Raising Stony Mayhall (5 page)

“So does that mean I can die?”

“Kid, you just took an arrow to the heart.” She gripped
his hand and started walking. “If you can die, I’m highly confident you won’t be checking out tonight.”

“Where is it?” his mother said under her breath.

Alice leaned forward, tilting her head to stay out of the path of light. She held a set of tweezers in each hand, keeping the wound open while their mother worked on the internal tissue.

“Where’s what?” Stony said. They’d already removed the arrowhead, so it couldn’t be that. He lay on his back on a beach towel spread on the kitchen floor. He felt pressure when his mother poked and tugged inside him, but he was otherwise comfortable. Only the bright light bothered his eyes.

“Nothing,” his mom said. “Lie still.” She’d been furious with him, of course. Stony didn’t mention that his sisters had conspired to hide the wound from her, and in return they didn’t mention that Stony had allowed Kwang to shoot at him. It was, they said, an accident.

Alice said, “It’s like … meat. Solid meat, all the way down.”

“Wait a minute,” Stony said. “You can’t find my
heart
?”

“I’m sure it’s in here somewhere,” his mother said. “How do you feel, John?”

“I’d feel better if you could find my heart.”

“He’s fine,” Alice said. “He’s always fine.”

His mother sighed. “Well, it’s not like it’s ever pumped or anything. All right then, let’s get the fishing line and close up. Are there any of the old wounds we should fix up while we’re here?”

His wounds never healed. In fact, they only grew larger as he grew. Stitches popped, even those made from the high-test
line his mother used. They repaired him like a rag doll with too much sentimental value to throw out.

He closed his eyes and let them tug and cinch and fasten him back into shape.

Later, he would think of the next few months as the Summer of Terror. He didn’t tell his mother or sisters that he’d seen the
Time
article, but he thought of it constantly. No matter what Alice said, he knew he’d die someday. And he knew how. The police would find him, and then they would shoot him, and then they would burn him.

While his mother and sisters slept, he walked the house. Occasionally he would lie down, impersonating a normal person, but his mind would thrash and root, his thoughts tangling into each other like blackberry vines. Sometimes he’d try to distract himself with the Little Big game: He’d stare up into the dark and convince himself that the ceiling was impossibly far away, that he was a speck, an ant in the middle of a huge bed. And then, abruptly, he was gigantic, a mountain range under a dark sky, and the floor was miles away below him. If he relaxed into it he could keep the scales flipping for minutes at a time. Years later, when he picked up a novel titled
Little, Big
, he thought, Hey, somebody else knows about this! But of course the book turned out to be about something else entirely.

One morning his mother asked him why he looked so tense. Did he look different? He tried to remember what his face felt like before he understood that the world was trying to kill him. He told her nothing was wrong and she let it go for the moment, but he could tell she was studying him. Then one night she came out of her bedroom at two or three in the morning and found him sitting on the floor in the middle of the living room, staring out the picture window. He was
watching for flashing lights, listening for sirens. He started when he noticed her standing there.

“Talk to me, my son.”

But of course that was the last thing she should have said. He couldn’t just talk when she told him to. Impossible.

“No one’s out there,” she said.

“I know.”

She crouched beside him and stared out the window with him. “No one can hurt you here, John,” she said. “This farm is mine, and it’s yours. It’s our mighty fortress. No one gets in without our say-so, I guarantee it.”

“You can’t promise that,” he said. “No one can promise that.”

“Oh yes I can.” She stood up and walked purposefully into the kitchen. He was curious, but he didn’t get up. Thirty seconds later she was back, holding a five-pound bag of flour. Then she opened the front door and walked outside.

He thought, Mom’s gone crazy.

He got to his feet and walked to the door. His mother stood on the lawn in her bare feet, cradling the white bag. “Come on,” she said. She tugged open the top of the bag, reached in, and then sprinkled a bit of the powder in a line at her feet.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“ ‘God sits above the circle of the earth,’ ” she said. “And we’re all safe inside it.” She began to walk in a circle around the house, scooping a handful of flour from the bag and tossing it before her. Stony followed her at a distance. Is this the kind of thing they did in church? They’d never let him go, of course, but if it was like this then maybe it was more interesting than he thought.

“Everything in this circle belongs to us,” she said. “Come on, say it. Everything in this circle …”

He laughed. “Belongs to us.”

By the time they reached the front of the house again the bag was empty. His mother turned it upside down and shook it over the lawn.

“There,” she said. “The walls are up.” A fuzzy circle of white surrounded the house.

“What if somebody digs underneath them?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “This is a magic circle. Now come on, my feet are about to freeze off.” She put an arm around his shoulder. “I know you can’t sleep, John, but you can lie down next to me for a while.”

He didn’t believe in magic circles, of course. He knew that the government wouldn’t be stopped by a border of baking material. No, he’d need his own defenses, his own fortifications. In fact, he could start working on them tonight.

Or maybe not tonight. His mother snored lightly beside him, and her arms were warm.

very August was a betrayal. Alice drove back to college. Junie came home from Kmart with new binders, plastic zip bags packed with colored pencils, protractors, compasses—shiny weapons for a war in which he was not allowed to enlist. And then one morning Chelsea and Junie and Kwang would be gone, driven away in a crowded yellow bus to their new classes, new teachers.

New friends.

The August he and Kwang were fourteen, the year Kwang went to high school, was especially cruel. Out of nowhere Kwang had developed an obsession with football. Two weeks before school began, he started practicing twice a day with the high school team, abandoning Stony to his sisters. Chelsea, though, was hardly ever home. She’d
fallen in love
with a greasy-haired eighteen-year-old named Alton, and since he wasn’t allowed to come to the farm, Chelsea spent most of the time at the lake with him, or in his Chevy Malibu. That left Junie, who since joining the youth group at the Baptist church only wanted to talk about Jesus.

His mother tried to make him feel like he was starting a
new year, too. As usual, she’d gone to the mall in Des Moines and bought him new gym shoes and a couple of pairs of jeans. The first day of class, Junie said a prayer over breakfast: “Bless us Lord for this oatmeal, and watch over us during the day, and bless our teachers” and on and on until she was almost late for the bus. Chelsea walked out to the end of the lane to be picked up by Alton. His mother kissed him on the cheek and left for work. And then he was alone.

He thought about going back to his bedroom to read, or heading down to work on the cellar. But if he stayed home, Mrs. Cho would only come looking for him. Finally he trudged across the field.

Mrs. Cho greeted him with a hug. “First day of the year. A very big day.” She went through the textbooks and study guides he’d brought with him—his mother purchased them each year from a used bookstore in Des Moines—and commented on each of them. “Ooh, calculus, very advanced. And American literature! That’s good for us both.”

His mother called it homeschooling, but Stony knew what it was: babysitting with books. He would churn through the assignments his mother and Mrs. Cho made up for him, and then start in on any homework Kwang and his sisters left lying around. He corrected math problems, filled in the blank spots in worksheets, proofread essays, finished extra-credit questions. Only Alice’s college textbooks, the ones she’d brought home because she couldn’t sell back, provided any challenge.

He was forced to create his own electives. He picked up an advanced degree in reruns (unlike his mother, Mrs. Cho considered television an important educational tool), with an emphasis in Dick Van Dyke and
Hogan’s Heroes
. But he also began to study car and small engine repair—Mr. Cho’s business. In Korea, Kwang had told Stony, his father had been an
engineer who worked on turbines for hydroelectric dams. But Mr. Cho had moved his family from Pittsburgh to Iowa because he wanted to become a farmer. This, even though he knew nothing about crops, owned no equipment, and did not have enough capital to seed a garden patch. Also, he did not like working outside. Eventually the side business he started in order to keep food on the table while he killed food in the fields turned into a full-time job.

“My sister wants to save my soul,” Stony told Mr. Cho one afternoon. Stony had dismantled a Toro engine down to the screws and laid out each part on a white sheet. It looked like a crime scene. Mr. Cho had said the engine was beyond repair, though not in so many words. He communicated primarily in grunts and scowls.

Stony said, “Do you know that word, soul?”

Mr. Cho did not answer; he was stretched out under a Chevy Vega that needed new brakes. Stony had never forgotten what Kwang had told him in the hayloft. The fact that Mr. Cho thought they should be careful around him didn’t make him want to avoid the man. The opposite, actually. Stony wanted to prove himself trustworthy, and at the same time, to hang around someone who thought of him as dangerous.

“The problem is,” Stony said, “I don’t think I have one.”

“Socket,” Mr. Cho said.

Stony picked up the socket wrench from the toolbox and squatted to hand it to him. Mr. Cho tilted his head to look at it, then said, “No! Nine-sixteen.”

Stony walked back to the tray of socket heads and started to fish through them. “The Bible’s not much help. A lot of resurrections, but those people come back to life, you know? Their bodies don’t stay dead.”

Mr. Cho reached up and impatiently slapped the fender of the Vega. Stony wondered, when Mr. Cho lay there with
his legs sticking out like that, did he ever think, That dead boy could bite me?

Stony snapped the nine-sixteenths head into place and put the wrench in his hands. “It seems to me that if I’m already dead, then my soul went to heaven or hell or wherever it was supposed to go. There’s nothing left to save.”

Mr. Cho grunted, though probably that was just because he was struggling with the bolt.

“On the other hand,” Stony said, “maybe what happened is that my soul never left like it was supposed to. It was
prevented
from going to the afterlife. So, there’s no use trying to save it, because some other rules are in effect. I’m in purgatory.”

“Shut up now,” Mr. Cho said. “Fix lawn mower.”

At night, after his family had gone to sleep, he worked on expanding the cellar. His mother had given him permission to dig a new floor to provide some headroom and to double the square footage. He’d already gone well beyond that. A crawl-space extended under the entire house, and he’d dug almost to the cinder-block walls in every direction.

The work was tedious, but he’d learned that he had a talent for manual labor. He could let his mind wander and work for hours without realizing it. He thought about the state of his soul. He thought about the Cubs. He thought about his body, and why he didn’t get tired, and how it was that it could move at all.

He couldn’t find himself in any of the science books he’d been reading. He knew how bodies were
supposed
to work: Lungs inhaled, alveoli transferred oxygen to red blood cells, the heart pumped blood to all the cells. But while he could
inhale and exhale, his heart didn’t beat, and there wasn’t any blood for it to pump anyway. If the cells didn’t receive any oxygen, they couldn’t do any work. Muscles couldn’t contract, neurons couldn’t fire. He should be as inert as a lump of clay. Yet he moved and talked. He grew. He had feelings and ideas. He thought things such as, How am I thinking this?

He’d found only one textbook that mentioned the outbreak of 1968. Alice had brought home a book called
Government and Society
that spent a measly three pages on it. The outbreak struck on October 1, and by the end of the next day, between 35,000 and 72,000 people were dead, depending on whether you counted people who were dead before the outbreak began and had to be killed again. The article was mostly about how the event changed federal disaster preparedness plans. It didn’t even talk about what caused the disease, what the living dead were, and what the government would do if they found more of them. It was as if the whole thing were all over and he didn’t exist.