James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing [1]

by G. Norman Lippert

  The wooden screen door below opened with a startled squawk. Rachel appeared in the opening holding a Ball jar of sweet pickles. Clete glanced down sharply. He could see the top of her head, her steely hair pulled back in a bun. He could see yellow seeds swimming in the green soup of the pickle jar.

  "Clete would you give this jar a yank for me? I can't seem to-"

  She stopped in mid-sentence,realizinghewasn'tinhisredwoodchair. Hisfeethung solidly in the air at about her eye-level, but off to the side.

  "Clete, what…" she said, and then looked up. She saw his feet, clad in his evening shoes, standing firmly on nothing. She followed them upwards until her eyes met his, wide and serious. "DearLordGodInHeaven!" she spat sharply, as if the phrase were all one syllable. Her entire body seemed to retract backwards, like a cuckoo bird being yanked back into its house. She disappeared through the door and it slapped dumbly shut behind her.

  Clete credited her for not dropping the pickles.

  She didn’t come back out, so Clete decided to continue with his experiment. He floated higher, passing the sewing room window of the second floor and approaching the attic. Slowly, he turned in the air, allowing himself to enjoy the sensation of weightlessness. Across the yard the barn was being gathered into dim violet shadows. He could see over the point of the stable, into the back corner of the pig pen now. There were no pigs to be seen, however. He knew they were all still busy at the trough, fighting over Rachel's potato skins and coffee grounds. Over the peak of the barn, Clete could just begin to see the hazy shape of Drake's woods and the reflected evening light of the pond. Normally, he could only see this far from the attic window. If he waited just a little while, when the night set fully, he would be able to see the pinprick glows of the city of Bastion Falls, just under the brim of the horizon.

  Something hard and pointed bumped his back and he startled, almost losing the rhythm of hisarms. Heturnedintheairandsawitwasthepeakoftheroof. Theapexofgreenshingles stretched away from him in the dim light, ending at the base of the brick chimney. Clete glanced down carefully. Between his feet, the patio looked like something painted on paper, distant and insignificant. The patio light still shone yellowly, but he was far outside its range now.

  Herealizedhewasn'tflappingquitesohardanymore,norwerehisarmsweary. He pumped the air almost casually, feeling its weight throttle against his palms like molasses. Slowly, he lowered himself, watching the roof reassert itself over his head, until he hovered directly in front of the round, cross-paned window of the attic. There was a book propped open on a steamer chest just inside the dust-grimed window. Clete squinted through his glasses at the tiny columns of type, flapping his arms cautiously so as to keep a steady altitude. The book was his and Rachel's family Bible. He had positioned it there ten minutes earlier, opened at random, directly beneath the attic light. He had intentionally not looked to see where he’d opened it to.

  He read tohimself,pickingaversefromtherightpage. But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty...

  Hesaidthewordsoftheversetohimselfseveraltimes,swishingtheairlazily. Whenhe was sure he would remember the phrase, he turned again, looking out over the dimming yard and the barn. After a few moment’s contemplation, he decided to attempt a small, experimental swoosh. He leaned forward, gathering momentum, and swooped. The evening air billowed beneath him, supporting him as he swept along a mild current. He spread his arms and glided out over the yard, picking up speed as he slipped from one air flux to the next. The barn loomed before him, swaying ponderously. He approached it. Bars of air beat at his shirtsleeves and batted his pant legs. Clete wondered if he could simply heave up to the barn with a series of flaps, slow himself, and then land in the open hay loft. He decided to try it. He angled up as the dark shape of the barn heaved over him. With a round of gentle arm waves, he settled smoothly onto the edge of the loft. His weight returned to him grudgingly as his feet touched down, and he could feel the relaxation of that secret, mental muscle.

  Clete looked around as if realizing for the first time where he was. Bales of stacked hay lay like sleeping soldiers along the canted roof of the loft. He could smell the familiar barny smell of wood dust, loose straw, and- faintly- animal dung. Below him, he could here Bethel softly pawing thedirtfloorandchewinghercud. Hewasinthehayloft. Hehadgottenherewithoutever touching the yard. He hadn't passed the familiar old water pump with its rusty bucket or climbed the old plank ladder. He had, in fact, flown straight in like a kite.

  He had flown into the loft.

  Clete's frown slowly, haltingly, fell from his haggard old farmer's face. In its place erected a careful, almost childlike smile.

  They were half-way through their dinner before Rachel said anything. She carefully dabbed at the corner of her mouth with a cloth napkin and reached for her water glass. "Decided to take up flying, then, did you?" she asked with remarkable mundanity. Clete considered the question as he chewed methodically. After a pause he answered. "Ayuh, I guess I have."

  He had gone up to the attic as soon as he got back from the barn. He needed to turn off the light. He also needed to check the old family Bible to see what it had been turned open to. It had been first Corinthians. Verse twenty-seven of chapter one began with "But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise…”

  There hadn't been much of a chance that Clete had imagined the whole thing anyway. Clete wasn’t a man given to very much imagining.

  ThenextmorningCletegotupatfive-thirty. He had been getting up at five-thirty for mostoffortyyearsandhedidsowithouttheaidofanalarmclockorthecustomaryrooster. He dressedinfrontofhisclosetmirror,choosinganotherpairofheavydenimoverallsandadifferent flannel work shirt. He dipped his comb into the water basin on his dresser and raked the stiff bristles of his gray crew-cutuntilitwasasflatasthefaceofanewstump. Heexaminedhimself grimly over the lenses of his glasses, and then went downstairs to meet Rachel for breakfast.

  He flew over to the barn to slop the pigs and feed the horses. Getting airborne, he discovered, was something that quickly became easier with practice. Whenhewasdonemilking Bethel, he made a spontaneous attempt to fly back to the house with the milk pail in his hand. He stood behind the barn, just outside the pig fence, and flapped steadily with his right hand, using the left to hold the pail. The air sang between his sieved fingers, thickening as it had before, but he was hardly able to get one boot off the ground while holding the bucket. He put the pail down on the straw-covered ground and stared at it dourly. What good was flying going to be if he couldn't carry anything?

  A fuzzy thought appeared in his mind, offering a solution. Perhaps he could make himself a belt-hook to hang things on, so he wouldn't have to use his arms to carry anything. The picture in his mind limped with the effort. It waslikesomethingfromachild'scrayondrawing. Hesaw himself flying gamely over the barn, trying to keep steady while a bucket of milk slopped from his belt. The picture disintegrated. Too messy. Too impractical. Why go to the effort to fly the milk over to the back veranda with a hook, spilling most along the way, when he could just as quickly walk it?

  No, he concluded, flying wasn't going to be the sort of thing that would revolutionize his farm life. Maybe he'd do it now and then just for the enjoyment of it, like walking down to Strecker woods and back on a summer evening. He'd tell Rachel he was just going to step out for a little fly. No harm in that. Otherwise...

  Otherwise Clete would simply go about business as usual. Being able to fly didn't get the fields plowed and seeded. It didn't get the pigs slopped or the cow milked. He was still Cletus Arvil Starcher, flying-man or not, and he still had farming to do.

  That decided, Clete picked up the milk pail, turned on his heel, and whistling a strangely melodic near-monotone, headed smartly through the open barn toward the house. Laterthatday,whileplowingtherestoftheStreckerloop,hedecidedtoflyhomefor lunch.

  It wasn't until the next evening that Clete discovered a
nother mental muscle he had spent most of his life not knowing about. He had used a portion of the evening to fly out to the southeast corner of Bethel's and the horses' pasture. A few braids of barbed wire had come loose of the fence-post out there, probably stripped by a wandering black bear or coyote. Clete discovered that he could carry small objects easily enough while flying, simply by utilizing the multiple pockets of his overalls. He had his hammer hooked into the loop on his hip and a handful of three inch nails in the front pouch. In the past, it would have taken him at least ten minutes to walk to that corner of the pasture, not counting time avoiding the mud bogs and puddles that were so prevalent this time of year. He flew there in less than forty seconds, catching tiny flashes of his reflection against the blue-mirrored sky of the pasture's puddles.

  Later, while leaning against the pig fence watching the sows wrestle for space at the trough, the second idea came to him. It wasn’t like the idea to fly that had occurred to him in the field two days earlier. Not entirely. This was an idea about something he could make. It was a refinement of the belt-hook idea for carrying things while flying, but it was much clearer, and it would work much better. He marveled that it had not been obvious to him from the first. That initial child's crayondrawing of himself flying with the milk pail spilling and jostling from his belt was gone. It was replaced with a perfect mental blueprint of a device; a device he knew he could make. It could carry things of all different sizes and shapes, and it had a counterbalancing mechanism, so that it would stay level no matter what position he flew in. His mind chewed systematically at the invention, tackling problems and proposing revisions. And some, detached part of him just sat and watched, amazed that he was actually having such inventive, imaginative thoughts.

  He was snapped out of this diversion by the commotion of the pigs. They lolled over each other with their sausage-like, coarse-haired bodies, grunting and squealing indignantly at the trough. The feed was getting low.

  Clete stepped toward the barn to retrieve a bag of sow-feedandthenstopped,hisfacea mask of mild surprise. There weren't any more bags stacked in the inside corner of the barn, under the loft ladder. He'd need to walk over to the feed shed with the wheelbarrow and bring back another load.

  As he turned and walked out of the shadow of the barn to pick up the wheelbarrow, yet another idea struck Clete. This one was exactlylike the idea he'd had while riding the Farm-all in the east field. He recognized the quality of it. It was like a post-hypnotic suggestion, or like meeting somebody you had only ever dreamed about. It came in the form of a question to himself.

  Why am I walking all the way over to the feed shed to carry back sow feed? Becausethesowsarehungry,hethoughtdimly. Ahungrysowisanunhappysow. An unhappy sow isn't a very tasty sow. But that wasn't the real thrust of the question. He knew that, because he'd asked it of himself. It wasn't why are you gettingfeed for the sows? It was why are you walking to get feed for the sows?

  Maybe there was a different way of doing it; a way he could get the sows their feed without all the heavy work and strain on his already sore back. And it would probably be faster, too. Faster is more practical, if quality isn't spent, or so his mother always used to tell him.

  The idea nagged at Clete. He adjusted his John Deere cap and rubbed thoughtfully at his upper lip. No harm in trying, he thought for the second time in three days. He looked at the narrow face of the feed shed some thirty yards distant. It stared back at him blindly, full of dumb curiosity. You lookin' over dis way? a voice in Clete's head queried. It was the voice of the hired hand his parents had had when he was a small boy. A black man with graying hair. His name had been Chesapeake Chester, or at least that was what everyone called him. Is it that ol' feed shed you starin' at, boy? If you want some feed to give those sows over yonder, you gonna hafta walk over an grab you up a sack. 'Less you know some other way t’do it...

  Cletecouldenvisiontheinsideoftheshed. Itwasstuffyandfulloftherichsmells of animal feed and fertilizer. Rachel's rake and shovel and garden trowel hung on the right-hand wall, splashed with a dusty sun-beam from a missing plank along the back. To the left was a rack of twoby-four shelves, three high and three long. The shelves were stacked high with this season's store of feed and Garden-Grow. He could see the big, fifty pound burlap sacks with the picture of the smiling pig on the front. Hubbard Hog Feed, the legend over the smiling pig read.

  Clete stared at the double doors of the feed shed and frowned that thoughtful, old man's frown under his glasses. He absently rubbed his upper lip, running the calluses of his thumb and fore-finger over the sand-papery gray stubble.

  The doors opened. Therewasnofanfare. Noexplosive motion or puff of magician's smoke. The doors simply swung apart and gently backed against the outside of the shed as if someone had casually pulled them open to get some feed. Clete wasn't surprised. He could feel the mental muscle flexing rhythmically in his head. It wasn't even as hard as flying.

  Steadily, like the parade of Mickey Mouse's brooms in Fantasia (which Clete had seen some twenty years earlier with Anne and little Dennis), fifty pound burlap sacks of Hubbard Hog Feed began to emerge from the darkness inside the feed shed. They marched across the yard to the barn, each bag bouncing slightly as it moved, as if being hefted along a chain of invisible hired hands.

  CletewasgladRachelcouldn'tseethefeedshedfromthekitchenwindow of the house. She had groused enough about his flying. He couldn’t bear to think what she’d say about this. He walked to the corner of the barn, where the feed bags rounded the entrance and floated inside. He reached out and touched one as it went by. The dry burlap rasped under his palm and swept on. Twenty bags went by, making disembodied pill-shaped shadows on the grass. When the last one turned the corner into the barn Clete followed it. He came into the shadow of the barn entrance just in time to see it settle gently onto the other nineteen, which had formed a neat, bricklayer’s stack under the loft ladder. It was just the way he stacked them when he did it by hand.

  Clete considered the stack, his lips pressed together in contemplation. Now here was a skill he could put to work. He came out of the barn a few moments later with one of the sacks hefted easily over his right shoulder. He plopped it down onto the pig-fence and pulled the string seal with a practiced hand. Yellow feed pouredfromthemouthofthesackintothefeedtroughwithadustyhiss, sending the sows into an ecstasy of grunts and smacks.

  Clete glanced over at the feed shed thirty yards away and deftly closed the doors. Greetings, reader. This has been a teaser excerpt of “Flyover Country”, which is available in hardcover and PDF download from www.lulu.com. Ifyou enjoyed “James Potter and the Hall of Elders’ Crossing”, I suspect you’ll also enjoy this quirky little tale. It’s short and sweet, but I think it’s fun and (dare I admit) a little endearing. Plus, it’s a great way to support your friendly neighborhood independent author since he (quite understandably) does not make any income from writing James Potter stories.

  Thank you for checking out the story, and happy reading.

  G. Norman Lippert