The most memorable lesson for both Daniel and Annalee occurred on a warm May afternoon. All three of them were cleaning the pantry, item number nine on Annalee’s list of spring chores, when the sky suddenly darkened with a mass of clouds. Within minutes rain began falling. Johnny Seven Moons went to the open door, inhaled deeply, and started stripping off his clothes. Daniel and Annalee exchanged anxious glances. ‘You going swimming?’ Daniel joked.
‘No,’ Seven Moons said, hopping out of his pants and tossing them aside, ‘I’m going for a walk in the warm spring rain. Join me if you like. Walking naked in warm spring rain is one of the highest spiritual pleasures available to human creatures.’
Annalee was already wiggling out of her jeans, but Daniel had a question: ‘Is it a higher pleasure than blowing up dams?’
Seven Moons shut his eyes and almost immediately opened them. ‘That’s a tough one, but I think they’d have to be the same. You see, if I didn’t blow up dams and keep rivers where they’re supposed to be, in not very long there would be no warm spring rain to walk naked in.’
It was splendid. Hands joined, Daniel in the middle, they walked naked across the flat and up the oak-studded knoll where, deliriously drenched, they sang ‘Old Man River’ to the clearing sky. The sun burned through minutes later. By the time they walked back to the house through the wraiths of mist lifting from the soaked grass, everything but their feet and hair had dried.
Annalee and Daniel recalled that walk with Seven Moons often, but they never talked about what had really moved them. Annalee had been so overwhelmed by the rain on her flesh that she was afraid she was going to come, to collapse in the wet grass. She felt constrained. It was difficult to shift her attention away from her body and back to them, even though they brought their own sweet joy.
Daniel remembered a moment as they’d started up the knoll, when he looked at his mother, so beautiful, her skin shining with rain, and then he’d looked at Seven Moons, strong and wise and brave, feeling their large hands in his and the rain splattering on his shoulders, feeling for just a moment that the world was perfect.
They both remembered yet never mentioned what Johnny Seven Moons had said when they reached the top of the knoll. He’d tilted his head back and groaned out, ‘Oh, blowing up dams is a tremendous responsibility, an important responsibility, a grave responsibility …’ And then he’d laughed like a loon, the sound echoing distantly across the flat and then lost in the hush of rain. He squeezed Daniel’s hand and grinned at Annalee. ‘It’s only at moments like this that I’m glad we’re all going to die.’
Seven Moons stayed seven months that first time, and visited for a week or two about four times a year after that. When eight months had passed since his last visit, Daniel began to worry.
When Smiling Jack showed up a month late for Christmas, Daniel asked if Seven Moons was back in prison. Smiling Jack didn’t know, but promised he’d check on Seven Moons’ whereabouts as soon as he had the chance. He cautioned Daniel it might take a while since Seven Moons wandered as he pleased – no phone, no address. Since Smiling Jack’s colossal tardiness was the result of a similar temperament, Daniel didn’t expect a speedy reply. A week after Jack’s departure, there was a letter in the P. O. box when they went into town for supplies. Smiling Jack said Seven Moons was staying near Gaulala taking care of his mother, who’d been very sick but was getting better, yet he probably wouldn’t get away until the fall. Without reason, Daniel was convinced he would never see Seven Moons again. When Annalee, concerned by his sudden and uncharacteristic moping, finally coaxed out his secret conviction, she suggested that he go visit Seven Moons in the spring.
Annalee was glad to help Daniel arrange the visit, which she hoped would last through the summer. If it could be worked out, then she’d ask Smiling Jack for a three-month vacation. She needed some unclaimed time. Running the safe house, while never unpleasant, had become increasingly boring. Daniel, with his sweet hunger for information and action, was inspiring, but he was also exhausting, and the random appearance of guests made it even more difficult for her to find and sustain a psychic rhythm of her own, an undistracted sense of herself. Annalee was particularly troubled by the recent onset of sexual desire for her son. She wasn’t sure if the desire was simply a convenient focus for the heightened eroticism that had begun with the walk in the rain or whether it was something specific between them, or between all mothers and sons at Daniel’s age, whirling in that prepubescent blur between boy and man. It didn’t help that he was tall, lanky, blue-eyed and fine-spirited. Lately, the sight of him naked unsettled and confused her. Not that she would ever act on the desire. So it wasn’t the fear of succumbing to temptation that bothered her so much as the distraction of dealing with it, and that’s why she was so eager to send Daniel off to Seven Moons’ summer camp that she used the location phone to leave Smiling Jack a message to get in touch as soon as possible.
She shouldn’t have bothered. When she and Daniel returned from San Francisco that night, Smiling Jack smiled at them from the kitchen table when they walked in. With him was a new guest, the first Jack had ever delivered, a striking man in his mid-thirties named Shamus Malloy. And everything changed.
Shamus Malloy was a professional smuggler, an alchemical metallurgist, a revolutionary thief, and – my goodness – a poet of more than modest accomplishment. At a trim six feet two he was slightly taller than Annalee, and, at thirty-six, ten years older. He had unruly hair the color of sandstone, intense blue eyes that hid nothing, and a resonant baritone voice that caressed long vowels and lightly rolled the r. What made his handsome presence unusual was the black glove he wore on his left hand.
Annalee was smitten.
Daniel was impressed and somewhat intimidated by Shamus’s magnetic quality, but not enough to squelch his curiosity about the black glove. Annalee had always told him that if you want to know something, don’t be afraid to ask, but Daniel knew by the way she was behaving – which was goofy – that she would get upset if he pressed Shamus about the glove. He had to be clever. He waited till Smiling Jack had departed and Annalee, who was sure tossing her hair out of her eyes a lot, was in the kitchen making tea, which she never drank. Then he casually inquired of Shamus, ‘How many falcons do you hunt?’
He was immediately sorry. Shamus fixed him with those direct, uncompromising blue eyes. The teakettle began a low banshee whistle in the kitchen, mounting toward a shriek before Annalee lifted it off the stove.
In the sudden silence Shamus said, ‘Daniel, what are we talking about?’ His tone was pleasant, but tinged with both irritation and challenge.
Daniel could feel his mother listening. ‘Falcons,’ he said. ‘Mom and I spent a whole year studying birds of prey. Raptors is what that class of birds is called. Raptors. Isn’t that an amazing word? Like rapture.’
It didn’t work. ‘Indeed – a lovely word. Directly from the Latin raptor, meaning snatcher, derived from the root rapere, to seize, which is also the source of both rapt and rape, seizures of two different kinds, since in one the recipient is transported into joy and in the other is violated and demeaned. But tell me, Daniel, how is this etymological exploration germane to your question about the number of falcons I hunt?’