The Giant-Slayer

by Iain Lawrence

  From then on she lived at Piper’s Pond. Her father, the King, saw no need to wander anymore, and his caravan never moved again. The grass grew up above the wheels, twining round the spokes.

  The Wishman too discovered a fondness for his home. Months later, he made one more journey down the Great North Road. He returned in seven weeks, with many small doilies, with samplers to put on his walls, and pretty little covers for the toilet paper, and a wedding ring for Jessamine.

  But for Jimmy the giant-slayer, there was nothing better than traveling. He soon had his own caravan with a high seat, and a team of six black horses. For nine months of the year he drove all through the land, from one edge of the world to another. Only in winter did he settle down. Beside Piper’s Pond his wagon sat warm and black in all the whiteness of the valley, with a thread of gray smoke rising from the chimney. There he stayed until the unicorns came down from the hills, sweeping silver through the valley.

  “What happened to Finnegan Flanders?” asked Chip.

  “He settled in the village where the farmers lived,” said Laurie. “For the first year, he did nothing but pose for statues.”

  “Then what?”

  “He learned how to build wagons. He got an old wagon builder to show him how. Soon every farmer in the valley wanted a Flanders wagon.”

  “Did he have any more adventures?”

  “He certainly did. Finnegan Flanders explored the land to the west of the swamp. He battled giants in the north and dragons in the south. When he was very old he went on a lecture tour that took him all through the east. So Finnegan Flanders saw the whole world.”

  “What about Fingal and the Woman?” asked Dickie.

  Fingal kept the Dragon’s Tooth for the rest of his days. And he did rather well in the end. From far and wide, people traveled to the foot of the Great North Road to see the birthplace of Jimmy the giant-slayer. Fingal sold souvenirs—little chips of wood from Jimmy’s cradle. But of course they were fake. Every night he made another batch by whittling at his firewood.

  He lived to be more than a hundred, famous through the world as Fingal, father of Jimmy.

  Whenever a traveler mentioned the bottomless swamp, Fingal was reminded of the Woman. He would always ask then if there had been any news of her, any sightings on the Great North Road. The answers were always the same: heads were scratched; chins were scraped; eyes looked off in the distance. “No,” said the travelers, “no, I can’t say I’ve seen her.”

  But far to the north, at the end of the Great North Road, the Woman lived happily. In the company of the Gypsy King, the Wishman, and Jessamine, she was more happy, in fact, than she had ever been with Fingal.

  For years she never spoke about her days in the giant’s castle. But then one morning when the sun was shining on Piper’s Pond, she sat down with Jessamine and, holding hands, told her all. There were things too horrible to dwell upon, but now and then a bright moment made the Woman smile as she recalled it.

  As they talked, children played around them. The giant-slayer took a fishing pole to the pond and cast out a line that split the bright surface. The Gypsy King was laughing.

  In the end, said the Woman, it was maybe something of a blessing that she’d been captured by the giant. “I’m glad I’m not the way I was before,” she said. “Now I have so very much.”

  On her first day out of the iron lung, Laurie stood for a while at the window. She looked down at Piper’s Pond and the green grass, and the driveway that was wet again with rain.

  She looked at the spot where they said she had fallen, but she couldn’t remember it happening. She couldn’t remember getting polio, or waking in the iron lung. To her it seemed unreal, like something that had never happened.

  Behind her, the machines kept breathing. And down below, a small figure appeared, a little boy hobbling on crutches. There was a nurse beside him, her white dress starched and bright. Her legs, in their white stockings, looked like bowling pins.

  The boy was moving quickly on his crutches. Leaning forward, swaying from side to side, he swung his legs in that way that made him lurch and tip. The nurse kept reaching out her hand, ready to hold him if she had to. But she never did, and as they walked along the path toward the pond she looked like a swan protecting a cygnet, shielding it with her wing.

  When they reached the pond, they sat on a bench. As the boy turned to arrange his crutches, Laurie saw his face. She had thought he was James Miner, and she was right. He looked proud and happy.

  The nurse produced a paper bag that she set by his hip. And the ducks came surging across the water. And James began to feed them, tossing bread crumbs from the bag.

  As Laurie watched, he looked up. It gave her the strangest feeling to see him from the window, as though she had become the prince in the tower and was now looking down at her young self. Then James waved at her, and she waved back, and that chased away the feeling.

  Too tired to stand for long, she went back to the chair between Dickie and Chip, where she had sat for an hour that morning. She was helping Chip sort through the pictures on the front of his iron lung.

  “That one at the top,” he said now. “With the girl on the merry-go-round.”

  Laurie reached up. “This one?”

  “Yes.”

  She took it down and set it on the pile. Nearly half of them were gone now, leaving pictures of different people in different places, and here and there a wild-haired boy looking scared or embarrassed, but seldom looking happy. At least they were the same boy, and Laurie at last could track him through the years as he moved in and out of different homes.

  Carolyn was watching from one side, Dickie from the other.

  “Now the one underneath,” said Chip. “The boy in the hot rod. I don’t know who that is.”

  They were still working on the pictures when Miss Freeman came into the room. She was even more happy than usual. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  Laurie explained. Then Miss Freeman said, “You’d better give a picture to Carolyn. One of the real ones, I mean.”

  “Why?” asked Chip, sounding a bit suspicious.

  “So she’ll have something to remember you by.”

  Now it was Carolyn who didn’t understand. She looked back with such a puzzled look that Miss Freeman laughed.

  “Carolyn,” said the nurse, “you’re going home, sweetheart.”

  The rubber collar pulsed at Carolyn’s neck like the throat of the Swamp Witch. “Home?” she said.

  “We just got a call from your parents,” said Miss Freeman. “They’ve bought a respirator; they’re setting up a room right now. The March of Dimes is helping them out, and …” She looked at Carolyn with absolute kindness, in the same way that Chip had always looked at her. “Don’t you see? You get to go home.”

  Carolyn smiled, but in a strange way. Chip and Dickie seemed more excited than Carolyn did. They said, “Yay!” together, and then Chip said, “Don’t you want to go home?”

  “Yeah, sure I do,” said Carolyn.

  “Gee, I thought you’d be happier than that,” said Miss Freeman. “I thought you’d be on cloud nine, all up in the air like one of those people on Feather Your Nest.”

  Carolyn nearly laughed at the image of that; she liked watching game shows, though she always saw them backward in her mirror.

  “Are you worried?” asked Miss Freeman. “’Cause you don’t have to worry, you know. You won’t have to frog-breathe all the way, if that’s what you’re thinking. They’ll move the respirator, with you inside it, all the way from here to your new house. The hand pump will get you downstairs. The ambulance will be all set up. The airplane will have a generator, and they’ll plug you right in. You lucky dog, you can travel all over, and you don’t even have to get out of bed.”

  “That’s not it,” said Carolyn. Her voice was quiet and serious.

  “Then what’s the matter?”

  “I’m the Swamp Witch,” said Carolyn. “It’s really true.” Her machine tre
mbled as it breathed. “You can’t take the ugly old witch out of the swamp. You have to take the swamp with her.”

  Miss Freeman didn’t understand at all. “Well!” she said, a bit miffed. “A lot of people are going to a lot of trouble for you, Carolyn. I thought you’d changed, but I guess I was wrong.” She started away in a huff.

  “No, wait,” said Carolyn. “Don’t get frosted.”

  But it was too late. In the breathing of the machines, Miss Freeman had left the room.

  “Miss Freeman!” said Carolyn.

  “Forget it,” said Dickie. They were staring straight up again, into the backward world of their mirrors. “She wouldn’t believe you anyway.”

  “I don’t know,” said Carolyn. “She’s pretty hip.”

  “Not that hip,” said Dickie. He had never used slang words before, and it made him a bit embarrassed now.

  “He’s right,” said Chip. “It sounds crazy: a story taking over.”

  They didn’t look at each other. “It’s keen, though,” said Carolyn after a moment. “I’m going home.” Then she smiled. “But I can’t call it home. I’ve never been there. They’ve moved all over. Like Gypsies.”

  There was another silence. The respirators hummed and creaked; the shadows of the bellows moved across the floor. Chip said, “I wish we hadn’t started the story.”

  “Why?” asked Carolyn. Then she understood. “Hey, you won’t be alone. Dickie’s here.”

  “Yeah, but not for long. He’s going away too,” said Chip.

  “I am?” said Dickie.

  “Sure. Didn’t Khan disappear into the forest?” said Chip. “Remember? He sort of vanished into the mountains.”

  Dickie was frowning again.

  “He went where it’s wild and empty,” said Chip. “Sure, that was in the story.”

  “I guess so,” said Dickie. “He would have gone where the unicorns live. Where it’s always bright and clear. Where a man can ride forever, up at the edge of the sky.”

  His voice faded away. It seemed he was talking about heaven, and nobody moved or said a word. Into Laurie’s mind came an image of James Miner looking fearfully from his treatment board and saying: I think one of us is going to die.

  “I wonder what it’s like up there,” said Dickie.

  “It’s Frontierland!” said Chip loudly. “That’s what I mean. You’re going to get better, and your folks will take you to Disneyland. That’s how it’s supposed to happen, remember?”

  “Yeah, you stupe,” said Carolyn. She tried to make it sound like a joke, but nobody laughed. Then Dickie turned his head aside at last, so that he faced away from the others, and he lay sliding gently on his cot as the respirator drew him in and out.

  “Boy, Chip. I’m sorry you’ll be alone,” he said.

  Laurie looked down from the window, across the grass toward the pond. James was still sitting on the bench, though not feeding the ducks anymore. They stood around him instead, gazing up like fat little people come to hear him talk.

  “What do you see?” asked Carolyn.

  Laurie felt a funny sense of déjà vu. It swept her back to her first day in the room, and she almost believed that if she turned around it would all begin again, that none of it had happened. When the sensation faded away, it was like waking from a dream.

  “James is sitting at the pond,” she said, poking her glasses. “Under the trees, on a bench. The willows are all droopy ’cause it was raining, but now the sun’s out and they look shiny and bright, like rhinestone trees.”

  The red car—the Starlight—came into view below her. It went slowly down the driveway, paused at the gate with a red blink of its brake lights, and raced off down the road, heading north.

  The gurgling roar of the engine made Chip strain his neck to see in the tilted mirror. “Was that the Starlight?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Laurie.

  Dickie asked, “Was Dr. Wishman driving?”

  “I don’t know,” said Laurie.

  “I bet he was. He’s traveling on,” said Dickie. “He’s going to help someone else now.”

  “Where’s he going?” asked Laurie.

  “He doesn’t know. Not yet.”

  Laurie was smiling. “He’ll just keep driving north.”

  “I guess so,” said Dickie. “He’ll know where he’s going when he gets there. He’ll find someone who needs him.”

  “That’s keen,” said Laurie. “What will happen then?”

  Dickie looked at Laurie in his mirror. He saw her poke her glasses into place and wondered how many times he had seen her do that already. She looked happier now than she had when he first met her, before summer, before polio. And she was looking at him with none of the pity she had shown before, as though she understood that he didn’t really mind the iron lung. It made him feel safe, protected. It was more a cocoon than a prison. At night, in his dreams, he came out of it, riding as Khan through the mountains, living forever at the edge of the sky.

  Laurie recovered completely from her polio. When Carolyn left later that month, Laurie walked beside her iron lung, down on the elevator, out to the ambulance.

  It was a huge production that made Carolyn blush with embarrassment. There were two people spelling each other on the hand bellows, and a generator in the van that came to get her. It had a little elevator to hoist her up inside.

  Laurie wished she could hold hands with the girl, but had to settle for putting her palm on the window of the respirator, just as Mr. Valentine had done for her.

  “Good luck at home,” she said.

  “Thanks,” said Carolyn. “Thanks for everything, Laurie.”

  As the van pulled away, Laurie ran beside it, round the curve past Piper’s Pond, out to the gate where it speeded up and left her behind.

  She said goodbye to Dickie and Chip a few days later, when both were moved to a bigger hospital. Chip kept gazing at Laurie, but he seemed shy and awkward surrounded by nurses and orderlies. “I’m going to miss you like crazy,” he told her in the elevator. Then his face blushed a very bright red. Laurie smiled back at him. “I’ll send you postcards,” she promised. “Cross my heart. I’ll write every week.”

  Dickie’s parents were there that day, and they wept as he was loaded into the ambulance, because even they could see how small and weak he’d grown, though his grin was as big as ever.

  “So long,” he said, just before the doors were closed. “Pretend that I’m waving, Laurie.”

  His parents had their car all packed. They would follow the ambulance and settle in with a sister of Mrs. Espinosa. “We’re taking everything,” said Dickie’s father. “I hope we’re there a good long time.”

  From that day on, the polio ward seemed a little lonely. There was no wheeze and whirr from the iron lungs, no need for Laurie to go farther down the hall than the big room with the television set. But she often did, on her weekly visits. She would walk beside James as he lurched on his crutches, or with Ruth and Peter in their wheelchairs. And she would stand at the door of an empty room, thinking of things both sad and wonderful.

  There was a day in the future when James Miner wouldn’t struggle along beside her. On that morning he would come running instead, his crutches forgotten, his braces discarded. He would race down the hall with his knees kicking high, his hair blowing back, a huge grin on his face.

  “Laurie!” he’d shout. “Laurie, I beat it!” He would hold out his little arms, and Laurie would sweep him up and hoist him to her shoulder, the way the crowd had lifted the giant-slayer at the edge of the world. She would stagger back with his weight, and the two of them would fall to the floor, laughing.

  James would be first on his feet. He would reach down to help her as she lay sprawled on the floor, still giggling. And for a moment he would tower above her, below the poster of the striding boy.

  His picture would be in the newspaper—not the big daily, but the local weekly. He would be part of a story about the March of Dimes, and Mr. Valentine would be
in it too. It would tell how James had been a Polio Pioneer, “a hero,” it would say. “Here’s a boy who risked everything in the fight against polio. And that fight nearly cost him his life. But polio could not have been beaten without James and the others.”

  In August of that year of 1955, Laurie Valentine sat with her father in the grass of the Shenandoah valley. The creek was nearly dry then, in the middle of a long, hot summer. The mud was gray and cracked. But a tiny stream still trickled from the culvert, and there a boy was building little weirs from willow sticks, trapping the black water into pools.

  He was blond and big, not at all like Dickie. But Laurie felt a pang to see him.

  “I hope that boy had his shots,” said Mr. Valentine. He bit his lip and stared around the little park. “I wonder if I should find his parents and have a word with them.”

  “No, Dad, he’s okay,” said Laurie. “Don’t worry about everybody.”

  Mr. Valentine was still wearing his tie, the one that he had worn home from work. But at least he had loosened the knot, and now he gave it another tug before he settled back on his elbows. “People think that it’s over, but it’s not,” he said. “It will be years yet before polio’s gone altogether. The war’s won, but it isn’t ended. There’s a lot of mopping up to do.”

  Laurie looked up at her father’s tired face. He looked like a very old soldier now, wearied by his work. “Will you have to get another job?” she asked.

  He smiled sadly and shook his head. “The Foundation will go on as long as I’m alive,” he told her. “We’ll have to keep the respirators running. We’ll have to pay for the wheelchairs and the crutches and braces. Every year we’ll need more money, and it’s going to be harder than ever to drum up donations for a beaten disease.” He sighed; he scratched his head. “Laurie, I lay awake last night thinking about this. I’m afraid my work is really only starting.”

  She felt sorry for him because he seemed so desperate. But she was disappointed too. He was away so much already, and she hated the thought that he could somehow be even busier.