by Tom McNeal
He sighed, looked around, and set to work. While a large pot of oatmeal boiled, he fried three thick strips of bacon. He slowly sliced apples and walnuts. He stirred the porridge and set down his wooden spoon. Then he took out a mortar and pestle, poured a liberal measure of blue pellets from the carton of rodent poison into the bowl, and began to grind the blue pellets into powder.
When they had been ground fine, he opened a small jar and tapped some of its granular contents into the bowl, and then he added three drops from a dark vial.
To himself, in a strangely dull voice, he said, “A pinch of this, a dash of that.”
When all these ingredients had been combined, he stirred them into the porridge.
Three bowlfuls were portioned out, each topped with apples, nuts, and brown sugar. The baker arranged the bowls along with strips of bacon and fresh pastries onto platters that he covered with polished silver domes. His movements were slow, almost laborious. He set the green shirt among the platters and carried the tray down the stairs to his serving cart, which he pushed to the third storeroom.
When he stepped forward and depressed the series of buttons that opened the moaning door, I rushed past him and was struck at once by the fetid stench of the dungeon. I flew to Jeremy and hovered at his ear. Jeremy! I cried. Listen, if you will!
His eyes fluttered open. “You’re back,” he murmured, and the faintest smile appeared on his scabbed and swollen lips.
Yes. Yes, I am back.
He allowed his eyes again to fall closed. “Does anybody know about us?”
The baker’s footsteps approached.
No. Not yet. What could I say? I said, But I have not given up.
“I’m happy you’re here. I missed you. We’re so hungry.” His smile stretched ever so slightly and blood welled in one of the fissures of his cracked lips. “I’ve been having that dream-that’s-not-a-dream thing,” he whispered.
Yes? I said. The one in which I do not sing?
“Mmm. But I like being there. I like being the ghost trying to talk to you.”
Jeremy again in the role of the ghost? It was too terrible to consider, but I could not speak—already the baker’s cart was rolling into the great chamber.
“Hallå!” he said. When he asked if it was not a great day to be alive, he did not wait for an answer. He laid the small green shirt over his blue armchair, then raised the domed metal lids to display the food and release the savory aroma of bacon. “Porridge, bacon, and pastries.” He made a wry, tired smile. “Of course, it may be poisoned.”
It is poisoned! I said. It is poisoned! Do not eat it!
Jeremy stared intently at the food. So did Ginger and Frank Bailey. They looked as unalive as the living can look. Their eyes were swollen and their skin was stretched thin over their bones.
The porridge is poisoned! I said again.
“My ghost says it’s poisoned,” Jeremy said in a cracked, dry voice.
Sten Blix’s laugh was hollow. “Your ghost. Well, I’m sure your ghost is right. And I’m sure he’ll bring you another meal you’ll like better, won’t he?”
He slid the poisoned food into the enclosures.
The bacon and pastries are fine, I said. But do not eat the porridge!
But there was only one rasher of bacon for each prisoner, and the baker had withheld the pastries.
Their hunger was too great.
They could not be stopped.
They ate the porridge—ate it greedily—until at last their wooden spoons clacked on their empty wooden bowls. The baker distributed the pastries, and they ate them, too. Only then did the baker settle himself in his rocking chair. He regarded the small green shirt that he spread across his hands, then ran his gaze thoughtfully from prisoner to prisoner.
Jeremy stared back as fiercely as a weak and failing creature could stare. “My ghost,” he said in a stiff whisper, “will never forget and never give up.”
Ginger covered her eyes with her open hands and began moving her lips.
Frank Bailey, in a small, earnest voice, said, “You could just let us go, Mr. Blix. You could just let us go.”
The baker looked at them almost sorrowfully. It was as if this had been a hunt, but the predator had lost his appetite for hunting.
“One last story,” he said, and lighted his pipe.
“It is about a little boy in a town like our own, a mute boy who could hear but wouldn’t speak.”
“Possy,” Frank Bailey whispered. He sat slumped on his cot. His voice faded into almost nothing. “Possy vanished.”
“Yes,” the baker said. “Let’s call him Possy—because when someone talked to him, it was as if he were playing dead.” The baker drew in and then exhaled a great stream of smoke. “Possy was a strange little creature. He would wear only green. Most of the people in the town were amused by the way he wandered about the streets in his green shirt and green corduroy pants, staring at people, shedding his clothes as the day grew warm, forgetting where he’d left them. The town’s baker, however, went to the sheriff to say there must be some law against four-year-old boys wandering the streets unattended, leaving their clothes here and there. The sheriff only laughed. ‘You mean Possy?’ he said. ‘Why, everybody knows Possy. Nobody’d cause Possy any harm.’ Everyone made a mascot of the wandering boy, even the sheriff. He could be seen driving about with Possy riding up front, grinning his idiot grin. One such day, the sheriff pulled alongside the town’s baker and said, ‘Possy and me are on patrol!’ and then he turned to the pathetic child and said, ‘Ain’t we, Possy?’
“So what could the town’s baker do? He tried to reason with the child, tried to get him to speak, and to put his shirt and pants back on, but Possy paid him no mind. In fact, he found the baker’s attempts to help him comical. ‘Put your pants on, Possy,’ the baker would say, and the boy would laugh with delight—or perhaps derision.”
Ginger’s eyes were nearly closed.
Jeremy’s were clouded.
Frank Bailey stared blankly ahead.
The baker seemed so immune to this inattention that I wondered for whom he was telling the tale. Yet he pulled at his pipe and continued.
“The town’s baker was the only one on earth who heard the boy speak. That is right. The boy could speak. It surprised the baker, and it might have surprised the boy, too. One day, in exasperation, the baker said, ‘There’s something wrong inside you.’ And the boy laughed and laughed, and then he looked right back at the baker and said out loud, ‘There’s something wrong inside you.’ Oh, it wasn’t perfectly clear. The words were thick and muddy, but it was clear to the baker what he said, and then the boy said it again, ‘There’s something wrong inside you.’ He laughed and began to repeat it, again and again, until the town’s baker had no choice but to offer the boy frosted cookies to get him off the street.”
Ginger’s eyelids drooped. Jeremy’s eyes fell closed. So did Frank Bailey’s.
“The boy was not seen again. But that was not the surprise. The surprise was that the baker felt no remorse. No, instead, he felt set free. The hidden door to the secret place that was his true home had swung open before him.”
The silence in the dungeon seemed to deepen.
“The baker went out in his delivery truck. When he came back, he told the sheriff that he had seen Possy out by the highway. He wondered if the boy had gotten home safely.” The baker again stared at the green shirt he held in his hands. “He had not, of course.”
He brought the shirt close to his face, sniffed it, laid it back down. “Even though the baker washed the shirt many times, it still bore faint traces of the boy’s scent.”
Ginger’s eyes fluttered open. “What did the baker do with the body?” she whispered. “Did you bury him here?”
The baker gave a small laugh. “Oh, my dear girl, if I had to dispose of a body, and I am not saying I did, why in the world would I do it here when right next door I have a walk-in oven?”
These words hung in the air.
/> Jeremy’s whisper could barely be heard. “Why are you telling us this?”
The baker did not answer.
“Aren’t you afraid we’ll tell somebody?”
Sten Blix actually laughed. “No, I am not afraid of that.”
Possy is alive, I said. Tell him that. Tell him Possy is alive.
In his faint voice, Jeremy said, “Possy is alive.”
The baker, betraying nothing, let his blue eyes fall on Jeremy. “So you are the Fairy Tale Boy to the last, still in search of a happy ending.”
He lives in the forest. Tell him that. Possy lives in the forest.
Jeremy parted his lips but did not speak.
“What?” the baker said, leaning forward. “Do you have some profound last words?”
“Lives in the forest,” Jeremy whispered.
The baker’s eyes registered nothing. He gave a tired laugh, in fact. “Did your ghost tell you that? Because if he did, your ghost is telling stories.”
He waited then, as if for Jeremy to say something more, but there was nothing more for Jeremy to say.
The baker laid the green shirt on his chair and turned to leave. To the prisoners, he said something he had never said before: “Farväl.”
Good-bye, in Swedish.
The baker was leaving, and I did not know what to do.
I yearned to stay with Jeremy and the others, as I had stayed to the end with my dear nephew, but if I stayed, it meant giving up all hope.
I must go, I said.
Jeremy nodded so subtly it could almost not be seen. I could sense that he felt his nearness to death. Still, he raised his head slightly.
“Bye,” he whispered.
He seemed to want to say more but could not.
The baker moved forward, and I with him. I looked back to see Ginger slip her arm through the bars so that her hand and Jeremy’s could meet.
When the baker pushed the buttons that opened the wall and then, on the other side, secured it, I recorded the sequence in my mind.
One three one seven.
1317.
The year the Swedish king hosted the Nyköping Banquet and had his guests escorted to the dungeon, where they were left to die.
It had grown late. Slowly, methodically, the baker straightened his house and tidied his kitchen, just as he had done at his hut in the woods on the fateful day that he gathered Ginger and Jeremy into his net. He hid the rodent poison in an empty carton of baking soda, which he placed in the refrigerator. And then, after a last look about, he sighed a great sigh and whispered, “Sa börjar det igen.”
So another moment has come.
He unlocked the door and stepped out into the night.
I hovered in the darkness and watched him. He locked the gate behind him, turned the corner, and headed toward the bakery under the light of a full moon.
I did not know what to do.
In the tales, as I have noted, malevolence is not just subdued but punished, and through some intercession of goodness, virtue is restored.
But in this tale, Jeremy and the other innocents lay dying, and I, the agent of intercession, did not know what to do.
I will tell you the ineffectual things that I tried. I will number the parties into whose ears I vainly shouted:
• Mayor Crinklaw, as he stood in his backyard grilling meat over a charcoal fire.
• Maddy and Marjory, as they played a game of cards in Maddy’s kitchen.
• Conk Crinklaw, as he and his friends watched car races at the county fairgrounds.
• Jeremy’s father and Jenny Applegarth, as they sat in her living room blankly watching TV.
• Elbow Adkins, as he sat on his back porch reading a magazine called Field & Stream.
• Frank Bailey’s mother, as she drank weak tea by her radio.
By this time, gray smoke had begun to rise from the bakery chimney.
I felt as impotent as I had felt long ago, as my dear young nephew gasped for air before finally expelling his last breath.
The sound of shifting leaves played in my ears, and I let the warm night breeze carry me north. I felt myself borne along without plan or intention. I drifted past rustling brown cornfields, past fences and pastures, past listless arid lands, until, not quite to my own surprise, I was on the fringe of the bleached-white escarpments and gaunt ravines of the Badlands. The moon threw long shadows. I moved through the tall, bony spires and ascended to the peak of the tallest one, where I was hidden from nothing.
And here, where I waited only for some merciful end to it all, I began to feel the world spreading out. Time slowed to the threshold of stillness. I felt a kind of accepting presence. I fell into the caress of the dead, not the wretched influence of the specters of the Zwischenraum but something benign and accommodating. I breathed deeply. I revisited the rooms of my youth, and then of my middle age. It was as if I could feel the books I picked up, and the feather of a falcon, and the smooth stone shaped like a heart, and then—oh, soft and reassuring sound—I heard the words of a small child.
Da sind Sie, lieber Onkel.
There you are, dear uncle.
Singen Sie, Onkel.
Sing, Uncle.
Had my ancient eyes closed? Had I, who could not sleep, been sleeping? It did not matter—I had heard this voice, and it came again.
Singen Sie, Onkel, bitte.
Sing, Uncle, please.
And then another voice, Jeremy’s voice: Please. Please, Jacob, please.
I cannot explain it. There are marvelous aspects of both your world and mine, and on rarest occasions one can slip into another. Such slippages cannot be explained, nor can they be ignored.
I turned at once toward town.
Never had I hastened as I hastened then, across canyon and pasture and field. The round moon threw uncertain shadows, but at last, for me, I had a course.
I knew where I was going.
I knew what I must do.
It was not yet midnight, and the smoke pouring from the bakery chimney was still gray.
Jenny Applegarth had raised a window to let in the night air, and now she lay asleep under a white cotton sheet with her head on a white pillow.
I drew close but was for a moment unnerved. I could not sing, never could I sing, but now, on this night, a melody visited my memory, and I sang.
I sang: The keeper did a-hunting go.
Jenny Applegarth turned in her sleep but did not waken.
I sang: And under his coat he carried a bow.
Mein Gott! Her eyelids lifted! She raised her head and peered into the darkness.
It was the song that she and Mr. Johnson had sung, with its dark hints buried within its cheerful melody: All for to shoot the merry little doe—
“Harold?” she said.
Among the leaves so green, O.
She sat upright, alert, frightened, perhaps, but listening. “Harold?”
The first doe he shot at he missed;
The second doe he trimmed he kissed;
The third doe went where nobody whist,
Among the leaves so green, O.
I eased from her room, singing still, and she rose and followed. She seemed to expect to find someone in the living room, but no one was there. When she peered out the front door, I slipped through, singing more. My song seemed full of meaning to me, but she seemed only confused. Still, I led, and she followed, searching for the source of the voice.
The fourth doe she did cross the plain;
The keeper fetched her back again;
Where she is now, she may remain,
Among the leaves so green, O.
“Harold?” she called, peering into the night. “Is this some kind of joke?”
I moved toward the baker’s house, along the silent, moonlit streets. I sang the menacing story, and she followed, confused and apprehensive, yet unwilling to turn back.
The fifth doe she did cross the brook;
The keeper fetched her back with his crook;
W
here she is now you may go and look,
Among the leaves so green, O.
We had reached the house itself, looming and ghastly to my eyes. There I stopped and sang the last verse.
The sixth doe she ran over the plain;
But he with his hounds did turn her again;
And it’s there he did hunt in a merry, merry vein,
Among the leaves so green, O.
It seemed to me this strange house covered in leaves must scream my meaning, but Jenny Applegarth stared at the darkened windows without understanding and, again, said only, “Harold?”
They are here! I shouted at her. Here!
But these words did not penetrate her ears. She was looking in the wrong direction, back down the lane, as if wondering how she had come to this spot.
And, then—Nein! Nein! Nein!—Jenny Applegarth turned back toward home.
Again I sang, but this time with the slightest alteration:
Where they are now you may go and look,
Among the leaves so green, O.
She stopped short. “What?”
Where they are now you may go and look,
Among the leaves so green, O.
“Where they are now?” she said. “That’s not how it goes.”
She stared at the baker’s vine-covered house and said the words to herself: “Where they are now you may go and look, among the leaves so green, O.” She did not understand, but then—and here I felt a silvery rush of hope—she said, “You mean they? Jeremy and Ginger?”
And then to the same tune I deviated further:
In the baker’s dungeon you must go and look,
