Guests on Earth (24 page)

It was much warmer inside, though the darkness was total. A match flared, then the yellow light of a lantern. Roy barked once, and was fed. Pan put something from his pack into Roy’s waiting bowl; whatever it was, it disappeared in an instant. Then Pan crossed to the small fireplace and lit a fire that caught instantly, too.

I had a moment to look around. It was like being in a fairytale, or a children’s book, or an animal’s house. A house like a hole in the ground, with no windows, its dirt floor deep in pine straw packed down into a sort of mat. Rudimentary wooden furniture made by Pan himself—for I had often seen him over at Brushwood building things for Mrs. Morris, chests and benches and such, sanding them and rubbing them with linseed oil until the wood gleamed. Pan had a little square table with the lamp on it, one chair, a couple of wooden chests, for clothes and supplies, I guessed, and a shelf that held a number of small wooden animals that he had obviously carved himself. The raised bed tick was covered by old blankets and quilts more of which also hung on the walls, such as they were. The space was so tiny that it seemed entirely natural to me when Pan dusted off his hands and helped me take off my coat, hanging it from a peg before leading me over to the bed, as there was no place else for both of us to sit and be comfortable. He took off his boots and put on some moccasins that he had made from some kind of animal skin. I took off my high-topped shoes and my damp socks. He gave me two of his own socks to put on, one orange, one brown. To be in this strange dwelling was like being in the hold of a boat, I decided, deep inside a sailing ship upon the high seas, crossing the ocean.

Pan grabbed up an old guitar and played me a tune. “Oh Polly, pretty Polly, come go along with me,” I sang along with him. “The first time I saw you, it wounded my heart.” I had not known he could play guitar. And I was fascinated to realize that he had no hesitation with words when he sang, though his regular speech was sparse and halting at best. I lay back on the blankets to listen, but then he put the guitar aside and began matter-of-factly to unbutton my dress, as if it were a job of work to be done. And indeed, it took him forever, with all those little bone buttons up the front so difficult for his hard, thick fingers, biting his lip and saying “pretty girl, pretty girl” over and over until it was almost a song, too. Then he pulled my dress off and took off his own shirt and undershirt and I could see all the springy brown hair on his muscled chest and his white arms like sculpture in a museum. Pan had a particular smell about him, earthy and somehow familiar. I unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants and he came to me finally, which was what I wanted, I knew it then, everything I wanted then or ever. The bed tick smelled piney and musty, like nothing else in the world, and the yellow firelight leapt all over the colors and patterns of the quilts on the wall, fans and flowers, diamonds and interlocking rings.

“A
IN’T YOU HUNGRY?”
S
uddenly Pan sat up, his thick hair touseled and sticking out every whichaway, which made me laugh, and I started tickling him which made him roll over on me again.

“Now I am really hungry!” I announced after that, and sat wrapped in a blanket to watch him get up and pull his pants on and disappear behind the quilt at the back where the cave grew narrower and deeper, as I would learn. He came back with a big piece of raw meat and some potatoes, which he cut up on a smooth rock by the fire and then fried in a long-handled iron skillet right there, sprinkling the food with salt and pepper, those familiar little paper packets from the dining hall. Had Flossie given these to him? And what about the old guitar? I remembered all the instruments on the porch that night we “sang the moon up” at the Bascomb homestead in Madison County.

Pan brought the whole skillet over to me, right there in the middle of the bed. “Can I have a fork?” I asked, and he brought that, too, and we ate sitting in the bed with the old black skillet on a pallet on our crossed knees, facing each other and sometimes feeding each other, too, Pan eating with his hands, though carefully, with his customary precision, me half naked and not even caring, though I did put my coat and my shoes on eventually to slip outside and pee, amazed at the brightness of the moon and all the sounds of night creatures in the forest. When I opened the plank door to come back in, I heard music again, the most beautiful, plaintive song, which he was playing on his harmonica. There is nothing like a harmonica to express yearning, I think. Pan just shrugged when I asked him what the melody was, then nodded when I asked him if he’d made it up.

He reached into the chest that doubled as a table by the bed, came up with a bottle, then screwed off the top and took a big drink of it before handing it over to me. “Brandy,” I said. I took a long swallow that burned all the way down but went straight to my head as I went on talking and talking, telling all those secrets I’d been so good at keeping. Though his eyes stayed right on me, bright as a bird’s, I knew he didn’t understand most of what I was talking about, but it didn’t matter. It never mattered. I was more myself with Pan in his lair than I had ever been before, or ever have been since. I talked until we finished the brandy and he reached for me, and then I slept like a stone until sometime later in the night when I woke up in a panic and started shaking him.

“Oh Lord,” I cried, “I’ve got to get back. You’ve got to take me back right now.” For with no windows, I couldn’t tell what time it was—it could have been noon, for all I knew! And I had morning music groups with Phoebe Dean.

“Okay, it’s okay.” Pan was dressed instantly, though it took me a few more minutes.

It turned out to be that magical time just before dawn, a time that I had never experienced out in nature before, the pearly sky lightening to the palest pink then deepening to salmon, winter trees like black lace against it, scratchy little tracks everywhere visible now in the snow, a rabbit jumping across our path, a nearby owl still to be heard.

“Looky there.” Pan pointed up and there was the owl himself in the crook of a massive tree; his huge head with its unblinking eyes swiveled all the way around to watch us as we left. “Too—tooo—whooo?” he called after us. “Me!” I felt like screaming out the answer. “Me, Evalina, that’s who!” As before, Pan went ahead, with me stepping in his footsteps where it was easier to walk. Now it seemed like no time at all until the forest opened upon the long white slope of the Highland Hospital grounds yet at a different place, I believed, from where we had entered. I could not be sure. Pan came to a stop, me beside him. Looking back at our single track, I wondered, was I even there? Now I could see the gracious buildings clustered on top of the hill, two hawks swooping figure eights against the gorgeous sky. The melody from “Morgen” ran through my mind. “And all around us will sing the muted silence of happiness.” A gray van drove slowly up the main driveway with its lights on, then the red and white grocery truck. Once again, I was starving. I turned to kiss Pan good-bye, but he was already gone.

“F
REDDY’S BACK!” THE
g
irls chorused later that day when I returned to Graystone after work, bone-tired yet still exhilarated. Our sitting room looked fussy and foreign to me now, like a room in an old French novel. Amanda and Myra had made brownies, which smelled wonderful baking.

“He is?” I hung up my coat and sank down upon the couch, scarcely able to comprehend this news.

“Yep,” Jinx said matter-of-factly. She stood in the middle of the floor holding the blue mixing bowl and licking chocolate off the spatula. “Freddy’s already been here twice. He’s after you, Evalina. He wants to jump your bones.”

Everybody giggled.

“Oh, he does not!” I said.

But just at that moment, Freddy himself burst in the door with a whoosh of cold air and his red cheeks redder than ever, wearing that silly hat with the earflaps, crossing over to the sofa to grab me up in the biggest hug. “Here you are! Man, I’ve been missing you!” he cried.

And Reader, I confess: My heart did not sink but soared to see him again, to hear him say, “my girl,” and to watch him fill up our whole parlor with goodness and vigor. I found myself smiling foolishly along with the others when he produced a cloth bag filled with gifts “from home”—which I began opening one by one, as everyone else tactfully disappeared—except for Jinx, of course, who recognized no social cues. Jinx had no more manners than a goat.

One by one, I opened the sweetest gifts:

—A needlepoint purse made by Freddy’s sister Elaine, with a repeating pattern of roses and hearts;

—A dainty gold locket which had belonged to some great-aunt or other, long deceased. Her initials were E.M.M.;

—A carefully wrapped package of divinity fudge, which I had never heard of, though apparently it is considered a great treat in Indiana;

—A loaf of his mother’s prize Nut Bread (“Very appropriate!” I had to say)—plus the family recipe written out in her spidery hand along with the notation, “How to keep Freddy happy”;

—Two mysterious hand-sewn items made of red-and-white-checked gingham cloth gathered up by elastic, with ruffles all around their bottoms.

“What do you think these are?” One in each hand, I held them aloft.

“Damned if I know.” Even the gift-giver looked perplexed.

“I know,” Amanda announced, gliding through. “They’re for the kitchen. You put one over your toaster and the other over your Mixmaster.”

“But why?” I asked.

“So nobody has to look at them, I guess,” Amanda said. “You know, to beautify your kitchen. I used to have some of those myself, back in the Dark Ages.”

“Or you could just wear them, I reckon,” Jinx suggested, grabbing one to pull it down over my head like a dustcap. Immediately, Freddy put on the other. Then we couldn’t even look at each other without going off into fits of laughter, while Jinx got so tickled that she had to lie down and bang her heels on the floor like a little girl. Suddenly Freddy stopped laughing and stared at me, very serious beneath his ruffled hat, until I had to turn away. From that day forward I was his girl for real, and we both knew it.

But this had nothing at all to do with Pan.

J
ANUARY
25
,
1948
.
H
ow well I remember this afternoon! Like one of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s arresting paintings hung in permanent exhibition on the wall of my memory . . .

A canceled music group had given me a free hour to duck into the Art Room, where I sat chatting with Miss Malone as I attempted to shape a little clay animal for Pan’s collection of “critters,” as he called them. This was to be an elephant, for Pan had no African or exotic animals at all, only realistic depictions of the creatures in his own forest. But I was finding this simple project harder going than I had expected, as my elephant kept tipping forward, to Miss Malone’s amusement and my annoyance. “His head’s too big,” she said, which gave me a sharp pang as I thought of Robert.

To change the subject, I pointed at the exhibit wall before us, where several of Mrs. Fitzgerald’s latest paintings were on display, all very different from her pastel scenes of travel in Europe, or the amusing, magical renderings of fairy-tales and Alice in Wonderland. The new paintings obviously reflected the more withdrawn, serious Mrs. Fitzgerald who had come back to us now—incomprehensible scenes done in glaring colors—blood red, royal blue. Each was crowded with human figures in attitudes of tragedy, torpor, or even death. Some were clearly women, with round, high breasts exposed; others were probably men, though it was impossible to distinguish the sex of many, much less decipher the meaning of these pictures.

“What’s going on?” I asked Miss Malone. “What do these mean?”

“Well, she’s very preoccupied with religion,” Miss Malone began.

“But wait—Mrs. Hodges told me she was in love with a Russian general,” I said.

“Oh, that!” Miss Malone smiled. “That’s just an idée fixe, it comes and goes, it’s been going on for years now. I guess the religious fixation has, too, but it’s gotten more intense recently. Much more intense. Notice the crosses everywhere—and there are Bible verses printed out on the back of all the canvases, too. Each one is a specific scene from the Bible, though I admit, it’s sometimes hard to tell—”

“Rowena!” It was Mrs. Fitzgerald herself, rushing across the room. “Rowena, you won’t believe it!” she cried, as somewhat taken aback, Miss Malone stood to hug her. “She’s here, she’s here, she’s already here! Oh Rowena—they just called me from the hospital.”

“That’s wonderful, Zelda.” Indeed, Miss Malone looked overjoyed herself, both for her favorite patient and because she and Karen were genuinely fond of children; they adored them, in fact, arranging games and activities for them at every staff picnic and event. I had always thought it a great pity that they would never have one of their own.

“This is a new grandchild?” I ventured.

Mrs. Fitzgerald turned a beaming face upon me, radiant as a spotlight, and suddenly I saw her old self pictured there, and remembered how beautiful she had been when I first saw her. “This is a brand-new little girl who has most recently arrived upon the earth, a very little girl with a very large name.”—now Mrs. Fitzgerald was hugging me, too—“Her name is Eleanor Lanahan, isn’t it clever of such a little girl to have such an important, serious name as Eleanor? To balance out the Lanahan, don’t you see, so now it’s a seesaw name, with equal weight, three syllables, on each side. A felicitous name, a noteworthy name. Names are very important, you know. Furthermore, Eleanor Lanahan has beautiful manners as well, having already invited me to pay her a visit in six weeks’ time.” Mrs. Fitzgerald was practically babbling, her face alive and glowing.

“Congratulations,” I said sincerely. “This is wonderful news.”

Mrs. Fitzgerald nodded vigorously. “She will be an angel in the world, I am making sure of that. These are for her, and for little Tim, too”—indicating the pictures with a sweeping gesture—“that they may know the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ, and walk in godliness all the days of their lives, and dwell in His house forever.”