The Stolen Child

by Keith Donohue

“Well . . . when I asked you about your father, all you said was, ‘He knows.’ ” McInnes yawned. Morning was quite nearly upon us. “What do you think he knew, Henry? Do you think he knew about the past?”

  I knew, but I did not say. There was coffee at the bar and eggs in a miniature refrigerator. Using the hot plate in the back, I made us breakfast, settling my wayward thoughts by concentrating on simple tasks. A kind of hazy, dirty light seeped in through the windows at dawn. I stood behind the counter; he sat in front on his usual stool, and we ate our scrambled eggs and drank our coffee black. At that hour the room looked worn and pitiful, and McInnes’s eyes tired and vacant, the way my father had appeared the last time we met.

  He put on his hat and shrugged into his coat. An awkward pause between us let me know that he would not be coming back. The night had been too raw and strange for the old professor. “Good-bye, and good luck.”

  As his hand turned the knob, I called out for him to wait. “What was my name,” I asked, “in this so-called former life of mine?”

  He did not bother to turn around. “You know, I never thought to ask.”

  • CHAPTER 16 •

  When a gun goes off on a cold winter’s day, the retort echoes through the forest for miles around and every living creature stops to look and listen. The first gunshot of hunting season startled and put the faeries on alert. Scouts fanned out along the ridge, searching for orange or camouflage vests or hats, listening for the trudge of men seeking out deer, pheasant, turkey, grouse, rabbit, fox, or black bear. Sometimes the hunters brought their dogs, dumb and beautiful—mottled pointers, feathery setters, blueticks, black-and-tans, retrievers. The dogs could be more dangerous than their owners. Unless we masked our scent along every path, the dogs could smell us out.

  My great fear in setting out alone is the chance of meeting up with a stray or worse. Years later, when we were fewer in number, a pack of hunting dogs picked up our trail and surprised us at rest in a shady grove. They raced our way, a stream of flashing sharp teeth and howling menace, and we moved as one by instinct, scrambling toward the safety of a bramble thicket. With each stride we took in retreat, the dogs gained two in pursuit. They were an army with knives drawn, hollering a primal battle cry, and we escaped only by sacrificing our bare skin to the tangle of thorns. We were lucky when they stopped at the edge of the thicket, confused and whimpering.

  But on this winter day, the dogs were far away. All we heard was the yelp, the random shot, the muttered curse, or the kill. I once saw a duck fall out of the sky, instantly changing from a stretched-forward silhouette to a pinwheel of feathers that landed with a clap on the water. Poaching had disappeared from these hills and valleys by the middle of the decade, so we had to worry only during the hunting season, which corresponded roughly with the late fall and winter holidays. The brightness of trees gave way to bareness, then to bitter cold, and we began to listen for humans in the glens and the crack of the gun. Two or three of us went out while the other faeries hunkered down, buried beneath blankets under a coat of fallen leaves, or in holes, or hid in hollow trees. We did our best to become unseeable, as if we did not exist. The early arrival of night or dripping-wet days were our only respite from the tense boredom of hiding. The odor of our constant fear mingled with the rot of November.

  Back to back to back in a triangle, Igel, Smaolach, and I sat watch upon the ridge, the morning sun buffered by low dense clouds, the air pregnant with snow. Ordinarily, Igel wanted nothing to do with me, not since that day years before when I nearly betrayed the clan by trying to speak with the man. Two sets of footsteps approached from the south; one heavy, crashing through the brush, the other soft. The humans stepped into a meadow. An air of impatience hung about the man, and the boy, about seven or eight years old, looked anxious to please. The father carried his shotgun, ready to fire. The son’s gun was broken apart and awkward to carry as he struggled out of the brush. They wore matching plaid jackets and billed caps with the earflaps down against the chill. We leaned forward to listen to their conversation in the stillness. With practice and concentration over the years, I was now able to decipher their speech.

  “I’m cold,” said the boy.

  “It’ll toughen you up. Besides, we haven’t found what we came for.”

  “We haven’t even seen one all day.”

  “They’re out here, Osk.”

  “I’ve only seen them in pictures.”

  “When you see the real thing,” said the man, “aim for the little bugger’s heart.” He motioned for the boy to follow, and they headed east into the shadows.

  “Let’s go,” said Igel, and we began to trail them, keeping ourselves hidden at a distance. When they paused, we paused, and at our second such stop, I tugged on Smaolach’s sleeve.

  “What are we doing?”

  “Igel thinks he may have found one.”

  We moved on, resting again when the quarry paused.

  “One what?” I asked.

  “A child.”

  They led us on a circuitous route along empty pathways. No prey appeared, they never fired their weapons, and they hadn’t said more than a few words. Over lunch, they maintained an uncomfortable silence, and I could not understand how these two were of any interest at all. The sullen pair headed back to a green pickup parked on the slope beside the road, and the boy stepped into the passenger’s side. As he crossed the front of the truck, the father muttered, “That was a fucking mistake.” Igel scrutinized the pair with savage intensity, and as the truck pulled away, he read out the license plate numbers, committing them to memory. Smaolach and I lagged behind Igel as he marched home, intent on his private ruminations.

  “Why did we track them all day? What do you mean, he found a child?”

  “Them clouds are ready to burst.” Smaolach studied the darkening sky. “You can smell it coming.”

  “What is he going to do?” I yelled. Up ahead, Igel stopped in his tracks and waited for us to catch up.

  “How long have you been with us, Aniday?” Igel asked. “What does your stone calendar say?”

  Ever since that day when they turned on me, I had been wary of Igel, and had learned to be deferential. “I don’t know. December? November? 1966?”

  He rolled his eyes, bit his lip, and continued. “I’ve been looking and waiting since you arrived, and it’s my turn now and that boy may be the one. When you and Speck are in town with your books, keep an eye out for that green truck. If you see it again, or the boy or the father, let me know. If you have the courage to follow them and find where he lives or goes to school, or where the father works, or if he has a mother, sister, brother, friend, you let me know.”

  “Of course I will, Igel. I’d be happy to spy on him at the library.”

  He bade Smaolach to walk with him, and I brought up the rear. A bitterly freezing rain began to fall, and I ran the last few moments to escape from being drenched. The warren excavated by Igel and Luchóg over the years proved an ideal shelter on such blustery nights, although most of the time claustrophobia forced me out. The cold and damp drove me into the tunnels, and with my palms I felt along in the darkness until I sensed the presence of others.

  “Who’s there?” I called out. No answer, only a furtive muffled sound.

  I called out again.

  “Go away, Aniday.” It was Béka.

  “You go away, you old fart. I’ve just come in from the rain.”

  “Go back the way you came. This hole is occupied.”

  I tried to reason with him. “Let me pass by, and I’ll sleep somewhere else.”

  A girl screamed and so did he. “She bit my damn finger.”

  “Who is there with you?”

  Speck shouted out in the darkness. “Just go, Aniday. I’ll follow you out.”

  “Vermin.” Béka cursed and let her go. I reached out in the darkness and she found my hand. We crawled back to the surface. Stinging rain gathered in her hair and flattened it against her skull. A thin layer of ice caked o
ver her head like a helmet, and the drops collected on our eyelashes and streamed down our faces. We stood still, unable to say anything to each other. She looked as if she wished to explain or apologize, but her lips trembled and her teeth knocked and chattered. Grabbing my hand again, she led me to the shelter of another tunnel. We crawled in and crouched near to the surface, out of the rain, yet not in the cold earth. I could not stand the silence, so I yammered on about the father and son we had followed and Igel’s instructions. Speck took it all in without speaking a word.

  “Squeeze out that water from your hair,” she said. “It will dry faster that way and stop dripping down your nose.”

  “What does he mean, he found a child?”

  “I’m cold,” she said, “and tired and sick and sore. Can’t we talk about this in the morning, Aniday?”

  “What did he mean that he’s been waiting since I got here?”

  “He’s next. He’s going to change places with that boy.” She pulled off her coat. Even in the darkness, her white sweater threw back enough light to allow me a better sense of her presence.

  “I don’t understand why he gets to go.”

  She laughed at my naïveté. “This is a hierarchy. Oldest to youngest. Igel makes all the decisions because he has seniority, and he gets to go next.”

  “How old is he?”

  She calculated in her mind. “I don’t know. He’s probably been here about one hundred years.”

  “You’re kidding.” The number nearly fried my brain. “How old are all the others? How old are you?”

  “Will you please let me sleep? We can figure this out in the morning. Now, come here and warm me up.”

  In the morning, Speck and I talked at length about the history of the faeries, and I wrote it all down, but those papers, like many others, are in ashes now. The best I can do is re-create from memory what we recorded that day, which was far from truly accurate to begin with, since Speck herself did not know the full story and could merely summarize or speculate. Still, I wish I had my notes, for the conversation was years ago, and my whole life seems to be nothing more than reconstructing memories.

  That my good friends could one day leave profoundly saddened me. The cast of characters, in fact, constantly revolves, but so slowly over time that they seemed permanent players. Igel was the oldest, followed by Béka, Blomma, Kivi, and the twins, Ragno and Zanzara, who came late in the nineteenth century. Onions arrived in the auspicious year of 1900. Smaolach and Luchóg were the sons of two families who had emigrated from the same village in Ireland in the first decades of the twentieth century, and Chavisory was a French Canadian whose parents had died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Besides myself, Speck was the baby, having been stolen as a four-year-old in the second year of the Great Depression.

  “I was a lot younger than most of the others when I made the change,” she said. “Except for the twins. From the beginning, there have been twins in this line, and they’re impossible to take unless very young. And we never take babies. Too much trouble.”

  Vague memories stirred the sauce of my thoughts. Where had I known twins before?

  “Luchóg named me, because I was a speck of a girl when they snatched me. Everyone else is ahead of me in line for the change, except you. You’re the bottom of the totem pole.”

  “And Igel has been waiting for his turn for a whole century?”

  “He’s seen a dozen make the change and had to bide his time. Now we’re all in line behind him.” The mention of such a wait caused her to shut her eyes. I leaned against a tree trunk, feeling helpless for her and hopeless for myself. Escape was not a constant thought, but occasionally I allowed myself to dream of leaving the group and rejoining my family. Dejected, Speck hung her head, dark hair covering her eyes, her lips parted, drawing in air as if each breath was a chore.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked.

  She looked up. “Help Igel.”

  I noticed that her once-white sweater was fraying at the collar and the sleeves, and I resolved to look for a replacement as we searched for the boy.

  In glowing red letters, the sign out front read OSCAR’S BAR, and alone in the lot behind the building, Béka found the hunter’s green pickup. He and Onions jumped into its bed and rode, undetected by the drunken driver, to the man’s house out in the country. She laughed when she read the name off the mailbox: LOVE’S. They memorized the location, sharing the good news with us later that night. With the information in hand, Igel set in motion our reconnaissance and assigned shifts of teams to watch the boy and his family to learn their movements and habits. He instructed us to pay close attention to the boy’s character and demeanor.

  “I want a detailed account of his life. Does he have any brothers or sisters? Uncles or aunts? Grammy and Gramps? Does he have any friends? What sort of games does he play? Any hobbies or spare-time activities? Find all there is to know about his relationship with his parents. How do they treat him? Is he inclined to daydream? To wander about by himself in the woods?”

  I transcribed his words in McInnes’s composition book and wondered how we might undertake such a task. Igel walked over and stood in front of me, glaring down at my scribbling.

  “You,” he said, “will be our scrivener. I want a complete record. You are to be his biographer. Everyone else can tell Aniday what they learn. Don’t come pestering me with every detail. When the story is complete, you can tell it. This will be the most perfect change in our history. Find me a new life.”

  Before I saw the child again, I felt as if I knew him as well as myself. Chavisory, for instance, found out that he was named after his uncle Oscar. Smaolach could do a passing imitation of his voice, and Kivi had applied an unknown calculus to plot out his height, weight, and general body type. After years of mere self-preservation and maintenance, the faeries’ industry and devotion to the task bordered on the fanatic.

  I was assigned to watch for him at the library, but I rarely bothered to look for him there, and it is by chance that he appeared at all. His mother had dragged the poor child along and left him alone on the small playground out front. From my hiding place, direct observation was impossible, so I watched his reflection in the plate-glass windows across the street, which distorted his appearance, making him smaller and somehow transparent.

  The dark-haired, beetle-browed boy sang quietly to himself as he climbed up and swooshed off the slide over and over again. His nose ran, and every time he mounted the stairs he’d wipe the snot with the back of his hand, then wipe his hand on his greasy corduroys. When he tired of the sliding board, he sauntered over to the swings to pump and pull himself into the clear blue sky. His blank expression never changed, and the song under his breath never faltered. I watched him for nearly an hour, and in that whole time, he expressed absolutely no emotion, content to play alone until his mother came. A thin smile creased his face when she arrived, and without a word he jumped down from the swing, grabbed her hand, and off they went. Their behavior and interaction baffled me. Parents and children take such everyday moments for granted, as if there is an endless supply.

  Had my parents forgotten me completely? The man who cried after me that long-ago morning surely had been my father, and I resolved to go see him, my mother, and my baby sisters one day soon. Perhaps after we had abducted the poor misfortunate bastard from the playground. The swing stopped, and the early June day faded. A swallow appeared, chasing insects in the air above the iron bars, and all of my desires were tipped by the wings as the bird scissored away into the milky dusk. I felt sorry for the boy, although I knew that changing places was the natural order. His capture would mean Igel’s release and one more step toward the head of the line for me.

  The child was an easy mark; his parents would barely be aware of the change. He had few friends, caused neither excitement nor alarm as a student, and was so ordinary as to be almost invisible. Ragno and Zanzara, who had taken residence in the family’s attic for months, reported that aside from peas a
nd carrots, the boy ate anything, preferred chocolate milk with his meals, slept on rubber sheets, and spent a lot of time in the living room watching a small box that let one know when to laugh and how to schedule bedtime. Our boy was a good sleeper, too, up to twelve hours at a stretch on weekends. Kivi and Blomma reported that he liked to play outdoors in a sandbox by the house, where he had set up an elaborate tableau of small plastic dolls in blue and gray. The doleful fellow seemed satisfied to go on living life as it is. I envied him.

  No matter how we pestered him, Igel refused to hear our report. We had been spying on Oscar for over a year, and everyone was ready for the change. I was running out of paper in McInnes’s book, and one more dispatch from the field would not only be a waste of time, but a waste of precious paper as well. Haughty, distracted, and burdened by the responsibilities of leadership, Igel kept to himself, as if he both yearned for and flinched at the possibility of freedom. His normally stoic disposition changed to a general peevishness. Kivi came to dinner once with a red welt under her eye.

  “What happened to you?”

  “That son of a bitch. Igel hit me, and all I asked him was if he was ready. He thought I meant ready to go, but all I meant was for dinner.”

  No one knew what to say to her.

  “I can’t wait till he leaves. I am sick and tired of the old crab. Maybe the new boy will be nice.”

  I stood up from the meal and stormed through the camp, looking for Igel, resolving to confront him, but he was not to be found in his usual places. I poked my head into the entranceway of one of his tunnels and called out, but no answer. Perhaps he had gone out to spy on the boy. Nobody knew where he might be found, so I spent several hours walking in circles, until chancing upon him alone down by the river, where he was staring at his reflection in the broken surface of water. He looked so alone that I forgot my anger and quietly crouched down beside him.

  “Igel? Are you all right?” I addressed the image on the water.

  “Do you remember,” he asked, “your life before this life?”