Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast (3 page)

Of course she came to our house first, that being the dearest place she knew. I saw her outside my window, gray as a gravestone, her dark eyes like the holes in a shroud. When she stared in she didn't know me, though I had always been her favorite.

“Mama, be gone,” I said, and waved my little cross at her, the one she had given me the very day I'd been born. “Avaunt.” The old Bible word sat heavy in my mouth.

She put her hand up on the window frame, and as I watched, the gray fingers turned splotchy pink from all the garlic I had rubbed into the wood.

Black tears dropped from her black eyes, then. But I never cried.

She tried each window in turn, and not a person awake in the house but me. But I had done my work well and the garlic held her out. She even tried the door, but it was no use. By the time she left, I was so sleepy I dropped down right by the door. Papa found me there at cockcrow. He never did ask what I was doing, and if he guessed, he never said.

Little Joshua Greenough was found dead in his crib. The doctor took two days to come over the mountains to pronounce it. By then the garlic around his little bed—to keep him from walking, too—had mixed with death smells. Everybody knew. Even the doctor, and him a city man. It hurt Joshua's mama and papa sore to do the cutting. But it had to be done.

The men came to our house that very noon to talk about what had to be. Papa kept shaking his head all through their talking. But even his being preacher didn't stop them. Once a vampire walks these mountain hollers, there's nary a house or barn that's safe. Nighttime is lost time. And no one can afford to lose much stock.

So they made their sharp sticks out of green wood, the curling shavings littering our cabin floor. Bubba played in them, not understanding. Sukey was busy with the baby, nursing it with a bottle and a sugar teat. It was my job to sweep up the wood curls. They felt slick on one side, bumpy on the other. Like my heart.

Papa said, “I was the one let her turn into a night walker. It's my business to stake her out.”

No one argued. Specially not the Greenoughs, their eyes still red from weeping.

“Just take my children,” Papa said. “And if anything goes wrong, cut off my hands and feet and bury me at Mill's Cross, under the stone. There's garlic hanging in the pantry. Mandy Jane will string me some.”

So Sukey took the baby and Bubba off to the Greenoughs' house, that seeming the right thing to do, and I stayed the rest of the afternoon with Papa, stringing garlic and pressing more into the windows. But the strand over the door he took down.

“I have to let her in somewhere,” he said. “And this is where I'll make my stand.” He touched me on the cheek, the first time ever. Papa never has been much for show.

"Now you run along to the Greenoughs', Mandy Jane,” he said. “And remember how much your mama loved you. This isn't her, child. Mama's gone. Something else has come to take her place. I should have remembered that the Good Book says, ‘The living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything.' ”

I wanted to ask him how the vampire knew to come first to our house, then; but I was silent, for Papa had been asleep and hadn't seen her.

I left without giving him a daughter's kiss, for his mind was well set on the night's doing. But I didn't go down the lane to the Greenoughs' at all. Wearing my triple strand of garlic, with my cross about my neck, I went to the burying ground, to Mama's grave.

It looked so raw against the greening hillside. The dirt was red day, but all it looked like to me was blood. There was no cross on it yet, no stone. That would come in a year. Just a humping, a heaping of red dirt over her coffin, the plain pinewood box hastily made.

I lay face down in that dirt, my arms opened wide. “Oh, Mama,” I said, “the Good Book says you are not dead but sleepeth. Sleep quietly, Mama, sleep well.” And I sang to her the lullaby she had always sung to me and then to Bubba and would have sung to Baby Ann had she lived to hold her.

 

Blacks and bays,
Dapples and grays,
All the pretty little horses.

 

And as I sang I remembered Papa thundering at prayer meeting once, "Behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.” The rest of the song just stuck in my throat then, so I turned over on the grave and stared up at the setting sun.

 

It had been a long and wearying day, and I fell asleep right there in the burying ground. Any other time fear might have overcome sleep. But I just dosed my eyes and slept.

When I woke, it was dead night. The moon was full and sitting between the horns of two hills. There was a sprinkling of stars overhead. And Mama began to move the ground beneath me, trying to rise.

The garlic strands must have worried her, for she did not come out of the earth all at once. It was the scrabbling of her long nails at my back that woke me. I leaped off that grave and was wide awake.

Standing aside the grave, I watched as first her long gray arms reached out of the earth. Then her head emerged with its hair that was once so gold now gray and streaked with black, and its shroud eyes. And then her body in its winding sheet, stained with dirt and torn from walking to and fro upon the land. Then her bare feet with blackened nails, though alive Mama used to paint those nails, her one vanity and Papa allowed it seeing she was so pretty and otherwise not vain.

She turned toward me as a hummingbird toward a flower, and she raised her face up and it was gray and bony. Her mouth peeled back from her teeth and I saw that they were pointed and her tongue was barbed.

“Mama gone,” I whispered in Bubba's voice, but so low I could hardly hear it myself.

She stepped toward me off that grave, lurching down the hump of dirt. But when she got dose, the garlic strands and the cross stayed her.

“Mama.”

She turned her head back and forth. It was dear she could not see with those black shroud eyes. She only sensed me there, something warm, something alive, something with blood running like satisfying streams through blue veins.

"Mama,” I said again. “Try and remember.”

That searching awful face turned toward me again, and the pointy teeth were bared once more. Her hands reached out to grab me, then pulled back.

“Remember how Bubba always sucks his thumb with that funny little noise you always said was like a little chuck in its hole. And how Sukey hums through her nose when she's baking bread. And how I listened to your belly to hear the baby. And how Papa always starts each meal with the blessing on things that grow fresh in the field.”

The gray face turned for a moment toward the hills, and I wasn't even sure she could hear me. But I had to keep trying.

“And remember when we picked the blueberries and Bubba fell down the hill, tumbling head-end over. And we laughed until we heard him, and he was saying the same six things over and over till long past bed.”

The gray face turned back toward me and I thought I saw a bit of light in the eyes. But it was just reflected moonlight.

“And the day Papa came home with the new ewe lamb and we fed her on a sugar teat. You stayed up all the night and I slept in the straw by your side.”

It was as if stars were twinkling in those dead eyes. I couldn't stop staring, but I didn't dare stop talking, either.

“And remember the day the bluebird stunned itself on the kitchen window and you held it in your hands. You wanned it to life, you said. To life, Mama.”

Those stars began to run down the gray cheeks.

"There's living, Mama, and there's dead. You've given so much life. Don't be bringing death to these hills now.” I could see that the stars were gone from the sky over her head; the moon was setting.

“Papa loved you too much to cut your hands and feet. You gotta return that love, Mama. You gotta."

Veins of red ran along the hills, outlining the rocks. As the sun began to rise, I took off one strand of garlic. Then the second. Then the last. I opened my arms. “Have you come back, Mama, or are you gone?”

The gray woman leaned over and clasped me tight in her arms. Her head bent down toward mine, her mouth on my forehead, my neck, the outline of my little gold cross burning across her lips.

She whispered, “Here and gone, child, here and gone,” in a voice like wind in the coppice, like the shaking of willow leaves. I felt her kiss on my cheek, a brand.

Then the sun came between the hills and hit her full in the face, burning her as red as earth. She smiled at me and then there were only dust motes in the air, dancing. When I looked down at my feet, the grave dirt was hardly disturbed but Mama's gold wedding band gleamed atop it.

I knelt down and picked it up, and unhooked the chain holding my cross. I slid the ring onto the chain, and the two nestled together right in the hollow of my throat. I sang:

 

Blacks and
bays,

Dapples and grays...

 

and from the earth itself, the final words sang out,

 

All the pretty little horses.

 

That was when I cried, long and loud, a sound I hope never to make again as long as I live.

Then I went back down the hill and home, where Papa still waited by the open door.

HARLYN HAD NOT EXPECTED to see a fairy that day in the garden. Buttercups, yes. And the occasional early rose. And varieties of plants with odd names like snow-in-summer and bachelor's button. Aunt Marilyn loved to plant and grow flowers, almost as much as she liked to watch birds. But if she had ever seen a fairy in her garden, she had neglected to tell Harlyn about it.

Yet there it was, flittering about on two fast-beating wings as veined and as transparent as stained glass. It sounded like a slightly dotty insect and was pulling the petals off the only red rose in bloom.

Harlyn drew in a sharp, surprised breath. When she exhaled, the wind nearly blew the fairy halfway across the arbor.

“Whooosh!” the fairy cried out. When it had gotten its tiny wings untangled at last, it flew back toward her, shaking its fist and scolding in a voice that sounded as if it were being run backward at the wrong speed. Harlyn didn't understand a word.

After a half-minute harangue, the fairy flew down to the ground and picked up the dropped petals, stuffing them into a silvery sack. Then it zipped off in the direction of the trees, canting to one side because of the sack's weight.

But how much can rose petals possibly weigh? Harlyn mused.

When the fairy disappeared into the copse of trees, Harlyn turned.

“Oh, Aunt Marilyn,” she said aloud, “boy, do you have some explaining to do.”

 

“A fairy?” said Aunt Marilyn, shaking her head. “Don't be silly, child. It must have been a ruby-throated hummingbird. They move that way.” Her hand described a sort of twittery up-and-down zigzag motion not unlike the fairy's flight pattern.

“A fairy,” Harlyn said. “It spoke to me. Well, yelled, actually.”

“And what did this fairy say?” Clearly Aunt Marilyn did not believe her.

“How should I know?” Harlyn answered. “I don't speak Fairy. But it wasn't happy, that's for sure.”

“It was pretty hot out there, dear...” Aunt Marilyn began in her understanding voice, the one she'd used since Harlyn's mother's latest breakdown brought Harlyn once again to her house.

Harlyn nodded, though they both knew the day was really on the cool side.

“How about a peanut-butter sandwich?” That was all Aunt Marilyn was going to say about the fairy; of this Harlyn was sure.

 

Harlyn ate the sandwich and drank a glass of milk while Aunt Marilyn hovered over her, carefully watching for signs of something like the delusions Harlyn's mother had entertained on and off ever since she had been a teenager. Harlyn was well aware of this scrutiny; she even welcomed it, usually.

“It was hot out, Aunt Marilyn, hotter than at home. And there were lots of birds,” Harlyn said at last.

“Nothing else?” This was Aunt Marilyn's way of offering a truce without actually saying the dreaded f-word, fairy.

“Nothing else,” Harlyn answered.

“I have to go shopping, and you can come with me if you want to...” Aunt Marilyn clearly wanted to shop alone, and Harlyn was really too old to need a baby-sitter, having already done a bit of sitting for other kids herself.

“I'd rather stay home,” she said. “I brought a book.” She had The Hobbit, which she was about to read for the fourth time.

Aunt Marilyn sighed and picked up her pocketbook and binoculars. “I won't be long.”

She will, though, Harlyn thought, especially if an interesting bird suddenly crosses her path.

As soon as the car left the driveway, Harlyn bolted out the back door and into the garden. This time the fairy was harvesting handfuls of mint from the herb patch. The little silvery pack was almost full.

Turning her face carefully to one side so as not to breathe on the fairy, Harlyn watched it out of the corner of her eye. Clearly it knew she was there, for she was much too big to be ignored. It ignored her nonetheless.

“Can I help?” she whispered.

The answer was as indistinguishable as before, high pitched and foreign and fast, but Harlyn took it as a yes. She knelt down and began to pull bits of mint leaves off, tearing them into tiny pieces that she handed to the fairy. The fairy took them, not at all gratefully, and tore them into even smaller bits, then stuffed them into the pack until it was overflowing. Then, without so much as a wave, it flew off.

“Well—and thanks to you, too!” Harlyn called after it.

 

She said nothing about seeing the fairy again when Aunt Marilyn came home. And what with one thing and another—making Toll House cookies and peanut-butter pie and helping Aunt Marilyn put stamps in her albums—the day flew past. At bedtime Harlyn borrowed a bunch of bird books, knowing that—though they had wings—fairies were certainly not birds. Probably not even a related genus or species. But the books were worth checking out anyway.