Across the Spectrum

by Nagle, Pati

  But the bass is hanging on, still giving them the whole chord. Dawn turns with a dirty look. He’s grinning. She sees movement on the dance floor below. The revelers set up a cheer and she looks down.

  Her host is standing. His wife is holding his hands. He beams at her. The revelers close in around them, shouting and laughing, all their hands stretched to touch him, and the thin man with butter-colored hair turns with chicken steps, nodding to them all. Jauntily, he puts his glass in his eye and it catches a thousand candles, throwing yellow light everywhere at once.

  Dawn blinks. The drummer smacks into a backbeat, and the bass player keeps pretending he’s an organist for two bars, and Dawn’s hands move over the strings of their own accord into a Santana number. The dance floor seethes. She can’t stop laughing, or crying.

  She doesn’t remember the end of the party. They play at least two more sets, rest, play again. Out of the muzzy night she remembers how the bass player helps find her hiking boots, remembers eating—god, eating everything, and the way the fiddler tries to tell her in some language certainly not English but not possibly anything else how wonderful she is and how they must do this again next year, and drinking eggnog “for the protein” the bass player says seriously, how he laces her boots on for her wrong-foot-about and makes her dance with him, and then a turn each with her host and hostess, how the drummer puts her guitar into its case for her and they all squeeze out the door together giggling and shoving to stand on the bare prairie looking east at a pale, overcast sky.

  “Surely you want to see the results of your handiwork,” the bass player murmurs in her ear, his arms wrapped round her from behind. They watch the horizon redden, a thin line of color between the black earth and the leaden sky.

  Dawn notices they are alone on the hillside. “Where’d everybody get to?”

  The bass player nibbles her ear. “When, not where. Speaking of which, have you a watch?” She puts up her wrist, her eyes on the sunrise, clutching his arm to her waist, feeling absurdly pleased. He says, “Ah, digital, very good. The year and everything.” This is obviously the answer to a question that’s been eating him all night. He’s very happy about it.

  She giggles. “What are you talking about?” She twists to look into his face.

  He kisses her sideways. “What I’m talking about is, not only can you come back again next year, but,” another kiss, “and, I can take you home.”

  She glances back at the barn door and finds instead an enormous boulder half-buried in the hillside. No door, no windows. No barn. She shakes her head. “God, am I drunk?”

  The boulder reddens while she watches. Gooseflesh ripples over her. The whole prairie reddens. She shudders once, and looks back at the sunrise. “How do I find it again?” she says, wondering.

  “The missus finds us.”

  The sun flashes across the curve of the planet like a thousand candles, shooting yellow light everywhere at once. Then it disappears into the cloud ceiling.

  She turns around in the bass player’s arms and kisses him properly. “Are you real?” she says, tangling her hands in the back of his coat.

  “Of course I’m real,” he says indignantly. “What’s your name, anyway?”

  She tells him.

  “Solstice”

  Jennifer Stevenson

  In wealthy winter time

  she dwelleth underground

  her husband waneth thin

  she waxeth round and round

  In wealthy winter time

  her music is renowned

  for rhythm or for rhyme

  there is no richer sound

  In wealthy winter time

  she gilds the iron ground

  and all her kin she welcomes in

  when blossom pear and blossom lime

  are nowhere to be found

  ∞

  On wealthy winter’s night

  she dwelleth underground

  her kin therein do raise a din

  it is a merry sound

  On wealthy winter’s night

  the hostess waxes round

  and in his skin the host wanes thin

  from dancing up and down

  On wealthy winter’s night

  she gilds the iron ground

  and wassails in the year again

  that now is brown and white

  and once was green and brown

  Cuckoo

  Madeleine E. Robins

  “Cuckoo” is a fantasy set in rural America, ca. 1905, about a woman who adopts a foundling gargoyle. I love it because it really is the first story I published that did exactly what I wanted it to do, where the ending echoes the story itself. It was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1984. No awards, but still my favorite.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Tannesburg was too small to have an orphanage. When the hired man from Sarah Eamon’s place found a baby swaddled tightly in grimy cloth and propped against a tree at the edge of Miss Eamon’s property, he brought it with him into town and left it with the doctor. And although the village was not yet connected to the new telephone line, Tannesburg had an efficient grapevine, and Miss Eamons had heard all about the foundling and the way it had squalled, tucked under Pete Hargill’s arm like a laundry bundle, long before Pete returned to work the next day. Then Sarah called at the doctor’s house, justifying her curiosity with a sense of responsibility: Had not the baby been abandoned beneath her elm tree for anyone to find?

  Mrs. Pratt, the doctor’s wife, ushered Sarah upstairs to the second best bedroom to see “the little stranger,” hastily accommodated in a makeshift crib. Mrs. Pratt went on about the child in nursery-room whispers, her voice squeezed high and girlish from her tight-corseted body, waving her hands with their accompaniments of lace and floating cambric while Sarah looked at the baby. She had expected a pudgy infant with a vapid baby’s face, but he was not like that. Even in sleep the tiny face was narrow, bony, with eyes set deeply below dark arched brows, and large elfin ears. Above his high, slanting forehead there was a dark thatch of coarse hair; about him altogether an air of strangeness, of slight deformity. As she looked at him, Sarah felt pity, and that vague wistfulness that sometimes hurt her at the sight of a baby. Then the child opened his eyes and stared soundlessly up at her, and Sarah felt a shock of familiarity run through her. They watched each other for a long moment; the baby’s eyes were violet.

  “. . . and so ugly, poor little thing. Who’s to take care of him is what I want to know, Miss Eamons. We’ve no provision for this sort of thing; the Doctor and I cannot be expected—after all, I’m not a young woman any more, and my health—”

  Sarah turned away from the crib. “I’d take him, Mrs. Pratt,” she said. “I’d like to.”

  While the ugly child in his crib slept, the ladies went down to the parlor, and Mrs. Pratt gave Sarah the first of many lectures she would hear on the folly of adopting the boy. What business had a maiden lady, no matter if she was barely thirty and well to do, to be raising a child like that, a boy, and a stray, too, parents the Lord knows who?

  Sarah heard the words over and over. Tannesburg had a certain pride in Miss Eamons, living in the old white house settled in acres of green lawn; as they would have protected Sarah from ruffians and outsiders, they now tried to protect her from the baby—only Sarah refused to be protected. From the first moment, sitting cool and smiling in Mrs. Pratt’s fussy parlor, her determined civility could not be persuaded.

  She took the boy home within the week, bought a crib and baby clothes, toys, made arrangements for the daughter of the livery stable to come and help with extra chores at the house. The boy was christened Joseph. Sarah spent hours sitting, watching him, playing with him, looking for the flash of something turbulent in his violet eyes. Two weeks after his discovery, Tannesburg was distracted from the subject of Miss Eamons and her foundling by the incursion of a horseless carriage into the streets; gradually the adoption ceased to be a nine-days’ wonder.


  Joe grew slowly, small for his age. Neither Sarah’s encouragement nor the cook’s ingenuity could fill out his frame or plumpen his narrow face. His nose grew long and bony, incongruous in a child’s face, and his elfin ears grew larger, pronouncedly pointed. There was also a deformity, twin ridges of bone parallel to his spine that began just below the shoulder blades. When he walked, Joe carried himself hunched forward slightly.

  Children in the town, even the gentlest of them, called him names. It might have been expected: his odd looks and violet stare were disconcerting; his voice was harsh and croaking. Sooner or later someone would give in to the temptation to play a trick on the dummy, taunt him, make him cry. When he was old enough to start at school the teasing briefly became worse, and Joe returned from school every day bruised and dirty and stubbornly silent. Just when Sarah thought she would have to do something, take steps, the boy learned an odd knack for effacing himself, avoiding the troublemakers, and the trouble lessened.

  Through the fights Sarah had watched, afraid to interfere or even comfort too much. Even as a very little boy, Joe had a manner that dismissed sympathy; Sarah had recognized that at once; it was something they shared.

  Though Miss Eamons and her boy became a commonplace, they were never wholly taken for granted. Married women from town called at the big white house from time to time to advise her about raising the boy, certain that even the best-intentioned maiden lady could not raise up a boy without guidance.

  They came, in complicated afternoon dresses bustled over important figures, carrying parasols and beaded reticules, and balanced teacups as they lectured. “Boys, Miss Eamons: you can’t wrap them in cotton wool. My Teddy, for instance—”

  They gave her the benefit of their experiences graciously, and if Joe stopped in the parlor for a moment on his way out to play, they smiled generously on him, disconcerted by the tenderness at the corner of Miss Eamon’s mouth and the gentleness of her hand on his hair. “Children must take their share of lumps, Miss Eamons,” the ladies would tell her when he had left. “You can’t be too easy with them just because . . . ”

  The “just because” would drift off uncomfortably, and after a little while the ladies would finish their tea and go, between discomfort and virtue. Sarah Eamons was a maiden lady; what did she know about raising boys? And such an odd boy. It must be such a quiet life for the child. Neither of them would have recognized Sarah Eamons an hour later, running in lunatic circles across the lawn near the wood, playing a ruleless game of catch-as-catch-can with Joe, laughing, breathless, until Joe reached up to overbalance her, knocking her to the ground.

  “Mama?” He circled back, just out of reach, to where Sarah lay gasping, a splash of white linen on the grass. For just a moment his eyes were dark and serious, alarmed. “Mama, are you all right? I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “You can’t wrap your Mama up in cotton wool, Joey,” she sputtered, laughing. Sarah got shakily to her feet again. “But I do think it’s time for dinner.”

  By the time they reached the house, hand in hand, Sarah was listening to a story of Joe’s; when Carrie, one of the hired girls, met them on the sun porch, they unclasped their hands as if by mutual consent, and Sarah sent him off to clean up for dinner.

  In the evenings they sat on the sun porch at the back of the old house if it was warm, with Joe by Sarah’s feet, leaning against her chair, near enough so that she could touch his shoulder as they talked, so that he could turn and bump his forehead against her knee, his awkward caress. When the weather turned cold, they moved indoors and sat together on an old red davenport, reading together, inspecting picture books of English castles, Russian mosques, French cathedrals with vaulted ceilings and odd carved figures guarding the downspouts and doorways. Sometimes Joe made up stories for Sarah’s benefit, or she would talk about growing up, about her parents, about waiting for something special that had never come.

  Once he asked Sarah why she had never married. She thought seriously before she replied; her answers to his questions were always considered. She and Joe were sitting that evening on the sun porch, washed with sounds: clatter of the hired man carrying coal for the new patent furnace, a rattle of supper dishes from the kitchen, a bird’s call from the woods, the silvery click of Sarah’s knitting needles. She was making a scarf for the boy; bright blue wool spilled down the front of her long white skirt. On the faded Oriental rug at her feet, Joe sat playing a game with twigs and stones. Sarah looked up at last, past the barn toward the trees that hemmed the north edge of the lawn. She smiled and admitted, “I suppose I never thought the last man who asked me would be the last man who asked me.”

  The boy accepted the logic of that. “There were lots of them that asked; didn’t you like any of them?” He clicked two stones against each other so that one jumped into the air and was lost in Sarah’s skirts.

  “Oh, well, like. I liked some of them. But not one of them specially,” she explained, still watching the border of wilderness. “They’d come on Sunday to take me buggy riding, or sometimes sit right here on the porch with me, watching the sunset.”

  “And?” The boy looked up at Sarah, frankly trying to reconcile her with a woman fifteen years younger, a Miss Eamons with beaux and a flirtatious manner.

  “And nothing, love. As soon as the sun set Carrie would rattle dishes inside and they’d realize that it was dusk, and me a single lady with no chaperone, and they’d do what was proper and take their leave.” Sarah’s eyes dropped from the woods to her knitting, from green to blue. “No one ever stayed past dusk,” she murmured, more for herself than for the boy.

  At her feet Joe nodded again and returned to his game. Sarah, looking down at his stooped shoulders and narrow head, smiled and returned to her knitting. It was as if, she thought, they had to know each other very well, as if each was learning the other even when they were quiet; then it was as if they were hermits, sharing the silence companionably, watching, waiting.

  When he was eleven or so, Sarah noticed that the bony ridges on Joe’s back were getting larger. The skin over them was stretched tight and dry, patchy red. Sarah swallowed a quick taste of panic; the thought came from nowhere: So soon? She sent for Dr. Pratt.

  The doctor examined Joe, teased him gently about his thinness, saying over his shoulder, “What’s the matter, Miss Eamons? Don’t you feed this boy more than once a week?”

  Sarah tried to joke back, her voice wavering over the words. “Feed him? Dr. Pratt, Joseph has two hollow legs. If you saw him at table!”

  Joe sat pliantly under the doctor’s prodding hands, grinned a shy grin that was overshadowed by that beaky nose, and said nothing.

  When the examination was done, they left Joe to dress; Sarah took the doctor out to the sun porch and sent for iced tea. Then she turned to him, and her eyes were dark-circled and afraid.

  “Boy really could use a few extra pounds, Miss Sarah,” Dr. Pratt began easily. “He hasn’t complained of any pain? The skin around the—ah—affected parts seems irritated.”

  “I’ve seen him scratching at it,” Sarah agreed. “But he hasn’t said anything. Doctor, what’s happening to him?”

  Dr. Pratt paused uncomfortably, as if he were genuinely at a loss. “Miss Sarah, I can’t tell you what I don’t know. We don’t know who his folks were, if this condition is congenital, anything like that, and I’ve never even heard of anything quite like your Joe’s case. All I can say is to wait. He’s sound, healthy—that is, except for . . . well, you know as well as I do that the boy’s not . . . altogether normal. This may be part of the course of his, uh, his condition.”

  “All we can do is wait,” Sarah repeated dully.

  “It’s the only answer I have right now,” the doctor agreed unhappily. “You might put some lotion on the bumps to soothe the itch.”

  Carrie brought the iced tea, and Sarah and Dr. Pratt sat quiet, sipping. When the doctor rose and Sarah had paid him, she offered to have the hired man take him back to town in the buggy, but he re
fused, insisting the walk would do him good. By the time Joe had appeared, half a cookie in his hand and his smile lined with crumbs, Sarah had calmed down a little and could smile at him.

  “It’s all right, Mama. I’m fine,” Joe told her, and patted her hand awkwardly.

  Sarah kept herself from gripping his hand, clutching at him. “You’re fine, but too skinny. Where do you keep all the cookies you eat?” she teased, but inside the voice repeated, So soon?

  After that, Sarah kept a jealous, distant watch on the boy, unwilling to encroach on his freedom but fearful, terrified of the change she knew in her bones was coming soon. Where the intuition came from, she could not have said, and gradually, as time went by and nothing seemed to happen, she began to scoff at her fears, relaxed and let the tension ease from her. It would be a shame, she reasoned, to hem Joe round just to ease her own mind.

  ∞

  She was awakened from deep sleep one night by shrieks. Joe’s screams, high and unnatural, like the coarse screech of a crow. Sarah was out of her bed in a minute, trailing her night wrapper around her as she ran. Outside his room the two hired girls stood, hands fluttering near their mouths in mingled fear and curiosity. “Don’t sound like nothing human,” Bess was saying.

  “I’m sure it’s just a nightmare,” Sarah said hurriedly. “Go on to bed. If I need you, I’ll ring.” She did not stop to argue.

  Joe was tangled up in his bedclothes, whimpering and crying. His skin was fiery hot to touch, and dry; when she turned him over Sarah saw that the bony ridges on his back were enlarged, breaking the skin in places. Sarah left Joe just long enough to send Bess for Dr. Pratt. Then she went back to Joe’s room, bathed his forehead in cool water, and held him trying to calm his cries.

  The doctor was not much help. He looked at the boy, gave Sarah a powder to bring the fever down, and shook his head, angry at his own helplessness. “I don’t know how to fight this. It must have something to do with his back, but I’m damned—excuse me, Miss Sarah. I don’t know what to tell you except to wait and do the things we can do for a fever: give him the powder when he gets restless, a spoonful in water. And send someone for me if he seems to get worse.”