Far Far Away

by Tom McNeal

  Jeremy pulled off his remaining shoe and tossed it over the fence.

  “Hallå!” the baker shouted. “Stop there! Stop there right now!”

  Jeremy flew for the fence and, springing almost out of himself, caught hold of the fence top and spilled over it, bouncing off clattering trash cans and rolling to the ground on the other side.

  Where, to my utter surprise, he sat up, looked at Ginger, who was standing there with his shoe in her hand, and began to laugh.

  “Code red?” he said. “I don’t remember anybody talking about code red.”

  “Yeah, well,” Ginger said, and now she was laughing, too. “I didn’t think it was going to come up.” She extended his muddy shoe. “Here you go, Cinderella!”

  “Hope it fits,” he joked, stuffing his muddy foot into the muddy shoe and half limping, half loping after her as they all scampered down the alleyway.

  I, however, paused at the fence to look back.

  Framed by the large window, the baker stood talking into the telephone while gazing out toward the yard, the fence, and the unseen me.

  Ein Anruf bei der Polizei.

  I was sure of it.

  The baker was contacting the sheriff.

  Maddy and Marjory had gone in one direction, Ginger and Jeremy in another. I caught up with them just as they rushed around a corner and—mein Gott!—knocked someone down!

  Mrs. Jenny Applegarth.

  In fact, Ginger had also gone sprawling, and Jeremy hardly knew whom to help first.

  Jenny Applegarth, he decided.

  “Sorry,” he said, extending his hand to pull her back up. “Are you okay?”

  They had fallen within a circle of light thrown by one of Main Street’s three streetlamps. When Jenny Applegarth looked up at him, a smile came to her lips. “Is that you, Jeremy—all dressed in black?”

  “Hi, Mrs. Applegarth,” Jeremy said. “I guess we weren’t paying attention.”

  Jeremy did yard work for Jenny Applegarth and had always liked her. Now she was brushing herself off and regarding Ginger, also dressed in black.

  “It’s me,” Ginger said, peeling up the front edge of her black watch cap. For once the girl seemed not to know what next to say.

  Mrs. Applegarth gazed down the empty street for a moment. “I thought I heard someone else, too.”

  The girlfriends, probably.

  “Maybe,” Ginger said, and offered nothing more.

  Jeremy said, “Well, I guess we’d better go now.”

  Jenny Applegarth nodded and then added a small smile. “I’ll let you know if I run into your missing shoe.”

  Jeremy glanced down at his muddy feet and started to offer an explanation, but Mrs. Applegarth held up an open hand to stop him. “The less I know, the better I like it.” Again she smiled. “Night, kiddos.”

  She began to walk away.

  “Mrs. Applegarth?” Ginger called softly, and Jenny Applegarth looked back.

  “If anybody asks—probably they won’t, but, I mean, let’s say they did—could you just forget you saw us tonight?”

  Jenny Applegarth regarded her for a moment. “It depends,” she said, “but maybe.” Her expression softened. “My memory always has been kind of dicey.”

  She turned the corner, disappearing from sight, and Ginger said they’d better keep moving.

  I glided smoothly ahead and soon confirmed my worst fear: I saw Sheriff Pittswort’s black-and-white patrol car wheeling from the police station and turning toward Main. I slipped back to Jeremy and advised him to hide at once.

  “What?” he said.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Ginger said.

  Sheriff Pittswort. He’s coming this way. Hide.

  “Quick,” Jeremy said, grabbing Ginger’s arm. “In here.”

  He pulled her behind a short wall of blue plastic bins stacked in the alcove of Crinklaw’s Superette.

  “What are you doing?” Ginger said.

  “Hiding.”

  “Because?” she asked. But at this moment the arcing beams of headlights swept onto the street. “It’s Pittswort!” she said, ducking back. She looked at Jeremy in amazement. “The baker called the freaking sheriff? Over freaking Pop Rocks?”

  Ginger and Jeremy crouched behind the bins as the sheriff’s car prowled down the street. Mounted to the car was a strong lamp that the sheriff used to probe into dark nooks and crannies, including those around the superette, but Jeremy and Ginger were well hidden, and the patrol car slowly passed by.

  “Okay,” Ginger whispered, “that was an unnecessary thrill.” She stood and looked around. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Wait, I said, for I had seen something else as well.

  “Just a second,” Jeremy said.

  “Why?” Ginger said. “Let’s just—”

  At that moment a second set of headlights turned onto Main. It was Deputy McRaven in a second patrol car. It, too, passed slowly by.

  All right, then, I said, and was about to tell Jeremy to hurry home when to my dismay I heard something else! Wait! I said. Wait. And hush.

  Jeremy took hold of Ginger’s arm to keep her quietly in place.

  Footsteps, I said, and in the next moment they could hear them, too—slow, shuffling footsteps coming this way. Behind the grocery crates, Ginger and Jeremy shrank into their smallest selves and held their breath.

  Closer and closer came the shuffling footsteps of a dark hooded figure.

  It was Mrs. Truax.

  And then, a few feet away, on the opposite side of the grocery crates, she stopped. She peered that way and this.

  “Possy?” she said at last in a dry, hollow voice. “Possy?”

  The stillness seemed to stretch beyond the earthly world. And then, at last, this strange hooded woman turned and shuffled slowly on, and Jeremy and Ginger fled toward home, where yet another unhappy surprise awaited.

  At the bookstore door, Jeremy pulled the leather thong from inside his shirt and … found it broken.

  “What?” Ginger said.

  Jeremy stood holding one end of the broken leather thong. “My key. It’s gone.” He looked back down the street. “I’d better go look for it.”

  “With Pittswort and McRaven and crazy Mrs. Truax crawling the streets?” Ginger said. “Are you doing any kind of thinking here at all?”

  Jeremy admitted that he probably was not.

  They circled to the side of the building, where Jeremy pried open a window that he knew was never latched. As he got set to climb through, Ginger grabbed hold of his arm. “So,” she said, grinning at him through the darkness. “How’d you like your first night outside the Jeremopolis city limits?”

  He gave a small laugh. “I’m not sure. It was all right, I guess.”

  “Not sure? My God, Jeremy. You were amazing! I said you had potential, and I was totally right.” She reached for his one remaining shoe. “I’m going to jettison this.”

  “Why?”

  “What good’s one shoe going to do you? Besides, from this minute on, you never owned a pair of black Converse.” She folded a stick of cinnamon gum into her mouth. “I’d also advise throwing all your muddy clothes in the washer.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He paused. “I think I’m not really suited to a life of crime.”

  “You might be surprised. Besides, it can have unexpected rewards.”

  She took off her wool cap, shook out her long red hair, and leaned forward as if to kiss Jeremy, but she did not. She let her hair graze his cheek, and when she whispered, “I think you’d make a great sidekick,” the sweet smell of cinnamon bloomed into the air.

  She touched a finger to the tip of his nose and stood smiling at him. “Au revoir, Jeremy Jeremy Johnson Johnson,” she said, and disappeared into the night, leaving her spicy scent behind.

  “Whew,” Jeremy said, though whether to himself or to me was uncertain. Then he climbed through the window and fell safely inside, or so he believed.

  Jeremy laid the broken thong on his beds
ide table and stared for some moments at its fancy knots tied tight by his grandfather. Thereafter he began to ready himself for bed.

  Doubtless there are specters who do not respect the privacy of mortals, but I am not one of them. At day’s end, I kept Jeremy company only until he said, “Good night, Jacob,” and then I took my leave. Sometimes, when he was feeling solitary, he would delay saying good night and we would talk before he fell to sleep. When his spirits were low, I would remind him of one of the day’s pleasant occurrences—a kind word from a teacher or the sight of a gliding nighthawk silhouetted by the moon. Such thoughts sometimes helped him slip into the sweet arms of sleep.

  This night, however, Jeremy was ready for slumber. Still—I could not help myself—I reminded him that we had not finished our vocabulary study.

  “Wake me early,” he said. “We’ll study then.”

  Of course, I said.

  “Good night, Jacob.”

  Good night, Jeremy.

  After retiring from Jeremy’s attic, I made my way to the belfry of the white church built by the town Lutherans. Here I passed my solitary evenings no matter the season, for while I might behold the beauty of snow, I was not chilled by it, and though I might hear the buzz of the summer’s mosquito, I was beyond its bite.

  I stretched my vaporous legs and gazed out at the vast prairie and sky and thought my disquieting thoughts. Distractions occurred—a star might shoot by, a browsing mouse might rustle a dry leaf, an owl might swoop from a nearby tree—but my apprehensions always returned.

  The thing undone.

  The unknown yet unmet desire.

  This riddle is my prison; I am trapped within it. The answer—the thing undone—is the door that might release me from the Zwischenraum, but if I could not find the door, how could I open it?

  What could it be—this thing undone? The Deutsche Wörterbuch, the monumental dictionary that Wilhelm and I undertook to compile, was of course undone. This was my first thought. When Wilhelm died, we were on words beginning with D. At my death, the work was in its seventh volume, and yet I had gotten only to F. But this could not be the thing undone, for it was a thing I could not do. From the Zwischenraum I could not continue our work on the great dictionary, or even encourage others to take it up. So it was not that.

  Had Wilhelm and I been alive, we would have discussed the thing undone, approached it with reason, determined its nature, devised a method of correction. But I was alone in the Zwischenraum. I had no advice and no answers and no methods. I had only a tender, terrible yearning for my absent brother.

  I wondered if the Zwischenraum was not a riddle to be solved and escaped from but, in fact, Hölle—hell itself—or die Hölle auf Erden—a living hell. And with that came the nagging fear that the maid in Steinau had been right, that Wilhelm was not here because he had passed beyond to a better place, a place I had no way of reaching.

  The thing undone.

  The unknown yet unmet desire.

  Finally, I remembered how, one night in a meeting hall, an aged traveler regaled Wilhelm and me with tales of faraway places, the Russian steppes, the Ganges and Nile rivers, the Great Wall of China, the Canadian Yukon, the American Badlands, on and on, each place more fascinating than the last.

  That night, as we had walked home under a cold moon, Wilhelm said, “All those marvelous places.” It was a soft, damp evening. The village butcher, passing by with his terrier, touched his hat to us. We had just turned up our lane when Wilhelm said, “We must go to these many places, Jacob, before we rest.”

  But we had our tales to transcribe and then the great dictionary to compile. One works and works, and then one morning the elm tree outside one’s study shatters into the smallest of pieces, and the room in which one sits shatters, and the niece with whom one sits shatters, too, and—blitzschnell!—in the quickest instant the life that one has taken as one’s daily due has been converted to this … what? … this place between smelling and tasting, between speaking and being heard, between living and finding peace.

  But Wilhelm’s words—We must go before we rest—had given me an excuse for movement. In one of the tales, a princess searching for her twelve brothers says that to find them she would travel as far as the sky is blue. It is a beautiful phrase, one that Wilhelm himself added, and it seemed now to command my own quest. I would travel as far as the sky was blue to find him. I needed no shelter, no food, no fire, no rest. However forlorn a ghost might be, he moves quickly and smoothly, without pause or break, and that was what I did.

  China, Mongolia, the Yukon, on and on, all of those places Wilhelm had wanted to go, everywhere looking for Wilhelm’s genial face, but I did not find him, and as months passed and then years, my hopes grew fainter. He was not here. He had not waited for me. He had passed on, and I had not.

  Decades slipped past. Wars, famines, inventions. A century, finally, and half of another.

  Then one day I found myself drifting with the wind across the grassy American plains, and I spied at a distance a specter working his way into the wind. He moved slowly—with the wind behind me, I covered four lengths to his one—and soon we approached each other.

  I nodded at him and saw in his dull, desperate eyes my own dull desperation.

  Wait, I said. To my own surprise, I said this.

  I did not expect him to turn, but he turned and hovered, leaning into the wind, waiting for me to speak again.

  I am looking for my Bruder Wilhelm Grimm.

  The dead man stared at me for a few moments and then—how surprised I was!—his lips curled into the slightest smile, which I beheld as a man in the desert might behold water.

  I know who you were, he said, and who your brother was, though I have not seen him. As a boy, I read your tales.

  This news had a soothing effect on me.

  For a long time, he said, I thought the Brothers Grimm wrote those fairy tales. Not until I was a grown man did I learn you had collected them from others.

  From this I knew he had not been dead as long as I, for when I was alive, few would have made this mistake. Yes, I said, most of the tales came from citizens of Hesse, where we lived for a long time, so, for my brother and me, the associations were tender.

  We talked for some time, though the man’s smile had now dried up and he kept peering north, into the wind, as if he had some appointment there to keep. I asked him if we might travel together in search of my brother, but he said he could not. He must travel on, against the wind.

  For how long?

  He looked at me with hollow eyes. Until I no longer must.

  Why? I asked. Why into the wind? What for you is the thing undone?

  He bent his head and said, On the answer to that question I will float away from this wretched place.

  So he, too, was enduring his own form of living Hölle.

  We parted company, that desperate soul and I, but a short time later I detected his voice carrying downwind to me: Hallo, hallo.

  I turned and saw him at a great distance motioning me his way. He could not come with the wind, so I must go into it. It took some effort, but in time I had overtaken him.

  Yes?

  I have remembered something that may be of interest to you. In a town some distance from here, there is a boy who can hear us. The slight smile again formed on the specter’s face. A boy who sleeps in an attic full of fairy tales.

  I felt something hopeful stirring within me.

  It is more even than that, the stranger said. I was told by another specter—a small, nervous woman from Moldova—that there was also in this town a Finder of Occasions who would bring harm to the boy.

  A Finder of Occasions? I asked, and the stranger replied, Someone who lies in wait until the opportunity is afforded to do harm or wreak havoc—here he cast his ancient, unhappy eyes at me—without leaving a trace behind.

  How will I know this boy? I asked. What is his name? Where will I look for him?

  He lives in a bookstore. The village itself can be seen
only from the corner of the eye.

  What?

  It is difficult to find but, once found, you will never lose it. The stranger closed his eyes and searched his memory. There were red buttes nearby. Red-stone buildings in the town. The smell of sulfur. A bakery with wondrous scents. He sighed and squinted into the wind. I cannot tarry. I must go.

  How do I locate this Finder of Occasions? I asked, but already the stranger had turned and begun to work his way into the wind.

  Off I hastened, full of expectation, but this boy and his store filled with books and his attic full of tales were not easily found. From village to village I went, from house to house and shop to shop until finally—I cannot tell you how many days had gone by—I stopped one evening and stood perfectly still. I closed my eyes and let the night wind move past me as the water moves past a rock in the river. How much time slipped by in this manner I cannot say, but when I again opened my eyes, the stars had scattered and the moon had moved and off to the side, almost behind me in fact, in the thinnest sliver of vision, I could just detect a strange and faint illumination.

  I hastened toward this light with uncertainty, and there, taking shape in silhouette, was an array of looming buttes, and a sign that said WELCOME TO NEVER BETTER, and along Main Street there was a bakery producing wondrous aromas, and there, in the last of the business district’s red-block buildings, was a bookstore where a boy sat alone, reading in an armchair under lamplight.

  The window was open.

  When I drew close and whispered, Listen, if you will, Jeremy Johnson Johnson looked up from his book, cocked his head, and said hopefully, “Mom?”

  Honestly, I was sorry to disappoint him. No, I said.

  Instinctively, he touched a finger to his temple. “Grandpa?”

  Again there was hope in his voice. Again I was sorry to say no.

  “Who are you, then?”

  I cannot explain the phrase I chose. A beggar, I said, echoing words from one of our tales, an ancient beggar with a broken heart. May I stay here awhile?

  Well, what have I told you about this boy’s kindness?—he did not hesitate an instant. “Sure, if you want,” he said, and asked me my name.