Dark Carnival (17 page)

'IT will take only a minute,' said Uncle Einar's sweet wife.

    'I refuse,' he said. 'And that takes me but a
second
.'

    'I've worked all morning,' she said, holding to her slender back. 'And you refuse to help? It's drumming for a rain.'

    'Let it rain,' he cried, morosely. 'I'll not be pierced by lightning just to air your clothes.'

    'But you're so quick at it,' she buttered him. 'Take you no time.'

    'Again, I refuse.' His vast tarpaulin wings hummed nervously behind his indignant back.

    She gave him a slender rope on which were tied one hundred fresh-washed clothes. He turned it in his fingers with a distaste on his mouth and in his eyes. 'So it's come to this,' he muttered, bitterly. 'To this, to this, to this.' He almost wept angry and acid tears.

    'Don't cry; you'll wet them down again,' she said. 'Jump up, now, run them about and it'll be finished in a jiffy.'

    'Run them about,' he said in mockery, both hollow and deep and terribly wounded. 'I say: let it thunder, let it pour!'

    'If it was a nice sunny day I wouldn't ask,' she said, reasonably. 'All my washing gone for nothing if you don't. They'll hang about the house — '

    That
did
it. If it was anything he hated it was clothes flagged and festooned so a man had to creep under them on the way across a room. He jumped up. He boomed his vast green wings.

    'But only as far as the pasture fence,' he said.

    'That's a darling!' She laughed with relief.

    Whirl: and up he jumped, like a spring, and his wings chewed and loved the cool air. Before you'd say Uncle Einar Has Green Wings he roared low across the farmland from his house, trailing the line of clothes in a vast fluttering loop behind, drying them in the pounding concussion and backwash from his wings!

    'Catch!'

    A minute later, back from the trip, he sailed the clothes, dry as popcorn, down on a series of clean blankets she'd laid for their landing spot.

    'Thank you, my sweet!' she cried.

    'Gahh!' he shouted, and flew off to settle under the apple tree and brood.

    Uncle Einar's beautiful silk-like wings hung like sea-green sails behind him and whirred and whispered from his shoulders when he sneezed or turned around swiftly. He was one of the few ones in the Family whose talent was visible. All the other cousins and nephews and brothers of his in various lands, in little towns across the world, did unseen mental things or did things with their fingers or their teeth, or blew across the sky like leaves, or loped in forests like wolves. They lived in comparative safety from the normal humans. Not so a man with great green wings.

    Not that he hated his wings. Far from it. In his youth he'd always flown nights. Nights were the times for winged men. Daylight held dangers, always had, always would, but night, ah, night, he had sailed over far lands and farther seas. With no danger to himself. It had been a rich full flying and an exhilaration.

    But now he could not fly at night.

    On his way home to some high mountain pass in Europe after a Homecoming among Family members in Mellin Town, Illinois (some years ago) he had drunk too much rich crimson wine. 'I'll be all right,' he had told himself, blearily, as he beat his long way under the morning stars, over the moon-dreaming country hills beyond Mellin Town. And then — crack out of the sky —  

    A high-tension tower.

    Like a netted duck! A great sizzling! His face was blown black by a blue sparkler of wire. He fended off the electricity with a terrific back-jumping percussion of his wings, and fell.

    His hitting the moonlit meadow under the tower made a noise like a large telephone book dropped from a window.

    Early the next morning, his dew-sodden wings shaking violently, he stood up. It was still dark. There was a faint bandage of dawn stretched across the middle east. Soon the bandage would stain and all flight would be restricted. There was nothing to do but take refuge in the forest and wait out the day in the deepest thicket until another night gave his wings a hidden movement in the sky.

    In this fashion he met his wife.

    During the day, which was warm for November 1st in Illinois country, pretty young Brunilla Wexley was out to udder a lost cow, for she carried a silver pail in one hand as she sidled through thickets and pleaded cleverly to the unseen cow to please return home or burst her gut with unplucked milk. The fact that the cow would have most certainly come home when her teats really needed pulling did not concern Brunilla Wexley. It was a sweet excuse for forest-journeying, thistle-blowing, and dandelion-chewing; all of which Brunilla was doing as she stumbled upon Uncle Einar.

    Asleep near a bush, he seemed a man under a green shelter.

    'Oh,' said Brunilla, with a fever. 'A man. In a camp-tent.'

    Uncle Einar awoke. The camp-tent spread like a large green fan behind him.

    'Oh,' said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. 'A man with wings.'

    That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt by anyone in her life so she wasn't afraid of anything and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him. She began to talk to him and in an hour they were old friends, and in two hours she'd quite forgotten his wings were there. And he somehow confessed how he happened to be in this wood.

    'Yes, I noticed you looked banged around,' she said. 'That right wing looks very bad. You'd best let me take you home and fix it. You won't be able to fly all the way to Europe on it, anyway. And who wants to live in Europe nowadays?'

    He thanked her but he didn't quite see how he could accept.

    'But I live alone,' she said. 'For, as you see, I'm quite ugly.'

    He insisted she was not.

    'How kind of you,' she said. 'But I am, there's no fooling myself. My folks are dead, I've a farm, a big one, all to myself, quite far from Mellin Town, and I'm in need of talking company.'

    But wasn't she afraid of him? he asked.

    'Proud and envious would be more near it,' she said. '
May
I?' And she stroked his large green membraned veils with careful envy. He shuddered at the touch and put his tongue between his teeth.

    So there was nothing for it but that he come to her house and have an ointment on that bruise, and my! what a burn across his face, beneath his eyes! 'Lucky you weren't blinded,' she said. 'How'd it happen?'

    'High-tension tower,' he said, and they were at her farm, hardly noticing they'd walked a mile, looking at each other.

    Well, a day passed, and another. And he thanked her at her door and said he must be going, he certainly appreciated the ointment and the care and the lodging. It was twilight and between now, six o'clock, and five the next morning, he must cross an ocean and a continent. 'Thank you, and good-bye,' he said, and started to fly off in the dusk and crashed right into a maple tree.

    'Oh!' she screamed, and ran to his unconscious body.

    That
did
it. When he waked the next hour he knew he'd fly no nights again. His delicate night-perception was gone. The winged telepathy that told him where towers, trees and wires stood across his path, the fine, clear vision and mentality that guided him ‘twixt cliff, pole, and pine, all of it was gone. That crack across his face, the blue electrical sparkle, had sloughed off his sensitivity, perhaps forever.

    'How'm I to fly back to Europe?' he groaned, pitifully.

    'Oh,' she said, looking coyly at the floor. 'Who wants Europe?'

    They were married. A distant relative, one of the Family, tied the bond. His name was Minister Elliott, and the Family constantly delighted in knowing that one of the fey Elliotts was actually a preacher of the Christian gospel. It was good for much irony and much jesting. Anyway, Minister Elliott arrived from Mellin Town with Father and Mother Elliott and Laura. The ceremony was brief, if a little inverted and dark and mildly different to Miss Brunilla, but it ended gaily. Uncle Einar stood with his fresh bride thinking that he didn't dare fly back to Europe in the day-time, which was the only time he could safely see now, for fear of being seen and shot down; but it didn't matter now, for with Brunilla beside him, Europe had less and less fascination for him.

    He didn't have to see very well to fly straight up, or come down. So it was only natural that on the night of their wedding he took Brunilla in his arms and flew right straight up into the clouds.

    A farmer, five miles over, glanced at a low cloud about midnight, saw faint glows and crackles.

    'Heat lightnin',' he said, spitting.

    They didn't come down till next morning; with the dew.

    The marriage took. She was so wing-proud of him, it lifted her to think she was the only woman in the world married to a winged man. 'Who else could say it?' she asked her mirror. And the answer was: 'No one!'

    He, on the other hand, found great beauty behind her face, great kindness and understanding. He made some changes in his diet to fit her thinking, and was careful with his wings about the house; knocked porcelains and spilled lamps were nerve-scrapers, he didn't do them. He also changed his sleeping habits, since he couldn't fly nights now anyhow. And she in turn fixed chairs so they were comfortable for his wings, put extra padding here or took it out there, and the things she said were the things he loved her for. 'We're in our cocoons, all of us,' she said. 'See how ugly I am?' she said. 'But one day I'll break out, spread wings as fine and handsome as you.'

    'You broke out long ago,' he said.

    She thought it over. 'Yes,' she had to admit. 'I know just which day it was, too. In the woods when I looked for a lost cow and found a camp-tent!' And they laughed, and in that moment, even as she'd said, her beauty proved that their meeting had slipped her from her ugliness, like a sword from its case.

    They had children. At first there was a fear, all on his part, that they'd be winged.

    'Nonsense,' she said. 'I'd love it. Keep them out from under foot.'

    'Then,' he exclaimed, holding her, 'they'd be in your
hair!
'

    'Ow,' she cried.

    Four children were born, three boys and a girl, who, for their energy, seemed to have wings. They popped up like toadstools in a few years and on hot summer days would ask Father to sit under the apple tree and fan them with his cooling wings and tell them wild starlit tales of youth and sky excursions. This, he did. And told them of the winds and cloud textures, and what a star feels like melting in your mouth, and the taste of high mountain air, and how it feels to be a pebble dropped from Mount Everest, turning to a green bloom, flowering your wings just before striking the frosty bottom.

    This was his marriage, then.

    And today, six years later, here sat Uncle Einar, here he was, fustering under the apple tree, grown impatient and unkind; not because this was his desire, but because after the long wait, he was still unable to fly nights, his extra sense had never returned. Here he sat despondently in the yard, looking like nothing more than a summer sun-parasol, green and discarded, abandoned for the season by the reckless vacationers who once sought refuge under its spread shadow. Was he to sit here forever, afraid to fly by day because someone might see him? Was his only flight to be as a clothes-drier for his good wife, or a fanner of children on hot August noons? Ah! To think!

    He hadn't minded it so much at first. There had been Brunilla and the new marriage and, for a time, the children to raise. But now he was beginning to fret again. He was no good. His one occupation had always been flying, running Family errands, quicker than storms. Why, in the old days, he'd been faster than the telegraph. Like a boomerang he'd whickled over hills and valleys and like a thistle landed. He had never wanted for money, there are always people willing to employ a winged man.

    But now? Bitterness! His wings jittered behind him.

    'Papa, fan us,' said little Meg.

    The children stood before him, looking up at his thought-dark face.

    'No,' he said.

    'Fan us, papa,' said Ronald.

    'It's a cool March day and there'll soon be rain,' said Uncle Einar.

    'There's a wind blowing, papa, that's all. The wind'll blow alla clouds ‘way,' said Stephen, no bigger than a bee.

    'Will you come watch us, papa?' asked Michael.

    He grew into himself, like the fingers inside a fist.

    'Run on, run on,' he told them. 'Let papa brood.'

    On this day he was shut of marriage, love, the children of the love, and the love of the children. Brunilla was hanging in the clothes upon the back porch. 'You whipped them dry as toast,' she called, delighted, trying to brighten him, for she liked pots, pans, and people's faces all polished and silvery, and his brooding of late was like a rust which was hard to get off surfaces. 'You're welcome,' he said, listlessly, thinking of old skies, night skies, star skies, moon skies, wind skies, cool skies, midnight and dawn skies, cloudy skies and all kinds of skies. Was it to be his fate to scull the pasturage from now on, so low for fear of being seen that he might break wing on the silo, or crack it on a kindly fence? Misery in a deep well!

    'Come watch us, papa,' pleaded Meg.

    'It's March,' said Ronald.

    'So it is,' said Uncle Einar. 'The rump of winter, which blows a fury.'

    'And we're goin' to the Hill,' said Michael, his eyes lighted like little globes. 'With all the kids from town.'

    Uncle Einar chewed his hand, gently, on the edge. 'What hill's that?'

    'The Kite Hill, of course!' they sang together.

    Now he looked at them.

    Each held a large paper kite against their gasping bosoms, their faces sweating with anticipation and animal glowing. In their small fingers were balls of white twine. From the kites, coloured red and blue and yellow and green, hung caudal appendages of cotton and silk strips.