Gifts for the One Who Comes After

by Gifts for the One Who Comes After (v5. 0) (epub)

  “For the Lost Suh-s-s . . . ”

  He paused again. That moment stretched on and on like putty. Just when we thought it was about to snap. Just when we thought he was about to snap—you could see Missus Felder leaning forward now, she might’ve said something, none of us would’ve dared, we knew you didn’t speak for a stutterer, not ever, but she would’ve, she had the word on her lips and she was going to give it to him—that was when Milo swallowed, pushed up the brim of the chimney-pot hat with his wrist.

  “Beg pardon, ladies,” he murmured ruefully, but it was out and the words were solid. “And now for the Lost . . . Sisters.”

  The applause was bigger than it had been for any of the other tricks. Milo took it as his due.

  “For this I need a volunteer. Anyone?”

  No one budged. We couldn’t, not yet. We weren’t ready for it.

  “Anyone? Ladies, please. Ah, good. You there. The . . . missus is the blue dress.”

  It was Ellie Hawley from across the street in the blue cotton frock with the raglan sleeves her husband brought back from Boston. We were all a bit thankful. She was a good sort. The type who knew to bring licorice strands to a boy’s magic show.

  “I’m hard of hearing, boy,” Missus Felder said. “Which was that?”

  God, we were thinking together, do not make him say it again.

  It was no good though. She was smiling. Her words were sweetness and light, and she was smiling like she was some sort of old biddy about to offer him tea and biscuits. You couldn’t trust a smile like that. Oh, boy, not ever.

  “I, uh, suh-suh-s-sorry, folks.” The hat tilted forward again. Milo pushed it up, and licked his lips. “I meant . . . ” He paused. Why was he pausing? Don’t pause here, boy, we were thinking. Stick with Ellie Hawley. She’s already getting up. She’s halfway to the stage now, boy. Stick with her.

  But we could see the look coming over his face. It was a proud look . . . and something else, something I couldn’t quite tell yet. A look older than he was. He knew that Ellie was the easy choice. He knew it the same way we knew it. He knew this was a trap, but there was something in him that wouldn’t let it go. We were watching. We were waiting. Milo was fighting with this thing, and we let him do it.

  “ . . . you there, in the front. Missus Felder. Puh-puh-please. Come on up here. Ma’am.”

  No, we were thinking together, do not ask for her. Do not do it, boy. Do not call on her, boy. Can’t you see the Devil has come to your garden party? Can’t you see the Devil has gotten into Missus Felder, and there ain’t no way to cheat the Devil if you let her up on stage with you?

  Missus Felder, she just smiled.

  She took her time getting there, walked almost like an old woman even though she didn’t look forty yet. Passed Ellie Hawley along the way, just swished past her blue dress with the raglan sleeves.

  “Well, boy,” said Missus Felder.

  “Thank you, Missus Felder.” Milo said like he meant it. He shuffled the cards again, each of those big, blue Bicycles. Missus Felder watched primly, patiently, hips swaying slightly as she shifted her weight from side to side. As he was shuffling, you could see Milo starting to look for the words, starting to line them up in his mind like bowling pins so they’d fall down easily once he got going.

  Just as he opened his mouth to start the patter, Missus Felder piped up:

  “Aren’t you going to ask me my name?”

  Milo paused at this, chewed back those words he had all lined up for the show. “Nuh-no, Missus Felder. They all nuh-know it already.”

  She nodded at this, like it was what she had been expecting all along. We all breathed a sigh of relief, but half of us were saying something pretty foul with that breath, let me tell you. Milo smiled a little wobbly smile and got with the shuffling again until he was all good and ready.

  This time he got three words into the patter—three perfect words, three flawless, ordinary, magical words.

  Then: “Aren’t you going to ask me where I’m from?”

  Milo shook his head, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. His hands missed the cards and three of them went flying out: an eight of spades, a red jack, and the two of diamonds. Milo tried snatching them out of the air, but he missed with those little hands of his and they fluttered like white doves to the grass.

  He placed the deck down steadily on the card table, and all the while Missus Felder was watching him with a look as wide and innocent as his own. There was a hush. We all knew something was coming. The kid knew something was coming. The kid was the kind of kid born with enough sense to know when something was coming but not enough to figure how to get out of the way. We could see the poor kid’s hands were trembling. He stooped to grab the cards, and as he was stooping, off slid that the black magician’s hat.

  Missus Felder was faster than a rattler. Like lightning striking or tragedy.

  The hat was in her hand then. She was holding it up to the audience. She was squinting at the inside of the brim of it.

  “My boy,” she said, squinting away, “my boy, it seems as if you’ve dropped this.”

  Milo straightened up right away with only the red jack in his hands. He was staring at the hat. He was staring at Missus Felder.

  “Aww, c’mon,” someone whispered in the audience; we didn’t know who, but we loved that person.

  “Come now, Milo, we can’t have the magician without his hat, can we?”

  Milo didn’t move. No one moved. No one dared to. Only the breeze tickling at the edges of his star-spattered cape.

  “Come here, boy. Now.” Her voice cracked like a whip. Milo couldn’t ignore it. None of us could ignore it, our feet itched to stand. Ellie Hawley went so far as taking that first step forward before she caught hold of herself and paused.

  Milo, though, he was too young to know better. He had been trained to obey voices like Missus Felder’s. He was stepping forward, he was stepping forward, and there—he was forward, he was just in front of her, and she was putting down the hat, she was resting it gently on his head, and she was tugging just so at the brim to set it straight.

  And she was tugging at it.

  And she was tugging at it.

  And down came the hat an inch farther.

  And down came the hat another inch.

  She was still tugging at it, still smiling like she was doing a favour for Milo, but none of us could see his face anymore. The hat was past his nose. The hat was past his mouth. The hat was past his chin, but Missus Felder just kept tugging it down and down and down. Now his shoulders were gone, and it was taking the boy up into it, Milo, he was just disappearing into the hat, disappearing to his knees and his shin and his ankles until the hat was resting on the ground.

  Missus Felder blinked as if she was confused. She blinked as if she didn’t understand what had happened. Then she picked up the hat. Quizzical. She held it out to the audience, showed us all the inside and it was empty. Perfectly empty.

  “Well,” she said, almost apologetically. “I guess that’s that, then.”

  And she stepped off the stage.

  The thing about magic is it only works when you let it. It only works when you believe in it entirely, when you give yourself over to it entirely. Magic can only give you a thing you want that badly, that desperately. No one can work magic over you. You can only work magic over yourself.

  Cheryl Felder knew something about magic.

  There were stories about Cheryl Felder, stories that poor Sandifer kid ought to have known the way that all kids know whose trees not to filch apples from and which backyards shouldn’t be ventured for Frisbees and baseballs. Some might say that these sorts of stories were nonsense and spoke only to the curmudgeonly tendencies of the grumbles who reside in any town block.

  But those people would be dead wrong.

  After Sayer disappeared not a single soul spoke, not a bird twittered, not a skir
t fluttered in the breeze. You could see those faces, each of them white as snow, white as a snow-woman caught in a melt.

  Lillian trembled, but she said nothing.

  She watched Missus Felder pluck a crustless tuna fish sandwich off the platter and vanish it with three remorseless bites.

  “Could use some cayenne,” she said with a sprung smile, “but all around, fine work, Lillian. Thanks for the show.”

  Cheryl Felder knew something about magic, and the biggest trick she knew was that people don’t like messing with it. Messing with magic was like sticking your hand down a blind hole, you never knew if there might be treasure at the bottom or if it might be some rattler’s hole. And all those women, they had something to lose, they had sons of their own, they had husbands, they had pretty hair or blue cotton frocks—something they didn’t want vanished. So after a while each of them stood up and collected leftover plates still piled high with uneaten licorice strands or oatmeal-raisin cookies and then each of them filed silently past Lillian Sandifer with neither a glance nor a touch nor a whisper of comfort.

  Don’t be too hard on them.

  They had loved that boy. We had all loved that boy.

  They tried to make up for it over the next couple of months, knowing as we all did what a bad time Lillian would be having with that empty room at the top of the stairs, the room filled with arithmetic workbooks and bottle rockets and adventure paperbacks. They dropped off casseroles. Their sons took over the raking of the lawn and the watering of the flowerbeds. Ellie Hawley brought over a fresh-baked apple pie every Sunday. But it was never spoken of, why this neighbourly hospitality was due.

  And Missus Felder, she did the same as she had always done. She shopped at the grocery store, squeezing peaches and plums to be sure they were ripe. She got her hair done once a week at the salon at the corner of Broad and Vine.

  The missuses of the neighbourhood never spoke to her of it. None could manage it. I wanted to. I did. That little boy had a way of being loved that seemed a brand of magic all his own, but if there was one thing I knew it was that I couldn’t meddle in this.

  Once I saw Lillian try, but only once.

  This was about three weeks after it had happened. Poor Lillian was looking wasted and fat at the same time, her cheekbones sharp as fishhooks but her chin sagging like a net. Joe had gone on one of his business trips out of town, leaving her by her lonesome for the big old holiday weekend. All the ladies of the Hollow were bringing out bowls of punch and wobbling gelatin towers filled with fruit and marshmallows, while the children lit up Burning Schoolhouses and Big Bertha firecrackers. There was a fizzy feeling to the air on those kinds of days, as it exploded with pops and whistles and sparks and the smell of hamburger sizzling on the grill.

  Missus Felder, she came out too for the block party and she brought with her a bowl of plump, red strawberries. She set them up at the end of her driveway on a little wooden table with a lace cloth thrown over, and she handed them out to kiddies as they whizzed by.

  Now she was trimming the hats off them, one by one. Snip! A little stalk and a flourish of leaves went skidding onto the sidewalk. Snip!

  And there was Lillian standing in front of her, trembling, thin-boned, in a yellow print dress that made her skin seem old as last year’s newspaper.

  “Please,” Lillian said. Just that. Just that word.

  “Careful,” said Missus Felder, never looking up, her fingers dusted white to the knuckle as she pinched strawberries out and laid on the confectionary sugar. “You’ll spoil your makeup if you keep up with that. You’ve too pretty a face for tears and if I’m not wrong there’s others around here that’d be willing to hook that husband of yours. A nice man, Joe. A handsome man. He deserves a pretty wife.”

  Lillian didn’t say anything. Her lips trembled. They were chapped and unrouged, and maybe she was wondering why she hadn’t put a touch of red on them. Missus Felder plucked up another strawberry and she looked at it carefully.

  “You’re a beautiful woman, Lillian, and children wear you out. They trample the roses of youth, leave a woman like some tattered thing hanging out on the clothesline. Let the boy go. He was ungrateful, selfish. Have another one if it’s in your heart to do so, but let that one go.”

  “But he’s my son, Cheryl. Please.”

  “Son or no son.” Now Missus Felder sighed a worn-out, old sigh as if the weather had gotten into her bones and really, she was just an old woman, why was she being troubled with this? “Do as you like, Lillian. But I’ll tell you for nothing that some children are best let go.”

  And that was that.

  The last flickers of September’s heat burned out in the flood of a ravenous, wet November that shuttered the windows and played havoc with the shingles; by the time December whispered in, we were all thankful for it. All of us except for Lillian Sandifer.

  There were some women who could take a loss and find their own way through, but Lillian, bless her, had had an easy life. Joe was everything you ought to have in a husband. He treated her gently. He brought her back fine cotton sheets from Boston, dresses and trinkets, a music box, a tiny wind-up carousel. Lillian loved all beautiful things. She had come as close to a life without loss as one can. But when December blew in—an easy December, full of light snows and bright silver days—it was like she took all the harshness, the cold, the cutting, fractured freeze into herself, and she let it break her.

  And then we all saw the snowman in Missus Felder’s yard.

  The snows had been light, as I said, barely enough for a footprint, really, but there it was: round as a turnip at the bottom; a thin, tapering carrot for a nose; two silver dollars for eyes; and a fresh knitted scarf in green and gold hung beneath its hawkish, polar jowls. It was a king snowman, the kind of snowman that children dream about making before their arms give out from pushing the ball around the yard, the kind of snowman that wouldn’t melt until halfway through May.

  And on its head was a black chimney-pot hat, creased somewhat at the brim with a red silk ribbon drawn around it to set off its colouring.

  A beauty, that hat; gorgeous to the eyes of a child and pure pain to his mother.

  I could never do a big thing with magic, and that has always been both a blessing and a curse to me. Oh, there are ways and there are ways, and I know this is true, but the ways have never worked for me. It’s an easy thing to change a boy’s name. It’s a little thing, particularly if it is a thing done kindly, if it is a thing that might be wanted. Then the change comes easily. But I cannot get blood from a stone, nor flesh from bread, nor make healthy a woman who wishes she were sick.

  That is the province of my sister. And if it is none of mine to meddle with that greater magic, then it is at least something of mine to meddle with her.

  It was a month into the hard end of winter I finally broke my silence.

  “You must let the boy go,” I told Cheryl, stepping in out of the cold, stamping my boots off to shed them of the slush that had begun to freeze around the edges. Winter always followed the two of us, winter and spring, summer and autumn, they had their own way about us whether we willed it or no.

  “I will not, Minnie. . . .” She paused like the name was bitter to her. “Minnie, they call you. Ha. They have a way with names, don’t they? Marianne. No, Marianne, I cannot.” She closed the door quickly. She hated the cold, kept a thin blanket wrapped around her in the winter. I could see her curved fingers clutching at the edges. Winter turned her into an old woman as surely as summer made her a young one.

  I gave her a look. It was not the dark and hooked scowl that came so easily to her face, no, it was a look entirely my own.

  “It’s time. It is long past time.”

  “Too skinny, and what has that husband of yours got you doing with your hair? I could never abide him, you know.” Her mouth twisted as she looked me up and down

  “I know. You could never abide any of them.
”

  “I abided my own well enough,” she said. “The poor duckling. The little lamb. Let me fetch you some cake.” She did. Tea, as well, the heat of it warming through the bone china cup. Her movements were quick and sharp as a bird’s.

  She settled us at the kitchen table. I remembered this house, I knew the ins and outs of it. The gold December light filtered softly through the window, touching a lace cloth, a badly polished silver candle holder. She never had an eye for the details, no, and this was what came of it.

  “Where is the boy, Cheryl?”

  She touched her tongue to her lip, scowled something fierce. “You know as well as I do.”

  “Let him out.”

  “No.”

  “They will come to hate us.” I knew she knew this. I could see it in her eyes, in the way she twisted at the lace cloth, but she could be a stubborn old biddy sometimes. “He was a good boy, and it was a small thing,” I said.

  “It was not a small thing!” she cried so harshly it took me by surprise, that her voice could go so ugly. So sad. I looked at my sister, and I saw then the thing that they all saw. That missus of nightmares and twisted stories, the hooked woman, the crone; she who devoured baseballs and Frisbees and footballs; she who stole the bright heart of summer and cursed the strawberries to wither on the vine; the son-stealer, the child-killer.

  “It was,” I said gently. “You know as well as I do that it was, and it is only spite and pride that keeps you from letting him go.”

  “You are a meddler too, Marianne, so mind your tongue,” she muttered but the words stung nonetheless. “No,” Cheryl whispered, chin curved down, and she was retreating, drawing in upon herself. “I know it as well. It was a mistake, all of it, nothing more than that.” She cupped the bone china in her hand and blew on the tea to cool it. “I did not mean for it to happen, you know I did not, I would not do such a thing to a child. To his mother.” She paused, took a sip, eyes hooded, lips twisting. “I know that the woman is dying. I know she will not live through the winter, but I cannot touch her, don’t you see that? Don’t you see, sister? I cannot heal the mother, I cannot summon the child. I cannot force a thing that is not wanted, and the boy will not come out!”