Things Invisible to See (26 page)

She set down her cup, and Davy crawled into her lap. He could hardly wait to tell Clare about the ghosts and the spring keeper.

“Spirits is very fond of whistling,” she remarked. “They do it to get your notice. If you ask ’em what in the Lord’s name they want, they go away.”

“If I ask one of the good spirits to bring me some springy shoes, will it bring them?”

And he showed her the picture in the magazine and told her about the birthday cake and the trick candle and the lost wish.

“Maybe,” said Ernestina. “Maybe not.”

A week later, when Aunt Helen and his mom were at the movies and Ernestina came over “to be in the house,” as his mother put it, she woke him up and carried him to the window. The tops of the pear trees were blossoming hills of light.

“Full moon,” said Ernestina. “You can wish on it. Show it what you want.”

He opened the magazine to the page, and the moonlight fell on the springy shoes, a bargain at two dollars and ninety-nine cents. Directly below them he heard a familiar thud: Clare had let her book slide to the floor and fallen asleep with the lamp on.

“Is the moon watching us?” he asked. He loved the moon’s dirty face.

Not the moon, Ernestina told him. The moon was just a lamp. But the Moon Regulator, who lit the moon every night—he would see the page. And he would send Davy those springy shoes. Not tomorrow, or the next day, perhaps. But he would send them. You never could tell which day he would choose.

She did not put Davy back to bed right away but let him stay up to see the stars. With the shortages, he was surprised to see so many.

“Hoo! They’s just as many as they was ’fore the war,” said Ernestina.

“Can they see us?”

“I ’spect they can. You never know who’s watching.”

From the solemnity of her voice, he knew these were grave matters, and he must not speak of them to anyone. Not even Grandpa. Not even Clare. And because no one had ever entrusted him with a secret before, he greatly looked forward to Ernestina’s coming, and every morning he asked, “Is Ernestina coming today?” and mostly Aunt Helen would say no, but sometimes she would say yes, and then Ernestina would sip her tea (which she drank with ice in the hot weather) on the back porch, and he would sit in her lap, content to watch her hands twinkle the yarn off the needles. He had noticed that she never talked about herself to anyone but him. If Clare or Helen or Nell came into the room, the real Ernestina seemed to disappear, leaving behind a polite shell of herself. Only to him would she tell her troubles, and he listened politely, waiting for the squawk of blue jays, when he could turn the talk to his own liking.

“Tell about the jays taking sand to the devil.”

“What’s today?”

“Wednesday.”

“They ain’t doing it.”

“Tell it anyway, please.”

“Why you want to hear the same story over and over?”

“Tell about the jays.”

“Well—they take a grain of sand a day till all the sand from the top of the earth is in Hell. They gonna ransom the folks down there.”

The jays screeched.

“Tell about Hell,” whispered Davy.

“Never been there.”

“Tell about the coffins, then.”

“Don’t know why you want to hear the same story over and over.”

“Tell.”

“Well, there’s Main Hell and there’s West Hell. Bad folks’ souls turn to rubber coffins and bounce through reg’lar Hell to West Hell. That’s the hottest part.”

She was fanning herself with a church program she’d found in her purse.

“I wish I were freezing, don’t you, Ernestina?”

Ernestina shook her head no.

“I b’lieve I’d rather be too hot than too cold. I can’t stand the cold.”

And Davy, wanting to please her, said, “I can’t stand it either,” though just now he thought he would like it very much.

Mostly she talked about hot weather and cold weather, and how in the summer the iceman overcharged her, and how in the winter the furnace broke and once all her clothes froze solid in the washtub and Henry said, “I’ll get ’em out,” and he chopped them free with the ax.

“Chopped all my clothes to pieces,” she said.

Davy never knew why, one night, after grieving over her ordinary disasters, she said, “The worst cold I ever heard of was Cold Friday. A man got froze at the gate of his house with his jug of whiskey at his lips.”

Davy shivered.

“There was a funeral, and the heat departed out of the church, and the preacher and all the families froze solid. And the preacher’s dog froze on the doorstep. They stayed that way all Friday. The root doctor was a little bit of a girl, and she froze right along with the rest of ’em. But the Lord saw fit to thaw her out. And soon everybody callin’ her Cold Friday, on account she’s the only one made it through.”

Except for the regular creak of the rocker, the air held perfectly still, as if it were listening.

“Lord, Lord, she be a powerful woman!” said Ernestina. “Five times she died, five times she come back. She froze and come back, she drowned and come back, her house burnt up and she fell in the fire and come back, she got the sleepy sickness and was buried alive and come back, she choked on a bone and come back.”

“I hear an owl,” whispered Davy.

“Too early for owls,” said Ernestina.

“I hear one.”

“The owl is old-time folks. She won’t hurt you. Oh, she was born the year the stars fell.”

And he did not know if “she” meant the owl or Cold Friday.

It was at night, when the stars looked huge, much closer than they looked at home, that Hal missed Helen and Clare the most. He wanted to show them the stars. They sparkled on the backs of the mountains that ringed the Lodge with the shapes of camels and laden beasts; he found himself lingering outside, though the Lodge had a very pleasant living room where he could sit around the fire with Stuart and Bob and listen to stories about what it was like on the mesa before the government came. Bob had camped around here as a boy. He’d lived in this very building when the lodge was a ranch school for boys; he’d seen the Indian ruins, which were still unexplored. You could find arrowheads and potsherds; they were so easy to find that the boys didn’t set much store by them. There was an Indian burial ground right by the lodge—would Hal like to see it? And Hal realized that he already had seen it and wondered why, on the manicured lawn of the lodge, this tiny square of land was fenced in and the grass allowed to grow rank and wild. No stones, no markers, nothing to tell you anybody was buried there.

Early in the morning he’d spied a horned toad sunning itself on the front steps like a little rococo dragon. And Bob told him the horned toads lived in the canyon. Bears lived there also and lumbered out at night to forage for garbage.

In the afternoon, he rode to Santa Fe with Stuart, who hired the station wagon that made the trip only on request; there was no other transportation if you didn’t have your own car. The Indian boy who drove it never exchanged a word with the passengers, and in his presence the passengers did not talk much to each other. When he took the curves on the narrow mountain road at fifty miles an hour, they suffered in silence. Nobody asked him to slow down.

The driver of the station wagon gave you two hours to do your business, and Hal, who had no business in Santa Fe, strolled under the colonnade of the Governor’s Palace and looked at the jewelry the Indians laid out on black cloths on the pavement. Necklaces, belts, rings, all turquoise and silver and so heavy—wouldn’t it weigh you down?

He chose a small silver bracelet inlaid with turquoise for Helen and a silver ring for Clare which showed the rainbow god in garnet and turquoise and jet. He would send it home for her if he couldn’t get there himself. But he would make every effort to go home, before the work here got under way. What a mysterious stranger I must be, he thought. I can’t tell them where I live or what I do.

On the trip back to the lodge, the driver stopped only at the guardhouse on the road into town and stayed only long enough for the guard to check their passes. The guard glanced down at their photographs, glanced up at their faces, and waved them on.

B
EN DIDN’T CALL FIRST
. He just walked through the door on Saturday afternoon and nearly startled Wanda out of her wits. She’d expected him on Friday and was sure his leave had been canceled. Now when she saw him in the hall—older, thinner, exhausted—she ran up to him and hugged him and burst into tears.

“Did you eat yet? I made some wonderful junket.”

“What time is it?” he asked. He tried to hide his anxiety. Ever since he’d left the Pacific, he had heard, behind all other sounds, the ripple of seconds passing, like the clocks in Lieberman’s jewelry store, which always reminded him of a swiftly flowing stream. Cooper, packing the raft, looking for lost animals, gluing them back into his glass galaxy—Cooper must have heard it passing for months. The sea rising, rushing over the island—why, it was only a matter of time.

“It’s three o’clock. Are you hungry? We can eat early.”

“No, thanks, I ate on the train,” he lied. “Where’s Willie?”

“He went out. He didn’t say where. Tell me about the trip, tell me about everything!” she begged and realized that of course he couldn’t tell her, not right away, that it would have to come out piece by piece, and she added, “Later. We can talk about the trip later. Let me
look
at you!”

He walked restlessly around the house, touching things, picking them up and putting them down. Ashtrays. The
Reader’s Digest.
The framed photograph he’d sent her of himself in uniform. Queer to see it again here, like a gift coming back to the giver.

“You were in the
Free Press,
” she said, “and the
News.
I saved the papers for you.”

“Thanks, Ma. I’ll read them later. I really am glad you saved them.” He hoped this sounded convincing. But Wanda was not fooled.

“You don’t have to talk to me right now if you’ve got things to do.”

“Oh, Ma.”

“I know you’ll want to phone your friends. They’ve been trying to reach you.”

Ben froze. “What friends?”

“The boys you used to play ball with. They’re all home on furlough too.”

She left him alone in the kitchen, and he knew he should call her back and tell her that none of his friends mattered, it was she that he had missed all along. Instead, he picked up the receiver and dialed Clare’s number. Ten rings. Nobody answered. What right have I to expect her to be there always? he asked himself. He hung up and dialed the Liebermans. On the third ring, Sol picked it up.

“Hello?”

A hubbub of voices rose and fell in the background.

“It’s me—Ben.”

“My God! I can’t believe it!”

“Speak up, I can’t hear you,” shouted Ben.

“My folks are having a party. Let’s go to the park and talk. I’ll take my dad’s car and pick you up in ten minutes. All the guys are home.”

His voice faded away; Ben pressed the receiver to his ear.

“Tom and Louis and Tony came in on Friday,” Sol ran on, “and Henry and Charley and George got in last night. And Stilts phoned this morning.”

“They all got furloughs? Why?”

“Death in the family. I’ll be right over. I’ll bring the contract.”

“What contract?”

“The one you sent. It came in the mail last week. I’ll bring it.”

So it was true. That far-off conversation with Death had set these strange events in motion. Knowledge sank its invisible weight into his heart.

Outside the air was heavy with honeysuckle. Standing on the curb, Ben remembered how he and Willie used to suck honey out of the blossoms on the way home from school. That orange fragrance on their fingers afterward. Gone now, those secret rituals that made a truce between them. The well of contentment he’d carried around for years was poisoned now; Cooper rotted at the bottom, tainting everything.

When Sol drew up and honked, Ben, close to tears, could not utter a word. Sol babbled on to fill the silence.

“When they all got furloughs, I thought it was kind of strange. I know the army gives furloughs for a death in the family, but I didn’t think you got one when your parakeet died.”

“Henry got a furlough for that?” exclaimed Ben, astonished.

Sol nodded.

“They all got one for a death in the family. The Baccos’ cat died of old age. George’s turtle got stuck behind the radiator. Stilts’s dog got hit by a car. The only thing anybody could think of that died in Charley’s family was the grass. Well, I thought that was pretty odd. But when they all started telling me the same dream, I got scared. Because I’d had the same one. We all had this dream about a telegram.”

Ben found himself trembling.

“It was a singing telegram,” Sol went on. And to the tune of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” he sang, in an uncertain tenor:

“Tom and Charley and Henry and Ben and Clackett and Stilts and Sol and Louis and Tony, together again, shall gather with glove and ball.

“On the twenty-seventh of June at four o’clock they shall see the contract, sink or swim, between Harkissian and me.

“He sang it to each of us five times.”

“Who sang it?” asked Ben.

“He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He wore a very fancy three-piece suit and a winged cap. And he carried a caduceus.”

“A what?”

“A staff twisted with snakes. You know—the symbol of doctors.”

“Let me see the contract,” said Ben.

“It’s rolled up in the back seat. Real parchment, isn’t it? You won’t mind if I stop to pick up a couple more people, will you?”

“Who?” Ben asked.

“Tony. He’s practicing with a friend.”

Bent over the contract, Ben had not noticed the route, and now he lifted his head like a man digging a hole who stands up too fast and for an instant knows nothing but the turning of the earth. Under the gnarled trees, in tall grass, a girl in a white sun dress was sitting in an armchair. She leaned forward and lobbed a ball to Tony, who ran back under the branches, caught it, and lobbed it back. The girl’s hand, in its huge glove, shot out and plucked it from the air, and Ben gave a shout.