THE NIGHT OIL Man came to check the propane tanks and hoses and lines that ran into the house because the mother was certain the house was about to explode. The Night Oil Man had claws that were black from oil and curved. He was muttering because it was the center of the night and bitter cold, and though he was on call, he clearly had other places to trundle toward at that hour. The child remained asleep in her little firebed, and the mother saw no use in waking her. In the flammable world, it was better for the child not to move a muscle, and if she was awake, she might toss Lamby into the air and they might go up in the conflagration. Earlier, the mother had moved the child’s bed with the child and the lamb outside onto the grass under the stars into the garden. If the child woke up she would be scared, but it was better than being blown to smithereens, the mother reasoned.
When the Night Oil Man returned from his inspection, he was angry, for he found nothing at all that might have signaled trouble, no cause whatsoever for alarm, and no reason to justify his being taken away from the thick of his Night Oil wife and the night.
At that moment, he might have strangled the mother or violated her in some unspeakable way, at the very least, were it not for the child whom he saw all of a sudden outside asleep in the little makeshift trundle bed under the stars. Seeing her from the corner of his half-closed, blackened eye, he hunched over her, and cinders dropped from his hair. Instead of squatting above the mother with his night oil grunts, the house exploding around them, he smiled at the child and the lamb neatly tucked in.
At this time, no mention was made of the smell—not the smell of the Night Oil Man, nor the smell of the child. The child was wearing an amulet containing the aromatic Oil of Wintergreen, an oil known in the Valley for warding off bats.
The Night Oil Man patted the child on the head, sneered at the mother, and made his way back into the night.
Before he left, the mother pressed a spare amulet into his hand. Despite the reassurances of the Night Oil Man, the mother put up her umbrella and held vigil all night at the mouth of the house, and waited for day to come.
A SMART BOMB was falling directly at her, but she was smarter, and she caught it and she held it in her arms and she rocked it and soothed it, until it was detonated and rendered harmless. The mother appeared meek and mild on the outside, but she was fierce and brave inside. She wrapped the bomb in swaddling clothes: her eyeless, soulless, inanimate child—so that another child might live.
IT WAS JULY, and the Headless Horseman Fife and Drum Corps was making its way across the sheepfold. The children were Grinning for Cheese and playing Hoops and the Game of Graces. It was a splendor to watch them on the lawn with their circles and ribbons and slender sticks, and the gaiety and laughter delighted the mother. On the Croquet Lawn, a Punch and Judy show was being staged. Chimneyside Tales were being told. There were games of Shuttlecock and Nine Pins. Bells rang. Some who came were walking on stilts. Others were spitting cherry pits, trying to go the distance. Little children were making dolls of cornhusks. The child sat next to the loom with her lamb. On the Bleaching Field, skirmishes between the Redcoats and the Patriots were being reenacted. At noon the Freedom Pole was raised, and at four the effigy of King George was strung up and hanged. The boys beat it soundly with sticks.
Effigies in fact abounded in the Valley. It was a valley of fewer and fewer men, and more and more, the women and children were asked to chase figments out on the memory field.
After the last tale was told, the mother noticed that there was some small calamity occurring in the bushes, and she rose to see what the commotion was. It was not enough apparently that King George had been strung up and hanged and beaten. Seven small boys had dragged the entrails of the King furtively into a wooded enclosure and were huddled around it. In the enclave, the boys were beating and battering the very daylights out of what remained with sticks.
In their fervor, they did not notice the mother. One boy who had been appointed Guard, so as to ensure no one came to take away their cache, had gotten caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment and had deserted his post.
The mother, as she got nearer, felt as if she were seeing through a veil something of the shrouded part of humanity, something at the very heart of life’s darkness. Mysterious are the days. Not far away, a small faceless cornhusk doll reached for day, or her mother, now a husk as well.
The boys bent over the wreckage and worked at it with unbounded passion until even the entrails of King George were no more. The mother knew that soon enough, the boys too would be gone without a trace.
NEWS TRAVELED FAST of the teenager’s drowning in the Palatine Lake at the edge of the village. No one knew why a healthy young man on a clear summer day should have drowned in a lake.
Hundreds of years before, the Palatines had come to this place to build boats, but they discovered that the wood was too heavy and their boats would not float.
The Great-Grandfathers in the Valley recalled the ice harvests. Next winter, a church will be built on the ice at the very place the boy bobbed up, and all will lift a crystal glass to him. The boy will not come back. He sank—no one knows why—like the Palatine’s wood.
Wunderbar, the Palatines will exclaim, looking at the magnificent glittering monument to their drowned son, but after that, an irrepressible gloom will enter them, and their hearts will grow heavy and sink. They had not realized how much they missed the Rhine.
Come summer, the palace melted, they will wish they too could go home, but there is no way back. The lake where the boy drowned will seem to have closed up around him, but that is not exactly the case. The water will retain the information of the boy’s body for a long, long time. And next to that memory, the people will stay.
THE ASTRONOMERS FOUND a new planet; it was situated in the Goldilocks Zone, they said. The Goldilocks Zone is a small, hospitable zone of possibility in the vast burning and freezing cosmos where life might actually be sustained. It is not too cold there; it is not too hot—it is just right.
The astronomers could barely contain their excitement for their new planet, and they named it Gliese, which sounded to the child like glissade, and she dreamt of water, the origin of life, and rock, and sandy beach, and a thousand streaming living organisms.
Water is so important—we can’t survive without it, even for a few days. The mother thought of the world of thirst, and the work of human hands, and the miracle of water and desire.
THE CHILD DREAMT of a beautiful lake, and the mother dreamt right along with her. It’s very blue and deep, the child said. It’s fed by warm and cool springs. At night it is as smooth as silk, and no bats skim the surface.
There is a beach, and on the beach there are many children, and they always invite the child to play the circle game, or the game where they would say again and again the name of Marco Polo, the Venetian explorer who traveled the Silk Road.
The mother kept the child tethered to her by a silk strand of the most remarkable resiliency. There was a special gland in the mother’s abdomen. The silk the mother produced was not only flexible, but it stretched to accommodate the farthest places the child would ever want to go. It was extremely durable, and as long as the child was alive, it would be there for her: smooth and strong, and with a lot of give.
Every night the child would spend a few seconds of dreamtime sharpening her teeth in preparation for the day when the silk tether would have to be severed. Only at the very end of the child’s life would her teeth be sharp enough to break it, and by then it would be almost painless. For now, the mother reeled the child in, but gently, almost imperceptibly.
Marco Polo traveled the Silk Road and reached farther than any of his predecessors—venturing even beyond Mongolia into China. He passed through Armenia, Persia, and Afghanistan over the Pamirs and all along the Silk Road to China. He was the first traveler to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia, naming and describing kingdom after kingdom.
The airport in Venice was named after Marco Polo, and one day, after the mother had died, the child would go there. On the outskirts of Venice is the Lago di Garda. It is said to be one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.
GLIESE’S STAR WAS cooler and smaller than the earth’s sun, but it was also much closer. A year passed there in thirteen days. In the paper there was a drawing of a child standing on Gliese, and behind the child was an enormous sun setting. It is only 120 trillion miles away, the astronomers say, which is not really so far.
THE ANGELS OF Death flew over the boy’s head. Three girls with their backpacks sat near his bed and took turns holding his hand. Surely, surely, he thought, if there was anyone out there, he would have heard, and it was by far the worst part of his short time on the planet that he had not made contact with those in other galaxies. Yes, he was only nine, and perhaps he would if he could only live a little bit longer. A number of distant civilizations could have developed and perished while flooding the cosmos with signals which have long since passed, or will never arrive in time.
Give me a sign, the boy says, and waits—and in the distance Gliese shines.
SEVEN ASTRONAUTS SLIPPED into unconsciousness—so said the report, and their bodies were whipped around in seats whose restraints had failed. The astronauts had continued to work as parts of the shuttle, including its wings, were falling off. Multiple failures of the smallest and largest sort had been set into motion. Helmets meant to protect them battered their skulls, but neither helmets nor spacesuits mattered in the end, for the crew had been subjected to five separate lethal events.
The breakup of the module and the crew’s subsequent exposure to hypersonic entry conditions were not survivable. The mother thought of that word, “survivable,” for a long time, and it filled her with awe.
Yes, the Gliese dreaming boy thought, there would be winds, shock waves, and other extreme conditions in the upper atmosphere. The craft went on a nauseating flat spin. Surely, the boy thought, the loss of cabin pressure had asphyxiated them within seconds.
THE PRODIGIOUS PUPPET-GOD and his Puppet Circus had come with its radical Utopian Vision in cardboard and cloth. There would be workshops, the poster said. At the workshops one might learn how to make effigies, father figures, giants for rallies, table heads for families, etc. Their mission: International Understanding through the Art of Puppetry. Their second mission: to honor all the disappearance when and where it occurred with small puppet actions. Tonight the Divine Reality Comedy was scheduled—and next week, the Everyday Domestic Resurrection Pageant. A smattering of applause could already be heard.
THE MOTHER BAKED an Appreciation Cake for Cecil Peter and his wife Wise Jean, who had saved the house once more, snuffing the flaming Swedish candelabra in the hall that she had left burning brightly while she went to the art exhibit at the child’s school.
The child had done a drawing of an angel and had wrapped it in red cellophane, and in a certain light, it looked to the mother as if the angel were catching fire.
Angels can be weird, the child wrote under her picture, but they have beauty inside.
The mother did not particularly like to bake, but the cake for Cecil Peter and Wise Jean turned out to be exceptional. It took up the entire kitchen, having risen so high and grown so large, she told the child, because it had been made in gratitude, and its enormity surprised even the mother who, whenever possible, tried to keep her emotions in check. It grew so large that by the time Cecil Peter and Wise Jean and all their relations arrived, they had to cut themselves an entrance out of cake to get in, and all then understood well the importance of Cecil Peter and Wise Jean to the mother, for there is something definitive about an entrance made of cake.
The mother hugged Cecil Peter’s wife Wise Jean, who, having dozed off in her chair, had seen the fire in a dream. When she woke, startled, she whispered to Cecil Peter to check on the house up the hill right away. Wise Jean, who was a volunteer firefighter, was blessed with extra vision, and Cecil Peter, who could always be counted on, nodded and was there in a flash.
Come let us dance, for time is short! The mother sang, and the child played the bone piano and the family danced like dervishes, and the house stood in all its glory, securely on the far side of the char.
When it was late and the family of Cecil Peter was sated and the child’s shoes showed wear from all the dancing, they wrapped what remained of the cake in shining silver foil, and the child put a fancy red ribbon on top to signify the fire, and the consensus was it looked like a space capsule, and they lifted it into the mother’s yellow wagon. It rivaled the moon in its brightness, and as it traveled down the hill, the moon did call to it, and the family of Cecil Peter and Wise Jean, including all their children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and other relations, began their glinty way back down the hill.
What a night, the mother thought, and while they made their way home, she thought of Cecil Peter who fell from an apple tree as a child and hurt his arm; Cecil Peter who had been Apple Tree Cecil, then Falling Cecil, then Cecil of the Gangrene. Like a saint the mother shuddered; now he was Cecil the One-Armed Handy Man, filled with cake, and celebrated for saving the house from cinders again.