ELIZABETH HAND lives on the Maine coast with novelist Richard Grant and their daughter Callie Anne. She is the author of the novels Winterlong (a nominee for the Philip K. Dick Award) and Aestival Tide, and is currently at work on Waking the Moon. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies such as The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Full Spectrum II and Twilight Zone. She is a Contributing Editor to Science Fiction Eye and her book reviews and criticism are published in The Washington Post, Penthouse, The Detroit Metro Times and the feminist quarterly, Belles Lettres.
The powerful slice of dark fantasy which follows is based on the author’s real-life experiences on the town route in Green County, Virginia, several years ago. “Like Julie Dean,” she notes, “I ate too many Bomb Pops, smoked too many cigarettes, and met the people you’ll find in this story, including the bearded lady and Sam and Little Eva. And as anyone who’s spent much time in those mountains can tell you, some truly weird stuff happens there.”
I MET THE BEARDED LADY the first day I rode with Cass on the town route. That sweltering afternoon I sprawled across my mattress on the floor. A few inches from my nose lay the crumpled notice of the revocation of my scholarship. Beside it a less formally worded letter indicated that in light of my recent lack of interest in the doings of The Fertile Mind Bookstore, my services there would no longer be needed, and would I please return the Defries Incunabula I had “borrowed” for my thesis immediately? From downstairs thumped the persistent bass line of the house band’s demo tape. Then another, more insistent thudding began outside my room. I moaned and pulled my pillow onto my head. I ignored the pounding on the door, finally pretended to be asleep as Cass let himself in.
“Time to wake up,” he announced, kneeling beside the mattress and sliding a popsicle down my back. “Time to go on the ice cream truck.”
I moaned and burrowed deeper into the bed. “Ow—that hurts—”
“It’s ice cream, Julie. It’s supposed to hurt.” Cass dug the popsicle into the nape of my neck, dripping pink ice and licking it from my skin between whispers. “Snap out of it, Jules. You been in here two whole weeks. Natalie at the bookstore’s worried.”
“Natalie at the bookstore fired me.” I reached for a cigarette and twisted to face the window. “You better go, Cass. I have work to do.”
“Huh.” He bent to flick at the scholarship notice, glanced at yet another sordid billet: UNDERGRADUATE ACADEMIC SUSPENSION in bold red characters. Beneath them a humorlessly detailed list of transgressions. “You’re not working on your thesis. You’re not doing anything. You got to get out of here, Julie. You promised. You said you’d come with me on the truck and you haven’t gone once since I started.” He stalked to the door, kicking at a drift of unpaid bills, uncashed checks, unopened letters from my parents, unreturned phone messages from Cass Tyrone. “You don’t come today, Julie, that’s it. No more ice cream.”
“No more Bomb Pops?” I asked plaintively.
“Nope.” He sidled across the hall, idly nudging a beer bottle down the steps.
“No more Chump Bars?”
“Forget it. And no Sno-Cones, either. I’ll save ’em for Little Eva.” Reaching into his knapsack, he tossed me another popsicle and waited. I unpeeled it and licked it thoughtfully, applying it to my aching forehead. Then I stood up.
“Okay. I’m coming.”
Outside, on the house’s crumbling brick, someone had spraypainted Dog Is Glove and You Are What You Smell, along with some enthusiastic criticism of the house band written by Cass himself. A few steps farther and the truck stood in a vacant parking lot glittering with squashed beer cans and shattered bottles. Before I could climb in, Cass made me walk with him around the rusted machine. He patted the flaking metal signs and kicked the tires appraisingly. The truck settled ominously into the gravel at this attention and Cass sighed. “Damn. Hope we don’t get another flat your first time out.”
Once it had been a Good Humor truck. Ghostly letters still glowed balefully above a phantom ice cream bar, since painted over with the slogan Jolly Times. One side of the cab was plastered with ancient decals displaying mottled eclairs twisted into weird shapes and faded, poisonous colors. I grimaced, then clambered in after Cass.
As the engine wheezed, the ancient cab rattled like a box of marbles, empty pop bottles and freezer cartons rolling underfoot as I tried to clear a place to lean against the freezer. Cass lit a cigarette, dropping the match into a grape puddle.
“You ready?” he shouted, and the truck lurched forward. I braced myself against the freezer lid, my hands sticking to the cool metal. Cass glanced back and apologized. “Sorry about that. Left a Chump Bar there last night. First stop’s Tandy Court.”
The truck hurtled through the university town of Zion, past the college lawn and the student ghettos, past tiny churches where clots of the faithful stirred listlessly on brown lawns, fanning themselves with Sunday bulletins. Cass and I sucked popsicles to cool off, the sticks piling on the floor between us like chicken bones at a barbecue. Above the dashboard dangled a string of rusty bells. Occasionally Cass tugged at an old gray shoelace to ring them, frowning at the wan metallic gargle. He hunched over the steering column, like a rodeo clown clinging to that great ugly hulk. Then he whooped, jangled the bells, and gunned the motor.
The road narrowed to a silvery track stretching before us, churches and homes falling away as we left the town limits. About us began the slow steady erosion of village into farmland, farmland into open country, the furrows of ploughed fields plunging into the ravines and ancient hollows of the Blue Ridge. We turned off the highway, bouncing across train tracks. I breathed the cloudy sweet scents of anthracite and honeysuckle and laughed, suddenly elated.
Below us perched a dozen trailer homes, strewn among stands of poplar and red oak like a doll village sprung from a sandbox. Old pickups and junked Chevys rusted side by side like Tonka Toys. The truck crept gingerly between ruts and boulders until we reached a little midden where an inflated Yogi Bear hung from a broom handle, revolving lazily in the breeze.
Cass shook his head, bemused. “Lot of toys on this route.” He pointed to a shiny new trailer shell, its brown pocket of lawn vivid with red plastic tulips and spinning whirligigs. In the trailer’s windows huddled small figures, brown and green and pink, staring out with shiny black eyes. More toys peered from other trailers as we crept by, rag dolls and inchworms abandoned in back lots. Only the pickups and motorcycles parked between Big Wheel bikes hinted that there might be adults somewhere.
“So where are all the kids?” I demanded, unwrapping a Neapolitan sandwich.
Cass halted the truck in a cul-de-sac. “Watch this.”
The bells jingled, echoing against the mountainside until the hollow chimed. Silence, except for distant birdsong.
Then another sound began, a clamorous tide of screen doors slamming open and shut, door after door creaking, booming, hissing closed. Drawers banged, coins jingled. And the children came, big ones dragging smaller ones, toddlers dragging dolls, galloping dogs and kittens scampering beneath the stalled truck. Cass fell into his seat, grinning. “Ready to sell some ice cream?” He threw open the freezer drawers, nodding to the group outside.
“Here’s the three Kims,” he commented, hefting an unopened carton. Three girls in cut-offs and T-shirts squirmed to the side of the truck, eyeing me warily.
“Hi,” whispered the prettiest girl, staring at Cass boldly enough to belie her soft voice. “Give me a ee-clair.”
Cass winked as he reached into the freezer. “Eclair? That’s a new one. Anything for your momma?”
She shook her head, clinked down two quarters and slipped away.
“What about you, Kim?” asked Cass. “Same thing?”
“Kimberly,” lisped the second girl. She had protruding front teeth and a true harelip, her split upper lip glowing pink and wet as bubblegum when she smiled. “Fudgesicle.”
He handed her a fudgesicle, and then the remaining children piled forward, yelling requests as I dredged ice cream from the freezer, frost billowing around me like steam. After the last child darted off, Cass wheeled the truck around and we plunged back up the road.
From one side of the mountain to the other I watched the same scene, an endless procession of children unwinding beneath the blinding sun. I felt sick from too many cigarettes and ice cream bars. My eyes ached; the landscape looked flat and bright, overexposed, the streams of children a timelapsed film: first the tiniest boys and girls, grinning and dirty as if freshly pulled from a garden. Then their older brothers and sisters, feral creatures with slanted eyes yellowed in the sunlight, bare arms and legs sleek and golden as perch. Girls just past puberty, one with her mother’s bra flapping loosely around her thin chest. An occasional boy, rude and bashful, a wad of chewing tobacco plumping his cheek. And finally another baby stumbling to the truck behind a mother ungraced by a gold ring, the two of them leaving naked footprints in the road.
“Wild girls,” Cass said softly as we watched them run from the truck, to swing over fences or perch there for an instant, staring back at us with glittering eyes. “Like dragonflies,” he murmured. I saw them as he did, shining creatures darting between the pines. A flicker in the trees and they were gone, their pretty husks crumbled in the sun.
Farther up and farther in we drove. The houses grew older, more scattered. There were no more telephone poles. The truck scaled tortuous roads so narrow I wondered how we’d get back down after dark. I stood beside the driver’s seat, balancing myself so that I could watch the sun dance in and out of the distant mountaintops. In front of me Cass fidgeted in his seat, chainsmoking.
“Count and see if we got enough for a case of beer when we get back,” he yelled over the droning motor.
My hands were stained in minutes, counting streaked pennies and quarters sticky with tar and gum and more lint than I cared to think about. I felt rather than saw the difference in one coin, so heavy I thought at first it was a silver dollar.
“What’s this?”
I tossed it gingerly into my other hand, extending it to Cass. The face was worn to a dull moon, but letters still caught the afternoon light and flashed as Cass took it from me. “Look: it’s not even in English.”
He shut one eye and regarded it appraisingly. “Another one? She gives me those sometimes. It’s real silver.”
I took it back, weighed it in my fist. “They worth anything?”
“Worth their weight in silver,” Cass replied brusquely, and he reddened. “I told Sam. But he wouldn’t take ’em back,” he added defensively. He bent to trace the characters on the coin with one finger. “They’re Greek. And they’re real, real old. I bring them to the stamp shop in Zion and the guy there gives me twenty bucks apiece. You can keep that one. I haven’t seen any for awhile.”
“I bet they’re worth more than twenty bucks,” I said, but Cass only shrugged.
“Not in Zion. And up here they’re only worth fifty cents.” And laughing he lit a cigarette.
“We’re almost at the bearded lady’s,” he announced. “You’ll meet Sam there. That’s always my last stop. I found her place by mistake,” he went on, pounding the dashboard for emphasis. “We’re not even supposed to go down this road.”
He pointed his cigarette at the dusty track winding before us, so narrow that branches poked through the windows, raking my arms as the truck crept down the hill.
“No one lives here. Just the kids, they’re always around. Come to play with Little Eva. But I never see anyone in these houses,” he mused, slowing the truck as it drifted past two dilapidated cottages, caved in upon themselves like an old man’s gums. Cass yanked on the shoelace and the bells rang faintly.
From the shadowy verdure appeared a tiny white house, stark and precise as a child’s drawing chalked against the woodlands. Here the dirt road straightened and the hill ended, as if too exhausted to go on. The truck, too, grated to a stop.
Behind the house stretched woods and fallow farmland, ochre clay, yellow flax fading into the silvery horizon where a distant silo wavered in the heat like a melting candle. From an unseen bog droned the resolute thud of a croaking bullfrog, the splash of a heron highstepping through the marsh. Shrill tuneless singing wafted from inside the house.
A kitten lay panting beneath the worn floorboards of a little porch, ignoring a white cabbage butterfly feebly beating its wings in the scant shade. The singing stopped abruptly and I heard a radio’s blare.
“Watch,” Cass whispered. He lit another cigarette and rang the bells. The kitten sprang from beneath the porch, craning to watch the front door.
One moment the doorway was black. The next a girl stood there, her hair a spiky orange nimbus flared about a white face. Barefoot, a dirty white nightgown flapping around legs golden with dust and feet stained brick red from the clay. She smiled and jigged up and down on her heels, glancing back at the house. The kitten ran to her, cuffing her ankle—I could have circled one of those ankles with my thumb and forefinger and slid a pencil between. Her thin arm lashed out and grabbed the kitten by its nape, dangling it absently like a pocketbook.
“Hi,” called Cass, blowing a smoke ring out the window. “Little Eva.”
The girl beamed, stepping towards the road, then stopped to squint back at the doorway. “She’s real shy,” Cass muttered. “Hey, Eva—”
He flourished a green and yellow popsicle shaped like a daisy. “I saved this for you. The three Kims wanted it but I told ’em, no way, this one’s for Little Eva.”
Giggling, she shuffled down the dirt walk, her feet slipping between paving stones and broken glass. I smiled, nodding reassuringly as she took the popsicle and squatted beside Cass on the truck’s metal side-steps. He opened a can of grape pop and drained it in one pull, then tossed the empty into the back of the truck. “Where’s your mom, Eva?”
“Right there.” She pointed with her ice pop, dropping and retrieving it from the dirt in one motion. The kitten scrambled from her arms and disappeared in the jewelweed.
From the shadows of the doorway stepped a woman, small and fat as a bobwhite, wearing a baggy blue shift like a hospital gown. Long greasy hair was bunched in a clumsy ball at the back of her neck; long black hairs plastered her forehead. From her chin curled thick tufts of black hair, coarse as a billy goat’s beard. A pair of glasses pinched her snub nose, thick-lensed glasses with cheap black plastic frames—standard county issue. Behind the grimy lenses her eyes glinted pale cloudy yellow. When she spoke, her voice creaked like burlap sacking and her head bobbed back and forth like a snake’s. It was a whole minute before I realized she was blind.
“Little Eva,” she yelled, her twang thick and muddy as a creek bottom. “Who’s it?”
“Ice cream man,” drawled Eva, and she poked her popsicle into the woman’s hand. “He give me this. Get money from Sam.”
Cass nodded slowly. “It’s Cass Tyrone, Maidie.” He thumped a heavy carton on the side of the truck. “I got you a box of eclairs here. That what you want?”
Her hands groped along the side of the truck, pouncing on the frost-rimed box. “Sam,” she shrilled. “Ice cream man.”
Someone else shuffled onto the porch then, wiping his hands on the front of a filthy union suit. Much older than Maidie, he wore only those greasy coveralls and a crudely drawn tattoo. He took very small steps to the edge of the porch—such small steps that I glanced down at his feet. Bare feet, grub white and hardly bigger than Little Eva’s.
How he walked on those feet was a mystery. He was very fat, although there was something deflated about his girth, as though the weight had somewhere slipped from him, leaving soft folds and ripples of slack papery skin. His head and neck looked as though they’d been piped from pastry cream, ornate folds and dimples of white flesh nearly hiding his features. Even his tattoo was blurred and softened by time, as though it had shrunk with him, like the image on a deflated balloon. I turned my head to keep from laughing nervously. But the old man turned his head as well, so that I stared into a pair of vivid garter-blue eyes fringed with lashes black as beetles. I coughed, embarrassed. He smiled at me and I drew back, my skin prickling.
Such a beautiful smile! Perfect white teeth and lips a little too red, as though he’d been eating some overripe fruit. I thought of Ingrid Bergman—that serene glow, those liquid eyes with their black lashes fluttering beneath a shock of grimy white hair. He was irresistible. Shyly I smiled back, and in a very soft voice he said, “Hello, Ice Cream.”
He was the ugliest man I had ever seen.
Cass nudged me, explaining, “That’s what he calls me. ‘Ice Cream.’ Like you call a blacksmith Smith, or a gardener Gardner.” I nodded doubtfully, but Sam smiled, tilting his head to Little Eva as he bent to tug her gently by the ear.
“You want a cigarette, Sam?” drawled Cass, handing him an Old Gold. Sam took it without a word.
“That’s my girl, Sam.” Cass sighed mournfully. “Julie Dean: she’s awful mean. Maidie, that’s my girl.”
The bearded lady wagged her head, then thumped her hand on the side of the truck, palm up, until I stuck my own hand out the window. She grabbed it and nearly yanked me out into the road.
“Maidie,” I said loudly, wincing as I heard my fingers crackle in her grip. “I’m Julie.”
She shook her head, staring eagerly at the roof of the truck. “I knowed all about you. He told me. He got this girl . . .” Her voice ebbed and she turned to Sam, wildly brandishing her box of eclairs as she shouted, “Take ’em, Sam! That Ice Cream’s girl?”
Sam smiled apologetically as he enfolded the box in one great soft paw. “I don’t know, Maidie,” he told her, then whispered to me, “She don’t see much people.” He spoke so slowly, so gently, that I wondered if he was dim-witted; if he’d ever been off the mountain. Ice Cream,” he murmured, and reached to stroke my hand. “Ice Cream, this your girl?”
Cass grabbed me, shaking me until my hair flew loose from my bandana and my jaw rattled. “This is her. The one and only. What you think, Sam?”
Sam stared at me. I saw a light flare and fade in his iris: the pupils pulsed like a pair of flexing black wings, then shrank to tiny points once more. I shrugged, then nodded uneasily.
“Julie,” he whispered. “You his girl?”
I shook my head, stammering, and shrank from the window.
“Julie Dean. I’ll remember,” whispered Sam. He slid his hand over mine, his skin smooth and dry and cool as glass. “You know, Ice Cream is awful good to us.”
“I thought everybody hated the ice cream man,” I remarked, grinning.
Sam shook his head, shocked. “We love ice cream.”
Cass grinned. “Hear that? They love me. Right, Maidie? Right, Eva?”
Maidie giggled sharply, tilting her head so that I saw the moles clustered beneath her chin, buried like dark thumbprints in that fleshy dewlap where the hairs grew thickest. I shuddered, thinking of cancers, those dark little fingers tickling her throat in the middle of the night. Little Eva laughed with her mother, clutching the truck’s fender.
“Ice Cream!” she shrieked. “Give me ice cream!”
Cass beamed and scooped another popsicle from the freezer, tossing it to her like a bear slapping a trout to shore. The kitten flashed from the grass, tumbling the pop in mid-air so it fell at Maidie’s feet.
“I’ll be by tomorrow,” Cass called to Sam, and he started back into the truck. “You catch me then.”
“I got money,” Sam muttered. He wriggled his hand into a pocket, then opened his palm to display a handful of tarnished coins, age-blackened and feathered with verdigris. Cass scrutinized the coins, finally picked out three. Eva giggled, baring a mouthful of green-iced teeth.
“Okay,” he said. “But I got to go now. Kiss, Little Eva?”
She fled tittering to the porch, pausing to spin and wave like one of those plastic whirligigs, bobbing goodbye before she skipped indoors. Cass started the truck and waved.
“So long, Maidie, Sam. Anything special tomorrow?”
Maidie yelled, “Eclairs,” then waddled back to the porch. For another minute Sam lingered, stroking the rusted metal of the truck’s headlights. “You’ll be back?” he finally asked.
“Sure, Sam,” Cass shouted above the motor. “Tomorrow.”
Sam nodded, lifting his hand and opening it a single time in measured farewell. “Tomorrow,” he repeated, and stepped back from the cloud of dirt and grass that erupted behind us. A minute later and they were gone from sight, hidden behind the oaks and serpentine road. Cass grinned like a dog, twisting in his seat to face me. “What’d you think?”
I lit a cigarette, staring at the fields streaming red and gold in the twilight, the tumbledown walls and rotting fenceposts. I waited a long time before answering him, and then I only said, “I thought it was sad,” and tossed my cigarette across the road.
“Sad?” said Cass, puzzled. “You thought Little Eva was sad?”
“Christ, they’re so poor. Like they haven’t had a real meal in months.”
“Sad?” he repeated. “Sad?” And he stomped the gas pedal. “I thought they’d make you happy.”
“Cass!” I shook my head, kicking at an empty beer bottle. “You’re feeding them.”
“I don’t give them anything,” he protested. “They buy that ice cream.”
“Cass, I saw you give him a box of eclairs.”
He shook his head violently, jerking the wheel from side to side. “He bought that, Julie. He paid for it.”
“Fifty cents for ten bucks worth of eclairs.”
“What are you saying? Just what are you saying?” Cass demanded. “I sold him that ice cream.” His face glowed bright pink, the stubble on his face a crimson fuzz. I hunched back against the freezer and looked away stubbornly.
“Look, Cass, I don’t care what you do with your money—”
“Shut up. Just shut up. What the hell do you know? They don’t need that ice cream. They love it. That’s why I go there. Not like—” He stopped, furious, switching the radio on and then off again.
We rode in silence. It grew darker as we traced our way back down again. Night leaked like black water to fill the rims and ridges of the mountains. The first stars gleamed as the trees began to bow before a cool rising wind. I reached over to roll up the window, as much to shut out the night itself as the chill air; but the handle was broken. I rubbed my arms and wished I’d brought a sweater. Silently Cass groped beneath his seat with one hand, then tossed me a dirty sweatshirt. I pulled it on gratefully and leaned forward to kiss him.
“Am I your girl? Is that what you tell them?”
He shrugged and shifted gears. He drove with his face pressed right up to the gritty windshield, shoving his glasses against the bridge of his nose as if that might make his eyes strong enough to pierce the dark tunnel of pine and shivering aspen. “Damn,” he muttered. “This place gets dark.”
I nodded, huddling into his sweatshirt as I peered into the night. It was like day was something that could be peeled away, and now the black core of the mountain, the pith and marrow of it, throbbed here. I saw averted eyes, heard wings and the rustle of pokeweed where something loped alongside us for a few yards before veering off into the bracken. I stuck my head out the window and saw reflected in the scarlet taillights a fox, one black foreleg raised as he watched us pass.
Then came a long stretch where the road flattened out and stretched before us like a solid shaft of darkness flying into the heart of the country. Overhead, branches linked and flowers dangled against the windshield, laving us in their dreamy scent. Cass cut back the engine and the truck glided down this gentle slope, headlights guttering on rabbits that did not run, but stopped to regard us with gooseberry eyes from the roadside. I yawned and let my arms droop out the window.
“Poison ivy,” warned Cass; but he did the same thing, sparks from his cigarette singeing sphinx moths and lacewings. Great white blossoms belled from the trees and I reached to grab a handful of flowers, yanking them through the window until the branch snapped and showered us with pollen and dew.
“Look,” I gasped, breathless from the cold spray. “What are they?”
Cass poked sagely at his glasses, leaning over to inhale.
“Really?” I lifted my face and shook the branch, spattering more dew on my sunburned cheeks. “They smell like heaven.”
“Nah. I don’t know what they are, really. White things—asphodel, moonflowers,” he finished, yawning. “They do smell like—”
He choked on the word, twisting the wheel sharply. “Sweet Jesus . . .”
In the road before us crouched a child, her eyes incandescent in the highbeams. I shouted and lunged for the wheel, tearing it from Cass’s hands. With a shearing sound the wheel spun free and the truck plowed forward.
There was no way we could avoid hitting her. The soft thump was almost a relief, the gentle slap of a great wave against a dinghy. The truck shuddered to a stop and Cass groaned, knocking me aside as he staggered through the door to land on his knees in the dirt. I followed and collapsed beside him.
She was dead, of course. A vivid russet bruise smeared her face from neck to shoulder, staining her torn T-shirt. At first I didn’t recognize the face beneath the speckled dirt and blood. Then I noticed the tiny pink cleft above her teeth, the blood pooling there to trickle into her mouth. Cass dabbed at her chin with his shirt sleeve, halted and began to cry. His keening rose higher and higher until I covered my ears against his screams, too stunned to calm him. I didn’t think to go for help. We knelt there a long time, and I dully brushed away the insects that landed on the child’s face.
Behind us something moved. A silhouette cut off the headlights’ beam. I stared at my hand splayed against the girl’s clenched fist, afraid to turn and face the figure standing in the light. Instead I waited for the cry that would drown out Cass’s voice: mother, father, searching sister.
But the voice was laconic, dull as dust. “What you crying for?”
I lifted my head and saw Maidie feeling her way along the front of the truck, balancing clumsily by grabbing the grill above one headlight. Cass stared at her and choked, clutching wildly at my knee. “She can’t see,” he gasped, and suddenly pushed at the girl’s body. “Julie—”
Maidie stood in front of the truck, her blue shift glowing in the backlight. I stammered loudly, “Maidie—we got trouble—Kimberly—we hit her.”
She stumbled towards us, smacking the grill and kicking violently at stones in her path. A rock bounded against the child’s forehead and Cass gagged, drawing closer to me. I rose to my knees and reached to halt the blind woman.
“Maidie. You better go back . . .”
Then she was on her knees beside us, groping in the dirt until she grasped the crushed shoulder, the head lolling like an overripe peach. “Hurt that pore old head,” she laughed, and her yellow eyes rolled behind glinting lenses. “Bang.”
I drew back in disgust, then squeezed Cass’s hand as I stood. “Don’t leave,” I warned him. “I’m getting help.”
Maidie leaned over the child, brushing the girl’s hair from her forehead. “Poor old head,” she chortled. Then she spat on her fingers and rubbed the dirt from the girl’s mouth, all the while staring blankly into the glaring headlights.
For a moment I hesitated, watching the gleam of light on her beard, the flash of her glasses like two bright coins. Then I turned to leave. Where the circle of light ended I paused, blinking as I tried to see where the road twisted. Behind me Cass hissed and Maidie giggled, the two sounds like a bird’s call. I glanced back once again.
Between Cass and the bearded woman the child stirred, thrashing at the ground until she heaved herself upright to stare at them sleepy-eyed. She shook her head so that her hair shone in a blur of dust, the face beneath that mane a sticky mess of blood and dirt. Then she stuck her finger in her mouth, blinking in the painful light, and asked doubtfully, “You the ice cream man?”
Cass nodded, dazed, pulled his glasses from his nose, put them back, stared from Maidie to the child once more. Then he laughed, hooting until the mountain rang, and I heard an owl’s mournful reply. “Jesus, you scared me! Kim, you all right?”
“Kimberly,” she murmured, rubbing her shoulder. She glanced at her bloody hand and wiped it on her shorts. “I sure fell,” she said. “Can I have a Sno-Cone?”
Cass staggered to his feet and sprinted to the truck. From inside he tossed Sno-Cones, eclairs, a frozen Moon-Pie. A can of pop exploded on the ground in a cherry mist and he stopped, seeing me for the first time. He ran his hands through his hair. “Sno-Cone,” he repeated.
“I just want an e-clair,” Maidie called petulantly, and she pounded the road with her palm. “We got to get back, Kimberly.” She lumbered to her feet and hobbled to the truck, the girl beside her scratching. Cass stepped down and put a Sno-Cone in each small hand, turned and handed Maidie an eclair. The bearded lady grabbed Kimberly by the neck and pushed her impatiently. “Take me home,” she rasped, and Kimberly started to walk up the road, limping slightly. Maidie kicked the stones from her path as they plodded past me, trailing melting ice cream. At the edge of light they disappeared from view, the soft uneven pad of their feet fading into the pines.
From the doorway Cass squinted after them, and I stared at him, both of us silent. Cass trembled so that the cigarette he lit flew off into the darkness like a firefly. In the road melted a dozen Sno-Cones and eclairs, pooling white and red and brown in the clay. I stepped towards the truck and knelt to inspect a slender rillet of blood. Already tiny spiders skated across the black surface and moths lit there to rest their wings, uncoiling dark tongues to feed. With one finger I touched the sticky surface and raised my hand to the light.
There was too much blood. She had not been breathing. The right side of her face had paled to the color of lilacs, and I had glimpsed the rim of bone beneath her cheek, the broken lip spilling blood into the earth. Now behind me two sets of footprints marked the mountain road, and I could hear a woman’s distant voice, a child’s faint reply. I wiped the blood from my finger, and slowly returned to the truck to help Cass up the steps. Gently I eased him onto the freezer, pushing his shoulders until he sat there quietly. Then I settled myself beside the wheel. I started the engine, tentatively pressing pedals until the truck heaved forward, and drove crouched at the edge of the seat, squinting into the halo of light that preceded us. Behind me Cass toyed with his glasses, dropping them once and retrieving them from the floor. I saw him reflected in the truck’s mirror like a trick of the light, his eyes fixed upon the passing hollows, the dark and tossing trees that hid from us a wonder.
After that I rode with Cass every morning on the town route. And as each afternoon struggled to its melancholy peak we’d start for the bearded lady’s house. Sometimes we’d take one or two of the children with us, Kimberly and June Bug flanking me atop the freezer or playing with the radio dials. But usually we’d just find them all waiting for us when we arrived, racing through the tall grass behind Eva: Little Eva always running, running to hug Cass’s knees and slip slyly past me when I stooped to greet her. Cass would bring a six-pack of True Blue Beer, and we’d squat beside Sam on the flimsy back porch, drinking and watching the children play.
The months marched past slowly. Our afternoons lingered into evenings when we took our cue from the hoarse voices of mothers hailing their children home. One night we stayed until moonrise, waving good-bye to the children as they took their hidden paths through the pinegroves. Their chatter was of school starting in the valley: new clothes and classrooms, a new teacher. The three Kims were the last to leave, and Cass handed each a popsicle as they passed the truck.
“Too cold,” Kimberly squealed, and tossed hers into the weeds. Cass nodded sadly as we walked back to the porch, tugging at his collar against the evening chill. Eva sat yawning in Sam’s lap, and the old man stroked her hair, humming to himself. I could scarcely see Maidie where she stood at the edge of the field, her face upturned to the lowering sky. Cass and I settled beside Sam, Cass reaching to take Eva into his arms.
“Will you miss me when it’s too cold for ice cream, Eva?” he asked mournfully. “When the three Kims are all drinking hot chocolate?”
She stared at him solemn-eyed for a moment as he gazed wistfully across the field. Then she slid from his lap, pursing her lips to kiss his chin, and pulled at Sam’s shoulder. “Show him what you can do, Sam,” she said imperiously. “That thing. Show Cass.”
Sam smiled and looked away.
“Show him!” She bounced against his side, pulling his union suit until he nodded and rose sighing, like a bear torn from his long sleep. Cass looked at me with mock alarm as Sam lumbered down the steps to the willow tree.
“Watch!” Eva shrilled, and Maidie turned to face us, her white face cold and impassive.
About the willow tree honeysuckle twined, wreathing it in gold and ivory trumpets. Sam reached and gently stripped the tiny blooms from a vine, disturbing the cicadas that sang there. In his hands the flowers glowed slightly in the dusk. I glanced up and marked where bats stitched the sky above him, and pointed for Eva to look.
“I see,” she said impatiently, pulling away from me. “Watch, Cass.”
Sam wheeled to face us, inclined his head to Eva and smiled. Then he flung his arms upwards, sending a stream of flowers into the air.
“See them?” cried Eva, clinging to Cass’s hand.
I saw nothing. Beside me Cass squinted, adjusting his glasses. Sam tore more honeysuckle from the willow and flung another handful into the air.
A black shape broke from the sky, whipped towards Sam’s face and fell away so quickly it looked like it was moving backwards. Another flicker of darkness inches from Sam’s face, and another; and they were everywhere, chasing the blossoms he hurled into the night, flitting about his face like great black moths. A faint rush of air upon my cheek: I saw the bluish sheen of wings, the starpoint reflection of one tiny eye as a bat skimmed past. I shuddered and drew closer to Cass. Eva laughed and darted away from the porch, joining Sam and gathering the broken flowers from the grass. She stood with face tilted to where the tiny shadows whirled, striking at flowers and craneflies.
“Can you hear them, Cass?” she called. He stood, eyes and mouth wide as he looked from the two of them to me, and nodded.
“I do,” he murmured.
Beside him I gripped the porch rail and shrank from them, the soft rush of wings and their plaintive song: a high thin sound like wires snapping. “Cass,” I whispered. “Cass—let’s go.”
But he didn’t hear me; only stood and watched until Maidie called to Eva and her sharp voice sent the bats flurrying into the night. Her voice stirred Cass as well; he turned to me blinking, shaking his head.
“Let’s go,” I urged him, and he took my hand, nodding dazedly: Sam walked to the porch steps and looked up at us.
“You be by tomorrow,” he said, and for a moment he held my other hand. His fingers were cold and damp, and when he withdrew them I found a green tendril in my palm, its single frail blossom crushed against my skin. “To say good-bye.”
“We’ll be here,” Cass called back as I led him towards the truck.
When we drove up the following afternoon it was late, the sun already burning off the tops of the mountains. Cass had bought a case of True Blue back in Zion. We’d been drinking most of the day, mourning the end of summer, the first golden leaves on the tulip poplars. From the top of the rise Maidie’s house looked still, and as we coasted down the hill I saw no one on the porch. The chairs and empty beer bottles were gone. So was the broom that Cass had made into a hobby-horse for Eva, and the broken pots and dishes that had been her toys. Cass parked the truck on the grass and looked at me.
“What the hell is this?” he wondered, and opened another beer. For several minutes we sat, waiting for Sam or Eva to greet us. Finally he finished his beer and said lamely, “Guess we better go find out.”
On the porch Eva’s half-grown kitten mewled, scampering off when Cass bent to pick it up. “Jeez,” he muttered, pushing tentatively at the screen door. It gave gently, and we hesitated before entering. Inside there was nothing: not a chair, not a rag, not a glass. Cass stared in disbelief, but put on a nonchalant expression when Sam trudged in.
“Looks like you been doing your spring cleaning,” Cass said uneasily.
Sam nodded. “I got to go. This time of year . . . take the girl with me.” He smiled vacantly and crossed to the back door. Cass and I looked at each other, perplexed. Sam said nothing more and stepped outside. I followed him, peering into the single other room that had held a cot and mattress. Empty.
I found Cass outside, weaving slightly as he followed Sam to the porch’s crumbling edge. “Where’re you going?” he asked plaintively, but Sam only shook his head in silence, leaning on the splintered rail and gazing out at the field.
There was no sign of Maidie, but I could hear Eva chanting tunelessly to herself in the thicket of jewelweed at wood’s edge. Cass heard, too, and called her name thickly. The golden fronds, heavy with blossoms and bees, twitched and crackled; and then Eva raced out, breathless, her face damp with excitement.
“Cass!” she cried, and scrambled up the porch steps to hug him. “We got to go.”
“Where?” he asked again, resting his beer against her neck as he smoothed her tangled hair. “You going off to school?”
She shook her head. “No. Sam’s place.” Eva hugged his legs and looked up at him imploringly. “You come too. Okay, Cass? Okay?”
Cass finished his beer and threw the bottle recklessly towards the field, to crash and shatter on stone. “I wish someone’d tell me where you all are going,” he insisted, turning to Sam.
The old man shrugged and eyed Little Eva. “You about ready?”
Eva shook her head fiercely. For the first time since I’d known her I saw her eyes blister with tears. “Sam—” she pleaded, yanking Cass’s hand at each word. “I want Cass too.”
“You know that ain’t up to me,” Sam replied bluntly, and he turned and went back inside.
Cass grinned then, and winked at me. “Just like a girl,” he remarked, tousling her hair.
Faint high voices called from the woods. From the brush scrambled the three Kims, tearing twigs from their hair and yelling to us as they clambered over the fence. Beside me Little Eva stiffened, slipping her hand from Cass’s as she watched her friends waving. Suddenly she let out a yell and sprang to meet them with arms flung wide, her hair a blazing flag in the sunset. Cass called after her, amused.
“That kid,” he laughed, then stopped and cocked his head.
“What?” I glanced back at the sagging porch door, wondering where Maidie and Sam had gone.
“Hear that?” Cass murmured. He looked at me sharply. “You hear that?”
I shook my head, smoothing the hair from my ears. “No. The kids?” I pointed to the girls greeting Eva in the tall grass.
“Singing,” Cass said softly. “Someone’s singing.” He stared intently after Eva.
Above the field the sun candled the clouds to an ardent sea. A chill breeze rose from the west, lifting a shimmering net of bees from the jewelweed and rattling the willow leaves. In the grass the girls shrieked and giggled, and as we watched the other children joined them for their evening games of Gray Wolf and Shadow-Tag, small white shapes slipping from the darkening trees with their mongrels romping underfoot. Eva pelted her friends with goldenrod while the boys tussled in furrows, their long blue shadows dancing across the grass until they were swallowed by the willow’s roots. Cass watched them, entranced, his head tilted to catch some faint sound on the wind.
“What is it?” I asked, but he only shook his head.
“Can’t you hear?” He looked at me in wonder, then turned away and walked across the field towards the children.
“Cass!” I called after him; but he ignored me. For several minutes I waited, and finally stepped back to the door. And stopped.
Someone was singing. Perhaps I had already heard without realizing, or mistaken the refrain for the cry of the crickets or nightjars. I cocked my head as Cass had done and tried to trace the music; but it was gone again, drowned by the children’s voices. I caught the bellow of Cass’s laughter among their play, then faint music once more: a woman’s voice, but wordless or else too far off for me to understand her song. At the doorway I paused and looked out at the field. The sun scarcely brushed the horizon now above the cirrus archipelago. Lightning bugs sparked the air and the children spilled through their trails, Cass lumbering among them with first Kim and then Little Eva hugging his narrow shoulders. For a long while I watched them, until only Eva’s amber hair and Cass’s white shirt flashed in the dusk. Finally Cass looked up and, seeing me for the first time, beckoned me to join them. I smiled and waved, then bounded down the steps and across the field.
From the grass hundreds of leafhoppers flew up as I passed, the click of their wings a soft and constant burr. Last light silvered the willow bark and faded. The wind was stronger now, and with the children’s voices it carried that faint music once more, ringing clearly over the whir of insects. I halted, suddenly dizzy, and stared at my feet as I tried to steady myself.
When I glanced up the children had fallen still. They stood ranged across the field, their dogs beside them motionless, ears pricked. I turned to see what held them.
As though storm-riven the willow thrashed, branches raking the sky as if to hurl the first stars earthward. I swore and stepped back in disbelief. Beneath me the ground shuddered, buckling like rotten bark. Then with a steady grinding roar the earth heaved. A rich spume of dirt and clover sprayed me as the ground beneath the tree split like a windfall apple.
The roaring stopped. A second of utter silence; and then song poured from the rift like a flock of swans. I clapped my hands to my ears and fell to my knees.
The dogs heard first. I felt the heat of their flanks as they streamed past me, heard their panting and faint whimpers. I forced myself to look up, brushing dirt from my face.
Above a gaping mouth in the red earth the willow reared. In its shadow stood Maidie, arms outstretched. She was singing, and the dogs streamed past her, vaulting into the darkness at her feet. I stared amazed. Then from behind me I heard voices, the soft stir of footsteps. I glanced back.
The field lay in gray half-light. Abruptly the darkness itself shivered, broken where the children ran laughing across the field, in twos and threes, girls clutching hands to form a chain across the waving grass, the littlest clinging to the bigger boys shouting in excitement. I yelled to them, but my voice was drowned by their laughter. They did not see me as they raced past.
She drew them, head thrown back as she sang on and on and on, her voice embracing stone and tree and hound and stars, until her song was the children and she sang them all into the earth. Her glasses fell from her face, the gaze she turned upon the children no longer blind but blinding: eyes like golden flowers, like sunrise, like autumn wheat. My hands were raw from kneading the clay as I stared, boys and girls rushing to her and laughing as they disappeared one by one into the rift at her feet. Her hands moved over and over again in a ceaseless welcoming wave, as though she gathered armfuls of bright blossoms to her breast. But I could not move: it was as if I had become that tree, and rooted to the earth.
Final footsteps pattered on the grass. Cass and Eva passed me, running hand in hand to join the rest, now gone beneath the willow. I screamed his name and they halted. Cass stared back dimly, shaking his head as though trying to recognize me. The woman I had known as Maidie raised her arms and fell silent. Then she called out a word, a name. Little Eva smiled at Cass, standing on tiptoe to kiss him. He smiled and kissed her forehead, then gathered her into his arms to carry her the last few steps to the willow. I watched as the woman waiting there took his hands; and lost him forever.
Another figure stepped from the tree’s shadow. He stooped to take the child from Cass’s arms. I saw Cass turn from Sam to the woman beside him, the woman whose wheat-gold eyes held a terrible sorrow. And suddenly I understood: knew the mother’s eternal anguish at losing the child again to him, that bleak consort, He Who Receives Many; knew why she gathered this bright harvest of playmates for a sunless garden, attendants for the girl no more a girl, the gentle maiden doomed to darkness the rest of the turning year.
One last moment they remained. The child raised her hand to me and opened it, once, in a tiny farewell. The ground trembled. A sound like rushing water rent the air. The willow tree crashed into darkness. A crack like granite shattering; a smell like ash and grinding stone. They were gone; all gone.
The night was silent. Before me stretched the empty field, an abandoned cottage. Then from the woods echoed a poorwill’s wail and its mate’s echoing lament. I stumbled to the fallen tree and, kneeling between its roots, wept among the anemones hiding children in the earth.