Never Never Stories

by Jason Sanford

  “Err, yes.” Gill had to admit that when Ria said it like that, his grand gesture didn't sound quite so grand.

  Ria kissed his cheek. “Thank you, but no.”

  “So the fact that I will watch you age and die doesn't bother you?”

  “Of course it does. But I'm not going to let it stop me from loving you.”

  Ria fell asleep with her arms wrapped around Gill. Gill, though, found himself unable to sleep as he pondered his life and love for Ria.

  Aithne and Gary stayed at the house for a few days. The night they were to leave, Aithne came to the greenhouse. “I wanted to say goodbye, Uncle Gill.”

  Gill sat up out of the pool, where he'd been relaxing. He was wearing his human clothes, which dribbled water across the dirt and moss.

  “I thought you didn't spend much time in the pool anymore?” Aithne asked.

  “I don't. Just wanted to do it one last time.”

  Aithne frowned but didn't say anything.

  “Have I ever told you about the cruel things the fey used to do?” Gill asked. “To humans, I mean.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like stealing human babies from their cribs and leaving a changeling in their place? Like tricking humans into eating fairy food so they'd be our slaves for a hundred years?”

  Aithne shook her head. “No. But I've read about that stuff. Wasn't sure if it was true.”

  “It's true. At least, some of it's true. We fey always believed we were so separate from humans but the truth is, we're just the same. Different, but the same.”

  Before Aithne could respond, Gill stepped toward her and took both her hands into his. “Do you love Gary?” he asked.

  Aithne nodded slightly. “I mean, I think I do. But we're just getting started, so we'll have to see.”

  “A sensible attitude.” Then, before Aithne could react, Gill grabbed her hands. He pushed her palms together and pulled her hands toward his body and into his chest. When their hands emerged, they held his glowing fairy heart. He quickly pushed the heart into Aithne's own chest and buried it deep inside her.

  “Uncle Gill?” Aithne asked, tears welling up around her eyes.

  “It's for you. For Gary, perhaps, if he's the one you truly love. If not, for the next love you find or the one after that. When you are ready, place my heart into his heart. He'll be able to join you for thousands of happy years.”

  “But what about you?”

  “I'll be okay,” Gill said, taking a wobbly step back from Aithne. He slapped his chest with his hands. “Millennia ago, when I was a human baby, I only had a human heart. I'm sure that same heart will work perfectly for me.”

  Aithne jumped forward and hugged Gill. “Thank you.”

  “Your mother and I both love you dearly,” he whispered. “Never forget that.”

  Aithne and Gill walked out to the front of the house, where Gary and Ria stood by Gary's car. After Aithne and Gary climbed in and drove away, Gill reached his arms around Ria and hugged her.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “'Course you do.” Then, looking into Gill's eyes, Ria suddenly became puzzled. “Are you okay?”

  “Never been better,” he said, already feeling the first ticks of human mortality racing through his veins. He reached for Ria's hand and raised it to his lips for a lingering kiss.

  “Sweet,” she said. “But I still don't want your heart.”

  Gill smiled. “Don't you already have it?”

  * * *

  Such was the love story of Gillian Dhu.

  Gill spent his remaining years with Ria – aging the same as her, enjoying life the same as her, and loving the same as her.

  Aithne visited them as often as she could. Gary came with her a few more times, then other men followed. Each time Aithne believed she was in love. Each time she would visit her mother and Uncle Gill and realize she still didn't know the first thing about the subject.

  Her mother and Uncle Gill both died when Ria was almost a hundred. Ria had been bedridden and Uncle Gill wasn't much more mobile. The nurse Aithne hired to take care of them later told her Ria appeared to pass away in her sleep. When the nurse found them, Gill was hunched over Ria's body as if he'd just had time to know that she was dead before he also died.

  The nurse figured the shock of Ria's death killed Gill. Aithne didn't mention that she had placed a glamour on her mother and Uncle Gill at their request, so when one died the other also passed. Neither had wanted to live on with the other gone.

  After the funerals, Aithne returned to the now-empty Victorian house, walking through the small rooms which once seemed so big, touching the dust which now coated everything. She then walked out back to the greenhouse. Many of the glass panes were smashed from rocks thrown by neighborhood kids. Inside, the shards of broken glass spun little reflections of sunlight across the moss and trees, reminding Aithne of the sprites that once danced here for Uncle Gill.

  Aithne watered the trees and moss, cleaned the scum out of the pond, and opened the roof of the greenhouse so the plants would have rain after she left. The sounds of Chicago flooded in. Traffic. Trains. Sirens. People. The occasional gunshot, even after all these years.

  Aithne held her hand to her chest, feeling the three beats inside. Her own human heart. The fairy hearts of Uncle Gill and Aithne Glaistig.

  Aithne suddenly remembered the handsome assistant gardener who'd recently come to work in the arboretum. How he talked on and on about his love of everything Scottish. On an impulse, she clipped a branch off the silver birch standing beside her and wrapped the cutting in a small glamour. A gift for the new gardener.

  Aithne smiled. She still had plenty of time to find her own love.

  And so began the love story of Aithne Cortés.

  Maps of the Bible

  Map 1: World of the Patriarchs

  (Including the possible locations of Sodom and Gomorrah; the route of the journeys of Abraham; and Wetumpka, Alabama, in 1962)

  A dead man's Bible. My Bible. Jedediah holds it to his nose as if the acid paper crisp and saddle-stitched decay still keeps me alive.

  Jed does this every Sunday before getting dressed for church. He rubs his hands across the Bible's crack-worn leather and lets his fingers pick at the flaking yellow tape that patches the bayonet slice across the front cover. My son barely remembers me, but he loves my Bible.

  Last Christmas, my damn brother-in-law Hank gave Jed a new Bible with slick leather, gold-trimmed pages, and the words of Christ in red. It sits unread on Jed's little bookshelf. You see, Jed's got sense. He knows a dead father's Bible – a dead-father-killed-in-Korea-war-hero Bible – is worth more than all the new in the world.

  That's gotta drive Hank crazy.

  “Jed. Come on,” Eliz yells softly from the kitchen.

  Jed walks stiffly down the hall. He's outgrown all his good clothes and now his belt cinches tight on the last hole and he hunches over slightly to avoid popping out the back seam of his blue blazer. All that fits are his socks and penny loafers. In the tongue notch of the right shoe he keeps an Indian head penny that Eliz says I gave to Jed when he was a baby.

  I didn't, but it's a good-hearted lie and I appreciate her for saying it.

  In the kitchen, Eliz inspects Jed. My wife is wearing a modest white dress with embroidered flowers that rise and fall across her lovely breasts. She spins Jed like a top then stops him face forward. “Almost time for new pants, I see. Definitely need a bigger blazer.”

  “Yes mahm.”

  Before they leave, Eliz puts a lemon cake with vanilla frosting in a small basket and covers it with a towel. Eliz rarely puts this much effort into Jed's clothes or cakes, but today a traveling preacher is visiting the church. His name is Brother Daniel Satorius. Dan. He grew up with me. Was best friends with me. But Eliz ain't making all this effort because of what Dan once meant to my dead self.

  “You be sure and tell Brother Satorius you want to be a preacher when you grow up,” she says.

&n
bsp; “Yes mahm.”

  Stay away from Dan, I yell without words. Anything he says about me is a lie.

  But Jed can't hear me as they get into that old Ford car of mine. Back at Chosin Reservoir, Dan and I often wished we'd had that Ford to bust out of that damn Chinese trap. Coulda outrun anything with that car, even with the stiff-up Korean cold which killed machines and rifles and men.

  Eliz still sends letters every few months seeking new information on me. Those dumb ass Pentagon paper-pushers always send the same form letter back: “Billy Stanton is still considered killed in action, location of body unknown.”

  Lord, give my wife the truth. Give it to her good.

  Just don't let Dan be the one to do it.

  As Eliz drives away, Jed rubs two quick wipes of his hands across the leather of my Bible. He does this because Eliz once told him that Bibles cracked and went brittle if you didn't hold them occasionally and mix hand oils into their leather. He then opens the Bible to the black and white maps in the back and traces travel routes to the places he wants to one day see.

  Don't go there, I mutter as his fingers dance across Asia into Korea. I stir up a slight breeze and the Bible pages flutter until he's looking at a map of ancient Egypt.

  * * *

  Map 2: Exodus from Egypt and the Conquest of Canaan

  (Including the probable route of the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness)

  On the way to church, Eliz picks up her brother, Hank.

  Hank is twenty years older than Eliz – so much older I once asked if their parents had been surprised at Eliz's birth. Hank said their mom had just turned fifty so of course they were surprised. He then added that this gave his little sister a purpose in life. That it fated her toward greater things than getting pregnant at seventeen and married to me.

  It's comments like that which made Hank unwelcome in my house when I was alive.

  Hank eases carefully into the car so he doesn't crease or wrinkle his suit, which is tight on his body just like Jed's clothes. Hank's a big man from his work as a lineman for the telephone company. Eliz swears she once saw Hank lift an entire telephone pole by himself, and I've never doubted she was telling the truth.

  Jed's favorite bedtime story is how his Uncle Hank once slammed a grown man through a solid oak door. This happened when Jed was a baby, but he's heard it so many times he half believes its his own memory.

  The story starts on one of those rare Sunday afternoons where Hank wanted everyone to go to a restaurant for after church instead of just eating at someone's house. Anyway, this damn drunk man at the table behind them started cursing at the top of his lungs – cursing the food, cursing the waitress, cursing the whole room. Hank warned the man to hush up. He said that there were women and children present and besides, that was no way to talk on the Lord's day.

  In response, the man cursed Hank.

  Dumb. Dumb ass. Hank stood up, turned around, and punched that man through the restaurant's bolt-shut side door. The police later said Hank did the right thing. They also had the decency to let an ambulance take the unconscious man to the hospital before they arrested him.

  As Hank sits down in the passenger's seat, the car rocks heavy to the right. Jed keeps the rocking going by slamming his weight from side to side in the backseat.

  “Stop that,” Eliz says. Hank laughs and rocks the car with Jed until Eliz glares at them both.

  “I see you got that lemon cake,” Hank says. “Bet that'll get Brother Satorius to give up his wandering ways.”

  Eliz tells Hank to hush or he won't even get to smell the cake.

  Who says a widow can't have spice?

  As I ghost around the car, I feel for Jed in the backseat – he's thinking about the story of Hank punching that man through a door. What Jed don't know is that the man was me. It was me cursing because Hank wouldn't let me sit beside my own wife in a restaurant, just on account of me being drunk on a Sunday.

  When I came before the judge for that, he took into account my past troubles and said I could do six months in jail or two years in the Marines. My friend Dan had joined the Marines a few weeks earlier, so I told the judge that's what I'd do.

  Damn bad choice – that's what hindsight gets me to knowing.

  * * *

  Map 3: Wetumpka from 1932 to 1952

  (Including the digging of the mine and God's introduction of fire ants)

  It sounds so good, the way me and Dan and Eliz grew up. We all lived on this little country road outside Wetumpka, with Dan's house just a hundred feet from mine and Eliz's another quarter mile away. The three of us played together almost every day, and I probably spent more nights sleeping at Dan's house than in my own home.

  Truth told, this suited my family. My dad cut lumber and spent months at a time on different logging jobs across Alabama. My mom liked this and when my dad was away she'd disappear for days or weeks. When this happened I lived with Dan's family, who took me in without a word of complaint.

  Dan, Eliz, and I had so many places to play we had trouble deciding where to go. Sometimes we'd play hide and seek in the cotton fields behind our houses. Other times we'd go to this V-cut ravine where the waters off the nearby fields sliced a hundred fifty feet down into the clay and sand. We'd climb the eroding slopes and pretend the sun-baked dirt was a distant mountain in far-off lands.

  Once, the three of us dug a mineshaft high up on the ravine. We dug twelve feet into the side of that ravine before Hank came looking for Eliz and told us to stop. He called us fools. Said we were gonna get caved-in and killed.

  After he took Eliz back home, Dan and I went back in our mineshaft and we soon dug right into the guts of a fire ant bed. Fire ants were still new to Alabama and we'd never even seen one until those ants poured over us and we ran screaming and crying to Dan's house. His father looked at us and the dozens of welts on our arms and legs and said, “Dang. So that's what a fire ant does.”

  Years later, in Korea, Dan read a Stars and Stripes newspaper article that said fire ants came from South America and had been introduced to the United States by way of Alabama. We both felt a strange honor at reading about our home state in a newspaper in Korea.

  The mine we dug is still there. Once, when Jed was visiting Hank's house, Jed went exploring and found it. Before he could poke his head in, I floated in and suddenly knew that Hank had been right – that hole could collapse and kill a kid.

  Don't go in, Yella Hawk, I yelled, using the nickname I'd given Jed as a baby. Suddenly he stopped and listened. I felt his only memory of me flash through his head – a memory of the metal toy car I bought him before I left for Korea. The car had been painted yellow with racing stickers on the hood and we used to push it back and forth across the wood-plank floor of our house.

  Instead of entering the mine, Jed ran to Eliz and asked if his father'd ever given him a nickname. Eliz looked horrified at not being able to remember. “I'm sorry,” she said. “It's been so long.” For the next week, Jed kept after her to remember, but she never could.

  Yella Hawk, I said. Yella Hawk.

  * * *

  Map 4: Prophets in Israel and Judah

  (Including where Jonah was swallowed by the fish and Elijah goes up to heaven in a whirlwind)

  The Wetumpka Church of Christ is a three room affair, with two small classrooms and a main hall where forty people can gather on the whitewashed oak pews. Hank, Eliz and I grew up in this church and half the people here are related by strange ancestral routes, which means the marrying options for those not related are by necessity limited.

  'Least, that's how Hank once explained away me and Eliz getting married. When I said I thought it was because I got her pregnant at seventeen, Hank backhanded me harder than most men could hit with a two-by-four.

  Anyway, nothing has changed in the church since I was a kid. For example, there's been an argument going on for forty years over whether or not to buy cushions for the pews, with some of the church's older sisters wanting them while anothe
r group of equally old sisters says cushions make people too comfortable in the presence of the Lord. All this means that when Jed sits down, his butt slides over the same splinters that mine once endured.

  The service has a while to start, so Jed folds an airplane out of scrap paper he keeps in my Bible. He's just finishing the wings when his cousin, Elijah, sits down. Elijah is fourteen – three years older than Jed – but Jed feels that Elijah's really the younger one.

  “Did you see the preacher's car?” Elijah asks. Jed shakes his head.

  “It had to be towed here. Brother Satorius lost control in some mud, hit a tree, and bent his axle.”

  “Let's go look,” Jed says. They bolt to the door, but Eliz tells them both to go sit down. “No playing in your suit,” she warns.

  So Jed and Elijah build paper airplanes. Of course, the temptation of paper airplanes is that they must fly, so Jedediah and Elijah spread apart on the pew and toss the plane back and forth, where it climbs and dives just like a Corsair bombing the shit out of anything moving.

  “Pa told me Brother Satorius fought in Korea with your dad,” Elijah says, catching the airplane by smacking his hands together in a silent clap. He unwrinkles the wings and flings it back to Jed.

  “Never heard that,” Jed says.

  That's because he ain't listened to me, and Eliz tells him nothing. Jed throws the plane back to Elijah just as Hank stands to start the church service, causing the congregation to go quiet.

  Now me, I ain't much of a haint. I can't wail at midnight or rise glowing from a grave. Still, I can flutter a little air. I jump Jed's airplane in mid flight so it flies up high until it's right before Hank's eyes. 'Course, I'd meant to put it into one of Hank's eyes, but it still gets him to coughing in anger as he grips the podium. Elijah and Jed grab their Bibles and pretend to read.

  Hank leads the congregation in a song, a prayer, and announcements. “There will be a fish fry next Sunday,” he says. “See Sister Sanford to sign up on what to bring.”