Old Lady nodded at a tree. ‘That’s likely.’
‘Well,’ he decided slowly, ‘I’ll stay invisible for tonight, and tomorrow you can fix me back all whole again, Old Lady.’
‘Now if that ain’t just like a critter, always wanting to be what he can’t be,’ remarked Old Lady to a beetle on a log.
‘What you mean?’ said Charlie.
‘Why,’ she explained, ‘it was real hard work, fixing you up. It’ll take a little time for it to wear off. Like a coat of paint wears off, boy.’
‘You!’ he cried. ‘You did this to me! Now you make me back, you make me seeable!’
‘Hush,’ she said. ‘It’ll wear off, a hand or a foot at a time.’
‘How’ll it look, me around the hills with just one hand showing!’
‘Like a five-winged bird hopping on the stones and bramble.’
‘Or a foot showing!’
‘Like a small pink rabbit jumping thicket.’
‘Or my head floating!’
‘Like a hairy balloon at the carnival!’
‘How long before I’m whole?’ he asked.
She deliberated that it might pretty well be an entire year.
He groaned. He began to sob and bite his lips and make fists. ‘You magicked me, you did this, you did this thing to me. Now I won’t be able to run home!’
She winked. ‘But you can stay here, child, stay on with me real comfortlike, and I’ll keep you fat and saucy.’
He flung it out: ‘You did this on purpose! You mean old hag, you want to keep me here!’
He ran off through the shrubs on the instant.
‘Charlie, come back!’
No answer but the pattern of his feet on the soft dark turf, and his wet choking cry which passed swiftly off and away.
She waited and then kindled herself a fire. ‘He’ll be back,’ she whispered. And thinking inward on herself, she said. ‘And now I’ll have me my company through spring and into late summer. Then, when I’m tired of him and want a silence, I’ll send him home.’
Charlie returned noiselessly with the first gray of dawn, gliding over the rimed turf to where Old Lady sprawled like a bleached stick before the scattered ashes.
He sat on some creek pebbles and stared at her.
She didn’t dare look at him or beyond. He had made no sound, so how could she know he was anywhere about? She couldn’t.
He sat there, tear marks on his cheeks.
Pretending to be just waking—but she had found no sleep from one end of the night to the other—Old Lady stood up, grunting and yawning, and turned in a circle to the dawn.
‘Charlie?’
Her eyes passed from pines to soil, to sky, to the far hills. She called out his name, over and over again, and she felt like staring plumb straight at him, but she stopped herself. ‘Charlie? Oh, Charles!’ she called, and heard the echoes say the very same.
He sat, beginning to grin a bit, suddenly, knowing he was close to her, yet she must feel alone. Perhaps he felt the growing of a secret power, perhaps he felt secure from the world, certainly he was pleased with his invisibility.
She said aloud, ‘Now where can that boy be? If he only made a noise so I could tell just where he is, maybe I’d fry him a breakfast.’
She prepared the morning victuals, irritated at his continuous quiet. She sizzled bacon on a hickory stick. ‘The smell of it will draw his nose,’ she muttered.
While her back was turned he swiped all the frying bacon and devoured it tastily.
She whirled, crying out, ‘Lord!’
She eyed the clearing suspiciously. ‘Charlie, that you?’
Charlie wiped his mouth clean on his wrists.
She trotted about the clearing, making like she was trying to locate him. Finally, with a clever thought, acting blind, she headed straight for him, groping. ‘Charlie, where are you?’
A lightning streak, he evaded her, bobbing, ducking.
It took all her will power not to give chase; but you can’t chase invisible boys, so she sat down, scowling, sputtering, and tried to fry more bacon. But every fresh strip she cut he would steal bubbling off the fire and run away far. Finally, cheeks burning, she cried, ‘I know where you are! Right there! I hear you run!’
She pointed to one side of him, not too accurate. He ran again. ‘Now you’re there!’ she shouted. ‘There, and there!’ pointing to all the places he was in the next five minutes. ‘I hear you press a grass blade, knock a flower, snap a twig. I got fine shell ears, delicate as roses. They can hear the stars moving!’
Silently he galloped off among the pines, his voice trailing back, ‘Can’t hear me when I’m set on a rock. I’ll just set!’
All day he sat on an observatory rock in the clear wind, motionless and sucking his tongue.
Old Lady gathered wood in the deep forest, feeling his eyes weaseling on her spine. She wanted to babble: ‘Oh, I see you, I see you! I was only fooling about invisible boys! You’re right there!’ But she swallowed her gall and gummed it tight.
The following morning he did the spiteful things. He began leaping from behind trees. He made toad-faces, frog-faces, spider-faces at her, clenching down his lips with his fingers, popping his raw eyes, pushing up his nostrils so you could peer in and see his brain thinking.
Once she dropped her kindling. She pretended it was a blue jay startled her.
He made a motion as if to strangle her.
She trembled a little.
He made another move as if to bang her shins and spit on her cheek.
These motions she bore without a lid-flicker or a mouth-twitch.
He stuck out his tongue, making strange bad noises. He wiggled his loose ears so she wanted to laugh, and finally she did laugh and explained it away quickly by saying, ‘Sat on a salamander! Whew, how it poked!’
By high noon the whole madness boiled to a terrible peak.
For it was at that exact hour that Charlie came racing down the valley stark boy-naked!
Old Lady nearly fell flat with shock!
‘Charlie!’ she almost cried.
Charlie raced naked up one side of a hill and naked down the other—naked as day, naked as the moon, raw as the sun and a newborn chick, his feet shimmering and rushing like the wings of a low-skimming hummingbird.
Old Lady’s tongue locked in her mouth. What could she say? Charlie, go dress? For shame? Stop that? Could she? Oh, Charlie, Charlie, God! Could she say that now? Well?
Upon the big rock, she witnessed him dancing up and down, naked as the day of his birth, stomping bare feet, smacking his hands on his knees and sucking in and out his white stomach like blowing and deflating a circus balloon.
She shut her eyes tight and prayed.
After three hours of this she pleaded, ‘Charlie, Charlie, come here! I got something to tell you!’
Like a fallen leaf he came, dressed again, praise the Lord.
‘Charlie,’ she said, looking at the pine trees, ‘I see your right toe. There it is.’
‘You do?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said very sadly. ‘There it is like a horny toad on the grass. And there, up there’s your left ear hanging on the air like a pink butterfly.’
Charlie danced. ‘I’m forming in. I’m forming in!’
Old Lady nodded. ‘Here comes your ankle!’
‘Gimme both my feet!’ ordered Charlie.
‘You got ’em.’
‘How about my hands?’
‘I see one crawling on your knee like a daddy longlegs.’
‘How about the other one?’
‘It’s crawling too.’
‘I got a body?’
‘Shaping up fine.’
‘I’ll need my head to go home, Old Lady.’
To go home, she thought wearily. ‘No!’ she said, stubborn and angry. ‘No, you ain’t got no head. No head at all,’ she cried. She’d leave that to the very last. ‘No head, no head,’ she insisted.
‘No head?’ he wailed.
‘Yes, oh my God, yes, yes, you got your blamed head!’ she snapped, giving up. ‘Now, fetch me back my bat with the needle in his eye!’
He flung it at her. ‘Haaaa-yoooo!’ His yelling went all up the valley, and long after he had run toward home she heard his echoes, racing.
Then she plucked up her kindling with a great dry weariness and started back toward her shack, sighing, talking.
And Charlie followed her all the way, really invisible now, so she couldn’t see him, just hear him, like a pine cone dropping or a deep underground stream trickling, or a squirrel clambering a bough; and over the fire at twilight she and Charlie sat, him so invisible, and her feeding him bacon he wouldn’t take, so she ate it herself, and then she fixed some magic and fell asleep with Charlie, made out of sticks and rags and pebbles, but still warm and her very own son, slumbering and nice in her shaking mother arms…and they talked about golden things in drowsy voices until dawn made the fire slowly, slowly wither out…
The end
