The Stolen Child

by Keith Donohue

  I squinted at her and smiled.

  “You are the one I saw in the woods that night. On the road? With the deer?” She started to raise her voice. “Don’t you remember? I saw you on the road with those other boys. It must have been eight or nine years ago by now. You’re all grown up and everything, but you’re that little boy, no doubt. I was worried about you.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about, ma’am.” I turned to go, but she grabbed my arm.

  “It is you. I cracked my head on the dashboard when I hit the deer, and I thought you were a dream at first. You came out of the forest—”

  I yelped a sound that hushed the room, a pure raw cry that startled everyone, myself included. I did not realize my capacity for such an inhuman noise still existed. My mother intervened.

  “Let go of my son,” she told her. “You’re hurting his arm.”

  “Look, lady,” I said, “I don’t know you.”

  My father stepped into the middle of the triangle. “What is this all about?”

  The woman’s eyes flashed in anger. “I saw your boy. One night I was driving home from the country, and this deer jumped right onto the road in front of my car. I swerved to miss her, but I clipped her with my bumper. I didn’t know what to do, so I got out of the car to see if I could help.”

  She shifted her attention from my father and began addressing me. “From the woods comes this boy, about seven or eight years old. Your son. And he startled me more than the deer did. Out of nowhere, walks right up to the deer like the most natural thing in the world; then he bent down to its mouth or nose or whatever you call it. Hard to believe, but he cupped his hand over her muzzle, and breathed. It was magic. The deer rolled off her side, unfolded her legs, stood, and sprang off. The most incredible thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  I realized then that she had experienced an encounter. But I knew I had not seen her before, and while some changelings are willing to inspire wild animals, I never engaged in such foolishness.

  “I got a real good look at the boy in my headlights,” she said, “although not so good at his friends in the forest. It was you. Who are you really?”

  “I don’t know her.”

  My mother, riveted by her story, came up with an alibi. “It can’t be Henry. Listen, he ran away from home when he was seven years old, and I didn’t let him out of my sight for the next few years. He was never out by himself at night.”

  The intensity melted from the woman’s voice, and her eyes searched for a sign of faith. “He looked at me, and when I asked him his name, he ran away. Since that night I’ve wondered . . .”

  My father spoke in a gentle tone he seldom used. “I’m sorry, but you must be mistaken. Everybody has a double in the world. Maybe you saw someone who looked a bit like my son. I’m sorry for your troubles.” She looked into his eyes, searching for affirmation, but he offered only the solace of his calm demeanor. He took the red coat from her arm and held it open for her. She slipped inside it, then left the room without a word, without looking back. In her wake trailed the remnants of anger and anxiety.

  “Did you ever?” my mother asked. “What a story. And to think that she’d actually have the nerve to say it.”

  From the corner of my eye, I could see my father watching me, and the sensation unnerved me. “Can we go now? Can we get out of here?”

  When we were all in the car and out of the city, I announced my decision. “I’m not going back there. No more recitals, no more lessons, no more strangers coming up to me with their wild stories. I quit.”

  For a moment, I thought my father would drive off the road. He lit a cigarette and let Mom take over the conversation.

  “Henry, you know how I feel about quitting. . . .”

  “Did you hear what that lady said?” Mary chimed in. “She thought you lived in the woods.”

  “You don’t even like to stand next to a tree.” Elizabeth laughed.

  “This isn’t about your feelings, Mom, but mine.”

  My father stared at the white line in the middle of the road.

  “You are a sensitive boy,” my mother continued. “But you can’t let one woman with one story ruin your life. You don’t mean to tell me you’re going to quit eight years of work on the basis of a fairy tale.”

  “It isn’t the woman in the red coat. I’ve had enough. Gone as far as I can go.”

  “Bill, why don’t you say something?”

  “Dad, I’m tired of it. Sick of practice, practice, practice. Tired of wasting my Saturdays. I think I should have a say over my own life.”

  He drew a deep breath and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. The rest of the Days understood the signal. Quiet all the way home. That night I could hear them talking, make out the ebb and flow of a loud and emotional confrontation, but I had lost all ability to eavesdrop from a distance. Once in a while I’d hear a “goddam” or “bloody” explode from him, and she may have cried—I suppose she did—but that’s it. Near midnight, he stormed out of the house, and the sound of the car pulling away left a desolation. I went downstairs to see if Mom had survived the ordeal and found her calmly sitting in the kitchen, a shoebox open on the table before her.

  “Henry, it’s late.” She tied a ribbon around a bundle of letters and set it in the box. “Your father used to write once a week while he was over in North Africa.” I knew the story by heart, but she unwound it again. Pregnant, with a husband overseas at war, all of nineteen at the time, she lived with his parents. She was still alone at the time of Henry’s birth, and I was now almost as old as she had been through the whole ordeal. Counting my life as a hobgoblin, I was old enough to be her grandfather. Untamed age had crept into her heart.

  “You think life’s easy when you’re young, and can take almost anything because your emotions run so strong. When you’re up, you’re in the stars, and when you’re down, you’re at the bottom of the well. But although I’ve grown old—”

  She was thirty-five by my calculations.

  “That doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be young. Of course, it’s your life to do with what you choose. I had high hopes for you as a pianist, Henry, but you can be whatever you wish. If it’s not in your heart, I understand.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea, Mom?”

  “That would be grand.”

  Two weeks later, during the afternoon before Christmas, Oscar Love and I drove into the city to celebrate my newly won independence. Ever since that episode with Sally, I’d had a question or two about my capability to have intercourse, so the trip was not without apprehension. When I lived in the forest, only one of those monsters could do the trick. He had been captured too late in his childhood, at the cusp of puberty, and he gave the poor females nothing but trouble. The rest of us were not ready physically to perform the act.

  But I was ready to experience sex that night. Oscar and I tipped back a bottle of cheap wine. Thus fortified, we approached the house at dusk as the girls were opening up shop. I would like to report that losing my virginity was both exotic and erotic, but the truth is that it was mainly dark, rough, and over much more quickly than I had expected. She was fair-skinned and past her glory, the crown of platinum hair a come-on and a ruse, and among her several rules for the duration, no kissing. When I displayed a tentative uncertainty as to where and how to go about the act, she grabbed me with her hand and pushed me into position. A short time later, all that remained was to get dressed, pay the bill, and wish her merry Christmas.

  When morning came with gifts around the tree and the family lounging in pajamas and robes, I felt on my way to a brand-new life. Mom and the twins were oblivious to any change as they went about their cheerful tasks, offering genuine affection and consideration of one another. My father, on the other hand, may have suspected my debauch of the night before. Earlier that morning, when I came home around two o’clock, the living room smelled of Camels, as if he had been waiting up for me and only gone to bed when Oscar’s ca
r pulled into the driveway. Throughout that drowsy holiday, my father moved about the house the way a bear moves through its territory when it smells the presence of another male. Nothing said, but wayward glances, brusqueness, a snarl or two. For the rest of our time together, we did not get along. A year and a half remained in my high school career before I could get away to college, so we circled one another, barely exchanging a sentence on our rare encounters. He treated me like a stranger half of the time.

  I recall two occasions when he stepped out of his inner world, and both times were unsettling. A few months after the scene at the winter recital, he brought up the matter of the woman in red and her strange story. We were tearing down my mother’s henhouse, having sold the birds and gotten out of the egg and chicken business after turning a handsome profit. His questions arrived in the intervals between the prying crowbar, squealing nails, and tearing lumber.

  “So, you remember that lady and her story about the boy and the deer?” He ripped another plank from the frame. “What do you make of that? Do you think such a thing could happen?”

  “Sounded incredible to me, but I suppose it might have happened. She seemed pretty sure of herself.”

  Grunting with effort, he tugged away at a rusty nail. “So it might be true? How do you explain her thinking it was you?”

  “I didn’t say it was true. She seemed convinced it happened, but it isn’t likely, is it? And anyway, suppose something like that did happen to her, she is wrong about me. I wasn’t there.”

  “Maybe it was someone who looked like you?” He threw his weight into it, and the rest of the wall crashed down, leaving only the skeleton stark against the sky.

  “That’s a possibility,” I said. “I reminded her of someone she saw once upon a time. Didn’t you tell her that everyone has a double in the world? Maybe she saw my evil twin?”

  He eyeballed the frame. “This’ll tumble down with a few good kicks.” He knocked down the frame, loaded it up in the back of a truck, and drove away.

  The second occasion occurred about a year later. His voice woke me at first light, and I followed the sound from my bedroom and through the back doorway. A feathery mist rose from the lawn and he stood, his back to me, in the middle of the wet grass, calling out my name as he faced a stand of firs. A dark trail of footsteps led into the woods ten feet in front of him. He was stuck to the spot, as if he had startled a wild animal that fled away in fear. But I saw no creature. By the time I drew near, the diminuendo of a few raspy calls of “Henry” lingered in the air. Then he fell to his knees, bent his head to the ground, and quietly wept. I crept back into the house, and pretended to be reading the sports page when he came in. My father stared at me hunched over the newspaper, my long fingers wrapped around a coffee cup. The wet belt of his robe dragged along the floor like a chain. Soaked, disheveled, and unshaven, he seemed much older, but maybe I had not noticed before how he was aging. His hands trembled as if palsied, and he took a Camel from his pocket. The cigarette was too wet to light despite his repeated attempts, so he crumpled the whole pack and tossed it in the trash can. I set a cup of coffee in front of him, and he stared at the steam as if I had handed him poison.

  “Dad, are you all right? You look a mess.”

  “You.” He pointed his finger at me like a gun, but that’s all he said. The word hung in the air all morning, and I do not think I ever heard him call me “Henry” again.

  • CHAPTER 12 •

  We entered the church to steal candles. Even in the dead of night, the slate and glass building asserted its prominence on Main Street. Bound by an iron fence, the church had been laid out in the shape of a cross, and no matter how one approached it, the symbols were inescapable. Huge chestnut doors at the top of a dozen steps, mosaics from the Bible in the stained-glass windows reflecting moonlight, parapets hiding angels lurking near the roof—the whole edifice loomed like a ship that threatened to swamp us as we drew near. Smaolach, Speck, and I crept through the graveyard adjacent to the eastern arm of the church and popped in through a side door that the priests left unlocked. The long rows of pews and the vaulted ceiling created a space that, in the darkness, pressed down on us; its emptiness had weight and substance. Once our eyes adjusted, however, the church did not seem as smothering. The threatening size diminished, and the high walls and arched ceilings reached out as if to embrace us. We split up, Smaolach and Speck in search of the larger candles in the sacristy to the right, I to find the smaller votive candles in an alcove on the other side of the altar. A fleeting presence seemed to follow me along the altar rail, and a real dread rose inside me. In a wrought iron stand, dozens of candles stood like lines of soldiers in glass cups. A coinbox rattled with pennies when I tapped my nails against its metal face, and spent matches littered the empty spaces. I struck a new match against the rough plate, and a small flame erupted like a fingersnap. At once, I regretted the fire, for I looked up and saw a woman’s face staring down at me. I shook out the light and crouched beneath the rail, hoping to be invisible.

  Panic and fear left as quickly as they had come, and what amazes me now is how much flows through the mind in such a short space of time. When I saw her eyes looking down on me, I remembered: the woman in red, my schoolmates, the people in town, the people in church, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, the kidnapping, drowning, prayers, the Virgin Mary, and my sisters, father, mother. I nearly had solved the riddle of my identity. Yet as quickly as it takes to say “Pardon me,” they vanished, and with them, my real story. It seemed as if the eyes of the statue flickered in the match light. I looked upon the enigmatic face of the Virgin Mary, idealized by an anonymous sculptor, the object of untold adoration, devotion, imagination, supplication. As I stuffed my pockets with candles, I felt a pang of guilt.

  Behind me, the great wooden doors at the center entrance groaned open as a penitent or a priest entered. We zipped out through the side door and zigzagged among the gravestones. Despite the fact that bodies lay buried there, the cemetery was not half as frightening as the church. I paused at a gravestone, ran my fingers over the incised letters, and was tempted to light a match to read the name. The others leapt over the iron fence, so I scurried to catch up, chasing them across town, until we were all safely beneath the library. Every close call thrilled us, and we sat on our blankets giggling like children. We lit enough candles to make our sanctuary shine. Smaolach crawled off to a dark corner and curled up like a fox, his nose buried under a cloaking arm. Speck and I sought out the brightness, and with our latest books, we sat side by side, the scrape of turning pages marking time.

  Ever since she had introduced me to this secret place, I loved going to the library. Initially, I went for the books first encountered in my childhood. Those old stories—Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Mother Goose, picture books like Mike Mulligan, Make Way for Ducklings, and Homer Price—promised another clue to my fading identity. Rather than help me recapture the past, the stories only alienated me further from it. By looking at the pictures and reading aloud the text, I had hoped to hear my mother’s voice again, but she was gone. After my first few visits to the library, I shelved such childish things and never again looked at them. Instead, I embarked upon a journey mapped by Speck, who chose, or helped me choose, stories to hold my adolescent interest: books like The Call of the Wild and White Fang, tales of adventure and derring-do. She helped me sound out words I could not decipher and explained characters, symbols, and plots that ran too wild or deep for my imagination. Her confidence, as she moved through the stacks and countless novels, inspired me to believe in my own ability to read and imagine. If not for her, I would be the same as Smaolach, filching comic books like Speed Carter or the Adventures of Mighty Mouse from the drugstore. Or worse, not reading at all.

  Cozy in our den, she held on her lap a fat volume of Shakespeare, the type set in a minuscule font, and I was midway through The Last of the Mohicans. The flickering candlelight conspired with the silence, and we only interrupted each other’s reading to s
hare a casual delight.

  “Speck, listen to this: ‘These children of the woods stood together for several moments pointing at the crumbling edifice, and conversing in the unintelligible language of their tribe.’ ”

  “Sounds like us. Who are these people?”

  I held up the book to show her its cover, the title in gilt letters on a green cloth. We receded back into our stories, and an hour or so passed before she spoke again.

  “Listen to this, Aniday. I’m reading Hamlet here and these two fellows come in. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet greets them: ‘Good lads, how do ye both?’ And Rosencrantz says, ‘As the indifferent children of the earth.’ And Guildenstern says, ‘Happy in that we are not over-happy. On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button.’ ”

  “Does he mean they were unlucky?”

  She laughed. “Not that, not that. Don’t go chasing after a better fortune.”

  I did not understand the half of what she said, but I laughed along with her, and then tried to find my place again with Hawkeye and Uncas. As morning threatened and we packed our things to go, I told her how much I had enjoyed what she had read to me about Fortune.

  “Write it down, boy. If you come across a passage in your reading that you’d like to remember, write it down in your little book; then you can read it again, memorize it, and have it whenever you wish.”

  I took out my pencil and a card from the stack I had filched from the card catalog. “What did they say?”

  “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: the indifferent children of the earth.”

  “The last of the Mohicans.”

  “That’s us.” She flashed her smile before going to the corner to wake our slumbering friend Smaolach.

  We would snitch a few books to take home with us for the satisfaction of lying abed on a chilled winter’s morning under weak sunshine and slipping out a slim volume to read at leisure. Between the covers, a book can be a sin. I have spent many hours in such a waking dream, and once having learned how to read, I could not imagine my life otherwise. The indifferent children around me did not share my enthusiasm for the written word. Some might sit for a good story well told, but if a book had no pictures, they showed scant interest.