Far Far Away (42 page)

Ginger’s eyelids drooped. Jeremy’s eyes fell closed. So did Frank Bailey’s.

“The boy was not seen again. But that was not the surprise. The surprise was that the baker felt no remorse. No, instead, he felt set free. The hidden door to the secret place that was his true home had swung open before him.”

The silence in the dungeon seemed to deepen.

“The baker went out in his delivery truck. When he came back, he told the sheriff that he had seen Possy out by the highway. He wondered if the boy had gotten home safely.” The baker again stared at the green shirt he held in his hands. “He had not, of course.”

He brought the shirt close to his face, sniffed it, laid it back down. “Even though the baker washed the shirt many times, it still bore faint traces of the boy’s scent.”

Ginger’s eyes fluttered open. “What did the baker do with the body?” she whispered. “Did you bury him here?”

The baker gave a small laugh. “Oh, my dear girl, if I had to dispose of a body, and I am not saying I did, why in the world would I do it here when right next door I have a walk-in oven?”

These words hung in the air.

Jeremy’s whisper could barely be heard. “Why are you telling us this?”

The baker did not answer.

“Aren’t you afraid we’ll tell somebody?”

Sten Blix actually laughed. “No, I am not afraid of that.”

Possy is alive
, I said.
Tell him that. Tell him Possy is alive
.

In his faint voice, Jeremy said, “Possy is alive.”

The baker, betraying nothing, let his blue eyes fall on Jeremy. “So you are the Fairy Tale Boy to the last, still in search of a happy ending.”

He lives in the forest. Tell him that. Possy lives in the forest
.

Jeremy parted his lips but did not speak.

“What?” the baker said, leaning forward. “Do you have some profound last words?”

“Lives in the forest,” Jeremy whispered.

The baker’s eyes registered nothing. He gave a tired laugh, in fact. “Did your ghost tell you that? Because if he did, your ghost is telling stories.”

He waited then, as if for Jeremy to say something more, but there was nothing more for Jeremy to say.

The baker laid the green shirt on his chair and turned to leave. To the prisoners, he said something he had never said before:
“Farväl.”

Good-bye, in Swedish.

The baker was leaving, and I did not know what to do.

I yearned to stay with Jeremy and the others, as I had stayed to the end with my dear nephew, but if I stayed, it meant giving up all hope.

I must go
, I said.

Jeremy nodded so subtly it could almost not be seen. I could sense that he felt his nearness to death. Still, he raised his head slightly.

“Bye,” he whispered.

He seemed to want to say more but could not.

The baker moved forward, and I with him. I looked back to see Ginger slip her arm through the bars so that her hand and Jeremy’s could meet.

When the baker pushed the buttons that opened the wall and then, on the other side, secured it, I recorded the sequence in my mind.

One three one seven.

1317.

The year the Swedish king hosted the Nyköping Banquet and had his guests escorted to the dungeon, where they were left to die.

It had grown late. Slowly, methodically, the baker straightened his house and tidied his kitchen, just as he had done at his hut in the woods on the fateful day that he gathered Ginger and Jeremy into his net. He hid the rodent poison in an empty carton of baking soda, which he placed in the refrigerator. And then, after a last look about, he sighed a great sigh and whispered,
“Sa börjar det igen.”

So another moment has come.

He unlocked the door and stepped out into the night.

I hovered in the darkness and watched him. He locked the gate behind him, turned the corner, and headed toward the bakery under the light of a full moon.

I did not know what to do.

In the tales, as I have noted, malevolence is not just subdued but punished, and through some intercession of goodness, virtue is restored.

But in this tale, Jeremy and the other innocents lay dying, and I, the agent of intercession, did not know what to do.

I will tell you the ineffectual things that I tried. I will number the parties into whose ears I vainly shouted:

• Mayor Crinklaw, as he stood in his backyard grilling meat over a charcoal fire.

• Maddy and Marjory, as they played a game of cards in Maddy’s kitchen.

• Conk Crinklaw, as he and his friends watched car races at the county fairgrounds.

• Jeremy’s father and Jenny Applegarth, as they sat in her living room blankly watching TV.

• Elbow Adkins, as he sat on his back porch reading a magazine called
Field & Stream
.

• Frank Bailey’s mother, as she drank weak tea by her radio.

By this time, gray smoke had begun to rise from the bakery chimney.

I felt as impotent as I had felt long ago, as my dear young nephew gasped for air before finally expelling his last breath.

The sound of shifting leaves played in my ears, and I let the warm night breeze carry me north. I felt myself borne along without plan or intention. I drifted past rustling brown cornfields, past fences and pastures, past listless arid lands, until, not quite
to my own surprise, I was on the fringe of the bleached-white escarpments and gaunt ravines of the Badlands. The moon threw long shadows. I moved through the tall, bony spires and ascended to the peak of the tallest one, where I was hidden from nothing.

And here, where I waited only for some merciful end to it all, I began to feel the world spreading out. Time slowed to the threshold of stillness. I felt a kind of accepting presence. I fell into the caress of the dead, not the wretched influence of the specters of the
Zwischenraum
but something benign and accommodating. I breathed deeply. I revisited the rooms of my youth, and then of my middle age. It was as if I could feel the books I picked up, and the feather of a falcon, and the smooth stone shaped like a heart, and then—oh, soft and reassuring sound—I heard the words of a small child.

Da sind Sie, lieber Onkel
.

There you are, dear uncle.

Singen Sie, Onkel
.

Sing, Uncle.

Had my ancient eyes closed? Had I, who could not sleep, been sleeping? It did not matter—I had heard this voice, and it came again.

Singen Sie, Onkel, bitte
.

Sing, Uncle, please.

And then another voice, Jeremy’s voice:
Please. Please, Jacob, please
.

I cannot explain it. There are marvelous aspects of both your world and mine, and on rarest occasions one can slip into another. Such slippages cannot be explained, nor can they be ignored.

I turned at once toward town.

Never had I hastened as I hastened then, across canyon and pasture and field. The round moon threw uncertain shadows, but at last, for me, I had a course.

I knew where I was going.

I knew what I must do.

It was not yet midnight, and the smoke pouring from the bakery chimney was still gray.

Jenny Applegarth had raised a window to let in the night air, and now she lay asleep under a white cotton sheet with her head on a white pillow.

I drew close but was for a moment unnerved. I could not sing, never could I sing, but now, on this night, a melody visited my memory, and I sang.

I sang:
The keeper did a-hunting go
.

Jenny Applegarth turned in her sleep but did not waken.

I sang:
And under his coat he carried a bow
.

Mein Gott!
Her eyelids lifted! She raised her head and peered into the darkness.

It was the song that she and Mr. Johnson had sung, with its dark hints buried within its cheerful melody:
All for to shoot the merry little doe—

“Harold?” she said.

She sat upright, alert, frightened, perhaps, but listening. “Harold?”

I eased from her room, singing still, and she rose and followed. She seemed to expect to find someone in the living room, but no one was there. When she peered out the front door, I slipped through, singing more. My song seemed full of meaning to me, but she seemed only confused. Still, I led, and she followed, searching for the source of the voice.

“Harold?” she called, peering into the night. “Is this some kind of joke?”

I moved toward the baker’s house, along the silent, moonlit streets. I sang the menacing story, and she followed, confused and apprehensive, yet unwilling to turn back.

We had reached the house itself, looming and ghastly to my eyes. There I stopped and sang the last verse.

It seemed to me this strange house covered in leaves must scream my meaning, but Jenny Applegarth stared at the darkened windows without understanding and, again, said only, “Harold?”

They are here!
I shouted at her.
Here!

But these words did not penetrate her ears. She was looking in the wrong direction, back down the lane, as if wondering how she had come to this spot.

And, then—
Nein! Nein! Nein!
—Jenny Applegarth turned back toward home.

Again I sang, but this time with the slightest alteration:

She stopped short. “What?”

“Where
they are
now?” she said. “That’s not how it goes.”

She stared at the baker’s vine-covered house and said the words to herself: “Where they are now you may go and look, among the leaves so green, O.” She did not understand, but then—and here I felt a silvery rush of hope—she said, “You mean
they
? Jeremy and Ginger?”

And then to the same tune I deviated further:

“What?”
she whispered. “What baker’s dungeon?”

I sang the verse again, and added another:

Jenny Applegarth stared in disbelief. Now it was she who did not know what to think or do.

And then she did.

She stared at the baker’s house, and a look of resolution formed on her face.

She began to run.