The Witch (11 page)

“Lost,” the boy said, breaking down. He sobbed and shook. The priest went cold inside. When the boy had calmed himself, the priest asked what had happened.

“We walked a long way. We passed beyond the last farms and fields and into places where no men lived. It was hot and the dust got into our mouths. At night we slept on the ground. The way grew steeper as we came to the mountains and the little ones were footsore. Still they urged us to go faster. On the sixth day I caught my leg between the tongue of the wagon and the harness. I was cut and bruised and I lagged behind until the others were nearly out of sight.”

The boy touched his bandaged leg, as if to remind himself. He was no older than twelve, and small for his age, and the miseries of his life had stooped his shoulders and made his head seem too large for his body. The priest gave him a mouthful of wine to restore him, and he started in again.

“It was night by the time I reached them. The road ran along in a narrow way between two high cliffs. It was dark on the ground but when I looked up, I saw the sky and stars in a gulf between the cliffs. The stars were like a pale river running through the sky.” The boy shook his head and looked away. “I believe it is the last thing I will ever call beautiful.

“I was close enough to hear and smell the horses, and to see the last light of the fire, and I hurried on because I was so glad I
had found them, and so hungry. And just as I approached, there was a horrible noise from all around, because men had come down from the hills and were shouting in a language I did not know, striding through the camp and making the children scream. The smallest ones they had no use for, and these they clubbed down or killed with their long knives. There were those boys who tried to fight back and they too were overcome. The girls . . .”

“Tell me.”

“They made of them brides,” the child said, shyly. After a moment he went on.

“I hid myself behind a rock and no one saw me. Finally they were done. The men piled the wagons with everything of value and they tied those still alive together with a rope and made the long line of them follow behind the wagons. The men were pleased with their night's work and they were laughing and calling to one another as they passed farther into the mountains.”

“Where was the land agent? What happened to him?”

“He spoke to the men in their strange language. He drove one of the wagons away.”

The priest stayed silent. The boy touched his knee. “Father? I did a terrible thing. Once the men had gone and it was all quiet, I walked among the dead, looking for food. I took food from their pockets. I moved their bodies aside so I could find something to eat. I dug in the ashes of the fire for the leavings. I could have, perhaps I could have . . .

“Father?”

The priest roused himself and put both hands hard on the boy's shoulders. “Listen to me. You will tell no one what happened. No one! Do you understand? When you came to the pass
in the mountains, it was daylight, and you saw the children in a beautiful valley, filled with fruit trees and shining waters and singing birds and flower scent. And as you went to join them, the cliff face crumbled and the entrance was blocked. You found your way home as best you could. That is what you will say. Do you hear me?”

The boy looked frightened, unconvinced. “You will not say what you saw! When you think of them you are to think of them in heaven, because that is where they are. Say it for me.”

“They are in heaven.”

The priest released the breath he had been holding and took his hands away. “Lay yourself down and sleep. No harm will come to you. The church will provide for you from now on.”

The boy allowed himself one brief, upturned glance, then lowered his eyes once more. He seemed to understand what would be required of him in his new life. “Let us pray for them,” the priest said. He folded his hands and searched for words as he might have sent a bucket into a deep well to haul up water. “Let us . . .” he began again, but nothing else came to
him.

The first Ryan brother was three years older than the next, and the second brother three years older than the last. Three by three. Everybody had gone to school with one of them, or just ahead or behind this or that one. Everybody knew them or knew of them: Richard, athletic, smart, and capable. Gabe, who was artistic and charming. And Tim, the youngest, who had yet to demonstrate any notable talents and was most often described as “quiet.” Their father, in many ways a difficult man, used his youngest son to keep the edge of his anger sharp. “I guess you think the world owes you a living, well, think again. You want to be a big fat loser? Fine, but you better pay your own way. I'm talking sooner rather than later, buddy.”

Tim let the angry complaints roll off him. He was used to hearing them, and anyway, his father was probably right. He was a year out of high school and he still lived at home, in the basement. He worked construction and took courses, fitfully, at the junior college. His older brothers had laid down such clear
trails of their own that he had no inclination to follow either of them and risk being some paler version. If failure was the only unused avenue left to him, he guessed he would be a failure. He spent his time in the basement smoking pot and lifting, and sometimes he went out with his loser friends. His father wasn't really serious about making him leave, because he was useful at repairing things around the house, and besides, he was already paying rent.

The boys' mother had moved out a few years ago, on account of the father being difficult, and lived in a faraway city. She sent them postcards of the beautiful views there, the ocean, harbors, bridges, and beaches.
My dearest boy—
this was how she addressed each of them—
I never stop thinking of you day or night, please don't forget me. Love, Mom.

Richard, the oldest brother, was made impatient by these cards. Their mother had chosen to leave, fine. She should stick with it, not keep circling back around, apologizing.
Don't forget me,
what did that mean? You weren't going to forget a mother, but you didn't necessarily have warm thoughts about one who ran off. It was true that his father wasn't the easiest guy in the world, but she'd known what she was signing up for, hadn't she? Why couldn't she have kept her part of the bargain, remained the same as she'd always been: weary, anxious, soothing, ineffectual?

Richard did not put his feelings into such exact words. It was not his habit. When his mother came to mind it was as something unpleasant, distressing, and then he pushed it aside. He had other things to worry about. He was working on a graduate degree in business, and it was killing him. It wasn't that the course material itself was so difficult, only that for the first time in his life, the people around him were every bit as smart and
competitive as he was. Test scores were one thing, but there was another, more subtle evaluation going on at all times. Who could cut it, who was marked for success, and who would fall behind. You were expected to carry yourself a certain way, project a layer of ease and confidence over the necessary killer instincts. Some of this came effortlessly to him. He'd played basketball and tennis. He had a jock's practiced nonchalance with his own body, and a stubborn focus on winning. He was a careful and deliberate speaker, funny at unexpected moments, winning people over. People liked him, approved of him, spoke of his leadership qualities.

But what if, in a moment of weakness or carelessness, the bright face he showed to the world slipped? He would be found out, revealed as he was to himself in his times of self-doubting: gnawed and anxious and timid. A secret fraud.

It did not occur to Richard that everyone else might also have their own secret and fraudulent self.

He had a serious girlfriend and things had gone on for long enough that a marriage seemed likely. They hadn't really talked about it, but they'd talked around the edges. Richard would finish his degree and find a placement in a good firm, and then he would be ready to establish himself as a married man. In the meantime, his girlfriend worked at the kind of job that could be set aside if the two of them moved to another city, or had children. She took note of how other people arranged their bridesmaids and invitations. Everything seemed to be on track, except for those times when one of them had some unaccountable spell of petulance or bad temper, or when the whole notion of being
on track
seemed a kind of joke that nobody ever got.

They were driving home from a dinner with another couple, an old school friend of Richard's and his newish wife. They had
attended the wedding the season before. “They seem really happy,” the girlfriend offered.

“Uh-huh.”

“What, you don't think they are?”

One of her habits that Richard disliked was this kind of eagerness to interpret, or overinterpret, the barest things he said. “I didn't say that.”

“Well you didn't sound very convinced.”

“I suppose I meant”—he cast about for something that might get him off the hook—“they seemed like they were trying too hard.”

“Really?” She shifted in her seat, getting comfortable for a session of exhausting analysis. “I guess they were kind of gung-ho. Finishing each other's sentences, all those cracks about him starting fires when he barbecues.”

“Like they were in some kind of sitcom,” Richard said, surprising himself at having arrived, almost by accident, at what he really felt. His friend's display of marital happiness made him want to grind his teeth. It was as if he'd never known his friend, as if they had not passed through all their wild-ass years together, as if getting married made you a stranger to yourself and everybody else.

“A hilarious sitcom about young married life,” she agreed. Once more stretching herself out in her seat, dangling her legs in a way she no doubt intended to be kittenish, provocative. “But how do you tell the difference? I mean, if people are really happy, or just trying to sell you on the idea? What do they do to convince you?”

“Nothing. You don't have to
act
genuine if you
are
genuine.”

“Goodness, why are you in such a bad mood?”

“I'm not,” Richard said heavily, because once again she was
too eager to ascribe meaning and motive, cause and effect, to everything. But of course, he was now actually in a bad mood, and he disliked having to answer questions.

“Could have fooled me.” She turned to look out her window in pointed silence. Thank God, a stop to the rattling noise of conversation.

He focused on his driving, powering past the slower traffic with the sudden acceleration that he knew alarmed her. She braced herself against the dashboard and recrossed her legs. Her skirt was short and it rode up farther on her thighs when she sat. She was wearing stockings that gave her legs a glossy, impermeable look. As if she wore them to taunt and frustrate him, along with all the other obstacles between right now and any hope of ending up in bed together naked. Because he was going to have to climb out of his surly temper (which she had in part provoked!), say the right solicitous things, humble himself, cater to her, make harmless, cooing noises. And this was what he had chosen for himself, everything that awaited, married life, a blind road leading over a cliff.

“Rich! Jesus!”

He had almost ridden up the bumper of a slower car. He braked, cut into the next lane, downshifted to reduce his speed. Someone behind them laid on their horn, then the sound flattened, left behind in their wake. Richard looked over at her. “Sorry.”

“What are you doing, are you drunk?”

“I spaced out. I said I'm sorry.”

“God!” She had been scared and now she was angry, and she wasn't going to let it go. “You get in a pissy mood for no reason, and you act out with reckless driving? What are you, a teenager?”

He didn't answer, didn't rise to it, and she sighed and tried
coming at him from another direction. “I thought you liked Ed and Charmaine. I thought you were looking forward to seeing them.”

He did. He had been. He could not account for his irritation, anger, and beyond that, the wave of desolation crashing over him. How did anyone ever know the first thing about themselves? What they wanted, what they ought to want. How to go about inhabiting any place of calm or satisfaction, so that at the end of your life you could look back and say, yes, well done. Or maybe the whole idea of worthy goals was chafing at him, the notion that all of life was a duty, a test, a series of chores to be undertaken with discipline and fortitude. What if, at the last possible moment, a clamoring voice rose up in you and asked, Why didn't you seek out joy?

His girlfriend reached over and touched his arm and it made him jump, although he was careful to keep the steering wheel steady. She said, “I'm not your mother. I'm not going anywhere. I won't abandon you.”

No, she would not. He would have to find some other way of getting rid of her.

—

Gabe, the second brother, understood his mother's absence from the family in terms of freedom, and freedom was a good thing, sure. His dad was probably a big part of her leaving, since his dad could be a real bastard when he put his back into it. But maybe there had been more to it, things his mother hadn't been able to do because she'd been tied down by the whole housewife deal. Plenty of his friends' mothers seemed to feel that way. Now that their kids were grown they had begun taking pottery classes and yoga classes and Italian classes. Why couldn't his
mother have stayed here and done the same? How far away from them did she have to go?

None of them knew what her life was like in her new city. Gabe tried to imagine her walking on a beach and picking up shells. But that didn't work, unless he changed other things about her, let her hair turn messy, the wind lifting and tangling it. She'd be wearing different clothes from her usual knit pants and sweaters, some kind of loose, flapping cotton. Was she a hippie now, hanging out with a bunch of other old, comical hippies? Did she burn homemade candles, live in a commune? That was the kind of thing somebody his mother's age might do if they were trying to be cool. Did his mother have any notion of coolness? Something completely unsuspected? Had she gotten tired of being just another mom-lady, had they, okay had he, not paid her enough attention, had she told herself nobody would even notice she was gone? The whole effort of thinking about her made him sad, because he didn't want to believe that he had never bothered to know her at all.

Gabe shared a downtown apartment with two friends, and with their occasional girlfriends. The three of them and a couple of other guys were in a band called the Fractions. They played at parties and clubs and were working on their first CD. Gabe was the lead singer and he wrote all of their songs. He stood at the front of the stage, the amplified instruments thundering around him, the lights bleared and blinding, and sang:

“Babe, I got nowhere to go

No more cards to show

If you put that big old hurt on me

If you say it's not to be

Oh you bring me down down down so low”

He was good-looking, in a blond, reedy fashion, and his voice could hit notes that were nearly liquid with yearning, and at every set there were girls who knew they would treat him a whole lot better than the girl in the song, if only they were given the chance.

Of course all the band members had other jobs, real jobs. There weren't any big paydays in music unless or until you got to some higher level. Meanwhile, they worked as bartenders and couriers, waiters and temp clerks, killing time until their big break. Maybe there would be a big break, or maybe there would just be the next band. The Fractions was only the latest in the series of bands Gabe had been a part of since high school, because musicians came and went, came and went.

Gabe waited tables at a Greek restaurant, where his good humor and attentiveness made him a favorite. A restaurant was also like a band in that people came and went, customers and employees too, all except for Nikos, the owner, and his chief cook, the ancient and blasphemous Sam. These two had spent the last thirty years, and most of their waking hours, working together and arguing and sending the same plates out full of food and taking them back again empty. Nikos ran the front of the house while Sam presided over the tiny, smelly kitchen, the repertoire of souvlaki and pastitsio and moussaka, cooking up lamb and fried cheese and swordfish with fennel and tomatoes. It was a neighborhood place that was losing its neighborhood. Nor was the restaurant hip enough or good enough to be a favorite of the young, adventurous dining crowd. It had settled into a slow, comfortable decline that seemed likely to last for a while.

Then Sam started losing it. He mixed up orders, or he let them burn while he went out into the alley for a smoke. Gabe
apologized to customers and lost more and more tips. Nikos shouted at Sam in Greek and Sam swore back and that at least had not changed. Sam grew more and more confused, more and more furious. He stood and puzzled over raw chickens while the soup pots boiled over. He charged into the restaurant with a push broom, telling people eating to move their goddamn feet. Nikos had the prep cook fill in, until an enraged Sam went after the man with a ten-pound brick of frozen cuttlefish.