The Stolen Child (7 page)

•                    CHAPTER 8                    •

         
I
have something for you.”

The last bitter days of winter imprisoned the whole band. A snowstorm and freezing temperatures made travel outside of camp impossible. Most of us spent night and day under cover in a drowse caused by the combination of cold and hunger. Speck stood above me, smiling, a surprise hidden behind her back. A breeze blew her long black hair across her face, and with an impatient hand, she brushed it aside like a curtain.

“Wake up, sleepyhead, and see what I found.”

Keeping the deerskin wrapped tight against the cold, I stood. She thrust out a single envelope, its whiteness in relief against her chapped hands. I took it from her and opened the envelope, sliding out a greeting card with a picture of a big red heart on its front. Absentmindedly, I let the envelope slip to the ground, and she quickly bent to pick it up.

“Look, Aniday,” she said, her stiff fingers working along the seams to carefully tear the seal. “If you would think to open it up, you could have two sides of paper—nothing but a stamp and address on the front, and on the back, you have a blank sheet.” She took the card from me. “See, you can draw on the front and back of this, and inside, too, go around this writing here.” Speck bounced on her toes in the snow, perhaps as much out of joy as to ward off the chill. I was speechless. She was usually hard as a stone, as if unable to bear interaction with the rest of us.

“You’re welcome. You could be more grateful. I trudged through the snow to bring that back while you and all these lummoxes were nice and cozy, sleeping the winter away.”

“How can I thank you?”

“Warm me up.” She came to my side, and I opened the deerskin rug for her to snuggle in, and she wrapped herself around me, waking me alert with her icy hands and limbs. We slid in near the slumber party under the heap of blankets and fell into a deep sleep. I awoke the next morning with my head pressed against her chest. Speck had one arm around me, and in her other hand she clutched the card. When she woke up, she blinked open her emerald eyes to welcome morning. Her first request was that I read the message inside the card:

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restored and sorrows end.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 30

There was no other signature, no addressee, and whatever names had been inked on the envelope had been smudged into oblivion by the wet snow.

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “Who is Shakespeare?” The name seemed vaguely familiar.

“His friend makes all his troubles end, if he but thinks about him         .         .         .         or her.”

The sun rose above the treetops, warming our peaceful camp. The aural signs of melting began: snow sloughing off firs, ice crystals breaking apart, the thaw and drip of icicles. I wanted to be alone with the card, and my pencil burned like an ember in my pocket.

“What are you going to write?”

“I want to make a calendar, but I do not know how. Do you know what day is today?”

“One day is like another.”

“Aren’t you curious about what day it is today?”

Speck wriggled into her coat, bidding me to do the same. She led me through the clearing to the highest point near the camp, a ridge that ran along the northwestern edge, a difficult passage over a steep slope of loose shale. My legs ached when we reached the summit, and I was out of breath. She, on the other hand, tapped her foot and told me to be quiet and listen. We were still and waited. Other than the thawing mountains, it was silent.

“What am I supposed to hear?”

“Concentrate,” she said.

I tried, but save for the occasional laugh of a nuthatch and the creak of twigs and branches, nothing reached my ear. I shrugged my shoulders.

“Try harder.”

I listened so intently that a fierce headache knocked inside my skull: her even, relaxed breathing, the beating of her heart, and a far-off rhythmic vibration that at first sounded like the rasp of a file but soon took on a more fixed character. A hum of alternating speeds, a low splash, the occasional horn, tires on pavement, and I realized we were listening to distant traffic.

“Neat,” I told her. “Cars.”

“Pay attention. What do you hear?”

My head was splitting, but I focused. “Lots of cars?” I guessed.

“Right.” She grinned. “Lots and lots of cars. Traffic in the morning.”

I still didn’t get it.

“People going to work. In the city. Schoolbuses and kids. Lots of cars in the morning. That means it’s a workday, not a Sunday. Sundays are quiet and not so many cars speeding by.”

She held her bare finger to the air and then tasted it in her mouth for an instant. “I think it’s a Monday,” she said.

“I’ve seen that trick before. How can you tell?”

“All those cars make smoke, and the factories make smoke. But there aren’t so many cars on the road and the factories are closed on Sundays. You hardly taste any smoke at all. Monday, a bit more. By Friday night, the air tastes like a mouthful of coal.” She licked her finger again. “Definitely a Monday. Now, let me see your letter.”

I handed over the valentine and envelope, which she inspected, pointing to the postmark over the stamp. “Do you remember what day is Valentine’s Day?”

“February fourteenth.” I felt proud, as if I had given the correct answer in math class. An image flashed of a woman, dressed in black and white, writing numbers on a chalkboard.

“That’s right, and you see this?” She pointed to the date on the postmark, which ran in a semicircle:
MON FEB 13 ’50 AM
. “That’s when your Shakespeare put it in the mailbox. On a Mon. That means Monday morning is when they stamped it.”

“So, today is Valentine’s Day? Happy Valentine’s Day.”

“No, Aniday. You have to learn to read the signs and figure it out. Deduction. How could today be Valentine’s Day if today is a Monday? How can we find a letter the day before it is lost? If I found the letter yesterday, and today is Monday, how could today be Valentine’s Day?”

I was confused and tired. My head ached.

“February thirteenth was last Monday. If this card had been out for more than a week, it would be ruined by now. I found it yesterday and brought it to you. Yesterday was a quiet day—not many cars—a Sunday. Today must be the next Monday.”

She made me question my ability to reason at all.

“It’s simple. Today is Monday, February 20, 1950. You do need a calendar.” She held out her hand for my pencil, which I gladly ceded her. On the back of the card, she drew seven boxes in a row and labeled
S-M-T-W-T-F-S
for the days of the week. Then she printed all the months of the year in a column on the side, and then on the opposite side, the numerals from 1 to 31. As she drew them, she quizzed me on the proper number of days in each month, singing a familiar song to help me remember, but we forgot about leap years, which would throw me off in time. From her pocket, she took three round metal circles to demonstrate that if I wanted to keep track of time, all I would have to do would be to move the disks to the next space on the calendar each morning, remembering to start over at the end of the week and month.

Speck would often show me what proved to be the obvious answer, for which nobody else had the clarity of imagination and creativity. At such moments of insight, her eyes fixed on me, the tremor in her voice disappeared. A single hair escaped now, bisecting her face. She gathered her mane with her two rough red hands and pushed it behind her ears, smiling all the while at my stare. “If you ever forget, Aniday, come find me.” She walked away, moving through the forest, across the ridge and away from camp, leaving me alone with my calendar. I spied her figure progressing among the trees until she blended into the natural world. When she vanished, all I could think of was the date: February 20, 1950. I had lost so much time.

Far below, the others in camp slumbered beneath a mat of stinking blankets and furs. By listening to the traffic and following the noise to its source, I could be back among the people, and one of those cars was bound to stop and take me home. The driver would see a boy standing by the side of the road and pull off on the berm ahead of me. I would wait for her, the woman in the red coat, to come save me. I would not run away, but wait there and try not to frighten her as before. She would lower herself to eye level, sweeping her hair back from her face. “Who are you?” I would summon up the faces of my parents and my little sister, tell the woman with the pale green eyes where I lived, how to get home. She would bid me climb into her car. Sitting beside her, I’d tell her my tale, and she would put her hand around the back of my head, saying everything would be all right. I’d jump from that car as we stopped before my house, my mother hanging laundry on the clothesline, my sister waddling toward me in her yellow dress, her arms aflutter. “I’ve found your boy,” the woman would say, and my father would pull up in a red fire engine. “We’ve been looking all over for you for a long time.” Later, after fried chicken and biscuits, we’d come back to the woods and rescue my friends Smaolach, Luchóg, and Speck, who could live with us and go to school and come home warm, safe, and sound. All I had to do was to concentrate and follow the sounds of civilization. I looked to the horizon as far as possible, but saw no sign. I listened, but heard nothing. I tried to remember, but could not recall my name.

Pocketing my three tokens, I turned over the calendar and read the Shakespeare aloud to myself: “But if the while I think on thee, dear friend         .         .         .” The people sleeping down below in the hollow were my friends. I took out my pencil and began to write all I could remember. Many a year has passed between then and now, and I have written this story more than once, but that was the beginning, alone atop the ridge. My fingers stiffened in the cold. As I walked down to the camp, the bedcovers called out to me with the promise of warm dreams.

N
ot long after Speck’s valentine, another gift landed in my lap. Luchóg brought it back from one of his pirating expeditions, unpacking his sack like Santa at the Christmas tree. “And this, little treasure, is for you. The sum-all and be-all of your earthly desires. Enough space here for your every dream. Miracle of miracles, and dry, too. Paper.”

He handed me a bound black notebook, the kind schoolchildren use for their lessons, the pages lined to ensure the proper placement of words and sentences. On the front was the name of the school and the title
RULED COMPOSITION BOOK
. On the back was a small box with this printed warning:
In the event of atomic attack: close the shades, lie down under your desk. Do not panic
. Inside, the author of the book, Thomas McInnes, had written his name on the flyleaf. The weathered pages were filled with his virtually indecipherable penmanship, the ink a rusty brown. As far as I could tell, it was a story, or part of a story, because on the last page, the writing ends mid-sentence with the rather cryptic
See Other Book
written on the inside back cover. Over the years, I tried to read it, but the point of the story eluded me. The beauty of the composition book for me stemmed from McInnes’s self-indulgence. He had written on only one side of the eighty-eight sheets of paper. I turned the book upside-down and wrote my contrary story in the opposite direction. While that journal is in ashes now with so much else, I can attest to its basic contents: a naturalist’s journal recording my observations of life in the forest, complete with drawings of found objects—a diary of the best years of my life.

My chronicle and calendar helped me track the passing time, which fell into an easy rhythm. I kept up hope for years, but no one ever came for me. Heartbreak ran like an undercurrent of time, but despair would come and go like the shadow of clouds. Those years were mixed with the happiness brought by my friends and companions, and as I aged inside, a casual nothing drowned the boy.

The snows stopped by mid-March most years, and a few weeks later the ice would melt, green life would bud, insects hatch, birds return, fish and frogs ready for the catching. Spring instantly restored our energies, the lengthening light corresponding to our interest in exploration. We would throw off our hides and ruined blankets, shed our jackets and shoes. The first warm day in May, nine of us would go down to the river and bathe our stinking bodies, drown the vermin living in our hair, scrape off the caked dirt and scum. Once, Blomma had stolen a bar of soap from a gas station, and we scrubbed it away to a splinter in a single renewing bath. Pale bodies on a pebbly shore, rubbed pink and clean.

The dandelions blossomed from nowhere, and the spring onions sprouted in the meadows, and our Onions would gorge herself, eating the bulbs and grass, staining her teeth and mouth green, reeking, indolent, until her skin itself smelled pungent and bittersweet. Luchóg and Smaolach distilled the dandelions into a potent brew. My calendar helped track the parade of berries: strawberries in June, followed by wild blueberries, gooseberries, elderberries, and more. In a patch of forest over the ridge, Speck and I found a red army of raspberries invading a hillside, and we spent many a July day gathering sweetness among the thorns. Blackberries ripened last, and I am sad every time to see the first potful at our evening repasts, for those black jewels are a harbinger of summer’s end.