4
THERE WASN’T ANYTHING IN THE AIR, nothing that I could see that might be keeping me in that spot. I could hear everything going on around me. And I could move, but there was some kind of force keeping me inside the circle she had drawn.
“Sam!” I heard a voice shout. It was my friend Abra coming down the alley.
I tried to lift my arm to wave her over, but the circle kept my arms tight to my sides.
“Come on,” she called out. “Your mom’s been looking for you. She’s going to take us home.”
At that point I realized I couldn’t talk. I could breathe, but that was it. My voice was gone. Nothing.
“Why are you standing there?” she said. “Your mom is waiting. C’mon!”
When she got closer she slowed down. I stared at her, and she looked confused. She reached out and pushed me playfully. Her foot scuffed mud and stones over the circle the old lady had drawn, and suddenly I could move. I jumped away from the circle.
What had just happened?
“What’s your problem?” she asked. “Let’s go. The Ferris wheel is going up and the livestock tents are out. I’m pretty sure I saw Steve and Bo sneaking onto the fairgrounds over by the break in the fence, where the cotton candy always is . . .”
She chattered on and on about the fair, and I followed her through the alley, expecting the old woman to jump out at us or that huge man to sweep down and question me. But nothing happened. We wandered out onto the sidewalk that ran in front of the antique store and walked toward my mother waiting in her car.
I climbed into the passenger seat and didn’t say a word. I couldn’t get the image of that woman out of my mind, the way she scraped that circle, the way it held me frozen.
“Hey,” my mom said, disapproval on her face, “where were you? And where’s your glove?”
I realized I had left my glove in Mr. Pelle’s back room.
“Where was I?” I said. “Where were you?”
She could tell I had been upset when she didn’t show up, so she let me get away with talking back to her.
“I’m sorry, Sam,” she said, tilting her head and frowning. “I know I’m never late, but I got caught up talking to Abra’s mom, and she asked if I could pick Abra up at the school, so by the time I got to practice you were gone. What a storm!”
Abra sat in the backseat and put her bag beside her. She kept glancing at me with a strange look on her face, but I tried to ignore her.
Yeah, what a storm, I thought, once again picturing the dark cloud of scribbles on the table around those words.
We drove north onto Kincade Road. That’s where the fair was setting up, in a park on the outskirts of town. The workers swarmed the area, building rides and putting up food tents, pulling trailers and backing up trucks. I looked and looked for the three old ladies, but I didn’t see them.
“Look, the Ferris wheel!” Abra said. “I can’t wait.”
There was a whimsical sound to her voice, and I knew exactly how she felt. The rides, the food, the lights—everything about the fair embodied summer and freedom and being young.
At the far end of the fair I saw the Ferris wheel going up, section by section. Three or four large men joined the massive, curving pieces of iron pulled from the back of a semi.
We left town. Abra and I both looked out the back window of my mom’s car for as long as the fair was visible. It was the best part of the summer, and I couldn’t wait.
Today’s Friday, tomorrow’s Saturday, then Sunday night the fair opens, I thought.
“Can we come on Sunday night?” I asked my mom.
“Of course we can,” she said.
We always think we have one more day. We always think tomorrow can do nothing but come around. It’s one of the great illusions we live with, that time will go on and on, that our lives will never end.
“Of course we can,” she’d said, but my mom wouldn’t make it to the fair that year.
Route 126 and Kincade Road were both lined with restaurants and gas stations and a small grid of houses in those days, population 1,931 (or so said the small sign as you drove into town, and so said that sign for many years). Route 126 traveled east to west. Kincade Road was my road, the road that went north into the farmland and the valley where the eastern and western mountain ranges started pinching together.
We had already dropped Abra off at her farmhouse and were driving the last stretch of Kincade Road before getting to our place. There was only one more farm north of us, and Kincade Road ended just past its lane, giving way first to woods and then to the two mountains that lined the opposite sides of our valley as they converged to a point. A river spilled out of their collision and drifted south through the valley, all the way to Deen.
When I was a kid, that valley was my entire world, and the mountains that lined it were the boundaries. Beyond them, there was nothing. I loved my life there at the edge of the world. I feel sorry for children who live in the midst and never have a chance to wander close to where everything ends.
A clean, delicious wind rushed into the car. We had driven mile after mile out of town until the houses dispersed and gradually gave way to cornfields. The cornstalks were about two feet tall, their narrow green tassels waving back and forth. In most places the fields went all the way from the edge of Kincade Road to the forests that lined the mountains. Everything smelled like cut grass and blue sky. The farming families in the valley tried to squeeze as much out of the land as we could, and as I had grown older I had begun to feel part of the earth, part of the struggle for life.
We approached a meaningless stop sign. The road that used to cross Kincade Road was no longer there, but my mom still insisted on stopping. I wondered if anyone would ever take that sign down. As I glanced over at the grassy bank that kept the cornfields at bay, I saw the cat.
It was pure white, really small, practically a kitten, and it walked like it was proud of itself, flicking its tail behind it like a tall, white snake.
“What, for a cat?” my mom asked, but she was already pulling over. That’s the kind of mom she was.
“Yeah, for a cat.” I opened my door. The cat turned and looked at me.
Now, decades later, I still wonder why that cat couldn’t have simply run away from me, disappearing into the corn and saving everything. Why did it have to come so willingly?
“Look at that,” I said. “He likes me.”
“How do you know it’s a he?” my mom asked.
“Can we take him home?” I asked, reaching out to the cat. It paused for a moment, moved away from me, then leaned back into my reach.
“I don’t know if your father will like that,” Mom said, but I had already brought the cat into the car and closed the door. I looked at my mom and made sad eyes, a great big pretend frown.
She laughed. I loved how my mom laughed.
Then she sighed and shook her head, but she couldn’t stop smiling. “You are going to get me into trouble,” she said. “What will you name him?”
“I think I’ll name him Icarus.”
“Icarus? Where’s that from?”
I shrugged. “Remember the story Dad told us the other night after dinner? The story about the father who built wings for himself and his son out of wax and feathers so they could escape the island they were on?”
“I think I was washing the dishes,” Mom said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “By myself.”
“It was a good story,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You missed out.”
“Well, what happened?”
“The father warned his son about flying too low because the sea’s spray would clog his wings. But he couldn’t fly too high or the sun would melt them.”
“And?”
“He flew too high, the wings melted, and he drowned in the sea.”
“That’s depressing.”
I shrugged again. “I like the name. Icarus.”
“You’ll have to buy food,” she warned me. “Where will you get money for that?”
“Oh, I’ve got tons of money,” I said, and we both laughed.
I wasn’t exactly rich, but I made five dollars a week mowing Mr. Jinn’s grass. Mr. Jinn owned the farm to the north of us, but I had never seen him in my life. Not ever. He was an old hermit and never left his house. His farm was all grown over with weeds, and the barns were falling in on themselves. He had a small yard that he kept mowed, though sometimes he called my mom and, in as few words as possible, asked if I could mow it for him. When I did, he left a five-dollar bill in an empty birdbath close to his house. Whenever I took the money from the birdbath, I could feel his eyes staring at me through one of the dark windows.
“Well, I guess you can name him whatever you want to name him if you’re footing the bill,” she said. The car turned in to the stone driveway that led to our house. “Just remember,” she said as she turned off the car, “names are powerful things. Sometimes they can even form us into who we become.”
But I wasn’t thinking about who I was becoming, or who the cat would become, because that’s how it is when you’re young and feel like you have all the time in the world.
I tried to tuck Icarus under my arm when we got out of the car so that my dad wouldn’t see, but at that moment he came walking in from the barn. He strolled over to my mom and kissed her on the cheek.
I murmured, “Gross.”
They both laughed. My dad stopped laughing when he saw what I had under my arm.
“What’s that?”
“What, that cute little cat?” my mom said, moving over to stand beside me.
Dad sighed. “As if we need another animal around here to feed.” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows as if to ask, And what do you have to say for yourself, young man?
I pulled the cat in tighter against my side and stroked his head. “I’ll take care of him, Dad, don’t worry. I’ll pay for the food. You won’t have to do a thing.”
He looked back over at my mom.
“He named the cat Icarus,” she said, as if that was her only argument on my behalf.
“What am I going to do with you two?” he said, trying not to smile. He turned and walked away. When he was far off, he shouted without turning around, “I’m fine with the cat. But not in the house!”
I looked at Mom and she smiled, and we walked to the house together. I put the cat down and waited to see what he would do. Without hesitating, he ran up beside my mom and walked with her, trying to move between and around her feet.
“He likes you, Mom!” I shouted.
“How do you know it’s a he?” she asked again.
“Because his name is Icarus.”
“Is that your cat?” a voice shouted to me from down the lane. Abra rode her bike up beside me. She had a goofy grin on her face.
“I got a cat! Can you believe it? Meet Icarus!” I laughed.
“Cats are for sissies,” she said, but I could tell she was jealous.
“Abra, would you like to stay for supper?” my mom called from the house, and we grinned at each other.
At about six o’clock I ran out to the barn to find my dad and tell him supper was ready. Abra stayed inside to help my mom set the table.
“Dad?” I shouted into the dark barn, where he usually finished up before supper. “Are you in here?”
My voice sounded thin and vanished quickly in the aisles between the pens and the holes in the ceiling that went up to the musty haymow. Sometimes we’d throw a few bales of hay down and then jump through the hole, landing on them. It was a good ten feet from the ceiling to the floor, and the rush took my breath away. Inside that old barn, when the sun was going down but we hadn’t turned on the lights yet, it was a dark place with a lot of deep shadows. It was the kind of place where you could believe in just about anything.
I thought back to the old lady who had drawn a circle in the ground around me. Who was the man in the shadows? Why were they all in the back room? What did Find the Tree of Life mean? I kept expecting one of the three women to walk out of a corner of the barn, holding that stick, looking at me with those eyes.
“Dad?” I shouted again.
“Over here, Son,” he said. I walked through the half-light to the back corner of the barn, where he kept one of the lambs that had been rejected by its mother. “Hold this bottle for me.”
It was warm in the barn, and flies buzzed everywhere. They dodged my steps and buzzed around me in a cloud. I grabbed the oversized bottle and stuck it between the bars of the gate, holding it with two hands. The little white lamb latched on and sucked, bucking its head and wagging its stumpy little tail a million times a minute. I reached out and petted the curly wool on its head.
“Thanks, boy,” my dad said, ruffling my hair and smiling. “I’m going to go hook up the tractor. You finish up that bottle for me and I’ll meet you inside.”
When he left, the barn felt dark and still. I jumped at every shadow. As I helped the lamb gulp down the last of the bottle, I stared into a corner where a beam of sunshine fell through one of the dusty barn windows. The light illuminated a spiderweb, and as I watched, a fly collided with the sticky strands. It fought and churned and spun until it was hopelessly entangled. A small black spider darted out from the shadows, hovered over the fly, and began wrapping it in a sticky cocoon.
A strange sense of fear burned inside me, and I backed away from the lamb. But there was something else, some feeling I couldn’t identify. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was nothing. Or maybe I could somehow sense the coming storm, the fact that things were about to change.
We ate supper together that night, our last supper together, though I didn’t know it at the time. New potatoes and green beans from our garden, and a roast my mom had cooked in the oven all day.
We never spoke much at supper, the three of us. Sometimes Mom would try to get us going with simple questions: “What’s the best thing that happened to you today? What’s the worst thing?” And my dad and I cooperated, more or less.
There was definitely more talking when Abra was there. My mom was always asking about her family—how they were going to spend their summer and how her baby brother was doing. My dad always tried to get information out of her about what crops her father was planting, how the animals were faring, that sort of thing. Her family’s farm was just to the south of ours, and we saw them a lot.
Every once in a great while my dad would tell a story during suppertime, and when he did I would listen with wide eyes. They were normally stories from his childhood injected with fictional characters or fantastic events. It was usually difficult to strain the truth from the fantasy, but they were always wonderful stories.
That night he cleared his plate and took a long drink of ice water. The outside of the glass was sweating because it was warm in the house, and it left a small, glistening ring on the table. He crossed his arms and leaned his chair back on two legs. When he sat like that he looked huge and old and wise, and I was reminded of how different a boy is from a man, how different I was from him.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “there was a great big tree in the front yard of this farm.”
“Like the oak?” I asked, looking over at Abra. But she didn’t even notice me—she just stared at my dad. We both loved when he told his stories.
“Just like the oak,” he said. “Only larger. And taller. Some of the boys in my neighborhood said that if you climbed all the way to the top, you’d be up in the clouds, maybe even in heaven. But that’s a different story. In this story, I had a dog, a wonderful dog named Ike. Ike was a German shepherd my grandfather gave me for my tenth birthday. Ike was eight weeks old when he came to live at the house. He was a beautiful dog.”
My mom stood up and took a few plates over to the sink, then came and sat down. She put her elbow on the table and leaned her face into the palm of her hand. She was a good listener.
“Ike didn’t always know what was best for him, and one day he chased a rabbit around the barn as my dad was backing out the tractor. Well, my dad backed over Ike, and he died. I was very sad. I cried for hours. Finally, as it started to get dark, my dad and my grandpa came in and asked if I’d like to help them bury Ike under the old oak tree. I said I would, and we took turns with the shovel, digging the hole and burying good old Ike.
“The next day it started to rain, and it hadn’t rained all summer. We’d been in a drought, and the farmers were happy to see the rain. Well, someone heard that we had buried Ike the night before out under that oak tree, and there were some superstitious people in the town. They started to think that old oak tree had the power to bring rain, and all you had to do was sacrifice an animal and bury it close to the roots.”
“That’s weird,” Abra said, wrinkling her nose.
“Me and my grandpa and my dad, we all knew this was hogwash, but someone kept coming out at night and burying animals under our tree. It got to be pretty bad, and the rain came down harder and harder until it looked like it might flood. So one night my grandpa went out there with a can of kerosene and doused the tree and burned it down. You should have seen the flames.”
For a moment he stared at the ceiling as if he were watching a massive tree burn.
“Everything went back to normal after that. But I was sad to see that tree go.”
It was very quiet around the table as we sat there thinking about Ike and the tree and the generations of farmers that had come before us. I wished I knew how much of that story was true. You never knew with my dad.
After dinner, Abra helped Mom with the dishes while Dad and I went back out for a few more hours of farm work. By the time I got back to the house, Abra had already ridden her bike home. We did that a lot, biked to each other’s houses, because there wasn’t anyone else who lived on Kincade Road once you got outside of town, and the ride wasn’t that far, maybe a mile or two. Well, there was Mr. Jinn, but no one ever saw him.
I made a house for Icarus by cutting apart a cardboard box, and Mom donated one of her old sweaters for the bedding. I put the box under the huge, green front porch of our farmhouse. I sat there on the steps and looked out over the massive garden, and the cat weaved a circle around my legs, purring.
The sun had gone, but there was still a bit of light in the western sky. The smell of cut hay filtered through the sunset. A few lightning bugs turned on and off and on and off, their yellow-green lights sharp like stars.
I saw the storm rolling in from the east, the clouds heavy and flashing with lightning. It sounded like some kind of war in heaven, a vicious battle that would end only after one side had completely destroyed the other. I had always thought of thunder coming after the lightning, a natural cause and effect, but that night I saw it in a new way. It felt like Thunder and Lightning were two beings battling each other, Lightning always striking first, Thunder coming later with the counterpunch.
The lightning and thunder grew close, and I thought again about what I had seen at the back of the antique store through the crack in the door. I remembered how the thunder had sounded, how the lightning had lit up the three women’s faces, pale and clear, and how the scratched-out words on the table had looked like an angry cloud.
But that storm, the one coming in through the dusk, wouldn’t be like scratches on a table. That storm would bring death and set everything else in motion.