Otherworldly Maine (39 page)

With pen and ink and old brown paper from Healy Tompkins's writing desk, she meticulously practices his handwriting. For an entire week, twenty minutes each day, she practices the long loops of his g's, the firm dots of his i's, the miserly crosses of his t's. Satisfied at last by her progress, she buries these papers in Mr. Mackee's pile of leaves, knowing that they will be ashes before noon.

Today she will rewrite Healy Tompkins's poem.

“A Translation, in His Own Hand,” a label will say. “Found by Mrs. Charles Egars.”

The Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society will look foolish when someone from the State Museum notices that the ink is fresh. Jenny's mother will punish her for making trouble, but Jenny doesn't care. As soon as she is finished, she will flyaway from Pithom and this museum and her parents' fights and everything. She is ready. Knapsack, one-way bus ticket to Portland, woolen jacket, and extra pair of sneakers wait by the door.

The hawk mummy winks at her with black glass eyes, although by now it is late October and the ceiling fan isn't on and the light hangs perfectly still.

It is not much of a poem, but she likes it anyway. Shabby outside, its strength lies within its words.

Jenny knows the power of words. She has heard her father work them upon her mother: I'm sorry, Ellen, I didn't mean it, she doesn't mean anything to me, it won't happen again, I'll come home tonight. Words make what he says true, even when it happens again.

But no one offers Jenny apologies to brush away the gray mat of lies that mantle her shoulders. They don't care about the filth. Do they even see it? No matter. If no one will remove it, she will escape it. She will escape it and never look back to Pithom and will never need to look back because before her will lie the entire rest of the world. Someone, somewhere, will care.

She writes in her best Healy Tompkins hand:

Before she can complete the exclamation point, the pen shoots across the shed as a spasm tears through her wrist. The inkwell tips and brown-black ink streams off the burl walnut desk onto the Ghiordes rug, which drinks it in.

It is nearly four o'clock.

Fear knots her stomach and arms and legs, which cramp with terror because soon the Ladies will be here; but no, it is something deeper than fear. It is something that knots up her bones and her skin and her arteries and her hair and reweaves them from the inside.

Legs shorten and twist, fingers lengthen, toes extend, a feather sprouts from each follicle.

She has wings to spread!

They are fast against her side, but she has wings and will fly. Far below will Pithom be, she will come forth from this tomb. Away from the Ladies of the Pithom Historical Society and away from her parents, Jenny Alcock will become glorious.

The shed is too small for her wings; they remain fast. The spell says seven cubits, which Jenny suddenly realizes must be very large. How big is a cubit? Outside there would be room for seven cubits, and more. Jenny takes a step forward toward the window and the wide world beyond. And cannot.

She is linen-bound.

To one side of her sits a fragment of wood and above it a label: Sliver of the True Cross. At her feet is another label, its o's gently typed: Hawk Mummy. Late Period. Purchased Cairo, 1889.

Jenny finds herself stared upon by herself. But this other girl who has Jenny's face and Jenny's shoes and Jenny's hair has eyes that are too shiny, too black, like polished glass.

This glass-eyed-thing with Jenny's face speaks in a language thick and throaty with age. Jenny cannot understand it, but she recognizes the words. Hieroglyphs have sound in them, and this is that sound.

The thing with Jenny's face throws open a window with bull's-eye panes. Wind flashes through the shed, tearing gently typed labels from their pins, shattering cabinet doors, snowing dust over shelves and tumbling precious, ancient relics: the tympanum of Saint Peter, the sailor's valentine, the hawk mummy.

As Jenny falls she shrieks, or would shriek, if her beak were not bound up like her wings.

The thing with Jenny's face replaces hawk-mummy Jenny carefully upon the shelf, dusts the linen wrappings and the wooden mask, and winks.

And flies out the window on wings seven cubits wide.

T
he aliens came to Earth the same spring that Cyrus Holmes found the old barrel. It was buried under a stack of old lumber in a dark corner of the barn, and it would have stayed buried if Cyrus hadn't been looking for his grandfather's tool chest. Grandpa had been a cooper all his life, and when he was gone, the tools had been stored away. They included a cooper's adze, which Cyrus thought might be just the thing for roughing out a new plow handle.

He found the adze. Once sharpened, it worked as well as he had hoped. He also found the barrel, and that was in rather worse shape. It had been drying for half a century, forgotten in the shadows, and its staves now fitted as badly as fence pickets. But a month or two in the pond would fix that, he told Allie, his wife. Then he could replace the hoops and have a decent vessel to harden his cider in.

All through that summer, Cyrus tended the barrel. He soaked the wood in pond water, watching the wood swell and tighten. He replaced the hoops with cobblings from his workbench. He stood the thing in the yard, filled it from the hose, and watched as the last leaks slowed and stopped. Finally, it was as tight as it would ever be, and the apples in his small orchard weren't quite ready.

In the meantime, there were the aliens. Cyrus knew all about them. He didn't have a tractor or a chain saw or an electric milker. He worked his fields with a yoke of oxen, cut his firewood with an axe, and milked his dozen cows by hand. Still, he was up-to-date enough. He had a car, for getting to church of a Sunday and so Allie could drive to her job in town. He had a radio or two. He even had a teevee set, and he never missed the six-thirty news.

He knew all about the aliens. He'd seen pictures of them, all smothered in pastel-patterned coal-scuttle helmets, like something out of a movie about the Great War. He'd heard they were refugees from some foreign disaster or war, and he knew they were asking for a place to settle in the ocean shallows, promising not to interfere with navigation or fishing—they farmed their food on land—and offering to trade. They had science beyond anything Earth knew, they had technology, and they had a price list. The space for a small colony, a little place to call their own, for instance, was worth the plans for a space drive. Help in settling in was worth a map to worlds that men could live on. Other things were worth money, credits that could be exchanged for travel tickets, for lesser goods, even for alien encyclopedias, suitably translated. Earth was drooling.

Cyrus thought it all interesting enough, but he was a farmer, a raw-boned, weathered outcropping of Maine's coastal hills. The aliens scarcely touched his life, and they never would, any more than the rest of modern life did. Too, he'd never seen an alien. Not many people had, for though they traveled plenty, they did it in closed black limousines, chauffered by UN flunkies.

Cyrus—he hated being called “Cy” so much that anyone who dared be so familiar might get day-old eggs or half-soured milk—Cyrus put the aliens on a par with Florida hurricanes and California floods and Detroit strikes. They were all interesting. They all made the news. And he thought about them only when they crossed the flickering screen of his teevee set.

But the day came, it did. His apples ripened, and he gathered up the falls and picked the rest. He set a basket of the best down cellar for winter eating, helped Allie put up two dozen jars of applesauce, and filled the trailer with the bags and boxes that remained. Then he visited the cider mill.

The mill was Bob Witham's. An ancient rig of flapping belts and groaning gears, powered by a gasoline engine, it was nearly as decrepit as its toothless, flatulent owner. But it made good cider.

Cyrus binned his apples and watched the endless belt haul them up the chute to the grinder. As old Bob paddled the pulp into the burlapped flats for the press, Cyrus said, “Got a barrel now.” He had to roar to be heard above the machinery.

Bob glanced up from his work. “Good for you.”

“Ayuh. Old one. Found it out in the barn.”

“Hope it's tight,” Bob held up a hand to examine a gob of apple pulp sticking to a thumb. He licked it off. “Good apples this year, Cyrus.”

“Should hope so. M'nured the bejeezus out of 'em. Soaked the barrel, too.”

“Oughta do it. Stand back now.” Bob threw a switch, and the grinder overhead groaned into silence. He flipped the last fold of burlap into place, laid a flat on top, and leaned into the pile of neatly wrapped squares of pulp. They rolled into the press on their dolly and jolted to a stop. He hauled on the lever that lowered the immense plate of the press into position. He flipped the lever that fed power to the belt that drove the press's screw. The screw turned. The plate mashed down. Juice spurted from the flats, collected in the gutters, and was pumped to the holding tank on the wall above their heads.

“Where's that cup?” asked Cyrus. Bob turned to point at the wall. There hung, just as it did every fall, a battered dipper. Once it had been enameled gray and blue. Now it was mostly rust, but Cyrus didn't mind. He took it off its nail and held it to catch the dripping cider. He drank deeply, and then he offered it to Bob. “It's good.”

“Ayuh. Barrel'll do it more good'n them plastic jugs of yours, too.”

“Hope so.” The juice was sweet and tart, yet not too tart. Once hardened and settled, it would have a decent kick to it.

When the last drop of juice had left the press, Cyrus fetched his jugs from the car. They were the five-gallon inflatable things the hardware store sold to campers. Cyrus had found them good for cider, for maple sap at sugaring-off time, even for hauling water in dry spells. Now he puffed them open and held them under the hose from the holding tank. They filled slowly, since the hose was none too big, but he was in no great hurry. The cows would need milking when he got home, but they could wait for half an hour. Sixty gallons of cider was well worth a little patience.

He didn't unload the trailer till after supper. Between milking the cows in the pasture and the other chores, he had no time, and even then he didn't have enough. The barrel was in the barn, resting on its side, the bung-hole neatly plugged, its filling port on top and open. He ranged his jugs beside it. Then he selected one and took it into the house. “Fresh cider,” he said to Allie. “Want a glass?” She did. They drank. They filled a pitcher for the fridge and put the rest in smaller jugs for the freezer. It would keep there, and they would have it for their grandchildren, for nieces and nephews, for themselves whenever they didn't care for hard cider. “I'll put the rest in the barrel tomorrow,” he told his wife, “That's soon enough.”

They refilled their glasses then, took them into their small living room, and turned on the news. And there were the aliens again, big as life. It seemed the French had sent them a case of wine. They liked it, asked for more, and paid, generously. “Our guests,” said the teevee announcer, “have said they will pay for whatever they want. And we want their money, for only with it can we buy the wonders they have to sell. The trick has been finding things they want. We are very different creatures, with different tastes and different needs, and they are far ahead of us in technology. Too many of the things we make, they can make better, and they have less desire for our handicrafts than we have for Indian pots and blankets. After all, we aren't related.” The announcer smiled, showing well-kept teeth.

Cyrus grunted. Allie said, “Maybe they would like your cider.”

Cyrus grunted again. “Doubt it. 'Tain't wine, is it?” She agreed. Cider was a country thing that rarely appealed even to most humans, living as they did in cities. Most folks preferred wine and beer. Why should the super-civilized aliens be any different?

First thing next morning, as soon as the milking was done, Cyrus headed for the barn. He wanted to get his cider into his barrel, get it working with a touch of baker's yeast, get it started toward his favorite brew. But when he entered the barn, the barrel was not as he had left it. The bung hole was no longer plugged, and the barrel itself had rolled a bit.

He scratched his head. Had someone come last night to steal some cider? No. All the jugs were there, just as full as he had left them. He swore.

When the barrel twitched, he swore again. When he saw a movement behind the unplugged bung-hole, he did it once more. Damn! His cider barrel, that he was counting on to give him better drink, was occupied. A rat? A mouse? It was late in the year for snakes, and birds would never enter such a place.

There was a sound, like a watery voice. The movement repeated, and a ropy thing, a tentacle, emerged from the bung-hole. With difficulty, he realized what he had. An alien. Of all things. What was it doing here? Where was its chauffeur? Where was its shell? He traded his puzzlement for a growing anger. What right did it have to take over his barrel, to deny him proper cider?