Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

“Hey there!” says the taller one. He’s trying so hard to adopt a lounging nonchalance that Gaelan’s afraid he might fall over.

  They look about twelve, but they were talking about driving, so they must be at least sixteen. Small-town boys always look younger than boys who grow up in the city.

  “We were just, uh …”

  “We came down here to, uh …”

  “It’s okay,” Gaelan says. “I won’t tell.”

  “Gee. Thanks.”

  “Yeah, thanks a lot. I’m Ricky.”

  “Hello.”

  “And I’m Chris.”

  “Hey!” Ricky says, trying to focus his red-rimmed eyes. “Aren’t you that guy on TV? The weatherman? What are you doing here?”

  “Geez, Ricky,” Chris says in hushing, big brother tones. “Don’t you know anything? It’s his dad upstairs.”

  “His dad?”

  “Yeah, his dad is Mayor Jones.”

  “Right. Hey! You’re really famous.”

  “Ricky, shut it,” Chris continues. “His dad … ? Just died?”

  “Oh. Gosh. That Jones.”

  “I’m not that famous,” Gaelan says. “I grew up here, just like you.”

  “Still. You’re on TV. That’s really something.”

  Some people look completely different in real life than they do on television; Gaelen often wishes he was one of them.

  “Listen, why don’t you guys go back on upstairs and get outta here for a while? You must be pretty bored by now. Nobody’s gonna care. I’m not anyway, and I’m family, so … go on, why don’t you? I’ll clean up down here.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Yeah. Thanks a lot.”

  “You should leave the weed with me, though,” Gaelan says, holding out his hand.

  “Oh! Right.”

  Ricky comes forward with the rolled, partially smoked joint and a book of matches; Chris offers up the ziplock plastic bag and flashlight. Gaelan feels a surge of affection for these boys—such good boys that they even relinquish the nonincriminating accessories of their crime. Chris and Ricky. Gaelan bets they’ve been best friends since kindergarten, and that their names are always said together just like that: Chrisnricky.

  “Hey, sorry about your dad.”

  “Yeah. He was a good mayor and all.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My mom says he brought me and my sister into the world.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  Gaelan feels his throat tighten. He nods his thanks. “I’ll see you around.”

  “Bye, Mr. Jones.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  Gaelan tries to imagine what it was like, being in the room with his father when he brought these boys into the world. He can’t. He’s witnessed plenty of animal births, but never the birth of a child. Did he ever ask to accompany his father on housecalls? Or did he just assume he wouldn’t be allowed? What did his father do all that time he was away? He’ll never know. The realization goes straight to his legs, making him feel like he’s tried to bench-press too much weight. His knees start to give way and he has to lean against one of the basement support beams to keep from ending up on the floor.

  Eventually he notices that he’s still holding the plastic bag of grass and the partially smoked joint. No need to let it go to waste. He sits down, lights up, settles his back agaist the support beam, and listens. Upstairs, they’ve started recycling hymns, repeating themselves. The Gymanfa is almost over.

  There’s a sound nearby, and a small boy suddenly materializes out of the shadows several feet away. Gaelan tries to stand but his limbs are sluggish and he’s beset with a sudden dizziness.

  “Excuse me,” the boy says. It’s hard to make out his face, but he has a pencil tucked behind his ear and a spiral notebook clutched to his chest. “I wasn’t intending to eavesdrop,” he continues. “I came down here to write.” There’s a furtive, nocturnal quality about him; he could be Woodward or Bernstein, whichever one it was who used to meet Deep Throat in unlit parking garages in the middle of the night.

  “None of us are supposed to be down here, you know,” Woodward Bernstein says. He stares at Gaelan, as if waiting for him to explain himself, and then he puts his head down and crosses the room quickly. When he gets to the foot of the stairs, he stops once more and turns around. “I’ve been down here for hours, but they’ll miss you if you’re gone too long.”

  And then he hustles up the stairs—on his way, Gaelan feels sure, to call in his scoop to The Washington Post.

  “We had to sing, you see,” Mr. Craven continues. “We had to!”

  “Yes,” Larken says. Mr. Craven has been stuck on this phrase for some time now. She wonders if he hasn’t forgotten where he is in the story and what comes next. “Otherwise, she might have …”

  “That’s right! She might have fallen. The way baby birds do sometimes, you know, right out of the nest.”

  In the adjacent parlor, there is a brief lull.

  “Y Delyn Aur!” calls a ragged voice.

  “Oh!” Mr. Craven says abruptly. “They need me for this one. The tenor part is tricky.”

  Larken guides Mr. Craven by the elbow into the parlor, where about forty to fifty people are singing in harmony. Some are crowded onto folding chairs, others are leaning against walls (many with bottles of beer in hand). The ladies have the softest chairs, and there are even a few children sitting on elders’ laps or on the floor. They sit erectly, for all children in Emlyn Springs know the importance of posture as it relates to breath support.

  Mrs. Regina Butts whispers to Larken, aggressively patting the empty chair next to her as if trying to coax a pet to jump up and sit. “Join us, why don’t you, dear?” Mrs. Butts was Larken’s high school guidance counselor, and Larken suspects she’s less interested in augmenting the alto section than in finding out whether her former advisee is still a lost cause, or has bettered her lot since abdicating the title of Little Miss Emlyn Springs for that of Town Slut.

  “I’d love to,” Larken lies, politely, “after I visit the ladies’ room.”

  Larken gets Mr. Craven settled with the tenors, purloins half a dozen Welsh cakes from the dining room table by shoving them into her jacket pocket, and makes her way upstairs.

  Somebody is using the bathroom, so she slips into one of the guest rooms and hides in the closet. No one will think to look for her here, except possibly her brother and sister.

  Bonnie is outside, sitting on the new-mown lawn with her long bare legs stretched out, surrounded by chattering children and males in various stages of maturity but similar stages of infatuation: little boys, fifth- and sixth-grade boys, junior high and high school boys, shy boys, peacocky boys, letter-sweater senior boys whose girlfriends stand around the perimeter of the circle and are looking on, sinking into their hips and pouting, trying to be jealous, but it’s impossible to hold a grudge against Miss Jones—who is so unlike every other grown-up in Emlyn Springs that she likes them all to call her Bonnie. She’s godmother to at least ten of them, including Chris and Ricky Reimnitz who’ve just emerged from the house to join the group.

  In another century, Bonnie would have been labeled a spinster and she would have looked older and more shriveled because of it. The word itself—spinster—has a hexing, shriveling power but no one has ever applied it to Bonnie Jones.

  It is not sex that the boys want from her, not exactly. There is some quality in her eyes that dissolves such notions, disarms them for reasons they cannot name. Bonnie Jones may be unmarried, she may be a little eccentric—living in that old garage the way she does, going out on her bike and picking up trash—and she may have the worst luck any of them have ever seen when it comes to making a living, but she is a legend, a conduit for all that might be good about their small dying town, and they know it.

  Even the five-year-olds can tell a version of “Flying Girl and the Tornado of 1978.”

  The town’s oldest citizen at the time was Mr. Armin Koester. It was several hours after the
tornado had done its damage and moved on. All the men were out looking, mostly in the muddy, ravaged cornfields surrounding the Jones place, but any sort of uneven ground was difficult for Mr. Koester to manage with his walker, so he confined his search to the paved streets of town.

  “Bonnie Jones!” he called, over and over, as they all did. “Aneira Hope!”

  He was crossing Bridge Street when the sound of the birds drew his attention, singing as they do sometimes at lucky dusk, but with a special exuberance on this evening. And Mr. Koester thought to himself what a day it had been for them, too, poor things, how relieved they must feel, how eager to sing again after that fearful enforced silence that always precedes a tornado, and then of course, the tornado itself, such a terrifying sound no matter how many times you’ve heard it—and Mr. Koester, a lifelong resident of Emlyn Springs, had heard it plenty. Birds surely have a quota of song time to fill, Mr. Koester thought, and the birds of Emlyn Springs were making up for what they’d lost.

  He gazed into the boughs of the trees for several minutes, listening, resting. (He and Mrs. Koester were dedicated walkers, but he’d slacked off quite a bit after she died last spring.) Only then did he realize that something about the angle of one of the tree trunks was off in relation to the other trees lining the ravine, and then he came to understand that that particular nondeciduous tree—a cedar—shouldn’t be there at all. Furthermore, it was upside down. It was leaning across the ravine some ways from the bridge, right where the springs are deepest, and just before the creek starts to furrow away from town and connect with the Big Blue.

  He didn’t believe his eyes at first. The cedar must have been savaged out of the ground, shot like a javelin over the top of the church steeple, and somersaulting into place with its top on one side of the ravine and its roots high up in the air on the other. They found out later it was plucked from the stand of cedars planted on the northwest corner of the Vance place, two and a half miles away.

  And there, at the very top (bottom) of the tree, nestled into its ripped, muddied roots, was seven-year-old Bonnie Jones, sitting on her bicycle seat.

  How it came to be that she was there, barely conscious and balanced precariously, fanny on the seat and the seat in the roots and the roots on the tree and the tree on the ground, no one save her mother will ever know, but there she was. She must have flown!

  The combined miracle of the cedar’s age (its root system was massive) and the precise way in which it came to rest (wedged among the limbs of the deciduous, partly denuded trees that lined the ravine on both sides) saved Bonnie’s life. The roots of that cedar intertwined with Bonnie’s limbs and held her fast—because she could not hold herself.

  “God in heaven, there she is!” Mr. Koester shouted. “There she is! There she is!” But no one heard him, and he quickly realized that it would take the employment of his singing voice to summon the others.

  Aiming heavenward, he sang the first song that came to mind, Number 65, “’R wy’n Canu” (“I Sing as a Bird”), with fervor and passion—as if Mrs. Koester herself, and not Bonnie Jones, were up in that tree. As if they were young again, all of twenty years old, and sweethearts.

  Soon the men came running, breathing raggedly at first, but in time recovering their voices and joining in. No one dared disturb the tree, the girl might fall, and so, while little Bethan Ellis rode her prize mare Eira all the way to Beatrice to notify the fire department (all the telephone lines within fifteen miles were down), and a dozen other boys and girls rounded up their spooked ponies, talked them down, saddled them, and cleared the highway so the fire truck could get through, they gathered in the ravine beneath her, ankle deep, making a human net to catch her should she fall. And they sang.

  They sang to bless her. They sang to let her know that they were there, for who knew what nightmares the poor thing might be having, what horrors she might have seen before landing there among the birds. Who even knew if she was alive? They might even have been singing her to her death.

  By the time the ladder truck arrived, every man in town was singing to seven-year-old Bonnie Jones, and a few women and children, too. The person now known as Blind Tom was there; he was thirteen at the time, and his vision had not yet begun to fail. Dr. Llewellyn Jones was there, along with his nurse, Alvina Closs—who stood beside him, holding his hand; Bud Humphries and his sister, Vonda, were there, and the Cravens and the Schlakes and the Ellises and the Byelicks, all of them, everybody who wasn’t too badly shaken up or hurt. Gaelan and Larken were not there, nor were they allowed to participate in the search; Viney thought it best they remain at her house, because who knew what kind of shape their sister would be in if and when she was found. Then, too, there was still the matter of Hope.

  They sang to Bonnie Jones, who did not yet know that her mother was nowhere to be found, or that the severe internal injuries she sustained when she came down made it unlikely that she’d ever bear children of her own.

  They parked the truck on the east side of the ravine, and a young fireman named George Jachulski carried her down the ladder and deposited her in her father’s arms. (He later moved up to Chicago to work for the fire department there and got himself killed saving another child only a couple of years later.) She was hurt bad, but she lived.

  The main character had to be told her own story, repeatedly and over time, and has integrated it so thoroughly that she now believes she remembers it all, and more. She says she remembers seeing her mother, encircled in the vortex by a hundred other smaller spirals of wind that swirled around her like ribbons, backlit by lightning flashes, as if her suspension in the sky had been cleverly, masterfully engineered, a Fourth of July spectacle. She says, too, that there was someone else there, an angel with white hair who lifted Hope up with immense and powerful arms and carried her away. She says that she remembers hearing the men’s voices, and even the sound of the trains—although the trains stopped coming to Emlyn Springs long ago.

  The event shaped Bonnie Jones to believe in the improbable, that’s sure, and in magic. Of course, she was already predisposed to do so; her mother told her often enough stories of the magic surrounding her conception: how she came to them when her father played the fairy king in that play about fairies and wayward pairs of lovers sleeping in the forest, and potions applied to lovers’ eyes, and Jack shall have Jill, naught shall go ill, the man shall have his mare again and all will be well.

  By now, everyone has their eyes on the clocks and watches; there is no secret as to when the Gymanfa is officially over. It concludes when the townsfolk, standing as they are able, sing two last songs; there’s an un-spoken expectation that the closest family members will rally before the trip to the cemetery and sing along.

  Bonnie comes inside. She notes her siblings’ absence but is unperturbed by it, as is Viney. If any two people in Emlyn Springs empathize with the need for privacy, they are Bonnie Jones and Alvina Closs. Neither of them hold Gaelan and Larken’s absence against them, or offer to seek them out.

  But not everyone has this attitude when it comes to tradition; Miss Axthelm especially feels that it would be entirely inappropriate to end the Gymanfa without all the mayor’s children in attendance. At her instigation, several citizens are sent to search the house and rout them out of their hiding places. Five minutes go by, then ten.

  “We can’t possibly begin without them,” Miss Axthelm continues to insist.

  “We can, Estella, and we should,” Viney says. “These folks are tired and need to get on home.”

  The witch falls silent, but she will badmouth Alvina Closs to her like-minded, mean-spirited friends for weeks to come.

  “Let’s get started, Hazel,” Viney says, and Miss Williams strikes a single note on the piano. There is a short silence as each person in the room hears within themselves their relationship to this note.

  And then they begin.

  Emlyn Springs has a unique arrangement of the Nebraska Fight Song: sung slowly, a cappella, in Welsh, and in four-part h
armony.

  O nid oes unman yn debyg i Nebraska …

  This arrangement is not transcribed anywhere, nor is it accredited; it has evolved gradually over the course of many years and belongs to no one single person.

  … annwyl “Nebraska U” …

  In the end, Larken and Gaelan Jones are nowhere to be found, and the town sings without them.

  Chapter 9

  The Wheel in the Hole and

  the Hole in the Ground

  Larken knocks on the bathroom door.

  “Are you almost ready, Bon? It’s time.”

  It is late afternoon. Gaelan and Larken emerged from their hiding places as soon as they heard the final chorus of “There is No Place Like Nebraska.” Rejoining Viney and Bonnie, they all stopped back at Viney’s house for a few minutes to freshen up before heading to the cemetery. Gaelan and Viney have already gone ahead.

  Bonnie emerges. She’s put on a pair of leggings under her black dress and changed into tennis shoes. “I’ve got Mom’s mouth,” she announces in a self-loathing tone, as if she’s confessing to adultery or heroin addiction.

  “What?” This kind of non sequitur is normal for Bonnie, born on the other side of the decade, on the other side of innocence, beyond the time frame that contains baby boomers. To Larken and Gaelan, it often seems as though their sister was born on the other side of the moon.

  Bonnie points at her own lips and traces a quick circle in the air around them. “Can’t you see it?”

  “Bon-bon, what are you talking about?” Larken is baffled. She used to understand everything Bonnie said; and even if she didn’t understand what she said, she understood what she meant.

  Bonnie goes on. Her voice is still confessional. “Sometimes I’ll catch my mouth doing something, and it feels like I’m possessed, like I don’t have any control. It’s been happening more than ever lately.”

  “You mean you don’t feel like you can control what you say?”

  “No, not my voice. My mouth. It’s Mom’s mouth.”

  “Sweetie—”

  “Don’t you remember that little puffing thing she used to do?”