[More of the Mad Art Project! I didn’t know there would be so many fairies — or that Tim would be so tolerant of them. But here we are. This story picks up right after Zara T’s Zine. Tim and Donovan are just leaving Shady Oaks Rest Home. Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
You’ll have discerned from my conversation with Donovan and Zara T that I lived to fight another day. Still, I’ll tell you about what happened that sleety afternoon in early March when the sheriff’s deputy came around by my place and bothered Donovan and my landlady.
But let me digress.
Someone had given Momma a little yellow lined pad of paper. On it she drew what she saw outside her window: mockingbirds nesting in the nearest water oak, a squirrel flirting his tail, a walking-stick bug navigating the windowsill.
She drew without much flair but with care and skill born of long practice. I don’t know how you describe crazy people’s art, or if Momma was, in fact, crazy, but her art was — unusual. At first you didn’t see it. Bird, leaf, twig, and bark were all drawn carefully and shaded in with excellent attention to textures. But — it’s hard to describe — everything looked like background. The bird was no more important than the leaves behind him; the leaves were no less important than a butterfly resting near a stem. Even though Momma was pretty good with scale and perspective and so on, she was depicting a flattened-out reality. More than other folks, she drew what she saw.
Because Momma never went anywhere except when the van took the rest home guests to church on Sunday, she never got another notebook. She had used her yellow pad just about up. She’d gone front to back, working on the fronts of the pages, then back to front, drawing on the backs of the pages. Then she’d filled in the margins on top above where the blue lines started.
The day Donovan came to tell me about Zara T’s zine, I had brought Momma a new notebook — a real sketch pad, no lines.
She sat on that bed in a pair of pink sweatpants and a Dallas Cowboys tee shirt that certainly had been donated out of a teenage boy’s closet. She opened the notebook, then hovered her pencil over the page. She looked at me.
“This notebook’s right pretty.”
Even in Bethlehem, they don’t say right pretty much this century, not without the broad affection of country some Southerners use. Momma, born in 1957, had been raised by a grandmother who was born in 1898, though. It’s dizzying to contemplate. I felt as if a rift had opened somewhere.
“Would you like to draw in it, Momma?”
She gazed at me. A strand of her white hair, cut off artlessly at chin length, caught on her lip. “I only ever had but one little boy … ”
“Yes,” I said, as I’d said before. “That’s me, Tim. I’m your son, Momma.”
She looked at me again, almost stealthily.
Momma had — has — fine, delicate features, maybe something like mine. I have one picture of the two of us together. While I know she was 18 in that Polaroid taken in 1976, she looks about 14. I was 4. In the picture, she was sitting on the porch step. I was standing, leaning against her, with one arm looped around her neck. We were blinking into the sun, which must have been behind whoever was taking the photo. Two children alone in the world.
Momma looks like a fairy, I thought, meaning now. She was eerie as a fairy, opening these rifts in time. At the same time, she said, “I’ll draw what I saw night before.”
Drawr, she said for draw, just as she said warsh for wash and so on. I don’t like writing out dialect like that, but imagine you can hear it — a kind of uncertain twang.
She seemed to like it when I sat on the bed. I didn’t try to touch her and she never asked for touch. Never held out her arms for a hug, anything like that. But I noticed she settled a bit when I sat near her. Not too far, not too close. Now I picked through the newspaper comics someone had left in the room for her.
Meanwhile, her pencil whispered over the page. After a while it fell silent.
“What did you draw, Momma?” I asked.
She looked at me, again with that sly, sideways look that might have had fear or might have had malice in it.
“I saw them last night,” she said. She held out the notebook. I took it and turned it slowly toward myself. I looked first at my hand — long, slim fingers, spatulate nails, middle-aged joints, heavy blue veins. Then the khaki fabric of my knee. Burn your khakis. I hesitated before I looked at the page.
The view was from Momma’s window, looking down. Across the grass and, closer, in the bare branches of the nearest water oak, people swarmed. They might have been tall as my palm. On the oak, their weight bent slender branches low. Some hung down from their hands while their companions clung to their middles or feet. In that way they might be chained two or three together, yards from the ground. One had dropped, leaving his hand attached to his companion’s foot. Or her companion’s. He spun towards the foot of the tree. His two long wings, slender like a dragonfly’s, trailed after him. He made no attempt to, perhaps could not, fly.
I stood up, walked to Momma’s window, and checked outside. This window, those gnarled twigs. These fairies.
Sometimes it’s best not to think. I sat on Momma’s bed again. She looked at me without expression.
“We used to see these at the old place,” I said, touching the picture. “Back when we lived off Bell’s Pond Road.”
She looked at me again, that sideways look. Women her age are mathematicians and lawyers, of course. Athletes. Teachers. But Momma, only 65, looked wizened, witless, and, just now, cruel.
Her cruelty and what intelligence she has are bound together, I thought out of the blue. That’s why — I didn’t know how to finish the thought. But I saw it, or felt it, maybe, as a physical fact. She had a splinter of intelligence in that sweet, vague, desperate mind, and it was sharp as a needle. Her grandmother, my great-grandmother, died when I was a toddler, leaving mother the house off Bell’s Pond Road. In utter despair with her BED-WEATTER son, with her life alone with the clever, cruel boy she had given birth to at just 14, she had turned to that intelligence for help, and it had not failed her. It had posted me out at the roadside where I was bound to attract attention and get picked up by social services at last. Her clever self knew her everyday self could not bear to lose me, so Clever Self engineered it all.
And here I had spent more than 40 years thinking I had betrayed Momma, when — again, probably without any conscious knowledge — she had saved us both.
I returned her gaze straight on. “I remember the house,” I said again. “I remember the fairies who used to come down from the woods.”
The slyness faded from her face. After a while she nodded. She said, “The little white house off Bell’s Pond Road.”
“Yes, Momma.” I held out the notebook and pointed to the fairies. “These came here last night?”
She nodded. “And night before.”
“How many?” I asked.
“Reckon couple hundred.”
There did not look like a couple of hundred fairies in that picture. But there looked like more than two dozen.
Unlike the light-clad people who visited the little white house off Bell’s Pond Road, these fairies did not look kind.
Donovan and I decided not to go straight back to my boarding house where the sheriff’s deputy might still be hanging around. Instead, we drove out to Jethra’s place up on the power line cut.
Though she herself was magical, or seemed so to me, Jethra always laughed at what she considered superstition. She thought nothing of buying a bit of land with a prefabricated, built-onto house right under the pylons carrying high-voltage power lines across Orme Mountain.
By now the sleet had let off. It was chilly, the temperature hovering just above freezing. We approached the place from the east with the sun setting behind us and the clouds parting here and there to reveal dark mauve-colored streaks of sky.
The truck squelched over slushy grass out front of Jethra’s house. The doors slammed behind us. The sound echoed. We couldn’t tell what color the house was in this light — of course Donovan knew; he grew up here. We couldn’t see much about what was in the shadows of the front porch. A broom leaning up against the wall, maybe, and a tattered flag that might have been a rainbow flag planted in the grass.
We went around the house, past leafless Rose of Sharon bushes and a silent HVAC unit. In back we came to Jethra’s graveyard.
Or whatever it was.
I’d been here before. Soon after Donnie Ross first called me, I came and looked at the remnants of Jethra’s mad art project: kitten-sized graves, some grass-grown, some fresh and decorated with pebbles or children’s plastic toys. She’d mounded them up here and there at irregular intervals to form three concentric circles. They were all tiny — you could put a shoebox over any one grave with its furnishings.
Graves may be the wrong word. Was this a witch’s circle? A fairy ring? In the dim light it looked like it. Beyond the graves was a pole barn and beyond the pole barn, about 50 yards off, the tree line hung back from the property.
I looked at the graves more closely. Had I missed something the last time I visited? Would anything here tell me what had become of Jethra Holloway? I dropped to one knee. Here was Penelope Moonchild’s grave. I’d seen it on Jethra’s Instagram feed. To keep the gerbil-sized blood clot company in its repose, Jethra had given Penelope Moonchild a half geode and a 5-inch-tall plastic doll. I picked up the geode and ran my fingers over the amethyst points inside, then the wet, pitted exterior.
Behind me, Donovan said, “Ma never grows onions.”
“What?” I turned, getting my knees muddy.
He squatted and pointed. “Look there.”
I pushed up and stepped across the graves in the dark to get to him. “What?” I asked again. I again squatted, cursing my lower back, to see what Donovan was getting at.
There it was. Luminous half-globe, tennis ball sized, with a curl at the top.
An onion, I suppose you know — or would if they taught children anything other than how to get participation trophies for joining a Zoom call these days — has a green shoot.
Green.
Not white, and especially not white with what just might have been a bit of rosy tint, though it was really too dark to tell.
“Don’t touch that,” I said to Donovan. I suppose I snapped. He stood up.
I looked around, just turning my head, not shifting my knees. I didn’t want to — was I thinking this? — to hurt one.
Then I saw the hole. My turn to point. “Look there.”
Donovan used the light on his phone to pick out a burrowed-up hole with a spray of dirt around the opening. It was almost, but not quite, as if someone had pulled up an onion. It was almost, but not quite, as if the onion had pulled itself up and — yes, there was the bent grass — crawled away.
Donovan’s phone light found a second hole. A third. We counted a dozen before a barn owl squalled from the pole barn. Donovan cut off the light. We let our eyes acclimate, looking at the shadows a while before glancing around again. More clouds were gone. We could see stars and the moon, three or four nights past the full.
Together we backed carefully out of the fairy ring.
“What were those?” Donovan asked. “What came up here? Moles? Groundhogs?”
We both knew whatever broke through the surface and crawled off was bigger than moles, smaller than groundhogs. We both had seen the miniature grave furniture tumbled aside.
Donovan turned on his heel and circled slowly, studying the perimeter of the yard. Mostly scrub cedar here. New growth. In the nearer shadows, last year’s broom grass bent under a burden of slushy ice that would not melt until morning.
Donovan was wearing denim jeans, combat boots, and a plaid shirt over a tee shirt. I saw him shiver, but I don’t think it was the cold. I had on a wool jacket over my button-down shirt and khakis. I put my hands in the pockets of my trousers, forcing the jacket back and letting Donovan see that I was carrying.
His shoulders settled. He nodded his head. “Shotgun in the truck, too,” he said.
I also nodded, but only in acknowledgement. “I don’t think we have to be worried about these little guys,” I said. “Would anything tended by your mother be evil, or stay evil for long? These are the good guys.”
We eyed each other, then searched the perimeter again. If these were the good guys, who were the bad guys?