The Blue Star

by Tony Earley

  “What are you doing?” he asked. He noticed that he was whispering, so he forced himself to loudly repeat the question. He still thought he sounded scared.

  “Houses know when people don’t live in them,” she said. “Did you ever notice that?”

  “What?”

  “Look at this door. It’s rotten and it’s all swelled up.”

  “I guess it got wet,” Jim said. He checked the ceiling for water stains but didn’t find any.

  “It knows that nobody lives here anymore so it started rotting.”

  “That’s crazy,” Jim said.

  Chrissie scowled at him impatiently. “Have you ever seen an old house that had fallen in?”

  “Sure. Lots of times. So?”

  “Well, have you ever seen a house that fell in while somebody was still living in it?”

  Jim thought for a minute. “No. I guess not.”

  “Then, you tell me what that proves.”

  “I don’t know what that proves.”

  “Yes, you do,” Chrissie said.

  She stepped past him toward the door opposite the stairway, which opened into what must have been the house’s parlor. The walls of the room had once been papered with an old-fashioned pattern of pink roses on a pale background, but large strips of the paper had been ripped from the walls and now lay twisted about the floor. The shredded wallpaper shared the floor with the broken glass from the windows and the rocks that had broken them. The glass crunched underneath their feet. Jim kicked one of the rocks and it fled noisily into a corner. He looked through the windows and saw the Major obediently watching the house. He noticed that neither of them had shut their door all the way.

  Chrissie found an old broom leaning in the corner and took a couple of halfhearted swipes at the floor. She called to Jim from across the room. “Look at the fireplace,” she said.

  “Somebody pulled up the hearth.”

  “Whoever it was, they were looking for money. I bet that poor couple wasn’t even cold in the grave before somebody broke in here looking for their savings. Don’t you think people are just awful?”

  “We’re in here,” Jim said.

  “But we don’t have bad intentions.”

  He walked over and looked into the hole where the hearth had been but saw only the ground underneath the house. The hearthstone lay off to one side. It was a large piece of fieldstone that someone had roughly chiseled into shape. Jim studied it for a moment, then worked his fingers underneath it and slid it back into place.

  “There,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Chrissie.

  She squatted and ran her finger around the edge of a perfectly round hole, about the size of a silver dollar, cut into one corner of the hearth. “What do you guess this was for?”

  Jim suddenly brightened with the answer. “Walnuts,” he said. “There’s a big walnut tree in the front yard. They used to put the walnuts into the hole and bust them open with a hammer.”

  Chrissie snapped her fingers. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s it exactly. They sat here by the fire in the wintertime and shelled walnuts. Whose job do you think it was?”

  “His,” Jim said.

  “Then she would put them into pound cakes.”

  “Whatever was left over. He ate most of them out of the shell.”

  “Well, then, I hope he was ashamed.”

  “He was.”

  When they left the parlor they tiptoed down the hallway, and Jim pushed open the door of the room on the right. The floor was covered in trash, with chicken bones and empty whiskey bottles and torn magazines and piles of old clothing; a man’s single shoe, rotting and curled up at the toe, lay on a soiled mattress in the corner. The ticking of the mattress was almost entirely blackened by dark stains.

  “Tramps,” Jim said. “Tramps stay here.” He thought about going to get his rifle out of the Major.

  “Lost people,” Chrissie said. “Lost people stay here. Just because somebody is lost doesn’t mean you have to call them a tramp.”

  She moved past him into the room and with the handle of the old broom poked through the piles of trash.

  “Are you looking for something in particular?” Jim asked.

  “No. I’m just looking.”

  When she reached the mattress she stood staring down at it a long time. She jabbed at the shoe with the broom. When she turned around, Jim thought she looked a little scared.

  “I have a bad feeling about this room,” she said. “Bad things have happened here.”

  “Then, let’s go.”

  Chrissie dropped the broom and tiptoed quickly across the floor. Jim shut the door securely behind her. He watched her carefully. If she had run for the car, he would have run, too.

  “Say a prayer,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Say a prayer. There are bad spirits in there and we don’t want them to follow us when we leave.”

  “What kind of spirits?”

  “Spirits of despair,” Chrissie said. “Say a prayer to protect us.”

  “You say one.”

  “I’m going to say one for the lost people. You say one about the spirits.”

  Jim closed his eyes. At first he couldn’t think of anything to pray, but then the words Lord, in the coming months protect us all from the spirits of despair whispered into his mind. The words puzzled and frightened him a little, and he tried to shake them out of his head. He never said them out loud. When he opened his eyes he saw Chrissie studying him.

  “Amen,” she said.

  “Amen.”

  “Do you think we’re safe here?”

  Jim closed his eyes again and listened but heard only the silence of the empty rooms and the slightly urgent sound of his own breathing. “I think we’re okay,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anybody else in here. Are the spirits after us?”

  “Not right now,” she said.

  Across the hallway they found the room that had once been the kitchen. A black stovepipe poked out of the wall, and beneath the stovepipe lay a sooty tin fire mat. Jim studied the four deep indentations in the tin and pictured a fat stove squatting there, connected to the chimney by the pipe, a fire burning in the box, a pound cake with walnuts cooking in the oven; the fact that a stove no longer occupied the place where a stove so obviously belonged made the room seem strangely forlorn. An overturned wooden chair lay on each side of the fire mat. The strips of oak caning the bottoms of the chairs were busted downward. Someone had apparently forced a foot through each of the seats.

  “Their chairs,” Chrissie said. “They liked to sit by the stove.”

  She righted one of the chairs and perched primly on the edge of the broken seat. She pointed with her chin at the other chair. “You sit there,” she said.

  Jim picked up the chair and turned it so that its back faced Chrissie; he squatted across the seat and sat on the frame. He draped his arms across the back, and Mama would ask him later how he had gotten his shirt so dirty.

  Chrissie watched him a long time, the look on her face unreadable. Then she dropped her chin to her chest and frowned.

  “What did I do?” Jim asked.

  “Old man,” she said, “I can’t believe you ate all the walnuts.”

  Jim blinked rapidly, then smiled. Once again he felt sunshine pouring out of his mouth. “Old woman,” he said in a gruff voice, “I didn’t eat all the walnuts. I just ate most of the walnuts.”

  “You didn’t leave me enough to make a cake.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it now. You know I flat love walnuts.”

  “I think you’re a very selfish old man.”

  “Am I?”

  Chrissie slowly nodded. “You only think about what you want. You never, ever think about what I want.”

  “But they were just walnuts.”

  “Not to me,” she said.

  “Chrissie . . .”

  She started, or pretended to. “What did you call me, old man?�
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  “Ah,” he said. “Old woman, I’m afraid I’m getting forgetful in my old age. Tell me, what did you say your name was?”

  “Juanita Loretta Rebecca,” she said.

  “And what’s my name again?”

  She closed one eye, cocked her head, and carefully considered him. “Hernando Amos Grover,” she said.

  Jim laughed out loud. “Okay, then,” he said. “If old Hernando Amos Grover goes and shells you some more walnuts, will you forgive him?”

  Chrissie stared at him sadly. “Probably,” she said. “I always do.”

  At that moment, whatever reserve and decorum that had held Jim in his chair, that for weeks had kept him from telling Chrissie how he felt, that had kept him from swimming to Hawaii and challenging Bucky Bucklaw to a fistfight, simply went away. He stood up and moved around the fire mat and knelt on one knee in front of Chrissie. Reaching into her lap, he picked up her right hand. He turned it palm upward and studied it the way he might have studied some book whose pages contained everything he needed to know in writing too small to read. When she didn’t withdraw her hand, he placed it against his cheek. Now it was warm and dry and smooth. Jim closed his eyes. He felt on the verge of calamity, and he had never felt more wonderful in his life. When he opened his eyes and spoke, his voice shook and came out lower than he had ever heard it. “Juanita,” he said, “you’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  “You’re a crazy old man,” she said softly, “saying a thing like that. If something happened to me, you know you’d just go off and marry somebody else.”

  “No,” he said. “I would never do that.”

  “You would, too. You just love me for my pound cakes.”

  “That’s not true,” Jim said. “I love everything about you.”

  Chrissie withdrew her hand. One strong feeling after another moved silently across her face like the shadows cast by clouds. One moment she looked fierce, and the next she looked ready to kiss him, and the next she looked as sad as anyone he had ever seen. Jim couldn’t tell from instant to instant what she might be thinking, so he didn’t dare move. He had the distinct feeling that whatever was about to happen would be the first really important thing to happen to him in his entire life. Chrissie might tell him she loved him, and she might punch him in the eye. Either way, Jim was sure that the boy who left this kitchen would be an entirely different boy than the one who had entered it.

  “Jim . . . ,” she said softly.

  “Shh,” he said. “Hernando. Please call me Hernando.”

  Chrissie reached out with a finger, as if to brush the hair away from his forehead, but seemed to think better of it and dropped her hand into her lap.

  “Jim,” she said, “I think we need to get on up the road.”

  “Chrissie, can I kiss you?”

  He watched as her chin first moved almost imperceptibly to the right, and then farther, with more assurance, to the left and back again.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t.”

  Jim and the Beanstalk

  ABOUT A third of the way up the mountain, the world disappeared. One minute Jim and Chrissie were traveling upward along a path Chrissie knew well and Jim knew somewhat: through open, second-growth stands of oak and maple and poplar and sweet gum muted by the drizzle and gathering fog; through rich hells of laurel and rhododendron, out of which carried the tumbling voices of creek branches and wet-weather springs too small for names; up slopes too steep for logging, where ancient pine trees of impossible girth and height still climbed out of sight. But the next minute, the cloud they had seen from the valley silently closed around them, and every landmark — every rock, bush, tree, and opening in the trees, every mud hole, bank, ditch, straightaway, and switchback — that marked the mountain as a place recognizable to them simply ceased to be. Jim slowed the Major and downshifted into first; he leaned forward until his chest touched the steering wheel, but he could see no more than a car length of road at a time unrolling ahead of them. For all he could tell, a car length of road was all that lay between them and falling off the edge of the world into the void feared long ago by sailors. He switched on the headlights, but the enveloping whiteness swallowed the feeble light the Major manufactured as easily as it had swallowed everything else. The windshield wipers also proved to be of little use. Jim felt a panicky sweat blossom in his armpits.

  “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I can’t see a daggum thing.”

  Chrissie, too, leaned forward and squinted into the fog. “I can’t see anything, either,” she said. “You be careful.”

  “I’m going to.”

  They had talked little since leaving the abandoned house. Jim was still tormented by a desire to kiss Chrissie — for that matter, by an overwhelming, though still somewhat vague, longing to possess her in general — but surprisingly did not feel awkward riding in the car with her. Likewise, Chrissie seemed to find traveling up the mountain with Jim a perfectly pleasant way to pass the time. Though she had refused to kiss him, she had, however briefly, pretended to be married to him; that make-believe intimacy, and the make-believe years on which it was built, seemed to remain comfortably settled around their shoulders — even as they left Hernando and Juanita sitting in their broken chairs by their ghostly stove, forever arguing about walnuts.

  “I’ve never been inside a cloud before,” Jim said. “How about you?”

  “Nothing like this. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”

  As long as Jim drove no faster than he could have walked, road enough to navigate continued to materialize before them. The switchbacks, however, proved to be especially frightening because Jim had to speed up in order to climb through them without stalling. But when he accelerated, waves of fog leapt angrily at the windshield and crashed against the glass, and the edge of the earth hurtled forward just inches ahead of the car’s front tires. Eventually Jim began to feel disoriented and dizzy. The Major seemed balanced on top of a flagpole, or caught in the uppermost branches of a tree; Jim was afraid that the slightest misstep on his part would send them plummeting into space. He kept driving, but his neck and shoulders ached with tension.

  When the switchbacks stopped rolling at them and Jim felt the road level out, he knew that they had driven out into the high, narrow valley that lay beneath the ridgeline of the mountain. A mailbox sprang into being suddenly on the right, and Jim had to swerve to miss it. More mailboxes, sometimes whole rows of them, appeared then at regular intervals, like sentries at the ends of the narrow, rutted roads that spilled down out of the deep hollows that creased the side of the ridge. And when the road rose again, Jim knew that they had reached the end of the valley, and that beside them, below the road, lay the bald from which — on a clear day — it was possible to see not only Aliceville but, farther away, the brick cotton mills that straddled the river at Roberta and Allendale and, beyond the mills, the hazy, patchwork country rolling away until at some point it mysteriously became South Carolina. Jim could feel the great empty space yawning to his left, although he could not see it, and the knowledge that it lay only yards away from where he drove made his heart leap like he had just dreamed he was falling. He stopped the car.

  “Let’s get out here for a minute,” he said.

  He climbed out but kept a hand safely on the reassuring bulk of the car. Chrissie walked around the Major and stood beside him — at a companionable distance, he thought, but not nearly close enough — and together they stared into the fog and imagined the world that lay beyond it.

  “Look,” Jim said. “You can see my house from here.”

  “I know.”

  “You mean you’ve looked for it?”

  “I mean you can see a long way from here. And I mean I’ve seen your house.”

  Jim nodded. The air was perfectly still, but the fog was chilly on his face. He shivered and stuck his hands in his pockets. He didn’t know what else to say. Hoping that Chrissie had
viewed his house as more important than any other house visible from the mountain had been too much to hope for.

  “I know what,” Chrissie said. “Let’s be really quiet and see if we can hear anything.”

  Jim let go of the Major and stood up straight. He cocked his ear toward the place where he knew the mountain fell away into the air. He closed his eyes, but that made him feel like he was falling, so he opened them again. Dead silence. He couldn’t remember ever being anyplace where he couldn’t hear anything at all. No wind blowing or dogs barking in the distance or Mama moving around in the next room or the low murmur of the uncles talking as they rocked on the porch. Nothing. He and Chrissie could have been the only living things left on earth, an idea that made him as happy as he could remember ever being — despite the fact that the noises that came to mind had always made him happy before. Eventually Chrissie took a deep breath and exhaled.

  “I couldn’t hear anything,” Jim said. “Could you?”

  “Nope,” she said. “I feel like we just climbed the beanstalk.”

  Jim smiled. “You never know. Maybe we did.”

  “Now all we have to worry about is getting past the giant’s house.”

  “Do you think he’d kill us if he knew we were up here?”

  “More than likely,” she said. “And then I think he’d eat us.”

  “I ain’t afraid of no giant,” Jim said. “I’ll chop his head off if he messes with us.”

  “Well, I’m still glad it’s foggy,” Chrissie said. “You never know when he’s watching. I’m going to walk up the road and count my footsteps, and you tell me when you can’t see me anymore.”