Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
Across the street from Janie’s apartment house was a park. It had a bandstand, a brook, a moulting peacock in a wire enclosure and a thick little copse of dwarf oak. In the copse was a hidden patch of bare earth, known only to Janie and several thousand people who were wont to use it in pairs at night. Since Janie was never there at night she felt herself its discoverer and its proprietor.
Some four days after the spanking episode, she thought of the place. She was bored with the twins; they never did anything interesting any more. Her mother had gone to lunch somewhere after locking her in her room. (One of her admirers, when she did this, had once asked, “What about the kid? Suppose there’s a fire or something?” “Fat chance!” Wima had said with regret.)
The door of her room was fastened with a hook-and-eye on the outside. She walked to the door and looked up at the corresponding spot inside. She heard the hook rise and fall. She opened the door and walked down the hall and out to the elevators. When the self-service car arrived, she got in and pressed the third-, second-, and first-floor buttons. One floor at a time the elevator descended, stopped, opened its gate, closed its gate, descended, stopped, opened its gate... it amused her, it was so stupid. At the bottom she pushed all of the buttons and slid out. Up the stupid elevator started. Janie clucked pityingly and went outdoors.
She crossed the street carefully, looking both ways. But when she got to the copse she was a little less ladylike. She climbed into the lower branches of the oak and across the multiple crotches to a branch she knew which overhung the hidden sanctuary. She thought she saw a movement in the bushes, but she was not sure. She hung from the branch, went hand over hand until it started to bend, waited until she had stopped swinging, and then let go.
It was an eight-inch drop to the earthen floor—usually. This time...
The very instant her fingers left the branch, her feet were caught and snatched violently backward. She struck ground flat on her stomach. Her hands happened to be together, at her midriff; the impact turned them inward and drove her own fist into her solar plexus. For an unbearably long time she was nothing but one tangled knot of pain. She fought and fought and at long last sucked a tearing breath into her lungs. It would come out through her nostrils but she could get no more in. She fought again in a series of sucking sobs and blowing hisses, until the pain started to leave her.
She managed to get up on her elbows. She spat out dirt, part dusty, part muddy. She got her eyes open just enough to see one of the twins squatting before her, inches away. “Ho-ho,” said the twin, grabbed her wrists, and pulled hard. Down she went on her face again. Reflexively she drew up her knees. She received a stinging blow on the rump. She looked down past her shoulder as she flung herself sideways and saw the other twin just in the midst of the follow-through with the stave from a nail keg which she held in her little hands. “He-hee,” said the twin.
Janie did what she had done to the sallow, black-eyed man at the cocktail party. “Eeep,” said the twin and disappeared, flickered out the way a squeezed appleseed disappears from between the fingers. The little cask stave clattered to the packed earth. Janie caught it up, whirled, and brought it down on the head of the twin who had pulled her arms. But the stave whooshed down to strike the ground; there was no one there.
Janie whimpered and got slowly to her feet. She was alone in the shadowed sanctuary. She turned and turned back. Nothing. No one.
Something plurped just on the centre part of her hair. She clapped her hand to it. Wet. She looked up and the other twin spit too. It hit her on the forehead. “Ho-ho,” said one. “He-hee,” said the other.
Janie’s upper lip curled away from her teeth, exactly the way her mother’s did. She still held the cask stave. She slung it upward with all her might. One twin did not even attempt to move. The other disappeared.
“Ho-ho.” There she was, on another branch. Both were grinning widely.
She hurled a bolt of hatred at them the like of which she had never even imagined before.
“Ooop,” said one. The other said “Eeep.” Then they were both gone.
Clenching her teeth, she leapt for the branch and swarmed up into the tree.
“
Ho-ho
.”
It was very distant. She looked up and around and down and back; and something made her look across the street.
Two little figures sat like gargoyles on top of the courtyard wall. They waved to her and were gone.
For a long time Janie clung to the tree and stared at the wall. Then she let herself slide down into the crotch, where she could put her back against the trunk and straddle a limb. She unbuttoned her pocket and got her handkerchief. She licked a fold of it good and wet and began wiping the dirt off her face with little feline dabs.
They’re only three years old
, she told herself from the astonished altitude of her seniority. Then,
They knew who it was all along, that moved those rompers
.
She said aloud, in admiration, “Ho-ho...” There was no anger left in her. Four days ago the twins couldn’t even reach a six-foot sill. They couldn’t even get away from a spanking. And now look.
She got down on the street side of the tree and stepped daintily across the street. In the vestibule, she stretched up and pressed the shiny brass button marked
JANITOR
. While waiting she stepped off the pattern of tiles in the floor, heel and toe.
“Who push dat? You push dat?” His voice filled the whole world.
She went and stood in front of him and pushed up her lips the way her mother did when she made her voice all croony, like sometimes on the telephone. “Mister Widdecombe, my mother says can I play with your little girls.”
“She say dat?
Well!
” The janitor took off his round hat and whacked it against his palm and put it on again. “Well. Dat’s mighty nice... little gal,” he said sternly, “is yo’ mother to home?”
“Oh
yes
,” said Janie, fairly radiating candour.
“You wait raht cheer,” he said, and pounded away down the cellar steps.
She had to wait more than ten minutes this time. When he came back with the twins he was fairly out of breath. They looked very solemn.
“Now don’t you let ’em get in any mischief. And see ef you cain’t keep them clo’es on ’em. They ain’t got no more use for clo’es than a jungle monkey. Gwan, now, hole hands, chillun, an’ mine you don’t leave go tel you git there.”
The twins approached guardedly. She took their hands. They watched her face. She began to move towards the elevators, and they followed. The janitor beamed after them.
Janie’s whole life shaped itself from that afternoon. It was a time of belonging, of thinking alike, of transcendent sharing. For her age, Janie had what was probably a unique vocabulary, yet she spoke hardly a word. The twins had not yet learned to talk. Their private vocabulary of squeaks and whispers was incidental to another kind of communion. Janie got a sign of it, a touch of it, a sudden opening, growing rush of it. Her mother hated her and feared her; her father was a remote and angry entity, always away or shouting at mother or closed sulkily about himself. She was talked to, never spoken to.
But here was converse, detailed, fluent, fascinating, with no sound but laughter. They would be silent; they would all squat suddenly and paw through Janie’s beautiful books; then suddenly it was the dolls. Janie showed them how she could get chocolates from the box in the other room without going in there and how she could throw a pillow clear up to the ceiling without touching it. They liked that, though the paintbox and easel impressed them more.
It was a thing together, binding, immortal; it would always be new for them and it would never be repeated.
The afternoon slid by, as smooth and soft and lovely as a passing gull, and as swift. When the hall door banged open and Wima’s voice clanged out, the twins were still there.
“All righty, all righty, come in for a drink then, who wants to stand out there all night.” She pawed her hat off and her hair swung raggedly over her face. The man caught her roughly and pulled her close and bit her face. She howled. “You’re crazy, you old crazy you.” Then she saw them, all three of them peering out. “Dear old Jesus be to God,” she said, “she’s got the place filled with niggers.”
“They’re going home,” said Janie resolutely. “I’ll take ’em home right now.”
“Honest to God, Pete,” she said to the man, “this is the God’s honest first time this ever happened. You got to believe that, Pete. What kind of a place you must think I run here, I hate to think how it looks to you. Well get them the hell out!” she screamed at Janie. “Honest to God, Pete, so help me, never before—”
Janie walked down the hall to the elevators. She looked at Bonnie and at Beanie. Their eyes were round. Janie’s mouth was as dry as a carpet and she was so embarrassed her legs cramped. She put the twins into an elevator and pressed the bottom button. She did not say good-bye, though she felt nothing else.
She walked slowly back to the apartment and went in and closed the door. Her mother got up from the man’s lap and clattered across the room. Her teeth shone and her chin was wet. She raised claws—not a hand, not a fist, but red, pointed claws.
Something happened inside Janie like the grinding of teeth, but deeper inside her than that. She was walking and she did not stop. She put her hands behind her and tilted her chin up so she could meet her mother’s eyes.
Wima’s voice ceased, snatched away. She loomed over the five-year-old, her claws out and forward, hanging, curving over, a blood-tipped wave about to break.
Janie walked past her and into her room, and quietly closed the door.
Wima’s arms drew back, strangely, as if they must follow the exact trajectory of their going. She repossessed them and the dissolving balance of her body and finally her voice. Behind her the man’s teeth clattered swiftly against a glass.
Wima turned and crossed the room to him, using the furniture like a series of canes and crutches. “Oh God,” she murmured, “but she gives me the creeps...”
He said, “You got lots going on around here.”
Janie lay in bed as stiff and smooth and contained as a round toothpick. Nothing would get in, nothing could get out; somewhere she had found this surface that went all the way through, and as long as she had it, nothing was going to happen.
But if anything happens
, came a whisper,
you’ll break
.
But if I don’t break, nothing will happen, she answered.
But if anything
...
The dark hours came and grew black and the black hours laboured by.
Her door crashed open and the light blazed. “He’s gone and baby, I’ve got business with you. Get out here!” Wima’s bathrobe swirled against the doorpost as she turned and went away.
Janie pushed back the covers and thumped her feet down. Without understanding quite why, she began to get dressed. She got her good plaid dress and the shoes with two buckles, and the knit pants and the slip with the lace rabbits. There were little rabbits on her socks too, and on the sweater, the buttons were rabbits’ fuzzy nubbin tails.
Wima was on the couch, pounding and pounding with her fist. “You wrecked my cel,” she said, and drank from a square-stemmed glass, “ebration, so you ought to know what I’m celebrating. You don’t know it but I’ve had a big trouble and I didn’t know how to hannel it, and now it’s all done for me. And I’ll tell you all about it right now, little baby Miss Big Ears. Big Mouth. Smarty. Because your father, I can hannel him any time, but what was I going to do with your big mouth going day and night? That was my trouble, what was I going to do about your big mouth when he got back. Well it’s all fixed, he won’t be back, the Heinies fixed it up for me.” She waved a yellow sheet. “Smart girls know that’s a telegram, and the telegram says, says here, ‘Regret to inform you that your husband.’ They shot your father, that’s what they regret to say, and now this is the way it’s going to be from now on between you and me. Whatever I want to do I do, an’ whatever you want to nose into, nose away. Now isn’t that fair?”
She turned to be answered but there was no answer. Janie was gone.
Wima knew before she started that there wasn’t any use looking, but something made her run to the hall closet and look in the top shelf. There wasn’t anything up there but Christmas tree ornaments and they hadn’t been touched in three years.
She stood in the middle of the living room, not knowing which way to go. She whispered, “Janie?”
She put her hands on the sides of her face and lifted her hair away from it. She turned around and around, and asked, “What’s the matter with me?”
Prodd used to say, “There’s this about a farm: when the market’s good there’s money, and when it’s bad there’s food.” Actually the principle hardly operated here, for his contact with markets was slight. It was a long haul to town and what if there’s a tooth off the hay rake? “We’ve still got a workin’ majority.” Two off, eight, twelve? “Then make another pass. No road will go by here, not ever. Place will never get too big, get out of hand.” Even the war passed them by, Prodd being over age and Lone—well, the sherif was by once and had a look at the half-wit working on Prodd’s, and one look was enough.
When Prodd was young the little farmhouse was there and when he married they built on to it—a little, not a lot, just a room. If the room had ever been used the land wouldn’t have been enough. Lone slept in the room of course but that wasn’t quite the same thing. That’s not what the room was for.
Lone sensed the change before anyone else, even before Mrs Prodd. It was a difference in the nature of one of her silences. It was a treasure-proud silence, and Lone felt it change as a man’s kind of pride might change when he turned from a jewel he treasured to a green shoot he treasured. He said nothing and concluded nothing; he just knew.
He went on with his work as before. He worked well; Prodd used to say that whatever anyone might think, that boy was a farmer before his accident. He said it not knowing that his own style of farming was as available to Lone as water from his pump. So was anything else Lone wanted to take.
So the day Prodd came down to the south meadow, where Lone was stepping and turning tirelessly, a very part of his whispering scythe, Lone knew what it was that he wanted to say. He caught Prodd’s gaze for half a breath in those disturbing eyes and knew as well that saying it would pain Prodd more than a little.
Understanding was hardly one of his troubles any more, but niceties of expression were. He stopped mowing and went to the forest margin near by and let the scythe-point drop into a rotten stump. It gave him time to rehearse his tongue, still thick and unwieldy after eight years here.
Prodd followed slowly. He was rehearsing too.
Suddenly, Lone found it. “Been thinking,” he said.
Prodd waited, glad to wait. Lone said, “I should go.” That wasn’t quite it. “Move along,” he said, watching. That was better.
“Ah, Lone. Why?”
Lone looked at him.
Because you want me to go
.
“Don’t you like it here?” said Prodd, not wanting to say that at all.
“Sure.” From Prodd’s mind, he caught,
Does he know?
and his own answered,
Of course I know!
But Prodd couldn’t hear that. Lone said slowly, “Just time to be moving along.”
“Well.” Prodd kicked a stone. He turned to look at the house and that turned him away from Lone, and that made it easier. “When we came here, we built Jack’s, your room, the room you’re using. We call it Jack’s room. You know why, you know who Jack is?”
Yes
, Lone thought. He said nothing.
“Long as you’re... long as you want to leave anyway, it won’t make no difference to you. Jack’s our son.” He squeezed his hands together. “I guess it sounds funny. Jack was the little guy we were so sure about, we built that room with seed money. Jack, he—”
He looked up at the house, at its stub of a built-on wing, and around at the rock-toothed forest rim. “—never got born,” he finished.
“Ah,” said Lone. He’d picked that up from Prodd. It was useful.
“He’s coming now, though,” said Prodd in a rush. His face was alight. “We’re a bit old for it, but there’s a daddy or two quite a bit older, and mothers too.” Again he looked up at the barn, the house. “Makes sense in a sort of way, you know, Lone. Now, if he’d been along when we planned it, the place would’ve been too small when he was growed enough to work it with me, and me with no place else to go. But now, why, I reckon when he’s growed we just naturally won’t be here any more, and he’ll take him a nice little wife and start out just about like we did. So you see it does make a kind of sense?” He seemed to be pleading. Lone made no attempt to understand this.
“Lone, listen to me, I don’t want you to feel we’re turning you out.”
“Said I was going.” Searching, he found something and amended, “ ’Fore you told me.”
That
, he thought,
was very right
.
“Look, I got to say something,” said Prodd. “I heard tell of folk who want kids and can’t have ’em, sometimes they just give up trying and take in somebody else’s. And sometimes, with a kid in the house, they turn right round and have one of their own after all.”
“Ah,” said Lone.
“So what I mean is, we taken you in, didn’t we, and now look.”
Lone did not know what to say. “Ah” seemed wrong.
“We got a lot to thank you for, is what I mean, so we don’t want you to feel we’re turning you out.”
“I already said.”
“Good then.” Prodd smiled. He had a lot of wrinkles on his face, mostly from smiling.
“Good,” said Lone. “About Jack.” He nodded vehemently. “Good.” He picked up the scythe. When he reached his windrow, he looked after Prodd.
Walks slower than he used to
, he thought.