Wonders of the Invisible World

by Christopher Barzak

  When I looked up from the trail of my father’s blood and stared at the gnarled old apple tree in front of me, the voice inside its hollow core said, I’ve been waiting for you. Come in.

  And I got down on my back, assuming that resistance at this point was fairly futile.

  The snow crunched beneath my weight as I began to slide backward along its surface, and then my head slipped through the hole at the bottom of the tree, which seemed to grow bigger and bigger as I pushed inside it, wider and wider, accommodating the width of my shoulders, until I had somehow fit myself inside the tree entirely, and then—

  —I was falling through darkness.

  In the dark, falling through the silence, I screamed. Screamed like I’d never screamed before. Screamed until my voice flew out of my mouth and floated like a silk scarf through the thousands of miles of dark above me.

  Then I landed, and the world shuddered.

  When I opened my eyes, I had to blink over and over, had to put my hands to my face to make sure my head was still there, that I was still real. Light had returned suddenly, so bright I felt shot through with arrows and crumpled up in a ball on the ground, feeling like one of my migraines might surge through my brain at any moment and wreck me completely.

  No surge came, though. Instead, I lay there, not moving, helpless to do anything but wait and watch, helpless to do anything but listen to the voice that whispered in my ear in that bright white void I’d landed in, unable to climb out.

  This is the story, the voice of the Living Death Tree said. This is what binds you.

  Then another wave of light washed over me, even brighter, blinding me once more.

  And when my vision returned, this is what I saw. This is what she showed me.

  A young man strode down a coal-patched back road lined on either side with towering silver maples. Light fell across their branches, oozed down to the tips of their leaves, collecting like sap, dripping. I stood beneath them, watching the heat and dust rise from the tar-spattered road in waves.

  The young man wore a wide-brimmed hat to shield his face from the sun. He took it off, though, when he stopped to look at the land that spread out before him. After wiping the sweat from his brow, he waved at an old man sitting on the front porch of a farmhouse, who nodded in return, then raised his hand, signaling the young man to come join him in the cool shadows. And by the time the last embers of light dipped below the tree line at the back of the farm that evening—the orchard, the corn, the hay fields, the creek that wound through the center of that place, even those ancient maples lining the road—everything the young man could see, he owned.

  His name was Lockwood, he told the Hodges family: two sallow-faced elderly parents of a too-skinny adolescent daughter. They wanted to go down to West Virginia, where they had family, they said, and where they’d heard there might be work available in coal mines. Running a farm, Hodges said, wasn’t worth it when the drought burned your crops, and what the sun didn’t burn, the grasshoppers devoured. They were already two payments behind with the bank, so Lockwood was able to buy the place from them for a song. Then off the Hodges family went in a rust-eaten green truck with its bed full of sticks for furniture.

  Lockwood watched as they disappeared down the road in a cloud of dust, a clatter of gears grinding within the ancient vehicle. Then he turned to his farm and started to work it.

  He was from somewhere up in New England, people in Temperance said after he’d been around town awhile, though none had heard this come out of Lockwood’s mouth, and he didn’t sound any different from them. He’d been the child of a minister, some said. Where he got his money, no one knew, but he arrived with enough to buy the Hodges farm when the Depression had grown so terrible that no one had cash any longer, not even hidden under their mattresses. There were whispers that he must have robbed his father’s church before leaving. There were whispers of an argument between the father and son that had sent him packing. And though no one could trace the whispers back to a credible source, they lingered, as whispers do, as the voice of the Living Death Tree lingered in my own ears, telling me this story.

  Each morning Lockwood rose before the sun did, and each night he returned to the house after the sun dipped below the horizon. He sowed fields and cut hay on days when the sun was strong and the wind dry, and when he wasn’t tilling he was working to get his first corn in, to pick through his orchard, taking bites from the occasional apple as he climbed through the branches. He repaired the falling-down barn, painted the paint-flaked white house a goldenrod color, and after his first harvest, he’d made enough money to acquire a few necessities: two cows, a bull, and a wife.

  He had one of the town girls in mind, a young woman he saw on her way to church each Sunday. Her name was Pluma Winchell, but everyone in Temperance called her Plumie. Her name reminded him of feathers, of smoke, of soft rose petals. All things that tickled, and indeed he was tickled each time he saw her walk through the town green with her mother, coming or going to church or the butcher. Her mother would slap Plumie’s arm whenever she caught her cutting looks his way. “What are you looking at, girl?” she’d say. But that only made Plumie smile even harder.

  He took Pluma Winchell for a wife the following spring, after the winter melted and the orchard blossomed. And when Lockwood brought her home, she exclaimed at the beauty of the apple blossoms that fell around her, dusting her shoulders. “Like snow,” she said, only they held the warmth of the sun and the fragrance of early summer.

  In their second year together, Lockwood became a father to a son, John Jr., and soon after, he purchased several neighboring farms when the banks foreclosed on their previous owners. The hands he hired to help as his own farm grew were sometimes the men who had owned the pieces of land he’d acquired. Most were immigrants with made-up first names like Mike or Charlie and real last names like Drbyniewski or Kubja who had dreamed of owning something in America. Now they scrabbled to survive and worked for what Lockwood offered, and with their help his harvests grew even larger.

  By his third year, the farm ran like clockwork. Hay twice in the summer, apples and corn in the fall. He switched one field over to oats and Plumie started a vegetable garden between the creek and the house, putting up jars of tomatoes and carrots and green beans in the cold stone cellar. The bull Lockwood bought the year before had got the two cows with calf, so his livestock doubled. Things were going well, even if some of the hands were said to gather in one of the taverns near Mosquito Lake on weekends and complain that Lockwood had stolen their property.

  A land baron, some called him, and from my place in the shadows of their story, I winced, trying to recall where I’d heard those words. They rattled around in the back of my memory like forgotten coins in a pocket. And when I picked them up to examine them, I remembered being a child at some school function for my brother Toby. I was no more than eight or nine, and the father of one of Toby’s classmates was sticking a finger in my dad’s face, arguing about something to do with the baseball game we’d been watching. I can’t remember what sent them into an argument, but at some point during their fight, the man told my dad he wasn’t better than anyone else in Temperance just because he’d come from a family of land barons.

  “What did he mean?” I’d asked my dad as we walked away from the field not long after, making our way back to the Blue Bomb.

  “Don’t worry about it, Aidan,” my dad had said, putting his big hand on my shoulder. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  When I thought about it now, it didn’t make sense. My dad and Grandma Bennie had had to sell off most of the farm in parcels over the years, just to get by after my granddad put a gun to his head and left my grandma to take care of a farm and a son on her own. We’d lost all of the land my great-grandfather, the real land baron, had purchased.

  Lockwood. Great-Grandfather Lockwood. Now he stood on the railroad-tie bridge he’d laid across Sugar Creek when he first arrived, and watched as the sun sank below the s
ilhouettes of the trees at the back of his property. There has to be something else, he thought as he crossed the bridge to wander the fields at twilight. I could hear the faint voice of his father in the recesses of Lockwood’s memory, the minister he’d stolen from to come here, to buy this property. The gloaming, Lockwood’s father had called the hour when the boundary between worlds was thin and the fae folk could be seen on the horizon.

  Behind his father’s back, Lockwood had laughed at those stories, had laughed at how they’d come from his father’s mouth. Imagine a minister believing in such things! But looking back, Lockwood didn’t hold it against his superstitious father either. With the distance between them now, he was able to even find it a little charming. To think he had come from such a family! To think how he had somehow escaped them to make a better life than the one he’d been given!

  He failed to remember that he’d stolen from his family in order to make this better life.

  One evening in late summer, he drifted through the cornfields, their stalks taller than his head, their leaves brushing his face and shoulders. They were whispering of their pleasure in the soil, but Lockwood couldn’t understand their vegetable language. And when they finally fell away from him, he found himself at the back of his property, at the edge of the woods, where he put the cows to pasture. The cows and their calves weren’t there at this hour—they were back in the barn, their eyelids lowered—but something at first glance made him think one of them must have remained behind. It stood in the shadows of the oaks and hickories, snorting at him.

  Lockwood was about to clap his hands and holler for the cow to move up the lane to the barn, but before his hands could meet one another, he froze, gasping at the creature that stepped out of the shadows. It was no cow after all. There, where the pasture met the woods, stood a white stag with antlers that branched out and farther out into a twisted ivory candelabra. The stag that had let me ride it home from another place and time, the stag that had let me ride it back to my own story.

  The stag’s eyes were round and black, its fur silver-white, and the tips of its antlers glowed in the purple evening shadows. Lockwood blinked as he dimly recalled a story his father had told him, a story in which this creature existed, a story Lockwood had never believed.

  There is more than this, the stag told him. Just that, nothing else. It was as if the creature had emerged from the woods to deliver this one message as a warning. And for one long moment, as Lockwood stood there, open-mouthed and staring, he thought he might be dreaming.

  Then the stag lifted its tail and kicked away, back into the woods, gone, as if it had never existed.

  —

  The vision began to shimmer then, and darkness filled my eyes like black water.

  Do you remember this story? the voice asked me. I shook my head in the dark and said no, I didn’t. I’d never seen any of this. Not that I could remember.

  I showed it to you, once, she said. I told you this story when you were still a boy.

  “When?” I asked.

  When you were thirteen, the voice told me. When you were awakening to the invisible world around you.

  “I don’t remember any of this,” I said.

  Then I will show you once again, the voice said. I will show you what should not be forgotten.

  The dark retreated. Light filled my eyes again. And in the center of that light, I saw a young boy. A dark-haired boy with green eyes and a streak of dirt smeared across his sweaty forehead.

  A boy, the tree whispered, who was slowly and secretly becoming a criminal.

  The criminal’s name was Dobry Jablonski. Twelve years old, he lived with his mother on the edge of Temperance in a one-room shack his father had built shortly before dying. For years after emigrating from Poland, his family had lived in a mining town over the border in Pennsylvania, but they’d left a year earlier to finally start a farm of their own in Ohio, to start the life they’d dreamed of making.

  Lies, Dobry Jablonski thought. This country is full of them. He hadn’t been able to convince his father of this, even after they’d lost their land, or his mother, even after she began to take in other people’s laundry, and all because they’d chosen to sail across the Atlantic and dream their lives into something better. But over time Dobry had come to notice how the dream of a better life didn’t happen for most people, no matter how hard they worked, perhaps especially for those who worked the hardest. He would have complained to his mother about this, as he’d complained to his father, if only she hadn’t lost her husband so recently. He didn’t want to deplete what hope she might have left for their future. Hope could keep people going, he knew that, and he wanted his mother to keep going, despite how he felt.

  Dobry was the man of the house now. His father had told him this while coughing up blood into a dirty handkerchief on his deathbed. That was months earlier, when the farm still belonged to them. Now Dobry worked for the man who had bought his father’s farm when they could no longer make payments. Now he worked for the man who paid the wages of a slave.

  There is no difference between this country and where we come from, Dobry thought as he stashed a basket full of apples at the edge of the orchard. He would walk past it later, after work, and take them home. If this man wants to pay me a slave’s wages, I will do what I must to compensate.

  Tall wooden ladders leaned into the green canopies of the orchard, and the hands climbed up and down the rungs in dirty trousers held up by suspenders. Each picker held a sack in front of his stomach, with a rope strapping the sack around his neck. Arms outstretched, they reached into the light of the golden evening, past the thick leaves of late summer, to pluck the fat apples from their stems. Others wandered between the trees to deposit the apples in barrels Lockwood had placed near the corncrib. But Dobry had other plans. After leaving his stolen apples at the far edge of the orchard, he ran back to continue picking.

  From the bedroom window on the second floor of the house, Plumie watched the boy at the edge of the orchard, stealing apples from her husband. She held the curtains apart only a few inches. Her breath was held at that moment, but the sheer blind swayed before her. It was I, a ghost standing next to her, who disturbed the curtains.

  The dark-haired boy with green eyes and skin pale as chalk was stealing. Plumie had been watching him hurry away in the late afternoons with a sack full of apples for weeks now. She hadn’t told her husband because the boy looked sick and the apples would do him good, she figured, and anyway, her husband didn’t pay the boy enough but to buy a scrap of meat at the end of the week and minor provisions like salt and flour, perhaps a sweet to suck on for an hour. Her own children didn’t want for anything. Plumie saw this as a fragile condition worth maintaining, but her heart still skipped a beat whenever she saw Dobry Jablonski scurrying away for the sake of a few apples. There he was now, returning, sack empty, to climb into the trees, to pull down the fat apples for the Lockwoods.

  When Plumie turned to go downstairs, I followed her, taking the steps I took every day of my life down into the kitchen. Plumie needed to feed her daughter. Ethel would be hungry at this hour. The girl was a much easier baby than John Jr. had been. Initially Plumie had thought there would be some kind of strange competition with a girl for her husband’s attention—this was something Plumie’s own mother had told her to watch out for—but Ethel could not have cared less about her father. He was so rarely around. Off hunting, planting, cutting, raking, slopping manure into the spreader. And there he was now: Plumie saw him through the kitchen window while Ethel sucked at her breast. He was coming up the lane from the woods. Beside him, sunlight glinted on the rippled surface of Sugar Creek.

  When Ethel finished, Plumie put her in the crib and went out to meet her husband. But when she looked through the gate of the barn, where she’d assumed he was headed, he wasn’t there. And he wasn’t in the lane where she’d seen him through the kitchen window a few minutes earlier. She turned toward the orchard then, and found him trudging across the rai
lroad-tie bridge. She had to raise her hand to block the sun, though, and by the time she got the light out of her eyes, he had disappeared into the red-globed trees, where the hands could be seen stripping the apples away from their limbs.

  A moment later, five crows fluttered out of the trees like an omen and cut through the blue air to land on the other side of the hay field, looking back at the orchard and nodding together, as if they knew something bad was about to happen. And only seconds later, Lockwood emerged from the orchard holding Dobry Jablonski by the shirt collar, slapping the back of the boy’s head to make him move faster. The boy fell several times on the journey, went down on his hands and knees in the dirt and the ruts that led toward the barn. But Lockwood pulled him up, again and again, until they were in Plumie’s garden, near her rhubarb. As they passed her, the boy managed to give Plumie a pleading look, like a nervous cow on its way up the chute to be slaughtered, and Plumie said, “John? John, what’s the matter here? What’s happened?”

  Her husband didn’t answer. He only moved toward the barn like a slow black cloud, full of thunder.

  Once in the barn, he tied the Jablonski boy’s hands to a post with binder twine that scratched at the boy’s wrists and bit into his skin even as Lockwood knotted it tighter. Plumie came to watch them from the front gate, her hand at her heart, which fluttered like the crows had. Something terrible was about to happen. “John,” she said, trying again to reach him, to reason with him. “What are you doing? This is a child. Have you forgotten?”