He almost believed her — after all, she was always right about everything, whether the coming weather or a mathematics problem or the right name for a tune — but he couldn’t put away the memory of illness like he could put away the memory of a dream. “I have been sick,” he declared to the radishes as he worked that morning in the salad garden. Yet after squatting for an hour along the rows of lettuce there wasn’t a trace of the ache in his bones, and by the time he had to leave for school he had nearly forgotten the whole thing, distracted by his work and by the usual noises of the farm. His father was down at the forge, making nails; he could hear his mother and Elizabeth washing flax; he could hear Tercin quietly cursing where he sat near the house with Caryn and Genevieve, making rick vanes. Even Tercin’s cursing seemed a part of the lovely day. There is nothing wrong, Peter thought to himself, because just the previous week Reverend Wallop had scolded them all for not properly appreciating the absence of affliction.
But later that morning in school he got the curious, suspended feeling back. Sara Cooper was reciting a poem in front of the class, and Peter had just noticed that Reuben Claflin had appeared at the window to watch. Reuben was Tercin’s usual partner in truancy, but Peter’s brother was nowhere to be seen. He thought Reuben’s habit of daring the window — placing himself just out of Mrs. Clark’s view — was stupid. “If you’re going to skip, skip,” he said. “There’s relaxing to be done.”
Reuben was ugly — it was something that the whole town agreed on. In fact, his ugliness was the standard by which the ugliness of other boys was measured, just as Tercin’s was the true standard of naughtiness against which the others’ behavior was measured and judged. “Why, that tinker was at least half as ugly as Reuben Claflin!” Peter’s mother had said just the previous Saturday of a man who had come selling in town. And if a child did something egregiously bad, then any parent might tell him, “You are a veritable Tercin Damien today!” And that was how Peter knew the fever was back — he felt cold, not hot, and suddenly Reuben’s face was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The pits and scars and the eyes set as close together as a vole’s added up to something so lovely he thought the pain in his chest was on account of it.
He had the floating feeling again, but this time it was like something in him as essential as his soul was flying out to cleave to the hideous perfection of the boy in the window. Sara was just starting her recitation:
The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the moldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall.
And the day is dark, dark, dark.
Peter stood up, knocking his desk over. He hadn’t wanted to stand up, or knock over his desk, or throw his arms out in front of him, or speak, but he said a word — it sounded a little like “Reuben!” though he wasn’t trying to say “Reuben.” It was more of a moan, the way a tongueless idiot would pronounce the name. It occurred to him to be acutely embarrassed, and to be afraid — nothing like this had ever happened to his brothers or his sisters when they had a fever. Mrs. Clark was striding toward him, very purposefully but ever so slowly, and every face in the class was turned toward him, every eye curious and many of the lips already turned in hard mocking smiles. He was suddenly very aware of the breeze blowing slowly through the window. Mrs. Clark’s feet were thunderous on the wooden floor of the classroom, but there was no other sound, until with a pop like a coal jumping in the fire a seam appeared across his vision, across the walls of the classroom and across the blackboard and across Sara’s arms and chest and hands. No matter how he turned his head it was there, even transecting Reuben’s still-beautiful face. Another endless moment and the seam burst, and the day unraveled into another day. Peter stood utterly still and calm as the vision beneath rushed over him. Then he was only his sight — he had no hands or feet or any body at all. The wind was gone, and the noise of Mrs. Clark walking and the other students laughing, and the pressure of the breeze. He beheld an empty blue sky, and then a woman falling through it.
He thought at first that she was a man, because she was dressed in a black jacket and pants, but then he saw the bones in her face and the length and richness of the hair that coiled around her head as she twisted in the air. She fell toward him, then caught him in her descent — though she never touched him, she tangled him up in her fall. He felt the lurch in his stomach, and the sting of the wind against his skin, and now he was close enough to see how frightened she was, and to understand that she was screaming, though he could not hear her. They spun together in the air — he caught a glimpse of a crowd standing in the middle of a stone causeway. They twisted again and he saw the two silver towers burning against the lovely blue sky.
Then he was in the classroom again, flat on his back on the floor. Mrs. Clark was kneeling next to him, her hand steadying a ruler stuck in his mouth. Sara was staring down at him, along with the rest of the class.
“Think of green fields!” Mrs. Clark said to him, speaking loud and slow. “Calm blue seas! Relaxing cloudless skies!” She explained to him — and to all the class, because not a sparrow dropped dead through her window or lightning struck the fields outside but a lesson of natural science was generated — that his brain had become overcome by the intense sincerity of Sara’s delivery, and so he had a fit.
“No, ma’am,” said Sara, putting her hand on his head. “I think it’s more than just the poetry. He’s burning up.”
“It might be the orange glanders,” his mother said. “Or the willow fever. Or the early early dropsy.” For each malady she had a separate poultice, and so all afternoon Peter sat restless and bored under strict directions not to disturb the plasters on his back and chest and belly while the rest of the family kept busy with the Lammas preparations. He wanted to be heaping up the ricks or laying the bowers or cooking, anything to distract him from thoughts of the falling woman. He hadn’t told his mother or anybody else about what he had seen. People see things when they get a fever — he knew that from the stories his brothers and sisters told. Caryn had dreamed that she saw their mother come into the room with a dripping bloody mallet, and as she held it over her in a way that was more blessing than threat, the drops became dark insects in the moonlight, and took wing to fly around the house. Horace had seen fiddling rabbits, and George a strange lady made all of fruits and vegetables. Peter wanted to tell them what he’d seen, because his vision was grander and stranger than any of theirs, but when he considered it he felt a drop in his stomach, like he was falling again, and he found himself sweating again, though the fever was long gone. “Nothing scary about a lady,” he told himself, sitting in the kitchen while his mother chopped carrots, “even when she’s falling through the sky.”
“What’s that?” his mother asked.
“I’m well,” he said. “I’m perfectly well. Can I take off the plasters and go help with the chores?”