Wonders of the Invisible World (21 page)

The criminal's name was Dobry Jablonski. Twelve years old, he lived with his mother on the edge of Temperance in a one-room shack his father had built shortly before dying. For years after emigrating from Poland, his family had lived in a mining town over the border in Pennsylvania, but they'd left a year earlier to finally start a farm of their own in Ohio, to start the life they'd dreamed of making.

Lies,
Dobry Jablonski thought.
This country is full of them.
He hadn't been able to convince his father of this, even after they'd lost their land, or his mother, even after she began to take in other people's laundry, and all because they'd chosen to sail across the Atlantic and dream their lives into something better. But over time Dobry had come to notice how the dream of a better life didn't happen for most people, no matter how hard they worked, perhaps especially for those who worked the hardest. He would have complained to his mother about this, as he'd complained to his father, if only she hadn't lost her husband so recently. He didn't want to deplete what hope she might have left for their future. Hope could keep people going, he knew that, and he wanted his mother to keep going, despite how he felt.

Dobry was the man of the house now. His father had told him this while coughing up blood into a dirty handkerchief on his deathbed. That was months earlier, when the farm still belonged to them. Now Dobry worked for the man who had bought his father's farm when they could no longer make payments. Now he worked for the man who paid the wages of a slave.

There is no difference between this country and where we come from,
Dobry thought as he stashed a basket full of apples at the edge of the orchard. He would walk past it later, after work, and take them home.
If this man wants to pay me a slave's wages, I will do what I must to compensate.

Tall wooden ladders leaned into the green canopies of the orchard, and the hands climbed up and down the rungs in dirty trousers held up by suspenders. Each picker held a sack in front of his stomach, with a rope strapping the sack around his neck. Arms outstretched, they reached into the light of the golden evening, past the thick leaves of late summer, to pluck the fat apples from their stems. Others wandered between the trees to deposit the apples in barrels Lockwood had placed near the corncrib. But Dobry had other plans. After leaving his stolen apples at the far edge of the orchard, he ran back to continue picking.

From the bedroom window on the second floor of the house, Plumie watched the boy at the edge of the orchard, stealing apples from her husband. She held the curtains apart only a few inches. Her breath was held at that moment, but the sheer blind swayed before her. It was I, a ghost standing next to her, who disturbed the curtains.

The dark-haired boy with green eyes and skin pale as chalk was stealing. Plumie had been watching him hurry away in the late afternoons with a sack full of apples for weeks now. She hadn't told her husband because the boy looked sick and the apples would do him good, she figured, and anyway, her husband didn't pay the boy enough but to buy a scrap of meat at the end of the week and minor provisions like salt and flour, perhaps a sweet to suck on for an hour. Her own children didn't want for anything. Plumie saw this as a fragile condition worth maintaining, but her heart still skipped a beat whenever she saw Dobry Jablonski scurrying away for the sake of a few apples. There he was now, returning, sack empty, to climb into the trees, to pull down the fat apples for the Lockwoods.

When Plumie turned to go downstairs, I followed her, taking the steps I took every day of my life down into the kitchen. Plumie needed to feed her daughter. Ethel would be hungry at this hour. The girl was a much easier baby than John Jr. had been. Initially Plumie had thought there would be some kind of strange competition with a girl for her husband's attention—this was something Plumie's own mother had told her to watch out for—but Ethel could not have cared less about her father. He was so rarely around. Off hunting, planting, cutting, raking, slopping manure into the spreader. And there he was now: Plumie saw him through the kitchen window while Ethel sucked at her breast. He was coming up the lane from the woods. Beside him, sunlight glinted on the rippled surface of Sugar Creek.

When Ethel finished, Plumie put her in the crib and went out to meet her husband. But when she looked through the gate of the barn, where she'd assumed he was headed, he wasn't there. And he wasn't in the lane where she'd seen him through the kitchen window a few minutes earlier. She turned toward the orchard then, and found him trudging across the railroad-tie bridge. She had to raise her hand to block the sun, though, and by the time she got the light out of her eyes, he had disappeared into the red-globed trees, where the hands could be seen stripping the apples away from their limbs.

A moment later, five crows fluttered out of the trees like an omen and cut through the blue air to land on the other side of the hay field, looking back at the orchard and nodding together, as if they knew something bad was about to happen. And only seconds later, Lockwood emerged from the orchard holding Dobry Jablonski by the shirt collar, slapping the back of the boy's head to make him move faster. The boy fell several times on the journey, went down on his hands and knees in the dirt and the ruts that led toward the barn. But Lockwood pulled him up, again and again, until they were in Plumie's garden, near her rhubarb. As they passed her, the boy managed to give Plumie a pleading look, like a nervous cow on its way up the chute to be slaughtered, and Plumie said, “John? John, what's the matter here? What's happened?”

Her husband didn't answer. He only moved toward the barn like a slow black cloud, full of thunder.

Once in the barn, he tied the Jablonski boy's hands to a post with binder twine that scratched at the boy's wrists and bit into his skin even as Lockwood knotted it tighter. Plumie came to watch them from the front gate, her hand at her heart, which fluttered like the crows had. Something terrible was about to happen. “John,” she said, trying again to reach him, to reason with him. “What are you doing? This is a child. Have you forgotten?”

“You'll be sleeping with the cows tonight,” Lockwood told the boy, ignoring his wife's pleas. “And tomorrow you'll go to Warren to speak with the sheriff. What do you think about that, little thief?”

When Dobry Jablonski didn't answer, Lockwood spat at the boy's feet.

He unlatched the gate, still ignoring Plumie, and went back to the orchard full of anger and righteousness, to deliver a lecture on the villainy of thievery, to teach the Slavs and Poles and whoever else worked on his farm a lesson.

Plumie whispered into the air, as if God might hear her. “Oh please, oh please, oh please,” she whispered. And each plea flew away like a crow, silent, sleek, and mysterious.

Word spread quickly that night, from household to household. Families who rarely spoke across their respective divisions talked of what had happened in the Lockwood orchard. Fathers and mothers warned their children not to steal, not here, not if they knew what was best for them. They scolded children who didn't even work for Lockwood. They scolded children who didn't work anywhere at all. Dobry Jablonski would be made into an example, and they knew this. This was exactly Lockwood's intention, to have everyone in Temperance distribute this warning for him, as he'd assumed they would.

Lockwood wandered around the house that night, oiling his rifle, occasionally peering out the window at the barn, where the Jablonski boy sat in manure, his legs splayed in front of him, his hands tied around a pole at his back. People had been tried for less, had gone to jail for less than stealing apples. Lockwood knew this, and he didn't care that he might seal the boy into a dark fate by taking him to see the sheriff in Warren the next morning.

At ten o'clock Lockwood joined his wife in bed, where he fell asleep as if nothing of great importance weighed on his shoulders, as if any other ordinary day had come to its inevitable end. Later I came to stand over them, the sleeping figures of my great-grandparents, and watched their mothlike breath hover over their parted mouths, watched the dip and rise of their stomachs as they inhaled and exhaled in unison.

Lockwood's dreams were busy that night. I watched them pass through his mind as his body slept. He dreamed of the white stag he'd seen at the back of his property. He dreamed of the stag lowering its head to take a long drink from Sugar Creek. When the stag had finally quenched its thirst, it raised its head and turned to look at him.

There is more than this,
it told Lockwood.

And then Lockwood woke, sitting up in bed before me, shivering in a cold sweat.

Breakfast first, he thought, splashing his face with water in the washroom. Then he'd put the boy in his truck and drive over to Warren. He'd have one of the hands manage the farm for the day. He'd give instructions to the letter and the work would get done as if he'd overseen it himself, especially with the Jablonski boy's fate weighing on the pickers.

Plumie had breakfast ready by the time he got downstairs. She fed him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee. He drank the coffee black and bitter, the steam curling into his flaring nostrils. After finishing, he rubbed bits of egg out of his mustache and stood to leave.

Outside, while he sat on the porch to pull his boots on, he looked up to find a woman walking down the dusty road. She wore a scarf over her head. A
babushka,
the Slav women called them. Her skirts were nearly in rags; he could see that even from this distance. Her arms were folded under her breasts, as if she was sick or frightened. But if she was frightened, it did not stop her. She came toward him without hesitating, barefoot, turning off the road into his dirt drive and walking up the front yard to meet him.

Lockwood stood on the porch looking down at her. “Morning, ma'am,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

The corners of the woman's mouth were turned down, and her eyes were glassy. Lockwood figured this must be the boy's mother. She had the same pale skin and green eyes. And what she did next nearly shocked him. It was something he'd never seen before. The woman got down on her knees before him and, in a thickly accented voice, begged for the life of her son.

“Get up,” Lockwood said, trying to pull her from the ground. “Get up, woman.”

But she would not rise. “It costs me nothing to beg,” she told him. “I already lost everything years ago. In Poland, my family was better. My father was a healer. We were respected, you see? Here, we are nothing. Things can change for the worse, not just better. I understand this now. If you did not know this already, I will tell you. My son is all I have in this world. His father is dead. If I do not have my son, I die also. Please. I beg you. I ask only for you to give me my son and he will repay twice what he took from you.”

Lockwood did not immediately answer. This woman—Eva Jablonski, if he remembered her name correctly—was something else. He was reminded of a different world, of a different time, when peasants knelt to beg for their lives or for the life of another. He thought of some of the tales his father had told him as a child. He thought of how the lords in those old tales displayed their lordliness by pardoning or by setting a task before a beggar to earn what they wanted. And wasn't he a kind of lord now? he thought. Wouldn't it be right to make a pact with this woman who asked for something without shame?

“I'll make you a deal,” he told Eva Jablonski. The woman narrowed her eyes but held his stare. Lockwood turned to face the orchard, pointing toward it. “If you can pick that orchard clean by the time the sun sets, I'll give you back your boy.”

Eva Jablonski turned to face the orchard, assessing the task set before her. She blinked twice, nodded wordlessly, then stood again, gathering her skirts about her, to trudge toward the trees.

Lockwood did not mention that nearly a quarter of the apples had been picked yesterday, that it had taken an entire day of five hands working together to clear just that one corner of the orchard. He had made the pact, and now he would see, as any lord would, if she kept her end of the bargain.