by John Smelcer
Lucy told her story, slowly, the way elders tell such stories, holding to certain words, allowing time to absorb them, to discover the meaning.
“It was dark in the beginning. Everything was dark. People lived in the blackness, having never seen the world or one another. Raven had heard of a chief who, it was said, had three boxes of treasure. One box contained the stars, another held the moon, and the largest, most ornately carved box held the sun.”
By now the boys were listening carefully, looking at Lucy. Noah placed another biscuit on the end of his stick and held it above the flames.
“Raven flew to the village and watched from a tree. When he saw the chief’s daughter come down to the creek to drink water, Raven turned himself into a pine needle, which fell into the creek and floated downriver toward the girl, who dipped her wooden ladle into the fresh water. She did not notice the small, green pine needle floating on the surface when she took a long drink, swallowing Raven inside her.”
By now Elijah, too, had placed another biscuit on his stick and held it at just the right height above the red and yellow flames. Simon studied his biscuit. It was almost ready.
“The chief’s daughter became pregnant. A month later she gave birth to a baby boy, which was really Raven in disguise. She loved her son, and the chief loved his grandson. The baby quickly grew into a young boy, who cried and cried to play with the box containing the stars. Tired of his crying, the chief let his grandson have it, warning him not to open it. But as soon as Raven received the box he opened it, releasing the stars, which flew up through the smokehole and settled into the black sky.”
Shadows cast by the fire flickered against the walls and the high roof of the old, dilapidated barn.
“The chief was angry that the boy had lost his treasure, but he loved his grandson; so when he cried to play with the box containing the moon, the old man gave in and gave him the carved cedar box. As quickly as he had released the stars, Raven opened the lid and freed the moon, which rose through the smokehole and took its place in the night sky. Now, for the first time, people could almost see the outlines of the world in which they lived.”
Lucy paused to check her own biscuit. It was light brown, which meant that it was nearly ready.
“Having released the stars and the moon, Raven turned his eyes toward the largest box, the box of daylight. He cried and cried, but the chief would not give it to him. That night, when the whole village slept, Raven turned himself back into a black bird, crept up to the great box, and lifted the heavy lid. As the sun began to rise up through the smokehole, the chief awoke and tried to catch his treasure. But the sun flew into the sky, and the whole world was bright. For the first time, people could clearly see mountains and rivers and trees and each other. Raven flew away while the chief sat on his empty box, sad that he had lost his treasures, sadder still that he had lost his beloved grandson, who was nowhere to be found. Just then, a ray of sunlight fell through the smokehole, and the chief held his hand in the light, felt its warmth, and knew that it was good and that it was meant to be shared with the world.”
Lucy smiled when she finished telling her gift, her small cheeks streaked with tears.
None of the boys spoke.
Outside, dark clouds lightened. The wind died altogether. Gently, without a sound, snowflakes began to fall. And somehow—miraculously—in the stillness of the new day, amid the quiet of the barn, the Spirit of the Season came and sat beside the fire.
Christmas had arrived after all.
Chapter Ten
THE FEMALE APPARITION standing at the far end of the otherwise empty gang showers in the boys’ locker room was the second adult ghost Elijah had ever seen. She was wearing ragged clothes, a pair of yellowish leather moccasins with beaded floral patterns on the top, and her hair was long and black with strands of gray streaking through the dark mass. She didn’t look too old. Maybe mid-forties, Elijah thought, though he couldn’t really tell. One thing was for sure: the woman was Indian. The odor of wood smoke filled the shower room. After looking around, the ghost floated into the locker area, full of boys changing into their clothes, some still standing around naked or in their underwear, one boy snapping a wet towel in the direction of a nearby friend.
Elijah followed the apparition, a towel wrapped around his waist. She hadn’t noticed him, which was strange, he thought, since other ghosts always seemed so attracted to him. Instead, she drifted through the noisy room looking for something . . . or someone. She even stood on tiptoes to look over one closed door of a toilet stall. Elijah had seen Billy Tall Mountain heading into the stall a few moments earlier.
Elijah laughed aloud.
Good thing Billy couldn’t see her.
After searching the room, the ghost with gray-streaked hair seemed to pour out a half-open window. Elijah watched as she crossed the broad, snow-covered lawn toward the administration building, passing through two teachers walking out the front door.
Elijah saw her again twice that week, wandering the halls of his dormitory one night and looking around the carpentry shop, even checking beneath the table saw and behind the wood planer.
“PLEASE TURN to page seventy-five,” announced Miss Creger, the new history teacher, quickly turning the pages of her own book.
At just that moment, a loud siren began to wind up until it reached a constant shriek, announcing a Civil Defense drill, a precaution in the event of nuclear attack.
“Everyone! Everyone!” the teacher shouted, clapping, trying to be heard over the piercing wail. “Please assume the proper position under your desks.”
All the students in the classroom scooted out from their chairs and crawled under their desks, tucking in legs and arms until each was huddled, turtle-like, lest any part be exposed to a nuclear blast or radiation. Lucy hated the drills. She knew, even at fourteen, that such a posture was futile. She had seen black-and-white photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a book she found in the library. The rubble in those photographs included no desks, no chairs, no buildings—only rubble, only the suggestion, the outlines, of where buildings once stood.
This was a stupid exercise, she thought.
The students waited beneath the false safety of their desktops until the siren ceased and the headmaster announced the all-clear on the intercom. A few minutes later, the classroom having returned to normal, a student office helper poked his head in the door and handed Miss Creger a note.
The two exchanged whispers.
Miss Creger seemed shaken. She was young and beautiful and thin. Wellington was her first teaching position. She seemed to enjoy her job, to enjoy teaching children. That the students at Wellington were Indian didn’t seem to matter to her. She even shared with her students something of her personal life—how she spent her summers, jokes her sister shared with her in her letters. She told them how she came to be at Wellington. For her, it wasn’t a last-option choice; it’s where she wanted to teach. She had applied during her last semester at a teacher’s college in northeast Missouri. She was elated when she received her letter of appointment from the headmaster. During the weekends, Miss Creger usually drove into town to spend time with friends she had made in the area and to dance at the local gathering places. She loved to dance. The students liked her fine. She was a good teacher and, to the students, a real person, someone from whom they could learn and to whom they could openly respond, which was a rare thing at the school.
When the office helper left, Miss Creger turned toward the class, looking for a face. “Lucy,” she said with a smile. “Can you come up front, please?”
Lucy wondered why she was being called to the front of the class. She wondered what the note said. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She was sure of it, at least mostly sure.
Miss Creger took Lucy aside and spoke in a low voice, trying to maintain her cheerfulness, though Lucy could see that the woman was forcing her smile, that she hid
something behind the upturned corners of her pretty lips.
“Lucy, you need to go speak to the counselor. Take this note with you,” she said, patting Lucy on the shoulder as she led her out the door, closing it softly as Lucy walked down the center of the long, empty hall.
As she walked along, slowly, hearing her footsteps echoing against the polished-cement floor and block walls, Lucy studied the note. Nothing in its handwritten contents explained why she was being called. It simply stated that “Lucy Secondchief is to report to the counselor immediately.” When she arrived, Lucy stood outside the dark wood-and-glass door for several moments, holding the note in both hands, reading it again and again, as if she had missed something.
Finally, she knocked lightly.
“Come in,” said a man’s voice from inside.
Lucy opened the door and stood in the entrance. A man in a brown suit with a brown-and-yellow-striped tie was sitting in the corner of a beige-colored cloth sofa, holding a piece of pale-yellow paper in one hand. The paper was thin and showed the effects of several folds. It looked almost transparent, and Lucy could make out lines of typed script.
“Are you Lucy Secondchief?”
“Yessir.”
“Come in, Lucy. Sit down,” he continued, leaning to his left and patting the surface of the sofa with his left hand.
Lucy walked over to the sofa, looking around the small office and at the framed diplomas and certificates hanging on the walls. Against one wall were several shelves full of books. They all seemed neatly ordered, fitted precisely into their spaces. She had never been in this office before, nor had she ever seen the man around school.
Lucy sat down, nervously, still holding the handwritten note.
The man picked up a mug of hot coffee from a little table just to the right of the sofa, sipping twice before replacing the cup in the center of its coaster. He cleared his throat before speaking.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news, Lucy. Your mother is dead. She died last week. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this. The telegram arrived only today. These things take time.”
He held up the piece of paper.
“Is there anyone you’d like to call?” he asked, reaching for a pad and pencil.
At first, Lucy did not understand the words. After several moments she realized she was not breathing. Then she breathed. Then she understood. There was no one else. Lucy had no parents now, no family at all. She was alone.
“No sir,” she finally replied.
After a brief pause, the man said, “You may go to your dorm room, if you’d like. You’re exempt from classes for the rest of the day.” Then, looking at his wristwatch, he added, “I have another student coming in any minute, so if that’s all,” he said, standing up and extending his right hand to pat Lucy on the shoulder. “I wish you luck. Everything will be okay.”
Lucy left the office. She didn’t want to sit in her dorm room alone, so she went back to class. On entering, she didn’t look at Miss Creger. She didn’t look at anyone, though everyone was looking at her. Instead, she spent the rest of the hour staring out the window, not hearing a single thing, not even the bell announcing lunch time. After the other students had left for the cafeteria, Miss Creger sat down at the desk next to Lucy, who was still staring out the window.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” she said softly.
Lucy didn’t respond at first, but the teacher could see the little girl’s eyes well with tears. Finally, she reached for Miss Creger’s hand. For several minutes the two sat looking out the window.
Miss Creger broke the silence.
“Tell me about your mother.”
Throughout the entire lunch hour, Lucy held hands with her teacher and told the story of her life with her mother. She talked about how she had lost her father, how she and her mother had struggled. She talked about their bedtime routine and about rabbits and the day the men came and took her away. Through tears, and almost unable to speak, Lucy described the last time she saw her mother—running behind the black car, slipping and falling in the mud. At times as she told the story, Lucy laughed and smiled. But mostly, she sobbed, her whole body trembling.
LUCY WAS QUIET and withdrawn for the rest of the week. Even after. Not even her friends could bring her out of her melancholy, though they tried. Lucy hardly ate. She went to bed early, crying herself to sleep. Sometimes, she stood in the shower for long stretches, momentarily comforted by the reassuring embrace of hot water.
Ever since her arrival, Lucy had seen Wellington as the place, the thing, that had taken her away from her mother, and now it seemed that it had taken her mother away from her. She was empty inside, and none of her friends could help.
Some wells are bottomless.
One Saturday, after she had finally stopped crying, Lucy reluctantly joined her friends ice skating on the pond at the lowest portion of the school grounds, beyond the old maintenance building where Simon had endured his punishment. She had borrowed a pair of skates—a size too big—from a girl who was sick with a cold. Slowly, with a kind of methodical certainty, she laced on the skates and glided, after a fashion, to the edge of the icy activity.
A stream along the woods at the edge of the school property emptied into the pond at the near end, swelling its sides and filling its depth. At the far end, the stream poured over a kind of spillway, and then resumed its course through the county for another sixteen miles, passing through farms and two small towns. Both pond and stream were frozen over, providing a sizable area for skating.
Several children were out on the pond, including a few girls in regular shoes, but mostly boys in hockey skates. Only a few students owned skates, but they took turns. Several boys were playing hockey with makeshift equipment: two-by-fours for sticks and a rock for a puck; and a few girls twirled and twirled in white-shoed figure skates. Most of the children just stood around talking, while others were running and sliding across the ice in their street shoes.
The pond was quite deep from the middle toward the earthen dam that held back the water to a depth of seven or eight feet. At the far end of the dam, near where the stream left the pond over the spillway, signs warned, “Danger! Thin Ice.”
Noah, Elijah, and Simon were busy racing one another on borrowed skates, when Lucy wobbled unsteadily away. No one noticed her skating slowly and deliberately toward the signs.
After easily winning the sprint, Simon looked around for Lucy, who usually applauded the winner. She wasn’t standing where they had left her. He looked across the pond, searching for her amid the many boys and girls skating or playing or standing around talking and laughing. Noah was the first to see her.
“Over there!” he yelled, pointing to the far side of the pond, toward the warning signs, where he could see a dark hole in the ice, thin ice fragments, glass-like, floating on the surface, still swelling from some recent motion in the water, just where he no longer saw Lucy.
All three boys sped to the hole. Noah and Simon stopped where the ice became too thin to support their weight, but Elijah kept going, the surface splintering spider-web-like beneath him. Other students, turning in the direction of the commotion, skated or ran or slid toward them, curious and afraid.
Elijah dropped onto his belly and pulled himself to the very edge of the dark opening, his arms and legs spread, distributing his weight as evenly as possible so that, he hoped, he wouldn’t break through.
Noah turned to the nearby students. “Give me your coats!” he shouted, pulling off his own. Several boys handed him their winter jackets. Noah started tying them together by their sleeves. Seeing what his friend was doing, Simon helped. They quickly tied a ten-foot lifeline made of multicolored coats.
More students approached, standing on the safe side of the signs. Some were asking who fell in, others wondered how Lucy could have missed the signs, and several girls stood with their hands pressed ag
ainst their face, anxious, beginning to cry.
Elijah reached into the icy water with one arm, shoulder deep, feeling around for Lucy.
“Lucy! Lucy!” His frantic voice called over and over.
Noah and Simon tried to inch closer to the hole, but every time they did, they could hear the sharp snapping of ice, could see fracture lines race across the surface. They stepped back.
Finally, his arm and hand freezing, Elijah felt something and pulled it up. A mat of long, black, gray-streaked hair floated to the surface. He reached into the mass of hair with both hands to lift her out when the head rolled up from beneath the dark water. Instead of Lucy’s face, it was the ghostly face of the Indian woman he had seen around the school. Her eyes were wide open, pupiless, gray-white and lifeless. Terrified, Elijah recoiled, releasing his hold. The head and hair sank, returning into the darkness. Elijah was terrified, afraid to reach again into the black water, certain that the ghost wanted to drag him beneath the ice.
Just then, a head again floated to the surface, its long, black hair floating like seaweed. Elijah cautiously reached for the head, ready to pull back in an instant. He grabbed a handful of black hair and slowly pulled. This time Lucy’s face emerged to greet him, her eyes closed, her skin chalky white. Elijah was sure she was dead, that the ghost had lured her to the thin ice and drowned her. He tried to pull her from the water. But the ice broke from the added weight, and Elijah plunged into the freezing pond with Lucy, splashing with his one free hand, trying to stay afloat while holding on to his friend at the same time. The water was so cold that he almost couldn’t breathe.
Noah tossed Elijah one end of the rope of coats and yelled, “Grab hold!”
Simon cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Grab the rope!”
Noah tossed it three times before Elijah could reach it. Then, as he held on to Lucy, Simon and Noah pulled. Inch by inch, they dragged Elijah and Lucy out of the water and across the surface until they were safely onto thick ice.