The Boys in the Trees (24 page)

•  •  •

When he was younger, he sometimes went out with his father. Not on his calls in town but on longer rides, along dusty roads, through twisting tracks with overhanging trees. Sometimes they sang songs and sometimes Eaton sat on his father’s lap and held the reins, but he couldn’t really drive because Prince was younger then too, and unpredictable. Once his father told him about a friend he’d had, and how they competed for everything, even the same girl.
But you won
, Eaton said, and his father smiled. Then he said that one of these times they’d bring fishing poles, see if they could catch a big fish and Lucy would cook it for their supper.

Sometimes Eaton’s father would bring him inside and the
farm women would make a fuss over the Doctor’s boy, sit him at a table with a plate of bread and jam. Sometimes he had to wait outside in the buggy, and the waiting could go on and on. Once they drove up a long lane, and when they came near the square stone house there was a woman standing by the wall, her apron pulled up over her face. She brought her hands down, came to meet them when she heard their turning wheels; her face had more freckles than Eaton had ever seen, and he wondered if that was why she was hiding. That was one of the times his father told him to wait in the buggy and he did, but it was a very long time. He was so thirsty waiting, and he thought that it would be all right if he looked for a pump or a well behind the quiet house. He didn’t find a pump, but he did find a freckle-faced boy about his own size, and they climbed an apple tree, pelted each other with the hard, green fruit, and chased around the barn a few times. The boy said there were kittens inside and they opened a creaking door, climbed a rough wooden ladder up to the hay, and lay on their stomachs looking at the nest the striped cat had circled out for herself, the wet, blind things squeaking around her.
Next time you come, you can take one home
, the boy said, his face so close that Eaton could feel the breath of his words.

His father’s calling was angry and his foot slipped going down the ladder; he almost fell, and that made him run faster, back to the waiting buggy. There was a small sack at his father’s feet and when Eaton opened it he saw wizened potatoes, smelled something rotten.
They’re no good
, he said, and his father told him it didn’t matter, told him that you had to take what people were able to give you, even if it wasn’t what you really wanted.

The next time his father led Prince out of the stable Eaton asked if they could go to the boy’s house to get a kitten, but his
father said no. And when he kept pestering his father slapped the side of the buggy, said he’d been wrong to take Eaton there at all. He said they’d talk about it later but days went by, the kittens all the time growing into cats, and they never did.

•  •  •

Shiner climbed a little higher in the tree and hung from his bent knees, his upside-down face moving between the leaves. It made Eaton think of the magic lantern Will’s father had and the way the pictures flickered, Mother Goose on her gander, Samson with the temple crashing down. When he had told Miss Alice about it once, she said that she would show them something even more amazing. After lunch, she led them into the back kitchen, dark because she’d draped a black cloth tight over the only window. She told them to stand on that side, facing the opposite, whitewashed wall, to stand still, let their eyes get used to the murky light, and look straight at the wall. What Eaton saw first was hazy, something shifting, that was no color he could put a name to.
Keep looking
, Miss Alice said, out of the gloom, and just as someone whispered,
I see it
, he saw it too. Something square and beside it a shape in the softest green, still shimmering but coming clearer as he looked.
What is it?
Rachel said, and then one of the young ones said,
A clue, can we have a clue please, Miss? One clue
, Miss Alice said.
It’s upside down
.

One clue was enough, and Eaton blinked and knew it.
A tree
, he said,
it’s a tree upside down
, and he knew it so surely that he couldn’t believe that just a moment before he hadn’t.
And a building with windows
, someone said, maybe Rachel again,
an upside-down building. Do you all see it?
Miss Alice said, and they all said they did, though Nina didn’t sound sure. Then Miss Alice climbed on a chair and pulled down the black cloth and they
all saw through the window, saw the green slope down to the river, the bulk of the stone factory on the other side, the dense plume of the maple tree just at the corner of it, all bathed in the light of the high sun.

Miss Alice said it was Science, said they all knew that sunlight was made up of colors, didn’t they? They did, most of them did, and she told them that the light of day bounced around all in a jumble, colors flying here and there and all mixed up. Then she said that she’d made the whole room into something like a magic lantern, maybe more like a camera; someone had shown her the same thing once. She showed them a hole she had made in the black cloth, explained that when the sunlight could only come in that one hole, it meant that only a bit of each color could get through. That was why they saw the tree, the stone wall of the factory, even though those things were behind them, and turned the other way. She couldn’t remember why they were upside down but she said that what they had seen was real, not magic, although it was very like magic. That the trembling tree, the building, were always there, that they just needed a way to be seen. They did it over and over, the boys taking turns on the chair, fixing the heavy dark cloth and taking it down again, seeing the same picture, a little more of it each time.

He remembered that, looking at Shiner’s leaf-dappled face, remembered that he had thought about it for hours, maybe for days. If they were there all the time, the factory and the tree, then so was the river, so were the houses, every person walking about. And that meant, that had to mean, that he was walking all the time through a hazy, upside-down world, that the empty air was filled with quivering shapes, just waiting to be revealed, that every solid thing in the world had a ghostly opposite. He
thought about it for days and then set it aside, not able to understand how it could really be.

•  •  •

There were more people than on the busiest market day in the street around the closed front gate, and faces peered over the rooftops across the way. Three young men had climbed the tree after them, and wouldn’t let anyone else up. They were talking loudly about a dance they’d been to, and someone named Chas who was sweet on a girl named Louisa, how he never went anywhere now unless she gave permission. An old man walking beneath heard their shouting laughter, looked up and shook his cane, called them ghouls and said why didn’t they get jobs instead of carousing all hours, instead of finding entertainment in watching some poor wretch lose his life. The young men just laughed more, and one of them tried to tear off twigs to pelt the angry man. But the twigs were green and bent instead of breaking, a handful of stripped-off leaves floating down to land in the space he’d already left.

I’m a ghoul too
, Shiner said, hunching his shoulders and rubbing his hands together, twisting his face. Eaton copied him, but he didn’t think that was the whole reason he had made the plan. The rest of it was something he didn’t seem to have a choice about, something he was caught up in. Something that must have started with the murders, because he found it hard to remember a time before.

It seemed to be all about waiting, this day, and in the tree he thought again that it was a good thing Will hadn’t come, thought about what it would have been like with that high voice chattering in his ear. Shiner said that Will just talked for the sake of hearing his own voice, and not much of what he said meant
anything at all. He had said that the day they were supposed to hunt buffalo with Will’s real bow and arrows, Shiner waiting out of sight while Eaton knocked on the heavy front door. Will said he couldn’t come and closed the door quickly, before Eaton had a chance to ask if they could take the bow anyway. Before the door slammed he heard Reverend Toller’s voice, talking in a church way. Sometimes the whole family had to spend the day on their knees.

The bows they’d made themselves didn’t work very well, the arrows plunking to the ground far short of the cows grazing in Arnold’s pasture. They left them lying there and went into the woods to look for more feathers, and Shiner said it was nice, just the two of them. Shiner didn’t talk much usually, and he didn’t like to explain the ideas he had. Usually he’d just charge off into something and Eaton and Will would follow, figuring it out as the game went along. He could run like the wind and he could fight if he had to, and he had the loudest yell of all of them, sending pigeons flapping through the dusty sunlight in Ridley’s falling-down barn. But sometimes he went completely still, seemed to disappear behind his own eyes. The way he did that would help him when he went to the Wild West, would make him a good scout, a good hunter. But Eaton didn’t like it, it even scared him a little, the way Shiner could remove himself. Something like Eaton’s father, when he raised his eyes from a book, turned from a twilight window. The way he had to blink a few times before he was really there, before he realized who was talking to him.

•  •  •

Drifter Dan could sit for hours without moving, even when a rattlesnake slithered right across his boot. Eaton wriggled to settle himself, his back against the smooth main trunk, his legs drawn
up, feet resting on a solid branch. Shiner had his own branch and was digging at it with his penknife, bending to blow bits of tree dust from the cuts. Eaton stared at his moving hand, the scratching blade, until they started to shimmy a little, until he noticed a far-off buzzing in his ears. He bent his head to touch his knees, the way his father had shown him once when he almost fainted. That was the morning of the funerals, when he sat at the breakfast table and everything looked strangely sharp-edged, the sound of the cutlery echoing, the sound of Lucy’s footsteps. He didn’t think he’d said anything but maybe his father was looking at him, his cool hand suddenly on the back of Eaton’s neck, his calm voice saying,
Put your head down. Put it down
. His new trousers were scratchy against his forehead, his cheek, and as he noticed that he realized he was feeling better, sat up slowly, saying,
I’m all right
, in answer to his father’s question. He opened his eyes to a frozen scene, his mother’s finger curled in the handle of her teacup, Lucy standing still, two white plates held in her raised hands. But just as quickly as he noticed it the scene changed, moved. His mother raised her cup, drank; his father picked up his napkin from the floor and sat down again in his chair. Lucy stepped forward with her plates, and the glistening yellow eyes of the eggs stared back at him. He didn’t think he could bear to touch them with his fork, see them burst and flow. He tore off bits of dry toast and put one in his mouth where it thickened, hard to swallow. It was a thing that made his mother cross, when he picked at his food, but that morning she just said,
You don’t have to do this. We could find someone else
.

For a moment the possibility was there, but he knew it was a coward’s moment, closed it down. She had said the same thing in his room the night before, laying out his clothes, and she
hugged him after she said it, his face crumpled into the slippery stuff of her dress, her smell both sweet and a little tart. Just as he felt himself begin to soften into her, she let him go, with a little push on his shoulder, and he took a deep breath. Sometimes, to his shame, what he most wanted was to curl up in her lap, the way he must have done when he was very small.

From across the table his father said,
It will be fine. You remember how I explained it?
He nodded his head, the toast paste in his mouth making it impossible to speak. His father had said that they were honoring Rachel by carrying her coffin, Eaton and Lucius and Nina’s older brothers. He explained exactly how it would be, where they would sit, what they would have to do, and when. Eaton nodded again when his father asked if he was all right now, egg dripping from the end of his fork.

Excused from the table, he sat on the back step, his arms around his drawn-up knees. Everything was stiff, the unfamiliar trousers, the newly starched shirt, and his skin beneath felt scraped raw, as if the slightest touch might make it bleed. He was tired beyond even knowing it, the last nights filled with tossing dreams. A fiend chasing him down a dark hallway and then appearing suddenly in front of him, turning slowly to reveal a version of his father’s face, pointed teeth dripping blood. At the table he had told his father that he was all right, but he knew that wasn’t so, knew that nothing would ever be right again. Rachel had given him her book to hide, the book she was making as a present for Christmas. And now she was dead and he couldn’t give it back, and her mother was dead, her sister Lil. There was no one to give it back to, and he didn’t know what to do. Only her father left, his eyes glowing in the dark dungeon, and it didn’t seem right that he should have it. Just days before, Reverend Toller had read the story of Abraham; he pointed to
the stained-glass window and the light falling through that same window made his pointing hand glow red. He had talked about Abraham’s anguish, knowing that he would have to slay his only son, but he didn’t say anything about what it was like for Isaac, tied to the altar, looking up at the knife in his own father’s hand. Isaac lived and that was supposed to make it all right, but what was it like for him, walking back down the mountain at his father’s side? What kind of dreams did Isaac have?

Eaton knew that they were in Heaven, Rachel and her mother and her sister, and he knew that was the part he was supposed to think about. How everything was peaceful and they were happy in Heaven, looking down on him, on everyone, with their hair flowing loose, soft wings, with light all around. He knew that at that very moment Rachel was looking down, that she was looking down at him, smiling, with a big hole in her head.