Mr. Tall (15 page)

Jack looked nervously over his shoulder. A few more girls, stragglers, splashed out of the corn. They looked haggard, their simple country dresses soiled and torn. They hurdled by beat and bored and glared at him as they passed. He saw in their eyes that they recognized him, but nobody smiled and nobody waved and nobody stopped. Nobody asked for his help. He forgot to look at their fair nether parts as they ran away. Jack turned to the twins.

He said, “All these girls, I—”

“Yep.”

“Some of 'em twice.”

“Are any of 'em, well, you know…?”

“You'd have to ask them.”

“Are you proud of yourself, Jack?”

“That's what we want to know, Jack that Jack. Tell us, are you proud?”

Jack was ashamed of what he had done—maybe for the first time in his life—but still, in his most secret heart, he wished that he had counted as the girls ran away. “Well,” he admitted. “Maybe a mite.”

“Then what are their names?” demanded one.

“Names?” Jack said.

“You heard her. Their names.”

Jack realized he had never known any of their names. They had all been farmers' daughters and millers' daughters and kings' daughters.

“Uh,” he said, thinking hard. “Susan?”

“No, Jack. None of us never
got
names.”

“The same way none of us never got more than the one white dress to wear, and it too tight, not even after you saw to it we needed a different color.”

“You never saw fit to ask us.”

“Not even after you lay with us.”

Jack remembered then—as clearly as if he were there—the rhythmic screech of a turning wheel, a dagger of hard moonlight, a girl lying back on a stack of sacked cornmeal, her white dress pushed above her waist. She said, I don't know, Jack. I don't know. But what had that meant, the “I don't know”? He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. What he wanted most right then was to forget that he had ever set foot in that mill, that he had ever set out down the road that led to that mill, but he could smell the corn dust, hear the wheel, the water, a soft gasp of breath.

“You have put thoughts in my head I find troublesome,” Jack said. “Please make it stop.”

“It ain't gonna stop, Jack.”

“You drank the seeing juice.”

“The what?”

“The seeing juice. You drank it all up.”

“Out of the jar we put in the road.”

“That's why you can see in the dark.”

“Oh, no!” Jack wailed. “I shoulda known. Y'all are witches. I thought all the witches was gone! Y'all done went and gave me a potion!”

“We're not witches, Jack. And not maidens. We're just girls.”

“We got the seeing juice from the old man beside the road. He said it was something you needed.”

“What prodigious perfidy!” Jack said.

“We put out it in the middle of the road so you would find it on your setting out.”

“But why?” Jack said. “Why would you do that to me?” But he knew even as he asked the question that its answer was obvious.

“Because we wanted you to see.”

“So you would know.”

“And now you see.”

“And now you know.”

“But I don't want to see,” Jack said. “And I don't want to know. I just want to set out. I want the sky to be new and the wind fresh on my cheek. I want to feel the warm red dust scrouging up between my toes. I want to whistle off down the road with the lunch my mama made slung over a pole and meet an old man who'll say, ‘Howdy, Jack. Today you're going to meet a giant with two heads, here's two silver hatchets.'”

“That ain't going to happen no more, Jack.”

“The black dog is going to get us all. He's eating all the stories up from the inside.”

“So enjoy it while you can.”

“It's almost like living, this knowing.”

Jack grabbed the twins by their hands and tried to pull them with him through the wheat.

“It's no use, Jack. Just let us go.”

“No,” Jack said, squeezing their hands so tightly he was afraid he might hurt them. “I ain't gonna turn you loose.”

“It's fine like this, Jack,” said one. “It's fine.”

“It's not fine,” he said.

“We're lucky in a way,” said the other. “We got to be in another story. Even if it was with you.”

“We're not weaving baskets and churning butter when nobody never comes. This is better.”

“But the way it ends.…” Jack said.

“Is the way it ends. The black dog's gonna catch us and say what it is he has to say and he'll bite us and we'll scream and that'll be that.”

“Come with me,” Jack pleaded, not knowing if their coming with him was even a narrative option. He had always traveled alone. “I'll get us a farm. How about that? I'll get us a farm and clear some new ground and sow some seeds and grow some corn and a few tomatoes and I won't set out no more. I won't be in any more stories. I'll try to be a regular man. Come with me and I'll marry one of you and won't lay a finger on the other one, I promise. We can grow us up a barnload of kids and live happily ever after.”

“Oh, Jack,” one chided. “You don't
do
happily ever after.”

“I do, too,” protested Jack. “I've done happily ever after lots of times.”

“But then the page turns.”

“The page turns and off you go again.”

“Shut
up,
” Jack said. “Just shut
up
and come
on.
”

He tried to jerk the girls after him. Their hands were sweaty, almost hot to the touch, calloused from weaving and churning. When they pulled back against him he squeezed harder and felt their delicate bones rubbing together underneath their skin.

“Ow!” said the girl he clutched with his left hand. “You're hurting me!”

“You let her go!” cried the girl on his right just as she clouted him upside the head. “Don't you hurt her no more!”

Jack dropped the hands of both girls and rubbed his ringing ear. He said, “What the hell'd you do that for? I'm just trying to save you!” But when he looked up the girls were gone, just gone, vanished as completely as if they had been imagined along the side of a road, and just as quickly forgotten.

Across the oceanic distance ahead of Jack lay the brushstroke of tree line in which he might conceivably find shelter from the black dog, while behind him rose the porous dam of tasseled corn through which the dog might at any moment break. To either side vast calms of wheat promised neither near-horizon nor hope. Jack turned again through the compass points, this way, then that way, but reckoned only despair. The cornfield lay too close behind him, the forest too far ahead. And as a child of the mountains his aversion to blank horizons was inbred and inalienable. Jack thought, How bleak a vista viewed from the doldrums of squandered life! Then he spat disgustedly because, as a plot man, he distrusted metaphor.

He took a heavy step toward the distant smudge of forest, stopped, shook his head and considered weeping. Who needed maidens anyway? Bedding a maiden was a lot of work. He took another step, then another and another until he creaked into an arthritic lumber. Maybe from now on he would concentrate on widows. Widows didn't smell as good as maidens, but they needed less convincing. The thought gave him resolve enough to ramp up into a run. He had no desire to run but ran nonetheless, getting on with his setting out because he was Jack,
that
Jack, and that was what he did—he set out—and that was all he knew, or had ever known, to do. He had never set down in any one place. Despite what he'd told the twins, he didn't even know if such a thing was possible. The implications hurt Jack's brain. Until the girls tricked him into drinking the seeing juice he had never been one to snag his jacket in the thicket of existential thought.

But what
if
he had hunkered down in some green valley and let the narrator go off down the road without him? Could he have lived the life of a regular man? Or was what the dog said true? If he stopped moving would he simply cease to be? He had sauntered carelessly through the stories, had taken for granted that another tale lay beyond the one through which he passed. How many times had Mama packed him a bite of dinner and kissed him good-bye at the gate? How many dew-tamped, red dirt roads had unrolled before him in the sweet of the morning? What
would
it have been like if he had stayed put and settled down with any one of the maidens who had inexplicably loved him, or had at least loved the charming but insincere version of himself he had conjured without scruple? The dog would never have had reason to run him to ground. Day stacking upon numbered day would have gently done the dog's work. At the end of his life he would have faded into memory and anecdote, a regular man, slipping away for good on the last breath that uttered his name.

And would that have been such a bad thing? Waking with the same woman beside him for a finite number of mornings, breathing in her familiar smell? Watching a yardful of children chase lightning bugs in the cool of the evening? Having a boy named Little Jack follow you down the road when you set out, then home when you turned around? Could he find in such small things satisfactory treasure? He didn't know if he would ever be presented the chance to clamber onto the precious, puny arc of a mortal life, or even if he would do so should the chance present itself, but he did not want to die alone in this foul folktale, in a conclusion not of his choosing, so he kept on, dog be damned.

Jack ran for miles and empty miles, his mind free from the embarrassment of exposition, the regret of flashback, the dread of foreshadow, beneath a dawning, electrical sky tinted the bilious gray of nausea. Pink sears of lightning intermittently scratched across it, followed by ripped barks of thunder. The close air occasionally rearranged itself as if uncomfortable, worrying the wheat into restive eddies, but this humid stirring brought with it no relief, only the promise of storm. He ran until he noticed with a waking start that the forest toward which he traveled had grown markedly closer, that it was now serrated by individual treetops. A single tree, an oak of considerable height, elevated on a plinth of some sort, had separated itself from the forest, well forward of the phalanx. Jack looked nervously behind him for the dog before slowing to a trot as he approached. The tree's position at the forefront of the cohort suggested it was a tree of some importance, a sentinel at least, maybe a general or a king of the trees; Jack guessed it was also probably a talking tree, given its perch on a pulpit. He had encountered only a few talking trees during his journeys, and for the most part found them to be on the dull side, so limited in their experience of the world. In their low, sapped voices they talked torpidly about the circling seasons, the glacial ripple of their growth rings.

Jack checked over his shoulder again and pulled up into a walk. Whatever the tree's rank he figured it was a tree he should howdy to before he piled into the woods.

“Hello, Daddy!” he called.

No answer.

He searched among its limbs and leaves for some sign of sentience. He wondered, as he often had, why some trees talked and some didn't. And how could you tell the difference between a tree that couldn't talk, and a tree that could talk but chose not to?

When he stopped near the tree he saw that it wasn't perched on top of a platform after all, but, rather, grew from the center of a moldering boat. Well, Jack thought, standing with his hands on his hips, his hat pushed back, a boat. He stared and stared, unable to stop staring, not so much at the incongruity of a boat locked in a vast waste of wheat, trackless miles from the sea, but with the rising recognition, as cold in his gut as a gulp of water from a winter spring, that he knew this boat from somewhere, that it was (or at least had been) a magic boat, a flying boat, and that he had flown in it. He had sailed, he remembered now, over the dogwood-splatted mountains and green fields striped with furrows, surrounded by friends he hadn't yet betrayed, all of them whooping with joy because they were young and it was spring and the fresh sun and rushing wind were warm on their faces and they were, of all things, flying in a boat. The boat rotting before him, its hull split by a tree, had once been his boat.

The old man had given Jack the boat because Jack, occasionally generous in those days, had shared his simple lunch of ashcake with the stranger. (Jack's good-for-nothing older brothers, Will and Tom, passing that way before Jack, had refused to share their fancy victuals with the old man. And for their stinginess no good came to that pair!) When Jack had called “Sail, Boat, Sail!” the boat had risen into the air and careered through the sky. He held tight to the gunnels and navigated by whim. When he said “Sail Over Here!” the boat sailed over here, and when he said “Sail Over There!” it sailed over there. He picked up Hardy Hardhead and Eatwell and Drinkwell and Seewell and Shootwell and Hearwell and Runwell, all those boys, and they flew hooting through the sky to the king's house, where they tricked the witch who had spelled the king's daughter out of all her gold, breaking the maiden's enchantment in the process. He remembered with a slap of regret that he had then married the king's daughter but left her for another tale shortly after their honeymoon. He wondered now why he had done that. She had loved him. Her breath had tasted like a waft of iris; her breasts had fit his hands like apples. Nor did he share the gold he had gotten with the Well boys, although without them he could never have beaten the witch. Instead he had swiped a pan of cold biscuits and a jug of wine out of the king's kitchen, slung the gold sack over his shoulder, and set off whistling down the starlit road.

The boat was in a sorry state. Jack knelt beside it now and scooped out mud and moldy leaves and acorns and bits of stick with his hands, finding that the keel had mostly blighted into earth. The tree had sprouted in the muck and grown to full measure, pushing up planking with its roots as it grew. Jack sat back on his haunches and considered whether it was possible to get the boat airborne again. “Fix, Boat, Fix,” he commanded, but it remained as rotten and unmoving as before. He also tried “Mend, Boat, Mend” and “Repair, Boat, Repair” and even the evangelical “Heal, Boat, Heal!” to no avail. He stepped over the gunnel into the boat and with his foot tested the bench in the stern from which he had so blithely navigated the sky. Convinced the seat would bear his weight, Jack sat and rested his chin in his hand, beneath the wide canopy of the tree, and gazed without seeing at the oak's knobby hide.