Lily and the Lost Boy

by Paula Fox

  The Coreys had watched men dance to that strange music. They formed a circle, their arms around each other’s waists. One or two would dance alone, their hands high in the air, clapping, sweat pouring down their faces. Mr. Kalligas urged Mr. Corey to join the circling men one night. The Greeks had clapped their hands and shouted encouragement, but Mr. Corey, shaking his head and smiling, had come up with the word shy, which amused everyone so much they forgot about persuading him to dance.

  “What a triumph!” he had said later. “The only time I’ve used the right word at the right time.” Mr. Kalligas had told them that same night about a foreigner, an American who lived in Panagia. “No one like him much but he is greatest dancer,” Mr. Kalligas had said.

  “Do you think Mr. Kalligas was talking about Jack’s father that time?” Lily asked Paul. But he was already turning down the street that would lead them east out of the village. She ran to catch up with him.

  They passed the last streetlight. From there on the houses had no electricity, only oil lamps. She meant to ask him her question again, but she couldn’t see his face. She felt a touch of fear as though she were alone on the dark road.

  They came to a crossroads. One led up the great mountain to Panagia; another curved out of sight around a hill and led to a beach where they sometimes went to swim. Still a third led off to the western side of the mountain, where Lily had seen flocks of sheep grazing. From a distance they had looked like grains of rice scattered amid the sloping meadows.

  The last village house stood by the crossroads. It was both a farm and a café. The Coreys had stopped there for cold lemonade on their way home from the beach. It was served to them by the young farmwife at one of three rickety tables in a yard beneath plane trees. Chickens scratched around their feet, and once a black goat no bigger than a puppy had leaped on their table and butted them with its hard little curly head.

  Lily and Paul took the road to the beach and halted after a hundred yards. Against the hill stood an arch overgrown with vines. Columns glimmered among chestnut trees. It was a windless night, and the braying of a donkey seemed very close. Paul poked her in the ribs.

  “Snakes come out at night,” he whispered.

  “Don’t scare me,” she begged.

  “So you came,” said a voice loudly from behind the arch. And Jack stepped out and jumped to the road. Lily gasped.

  “Of course we did,” said Paul.

  “Since we saw you this afternoon, did you go all the way back to Panagia?” Lily asked.

  He didn’t answer her. “You didn’t mention that you were bringing her along,” he said to Paul.

  When Paul said nothing, Lily spoke up with more confidence than she felt. “I go where I want to go,” she said.

  Jack glanced at a luminous wristwatch on his arm.

  “In two minutes we can see the satellite passing,” he said. “You have to have very good eyesight.” He looked at Paul. “You know about it, don’t you?” Paul shook his head. “It goes by this time every night.”

  Paul said, “You could have had supper at our house.”

  “I didn’t need to,” replied Jack. “I bought cheese and bread in the village and went back to the acropolis. I’m looking for old coins.”

  “Doesn’t your father worry?” Lily asked. Without bothering to look at her, Jack said scornfully, “Why should he? Look! There it is!”

  Lily and Paul looked straight up. A pinpoint of light—like the tiny light the eye doctor flashes in your eye—moved steadily across the sky and then was lost to view among the stars.

  “That’s it,” said Jack. He was poised at the edge of the road in a ray of moonlight. There was something about his face that reminded Lily of the statue of the youth in the museum garden. Perhaps it was the faint smile on his lips that didn’t change the expression around his deep-set eyes. His brows were dark and nearly met above his nose. He was much taller than Paul. A lock of his dark hair fell over his forehead. He pushed it back with his bandaged hand. Lily saw that the bandage was nothing but an old rag, a piece of soiled undershirt.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  Paul pinched her elbow.

  “Ninety-three,” said Jack.

  “I know a nice friend for you,” Lily said. “She’s a hundred and three.” Paul snickered.

  “I’m going to the beach,” Jack said coldly. “I want to look inside that shack where the old woman cooks.” He set off without a backward look.

  “Why?” asked Lily. Paul, ignoring her question, followed him.

  The shack was one of Lily’s favorite places to have a meal. You didn’t get much choice—fish or eggs and fried potatoes—but the potatoes were delicious and crisp, and the woman emptied them on your plate from a wire basket she had just lifted out of bubbling oil. A young fisherman brought her fish right out of the sea. When the Coreys sat there under the shade of an arbor with a grapevine climbing around it and they were salt-covered and damp-haired from the water, it always seemed a feast.

  “I know what her kitchen looks like,” Lily said. Jack was walking quickly, and Paul left her behind to catch up with him. Should she turn around and go home? She didn’t. After crossing a low ridge of sand, the sea lay before them. A few yards out from the beach was the dark blot of an islet with scrub pine along its back. It huddled in the water like an animal at a water hole. She had swum out to it many times.

  Jack broke into a run, stood for a second at the edge of the water, then ran in. “Come on!” he called back as he started to swim.

  A dog barked once. It was not a sound you often heard in the village. As Lily had observed to Paul, it was hard for a dog to make a living in Limena. She knew that the lawyer who owned the dog (whose name was Rosa) lived around here in a house set back in the pines. Rosa wandered freely around the village and into tavernas, paid respectful attention by people because she belonged to an educated man.

  “He walked right in with his clothes on,” Paul said admiringly.

  “Maybe he doesn’t know the difference between water and air,” Lily said.

  “If you’re going to be mean, why don’t you go on home?” Paul asked her in a hard voice.

  Jack stood up in the water, a dark shape except for his pale face. “It’s a good way to wash your clothes,” he called to them. Everything he does is good, he thinks, Lily told herself.

  When Jack joined them, she saw the bandage was gone. There was a painful-looking gash on his hand. For a moment Jack stared at it, touched it with a finger, then shook his head as though to put it out of mind. He looks after himself, Lily thought, and he does what he wants to. But he’s alone.

  “The water is great,” Jack said. “There’re sharks, you know. A woman was torn to bits near Kavalla last week. Let’s go look at that so-called restaurant.”

  “Nobody calls it a so-called restaurant,” Lily muttered.

  Rosa barked again. “I had a dog up in Panagia. But something got it in the night.”

  “What?” Paul asked.

  “There are things it’s best not to know,” Jack said dramatically. Lily wondered if his father had said that. She tagged behind them as they walked up to the shack.

  The woman closed up her shack at sunset. Lily had seen her put out the fire beneath the big pot and scatter the coals in the tile trench over which she fried fish and eggs. She would be home now, sleeping after her hard day’s work.

  “Can’t we do something else?” Lily asked. They didn’t answer her. She wished Rosa would come and chase them all away, but Rosa was such a mild creature she never chased anything. She was probably wagging her tail now, even as she barked, anticipating a social call.

  Jack sat down at a table. “Service, here!” he called in a haughty voice. Paul laughed. She wouldn’t be able to stop them from doing anything Jack thought up, Lily knew. She felt so troubled, thinking of the sleeping woman and feeling her own helplessness, that she almost wished she were home in Williamstown.

  She stayed outside beneath the ar
bor while Jack and Paul went into the kitchen. On the chair where Jack had sat a puddle of water glimmered faintly in the starlight; she thought she heard his shoes squishing as he moved about the shack. Why had she tagged along with the two of them? Watery Jack and her brother made silly by him. There was a thud as though something had been knocked over.

  “What a joint,” Jack said, coming out. He turned to Paul, a step behind him. “We have to do something that will let her know someone has been here. Night customers.”

  “Why?” asked Lily.

  “To show her,” he replied indifferently, looking out at the sea.

  “Show her what!” Lily demanded.

  “Oh, Lily!” Paul burst out.

  “Lily!” exclaimed Jack. “What a name!”

  “I’m going home,” Lily said.

  “We’ll turn the tables and chairs upside down—and take that pot into the woods—and why don’t you go home?”

  But Paul, to Lily’s relief, said, “No. She goes home when I do.” Jack stared at him, shrugged, and began to upend the tables. Paul turned over the chairs.

  “We’ll get the pot and hide it,” Jack said.

  Again Paul said, “No.”

  Jack drew back his foot and kicked up the sand. “Why not?” he asked challengingly.

  “She makes her living here,” Paul replied.

  “Living!” he snorted. He looked at the upended tables and chairs. “It isn’t enough,” he said flatly.

  “It is enough!” cried Lily. “You said you wanted her to know someone had been here. She will now. Paul, listen. Mom may get up and look for us. We ought to go.”

  “All right,” he said. She saw him glance quickly at Jack. She suspected he was worried that Jack would think he did what she told him. “I was about to say we have to go. I have to get up early,” he said.

  “It’s all the same to me,” Jack said quickly. “I have a long walk up the mountain. It’ll be dark as a pit.”

  “I’d be scared,” Paul said. He held out his hand as though to offer Jack something.

  “Of what?” Jack scoffed. “I’m not scared of anything. You have to be careful. That’s all. Some old English lady slipped on the pine needles up at the acropolis. And she fell into the sea. All she had to do was read the sign up there. People are stupid.”

  They left the shack and walked across the beach to the road. “You might step on a sleeping viper,” Lily said to Jack.

  “Not me. I’ve got eyes in the back of my head,” he said.

  “You don’t have them in your feet,” Lily snapped.

  Their footsteps echoed along the road. Lily heard the tinkle of a bell. Sheep must be moving somewhere above on the hill.

  “Do you ever go to villages on the other side of the island?” Paul asked.

  “We can go anywhere,” Jack replied. “We can go to Istanbul in a morning on my father’s motorcycle.”

  Lily imagined the motorcycle, snorting like a rhinoceros along the quiet mountain roads. She looked up at the star-strewn sky until she grew dizzy. What if, when she got home, she found her room torn up, the bedclothes on the floor, her books scattered beneath the bed, the lamp on its side? She’d be angry and, if she didn’t know who had done the damage, frightened. But perhaps the woman who owned the shack would only think—boys … boys up to mischief. Yet Lily was pretty sure that whatever the boys of Limena might do, they wouldn’t mess up a place where a person worked. Life was too difficult on the island. She didn’t know exactly when she’d begun to realize that, maybe watching the ancient woman painfully gathering up twigs in Stella’s yard.

  “Next time we’ll rent a boat,” Jack was saying. “There’s a sunken village an hour or two away from Limena. There was an earthquake years ago and a piece of the island sank down and took this little village with it. You row right over it, and you can look through the water at houses and a street and skeletons.”

  “Have you seen it?” Lily asked, interested despite herself.

  “I heard about it from a person I trust,” he answered loftily.

  “Your father?” she asked. Jack said nothing.

  “I’m going to Keramoti tomorrow with my friend Manolis and his father,” Paul said.

  “You didn’t tell me that,” Lily said.

  “I don’t tell you everything,” Paul said sharply. He turned away from her to Jack. “His father makes those big jars almost like the old ones you see in the museum. He sells them on the mainland.”

  Jack yawned. “Sounds boring,” he commented.

  “How are you going to let us know when we can row over that sunken village?” Paul asked timidly. “I’d better tell you where we live.”

  They had reached the crossroads where the stone farmhouse stood.

  “I know where you live,” Jack said. “I’ve been watching. I’ll leave a note under your gate.” He paused for a moment. “It might be hard to get a boat. So meanwhile we can meet at the bicycle place.”

  Quite suddenly, he turned his back on Paul and Lily and strode up the road toward the mountain and Panagia.

  “What a pill,” she said.

  “He is not,” Paul whispered fiercely. “You don’t know anything about him!”

  “What do you know?” she demanded.

  Paul looked up at the farmhouse. “You want to wake up everybody?”

  “Going into the water like that, with all his clothes on. What was he trying to prove?”

  “I don’t know,” Paul said uncertainly. “But he’s not a pill.”

  Lily sighed. Her shoes were full of sand.

  “Come on, let’s go home,” Paul said.

  “Could we go back by the Silenus Gate?” she asked. “Maybe the satyr will wink at us.”

  “It takes too long that way. And it’s superstition anyhow,” Paul said, walking on down the road to the village.

  “You went there with me before,” Lily protested. She had heard from Mr. Kalligas that the satyr would wink if you waited long enough. She and Paul had gone to look at him one lazy afternoon when most of the people in the village were taking their afternoon rest. The satyr looked out of weathered, crumbling stone, grinning as though he was glad he’d ruined himself with pleasures, his fat face half-hidden by tendrils of vine.

  The village was dark now. When they reached the shrine of Dionysus, Lily saw that the donkey and their garbage were gone. She went up the steps and touched a column. It was cool beneath her fingers.

  “Lily!” Paul said.

  “I feel bad,” she said quickly. “I want to go back and put the tables and chairs right.”

  “I won’t go,” he said at once.

  “I’ll go alone,” she said.

  He started up the sloping path to home. She caught up with him, tried to see his face.

  “It’s not bad—having someone besides just us, to talk English with,” he said.

  “I guess so,” she said halfheartedly. She understood there would be no use in arguing with him.

  They tiptoed into the house and went to the kitchen. “I’m going to bed,” Paul said. Lily turned on the light, an uncovered bulb hanging by a cord from the ceiling. It gave a faint ping, dimmed, and brightened again. The village generator wasn’t very dependable.

  “I’m going then,” she said.

  He went and peered into the sink, then turned and looked directly at her. “You don’t have the nerve,” he said.

  “I’ll go without nerve,” she said.

  He yawned hugely. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” he said. But he didn’t wait to see anything, just walked out of the kitchen without another word.

  Lily cut two pieces of bread and smeared them with honey. She would eat the sandwich when she reached the shack. It wasn’t so far after all, a little over a mile. Nothing would happen to her. That time she’d fallen off a wall into a patch of nettles people had run out of their houses to help her. The farmer in the stone house would hear her cry out if she saw a snake. It will be a brave thing to do, she thought. And Lil
y wanted to be brave.

  FOUR

  A faint, low wind—it seemed to strike her legs just below her knees—was the only sound Lily heard until her feet dislodged some pebbles near Dionysus’ shrine. The wind dropped then, and the silence heaved up. Soon she turned east and in a few minutes had left the houses behind her. The dark was like a cat’s thick fur pressing against her face.

  As long as there had been houses, she held back the fear that had first come to her the time she and Paul and their parents had walked through a grove of the oldest olive trees in Limena.

  Mr. Kalligas had taken them there to show them the remains of a Hellenistic cemetery. Gleaming white edges of marble tombs showed through the earth among clumps of lavender where bees hummed and fed. She and Paul had run ahead, bored with the way Mr. Kalligas would halt and, his hand pointing to a tomb, speak of a dozen things—his life in the British navy, the odd ways of tourists, his son and daughter far away, working at jobs in Germany.

  Paul had suddenly shouted something—it must have been her name, he was looking at her so intently, gesturing at a huge olive tree that was so twisted it seemed it would uncoil like an overtightened spring at any moment. As Lily stared at it, she saw emerge from its hollow trunk two enormous vipers writhing in the air.

  Her ankles went numb, then her legs.

  “I can’t move,” she muttered to Paul. He gripped her arms and rocked her back and forth as though she were a doll. “They’ve gone! They dropped back inside the tree. It’s okay, Lily. Lily!” After that she never looked at an olive tree without remembering what she had seen that day.

  Her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. Her hearing sharpened. She heard a multitude of sounds: cicadas like small knives being sharpened rapidly on steel, the movements of animals across brush and over stones, vagrant breezes rising among the pines and chestnuts on the hill. The air was pungent with the smells of resin and wild herbs and flowers. As she turned toward the beach at the crossroads, she could see ahead the hunched, shoulder-like arch of Herakles. She wished there were a replica she could always carry with her of the immense eyes, supposed to ward off evil, that were carved on a slab of stone near the Parmenon gate.