by Tom McNeal
I did not understand. Too much of whom?
He gazed back into the smoke that rose from the bakery built above a dungeon. Them, he said, and contempt crept into his voice. The girl with her prayers. The boy with his ghosts. And poor wretched Frankie, with his belief in my goodness.
I was afraid he would leave. I asked what I had come to ask: What happened to you that you could do such things as you have done?
He did not answer. He leaned far over the chimney and, breathing deeply of the smoke, rose with it and slowly disappeared.
I tried to follow and called after him—What was it you wanted? How were such desires formed?—but the baker had gone wherever such souls go.
In the pale green hospital room, Jeremy Johnson Johnson was sleeping. So, in their chairs nearby, were his father and Jenny Applegarth. Nourishment dripped through a transparent tube leading from a machine to a bandaged area of Jeremy’s wrist. The prisoner had become a patient, and though he looked waxy and frail, the physicians had pronounced that he would slowly recover to full strength, that all the prisoners would.
A few minutes before, when a doctor quietly visited, she opened a folder to read notes and add some of her own. I observed a strange array of words and phrases—“chronic poisoning,” “warfarin,” “vitamin K,” “enhanced excretion,” “whole bowel irrigation”—which, together, presumably indicated what had been done to Jeremy by the baker and what the doctors had done to reverse the effects.
I hovered there, watching Jeremy breathe in and breathe out, for I felt his breathing almost as if it were my own. Something had occurred to me. I felt disencumbered. For the first time since that day in September when the elm tree in the garden extinguished, I felt release. From what, I was not sure, yet I felt no urgency to know. I was enjoying too much the image of Jeremy, alive and breathing.
At last, I moved close. Listen, if you will, I whispered. Listen, if you will.
He eyes fluttered open. He made a faint but actual smile. “Oh, hi,” he said.
At once, Mr. Johnson and Jenny Applegarth jerked awake.
“Hey, buddy,” his father said. He reached out to touch Jeremy’s hand.
Jenny Applegarth gave Jeremy’s other hand a squeeze, then stepped away. “Think I’ll give you two a minute alone,” she said.
I, too, respected their privacy and followed Jenny Applegarth to a room near the end of the shiny corridor. Inside, Mrs. Bailey sat on the edge of her son’s bed, gently massaging his arm. The boy slept. He, too, had a tube running to his wrist. Mrs. Bailey and Jenny Applegarth exchanged nods.
“Doing okay?” Jenny Applegarth said.
“He is,” Mrs. Bailey said. “They say he is, anyhow. Though he doesna’ look so good.”
“How about you?”
“Well, you know.…” She gazed at her son. “At least now I can see him and hold his hand and fuss over him.” Her eyes moved to Jenny Applegarth’s. “He’s a good boy,” she said. “He couldna’ be better, if people just knew.”
“I know,” Jenny Applegarth said.
“The Crinklaw boy told me what you did. How you went right in and held my boy and rode with him when they brought him here.”
Jenny Applegarth looked down. “It wasn’t hard.”
They were both quiet, then Mrs. Bailey said, “Conk said you heard a voice, a voice that sang.” She paused. “It made me think of an angel.”
“That’s right. I did hear a voice.” Jenny Applegarth smiled. “But I’d hate to think an angel couldn’t sing a little better than that.”
The women both laughed at this, which I found irritating.
“Do you still hear it, then? The singing voice?” Mrs. Bailey asked.
“I don’t, no.”
This was true. I could sing, in my tuneless way, but there was no longer the need.
“You know, I can never repay you,” Mrs. Bailey said as Jenny began to take her leave, and Jenny replied, “I don’t know why you’d try.”
A kind woman, even if she did not appreciate my singing.
From Frank Bailey’s room, she walked to Ginger’s. In the passing instant that the door was swinging open, Conk could be seen leaping from the edge of the bed into a chair. His fearful expression turned to relief, however, when he saw that it was Jenny.
“Hoo-boy,” he said. “I thought it was McRaven or her grandfather. I was just sitting on the bed, holding her hand. But her grandfather … I don’t know. He’s like Attila the Hun or something. And McRaven keeps coming in and just staring at her like she’s a goddess or something, which is kind of creepy since she looks half-dead.”
Jenny Applegarth gave a murmuring laugh and looked at Ginger, who slept peacefully in spite of—or perhaps because of—the liquid dripping into her arm. “So how’s our patient?”
“Okay, I think. She woke up a while ago. First thing she asked was how’s Jeremy. Then she asked about Frank. I told her they were okay, and she fell right back to sleep.”
Jenny Applegarth said, “What they’ve been through …”
Conk nodded his head and said, “Yeah.”
Ginger stirred ever so slightly but continued to sleep. While Conk kept his eyes on Ginger, Jenny Applegarth regarded Conk. She seemed to be looking at him in a new way. I did not blame her. He had shown considerable valor in this episode.
From the corridor, the squeak of a cart gave me a strange start, but it merely preceded the appearance of Mr. Johnson in the doorway, with Jeremy just behind, holding himself stiffly upright, with one arm on the rolling medical stand to which the nourishment tubes were still attached.
“Hello?” Mr. Johnson called softly. “Anybody home?”
Conk looked at them, then leaned close to Ginger’s ear. “Ginger. Can you wake up? Jeremy’s here.”
Her eyelids fluttered open, closed momentarily, and opened again. Her gaze fell on Jeremy and a weak smile came to her lips. “Hey,” she said.
With help from his father, Jeremy rolled his medical stand forward. “How’re you doing?” he asked.
“Better. How about you?” She closed her eyes. “How’re things in Johnson-Johnsonville?”
“Better,” he said.
She looked at him then and extended her hand, and as he stepped forward to take it, his face twisted and he seemed about to cry, but he tightened against the tears and held them back.
Everyone but Jeremy slipped away from the room. Ginger again closed her eyes. In a weak, whispery voice, she said, “My grandfather. He said nobody believes that a ghost …” She laughed softly. She seemed almost asleep. And then she was talking again. “I do, though. And you do.” She raised her eyelids and looked at him. “That’s all that matters, right?”
This time the tears Jeremy had been suppressing could be suppressed no more. “Yeah, that’s all that matters.”
When he had wiped his eyes and regained himself, it was quiet. In a soft voice she said, “You want to kiss me?”
What followed was a long, suspended moment, in which she closed her eyes, and as Jeremy leaned forward, one last residual tear welled at the very edge of his eye directly above her slightly parted lips. And then, before I could shout in alarm, the tear spilled free—and there was nothing for me to do but rush past and, with the smallest draft, ever so slightly alter its flight.
The tear landed, safely, on her cheek.
Her eyes snapped open in surprise. “That was close,” she said. But she did not explain further. She merely closed her eyes again so that she might still collect her kiss.
And so to this tale, there is little more to add. I will tell you that my suspicions—and perhaps yours—regarding Possy Truax were happily confirmed. He was indeed alive. For the past twenty years, he had been living, if it may be called that, under the influence and authority of Sten Blix. He lived in a rude hut not far from the baker’s cabin, and for all those years he did as the baker bade him. The search party, including the sheriff and Mrs. Truax, came upon him in the forest, raking the grounds around the baker’s
cabin, and when his mother, looking upon this large blank-faced man, pulled back her hood so that he might see her face, he let the rake fall from his hands and walked toward her and held on to her for a long time. He would not release her hand even while they walked to the patrol car, nor all the way back home. And yet, when a doctor who specialized in such matters came to see him, and asked whether he feared Mr. Blix, or hated him, or liked him, or depended on him, Possy nodded only at the latter.
“It will take time,” the doctor said to Mrs. Truax, and Mrs. Truax said, “I’ve got time.”
During Jeremy’s convalescence, Mr. Milo Castle called to ask about his well-being. When he inquired about the financial difficulties of the bookstore, Jeremy explained that the lender was in the process of taking possession of the bookstore. He tried to sound positive. He said he was “still hoping something would turn up.”
“Maybe it will,” Milo Castle said. “Maybe it will.”
And a few nights later, at the end of the last round of Uncommon Knowledge, Milo Castle reminded the audience of Jeremy (a small portion of his appearance was shown on the screen, during which he answered the question regarding Rapunzel), and then he explained that after that show had been taped, Jeremy—“like some innocent in one of the Grimm Brothers’ own tales”—had been abducted and poisoned (here photos of news coverage appeared on the screen, including the newspaper headline THREE YOUTHS HELD CAPTIVE IN MODERN-DAY DUNGEON). Milo Castle mentioned the Two-Book Bookstore and the debt that had been incurred. Then he cleared his voice and said he was proud to announce that Uncommon Knowledge was sending a check in the amount of twenty-two thousand dollars to cover this debt. “And, if anyone else would like to help, here is how you can contact Jeremy at the Two-Book Bookstore.”
Since this announcement, the store has had a good deal more traffic. Supportive letters have come in from all corners, some with monies enclosed. Visitors, too, have journeyed to this little town, many of them morbid sightseers coming to stare at the baker’s vine-covered house and the Green Oven Bakery, now locked and shuttered. But many of the travelers come to meet Jeremy and visit the bookstore and, sometimes, buy a book. They also stop at Elbow’s Café and shop at Crinklaw’s Superette and stay at the Red Buttes Motel, helping everyone prosper, so the citizens have adjusted their view of Jeremy Johnson Johnson.
* * *
Jeremy and Ginger stick to themselves, often just sitting easily together in the park or the bookstore attic without speaking at all. Saturdays, Ginger helps Jeremy with Jenny Applegarth’s yard work, and always, at ten o’clock, Jenny brings out cucumber sandwiches and lemonade. Occasionally, Ginger and Jeremy invite Frank Bailey for a lakeside picnic or they join the girlfriends and Conk to play horseshoes or watch TV at Mayor Crinklaw’s house. More and more often, Maddy can be found in Conk’s company, and sometimes Jeremy and Ginger ride with them to a nearby town to see a movie.
The mayor himself has been magnanimous about Jeremy’s change of fortunes. He accepted repayment of the principle but refused all interest, and one evening before the fall Konzert, while standing in the park band shell with Lemmy Wittle and the other music makers, the mayor made a few announcements.
“Now, before I turn things over to the conductor,” the mayor said, “I want to give a little update on Possy, because I know you all have been asking. The answer is, he’s just plain been through it, and for a lot of years, and so we all just have to take it slow and easy. What I’m told is he’s not capable of a lot. In fact, what they tell me is all he can do is listen good and follow orders.” The mayor paused a moment to survey the crowd. “Now, I know just exactly what all you married gals are thinking: All he can do is listen good and follow orders—I married the wrong man!”
Raucous laughter worked its way to the back of the crowd, where Conk, Maddy, Marjory, Jeremy, Ginger, and Frank Bailey stood loosely together. Conk, shaking his head, turned to the others and said, “That’s why he’s the mayor.”
“But I got some good news,” the mayor continued from the bandstand. “Mrs. Truax doesn’t want to move Possy from her trailer, but she said it’s okay if a couple of us old boys build her a room addition so her and Possy don’t bump into each other quite so much. And, on another front, last night the Council and me approved a position for Possy, raking up leaves in this very park, and from what I heard this morning, he’s taking right to it.”
The heads in the crowd nodded as one, and the applause was loud and long.
“Okay, then,” the mayor said, “I’ve got one more item of business.”
He held out the promissory note from Jeremy for the crowd to see. Then he said, “Okay, Lemmy,” and with Lemmy Wittle providing a prolonged drumroll, the mayor set the promissory note on fire, to general applause.
“How about it, Jeremy Johnson Johnson?” the mayor called out to the back of the aggregation when the note was in ashes. “You happy?”
As the smiling crowd turned around to look at him, Jeremy’s cheeks began to redden. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I am.”
And then these townspeople, to Jeremy’s surprise, and to mine, and perhaps to the surprise of the townspeople themselves, gave him such hearty and sustained applause that Jeremy could only cast down his eyes and wait for the acclaim to cease, but it did not. It seemed, if anything, to swell louder.
Finally, when it began to trail off, the mayor called out, “How about you, Ginger? You happy? And, Frank Bailey, how about you?”
They both nodded and grinned. Ginger even provided an actress’s graceful bow, which drew appreciative whistles and cheers.
“What about you, Conk?” the mayor shouted. “You happy for once?”
“I would be,” Conk called back, “if you’d stop your yammering!”—which gave rise to more hoots and laughter.
The mayor, nodding, raised his hands for quiet. “Oh, I’ll quit yammering, but I got to say something first.” He surveyed the crowd, which grew quiet. “This is the truth. It don’t matter how young you are or how old you get or how brittle your bones are or how leaky your gray cells, you are still going to flat like a happy ending. And that’s what this is, folks. A happy ending”—he stretched a grin across his broad jaw—“or as close as any of us in this part of the country is likely to find.”
It was true for me as well. A great relaxation had come over me. I had felt it for days, and had only to wait for a gentle wind to close my eyes and give myself up to the vast beyond. I was hopeful I would find Wilhelm, and Dortchen, and little Jacob, who had somehow reached through and saved not just Jeremy and the others, but me as well.
Yours is a good story, Jeremy, I told him one day. You should put it to paper.
“I wouldn’t even know how to start,” Jeremy said.
I do, I said quietly because I had spent hours and days with it, thinking it through, and that night, when we sat down at the library table and I began to speak, it came with remarkable ease, as if I were merely reading my own tale.
This, I began, is the strange and fateful tale of a boy, a girl, and a ghost.
Several days later, it was all on paper, all but the final few pages.
Jeremy and Ginger will soon return to school. They have arranged to take the same classes, study the same texts. They are teaching each other French, and less and less often they ask for my assistance. They have one another. And yet Jeremy does not entirely neglect his old friend.
One evening, when we are alone, he unwraps for me a book he has purchased by mail. It is a handsome old edition of the Household Tales—bound in brown leather, with a fine illustration of Rapunzel on the cover—and when he opens the volume, there is an even more pleasant surprise. The text of the tales runs in two separate columns, one in English and one in the original German, exactly as Wilhelm and I transcribed them. When I see this, I am quite powerfully affected.
“Do you like it?” he asks.
Yes. I do. Very much.
He does not need to speak. He is brimming with pleasure. He is happy. Throu
gh the open window I feel a gentle wind.
May I ask a favor?
“Sure.”
Could we sit here and read our way through this volume together?
“Sure,” he says again.
And that is what we do over the next several days, reading slowly, at the speed of mortals. And then, upon turning the final page of the final tale, we both are quiet. The hoo-hooing of a mourning dove carries on the breeze.
Jeremy, I say, but there must be something in my tone or inflection, for in a low, deflated voice he says, “I know.”
Again we fall silent.
“Will you come back?”
I do not know.
I see the contortion of his face, the swell and slide of the first tear. He rushes a hand to his face.
It is all right, Jeremy. There is no one here to see but me.
“Yeah,” he says in a small, snuffling voice, and suddenly he seems the boy I found years before, “and when you’re gone, there’ll be no one here to see at all.”
You have Ginger. Your father. And then there will be more people at university.
He wipes at his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. “I’ll remember to study.”
Yes. It is important to study. But also to enjoy.
Again he snuffles, but he has composed himself. He takes a deep breath and clears his throat. “Okay,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about this. I didn’t get to say it to my mother or to my grandfather before they left, but I’m going to say it to you.”
But, oh, I cannot bear it. I know. You do not need to speak the words. I know.
He looks toward me with watery eyes. “Okay.”
And you know. You know, too.
He nods, and tears again swell in his eyes.
I must go, Jeremy. I must go now.
“Okay.”
Your grandfather was right, Jeremy. You are a dear, good boy. This is all I have set out to say, but something draws me further. And I love you more than the sun and the moon.
