Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  And I didn’t ask him to. I hadn’t taught children for twenty-three years for nothing. One can only push so far, and then one must rely on righteous guilt.

  I remember clearly one thing Walt said that day. I didn’t hold the comment against him. I still don’t. He was so young. He said, “There’s no money in real art.”

  I said gently, “But there’s soul in it.”

  And, of course, he had no answer to that.

  The next month America entered the war. Walt wrote me that he’d joined the Navy. But all during his time at the Naval base in Connecticut, and all during his time in France driving supply trucks, he wrote me that he kept studying and learning, copying fine paintings. He wrote that he had a copy of Whistler’s “The Little White Girl” in his kit bag, and wrinkled and stained though it became, he looked at it every night, drinking in the lines and composition.

  It was only later that I learned about the cowboys he drew on the supply trucks, and the fake Croix de Guerre he painted on soldiers’ leather jackets for ten francs each.

  Well, I’m sure you can see where this is going, Mr. Snelling. I notice that you’re not looking at your watch now. Isn’t it amazing how all the epic human battles can be fought on such humble grounds? Altruism versus selfishness in every hospital. Civilization versus barbarism in every classroom. And the highest ideals of Art versus base commerce in letters carried by the humble Postal Service.

  We had it out when Walt come home. He came to see me in Marceline, the first time he’d been back since he was nine. He used a portion of his Navy pay. That alone was proof to me that the values I had tried to give him had not been dulled by the roughness of war. He came to see me even before he visited his mother.

  I waited for him in the parlor of my boardinghouse. I can still see that room, with its plush green sofa and red figured rug and Tiffany glass lamp above the round table. I remember it seemed incredible to me that the other boarders going in and out, good respectable souls that they were, had no idea of the importance of the meeting to come. And how Walt had changed! He was a man, still in uniform, with a man’s power. But I knew that my power, that of Art, was at least equal to his. In fact, there is no power greater, save that of the Creator Himself.

  “Hello, Miss Peeler,” Walt said. He seemed nervous, and a little defiant. But so glad to see me!

  “You’ve returned,” I said, and then—I don’t blush to admit this, Mr. Snelling—I cried a little. No one knew the fears I’d had for Walt’s safety during the war. I made it my business that no one should know.

  His defiance left him immediately. He sat beside me on the sofa and took my hands, and for nearly an hour he entertained me with stories of his gallant comrades in arms. People went past, watching us curiously, but I introduced him to no one. For that hour, doubly precious because of the battle to come, he was mine.

  Let me say something here, Mr. Snelling. I count it as not the weakest proof of Walt’s talent that he came to me in his hour of questioning. He was always attached to me, but this was more than mere attachment. Only the most idealistic and noblest of souls recognize that they can profit from the guidance of those that have trod the same way before. I am not, and never was, an artist. I was not entrusted with that gift myself. But I was a teacher, devoting my life to nurturing that which is highest in my students, and Walt at his crossroads recognized that.

  He pulled a sketchpad from his traveling case.

  “Now, I want you to look at this with an open mind. Promise me!” I had never seen his face so serious.

  “I will,” I said, and it was a solemn promise between us.

  He opened the pad. Page after page of drawings of a mouse with a human face, dressed in red velvet pants with two huge pearl buttons, grinning merrily. “Mortimer,” it said on some pages. Later in the sketchpad Mortimer Mouse was joined by a lady mouse. Both were shown boarding a plane powered by a dachshund wound up tight like a rubber band. The plane almost hits sketched-in mountains and trees. At the end both mice parachute to safety, the girl with a great display of patched bloomers.

  The drawing was unbelievably crude. “Mortimer’s” head was no more than a circle, with an oblong circle for a snout. His so-called legs were mere lines. The whole was merry, mocking, vulgar, nauseatingly cute, without taste or real emotions or any meaning beyond the desire to provoke the most simple-minded laugh.

  “It’s preliminary sketches for an animated motion picture,” Walt said. “Roy’s already talked to some fellows at an outfit called The Kansas City Film Ad Company. They do advertising, mostly, little one-minute animated shorts for local theaters. But they might be interested in trying for something bigger. This could be my opportunity!”

  I remember that I closed my eyes. It was a prayer for eloquence.

  “Walt,” I finally said, “this is a turning point for the rest of your life. If you give your talent to . . . to this, it will be exactly like using a fine horsehair brush to paint a barn door. In a short time the brush is worn and damaged, unfit for anything else. But unlike a brush, dear Walt, your talent is not replaceable—once dulled, you can never obtain another. Your talent is given you only once, and to waste its freshness, its fine edges, on cartoons . . .”

  For a moment I thought I couldn’t go on. But then words found me. Art itself came to my rescue, giving my words wings. I spoke of Gauguin, turning his back on his comfortable stockbroker life to paint from his heart in the South Seas. I spoke of Delacroix, staying faithful to the patrician and the sublime despite the scorn heaped on him. I spoke of Art’s scared mission to capture the essence of man’s soul, and of—oh!—the emptiness of the lives of those who accept tawdry, secondhand substitutes for that soul. I scarcely know what I said. I would have said anything to keep him faithful to the best that was in him, the highest of which he was capable.

  He listened, but I wasn’t reaching him. I could see that. He was only eighteen, and he was on fire with the vulgar hustle the war had brought to the cities. The post-war era—the first war, I mean—was a sad time for true culture, Mr. Snelling. Not that the present day is any better.

  A cookie with your tea?

  Oh, of course the story’s not over! It’s just that I never quite know how to tell people the next part. It always sounds . . . mystical. And in 1950, who has the spirituality to credit mystical intervention? Especially in what Art has become now? When I think of the soulless so-called Cubists, elevating technical exercises above the—

  Yes. Of course. What actually happened on the green sofa.

  I could see Walt was not persuaded. I had failed. The greatest talent it was ever my happiness to nurture was voluntarily turning himself over to Mammon. I was distraught. I begged, pleaded, argued. Finally, Walt left me, striding away with that sullen expression I knew so well from two and a half decades in the classroom. But you must remember—he was so young!

  I followed him out to the street. He started to cross. I grabbed his sleeve. He shook himself free and ran into the street. And at that moment—the neighborhood where I boarded wasn’t at all what it had once been, remember that please—at that moment a rat darted out from behind a trashcan in the adjacent alley. It ran straight toward me, and I screamed. Walt stopped in the middle of the street, and half-turned, and immediately was struck by one of Mr. Ford’s mass-produced model Ts.

  Just give me a moment, please.

  There.

  Walt said that? I am glad of it. You see, he recognizes as well as I do that the accident was his true moment of decision. If it was an accident. Walt has always denied the mystical intervention of Art herself. Still, you men persist in thinking of yourselves as so much more rational than we women, do you not?

  At any rate, Walt is certainly right when he says that dreadful time in the hospital changed his life. I visited him every day. We talked for hours. I took a formal leave from my classroom to be with him, and have never regretted it. Teaching goes on in many ways, Mr. Snelling, and education is never confined by four walls.r />
  It was a year before Walt recovered from his injuries, which I’m sure he told you were extensive. There was damage to the lungs, ribs, and hips, followed by infection. Now, of course, we would have these wonderful new antibiotics to aid his recovery, but not then. All Walt had was the sustaining belief in the highest ideals of Art, which I strengthened and girded every day. He came out of the hospital a chastened man.

  The rest I’m sure he’s told you. He’s worked thirty-two years now on the Kansas City Star, in the illustration department to be sure, but only to support himself. His real effort, his real soul, has gone into his painting. He has endured many hardships and disappointments—not unlike the masters before him. It’s a disgrace to the world, of course, that he should only have his first show at forty-nine, but then the world has always been slow to acknowledge genuine merit. And of course Walt paints the true soul of his subjects, not like these cold travesties who think painting is about the paint, Mondrian and Rothko and this Pollock person . . . When Walt’s show opens next week, you’ll see what I mean. His work bears comparison with the best of past masters. Why, there’s one picture that might almost have been painted by Burne-Jones himself.

  Dear me, I had no idea it was so late. Do you really have to go?

  Well, let me leave you with just one summary quote for your paper. Let me see, I want to choose my words carefully. How about this: “Miss Annie Peeler has had faith in Mr. Walt Disney’s talent from his childhood. His show at the Kansas City Public Library is long overdue, and this humble beginning will undoubtedly be the harbinger of acknowledgment by the art world. Miss Peeler will say of her own contribution to Mr. Disney’s career only that she did no more than any proud member of our educational system should do, striving always to keep our pupils’ eyes fixed on the highest of which humanity is capable. If we do this, our children’s success is inevitable.”

  There, how’s that?

  One last cup of tea?

  WORDS LIKE PALE STONES

  We begin the anthology with a thought-provoking fairy tale about the magic of words and the power of knowledge. Here the familiar tale of “Rumplestiltskin” is re-created in a rich story that works (like the best fairy tales) on several levels: as an entertaining piece of dark fantasy and as an exploration of the nature of the creative process.

  Nancy Kress is the author of six books to date, including a wonderfully quirky fantasy (her first novel) titled The Prince of Morning Bells. She has won the Nebula Award twice, for her story “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and the novella “Beggars in Spain.” Kress lives in Brockport, New York.

  THE GREENWOOD GREW LESS GREEN AS WE TRAVELED west. Grasses lay flatter against the earth. Brush became skimpy. Trees withered, their bare branches like crippled arms against the sky. There were no flowers. My stolen horse, double-laden but both of us so light that the animal hardly noticed, picked his way more easily through the thinning forest. Once his hooves hit some half-buried stone and sparks struck, strange pale fire slow to die away, the light wavering over the ground as if alive. I shuddered and looked away.

  But the baby watched the sparks intently, his fretful body for once still in the saddle. I could feel his sturdy little back pressed against me. He was silent, although he now has a score of words, “go” and “gimme” and “mine!” that ordinarily he uses all day long. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew how his eyes would look: wide and blue and demanding, beautiful eyes under thick black lashes. His father’s eyes, recognizing his great-great-grandfather’s country.

  It is terrible for a mother to know she is afraid of her infant son.

  I could have stabbed the prince with the spindle from the spinning wheel. Not as sharp as a needle, perhaps, but it would have done. Once I had used just such a spindle on Jack Starling, the miller’s son, who thought he could make free with me, the daughter of a village drunkard and a washerwoman whose boasting lies were as much a joke as her husband’s nightly stagger. I have the old blood in me. My father was a lord! My grandmother could fly to the moon! And, finally, My daughter Ludie is such a good spinster she can spin straw into gold!

  “Go ahead and spin me,” Jack leered when he caught me alone in our hovel. His hands were hot and his breath foul. When he pushed both against my breasts, I stabbed him with the spindle, square in the belly, and he doubled over like scythed hay. The spindle revolved in a stone whorl; I bashed him over the head with that and he went down, crashing into the milk pail with a racket like the end of the world. His head wore a bloody patch, soft as pulp, for a month.

  But there was no stone whorl, no milk bucket, no foul breath in the palace. Even the spinning was different. “See,” he said to me, elegant in his velvets and silks, his clean teeth gleaming, and the beautiful blue eyes bright with avarice, “it’s a spinning wheel. Have you ever seen one before?”

  “No,” I said, my voice sounding high and squeaky, not at all my own. Straw covered the floor, rose to the ceiling in bales, choked the air with chaff.

  “They’re new,” he said. “From the east.” He lounged against the door, and no straw clung to his doublet or knee breeches, slick with embroidery and jewels. “They spin much faster than the hand-held distaff and spindle.”

  “My spindle rested in a whorl. Not in my hand,” I said, and somehow the words gave me courage. I looked at him straight, prince or no prince. “But, my lord, I’m afraid you’ve been misled. My mother . . . says things sometimes. I cannot spin straw into gold. No mortal could.”

  He only smiled, for of course he was not mortal. Not completely. The old blood ran somewhere in his veins, mixed but there. Fevered and tainted, some said. Only the glimmerings of magic were there, and glimmerings without mastery were what made the cruelty. So I had heard all my life, but I never believed it—people will, after all, say anything—until I stood with him in that windowless room, watching his smile as he lounged against the door, chaff rising like dusty gold around me.

  “I think you are completely capable of spinning straw into gold,” he said. “In fact, I expect you to have spun all the straw in this room into gold by morning.”

  “Then you expect the moon to wipe your ass!” I said, and immediately clapped my hand over my mouth. Always, always my mouth brings me trouble. But he only went on smiling, and it was then, for the first time, that I was afraid. Of that bright, blue-eyed smile.

  “If you don’t spin it all into gold,” he said silkily, “I will have you killed. But if you do, I will marry you. There—that’s a sweet inducement, is it not? A prince for a husband for a girl like you. And for me—a wife with a dowry of endless golden fingers.”

  I saw then, as if in a vision, his fingers endlessly on me, and at the expression on my face his smile broadened.

  “A slow death,” he said, “and a painful one. But that won’t happen, will it, my magical spinster? You won’t let it happen?”

  “I cannot spin straw into gold!” I shouted, in a perfect frenzy of loathing and fear, but he never heard me. A rat crept out from behind the bales and started across the floor. The prince’s face went ashen. In a moment he was gone, whirling through the door and slamming it behind him before the rat could reach him. I heard the heavy iron bar drop into its latch on the other side, and I turned to look at the foreign spinning wheel, backed by bales to the rough beams of the ceiling.

  My knees gave way and I sank down upon the straw.

  There are so many slow and painful ways to die.

  I don’t know how long I shrank there, like some mewling and whimpering babe, visioning horrors no babe ever thought of. But when I came back to myself, the rat was still nosing at the door, trying to squeeze underneath. It should have fit; not even our village rats are so thin and mangy. On hands and knees, I scuttled to join the rat. Side by side we poked at the bottom of the door, the sides, the hinges.

  It was all fast and tight. Not even a flea could have escaped.

  Next I wormed behind the bales of straw, feeling every inch of the walls. They were st
one, and there were no chinks, no spaces made rotten by damp or moss. This angered me. Why should the palace be the only sound stone dwelling in the entire damp-eaten village? Even Jack Starling’s father’s mill had weak stones, damn his crumbling grindstone and his scurrilous soul.

  The ceiling beams were strong wood, holding up stronger, without cracks.

  There were no windows, only light from candles in stone sconces.

  The stone floor held no hidden trapdoors, nor any place to pry up the stone to make a tunnel.

  I turned to the spinning wheel. Under other circumstances I might have found it a pretty thing, of polished wood. When I touched the wheel, it spun freely, revolving the spindle much faster than even I, the best spinster in the village, could have done. With such a thing, I could have spun thread seven times as fast. I could have become prosperous, bought a new thatch roof for our leaky cottage, a proper bed for my sodden father . . .

  The rat still crouched by the door, watching me.

  I fitted straw into the distaff. Who knew—the spinning wheel itself was from some foreign place. “From the east,” he’d said. Maybe the magic of the Old Ones dwelt there, too, as well as in the west. Maybe the foreign wheel could spin straw. Maybe it could even spin the stuff into gold. How would I, the daughter of a drunkard and a lying braggart, know any different?

  I pushed the polished wheel. It revolved the spindle, and the straw was pulled forward from the distaff, under my twisting fingers, toward the spindle. The straw, straw still, broke and fell to the floor in a powder of chaff.

  I tried again. And again. The shining wheel became covered with sticky bits of straw, obscuring its brightness. The straw fell to the stone floor. It would not even wind once around the spindle.

  I screamed and kicked the spinning wheel. It fell over, hard. There was the sound of splintering wood. “By God’s blood,” I shouted at the cursed thing, “damn you for a demon!”