The Ten Thousand Doors of January(19)
A look of deepest consternation. “No, no. Words.” He tried to explain further, with lots of stuttering sentences about the nature of the written word and the shape of the universe, the relative thickness of ink and blood, the significance of languages and their careful study—but between his limited verbs and her tendency to laugh they made little progress. He surrendered, and asked her questions about her own world instead.
She answered as well as she could but found herself limited by her shuttered life. She knew little about the nearby town, and only as much about the wider world as could be taught in two grades of education at the one-room schoolhouse. “It’s not as exciting as yours, I bet. Tell me about the ocean. Do you know how to sail? How far have you been?”
He spoke and she listened, and dusk swept over the two of them like a great dove’s wing. Ade noticed the settling quiet of the day and the rhythmic whip-poor-will-ing of the night birds and knew it was past time to be home but couldn’t make herself turn away. She felt suspended, hovering weightless in some place where she could believe in ghosts and magic and other worlds, in this strange black boy and his hands flashing through the dimness.
“And no one in my home is like you. Did something happen, to take away your skin? Did it—what—” The boy’s English devolved into a series of guttural exclamations Ade felt could be translated universally to What the hell is that? He whipped left and right, staring into the shadowed field.
“Those are fireflies, ghost boy. Last of the year. Don’t you have those on the other side of your door?”
“Fireflies? No, we do not have these. What are they for?”
“They aren’t for anything. Except telling you it’s dark, and you’re in twenty heaps of trouble if you don’t get home soon.” Ade sighed. “I have to go.”
The boy was looking up now at the evening stars shining with disapproving brightness above them. Another string of words that Ade had no difficulty translating. “I must go also.” His eyes found hers, dark and shining. “But you will return?”
“Shit, on a Sunday? After staying out late? I’ll be lucky if they don’t lock me in the hay barn till Christmas.” It was clear the boy missed several important nouns in this statement, but he pressed her and they agreed: in three days, both would return.
“And I will take you back with me, and you will believe me.”
“All right, ghost boy.”
He smiled. It was such a giddy, starstruck expression, as if the boy could imagine nothing better than meeting her in this field in three days, that Ade saw no other recourse than to kiss him. It was a clumsy kiss, a dry brush that almost missed his mouth entirely, but afterward their hearts racketed strangely in their chests and their limbs tingled and shook, so perhaps it was not such a poor effort after all.
Ade left then in a whirl of skirt and red blanket, and it was several minutes before the boy could recall precisely where he was and where he ought to go next.
At home Mama Larson greeted her with a wailing diatribe on the fates of girls who stayed out alone late at night, the fear and anxiety she’d caused her dear aunts (Aunt Lizzie interrupted to say she’d been mad as a hare, not fearful, and Mama Larson could just speak for herself), and the inevitability of the decline of womanhood in this country. “And where is your coat, fool child?”
Ade considered. “Elsewhere,” she answered, and wafted up the stairs.
The weekly trial of Sunday church was somewhat easier to bear, Ade found, when one harbored a delicious and impossible secret burning like a lantern in the center of oneself. The townspeople—who weren’t really townspeople at all, but more a collection of feral persons who lived on farms just as isolated and distant as the Larson family’s, who congregated only for auctions, funerals, and God—shuffled into the pews with the same dulled expressions they wore every week, and Ade felt herself separate from them in a new and quite agreeable fashion. Preacher McDowell’s sermon warbled around her like a river breaking around a stone.
The Larson women always sat in the third row from the back because Mama Larson insisted it was prideful to sit in the front row but impolite to sit in the very back, and because all of them enjoyed the thrill of superiority that came from watching the latecomers straggle in and slide into the last pew with their necks bowed. That Sunday the last pew was occupied by a few red-faced members of the Buhler tribe and the Hanson boy who was in his forties but still called “boy” because his time in the war had shaken the sense out of him. But at the very end of the sermon, as measured by McDowell’s increasing volume and perspiration, a man Ade didn’t recognize entered the church and tucked himself into the second-to-last row.
Ade didn’t know much about the wider world, but she knew for certain this man lived there. Everything about him spoke of precision and order. His woolen coat was short and sharp, revealing a long length of pressed black trouser. His graying mustache was clipped with surgical precision. There was an almost imperceptible shuffling sound as every member of the congregation attempted to look at the stranger without anyone else seeing them look.
The service ended and the flow of people bottlenecked itself around the interloper. A few of the first-pew families had taken it upon themselves to make introductions and inquiries. They hoped he’d enjoyed their little service (although Ade was unconvinced that enjoyment was even a distant goal of Preacher McDowell’s) and wondered at his occupation in the area. Perhaps he had relations nearby? Or business on the river?