16 ◆ Micah

MICAH HAD FALLEN ASLEEP holding a framed picture of Joan. She was waiting for a parade, sunglasses on, fingers tugging thoughtfully on a lock of her silver-blond hair. It was not restful sleep. The air was unbearably dry. He dreamed of lying there awake. And then he was awake, but he could not open his eyes, because their lids had somehow fused. He called for Joan, for Charles, and finally for Lyris.

No one came for the longest time. Dry sand covered his eyes. He wondered what had happened to him, where he had gone, where everyone was. He felt buried alive. He thought of calling out again. If he had landed in some unfamiliar place, maybe it would be better to keep quiet until he knew more. The pillow and blankets were there. Wherever he was, his bed was present.

“What’s the matter?” said Lyris.

“I’m blind.”

“You’re having a dream.”

“Look at my eyes.”

“Go back to sleep.” She switched on the light, turning the darkness pale red. “You do have a problem.”

“I think I’m blind, Lyris.”

“No, no, no. It’s just, you know, what does Joan call it? Stardust.”

“It’s not stardust,” he said. “You don’t know what Joan calls anything.”

Galvanized by the unfairness of this latest development, he thrashed around the bed. He groaned and growled, dug his heels into the mattress, arched his back like a wild thing.

“Stop it,” said Lyris. “That really doesn’t help.”

She went out, and when she returned, she pressed a hot washcloth over his eyes. It did feel good. His anger melted in the wet heat of the cloth.

“Did this ever happen to you?” asked Micah.

“Yes.”

“Where were you then?”

“The orphanage.”

“And what did they do?”

“What I’m doing,” she said.

Follard assembled the components of a bomb with items found around the house. A stick of incense would be the fuse. He poured some of the kerosene from the blue container into a milk jug. Then he topped off the larger vessel with water, although whom this would fool he did not know.

He parked his car on the WPA road. The jug of kerosene he carried in his right hand. The other devices fit easily into the pockets of his coat. The bomb could be assembled on site in a matter of minutes.

The moon poured light on the ground. He breathed deeply, according to the medical instructions. The sound of his breath filled his ears, as the sound of flames would soon.

Follard moved along through the trees, left leg, right leg, milk jug, over the roots, down the gullies full of wet leaves, toward the Darling place. The barn in which Lyris had been locked would burn to cinders. Someday she would understand.

Follard came down from the trees and into a field of tall brambles. Where was he? The dried burrs waved. He bowed and pushed through the stalks, into a clearing he’d never seen: ruins, moss, and the broad soft leaves of skunk cabbage. The trees began again on the other side of what must once have been a house. He was too far south, that’s all he could think. Broken glass glinted on the low walls. A paper target tacked to a dead tree had its heart shot out. He made a note to come back with the metal detector. The coins always fell nearest the house. Follard began to weave, as if he had the metal detector in hand. Then he stopped, hearing a slow creaking sound. The long grass moved unnaturally. Too late, he realized the ground was giving way. Then boards splintered, a wooden platform under the grass, and Follard and his bomb dropped into a hole in the ground.

Micah could see again, but not clearly. He walked to the bathroom and stood at the sink, cupping his hands, filling them, splashing water on his face. When the water got too hot he turned it off and dried his eyes with a towel. Back in his room, Lyris sat in a chair looking at the picture of Joan.

“How’s that blindness coming along?” she said.

“It’s better than it was.”

She handed him his completed homework, an assignment to write questions using words with the ou or ow sound. “Try reading this.”

“What town do you live in, Heathcliff?” he read. “Do you go about bugging people? Why are you so loud, my friend?”

“Now do you believe you can see?”

Micah shut off the light and got into bed. He and Lyris began to talk. They stared at the ceiling, Micah in his bed and Lyris in the chair, and spoke softly into the darkness. Like siblings who had grown up together, they got down to the true business of parents acting erratically and children responding as best they knew how.

He asked if she would stay now that Joan was gone. She asked where he thought she might go instead. He speculated that since the Home Bringers had brought her to this place because Joan was here, they might now decide to take her to some other place. Lyris said she hoped that would not happen. She said she could not be moving around her whole life. She had moved enough. It occurred to Micah that the Home Bringers might even find Joan and take Lyris to her. Lyris said she could not be forever chasing Joan, and besides, Joan would be coming home in the spring, if what Charles said was true. Micah said Charles could not always be believed and if they were going to keep talking, they should go down and get something to eat. Lyris agreed.

They made a snack tray and went into the living room, where Charles slept on the davenport with a bottle of whiskey and a glass on the floor beside him. Lyris pantomimed waking him, and Micah shook his head. The television was on with no sound. A girl in a black velvet coat was riding a large brown horse over gates and streams. Horse and rider floated at the top of each jump. Once, when the horse veered from a gate, the rider whapped its flank with a stick and circled back for a second try. The horse skidded to a halt, and the rider fell off. Now it was getting interesting. Micah and Lyris sat on a braided rug, eating crackers and watching the rider climb back into the saddle. She had hit her head, but she was no quitter.

Charles mumbled in his sleep, moving his hand slowly beside the davenport. In a dream, he, Micah, and Lyris were at Colette’s house, waiting for Joan. She should have been there a long time ago. The kids were watching TV, and Colette was pushing to get supper on. Finally Joan showed up with Jerry. She sat down in a chair in a corner.

“There’s your bride,” said Jerry. “She’s not doing so well.”

Charles knelt by her side. Joan smiled, but her face was someone else’s, a stranger’s face. He asked if she was hungry. “In a while,” she said. “You go on ahead.”

Octavia Perry’s brother rode with her to the Elephant. He wanted her Grand Am and felt that turning her over to a ­middle-aged postman in the dead of night was an acceptable price to pay. Jerry had yet to arrive. He and Octavia could not go in her car because of the antitheft tracking device. The grove at the Elephant was desolate against the sky. The brother sensed that his sister was growing up — too fast, maybe, but there you have it. “Just leave the keys in the ignition,” he said.

They got out of the car and crossed paths before the hood. Octavia looked at her brother. He was not as handsome as he thought he was. His ears were too small. She hugged him, which felt awkward, since their physical contact had been limited to hitting and pushing for many years. Octavia looked over his shoulder at the valley beyond the Elephant, the separate lights of the farms in the distance.

“Am I making a mistake?” she said.

“I can’t answer that, Taff.”

She disengaged from the hug, her hands lingering on his forearms. It seemed decent of him not to hustle her off the scene by saying whatever she wanted to hear. In his mind, she knew, he was already behind the wheel.

“Go,” she said.

He left. Octavia stood beneath a larch tree, suitcase by her feet. In it she had packed clothes, bracelets, makeup, two sandwiches, and a journal of blank pages. She had never been able to write down her thoughts, which had seemed so run-of-the-mill. Now things would be different.

Her brother stopped a half-mile away. The taillights shone on a hill. Probably he wanted to be sure that her ride would come. He could be very sweet in his way. Her whole family appeared benign, if misguided, in retrospect. Her mother would take it the hardest, would feel so cheated. But November would come, December, snow would fly from the rooftops, and she would know her daughter was gone.

Jerry arrived just when it seemed he would not. He took her hands and held them out and asked her to let him look at her. She wore a CPO coat over a black dress. The wind gusted in the branches.

“Where should we go?” he said.

She pushed strands of hair from her forehead. “Texas?”

“Why there?”

“I heard it was nice,” she said softly, the toe of her shoe turning in the grass.

Follard stood in the hole he’d discovered by accident. Anyone without broken ribs could have gotten out. His chin was level with the ground. The hole was lined with corroded metal that had folded down in places to reveal wooden staves behind it. It must have once been a cistern or a dry well. He tried to climb, but the pain made him want to die.

The foxhunters — Vincent, Leo, old Bob, and Kevin — heard his calls while going by the abandoned farm. They fol- lowed Kevin’s dog to Follard, who could not stop talking. He had given his situation some thought and explained about his ribs and why the obvious solution, pulling him up by the arms, was out of the question. Instead, he said, they should find bricks or rocks to put into the cistern, to serve as steps. He handed up the milk jug to make room.

Leo Miner took the cap off and smelled the kerosene. “What’s this for?” He offered the jug around for others to share his discovery.

“I got all the way out here and realized I forgot the fuel for my lantern,” said Follard. “I’m camping. So then I had to go back.”

“Where’s your tent?” said old Bob.

“North of here.”

“We just come from north,” said Vincent.

“You must have passed it,” said Follard.

The foxhunters talked things over. Follard’s explanation made some sense, and yet they could not help but suspect that he was up to trouble. He was in no shape, however, to do anything, and they could hardly leave him. They could confiscate the kerosene; they could confiscate Follard himself if they felt like it. Having thus reached a resolution, they began looking around for something for Follard to step up on. The dog ran here and there, not grasping what they were after. No rocks could be pried from the foundation. Those old-time masons knew what they were doing. The hunters gathered again around the cistern, hunkered down. It seemed unbelievable that this man only slightly below them could not be raised to their level. Old Bob offered Follard a drink of schnapps, which he gratefully accepted. Kevin showed him the fox they had killed about an hour ago. It was such a small thing, like a house pet.

“I have an idea,” said Leo.

“It’ll never work.”

“Listen to me, Vincent,” said Leo. “What if we take off our coats, tie them together by the sleeves, and form a kind of sling to lift him out?”

“Sure, that will solve it,” said Vincent.

“It’s worth trying,” said Kevin.

“It’s cold down here,” said Follard.

“You keep out of this.”

They tied their coats together. It worked. When Follard was free, everyone stood in silent admiration of Leo’s ingenuity. Then Leo picked up the jug of kerosene and carried it out into the clearing. He poured it on the ground at the base of the dead tree with the paper target. Not to be outdone, Vincent tossed a match on the kerosene. The fire seemed to fall from the sky. The tree went up like dry paper.

“That’s what I wanted to do,” said Follard.

In town, Colette was still awake. She sat in bed, reading a letter she had written to the Bily Clock Museum. She shook her head. All she wanted was to say how much she had enjoyed her visit, but reservations kept creeping in. She tore the letter and tossed the pieces on the floor. There were others down there. Colette put a clean sheet of paper on a breadboard in her lap. Dear Sir or Madam, she wrote. You have a place that is unlike any other. Take care of it. And tell me this: What made those brothers the way they were? Could it ever happen again?

The riders pinned ribbons to the bridles of their horses. Lyris turned off the television. She stretched, arms lifted and palms up, as if to keep something from falling. A coughing fit seized Micah and he staggered to the boot room, where he would not wake Charles. He rested his arms on the deep freeze and looked out the window. The porch columns, the barn, the tracks, and the trees were all there in the moonlight. How good it felt not to be coughing anymore.

Charles woke anyway and lumbered outside in his stocking feet. He called Micah and Lyris to come see a band of light in the sky. None of them could identify it as the reflection of a burning tree. Through some distortion of the night air, it seemed vast and very far away.

“Must be . . . the aurora borealis,” said Charles.

“I don’t think so,” said Lyris. “It seems to be dying out.”

“That is aurora as sure as we’re standing here.”

“Joan would know,” said Micah.

They stayed out a little while longer. The goat lay on the porch, ears back, a placid silver form. Then the moon slipped below the trees and darkness welled over the house, the fields, the woods, and the road. A night bird called, a cat answered, yowling with a hunger that would never go away, and it was quiet.