Land of Dreams (5 page)

Beneath the joke was a certain amount of scandal. It was true – MacWilt would no more house a foundling or feed a gypsy than he’d give a gold piece to a beggar, which is to say never. The woman died, some said in childbirth, when Lantz was eight, and there was a brief, wicked rumour that the unlikely offspring had been a monster and that MacWilt himself had borrowed a skiff, rowed three miles out to sea in a calm, and cast it into the deep ocean. Some went so far as to whisper that he’d murdered the woman himself, out of sheer horror, but it had never been proved.

Lantz, though, fled into the woods and stayed there, and village children brought him what he needed to stay alive. He avoided the village, although he sometimes helped Skeezix fish for tide-pool animals, and now and then Mrs Jensen hiked out to his shack above the bluffs with a basket of food. Helen one time had brought him a caged canary, but Lantz had fled in horror at the sight of it and they hadn’t seen him after that for months.

It was all very strange, and the later at night Jack thought about it, the stranger it seemed. There was no profit in thinking after midnight. Some little bit of the darkness slipped in and cast shadows across what ought to be commonplace details and events. The late hour changed their countenance in subtle ways until you began to see patterns in the stones in the tumbled countryside of your mind, patterns that were the vague outlines of almost recognizable shapes.

Jack shook the sleep out of his head. Mrs Jensen was laying the remains of an apple pie on the table, and beside it a pitcher of cream and a cold joint of beef and a great wedge of cheese. Skeezix nodded to Helen by way of politeness and then sat down and helped himself to the beef and cheese. The sight of Skeezix eating swept the doubts and suspicions and vagaries out of Jack’s mind. There was something about an apple pie, he thought as he sat down at the table, that made a mockery of late-night fears. But as he ate it, sleepy and drying out in front of the Are, he couldn’t quite rid his thoughts of the sound of the moving wind and the pattering rain.

J
ACK PORTLAND AWOKE LATE
in the morning, feeling as if he’d just eaten. It took him a moment to realize that he had, that he’d spent two hours in the middle of the night at Dr Jensen’s, following Skeezix’s lead and shoving down food.

The sky had partly cleared. What clouds were left blew across the heavens on a rushing wind, throwing a scattering of raindrops now and then, just to keep their hand in, but clearly put to flight at last.

From his loft window Jack could see halfway to Moonvale on a clear day. Only the rise of the Moonvale Hills and the low, drifting fog that shrouded them stood in the way. It would have been nice, perhaps, to have been able to see on a spring dawn the distant pinnacle of a shingled church steeple or plumes of sleepy smoke hovering above distant chimneys like the misty promise of enchantment just beyond the hills. But Moonvale was too far away and its church spires hidden. Any smoke from chimneys might as easily be cloud drift, and the only evidence of a city at all was that at night there was the faint glow of lights along the horizon, stretching down almost to the sea.

He hadn’t even been to Moonvale, although Helen had. If his father were alive the two of them would have been there and beyond. Some day … Jack thought. But the idea of it, of leaving Rio Dell and wandering off alone, was better left a dream. It was safer that way; like most dreams, it might lose just a little bit of its charm coming true.

A rush of wind blew through the open window, fluttering the pages of his book. Jack reached out and yanked closed one of the two shutters, fixing it tight with a wooden peg just as the wind threw the second shut with a bang. Though feeble light shone through knotholes and between the oak I slats of the barn, it was not enough to read by, so Jack lit three candles on the table beside his bed, then watched the flames dance and flicker in the little gusts that found their way through the slats. He wanted the sort of book that didn’t seem to need a beginning and end, that could be opened at any page without suffering for it – slow, candlelight reading.

He could have slept in the house, of course. Mr Willoughby might easily have preferred it. At times Mr Willoughby wanted more company than his cats. Jack rarely wanted any company beyond his friends. A year or so after his father’s death Mr Willoughby had asked Jack to call him ‘Pop’, of all things. Jack had made a painful effort, and they had stumbled along with it for about a month, but it was never natural for either of them, so Jack gave up on it. He’d stuck to ‘Mr Willoughby’ for a time thereafter, then settled finally on ‘Willoughby’ in the years since.

Jack had known his mother for a few short years and could recall almost nothing about her, depending upon the sad, usually drunken, reminiscences of old Willoughby. Jack owned a picture of her too, a faded photograph in which she wore a velvet dress –the dress she died in. Willoughby was her uncle and was the only family Jack had left. He did his best at it, too, but wasn’t cut out entirely for the raising of small orphaned boys. Willoughby wasn’t cut out for much of anything, but he had the right instincts.

‘I’m not much of a farmer,’ Willoughby would admit, shaking his head as if remembering something that he hadn’t the power to speak of. It was what Jack called a three-glass revelation – maudlin and sad, but without the edge of despair that set in after the fifth glass. And Willoughby was right, as far as it went. His farm was a ruin of weedy pastureland and broken fences and a half dozen or so independent-minded cattle who, Jack was certain, understood
themselves
to be the I owners of the farm. Jack had found one of the cows clopping through the village not half a block from the town hall one sunny afternoon, on his way, Jack was certain, to have a go at altering the deed to Willoughby’s land, in payment, perhaps, for sixty thousand quarts of milk given on loan.

But Willoughby’s ‘I’m not much of a farmer’ sentiment seemed to hint that there was work he was more suited to. Things might have been different, it seemed to imply. He’d think of Jack’s mother and shake his head. Then Jack would change the subject –happy though he would have been to glimpse bits and pieces of the past. Dr Jensen had told Jack that some day he’d see through it all clearly, and Jack supposed he was right. He often was, in his way.

When Jack had moved from the house to the barn at the age of twelve, Willoughby had said that Jack was exactly like his father and would one day be moving along into realms much farther removed than a hayloft.

But Jack’s father was dead, shot to death on the meadow. That was Willoughby’s way of being philosophic about death, Jack supposed – calling it a ‘realm’, as if it were something more than nothing. That was two-glass optimism on Willoughby’s part and was accompanied by squinting and nodding and an immediate third glass, which, at a blow, would level any such mystical talk and set Willoughby’s head from nodding to shaking. Seven glasses would set it to nodding again, in time to deep, sonorous snoring. That would continue until morning and was half the reason that Jack had moved to the loft.

The other half had to do with an evening on which the seven glasses had failed to put Willoughby to sleep, and he had muttered halfway through an eighth glass something about Lars Portland orphaning his own son. Nonsense had followed, giving way to sleep, and although poor Willoughby wouldn’t have remembered the slip the following morning anyway, Jack waited two weeks before announcing that the loft had taken his fancy. He wanted a view, he’d said, and that was the truth.

The ruined farm couldn’t pay. By the time Jack was six he knew that Willoughby had some little bit of money put away somewhere. Where it had come from was none of Jack’s business. Jack had never wanted for anything beyond a view – that and the unveiling of a few shrouded mysteries. Now he had a strange feeling, what with the change in the weather and the sky lit up at night and the tub water behaving like it did, that someone’s hand was on the curtain and at any moment would snatch it aside.

He realised, of a sudden, that his mind wasn’t at all on his book. Two of the candles had blown out and one of the shutters rattled against the window casing. Wind whistled softly through chinks. Rusted hinges squeaked downstairs and the barn door slammed. Yellow lantern light leaped up the walls, and Willoughby, come to work on his cheese, hummed softly and tunelessly after barring the door against the wind. There’d be coffee in the house.

Jack pulled on his trousers, shirt, and sweater and stepped across to the stile railing that fronted the loft. The rear half of the barn floor, separated from the cattle by a tight, low, panelled wall, was swept clean every afternoon. Tables and benches lined the walls, cluttered with tubs and buckets and shrouds of cheesecloth. Cheeses hung in nets from the ceiling and sat in moulds along the walls, heaped together, one atop and beside another like buildings along a street.

Jack and Willoughby couldn’t begin to eat that many cheeses, and Willoughby never sold any. The cheeses were an excuse to keep six cows.
One
cow would have been enough to keep them in milk and butter. Years ago Jack had assumed that the cheeses would one day come to something, that there would be some end to them. ‘Some things are never finished,’ Willoughby had said cryptically. They can’t be. Finishing doesn’t enter in.’

Many of the cheeses had long since become dust, and the rest had become a sort of mouse township, complete, Jack assumed, with aldermen and a mouse mayor. ‘Let the mice have them,’ Willoughby had said patiently. There was a lot in Willoughby to admire.

Jack could see the mice working the cheese. They appeared from little gnawed avenues and then disappeared again, toting chunks from deep in the interior toward secret destinations. Why they bothered was more than Jack could say. Why haul cheese from house to house in a city built of cheese? It had to do with ageing it, perhaps; the mice were connoisseurs.

Willoughby meddled with a cheese mould for a moment, cursed under his breath, and went out again through the door, shutting it after him. Lantern light flickered across the cheese, guttering in the cool, moving air of the barn. There was a noise in the shadows – the meowing of a cat and the scraping of claws against the boards of the barn wall. The cat pounced, suddenly, out into the circle of yellow light, landing on all fours but with its front paws together, trying to pin something to the floor. It was a mouse, running higgledy-piggledy, scurrying toward a crack in the floorboards.

‘Hey!’ Jack shouted at the cat, thinking to take the side of the mouse. He bent over to pluck up his shoe in order to pitch it over the railing. But then he saw that the shout had been enough. The cat had stopped where it landed in the lantern light. It stood there gaping, as if it had seen something it hadn’t half expected to see. Jack gaped too and straightened up slowly. There wasn’t a mouse on the floor of the barn at all; there was a tiny thumbsized man. He clutched in his hands the head of a mouse, a mask, actually. All Jack’s gaping and goggling lasted only a fraction of a second; before Jack could speak, before he could shout at the man, compel him to stay, the cat leaped at him and he dashed through a chink in the barn wall and was gone.

Jack fairly flew down the ladder. The little man had disappeared, lost in the high grass. Jack started after him but gave it up almost at once, fearful he’d step on him by mistake. He walked back into the barn and yanked the lantern off its hook and then held it near the chink in the barn siding, trying to illuminate it in such a way that he could see what lay beyond – outside. There was nothing but morning gloom and grass blades, just as he’d known there’d be.

The door opened and Willoughby strode back in, looking grizzled and tired. He chased the cat out and then asked Jack what it was he was looking for, down on his knees on the barn floor like that. Jack shrugged. It was an impossible question to answer.

‘See something, did you?’ asked Willoughby, looking at him sideways.

‘Yes. I think so. Might just have been a mouse, I suppose.’

‘You don’t
know
if it was a mouse?’

‘It was too dark. I couldn’t see clear. It looked like, like –’

‘Something that wasn’t a mouse?’

‘Exactly,’ said Jack. It seemed to him suddenly that Willoughby wouldn’t at all be surprised to hear that little men in costume came and went in the darkness. ‘What was it?’

Willoughby shrugged suddenly, as if he were weary of the whole subject. ‘Nothing you should meddle with,’ he said, taking the lantern and hanging it again on its hook. ‘It probably
was
a mouse, now that I think of it. What else
could
it be? You leave it alone. It’ll only waste your time. There’s trouble that comes from peering through cracks like that; you can mark my words. Your father found it – you already know that. So you’ leave it alone. There’s better things to do. Weather’s broke, if you ask me, and when I come up from town this morning I found this on the Cottonwood at the fork.’

He handed Jack a sheet of grainy paper, gaudy with colour even in the shadowy barn. CARNIVAL! it said across the top, and below that were the words
Dr Brown of World Renown
in smoky, languorous lettering that might have looked mystical and exotic if it weren’t for the cheap and tawdry effect of the colour-washed sketch below: a bird’s-eye glimpse of a carnival spread out in an open field: vast coasters and whirlabouts, a Ferris wheel with a rainbow of coloured cars leaning off it at jaunty angles, wild-eyed, broad-faced people staggering out of a funhouse through the window of which peered a tilt-headed skeleton with jewels in its eyes, wearing a slouch hat.