The Boy With Penny Eyes (8 page)

The lights were hot; they were always too hot. There were June bugs out tonight, and mosquitoes as big as thumbnails. She looked up; at the top of the center pole, where it was dark green from the shadows made by the artificial light and canvas, a lone wasp circled. He landed on the pole, took off, alighted again.

Already they were starting up from the back aisles, beginning to move out into the long line that would be endless, the line of sunken faces, eyes that begged, hopeless hungry stares, rasping breath, clutching fingers, the words, "Please, please . . ."

"Brothers and sisters," Uncle Henry said. His long gray-panted leg was tall as a smokestack as he stood next to her. She refused to look up at him.

She closed her eyes.

Oh, God. What is it you want me to do?

She saw that face again; that first face. How old was she then? Five years old. The same sawdust, the same smell of tent and summer sweat, the same anticipation. She had been out in one of the folding chairs with her mother, next to the aisle. She remembered her feet swinging because they didn't reach the floor. She remembered someone in the back singing "Precious Lord" in a low voice, almost under the breath, ashamed or unwilling to share it. She remembered a fat man across the aisle from her, slapping at mosquitoes on his neck, the brown spot on his huge, almost bald head looking purple under the lights. She remembered the endless line filing past her, the cripples, the legless in wheelchairs, the bone-thin, the wheezing, the coughing, the weeping fat women with older women on their arms. They passed her like frames in a movie film, one frame for each broken human being.

And then one of them, a man with long matted hair, and a beard and sores on his face, and spittle on his lips, collapsed in the aisle next to her. He moaned and held his arms out blindly. And without thinking she held out her hand over him. And then she cried out the one word that changed her life. "Light!" she cried. For there was a great light where the man had been, a great mass of luminescence, near perfect in its fullness but for a spot, a blemish in the perfection, and she cried, "His leg! His leg!"

And then they carried him off, and the doctors looked at his leg and found what was wrong there, and then their eyes were always on her. They called her a reader, and the hardness came to her mother's eyes, the hard light of a calling, and the lines of people came to her, and there were tents all summer long, the same tents and smells, and the churches and school auditoriums and halls in the winter, Uncle Henry driving them through the freeze to see the people, see their light and tell them where to look, reading them, the mouths and eyes that begged, "Read! Tell me what it is!"

God, please tell me . . .

The mosquitoes were frenzied now. The heat of the lights, the closeness of the human bodies, the smell of hot blood, drove them around the tent in slapping clouds. The wasp, Mary saw, had settled on the pole and clung still as death, watching in the near shadows what happened below.
Was that God?
she thought.
Was that Him up there, watching to see that she did His will, waiting to sting her with the poison of death if she did not do as He commanded?

She tugged her eyes away from the wasp onto Uncle Henry's bearded face, the stain of tobacco on his teeth, the breath of tobacco on his lips as he knelt beside her. "They're ready, child," he said.

Her mother took her arm.

She was led to the edge of the steps. Through her sandals she felt the uneven slats of wood sinking beneath her tiny weight, pushing her forward. She looked at the floor. There was an awful hush; even the mosquitoes seemed to quiet.

Her mother said into her ear, pulling aside the yellow bangs of her straight hair. "Now." She shut her eyes.

There was a body there. She did not look at or feel it, but her mind saw it. She saw broken light. She felt arms on her, clutching fingers, old skin like a turkey's throat, but her mind saw the shaping light, felt its contours, and suddenly she came to a place where the light was dim and weak, as if the brightness in the rest had been shielded or the source pulled away.

She brought her mind away, opening her eyes, forgetting what she would see. There was the face that went with the arms, the withered face, the hopeless eyes like claws, digging into her, pleading with her, "Please, please tell me how to be well."

Mary shut her eyes again, holding them closed as tight as she could. Tears wanted to come because she could not say that the woman's heart would get better, could not tell her that she would soon die, the light was so dim, that it had grown weaker even as Mary had looked at it.

She felt the woman's hand on her arm, gripping her, waiting for the answer, the sentence of death, and she only said, "Your heart," two soft words, and then the woman's hands were pried gently from her and she heard sobbing as the woman was led away. And then there was another presence before her, another light to hold in her mind, and her own heart shook not with joy but with despair because if she opened her eyes once more, she would see the same face, an endless line of the same face, out through the flaps of the tent and into the dark night, the procession of the dead and dying, the endless, endless line . . .

God, tell me what to do!

Remembering, with the hard bathroom door at her back, Mary bit her lip so hard that a rush of salty blood covered her tongue.

Plea—

Out in the hallway, she thought she heard a sound. Suddenly alert, she listened, but there was nothing, and she slumped back against the door.

Please, tell me!

She remembered the first night her mother brought her to read in the tent. There was thunder, and lightning so intense it had a sound of its own, a crack that fought with the loud thumping roars of thunderclaps and filled the July night with God's fury.

She hid under the bed with her teddy bear. Her blouse was soaked with sweat. She tried to clamp her eyes shut but the cracks of lightning made shadows even through her closed lids. The rumble of thunder shook the house, and hot wet rain beat against the side of her bedroom wall in whacking sheets, trying to break in at her. The rain fell so hard it drove through the closed shutters, pelting warm water on the floor, splashing out to hit her bare leg. She held her bear so tightly he threatened to burst.

"I won't go, Tam," she told the bear. As she said it she heard Uncle Henry hitching up the horses outside her window, shouting to the farm helper Reddy through the drenching storm. Tears ran down her face, only the salty taste making them different from the drops beating in through the window.

She opened her eyes and looked at the teddy bear, a crumpled thing that stared up at her half blindly, one button eye lost. A white flash of lightning made his face horrible.

Outside, Uncle Henry's shouts to Reddy stopped. The rain slackened. She knew Uncle Henry was in the house now. Soon her mother would come for her. As the hall clock struck the hour of seven, her mother's voice came: "Mary, it's time."

She pulled back farther under the bed, clutching the bear.

"Mary," her mother called.

The rain beat for a moment longer and then stopped, leaving the sharp, clean smell of ozone. Water dropped from the roof outside into a depression of dirt outside her window. The world smelled like July, after a storm.

The door to her room opened. Mary felt her mother enter as much as heard her. "Mary?" she called impatiently, but then the tone changed by the end of the word. Mary hugged the bear, looked out as two thin legs, bearing feet in two old shoes, stopped before the bed.

"Mary?" her mother said. Her voice had a tone Mary had not heard since she was a baby. Her mother bent down, her face dropping below the line of the bed, becoming visible to the girl.

"Come out, Mary," she said softly.

Mary crawled out. Her mother's hand brushed back her hair. She sat on the bed, next to her mother, her face buried in her mother's dress.

She heard Uncle Henry come to the door, and start to say, "We—" but then he stopped and went away. Her mother's hand rested on her head, stroking her hair.

Her mother said, "Are you scared, Mary?"

"Yes."

"Don't be. This is what God wants you to do."

"It's not!" she bawled. "He would never want me to do something I'm afraid of!" And then she was crying, and her mother held her even tighter.

"What are you afraid of?"

"I'm scared of telling them they have to die!"

"That's nothing to be frightened of. All of these people—you'll be helping them. Their light is God's own light, in them." After a moment her mother said, "God is speaking to you, Mary. He's speaking to you through me. And He's telling me that this is a great gift He's given you, and that there's nothing for you to be afraid of. He will always tell you what to do." She could feel the strength in her mother's arms. "God gave you this gift to root out Satan, Mary. That's the real reason why you must read. If you were to read Satan, you would find him out, because there would be a sickly light, nearly black emptiness, because God's light has been taken from him." She held Mary away from her, and there was an almost prophetic gleam in her eye. "If you were to root Satan out, it would be because God wanted you to, and I would be there to tell you what He wants."

Oh, God, tell me what to do!

She remembered the look on her mother's face when she left to marry Jacob, the cold certainty in her mother's grim eyes that said, "This is not what God wants. This voice in your heart is Satan's voice."

There came a sound outside the bathroom door.

Who could that be? She could hear the distant, muffled sound of voices singing a hymn, which meant that Jacob's service had not ended. Christine would be there assisting him, taking Mary's own place after she had told Jacob she did not feel well and wanted to stay in bed.

Could it be the boy?

"Who's out there?" she called.

The footsteps stopped outside the bathroom door.

Mary held her breath.

The footsteps moved away from her, down the hallway. She heard a door close and then nothing.

It must have been the boy.

Oh, God. Mother.

In all the years since she had left her mother, since she had married Jacob and become his wife, she had thought she had done the right thing. But listening to that other voice, the one in her heart, had been the wrong thing after all. As her mother had known, that voice had been Satan's, tempting her, leading her away from her reading and the true calling that God wanted her to take, the searching out of Satan.

And now her mother was gone, and she had to beg Him to tell her what to do, alone.
God, please help me!

Because she had found what He had wanted her to.

That morning, when she had discovered the boy sleeping in the back of the church, huddled there like a lost animal, her mind had unconsciously opened when she put her hand on him and she had read him, and there had been only a weak, dull light.

Nearly black emptiness.

Someone called his name.

He heard the lap of the shore, the gurgle of water in the fish tank, but now when he opened his eyes there was no ripple on the ceiling and only a small light in the room. The ceiling was pale orange. He saw, in the corners of his vision that weren't covered by the figure standing over him, the long grotesque shadows of the stuffed animals in the room, distorted pigs and bears, orange in the glow of the lamp on the desk.

"Billy?" the figure over him called again. It was the man who had found him in the back of the church.

Billy sat up and looked at him.

The man blinked, and then a genuine smile spread across his face. "Thought you were going to sleep forever," he said. "You feel all right?" He reached out and touched the boy's forehead with the back of his hand. Billy didn't resist.