The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  She just stood and stared at Sylvie, unabashed. It was clear that the rules of human behaviour did not apply to her. Sylvie knew it was her own horns that had drawn the faun towards her.

  “What a gorgeous harvest table,” Sylvie’s mother said, sitting down and gesturing to Sylvie to take the chair beside her. “I’d kill for one.”

  “This place is fabulous,” Adrienne said. “And you get a very generous stipend. I’ve applied three times but I’ve never been lucky. Too much competition from assholes to the north. As if you don’t have your own retreats. Your whole bloody country is a retreat!”

  Krzysztof flipped a chair around and sat on it backwards, ignoring Adrienne.

  “This is my new strategy,” Adrienne said, shoving her own chair back and swinging her feet up onto the lap of the man beside her. “I’m going to pester Krzysztof so he can’t work. Drive up at every opportunity. Keep him pissed and hungover and distracted. He’ll never be invited back.”

  “How do you know each other?” Sylvie’s mother asked.

  “Oh, artists all know each other. Borders don’t mean anything to artists. We’re like migrating animals.” She leaned forward and poured herself another glass of cider. “Payton, why don’t you take Sylvie down to play in the guest house? But take your hoofs off first – you’re going to twist an ankle. And drop the mute thing, already. You are creeping Sylvie out.”

  “Excuse me,” Krzysztof said unpleasantly. “The guest house is my goddamn studio.”

  The faun continued to look at Sylvie with imploring eyes. Sylvie considered getting up in response to her unspoken plea, but she felt confused and abashed by her gaze and she was insulted by Adrienne’s term play. So she just sat as though she were part of the adult conversation, trying to figure out the meaning of this scene she had found herself in, which was not immediately evident.

  The other man at the table wore clip-on sunglasses flipped up, like awnings over his regular glasses. He was nice-looking but totally silent. He was married to Adrienne, Sylvie deduced from the flat tone of her voice when she spoke to him and the fact that her feet were in his lap. The other woman Sylvie judged to be the age of a university student. She had long golden hair and beautiful big eyes and a sad and lifeless air, and she never spoke.

  From their seats at the table they could see a tree house where three little boys were playing. One had a rope with a plastic milk jug tied to it; he was dangling it from the platform and the other two were below with sticks, hitting the jug like a piñata. They were slightly different sizes, but from their similar childish behaviour Sylvie judged them all to be about eight. Adrienne explained that the blond kids were hers and the kid up on the platform was Payton’s little brother, Liam. She seemed about to say something else, and then she changed her mind.

  “These comely Canadian wenches have been on their own pilgrimage, to the Renaissance Festival,” Krzysztof said, pouring Liz some cider and gesturing to ask whether he could give some to Sylvie (Liz shook her head). “That crude commercial rite of Bacchus down the road. Dowagers streaming in by the thousands to show off their goods. The plunging décolletages! The boobs thrust out like howitzers over laced corsets – my god!”

  “I beg your pardon,” Liz said, putting a hand to the neckline of her top. She had on skinny white capris and a new top, very low-cut, in a pattern that was not quite an animal print. Enlarged tree bark maybe. “You weren’t actually there yesterday, were you?” she said.

  “Took the kid a while back,” he said.

  “We were there yesterday,” Adrienne said. “It was the longest afternoon of my life.”

  “I hear you,” said Liz. Talking in a bubbly but secretly nervous way, she went on to tell them how she had struck up a conversation with a woman. In the Chateau Vino, she said, making fun of the name. “Just this ordinary woman. I mean, she was dressed like Maid Marian and she still managed to look like a soccer mom. I asked her where she was from – I figured she’d say, ‘Minnetonka. I’m a clerk at Walmart,’ or something – and she says, ‘I’m the second daughter of the Earl of Blackmoor. When I was sixteen, my father tried to marry me off to a cruel baron. So I escaped to Bristol in a turnip cart, and then I became the mistress of Captain Kidd.’ ”

  They all laughed. They talked about the cybergoths who were starting to take over the festival, and about the mishmash of costumes you saw there, mythological creatures such as centaurs and unicorns walking around with people in Elizabethan dress. “It’s sort of like the Flintstones riding dinosaurs,” Liz said. And Krzysztof said, “It’s not in the least like that,” and Liz put her hand on his arm and laughed flirtatiously into his face.

  They talked about the cider and tilted their glasses up to the sun, and Krzysztof and Adrienne argued about whether this cider was cloudier than the cider they had drunk the day before. Adrienne’s husband and the university student laughed along with the others, but Adrienne’s husband hardly spoke and Melody, the young woman, never did. She was wearing cut-offs and a tiny lacy black top, and she sat tightly, as though she was too cold to move. Sylvie could not figure out who she was connected to, though it was Krzysztof she watched with her big, sad eyes.

  And all the while the faun stood by Sylvie’s chair, gazing at her with an intense expression of appeal. When Sylvie looked in its direction, it took a step backwards. It was trying to lead her away but it would not make a Come here gesture. And so finally Sylvie got up and the faun turned and led her towards the house. They were about the same height, but the faun’s hoofs raised it a few inches. The hoofs looked exactly like real hoofs, split and brown and glossy. The faun was wearing brown shorts and light brown tights with fur sewn on them, fur that curled prettily down over its hoofs. It had a tail that grew naturally from the back of its shorts. She – it – was perfect.

  The door to the house was painted a deep red and had an old-fashioned iron handle. The faun tilted its head and looked at the handle curiously, so Sylvie went ahead and opened the door. The house was dark after the sunshine of the yard. A hunting lodge, it would have to be. Hoofs clicking against the wooden floor, the faun turned mincingly around, as though in wonder at discovering a human abode. It looked with surprise at the big stuffed sofa and chairs, at the tall grandfather clock, and at the fern, into which it buried its face for a moment. Then it tripped around the kitchen, looking shyly at the white appliances, and cunning came into its eyes. Come here, it said by tilting its head. Sylvie walked across the kitchen. There were shelves crowded with bottles of all colours and shapes, and piles of vegetables on the wooden sideboards, and a big old-fashioned stove, and a deep white sink. Where a body lay. A long, pinkish brown body with tiny arms, curled piteously to fit into the sink. Headless. The faun smiled over it, enjoying Sylvie’s horror.

  Sylvie ran outside and sat again on the chair beside her mother. She put her feet on the rung of her mother’s chair. Above them the trees breathed and dropped sunlight in patches on the table. A tray of Puffed Wheat cake was brought out and broken into chunks and the little boys ran over from the tree house and grabbed it up. Lemonade was poured for them and cheese was cut. Wasps discovered the table and the boys began to whine.

  Sylvie said no to the cake. She felt too sick to eat. What was it in the sink? It was dead and skinned. Bloodless, neat, muscle-bound. It was not the shape of any animal she knew. It was a life form that had fallen from another world and been slaughtered in this one.

  Payton had come back outside and taken her spot at the edge of the forest. She also ignored appeals to eat. Sylvie could not look at her. She was appalled by the graceful, innocent way she stood and moved, when in fact she was so knowing and so cruel.

  Then there were efforts to get Payton to take Sylvie to the lake. “All of you can go,” said Adrienne. The boys hooted and ran to fetch their things. “I guess this is why we pay you the big bucks,” she said to Melody, and Melody stood up reluctantly.

  “I don’t have a bathing suit,” Sylvie said, and Adrienne laughed.
r />   “Payton has two,” she said. “Payton, you’ll lend Sylvie one of your swimsuits, won’t you?” and Sylvie understood that what was funny was the word bathing.

  “Are you coming?” Sylvie asked her mother in a low voice. Liz gave her head a private shake, not meeting Sylvie’s eyes. She moved slightly on her chair to shut Sylvie out.

  “They’re in the canvas bag in the back of the van,” Adrienne said, but Payton gave no sign that she’d heard. “Sylvie, come and pick out which one you want,” Adrienne said loudly.

  So Sylvie got up and followed Adrienne to the alligator van. Adrienne opened the big door at the back and beckoned Sylvie closer. “I just wanted to talk to you for a minute,” she said in a low voice. “I wanted to tell you their mother is very sick. Payton and Liam’s mother. Well, she’s dying, actually. It’s harsh to say it that way, but it’s the sort of thing that happens, and you’re a grown-up girl, I can see how mature you are. She has breast cancer. The poor kids don’t have a father. God knows where they’re going to end up. We brought them with us to give everybody a breather. I thought I’d tell you in case Payton is a little hard to take. She can be, I know. But will you cut her some slack?”

  “Yes,” Sylvie said. They were standing under the door, looking through the van windows at Payton, tiny and motionless under a tree, as though they were looking at her through the wrong end of binoculars.

  “It’s really nice that she has you to hang out with today,” Adrienne said. “I hope you can get her to go swimming. I don’t know if she’ll take that costume off. Her mother made it – her mother was very talented that way. She always intended to take Payton to the festival, and then things got really bad really fast.” Adrienne pulled two bathing suits out of a red canvas bag. An orange two-piece and a blue and white striped one-piece. “Just take these upstairs. I bet she’ll follow you. You can grab towels from the bathroom.”

  First Sylvie went to the car and got her overnight bag, and then she walked alone into the cool, dark house. She saw a steep staircase and she climbed it. Upstairs, she went into the first bedroom she saw. It had a large brass bed and a big wooden desk and a round rug made of rags, braided and coiled in a way that Sylvie knew how to do herself. The whole house, with its solid and simple furniture, reminded her of the big house at the Fort. Three or four books were scattered on the desk, and Sylvie picked one up. The Golden Bough, with a beautiful thick cover of moulded leather. Inside were old-fashioned illustrations in soft colours, as though hand-painted. In the first, a barefoot woman in an animal-skin dress led a goat away from a forest. She had her head turned back regretfully and she was blowing on a long horn. Sylvie turned the thick pages slowly. She recognized an adult version of the sort of stories she loved, but the text was dense and resisted her.

  Also on the desk was a photograph, a family portrait. It had been taken at the booth Sylvie and Liz had visited at the Renaissance Festival. To Sylvie’s surprise she knew all three people in it. The woman was Mary Magdalene, who used to come to their house and whom Sylvie loved. Once when she was little, when all the mothers were sitting around talking in the dining room, for no reason Mary Magdalene reached out and lifted Sylvie onto her lap. Then she got up from the table and carried Sylvie to the couch, where she sat and read to her, a story about a mouse dentist who dared to fix the teeth of a fox. It was the only time Sylvie ever heard that story, but she remembered it perfectly. And there in the picture sat Mary Magdalene with her curling dark hair, a happy childhood memory resplendent in a blue velvet gown.

  And beside her was her son, Sylvie’s old friend Sparky, wearing a leather vest laced at the front. He was taller, of course, but it was him, with his hair and eyes exactly the same warm shade of brown and his happy interest in the world showing on his face. He was holding one arm so that it showed off a beautiful sleeve of overlapping silver leaves. He must be thirteen. He looked willing to be in the picture, not sulky and aloof like a teenager. It was a beautiful picture, as though they truly were a family living in a stone house in a valley with mist rising around it and sheep grazing on the hills.

  “Krzysztof’s family,” said the faun, at her elbow. She laughed at how startled Sylvie was. “It’s feathered mail,” she explained then, as if she could read Sylvie’s thoughts. “Falconers wear it so the falcon can land on their arm and not tear the skin.”

  “They didn’t have anything like that at the photo booth,” Sylvie said.

  “I guess it belongs to the kid, then. He must be a falconer.” Then Payton pointed to Krzysztof, the man sitting outside at this moment with her mother. “What a pig. Well, that’s an insult to another hoofed beast. What a human.”

  Sylvie put the photograph back on the dresser. “I thought you didn’t talk.”

  “Fauns talk among themselves,” Payton said. “What did you think? Did you think we’re just what humans see?” Her freckles were perfect little brown ovals drawn on with a makeup pencil. Her breath had a mushroomy smell. “Go and change,” she said. “Go into the other room.” She picked up the blue and white bathing suit and thrust it at Sylvie. “Take this one. Put it on under your clothes.”

  As Sylvie walked across the hall, Payton called, “You’ll like it. It’s got a hole in the crotch.”

  Adrienne and her husband were in the kitchen working when Sylvie and Payton walked through with all their clothes on. “My, aren’t you the modest pair,” Adrienne said. “Well, have a fun time bathing.”

  Sylvie did not look over at the harvest table. Melody was standing by the step and they followed her across the yard and onto a path that opened into the woods. She had on a black bikini under a long, see-through shirt of pale yellow, and she was carrying her purse and a big canvas beach bag. Her body was thin but curvy; her breasts looked like two apples rocking on the narrow board of her chest. The trail they followed was covered with fallen leaves and sank gradually lower. The three little boys ran ahead and Sylvie walked silently beside Payton. They had to walk slowly because of Payton, who plodded along in her hoofs, holding her hands in front of her like kangaroo paws.

  Sylvie was not wearing a bathing suit and she suspected that Payton was not either. When she went back to the big bedroom after tucking the bathing suit under a pillow in the second bedroom, Payton was still dressed in her faun costume, standing at the window looking through Sylvie’s binoculars.

  “Cool,” she said.

  “Are binoculars allowed in your faun act?” Sylvie said.

  “Actually, little sucky Canadian girl, binoculars were invented to give faun vision to humans.”

  She handed them to Sylvie in a sneering, check-it-out-for-yourself way. Sylvie raised them to her face and, without having to refocus, saw the temple of a man’s bent head with a vein twisting along it. She located the arm that belonged with this head and followed it down to where Krzysztof’s hand, a big, expressive hand with dark hairs on the backs of the fingers, was exploring the white fabric covering a slender thigh. Then she handed back the binoculars.

  None of them spoke on that long walk to the beach, except Melody, who called once for the little boys to wait. As she walked, Sylvie thought about Sparky and Mary Magdalene, about how terribly she had missed them since they moved away, without realizing it and without thinking about them very often. But suddenly her grief blurred her eyes and squeezed her chest, and she understood that she’d been waiting, as though they’d promised to come back for her and were late.

  Finally water glinted through the trees and the woods opened to the lake, a finger lake with a tiny beach and a swimming area roped off. Three pairs of sunbathers lay on the sand. No one was swimming – the sun was warm but the air was cool, and the water would be too. Melody dropped the beach bag. She knelt and pulled two big deflated beach toys out of it, and the blond boys sprang for them. “Share with Liam,” Melody said as the three of them ran up the beach. “The pump?” she called after them, and one of the blond boys came back for it.

  In spite of the cold, Melody took off her
yellow shirt, spread out her towel, and lay down in her bikini. “Stay together,” she said to Sylvie and Payton without looking at them. “Don’t go outside the buoys.” She fished an MP3 player out of her purse and stuck in earbuds and closed her eyes.

  Sylvie and Payton sank back into the woods. From its edge they watched the boys blow up the two inflatable floats. One was a purple turtle and the other was a sort of Jeep or tank with a cord dangling from each end. It had a label you could read with the binoculars: Aqua-Hummer. The pump was a foot pump; Payton’s brother, Liam, took it over almost at once and worked it hard, first with his foot and then with the heel of his hand. He was skinny but he worked fiercely, leaning his whole body into the job. When both floats were inflated, he stood up in satisfaction, and in a flash the two blond boys had yanked them away and were running towards the water. Liam ran after them and tried to grab onto the floats, but they managed to kick him off. He fought them, splashed back and forth from one beach toy to the other, while Adrienne’s boys paddled vigorously away from him.

  Sylvie and Payton watched for a while, and then they grew tired of his misery and stepped back into the woods. The game they fell into playing was not to be where humans expected them to be, but always to be watching. They found a spot very close to where a couple was lying and set about spying. Sylvie trained the binoculars on the woman and picked up the skull pendant hanging between her breasts. Then she swivelled towards the man just as he was rolling over, his muscles writhing like the pythons she’d seen the day before. When they stilled, she discovered a big eye tattooed between his shoulder blades.

  Then Liam was back, crying across the sand and floundering through the weedy verge towards Payton. Payton froze into one of her faun poses. “They won’t share,” he wept. Angry tears smeared the dust and sand on his small face. He batted at her arm once or twice. “Payton, it’s not fair,” he cried. His little tummy went in and out as he sobbed.