YAAN-2
Days later, after Rook had assured me that he had absolutely no qualms about my mother’s discretion, I disclosed to Mom that he had said he was from a planet. Thinking that she might not know what a planet was, I told her, “A planet is a world beyond the sky.”
She conveyed no surprise, either that there might be worlds beyond the sky, or that Rook might be from one of them. She didn’t even offer me her customary bland “Is that so?” look, instead continuing to give her attention to the beans and Lhaelweed sprouts that were heating in bowl-pans on the grill above our fire pit, filling my nostrils with as agreeable an expectation of the coming meal as the sight of the crushed red winterberries in the white bowls on the dinner table. She went about her business for a few more moments, before half-turning to me, and saying, “Well,” as if expecting me to elucidate.
“Well?” Mom wasn’t one to expect a barrage of words; when communicating with her, I used them sparingly.
She said, “Is he a liar?”
Harshness striped her voice, and as she spoke a couple of the hundreds of strands of her entity pattern that were intertwined with many if not most of the strands of my entity pattern disengaged, and swatted the strands to which they’d been connected. It stung me; Mom could sting me like no one else could. I turned my back to her, and didn’t answer.
Placing her bowl-pans of beans and sprouts on the flat brick partition of the fire pit, she came up behind me. Right behind me; I could feel the fabric of her shirt touching the fabric of mine; I could smell the bean and sprout smoke on her, mingling with her unique “mom-smell.” She said, “Well,” again, as if expecting me to address her question, which I had assumed was rhetorical.
“No” I said, “Not like me.” This was a reference to the fact that because she wouldn’t let me talk to Rook or Jake about the patterns of existence, I was forever hiding myself, my true self, from them.
She waited, and I sniffed, “He could think it was true and it not be true.”
“That’s true,” she acknowledged, and I could hear regret in the altered timbre of her voice, and feel it in the altered thrum of her entity pattern.
Another moment passed; the beans and sprouts whispered as they cooled; Mom, close to my ear, murmured, “People will speak to you harshly now and then during your life, Yaan.”
“But not you! You don’t have to.” I felt the tears on my cheeks; I couldn’t stop them from forming. It was silly, I knew; she’d done nothing but raise her voice in mild disapprobation; but she was wise, she was strong, she was gentle and patient and kind, and it cut me to the bone whenever she rebuked me—whenever, as it seemed to me, she became what she was not, became just another of the people she had mentioned who would speak to me harshly during my life.
Her sorrow weighed heavy upon me; I had caused her to her feel sad, just as she had caused me to feel sad. I was about to blubber “Sorry,” or “I didn’t mean it,” or something in that vein, when she whispered, “No, not me;” and as the pattern strands of her being that had disengaged from me re-interlaced with my pattern, I felt her cheek against my cheek. I swiveled around in her arms and squeezed her as hard as I could, noting, as I did, the many strands of her pattern that reached out in all directions to people and places far away, or gone. I had seen them reach out so many times before, but this time, the sight of them sang in my tears.
Mom and I lived far away from anywhere, in a three-room hut of dusty logs which bulged, almost unnoticeable, like a mole or a small wart, from a square of scrubby untilled land that was more or less at the intersection of four farms.
South and west of our hut was the Dallidoes’ farm, a checkerboard of cornfields and bean fields splashed with a couple of hayfields and a pigyard, which I seldom saw but often smelled. A whole bunch of chickens ran around everywhere, it seemed like, on the Dallidoe farm, though they always disappeared at night—into their coops, I presumed. The Dallidoes kept to themselves. Not that they were ever un-friendly to Mom or me, just aloof, private. Hector Dallidoe, “a nondescript farmer,” in the words of Jake, was good friends with Farmer Green, however; it wasn’t unusual for me to see him when I was roaming about on Farmer Green’s property.
South and east of us was the Gerbils’ farm, which was more or less one big cowyard. They had hundreds of cattle, spread across various big and little cowyards that were partitioned by a random collection of wooden and wire fences. They had a few cornfields, too, but these were like unto afterthoughts to the cowyards; and the cows sometimes wandered around in the them, too, particularly after the autumn harvest, as if making sure that these mere crop fields knew they were secondary. The Gerbils were even more aloof than the Dallidoes. I never saw Ma or Pa Gerbil; and the fieldworkers, who according to Tameedah Green were without exception Ma and Pa’s sons and daughters, never took any notice of me, even to say hello. They never chased me off their land, however, when I was wandering around on it, which I considered evidence of inward amiability. And Golden Gerbil, one of Ma and Pa’s sons, filled Lohu’s trough with water if we went a few days without rain, and left spare corn in a corner of his field if we had a heavy snow, or if vegetation had otherwise become scarce due to a prolonged drought or freeze.
North and west of us was Farmer Green’s, which was by far the largest of the properties, acres upon acres of hay-, corn-, and beanfields, cow-, horse-, and goatyards, barns, coops, and grain and silage storehouses, that I romped across and explored daily, not only because it was the largest and most varied and interesting of the farms, but because it was the most welcoming, Farmer and Tameedah Green both being quite fond of Mom and me. Also, Rook and Jake worked there.
North and east of us had been another farm, a small one, but the owners had departed, according to Tameedah Green, at about the time Mom and I had moved in (which was before my memory). They had left Lohu behind because, in the words of Farmer Green, he was old and gray and worthless; and they had never returned. The fields of this farm had in recent years yielded to weed and scrub. It was my understanding, erroneous as it turned out, that our home had been a part of this property.
Beyond these four farms to the north and east lay forestland, mostly oak, and to the south and west a scrubland of oak and brush which gave way to forest as well, of oak, beech, souse, goldtip, and even some giant tildoyas, sloping in gentle undulations to the upland valley of Lake Twell.
You could say we lived on a plain, considering that flat fields extended in every direction, and that the nearest trees (other than a shade elm here and there) were most of a half hour’s walk away. Yet, living on this plain we had forest surrounding us, always visible in all directions, which lent our home a sense of isolation, of being hidden away from the rest of the world, which the windiness of the plain—blustery and portentous in the autumn, gray and bitter and white with snow in the winter, wet and raw in the spring (as on that morning Rook and I sat on the fence of the little cowyard and he told me he was from another world), and in the summer filled with smells of hay and wheat and dust and delight—accentuated, by drowning out any outside sounds that might drift from the other side of the forest into our little world.
Many a morning, especially in the gray raw autumns we had there, mist from Lake Twell would roll in over the fields, bringing with it the calls of the loons, and as winter approached, the suggestion—maybe in the ancient echo of the loons’ calls—of a skimmering crackling cry as of rock sliding across ice and a giant invisible bird, or dragon, ripping the wind with its talons: a heart-rending, infinite sound, I thought, yet made beautiful by the gentle hum of the surrounding woods, grand, with its thumping silence—that is, as Mom would say, there was in its silence a quality that made the heart thump, or gave it the sense, or feel, of thumping even when it was at a resting rate.
I explored all of these farms, and the surrounding woods almost every day, immersed in and part of the beauty of each of their patterns, as well as the larger pattern of the whole that consisted of all the farms and the surrounding woods and all the people, animals, plants, and other things that comprised each of them, the connections between patterns, between entities, so myriad that one could say everything was connected to everything.
Although Jake’s and Rook’s connections to the greater pattern of the area were less intrinsic than were those of most everyone else on the four farms, and, as well, the few connections they did have being, as was obvious to me, temporary ones, I’d never considered that either of them could actually be from another world; but maybe, I thought, I should have.
Not long after I asked Mom whether she believed that Rook was from another world, I asked Jake, “Is Rook from beyond the sky?”
Unsurprised by my question, he said, “That’s what he says.”
“You’ve got nothing more to add?”
He smiled, as he always did when I was sarcastic to him. I’d noticed that he seemed to appreciate it when Mom needled him, so I tried to sometimes, too, although I wasn’t very good at it. He said, “Well, he was five or six when I found him, and he told me then that he was from Shamokin.”
“And you believe him?”
“Sure. Well, why not; remember that obloid thing; it was probably from out there—you know, space,” (this he said nodding at the sky), “so why can’t Rook be, too?”
By “obloid thing,” he was referring to the object, about half the size of a cow, that I had stumbled upon two years before while exploring the woods east of Farmer Green’s fields. It was half-buried in the loam when I came upon it, and appeared to be made of a shiny copper-gold-purple metal. It scared me because unlike every tree, plant, rock, and animal in the forest, the patterns of which were all linked to other parts of the forest, it wasn’t interconnected with anything—not one single thing. Its pattern, though within the forest, was utterly isolated from it, as when, for example, a fence is first built at the edge of a roughland—except that over time, as grass and weeds and animals adapt to the presence of the fence, it becomes a part of the pattern of the life of the roughland. This sphere, which, muddy, leaf-covered, and half-buried, seemed to have been there for quite some time, remained unconnected to anything. Rattled, I had rounded up Mom, Jake, and Rook, and brought them out to see it.
None of them had known what it was. After they had examined it, Rook had asked, “Another piece of the iron god?” which was a reference to the similar spheroids, found many years before in the forests of Roncala, that had been theorized, Jake told me, to be the testicles of the Iron God. “I imagine it was postulated as a joke,” he explained, “but some moron in an influential position took it as a serious argument—and most people in influential positions are morons—and it became widespread belief.”
Jake shrugged (in response to Rook’s question about the spheroids being another piece of the Iron God) and then asked Mom, “What do you think, Itty?” He was the only person on the four farms who dared call Mom by a nickname. He often called her “Itty,” because of her small stature.
Ignoring him, she glanced at me with a subtly questioning twitch of her eyebrows. I shook my head, telling her, no, it doesn’t fit, its pattern doesn’t mesh with the pattern of the surrounding woods.
“It doesn’t fit,” she said, and Jake and Rook both agreed with her without wondering about her choice of words.
House of Leopard came for it a couple of days later. A few young men wearing black and yellow uniforms loaded it onto a large shiny black covered wagon, and with the majority of the denizens of the four farms watching them in wonderment, carried it away. None of the four of us had mentioned the sphere to anybody else; but a young fieldhand named Rorgan Jooness had stumbled upon it a few mornings after we had investigated it, and word had spread about it like seeds from a kelpbush thereafter, across the four farms and beyond.
“So, in essence,” I told Jake,” you’re saying that either he is from another world or he isn’t from another world.”
Jake laughed, and said, “Yeah, I think that about sums it up.”
I knew, within, that neither Mom nor Jake would confirm or dismiss Rook’s revelation that he came from beyond the sky. Mom had an annoying tendency to withhold her opinions about things even when she had a definite viewpoint because she wanted me to decide for myself what I believed; and beyond that, she was very careful about reaching conclusions. And so was Jake. Like Rook himself, neither of them ever confirmed anything without direct evidence that it was true, or dismissed it without compelling evidence that it was not true. If a claim was made, a fact posited, they would just let it lay there, let it exist, as a possibility (although Jake would often pretend that he believed or disbelieved things).
I knew, within, that nothing either of them would say would alter the new light in which I saw Rook. And sitting with him on the fence in the moments after he told me he was from among the stars, I did look at him in a new light. The thickness of the jet-black hair upon his head, the hairlessness of the rest of his body, his great strength that belied his comparatively thin build, the olive-like color of his skin, darker than some of the farmhands, lighter than others, but unique in the exact shade of the color, his resistance to the cold; all of this did speak to an inhuman-ness. Yet, while his entity pattern was a unique blend of dark blue and light blue and purple and green and teal loops and arcs, and an undulating diaphanous ribbon of music, it was to my senses a human one.
“But how…is that why…”
My question was interrupted by the appearance of a very large man. Actually, he wasn’t a man, for unlike Rook’s, his entity pattern was to my eyes not human, though to my physical eyes he looked like a man—a very very tall man, at least a head taller than Tolan Blabb, who was the tallest of Farmer Green’s fieldhands; a very very thick man, at least one and a half times the girth of Jake, who was considered stout; and a very very dirty man, so dirty, in fact, one could have said he was made of mud. He was rumbling at a slow but steady pace across the field that was north and east of the little cowyard—the big cowyard, as I considered it.
Rook watched this man of mud go with some curiosity, and Jake, stopping and watching him as well, stroked his chin in wonderment.
Tolan didn’t notice him, so intent was he upon Estobbias, but somebody else did. From the northern fields beyond the barn beside which Jake worked came a cry of warning, which was soon echoed behind us, from Farmer Green’s house.
The man of mud, reaching the western border of the big cowyard, climbed over the wooden fence there with surprising difficulty, it being no larger than the one upon which Rook and I sat, quite a pitiful barrier for someone of his stature. Once over it, he re-commenced his lumber, across a still-barren cornfield, beyond which, to the south, was Lohu’s field, and beyond that the border/corner of Farmer Green’s farm, where Mom’s and my hut was, The Corner.