by Greg Bear
Mom’s voice drifted from behind the louvered doors. “Do you hear that? The poor child’s going to have nightmares. It’ll warp him.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” Dad said.
“Exaggerate what? That those filthy people are back? Ben, they must be a hundred years old now! They’re trying to do the same thing to your son that they did to your brother … and just look at him! Living in sin, writing for those hell-spawned girlie magazines.”
“He ain’t living in sin, he’s living alone in an apartment in New York City. And he writes for all kinds of places.”
“They tried to do it to you, too! Just thank God your aunt saved you.”
“Margie, I hope you don’t intend—”
“I certainly do intend. She knows all about them people. She chased them off once, she can sure do it again!”
All hell had broken loose. I didn’t understand half of it, but I could feel the presence of Great Aunt Sybil Danser. I could almost hear her crackling voice and the shustle of her satchel of Billy Grahams and Zondervans and little tiny pamphlets with shining light in blue offset on their covers.
I knew there was no way to get the full story from the folks short of listening in, but they’d stopped talking and were sitting in that stony kind of silence that indicated Dad’s disgust and Mom’s determination. I was mad that nobody was blaming me, as if I were some idiot child not capable of being bad on my own. I was mad at Michael for precipitating the whole mess.
And I was curious. Were the man and woman more than a hundred years old? Why hadn’t I seen them before, in town, or heard about them from other kids? Surely I wasn’t the only one they’d seen on the road and told stories to.
I decided to get to the source. I walked up to the louvered doors and leaned my cheek against them. “Can I go play at George’s?”
“Yes,” Mom said. “Be back for evening chores.”
George lived on the next farm, a mile and a half east. I took my bike and rode down the old dirt road going south.
They were both under the same tree, eating a picnic lunch from a wicker basket. I pulled my bike over and leaned it against the gray rock, shading my eyes to see them more clearly.
“Hello, boy,” the old man said. “Ain’t seen you in a while.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. The woman offered me a cookie, and I refused with a muttered, “No, thank you, ma’am.”
“Well then, perhaps you’d like to tell us your story.”
“No, ma’am.”
“No story to tell us? That’s odd. Meg was sure you had a story in you someplace. Peeking out from behind your ears maybe, thumbing its nose at us.”
The woman smiled ingratiatingly. “Tea?”
“There’s going to be trouble,” I said.
“Already?” The woman smoothed the skirt in her lap and set a plate of nut bread into it. “Well, it comes sooner or later, this time sooner. What do you think of it, boy?”
“I think I got into a lot of trouble for not much being bad,” I said. “I don’t know why.”
“Sit down, then,” the old man said. “Listen to a tale, then tell us what’s going on.”
I sat down, not too keen about hearing another story, but out of politeness. I took a piece of nut bread and nibbled on it as the woman sipped her tea and cleared her throat.
“Once there was a city on the shore of a broad blue sea. In the city lived five hundred children and nobody else, because the wind from the sea wouldn’t let anyone grow old. Well, children don’t have kids of their own, of course, so when the wind came up in the first year the city never grew any larger.”
“Where’d all the grown-ups go?” I asked. The old man held his fingers to his lips and shook his head.
“The children tried to play all day, but it wasn’t enough. They became frightened at night and had bad dreams. There was nobody to comfort them because only grown-ups are really good at making nightmares go away. Now, sometimes nightmares are white horses that come out of the sea, so they set up guards along the beaches and fought them back with wands made of blackthorn. But there was another kind of nightmare, horses that were black and rose out of the ground, and those were impossible to guard against. So the children got together one day and decided to tell all the scary stories there were to tell, to prepare themselves for all the nightmares. They found it was pretty easy to think up scary stories, and every one of them had a story or two to tell. They stayed up all night spinning yarns about ghosts and dead things, and live things that shouldn’t have been, and things that were neither. They talked about death and about monsters that suck blood, about things that live way deep in the earth and long, thin things that sneak through cracks in doors to lean over beds at night and babble in tongues no one could understand. They talked about eyes without heads, and vice versa, and little blue shoes that walk across a cold empty white room, with no one in them, and a bunk bed that creaks when it’s empty, and a printing press that produces newspapers from a city that never was. Pretty soon, by morning, they’d told all the scary stories. When the black horses came out of the ground the next night, and the white horses trotted in from the sea, the children greeted them with cakes and ginger ale, and they all held a big party. They also invited the pale sheet-things from the clouds, and everyone ate hearty and had a good time. One white horse let a little boy ride on it and took him wherever he wanted to go. And there were no more bad dreams in the city of children by the sea.”
I finished the piece of bread and wiped my hands on my crossed legs. “So that’s why you tried to scare me,” I said.
She shook her head. “I never have a reason for telling a story, and neither should you.”
“I don’t think I’m going to tell stories anymore,” I said. “The folks get too upset.”
“Philistines,” the old man said, looking off across the fields.
“Listen, young man. There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitive—and getting away with it—is far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun.”
“Then why are Mom and Dad so mad?”
The old man shook his head. “An eternal mystery.”
“Well, I’m not so sure,” I said. “I scared my little brother pretty bad, and that’s not nice.”
“Being scared is nothing,” the old woman said. “Being bored, or ignorant—now that’s a crime.”
“I still don’t know. My folks say you have to be a hundred years old. You did something to my uncle they didn’t like, and that was a long time ago. What kind of people are you, anyway?”
The old man smiled. “Old, yes. But not a hundred.”
“I just came out here to warn you. Mom and Dad are bringing out my great aunt, and she’s no fun for anyone. You better go away.” With that said, I ran back to my bike and rode off, pumping for all I was worth. I was between a rock and a hard place.
I loved my folks but I itched to hear more stories. Why wasn’t it easier to make decisions?
That night I slept restlessly. I didn’t have any dreams, but I kept waking up with something pounding at the back of my head, like it wanted to be let in. I scrunched my face up and pressed it back.
At Sunday breakfast, Mom looked across the table at me and put on a kind face. “We’re going to pick up Auntie Danser this afternoon, at the airport,” she said.
My face went like warm butter.
“You’ll come with us, won’t you?” she asked. “You always did like the airport.”
“All the way from where she lives?” I asked.
“From Omaha,” Dad said.
I didn’t want to go, but it was more a command than a request. I nodded, and Dad smiled at me around his pipe.
“Don’t eat too many biscuits,” Mom warned him. “Y
ou’re putting on weight again.”
“I’ll wear it off come harvest. You cook as if the whole crew was here, anyway.”
“Auntie Danser will straighten it all out,” Mom said, her mind elsewhere. I caught the suggestion of a grimace on Dad’s face, and the pipe wriggled as he bit down on it harder.
The airport was something out of a TV space movie. It went on forever, with stairways going up to restaurants and big smoky windows that looked out on the screaming jets, and crowds of people, all leaving, except for one pear-shaped figure in a cotton print dress with fat ankles and glasses thick as headlamps. I knew her from a hundred yards.
When we met, she shook hands with Mom, hugged Dad as if she didn’t want to, then bent down and gave me a smile. Her teeth were yellow and even, sound as a horse’s. She was the ugliest woman I’d ever seen. She smelled of lilacs. To this day lilacs take my appetite away.
She carried a bag. Part of it was filled with knitting, part with books and pamphlets. I always wondered why she never carried a Bible—just Billy Grahams and Zondervans.
One pamphlet fell out, and Dad bent to pick it up.
“Keep it, read it,” Auntie Danser instructed him. “Do you good.” She turned to Mom and scrutinized her from the bottom of a swimming pool. “You’re looking good. He must be treating you right.”
Dad ushered us out the automatic doors into the dry heat. Her one suitcase was light as a mummy and probably just as empty. I carried it, and it didn’t even bring sweat to my brow. Her life was not in clothes and toiletry but in the plastic knitting bag.
We drove back to the farm in the big white station wagon. I leaned my head against the cool glass of the rear seat window and considered puking. Auntie Danser, I told myself, was like a mental dose of castor oil. Or like a visit to the dentist. Even if nothing was going to happen her smell presaged disaster, and like a horse sniffing a storm, my entrails worried.
Mom looked across the seat at me—Auntie Danser was riding up front with Dad—and asked, “You feeling okay? Did they give you anything to eat? Anything funny?”
I said they’d given me a piece of nut bread. Mom went, “Oh, Lord.”
“Margie, they don’t work like that. They got other ways.” Auntie Danser leaned over the backseat and goggled at me. “Boy’s just worried. I know all about it. These people and I have had it out before.”
Through those murky glasses, her flat eyes knew me to my young pithy core. I didn’t like being known so well. I could see that Auntie Danser’s life was firm and predictable, and I made a sudden commitment I liked the man and woman. They caused trouble, but they were the exact opposite of my great aunt. I felt better, and I gave her a reassuring grin. “Boy will be okay,” she said. “Just a colic of the upset mind.”
Michael and Barbara sat on the front porch as the car drove up. Somehow a visit by Auntie Danser didn’t bother them as much as it did me. They didn’t fawn over her, but they accepted her without complaining—even out of adult earshot. That made me think more carefully about them. I decided I didn’t love them any the less, but I couldn’t trust them, either. The world was taking sides, and so far on my side I was very lonely. I didn’t count the two old people on my side, because I wasn’t sure they were—but they came a lot closer than anybody in my family.
Auntie Danser wanted to read Billy Graham books to us kids after dinner, but Dad snuck us out before Mom could gather us together—all but Barbara, who stayed to listen. We watched the sunset from the loft of the old wood barn, then tried to catch the little birds that lived in the rafters. By dark and bedtime I was hungry, but not for food.
I asked Dad if he’d tell me a story before bed.
“You know your mom doesn’t approve of all that fairy-tale stuff,” he said.
“Then no fairy tales. Just a story.”
“I’m out of practice, son,” he confided. He looked very sad. “Your mom says we should concentrate on things that are real and not waste our time with make-believe. Life’s hard. I may have to sell the farm, you know, and work for that feed-mixer in Mitchell.”
I went to bed and felt like crying. A whole lot of my family had died that night, I didn’t know exactly how, or why.
But I was mad.
I didn’t go to school the next day. During the night I’d had a dream, which came so true and whole to me that I had to rush to the stand of cottonwoods and tell the old people.
I grabbed up my lunch box and walked at a brisk pace down the road.
They weren’t under the tree. On a piece of wire bradded to the biggest tree they’d left a note on faded brown paper. It was in a strong feminine hand, sepia-inked, delicately scribed with what could have been a goose-quill pen.
It said: “We’re at the old Hauskopf farm. Come if you must.”
Not “Come if you can.”
I felt a twinge. The Hauskopf farm, abandoned fifteen years ago and never sold, was three miles farther down the road and left on a deep-rutted fork. It took me an hour to get there.
The house still looked deserted. All the white paint had fallen off, leaving dead, silver-gray wood. The windows stared. I walked up the porch steps and knocked on the heavy oak door. For a moment I thought no one was going to answer. Then I heard what sounded like a gust of wind, but inside the house, and the old woman opened the door.
“Hello, boy,” she said. “Come for more stories?”
She invited me in. Wildflowers grew along the baseboards, and tiny roses peered from brambles that covered the walls. A quail led her train of inch-and-a-half fluffball chicks from under the stairs, into the living room. The floor was carpeted, but the flowers in the weave seemed more than patterns. I could stare down for minutes and keep picking out details.
“This way, boy,” the woman said, and took my hand. Her fingers were smooth and warm, but I had the impression they were also hard as wood.
A tree rose in the living room, growing out of the floor and sending its branches up to support the ceiling. Rabbits and quail and a lazy-looking brindle cat stared at me from the tangles of its roots. A wooden bench surrounded the base of the tree. On the side away from us, I heard someone breathing. The old man poked his head around and smiled at me, lifting his long pipe in greeting.
“Hello, boy,” he said.
“The boy looks like he’s ready to tell us a story, this time,” the woman said.
“Of course, Meg. Have a seat, boy. Cup of cider? Tea? Herb biscuit?”
“Cider, please,” I said.
The old man stood and went down the hall to the kitchen. He came back with a wooden tray and three steaming cups of mulled cider. The cinnamon tickled my nose as I sipped.
“Now. What’s your story?”
“It’s about two hawks,” I said, and then hesitated.
“Go on.”
“Brother hawks. Never did like each other. Fought for a strip of land where they could hunt.”
“Yes?”
“Finally, one hawk met an old crippled bobcat that had set up a place for itself in a rockpile. The bobcat was learning itself magic so it wouldn’t have to go out and catch dinner, which was awful hard for it now. The hawk landed near the bobcat and told it about his brother, and how cruel he was. So the bobcat said, ‘Why not give him the land for the day? Here’s what you can do.’ The bobcat told him how he could turn into a rabbit, but a very strong rabbit no hawk could hurt.”
“Wily bobcat,” the old man said, smiling.
“‘You mean, my brother wouldn’t be able to catch me?’ the hawk asked. ‘Course not,’ the bobcat said. ‘And you can teach him a lesson. You’ll tussle with him, scare him real bad—show him what tough animals there are on the land he wants. Then he’ll go away and hunt somewheres else.’ The hawk thought that sounded like a fine idea. So he let the bobcat turn him into a rabbit, and he hopped back to the land and waited in a pa
tch of grass. Sure enough, his brother’s shadow soon passed by, and then he heard a swoop and saw the claws held out. So he filled himself with being mad and jumped up and practically bit all the tail feathers off his brother. The hawk just flapped up and rolled over on the ground, blinking and gawking with his beak wide. ‘Rabbit,’ he said, ‘that’s not natural. Rabbits don’t act that way.’
“‘Round here they do,’ the hawk-rabbit said. ‘This is a tough old land, and all the animals here know the tricks of escaping from bad birds like you.’ This scared the brother hawk, and he flew away as best he could and never came back again. The hawk-rabbit hopped to the rockpile and stood up before the bobcat, saying, ‘It worked real fine. I thank you. Now turn me back, and I’ll go hunt my land.’ But the bobcat only grinned and reached out with a paw and broke the rabbit’s neck. Then he ate him, and said, ‘Now the land’s mine and no hawks can take away the easy game.’ And that’s how the greed of two hawks turned their land over to a bobcat.”
The old woman looked at me with wide, baked-chestnut eyes and smiled. “You’ve got it,” she said. “Just like your uncle. Hasn’t he got it, Jack?” The old man nodded and took his pipe from his mouth. “He’s got it fine. He’ll make a good one.”
“Now, boy, why did you make up that story?”
I thought for a moment, then shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “It just came up.”
“What are you going to do with the story?”
I didn’t have an answer for that question, either.
“Got any other stories in you?”
I considered, then said, “Think so.”
A car drove up outside, and Mom called my name. The old woman stood and straightened her dress. “Follow me,” she said. “Go out the back door, walk around the house. Return home with them. Tomorrow, go to school like you’re supposed to do. Next Saturday, come back, and we’ll talk some more.”
“Son? You in there?”
I walked out the back and came around to the front of the house. Mom and Auntie Danser waited in the station wagon. “You aren’t allowed out here. Were you in that house?” Mom asked. I shook my head.
