Mister Boots

That night we build a fire in the fireplace. We all get a little drunk, my sister and me on sherry we found when we didn’t find the money, and Mister Boots on his pain medicine. My sister sits on the floor, knitting again. Every now and then she reaches up to give Boots a pat on the shoulder. I’m lying flat out on the rug Mother crocheted, and all of a sudden here’s Mister Boots, telling us his story. To Jocelyn. In all this time, he hardly even began to tell it to me. At first, as usual, I can’t make out what he’s talking about.

He says, “Please excuse me,” and my sister says, “What for?” and he says, “For how I am,” and my sister says, “Of course,” and he says, “I mean really,” and, “It’s that I know other things. Stallions.” He thinks about it and then says, “Pitted against each other. I have the scars. And I wasn’t lazy. I never understood why they beat me. They raced us, too.”

He sits up and puts his bandaged feet on the floor. My sister stops knitting. She touches his knee. “It’s all right now,” she says. “You won’t have any of that again.”

“Of course we all did love to race. Even out in the pasture we’d race for no reason. Some horses stood up for each other, but not a single human being stood up for me. But then there was one, and—” he looks over at me “—and then there was you.”

He stops and puts his head back on the pillow and his feet back up and starts again, so quietly I have to move closer and my sister leans her head on the same pillow, right up next to his. He’s talking in a whispery way that makes it magic. I wouldn’t dare interrupt.

He grunts a couple of horsey grunts, and I’m wondering if he’s still in pain even though he’s drunk from that painkiller. “Those men had whips as long as three horses. They snapped. Lots of times not over my head. One night, after the worst . . . something happened. It was from panic.

“I turned boy, escaped between the bars of the round pen, ran, and hid inside a gunnysack. But I turned colt again as soon as my terror died. They brought me back and terrified me worse than ever. But there would be another time.” He’s out of breath just telling about it. “Give me a sip of your sherry.”

“And then tied up,” he says, “all day long. Sometimes in the sun. Nothing to do but learn to untie myself. Even as a horse I could do that. Lots of us could. We had plenty of time to learn it.”

“I did, too, but the panic was worse. A time did come when I changed out of terror again. I knew what to do this time. I ran, first as boy, and then for a long time as horse, long and hard and up into the mountains. When the going got too rough and steep and frightened me as a horse, then as a boy—until I ran into a man, his arms around me as I fell. I was too tired to care that this was, yet again, a man.

“That man couldn’t bear to be with people, but he was happy to be with me, boy or colt. Neither of us understood what I was, but he knew me right away. Or cared about me, which is the same thing and just as good. He held me on his lap until I stopped trembling. Stroked me, groomed me, both as boy and colt. His was the first love I ever got from a human being. All I know I learned from him. Except how to hear and smell and listen. I knew all those better than he did.

“You’d think, with all that galloping around in pastures . . .” He shakes his head, up and down like a horse would. “You’d think when I think of freedom it would be as a horse . . . built for speed, born for speed and nothing other. You’d think it would be as a horse that I would feel free, but never so, sad to say.

“At first I thought the part being a boy was the dream, and after that I thought the horse part was the dream—of speed and flying, as if a horse could be a bird. I thought I had been a person from the start, and only thought myself a horse, just as you do, Boy. But why would I daydream so much terror?” He rolls his big horse eyes. “I rubbed the skin off my chest and shoulders. I cut my lips. One time I jumped, but landed on the fence, only halfway out.”

My sister leans her head into the couch cushions and begins to cry. Mister Boots turns and nibbles at her neck. I’m wondering if he knows how to kiss? It looks like he doesn’t.

Then my sister turns and they’re cheek to cheek, nuzzling and nibbling like horses do, even my sister. I’m not sure, but I think he licked her neck. I don’t know what to do to stop it.

My sister says, “I don’t want you ever hurt,” and I say, “Moonlight Blue is a horse and did you see his color? Flea-bit, flea-bit. That’s really what they call it. Sometimes they even call it fly-specked.”

“Moonlight Blue,” she says, as if it’s the most beautiful name there ever was. (Does she know it was me thought that name up? But then I never told her.) “Moonlight Blue. I love you, Moonlight Blue.”

So they lean against each other until Mister Boots falls asleep again or maybe passes out from the painkiller. My sister keeps patting him like she forgot she was doing it, but she finally turns back to her knitting.

I’m resigned—to everything. What else is there to do? I tell my sister I want to help knit things so we can get some more money, but she says she doesn’t have the time to teach me now. Maybe later. She says she could knit three things in the time it would take her to teach me to do one messy, no-good thing. Except all she’s doing is just knitting this red sweater for Mister Boots. If she goes on like this, she’ll never make any money.

I wish she wasn’t so beautiful. She could have any boy she wanted if only she didn’t always hide in her hair. If she was ugly I wouldn’t mind her loving Mister Boots. I’d think he was all the love she could ever get.

But I don’t go look for the money. I go outside in the dark and pick up another little nothing pebble. I hug it in both hands. I want to make it feel comfortable. I think how holding my pebble is just as if I held a star. I know that’s not even a little bit true (it isn’t that my mother and my sister haven’t homeschooled me enough—too much in fact), but I like thinking it. I lie down on the sand and put the pebble in my mouth. We never have candy. I can’t remember last time I had some. (After I find the money, I’m going to sneak some for candy.) Then I almost swallow the pebble, so I take it out and put it in my belly button to keep it warm. It fits perfectly. I squint to make the stars funny and fuzzy. I hold my breath and tense up all my muscles and think hard. If I once was so magic I could fly, I ought to be magic enough to find our money.

Just then an owl flies right over me. Utterly silent. Utterly magic. I see the white underbelly. I feel him, too—the rush of air. I think about flying, how I could raise my arms and lift myself right up. I think I’m floating away, but I fall asleep by mistake. I know I just dream it.

My sister must have knit all night. When I wake up and go inside, Mister Boots is wearing the red sweater and my sister is shaving him . . . shaving off those sparse, coarse, horsey whiskers. She says she’s not going to cut his hair. She’s keeping it like a mane. After she shaves him, my sister begins knitting him a pair of socks. I wonder if she’s ever going to get back to knitting for us to sell?

Mister Boots is as curious as a horse. As soon as he can hobble around holding on to walls, he examines our house. He says he’s only been in two houses in his whole life. That’s not so odd, I’ve hardly been in more than that myself. He leans close. Blows. Licks. Nibbles. Tastes. It’s a good thing Mother isn’t here to watch. She’d say he’s getting germs all over. And she wouldn’t like the way he pries into drawers and boxes, and how he lies down on all the beds, even my little one (which nobody fits but me). When he was out with that man who helped him, he slept on hay. They both did. Back then Boots never even knew there were such things as beds.

I found out that he can’t read. I brought him my book, Black Beauty. I thought maybe, since Mister Boots was mostly just lying around recovering, he’d read to me some evenings, but I’m the one who has to read to him. We hardly have any books. We’re too poor. There’s Jocelyn’s old learning-to-read books that I learned on, there’s a dictionary, and there’s one really good book called Smoky the Cow Horse. I’ve read that a dozen times.

I haven’t been out to water my tree lately, so I decide I should go. I’ll bet water to a tree is like candy to a person. I’ll bet the tree sucks it in real slow to make it last a long time.

I usually go at night when I can secretly borrow somebody’s horse, but this time I borrow one in daylight—Rusty, the pony. From what they said in town it’s never been a secret, anyway.

When I get close I see a horse and a tent, and when I get closer I see that it’s a very nice horse. Then a man comes out of the tent, and it’s just the opposite of when I found Mister Boots. This man’s all dressed up in fancy clothes, riding britches, and shiny English-type boots. The man’s too soft and too fat, but the horse is in good shape—probably from having to carry a fat man around all the time.

The man has shiny, Japanese-ish hair, a showy little mustache, and a teeny, useless little goatee. Everything shiny black. He says a fancy “Good morning,” and gives me a fancy, phony smile.

I don’t answer. I get off the horse and, real quick, pour the water down at the tree roots. He’s not going take any water away from my tree. Besides, a man like this will have canteens.

He starts gathering his things and tying them on his horse. I jump back on Rusty. She’s small enough that I don’t need to put her in a low place for getting on. (I shouldn’t think “jumped on her.” I really pulled myself up by her mane, which, since she’s a pony, she doesn’t have much of.)

I wait while our father packs up his tent and mounts up, and we head for the cottage. He rides in front, and he sure knows the way. When we’re almost there, I jump off Rusty and put her in the neighbor’s pasture where she belongs. Then I walk along behind our father. My sister comes out to the porch. She heard the horse, and she knows somebody riding up on a horse isn’t going to be me; I never ride all the way in. When she sees our father she just stands and stares. She looks wonderful! All of a sudden taller—standing straight for a change—and her mussed-up hair all golden in the sun. She has her knitting needles in her hand. The way she’s holding them makes her look dangerous. I realize she’s not as helpless as she’s always seemed to be. Yes, I think, yes! My sister!

Of course who’s in there is Mister Boots, dressed in our father’s clothes. He’s lying with his bandaged feet propped up on cushions and the couch arm, but when our father comes in, he sits up fast, and carefully doesn’t look him in the eyes. That’s the horse way, so as not to challenge.

Our father stares though. He’s taking in his own old circus-type clothes—how they droop on Boots and are too short. How his fancy alligator belt has a hole punched in it to make it smaller.

He doesn’t say anything. He just grunts and goes back to Mother’s bedroom and then comes right out again, asks, straight at Mister Boots, “Where is she!” as if Boots had hidden her away. Our father looks like he’s going to punch Mister Boots, so my sister says, “She’s at the undertaker in Tungsten Town.”

Had I thought at all about having a father, he’s not the sort I would ever have wanted. His eyes are squinty, and his cheeks are chubby (having a goatee doesn’t help at all). His thighs must be as big around as my waist.

“But you . . . You . . . All of us . . .” My sister’s so upset she can’t talk. She has tears in her eyes again, but this time from frustration—maybe at herself for not being able to say anything at all.

“I never did one single thing that wasn’t for your own good. Take this boy, here. From the very start he disobeyed everything we said. Remember? Tore up books, unraveled knitting, even played with fire. It’s a wonder he hasn’t burned the house down by now. There wasn’t anything bad he didn’t do. Look,” he says, and bares his forearm. “He bit me. Look at these teeth marks. And here on my hand, too. You were a big girl then, what? Ten . . . twelve years old? You remember all that.”

My sister is impressive. I used to think “wishy-washy and dishwater blond,” but now I think “golden lion-type hair.” She looks like she might even yell out “Bullshit!” like those wranglers at the next-door ranch do. I wish she would.

“Who is this man here?” Our father is pointing at Mister Boots as if to shoot him with a finger. “What has this man got to do with your mother? Where is this man sleeping? Are you married? I never heard about it.”

But I guess I must be nervous because I hop and jump and cavort around. Then I laugh like a crazy person, and I give this screech. It makes everybody jump. I remember I used to do that a lot a long time ago, to scare people. I forgot all about it. I don’t know what I’m trying to do now. Maybe I want to be as bad as our father says I used to be.

He sits up straight and frowns at me. “There now, what did I tell you? Discipline! Like I always say.” He slaps his hand hard on his own knee, as if it’s instead of hitting me. Then he turns to my sister and whispers, “I never lose my temper. Never!” He settles back, his fat knees wide apart. “Never!” Then he asks if there’s any beer around, but we haven’t ever had any such thing as beer or liquor, just that little bit of sherry we found and drank all up. I don’t need to wonder anymore what it’s like to get drunk.

My sister doesn’t know what to make of me. I cross my eyes at her, but I don’t know what to make of me either. She sits down next to Mister Boots. She pats his shoulder as if to calm him. The way his hair hangs over his forehead, half to one side and half to the other . . . I’ve seen the exact same thing with horses. It always gives them a mild, sweet look. Even so, right now, he doesn’t look so mild. “Easy, easy,” my sister says, exactly as you say to a horse. She turns to our father. “You came back because Mother’s dead. We’re fine.”

“Need you!” My sister turns around and pulls up her blouse to show her bare back. She has some of those exact same scars. No wonder she doesn’t like men. So then what about Mother? If Mother has them, the undertaker will know all about it. But it won’t be the first time he’s seen that. I’ve seen scars on those wranglers next door when I watch them wash up in the cow pond. Not just on the black men, but the white men, too, though not quite as bad. (They don’t care about me watching. They all think I’m a boy.)

Mister Boots looks at my sister’s back and then he turns and stares at our father. I know that stare, that lowered head, but our father doesn’t get the message. I’ve never seen Boots look like this. His face is as impassive as a horse’s always is to humans, but I can almost see Moonlight Blue with his ears plastered back. Can’t our father see that?

Our father doesn’t seem to care that my sister’s back looks terrible. He shakes his head as if to say, Yes, yes, I know all that. And I guess he does. “Well,” he says, “if no brandy, how about some coffee then?”

But I think, How about pouring boiling hot coffee on our father’s head, and then how about we all jump him and hold him and maybe whip him so he’ll have the same marks all over him that we have on us? Except he probably has them already.

“I’m going to get the coffee,” I say. I need for something to be happening. I start to jump—jump and jump and jump toward the kitchen. It’s not easy. Why in the world am I doing this? The good thing about it is, everybody is looking at me and wondering about me. I want to go on acting crazy. Or maybe I want to go slowly so my sister can stop me just in case I’m doing the wrong thing, and she does get up to do that.

Our father says, “Good boy.” He gets up, faster than you’d think a fat man would, and grabs my sister’s arm and twists it up behind her so she gasps and has to lean way down as if she has a stomachache.

Then I remember. I’ve had this dream, over and over, my arm twisted exactly like that. I’ll bet I didn’t fly like my sister said I did. I’ll bet our father broke my elbow just this way. If I was only three years old, it probably wouldn’t have taken much twisting to do it.

I keep on jumping and jumping, and when I’m in the kitchen, I stop. I stir the fire in the stove and throw on kindling, and then I stand still and listen. I hear my sister gasp again. I feel bad for her, and I feel bad that I’m not strong enough to rescue her.

And then—but I didn’t see any of it. I hear a clatter that sounds like hooves on our wood floor. I hear our father make a funny noise. I go back in and everybody is sitting exactly as before, except not a single person looks the same. My sister is next to Mister Boots on the couch holding Boots’s wrist. Boots is staring at his bandaged feet. Our father is in the chair, again lounging back, except it doesn’t look like lounging anymore. It looks . . . Well, he’s kind of shriveled.

Our father looks at me and says, “I thought you went for coffee.” His voice sounds as if he’s suddenly caught a cold. He’s staring down at that little round rug Mother hooked that has birds all over it and is so pretty. We always keep it in front of that big chair. There’s not much around here Mother didn’t make.

I say, “Oh,” and go back to get the coffee. This time I walk like a normal person. I still don’t know if I’ll pour the whole pot of boiling coffee on our father’s head or not.

I’m beginning to remember all those things I used to do when I was little and everybody said I was a handful. I did mess things up, but it must have been only when our father was here.

Anyway, my very own father doesn’t know how old I am and that I’m not a boy! Maybe my mother and my sister tried to fool him. Maybe he wouldn’t have wanted me if I wasn’t a boy. All the babies in the graveyard are boys and he already had my sister so maybe he didn’t want any more like her.

I bring the coffee, all very normal, on a tray and with oat cookies my sister made for Mister Boots. (Boots doesn’t like coffee, so I brought him tea. I brought myself cider but in a cup so it looks like coffee, so my sister will be mad at me.

Nobody says anything; we all just eat and sip. And pretty soon my sister gets up to get supper, which is nothing but beans. We don’t have any money for really good food. This is the best we have. I used to think everybody in the world ate mostly beans, but by now I know beans are a dead giveaway to how poor a person is. It’ll especially be a dead giveaway when we have beans again tomorrow.

We have this little table in our little kitchen. Hardly room enough for four. We don’t have a dining room. We have a sitting room and then the little kitchen with worn-out linoleum, which I never noticed how worn-out till right now. But we have a nice big window over the sink with very nice curtains Mother made. They have ducks on them.

We’ve been eating without any talking when all of sudden my sister asks our father if he knows where any money might be. I wish she hadn’t said anything. If she wanted to ask things, she should have come to me and discussed it first, because if our father knows where any money might be, he’ll just take it for himself. I’ll bet that’s why he came back.

And then he practically says it—at least that he did it before. “Why, I took the money with me.” Then he smiles around at each of us. “I was off all the way to New York. To make money for the family. I knew you’d get along. Even then your mother was knitting away so fast you wouldn’t believe it.”

(We hadn’t even thought of putting Mister Boots in there. I guess both my sister and I wanted him handy in the living room, not shut away down the hall in that back bedroom. Besides, it’s a terrible mess; you can’t even get to the bed, partly because we’ve been looking for the money in there and then because my sister has been rummaging around in the clothes to find things for Mister Boots. Not a single one of us ever cleaned up in there. We just kept the door shut.)

I sit on our front step, my hand over my mouth. Mister Boots ought to be out here—all his talk of breezes on cheeks and skies that go on forever. I’d help him to come out, but I have to get rid of my giggles first. I keep giggling until suddenly I start to cry—for no reason whatsoever. For a while, it’s either cry or giggle. Finally it stops.

When I go back and check that room again, it looks as if our father has had a fit in there. Even what was hanging in the closet is on the floor. I hear a lot of thumping and scraping, and I see right away where the secret hiding place is. There’s a trapdoor in the ceiling of the closet. Our father is up there cursing. I’ve heard the wranglers next door say lots of things. I was hoping to learn more words, but our father doesn’t say anything I haven’t heard already.

My second thought is that Mother would never have gone up there, so our money can’t be up there. I mean, Mother never even went in that room that I know of. If she had, she’d have cleaned it up a long time ago.

Our father throws down an oblong box. Dust flies up when it hits the floor, and it gets even more broken than it already is. You can see where it used to be red with gold designs, but the colors are almost all worn off. The lid is just barely hanging on, and there’s something odd about the bottom, as if there’s two bottoms. Then he jumps down, carrying a smaller, square box as worn out as the bigger one, and it looks to have two bottoms, too, and one’s a mirror. The money has got to be someplace like that, a secret extra bottom.

“I know that.” He looks at me like he knows I’m guilty—like it’s always got to be me. So then I start thinking it’s got to be me, too. I’m the one who does all the bad things around here. Except I don’t know where anything is, money or brandy or anything. The trouble is I say I know. “Buried in the yard,” I say, “in the nice soft dirt of the vegetable garden. Seventh carrot.”

Our father gets his face up real close to mine. He smells of fat-man sweat and cigars. I turn away because of that, so then his hot sloppy whisper gets right inside my ear. “And you’re the one who’s going to dig it up.”

Our father’s horse is right there by the door, all cinched up and ready. I’m just riding a pony. He’s going to catch me, and we’re going to be out here all alone. But I keep on, and when I get to my tree, I don’t get off, I just reach up and grab the first branch as we gallop by and start climbing. I’m thinking how good I am at things like this and how no fat man can get me. But our father does exactly the same thing. I thought he was too big and soft for that. Then I think if I get high enough, the branches will be small and our father will fall.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’ve heard Mother say the same thing, too often, though mostly she said, “Well begun is half done,” and of course most of all, “A stitch in time . . .” I’ve heard Mister Boots say the same sorts of things, except Boots’s were odder, as if a horse had made them up all by himself. Like, “When we want enough, we get a little.” I’m sick of all those things.

I thought my tree would save me by breaking itself. It’s not easy getting water way out here. I thought it would do something for me for a change. I know this is exactly the kind of thinking Mother didn’t want me to do when she told me to be scientific, but I thought it anyway.

Some branches do break, but not enough. Our father grabs me by the ankle in no time and pulls me down to him. Even before we’re on the ground, he twists my arm up behind me.

I ask what the horse’s name is, but our father just grunts a whole batch of angry grunts. I wonder what he’ll think when I dig up the doctor’s fancy clothes instead of money.

The doctor’s clothes aren’t hard to dig up. I just heeled them in until I’d have time to take them to a better spot. I think to run the minute a little bit of them shows, but our father has his eye on me. I just go on digging until the clothes are completely out. I pick them up and shake the dirt off so he can see they’re not bags of money.

He gets this funny look. Then he slaps my cheek. Says, “What’s going on? Why are these buried? Where’s the body?” Things like that. But the way he’s bouncing me around, I couldn’t answer if I wanted to.

My sister and Mister Boots grab each other to hold each other back. My sister says, “Easy. Nice and easy,” as if trying to slow down a horse that’s going a little bit too fast, but Mister Boots is standing as still as could be, though he’s trembling. My sister is, too. I can see the bottom of her skirt shake.

They go and stand in the doorway, but we go to his horse, where some stuff is still tied on his saddle. (I’m thinking about what Boots said about being tied up for hours, and how this horse still has a tight cinch, too.) Our father keeps hanging on to me, so he has to do everything one-handed. He reaches in his saddlebag and takes out a pistol.

He sticks the pistol in his belt and then takes out a black stick thing with silvery edges. It looks like a quirt, only it isn’t. He points it at me as if it’s the pistol. I know what it is. I remember from a long time ago. A magic wand. He points it at me and grins a big grin like, Now I’ve got you. “Blam,” he says. “Blam, blam, blam.” Then he laughs and it’s like I not only inherited his black Japanese hair, but that high-pitched, stupid laugh. I will never laugh again, not like that anyway, even if I have to go out in the desert to practice up a new one.

“She didn’t believe in me either, but I’m here, big as life.” (Bigger, I’m thinking, bigger and fatter than life.) “And I kept you all in lots more than beans.” He waves the wand right close to my face, and flowers pop out of it. So fast they hit me in the eye, and so many and such big ones you’d think . . . you’d know they couldn’t come out of that narrow tube. Except they don’t smell good. They make me sneeze. But what about Mother! All the things she said not to believe in are true.

I reach to take the flowers. Since they came out of thin air, why would he need them back when it’s so easy to get more? But he snatches them away and stuffs them in the saddlebag, so then I know they can’t be real or they’d be ruined in there. No wonder they smell bad; they’re old.

Our father puts the magic wand in his belt beside the pistol. He’s pretty good when you think he’s doing all this with just one hand, and that I’ve wiggled all around and sneezed a whole half dozen times.

We sit exactly as before. Our father lets go of my arm and holds me between his knees instead. “Watch,” he says. Then . . . One minute his hands are empty and the next a flame flies out—flies across the room and hits the far corner wall. We all jump, but Mister Boots shies practically out the door. You’d think he’d be ashamed, except he didn’t shy as much as most horses would from a flash of fire. Most would be gone.

“Now,” our father says again. He lets me go and sits, legs as wide apart as before, the knees of his riding britches nice and snug, but his crotch drooping, the pistol and the magic wand tucked right out in front. He smiles around at everybody. “Now listen, I’m going to take this boy here along with me. All the way to Los Angeles. I need him. He’ll get to see the world. Get to ride real horses. Maybe drive my trotter. I’ll teach him all the tricks. He’ll wear decent clothes and eat decent food. Lots of oranges and no more beans.

“Boy,” he says, and turns to me, “I’ll raise you up in the air, with, like they say, no visible means of support. Only you will know how it’s done. You’ll have a nice costume. Any color you want.” Then he says, “Lassiter and Son,” three times.

All of a sudden I want to go. I don’t care that I don’t like him, or even that he’ll twist my arm behind me. I want to make flowers pop out of things. I want to throw fire. I want to go so badly I start feeling sick to my stomach.

“This boy’s wasting his life out here.” (Yes, I am. I always knew it.) “And he wants to come.” He turns to me. “You’ll like it. You’ll be around men. Now you go shake these clothes out real good for me, boy. I want to try them on. They’re high-quality clothes.”

He takes the pistol from his belt, aims out the door, and shoots. Right through the screen. Outside a puff of sand flies up, and Mister Boots shies again. It’s good he’s not being a horse and nobody is riding him. They’d have fallen off for sure.

When our father comes back, he does look impressive. “Now then . . . Mister Boots, is it? Now Mister Boots, I want to know how you did that trick earlier today? Projections? Mirrors? I didn’t quite catch it.”

I notice my sister isn’t calling me Roberta. More and more I’m thinking all this must have started way back with Mother. I’m glad. I like having secrets, but I like being a secret even more.

So then I do think, and what I think is: Yes I can. I haven’t had any trouble being a boy so far, and I haven’t even tried. I know our father wouldn’t want me if he knew I was a girl. My sister knows that, too. She could have stopped all this right then with that one single word: Roberta.

“There are no magicians like there used to be.” Our father is sounding kind of dreamy. “No one anymore at all like me. I’ll teach you, boy. Hundreds of secrets. Thousands.” He’s nodding to himself, and he has this little satisfied smile. He looks as if everything is exactly the way he wants it, but then he says, “The money,” and keeps on nodding and smiling to himself. “The money.”

I can’t wait until I can get off alone and check for false bottoms or odd mirrors. I can’t tell my sister. She shouldn’t know these magic things. Our father told me not to tell anybody about those boxes. He said magicians have to swear not to tell and he said, now that I know, I have to swear it, too, and not even tell my sister. He said, “What’s the use of magic if everybody knows about it?” It’s easy to see that that’s the exact truth.