The Stolen Child

by Keith Donohue

  The girls stopped swinging. My mother leaned forward. I forgot about the gathering storm and concentrated on the elusive melody, but it receded in the swale of talk.

  “I was jammed inside, man. My arms are trapped up against the sides of the hole. Worse is, my feet aren’t on the bottom of the pit, but dangling there, at the top of a bottomless pit. Or maybe something’s down at the bottom, going to get me.” He lunged out at the girls, who screamed and giggled.

  “I stayed still, considering my situation, Mrs. Day, and I shout out to Little Oscar to be cool with the yelling ’cause he was getting on my nerves. And I says, ‘I’m stuck in a hole, but I will get you as soon as I can figure out a way to get out.’ And he says he thinks it’s a tunnel. So I tell him to crawl around and if he sees a pair of big feet in the middle of the air, they’re mine and could he help me get out?”

  In the distance, the low rumble of thunder. I hopped off the porch and ran down to roll up the windows of his car. The hobgoblins would be huddled, all elbows and knees, worried about a sudden wrack of lightning. The song had slipped my mind again.

  “Morning comes, so now I see where I am, which is still stuck in a hole. But give myself a skosh more room on the left, all I have to do is twist and down I go. Turns out I was only a foot or two off the bottom. But my feet are asleep, and my arms are aching, and I have to take a leak—pardon my French, Mrs. Day. I was dog-tired, but that boy—”

  We jumped at a loud boom of thunder and a wraith of light that filled the horizon. The air smelled of electricity and the coming deluge. When the first fat drops lashed the ground like coins, we scurried inside. Cummings sat between Mary and Elizabeth on the sofa, and Mom and I perched in the uncomfortable chairs.

  “At the bottom of this hole,” Jimmy continued over the rumbling, “tunnels in three different directions. I shouted down each one, but no reply. I was beginning to wonder whether Oscar was at the other end of any one of them or did I dream up the whole thing. You should see these tunnels, man, unbelievably cool. Lord knows who or what made them. Or why. As you crawl along, they get real skinny, like maybe kids made them. You snake on your belly until you come to the end and another chamber, sometimes big enough where even I could squat. And at each of the chambers, there were more tunnels. It just now occurs to me that I saw something like this on TV with Cronkite. Like the VC. Maybe it’s a Vietnamese camp?”

  “Do you really think,” I asked, “that the Vietcong have invaded America and set up camp in the middle of nowhere?”

  “No, man. Do you think I’m crazy? Maybe it’s where they train our guys to go into the tunnels to find their guys? Like a beehive. A freakin’ maze. I went back and forth, trying not to get lost, when suddenly I realized that I hadn’t heard from Oscar all day. Just when I think maybe he’s dead, here he crawls in like a mole and pops his head up. The thing of it is—and I didn’t notice this at first because of all the dirt and grime—he was naked as a jaybird.”

  “What happened to his clothes?” Mom asked.

  The changelings stripped him, wrapped him in a caul of spiderwebs, and threw the body in the river to make him their own. That’s what they thought they were doing.

  “Mrs. Day, I have no clue. First thing we had to do was get up out of the earth, and he showed me these holes along each of the walls where these handgrips and foot ledges had been carved. I didn’t notice them before, but up he scooted, like climbing a ladder.”

  I had spent the better part of a month carving out those handholds, and I could almost picture the hobgoblin who was constantly digging in the warren.

  “It was late when I found him, and the kid was tired and hungry, and in no condition to tramp back through the woods. And I was sure everyone was still looking for us. So we’re sitting there wondering what to do next, when he asks me if I’m hungry. He marches right over to the edge of the ring and rolls back an old dirty blanket that’s lying there. Underneath is a whole stash of food. Like a grocery store in the middle of the freakin’ woods. Peas, pears, applesauce, baked beans, a bag of sugar, a box of salt, dried-out mushrooms, raisins, apples. Like finding a buried treasure.”

  I looked out the window. The storm had abated. Where had they gone?

  “As I’m fixing up dinner, Oscar starts poking around the edges of this camp, exploring while I’m trying to find a way to open the cans. The kid comes back wearing these groovy old-time pants like knickerbockers and a dingy white sweater. He says he found a whole pile of things. You wouldn’t believe the stuff that’s out there—clothes and shoes, and gloves, hats, mittens. We go around uncovering all this junk—buttons, a pouch of primo weed—excuse me, Mrs. Day—a rock collection, and old cards and newspapers with stuff written on them, like a kid practicing his ABCs. Someone had saved a ball of string, a hair comb, a pair of rusty scissors. This freakin’ mixed-up doll baby. Like a commune out there, man. When I told the cops, they said they were going to go up and investigate, because they don’t want those types around our town.”

  “I should say not.” My mother pursed her lips.

  Elizabeth barked at her. “What’s wrong with communing with nature?”

  “I didn’t say anything about nature.”

  “Whoever lives out there,” Jimmy continued, “must have split before I got there, because they were gone, man. Over supper, Oscar tells me how he came to be naked in a hole in the ground in the middle of the forest. This group of children, pretending to be pirates, kidnapped him and tied him to a tree. Another boy put on a mask that looked exactly like him and made him jump into a hole. He took off all his clothes, and then he made Oscar take off all his clothes. I’m getting kind of freaked out, but the other kid says for Oscar to forget it all happened, and he climbs out, puts a lid on the tunnel.”

  He chose not to go through with the change. I tried to remember who that might be.

  “All the kids ran away, except for one girl, who said she would help him home. But when she heard a dog barking, she ran away too. When nobody came for him in the morning, he was scared and all freaked out, and that’s when he heard me. I don’t believe a word of it, but it does explain a lot of things. Like the children’s old clothes.”

  “And that boy they found in the river,” Mom said.

  “Maybe that’s what he thought he saw,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe that boy kinda looked like him, and that’s why Oscar thought he was wearing a mask.”

  Mary put forward her own theory. “Maybe it was his double. Daddy used to say that everybody has one.”

  Mom had the last word on the subject. “Sounds like the fairies to me.”

  They all laughed, but I knew better. I pressed my forehead against the cool windowpane and searched the landscape for those I have tried to forget. The puddles in the yard were sinking slowly into the earth.

  • CHAPTER 20 •

  We lost our home and never went back. Trackers and dogs arrived first, poking about the camp, uncovering what we had left behind in our evacuation. Then men in black suits came to take photographs of the holes and our footprints left in the dirt. A helicopter hovered over the site, filming the oval perimeter and well-trod pathways into the woods. Dozens of soldiers in green uniforms collected every discarded possession and carted them off in boxes and bags. A few souls shinnied underground, crawled through the network of burrows and emerged blinking at the sky as if they had been beneath the sea. Weeks later, another crew arrived, their heavy machinery rumbling up the hill, cutting a swath through the old trees to collapse the tunnels, dig them up, and bury them again, turning the earth over and over until the top ran orange with thick wet clay. Then they doused the ring with gasoline and set the field afire. By the end of that summer, nothing remained but ashes and the blackened skeletons of a few trees.

  Such destruction did not temper the urge to return home. I could not sleep without the familiar pattern of stars and sky framed by branches overhead. Every night-sound—a snapped twig or a woodrat scrabbling through the brush—disturbed my rest, and in
the mornings my head and neck ached. I heard, too, the others moaning in their dreams or straining behind the bushes to relieve the growing pressure in their guts. Smaolach looked over his shoulder a dozen times each hour. Onions chewed her nails and braided intricate chains of grass. Each swell of restlessness was followed by a swale of listlessness. Knowing our home was gone, we kept looking for it still, as if hope alone could restore our lives. When hope faded, a morbid curiosity set in. We would go back time and again to worry over the bones.

  Hidden in the top of tall oaks or scattered in pockets along the ridge, we’d witness and whisper among ourselves, descrying the loss and ruin. The raspberries crushed under the backhoe, the chokecherry felled by a bulldozer, the paths and lanes of our carousals and mad ecstasies erased as one might rub away a drawing or tear up a page. That campsite had existed since the arrival of the first French fur traders, who had encountered the tribes at their ancestral territory. Homesick, we drifted away, huddling in makeshift shelters, lost for good.

  We wandered rough country into early autumn. The influx of men, dogs, and machines made moving about difficult and unsafe, so we spent hard days and nights together, bored and hungry. Whenever someone roamed too far from the group, we ran into danger. Ragno and Zanzara were spotted by a surveyor when they crossed in front of his spyglass. The man hollered and gave chase, but my friends were too fast. Dump trucks brought in loads of gravel to line the dirt road carved from the highway to our old clearing. Chavisory and Onions made a game of finding gems among the rubble; any unusual stone would do. By moonlight, they picked over each newly spread load, until the night when they were discovered by a driver sleeping in his rig. He sneaked up on them and grabbed the girls by their collars. They would have been caught if Onions hadn’t snapped free and bitten him hard enough to draw blood. That driver may be the only man alive with a faery’s scars lined up like beads in the web of skin between his thumb and finger.

  On the construction site where the men dug cellars, Luchóg spotted an open pack of cigarettes resting on the front seat of an empty truck. Quiet as a mouse, he skittered over, and as he reached inside to steal the smokes, his knee hit the horn. He grabbed the Lucky Strikes as the door to a nearby outhouse burst open, and the man, tugging up his trousers, swore and cursed as he came looking about for the trespasser. He hustled over to the truck, searched about the cab, and then ducked his head behind the dashboard. From the edge of the forest, Luchóg could not resist any longer and struck a match in the lingering darkness. After the very first drag, he had to duck when birdshot peppered the air above his head. The man fired the shotgun again, long after my friend had disappeared, laughing and coughing, into the heart of the forest.

  After these incidents, Béka clamped down on our freedoms. We were not allowed to travel alone, nor could we be on any road during the daylight. He restricted any forays into town for supplies out of fear of detection. By day, the hum of engines, the staccato of hammers echoing from our old home to wherever we had camped. By night, a haunting stillness invaded. I longed to run away with Speck to the library and its comforting privacy. I missed my books and papers, and my materials were few: McInnes’s fading composition book, a drawing of the woman in the red coat, a handful of letters. Numbed, I was not writing, either, and time passed unrecorded. In a way, it did not exist at all.

  To gather food, Ragno, Zanzara, and I sewed together a crude net, and after much trial and error, we managed to capture a brace of grouse, which we then killed and took home for dinner. The tribe made a ceremony of plucking feathers, tying them in bundles, and wearing them in our hair like the Huron. We dressed the birds and risked our first large fire of the season, allowing us to roast our meal and providing comfort on a cool night. Assembled in a small circle, our faces glowed in the flickering light, signs of anxious weariness in our tired eyes, but the meal would prove revitalizing. As the fire burnt down and our bellies filled, a calm complacency settled upon us, like a blanket drawn around our shoulders by absent mothers.

  Wiping his greasy mouth on his sleeve, Béka cleared his throat to summon our attention. The chitchat and marrow sucking stopped at once. “We have angered the people, and there will be no rest for a long, long time. It was wrong to lose that boy, but worse still was bringing him to camp in the first place.” We had heard this speech many times before, but Onions, his favorite, played the Fool to his Lear.

  “But they have Igel. Why are they so mad?” she asked.

  “She’s right. They have Igel. He’s their Oscar,” Kivi said, joining the chorus. “But we don’t have ours. Why should they be mad? We are the ones who have lost.”

  “This is not about the boy. They found us, found our home, and now bury it under asphalt. They know we are here. They won’t stop looking for us until they find us and drive us from these woods. A hundred years ago, there were coyotes, wolves, lions in these hills. The sky blackened with flocks of passenger pigeons every spring. Bluebirds lived among us, and the creeks and rivers were fat with fishes and toads and terrapins. Once it was not unusual to see a man with one hundred wolf pelts drying by his barn. Look around you. They come in, hunt and chop, and take it all away. Igel was right: Things will never be the same, and we are next.”

  Those who had finished their meals threw the bones in the fire, which sputtered and crackled with the new fat. We were bored by doom and gloom. While I listened to our new leader and his message, I noticed some of us did not accept his sermon. Whispers and murmurs ran along the circle. At the far end of the fire, Smaolach was not paying attention, but drawing in the dirt with a stick.

  “You think you know better than me?” Béka yelled down to him. “You know what to do, and how to keep us alive?”

  Smaolach kept his eyes down, pushed the point into the earth.

  “I am the eldest,” Béka continued. “By rights, I am the new leader, and I will not accept anyone challenging my authority.”

  Speck raised her voice in defense. “Nobody questions the rules . . . or your leadership.”

  Continuing to make his map, Smaolach spoke so softly as to almost not be heard at all. “I am merely showing my friends here our new position, as I estimate it from the time traveled and by calculating the stars in the sky. You have earned the right to be our leader, and to tell us where to go.”

  With a grunt, Béka took Onions by the hand and disappeared into the brush. Smaolach, Luchóg, Speck, Chavisory, and I huddled around the map as the others dispersed. I do not remember ever seeing a map before. Curious as to how it worked and what all of the symbols represented, I leaned forward and examined the drawing, deducing at once that the wavy lines stood for waterways—the river and the creek—but what to make of the perfectly straight line that crossed the river, the bunches of boxes arranged in a grid, and the jagged edge between one large oval and an X in the sand?

  “The way I see it”—Smaolach pointed to the right side of the map—“there is what’s known and what’s unknown. To the east is the city. And I can only guess that the smell of the air means the city is heading our way. East is out. The question is: Do we cross the river to the south? If so, we cut ourselves off from the town.” He pointed with the stick to the set of squares.

  “If we go south, we would have to cross the river again and again for supplies and clothes and shoes. The river is a dangerous place.”

  “Tell that,” Chavisory said, “to Oscar Love.”

  Luchóg offered an alternative. “But we don’t know that another town might be somewhere over the other side. No one has ever looked. I say we scout for a place on the other side of the river.”

  “We need to be near the water,” I volunteered, and put my finger on the wavy lines.

  “But not in the water,” Speck argued. “I say north and west, stick to the creek or follow the river till it bends up.” She took the stick from his hand and drew where the river curved to the north.

  “How do you know it bends?” Chavisory asked.

  “I’ve been that far.”


  We looked at Speck with awe, as if she had seen the edge of the world. She stared back, defying anyone’s challenge or disbelief. “Two days from here. Or we should find a place near the creek. It dries up in August and September some years, but we could build a cistern.”

  Thinking of our hideaway beneath the library, I spoke up. “I vote for the creek. We follow it from the hills into town whenever we need supplies or anything. If we go too far away—”

  “He’s right, you know,” said Luchóg, patting his chest and the empty pouch beneath his shirt. “We need things from town. Let’s tell Béka we want to stay by the creek. Agreed?”

  He lay there snoring, slack-jawed, his arm flung over Onions at his side. She heard our approach, popped open her eyes, smiled, and put a finger to her lips to whisper hush. Had we taken her advice, perhaps we would have caught him at a better time, in a more generous mood, but Speck, for one, never had any patience. She kicked his foot and roused him from his slumber.

  “What do you want now?” he roared through a yawn. Since his ascension to leadership, Béka attempted to appear bigger than he was. He was trying to imply a threat by rising to his feet.

  “We are tired of this life,” said Speck.

  “Of never having two nights in one bed,” said Chavisory.

  Luchóg added, “I haven’t had a smoke since that man nearly shot off my head.”

  Béka raked his face with his palm, considering our demands in the haze of half-sleep. He began to pace before us, two steps to the left, pivot, two steps to the right. When he stopped and folded his arms behind his back, he showed that he would prefer not to have this conversation, but we did not listen to such silent refusals. A breeze rattled the upper branches of the trees.

  Smaolach stepped up to him. “First of all, nobody respects and admires your leadership more than me. You have kept us from harm and led us out of darkness, but we need a new camp, not this wandering aimlessly. Water nearby and a way back to civilization. We decided—”