by N. D. Wilson
Leaving behind the moonlit attic was like stepping into a hole, and the steep stairs squealed at him as he went.
Someone had left the light on in the bathroom—a band of glow at the bottom of the door frosted the carpeted landing. When he reached the door, Henry put his hand out for the knob and froze. Someone was probably inside. No one would leave the light on and then shut the door.
Henry hated knocking. He hated conversations through bathroom doors. So he dropped his hand and turned to go sit on the stairs and wait. He hadn’t taken a step when the knob turned. Henry caught his breath, jumped toward the stairs, and sat down in the darkness.
An old man stepped onto the landing. He was short and had a polished bald head with white hair straggling off the sides. Long tweed trousers were rolled up at his ankles, and a purple satin bathrobe hung down around a dirty white T-shirt. The bottom of the bathrobe piled on the floor around the man’s bare feet.
The man was daubing shaving cream off his neck with a hand towel. He sniffed loudly and brought the towel up to his face while he turned toward Grandfather’s bedroom door at the end of the landing. The purple robe dragged behind him like the train on a wedding dress. Before he touched the door, he looked back over his shoulder. His deep black eyes settled on Henry in the darkness.
Henry blinked hard and then yawned, stretching his arms above his head. Someone had left the bathroom light on, but the door was open. Why was he sitting on the stairs? He wasn’t sure, but he needed to use the bathroom.
He did, and then hurried back up the stairs into his attic.
Henry slid into his bed with his mind wandering aimlessly, looking for something it had lost. He knew he had forgotten something, but he didn’t notice when one blink was too heavy to reopen. He was somewhere else, dreaming of a field where he knew how to throw a ball. And for some reason, a man in a purple robe was watching.
CHAPTER THREE
Henry slept for a long time. He woke because he couldn’t sleep any longer. His body was full. He picked himself up out of bed, pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt, and felt his way down the steep stairs with feet a little soft from sleep. He found his aunt in the kitchen.
“Henry!” she said, and grinned at him. She was still canning. Her hair was staggering away from her temples, and her face was tomato red above a faded green apron. An enormous black pot boiled on the stove. “We were about to send out a search-and-rescue team.” She laughed and cranked a contraption that was pulping wrinkly apples. Henry stared at the long snake of peels and cores and nastiness that was crawling out of one end. Dotty looked back at him and laughed again. “Don’t you look down on my apples, Henry York! The worms add to the flavor. Cold cereal’s on the shelf behind you if you like, and I’d think you would after coming out of hibernation. Bowl’s on the counter. Milk’s in the fridge.”
“Thanks,” Henry said, and began assembling his breakfast. He was used to milk with transparent edges, milk that looked a little blue. This milk looked more like cream. It was thick, white, and coated the cereal with film as Henry poured. In his mouth, he could feel it clinging to his tongue. His tongue didn’t mind.
Dotty dumped a bowl of pulped cores into the trash and turned around.
“Well, then, Henry York,” she said. “When you’re finished there, you can rinse out your bowl. Then, unless you want to go back to bed and sleep through another meal, you can head out to the barn. Your uncle wants to talk with you. You should have it to yourselves. The girls are off in town for a birthday.” She wiped her hands on her apron and turned back to her work.
Henry, licking his teeth, walked out of the kitchen, through mounds of boots in the mudroom, and onto the back porch. The overgrown lawn drifted downhill to the foot of the barn. Beyond the barn, flat fields stretched to the horizon, broken only by irrigation ditches and the occasional dirt road. The rest was all sky.
Henry stood and stared blankly at the landscape. At another time, it would have affected him. He would have marveled at the flatness, at the bareness, at how much space could fit into a single view. Instead, he wandered through his sleep-cobwebbed mind, trying to sort and straighten thoughts just as filmy as his teeth and tongue.
Distracted, Henry walked down to the barn. The door was a puzzle. It was a slider, and he couldn’t get the metal lever to unlatch. When he did finally succeed in jerking it up, he couldn’t persuade the big plank door to plow along its rusty runners. With a slip and a stagger, he got it in the end and walked inside, too curious about the contents of the barn to notice his rust-stained hands. It was bigger inside than he had expected. There were old plank stalls along both sides. A Weed Eater and three bicycles dangled from the beams.
“Henry? That you down there?” Uncle Frank’s voice fell through the ceiling above him. “Come on up. There’s a ladder at the end.”
Henry found the ladder, nailed to the wall and completely vertical. He stepped onto the lowest rung, a dry, dirty board, and stared up the ladder shaft—up past two levels, up to the underside of the barn’s beamed ceiling. There had been a ladder on Henry’s bunk bed, and that was as high as he’d ever climbed.
“Henry?” his uncle yelled.
“Yeah, I’m coming, Uncle Frank.”
“All the way up. I’m in the loft.”
Henry started climbing. If he fell, there would be an enormous dust cloud where he landed. Would Uncle Frank even hear him? How long would he lie there? What would he look like to Frank, from up in the loft? He shivered.
As he climbed through the second level, he glanced around. Large pink chalk clouds decorated the floor beside a hopscotch grid. He quickly scrambled up the last couple of rungs and stuck his head through the floor into the loft.
“Heya, Henry,” Uncle Frank said. He was sitting at a desk buried in stuff. “You like the climb?”
“Sure,” Henry said, breathing hard. He came the rest of the way up and stepped off the ladder.
Frank smiled. “It goes higher. Up all the way to the roost. Climb on up if you like. There’s a little door you can throw open, and a shelf that’s pretty much pigeon world. You have to be careful. It gets slick if they’ve been there recently. It’s probably the highest elevation in Kansas, not counting other barns and the silos. There’s some big ones around here.”
“Silos?” Henry asked, looking toward the roost. “Like where they store grain?”
“That’s what I mean,” Frank said. “Now, Henry, I want to tell you something. Your aunt doesn’t know about it, and I might not even tell her for a good while. But I need to spill beans to somebody, and here you are.”
“What is it?” Henry pulled his eyes down from the roost and looked at his uncle. Frank had a computer on an old buffet, a hutch full of doors and drawers. The monitor sat in the middle, surrounded by mounds of knickknacks—jumbled figurines, small vases, and tools. Henry could see a hatchet handle and a miniature Canadian flag in one pile, half a model ship in another.
Frank leaned back in his chair and curled his lips against his teeth. “I got a store on the Internet, and I sell things to people all over the world. Been doing it for almost two months now, and today I’ve struck it rich!” Frank laughed. “I’ve just sold two tumbleweeds for fifteen hundred dollars.”
“Who’d buy tumbleweed?” Henry asked. “That’s a lot of money.”
Frank grinned and put his hands behind his head. “Yes, it is. I would have been happy with ten dollars for the both of them, but some Japanese businessmen got their blood up for the weeds, fought it out with each other, and here I sit, a wealthy man. That’s seven hundred and fifty dollars a pop.”
“Wow,” Henry said. “Do you really think they’ll pay?”
“Sure they will.” He straightened and slid forward in his chair. “Are you busy with something? How about we ride into town for some ice cream and then go pickin’ money? Run in and tell your aunt we’re going. I’ll be in just after I e-mail my new client.”
Henry didn’t ride in the back of the truck this
time. He bounced and jostled between the door and the long prong of the stick shift. He was not buckled. He had waited to be told, but now he suspected that wouldn’t happen.
Henry cranked his window down, put his arm out, and leaned his face into the wind. They were going all the way to the other side of town, his uncle had said, and so they had taken the farm roads around rather than driving straight through. Henry’s father had given him a book on city planning for Christmas, so he couldn’t help thinking of the road as a sort of beltway, a ring road. Only it’s gravel, Henry thought. And barely two lanes.
He stopped thinking about cities and watched the town of Henry slide past to his right. He was thrown against his door and bounced up to the roof as the truck failed to leap a pothole. The window handle dug into his leg, and he hit his head on something. Still, he didn’t buckle. He did, however, sneak his hand up when he thought his uncle wasn’t looking and lock his door.
Locusts were flying up in front of the truck and spinning off in its wake when Frank turned right to connect to the main road and reenter the town from the other side.
“Is that really faster?” Henry asked.
“Nope,” Frank said. “Just more fun. No point in taking a truck like this down Main Street except when we’re heading to the barbershop or closer.”
The two of them began with ice cream at a gas station. Then they pressed their faces on the window of the closed antique shop, squinting at stacks of wheels in the dusty darkness. The ice cream made Frank hungry, so he took Henry to a place called Lenny’s, owned by a man named Kyle, and they ate flat cheeseburgers and thick fries. In a town smaller than Henry had first imagined, they managed to dawdle away the afternoon, going from place to place for one reason or another or no reason at all. Until finally they arrived at the city park and a rummage sale run by senior citizens beneath a sagging pavilion.
As Henry climbed out of the truck, an old woman in a red vest told him to make sure to spend his money, because all of it would go toward the Fourth of July fireworks at the football field.
Henry didn’t have any money, and he wasn’t all that interested in the rummage sale. He sat down with his back to a pole.
“Hey, Henry!” Frank yelled across three rows of tables. “You got a glove?”
“A glove?” Henry blinked. “What do you mean?”
“Baseball glove,” Frank said. “You got one? ’Ope, never mind, it’s a lefty.”
Henry sat up. “I’m left-handed,” he said. “But I don’t think I want it. I don’t really like baseball.” Which is what many people say when they mean “I’m not any good.”
“Well, get on over here and try it on. Boy needs a glove.”
Henry didn’t need to try it on. If he had a glove, then someone would want to play catch, and he would have to throw. He wanted to practice before that happened. Still, he stood up and picked his way through the rows of tables until he stood in front of his uncle. The leather was dark and old. Hairline cracks stood out on the thick fingers, but the palm was shiny smooth. Henry slid his hand inside. It fit nicely.
“We’ll oil it up when we get home.” Frank took Henry’s gloved hand and held it up to his face. “Smell that leather,” he said. “Specially treated with dirt, sweat, and ten thousand catches. An old glove’s the best glove. You can’t buy history new.”
When they left the rummage sale, Frank stowed a wide-bodied lamp and an incomplete set of encyclopedias in the back of the truck. And Henry was not only the fearful owner of a new baseball glove, but also a knife. It was a lock-blade that didn’t lock, and it felt strange in his hand. His parents had never prohibited his owning a knife, probably because it had never crossed their minds that he might get one. Henry held the blade open and touched its edge with his finger.
“Pretty dull now,” Frank said, taking his eyes off the dirt road. “But I’ll sharpen it up for you. Dotty’s got the sharpest knives I know of. Can’t tolerate a dull knife. Anybody half smart keeps their knives sharp.”
“Does she ever cut herself?”
“I’ll tell you a little secret, Henry, a secret that everybody knows. It’s the dull knife that cuts you.” Frank leaned over and slapped Henry’s knee. “You aren’t gonna slip whittling with a sharp blade. And if you did, the cut would be cleaner and easier to tend. Sharp knives are safer. Fact. I’d even recommend you not go carving anything until I get out my kit and put an edge on that blade.”
“Okay, Uncle Frank.” Henry let go of the blade, and it dropped limply back into the handle. “How come it won’t stay open?”
Frank drummed his fingers on the wheel. “Oh, somethin’ or other’s busted on the inside. I’ve had lots of knives like that. Doesn’t make much difference unless it comes open in your pocket. I’ve still got a scar from when one did that. Forgot I had it with me and slid into second base. Just press your thumb down on the side of the blade when you’ve got it open and you’ll be fine. Gets you a much stronger grip, too.”
“Okay,” Henry said. He didn’t put the knife back in his pocket.
Uncle Frank pulled the truck onto a dirt patch that straddled a ditch and faded into the field.
“Here we are, Henry. Tumbleweeds are like people. They tend to collect someplace out of the wind.”
“What?” Henry asked. Frank was already getting out of the truck.
“It’s not just people and weeds,” Frank said. “It’s everything.” He stepped down into the ditch. A trickle of water ran along the bottom and into a culvert. Tangled and muddy, tumbleweed clung to the culvert mouth and rustled around Frank’s legs as he moved. He grabbed the matted weeds, lifted them up, and threw a pile onto the gravel shoulder. The bottom of the lump dripped brown water.
“You ever wonder, Henry, how bits of dust find each other on the floor?” Frank began kicking the remaining weeds into a mound. “Some part of a blade of grass gets eaten by a cow and dropped out its back end, where it dries in the sun and gets trampled. Then some wind picks it up, and, of all the little bits of nothing much in the world, it comes in your window and lands on your floor.”
Henry watched while Frank scrambled out of the ditch and threw the tumble-blobs into the back of the truck.
“Then,” Frank continued, brushing off his hands, “that little bit of dust meets another little bit of dust, only it came off your sweater, which was cut from some sheep in New Zealand, and the two bits grab some of your hair and some other hair that you picked up on your shirt from a booth in a restaurant, and then they get kicked around until they all roll under your bed and hide in the corner.”
Frank was trying to tie down the weeds with string.
“It’s the same with people. If they’re a little lost, they get blown around until they drop into some shelter or hole or culvert.”
He snapped off the end of the twine and climbed back into the truck. Henry climbed back in beside him.
“There are holes like that in cities,” he said, “in houses—anyplace. Holes where the lost things stop.”
“Like where?” Henry asked.
Frank laughed and started the truck. “Like belly buttons. Like here. And Cleveland. Henry is on a much smaller scale, so fewer people drift here. And when they climb out, they end up pushed around until they come to rest someplace else.”
Henry watched Uncle Frank shift into gear.
“I was lost once,” Frank said, and looked over at him. “But I’m found now. I’m under the bed. I’m in the same culvert you are. Only, I don’t think you’re done tumblin’.”
Despite the string Frank had thrown across the truck bed, pairs and clusters of tumbleweed gusted away every few hundred yards as they drove home.
“That’s how rich I am,” Frank said when Henry pointed out one particularly large cluster in the road behind them. “Thousands of dollars flyin’ out of my truck and I’m not even gonna slow down. If I was half smart, I would have brought a tarp. Let’s see if I can lose all of them before our turn.”
He punched the gas. A col
umn of dust, flying gravel, and the occasional bouncing weed followed them all the way home.
When they arrived, Frank pulled the truck into the grass and drove across the lawn, around the house, and straight up to the barn. Henry kicked his door open and walked back to where Frank stood beside the tailgate. There were four weeds tangled up in the string, hanging behind the truck. Frank’s rummage-sale lamp had lost its shade, and the box of encyclopedias had tipped over and spilled its contents against the tailgate.
“Hmm,” Uncle Frank said. Henry didn’t say anything. “Sometimes, Henry, I do wish I had a bit more of your aunt Dotty in me. Grab those weeds and throw ’em in one of the horse stalls. I’m gonna get a tarp and run back out real quick. You stay here. Don’t tell your aunt what we’ve been doin’.”
“Okay,” Henry said.
After dinner, Dotty and Frank went out to the front porch for the one smoke Frank was allowed per day. Henry followed the girls to their room and collapsed onto the floor. He had accepted Uncle Frank’s offer to divvy up the girls’ leftover meat loaf, and now there was more meat inside him than there had ever been in the history of his life. Probably more ketchup, too. His cousins were talking around him, but he couldn’t make his mind listen.
A population of dolls was scattered throughout the room. Some, china-skinned and delicate, stood in a line across the top of the dresser, each propped up by its own metal stand. A few others, with floppy limbs and stitched features, sprawled on beds, and one, a plastic child, lay on its side looking at Henry. One of its eyes was shut.
A little creepy, Henry thought. But then, he’d never been around a doll that hadn’t been used in primitive rituals. His parents had been bringing those back from their trips for as long as he could remember.
A bunk bed filled one side of the room, a smaller bed squatted on the other, and a big window between them looked out on the barn. The view from Henry’s room would have been nearly identical if he’d had a window.
