During the time the vet worked there, the place had filled with amazing stenches, paint, turpentine, old wheat paste and horse hair, pulverized wood dust, Swifty’s pee, the varnish. These and other things, things without names, smells damp and dry, steeped the house. This was summer and, while Mother kept the windows open so to catch the breezes, the air hung dead outside, so the smells of the veteran’s work lingered and settled.
The first storm changed that. I missed its approach but awoke when a white flash and simultaneous thunder kicked the world to life just outside my window. It was that close, close enough so that when the sound awakened me, the lightning still lingered at the black edges of my room. Air, finally cool, breezed across me, sucked the heat of my body through summer sweats and carried it away. For minutes I was afraid to move, afraid another smash would blast the porch roof outside my window to flinders and me with it.
Finally, something about the rain, wind, and the stillness of our home made me tingle. Lightning and thunder were coming regularly, but none with the immediacy of that first shock. I got up.
Raymie was in the hall. The lamp threw a dull yellow cone up the wall. The kid stood between it and me. His cheek and body were pressed against the not quite white wall, as though he were floating on it, peering beneath. I assumed he was…
Truth is, I had no idea what he was or was not. I’d never seen him at anything like this. A tide of white lightning washed the hallway. The light froze his shadow on the wall for a flickering moment then it was gone. Raymond didn’t move then he did. His fingertips walked his right hand a few inches nearer his head. His left hand slipped higher, higher, then stopped. He shifted his weight, tottered, shuffled closer to me, turned toward me... then he sang. No tune, no radio melody, nothing from memory, a kid’s floating hum trying to find itself. The thunder rumbled below it.
Then the lamp winked and was gone. The storm hung fire and there was nothing, no light for seconds. Then distant lightning from Mom’s end, dimly, then once or twice brilliantly, quietly lit us. Each time, the kid had moved closer, flash by flash, each time, he was in a different position and nearer. His small voice and songless song grew louder, his bare feet hushing the carpet, my way. Distant thunders but no lightning, nothing but my brother’s voice and the closer, closer shuffle of his small bare feet.
I wanted to fill the place with daylight, jump, yell. I didn’t. I knew there was a danger, waking sleepwalkers. I didn’t know what, but knew there was, so I backed toward my room, keeping darkness between us.
I didn’t remember closing my door, but suddenly my back was against it. The wind, likely, the wind that now blew through the hall must have eased it shut. Now I noticed the wind; it flowed over my feet and toward the crack beneath my door. Cool storm air from the side hallway, from downstairs, from Pop-pop’s empty room, from our mother’s room, sighed along the hallway and brought my brother toward me.
“Raym,” I whispered. “Raymie,” I said louder. “Raymond!” I shouted, but the shout was like one those thin screams made in a dream that’s nearly over. The lightning came bright and silent and Raymond’s face was inches from my chest, his eyes were wide and wild, his mouth open, every tooth he owned showing in a silent cry lost in the thunder. The lightning held the hallway flickering in a semblance of movement as shadows came into being then collapsed one on top of the other.
And that was that.
I screamed us all awake. Mom came from her room with candle. Raymie cried. I tried it, but the bathroom light didn’t work.
“Raymond, oh, honey Raymond, it’s okay. It’s just rain and thunder. Can’t hurt you.” She looked at me. “And what’re you yelling at?”
I was still flicking the light switch. “Power’s out,” I said.
“Get Pop-pop’s whatever… his fish light.” As though I were an idiot.
When I returned with the camp lantern she was holding the kid in her arms. He was snuffling and looking sheepish, like he did. I put the lantern on the table. It threw a bull’s-eye of light on the ceiling. The outer rings ran down the wall and spread a little yellow on the hunt.
“What were you doing? Where did you think you were? Oh, honey…” She cooed while she petted Raymond’s wet hair back from his eyes.
He looked at her and, this is funny, the cry oozed out of his face and was replaced, I swear, by a look, one of those ‘I have a secret’ looks. I had felt that look cross my face from time to time. Raymie tossed it away in less than a second…
“Raymond?” Mom said.
…and he replaced that look with a smile so beautiful.
“I was in a dainty place,” he said.
“…a what?” Mom said.
“I was in a dainty place.”
I almost dropped dead away.
The power was back next day. That day, Mom hung the first pictures in the hall. Family photos. Raymie’s episode and the photos were not connected. I don’t think, anyway. Mom simply came out of her room that morning, stretched, looked down the long white hall. “Little bleak, huh?”
That was that. After breakfast she tap-tap-tapped a couple pictures of Dad and us on the wall, a few of Raymie and me, two of her with Dad from before the war, one with him in his uniform, a lake in the background. Mom blushed when she hung that one. She sniffled when she touched it. Going into the walls, the nails sounded soft, as though they were being driven into thick nothing.
“Better?” she said.
I shrugged.
She started bringing home frames, plain ones from the Five-and-Dime, beat-up things from junk shops. Into them she fed photos that had been around for as long as I’d been alive, shots of Pop-pop, Nanna and Mom at the shore or on a mountainside, them sitting in clearings in the woods or by lakes. There were photographs of family I didn’t know, or of us in places I’d never been, pictures of me held by people I never knew or those I knew to be dead. There were pictures of young Pop-pop and pretty Nanna and other dead people in prickly clothes from horse and buggy days, Mom’s people, slicked and unsmiling. There was none of Dad’s people I think. Some pictures I asked about and when she explained I still didn’t know.
By the start of school, the old lace walls were black and white with pictures and frames.
“I want you guys to know where you came from,” she said at the table. Dinner had been cleared and she was matching pictures to frames. “You know, those people,” she flicked her head upward. Raymie followed the look through the kitchen ceiling. “They all lived, had lives and did, well, whatever. Now…” she sniffled, “now, you’re them.”
Raymie and I looked at each other. His mouth was open.
I guess she looked at me because I was squinting. “I mean, you’re what’s left of your dad and me and Pop-pop and Nanna, all our people. You’re it, what’s here.” She stopped talking and went back to framing.
“Family,” she said smiling, touching my neck.
Okay. Why I almost dropped dead that night. It goes back to the picture that lay beneath the almost white paint and a bit to the mostly dead family that was gathering in the hallway. Beyond the hunt and trees, there was a castle. Could it be seen? No. I put it there with my head, built it through days of sitting, reading to myself or remembering Pop-pop’s stories, bringing forth all the stuff that scared me in them. I put the castle on the far side of the woods. It was a huge stone thing on a hill on its own sunny plain, a little Sleeping Beauty, some of Prince Valiant, a bit of Rapunzel and some of the White Castle, downtown. The place was white, anyway. White in the sun, at night it was black and pierced a thousand places by candle-lit windows and torch-bright arrow slits. The place wasn’t well thought out. I’d pictured a lot of towers, portcullises and drawbridges, a moat. Inside were feasting halls with house-high fireplaces, torches, banners everywhere. The halls had pine boughs spread across the floor. Pop-pop said they did that, that it made things smell good, like our living room at Christmas and after. Below were dungeons and passageways, one secret place to another. There were high r
ooms of stone and tapestries. And here and there were rooms for just me and the friends I’d have.
And another place, a small place. No windows. Whenever I saw it in my head the room was yellow with candlelight, filled with the scent of hot wax mingled with spices—Pop-pop’s tales always had people who risked the world for spices and riches. The room smelled old. Old like the mummy-room at the museum. Yet this was a room of small things, fragile this-and-thats. There were shelves and cupboards, chests and boxes, small vaults and built-in safes sealed with cunning locks and demonically clever traps—more Pop-pop words—that were filled with cogs, gears, springs, spools of wire, with limbs and digits, hearts and eyes for mechanical people and clockwork beasts, of gadget bits, parts of toys and tick-tock whimsies to amaze and delight. There was a table of instruments, tools that warped space with vorpaled edges and measured the impossible with verniers of light. Things waited here and there, for repairs for building, just for so, for nice.
This place was the heart of it all, what I always thought of as a “dainty place.” A Nanna-name. Nanna never saw the room, of course. It was only in my head and she was gone long before it existed even there. In life, whenever Nanna saw a precious thing, a lady-watch, a tiny cup, a spun-glass animal, or wooden balls within rings inside boxes, she would cup it in her hands, hold it to her eye and breathe, “Oh, isn’t this just what whimsy is? Isn’t that a dainty place?”
I was young. That look, the move, her eye, those words are almost all I remember.
Raymond, of course, had never known, never heard, and I’d never spoken it, not to him nor anyone. Yet, that night, he was there, awake and back from some place, that dainty place at the heart of my castle of terrors.
He asked me about Nanna soon after. Half a dozen pictures of her were on the wall, photos that spanned her life from when she married Pop-pop, a bright hazy beauty next to him, a straight-haired, horse-faced, hard-collared boy, younger than Mom was now, all the way to her last days, skin dried to crinkles and not a lick of spit in her.
“Who’s she?” Raymie said, pointing at the bride.
“Nanna,” I said. “Grandmother. Mom’s mom.”
“And that? Who’s that?”
“Nanna, too. She’s old there.”
“No!” he yelled, looking from one to the other. Then he laughed. “No.”
The pictures opened doors. We’d meet in the hallway. He’d point, “Who’s that?”
“Dad,” I’d say or whomever.
“Tell me about your dad!”
“Your dad, too…” I’d say.
“No,” he said, and looked again. “No. That’s your dad. Where’s my dad?”
“Same one.”
Then he cried.
Or I’d be in my room working tricks from Malini, making balls disappear, reappear, and the kid would drag me to the wall. “Where are we there?” or “Who’s that?”
I’d answer if I could. If I didn’t know, or tried to put him aside, Raymie wouldn’t stop. “Well is that our mountain?” “Well is it our another Granddad?” “Well is it Pop-pop’s brother?” “Well is that their house?” “I guess that’s your dad, too?”
Sometimes I’d ask Mom. Sometimes she knew, other times she’d shake her head. “Pop-pop knew what that was, but…”
On one picture a woman posed by a steam tractor with spiral sprung iron wheels twice the woman’s height. A dirty man perched on the machine’s high saddle. “No. Pop-pop told me who and what, but darned if I remember.” She had another squint, ticked her tongue and gave up.
Raymond always seemed sure, always gave me a look as though I held back some truth I didn’t want to share. Ignorance was never enough so I took a hint from the Big Book of Malini and made things up.
That great iron and steam thing once had been a fearsome beast. Alive and raging, it was captured in the forest. “Yeah, the forest on the wall. Before.” When captured, it had been changed into a machine. “Yep, that one.” A mighty witch, our great, great-grandmom from the old country, cast the spell. “Her in the picture. There!” I pointed. “She used the machine with her Imp, Igor—him, up in the saddle, cripes!—they killed Nazis in the war with it. The mountains? No, they’re not our mountains, those’re mountains beyond our mountain, they’re mountains in a place you’ve never seen. You might. One day.”
It was like that.
Raymie nodded his head, touched the picture, looked at me, smiled. That would be that. Much easier than a thousand questions after an “I don’t know.”
In my one of my tales an old guy, a stiff black suit standing to his shins in mud in the middle of a field, was an escaped priest from far away and over the seas. He’d fallen in love with a peasant girl who came to hear him, the young priest, serve mass. He left the monastery, where he’d been under a vow of loveless silence, to woo her. The monks chased them across the land. Along the way they’d become robbers just to earn their living.
It went on.
Finally, their backs to a cliff, out of bullets, the two decided to leap into the sea rather than surrender to the ravaging hordes of monks and nuns. In their final moment they were rescued by a crew of Barbary Pirates who climbed up the cliffs, set to and slew all the holy people, then offered the robber priest and his peasant love a place on their jolly ship. They accepted immediately and sailed upon the seven seas—the Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, Superior, Arctic, Mississippi, and Titicaca—where they laid waste to many towns and collected precious jewels, mountains of gold, countless bolts of fine silks, and spices galore from all around the world.
When the pirate priest and his corsair wife grew tired of blood and treasure, they retired to a farm near Philly. They built a castle—gone now—and raised a bunch of kids. The only photograph ever taken of them—“this one”—was snapped by one of the children—a school-chum of Pop-pop’s who gave it him just before he marched off to war, making Pop-pop swear never to tell the whole true story, ever.
“He died in the war, of course,” I told Raymie.
“How do you know it, then?” the kid asked.
“Pop-pop talked in his sleep,” I said. “Didn’t you know that?”
There were dozens of other tales and the next noise in the hallway came in late summer.
I woke. There was a cricket’s insistent buzz at the heart of the house’s silence. I had heard crickets in the yard, in the park. This was inside. Summer had lingered into deep September. Still, wet heat wrapped the nights. With windows open, this thing had come and settled into the walls I guessed. It played an insistent, metallic chitter.
I lay not sleeping. What if the bug chewed the wires, made a short? What if the constant sawing of cricket legs heated them to kindling and he burst to life inside the walls, set the house and us on fire?
Stupid? Yes. Possible? Well…
Into the hallway with me. And the chirrup, chirrup, stopped. Still, a bug could chew and chew so silently… I waited. Listened. Nothing, nothing. Nothing. To bed and moments later the chirrup-chirrup began again. And I was back. That pattern continued. Finally, I surrendered, slept. We lived.
I said nothing the next day. Raymie did.
“Woods’re back,” he said, his fork burrowing into his mashed potatoes. “Ch, ch, ch, ch, ch,” he said, a tolerable impression.
“What?” Mother said.
“The forest is coming back. I heard.” He did his noise again.
“There’s a cricket in the baseboard,” I said. “Must have come in a window. Something. It might eat the wires. Probably not, though, huh?”
“Well, some people think they’re lucky,” Mother said. “So, third grade? You like it better?”
I didn’t. That’s all she said about it. That’s all I said about chewed wires. The kid smiled.
That night they were back: the heat, the ch-ch-ch and sudden silence. I became familiar with it, insect conflagration. Night-by-night the fear of flames became ordinary.
Top to bottom, it was a long stairway, fifteen steps, three m
ore to the living room floor. That summer I had grown long enough in my legs and arms to feel that I’d be able to make the jump, eleven feet and three inches, top step to bottom landing. I’d tested my reach, leaned out from the top, walked my hand down the banister on the right, inched-down against the wall on the left. Long arms. I reached nearly halfway down by the time third grade started. Saturday morning, I leaned farther than ever, body horizontal. I said a prayer to Dad and committed. I swung out on a whim, kicked my legs ahead to proceed the fall, enough, I hoped, to miss the last steps and land flat on the landing. I landed flat on the landing. Almost went head-first into the wall, but didn’t. I was alive and whole and it never hurt a bit and the world was wonderful.
“Do it again!” The kid had been watching from the hallway. “Then me…” He came down a couple steps, grabbed the rail with both hands, looked at the space ahead. He was thinking.
I yelped, ran, grabbed the kid, and dragged him to the landing. “You’re too little. You’d bust your noodle.” I tapped his head. “I’ve been waiting since I was your age to do that.” I mussed his hair.
He gave me the look, the I-can-do-anything-I-want look, the you-can’t-tell-ME look, and shoved his hair back.
“Breakfast,” Mom called from the kitchen.
Raymond relaxed in my arms.
“Okay?” I eased off. “Okay, you won’t?”
“Before it’s lunch, guys, come on.” Mom came in from the kitchen. “What?” she said, looking at the two of us facing off.
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