Dad did not flinch at this.
‘Anything new, Dad?’
Dad’s hand still lay tucked in the side of the chair. He lifted a grey, slightly worried, very tired gaze to his son:
‘Stone lion blew off the library steps. Prowling the town now looking for Christians. Won’t find any. Got the only one no in captivity here, and she’s a good cook.’
‘Bosh,’ said Mom.
Walking upstairs, Will heard what he half expected to hear.
A soft fluming sigh as something fresh was tossed on the fire. In his mind, he saw Dad standing at the hearth looking down as the paper crinkled to ash:
‘. . .COOGER . . . DARK . . . CARNIVAL . . . WITCH . . . WONDERS. . .’
He wanted to go back down and stand with Dad hands out, to be warmed by the fire.
Instead he went slowly up to shut the door of his room.
Some nights, abed, Will put his ear to the wall to listen, and if his folks talked things that were right, he stayed, and if not right he turned away. If it was about time and passing years or himself or town or just the general inconclusive way God ran the world, he listened warmly, comfortably, secretly, for it was usually Dad talking. He could not often speak with Dad anywhere in the world, inside or out, but this was different. There was a thing in Dad’s voice, up, over, down, easy as a hand winging soft in the air like a white bird describing flight pattern, made the ear want to follow and the mind’s eye to see.
And the odd thing in Dad’s voice was the sound truth makes being said. The sound of truth, in a wild roving land of city or plain country lies, will spell any boy. Many nights Will drowsed this way, his senses like stopped clocks long before that half-singing voice was still. Dad’s voice was a midnight school, teaching deep fathom hours, and the subject was life.
So it was this night, Will’s eyes shut, head leaned to the cool plaster. At first Dad’s voice, a Congo drum, boomed softly, horizons away. Mother’s voice, she used her water-bright soprano in the Baptist choir, did not sing, yet sang back replies. Will imagined Dad sprawled talking to the empty ceiling:
‘. . .Will. . .makes me feel so old. . .a man should play baseball with his son. . .’
‘Not necessary,’ said the woman’s voice, kindly. ‘You’re a good man.’
‘ – in a bad season. Hell, I was forty when he was born! And you! Who’s your daughter? people say. God, when you lie down your thoughts turn to mush. Hell!’
Will heard the shift of weight as Dad sat up in the dark. A match was being struck, a pipe was being smoked. The wind rattled the windows.
‘. . .man with poster under his arm. . .’
‘. . .carnival. . . ‘ said his mother’s voice, ‘. . .this late in the year?’
Will wanted to turn away, but couldn’t.
‘. . .most beautiful. . .woman. . .in the world,’ Dad’s voice murmured.
Mother laughed softly. ‘You know I’m not.’
No! thought Will, that’s from the handbill! Why doesn’t Dad tell!!?
Because, Will answered himself. Something’s going on. Oh, something is going on!
Will saw that paper frolicked in the trees, its words THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, and fever prickled his cheeks. He thought: Jim, the street of the Theatre, the naked people in the stage of that Theatre window, crazy as Chinese opera, darn odd crazy as old Chinese opera, judo, ju-jitsu, Indian puzzles, and now his father’s voice, dreaming off, sad, sadder, saddest, much too much to understand. And suddenly he was scared because Dad wouldn’t talk about the handbill he had secretly burned. Will gazed out the window. There! Like a milkweed plume! White paper danced in the air.
‘No,’ he whispered, ‘no carnival’s coming this late. It can’t!’ He hid under the covers, switched on his flashlight, opened a book. The first picture he saw was a prehistoric reptile trap-drumming a night sky a million years lost.
Heck, he thought, in the rush I got Jim’s book he’s got one of mine.
But it was a pretty fine reptile.
And flying toward sleep, he thought he heard his father, restless, below. The front door shut. His father was going back to work late, for no reason, with brooms, or books, downtown, away. . .away. . .
And mother asleep, content, not knowing he had gone.
9
No one else in the world had a name came so well off the tongue.
‘Jim Nightshade. That’s me.’
Jim stood tall and now lay long in bed, strung together by marsh-grass, his bones easy in his flesh, his flesh easy on his bones. The library books lay unopened-by his relaxed right hand.
Waiting, his eyes were dark as twilight, with shadows under the eyes from the time, his mother said, he had almost died when he was three and still remembered. His hair was dark autumn chestnut and the veins in his temples and brow and in his neck and ticking in his wrists and on the backs of his slender hands, all these were dark blue. He was marbled with dark, was Jim Nightshade, a boy who talked less and smiled less as the years increased.
The trouble with Jim was he looked at the world and could not look away. And when you never look away all your life, by the time you are thirteen you have done twenty years taking in the laundry of the world.
Will Halloway, it was in him young to always look just beyond, over or to one side. So at thirteen he had saved up only six years of staring.
Jim knew every centimetre of his shadow, could have cut it out of tar paper, furled it, and run it up a flagpole – his banner.
Will, he was occasionally surprised to see his shadow following him somewhere, but that was that.
‘Jim? You awake?’
‘Hi, Mom.’
A door opened and now shut. He felt her weight on the bed.
‘Why, Jim, your hands are ice. You shouldn’t have the window so high. Mind your health.’
‘Sure.’
‘Don’t say “sure” that way. You don’t know until you’ve had three children and lost all but one.’
‘Never going to have any,’ said Jim.
‘You just say that.’
‘I know it. I know everything.’
She waited a moment. ‘What do you know?’
‘No use making more People. People die.’
His voice was very calm and quiet and almost sad.
‘That’s everything.’
‘Almost everything. You’re here, Jim. If you weren’t, I’d have given up long ago.’
‘Mom.’ A long silence. ‘Can you remember Dad’s face? Do I look like him?’
‘The day you go away is the day he leaves forever.’
‘Who’s going away?’
‘Why, just lying there, Jim, you run so fast. I never saw anyone move so much, just sleeping. Promise me, Jim. Wherever you go and come back, bring lots of kids. Let them run wild. Let me spoil them, some day.
‘I’m never going to own anything can hurt me.’
‘You going to collect rocks, Jim? No, some day, you’ve got to be hurt.’
‘No, I don’t’
He looked at her. Her face had been hit a long time ago. The bruises had never gone from around her eyes.
‘You’ll live and get hurt,’ she said, in the dark. ‘But when it’s time, tell me. Say good-bye. Otherwise, I might not let you go. Wouldn’t that be terrible, to just grab ahold?’
She rose up suddenly and went to put the window down.
‘Why do boys want their windows open wide?’
‘Warm blood.’
‘Warm blood.’ She stood alone. ‘That’s the story of all our sorrows. And don’t ask why.
The door shut.
Jim alone, raised the window, and leaned into the absolutely clear night.
Storm, he thought, you there?
Yes.
Feel. . .away to the west. . .a real humdinger, rushing along!
The shadow of the lightning-rod lay in the drive below.
He sucked in cold air, gave out a vast exhilaration of heat.
Why, he thought, why don’t I climb up, knock that lightning-rod loose, throw it away?
And then see what happens?
Yes.
And then see what happens!
10
Just after midnight.
Shuffling footsteps.
Along the empty street came the lightning-rod salesman, his leather valise swung almost empty in his baseball-mitt hand, his face at ease. He turned a corner and stopped.
Paper-soft white moths tapped at an empty store window, looking in.
And in the window, like a great coffin boat of star-coloured glass, beached on two sawhorses lay a chunk of Alaska Snow Company ice chopped to a size great enough to flash in a giant’s ring.
And sealed in this ice was the most beautiful woman in the world.
The lightning-rod salesman’s smile faded.
In the dreaming coldness of ice like someone fallen and slept in snow avalanches a thousand years, forever young, was this woman.
She was as fair as this morning and fresh as tomorrow’s flowers and lovely as any maid when a man shuts up his eyes and traps her, in cameo perfection, on the shell of his eyelids. The lightning-rod salesman remembered to breathe.
Once, long ago, travelling among the marbles of Rome and Florence, he had seen women like this, kept in stone instead of Ice. Once, wandering in the Louvre, he had found women like this, washed in summer colour and kept in paint. Once, as a boy, sneaking the cool grottoes behind a motion picture theatre screen, on his way to a free seat, he had glanced up and there towering and flooding the haunted dark seen a women’s face as he had never seen it since, of such size and beauty built of milk-bone and moon-flesh, at to freeze him there alone behind the stage, shadowed by the, motion of her lips, the bird-wing flicker of her eyes, the
