Ruth studied his face, a rare look of love and wonder in her gaze. Both grinned a private, sheepish half-smile, the meaning of which eluded me. Sitting between them, I basked in the warmth of the moment, lacking any guilt over the fact that I was not their child. We drove on, the happiest of happy little families.
As we crossed a high bridge over the river not far from our house, a commotion flashed along the riverbank far below. To my horror, I saw a line of changelings walking through a clearing in single file, blending in with the budding trees and bushes, then vanishing in a blink. Those strange children moved like deer. My parents were oblivious, but at the thought of those creatures down there, I flushed and broke into a sweat, which as quickly turned to a chill. That they still existed alarmed me, for I had nearly forgotten them. That they could expose my past made me ill, and I was about to beg my father to pull off the road. But he lit up another cigarette and opened his window wider, and the fresh air alleviated my nausea, if not my fear.
Mom broke the spell. “Didn’t Mr. Martin ask us to commit to four months?”
“I’ll call him Monday and work out a deal. Let’s try two months, actually, at first. See if the boy likes it.”
For the next eight years, I took piano lessons, and it was the happiest time of all my lives. If I came in early to school, the nuns were glad to let me practice at the upright in the lunchroom. Later on, they let me into the church to learn the organ, and I was the youngest substitute organist the parish ever had. Life became orderly, and the discipline a joy. Each morning, my hand went under the warm bellies of the chickens, collecting eggs, and each afternoon, my fingers upon the keyboard, perfecting my technique. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, the trip into the city proved a tonic, away from farm and family and into civilization. No longer something wild, but a creature of culture, on my way to becoming a virtuoso once again.
? CHAPTER 6 ?
In setting down these recollections of my early years so far removed from their unfolding, I am fooled, as all are, by time itself. My parents, long gone from my world, live again. The redcoated woman, met only once, abides more persistently in mind than what I did yesterday or whether I had thistles and honey or elderberries for breakfast. My sisters, now grown into their middle years, are ever infants to me, two matching cherubs, ringlets of curls, chubby and helpless as cubs. Memory, which so confounds our waking life with anticipation and regret, may well be our one true earthly consolation when time slips out of joint.
My first nighttime foray into the woods left me exhausted. I burrowed beneath a heap of coats and blankets and furs, and by next midday, a fever burned. Zanzara brought me a cup of hot tea and a bowl of nasty broth, ordering me to “drink, drink, sip it.” But I could not stomach a single swallow. No matter how many layers they heaped upon me, I could not get warm. By nightfall, I shook uncontrollably with chills. My teeth rattled and my bones ached.
Sleep brought strange, horrible nightmares where everything seemed to happen at once. My family invaded my dreams. Hands joined, they stand in a half circle around a hole in the ground, silent as stones. My father grabs me around the ankle and pulls me from the hollow tree where I lie hidden and sets me on the ground. Then he reaches in again and yanks each twin by the ankles and holds them aloft, the girls giggling in fear and pleasure. And my mother admonishes him: “Don’t be so hard on the boy. Where have you been, where have you been?”
Then I am on the road, in the arclight streaming from an old Ford, the deer supine on the pavement, its breathing shallow, and I synchronize my respiration with its rhythms and the redcoated woman with the pale green eyes says: “Who are you?” And she bends to my face, taking my chin in her hands, to kiss me on the lips, and I am a boy again. Me. But I cannot remember my name.
Aniday. A wild child like myself, a girl named Speck, leans over to kiss my forehead, and her lips cool my hot skin. Behind her, the oak leaves turn into a thousand crows that take off in unison, flying away in a great twisting, singing tornado of wings. Silence returns after the drumming flock escapes to the horizon and morning breaks through. I give chase to the birds, running so fast and so hard that my skin splits a seam on both sides and my heart drums against my ribs until halted by the deathly appearance of a roiling black river. Concentrating with my entire mind, I see to the other side, and there on the bank, holding hands around a hole in the ground, are my father and mother, the woman in the red coat, my two sisters, and the boy who is not me. They stand like stones, like trees, staring into the clearing. If I summon courage to jump into the water, I may reach them. Blackwater once carried me away, so I stand on the bank, calling out in a voice that cannot be heard, with words no one can understand.