Morning Child and Other Stories

by Gardner Dozois

  Shivering, he manhandled the last end of the packing crate into position and began to nail, noticing that he was taking unusual, almost obsessive, care to make sure that the crate was closely and firmly sealed—again without knowing why—as though for some esoteric reason it needed to be airtight. A line from an old church song was running repeatedly through his head: Amazing grace…something something…that saved a wretch like me….

  When the job was done—and he took twice as long about it as he should have taken—but before he turned out the lights and went gratefully home, the workman took out a Magic Marker and on the side of the crate in large, somewhat shaky letters wrote:

  Mrs. Alma Kingsley

  Maple Hill Farm

  Eden Falls, Vermont

  “Gamma, there’s a truck with men outside!”

  Alma Kingsley put her Manhattan down on the kitchen counter—carefully, for her arthritis was acting up again—and said to her granddaughter, “Dear child, please do endeavor to refrain from calling me ‘Gamma’ in the future. It makes you sound most deplorably winsome.”

  Jennifer beamed and laughed, as she did at all of her grandmother’s more gravely sententious pronouncements. She didn’t know what they meant, but they all sounded funny to her.

  Meanwhile, however, the driver of the truck was leaning on his horn, and his assistant was at the tailgate, wrestling an enormous crate onto the lift. “Come, child,” Mrs. Kingsley said. “Get your coat. You may find this interesting.” She swept into the yard, little Jenny trailing after her like a hyperkinetic pull-toy.

  Outside, the day was cold, with a promise of snow in the air—a promise seconded by a sky as uniformly gray and featureless as an old blanket. Beyond the rocky, frozen fields, a fringe of trees marked the ravine separating Maple Hill Farm from the Laferrier place—though their farmhouse was not visible from here. They were isolated, alone among the Green Mountains, and that was the way Alma Kingsley preferred it. She couldn’t abide people tromping through here with their problems and their petty jealousies and ambitions. She’d put the world behind her more than a decade ago, when she gave up the editorship of New England magazine, and she liked it that way.

  As they crossed the yard, a flight of three military jets screamed by, only a couple of hundred feet away, flying very low to the ground, black and sleek and predatory as mechanical sharks. The immense noise of their passing seemed to shake the bones of the world, and everybody looked up, Jennifer waving excitedly, the two workmen staring at them expressionlessly for a moment and then looking away. The jets roared away across the fields, still hugging the ground, afterburners blazing, hopped up over a distant ridge, and were gone. They left a shocked, ringing silence in their wake.

  Alma Kingsley compressed her lips and kept walking. She didn’t like military planes flying across her land, but there was little point in complaining at a time like this, when she’d only be ignored. They were practicing for war—practicing flying low to the ground to avoid radar, maybe, or perhaps doing mock strafing runs on her barn or the delivery truck. They’d get to try their hand at the real thing soon enough, the way things were going.

  Jennifer was babbling happily to her about the planes, but she ignored her. The workmen nodded politely to her, not quite tugging the forelocks they didn’t have anyway, and she nodded stiffly back. No one spoke. She gestured for them to unload the big crate, and tugged an inquisitive Jennifer safely out of the way while the lift lowered it ponderously to the ground, and the men grunted it onto a hand-truck.

  Iago came bounding up from wherever it is that dogs go, barking furiously at the men, who ignored him. The huge black mongrel ran in frantic circles, from Mrs. Kingsley to the truck and back again, until she had to take him by the collar, swat him on the rump to get his attention, and—pointing firmly downward—order him to “Sit!” He obeyed unhappily, watching the unloading with a worried, disapproving expression.

  She supervised the delivery, directing the workmen to take the crate—carefully!—into the old barn, which had once held a few cows and maybe a horse but now had been snugged up and served for storage space. They set the crate down and produced hammers and pry bars, and, with a shriek and squeal of protesting nails, the front came off, revealing her newest acquisition, a perfectly lovely piece that she had spotted on her last trip down south and which (not coincidentally) was the spitting image of a dresser her Aunt Dorothy had owned when she was a child, and which she had always, through all the intervening decades, lusted after. It was a triumph of will, her owning this piece, and the fulfillment of a girlhood oath, and she savored it as such.

  “Now I’m going to want you to come back Tuesday, after the guests are gone, to place it in the house,” she admonished the driver. Then, to her granddaughter, “No, dear, we do not root about on the dirty floor like small, ill-mannered swine.” And again to the driver, “Tuesday, you understand, because I will not have you underfoot with company here. I’ll need to decide which furniture to shift, as well.”

  The driver nodded slowly and, after a pause, said “Yep.” There was a quiet censuriousness to his monosyllabic reply, as if it were an admonition to keep her words and reasons to herself. His assistant, chewing on something—either gum or “chaw,” probably the latter—jaws agape and about as attractive-looking as a cow at its cud, was wielding his pry bar with abandon, splintering the crate’s planks, threatening the absolutely priceless—and irreparable should it be damaged—patina of the wood. Until finally she could not bear to simply watch any longer.

  “Hand me that pry,” she snapped, and took it away from the gawking youth. There was a correct way to uncrate furniture; you sought out the joints and deftly, even daintily, applied leverage there, so that the whole thing popped open like a walnut shell under properly applied nutcrackers. Brute force was totally unnecessary. And so she would have shown him, only her arthritis chose that instant to seize up, and her hands became about as useless as clubs, and wouldn’t close all the way around the pry. She made a feeble pass or two at the wood, but it was hopeless—the tool slid in her hand, refusing to obey her. She couldn’t even hold the damnable thing.

  She looked up then, and in a timeless instant of glaring horror saw that the driver and his slack-jawed assistant were both staring her with pity in their eyes. Jennifer, thankfully, was too young to comprehend, and stood looking on with innocent curiosity.

  For a moment, she trembled with humiliation, and then, furiously, she flung the pry bar to the floor. Tears flooding her eyes, she gasped, “Oh, you do it!” and fled.

  Behind her, the men quietly, red-facedly, settled the dresser into a dry corner. When it was in place, the driver rubbed it down with his pocket bandana to remove any greasy fingerprints, and swiftly pulled each drawer out a half-inch and back in again, to make sure that none had seized up in transit. He was a conscientious man, and always gave his work this extra bit of care and attention. But he wasn’t anxious to linger, and it was entirely understandable that, in his haste, he didn’t fully re-close one drawer.

  It was dying.

  Hunger had driven it to the sharp edge of starvation. It was already seriously sick, or it would have abandoned the dresser immediately upon regaining the mental equilibrium that served it for consciousness. No matter how comfortably enclosed, how nurturing and psychologically sheltering a niche it was, the drawer had proven unsafe. But the long exposure to first one, then another truck’s electrical systems had weakened and disoriented it, and filled it with anguished glimpses of something that was once, or perhaps ought to be, but was now no more. It trembled shiveringly where it was, until the hunger rose up like a wall and forced it out.

  Moving as swiftly—as noiselessly—as shifting shadows, it scavenged the barn, a whirlwind of silent wrath, in search of the fire-of-life all living creatures carried within. Up in the rafters it took a clutch of bats, engulfing them before they could stir from their upside-down perches, and felt better for it, unsatisfied, but no longer so ravenous. Again and
again, it scoured the barn, knowing that there should be more prey, and bewildered by its absence.

  Frequently it passed by yellow cardboard boxes with grain spilling out from them and of course could not recognize them as bait stations filled with rat poison. But it quickly came to realize that the nourishment it must have would of necessity have to be found outside.

  Cautiously, it edged out into the farmyard, slipping easily under the barn door.

  And—fire! fear! pain! horror!—found its spatial sense overwhelmed by land that stretched far and away, featureless and with no place to hide, no sheltering masses or deep crannies into which to duck, nothing but rolling, exposed emptiness for hundreds of times its own length. Off to one side was the farmhouse, surrounded by evergreen shrubbery and a few ancient oaks, but it hardly spared that a glimpse in its panicked retreat back into the barn.

  Terrified, cold, and hungry, it returned to the half-open drawer to huddle shivering like a wounded animal, its mind looping furiously over and over again and still not easing out the jagged static terror. It waited, because it had to, waited for something to change, for food to come to it, or else for the hunger and need to grow so great that it would be forced out into the openness and emptiness where it currently dared not go.

  Mrs. Kingsley was tucking Jennifer into bed when the child’s father came up the drive. She carefully bundled the little girl in, first between a pair of flannel sheets, then under a thin electric blanket, and finally—to top it all off—pulling a double-wedding band quilt over all. The quilt was one her mother had made, in point of fact, and Alma Kingsley hoped to live long enough to pass it on to her granddaughter, when the child came of marrying age.

  “It’s snowing outside,” Jennifer said as her grandmother smoothed down the quilt. And then, in that flat, absolutely sincere way children have of presenting their fantasies, she said, “And I saw a Monster from my window.”

  It was then, in a kind of ironic counterpoint, that the El Dorado purred up the long drive. Jennifer sat up immediately. “Is that Daddy, Gamma?”

  Mrs. Kingsley smoothed the child down on the pillow, then turned to look out the window. A few small, bitter flakes of snow were falling from the black sky. They fell fast, a precursor of more to come. The El Dorado pulled off the drive, which was unnecessary, and onto the house’s front yard, which was worse. It was winter and the grass was dead, but, still, that kind of treatment hurt a lawn.

  “Yes, it’s your father,” she said. The car’s front door opened and the man himself spilled drunkenly out. “No, don’t get up. I am certain that your father would rather find you tucked angelically into bed than running about cater-wauling like a wild heathen Indian. Parents are peculiar in that respect.”

  Jenny giggled appreciatively, if somewhat sleepily. Outside, the El Dorado’s other front door swung open.

  Alma Kingsley slipped out of the room, snapping off the light. “I’ll leave the door open a crack,” she said. “Now you just lie there with your eyes closed, so when your father comes in to kiss you goodnight, you can open them and surprise him. Won’t that be fun?”

  The child nodded slowly, then twisted a bit to dig her cheek into the pillows.

  “Sweet dreams,” Mrs. Kingsley murmured.

  She went downstairs to confront the father.

  Iago came padding out from the kitchen as she threw a jacket over her thin shoulders against the terrible cold outside. He stood by her side, anxious with doggish worries of his own, as she flung the front door open. Desmond stood on the stoop, one arm flung around his roadhouse floozy’s neck, grappling vaguely for her breasts, and the other digging through his pockets—with equal incompetence—in search of the door key. He gaped up stupidly at her.

  “How dare you?” she whispered, so as not to wake the child. “Your own daughter is in this house!” The snow was falling more thickly now, slanting down fast and tightly together, filling the air. The air was so full of snowflakes you could choke on them. If you listened carefully, you could hear them hit, it was so quiet. A whispery, slithery sound.

  Desmond released the woman. He looked directly into Alma Kingsley’s eyes, possibly the first time he had done so since arriving at Maple Hill Farm. “You sanctimonious old bag,” he said quietly, also unwilling to disturb the child. “Stephanie died over a year ago. And you know something? A year is a long time to go without. You’d know that yourself, if you could remember that far back….”

  The floozy—her hair was that hideous aniline red that positively shrieked its artificiality—hung back, embarrassed. Or maybe not; she gaped up at them from the car, as vacant-faced as a cow. Mrs. Kingsley didn’t spare her a second glance.

  “I will not tolerate having the morals of a child corrupted within my house!” She moved to slam the door shut in his face.

  The father caught the door with one hand, and effortlessly held it open. He was a short, heavy man, with a dirty little fringe of beard. About as far from the Kingsley type as you could get, but a strong creature nevertheless. For an instant, she thought he was going to actually strike her, could almost feel the pain, the old bones cracking under porcelain skin…. But he didn’t. He just grinned, a mean, drunken grin. “I don’t like bringing Jenny up here twice a year,” he said. “I only did it for Stephanie’s sake, when she was alive, and now for Jenny. She likes being on your farm. But I’ll tell you this—either you let us in or this is the fucking last time you’ll ever see the child again.”

  She stood motionless in the doorway, losing heat to the out-of-doors while Desmond leered up at her. The snow was gathering already, a light powder-sugar frosting on the bare and frozen ground. The wind was already sweeping it to and fro. The air was cold on her face and it seemed to her that so long as she didn’t move, she could hold back the future, keep from ever having to move, keep from slipping into a situation where she had lost control, where she was defeated before she even began.

  At her heel, the dog whined plaintively. “Hush, Iago,” she said automatically. She moved aside.

  In the morning, she set out four plates for breakfast—the good Spode china, too, as pointed a bit of formality as it was possible to give a guest. She considered turning on the big plug-in radio on the kitchen counter, all the company she had most mornings as she cooked a solitary breakfast for herself, but there was a delicious quiet and serenity out here this morning, the snow now falling heavily but without sound close outside the window, like a slow fall of feathers, muting the daylight and filling it with shifting highlights, so that it was like being all alone in a bubble on the bottom of the sea. She hated to shatter that peacefulness with noise before it needed to be shattered; Desmond would be down and rattling the china with his booming, cheaply genial voice soon enough.

  Besides, there wouldn’t be much worth listening to on the radio anyway. Sometimes she could pull in WGBH from Boston in the mornings and listen to chamber music or string quartets, but for months now there’d been too much static from all the sunspot activity to tune it in clearly, and all she’d been able to get for the last few days were somberly hysterical talk-radio stations yattering on about the current international crisis, lines being drawn in the sand, frantic diplomatic efforts, troops massing at borders, military alerts, security advisories, leaves being canceled, aircraft carriers on the move, and so on—and she was sick to the teeth of that. All the familiar stuff, saber-rattling, jingoism, the vitriolic outpourings of suddenly acceptable racism toward people we were supposed to like only a few months before. Primate Aggressive Displays, chimps hooting at each other and beating their breasts until they had worked themselves up into enough of a lather to attack. It seemed like she’d been hearing this stuff all her long life, one conflict after another, one enemy after another, and she was sick of it. Let them have their war and leave her alone, here in her own kitchen. She didn’t have to listen to them talk about it!

  “Hi, Gamma!” It was Jennifer, down first, chirpy-happy as usual, practically bouncing with enthusiasm. Rememb
er when you had that much energy? Mrs. Kingsley thought wryly. Remember when you had a fourth of it? She let Jennifer help by setting out the silverware and napkins, while she fried up eggs and sausages and piles of French toast, all in an iron skillet with lots of Crisco.

  The second one up was her son-in-law’s roadhouse pick-up. She slumped down on a chair, eyes bleary under smeared makeup. Her hair was done in that kind of razor-cut where you can never tell if it’s brushed or not. “Morning,” she mumbled. She picked up a fork and stared at it, turning it over and over in her hand, as if she’d never seen Grand Baroque silver before in her life, and were searching for a clue to its purpose.

  Sliding breakfast in front of her, Mrs. Kingsley was struck by the horrible realization that this young chippie was somebody’s daughter, and probably came down to the breakfast table in exactly the same sullen way every morning, with grumbled greeting and averted eyes. Maybe she hadn’t even noticed yet that she hadn’t made it home the night before.

  “It snowed two feet last night,” the child announced. “Gamma says maybe it’ll snow all day today, right Gamma?” Then, when Gamma didn’t reply, “My name’s Jennifer, what’s yours?”

  The woman stared at Jennifer, as if the girl had been suddenly and without warning plopped down out of the sky before her. “Candy,” she said at last.

  The child’s father chose that moment to make his appearance. He lifted Jennifer out of her chair, hugged her, and held her up in the air while she squealed. Then he peered out the window. “Still coming down, eh?” He whistled. “Look at that drift over by the barn! Jesus!”

  Desmond was wearing jeans and a green football jersey with white sleeves and a double-zero numeral on the back. Bits of lint were stuck in his beard; it would never have occurred to him to brush it before breakfast. He took a sip from the coffee cup that had been awaiting him for the past ten minutes, ever since she’d heard himself clumping about overhead, and made a face. “Could you warm this thing úp for me?”