More Than Human (6 page)

Lone’s next conscious thought was, Well, that’s finished.
       What’s finished? he asked himself.
       He looked around. “Mowing,” he said. Only then he realized that he had been working for more than three hours since Prodd spoke to him, and it was as if some other person had done it. He himself had been—
gone
in some way.
       Absently he took his whetstone and began to dress the scythe. It made a sound like a pot boiling over when he moved it slowly, and like a shrew dying when he moved it fast.
       Where had he known this feeling of time passing, as it were, behind his back?
       He moved the stone slowly. Cooking and warmth and work. A birthday cake. A clean bed. A sense of... “Membership” was not a word he possessed but that was his thought.
       No, obliterated time didn’t exist in those memories. He moved the stone faster.
       Death-cries in the wood. Lonely hunter and its solitary prey. The sap falls and the bear sleeps and the birds fly south, all doing it together, not because they are all members of the same thing, but only because they are all solitary things hurt by the same thing.
       That was where time had passed without his awareness of it. Almost always, before he came here. That was how he had lived.
       Why should it come back to him now, then?
       He swept his gaze around the land, as Prodd had done, taking in the house and its unbalancing bulge, and the land, and the woods which held the farm like water in a basin. When I was alone, he thought, time passed me like that. Time passes like that now, so it must be that I am alone again.
       And then he knew that he had been alone the whole time. Mrs Prodd hadn’t raised him up, not really. She had been raising up her Jack the whole time.
       Once in the wood, in water and agony, he had been a part of something, and in wetness and pain it had been torn from him. And if, for eight years now, he had thought he had found something else to belong to, then for eight years he had been wrong.
       Anger was foreign to him; he had only felt it once before. But now it came, a wash of it that made him swell, that drained and left him weak. And he himself was the object of it. For hadn’t he known? Hadn’t he taken a name for himself, knowing that the name was a crystallization of all he had ever been and done? All he had ever been and done was
alone
. Why should he have let himself feel any other way?
       Wrong. Wrong as a squirrel with feathers, or a wolf with wooden teeth; not injustice, not unfairness—just a wrongness that, under the sky, could not exist... the idea that such as he could belong to anything.
       Hear that,
son
? Hear that,
man
?
       Hear that, Lone?
       He picked up three long fresh stalks of timothy and braided them together. He upended the scythe and thrust the handle deep enough into the soft earth so it would stand upright. He tied the braided grass to one of the grips and slipped the whetstone into the loops so it would stay. Then he walked off into the woods.

It was too late even for the copse’s nocturnal habitants. It was cold at the hidden foot of the dwarf oak and as dark as the chambers of a dead man’s heart.
       She sat on the bare earth. As time went on, she had slid down a little and her plaid skirt had moved up. Her legs were icy, especially when the night air moved on them. But she didn’t pull the skirt down because it didn’t matter. Her hand lay on one of the fuzzy buttons of her sweater because, two hours ago, she had been fingering it and wondering what it was like to be a bunny. Now she didn’t care whether or not the button was a bunny’s tail or where her hand happened to be.
       She had learned all she could from being there. She had learned that if you leave your eyes open until you have to blink and you don’t blink, they start to hurt. Then if you leave them open even longer, they hurt worse and worse. And if you still leave them open, they suddenly stop hurting.
       It was too dark there to know whether they could still see after that.
       And she had learned that if you sit absolutely still for long enough it hurts too, and then stops. But then you mustn’t move, not the tiniest little bit, because if you do it will hurt worse than anything.
       When a top spins it stands up straight and walks around. When it slows a little it stands in one place and wobbles. When it slows a lot it waggles around like Major Grenfell after a cocktail party. Then it almost stops and lies down and bumps and thumps and thrashes around. After that it won’t move any more.
       When she had the happy time with the twins she had been spinning like that. When Mother came home the top inside didn’t walk any more, it stood still and waggled. When Mother called her out of her bed she was waving and weaving. When she hid here her spinner inside bumped and kicked. Well, it wasn’t doing it any more and it wouldn’t.
       She started to see how long she could hold her breath. Not with a big deep lungful first, but just breathing quieter and quieter and missing an in and quieter and quieter still, and missing an out. She got to where the misses took longer than the breathings.
       The wind stirred her skirt. All she could feel was the movement and that too was remote, as if she had a thin pillow between it and her legs.
       Her spinner, with the lift gone out of it, went round and round with its rim on the floor and went slower and slower and at last
       stopped
       ...and began to roll back the other way, but not very far, not fast and
       stopped
       and a little way back, it was too dark for anything to roll and even if it did you wouldn’t be able to see it, you couldn’t even hear it, it was so dark.
       But anyway, she rolled. She rolled over on her stomach and on her back and pain squeezed her nostrils together and filled up her stomach like too much soda water. She gasped with the pain and gasping was breathing and when she breathed she remembered who she was. She rolled over again without wanting to, and something like little animals ran on her face. She fought them weakly. They weren’t pretend-things, she discovered; they were real as real. They whispered and cooed. She tried to sit up and the little animals ran behind her and helped. She dangled her head down and felt the warmth of her breath falling into the front of her dress. One of the little animals stroked her cheek and she put up a hand and caught it.
       “Ho-ho,” it said.
       On the other side, something soft and small and strong wriggled and snuggled tight up against her. She felt it, smooth and alive. It said “He-hee.”
       She put one arm around Bonnie and one arm around Beanie and began to cry.

Lone came back to borrow an axe. You can do just so much with your bare hands.
       When he broke out of the woods he saw the difference in the farm. It was as if every day it existed had been a gray day, and now the sun was on it. All the colors were brighter by an immensurable amount; the barn-smells, growth-smells, stove-smoke smells were clearer and purer. The corn stretched skyward with such intensity in its lines that it seemed to be threatening its roots.
       Prodd’s venerable stake-bed pick-up truck was grunting and howling somewhere down the slope. Following the margins, Lone went downhill until he could see the truck. It was in the fallow field which, apparently, Prodd had decided to turn. The truck was hitched to a gang plough with all the shares but one removed. The right rear wheel had run too close to the furrow, dropped in, and buried, so that the truck rested on its rear axle and the wheel spun almost free. Prodd was pounding stones under it with the end of a pick-handle. When he saw Lone he dropped it and ran towards him, his face beaming like firelight. He took Lone’s upper arms in his hands and read his face like the page of a book, slowly, a line at a time, moving his lips. “Man, I thought I wouldn’t see you again, going off like you did.”
       “You want help,” said Lone, meaning the truck.
       Prodd misunderstood. “Now wouldn’t you know,” he said happily. “Come all the way back just to see if you could lend a hand. Oh, I been doing fine by myself, Lone, believe me. Not that I don’t appreciate it. But I feel like it these days. Working, I mean.”
       Lone went and picked up the pick-handle. He prodded at the stones under the wheel. “Drive,” he said.
       “Wait’ll Ma sees you,” said Prodd. “Like old times.” He got in and started the truck. Lone put the small of his back against the rear edge of the truck-bed, clamped his hands on it, and as the clutch engaged, he heaved. The body came up as high as the rear springs would let it, and still higher. He leaned back. The wheel found purchase and the truck jolted up and forward on to firm ground.
       Prodd climbed out and came back to look into the hole, the irresistible and useless act of a man who picks up broken china and puts its edges together. “I used to say, I bet you were a farmer once,” he grinned. “But now I know. You were a hydraulic jack.”
       Lone did not smile. He never smiled. Prodd went to the plough and Lone helped him wrestle the hitch back to the truck. “Horse dropped dead,” Prodd explained. “Truck’s all right but sometimes I wish there was some way to keep this from happening. Spend half my time diggin’ it out. I’d get another horse, but you know—hold everything till after Jack gets here. You’d think that would bother me, losing the horse.” He looked up at the house and smiled. “Nothing bothers me now. Had breakfast?”
       “Yes.”
       “Well come have some more. You know Ma. Wouldn’t forgive either of us if she wasn’t to feed you.”
       They went back to the house, and when Ma saw Lone she hugged him hard. Something stirred uncomfortably in Lone. He wanted an axe. He thought all these other things were settled. “You sit right down there and I’ll get you some breakfast.”
       “Told you,” said Prodd, watching her, smiling. Lone watched her too. She was heavier and happy as a kitten in a cowshed. “What are doing now, Lone?”
       Lone looked into his eyes to find some sort of an answer. “Working,” he said. He moved his hand. “Up there.”
       “In the woods?”
       “Yes.”
       “What you doing?” When Lone waited, Prodd asked, “You hired out? No? Then what—trapping?”
       “Trapping,” said Lone, knowing that this would be sufficient.
       He ate. From where he sat he could see Jack’s room. The bed was gone. There was a new one in there, not much longer than his forearm, all draped with pale-blue cotton and cheesecloth with dozens of little tucks sewn into it.
       When he was finished they all sat around the table and for a time nobody said anything. Lone looked into Prodd’s eyes and found
He’s a good boy but not the kind to set around and visit
. He couldn’t understand the visit image, a vague and happy blur of conversation-sounds and laughter. He recognized this as one of the many lacks he was aware of in himself—lacks, rather than inadequacies; things he could not do and would never be able to do. So he just asked Prodd for the axe and went out.
       “You don’t s’pose he’s mad at us?” asked Mrs Prodd, looking anxiously after Lone.
       “Him?” said Prodd. “He wouldn’t have come back here if he was. I was afraid of that myself until today.” He went to the door. “Don’t you lift nothing heavy, hear?”

Janie read as slowly and carefully as she could. She didn’t have to read aloud, but only carefully enough so the twins could understand. She had reached the part where the woman tied the man to the pillar and then let the other man, the “my rival, her laughing lover” one, out of the closet where he had been hidden and gave him the whip. Janie looked up at that point and found Bonnie gone and Beanie in the cold fireplace, pretending there was a mouse hiding in the ashes. “Oh, you’re not listening,” she said.
      
Want the one with the pictures
, the silent message came.
       “I’m getting so tired of that one,” said Janie petulantly. But she closed
Venus in Furs
by von Sacher-Masoch and put it on the table. “This’s anyway got a story to it,” she complained, going to the shelves. She found the wanted volume between
My Gun Is Quick
and
The Illustrated Ivan Block
, and hefted it back to the armchair. Bonnie disappeared from the fireplace and reappeared by the chair. Beanie stood on the other side; wherever she had been, she had been aware of what was happening. If anything, she liked this book even better than Bonnie.
       Janie opened the book at random. The twins leaned forward breathless, their eyes bulging.
      
Read it
.
       “Oh, all right,” said Janie. “ ‘D34556. Tieback. Double shirred. 90 inches long. Maize, burgundy, hunter green and white. $24.68. D34557. Cottage style. Stuart or Argyll plaid, see illus. $4.92 pair. D34—’ ”
       And they were happy again.
       They had been happy ever since they got here and much of the hectic time before that. They had learned how to open the back of a trailer-truck and how to lie without moving under hay, and Janie could pull clothes-pins off a line and the twins could appear inside a room, like a store at night, and unlock the door from the inside when it was fastened with some kind of lock that Janie couldn’t move, the way she could a hook-and-eye or a tower bolt which was shot but not turned. The best thing they had learned, though, was the way the twins could attract attention when somebody was chasing Janie. They’d found out for sure that to have two little girls throwing rocks from second-floor windows and appearing under their feet to trip them and suddenly sitting on their shoulders and wetting into their collars, made it impossible to catch Janie, who was just ordinarily running. Ho-ho.
       And this house was just the happiest thing of all. It was miles and miles away from anything or anybody and no one ever came here. It was a big house on a hill, in forest so thick you hardly knew it was there. It had a big high wall around it on the road side, and a big high fence on the woods side and a brook ran through. Bonnie had found it one day when they had gotten tired and gone to sleep by the road. Bonnie woke up and went exploring by herself and found the fence and went along it until she saw the house. They’d had a terrible time finding some way to get Janie in, though, until Beanie fell into the brook where it went through the fence, and came up on the inside.
       There were zillions of books in the biggest room and plenty of old sheets they could wrap around themselves when it was cold. Down in the cold dark cellar rooms they had found a half-dozen cases of canned vegetables and some bottles of wine, which latter they smashed all over because, although it tasted bad, it smelled just wonderful. There was a pool out back to swim in that was more fun than the bathrooms, which had no windows. There were plenty of places for hide-and-seek. There was even a little room with chains on the walls, and bars.