Afternoon of the Elves (5 page)

But why? What did the elves discuss? What language did they speak? Did they talk in words, or did communication take place through some form of silent sign language? After all, there was never a mutter or a cough in the yard, not during the day and not at night either, according to Sara-Kate. There was only the sound of the wind moving through bushes and tree boughs.

“If I were an elf and wanted to speak so that no one would hear me, I would make up a language that sounded like ordinary natural sounds,” Sara-Kate had said.

“What sounds?” Hillary asked.

“Be quiet and listen for a minute.” They had stood still until the tiny noises within the boundaries of the yard began to distinguish themselves from the louder noises of the town: from traffic passing in the street, the shriek of brakes, the cries of children and yapping of dogs.

Underneath these town noises, Hillary heard tiny chirps and squeaks. She heard a faint vibration or buzz coming through the air. She heard pecking and tapping noises, little creaks and scratches, groans and gushes, clickings and drippings. Finally, she heard the clear notes of a bird, very close by.

“Is that an elf talking?” she whispered in amazement.

Sara-Kate shrugged. “It could be. Who can tell?”

Hillary had nodded. It might very well be. But of course, with elves it was impossible to be sure of anything. One might suppose that certain things were happening, that the elves acted in a certain way, but who could really tell? Facts can be understood differently, they can add up to different answers depending on how they are viewed.

This uncertainty about the elves had come home to Hillary after a particularly interesting conversation with Sara-Kate one day, a conversation about the strange little pool the elves had made for themselves out of an old tin pan sunk in the ground near the Ferris wheel.

At night in the dark, or perhaps in faint moonlight, the elves bathed in the pool. Hillary knew they bathed because she saw fresh seeds and half-eaten berries near the water's edge. She saw small, square pieces of wood floating in the water, along with tiny, yellow leaves that seemed to have no source within the yard.

What purpose did the wooden pieces serve? Hillary wondered. And what about the leaves?

After some thought, she had come up with an answer. The wooden squares were rafts upon which the elves sat or lay, and the leaves were washcloths, because the elves must have some means of washing, mustn't they? It seemed most likely.

But Sara-Kate had laughed when she heard Hillary's ideas.

“Why do you think that these elves are anything like you?” she asked. “You play with rafts in pools and you use washcloths, so you think elves must, too. But maybe elves aren't like you at all. Maybe they're so different that nothing they do is anything like what you do. Maybe they've never even seen a washcloth and these leaves are for something else, for collecting starlight, say.”

“Collecting starlight! Why?”

“Maybe for energy to run things, the way we use the sun for solar energy.”

“To run what?”

“Well, there's the Ferris wheel. Suppose the wood pieces aren't water rafts but power rafts. Maybe the swimming pool isn't for swimming at all. It could be a power center that collects energy and stores it for future use. I'm not saying this is true,” Sara-Kate added hastily. “I'm just trying to show you what's possible.”

Hillary was astounded. Starlight collectors! She would never have imagined such a thing and she looked with respect at Sara-Kate. Not that she was convinced about the power rafts, but she saw that Sara-Kate was right in principle. She must not take anything for granted when it came to an unknown like elves. She must just watch and wait and hope that they would reveal themselves more clearly.

In the meantime, the road and bridge project went forward in the afternoons until most parts of the yard had been linked with the elf village. But Indian summer soon passed and the days grew shorter and colder, making it less pleasant to work outside.

Less pleasant especially for Sara-Kate, Hillary thought. She stubbornly refused to put on any kind of coat. While Hillary arrived wearing sweaters and jackets and finally a new quilted parka, Sara-Kate went on working in her same blue sweatshirt, which by this time was looking rather ragged around the cuffs.

“Aren't you cold?” Hillary asked her. On some afternoons, there was a thin layer of ice on the elves' pool.

“No,” Sara-Kate answered.

“Are you trying to act like an elf and have thick skin?” Hillary said, teasing a little.

Sara-Kate had turned on her in one of her unpredictable bursts of fury.

“For your information, I'm not trying to act like anything. I happen to be like an elf, that's all. I don't get cold. If you think that's weird, why don't you go away and tell your stupid friends about it.”

But, of course, Hillary chose not to go away.

In all the time that Hillary had been going to Sara-Kate's backyard to work on the elf village, Sara-Kate had never once invited her inside her house.

Never once had she offered Hillary a soda or a snack. She had never asked her in to see her room, or to watch television. When it rained, Hillary went home. When she got hungry, Hillary went back to her own kitchen.

“Do you want something?” she'd ask Sara-Kate. “We have cupcakes.” Or she'd offer an apple, popcorn, lemonade, for Mrs. Lenox believed in a well-stocked larder and kept many delicious snacks on her shelves.

But Sara-Kate never wanted anything. Elf banquets were one thing. For herself, she did not seem interested in food. She didn't like to watch Hillary eating either, or so it seemed, for she would turn away and go off to another part of the yard while Hillary nibbled around the edges of a raspberry fruit pie or a chocolate-chip cookie she had brought from home. It was as if Sara-Kate found the sight of this sort of food disgusting.

On the other hand, Hillary occasionally caught her tossing a handful of yard berries into her mouth when she thought no one was looking. And she often munched on mint leaves from a patch of mint grown wild near the back porch.

“Elves chew mint like gum,” she told Hillary once.

Hillary watched Sara-Kate chewing and guessed that her odd tastes were another instance of her being “like an elf.”

“If you ask me, Sara-Kate
is
an elf,” Jane said in a nasty voice to Hillary at school. “She's a mean, dirty little elf who's put a spell on you and is going to get you in trouble, wait and see.”

Jane and Alison were angry at Hillary and she was angry at them.

“You think you're so great because a big fifth grader is your friend,” Alison hissed. “But nobody in the whole school likes Sara-Kate. Nobody else wants to hang around her horrible old house. There's not even any furniture in there, did you know? Somebody sneaked up and looked through the window one day. There aren't any chairs or anything.”

“Sara-Kate is your friend because she can't get anybody else,” Jane added. “She got you by telling you a lot of lies about elves. Why are you so stupid, Hillary?”

“Shut up,” Hillary replied. “Sara-Kate isn't lying. And she has beautiful furniture. Whoever said she didn't is the one who's lying. I've been in her house hundreds of times so I should know.”

Not only had Hillary never seen the inside of Sara-Kate's house, she had not seen Sara-Kate's mother since the day she'd stared out the second floor window for that brief moment. Mrs. Connolly never came out of the house. She never came to the door to call Sara-Kate inside. She never made a sound.

And yet, she was there. Hillary knew it. Besides the way the shades moved at times—as if someone were crouched behind them watching the activity in the yard—there were the errands that Sara-Kate was constantly being sent to do.

Hillary had even begun to accompany her: to the drugstore to pick up a prescription; to the post office; to the little grocery store two blocks away for a bunch of carrots, a half gallon of milk, a box of Saltines. Hillary went secretly, of course. Her parents would never have allowed her to walk around the town, which was more like a small city in the downtown sections. They would have worried about traffic on the busy streets, about the beckoning finger of a stranger. They would have worried that Hillary would become lost, or get bitten by one of the homeless dogs that roamed the trashy alleys, or fall into a hole and lie there unconscious and ignored.

Apparently Sara-Kate's mother worried about none of these possibilities. Hillary wondered if she knew where Sara-Kate was half the time. And naturally Sara-Kate didn't worry. Perhaps she'd never been told about the terrible things that can happen to a child alone on the streets. She went to the laundromat to wash clothes, to the hardware store to “make a payment,” to the bank to cash a check.

Hillary watched Sara-Kate's small figure transact these grown-up pieces of business with increasing amazement. After all, Sara-Kate was no bigger than Hillary, and though she was two years older, she did not look old enough to be so effective in the adult world. But effective she was, although Hillary once heard her questioned by a woman in the business office of the telephone company, where she had gone to restart telephone service that had been shut off at her house.

“Where is your mother?” the woman inquired sharply. “She should be handling this.”

“She's sick, so she had to send me,” Sara-Kate replied quickly. The telephone official regarded her doubtfully, but she accepted the pile of money that Sara-Kate placed on her desk.

“How do you know what to do?” Hillary asked Sara-Kate later. “Do you do everything for your mother?”

“Not everything. Just what she tells me.”

So Sara-Kate's mother was sick. That scrap of information was among the few that Hillary managed to glean during her month of visiting the Connollys' backyard. Sara-Kate almost never spoke about herself. She never told stories about her family. If Hillary forgot and questioned her too closely on some personal matter, Sara-Kate snapped at her. Or she was silent, as if she had not heard.

“What sickness does your mother have?”

Silence.

“Are you the only child in your family, like me?”

Silence.

“Why was your telephone shut off?”

Silence.

Only about the elf village and the elves themselves did Sara-Kate became talkative and open. In fact, as time went on, the mysterious world of the elves became clearer and clearer in Hillary's mind from Sara-Kate's telling about it, and Hillary could almost see the pale, quick-as-a-wink faces peer out from the underbrush.

Perhaps she had seen one, or rather part of one. As Sara-Kate explained, the elfin trick of invisibility depended to a great extent on their never appearing whole before humans. Sara-Kate herself saw bits and pieces of elves everywhere in the yard: a flash of arm, a pointed foot, an eye, wheaten hair blowing in the wind like yellow grass.

“It isn't where you look for elves so much as how you look,” she advised one day when Hillary had despaired of ever seeing the little people. “You've got to train yourself to notice details. You can't just stomp around the place expecting to be shown things. Go slowly and quietly, and look deep.”

So Hillary went slowly and quietly. She began to look deep into the bushes of Sara-Kate's yard, deep into piles of leaves, into hedges. The yard seemed more open now because the trees and bushes had shed their leaves. She saw holes, hollows, and stumps that hadn't been visible under all the foliage.

“I think I just saw an elbow!” she would call to Sara-Kate, who would turn toward her skeptically.

“Are you sure?” she'd ask. “Are you really sure?”

“Yes!” Hillary would cry, but she wasn't. She was never sure what she had seen. It was maddening.

Hillary found herself bringing her new noticing eyes back home with her to her own yard. She noticed, for instance, how the ivy climbing her father's birdbath turned brittle, then brown, and began to lose its grip on the fluted stem.

She saw an abandoned nest in the bare branches of the apple tree. She noticed how evening came earlier and earlier, until it was completely dark when her father returned home from his office and there was no time for him to work in his garden. But then again, she saw that frost had killed the flowers and the grass had stopped growing so there was no reason for him to go out there anyway.

At the dinner table, Mr. Lenox looked tired and talked about people who weren't doing their jobs at work. When Hillary's fork dropped on her plate with a crash by mistake, he jumped and scowled at her. Looking deep, Hillary thought she knew why.