, I sweep Grace’s pill bottles into my purse.

Then, having settled my sister in the passenger seat with a cotton blanket, I drive while Grace catnaps. I sneak a peek at her: her fuchsia baseball cap tames her spikes, a half-smile plays on her lips. Sleep is Grace’s escape, diminishing her discomfort to about a Level 3, the equivalent of the frowning face on Marjorie’s pain chart that is labeled Hurts Even More. Too often lately, Grace’s suffering veers toward Level 5’s tearful scowl, Don’t Have to Be Crying to Feel This Much Pain.

Ironically, the thought of the chart makes me smile. One day not long ago, having tired of Marjorie’s ministrations, Grace grabbed the pain chart behind the nurse’s back and scribbled moustaches and devil horns on each face in the ranking, holding the paper up to me gleefully.

During this silent drive, however, there is little elation. Instead, worry nips at me. My sister’s illness has forced her to relinquish control and rely on the sibling she has always defended. I pray I am up to the task, this final chance for a slacker older sibling to shine.

Twenty miles later, Grace stirs and consults the GPS on her phone. “We’re close. Less than ten miles.” Her voice sounds stronger than it has in days. Damn Tom and his doubts. She stretches, and then squares herself to face me. “So: why are we here, exactly?”

I frown, blaming Grace’s meds for this memory lapse. “Back at the house, remember?” I prompt. “Helping? The birds?”

“Not ‘here’ in this car. Here.” Grace’s outstretched arms encompass years. “Together. You and me.”

Feeling cornered, I train my eyes on the road. “It’s simple. You’re my sister. You needed my help. So I came.”

“I know Tom put you up to it, but much as I hate to admit it, I do need help. But what about your job?”

“I told you. I’m, um, managing things remotely. You know, living the laptop lifestyle.” Hadn’t I perpetuated this ruse daily since my arrival weeks ago, dutifully departing Grace’s house, laptop tucked under my arm, and taking refuge in a nearby coffee shop?

“You’re managing things, all right. You don’t think Tom and I know you’re faking?”

My cheeks flame. “It’s called networking.”

“Come on, Merrill.”

“Well! I guess you two are having a good laugh over me.”

“We’re not laughing, honey. We’re worried.”

“Could you possibly let me worry for once?” I ask, pounding the steering wheel. “Although clearly, I can’t even do that right.” Chewing my lower lip, I busy myself adjusting the radio. “I should have told you,” I admit eventually. “I’m sorry.”

Grace stares out at traffic pooling around us on the drawbridge and crosses her arms. “Yes, you should have. But apology accepted. And now, just drive, please.”

“Right. Drive. Are you suggesting I just crash through them, then?” I gesture to the cause of the traffic jam: broad wooden barricades stretching across the highway a quarter mile ahead.

“I … I don’t know. There must be a way around them. Keep going.” She types furiously on her phone, presumably for alternate directions.

Trapped in traffic, I do as she asks, but after crawling a few car lengths, we spot a phalanx of soldiers surrounding the blockade, reinforcing it.

“That’s it, Grace. I’m not about to argue with them.” Ignoring the horns of exasperated drivers surrounding us, I lurch into the right lane, negotiating the last U-turn before the barrier. The jug handle exit winds us past a wasteland of storm-ravaged properties — bungalows buried in sand, a decapitated garden center whose sheared-off shingled roof rests beside it — before depositing us back on the bridge, headed in the opposite direction, toward home. I sag in my seat, despondent. This isn’t your fault, I tell myself. You tried.

Grace drops her phone onto the seat and stares at me. “You mean to tell me you’re giving up after we drove all this way?”

“What other choice do I have? Barrel through the barrier?” I mime a phone at my ear. “‘Hey there, Tom, would you mind popping down to the shore and bailing your wife and me out of jail?’ Nooo thanks.” As we backtrack over the bridge, I glimpse a flotilla of unmoored boats bobbing like bumper cars in the marina below.

“For God’s sake, Merrill,” my sister retorts. “Would it kill you to just once take a risk?”

“Thanks a ton, Grace.” My core thrums with indignation, but in my heart I know she is right. I have lived my entire life as a rules follower, fearful of coloring outside the lines. But today should count for something, shouldn’t it? I have risked everything — Grace’s health, Tom’s wrath — by the mere act of loading my frail sister into the car.

Even so, Grace demands more of me, and I want to give it to her.

“You want me take a risk?” I counter. “Okay. We’ll drive. Just tell me where.”

A smug Grace directs me toward the next exit. As we approach, we see that the authorities have blocked that ramp, as well as the following two.

“Take the next open exit,” Grace orders, undeterred. “We’ll find our way back.”

I obey. A mile or so later, an exit ramp opens up. In the unfamiliar coastal town, we maneuver around downed trees, utility trucks, a displaced boat tilting drunkenly on a curb. As we approach ground zero of the storm, our GPS hiccups, and then fails; our cell service dwindles to a single bar. And still, I drive. My sister shouts that she has spotted a church spire, and I home in on the steeple dissecting a cloud as though it were the North Star. We wend our way toward the spire; after several wrong turns and a dead end, we finally park beneath it.

As I start to help Grace out of the car, she rejects her wheelchair, but miraculously accepts her cane. I follow, dragging her oxygen cart, and we head inside. Immediately, a dark-haired woman approaches us.

“Welcome,” she says, smiling broadly. “If you need housing, we’ve started a list over there.” She points to a corkboard spackled with hand-lettered index cards.

“Thank you, Joanna,” I reply, reading her name tag, “But we’ve come to help.”

“Wonderful. You’re in the right place.”

Joanna leads us to a card table, where she hands us a sheet of adhesive labels and some felt-tipped pens. We write our names on the badges, then follow her into the church kitchen, past industrial stoves and a wall of refrigerators to a counter piled with sacks of assorted breads. “Our immediate need is sandwiches,” Joanna says. “Loads of them. All we have at the moment is peanut butter and jelly, but it will have to do.” She pulls spreads from a pantry; in no time, we forge an assembly line, stacking sandwiches in disposable aluminum pans that Joanna periodically retrieves.

While we work, volunteers come and go, sharing accounts of the storm damage they have witnessed: splintered boardwalks, power outages, the National Guard restoring order at the beachfront after reports of looting.

As the enormity of the disaster sets in, the few hundred sandwiches we have made seem a paltry offering, a grain of sand in the dunes of recovery. Nevertheless, we persevere. And as we labor in that church kitchen, Grace comes alive. As if by some magic of fluorescent lighting, my sister glows.

“It feels so good to be doing something,” she says. As Joanna retrieves another pan of sandwiches and then departs, Grace waves her spreader at me: “Hey, Merrill. Does Tom know we’re here?”

I wait before replying, carefully thinning the jelly on my slice to reach every corner of the bread. “Um, not exactly.”

“Ha!” Grace grins like a child who has pulled something over on a parent. “Wait till I tell him.”

As I turn away so she can’t see my eyes fill, Joanna rushes into the kitchen.

“Does anybody have a car?” she asks. A local restaurant wants to donate its freezer of food before everything spoils, and Joanna needs someone to retrieve it.

“My sister does,” answers Grace. “She’ll go.”

“I don’t really know my way around.” I widen my eyes at Grace in protest. We’re already doing enough.

As usual, Grace ignores me. “This is a small town, right? How far could it be?”

“Not far at all,” says Joanna, hugging my sister. “That would be such a huge help.”

Reluctantly, I agree to go, but only after equipping Joanna with my cell number and a hasty lesson in the operation of Grace’s oxygen tank. In turn, Joanna sketches the route to the restaurant on a napkin. As I leave the kitchen, my sister and Joanna begin to debate the migratory patterns of seagulls.

Let them go, Grace.

On my way out, I pass folding tables accumulating a small mountain of lost and found items: trophies, bedroom slippers, a plastic bin of crayons. Someone has set a few dozen damp photos on a ‘Greetings from Asbury Park’ beach towel to dry, and I stop to examine them. One snapshot in particular catches my eye: two young girls dressed alike, very likely sisters, sharing the lap of a shopping mall Santa. Their plaid skirts, snowy blouses, red tights, and patent leather Mary Janes recall the holiday uniform of our youth.

I pick up the photo and run my finger over it, finding it rough. The saltwater journey has exfoliated its surface, blurring the girls’ faces. And yet, something in the arrangement of the siblings’ limbs speaks to me. The way the older girl has thrown her arm around the younger one’s neck, whether in camaraderie or aggression, I can’t discern, due to their unreadable expressions. Grace and I had posed similarly over the years, those Christmas moments preserved and dry in a family album somewhere. Perhaps I had protected Grace in the past, I think.

As I set the photo down, I ponder the infinite number of memories such as this Yuletide reminder that the hurricane has wrenched from their owners, and wonder how long it will take to reunite them.

After following Joanna’s directions to the restaurant, I console the dazed proprietor, who presses dozens of sweating plastic food containers upon me. It takes multiple trips and probably 45 minutes to fill my car; when I finally check my phone before heading back to the church, I discover several missed calls and a terse text from Joanna that makes my gut clench: “Please hurry. Grace is ill.”

I cup my hand over my mouth, recalling Grace’s pain meds inside my purse, which sits on the passenger seat beside me.

Though I barely recall that drive back to the church, I will never forget the spectacle of my barely conscious sister reclining on a bed of blankets on the kitchen floor. I kneel beside her and tighten the strap that secures her oxygen mask. “I’m so sorry. I never should have left you here alone.”

Wincing, Grace shakes her head. She presses her hands into her belly, the epicenter of her pain. I do not need Marjorie’s pain scale to gauge her discomfort at this moment, which seems off the charts. Trembling, I scramble in my purse for a pill, but she waves it away.

“This was the last day,” she struggles to say through her mask.

Despite strenuous efforts to withhold them, tears spill down my cheeks. “No, Grace. It’s not your last day,” I say, slapping the yellowed linoleum. “Don’t you dare think that.” Though I can imagine few places more sacred to expire than a quaint seashore church, I cannot, will not let my sister spend her final moments on a kitchen floor, struggling to breathe.

I lie down beside her. “Please. Fight with me,” I murmur into her ear. “I know you can find your way back. Remember the birds.”

Grace claws at her oxygen mask, tugging it to one side. Even clouded with pain, her cornflower gaze rivals the sun-washed sky we glimpsed on television that morning. “Not ‘last day,’” she whispers hoarsely.

“Not what, Grace? I’m sorry. I can’t understand you.”

Even over the whine of the approaching ambulance, my sister’s next words are crystal clear: “This was the best day, Merrill.”

 

Despite the events in the church kitchen, I have zero regrets about driving Grace’s cancer getaway car that day. During that momentary calm following the medical storm, when Grace’s breathing steadied and my panic subsided, anything seemed possible. That moment, that memory, became the bow on the gift of our final days together.

I stay on at my sister’s house for a time after her memorial service, appropriating Grace’s backyard rituals: replenishing water, dabbing peanut butter onto feeders in her aviary refuge. One day, a package as light as air arrives, addressed to Grace, and I open it. Beneath a cloud of tissue rests a handmade birdhouse of balsa wood, painted cornflower blue, its door the same crimson as the tulips blooming in the painted emerald pot outside it. As I hold the birdhouse aloft, powdery sand dusts my cheeks, and a note flutters to the ground:

Dear Grace and Merrill,

I was so relieved to hear Grace’s condition had stabilized. She is in my prayers daily.

(The words on the page blur, and I blink to re-focus them.)

Our town cleanup continues, and the church lost and found overflows. We must make space. This item arrived several weeks ago. Since no one has claimed it, I thought of Grace. May it bring joy (and birds) to her garden.

Blessings,

Joanna

Tears streaming by now, I carefully carry the birdhouse out back, setting it here and there, ultimately nestling it in the arms of a sturdy, mature maple. It calls to mind one of Grace’s last lucid days, when she summoned me to the television in the living room.

“Merrill, come look! It’s a miracle. The birds are back.”

I perch on the edge of her hospital bed to watch. It is a month after the storm, and the birds are back, although not necessarily to their native habitats, the reporter explains. In a bizarre twist of nature, a number of wayward species blown off course by the coastal storm are turning up like immigrants in the most unexpected places — gannets skimming the Hudson River, petrels poking around Massachusetts.

“Which makes their pilgrimages nothing short of amazing,” concludes the reporter.

A beaming Grace turns to me. “I knew they’d come back. It’s a sign, isn’t it?”

As someone suspicious of most signs, omens, or ‘God winks,’ I find myself a tiny bit jealous of my sister’s capacity for hope. “Yes, it is,” I say, to appease her.

“And remember.” Grace trains her cornflower gaze on me a final time. “Those very first birds passing through the eye of a storm are the most vulnerable ones.”

Yes, Grace, they might be, I think, walking back to the house after settling Joanna’s gift. But they are also capable of surviving, and flourishing.

As I admire Joanna’s birdhouse from my sister’s back steps, a fluttering in the maple catches my eye. To my surprise, a cocky Jersey Shore seagull, a hundred miles off course, has alighted on the newly installed birdhouse.

I approach, marveling at the path of this wayward bird that weeks ago perceived a subtle shift in the atmosphere and took flight. This creature has no more business poking around Grace’s Pennsylvania garden than I do.

And yet, here we are, unlikely comrades, thrown together by wind, currents, tides, instincts.

The seagull caws, unfazed by my proximity. Thinking he might be hungry, I scoop peanut butter from a nearby feeder with my finger and smear some on the perch of the birdhouse. My instincts are correct; he bends and consumes every scrap.

The peanut butter is all I have, but it will have to do for now. And while I can no more predict our futures than forecast the next hurricane, I somehow sense clearer, calmer skies ahead for us both.

Featured image: Shutterstock

All Happy Families

Jesse Sherwood is a runner-up in our 2020 Great American Fiction Contest. See all of the winners. 

His body is light.

For whatever reason, I imagine cardboard tubes under the blankets. Like the tubes at the center of a roll of paper towels or toilet paper. These tubes are stitched together to form his body. Tubes of different sizes: The largest link together to mold the long bones, his legs and arms; mid-size tubes are crumpled for the joints and are laid out into the long staccato of his spine; the smallest make up the blood vessels, shrinking toward capillaries, spreading like intricate cardboard blooms throughout his body.

His eyes are half-open, glazed with opiates. He stares at some point beyond his feet. Every once in a while, his lids droop and close for a number of seconds before opening. My sister is probably on a similar opioid. She cracks a joke, in bad taste, in her style:

“And we always thought you’d kill yourself.”

And I think: It’s the truth.

I never imagined him dying like this: flesh detaching from bone, skin and eyes bleaching out, everything shrinking like he was laid out and shriveling in the sun. Any other way seems more reasonable than this, more like him.

But maybe this is a form of karma? His unbreakable ego, an ego that would take its own life, has to face the indignity of becoming nothing but a decaying animal like the rest of us. Maybe that’s why he is being crushed down, made immobile, stripped of all the things that ego was built on. I’m sure if we brought a gun and he could manage it; he wouldn’t hesitate. I suppose I wouldn’t either.

Abigail waits for a reaction to the joke, her hands gripping the rails of the bed tightly, veins coiling close to bone just like in our father’s hands now. She gives up and looks at Crystal and me, forcing a smile.

“I thought it was funny,” she says.

Crystal breathes out loudly and her breath, all mint and what smells like used dryer sheet, passes by me. She starts moving toward the door.

“I need a break,” she says to me. “Coffee?”

I wave it off. Abigail says she’ll go with her, and I can tell by Crystal’s look that what she wanted was a break from our pilled-up sister. They leave the room and I use the time to sit for a while. The weight of the baby in me — seven months — sits heavy on my organs and bends my back, like I was pulling hard on ropes tied to something immovable on the ground. There’s a tight ball of pain in the small there, pulsing needles down into the base of my spine. Sometimes sitting helps, but I haven’t tried it this past hour or so, with my sisters. So I sit and it does help some and I think about taking up my father’s hand in mine, but it’s the arm with the IV and that thing they put on your finger with the red light. Why wouldn’t they put it in the other arm, on the other side? This is the only chair; they knew someone would be sitting here.

There are times when I realize how much like my father I am, but it isn’t until now — now that he’s so much unlike the father I knew or want to remember and we’re alone — that our similarity hardens into fact. He wouldn’t sit around like this waiting for someone to die, waiting bedside, and I have an overwhelming urge to leave, too, an impatience not to see any more of this. I was young when my grandfather died, but I remember how my dad acted like it wasn’t happening. He took no time off work, never returned his sister’s frantic calls, kept religiously to his routines. I remember my mother — they hadn’t split yet — asking if he was planning on going to the funeral, and he said No, not making eye contact with her, then, Why would I? in a harsh tone, as if my mother were an idiot. I’d had a boyfriend in college who’d grown up Evangelical. I told him about this and he said that Jesus had said: Let the dead bury the dead. But that wasn’t why my father ignored my grandfather’s death. It was this, this thing in me now telling me to flee, sitting taut in my chest like a knot pulling tighter into itself.

My sisters return before I even get a chance to catch my breath from them. I can tell things went badly, that they’ve been arguing. Abigail’s color is grapefruit, sloping down her cheeks in dabs like she’d rubbed dye on her face. Crystal acts pretend-happy, that slight twitch in her eye as she holds her practiced smile.

“He move at all? Anything?” Crystal lets down the smile, asking in the harsh tone she inherited from our Dad.

I just look back at her, because we both know — all three of us know — it’s a dumb question. Abigail, as if I’d made a precedent, settles gently on the corner of Dad’s bed, her thinness barely creasing the sheets there. The reddish flare on her face disappears, her features ashen as if the buzz from the pills has pulled the flush away like a wave. But it isn’t the pills at all — it’s our father that’s drained her. The sight of him.

He used to be what people used to call virile. Tall, though not as tall as Crystal, with thick, curly hair, and solid muscle threading over his body. I try to hold that image of him, all those years ago when he was like that and things were good, but it always fades to this brittle dying man in this bed. Though it had been coming long before this. Whatever it was he felt the world owed him he never received, so he let his life wane. Cancer was a formality. Our mother knows it. That’s why she’s not here. That’s why she left all those years ago.

For a brief moment, staring at his sunken, yellowed face, I remember. I see an image of them, my father and my mother. It’s summer and they are sitting on grass next to each other. He’s in a navy-blue T-shirt and his ever-present jeans — no matter how hot — and she’s in a cotton dress with pale lilacs on it. He’s tanned copper; she’s pinked with fresh sunburn. He squints; she shields her eyes despite the large O sunglasses covering them. She’s smiling; he smirks. Their hands are very near each other in the grass, but they don’t touch. I see them like this, happy, before he sank into himself and she left.

I’m pulled back into this room by Abigail, who I see has started crying. She speaks, looking at Dad, not at Crystal or me.

“You remember the story about the deer?” she says, sniffing up snot loudly.

“Yeah,” Crystal says, looking up from her phone and staring at him too.

And I think: How could we forget?

 

My father was nine when he’d seen the deer die. It was an old age considering the time, 1965, and the place, rural upstate New York. His father, my grandfather, wasn’t a hunter, just like my great-grandfather hadn’t been, so he never passed on the practice of killing things to his sons. Other boys my dad knew had been out hunting with their fathers since they could walk in the woods without holding someone’s hand. I’m sure they talked about it at school: the cold mornings laced in frost, the crunch of leaf under snow, the shot of the gun cutting through the dawn. I imagine my father pretending that he’d done the same with his father, exaggerating a turkey’s spray of feathers, or the size of a deer’s antlers.

It wasn’t hunting season the night it happened. My father would never remember where they were driving from, or why he was the only one in the truck with my grandfather. He would remember how the snow seemed to go unbroken from shoulder to shoulder, as if they weren’t on a road at all, just a convenient clear path through the woods and fields. He’d remember that Hank Williams came grainy from the radio, the tires pressing through the snow, a sound like ripping fabric. He’d remember his father’s deep hum that didn’t match the Hank Williams tune or the tires. The ever-present smell of the cigarettes his father smoked through a minute crack in the window and the beer he took sips out of.

My grandfather, whom I would never meet, had a Norman Mailer look to him; that sort of pompous but sad stare, perhaps coming from the unexpected blueness of the eyes amid the tanned skin. At that time he was around 30 and probably still had the curly chestnut hair my father and us daughters would inherit and grandfather would go on to dye a strange color that looked like wood stain. As was the fashion, he had sideburns, slightly darker in color than his hair. He was tall, thin, strong — what some might call ropey. Those old pictures show my father as the type of boy they’d put in a Lassie episode, with chubby cheeks and a head of blond curls that would suddenly darken — as mine would — when puberty came.

I can see them both. My grandfather peering through his cigarette smoke and the falling snow, trying to stay on the road and not drift off into a field. My Dad bundled up in a jacket, a hat, maybe a scarf, maybe mittens too, falling asleep in the warmth from the truck’s heater, now and then being jolted awake by the shudder from a pot hole.

Then a jolt came that would keep him awake and make my grandfather lose control of the truck. I imagine, being the type of man I had always heard he was, that my grandfather swore when it happened, the whole thing occurring in that brief second of the curse. The loud thud of the impact passing through the skin of the truck, his foot reflexively compressing the brake, the tires’ lock and skid, and the final thump as the truck slid into a pile of snow on the shoulder next to a field, the pile of snow inexplicable, as if an entire cloud had condensed and fell there. And my blond-curled father holding himself tightly in the seat with his small arms, unsure of what was happening. Dad wouldn’t have said anything, of course. Out of fear, not only of the unknown event but also the anger and frustration he could sense emanating from his father as he burned through gears, back and forth, back and forth, getting the truck unstuck. The headlights lunging at and pulling away from the pile of snow, yellow in the light like tallow.

He did get the truck unstuck. He backed it onto the road and parked, left it running, said to the boy, Come on. That’s how my father told it. No preamble or explanation, just Come on, and opening his door and letting the boy open his own and dangle down to the snow and do his best not to slip and fall. And the truck seat folding forward and grandfather taking out the gun, checking to make sure it was loaded, and then pushing the seat back with a click and slamming his door. The boy pushing to close his but it not latching and my grandfather, maybe swearing again, coming around and slamming it. Maybe he said Come on again before walking back the way they’d come. Then my grandfather going back for the flashlight — my father remembered that part. Surely then he swore. Then the gruff walk back to the boy standing in the road, waiting. Shining the light in the boy’s eyes and walking on past him.

My father said it didn’t take grandfather long to find the blood. The burst on the ground where it had hit the truck, like a crimson palm leaf, a few yards off the pool where it had laid a moment, and then the drops dotting the snow where it had stumbled off. Not considering the boy, the depth of snow, the time of night, or the temperature, grandfather began trudging into the field, following the drops. Maybe he wanted the meat. Surely it couldn’t have been compassion, to put the deer out of its misery. Though that’s how my Dad always framed it. But it doesn’t make sense that way. It had to be something with enough power to keep grandfather from pulling out any more cigarettes or grabbing more beer. And it was 1965, and it was rural upstate. Such things as compassion from men were in short supply. That’s what mothers were for, and it was seldom even to be had there. My father never spoke of his mother or his father this way, but I gathered it from how he was with us girls. The way he’d turn stern, indifferent, whenever emotion was involved. So grandfather followed the blood because of his dented truck, because of getting stuck, because he’d been made scared.

Father always said the field was big, 80 acres or more. But I’ve been past it many times and it can’t be more than 40. He said it was different back then, even though the trees bordering the field today are at least 70 or more years old. I imagine that for his age and size, that cold, dark field must have seemed limitless, ice and snow spreading to the horizons under the spray of stars overhead. He never told how long he followed behind my grandfather, hopping into the holes the man’s boots made, calculating each leap, making a game of it despite his fatigue and chill. He only told us that he had had to catch up to his father, some 20 yards ahead, standing motionless in the field, silhouetted by the flashlight pointed at the ground. And then he saw the deer.

It lay on its side heaving, struggling for each breath. My father remembered its gulps for air sounded like someone rattling a plastic shopping bag deep in its chest. He remembered the blood flowing from its nose and mouth, bubbling and steaming before dripping onto the snow. Its eyes wide and terrified — black balls, he said, like marbles. One leg kicked out with no rhythm to it, sending sprays of snow a yard out from its body. Then he noticed the deer’s side, a large split across the ribcage. How it was strangely bloodless, and how he could see the pinks and yellows of organs peeking through the crack, steaming too like the blood. He never said whether he was scared or sad for the deer, but he was mesmerized enough to tell his three girls about it almost every single year in the winter, even after he’d become bitter, even after he’d become sick.

I know grandfather wouldn’t have told him not to look, or took him under his arm and said, Are you okay? Instead he raised the gun to his shoulder and told him to Turn around, but the boy didn’t. He just kept watching the deer’s eyes. And then the crack of the gun splintered everything.

I see my father, that little boy, jumping when it happens. The deer’s head dropping into its pool of blood in the snow, the last breath escaping, its steam dissipating as it rose into the air, its hoof locking mid-kick, the echo of the gun off in the distance, clacking its way across the countryside, until it is nothing but silence and the boy and the man and the dead deer.

My father told how grandfather stood awhile. I imagine my grandfather pulling a cigarette from his pocket and lighting it, the gun — father never said rifle or shotgun, but I picture rifle — leaning against his shoulder like a soldier in formation, or resting on his boot, the still-warm barrel in his free hand. Deciding, estimating. First, whether it’s worth the fuss. Second, the distance to the truck. Third, how much energy he has to pull it there over the snow. Lastly, the boy.

Whatever the sum of the estimates, he decides to take the deer, giving the boy the flashlight and the gun to carry, telling him to keep the light trained in front of his steps so he doesn’t trip.

It must have been the longest walk of my father’s life. My grandfather dragging the deer and Dad trying to balance the heavy gun and shine the light in front of grandfather without losing his own footing. But he did it — they both did it — and that was when the estimating he had forgotten to do must have struck my grandfather: how to get the deer into the bed of the truck. Again, he looked to the boy, this time calculating his height, his weight, how strong he thinks his son is. But my grandfather knows. He’s lugged the damn thing already and knows it has to be almost two hundred pounds, if not more. Like with his prior estimations, he decides to go ahead despite the obvious odds against success. He tells the boy to get the head, the shoulder. My Dad puts his hands under the shoulder and looks at the deer’s face. Where the blood had been bubbling out there is a scrim of pink snow like a growth of crystals; the eye he can see is still open, a black ball with no focus. He smells the musky scent of the fur, an acrid and earthy smell, like vinegar mixed with clay. Grandfather told him, Ready, didn’t ask it, and then he lifted it off the ground.

This part was always hard, and still is hard, for me to imagine, but I try. The man pulling up the back of the body quickly, like a weightlifter pulling a bar off the ground in one swift motion, the boy starting a second late, then trying to do the same and only getting the head and shoulder a foot or so off the ground, the cold, stiffening body looking like a distorted capital M: the butt on the tailgate, the back sloping down to the boy’s hands where he raised up the shoulder, then from there the neck bending back down and the head touching the ground. How they got it in from there, I’m not sure. Maybe my father somehow managed to push the shoulder up to the level of the tailgate. Maybe my grandfather shuffled over to help the boy lift it up and in. Their hands close together on the fur as they pushed. Whatever happened, it was done. Then my grandfather climbed up and slid the deer all the way into the bed, hopped down, and closed the tailgate. Maybe he said, Come on, to the boy again, not saying thank you or acknowledging the extraordinary effort just made by a boy of nine, but just assuming it the way one expects a knife to be sharp.

They went back to the house then, and that’s where my father always ended the story. But I go on with it, and I do it now with my sisters.

That snowy drive again, this time with the radio off, only the rip of the tires, my father falling fully asleep, the jolts from potholes having no effect, and my grandfather popping a beer again, smoking through a crack in the window, again. Then getting home and leaving the deer in the back of the truck to preserve in the cold. And my grandfather scooping my father out of the cab and carrying him in, taking him into the dark house and trying to go quietly up the stairs, going to the room my Dad shared with one of his older brothers and laying him on his small bed. Pulling his boots off and getting him out of his jacket, hat, and mittens, pulling a blanket over him against the chill. Then he went downstairs and sat in the kitchen, drinking another beer or two or three, thinking about who he could get to gut and butcher the deer for the cheapest price, where he was going to store all the meat. Then maybe he considered his son.

But maybe I have the story wrong, have misunderstood the grandfather I’ve never known, and by extension this man lying here half-dead. Maybe the whole time all my grandfather was thinking about was my father. Maybe that’s why he was angry, because of the injury that could’ve come to the small boy. Maybe he followed its blood trail for the meat, because they were poor and he had to feed my father and his siblings. Each step along the way, my grandfather caring for the boy above all else.

 

Crystal is the first to leave. Her phone has been vibrating all night. She takes it from her purse. I have to go, she says, and expects us to understand, maybe even feel bad for her. But we don’t understand. We’re indifferent. She kisses Dad on the forehead, gives Abigail a one-armed embrace, and comes around to me for the same, bending down so I don’t have to get up. I thank her for this, but she thinks I’m thanking her for her presence here, for staying as long as she has for this man she never liked and possibly doesn’t even love. When she’s gone, Abigail opens up, speaking to me but keeping her eyes trained on our father.

“Sometimes I wonder if it even happened. That deer,” she says.

“Who knows,” I say, tired, my back seamed with pain.

“Maybe he made it all up and we made it all up.” She turns and smiles at me, tears in her eyes.

She’s right. How can she not be? From our father’s end, the memory of a nine-year-old, spoken to us girls with dramatic flair. On our end, all the imagining and filling-in. Abigail’s version, when I’ve heard it, is much different than Crystal’s or mine. Some parts come from movies, other parts from books, others from the dumb psychology articles she always shares on Facebook. And mine? Who the hell knows where my version comes from.

“Dad,” Abigail says to him, at that register just before screaming, “did you make it up?”

“Abigail,” I say.

“No,” she says, still too loud, “I need to know.” She starts crying again. “I need to know before he fucking dies.”

She crumples on the corner of the bed by his feet. Our father remains mute, there and not there. I consider getting up to rub her back, but I don’t. Instead, I think, My little sister, amazed at the bare fact of it. By the bare fact of all of us.

We are silent for a long time before a nurse comes in to check on Dad. She’s thin, even thinner than Abigail. Barely a wisp of a person, with rich red hair pulled back into a large knot at the back of her skull. She moves as if we were asleep. The loudest noise is the scratch of her pen on the clipboard. I think for a second that it’s so odd she hasn’t said anything to us, anything to him, but then I wonder whether I’m wrong, whether she’d said hello to me and Abigail and my father but I’d somehow blocked it out.

As the nurse leaves she smiles at me: a tired, obligatory smile, a sad one she must give to several people a day. Just before the woman is out the door, Abigail calls to her:

“He’s going to die tonight, isn’t he?”

The nurse smiles at her with that smile, spidering lines throughout her face, and she shrugs. It could be offensive, but I find it honest, and Abigail must too, because she says nothing back. When the nurse closes the door gently, without the slightest click, Abigail poses the question to me:

“He’s going to die tonight, isn’t he?”

And I think: He will.

And he did.

 

I think, or I thought, I’d have left that night before Abigail, but I don’t. My husband, who I am sure will come to take me home before 10 p.m., doesn’t show until close to 11, slightly drunk. Abigail after her question to me — maybe more a statement — becomes even more insubstantial in the silence, gets up eventually and says, I’m leaving; I can’t do it anymore; not today. This time I do get up from the chair and embrace this sister. It is tight and sincere. She sobs in the crook between my shoulder and neck, holding on to me until the tears pass. When she straightens up I feel the spot where the tears went into the sweater cool like menthol rub. Abigail points to my stomach, to the baby:

“Take care of my niece or nephew,” she says. I nod and hold her hand to the door.

In two days, the night of our father’s memorial service, she will overdose on fentanyl, be discovered blue in the bathroom by her boyfriend. He will rush her to the hospital where, after some uncertainty, she will be stabilized and, when she awakes, will decide to go to rehab. Crystal will begrudge her this and stop speaking to her. Even 10 years later when Crystal has her uterus removed — cancer too — and a sober Abigail comes to her in the hospital room, there will be silence, a silence only broken five years later when Crystal’s cancer returns.

But now, with my father, I sit once more in the chair. I rub my distended belly, even rolling up the sweater and T-shirt beneath it to expose the stretched skin there, my belly button spread into a crop circle ring. I take my father’s IV’ed hand and place it on my stomach. It’s surprisingly warm and soft.

The baby will be a boy. He will have blond curls like his mother, like his grandfather. These curls will turn dark too. When he is nine there will be no truck, no gun, no deer. He will grow up tall, thin, strong — ropey.

He will be happy.

Featured image: Shutterstock

“The Enchanted Hour” by Sinclair Lewis

Editor George Horace Lorimer accepted Sinclair Lewis’s short story “Nature, Inc.” from The Saturday Evening Post’s “slush pile” of manuscripts in 1915 and began a prolific relationship between the satirical author and the magazine. Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922) brought this kinship to a screeching halt due to its critique of business and the middle class. Lorimer wrote an unkind review of the book, and Lewis was left out of the Post for years to come.

Like “Nature, Inc.,” his 1919 story “The Enchanted Hour” features one of the author’s favorite settings for satire: a new-age commune of artists and farmers.

Content warning: This story contains language that might be unacceptable today but was commonly used at the time.

Published on August 9, 1919

 

Leyland had devoted his imagination to science, in college. To him the winter stars were not flowers in the black field of heaven. They were vaster suns, each with its planets of more splendid human races. As he looked up, his mind flying through ether from sun to eternal roaring sun, he expanded with worshiping awe. And a chunk of quartz was something more than a pretty arrangement of dead angles. It was the battleground of shooting, charging electrons; it had all the mystery and illimitable force of the stars themselves.

He regarded this daydreaming as a vice and a waste of the time that ought to be devoted to learning chemical formulas. But it led him to go adventuring after graduation.

He became assistant to Doctor Ballinger, who was experimenting on the Pacific Coast with iodine, soda and other products of kelp. That sounded sane and scientific. But Leyland guiltily knew that his real interest was not in analyzing the ashes of burned seaweeds, but in seeing mountains and Chinamen and in going upon the ocean in boats. He was reared in the Middle West; he had never seen a mountain nor any Chinaman save the one who ironed professors’ shirts till 1 a.m. So at nothing in particular a week he went to the place where — if your eyes are but good enough — you can glance across to junk sails and the palms of South Sea isles.

The experiments were conducted at Pasqual, a California fishing port. It was a dingy place, but there was a back street of old adobe; Portuguese fishermen with earrings babbled about the wharves; and Doctor Ballinger was a curly-headed, placid, pipe-smoking big brother. Leyland crept out of the awe of college blackboards and became human.

It was the perfect time, the rare sweet hour when youth is invincible and friends are kings. All morning he was out in the kelp-harvesting boat under a gallant and open sky. Ashore the foothills led the eye up cherry-red escarpments and gray-green slants to the mountains beyond. All afternoon he worked in the laboratory. And all evening he talked with the geniuses — with the members of the New Light Colony.

They were at least geniuses, those colonists. They intended within five or ten years — this was twenty years ago — to reform the distribution of wealth, the education of children, the interpretation of Ibsen and the iniquitous prices at the Pasqual grocery. They were mad and delightful.

Leyland was fascinated. They were so obviously impractical that it didn’t matter whether they were practical or not.

There were twenty-five or thirty of the colonists — half, young idealists; half, disillusioned dreamers who, after failure or weary success with schools or newspapers or reform leagues, had fled to the colony as to a white cloister for deliverance from having to make decisions. Each family had ten acres of land and grew figs or chickens or super-potatoes. They joined in a community eucalyptus grove which was to produce incredibly profitable semi-hardwood in an incredibly short time; in a community dining room and kitchen where they took turns at working; in a building that was reading room and theater and temple of whatever arts were fashionable at the moment; and in a nursery — whenever they happened to have a nurse, which never happened to be the present.

Their houses were brown bungalows with fireplaces, rows of latticed windows and low roofs; all very pleasant and gentle, inconspicuous among drowsy hillside pines. Beneath the slope, a wide bay was outflung toward a fantastic headland up which the waves climbed all day long, and for background there were low mountains, eternal and never the same, sliding into new shapes and colors in the play of light, in the eagerness of morning, noon serenity, contemplative dusk. The scent of the place was warm and good; not the gritty smell of cities, but the odor of pine needles, of poppies and the sea.

Most of the colonists were not only agricultural but vaguely literary. They said of one another, “Oh, he writes,” though they did not say just what it was that he wrote or where it might be read. But in their talk they were tremendous and — let this be understood — perhaps a dozen times as merry and interesting as the chemists and businessmen Leyland had met. He had not known there were so many things to talk about: Duse’s technic, the value of alfalfa, single tax and the hypocrisy of rising when ladies came into the room. They talked before breakfast; they talked while they worked in the fields all day — some days; they talked before driftwood fires all night — every night. The question of how they got sleep was as puzzling as the question of how they made a living.

Leyland revered the unelected dean of the colony — Fischer, a gaunt, speculative, sonorous, somehow heroic man; a master with few and shabby disciples; a judge of culture whose verdicts the criminals never heard; a failure in all but faith; a novelist who was too busy studying music to write novels, too interested in photography to make music and too fascinated by spiritualism to develop his pictures. Not quite so well as Fischer, Leyland liked Miss Barge, who did not talk but who really did garden; Mr. and Mrs. Tiddenham, the artists and teachers of folk dancing and weaving; Soulier, the unfrocked clergyman, a jolly, friendly man, very grim in his attacks on churches; Miss Garver, who had been secretary of leagues for all the different kinds of reforms that have been invented since Plato; and young Max Toinans, once a newspaperman, now an unpublished author of novels in which the villains were usually moral parents and the heroines ladies of reputations only too certain.

The colonists spent much of their conversational vigor in denouncing public personages as mediocre and commercial. They stirred Leyland to understand how unceasingly he would have to fight against his every weakness. And when he was bothered by Fischer’s complaining, when it seemed to him that some of the colonists took doctrines — any doctrines — as frowzy men take drugs, he still admired their willingness to play.

For these modern conventuals remained children. They picnicked on the shore. They came early in a chattering parade, carrying baskets and wicker-covered demijohns of honey-colored native wine, trailing through the poppies — talking, laughing, talking. They ran barefoot out into the surf, chased one another with whips of seaweed, tiptoed about the little lovely gardens in pools at low tide to peep at sea anemones and the gravely absurd tiny crabs. At twilight they built a fire in a sand-paved corridor among the swart rocks, cooked clams and Hamburg steak, warmed tamales, made reeking delicious coffee. They washed the dishes in sand and curled by the fire, luxuriously talking, laughing, talking while the firelight beat on their exhilarated faces, slipped across the wet rocks, reached toward the breakers and made mysterious the void beyond.

In the afternoon — Leyland with them on holidays — they hunted quail in the still close manzanita thickets. They rode ancient and quite bad horses up climbing trails to canon heads. They gave plays; outdoor pageants or tricky flashes of flippancy in which they more cleverly made fun of themselves than could any outsider. Even the most querulous of them were excited over painting scenery or rehearsing tableaux of graceful, other-worldly figures against a background of silhouetted pines. They danced in costume, in loose peplums or Egyptian priestly robes. Shrieking, they hacked at tennis on a court like a washboard.

But their play merely pointed their eagerness to make a new world. They believed that each of them was a genius. And within a month, as soon as he had ceased to be uncomfortable at their habit of collecting statistics by guessing at them, Leyland was admitted as one of the geniuses.

They insisted that he must — he flutteringly promised that he would — devote his chemistry to revolution in daily life. He was immediately to create new fuels, new building materials, road surfacing that would be cheap, easily laid, smooth as a razor blade. Especially — this was rather stressed in a colony which had not been so successful in abolishing dishwashing as in abolishing religion — he was to emancipate housework by the invention of synthesized foods. He was to produce opalescent tablets that would be of more unctuous taste than mushrooms fried in butter — in much butter — and more satisfying than planked steak, yet enable the housekeeper to do her cooking by taking the tablets from a box and her dishwashing by chucking the box into a stove; or preferably into a fireplace — a fireplace with a beaten-copper motto.

He planned it as a young poet discovers songs. Behind the colonists’ volubility he found joy of life. Behind the joy he found ideals. And behind the ideals and in them and a tremulous light over them — he found Ilka.

For it was not Fischer nor the uncompromising Max Toinans who brought Leyland to the colony every evening, every afternoon off, but a girl of seventeen with bobbed hair flickering and little ankles bright as she raced up the long hill slopes. Ilka was the breathlessly disobedient ward of the Tiddenhams. She was the amateur of every art, precociously rebellious against proprieties, equally enthusiastic about sprawling on the soft brown earth and the ceremony of lighting a cigarette. She was a nuisance and a bomb — the wonder child Ilka; who drooped her young lips toward a man’s till he was mad to kiss her, then fled, and when the foolish sage lumbered after her was discovered primly sitting upon a rock and indignantly explaining that she had just meant to ask about the tariff.

The solemn young Leyland was five years her senior and when she set her scatterbrains earnestly to the task she could make him weep in five minutes.

But between bedevilments she was a comrade — a dear and adventurous and sunny chum. Her chestnut eyes steady and her lunatic feet calmed to plucky trudging, she panted with Leyland up dripping canyons; or they lay on their stomachs in the rough, waving, salt-scented grass on a cliff above the sea, gazing at the slaty line where the mystery of deep-blue ocean met the wonder of gold-blue sky; and talked of all they were gloriously going to do. He was to be lord of science — a Huxley, an Edison, a Pasteur. She was to dance in royal theaters, with exquisite gestures to create a spell in which adoring thousands would find anew the ache of beauty, and in painted barges with Cleopatra and slave girls of gilded limbs go floating to the tinkle of little music beneath the columns of grotesque temples, or with yogis in the silence of gray Himalayan uplands find all power and secrets.

As evening fog drove in and they were encircled by its walls, as the breakers pounded more menacingly below, they were caught by the fear of night and Nature, which is ancient as the sea. They ceased to jabber about their knowledge of electricity; they clasped hands as here upon this cliff, when it was a mountain spur leagues from the tide, barbaric youths and maidens of tribes that are gone without one trace clung to each other for protection from the god of loneliness. Without knowing it, they remembered the terrors of ancestors dead a thousand thousand years ago; and they became too solemn even for delightfully shuddering fear. Unspeaking, they moved closer; unsmiling, they crept over rocks and along the milky-misted beach to the ruddy lights and gossip of home.

And that same evening she would refuse to dance; ignore him while she tormented him by making butterfly love to the cynical Max Toinans.

Leyland could think of no phrases save “elfish” and “fascinatingly irregular” with which to describe Ilka’s face — the jolly, vulgar little nose, the precise chin, the impudent mouth, the childish brown cheeks, the clear golden brown of her loyal eyes. But he needed no incantations to summon her. He was singing to himself “I love her!” even while he was judiciously remarking to Captain Catty, the boisterous skipper of the kelp boat: “Yep, good idea; better swing to north’ard.”

Suddenly, ineloquently, between dances at Social Hall, he tried to express to Ilka his impressions regarding her lips and eyes and her value as inspiration to rising young men.

“Don’t be silly! You can’t support me. Besides, I’m never going to marry. I’m going to Russia to study dancing. Besides, I’m already engaged to a couple of boys in Oakland. Besides, Max Toinans is waiting for this dance, the sweet thing,” was her not altogether romantic answer.

Nor would she be more definite during any of his later proposals — at least during most of them. She did decide to marry him now and then, and once she kissed him distractingly and ran away. But always immediately after accepting him she sat up late to write him little notes on pink paper in which, with lofty and aged resignation, she unaccepted him.

Then the kelp experiments were over.

He had no salary; he needed a salary; and he took an offered teaching fellowship at Johns Hopkins.

The rest of the colony were affectionate at parting — Fischer, the Tiddenhams, Miss Barge, Miss Garver, Soulier, even Max Toinans. They begged him to come back as soon as he could. But Ilka was tenderly illusive. She said she didn’t know her own mind. Besides, she had an engagement at the dressmaker’s.

He wrote four postcards and a letter to her the first day on the eastward train; five postcards and two letters the second day; one postcard the third — when he gave her up forever; and three long letters the fourth — when he couldn’t live without her.

All of these and perhaps twenty later letters she answered in one post card which informed him that she had a cold and a chow pup.

For twenty years he never wrote to Ilka, never saw the Pasqual colony and never felt like a genius.

At forty-three he was the chief chemist of the great Galway Paint Corporation. He was a sound workman; his papers were heard with respect at association meetings; and during the war his experiments with American dyes won him a good many short inexact paragraphs in the newspapers.

His salary was sixteen thousand, his favorite car a Vance eight and — more or less incidentally — he had a round, comfortable, pretty, nice-voiced, pigeon-sleek, expensive wife named Adeline, two children, two rich brothers-in-law, a stucco suburban house and a reserve fund of friends who played auction and were faithful and prosperous and consistently dull.

His neighbors said of him: “Good practical man; no wild theories like some of these scientific sharks. Nice little wife and family too. Let’s have them for Sunday supper.”

Thus the successful Leyland at forty-three.

II

Sometimes it is the face of a woman known long ago; sometimes a high adventure, war or perilous voyaging undertaken in the day when youth was not made irritable by discomfort or anxious by danger; but always to every man there is one vision that is a nucleus for dreams. It abides in the holy place of his mind as the one pure and eternal thing; and ever at unexpected glimpses of beauty the symbol of perfect happiness returns and the man surprised into dreaming is lonely with the loss of his enchanted hour.

To Leyland it was the Pasqual colonists who represented that lost happiness and who rebuked him for not having worked miracles.

They were to him like shrouded gods standing aloof on cloudy peaks, watching his success and judging it failure. He had desired to create ambrosia — and he had produced a new kind of red barn paint.

He had never at any one moment given up his intention of being a magician, but — well, the factories had offered him good pay; and in a big house money did slip away, nobody quite knew how. He justified himself — and continued to feel guilty. He planned to do something startling — and remained a part of hard-walled laboratories in gray plants; a part of his wife’s social advancement.

Adeline was a good wife and rather amusing. She thought about her clothes; she shone like a Charleston doorplate at dances, at concerts; she liked Leyland and let him talk about his work without very often interrupting him to give orders to the cook. But the only chemical symbol she knew was that for water, and she knew it because all humorous persons use it when ordering highballs. And she would have been shocked to rudeness by the sight of the colonists in flannel shirts and bulbous spectacles talking about the individuality of Stirner while they hoed potatoes.

Leyland had come to see that the colonists weren’t really divine. But whenever his friends sneered at what they called short-haired women and long-haired men, Leyland was irritable. They were, he declared, the children of light, the makers of dreams; and their visionary ideas often came true. While his mind stood up like the Pharisee and thanked God that he was not eccentric, his heart mourned for the days of flying feet and time enough to sit looking at clouds over mountain peaks.

Perhaps once a week he thought of the colony. The scent of damp wood made him smell and see the ground covered with pine needles in the California rainy season. The curious taste of wood smoke in a cigarette smoked by a fireplace gave a quick illusion of being at the evening picnics, and he saw the shadows on Fischer’s face, heard the laughter, and the sound of ocean hung like a curtain behind the babble.

Sometimes it was the face of a girl in a street car, a face dismayingly young and innocent and credulous of romance. Always she was Ilka and for half a second he desperately had to flee to her.

Once he was addressing the state chemical association. He had with courteous viciousness proved that the head of the chemical department of the state university was an ass. He was pounding it home: “As a commercial proposition the manufacturers of gas engines, in neglecting the boosting of grain alcohol — ”

He realized that he was staring at a lean man, a man like Fischer, and while his own voice went on he heard the dean drawling: “My boy, it’s in your hands; you can be a faithful hired man or you can be an Oliver Lodge.”

And once at a painstakingly dull dinner party, when Leyland was staring at a pink celluloid bird in a green wicker cage and wondering whether it really was worthwhile to work all one’s life to support pink celluloid birds, his host put a sentimental record on the phonograph; and instantly Leyland was running through purple lupine with a girl and stopping on a hill crest to worship the Pacific and the red sun.

He knew that the colony was disappointed by — was it by his having failed to revolutionize the home or by his having succeeded in paying the rent? Once in a hotel lobby he had encountered Miss Garver, who was out lecturing on women in industry. It was a moment when Leyland felt important. He was rushing in to read the law to the board of directors. But he stopped, vaguely uneasy.

She looked him over gravely and: “Oh, how do you do? I hear you are a person of consequence now. You made some dyes, didn’t you? I don’t suppose you waste time dreaming — now.” He was not amused but pleading: “But the dyes do help. They’ve freed us from German domination of our markets.”

“Yes? I thought you were going to free us from having any markets!”

He tried to be friendly. He puffed: “Is, uh — Often get back to the colony?”

“Of course.”

“What is Ilka doing?”

“Her dancing of course. She teaches, oh, so helpfully!”

“Is she married?”

“No. Well, it’s been pleasant to see you. I must hurry on.” It was Miss Garver who dismissed Leyland, not he who politely escaped. And she said nothing about seeing him again. He felt that it was the whole colony that had dismissed him. He wrote to Fischer next day.

To his rivals in the profession Leyland would have written with amused ease, but to this man Fischer, who did not know chemistry from morphology, he was humble, trying to defend himself from unspoken charges. The dean did not answer for three months; then briefly, his letter ending:

“I wonder that a busy practical man like you wastes time corresponding with a ne’er-do-well. We’re putting on a Dunsany play and starting a class in Freud — but you won’t be interested. If you care to write again, tell me about your new car — yr. newest one. Suppose you have two at least. Oh, well, I too am luxurious! I have a new oilcloth on my writing table.”

That hurt — the picture of the old man in his one-room hill shack.

He began to brood. Every evening he came home unhappy, to be comforted by his wife. Adeline listened to his latest tragedy and suggested lively things to do that evening, and assured him that he was the king of scientists, the pontiff of idealists and superior to Samuel Higsby Mink, chief chemist of the Calhoun Paint Works.

He was grateful to Adeline for enduring his worry. Yet sometimes, lying awake in the morning, he resented her very comforting. Didn’t she thus keep him content with petty tasks? Oh, he was little, he sighed! He who should have been a competitor with the great ones, with Remsen and Curie, was of the common people. The more he devoted himself to satisfying Adeline’s friends by choosing correct ties and smart adjectives, the more he betrayed himself as being at heart what the back country called “just folks.” And never, while the gods of the colony watched him, could he relax into happiness in his work, his wife, his children; never could he be satisfied with being common.

It would have been better, he felt, had he totally failed. He wouldn’t have been bound to his world of well-fed stupidity. He wouldn’t have been ridden by a suspicion that — without knowing it, without doing anything so picturesque as signing documents in blood — he had sold his soul to the devil of mediocrity.

Thus the fretting Leyland at forty-three.

III

All winter his task had been to find a more permanent varnish for motor cars and he sagged with the discouragement of not having found it. His ingenuity was worn out. He could think of no more methods, no more formulas. He watched himself grow nervous. The first sign that he noticed was his failure to react to the tumultuous coming of April. His step did not spring nor his chest expand to the good air. The sunshine was merely a bother to tired eyes as it glared on the papers on his desk.

Then he saw how much too much he was smoking. He took a cigarette without knowing that he was doing it; was astonished to find that he was smoking; furiously threw the thing away; resolved not to smoke again till after dinner — and ten minutes later found that another cigarette had sneaked out of his case, got itself lighted and insinuated itself into his fingers.

He realized that he was worrying about nothing in particular and everything in general; about going to the dentist, about the number of Victory Bonds to buy, about the duty of having a neglected acquaintance out to the house for dinner. Ten minutes after he had caught a train he discovered that he was worrying about not having time to catch it. He worried about not having mailed a letter that he knew he had mailed; and when he had laboriously satisfied himself he worried about not having addressed, stamped and signed it.

One-third of the time he was fleeing to Adeline for solace; one-third he was wondering whether her solace wasn’t a stupefying poison; and the rest of the time he gave to admitting that this was hard on her — which gave him a chance to worry about worrying her.

Desire for the colony was bothering him. He could be serene there — even in poverty. And was it too late for him to begin the vague big work? He smelled the ocean wind and hot hollows among the manzanita bushes. Silver-fretted mountains seemed to laugh at him for speculations about having mailed letters. He saw himself running to Fischer, Soulier, the Tiddenhams, Max Toinans. Through the spring rains, when his stodgy backyard was by an early morning mist turned from smugness to mystery, he looked down from the sleeping porch and fancied that garage and lawn and clothes posts were gone; that he was tramping the rough, waving, salt-scented grass above the ocean with a girl beside him.

Adeline knew that he was discontented; she babied him and gave him lamb chops with fresh peas. But she was not one of those exasperating superior people who are too stupid ever to lose their tempers. When on successive days he complained because they never went out in the evening and because they were going out this evening, she snapped: “You’re perfectly impossible! If you don’t wish to go — don’t. I’m going.”

She marched to the door and stood on the porch drawing on her gloves so that he would have a chance to catch her. Which of course he innocently did.

They talked it over when they returned, but as “it” was nothing more definite than his desire to be twenty-three at the age of forty-three they didn’t make any large decisions; and the next evening, feeling that this was an entirely new and interesting question, he complained because they never went out in the evening.

All the while he knew how absurd he was. It was because his wife was nearer to him than anyone else; because she was a part of him and he of her that he plagued his own self in her. Only, he whisperingly asked himself, if she had been Ilka, would he have had to plague her?

A small ludicrous thing made the break. Neighbors came in one evening. He was glad enough to see them, but he hadn’t finished the paper; he was in the midst of a delightful account of political graft; and while the talk labored through the first polite queries about the children, he picked up the paper — just to peep at the end of the story. Through the paper he could feel Adeline rustling with displeasure.

When the neighbors had gone she said: “You weren’t very polite.”

“What do you mean?” — knowing perfectly what she meant.

“Reading when they came in.”

“Well, they knew I was glad to see ’em without my shouting about it! And I didn’t want to see ’em anyway! Walshman is a bore and his wife is worse.”

“They are very good friends of mine and I won’t have you criticize them!”

“You criticize my friends enough! If I didn’t absolutely demand it you’d never be polite to poor old Bolton — heart of gold — ”

“Crude, jocular old — ”

“He isn’t a bit worse than Mrs. Walshman with her confounded coy — ”

After ten minutes of diplomatic incivilities regarding the Walshmans, the rector and the sales manager of the paint corporation, Leyland banged the ash receiver on the table and roared: “Then the way you called me down for wearing a cap last Sunday! I have something more important to think about than pleasing the Opendykes with my clothes!”

“You might tell me what it is!”

“I’m glad to have you admit that! You think my chemistry is about as important as bricklaying. You haven’t the faintest — ”

“Oh, I know, dear! I didn’t mean that. But really you irritate me so. What is it you want, anyway?”

She put it so directly that he was startled out of observance of the technic of domestic squabbling and actually said what he meant: “I want to get off by myself and think!”

Instantly he was frightened. She had always accompanied him on journeys. To suggest a vacation was like demanding a divorce.

“You want — You mean you want to go away without me?”

“Why — yes, I do!”

“Well, I think it would be a very good thing. We’re fond of each other, but we do need a rest. If you wouldn’t be lonely — ”

IV

The steady businessman who sat in the smoking compartment of the California Pullman and talked about the paint market seemed guiltless of desire for the luxury of martyrdom. But he was asking himself whether he was not going to give up his position and risk poverty for his family in order to work for an obscure and certainly ungrateful millennium. And he was excited with the adventure of it.

He had not told the Pasqual colony he was coming. He would surprise them.

He stayed for a day in San Francisco. The papers must have known something about his experiments in dyes, for a Banner reporter recognized his name on the register and came up to tell him what to say about America’s independence of German industries. The reporter was cordial. Leyland asked him if he knew any of the boys who had done newspaper work on the coast twenty years before.

Oh, yes! There was Max Toinans. He was back on the Advertiser as city editor. No, Max didn’t seem to have done much with writing fiction. And Mr. Leyland knew him? Well, well! He was going to have luncheon with Max and he’d tell him Leyland was in town. Probably Max would send a reporter round to see him.

Leyland always laughed at publicity, but it is a fact that he waited at his hotel till two o’clock to be interviewed by one of Max’s young men. That would be amusing — the supercilious Max, who had never taken him seriously at the colony, recognizing him as a personage, sending someone to ask his high opinions.

But Max didn’t send anyone to ask his high opinions.

At two Leyland strolled out, found the Advertiser office. He did not care to be interviewed. The thrill of that was gone. He wanted to see Max Toinans for himself. Good old Max, with his contempt of slatternly writing! He remembered how Mrs. Tiddenham, during the one week when she pursued palmistry as a life work, had previsioned Max in a London study with high ceilings and a bust of Beethoven, writing essays about art and George Moore.

He climbed paper-littered stairs to an airless room filled with typewriters, newspaper files and cigarette smoke. In a coop beyond he saw Max — gray now, with wrinkles like parentheses beside his mouth, yet somehow unchanged. Max was busy; did not look up. Leyland waited, sit- ting on the edge of a table, wriggling with the glad, boyish thought: “Won’t Max be excited when he sees me here!”

Max trotted out, glanced at Leyland, said in a manner neither angry nor interested: “Oh, hello, Leyland! Heard you were in town. Still teaching chemistry?”

“Yes, I’m still in chemistry. But not teaching. How goes the work?”

“You can see that I’m on it.”

“Well, I did want to have a glimpse of you, old man.”

“Yell! Glad you came in. Come in see us again.”

Leyland wanted to demand: “My dear sir, what has there been in your flaming welcome that’d make me ever want to see you again?” But he smiled idiotically, mumbled, shook hands with the ecstasy of insincerity and fled downstairs — down to the street of strangers.

V

The train reached Pasqual, the station for the colony, in early evening. Leyland had rarely recalled Pasqual itself and he looked indifferently at the familiar buildings — the dumpy restaurant where he had always breakfasted, the drug store where he had bought magazines, the pier from which the kelp boat had set out.

He started for the colony on foot. He passed adobe houses with sagging upper balconies and a dwarf Chinatown where black and vermilion posters were strange against the shuttered walls of prim wooden houses. Beside a garden wall topped with old Spanish tiles was a new cement and fire-brick garage. He left the roaring of the garage and swung into valley. In the twilight he climbed a dusty road between a grove of dark and priestly pines, guardian figures from an island of the dead, and an open field where the bronze-green foliage of scrub oaks was lost in downy shadows. From the summit he looked back across the reaching bay. Out of the wide dimness of it clean white lines flashed from the homeward rolling waves. The pounding of the breakers was lulled and even the hilltop breeze was gentle. Along the horizon slipped a flush of rose that deepened to carmine and vanished.

Peace descended on him from the colored dusk. He was smiling. He plunged into a remembered footpath that skirted groves and secret tiny pastures, in a dark fragrant world, silent save for the patter of rabbits, the fall of a pine cone. He walked quickly, proud of recalling the twists of this old shortcut.

He felt a wholesome weariness, an interested appetite. He came out of the gloom of gnarly cypresses and saw the lights of the colony — of home.

They would be so surprised, so glad!

He clattered up the steps of the community dining room, stopped, quieted himself, stepped into the room — after twenty years. He was safe. He had begun his life anew.

He saw the artistic Tiddenhams; Soulier, the agnostic; the gardening Miss Barge. Their faces were so wistfully and oft remembered that he found no changes in them, no grayness or sagging flesh, but only their unaltered selves.

But he realized that he knew no one else here; that the dean, good old Fischer, was absent; that most of these fervent gossipers were strangers to him. And he realized that Mr. Tiddenham was looking at him, nodding indifferently; that only Miss Barge, the unpoetic, was waving to him in greeting.

He started for her table. A minute ago he had thought less of her than of any other in the colony; now she was dearest to him.

He stopped to greet the Tiddenhams.

“Oh! Why, it’s Ross Leyland! This is so nice,” yawned Mrs. Tiddenham, while her husband grunted: “Oh, didn’t know you at first! Going to be here for some time?”

“I hadn’t planned — Say! Can’t we have a regular old-time picnic while I’m here?”

The Tiddenhams looked at each other as though nice people didn’t talk about picnics, and the husband said doubtfully: “Why, uh, why, we might think about having one!”

“Well, I’ll see you later.”

He came to Soulier, who stopped a gesticulatory discussion long enough to stare at Leyland and mutter: “Why, hello! Back in God’s country, eh? Drop into my cottage sometime.”

Neither the Tiddenhams nor Soulier had suggested his dining with them.

Abashed as an intruding freshman, Leyland stumbled to Miss Barge and in her found a lean comfort: “Welcome back, Ross! Glad to see you. Sit down and have supper. Where you bound for?”

Her friendliness was genuine, but she was not — like the others — a licensed dealer in optimism. She talked of mammoth onions and asked questions about dyes as though she regarded factories as respectable. Fischer — it was his inspiration Leyland needed! And Ilka!

“Where’s Fischer?” he asked.

“Probably home. He usually cooks for himself now.”

“I — don’t suppose Ilka is here?” He told himself not to be disappointed — and he was duly disappointed when Miss Barge chirped:

“No, she’s up in Oakland. Almost never comes down here anymore.”

And that was all they had to say. Miss Barge and he did trade words about coal-tar products and phosphates, but he was waiting for her to show that she was waiting for him to go; and when she tactfully tried to glance at her watch he leaped up, said nice things about being glad to see her, and fled.

He floundered up the path to Fischer’s bungalow. He stopped, breathed deep. Through the window he saw the dean’s worn head as he stooped over a book on the table, his fine long hand up at his temple. As the novice bursts into the abbot’s high-groined cell crying “Father, I have sinned,” so Leyland pushed open the door, his soul at his lips.

Fischer studied him.

“Well, this is a surprise, Ross.”

“Yes, it’s — Lord, I’m glad to see you again!”

“Out here for a trip? I suppose you’re doing all the millionaire stunts — golf at Del Monte and riding at Santa Barbara?”

“No, I am not! I’m not a millionaire and I’m not a tourist.” Leyland was trying to say “I have come here to save my soul!” He tried desperately, resentfully. He failed. He ended weakly: “Came out largely to have a glimpse of the good old bunch.”

“Um! Well, that’s very gratifying.”

“See here, dean!” Uninvited, Leyland dragged a chair from the wall. “I want you to stop making fun of me. I’m not a rich man, but — well, fact is, saved up a little money and thought I might plan to take sort of a little vacation from the grind and try to do some of the things we used to talk over. Food.”

“Food?”

“Yes. Don’t you remember? You used to say I ought to invent foods that would get rid of housework.”

“Did I? I’d forgotten.”

“Why, I’ve always thought of you as waiting — ”

“Tell you what you chemists should have done though. A chance for really inspired science, and all you fellows neglecting it! You ought to assist some art-theater director by finding dyes for costumes.”

“Why,” much disappointed, “dyes are my specialty!”

“Oh!” Fischer was equally disappointed. Then, brightening as he thought of a new criticism, he said that he was afraid — it sounded as though he meant that he hoped — that Leyland’s dyes were too commercial for use in the new theater arts. And that was all the attention he gave to the soul or the dyes of Leyland. The thought of commerce was the starting point for an attack on a remarkably catholic assortment of dramatists, new-thought healers and grand dukes. Leyland tried to defend the prosperous — and by implication himself. He mentioned famous inventors. But as the supreme judge exposed each of these criminals and left them trembling with shame before the entire world and the suburban spaces of the universe, Leyland stopped listening to him and looked about the room.

He saw that it was not picturesque as he had remembered, but plain dirty. On the pine table were stacks of food-gummed dishes and an exact circle of grease marked the place for plates. A frying pan was on the floor beside the rusty cannonball stove. The bedclothes in the bunk were writhing and gray and unwholesome. And as for the man himself — his hair was not quite so much leonine as in need of cutting.

Leyland snarled at himself for his sneers.

“That’s the result of Adeline’s eternal superiority to people in flannel shirts,” he explained, with the human male’s desire to blame all errors of Nature upon his wife. He tried to get back to harmony by turning Fischer to the subject of the colony.

“I hear Miss Barge is doing wonders with her farm,” he Piped.

Without a break Fischer started in on his associate geniuses. He said that Miss Barge was a materialist and not such a confoundedly good farmer either; that Mrs. Tiddenham was a censorious scandalmonger; that Tiddenham was erroneous in his evaluation of Veblen; and that Soulier lied — simply lied, that was all — when he claimed to have shot thirty rabbits in Deep Water Canyon. The new members of the colony were either immoral or too finicky about morals, and all of them were ridiculously wrong about the choice of the next play for the community theater. He did not rave — the shaggy old man; in the pleasure of whispering scandals about his only friends in the world he beamed on Leyland like a father.

It was then that Leyland escaped — a little sick, altogether confused. Only four facts emerged clearly: They had not, these years, awaited his creation of magic food; they had not asked him to stay overnight; he’d have to walk back to Pasqual; and his feet were as tired as his soul and much more noticeable.

As he crawled along the path recently so eagerly followed, as sneaking fog blurred the forest, a vision beset him and he saw that the shrouded and waiting gods were a myth and that their temples, across whose pillars slanted ever the smoke from attentive altars, were empty save for rags and echoes and the odor of death.

VI

He stayed late abed; he had breakfast fast at the musty hotel in Pasqual; he was clammy in addressing the waitress and half desirous of taking the next train out of town. But toward noon he crept back to the colony. Miss Barge gave him luncheon with the Tiddenhams, Soulier, Fischer and one outsider, young Dr. Solon Ebert, a university instructor, invited because he was a fellow scientist. In his nod the doctor did not show much fellowship. He was excited about the colony and, though Leyland tried to make Ebert understand that he himself had known these people for twenty years, the convert kept explaining what was a New Light colony — and where and why and how.

Fischer continued his complaint that Leyland had made money, and when they saw how meekly Leyland took it the Tiddenhams and Soulier awoke to interest in him. They demanded of him what sort of “People he knew; in what sort of a house he lived.”

They told him that he was respectable. He apologized.

They told him that he ought to have started a little theater in his home city. He admitted it. He didn’t believe it, but he admitted it.

They told him that he ought never to have left the colony. He agreed.

The loud voice of Dr. Solon Ebert took charge of the conversation. Doctor Ebert was a swollen-eyed, greasy-faced, self-satisfied young man, with the accent of an old-clothes dealer, the manner of a pig in a hurry, and no great cleanliness. Doctor Ebert did not think much of Mr. Leyland, who had received a doctor-of-philosophy degree eighteen years before but had forgotten it.

“So you admit you are not satisfied with your career, eh?” Ebert shied at him. “The trouble with you, my friend, is that you have commercialized your work. You ought to have stayed in a university laboratory.”

“I seem to have heard that word ‘commercialized’ before,” sighed Leyland.

“We’re getting somewhere with pure theory in the colleges, while you factory fellows expect the maiden science to scrub floors!”

Leyland stated distinctly: “No; when I look you over I fancy that the best thing the maiden science could do would be to scrub you!”

Miss Barge chuckled; Mrs. Tiddenham clamored “How vulgar!” while Solon Ebert wheezed, tried to look fierce and panted:

“You’ll apologize for that!”

Compact, erect, easy, Leyland reflected aloud: “I’m so glad I said that. It was vulgar, wasn’t it! Cheap! And how often we’ve all wanted to say things like that. I’ve tolerated the rest of you because I once loved you. But not from this — Oh, look at him! He does need scrubbing!”

Ebert made sounds of fattily degenerated belligerency, but Leyland blithely ignored him: “I’ve insulted him, but think how much worse it might have been! I wanted to insult all of you except Nan Barge. You can’t paint, you can’t write and you can’t grow very good cabbages. You’re failures. That’s why you stay on here in this hole —

“But you try to hide it by being contemptuous. I came to you with respect — wonderful chance for you! For the first time a grown-up person was willing to listen to you. All right. I was punished for going to professional idealists for ideals. But it’s cruel and unusual punishment to have to hear the kindergarten lessons of Solly Ebert!”

He was enjoying himself. He felt that he was a motion-picture hero facing bandits.

Miss Barge murmured: “You’re right, Ross. This Ebert boy is rather trying. But do you know, you were a lot like him when you were here as a boy. You were sweet and eager, but dreadfully condescending — especially to me.”

Gravely: “Then I was a fool indeed! I — Oh, what’s the use! What’s the use!”

All the cheap delight of easy defiance was gone. He was sick of the unpleasant scene. He rushed out of the room — toward Pasqual, toward the train, toward home and the tenderness of Adeline. He was rimmed round by a cup of jade and gold and living blue, of ancient hills and waves reborn each sparkling minute; but to him it was a painting of which he was weary.

He thought brokenly: “I want to see Ilka before I go East. I’d like to touch her hands. I’ll go up to Oakland and surprise her. No! She’d be like the others. I’ll leave that one illusion.”

He laughed.

“Was I like Ebert when I was a youngster? And all these years I’ve been remembering myself as a bloomin’ star-browed acolyte and wanting to go back and be — that noisy nuisance! Solving the complications and compromises of real life by ignoring them! I’m glad I’m Our Mr. Leyland of the Galway Paint Corporation! I’ll get the kids some curios in Chinatown and go back and — I’ll take Adeline a mandarin coat. Goodbye, Ilka! I’m glad I’m not going to see you. Because I want to go on remembering you!”

He was proud of himself for doing so well with renouncing all dreams forever and ever — till he looked back for the last sight of the mountains. Then it tediously started all over again and he was as anxious to go and be inspired by Fischer as if he had never thought of it before. And he was hungry. He had bolted in the middle of luncheon. He wished that without losing any of the pleasure of being vulgar and rude he might have postponed it till after luncheon. And the food at the Pasqual hotel was bad — very bad.

He sulkily turned in at the restaurant where he had boarded as a cub.

The spherical figure of Madame Luquin, the restaurant keeper, was familiar but uninteresting. He lounged to the lunch counter, drawled: “Coffee and small steak, please.”

Madame Luquin dropped her head as she stared at him; then shrieked: “Well, well, well! So you didn’t think I’d know who it was! You thought you could fool the old lady! Why, we was just talking of you the other day — saying there’d never been a livelier boy in town. And my! You knew so much! Pa! Come see who’s here! Pa!”

Her tuft-bearded little French husband popped out of the kitchen, peered, yelped: “Rows Leylant!” He shook Leyland’s hand while he yammered at an invisible assistant: “Pete! Run by the drug store! Bring Mr. Dohengy and Cap’n Catty. Tell them there’s an old friend here.”

The word “friend” seemed to Leyland the thing for which he had crossed half the continent. And he hadn’t even remembered their names! Along with the Luquins he had forgotten Mr. Dohengy, the druggist, and Cap’n Catty, skipper of the kelp boat. They had not forgotten him. They pounded his shoulder. They were sure that he had a bank account and a “fine wife and children who talked just like their daddy.” They hung about him, eager to smile at his jokes, triumphant in his success — which had suddenly become real success.

1. Luquin snorted: “Mamma and I, we always say you make good. You are not like those silly chumps at the colony.”

Somehow Leyland did not defend his friends then — nor when Captain Catty added: “Those highbrows! Wouldn’t have one of ’em on any boat of mine. You were a pretty good seaman, Ross — for a farmer!”

Madame Luquin wailed: “Don’t let this boy run away from us again! Cap’n, ain’t you going to take him out for some abalones tomorrow?”

“I am so!” roared the captain. And he did.

Leyland stayed at Pasqual for three days without once returning to the colony. He told himself that these people loved him because he was of the common people; and that it was good to be common and to cease blaming himself for not being an archangel. He wasn’t going to Oakland to see Ilka. No! And on the third day, as he strode up from the wharves whistling, he came on Ilka in the dusty Pasqual street and stopped — shaken.

She was the same impulsive fairy child. A half block away he was conscious of her lips and eyes. He tried to be defiant; to look at her casually. He — would — not be — condescended — to!

She came swiftly. She raised a clear voice in: “Why! My dear! They said you’d gone!”

He was her slave! Twenty years vanished. She was the little tender moon of evening; she was all that was delicately bright and most precious and inalienably his. Adeline was an intruder and factory laboratories were absurd. Still he tried to save himself. He asserted that Ilka’s round face was pudgy and heavy now; that her brown cheeks had turned sallow and her firm neck became stringy. And it didn’t matter! She was Ilka! He was slipping his arm about her shoulder, which fitted contentedly into the curve of his elbow.

“You dear thing!” she whispered.

“Have you remembered me?”

“So often! But you’ve never thought of me!”

“Only about once a day!” he sighed.

“And you with a wife and children, they tell me.”

“Yes, but — And she’s a particularly nice wife. But you — you’re you, Ilka!”

“Am I? That’s consistent of me.”

“And you’ve never married?”

“No, but I think perhaps I’m going to be.”

“Oh!”

“Why don’t you accuse me of being faithless, Ross?”

“Stop mocking me, dear! Do you know that we two should have been married?”

A voice — perhaps not of conscience but of common sense, of the habit of being a member of working society — was shouting at him: “Stop it! You’ll be sorry! You love Adeline, and Ilka will be like the rest of the colony.”

But while he noted the voice he was demanding: “Isn’t it true? Don’t you get tired of dancing?”

“Dance? I? Heavens, I don’t dance! I just try to teach dancing. And I don’t even invent steps. I steal them from others. Yes, I’m a failure, like all of us at the colony — except you.”

They had, without planning it, wavered down the street to the long blank beach. They linked arms; they talked without embarrassment; when they glanced examiningly at each other it was with no peeping curiosity but with the quick smiles of reunited friends.

At her mention of the colony he edged into the story of his misadventures there and ended: “Was I a fool? Or were they beastly?”

She curled on the sand; he was at her feet rocking, his hands about his knees, while she mused:

“Neither! They demand perfection, so naturally they’re critical; and naturally they can’t live up to their own demand. You have no right to sneer at them because they can’t see much beauty in washing frying pans; but they have no right to sneer at you because you can stand washing ’em. They’re the voice of conscience and you’re the clever hands. You’re a real person and they’re fairy folk. And I — oh, I guess I belong with them!”

It was what he had found out for himself. He was common people, like Captain Catty and Madame Luquin — and Adeline! Very well, then. He’d better escape. Ilka would merely make him unhappy. She was the brown-breasted nymph in the brake and he the puffing mortal lover, following a path where lurked scummy pools and death. He’d say a nice brotherly farewell now and pack and catch the next train and –

“Let’s get some lunch and tramp off down the coast!” he cried.

“Yes! Let’s!”

Which was the end of sensible reflections. They raced to Luquin’s; bought sandwiches and a bottle of milk; tramped side by side down the beach, strained up a cliff, brushed through poppy stems thick among the heather; and — not quite so quickly as once — climbed the first of the gray dry foothills to the shade of a scrub oak solitary in a tilted field. They looked down to the purple-streaked ocean and the roofs of the colony bungalows like glistening plates of metal among the shaggy pines. They bustled about spreading the sandwiches on a sheet of newspaper. They laughed a good deal and he kissed her fingers and their puppylike dashes kept them from thinking. But when luncheon was done they sat staring, too conscious of each other for laughter.

“Why didn’t you answer my letters?” he quavered.

“Why didn’t you go on writing?”

“Why should I have?”

“Dear, it’s dangerous for two people like us to start the whys. Either we’ll quarrel or — ”

“I’ll kiss you.”

“Perhaps! And that Oh, it’s not that I’m puritanical! It’s just that we’ve learned to be quiet and to work. I’ve done some decent things with my pupils, even if I haven’t proved to be a creator. In that I’m like you; not like our frenzied friends. We may have sold our dreams, but it was a good and a sweet thing we bought — the chance to be quiet and work. And so — ”

“Ilka, not to interrupt you, but do you know that I love you?”

Suddenly, terribly, she mourned: “Don’t! I’ve wanted you so much! Wanted you back! Hoped you’d write! All this — Is it twenty years? It can’t be! I didn’t know what train you were going to take that day and I ran away; and when I came back you were gone. Ross! Don’t go back! Not right away! Stay with me a week or two! We’ll ride down the coast road and explore the back country. It won’t hurt — them. Your wife — I’m sure she’s very nice indeed; and my man, the one I’m engaged to up in the city, he’s comfy and he adores me. He’s one of the people you can always reach when you suddenly want to phone ’em. But they’re not we. They’re outsiders. Stay with Ilka!”

Then all the complications, the musings, the retreats of conscience were gone and it was fear that held Leyland. In fear they stared; their eyes confessed the shared and communicated fear.

He did not discuss it. He sprang up. He said hastily: “Yes, I’d like to. But I won’t! Quiet and work — that’s what we’ve bought. If we throw that away we still won’t have the dreams back: we’ll just have nothing. I’ll race you to the bottom of the hill. I know now what’s been weakening me all these years of half working — that’s kept me from contentment with being the decent common folks that I really am. I’ve been in love with you! And I thought it was ideals, the memory of Fischer and the colony and these hills! They! It was you! Now I’m safe, because I know what to fight.”

She reached up her hands, still small and childish and plump and soft; she kissed him and said: “Yes! I’m sorry! Come!”

They returned sedately, talking about how badly Tiddenham painted — for a good painter; they were commonplace and slightly dull. They parted with a handshake too firm to mean anything. In one hour he was on the train.

All through his packing he had been afraid that, once he was gone from Ilka, he would want to leave the train at the first stop and run back to her. But he found himself unable to picture her clearly. He was — without trying to — recalling Adeline and the children. And suddenly he was thinking of the formula for motor-car varnish. He was busily scratching down letters and figures. He was humming. He felt a new power. Youth was that day gone from him; youth and its enchantment of unreality. But in exchange for it he had the resoluteness and contented acceptance of fate that marked his first hour of maturity.

 

Featured image: illustrated by James H. Crank / SEPS.

“The Lost Gospel” by Arthur Train

American lawyer and writer, Arthur Train, was a prolific author of legal thrillers. His most popular work featured recurring fictional lawyer Mr. Ephraim Tutt. In “The Lost Gospel,” an explorer searches the Egyptian desert for lost artifacts that will prove or disprove his faith.

Published on June 7, 1924

 

For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

 

“The trouble with Christianity,” said Ismail Bey, “is that it is utterly unpractical.”

“The trouble with Christianity,” said Count Poldolski, “is that we do not really know what Christ taught.”

“The trouble with Christianity,” said Rhoda Calthrop, “is that it has never been tried.”

The party, following the wake of fashion, had come up from Cairo on Calthrop’s dahabeah to see the recent excavations in the Valley of the Kings, and the Cheetah, on whose awning-covered deck they were sitting, was moored along with a hundred other pleasure craft on the east bank of the Nile a mile above Thebes. Ismail Bey waved a sleek white hand across the turbid river toward the red-brown fields that stretched to the Libyan Hills. Under the cobalt arc the whole Egyptian world of palm-rimmed bank, of broken column and ruined temple, as well as the turgid current of the Nile itself, was a welter of dazzling gold, flushed with scarlet and streaked with purple.

“On these sands can be traced the history of all the ancient civilizations — of Assyria and Babylon, of Macedon, Greece and Rome — and of all the old religions.

“Nothing remains of any of them.”

“I thought you were a good Mohammedan, excellency,” commented his hostess.

“I am,” answered Ismail Bey quite calmly. “I obey the sheri’s, I pay the charitable tax, I say my prayers five times a day, I fast during Ramadan, and I have even made the pilgrimage to Mecca. What more is necessary?”

“Faith!” replied Miss Calthrop.

The Egyptian laughed.

“I am a graduate of Balliol,” he said. “All sensible men believe the same thing. What it is no sensible man ever tells.”

“But Christianity remains!” protested the beautiful Princess Zeeka.

“What you call Christianity!” retorted Poldolski. “But does anybody know what Christ really preached? The Gospels are not contemporaneous. They were written many years after the events chronicled therein occurred.”

“Christ gave us a spiritual ideal,” answered Miss Calthrop gravely, “to which we hope the world may some day attain.”

The breeze from the south was stirring the ripples among the sand bars to lavender. Hoopoes and wild pigeons flew downstream — imps fleeing the gates of Paradise, marking the channel to silent boats with widespread lateen sails on their way from Aswan to Cairo and Alexandria, black lacquer on a yellow screen. From an adjacent dahabeah came the insistent rasp of a phonograph playing Papa Loves Mamma. The escarpments to the west smoldered, spraying the sky with gold.

“How mysterious the Nile is!” the princess murmured. “No wonder it is worshiped as a god!”

The Egyptian’s eyes narrowed.

“The Nile,” he replied, “like religion, is born amid the fierce passions of savagery, in the midday darkness of primeval growths, in the ruthlessness of credulity and fanaticism and the strange worship of beasts in the likeness of men — ” He half closed his lids and let the smoke curl slowly from his nostrils as he watched the rose-tinted oval face of the princess. “And like all religions, it eventually disappears.”

“But Christianity does not!” The eyes of the princess were smoldering.

Ismail Bey shrugged.

“If Poldolski is right, your true Christianity may have disappeared already. I do not wish to give offense, my friends; but did not Christ teach self-sacrifice, nonresistance and forgiveness of wrongs? Did he make any distinction between individuals and nations in his teachings? Well — I am, it is true, a Mohammedan — a barbarian, if you will — but to me there is something curiously inconsistent in the application of these doctrines among what you would call the more civilized nations. It is not enough to say that Christ did not mean literally what he said. Does anybody claim that the Prophet Moses or the Prophet Mohammed did not mean exactly what he said? Listen!”

From the circle of sailors seated cross-legged in the bow of the dahabeah came the monotonous thump of a daraboukeh. “Al-lah!” they chanted fiercely. “Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!” The cry rose harsh and nasal in the silence of the sunset.

“Those down there do not doubt that when they die they will go instantly to Paradise,” said the Egyptian.

“That is my point, excellency,” agreed the Pole. “The words of the Koran came from the lips of Mohammed. Christ did not write the Gospels. His meaning has always been the subject of controversy. It is conceivable that the discovery of a new Septuagint might change our entire viewpoint.”

“Like that found by Tischendorf in Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai,” suggested Professor Troy of the Azar. “Such manuscripts occasionally turn up. There must be hundreds of them hidden away in ancient libraries or among unexcavated ruins. Our three chief sources of knowledge concerning Christ’s teachings are the Alexandrian manuscript in the British Museum, Codex A, as we call it; the Vatican manuscript at Rome, Codex B; and the Sinaitic, Codex Aleph, at St. Petersburg; and they all range from about 300 to 450 A.D. But the prior existence of certain others is well established — the Lost Gospel referred to by Saint Hermanticus, for example.”

Major Bagley, of the Camel Corps, put down his glass.

“Oh, I say! Have you heard of that too? I always thought it was just another Arab yarn, like the vanished oasis of Kurafra.”

“It’s more than a yarn,” replied Professor Troy. “There are many references to it in the writings of the Fathers. The Fifth Gospel is alleged to have been written in Latin by a member of the household of Pontius Pilate. It is a tradition, you remember, that Procula, Pilate’s wife, secretly visited the Saviour in prison before his crucifixion and became a convert. The story is somehow mixed up with that.”

“What is supposed to have become of this Lost Gospel?” asked Miss Calthrop with interest.

“It is said to have been brought to Egypt, where it disappeared. What have you heard about it, Bagley?”

“I’ve heard such a story, or its first cousin, told around many a caravan fire in strange places,” answered the officer. “Curiously enough, it is usually associated with the legend of Kurafra — the City Devoured by the Sand, as the Bedouins call it. The desert is full of such tales.”

“It always gives me a funny feeling to hear the Arabs refer so casually to historical characters — almost as if they were still alive,” remarked the hostess as she handed Ismail Bey his tea. “But in Egypt the past and the present are one.”

From behind the high bank against which the Cheetah was moored came the syncopated warbling of a flute, closer at hand the creaking of the shadoofs used in the days of Amenhotep. A procession of fellahin carrying tools and baskets, of boys on donkeys, of female figures bearing jars upon their shoulders, moved along the edge of the bluff — children of the Pharaohs sprung to life from the temple walls.

The hostess’ brother, Hugh Calthrop, who had been sitting by himself in the Cheetah’s stern, arose and came forward with a paper in his hand. He was an emotional young fellow, given to doing things on the spur of the moment.

“Look here,” he said, pulling his short mustache nervously, “this is certainly very queer.” He poured himself out a drink.

“Did any of you ever know Paul Trent?”

“I seem to have heard the name.” Professor Troy rubbed his chin as if to stir the magic lamp of recollection.

“Of course,” answered Miss Calthrop. “He used to come to our house in Chicago almost every Sunday afternoon. But wasn’t he killed in the war?”

Calthrop held up the paper.

“I have just had a letter from him!”

“From Paul?” exclaimed his sister incredulously. “But he has been dead ten years!”

“Exactly. This letter which you saw handed to me not ten minutes ago by Yussuf was written to his mother in January, 1914. It’s been wandering around ever since.”

“How is that possible?” asked the Princess Zeeka.

Ismail Bey glanced at her quizzically.

“When you know Egypt better, dearest lady, that will not surprise you.”

“I do not care to know Egypt any better,” she answered coldly. “Please tell us about the letter.”

Calthrop pulled a chair into the group and sat down.

“It’s certainly weird — a voice from the dead and that sort of thing. Trent was a young Egyptologist of Chicago University, out here on his sabbatical. He wanted to do a little original work, and I let him have some money. The last I heard he was in Jerusalem. Then came the war. I assumed, naturally, he’d managed to enlist, and thought no more about it. Anyhow it would have been no time to hunt for missing archeologists. But when the show ended Trent didn’t turn up. Meantime his old mother — who always refused to believe that he would not come back — died herself. I was her executor. The State Department made some sort of an investigation and traced him as far as Bukara in company with a German named Harnach-Hulsen. They simply vanished into the desert.”

“But the letter!” cried the princess. “From where did your friend mail it?”

“It was written in the desert and given to a passing caravan for Siwa. Heaven knows what happened to it. Perhaps the Arab put it in his pocket — if Arabs have pockets — and just forgot it. Or it may have been tucked into a pigeonhole in Bukara or Siwa, or left lying around until it was picked up by somebody who decided that the easiest thing to do was to stick it in the mail — as perhaps it was.”

“But how does it come to you?” asked Professor Troy.

“Because, having been delivered through the mail to Mrs. Trent’s address in Chicago, it has been forwarded to me here as her executor.”

“After all,” commented Ismail Bey, “ten years is not so long for a letter to go ten thousand miles. That is a thousand miles a year. Out here we should call that fast.”

“I will read you the letter,” said Calthrop.

“WESTERN DESERT, BUKARA.”

January 6, 1914.

“‘Dearest mother: You will already have got the letter I mailed you from Cairo on Christmas Day, and learned how at the monastery of the Benedictine Monks of Beuren in Jerusalem I had the luck to stumble upon Max Harnach-Hulsen, the famous German Egyptologist, who became tremendously interested in my theory that Roman and possibly Persian remains would very likely be found in the Libyan Desert north of the Oasis of Beharieh in the direction of the Fayum. My funds were getting rather low and to my great delight he agreed to join forces with me. Otherwise I couldn’t have gone. It appears that the Emperor William II personally is putting up for him and so of course he had first to wire Berlin. Meantime we went on by rail to Cairo for the holidays, and there I found your dear little present. I shall always wear it, mother dear. Thank you a thousand times.

“‘Well, a few days later H-H got a reply from the Kaiser, offering to supply all the necessary funds on the condition that the funds should go to the University of Berlin or, as he put it, “to my people.” That seems fair enough. And I may say there has been no lack of money. Well, we made our arrangements and got off by rail before New Year’s to Medinet-el-Fayum and from there to Beharieh, making the balance of the journey to Bukara by motor and camel. Here it really looked as if we might be badly hung up on account of the difficulty of finding any camels not infected with hump disease. However, H-H, who is an authoritative person, an officer in the Landwehr, went to the gendarmerie and saw the omdeh and made a big noise about the Kaiser, and the first thing I knew we had all the camels we wanted — beautiful slender hajins such as one never sees except in the desert. So this is really goodbye.

“‘I like H-H immensely in spite of his gruff manner, which really doesn’t mean anything. He is a big, reddish man about six feet two, with cropped hair, a thick neck and very large hands and feet, a man of iron — physically and intellectually a reincarnation of what I imagine Bismarck to have been. He is very chummy with the Kaiser and belongs to a sort of dining club of which General von Bernhardi, Admiral von Tirpitz, and the Prince-Bishop of Breslau also are members. He has shown me several very intimate letters from William II, whom he admires extravagantly. In fact he classes him with Hammurabi, Moses, Abraham, Mohammed, Charlemagne, Shakspere and Lincoln.

“‘Well, he may be everything H-H says, but as I don’t know the gentleman, I’m no judge. Anyhow, he must be a clever chap. H-H is obsessed with the idea that there is danger of the Germans, who used to be the best fighting men and most warlike nation in Europe, becoming what he calls a too peace-loving nation. He says that what they need is a shock to reawaken their warlike instincts. I can hardly keep my face straight when he is getting off this bunk. In some ways I feel that H-H isn’t much more sympathetic to me than one of our Arab camel drivers. But he is a regular he-man for all that, and we are great pals. So, good-by again, mother.

Your loving son,

“PAUL.’”

Calthrop turned the letter over dramatically.

“Now listen to what is written in pencil on the back:

“‘Jan. 23.

“‘Dearest mother: We have made the greatest find in history. I cannot say more now, but we shall both be famous. I am forbidden to reveal its nature, but you will soon learn. We are about two hundred kilometers from Bukara. I have promised Harnach-Hulsen not to say where until we make a formal announcement. I have just time to scratch this off and give it to a passing Bedouin who is on his way to Siwa. God bless you, mother. Hur-rah! Hurrah!

“‘PAUL.’”

A gray dusk distilled itself along the canals; the surface of the Nile was a steel mirror clouded here and there by the breath of the night wind. A felucca came down midstream, a ripple spreading wide from her bows, her oars swinging to a muffled chantey that might have been the barbaric ritual of some equatorial deity.

“Bismillah!” muttered the Egyptian. “I wonder what they found.”

“God only knows what they found,” answered Calthrop. “But I am going to find out.”

“Hugh,” cried his sister, “you don’t mean you are going to — ”

“Yes — tomorrow. I’m starting for Beharieh, not in the hope of finding Trent, because of course he’s been dead ten years — but of finding what he found.”

There was no sound but the clutch and whisper of the current along the dahabeah’s sides.

“You’d be crazy to try anything of the kind!”

Bagley tossed his cigarette overboard definitely.

“There’s not a drop of water between Bukara and Siwa, and none in the direction of the Fayum. Rohlfs nearly died there in ’72. Our flyers have scoured the desert in every direction around there for five hundred kilometers. Besides,” he added, “I doubt if the frontier districts administrator would give you a permit.”

“All the same, I’m going!” declared Calthrop. “But I won’t risk anybody’s life but my own. I shall go to Bukara, look up some of the Arabs that went with Trent and start out from there. You couldn’t expect me to do anything else!” he exclaimed.

The princess looked at him meaningly. “No,” she said; “no one could expect you to do anything else.”

Calthrop thrust the letter in his pocket and stood up.

“I’m going down to collect my duffel,” he remarked. “The Cairo train leaves at nine.”

He walked alone to the stern again. The Nile was jet. Night had fallen. To his excited imagination it seemed alive with mysterious noises — faint cries and distant shoutings, the neighing of horses, the tramp of legionaries, the crash of arms, the rumble of chariot wheels; while from the bow came the never-ceasing throb of the daraboukeh and at intervals the lonely cry of “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! La ilaha illa-llah!”

II

“In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful: I On the blessed day of Friday, 28th Rabia eth Thani, 1332, there came to our town Bukara the honored Max Harnach-Hulsen, the German, professor of the honored Zawia of Berlin, and also the honored Paul Trent, the American, professor of the honored Zawia of Chicago in the Etats-Unix, and they are carrying the orders of the great and honored General Sir Martin Crafts; and according to the exalted orders we met them with great honor and hospitality and congratulated them on their safe arrival to us. We hoped that God may be exalted, would grant success to their efforts, and return them safe and victorious in the best condition for the sake of the Prophet.

“(Signed) “The Second Adviser of Bukara, Amed El Sussu, May God forgive him.

“The Judge, OSWAN EL BARASSI, May God forgive him.

“The Adviser, SAYED MOHAMMED IBU OMAR EL FADHILL, May God forgive him.

“The Wakil of the Sayed at Bukara, MOHAMMED SALEH EL BASICARI, May God forgive him.”

Thus had read the only official record of the visit of the two archaeologists to the town of Bukara; the only record, in fact, since although Calthrop had stayed there a week he had found no other clew to them. Yet unless all the Arabs who had accompanied Trent and Harnach-Hulsen had died of thirst, one or more of them should be still living in the oasis. He was in the absurd position of having a caravan on his hands and with no idea of where he wanted to go. Inquiries of the omdeh elicited only the customary shrugs and the positive assurance that there were no archaeological remains in that part of the country, for in spite of the difficulty of travel every inch of the Western Desert under the control of the frontier districts administration — which was responsible for the safety of all country not watered by the Nile between the Sudan and the Mediterranean — had been covered time and again by the Camel Corps Patrol. Those who had followed the regular caravan routes to Siwa, to Taizerbo, to Kebabo, on the way to the Tebu or Lake Chad, or to Dachel on the south, had never heard even so much as a whisper of any such place as Kurafra.

And then the omdeh ventured to give Calthrop a piece of advice. Why not, he suggested, instead of starting off blindfold into the desert, without any definite objective, enlarge his caravan and make the trip to Siwa, the ancient site of the Temple of Jupiter Ammon, where he could visit and photograph the rock tombs of the Karit-el-Musabberin, the temple of Aghormi and the ruins at Ummebeida?

Calthrop thanked him and let it go at that. Eventually he caused it to be known throughout the bazaar that he would pay one hundred pounds gold to anyone who would guide his caravan to where he could find any trace of the missing men. Then and then only did Mohammed Ali Ibrahim ben Rahim make his appearance, a desiccated Berber with a skin like a lizard’s, and eyes as sharp and glinting.

“Not of my own knowledge,” he protested, “but by that of my sister’s son, Mohammed Yussuf el Bulaki, the peace of God be on him. For he is no longer living, being taken in his sixty-first year, while I, full of years, am still alive at eighty-two. Neither did I hear it from his own lips, but by hearsay from my sister Fatima, after her son, my nephew, was dead; for I was then dwelling at Siwa, where my grandsons were in attendance at the Zawia, and I heard it from her after she was a widow and had come to dwell with me. Nevertheless, by the accuracy of her repetition am I able to guide the gentleman’s caravan to the spot described by my nephew, for he noted the course by Jerdi, as we call the North Star, in its relation to certain other minor stars and by other methods which it is not necessary to go into.”

And now it was sunset of the fifth day out from Bukara.

“Adaryayan!” shouted Ibrahim. “We have arrived, oh, sick ones!”

The caravan halted in the hatia in the lee of the dunes and two of the baggage camels dropped to their knees. Calthrop, mounted on a fast hajin, had ridden on ahead and was already on the top of the next gherd. As far as his vision carried, one snow-white dune lifted beyond another. All day long they had climbed ridge after ridge under a sun that scorched through helmet and kufiya alike, until now the dispirited camels trailed their heads and gave off that acrid odor which is the inevitable concomitant of thirst. They had had nothing to eat since the third day, when the prickly, juiceless bush of the Mehemsa, sometimes found under the ridges, had entirely disappeared. Now the poor beasts struggled along, limping and wavering, and when they stopped tried to eat the stuffing of the baggage saddles. “Haya alla Salat!” came the call to prayer from below.

“Haya alla Salat!”

Already the Arabs were at their devotions — making kibla, as it is called — washing their hands in the sand, prostrating themselves, and praying with a quick glance over each shoulder and a muttered ejaculation to drive away the evil spirits supposed to be lurking behind them. To Calthrop, sitting alone upon his hajin and looking down upon them from the top of the gherd, it no longer seemed fantastic that these children of the desert should people it with jinn and houris, see the finger prints of Allah upon the drifting sands and hear the voices of his angels in the lisp of the night wind along the wadis.

The setting sun burning upon Calthrop’s back told him that he, like the rest of them, was facing the sacred Kaaba a thousand miles away, toward which amidst this desolate waste of sand they turned as unerringly as the compass needle swings to the magnetic pole. He had always thought of the desert as a dead thing like the surface of the moon; odorless, silent, for the most part motionless; a place of intolerable solitude. To his surprise he had found it quite otherwise, even amid the fantastic desolation of the apparently lifeless dunes. It had not amazed him to find the flat stony plain about Bukara spotted with gray gorse, a grazing ground for sheep and camels, to see long lines of hamlas come stalking over the horizon’s rim laden with ivory and feathers from Wadai and Lake Chad, to find the news of the Near East discussed with passionate earnestness by fadhling caravans; in a word, to find the Western Desert teeming with activity. But what astounded him was that here, far from the routes of the Jalo, Anjela, Siwa, Jaghabub and Darfur caravans, amid the weird, curly hummocks that stretch like an ice flow between Bukara and the Fayum, frequented only by the scattered descendants of the fierce bandits who lurked there in the days of the Romans, where all vegetable growth is extinct and not even a desiccated bush breaks the blinding smoothness of the surface, where no jackal or cony can survive, and where water does not exist — that here he should feel no loneliness, but on the contrary a curious sense of familiarity with it all, as if he had been born, lived and perhaps died there. He was filled with an exalted sense of the power and mystery of God, the unity of all things physical and spiritual, of being guided and directed, of his own essential participation in the affairs of an unseen world. The wind bore across the ridges a faint odor of myrrh, a curious scent of the desert, of the untarnished earth itself; it lifted the white sand from the crests of the gherds and sent it trickling, sifting and whispering in tiny avalanches down into the hatias, seeming to drive the snowy dunes before it like the billows of a mighty sea that swept on and on, irresistible, relentless, inevitable, like the tide submerging whatever came in its way. Indeed, Professor Troy had said that the gherds did move and for that reason were known as traveling dunes; that once the whole Libyan Desert was a well-watered and fertile country supporting a considerable degree of civilization, but that gradually the desert sea that washed the southern edges of its oases had encroached upon and smothered the inhabitants, filling their cisterns, absorbing their lakes, blotting out their villages and towns, rising higher and higher until it submerged even their temples and their hills, driving the population toward the seaboard on the one hand and the Nile upon the other.

From the hatia rose the pungent scent of dung-fed fires and the grumbling roar of the camels. The black goats’-hair tents had been pitched and the water girbas and bales of supplies arranged in a zareba, or hollow square. Supper would be ready in a few minutes. Calthrop was ready for it in spite of his swollen tongue, his burning throat, his inflamed eyes and his cracked lips and gums. He had expected and discounted all that. What he had not fully previsioned was the vast waste of sand through which now for nearly a week the camels had patiently struggled up and down, slipping and sliding, sinking at times almost to their knees. There were no tracks of any sort. Whatever wandering Bedouin might pass that way left no trace behind him — spurlos versenkt. The sun, the wind, and Jerdi, the North Star, are the only guides in this part of the Western Desert. Yet the guide, Mohammed Ali Ihrahim ben Rahim, had never faltered. But another day and they must find water. The camels could last but three or four more at most.

He swept with his glasses the sea of foaming breakers that came rushing toward him, one behind the other, higher and higher. A wisp of sand curled lightly along the top of the gherd like a whiplash. The hajin raised its head, which it had lowered almost to its knees, and wriggled its cushioned lips. It, like its rider, felt a call to something. Then the light dimmed to purple and at the same instant his eye caught a gara, or tabular hill, strangely rectangular in this tipsy curving world. It might, of course, be a trick of shadow, but he knew that a straight shadow can be cast only by a straight line. He looked again. Behind the gara, clearly defined against the side of one of the gherds, was a pyramidal gray patch. He glanced back over his shoulder. The sun was sinking in a whorl of flamingo feathers. The cohorts of the gherds gleamed with purple and gold. Calthrop tightened his rein and plunged down the other side of the dune, urging his hajin to top speed.

There is no twilight in the desert. The sun dies in a single iridescent moment. Yet, when, ten minutes later, Calthrop pulled in his sweating hajin there was still light enough for him to determine that what towered above him against the pale saffron of the afterglow was beyond peradventure the peak of a pyramid. In three tiers it rose to a point fifty feet above the floor of the hatia, terminating in a single massive block. On three sides the engulfing sand rose nearly to the top, then fell away sharply on the fourth, revealing cracks and apertures almost large enough to permit the passage of a human being.

Breathless, he peered through the dusk along the hatia. Surely it had a curious and significant regularity of form — this sandy ravine in the lee of the gherd — like a giant avenue. He hobbled the hajin and walked along the hatia for a hundred yards until, climbing imperceptibly, he found himself standing upon the top of the gara. His hobnails grated harshly; he kicked and struck stone; he was standing upon the pylon of a submerged temple. Kurafra!

He stood there stirred to his heart’s core at the visions conjured by his imagination. Here beneath his feet Amenhotep or Rameses the Great, or possibly even Nimrod, the Assyrian conqueror, had marked the western boundary of his kingdom. Here under the lash had strained thousands of slaves, glistening black giants from Ethiopia, from Numidia and from the distant oases of the west. Here some proud monarch, now a mummy, had raised his shrine to the great Ammon and, reclining with his queen like an Egyptian Canute upon the rim of the desert sea, had looked out across the sandy waves and bidden them to advance no farther. How they had mocked him!

The line of light on the western horizon had vanished. Like lamps turned on by an unseen hand, the firmament unexpectedly blazed with stars. Above, the night was girdled with a sash of silver dust.

Calthrop realized that he could not possibly find his way back to the camp in the dark, but the Arabs would know that he must be nearby and he could rejoin them at daylight. With blanket, haversack, canteen and shamadan, or wind candle, he could be perfectly comfortable. Flashlight in hand, he began looking for a likely spot to sleep. Throwing the circle of light along the surface of the pyramid, he examined the crevices until he found one large enough to creep into, and then worked his body through the aperture and crawled along, turning the ray of light ahead toward the interior. Reddish brown, the rough sandstone leaped toward him, then the gleam lost itself in darkness to reflect a darker surface some thirty feet distant.

Getting to his feet again, Calthrop fished his baggage through the crack behind him, and clasping it in his arms crept along the sandy floor into the chamber, or hollow, under the dome. Clearly he was not the first to be there, for in one corner lay the charred remains of a fire and not far off the skeleton of a sheep. There was also about half an alof, or bundle of fodder, and this he took outside and tossed to the hajin. Then he lit the shamadan, spread out his blanket and prepared to make himself at home.

By the time he had eaten the contents of his haversack, drunk the hot coffee from his vacuum bottle and lit a cigarette he was in a mood of exultation. It was reasonably certain that he was sitting in one of the pyramids that fringed the once-fertile strip watered in ancient times by the great Wadi al Fardi, which had flowed through Taizerbo to Jaghabub and thence past the oasis of Siwa to the Nile. Henceforth Kurafra would no longer be a myth but an actuality. But for how long? As vain to attempt to dam the ocean as these steadily advancing dunes of sand. Another year or so and pyramid and temple might disappear forever.

Lifting the shamadan above his head, Calthrop examined the walls. They were devoid of ornamentation. This upper chamber obviously had played no part in the religious functions of the priesthood of Amon-Ra. There was no means of telling whether the last visitor had been there ten, ten hundred, or ten thousand years ago. Higher up where the walls drew closer together it was harder to see, and Calthrop, who was an agile climber, managed to get a few good handholds and swing himself up nearly to the capstone. For a moment, badly winded, he hung there in the darkness like a bat, looking down between his feet at the glow from the shamadan. Then holding himself by one hand while he braced himself with his feet, he peered with the flashlight into every aperture.

Everywhere it caught on rough ocher-red surfaces except one, where some smaller stones had been heaped together. Pushing them aside he disclosed a blackened box, or receptacle, about eighteen inches square. His position was awkward; he had but a single free hand and that held the light, and as he shifted the object to his shoulder his foot slipped. For a moment or two he swung there and then fell heavily to the floor below, striking his head a violent blow against the edge of his find.

When he came to himself he found that he was severely bruised from head to foot and suffering from a sprained wrist. The flashlight was smashed to atoms. He lay there several minutes more, trying to collect himself, while the wind shrieked and roared through the cracks of the pyramid.

The gibleh had brought the sand storm and it was evidently centering among the ruins of Kurafra. And then Calthrop remembered the casket, and in spite of his pain crawled to his knees and shifted the light from the shamadan this way and that along the floor until he found it lying unharmed nearby. The hide of which it was made was black with age and hard as iron, and the peculiar shapelessness of the affair gave it somewhat the appearance of an enormous dried shark’s egg. With the shamadan elevated upon his haversack, he sat down and lifted the casket upon his knees. As he did so he found that he was trembling.

“Nonsense!” he said aloud. “It’s probably empty anyhow!”

His heart beat like a tom-tom as he grasped the cover, and when he attempted to lift it the leather hinges broke, discharging a small cloud of fine dust. Raising the shamadan above his head, Calthrop looked inside.

III

“I lifted the shamadan above my head and looked inside,” said Calthrop. “Try to picture to yourself what a tremendous moment that was for me! I was pretty well done after six days on camel back. I’d traveled nearly two hundred and fifty miles. I’d fallen twenty feet and given my head a beastly knock. I’d just discovered the ruins of a city that no white man knew existed. I was more or less lost in the heart of the Libyan Desert. I didn’t know whether I was ever going to get back or not, and I had a queer feeling that I wasn’t alone in the place. I can’t explain it.

“All those elements combined to give the performance a curious feeling of unreality. Was I there, or was I dreaming it? Or was I someone else? Was I sitting cross-legged inside a pyramid five thousand years old, holding this thing on my knees, or where was I? And outside the gibleh was shrieking like all the demons of hell let loose, and the sand came rattling and sifting through the cracks and swirling across the floor. The shamadan flickered and burned blue. I seemed to hear shouts and screams all around, above and below. And that box wasn’t mine! Yes, I confess it, I hesitated a few seconds before lifting the cover. And then I did! At first I couldn’t make out anything, and then I saw there was a mess of papers and — Well, I’ll show you what I found, exactly as I found it.”

Calthrop got up from the dinner table at which they were seated and went to his cabin. He had returned from his trip only that afternoon, but the members of the party had already learned the details from General Hunter of how the caravan had nearly perished of thirst seven days from Bukara, had been found by a flyer sent out by the Frontier Districts Administration, and how Calthrop himself had been finally rescued by a troop of the Camel Corps Patrol under Major Bagley himself.

He was hollow-eyed, burned black, with cracked lips, almost a wreck, but obviously laboring under an exhilaration that approached hysteria. Something had happened to the man; something that had profoundly affected him; something concerning which they had not cared to ask him.

He returned, carrying the casket in his arms, and they watched him breathlessly as he held it above the candles. The only sound was the lap of the current against the river bank, the scream of the frogs, the chanting of the sailors, to the faint pulsations of the daraboukeh. Through the plate-glass windows of the saloon a white moon looked in upon a table decorated with flowers and silverware. The Princess Zeeka, smoking a tiny cigarette in a long jade holder, sat with her chin in her hands, her elbows among the wineglasses, her eyes fastened expectantly upon Calthrop’s face.

“Move those glasses, will you?” he said to his sister. “Push the candles nearer together please, excellency. Yes, I want you all to have the story just as it unfolded itself to me, step by step. What that box contained might have changed the whole history of civilization!”

He waited while Miss Calthrop arranged the glasses, then placed the box in the center of the table and opened it.

“This is what I found!”

And Calthrop held up to their astonished gaze a Roman short sword and scabbard, with its accompanying belt, thickly studded with semiprecious stones. Even after two thousand years the facets of the jewels reflected the candlelight undimmed. Professor Troy examined it carefully.

“Extraordinary! It is of the time of Tiberius. Congratulations, Calthrop. You’ll be famous. Even the coins of Hadrian found in the Fayum created a sensation, and they were nothing to this.”

But the princess looked slightly disappointed.

“I see that you were joking,” she said. “All you meant was that a sword might have changed the destinies of Europe.”

“Wait a moment,” he answered excitedly. “No, I did not refer to the sword, but to something else — that the box once contained.”

“What was that?” asked Ismail Bey. “And what has become of it?”

“These will tell you,” he replied, lifting a bundle of letters. “Do you read German easily?” he asked the princess.

“I do not like to read German,” answered Zeeka.

“Give them to me. I will make a try at it,” said Professor Troy. “I spent three years at Heidelberg in my extreme youth.”

“How soiled they are!” exclaimed the princess. “I am glad I do not have to read them.”

“Do you remember our conversation about Christianity the evening before I left,” went on Calthrop, “and how the professor told us about the legend of the Lost Gospel, and suggested that — ”

“By George, Calthrop!” exploded Troy. “This is a letter from William Hohenzollern, former Emperor of Germany!”

“That does not interest me in the least,” remarked the princess.

Troy wiped his glasses and spread the crumpled sheet upon the snowy damask before him. “Listen,” he commanded,

“‘AT THE MANEUVERS,

“‘August 20, 1913.

“My dear Harnach-Hulsen: I trust that by this time you are safely at Jerusalem. You remember our interesting talk about a year ago, when Cardinal Kopp, Prince-Bishop of Breslau, and our friends Von Tirpitz and Von Bernhardi were present, and we discussed the biological aspect of war. At that time your remarks struck me as of great force. When you have the time I should be glad to have you set them down in writing. I shall see that they are disseminated through the proper educational, military and ecclesiastic channels, in order that the virility of my people may not be permitted to decay through the insidious and demoralizing influence of an effeminate desire for peace which dominates our age and threatens to spoil the soul of the German people according to its true moral significance. War is not merely a necessary element in the life of nations, but an indispensable factor of culture, in which a truly civilized nation finds the highest expression of strength and vitality.

“‘In answer to the query in your last letter, I distinguish between two different kinds of revelation — a progressive historical revelation and a purely religious one, paving the way to the future coming of the Messiah. As to the first, there is not the smallest doubt in my mind that God constantly reveals himself through the human race created by Him, through some great savant or priest or king, whether among the heathens, Jews or Christians.

“‘The second kind of revelation, the more religious kind, is that which is introduced from Abraham onward, slowly, but with foresight, all-wise and all-knowing, the actual revelation of the Almighty.

“‘Is not His Word our authority? Delitzsch, as a good theologian, should not forget that our great teacher Luther taught us to sing and believe, Das Wort sie sollen Lassen stehn.

“‘It must be our guide, until the Messiah, announced and foreshadowed by the prophets and psalmists, shall at last declare himself. In what form or when the Messiah.may appear no one knows. It may be in the far future or he may be on earth among us even now, unrevealed save to those who perceive and understand, beggar or emperor. But the day arrives!

“‘Unfortunately the condition of her majesty has become worse. My heart is filled with the most grievous sorrow. God with us!

“‘With heartiest thanks and many greetings, I remain always,

“‘Your sincere friend,

“‘WILLIAM I. R.’”

“A characteristic epistle, but not highly illuminating,” declared Ismail Bey. “What else have you got there, Calthrop?”

“Did not this same emperor recently remarry?” the Princess Zeeka inquired of Troy.

The professor ignored her, for he regarded her as a bore. Besides, he was engaged at that moment in wondering whom William had in mind in penning the words “beggar or emperor.”

“Yes, dear lady, he did remarry,” answered Ismail Bey. “But having deprived him of the occupation of war, you should not begrudge him the consolation of love.”

“The next in order is Harnach-Hulsen’s answering letter to the Kaiser,” said Calthrop. “Will you help us out again, professor?”

Troy nodded.

“I knew Harnach-Hulsen years ago at Heidelberg. I recall him chiefly as a duelist for the Saxe-Gothas. He had quite a record.”

“Well, here is his letter. It is a long one. Take your time.”

Professor Troy drew his chair toward the table so that the candlelight fell upon the bundle of sheets in his hand. They were covered with a fine running script.

“He dates his epistle from the Pyramid Emperor William II,” he remarked dryly, glancing at his host.

“‘Jan. 29, 1914.

“‘Imperial and Royal Majesty and All-Highest Lord: With most humble gratitude I acknowledge Your Majesty’s wire received at Cairo. I can already say without egotism that Your Majesty’s interest in this expedition has borne surprising fruit. I have in fact made discoveries of the highest archeological importance, in their way rivaling those of Schliemann.

“‘To take matters in order: After leaving Bukara we proceeded northeastwards toward the Fayum for five days without finding water, although assured by our Berbers that there were desert wells within a distance of two hundred and fifty kilometers. They may have had some sinister plan. I do not trust these people. The only way to get along with them is by dominating them absolutely. The traveling was exceedingly difficult owing to the immense dunes of white sand thrown up by the wind, which drift quite a long distance each year. To cross these dunes is slow and exhausting work, and it is better where possible to follow the hatias between them and to cross at the low places. It is hard to shape any very definite course.

“‘However, on the seventh day, about sunset, when our camels were giving signs of exhaustion, I thought I saw from the top of one of the dunes, at a distance of about a mile, something projecting from the sand that looked like an outcropping of limestone. To my great excitement this proved to be the top of a small pyramid almost entirely submerged; and shortly, at about the right distance, we came upon the two pylons of a temple. It is probable that had we not discovered these they would have been obliterated entirely by the moving sands within a few years.

“‘Here we established our camp and, having measured and photographed the surface remains, began excavating on the side of the pyramid toward the temple, where the stones appeared to have been previously tampered with.

“‘We are proceeding slowly also to excavate the outer surface of the pylons, and have already laid bare not only the usual hymns to Amon-Ra and Sebek, the crocodile god, but also inscriptions made during the reign of Darius and added to by Nektanebes, as well as a Greek inscription in sixty-six lines dating from the second year of the reign of the Emperor Galba, A.D. 69. We have named the pyramid, subject to your gracious permission, the Pyramid of the Emperor William II.

“‘We broke very easily through the outer wall of the pyramid and found a rough passage leading to an unfinished empty chamber. Charred embers and a roll of matting upon the floor showed that robbers had once used it for a hiding place. Concealed in a recess, we found a small chest containing a jeweled belt and short sword, a few gold coins and a papyrus many meters in length. This last appears to be a sort of journal, in the form of a letter addressed to the Emperor Tiberius at Capri by one Gaius Marcus Claudius Silenus, a Roman gentleman traveling in the East under the imperial protection. The Latin text is hard to decipher, probably owing to the fact that it was written in many different localities and under varying conditions. I am translating it as fast as I can with due regard for our other work.

“‘The manuscript is dated at Thebes, in the seven hundred and sixty-sixth year of the founding of the city of Rome, and after the customary complimentary salutations to Tiberius begins with a brief statement that the writer, having killed many crocodiles and lions — these last with the aid of hunting cheetahs of the celebrated breed trained by the Ptolemys — has learned of the ruins of an ancient city called Kurafra lying on the edge of the Western Desert, which he contemplates visiting.

“‘He then proceeds to give a long and unnecessarily detailed account of his travels in Cappadocia, Armenia and Syria, where he was the guest of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee, on his way to Caesarea to stay with his cousin, Claudia Procula, wife of Pontius Pilatus, the procurator of Judea. He describes Herod as a drunkard, unfit for kingship, and laboring under the delusion of being the Messias of the Jews, and declares that he caused the murder of Iokanaan because the latter denied the truth of his claim. I regard this as of some historic interest, as it is in flat contradiction of Josephus.

“‘I find the work of translating the papyrus most fatiguing, as I have broken my reading glasses. The manuscript contains a description of the miraculous healing of Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s chief steward, by the thaumaturge known as Jesus, or Joshua, of Nazareth, whom Iokanaan had proclaimed to be the Messias of the Jews, and who was working many miracles throughout Galilee and Samaria. Silenus writes that there is no question about the authenticity of the various cures, since Chuza and Joanna are truthful people, as is also Jairus, a prominent citizen of Capernaum, whose little daughter was brought back to life by the prophet. He also tells how a Jew named Lazarus was similarly raised from the dead, and recounts many restorations of lepers, paralytics, palsied, deaf and dumb, and those officially certified as insane. He describes the great excitement attendant upon these miracles, and mentions a letter that he has received from Claudia Procula, his cousin, asking him to look into the matter with a view to the possibility of inducing the prophet to come to Jerusalem to try to cure Pilate of diabetes.

“‘Silenus then tells of how he went on in the company of Herod Antipas, Herodias and Salome, her daughter, to Jerusalem, where Pilate, who had come up from Caesarea for the Feast of the Passover, was occupying the palace of Herod the Great. He describes how annoyed Antipas is at finding the palace in which he was brought up as a boy commandeered by the Romans and how it has resulted in a certain coldness between himself and the tetrarch, whom he had just been visiting on the friendliest terms. Here he finds to his surprise that his cousin Procula is already, without as yet having seen Christ, more than half a convert to his teachings, fully believing that he is the long-foretold Messias of the Jews. He also related how Pilate is very unpopular with all classes, but particularly the Pharisees, and how they are always plotting his removal by trying to lead him into acts giving the impression that he is disloyal to the emperor.

“‘Then comes a description of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, his cleansing of the temple, and of his accusation by the officers of the Sanhedrin of treason to Caesar, as a result of which he is placed under arrest and brought before Pilate.

“‘Next follows an account of how Silenus is sent secretly to Christ with an offer of freedom if he would cure Pilate of disease, which is refused, and of the trial of Christ, with its background of political plot and counterplot. Pilate, fearful that unless he accedes to the demand of the Sanhedrin and turns Christ over to them he will be accused of treason to Rome, recalls the presence of Herod in the city and accordingly seeks to escape responsibility for either the release or the delivery of the prisoner to the Jews by sending Silenus to Herod with the suggestion that, as Christ is a Galilean, he comes within the latter’s jurisdiction. But the tetrarch is too wily to be caught and sends the prisoner back to Pilate at the praetorium, inwardly pleased at the dilemma in which the Roman procurator finds himself.

“‘Silenus describes how Pilate, realizing that he cannot evade his duty, becomes greatly disturbed, and representing that he will take the case under advisement sends Silenus to Christ to interrogate him as to his actual doctrines and to determine whether they are treasonable. Procula, unknown to her husband, insists on going with him. They find Christ in a dungeon of the Sanhedrin and have a lengthy conversation with him. They also seek him out later and continue the discussion of various phases of his doctrines, more particularly with respect to the ultimate determination of contested issues.

“‘I cannot say that these alleged interpretations of Christ’s philosophy, even if genuine, add anything to the German theory of culture so often elucidated by Your Royal and Gracious Majesty to Von Bernhardi, Von Tirpitz and myself. In fact it may so easily cause a natural confusion and misunderstanding as to our biological point of view that it perhaps would better be suppressed in the higher interests of the state. I am in grave doubt as to what course to pursue, as any suspicion of our discovery on the part of the public would doubtless result in the demand for a complete disclosure, the refusal of which might arouse unfavorable inference.

“‘Would that Your Gracious Majesty were here to direct my thoughts into harmony with the purposes of Almighty God! I am writing this letter in the unlikely hope that I may be able to transmit it to Bukara by some passing caravan.

“‘To my great satisfaction, I learned from your telegram that there had been an improvement in the health of Her Majesty. May God help further.

“‘With the deepest respect, unlimited fidelity and gratitude, I am, All-Highest, Your Imperial and Royal Majesty’s most humble servant,

“‘MAX HARNACH-HULSEN.’

“Mashallah!” shouted Ismail Bey. “Where is this papyrus?”

He started to look into the casket, but Calthrop restrained him by a touch upon the shoulder.

“A moment, excellency, if you please! Let us take one thing at a time. There is still one other paper — an unfinished letter from Trent to his mother. That letter I will read to you myself:

“‘PYRAMID WILLIAM

“‘Jan. 29, 1914.

“‘Dearest mother: At last I can tell you the marvelous news! We’ve found Kurafra! Do you realize what that means? You can’t blame me for being excited. Who wouldn’t be? But Kurafra is nothing to what we found there! Our caravan had a terrible time crossing the dunes, and we were nearly all in when we found the pyramid that marks the site. Of course we both went nearly crazy. I’m sure Harnach-Hulsen would have got drunk if there had been anything to get drunk on but laghbi. As it was, he made a long speech and toasted the Kaiser in lukewarm coffee. Then he had a sort of dedication ceremony and baptized the pyramid. “I name thee Wilhelm der Zweite.” It was funny as anything, although he took it dead seriously.

“‘I didn’t grudge it to him, for I found the Lost Gospel! H-H didn’t! He may claim to, but he didn’t! I got climbing around inside the peak of old Wilhelm Secundus, and there it was, in a box, where it had lain for nineteen hundred years! You see, Marcus Claudius Silenus, who wrote it to send to the Emperor Tiberius … evidently hadn’t time to finish it at Jerusalem and so he took it along with him when he started off to hunt for Kurafra in 31 A.D. H-H says that what undoubtedly happened was that Silenus was murdered by robbers who hid their booty in the pyramid and forgot to come back for it, or were killed or something.

“‘Anyhow, we’ve got it! And it’s the greatest find since the Sinaitic parchment, the Codex Aleph as they call it, and infinitely more important. For it is an actual Fifth Gospel, in which the writer has written down with the greatest care the exact words of Christ about a lot of things that have always been the subject of argument. For example, regarding the individual ownership of property. But, far more important, his ideas about war! This wonderful old papyrus is going to change everything. The language is so simple, yet so beautiful and convincing. Only to think that the fingers that wrote the letters that are lying now before me had just touched those of Jesus! I can’t sleep. I can hardly eat. With this direct revelation and injunction from Christ’s own lips, there can never be any such thing as war again!

“‘Harnach-Hulsen does not seem very well. I am afraid the heat has done him up. He has been acting very queer and grouchy for a couple of days. He — ”

“Why did he not finish the letter?” asked Zeeka.

“That you must judge for yourself.” Calthrop placed the letter with the others and poured himself a glass of brandy and soda.

“Now to go back a little, let me resume my narrative. I’ve told you how I fell with the casket in my arms and hit my head and probably passed out for a while; and how I finally came to, grubbed around for the box and opened it. Finding the sword, of course, gave me a stupendous kick; but naturally it was nothing to the thrill I got out of the letters. I’d give a lot to be able to paint the thing for you exactly as it was.”

He hesitated, put down his glass and fumbled for his words.

“You see, a very queer sort of thing happened. I’m the last person in the world for that kind of an experience. The wind was raising Cain all around and through the pyramid and the flame of my shamadan kept flickering — what’s the word they use? — ‘guttering,’ I guess — and made weird shadows all over the place and gave me a feeling that I was not alone in there. I could feel — presences — emanations or something. And as I read the letters — it’s hard for me to explain — I can only describe it by saying that I lost my time sense; or rather, as it were, I saw time as a whole — going both ways at once. I — well, I seemed to be detached from the whole business. It was as if everything had telescoped — reversed itself or something — and turned inside out. It was quite weird, I can tell you.”

He shut his eyes and passed his hand across his forehead.

“Of course the bang on my head had something to do with it, no doubt — exhaustion and all that — but I found myself looking very intently at the flame of the shamadan. I suppose there is such a thing as autohypnosis. Anyhow, at first it seemed to be just a blur of radiance. The air was full of flying sand and the flame danced and wavered and tore at the wick — and right there It — whatever It was — happened.”

He pulled one of the candles in front of him. Through the window a broad, glittering moon path lay like a silver drugget across the Nile. Calthrop pointed into the flame.

“As I looked,” he said slowly, “the blur focused — if you get what I mean — and everything became very clear — and distinct — and still — and small. I seemed to be inside the flame, looking out, and at the same time to be outside looking in, and seeing myself in there looking out, as if the whole thing were going on at the wrong end of a spy glass and I had gone through. I know it sounds quite mad.”

He laughed nervously.

“Anyhow, it was all more like feeling than seeing; a visual awareness, if there is such a thing, that I was sitting there inside that blooming pyramid in the middle of a sandstorm fishing inside the box by the light of the shamadan. And I felt sure — you’ll probably think me an utter idiot — that there was something in there near me that I can’t possibly describe. The flame burned up bright again until the inside of the pyramid was bright as day and I could see right through it as if it had been made of glass. And out of the middle of the light a great thing like a gigantic seesaw ran up through the pyramid into the sky — into eternity. It said ‘Don’t touch it!’ Then I knew that It was myself and that the seesaw was Time. I found that I was sliding along it, faster and faster, until I was shooting out into space with the velocity of light. As I flew I saw everything that ever happened. You’ve seen those moving pictures that illustrate Einstein’s theory, showing a human being shot into space at such a rate of speed that he goes flying back through the centuries, overtaking and passing the former years? Well, it was like that, you know. I saw everything that ever happened — only backwards.

“I saw the desert floor sinking lower and lower and the pylons of the temple lifting higher and higher, until temple and pyramid both stood free and clear of the sand and joined by a long avenue of sphinxes. I saw caravans of camels and Bedouins on fast hajins — hawk-faced men with cruel mouths — coming and going. I saw the pyramid being built and the slaves dragging the stones into place up an inclined spiral plane that wound around it. The country was soft and green and covered with palm trees, and the air was sweet and laden with moisture. And then I came rushing down aslant time again and seeing it all forward instead of backwards, the desert sand drifting in, the pylons and the pyramid sinking back, back, until I was looking into a fire surrounded by a circle of peering Arab faces, and then I saw that the fire was my own shamadan and the circle of faces was the same face repeated over and over again — the face of old Ibrahim, who was sitting cross-legged there behind me.”

Calthrop laughed again — apologetically.

“How he had found his way there across the dunes in that sandstorm I can’t imagine, but there he was, and his presence gave me considerable relief. He said that he had stood outside for a long time and shouted to me, but the wind must have carried away his voice. I had begun to feel very chilly. Ibrahim went snooping back in the darkness and came back presently with a handful of brush and a few cakes of camel dung, with which we built a fire, and then I pulled out my brandy flask and mixed a couple of stiff drinks with the water from my zemzemieh. He showed no reluctance about taking it.

“Did you ever see an Arab partly boiled? It’s a very curious sight. I fancy we were both pretty well lit up. At all events, he told me the story of his life, and whenever he showed signs of weakening I’d give him another drink. He was eighty-two years old, he said, and had seen many, many things. I let him run on, and by and by he got down to what I was after.

“It was, he said, in the thirteen-hundred-and-thirty-sixth year of the Hejireh that there came to their town of Bukara a red gentleman, a khawlija el hamri, named Harnach-Hulsen, and a white gentleman, a khawaja el abiad, named Trent. When, however, they learned that these gentlemen sought to find Kurafra the Forbidden City, which Allah had caused to disappear, they were afraid and refused to go with them; but eventually the strangers overcame their fears with gold, and they went. Then he, Mohammed Ali Ibrahim ben Rahim, from the knowledge handed down to him by his great-grandfather, who had it from his great-grandfather, led them here in five days’ journey, to their great joy. Now, there was at that time a well in this place which has since filled with sand.

“Accordingly they made their camp at the other end of the hatia beside the well, but the two gentlemen pitched their tent outside the pyramid and Ibrahim remained with them to serve them. Each day they superintended the digging, and transcribed what was written upon the walls of the temple and made photographs. At night they were busy inside their tent. When they found the chest inside the pyramid they were both very much excited and abandoned everything else in order to decipher the parchment. They sat about all day, and because of the heat in the tent they went inside the pyramid and worked there, coming out at evening and mealtimes.

“Then one night they had a violent row. Ibrahim did not know what it was about, but he felt sure it had something to do with the papyrus. It was a still, moonlit night and the Arabs could hear the red gentleman shouting inside the tent at the other end of the hatia. They, of course, did not know what he was saying; but they could make out references to the Prophet Christ and the phrase ‘mahr ve khareb,’ signifying ‘annihilation.’ The voices rose higher and higher, until the Arabs became very much terrified, and at length the two gentlemen came out of the tent. The khawaja el abiad had the box in his arms and the khawaja el hamri was trying to take it away from him. The struggle became so violent that the entire contents, including the sword, fell out upon the sand. The white gentleman grabbed the papyrus, thrust it behind his back and began pleading with the red gentleman. But the latter seemed to have gone mad, for he picked up the sword and drove it through the white gentleman’s breast. Then he wrenched the papyrus out of the hand of the dead man and threw it into the middle of the fire.”

Calthrop’s lips quivered as he reached into the box and removed a blackened stick to which adhered a charred irregular strip of parchment about two inches wide.

“Ad Tiberium Cmsarem Imperatorem Capreae,” spelled out Ismail Bey. “Magistro Meo Salutem Mashallah! It is a part of the letter to Tiberius!”

“The Lost Gospel!” whispered Calthrop. “All that is left of what might have changed the destiny of the world!” And he burst into tears.

There was a prolonged silence. The princess laid her hand gently on Calthrop’s arm. Her own eyes were wet.

“Do not cry,” she said. “Please do not cry!”

“I’m sorry,” he answered. “I’m a bit strung up.” He ground his handkerchief into his eyes. “Well, after Harnach-Hulsen had burned up the papyrus he went back into the tent, and Ibrahim and the other Arabs ran away. When they came back in the morning Trent was dead and Harnach-Hulsen was still in the tent.”

He stopped and took a sip of water.

“And what became of the German?” asked Imail Bey.

“That is highly significant,” said Calthrop. “When the Arabs realized what had happened they were so fearful lest they should be accused of the murder that they killed Harnach-Hulsen and buried the two of them in the same grave.”

Again he paused.

“So the world will never know — ” began his sister as she stared at the fragment of burnt papyrus. Somehow the past seemed very close to all of them — the past which is part of the present, and of the future. From the neighboring dahabeah floated laughter, the tinkle of silver upon glass, the wheeze of the phonograph playing The Barnyard Blues, while myriad frogs shrilled in the shadoofs — lineal descendants of the same batrachians that had sung to sleep the infant Moses and acclaimed his finding by the daughter of the Pharaoh. A great star hung like a sconce of liquid fire over the Temple of Karnak — just such a star as had guided the Magi to the manger of Bethlehem, where lay the infant Christ.

“There isn’t much more to tell,” said Calthrop at length. “Ibrahim said the rest of the Arabs had never returned to Bukara and that he himself had lived in Siwa for five years before going back to his family. His story had pretty well knocked me out. The wind was shrieking outside the pyramid, the fire was almost dead, and it was getting terribly cold in there. I wouldn’t have cared if Eblis himself had been waiting for me out there in the hatia. I threw the things into the casket, bundled up the rest of my stuff and told Ibrahim that I was going back to the caravan no matter what. He protested at first; but finally he gave in, and we went out and found the camels huddled against one another, half buried in sand. The wind nearly tore me off my beast’s back, and whirled my blanket and raincoat in flapping circles above my head. The air was a thick sheet of stinging, biting dust and grit that cut like glass. The screaming gusts seemed to tear my eyes from their sockets. All sense of direction was blotted out, like the sky. One could only feel.

“I don’t know how we ever made the caravan or how we managed to stick it out when we did. But eventually the wind died down, and by dawn the sky was clear and the air still. By nine o’clock the heat had become suffocating. We were seven days from Bukara, and without water our chances of getting back there were small. While the Arabs were packing the camels I climbed up to the top of the gherd from which I had spied the pyramid the night before. What I’m going to tell you isn’t the least queer part of it all either. There wasn’t a sign of either temple or pyramid left! During the night the sand had completely covered both. The desert had finished its job!”

He lit a cigarette at one of the candles.

“Bagley’s told you the rest, of course — how they spotted us with a flyer and the Camel Corps Patrol picked us up about ninety kilos out of Bukara. You can bet I was glad to see them! I had to abandon my caravan but they gave me a fresh hajin and — Well, here I am!”

He began gathering up the papers. Ismail Bey watched him, frowning. “An efficient person — from his own viewpoint — this Harnach-Hulsen,” he mused. “But the world would never have accepted it.”

“Very efficient; very learned,” agreed Professor Troy. “And if you will believe it, as a young man, very sentimental.”

“Didn’t he write a book on Civilization and Decay?” inquired Rhoda Cafthrop.

“Yes; and in it he gave warning of the danger to civilization of the rising tide of barbarism. The Kaiser gave him the Black Eagle for it,” said Troy.

“How beautiful the sword is!” exclaimed the Princess Zeeka. “How the hilt sparkles! I know many of the stones. We have them in Russia, set in our icons. There is beryl and topaz and turquoise and lapis lazuli. Even a sword can be very beautiful.”

Ismail Bey, holding it under the candles, drew the blade part way from the jeweled scabbard. The princess examined it eagerly.

“How bright it is, in spite of its great age!” she said. “Is it not strange for such an old sword to be so blight?”

The Egyptian turned it slowly. The silken shades of the candles tinged the blade a dull red.

“What is that thin black line under the hilt?” asked the princess.

Ismail Bey glanced at her through his eyebrows.

“That, dear lady,” he answered reverently, “is the blood of a very gallant gentleman.”

For several minutes there was no sound save the chirping of the frogs and the melancholy challenge, “Allahu akbar! La-ilahah! Al-lah! Al-lah!”

Then a footstep clattered in the passage, and Hawkins, the wireless operator, immaculate in white duck, entered, cap in hand.

“Beg pardon,” he said, “but Jerusalem is broadcasting, and — the French have just entered the Ruhr!”

 

Featured image: Illustrated by James H. Crank / SEPS.

Fifty Million Cents

Amanda Irene Rush is a runner-up in our 2020 Great American Fiction Contest. See all of the winners. 

Joey is nine years old when his mother goes nuts and his sister goes bad and he has to live with his grandmother who gets mad if he eats cheese in the living room. His grandmother gets mad about a lot of things these days. This morning is no different.

“I’ll be late again,” she says, glancing at the clock as she cranks the wheel into River Trails. “You’d think your grandfather could drive you once in a while.” She gives Joey his lunch money and leans across his lap to open the door. “I’ll be here between four and four forty-five,” she says. “Don’t make me wait.”

Joey has just enough time to get his feet on the ground and push the door closed before the car is moving again. He watches it turn onto Slater Road without stopping at the stop sign.

He still has two hours before the bus comes so he heads for Todd’s. Todd is his best friend who lives in the back of the trailer park. The same park he and his mother and his sister lived in before his mother started talking to herself and the electric was shut off. Joey knew there was something up when he brought home a form the school wanted his mother to sign and instead of signing it, she stared at it for a long time and then crumpled it up. His grandmother doesn’t want the school to know there’s a problem in the family, so every morning for the past month he’s been going to Todd’s house after his grandmother drops him off.

Joey doesn’t mind. Todd’s mother leaves for work early, leaving them free to eat Sugar Smacks and Cookie Crisp out of the box while they watch movies on the new cable channel — HBO. Even Joey’s grandparents don’t have HBO. Some days he and Todd cut school and play in the woods near the bus stop, or else sneak into the orange grove behind the woods. Joey worries about getting caught and being sent to Crowl Detention like his sister. “A couple months in there ought to make any kid want to go to school again,” his grandmother has said. Todd tells him not to be such a chicken fart. “It ain’t like we never go.”

This time of morning the air is cool and the park is quiet. He can hear the swish-swish sound his corduroys make as he walks. He sees Tinky the Chihuahua sitting in the big front window of the single-wide where the lady who always gives apples for Halloween lives. The dog starts to yelp like someone’s stepping on his tail and even from the road Joey can see its tiny body shaking. On the other side of the street is his old trailer. The bedroom he shared with his sister — until they could get a house, his mother used to say whenever his sister complained that she was too old to share a room with a boy — has a broken window, and weeds are already sprouting up in the cracked driveway. The trailer looks like it’s been empty for years. Some kids in the park have been saying it’s haunted. Joey shakes the coins in his pocket as he passes.

His grandmother gives him 45 cents every day for lunch — the reduced rate he’s always had. “Don’t tell anybody you live with us now,” his grandmother has said. “I’m not paying a dollar twenty-five for that tripe they serve.” His grandparents could probably afford it. They live in a condominium — with matching dishes and furniture — in Cape Coral, a city downriver along the Caloosahatchee. There aren’t any trailer parks in Cape Coral.

Todd’s mom is on her way out when Joey gets there. She’s shouting at Todd from outside the door that he had better have a clean shirt on when she gets home or he’s going to get it. She gets into her car and waves to Joey as she backs out of the driveway. Inside, he finds Todd sitting in front of the television watching a Donald Duck cartoon with his hand inside a box of Sugar Smacks. He sits down on the floor next to Todd and holds out his hand. Todd’s is already good and sticky.

“Those chipmunks are stealing that duck’s nuts,” Todd says laughing.

 

When Joey’s mother came back from the hospital a couple weeks ago, Joey thought she was cured and expected they would be moving out of his grandparents’ second-story condo and back into their double-wide in River Trails. What he didn’t expect was that his mother would sit in the big recliner in his grandparents’ living room staring at him for hours while he tried to ignore her, first by concentrating on the TV, and then on solving a Rubik’s Cube, and finally on a book he had gotten from the library, a Choose Your Own Adventure story. He had met his end three times already when his mother’s attention finally became unbearable.

“What are you looking at?” Joey cried.

His mother smiled with one side of her mouth. Then she spoke in a voice that reminded Joey of that movie he and Todd watched about the people who grow humans in their backyard and eat their brains. “If you ever grow up, I’ll kill you.”

That night, on the screened-in porch that overlooked the dock where the boats were kept, Joey slept underneath the thing his grandmother called a davenport. His mother was staying in the spare bedroom. He imagined her coming for him with a knife and figured he could make a quick escape by busting out the screen. He didn’t think the drop down would hurt him too bad. He had fallen out of plenty of trees. And if he should roll and fall into the canal, well, that was okay, too. He knew how to swim. Lying there, going over the plan, he wished he had thought of grabbing the knife himself.

The next day Todd told him he looked like the guy in the zombie movie who thought he had been turned into a zombie but was really okay in the end. Joey broke down and told Todd everything and to his shame had even cried a little.

Todd was good enough to ignore this weakness, but said, so quietly it was almost to himself, “Shit, my mom threatens to kill me every day.”

It’s true. Todd’s mom is a tough lady. She doesn’t even look like a lady. She’s built like most kids’ dads. She even has a bald spot on the top of her head. Joey’s had to duck for cover many times when she started throwing shoes and magazines and frying pans at Todd. Like the time Todd poured an entire bottle of onion powder in the crock of soup she fixed for supper. Or the time he let the dog eat a pair of her pantyhose to see if they would really come out its butt.

 

It’s nearing the end of the school year and the weather’s getting hot. By the time the bus drops Joey off and he has to walk the quarter mile through the park, past the laundromat and the pool, to the front entrance, where he waits for his grandmother on the bench near the security guard shack — which as far as he knows has never had a guard — he’s dripping sweat and has a throbbing headache from the strong stink of blacktop.

Joey hates these long waits after school, sitting alone on the metal bench with no shade. He wishes he could have Todd hang out with him so they could play dungeons in the shack, but his grandmother hates Todd. She calls him that Todd and refers to his mom as that woman, although she’s never met her.

One afternoon, Joey notices a pop machine has gone up at the laundromat by the pool. The machine has the normal stuff: Coke, Tab, Sprite, and something he’s never heard of — Mello Yello. The button for it is bright yellow and the letters are colored in orange and green swirls. He digs into his pocket. He has two pennies he found during recess buried in the dirt underneath a palm tree. The can cost 50 cents. It might as well cost 50 million cents.

 

The next morning when his grandmother drops him off Joey asks her if he can have 50 cents.

“I already gave you your lunch money,” she says.

He tells her he wants to buy a book on planets for a project he has to do for school. “My teacher said I need the money today so she can order it for me.”

His grandmother gives him the look he’s seen her give his mother when she used to ask for seconds at the dinner table.

“I would get it from the library,” he says, “but I need to cut some pictures out of it and I can’t mess up a library book.” He says this with his head down, trying to sound like the kid in his class who always gets the teacher to let him go to the bathroom in the middle of their weekly spelling bees.

His grandmother sits there for a while longer, just staring out the window. Joey wonders if she even heard him and is about to say it all again when she finally says, “I don’t even know if I have any change.” She digs through her purse and his heart leaps at the thought that he might get a dollar bill. She finds some change in her change purse and hands him two quarters.

“Since it’s for school,” she says. He thanks her as he closes the door behind him.

Later that day after the bus drops him off, Joey runs all the way to the laundromat. He’s relieved to see the machine is still there. Breathless, he takes the quarters out of his pocket and slides the first one in. It drops and clanks as it hits its mark. He drops the second one in but it doesn’t clink. He bites his lip and pushes the big plastic button. Nothing happens. He presses it again, harder. Then again. He slides the metal bar up and down and sticks his fingers up in the change return.

He kicks the machine a few times. “What the heck?!” he yells.

The pool man hears him and tells him to quit kicking the machine.

“It ate my money,” Joey hollers.

“T.S., kid.” The pool man laughs.

 

At dinner Joey picks at the skinless chicken and mashed potatoes and wonders how he’s going to get 50 more cents out of his grandmother. It’s no use asking his grandfather, because he never talks anymore. At dinner each night, his grandfather sits at the head of the table staring at his plate, taking a bite of something now and then, but mostly just pushing his food around.

His grandmother’s purse sits on the table near the front door, where she keeps her clip-on sunglasses and extra golf tees. She never leaves change lying around. The purse is a big, tan bag with zippered compartments of various sizes. Joey doesn’t know which one holds her change purse. It would take him a month to find anything in that bag.

Joey doesn’t figure his mother has any money. She sits across from him with an empty ashtray and a pack of Camels on her dinner plate. She picks up the salt shaker, runs her thumb over the top, and brings the imaginary flame to the tip of her cigarette. Invisible smoke blows in Joey’s face.

“Why aren’t you eating?” his grandmother says.

Joey drops his fork and it clatters on his plate.

“You’ve been eating junk food after school with that Todd, haven’t you?”

He stares at her.

“That Todd is no good,” she says, spooning gravy onto her potatoes. She looks at his grandfather. “Are you hearing this, George?” His grandfather looks at her and nods. “Don’t you think it’s a bad idea for him to be eating junk every day with that Todd?” His grandfather nods again and pushes his potatoes away from his chicken with a fork. “Aren’t you going to say anything to the boy?” His grandfather stares at her blankly. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she says, banging the gravy bowl down. She points the dripping spoon at Joey. “I don’t want you eating junk after school.”

 

The next morning at Todd’s, Joey asks if he can borrow a nickel.

“What you need a nickel for?”

“My grandmother gave me my lunch money, but I think five cents of it fell out on my way here ’cause I only have 40.” Joey holds out his hand and shows Todd the four shiny dimes.

Todd goes into the living room and motions for him to follow. Lifting a cushion off the couch, he plucks up a nickel, a dime, and three pennies from underneath a dusty pile of Potato Stix and a yellowed subscription card for TV Guide. Todd gives Joey the nickel and puts the other 13 cents in his own pocket.

“Let’s go see if the cat’s got any more of them worms coming out its ass.”

 

That day Joey skips lunch but he isn’t hungry. Before catching the bus in the morning, he and Todd ate half a box of Cookie Crisp while they watched part of a movie about a kid who gets lost in the woods and is rescued by a grumpy old man with a walking stick.

In the afternoon, the coins clink and clank and the can tumbles out of the machine. Joey holds up the can like Todd once held up a snake he chased out from under a cactus plant in his front yard. The can is icy cold and glistens in the sun. He doesn’t crack it open right away. His plan is to hide behind the security shack and drink it so that his grandmother won’t see him if she pulls into the park just as he’s taking a swig. He squats behind the shack, keeping a look out onto Slater Road. Just as he gets settled and has the can open, the little white car pulls in. He sets the can down carefully just inside the shack where no one will see it. He turns to look at it once more as he’s walking away.

“What were you doing in there?” His grandmother asks when he gets in the car.

“Nothing.”

“You shouldn’t go in there when it’s this hot unless it’s raining. You’ll get heatstroke.”

The next morning Joey waits until the car is far down the road before he goes into the shack. The can is still there, surrounded now by ants that march in line from inside the can to the patch of grass outside.

 

Joey and Todd look for more change under the rest of the furniture.

“You should get some new pants if you keep losing stuff,” Todd says.

They eat an entire box of Sugar Smacks while they watch a movie that has the guy who plays Mr. Furley in it. Then they look through Todd’s mom’s underwear drawer.

“It’s as big as a damn flag,” Todd says, holding up a pair. For kicks they both get in it and stumble around the trailer scaring the dog. The dog hops into the bathtub to get away, and Joey and Todd fall over together in a tangle, laughing.

“Suck school,” Todd says, leaving the underwear in a heap on the bathroom floor. “Let’s go to the woods.”

They wait for the bus to leave before they cross the dirt path that leads into the woods. They’ve been warned not to play in the woods because wild boars and giant raccoons live in there.

“Let me find a boar wants to pick a fight,” Todd says, pushing up sleeves he doesn’t have. He never wears anything but T-shirts with ironed-on pictures of monster trucks and cartoon characters like Mighty Mouse and Hong Kong Phooey.

Most of the day they play pirates, making each other walk over a pool of mud across a fallen tree trunk that is the plank, and using a long stick they find on the ground as a sword. When they get tired, they sit on the plank and throw rocks and pieces of wood into the thick mud, watching them sink. Later, they go back to the trailer and Todd opens some chicken noodle soup, which they eat cold and salty out of the can — “like soldiers do,” Todd says.

Before Joey leaves to go meet his grandmother, he puts his lunch money in his shoe so she won’t hear it jingle in his pocket.

 

At school the next day Joey skips lunch again. He goes down to the pop machine after the bus drops him off and digs that day’s lunch money out of his pocket and yesterday’s out of his shoe. Ten more cents and he could have two cans. The thought makes him dizzy. He pushes the metal bar down just for the hell of it and sticks his finger in the return slot. He pulls out a dime. He jumps around and shouts. The pool man is looking over at him and Joey waves to him. He slides the dimes and nickels into the slot, listening to each coin clink and catch, and pushes the button. Nothing happens at first, so he pushes it again. A little red light flashes in the corner telling him to please make another selection. At first, he can only stare dumbly at the light, feeling like he does when he turns the page excitedly in one of the Adventure books only to learn he’s dead.

He slams the bar down to get his money back, thinking maybe the red light is a mistake. Maybe if he puts it in again he’ll get what he’s after. But nothing comes out. The anger in him wells up so fast, as painful and unexpected as a goosing from Todd. He starts cursing then, yelling out things he’s heard Todd’s mom scream at Todd, smashing the buttons with the flat of his hand as he does.

“You asshole!” He yells. “You no-good bastard!” A Coke falls out of the machine and he rips it out of the slot and throws it against the wall of the laundromat. He wants it to explode.

“Hey!” The pool man shouts, dropping his net and coming toward him. Joey runs to the security shack, crying all the way.

 

A week passes before Joey goes back to the machine. He starts to eat lunch again but still keeps the 50 extra cents in his shoe. There are round impressions on the bottom of his right foot. That afternoon the pool is deserted, the water still. The pool man’s net hangs on the fence, which is latched shut. The machine stands there like nothing ever happened. Joey carefully feeds the coins into the slot and listens closely for the telling clicks and clangs. He pushes the button. The can rolls down and he lifts it out. Remembering what happened before when he waited to drink it, he decides to open it right away. He taps the top of it like he’s seen Todd do to the Pabst cans he filches from his mom’s supply, then he jerks at the tab.

The ring brakes off and hooks onto his finger. He shakes it off and tries to pry his nail underneath the jagged piece of metal that remains. It cuts into his skin underneath his fingernail and blood oozes out onto the top of the can and collects in a thin ring around the rim.

He sits down on the ground and doesn’t cry. With his finger in his mouth he looks at the closed can. He picks up a rock and starts to beat on the top of the can where the other half of the tab remains. After several attempts the little triangle of metal gives in. He goes to take a sip but sees pieces of rock and dirt floating in the clear, yellow liquid. He sets the can gently near the machine and walks to the security shack.

 

The next morning Joey and Todd watch a movie about some street racer guys while they eat the rest of the Cookie Crisp. The movie runs long and they miss the bus.

Joey suggests they go play pirates, but Todd says, “I’m bored with the woods. Let’s sneak into the orange grove.”

As much as they’ve been warned about the boars and the raccoons, they’ve been warned even more about Farmer Jack who owns the grove behind the woods. Though they’ve never seen it, rumor has it Farmer Jack carries a loaded shotgun to the john and has a pit bull named Cracker he keeps chained behind his house.

“Cracker, my ass,” Todd says, jamming a half-burnt cigarette butt he found on the ground into the corner of his mouth.

They make their way through the woods, carefully crossing over the puddle of mud on the fallen trunk that served as their plank, weaving a path through a thicket of scratchy bushes. They squat down near the edge of the grove and stare up at the trees with the fat yellow fruits.

“Time to do some picking,” Todd says, nudging Joey in the stomach. He follows Todd as they disentangle themselves from the bush.

They have to go in pretty deep before they find some fruit they can reach on their tiptoes. Joey has just twisted one off when he hears a low growl from behind. Then he hears Todd scream, “Run!”

Joey turns around. Cracker looks bigger and uglier and meaner than he ever imagined. The dog is showing teeth and raising up mangy fur on its back. The fruit falls out of Joey’s hand.

Joey stands like the dead and avoids eye contact, remembering something he read once. He’s hoping Todd might make a noise to distract the beast so he can make a run for it too, but he’s nowhere to be heard.

Realizing that it’s just him and Cracker, Joey slowly moves his right foot as if to step in one direction, planning to then fake the dog out and run in the other. Cracker is as fast as he is ugly, though, and before Joey knows it he’s on his back and the dog is pulling at his right shoe, its long, ragged nails raising dust as it hunkers down.

Joey kicks frantically at the dog’s head with his other foot, hoping it will change shoes, but the dog holds on. He looks around for some kind of weapon — stick, rock, anything. He sees the orange he dropped and remembers the time Todd squeezed one at his eye. He had screamed out and then Todd shot it at his own eye, exclaiming, “Damn, you ain’t fooling!”

Joey stretches for the orange, the dog pulling him in the other direction, and manages to roll the piece of fruit his way. He props himself up on his elbow and clutches the orange in his other hand. Juice runs down his arm.

He looks at the dog. He looks it right in its eyes, which are milky and soft looking. The dog lets go of his shoe and sniffs at the orange. It licks the juice off Joey’s hand with its large, broad tongue. Joey stands up then, hopping a little trying to get his shoe on straight, and sets the piece of fruit down in front of the dog. It lays down on its belly and starts chewing. Behind him, he can hear Farmer Jack running, cussing at Cracker.

The dog has pieces of orange all over its muzzle. Joey pats it on its head, then takes off running. He runs right through the thorn bushes and keeps running without looking back. He reaches the plank and sees Todd on the other side waiting for him.

“Hurry up!” Todd screams.

Halfway across the plank, Joey’s foot slips and he falls into the mud. He starts to sink some, and he hears the mud make sucking sounds as Todd tries to pull him out. Joey’s up to his waist before Todd gets a good grip on his arms. Todd pulls and pulls, the mud gives, and Joey flops himself onto dry land. Joey looks down at his feet. The mud has sucked off his left shoe.

 

When they reach the bus stop, Joey says so long to Todd. He doesn’t hear any kids around so he figures it’s still early. He walks along unevenly, wondering how he’s going to explain the mud to his grandmother. And not just the mud, but the scratches and the blood and the missing shoe, too. He stops at the laundromat and sits down on the curb. He takes off his remaining shoe. His lunch money is still there. He gets up and stands in front of the machine in his socks. He takes a deep breath and lets the coins fall into the slot. He knows he’s a nickel short, but he pushes the button anyway. The can tumbles down.

“Fucking-A,” he whispers, and reaches for it. He holds the can in a muddy hand and wipes his other hand on his clean sock. Holding his breath, he pulls the tab. It pulls smooth. As he lifts the can to his lips, he can hear the crackling sound of carbonation. He drinks until his eyes water. The second drink he takes, he holds in his mouth before swallowing. The bubbles tingle on his tongue. He takes his socks off and leaves them with his shoe. He walks — barefoot and covered in mud — to the front of the park by way of patches of dirt and grass so as not to burn his feet, sipping on the good coolness in that can. It starts to rain a little so he sits in the security shack.

When his grandmother pulls up, he gets in the car without a word.

“What in hell’s name happened to you?” His grandmother says.

Joey tips the can back and takes a drink. He lets out a small burp. “Todd and I skipped school and I got attacked by a dog and then I fell in some mud.” He stares out the front window and waits for whatever will come — shouting, crying, maybe hitting. He doesn’t know what, and he doesn’t care. The rain has stopped and the sun is shining again. His stomach growls loudly.

“I suppose you didn’t get any lunch, did you?”

He shakes his head.

“And you’ve lost your shoes.”

He looks down at his toes. “I’m sorry I got mud on the seat,” he says.

“What’s that you’re drinking?” she asks.

He gives her the can, which is lukewarm now and smudged with mud. She looks at it and then takes a long drink.

“Hmm,” she says, handing it back to him.

He stares at her as she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She looks different. She’s smiling.

“Your grandfather’s gonna crap when he sees the inside of this car,” she says. “That oughta get him talking.

Featured image: Shutterstock

Isaac Asimov’s Conversations with Ben Franklin

Spanning time and space, the fictional worlds of scientist and prolific writer Isaac Asimov imagine alternative realities. Ones in which scientists and engineers resolve galactic struggles and robots walk among people.

Asimov also expressed concerns with the real world in his nonfiction writing, as in 1971 when he proposed — in this magazine — that the United States ought to make the long-overdue transition from its imperial system of measurement to the one utilized by most other nations. “Sanity is the metric system!” he railed, challenging his readers to attempt to memorize the convoluted conversions and calculations required to keep up the pigheaded American tradition of inches and pounds.

Today is the 100th anniversary of Asimov’s birth, and his writings display deep admiration, and tough love, for the country the Russian immigrant made his second home.

In addition to his arguments for reason in the way of official measurement and his musings on extraterrestrial life, Asimov imagined a series of conversations he might have with the founding father (and founder of The Saturday Evening Post) Benjamin Franklin. His most popular writings in the Post were a series in 1974 that depicted somnambulant run-ins with a ghostly Ben Franklin, starting with “The Dream.”

In Asimov’s story, Franklin is delighted to hear about the technological advancements of the modern era, and he excitedly learns the news that his nation is about to celebrate its bicentennial. Though the details of radio communication and television are difficult to conceive, Franklin is most bemused by his country’s failure to bring about world peace and unity amidst a time of unprecedented possibilities in travel and communication.

“My world seems like a science fiction world even to those of us who have lived through the recent years to reach the present,” Asimov tells the founding father. After explaining to Franklin the capabilities of space travel, satellites, and fossil fuels, Asimov also lets him in on the difficult prospects of nuclear war, gas shortages, and pollution. As in much of Asimov’s work, the tragic irony of looming catastrophe in an age of rapid advancement is all too real:

Franklin said, “You say, the, that every nation needs every other nation; for oil, or for metal, or for industrial experience and technological knowledge. You say that the oil supplies will soon be used up and that permanent new energy supplies must be found by nations working together. You say that failure to cooperate means the end of your technological civilization and the death of billions You say it all as though it were such apparent truth that it wearied you to have to explain it to me.”

In the final installment, Franklin gives his simple advice to Asimov on the message great writers must strive to express to avoid the end of civilization: “Unite or die.”

Asimov criticized American anti-intellectualism and widespread ignorance, but it is difficult to say exactly what the science fiction writer might think of the state of his country if he could see it on his 100th birthday. He would be quite surprised (or not at all) at the ubiquity of touchscreen technology and the prospects of artificial intelligence. Perhaps he would be disappointed in the failure of 21st-century people to unite in solving our climate crisis. But one thing is for sure: if Asimov could visit the United States today, he would be appalled to find that we are still stubbornly holding out on a shift to the metric system.

Featured image by Lucian Lupinski in The Saturday Evening Post, May 1974

The Most Popular New Fiction of 2019

1. Four Months after Herbert Died

By Jessica Federle

“For all 68 years of his life, being overlooked had been a norm. Finally, it seemed that being overlooked had fallen in his favor.”

2. Marlie’s House

By Sara Amis

Escaping to the Georgia home she once shared with her parents, a young artist creates a happiness mural. But happiness, like life, won’t last forever.

3. Papa

By Jonathan Vollinger

Young Jack looks to his father for answers about his mother’s strange behavior.

4. Calculus 1

By John M. Floyd

He was good at math — but some problems aren’t so easily solved.

5. A Sentimental Person

By Kevin Fitton

Years after his wife’s death, a Michigan pastor learns how to play the blues and how to let go.

6. The Mailman

By Jeff Wallach

A technical writer living in Oregon discovers the new mailman is his friend’s dead husband.

7. Cool, Damp Cloth

By Niles Reddick

“At the first light, I … saw a fellow with a cigarette in one hand, cell phone in the other, and his belly steered the old Buick when the light turned green.”

8. Everything in Time Travel Has Been Done

By Doug Lane

When picking a science fair project, NEVER pick time travel. It’s worse than dangerous: There are no great projects left.

9. The Mansion

By Mehdi M. Kashani

The winds of fate don’t always smell so sweet.

10. The Day the Earth Smiled

By Nathan Goodroe

Dad’s obsession was pretty overwhelming, so he wouldn’t settle for a normal family photo.

 

Featured image: Shutterstock

Grateful

Evelyn ignored the protracted honks of protest and continued steering her silver SUV through the clotted traffic, nearly scraping a few bumpers with her dicey maneuvers.

In the passenger seat, Delilah stuck pink Post-Its to select pages of a thick home décor magazine. Using her substantial alimony payments, she’d refurnished her living room, outfitted her master bath with a vintage clawfoot tub, and had the exterior of her home painted, twice, all in an effort to fill the void left by her divorce. PJ preferred the back seat, with her canvas bag stuffed with paperback thrillers and snacks perched conveniently beside her.

For each of the past 25 years, they had driven from Southern to Northern California and spent a weekend in San Francisco. They ate at eclectic restaurants, walked along the beach, and shopped. The road trip, always taken in June, was an inviolable tradition.

Secrets were rare among the three of them, but until today, Evelyn had been determined to keep her husband’s affair a secret she took to her grave.

“I need to stop off in Santa Barbara,” Evelyn said.

“No problem,” PJ said.

“Beautiful there,” said Delilah.

Evelyn took a deep breath and continued, “To see a woman Richard used to see.”

“As in romantically?” PJ asked, her thin eyebrows rising above the rims of her cat’s-eye glasses. “Impossible. Richard idolizes you. Always has.”

“I’m surprised too,” Delilah said, folding up her magazine. “But why is today the first we’re hearing of this?” She raised her chin in that commanding way she’d perfected as a sixth-grade teacher, fully expecting an acceptable response. With a serial cheater of an ex-husband, Delilah was less fazed by infidelity than by Evelyn’s belated confession.

“I’ve never told anyone,” Evelyn replied. By the worry on her friends’ faces, she knew she’d waited too long to seek solace from the two women who’d been her steadfast confidantes since college, over 40 years ago.

 

They’d met at a freshman mixer, back when PJ had been known as Penelope Jean. They’d each hovered solicitously at different spots around the refreshments table, noshing on chips and watered-down punch in a feeble attempt to mask the uneasiness of not fitting in.

“We’re misfits,” Evelyn had declared, after introducing herself. “So let’s be misfits together.”

With that, they’d formed their own little clique. They’d commiserated over grueling papers and bad dates. They’d advised, consoled, but had never judged. Or had tried not to, anyway. Unconditional acceptance, borne out of a shared need to at least fit in with each other, had formed a pillar of their long friendship.

“It happened about 12 years ago,” Evelyn said.

“Let me guess, she was really young,” said PJ, whose husband had left her for a 24-year-old drama student the day after PJ had turned 50. Since then, she’d been so age-conscious that she kept her hair dyed solid black and had invested a small fortune on creams and noninvasive procedures to stave off the wrinkles and age spots.

“She was probably in her early 30s back then,” Evelyn said, then explained that Courtney had been the prosecutor on the few criminal cases Richard had handled for his firm. At 52, he’d still been trim and attractive, with deep-set blue eyes, a strong jawline, and a full head of thick, peppery hair. He’d been propositioned by various women through the years, but Courtney had been the first to whom he’d fallen prey.

Richard had Alzheimer’s now. He was no longer the hard-charging attorney or the man who’d easily garnered random female attention. Perhaps one of the saving graces of the disease was the eventual loss of the inclination to care.

 

The affair lasted a year and a half. Ordinarily dauntless and self-confident, Richard confessed to Evelyn with his head bowed and shoulders slumped with the cumbrous weight of guilt, disappointment, and self-condemnation, knowing full well nothing would absolve him.

Evelyn permitted herself a brief stretch of self-pity and wept privately, hurt, humiliated, and angry. She felt extraordinarily old at the age of 50. Although she dressed well and remained slim, her hair had grayed completely, and deep lines had sunk in around her eyes, nose, and lips.

He moved out, at her insistence, and leased an apartment nearby, until she asked him back several months later. Beneath the emotional scars and tenuous trust, she still loved him. She imagined she always would.

A five-month stint with marriage counseling established that they still loved and respected each other, but by then, as they approached their 26th year of marriage, “love and respect” had become an empty, banal catchphrase rather than the aspiration they’d once held as newlyweds.

“You need more therapy,” the counselor stressed during their final session. “You need to dig deep to heal. Then learn to be with each other again. Get your mojo back.”

Evelyn scoffed at the mention of digging deep, which she equated with peeling off a crusty scab and reliving the traumatic aftermath of being told Richard had been with another woman. Besides, mojo was overrated, strictly for the idealistic younger set. At least that’s what she told herself.

 

The middle school library, where Evelyn had volunteered two hours of her Thursday mornings, was where she’d overheard two moms chatting blithely about their husbands’ ongoing affairs — affairs they’d expressly permitted their husbands to have.

Lorna was a fit and leggy 40-something blonde who often dressed in tennis garb. “Neil has his girlfriend,” she told Evelyn. “And I have my life the way I want it. I do lunch and the spa with my friends, and I do what I want, when I want. And of course we show up to the important stuff together.”

Alice was a petite redhead married to a real estate developer. “Barry and I have a deal,” she said matter-of-factly. “He has Erica, and I buy what I want. I can even see anyone I want. It works for us. It’s perfectly copacetic.” She fingered an impressive diamond pendant and nodded approvingly, as if indicating that Evelyn would be positively insane not to strike up a similar deal with her own husband.

“We don’t have to be martyrs like our mothers were,” Lorna added crisply. “Putting up with certain things in marriage without getting something out of it.” The conversations in the school library had certainly spiced up those volunteer sessions. If those women were at all distressed, they hid it well with their talk of clothes and workout regimens.

Evelyn deemed those women jaded, vapid, and superficial. Yet, something about their “perfectly copacetic” relationships continued to intrigue her.

 

Evelyn and Richard never again spoke of the affair. In fact, they rarely spoke. The absence of the usual everyday conversation cocooned them in safety, or the illusion of it, as if not mentioning the transgression gradually whittled it into nonexistence.

They marched on. Evelyn managed their household, their finances, and their children. Richard immersed himself in work, his reliable method of escape. They behaved in ways contrary to the advice of the marriage counselor, constantly tiptoeing around each other and deliberately eschewing any discussion of their problems. Doing anything but digging deep and reclaiming their mojo. Their marriage had become tiresome and dull.

In a moment of abandon, and deep despair, Evelyn proposed that Richard continue seeing Courtney. She’d already weighed the risks, one of which included the possibility that sending him back to Courtney, even temporarily, could further alienate her from him. However, she was also keenly aware of the tension and interminable silence that was eroding their marriage. She’d listened to enough of Lorna and Alice’s conversations in the school library to have gleaned that their “perfectly copacetic” open marriages had offered some modicum of satisfaction that was preferable to the ineffable nothingness she had with Richard.

“That’s insane,” Richard said, raking his fingers through his hair.

Evelyn stared at him determinedly. “Maybe, but so what if it is?”

“Do you want a divorce?” Richard had asked. “Is that what this is about?”

“No. No divorce,” Evelyn replied flatly, swiping her hands through the air. She envied Courtney for her youth, but she had little desire to relive her own younger days. She simply wanted to move forward, age gracefully and comfortably, and remain married while doing so. “I’m okay with it this time,” she added. “Hell, I’m the one who’s trying to get you to go along with this crazy, insane idea. But we won’t call it cheating. It’s more of an … arrangement.”

As she’d urged Richard to embark upon this unorthodox marital sojourn, she’d discerned something Lorna and Alice hadn’t conveyed. Being in control, assuming the role of orchestrator instead of hapless victim, was empowering.

“I made a mistake before,” Richard said. “I can’t do that to us again.”

“But how much of us is really left?” she asked in earnest.

He couldn’t refute or respond otherwise, a rarity for a silver-tonged lawyer who was gifted with the skill of persuasion.

She persisted, and when he capitulated finally, she panicked and asked herself, “What have I gone and done?” She nevertheless shoved aside her fears and became adept at distracting herself whenever she caught herself thinking about Richard in bed with another woman.

With chagrin, she realized that she’d become her own version of Lorna and Alice, equally jaded and forlorn, although she never deigned to mention a word of her proposal in the school library.

Six months after the affair began, Richard abruptly ended it. The set-up, arrangement, or whatever it was had tested the grit and stretched the limits of their marriage, leaving them more damaged and bewildered than ever.

 

“It’s all so … not you,” PJ said, her puzzled face framed by the rearview mirror.

Evelyn met PJ’s gaze in the mirror. “I’m not the traditionalist you thought I was.”

“Neither is Richard, apparently.”

“She gave him the go-ahead,” Delilah interjected. “He’s flawed, just like anyone else, which isn’t an excuse. Just an explanation.”

“None of this says why you want to see this woman,” PJ said.

“Courtney’s sick. A rare bone disease, according to her Facebook. I’ve got a few things to say to her.” Evelyn took her phone out of the caddy wedged between the seats and handed it to Delilah. “Why don’t you get into my Facebook. Look for a brunette with green eyes. We’ve been in touch off and on recently. It’s an old photo, but it’s her.”

Delilah’s fingers grazed the screen. “She’s gorgeous. Great hair. Great eyes. Great smile. Just the sort of gal I’ve always envied but just had to hate.” She shrugged and passed the phone to PJ in the backseat.

PJ lifted her glasses, leaving them perched on her forehead, and squinted at the dated image of Courtney. “And you weren’t afraid of losing Richard to this?”

“Of course I was, but I was the one he came home to. Both times,” Evelyn muttered, suddenly feeling more pathetic than proud of that fact.

Delilah said, “I may know the answer to this already, if I know you as well as I think I do, but did you ever go out and have your own affair, tryst, what have you?”

“No.”

“But you thought about it, right?” PJ asked. “Nothing wrong with one of those open marriages. Come on, admit you thought about it … even a skosh.”

“No.”

“Why not?” asked Delilah.

“Because I was happy before, but Richard wasn’t. Maybe it was a midlife crisis or plain old male ego that got him to do what he did. Whatever the case, I wasn’t going to let it split us up.” She sighed.

She had a fleeting urge to further justify what she’d done, but said nothing.

One day, though, she’d muster a cogent explanation for the unfathomable despair that had driven her to make an audacious but foolhardy proposal that had had profound and negative effects on her, Richard, and Courtney. She’d tell them that the so-called go-ahead she’d given had been intended as a means of salvation to benefit both herself and Richard and not a special dispensation for Richard alone. Finally, she’d find the exact right words to articulate the distress, trauma, fury, loss of self, and craving for clarity and resolution that she’d carried in her highly guarded emotional repository for the past dozen years. But first, she needed to fully comprehend all of it herself. She was even contemplating a return to the psychotherapy she’d previously sworn off.

 

Courtney was an aged, brittle-boned woman now. A sickly hue colored her gaunt cheeks, and her hair had thinned to unsightly gray tufts.

“Most people who say they’ll visit these days usually don’t,” she said resignedly, and led Evelyn to a brown sofa in the small living room. The place had a musty odor. The walls were white and yellowed at two corners from water damage.

Evelyn placed her leather tote beside her on the sofa. She informed Courtney of Richard’s Alzheimer’s, then observed the familiar expression of disbelief and sorrow she’d seen on the faces of family and friends.

“He was always so strong,” Courtney said. “Brilliant. Powerful. And you knew I loved him,” she added, referring obliquely to the letter of apology she’d written to Evelyn over a decade ago.

Evelyn had tossed the letter years ago, but the memory of it was achingly fresh. Courtney had apologized, because dating a married man was not something she’d ever thought she’d do. She’d confessed to having fallen in love with Richard. The more time she’d spent with him, the deeper her attachment, and the greater her desire for more of a life with him. All had formed the impetus for Richard to immediately sever ties. The written apology had proven some level of conscientiousness, but sending it had been a ballsy move.

“He never felt the same about me,” Courtney said, tossing up a hand and landing it gently on her lap. “He didn’t have to tell me. We never even slept together that second time around.”

Evelyn widened her eyes, stunned and oddly pleased at the same time.

“Oh,” Courtney said softly. “You didn’t know, did you?”

Evelyn folded her hands on her lap and digested this new bit of information. She imagined the anguish, disquiet, and sense of foreboding Richard must have experienced during that second time around with Courtney. She took a sliver of perverse pleasure in supposing that those unpleasant states of mind had been some sort of karma for the sheer pleasure he’d had during the original affair. She’d forgiven him long ago, but she’d never been certain he’d forgiven himself. Or ever would.

“Most times, we just went out to dinner,” Courtney said. “He was with me but never really with me.” She bit the corner of her chapped lips, as if stopping herself from reminiscing aloud.

Evelyn stood. She figured now was as good a time as any to end their visit. She pulled out a check from the inner pocket of her tote and gave it to Courtney. “I’d like you to have this.”

Courtney hesitated, then took the check and looked up at Evelyn, perplexed. “Ten grand?”

“I read your Facebook posts. You have bills. You haven’t worked in some time, and your insurance has lapsed.”

“Of all people, you don’t owe me anything.”

“No I don’t, but you were a part of Richard’s life, even if a small part, and therefore a part of mine. What you had with him was wrong, but it gave him something besides sex, at least that first time around, that I couldn’t give him. Or maybe I could’ve but didn’t try. Figuring it out now is pointless. All I know is that shit happens and everyone deserves some happiness. So take the check. I hope it helps.” She picked up her leather tote and walked across the living room.

Courtney followed, stuffing the check into a frayed pocket of her sweater.

Just as Evelyn opened the door, Courtney placed a hand on her arm and said, rather timidly, “Thank you.” Her large green eyes, sad and desolate, belonged to a woman who’d given and desired love but had never received it in return, a woman who’d lost all hope.

“You’re welcome,” Evelyn said and walked out. She was smiling but also had the inexplicable urge to cry.

She’d come here to atone for her part in the past, but she hadn’t anticipated the overwhelming relief. She was ready to forgive herself. Finally. She continued down the walkway, wiping a tear from her eye.

 

Delilah and PJ stood beside the silver SUV, concerned and curious. As if by some deep-rooted, soul sister instinct, they’d each extended their arms, and Evelyn walked straight into their embrace.

They huddled for a moment, arms wrapped tightly around each other, the warm sun beating on their backs. With these women, Evelyn always felt at home.

Evelyn pulled away and said, “Let’s get going. I’ll tell you all about it in the car.”

“I’ll drive,” said Delilah, who customarily drove the second shift of these road trips.

As Delilah steered the car away from the curb, Evelyn took one last glimpse at the drab little home. She wondered, uselessly, how many days, weeks, or months Courtney had spent alone in there. One day, her disease will claim her life, and the Alzheimer’s that was slowly but surely obliterating Richard’s memory, intellect, and persona — his very essence — will usher in the complications that will lead to the end of his. Compassion triumphed over regret and loathing. It had to.

Evelyn grinned at Delilah and PJ, her allies for life, grateful that whatever the future held, none of them would ever endure it alone.

Featured image: Shutterstock

F

You’ve been refreshing the page for an hour now, and all you’re looking for is a single letter. You hope it’s a B. Even a C would be okay. You don’t expect an A in Mr. Miller’s English class, although you did stay up until two o’clock finishing that final research paper. It’s the best paper you’ve ever written, but you’re unsure how he’ll respond to it.

You refresh the page again and nothing. You pound your fist against the desk, wanting the suspense to be over and for your long summer to begin. You want nothing more to do with Mr. Miller, the worst teacher of your semester, a man who spent less time showing you how to write and more time boasting about his novels and how his literary agent keeps trying and failing to sell his latest manuscript. You’re not sure a class went by without him mentioning how three of his self-published novels were on Amazon. You might have even purchased one if you didn’t find the man so pathetic.

Your stomach growls. There’s nothing in the fridge, but maybe there’s a lasagna in the freezer, so you stand up, ready to shut down your laptop for the night. You can check your grades tomorrow. You got a B in every other class, so why would English be any different?

Still, your curiosity gets the best of you. You count to five, then refresh the page one last time.

There it is, finally, a grade next to your English class. The letter looks like an A at first, but then a brief gasp escapes your throat.

It’s an F.

That can’t be right. Your eyes are playing tricks. You click out of the page and come back in. You shut down your laptop and boot it up again. You’ve never received an F on anything in your life and yet there it is staring back at you, taunting you.

Mr. Miller must really not have liked that research paper, since you received an A on every other assignment. This is so dumb. He gave you the wrong grade — that’s the only explanation — so you e-mail him. You’re nice about it, just curious if he made a mistake. He’ll fix the issue in a prompt manner, you’re certain.

But an hour goes by and then five more hours and nothing. You managed to get some work done around the house, even made it to the gym before it closed, but by the time you’re heating up some leftover Thai food, you’ve double-checked your e-mail for the 50th time and nada. Mr. Miller isn’t writing you back.

You remain calm. Maybe he’ll check his e-mail later tonight or tomorrow. Maybe he’s traveling, you don’t know.

You watch a bad movie and go to bed and then check your e-mail again in the morning. There’s still nothing from Mr. Miller. He’s clearly avoiding you at this point, he’s such a coward, and so part of you wants to take the F and move on.

But no, you won’t let him get away with this. You open your web browser and type in his URL, www.masonmillerbooks.com — you can’t forget it since he promoted it every day. Maybe he has a personal e-mail you can write to.

If you weren’t so mad at the guy you would have felt sorry for him because this site is a joke. It looks like a five-year-old designed it, with the ugly gray background and the words in big italics. His books don’t look any better, the covers amateurish at best with shirtless men caressing scantily clad women, titles like Evermore and Ravaged and Tumultuous so cheesy you want to vomit.

You click around the site to find his e-mail address, but there’s no contact page or About Me, only links to his novels and short stories, as well as an orange form asking readers to sign up for his newsletter. You have nothing to lose, so you put in your e-mail and click SIGN UP.

The e-mail alert noise echoes through your bedroom. There’s something new from Mr. Miller, but it’s not the e-mail you hoped for — “Thanks for signing up for my newsletter!” the subject line reads. It’s a typical form e-mail any of his subscribers receives.

You click on it anyway. The e-mail is plain and basic, with a welcome and a thank you and links to his books, but there’s a discovery, too: At the bottom next to a sad, italicized Unsubscribe button is an address: 2848 Wonderstruck Court.

You rest your palm against your chin. You always wondered where Mr. Miller lived, and now here it is. You’ve cracked the case. What a moron to put his home address in the e-mail of his newsletter!

Wonderstruck Court. It sounds like something royal, magical. You picture Mr. Miller sitting on a throne in his Wonderstruck castle, enjoying a rack of lamb and a reserve chardonnay as he roars with laughter over the F he just gave you.

You go to Google Earth and type in the address. Thankfully his home is only 10 minutes away.

You could e-mail him first. Maybe wait another day, or until the end of the weekend. Play it safe, like you always play it safe.

But no — you head straight to your car. You’re not going to hurt him or yell at him. You just want to talk.

You keep the radio turned off as you drive to Mr. Miller’s neighborhood. You enjoy the silence, the time to reflect. You wonder what went through his mind as he read your final paper. Did he gasp? Did he tear up the pages and stuff them in the trash can?

You park against the curb on Wonderstruck Court, then put on your light jacket and climb out of the car. You step across a couple of empty driveways before you stumble to the third house and see the number 2848. This driveway is empty, too.

You approach his front door, knock three times, and then ring the doorbell. You probably should have rehearsed something to say to Mr. Miller, at least decided on what to open with. You’re willing to be nice about this, but you also have no reluctance in chewing him out.

Thirty seconds go by. You ring the doorbell again, and no answer. You take a few steps back, shove your hands into your pockets, and survey the house. There’s nothing special about this place. Unremarkable, just like your teacher. Faded beige and brown paint, two cracks in a front-story window, a square-shaped yellow lawn.

He’s not home, so you head back toward your car, ready to sit in the driver’s seat and wait for him to arrive as long as you need to, when you hear a loud clanging sound to your left.

You glance at the tall black gate next to the garage. It’s wide open, the growing wind slamming it back and forth against a wooden fence.

You walk past the gate and don’t bother shutting it behind you. It was his fault for leaving it open, and he’s practically inviting you into the house at this point, especially when you pull on the sliding door next to the covered barbecue and it opens with ease.

You step foot inside your teacher’s living room and there are no butterflies in your stomach, no worry an alarm is about to go off or a trained Doberman is going to pounce on you from the shadows. The one-story house is spacious and clean.

“Mr. Miller?” you ask as you tiptoe down the hallway. There’s no answer, so you move forward, past a laundry room and half-bathroom before you enter an office that’s so messy, so littered with papers and books and binders you can barely find any carpet to stand on. Unlike the rest of the house, this is clearly Mr. Miller’s territory, one that he hasn’t allowed his wife or a professional cleaner to touch, except for maybe the shiny, dust-free bookshelf that towers toward the ceiling.

You run the back of your fingers along the spines of the books, 10 copies each of Evermore and Ravaged and Tumultuous side by side, along with literary journals and a fiction anthology. He has so much of his work on display, along with a framed picture on the wall of what must be his family, Mr. Miller standing on the beach with a woman and two boys.

You take a seat on his computer chair and see photos of his kids next to the monitor, too. The boys look just like him, with short brown hair and giant dimples. The sight of them makes your stomach hurt. You wait for the pain to pass.

The room is warm and stuffy, so you remove your jacket and toss it on the floor before you push the chair closer to the desk and touch the keyboard. The massive monitor screen ignites in an instant.

You clap your hands when no password is needed and Mr. Miller’s computer desktop flashes across your eyes, an image of an idyllic winter wonderland. A dozen folders clutter up the screen with names like GradSchool, Teaching, ShortStories. You double-click on the Novels folder, and up come nine more folders, some with titles you recognize, like Evermore – Book 1, and some with oddball names like LesbianDinosaur. Such a variety of Mr. Miller’s important manuscripts, most of them unpublished, right there at your fingertips.

You minimize the folders screen. You’re not here to read his books. You came here to do one thing, and if he’s not going to be here to help, you might as well do it yourself.

You open his web browser and lean closer toward the monitor, searching through his web history, scrolling down until you find the tab you’re looking for.

“Please,” you whisper. “Please work.”

When the tab takes you to Mr. Miller’s college account, a grin flashes across your face, but then your heart starts beating out of control when a Honda Accord pulls into the driveway. The shades on the office window are drawn enough for you to see Mr. Miller step out of the car and walk toward the house. You’ve got 20 seconds to get this done, maybe less.

You focus on the screen again and scroll down to CLASS ROSTER. Next to your name is that ugly F. There are CHANGE and DELETE buttons next to it. You click on CHANGE.

You hear the front door open, so you stay as quiet as possible. You could make your grade an A — you deserve an A — but as the sound of your teacher’s footsteps echo down the hallway, you click on the letter B and hit SAVE CHANGES.

You exit out of the page and clear the Internet history, then jump to your feet and hurry past the office door. Mr. Miller is in the kitchen, drinking a beer as he scrolls through his phone.

You tiptoe in the other direction, trying not to make a sound as you head back to the sliding door. You move faster and faster. It’s five steps away.

“Hey!” a voice shouts behind you. “Who the hell are you?”

You spin around. Mr. Miller is no longer in the kitchen but halfway across the living room charging toward you.

“Oh.” He stops and sets the beer on a glass table. “What are you doing here?”

You don’t make a run for it. You stay strong and face him. “I needed to take care of something, that’s all —”

“You think you can just break into my house?” He grabs your arm. “You think you can just do whatever the hell you want and get away with it?”

“No. I came here to talk to you about my grade. You gave me an F, Mr. Miller.”

“And what?” he asks. “Are you surprised by that? You just wasted your time these last four months, and mine. I’m pretty sure your grade in my course reflects that.”

“Why would it be a waste of my time? I just wanted to get to know my own father.”

He tightens his grip, but you don’t try to wrestle him away. You stare into his eyes without blinking or flinching.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Miller? You didn’t like my research paper? I figured you would have loved it since it’s all about you. We both know there’s nothing you enjoy more in this world than yourself —”

“Okay, enough!” He lets you go, then crosses his arms. “You’ve had your fun, and you’ve made your point, but you’re not my child. You mean nothing to me. All you are is another student whining about a grade.”

You cross your arms, too, striking the exact same pose. “And what are you, Dad? After all this time I spent searching for you, what do I find? A total loser who’s trying to be the next Nicholas Sparks —”

“Get out of my house!” He clenches his hand into a fist, like he’s ready to hit you, but then he shoves you toward the door. “I’m better than Nicholas Sparks! I’m better than all of them!” He gets in your face, his nose an inch away from yours. “You were a mistake, that’s all,” he whispers. “I’m glad I walked out on your mother. I’m glad I didn’t spend time to getting to know you. Because the family I have now is the only one that matters to me.”

You’ve managed to stay unemotional this whole time, but now tears are welling up in your eyes, and you can’t stop them. You move past your father before he has a chance to push you again, and you hurry down the hallway toward his office.

“Hey, where are you going!” he shouts. “I told you to get out of here!”

“Don’t worry, I’m leaving!” you yell back. “I forgot my coat!”

“Well, hurry up! I don’t want to see your face ever again!”

You enter the office and pick your jacket off the carpet. As you put it on, you say, “Trust me. You won’t.”

You approach his laptop again. It’s still powered on. You click on the folder called Novels and drag it to the bottom of the screen.

“You have 10 seconds before I call the cops!” your father shouts. “Ten! Nine! Eight!”

You wipe a tear from your cheek as you right-click on the icon and select Empty Trash.

You’re out of the house before his countdown ends, and you don’t even bother looking at him as you leave the premises.

When you arrive at your car, the decision’s been made. You had the desire to take a risk, move across the country, get to know your absentee father by any means necessary.

But now it’s time, finally.

It’s time to go home.

Featured image: Ekkapop Sittiwantana / Shutterstock

Guide to the Archive: Ray Bradbury

Between 1950 and 2009, The Saturday Evening Post published 13 short stories by Ray Bradbury, the science fiction and fantasy author best known for his novel, Fahrenheit 451.

Saturday Evening Post members can enjoy reading these stories in our digital archive, along with fiction by other greats such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Jack London. Subscribe today.

Stories and Poems by Ray Bradbury

“The World the Children Made,” September 23, 1950, page 26

“The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” June 23, 1951, page 28

“The April Witch,” April 5, 1952, page 31

“They Knew What They Wanted,” June 26, 1954, page 22

“Summer in the Air,” February 18, 1956, page 28

“Good-by, Grandma,” May 25, 1957, page 28

“The Happiness Machine,” September 14, 1957, page 43

“The Magic White Suit” [novelette], October 4, 1958, page 28

“Forever Voyage,” January 9, 1960, page 16

“The Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” April 30, 1960, page 22

“The Beggar on the Dublin Bridge,” January 14, 1961, page 28

“The Prehistoric Producer,” June 23, 1962, page 18

“Fathers and Sons Banquet” [poem], May 1974, page 59

“Up from the Deep,” September 1981, page 12

“America” [poem], July/August 2009, page 35

“Juggernaut,” September 1, 2009, page 29

 

Video Image Credits

0:13 – Image of Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, IUPUI (photo by SEP staff)
0:25 – New Yorker cover: Alamy
0:45 – All images associated with EC Comics are owned and licensed by William M Gaines Agent, Inc. © 2019, All Rights Reserved.
0:56 – Copyright © NBM Graphic Novels
1:46 – Ray Bradbury (Wikimedia Commons,  MDCarchives via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

Tani-San and the Art of the Deal

Tani-san had always been a great one for experiments. As a child, she had attempted to discover which of a spider’s legs was the most important, only to find that it was always the last one. And then there was her investigation into the appallingly low survival IQ among city dwellers, which basically involved her creeping up behind people and hitting them over the head with a baguette. Indeed, her interest in the sciences had continued into middle age, eventually leading her to a very curious line of inquiry — namely, what she could make happen when she stopped going along with things.

One such experiment came about as a result of an incident that occurred on an unseasonably hot day in early autumn when she and her three friends were holidaying in the scenic prefecture of Niigata. They had just left the Garden of Harmony hot springs under something of a cloud when the minivan that was transporting them spluttered to a halt. A problem with the fuel pump apparently. As I say, it was rather warm and before long they were all starting to feel thirsty. So while the driver was waiting for the repair truck to arrive, the ladies went in search of a roadside station that lay “a few minutes” up the road — or so they were led to believe.

If ever a shop looked set to discourage trade, it was the miserable little concern they stumbled on some 20 minutes later. Why anyone would wish to set up business in such a godforsaken spot was beyond understanding: There couldn’t be more than 10 cars a day down that stretch of road. A large wooden strawberry stood outside in an attempt to attract custom, but because its features had been so badly touched up over the years, it had started to assume a lecherous expression.

Tani-san, who by that stage was not only parched but in a very bad mood indeed, was the first to enter the premises, making straight for the refrigerator cabinet, which buzzed as ominously as an electrical relay station. Grabbing four bottles of ice-cold mineral water, she marched over to the payment area.

“Shop!” she called out, slamming the drinks down on the counter.

The muted babble of daytime TV came drifting in from a room at the back. Then, after an unreasonably long interval, a scruffy individual in a sleeveless shirt emerged from behind the yellow curtain. A wholly undistinguished item, he was entirely bald apart from a single tuft of what might have easily passed as pubic hair that sprouted from the middle of his forehead.

“480 yen,” he said, scratching his armpit.

At this, Mrs. Sekiguchi and Mrs. Terakado exchanged sideways glances. You see, there had been a bit of a discussion before they set out for the shop. Mrs. Sekiguchi had insisted that she would buy the drinks because Mrs. Terakado had paid for their mud therapy at the hot springs. But then Mrs. Terakado insisted that she would buy them because Mrs. Sekiguchi had paid for their chalet. As a result, neither of them had brought their wallets. But then Mrs. Ishihama stepped up to the plate, took out her frog-shaped purse, and handed the shopkeeper a 10,000-yen note.

“I can’t change that,” he said with a shrug, “I’ve only got one 2,000 and two 1,000 bills in the till. Haven’t you got anything smaller?”

The obliging Mrs. Ish — who was a little bit light in the brain department — leafed through her stash of 5,000-, 2,000- and 1,000-yen notes.

“I don’t believe I do,” she said, carefully examining each one in turn. “Perhaps if you were to lend me a pair of scissors …”

Tani-san, on the other hand, could have quite easily provided him with the correct change, but she didn’t like his attitude, so she chose not to. Instead, she grabbed the four sweating bottles and handed one to each of her friends, quietly instructing them to follow her lead. The situation was about to get a lot more complicated than it needed to be.

Turning then, she squared up to the owner and drew herself up to her full height, which was well over four feet.

“Now, see here,” she said. “We’re not going to give you any of our money because we don’t like you. But neither are we common thieves. So instead of cash, you’ll just have to accept payment in either goods or services. You decide.”

“What?” said the hapless proprietor, thrown off his game, such as it was.

“Goods or services,” repeated Tani-san. “Which is it to be?”

The little man gave a disbelieving grunt and looked from one to the other.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Is this some sort of joke?”

“No joke,” said Tani-san. “Have you never heard of bartering, the act of exchanging one commodity for another? You give us these drinks in exchange for four penicillin tablets — that sort of thing?”

“Penicillin tablets?”

“Well, penicillin tablets or beaver pelts. Whichever is the most appropriate.”

This met with a perplexed silence. It was as though they had just stepped into the retail equivalent of the Twilight Zone.

“Look,” said the shopkeeper, “I haven’t got time for silly games.” (Although, actually, he had.) “If you’re not going pay for those drinks, you’ll have to put them back.”

However, Tani-san held on to her thirst-quenching beverage, which she had every intention of consuming in the next three minutes.

“Let me assure you, it’s no game,” she said. “In fact, given your current attitude, I would like to propose that we suspend the monetary system for the purposes of this transaction.”

The shopkeeper frowned.

“You can’t just do that off your own bat,” he said. “It’s not your decision. I get the money, you get the drinks. That’s how this works.”

“Yes,” admitted Tani-san, “well of course it is a system that has been found to work, although the downside is that it is extremely boring. Besides, the concept of money only exists by joint agreement. If the majority stop believing in it then it ceases to be a valid means of exchange.”

With that, she turned to her three friends.

“Hands up all those who have stopped believing in the monetary system,” she said.

As before, Mrs. Sekiguchi and Mrs. Terakado exchanged glances because they were not entirely sure what was expected of them. But then Mrs. Sekiguchi slowly raised her hand, followed by Mrs. Terakado, who smiled sheepishly at the shopkeeper. As for Mrs. Ish, she just stood there gazing gormlessly into space until a swift poke in the ribs from Tani-san prompted her to do the same. Tani-san’s vote made it a landslide victory for the barterers.

“I make that four to one,” she said, gazing at the shopkeeper. “So I ask you again: goods or services?”

Now, let’s just take a moment and imagine what it was like to be in his shoes: Week after week, month after month, wasting away in that miserable little hole of a shop with nothing to look out on but an empty stretch of tarmac. When you’re not filling your days with online gambling and daytime TV, you go through the motions of reorganizing the shelves, checking the stock, fixing the strip lights, and touching up the strawberry. But business is so bad that you don’t even bother to keep much money in the till anymore. The only living thing that you have seen in the last 24 hours is a bean goose that flew down on Tuesday morning and did its business on the veranda. But then, just when you are about to chuck it all in and take the gas pipe, real human customers come walking through your door, thus lending some semblance of purpose to an otherwise thankless existence. Yet all you get is this:

“… Well, come on,” urged Tani-san. “Make your mind up. We haven’t got all day. Just remember: We’re not going to give you any money because we don’t believe in it anymore.”

Is it any wonder, in light of the above, that he suddenly lost it?

“Okay! Fine!” he snapped, turning bright red and waving his arms about like a foreigner. “Two can play at that game! As of now, those drinks are not for sale. And neither is anything else for that matter. In fact, now I come to think of it, this is not a shop at all. It’s a roadside exhibition of contemporary foodstuffs. There! How do you like that?”

On the quiet, Tani-san was rather pleased with his return volley, though she was quick to counter it.

“I see,” she said. “In that case, you leave us no alternative but to force your hand. Ladies …”

With that, she unscrewed the cap on her bottle and took a long, refreshing swig of liquid bliss. Needless to say, her three desiccated friends required very little encouragement to do likewise.

“Hey! Hey! Stop that!” remonstrated the shopkeeper with a series of impotent gestures. “You haven’t paid for those yet! Stop it! Stop it, I say!”

Yet his angry protests made not a jot of difference. As soon as the ladies put those bottles to their lips, the die was cast and there was no going back. Indeed, the hard-nosed pragmatist in him realized this and was already planning his next move. One thing he could do was to call the police. The only problem with that was it would take ages for them to get there from Nagano, and in the meantime he would have to hold four middle-aged ladies hostage, which was problematic in itself. In the end, it hardly seemed worth it for a measly 480 yen. All the same, he felt that he should come away from the situation with something — just to save face if nothing else. And so inevitably he found himself playing into Tani-san’s hands, a fact of which he was all too painfully aware.

“All right, all right,” he conceded, slumping defeatedly onto the stool behind the counter. “I give up. What ‘goods’ have you got?”

So then his four troublesome customers proceeded to empty out their pockets, laying the contents on the table in front of him. Before long, there was quite an accumulation of odds and ends. Sifting through the used tissues and the half-eaten candy bars, he alighted on a tubular object, which was like a glue stick but bright yellow.

“… And what, may I ask, is this?” he enquired, holding it up between thumb and forefinger.

“Oh, ah, yes!” said Mrs. Terakado, recognizing it as hers. “Now that is what they call a butter stick. It’s for buttering toast. I tend to carry it around with me in case of emergencies.”

He was tempted to seek clarification on this last point, but decided that it wasn’t worth it.

“And this?” he asked, equally mystified by a small glass bottle containing the dregs of some colorless liquid.

“Knee cleaning ointment,” mumbled a shamefaced Mrs. Sekiguchi, looking to her feet.

He peered quizzically at the label on the bottle and then returned it to the pile of half-melted peppermints, loose hairpins, and out-of-date promotional vouchers, none of which were acceptable recompense for the four drinks. But then he had an inspired thought:

“… You did say goods or services?” he enquired craftily.

“I did,” said Tani-san, eyeing him from across the counter. “What of it?”

“Come with me,” he said.

With that, he got up and led them through the curtain into the kitchen at the back. They then found themselves in the dingiest stockroom that Tani-san had ever seen: thick with cobwebs and permeated by the stench of rotting pilchards. A single naked light bulb illuminated a set of shelves and a large fridge-freezer that sat against the wall, caked in unholy residues.

From one dark corner, he then produced a mop, a bucket, and a box of cleaning materials, which he thrust into the ladies’ hands.

“Clean this place up,” he said. “And we’ll call it quits.”

Feeling rather pleased with himself, he left them to it and headed back through into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Soon he was settled in his favorite corner with a bag of green tea Kit Kats and a dog-eared manga. To add to his contentment on this occasion, there were the soothing sounds of his annoying customers laboring away in the background to pay off their debt — well, three of them were laboring away. Tani-san was supervising, naturally.

Yet it wasn’t long after that he became aware it had suddenly gone very quiet back there. Grumbling under his breath, he set aside the adventures of Astro Boy and headed down the passageway into the stockroom, only to find it deserted and with the back door wedged open.

When he stepped outside into the sunshine, the first things he noticed were the four bothersome ladies sitting along the wall, chatting quietly to each other while they waited for their driver to pick them up. Close by was the fridge-freezer, which they had disconnected and dragged outside into the car park. To make matters worse, they had emptied it of its contents. There was row upon row of ice creams, soba noodles, sandwiches, and rice balls all laid out on the ground in neat lines, thawing in the afternoon heat.

“What are you doing?” he asked, gazing at their handiwork aghast. “You can’t just quit the job half way through and leave all this stock lying around! I’ll lose the lot!”

“On the contrary,” said the ladies’ foreman, feigning offence. “I think you’ll find, on closer inspection, that we have more than fulfilled our half of the bargain.”

“Oh no, you haven’t!” he retorted. “Not by a long chalk!”

“Well, I beg to I disagree,” said Tani-san. “We have. Obviously.”

In the face of her unshakeable certainty, the proprietor was at a loss for words. All he could do was to hold out his arms in mute appeal until, at last, his objections emerged by means of the appropriate orifice — any other, and he would have been in big trouble:

“By what tortuous line of reasoning can you even begin to say that?” came his outraged reply. “All you’ve done is move things around and make a mess. In fact, it’s far worse now than it was at the beginning! Just look at my Green Tea Haagen-Dazs! It’s like a chemical spill!”

“Well, I can’t help that,” Tani-san calmly explained to him. “The deal was very straightforward: We were to reimburse you for four bottles of water, which, by my calculation, equates to 6 minutes of labor from four low-skilled workers on the minimum wage. In point of fact, we actually worked for 7 minutes 47 seconds. So if anything, you owe us. But of course, if it’s so important to get your stock back into the freezer before it starts growing hair, I would be more than happy to renegotiate on behalf of my members.”

I only need add that by time their driver finally pulled up outside the shop, the forecourt had been cleared of all perishable foodstuffs. Moments later, the ladies themselves came marching out of the entrance, loaded high with sandwiches, cakes, biscuits, cup noodles, and chocolate. Tani-san was the last to emerge, closely followed by the angry shopkeeper, who handed her his last two family-sized bags of potato chips as she climbed into the back of the newly-repaired minivan.

“Please don’t ever come this way again,” he said.

Needless to say, she had no intention of doing so, although it wasn’t the last time she saw him. A year or so later, she was at home one evening, half-watching the NHK news when his unflattering mug shot came up on the screen. Reaching for the TV remote, she turned up the volume:

“… so-called mastermind of the Kokan Gang,” said the commentator, “all of whom were arrested last night at a branch of One-Stop in a district of Shibata. For several months, this notorious gang of criminals have been terrorizing lonely convenience stores in Niigata and the surrounding prefectures, forcing retailers to relinquish their stock by rejecting the monetary system. At ten o’clock last night, they entered the Tsukioka branch of One-Stop unaware that Tatsuya Harada, Professor of Economics at Tokyo University, was standing behind them in the queue. With no regard for his personal safety, the professor argued the case for strict monetarist policies for a full 20 minutes, keeping the criminals intellectually cornered until the police arrived.”

Featured image: Shutterstock.com