The Great Upending

by Beth Kephart

  When it was probably all clear, I stood up and started walking. When I got to the pond, I walked faster than that. When I got to the hill, I was half running, but not really running, and Hawk was on the path to the tree, forcing a cloud of dust behind him. He was already high in the branches.

  I had dust on my glasses now, in my hair, and on my tongue. Hawk was on the branch above me.

  “I’m sorry, Hawk,” I say now. Mean it.

  “I blew the whistle,” he says. “Three times, I blew it. He could have seen you, Sara, maybe he did. Blowing the whistle was your plan.”

  “I was onto something.”

  “It was a close call.”

  “Hawk—”

  “You could have ruined everything. I trusted you.” His voice is so mad and so accusing and I know he’s right, but he has to listen.

  “But I didn’t, Hawk. I didn’t blow it. Will you calm down and listen? Don’t you want to know what I saw?”

  Hawk pushes the leaves between us to one side. He stares down at me. He waits.

  “ ’Course I do.”

  “He’s leaving, Hawk. Looks like he is, anyway.”

  Hawk’s eyebrows shoot up over his two moon eyes. His face is still all red with being mad. “What are you talking about? Leaving?”

  “He’s packed up. The Silver Whale is stuffed. He’s got that crazy bike of his inside. A suitcase. A bunch of books. A pair of suspenders.”

  “Leaving?” Hawk says, his voice practically hitting a screech. “Leaving?” He jumps down from the tree. He starts walking a circle. He looks up at me. “But he can’t leave,” he says, like it’ll be my fault if that happens. “We can’t let him.”

  “Hawk,” I say, looking down at his head.

  “What?” He stops.

  “There’s something else.”

  “There can’t be something else.”

  “There is.” I wrangle down. It takes me a second. I stand looking down at Hawk. He stands looking up.

  “There’s a crate. A different crate than the one Ilke brought. A not-busted crate. That crate is filled to spill with drawings. The Roundabouts, I figure. Book Three.”

  “No. Way,” Hawk says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I saw it. It’s beautiful, Hawk. It’s really beautiful. Sketches, mostly, of right here. Pictures of our farm and the pigs and the sunflowers and Jolly. It’s hard to see, but it’s easy to tell. The Roundabouts, Hawk. Our farm as inspiration.”

  Hawk watches me. He puts both arms out, like he needs balance. He won’t believe me, but he does. “You sure?”

  “Right in the back. Stashed. It’s so so so so beautiful, Hawk. But The Mister’s leaving.”

  “Leaving,” Hawk says.

  “And if he gets away, nobody will know where he is. If he leaves, he’ll never finish the thing he came here to do. He needs this farm. He needs our farm, Hawk, us, and Ilke—she’s scaring him away. We’re scaring him too, with that stupid special delivery. We should have left him straight alone, like Mom said.”

  “A modern classic,” Hawk says, his voice gone straight from anger to awe. “Made right here. On this farm.”

  “Or maybe would have been. Or maybe it’s too late. Maybe we’ll never know the end of his story. Maybe he’ll never make it.”

  “What do you think he burned in that bonfire?” Hawk asks, scratching his head and closing his eyes so that he can see the smoke again in his memory.

  “No way of knowing.”

  We turn, look over the trees, past the pond, toward the field, toward the lighthouse. We turn, and I wonder if The Mister can see us.

  “What did he say, Hawk, when he saw you with the letter? Bright Star right there, on the envelope. What did you tell him?”

  “I just said it’d come direct to our front door, a special delivery,” Hawk says. “He took one look and turned away. He wanted nothing of it.”

  “Did he mention Ilke?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say anything? Think.”

  “What he said was… What he said was ‘The vision is mine, nobody else’s.’ ”

  “The vision is his.”

  “That was it. He wasn’t happy, I can tell you that. I would say that it was worse than that. I would say he was disappointed.”

  “In you?”

  He shrugs.

  “In us?”

  “Probably.”

  “But he needs us, Hawk. Don’t you think? He does.” I put my hand on my heart to stop its hard beating. I try to catch my breath, but I’m having trouble.

  “We can’t let him leave.”

  “How do we stop him?”

  “I don’t know. Can’t figure it.”

  Leave The Mister alone, Mom said, and we can’t ask Mom. We can’t ask Dad. We shouldn’t be asking Mrs. Kalin.

  The sky has turned a blue darker than blue. I clean my glasses with the hem of my T-shirt and put them back on, and I see that the actual color of the actual sky is not sunny-day clear. A storm could be coming. A real one. “Maybe we should tell Mom and Dad,” I say, contradicting my own thinking, going back and forth with my thoughts. “Tell them what happened.”

  “And say what?” Hawk says. “That M. B. Banks is packing up to leave, and maybe that’s because of us, maybe we did some interfering?”

  I’m leaning against the tree. He’s sitting, knees to his chin, on the ground. He’s burying his face in his knees.

  “Maybe we should tell them,” I say. “Maybe we should tell them what we know, what we were thinking.”

  “Don’t you think they have enough worries?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Still.”

  “Yeah,” he says. And he’s so completely sad and I feel so completely bad and I don’t know what I was thinking. What kind of plan did I have, anyway? Where did I think this would be going?

  The sky changes more colors. There are more and more clouds and they’re coming faster in. Feels like ginger-ale bubbles against my skin.

  “It’s going to rain, Hawk,” I say. “For real it is. You see it?”

  “I see it.”

  “We’ve got to get back.”

  “I know it,” Hawk says, but he doesn’t stand.

  “Hawk?”

  “You don’t have a next step,” he says. “In your plan. Do you?”

  “We’ll figure it out, Hawk,” I say, and throw my arm across his shoulder. “He hasn’t left yet. Right? He’s still right there, in the lighthouse.”

  “You really think it’ll rain?” Hawk asks, like he hasn’t studied all the clouds and their meanings with Mom. Like that hasn’t been part of our homeschooling lessons, part of our lives, since the first.

  “I think it will rain.”

  “I thought the skies had forgotten how.”

  “I don’t think the skies think,” I say.

  “Wish I didn’t have to think,” he says.

  I grab Book One from the hollow of the tree. Hawk hugs his special delivery tight against his chest.

  Sweet, Soft Thud

  We hurry up to our rooms and back down—almost late for dinner. We put out the forks and knives, fold the paper towel napkins. Hawk cracks another frozen log of lemonade concentrate into the pitcher with the leftover orange slices and stirs. Mom steps in through the back door and heads straight past, to the front of the house, and out onto the porch. She goes no farther than that.

  “Kids?” she calls. “Kids? You won’t guess what.” Sticking her head back into the house and calling up to our rooms, to where she thinks we’ve been, fast asleep and dreaming.

  Now Dad is hurrying in through the back door, leaving a basket of eggs on the table and two jars of goat milk, sealed tight against the cats that follow him in. Mom’s on her porch rocker by the time Hawk and I step out to join her. When Dad sits down on his own broken bit of wicker, Figgis jumps to his lap and arches her back.

  “Front row seats,” Dad says. “On our August storm.” Not taking his eyes from the sky as Hawk and I settle in. Not lookin
g for us to report on our sleeping afternoon off from our chores. Just looking for hope for his cistern.

  “Just let it be,” Mom says. “Just let it come.”

  Closing her eyes as she says it.

  It’s still just clouds and a more forceful breeze, the atmosphere feeling trapped inside a jar. A thickening. Best show on earth, this will be, this rain that’s coming, that will crack the sky, that will turn brown to green and dirt to mud and the dry patch under the bridge to a creek and the cistern into a better place. There are buckets and tubs and Hawk’s cannikins and gallipots and one of us will remember them soon—set them down out here so we can catch the stuff, save it, drink it fresh from the clouds—but not just yet.

  The first drop of rain is a sweet, soft thud.

  The first crack is a light show and a drumroll.

  Verdi the rooster puts some opera to it.

  “Will you look at that,” Dad says.

  A Good Night for Candlesticks

  It comes for real.

  We’re wild with forgetting everything we do not have.

  We’re just us.

  No beginnings, no ends, no troubles, and we don’t need to hear the stories Mom and Dad won’t tell about their afternoon of asking, and they don’t need to hear about the mess I think I made, because it’s raining and the rain just is, the rain is the moment that we’re living in.

  We’re dancing in the slap and the streak of it. We’re plunking rain-catch things down on the lawn, in the garden, by the goats, with the pigs, on the roof. Milk cartons and milking pails. Old pitchers. The plugged-up kitchen sink that’s been sitting in the barn. The red wagon and the copper-bottomed pans and the scrub buckets and the coin jars and the flowerpots, every last place where falling water can be safe, plus the three blue barrels where we will pour all the collected stuff whenever the rain doesn’t rain anymore.

  It’s been so long since it rained like this that we have to remember it quick—where we stashed the catching things and where they make the best catching fit: at the bottom of a drain spout, on the bench beside the pond, beneath the shallow stone birdbath, which gets overflowed in minutes—and the more we do, the wetter we are, and the darker it gets, and the cows push their heads out of their barn to catch the kerplunks, and Jolly and Molly and Jo and Polly ring the bells on their necks, and the cats don’t know what to do with themselves, and the guinea fowl go very quiet, and Old Moe is full of warthog sounds. Phooey’s holed up in the cab of Dad’s truck. We’ll get a good blue egg out of the excitement.

  “Well that’s certainly enough,” Mom says, when she sees Dad dragging out a plastic duffel bag.

  “You’re a spoilsport, Becca Weust,” Dad says, leaving the duffel inside. He calls Mom her birth-right name whenever he’s most in love with her.

  “The perennial kid, John,” Mom says. “Always a kid.”

  He takes her in his arms like he’s about to do a boardwalk dance. He bends down to give her a kiss.

  “Ewww,” Hawk says. Mom laughs.

  The rain falls like coins from the sky.

  I’d forgotten how it sounds, to hear Mom laugh.

  We run or almost run. They run. To the barns and back. To the pigs and west. To the pond and to the bridge, hoping for a creek. Hearing the patter as we work. Watching the lightning strike. Seeing the Scholls blinking on and off.

  I don’t know how long it takes before we’re finally all back inside. The floors skidding. The kitchen ransacked, the cats shaking their coats in two separate corners, licking the rain from their fur, our own hands cleaner than they’ve been. I’m sitting on the inside steps full of dark, sweet drip when the power on the farm goes out. A buzz, a pop, and it fizzles. The hum of every inside motor stops. Time stops. The absolute dark.

  “Honey?” Dad calls from somewhere.

  “It blew,” Mom calls back.

  “A good night for candlesticks,” Dad says. I hear him scurrying around in that back bedroom of theirs, and now here he is, his chin lit up, a thick flame in his hand. He looks like Christmas Eve when we sing “Silent Night” and pass each other hope, wick to wick. He has an extra candle and a dish for me, and Hawk’s right behind him, lit up too, his hair a dark mop on his head with a halo fringe. Hawk carries a second flame for Mom.

  “It was the best of times,” Dad says, leaving out the other half of that saying and looking like Dad from a few years ago, a spark in his cheeks and his eyes. The Dad before his daughter got sick. The Dad before the machines began to die. The Dad the banks respected.

  “Nobody predicted this,” I hear Mom say. “All this rain. Coming from where?”

  “Don’t kick a gift horse,” Dad says, and now Mom’s standing here, at the base of the stairs, looking like the sun the way the candle catches her face. There’s gold in her eyes and glow in her hair. I think of The Mister in his lighthouse, come all the way here from I still don’t know where, parking his Silver Whale and tucking in behind a lavender-wreath door and choosing three round rooms with a few round things. The Mister choosing this farm. Drawing this farm into the pages of his story, his very modern classic in the making. I think of him out ducking in and out of the shadows behind me, into the skirts of evergreens, into the shadows of the goat barn. I think of him not taking Hawk’s special delivery, saying only six words, but what do they mean? Every shoot of lightning cracks the darkness of this house, and that means it cracks the lighthouse, too, strikes through the band of upstairs glass, then bumps down quick, spiral step by step.

  His things in that car. Himself in that lighthouse, which isn’t really a lighthouse. It’s just a silo we turned around.

  Everything turns around.

  Maybe?

  Sometimes?

  “Pretty sure there’s only one choice for dinner,” Mom says. She leads the way into the kitchen with one hand cupped around her yellow flame. I hear her put the dishes out where we’d already laid the forks and knives, the paper towel napkins. I hear her open and close the refrigerator door, quick, to keep the chill in. We fumble our way to our seats as the cutting begins. A slice of Strawberry Wonder pie for each one of us. Seconds, soon enough. A nice fresh smell where there’d been smoke.

  Who knows what time it is? It doesn’t matter. Who cares that both cats have jumped up onto the table and are licking our four plates clean now that the second servings are done? Who really wants tomorrow to come? Who needs the lights, when we are the light?

  Good as good gets. Don’t look ahead and don’t look back, and that’s the truth of it, and that’s what The Mister sees. That’s what The Mister sees when he looks at us. Or. That is what he drew.

  The rain is talk. The rain explains itself. The rain doesn’t lie, and it does not tell the truth. The rain does not have to ask. Our candles are burning to their little stubs. Our clothes are cardboard crunch. The floor’s so wet that our candlelight makes it look like an ice-pond slick. The cats have strawberry tongues.

  “The day is drawing its curtains closed,” Dad finally says, and I don’t know if that’s an original or something hanging on the wall.

  “Time,” Mom says, “for bed.”

  “Appreciate,” Hawk says, “how you gave us the afternoon off.”

  “Appreciate,” I say. Enough.

  One by one we push back our chairs and stand. We leave the plates where they are, to the cats.

  “Good night,” we say. “Good night. Good night.” Hawk and me on the stairs now, and heading up. Mom and Dad tracing around, to their room. I find my door by candlelight. I turn the knob. I stop.

  “Twenty minutes,” Hawk whispers. “My room.”

  “Twenty minutes,” I say, a more or less guess, since no one has a working clock. I close the door behind me, candlelight my way to the windows, slammed shut. I stand there watching the dark and the dying lightning strikes through the blur of the rain. I listen to the big kerplunks of water falling, filling, still.

  More on What We Know So Far

  Hawk sits on his bedroom floor wit
h his candle blown out, his flashlight spilling light. I sit close, wearing dry pants, a dry shirt, dry rain-cleaned hair at last. We smell like rain. Rain’s a good, clean smell.

  “What are we going to do?” Hawk wants to know. “About The Mister?”

  “Thinking,” I say.

  He pages through Roundabouts: Book Two, looking for his own clues. He shoves the book in my direction so I can see what he sees. There are cities built of mushroom caps. There are countries inside nests. The red shoes are huge beside snowflakes and small beside giraffes and full of splash in summer creeks. They’re walking up the bark of trees, the green of stalks, the shine of seeds, and you wouldn’t think that there’s story in it, but it’s story, true. It’s like the shoes are you or the shoes are me, the shoes are how we dream.

  Every page, and there’s more beauty in it.

  “What does it mean?” Hawk asks, closing the book, leaning his head against the bed. “About The Mister? What does it say?”

  “That he sees what isn’t,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Hawk says, scratching his head.

  “I think it’s a story about aloneness,” I say, lying on my side now, paging through the book again. “I mean: there’s only this one pair of shoes.”

  “Aloneness,” Hawk says. “Or differentness.”

  “Why not both?” I say, pulling the knots from my hair.

  “See how it ends?” Hawk says, taking the book from me. He turns to the last picture, which spills across two pages. “It ends here,” he says, pointing to the pair of shoes on an ice-snow cliff. “Right here. See how it is? There’s a blue river below. There’s a world across. Shoes could only get to the next place by taking a running leap.”

  Hawk slides the book from his lap to mine. He throws the cone of light onto the scene. I sit up to study it. Hawk waits.

  “You see it?” he says.

  “I see it,” I say.

  A cliff of snow. A split of earth. A field of green. Looks like a farm to me, that green. Looks like people on that farm. Looks like the shoes could have some people company. If the shoes take the running start. If they leap.