The Changeling

by Joy Williams

She looked about the room for something she might have written upon the night before. There didn’t seem to be anything. She sat on the bed and looked at the screen in front of the fireplace. Hammered into the brass of the screen were hunters shooting birds out of trees. She screen shone unevenly. The hunters’ mouths and eyes were clogged with whitened wax. Aaron, the hunter, had liked the motif. But in the end it was he who had been the hunted. God was the final hunter, lovingly hunting.

  Pearl peered over the screen. A child’s lined writing pad lay in the ashes. She pushed back the screen and picked it up. She had written upon it in crayon. The letters were crude and wavering.

  I PEARL BELIEVE THAT MY SON SAMUEL

  Pearl paused. Perhaps she should straighten herself out with just one drink before reading further. Her hand shook. It had been an enlightened civilization centuries ago, had it not, which instead of punishing witches punished those who believed in witches? She had never been punished. She had never been punished enough.

  IS NOT A HUMAN CHILD HE WITH THE OLD WOMAN WHOSE HE IS

  Pearl’s hand felt numb. In a way she still felt drunk, with her heart beating muddily, everything turning and falling. She looked at the words, rising.

  INTO ANIMALS CHILDS DO NOT FEEL THIS HAPPENING BUT I SEE

  It was so muggy in the room. The sky was milky and sullen. Seven, the clock said. Noah had brought the animals into the ark by sevens. A clock downstairs rang six times but that was the old ship’s clock. Pearl dropped the paper with more distaste than horror. The nauseous intrigues of the drunk! The suspicions and complaints! It was absolute gibberish. The wild ugly words trailed off into a thick straight crayoned line. Like a heart stopping on a cardiogram. Or a mind. The death of the mind.

  Perhaps she had at last gone too far. Her brain had become shrunken and inflamed. She was hallucinatory and hateful and mean-spirited. She had always been suspicious of her Sam (and his name had never been Samuel, not ever, it just showed how drunk she’d been to write that), she had never been a decent mother to him, her only child, her only tie to life, really. He had always been sad and quiet and unknown to her but that was her fault alone. And he had always seemed different from the others, but why indeed shouldn’t he be? Some deep part of him was probably still cold with the shock of that terrible plane crash. Even an infant has to be affected by a moment of horror, a moment when all around in a stinking swamp people were metamorphosing into so much meat and probate.

  TO BE CLOSER TO GOD TO BE ANIMALS

  What a dangerous woman she was! She crumpled the paper disgustedly and then tore it into pieces. She went back to the bed and lay upon it with a sigh. She lay with her eyes open for when she closed them she felt sick. She hated the night, the nightly battle with terror and time, but she survived it once more. This time just barely, she thought. And now it was day, a new day, a birth day. Sam was the gentlest, the most modest of all the children. To cloak him in her sickness, to make him the instrument of her disease . . . She groaned. No wonder the child had found refuge in his grandmother. Any fantasy would be preferable to Pearl’s own.

  She remembered once seeing the old woman on the beach. It had been the only time on the island she had seen her without Sam and she had been worried at first at seeing her there, sitting on the beach, on the shore among the stones with the sun going in and out of the clouds, making her first light and then dark. The old woman had seemed a thing eternal, come to life, a being who knew all things, the source of all Pearl lived with.

  “Pearl,” a child cried from the hall, “come for waffles, you must, Uncle Thomas said so.”

  Pearl padded out, her bare foot striking a half-eaten peach one of them had left by the door.

  They were eating out on the patio. The women wanted to enjoy the last of the fading colors of the summer garden. Two large glass and wrought-iron tables were set with jugs of milk and syrup and bowls of fruit. Jesse was watering the flower beds that lay behind the brick border that Les had laid years before. He would water the flowers for a while and then just run the hose on the bricks. Then he would flip the hose up into the oak overhead, casting out birds. Then he would sprinkle it on his toes.

  “Don’t waste that water,” Miriam called, “the well will run dry. That storm didn’t soak.”

  “I am reading Hamlet, Uncle Thomas. I am enjoying it, I think,” Peter said.

  Thomas stood with a bright orange beach towel around his neck. He had just come up from the beach. He flipped his long hair back with his hands. Pearl felt droplets of water fall upon her arm.

  “Do you know why it was that Hamlet chose not to commit suicide?” Thomas asked.

  “So he wouldn’t fall into the cocoa,” Ashbel giggled.

  “Dope,” Franny said.

  Peter shook his head.

  Thomas said, “Because Hamlet realized that suicides go to their death in triumph.”

  Ashbel giggled again. “Why did the elephant stand on the marshmallow?”

  “Dope,” Franny said. “You think every riddle has the same answer. Besides that, you tell jokes backwards.”

  Tracker was pretending to fence with a garden rake.

  “How now! A rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!”

  Lincoln looked at him with loathing. Tracker caught his glance and blushed. He went over to harass his brother Timmy. “Look, Tim,” he said, “I’m gonna take off your thumb.” He folded the little boy’s hand and appeared to pluck off his left thumb between his thumb and forefinger of his own right hand.

  Timmy squeaked.

  Lincoln muttered something unpleasant.

  “Oh please, don’t do that,” Pearl said to him. She hated the way Lincoln talked about his children.

  He looked at her indulgently. “Children have no awareness of being disliked, Pearl. They can’t relate another person’s hatred of them to themselves as they have no idea what their selves are.” He yawned. His belly strained against his tennis jersey.

  Miriam hovered over the blackened waffle iron. A fragrant stack of waffles was accumulating beneath a nickel-plated warmer.

  “Franny,” she said, “pick some flowers for Mommy, will you, and put them on the table.” She sighed and wiped her hands on her apron. “August is the saddest month,” she said. “Everything is fading.”

  “Thy young glories

  Leaf and bud and flower

  Change cometh over them

  With every hour.”

  Her voice was gentle and quavering. She plopped more batter on the grid.

  “Transmutation is nature’s law,” Thomas said. To Pearl, he smiled. “How are you feeling this morning?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, just fine,” she said, smiling. “Where are Joe and Sweet?” she asked, smiling and smiling.

  “They overslept, I suppose,” Thomas said.

  “I wish I was pretty,” Franny lamented, yanking at the flowers in a careless way.

  “It is not for human beings to be pretty, Franny,” Thomas said. “We have language and intelligence, which has to be enough. We must leave the pretties to the animals.”

  Timmy pounced at a lizard near Lincoln’s foot, jarring the table.

  “In one of the Greek accounts of creation,” Thomas went on, “the god Epimetheus was given the responsibility for distributing the ingredients of biological creation among all the creatures. He lavished everything upon the wild animals, beautiful fur and feathers, gracefulness of form, strength and agility. By the time he came to man, he had run out of desirable characteristics. Man was left with just weakness and ugliness. It was his brother Prometheus who gave man dominance to keep him from shame.”

  “I don’t mind being ugly,” Tracker said, “but I won’t be weak.”

  Lincoln looked at him in surprise. “Oh, oh, oh,” he said. “We’d better watch out now.” He looked at Timmy. “What are you doing down there?” He nudged him with his foot.

  Pearl, with trembling hand, put on a pair of sunglasses. Everything looked yellow. She took them off again. Hell was a place
of learning, a place where trees give shade, dew falls and grass grows . . . She casually gripped her knees. The children ran about the patio, beautiful and happy. She felt like a lump amid them, an outrage. And the other adults even worse. Yahoos kept by wild horses . . .

  “It’s going to be a hot one,” Shelly said. She was pregnant again. She wore a necklace from which dangled a gold arrow pointing downward and the letters BABY. She hadn’t gained much weight. She was still very early on. She poured cream upon her strawberries.

  “Look here, Jane,” Thomas said, “without calling this a pitcher tell me what it is.” Thomas was always doing this sort of thing with the smaller children. Jane stared soberly at the pitcher. Timmy, scrambling up, knocked his head against the side of the table and knocked the pitcher over.

  “Goddamn it!” Lincoln shouted.

  Thomas laughed. “That’s very good, Tim. Tim has it. When there are no names, the world is not classified in limits and bounds.”

  Timmy’s jaws expanded sideways. He smiled. He lapped the cream from his arm.

  “Pearl, have some coffee! You’re shaking.”

  She looked at Thomas worriedly, then absentmindedly cut into her waffle, which was almost afloat with syrup. She put her fork down. In the oak tree she saw Peter’s large, pale shape.

  “Pearl, Pearl,” Thomas admonished her. He spoke her name stolidly, like a woodsman axing a tree.

  Sam sat some distance from her in an iron chair. He looked at each of them in turn with his patient, yellow eyes. Pearl watched him. His eyes were pitiless and serene, like his grandmother’s. Thomas called her name again. He pushed a white mug of coffee toward her fingers.

  I have to stop this, Pearl thought. I’m going mad. Everything was turning white. Her white nails were gnawed and ugly upon the smooth white mug. She had let one of the children paint them. There was the story, wasn’t there? about the English-woman, who could have been French or Dutch, or even a wealthy American, with one of those wealthy purses or belts or eyeglass cases that says upon it “shit shit shit shit shit,” and this woman, whoever she was, was mad but she had been cured of it and they had asked her what it had been like in there, in madness, and she’d said, the angels are white, they give off the most amazing light . . .

  “Please,” Pearl said.

  The adults stared at her. The children clamored around. Franny was picking the Queen Anne’s lace which grew raggedly in the cracks between the bricks. She spread her fingers beneath one and sang:

  “Mama had a baby and its head popped off !”

  The flower sailed into Pearl’s lap, where she looked at it.

  “Please what, Pearl?” Shelly said.

  Pearl sipped at the coffee. “Thank you, rather,” she said. It was amazing that they couldn’t see what was happening. She looked at the children’s dark and lovely and thoughtless little faces. And then again, with great effort, as though she were hauling herself out of a well, she thought, I must stop this. She prayed for something utilitarian and magical to help her out of the well. Reality is so confusing. The senses are such bad witnesses. She could trust none of them.

  Sam smiled at her.

  Thomas was talking about sea turtles. “The most astonishing thing,” he said. “I saw it once in Florida. Hundreds of newly hatched turtles unerringly making their way to the sea beneath the terrible shadows of the gulls.”

  “The classic example,” Lincoln mumbled around mouthfuls of food, “of the spontaneity of the quest for the not-yet-seen.”

  Florida, Pearl thought. So that’s what Thomas had been doing there. He hadn’t been sitting around the hospital plotting ways to throttle her at all. He’d been on the beach, like any tourist, watching tiny flippered things gobbled up on their way back home. Things sometimes were more proper than they seemed.

  “We must go into town today,” Miriam said, “and get the children their presents.”

  Pearl straightened in her chair. “Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes, what should I get, do you think?”

  All very well to speak of ordinary things, she thought. But the sun was so hot and her soul was crying out for drink. It was the children’s birthday. And something terrible was about to happen.

  “The boys get knives,” Lincoln said abruptly.

  “Knives! Whatever for?”

  “To cut things with”—Lincoln laughed—“to cut things off with.”

  “Oh really,” Pearl said with relief, grimacing, “how trite.”

  Lincoln grinned. He lathered butter on a waffle and began to eat again. He had gained seventy-five pounds since he met Shelly. He was vast and smooth-skinned. Pearl thought of his terrible weight upon Shelly, pressing her down.

  Shelly said, “We’re all going into town later this morning, Pearl, if you’d like to come with us. All the adults I mean . . .”

  “Town?” Pearl said. “Oh, I don’t know about . . . town.”

  “It might be the last good day of the summer. The signs are for an early fall this year.”

  “Yes, Pearl,” Thomas said, “it would do you good. Let the children fend for themselves.”

  The children around Pearl smiled at her encouragingly. They possessed a sympathetic and profound belief in her manner, which is not to say that they thought for a moment that this manner offered useful truths to them.

  “Come to town with us,” Thomas insisted.

  “All right,” she said. To the children, she said, “I’m off with the grownups today.”

  They giggled and patted her arm.

  “We’ll leave in an hour,” Thomas said.

  After breakfast, Pearl wandered down to the pool, followed by some of the children. The slanted roof of the children’s stone house rippled in the sun.

  The ground around the pool was dark and a little slippery. A lizard was resting in the head of the sculpture. Pearl could see its slender ocher tail.

  “Look at me, Pearl!”

  Timmy ran from behind her and somersaulted into the water, the surface furling back like a flower to receive him. Down he went to the very bottom. He held the bottom with his hands. The water swept around him there. It hardly looked like Timmy there. He shot up, triumphant. Water ran in long flat streams down his cheeks.

  Ashbel said, “Our Mommy made cakes for us all. They’re chocolate and jam. We can eat them all tonight.”

  “Good,” Pearl said.

  “She’s not sneaking any vegetables into them or anything. Just chocolate and sugar and jam. We can eat them all tonight.”

  “Good,” Pearl said.

  Pearl saw a large dark shape in the sky next to the top story of the house. It was dark and yet at the same time seemed lighter than the sky. It was dense and black. It was outside of Sam’s room.

  She didn’t ask the children if they saw it too. What if they didn’t? She would be all alone.

  A winged light beating on the windows of her little Sam’s room. On heavy wings, it left.

  “What are you children going to be doing today?” Pearl wondered.

  “We’ll play and hunt and eat and hide,” Tracker said.

  “It will be like always,” Jane said.

  “It’s nice here when there’s just us,” Tracker said.

  “And Pearl,” Ashbel said. “Just us and Pearl. That’s the nicest.” He curved his fingers around her wrist.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Pearl rode in silence with the others to the dock. Shelly and Lincoln. Miriam and Thomas. The water was dark, the air warm and still.

  There was talk of a tropical storm building up several hundred miles off the Outer Banks. They might get more rain tonight or tomorrow.

  Pearl looked into the water. A kingdom of creatures there. Discolored froth pressed against the sides of the dock.

  “Ughh,” she said, “I hate those bubbles, particularly when the wind brings them up on the lawn.”

  “Once it was believed that sea froth could impregnate a woman,” Thomas said.

  She blushed, annoyed. “The things they
had to worry about in those days!”

  “What days were those?” Thomas asked.

  “Oh,” she said, “imagine. Everyone a neurotic. And no psychiatrists. No gin.”

  Thomas smiled. His teeth were white but his breath was slightly bad. He wore a cotton shirt that was very white.

  Lincoln, in a desultory way, was trying to net a crab. He jabbed the pole down. The pressure of the current pulled the net sideways. The crab escaped into the image of a rock which Lincoln threw disgustedly away.

  About a mile offshore, they saw a deer.

  “Oh, the poor thing!” Shelly exclaimed.

  The animal’s head went under for an instant and then resurfaced.

  “I’m so glad the children aren’t here to see this. How sad this is,” Shelly said.

  There was nothing that could be done. The launch was pulled past. The pretty animal’s uncomprehending head receded.

  Pearl looked back at the shape in the water. It had no sense of its needs, its strangeness, its goneness. It wanted the sea merely, the cold, inaccessible depths. Pearl could understand that. People changed after death, of course, they passed into the interests of another life. It all went on and on and on. We are like salamanders dancing in the fire.

  “She looks so determined,” Shelly persisted. “Do you think she might make shore?”

  “It,” Lincoln said irritably. “Animals are referred to as ‘it.’”

  Thomas said, “You know, ten or twelve people drown off this town each summer.”

  “It sounds more like a matter of statistics than of death,” Lincoln said. He giggled and shrugged.

  Pearl leaned back against the boat cushions. The canvas warmed her back. She stretched out her legs and noticed Thomas glance at them.

  For quite some time now, Pearl hadn’t been able to understand where she had seen the resemblance. But it had certainly been her impression, years before, that Thomas looked like Walker. Perhaps it was that she was just remembering Walker less well. She kept seeing him in a green smoking jacket, for example, that she knew he never had. And his style of lovemaking had seemed inappropriate to her past responses for years now. He would brush against her mind like a moth against a bulb and she would try to think about him. How did he comb his hair . . . how did he help a child into a boat . . . ? She would try to think of the brief time they shared before Sam was born. But of course one never shares time with anyone. Not even now, this instant now, when she was staring into Thomas’s eyes. This moment in the sunlight, with the other shore approaching, meant nothing. We find the ones with whom we can share nothing, that nothing not being time. There Thomas sat, hunched forward slightly, his eyes smiling slightly, massively present and at ease, utterly familiar to her and completely unknown.