The Obsidian Blade

by Pete Hautman

  But the excitement faded over the next months when no other passenger pigeons were seen. Lorna Gingrass had apparently killed the last — and only — pair. Hopewell House once again closed its doors, and the passenger pigeon story faded from the national memory.

  The Reverend chuckled, a sound Tucker hadn’t heard in weeks.

  “I sometimes think those two birds were Hopewell’s last gasp,” he said. “It’s been downhill for this community ever since.”

  Tucker didn’t want to talk about pigeons. He wanted to talk about his uncle.

  “Do you ever talk to him?” he asked. “Uncle Curtis?”

  His father’s smile flattened. “I failed Curtis, son. But some things, like the passenger pigeons, are best left buried in the past.” He picked up the troll and went to work on its eyes.

  AS THE WEATHER TURNED COLD AND TUCKER SPENT more time at home, he began noticing a number of disturbing changes in his mother — little things at first, such as turning light switches on and off several times, and washing clean clothes over and over again, and making strange, repetitive movements — she would sit in her favorite chair and flop her head back and forth, or flap her hands as if she was trying to air-dry them. She carried a book of sudoku puzzles with her everywhere, and seemed content only when filling in grids.

  Anything new or unexpected would upset her — loud noises, a surprise visitor, or even a rearrangement of furniture. One day, Tucker pulled the sofa out from the wall to get a book that had fallen behind it and neglected to push the sofa back in place. When his mom came into the room and noticed the sofa out of place, she started flapping her hands, then ran upstairs to her room and rolled herself up in her comforter. She stayed like that until Tucker’s dad got home and coaxed her out of her improvised cocoon.

  Such episodes came more and more frequently. She kept the window shades pulled down, claiming that she did not care to be “watched like some bug in a bottle.” She lost weight, and her already light skin grew paler from lack of sunlight. Her once warm and strong voice became hesitant and quavery. Her hair began to change color, emerging brittle and white without bothering to pause at gray. Some days she would sit brushing it, counting the strokes, until it crackled with static electricity and stood out from her head in a pale, orange-tipped nimbus.

  Her organ playing deteriorated as well. Her hands would jitter across the keys, producing a cacophony of raucous bleats and howls that caused Mrs. Iverson’s one-year-old to cry. One day she refused to play the instrument at all, claiming that the pipes were sucking her soul out through her fingertips.

  The Reverend persuaded Alvina Johanson to make another effort to learn the eccentric ways of the instrument. Soon, Alvina’s approximations of “Abide with Me” and “Amazing Grace” filled the church as Emily Feye sat with Tucker in the front pew with her crackling hair and distant smile, working a sudoku puzzle.

  Tucker’s father took her to several doctors. Harmon Anderson, their family doctor in nearby Chalmers, referred her to a neurologist in Minneapolis. The neurologist referred her to a psychiatrist. Their diagnoses ranged from depression to schizophrenia to chronic fatigue syndrome. They prescribed a panoply of drugs, but nothing helped. Finally, in November, Tucker and his father took her to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. After two long days of tests and interviews, Dr. Levitt, awkward and stiffly formal in his suit and tie, invited Tucker and his father into his office.

  “Emily is in excellent physical health,” said Dr. Levitt, staring into the computer mounted on his desk. “Other than being profoundly autistic, of course.”

  “Autistic?” The Reverend raised his eyebrows. “Emily is not autistic.”

  The doctor looked at him, then back at the computer. “You didn’t know she was autistic?”

  Tucker said, “Isn’t autism something you’re born with?”

  “That is correct,” said the doctor, still staring into his screen.

  “She didn’t used to be like this,” Tucker said. “Mom was happy. We used to do stuff, and talk all the time. Now she hardly talks at all. She just stays in the house and does her puzzles.”

  “She was perfectly normal,” the Reverend said.

  The doctor leaned closer to the screen. “Yes . . . I see you stated that in your admission papers, but people are often blind when it comes to loved ones. Your wife has been thoroughly examined by our specialists. She presents a classic autism-spectrum profile. Her social interaction skills are severely limited, her lack of affect is extreme, her repetitive behaviors and her anxiety when confronted with changes to her environment are a ninety-four-percent indicator for profound autism. . . . It is possible that she is suffering from RAD.”

  “What’s RAD?” Tucker asked.

  “Rapid-onset Autism-like Disorder. Quite rare, although we are seeing more cases in recent years, mostly in people who work in IT and other computer-related fields. Does your wife spend a lot of time online?”

  “We don’t even own a computer!” the Reverend said.

  “In that case, I would suggest that although her symptoms may have recently become worse, they were always present. I very much doubt that it came upon her suddenly.”

  Tucker looked at his father, whose face was slowly turning red.

  The doctor was rocking back and forth slightly as he stared into the computer screen. Oblivious, he continued speaking. “You must realize that autism is not a disease in the usual sense. It is not contagious, nor is it something that will go away — with or without treatment. Autism develops in the womb, perhaps even at conception.” The doctor typed something into his computer. He pursed his lips. “She may be suffering from depression as well. We will need more tests. It is not always easy to diagnose psychiatric conditions in autistic patients.”

  “She. Is. Not. Autistic!” the Reverend said, his voice rising with each word.

  The doctor sat back. “Mr. Feye, please control yourself.”

  “Control myself? My wife suddenly goes mad and you’re telling me she was born that way? Autistic? What kind of doctor are you? You talk about her like she’s a statistic, like she’s not a person.”

  “I can assure you, Mr. Feye, I am well aware that Mrs. Feye is a person.”

  “How would you know? You’re hardly a person yourself! Look at you, with your fish face and your starchy suit and your computer that you look at more than you look at us. My wife is not numbers on a screen!”

  The doctor was turning red, too. “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave,” he said.

  “With pleasure.” The Reverend stood up and stalked out of the room.

  Tucker stood up slowly. “Is there anything we can do to make her better?” he asked.

  “Find her another doctor,” Dr. Levitt said stiffly. “Or better yet, another husband.”

  The ride home from Mayo was long and quiet. Tucker’s mother sat in back, staring out the window, bobbing her head, counting mileposts.

  “Are we going to see a different doctor?” Tucker asked as they passed milepost fifty-two.

  His father, his mouth held in a hard straight line, shook his head.

  One mile later, Emily Feye said, “Fifty-three.”

  Tucker said, “Maybe it would help to pray for her.”

  “Pray all you want,” said the Reverend Feye after a very long pause.

  “I will,” said Tucker.

  “Autism! The man is an idiot.”

  Tucker silently agreed.

  “Fifty-four,” said his mother.

  “Do you know what I miss about God?” the Reverend asked.

  Tucker shook his head.

  “I miss having someone to blame things on.”

  “Fifty-five,” said Emily Feye.

  That night, Tucker prayed for his mother. He prayed for his father, too. The next morning — it was a Saturday — he found his mom in the kitchen cooking pancakes and sausages. She was fully dressed, and her hair was pulled back into a neat bun. The shades were up and sunlight filled the room. She looked at him and
smiled in a way that made her look perfectly, happily normal.

  “Morning, sleepyhead!” she said.

  Tucker didn’t know what to say. Had his prayers worked?

  “You look good,” he said, sitting down at the table.

  She laughed and patted her hair. “I’ve really let myself go lately. You must have thought I’d gone completely out of my mind.”

  “So are you okay now?”

  “I feel wonderful!”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “He went into church to work on the organ. How I miss playing that crazy machine! I feel like I’ve just woken up from a bad dream. The things that have been going through my head! Of course, I’ve always had quite an imagination. When I was little, I used to believe I was a princess. I lived in a magic castle with servants, who would bring me anything I wanted. Sometimes it seemed so real, I believed it was true.”

  “I guess little kids imagine a lot of stuff.”

  “I guess they do.” She put a pancake and two sausage links on a plate and placed it before him. “Lately I’ve been remembering the strangest things. When I was a girl — I must have been six or seven — I remember walking home from school one day when two big black men came up the road.”

  “You mean like African Americans?”

  “No, but they had black hair and black beards and they were wearing black suits. I thought they were Amish, so I wasn’t afraid. One of them said something to me in a language I didn’t understand, then the other one grabbed me and stuck something in my mouth, like a little plastic rod. A second later he yanked it out and they both ran off. I told my father, and the police went looking for the men but never found them. Later, Greta told me I must have imagined the whole thing.” She shook her head, bemused by the memory. “But I don’t know. . . . It was so real. . . .”

  She prepared a plate for herself and sat down across from him.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been acting so strangely, honey. I really don’t know what came over me.”

  “That’s okay,” Tucker said. She’d had good mornings before. As he ate his pancakes, he allowed himself a glimmer of hope. Maybe this time it would last.

  It didn’t last.

  They ate their breakfast, talking and laughing, just like old times. But after they were done eating, his mom retired to her chair in the living room and began working a sudoku puzzle. Soon she was staring into space and bobbing her head, her features slack, her eyes empty. Tucker looked at the puzzle in her lap. The blanks had been filled in with random numbers and made no sense whatsoever.

  TUCKER KEPT PRAYING FOR HIS MOTHER, BUT HER GOOD moments came less and less often. Most days she never changed out of her white cotton nightgown.

  “I look like one of them,” she said to Tucker one morning, staring at her blurry reflection in the polished steel side of the toaster.

  “Them who?” Tucker asked.

  “You don’t see them?” She looked at him.

  “See who?”

  “Them.” She pointed at the kitchen window. Tucker looked, half expecting to see someone staring in at them. “Ghosts,” she said as she lowered the shade.

  “There’s no such thing,” Tucker said, the hairs on the back of his neck stirring.

  In fact, Tucker had seen two ghosts in recent weeks.

  The first time, he had awakened early one morning and looked out his bedroom window to see a man made of fog staring in at him. For a fraction of a second, Tucker could pick out every detail of the man’s features — a wide, down-turned mouth, a long nose, two close-set eyes, and a thick mop of colorless hair — then it was gone. It happened so quickly that Tucker didn’t have time to be scared, and after a few minutes of perplexity, he decided that he must have imagined it.

  The second ghost had appeared on the roof of the house in the middle of the day. Tucker had looked up and seen a faint, gaseous, humanlike shape standing on — or floating just above — the peak of the roof. The bright sunlight made it difficult to see any details, but Tucker had the impression that this time it was a woman, and that she was watching him. The image lasted for five or six seconds, slowly becoming harder to see, then it disappeared entirely.

  Water vapor steaming from the hot shingles? A cloud of insects? Tucker had forcibly ejected both events from his mind and did not think about it again until his mother brought up the subject of ghosts.

  “If there were really ghosts,” Tucker said, “everybody would see them. Dad would see them too.”

  “He is one of them, Kosh.”

  “Kosh?” said Tucker.

  His mother turned away as if he weren’t present, opened the silverware drawer, and began polishing the clean spoons with the corner of her nightgown.

  Tucker couldn’t stop thinking about ghosts. His mom was getting more than weird; she was getting scary — calling him strange names and saying Dad was a ghost. He peeked through the half-open door of his dad’s study. His father was sitting with his elbows propped on his desk next to a half-carved troll, his chin resting on his fists, staring bleakly into space.

  Tucker pushed the door all the way open. “Dad?”

  The Reverend closed his eyes. “Tuck.”

  “Mom says she sees ghosts.”

  The Reverend shook his head. “There are no such things as ghosts.”

  “I saw something on the roof.”

  His father’s eyes snapped open.

  “You stay off that roof,” he said.

  “I didn’t say I was on the roof. I said I saw something there. Like a . . . like a ghost.”

  “A trick of the light. Heat distortion.”

  “It looked real.”

  “It wasn’t,” his father said with startling intensity.

  Tucker decided to change the subject. “Mom counted her cornflakes this morning. She lined them up on the table and counted. She told me she was only hungry for thirty-nine flakes.”

  The Reverend did not reply.

  “She’s polishing the spoons again.”

  The Reverend’s shoulders slumped.

  “Maybe we should take her to another doctor,” Tucker said.

  “The doctors are useless.”

  “She called me Kosh.”

  Tucker’s father turned and stared at him.

  “Kosh?”

  “Yeah. Who’s Kosh?”

  His father grimaced, as if the words caused him pain. “Nobody,” he said.

  “Are you okay?” Tucker asked.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tucker. “You look sad.”

  “Happiness is overrated.” The Reverend’s expression softened. “I know this has been hard on you, Tuck. I’m sorry.”

  “I just want everything to be like before.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s not how life works.”

  “How come you still preach, then?”

  The Reverend’s forehead knotted, but his mouth curved into a smile. “Because it’s my job.”

  “But you don’t believe in God.”

  “I believe in preaching.” The Reverend swiveled his chair toward the window and did not say another word.

  As his mother sank slowly into her private world of ghosts and clean light switches, as his father grew even more distant, as the crisp brown fields of autumn surrendered to a blanket of snow, Tucker distracted himself with school and snowmobiling with Tom and Will Krause. It had been five months since Lahlia had gone to live with the Beckers. He wondered whether she had learned to speak any English. He wanted to ask her how she had met his father. The Reverend Feye had steadfastly refused to talk about it.

  Christmas came. The Reverend cut down a stunted spruce tree growing near the edge of the woods and dragged it home. His mother watched dully from her easy chair as Tucker and his father did their best to decorate the sorry little tree. It felt to Tucker as if they were faking it — just pretending to have Christmas. His dad bought him a snowboard, though, which gave Tucker another excuse t
o get out of the house as much as possible.

  Emily Feye had become the subject of much gossip in Hopewell. Her increasingly odd appearance — white hair, staring eyes, quivering lips — was impossible to ignore. At home, she continued to cook and clean, but little more. One mid-January day, she left the house in her bathrobe and a long coat and walked into town. They got a call from Red Grauber, the owner of the Pigeon Drop Inn.

  “Adrian, your wife is standing on the street in front of the old hotel talking to the air. You might want to come get her.”

  Tucker and his dad jumped in the car and drove downtown, where they found her huddled on the front steps of Hopewell House. She was happy to get into the warm car but seemed puzzled as to why they had come for her.

  “I was just having a little walk,” she said.

  A few weeks later, on a cold Sunday in February, as the Reverend was preaching on the care of the soul, Emily Feye stood up from her front-row pew and cried out, “I see them!”

  The church went dead silent. She turned, facing the congregation. Her eyes lifted and she pointed at a space several feet above the heads of the parishioners.

  “They watch us,” she said. “Bugs in a bottle.”

  The Reverend, after a moment of stunned silence, said, “It is true. The souls of our departed loved ones watch us as they pave the way for us to one day enter the kingdom of Heaven. . . .” As he spoke, the Reverend stepped down from his pulpit and took his wife by the hand.

  “I was a princess,” she said querulously.

  Gently, he sat her down. She did not resist; the angry light faded from her eyes.

  As the days and weeks and months passed, Emily Feye became even stranger and more ethereal. The Reverend now spent nearly every free hour in his study, reading or carving. Tucker felt as if both his parents were fading slowly away, growing more ghostly and insubstantial with each passing week.