high, high lonely sound. Do you want to cry just because you are tired? Or is it something else?
It is hot. It is late. The carnie grub squats under a strand of blinking white lights. Takes the pack of crumpled Camels from his shirt-sleeve, ignites one with a Flippo. He inhales. He exhales. The pale gray smoke encircles his head. He sits now and pulls off his boots. Sits and watches the sky. Listening.
The ticket girl smiles at him. Her nurse book is flattened before her. There is a hanky stuck in her cleavage. She is snapping gum, drumming fingers. Nothing left to do. One by one the machines are shut off and it grows quiet. Getting late, hon, she calls. That time.
Yup. That time. He leans back. Above him are white lights and stars. The electric cables are humming. The mosquitoes are humming. The whole fair is humming, but low, almost unheard. The carnie grub exhales a lasso of smoke. It floats toward the sky. Up and up.
It seems to ring the moon. Hangs there and fades away. He claps his hands and gets up.
The ticket girl jangles her coins. There is a reddish flash to the west, heat lightning. A far-off rumble. She slaps her nurse book closed. The carnie grub yawns. You are watching— near, from a distance, you aren’t sure. But you know. You see. You will not forget. You will not forget one single moment.
Over there, the sideshow trailer. The jar. The baby. Its right temple touching the cold glass. Its fists almost clenched. Its face white and swollen, eyes open, eyes dead, almost unseen in the dark now. The mouth is barely open, looking as if it were on the verge of making a high sound, a soft sound. Years from now you might hear it, but not now. Now you are lost outside of this place, lost from yourself, and so tired. Years from now you will think of this night, this long hot night. Years and years from now I—lost, lost forever. Here, this night, though, the frog baby sleeps, never dreaming.
The Last Day of June
or, The Old Ones
Early morning on the last day of June. The young schoolteacher was dressing himself before his wardrobe mirror in the cramped attic room he rented from the bachelor farmer who lived below. It had been hot all night in the cramped attic room; today would be even hotter. The rising sun shone so brightly into the mirror he had to bend closer to see his face through the veil of dust. His was a boyish face, still downy on the cheeks and only just twenty, but in this light it faded into the pale, looked almost spectral. In another time, he thought, this is what poets who died young looked like, but he was finished as a poet. He put on a clean shirt today but no collar; he rolled up the sleeves and was glad that school was out, so he could get by without the seersucker. Downstairs, he had heard farmer and farmhand leave the house to go about their chores. A meadowlark was singing off in the paddock. And from much farther away, out the window and across a sea of indigo fields, from beyond the eastern gap and maybe even originating from the mountains themselves, he heard, or thought he heard, a thin high sound, like the peal of a distant waterfall, perhaps, or like bells.
In the village, the village barber stood under the morning glory trellis outside his cottage door, and he, too, thought he heard something afar, where it was still more blue than golden. It was as if the mist coming down the mountains to the east could make a sound. A tinkling, silvery sound–children laughing to the sound of pennywhistle and tambourine. But no, that was in another place and time. He had dreamt last night of such a place, an icebound world high in mountains much higher than these. A land of the dire wolf and ikons. The barber looked off in the opposite direction, toward the rising sun, past the tavern and the church steeple and the mayor’s big house, into the foothills, but was too blinded by dawnlight to see any further. From that end of the village, down in the hollows still purple too with mist, he was certain he could hear an echo now–high, tremulous, almost a merry taunt. It was then that the barber, who was not young at all, remembered what he had heard from a traveling representative of a hair tonic company a month or more ago: that the Old Ones had been seen this year two or three counties over, that they had come down from their mountaintops for the first time in longer than most folks could remember, and that people said they were on the roam once again. They snatch babies right out of their bassinets, some fools would say, but they were thinking of the tribes of Romany, and no Gypsies had ever or would ever come here. The winters lingered too long, the summers sped like sparrows. But the barber looked forward to seeing the Old Ones again, for, like him, they did not quite belong to this place or any other, and yet they were bound to this rocky land as surely as ghosts of the murdered must haunt the rooms where they died.
The young schoolteacher had crossed the fields to where the white cattle, like bewitched sisters in a myth, huddled under a grove of oaks; they looked up sleepily but did not move as he passed them on his way to where the red-dirt road intersected with the gray-dirt road. Today the schoolteacher had books to return to the public library, and he was contemplating which he might borrow next. He meant to reread Homer this summer break, when there was so little else for a schoolteacher to do, but wondered instead if he shouldn’t try A Midsummer’s Night Dream. The village librarian wore her hair up with dragonfly barrettes like a girl from the city, and she was unmarried. She would have to ignore that he was hatless, in his shirtsleeves–but, after all, she had shown him books containing illustrations of ladies and gentlemen wearing much less than this. She had been places, seen things, if only in books. Thinking of her, he picked up his speed. Now there was no question that he heard, coming down the gray-dirt road from the pass between Owl’s Head and Nag’s Head, coming his way, the creaking of wagon wheels and the jangle of bells on horses’ reins.
Mid-morning on the last day of June. The sleek gray quarter horse tethered to the mayor’s hitching post had been waiting patiently for an hour as the mayor busied himself within the house. It was the largest house for miles around, with porches wide as a steamship’s deck, and a stained-glass window, round like a porthole, in a high stairwell that looked out over the entire village. The mayor had woken with a fierce headache and had stubbed his toe on the chamber pot, and being a superstitious man, was certain that these were not good omens. Besides that, it was certain to be another very hot day, never felicitous for a large and heavy man. He kept a slim silver flask in his coat pocket, which he replenished, as he did every morning, with the cool clear liquid that smelled of crushed juniper berries. His wife was dead. She was buried under a juniper tree. The mayor had received a letter four mornings ago; it was still in his coat pocket, filed next to the flask, and he had still not opened it. Outside he heard his mare neigh once, as if to tell him to hurry, the minutes of the day were already dissolving one by one.
The barber was unfurling the striped awning up and over his shop window. The low morning sun glanced off all the bright things within. He kept his shop very clean, all the silver highly polished and the mirrors, large and small, spotless. Even before the awning spread its shadow, the shop was cool, too, perhaps the coolest place in town. It was the cool of silver and shadow. And quiet, often too quiet. There was reason today, however, for the barber to whistle, and whistle he did, one of the old country roundelays. The last time the Old Ones had come through here, he had shaved many of their chins, even trimmed many of the women’s long gray hair, and they paid what he asked without fuss. In fact, they never seemed to speak a word, even among themselves. The barber knew they liked to camp down in the hollows, the mayor’s disused lands, where rocks had never been raked from the topsoil, and no one would bother them. If this visit were to be like those of past decades, they would camp a night or two at most, pick up, and continue on their way, people said, until they found another, even more remote, part of the mountains to make their new home. The barber tied on his apron and sprinkled rosewater about the little shop, like a priest blessing a chapel.
Word had spread. In the village square, citizens in bonnets and caps were gathering, pointing down the post road, search
ing the horizon. The tavern was serving lemonade under its awnings as if this were a holiday. Children spun tin tops and wooden hoops out over the dusty road, only to be pulled back onto the green by nervous parents. Would there be a parade? Was the Fourth coming early? There was little talk in front of the children, but no one wanted to miss seeing them pass–the elders who’d seen it all before, sometimes several times, no less than the youngsters who had never. At ten, as if in welcome to the newcomers, the bells of the church steeple rang out their little melody of the hours, and the last of the children were called off the road to make way for what was now imminent.
The library was new, a Carnegie, quite small but large for a village this size, with a copper-topped rotunda like a teapot lid and dome lights and fanlights and a green glass floor between the book stacks. No light went to waste in the library. The schoolteacher was in the library, looking over the old leather-bound set of Shakespeare, of which the girl librarian was very proud, when the procession began outside the big leaded-glass windows. He had never witnessed anything like
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