Ghost Boy (9 page)

Chapter

18

I
t was just as the Gypsy had said. With the night came a storm. The storm brought thunder and great sheets of white lightning, wind that buffeted the truck and screamed through the cracks of doors and windows. It brought the man in trouble.

But first the truck skidded off the road.

They were singing “Roll Out the Barrel” when Samuel suddenly wrenched on the wheel, spinning it in his enormous hands. The engine raced and the truck lurched sideways, toppling Tina from her apple box. Lightning flashed, and the crack of thunder came an instant later. The Airstream pushed against the truck and turned it faster. The truck wobbled, tilting up, and came to a stop at a terrible slant, with Harold jammed against the door.

Samuel clung to the wheel. He switched the engine off, but the windshield wipers clicked and clicked, and the headlights threw their cones up through the rain and the clouds.

“Is anyone hurt?” he asked. “Can you open your door?”

Harold pulled the handle. The door flew open, and he tumbled out with Tina behind him, down to the mud of the ditch.

The trailer pointed one way, the truck the other. It seemed impossibly stuck, a front wheel right off the ground, spinning slowly.

Samuel stood in the rain and the wind and banged his fists on his head. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I don't know how I did it. Stupid! I'm just stupid.”

“You're not stupid, you lug,” said Tina. “No one can drive better than you.”

The Gypsy Magda stopped behind the trailer, her headlights blinding on its silver. She climbed from the cab in her scarves and bracelets, with a blanket wrapped around her, flapping in the wind.

“The little truck will never pull us out,” said Samuel. “We'll get them both stuck if we try.” He kicked the trailer's wheel. “What do we do? What on earth do we do?”

“We wait,” said the Gypsy Magda. Her hair streamed in tangles of gray. Her bracelets and bells tinkled in the wind. The lightning lit her like a skeleton in rags. “He is coming now, the man in trouble,” she said. “He is on his way.”

Chapter

19

T
he man in trouble came from the prairie, in a spot of light, as the Gypsy herself had come. He rode an ancient tractor that was huge and red, with metal wheels and a smokestack like a crooked finger, capped by a chattering lid. He sat high on a small metal seat, with a black Stetson on his head and glistening oilskins tumbling from his shoulders. On his lap he held a child, a girl, who lolled and tipped against him as though her bones had melted in the rain.

He drove down through the ditch and up to the road behind the Gypsy's truck, then turned to his right with mud spraying from the wheels.

It seemed he wouldn't stop. It seemed he would go right by on that enormous, bloodred tractor. But the Gypsy Magda spread her arms, and the wind thrashed at her scarves and blanket. Like a scarecrow, she stood in his way.

The farmer stopped. He shouted down, “You madwoman! You witch! Get thee behind me.”

She stayed where she was. Then Samuel came forward into his headlights, with Tina behind him, and Harold the Ghost.

“Good God almighty,” said the farmer. “Have you come to take her? Are you devils?”

“Gosh, no,” said Tina.

“You are not of this world, whatever you are.” He fumbled with the gearshift, jamming it forward and back. “Out of my way, I tell you!”

He stood on the tractor, black and gaunt against the clouds. The child's head rolled back as he raised an arm and shouted, “In the name of God I command you to go!”

Lightning seared across the sky. It made, for an instant, a world of white and black. The farmer in his oilskins, the Gypsy below him, seemed to smoke in that flash of hot light as the rain pelted off them in spray. Thunder boomed and echoed, and another flash of lightning cracked through the clouds. The light was blinding, the noise deafening. Harold could see or hear nothing for nearly a minute.

Then the farmer blinked down from his seat. “You are still here,” he said.

Samuel stood against the small front wheels. As big as he was, he was dwarfed by the tractor. “We're circus people,” he said. “That's all we are. We're stuck and we need some help.”

“Circus people?” said the farmer. “Freaks, you mean? Is that all you are?”

“Yes. Yes, we're freaks,” said Samuel, and Harold could see how hard it was for him to use that word. “We just need a push on the truck.”

“I can't help you. I'm sorry, and God forgive me, but I can't stay to help you.”

“The child!” said the Gypsy Magda. “You're frightened for the child.”

The farmer lowered his head. Rain poured from the Stetson, down on his oilskins, on the face of the child, bare in the blankets.

“Give her to me.” The Gypsy Magda reached up along the tractor's fender. Her bracelets scratched on the metal. “I can help her if you give her to me.”

“My firstborn.” He held the child closely, turning away as the Gypsy Magda groped across the fender. Her hand clutched at his boot, at the sodden cuffs of his pants.

Then her eyes closed. “She lies below a quilt you call the Drunkard's Path, under a picture her grandmother made. A cat, it sleeps by her feet. She dreams of giants and she cries out. The house, she says, it is spinning.”

The farmer gawked at her. “How do you know this?”

“She knows everything,” said Harold. He stepped up to the front of the tractor. “You have to trust her. You have to.”

“You won't find your doctor,” said the Gypsy Magda. “His gate is closed, his windows black. He rides across the prairie in a buggy, a bag at his side and hot bricks at his feet. A dog—a white dog—runs behind him.” She reached farther up his leg, clawing at his oilskins. A flash of lightning showed her there, the fallen scarves around her shoulders, the numbers on her arm.

“The devil's mark,” the farmer said. He shook her off and jammed the tractor into gear.

“It will be the death of her!” screamed the Gypsy Magda. “You will take her home, and the doctor—when he comes—will come too late.”

The tractor leapt forward, and Samuel fell away on the left side, the Gypsy Magda on the right. Only Harold stood in its path. The radiator grille, like rows of metal teeth, clanked toward him. “Stop!” he shouted, his hands held out. “You have to trust her.”

The metal touched his hands. The tractor pushed him back, his boots skidding in the mud. The engine roared and clattered, and it seemed the teeth would swallow him whole. He fell to his knees, got up, fell again. And then the roaring stopped.

The farmer was crying. “She might be gone already. She hasn't moved or said a word.” Rain hammered on his Stetson and his oilskins, and he hunched over his daughter, shoulders shaking with his sobs.

Samuel climbed up and took the girl. He didn't speak; he just lifted her from the farmer's lap and carried her through the mud and the rain to the Gypsy Magda's truck. And they all crowded inside it, the farmer in the doorway, as the Gypsy Magda lit her candles. “Open the blankets,” she said.

Harold peeled them back. The girl was tiny, frail and very thin. Her eyes open, her lips apart, she seemed to be not quite alive and not quite dead, but somewhere in between, staring out from a lonely world.

“Oh, the poor thing,” said Tina. “The poor little thing.”

“No talking!” snapped the Gypsy Magda. “She must hear no words of pity.”

The Gypsy Magda opened jars and stoneware pots. She ground powders in her palms, working in the candlelight with the din of rain against the roof. She muttered incantations as she stirred the powders into a paste, as she dabbed it lightly on the skin above the young girl's lips. It smelled strongly, and sweetly, of meadows and trees, of mushrooms and earth. She moved her hands along the small body.

“Breathe the world of the living,” she said, and touched more of the paste to the child's lips. “Taste the earth, the plants.” She pressed little balls into the girl's closed fists. “Feel the things you've left behind. Breathe and taste and feel. Breathe and taste and feel.”

The Gypsy's chant, the rain on the roof, were the only sounds. Her hands were all that moved. Then the child's nostrils twitched, her eyelids fluttered, and the little fists closed tightly.

“Breathe and taste and feel,” said the Gypsy Magda.

Thunder rolled, and a gust of wind shook the truck. Rain misted through the doorway, past the farmer's shoulders.

“Take her hand,” the Gypsy Magda said to Harold. “Hold it tight and wish her better.”

Harold did as he was told. The child's skin was cold and dry, the fist like a bundle of roots in his hand. But he held it and he wished. He imagined her playing in a schoolyard, laughing with her friends.

“And now we wait,” said the Gypsy Magda.

Chapter

20

T
he child died, or so the Gypsy Magda said. She died and then returned from the land of the dead to the land of the living. The small eyes closed and opened, and a smile came to her lips. She looked at Harold and asked, “Are you an angel?”

“I believe he is,” the Gypsy Magda said. “Yes, I believe that he is.”

They settled the child into a nest of pillows, then traveled east, the way they had come, down a road that was thick with mud. The Gypsy Magda drove, with the farmer shouting directions, with Harold squeezed between them. From the back of the truck came laughter as Samuel and Tina and the child lolled on the Gypsy's cushions.

“Turn here,” shouted the farmer.

The truck slowed and swung to the left, up a narrow lane toward a farmhouse in a field. Again the child laughed, and the farmer smiled. “She seems well,” he said. “I cannot thank you enough.”

“You must never talk of what was done,” the Gypsy Magda said. “You must never ask her where she was or what she saw.”

The farmer nodded. He fiddled with the Stetson that he held now in his lap, bending the brim into curves. “I am a patient man,” he said. “A good man, I believe. But I would not have answered such rudeness as I showed you with the kindness that you gave.”

“It was nothing,” said the Gypsy Magda. “Nothing.”

“It was the world to me.”

“The child we helped, not you,” said the Gypsy Magda. “We know what it is to suffer.”

The farmer turned the hat upside down and balanced the crown on his knee. “And you,” he said to Harold. “You put yourself right before the tractor. I could have squashed you; I nearly did. Yet there you stood, like Gabriel himself, all bright and shiny, white as goodness. Is it true? Are you not an angel?”

Harold shook his head. “No, sir.”

“Then you are a saint. Or you ought to be.” The farmer tipped the Stetson up against his chest. “You saved my daughter's life, and I'm forever in your debt. How can I repay you?”

Harold eyed the Stetson and wondered: Could he ask for that?

“Anything,” the farmer said. “Only name it.”

He almost did. It was on his lips to ask for that big, tall hat. But he saw the Gypsy Magda watching him as the lights of the farmhouse came swimming out of the rain. She had asked for nothing, and it was she who had really saved the child.

“Money?” asked the farmer. “I haven't much, but every penny that I own I'll gladly give to you.”

“No,” said Harold. He remembered the cook in his battered hat, the pride in the Gypsy's voice. And he said again, as grandly as he could, “I only wish I was a little bit darker.”

The farmer laughed. “I sow the ground, but God grows the plants. I leave the miracles to Him.”

         

T
HE HOUSE WAS SMALL
and tidy, with scrolls of woodwork above the doors and windows. It looked like an overgrown birdhouse, a square little building with only one room. Water poured from the roof in a dreary black gurgling, into barrels that overflowed. But if a house could be cheerful, this one was. It seemed as safe and inviting as the Liberty church.

The Gypsy Magda parked the truck below it, beside a whitewashed shed where chickens squawked. A curtain cracked open in the farmhouse window, and a woman peered out, black against the light.

“Can you give me a moment,” the farmer asked, “to tell the wife I have brought some … some company?” He fidgeted with his Stetson. His voice had a nervous crack. “She's not used to company. She—she might be alarmed. At company coming.”

“We understand,” said the Gypsy Magda.

He took his daughter and carried her up to the house. The door closed behind him, then opened soon after. And he waved, and they followed him in.

The farmer's wife was big and husky. Her face was brown and smoothly lumped, like a potato fresh from the ground. The farmer had prepared her well; she smiled at her visitors as though circus freaks called every day at her tumbledown home on the prairie.

“Sit,” she said. “Please. I will bring you some food.”

Harold saw that the floor had been quickly swept. A little pile of wood chips and bark and grass was pushed to the corner, behind a broom that stood on its tattered straws. Above it, on a loft that was reached by a ladder, two children stared down, as small as bats up there in the heat of the woodstove. A cloth had been thrown over the table, and an odd assortment of chairs placed around it—a rocker and a milking stool, a bench still wet from rain.

“Gee, this is swell,” said Tina.

On their loft, the children giggled. The farmer's wife glared at them. “Those are the twins,” she said. “They're supposed to be
sleeping
.” Then she picked up the broom and bashed its handle at the side of the loft. “So, what do you think of this weather?” she asked, smiling, as she put the broom back in the corner.

They ate soup and chunks of fresh bread. The girl who had died sat beside Harold, squeezed with him into the rocker. When he leaned forward so did she, and they dipped their bread together into bowls of thick brown soup.

“Harold's an angel,” she said.

“You bet he is,” said Tina. “He's something else, that Harold.”

He ate without talking. Then supper was over and the farmer's wife touched him on the shoulder. “Harold?” she asked. “Is that your name?”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Harold.

“Would you help me out back for a moment? Will you be kind enough to carry the kettle?”

He stood up, and she gave him a cloth to wrap around his hand. It was a big, black kettle that steamed on the stove.

She took a lamp and led him through a low door to a shed behind the house. Along the wall was a wooden bench, a washboard propped on its side, and a washbasin under a red-handled pump. The farmer's black clothes stewed in a black broth in the basin.

“Sit,” she said.

“Where?” asked Harold. There was nowhere to sit.

“Oh, mercy me,” she said. “The stool's in the house, of course.”

She pulled the clothes from their broth and hung them, dripping, on a little clothesline. Then she heaved the basin down to the floor and added water from the kettle. She opened a jar of foul-smelling liquid as black as molasses. And she dyed the white hair of Harold the Ghost.

He knelt on the floor and tipped like a bottle as her big strong hands kneaded and pushed at his head. He watched the water in the basin turn to black and froth. She spilled it out and filled it again, and rinsed him with a dipper. Then she grabbed his hair and lifted his head, and he could see that she was smiling.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“Like a count,” she said. “Like an Eye-talian count.” She gave him a towel and fetched a mirror, and took him close to the lamp.

He turned his head to look sideways, and she moved the mirror, and he turned his head again. They went around in a circle like a lord and a lady dancing. And then she laughed and gave him the mirror to hold for himself.

He saw a squinting, frightened, white-faced boy. Then he tipped the mirror and saw a black-haired boy, a suddenly grinning boy who didn't look like him at all. He touched his eyebrows and wished they were black instead of white, or not quite so ghastly white. He would have liked his skin to be a little darker, his eyes something more than clear. But for the first time in his life he liked the face he saw.

“Your own mother would hardly know you,” said the farmer's wife. She put the lid on the jar and tipped out the basin. “You are a different person, sure enough. Now come, let's show your friends.”

Harold stooped to go through the door, for it seemed that he was taller now, and broader. His boots didn't scuff or drag on the floor; they carried him across the kitchen in great, long strides. At the table faces turned toward him, and he tipped his head back a bit, so that the light might shine on his very black hair.

The farmer stroked his chin and nodded slowly. Samuel showed his crooked teeth. “Well, who is this?” he said. “Who's this handsome boy, and where has Harold gone?”

“Oh, you lug,” said Tina. “You look terrific, Harold. You look just swell.”

But the child, the farmer's daughter, wasn't pleased at all. “He looks like a goblin,” she said. “I thought he was an angel.”

“Hush!” the farmer said. “You will be off to your bed with talk like that.”

Harold crumpled slightly. His hands, which had felt so strong, began to shake and sweat. But the Gypsy Magda rose from her place and came across to Harold. “She's only a child,” she said. “She speaks without thinking. You look very handsome, very nice. But you have always looked handsome to me.”

The Gypsy Magda came up on her toes and gave Harold a cold, dry kiss on the cheek. “You have got the one thing that you wished. You should smile; you should laugh. You were right to be happy.”

The farmer's wife brought blankets and quilts, and the travelers bedded down on the floor. Harold listened to the rain pattering on the roof. He heard it stop at midnight, and was still awake when the farmer got up and roused them all. Dawn was hours away, but they dressed and drove back to the road, where the farmer hauled Samuel's truck from the ditch with his tractor. Then he stood in the glare of the tractor's headlights and solemnly shook hands with everyone. Last of all was Harold.

“You have a good lot of friends,” he said. “You are blessed for that.”

“Yes, sir,” said Harold.

“Do you know what the Bible says about friends?”

“A lot, I bet,” said Harold, groaning inside. The wind, at his back, blew strands of dark hair before his eyes. He felt new, different, at last like the snake he had envied for shedding its skin; he wanted to be off on the road, not listening to sermons.

“It tells you to be proud of them, and not to be ashamed of what they do.”

Harold nodded. The farmer squeezed his hand with big, plow-strengthened fingers. The Gypsy, in her truck, was watching him.

“You are not listening; I can see that,” said the farmer. “Go on, then, and be off with your friends.”

He stood by the road, and he shouted after the trucks. “Good luck! Good luck to all of you!”

The truck left the farmer behind. It roared on to the west, into a world just starting to turn from black into gray. Harold rolled his window down. He took the old leather helmet that lay on the seat beside him, and flung it out across the prairie. It leapt and rolled like a little tumbleweed, falling back as the truck moved on.

Then Harold closed the window and leaned his dark head against the glass.

No one spoke a word.