Black Glass

by Karen Joy Fowler

  • • •

  I’M GOING TO LEAVE YOU with a bit of theory to think about. It’s a sort of riddle. There are good Indians, there are bad Indians, and there are dead Indians. Which am I?

  There can be more than one right answer.

  THE BREW

  I spent last Christmas in The Hague. I hadn’t wanted to be in a foreign country and away from the family at Christmastime, but it happened. Once I was there I found it lonely but also pleasantly insulated. The streets were strung with lights and it rained often, so the lights reflected off the shiny cobblestones, came at you out of the clouds like pale, golden bubbles. If you could ignore the damp, you felt wrapped in cotton, wrapped against breaking. I heightened the feeling by stopping in an ice cream shop for a cup of tea with rum.

  Of course it was an illusion. Ever since I was young, whenever I have traveled, my mother has contrived to have a letter sent, usually waiting for me, sometimes a day or two behind my arrival. I am her only daughter and she was not the sort to let an illness stop her, and so the letter was at the hotel when I returned from my tea. It was a very cheerful letter, very loving, and the message that it was probably the last letter I would get from her and that I needed to finish things up and hurry home was nowhere on the page but only in my heart. She sent some funny family stories and some small-town gossip, and the death she talked about was not her own but belonged instead to an old man who was once a neighbor of ours.

  After I read the letter I wanted to go out again, to see if I could recover the mood of the mists and the golden lights. I tried. I walked for hours, wandering in and out of the clouds, out to the canals and into the stores. Although my own children are too old for toys and too young for grandchildren, I did a lot of window shopping at the toy stores. I was puzzling over the black elf they have in Holland, St. Nicholas’s sidekick, wondering who he was and where he came into it all, when I saw a music box. It was a glass globe on a wooden base, and if you wound it, it played music, and if you shook it, it snowed. Inside the globe there was a tiny forest of ceramic trees and, in the center, a unicorn with a silver horn, corkscrewed, like a narwhal’s, and one gaily bent foreleg. A unicorn, tinted blue and frolicking in the snow.

  What appealed to me most about the music box was not the snow or the unicorn but the size. It was a little world, all enclosed, and I could imagine it as a real place, a place I could go. A little winter. There was an aquarium in the lobby of my hotel, and I had a similar reaction to it. A little piece of ocean there, in the dry land of the lobby. Sometimes we can find a smaller world where we can live, inside the bigger world where we cannot.

  Otherwise the store was filled with items tied in to The Lion King. Less enchanting items to my mind—why is it that children always side with the aristocracy? Little royalists, each and every one of us, until we grow up and find ourselves in the cubicle or the scullery. And even then there’s a sense of injustice about it all. Someone belongs there, but surely not us.

  I’m going to tell you a secret, something I have never told anyone before. I took an oath when I was seventeen years old and have never broken it, although I cannot, in general, be trusted with secrets and usually try to warn people of this before they confide in me. But the oath was about the man who died, my old neighbor, and so I am no longer bound to it. The secret takes the form of a story.

  I should warn you that parts of the story will be hard to believe. Parts of it are not much to my credit, but I don’t suppose you’ll have trouble believing those. It’s a big story, and this is just a small piece of it, my piece, which ends with my mother’s letter and The Hague and the unicorn music box.

  It begins in Bloomington, Indiana, the year I turned ten. It snowed early and often that year. My friend Bobby and I built caves of snow, choirs of snowmen, and bridges that collapsed if you ever tried to actually walk them.

  We had a neighbor who lived next door to me and across the street from Bobby. His name was John McBean. Until that year McBean had been a figure of almost no interest to us. He didn’t care for children much, and why should he? Behind his back we called him Rudolph, because he had a large purplish nose, and cold weather whitened the rest of his face into paste so his nose stood out in startling contrast. He had no wife, no family that we were aware of. People used to pity that back then. He seemed to us quite an old man, grandfather age, but we were children, what did we know? Even now I have no idea what he did for a living. He was retired when I knew him, but I have no idea of what he was retired from. Work, such as our fathers did, was nothing very interesting, nothing to speculate on. We thought the name McBean rather funny, and then he was quite the skinflint, which struck us all, even our parents, as delightful, since he actually was Scottish. It gave rise to many jokes, limp, in retrospect, but pretty rich back then.

  One afternoon that year Mr. McBean slipped in his icy yard. He went down with a roar. My father ran out to him, but as my father was helping him up, McBean tried to hit him in the chin. My father came home much amused. “He said I was a British spy,” my father told my mother.

  “You devil,” she said. She kissed him.

  He kissed her back. “It had something to do with Bonnie Prince Charlie. He wants to see a Stuart on the throne of England. He seemed to think I was preventing it.”

  As luck would have it, this was also the year that Disney ran a television episode on the Great Pretender. I have a vague picture in my mind of a British actor—the same one who appeared with Hayley Mills in The Moon-Spinners. Whatever happened to him, whoever he was?

  So Bobby and I gave up the ever popular game of World War II and began instead, for a brief period, to play at being Jacobites. The struggle for the throne of England involved less direct confrontation, fewer sound effects, and less running about. It was a game of stealth, of hiding and escaping, altogether a more adult activity.

  It was my idea to break into the McBean cellar as a covert operation on behalf of the prince. I was interested in the cellar, having begun to note how often and at what odd hours McBean went down there. The cellar window could be seen from my bedroom. Once I rose late at night, and in the short time I watched, the light went on and off three times. It seemed a signal. I told Bobby that Mr. McBean might be holding the prince captive down there and that we should go and see. This plan added a real sense of danger to our imaginary game, without, we thought, actually putting us into peril.

  The cellar door was set at an incline, and such were the times that it shocked us to try it and find it locked. Bobby thought he could fit through the little window, whose latch could be lifted with a pencil. If he couldn’t, I certainly could, though I was desperately hoping it wouldn’t come to that—already at age ten I was more of an idea person. Bobby had the spirit. So I offered to go around the front and distract Mr. McBean long enough for Bobby to try the window. I believe that I said he shouldn’t actually enter, that we would save that for a time when McBean was away. That’s the way I remember it, my saying that.

  And I remember that it had just snowed again, a fresh white powder and a north wind, so the snow blew off the trees as if it were still coming down. It was bright, one of those paradoxical days of sun and ice, and so much light everything was drowned in it so you stumbled about as if there were no light at all. My scarf was iced with breath and my footprints were as large as a man’s. I knocked at the front door, but my mittens muffled the sound. It took several tries and much pounding before Mr. McBean answered, too long to be accounted for simply by the mittens. When he did answer, he did it without opening the door.

  “Go on with you,” he said. “This is not a good time.”

  “Would you like your walk shoveled?” I asked him.

  “A slip of a girl like you? You couldn’t even lift the shovel.” I imagine there is a tone, an expression, that would make this response affectionate, but Mr. McBean affected neither. He opened the door enough to tower over me with his blue nose, his glu
ey face, and the clenched set of his mouth.

  “Bobby would help me. Thirty cents.”

  “Thirty cents! And that’s the idlest boy God ever created. Thirty cents?”

  “Since it’s to be split. Fifteen cents each.”

  The door was closing again.

  “Twenty cents.”

  “I’ve been shoveling my own walk long enough. No reason to stop.”

  The door clicked shut. The whole exchange had taken less than a minute. I stood undecidedly at the door for another minute, then stepped off the porch, into the yard. I walked around the back. I got there just in time to see the cellar light go on. The window was open. Bobby was gone.

  I stood outside, but there was a wind, as I’ve said, and I couldn’t hear and it was so bright outside and so dim within, I could hardly see. I knew that Bobby was inside, because there were no footprints leading away but my own. I had looked through the window on other occasions so I knew the light was a single bulb, hanging by its neck like a turnip, and that there were many objects between me and it, old and broken furniture, rusted tools, lawn mowers and rakes, boxes piled into stairs. I waited. I think I waited a very long time. The light went out. I waited some more. I moved to a tree, using it as a windbreak until finally it was clear there was no point in waiting any longer. Then I ran home, my face stinging with cold and tears, into our living room, where my mother pulled off my stiff scarf and rubbed my hands until the pins came into them. She made me cocoa with marshmallows. I would like you to believe that the next few hours were a very bad time for me, that I suffered a good deal more than Bobby did.

  That case being so hard to make persuasively, I will tell you instead what was happening to him.

  • • •

  BOBBY DID, INDEED, manage to wiggle in through the window, although it was hard enough to give him some pause as to how he would get out again. He landed on a stack of wooden crates, conveniently offset so that he could descend them like steps. Everywhere was cobwebs and dust; it was too dark to see this, but he could feel it and smell it. He was groping his way forward, hand over hand, when he heard the door at the top of the stairs. At the very moment the light went on, he found himself looking down the empty eye slit of a suit of armor. It made him gasp; he couldn’t help it. So he heard the footsteps on the stairs stop suddenly and then begin again, wary now. He hid himself behind a barrel. He thought maybe he’d escape notice—there was so much stuff in the cellar and the light so dim—and that was the worst time, those moments when he thought he might make it, much worse than what came next, when he found himself staring into the cracked and reddened eyes of Mr. McBean.

  “What the devil are you doing?” McBean asked. He had a smoky, startled voice. “You’ve no business down here.”

  “I was just playing a game,” Bobby told him, but he didn’t seem to hear.

  “Who sent you? What did they tell you?”

  He seemed to be frightened—of Bobby!—and angry, and that was to be expected, but there was something else that began to dawn on Bobby only slowly. His accent had thickened with every word. Mr. McBean was deadly drunk. He reached into Bobby’s hiding place and hauled him out of it, and his breath, as Bobby came closer, was as ripe as spoiled apples.

  “We were playing at putting a Stuart on the throne,” Bobby told him, imagining he could sympathize with this, but it seemed to be the wrong thing to say.

  He pulled Bobby by the arm to the stairs. “Up we go.”

  “I have to be home by dinner.” By now Bobby was very frightened.

  “We’ll see. I have to think what’s to be done with you,” said McBean.

  They reached the door, then moved on into the living room, where they sat for a long time in silence while McBean’s eyes turned redder and redder and his fingers pinched into Bobby’s arm. With his free hand, he drank. Perhaps this is what kept him warm, for the house was very cold and Bobby was glad he still had his coat on. Bobby was both trembling and shivering.

  “Who told you about Prince Charlie?” McBean asked finally. “What did they say to you?” So Bobby told him what he knew, the Disney version, long as he could make it, waiting of course, for me to do something, to send someone. McBean made the story longer by interrupting with suspicious and skeptical questions. Eventually the questions ceased and his grip loosened. Bobby hoped he might be falling asleep. His eyes were lowered. But when Bobby stopped talking, McBean shook himself awake, and his hand was a clamp on Bobby’s forearm again. “What a load of treacle.” His voice filled with contemptuous spit. “It was nothing like that.”

  He stared at Bobby for a moment and then past him.

  “I’ve never told this story before,” he said, and the pupils of his eyes were as empty and dark as the slit in the armor. “No doubt I shall regret telling it now.”

  • • •

  IN THE DAYS of the bonnie prince, the head of the McBane clan was the charismatic Ian McBane. Ian was a man with many talents, all of which he had honed and refined over the fifty-odd years he had lived so far. He was a botanist, an orientalist, a poet, and a master brewer. He was also a godly man, a paragon, perhaps. At least in this story. To be godly is a hard thing and may create a hard man. A godly man is not necessarily a kindly man, although he can be, of course.

  Now in those days, the woods and caves of Scotland were filled with witches; the church waged constant battle. Some of them were old and haggish, but others were mortally beautiful. The two words go together, mind you, mortal and beautiful. Nothing is so beautiful as that which will fade.

  These witches were well aware of Ian McBane. They envied him his skills in the brewery, coveted his knowledge of chemistry. They themselves were always boiling and stirring, but they could only do what they knew how to do. Besides, his godliness irked them. Many times they sent the most beautiful among them, tricked out further with charms and incantations, to visit Ian McBane in his bedchamber and offer what they could offer in return for expert advice. They were so touching in their eagerness for knowledge, so unaware of their own desirability. They had the perfection of dreams. But Ian, who was after all fifty and not twenty, withstood them.

  All of Scotland was hoping to see Charles Edward Stuart on the throne, and from hopes they progressed to rumors and from rumors to sightings. Then came the great victory at Falkirk. Naturally, Ian wished to do his part and naturally, being a man of influence and standing, his part must be a large one. It was the sin of ambition which gave the witches an opening.

  This time the woman they sent was not young and beautiful but old and sweet. She was everyone’s mother. She wore a scarf on her hair and her stockings rolled at her ankles. Blue rivers ran just beneath the skin of her legs. Out of her sleeve she drew a leather pouch.

  “From the end of the world,” she said. “Brought me by a black warrior riding a white elephant, carried over mountains and across oceans.” She made it a lullaby. Ian was drowsy when she finished. So she took his hand and emptied the pouch into his palm, closing it for him. When he opened his hand, he held the curled shards and splinters of a unicorn’s horn.

  Ian had never seen a unicorn’s horn before, although he knew that the king of Denmark had an entire throne made of them. A unicorn’s horn is a thing of power. It purifies water, nullifies poison. The witch reached out to Ian, slit his thumb with her one long nail, so his thumb ran blood. Then she touched the wound with a piece of horn. His thumb healed before his eyes, healed as if it had never been cut, the blood running back inside, the cut sealing over like water.

  In return Ian gave the witch what she asked. He had given her his godliness, too, but he didn’t know this at the time. When the witch was gone, Ian took the horn and ground it into dust. He subjected it to one more test of authenticity. He mixed a few grains into a hemlock concoction and fed it to his cat, stroking it down her throat. The cat followed the hemlock with a saucer of milk, which she wiped, purring,
from her whiskers.

  Ian had already put down a very fine single malt whiskey, many bottles, enough for the entire McBane clan to toast the coronation of Charles Stuart. It was golden in color and 90 proof, enough to make a large man feel larger without incapacitating him. Ian added a few pinches of the horn to every bottle. The whiskey color shattered and then vanished, so the standing bottle was filled with liquid the color of rainwater, but if you shook it, it pearled like the sea. Ian bottled his brew with a unicorn label, the unicorn enraged, two hooves slicing the air.

  Have you ever heard of the American ghost dancers? The Boxers of China? Same sort of thing here. Ian distributed his whiskey to the McBanes before they marched off to Culloden. Ian assured them that the drink, taken just before the battle, would make them invulnerable. Sword wounds would seal up overnight; bullets would pass through flesh as if it were air.

  I don’t suppose your Disney says very much about Culloden. A massacre is a hard thing to set to music. Certainly they tell no stories and sing no songs about the McBanes that day. Davie McBane was the first to go, reeling about drunkenly and falling beneath one of the McBanes’ own horses. Little Angus went next, shouting and racing down the top of a small hill, but before he could strike a single blow for Scotland, a dozen arrows jutted from him at all points. His name was a joke and he made a big, fat target. His youngest brother, Robbie, a boy of only fifteen years, followed Angus in, and so delirious with whiskey that he wore no helmet and carried no weapon. His stomach was split open like a purse. An hour later, only two of the McBanes still lived. The rest had died grotesquely, humorously, without accounting for a single enemy death.